Game: Bodies and Souls: 20 Templates
Publisher: Second World Simulations
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 3rd, June 2002
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10 [ Really good ]
Total Score: 9
Average Score: 4.50
The first thing you’re likely to notice when you open Bodies and Souls if the technical proficiency of the document’s creator. It seems that I’m still finding cause to say that even has the PDF roleplaying publication sector matures. This is good. The more suave and sophisticated the PDF get then the more popular they’ll become and the more healthy the industry as a whole will be. What’s so special about Bodies and Soul’s electronic panache then? (We’ll get to how it’s rather special in terms of quality rpg offerings in just a bit.) It’s a three-dimensional PDF; there are non-offensive inner-windows of text that either open up to explain terms you might be unfamiliar with or lay in wait to serve as an introduction. You can close these windows with just a click of a button. A click of a button, a button set into the actual page, will hide the document’s graphics so you can print out just the text and a click of another button will show all the artwork again. I’m a great fan of hyperlinks inside PDF documents and this is just how the index page is presented; if the Fly Lord template catches your eye then you can simply click on the name and you’ll be whisked straight to page 17 in the 49 page download. In addition, the usual thumbnail and bookmark sidebars found on every Acrobat reader have been constructed professionally. The combined effect of this is a user-friendly appearance and a document that’s easy to navigate around. You’ll want to navigate around Bodies and Souls, it has a great deal of quality content to offer.
Bodies and Souls strikes me as a supplement for intelligent gamers. The premise is to provide 20 templates (if you hadn’t guessed) to change, warp, mutant or alter by possession “basic creatures” into something else entirely. I think this is a great idea. The author, Steven Palmer Peterson, explains why he thinks it is a good and he does it so well I’ll include this tiny snippet of a direct quote from the download. “I like templates; they’re a way of turning the familiar into the alien; a way of making players think they face an old foe when in fact they face something new. They’re also a way of extending the game-life of creatures and enemies I already use. I can keep employing orcs and worgs indefinitely if I have ways of making them wildly different. Moreover, this helps reduce the random-zoo appearance of my world.”
The range of templates available generates a similarly wide range of resulting moods and genres. There’s everything through high and low fantasy, to sci-fi, to b-movie and even comic book. This was the intended result. Everything has an underlying dark and somewhat gritty feeling though; some of the templates (such as the Atomic) may lend themselves to a comic book style but it’s not the bright, three colour feel you might associate with Superman but more like the atmospheric tension you might expect from the dark age Batman. Similarly, those templates that settle nicely into the high fantasy element (the scion of fire) but again there is still the underlying notions of cost and sacrifice.
The sub-title “20 Templates” for Bodies and Souls is selling itself short, I feel. There are five pages, that’s 10% of the download, at the start given over to intelligent discussion on the best ways to apply these templates to characters. One of the possible options is to allow players to pay for the templates in stages, to purchase partial templates, and I was pleased to see that each of the templates presented went to the bother of presenting sensible partial purchase options. There is even a new game mechanic: Stability. Stability is designed to give the edge back to characters and npcs with superior stats in those situations where the vanilla d20 rules might just corrupt the maths. The example of a chess game is given. If you resolve the entire chess game on the basis of just one dice roll then the amateur will beat the grandmaster too often thanks to the luck of the dice, by turning the chess game into the best of four rolls then the odds of winning the vast majority of the matches return firmly to the grandmaster. You could say that the chess game mechanic as a Stability of 4.
There are some rather complicated gaming issues discussed, at one point there’s even an aside for maths geeks, but the author has an extremely clear writing style and so the reader is safely guided through to safety. The writing style is slightly different from what you might usually get from rpg supplements. Bodies and Souls is written in the first person; throughout the download the author refers to himself as “I” when he expresses ideas and suggestions. In contrast, if you pick up your copy of the Dungeon Master’s Guide and open it at random you’ll be hard pressed to find any mention of “I”. It’s not wrong. It’s just different.
I liked Bodies and Souls. It wasn’t the technical wizardly, the writing style or the range of templates in the download that made the document for me – although they certainly helped. The templates are good, each one is an inspiration, each one is well thought out and each one has the potential to boost your game. Not every template has the potential to boost the combat abilities of your monsters, Bodies and Souls is too thorough for that, some templates apply only to (previously) inanimate objects and others, such as the Faded, simply eat away at once powerful creatures.
RPG Now has given Bodies and Souls: 20 Templates the Mature audience rating. I’d agree with this. I’m not religiously minded and so it’s not the concept of possession or the description of the exorcism feat that inclines me to agree with the warning but some of the discussion in the succubus possession template does. Given that you’ll probably need a credit card to purchase the download, I don’t think the audience rating will prove to be a problem.
