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The Three Rocketeers • A World of Adventure for Fate Core
Publisher: Evil Hat Productions
by Bruce B. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 11/17/2015 09:04:20

This is pretty glorious. Basically, everywhere Alexander Dumas might have mentioned counties, strike those and put in star systems instead. It's got lines like "The Vatican system was first explored by Star Pope Andromeda II when a catastrophic engine failure stranded her ship in the system." If this kind of thing works for you, then you'll be delighted to know that this book does it really well, really consistently. (If it doesn't, well, there'll be another book along in due season.) For some of us, this as very much as wanted and lovable as very different works like Mindjammer (which I just got done praising again earlier this morning).

There's also some neat game mechanics in here. This Fate riff uses six aspects, stunts, and nothing else. If you've seen the stuff Rob Donoghue's been doing with TinyFate and the like...yup, same kind of thing. I won't go on at length - you can check it out yourself. I will note that I love every permutation on the idea behind this example stunt:

Master of Disguise: Because I am a master of disguise with a knack for being in the right place at the right time, once per session I can join a scene already in progress, having posed as a minor character.

...because it so perfectly adapts a whole bunch of great dramatic/comedic moments to game play, and the game really supports it rather than making you struggle to get through unwarranted barriers.

As you'd expect, swordplay gets extra attention. Swordplay stunts combine four elements - appearance, edge (special tricks), main hand, and off-hand - into a single package. All Rocketeers have a swordplay stunt that models how they fight. For instance:

Subtle: Invoking your fencing aspect to create an advantage based on misdirection grants +3 instead of +2. Perfect Footwork: When you succeed with style on defense, you may create a situation aspect with a free invocation instead of gaining a boost. Small Sword: Gain +1 to attack an enemy who has already acted in the round. Cloak: Gain +1 to create an advantage when you obfuscate your weapon.

(That's from the Rocketeer-version writeup of Aramis.)

Since there aren't skills to spend milestone advances on, you use milestones to add an additional entry to an element of your character's swordplay stunt.

As is of course necessary for Dumas-type action, there's fun handling of conspiracies:

In Three Rocketeers, conspiracies are modeled with aspects—alliance, goal, and weakness—and approaches—Influence, Might, Power, Reach, Resources, and Secrecy.

And there's a great adventure, and just loads for fun. I've said "fun" quite a few times in this post. Well, what can I say? This is a really fun book.

(Reposted from my Google+ stream, at https://plus.google.com/u/0/107122403431806926287/posts/bHTpiNEhSCr )



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
The Three Rocketeers • A World of Adventure for Fate Core
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Vow of Honor RPG
Publisher: Sigil Stone Publishing
by Bruce B. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 05/08/2015 13:34:09

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 Saharan 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: http://www.bendutter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Vow-of-Honor-Quick-Start.pdf . 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.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Vow of Honor RPG
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Interstellar Patrol (Fate Accelerated Edition)
Publisher: Nothing Ventured Games
by Bruce B. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 09/14/2014 19:56:02

Outstanding! This is a short but rich collection of tools to use in making up a setting and adventures as you go. Paul Stefko has done a fantastic job bringing together key elements of optimistic space exploration in the vein of the original Star Trek, and making each bit intensely useful. It's loaded with insights that simply hadn't occurred to me before but made immediate sense the moment I saw them, like how the stunts each PC crew member take can help flesh out their part of a ship and implicitly the whole culture of their fleet. The idea of crew taking consequences on behalf of the ship while it's in battle - including damage from showers of sparks, being flung around, etc. - is another one of those "dang, I wish I'd thought of that" elements.

There's a lot of humor in here, but no mocking, and enough to allow for drama that's very real and consequential as the characters experience it. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the genre. It's not a campaign ready to go, it's what you need to go ahead and go without everything done in advance.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Interstellar Patrol (Fate Accelerated Edition)
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Lucien's Guide to the Grand Stair (Diceless)
Publisher: Rite Publishing
by Bruce B. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/11/2014 00:12:34

This is a couple dozen pages' worth of commentary on the Grand Stair, the liminal space that links worlds in the setting. The bulk of it is the correspondence and lecture notes of a particularly talented traveler and observer. Rob Donoghue does a good job capturing the voice of a smart, capable jerk here - Lucien is what a lot of net flamers fancy themselves, but with the accomplishments to justify a good measure of self-confidence. There are also some very nifty new sorcery spells, suggestions for new uses of existing cantrips and such, and a very sensible framework for allowing characters to develop individual aspects of the Grand Stair powers.

All of this does the most important thing a setting book like this can do: it opens up possibilities rather than closing them off. Every statement about "this is how the Grand Stair works" comes with an acknowledgement of the variety innate in a basically infinite setting, and every speculation about why the Grand Stair works like this comes with some frank acknowledgement of the limits to anyone's knowledge. If you want to establish the essence of the Grand Stair as an unsolveable mystery, this book has your back. But it also supports you if you want to use one of the theories presented here or invent some of your own. It's useful.

Highly recommended.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Lucien's Guide to the Grand Stair (Diceless)
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Dungeon World
Publisher: Burning Wheel
by Bruce B. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 11/30/2012 14:00:09

What an amazing, delightful game this is. It really captures the feeling of the best parts of dungeon crawling as I remember it from being an enthusiastic teen new to everything in rolegaming, and so much that introductions promised me but games never quite delivered. It's one of the most satisfying action adventure-oriented games I've played in ages, providing enough emotional foundation to make the characters interesting, engaging people without losing the feel of bold competent people doing exciting things well.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Dungeon World
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Thornburg - A Dungeon World Adventure
Publisher: At the Table Games
by Bruce B. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 11/30/2012 13:55:11

I liked this a lot. It's short but it's rich in eccentric personalities, great fodder for continuing interactions. As a GM, I'm very much prone to overwriting, with a lot of detail that never gets used. Thornburg shows how to use a game like Dungeon World right, focusing on hooks that will actually matter in play. Each of the people and places has something a bit off about it (or way more than a bit), and doesn't tell you what's "actually" up with any of them. But each one is a standing invention to a group's players to guess, propose, discuss, debate, and otherwise invent their way into fun, dramatic messes.

I'm also very, very happy with the author's response to a couple of questions in private messaging: super fast and thoroughly gentlemanly and generous. I'll be looking for more like this.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Thornburg - A Dungeon World Adventure
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Doomed Slayers
Publisher: JürgenWerks
by Bruce B. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 07/04/2012 13:19:45

Jürgen Hubert is one of those gamers who makes it worth my while not to become a complete hermit. He's got a steady cascade of neat interpretations, fresh ideas, and conceptual fusions, and is fun to read. (He's drastically changed my perception of at least one setting (Dark Sun), and influenced significantly my takes on others.) For old-timers, I can say that he reminds me a lot of the Bryan Armor kept White Wolf newsgroups, lists, and forums full of fresh ideas back in the '90s. Now he's published a PDF, and I think you should buy it.

Doomed Slayers is a mechanics-free supplement offering a cultural angle on any fantasy setting where some people make a primary undertaking out of adventuring into dangerous places to defeat perils and gather loot. What kind of person does that, anyway, and why? Jürgen's got some answers for your consideration.

Why? A whole spread of reasons, including surviving a tragic encounter with monsters, hoping for the romance and glory storytellers talk about, escaping banal heavy obligations, and more.

What? This is the heart of the piece. There's a Slayer's Code, each point expanded on in the file:

  • Go where you are needed, help where you can.
  • Do not tarry where you are not needed.
  • Own only what you can take with you.
  • Fight the monsters, not your kin.

There are also some common responses to Slayers, from the rest of their society:

  • Pay them what you can, appropriate to what you ask of them.
  • Do not bar their way.
  • What they find, they keep.

Out of all this, and the rest of the concepts laid out, a complete yet highly adaptable social structure emerges. You'll recognize precedents, and it's not like Jürgen would claim otherwise - he explicitly discusses some of them, and how the specifics of D&Doid fantasy might change them. You get a system that is fallible and exploitable in lots of ways, and yet serves a real purpose and is capable of enduring for a long time, if the classic dungeon fantasy conditions continue. You get a genuine moral and social foundation for what could easily be - often is - purely amoral or even anti-moral looting and pillage.

I love it. I hope you will too.

I have a couple of brief criticisms, neither of which in the slightest detracts from my recommendation.

First, I'm not wild about the art. It's a cartoony style, and I'm a hard sell on cartoons as game book illustrations. It seems fairly well done, it just doesn't feel to me like a good fit for the prose.

Second, the publisher botched the incorporation of the OGL. I've already passed relevant info and contact suggestions along. If any of you are actually publishing OGL stuff these days and want to do the same, couldn't hurt.

So. Go. Get. Read. Like. Use.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Doomed Slayers
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An Evening's Entertainment
Publisher: Ronin Arts
by Bruce B. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 10/06/2003 00:00:00

A real treat - interesting frameworks that lend themselves to stories going in various directions, constructed so as to fit in easily with quite a variety of settings, with the quality of layout I expect of Ronin Art books. Excellent value for the money, good fun for my players and for me.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
An Evening's Entertainment
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Last Rites: anniversary edition
Publisher: 12 to Midnight
by Bruce B. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 10/06/2003 00:00:00

A real treat for those of us looking for "real-world" paranormal phenomena for use in a horror game. The creators have obviously done their homework, and offer up excellent treatments of classic ghost lore anchored in a satisfying backstory and nicely unfolding plot. I found the starting a little abrupt and would like to have seen more fleshing out of hooks for characters who aren't already steeped in paranormal investigation, but that's my own complaint. The maps and diagrams are particularly useful, with the escalating pace of hauntings great for building the mood.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Last Rites: anniversary edition
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