Simon Washbourne heard this call, and has bravely stepped up to fill the gap with his new RPG about English schoolchildren. He called it the only thing such a game could be called: Lashings of Ginger Beer (hereafter LoGB), and you can now buy it from his website for the very reasonable price of US$2.50.
What’s that you say? You don’t know what a lashing of ginger beer is? Well, frankly, nobody does. Nobody ever has.
They were invented by the strange and frightening mind of Enid Blyton, an English author who penned more children’s stories in her lifetime than there are porn sites on the net. All of these are set in an idyllic eternal childhood setting sometime in post-WW1 England, and are full of polite, plucky, rosy-cheeked young children who never say a rude word and always go to bed on time. Those stories that don’t involve fairies or farms or magic tend to involve adventurous groups who spend every single summer holiday riding around on their bikes, camping in the countryside or visiting seaside cottages, where they also solve arcane mysteries, discover ancient smuggler’s caves and catch major international criminals. And on their adventures or bike rides, they always take huge hampers of good British tuck: baked ham, roast beef, apple sauce, gravy, salmon terrine, cured bacon, pork sausages, black pudding, farm eggs, fresh baked bread, whipped butter, goose pate, cake, mince pies, scones with cream and jam, warm tea and the absolutely essential lashings of ginger beer.
The best examples are The Famous Five Series, The Secret Seven Series and The Island of Adventure Series. It is these books that Mr Washbourne’s game is primarily aiming to emulate. You Americans should imagine The Hardy Boys or Trixie Belden, only much wetter, and much more British.
As you can tell, I was pulled into the closet and avuncularally molested by these books at an early age, and they left a deep and abiding impression on me. So when I approached LoGB, it was with very high expectations. It had to do justice to nothing less than all my childhood dreams.
With that admittedly harsh requirement in mind, let’s take a look see…
The book is 28 pages long – and that’s with some very generous margins. But this length is entirely appropriate: the mechanics are terribly simple and much familiarity with the setting has been assumed. The game is designed to be simple and the setting is hardly a complex one, so belabouring its rules and genre tropes would be waffle, in a game already burdened with a tendency towards circumlocution.
The simplistic approach also helps the game to target new gamers, which is a clear goal here. This is certainly a sensible approach, given the possible audience, but this doesn’t justify the painfully simplistic, almost childlike language. Aiming the game at children would justify the tone, but that would make the jokes about feeding acid to Timmy the dog somewhat inappropriate. More than once I was left unsure as to whom precisely the game was intended.
The simple approach does makes it quick to read and easy to navigate, though, not to mention fast to download. The only art included is a scattering of line drawings, brilliantly in-keeping with the stories being emulated, but with wonderfully inappropriate humorous captions (like feeding Timmy acid). All told, the game is very easy on the eyes, and more importantly, very easy on the printer, which is a nice combination.
Onto the text itself: after the obligatory explanation of roleplaying, we move onto character generation. Kids in LoGB have four stats: Tough, Deft, Clever and Charm. Charm really should be Charming (or Polite) to fit the adjective format, but no matter. Each stat is a number from 1 to 3 and is predetermined by age group. Younger kids are more Deft and Charming, while older kids are Tougher and more Clever. You also get one freebie point to increase one attribute. This isn’t really enough to distinguish two characters of the same age, so your game will need to feature an age range if players are going to have a niche. Nor is this enough to really capture the genre – eldest Famous Fiver Julian is a lot smarter than Dick, but Dick’s at least as strong, if not more so. Still, this is easily fixed by just giving players eight points to spend.
Most of the character distinction comes not from stats, but from Kid Type – class, if you will. Kids can be Good (the ‘normal’ option), Swots, or Truants. Swots mimic the more bookish, sissy or weedy members of a group, such as Anne in the Famous Five or Lucy in the Adventure series. Their opposite, Truants, are the rebellious types who scrimp apples and say darn, or, if they are girls, have the hide to wear dungarees instead of pretty dresses. George in the Five is the classic Truant.
Each class gets six “skills” to choose from, and eight points to spend. All kids start with Hide and Snoop. Good kids gets standard things like Camping, Riding Bicycles and Spotting Nasty People. Swots get book learning like Science, History and Music. Truants get physical talents like Wriggling, naughtiness like Lie Convincingly or a talent with a Catapult (that’s a sling-shot to you Americans).
Each class can choose skills from the other lists, but at an increased cost. In general, PCs will be strongly defined by their type. Which seems terribly limiting, given that almost all heroes of these books are good at climbing trees or spotting nasty people. Also, the Swot skill list is rather flawed, splitting its skills into Science, History, Geography and so on. In the books, characters just tend to be good at ALL of these things – good at school lessons, in fact – and tests on them are perishingly rare. Whereas riding bikes happens almost constantly, and climbing isn’t far behind. While this does mirror the sheer uselessness of Anne and Lucy in the books, it doesn’t add up to much fun in a game.
Also, Swots lack the Homemaking skills, something that really defines Anne and Lucy. A terrible oversight.
The system itself is, as mentioned, very simple: you add your skill level to your attribute and roll that many D6s. Generally this will be between two and six dice. One six is a success; multiple sixes indicate more dramatic successes. This produces a fairly low level of success – characters of average Deft and a point in Snoop are only going to sneak successfully 40% of the time, and someone who has maxed out both Deftness and Snoop will still fail one time out of four. Still, this does allow their enemies to catch or elude them, which is terribly appropriate.
Contested rolls are adjudicated by counting the number of sixes, with an equal amount being a tie. A success in a fight takes one point of Toughness off the fighter, so it is quite a strong death-spiral. Reaching zero means you’re out of the fight (but not seriously injured, this is Idyllic England after all – you go home with a scraped knee and torn shirt).
The system section closes with an explanation that when a test is made successfully, narrative control should pass to the players – or they can narrate both successes and failures as they wish. GMs are allowed to over-rule anything they consider out of place, but there are no guidelines whatsoever as to what sort of scope would be appropriate. A short example compares a one-six success to a two-six success, but that is all the help we get.
The next chapter contains a few odds and ends about the setting – how to name your gang, what sort of language to use (as in “I declare, it’s beastly luck that our jolly jape was dashed by that frightful rotter!”) and an equipment section. Kids begin with one item and can roll on an equipment list to get more. Each item has a number: players must roll equal or under that on a D6 to get it. If they fail, they can’t roll again on that item but must keep rolling until they have three items. I can see that this semi-random system could be interesting, but I have little interest in playing a game where only one kid has a bike, nor can I see what was wrong with including a point-buy system. After all, why have a game called Lashings of Ginger Beer wherein it is entirely possible that no character will start with any ginger beer at all, even if they want some?
This chapter ends with an exhortation that the game is designed to have a bit of fun and thus to ignore the rules blah blah blah. Standard fare, of course, but the attitude expressed so underlines much of the loose and slapdash nature of the rules that it’s easy to read it as a final admission of the careless design philosophy. That is, it confirmed for me the feeling I’d been getting from every page of the rules so far – that very little work had gone into it at all. The system is decent, but hardly inspired and the setting information is sketchy and uninspiring, and fails to capture all the nuances of the setting. Overall, it looks like an afterthought, as if the author liked the idea more in terms of the adventures it could provide, and threw the rest together in five minutes so the adventures could be played.
That said, the rest of the book – more than half the page count – is made up of these adventures. Three of these are just outlines or encounters but the other three are four page tales full of appropriate crimes, interesting villains and some very nice scenes. They’re a little short (don’t expect them to last more than two or three hours at the most) but together would be great for whiling away the hours on a rainy day.
The adventures are the best part of the game, and clearly where the most work was done. It is only in them that the setting comes to life and begins to inspire the reader, that the game finally seems to be something fun to play. Washbourne clearly understands the plots of his source material, and captures them well. But he’s equally clearly skimped on the rules and chargen, hoping that the plots and the over-powering ethos of the game will carry it through.
And for the groups to which this game will appeal, they probably will. It’s not as if a game with this small an audience – or this cheap - should be trying to win a Diana Jones Award, after all. It does what it needs to – provide rules and adventures to let you play a Famous Five type game.
On the other hand, it doesn’t do that particularly well, or stylishly. It provides only a patchily written ruleset and setting information that falls short of capturing many aspects of the books, and indeed, the imagination. As a result, precious little in this game really grabbed me and inspired me to play – not the game mechanics, nor the treatment of the setting, nor the writing style. It left me with an impression that it might be, as the author said, just a bit of fun. And I expect a bit more than that from my games, and my game rules.
It is definitely a decent game, but it is not a great one. It gets the job done, but it fails to ever excel at it. And in a genre this ripe for roleplay, that’s a terrible shame.
Substance 3 (Adequate) Style 3 (Adequate)
