I want to approach this with an unbiased approach, but it's difficult. I came across this game while developing my own and discovered eerie similarities. But soon I came to the conclusion that they were two different breeds of the same animal. And this animal is beautiful. And forget unbias or bias, I see no reason to give it subpar 5 Stars.

If you want to know what Broken Rooms is, imagine Fringe and Sliders if seen through a Kübler-Ross model lens. As many of the characters are going through emotional states of loss, the worlds themselves are as well. Thirteen worlds, all mirrored off of ours and all facing an apocalypse level event. In which society is trying to cope with the loss of existence as man knows it. I love this game, and hopeful I can convince you to love this game.

The Product

I've seen some complaints of the text being too large. I, however, feel it's fine. Everything is spacious, but so well organized I never noticed. The art all fits, despite being mostly photographs run through filters. Everything fits concisely. If anything, it feels like a report or textbook from an organization teaching it's employees, only not that obvious. Also, the book is oozing with flavor text. Standing in at a crazy 465 pages with roughly 50 pages of rules, about 60 pages of "stuff", and about 300 pages of setting. Yeah. It's all thick atmospheric juicy steak of information. And I love it.

The art's nice, the layout. It's easy to read. It flows naturally. And the last 200 pages read like diaries and reports from each of the 13 worlds. It loads decently on my smartphone and reads smooth on my desktop.

The only gripe I have is the character sheet is too simple. Years of being spoiled by White Wolf and Mr Gone have left me craving very stylish sheets. This game's sheet is just test and a few tables. It's almost too basic, like a psychiatry report. Which fits in thematically with the MHPA below and the stages of grief motif.

The System

The momentum system uses D12s and focuses on story and character. It allows characters to build and spend world altering power called momentum. Stats are as simple as Mental, Physical, and Soul. There's 20 skills. Special powers. "Qualities" that feel like more powerful once-per-session versions of Aspects from Fate. The wound system mirrors the stats, with mind, body, and soul taking damage along tracks of dots.

What's most outstanding is players are forced to fill out a Motivation, Personality, History, and Appearance questionnaire. The MPHA, as it's referred to, really brings the feel of the game together. Each of the 23 or so questions rounds out everything you could want to know about a person, like you're prepping for a psychiatry exam instead of building a character. It reminds me of Apocalypse World and Outbreak Undead partly. But here it's so much more. This sets the game apart from most. Character stats and skills are so simple and short that they don't form who the character is. The MHPA really sets the game tone apart.

Dice mechanics: Pools of 12s rolled to beat target numbers for successes. With target numbers being based on situations and number of successes modifying difficulty. Dice that add up to generate Momentum. No successes with only 1s or 2s create a critical failure - botch. Yes, you've heard all this song and dance before, only with D10s. Which is fine. The D12 fits their meta and they'd have suggested D13s if they were easily accessible. All that matters is it works. Though I have no ability to playtest it, everything seems to work fluidly on paper. Don't hold me to that. If you like D10 dice pools with target difficulties and numbers of success, you'll like this.

Characters can use shared locations between the 13 worlds to hop across realities. The most outstanding mechanic, however, are Meridians. They sound simple: Blocking, Changing, Finding, Keeping, Opening, Writing, etc. Each has a concept and you pump reality power (Momentum) into them to do the effect of their name. Breaking? You can break things, break people, break ideas. Finding is one part Scrying and one part Bloodhound. Writing allows you to rewrite information from changing data on a hard drive to changing people's memories. It's not telepathy, it more like very quick Inception done with a magic marker on their erasable brain. Meridians are the big party prize here. Characters can mess with just about anything, and it makes for fun times. Almost makes me think you could use this to run a version of the movie Push meets the movie The One. Well, not The One by the book's default rules, as coming anywhere near your alternate self leads to very bad consequences.

There's a wide range of hazard rules for starvation and hypothermia and stuff, as well as objects like weapons and magical artifacts. Well, just "Artifacts", but we know what the deal is. Overall I'd like to say the system shines. It's stuff I've seen a million times before by other companies. But I've seen a million slices of pizza by different companies and most every one is delicious. I'd say the system is efficient and does what it needs to. No, with glaring eye strain the Setting is what shines. So brightly you gotta wear shades.

The Setting

The game likes to stay ambiguous like Apocalypse World. In 2002 something happened. No one knows exactly what. Then there were twelve other Earths and everyone but us faced the apocalypse. 10 years later, the world hopping characters with a specific genome are trying to jump between the 13 realms and patch up all the holes, save all the peoples, and stop all the problems. Mostly they seem to die all the deaths and go all the crazies. It's a game of ideas. it's a game of endless questions and very few answers. It's exactly the mystery that made me fall in love with Don't Rest Your Head, Lacuna, HoL, Summerland, Exquisite Replicas, Kult, Enter the Shadowside, Apocalypse World, and The Shadow of Yesterday (actually I could list games I love for hours but I'll stop here). It's a question with you providing the answer through gameplay.

What is the question? And what answer are you likely to find?

Good question. There are 13 Earths. Each one has the number in superscript like "Earth to the eight power". It's neat. Earth one is "normal", whatever that means to you. Two is Left Behind with less religious tone and nature reclaiming the world. Three is claimed as the after effects of an asteroid, but described it honestly sounds more like Kairo/Pulse after the ghosts are gone. Four is the classic bug-alien invasion. Five is Children of Men. Six is Al Gore's nightmare. Seven is the ice age. Eight is the panic that comes when a black hole is only years from pulling Earth in. Nine is ocean-water zombies. Ten is that Abrams show Revolution. Eleven is a Monty Python Church Police sketch taken all the way with no humor whatsoever. Twelve is the best, with make believe monsters that only children can see and roaming armies of kids who protect parents from them. Thirteen is basically the grease trap of the other 12, being an empty place where the shadow versions of realities catch like a filter.

You say to me "Thirteen worlds, that's neat. Is that it?" and I say to you "That's 300+ pages of thirteen worlds." Sure. You could ditch the setting and use the Momentum system to try and convert something else, but you won't have much fun just using the system. Or maybe you will, it's your fun. But if you decided to ditch the momentum system and convert Broken Room's setting into anything else, it's glorious no matter what it runs on. I kind of want to try doing it with Apocalypse World or Fate. However, the current system works fine for the setting, so no need to convert, though we know you'll try. No matter what you do, this is a thick phone book of setting. And each world is so filled with so much flavor you're going to have to take a long time to digest and some antacids and maybe a ciesta.

Buy the book already. The last 200 pages are characters writing reports and letters about their travels in these worlds, which is worth it alone. The last half of the book is on par with most things that White Wolf put out. You know, the company known primarily for industry grade flavor text and setting the story game bar (before Ron Edwards, Vincent Baker, and Jason Morningstar helped smash it apart).

The Final Verdict

I like it. Now. I'm poor and always trying to save away for basic meals let alone the luxury of games I can't play. Even as a PDF on sale, $25 is a big chunk of my cash. I'm use to spending that much on a stack of printed books. Let alone trying to imagine buying the print of this for $50. I'll just say that after reading it, it was worth the money. When I'm no longer poor I'm buying the hardback no matter the cost. It's a damn good setting. The Meridians, the world hopping, the strange rules and paradoxes of alternate selves, and the thick chunk of thirteen unique settings makes for an awesome product. It's not a game of treadmills or narrowly designed railroads. It's a game of getting lost in a maze. It's Alice in Wonderland if created and produced by J J Abrams. It's character and story driven world hopping in which everywhere you go is falling apart. It's The Lost Room if every time he exited it was a different universe that was about to be eaten by Cthulhu.

The only problems I see are...well, the character sheet. Two, the "always could be more" effect I get with stuff. This is a great game, but another supplement or two wouldn't fill my appetite. I'm gluttonous, though. Your results may vary.

By now you know if you like it. If it sounds like the type of game that interests you, it's worth it. The only crime here is it has nearly none of the exposure it deserves.

I did a full review for the core book release. Go read that if you like. I'm reading this free book after the paid release, with hindsight. Which means that my earlier review is now wrong and muddled. I'll tell you why.

This is a good game. It knows what it wants to do and it does it. The core book has a nice layout and design, while this "preview early release" looks like it was cobbled together in Notepad with some pictures throw in. So you can see a definite growth of quality in game design from this to the full release. They got that right. But it's why I have a hard time giving this 5 stars.

Now reading this prerelease copy, I get a sense that parts of the game retrograded in quality. This Grand Tourney book in many ways is BETTER than the full release. I'll explain the differences.

First, let me say the full game has a lot more. Grand Tourney is 39 pages. While the full book Of Fate and Fealty is closer to 195. That difference isn't art or fiction filler, either. It's a whole lot of tools in the toolbox. About 80 pages of magic systems and spells. A good 80 pages of antagonists. 60 or so pages of character options. There's a lot of awesome stuff to convince you to step up from free to buy the full version. In fact, I'd suggest you just go buy the full version right now. The game has a great system for playing medieval legends in a very One Roll Engine style of dice mechanic. It's all cohesive, coherent, and a lot of other C words like Cool and Cowabunga. The only problem the full game has is "not enough" syndrome. As in, no matter how much the creator adds to the game it's just not enough.

Ok. Now. Why this free Grand Toruney is better than the full game... which is a stroke of luck, because it's free. So you can get both for the price of one anyways! This demo version teaches you the dice system and how to play more clearly and quicker. It takes under 9 pages to know how to play the game, where as the full edition rambles about for 30 pages. Also, the pictures of color dice pools and miniatures distance are fantastic here and completely missing in the full book. Overall, this is actually a better learning tool to jump into the game with and the full book feels like an advanced player's guide. This is newb friendly.

Here's the big killer thing. The full book has no setting. No locations, no people of interest. No plots or quests or adventures. It's a giant toolbox that offers you ever conceivable mechanic and basic stat block you'd need to make your own game world or stories. But nothing specific. It's a very setting free book. The Grand Tourney, however, is the opposite. There's not a lot of advanced mechanics, not much source material for setup. But it has a good game world and questline. It has kingdoms, important people, a map (sorely lacking from the full book), a two act adventure, and a lot of fun flavor. It's not a lot of material, it's only 16 pages of setting and adventure, preceded by 13 pages of pre made characters (sorely lacking in the full book), preceded by 9 pages of rules and a cover.

If anything, I would have suggested that the creator merge all this material into the full book and bring it up to the quality of that layout. It would erase away a lot of my complaints with the full book. merging them into one great product. Still, this Grand Tourney is free and is a great introduction.

All that said, it's worth the time and effort to play this game. If you like Arthurean legend, Robin Hood stories, Beowulf, and that whole block of history from about 800ad to 1600ad, then this is the book for you. If you like epic legends and tragedies as opposed to realism simulation, this is the game for you. If you'd rather watch live Shakespeare plays than the history channel's coverage of medieval warfare, this is your thing. Buy the full game and help support Adam so he can invest money to overhaul the game with twice the material and more art. Or maybe he can put the money towards some good expansion books. Either way, this is a good product line.

What this is

Of Fate and Fealty is carried on strong themes. Language carries the power of doom. Nobility is a mandate that infers magical powers and legitimate lordship. Magical folk exist. Kingdoms rules by gentle lords, kind and cruel. The King is gone. The waking world mirrors the fair world. Destiny is powerful and drives you foreword. The game lists inspiration from Morte D' Arthur, King Arthur and Knights, Beowulf, Fairie Queene, Silmarillion, Charlemagne, Canterbury Tales, Culwch and Olwen, and even Alice in Wonderland. My own personal list I drew up while reading the game was Tristan and Iseult, Beowulf, Roland, Gerald the Fearless, William Tell, Wayland the Smith, and far far more Gawain than Arthur. If you prefer Mount and Blade to Skyrim, you'll prefer this to most popular Tolkien fantasy rpg derivatives. Politics can take on a very A Song of Ice and Fire feel, with adventures going straight into myth and legend, and combat seems to take a combination of dirty gritty realism merged with heroic legendary battles.

If the above paragraph fills you with giddy anticipation, then this is the game for you.

The Mechanics, Setting, and Concepts

Let's start with the game's blurb. Wield Magic with depth and nuance: Gone are the tables and charts and uncontrollable mechanics of older games, in it's place a system of variety and flexibility that allows the magic system a good range. Choose your Destiny: Every character has a Doom, which drives each character on it's own mythological character arc, making Joseph Campbell proud. Define your character: Much like the Aspects in Fate, your character is defined by adjectives that assist them in rolls. Ditch the Calculator: This system, The Magenta Project, is very clean. Play an Archetype: Instead of classes, characters get a form of occupation that is very flexible, allowing a lot of customization. Original Artwork: I'll get to this later, but it's a wide range of good and bad, does well for an indie rpg.

Now. The dice roll system works on matching numbers. It reminds me of the One Roll Engine, it even has it's own version of hard and wiggle dice. Though there's enough of a difference to give a distinct feel. Most interesting to me is the penalty dice the GM can impose. Whatever number this penalty dice rolls cancels all other dice that match it, ie roll a 3 and all 3s are cancelled out, theoretically wrenching your gears to a grinding halt.

The status system is intriguing, an interesting range designed to retell medieval legends. Characters aren't just facing lowered hit points. They're Exhausted, Weary, Prone, Besotted, and Felled. Felled, in particular, reminds me how every legendary mythological character gets mortally wounded at some time and must "Recover or die." And herbs! You use herbs to heal. Oh boy, this takes me back to my Dragon Warrior days on the NES. Combat is relatively simple, but there's all these complex options and alternatives to keep it fresh. It feels like you'll be focusing on tactics, shield bashes, shoving the enemy off balance, horse mounted combat. All the realistic applications of medieval combat. Distances are descriptive of the time and place with At Hand, Apart, Away, and Far Afield. Yeah. Even the game language takes you back to the 1200s. There's also soul combat, and conflict of personality. Skills are covered in flavor, ranging from the craft recovery of honey from beehives, to staunching wounds, and from jousting to cajoling. This is a very distinct game world with very distinct skills focused on recreating medieval stories.

Now this might just be my interpretation, but the game seems to be targeted to humans. While the book talks about a variety of species and offers Dwarves, High Elves, Maze Goblins, and Sprites as playable characters, the overall text and setting give a very human centric feel. This is real medieval times, not Tolkien. There's no great alliance of the fairy kingdoms that rule the world, with humans the growing upstarts. This is a fairly human centric and human controlled world that the mythological races are simply overlapping into. Much like real history the belief seems to be that humanity controls the world while the fae and spirit folk have their own kingdoms on the edges or outside of our world. The game mentions the fairy worlds, but it doesn't explain them at all.

In fact there's no real setting. "But you said there was a thick dripping setting?" Yes. The atmosphere of the game, the setting, concept and ideas: amazingly concise. It knows the kind of story it wants to tell and it tells it well. There's no geographical setting. No kingdoms, no landmarks. No explanation what the fairylands are like. It's a huge vacancy just begging for a world book or campaign supplement. This is both a blessing and a curse. For creative gamers, this is a perfect system. It's everything you need to know to paint a beautiful picture like a big set of expensive brushes and an infinite range of paint colors. For the more Paint-By-Numbers gamer, you'll want to either pick up an existing medieval game world or pair up with a creative gamer to help create a world for you. Though for the price people will pay for this game, I was hoping for an example kingdom or world. C'est la vie.

While each playable class or "Archetype" may look like traditional OSRIC or OGL classes fantasy gamers are use to, the similarities are from a distance. In detail, each one is modeled more after actual legendary character types. Or as you might say, mythological Archetypes. I'll mention it now that the game is color coded. Dice pools and abilities are sectioned into one of four colors based on combat, social, mental, and spiritual strength. This is very reminiscent of Don't Rest Your Head, but it gives a LOT of variation to the ORE-esque dice system. Adds a lot of variability. The color coating drenches down into magic, combat, character design, and even siege warfare. Making it delicious and exotically spicy.

Magic is geared towards things like Oaths, Edicts, Prayer, Tricks, Songs, Charms, and traditional thaumaturgical rites. Though calling forth the dead, making pacts with a devil, and shamanism are included. In fact, one third the book is centered on the variety of different magical systems that coexist. Which offers a wide and nice range but also brings into question the martial versus magical balance. Like all fantasy games, power curves create a delicate problem of balance. How a knight on horseback can hope to compete against a powerful wizard is a traditional quandry. I haven't playtested this enough to get the feel of that balance but my instinct tells me the destiny driven Doom system helps balance all of this out.

There's an entire prestige system for reputation. Including Vassals, which is a great way of emulating the troupe play of both Ars Magicka and Reign. With tweaking, each player can have an entire band of followers and hanger-ons. Befitting the source material, of course. Still, Prestige is great for allowing lateral growth. Instead of stats and gear, players can focus on owning land, gaining fealty, and wielding their reputation to resolve conflict without a sword leaving a sheath.

What's interesting to note is this game feels completely free of Christianity. It's 1200ad Europe without churches and popes, instead filled with the gods and goddesses of Ye Olde. It helps bypass the entire Inquisition feel a lot of medieval games get. It plays down the Holy Grail Arthurian angle and plays up the pure Merlin, Morgan le Faye, Lady of the Lake side of things. No burning witches, no corrupted church officials, no crusades. I consider this a very good thing for the pure feel of these mythologies. There is a hint of Saints, but only as ascended mythological heroes. Though Witches, in a Grimm and Shakespearean tradition, are still feared and cast from society. This is much more the Meg Mucklebones type of Witch than the friendly neo-pagan like my wife. Actually overall I get a sense the game has a Legend feel. All the way down to Jack and Honeythorn infiltrating the Lord of Darkness's fortress. That is, when you're not stuck in A Knight's Tale or Willow territory.

Antagonists have a wide range. Corrupt people, magical entities, spirits. All the classics: dragons and ogres. Though there's actually a small focused amount of stuff in this book, it's easy to use the same stats and just change the names and abilities to include a wider range of cryptozoology. In fact, there's a wide range of OSRIC books online that can be easily dropped into the game. That is, until the creator capitalizes on releasing a monster compendium. HINT to Adam: Make a monster compendium.

What's very notable to fans of wargaming and medieval hobbyists is the inclusion of mass war rules. When I read it, I get less the distinction of actual gritty blood and sweat being on the front lines... and much more a feeling of those hand drawn maps with the little wooden figures the general pushes with a stick. Warroom planning. How strongly that plays into your game is all up to your preference, as it's easy to pull this system down to the micro level to show a hero fighting a dozen soldiers by himself and then pull up to the macro to show entire battalions clashing. As abstract as it is, I'd like to see a lot more attention to warfare because it gets a total of 4 pages out of 190. With the subject matter, and the game's demographic, I'm sure this could see it's way into an entire expanded supplemental book.

This book is very coated and dripping in the Wyrd. Which I suggest you look up the Anglo-Saxon meaning of, and it's counterpart the Urðr. In fact, if there is any release I would most like to see for this game system it would be a Norse conversion book that remodels everything from Yggdrasil down to Æsir. There's some more advice, Adam.

The Book Itself

I'm conflicted. Some of the art is great. I didn't like Mary Steigerwald's illustrations the first few pages. As I read, it grew on me. By the halfway point I loved some of the pieces. So it's a variety. Mary's style reminds me of a comic line art version of The Secret of Kells, which is just begging for wide painted backgrounds. Where her art falls flat is motion. Still characters are nicely designed but the action sequences are a bit stiff. Everything is some combination of colored pencils and watercolor. It's all ethereal.

That said for an indie production with very little budget this book has great art. It's not Wizards of the Coast, of course not. Adam didn't drop $10,000 into an art budget. Compared to industry professionals, no, the art is not going to stand up. Compared to a lot of indie productions, through, the art is beautiful. It could be replaced. The fact is, though, that gamers are here for the game. The rules and setting is good enough to ignore the weaker art pieces. Also, mind you, I grew up on 80s games. Early companies like Palladium Games and Cyberpunk 2020 had some atrocious art. Go back and look at Champions or Runequest sometime, even first edition D&D. Some of the smaller companies hired terrible artists. Books choked with eye sores. Yet we bought them and played the hell out of them. Maybe I've been spoiled by White Wolf and WOTC. Oh well. A game is a game, the art shouldn't kill the game mechanics or dissuade players from playing.

Now I feel like a jerk. My point is, the art in this book works. Steigerwald's goblins, particularly, are fantastic. The monsters, too. The stained glass window pieces are my favorite. The handful of stock art pulled from Public Domain are all spot on for the content. In fact, apart from my grumpy attitude towards art style, each piece fits the book very well. Not one single art piece in the entire thing is out of place. Each one feels like it pulls you right into the setting drenching you with atmosphere. The choices of content fit perfectly.

The overall layout is ebook. It's mostly double column for game mechanics, and single column for flavor text. The backgrounds add to the feel of the game but are fuzzy enough to never make the text eye-straining. The fonts, the choices of design, it all works well to convey the game's feeling. Very good job. The character sheet, however, looks like it was made in Word in about five minutes.

Overall it's a great game design. The text flows in expected order. Within 14 pages you know how to play the entire game, but character creation isn't until page 30. By page 80 you have everything you need to start. After that, the last 110 pages list out details. All the encyclopedic information. While there's no real seperation between the player's section of the book and the game master's section, this game doesn't need it. It isn't a game of mysteries where the game master holds some terrible secrets behind a screen. We all know how Romeo and Juliet turned out, how Beowulf died. When you play this game, you know exactly what you're getting into, and the layout runs with that concept. It has decent art that fits very well, it has a good layout for reading from a computer or tablet, and it gives you everything to pick up and play.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

The game is good. Mechanics wise, you could pick this up and play very easily. There's enough here to run long campaigns for years to come. It doesn't feel short, but there is a lot lacking. It could do with either another 100 pages, or several supplement books. Notably: a world setting better definition of the fairy lands, a wider variety of monsters and antagonists, and a warfare book. But I'm just complaining. I know we're no longer in the D20 boom of a billion books for every little thing. This book does what it needs to do, asking you to do your part to fill it with stories.

The ebook is good. It's laid out perfectly, reads well and clean. The art is a range that you might really like or hate. Nothing is an eyesore, but nothing here is Todd Lockwood. It's not a deal breaker to me. I say buy buy buy.

Let me start by saying that I traded a copy of my company's game for his company's game. Would I buy this game? Probably not. Because I don't know a soul that is into medieval heroic legend roleplaying. However, if I belonged to a reenactment group or LARPed, if I was a huge fan of Arthurian legend, or I had actual cool friends then yes. Yes I would buy this. Do you long for days of Knights, Dragons, Maidens, Witches, Fairies, Chivalry, and Destiny driven tragedy? Then buy this game.