I was very intrigued by the concept of this setting, as I think there is the potential for a great supers game built into 5e. Supers & Sorcery certainly touches on some good ideas, but overall it ends up a little too tied to the setting, Ghaistala, which to me was a little too heavy on the fantasy elements - I was never quite clear on what makes the characters super heroes versus fantasy heroes. Ghaistala came across to me as a high magic fantasy setting with some technological elements, but with so many of the creatures in the setting having strange powers and abilities and lots of magic as kind of a default state of being it makes it a little harder to see the PC's as special heroes. Not that this can't work - but it is more Thor Ragnarok than Metropolis or Gotham. And most of the book serves the purpose of supporting the setting, and I think it does that pretty effectively, and there is a lot here with 216 pages, but I hoped to see more of what is briefly touched upon in chapter 9 which describes different kinds of super hero stories you might focus on for a campaign; I may not have been attentive enough to the kickstarter campaign as I think I was expecting something a little closer to a universal 5e super powers compendium rather than what is very much a setting book. The chapter on creating your campaign had strangely about just as much space provided as for the two new player character races, one of plant people and one kobold-gnome hybrid, which appeared at the very beginning of the book, neither of which seemed to me particularly central to the setting, other than to emphasize two main themes I drew from the book - creatures from across the multiverse have been appearing on Ghaistala for some time now, and on Ghaistala every creature seems to have the ability to mate with every other creature found there. There were some other interesting character options in the subclasses, but neither the super powered origins nor the archon class did much for me. I particularly liked the fighter as superhero subclass and the warlock wielding a power ring on behalf of the "cosmic light."
Rating: [3 of 5 Stars!] |