OUT OF THE BOX September 3, 2003 By: Kenneth Hite

This is showing up on Wednesday firstly because I didn't do any work at all on the Labor Day weekend, unless mixing Blue Hawaiians and kitbashing a Gettysburg: 1963 wargame counts as work. (And no, although it seems like the two are connected, they're not.) Secondly, I kept hoping against hope that my review copy of Orpheus would arrive, and I was unable to operate my word processor with the hot, salty tears of disappointment blurring my eyes. And thirdly, reading Fantasy Hero takes a lot longer than you might think, even if you have, in the past, written whole books with Steve Long. But the drinking, kitbashing, and reading are done -- although the tears still flow -- and in honor of Steve's puissant tome, I've decided to dedicate this safari into the Bigass Review Pile to fantasy reviews. Further up and farther in, then.

Tome Of Mighty Lifting

And in the interest of working the delts and lats, let's start with the aforementioned tome, Steven S. Long's Fantasy Hero (415 page softcover, black and white, $31.99) is one of those rare and wonderful books that is exactly what it claims to be, and exactly what you're looking for, assuming you're looking for a gigantic guide-and-companion to running fantasy games in the Hero system. Although Steve ably covers "genre" topics such as tropes and types of fantasy on the one hand, and "setting" topics such as geography and politics on the other, the real meat of the book is the Hero mechanics for various races, professions, and backgrounds (something like 60 Package Deals all told), pre-gunpowder combat (both individual and en masse), and magic. This last, for my money, is the chewy nougat center of this book -- the magic rules clearly explain the various options for magic system design, intelligently explain how to achieve a given system feel using the Hero system, and then give a wide spread of a dozen sample magic systems (each with a lightning bolt among their sample spells) to demonstrate the foregoing. (One or two of them aren't quite fleshed out -- the Chaos Blade Package Deal is sorely missed, for example.) The Hero 5th practice of helpful example or amplifying sidebars isn't quite as crunchy here as in previous books, but it's more than churlish to complain about a lack of crunch in this book of all things. The art varies widely, but Andy Mathews continues to provide his clean, readable, useful layout. Bottom line -- if you're a Hero system gamer, you need this book. If you're just interested in fantasy, or game design, or setting development -- well, you only need one or two hundred pages of it. You can use the rest as free weights.

Dancing In The Ruins

I have said this before, but it bears repeating: S. John Ross is probably, word for word and sentence for sentence, the best writer working in gaming today. His skills in setting design, story construction, and general fun-providing are similarly mighty, honed by years in various industry salt mines and decades of practical role-playing experience. All of this shows, to good advantage, in his deceptively slim Big Eyes, Small Mouth setting book Uresia: Grave of Heaven (111 page digest-sized softcover, black and white, $15.95). This is a "fantasy anime" inspired setting, a world where the gods died long ago in a huge cataclysm that smashed the world into a fan of islands. This conveniently provides (all in one) a fascinating nest of cosmology, a suitably epic backstory, city-sized ruins suitable for delving, a reason to ignore religion (although the four broken, surviving gods are vastly more finely painted than most games' entire pantheons), and plenty of neat cultures for swashbuckling in, around, and through. Such sheer, delicious density -- of single design decisions working almost invisibly in many directions and on many different levels -- pervades the book. Thus, especially for fans of S. John's previous work, reading Uresia is like relaxing into a hot, perfumed bath. All the wit, warmth, and humanity he brings to his writing is here in a gel, from the tragic necromancers of Yem to the Reformed Evil Empire of Koval. There are a few new BESM crunches here, such as the God of Cookery attribute and templates for little sentient slime-balls (apparently a feature of anime fantasy), and a journeyman start on mapping the Uresian specifics into the BESM framework. (I wanted more beast-men templates.) Most of the book, though, is content to map the setting, capped by a town and a city that show S. John's comfort with both medieval demographics and hooky fantasy game fun. His excellent maps, an adequate index, and some variable art tie things together well -- if you're looking for a fantasy world, or for an example of what to look for in a fantasy world, look at Uresia.

Wheels On Fire

Not everyone will like Luke Crane's The Burning Wheel (two digest-sized volumes of 240 and 232 pages, black and white softcovers, $15 total postpaid from the author) as much as I did, and even I found it a little rough going in places. The tone wavers between chatty and imperious, the rules engine (a perfectly simple d6 based dice pool) has a lot of winky exceptions, it's very grainy (stats for baby goblins to elder dragons run from 1 to 10) the rules shorthand is kind of daunting until you get used to it, and not all the art works (although Dan Licht's graphic design is excellent, overall). The combination of gritty martial arts and straight Tolkein fantasy will jar some folk, though I found it very refreshing. Most importantly, there are going to be people who just don't want to play out a fight scene using the key innovation -- scripted combat. Each combat is divided into three-round "exchanges"; players (and NPCs, which is to say, the GM) script their actions in advance, and each round (or "volley") is resolved simultaneously. If you didn't Block and the orc Struck, you're in a bad way.

Me, I wanted more. I wanted to see longer scripts, and "one man vs. a dozen orcs" type heroic, large-scale script systems. I wanted to see the system adapted to lockpicking or crossing a mountain pass or seducing the queen. This engine really seems to open up combat, and (once you memorize the nine options) recaptures the feel of desperate calculation, wild flailing, and instinctive brutality that melee combat truly is. Crane has a lot of other interesting notions packed away in these slim volumes; his Artha system combines hero points with roleplaying XP in an interesting fashion, I like the idea of virtues and flaws both costing points ("if you want to play a one-legged dwarf, pay the points and do it"), and I have loved lifepath chargen systems ever since I opened my first black box of Traveller. (It still implies that elves don't do much, for all their centuries of life -- but there's a terrific Grief mechanic that really brings those centuries home for the player.) The orcs, especially, are vastly multifarious while still being fully evil and satisfyingly traditional. Anyone looking for interesting game design ideas, for a well-realized take on fantasy core elements, or just for a new fantasy gaming experience should take a look at The Burning Wheel. In an era of mules in d20 harness, this is a mustang.

Just the Facts, Goodwife

Aaron Stimson's From Stone to Steel (351 page black and white hardback, $39.95), published by MonkeyGod Enterprises, is essentially a history of arms, armor, and warfare from the Stone Age to the Renaissance. It's not a bad history by any means, although it's neither perfectly accurate nor perfectly up to date, and it gives readers a decent sense of why certain weapons show up where and when they do, and how they get used (and on whom). The crunch of the book (24 pages or so of d20 weapons and armor tables) thus has plenty of useful context. An appendix or two has some new rules for weapon damage, armor damage, and so forth, and a brief treatment of historical magic weapons such as Durendal or the Spear of Destiny (which are pretty underpowered for major artifacts). Historical prestige classes, scattered throughout, include the Aztec Jaguar Knights, the Roman Legionary (called the "Legionnaire" for some odd reason), Janissaries, and so on. For me, this book looks more like a d20 time travel game resource than a fantasy game resource per se; someone setting a game in one era of history (or one ripped-off culture) will not get too much use out of the majority of the book, and will likely be better off with a more focused supplement. Still, it's a grand effort, competently executed.

Where From Stone to Steel is all epic sweeps and big pictures, Suzi Yee and Joseph Browning's A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe (144 page, black and white softcover, $25) from Expeditious Retreat Press drills remorselessly down to the details. Yee and Browning's remit is to take as much real-life medieval demographics, law, economics, and society as possible, run it lightly through the D&D; filter (How do resurrection spells affect feudal inheritance law?) and emerge on the other side with a historically-tested system for developing a magical medieval society based on medieval Germany, only with magic. This book will go as deep as you want, and likely deeper than you care to, but a fairly sturdy and clear (if not necessarily simple) system of forms and rules will guide anyone interested through the process of designing a manor, town, city, or kingdom complete with tax base. I have likely undersold this book, which is a mistake, because it filled me with a savage demon joy that is the grown-up version of reading all those Gary Gygax lists of noble titles way back in the day. It blows away even Ars Magica and Vampire Dark Ages supplements for depth and for game utility -- and, of course, it's d20 compatible, another plus. (Its only possible rival is Lisa Steele's magisterial, system-less Fief, which has no design guidelines to speak of, but a mass of useful details.) Players and DMs interested in detail and realism, who want an in-depth guide to designing a setting that combines historical robustness with a surprising degree of attention to magic's impact on the foregoing, will find this book staying very close to the top of the pile. I know that I, personally, am never designing another feudal-era setting without it.

By comparison, Mike Mearls' Cityworks (158 pages plus 16 pages of preview for an entirely different book, black and white hardcover, $24.95) from Fantasy Flight Games is very much a "back to basics" text. This is d20 city design at its most elemental -- where do cities go, what's in them, how can fighters play in them. Charts, tables, clear and simple rules -- all unexceptionable. While this material is surely useful to the new DM wanting to build a city or run a city adventure, it's almost too shorn of personality to pique the interest of long-time urban-adventure fans. (The prime exception is the superb "Speaker of the City" prestige class -- a kind of urban druid. Man, did I want to see 156 more pages of this kind of thing.) Not only are we mostly missing a strong fantasy personality (although we get a nod to subterranean or treetop cities in a couple of pages), the material is also very deracinated -- there are hardly any examples from history, legend, or fantasy literature to compare or contrast. No mention of Rome, Jerusalem, or Mecca in discussions of the "religious city" -- or of the three very different models those three examples can become. While this may give the new DM the confidence of the clear outline on a blank slate, it isn't likely to produce the kind of variety, flavor, and (dare I say it) urbanity that one looks for in the city in the first place.

Hogs, Warts, And All

A rapid note at the end here on Matt Forbeck's Redhurst Academy of Magic: Student Handbook (159 pages, full color landscape-format hardback, $29.99), from Human Head Studios. This is, unashamedly, a pastiche setting based on the Hogwarts School from Harry Potter And The Currently Available Sequel. Presented (very attractively -- kudos to Matt Forbeck and Tim Bowman for graphic design) tongue in cheek throughout as a student handbook, it manages to be a very detailed (though only adequately, if plentifully, mapped) "young wizard academy" d20 setting intended for magic-users of 1st to 3rd levels. (One cute touch: Redhurst Academy moves through the various worlds of the multiverse; a few pages in the book note its role in other d20 settings such as Arcanis, Dungeon World, Freeport, Geanavue in Kalamar, Nyambe, and the Scarred Lands.) An evil former student writes unkind marginal comments (in red) directed to an unknown master (whose name is surely not an anagram for "I Am Volmedort"); these provide some story hooks and clever (if occasionally repetitive) perspectives that mostly confirm our suspicions. The format mitigates against any great amount of DM advice or campaign setup information, but most gamers interested in the genre in the first place will be able to grok it without too much trouble -- there's even a "class credits for XP" system in there. Since we're not likely to ever see an actual Harry Potter RPG, if you're interested in playing in a close copy of it, you might enroll your players at Redhurst for a semester or two.

Two Weeks Into The Future