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SETTING:
In Short, the setting is by far the worst part of this book. I had to check to see if I still had all my teeth after reading the sickly sweetness of it. It’s the sort of claptrap I’d expect to find 8 year olds producing, it’s that bad. To be fair, this may be the fault of the writings they draw from, in which case, getting a license and writing the setting as given at least frees the game designers from blame.
Oh, you want details. Sure. To begin with, we have the origins of the world, the Gods and general mythic beginning of, well, everything. Actually, this isn’t too bad. I have some fault here, but really they have more to do with the other problems, retroactive faults if you will. The four ‘primary’ deities, the Twilight Gods that created everything are neatly tied to the four alchemical elements, the four seasons and the four suits of the Tarot. Given what Twilight seems to be, in terms of the Setting, I failed to see why these four gods are ‘Twilight’ gods. They created the seven gods of Light, to oppose the seven Exarchs of Shadow, or evil demonic beings from beyond reality. Since Twilight supposedly is a balance between Light and Shadow, why the Twilight Gods are directly opposed to Shadow is unclear.
Okay, that’s unclear. I understand why the Gods oppose Shadow, what I don’t see is why ‘Twilight’ anything is opposed to Shadow. If it’s a balance thing, it should be more obvious. I’m going skip the ancient history and jump up to the ‘modern times’ part of the setting. It’s relatively simplistic, and relatively generic, ending with a terrible war against ‘sorcerer kings’ that… well, you get the idea. Actually, the Sorcerer Kings are pretty important, the beginnings of the modern times. Basically, a bunch magicians got really powerful, evil and immortal all over the world, made everyone’s lives miserable, and forces of light rebelled, and managed to kill all but one, but as they died, they wrecked the areas around them. With me so far?
So, Aldis, the main kingdom, has become a shining beacon of light in the world, build on the previous shining beacon of light in the world, also known as Aldis. The king is magically chosen by a Golden Hart the day the old king dies. Anyone can be chosen. The King (Sovereign) gets an incredibly powerful ancient artifact, the scepter of the Blue Rose. What’s its power? Well, apparently it detects alignment, but only once per person. This is used to determine who can be a Noble. Anyone can be a noble, if they have a basic education, and are Good. Anyone. Let me say that again. Anyone. Hate your life, can read and write, basically a good person? Become a noble. No need to figure out what fief you should have, how you are supposed to make a living, nothing.
What is really neat about this is you can turn evil later, and unless you are stupidly blatant about it, they can’t prove it. So in other words, you have nothing but upward mobility. Why would anyone be a peasant/serf/farmer/laborer? I guess if you are too stupid to learn, because, no enlightened society would actually keep knowledge from anyone, or are just plain selfish and evil, you can’t move up.
The worst problem here is the Golden Hart. See, in 12 tries, it managed to screw up twice, putting a cruel tyrant on once, then a madwoman. If the fluff is followed, its current choice isn’t bad, but by choosing the 18 year old girl, instead of the son of the former king, it actually caused a powerfully placed noble to gradually turn evil to destroy the country from within. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think a magic animal is the best way to choose a leader, especially when it has such a crappy track record.
Things are so nice in Aldis they don’t even have a standing army. I guess there are too many nobles who don’t want to join. This is despite the fact that there are two hostile foreign powers that wish to attack/destroy candy cane land. Only impassable terrain stops them. Apparently, however, there are no naval powers on this planet, as Aldis has a huge coastline.
The three neighboring kingdoms suffer the same shallow design philosophy, though with thankfully less detail. Jarzon is an intolerant, phallo-centric theocracy, Kern is an evil land of undead, human slaves and… okay, I guess it isn’t really a kingdom, it’s a lich’s huge front yard. Living slaves exist solely because the undead aren’t nimble enough to mine power crystals. The last land is a land of nomadic barbarians, but apparently peaceful nomadic barbarians, who rage, because they never attack Aldis.
To sum up so far, the writers took more effort in designing the fashion sense of Aldis than they did anything else. I kid you not, I know more about what people wear in Aldis (men with dresses in the central valley, yadda yadda) than what the Nobles actually do.
I’ll only cover a few more niggling details about this setting before moving on to the stuff I actually like. Unicorns. There are unicorns, a staple of fantasy literature to be sure. Here they are wise, all powerful demigods, springing into being along side the very first God of Light. Even the mighty griffons bow to them. Don’t get me wrong, I like unicorns, but given everything else going on, this only reminds me of ‘typical pre-pubescent girl fantasy’ that seems to drive everything else. The only major woods are ruled by the unicorns, for example, unicorns led the fight against the sorcerer kings in another. Personally I am surprised a unicorn doesn’t pick the sovereign, instead of a deer.
Homosexuality: I am almost afraid to mention this topic, given the decidedly PC/un-PC nature of the debate. However, given just how important it seems to be in Aldis, I feel I would be remiss in ignoring it. Hmm… okay the first God of Light is also the god of Homosexual relations. All the twilight Gods have male and female aspects, one of the major points of conflict with Jarzon is the ‘immoral’ sexual relations in Aldis, Men wear dresses in the Central valley, the Sea People have a 50% homosexual population, and on and on. In fact, listed in the designers ‘identifying factors’ of the Genre, Homosexual relationships are listed first. To be honest, none of this, taken separately would bother me in the least. It is the weight, the constant repetition of this that irritates. To be blunt, 40% of the potential readership of this book is likely to not be gay, to not care about or want to read about being Gay. Another 40% are more ambivalent but also not particularly gay. My estimation is that the actual readership, the numbers are far more skewed towards the first group. (Ed. Note: My numbers are based off the following assumptions. 10% of the population is gay, say another 10% is bi. Half of the population is male, who as non-gays are generally uncomfortable with the topic, the other half are female, and apparently enjoy reading about male gay relationships. As a reader, my experiences are that far more female authors write male homosexual relationships than male authors write, say, lesbian relationships. I would guess that this fact is one reason more females read female authors than males do, not chauvinism or any other ism.)
The biggest problem I actually have with this is the repetition of it, over and over and over and over… you get the picture. I realize that many female authors, the only kind listed by the game designers, write gay relationships. I’ve read my share, ranging from central characters to offhand mention. I can’t think of a single instance where it was a prominent feature of the culture. The idea of a sovereign or noble ‘marrying’ this way is problematic from a feudal inheritance sort of view. Oh, wait, nobility isn’t hereditary… apparently people don’t die and have to pass on their property to heirs. Given how nice everything else is, I’d guess that no one owns anything, they just borrow it from the land, and no one argues.
Oh, and finally we have the races. I have two problems here. The first is the proud declaration that there are no elves. But they have Vata, which are tall and thin and magical, and live long lives, have silvery hair. There are two types, one is normal the other has black skin, dark vision and light sensitivity. Elf and drow, by any other name…
The second, more annoying problem is the Psychic animals. I know that mind bonded animals appear in fiction, I know these animals are often special, greater than normal animals. I also know that they are pretty freaking rare in their world setting, most of the time. Here, they are four legged people who can’t talk. They are everywhere. Cats, dogs…er wolves, horses, dolphins, whales, griffons, unicorns. Most are playable races, they even have representation in government. Not in Jarzon, where they considered are evil and persecuted (in case, you know, you wanted to play a Jarzoni). I can’t think of a worse way to handle a ‘genre element’ than this. In fact, reading it gave me two or three ideas how to do it. I won’t say they were good, but anything is better than this glut. To aggravate matters, magic types can have familiars, making ordinary animals essentially the same as the psychic playable race. And then there is a flying cat. Yup, one more cutesy element, in case you weren’t already gagging on it.
What makes this so tragic is that all of this is draped on a damn solid reworking of normal D&D rules. Solid rules and pretty good production values; Green Ronin has put out a generally excellent package once more, just wrapped in cotton candy.
SYSTEM:
To start with, they eliminate waste. You have stripped down attributes, the same six, only instead of generating 3-18, and finding your bonus, you just take the bonus. They give you six points (four if you are an animal…) which, when I thought about it was a pretty good number. I do have one gripe here. I have long complained about D&D’s focus on Strength to hit people. I allowed for the arguments that when bludgeoning your way past heavy armor that strength was more important than hand-eye coordination. Given Blue Rose’s overall feel, lightly armored duelists, contests of speed and skill, etc, why they retained STR as the ‘accuracy’ stat, I have no idea.
From there you pick a background, which is either a regional/ethnic origin, or an actual race. This gives you some favored skills and feats, a nice way to get a handle on who your people are. My only real problem here is that you can play a dolphin. Why? This isn’t an aquatic game, anyone playing a dolphin is going to force everyone else to play dolphins, or maybe sea people. Never mind the fact that the entire ‘psychic animal’ player race irritates me, Dolphins just don’t fit. Given that the concept of the game is that relationships and romance are important, playing dolphins… doesn’t fit. They do make a weird sort of sense, right up there with unicorn posters are dolphin tattoos, as things I expect girls to think are good ideas.
Hmm… I mention, but not dwell on, the fact that the game suggests as ‘good’ character concepts playing cross gender and cross sexual orientation characters. It doesn’t mention them as possibilities, it actually says they are good ideas.
Onward. Let me say I am not a huge fan of classes. That said, Blue Rose actually does it right. Mostly. Rather than having a dozen, highly specialized classes, BR has three, highly generic classes. I can’t find any real conceptual gap here, either. You have your Magic guy, your Skill guy, and your Muscle Guy. Since you get a feat each level, and no special abilities, and the choice of where you want your saving throws to go, this works out pretty good. The only flaw with this is the fact that each class gets access to ‘special’ feats, some of which seem arbitrary. Fighty guys can’t learn to deflect arrows, for example, but magic guys can. Huh?
Skills: The changes here from typical D&D are sort of hit or miss. The skill list has been shortened, but I didn’t really miss anything. Some of the shortening was ‘grouping’; instead of spot, listen and search, you have Notice. Works for me. However, you no longer get skill points. Basically you know a skill to the maximum allowed by your level, and if it’s not a favored skill, it’s halved. You can get more favored skills, or learn more skills by changing classes or by spending feats. On the one hand, this is fairly tolerable, but I can see how you might have a tendency to get ‘clone-itus’ All fourth level warriors from Jarzon have the same skills at the same levels. My theory is that you can be defined in many ways by what you know, if that is highly regimented, it’s hard to stand out from a crowed. How often do we stereotype people by their professions? With only three choices, well… Still, it is less book keeping.
Feats: Mostly familiar to D&D players, there weren’t too many obvious changes. You have general feats, arcane feats, expert feats and martial feats. Only Adepts can take arcane feats, only experts can take expert feats and only warriors can take martial feats. That’s my beef here, a fighty expert, should you chose to make one, is restricted from taking martial feats, meaning you have to multiclass. Normally I would say this is hardly a bad thing, but given the feel of the game it seems out of place. The wide open class structure seems to lend itself to follow the concept character development. If my fighter type wants to know more skills, he spends his feat on a skill, if he wants some magic, he buys an arcane feat. He still fights first, his skills or magic are meant to supplement that, not push towards a whole new path in life. Also, as noted before, some of the feat divisions seem a little arbitrary. Magic is largely feat driven, I should point out here. I’ll cover that more latter.
One major change is the combat system. This is obvious during character creation, as each class has prominently a Defense stat, which roughly parallels the Attack line, and a toughness save. No one has hit dice, in fact there are no hit points. You also don’t see the ‘four attack per round’ breakdown of the BAB. This is pretty good stuff. The Toughness save instead of HP seems like a solid concept, lifted from Mutants&Masterminds. I haven’t had a chance to actually use it in play, but it seems better reasoned then they typical HP pool. Furthermore, the DB bit is a damn fined addition to the game. I’ve always hated the idea that two characters of vastly differing skill are equally hard (or easy) to hit, based entirely off of what they are wearing. Conceptually weak idea, at best; tragically unfair at worst. I won’t say that a level dependant DB is the best idea out there, but it works, it’s simple, and it’s easy to implement. Why they didn’t add it to 3.5 I will never know. As for the rest of the combat system, it matches its intent. This isn’t strategic combat, it’s streamlined. Also, it is less arbitrary. You have one second combat rounds, one swing per attack, and no random damage dice, to go along with the lack of HP. Gone are the days of +5 magic swords. Magic swords are easy enough to get, but their only effect seems to be to overcome damage reduction, sounds good to me. Armor still makes you harder to hit, which doesn’t. This leads to the oddity of not having magic armor; since magic swords don’t make it easier to hit people, why should magic armor make it harder to be hit, thus no magic armor. Of course, if magic weapons made it easier to hurt people, and armor made it harder to be hurt, this wouldn’t be a problem. A missed opportunity, but hardly a deal breaker.
To go along with a sort of heroic ideal, there are mook rules… Er… minion rules I mean. This allows for streamlined combat, allows even low level heroes to feel heroic, but man, I always feel sorry for those poor minion bastards who die at the slightest scratch. It fits, some people will like it, some people won’t.
So, to sum up combat: Fewer rules, fewer permutations, fewer abstractions, faster furious-er. I could play this and be perfectly happy. Is it better than D&D? That depends on your point of view. I’d say it fits the style of the game, where more crunchy combat rules might not.
Ah, magic. In a way, this is the reason I bought BR in the first place. Magic rules that made sense, that fit literary styles, that weren’t silly. Did it deliver? Sure it did. What it didn’t do was give me easy to understand rules. I’ve admitted before to being magically dense, which probably didn’t help me any. Let me sum up How magic works first.
Magic, or Arcana, is essentially feat driven. You buy a feat that allows you to do X. Your ability at X works like a skill. This can be full value skill (level plus three) or cross class (1/2 full value) depending on whether or not you are an Adept. There are several different Groupings of Arcana, and if evil nasty hurtingness is your game, there are Sorceries based off those Arcana, which will lead you down the path of evil, appropriately enough.
Unfortunately things aren’t very clearly arranged. You have a master list of alphabetized powers, only looking at the powers themselves can you tell which are useable untrained, and what feat is necessary to learn it. Powers (arcane) are broken down by trained/untrained, type, fatiguing or not, and sorcery or not. This is where I started to get confused. It took some reading, and some guessing to figure out that certain feats, namely those available only to adepts, give you access to all the arcana(powers) under a single group, as well as the untrained groupless powers but no training, certain general feats only give you access to certain powers, rather than whole groups, eliminating the whole untrained heading. But then, a given feat is necessary to learn, or train, in any given Power under any group. Add to this certain feats that allow you certain powers, that aren’t Arcana, but rather expansions of certain Arcana, and it gets to be a real mess.
Hmm… let me see if I can make this a bit simpler. An adept, wanting to know how to do something, needs to buy a Talent which is a group of Arcana. This only allows him to use these Arcana Untrained, along with the two Arcana that don’t fall under a Talent grouping. Then he needs to take another feat that actually makes him trained in two of his available Talents. If, by chance, he is a Healer, and wants to say, cure disease, he needs to take that specific Feat, as it isn’t an actual Arcana itself. Very feat heavy, very complex, and poorly organized.
A non Adept has three choices. He can’t buy a Talent group, but he can learn the two ungrouped abilities through Training. He can buy a single Arcana buy itself (which an Adept can do) but has no access to any other arcane, trained or not, or he can take Wild Talent, which gives him the entire Talent untrained, but tends to go off at random (more often as he gets higher in level…?). Or he could ignore all of that, take a bunch of arcane general feats (arcane strike, a general feat that makes your hits magic…) making a magically powerful guy with no actual magic. Fun.
Interestingly, one of the groupings, meditative, is unimportant. That is to say, it has absolutely NO arcana exclusive to it, all of them are shared with other Talent groups. In fact, the only shared Arcana are Meditative, with one exception. Furthermore, I think it is the smallest grouping, with only four powers. My point is that an Adept wishing to ‘master’ all talents could skip meditative all together, and still learn all the Arcana. The sheer number of feat required for this is daunting, however. Lessee, assuming that he didn’t mind being untrained, as long as he could use every arcana… but not shortcutting by wild talenting everything… 26 feats (five for talents) and he’d still be missing out on half his potential abilities (cure poison, disease, imbue life, summon elemental, stuff like that). Okay, so no mage gets to know it all, but given the relatively tiny power list, one page worth, and the relatively weak power available, it does seem that the adept gets shorted just a bit. Adepts are not going to break this game, even at higher levels. Hmm, that actually could be a good thing…
I’ll sum up Magic: Innovative, well conceived, execution was slightly sloppy. Fits the ‘genre’ and style of the game. Sorcery, arguably a potent concept, is poorly executed as well. It gets it’s own, two page, chapter, but all it’s powers are ‘hidden’ in the mundane, normal Arcana, and for the most part seem… weak. I wonder just how powerful the Sorcerer kings could have been with these Arcana to draw from.
Time to cover a few add on rules.
Alignment in BR is a weird mix of ‘black and white, plus grey.’ A powerfully black and white world view, Light vs. Shadow, but a third, Twilight path that literally is ‘I do both.’ Make of it what you will.
Corruption: For this ‘style’ of game, I’ll allow that corruption rules are a good thing. They fit certain literary conceits, that evil acts affect the person as much as the victims. That said, I don’t think the corruption rules here work well. Simply doing an evil act isn’t enough to gain corruption. Evil has to be done in corrupt places, or while touching a corrupt item. Sorcery is inherently evil, as in ‘I cast my sorcerous attack spell to drive off the demon before it consumes the little girl.’ And so become corrupt. I have a hard time considering an act outside of context as Evil. Anyway, a single point of corruption counts as a negative point of Wisdom and Con, so after five points of corruption an average person is dead, while a nearly inhuman Adept could, in theory, survive up to ten. Or, he could just go embrace it, in which case it becomes his casting stat. Now we start to see power in evil. If you potentially gain a point of corruption every time you cast a sorcery, in theory you could have a corruption, and therefore a casting stat way up in the hundreds really quickly. Sure, you are using it to power pretty lame abilities, but still…
Oh, let’s talk about removing corruption, since we don’t want to be gloriously evil villains. Ten points of conviction buy off one point of corruption. Since you get one point of conviction every day (at a minimum) a little rest, down time, say, and poof, your corruption is all gone.
Social interaction: They actually go into some depth here, with a couple of pages of rules on top of the skill descriptions, and add feats that allow more depth to certain skills. Mileage may vary.
Conviction: Pretty much action points in use, they do refresh, which is nice. I like this sort of mechanic, and the way it is presented makes it feel better than ‘action points’. The idea is if you feel strongly about something, you do better at it. I like. And since they refresh, rather than waiting for new levels, you are more inclined to use them, rather than horde them, and they don’t have to give you a lot. Good stuff.
Reputation: Useless, stupid mechanic. I gained a level, more people know me now. I feel that this is an ‘in game’ sort of bonus. If the players do good stuff, obvious stuff, than people know them, if they mope around and do secret stuff, they remain anonymous. If they do downright stupid, irritating things, than people learn they are buffoons. Why give it out arbitrarily?
Wealth: Entirely abstract, straight out of D20 Modern. I’ve got an entire rant on this on my hard drive. Really I do. I feel that if you want abstract money, go all the way and let the GM decide how you are doing based off the needs of the plot. Otherwise, let the players have their rewards. What feels better, getting a bag with 100 gold doubloons, or learning your character got a +1 wealth bonus. Better, if everyone in the party gets a +1 wealth bonus, what does that mean if one player had a wealth of 1, and one had a wealth of 20? That they got radically different amounts of money, that’s what. The rich get richer, the poor get slightly less poor. How you feel is your business.
Experience: Hey, this is new! Smack dab in a D&D based, level game, is the neatest, brokenly workable, cool exp idea I’ve seen. The GM hands out the levels when he feels the players have earned it! Whoa. Elegant, simple, easy to use. So, what’s wrong with it? GM’s that never want to hand out levels, players that always feel cheated when they can’t put a number on something. A good, mature group, and this sucker is an outstanding systemless system. A petty, bickering group of brats that barely tolerate each other once a week, and you have a recipe for disaster. That said, I’d use it in a heart beat, even in other D20 based games. This has got to be the easiest thing in the world to steal.
OTHER STUFF:
Okay, I’ll close up with a very brief overview of the whole book. It’s nicely done, the art fits the style for the most part, though slightly cheap at times. There are attractive borders, blocked text, usually fiction, but occasionally expansions or tables. The arrangement was tolerable, without major, jarring flaws. I didn’t notice any real editorial problems, but I wasn’t really looking. Motif’s, like the Light, Twilight, Shadow grouping, and the Tarot Card thread appear throughout the book, giving it a unified feeling. Nice touches include the Index, and an appendix for translating these rules to and from traditional D20.
MY TAKE:
Overall, I give the rules a very high mark, 4 or even 5 if you like level/class systems, and D20 stuff in general. This is a good take on it.
The Setting, and even the Genre stuff, I give a 2, it’s mostly crap, but the crap is well supported by the rules, and is even internally consistent, if overly simplistic. I would only recommend the setting to small children, who I suspect had something to do with conceiving it.
If I hadn’t already bought it, would I? Sure. But then, I am one of those types of GM’s that prefers not to use existing settings, but to spin my own from whole cloth. The basic rule set could become my favorite variation on the D20 system, and I would enjoy seeing more D20 products using this type of system, with a few more tweaks. If you are a setting freak, I’d probably pass on it. If you won’t touch an OGL product, I’d pass on it, there isn’t anything else here. As for Genre, I… you know, I don’t have anything coherent to say here, I really don’t. Something about waiting for a more coherent setting or something… I just don’t know. I’ll have to torture myself with a Mercedes Lackey book or something, just to make sure it’s just this book, and not her fault.
PS: I have nothing against 13 year old girls, many of my cousins are, or have been in that catagory. I also like to think many of my cousins would still think the setting was...sappy.
