Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road

There are separate lists for each of the four countries of Oz.

Please Support The Geek!

I also liked that the random encounters are determined by card draw. Savage Worlds uses playing cards to determine combat order, but nowhere else. Giving that card deck a bit more mileage is a nice touch. And now we get to the Plot Point Campaign section. It's very difficult to review adventures.

The closest comparison would be reviewing the instructions of how to do magic tricks. You are seeing what the magicians sees, but you have to be careful not to take away the magic from the audience. Starting with the high points: Dorothy is not the only person who disappeared from Earth without a trace. A couple of famous missing people are revealed to have made it to Oz, though their existence is an easter egg rather than a plot point lower case.

One adventure features a Groundhog Day-style time loop that is rather cleverly done. And now for the lows: The first two adventures are the weakest. The Prelude only exists to isolate the PC group and doesn't particularly serve the larger storyline. The first adventure that does introduce the larger storyline largely involves being rescued by others and sidelined from most of the action.

Nearly every adventure suffers from lazy "fail forward" design. Now, I have no problem with "fail forward" as a concept. Nobody likes being unable to proceed in an adventure because somebody failed a die roll. But the way the die rolling parts of the adventures are structured, it's impossible to lose. The adventures use something they call "dramatic tasks" to represent some activities in the adventures. It basically creates a "progress bar" to some task to add flavor or interest to non-combat activities.

These tasks are generally set up so that you have to get a certain amount of successful rolls in a certain period of time or you fail the task. However, these tasks are written so that there's no way to really fail them. It might take some extra rolls to succeed, but the adventures only advance once you do. The most consistent failure cost in the tasks is extra time taken, which is fairly weak. While how long it takes you to get somewhere or find something might matter in terms of resource management rations, wound healing, random encounters, and other things that GMs often gloss over , it doesn't matter in terms of the story.

Just like in a video game, no matter how long it takes you to get to the quest location, you've always gotten there at just the right time. Now we come to the bestiary. As someone who has read the Oz books, there was little I recognized here. The biggest omission is the kalidah. It's canon to the novels, but also a perfect monster for gamers to fight. I can't imagine why they would leave it out.

As I mentioned earlier, this section is a mix of monsters created by the designers and other content contributed by Kickstarter backers. And most of the stuff the designers put in are monsters. Several varieties of giant, mass produced tin men and scarecrows, and soldiers and fighters from all four edges of Oz. The saving grace of this section really is the stuff submitted by Kickstarter backers. Mechanical dragons, shapeshifting horses, and dogs that grant luck by licking your hand are all things that they came up with. Then comes the NPC section that really highlights the mixed bag you get when you let your Kickstarter backers dictate so much of your content.

There are major NPCs like Ozymandius. Mombi and others that have faces provided by backers, as well as a horde of minor NPCs that are simply backers writing themselves or an idealized version of themselves into the setting. The final section of the book is a brief bonus adventure that I would call a dungeon crawl if it wasn't so linear. If you are a gamer, the setting is an approachable version of Oz. It fits most of the tropes that you expect from a fantasy setting, but does offer a few unique touches.

The Plot Point Campaign is linear, maybe a little railroady, but the story it tells is interesting. If you are a fan of the Judy Garland Wizard of Oz movie, but want something a little more grown up, this is something you might enjoy. If you saw that gag movie poster for Wizard of Oz 2: If you are a fan of the novels, like I am, I cannot recommend this book. Like a lot of Oz content for the non-Oz market, it borrows as much imagery as it can from the film version while claiming to be based on the novels. Even then, it only borrows the stuff that support the story it's trying to tell, while avoiding the stuff that's too "kiddie", silly or not "adult" enough, leaving the setting rather bland overall.

Douglas Wall at 5: Dark Oz , review , Savage Worlds. Tuesday, September 4, Which Old Witch?

This one has been in the hopper since It was intended as a companion to another couple of blog posts from that time. I really don't know why I didn't publish it at that time. Maybe I was looking for some sort of concluding thought that never came. Even without that, I think this holds up just fine. I think this will be the last of the Witch blogs, at least for now. I do have some things related to the IRC chat that I want to expand upon. Of all the Witch blogs I've done, I think this might be the one that Tim was really waiting for.

I've talked about witches as player-characters and as story motivators, but now I'm going to talk about witches as antagonists and villains.

First let me reiterate: The Witch is Dead! It's a cliche of Oz fiction by now, so I will not be talking about bringing back the Wicked Witch of the West in any way, shape or form. One thing I particularly liked about The Jaded City of Oz the sample adventure in the AiO rulebook is that the Winkie Country scene deals with the legacy of the Wicked Witch of the West without requiring her to be present. There are other Witches to use in your adventures.

Mombi, the Wicked Witch of the North. Even after she was removed from power in the Gillikin Country by the Good Witch of the North, she still kept the captive Princess Ozma in the body of the boy Tippetarius. Once Ozma was freed and set upon the throne of Oz, Glinda removed Mombi's ability to work magic.

• To report this review as inappropriate, please complete this short form..
• Adventures In Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond The Yellow Brick Road!
• The Global Economic Crisis and Consequences for Development Strategy in Dubai (The Economics of the Middle East)?
• Caravaggio (German Edition).

This doesn't remove her completely from villainy, however. She may not be able to cast spells, or create magical items, but she can still use magical things that already exist in Oz. Mombi does return in the Famous Forty. Since Ozma orders her melted I always thought of the Wicked Witch of the West as a special case when it came to water, but Ruth Plumly Thompson apparently thought differently at the end of that story, you might want to set your Mombi stories in between those two appearances.

Blinkie, the presumed Wicked Witch of the South. Although she is not acknowledged with the full title of Wicked Witch of the South in her appearance in Oz canon, she is referred to as a Wicked Witch. Again, the story ends with Blinkie having her powers removed by Glinda. Though this time, she's also been greatly reduced in size. But she was the leader of a coven, so some of her sister witches might turn up in your stories. They might even be trying to restore Blinkie to her old size and power. Technically, she's a Yookoohoo, but she could make for an interesting villainess. Trapped in the form of a Green Monkey since her last appearance in the stories, she may be down, but it's still too early to count her out.

I detailed a couple of possible ways she could get back to her old form in the AiO rulebook, but even as a monkey, there are lots of ways for her to get into mischief.

Order Adventures in Oz From These Fine Sellers

Interestingly enough, Red Reera, the other Yookoohoo to grace the original novels, would probably make a very effective antagonist. She's not evil, but she is powerful and irritable, which is almost the same thing. There must be something about becoming a Yookoohoo that makes a person misanthropic. For the moment, it seems that all she wants is to be left alone. I almost feel bad for anyone who might be foolish enough try to conquer her little cottage.

Douglas Wall at It's sort of habit by now. I started out as an eager blogger looking for an opportunity to put out more content. Also, the first few rounds were focused on discussing a variety of games. They were probably rightly criticized for favoring the collector over the player, but I seem to fall very neatly in the collector mold. Since I've fallen away from blogging, it's a reminder that I should be doing more with the blog than I am. Every year, I do my best to complete the month, in the hopes that it will reignite the fire and encourage the habit of blogging.

And every year, it doesn't really seem to take. Douglas Wall at 4: Normally, I try to beg off of this sort of question since I spend most of my time as GM. But I've noticed that something that's been tripping me up in my recent opportunities as player is also something that's dogged me throughout my GMing career as well. In the case of my NPCs as GM, I've made a number of attempts to remedy this, as I've mentioned earlier in the month, trying to make them evocative through image choices or performance.

But I've realized that's not the flaw. Because it's come up in my play opportunities as well. It's been really obvious as I've been playing in my friend Jordan's games, since the rest of the playgroup tends toward very "loud" characters. Among a horde of scene-stealers, milquetoast guy really fades into the background. The majority of it, I think, boils down to having an agenda as a character. It doesn't even have to be a big agenda. Just so long as the character has something to do in every scene, or even most scenes.

While he was a very effective fighter and got to show off in that way during fights, he also had robot things and Japanese things to do when the heat was off. It's something I need to keep in mind as I move forward as a player and as a GM. Douglas Wall at 2: As I've said earlier this month, gaming has forced me to be social to a degree that I wouldn't otherwise be.

So it's actually fair to say that gaming is the reason I have friends at all. The great strength of F. Most modern approaches to Oz have focused on making them more serious, darker, more for grown-ups. There's nothing wrong with this approach, but it does turn the basic concept of Oz on its head.

As such I found the premise of the game refreshing in its traditionalism. And that's the point of RPGs: Oz, as presented in the original stories, is a land of talking animals, walking puzzle people and even pastries come to life. AiO doesn't apologize for this, doesn't try to update it or make it more logical, this game celebrates imagination and whimsy. This system as present is simple and basic. This is a plus for a game that clearly envisions children a frequent players.

To see if their character has succeeded in a challenge the player rolls two six-sided dice. If one of their dice comes up matching or lower than their appropriate Skill they have succeeded, if both succeed they get a Special Success. If both exceed the Skill level then the character fails. To build their characters players pick from one of several Templates based on characters from the novel: From there the player may modify the Template to create the character they envision.

Its simple and fast. Instead most damage is taken against a character's Wits score. When the Wits score hits bottom the victim gives up or runs away. It keeps the game from being about stomping people for the sake of it and helps maintain the fun feeling of a kid's book. But the key to making this game feel less like a typical swords and sorcery game and more like a children's odyssey is that to earn Oz Points the game's equivalent to Experience Points the characters must Make New Friends and Help the Friends they already have.

This isn't a game about beating up monsters and looting them after. This is a wonderful and elegant rule. When I gave this game a test run my players all adults instantly understood what the game was about when I explained how they would achieve success in the game.