Evening!
I finally broke down and bought the Robotech Shadow Chronicles RPG book from Palladium. It's made me emotional, so I figured I'd bust out a quick review. Here goes...
I like the format a lot. I would love to see this format for more games. The small size is handy, and yes, it doesn't lay flat, and a mech takes a few pages for stats, but it's overall ease of use is increased. Flipping pages is easy, it's a nice size to sit and read with in a chair. The larger size always needed to be set on a table, or it flopped around... Minor complaints about the large format I know, but somehow having the smaller one makes the big one seem old fashioned and cumbersome.
From a layout point of view, the smaller size makes Palladium's stale layout palatable. In their other products, the horrificly dated, boring, hard to read two column typewriter clone layout pisses me off to no end. I'm a visual, graphic person, I buy and play games largely for the visuals, including, no especially for the information design. RPGs are all about conveying information. I think R. Talsorian Games set and continually raised the bar back in the 80s and 90s with their products, especially the Mekton and Fuzion, graphically speaking. Dream Pod 9 also had awesome graphic design. Compared to these, the typical Palladium crap, well, it was crap. But Shadow Chronicles holds its own. Even the little flourish of a title font for (get this) titles helped a lot. The book was on the verge of good graphic design.
Until of course, the crappy faux grayscale images appeared. That ruined it for me. It looks like crap. It looks bad. And in this day and age, it's ridiculous to have a book professionally printed with amateur production techniques like that. Why I ask? Why do they print them like that? If it's to keep the cost down, then just stick to the line art. The line art in Shadow Chronicles wasn't mind blowing, but it was clean and tight. They were more technical drawings rather than illustrations or "art".
The new organization confused the hell out of me too, but that's to be expected in Palladium products. One just has to learn to sift or try and use the (insert sarcasm) quick find table of contents. All that was fine back in 1986, but hey! it's 2008, there are these people called GRAPHIC DESIGNERS who will take your crappy BACK-SIDE two column book and turn it into something exciting, engaging and ultimately more useful.
For the record: I probably lean towards jilted ex-Palladium lover than an objective reviewer. But maybe someone over there will read this and say, gee, it wouldn't take that much effort to turn this into a modern, efficient book. And then, maybe, I would buy lots more from them. I also would write a super positive review instead of a snarky "I wish it was..."
Enjoy!
Rogue-z
And just to prove I'm not really a hater, check out this thread: Other Strangeness
Tags: Review Palladium Robotech
