Produktbeschreibung
This is meant to be the companion of the Street Fighter core rulebook, and all in all it's not bad. The "Shadoloo" referred to in the title is the game's globe-spanning criminal empire and main collection of bad guys, which means that this is mostly for the GM and not the players.
The book begins by giving a brief overview of how Shadoloo operates; this is at times too brief and at times not brief enough, concentrating on the big string-pullers and not the street-level plots and crimes which the player characters are more likely to thwart. Still, it's not a bad set up at all, and has plenty of good ideas in it.
Next, those Street Fighter characters and martial arts styles conspicuously left out of the core rulebook are profiled. The fighting styles are in balance with their predecessors, and the new special manuevers add interesting new dimensions to combat. The sample villains provided are standard issue heavies, which in a game like this means lethal, colorful, and robustly evil.
Third, the book profiles Shadoloo's island fortress headquarters, which is sufficiently dangerous and weird to offer all kinds of inspiration to even novice gamemasters. Some of the elements like brainwashed jungle tribesmen, murderous rose bushes, super-intelligent giant squids, and robot guards with ray guns may not be in keeping with some playing styles, but none of these are critical components of the chapter and can easily be left out of the game.
Finally, as in the core rulebook, an adventure is provided. It has all the common features of a Street Fighter scenario: intrigue, wacky hijinx, melodramatic villainy, and plenty of opportunity to kick butt.
All throughout, the artwork is solid and the pages, including much of the text, are full-color.
Downsides to the "Secrets of Shadoloo" include its brevity (around 80 pages), and its cursory examination of the organization's daily activities and personalities.
It's not perfect by any means, but "Secrets of Shadoloo" adds some good stuff to the core rules without including any real junk, and considering what followed in the product line, that's something to be proud of. |
