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Deliria is a modern fairie tale setting that takes place primarily in the regions of overlap between the world of humanity and the world of faeries, termed "the Myterium". For me, the feel of the setting was reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere or Clive Barker’s more fantastic works like Great and Secret Show, Everville, and Imajica. The faeries of Deliria are as fascinated by humanity as we are of them, which drives interaction between the two worlds. The true faeries of the setting are immortal, inexplicable, and ever-changing. Most interaction is with half-breeds, changelings, and those faeries, like brownies and dryads, who have strong ties to the world of men and whose motivations and perspective are a little easier to understand.
Setting
The creatures of faerie are diverse and wear many guises. We are not presented with the kiths of Changeling: The Dreaming, but a rundown of basic capabilities, a sampling of powers, and a vast array of forms and archetypes that residents of Faerie utilize. The setting is similarly open. Details are given of a few specific areas and several large regions within Faerie, but the rest is left to the game master to detail. Similarly, there is no over-arching plot or context for the game, the setting is presented as a toolbox. Some, like I, will find this extremely liberating. Others will be frustrated by the lack of direction or a starting point. The book is filled with plenty of ideas, though, and I didn’t find it hard to immediately come up with the skeleton of a campaign just from inspirational sidebars and cool aspects of the basic setting.
System
The theory behind Deliria’s Compact system is admirable: create a three-tiered rule set with varying levels of detail and complexity built to allow movement between the levels as needed during play. So, if you are dealing with social interaction you can use the Narrative level which is very rules-light, and then when a combat ensues you can switch to the detail-heavy Advanced rules, using the Basic rules for stuff that falls in between. The problem lies in the implementation. The elements are there, but not enough has been done to make the results between different levels of play consistent, particularly where character generation is concerned. Also, the sections on mechanics are very unclear and inconsistent. The organization of the rules isn’t bad, but sections contradict each other and the rules summary pages don’t jibe with the text. In addition, there are few examples and they tend not to agree with the rules text, either. Attempts to get clarification from the designers has led (in my experience) to even more confusion as they give interpretations that don’t fit the book at all and don’t seem balanced or well-thought out. When running my campaign, I have taken to using my own interpretations. I expect many people are doing the same because the rules are too muddled to even get through character generation and I appear to be the first person to ask on their forums for clarification and get an answer. When I went looking for answers, I found posts on their boards asking the same questions as far back as December and January without any response from the staff. Just in the past couple weeks they have announced they will be putting out an FAQ and a clarification of the rules set, though, so hopefully more answers are forthcoming. I just hope they are better discussed and playtested than those received so far.
As for what is there, the magic system is very good, based on the premise that anyone with sufficiently strong spirit and intelligence can perform it but the greatest effects are going to only be available to those who learn some sort of magic system (ranging from simple witchcraft and faerie wishcraft to things like spincraft, a techno-magical system based on reality-hacking) and adhere to its use of tools, rituals, and limitations. It is a much better implementation of an open-ended magical system than Mage: The Ascension ever pulled off and I’ve found it to work very smoothly in play, provided you don’t get overly bogged down in modifiers. Another interesting part of the system is the use of playing cards as a randomizer. How it works is that a card is drawn. If it is black, its value is subtracted from the characters Prowess (a combination of innate ability and skill). If it is red, it is added. Royal cards have special meaning, bad for black, good for red. It is an interesting system. I had originally thought that the weight on the randomizer was a little heavy, but after playing a bit and crunching probabilities, it isn’t all that bad. Particularly if you judiciously use the rule allowing automatic successes where Prowess is higher than the Challenge Level and only pull out the randomizer when it is really important or the character doesn’t have the skill for automatic success.
Character creation needs some work to clean up the system problems and clarify the rules, but the premise is solid. There are two levels of detail available, depending on which end of the rules spectrum you are going to be playing in most (Narrative and Basic or Basic and Advanced). The more simple level has three attributes (Body, Mind, Spirit) and seven very broad skills. The more complex level expands the attributes out into four aspects each, for a total of twelve) and adds specific skills (individual languages instead of just Languages, individual weapon skills instead of just Martial). It should be noted that the numbers are just a part of character generation. There are several steps based just on detailing the character from a narrative and psychological standpoint. Before you assign stats, the character generation rules have you write a short story about your character, come up with passions, secrets, and obstacles, and afterwards you are asked what the character would wish for if given three wishes. Sort of gimmicky, but I think well suited to the genre, particularly if you have players not experienced in this sort of character-heavy game. There are also three levels of points that allow you to choose a power level for your game, from the regular-joe Wanderer Saga to the more competent Journeyman Saga or even the epic Heroic Saga. There are also rules for faerie and part-faerie characters. It should be noted, though, that the focus of the game is on low-power human characters as it is going for the classic faerie tale model where a normal person is swept up into the fantastic and proves themselves and grows.
Style
The artwork in the book is absolutely gorgeous and a good mix of styles. I found it very evocative of the setting and this is coming from someone who rarely pays much attention to the art in gaming books. The writing, however, needs a little work. It tends to be overworked and redundant. If better edited, much needed examples could have been fit in as well as the supplemental material from the CD, much of which really should have been in the main book (like descriptions of creatures mentioned repeatedly in the text and half the Advanced rules). Better editing would probably have cleared up a lot of the problems with the rules (which may not be broken, just very poorly explained). Otherwise, the general approach of the book is very good, the setting sections are peppered with sidebars with cool ideas and specifics and there is a reasonably logical flow to the parts on rules mechanics. The only things I had problems finding weren’t misplaced, just not there.
Summary
I like this game. I really do. I was run through a single incredibly cheesy demo at a convention where the GM, confused by the same things as I would be later, changed interpretations of the rules several times during the game and I still shelled out $40 for the book. The potential was that apparent. Thus far, it has been everything I wanted Changeling: The Dreaming to be. My gaming group is enjoying the game I’m running and I’m so inspired I am having no trouble coming up with stories. That established, I can’t fully recommend people get the game until Laughing Pan puts out its FAQ. The rules are simply too confused, unclear, and incomplete to run the game without doing as I have and hacking a coherent system out of it yourself. The book really just needs a complete revision for the second printing. With the $40 price tag, it just isn’t worth getting unless you are a die-hard who can work around a flawed system or are just looking for inspirational material for other games.
