FVLMINATA: Armed with Lightning (the V is the letter “u”) is a brand-new historical fantasy game from a company called Thyrsus. The main authors are Jason E. Roberts and Michael S. Miller.
This game is set in a non-decaying version of the Roman Empire at its height. In real life Rome started collapsing at some point, but in the world of FVLMINATA the Romans invented gunpowder and were able to achieve an unbeatable advantage over their military enemies. This prevented any sort of collapse and Roman borders seem relatively secure, although there is always a good deal of skirmishing with various groups.
FVLMINATA is alternate but not too alternate history; gunpowder plays a minor role in non-military affairs and I didn’t glimpse any other technological inventions. Steampunk fans should look elsewhere. What is presented is a huge Roman empire that doesn’t seem to have too many major problems.
The game is not about your traditional adventuring party fantasy. The authors make several sarcastic remarks about dungeon crawls and other staples of D&D and similar games. Instead typical campaigns might focus on soap opera type drama, political intrigue and daily life. More action packed stuff may follow in future supplements.
I’ll split the rest of the review into a discussion of the setting and the rules. The setting is the most unique part of FVLMINATA and I’ll discuss that first.
Setting
Like I said before, because of the invention of gunpowder in this world the Roman Empire never went into decline. It is 248 AD, the year 1000 AUC in the Roman calendar. Rome controls almost everything between Armenia and Hispania/Spain.
The first thing a reader needs to get used to is the extensive use of Latin. A handy pronunciation guide is right up front. Actually, you only need to memorize a handful of key terms, but almost always the Latin word is included in parentheses when a new concept is being introduced. The use of Latin is one of the neatest things about gaming in this setting because it is an actual dead language that is not too hard to use. You can give your games a lot of authenticity by using Latin terms and you don’t have to rely on the goofiness of modern day game designers to come up with terms for you. Even the most detailed fantasy languages such as Quenya and Sindarin from Tolkien and Tsolyani from Barker (Tekumel) can’t compare to an actual real-life language. Also, since Latin is the basis for a lot of the English vocabulary that was imported from French, many of the words seem vaguely familiar. The pronunciation is not that different from Spanish, which is a language many Americans are passably familiar with.
The majority of the book is a detailed look at the lives of the residents of Rome and other cities in the Empire. Want to know how some authors conjecture Roman food, laws and entertainment worked? This is the book for you. Want a bunch of ready-made adventure ideas? This is not the book for you.
The amount of detail here is really impressive. You get information on the career path of a Senator, the history of the Roman Empire, makeup, dining, festivals and many other aspects of daily life. There is a really good mix of historical research and creativity; the mix is so good that I can rarely tell what is made up and what is real.
The first 20 pages of setting information is on the geography of the city of Rome and of the various provinces. The map of the city of Rome lacks detail and hopefully will be improved upon in an upcoming supplement. The map of the Empire is functional but is not high quality and also lacks detail. Each province has also a paragraph or so of information.
Surprisingly, the history section is only about six pages long. The game takes the mythic history of Rome as the truth and doesn’t try to explain what historians really think was going on in Italy before Rome. Events diverge from real history about 96 AD with the discovery of gunpowder/fulminata. As of the current date the emperor is Avidius Maximus, an immature teenager.
Next we get about 30 or so pages on government, religion and many other aspects of daily life. A lot of fantasy settings lack any real cultural detail; since this game is based upon a real culture it has detail in spades. Want to know about the industry of quarrying? It’s in here.
The next 20 or so pages are about entertainers, which here means mostly gladiators and charioteers. The amount of details on this one topic is astounding, which probably has to do with a desire to cash in on interest surrounding movies like Ben Hur and Gladiator. There is certainly enough material here to run a campaign surrounding these sports. I personally would have moved all of this material to a supplement, but it is fun to read anyway.
The last setting chapter is 20 or so pages on the Roman military. Despite the invention of gunpowder, the legions are still the good old Roman legions. Extensive detail is given on ranks, units and tactics. However, the focus is on roleplaying details, not wargaming. If you’re dying to play a female fighter, there is a new invention called the Amazonian Guard just for you. There are also several pages on the navy.
The real problem with the military section is that there is only a third of a page dedicated to enemies of Rome. What is the point of having all this military detail if there is no real information about the people the military is supposed to fight? This is my main criticism of this initial rulebook: there is no detail on setting your game outside the city of Rome or one of the other major cities. In order to set your game in an exotic province, you need to know about the non-citizen locals, and this books provides basically zero information on them. For example, the major threat to the Empire is the Parthians, who appear to be ancient Persians/Iranians. But I personally know nothing about Persians of this time period and couldn’t put together a realistic encounter between Romans and Parthians, let alone set my game on the Parthian frontier.
Rules
FVLMINATA is from a new company and is not directly based upon any previous rules set that I know of. Like most modern games it has a core mechanic. Be warned, FVLMINATA’s is very gimmicky and may not appeal to everyone.
First up you have to create your own specialty dice. Take some d8s and wrap them up in stickers the game thoughtfully includes. These stickers turn the d8s into d4s, with the four labels I, III, IV and VI. This is supposed to simulate some game Romans played with the knucklebones of sheep. The converted dice are called tali.
In order to accomplish anything you need to succeed at an action roll. This involves rolling under the sum of the appropriate attribute and skill on four (yes four) tali. The target number (attribute skill) can be modified by the GM to reflect difficulty. The annoying aspect of this for me is that I don’t like rolling four dice every time my character takes an action.
A neat thing about FVLMINATA (although I am sure other games have this as well) is that each skill can be used with different attributes depending on the situation. A rifle is called a pilum. Shooting your pilum and cleaning your pilum both use the pilum skill, but use different attributes.
If you succeed at your action roll, you have to role four dice another time for an effect roll. This is where the true gimmick/flavor of the game comes in, because instead of simple adding up the dice, you use the results to a form a hand like you do in poker. For example, you can get a two of a kind or one of each of the four numbers. The harder the hand you rolled, the more effective your action is.
The actual numeric effect (if an actual number is needed) is found in the Effect Table, which lists multipliers that modify some base effect. Confusing matters, there are Special Effect Multipliers that are basically just twice the regular effects and Inverse Effect Multipliers for when more of something is bad for you. Text descriptions give a lot of advice on how to interpret effect rolls for different categories of skills, like influencing someone or healing them.
My fundamental opinion on this system is that it requires too much dice rolling. To do anything you need to roll eight dice, four each for the two steps. When two characters are opposing each other, each player needs to roll eight, for a grand total of sixteen dice.
Character creation is relatively unstructured. The most important choice is social rank, which is one of Senator, Equestrian, Plebian, Freedman, Foreigner, or Slave. The first three are Roman citizens and the last three aren’t. Rank is very important in Roman society and the game advises you to create a party of characters of similar rank to explain why these characters associate with each other. The authors include a long list of Roman names to let your character have that authentic feel.
You get 42 points to split among four attributes rated between 5 and 15 each. The attributes are Intelligentia, Agilitas, Pietas and Vis (strength). Note how they are in Latin, this is a huge part of the flavor of the game. You also get 42 skill points to do as you please, plus each social rank gets some bonus skills. Skills are split into categories based upon their patron god in the Roman pantheon. Each player selects a patron for his character and skill from that patron are increased by 1. As an example, a soldier might have as his patron Mars the god of war, and all his weapon skills will be 1 higher than the amount of points he spent on them. There is no official class, archetype, or profession system. Later in the book there is plenty of roleplaying material on different occupations though.
There is nothing non-standard about attributes and skill, but I think the game integrates the Roman flavor well by using Latin names for attributes and assigning the skills to gods.
The really new spot on the character sheet is for your various personality stats. First, you have four humors: black bile, blood, phlegm and yellow bile. This is some sort of Roman mumbo jumbo but the basic idea is that a successful person has his humors in balance. Being in balance gives minor advantages in certain situations throughout the game. Most characters start out of balance, meaning that they have positive scores in some of the four humors. Depending on how out of balance you are, you get physical, mental and emotional temperaments that are adjectives that describe your character’s personality. These are found on a big table and examples include sentimental, fatigued, and lecherous. I think this system is a fun way to encourage roleplaying.
Combat is not the main focus of the game, and the basic rule is just to use your weapon skills to attack. Initiative is strangely given out by social rank (senator, plebian, etc.) and damage is a combination of a weapon rating and our good friend the Effects Table. For such a simple system, it is odd that weapons use one of three damage modes (blunt, edge, pilum/gun) and each suit of armor has a different effectiveness against each type. It seems like you have a number of wound points equal to your Vis/Strength score. When your damage exceeds this total, you are unconscious. Given the weapon damage ratings, this is going to happen pretty quickly in combat. Luckily, you get to take another amount of wound points equal to your Vis between unconsciousness and death. Each 2 wound points gives your character a –1 penalty to difficulty modifiers on action rolls.
There aren’t that many special rules for rifles (pila) and pistols (hastulae). Basically they are flintlocks and take time to reload so they can only be used once in a disorganized melee. Roman legionaries, the monopoly users of guns, are issued rifles and short swords called gladii. The main Roman military tactic seems to be massed firing of rifles into the enemy ranks, and to use the gladii when the two sides close.
FVLMINATA has rules for magic, as any good fantasy game should. Unlike most games, magic isn’t the star of the show. Magi characters usually have a regular day job and their orders seem most like the Masons or Lion’s Club. Details are given on three orders but the differences are mostly about roleplaying. The two semi-official Roman orders are the Mithraic Priests, followers of a Persian tradition, and Etruscan Diviners who follow a cultural tradition that Rome assimilated. These two groups are the only ones who know the secrets of making gunpowder; they have everyone else fooled into thinking it is mined in volcanoes. Witches are the third group; they are probably included to give female characters something to do.
Magi learn spells like skills. Spells can be at a –1, 0 and 1 mastery, and learning new spells is restricted in that you can only have a certain number of –1 spells. You have to increase the ratings of existing spells to 0 before learning new ones. Spells themselves have power ratings that describe how many magic points it takes to cast them. A magus’s magic point total refreshes every day.
Spells are taken from different Mediterranean cultures. For example, the Seal of Isis spell is from Aegypt. There are a few Iudean (Jewish/Israeli) spells. They are a little more subtle than your usual flashy D&D fare.
Interestingly, the Roman gods do not play a very important role in the game. Unlike in D&D, priests are not granted magic powers by the gods and instead seem to be political hacks. You can call for divine intervention, but this gives only a minor bonus on your dice rolls. The game’s feel is definitely one of realism rather than something mythic like the Odyssey.
As far as I can tell, there are no nonhuman sentient beings or monsters of any sort in this setting. Since a campaign could involve civilized Romans going out into the provinces, a GM could easily include monsters or nonhumans out in the wilderness if he wanted to.
Adventure (spoilers)
The rulebook includes a sample adventure. It basically involves military men busting a spice merchant for smuggling gunpowder out of Rome to sell to the Chinese. As far as I know Wen Ho Lee is not involved. The first part of the adventure is a luxurious dinner at the merchant’s house. The rest of the adventure is some lame detective work followed by beating up on flunkies. The final showdown is on a boat.
It is suggested that you use pregenerated characters. The characters seem like a typical Star Trek crew: officer, weapons officer, engineer, doctor, and intelligence officer. The only odd thing is that the officer’s wife is along for the ride as well. There is supposed to be a love-triangle subplot to add to the drama.
The adventure definitely isn’t the strong point of the book.
Design
The book uses a relatively large font in a two-column style. But trust me, there is plenty of text here for you to read. The art style is pencil shading. Unfortunately the most common piece of art is a character portrait from the waist up. This gets a little boring after a while since everyone starts to look the same. I would have preferred more functional art such as better maps and detailed pictures of clothes, buildings and equipment.
Future Products
Some of the problems with this rulebook will hopefully be addressed in future products. I got this info off of the website www.fvlminata.com.
The most serious problem with this book is that there is no information about people living in the provinces. What is needed is a starter setting for those not interested in the city of Rome itself. An upcoming product Insulae Britannicae (British Isles) should do just that. Hopefully this product will be a great setting where you can explore both Roman civilization and how it impacts native groups in a frontier setting.
For those interested in political intrigue, Bellum Civium is about a civil war. Right now we know nothing about the different political factions in the Empire and hopefully this book will make running a Senatorial or military campaign a lot more fun.
Wrapup
For me the greatest strength of this setting is having a vaguely familiar but still different fantasy world in which to place whatever genre story you want. If you set your game in medieval Europe everyone thinks they’re the experts, and fictional fantasy worlds often lack depth. Here you get a world which has all the detail you want but much less of the historical baggage. This has a lot to do with the fact that Europe went through the Dark Ages that destroyed the legacy of Rome, but also relates to the alternate history setting. By changing history, the authors made it so things are different enough that no one should feel obligated to do enormous amounts of historical research before every session. As I have posted before on rpg.net, I wish that the creators of the WWII games Gear Krieg, Godlike and Weird Wars had dreamed up some alternate history of their own to make things more interesting. FVLMINATA shows what a rich genre alternate can be if it is done correctly.
It is certainly possible to use FVLMINATA’s Roman Empire as a generic fantasy setting. Junk the FVLMINATA rules and bring in whatever other system you prefer and game away. The provinces are filled with all sorts of non-citizen riff-raff that could easily include your favorite fantasy race or country. Rome is certainly majestic enough that importing high levels of magic wouldn’t ruin its feel.
Since Ars Magica already uses a lot of Latin jargon, importing its system into FVLMINATA will preserve a lot of its flavor. It might be nice to do away with the social stigma attached to magi in the Mythic Europe of Ars Magica for once. If you want religious based magic and a good overall game system, the forthcoming Tekumel game should be easily convertible. Like FVLMINATA, it is set in a huge empire where social rank is of the utmost importance. Just replace the Tekumel temples with Roman ones and away you go.
For all of you FATAL players, Romans seem to have a more relaxed attitude towards sex than medieval Christians. :)
All in all, in case you couldn’t tell I like the FVLMINATA setting a lot better than the dice-heavy rules. I’m giving it a 4 for substance, although if they didn’t include the rules I would have given it a 5. I’m pretty ambivalent about the art, so I’ll give it a 3 for style.
As a final point, I wish to commend the authors for the amount of historical research that they did. Some historical games are more accurate than others; from what I can tell this one is dead on target.
I think this is a great approach to fantasy gaming and look forward to seeing more products from Thyrsus set in the glorious Roman Empire.
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