Pyramid Review
Weird Wars: Tour of Darkness (for Shane Lacy Hensley's Savage Worlds)
Published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group
Written by Teller with Shane Lacy Hensley, Simon Lucas, Rob Lusk, Greg Whalen, & Jason Young
Illustrated by Niklas Brandt, Cheyenne Wright & Richard Pollard
146-page black & white hardback; $29.95
Except for Recon, both in its original version published by RPG Inc. and the revamp released by Palladium, the Vietnam War has to date remained the province of the war-gaming rather than the roleplaying hobby. But Revised Recon is now joined by a second, Weird Wars: Tour of Darkness. As the title suggests, this is a sequel to 2001's Weird Wars II: Blood On the Rhine, but unlike that game, Tour of Darkness is not powered by the d20 System. Instead it uses Shane Lacy Hensley's Savage Worlds, the pulp orientated RPG also used for Evernight and 50 Fathoms.
Spanning roughly a 25-year period, Tour of Darkness encompasses the history of Southeast Asia from the end of World War II to the fall of South Vietnam. Games can be run during France's attempted reoccupation of her Indochina colonies, during the early build up of U.S. forces in the early sixties, and finally in the desperate years of the late 1960s when conscripts spent a hellish year in-country. Tour of Darkness can be run as a straight military game, but as it also happens to be a Weird Wars title, there is a lot more going on. Horrors lurk out in the jungle, temples to dark gods stand forgotten, . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: June 29, 2007
Copyright © 2007 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.