Pyramid Review
Out in the Black (for the Serenity Roleplaying Game)
Published by Margaret Weis Productions
Written & Designed by Tracy Hickman & Laura Hickman
Illustrated by Lindsay Archer, Dan Bryce, Larry Elmore, Tracy Hickman, & Ryan Wolfe
Cover by 11TH HOUR
104-page b&w softcover; $24.99
So 12 months in and we finally get some proper support for the Serenity Roleplaying Game. And even more amazingly, this support actually comes with an index (even if only a character index) and a character sheet, both of which the core rule book singularly lacked, along with several other elements.
To be fair, licenses are not always the easiest of things to handle for a games publisher. Nevertheless, it has been a long wait for Out in the Black, the first proper support and the first scenario for the game. In the meantime, several Traveller scenarios have appeared that could easily be run in the Firefly 'Verse. All they needed was a little western-afying. Plus all of them were cheap.
Out in the Black is not only of note -- important being too big a word to use here -- because it is the first scenario and supplement for the Serenity Roleplaying Game, but because it is co-written by Tracy Hickman and Laura Hickman, who happen to have a number of classic Advanced Dungeons & Dragons scenarios to their names, including I6 Ravenloft, DL1 Dragons of Despair, and the I3-5 Desert of Desolation series. The question is, can Out in the Black be as good as those scenarios were in their . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: November 24, 2006
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