Interstellar Expeditions & XTRO Succession Wars Reviews!

New products, awesome!

First up, another XTRO.  Great idea these XTRO's are, they are TROs that come out more often.  I would like to see them eventually compiled (and the massive amount of bugs fixed) and released in paper form however.

Anyway, the Succession Wars.  First, I must say, this cover is absolutely beautiful, one of the top mech color images I've ever seen (it just *feels* like BT).  It is a Marauder with dual blazers and dual SRM6's, plus some freezers.  The book has 7 mechs and 7 other vehicles.  I noticed that CGL apparently still doesn't have a decent method for making record sheets.  Freezers for example are just listed as double heat sinks, and its a bit confusing.  Think of a freezer as not a heat sink, but a device that uses 3 crits and eats up 2 heat.  Heat sinks are completely separate.  The designs are interesting, and we *finally* get stats for the Super Wasp and Super Griffin from the original Black Widow Company scenario book.  They don't match up unfortunately, but they can't, and the attempt was sufficient to make these units playable IMO.  Some designs were interesting and potentially usable (Marauder), others not so much (Buffalo).  In fact, the Buffalo is a 100 ton hover with a booby trap and drone OS.  Neato, but it also carries 900 shots of MG ammo to help make the boom bigger.  However, there are no rules that say carrying more ammo makes the boom bigger so it was kinda silly.  Oh well.  Anyway, in short, another XTRO, if you liked the others, you'll like this one, and for $5 you really can't go wrong.

And onto Interstellar Players 3, Interstellar Expeditions.

A pretty good looking cover.  A 120 page book filled to the brim with words.  I typically don't read the books, only skim them, but this one had a lot of little things that jumped out at me.  I will be taking some more time to skim it more thoroughly.  We do get a couple Clan Industrial Mechs plus a jumping vehicle along side the the Bug-Eye and Faslane updated warships.

We also get system stats for 27 new periphery systems.  More details on the 5 hidden worlds, though 2 are still "unknown" for location, which stinks.  This book feels like a GM's wet dream for scenario ideas and campaigns.  Though I do have my beef with various aspects of CGL, I really can't denounce their writing abilities in any way.  There are a few new critters, a couple RPG character generation templates, and a random assignment table.

Though I haven't read the thing, I can say if your into the RPG at all, its a must have.  If your into the universe, its also a must have... heck, unless all you care about it is simply rolling dice it really looks like a great book.  

Oh, and the best part IMO, we get maps of all 4 directions of the deep periphery, not just toward clan space.  While the maps aren't real detailed (they are like most deep periphery maps) they do give us a lot of information we have simply never had before in any way.

And, a surprise... took me an hour, but I merged all 4 of those deep periphery maps into 1.  Do NOT take this as exact, some didn't quite line up perfectly and could be off maybe a quarter diameter of a system circle.  BUT, it does let you look around a bit easier and see what all is out there.  Download the PDF here.

And finally, I added all the unit data from these 2 books, so I'm 100% updated again on my data.  However, like usual, many of these units don't work yet until I update my code for the record sheets.  I'll get to it eventually :)

If anybody is interested in an API for my data, let me know, I can put one together pretty quickly.