The 1936 Olympics.

. . . but expands greatly on what the world looks like, decade by decade.


Election season, 40 years later.

"A World Gone Mad" ends with the present day.

Greg Stolze wrote two new chapters on how to play a WT character and how to run a WT game. As you might guess, they are not unawesome.

We're stealing blatantly from Reign to revise the stats in Wild Talents. The old Godlike stats worked perfectly in Godlike, but WT is so much broader that they didn't quite fit. So we're replacing Cool with Charm, for your characters who are loaded with social graces, and folding Cool's old functions into the Command stat.

I talked briefly about skills. Specialties for noncombat skills are less detailed than specialties for combat skills, but you can use one to increase the speed of your action ("Research faster, damn you!"), or make the equivalent of a "called shot" to increase your chances of a particularly spectacular success ("Everybody said I was MAD to search the public water system database for information about the McGuffin -- but look what I found!"), and a few other things. Nothing particularly earthshaking, it just makes the weird "martial arts" exceptions something sensible and widely applicable.

We're tightening up the power creation system. The Attacks/Defends rules exceptions ("If it has Attacks it does this, but if it also has Defends it does this") are gone for most powers. There are a couple of other fixes to how power qualities work. Willpower costs are getting revised, too, so fewer powers are prohibitively difficult to use.

Speaking of which, Cosmic Power, Power Mimic, and Gadgeteering . . .


What gas shortage?

. . . are getting streamlined so they function as three flavors of the same essential power, and using Cosmic Power doesn't remove your character from the game for lack of Willpower afterward.

And there are some edits to weapons and combat rules.

Now, somebody out there right this second is yelling, "HEY. You promised the rules would be the same in the new edition as in First Edition that I bought a year ago!"

And that's very true. That was the plan up until relatively recently. But what it comes down to is, there were TONS of ways we could improve the game for the greater enjoyment of everybody who plays it. It seemed dumb to not fix the things that we really want to fix right now, when we're about to pay through the nose to print a mountain of new books.

So there'll be a comprehensive rules update kit available free on the site. You can download that, print it out, stick it in your copy of WT1, and you'll be set.

Then if you want to buy a copy of Second Edition after all, well, I won't stop you.

And Gumby is right, This Favored Land will rock your face off.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.