 Goto [ Index ] |
Turjan-level play is different. In some respects, it’s a middle ground between Cugel-level and more typical fantasy games, so it might be a good way to ease your players into some of the more unusual aspects of the Dying Earth game system and setting. Where Cugel-level games revolve around the Persuade/Rebuff mechanic (see the various reviews of the Dying Earth RPG for more information), Turjan-level games are much less wordy affairs, where arguments are settled rapidly by blade or spell rather than drawn-out debate. Cugel-level characters tend to be seedy-looking wastrels and layabouts, with transient concerns such as where their next meal is coming from; whereas Turjan-level characters are handsome, physically and mentally powerful, driven individuals dedicated to gathering magical power.
Turjan’s Tome of Beauty and Horror is an attempt to expand on Turjan-level play and emphasise those differences, providing a number of variant rules to better model the stories in the first Dying Earth book (called simply The Dying Earth).
The front cover is an excellent piece by Ralph Horsley, depicting a roguish-looking magician surprising another wizard as the latter reclines on a chaise longue with a lilac-skinned, bird-masked nymph. It’s testament to Ralph’s perfect appropriateness to the Dying Earth setting that I can’t recall whether the scene in the picture is taken directly from one of Vance’s stories, or whether it’s entirely of the artist’s invention, but it’s a perfect fit for this book. Details like the opulent decadence of the chamber and apparel, the defending wizard grasping a glowing amulet to repel the attacker’s sinister green-smoking fingers, and the nymph’s embrace that might be loving or deliberately impeding the reclining magician, all add up to capture the feel of Turjan-level games and the corresponding stories.
The interior art is more variable, with what looks like more Ralph Horsley pieces (uncredited, though) and some excellent detailed line drawings at the high end of the scale, and some less appropriate, more amateurish work at the low end. Layout is clean and effective throughout, and there are no more than an average number of proofing errors, none of which significantly affect the enjoyment or use of the book.
Chapter 1, Character Creation: This chapter has as much guidance as it does rules, with tips on creating viable Turjan-level characters. Although the original Turjan was both a warrior and a magician, Turjan-level characters need not be similarly versatile: rules, recommendations and examples are provided for pure fighters, stealth experts, and social specialists too. Since TDE includes a ‘Wallop’ system to allow a character with a clear superiority in any one area to seriously humiliate an opponent, such characters can be highly viable in a game where most are warrior-wizards; a femme fatale who’s maxed-out Seduction and Persuade can have the most powerful adventurer twisted round her little finger with no more than a sidelong glance.
Chapter 2, Running Turjan-Level Adventures: This is a short chapter more about atmosphere than rules, though it does include a few suitably Turjanic rule changes. Turjan-level games have more combat than is typical at Cugel-level (where showing a clean pair of heels, or talking your way out of a fight, is usually the best option). The already rapid TDE combat system is tweaked slightly for even greater speed, with some neat ideas to get players thinking fast too (faffing about with complex strategies and rules lawyering is likely to mean you lose Initiative automatically, thus encouraging the kind of seat-of-the-pants combat as practiced by Turjan and his peers in the stories). This chapter also mentions other sources of Turjan-style inspiration, including Jack Vance’s non-Dying Earth novels and the works of Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, providing a good overview of ‘baroque fantasy’ (see http://rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=126469&highlight=baroque+and+fantasy for more potential inspiration).
Chapter 3, Arcane Items of Terrible Might: Naturally, this is the magic items chapter. Useful gizmos abound in Vance, though characters will rarely be so weighed-down with them as would the average D&D adventurer, and many magical items have some kind of more-or-less humorous side-effect even in the relatively serious environment of a Turjan-level game. These items are almost all weird, quirky things, but all inspire a variety of possible uses to the perspicacious wizard.
Chapter 4, Noble Qualities and Obscure Merits: Tweaks were first introduced in other TDE supplements as a means of customising characters, but this chapter contains specifically Turjanic tweaks. For the most part these are suitably heroic in concept, with many of them allowing characters to make some kind of emergency comeback after a near-defeat.
Chapter 5, Occult Footnotes and Marginal Scrawls: This has new spells and also introduces “prerequisite specialisations,” which allow Turjan-level magicians to begin to master the various skills that will one day take them to the heady heights of archmagehood. These prerequisite specialisations are also useful in their own right, with the creative gaining great benefit from Vat Mastery (see below) and the paranoid from Warding (assorted protective, defensive, and counter-offensive spells that can be cast in advance and activated as needed). A discussion on the nature of Phandaal’s Hundred Spells suggests two options for dealing with the fact that TDE and its supplements now contain over 100 spells, with perhaps the most satisfactory being to treat any spells beyond the 100 as imperfect spells with even more weird and unpleasant side-effects than usual when a casting fails.
Magicians in baroque fantasy settings seem obsessed with creating new life, and the setting of TDE is no exception. This chapter features extensive rules for crafting life in the Vats. For most magicians, such a quest to create life is more about prestige than utility. A would-be archmage will be more proud of any creation of new life, even a sickly gelid-fleshed creature that gasps out only a single breath before expiring, than of the creation of a powerful magical artefact. Thus anyone serious about attaining the heights of magical power will devote some points to Vat Mastery and a lot of time to practising the art of life creation. TDE’s sixfold mechanic for degrees of success and failure once more comes to the fore here, with a number of interesting effects depending on the success or failure of various processed of vat creation.
Chapter 6, Acquaintances of Cruelty and Renown: An expansion on the Notable Personages section in the TDE rulebook, featuring some of the characters from the earlier stories and one or two which seem to have been invented specifically for this book. These NPCs are essential to running a Turjan-level campaign; while a Cugel-level campaign can manage without very many detailed powerful NPCs, since most NPCs will only appear briefly to be fleeced or to fleece, a Turjan-level game needs plenty of contacts and allies.
Chapter 7, Rumours of Impending Hazard: This is a collection of scenario hooks, but with a difference. I love scenario hooks generally, and they’re particularly useful for a TDE campaign, where it’s important that players have a good deal of freedom over which quests they pursue; there’s little point in having an adventure fully detailed if the PCs choose to go elsewhere. This chapter, unlike most scenario hooks, can be freely read by the players in a TDE game. The hooks are presented as rumours, so that the players can decide whether to ignore or follow up each rumour as they desire. Since Turjan-level games will often revolve around seeking out ancient knowledge, mysterious artefacts and similar, this is an excellent move. Turjan-level characters are powerful personages in their own right, capable of setting their own agendas rather than being blown hither and yon by the winds of fortune.
The hooks themselves are generally excellent. Combine these with the machinations of the PCs and important NPCs, plus the various other activities of the PCs such as vat creature creation, and you will have enough material to run a Turjan-level game for the foreseeable future. 25 Rumours of Impending Hazard are detailed, including attempts to recover obscure grimoires or sunken treasure ships, calls to rescue missing relatives or protect innocent young women, mysterious places to explore and many other worthy goals for Turjanic games. Sure, some of these are fairly standard fantasy adventure fare, but they all contain some kind of Dying Earth twist… and some are just brimming over with the baroquely fantastic, such as the time-travelling vintage clothing emporium, or the archmage looking to hire adventurers to ride on a comet with him.
Chapter 8, Beyond the Dying Earth: This chapter cover the extraplanar realms that Turjan-level adventurers often wander into -- places even weirder than the Dying Earth itself. In effect, this is another 12 scenario hooks. This time though each one involves not just a reason to travel to a new world, but the possibility of far more adventures in said world.
This chapter is a bit of a mixed bag, and I have to admit I found it a little disappointing in comparison to the rest of the book -- it’s not that it isn’t good, it just doesn’t seem as good as the rest. I guess I was hoping for some more information on the worlds mentioned in the Dying Earth books themselves (such as Embelyon, mentioned earlier in the book in the entry describing its current master Pandelume), and some more ideas about precisely how to travel to and from other worlds. The worlds that are depicted are sometimes very much in keeping with the odd places visited by the protagonists of Vance’s work, sometimes not so much.
The rest of the book is devoted to an extra 8 pages of taglines (amusingly for a book about egotistical magicians, about a page and a half of them begin with the word “I”), which aren’t strictly necessary for Turjan-level games but can still be useful for getting players into the habit of speaking the right type of dialogue, and some comprehensive indices of the new spells, tweaks and items presented in the book.
Overall, this is a very thought-provoking work. Thought-provoking because (as an especial fan of Vance’s Cugel stories, The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel’s Saga) I’d never seriously considered running anything other than a Cugel-level game before. Fantasy, after all, could be handled with D&D, or Conan, or HeroQuest, or BESM, or Amber, or Dragon Warriors, or or or… So, it’s a pleasant surprise that I’m now giving some thought to running a Turjan-level game or two. My players generally enjoyed the Cugel-level TDE games I ran, but at least some of them would almost certainly prefer the slightly more powerful characters and greater degree of player control found in Turjan-level games. So, who is this book useful for:
* TDE completists. Obviously.
* TDE players and GMs who want a middle ground between the sudden reversals of fortune that characterise most games of TDE, and the high fantasy of D&D et al.
* Anyone wanting to run a swords-and-sorcery or baroque fantasy game -- there are enough unusual ideas here to keep you going for a while, even if you don’t use this book with the TDE rules in the end. Certainly Turjan’s Tome would fit for running games in Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne, or even (with a tweak or two) Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar.
Explanation of ratings:
Style gets a 4, since though it’s competent and in places very good, it doesn’t quite compete with all those full-colour glossy books… This could have been a 5 were it not for the small number of amateurish art pieces; the better art is often worth a 5, but unfortunately bad art is more memorable than good when talking about the overall style of a book. The writing is of a very high standard, clear, amusing and informative simultaneously; if I were to base Style on the physical look of the book alone, it might only get a 3 (again, because occasional bad art tends to drag down an otherwise great book), but the liveliness of the text pushes this up to a 4.
Substance gets a 5, despite the slightly weak Chapter 8. Chapters 1 to 7 are so useful they more than make up for it, and when I do get round to running this I will still get a fair bit of use out of Chapter 8 anyway. I’m always impressed by any book that, like this one, finds room both to transform the feel of the campaigns played when used in conjunction with the core book, and to include so many adventure and campaign ideas too. The rules changes are elegant and simple, leaving the impression as with the rest of the book that there is no padding here; all content is of high utility.
Please help support RPGnet by purchasing the following (probably) related items through DriveThruRPG.
