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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.