Pyramid Review
Crime Scene: Feds (for the d20 System)
Published by Hogshead Publishing
Written by Ian Hunt
Cover by Shaun Thomas
Illustrated by David Esbri, Ursula Vernon, & Marcio Fiorito
80-page b&w softcover; $18.95
The FBI has been common enough as a subject for magazine articles, especially for Call of Cthulhu, but considering its importance in US law enforcement and how often they turn up in modern-set campaigns, it is a surprise that no gaming supplement has been devoted to them. With the advent of the d20 System there are now two, of which one is an addition to Hogshead Publishing's range of law and crime source books for the here and now. Crime Scene: Feds details the FBI for the d20 System and is the sourcebook for federal law enforcement. Where Crime Scene: Police Investigation covers state and local law enforcement, Crime Scene: Forensics would be a useful companion, providing the technical details of crime detection, while the sourcebooks on the Mob and the Yakuza explore the bad guys. So while Crime Scene: Feds might not be the only d20 System sourcebook on the FBI, it is the best supported.
From the outset this supplement plays it straight. This is not a cinematic or fictional take upon the FBI like The X-Files. Instead this is very much a procedure book: who the FBI are, what its responsibilities are, how it works, and so on. This is presented in Hogshead's usual style as a well-read document. It is lightly illustrated, but is very text heavy. In fact, it is so text heavy . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: November 4, 2005
Copyright © 2005 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.