Vow of Honor additional comment

Eep! I left out something significant! Vow of Honor does give some pages to playing non-Arbiter characters. Instead of Honor Dice and the Tenet of Honor, these characters have Motivation Dice and your pick of ten Motivations: Acceptance, Curiosity, Family, Independence, Order, Power, Love, Socialization, Safety, and Vengeance. Each provides a special maneuver. In the case of Curiosity, for instance, you can spend Motivation Dice “to discover something interesting, dangerous, or pertinent to your current objectives.”

Your character earns an impediment mark when there’s a serious obstacle to their ability to act on their motivations, and a bolstered mark when they get to act in a way that fulfills a motivation. Where Arbiters accumulate checks in their exercise of the Tenets of Honor to advance, non-Arbiters accumulate impediment and bolstered marks—any combination of ten total in their two motivations enables an advance.

Skills, talents, and the rest of the system work the same way.

Vow of Honor, by Ben Dutter

Vow of Honor is a digest-sized roleplaying game, available from DriveThruRPG in hardcover and softcover print versions (usually $45 and $25, $40 and $20 as I write this) and PDF (usually $12, currently $10). It’s written by Ben Dutter, edited by Joshua Yearsley, has layout and graphic design by Philip Gessert, and includes art by Markus Lovadina, Lee Che, Winston Lew, and Stephen Garrett Rusk. It’s 260 pages long, with chapter-level bookmarks (and additional depth in the odds-and-ends material at the back).

This is a lovely game both physically and in its contents. It’s gorgeous, with great page design, illustrations that are simple but rich and appealing in both black and white and color, beautiful typography, the whole deal. And it’s another of those relatively rare games that’s very strongly about people doing the right thing in the midst of difficult situations.

The Setting

The player characters in Vow of Honor are Arbiters, members of the Order of Fasann, an institution apart from any local government or other authority dedicated to applying its tenets of honor—compassion, commitment, purity, righteousness, and understanding—to help the people around them. They live on, or rather in, Sasara, which is…not exactly a world.

Vow of Honor is set in the distant future. Sasara is a manufactured place, built as the crowning glory of humanity’s spacefaring days, now long passed. People live in Sasara’s interior, where the horizon rises gently in the distance and the skies have constantly shifting, glowing clouds instead of sun or stars. The civilization of Sasara’s builders has long since gone, and, as the game explains:

The majority of Sasarans live along the Spine; a strip of land roughly 2,000 kilometers wide, stretching away north to south. It is here where crops can grow and trees can be felled, and its climate is tranquil enough to be tolerable.

To the distant east and west lie the Void Lands. There, strange plants flourish, and glassy craters fill its fields and forests; twisted obelisks of unknown materials stand silent vigil, and evil energies and caustic gases fill the air. Brave explorers have attempted to conquer the Void Lands many times, but not one has succeeded.

In the nifty tradition of a bunch of good far-future settings, including Tekumel in the RPG world, the people of Sasara are on the far side of a whole lot of intermingling, and show it. They’re pretty much all tan to dark-skinned, with dark hair and eyes, and no contemporary ethnicity has survived. (I do think the game misses an opportunity here to cultivate a wide-ranging diversity of uncommon appearances. Convergence of features does happen, but so does fresh radiation out into new combinations.)

Life is hard on Sasara for most people most of the time. It’s simply not feasible to maintain a lot of industrialization—unlike some big artificial structures like the Ringworld or Rama, it has miles of earth and rock, but the mineral concentrations aren’t there and the infrastructure that industry takes isn’t there even if they were. So there’s room for local innovation, but overall, life continues in seldom-changing broad strokes. People make the moral compromises and transgressions that survival on the margins requires, and there’s seldom the physical, mental, or social free space in which to dream of things going better. The mysterious Forebears are long gone, strange things fill the world wherever people can’t keep up a constant guard, and that’s just how it is.

Into this situation comes the Order of Fasann, and the player characters.

The Order’s members commit themselves to advancing the cause of Honor, defined with five tenets: commitment, compassion, purity (including freedom from physical, mental, and spiritual corruption, and seeking the best possible from oneself and others), righteousness (the pursuit of what is just, good, and noble), and understanding. The Order’s many Enclaves train promising teens and young adults (and sometimes older people in the wake of life changes) to seek out and respond to Dishonor, the negation of these tenets, and to help the people and lands around them.

The Order’s vision of Honor is all-encompassing: it’s equally appropriate for Arbiters to deal with blighted, infertile farms and pastures, with monsters haunting ruins and roads people need to use, with civic corruption, and with family strife. Cruelty, infidelity to one’s commitments, dishonesty, hate mongering, and ignorance are all aspects of Dishonor, all deserving of Arbiters’ efforts to cure them.

There’s a lot of supporting detail for all of this, which I’m eliding so that I don’t end up just copying the whole game. It’s kinda tempting, though: Vow of Honor is rich in well-chosen, useful details. Take the section on settlements:

A typical Sasaran settlement is extremely well fortified, well masoned, and very small. Sasara’s violent weather precludes working with weak materials, and the bloodthirsty beasts and demons stalking its wilds ensure that any settlement intended to last will build a high and powerful wall.

Most Sasaran cities are several days’ journey away from one another, enabling them to pull upon large areas of wilderness and natural resources without starving or constantly going to war. Several settlements have grown into seats of power, defendable against any invader, surrounded by lush and fertile lands, with well-built walls and edifices.

However, many other towns and villages aren’t so lucky. It isn’t uncommon for you, as an Arbiter, to travel to a town you’ve known for several years to be prosperous, only to arrive and find it burnt to the ground, or destroyed under a new basin of water—or, worse, you discover that its population was forced into slavery, or savaged or eaten by adabhuta.

Well-established settlements and cities invariably have an Enclave. Many have a Church of Creation, a place of congregation for those who believe in the holy omnipotence of the Creators.

In a simple view, most Sasaran cities are similar to Earth’s cities from the fourteenth to fifteenth century in southern and eastern Europe, northern Africa, the Indus River Valley, and the Middle East: their structures are built with stone, clay, brick, columns, tiles, and mosaics. Most are masterfully crafted, and some are accented with scavenged materials and technology from Forebear ruins. The wealthiest and most powerful Sasarans often build decadent and powerful castles and palaces, well stocked with the relics of the previous age.

Like I said: useful. In just a few paragraphs, we get historical references, a sense of stable norms and common kinds of threat to them, some ideas about what would constitute a bad situation that locals would like to fix, the whole deal. It goes like that throughout, on each subject from clothing to exotic creatures from future lineages.

The Pedagogy

That is to say, the theory and practice of teaching as Dutter’s carried it out in Vow of Honor. I said in Google+ comments as I was reading that I wanted to talk about this particular topic, and I still do.

Vow of Honor is a little weaker than I’d like in infrastructure, if that’s the word I want. There’s no index, and the table of contents and bookmarks have only chapter-level entries. But it’s still quite easy to find particular topics and their substance. Every single section gets a recap: boxed text with a border and color that set it very strongly off from the main body of the book, which summarizes the most important points. Game terms get repeated to build familiarity, and descriptions are expressed in slightly different terms than they were in the preceding exposition. You can flip through a chapter, just looking at those, and very quickly get to the thing you’re looking for.

It’s a basic principle of teaching: tell your students what you’re going to tell them, tell it to them, and tell them what you told them. Among other things, game books very much are works of instruction, conveying information that includes both data and views about the data. But, to put it mildly, a lot of gaming authors aren’t especially good at putting their info out in ways that work with how people actually learn things. Dutter’s recaps do the job as well as any game book I can ever recall reading.

If you’re interested in good instruction via game book, Vow of Honor is worth a look even if the setting and system don’t do much for you.

The Spirit of the Game

I love it when a game offers up rules that work very well for the particular setting it presents and that also cover a whole spread of other related cases. I find myself a little short for useful terminology here, because it’s not exactly a matter of genre but of a specific approach to a kind of challenge that can occur in many genres. The Arbiters are people committed to doing a broad spectrum of good deeds in the midst of a difficult world. Their moral challenges aren’t really much different from the one Raymond Chandler proposes in “The Simple Art of Murder”:

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

Look at the Tenets of Honor the Arbiters swear to uphold: Compassion. Commitment. Purity. Righteousness. Understanding. All there.

All of which is to say that as a rules system, Vow of Honor would work fine in milieus other than the fascinating default of Sasara.

The Game

Vow of Honor uses a straightforward d6 dice pool system. You roll one or more d6s, and see whether each is a success depending on your character’s relevant skill level—if they’re just barely trained at all, only 6s are successes, while if they’re exemplary in that skill, 3-6s are all successes. Complications ensue, of course. 🙂

Each character has ratings in eight skills: Awareness, Coordination, Influence, Knowledge, Logic, Might, Resistance, and Stealth. The rating in each is Poor (6+ to succeed on a roll), Average (5-6 to succeed), Good (4-6 to succeed), or Exemplary (3-6). There’s a standard skill array—one exemplary, one good, five average, one poor—and some alternatives in the book for different mixes of focus and diversity in aptitude. You also pick a talent, a special thing your character is good at that cuts across the standard skill lines and gives you a bonus die to roll when it applies; examples in the book include Smooth Talker and Tracker.

Challenges, whether tasks to perform or enemies to overcome, come with Difficulty, Threshold, and Severity. Difficulty is the number of successes you need to roll to win. Threshold is a property of long, ongoing challenges: when you roll that many successes, the difficulty goes down by 1. If a test is Difficulty 3, Threshold 2, for instance, it takes a total of 9 successes to beat: 3 to reduce it to Difficulty 3, Threshold 1, 3 more to reduce it to Difficulty 3, Threshold 0, and then 3 more to beat what’s left of it. Severity is the enemy’s skill level: your character has to earn that many successes with whatever means of resistance they’re using. It’s also the level of harm  your character faces for failing. The details depend on the kind of challenge, with guidelines for level and duration of injury, short- and long-term penalties to affected skills, and so on.

(Vow of Honor is one of the games where only the players roll. What would otherwise be the GM rolling for NPCs’ efforts is handled by players rolling to resist enemy Severity.)

Your character has a pool of Honor Dice, or HD, which you can spend for bonuses on individual rolls. Unsurprisingly, they earn HD by acting in accord with the tenets of honor, and lose them by acting dishonorably. You usually spend HD in a straightforward “I’m also rolling this die” way, and aiming for successes with the threshold set by your character’s skill level for that particular challenge. But it’s possible to get more out of an HD.

In addition to their skills and starting talent, your character begins play oathsworn to two of the five tenets of honor. Each tenet you choose gives your character a pick from two benefits. If they’re oathsworn to Understanding, for instance, you can decided whether HD they spend on efforts to learn, understand, empathize, or deduce provide automatic successes, or whether they can spend an HD to automatically know the difficulty, threshold, and severity for a particular task or enemy.

Character advancement depends on upholding the whole spectrum of honor. When your character’s upheld each of the five tenets in a notable, significant way, they earn an advance, which you can spend to improve a skill or to add or improve a talent. Acting significantly against any of the tenet costs your character HD, and three major violations make your character stained with regard to that tenet. It takes an act of significant sacrifice to remove the stain and recover the ability to make further progress.

I could go on—it’s a good system—but there is a quick start document, so I’ll settle for linking to that. It’s not just that it’s a solid, simple but very flexible system, but that the book shows how to use it in a  whole bunch of different ways, with generous discussion of examples and possibilities, and keeping it all very much a coherent whole.

Summary

I really like this game and am really looking forward to putting it to play.

Bruce and the DMG, Part 5: Chapter 1, Third Part

Today I shift into higher gear to take a quick…stop laughing, out there…okay, quicker look at more topics in the “A World of Your Own” chapter.

Mapping Your Campaign

A single page, starting with an explanation of what sorts of features show on scales from 1 mile per hex to 60 miles per hex. It's got good advice on things like natural routes for rivers and what density of settlement goes with what general vibe of civilization versus wasteland.

Settlements

Most of six pages here. It starts with a discussion of placing and developing settlements, and I am so happy to see it continuing with the awareness of what this is all for:

A settlement exists primarily to facilitate the story and fun of your campaign. Other than that, the settlement's purpose determines the amount of detail you put into it. Create only the features of a settlement that you'll know you'll need, along with notes on general features. Then allow the place to grow organically as the adventurers interact with more and more of it, keeping notes on new places you invent.

Like a lot of DMs of my vintage, I spent a lot of time early on in basically fruitless and misplaced efforts at simulation. These all had loads of unexamined assumptions about what was being simulated, and did very little to ever enhance fun in play. Here, on the other hand, is a discussion of settlement purposes that includes local color, home base, and adventure site. This is very much better for the kind of fantasy adventuring I wanted then and still like now.

The remarks on settlements at various scales of size are heavy on practicality: who's in charge overall, who collects the taxes, who provides defense, how and where does commerce take place, and so on. This is the kind of thing I could look at when improvising a village, or town, or city, and feel confident I wasn't overlooking any relevant fundamentals.

Likewise with atmosphere, something that's near and dear to my heart. It's about the senses, something which early RPGs often attended to only patchily. But characters exist in an environment, with stuff coming in on all sensory channels. It's good to think about, and as this discussion emphasizes, can set a lot of tone with very little direct exposition.

Government gets a page and a half. It's less engaging to me, but then that's me not being especially enthusiastic about feudal social arrangements. I know they're traditional for D&D and it's perfectly sensible to focus on them; I just would rather have seen more on both classical and late medieval/early Renaissance models, particularly where there are wildly different forms of government existing cheek by jowl.

Commerce and currency get brief but useful coverage, and currency includes really nice artwork of coins and explicit discussion of how to use varying regional currencies for color without bogging down in endless exchange rate tables and such. As throughout this book, existing D&D settings – in this particular case, the Forgotten Realms – provide handy examples. I'm impressed at the sustained juggling act involved here, never suggesting that by golly everyone's gotta do it this way while promoting an awareness of neat stuff you could also buy and use from Wizards.

Languages and Dialects

It's short, but it's to the point, and offers up nice options, including some I tend not to think of when thinking about D&D. So…it works.

Factions and Organizations

Two and a half pages here, and one of the places where the legacy of game design from the late '80s through '90s shows to best effect – this is not something you'd see, I think, without the benefit of seeing what's worked with template systems like West End's Star Wars and Shadowrun and splat systems like White Wolf's:

Temples, guilds, orders, secret societies, and colleges are important forces in the social order of any civilization. Their influence might stretch across multiple towns and cities, with or without a similarly wide-ranging political authority. Organizations can play an important part in the lives of player characters, becoming their patrons, allies, or enemies just like individual nonplayer characters. When characters join these organizations, they become part of something larger than themselves, which can give their adventures a context in the wider world.

We get the Harpers and Zhentarim as handy worked examples, and really nice concise guidelines on creating new organizations. Symbols, names, and slogans get attention here, with a good discussion of how important such compact expressions of a faction's nature (as it is, or as it might wish to be, or as it once was) are in play.

There's an optional system for renown within a faction, with five tiers of status (illustrated with ranks for the Harpers, the Zhentarim, and three other Realms groups). It's straightforward, and it doesn't seem like it would make all groups feel structured too much the same given the variety in what those ranks can mean and do. There's also an interesting riff on those rules to track piety in game worlds with active gods. And given that example, I can see how it could adapt to other kinds of status within allegiance, too.

Magic in Your World

I'm just going to say again how much I like the “you” and “yours” in this book.

This is a page and change covering things you'd want to consider in building your setting, including various riffs for schools of magic and resurrection, and the role of teleportation circles.

That's it for this time. Next post, Creating a Campaign and Campaign Events, which I shall enthuse about at length.

 

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Bruce and the DMG, Part 4: Chapter 1, second part

Today I'm going to write about gasp four pages, instead of one or three! Today's section is Gods of Your World, and here again is some very nifty stuff.

The Player's Handbook establishes clerical domains. Each one gives the cleric committed to it some spells to know that don't count against their regular spell limits, a distinctive use for the Channel Divinity ability all clerics get at 2nd level, and a variety of other special abilities. The Trickery domain, for instance, gives the cleric:

• Bonus spells including Charm Person and Disguise Self at 1st level, through Blink, Dimension, and Polymorph (among others), up to Dominate Person and Modify Memory at 9th.
• At 1st level, the ability to touch a willing target and give it advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks for the next hour.
• At 2nd level, the ability to use Channel Divinity to create an illusory duplicate, and among other things to cast spells as if the cleric were standing where the illusion is right now. At 17th level, this grows to four duplicates, not just one.
• At 6th level, the ability to use it to become invisible for a turn.
• At 8th level, the ability to infuse their weapon with a poison given as a gift by the deity and do extra damage.

The other domains – Knowledge, Life, Nature, War, and so on – are all comparably nifty for their areas of interest.

The DMG discussion of gods leads off with the Dawn War deities, the default from 4th edition. And I want to take a moment here to say something about that.

I was really put off by some of the promotion for 5th edition, which I felt did altogether unearned slagging on 4th, pandering to the noisy part of the fan base that really hated 4e (and often had no idea what it was talking about). That dislike is the largest element in my not having really looked at 5e until just recently – I felt annoyed and offended at seeing the work of, among others, good friends abused so vigorously. And yet in the actual books, there are all kinds of entirely friendly, respectful nods to the preceding edition, right alongside ones to all the others. I am at least as happy with the books in this regard as I was unhappy with their promotion.

Now, to discussion. As with the overall nature of the world, the book establishes a default assumption, Loose Pantheons:

Most D&D worlds have a loose pantheon of gods. A multitude of deities rule the various aspects of existence, variously cooperating with and competing against one another to administer the affairs of the universe. People gather in public shrines to worship gods of life and wisdom, or meet in hidden places to venerate gods of deception or destruction.

And this:

People in most D&D worlds are polytheistic, honoring deites of their own and acknowledging pantheons of other cultures. Individuals pay homage to various gods, regardless of alignment. In the Forgotten Realms, a person might propitiate Umberlee before setting out to sea, join a communal feast to celebrate Chauntea at harvest time, and pray to Malar before going hunting.

Some individuals feel a calling to a particular deity's service and claim that god as a patron. Particularly devoted individuals become priests by setting up a shrine or helping to staff a holy site. Much more rarely, those who feel such a calling become clerics or paladins, invested with the responsibility of true divine power.

One of the classic complaints about early D&D was that it was a very Midwestern Protestant sort of polytheism. 🙂 Here, in simple, useful language, 5e explains what routine polytheistic life is like, and adds coolness to clerics and paladins by explain how distinctive their way of life is. This is great stuff! So's this:

This pantheon draws in several nonhuman deities and establishes them as universal gods. […] Humans worship Moradin and Corellon as gods of their respective portfolios, rather than as racial deities.

I'm not up on all the evolution of D&D, but that's certainly a take I haven't seen before in D&D. Another concise statement that opens up a whole spectrum of possibilities. Coolness!

Next comes a subsection on other religious sytems: tight pantheons, mystery cults, monotheism, dualism, animism, and forces and philosophies. Each gets well defined, in terms that lead right to gaming explanations. I could keep quoting and quoting, but there has to be a line somewhere, and this is it.

Finally, there's a subsection on Humanoids and the Gods. It lays out the reasonable default that humans tend toward more religious variety than the other races, and that in particular a bunch of races have (or at least think they have) a unique, distinct creator god, who anchors the rest of their religious activity. But having explained that, it goes on to ask the DM interesting questions:

With that in mind, consider the role of the gods in your world and their ties to different humanoid races. Does each race have a creator god? How does that god shape that race's culture? Are other folk free of such divine ties and free to worship as they wish? Has a race turned against the god that created it? Has a new race appeared, created by a god within the past few years?

A deity might also have ties to a kingdom, noble line, or other cultural institution. With the death of the emperor, a new ruler might be selected by divine portents sent by the deity who protected the empire in its earliest days. In such a land, the worship of other gods might be outlawed or tightly controlled.

Finally, consider the difference between gods who are tied to specific humanoid races and gods with more diverse followers. Do the races with their own pantheons enjoy a place of privilege in your world, with the gods taking an active role in their affairs? Are the other races ignored by the gods, or are those races the deciding factor that can tilt the balance of power in favor of one god or another?

This is the kind of thing that makes me want to go out and create a zillion more settings.

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Bruce and the DMG, Part 3: Chapter 1, first part

I'm not going to do this kind of super-close reading all the way through. At least I don't think I am. Mostly it'll apply to passages of particular importance, that set the foundation for the rest of the work. I have a lot more to say about philosophy of gaming and principles of play than about the details of encumbrance, for instance.

That said, Chapter 1, “A World of Your Own”, opens with some fascinating stuff I do want to read closely. So here we go!

Your world is the setting for your campaign, the place where adventures happen. Even if you use an existing setting, such as the Forgotten Realms, it becomes yours as you set your adventures there, create characters to inhabit it, and make changes to it over the course of your campaign. This chapter is all about building your world and then creating a campaign to take place in it.

I like every part of that paragraph. It repeats the theme already established, and enthused about here, about how every campaign's world becomes its own in play. I continue to think this is true, and important to remind DMs of.

The first section heading is The Big Picture, and the next page or two is what really, truly sold me on 5e. What we get here is a review of the core assumptions of D&D for this edition, each with a paragraph of commentary: Gods oversee the world. Much of the world is untamed. The world is ancient. Conflict shapes the world's history. The world is magical. Here's their style:

The world is ancient. Empires rise and fall, leaving few places that have not been touched by imperial grandeur or decay. War, time, and natural forces eventually claim the mortal world, leaving it rich in places of adventure and mystery. Ancient civilizations and their knowledge survive in legends, magic items, and their ruins. Chaos and evil often follow an empire's collapse.

Matching these is a set of possibilities under the subheading It's Your World. They include: The world is a mundane place. The world is new. The world is known. Monsters are uncommon. Magic is everywhere. Gods inhabit the land, or are entirely absent. Here's the last of those:

Gods inhabit the land, or are entirely absent. What if the gods regularly walk the earth? What if the characters can challenge them and seize their power? Or what if the gods are remote, and even angles never make contact with mortals? In the Dark Sun setting, the gods are extremely distant – perhaps nonexistent – and cleric rely instead on elemental power for their magic.

This is a very confident, self-aware piece of writing. Its creators know what they want, and are aware that they're making choices from among a range of possibilities for each chosen emphasis, and are comfortable encouraging DMs to make their own choices. They keep tying various options back to existing D&D settings, too, which is good for awareness of all the various flavors of D&D as parts of a greater whole, and helpful to DMs wondering something like, “Hmm, what should I do to give my game a feeling like that?”

The expository tone and style continue to impress me, too. I'm reminded of something Justin Achilli wrote in instructions to authors for one of his Vampire: The Masquerade projects, to the effect of, “Don't make readers jump through hoops to understand what you mean. They've already proven they're cool enough by buying the book.” This is straightforward writing, which is an entirely different thing from stupid writing. Useful simplicity takes just as much work – sometimes a lot more, really – than useful complexity.

Next up will be the discussion of gods and religions, which continues the trend of most excellent utility.

 

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Bruce and the DMG, Part 2: The Introduction

The DMG’s introduction comes after a credit’s page and table of contents. I’ll come back to them, but this three-page section lays out a grand plan for the book and says something that I want to give prominent space to up front.

First of all, here as throughout both this volume and the Player’s Handbook, the game talks very directly to the reader:

It’s good to be the Dungeon Master! Not only do you get to tell fantastic stories about heroes, villains, monsters, and magic, but you also get to create the world in which these stories live. Whether you’re running a D&D game already or you think it’s something you want to try, this book is for you.

(I’ll probably come back to assumptions and declarations about the roles of participants in D&D games later, possibly in a separate post. It’s easy for me to come across way grumpier than I intend when writing about some of the game creators’ world’s discussion of these things, so it’ll take more pondering to do right.)

I am profoundly impressed at how much this edition lives up to early promises of supporting a wide range of play styles, preferences, and needs. We begin with an explanation of adventures and campaigns, and the discussion suggests that a great single-session adventure and a great years-long campaign are both worthwhile. It expands on the thought:

Inventing, writing, storytelling, improvising, acting, refereeing – every DM handles these roles differently, and you’ll probably enjoy some more than others. It helps to remember that Dungeons & Dragons is a hobby, and being the DM should be fun. Focus on the aspects you enjoy and downplay the rest. For example, if you don’t like creating your own adventures, you can use published ones. You can also lean on the other players to help you with rules mastery and world-building.

It’s hard to describe just how much of a radical advance this is over the state of roleplaying game writing back when I discovered it in the ’70s. The early norm was a hodge-podge of would-be textbook detached narrative, would-be Vancian or Dunsanian flights of fancy, and a lot of just plain not very good prose. And it was like pulling teeth sometimes to persuade game writers that they ought to talk directly to their players, rather than couching everything in passive-voiced distancing. Heck, the argument about second person’s superiority over third for the kind of instructional writing rulebooks are was still a live issue when I started writing commercially in the ’90s, with long heated denunciations of anyone who dared to get so “casual” as to deal directly with the audience.

In some ways that was part and parcel of the larger struggle to get games written by people willing to admit that they were writing rules for a game, and that this was supposed to be enjoyable, but that it takes collaboration to make it work. Early editions of D&D and other games were loaded with multiple layers of kludge that could have been cleared up with the simple directive, “Talk with players about what you want out of this, and what they like and don’t about play.” There were whole racks of monsters that existed purely to punish players being too thorough or insufficient thorough or incorrectly thorough in their search descriptions, that could have been cleared up with a few sentences from the DM like “Let’s talk about how much game time and effort we want to dedicate to standard searching, and what level of caution seems fun for everyone.” And so forth and so on. There’s a frequently frustrated mid-teens gamer in me who relaxes at reading passages like the one quoted above, and at all they imply.

The introduction divides this book into three parts: Master of Worlds, Master of Adventures, and Master of Rules. Each gets a few paragraphs of overview. A couple highlights:

Every DM is the creator of his or her own campaign world. Whether you invent a world, adapt a world from a favorite movie or novel, or use a published setting for the D&D game, you make that world your own over the course of a campaign.

That’s entirely true, and something that it’s sometimes difficult to persuade gamers of. Certainly we had problems in White Wolf games convincing readers that we didn’t just want them to make whatever stock elements they used their own, but that we saw it as an inevitability, that their own chronicles would necessarily become their own. It’s true of every production of a play or performance of a work of music, and gaming has the potential for much deeper alteration and customization than many kinds of creative effort.

Also, there’ve always been vocal contingents of gamers who like to loudly insist that using someone else’s resources of setting, plot, etc., condemns a game group to inferior status. It makes me happy to see all the various possibilities treated with equal dignity as creators.

As a referee, the DM acts as a mediator between the rules and the players. A player tells the DM what he or she wants to do, and the DM tells the player whether it is successful or not, in some cases asking the player to make a die roll to determine success.

“Mediator between the rules and the players”….that works for me, for sure. I’ve sometimes said that I think of published rules as input into the game that the group creates in its play, and 5e seems to share the same general outlook. (When I write about the credits, I’ll have some to say about individual and collective authorship; for now, know that I generally like to refer to what the game says as opposed to what some particular author says, particularly in multi-author efforts, because the end result is a distinctive thing of its own. Sometimes I make an exception when I do know just who wrote which part, sometimes not.)

The last page of the introduction, Know Your Players, gets at something I think is crucially important, and does so in a very understated way. It discusses things players like to do in the course of a D&D game, including acting, exploring, instigating, fighting, optimizing, problem solving, and storytelling. Each one gets a few bullet points, like this:

Players who desire exploration want to experience the wonders that a fantasy world has to offer. They want to know what’s around the next corner or hill. They also like to find hidden clues and treasure.

Engage players who like exploration by….

• dropping clues that hint at things yet to come.
• letting them find things when they take the time to explore.
• providing rich descriptions of exciting environments, and using interesting maps and props.
• giving monsters secrets to uncover or cultural details to learn.

Likewise with each of the other sources of enjoyment in play.

What makes me happy is a particular kind of thing that isn’t here: there are no isms. Nobody is an explorationist; it’s just that some players really like exploration, while others don’t. The focus here is on things people do while gaming, not things they are.

My experience of gaming theory and analysis is that building categories around identities is a good way to send the whole thing straight into useless argument. People get defensive about identities, and why not? Identities matter. But poorly defined identities end up cutting their holders off from possible enjoyments, while committing them to stuff they may not like but that’s part of the identity as they understand it. This isn’t just a gaming problem, of course, it happens wherever an identity gets nailed down where it might not really be the most helpful way to think about a category.

The approach 5e takes here (and throughout the book) encourages experimentation, and allows room for changing preferences over time. It also fosters a cooperative rather than competitive spirit to the group’s shared experience – we can add some of this without necessarily ruining that or the other, because there’s no intrinsic competition. None of these preferences in terms that require them to work at the expense of another.

To sum up, this is the kind of foundation that I’d like all RPGs to have in their advice. It’s clear, flexible, encouraging, connected to inspirations in other media, and just plain good-natured.

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Bruce and the DMG, Part 1: The Volume

D&D 5th edition logo

There's still stuff to talk about before I get to the contents! (In my head is a series of posts stringing this out and out and out…but no.) This post is about the physical volume that is my copy of the Dungeon Master's Guide.

It's an 8″ x 11″ hardbound book, 320 pages, with a retail price of $50 US. By my standards, at least, that's pricey, but as the ensuing parts of this review will suggest, I think it delivers solid value for that price. The cover is a purple-dominated scene of a heavily armored warrior suffering under the attacks of some kind of undead lord, with the red D&D logo and “Dungeon Master's Guide” up top, the white-on-red fire streak saying “Dungeons & Dragons” and “Everything a Dungeon Master needs to weave legendary stories for the world's greatest roleplaying game” down below. So this is very clearly on what it's all about. 🙂

I really prefer my game books in digest/trade paperback size. They're easier to shelve, and easier for me to hold, and significantly easier for me to refer to with the reduced physical space to scan for particular information. The 4th edition Essentials books were therefore a great joy to me in these ways. But I wasn't expecting 5e to keep that up, so the fact that it doesn't is no particular shock or sorrow.

All three 5th edition volumes have a very nifty feature. The front cover is entirely glossy, and so's the spine. But half the back cover is a nicely textured matte finish, setting off the back-cover blurb physically as well as visually. It feels really nice in my hands – it's a pure luxury touch that pays off, at least for me. I spend a solid majority of my gaming time and purchasing on electronic formats these days, but have always maintained that I like physical books for the things that only they can do. This is a perfect example. No PDF's ever going to go from glossy to matte beneath my fingers, I'm fairly sure.

The back cover matter, in case you're interested:

Entertain and inspire your players

The Dungeon Master's Guide provides the inspiration and guidance you need to spark your imagination and create worlds of adventure for your players to explore and enjoy.

Inside you'll find world-building advice, tips and tricks for creating memorable dungeons and adventures, optional game rules, hundreds of classic D&D magic items, and many other tools to help you be a great Dungeon Master.

When you're ready for even more, expand your adventures with the fifth edition Player's Handbook and Monster Manual.

Well, okay, then! That sounds like a good set of goals for a DMG to have. And I notice that starting right on the front and back covers, they're talking about dungeons as one part of the overall work – it's not just dungeoneering, but “worlds”. That makes me happy.

Next post, I'll actually open up the book!

 

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Bruce and the DMG, Prologue

Let’s get this show on the road! It’s time to take a look at the Dungeon Master’s Guide for the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. But before we get to what’s in the book, I want to write a little about the biases I bring to bear.

I’ve been playing roleplaying games a long time – since 1977 – and helping to create them on and off for a good long while. It’s my experience that a whole lot of RPGs do a bad job of helping the referee understand what a successful session and campaign of this game might be like, what choices they should be thinking about to craft a fun time for their particular group, and like that. We are, far too often, left with something like Bun Rab’s angry denunciation of lucky rabbit’s feet in a Pogo strip: “What’s a rabbit’s foot without the rabbit? Nothin’ but a handful of disembodied toes!” So I’m always on the lookout for games that actually do provide this kind of teaching and support for the whole process of play.

D&D 3rd edition was pretty good about this. D&D 4th edition was excellent, but not nearly enough people knew it; far too many people harshing on the game never actually looked at what it said, even when they’d bought the books. Further, in recent years there’ve been a whole bunch of good RPGs of all sorts that do referee support really well. So I come at this deeply curious to see what sort of influences I spot, and also what kinds of cool new stuff (or at least new-to-me stuff) there is.

Finally, I much prefer to get enthusiastic over things that make me happy than to rant on about ones that make me unhappy or angry. Most of the time, therefore, you’ll find me spending more time and effort to explain just why something delights me than on artisanal locally sourced slams on parts I dislike. Negativity’s easy to come by; (hopefully) thoughtful happiness is in shorter supply, and it’s what I prefer to offer.

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Solipsist, by David Donachie

There’s a joking reference I learned from reading British stories. The original version is a 19th century cartoon from Punch magazine, showing an obviously intimidated curate as the guest of his much wealthier boss, the local bishop. The bishop says, “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr. Jones.” The curate replies, “Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!” It caught on, as so many Punch lines have, and a “curate’s egg” can be any sort of thing with mixed good and bad qualities. Solipsist is a curate’s egg of an RPG.

The worst of the egg

I nearly didn’t review this game, and my hesitation is entirely due to one throwaway line:

Throughout the text we refer to Solipsists, players and the GM using “he”, “him”, “his”. etc. This is just a convention we’ve used in this book.

I will not here do a full-bore spiel about the concept of privilege as manifest in gaming writing. Nonetheless, that’s an archetypal bit of privilege in action. Donachie can be flippant about it, because nobody with any clout is going to suggest that as someone with a male-sounding name and who’s referred to by the publisher and others with male pronouns, he is presumptively not a gamer and should be regarded with suspicion. It’s very unlikely that anyone will insist that if he games with miniature figures, they should all have enormous penises and wear bondage gear, or that his characters should expect to be subservient to all those of any other group of players. He will probably never get groped in a game store; if he does, it’s very unlikely that the store owner will start by assuming that he did something to bring it on. The odds are excellent that he will never show up at a gaming session pitched to him as male-friendly only to have his character raped and enslaved. And on, and on, and on, and on.

(As always, someone will doubt that the inverse of these things actually happen to anyone. Another time I’ll do a post about educational resources. For now…yes, in fact, they do, and careful, reliable accounts are readily available via common search engines.)

The point here is that for a lot of gamers, it’s not at all a given that they should be allowed to identify as gamers or associate with other gamers. Women, people of color whatever their sex and gender, LGBT people…quite a few kinds of people who like to game and wish to participate in gaming scenes have to struggle to get more advantaged gamers to accept them as equals. They don’t get to casually toss off their choice of associations and usages. I know that some of the people who read my reviews will look at that line and think “I can sit on this batch of bucks and save it for someone who’s willing to write about players, GMs, and characters in ways that include me in”. And I’ll think they’re being pretty sensible.

The rest of the egg

Solipsist is a 98-page digest-sized RPG, available in PDF from DriveThruRPG for $10 US. It’s not bookmarked, though the organization is good, the index is accurate and thorough, and the actual rules are so compact that I never felt more than simply annoyed by the absence. As with a lot of digest-sized books, it’s got a single-column layout and the art is all either full-page or nearly so. The layout and typography are very crisp and clean. The footer space on some pages has authorial comments or mood-inspiring quotations, and is blank on others.

This is a game about people who have the right kind of force of will to change reality. What they want hard enough may come true. But there are complications.

Solipsists who wish for everything they want, all at one, disappear into their own pocket universes, and leave behind a tear in the fabric of consensus reality. Through those tears come the shadows, mysterious and possibly unknowable forces or entities out to devour all of reality and solipsists in particular. So solipsists who’d like their works to last and who don’t want to annihilate reality at large have to pace themselves, balancing the changes they wish for with affirmations of their connections to consensus reality. As Queen nearly put it, “Too much wishing will kill you just as sure as not enough.”

A brief observation on terminology

Solipsist capitalizes game terms. Lots and lots of game terms. So it has sentences like this: “Overshoot: Succeeding at Changing Reality so completely that your Obsessions run away with you and the Change goes out of your control.”

I’m not going to say that this is wrong, because it’s a stylistic issue. I do say that I don’t believe it helps, and that the risks of ambiguity between game-mechanical terms and more general usages is often overrated by gaming authors (including me in the past). I think that where there’s any risk of confusion, it’s almost always possible to clarify by simple adjustments to the passage; I strongly recommend that authors try out passages on a variety of readers and see whether confusion actually occurs, and where it doesn’t, don’t add complications.

More of the rest of the egg

Mechanically, Solipsist is a strikingly minimalist game.

It’s diceless, and that’s a big part of why I went ahead with the review despite reservations. I really love diceless games and want to see more of them, and am doing my part to get the word out about what’s available in this part of the gaming ecosystem.

There are no skills, and only certain very specific kinds of attribute. Broadly speaking, if you want your character to do something that doesn’t contradict local reality as established so far in play, they can go ahead and do it. You could, of course, plug in any of many fine rules sets to provide a simple addendum to cover the mundane side of this game’s solipsists, but there’s something to be said for the “sure, go ahead” approach.

These are the features each solipsist has:

#1. A vision. Example characters’ visions include:

• My vision is of a just world. A place where I preside over a fair society. My rules are followed and I am respected. There is no injustice here, only order and my law.
• My vision is of a world covered by ocean, where no humans exist. I am the mermaid princess of this underwater kingdom.
• My vision is of a world where family is so important that each family shares its life essence. I am the sole survivor of my whole family and they live on through me.
• My vision is of an endless and glorious summer, where the flowers are ever in bloom and in the balmy evenings my new-found friends drink with me and smile.

Whatever the vision, it needs to center on the solipsist: what do they want to do and be, and what must the world be to accommodate that?

#2. Obsessions. These are particular drives that feed into the vision. They may be specific aspects of the vision itself, or desires that would move the character closer to the vision without being part of it themselves. These are the obsessions for the would-be mermaid, for instance:

• I want to have a house by the sea (3 points)
• I want to become a mermaid (3 points)
• I want to breathe water (1 point)
• I want to free the killer whales (1 point)
• I want to see the sea cover the Earth (1 point)

I’ll come back to the point values in a moment; for now, just know that each character has exactly 5 obsessions, and divides 9 points between them. Higher-ranked ones will be more significant in attempts to change reality in the character’s here-and-now.

#3. Limitations. These are the things that make the character hesitate, feel unable or unworthy to pursue their vision, and connect them to consensus reality. As with obsessions, there are always 5, with 9 points divided between them. Here are the ones for the would-be mermaid:

• My son would die (4 points)
• My family love me (2 points)
• I cannot swim (1 point)
• I hate what being alone does to me (1 point)
• My pet snake cannot breathe water (1 point)

#4. Tears. Over time, uncontrolled and overpowered shifts in reality tear it. Characters start off with no legacy of tears, but they build them up over time, and must make efforts to fix the tears before everything just breaks down.

#5. Infestation. In Solipsist‘s cosmology, the fundamental units of the universe are almost infinitely small living beings, named animacules in an homage to Anton van Leeuwenhoek’s term for the bacteria and other microorganisms he was the first to see through primitive microscopes. The animacules shape reality in response to the conscious and unconscious desires of all living beings, and most efficiently when reflecting solipsists’ desires. The infestation score is a pool of points you can spend on useful tasks, and can regain with suitable effort.

Something I like about this game is that infestation scores could work just as well for other things, from generic fate/action points to Mage-style Arete ratings, with no dislocation at all to anything else in the game. A sidebar specifically discusses ways of modifying play to reflect various ambiences, and one option is Mage-inspired, with non-solipsist bystanders affecting the difficulty of reality changes. This is a very tinker-friendly game that way, and that always makes me happy.

Once made, of course, characters go about trying to change reality. This is mechanically simple but quite elegant. The proposed change must include and affect the solipsist then and there, and it must be in accord with their vision. Changes that have no consequence for the solipsist just don’t happen, and neither do ones that work against the world the solipsist dreams of.

The GM sets the difficulty, and there are simple rules for this: 3, +1 if a change contradicts facts established in the current story or +2 if it contradicts facts established in the current scene, +2 or more if shadows are active in the area (more about them later), plus the ratings of all the solipsist’s relevant limitations. This is where the strategic element of assigning points feeds into the tactics of any particular change.

Now the player sets about reducing the difficulty, subtracting the rating of each relevant obsession. The goal is to get the difficulty to 0. If juggling obsessions doesn’t do it, you’ve got two options. One is to spend infestation points, shifting it closer to 0 on a 1-for-1 basis. If that’s still not enough, you can have your character push it, gaining a tear and reducing the difficulty by 5.

The outcome falls into one of three categories. If the final difficulty is greater than 0, the attempted change fails. Involved limitations get experience ticks, and the GM narrates the results. If the difficulty is exactly 0, the change goes as you want, and you narrate the results. If the difficulty is below 0, the change happens in an uncontrolled way. Obsessions get experience ticks, your character gains a tear, new infestation points come in, and whatever happens is to going to highlight the impact of runaway obsessions and limitations.

And that’s the heart of the game, right there.

A clever subheading evoking eggs and development

I’m not going to cover character development in nearly so much detail.

It’s possible for a character to fulfill enough obsessions and have enough tears accumulated that they fall into their own pocket universe. That’s the last they’ll be seen in play for good or bad; their last connection to the campaign will be the player narrating how the disappearance seems – whether it’s got a mundane cover or is overtly strange, and so on – to those who remain in consensus reality.

It’s also possible to take steps to avoid that. The game describes ways to reduce limitations and obsessions, and also to develop new ones,and to close up tears.

Mechanics cover multiple solipsists working together or just being near each other and not helping out. I admit that I think this game may be strongest for one-on-one play just because clashing visions looks likely to bring in more nuisance than reward. I’ve only had the chance to play it one-on-one, though, so I can’t be a voice of experience in the matter.

Earlier, I referred to the shadows. These are the unnatural forces that challenge solipsists’ ability to pursue their vision. The game offers a whole spread of possibilities: they’re a force of nature (predators feeding on animacules, perhaps), or other solipsists who don’t otherwise interact with the characters, or ascended solipsists returning to consensus reality to steal more animacules as needed, or the dark side of the solipsists’ own nature, or the doctors in the asylum trying to cure the characters’ delusions. They may also not appear at all, if you want to dispense with them as a source of threat and difficulty.

The game offers quite nifty mechanics for handling the shadows. As GM, you set an overall shadow strength, and give yourself that many shadow tokens or shadow points; the game has guidelines for how many points per character you’ll want to consider, with an eye on characters being able to prevail after good and perhaps costly effort. I will pause here to say that this is another reason I’m reviewing the game. I love that expectation for the outcome of play, and love to say “Here’s another game doing it just the way I like it!”

Some shadow points go to establishing one or several threads, each with its own rating. The thread strength raises the difficulty of reality-changing attempts when the person, place, thing, quality, or whatever that it represents is present as a solipsist tries to do their stuff. There’s always some way to resolve it: burn the tape (or copy it and inflict its vision on another person before seven days expire), find the missing person, complete the unfinished novel, etc. Other shadow points measure the overall strength of the underlying shadow, which can undertake reality-destroying changes of its own and can be engaged directly once the solipsists have identified and isolated it.

So, depending on the priorities mutually agreeable to players and GM, Solipsist games can cover a wide spread of combos of “I shall pursue my vision” and “I shall save the world from being negated and annihilated”. The advice on evolving development is compact but good.

There are some ways the game shows its origins as an individual project within a small development community. There are some “oh you hadda been there” moments, like a joke that is explained by artwork that’s supposed to explain it only if you’ve heard or read the rest of the story somewhere outside the rulebook. The example of play is long but oddly incomplete in some ways, offering no clear sense at all of how two characters with such divergent visions ever came together or got to the point they’re at when the example begins. It reads like a lot of drafts I’ve read and some I’ve written, where the author finds their early readers not getting something and fills it in personally. This works right up until you distribute it to people who don’t have you within easy access reach all the time.

One final criticism that’s not a problem with the book, but with the consensus reality of us the gamers. 🙂 It’s got multiple references to online discussions that simply don’t exist anymore. Forums do crash, get hacked, and otherwise wear out, and I’m not driven to fits of rage over it or anything. But I’d have liked to see some of those discussions. Perhaps in future there could be an archive site under the author’s or publisher’s own control with backups?

At meal’s end: a verdict

There’s enough about Solipsist I dislike that I can’t give it any kind of straight-on, no-major-reservations recommendation, of the sort I’ve given other books I’ve reviewed lately. If the doubts and problems I’ve pointed out seem like they’d be problems for you too, I can only recommend that you see about gathering some more info before making a purchase.

On the other hand, though, in many ways this is one of those games I think I’ve always wanted without quite knowing it. Yearning for a different reality, but held back by elements of oneself just as strong as important as the escape-fueling obsessions? Yeah, I know a thing or two about that myself, and I also find it a really great source of fantasy drama and adventure. The lightness and personal focus of this game let it open new windows on scenes often viewed through more weighty edifices’ galleries, like Mage and Nobilis; because the cosmological framework is so sparce, there’s room to welcome in very idiosyncratic and deeply personal visions without them clashing with or requiring adjustments to lots of existing setting material. Its dicelessness makes it fine for playing at a distance without needing any dice rollers and such.

I like it, but I’d love to see a new edition that would bring the not-so-excellent parts up to the standard of the rest.

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Uresia: Grave of Heaven, by S. John Ross

Uresia: Grave of Heaven is a 114-page PDF, 6″ x 9″, sold by the author at his website for $19.95 US. (You can also get it via Lulu; see the link in the preceding sentence for info.) There’s a 48-page free preview, too, available via that same link.

This is the second edition of Uresia. The first used the Big Eyes, Small Mouth system, and came out from the late, lamented Guardians of Order. This time around it’s system-less, with no more mechanics than price lists in prevailing currency, and a couple 1-100 or 1-1,000 charts to roll on for random possibilities of different sorts. S. John doesn’t have much to say about applying particular mechanics, apart from some very smart words on the theme of not messing a lot with prices if the game you’re using has stock price lists of its own. What we get is a lot of good clear description, almost but not exclusively in terms of how people in the game world would measure, categorize, and otherwise deal with things.

So what’s Uresia?

I’m going to answer that by quoting the first page of the book.

In an age before history, the gods ruled the heavens and man ruled the world. Everyone had their place, everyone stayed busy, and it was good. Or, as good as things tend to be.

But the gods grew numerous, fractious, and vain. Bored with their celestial realms, they came to the mortal lands to walk among men, dictate their lives, indulge in the affections of their worshippers, and squabble. The squabbles of gods became a war of gods, and men were as ants, to be trampled underfoot.

In time, the wars reached such a pitch that there’d be no peace until the gods destroyed everything. Even the heavens. Even themselves.

Hymns and legends tell that the final battle began with a great and sudden silence, as the gods abandoned their meddling to ascend, one last time, to take sides. For a few hours, there was gentle rain and distant thunder. Men held their breath, eyes skyward.

Night fell. The rains stopped, and the clouds parted.

The stars twinkled, quietly. No gods appeared to gloat. No gods appeared to fight. No gods appeared at all.

And in that final, elated moment, men cheered, believing they were free…believing peace had come. They were right. But not in any way they’d enjoy.

The stars rippled, space ruptured, and there was a hideous, swollen light. Balls of fire tumbled forth—vast globes of destructive brilliance.

Heaven had died, and the sky fell.

The balls of fire were the remains…the broken, incandescent realms of gods and devils and more. Mighty halls fell; howling pits fell; impossible cities fell; the dark realm of death fell; the holy forest fell. They struck the lands of men, plunging the world into boiling ocean foam.

On a broken ring of islands—remnants scorched by lava and washed clean by storms—a few living things held on. In the center of that ring, at the heart of destruction, the fiery wreckage of heaven boiled, churned, and cooled into green and inviting lands: new islands in a new sea. Men called these isles Uresia: grave of the gods.

That was a long time ago.

Where do you go with that opening? Well, if you’re S. John, you go to an archipelago nearly as wide as the continental United States, with hundreds of thousands or millions of people of multiple species, going about life in a whole bunch of ways.

For me, the essence of Uresia is that it’s a realm not on the brink of anything. The heavens and gods fell many centuries ago, and though delving into their remains keeps a lot of would-be adventurers busy, it’s not a driving concern in most people’s lives. There was a big time of war in the recent past, of which more later, but it wasn’t a world war or apocalyptic sort of struggle, and there is no overwhelming doom lurking in the near future, even though there are baddies of assorted ambition and power to act on them. Uresia is a place, or bunch of places, in the middle of its history, with ups and downs and a lot of getting by.

Uresia the book wears its inspirations on its sleeve, and no effort at concealment. (Years back, when a prominent sf writer was making an ignorant fool of himself in a debate about copyright law of the time, several writers on the GEnie forums wondered if anyone could maybe take him aside and explain things to him so he’d get a clue. Another prominent writer said, “Being explained to isn’t his best thing.” Likewise, acts of modesty and misdirection aren’t S. John’s best thing.) If you look at that page over on the right of these paragraphs, and you think, “Hey, that looks familiar”, then you’ve been splashing around in the same pools of influence: Zork and other computer games, relatively early D&D modules and boxed sets like first edition Forgotten Realms, and like that. But it works as its own entity, with more than self-contained vitality to keep it rolling to all sorts of interesting destinations.

It’s also a really gorgeous book. The typography is wonderful, a pleasure to read on every page. The cartography is just amazing. The design, as you see here, is clear but never deal. Of late I’ve been buying my games exclusively in electronic formats, but I can feel my resolve crumbling each time I go through Uresia, and I sense a Lulu order in my future. In the meantime, the PDF displays just fine on my first-generation iPad, with few major lags, and it’s got detailed enough bookmarking to make it very easy to get to whatever part I might want to look at this particular moment.

One thing Uresia isn’t is a nostalgia fest in any limiting sense. S. John likes the things he likes, and tells you about them in a great few pages at the end, but there’s no “oh, you hadda/shoulda been there” vibe here. He keeps finding new things to like, too, and has new thoughts about old ones. This is fresh work, something that works just fine for at least some gamers who weren’t even born when a lot of the inspirations were flourishing.

Who do you play, and who do they deal with?

One of the great pleasures of going system-free in gaming writing is the simple freedom to include stuff that fits here regardless of whether it fit the schemas laid down in some other rulebook yonder. The gentleman satyr at right is a good example of this. There are a lot of different species in Uresia, and it works to describe them in simple strokes (some broad, some narrow). Thus there are beast-peoples, both intelligent animals and animal-human hybrids, in however many sorts feel like they would make sense for the locales you’re using and the style of game you want this time around. “Troll” is in Uresia a catch-all term: “There are ogrish Trolls, reptilian Trolls, and others. They’re mostly big, mostly strong, and mostly smarter than most men assume.” Ditto for others.

My personal favorite, I think, are the satyrs. S. John’s done something really interesting with them, and I’ll just quote a bit more.

Satyrs are frequently stereotyped as lecherous hedonists, but they’re too busy gorging, drinking, and fornicating to object. Satyrs judge others by sexual performance the way some Humans judge by handshake. They understand that not everyone wants to have sex with them…but as far as a Satyr is concerned, that’s a challenge, not a restriction. Many extend their affections beyond reasonable species boundaries (including livestock, household pets, and large plants) and lots of them are obsessed with underwear. There are Elu pirate ships crewed entirely by Satyrs who stage panty raids on passenger caravels. Their passions for wine, food, and art (especially music) are comparably intense. Satyrs are creatures of appetite, and they are in every sense adventurous, curious, and romantic.

Beneath their libertine pursuit of pleasure, Satyrs are an intelligent and emotional people. Hailing mostly from Lochria (p. 18), Satyrs keep modern societies, produce beautiful handicrafts (many made one-handed), and are capable of great heroism—particularly if some derring-do is called for. […]

Satyrs feel passion (of every kind) with a singular intensity, and this gives them an edge in those pursuits where the fires of imagination and desire are paramount. They are also profoundly loyal, once they decide to grant their loyalty. […]

Satyric passions come at a price. Satyrs feel disappointment, loss, and resentmen with that same notable intensity, leading to social difficulties with cooler-headed races.

Following that is a half-page boxed text that is the specific passage that made me say “I must write up a review.” Here you go:

Tréan Aradam, Acolyte of the Sisters of Fair Judgment {who believe in the sanctity of any and every fair competition – yr. ob’d’nt reviewer}, is a priest of the Arbiters, and the youngest cleric ever accepted in the Drunken Louts of Bascerly Lane, one of the oldest, loudest, and least-respected privatedelving clubs in Dreed. He’s been delving into dungeons since he was 10 years old…and that’s just two years, so far.

His companions, a Water Slime named Sluice and a mildly-infamous duelist (Francesca Arturi, a Satyr twice his age) round the troupe into a trio, and whenever they walk into a bar, it’s like the beginning of fifteen different off-color jokes (that the priest is the underage boy only complicates the comic possibilities). Tréan’s trio chuckle politely at the jests; it’s all just part of the territory. They’re bound by a fairly serious quest, and if that means the company of drunks who don’t understand them, so be it.

All three of “Tréan’s Trio” were raised as church-orphans at the Sisterhood’s temple in western Dreed, immersed in the lore of the Arbiters, and in the fast pace world of Indulgence’s competitive cooking scene, where those of their faith serve as respected referees. Of the three, only Tréan took the vows of Fair Judgment, but his companions share his affection for the clerics who fed and protect them.

Just over two years ago, assassins slipped into the temple and murdered every single priest. Tréan alone survived, rescued by Sluice and “Fresca”, the latter of whom was visiting to return a book she’d borrowed as a child. Horrified by the event but determined to set it right, they banded together to investigate. Rather than a lack of leads, they found an abundance of them: leads to grudges by a hundred embittered chefs, several blade-duelists of Fresca’s sort, and and assorted thieves, delvers, bounty hunters, and even rival priests. Valued as impartial observers, Arbiter priesthoods earn their fair share of bile from competitors of every stripe, when the call doesn’t go their way.

And so, the trio joined adventuring society, downplaying their shared tragedy and purpose. To the delver community, they’re a successful novelty act: they’ve plundered new levels beneath the Ever-Crumbling Mansion of Vanity, rescued emerald miners from sentient floods, and discovered three new Raansa ruins west of Sword Mountain. And of course, given their upbringing, they fight fair. For now.

And they are—like many delving troupes—a family as much as a band of shieldmates. Francesca is the boy’s guidance, but in just as many ways, she needs him to be hers. Her worldliness, and his naïvete, balance neatly with the mad and caring spirit of the slime who tends both their wounds. Bit by bit and clue by clue, their path (back and forth between the low dives of Dreed and the noble houses of west Temphis) become focused on one salient fact: a hundred or a thousand men may resent their referee, but only very rich and powerful ones can afford groups of professional assassins. They feel closer and closer to the truth, and one day, they might walk into a bar, and for whoever is sitting there, it’ll be no joke at all.

Uresia is the kind of world where that happens.

Slimes? What’s that about slimes?

Yup, Uresia’s inhabitants include “intelligent drops of thick goo”, usually about the size of beach balls, though some are much larger or smaller than that. At rest, they take on a shape reminiscent of onions and teardrops, and their various species are mostly distinguished by color. They’re telepathic with each other, and communicate with the rest of the world via squeaks.

Some Slime varieties have small wings and can fly, but most are wingless and scoot merrily along the ground. (Celari scholars classify Slimes as pygiapods, or “ass-footed”, while Slimes classify Celari scholars as pygiacephalic.) Slimes have large, expressive eyes and no apparent appendages or mouth (though they can definitely bite, and form suggestive facial expressions when they care to).

The description goes on, but you get the idea, I hope. They’re fun, but not just purely silly: they have the same potential for hopes, fears, ambitions, challenges, success, and failure as anyone else. There’s whimsy here, but it’s the kind of whimsy that reality itself often offers, coexisting with the rest rather than displacing it.

Something about a war?

That’s right, there is, and it’s also great. (It has nothing in particular to do with the cat-woman here, I just really like the illustration.) One of the larger kingdoms of Uresia had, until just a few decades ago, an empire spanning a lot of the archipelago. It grew and grew, and was vile in all sort of ways…but its leaders reached too far, let their ambitions run ahead of assets, and run into more opposition than they could handle. Allied enemies pushed them back all the way to their home island. The people of Koval deposed the mad Empress who’d led them, set up a more conventional monarchy, and showed enough sense of “that’s not us anymore” and capitulation that they managed to survive.

Thirty years on, they’re still trying to show the rest of Uresia—and, really, themselves—that they’ve changed from the people who made the Empire run, while trying to hang onto the qualities that are still important in their self-definition. It’s tricky, and not always successful.

So there’s all this great legacy stuff to play with! The soldiers who held garrisons throughout the now-gone empire didn’t (couldn’t) all go home, and they have descendants, who have tangled relations with the people around them. So do the civilians who did all the things that military bases need done by civilians, and their families, and the settlers who came sometimes to escape the heart of the mad empire and sometimes to take part in the glorious triumphs now gone by. Likewise, there are settlements of the allied nations who broke the Empire, and they have tangled situations too.

It’s genuinely nifty fodder for roleplaying, with dozens of hooks sprinkled all through the writeups of various peoples and places. The tone is overall optimistic, but not stupidly so, and that suits me very well indeed.

It’s been 2500 words so far. You done yet?

Fortunately or un-, no, I’m not. There’s a boatload of things I haven’t even begun to enthuse about. But my fingers are suggesting that maybe this is most of enough, so I’ll try hitting some points in brief.

• Magic. This is one of the areas where it’d be easiest for system-less writing to go soft and squishy, but S. John doesn’t. He provides descriptions of how various kinds of magic work in Uresia that I’d feel comfortable modeling each in any of several generic/multi-purpose rules systems. In addition to those, he’s got a great section on “The Frontiers of Magic”, explaining what Uresian magic can and can’t do with regard to love and loyalty, time travel, scrying, and several other of the classic trouble spots for magic systems. When I was working with a player on the specifics for his character, we found it easy to reach agreement on what the wizard’s spells would do easily, with difficulty, or not at all. We both felt more than adequately supported as we did the necessary rules work.

• Anachronism and relaxed cultural boundaries. On the whole, Uresia partakes of the vaguely late medieval/early Renaissance European style that’s the D&D family tree’s main trunk. But not exclusively so. There are various places where we find people playing with computer gaming consoles that may or may not be anything like those from our part of reality. There are mighty elemental magic-powered ships, and there are zippy but explosive locomotives. There are exotic creatures to keep the slimes company. One of the kingdoms is run by a 60-year-old guy who was pushed through a portal to Uresia as a teenager and managed to make good.

Uresia isn’t nearly as high-octane as Arduin, but they could happily hang out together. S. John’s work and Hargrove’s share an openness to incorporating things that come along, sometimes changing them a lot and sometimes letting them keep on being themselves in a weird new context. It would therefore be easy to adapt in a lot of ways. You might run it with the Ironclaw system, for instance, and do away with the usual species while keeping around the slimes and all. You could give the islands steampunk or magitech or fedorapunk features and not really have to alter much of anything beyond travel times, because the setting is not about all the ways people suffer and are screwed by the limits of their societies.

• Sex, gender, race, etc. On the whole, Uresia is very accommodating and sometimes overtly inclusive. It’s not perfect in this regard: there are some art pieces that struck me as all-too-classic sexist pandering. And it’s not so much that the book has anything to say about non-cis, non-hetero ways of life as that it has nothing to say against them. I don’t want that to come off as dismissive, mind you. It’s really darned easy to lapse into prevailing prejudices while filling up the nooks and crannies of a description, and very strongly to S. John’s credit that he doesn’t do that. I have no problem recommending it as a queer-accommodating work that won’t be spending a lot of time trying to push people into designated role boxes.

Ethnicity is likewise basically not being seen. There are cultural prejudices to be found, because Uresia’s people are, you know, people, but they tend to be based on things like language, social and political organization, religion, and all that stuff about how people live from day to day (or wish they lived, or think they should live). Nothing in the book would stop you from making a monochromatic parade of whiteness from one side of the archipelago to the other…but not a scrap of the book leads you in that direction, either. It’ll be a thing you bring to the game, one way or another.

• Not killing all the time. It’s possible that this is just one of my trademark hangups—I really don’t know how much others notice or care—but these days it is for me a very big deal when a game provides lots of cool things to do besides slaughter. Uresia delivers very, very abundantly in this regard.

As the picture and text at right should suggest, Iron Chef: Uresia would make a fine campaign hook, in any of several, er, flavors. Likewise, as suggested in the Tréan’s Trio quote up above, being a traveling—or resident—referee could be a way of life for characters who want to engage with the social world in all its manifold weirdness. One of my players spent some time pondering an almost entirely non-combatant architect and surveyor working with a delver troupe, though she ended up doing something else. A satyr paladin could keep very busy defending many worthy people from threats besides lethal ones, and have hot and cold running emotional torrents all the while.

Uresia also provides openings a-plenty for another of my very most favorite things, exploration. There are those ruins of heaven around. By no means every island is known in detail, or even at all, to others: there are separate entries in the equipment chapter for “map or chart, block- or plate-printed (certain to be inaccurate/incomplete/censored)”, “map or chart, professionally prepared (quality and accuracy varies)”, and “map or chart, detailed, quality proven (typically illegal, a trade secret, or both)”. There are lands beyond the archipelago, too, and room for some really epic adventures of travel and documentation, for those who like that sort of thing, and I do.

• Names. You could pay a big chunk of the price of this book just for the Notes on Naming and be spending your money wisely. S. John doesn’t just talk about the styles of name for various lands. (In his inimitable way: “If you were a god mighty enough to pick up Sweden and shake it like a salt-shaker over Switzerland, you’d created a mix of sounds that would be eerily reminiscent of Celar, including the helpless screams of unfortunate Swedes plummeting to their doom (plummeting to one’s doom is a respectably common Celari demise.”) He offers useful, clear instructions on how to make more names of those sorts: what elements to start with and how to mash and tweak them.

He also flags something that I’ve almost never seen addressed in game books. People move around. Not everybody living in a place have ancestors there back into time immemorial. There are immigrants, intentional and otherwise. People pass through and leave legacies. He discusses a bunch of ways to use names from nearby and faraway places for characters in a particular region, and the place descriptions demonstrate all of them. It’s a crucial part of making Uresia feel like a world rather a collection of isolated points.

So you’re saying you liked Uresia: Grave of Heaven?

I sure did. I very highly recommend it, both to use as a rich, fun setting of its own and to borrow or adapt from for other settings. I’ve had fun reading it, and fun running it, and look forward to lots more use.

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