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The Deryni Adventure Game

If you're already familiar with the world of Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels, then let's just say that even if you don't use the game system included in the Deryni Adventure Game, it's still the best resource you could have short of leaving all of the novels out the gaming table.

Honestly, I was expecting a thin little softbound book with a handful of rules and summaries of the setting and characters. Especially since I knew it was based on the fairly rules-light free RPG called Fudge.

What it turned out to be was a 256-page hardbound book with an intimidating amount of setting information and a surprising number of rules.

The Basics

Let's go over the basics: the Deryni novels are set in a fairly realistic alternate version of 10^th to 12^th century Europe. The major difference (beyond the fact that the countries are all different) is the presence of Deryni... a race of humans who possess strange supernatural powers that fall somewhere between traditional spell-casting and psychic powers. In the main country of the setting (Gwynedd), the Deryni once ruled as magical tyrants but were overthrown and then viciously purged from their society. Now the few remaining Deryni live in fear that their magical nature will be discovered by the church... or at least they did until the kings of Gwynedd (the Haldanes) started trying to make the land safe for them to live as equals.

Fudge is a relatively rules-light game system that rates all character abilities on a scale from Terrible to Superb (basically -3 to +3, but the rules always refer to things by the name of the rating rather than giving it a number). A skill test involves rolling 4 special "fudge dice", which are d6s that happen to be labelled -1, -1, 0, 0, +1 and +1. Basically you roll 4d3-8 and adjust your rating up or down as many steps as your roll to see how well you perform. The GM sets what level of performance is "good enough" and you go from there.

That's the basics. But there's a lot more here than that.

The Complications

The setting information is extensive. Large portions of it read more like a treatise on life in the Middle Ages. I mean, they mention what sorts of jewelry are worn in the books and what peasants commonly had for dinner. The historical information is, if anything, too seamlessly joined to the setting information... I'd actually like to know which parts are from the novels and which are from the real world, at least in the cases where the novels differ from real history.

Then there are the rules. Fudge is usually pretty lightweight. I've seen Fudge implementations that were about like Over the Edge... a character would have a handful of ratings like "Warrior knight: Good" and "Musician: Fair" and that would be it. Here, they've expanded the basic Fudge rules quite a bit. There are 5 pages of Gifts (binary traits like owning a warhorse or having danger sense), 5 pages of Faults (also binary, but bad for you), 9 different skill groups and no less than 12 pages of skills... and a single skill often has only one line of description.

That's a lot of detail... in fact, I think "detail, detail, detail" would be a good summary of the book.

Let's put it this way... instead of having an index in the back of the book, they just have a table of contents up front... which is 4 pages long and has 3 columns of entries per page. It's pretty much an index on its own. The rules for character creation (including all of the skill descriptions and special Gifts) take up 37 pages. There's a one-page character sheet at the end of that section... why it's not in the very back, where you'd expect to find it, I don't know, but that's a minor point. A bigger qualm is that being only one page long, you're liable to run out of room, quick.

Ward Cubes, Merasha and Transfer Portals, Oh My!

I'm not really sure what tack to take in reviewing this game. A simple chapter by chapter overview doesn't seem like it would do it justice, and anyway, I checked and RPG.net already has a review like that.

Instead, I'm just going to talk about some of the niftier bits. In particular, their magic system, since really... the powers of the Deryni are a major part of the world and hey, I'm always interesting in new magic systems. I don't think I'm alone on that point, either.

So, the magic system in the game has the advantage that it's got source material to draw from... and the disadvantage that they wanted to stick to that source material. This means that there are some powers that I'd personally want to handle differently so as to make a better RPG, but they needed to stay as close to the source material as possible.

The Basic Mechanics:

Magic is handled pretty similarly to everything else. Deryni (or magic-imbued humans, which do exist in the setting) get a Power stat which normal humans lack. That's their raw magical strength. It's hardly used at all, really, as the skills mostly supplant it. Its main effect is to help the GM decide how tiring a particular spell will be for you, but there aren't really any solid rules for it. I'd probably house-rule it to say that you use Power in place of Stamina when determining how many spells you can cast before becoming exhausted.

Then they have 14 skills in the "Magic" skill group, each of which has its own default rating (either Poor or Terrible). Some of them (like Healing) require you to have a special Gift to learn the skill at all, because even amongst Deryni the healing talent is very rare. The fourteen skills mostly cover magical powers, although there are two that are just knowledges (Latin and Meditation) and one that's sort of a meta-skill... the Arcane Lore skill covers your knowledge of advanced magical techniques, which anyone can study but which only magic-using characters can really apply.

All Deryni start with the skills of Body-Control, Casting, Mind-Reading, Mind-Speech, Shields and Truth-Reading at a rating of Poor. This represents the innate abilities which all Deryni possess. Other magical abilities start at Terrible and may require a special Gift to buy them at all.

Minor and simple magical actions can be performed without even a roll. For example, the Spellcasting skill is used to perform some of the more traditionally magical effects such as conjuring a glow (called "handfire" in the setting) to light your way. The rules state that as long as the character already knows how to conjure handfire, it shouldn't even require a roll because it's almost effortless in the novels.

More difficult tasks use the normal skill system, with the caveat that some effects are particularly fatiguing and may tire the character out (of course, a particularly strenuous physical task could well do the same).

Psychic Powers or Mystical Arts?

There's no clear delineation between "psi" and "magic" in the Deryni setting. While the basic powers of a Deryni (like Body-Control and Truth-Reading) would generally conform to what most people think of as psychic powers, they can also be used in more complex ways to produce things like spells of warding or shape-shifting.

Deryni get a wide variety of powers even without any special Gifts. They can control their heart rate, postpone the effects of fatigue, project their senses in a particular direction (referred to as "Casting"), read minds, send telepathic messages (or combine reading and sending to establish a deep mental rapport with another person), protect themselves from psychic attack with mental Shields or tell when someone is lying. Affecting another person with a mental power requires you to touch them initially, but once you're familiar with their mind you can contact them at range.

That last power on that list (telling when someone is lying) is probably the most unbalancing in actual RPG terms... it's considered a magical sense, not a probe, so the target's Shields (or lack thereof) doesn't affect it. A good Truth-Reader can tell even when a powerful Deryni is lying... presumably. The rules actually don't specify how difficult it is to use Truth-Reading, so it's hard to say. It only provides a binary "truth/lie" result and can't detect lies of omission, so it seems to me that what difficulty you set for it will have a huge impact on how useful it is.

Trained Deryni, though, have access to even greater abilities. The art of Moving Objects isn't all that unbalancing (it's a weak form of telekinesis that could deflect an arrow but not knock down a door) but the art of Mind-Control is the sort of thing that caused the Deryni in Gwynedd to be hated in the first place. Luckily for game balance, controlling someone's mind requires you to first establish a mental rapport and it's difficult and exhausting.

The art of Spellcasting opens up a variety of additional abilities, such as conjuring handfire, conjuring real fire, or establishing anti-magic wards to protect an area. Beyond that, there's also the Arcane Lore skill, which represents knowledge of really esoteric magical effects and ancient lore.

Which brings up an interesting balancing mechanism... really potent abilities are treated as Combined Skills, which just means that your rating is the lowest rating of all the skills involved. So, opening a lock telekinetically is based on the lower of your Casting (to sense the mechanism) and Move Object (to turn the tumblers) skills. Forcing a target to tell you the truth is based on the lower of your Mind-Control and Truth-Reading skills.

The really nasty power of Heart Stopping (yes, it causes the target to have a heart attack and usually die) is based on the lower of Arcane Lore and Move Objects (you telekinetically halt their heart) and is opposed by the target's Willpower. It also automatically fails against anyone with active Shields, but it can still be very deadly against ordinary humans. Myself, I'd probably add Spellcasting to the list and make it a particularly fatiguing spell, just because the ability to make any human NPC keel over and die is pretty darn nasty, even if strong will does help protect against it.

Really advanced spells require you to purchase a unique skill for them and then also depend on both your Spellcasting and Arcane Lore skills. So the art of Summoning monsters, for example, not only requires you to invest points in learning another magical skill, your rating when you use it will be limited to the lowest of three different skills. Fortunately or unfortunately, the authors give you very little information on the example advanced spells. These represent powers that were considered mysterious even by the standards of the Deryni in the novels, so there aren't very many in the source material and they aren't explained in great detail. Advanced spells like this will require a lot of GM adjudication.

And that is probably one of the big trade-offs of this system. There aren't a lot of rules for determining the difficulty of a given magical task... for the most part it'll just be up to the GM to estimate. With mature players, this probably won't be a problem, but I could see a huge argument over whether a given effect should be a higher or lower difficulty. With the relatively small range of numbers that Fudge uses (-3 to +3, usually), browbeating the GM into lowering the difficulty by a step could be a big boost.

Ritual Magic

The rules also have a small section covering Ritual Magic. This is basically a group of Deryni (or empowered humans) working together to cast a single, extra-powerful spell. The rules imply that whoever leads the ritual makes the actual casting check, but everyone involved shares the fatigue costs and everyone has to perform the rites correctly or the roll will be penalized.

The exact details however, are largely up to the GM. Basically, the GM describes the ritual that has to be performed, the characters perform it, and as long as they did it correctly the lead mage gets to make their casting roll. If the ritual had to be rushed or was incomplete in some fashion ("Darn! We're out of virgin blood!") the roll may be penalized or may automatically fail.

If the roll succeeds, the spell goes off and has... whatever effect the GM defined for it. There are only three examples given, all taken from the books... magically spying on an enemy by using her necklace as a link to her, creating a transfer portal (a magical gate from one place to another) and activating the magical potential of a Haldane heir.

Ka-zaap!

An amusing add-on to the magic section is channeling your magical powers into your sword to make a foe-slaying super-blow with it. This destroys the sword and may well slay the caster as well... it's uncertain because the only times this has ever been done in the novels, the caster died, but it's not like it happened a lot.

The rules here suggest calling it a "Dying Effort", which means that the Deryni overextends his powers so far that death is inevitable. The game suggests that such momentous events be handed as a dramatic climax: the character automatically succeeds in the task, but perishes shortly thereafter. It's an optional rule, but it lets characters that are willing to die to succeed at something do so without having to worry about uncooperative dice ruining the drama.

There are also some rules for the Duel Arcane, a kind of formal magical ritual where two Deryni encase themselves in a magical ward and only one Deryni leaves. One bit that I really like is that the opening salvos of spells are regarded purely as flavor text as the combatants test out each other's defenses and establish which one of them has the higher skills and raw Power level. After that, it turns into a standard magical combat, with them trading spells and the winner of each exchange stunning or injuring the other until one side loses. That fits in well with how magical duels are described in the books.

Guidelines, Not Hard Rules

The biggest qualm I have about the magic in The Deryni Adventure Game is their preference for guidelines over hard rules. There are little oversights like not giving a difficulty for Truth-Reading (I'd probably use the "foe's" social skill for the difficulty as that would be much less unbalancing in the long run than just using a set difficulty) that make me think that in play I'd have to be ready to make a bunch of arbitrary rules... and keep track of them for later, because my players would really rag on me if they thought that I was making a power harder for them than it had been for someone else earlier.

Personally, I'm not familiar enough with the Deryni novels anymore to do it justice. I'd definitely want to reread them before trying to run a game.

Overall? This is a high quality game with a lot more detail than I was honestly expecting (there are a lot more skills that I would ever really use in a game). However, some of the rules are very vague... that's normally not so much of a problem, but here you're trying to make sure that you're handling things in a way that fits the setting as described by the novels. Also, I think it might be a little difficult to balance a mixed party of humans and Deryni, but that's more a matter of good GMing than game rules... you have to make sure that a magical power isn't the best solution to most problems. Humans get one more Gift than Deryni do, won't have to blow any skill points on magical skills, aren't in immediate danger of being burned at the stake if their true nature gets found out, and they aren't vulnerable to the anti-Deryni drug Merasha, but otherwise they're generally inferior to Deryni... but that's true in the setting as well, so I can't really fault the game for emulating that.

I give the game a rating of 4 for Style and 4 for Substance. The Substance rating would be five for setting detail alone, but I don't rate the rules quite as highly. It's definitely worth getting if you're a fan of the series, though.