Introduction

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that Malcolm Sheppard is a friend of mine, and I have discussed the game with him via email since purchasing it. However, I did purchase it with my own money, and will strive to be as neutral as possible in discussing its flaws and its merits.

The relationship between roleplaying games and fiction writing is an interesting one. It is not unusual for a creative player to become so attached to a character he roleplays that he wants to write stories about that character, if only for his own enjoyment. The urge to write what you roleplay can be so strong that it can cause professional writers who normally write for money to write game fanfiction on the side, as in the case of a renowned novelist I know who writes on-line fiction about the City of Heroes characters she roleplays.

Historically, most pencil-and-paper role-playing games have been ambivalent to players writing fiction, taking no notice of it in the rules. However, some games, such as the Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game, awarded minor benefits to a player who wanted to make that kind of contribution—and more recently De Profundis went to the opposite extreme, being played through nothing but fiction writing. Codex takes a middle-ground approach: In Codex, writing is a substantial part of, but not the entirety of, the role-playing game experience.

The Package

Codex is sold at RPGNow as a 30-page PDF file, which can be downloaded, printed, and bound at your own convenience. The bundle actually includes two separate PDF files: a full-color version for screen reading or color printing, and a black-and-white version that can be printed out more cheaply. This is a clever idea and I wish more downloadable PDF games came this way. However, calling it 30 pages is mildly misleading; if we disregard the front cover, back cover, advertisement for the publisher's next game, character sheet, title page, and table of contents, you actually get only 24 pages of gaming content. But those 24 pages do contain more than sufficient material to justify the $6.95 cover price.

The pages are tightly packed with two columns of writing in a serif font with sans-serif headers, with a few illustrations here and there and approximately one-inch margins all the way around the page. Tables are set off from the text by solid borders and a gray-toned background. The full-color PDF has a parchment-colored background and a decorative header and footer; the printable PDF leaves these off. There is not a lot of wasted space, the layout looks very nice, and it is easy to read.

The Premise

Codex is founded on the premise that creative people, people who enjoy writing, might want more out of a roleplaying game than just sitting around with a character sheet and rolling dice. In Codex, you will have a character sheet, and you will roll dice (or at least, one die, if you're using Codex by itself), but just as much of your play experience will come between gaming sessions as during them—and perhaps more. A Codex player writes stories about his character, and the world around his character, and these stories contribute to the character's advancement and the building of their shared world.

At the heart of Codex is an expansion of the idea of bluebooking, as originated by Aaron Allston in a Champions supplement. In bluebooking, a "blue book" (if taken literally, one of the notebooks used for essay answers in college exams, but any notebook would do) would be used for recording what went on between sessions, and for out-of-session dialogue and roleplay between player and GM. Codex keeps the Blue Book, but adds two more books in two more colors: the Green Book and the Red Book.

The Blue Book is where a player records stories, vignettes, anecdotes, and so forth, about his character or about things that are important to his character. He will make one entry after each game session, and each entry may later be used to apply skill bonuses for that character. The Green Book is where the players as a whole record the events of each game session, after the fact, dividing up the labor however they want to do it. Entries in the green book may be used by players to apply skill bonuses to other players' characters. The Red Book is where the gamemaster writes out the things that he wants the characters to know, as well as a private section for things that should only be known by him.

The System

In making a character, a player divides a pool of points up among Attributes relating not to that character's own physique or abilities, but to how that character relates to the rest of his world: Belief (what he believes in), Clan (his family or organization), Home (the geographical area from which he hails), Society (his native culture), Story (a tale the character might tell, or that has meaning for him), and Vision (an image, sculpture, photograph, symbol, etc. that is important to the character). But assigning points to those Attributes is not all. The player also has to assign them a one-word descriptor explaining what their relationship is with that Attribute (are they "ambivalent" to it, are they "fanatical" about it, etc.) and write a brief story (or, in the case of Vision, create an image) relating to each Attribute—and cannot mention the character itself in any of them.

Unlike in most other RPGs, the character creation process ends here—there is no assignment of skills or equipment at the character creation stage. Instead, skills are developed on the fly; when a situation comes up in play where the skill would be used, the player looks at his Blue Book entries, and other players look at the Green Book entries, to see whether the character's background and adventures give him that skill. Then any applicable Attribute and Skill bonuses are added to the result of a 20-sided die roll, in a simple opposed test vs. the GM. (Alternately, you can choose to play completely dicelessly, by assuming the result of every roll to be "10".)

One interesting feature of Codex is the way in which it treats scale. Every object in the game—whether it is a player-character, non-player-character, spaceship, city, and so on—is considered to have the same set of Attributes as a character, and can use skills and abilities in the same way. In order that individual player-characters can affect entities of a larger scale (for example, to persuade a town council not to foreclose on a building), they have the ability to scale up in order to act on the same scale as that object, at a slight penalty, if they can muster the required number of skill points (more than one character may combine their skills toward a common goal; in fact, it's encouraged). Alternately, multiple characters may get together to constitute a single entity of that larger scale and act without a penalty on that scale (though the abilities of such an entity are only as good as its weakest member).

After the rules, the last six pages of the book are given over to example material, presenting a fantasy setting called The City of Eight Gates. Numerical, descriptive, and fictional entries are given for all six of the city's Attribute categories, plus a Blue Book entry for the city; there is also a brief writeup of a character (without Attribute fiction entries but with a Blue Book entry). There is also a Founding Entry from the GM's Red Book, and an example of combat skill resolution given in dialogue form. Finally comes a character sheet, which can of course be printed out as many times as is necessary.

Flaws

Though it does not have many, Codex is not without its flaws. The greatest of these are due to its brevity; even for so simple a game as this, it cannot be easy keeping the rules down to 30 pages. For example, on page 4, a table that provides advice for converting Codex to use the dice pools of other popular RPGs provides a formula that is not adequately explained, with an example that makes little sense. Fortunately, this table is not strictly necessary to playing the game by itself.

There are a few places where rules explanations are not as clear as they might be. For example, the description of skill and equipment selection in the character creation section seemed to imply some skills were chosen at character creation, and only the ones you didn't think of at the time were improvised later. I had to consult with Malcolm before I fully understood that you do not select any skills at all during character creation but improvise them all on the fly instead.

There is also at least one place where examples seem to contradict the rules. The character creation section explicitly states that a character's Attribute vignettes cannot mention the character at all—but the City of Eight Gates's Attribute writeups mention the city specifically. Presumably the exclusionary rule only holds for player-characters, not objects and places—but this is not mentioned anywhere in the game.

That the game is thin in terms of original setting material cannot really be considered a flaw, given that the whole purpose of the game is to let players and gamemasters come up with settings of their own. Still, I would have liked to see a few more pages of examples, such as fully-written Attribute fiction for the starting character, not just the city, and an example post-play Green Book entry—even if they made the book cost another buck or two. The examples it does have are good, but a few things could have been a little clearer, and the additional examples would have been fun to read.

None of these flaws is serious enough to be a gamebreaker; they are annoyances at most, and hopefully will be addressed in a future edition.

Merits

It's an axiom of game design that the simpler a system is, the less the GM and players are limited by it. This is definitely true in Codex's case, as the only limits to setting and character are the GM's and players' imagination. Furthermore, unlike in most games, the players have almost as much say in the building the gameworld as the GM. This can take a game of Codex beyond being a game, and into the realm of collaborative shared-world storytelling.

The lack of reliance on complex rules also means that gameplay is less likely to get bogged down in endless combat rounds to the point where the players can't remember what was happening before the combat started. This frees the GM and the players to worry about the business of getting the story told and letting the adventures happen. And the emphasis of the game on cooperation (combining skills to work at a higher scale, or using the Green Book to assign bonuses to other players' characters) makes it easier for the players to work together without anyone feeling left out.

Codex might be especially suited to playing on a set of linked LiveJournals. Use a community for the Green Book and individual journals for the Blue Books and Red Book, with a privacy lock for private Red Book entries. That way all the players could read all available entries, and spectators could follow the stories as well.

Cautions

But this strength comes with potential drawbacks. They are not quite flaws, however—more in the nature of cautions. Codex is not likely to be the best game for all situations, any more than every mechanical problem can be fixed with a wrench.

It should be noted that Codex requires a great deal of trust between the GM and the players, and a certain level of discipline. As part of the object of the game is to create fiction that the other players and GM can enjoy reading, any player can look at any book (except for the private portions of the GM's Red Book) at any time. This means that players can't keep secrets from other players; players have to be able to separate in-character knowledge from out-of-character knowledge, so a character does not act on information his player has but he should not. Also, the GM has to be able to trust the players not to munch out and write Blue Book entries where their character gets a doctorate in rocket science, learns to play guitar, is elected President of the World, and becomes a breeder of champion horses all at once. Finally, the players have to be willing to put in the writing work necessary to write a complete Blue Book entry each plus a shared Green Book entry between every session.

All that takes a special kind of player, and a special kind of GM. By and large, you're probably not going to be able to run Codex as a pick-up game with strangers, or do a demonstration at a gaming convention. But if you can find the right group of players—trustworthy, disciplined, and creative—then you will probably have a blast.

Conclusion

Codex is an interesting new spin on an old idea, codifying the practice of bluebooking into a full-fledged game of its own. It has a few flaws, but nothing that would get in the way of playing it provided that you had the right kind of players. At $6.95 for an instantly-downloadable PDF, it's a bargain for anyone who enjoys writing and gaming and would like to try combining the two.

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