|
Promised Sands is obviously a labor of love. That doesn't
say anything about quality. Promised Sands has some small
but nice innovations. That doesn't say anything about
quality either. Promised Sands has a passion and energy
about it that you won't find in the last fifty books that
Wizards of the Coast published... but Promised Sands does
badly at some basics that any RPG should do well, like
describe how to build a character, or maintain a clear point
of view. So this is a resolutely mixed review.
(Disclaimer: This is a review based on reading, not
playtesting, and on a rather quick read in spots at that.
As the book is a bit disorganized, I may have missed
important things.)
Promised Sands reminds me of Tekumel, of Jorune, of a
far-post-apocalyptic Shadowrun or Rifts, and of real-world
Middle Eastern anthropology. It is distinctly not an
Arabian Nights sort of place. It's a dark gritty realistic
desert world, with cultures and technologies that make sense
in such a place. This works quite well, and gives it a
strong and distinctive sense of place.
The world of T'nah is a blasted poisoned desert
world. With oceans, but I guess they're poisoned too. It's
inhabited by humans, and various not-quite-humans who aren't
called elves and dwarves and drow and half-orcs, and the
Numids who are humanoids with funky skulls evolved for a
desert world and don't need a disclaimer, and
anthropomorphic horses and cats. Gotta have those
anthropomorphic horses and cats. (I'm an out-and-out furry
fan, and I wouldn't have included anthropomorphic horses and
cats here.)
Still ... Is this a future Earth, or a world that we
colonized, or a world with parallel evolution, or what? If
it's Earth, there are some extra moons -- but they're small,
and the future history does seem to start with a meteorite
bombardment. There are hints it's Earth, but I didn't see
it said one way or the other explicitly. (This is one of
the important things I might have missed -- several minutes
poking at the index and table of contents and setting intro
didn't tell me the answer though. I know how to find the
History skill and make a roll that'll tell me the answer,
but I don't know the answer.)
THE RULES
The rules try to make sure that you will probably get
screwed, but not necessarily all that badly. This is
intentional -- and, really, that's a feature of most
dice-based rule systems.
The writing is rather squdgy: often vague, often too concise
to be clear. I frequently had to read a paragraph of rules
several times before I understood it clearly enough to play
it -- and sometimes had to discover the answer to a question
buried deep in some rules thirty pages later. (I do not
have this problem with most game books: it's not me, it's
them.) A fully-worked example of character creation would
help a lot.
ATTRIBUTES
There are nine attributes, like Strength and Perception and
Resolve. In a neutral case, they range from 3-18 or so.
Not that many people will be in a neutral case, though. The
attributes are all rolled on three dice: one die determined
by your species, one die by your place of origin, and the
third by the profession you studied as you grew up.
So, a human Azili entertainer would get 3d6 Strength. A
Ebon Syl (never call them drow) gets d4 for Strength, coming
from Dyevan as most of them do gives another d4, and
training as an animal trainer gives another d4 (I'm not sure
why animal training doesn't require more strength), so that
character would get 3d4 Strength. If this character were an
entertainer instead, he'd get 2d4+d6 for Strength. The dice
determine your current value, and your maximum -- no matter
what, that Ebon Syl could never get above 12. The book
suggests but does not require that GMs (Bards, but I can't
call them that) allow characters to take the best of three
rolls for each attribute.
Like so many other Promised Sands rules, this one is
somewhere between neat and perplexing. It neatly
incorporates racial, cultural, and professional modifiers
and maxima into one nice succinct system. Of course, you
can get the same effect from using 3d6 for everything,
giving Ebon Syl, Dyevan people, and animal trainers each
a -1 Strength modifier, and using double the Strength
modifier for maximum strength. The mixed-dice approach is
arguably a touch slicker.
Mathematically, mixing dice increases variability -- it's
easier to get extremely high or low scores. For example
d4+d8 has the same range and average as 2d6, but it's
slightly easier to get an extreme 12 (1/32 vs. 1/36) and
slightly harder to get an average value 7 (1/8 vs. 1/6).
One might think that the authors did this intentionally --
after all, they *do* want to toss the occasional very-low
attribute or other problem at the character. But allowing
the best of three rolls more or less erases the change in
variability.
QUALITIES
You also get Qualities, like Alertness or Ambidexterity.
Some come from your species, and I guess you can pick others
as you like. Qualities are like Advantages and
Disadvantages squashed together on a scale from 1 to 10. The
bottom 1-3 or 1-4 or 1-5 of the scale is actually
detrimental. Alertness 1 is half-blind; Alertness 10 is
preternaturally alert.
As you pick race and such, you get some dice and points to
spend on Qualities. You can split the dice as you wish --
e.g., if you have 3d4 to spend, you could put 1d4 to
Alertness, 1d4 to Ambidexterity, and 1d4 to Appearance.
Then you roll the dice, and look on the 1-10 scale that goes
with each quality. The bottom 3-5 points of each Quality
are actually bad, so if you split your 3d4 around, you're
surely doomed: you might wind up half-blind, with a withered
arm, and hideous. Even if you put them all into Appearance
and roll badly, you could still wind up "the last one picked
for a dance". And that's by spending stuff that you might
think should be good.
Though, you roll these in order, I guess, and you can
take penalties on one roll to give bonuses on later ones.
There are also fixed-price advantages and disadvantages, in
case you run out of points to play with and you're still
screwed in a way you don't like.
After doing it once, the Qualities system seemed bizarre but
workable. Focussing on a few strong Qualities rather than a
wide spread of small-but-positive ones seemed essential:
half the points of a strong Quality will buy you two
small-but-negative Qualities.
This part of the system was distinctive and workable, but I
found it awkward and a bit opposed to itself.
FIELDS AND OCCUPATIONS
Fields are big categories of things you can be, like warrior
or Vhzine (scholar) or Maroc (destructive sorcerer). Each
one has some foci in it: Vzhines can be midwives, or clerks,
or explorers, or students, or, as they advance in their
careers, politicians and experts. When you develop a
starting character, you've had one apprenticeship, but it
might have a few other jobs or interests -- as a Vhzine,
say, you could be a nearly-professional midwife, but have
spent some time working as a clerk -- or a jailer or a
blacksmith or some other non-scholar.
Your apprenticeship is your primary field, and gives you a
pile of points towards skills, plus some starting equipment
and contacts and sometimes some whatnots as well. You also
get a secondary field, giving fewer of these things, and a
tertiary field, giving even fewer.
Conceptually, this is quite nice. It takes a very flexible
system to allow you to play a midwife who moonlights as a
jailer. Promised Sands does better: it actually gives
enough material in the character generation chapter to
lead you to playing a midwife-jailer -- or a wide
range of other combinations. Pretty impressive, and not
something that many other games do.
The problem here is in the writing. It took me several
passes before I understood what was going on well enough to
realize that a midwife-jailer was a possibility. The rules
for character creation seemed to have been chopped up and
scattered between the various gigantic 50-page sections of
career options. A fully detailed example of character
creation would have helped matters greatly.
SKILLS (AND SKILL ROLLS)
Skills are percentile-valued. Every skill is based on an
Attribute: Appraise is based on Perception. You add your
skill level to your attribute value when rolling. I,
personally, prefer smaller dice, d10s to d20s; I hate
fussing with +1% bonuses, or even the +3% bonuses that
Promised Sands often gives. It's not enough of a bonus to
be worth the math, for me. Still, there's nothing actively
wrong with percentile systems, and some people like them.
Promised Sands also uses an effect die, a third d10 rolled
at the same time as the percentile dice. If you succeed,
the effect die tells how well you did. For example, if
you're attacking, the effect die contributes to the damage
you did. If you failed, the effect die tells how badly you
failed. Both your success chance and your effect can get
modifiers -- e.g., if you try for a called shot on your
enemy's head, you get a big penalty to hit and a big plus on
effect -- and that does give the gamemaster a kind of
flexibility that a simple success/failure system doesn't.
There are three dice in each roll, so they call it
the Trinary System.
On the whole, this makes sense.
There's at least one odd feature in extended tests -- where
you use a skill for several hours (say) and accumulate
progress towards a goal. The rule is, each hour (or
whatever) you make a skill roll. If you succeed, you add
your effect die to the running total. If you fail, you
subtract your effect die from the running total. When the
running total is high enough, you've done it. For example,
you might need a total Effect of 10 to successfully grow
your healing herbs in your little herb garden. That's about
two hours of successful work.
But ... If you are a new character, you're doomed. You
might well have a 40% chance of success on a Horticulture
roll to plant that garden -- which is what the example
midwife character does have (unless the 30% already includes
the relevant Attribute.) 60% of the time you'll fail and
subtract from the running total, and only 40% of the time do
you succeed. On the average, you lose one point from the
running total each hour. You need several lucky rolls to
get the garden done at all.
Oh, and there are a lot of skills. Twenty pages
of them, mostly with small descriptions. Some of them, like
"Charge into battle" or "Heave Object", or "Swabbing the
Deck" might be subsumed by other skills in other systems,
and that would probably be a good thing. The world isn't
*so* bizarre as to need this much detail.
... but the system is that bizarre. Each skill you have
gives you a bonus on related skills. So, if you have a
bunch of mutually related skills, they all get big bonuses
-- and that's plenty of incentive for the system to have a
pile of odd little skills. Your "Charge" skill isn't very
useful but itself, but it helps all your combat skills.
I think I'd prefer fewer skills with higher values, and
fewer modifiers, myself.
MAGIC
Two forms of magic: Maroc magic, which is aggressive and
nasty, and Qai, which is nicer and more inward-focussed.
Maroc magic can really demolish you if you're not careful
when you cast it. Qai can be almost as bad in the long
term. Neither system is that notable (but neither is a copy
of anything I can think of, either.)
ADVANCEMENT
You get experience points, called Wisdom points, and you
spend them on skills and such. It looks slow. You get
Wisdom for roleplay, cooperation, not being a total assh*le,
and so on. Nothing surprising here.
LATER CAREERS
So, after over a hundred pages of chargen material, you
are ready to play ... turn the page, read a bit, and
encounter ... more chargen material. Another forty
pages or so.
The first chargen section takes you to the end of
apprenticeship. But you can develop your character further,
evolving from an assistant midwife to a professional midwife
to the head of the midwife's guild to a minor local
politician to a mayor of a town, say. The first chargen
section listed lots of starting professions. The later ones
list the advanced professions.
THE SETTING
The setting is stylish in many ways, and definitely not
familiar fantasy territory. It has a number of features
which give it a distinctively alien and extreme flavor:
e.g., camel urine is a standard beverage in some places, and
this is utterly unremarkable in the world. This nicely
underscores how dry the world is, and how important water
is.
But ... um ... if it's so dry, what are all those swamps
doing there? Or that ocean? Some people come from
underwater domed cities! (Though we don't know how they got
to land from there -- submarines aren't mentioned anywhere I
can see.)
In any case, the setting sections are far scantier than they
should be. There are a lot of nice bits of detail work --
we know several facts about the sitar-player in one
particular brothel -- but the picture that emerges from the
setting section is a bit scattered.
THE MONSTERS
Oh, yes, there are monsters. Some evolved, some were made,
and most have no known origin. Most of them were
unremarkable, or worse. Like the drachen, who must not be
called dragons, and the people who bond with them by feeding
them, who must not be called Pernese.
Or the djezin, which seem to be an important category of
monsters. I think they roughly correspond to D&D giants.
But the full general description of them says, "There are
many species ... of Djezin, and none of them look anything
alike, save that all are fearsome and hideous in
aspect." Why are they called Djezin as a group, instead
of just Dhiv and Liz'ahr and such? I think they're
historically associated somehow, but I only found a few
tangential references to them.
But the giant spider/goat was worth the price of reading the
bestiary. They were originally made to produce vast amounts
of silk as their fur, but something went wrong, and they
came out as monsters. They're cooler and more plausible
than any number of dragon-lookalikes and gigantic desert
crabs, and the illustration was nicely disturbing in a way
that no number of craggy gianty things or not-a-dragons
would be.
RANDOM ANNOYANCES AND BUGS
There's a ton of vocabulary. Scholars aren't scholars, they're
"vhzine". I don't mind learning a lot of new words for new
concepts ("Maroc" is a fine name for a new and unfamiliar
kind of magic), but English has a perfectly good word for "scholar"
already, and there are so many new words in this book
that it's hard enough already. Besides, why a new word for
"scholar", but not one for "criminal"? They're both the
names of categories of professions.
There were a number of places where the book was just plain
wrong in a jarring way. A particular kind of goo is
described as being "slightly more acidic than lye". Well,
lye's a strong base. Milk is more acidic than lye. Not a
big deal -- I can read it as "more *caustic* than lye" --
but there were enough things like that to be annoying.
Some were in the rules. The number of actions you get
per round is your Reflex attribute divided by 5, rounded
down. Fine ... except that you could have Reflex as low as 3
or 4, in which case you presumably can't ever take an action
in combat.
The full combat system has many gory details of hit
locations and bone damage and nerve damage and stuff. Not
my style, but perfectly respectable.
The tone was sometimes gratuitously sarcastic too. For
example, every creature lists how many actions per round it
gets -- except for a poisonous plant, which ought to get
zero, but actually gets "Yeah, right".
The book doesn't have a solid point of view. It has
in-character quotes from T'nah, which get you firmly in the
otherworld mindset, mixed with quotes from Socrates and
Goethe, which break it.
There's a lot of extraneous material. Twenty pages of
pregenerated characters, for example -- nicely done, and
nicely illustrated. Another game would have been proud to
put them on their website as free downloads. I don't think
they were worth the space in the book.
THE JUDGMENT
The book was quite crunchy, and did several very cool things
with character creation. This is important, since character
creation took up far too much of the book. I wish it had
more material on the world, though. Substance 4 out of 5,
with a 5 for the character creation and a 3 for everything
else.
The book was harder to read and use than it should have
been. It had an index -- that's worth a +1 on Style right
there -- but the index only gave one key reference for each
term, and often that wasn't enough or wasn't the right
reference. Well over 150 pages are devoted to character
creation, but there's no example of how to do it, and I had
a lot of trouble figuring many things out. Style 2 out of
5.
|
