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Chapter 1 brings you a new class (Sailor) and variations on the
Grunt to so your players can be Marines of various flavors. Also
included are the Navajo Code Talkers, Naval Commanders and
Naval Aviators. As you’d expect the new skills and feats are
either naval or jungle related, which fits in with the setting. The
Prestige Classes are cool and include Navy Frogmen, OSI
Shaman and others. A short section on life in the Pacific during
the war ends this chapter and will help players and WM’s flesh
out their campaign.
Chapters 2 and 3 introduce a handful of new weapons, but
focuses on aircraft and ships. Naval Combat is given what I feel
is the proper amount of space, just a couple of pages, as I don’t
see a whole lot of combat between carriers going on. An
adventure aboard a carrier or a sub, now that’s a different
matter entirely.
Chapter 4 is also relatively short at 10 pages, but has enough
detail regarding the history of the period to jump-start your
campaign and keep from leaving players in the dark.
Chapter 5 has many ways for the WM to run the campaign (Sea,
Island, Air) and is loaded with fully-fleshed out NPC’s. Like the
Nazi’s in Germany the Japanese have their own dealings with the
super-natural and the OSI is also here for the allies.
The Bestiary gives you nine new monsters and while that’s not a
lot, the authors were wise enough to give you some hints at
using existing aquatic creatures that you already have available
to you in the Monster Manual. No need to reprint them here and
they saw that.
BASICS
Land of the Rising Dead is a supplement for Weird War II, and
we’ve moved out of the European theatre of war and now find
ourselves in the South Pacific. It is a perfect bound soft-back
book that is 144-pages in length with a color cover and black &
white interior. It has a retail price of $25.00 USD and you’ll
need the first Weird Wars book, Blood on the Rhine and the PHB
(to play) and DMG (to run the game) to use Land of the Rising
Dead.
BETWEEN THE COVERS
Inside you’ll find seven chapters (Welcome Aboard!; Equipment,
Vehicles, & Ships; Naval Combat; History; War Master’s Secrets;
Bestiary; and Here Be Dragons).
The introduction to the book does a very nice job of painting you
a picture of the hell of war in the Pacific, but also the hell of
fighting the undead and even beside the undead. This theatre
of operations for WWII was really not my favorite (that sounds
kind of weird, having a favorite theatre of war) as I was not a
big fan of The Thin Red Line, but am thoroughly hooked on
Band of Brothers. Anyway, the story did help a lot to interest
me in the setting.
The seventh chapter is something that I think is just about a
necessity in any campaign setting book, an adventure. It
doesn’t have to be an epic save-the-world kind of thing, just
something to help acquaint the players (and the WM!) with the
setting and to get a feel for things. Without divulging national
secrets (i.e. too much about the adventure) the PC’s in Here Be
Dragons will get a taste of the water and the jungle and
hopefully not die of lead poisoning.
VALUE
My lackluster interest in the general setting was pretty quickly
put to rest as it was made very interesting by the authors. The
historical photos were excellent, but I found the drawings to be
a small step down from Blood on the Rhine. The book is a good
addition to the base game, but is not something you need to
keep your game for suffering or falling behind. If you want to
expand your game and still stay in the Weird War world then this
is a very good book to pick up. It’s also made more useful in
that characters from one theater (Army grunt) can hook up with
those from another (Navy frogman) without screwing things up.
A good book and I’m looking forward to taking a look at Afrika
Korpse soon.
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