Apathy Blogs

I have always felt you learn a lot about a system through character creation. So when I received a complementary PDF of Shadow, Sword, and Spell I figured the best way to check it out is to make a character. SS&S is a rules light RPG intended for a pulp fantasy style game.

First step is choosing abilities. I notice that the character doesn’t have a name yet. I assume we will get to that. Abilities range from 1 to 12 with 7 being average. It looks like you get 35 points to spread around five abilities, which means characters aren’t above average. If you want to be really good at something, you need to be bad at other things. Here’s where I decided to allocate my points:

• Brawn: 6
• Quickness: 9
• Toughness: 7
• Wits: 8
• Will: 5

I decided my character should be quick with his hands and his wits, if a little low on self control. This character is going to be based on my original Deinol character, who was a traveling gambler. There are three more abilities that are derived from the above stats. Vitality comes from a combination of brawn and toughness, Resolve is from wits and will, and Sanity is from will. It looks like my character is going to be weak against madness.

• Vitality: 30
• Resolve: 30
• Sanity: 25

According to the 5 steps at the beginning of the character creation chapter backgrounds is next. However, the book stops and talks about hooks (which is step 4) between abilities and backgrounds. I’m following the steps so I’ll skip to backgrounds for now. These are packages that adjust your character to fit a theme. Backgrounds come in two parts. The first is your culture: primitive, barbarian, civilized, and advanced. I’m going to go with civilized. This gives me some starting skills: Bureaucracy, Diplomacy, and Native Language. Then you add another modifier to that which gives some skill bonuses. I choose Mercantile and get a +1 Bargain, and +1 Diplomacy.

Edit: After reading D20 Source’s article which pointed out errata (Clarity on Skills linked from here) I realize that the following is all incorrect.

The next step is choosing skills. The math for buying skill ranks is a little strange, as it is based on your original ability score. I would have probably preferred a more unified math formula, as this one feels a little awkward. There are odd point breaks in the system. Past the first rank in a skill, it is better to have a 4 in the base ability than a 5. 8 seems preferable to 9 if you plan to put a skill above 10. It also looks like starting points are spent differently than experience points. There also seems to be a bit of confusion about what a base rank looks like. If I buy the base rank of Melee (a brawn skill), will it start at Rank 6 (my brawn score), Rank 0 (so it plus brawn = 6) or Rank 1 (so it plus brawn = 7). I’m going to run with base Rank = 0 and go from there. Let’s see what I end up with.

• Bargain (Fast Talk) 2/4 (cost 7 points)
• Brawl 0 (cost 3 points)
• Bureaucracy 1 (cost 0 points)
• Defend 0 (cost 5 points)
• Diplomacy (Persuasion) 2/4 (cost 4 points)
• Divination 2 (cost 8 points)
• Dodge 0 (cost 5 points)
• Gaming 3 (cost 10 points)
• Melee 0 (cost 3 points)
• Native Language 0 (cost 0 points)

I was tempted to have a bit of magic just to try out that system, but settled on Divination instead. I think I did a decent job making a fast talking card shark who relies on his natural quickness to survive in a bar fight. I still think the point buy system is a tad bit awkward, having to look up the exact point values each time I bought a skill. Being a computer guy, I actually built a spreadsheet. Something simple like 4 points for initial rank and 2 points per rank after would have made more or less the same character without being quite as fiddly. Edit: It looks like the “Expert” book will have an option to simplify it to 6 points for base skill rank and 3 points per rank after that. I’m also not certain specialization is worth it in the long run, as you have to buy them up separately after that. If I am wrong about the base rank then all my ranks above should be one higher. Actually resolving skills looks pretty easy (roll under Rank + Ability on 2d12). I do like that fighting, magic, and other skills all use the same core skill mechanic.

Update: I felt I shouldn’t leave this article with incorrect stats, so after learning from my above mistakes, I came back and updated my skills. SS&S is setup so that abilities imply competency in a lot of skills. For example, I can do Investigation (Wits) untrained at 8 (ability) + 8 (base rank) – 4 (untrained penalty) = 12, which is still almost 50% for a routine task. Since that is the case, I bought all of the skills (using 45 points) at base rank so Deinol is decent with a knife, and good at dodging, gaming, and card-reading.

• Bargain (Will) 5 {cost 5} TN = 5 (ability) +5 (skill) +1 (bonus) = 11
• Bureaucracy (Wits) 8 {cost 0} TN = 8 + 8 = 16
• Defend (Quick) 9 {cost 9} TN = 9 + 9 = 18
• Diplomacy (Will) 5 {cost 0} TN = 5 + 5 + 1 (bonus) = 11
• Divination (Wits) [Card-Reading] 8 {cost 8} TN = 8 + 8 = 16
• Dodge (Quick) 9 {cost 9} TN = 9 + 9 = 18
• Gaming (Wits) 8 {cost 8} TN = 8 + 8 = 16
• Melee (Melee) 6 {cost 6} TN = 6 + 6 = 12
• Native Language (Wits) 8 {cost 0} TN = 8 + 8 = 16

Hooks remind me a lot of aspects from the FATE system (Spirit of the Century, Houses of the Blooded, and Dresden Files RPG). They are descriptive things about your character that you can activate using an action point to get a +2 bonus or a re-roll. Every character begins with five hooks. For Deinol, I came up with the following:

• A well traveled man with a friendly smile, he is easily liked.
• Likes to gamble, lives on the edge.
• Quck to anger, quicker to forgive.
• A tad bit lazy, never passes up an opportunity for easy money.
• Always keeps his word, when you can get him to give it.

Since I’m my own gamemaster in this exercise, I’ll have to approve those hooks. I certainly think it gives him enough quirks. As for finishing touches, the only required details are name, age, and gender. Deinol is a 24 year old male. For equipment I’d get him a deck of cards, a deck of marked cards, some dice, a dagger, clothes and a cloak with many pockets, and a deck of divination cards.

So that’s it for making a Shadow, Sword and Spell character. The book is everything you need to play and comes with a variety of premade foes and monsters. Since stat blocks are fairly short with a few skills there are 2-3 per page. That means there are 40-50 in the book and it would be easy to add more. The default setting includes a cult of Azathoth, which made me smile. I probably wouldn’t run the game as a long campaign, but I would definitely run a one-shot here or there. If you are looking for a light game in one book, this one is well worth checking out.

Want to learn more about Shadow, Sword, & Spell? Read on…

• Atomic Array: Episode 045: Shadow, Sword & Spell
• Apathy Blogs: Shadow, Sword, & Spell Character Creation
• D20 Source: En Garde! Shadow, Sword, & Spell

I’ve done a review of Dogs in the Vineyard in the past. Here’s an interesting interview with the creator, Vincent Baker. They also have a youtube promo. Check it out!

The Zobeck Gazetteer is a 50 page setting guide from Open Design. Zobeck is an independent city that can be placed in any fantasy campaign world and features kobolds, gypsies, and clockwork creations. The Free City of Zobeck is also used in Kobold Quarterly articles, which is an excellent gaming magazine.

One of the most unique things about this product is how it was created. Open Design began as an experiment in RPG patronage. Instead of being contracted to write an adventure for a publisher, Wolfgang Baur decided to write an adventure for a group of patrons. If enough interested people put money toward a project, he would write it for them. But patronage is more than just pre-ordering a product. Being a patron means helping to shape the final product. Not only do patrons help select what the adventure will be about, but they get to provide feedback and ideas as the project is being developed. If you are interested in seeing the process of adventure writing, I definitely recommend taking a look at being a patron. As a result of the extra playtesting and review the final products tend to be very polished.

The most recent patronage project, Tales of Zobeck, has two parts. The first part is the Zobeck Gazetteer which is available for purchase by the public in either PDF or print form. The second part is an anthology of adventures set in Zobeck. This review looks at how the Zobeck Gazetteer stands on its own. I have actually (with difficulty) refrained from reading the adventures in Tales. My current campaign is too high of level to use them directly and I hold a faint hope that someday I can convince someone else to run one of these adventures for me. I came relatively late to the project as a patron so I mostly observed the process and did not take much part in its creation. If you are interested in seeing the process of adventure writing then I definitely recommend taking a look at being a patron. I really like what I’ve seen so far and I plan on being much more involved in the next project.

About two-thirds of the Gazetteer is information about the setting which could be used with any game system. The remaining materials are d20 rules that mainly deal with clockwork creatures and magic. There are details about the city, its inhabitants, and its gods. One of my favorite sections is the Kobold Ghetto. Much of the city’s wealth comes from the silver mines worked by kobolds. The cramped jumble of streets that make up the Ghetto is where they make their home. Visitors, who are allowed in only at night, should be wary of traps that are set throughout the area. Many are just annoying, but some of the traps prove to be deadly. I found their descriptions to be particularly entertaining.

There are six major gods of Zobeck, including Zobeck’s patron deity: Rava the Gear Goddess. Hers is the largest temple in the city and contains the Clockwork Oracle. The rest of the gods are a diverse pantheon that covers most of the usual divine portfolios. I found it interesting that the usual d20 information on gods was not present (domains and favored weapon.) Enough information is presented to easily allow appropriate selections to be made from whichever rules sources a cleric player may have access to.

It is due to the Gear Goddess’s devoted followers that clockwork creations are common in Zobeck. Clockwork soldiers patrol the streets and there is a race of Gearforged that allows players to be constructs themselves. An article on the magic of Zobeck adds a number of clockwork related spells for clerics and wizards. These plus the gear domain are great additions to any game that desires a little more of a steampunk feel.

Overall I think this is a great supplement by itself. It contains a lot of great adventure hook ideas. I’ve already decided that an upcoming villain in my game will be from here. It packs a lot in for its size and leaves you wanting even more. It may make you go out and buy back copies of Kobold Quarterly just for the extra Zobeck articles.

Apathy Rating: 5/5.

Helix: The Post-Apocalypse, High-Tech, Fantasy, Western RPG is the first game I’ve been given a free review copy of. This excited me and I really wanted to return the favor with a good review, but I must be honest in my opinions. While Helix has a lot of buzzwords in the title, I can sum it up in one: amateurish.

Looking at the credits I see the lack of an editor and it shows in the product. My advice to anyone truly interested in the game is to certainly wait until a revised edition before buying a print copy. For the publisher of the game, I suggest you pay a freelance editor to go over your book at least once before sending a product to print. Sentences like: “You are getting sleepy until you are asleep” do not belong in the rules. If there are grammar mistakes on every page, you need to do more proof reading. A template for monster statistics should be used; I’ve seen “Hite Points” and other typos plus inconsistent ordering of attributes.

Art in the book is about the level I would call high-school doodle art. The sort of art a high-school student might have drawn while bored. If they never took any art classes in college, that’s about the quality you see in this book. There’s a reason good artists study anatomy, so they know how to make a human figure that doesn’t somehow look wrong. I also highly recommend ditching all the pictures of people who look like bad LARPers. Some of the art has pencil smudges and eraser marks that should have been cleaned up in Photoshop.

The rules themselves are relatively simple. Skill rolls use a d6 roll under skill method, attribute rolls are d12 roll under stat. Nothing terrible, but nothing exciting or different. They try to promote themselves as “d12′s aren’t useless anymore.” I hate to say it, but I’ve played several better games that use the d12. Advanced Heroquest or Everlasting are the first that come to mind. I found it odd that a variety of damages were given for unarmed combat that included nearly any body part you’d want to hit someone with, but no reason mechanically for why anyone would do anything besides kick, which does twice the damage of anything else. Unless you are a martial artist, in which case double kick is twice kick damage. Why not just give a single unarmed damage that lets the player describe a kick, punch, or headbutt to accompany it? As it is the only reason to not perform max damage would be aesthetic and role-play reasons.

The over abundance of unneeded skills reminds me of many games I played in the 80′s. As was pointed out in my RPG club’s discussion of the game, there are too many similar skills. Does the game need both seduction and erotic dancing as skills? A tighter list of skills with optional specialties is often a better choice mechanically. The explanation that many skills lets a player customize their background more isn’t helpful if it muddies the game rules too much. The difference between filch and pick-pocket is too nit picky for most people.

The only thing that could have made this worthwhile is a fantastic setting. Instead I think they tried to do too much. The magic system reminds me of the Matrix, or more properly Mage’s Virtual Adepts. It does have a unique shamanistic look at the “computer code as magic” idea though. The game is supposed to take place in the wilderness areas between big cities, but I think some descriptions of the big cities would be nice as well. One of the things I really liked from the original Gamma World boxed set was the poster map of what was once the United States. Expanding more details about the setting would have really improved the product. Come to think of it, I would have preferred this as a setting book for an existing system like True20. There are some interesting ideas in the game that could use further development, but overall it seems to suffer from trying to use too many genres instead of creating a unique new world vision.

I will give them credit for continuing to update their site with extra content. The updates have the same quality of art and editorial oversight, but at least they are trying to give good support to their customers. I wasn’t too impressed with their forums though. The forums are hosted by a forum company, and being asked to click no to a bunch of mailing lists is not an experience I enjoyed. I highly recommend they invest in their own domain so they can operate their own forums and announcements. I wish them luck in their future endeavors, and hope they have learned much from this release.

Apathy Rating: 1/5.

Universalis is a universal role-playing game. It is not intended to be a Generic Universal Role-Playing Game that allows a game master to run any sort of setting. In fact, it does not have a separate game master at all. It is a very rules light system for cooperative storytelling. Individual players do not necessarily have a specific character they play. Instead the story grows naturally from the input of all players.

Our first game of this turned out to be very silly. It turned into 80′s cartoon adventures. We had a bronze age ruled by My Little Ponies who were at war with Glow Worms. Care Bears were a secret order of holy knights dedicated to preventing the prophecy of Ruxpin the Destroyer, “When all the pyramids fall, Ruxpin shall rise.” In the end it fell to Thundar, the kobold servant of Glow the Hut, and his one time enemy Harold Weston, Squirrel cavalry commander for the ponies, to try and stop the mysterious figure from fulfilling the prophecy. One of their companions was a Marsh Wolf, which are puffy and squishy and smell of hot chocolate. They were trying to stop the gladiatorial fight between the four ponies of the apocolypse (Sniffles, Snuffles, Tum Tum, and Bucket) and the glow worm champion Maltox (huge and spike covered) which would take place upon the last pyramid. If the blood of both fell atop the pyramid, Ruxpin would rise again. The Marsh Wolf revealed itself as the mysterious figure and the protagonists were unable to stop its scheme. Blood flowed and the apocalypse began. We left it there in case we wanted to do a sequal, “Revenge of the Ruxpin.”

It was late, we’d been drinking, and things got very silly. We had a lot of fun though.

Our second game we tried to be much more serious. Probably too serious, as we lost steam somewhere. It is hard to do a mystery without a GM who knows where it is going. Our game was X-files but set in cold war Soviet Union. There was a mysterious murder, a child attacked in the woods by hair, and a mysterious cult involving a barber. Nobody really knew where to take it from there.

So Universalis is very much a game that can be anything. It is only as good as what you put into it. I can’t say we really tested the rules that well, because we never had to resort to the conflict resolution. We always found that people would compromise before it got to that. Perhaps we are simply a more cooperative bunch. As it is, I highly recomend giving this game a try. It is a unique exerience and you never know what you’ll end up with.

Apathy Rating: 4/5.

Last weekend my friend’s invited me over to play a game of Dogs in the Vineyard. I must admit I was skeptical about the setting at first. You are “God’s Watchdogs” in the wild west, specifically in the early days of Mormon settlers. It is sort of like a Mormon Inquisition, only there still is a US sheriff around to deal with as well. As I am not particularly religious, I rarely play religious characters. On the other hand, role-playing is about being something other than yourself, so I was willing to try it out.

I can say I’m very glad I did. The system is very unique and refreshing. If one of my complaints about 4e Dungeons and Dragons is that it doesn’t support much for role-playing interaction, then Dogs in the Vineyard is exactly the opposite. All conflicts are resolved with a unified system. You start with a pool of dice using two of the four statistics. What pair is used depends on if it is a non-violent conflict, physical brawl, lethal fight, or a gun battle. You have a number of traits for your character that can be anything you can think of. Some of the traits I had were “Knife Fighter” and “Afraid of God” to give you an idea of the variety available. If you can find a way to apply a trait to the given situation, you can roll those dice and add them to your pool. You only use two dice at a time until someone relents or runs out of dice, so each conflict takes a little while to resolve. This lends itself to an action then reaction, back and forth feel. It really encourages creative role-playing and narrative development. Conflicts can always escalate from one form to another. If you are having trouble convincing the town hooligans to back down, roughing them up may do the trick.

Another interesting aspect to the system is that conflict leads to experience. You don’t even have to win to get some. Physical fights can also lead to damage, but most of the consequences of non-lethal engagements are actually good things. Sometimes you might gain new traits, or build new relationships. Damage usually comes in the form of reducing the power of one of your existing traits. Either way, you really get the sense that your character develops over the course of the story.

The setting of the game has the potential to either be very silly or very serious. You are dealing with faith and morality in a potentially lawless area, so which you get depends on the disposition of your group of players. Our story involved the murder of a man in a small town. He lost a lot of money gambling and made a few enemies around town. We soon learned that a group of brothers were the likely suspects, and they even admitted to giving him a beating before his death. The widow was quick to accuse them of the murder, and after a near brawl during a church service she eventually admitted to the crime. It turns out that the man had been taking his frustration out on her, and she finally couldn’t take it any more. In the end we decided that it would be up to her if she turned herself in to the law, for we felt she truly regretted the crime and was driven to it besides. She turned herself in and we left town quietly.

So if you want a story driven role-playing game, I definitely say give Dogs in the Vineyard a shot. I know I have a soft spot for independent games, but we had a blast playing it. It was an engaging experience for all involved and nobody at the table got bored. All in all we had a great experience and in the end that’s what counts the most.

Apathy Rating: 4/5.