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Contagion Second Edition $12.95
Average Rating:4.3 / 5
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Contagion Second Edition
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Contagion Second Edition
Publisher: Aegis Studios
by Corey D. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 11/10/2014 12:23:36

I have been looking for a setting like this for as long as I've been playing RPGs (20+ years). The writing is excellent (save for some things that got cleared up in the errata), and the artwork is tremendous. The flexibility and depth of character creation is some of the best I've ever seen.

I came across this only by chance just before Halloween. I read the free sample chapter and bought the book before I even finished reading it. Since then I've bought almost everything that's on the site related to it.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Creator Reply:
A truly heartwarming review! Thank you! Travis Legge Aegis Studios
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Contagion Second Edition
Publisher: Aegis Studios
by anthony u. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 02/18/2014 03:10:01

If I were to make a modern d20 rpg, this is pretty much what I would make.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Creator Reply:
What better review could one ask for?!? THANK YOU!
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Contagion Second Edition
Publisher: Aegis Studios
by David V. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/26/2014 17:00:55

I was very happy with the 2nd edition of Contagion.

I am going to go over what makes this different. The game clocks in around 600 pages. It is a point buy system without levels.

The book starts with doing point buy based on campaign type street 200 to cosmic 500. Once the point total is decided you go on to buy Callings which are similar to classes. Callings range from martial soldier, slayer, hunter ect to more magical magus/soberer, arcanis/magic user, clergy/cleric ect. Each of the callings have point cost. There are 36 callings. The next is occupations that add benefits like extra skill ranks based on the occupations 30 occupations. These also have point cost. The next thing is race 22 races. Each of these have point cost also based on the power of the race. Some races such as Angels and demons may cost 60, but have allot of extra like immunities and access to some magic through supernatural abilities. There is allot of variety in callings, occupations, and races that can do a variety of things like Supernatural, World of Darkness, and Sleepy Hallow just name few.

Next you buy abilities, skills, and feats. The abilities are strength, agility, stamina, intelligence, awareness, and presence. Although some abilities are slightly different than traditional d20 they are familiar enough. Stamina is similar to con ect. The ability point buy is two per rank=ability score. There is a wide variety of skills to buy 3 per discipline group one point per individual skill. Skill check is d20 plus rank (8=8 ranks) plus ability modifier. This needs to equal or exceed target number. This is how combat works also. There are archery, firearms, hand to hand, thrown, and wrestling these are the combat skills. So roll d20 + appropriate skill rank + stat bonus. Feats tweak your skills such as having the archaic and simple weapon feat allow you to add your hand to hand combat ranks to melee checks.

In the combat section there are several things that are tweaks. defense is Agility + Awareness/2 . Armor adds to defense. The attack roll most equal or exceed defense. Hit points are Stamina+Srength. This does give you a bit more starting hit points, but since there is no level you have to raise either you strength or stamina to raise you hit points. There is no d10 level. This does make things more gritty. There is also bruised -1 to rolls when take hit point damage. Also there is shaken threshold that is based on stamina modifier. once the character drops to the shaken the character suffers an additional minus -2. There is also a massive damage threshold which is your stamina score. Take damage equal or greater than massive damage threshold make fort save DC 15 be reduced to -1 damage. The fort save is strength and stamina modifier. Reflex is the agility and awareness modifiers. The will save is the intelligence and presence modifiers. The death and dying is -1 to -9 one hit point around -10 dead.

There is contagion which is the sum of all of your stats which is energy that fuels magic when used by casters activates certain character abilities and allows things like an extra d10 to rolls and ignore conditions for around.

Magic has affinity which is linked to a stat based on calling magus is stamina and arcanist is intelligence. Magnitude is the strength of the spell. Affinity determines how many spells and the magnitude of the spell that can be cast. There is also psychics who use abilities similar to psionics this works same way as magic.

Overall this was a good game. 5 stars for content. 4 for editing there was some errata issues there is free PDF on the drivethru site. There is also a 80 page free content PDF.

I will also give some props to drivethru they delivered a nice hardback.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Creator Reply:
Thanks so much for the detailed breakdown and review! I\'m glad to hear you enjoyed the book and hope to hear your thoughts on more of the supplements! Thanks, Travis Legge Aegis Studios
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Contagion Second Edition
Publisher: Aegis Studios
by Sean P. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/09/2014 13:40:41

We've played a few sessions of Contagion 2nd Ed now, and we're very much enjoying it. The setting is rich and fun, and character creation is hugely diverse and dynamic. The rules are built on a fairly standard D20 system, so they don't feel unfamiliar, but it's not just a repackaged version of another game and stand quite well on their own. Game play seems to be as balanced as the DM wants it to be, and there's a lot of opportunity to be both player friendly and Lovecraftian as the tone of the story requires. The book itself in frequently injected with bits of lore and short story which are enjoyable. They sometimes get a bit distracting while going through race and calling descriptions, but ultimately I feel like its more helpful to have more than less.

That all sounds pretty good, so why 4 stars instead of 5? My players and I all found the organization within the book to be confusing. It's not uncommon to be attempting to read the rules for something only to be directed to another chapter which may or may not answer your question before directing you back to the chapter you were on to start with. Character Creation especially was difficult to follow at first because the character creation chapter gives brief descriptions of races and callings and the cost to choose them, but you have to go to a different chapter to get the full mechanical information for them. We would sooner have seen the brief descriptions removed or placed in the races and callings chapters. In a physical book I don't think this would be too frustrating to flip back and forth from page to page, but in a PDF it's taking me some time to get the right bookmarks and annotations in place to allow me to follow what I need to follow to make everything work out. This is exacerbated by the table of contents which is designed for the print version of the book. The PDF version is off by about 12 - 15 pages because of the introductory material.

The bottom line is that we really enjoy this game and are very much looking forward to continuing our story. If you do not like games with a fair amount of crunch, you might want to steer clear on this one, and if you're not willing to put the time into jumping around between chapters while you try to puzzle everything out, skip it. If you are willing to put the effort in then you'll find Contagion 2nd Edition to be more than worth the effort.

tl;dr: The setting is excellent and the rules are good, but the book itself could use better organization. We like it.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Creator Reply:
Sean, Thanks so much for the excellent review! I\'m sorry to hear about the organization issues. I know how frustrating it is when you\'re in the middle of a scene, you need to look up some information and you have difficulties finding it. It can really grind the game to a halt. We will look into a few ways to mitigate those organizational issues and update the file as soon as we can implement them! Thank you, Travis Legge Aegis Studios
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Sean, I believe you will find the Gold Edition FAR better organized, and much more navigation friendly. Thanks, Travis
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