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The Game Master’s shield (aka the GM’s screen) has been a part of tabletop fantasy almost since the beginning. Now, for the first time, GMs have a SORD to go with their shield, completing the set. And not a moment too soon.
SORD is the System Operational Reference Digest, from Myth Merchant Press. Made for the 3.5 OGL rules, it aims to collect and reorganize all of the game’s relevant combat information into concise, easy-to-use breakdowns, eliminating (or at least heavily-reducing) page-flipping that grinds games to a halt. Indeed, the book sets the lofty goal of shaving fifteen minutes off of how long it takes you to run a combat encounter! But how well does SORD really present itself? Let’s look under the hood…
From a technical standpoint, the PDF is quite impressive. Barely over a megabyte in size, the PDF is thirty-two pages long, with a page for the cover, a page for the credits/legal/OGL, and a page for the introduction/explanation. All of the other pages are dedicated to the rules. The book has no illustrations (obviously) but does use some color as a means of highlighting certain things. As a nice bonus, the PDF uses layers, allowing you to toggle the color settings to make the book more printer-friendly. Even navigation is easy, as the book has full bookmarks and a hyperlinked table of contents (which it recommends pasting inside your GM shield, so you can reference the rest of the book at-a-glance).
SORD’s layout is, I have to admit, brilliant. The book uses a single-page reference for everything. For example, the first page of rules covers the rules regarding the combat round, and attacks of opportunity. The page has three lightly-colored boxes regarding different information about those topics. Each box has various sub-headings, and each sub-heading has one or more bulleted points (some of which are nested), with significant terms being highlighted. And that’s all in just one page; after that, the next page repeats the process, this time regarding the rules for initiative, readied and delayed actions. It’s pretty clear that the book’s author, Steve Muchow, is a crazy genius, except without being crazy.
Of course, this isn’t to say that SORD is a perfect product. It’s not. It has some things that seem like errors, and other things that I wish had been included but weren’t. For example, the page about actions lists an (expanded) chart regarding what actions provoke AoO’s and which don’t. However, in the column that should say “yes” or “no” regarding provoking AoO’s, there are only “yes” listings, with the fields where “no” should be being blank. This happens in one or two other places as well. Similarly, the attack modifiers page lists the three base attack bonus progression rates, and has which classes use which rate…but there’s no mention of the NPC classes. I found little things like that throughout the book. And finally, materials from the expanded sections of the SRD (namely, the epic and psionic sections) were ignored utterly, which is something of a shame.
Despite these minor points, though, SORD is an incredibly useful book if you’re running 3.5. While I haven’t had the chance to try it out in a game yet, I can easily believe that it’ll live up to its promise to speed up combat by at least fifteen minutes. In fact, even the problems I had with it seem like they’ll be ironed out soon, since in his introduction the author promises to keep fixing problems with SORD as they’re found. I’ve no doubt that once the kinks are worked out, this’ll be a five-star book, but for now there is still some room for improvement (albeit not that much room), so I’m giving it four out of five. In the meantime, GM’s everywhere should put their game to the SORD.
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