Pyramid Review
Grim Tales (for the d20 System)
Published by Badeaxe Games
Written by Benjamin Durbin
Cover by Ken Kelly
Illustrated by Scott Drouin, Andrew Hale, Jeremy Mohler, John O'Connor, Scott Purdy & Jim Zubkavich
212-page hardcover; $34.95
It is an unfortunate fact that the pulp genre has been ill served by the d20 System. Until the publication of d20 Adventure!, the adaptation of White Wolf's Origins Award winning RPG that is a prequel to the Aberrant and Trinity RPGs, the best choice still remained the two mini games published in issues of Dungeon/Polyhedron. Badaxe Games' Grim Tales sets out to counter this omission. With its tagline of "High Adventure, Low Magic," it is a "Rules Resource And Campaign Toolkit" that describes itself as a sourcebook for fantastic roleplaying in the pulp genre. It sets out to cover material "from the dawn of Atlantis to the apocalyptic future of a dying planet." These are not high claims, but on past form, pulp RPGs often fail to live up to their claims.
In simple terms what Grim Tales does, is being together a wide selection of rules and mechanics from other sources. This game files off the knobs and whistles of the d20 System, best represented by the d20 Modern Roleplaying Game (but any d20 System-based RPG will do) and distills the remainder down into its essences. From that base, the author retools the game based on one simple fact: Magic is both scarce and potentially dangerous to its user. With magic scarce and magic weaponry scarcer still, . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: December 7, 2007
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