Review Shane Lacy Hensley's "Savage Worlds" system has received a lot of attention and much praise, but grumbles about the weight of the super-hero options have been a frequent undercurrent. Despite the cover claim that SW includes everything you need for heroic action the text inside is a little more honest and admits that the basic rulebook really only deals with low-powered comicbook capers. Enter "Necessary Evil."
Super-hero games are enjoying something of a renaissance at the moment, at least partly down to the success of the on-line computer game "City of Heroes" (itself soon to be a roleplaying game, such is our circular world), which is good news for gamers with a bent to wear their undies outside their trousers and spend their time interfering in other people's business. It's a fine time to be a hero, with plenty to choose from between the revitalised "Champions" game and well-received newcomers including "Silver Age Sentinels" and "Mutants & Masterminds," but as the shelves grow crowded with capes a new game is likely to need something special in order to stand out; NE takes a typically Savage approach by turning the genre on its head... to a point.
So, the greatest heroes of Earth have been rather embarrassingly tricked into a colossal tactical snafu and almost all of them have been wiped out by alien invaders. As nations fall to the egregious extra-terrestrials the Earth is in desperate need of super-powered muscle to fight back, but with the heores destroyed or dispersed who is left? Why, your unfriendly neighbourhood Super-villain, of course.
This much you can learn from the cover, and it's the basic premise behind "Necessary Evil." Instead of playing a white hat you get to be the badguy for once. Sounds potentially appealing, but the concept is not without some problems.
Physically this is the best SW supplement yet, a beefy hardback chock full of colour art and sporting a nicely menacing cover showing the head villain's mask looming, uh, villainously out of a dark cityscape. The scene is set for something really nasty, especially given the way that "Savage Worlds" supplements have twisted the tails of familiar settings in the past. The cover also sports more logos than a Formula 1 car, quite impressive given that it's not a licensed product for someone else's game. Inside the good impressions are reinforced with a frequent (but not space-filling) use of quality art from the likes of Storn, well known to "Champions" players. Here the pictures are colour and have just the sort of bold style needed to convey the comicbook setting. There's no sense of randomly recycled art used to pad the book out, either. Editing is mostly good, despite evidence that someone has been using a computer spellchecker without supervision. Hmm, maybe if they had Super Vision they wouldn't need extra proofreading.
As well as general illustrations the book is well endowed in the map department, with plenty of clear, computer drawn maps accompanying the adventures, as well as a rather charming two page spread of "Generic Villain Hide Out Maps." perfect for the villain who likes to catalogue shop. The chief location of Star City, an artificial island home to most of the world's supers, is treated to a lovely full page colour map that looks almost like a satellite photograph. What a pity the absence of any actual locations, other than the names of the star points, makes it entirely superfluous. After all, telling us that the city is an eight-pointed star gives us almost all of the information shown on the map, but none of the key locations featured in the adventures are included. If it's not a mistake then it's certainly a missed opportunity. As is the norm in colour games these days the pages have been treated to a colour background, in this case a pale cityscape which thankfully does not obscure the text but does make it look as though you've been hurriedly wiping spilt tea from the page.
There is a decent, although hardly exhaustive, index and the contents page nicely presents the upcoming goodies; between them you should be able to navigate this volume without trouble. NE continues the SW style of providing books that are half rules and setting supplements and half adventure. The rules here are solid and clearly presented, with brief advice on concept, example character types (these are particularly well illustrated) and new Edges and Hindrances appropriate to the genre. Expect any fans of the Blackadder series to start chuckling the moment they see the hindrance "Gloater," mind you, but on the whole these are well designed and in keeping with the flavour of the main rulebook. Knockback, something of an essential to re-creating those downtown destruction derbies from the comics, is addressed, along with new gear and vehicles. All very nice, and SW fans will pounce on this stuff gleefully. The real treat, however, follows: Powers.
Putting the Super into Super-villain, Powers are key to making a character suitable for this setting, and the authors have gone for the tried and tested list of options approach. Pay your points, take your power. It's a nicely extensive list and the inclusion of suggested "Trappings" such as "Cold stare, horrible visage, dark cowl" for the "Fear" power give the players ways to avoid a situation where two characters with the same power seem like the same person. There are different levels and combinations available and the use of Powers does not muck around with the fundamental speed and ease of the "Savage Worlds" game, which is much of the appeal of this particular set of rules, of course. If you need further details on how those rules function then you will find several reviews of the basic game on RPGnet.
