The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Ah, the fantasy role-playing gaming industry - bastion of imagination and creativity. At least that's what it says on the cover, right next to the picture of the barbarian babe in the chain-mail bikini. With the advent of games like Mage: The Ascension and Over The Edge role-playing became all 'nineties' and postmodern, dealing with more mature themes and exotic, subjective-reality settings. This incidentally spawned a new renaissance in the gaming industry for inventiveness and high-production standards. But your typical fantasy book still falls far behind, buried under the weight of fantasy conventions that are as old as the Tolkien chapter quotes.

I am always interested in fantasy books that 'push the envelope' and do something new with the genre. I can think of only a handful of settings that do this, including AD&D's now defunct Planescape setting or the excellent Amber role- playing game. Coming to think of it both featured elves and wizards, so go figure.

So I pricked up my ears when I came across OtherWorld Creations slick web site. It would seem that OtherWorld had managed to beat everyone else to the post and actually publish the first d20 campaign book, rather than another of the slew of d20 adventures that are flooding the market. So I bought a copy of the Diomin worldbook and had a look.

The cover seemed to promise everything I'd been hoping for. It resembled a dark mix of SLA Industries and Ravenloft, with a rich, glossy artwork reminiscent of the excellent Immortal role-playing game. 'Elves? We don't need no stinkin' elves',' proudly proclaimed the cover blurb. 'Who needs elves?' it adds.

Setting

The book starts with the obligatory fantasy creation myth, which itself begins with an extract from the Book of Genesis. Usually, I find this sort of thing a bit pretentious, but here it's curiously appropriate because the whole thing's been ripped straight from the Bible. Sure, there are some cosmetic differences: most of the biblical figures have been cleverly renamed, making them easier to copyright. For instance, God is known as 'The One' and Satan is known as 'Cedron', which unfortunately sounds a lot like Cedric. To be honest, I prefer the biblical names.

The rest of the historical details of Diomin are, in an unprecedented break from tradition, hidden amongst the PC race descriptions which means players can participate in the new sub-game 'hunt the obscure setting detail' - probably for hours at a time. What's more, almost no details about Diomin itself are included - you know, like geography and climate. Okay, I'll admit that these are the bits I skip through anyway, but it's nice to have them sometimes. For example, the Dark Sun setting turned the landscape into a full-blown campaign antagonist. OtherWorld have thoughtfully included a map or two, but they looked like they were put together with the old paint package that comes with Windows 3.1, and you just can't get a feel for the world from them.

Anyway, back to the races of Diomin: these include fantasy stereotypes such as the proud Arak barbarians, the decadent Gnolaum, the Romanesque Empire of the Tirasim and their evil counterparts, the Zeredites. This part of the book is actually the most interesting, and the various human-derived races make for a refreshing break from the usual humans-but-shorter or humans-but-with-pointy-ears boredom that other fantasy RPGs suffer from. Of note are the Hearthom - a race of passionate, living statues with mysterious origins - and the Tirasim Empire, with its political intrigues with the Zeredites.

Of course, the book is notable for its absence of elves - although I don't know why they bothered: the feudalistic Gnolaum are all but elves in name and ears, as arrived through a series of lawyers so as, one supposes, no elvish copyrights are infringed. What's more, removing one fantasy cliché and simply replacing it with another, i.e. the evil Gadianti cat-men, renders the whole exercise futile. Yes, that's right, evil cat men - how passé.

Rules

The most exciting ramification of the whole d20 fad is the idea of open-content: material that belongs to everybody and can be freely (well, sort of) re-used, on the only condition that it is published under the OGL (Open Gaming License) - an idea known as copyleft. Now, not only can you buy d20 material for its regular content (adventures, settings, etc) but you can also reuse the open content rules as and how you wish. Say, if you wanted to start your own d20 publishing house and, let's face facts, who doesn't these days?

Yet, it seems OtherWorld just haven't quite got into the open-content spirit. With the potential to publish new spells, races, classes and so forth it seems odd that the books only contribution to the open-gaming community is a single new feat, a single new character class and a few races. There are no monsters, no new spells and no prestige classes. While there are six whole, new PC races to choose from, most are so closely tied to the Diomin setting you'd be hard put to use them anywhere else. Besides, the cultural details of these races are non-open so at the end of the day all you get are a few lines of statistics in that anyone could have come up with.

The same cannot be said for the shaman class. One of the reasons I bought Diomin was the promise of the new shaman character class, lacking in the 3rd Edition rules. And I wasn't disappointed: a whole fourteen sides are devoted to shamans and the spirit world, all of which is open-content. But, it's completely useless, being too closely tied to the setting. If I wanted to use the Diomin shaman class for my own, home-grown setting I'd have to completely rewrite the material, by which time I might as well have written a whole new class from scratch. What is more, the rules for summoning spirits are too clunky and vague. Nearly each level of shaman advancement brings extra rules and added complication for controlling spirits where a more unified system would be expected.

However, despite my qualms with Diomin's open-content, OtherWorld has published, and continue to publish, additional prestige classes, monsters and spells on their web site for free download. I heartily recommend you check them out. If this continues it will redeem the lack of open-content in the worldbook and, hopefully, start a rather nice trend in the gaming industry.

Conclusion

In the end, the Diomin setting seems more like a work in progress than a finished product - a setting haunted by biblical references and black-and-white morality. OtherWorld are trying to sell Diomin on the basis of its originality and, in my opinion; it's just not original enough - quite the reverse, generic in fact. It reeks of 'teen spirit', like a mid-term paper hastily finished during a lunchtime and handed in with a "that'll do" attitude. Perhaps with a small picture of Conan the Barbarian absent-mindedly drawn in a corner.

As a fellow reviewer pointed out on this very web site, new gaming companies are not considered fair game for bad reviews, particularly in the harsh climate of this industry. But, Diomin really doesn't have anything to redeem itself with. The financial difficulties, such as costs of print, hiring artists and distribution, etc, that OtherWorld are facing must be hard, which excuses the layout and artwork (and three-inch margins!) contained in Diomin. What it doesn't excuse is the poor quality of the actual material. It costs little to develop a well-rounded setting save time, effort and imagination. Considering Diomin is supposed to be OtherWorld Creations flagship product I would say very little time, effort or imagination has been spent on it.

To add insult to injury, nearly half of the book is taken up with the 'epic' starting adventure To Save a Nation. It's linear, predictable, and not particularly epic, taking up much needed space that could have been devoted to further setting material. If I'd wanted a d20 adventure I could have bought a better one from the wide choice lining bookshelves at the moment.

As it stands, Diomin is disjointed and incomplete. Future supplements promise more information, but when I buy a 'worldbook' I do expect a fully fleshed world and there's barely enough material here to run a campaign. If I were a cynical person (and I am) I would suspect that either a lot of the material was being saved for these hypothetical future supplements or simply hadn't been written in rush to get to publication.

Wait for the second edition. If there is one.