Scion: Hero (redux)

If you've been reading my blog for a while, then you may have read that my group and I played the Scion demo a while back. This review covers the actual game itself, not that demo.

Let me preface this by saying that I really enjoy playing this game, and it may well take the place of one of my regular systems when next I finish a campaign.

That said, I found the book itself to be very disappointing.

The system is great, the idea is fun, but there's just not a lot of information given. Instead of setting information we get a 39 page short story that takes up the beginning of the book. Instead of a reasonable number of example birthrights or titanspawn, we get a 60 page adventure module that is really only designed to be used with the pregenerated characters. It's not even a particularly great adventure. It manages to be both too railroady and too wide open at the same time.

It's too bad. the game has a lot of potential, but it just doesn't give any real information telling a GM what to do with it.

To make matters worse, the art is a greatly varying quality, and I found several of the watermarks to be too dark to read the text over them easily. For a game that will be receiving limited additional information (two companion books, but no splats) it's just too shy on things it needs, and too thick on stuff that is of limited usefulness.

I see this game doing well in the technical aspects (like Best Rules), but as an overall product I was unimpressed. 7.5 out of 10, and I feel that may be on the generous side since I like the actual game so much.