Introduction
The Turakian Age (TA hereafter) is Hero Games' first published setting for its Fantasy Hero line of HERO System 5th Edition game books. It describes Ambrethel, a large and detailed high fantasy world.
“’High fantasy?’ Isn’t that just a fancy way of saying “D&D?’” Well, mostly. TA is indeed a pseudo-medieval world filled with powerful magic and all the usual elves, dwarves, dragons and polytheistic spellcasting priests we’re familiar with. There’s even a Dark Lord with an army of orcs and demons ready to sweep down out of his remote stronghold and conquer the world. At the same time, designer Steve Long handles this subject matter much more deftly than usual, paying tremendous attention to traditionally-neglected areas of high fantasy world design like religion and politics.
So, does TA succeed overall as a fantasy setting? Does it still have value for non-HERO gamers? Read on.
Physical Presentation
TA has its charms, but looks aren't one of them. HERO books in general are not known for their glossy pages and flashy art, but TA is still worse than most in this area, due to a poor cover and an overabundance of recycled interior art.
TA is a standard-sized 319-page softcover book. The cover is a wraparound piece depicting a desolate landscape where a wizard is using his power to open a magic portal of some kind while his companions look on. In theory, there's no reason it shouldn't work, as both the subject matter and the composition are quite conductive to a good high fantasy feel. In actuality, the art in question seems to have been created with one of those godawful Poser-style digital imaging programs. The detail on the characters and background is abysmally low, resulting in the whole piece looking like a screenshot from a cheesy first-generation Playstation game cutscene. Blech. I'm hard-pressed to come up with a HERO cover from any edition of the game that isn't executed better than this one.
Inside, things improve and the art that's included is generally up to par. Long-time HERO gamers will note that TA recycles several pieces of art from other books, including ones from earlier 80s and 90s Fantasy HERO titles. This repetition is jarring and unnecessary, as the space the recycled art takes up could have been much better used to flesh-out various important world details that the text currently neglects. Perhaps I'm simply unfairly biased against this practice, though, as heavy art recycling never fails to remind of TSR's dying days back in the 90s.
Finally, and most importantly, TA defies convention by being the only HERO title in years to include virtually no index. Apparently, the 60+ page index and pronunciation guide intended to accompany TA was cut for space reasons. The last page of the book notes that it can be downloaded free from the Hero Games website, but for people like myself who happen to do a lot of reading away from home in various places without computers handy, it's still a huge pain to find almost anything in this book at a given moment.
I normally give HERO titles a solid Style rating of 4, simply for the neat covers, solid layouts and fantastic indices. I wish I could do the same here. Too bad.
Style: 2
Content
TA is divided up into nine chapters. Each is described below.
Chapter One: A History of the Turakian Age
This chapter describes, in brief, a 5000-year history of the Turakian Age, named for Kal-Turak, Ravager of Men, the setting’s Sauron-style BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy). Interestingly enough, the world of Ambrethel is actually intended to be our own Earth as it existed over 73,000 years ago, before a protracted series of magical cataclysms altered the shape of the continents and buried almost all traces of primeval civilization. This technically puts it in the same world and official chronology as the setting books in the Star Hero and Champions lines (wherein Kal-Turak is literally resurrected as a mystic supervillian in the modern day). However, since Ambrethel is so different from the Earth we know, only the most observant players will ever realize this (as the only real clue is in the shapes of certain constellations).
Overall, this chapter does a good job summarizing Turakian history over the course of the last few millennia. The various fallen empires, legendary figures and epic conflicts described are suitably rich with plot fodder, which is the real purpose, after all. A handy timeline caps off the chapter and makes a great handout for players new to the setting.
Chapter Two: The Peoples of Ambrethel
This chapter gives physical and cultural descriptions (and game stats) for the various Turakian races. They are:
Men: Self-explanatory for the most part, but there’s a lot of good information on the various human ethnic groups found in Ambrethel, their dress, appearance, customs, etc.
Drakine: Dragon men. The second most powerful and numerous of the major races after man.
Dwarves: Self-explanatory.
Elves: Self-explanatory. It should be noted, though, that Turakian elves are noted for their language, Shalionderentine, in which few words have less than ten syllables. If you plan to play an elf character, you’ll either have to fake it a lot, or get used to pronouncing tongue-twisters like “Alanethalakanderi” (an elven clan) and “thelananeradasalirtarwaryn” (a type of elven artisan also known as a “treesmith”). The obligatory Dark Elves are included, as well, and have pretty much the same appearance, mannerism and “origin story” as their D&D counterparts. At least there’s no spider worship and S&M-tinged matriarchal tyranny, though.
Halflings: Self-explanatory.
Gnomes: Self-explanatory. In Ambrethel, a gnome is a fertile cross between an elf and a halfling.
Erquigdlit: Dog men.
Pakasa: Cat men.
Leomachi: Like a centaur, except with the lower body of a lion instead of a horse.
Orcs/half-orcs: Self-explanatory.
Goblins: Self-explanatory.
Troll: More like huge, powerful orcs/goblins than the skinny, regenerating D&D variety.
Chapter Three: The Realms of Ambrethel
This chapter is a gazetteer-style overview of the various nation-states and territories of Ambrethel. Covering over five dozen nations over two continents and several sub-continents, a total land area larger than the whole of Eurasia, this is an ambitious chapter indeed. Long pulls it off, though, over the course of 111 tightly-packed pages.
Each realm’s entry begins with a basic info block listing the government type, ruler, capital city, religion, coinage, languages, economic resources, military makeup and coat of arms. Two important things to note here are that the “Resources” entries are not terribly useful. There’s seemingly only the same half a dozen items listed for each realm. Indeed, virtually every one reads: “Fishing, herding, farming, craftwork” or some combination of the same four terms in a slightly-varying order. Granted, the main text of an entry often specifies other, more unique, resources, but this is rare. Not very helpful, all things considered.
Secondly, the section describing each land’s coat of arms does so in very technical real-world heraldry lingo, which often makes little to no sense to the uninitiated. “Pean, a red chevron cotised”, one entry reads in whole. Huh? I don’t know about you, but I have no idea how to form a mental image from that. Unfortunately, neither illustrations nor a helpful index of these terms are provided.
As for the realms themselves, they’re a good lot. Your standard kingdoms, empires, bustling free cities (Aarn functioning as Ambrethel’s equivalent of Greyhawk or Waterdeep), tribal territories, etc. Seemingly generic, Long takes care to give each one a little something special like a tense political situation, religious strife, or unique and colorful set of customs.
There are some more exotic areas, as well. The Indusharian lands are a sort of fantasy India. In a nice change of place, Thon-Sa, the pseudo-Asian land that births the ever-popular unarmed martial artist characters is based not on a fantasy China or Japan, but on Tibet. Thun is a tropical land ruled over by sinister sorcerer-priests struggling to free their ancient Lovecraftian gods from divine imprisonment, bringing to mind the legions of creepy, human-sacrificing high priests that Conan the Barbarian has clashed with over the years.
By and large, this chapter is a huge success, with “exotic” realms that really do seem fresh for a change and enough care put into making the old standbys compelling in their own way.
The chapter wraps up with brief overviews of the Sunless Realms (the subterranean world of caverns beneath Ambrethel that functions just like the Underdark of Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms fame) and various alternate planes of existence, including the standard heaven, hell and elemental planes, as well as more bizarre and difficult to reach corners of reality like the Brialic realms, planes of pure thought and primal archetypes and the Qliphothic World, a dimension of primal entropy.
Chapter Five: Life In 5000 SE
This chapter is a detailed overview of the various aspects of day-to-day life in the year 5000 of Ambrethel’s Second Epoch, when most TA campaigns are assumed to begin. It includes detailed accounts of how Ambrethel’s various cultures and societies tend to view freelance adventurers as well as information on different calendars in common use (ten in total), seven different cultural versions of the Zodiac, holidays and festivals, burial customs, marriage and family life, government, military life, slavery, technology, trade, currency, and magic in society.
Overall, this is a very detailed chapter that provides the context that binds the various nations and territories mentioned in the previous chapter into a credible world.
Chapter Five: Turakian Character Creation
This chapter opens with a set of suggested guidelines for creating TA characters. It covers the initial character concept, as well as the selection of race, appropriate cultural and professional skills and equipment.
Next is a lengthy overview of the various fantasy high fantasy archetypes (warrior, wizard, priest, rogue) and how they fit within the cultural context of Ambrethel. Priestly character can elect to belong to orders like the Druids, Fists of the Skyfather, Anvilites and Ophelite Brotherhood. As well as the classic rangers, gladiators and paladins, warriors have eight different flavors of barbarian warrior to choose from, as well as nine orders of knighthood and five famous mercenary companies. Rogues have career options like guild thieves, bards, tomb raiders, montebanks, and assassins. Not to be outdone, wizards can join up with the the Black Guild, the Mages Guild of Aarn, the Coven of D’yos or the barbaric Ulronai warrior-mages.
After that, there’s a brief primer on other miscellaneous game elements and how they work in Ambrethel. The section on gambling includes rules for various exotic games of chance. The language chart not only illustrates every commonly-spoken language on the surface of Ambrethel, but also which are related to which and how closely. Rules for distinct styles of armed and unarmed martial arts and a section on new weapons unique to the setting rounds things out.
All things considered, this chapter accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do by presenting a ton of options to encourage players to keep the world in mind when designing characters. After all, a plain old generic assassin can’t hope to hold a candle to a sinister Scorpion Lord of Tarklesh.
Chapter Six: The Gods of Ambrethel
My nomination for the highlight of the book, this chapter deals, of course, with religion.
Now, religion tends to get the short shrift in high fantasy. Your typical D&D-style world tosses out a list of gods and that’s that. You end up with one-dimensional “deities” that function like crosses between really powerful monsters and incidental excuses for priest characters to have superpowers. Often, you just can’t comprehend how anyone could actually take religion seriously in such a setting. Thankfully, TA is one of the very few high fantasy settings to do religion right.
To start with, you have the High Faith. The most widespread and powerful religion in Ambrethel, the High Faith reveres a pantheon of 24 major gods and as many minor ones as the GM feels like adding. The High Faith is what’s known as a henotheistic faith, which is to say that all priests and worshippers worship all the gods as a whole. There’s no such thing as a “priest of Ophel” (the sun god) or a “cleric of Mordak” (god of evil and the underworld). The High Faith is practiced not only by humans, but by elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings and orcs, as well. Each culture has different names for each god (Mordak is Kraan to the orcs) and the iconography varies with culture and geography, but the gods themselves are the same. The High Faith divides the gods themselves into three camps, the Blue Gods have dominion over goodly causes, the Scarlet Gods hold sway over evil, and the Grey Gods represent forces neutral to worshippers, like nature or magic. The gods also have their various angels (selestines), demons, saints (or Esailes, as they’re known in Ambrethel), and evil saint equivilents (the Demonhanded).
So far, it’s pretty normal. Nothing special. Just as in the real world, though, things are rarely as simple as all that. First of all, the priest Hergesh hit the scene a couple thousand years ago and pulled a Martin Luther on the High Faith, declaring that the Bonifact (the High Faith’s version of the Catholic Pope) actually had things mostly wrong. According to Hergesh, there are no Grey Gods at all, just Blue and Scarlet, and many of those were classified in the wrong category. Before long, the Hergeshite doctrine led to the greatest religious schism in the history of the world, with High Faith adherents and Hergeshites still squabbling to this day over the proper creed to follow, a battle that manifests itself as a protracted religious Cold War with periodic bouts of assassination, religious terrorism and holy warfare to keep things lively. Strangely, the gods themselves don’t seem to be in any hurry to settle the issue one way or the other.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Not all people worship the Blue, Grey and Scarlet Gods. In Thun, the unnaturally-pale sorcerer-priests sacrifice countless slaves in an effort to summon such colorful, Cthulhu-esque characters as N’ggog-Eyl, the Lord of the Scarlet Infinities. The Talarshandi worship the enigmatic reptile god S’taa’sha. In the city-state of Eltirian, the populace reveres the eight Gods Who Watch Over Entrain. In Deviltry, it’s Linear the cat goddess. The Kurum-Sathri follow Ambrethel’s only known form of strict monotheism. The Ventati barbarians worship only their own weapons, or, more specifically, the sprits they believe dwell within them.
And still the list goes on, with the above examples only constituting not even half of the religious diversity described in this chapter.
In other words, TA’s treatment of religion in high fantasy as something other than a trite caricature or a meaningless background element is refreshing the extreme. It’s actually managed to make me, as non-religious a person as they come, really excited about playing a priest in a fantasy game, something that years and years of play in other, otherwise similar published worlds has never come close to doing. Kudos to designer Long for cooking up a cosmology that should be required reading for other professionals working in the subgenre.
Chapter Seven: Turakian Magic
Magic in Ambrethel is divided up into more than twenty major and minor Arcana, which mostly consist of fantasy staples like Necromancy and Conjuration which need no introduction. Two major exceptions are the setting-specific spellcasting forms of Turakian Theurgy and Ulronai Warrior-Magic, which make up the bulk of this chapter.
Theurgy is divided into two subcategories: Divine/Infernal-Powered and Celestial. Divine/Infernal Theurgy is a dangerous method by which daring spellcasters essentially “steal” bits of magic power from the gods to manifest magical effects associated with those gods’ divine domains. Casters who aren’t careful or skilled enough risk being smote by outraged gods in a variety of nasty ways (including blinding, stunning, curses, and potentially-deadly damage).
Celestial Theurgy is magic based on harnessing the primal power of the various planets and constellations. A good example of such a spell is the Pentacles of Tharasis, which allows the caster to tap into the offensive power associated by astrologers with the red planet Tharasis (Mars).
The chapter also includes numerous examples of divine magic associated with various Turakian gods. It’s a good selection, but necessarily incomplete due to the sheer diversity of religion in Ambrethel.
Finally, there’s a lengthy subchapter on magic items unique to the TA setting covering both commonplace items and more unique “ancient artifact”-type ones.
Chapter Eight: Gamemastering the Turakian Age
This chapter is a hodgepodge of information intended for the GM’s eyes only. In addition to several pages of one-paragraph adventure seeds, it also includes a “GM’s Vault” section. The GM’s Vault is sort of a series of footnotes to the book’s first seven chapters that detail the “real story” behind mysteries only hinted at in the main text. This approach allows for the inclusion of a lot of secret plots and conspiracies without spoilers compromising the utility of the main text for players. Another nice touch are outlines for a number of potential Turakian campaigns centered around overreaching themes like romance, court politics, religious rivalries and the epic battle against Kal-Turak and his minions. Each includes more than enough adventure seeds to get the wheels of a great campaign turning.
Chapter Nine: The Renowned of Ambrethel
TA’s final chapter is a selection of pre-made NPCs for use with Turakian campaigns. Broadly categorized as either “enemies” or “allies”, they represent a good selection of characters, each able to aid or hinder the PCs in a distinct way. The enemies include a rebellious baron, an amoral Drakine adventurer, a sinister king with an evil artifact blade and a lust for conquest and a lich who rules an underground fiefdom in the Sunless Realms. Among the allies are a savage, but noble Gorthundan barbarian chieftain, a swashbuckling orcish sea captain, a sleazy urban information broker, an Ulronai warrior-mage fated to fulfill an ancient prophecy and the chivalrous crown prince of Thurgandia.
In the final evaluation, TA text presents a fantasy world that’s both comfortably familiar for high fantasy veterans, but constructed with a level of care and detail that elevates it over the crowd.
Substance: 5
Final Analysis
TA is good. How good? For my money, it's definitely the best overall high fantasy setting out there right now. It avoids the pitfalls so commonly encountered in the competition by keeping the orcs, dragons, wizards, barbarians and other fun stuff without giving believable and compelling religion and politics the short end of the stick. It also supports a wide-variety of play-styles, with as much attention paid to the romantic turmoil of various royal families and the simmering religious, ethnic and political strife in a given land as to how many orcs lurk in the local dungeon.
It’s also, incidentally, a tremendous value for its price.
How useful is it if you’re not into HERO? Very. The vast majority of the book has no game statistics and the parts that do also describe the effects they represent in plain English, making conversion to other systems extremely easy.
Are there problems? Oh, yes. The aforementioned lack of a good index is the major one. Here’s another: The book mentions various monsters and races detailed in HERO Games’ Monsters, Minions and Marauders sourcebook, but doesn’t explain what they are or what role they play in the game. One underground race, the Migdalar, is mentioned at least three times throughout the text, but never once does said text even hint at what a Migdalar actually is (for reference, they’re a muscular, four-armed psionic race with no heads, but bestial faces set into their abdomens). As far as I’m concerned, if TA is going to require the use of MM&M for full comprehension, it should bloody well say so on the back cover somewhere as a courtesy to potential buyers. Finally, TA includes no game statistics at all for its own namesake: Kal-Turak! It has plenty of info on his demonic origins, rise to power, evil servants and plans for conquest, but no stats at all. Now, it’s easy enough to assume that because Kal-Turak is a nigh-unstoppable demigod plot device like Tolkien’s Sauron, stats aren’t necessary or desirable. Maybe that’s so, but a note in the text explaining the wisdom of this approach for the sake of players who feel a little ripped-off in not getting stats for the main bad guy would have been appreciated.
Still, the few warts on TA are easy to overlook in light of the huge and compelling world it represents. TA may be vanilla, but it’s gourmet French vanilla with sprinkles, fudge and Oreo cookie bits in a fresh-baked waffle cone.
Sweet.
Summary
Substance: 2
Substance: 5
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