Pyramid Pick
Shiki (for Sengoku RPG)
Published by Gold Rush Games
Written by Michael Montesa
96 pages, $16.00
Most gamers -- not to mention gaming companies -- have a love/hate relationship with prepackaged adventures. On the one hand, they're incredibly handy, saving the Game Master many hours of painstaking effort needed to produce his own scenarios. Prepackaged adventures come with everything you need: NPC stats, maps, background information, and (if you're lucky) synopses and outlines. On the other hand, the very nature of prepackaged adventures generally preclude their being too specific, for in doing so they diminish their utility to the broadest possible audience of gamers. Thus, game publishers must always walk a fine line between providing so much detail that it prevents the adventure's being usable by many GMs and so little that the GM might as well have designed it himself.
All things considered, Shiki, an epic adventure anthology for Gold Rush Games' Sengoku, walks that fine line very well indeed. Of course, Shiki "cheats" a little in that it's not a run of the mill collection of unrelated scenarios. Instead, it's more of a campaign framework that provides the GM with four adventures, each one tied thematically the one of the four seasons (the eponymous Shiki of the title) and to each other by an overarching plotline.
That plotline concerns the quest of the player characters to protect the heir of a defeated clan until such . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: October 6, 2000
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