Pyramid Review
Four Bastards: A Feng Shui Scenario Sourcebook
Published by Atlas Games
Written by Robin D. Laws
32 pp., $8.95 US
(Editor's note: If you're going to be a player in Four Bastards, it would be naughty to read this review, because it contains spoilers. You have been warned.)
Four Bastards is an adventure supplement for Feng Shui, written by Robin Laws, the original game's author. In this adventure, an attack on an orphanage draws the characters into a plot hatched by four men, all bastard sons of the same man, to rule the world through a magical ritual involving blowing up five feng shui sites, one for each element (earth, air, fire, wood, and water). The climax of the adventure takes place on Three Gorges Dam, a colossal project that won't be completed in the real world for nearly another decade, but as Robin Laws points out, sometimes accuracy has to take a back seat to a cool setting.
The adventure opens with the attack on the orphanage, which, in another nice touch the characters discover was masterminded by someone who used to be on their side but was kicked out of the Dragons for excessive brutality. It does not escape Robin Laws' notice that excessive brutality is common among player characters, too. This one incident leads the characters across time and across the globe to foil the plot of this renegade Dragon and his four half-brothers.
The next piece of the puzzle comes into place in the ex-Soviet republic of Baharistan (a thinly-veiled . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: September 1, 2000
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