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Seer Delight $2.25 $1.56
Publisher: Spellbook Games
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by Christopher H. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 05/23/2010 12:20:03

If you run a fantasy game in which your PCs have access to oracles or fortune-tellers, and you'd enjoy answering their questions by rolling on random tables, you might appreciate the bulk of "Seer Delight."

The first couple of pages focus on stats for seers—which, despite the product description, are not given in d20/OGL, older D&D, or systemless terms, but are given in Spellbook Games's idiosyncratic, unpublished (as far as I know) system. "Seer Delight" doesn't really explain the system, but it does go farther than any other Spellbook Games product I've read, revealing that GTET stands for "Greater Than or Equal To." (I have no idea why the authors used "GTET" instead of "≥"—a symbol everybody would easily understand—for that.) If you really need to decipher the stats, you can visit Spellbook Games's home page and download a conversion document. Personally, I plan to just ignore most of the first two pages of text.

At the bottom of the fourth page of the PDF (Spellbook Games didn't bother to number the pages for easy reference), the product turns to a set of tables that are truly systemless, appropriate to any fantasy game. If your PCs ask a seer whether they will find the MacGuffin, you can turn to page 5, roll d%, and consult the table for a suggested answer. The nice thing about these charts is that they numerous variations on "yes" and "no" answers, and they build in potentially interesting story hooks—if you decide that the oracle or fortune is true (more on that later). For example, one possible result on the MacGuffin question is "No, it has been moved," while another is "Yes, after breaking the spell." The tables on p. 5 through the end of the booklet offer randomized answers to nine different typical questions. Should your players present the seer with multiple-choice questions, you can use the tables on p. 10 to randomly decide how the seer answers. The final page is useless unless you're employing Spellbook Games's idiosyncratic crunch. On the other hand, with a little tweaking, you can make the tables on pp. 5–9 work for non-fantasy games as well.

In general, "Seer Delight" proceeds from the assumption that a true seer will simply tell the PCs the truth or will honestly tell the PCs if s/he does not know the true answer to their question. Using Spellbook Games's crunch, the tables on pp. 5–10 are best used for fakers. Nevertheless, you might still want to use the tables if you, as DM, don't know or haven't decided what the true answer ought to be.

I find it annoying that Spellbook Games labels their products as being for use with d20/OGL and older versions of D&D (hard to pull off at the same time) as a being generic/systemless, when in fact they're filled with crunch from an unpublished system "compatible" with pre-d20 versions of D&D if you run it through a conversion filter that is never mentioned in the products or product descriptions, even if it is freely available on the publisher's web site. However, a good 60% of "Seer Delight" is truly systemless, and useful enough to find a place in the "random tables" section of my digital DM binder.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
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Seer Delight
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