Customer Reviews

Savage Worlds Explorers Edition (S2P10010)

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

First things first - note the price. With that out of the way, the system is largely the same as in the revised edition, with a few changes (unified damage mechanics, for example). Some supplementary material was removed since the last edition, such as fantasy races (but the rules for race creation remain), many vehicle stat blocks, and a character sheet (not a big deal - find your favorite version online). A basic but fun pirate-themed adventure is added to the end of the book to kick-start the Savage Worlds experience. The most pleasant surprise of this edition, though, is the presentation. The full-color pages are full of top-notch art (even if a good number of the pieces are borrowed from other books from the same publisher) that ranges from style-enforcing to downright inspiring. If you have any interest in the Savage Worlds system, you no longer have an excuse not to buy the rules. And if you are a fan, buy a copy for everyone at the table.

If you've ever desired an RPG system that would allow you to create your own setting and have it up and running literally within a few hours- Savage Worlds is your baby. It is a "universal" system that covers nearly everything you or your players would want to do while remaining extremely simple to organize. It's also a great system for people who are new to RPG's due to the relatively short list of skills and abilities (you don't have to be a genius to put together an effective character), and all of the skills are useful, intuitive, and flexible. For example, "fighting" covers all type of combat- fists, swords, clubs, kung-fu, lightsabers, etc, while "shooting" covers any type of ranged attack- guns, bow & arrow, throwing knives, machine guns, laser rifles... It really lets you be creative with your character without needing to specify in the rules exactly what they specialize in. The Savage Worlds systems also supports roleplaying and creativity through it's use of "tricks" your players can think up on the spot: declare what you're trying to do, make a basic check (agility, strength, etc), and if you pull it off you'll get a bonus against the enemy or task you're working on. Players can also be awarded "bennies" for creative play, which can be spent to re-roll dice.

Savage Worlds really does boil down to its declaration of being Fast! Furious! and Fun! And for about 10 bucks, it's certainly the most affordable core RPG book on the market. After playing around with the information provided in this book, you'll definitely want to explore some of the official Savage Worlds settings which include themes such as swashbuckling high-seas adventure, supernatural westerns, gothic horror, pulp action, and super heros.

I think it would take more effort to make a Savage Worlds game NOT entertaining than it takes to get one up and running. RPG fans, you can't go wrong with this one.

Savage Worlds advertises its mechanics as "fast and furious", which is true: the rules are bareboned but solid, and combat proceeds quickly, and in an interesting fashion. Die rolls outide of combat are quick, without much "searching for the right chart" time spent. The book itself is concise, compact, and provides a good deal of rules and info for such a small package. Sometimes, it's a little hard to find exactly what you're looking for, a back-of-book index would have been nice, but that's really my only complaint. Personally, I prefer a bit more crunch in my RPG systems, but it's all subjective. The wonderful thing about SW is the AMAZING array of variable settings available. Whether they are hardbound setting/campaign books, PDF downloads, or setting converions found online and made by enthusiastic gamers, there is no dearth of a selection. I am playing in a Rippers (Savage Worlds; S2P10005) story right now and having a blast. Highly recommended!

WARNING! This review was written when the item in question was in-print and priced below ten dollars. All comments on the value-for-money it represented at that time were made in that frame of reference. Given the prices I'm seeing these days, I strongly recommend prospective buyers look at Savage Worlds Deluxe (S2P10014) before making a decision to buy.

The Savage Worlds game system is fairly simple one (though not, in my opinion, the simplest one out there that does a decent job of sustaining a role-playing game) with some questionable mechanics, probably the most controversial being the "exploding dice" that can have a .22 pistol outperforming a bazooka and the initiative that is random each combat round irrespective of player character stats. If you understand that to take a game under this system totally seriously is to make a fundamental error in judgment, you can perhaps sit back and enjoy the flow of the game, occasional ridiculous events and all, in the "larger than life" way it was intended to be used.

The book calls it a fast, furious, fun game system and I suppose it can be, most times, once everyone is comfortable with the system, which I place in order of increasing complexity on a scale thus: Call of Cthulhu BRP -> Savage Worlds -> D20-based games -> GURPS. I found it a bit hard to remember the mechanics of combat at first to be honest, but that is a matter of practice.

Characters are points built in this system, and stats are not rated as numeric values but as poly dice type. A strength of D8 means that when called upon to test vs Strength, you roll a D8 and attempt to get a target number, almost invariably 4. Same story with skills. You have five points to improve a basic starting stats template (d4 in everything, 1 point per die-type increase d4->d6->d8->d10->d12) and 15 points to buy skills.

You then pick hindrances if you want them, things that "nerf" your character in certain circumstances such as illiteracy or being very old or very young. You can choose one major hindrance and up to two minor hindrances. These give you points with which to buy "edges" (factors like ambidextrousness and lightning draw that help your character in much the same way that feats do in D20-based games), more skills, additional stat dice increases or money. It is easy to spend a lot of time dithering here, but it usually isn't worth it. Trying to minmax a character in Savage Worlds is sorta missing the point of the system.

The skills and spells lists have been pared down to the minimum required to present a playable game. If you want to shoot, for example, you have a "shooting" skill. That's it. No "rifle", "handgun", "Bow" etc. Just shooting. Melee is covered by the "fighting" skill, and throwing rocks at people when all else fails is done with a "throwing" skill. This sparseness does make for a very quick assimilation of that facet of the game.

The magic lists are all interpretable in many ways - as straight High Fantasy magic, as religious miracles, as psychic phenomena and as Weird Science gadgeteering. The object being to reduce what is needed to explain essentially the same effects in game terms no matter how they are arrived at - a fireball spell is much the same as a "call fire upon the sinner" prayer as is the Weird Science steampunk flamethrower. This makes for a compact rulebook and a magic system that can be assimilated quickly.

The game is played between PC "Wild Cards" and NPC "Extras". The extras are very much simplified when it comes to dice rolled and damage sustained, which means they are easy to use. So easy that a PC can bring along a retinue, bodyguard, street gang or whatever and control them him/herself rather than requiring the GM to handle that. This is a very interesting development, one that GMs should check out IMO. Boss Monsters are, of course, NPC Wild Cards and therefore harder to put in their place. All in all a well-conceived way of dealing with the need for lots of people on stage.

It plays very well, usually, but sometimes, when a player is very lucky the aforementioned exploding dice can introduce a note of surrealness into the game. For example, a Wild Card with shooting skill D6 fires a six-shooter at a locomotive, and rolls a "6". He rerolls the die and adds the score to the six he rolled. He might be lucky enough to do this a second time, too. Each full multiple of 4 over the target number is called a "raise". A raise on a combat roll adds one D6 to the damage roll. So he rolls his usual 2D6+1 and rolls a double six, then another six then a four. Then he gets that extra die, with which he also "aces" (the term for rolling the max on a die) and so on, with the end result that a single shot from a .45 Colt sends the locomotive boiler to the happy hunting grounds in a violent explosion. Yes, something very like this has happened in a Savage Worlds game I've played.

Like I say, if you take it too seriously you are doing it wrong. In this case, we all agreed it was a Hollywood moment worthy of Wild Wild West and moved on, but I've met people for whom this sort of thing was a show-stopper.

An interesting phenomenon is that many GMs running Savage Worlds have dispensed with the GM screen entirely and simply roll their dice in the open, using a hand as a screen if the roll must remain secret.

[EDIT] I've run many games now, and have found that dispensing with the GM shield and sitting "in the round" makes the game more fun in some unclassifiable way. I urge everyone to try it.[/EDIT]

So much for the Savage Worlds game system itself

I don't know how Pinnacle stay in business printing full color books at this price - and when I say that, even the rare pages with no artwork on them are in full color since every page has "worn page edge" ornamentation and the pages are tinted, with sidebars in a complementary color. Other games publishers are going broke with established lines while publishing in black and white! The graphic design is subtle and awesome. The artwork is astounding in places.

This ten dollar book is also a bedrock upon which to set other settings: Realms of Cthulhu for gothic, Lovecraftian horror, Deadlands Reloaded for a bizarre yet very enjoyable Weird West setting, Weird War for, well, WWII meets high fantasy meets steampunk and about a dozen other settings including your bog-standard High Fantasy game. That said, you can play almost any of those settings with just an imaginative GM and this book, since it is a complete game system in its own right.

My copy, not purchased from an Amazon dealer I should make clear, began to shed pages in the first few days I had it, which was disappointing but not disastrous as I had already figured out that the perfect binding wouldn't withstand heavy in-game usage (like being pounded flat so a rule could be read while using both hands for dice rolling or fending off enraged co-players) and I planned to have done what I'd seen done over at the Gnome Stew blog; to get it spiral bound at an office supply store for about 6 bucks. I recommend the idea to everyone, and I'm gradually converting all my "half-size" rulebooks to this binding.

[EDIT] My spiral bound rulebook has proved so easy to use in play and is so self-evidently better in-use than the binding it is sold in that people always ask me how I did it. If you follow my example, ask the office supply store person to use the next size larger spiral than they would normally fit. You'll thank me later.[/EDIT]

At this price Savage Worlds has to be the cheapest commercial RPG to try out, and the Explorer's Edition is one of the nicest-looking rulebooks I've ever bought. I recommend the book and the game system to any face-to-face RPG fan, and especially any GM who is feeling the strain as the party size in his or her campaign is beginning to strain the game mechanics and the time constraints of the game session.

Savage Worlds is marketed with the tagline "Fast, Fun, Furious" or something along those lines and it lives up to that. The game mechanics are quick to learn and seem to draw heavily on many common miniatures wargames. This makes combat fairly quick and gives it a tactical flavor that many other RPG's don't have. The non-combat rules are equally to the point. The philosophy here seems to be that role-playing is best left to the players and the GM, not to the dice. The book has nice illustrations and very useful summary charts and tables at the end of each section. The book covers everything you need to play including rules for vehicle combat and chases, mass combat (wars and the like), terror and psychological damage, and also has a variety of staple monsters as well as guidelines for creating settings and races. Recommended for role-playing groups who are also fans of wargames and/or for those who prefer rules-light and laid-back gaming.

Savage Worlds is a great system for adventuring. On top of that, the Savage Worlds Explorers' Edition is small, thin, and light, meaning that this book, my dice, and two packs of Bicycle playing cards are all I need to run a pulpy action-adventure game at basically any time and place.

New players can create characters with somewhere between five and ten minutes of explanation from the GM, without excessive hand-holding. Old hands at mainstream systems may complain at the lack of detail, but they should grasp the system almost instantly.

The mechanics are actually pretty conventional. Your character has stats, skills, equipment, Edges and Hindrances (like perk-and-quirk rules in other systems). What sets SW apart is the degree to which these conventional mechanics are stripped of fat and cruft to yield a slick, fast-playing system that stays out of your way and doesn't generate headaches for you.

Combat is a smooth and streamlined experience. Only important characters ("Wild Cards") can take more than one significant hit, so there's no HP for the GM to keep track of. Large battles present few problems. Each character has two scores which determine their hardiness in combat; Parry and Toughness. Each of your five base attributes takes a role in combat, so characters fight differently based on their strong point, as opposed to either well or not at all.

Initiative is easily handled with cards, requiring no book-keeping and, like much of the system, fairly easy to explain.

Die rolls yield a hyper-geometric distribution of results, meaning that die rolls are open-ended. Characters with low stats are less likely to succeed, but because you roll again and add up the results each time you roll an Ace (the highest number on the die), any character can get lucky and do something amazing, even if it's not their forte.

The attributes and skills lack in detail, but Edges and Hindrances give you the leeway to customize your character and give them special strengths and interesting failings (I personally find the Hindrances more interesting).

Also, the Powers give you a perfect framework for any kind of extraordinary ability, be it magic, superscience, super powers or psionics. The basic features of the Powers are defined, and added details, like possible defenses or the look-and-feel of the Power when enacted, are determined by the trappings of the power, which can be whatever the player chooses. I have a low-magic pulp fantasy setting based on this book, and virtually all of the Powers are still allowable; the trappings are merely restricted so that magic is occult and rare.

The chase and mass-battle systems are, to my mind, TOO conventional. These are places where new and exciting mechanics could have gone, but to my mind there is too much discussion of the mechanics themselves and too little advice on how to add flavor and excitement to such scenes in your game.

The GM advice section is pithy and short, but lacks some details that I wish were included. A discussion of how to make and use a Plot Point campaign would be fantastic, but the race-creation rules are an invaluable guide.

All told, SWEX is a great, small purchase that can give you plenty of fun and excitement with your roleplaying group. Together with the toolkits and other settings, there are tons of material out there for you to play from (or just make your own and share it with the great system conversions on Dragonsfoot or elsewhere). This has swiftly become one of my two preferred systems (the other being Spirit of the Century's FATE 3.0), and is my go-to system for GM-ing pickup games.

If you're a player, buying this gives you all the information you need to run a game in any of Pinnacle/GWG's more expensive settings, and it's cheap enough for every player to get one. If you're a creative GM, this and the internet gives you all you need to run fantastic adventures filled with explosions, intrigue, swashbuckling action, and propery damage.

Y'know, fun.

For $10, who could resist giving this system a spin? Geared to require as little rules look up as possible, Savage Worlds allows your games to move along at a frenzied pace. Character creation is also simple, although too simple for my tastes. I've always been a big fan of having enough skills that two characters of the same type will look nothing alike. Unfortunately, that's the one area in which Savage Worlds is lacking.

The flaw mainly comes from the over-simplification of skills. Take the shooting skill in a time travel campaign that starts in the modern era, with a background that your character is a gun-nut. Oh look! We're in medieval times, so I'll just pick up that crossbow and use it. Yes, knowing how to use a pistol means you can shoot a crossbow equally well--or an alien laser, or a bazooka, or a TOW missile, or--well you get the idea. If you shoot it, it's one skill to rule them all!

Leveling up is far different from what you get in most games, requiring a bit of adjustment. Typical XP awards are 1-3 points every session, with 5 points getting you an "advance"--an extra bonus such as a stat, skill, or perk. Every so many advances, you gain a level, which actually unlocks new perks.

You will want a sourcebook to work with unless you want to take the time to make an entire world. Fortunately, this turns out to be relatively easy to do. While this book is inexpensive, the sourcebooks are not, typically running $30 - $40, putting them in the same range as many other games.

For the money, Savage Worlds is hard to beat. The information provided for the GM makes it easy to use any of the published worlds, or create one of their own with a little more work. The only shortfall of the system for me is the rather limited skillset, but there's nothing that says the GM can't make changes...

I won't review the system other than to say it is everything they say it is, Fast, Furious, Fun. The mechanics are simple, and it can handle different genres with a few minor tweaks. Suitable for both beginner's and experienced players.

What earns the 5 star rating though, is that this is a complete rulebook, with everything you need to play (other than imagination), good art, nicely laid out (could use an index, though); all for under $10! If you want more, the support available at the publisher's website is amazing, including a forum thread dedicated to rules questions.
I hope that this trend continues and carries over to other publishers. They've proven that a core rulebook doesn't have to be $25 to $30, or $40+ for a hardback! The level of support is phenomenal, and I would call this a mut have for any RPG gamer.

Savage Worlds is fantastic. It's the best RPG game I've played since probably the early 90s. It's extremely fun and gives you tons of options. Its rules are simple and yet allow you to do virtually anything. After playing Savage Worlds you will never want to look back at outdated systems like D&D and Pathfinder. The low price of this book (which is from quality glossy type of paper, by the way) is ridiculous. You can't wrong with this. Highly recommended to anybody. And if you are looking for a superb fantasy setting to go with Savage Worlds, have a look at Hellfrost.

I want to start of by saying the copy I purchased is the 3rd printing which is the newest at this point. This printing doesn't have the binding issues and has a index in the back. So it seems the company has listened to peoples' problems and took it upon themselves to address them. That's much more than anyone can say for other big shot companies that don't give a damn what the players want because they know the players will buy their stuff anyway.

Now, onto the actual content. I sadly haven't had a chance to play this yet. In fact I'm still reading it. I know it isn't proper to review a book without fully reading it, but so far I really like. I have read the character creation and skipped around to a few other parts and I like what I'm seeing. Now I will say I don't think it's the best or maybe the most simple system out there. That would probably go to FATE (Spirit of the Century, Starblazer Adventures, and to be released Starblazer Adventures: Legends of Anglerre) in my opinion. I do however, think it's the best system that does what it was designed to do. If that makes sense. It's designed to give you a quick fun game which fits any setting and any situation, that's simple for new players, but intuitive for experienced players.

Again, I have yet to play this with a group I'm just going by how I feel from what I've read so far. I may comeback after a play through if my mind is changed after seeing it in action. In fact, I really would love to play this with my brother and cousins because they wanna play but are put off by the larger rulebooks I own. If you love rpgs and want something different, or you wanna try them but don't feel like spending around $70 on a D&D or Pathfinder set without knowing if rpgs are really "your thing", pick this up. Mine was about $15 after shipping. Can't beat that for a brand new full color book.