Hero's Call: "Heroic Episode Templates" Your thoughts on quality/usefulness?

[Emirikol 436]

I'm not seeing any practical use to these.  The hooks are just scraps, there are few/no game mechanics (even lowly skill checks) included in the majority.

I'd get more use out of a page of 6-8 adventure hooks rather than a bunch of Warhammer-ism-lacking brainstorms about processes and questions on outcomes. Mind you, they're not poorly written/edited.  They're just not useful IMHO.

Your thoughts?  Are they something that could be developed or are they as lacking in Warhammer content/theme as the ones in the GMs Toolkit? 

jh

[BigKahuna 731]

Interesting how perspectives differ.  I personally found the Episode Template concept to be one of the best aspects of the expansion books. One of the things that I find nice about it is that usually when you buy an adventure, your run the adventure and its over, the book goes on the shelf and aside from potentially reusing characters and whatever other mechanical items that are included it is for the most part kind of "over".   

Templates are effectively starting points for adventures that use the expansions book theme (aka in Lure of power the themes are politically driven starting points as I assume they are in the other books appropriate to that books theme).  They give you information sufficient to get the wheels spinning in creating adventures and you don't need to look beyond the basic GM resources that the expansion includes.  The books "life" is much longer and its much easier to create a campaign from it rather than just a single adventure as a result.  I also think they accuratly captured the way most GM's think as most GM's that while they like published material ultimatly as they run a campaign they want to invent their own adventures anyway rather than having everything defined.  Hence Templates kind of create the basis for a campaign and they are cleverly written to allow for easier connections.

With the expansions you get best of both worlds because they all include a full published adventure as well, but when your done running it the material is hardly "used up" thanks to the templates that give you branches from to hang your next adventuring hat sort of speak.

So overall I like it, though I would love to see a "thicker" book with more content overall with a longer adventure.  For example in the Lure of Power I think it The Mirror of Desire is an awsome adventure that just feels…. like it should be longer.  I would like to see more location and NPC character information in the expansions but I suppose we always desire "more" of anything we feel is awsome so I suppose that kind of review is probobly quite common.

All and all though I was very happy with Lure of Power which was one of the first expansions I bought.  Though right now Im frenzy with it and I don't see myself needing to purchase another expansion for a while so certainly there has been sufficient content to keep me interested for quite some time. 

Personally I would love to see more campaign centric books like "The City of Alderof" and have an entire book/expansion dedicated to running adventures in the city with people, places and hooks defined. 

[Pallomides 0]

I would love to see Modules like they did in Iron Crown Enterprise`s version of Middle Earth. Those were some of the best scourcebooks ever written.