THE SETTING
Remember that Lee Majors movie-within-a-movie in Scrooged called The Night the Reindeer Died? Well, cross that with the Rankin-Bass series of Christmas specials, and you've got Santa's Soldiers.
Santa really is a plump, jolly, magical individual who distributes toys made by his elves to all the good little girls and boys of the world... but that's where the comforting legend leaves off and Santa's Soldiers takes over.
You see, according to the game, Santa is rather naive, and he has plenty of enemies. To offset this rather worrisome combination, Mrs. Claus -- who is a deadly and ruthless assassin behind that grandmotherly facade -- organized a select group of elves into the Order of St. Nicholas (OSN), whose sole mission is to protect Santa and Christmas... by any means necessary.
The setting is a sometimes uncomfortable mix of the whimsical and the gritty. Players take the roles of the elven soldiers of the OSN, pitting big guns, sharp swords, sharper candy canes, ornament grenades, and Christmas magic against a variety of Santa-hating foes.
Several of these enemies draw their inspiration from Christmas special villains, such as the Winter Wizard (a.k.a. Winterbolt from "Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July") and the Grunch (a.k.a. the Grinch). The latter exemplifies the decidedly black humor of the game: The Grunch, upon discovering that the "Woos" were still singing even after he stole their Christmas goodies, didn't find the true meaning of Christmas; rather, he killed them all and fed them to his dog.
The game cleverly uses Santa's counterparts for the other three season's main holidays as his foes: The Easter Bunny (Spring, Easter), the Boogieman (Fall, Halloween), and the Anti-Claus (Summer, the Water Festival). Never heard of that last guy or his holiday? That's because the Water Festival fell out of favor due to Santa's growing influence, which is why the lord of the Festival went criminally insane and made himself the Anti-Claus.
(Actually, the OSN can't prove that the Easter Bunny is an enemy of Santa. They just have suspicions based upon her support for fax machines and opposition to electronic publishing, seeing this as a possible deforestation effort with the goal of hastening global warming, thereby lengthening spring and shortening winter.)
(I thought that was pretty damn funny.)
And then, of course, there's the Roman Catholic Church.
Yes, you read that correctly. You see, the Church includes an organization called Operation: True Meaning of Christmas, the goal of which is to remind people that Jesus is the Reason for the Season. After OTMC discovered the reality of Santa Claus, however, they decided that he was the main obstacle to their mission and focused their efforts on his destruction. So, the happy PC elf soldiers may well be assigned to gun down priests in order to protect Santa.
I find that fairly yucky.
THE SYSTEM
The Santa's Soldiers game system closely resembles a stripped-down Pendragon. That may seem like a pretty heady comparison for a 28-page downloadable comedy RPG, but there's a reason for that: the game designers put some serious thought into this system, and the result is solid enough for use as a quickie generic set of mechanics.
Like Pendragon, Santa's Soldiers uses a single d20 roll-under mechanic for all task resolution rolls and one or more d6s for damage rolls. A 1 is always a critical success and a 20 is always a botch. This means that ability levels in excess of 20 are of no value for unmodified rolls; if this bothers you, import Hero War's mastery mechanic, and you're good to go. Unlike Pendragon, the system uses a directly linked attribute skill mechanic. Because attributes share Pendragon's 3-18 scale, this means that the system is heavily weighted toward attributes over skills. Again, if this bothers you, slap on a penalty for unskilled attempts at skill use.
Character Creation
Players roll 3d6 to get their characters' scores in four attributes: Nimbleness, Strength, Cunning, and Christmas Spirit. All except Strength have associated skills, and all except Christmas Spirit are self-explanatory. The latter is a nebulous trait covering a variety of skills supposedly not covered by the other three, including Field Medicine, Toymaking, and Snow Travel, as well as the Magic skill. Non-elves have different attributes that fill this niche, and some of the resulting attribute/skill combinations are even stranger. Halloween monsters use Creepiness for Field Medicine?
Well, okay, I guess that does make a weird sort of sense...
Then we get to the derived attributes. Health -- basically Hit Points -- is the sum of Strength or Cunning (whichever is higher) and Christmas Spirit. Characters get from 1 to 3 actions per round and a damage bonus of -2 to 3 based upon their Nimbleness and Strength scores, respectively.
PCs are members of one of eight OSN brigades, each one named after one of the eight reindeer and each with the same rank and purpose. The ninth brigade, Brigade Rudolf, is the ruling circle of the Order and is off limits to PCs.
PCs are also members of one of four brigades, which correspond to fairly loose character classes. These brigades determine the special perks and extra skills with which the characters begin the game. The brigades and their perks are as follows: Grunt (extra Health), Commando (Marksman skill), Mage (Magic skill), and Support (extra starting skills). In addition, all elves get half of their Cunning score in skill points to spend however their players wish.
Combat
Combat is both simple and slick, utilizing the basic mechanic jazzed up with several clever little touches worthy of a much more advanced game. For example, a character can spend as many of his actions as he wishes on dodging. For every round spent, he makes one dodge roll, and the best margin of success is added to the difficulty of all attempts to hit him. Another example is the damage done by a great axe: the strength multiplier is doubled, meaning that weaker characters using such a heavy weapon will do less damage than they would have with a lighter weapon, while stronger characters who can take full advantage of that extra weight will do more damage.
Magic
Mages purchase spells with their skill points at a cost equal to the spells' casting difficulty, which ranges from 1 to 6. Each spell also has a set number of actions required for casting. Other than that, there are no limitations on spell casting, such as fatigue or magic points. The spells themselves are a mix of stock D&D spells and stock D&D spells with Christmassy twists. The list is only of elf magic, but the spell descriptions are simple enough to make the creation of other spells a snap.
THE BOOK
The writing is clear, concise, and frequently quite witty. The layout is slightly busy in places, but this is forgivable considering the amount of information squeezed into 28 pages. The artwork is mostly simple and cartoonish, but it does have a certain charm that grew on me after a while. There is no index, but one is hardly necessary in a book this small.
The game includes an adventure dealing with the mystery of why no letters to Santa are coming out of one particular little town. There is no obvious solution to the problem, although any one that would work would most likely require as much talking as fighting.
CONCLUSION
Santa's Soldiers proves just how much of a game can be packed into a minimal number of pages. While I personally find the game setting too whimsical to be cynical and too cynical to be whimsical, it should appeal to fans of the lighter shades of dark humor. The point is that this is more than just a cheap play-and-toss game; it is, in fact, as complete and as well-designed as games many times its size and cost. Deep 7 has a nice template here for cheap and efficient game design, and I hope they stick with it.
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