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Month: April 2007

Scion Demo

White Wolf put up the Scion demo the other week; I just got around to downloading it. Scion is the one where you play the children of gods in the modern world; it’s not the World of Darkness. They’re going for a Mage: The Hero Defined feel, and not coming up much short as far as I can tell from reading the demo.

The system is standard Storyteller, tweaked for heroism. Successes are 7 or more on a ten sider, rather than 8 or more. PCs have a Legend rating, and penalties can’t bring your die pool beneath your Legend rating. And, of course, there are stunt rules.

I count six different kinds of special powers you get out of being a hero. Epic attributes are a lot like Aberrant’s Mega-attributes; they give autosuccesses and provide variable benefits related to the attribute. Nothing else is really explained in the demo. I’m a bit concerned that there’s too much complexity there, but we’ll see.

Combat is pretty heavily revamped. It’s reminiscent of Feng Shui, in that every action takes a number of ticks. If we’re on tick 3, and I take a Speed 3 action, I’ll act again on tick 6. There are no rounds, however; you just keep going until the fight’s over.

For example characters, we’ve got a jetsetting gunslinger child of Aphrodite, a former US Marshal investigative type who’s the son of Horus, a cardiac surgeon child of Tezcatlipoca, a teen auto mechanic whose dad is Thor, a necromantic embalmer from New Orleans who’s the daughter of Baron Samedi, and a photographer/martial artist child of Susan-o. That happens to be one Scion from the six pantheons outlined in the main rulebook.

I’m sorta medium amped for this. Street date is a couple of weeks from now.

EMI Drops DRM

EMI’s going to sell all their music online without DRM. It’ll be available through iTunes first; it’ll also cost 30 cents more for a track without DRM, but the quality will be twice as high. If you want to keep the old price, you’ll still be able to get DRM’d tracks for a buck.

Albums will be DRM-free at the same old price. You’ll be able to convert your DRM’d tracks to non-DRM tracks for 30 cents per track.

This is pretty good. Philosophically, I don’t want to pay more for music without the DRM, but since the quality is better I won’t mentally grumble too much. And since I buy most of my music by the album anyway? No big deal.

I should be able to convert full albums to DRM-less at no charge, though.