Benjamin Rogers has a very large beard. I’m not kidding; that fucking thing is massive, it’s like a reverse afro of orange hair projecting from his chin. You can’t help but to look at it, then realize that you’re staring at it, then look away again before he notices, shamefaced.
Well, not really. But it’s as good an intro as any to a review of his magnum opus, Promised Sands. (I have trouble writing introductions.)
Let’s step through: The opening fiction isn’t bad, giving a look at a pair of young people falling into the influence of a mentor, only to have one of them make a very serious – and very stupid – series of mistakes. You’re always trying to straddle a line in the opening fiction between showing off the world – which results in a dry recitation of place names and locations – and dealing with interesting characters, which is the basic engine behind any story. In this case, we get some interesting characters and a brief glance at the world surrounding them. It’s competent, but it’s not something that I’d use as a reference point.
Following that, we get a series of definitions.
And here, we’re going to introduce MacLennan’s Third Law, which is:
MACLENNAN’S THIRD LAW:
If you are going to describe anything in your game world, then make damned sure that your description does not include undefined terms, for the sake of your reader’s sanity.
For example: In the description of the lands of T’nah, we learn that the city of Kahl Gok provides living quarters for the Drachen riders of the Aij’ak.
However, there’s no explanation for what a Drachen is, or who the riders of the Aij’ak are. And we’re still trying to work all of this into the framework of the Maroc and the the Ido; and we’re also still trying to figure out what the practical difference between Ido and Maroc is. There’s so much information, so many terms which are particular to the setting, that it’s difficult to figure out what refers to what. And this continues throughout the entire book – there’s a section detailing the cultures that you can pick for your character before you wind up actually finding out what those cultures are about.
So: If you are writing a role-playing game, then remember that your reader has absolutely no idea what your world is like until you tell him; and then, if you do tell him, you have to start from the ground up and fill him in step by step. I would throw more obscenity in there if I thought that it would get my message across.
The races: Essentially, you’re seeing the D&D races rewritten to Promised Sands’ statistics – in order, you’ve got dwarves, orcs, two types of elves – normal and pseudo-drow – “troog”, crosses between gazelle and halflings, humans – both in original and adapted variety – a race which has a bony plate on its head, kinda like the Minbari from Babylon 5, five crossbreed races drawn from those previous races, and horse- and cat-people. They’re pretty standard races; I believe that the half-breed races could have been left out entirely, or sharply trimmed, without causing much harm to the game’s structure, but I’ll not dwell on that in order to get to what I thought would be a really interesting aspect of the game: The character creation, which basically acts like Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing’s career system, but more detailed.
Or, at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. I was, initially, going to gush about how detailed and interesting the character creation system is; how you can actually see your character developing as you run him through the early careers of his life, as he goes from apprentice to journeyman and so forth.
I was going to gush about it, until I actually tried to create a character. Essentially, the character creation system is literally hamstrung by its poor organization , lack of a chart by which you can track your progress through character creation, and over-assumption of familiarity with the game’s baroque world.
For example: For my initial character, I decided that I wanted to create a character who’s a Yethite, sort of like the Christians of the game world - spiritual pacifists. I also decided that I’d like to have a character who’s fairly smart, so I took a Numid as my character race. And, since I figured that he’d need a good occupation - and since it was first on the list - I decided that he’d be a blacksmith. In short, I’d have a character who was fairly smart, a dedicated pacifist, who spent his early life as a blacksmith.
Initial race selection worked out just fine - being a Numid got me the first dice I would roll for an attribute, and my culture package gave me my second set and some basic skills. Since I skipped directly to the culture that I wanted to take, I didn’t notice the paragraph at the beginning of the section where it mentions that each cultural skill starts at +10, which occurs after three paragraphs of easily shippable boilerplate text - which is unfortunate, since it’s important information.
One thing that I’m very happy with in this section is the ability to generate Qualities, a list of…well, qualities that affect your character. There’s ten of them, ranging from 1 to ten, worst to best - but the great thing about it is that, through various means, you can roll on the chart and see what affects your character. So, if, say, the Numid race has poor eyesight, then you roll 1d4 on the Eyesight table and see just how bad your Numid’s eyesight is, with the appropriate mechanical effects. It’s a great little mechanic, allowing racial penalties to exist in varying forms without feeling overbearing. (You can also spend Quality Points, which you get in chargen, in order to boost your result - so if you roll 1, and you want a character who isn’t blind, then you can blow two Quality points and boost your result up to 3, which is somewhat better.)
In any case; over to the occupation section, where we find out what kind of blacksmith our Numid Yethite friend is going to be. Each occupation has a basic SEC - Socio-Economic Category - which determines what kind of occupation you can take, so that if you’re from the slave socio-economic status, you can’t take a job as a noble diplomat. The SEC roll is determined by a dice roll, however, so it’s possible to have what you thought was going to be a Numid fighter wind up as a Numid slave field hand - you can shift occupations, of course, and there’s mechanics to leave a bad caste, but fans of more ordered character creation probably won’t be too happy with this. (As I understand, Mr. Rogers has been working on a way to come up with a point-based system for character creation, so perhaps we’ll see that in the future.)
But back to the story: My Numid Yethite wanted to be a blacksmith, meaning that his cultural SEC rating would have to equal or exceed the SEC rating for the job. Unfortunately, the Yethite culture’s SEC rating is…N/A. I was rather confused about this, so I PM’d Mr. Rogers for clarification. Mr. Rogers replied that the Yethites live in a communal system, and don’t really have a SEC rating per se - so my Yethite Numid, whom I’d originally envisioned as an urbanite, was now a member of a commune.
And here’s one of the primary weaknesses of the character creation system: The character creation and the setting are so mechanically intertwined that you can’t separate them. If you simply create a character without having read the entire book, then you will be totally lost when it comes to making a character because you won’t know who’s who. As a matter of face, if you take a culture that has your race as a traditional enemy, then you automatically start the game as a slave - and there’s no description of racial enemies in the cultural thumbnails that you pick from. If you want to find out which races the Chak traditionally beat on, then you have to flip to the back of the book to read that culture’s description - and, of course, the cultural descriptions don’t formally list racial enemies. Honestly: There’s no good excuse that I can think of to make the book’s fluff this intertwined with the character creation. I am actually looking back fondly on how organized fucking Synnibarr was, for crying out loud - for all of its faults, there was a clear progression through the various steps of character creation, and all of the tables that you needed were right there where you needed them. Christ!
Anywas: I decided to start over again, this time making a Numid from the Shnahn culture. Again, racial selection and cultural selection were easy enough, but the description for my chosen occupation - Rusahn Azili Pledge - was…
Fuck.
Okay, let’s see if I can explain this: If I’m reading correctly, your character goes through an initial apprenticeship, during which time he can pick a primary, secondary and tertiary careers - in other words, you can have a side occupation and a hobby as well as your primary occupation. You spend 1d4 +3 years in your chosen occupation, and at the end of your term of service, you can try to advance out of your existing occupation by making a roll on a particular skill. Right? Right.
But here’s the thing: When I decided to be a Rusashn initiate, the career lists being Qai sensitive as one of the requirements, as well as needing to have a contact within the sect. However, there’s no way for a character coming fresh out of the first two steps of character creation to have access to contacts; unless I miss my guess, there’s no way to enter into that career for a newbie character. There is a Qai Sensitive career that lets you get in on the ground floor, but as far as I can tell, there’s no legal way to enter into the initiate category from the beginning. (There’s also no particular way to find stuff in a hurry, since there’s no formatting to make the titles of the occupations stand out – and believe me, this makes it very difficult to find stuff in short order. My brother also faults the book for having the text too close to the gutter, but…meh.)
There is a way to extend your character into an advanced occupation, much like Warhammer Fantasy - as a matter of fact, the career system here does use WHFRP as its model - but then I have to ask why cult initiate is listed among the basic occupations, rather than being an advanced occupation. You can have a second apprenticeship, albeit with fewer gains in skills, but it’s slipped into a paragraph headered “Promotions and Advanced Occupations” - neither of which would suggest “second apprenticeship” to me. There doesn’t seem to be a clear, coherent model for how this system works - or, at least, a clear and coherent model that’s written down in the book, rather than in Benjamin Roger’s head.
Even more confusing are suggestions that the career system may have been slightly different at some point. For example, if you roll a critical failure in an attempt to promote out of the Kril drachen caregiver occupation, then the book states that your next occupation must be as a slave - but the character generation seems to suggest that (a) you pick your occupations all at once, primary, secondary and tertiary, and (b) your initial career only indicates your basic skill set, rather than your end socioeconomic status. As a matter of fact, there’s no rules available for how you adjust skills when you take on a new occupation - so your drachen tender may be the best drachen tender ever to swing a shovel, but he won’t learn any new skills relating to his occupation. And on top of that, the game specifies stuff like “you must take Water Scout for the next year”, which seems to suggest that you have to transfer into a new occupation…but then, do you take Water Scout as your Secondary occupation?
Usually, at this point, I start screaming something about the game eating my eyes.
I’m sure that there’s a good explanation for how all of this is supposed to work; right now, it looks like the authors of the game started out with a life path system, like Traveller, then backtracked and let you pick whatever occupations you wanted to without removing the legacy life path stuff. There is a section later in the book about advanced occupations, but looking at it, it doesn’t’ seem to explain how the basic chargen is supposed to work for promotion.
Let’s shunt chargen to the side for a moment and move on.
The system for the game is interesting. I have to give my standard warning about me not being a math or probability geek, so you can take everything about the system with a grain of salt. Thank God, the game does not require you to roll a whole bunch of different dice of varying sides in order to determine something as simple as a fucking attribute check - I’m glaring at you specifically, Children of the Sun and Deadlands. You roll two ten-sided dice to determine success or failure, and then another ten-sided dice to determine how well or poorly you succeeded or failed. Criticals occur when you’re under 10% of your original skill, much like Call of Cthulhu. You can also bet that you’ll exceed the original difficult value by giving yourself a penalty to the roll - if the difficulty class is, say, 70%, then you can choose to add +20 to the result of your dice roll. If you still succeed at the check, then you can add +2 to the effect dice. It’s kind of like L5R’s raise system, where you make succeeding at the goal a lot harder in order to get a bigger payoff for success. You can also choose to reverse the equation - for every five you drop off of your percentile result, with the eventual goal of getting under the target number, you take another point off the effect dice. You have a hedge against failure or success, basically.
You also have the ability to DIS the GM, which basically functions the same way that an interrupt does in Magic: The Gathering - you can interrupt the flow of the action by throwing a token onto the table and taking your action right then, instead of going with the regular flow of the game. It doesn’t seem terrifically well-defined - for example, the book suggests that you can use it once every scene, once every combat situation - but I’m not sure if having characters be able to automatically strike first will give them an disproportionate combat advantage. More confusingly, DIS seems to be both a game characteristic - since you can buy more of it at character creation - and a game mechanic - since you can be allowed one use of DIS once per scene, combat, or what have you.
Combat: Whimper. I hate describing combat systems, but you roll your Reflex dice; success means you add the effect dice to your Reflexes, failure means you subtract it, so that initiative roll is mighty important. You get multiple actions per turn - equivalent to your Reflexes divided by five, rounding down - and it seems fairly straightforward enough. Damage is split into two types, shock and lethal; shock is temporary and goes away quick, while lethal damage lingers. Of course, the curse of lousy editing strikes again; the effects of damage are discussed, but, weirdly enough, not how damage is done. We’re told that the effect dice adds to damage, but not in what percentage, or what dice you roll when you’re trying to roll for damage. Do you add the ED to the damage roll? Double it? Multiply the amount of damage done by the ED? Dunno. The book doesn’t say - at least, not in this section. This is sloppy, sloppy work.
Skills: There are way, way too many skills here. As pointed out by another excellent review of the game, http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/9/9428.phtml, there’s six different skills that accomplish what one - Persuasion - does in D&D or Call of Cthulhu. Mr. Rogers explained this as having different skills accomplish different functions in the game at different times, so you use one skill for this situation, another skill for this situation - which makes it difficult to have anything but hyper-specialized con men whose golden tongues abandon them the minute that they’re not in their exact situation. (“Damn! If only I could find a way by which I could con these people, rather than having to rely on my pathetic lie skill!”) There’s also a lot of domestic and occupation skills - Mr. Rogers mentions having characters who have gone from normal farm boys to heroes overnight, but he eschews the ridiculously simple “Profession: X” system that D&D came up with and insists that you have to blow your hard-earned points on skills like Midwife, or Farming, or Irrigation. There’s also no short-form index for skills, so that you can see what skills exist at a glance - Palladium, for all of its many and glaring faults, was particularly good in this regard.
Magic: Whooooo. Magic is another part I hate describing. Basically, there’s two kinds of magic available, Ido and Qai. Ido basically involves channeling yourself to a stone - called a Maroc stone -
And while I’m on a particular subject, I’d just like to take the time to state that the other review of Promised Sands was entirely, entirely correct when it said that the game uses entirely too much specialized jargon and in-game worldspeak to be understandable. The history that you read in the beginning of the book only becomes clear when you read the rest of the book, ensuring that the new reader is going to be confused from the get-go. And when it gets into the magic section, it starts to get entirely opaque. So:
MACLENNAN’S FOURTH LAW: You are NOT TOLKIEN, goddamit! Stop trying to come up with new names for shit that already has a perfectly good name.
And for that matter, the standard reply is “Well, those are perfectly good words in Turkish and Arabic.”
And my response is “Is your audience primarily Turkish and Arabic?”
Anyways:
Oh, and another:
MACLENNAN’S FOURTH AND A HALF LAW:
If you use a phrase like “The power of X makes the power of Y seem like a children’s toy/simple longing/cheap trick”, you should be aware that cliché has been used so many times that it’s walking around bowlegged. Bowlegged and sore.
Anyways. Maroc users are actually interesting in that they graft magic stones to their body - the closer to the pituitary gland, the better your magic, but the more damage you take in the event of a backlash. You essentially use a series of magic verbsm like Ars Magica, to manipulate various forces, using magic points in order to power the effect; of course, if you don’t use enough magic points, then you wind up with Surge, magical backlash. I should point out that the section describing this makes it extraordinarily difficult to imagine, mostly because there’s precious few metaphors explaining what happens in real-world terms. For example:
The released Ido always has a certain amount of residual interaction with reality. This interaction can be devastating to an ill-prepared Maroc. Once activated, the Surge from a Mahya will suck power into the vacuum created by the release of Ido. If the Maroc has not saved enough power to fill this void, then his own life force will be altered by the energy swirling about the Ido Surge.
Clear as mud, right?
Try this rewrite:
Spells always affect the reality around them; if a spell caster doesn’t use enough energy to control the effect, then he takes damage appropriate to the type of spell being cast.
To boot, I’m realizing more and more that the game uses in-game terms to refer to game mechanics, even though there’s no particular need to. It’s goddamned hard to understand. There’s also the question of why the verbs are listed with the initial power cost, and then the cost to use it without avoiding Surge - why not just say that it costs three power, and then say that if you spend any less than that, you take damage? While it looks like an interesting magic system, and it’s going to be a lot of fun for guys who like freeform magic effects, I’m not sure that it’s going to work as well as systems that have been more finely tuned, like Mage or Ars Magica. That’s not a strike against the game - it usually takes about two or three editions to work the kinks out of a freeform magic system - but it’s something to be aware of.
As for the Qai: The section is written in the same dry, jargon-heavy style as the section on Ido; there’s no sense of personality in the description, which is unfortunate, especially since it sounds like Qai is nothing but sensation. Qai users generate Taint instead of Surge, going from the relative calm of Qai to the cacaphony of Ido – sort of like going from a Preserver to a Defiler in the Dark Sun setting, or a little bit like it, at least. As the Maroc use gems that they embed in their flesh, the Qai use crystals, usually as knives or something similar – which is kinda cool, truth be told.
Anyways. Instead of a freeform magic system, Qai lets you perform prearranged effects, using the effect dice in order to determine exactly how well it’s pulled off. There are points where the description of effects is a little wonky – for example, the Discerning spell effect list has various pickup lines listed as success levels, with “Excuse me, are you busy for the rest of your life? Can I get you a kingdom?” as a critical success – that kind of pickup line is pretty pathetic, until you realize that that’s what everybody else would be saying to the caster. (Of course, it’s still kinda pathetic, but that’s the point.) There’s actually some pretty interesting powers in here, ranging from psychometry to emotion projection to making weapons out of your bones – there’s a good selection of them available, but not enough that there’s no room for expansion.
The next chapter covers healing and experience, two great tastes that jostle uncomfortably in the same space until one of them wakes up with a knife in its throat. Experience is handled in a decidely wonky fashion – well, let’s not beat around the bush: It’s overly complex for no good reason, involving spending Wisdom points on a logarythmic scale – you pay 10 for the initial point, then 5 for each point up to 10, then 10 points for each point up to 20…ending at 97, where you’re paying 10640 points for a single point’s worth of increase.
I’d like to point out that Unknown Armies did something like the same thing when it came out with its percentile-based point system - there was some baroque system involving spending the “ones” digit of the percentage you were buying, so going from 0 to ten in a skill costs 1+2+3+4+5+6…all the way to ten. Then, in the second edition, heads were slapped, and the new system let you spend one experience point to gain one skill point. It made handing out experience much easier, believe me. I’m sure that there’s a mathematical reason for making higher skills harder to get; I’m also sure that handing out experience is going to be a nightmare for the GM. If you’re interested in doing complicated math, Qai expressions are bought with the following equation:
(100+(-1 x SV Mods) x (Threshold+ Sustaining Threshold))
Good, clean wholesome fun! By which I mean, OW FUCK MY BRAIN
There’s a simple Renown system by which you can buy up your character’s reputation, but unfortunately, it simply involves spending experience points to gain Renown – compare that to Werewolf, where you gain specific amounts of Renown for specific actions, and lose the same for being a big chicken. (You can also gain infamy by doing bad stuff – although I’m not sure how you “cannibalize a living body”, considering that somebody being eaten isn’t going to be interested in sitting around waiting for the cannibal to finish his meal.)
There’s also the ability to use Legend points, which basically lets you blow all of the Legend points that you used on a single action. So, instead of White Wolf’s willpower, where you have a constantly regenerating pool of “luck points”, or Mutants and Mastermind’s hero points, which I believe regenerate, you get the ability to influence the living shit out of one dice roll…and that’s it. Of course, whatever you blow your points on becomes part of your Epic, which…lets you turn in your character to BBRACK productions in order for them to make the character “official”.
Of course, the problem with this is that – say, for example, that you’re fighting Oograh the Stupid. You blow fifty Legend points on a swordstroke that hits him, but which bounces off his armor, or doesn’t do enough damage to do much more than slow him down. Do you write down “Mildly inconvienced Oograh the Stupid” as part of your epic? I suppose so, but the mechanic seems less about being a useful tool for a PC and more about drawing people in with the idea of making your PC “official” – which is kinda silly, since the characters in anybody’s home game are going to be more important than what the game company creates. Validation is nice, but external validation doesn’t have any value after a while.
The advanced occupation system: Okay, perhaps we’re into the other half of the character creation system. Here, you gain an initial skill point set for entering into the occupation, then XP to buy whatever skills you think are best. There’s still not much explanation of how it merges up with the initial character generation you see earlier, but it makes more sense to me than it did earlier. This time, you are going through them year by year, getting a different amount of skill points every year and deciding, on a year-by-year basis, whether you want to promote yourself out of it or stick to your guns. We’re still getting the same funky formatting problems as the chapter before, but I’m willing to put up with it.
The GM chapter, or the “Barding” chapter – well, there’s some good GM advice in here, but it’s written in a style that just comes off as stilted and pseuo-profound, rather than the companionable and friendly tone that a lot of products take. Fuck it: The writing is McCrackenesque at points. For example:
This is where it is important to be focused, and to manage a focused game. Not every path on the road of probability leads us towards a given desired end, but in the story of our lives, every path we take does lead us toward our end. The game should reflect this, and should circulate around the characters, however insignificant they are in the “big picture”. The events of any session should be focused towards resolving the situation in which the characters are involved. While detours and side routes can be memorable fun, they should certainly be the exception and not the rule. For example, if every episode of a sci-fi television series about investigating the unknown were to be based on old black and white horror films, or if every episode of a horror series were to model a Broadway musical, then the very nature of the shows would be very different.
This paragraph makes no sense. Besides the tortured syntax of the second sentence, which basically can be collapsed into “Whereever you go, there you are”, there’s only one real point – that the game should focus on the characters at all times. The point about the detours is semi-good advice, but then again, if the players like the idea of fighting against Frankenstein every week, then you may simply have to accept the shift from what you wanted to what they wanted.
Or this:
Always keep in mind that your storytelling is only successful if all of the people playing enjoy the story. The players are real people, and even though their characters are not, the players nonetheless relate to those characters closely. In one sense, they are similar to actors who may be attached to the characters they play; imagine how Bela Lugosi would have responded to a script wherein Dracula is an ineffective and unfrightening buffoon, a nitwit incapable of any success whatsoever. I think it’s safe to say that there would be stout objection. Can a player be expected to object any less, when a fate they disagree with, and find completely outside the realm of the likely, comes to their character?
People don’t use words like “nonetheless”, or “buffoon”, or “stout” in everyday conversation. Oh, they might, but they’ll sound forced and artificial when they do. So while I’m thinking of the conversational tone that most “How to be a GM” chapters take on, I’m forced to conclude that the GM chapter didn’t get as much attention as it deserved.
As a matter of fact, on re-reading the section, I begin to understand what happened: Instead of writing the section in an easy-to-read, colloquial style, the author of the piece decided that it would be a good idea to replace all of the nickel words with two-dollar ones.
It results in English that’s almost physically painful to read, where a point that could be contained within a single sentence is stretched out to cover an entire paragraph; for example, the idea "Different people like different game styles" is covered thus:
"The type of person they [the players] are determines their inherent motivation. This is a relatively fixed thing, and you can’t do anything about it. Some people like crunching numbers, rolling dice and seeing the bodies pile up. Others like epic combats, a sweeping story, big battles, and seeing the bodies pile up. Some prefer more sedate stories, no fighting, a little romance, a little emotional struggle towards a happy ending. Some others enjoy angst and inner turmoil, trying to work out their character’s suffering and heartache by any means necessary. Mostl ike a lot of action to spur their character’s development."
You can feel your head bobbing in agreement at the first sentence, bobbing in annoyance by the second, and sharpening a knife by the third. Yes, different people like different styles of play, but the description above reminds me of slogging through thick mud while being shot at by the Kaiser. Lordy.
We see the legends of the world before we see the world itself, and there’s some interesting stuff scattered here and there – nothing that’s truly earth-shaking, but nothing embarasses itself, either. I liked the cave of Truth, for example, featuring a huge stone head which answers one question for each person – of course, since it exaggerates and misdirects, as the book says, I question its utility. And I like it not because I think that it’s a unique magical item, but because I believe that it’s part of Promised Sands’ second hook, which is that what appears to be a fantasy world is – in fact – just another fantasy world.
Ha! No, I kid, there’s actually some post-apocalyptic elements mixed into the game, although the game world is so far past the apocalypse in question that it’s post-apocalyptic only in the loosest sense of the word.
We finally get the Rosetta Stone that makes the setting work as a setting, rather than as a disconnected series of odd names and vague references. If I’m reading it correctly, the cultures of the game world are the remnants of the Renizant Empire, which came apart after the Qai users managed to defeat the last of the Maroc Kings. (Since the addiction to arcane terminology still abounds, it’s difficult to sort out who’s doing what.)
An aside: one of the coolest parts of the entire game is the relationship between the Chak and the Troog / Yethites. As the book explains, the Chak were basically engaged in beating the living shit out of everyone that they came across, until they found a Troog village. They decided that they wanted to see one of the Yethites fight, and so tortured the entire village to death in front of one Yethite, daring him to pick up a sword and fight to save his people – except that he didn’t. As a result, the Chak realized that they were truly defeated, and made the Yethites their new masters.
It’s a neat take on pacifism – sort of the ultimate form of passive-aggresivism, where your will is able to destroy a weaker race’s ability to fight. There would have to be magic involved, I imagine, since the Chak would have probably just killed the resisting Yethite after the torture was over and moved on. (Pacifism just doesn’t work in real life.) However, it’s a neat idea to see the orcs of the setting forcing themselves to live as a peaceful race wants them to just because of the cultural influence that the peaceful society is able to inflict.
One problem, however, is that the same story about the torture is repeated about five different times, each time chipping away at the original impact of the story. While the idea of the Chak dying because they’re unable to find an opponent to fight is interesting, it isn’t followed up on, either mechanically or within the section on the Chak. It’s a great idea, but one that needs some serious followup.
Anyways. The story section is plagued by too much specialized terminology, which makes it difficult to follow who’s doing what. If I’m to understand it correctly: The Numa have created an empire very much like Rome in its later stages, while the Chak and the Jaalna are at each other’s throats thanks to the Jaalna’s bond-pets – Drachen – eating the Troog. Pure-strain humnaity, which spent the last three thousand years in domes underneath the sea, has come to the surface and are now trying to lay claim to their society.
The flora and fauna of Promised Sands are described in some detail, but , as in all monster compilations, the focus is primarily on the spiny and hurty bits of the ecosphere. Right out of the gate, of course, there’s a hearty "What the fuck?" as the beaver, of all creatures, is described as one of the creatures of Promised Sands. Now, the beaver, if you remember, primarily makes its home by damming up bodies of free-flowing water - streams and rivers. Their existence, then, demands that they have access to both free-flowing water and a shitload of trees. The book says that they’re in Yethite lands, and within the rivers of the pampas, but if there’s that much water available, then why live in the desert? Why aren’t the cultures of the world clustered around the fresh water, like the ancient civilizations of the Fertile Crescent? Thanks to the ass-backwards approach of describing the monsters first, then the world, I have no idea. I do know that you won’t find any beavers within a thousand miles of the Nile, unless my knowledge of beavers has been impeed in some dramatic fashion.
And then, on the very next page, there’s the Desert Hare, which is basically a mutated, omnivorous rabbit. And there’s a quote from a Yethite that goes thus: "Shhh. Be vewwy, vewwy quiet. The dethert hare ith hunting me!"
Ho-kay.
The book suffers from its origins as a homebrew game created around a gaming table. I have absolutely no idea how, say, Tribe 8 was created, but I know that they were able to avoid bringing the scent of stale in-game humor to the book that they wrote. Anyways. We get a selection of monsters, none of them truly standouts. There’s a series of ...well, I want to describe them as ogres, but that description is reserved for another creature elsewhere in Promised Sands; they come in different clans and are marked by some fairly decent artwork. I did notice yet another It Crawls Up Inside Of You And Lays Eggs monster, the Kutul, an intestinal parasite which eventually takes over its host. (I’m beginning to suspect some kind of deep-seated neurosis in role-playing, what with all of the "They’re using as breeders!" monsters running around.)
I will point out something that I liked about the monster section: There’s a short fiction piece next to the section on the kril - the ogres of the setting - dealing with an attempted sexual assault by a kril that’s handled with the most taste and restraint that I’ve seen so far in an RPG. It’s not FATAL; it’s the anti-FATAL. My only complaint is that it isn’t mentioned in the kril’s writeup that its blood can cause genetic corruption.
The world of T’nah is next on the list to be written up. However, it’s written as fiction, meaning that what would normally be a simple description winds up as huge chunks of exposition wrapped in the thin skin of a story, like a snake after eating an elephant - yeah, the snake is pretty, but it’s so distended by the elephant that you can’t help but to pay attention to that instead. I did like the first telling of the story of how the Yethites defeated the Chak, but again, it’s told too many times after that for the original story to maintain its impact. There’s also some particularly wooden dialogue from the scribe:
Watar’s eyes shot up to meet those of the ancient general. "My Lord! My people are not slaves! We serve the Ch’ak because it is our privilege and honor!" Cultural pride radiated from Watar. "My Lord, would you dishonor me and my people so?"
A conversation between a fifteen-year old human and a computer about the history of humanity in the undersea domes is fascinating, but lasts too briefly. We get a description of the rise of the Maroc Kings, but it’s written in the usual In-The-Time-Before-Atlantis-Sank-Beneath-The Waves pseudolegend style that’s plagued fantasy games for a long time. The cultures of T’nah are next, broken down by their attitudes towards gender, family, slavery and so forth. There are some parts that are kind of cool - I’m thinking specifically of the Dusteen’s pride in their status as semi-slaves, and the wiggle room that the "wet denizens" - dome-raised humans - grant themselves for slavery. (Citizens aren’t enslaved, but if you commit a crime or rack up a huge debt, you’re not a citizen anymore.) Again, the curse of the stilted dialogue rears its unlovely head:
"Our spirits cannot return home, and they must not be allowed to become part of T’nah. Every Equin is to be given a medallion at birth made from the metal of the weapons and tools brought with us. They will become receptacles for our souls when we die. When we find a way to return to our home, we will take the souls of our dead with us. As for the bodies of the dead? Pfah! From the sands of T’nah are they made, so let them return. As long as I don’t have to smell them doing so!"
That’s a dictate from the First Alpha of the Equins, but it sounds mighty stilted - even the attempt at humor in the last sentence falls flat on its face. There’s no sense of actually listening to somebody talk, just somebody winding out a lot of exposition in the guise of issuing a decree. Anyways.
The deity and religion descriptions follow. Just by way of an example, let’s pick apart the religion of the Equins: We’re told that the Equins think of themselves as a herd on a global scale, so everybody’s supposed to take care of each other. (How many times have you seen a gazelle herd gather to defend one of its sick members that a pack of cheetahs are trying to drag down? Answer: Never, because the entire herd bolts and lets the slow, old and sick feed the cheetah.) We’re also told that some of the Equins are made Wardens to take care of “sacred ranges, copses of trees that hold special significance to the Herd, rock formations, etc.” - but we’re not told what makes these particular locations special, or why.
There are some neat bits - like the idea of a tirickster-god whose followers tattoo themselves in order to be safe from their mischief - but for every neat idea, there’s some amateur fanfic like this:
Seeing their lives to be devoid of a heaven, hell or afterlife, an outsider once tried to convert a Kohn’ar to a more optimistic philosophy by saying “Look how that rat crawls through the tunnel there; he enters into the tunnel, scurrying as rapidly as possible, and out the other side. Your life is like that, you jump in, run like hell is chasing you, and jump back out. Now, the way I see things,” he continued on, but the Kon’ahr stopped him and said “Yes, but if the tunnel collapses, at least the rat is not in there.”
Many scholars find their attempts to dsicuss theology with the Kon’ahr similarly thwarted, as there is really none to speak of. The Gazeteer lists various cultures of T’nah, concentrating mostly on the products that they produce - which is fantastic, if you’re playing Wandering Artisans of T’nah; not so good if your players aren’t interested in playing a wandering coalition of buyers for art galleries. Actually, that’s kind of unfair; there is enough information given on the setting for an imaginative GM to use, but it doesn’t jump out and bite you like, say, John Tynes’ description of Carcosa does. Again, for a setting that’s supposed to be focused on the desert, there’s an awful lot of water bopping around - there’s even lakes, for God’d sakes.
I found Uvah, the Trade Guild home and T’nah’s equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah, to be remarkably interesting, although the “cooked alive and eaten” thing is a little - well, if you’ve ever seen or heard of an artist named Dolcett, you may find a common link. You may also not want to go looking for Dolcett’s work unless you have twenty or so SAN points to spare.
I do find myself fascinated with the Citadel of the Ch’ak, a titanic monolith from which no one ever returns - it reminds me of Pica Towers, actually, and you should go looking for the Pica Towers shorts (and the trailer to Jojo in the Stars) - unless you have some odd phobia of stuff that’s absolutely awesome. So, to sum up: Is Promised Sands worth your money? Not in its first edition, no. The character creation system is, as far as I can tell, broken, and there needs to be serious attention paid in the next edition to cleaning it up. The book’s ass-backwards format of putting the system first, setting second needs to be changed around, so that the meat of the book is right up front. The section on the world of T’nah needs to be rewritten to remove the adolescent clunkiness and poor organization of information.
But, ultimately, the primary problem with Promised Sands is that it’s another fantasy heartbreaker; and that’s an essay, incidentally, that I’m seriously thinking of having tatooed on my back. With the introduction of the d20 open license, any yahoo with a pen can - and will - create his own fantasy setting and publish it, and he can do it without having to reinvent the wheel. There are literally dozens of new settings out there, all using the same engine, and they don’t require you to learn an arcane dice-rolling system and an overcomplicated and underorganized career system. Pick it up if you want to see Benjamin Rogers’ first stab at creating an RPG: but I would recommend waiting for his next effort before you get into his next work.
-Darren MacLennan
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