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Introduction

Ever since I ran across a copy of Charles de Lint's short story collection Dreams Underfoot, I've been in love with urban fantasy. Naturally, that's affected my RPG choices, as my reviews of the WitchCraft and Everlasting lines can attest. But as much as I love these settings, they don't focus on one important aspect of urban fantasy: ordinary, everyday people encountering the whimsy, wonder, and terror of the Fey.

I suppose that shouldn't be too surprising. Action features much less prominently in this sort of tale than it does in the typical RPG. And unlike in horror games such as Call of Cthulhu, which also deal with more-or-less average protagonists, the supernatural in urban fantasy isn't always something to flee or banish. Sometimes, it's just something to experience. These factors don't seem to lend themselves to the standard roleplaying adventure format.

Enter Deliria – a roleplaying game of modern-day faerie tales penned by Mage: the Ascension writer Phil Brucato. It strides boldly into Charles de Lint country determined to make the game fit the source material, not the other way around.

Presented as a breathtaking twilight run alongside the Dream-stag, the opening chapter takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the fey realms. And as befits such a deliberately unorthodox game, the trip starts in the most innocuous of places: the modern home, with its house-sprites, hearth spirits, and magical devices that make light, cold, heat, music, and visions. Right off the bat, Deliria establishes that technology is not anathema to magic, but rather is a kindred discipline that is opening up the human mind like it has never been opened before.

From there, the chapter moves on to the Mysterium – the magical areas of our world where folks "know the score" about the supernatural, like the more mystical parts of de Lint's fictional city of Newford. The text lingers on goblin markets, where merchants of this world and of others ply their trades, and on sanctora, a nebulous term referring to places where dwellers in the Mysterium can gather and (in more private sanctora) indulge in all manner of weirdness.

Then, naturally enough, it's on to Deliria itself – the faerie realm. And it overflows with all the wonders you could want. Vast unicorn-haunted forests of every tree from palm to fir. Lightning bolts frozen eternally from ground to sky. A school of wizardry in a single massive oak tree. A floating mountain filled with Victorian mines and furnaces. An idealized realm of medieval bliss. A… shopping mall...?

Yes, a shopping mall. A fairy-ish version of a mall, but a mall nonetheless. A recurring theme in the game is not just the influence of faeries on mortals, but also the influence of mortals on faeries. For example, as humans created the shopping mall, their dreams turned a rustic faerie marketplace into one huge multi-story center of commerce, complete with paved buggy-filled parking lots. In a similar vein, the Internet has begun to manifest in Deliria as a crystalline kudzu vine that's slowly choking off the local vegetation, and online gamers have begun to project themselves into the faerie realm and set up little kingdoms as bases from whence to hack and slash.

In trying to pull off this juxtaposition, the game straddles a very fine line between "whimsical" and "campy". I still haven't quite decided if it succeeds. On the one hand, this sort of thing tainted for me what is otherwise one of the most evocative visions of the faerie realm I've ever read. On the other hand, that taint is kind of the point.

Potentially more troubling is the style-to-substance ratio here. The chapter crackles with ideas begging for use, but they streak by in a beautiful Impressionistic blur. Granted, nailing down the Fey realm with maps and math might not feel quite right, but this being a game, I think a few more hard facts here and there would've been helpful.

Chapter Two: Fire in the Head

It would have been a shame had Deliria presented such a beautiful vision of Fairyland only to offer the same old character types to experience it. Thankfully, such is not the case. Here, the book looks at what makes a fairytale hero – an individual on a highly personal journey of innocence, challenge, and transformation. These heroes don't need great martial or mystical prowess to qualify. All that's needed is a chance for them to brush up against the uncanny and enough curiosity to keep them from shrugging and turning away. In this sense, Deliria heroes are to ethereal wonder what Call of Cthulhu investigators are to Lovecraftian horror.

My favorite aspect of this chapter – and the first whiff of a game mechanic, albeit not much of one – is the concept of the "Motif". The idea is that certain individuals are born to, gravitate toward, or unwittingly become certain fairytale archetypes: the Faerie Godmother, the Knight, the Princess, the Witch, and so on. But again, the modern world touches the faerie tropes: more contemporary Motifs include the Agent of Order (a.k.a. the Man in Black), the fame-powered Cylebrity, the hypertech Neomancer, and the Urban Tribalist.

None of these offer any game mechanic benefits; rather, they are simply ways of visualizing the hero, or what the hero might become, with suggestions for appropriate skills and abilities and examples of the Motif in literature and pop culture. There is at least one interesting in-game effect of the Motif, however: the denizens of the Fey realm may treat characters as their Motifs, even if they've never met before. This could lead to some great story hooks – "Knights" expected to slay dragons, "Princesses" locked away in towers for no apparent reason, and so on.

Chapter Three: Good Neighbors

Of course, it wouldn't be much of a fairytale game without faeries, would it?

This chapter begins with a captivating look at the intertwined destinies of humans and faeries down through the ages, presented as a kind of ongoing synergy between humanity's ability to dream and the faeries' ability to inspire. Along the way, the text suggests several possible origins for the fey but confirms none of them – ordinarily an approach that I find mildly annoying, but here, not so much, given the fact that the faeries in the setting simply won't discuss the matter. (At least, not truthfully.)

Of course, history's all well and good – very good, in this case – but a game of modern-day faeries will live and die on its handling of the faeries themselves.

The faeries break down into three broad power levels. From the most to least potent, they are:

• Aelderfolk: the only truly immortal faeries, native to Deliria
• Aelden: long-lived but mortal faeries hovering between the worlds

• Shimmerlings: minor manifestations of faerie essence in the mortal world, rarely smarter than children and like insects to the Aelderfolk

Each type gets a range of stats for their attributes, innate powers and flaws, number of forms, and ability to use faerie magic (and turn mortal magic back on the caster). And in terms of faerie stats, that's just about it. Again, this lack of hard numbers may be thematic, but I'm not sure that it's practical from a game design standpoint.

Note that there is no faerie bestiary here – something that might not bug me so much if there were a toolkit for creating many interesting and distinct faeries from scratch. There's a list of powers common to all faeries – remaining unseen, beguiling mortals, creating glamours, etc. – but no mechanics to put them into practice. And given the fact that faerie magic can do pretty much whatever the caster wants it to do, such abilities seem almost superfluous anyway – as do the handful of innate powers in the book to which both humans and faeries may have access. More on the latter in a moment.

The game does allow for Aelden player characters... sort of. The text recommends that GMs stick to the recommended stat ranges for Aelden PCs, but how this relates to the standard character creation rules (see below) isn't explained.

The good news is that where the chapter stumbles in practice, it excels in concept. It looks at faeries from a number of intriguing angles: their traditional roles in human faerie tales (guides, lovers, predators, tricksters, etc.), their Heartsongs (i.e., their true natures – beguiling, contemplative, malignant, etc.), and their Guises (i.e., their various forms – the Dragon, the Hag, the Sprite, the Totem, etc., as well as more modern forms like the Alien and the Gremlin). Of course, the scarcity of well-defined powers won't make it particularly easy to apply these guises beyond basic appearance.

And thankfully, the lack of concrete rules doesn't mean a lack of details. The chapter does a great job of presenting the various quirks of faeries – their bizarre attitudes, likes, dislikes, affinities, weaknesses, and dooms. It's an avalanche of faerie lore presented as unrestrictive possibilities. Take iron, for example – why does it harm faeries? The chapter offers multiple explanations, from iron as a symbol of human technology to its reverberation at a faerie-irritating frequency in the music of Creation. Any, all, or none of the answers could be true. And even then it may not matter so much, because some faeries deal with iron just fine.

This sheer volume of detailed mythic ambiguity perfectly captures the enigmatic essence of Faerie, even if it doesn't do so in rule form. (Well, aside from giving a penalty for faeries to see people wearing their clothes inside out. Why is that the one faerie quirk that gets an actual mechanic? Beats me. That's Faerie for you, I guess.)

Chapter Four: Circle and Saga

Having covered what makes a faerie, the book takes up the topic of what makes a faerie tale. And perhaps because the subject doesn’t call for even the pretense of rules, it does so with aplomb.

The chapter takes the wise approach of differentiating between faerie tales and myths, the latter being the tales of grander scope that readers may be more likely to associate with fantasy in general and fantasy RPGs in particular. The text emphasizes the more intimate nature of faerie tales, with their focus on the transformation of an individual rather than on an individual transforming the world – a process that the book effectively defends as neither escapism, nor kid stuff, nor power fantasy. It does, however, show the origins of such misconceptions in a fascinating little history of the faerie tale.

The thing is, all of this stuff about individual journeys doesn't seem to lend itself well to the standard gaming group format, and the GM advice that takes up the rest of the chapter doesn't really address this issue. That aside, the tips are quite good, and go beyond the standard stuff about planning ahead, staying flexible, etc. I particularly like the sidebar lists of potential faerie tale themes, hooks, settings, challenges, adversaries and allies – 7 each of the "classics" (witches, caves, magical steeds, lost in the wilderness, etc.) and of modern versions (rebellious machines, slums, government conspiracies, computer sprites, etc.). And I absolutely love the "Circle-shared setting" concept, in which the players and GM – the "Circle" – not only rotate multiple roles in Ars Magica fashion, but also share the responsibility for creating and "running" various parts of the city chosen as home for the group. It looks like this would be a great way to create a place that feels real and alive, like Charles de Lint's city of Newford.

Chapter Five: Challenge and Chance

At last, the rules.

Deliria uses the Compact System, so named because it can be compressed or expanded into three general levels of complexity: Narrative, Basic, and Advanced. Distinguishing these are a decreasing reliance on pure roleplaying for task resolution and an increase in modifiers and attribute/skill detail, among other things.

The basic system uses a deck of playing cards for each player and the GM, with the King of Diamonds, the King of Clubs, and the two Jokers removed. If the character's ability level isn't already sufficient to beat the difficulty (when using the Narrative or Basic rules, and at the GM's discretion), or if the player wants to try for a better result, the player draws a card from the deck. Red cards are positive, black cards are negative. Red and black numbered cards add or subtract to the ability score, red or black Queens result in automatic success or failure, and red or black Kings result in automatic Triumph (critical success) or Disaster (critical failure). Jacks, red or black, are simply read as zeros.

The chapter includes an optional dice resolution mechanic using 2d10 to replace the cards, although this is a simulation of the card mechanic rather than a distinct mechanic of its own. A "suit" d10 indicates the suit of the "card" and whether it's a face card, and a "face" d10 gives the number or face, both by referencing their own simple tables. The stop-and-think factor there is a little too high for my taste.

There's also a card-draw utility on the web site and the included CD/ROM to facilitate online play. It seems to work quite nicely.

So far, this gives me one mechanic I love and one I despise. One reason I never fully took to Feng Shui is the over/under die mechanic – I love the idea of a character's ability level being his average performance, but having to subtract one die from another to get a result that's then added or subtracted from the ability score just bogged down my thought process somehow. Deliria neatly avoids that problem: red = positive, black = negative.

On the other hand, the mechanic also includes auto-successes/failures and (worse) auto-critical successes/critical failures – something that's always been a pet peeve of mine. So, Joe Average wants to jump to the roof of a five-story building? Well, his ability scores make that pretty unlikely… but look! He drew a King of Hearts! Off he goes to the roof, and with style! Yes, I realize that GM fiat can and should negate such a result, but a good way to judge the quality of a game system is how often GM fiat becomes necessary to counter ridiculous results. Here, that's kicking in with the Compact System's basic mechanic. An open-ending mechanic would have been a better choice.

And that's not the last time this situation comes up, either. The Deliria incarnation of the Drama/Hero/Fate Point is Fortune, which players can spend during challenges in one of two ways: to make binding re-draws – thereby making the result better or worse – or to get an automatic (but minimal) success in all situations other than automatic Disasters. So, if you're holding a point of Fortune, failure at any action, regardless of difficulty, becomes a function of your willingness to allow the failure to occur and to the pure luck involved in not drawing a King of Spades. In such cases, ability simply does not matter beyond the chance of that Fortune point becoming necessary in the first place.

I appreciate the fact that contested actions – a.k.a. "Challenges" – don't require a draw from both parties; instead, the defender's ability score + 6 becomes the target number of the aggressor. The defender has the option of making a "Counterdraw," spending an action to draw one card that reduces the attacker's ability level for the attempt. That's great, except that Counterdraws "misdirect without actual contact," with heckling as well as dodging used as examples. Yet the combat section says the defender's dodging ability is the attacker's target number – hence, a Challenge. So, is a dodge attempt both a Challenge and a Counterdraw? And if a defender whose dodge score is the attacker's target number decides to Counterdraw by heckling, we're back to success as a matter of pure chance – the defender can't apply any particular skill to the heckling.

In short, these rules just weren't very clear to me. What was clear at this point was my building headache.

And speaking of pain…

Violence

I have to give Deliria a lot of credit here. When staying true to the subgenre, physical combat shouldn't be the focus – or even a part – of every urban fantasy adventure. But violence tends to provide such a dramatic and definitive measure of victory that it seems to be the solution to just about every adventure of any sort I've ever run or played. Well, in Deliria, names really can hurt you almost as badly as sticks and stones. Combat needn't be physical – it may be spiritual, emotional, or even social. A vicious assault on an individual's reputation may be slower than a sword thrust or a gunshot, but it can literally drive the target to suicide.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the mechanics behind combat are really, really strange – the kind of mechanics that seem different just for the sake of being different rather than for any practical concerns.

The central idea behind the combat system is that the tricky part isn't hitting, it's harming. To that end, the target number for an attack depends in part upon which of the five wound levels – Suffering, Wound, Crippling, Mortal, and Fatal – the attacker wants to inflict. The higher the damage level, the higher the modifier. Wound effects take the form of penalties to actions and (at higher levels) the loss of ½, ¾, or all of the character's remaining Vitality, a holistic measure of life force (see below). In addition, players are expected to roleplay damage effects – an admirable enough goal.

But yet again, the system's seeming obsession with random effects kicks in. If the attacker is okay with going for the default damage level of Suffering, a basic success is all that's needed. A success at two higher than the target number bumps the damage to a Wound… but to get an unintended Crippling or Mortal result requires a red royal or a red 10, respectively. And a Fatal result requires a Triumph, which can be a success +10 or a randomly drawn King of Hearts. In other words, a really skilled combatant interesting in only inflicting pain can either wound or outright kill an opponent due to skill, but can only cripple or mortally wound an opponent through sheer chance.

And due to this damage mechanic, weapons generally make successful attacks more likely rather than add directly to damage. I say "generally" because extremely large weapons increase both the damage inflicted by one wound level and the wielder's effective size. Since size in the game makes smaller creatures harder to hit but easier to wound and larger creatures easier to hit but harder to wound, this simulates big, awkward-but-deadly weapons fairly well and allows weapon choice to serve as an "equalizer" for smaller foes. But are you really more likely to dish out serious wounds using a quarterstaff – rated as a huge weapon – than you are with a two-handed sword? Are you really better off whacking a giant with a table than chopping him with a battleaxe? And if extra damage doesn't kick in until you get to the huge weapons, why do the smallest possible fangs and claws add a level of damage rather than a +1 to the attack?

And then there's armor. As you might expect, it makes a target less likely to be hit rather than less likely to take damage, since a "hit" in this system means a damaging hit. But most armor also incurs Agility penalties. Since Agility is used for physical defense, this makes the usefulness of armor rather questionable. It may be that the penalty doesn't apply against defense, but if so, the rules don't make this clear.

All that said, I do like the subsequent discussion of social and psychic combat, in which the chapter suggests a wide range of attribute/skill combinations that might be used for attack and defense – an assault on someone's reputation with a creative use of mass media, for example, might be countered by the target's wily application of street smarts.

Chapter Six: Mask and Mirror

As might be expected from a game with Deliria's lofty design goals, character creation begins with contemplations of the character's background, motivations, and goals rather than numbers. Appropriately enough, this process begins with a story – a brief little interlude from the character's life, illustrating how he or she typically deals with situations. This is a great idea, except that coming as it does at the front end of character creation, the player may well not know how the character deals with problems – the specifics to come will have a heavy impact on that, and the system's not loose enough to ensure that those details will be able to fit whatever the player can conceive at this point.

The way in which the character creation system does get down to the numbers really caught my eye, however.

Graces & Vocations

As with the resolution system, character creation works on different levels of complexity. At the basic level, the system uses highly generalized Graces (attributes) and Vocations (skills). The Graces – which have a human scale of 1-10 – echo the Tri-Stat stats: Body, Mind, and Spirit. Ordinarily, I can't abide a holistic Body stat due to the way it blurs the line between agility and strength. But here, I don't have to: fight over the thermostat.

(I should explain that the preceding sentence was a product of me effectively sleep-reviewing during a late-night writing session. I have no memory of writing it, nor do I have any idea what I meant. But at the urging of some folks in this thread who said it was appropriately surreal for a review of a game called Deliria, I've left it in. We now return you to your regularly scheduled review…)

But here, I don't have to: the advanced option breaks down both Graces and Vocations into more specific Aspects. Body, for example, breaks down into Agility, Beauty, Health, and Strength. (And seeing that breakdown, I'm even more inclined to use the advanced option. I'd rather that every musclebound troll, giant, and ogre not be a ninja supermodel.) Each Grace has four Aspects, and the level of the Grace x 4 is the number of points to divide between the Aspects.

The breakdown's not perfect, however. Since weapons make damaging hits more likely, it's easy enough to deal with Agility and Strength being lumped together in combat at the basic level. But in the advanced version, attacks use only Agility, rendering Strength absolutely meaningless to damage… unless you use the optional rule on the CD/ROM, in which case Strength does matter to damage… if you happen to be the strongest person in the world (or stronger).

As odd as that is, though, it's nothing compared to the strangeness of the basic/advanced Vocation dichotomy.

Using the basic method, the Vocations are Academia, Art, Athletics, Craftsmanship, Domestic, Influence, Languages, Martial, Metaphysics, and Technology. In practical terms, this setup means that thanks to a high Martial score, a good boxer will know how to use every means of combat known to man – martial arts, handguns, artillery, chainsaws, darts, plastic explosives, boomerangs, etc. A good chef will have a high Domestic score, making him an expert survivalist, hunter, and handyman, and a damn fine parent. And a pro racecar driver's high Technology score will make the brainy devil an accomplished chemist, electrician, coachman, sailor, engineer, and nanotechnician.

Using the Aspects for Vocations improves the situation but introduces a new quirk of its own: the level of the Vocation governs both the depth and breadth of the knowledge of the Aspects. If your Vocation is 5 in Domestic, for example, you will know a minimum of 5 Aspects at level 5. This isn't a huge problem until you're forced to take Aspects that don't fit the character concept – at that point, we're back to the problem of the basic method. There's a way around this issue, but it has problems of its own. More on that in just a moment.

Deliria

Speaking of weird dichotomies between the basic and advanced methods, the one regarding the game's eponymous Deliria stat is a doozy. Deliria measures a person's ability to perceive the irrational, but also measures how irrational the person is. In other words, if you want to see faeries, it helps to be a little nuts. Okay, that makes some sense. But by default, the score is based on ½ of Mind. So, the smarter you are, the nuttier you are. (For perspective, this makes the smartest people on the planet as flaky as the average child.)

Now consider the optional rule taking into account the Mind Aspects, making Deliria equal to Wisdom subtracted from Imagination. That makes more sense to me than the ½ Mind method, but it can also produce radically different scores. For example, one potential player's character got child-like levels of Deliria with the basic method and a "painfully sane" rating of 0 with the advanced method. I'm all for optional levels of complexity, but I expect those levels to offer progressively more detail, not contradictory results.

Vitality

I'm also not particularly pleased with Vitality, the system's hit point analog, which is based on the combined score of all three Graces. I do understand why it's calculated that way, allowing as it does for a New Age-y holistic view of personhood and for the equal importance of mental, spiritual, and physical attacks. Still, I'd prefer that damage from such attacks be recorded separately to allow for individuals who can physically soak up a lot of punishment regardless of their mental state.

The listed meanings of the colors, textures, and tones of Vitality-produced auras are a nice touch, however, as are the discussions of raising, sharing, sacrificing, and stealing Vitality through everything from sex to self-sacrifice to vampirism to simply experiencing a thrill.

Fortune

And then we have Fortune points, which start at 3 and may go no higher than 5. These are the game's Hero/Drama/Fate points. As previously mentioned, Fortune points can either earn binding re-draws or give automatic successes, so unless a player really, really needs a better-than-average success, there's no reason to do the former. They can also be used to avert a character's certain death, or to increase an attack's wound level. (They cannot, however, be used to make re-draws for an attack.)

Favor Points

Now up to this point, there aren't a whole lot of discretionary points to spend – just 15 each to apply to Graces and Vocations. That changes once we get to Favor Points, which players can spend on characters to increase Graces and Vocations (or their Aspects, if used), raise Deliria, Fortune, and Vitality, and buy supernatural powers known as Favors. (The fact that Favor Points don't directly relate to Favors is just one more bit of confusion.)

The game has three power levels – Wanderer, Journeyman, and Heroic – rated in increasing numbers of Favor Points offered and levels of Wyrds (drawbacks) required. (The logic behind the latter being that great heroes in fairy tales always have some Achilles' heel.)

(It was at this point, by the way, that my attempt at a review playtest broke down. Why? Well, when all of my potential players came back with Captain America-class characters at Wanderer level, I noticed I was using one of three contradictory Aspect costs given in the chapter. (The one I was using made it pointless to increase Aspects in lieu of Graces, which had already caused some confusion.) It took me well over a month to get an answer on the game's forum – or, rather, for me to get someone else's answer to the same question, as mine never got one. With player interest lagging and with more games in line for playtest, I thought it best to go the capsule route and move on.)

Favors

Favors come in three varieties: Accords (magic abilities), Legacies (innate powers), and Wyrds (the aforementioned drawbacks). Accords get their own chapter, so I will deal with them there accordingly (pardon the pun).

Legacies and Wyrds both come in four levels, and any points of Wyrd taken in excess of those required by the power level of play translate into extra Favor Points. There aren't many of either:

Legacies:

• Adaptation* (to environments)
• Bardic Gift
• Element Affinity
• Fang and Claw*
• Mindcasting (a mix of various psi powers, such as mindreading and astral projection)
• Mystery*(a Legacy unknown to both the character and the player)
• Shape-shifting
• Soulsight

Wyrds:

• Bane*
• Cannibal
• Curse
• Doom
• Lifethief
• Mystery* (a Wyrd unknown to both the character and the player)
• Season (as in, tied to the turning of the seasons)
• Stranger in a Strange Land*

(*from the included CD/ROM)

Note that as PC special abilities go, Legacies are well on the lower end of the power spectrum. The highest level of Element Affinity, for example, allows the character to meld with the relevant element for a few minutes, and only once between dawn and midnight – nice, but hardly earth shattering. Nor should it be, since the PCs aren't meant to be supernatural powerhouses. Trouble is, this is the same pool of powers from which to create the fey, leaving them a little handicapped and overly dependent upon magic. Granted, the edge faeries have in magic makes up for this somewhat (see below), but the freeform nature of that magic makes any of these human-scale Legacies seem rather silly: "He can do anything he can imagine!! And also, briefly turn into water once a day."

In addition to the power-related Legacies, the chapter (and the CD/ROM) include a handful of "Everyman" Legacies and Wyrds – non-supernatural perks and flaws.

Everyman Legacies:

• Fame*
• Wealth

Everyman Wyrds:

• Handicap*
• Poverty
• Secret Nemesis

(*from the CD/ROM)

This is a rather halfhearted attempt at tacking a typical ad/disad system onto the supernatural abilities and disabilities. I'd rather there either be more such options or else none at all, as this method left some of my potential players wondering why they couldn't get points back for other non-magical flaws.

Chapter Seven: Pocketful of Miracles

In this one chapter, at least, everything comes together. The Deliria magic system is so good, it almost makes up for the game's flaws.

All magic uses the same basic system. Mechanically, it's a draw using the character's Spirit Grace and his level in the appropriate magic style (known as an Accord) against a difficulty determined by the general nature and degree of the intent, factoring in a number of circumstantial modifiers. Every casting requires tools and three actions to bind the spell into being. Theoretically, anyone can do just about anything, which would in and of itself result in a flexible but bland mechanic. What really adds flavor to that flexibility is the nature of the Accords.

Although the basic mechanic remains the same regardless of the Accord being used, the Accords determine what tools and actions are appropriate, as well as any particular weaknesses to the practitioner's powers. For example, a witch might light candles, perform a dance, and inscribe a sacred circle, while a mad scientist might draw a blueprint, activate a computer program, and pull a trigger. The mad scientist won't be casting any quickie spells, but the witch probably won't be too handy at affecting machinery. In addition, both of their spells will leave distinct thematic "echoes" in their wake: plants might suddenly grow or die around the witch, while machines might spark, sputter, or rev to life around the mad scientist.

The breadth of the Accords covers just about any magical tradition you could want, from the aforementioned witches and mad scientists to hermetic magicians, kung fu mystics, shamans, and more. Faeries have their own Accord – Faerie Wishcraft – and aelderfolk can cast powerful spells in a fraction of the time it takes human, aelden, or shimmerling magicians. (Again, this waters down the need for any powers unique to individual faeries.)

My favorite part about the system, though, is actually just an option: allowing Vocations to translate into bonus points when casting a spell. So, if the witch is a really good cook or dancer, she might get bonus points when casting a spell involving cooking up a witch's brew or dancing a sacred dance. And the mad scientist might apply any number of scientific and technical skills in the creation of his devices. This provides a way for even practitioners of the same Accord to be mechanically and thematically distinct.

CD/ROM

I've already covered some of the key features of the CD/ROM that comes with the book. Other tidbits include samples of art and music, as well as general descriptions of Celestials (angels), Howlers (demons), and Whisperlings (ghosts) and write-ups of sample characters. The latter are sorely needed, given the print book's lack of any sort of bestiary; however, the book here already adds new Legacies in order to create some of these few characters, which only serves to highlight the game's limitations. If the game can't create even a handful of sample characters without adding new Legacies, how many will the GM have to create on his own?

(Most, if not all, of the files on the CD/ROM may be downloaded from the company web site here; however, as I write this, the download page isn't up due to a server migration.)

The game's web site promises art that "strides beyond cliché" – a pretentious claim, to be sure. But as the saying goes: "It ain't bragging if you can do it." This 8-1/2" x 11" full-color hardback is jaw-droppingly beautiful. Literally. The book had my mouth hanging open in wonder. (And, to my eternal shame, actually elicited from me a Neo-like "Whoa...") It's more beautiful than Buffy. More beautiful than Nobilis. More beautiful than any game book I've ever seen in my life. It's the quality of a coffee table book of fantasy art. In fact, it includes art by Nènè Thomas, a fantasy artist whose work has hung on my wall for years now. Be warned that this is not a book designed with kids in mind, though. There's abundant (but tastefully done) nudity, and at least one sex scene that I'm not even going to attempt to describe.

The writing is also very lush and evocative, including many excellent fiction pieces. The jarring and persistent dropping of f-bombs in the middle of poetic descriptions makes the author sound like Tolkien with Tourette's syndrome at times, however, and seems intended to reassure the reader that "hey, we're totally edgy and stuff, despite all this flowery faerie crap." And in a more general sense, the sheer verbosity of the writing pushes out key information, as the "we ran out of room" explanation on the CD/ROM can attest.

Also, the author repeatedly cites NPCs mentioned in scattered sidebars and/or fiction pieces as examples of various game concepts – characters who are clearly iconic in his conception of the setting, but who didn't make enough of an impression for me to recognize them by name alone. Oh, I knew I'd read the names somewhere in the book, but that just set me on the frustrating task of trying to figure out where – not the sort of thing that lends itself to learning the rules. It would have been much easier if all such characters appeared together in one section.

The layout is every bit as beautiful as the artwork, although the use of symbols to set off topics really didn't work for me. (And are a teardrop with an eye in it and an inverted purple pentagon containing two wine glasses really "self-explanatory" symbols, as the text asserts?) Other than that, the only problem I had was with the table describing the levels of Graces, which uses a different color for each level. Note to the designer: bright yellow on white isn't particularly legible.

Despite the presence of an index, the organization leaves a lot to be desired. Trying to find an important fact in the almost stream-of-consciousness setting description is only slightly easier than finding a specific reference somewhere in a novel – the aforementioned NPC references, for example.

In the end, Deliria is the very essence of Faerie: it's extremely beautiful and enigmatic, very compelling and very contradictory. It makes you want to understand it while stubbornly defying logic, offering only headaches for your trouble.

Which is incredibly frustrating, because I really and truly wanted to love this game. And I do, in some ways. But I just can't see how to recommend it in good conscience in its present form. The setting contains some great ideas, but that's largely all they are: ideas, rather than fleshed-out concepts ready for play. And aside from the magic system, the rules are far too flawed, quirky, and confusing to be a selling point on their own.

But even if I can't recommend this game, I can say this much: it's worth another try. Phil clearly has a worthwhile vision. In fact, I know he does, because I've looked over the designer notes available on the web site. I only wish the end result had looked at least a little closer to some of the initial concepts. There's a great game here just waiting for a chance to shine.

And damn, it sure is pretty.