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Physically Weapons of the Gods is a well produced and sturdy hardback. The art is all from the comic of the same name, and I find it attractive. It gives the book a unified feel. My only nit pick with this is that because all the art is from the comic every piece of art in the book is rectangular. The result of this is a slightly less organic feeling than other books where the occasional piece of art will break out of its box with the text wrapping around it. But that is a minor thing.
The online support for this game is great. Some people have criticized the size of the errata, but the truth is that there are many popular games which ought to have an errata of that size and do not. In addition there are a wide range of utilities and cheat sheets all made available through the publisher’s web site. Eos Press simply could not have done a better job when it comes to errata and online support.
System Overview
In Weapons of the Gods any action is assigned to a corresponding skill. The player rolls a specific number of dice which depend on the value of that skill, relevant specialties, and the value of the attribute corresponding to that skill, usually between 1 and 7. The player then looks for a set, with the final result being ten times the number of matching dice plus the number on that die. So a roll of 5, 5, 4, 7, 7 is 27. Positive and negative modifiers may be included by adding directly to the result, though only the biggest of each has an effect.
There are a number of other quirks to this system to make it even more interesting. The River allows each character to set aside a certain number of dice to use in later rolls. Joss allows a character to add dice to his own rolls or remove them from an opponent’s pool. All of this combines into an excellent and fun framework.
I like this system. The way the river and joss interact with the die rolling mechanic ensures that spectacular things will continue happening throughout the game. It takes spectacular rolls, which often provide the most entertainment in a combat oriented role playing game, and puts a great deal of power to control when they occur into the hands of the players. The critical hit system is fairly straightforward, but the critical miss system also deserves special measure. The rules for critical misses require player approval, and strongly suggest a bribe. Again, this puts more control of the systems most interesting events into the hands of the player.
The only real downside to the die mechanic is the difficulty in figuring out probabilities, or even average rolls. Some people have claimed it was unintuitive, but neither I nor any of my players had trouble grasping the basic system.
Lore Sheets
Weapons of the Gods includes a concept called lore sheets. Each lore sheet represents knowledge about a single part of the setting. For example a player might buy his character a lore sheet about the beginning of the martial arts world, or about the role of women in society. That would indicate that the character knew everything there was to know about that part of the setting. However this effect is secondary to the main purpose of lore sheets.
Each lore sheet contains a set of things a character can spend experience on which will influence the story. For example a character could guarantee that a certain magical weapon appear in the story or even that they will come to possess that weapon. Another player could spend experience points to cause an NPC to fall in love with their PC.
Overall the effect of loresheets is to make Weapons of the Gods a much easier game to create plots for as the Sage. If you give the players a healthy amount of experience once you get the game rolling they will buy these sorts of things and thus provide a wide range of options for where the plot of the game should go. Even better, when you drive the plot in that direction you know for sure that at least one player is genuinely interested in that part of the plot. A major bonus. This also gives the players a great deal more power over the plot than most other systems.
There are two issues here. The most obvious is that experience spent on the plot may not have long term benefits while a new kung fu technique would. Thus a player may be less inclined to spend on a lover when the other players are all buying cool new powers. There are at least two options I see to resolve this. One is to give experience that can only be spent on loresheets. The other is to make it clear that a player who never spends experience on the plot will fall to more and more of a supporting role in the story, even if they are more powerful. There are certainly relatively easy options available to address this problem.
The biggest issue I have with the lore sheets chapter is that it does a poor job of presenting the setting. The lore sheets spend a great deal of time talking about the history of the world. And the lore sheets dealing with relationships are excellent. However the book as a whole never gave me a good feel for the setting and I think a more traditional presentation would have done a better job for that purpose.
Martial Arts
Martial arts are the main focus of Weapons of the Gods. Martial arts are divided into styles, each of which has a buy in cost, and then a sequence of abilities. Characters have five small pools of Chi (mana) which replenish fairly quickly. Most martial arts are tied to a single color of Chi, and each ability within the sequence of a martial art costs progressively more Chi than the last. Thus a character might have a martial art that uses one red Chi to increase the chance of hitting, two to increase initiative, three to set things on fire, and so on.
Each character has two or three of these martial arts at the beginning of the game, and if they received any decent advice at character creation these should all draw from different colors. Thus a character might use one style to enhance his sword until that color is empty and then switch to another color that allows him exceptional kicks while he waits for the first to refill.
In play this necessitates some system to keep track of the information. I use counters of various colors, which seems effective. One of my players has taken to keeping a D6 on top of each color of Chi on the character sheet turned to the amount she has left. Overall I like the feel this system lends to combat, where each character has several kinds of tricks they rotate between. The quickly regenerating pools mean that combat is not entirely a fight over resource efficiency.
Where lore sheets make the job of the Sage (aka GM) easier than in most other games the martial arts tend to make that job harder. There are a huge number of different styles, and often several styles will have mechanically identical effects. However, these effects are typically specified in complete sentences, often preceded by flavor text. Given that so many of them could have been summarized “+X modifier to Y roll” I wish this information was better called out in some kind of shorthand. Similarly techniques are often defined as being like a previous technique in that style, with specific changes. In many cases it would have been better to just repeat a shorthand notation or even the text description, rather than referring the reader back to figuring out what the last thing did. This is not nearly as big an issue as a player who will only be doing character creation once or twice, but as a Sage I found it annoying to have to do for each NPC.
Secret Arts
Weapons of the Gods rolls magic, medicine and social activity into a single system it calls “the secret arts.” The core of the secret arts is pretty simple. Characters can be hit with negative and positive afflictions. Both are conditional. A negative affliction gives a penalty of some kind to characters that do not play along with the condition. A positive affliction gives a bonus of some kind to characters that play along with the condition.
The best part about the system is that anything can act as either kind of effect. Thus a character can have something bad happen to them, like contracting a disease or ending up in love with the “bad guy” that in another game might annoy a player. But under this system, rather than punishing them mechanically for the sake of some story goal you can reward them for going along with whatever cool plot idea you have. So the sick character receives a bonus for acting sick, rather than losing something. Weapons of the Gods encourages players to play along with things they might not have before while still having a good time.
The rules for the Secret arts allow characters to create new afflictions, reduce the magnitude of inflictions, and transform afflictions in various ways. Overall it is a freeform magic system that allows a lot of flexibility.
Once again the idea is great and I have trouble with the details. Be prepared to read this section several times. It is not presented in a way that is easy to learn. It is also not presented in a way that is easy to reference. Though it is organized as lore sheets often the mechanics for a power will appear on some other lore sheet than the one that grants a power.
Overview
Weapons of the Gods is at its core an excellent game that does a variety of things to get the players more involved in the story. I wish it worked out many of the details better, and sometimes I even feel like it wants to seem more complex than it is. However, if you have the time and desire to learn a new system, or are looking for a focused martial arts/wuxia system it is well worth a look.
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