Pyramid Review: Aurora Australis (for Trinity)

Pyramid Review

Aurora Australis (for Trinity)

Published by White Wolf Game Studio

Written by James Kiley and Scott Nimmo with Bruce Baugh

144 pages, $19.95

Aurora Australis is the fifth in a series of supplements detailing one of Psi Orders of the science fiction roleplaying game Trinity. It's also the first one published under the ArtHaus, White Wolf's imprint for games whose sales are good enough to escape the axe, but not good enough to warrant more than a few products a year. In addition, Aurora Australis is the last Trinity supplement developed under Andrew Bates, who guided the line from its inception and has now left White Wolf to pursue freelance projects of his own. Consequently, Aurora Australis is a transitional book for a game line that failed to live up to the potential White Wolf placed in it two and a half years ago. It's also a good object lesson on why this is the case.

To begin with, Aurora Australis is the first Psi Order sourcebook without a portion of its pages presented in full color. For someone familiar with earlier supplements like myself, this was somewhat jarring. Admittedly, the Trinity Players Guide preceded Aurora Australis down this path, but I couldn't help but be disappointed. As I understand it, the inclusion of full color glossy pages made Trinity a very expensive line to produce. Given that it never proved as popular as White Wolf had hoped, it's understandable that corners had to be cut somewhere to keep it viable . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: May 5, 2000

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