Pyramid Pick
Down in Flames
Published by BTRC
Written by Greg Porter
72 pages, $12.00

Sometimes, the hardest thing to do in a roleplaying campaign is to bring things to an end. It's time to move on, start something a fresh -- a new set of characters, or maybe even a whole new game. But to just walk away from the current story doesn't seem right. There's no closure, no denouement.

Well, if that's your problem, look no further. Down in Flames has more closure than a bickering couple in a door factory. You want to end your roleplaying campaign -- really end it -- then this book is for you.

While it is written for Blacksburg Tactical Research Center's own CORPS modern-day/near-future roleplaying game, the author has kept the stats to a minimum (confined mostly to sidebars) and there's plenty of good ol' plain text descriptions that can be easily hijacked into any number of game systems. And while primarily set in the modern day, it wouldn't take too much work to adapt the neat ideas in this book to many other roleplaying genres.

And there are a boatload of really cool ideas, all based on the premise of bringing your roleplaying campaign to an end by ending the world. Nothing instantaneous and unexpected, mind you -- even as you're ending your RPG campaign, you want to have some fun while doing it. So most of the planet's demises come with warning, or are slow in developing, or both.

The first one presented is your basic global warming disaster -- the seas rise, coastal cities are destroyed, most of the arable land is flooded, billions dead, that sort of thing. But there's another scenario offered: What if the flooding is caused not by a rise in the sea level, but a catastrophic lowering of the land level? "Like a magma souffle gone bad," the book says. You get the same flooding, but toss in killer earthquakes and volcanoes everywhere as a bonus. OK, the science on some of these isn't perfect, but like Porter says in the introduction, "It's no less a suspension of disbelief than magic or starships."

But Down in Flames is just getting started. In "Shake & Bake," a planet-sized mass crashes into the sun, releasing light, heat, and radiation many times normal. Anyone caught in the open simply dies. Electronics are fried, temperatures soar, weather goes haywire. And it will be years before the wounded star settles down, provided anybody can live that long. There's a big-rock-is-coming-to-wipe-us-out scenario with a cute twist, a nuclear-war-aftermath scenario, a worldwide plague scenario, and more. In "Malthusian Meltdown," it's not one big thing -- it's a bunch of little things finally tipping the ecological scales and damaging the ecosystem to the point where there's not enough food anymore, with the resulting riots, martial law, and other unpleasantness. Porter has done a fine job of mixing the big catastrophes with the seemingly little ones, giving the reader many different paths to his roleplaying doom.

After these more grounded, "could happen" (just maybe) type scenarios, Porter starts to let his imagination roam. There are several different alien invasion scenarios, and a scenario where a subatomic experiment rips the fabric of the time-space continuum, with waves of change crisscrossing the globe, replacing whatever's there (including people) with something or somewhere or somewhen else. There's several spiritually-based scenarios, including demons and angels battling it out in the streets and not caring much about collateral damage, everyone on the planet slowly going insane from an unknown cause, a Lovecraftian return of the Old Gods, and a particularly interesting one based on the Buddhist concept of souls and reincarnation that I don't want to give away the surprise on. And another very strange end of the world in which no one dies; in fact, that's the problem -- no one can die. Sounds good, right? Well, not after Porter gets through with it . . .

The book wraps up with some maps of the world, taken from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, modified to show the results of changes in sea level, both up and down, major and minor. Just a little something to give the players a real look at what they're up against.

The book is well-written, and layout is professional, though not special or anything. The art is also no great shakes, but BTRC doesn't have the massive production budgets a lot of other companies do. What they have is good ideas, presented well. Down in Flames is a gold mine of cool ideas, and well worth having.

-- Scott D. Haring