Savage Characters Volume One

Savage Characters, Volume 1
By Jim Davenport, Dragonlaird Gaming
Review and Advice: Tom Barlow, Allen Bohannon, Chris Daianu, Mark Daymude,
James Dugger, Joanna Gilicinski, Mark Gilicinski, Norm Hensley, Simon Lucas,
Dave McGuire, Rory McLeod, Josh Minto, Tina Monk, Mark Plemmons, Jeff Rees,
Nathan Rockwood, Paul Vogt, Tim Weber
Editing: Kate Sedon
Layout: Heather S. Miller
Rules Editing: Norm Hensley
Illustrations:
Bart Browne (Theta Ships & Iron Men)
Jesse Griffith (Sixguns & Ghost Lands)
Gordon Napier (Dark Ages & Dragon Gods)
Vicki Moon Spiegel (Demon Streets & Made Men)

The Savage Characters series utilizes the Savage Worlds Deluxe game engine to present TWENTY
ORIGINAL CHARACTERS. Each character is defined with a rich background, full body portrait,
full stats as a Legendary figure, the complete build path to play them at whatever experience level
you choose, and five adventure ideas (one for each rank). Each of them could be friend or foe, PC
or NPC. Used together, they present entwined histories and related adventures.
The characters are grouped into four Dragonlaird Gaming settings with five characters in each
setting. The settings are original but the characters could be easily used in other games of the
haunted west, fantasy, modern horror, or space opera genres.

Overview:
Often character completions are nothing more than a stack of Pre-generated characters with little rhyme or reason for other than to speed up your game prep. This is often the only reason why so often we pick these products up.  Refreshingly, Savage Characters Volume One offers up very much more. Inside you will find a collection of well thought out and built characters. Each with detailed backgrounds, progression advancement, and adventure hooks.

PRO’s: 

There is a lot more product here then meets the eye at first glance.  This PDF is also a shocking 155 pages long! Definitely not the page count that most would come to expect of a Character compilation book. The product also contains several new Skills, Edges, and Races that are fully detailed as well. Providing you with some fun stuff to bring to your table, with the bonus of being very easy on the wallet.

The book is a collection of twenty complete characters. Each of these is presented with their full advancement from 0-80 exp. Allowing you to throw down all twenty of these characters at any step of progression from 0 to 80 exp. You, in fact, have far more than twenty possible characters that you could pull from this product because of this. Or if you prefer you can pick any point along this build to deviate and make the character your own.

The book is laid out well with each of the presented characters designed to fit into one of the four presented settings. Alternatively, it would be easy to use them seamlessly in most any similar setting with Little to no issue or need of modification as they are presented.

Additionally each character has a fully realized back story and several adventure hooks. Each character has one hook for each Tier of advancement. The characters also have story connections with other characters presented in the given theme. This can even further take some of the work burden off a busy GM.

CON’s
Really when you produce a book like this you have to walk a fine line. You have to strive to hit the tone of crafting characters that you would want to play in a game. Yet they must be generic enough that they can fit in any similar setting.

Overall this product hits a home run in this department. Most all of the Characters in this book could easily be seamlessly dropped into any appropriate Savage World Setting and be ready for play “As is”. The Ghost lands & Sixguns setting Characters would be  harder I think to drop into a Deadlands style game without a raised eyebrow or two. But hey it is the “Weird West”

Hyper-linking at least to each of the settings would have been a pleasant bonus as this product was far larger than I thought it was going in. With these minor exceptions the whole book was overall a treat.

Runkle’s Ranking ?

It is obvious a lot of thought went into the creation of this product. If your group plays Savage Worlds this book would be well worth your time. This is a perfect buy for one-shot games, or to give to a player to use as a fill in seat when another gamer joins your table for the night.

The Gm will get plenty of use out of this product if they want to bring some of the books presented settings into their game and pull them from this product.

It’s easy to read and the layout and art is very nice. The addition of some Edges, Backgrounds, and Races are always a plus. Overall I would compare this to Pathfinders Codex of NPC’s.  Easily an above average product. 

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