The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Preamble

Chivalry and Sorcery Light (C&SL) is a set of "fast play" rules for the Chivalry and Sorcery line of game products. Specifically it is a simplification of the rules contained in Chivalry and Sorcery, 3rd Edition (C&S3). It is designed to be compatible with C&S3 so that material published for the more complex and complete edition can be used within C&SL.

Since C&SL can be used either as an introductory game to introduce people to the more complex C&S3 rules and as a standalone game independent of C&S3, this review will tackle both approaches where relevant.

It should be noted for sake of fairness that my copy of C&SL is a review copy sent me by the publisher. I will try to be uninfluenced by this, but will state it for the record.

Physical Components

C&SL is an astonishingly thin book. Weighing in at 40 pages, the rulebooks still contains rules for character generation, combat and magic, as well as a bestiary. An eight-page pullout section in the middle of the book includes an introductory scenario, some pregenerated characters and a character sheet. All told, for the money you get a lot of game, even with the low page count.

The layout of the rules is... well, allow me to digress.

When C&S3 came out, among the very many reasons it was mocked was its layout. It didn't have any for any practical purposes. It had long streams of extremely dense text with spastic use of fonts. Half of the problems people had with the rules—myself included—had nothing to do with the rules at all. It had to do with the fact you couldn't find the rules without spending an awful lot of undue effort. Attaching the "™" symbol to every third word in the book made things even worse. The C&S3 rulebook was a complete mess.

C&SL is almost, but not quite, completely unlike C&S3 in this regard. Its layout is crisp and clean. Whitespace is used to block the text into related concepts. Fonts are properly used for emphasis (bold, italic) and for section headings (different fonts). Reasonably good stock art is used to help fill blank spaces caused by proper layout. Examples are distinguished from surrounding text by placing them into sidebars and shading the sidebars grey.

About the only thing I thought could have been improved layout-wise is the use of tables. Some tables are long, wide lists lacking the traditional alternating bands of grey and white backgrounds to ease navigation. This is a minor problem, however. In all other respects C&SL is laid out as well as the layout kings in the industry. Indeed the layout reminds me of the good layouts from BTRC, my favorite company for functional layouts.

Rules

The core mechanism of C&SL is described early on in the book. It is based upon a d% roll combined with an extra d10 roll called the Crit Die. The mechanism is very reminiscent of C&S3. Indeed the only major difference is that the Crit Die only has significance on a 1 (or less) and a 10 (or more), unlike the table-driven approach to the Crit Die used in C&S3. If you succeed with your d% roll and your modified Crit Die roll is 10 or more, you have a critical success. If you fail with your d% roll and you roll a 1 or less on the Crit Die after modifications, you have a critical failure. There are circumstances which will modify the Crit Die roll, however, so things aren't quite as simple as saying that 10% of all successes are critical successes.

There is a small bug in the core rules as provided. Unlike C&S3, in which there were all sorts of mechanisms for altering Crit Die rolls (most notably when success percentages went outside of a permitted range for a given skill), in C&SL there are only two mechanisms: some weapons will increase the Crit Die when used, and success chances over 100% will increase the Crit Die. The latter isn't a problem, in my opinion, but the former is a glitch: it is impossible to get a critical failure when using such weapons. Since it is the modified Crit Die result of 1 which turns a failure into a critical failure, a weapon with a +1 Crit Die modifier will always have a minimum Crit Die result of 2. The easy fix for this is to say that an unmodified Crit Die roll of 1 paired with a failure on the skill roll makes a critical failure when the Crit Die is modified by weapon type.

Character Generation

Character creation is very different in C&SL than it is in C&S3. In the more complex game, character generation goes into fussy detail about every aspect of the character ranging from background to social standing to personality to family to a whole host of other details. In C&SL the procedure is to choose (!) a social class, set attributes, calculate some secondary stats, choose a vocation (with attendant skill mastery), choose skills and buy equipment, filling in combat details as necessary.

The attributes C&SL provides are identical to those in C&S3: strength, constitution, agility, intellect, wisdom, discipline, bardic voice, appearance and piety. The mechanism to generate them, however, is different. All attributes range between 2 and 18 inclusive (10 average). They are divided into three categories: physical, mental and social. 30 points are distributed between these categories with no more than 15 and no fewer than 5 given to any particular category. All attributes in the category are set to the level assigned. After this is completed, individual attributes may be altered by up to ±3, so long as the cumulative alterations in a category are equal to zero. This sounds more complex than it is. In reality it allows for much faster-moving attribute selection than that provided in C&S3.

While the process of generating characters in this edition is much more streamlined than any previous edition of the game line, I personally feel that it does so at the expense of the C&S flavour. First there are fewer available vocations than in C&S3. Since vocations are, essentially, skills packages, restricting the number of (non-mage) vocations seems a bit silly. (Restricting the number of mage vocations makes more sense given that even C&S3 has a fairly complex magic system.) (Yes, "magic" and not "magick". I hate the affectation of using the extraneous 'k' at the end of the word!) More importantly, however, the social status attributes are gone in this edition of C&S; social status ratings having been one of the identifying characteristics of C&S since 1977.

All the flavour issues aside, however, there are some good changes in the character generation process. For starters, the process of learning skills has been made simpler (and radically better, IMO) than it was in C&S3. Skill costs are directly linked to skill difficulty factors now. Minimum and maximum chances of success are eliminated. Attribute bonuses are simply 3×Attribute instead of a table lookup with only one attribute per skill. It may look like the same alphabet soup of C&S3 (BCS, PSF, TSC, etc.), but it is a whole lot easier to use.

Combat

The C&SL combat system has finally dropped the action point-based system of C&S3 (bleah!). While there are, indeed, action points calculated during character creation, they are used mainly for movement. After movement, any remaining APs are converted to "blows" (a single attack or defense action) based upon what kind of weapon the character is using. After that, a more C&S-ish combat system takes over (complete with the long-lost C&S "bash" in an appendix!).

The combat system itself is an exchange of blows. You expend a blow to attack. You expend a blow for an active defense. (You expend fatigue for passive defenses, except with shields.) The way it works is this. You first calculate the attacker's TSC (total success chance). If the defender is using a passive defense, half the defender's PSF (personal skill factor—a combination of attribute, situation and skill level bonuses) is removed and the attack roll made. If the defender is using an active defense, the roll is made and the defender calculates a TSC for the defensive skill being used. From this TSC, the attacker's PSF is removed. If the ensuing roll is successful, the attack is deflected, parried or dodged as appropriate.

Ranged combat works similarly except that only an active defense (specifically a dodge) can be used to defend against it.

Once a hit has been achieved, damage is calculated by taking a weapon's base damage, adding half the governing attribute (a quarter if the weapon is a light one), a skill bonus and the Crit Die result (possibly modified by the weapon type). Armour values are removed from the damage, modified by the armour type vs. the damage type. The resulting value is removed from the target's fatigue. If the target has no fatigue points left over, the damage is taken to the target's body points. If the attacker rolled a critical success, in addition to the normal fatigue damage, an additional 1d10 damage is done directly to the target's body points, something which may result in special critical effects ranging from being put in debilitating agony to death.

Overall I like what I see in the combat system. The return of blows and bashes is a good thing. The more streamlined damage system is even better. But C&SL's combat system is devoted mainly to foot-based combat. The only nod to knights on horseback provided is a single paragraph of, in my opinion, not very good rules to handle lance attacks from horseback. You need to go to a supplement to do it right.

Magic

C&S3 was widely regarded as having dumbed-down the (in)famous complexity of C&S magic systems. C&SL has gone a step further. Where C&S3 had several "modes" (skill groups) of magic and over a dozen "magicks" (groups of spells), C&SL has only two modes (magus and witchcraft) and 10 spell lists (air, fire, water, earth, arcane, command, divination, illusion, plant and ward). Characters are restricted in the rank of spells they can select by the lower of their mode and individual "magicks" skill levels. Additionally, the magic mode provides "magick factors" which limit the number of spells a mage can learn.

An interesting twist to the classic C&S "magic focus" is that, instead of going through a tedious process of enchanting materials, C&SL characters make their foci by learning a "skill", one which has no levels. Making a ring-based focus has a difficulty factor of 3 and a wand-based focus has a difficulty factor of 5. (This latter point is confusing. In all ways a ring is a superior focus, yet the wand is more costly to make. This makes no sense to me whatsoever. I would reverse the two values.)

The casting of spells costs fatigue based on complexity, casting method, spell rank and the use of a focus. Some spells which cause damage can have the damage enhanced by expending additional fatigue. (The rules aren't exactly clear on this point, but the designers have confirmed this is the intent.) In addition to spending fatigue, however, the caster may also have to target the spell (roll a successful task based on what kind of resistance the spell will face). A spell that fails the targetting roll will still cost fatigue.

Personally I am a bit disappointed with C&SL's magic rules. C&S3 was often criticized for its distinctly un-C&Sish magic system. C&SL is worse in this regard. I find myself continually yearning for the good old days of "basic magick" and a spell system which required a Ph.D. to use successfully.

Miscellaneous

The bestiary which comes with this set is very small. The rules have been designed to work with C&S3's bestiary, however, so GMs who run out of creatures can buy the older game's supplement and use it without much difficulty.

Non-human PCs are barely addressed at all in C&SL. I would not recommend the provided rules at all. People wanting to insert elves and dwarves and such would be better served by using C&S3. For NPCs, however, the provided rules are acceptable.

Character advancement is limited to level 5 in C&SL. Post-level 5 characters will have to be redone in C&S3.

Conclusion

As a set of simple "leg-up" rules to C&S3, C&SL is a good product. C&S3 is a daunting set of rules, made worse by very bad layout and presentation. C&SL is streamlined, easy to read and much better explained (minus a few minor glitches) than its bigger brother. On the downside, however, it loses a lot of the flavour that made C&S what it is to its fans. Another factor interfering with its introductory nature is that it doesn't handle the Light-to-3 translation well at all. Little cryptic comments here and there reference C&S3 and how to move information from one game to the other. This should have been compiled into an annex instead.

As a standalone game, C&SL is nowhere near as much a success. It relies too heavily on C&S3 for vital components (creatures, characters over level 5, a detailed skills list, a rich magic system) to be taken seriously as anything other than an introductory set of rules: the Basic Dungeons of Dragons of the Chivalry and Sorcery line, in effect.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 3 (Average)

Chivalry & Sorcery Light
Author: Edward E. Simbalist, Wilf K. Backhaus, Steve C. Betney Category: game Company/Publisher: Brittannia Game Designs / Maple Leaf Games / Gamestuff Line: Chivalry & Sorcery Cost: $9.95 Page count: 40 ISBN: 1-902500-01-6 SKU: 6000 Capsule Review by Michael T. Richter on 11/25/99. Genre tags: Fantasy Historical	Preamble Chivalry and Sorcery Light (C&SL) is a set of "fast play" rules for the Chivalry and Sorcery line of game products. Specifically it is a simplification of the rules contained in Chivalry and Sorcery, 3rd Edition (C&S3). It is designed to be compatible with C&S3 so that material published for the more complex and complete edition can be used within C&SL. Since C&SL can be used either as an introductory game to introduce people to the more complex C&S3 rules and as a standalone game independent of C&S3, this review will tackle both approaches where relevant. It should be noted for sake of fairness that my copy of C&SL is a review copy sent me by the publisher. I will try to be uninfluenced by this, but will state it for the record. Physical Components C&SL is an astonishingly thin book. Weighing in at 40 pages, the rulebooks still contains rules for character generation, combat and magic, as well as a bestiary. An eight-page pullout section in the middle of the book includes an introductory scenario, some pregenerated characters and a character sheet. All told, for the money you get a lot of game, even with the low page count. The layout of the rules is... well, allow me to digress. When C&S3 came out, among the very many reasons it was mocked was its layout. It didn't have any for any practical purposes. It had long streams of extremely dense text with spastic use of fonts. Half of the problems people had with the rules—myself included—had nothing to do with the rules at all. It had to do with the fact you couldn't find the rules without spending an awful lot of undue effort. Attaching the "™" symbol to every third word in the book made things even worse. The C&S3 rulebook was a complete mess. C&SL is almost, but not quite, completely unlike C&S3 in this regard. Its layout is crisp and clean. Whitespace is used to block the text into related concepts. Fonts are properly used for emphasis (bold, italic) and for section headings (different fonts). Reasonably good stock art is used to help fill blank spaces caused by proper layout. Examples are distinguished from surrounding text by placing them into sidebars and shading the sidebars grey. About the only thing I thought could have been improved layout-wise is the use of tables. Some tables are long, wide lists lacking the traditional alternating bands of grey and white backgrounds to ease navigation. This is a minor problem, however. In all other respects C&SL is laid out as well as the layout kings in the industry. Indeed the layout reminds me of the good layouts from BTRC, my favorite company for functional layouts. Rules The core mechanism of C&SL is described early on in the book. It is based upon a d% roll combined with an extra d10 roll called the Crit Die. The mechanism is very reminiscent of C&S3. Indeed the only major difference is that the Crit Die only has significance on a 1 (or less) and a 10 (or more), unlike the table-driven approach to the Crit Die used in C&S3. If you succeed with your d% roll and your modified Crit Die roll is 10 or more, you have a critical success. If you fail with your d% roll and you roll a 1 or less on the Crit Die after modifications, you have a critical failure. There are circumstances which will modify the Crit Die roll, however, so things aren't quite as simple as saying that 10% of all successes are critical successes. There is a small bug in the core rules as provided. Unlike C&S3, in which there were all sorts of mechanisms for altering Crit Die rolls (most notably when success percentages went outside of a permitted range for a given skill), in C&SL there are only two mechanisms: some weapons will increase the Crit Die when used, and success chances over 100% will increase the Crit Die. The latter isn't a problem, in my opinion, but the former is a glitch: it is impossible to get a critical failure when using such weapons. Since it is the modified Crit Die result of 1 which turns a failure into a critical failure, a weapon with a +1 Crit Die modifier will always have a minimum Crit Die result of 2. The easy fix for this is to say that an unmodified Crit Die roll of 1 paired with a failure on the skill roll makes a critical failure when the Crit Die is modified by weapon type. Character Generation Character creation is very different in C&SL than it is in C&S3. In the more complex game, character generation goes into fussy detail about every aspect of the character ranging from background to social standing to personality to family to a whole host of other details. In C&SL the procedure is to choose (!) a social class, set attributes, calculate some secondary stats, choose a vocation (with attendant skill mastery), choose skills and buy equipment, filling in combat details as necessary. The attributes C&SL provides are identical to those in C&S3: strength, constitution, agility, intellect, wisdom, discipline, bardic voice, appearance and piety. The mechanism to generate them, however, is different. All attributes range between 2 and 18 inclusive (10 average). They are divided into three categories: physical, mental and social. 30 points are distributed between these categories with no more than 15 and no fewer than 5 given to any particular category. All attributes in the category are set to the level assigned. After this is completed, individual attributes may be altered by up to ±3, so long as the cumulative alterations in a category are equal to zero. This sounds more complex than it is. In reality it allows for much faster-moving attribute selection than that provided in C&S3. While the process of generating characters in this edition is much more streamlined than any previous edition of the game line, I personally feel that it does so at the expense of the C&S flavour. First there are fewer available vocations than in C&S3. Since vocations are, essentially, skills packages, restricting the number of (non-mage) vocations seems a bit silly. (Restricting the number of mage vocations makes more sense given that even C&S3 has a fairly complex magic system.) (Yes, "magic" and not "magick". I hate the affectation of using the extraneous 'k' at the end of the word!) More importantly, however, the social status attributes are gone in this edition of C&S; social status ratings having been one of the identifying characteristics of C&S since 1977. All the flavour issues aside, however, there are some good changes in the character generation process. For starters, the process of learning skills has been made simpler (and radically better, IMO) than it was in C&S3. Skill costs are directly linked to skill difficulty factors now. Minimum and maximum chances of success are eliminated. Attribute bonuses are simply 3×Attribute instead of a table lookup with only one attribute per skill. It may look like the same alphabet soup of C&S3 (BCS, PSF, TSC, etc.), but it is a whole lot easier to use. Combat The C&SL combat system has finally dropped the action point-based system of C&S3 (bleah!). While there are, indeed, action points calculated during character creation, they are used mainly for movement. After movement, any remaining APs are converted to "blows" (a single attack or defense action) based upon what kind of weapon the character is using. After that, a more C&S-ish combat system takes over (complete with the long-lost C&S "bash" in an appendix!). The combat system itself is an exchange of blows. You expend a blow to attack. You expend a blow for an active defense. (You expend fatigue for passive defenses, except with shields.) The way it works is this. You first calculate the attacker's TSC (total success chance). If the defender is using a passive defense, half the defender's PSF (personal skill factor—a combination of attribute, situation and skill level bonuses) is removed and the attack roll made. If the defender is using an active defense, the roll is made and the defender calculates a TSC for the defensive skill being used. From this TSC, the attacker's PSF is removed. If the ensuing roll is successful, the attack is deflected, parried or dodged as appropriate. Ranged combat works similarly except that only an active defense (specifically a dodge) can be used to defend against it. Once a hit has been achieved, damage is calculated by taking a weapon's base damage, adding half the governing attribute (a quarter if the weapon is a light one), a skill bonus and the Crit Die result (possibly modified by the weapon type). Armour values are removed from the damage, modified by the armour type vs. the damage type. The resulting value is removed from the target's fatigue. If the target has no fatigue points left over, the damage is taken to the target's body points. If the attacker rolled a critical success, in addition to the normal fatigue damage, an additional 1d10 damage is done directly to the target's body points, something which may result in special critical effects ranging from being put in debilitating agony to death. Overall I like what I see in the combat system. The return of blows and bashes is a good thing. The more streamlined damage system is even better. But C&SL's combat system is devoted mainly to foot-based combat. The only nod to knights on horseback provided is a single paragraph of, in my opinion, not very good rules to handle lance attacks from horseback. You need to go to a supplement to do it right. Magic C&S3 was widely regarded as having dumbed-down the (in)famous complexity of C&S magic systems. C&SL has gone a step further. Where C&S3 had several "modes" (skill groups) of magic and over a dozen "magicks" (groups of spells), C&SL has only two modes (magus and witchcraft) and 10 spell lists (air, fire, water, earth, arcane, command, divination, illusion, plant and ward). Characters are restricted in the rank of spells they can select by the lower of their mode and individual "magicks" skill levels. Additionally, the magic mode provides "magick factors" which limit the number of spells a mage can learn. An interesting twist to the classic C&S "magic focus" is that, instead of going through a tedious process of enchanting materials, C&SL characters make their foci by learning a "skill", one which has no levels. Making a ring-based focus has a difficulty factor of 3 and a wand-based focus has a difficulty factor of 5. (This latter point is confusing. In all ways a ring is a superior focus, yet the wand is more costly to make. This makes no sense to me whatsoever. I would reverse the two values.) The casting of spells costs fatigue based on complexity, casting method, spell rank and the use of a focus. Some spells which cause damage can have the damage enhanced by expending additional fatigue. (The rules aren't exactly clear on this point, but the designers have confirmed this is the intent.) In addition to spending fatigue, however, the caster may also have to target the spell (roll a successful task based on what kind of resistance the spell will face). A spell that fails the targetting roll will still cost fatigue. Personally I am a bit disappointed with C&SL's magic rules. C&S3 was often criticized for its distinctly un-C&Sish magic system. C&SL is worse in this regard. I find myself continually yearning for the good old days of "basic magick" and a spell system which required a Ph.D. to use successfully. Miscellaneous The bestiary which comes with this set is very small. The rules have been designed to work with C&S3's bestiary, however, so GMs who run out of creatures can buy the older game's supplement and use it without much difficulty. Non-human PCs are barely addressed at all in C&SL. I would not recommend the provided rules at all. People wanting to insert elves and dwarves and such would be better served by using C&S3. For NPCs, however, the provided rules are acceptable. Character advancement is limited to level 5 in C&SL. Post-level 5 characters will have to be redone in C&S3. Conclusion As a set of simple "leg-up" rules to C&S3, C&SL is a good product. C&S3 is a daunting set of rules, made worse by very bad layout and presentation. C&SL is streamlined, easy to read and much better explained (minus a few minor glitches) than its bigger brother. On the downside, however, it loses a lot of the flavour that made C&S what it is to its fans. Another factor interfering with its introductory nature is that it doesn't handle the Light-to-3 translation well at all. Little cryptic comments here and there reference C&S3 and how to move information from one game to the other. This should have been compiled into an annex instead. As a standalone game, C&SL is nowhere near as much a success. It relies too heavily on C&S3 for vital components (creatures, characters over level 5, a detailed skills list, a rich magic system) to be taken seriously as anything other than an introductory set of rules: the Basic Dungeons of Dragons of the Chivalry and Sorcery line, in effect. Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 3 (Average)

Chivalry & Sorcery Light