Ready? Here we go.
Style – An overall impression.
Physically, Hex’s binding seems sturdy. The book is of standard RPG rulebook size, and 160 pages thick. The font size is small while still readable, and the margins are fairly small. In other words, you are definitely not getting ripped off on the words per page ratio, which is nice. The game is published in black and white, apart of course from the covers.
The game’s layout is very impressive. The background color of each page is a nice and unobtrusive “decaying grey”, which makes you feel like you’re reading an old newspaper. The choice of fonts fit the victorian theme very well. Where the game really shines visually, however, is the multiple handouts found throughout the book. Some are excerpts form letters, others are false ads, and so on. Each one of those handouts does an awesome job of setting the mood. The hand-drawn illustrations, on the other hand, range from average to below average – which makes the fact that they are few and far-between a blessing of sorts. The only exceptions are the color illustrations on the front and back cover, which are gorgeous. Overall, Hex ends up being generally quite pretty to look at.
Hex’s prose is mostly good, despite the fact that some of the game’s content could’ve ended up coming across as very dry. Hopefully, that’ll remain true for the english version. The book contains several short stories or in-character blurbs that are below-average, but that’s to be expected as it is often the case with most RPGs. The text could’ve used a good bit more editing, however. Even though the typos and spelling errors are few and far-between, some terms are used once or twice and then never seen nor explained again. Having read Wuxia, I know for a fact that those terms are an issue of copy-pasting that was not double checked, which makes this all the more annoying. Still, the text ends up being mostly easy to follow, and pleasant to read.
Substance – Chapter by chapter.
The first thing you need to know about Hex is that it jumps right in. No introduction, no “what is a roleplaying game” blurb, not even a phrase or three about what the game is about. The lack of an introduction explaining what roleplaying is doesn’t bother me, but it’s a major oversight considering the business strategy of Studio Mammouth. While I was chatting with the reps at the game’s launch (where I received my comp copy), one of them told me that they were about to publish a few board games as well, and that they planned to market RPGs as just another type of game, no different than board games. Considering this, not including a chapter on the basics is a huge oversight. This said, even as an experienced roleplayer, I think I would’ve liked to read a page or two explaining what the game is supposed to be about. Jumping right into the details of the setting without having an overall mental picture of what Hex was about made it hard for me to fit the various pieces into the whole of the game as I read them.
The first chapter, “History & Geography”, is divided in two sections. The first one, titled “The Nations” presents each of the major powers of the old continents, along with the highlights of their respective histories and social context. The historical focus spans from the 1850s to the early 1910s. Overall, this chapter is very informative, and it does a very good job of conveying the feel of the victorian age. Being by no means an expert on this era, I felt I came out of that chapter with a very good grasp of what the setting was all about.
The second section of the first chapter, “Who’s who” (literally, as the authors have chosen to name this chapter in english, for some reason), presents an ensemble of NPCs. Some of them are historical characters (like Helena Blavatsky, Alfred Dreyfus or Gustave Eiffel), while others are from works of fiction (like the Phantom of the Opera, Dorian Gray, Captain Nemo, or Professor Moriarty). The chapter is quite interesting and is very likely to spawn several adventure seeds for anyone who reads it. Yet, there are some issues. While the cast of characters does a very good job of showing off what sorts of cool things you can do with the setting, the tone varies wildly from one to the other, ranging from low-key occult mysteries to over-the-top pulp espionage. This could have been a cool feature if there had been an introduction on the various genres the game was meant to emulate, along with advice on how to pick one and stick with it. Since no such blurb exists, however, the game ends up coming across as lacking any sort of coherent genre conventions – as if the game was trying to emulate two or three very different genres as the same time.
A second issue arises from the “Who’s who” section. Along with the description of each potential NPC is a paragraph or two on how to use them in a game. The problem here is that most of this advice casts the NPC squarely as a Mary Sue. The end result is that those NPCs are far more likely to steal the spotlight from the PCs than anything else. For instance, after describing how powerful and influent Helena Blavatsky was throughout her life, the rulebook proceeds to suggest building a campaign where the players are her retinue – with one of them being her gardener, and another her piano teacher, for instance. That campaign, still according to the book, should follow the travels and adventures of Blavatsky, with her retinue of PCs getting involved because they’re alongside her. While I’ll allow that it’s possible for a GM to pull that off without stealing the spotlight from the PCs or railroading them, it’s still quite a daunting task. When you enter into the equation the fact that the same sort of advice is provided with each NPC presented in the chapter, and the fact that the rulebook doesn’t have a chapter with GM advice (let alone GM advice dealing with this particular issue), it’s really hard not to feel like the game is actually advocating that style of play.
The second chapter, called “Sciences and Beliefs”, is also divided in two sections. The first, ”Science, religion of the modern man” takes the form of a conference given by Van Helsing. Basically, it’s an overview of the various scientific advances and beliefs of the victorian era, with a heavy emphasis on psychology. While the chapter is useful to grasp the place of science in the setting, it’s hampered by the fact that it assumes you already know a whole lot of stuff. If you’re not at least superficially familiar with the history of natural sciences and averagely versed in the history of social sciences and psychiatry, you should make sure you have a laptop and a bookmark of Wikipedia nearby. The only exception is the few pages provided on mesmerism, which go into the amount of details they should’ve went into for a lot of the other topics presented in the section.
The second section of Chapter Two, called “Of supernatural and its different practices”, is still written as a conference from Van Helsing. It begins by describing about half a dozen secret societies (the most important being the Rosicrucian Order and Freemasonry), and follows by discussing spiritism in relation to high society, fashion, and science. Here, the amount of details provided is just right – which makes the whole section both useful and informative.
With the third chapter, we enter the realm of rules. Called “Creation and Simulation”, it deals with exactly that. The first section, “Character Creation”, presents how to create characters. It starts off with the player choosing priorities in a way that’s very similar to early editions of Shadowrun. The players have to split a certain amount of “priority points” among five different categories : Social Rank, Attributes, Proficiencies, Traits, and Experience. The following paragraphs will take the time to explain each priority, as the authors have chosen to explain the basics of the system, called Persona, throughout character creation.
Social ranks are simple enough – where exactly do you fit in society? Are you dirt poor, or filthy rich? Or somewhere in-between, maybe? The choice you make here will have an impact on your financial resources, but also on what kind of proficiencies you can take up. While a bit restrictive, this relation between social rank and the skills you learn fits with the victorian era, so the restriction ends up feeling right. Next up are attributes: Vigor, Agility, Intuition, Spirit, and Presence. Mechanically, each attribute (rating between 1 and 10 for humans) constitutes a pool of d10s that you have to roll against a target number (usually 10) whenever you try to accomplish something.
Proficiencies are split into three categories – crafts, professions, and hobbies. Mechanically, crafts and professions are identical; both are “wide” skills that encompass various skills with a much narrower focus. For instance, if my character has pottery as a craft, he’ll be considered proficient in every skill necessary for him to practice his craft, such as keeping a budget, bargaining the price of materials, building or repairing the tools of the trade, and actual pottery-making. The real difference between crafts and professions is that the former are the kind of manual jobs that are practiced by the masses, while professions are academic pursuits that belong mostly in high society. In other words, if you’re of a very low social rank, you can’t pick professions. Conversely, if you’re of a very high social rank, you can’t have a craft as this would not be proper. As I’ve pointed out above, that sort of restrictions fits the genre quite well, so they make sense. Besides, they end up being sort of a non-issue when you consider how wide both types of proficiencies are, as most essential skills are included in both some professions and some crafts. Hobbies, however, are different mechanically from either professions or crafts. They are much narrower skills – cheaper to buy, but less versatile. Were I to take “Potter” as a hobby, for instance, I could be very good at making pots but I would not have access to all those nifty related skills I get if I take it as a craft, nor would I be allowed to take specialisations (more on those below). In any case, all types of proficiencies are mechanically handled the same way: their rating (again between 1 and 10 in most cases) are subtracted from the target number.
A clever bit of game-design found in Persona is how it handles specialisations. Contrary to how they work in most of the games out there, specialisations do not add to your proficiency rating. Rather, they allow you to re-roll a certain number of dice that did not manage to come up a success (i.e.: equal or above the target number). How is that clever? I’m glad you asked. In most games, a specialisation is merely a way to cheaply raise your proficiency (or skill) by one increment; therefore, only one specialisation is usually allowed per skill. Not in Hex. As it simply allows you to re-roll, you can specialise in multiple areas (or even more than once in the same area) as much as you want without it off-setting the game balance.
Traits are positive aspects of your character which help you out in certain circumstances. For instance, “city-dweller” help you out when your actions relate to being in a city. Mechanically, traits are all over the place. Some give you one or two more dice to roll, others lower the target number by one or two, while yet others allow you to re-roll one or two dice. Even if I don’t doubt there’s a difference between those three kinds of bonuses when you look at the probabilities, I suspect it’s a minor one. Considering how small that difference is, I would’ve liked it better if they had just picked one and stuck with it. (Interestingly enough, that’s the case with Wuxia, which uses almost exclusively the “re-roll X dice” shtick for traits.)
In the same sub-section as traits are dramas. Basically, dramas are a mix of flaws and issues that inhabit a character, thus providing the player with roleplaying opportunities. Whenever the GM brings a drama into play, the player may be awarded a certain number of heroism points (more on those below) based on how interesting the GM judges the roleplay to be. That sort of GM-centric approach is fine when taking up chinks in your character’s armor is balanced by awarding the player some extra points to use during character generation or simply by the fact that they can earn you bonuses during play – heroism points, in this case. The problem with Hex’s dramas, however, is that their design goals are all over the place. Every character gets one drama for free, and can buy others with creation points dedicated to traits. Paying for negative aspects of a character, in my opinion, harkens to a less GM-centric style of play where you either collect on the mechanical bonus every time the negative stuff happens, or where you get to bring it into play yourself for purpose of character development. Or both. Here, we get a dysfunctional hybrid where you pay up but still surrender control over to the GM. That makes paying creation points for dramas a bad idea, no matter how you cut it.
Likewise, the idea of setting “experience” as a priority doesn’t make much sense. In the five priorities listed above at the start of character creation, one of the priorities is experience. Basically, your character starts with experience points (XP, from here on) that you get to spend on further attributes, proficiencies, and traits for your character. They do not get you any sort of new stuff – it’s just more points to spend. Up until this point, character creation was nice and clean. The only thing setting XP as a priority achieves is making it more complicated. That needless complication, however, isn’t nearly as bad as the other rule concerning experience points at character creation, which had me completely flabbergasted and bleeding through my ears. Basically, if a player takes up the responsibility of bringing “something artistic” (like a character journal, or sketches, or music composed for the game) every game session, he gets another 50 XP at character creation if the GM considers your creation to be good enough. That “something artistic” must be given to the GM at the beginning of each game session. If, for some reason, the player stops bringing said “something artistic”, he is imposed a 75 XP penalty that he’ll be required to pay before being allowed to spend any further XP on his character. (Hopefully, a GM Viking Hat will be included with the english version.) Honestly, if a GM ever pulled that one after I had spent several hours of my time coming up with stuff for the campaign, I would probably take my dice and leave. As far as bad ideas go, this one is pretty far out there.
Once you’re finished spending all your creation points and experience points, all that’s left to do is to calculate your secondary attributes and determine your resources. Health in Hex is kept track of through reverse hits points of sorts. You track down the number of wounds you receive, and each time you get a certain number of them, you cross a wound threshold and get penalties. Hex also includes a sanity mechanic. You begin by splitting a certain amount of points between two secondary stats called “Superstition” and “Reason”. Each represents how apt you are to make sense of the things that appear before you. Under each of those two stats, you have “stress hit points” which get subtracted whenever you encounter something stressful, and are compared to thresholds just like with physical health. (More details below). Finally, all that’s left is determining your resources. The process is simple enough – you get either two contacts or one friend, and you have resources in accord with your social rank.
The second section of the third chapter, presenting the task resolution and combat rules, is entitled “Game Mechanics”. It is relatively short, considering how much of the system has already been explained throughout character creation. In fact, you can probably guess most of it. 1s are always a failure, 10s are always a success. Some tests are “simple” (unopposed) and based on the number of successes you manage to score, while others are opposed and based on the number of successes you manage to score above and beyond those that your opponent has managed to score himself. Target numbers are mostly 10 minus the appropriate proficiencies, although they can go up or down if the task is especially challenging or especially easy. An interesting aspect of the task resolution is that you actually need only one success in order to succeed. The other successes you might score are used as you see fit to amp up the result of your action. You can make it more lasting, more efficient, quicker, or even just cooler. In my opinion, that way to approach a system based on the number of successes you get is rather novel, and grant the player a nice amount of control over his actions. In fact, it feels like a good compromise between traditional game mechanics and those of games like Wushu or Dogs in the Vineyard where you have total control on the details of your character’s actions.
Following basic task resolution is a section on heroism points. Basically, the GM hands them to the player based on roleplaying (in relation to dramas) or dramatic (i.e.: cool and impressive) actions. Heroism points can be used in a variety of ways that basically amount to making tests more easy. It’s also here that we learn that heroism points take the place of XP based on the quality of roleplay, in Hex. If you do something cool or impressive, you get heroism points. The rationale here is that good roleplay cannot be linked in-game to your character evolving, and therefore should not play a part in the XP awarded. While it’s a logic that doesn’t really appeal to me, I can certainly say that it stands on it’s on.
Next is combat. Initiative is static with everyone’s initiative being determined by their Intuition score, with higher being better. Next comes the attack rolls, which I really wish I could understand. The paragraph talks of an opposed test using a proficiency limited by an attribute, against a target number equivalent to an attribute of the target. That’s it. Nothing else, not even a mention of what the target has to roll, which you would think is really important since they mention it’s an opposed test. If I had to guess, I’d say the paragraph is an artefact of an earlier version of the system. Anyhow. Supposing you do manage to figure out how to resolve the attacks, the winner of the opposed roll can use his successes to customize his attack in a variety of ways, like causing more damage, targeting a specific body part, pushing back the opponent, or investing them in his defense pool. Basically, the defense pool is a reserve of dice you can build up during combat and then use to cancel the successes of an opponent attacking you. I’d love to tell you how powerful or inefficient that defense pool is, but since I can’t figure out how the attack rolls work, I can’t. Tough luck for you guys, huh?
It bears mentioning that according to the rulebook, each step should be resolved for everyone before you move on to the next one. In other words, you have to resolve the attack rolls of everyone before resolving damage. I might be wrong, but it feels like that would likely end up bogging down play a good deal, as you would need to note the successes of every attack that managed to hit, and then go back to those notes for the damage phase. For a GM, that could easily mean having to note an awful lot of stuff each round if the battle involves multiple opponents besides the PCs.
An interesting mechanic in the combat rules, however, is the so-called group-reserve. Basically, when you fight as a team, you can invest a success in the group reserve each round, and/or draw two successes from it. Moreover, a character knowledgeable in strategy can act as leader and roll a test in order to expand the number of dice that can be sent in or taken out of the group reserve. Overall, this specific mechanic is an amazingly simple way to reflect how a group working as a whole can be stronger.
It bears mentioning that apart from a short list of weapons, simple rules for resolving damage, and simple rules for healing, that’s pretty much it. You have no guidelines to resolve damage from fire, electricity, falls, or drowning. If you need those, you’re on your own.
What follows, however, is a more in-depth explanation of the “stress” rules. Basically, it goes down like this: you encounter something, the GM calls it as being linked to reason or superstition, and says how many points of “stress damage” it’s worth. You roll the appropriate secondary stat (i.e.: reason and superstition) against… I don’t know. I suppose a target number is in order, probably modified by something since 10 (the basic target number) is sort of hard to get on a d10. I guess you have to decide, because no target number nor any way to modify it have been provided. Anyhow. You roll the appropriate stat, and each success you get can be used to cancel one point of stress damage. The rest is marked under the stat used, and compared to various thresholds. It’s interesting to note, however, that you can try and convince the GM to roll your other secondary stat instead of the one he announced. To use an example from the book, if someone appears suddenly out of nowhere and the GM asks to roll Superstition, I can argue that my knowledge of physics allows me to deduce (correctly or not) that it’s just a trick with mirrors, thus allowing me to roll Reason instead. That’s a cool little feature, and it feels to me like it’s bound to put the whole science v.s. supernatural issue to the forefront of the stories, which is nice and quite within the genre.
The last part of that section is dedicated to experience points. Once again, Hex here is guilty of giving an enormous amount of power to the GM. Basically, they advocate setting objectives for a scenario, and assigning a certain number of XPs to each. The players are not informed of the objectives, and don’t have a say in what they are. Needless to say, this approach to experience points runs a huge risk of actually encouraging GMs to railroad the players. Anyway. Afterwards, there’s a short reminder of how to spend experience points, which is a bit redundant since they explained it already in the Character Creation chapter.
The last chapter, “Campaigns and Scenarios” presents three different scenarios that can be used in Hex. The first one, “Moonlight”, deals with the PCs being tricked into going to a sanatorium in the alps for a moment of cure, and being experimented on by the minions of famous bad guy Fantomas. The scenario is presented in a very railroady fashion (indeed, it warns us that it is as a foreword) and is concluded inevitably with the PCs being heavily wounded, and Fantomas giving them a speech about how impressed he is that they managed to slightly foil his plans, thus neatly proving my earlier point about the “Who’s who” section being dangerously close to being a collection of Mary Sues.
The second scenario, “The Sephirah of Wonderland”, barely even mentions the PCs. That’s not exactly surprising, because I have a hard time imagining how they can manage to be interesting compared to the NPCs featured in this scenario. Shall I list them? Mozart, Salieri, Faust, Alice (from Alice in Wonderland), The Queen of Hearts, The Cheshire Cat, R.M. Renfield (from Dracula), Mina Murray (from Dracula), Van Helsing (from Dracula), Dracula (from Dracula), and Sigmund Freud. Oh, yeah… does the Antichrist count if he’s currently just the unborn child of Alice? It’s interesting to see how they managed to tie all those characters together (with the Kabbalah, of all things!), but there’s little room for the PCs in that tightly weaved story.
The third and last scenario, “The Last Emperor”, is much better. It thrusts the player in the middle of a conflict between Fu Manchu and Aleister Crowley set in San Francisco, and then leaves them free to do as they please. The scenario suggests several scenes that can be interesting, but each is summed up in a paragraph and none of them are presented in a way that makes them linked sequentially. No potential for railroading. This one makes me happy.
Before I go with my closing remarks, it bears mentioning that you can find a very long list of suggested materials to serve as inspiration at the end of the rulebook, which is nice. Ranging from books to cinema, it feels fairly extensive.
Wait up, aren’t you forgetting something?
You may have noticed that I’ve said nothing of the rules concerning magic, even though Hex is describes itself as the “Chronicles of a world between belief and reason.” That is no oversight on my part. There are none. You can take “Seer” as a craft, or “Mystic” as a profession. You’re told the sort of thing you can do (fortune telling, kabbalah, etc.) in a short paragraph, and then that’s it. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Rien. What that means is that, primo, you can’t do magic, and secundo, the magic the NPCs use relies on nothing but GM fiat. In other words, some of the NPCs aren’t Mary Sues, they’re Elder Gods.
The Bottom Line
The graphic design and the prose of Hex earned it a 4 in style, initially. With the editing issues mentioned above, I have to drop that to a 3. Even though they don’t pop up often, they do so in big ways. The mistakes mostly mess with content (and they will have an impact on the content rating), but they’re meaningful enough to make the experience of reading some chapters frustrating, and that frustration ends up hurting the prose. Thus, it also affects style.
Based strictly on the setting elements and the bare bones of the system, Hex would’ve deserved a 3 in content. The setting info is really interesting, and while the system is average, it has the gears to work decently. The railroady scenarios, the list of Mary Sues, and the rules regarding experience drop it to a 2. The unintelligible rules regarding combat and stress, sadly, drop it to a 1.
If you’re looking for a gaming resource chock full of ideas for a game set in the victorian era, Hex might be a nice grab. If you’re looking for a complete RPG, however, you might be better off with something else unless you’re prepared to do a lot of houseruling.
Happy gaming, Jocelyn
