systemmastery – System Mastery

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Chapter 36 opens with our new favorite phrase: “Several months later.”  The languid pace of this rescue is wild, right?  Anyway, all three chapters this week concern Corran’s attempts to impress a bunch of pirates.  He hasn’t advanced on the case of his wife yet.  The book has about 12 chapters left.

Reviewing a playtest?  That doesn’t seem right!  Well, it certainly isn’t in our usual bag of tricks, but hey, this is a rare situation where someone writing a modern game ASKED for our opinion (sort of, they asked for opinions in general) and we can be constructive and nice!  Will we?  Maybe!  Also this is our THIRD review of a Marvel game (with a fourth on the horizon) and so you’ll just have to forgive us not putting a bunch of Excelsiors and No-Prizes and stuff in the writeup.  Except shoot we just did.

Last thing.  We didn’t mention one thing during the review that we both wanted to, which is that the game has a rule stating that you never accidentally kill anyone, you can always choose to knock them out instead.  This is progressive and laudable, but has the funny side effect of turning all the game’s sermons about how “real Marvel heroes would never use guns” into an even sillier thing to bother with.

In the near future, two rival gangs fight for control of Frasier Park, CA by playing a knock-off version of Dance Dance Revolution but mostly just say the N-word a lot.

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Okay, here we go!  We’re done with the Jedi temple, we’re done with Grandpa’s house, time to finally rescue Mirax, all we gotta do is… join up with a pirate crew for at least a month WHAT IS THIS HOW DID THIS HAPPEN.

Mea culpa time (Jef version):  This is one of those games where I knew exactly what it was and have been recommending it for years for any RP session that needs to be about spiraling into failure… but I’ve never read it til now.  So hey, were all my recommendations justified?  Let’s find out, shall we?

One of the few actually decent DreamWorks animated films but it still can’t escape the dreaded “all the characters dance” ending.

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Obviously Corran is feeling a little down on himself for spending two and a half months at the Jedi academy instead of just looking for his wife, so the most natural course of action is to go crash at his grandpa’s house for an impromptu family reunion and night on the town!  Okay, fine other stuff is happening too, but that is the main thing that’s happening.

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Ooh lots of ground to cover this week, as get this, Corran Horn is leaving Yavin 4!  With about half of the book left, will we finally start the book?  Also we get to deal with Exar Kun, and meet Booster Terrik!

Ooh, a steampunk one!  You can tell because of the brown and the gear and the goggles and all.  Oh, I guess it also says steampunk on there, in retrospect I suppose that was a dead giveaway.  Anyhow Tephra is definitely drifting in the fantasy direction on the old -punk continuum, with neat races and a whole fantastical path to airshippery, plus it’s all D12 based, which is always fun.

In what I can only describe as one of the worst movies that we have ever seen; Jenny McCarthy takes some time off from spreading misinformation about vaccines to write and star in a humorless “comedy” where everyone sucks and nobody learns anything.