Fireborn: The Roleplaying Game Player's Handbook
The Preamble
Fireborn is a roleplaying game with a fascinating premise: you play dragons, in human form, in the modern world. When I first heard of this, my response was, hm, this sounds cool, I gotta check this out!
The game turned out to have twisted within the spine of this book some very intriguing ideas, and an excellent game engine; its presentation, as you will see, is not without its flaws, however.
Rather than do a chapter by chapter breakdown, I'm going to follow my own route in reviewing this product.
Flavor, Genre, Theme
Fireborn is of a genre you might call Urban Fantasy. In other words, it is a modern day setting with heavy magical elements embedded within it.
The world is changing. Magic, long absent in the world, is returning. And with it, the players are beginning to have memories return to them, via dreams and flashbacks, of a time long ago, before the ice covered the world, of when they soared through the air, wings lofting them upward, scaly hides shielding their body, and serpetine eyes peering down at the world below them.
These dreams, these flashbacks, become more and more prominent, until the PCs finally realize... that they are Dragons, reborn in human form to shelter their souls from the absence of magic, being reborn over and over, generation after generation, forgetting who and what they were... until, now, finally, magic has returned. With it, their memories slowly remind them of who and what they are, and just as slowly, start returning to them the power of their old draconic origins... but slowly, and piecemeal.
And as their memories return, they slowly remember how the Mythic Age was ended, by terribly unnatural creatures called Those Who Dwell Below; formless, gibbering things who loathed the world, and sought to bring it to an end. They nearly succeeded, destroying the Mythic Age, and Dragons in the process.
Dragons are returning... and so are their foes.
Playstyle
One of the amazing things of Fireborn is its ability to play in any one of a number of themes and subgenres. Urban fantasy is obvious, as mentioned.
However, you also play flashbacks, ala Highlander, to a time when you were true Dragons. As such, you also make a Dragon character, for playing through these flashbacks; a chance to play monolithically powerful creatures without being in munchkinland. A chance to experience the might of the wurm... to interact with the wonders of the fey of old... of wizards and warriors... and of those terrible foes, Those Who Dwell Below.
And as highlander, you can get into alleyway swordfights. Or matrix style martial arts action, coupled with blazing weapons fire. Or xfiles-style conspiracies as governments, cults, and cabals attempt to shape the world to come as magic changes everything we once knew. Or interacting with fey and fell creatures from myth and legend. Or dark horror, as the formless, cthulhuoid Those Who Dwell Below, begin to worm their way back into the world once more.
A vast array of different playstyles can be supported with Fireborn. It just awaits for you to choose which one.
Characters, in brief
Characters are defined by four Aspects; Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. Fire represents your physical capabilities in Action, and Water in Reaction; Air representing mental capabilities in Action, and Earth in Reaction.
(I probably would have done it Fire and Earth for physical, Air and Water for mental, just because it sounds better to me, but oh well, heh).
When you generate your Scion (IE human character), you are given 28 points to purchase scores in your attributes. The Purchase table goes as follows:
1 - 1
2 - 2
3 - 4
4 - 7
5 - 10
6 - 16
One odd result of this is that you cannot have a two in any Aspect, unless you don't mind having unspent points. A bit odd, and I probably would have done it differently to account for this, but its either easily houseruled, or just ignored as it doesn't break anything.
The next step is selecting a background. For example, your background could be an Artist, Paramedic, Ex-Military, or Programmer. Each gives you a list of primary skills that start out at a score of 4, and secondary skills that start out at a score of 2. Additionally, it gives you a selection of three edges (advantages) of which you choose one, a number of Fighting Style points to purchase fighting styles, and a wealth rating.
The third step is to select a Sire. A Sire is a representative of different draconic personalities, and a kind of guiding principle of your life, conscious or no. Each selection also gives you a selection of three edges to choose one from, more fighting style rank ponts, and some bonus karma (see below).
Fourth, you fill out some dependant traits, such as your karma score, wound levels, etc. Then, finally, you get your Fire + Water to purchase more ranks in physical skills, none to exceed a rank of 4; then do the same with Air + Water for mental skills.; get a bonus edge from the master list of edges (within limits; edges can have a rank as well, and you get just 1 rank at this moment), purchase fighting style ranks, and get your first power, Group Mind.
Edges, Fighting Styles, etc
Edges could be compared to feats from d20, or advantages, virtues, what have you. They grant you special abilities or access to resources otherwise more limited.
Fighting styles are schools of fighting, that grant you sequences of attacks and defenses that, if succeed, give you additional payoffs against your foe. Some are obviously more traditionaly martial arts, such as Eastern Small Style or Drunkey Monkey. Others include the Gunfu style, which combines gunfire with melee strikes, and Barroom Brawling.
At this point, there is little to make your character more than an exceptional human being; there are two exceptions though. The first is Group Mind: your first power, an ability that allows you to communicate via Telepathy with your Broodmates (IE the other players); the other is magic. It is possible to learn to cast spells, by taking the Casting skill and the Casting Edge.
The System, in brief
Fireborn uses a mechanic called Dynamic D6 (Dd6). Essentially, its a dice pool mechanic; you roll a pool of six-sided dice, and each roll with a 4 or better is one level of success.
When pitting yourself against a static problem, essentially you add your skill level to the Aspect to be rolled. For example, if you were to climb a wall, had a Fire of 3 and a Skill of 3, you would roll 6 dice. The Threshold of the test determines how difficult it is, and thus how many successes you need to succeed.
It becomes more complex, however, when you are in danger or otherwise threatened by others. In this case, skill represents your ability to focus yourself in some areas, albeit at the risk of leaving yourself exposed in others.
The best example is combat, of course. Instead of skills adding dice to your Aspects, the skill level instead allows you to move dice from one Aspect to another. Essentially, this is what always happens, but it rarely makes a difference except when threatened.
Thus, if you had a 4 in all four Aspects, a climb of 3, and were climbing up that same wall when someone starts firing a gun at you... you might have moved 2 dice from Air and 1 die from earth, making your air a 2 for the time being, and your earth a 3, leaving Water alone.
During a round of actions, you are allowed to make two stance changes; a stance change is when you move dice to one Aspect from one or more other ones. Thus, during a combat round, you could allocate dice twice, but no more. This could leave you vulnerable in other areas.
Combat
Combat gets more complicated, as is usually the case. It tends to feel a bit counter-intuitive at first, but as we found, once you get the hang of it, it comes easily.
Combat starts off with an initiative phase, which is rolled once at the beginning of combat. You roll your Fire + Air, and the higher your # of successes, the earlier in the round you act.
Then, you start the turn. When your turn arrives, you get one mental and one physical action. Now, at first people ignored the mental actions, but as I will explain later, we stopped doing that rather quickly.
Physical actions are what are the meat and bones of the combat system. It was designed to be very cinematic, with a lot of crunchy bits, and it certainly pays off. Physical actions are generally described by a sequence of actions you string together (called, naturally your Sequence).
For example, if you wanted to run forward, jump over a small gap, then punch someone in the head, you would do a Dash + Jump + Right Fist Strike.
Or if you wanted to do something more complex: perhaps run forward, leap over the gap as above, punch him, do a flying kick, then punch him again, you might do a Dash + Jump + Right Fist strike + Power + Left Kick + Left Fist strike.
How actions are resolved are: I roll my Fire + any dice I moved over to fire; each success I earn counts as one manuever succeeded, starting from the left and moving towards the right. However, the defender also has actions, and each success of his neutralizes one of mine. Thus, for my second sequence, if I got 6 successes, but the defender earned tthree successes defending, I'd get the Dash + Jump + Right Fist Strike.
It was at this moment we ran into our first difficulty: what happens to a defender defending against manuevers that is done out of reach? For example, if he had earned 6 successes, how did he stop me from running towards him?
There were a few bits of confusion, but an errata published answered these questions. See more about the errata, below.
Once you land one or more blows, damage is standardized; you dont roll for damage. Its always set, based on your attack type. How you do more damage, however, is by using manuevers such as Power, which increases damage of the next attack after it by +5, or press, which increases damage of the last attack before it by +2.
Defenders defend in a similar way. They must use one defense for each attack. So, in the second sequence above, the target is being attacked 3 times; so you must have three defenses.
There are defenses such as dodge, spin, crouch, etc, each used in different circumstantial positions. So, you could, for instance, do Crouch + Dodge + Spin + Ready + Left Fist Strike. The first three being defensive manuevers, the Ready being used to switch to attack, and the last to landing a counterattack.
Now, you are limited to how many manuevers you can do in a sequence; your sequence can never be longer than your base Fire (for attacking) or Water (for defending) Aspect; also, most (though not all) manuevers are goverened by a skill; if you are using more than one type, you use your lowest skill to determine how many dice you are allowed to move, if you wish.
Finally, you may not perform more manuevers goverened by a particular skill than the score in that skill; thus, if your melee skill is 2, you cannot perform more than two melee attacks; if your quickness skill is 2, you cannot perform more than two quickness-based manuevers in a sequence.
It sounds a bit complex, and when first playing it, it was... but once we got used to it, it flowed very well. Like riding a bike, just had to learn the process one time.
As before, I mentionned you get one physical and one mental action. The physical action can be a sequence of manuevers, as above. The mental action is generally just one action. But when used correctly, they can have a profound effect on the battlefield.
Just one example is the Feint Manuever: when succeeded, each success gives you one bonus die per success on an immediate Fire Test (IE physical attack) against that foe.
Once you are hit, you take a set amount of damage. Each character has a wound level chart. The chart scales based on your Water score. Any damage less than your Water score does no damage; damage equal to your Water but less than twice does a minor wound (and you have a number of minor wounds equal to your Earth score); each increase equal to your Water in damage is a cumulative -1 to your dice pools; once you have had 6 dice of penalties, you are down; 7 is dying, and 8 is dead.
In practice, my groups discovered that the first couple of combats went a little sluggish as we were all learning the system. Once we got it, though, it went by very fast. The combat system allows for a very cinematic method of playing out combat which made things very fun to try. Additionally, if you got creative enough with your descriptions, then like some other games, you can earn bonus dice in your attempts.
Dragon Creation, in Brief
Dragon creation was even more fun. It gave you an option of mirroring your Scion character, but this was limited and boring; I suggest using the full method.
You start out like you do with the Scion: purchasing your Aspects. Only, you get 40 points instead of 28, and you get 15 points of supernatural attributes to assign. supernatural scores are automatic successes you get with said aspect.
Then, you select your Outlook. This is a bit like Background or Sire for the Scion, in that it gives you primary skills (at a score of 6), secondary skills (at a score of 3), fighting and spell picks, and a hoard value.
After this, you select your dominant breed, which is either Beast (animalish), Drake (european dragonish), or Serpent (asian style dragon).
Then you select your minor breed; each breed have their advantages and disadvantages. For example, the Dire Dragon, Many-Headed Dragon, Sea Dragon, and Fire Dragon.
Among these advantages are a selection of 4 to 5 powers, which you rank from 5 (mnost powerful) to 1 (least powerful); these are some of the typical powers associated with dragons from differing cultures. Then, you select a Legacy: a single, overriding power based off one of the powers you already have, that can do even more than your basic powers.
You also get bonus edges, skills, etc. As you can imagine, the Dragon character is far more powerful.
In the chapter that discusses Dragon creation, you find the subject matter of character advancement, and Awakening. Awakening is the process in which characters start rediscovering their draconic abilities, and can even temporarily take on some dragon aspects, such as a tail, a pair of wings, or their scaly hide.
Equipment and Wealth
Wealth and equipment work in a very interesting fashion. Anything that is two or so below your wealth score are trivial purchases. Each item as a wealth rating to purchase, and possibly a Street Credit rating.
When purchasing items that are not trivial, your wealth score temporarily goes down by one, until the next adventure/session/whatever. Street credit works the same way, as this is how you purchase black market items.
The setting is in London, where all guns except Shotguns are illegal; so if you plan on totting guns around, street cred can be worthwhile, heh.
(at this point, I'm wishing I'd done a chapter by chapter review instead of jumping around; this is a crunch game, and thus probably should have had a narrower focus; however, I'm almost done, and decide to stick it through!)
Size Does Matter!
This section discusses how size does matter; to truly reflect the power of a dragon over your Scion. Thus, it has scaling rules when, say, a Dragon is fighting a human. It goes to show how frightening Dragons can be.
A Matter of Magic and Karma
Magic in this game is represented with a list of spells, rather than an effect-driven system ala Ars Magica. However, each spell is listed with a number of casting options you can learn with the spell.
The reasoning is based on the premise of the background. Dragons and other supernatural creatures live off Karma. Natural creatures, such as you, or bambi, generate karma.
Unnatural creatures, such as Those Who Dwell Below, live off Taint, a corrupted form of Karma. Taint is that way characters must feel when entering stygian, cyclopean settings, or reading books Man Was Not Meant To Read.
When casting spells, if you get more successes than you need; you take damage from the excess energy. However, if you didnt get enough successes, you can keep on weaving the magic to build your successes up. Casting options lets you burn off extra successes to enhance the spell rather than take the damage.
The only problem is, a human who doesnt cast a spell with perfect precision might generate Taint. Which is poisonous to supernatural creatures, and tends to drive even natural ones mad. :)
Karma, to mention it, is the energy of magic. All living things have it to some degree; or unnatural ones having Taint instead. Anyone with Karma can choose to spend Karma to enhance their chance of success. Scions have a lot of karma compared to humans, and Dragons even moreso.
The Bad Stuff
There are three things wrong with this product, however.
The first is its errata. Believe it or not, there isn't a lot of it compared to other products. The problem is, the errata that was needed really glared out like a sore thumb. They were BLATANTLY obvious, showing that a final round of proofreading either was never done, or was done by an untrainned monkey; I don't mind the need for errata (its become kind of industry standard, sadly); but these errata was just glaring how obvious they were, and it was amazing they completely missed these.
Luckily, they responded to the anger over their bad proofreading by releasing a well-done errata, and taking a much more careful proofread of their Game Master's Guide before releasing it. Not that it helps you with buying this: just be prepared to either pick up the free errata booklet that sometimes comes with it now, depending on how you get your PHB from, or downloading the errata from their website.
The second is its layout: while its mostly good, and the artwork is very good, they made some odd choices. For example, character advancement rules are in the back of dragon character creation. This is odd, because dragons don't advance; they are played only in flashbacks, generally at around max power, so no advancement is necessary for them, only for scions. Yet, the advancement rules are found there.
But not all of them. Some of the items, such as how much it costs to increase an edge, or a power, are spread out in other parts of the book. Its very disorienting; they really should have had a seperate chapter for all advancement rules in one section.
Finally, the flavor of the book at the text: I've heard from a lot of people they found the Fireborn book a little... uninspiring, despite its concept. They have a point. The book just doesn't seem to have a very strong flavor to it.
I think I know why, however. I have managed to email with a couple people involved with the project. Originally, it started much darker. However, they were afraid of being compared to White Wolf's World of Darkness, so they began to change it to be less dark and gothic.
The thing is, I get the feeling the product itself still wants to be dark; that it started out that way and then last-minute was changed. Thus, I think it suffers from not having a clear cut direction its trying to go.
I think this last complaint, however, isn't quite so valid: sure, the text isn't wonderful, but as I pointed above earlier, its capable of playing such a wide variety of themes and genres, its horizons are amazingly broad.
Ye Olde Summary
I was really amazingly irritated at the errata needed. However, despite that, we took it out for a test drive.
The system works. It works beautifully. It required a couple of clarifications here and there, but essentially, its a very crunchy, cinematic roleplaying experience that flows very elegantly and well once you get used to it. It does its job, and admirably so.
And how cool is it to be able to play dragons without being munchkins?
Our group had a blast with it, and now we are gearing up to do a full campaign. Its going to have elements of xfiles, call of cthulhu, with some heavy matrix style fight scenes. I just cant wait to run it! :)
Who should buy this? Who should not?
Who should avoid this? Anyone who hates needing errata and has great disdain for books that were not proofread enough; anyone who doesn't like Urban Fantasy; and anyone who doesn't like crunchy systems.
Who should buy this book? Anyone who doesn't mind errata, who like crunchy systems, and who enjoy multi-themed campaigns mixing gunfire with cults, conspiracies, faires, werewolves, monsters, and DRAGONS! :)
You can visit the Fireborn official website here: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/fireborn.html
Side note: sorry that this rambled. Next time, I'll sit down and plan out my review before typing it up. Thanks!
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