OUT OF THE BOX August 19, 2003 By: Kenneth Hite

I'm back, after roughly a fortnight in that scepter'd isle and well-known fantasy setting, England. I didn't really get a feeling for "British gaming" as compared to American gaming, except that British Unknown Armies players generally don't start shooting people early enough. However, I did have a swell time, and huge thanks go out to James Palmer, James Wallis, Phil Masters, and their families, friends, and flat-mates who put up with me. In honor (or even "honour") of them, then, we'll start with a con report, and continue with an all-British extravaganza of reviews, in rough historical order, forthwith.

All Mod Cons: The ConJuration Report

I crossed the Pond as Guest of Honour at ConJuration, the 2002 incarnation of the British Roleplaying Society's biennial convention. Held in scenic Cambridge, England, the con sported about 100 members, which I was told is large for a British convention. The dealer's room was three or five dealers strong; a 'zine, a games store, a bookseller, a print company, and (apparently) an RPG publisher called Ragged Angel. I can vouch for the first three being there, at least, but unlike many cons, I didn't spend much time in the dealer's room this show. I was tapped for fine panels, a Guest of Honour talk-slash-interview-slash-blather-hour manfully moderated by Phil Masters, and the real ale bar (there was also a regular bar-type bar on the premises -- it's as though they knew me). All of these things, even the bars, developed a conspiratorial theme alongside game industry news and gossip, questions of setting design, and historical fun. I bought a couple of games at a tremendous auction, conducted by Michael Cule. I also got to play some games, including an Unknown Armies game set in Chicago in 1929 that wound up with satisfying amounts of horror and (eventually) gunplay. The con had a definite "games first" feel, which I can only endorse, but the panels were also all fairly well attended; the show felt more like an extended gaming weekend with an extended crowd of gaming mates than it did like a convention. If that sounds like your kind of scene, keep an eye out in two years. And save room for the real ale.

Going Underground

David Chart, the Ars Magica line developer, and author of The Black Monks of Glastonbury (79 page black and white softcover, $17.95) from Atlas Games, attended the show, which is surely sufficient reason to review his book here and now. If you need more, there's the Guaranteed Insider Fact that this product indicates the level of myth and medieval lore that Chart intends to present in Ars Magica 5th Edition, now in playtest. So, on those terms, how does it do? Rather interestingly -- it presents a number of odd happenings that, while historically accurate, Chart builds into a picture of secret diabolism subverting all that the abbey once held dear -- bolstered by an (authentic) medieval prophecy seeming to describe the abbey as a section of the demonic realm (or regio) Saphat. This, plus artifacts like the Tongs Of St. Dunstan and story hooks like the body of Mordred, give this section of Mythic Europe a nicely mythic feel. However, Ars Magica fans may balk at the price, since this is one of Atlas' Coriolis line of books, containing dual stats and rules for d20 as well as the Ars Magica info we crave. The adaptation is interestingly done, with d20 rules for vis, auras, and the Aegis of the Hearth spell plus a diabolist prestige class (read: "super-powerful evil NPC builder"). The material presented, however, will only work for a relatively rules-light, story-heavy DM -- as interesting as the setting is, there's not enough "hack factor" or crunch to keep a standard party busy for long.

This Is the Modern World

The author of GURPS Age of Napoleon (128 page black and white softcover, $22.95), Nicholas H.M. Caldwell, also attended ConJuration, which just goes to show the level of talent you can assemble around a real ale bar when you try. The book, similarly, shows the level of historical detail found in the best GURPS supplements, with information on music, trade, and tactics, and statistics for fourteen characters of the age (and potted mini-bios for 29 more). Aubrey fans will be able to fight things out on the high seas (with rules from GURPS Compendium II and stats from this book) while Maturin fans get a decent level of support for espionage campaigns. In fact, if this book has a flaw at all, it is in combining these perhaps too-intricate details with a perhaps over-broad sweep, including not only the age of Napoleon but the French and American Revolutions preceding his rise by decades. This means that riffs on Napoleonics, such as Flintloque with its British orcs and French elves, get short shrift. Fans of straight Napoleonic roleplaying, should there be such a wondrous thing, will find little to cavil at, but those seeking to add fantastic or magical elements to the setting will have to do their own heavy lifting. What GURPS Age of Napoleon does do quite well is provide a meaty backstop for other GURPS books from the rapier action of GURPS Scarlet Pimpernel to the grotty Regency guttersniping of GURPS Goblins. Any GURPS gamer will find useful material here, especially (of course) for historical and time-travel games, as it nicely plugs the hole between GURPS Swashbucklers and GURPS Steampunk.

Smithers-Jones

Which brings us to the Victorian Era, already in progress. No-one associated with Victoriana (303 page black and white softcover, $29.99) attended the show, as far as I know, but the company that produces it, Heresy Gaming, is headquartered in the U.K., which surely counts for something. John Tuckey's Victoriana is powered by the old Hero-sub-Interlock Fuzion system, slightly tweaked for human pulp-level gaming. The setting is the Victorian era, more than slightly tweaked for fantasy races and magic -- although contrary to most such games, Victoriana tends to play up the grim, unpleasant nature of Victorian society. Thus, in 1867 the British are still mired in the Crimean War while the U.S. has yet to free the slaves as civil war remains only a threat. Jack the Ripper is inventing the mass-media mass murder 21 years early, and the Reform Act remains un-passed, keeping the British masses ever farther from the vote and justice. (A word of warning: it's not always easy to tell which choices are intentional world changes, and which are due to the sloppy editing -- for example, in India, apparently, it's 1857, not 1867, and the U.S. entry lists a 35% slave population, which is about three times too high.) The default assumption is that you, as a 21st-century roleplayer, will find Victorian society miserable and oppressive, and that your character will thusly be working to overthrow it as a radical or even a revolutionary. For Shadowrun fans, the PCs here are assumed to be "gutter-runners," and the game takes the bold step (despite bows to Charles Babbage and airships) of keeping the feeling very grimy and street-level -- even to the extent of giving lower-class characters more points to build characters with! (You have to respect an RPG setting that actually models effete, inbred aristocrats.) The game really needed another major editing pass, but those interested in the era will be able to sort out most of the boners and be left with a pretty sound adaptation of Fuzion for a very interesting take on the darkness behind the empire where the sun never set.

Burning Sky

Britain's most successful RPG company, Mongoose Publishing, has developed its first "home-grown" d20 setting to go along with licenses such as Slaine, Judge Dredd, and Babylon 5. Owing something no doubt to the British zest for dystopias and misery, Matthew Sprange and Ian Sturrock have developed a future world fallen into selfishness, short-sightedness, and corporate-political bloc rule. And just as Marx warned us, this crisis of the world system has produced an inevitable war between giant robots. In Armageddon: 2089 (304 page full color hardback, $44.95), elite WarMek pilots raid deep into enemy territory (the naval stalemate making actual invasions impossible), destroy targets, and get out. The war, between a corporatist U.S. and an increasingly repressive and bureaucratized European Federation, began as a war for British independence from Europe and now bids fair to destroy civilization, one WarMek crawl at a time. Sprange and Sturrock's adaptation of the d20 system to mecha fighting is pretty impressive; the electronic warfare rules specifically deserve mention for intelligence and relative smoothness. It will be a good idea to read the whole book before playing, not only because some of the rules aren't where I would have expected them to be (although the adequate index helps rather), but because much of the sidebar text comes in the form of "IWN News Briefs" which give a nice flavor to the world. You won't get it from the map, which seems to contradict the flavor text in many places -- a significant down-check in a world book. Matters become little better in Earth: 2089 (128 page full color softcover, $24.95), Alejandro Melchor's "setting book" for the Armageddon War. Again, the maps tell you little that a modern atlas won't (except that the editor doesn't know how to spell "Colombia"), and the writeups, while generally keen to provide something of a story seed, don't ever seem to mesh into a coherent whole. The added prestige classes allow you to model graduates of Sandhurst, the privatized West Point, or various other Mek academies. This emphasis on the Meks did, however, produce some very good WarMek art in both the core book and in Alejandro Melchor's Warmachines of 2089 (128 page full color softcover, $24.95). Although a little space is given to WarMek repair rules and a design overview (as well as a straight-faced "military history of WarMek design and tactics"), the meat of the book is lots and lots of new WarMek designs, as well it should be. In both the core book and this supplement, kudos go out to the authors for including some realistically "broken" models, hangar queens, one-trick ponies, and cheap-but-standard Meks. This attention to detail and realism should have been ported over to the world, if only to allay the sneaking suspicion that the world of 2089 only exists as a place for WarMeks to fight in.

That's Entertainment

Much farther into the future than 2089, in the age of the Dying Earth, humanity is if anything more contemptible -- but the world, somehow, seems rather more fun. Jim Webster and David Thomas present that fun (and, regretfully, the contemptibleness, if that is, indeed, the word for which I reach in vain) in fine fashion with the Scaum Valley Gazetteer (176 pages of stark blacks and limpid whites, bound between pliant, yielding covers of exquisite softness, a veritable gift to the needy at $29.95), Pelgrane Press' latest supplement to Robin Laws' extraordinarily wonderful Dying Earth Roleplaying Game. This is both a grand setting book, providing plenty of rich quotidian details about life along the Scaum River and its lesser tributaries, and a restrained campaign book, as there are plenty of adventures to tempt the careless and the greedy on a trip down the Scaum. Pelgrane Press continues its string of high-quality releases for the line, and the Scaum Valley Gazetteer makes a more than suitable follow-on to the Kaiin Player's Guide, which helpfully covers the city at the very mouth of the Scaum Valley. All this, plus a congeries of utile indices, attractive and even informative maps by the redoubtable Sarah Wroot, and plenty of useful NPCs, cantraps, spells, and items liberally festoon this sourcebook, making it a model of setting presentation as well as gentility and wit. For it must be true, in gaming as in life, that the Scaum always rises to the top.

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