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by Anna T
on 4/30/2009
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Dancers in the Dusk Review
I greatly enjoy Dancers over all...
Chapter One presents new rules on Dreams, with traveling them, Oneiroscopy for intrepreting Dreams, Incubi that offer new antagonists for changelings to confront when in Dreams and not just or always a Gentry. A new half template in that of the Cambion is introduced, a half human, half dream result of Incubus & Succubi.
Chapter Two delves into Fate and using it in a chronicle, again, more antagonists and new contracts or introduced. Curses are also explored and looked at. Especially useful are some of the new pledges. Lastly in this chapter is a new type of magic item, the Trophy... once belonging to one of the True Fae, how they work and their drawbacks.
Chapter Three explore more of the Hedge, offering ideas and places on how to flesh it out more with various denizens and locations. There's a lot of good ideas in this chapter. A fair warning, this book offers the potential for players or an ST to turn the Hedge into more of a Disney Land trip then offering horrors. For a discerning ST, what's offered here can help you keep any Hedge trip from meaning that its instant kill of the characters. You can provide more story of the strangeness and weirdness of the Hedge. For players, the new threats presented here are still dangerous. And the Unmade... one version of what happens to a Mage who thinks they're going to find Arcadia. Take off those Rose Colored Glasses now...
Chapter Four... New, alternate rules are presented here for increasing Wyrd and what happens. Good only if you're doing a short term chronicle and want to show players why it's not a good idea to instantly increase ones Wyrd. As to the Dusk Court... maybe it's me, maybe it's not. But I'm a little burnt out on seeing yet another Court. It's good, once I took the time to really sit and read it and the way they're presented, you can have a Dusk court character in a Seasonally ruled Court. And several new Entitlements offer up more possibilities for play.
Each chapter is good and offers something to the table for Changeling. Taken all together, it does come off as a bit disjointed and doesn't have a very good unifying theme. |
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by Telperion
on 4/28/2009
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Pretty good for STs, but not so great otherwise
I have had this book for a couple of weeks now, and I'm only now about done reading it, which is weird. Usually it only takes me about three or four days to go through a CtL book, but this time around the book has been spending a whole lot more time on the shelf than what's common for a new CtL book in my home.
It's not that the book doesn't contain good material, but the stuff that's in there is covered in a few pages and then we get lots'n'lots of antagonists. Seriously, the vast majority of the book contains what I would call "filler material", which is to say examples of how to create and implement antagonists. And it's not even bad material, but there's just too much of it in comparison to the "good stuff", which is the game enhancing part of the book.
I'm giving this book 4 stars, because there's so much filler in it that I'll be borrowing stuff from it for years. And it's all very useful. The reason why I'm not giving it five stars is because this book is all over the place: unlike all the other CtL books this one doesn't have a clear concept, but is a hodgepodge of neat ideas thrown together with excessive use of examples.
As a reading experience this book definitely falls short of what I have come expect from the CtL gameline. |