Author: Micah Skaritka, Dav Harnish, Frank Nolan
Category: game
Company/Publisher: Apophis Consortium
Line: Obsidian
Cost: $28.00
Page count: Approx. 260
ISBN: 0-9671263-0-4
SKU: AP001000
Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan on 01/13/00.
Genre tags: Science_fiction Horror Far_Future Conspiracy Gothic

First off, I want to thank Derek Guder and Roger Taylor for their reviews, which helped me organize my thoughts for this review. Being able to wade through the book with their reviews clarifying things helped immensely. Hopefully, I'll be able to add something on to what they've already laid down without treading on the toes of what they've already written.

Second off, it's confession time: I'm actually working for the company that create this product, doing fiction for the supplement to this. The company sent me a free copy of the book to review before I hopped aboard, with the request that I write a review of it. Since I wanted to fill one responsibility in order to move on to another, I figured I'd finish this review and then excuse myself from doing future reviews of the company's line. Take the below with a grain of salt, at least.

So, to begin:

The English language is a difficult sucker, but it shouldn't be this difficult to use.

Obsidian; The Age of Darkness is practically crippled by its use of the English language; if it weren't for a sparse description of the city, a confused and disorganized overview of the world that it lives in, and a mixture of design elements that don't yet seem to gel with each other, it would be a good game. This, everybody - and I'm looking at you, White Wolf - is why you desperately need a good copy editor, even if you do happen to need the thing out the door in two weeks or what have you. Obsidian manages to avoid the standard Page XX tomfoolery, but there are other misuses that crippled my understanding - and enjoyment - of the game.

However, you have to give the authors points for trying. Obsidian drags together Hellraiser, Judge Dredd, Necromunda, Warhammer 40,000, Tribe 8, Cyberpunk, Kult, Brave New World (the book), Vampire: The Masquerade, John Ostrander's Grimjack, Hunter: The Reckoning, Stephen King's The Mist, Hell on Earth, Wasteworld, and lets them fight it out for dominance. The result is a cyberpunk environment in a society that can't really afford it, where Kults and Mystics fight it out for dominance in the streets while the forces of demonkind rule the wastelands outside.

So, does it work?

Err...

See, that's just the problem; For all I know, the authors may have had some really brilliant ideas. It might all fit together like a glove in their personal games, but I'll never know - the book's organization is all over the map, and it's difficult to understand even the simplest of details. Purple prose abounds, and there's a lot of over- and mis-use of large words where much simpler ones would go. Terms are used - almost over-used - before they're explained; I was trying to figure out what the Box of Under was until I finally found the chapter on the various cults. There's a complete explanation of the history of the world through the lens of Obsidian, but there's dozens of terms used that you're completely unfamiliar with.

So: What's the game about? As far as I can tell from beating through the dense brush of Obsidian's text, everything was perfect in Demon Land until humanity began to corrupt them through their various sins. As the various circles of Hell are corrupted, they take on the attributes of a particular sin, with various famous human agents forwarding their causes on the Earthly plane. Eventually, things got so whacked out of joint that the demons spilled over into Earth and wiped out huge numbers of human beings. One of the major beings - named Silesia - wound up nuking large portions of the earth in an attempt to herd human beings, apparently forgetting that gigantic radioactive firestorms do not tend to herd people so much as kill them.

Humanity wound up sponsored by the only uncorrupted Circle of Hell, with Mystics helping the new humanity - and this reminds me of Tribe 8's mystic beings, for some reason. Humanity now lives in a gigantic city, which is in turn made up of a few hundred smaller cities, organized in four levels. The demons can't get in because the city's defended by massive amounts of guns, which reminds me of the dimensional forts from Grimjack. Inside of the cities, there's a cross between a single, vaguely Big-Brotherish government and utter anarchy in the streets that it claims to rule. Kultists, avowed enemies of humanity, try to jockey for position while the Law and the Mystics track them down. Corporate assassins take out government-sponsored contracts on people's lives. Outside, in the Wasteland, everything is barren and empty, but people still survive.

Which, in truth, is kind of silly. For one thing, cyberpunk environments flourish in very limited situations - I remember one massively silly film where they were trying to mix cyberpunk with Big Brotherism, blissfully unaware that the two genres are completely incompatible. Cyberpunk environments are driven by the market, by personal freedom, by an unseen hierarchy of order that keeps people in line; Big Brother environments are much like THX-1138, where micromanagement is the order of the day and personal freedoms are sharply limited. As Roger Taylor so graciously pointed out, it's a cyberpunk environment in what should be a totalitarian / theocratic one.

So, here's the situation: There's a situation outside which is about as dangerous as all get out, where most of humanity has been wiped out and where a single totalitarian government may be the only hope for survival. This is Warhammer 40,000. However, within the city, corporations are tinkering around with deadly diseases, assassination is legal, and there are a broad section of the disenfranchised for the demons to snack on. The city seems unaware of the situation outside, and that kind of dichotomy seems...well, pretty silly. While independent virus research must be done outside of the city, corporations actually declare virus wars on each other, releasing viruses to afflict the populace in an attempt to get them to buy cures. Of course, there was an incident where a disease got out of control and caused a new disease, and there's always harsh punishments for viruses, but the net result is that corporations aren't prevented from doing this beforehand.

This is really, really hard to buy. First off, this is the last remnants of humanity. A single bad virus - one with a long incubation time - could hide until it was nice and spread around, and then kill the population of the city in a single shot. That's the last remnants of humanity dying in droves. In any other environment, only the insane would try this kind of thing. Here, it still happens. The book says "very infrequently", but the amount of information included in the book about them suggests otherwise. (Demonic plagues still hit the population, but they're not controllable.)

Another example: there are homeless "scrags" in the streets, but how that works, I have no idea - a society on its last legs wouldn't allow somebody not to have a job, and most of these scrags apparently function as a free-roaming herd for any interested Kultists. Employ and guard the scrags, and you force the Kultists to be more discerning. But it's a remnant from cyberpunk games that there have to be homeless, there has to be an underclass. In one setting, it makes sense. In an end-of-the-world setting, it doesn't make sense. I also wonder about a game whose setting is limited to one particular city, especially when every part of the city is identical - there's the Wasteland, but it's not described in great detail. (I've been told by the game's authors that there's a sequel game coming out that covers them in great detail.)

I was going to say that the game isn't sure about which side it wants the characters to play - and that's not a bad thing, but if one side gets shafted, then the result is that one side gets abbreviated stats in the back of the book and the other gets the full treatment. Fortunately, all sides get their share of the rules, whether Mystic, Kultist or corporate.

I have to fight the temptation to spell that Korporate, just to keep with the book's trends.

There's enough meat here to play with any particular character that you'd like, so that's a score in Obsidian's favor. There's even a neat little process for creating a corporation with a point system, so that you can tell what your corporation has and what it doesn't. The use of different fonts for each cult, however, is really jarring, and breaks up what little flow the text has on its own.

The rules themselves? They're pretty neat, although I'm sure that they've got a rough edge or two. What I liked the best is the social aspect of creating a character - you pick three "templates" - an Ethos and two Socials - which determine background, motivation, and various assets.

The first, Ethos, is the bad part, where you can only have a choice of about six Ethoses, three of which are variants of Mystic. If you're not a Corporate, Mystic, Machine or Kultist, then you don't really have a hook that the game can work with. There's no such thing as a normal person available for character generation.

What I do like are the secondary socials, so you can be a Mystic who lives on the Street, or a Kultist who's an investigator. I was going to say that it was more flexible than White Wolf's "pick a frat and we'll go" until I realized that the game only offered four choices of allegiance. White Wolf's character sections are also always pretty straightforward: I was confused about what the default starting point was for attributes and skills until I saw it detailed in a character summary - but as far as I can tell, that's the only place where it's mentioned. The step of allocating the mandatory two dice to attributes and skills doesn't correspond to the summary. It's a creepy feeling to think that the game's authors may not even have a grip on how the game is supposed to work. And picking ten "points" of rituals is hard to figure out until you realize that you just spend points for dice of rituals - but I had to flip back and forth to find it. As it's been mentioned before, the organization is poor. Also, unless the bonus generation points are spent liberally, most skills will be fairly low - even lower than Paranoia, in which skills aren't even that important. (Well, except Bootlicking.) Everybody starts out with two dice worth of skills, and most occupations only deal out measly +2 bonuses to a single skill, or +1 to an attribute and +2 to a skill. Skills may not be important, but you should have some more influence over your

The system is somewhat similar to West End's D6 system - you're assigned a difficulty number to beat with a number of six-sided dice, ranging from three to twenty-one. The combat system is modified by levels depending on the difficulty of an action; there's examples given. Damage is allocated with a hit location table - in a neat bit of game mechanics, bursts hit two locations while full automatics hit five. However, because the allocations are random, it could lead to some goofy hit locations - four in the left arm, one in the right leg, for example. There is a useful rule for letting skilled characters hit additional times.

As for the villains: I find them interesting. It reminds me of a cross between Torg and Warzone, with monsters and landscapes that are entirely based around a particular theme or sin. It sounds like a wargame - and in Warzone's case, it's true - but it also allows one to expand on the particular ecology of a race of monsters, like Torg did with its various invading cosms. Some of them are very loosely defined - the Circle of Avarice sounds just like the traditional Hell - while others aren't defined at all, like the enigmatic Box of Under. (That's good, I should point out.)

What's also nice is the fact that you can create your own demons - there's a wide variety of powers at different costs that you can stick together to form a demon, with special sub-abilities for demons from each circle. If you want to throw something completely unexpected at the players, you can do that; if you want to go with a standard demon, there's examples given in the back of the book. Most of them are fairly standard, but there are a few abilities that stand out - I liked the one that allowed a demon to mark a human off as immune from attack from other demons of the same Circle.

There's also a corporate entity generator, and I liked this - it lets you distribute points around to determine just how much a company has in terms of resources and personnel. It's a useful resource for anybody who needs to figure out just what their company has, or if it has a contracting license, or what have you; it also includes some minor hooks for adventures, like keeping a corporate customer happy, or recovering an artifact that the company was lucky enough to get ahold of. Expanded into a full-length book, maybe a supplement, it would be worth buying; however, it doesn't help the rest of the book in terms of cohesion.

The equipment chapter has a lot of stuff, most of it along fairly standard lines - holsters, ID cards, medical kits, watches, disease pills and so on. Armor runs through individual areas of the body to be armored, so that you can buy leg greaves and so forth; there's also suits of power armor for various amounts of cash. The guns take up a big section of their own - I like that they have the option available, but there's way too much information on who made them, their history, endless information that chews up space that could be used somewhere else. The explosives are interesting, ranging from napalm to sub-nuclear; the detonators were a bit much. There's also an short list of vehicles and an enormous amount of modificatons for them, most of which are fairly standard - fire extinguishers, all-wheel steering and so forth. Ejector seats will have to wait for another day, I suppose.

What's unfortunate is the Cyberware chapter - most of it is designed to simply augment existing attributes and damage; I don't believe that there's an entry for complete limb replacement, or decentralized hearts or anything fancy beyond electricity-conducting fingertips. There's a lengthy list of security devices which would be handy for any Shadowrun GM, but I don't know why they're here; are corporate raids supposed to be this frequent?

The chemicals and drugs run the gamut. Some of them are interesting, like a drug that lets you see sound as if it were disturbing water - the air ripples - while some, like syntharettes, are just boosted versions of cigarettes. Methadone, a real-life drug, makes its appearance as a mystically-inclined drug which allows for greater contemplation; me, I thought that it was a substitute for heroin.

There's a lot more than what I've described here, but I can only read so much before my eyes start to hurt. There's sample demons, Terror Ratings, the various occupations. And there's also the sneaking feeling that I'm reading it too quick, or not in enough detail, which is a feeling that anybody is going to get when they read it - I keep thinking that there's some philosopher's stone of a concept that'll make the thing work for me. I've been told that I read things too quickly, like when I reviewed Aberrant - in that case, the rules were crystal-clear, whereas the setting had a lot of information intertwined with comics, interviews, and assorted other junk, making it less than useful. In Obsidian's case, it's just a result of the poor writing and a lot of fancy terms for what should be straightforward.

Ultimately, I'll say this: Obsidian is a mess of a game, but there's a lot of interesting ideas within it. And those ideas are good when taken individually, but they wind up in a stew of poor writing and half-thought out ideas that just don't work. I've been told by the author that it works if you play it, and I imagine it does. But it isn't a fun read, and I have to say that I wouldn't recommend it to anybody who's in the market for a new game.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)