Foes of Freedom (a Mutants and Masterminds Sourcebook)

Rating:
Summary: Could have been much worse
Review: I feel a bit torn in writing this review. On the one had, it is a noticeable comedown in quality from Green Ronin's awesome "Freedom City" sourcebook. On the other, it is just as much an improvement over the drekful "Crooks!" sourcebook.

In "Freedom City," a number of super villains are profiled with full write up and game statistics; others are mentioned and given a few sentences in description. "Foes of Freedom" seeks to cover those characters, and provide a few (a very few) more. Each entry has character background, statistics, information on how the GM can use the villain, and some suggestions for possible crimes around which adventures can be made.

This is the same format as "Crooks!" but "Foes" is easily the superior book. The artwork is far better (though not as good as in "Freedom City," the biographies are more succinct, and while the villains themselves are in general hardly original, they successfully compliment the Freedom City campaign tenor.

The flaws, however, are not hard to miss. At 96 pages, it's awfully short. The section on Blackstone Penitentiary is fairly good, but much too brief (five pages.) A number of entries (I counted four) do not have a picture to go along with them; considering that this is for a comic book RPG, and that comics are visual in nature, this oversight is bothersome. Meanwhile, some artwork is superfluous, showing us characters depicted elsewhere in the book, or of dubious utility like the apartment map on page 30.

The addition of the villainous group Labrynth is unnecessary; the Labrynth is another super secretive string-pulling bunch of evil powerbrokers in a campaign world that already has organizations like SHADOW, Overthrow, and more mundane organized crime families. The entry on the Foundry organization doesn't supply much useful information, but rather dwells on some uninteresting robot statistics instead.

Though I've spent most of this review talking about the flaws of the book, it is still a fairly serviceable addition to the Mutant and Masterminds product line. If you can find a copy at a reasonable price (no easy feat, considering it's $24.00 price tag) then pick up a copy. Otherwise, don't sweat it.