LW Adventure Game - a quick run down.

[greg]

I got my adventure game from Cubicle 7 a couple of weeks ago.

It is an impressive box - full of maps, adventure sheets and books. Everything looks good - the books are well layed out and in full colour.

Book of Kai Training is character creation. The characters can be a little more detailed and varied, with skills and so on to supplement disciplines. But, and this is a big but, they can only be Kai Lords.

The Book of Kai Wisdom has basic and advanced rules (or Initiate and Master). The rules seemed to have eliminated the bugs in Mongoose's system, particularly many-on-one combat. There is also a basic Magnamund gazetteer

Book of Kai Legends has two scenarios. The first one is very basic and has a run down of the rules at every stage. It is very good for new players and DMs. The second is a little more interesting.

This a huge improvement over Mongoose's MPGB. However it still lacks the epic feel of Lone Wolf, and the variety necessary for a good RPG.

I do think Cubicle 7 have produced a quality procuct, hoewever, as an experienced gamer with a small group of players, I can't see us ever playing this except as a curiosity.

[Dave]

Despite the apparently tremendous limitation of the Character class of "Kai Lord", I think you'll find that choices of abilities and player-style can greatly increase the actual range of characters quite a bit (I'm just speaking from my experience with the books - I haven't seen the package - so maybe characters don't choose Disciplines? That would render the rest of my argument invalid.)

Want to play a "magician-type"? Take psionics - Mind-blast, mind over matter, mindshield, etc.
Want to play a "ranger-type"? Take Hunting, Tracking, Camouflage
Want to play a "druid-type"? take Animal Kinship, Healing, etc.

I think that there are possibilities within the class to explore a range of play-styles and still get the feeling of standard RPG classes...

Disclaimer: Everything I just said may be pointless - the RPG gameplay mechanics may be so far removed from the gamebooks, that the above ideas are entirely off-the-mark! Sorry, if so.

[Lost Wolf]

Received my own copy as well and probably I'll describe my experience in a dedicated thread.
But here I'll just say that the product is a very quality one, really gorgeous for the price.
My group already made three sessions. We're a group of both veteran roleplayers and less experienced ones, and currently we play mainly D&D 5th edition (great game by the way).

Book of Kai Training is nice. We use only the basic rules plus the Kai Favor rule (this one a bit changed). I'm the game master and I asked for players if they wanted to use the advanced rules. They said "don't bother" because we play Lone Wolf as something rule-light to play with when part of our D&D group can't play.

Book of Kai Wisdom adds a lot of fluff that I didn't know about, like kagonite and other stuff. We use a little of the advanced rules but again we don't want to bother much. I find some rules of combat confusing, and others not very good.

Book of Kai Legends I read a bit about it but skipped most of it because...

We played Flight from the Dark as the first adventure!
since my players never read Lone Wolf.
We played it in one session and they had a blast.
We then played Fire on the Water in two sessions and now they can't wait to play the third adventure.