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Disclaimer: One of the authors of Blue Rose is an old friend of mine.

Blue Rose calls itself the RPG of romantic fantasy. I didn't know what that meant particularly, but they do define it: it's fantasy in the style of Diane Duane, Mercedes Lackey, Tamara Pierce, and others. Some general characteristics are:

1. The main characters tend to start as loners and outcasts, and find a place of importance and belonging in society.
2. There there are infrequently the Tolkienian races (elves, dwarves, orcs, hobbits).
3. There are frequently sentient animals, generally mind-bonded with the main characters.
4. Stories tend to be smaller and more personal than the great world-saving quests and bloody deeds of a Frodo or a Conan.
5. Society -- or at least the nice bits of it -- is fairly egalitarian, especially with respect to gender roles and often sexual orientation. Only villians stay sexist or homophobic.
6. Heroes tend to be environmentally conscious.
7. Magic (or at least the magic of the heroes) is typically innate, will-based, natural, and well-regarded.

So that's what Blue Rose sets out to do, and they mostly do a good job of it. (I didn't get the sense that characters generally start as outcasts, but the rest seems to apply.)

Setting: The heroes (other games call them "player-characters" or some such, but Blue Rose out and out expects them to be heroic, as a matter of style) come from the kingdom of Aldis on the world of Aldea. Aldea has a mythic history, with gods of light and gods of twilight and nasty not-quite-gods of shadow. There's an Old Kingdom, long gone except for artifacts and shadowgates and such; it used to be pretty nice, until the Shadow-oriented sorcerers snagged it and did the traditional Awful Things. But after a sorcerous disaster, some heroic rebels ... you get the point. There's a sensible amount of background here: enough to use, and familiar enough so you can snarf bits from your favorite novel and file off the serial numbers and stick them in. But the authors have good sense and/or desire to write supplements, and don't overwhelm us with details.

Aldis, the country that the heroes come from, is a pretty nice place. There are rhydan, the promised sentient animals of various species, and as promised they can bond with humans. And you can play one if you like, with or without a bond. There are the vata, who seem to be elves and drow with the serial numbers filed crudely off, and night people, who are pretty much half-orcs with the serial numbers filed crudely off.

Aldis has a king or queen, conveniently chosen by a mystical Golden Hart. There are nobles, who are conveniently chosen by the sovereign's mystical Blue Rose Scepter. They start as travelling nobles without land, and wander around solving problems and doing good deeds; some may get lands later on. Which is quite a convenient story hook, of course.

And Aldis very strongly reflects the general characteristics of romantic fantasy above. For example, there's almost no trace of homophobia. Not out of ignorance, either: homophobes are actively despised. Contrast, say, Fulminata or my own World Tree, where there's no homophobia per se either, because 'homosexual' isn't a recognized social category -- but in both those settings there are quite strong prejudices against various sexual behaviors. They're not utopian, they just have different bigotries. Blue Rose is very politically correct on this point. So am I, in my daily life, but I found it somewhat cloying in Aldis.

Magic is quite common in Aldis: about 1/10 of the population has magic. This matters a lot, of course. Healing is common and important; there is a psychic relay network for fast communication; etc. This shows up in the culture as well as the game rules, unlike some games with extensive magic systems (and apparently lots of mages) and villagers terrified of light spells.

There is a sensible collection of bad guys, from "unscrupulous merchants" (which is a very nice touch) to a wicked homophobic theocratic neighbor to an out-and-out Lich King. And, there's a threat from within: anyone who uses magic inappropriately risks being corrupted by shadow. More on that in a bit.

Rules

Blue Rose uses the True20 system, which is mostly a stripped-down and cleaned-up version of d20. For example, in d20, you can have a Strength of 13 or 14, say, but you rarely use the numbers 13 or 14. You mostly use the strength modifier, which, for those, is +1. True20, like, say, Ars Magica, just uses the Strength Modifier as your Strength attribute: your Strength would be +1, and you wouldn't bother with 13 or 14 at all.

But most of the gadgetry of the d20 system is there: levels and classes and favored skills and feats and Fortitude saving throws and so on. I won't talk about that stuff much, 'cause you know it mutatis mutandis, or actively don't care. Some things are very non-d20, like the way that they don't do hit points. It looks cool, but I haven't gotten to playtest it, and it's hard to judge in the abstract.

One feature which distinguishes good games from bad is that the good games have rules which fit the setting properly. The thing that struck me most about Blue Rose was the magic system, and, in particular, how corruption works.

It's very much not D&D magic. The arcana are much weaker than D&D spells -- there's nothing like a fireball or lightning bolt or even a mass-effect Sleep spell available to heroes. Arcana are fairly small and limited things, like Calm which drains intense emotions from someone you're in mental contact with already, or Cold Shaping which lets you freeze moderate amounts of water. They're not entirely devoid of combat force -- Cold Shaping can do moderate damage to a victim -- but they aren't the heavy artillery of D&D. There are a lot of socially-oriented arcana, too, as befits a heavily socially-oriented game.

And you can't use a lot of them. The more powerful ones require a fatigue roll or lose a fatigue level. You have only three fatigue levels between fresh and unconscious, and the fatigue rolls get harder if you use lots of magic in quick succession, so you pretty much have to be cautious about using the heavy stuff.

The part that impressed me the most was the Sorcery and Corruption rules. Most of the more aggressive arcana are marked as Sorcery. That means that they can be used for evil in ways that will corrupt you. If you use them, you have to save vs. Corruption or get a corruption point -- minor pecadillos are pretty easy saves to make, major wickedness is a lot harder.

Corruption points are pretty nasty for nice characters. They're a penalty to your Wisdom and Constitution, and they might make you do bad things. Getting rid of corruption points is slow and heavy work. So far, so boring...

...But you can choose to embrace Corruption. If you do, a bunch of stuff happens to you -- you can't be healed by anyone but a corrupted healer, for example, nor can you be resurrected, and you'll come back as a vampire or lich instead. But most of the stuff is good (in the powergamer sense): the Corruption points stop being penalties to your Wisdom and Constitution, and, instead, start being bonuses on all of your arcana. If you embrace Corruption and do a lot of wickedness, your magic gets a whole lot stronger.

So ... those of us with a strong powergamer streak will find a certain player-side temptation to embracing corruption. If we also have a strong roleplayer streak, we will experience, player-side, the same moral dilemma that the character is experiencing: be good? Or sacrifice our goodness, get really powerful, and get that revenge we really want?

It's a nice clean rule that puts that dilemma right into the heart of the game, in mechanics as well as roleplaying. Quite impressive.

Also the experience system was pretty nice. There isn't one. The gamemaster decides when you go up a level. It is supposed to be every game or two, based on what you've done and the needs of the story. Going up a level isn't a small thing, but it's not as dramatic a step as it is when a D&D mage goes from 8th to 9th level and gets a whole new set of really imposing spells. So I think the Blue Rose approach can work nicely for Blue Rose, assuming a reasonably sane gamemaster. And I wouldn't miss the bookkeeping that experience points involve.

Style

The art's adequate. The book is entirely readable, the language is clear and straightforward, and I didn't notice any typos or bad page references or such. There's a nice big index, and the one thing I looked up in it was right were the index said it was. Not stunning, but entirely serviceable.

The Judgement

Blue Rose is trying to do something fairly specific: encourage roleplaying of a particular sort of character in a particular sort of story. On the whole it succeeded. If you want to live in a Duane or Lackey or McCaffery or Norton novel, Blue Rose will admirably assist you to do so. If those authors annoy you, Blue Rose will annoy you in just the same way. Which, I suppose, is the best one can say for any setting-oriented RPG.

In consulting DriveThruRPG we've come up with a number of products which we think might be related, but some might be inaccurate because the name, Blue Rose, is so short. Nonetheless, take a look, as purchasing through the RPGnet Store helps to support RPGnet.