Savage Worlds

Last Saturday some friends came over to my place to play some board games. When we couldn’t decide what game to play I offered to run “Pirates of the Spanish Main” for them. “Pirates of the Spanish Main” is a stand-alone setting based on the Savage Worlds rules. I haven’t run SW before and I had only read the setting once but the rules seemed easy enough and I was pretty sure I could come up with some adventure on the go. In the end I used the adventure included in the “Pirates of the Spanish Main” book.
Pinnacle Entertainment advertises Savage Worlds as “Fast! Furios! Fun!” and I have to agree that this description is spot on. It took some while to get used to the roll mechanic and the combat rules, but we figured it out eventually and we stopped bothering about the rules and played. The combat is much faster and feels more lethal than in the new D&D for example and that’s a good thing in my book. Player characters normally don’t die but a good hit by an elite NPC could mean he’s lying face-down on the floor eating dust very fast. Normal NPCs go down with one good hit. This makes combats fast and furious, which suits the cinematic nature of most roleplaying settings.
My player group had also a lot of fun during character creation. Especially the Edges and Hindrances let them come up with some colorful ideas for their characters and within a few minutes we had a motley crew of pirates ready for adventure. We didn’t finish the adventure in one session so we resheduled our upcoming D&D night to play “Pirates of the Spanish Main” instead and I am thinking about starting a Rippers campaign (another setting using the SW rules) in the coming weeks!
Savage World is an awesome game to pick up especially if you are interested in a fast and fun roleplaying game.