Spurred by the "GM's Day" Sale on DriveThruRPG.com, this morning I bought and read the PDF of the V&V adventure "Escape From The Microverse."
This adventure was the first 'modern,' new V&V adventure published by FGU that I have personally purchased. (I did buy "Into the Sub-Realm" last year, but don't really count that one, since it was apparently completed in the mid-1980s.)
I was very favorably impressed.
To start, I really liked how the structure, font, design, cartography, narrative structure, and artwork all successfully captured the "look and feel" of the 1980s V&V adventures published by FGU. I am sure that took a lot of work to capture that so well, and it showed. I also noted favorably that the interior artwork was also, while in a reminiscent style, a cut above the interior art of some of the classic V&V adventures I own.)
In that same vein, I appreciated that the text began with a set-up also written in the 'classic' style: there's a physicists' convention being held in the PC's (generic, unspecified) home town. No hint of a specific V&V 'universe' setting, or of a real-world city setting. I remembered this fondly from some of the 1980s V&V modules, because my family lived at the time in a not-very-big, somewhat distant suburb of a much larger city. So imagining all these wild, super hero things happening in my little suburban town always cracked me up as a teenager.
I loved the "Micronauts" as a kid. So the whole topic of this adventure would've really appealed to me as a kid,and still did now as a 40-something family man. I liked how the adventure set up a (theoretically) ongoing mechanism for a V&V campaign to go back to this Microverse in the future, if they'd want.
Probably because I loved "Micronauts" so much as a kid, both the toys and the Marvel comic book, I found myself wishing that some of the characters and situations in this adventure were closer to the Micronauts world. But to the creators' credit, they created their own original characters. I also would've loved some rules covering how to handle 'little micronauts' coming to our, 'big' world. Maybe that'll be in a sequel?
In conclusion, the GM's Day sale is running for another week, and I wonder if anyone here might recommend to me another, particularly excellent 'new,' and 'modern' V&V adventure published in the last 7-8 years? (I plan to buy the WW2-themed ones when they are complied in print in a Giant. So I suppose I am asking for suggestions other than those.)
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