A Flames Rising Review:

Wolfsheim is a mini-adventure for Scion, stand alone, suitable for an evening’s play or as a pick-up or convention game, though it will need experienced characters to be pre-generated in such an instance. It’s fairly straightforward, if a little rail-roady (as most of these adventures from White Wolf have been) and it could easily be shifted in space and time from its modern, Germanic setting to just about anywhere or anywhen.

The basic storyline is that of Yojimbo, the famous Japanese samurai story, a town caught between two predatory groups and the wanderers coming in, upsetting the balance between the people and their antagonists and, hopefully, causing a new peace to come about (through a great deal of bloodshed in the middle).

Wolfsheim is 44 pages, landscape - so suitable for laptop oriented gaming - of adventure with a short introduction and quite a few pages of organisational material, cuecards and NPC stat cards in the back. The meat of the adventure runs to about 22 pages all told with the rest taken up with the introductory material, background information, NPC motivations and the aforementioned play aids. The adventure is tight and focussed and, as well as falling within the overall Yojimbo scenario, also draws on dark fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretal and the myths and stories that circulate about the Black Forest.

The layout in unremarkable but workmanlike, I still can’t abide the layout or stylistic choices made in much of the modern White Wolf material but this is personal taste. While it biases my review it may not impact so much on your appreciation of the book.

The NPCs appear to be balanced and, while strong, there are circumstances and alliances that the players can take advantage of in order to even their odds. Taken as a straightforward fight players may find the scenario challenging - and it is combat heavy - but if they have even a modicum of cunning, or are combat oriented, they should survive the scenario fine.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Read the full review at FlamesRising.com: http://www.flamesrising.com/wolfsheim-scion-review