Preface
First, be warned that I am a Jack Vance freak fanboy.
Second, this is a capsule review, not a playtest. DE is easy enough to learn, but it has a mechanism called styles, which makes for some unpredictability. More on that later.
Third, Jack Vance’s language style is infectious. As this language is an integrated part of the game I will not attempt to keep my writing free of Vancianisms; if my language bugs you at places, you may take this as an indication that neither the Dying Earth RPG would bug you too, or that I am an inept writer.
This review contains first an overview of the game, and then 3 sections on subjects I find particularly worthy to dwell on: a look at this game’s relationship to standard fantasy, a critique of the core system, and the obvious question “Does this RPG really help you play as Jack Vance writes?”.
A note of pedantry: Jack Vance’s peculiar but amusing concept of magic for the Dying Earth books were copied more or less completely to a certain standard fantasy game called Dungeons and Dragons. A truly baffling game design decision, all considered.
Overview
The Dying Earth is a fantasy game set in an far future were the sun is about to go out, hence the name. The Earth itself is not dying as such, in fact it is covered with teeming wilderness and dotted with ruins of ancient temples and cities, and the occasional community ruled by strange customs and sometimes a petty tyrant. The ages of science are long gone, and magic has taken it’s place.
The players take the role, depending on the power level decided by the GM, as neither wandering adventures, local mages or nearly godlike arch-mages.
The book itself is 190 pages in hardcover. It very well laid out, have good examples, footnotes and a fine index. It is obvious that the writers have taken every pain to make to this game easy to learn and use; for example the obligatory “what is roleplaying” section is the best I remember reading, ever. The book also benefit from being able to take quotes from the Dying Earth books to create the right atmosphere. No need for the standard 5 pages of lard-like gamer amateur fiction, Vance can do the job in a hundred words.
The Dying Earth RPG contains all the elements you can expect form a basic rulebook; how to make a character, GM advice, player advice, a monster collection, and so on. Rather than making this review an advanced table of contents, I will instead move on to points of particular interest.
What kind of fantasy is this?
Dying Earth is situational fantasy, similar to situational comedy. It’s focus is the scene at hand, rather than the great fight between good and evil. Characters in this game concern themselves with getting revenge over whoever affronted their dignity last, swindling their way out of inn bills they cannot pay, seducing temple virgins and fleeing mad mobs of irate customers for their wonder elixirs, which did not turn out to ail skin disorders at all, being, as it were, made of dishwater.
Since the situations are all that matters, the characters are not all that different, rules wise. There are no optional disadvantages, all characters are subject to arrogance, avarice, indolence, gourmandism, pettifoggery and rakishness by default, and must expend character points if they wish to lessen these standard traits. A complex character background is not required or indeed useful; still the game has better rules for having henchmen, items, contacts in high places and wealth than most.
Talk and magic is as important in Dying Earth as combat. And the rules reflect this.
The core system
There are no classes. There are no basic attributes like strength and intelligence. There are however several skills.
Let us take the skill Perception. Say you have 5 in Perception rating, and therefore start with a perception pool of 5. Now you wish to find the sapphire that fell in the grass during the coughing fit of the Womugan the Obese: you roll a single six sided die, on a 4 you succeed. “What!” you say, “What good is the skill then?”. Well, if you had failed your 4 roll, you could have paid a point form your perception pool to make a reroll, to get another chance of finding the gem. You could of course keep rolling 5 times if you kept failing, but then you would be out of perception rerolls, maybe for the rest of the session…
Now let us say you wishes to use your perception to spot a card cheat. The card cheat is in fact the initiating part, he rolls a 2 on his first attempt, but uses his Quick Fingers skill pool to reroll getting a 5. Now you get your first, free, attempt to counter his skill. If this is a failure you can spend perception pool points to reroll. If you succeed, the card cheat must make a new reroll (and pay for it) to negate your success. And so on until neither one of you gives up, in order to preserve precious pool points, or run out of points and thus looses.
A bit of gaming theory
Notice how this contest seems like combat in other games? Thrust and counter trust? The use of ability pools for rerolls solves an ancient games designer problem: “Why is all skill use, exempt combat, boring?” The answer of course is that in most games a skill is an all or nothing affair. Horse chases, swinging across chasms, wooing princesses: a single die roll. It’s just more fun to kill orks.
Another problem with the single skill roll is that you often fail. 90 % in climb? You will fall to your death within 10 climbing attempts. 90% in sword attack? Those orks will die by the dozens because you roll each combat round: the one in ten failure will drown in a sea of merry slaughter. A reroll pool lets you pay a little price to reroll that fatal climbing roll, hanging on with your fingernails after all.
Yet another old problem the reroll pool system solves is this: if two skills could benefit a roll, which one to use? Say the card cheat from above had 7 both in Gambling and in Quick Fingers, should he not be better at cheating than if he had 7 in just one of these skills? In a typical RPG he would not. The GM would rule which one of his skills he could use, and the other skill would not help him at all. In Dying Earth both skills would help him because he can use both pools, giving him an effective pool of 14, and the choice to preserve a pool he intents to use later (maybe his quick fingers pool will find use in lifting that sapphire out of your pocket as the evening progresses).
A personal note: Now that I have seen these old problems solved elegantly and with seeming ease, I must say I will look more harshly on all those games who have just ignored the problems for decades.
Persuasion, Magic and Combat skills
Dying Earth ads a level of complexity to its most important skills: persuasion, magic and combat. Each of these skills have styles.
Let us take Persuasion: it has 6 different styles, and you must choose one of them (or roll a die). Now to resist Persuasion everybody is advised to have the Rebuke skill, which also comes in 6 different styles. Each style trumps another style and is in turn trumped by a third style. If you a trumped you must pay precious extra points from your skill pool to make rerolls against it. So, if your persuasion style is Charming people with a Wary rebuke style will have a hard time resisting your friendly advice, while people with a Contrary rebuke style will be inclined to do exactly the opposite of what you say.
Similarly if your attack style is pure Strength, you will bash away the defense style Parry with ease, while the defense style Vexation will, well, vex you no end.
How does all this balance? Is there a particular combination of styles that will rule the day, all things being equal? Here a couple of months of playtesting would have been nice, but it seems safe to assume that a character who is lucky to face only people with defense and rebuff skills he can trump, will be happy and prosperous, while the character who faces skills that can trump him must get used to adversity.
There are other neat features of the core rule system, but suffice to say that they mostly gives little advantages to those with high skill ratings and pools.
On magic
Magic is spell based and uses the same skill system as the rest of the system, with magic styles, pools and whatnot. Of special interest is the Arch-mage, the highest powerlevel in the game: an Arch-mage controls a Sandestin, in effect a magic elemental, which can do anything magic can do with the snap of a finger. Or tentacle. This gives the Arch-mage vast power, the only drawback being that Sandestins are devious, uncooperative and lazy.
Is this game REALLY Jack Vance’s Dying Earth?
The answer is quite simply yes. Every advice and every rule support play in the spirit of the books. I dare say that the rulebook is so well written that it could make even a group of strangers to the books play a perfect game of Dying Earth. An example: as I mentioned in the preface the language of Jack Vance is special, and quite central to the setting. Everybody in the books talks this way. In order to motivate the players to use the special language, they are each equipped with a couple of quotes for Vance’s books at the beginning of the game. If they succeed in using these quotes during the game, they get a XP bonus, the wittier the use, the bigger the bonus. A quote might be “I have taken counsel with myself and believe I can adequately fulfill the obligations of the job”.
Other features that help insure playing in the right spirit is the adventures checklist, which guides the GM to make Vancian adventures (it goes from Odd Customs to Floppish Apparel), sound advice to players on which concepts from other roleplaying games to forget in a hurry (such as combat is good, adversity is bad) and the whole emphasis on persuasion, which gets as much coverage as combat. In fact all standard RPG rules and advice that support a consistent DE game have been streamlined, and all standard RPG rules and advice that do not has been dumped without ceremony, making The Dying Earth roleplaying game a masterpiece in novel-to-roleplaying game adaptation.
In short
You should consider buying Dying Earth if:
- You are interested in a simple rule system that solves many problems that other games have ignored, and thus forced you to work around.
- You are interested in a different take on fantasy, or perhaps interested in situational roleplaying in general.
- You are a Jack Vance freak fanboy.
Mads Jakobsen
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