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Synopsis
Cloak of Steel is an OGL game in PDF format found at RPGNOW. Cloak of Steel is a class less and level-less fantasy role-playing game. Cloak of Steel derives its name from enormous war machines called cloaks (what we in the western world have taken to call "mecha" but that is alas a rant and bears no place in a review.)
At first glance, Cloak of Steel didn't seem to interest me. It may be class-less, level-less but it is still somewhat constrained in many ways by the roots of its grandfather game. I continued to hear interesting things about Cloak of Steel so I decided to look and see for myself.
Let me presage the rest of this review with some caveats, this game is huge, and an in depth review has taken me sometime. Players flaking on me almost prevented this from being a play test review. Then at the last minute I wrangled two players to test it Understand that I will be running a campaign of this game with long term aims even if I have to duct tape my players to their chairs (mind you they want to play its just scheduling that's bee a problem.) I'm writing this review as a dual purpose review-one is to provide you readers with information on the game, and how good or bad I think it is, the other is to address elements that need work-these elements needing work do not seriously impair the game, nor do they reduce my enthusiasm one bit for this game.
The final caveat: This was a review copy. Having no funds at all, and a serious likelihood of not have any for some time to come; the game writer was kind enough to share this game with me so that I might review it.
Initial Impressions
When I finally got through downloading the massive sixteen megabyte file I was tired, frustrated from disconnects and other issues and ready to throw in the towel, however I opened the PDF and took a look and read to my delight that it was worth every minute of my frustration in downloading it. The bad news is of course that being a huge file; it has a lot of information and takes a while to absorb. The good news is that the creator has done some electronic magic and reduced the download size considerable (ten megabytes).
Cloak of Steel is 217 page game though the major game elements fill only 196 pages with a front cover as page 1, the OGL license, an index, and finally a back cover add for more games among other things padding the length a bit.)
There sadly is no table of contents but considering the size of the game and an index, I'm quite pleased to say that except for writing this review I didn't miss it.
The first pages of the game after the OGL license and a quick rundown on the company, then the LIVE system itself (the classless and level less modification to d20 that this game run's on, sort of a hybrid gas-electric with some horsepower), a piracy rant, and the basics of stats, and dice, explained. This is the first moment that I realize a hiccup between the design of the game as a complete OGL, and some minor issues of details later on-it is a complete game system, it just presumes a familiarity with D20 on one hand, but also present information as if you might be new to the whole d20 game structure. This isn't inherently bad, but it does take up space better served elsewhere.
A few pages are given to explain the sun the moon, the directions (since not a globe it uses a bit different standards) and this is all wonderful information that helps a GM to convey the world.
Setting
Here is the meat of the world, a deep overview of the major countries of the primary continent of interest and associated forces. The breakdown gives a brief history of the country, a snapshot view of its current present direction and goings on, culture, government military, people, cities, a list of country derived names, religion, its allies and enemies often its behaviors towards slavery and half-men since it is mostly a human-centric world. Then finally special rules on magical ties, an advantage unique to the country, and in some cases a bit of information on their cloaks and technology. In general, it is a lot of information, and far be it from me to complain about the details, except the weight of the world tends to overwhelm space for rules system elements and clarifications. My suggestion would have been a shorter but same level of detail list of countries, with plans for expansion books for the rest of the world. I hate to suggest that because that usually means more money to be spent to get a "complete" game. Yet, the limits of PDF technology make it a preferable model for two cheap books with lots of detail than one large one that is forced to skimp somewhere. Never mind the fact that unlike print you do not have a page break requirement for the printers to live up to, overall this section gets a rating of 15 out of 20 sides on the old D20.
Half Men
Cloak of Steel has only two races: men and half-men. This section focuses on what half-men are and some special bonuses they can purchase-along with the nature of racism towards them in the game. This section should actually have been grouped with the rest of the Half-men details in character creation. Good material just in the wrong place.
Cloak History
Cloaks! Yay! Finally, we get the real reason to get this game, a fantasy trope that is not yet so clichéd as to be overused. The details here are the history and concept, including how cloaks tend to be individualized to a specific person. We also get a bit on airships (which are not just dirigibles and blimps, but aircraft of any kind, my mind spins with wonders of iron and wood fortresses with flapping rows of wings keeping aloft city sized carriers for air dropping cloaks, and you know many games disappoint my inner vision but this one does not.)
Conflict
A short bit more information on conflict in the world, I expected to see more on slavery and anti-slavery but didn't get so much of that as war, potential war, and rebellion elements among the various nations.
Religion
Religion is covered in depth giving the general beliefs of the world, and in this game, they are just that, beliefs, gods and goddesses, spiritual forces of godlike natures are not a provable fact in this world. Instead the question is left open, while there are religious spell casters, their magic is not divine, rather it simply uses a different method of casting to access the same magic as other spell casters.
Money and Commerce
We get a bit on commerce, coins, and other bits of wealth including slaves. It is at this point that I seriously want someone to reorganize this game because it doesn't seem to flow logically to me. Having had play test feedback of my own I learned that editors seem to love "world first rules second" but most people who actually play games don't seem to want it that way, and here we've had a huge chunk of world with few rules, ad most of those rules really belong in respective chapters on feats, magic, equipment with only brief mention in the world text to reference the appropriate sections. I'd much prefer the commerce and coinage information either under each country specifically, or in the equipment/outfitting chapters either one makes sense to me that tacked on at the end of a general world overview does not.
Character Creation
This begins the heart of any role-playing game, character creation; an outline begins the chapter showing the general steps to produce a character. The next few pages cover the various breeds of Half-Men their modifiers to both attributes, and the penalties they pay for their advantages (in feats and skill points), here is where the previous information on Half-men should have gone. Half -men are creatures born with traits of both man and animal, they cover a wide range of types from Dog People and Rabbitkin to Toadmen, in general they are something interesting to me as set of races because it allows a lot of variety here for players who want more than "mere" humans.
When we finish with the Half men we get a couple of skill "packages" as examples of how to build Warriors, Priests, Magicians, and Engineers among others with the skill system. Not a lot of detail here, in fact some of the space is wasted with specific character histories for the sample characters (found later on).
After that we come to the "categories" of age and training-this is essentially an experience system that replaces levels in the game.
The categories range from Kid-to Journeyman on up to Old Master. Each category includes the number of points you can spend on attributes, your basic Skill points, number of feats, starting HP (not hit points, at least not yet, these are Hero points and are not described well enough to get a confusing duplicated abbreviation), your base reputation, attack and defense scores. Now the catch and the expected balancers are the fact that age caps abilities differently an Old Master has limits on his physical scores, as does a kid and teen that differ quite a bit, in addition to that Hero Points diminish as one gets older (which explains the anime convention of the brash young kid who succeeds a lot on heart and courage).
A quick and brief explanation of buying skills, feats, and so on then continues this section. There is a brief paragraph on bonuses and detriments (which are somewhat like feats but you can of course get extra "starting experience" by taking negative traits to spend on your character, you can overspend as well but lose skill points to pay for them.) During character creation, I found it an interesting juggle to play skill and natural talent together this way, allowing me to create a snakeperson alchemist of some experience even though he'd been a slave.
It adds something to the play I believe and makes for some interesting characters when done in moderation. Derived statistic are what you expect but character in Cloak of Steel get 3 base actions, saving throws are based on base attack plus attribute modifiers, initiative is based on your reflex save and Defense class is a default base plus reflex save-in this DC is how hard you are to hit, armor, absorbs damage. Yes, not new or innovative, but still a good change in my opinion. Mana points are what power magic, which is a feat driven system where you must take appropriate feats to cast spells, and then feats for each spell, more on that when we get to the magic chapter later. Hit points are derived from Constitution (raw score) plus Strength (bonus) this is your general hit points, you then take this score and perform a series of quite simple calculations to get a specific area hit point score-for arms, head, legs, wings, etc. I'm not fond of specific hit locations in games, not because I don't like them, but because they often don't work well because every sword swing, foot potions, bend, twist, dodge, tree branch, what have you changes the available targets significantly. I noted in making characters for my players that the area hit points score actually exceeds the general hit points (the sum of the parts are greater than the whole apparently). This actually strikes me as a good thing for a system, which allows limb loss, and limb replacement.
The remainder of this part of the chapter covers strength and size, reputations, experience, (how to spend it, and what things cost) and starting money. If you feel I'm no covering these in depth you must understand for the most part these bits take up one or two paragraphs. Another location error as I see it the attribute chart which shows the bonuses for an attribute is at the front of the book in the system "quick" overview, rather here near character creation where it is actually needed.
Sample Characters
This is a group of iconic or sample characters which include a Rat-man engineer with a clockwork arm, a cat lady explorer, a human priest, human warrior, and noblewoman of Royomuertivo, with the last exception the others are fairly broad based and useful for showing how to do such things, but the noblewoman has some pretty specific cultural elements that I think bars her from being quite so useful, still its nice to see that broad character mixes can work. Now, this is a minor issue but none of these people have CLOAKS! The game is called Cloak of Steel yet the sample player characters have no cloaks. This is odd choice on the part of the designer.
Skill
Skills chapter, this gives a general break down of how when, and what to use skills for, it mentions the Take 10 and Take 20 rules as well as skill synergy and combined attempts. What bothers me, is that the skill list page it seems that here I'm expected to know much of the skills use from D&D, yet this is an OGL game which shouldn't require reference to said book.
Feats
Feats, and all this is simply is a chart similar to the skills list. Showing the feat, its requirements and a basic description, but there simply is again not enough detail here, I hoped in the case of some feats like Brew Potion I'd find more information under the magic chapter, but no, there isn't more detail there-Brew Potion allows one to store magic in potion it costs double mana to do so-but nothing is said on if there are specific ingredients (will plain water work?), time to brew said potion, mixing of potions with one another, or any other details that might be nice to know, especially considering one of my players had a snakeperson alchemist assistant---he could make potions, but the rules on that are left to my own imagination.
The Good the Bad and the really Ugly
Bonuses and Detriments, as previously mentioned these are feat like abilities, usually these have no requirements they do have variable costs, and, provide a small bonus or penalty.
Now here is my first major complaint I'm reading along and see bonuses costing 2 and 4 points-all is good, then I run into Gigantism that costs 28 points. I thought perhaps this was a mistake but had it confirmed no that is correct. Now yes this bonus provides a huge benefit in excess of the others, but the next closes costing bonus is 6 points, and there isn't a single detriment higher than -6 (some are stackable like Unskilled so conceivably you could buy this by being unskilled, but wait you lose points anyway to pay for bonuses that your detriments don't cover.). Gigantism needs to be cheapened, reduced in effect, or dropped entirely its broken, its expensive but it is also dangerously munchkin-Dwarfism its counterpart detriment is a -2 point cost.
There is a serious glitch here between the two they need to be brought closer together in terms of effect and counter effect. Or there needs to be a lot more high cost bonuses and detriments to even the field.
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Weapons
Weapons, pretty much just a series of charts of weapons from human scale to airship scale little explanation is given for the use of some weapons, and some major weapons that are unique Cloak of Steel are left off the charts: Ex. Broadblades, the Managuns, etc are all found respectively under their country of origin, this is another misplaced element that needs correction.
I'd have like some explanations of some of the weapons for example, what is the airship Rapido? I presume it is's a black powder cranked machine gun made up of many barrels that are spun to touch the spark igniter for the powder. That is just a presumption for all I know it could shoot rabid weasels. (And every game needs a Rabid Weasel gun).
The game also includes scaling rules to adjust the damage of weapons from man sized to giant/cloak-sized weapons with incremental increases to the weapons durability, damage and so on. The system is quick and dirty but seems to work though it is a bit poorly explained (I was trying to convert a managun which has a two dice damage rating, and the system only includes a single dice of that type. So do I scale each die separately?). Weapons also get a penetration rating (how much armor one can ignore) since armor absorbs damage having it ignored by certain weapons makes for an effective and useful change to the OGL system..
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Armor
Covers human armor how much it protects, its weight, and how much it costs, nothing wonderfully strange here.
Cloaks! Of! Steel!
We've gone through over half the book and finally we get to the actual meat of CLOAKS, yes the big massive armored figures that vary from human form, to animal to mythical with aerial transforming gryphons, to centaur, and spider-person cloaks with chains (as shown in the art).
It is one of the best parts of the game, but has some odd design choices. We get the basic design rules. Cloaks are treated as characters, construct characters at that (with one exception which is treated as undead.). The game provied the base attributes (Str 29, Con 19) and Dex modifier (it relies on the users Dex, but it seems the basic cloak out of the box is a clumsy mechanism. This is not unexpected from the source material-the average Escaflowne armored suit was fairly slow and un-agile compared to the more unique ones.)
We also get modifiers for countries (For example Mecansola doesn't have or use magic relying on steam mecha) and so on, some countries have it really easy and special (Staholm) with lots of freebies for only a minor cost. Fortunately, it is a minor enough balance issue all things considered ad most countries get some benefit with a minor flaw or challenge added to make it a bit more equitable.. There are two scales of cloaks-the cloak and the squire (powered armor suit in Science Fiction Mecha games.)
The differences are significant in both attributes, scale, and the fact your squires are open to the air, while your average cloak ,if not sealed, is at least not showing a pilot to shoot at with arrows. In addition, there are Light Cloaks, and Magician Cloak (I love the way that sounds) variations to the default cloak.
Light cloaks tend to be used as scouts, aren't as tough or strong, but are more agile, while Magician Cloaks are also lighter, less seriously physically buff, but can scale up magic for their pilot to cloak scale!
Constructing a cloak is a simple affair of selecting the type, assigning the base attributes (modified by frame differences). Then choose your starting cloak feats (of which you get 7) these starting feats can come from either the "Starting Cloak Feat" Table or the General Cloak Feat table. The former has things that can only be taken at the initial construction of your cloak.
Now I understand the reasons why, but it seems odd to me that you can't later on go back and have a magic sword crafted for your cloak, or discover a feature you didn't know it had like a invisibility cloak. These things are standard events in fantasy gaming and mecha gaming respectively. Of course, I'd simply allow the player to make a new cloak and use their earned experience to buy any feats for their new one to get around this, or simply wave it as a 'retrofit" after a fierce battle.
Most cloaks rely on mana stones for power, some use boilers, interestingly enough you can have a magician cloak that uses a boiler but instead of spending mana to power your spells to scale, it uses hit points!
The feats here are a bit different than standard OGL stuff so I'm going to list them
Starting Cloak Feats
Bought Cloak Feats
Whew! That is a lot. There are some serious issues here that I don't think were considered or thoroughly play tested.
For example the requirements for Bite Attack and Improved Bite Attack are the same, so why take the lesser one? From a mechanical stand point, none.
Even more abusive is Mythryl Armor that adds 1 to Dex and +1 Armor, while Heavy Armor, which costs the same number of feats, only gives +1 Armor. This needs to be fixed, my personal suggestion to the creator is to make Improved Bite require Bite, and either have Heavy armor add +5 hit points (heavy frame needed for armor) or make mythryl armor cost more feats.
The next bit covers squires in much the same way they are smaller, and can't have transformation and animal form, as well as being weaker, but fundamentally get most of the same abilities.
After squires, we have the more vehicles like airships, which can be anything from helicopter like to dirigible, to flying boat. This takes a more mechanical less organic approach using mass, props, sails, and other assorted mechanical bits to be purchased to build ones craft. However like Cloaks and Squires it offers some "feat like" abilities including Magic Matrices for mages to use (quick to your Gunnery pod!) this makes the game offer a very interesting feel in my opinion, as you have massive war craft, droppable cloaks and all sorts of interesting military campaigns one can run. My only use of airships in my play test was a slave carrier, which crashed, and the players had to survive as the bail out squire pilots tried to re-capture them.
In our initial game we did not get to use cloaks, I had intended to, but the players ran out of time before building their cloaks themselves-the plan was they discovered some hidden overgrown magical fortress with two cloaks that appeared to be locked in eternal struggle with vines covering them. They discovered the cloaks, and since I like thematic things one was a panther cloak mecha for the catlady thief pc, and the other was a dragon for the serpentman alchemist. He created his one after the session and pointed out the fact that some feats were better than others for the same cost. But I gave him his free exotic weapon, and an extra feat and we made exactly the dragon he wanted. The reason for the extra feat was to allow the panther invisibility-and to build an effective animal design with that costs 8 feats, not the starting 7.
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Combat
In general, not a lot new here, attack, defense, parry. You do get to spend Hero points in combat as well as other actions which can add 1d6 to a roll or subtract 1d6 to a roll, including to hit, or combat. This became important when our erstwhile heroes had to evade an assassin vine to get to the fortress in our preliminary adventure. We get a "location hit chart" which frankly is a personal 'the suck" I don't like them and feel all hit locations should be descriptively derived. In this case, it also seems to go backwards of d20 in that "good" head or neck hits you need a 1 or 2, but the right foot needs a 20 on the chart. Personally, the game uses success levels, where every +5 over your roll is an additional "I done good" point. I'd like to have seen that implemented in the hit location chart. Like any good anime game the combat system goes into a stunt system where dramatic over the top anime actions get a reward, in this case it uses an extra action but earns a hero point (one of the few ways to get them besides experience) so it's a rather good reason to make use of them..
Some of the better new pieces that are here are reflexive actions-either attacks or defenses that can be used when the opportunity presents itself. (Although in a heroic game the presumption that someone say drinking potion is not also trying to dodge, weave and parry madly has always struck me as odd..) These are a better version and far more logical version of attacks of opportunity still odd but at least with good defensive uses.
Vehicle Combat
This is wasted space. Four pages of details on vehicular combat.
How many vehicles make use of these rules? Carts (which won't need most of them due to their simplicity and slowness) and airships yet another place where some material could be cut or simplified to make more room for other elements. . Cloaks and squires are treated as characters for most actions, so in general I feel this space could have been used better. But then again, I don't plan to use airship-to-airship battles much; I wanted the game for cloaks.
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Magic
Magic, any good fantasy games needs it or something like it to give us that oomph of the fantastic.
We start out with Magical styles, an all to brief mention of how different casting types work, from Prayer to Word magic, to Katas missing from the list is Peasant Magic (found in the setting write up) as well as more details on these magical styles also found under their regional areas.
Magical items include general information on the feats for creating magical items and their requirements. Some of it is odd; like you must spend 1/10 the mana cost as experience to create an item (which I quickly ignored for potions since they are one use at best) again an area that needed much more detail and explanation especially with what follows.
The next part of magic starting on page 160 covers magical limbs, implants and other things that can be grafted on to a human form, including non-magical clockwork parts. These are interesting and add to the feel of magic as technology of the game, but there are still some minor issues. The editing so far is fair there is a spelling error hear under Clockwork Eye options: tear, instead of tier, I suspect there must been some sort of accidental slip here, but the appropriate word is tier. The limbs and parts covers golem limbs, to gem eyes, to undead parts from the necromancies of the Royomuertivons.
Magical substances covers pages 163-164 and are your average list of special materials, with a few new ones thrown in-like crafting bits of your honored ancestors if you're a Royomuertivon. Yeah, fun necromantic technology (and they are one of the nicer cultures, but the game isn't dark for all that just friendly hedonistic necromancers, which I find delightful.)
One thing of note there is a bonus I didn't mention because I hadn't gotten far enough along to bring it up.
Two elements trigger this issue: a bonus "Psi Resistant" and the material "Psimetal", which causes me the same concern. Because the game provides no psionics rules whatsoever.
Finally we come to the Feat driven magic system, which requires a feat to cast spells, and gain access to Tier one spells, and the a feat for each spell you wish to have. In addition, you must buy a lower level tier spell effect to purchase a higher tier spell effect of the same broad effect. You must also take feats that allow you to cast the greater tiers as well.
It's a nice system, incredibly flexible and rules light, it does however constrain magic wielder to truly specific focuses, and narrow fields of ability. This is not a bad thing and the tiers remind me much of a certain "Tactics" style fantasy playstation game. Sometime however the details are frightfully few as all the spell information is crammed into another chart with a tiny font. I want detail.. Darn it.
Spells Effects
With all but a few exceptions, each has a single Tier 1-3 ability, Time has two different sets of Tiers, and perhaps it should be broken out into "Fast" and "Slow"
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and Adventuring we a go-go.
Adventuring chapter, it covers all the mean nasty bits of poison, disease, ability score damage, (so your ordinary night in a third world Brothel is an adventure?)
It also mentions Hero points and explains them a bit more which is useful but perhaps should have come up in the basic systems chapter or even character creation since its relevant need to know information.
Adversaries
I hate this chapter.
Yes hate, strong word but its hard to read through basically it's the monster manual bit of the Cloak of Steel game, but it alternates special abilities, special attacks, with the various "subtypes" of creatures, you can use to construct monsters.
It's horribly alphabetical-meaning if I want to look up Shapechangers, I have to weed through Scent, Shadowshift, and other special abilities to get to a creature template. (A rough one a that) give me a world specific bestiary any day.
What is worse is there is /no stats/ for generic Pilots of Squires/Cloaks, and that's what this game is about, no its not hard to stat up, but frankly I'd much prefer a ditching of the Monster Manual lite bits in exchange for more specific critters and "general" cloak bad guys.
Appendices
The rest of the books is taken up by a myriad of minor things: Short designers notes, apc sheet (an ugly but serviceable one) and then some quick reference cards for statting bad guys. Finally the actual Bestiary with a handful of converted monsters and some unique ones to Cloak of Steel (should been in the adversaries section! Gah!)
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Conclusion
It's a heck of a game with a lot of material it just has some serious issues with the kind of support a gamer needs. It often glosses over relevant bits of rules and game to detail more culture information.
I am all for detail but equal amounts of both and if sacrifices have to be made, make it with setting bits first-especially since you don't need but two countries at conflict to provide a vast setting for adventure in any game.
Art
The art in the game is mostly good solid anime themed stuff some it rough (the naked girl in the magic section is kinda wobbly.) Some of it quite good-all of the cloaks for example.
. My only complaint here is it seems some of it was reused and that space could been used to add text stuff that it is missing, and the rabbit-kin picture, which is entirely inappropriate both genre and theme.
I love Cloak and Steel, I find it a good implementation of OGL, it is not as brilliant a departure as Mutants and Masterminds, but it has features that far surpass it in a few ways (Hero points for example have a bit more effectiveness in my opinion, plus you get more and earn them back in play which makes for a faster style of heroic play.)
Average Faces: 11 out of 20
Total Score: (my bias) the game tried new stuff, it just needs a good solid layout and editing rewrite with more explication I award it an extra 3 of 20 making its total score one my OGL review scale 14 of 20.
Would I recommend this game? Yes! It has much going for it, although I'd like to talk the author into a cleaned up second edition, I am still very happy with this game and despite my complaints will be using it to run a campaign (unless I can talk someone into running it for me.)
