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by Curt M. [Verified Purchaser]
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Date Added: 01/11/2012 17:54:33 |
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My only complaint about this PDF, especially since the Spirit Magic PDF is available for free, is the lack of maritime rules, as these are already open content. That being said, this $1 PDF is a great medium to get playability out of various RQI and RQII PDFs either still available for purchase here on RPGnow, or still downloadable from previous purchases of now out of print PDFs. If you're like me, you "found" Runequest Pirates during RPGnow's "Talk Like a Pirate" festivities.
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Darrians continues Mongoose' Alien Module series in fine fashion. Darrians present new and interesting options for players in search of a new Traveller experience. The art is fine, and the reader comes away from the book with a real feel for the Darrian culture.
My one gripe, and this holds true for the entire Alien Module series, is that unlike the careers in the Career books, the careers here have limited event options, similar to the core rulebook. For such an interesting race, I wanted to see more life event options. Ah well, it is better to be left wanting more than regretting the purchase.
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Cybernetics scores a great win for Mongoose Traveller. I personally wish that this book would have been elevated to "Career Book" status, as it presents many career and chargen options for players. The careers presented fit well with established careers from the career books, such as the Cybernetic Agent receiving Trust, as in Book 5: Agent.
The artwork is superb, their are plenty of components presented and options for the type of modified being a player wishes to create. It can make very powerful characters, but there are appropriate drawbacks given. The only thing that would improve this book would be to have it include rules for androids and "supplant" Mongoose' Book 9, Robot.
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Book 9: Robot follows Mongoose' wonderful eighth career book, Dilettante. There are some large shoes to fill, and unfortunately Robot fails to live up to its predecessor. The fluff is fine, giving insightful looks at a few different "ages" for robots, indicating the degree of social acceptance and rank that robots may achieve. Imaginative NPCs are provided, as well.
However, the rules system does not work. For instance, if creating a large Size 5 robot, unless one takes the Lightweight frame option, it is impossible to make a large android, because Size 5 legs cannot support the weight of the body. There is a "slot" system provided, but its usage is not fully explained. Do limbs "use up" slots, or does their slot statistic provide extra slots for gadgets? Legs are specifically mentioned to come singly, but there is no mention of whether arms come in pairs or as one. The number of slots indicated on the arm entry seems to indicate that they come in pairs, but no explanation is given.
The PC generation process is incredibly tedious, with players being required to do a lot of bookkeeping in order to remember whether their character will be smart enough to go adventuring and whether or not all of its spiffy gadgets will fit. Statistics are provided for human-like robots reminiscent of the Cylons from New Battlestar Galactica. However, these characters are incredibly unbalanced, gameplay-wise, and the careers provided do not mesh well with the point-buy rules.
I personally wish that this book would have followed in the path of Mongoose' Cybernetics book, simply listing components and how and where they fit on the body. If I ever run a campaign featuring androids, I will house rule that the Cybernetics book represent robots as well.
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Animal Encounters is a fine bestiary for Mongoose Traveller. Not only are the advertised encounters present for all sorts of worlds and habitats, but a very workable animal creation system. The creatures rolled will be unique and memorable thanks to the quirks system.
One complaint is that the animal NPCs in the encounter section do not have a size given. One is supposed to infer size from physical characteristics. The book is skimpy in the art department, but what's there isn't bad. Overall, this is a book that I definitely recommend. It takes the animal creation process from the core book and adds many options.
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Zhodani covers the necessary human villains of the Original Traveller Universe. While the game elements presented within, and the fluff as well, are given well and really immerse one in the Zhodani culture, this book has one major flaw.
The artwork is horrendous. It's a shame to say it about this product, but especially the drawings in the career section. The pictures there look like they come from a bad Tintin fan comic. It's not enough to turn one off completely, but it distracts greatly from an otherwise-fantastic book.
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Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2012/01/10/tabletop-review-legend/
Legend is the latest game from Mongoose Publishing, released towards the end of 2011, and just beginning to build up a head of steam. The game touts itself as a generic fantasy role playing game (FRPG), and one that is best suited to gritty, heroic play.
The character building experience is a mix of styles that have seen their ups and downs during the years. The seven basic characteristics, for example, share five in common with every edition of D&D since the 1970′s, with the addition of a variant on Wisdom in the Power stat, and a seventh stat in Size, providing a gestalt of height, weight and bulk for your character.
The figured characteristics – attributes in Legend parlance – include such old chestnuts as hit points, but also a rudimentary hit location system that breaks the body down into seven distinct locations, each with it’s own hit point value. In addition to some common attributes like damage bonuses and magic points, something called Strike Rank is determined, which works out to be a static initiative stat to which additional dice are added to determine order of action in combat.
The skill system is the real meat and potatoes of the character building process, with a combination of common “everyman” skills that each character starts with, augmented by their cultural background, prior profession, and a pool of extra points to be distributed, within reason, amongst all possible skills.
The backgrounds and professions deserve a bit more attention. Within parameters set by the game master, players may choose to be Primitive, Nomad, Barbarian or Civilized. Your choice determines some set bonuses to certain skills, as well as access to a handful of advanced skills depending on the background you choose. In addition, you make some initial selections of combat styles that your character will be versed in, from Sword & Shield to 2H Spear to Blowgun. Again, your choices will be narrowed down by your culture of choice. Your background also determines your starting cash. No real attempt has been made at balance here, necessarily, but the differences do allow for some real distinctions to be made in future role-play.
Professions are limited by your background – for example, anyone can be an Animal Trainer, no matter where they come from, but an Alchemist requires that you be Civilized, while Herdsman requires that you not be, only an option for Primitive, Nomad or Barbarian characters. The profession further increases specific skills, opens up more potential for advanced skills and combat experience, and, for a handful of choices, provides access to magic skills.
Magic is an interesting thing in Legend. There’s a skill that your GM may include in your basic skills, or may choose not to – Common Magic. Some games may take the assumption that nearly everyone has a smattering of magic, and that’s where Common Magic comes in. Some games will not, and will insist that players invest points or professional background in learning the mystical arts.
The next steps take the game back in a more traditional direction, with random dice rolls determining real background information, from the state of your parents, how many siblings and extended family you have, and your family’s reputation and connections at the start of the game, all of which lead to potentially starting with Allies, Contacts or Enemies. Finally, a single percentile dice roll will determine a single defining background event from a long table. Bowing to more modern conventions, the game does allow for re-rolls where results make no sense. This tool gives newer players, or those who are feeling uninspired, something to grasp onto in terms of a pre-made background, and some real story hooks for the GM.
Character building is remarkably quick, and once the math involved becomes second nature, can seem almost deceptively simple. Something that you’ll see started in the character building section, and carried throughout the entire book, are inset examples of whatever is being discussed. You can read through the entire process of creating a character in the character creation section. Later, you’ll be able to read about combat examples, including one that’s a couple pages long and spans multiple combat rounds. It’s easily the best design choice in the book, and most of the examples are genuinely useful to the new player or GM.
The rest of the book is dedicated to the rules of play, including how skills work, and how they interact with one another. The percentile based skill system does allow for some really wonderful, realistic nuances. My favorite is that, as your skill improves, your ability at improving it decreases – the mechanic being that, to increase your skill, you must roll higher than your existing skill percentage or it only increases by a single percentage point at a time, instead of two to five points that would come from a successful roll. This makes the learning curve gentle at first, over time becoming steeper as mastery is achieved. Another interesting choice is determining the level of success in cases where both competing rolls succeed. There, assuming no one has rolled a critical success or failure, the higher roll is the better result, so long as it is below the skill level in question. Counterintuitive, but a novel way of determining the level of success, and a way of rewarding rolls that aren’t at the low end of the scale.
Combat is complex at first, but quickly becomes easier to use with experience. The system of levels of success, combined with various combat maneuvers that become available depending on the interaction of attack and defense skills leads to a system that is exciting, cinematic and a real breath of fresh air compared to many of the, “I hit it with my sword” style systems in place today. You needn’t invest time in coming up with flowery ways to say, “I hit you for three points of damage” with Legend, as you may well be able to say, “I feinted in with my sword, but then caught you on the wrist with the edge of my shield, sending your spear flying out of your reach.” Sure, I had to embellish a little, but the fact that disarming, trips, weapons being pinned, or being impaled in flesh, are all possible, legitimate results of a pair of combat rolls.
Once those mechanics are out of the way, several chapters describe some different magical systems. This is, initially, GM territory. The GM has to decide which, if any, of theses systems is available for use in her game. Common Magic is designed to be just that – magic available to the common man. There are spells to make you a better blacksmith or a better orator, right alongside spells to deflect other spells or make your weapon magically sharper. A step up in power, but also in responsibility, comes from Divine Magic, the magical gifts of supernatural beings in exchange for sacrifices of your own personal power. Finally, a chapter is given on Sorcery, a nod to the grimoires and long periods of study from much of fantasy fiction.
The most interesting thing about all three magical systems is the lack of focus on simple, boring damage-dealing spells. You’ll not find yourself taking analogues to Magic Missile, Fireball or the like, though a few spells that do simple damage are included. The bulk of the spells are what would be better known to the kids with their MMOs as “buffs” and “debuffs” – spells to improve yourself and your own chances, or to reduce the odds of your opponent succeeding. Between that, and the assumption of ubiquity of magic, it changes the whole feel of the game. No longer are wizards the sole purveyors of powerful magic – everyone, including the sword master, knows his way around an invocation or three.
Magic, and the way that it is presented, dovetails nicely into the next section, which deals with the creation of guilds, factions and cults. These groups not only include groups of like-minded professionals with a common trade, but also include all religions in the world, as well as sorcerous orders where spells and rituals are shared. It is by way of these cults that spells are learned, and other benefits gained. The problem here is that, unlike literally the rest of the system, which can just be thrown together in a modular way, this will require a real investment of time on the part of the GM. There are some samples in the book, but they consist of a single cult, and a single sorcerous order, and an assassin’s guild. They could be used exactly as they’re written, but each one demands that others be built alongside to serve as allies and adversaries in the larger scale of play during the game.
Thankfully, the last chapter of the book is a GM’s guidebook, to help make some of the tough decisions that are inherent in any generic system. The bulk of the world-building happens here, and I think it’s full of valuable advice. That said, it doesn’t take away from the daunting task of building your world to your own satisfaction. A Legend GM is going to be very, very busy with preparatory work before the first characteristic gets rolled.
Now, I will state flat out that I am a real fan of the systems presented in Legend, but that is in no small part because they have a long and storied history that I have had to put on the back burner while I described the game. Legend, until very recently, was simply called RuneQuest II. Might ring a bell for some of you, either from that time, or as far back as 1978, when the first edition of RuneQuest came out. Many of the rules from that old hardbound red book (I owned it myself, back then) are alive and kicking in this new, generic game.
What’s the story here, you might ask? Well, when the game was RuneQuest II, it came with a default universe into which you could set your characters – a place called Glorantha, which was as fully-realized a game world as any I’ve ever encountered. For reasons of business, Mongoose was no longer allowed to use the RuneQuest name or the copyrighted materials related to Glorantha. So, because they had a great deal invested in the system, they took a knife (or perhaps an axe) to the rules they’d written, and excised every bit of Glorantha they could.
The operation was a success, but there were a few complications.
The first thing that might catch your eye is references in the examples, or in spell descriptions, or scattered through the rules, to creatures like Trolls, or Trollkin, or Broo – monstrous races that are part and parcel of the Glorantha universe that somehow managed to stay in the game. Trolls I could have excused – they’re a very nearly generic FRPG trope – but the others are distinctly RuneQuest in nature.
Also, you’ll see periodic references to spirits, again in examples, or in spell descriptions. Heck, some of the spells tell you whether they work on spirits or not, and others are designed to protect you against spirits. And yet, nowhere in the rules are there any official reference to what spirits are, what they can do, or how characters might interact with them. Again, this is the detritus of having once been so closely married to the RuneQuest II default world.
Neither of these issues is a deal-breaker, and the folks at Mongoose have released a free PDF add-on with the old RuneQuest II rules for spirits, and a fourth type of magic, Spirit Magic, along with rules on being a shaman that expand on the shaman profession listed in the main book. It’s available on their website as a free download, and I hope it’ll be integrated into the main PDF eventually.
The one really glaring hole in the game, however, came when they removed the section of the RuneQuest rules on animals and monsters. With so many of them being directly related to, or even perhaps copyrighted material from, RuneQuest, their removal made sense. But to have taken them all, and not left the statistics for the normal animals was probably a mistake. Now GMs have no point of reference to work from, and there never were rules or suggestions on how to create your own critters from scratch. This is the biggest issue with accepting at face value that the book is a complete game – without those rules, you’re left with humans fighting humans. No wilderness encounters, no gladiatorial combats with lions or bears. Not even stats for the horses the characters might be riding. Thankfully, they released a supplement, Monsters of Legend, that fills the hole, but unlike the additional rules on spirit magic, it’s a full product, and you’ll have to pay for it.
With those caveats in place, I have to say that, as a fan of RuneQuest, I love this game. I love that it’s been made deliberately generic, and expanded so significantly from the time I first played RQ back in 1980.
I’ve spoken with Matt Sprange at Mongoose, and there are a series of add-ons, either available now, or for pre-order, including world books for Elric of Melnibone, Deus Vult, where characters are secret agents in the service of the Catholic Church, fighting the supernatural, and Age of Treason, a totally new world, with a focus on political machinations. In addition, the “* of Legend” series of books will be more rules without a specific world associated with them. Monsters of Legend is out now, with Arms of Legend (weapons and armor), Vikings of Legend (pillage and plunder on the high seas around Scandinavia) and Arcania of Legend: Blood Magic (the first in a series that introduces yet more forms of magic) available for pre-order and coming soon. Anything that has a title in the form “* of Legend” will have the added benefit of being entirely open content as well.
Who ought to buy this game? Fans of fantasy role playing will probably like the open framework. Fans of allowing characters to do and become whatever they will, outside of the strictures of classes and professions will welcome the wide open skill and magic systems. Anyone looking for a game that could easily map onto historical game play, excising the magic entirely, will find a perfect tool in Legend.
One group in particular, however, ought to probably avoid it – anyone who invested in the most recent RuneQuest II books. Much of the content is word-for-word identical the core RuneQuest II manual. You might benefit from the world books I mentioned above, but you don’t need to duplicate your purchase unless you just want to see the new artwork or to support Mongoose in their other operations.
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Originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2012/01/02/tabletop-review-supplem
ent-12-dynasty-traveller/
One of the strengths of a long-running RPG series is that, over time, rules that were only briefly covered or considered peripheral in the core are eventually taken aside and given real consideration.
In the early days of Traveller for example, world creation was quite utilitarian. You had a system. It had a primary world that had some statistics to help define it. Maybe there was a naval base, maybe a gas giant. All that really mattered was that one, main world. Then they released the Scouts book, and provided hardcore geeks (like me) with the tools we needed to generate whole systems – what kind of star is it, how far out is the habitable zone, how many gas giants are there, could any of their moons support life? It gave you a level of optional depth to work from that had been lacking.
I was expecting Supplement 12: Dynasty, to be the same sort of addition. Advertised as, “A complete guide on founding, growing and running your own world in Traveller,” I fully anticipated a very traditional supplement: one that took the base rules for generating worlds and systems from the Core Rules and blew it up into a fully-fleshed out system.
Instead what I found was a totally new game that just happens to take place in the same universe.
Most RPGs, by their very nature, are character focused. You take on the “role” of a character that you “play” throughout the “game”. It’s right there on the tin. Different situations will, of course, cause the focus to zoom in or out. All of the characters are on a space ship, and a fight begins. The focus is now less on the individual characters and more on the ship to ship combat. In fantasy games, maybe you’re running a castle or a keep, and need to protect it from the hordes of goblins. The combat becomes one of armies instead of individuals.
Dynasty takes that zoom out feature, and goes two levels bigger. The focus is not on individuals, nor ships, nor even armadas. No, in a Dynasty game, you play the entire dynasty as a cohesive whole, with “dynasty” redefined to include criminal syndicates, religious sects, mercantile operations, military groups and noble houses, just to name a few. New characteristics are derived for you to use to describe your dynasty, including Cleverness, Greed, Loyalty, Militarism, Population, Scheming, Tenacity and Tradition. Same concepts, just on a different scale entirely.
At the end of the chapter on creating a dynasty, a few brief paragraphs dictate how you can take a currently running Traveller campaign that has hit a certain level of competence (high skill levels, high social standings, a significant number of allies and contacts, and 10 million credits in liquid funds) and form a dynasty. This is the first instance of specifically zooming between the levels of focus, and while it is brief, it does allow the players to skip the dice rolling and go straight into a Dynasty game with a point buy system based on the competence of their characters.
The game is intended to still be effectively a roleplaying game, with the role being that of the dynasty as a whole. The time scale dilates as well, giving you turns (generations, in Dynasty parlance) that are thirty years long. During these turns, you can have all manner of machinations going on, coups de etat, pandemics, rebellions, inventions, and all other manner of large-scale events, which impact your stats and future direction. The rules are full of ideas for what the various types of dynasties can do with their resources, how long those operations take, and how to resolve the results.
A chapter is devoted to conflict between dynasties as well, with five self-described mini-games (Crime Spree, Hostile Takeover, Public Malice, Space War and Waging War) and rules on how they are resolved. This gives you tools to determine the results of dynasties clashing against one another.
In my opinion, the most interesting part of the rules starts in the chapter called Heroes and Villains. This chapter is about taking your dynasties and extracting individuals out of them, at different points in time, and playing those characters using the traditional Traveller rules. Remember, dynasties are based on generations, so your characters might not last more than one or two generations before they’ve passed on, leaving the reins in other, capable hands. As the book suggests, you might find yourself playing the children and even great-great-grandchildren of your original PCs.
This section gives special die modifiers for characteristics based on what sort of dynasty you’re from, as well as preferential treatment for certain career paths. A nice addition is the specialized Life Event tables by the type of dynasty your new character is from – and the Life Event table has always been on of the weakest ones to me, so anything that spices it up is a bonus.
The book closes with a chapter that is targeted at both players and GMs, on how to role-play dynasties. It’s very helpful in wrapping your brain around this new way of looking at the things you took for granted as being “bigger than you” in the original game, as well as how to make the game stay interesting for all involved. Also included are some sample dynasties for you to use as allies or enemies of your player’s new dynasty.
Drawbacks include the presence of a scant dozen images, and very few examples. As this really does include a totally new game, it would have definitely benefited from an example of play as well, to give players and GMs something to build upon. Because that extensive example is absent, I suspect that most will require multiple readings before a real understanding of how best to use the game can be acquired.
Dynasty wasn’t remotely the book I was looking for when I picked it up. It went head and shoulders above what I’d expected in terms of details, but in a direction I never expected that it would go. I’m not sure it’s the sort of book you’ll want early on (unless, like me, you suffer from a need to complete collections), but it may be the book you wind up needing if you have a series of successful campaigns under your belt, and are looking to change the scale of your games to reflect, “what happens after you win.”
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Designers & Dragons is a really interesting book. As it explores the history of all the companies that created our hobby, it shows the people behind them, their history, their dreams, their rise and, sometimes, their fall. There are few pictures, but these few are about cover also of long forgotten products and reading the pages of this book you could feel a nostalgic feeling of your youth.
In my opinion is a book that could be a pleasant reading, but also an interesting one for every role playing's scholar.
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(Italian) Designer & Dragons è un libro veramente interessante. Nell'esplorare la storia di tutte le società che hanno creato il nostro hobby, vengono presentate le persone dietro queste aziende, la loro storia, i loro sogni, la loro ascesa ed, a volte, la loro caduta. Vi sono poche immagini, ma queste poche riguardano copertine anche di prodotti ormai dimenticati e leggemmo le pagine di questo libro puoi sentire un senso di nostalgia per la tua gioventù.
A mio parere questo libro può essere una lettura piacevole, ma anche una interessante per qualsiasi studioso di giochi di ruolo.
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I am not currently running a Traveller campain, but even so I have found this book useful to potray major factions in an Empire or simular large area. The "stats" in the book could be used (with a little work) to represent large bodies in other systems. If you need/want a way of representing Mega-Corporations, Noble Houses or other simular organizations and your current system doesn't quite match what you want, you might want to give this one a gander
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Excellent supplement to the Legend Core Rulebook. Due to space and cost considerations, Mongoose had to leave the Spirit Magic section out of the core rulebook. However with the release of Legend they kindly packaged the section, incorporating the "Shamanism for Fun and Prophets" article from Signs & Portents Magazine 89, and released it under the OGL.
If you check the Legend Core Rulebook, you'll find that it still mentions "four kinds of magic." Spirit Magic is the fourth kind, making this book essential to Legend, particularly if you want to give your shaman characters spirit magic with real bite to it, a match for any of the other magic types - Common Magic, Divine Magic and Sorcery.
I do more than recommend it - you will need it.
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Highly recommended. The recently-updated version includes Chaos features and rules for ogres, though it comes at a smaller file size and the covers, sans the covers of the Legend Spirit Magic book.
One thing I wished they could have done - a "build your own monster" chapter. All, perhaps, in good time.
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Originally posted at http://diehardgamefan.com/2011/12/30/supp11animalenc/
Supplement 11 is a very traditional entry into the Traveller supplement line: take an element that exists in the core rules in a rudimentary form, and expand upon it. In this case, it takes the basic rules for animals, all manner of non-terrestrial animals, and turns out 96 pages of support for them.
Alien life forms, in the form of animals, are a staple of all forms of science fiction, but are especially important for a space opera campaign. The original Star Wars trilogy gave us riding lizards, trash compactor monsters, the yeti-like creature on Hoth, and both the rancor and the sarlacc in Jabba’s service. If you like to include such critters in your games, or want to be inspired to do so, this might be the supplement for you. (I had to go look up how to spell Sarlacc, I’ll have you know. You see what I do for you people?)
The book begins with a few pages on animal psychology, and other information on how to play the animals your characters encounter in a believable way. Then, into the meat of the information, an expanded set of rules for creating random animals. The same notions from the core rules are included and expanded upon, giving you more options, as well as providing information on how your animals could evolve additional abilities appropriate to their natures, and tables of quirks to make each encounter with a Pouncer or Hunter type subtly different.
After a brief discussion (and appropriate tables for random determination) of how to stage encounters with the creatures you’ve designed, including the range at which the attack occurs, the bulk of the mechanics are completed. The next fifty or so pages are filled instead with the most comprehensive random encounter table collection you could imagine.
Broken down first by the temperature profile of the world (Cold, Temperate or Hot), and then internally first by atmosphere type (Thin, Standard or Dense), and then further by the environment the encounter is taking place in (Woods, Hills, Plains, Riverbank, Ocean, etc), each table is a 2d6 roll to determine the kind of critter that your players will encounter, complete with special events on a natural 7, and stats rolls for the critters in question.
In addition, the next few pages include encounters in unusual locations that didn’t fit the mold of the previous tables, including Gas Giants, Asteroids (giant space worm, anyone?), Nebulae, Low Orbit and Deep Space. Very nearly every possible place that you could desire to have an encounter with a non-sentient alien species is covered.
Finally, the book closes with a few page of pre-designed animals, and a table to aid in costuming those animals based on the situations in which they are encountered. Some brief blurbs are given for the animals, to fire the GMs imagination, and help lead him or her to designing interesting, well thought-out animals of their own. The final page is a handy animal record sheet for easy reproducing.
Is this an essential supplement? No, not hardly. I’ve played Traveller for a number of years (very nearly back to it’s inception in 1977), and have never spent a great deal of time on animal encounters – which is odd, given their prevalence in science fiction, and the general, “Go out and kill some monsters.” feel of many fantasy RPGs. But if you are interested in having more animal encounters in your game, and you find the existing rules to be limiting or uninspiring, I think you’ll find that Supplement 11 gives you all the information you need to make that happen.
Happily, there are little tidbits of fluff decorating the book, often at the head of each chapter, but also associated with some of the pre-built animals near the end. They’re not specific to any one game world, and don’t assume a Third Imperium game over any other, but added a nice break and some inspiration for how you, as the GM, can bring more animal encounters into your player’s lives. This helps to counter the near-absence of art in the book – if you buy RPG books at all because of the art, this will not be an essential “must-buy” for your collection.
The real strength of the book comes from the flexibility it gives. If you’re very interested in creating specialized animals for your characters to encounter, the rules are there, and they’re very thorough. They have a kind of veracity to them, that makes one think that a zoologist was consulted during their creation. And if you don’t care that much, but think that an encounter makes sense given where your players have found themselves, there are random tables to make that a no-brainer decision – a call-back to the wandering monster tables of (some of) our youth.
I’ll simply close by saying that, having access to this information, I feel like I am more likely to use it, to include some animal encounters in my games, than I was before I read Supplement 11. A chapter of the core rules that I used to gloss over has been made much more interesting and useful because of it.
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Legend is a updated version of a classic and flexible game that started with Runequest back in 1978.
It can easily be adapted to almost any setting, and some examples with the older versions are Call of Cthuhlu, Ringworld, Elfquest, Hawkmoon, Elric, and Superworld among many others. To aid with this adaptability, they removed the Glorantha specific items that were always so prevalent in the other RQ versions. Something that our groups usually did anyhow as we were never fans of Glorantha.
My group is really looking forward to this, and at the current price of $1, it's a great deal that any multisystem gamer can't pass up. On the other hand, if you only ever play one game system, you really should branch out and try this.
In short it's a great game system that does not use either classes or levels and is primarily based on skills with a percentile task resolution system. Your character options for development are as wide open as your GM will allow.
You want a mage with a zweihander, no problem. A sneaky little priest that moonlights as a cat burglar, it's covered. A burly monster hunter that knits his own sweaters, it can be arranged. Do what you want, not what the cliche says you have to.
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I really didn’t know what to expect when I downloaded this book. Usually a product goes out of its way to describe what you’re paying for, but the product description page didn’t really present much to go on. Curious, I checked out what Van Graaf’s Journal of Adventuring had to say about what your PC should be doing when he’s raiding dungeons and fighting dragons. The results were an interesting mix of insightful and obvious. Let’s take a closer look.
Before anything else is said, one thing must be pointed out: the page count given in the product description is wrong. This PDF has 142 pages, not 256. Worse, there are no bookmarks here, which I consider to be unforgivable in a book this size. With any luck, these problems will be quickly corrected.
Van Graaf’s Journal of Adventuring takes a somewhat simplistic tone in its visual presentation. The pages have a plain white background, with small borders along the top and bottom. Some black and white illustrations break things up every couple of pages. This isn’t anything that would break your printer, so there’s no fuss there.
The first of the book’s four sections is dedicated to (non-magical) gear. I personally found this section of the book to be the best, as there was a lot of great ideas and new materials here. The book talks about what sort of equipment you’ll likely have/need in various environments and situations, presents a system where you can make a check to determine if you have some incidental item on you (that is, it’s an answer for when your player says “oh come on, I’m sure I’d have an extra bowstring! I’m a ranger! Do I really need to writing EVERYTHING on my character sheet?!”), along with a list of some of the more likely items and what their game effects, if any, are.
Some space is then given over to what classes (from the Core Rulebook only) would use what equipment, how to transport equipment and under what circumstances (e.g. are you going for speed and stealth? Or is this a long trip where you can be weighed down with a lot of gear?), various containers, and how items are carried on the body. This last one deserves special mention, as it’s my favorite part of the book. The authors cogently note that very little attention is paid to how a character stores the gear they’re carrying, and there’s only a basic rule for how long it takes to draw things. To rectify that, they present a system of charting exactly where a character’s items are stored on the body, including how many items can be carried and where, and how long it thus takes to draw various stowed gear. It’s a slightly more complex system than standard Pathfinder, but only slightly, and it adds a level of verisimilitude to the game that I quite liked.
This first part of the book was, as I said, the best part of it, at least for me. Here we got a lot of down-to-earth overviews of things that aren’t usually thought of in the abstracted world of an RPG, even one as relatively-intricate as Pathfinder. The new uses for equipment, along with systems for checking for mundane equipment and personal storage, where very innovative. Groups that enjoy a low-magic, more gritty style of play will adore what’s here.
The book’s second section is where things become disappointingly prosaic. It analyzes the various party roles (e.g. healer, face man, magic offense, etc.) and the various classes in terms of their combat and non-combat roles and how they relate to other classes. Issues of party leadership (not the feat) are discussed, and then things start to get a little better where issues of marching order and party movement are discussed. Keeping watch is given some coverage, along with combat tactics. It’s after this that “tactical templates” are presented, which are various team-based moves that can grant a minor bonus in combat. These take time to learn, but once trained in them a group can pull off some interesting maneuvers. For example, training for 2 weeks in the Flash-Bang maneuver lets you, if you get the drop on an enemy with a bright and loud attack in an enclosed space, keep them flat-footed until the round after the surprise round, instead of just the surprise round.
A fairly lengthy assessment of various terrain types and battlefield condition follows, along with new rules for various party synergies – little bonuses that PCs can gain for using complementary tactics (e.g. if you have 5 ranks in Bluff and are flanking a target, your ally gains a bonus to feinting Bluff checks). The section closes out with a hard look at identifying enemies, defeating them, and dealing with them once they’re defeated (e.g. the logistics of taking prisoners).
This section wasn’t quite as inspirational as the first one, mostly because the beginning part dealing with combat roles and the strengths and weaknesses of various classes is fairly intuitive, and veteran players will automatically know what’s here. A refresher never hurt anyone, of course, but it still comes across as something that everyone already knows. Conversely, the elements covering more tactical aspects, such as marching order, setting up watches, keeping prisoners, etc. were much more inspired, because they take place in the parts of the game that – in my experience – tend to be glossed over; these put elements that are typically background parts of the game firmly in the foreground. I had mixed feelings about the new tactical templates and synergies, however, as while they’re a great way to make the group a more cohesive entity rather than a collection of individuals, I wasn’t sure I liked how these were another way to pile on bonuses (something I don’t think PCs need any more of).
The third section is called “Intelligent Spellcasting” and takes up just over a third of the book. It opens with discussions of spells in broad themes (e.g. healing spells, direct harm combat spells, transportation spells, etc.) and includes lists of the Core Rulebook spells that fall into each category. It then discusses the party roles that spellcasters can play (e.g. defender, spy, booster) and – and this is the biggest space-eater in the book – presents spell lists for each of the spellcasting classes in the Core Rulebook based on each of these party roles.
How much you value this chapter will depend on how you view pre-packaged spell lists by (non-)combat role. This chapter is, unfortunately, weakened simply by the fact that a lot of Pathfinder’s magical utility has been expanded, both in terms of spells and spellcasting classes, by the Advanced Player’s Guide, Ultimate Magic, and even Ultimate Combat. Even considering the Core Rulebook-only presentation here, if you’re not interested in the best way to make a healing-focused druid, for example, you won’t have much use for this section.
The last section of the book is “The Home Base,” and primarily focuses on where the adventurers hang their hats. This doesn’t need to be a permanent place to set up kip, but rather is where the party will be resting and generally storing their gear, licking their wounds, and operating out of for a period of time.
This section cogently starts off by noting that the first thing to be considered for a base of operations is provisions, for which it introduces the new Provision Rating, along with various modifiers for said rating. Rules then cover stockpiling provisions, what happens when your provisions are cut off, and rationing food and water.
The book then talks about how to conceal your base, how to erect various defenses (e.g. trenches, fences, etc.), how to guard the entrances, and storage and alarms. A larger section is given for guards and sentries, as the book wisely details the various issues that come with employing such people (e.g. supplying them, paying them, modifiers to their discipline and priorities, patrol routes, etc.).
Temporary settlements are given several pages, examining the different types (such as a gathering of tents, abandoned buildings, basic shelters in the wild), along with permanent bases ranging from manor houses to ships to castles to underground fortresses and more. It’s worth noting that none of these cover costs of construction (it keeps referring the reader to Van Graaf’s Journal of Strongholds and Dynasties, which at the time of this writing doesn’t seem to have been released yet) but rather focuses on the practical implications that such domiciles entail. The book then closes with several pages dedicated to running an institution wherein you handle training students (e.g. if you’re running a thieves’ guild or bardic college).
This last section was much more to my liking than its predecessor, simply because it again focuses on taking some of the elements of the game that are assumed and puts them front and center. The practical considerations food and water, keeping your guards paid and disciplined, choosing where to set up a base and more are all smartly discussed and commented on, with various mechanics given as needed. This is another part of the book that will be irresistible to those who want to delve into the nitty-gritty details, rather than cast a spell to create a personal demiplane and magically bind a few planar creatures as guards.
Overall, I found Van Graaf’s Journal of Adventuring to be a mixed bag, but one which hit more often than it missed. The book does have some not-inconsiderable strikes against it, such as its lack of bookmarks or how it sometimes belabors the obvious of the various class roles. But the considerations it places on the all-too-often ignored practical aspects of adventuring are highly evocative, and make the details of a campaign seem exciting for how fleshed out they are. Sometimes given game mechanics and sometimes discussed solely in terms of the impact on the game world, there’s a lot here for those who want to paint a very holistic, vivid picture of what goes into adventuring beyond the raiding and killing. As the title says, this is a journal of adventuring, with all that that entails.
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