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One of gaming’s great ironies is the fact that with the limitless variety of characters out there, from elves and dwarves to aliens and superheroes, the rarest of them all may well be the normal person. Not just a hero lacking special powers, like a gunslinger or a pirate – or even a relatively helpless-but-savvy investigator of supernatural horrors – but just your basic Joe Average.SubstanceWell, that’s exactly what Heaven & Earth – now in its third edition and published by Abstract Nova – asks you to play: a completely normal, everyday person, drawn for whatever reason to the seemingly idyllic heartland community of Potter’s Lake, Kansas… a place that is anything but normal or everyday.
Chapter I: Introduction
Offering a brief overview of the setting and the system, this chapter warrants mention primarily for two reasons:Chapter II: Character Creation
- Considering the rather off-the-wall nature of the setting, it wisely states that the game will assume participants are experienced roleplayers. Despite the simplistic system, this really isn’t the game for beginners.
- Again considering the nature of the setting, it even-more-wisely warns that the cosmology presented is neither for the easily offended nor intended as commentary on real-world spiritual matters.
The first edition of Heaven & Earth used a diceless system. The second used Guardians of Order’s Tri-Stat. This edition uses an original system that, appropriately enough, takes some major cues from its fellow surreal RPG, Over the Edge – particularly in the area of character creation.Chapter III: Game MechanicsPlayers of starting characters divide 14 points among six Attributes: Coordination, Strength, Fortitude, and Awareness, Aura, and Knowledge. Tellingly, only two of the six, Coordination and Strength, are purely physical. (Fortitude refers to mental, not physical, stamina.)
Players then have 9 points to spend on an occupation for the character, which is a package of associated abilities strongly reminiscent of the Central Trait concept from Over the Edge: if your occupation is “Fireman,” for example, your character can use your Fireman score to do anything that a fireman should be able to do.
Interestingly, though, Heaven & Earth avoids some of the game balance issues arising from OtE’s method by varying the cost of occupations based upon their breadth. For example, playing a Park Ranger costs 5 points, while playing a Scientist costs 4, simply because the Park Ranger possesses a broader range of skills. Occupations come in the ranks of Rookie, Professional, and Veteran, costing 1, 2, and 3 points, respectively. Any leftover points may go to second occupations, raising Attributes, extracurricular skills (analogous to Secondary Traits in OtE), or points of Destiny. Destiny, in turn, functions as both experience points and the game’s variation on Drama or Fate Points.
The end result is a character creation system that overlays the quick concept-to-creation style of Over the Edge on top of an attribute system to help differentiate characters of the same general type.
Playtest: Setting aside concept-thinking time and the time required to help multiple players, I’d estimate that character creation took roughly 15 minutes. Everyone seemed pretty happy with how it worked out.
Then one drawback, if you consider it that, is the lack of allowance for “weird” character types. But then, these characters aren’t really supposed to be weird. (As far as they know, at least…)
The task resolution system uses the attribute plus skill plus die roll method so common in modern games; however, it is the die type that varies with difficulty, not the target number. The die types range from a d20 for easy tasks to a d4 for nearly impossible ones, while the target number remains static at nine. Players can spend two Destiny Points to turn a failure into a success or one Destiny point on a reroll.Chapter IV: Potter’s LakeGenerally speaking, I don’t care for this kind of closed difficulty scale, nor for mechanics allowed for purchased auto-successes. However, given the decidedly human scale of the game, the closed range of difficulty levels doesn’t seem like such a big deal. And as for the purchased successes, well… let’s just say that there’s a setting-based reason why Destiny might occasionally allow PCs to succeed when they should have failed. (See below, if you’re a GM…)
Playtest: One disadvantage of the H&E mechanics as compared to the OtE mechanics is the lack of any sort of skill defaulting mechanic. For example, one character was playing a mechanic. During the review playtest, she wanted her character to intimidate an NPC. She lacked any sort of intimidation skill but thought that a mechanic ought to be at least somewhat more intimidating than the average person, but the rules don’t cover abilities only tangentially affected by a profession. Combat is, in a word, brutal. An attack works as an ordinary skill check, with the die type determined by the target’s defensive capability for hand-to-hand attacks or miscellaneous conditional modifiers for ranged attacks. While this method automatically reveals an opponents’ ability in hand-to-hand combat, it has the advantage of eliminating the need for a defense roll. Damage is either the attacker’s Strength for unarmed attacks, Strength plus a variable die roll for melee weapon attacks, or a straight die roll for ranged weapons. Characters can take 20 points of Blunt damage – which, for some odd reason, includes slashes with edged weapons – before falling unconscious, and can take 10 points of Lethal damage before dying. Now factor in the fact that firearm damage ranges from 1d10 to 1d20, and the fact that Lethal attacks doing six or more points of damage results in an additional point of Lethal damage every five minutes, and you have a recipe for a very short combat when even the moderately heavy ordinance comes out.
Given the game’s focus on interaction and investigation, I like this strong incentive to avoid the bloody stuff. The only real downside is the absence of any indication regarding how much damage a nonhuman creature might be able to take.
Playtest: Let's say Joe successfully hits Bill with a baseball bat. Joe's a burly guy, so his Strength is 4. Bill's equally burly, but that's not going to do him any good in resisting damage in this game – he gets 20 points of Blunt Trauma, just like everyone else. Bats do 1d8+Strength in damage, and Joe gets a 5, Bill's down Ľ of the damage he can take before passing out. Now, what if Joe had used a high-caliber rifle? Well, then the damage would have been a flat 1d12. Joe gets a 12. Bill can take 10 points of Lethal damage, so just like that, he's dead. But even if he'd just taken 6 points of damage, he'd be losing another point of Lethal damage every round.
WARNING #1: I am now going to start delving into spoiler territory. Read no further if you want to be completely surprised by all Potter’s Lake has to offer. I’ll be giving a second warning below when I come to the point at which reading further will completely ruin your enjoyment of the game.
An exquisite collection of variously unnerving locations in and around the town, such as the hospital with the eerie clown specter who manifests to entertain the corpses in the morgue, the Air Force base serving as the headquarters for the ominously-named Project Grayscale, and the foreboding woods with the shack of a mysterious wild man that’s never in the same place.Chapter V: Dramatis PersonaeAn exquisite collection of variously unnerving locations in and around the town, such as the hospital with the eerie clown specter who manifests to entertain the corpses in the morgue, the Air Force base serving as the headquarters for the ominously-named Project Grayscale, and the foreboding woods with the shack of a mysterious wild man that’s never in the same place.
There’s much more to the town than the supernatural, however. A variety of mundane details, like the local festivals, the popular hang-outs, and the paper mill that helps keep the local economy running. These bits of verisimilitude differentiate the place from Over the Edge’s Al Almarja – where that place is a nearly constant bombardment of the strange, Potter’s Lake plays its surreal hand much closer to its chest.
There’s much more to the town than the supernatural, however. A variety of mundane details, like the local festivals, the popular hang-outs, and the paper mill that helps keep the local economy running.
Oddly, while the game laudably gives up its biggest secrets to the GM in the main rulebook, the majority of the “little secrets” about the town’s quirks remain a mystery. That would be fine if they were expressly stated as being forever left up to the GM and never to be revealed as being involved in the larger drama, but such is not the case. So, a GM coming up with his own explanation for the various location-based phenomena cannot know for certain whether he’s tampering with some key element to the overall mystery. (Or even if an upcoming supplement is going to explain the mystery in question at all.)
The “Who” to the previous chapter’s “Where,” this section gives the dirt on the town’s assorted weirdoes. Again, the weirdness tends to be of the subtle variety – strange enough to elicit a quiet “WTF…?” but not so bizarre as to provoke horrified screams. Examples include the loathsome, hag-like mayor about whose beauty the townsfolk all comment, the twin brothers who seem to communicate just fine despite the fact that one of them can’t speak, and the lady who gets important messages from her herd of stray cats.Given the nature of the game and the setting, this chapter proves absolutely vital. With most of the hard-hitting action and adventure so often associated with gaming being absent, character interaction has to take up the slack, and the book does a fine job of providing the GM with plenty of material in that regard.
Again, however, the little mysteries about the townsfolk largely remain mysteries to players and GM alike, giving the GM no indication of neither the potential importance of these oddities nor the possibility of future official explanations.
WARNING #2: Let me be extremely clear, here: if you want to enjoy this game as a player, do not read the spoiler text below. I mean it. Knowing this information will destroy your enjoyment of this game.
Chapter VI: Revelations
Some games would make you wait through years of metaplot-dribbling to get to the kind of Big Secret that H&E includes right here in the core rulebook.Chapter VII: Secret SocietiesTo make a long story short: the Earth was created to be the metaphysical chessboard of God and Satan – a place to see who could convert the most souls to their cause. If that strikes you as callous, you ain’t heard nothing yet: when the game’s over, humanity will have served its purpose and will cease to exist.
Jesus Christ, having gained a great deal of empathy for humanity, decides that Dad’s not being very nice about this and resolves to thwart both God and Satan by ensuring that humanity isn’t just waiting around for a cosmic game to end. To that purpose, He sires a line of descendants through Mary Magdalene, all of whom have at least a latent touch of Christ’s power in the form of psychic abilities. He also wants humanity to eat of the second of the two forbidden trees of the Garden of Eden, which can make humans like unto gods themselves.
The kicker? The Garden of Eden has been right in front of humanity’s nose all along, going unnoticed because it’s gradually fallen apart over the years. And the most significant remaining fragment of the Garden – the one containing the Trees of Knowledge and Life – happens to be the forest outside of Potter’s Lake. The place is so darned spooky because Satan’s doing his best to corrupt the forest and keep meddling humans from finding the Trees. And the PCs? They’re all descendants of Christ, drawn to Potter’s Lake in the buildup to the final showdown between God, Satan, and Christ. (Which is why that aforementioned Destiny auto-success mechanic makes sense.)
And you thought it was just a weird little town…
Given the inordinate amount of supernatural goings-on in Potter’s Lake, it should come as no surprise that various secretive organizations have set their sights on the town. This chapter describes the four major players:Chapter VIII: The Goetia
- Brotherhood of Ioannes: Remnants of the Knights Templar following the prophetic words of the occasionally-animated severed head of John the Baptist.
- Project: Grayscale: A sinister military experiment operating out of the nearby Powell AFB that kidnaps and studies those with paranormal abilities.
- The Wing of St. Michael: Modern-day knights investigating the paranormal on behalf of the Pope with espionage and blessed blades.
- The Zetetic Society: An organization of Christian Fundamentalists scoffing at notions that conflict with their worldview – scientific and supernatural alike – yet keenly aware of the unnatural forces at play in the town.
The book takes pains to point out that these groups, like the supernatural, operate with extreme subtlety, so they aren’t likely opponents in blazing gun battles. Each of them, however, hold a piece of the puzzle that is Potter’s Lake, so the PCs will have to deal with them all sooner or later.
The H&E cosmology includes ancient and powerful spirit beings aligned with neither God nor Satan – creatures that have aligned themselves with concepts such as “love” or “hate,” and who feed off of the expression of these concepts in humans through possession, subtle or overt. The most powerful of these beings are the Goetia. Although they fear neither angels nor demons, mortal magicians can bind even the mightiest of them (see below).Chapter IX: MagickLike every other supernatural creature in the book, the Goetia aren’t intended to be direct antagonists. Battles with them will be contests of will, not force. In fact, they may well serve as allies of the “enemy-of-my-enemy” sort, if they figure out that Armageddon will mean an end to humanity, their chosen prey.
H&E manages to make magic at once flexible, rare, and mysterious.Chapter X: GhostsSpells can do pretty much anything and can be cast instantly by anyone willing to learn them. Unfortunately, there’s a bit more to it than that. Spell difficulties go no lower than Hard (d8), and there is no spellcasting skill to employ – the casting roll depends upon the magician’s Fortitude score alone. In this setting, magic skills – skills such as astrology, dream interpretation, and sacred geometry – involve not the ability to cast a spell, but rather the ability learn various rituals to tilt the odds of spellcasting in the magician’s favor. These rituals can involve anything from the use of foci and grimoires to fasting or simply concentrating for an extended amount of time. Every three components employed grant a +1 bonus to a spellcasting attempt, and no more than six components may be used in any one ritual.
In other words, not even the greatest sorcerer in the world can garner anything more than a +2 bonus to a spellcasting attempt. (Magicians can gain one more bonus point by spending a point of Destiny prior to the attempt but cannot spend Destiny to re-roll.)
Furthermore, the GM has discretion in creating backlash effects for failed castings – the more powerful the effect, the more severe the backlash for failure. Attempting to magically strike someone dead and failing, for example, might result in the magician’s death.
I’m a little ambivalent about this system. I like how it ensures the rarity of magic and how it allows for player-designed rituals in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the occult magic system found in the Orrorsh sourcebook for Torg. However, I don’t really care for the way in which it maxes out sorcerous ability once a magician has the maximum level of human Fortitude and six ritual components at his disposal.
Chapter XI: The GiftedAs previously mentioned, the one and only reason for the Earth’s existence is as a place from which God and Satan can compete for and harvest souls. And yet, ghosts exist… and Potter’s Lake has more than its share. How is this possible? The answer is that ghosts are not the souls of the dead, but rather the psychic impressions they leave behind.
Of the handful of supernatural entities described in the book, ghosts get the most concrete powers – telekinesis, illusions, manifestation, etc. – and are the most likely to directly oppose the characters. Even so, such confrontations won’t be of the physical sort. Only certain Gifted (see below) can dispel ghosts directly; others will have to destroy the focus of their hauntings or else discover and fulfill the needs that drive them.
This serves to maintain ghosts as eerie mysteries to be unraveled, just as they’re viewed by real-world paranormal investigators. (This as opposed to Call of Cthulhu, for example, in which they become objects simple Power-vs.-Power roll-offs.)
Chapter XII: The HostAll of the descendants of Christ in the setting contain a touch of the Divine, however diluted. In some, this manifests in psychic powers. Such individuals are known collectively as the Gifted.
Unlike magic, psychic powers are highly specific and require skills to use (along with Fortitude). Psychic powers also do not include the risk of backlash, although a straight Fortitude roll against the same difficulty as the power use is required to avoid burning out the power for 24 hours. Like magic, however, psychic powers are very difficult to use, with the lowest possible difficult being Hard (d8).
Also like magic, PCs cannot begin the game with active psychic powers, although they may have systemless, GM-controlled “wild talents” such as Psychometry, True Sight (the ability to see the supernatural), and Visions. This allows GMs to offer clues to the adventure at hand while giving PCs the first inklings that they may be more special than they’d previously suspected.
Active powers include Channeling, Clairvoyance, Dream Voyage, Precognition, Psychic Healing, Pyrokinesis, and Telekinesis. Aside from the possibility of 24-hour burnout, the main restraint on the Gifted is the danger of being kidnapped for study by Project: Grayscale. That, of course, requires that the Gifted in question know about Project: Grayscale.
Chapter XIII: GamemasteringAngels and demons in the setting wield powers of Old Testament, city-destroying, first-born-slaying levels. And yes, demons and angels can possess people. Yet they are also creatures of subtlety, since their job is to win souls for their respective masters. Demons literally raising Hell, for example, often causes afflicted humans to flee into the arms of the enemy, which defeats the whole purpose.
That being the case, PCs aren’t going to be playing “A Paladin in Hell.” They may combat the machinations of angels and demons, but they won’t combat the angels and demons themselves. Like the Goetia, they don’t even get stats – they can do whatever they need to do. This has the advantage of keeping these beings fearful and enigmatic, although it presents a bit of a challenge to the GM, given the lack of a “direct approach” to defeating them.
Chapter XIV: The Waiting RoomGMing tips are always welcome, but in an off-the-wall game like this, they’re a necessity. While rather generic tips take up a good chunk of this chapter, the text also includes excellent advice on making NPCs vibrant parts of the setting, on maintaining the game’s mood and theme, and on making appropriate use of the supernatural elements without becoming too heavy-handed about it… at least until the PCs find the Trees, that is, and the chapter includes a sidebar about that eventuality as well.
What the chapter lacks is an example of a step-by-step progression from a group’s meeting to the uncovering of various clues to a climactic confrontation with the forces of Heaven and Hell. I don’t know if the need for such a thing speaks of a lack of creativity on my part, but with the information given, I had a difficult time visualizing how to get from A to Z.
StyleA terrible storm and flash flood strand the PCs at the local hospital, where they become embroiled in the aftershocks of a tragedy that occurred many years before.
The story provides a way for the PCs to get together as part of the natural progression of the story rather than a contrived plot device to get them together at its outset. It also offers plenty of time for the PCs to interact with many of the local weirdoes and catch some glimpses of the truly unnatural.
On the downside, the adventure proves to be linear in the extreme, to the point that the PCs really have little influence on the progression of events. If your players really get into interaction, this may not matter to them – in fact, they may not even realize that it’s happening. If your players are really into action, however, you may find them chafing.
The artwork begins with an attractive and evocative – if not particularly stunning – cover, and continues with highly competent and consistent illustrations throughout. If there’s any problem with the latter, it’s that the stark clarity of their style removes pretty much any feeling of eeriness and unseen menace. On the other hand, it does do a bang-up job of conveying the almost cloying sense of normalcy that serves as the town’s paper-thin veneer.The writing, by contrast, handles both duties well, describing everything from the most mundane factoid to the wildly supernatural bit of cosmology with equal clarity and flair. The text makes the rules easy to follow as well, although given the simplicity of the system, that’s not really much of an accomplishment. The book seems free of obvious typos.
The layout provides plenty of white space and eye-friendly font combinations, as well has helpful but unobtrusive sidebars.
Regrettably, the book lacks an index. While one might not seem all that vital for such a small game book, I found myself several times digging for some bit of key information about a person or place. (And besides, I stand by my belief that all RPGs ought to have indices on general principles.)
Conclusion
Heaven & Earth isn’t for those seeking crunchy, detailed rules. It also isn’t for those wanting regular combats with monsters, or even regular combats, period.
On the other hand, H&E should hold strong appeal for fans of interaction-heavy games and for those who enjoy surreal horror but who want something more subtle and humanocentric than Over the Edge. For these gamers, H&E
Heaven & Earth won’t ever appeal to gamers demanding crunchy, detailed rules. For those who enjoy surreal horror, however, and who would like something subtler and humanocentric than Over the Edge, it’s definitely worth the money. You get a solid little system, a well-detailed setting, and a mind-blowing cosmology in a mere 128 pages of gaming goodness. At $24.95 – the price of many game supplements these days – such gamers will find it a bargain.
SUBSTANCE:
- Setting
- Quality = 5.0
- Quantity = 4.0
- Rules
- Quality = 4.0
- Quantity = 4.5
STYLE:
- Artwork = 4.5
- Layout/Readability = 5.0
- Organization = 4.0
- Writing = 4.5
- Proofreading Penalty = 0.0
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