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Bryan Talbot's comic The Adventures of Luther Arkwright took ten years to write. Although finally completed in 1989, it still rates as one of my favourite comics ever. A reality-spanning tale about psychic operatives attempting to save the multiverse from the depredations of a force they don't really understand, it took on the trappings of Moorcockian sci-fi and blended it with a bundle of Eastern philosophies, magickal theories and a good helping of William Blake's apocalyptic poetry for good measure.
The role-playing game based on it originally came out in 1992, published by an acquaintance of Talbot's. It never went to a second edition, and never spawned any supplements. There was one official adventure, published in the long, long defunct mag Role-Player Independent, the decent Mad Monks and Englishmen, which was republished on the web a while back. It's worth a look, actually, especially if your tastes run to steampunk.
Despite its obscurity, the Luther Arkwright role-playing game is not all that hard to find. At the time of writing, top British store Leisure Games had it in stock, and I saw a copy on the shelves of my own local shop a few weeks ago. I suspect that this is because 23rd Parallel Games still haven't sold out of the original print run (I hope that's not the case - I really feel for James Brunton if that's true).
Mine was sold to me in 2001 at a convention stall by Bryan Talbot himself. He signed it to me and drew a picture of Luther Arkwright on the flyleaf. which was nice.
The Artifact
The book is 160 pages long, printed on slick, shiny (as opposed to glossy) paper in European A4 size (slightly narrower and taller than US Letter size, if I remember right). It's perfect bound, with no text on the plain white spine, and nothing but "23rd Parallel Games" written in big black letters on the back cover.
The front cover contains the only piece of original artwork in the book - a full-length colour portrait of Luther himself by Bryan Talbot, superimposed over a collage of frames from the comic.
Inside, the text is divided up into columns, sometimes two, sometimes three. Every piece of the inside art is cut and pasted from the comic. The text- well, the text. It's fair to say that the text is indicative of the state of desktop publishing in 1992. As in, before Windows.
I need to explain this bit: I have a couple friends who work in academia in the fields of engineeing and maths. They told me about a mark-up language produced long ago called LATEX (pronounced "lay-tech"), which, before Windows etc. became the standard for technical documents and academic papers, since it was possible to produce complex mathematical figures and equations effectively and accurately. They still use it. It's a nightmare to use, and it's actually quite limited aesthetically, inasmuch as it's ugly as hell, and only has about four valid fonts. The result is that every document written in LATEX is impossible to mistake, because they all look the same. The Luther Arkwright RPG looks like it was written in LATEX. Even twelve years ago, it looked rough. Now, in a world where any idiot can produce something the equal of what the pros were bringing out in the early 90s, it looks a real mess.
This isn't helped by the writing, which is clunky, and packed full of grammar and punctuation errors. It reads like it was written by my mate the engineering lecturer (who writes wargaming rules and likes 'em complicated). Oh, and the contents pages are on pages 3, 35, and 79. That's right - three TOCs. Ouch.
System
The system is based on percentile ratings (as in stats and skills are rated on a percentage chance), with a proportional difficulty/result table, which gives the ranges for different success results, ranging from A (critical, lower than 1/5 of skill roll) to E (success at higher than 4/5 of skill roll). It sounds like a nightmare, but it isn't, actually. the table includes a row for how many shots in an auto burst hit, and how much you multiply damage by if you hit (as in if you hit with an A, you multiply damage by x3, but if you only get an E, you halve the damage, meaning that hits can be lethal or glancing with most weapons).
The combat rules are fairly straightforward: you roll to hit, the other guy rolls to parry or dodge, and you work out the damage. If you've played Call of Cthulhu, you'll know the score: it's your basic percentile system, with the difficulty/result tweak, and it works OK. Combat is deadly, and actually, against all expectations, quite fast.
Everything is covered by the percentile mechanic - including stats - which is where the bad part comes in, because character generation is a real headache. Every stat, expressed as a percentile, has a different starting range (Strength is 4D10+20, Endurance is 4D10+30, Willpower is 6D10+10, and PSI-rating is a straight D100 roll, for example). You add your Intellect and Willpower ratngs to your age multiplied by ten to get "Life Points", which are the points you spend on Skills. Some skills have starting percentages, worked out by doing various arithmetical things with stats, while others have a "First Point" bonus, meaning that the first life point you spend on these skills might be worth 10% or 15%, instead of just 1%. I mean, it's a concession to realism, but it makes character generation really painful.
Worst still is the rule about working out whether or not you have PSI-powers or not. Basically, the GM picks one person out of the group and decides that he has PSI-abilities (you know, like telepathy, and telekinesis and time-distortion and stuff). And has the option of allowing any character (even the Psychic one) to take a "Warrior Option", which is a pool of discretionary points specifically designed to turn a character into a combat monster. With a mature and balanced GM and equally mature players, this would work, but let's face it - we're the kind of people who would rather play role-playing games than do the stuff that normal adults do (that's a joke, kids), and as a result, this system is so very open to abuse.
It's a shame that the character generation system is such a complete pain. The actual rules for psychic powers, although again screwed up a bit by all the pallava of having to calculate the percentages during character generation, are pretty decent, with a division between non-active psychic talents, like a sixth sense or miraculous intuition, and the really impressive ones (telekinesis, telepathy, psychometry, superior physical ability enhancements), as well as a great and dramatically apt system for "Wildcards", the effects that you don't want, like a halo appearing over your head when you're using telepathy, or ectoplasmic entities flying everywhere when you're healing someone. Very cool.
Background
The Luther Arkwright RPG expects you to have read the comic. That's all there is to it. The comic is your sourcebook. There is a fairly decent summary of the series in the back, as well as an essay which explains what was going on in the series. There's a list of 23 sample adventure plots (although a couple of them are just jokes, anyway) , but none of them is more than about a hundred words long. If you're going to have any hope of running the game, you need to know the comics back to front. And that is that.
Evaluation
It's all right. I give it a 2 for style. It would get a 1, but the rules for "Wildcards" are worth an extra point in and of themselves. It gets 3 for substance, because although the character generation system is a pain, the system isn't really broke.
If you play Call of Cthulhu or Stormbringer, you might find this an interesting source of ideas, what with the psychics rules and the percentile difficulty table. If you liked the Luther Arkwright comics, you might enjoy this; alternatively, you might be better served by waiting until such time as Hogshead get around to bringing out their D20 Luther Arkwright game, Zero Zero, which got announced last year.
