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Deathstalkers II is a massive tome that brings another entry into the horror fantasy mechanics and setting joining other games like Warhammer 2nd edition. For those who want a book that has it all, Deathstalkers II would be that book.
Deathstalkers II has a standard two-column format with chains and skulls adorning the borders. The page number is hidden by the skull on the outer edge. This makes it difficult to find the page number at times but once you know where it’s at, you’re set. The chapter is set on the outer border inside a black sword in roman numerals. Tables range from being easy to read to amateurish and bordering on first product issued. For example, I find it easier to read when the text is alternatively a different color as opposed to being boxed in with every line of text having a solid black line under it.Borders and margins are good.
Art varies tremendously and there’s probably too much of it. Some of my favorite pieces are signed by “MB”, who I imagine is Marcelo Barbosa. He does fantastic figure work in the class section. While DSS, who I’m assuming is Dusten Sonnon, perhaps doesn’t have the technical expertise down, his illustrations of the juggernaughts have character. Each chapter has a full splash page and there are many full-page illustrations. While I’m not a collector of the Cutter’s Guild material, I do recognize some of the art from previous products.
Based in part on the OGL, Deathstalkers II nonetheless reminds me a great deal of Palladium Fantasy with elements of other games added. In looking at the races for example, your stats don’t get modifiers, instead, you get extra dice. Characters use many of the same statistics that you would use for most OGL/d20 games including strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom and charisma, but an odd one, courage, is also added. In addition, character race also determines the type of hit dice you get per level. That’s right, characters gaining hit points based not on their class, but on their race.
In terms of races, I’m not too crazy about some of the naming conventions. It’s like anything that looked human but was different, like a Palladium Wolfen style creature, was called a half-XX. In this case, half-wolf. Same deal for numerous other races like the half-cat, half-giant, and half-dead. Unless its parentage makes it half, the name is really misleading.
In terms of races, they’re designed with the core setting in mind. Each one has background details about how they fit into the campaign world and each one has a unique special ability known as ‘rage’. The thing that worries me a bit is that unlike say D&D, there are no CR or ECL adjustments. That means each race starts off on very unequal ground. Now that’s the way it is in several games, including Warhammer and Palladium fanasy. The trick is in the role playing aspects where humans, as in those games, are the dominant race and to be something else pits your character’s life in danger.
There are some old favorites here with different tweaks. For example, the kobold here isn’t dragon spawn or a dwarf offshoot, instead they are a mix of different types of blood and depending on their mood and situation, their physical abilities and appearance changes to either be neutral, offensive (orc heritage) or beautiful (elf heritage). Some of the races have changes that some won’t like.
For example, elves here are pained by killing suffering ‘Kala’Hur’. The more killed by the elf, the more server the effects occur. This ranges from charisma loss to gaining penalties to Handle Animal and Ride checks. There are benefits as well though as the character becomes more and more entwined in the realms of shadows, radiating shadows and death.
I’m not going over every race, but here’s a quick listing: Centaur, Demon (Antithrax), Dwarf, Elf, Fairy, Fayan, Gnome, Gnome (West Lander), Gobllyn, Half-Cat, Half-Dead, Half-Giant, Half-Wolf, Human, Kelpie, Kobold, Minotaur (Red and Blue), Minotaur (Bestial), Ogre, Orc, Sabyr, Stagian, and Wu-Zen.
Some of the races have variants within them. For example, there are more than one type of human, half-cat and sabyr. Because game balance isn’t a big issue in character creation, players will have options to pick from mundane races to fantastical ones like the sabyrs, which are dragon humanoids.
In terms of character classes, we have a set-up similar to Rolemaster in that there are non-spellcasters, demi-spellcasters and full spellcasters. The first two are detailed in Section Three, while the latter comes in at a latter date. Unlike most d20 games, multi-classing isn’t favored here as there are some delays in gaining power until you surpass your old level, much as earlier editions of D&D. For example, many of your abilities, like saving throws, base attacks and defense bonuses, do not raise until you surpass the level you used to have in your old class. Also, because each class has it’s own experience point chart, your experience points don’t transfer over because you’ve started a new class so it’s back to zero experience points in the new class for you.
In addition, unlike Rolemaster or D&D 3rd edition, the experience points are not an even level here, another hark to the older editions. This means that the classes are in and of them not balanced as each class has it’s own experience points to advance. Class advancement only goes up to level seventeen here, but notes are included for those going up higher levels. Perhaps another nod to Warhammer is that each class also has career exits.
Classes range from generic all-purpose ones like mercenaries and apprentices, to adventurers and thieves. Specific world focusing classes are included like the Juggernaught Slayers. In this world, the Juggernaughts are a world shattering force that has helped pushed the world past it’s age of empires into an age of city-states. Others like the Obsidian Guardsman have specific roles in the campaign. Background details for all classes are included though and you’ll find notes on guilds for assassins under assassins, as well as typical job earnings for the characters.
These classes are somewhat similar to standard OGL ones but have their own differences. For example, they have requirements, like ability requirements. They have ‘specialty’ skills, (think class skills from D&D), as well as starting equipment.
For level advancement, they have titles, another throw back to 1st edition, as well as notes on how many skill points, APR (Actions Per Round), saving throw modifiers (Fort, Ref, Will), hit, parry, and dodge bonuses, initiative, damage, feats, and special.
Characters gain a lot of skill points compared to the other OGL systems I’ve seen ,but because they have to spend points on weapon skills, it’s necessary. In addition, skills generally have more levels to them than standard D&D, almost like the old martial arts in Rolemaster where you had different rankings of the same skill.
Characters also gain more feats. Not always mind you. Those classes with a lot of special abilities will usually only gain a special ability or a feat. Take the mercenary for example. They gain a feat almost every level, but have no special abilities. The witch hunter on the other hand, only gains six feats but gains numerous special abilities, including magic resistance and spell immunities.
Some miscellaneous elements are included in chapter four like alignment (standard nine D&D ones), birth signs and abilities for them, languages, slang names, use of fame points, and insanities. In some ways, it reminds me of the old Arduin books as anything that sounds neat or typical for a dark fantasy game is thrown in.
When getting to feats and skills in chapter five, it’s interesting to note that some of the typical OGL stances are gone. For example, your maximum amount of skills can be 10 higher than your class level. That’ll eat up those extra skill points pretty quick. In addition, you can also buy skill points with experience points. For every six hundred experience points you spend, you get a skill point.
The bad thing is the terminology here. For an OGL game, some things went outside the familiar. Making class skills into class specialty skills and cross-class skills into shared skills, makes no sense, especially since it works the same. Specialty skills are bought on a one per one basis and shared skills on a two per one basis.
The game includes one hundred and seventy skills. Not some of these are for the WE or weapon expertise skills. These have an effect similar to the old weapon specialization where you can gain greater and greater ranks of weapon skill giving you the ability to critical hit easier, reduce your miss chance, and bonuses to attack and parry. There are some limits to what characters can take. For example, wizards can never raise about WE x4 and only archers can get WE x5 or higher in bows and ranged weapons, while only fighters and ranger-type classes can get WE x5 or higher for melee weapons.
Skills include sample DC rolls, as well as various modifiers and notes on how the different levels work. For example, Blacksmithing has six levels, but only dwarves can get that sixth level. DC listings are included for things like making weapons out of exotic materials or noting what level of skill the user has.
Many of the skills have game effects that make them worth taking. For example, Monsterlore gives characters a favored foe is they have five ranks in the skill. They gain a +2 bonus on attack and defense rolls when fighting those foes, as well as a bonus to several skills.
Another interesting thing was the Weight Lifting skill, which again, reminded me of Palladium, in that you have a skill, that can directly influence the game stats. In this case, Weight Lifting allows the character to make a DC check and if made, the character gains 1-point to his Strength score.
For feats, we have one hundred and fifty seven. Many of these are familiar to those who’ve played OGL games as they included things like item creation feats and Quick Draw. Others are crafted directly for the game including Magic Resistance, where you take less damage from magical attacks and gain a bonus on saving throws versus magical attacks.
Like skills, feats can also be bought with experience points. The experience point costs range tremendously from three thousand for Fate I, which allows the player to re-roll attack, defense, or damage during combat, but only four times, to Spring Attack, costing ten thousand.
Combat is perhaps the area where the book disappoints me the most because it adds layers of complexity to the game. Remember those Actions Per Round you get? Well, let’s start at the beginning.
You roll initiative. Those who have the higher initiative have the ‘Aggressive Advantage’. When your turn comes, you roll to hit. The to-hit roll is basically meaningless in determining if you hit, much like Palladium. Only on a roll of 1, a fumble, or a 2-5, do you miss.
The trick is that your enemy can dodge or parry. It’s not a free action though and consumes one of their APR. Now if you went ahead of someone and they dodged your attack, they still get to go on their turn, provided they still have some APR left. And if your have more than one APR, you may in turn, dodge or parry that attack.
Combat continues for that round until everyone uses up all their APR. and then goes in reverse order. You don’t lose your Aggressive Advantage though. The AA lets the character, when being attacked, after blocking or parrying, make another attack. Useful, but it eats up APR.
There’s a lot more to combat than that though. The game uses damage reduction on armor, and some creatures have natural damage reduction. The game has a form of attacks of opportunity, and once again goes with its own naming convention, Moments of Opportunity. The parrying and dodging can be simple, or involve more like jumping away or knowing away an opponent’s weapon. Each one has it’s own bits and parts.
One nice thing is that they note that you’re not going to be able to parry a dragon’s bite attack and that you’d have to use a dodge to get out of the way. Other parts that seem to make sense like natural attack versus parry are puzzling though as if a defender successfully parries a natural attack, the attack takes damage. How does that work for creatures like the Wu-Zen whose natural claw attacks are virtually unbreakable?
Another nice thing is that the author walks the reader through several fighting sessions, showing exactly how combat works when fighting one on one, one against several, and groups against groups.
Those interested in the spells will find that we have the two-main archetypes here, priests and wizards. Priests serve a single god and purchase their spells with experience points. He can purchase spells of his level until he has purchased all the spells for that level. Once the priest purchases all those spells, he automatically gains his next level.
Wizards on the other hand, can be generic well rounded spell casters or they can specialize. For specialization, we have familiar fields like necromancers, elementalists, summoners and divination. Others like aeromancer and war caster are a bit different than standard d20 games in name, but similar in other aspects.
These specialty fields have spell types that it encompasses based on the type of spell. For example, the war caster has hurt, fire, force, and heal, while the hydromancer has water, creation, cold, electricity, and acid. Wizards get spell choices as they go up in levels and don’t pay experience points for them.
Wizards get spell castings per day. They start off with a score equal to half their Constitution score. Now by using ingredients or power words, they can reduce the amount of castings that the spell cost from one to half. They gain more castings as they go up in level. They can also try to cast again, but have to make a Fortitude save against DC 15 with a penalty for each spell cast. Those that fail have to roll on the table, Effects of Malformed Magic.
There are a lot of spells included, and they don’t work like the standard D&D spells for the most part. Spells also have spell levels in and of themselves and those spell levels go up at the point the caster picked them up, as opposed to going up per level at the caster’s level. Spells range from 1st to 15th level, and perhaps as another nod that I see to Palladium fantasy, include Spells of Legend.
After getting through the spells, we get world background in the form of Gods nad Angels. The names are a mixed lot as if you take a real-world god, you should either go with it’s original ideas, or just not use it. Loki as the god of jungles just seems wrong. Some of the other names are old style like Kain, the Enemy of the Gods who is actually an assassin of the gods. Others seem to close to other names like Mystyra being the ‘Granter of Magic’, sounding an awful lot like the Forgotten Realms goddess of magic.
Each god includes alignment, description, beliefs, appearing, history, holy days, hit points, DR, and Divine Gifts. Why they have hit points and DR without full combat statistics I don’t know.
Gods are broken down into the High Gods, gods, demigods, and dead gods, along with godlings, who are really just powerful mortals.
In terms of organization, strangely enough, The Buyer’s Guide, where you outfit your character, is far and away from most other bits of character creation. For money, we have a fairly standard gold-silver-copper piece ranking with two additions, golden sables, each one equal to twenty five gold pieces and everlight, each one equal to one thousand gold pieces.
Armor here does not provide an armor class bonus. Instead it acts as damage reduction, giving the character a DR. Those looking for more detailed combat and record keeping, can note the armor’s hardness and hit points and subtract hit points from the armor for points that exceed the armor’s hardness value.
Weapons here vary in terms of damage but generally, it’s higher than their d20 counter parts. For example, a claymore does 4d6 while a battle axe can do up to 3d10 if it’s long. The equipment section, despite having lots of listings and tables, does not have illustrations or details on the weapons within the tables.
Still, as far as completeness goes, it does include details on herbs, poisons, and drugs, and includes location codes, climate codes, chance to locate, mixability, addition factor and poison class. Reminds me a lot of the old Bard Game’s Compleate Alchemist book.
Magic items are included, and are broken up by type. For example, we have armor properties and weapon properties, much like those found in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. We have scrolls, rings, potions, and rod, staffs and wands. It’s a big section and while some of them are familiar to anyone whose played D&D for a while, it does have some of it’s own takes on the items. For example, since armor class isn’t relevant, an amulet of natural armor doesn’t provide an armor class bonus, it provides a damage reduction bonus.
The most powerful of weapons are holy weapons and rune weapons. Another reminder of Palladium Fantasy is that the weapons are made of a material that cannot be broken and are unique weapons. They are also intelligent with many of their own ability scores and can communicate with those near them. As a nod to an old favorite, we have Deathbringer, a runic blade that does, oh, a moderate 1d100 x 10 points of damage. Some good stuff here.
The world guide doesn’t fill every question you have about the main setting, Arkastapha, clocking in at sixty pages, but between it and the background information in the various sections of class and race, you have more than enough to go by. A good deal of the information starts off with the rise of the juggernauts and how they came to be, giving rise to new gods, as well as the demons and how their patron mother prepared them to nearly take over the world.
In short, things are not going well. It’s an era where empires have failed and city-states struggle to stay alive. People do not wander from their homes and the history of yesteryear becomes the myths of today. While maps are provided for the twenty different sections, these maps are not super detailed and include no up-close maps of any cities, bars or other locations. It does provide brief background notes on various cities and nearby lands as well as adventure ideas and seeds aplenty, but those looking for say, city blocks where population and other details are quickly listed, will have some reading ahead of them.
One of the complaints against the Warhammer 2nd edition book, was that it didn’t include enough setting and monster information. Between the details in chapter eleven on the setting and the monsters in chapter twelve, most readers should be happy. We have the unique creatures of the setting, including numerous types of juggernauts and demons, as well as old favorites like basilisks and trolls.
Each monster has standard statistics, similar to a player’s in some way, but also includes a CR and XP value. The CR rating, to me, is useless. I say this because level is not an indicator of power in this game system. While there are many benefits of leveling up, I could easily see two different groups of different races, where one group has spent experience points on skills and feats, and the other note, being of completely different power levels. In terms of experience points, this is an award handed to everyone. As a side note, the authors didn’t include a break down of monsters by CR, so even if you wanted to use the CR’s to arrange encounters for your groups, you’re out of luck.
The thing I didn’t like, is that many ‘monster’ races, are listed as playable and don’t have generic everyday versions at the end of the book. So we have no orcs for example.
The appendix includes a blank character sheet, glossary, and massive index.
Note, despite being a lengthy review, there are some sections I’ve just glossed over and others I’ve left out entirely. For example, I didn’t go into real depth with the gods, and I didn’t mention how the game handles things like encumbrance or mention that it has a section on runes, circles and wards. Lots of stuff in this book, too much even for this review to cover.
There were a few places I think the book could’ve been lightened a bit. For example, anytime a similar concept to d20 was used, I would’ve used that terminology. Why go OGL and reinvent the wheel anyway? I would’ve handled experience points and multi-classing different, and probably not gone with extra dice for characters during character generation, as opposed to straight bonuses. I would’ve probably got rid of any full-page art just to reduce the size of the book. While some feel that more is more, I feel that well, “more”, as in terms of content, is “more”. I would’ve also provided a fully detailed example of character generation. The combat examples are excellent and go a long way in showcasing the options in combat but starting with character creation would be the way to go. That’s just me though.
For those looking for something that similar to D&D but with it’s own twists, a book that comes with it’s own setting, magic, and monsters, a book requiring no other book to jump right in and play, Deathstalkers II is perfect for you.
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