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A note to owners of other ORE games: As you probably already know, Reign uses the One Roll Engine. In preparing for this review, I pursued the versions of the ORE system featured in Godlike and Nemesis. (Sadly, I didn’t get a chance to get my hands on Wild Talents.) Before I go into the review proper, I want to stress out that Reign is a major overhaul of the ORE system, above and beyond the company rules which have been the source of the hype surrounding the game. While I won’t go into comparisons, I’ll try to make those differences as obvious as I can throughout the review. Therefore, I invite you not to skim the system parts too much – there might be something interesting you didn’t know about in there!
Style – An overall impression
Reign is available in four different versions. You can get it either in hardcover or softcover, and you can pick between two different pieces of cover art. My own copy is the hardcover version, with the cover art by Daniel Solis. Physically, Reign is 366 pages thick, with the last three pages left blank. Of standard RPG-rulebook proportions, its binding is sturdy. The paper used is pretty much the same basic paper I use in my printer. While it didn’t strike me immediately, a friend who flipped through the book pointed out that the pages have a “photocopied” look about them. After looking at them a bit closer, I have to say he’s right.
Visually, Reign definitely has a style of its own. Much of the margins are filled with patterns (vines, flowers, and such) or by flavour text written in a font that also sets the mood visually, even if you don’t read the text itself. The art featured in the book falls within two very different categories. The rules sections open with full-page black and white photos which have been digitally altered. The end result is very impressive, and make me wish that RPGs would use photography more as a medium for its illustrations. The other type of art makes up the maps used to open the setting sections, and the illustrations featured in the bestiary. Those illustrations are made up of very minimalist and somewhat abstract brush strokes, which remind me of East Asian brush painting and calligraphy. To this day, I still haven’t figured out whether I like them or not. They’re beautiful, but I’m not quite sure they manage to be evocative the way I expect RPG art to be. One day they are, and the other day they’re not – hence my dilemma. In any case, they certainly have the merit of being unique.
Prose-wise, Reign is pretty much up to the standard that Unknown Armies has taught me to hold Greg Stolze up to. For those of you who haven’t read Unknown Armies, that’s a very high standard. The flavour text (and there’s a lot of it throughout the book) is very well written, and adds a lot to the rest of the book. The setting bits are written up very clearly, and each section on a nation begins with a short story told by that nation. What’s impressive here is that each story has a distinctive tone, which really underlines the fact that the cultures are different. The rules, which represent the main bulk of the text, are explained clearly and are supported by a decent amount of examples. Moreover, they’re written in a conversational tone that’s sometimes witty and sometimes insightful. On the editing side of things, I didn’t notice too many typos or editing errors. Overall, Reign is an easy read – it’s both entertaining and mostly crystal clear.
Substance – By topics.
Usually, I like to review a rulebook chapter by chapter. In the case of Reign, that’s just not possible. For one, the setting sections are parsed throughout the book. Moreover, most of the GM advice is provided on the spot as topics get addressed. The end result is that, although that division of content works very well for Reign itself, my review would be nigh unreadable if I presented the game chapter by chapter. Hence, I’ve decided to go at it by dividing Reign in four different “topics” : the setting, the basic rules, the company rules, and the other stuff.
The Setting
The “default setting” of Reign is a fantasy world made up of two continents called Heluso and Milonda. The information regarding the setting is provided in various sections parsed throughout the book, presenting the different nations and cultures found on the two continents. Each culture is given somewhere between 10 and 15 pages, with the last section presented dealing with the world as a whole. Although a lot of rules (martial paths, esoteric disciplines, schools of magic) have a flavour that’s very specific to the default setting, I’ll go into those further down in the rules section of this review.Although the book ends with a section on the world as a whole (after having first presented each nation), I’ll start with it for clarity’s sake. The fantasy setting of Reign is a flat world, with the sun and the moon just hanging in the sky and changing intensity to produce days, nights, and seasons. The continents themselves are both shaped like bodies – a man and a woman – lying down in the proportionally shallow waters of the ocean. The end result of this set-up is a world that feels strange and sort of poetic, with people as continents and zones where the sun never shines.
The section on each nation is very detailed, addressing the broad aspects of each culture as well as the small details. The format used is the same for the different nations. The topics aspects covered are: values, culture (including longer than usual bits on food and clothing), the political situation, and the nation at war. In addition to this, the section begins with the typical story the nation tells, which I mentioned earlier. Overall, that structure manages to give a good portrait of each nation, while giving GMs and players enough wiggle room to insert their own color and preferences within that framework.
Reign has four sections dealing with different nations, one for each great culture present in the world of Heluso and Milonda. The first nation, Uldholm, is ruled by its various guilds rather than by aristocracy, and values ambition and hard work above all. On the flipside, those who do not belong to guilds (because they’re too lazy to work, according to public morals) are left almost without any rights. More advanced than the other nations in term of progress and invention, they also rely heavily on sorcerers on the battlefield. The second nation, called the Truil Tribes, is a collection of three different tribes, all of them hunters and gatherers. They are stoic, practical, freedom-loving, and family oriented. Naturally, as is always the case with a collection of tribes, there is some amount of in-fighting within the “nation.” At war, they rely mostly on guerrilla warfare. The third nation is called Dindavara. A warrior society, its power structure is feudal, with a strong dividing line between the nobles and the common people. For both people, however, respect and hard work are key values. On the battlefield, the dindavarans rely on their superior armaments and the dedication of their warriors to the art of battle. The last nation presented in the Reign rulebook is the Empire. Made up of five different nations under the rule of a single Emperess, this is a nation on its decline. Decadent, the central value of the Empire is a form of quiet resignation. Beyond that, what matters is power. The people of the Empire love power for its own sake, and spend a lot of time jockeying for it. At war, a mighty army of sorcerers, foot soldiers and elite troops are at the command of the Emperess. The reach of the troops is over-extended, however, and the command structure is crumbling under politics and incompetence. Thus, despite having the mightiest army of Heluso and Milonda, the Empire is a but a shadow of its former glory.
As you may or may not have noticed, each nation is similar to a culture of our own world. Uldholm is a strangely medieval America, with a sort of simplified capitalism at the heart of its way of life. The Truil Tribes are very similar to the Native American nations in the early days of colonisation by the Europeans. Dindavara has a distinctively asian flavour, with its emphasis on stoicism and martial prowess. Finally, The Empire feels very much like the ancient Roman Empire at the time of its decline. The end result is that Heluso and Milonda is an odd sort of bricolage of cultures. Some people might have a hard time believing in how they fit together, or how they might have developed so differently throughout their history even though they’ve been neighbours forever. I know I do. Still, it’s far from a major problem, given how the rest of the book is written. I’ll go into further details about that later on.
Back to the “The Entire World” section, some notes and additions to the general setting are provided to help get a better picture of the world as a whole. Some notes on sexism, racism and literacy through Heluso and Milonda are provided, as well as a few pages on what is called “Mud Dukes,” which are basically small independent nations, and how they fit into the big picture.
Overall, Reign’s “default setting” is interesting, but it doesn’t reinvent anything.
The Basic Rules
At its core, Reign’s system – the One-Roll engine – is a task resolution using a dice pool of d10s. How many dice are in the dice pool is determined by adding the level of the skill used and the level of the relevant attribute, up to a maximum of 10 dice. Once you’ve thrown the dice, what you’re looking for are “sets” (groups of dice that came up the same number) that are “wide” (the more the number of dice that came up the same number, the better) and “high” (the higher the number that came up, the better). In generic terms, the result’s width indicates the action’s efficiency (speed, raw power), while the result’s height indicates the action’s quality (style, precision). In most cases, width trumps height: a result of 3x4 would be more advantageous than on of 2x8, for instance. You can only keep one set if you come up with multiple ones. Which one you keep is up to you.An interesting twist on the attribute+skill scheme are the “expert die” and the “master die” which can be bought for skills. Each type give you more control over the outcome of your roll. In the case of the expert die, it allows you to set the result of that particular die to whichever height you want it to be before you roll the dice. Most of the time, this is going to be 10, but not always. The master die also allows you to set the result of that particular die to whichever height you want it to be. Only, it allows you to do so after the other dice have been rolled; the end result is that you’re guaranteed to get at least a result that’s two dice wide each time you use that skill.
The game presents three distinctive types of tasks which can be encountered and resolved with dice. The static contest is when you try accomplishing a task with no opposition. You roll your dice pool, and hope for a set. If the GM thinks the task requires extra finesse, he might set a minimum height for your roll. That’s it. If you get a set, you succeed. The wider the set, the faster you accomplished what you set out to do. The higher the roll, the more style and finesse you’ve put into it. A second type of contest, the dynamic contest, is used when you have competition. It’s different from having opposition. An opponent is someone trying to stop you from doing whatever you’re doing. A competitor, on the other hand, is someone who’s trying to accomplish the same thing when only one of you can succeed. The way dynamic contests get resolved depends a lot on the nature of the task at hand. If you’re trying to be the first on the top of a hill, chances are width is what will count, because it’s a matter of speed. If you’re among a group of people each attempting to paint a portrait of the king’s likeliness for the banquet in five days, height is what’ll matter because you have all the time in the world, but style is of the essence.
The last type of task resolution is the opposed contest. You’re trying to do something; the other guy is trying to make you fail. How this gets resolved is through the use of a mechanic called “gobble dice”. Basically, whenever someone is trying to stop someone else from succeeding, the set he comes up with is made up of gobble dice. Those dice can be used to cancel a die in the other guy’s set on a one-for-one basis. This works as long as you’re quicker than he is, and as long as the height of your die is equal or better than his. For instance, suppose a guy is trying to axe me and comes up with a 3x6 result. If I try to dodge and get a 3x6 also, I’m good – I can blow two dice out of his pool and thus destroy his set. If my result is wider or higher, I’m golden. If I get a 2x6, I’m not quick enough – no cigar. If I get a 3x4 (or 4x4, for that matter), the guy’s attack move is just too precise for the kind of dodge I can manage, and I get hit.
Once you get the hang of the gobble dice, the rest of combat is a breeze. The game’s system is called the One-Roll Engine because each round gets resolved in one roll. Initiative is determined by width. Actions get resolved according to the various types of tasks involved (mostly opposed contests, if you’re wondering). For attacks, ORE features a simple hit location system: the height of the attack roll determines where you’re hit. Damage is determined by the weapon used and by the width of the result. There are two kinds of damage possible, which are pretty much self-explanatory: shock and killing damage. Whenever a limb is filled with shock damage, any other shock damage gets turned into killing damage. Whenever a limb is filled with killing damage, it becomes useless and the rest of the damage gets redirected. A torso or a head filled with killing damage (or even shock damage) is bad news. That’s all there is to it.
It really should be pointed out that the combat in Reign (just like in other ORE games) is rather deadly. For instance, a long sword does a damage of “Width+1 Killing Damage.” Each limb has five damage boxes, the torso has ten, and the head has four. In other words, a set of 3x10 kills you straight off, because you just got stabbed in the face. That kind of grittiness is a feature rather than a bug, but it might not appeal to everyone.
To add some complexity to the combat, a ton of special moves are presented. They are presented in a way detailing both what they are and how they work rules-wise. Apart from what the author calls the big seven (attack, dodge, parry, move, aim, called shot, multiple actions), there are twenty-two combat manoeuvres, although some are minor variations around the same basic action. Wholly optional, they still rely on the “one roll” principle, which means they can be added without slowing down gameplay. Apart from this, a whole slew of rules are also provided, ranging from cover and armor, to unworthy opponents (mooks!) and followers (mooks of your own!) The end result are combat rules that feel both simple and exhaustive.
Jumping back to the basics, let’s now take a look at character creation. There are basically two ways to generate a character for Reign. One is ye olde point-based character creation system, while the other is a “one roll” character creation – which is obviously random. What’s interesting is that the random character creation method does not only provide the character with stats, but also with justifications for those stats in the form of bits of character backstory. While those bits are clearly linked to the Heluso and Milonda setting, they’re still generic enough to be adapted without too much problems to any setting set in medieval times – fantasy or otherwise. Each character has six attributes (body, coordination, knowledge, command, sense, charm), along with skills linked to each attribute. Each skill gets about half a page dedicated to it, giving numerous examples of its use and of the relevant rules. The section on skills reminded me a lot of the way Spirit of the Century provides advice and possibilities for each skill, and that’s a very good thing. Naturally, the skills provided are the sort of skills you expect to find in a fantasy setting. Besides attributes and skills, the character also has access to advantages and problems. The former have a point cost attached to them, and give you an edge under specific circumstances. The latter do not cost anything to pick up, and generate experience points whenever they come into play. Finally, the character also has three passions: a mission (a clear goal), a duty (an ethical principle or value), and a craving (a selfish short-term goal you try to reach as often as you can.) Whenever you act in accordance to a passion, you get a die to add to your pool. Whenever you act in a way that goes against one of your passions, you take away a die.
A big part of character creation (and of the rulebook) are the various “special paths” that characters have access to. They are of three kinds: esoteric disciplines (special usages of non-combat skills), martial paths (special usages of combat skills), and schools of magic. Esoteric disciplines and martial paths work pretty much the same way. Each discipline or path is made up of five special abilities, graded in order of “powerfulness” (for lack of a better term). Those abilities must be bought in order, meaning that a character with the fifth and last ability of a discipline or path has necessarily all the other four abilities. In some cases, each subsequent ability is a more powerful version of the preceding one, while in other cases each ability brings something different to the table.
Magic works a bit differently. Although spells are bought much like esoteric disciplines or martial paths, the spells are also graded in intensity. Any spell past the first intensity requires that you have the sorcery skill in order to purchase them. Moreover, some schools of magic provided for Heluso and Milonda are linked to a specific ability (like a craft, or dancing) and require that you to be skilful in that craft as well. Finally, some spells (in the setting of Heluso and Milonda) require the sorcerer to be attuned to the type of magic he’s practicing. Those attunements either require to cast a temporary attunement spells first, or to be permanently attuned (which turns the sorcerer into something not quite human.)
All the esoteric disciplines, martial paths and magic schools provided in Reign are tailored for the default setting of Heluso and Milonda. However, they’re generic enough that most of them can be adapted to other settings with a minimum of fiddling.
Overall, Reign’s basic system feels elegant. It strikes a nice balance between details and ease of play. Even without the company rules, it’d be a game worth buying.
The Company Rules
Much of the hype surrounding Reign prior to its release has been about the company rules. Those rules are designed to allow players to take control of countries, guilds, tribes, brotherhoods, or whatever else along those lines you can think of. Although it’s always been possible for gamers to roleplay those situations, Reign is the first game (to the extent of my knowledge) to provide mechanics to support and promote that sort of play. For simplicity’s sake, the author has chosen the generic term “company” to refer to any sort of organisation that might make use of those rules. Therefore, keep in mind that the term “company” here can mean a small band of mercenaries, a powerful merchant’s guild, a great nation, and everything else in-between.Each company is made up of five attributes: Might (military prowess), Treasure (wealth), Influence (political power), Territory (the land, its value, the population, its culture and its technological level), and Sovereignty (the people’s loyalty to the company, the strength of their common identity.) Each attribute is rated from 0 to 6, with the exception of sovereignty which must be at a minimum of 1 in order for the company to actually be a company rather than just a group of people not united in any way. Along with a short description of what each rating means, each attribute gets presented along with a few examples of how you can temporarily raise that attribute. For instance, you can raise Might by using scare tactics, or increase Treasure by asking for a loan.
Rules are also provided for combining and dividing companies, and on how to improve each attribute. What’s important to understand here is that the attribute scores are exponential in nature. A Might of 4 is not a Might of 3 plus a Might of 1 – it’s more powerful than that. The end result is that there’s not much to be gained in forcing a much smaller company to combine with your own, just like a schism that divides your company in two will not necessarily reduce your attributes by half. Although those rules fall a bit on the technical side, they do a really good job of simulating those kinds of situations in a way that feels more than purely mathematical. Besides, those sorts of events are not likely to happen every game session.
But what do companies do, exactly? Well, anything you design them to do, but the rulebook provides ten examples of actions a company can take : Attack, Being Informed, Counter-Espionage, Defend, Espionage, Improve the Culture, Policing, Rise in Stature, Train and Levy Troops, and Unconventional Warfare. The result of a company’s action is resolved using the same ORE system as with the rest of Reign. You simply combine two attributes relevant to the action (like Might + Treasure in the case of the “Attack” action, for instance) and roll your dice pool away. Here’s the kicker, however. Each time you use an attribute during a month, it decreases by one for the rest of that month. For instance, if I have a Might of 3 and a Treasure of 2, my first attack will be with a pool of 5d10, my second with a pool of 3d10, and my third with a pool of 1d10. It makes sense. Resources get spent, troops get tired, and so on.
A very important part of the company rules is how the individual PCs can influence the outcome of whatever action the company undertakes. Through their actions, they can give the company bonuses (or inflict penalties upon it if they fail whatever plan they had to help the company.) Those bonuses and/or penalties act as a sort of interface between “regular play” and “company play”, as the adventures the PCs undertake can very much be about helping the company achieve its goals on a more personal, character-centered level. Inversely, the company can be used to help along whatever adventures the PCs choose to undertake. Need information? Send some spies. Want to infiltrate the palace of Baron X in order to steal his treasure? Use the army and besiege the mansion of Count Y to make sure he unlocks the door and lets you in the next time he visits his good friend Baron X. And so on. In the end, it’s all good. The company rules have a nice flexibility to them, allowing companies to either take center stage or be just another tool for the PCs to use. Or both. Either way, the last page of the company rules provides advice on how to use companies to support all those various modes of play, along with suggestions on how to pace switching between PC-centered play and Company-centered play.
Overall, what impressed me the most about the company rules was how underwhelmed I was by them. I know it sounds a bit contradictory, so I’ll try to explain. The company rules feel incredibly simple. They make perfect sense, and each part of the whole feels like a logical design decision. Reign is the first game to feature rules like that, and I sat down to read them expecting an extremely clever bit of game design that nobody had ever thought about before. There’s nothing especially clever about them. They’re a logical outgrowth of the ORE system produced by the design goal of modeling “companies.” The same thing could’ve been done with Unisystem, Silhouette, d20, Synergy, you name it. Kudos to Greg Stolze for taking a design goal and herding it towards its logical end result. Ultimately, I think that this sort of methodical approach makes the company rules accessible, which is their main merit. The rules allow you to rule a nation in a way that feels detailed without bogging you down with minutiae like the exact number of troops, or the value of your exportations. And, more importantly, that level of abstraction allows for the action of the individual PCs to have a concrete impact on how things go for the company.
The best thing about the company rules, however, is how modular they are. You can just take them “as is” and slap them on top of whatever game you’re playing. It’s as simple as that. Since they function on a whole different level than “regular play,” you don’t even have to change the rules to adapt them to the system you’re using.
The Other Stuff
Sure, Reign’s full of “regular” other stuff like rules on spending money, on enchanted artifacts, or a really really exhaustive section on acquired land and titles of merit. Sure, it presents rules on drowning, burning, and being struck by lightning. Sure, it’s got a bestiary of both mundane animals and fantastical creatures from Heluso and Milonda. Sure, it’s got a giant turtle-like creature that’s stated as a company and could very be the Tarrasque of the next generation. And sure, it’s got a whole slew of pages on alien-like “demons” following each step of their evolution, from formless blob to a colony of demon-spawns (also stated as a company.) But this “other stuff” part of the review isn’t about those.No, it’s about the bits of advice, and about the book’s design transparency. Apart from the company rules, it’s those bits that really make Reign a product that brings something new to the table. It would’ve been really easy to just skip them, because they’re scattered throughout the book, and because they touch on really different topics. But that wouldn’t be doing the game justice. The paragraphs that follow are therefore going to be a mixed bag. Bear with me.
The first thing that really needs to be stressed out about Reign is how easily it can be adapted to other settings than Heluso and Milonda. Although it doesn’t feel disconnected from its default setting, it’s definitely not linked with it either. It feels like the author went out of his way to make sure the system as written is independent from Heluso and Milonda. To me, that’s a definite plus because I’m not all that interested in the default setting. This said, Reign goes above and beyond keeping the rules and the setting independent. On several occasions, examples and suggestions are given on how you can change some things to adapt the examples provided for Heluso and Milonda to other kinds of setting. To the extent of my knowledge, this is a first time a game with a setting actively acknowledges that its system might be used for something else than the default setting. And I’m pretty sure it isthe first time the author has put some effort into making that easier.
In the case of magic, it goes even beyond make it as easy as possible to adapt. A whole section of the book is dedicated to advice on how to build a setting that includes magic. The author here gives suggestions on what to think about. How does magic work? What does it do? What’s its impact on the world? I’ve found that section to be particularly enlightening, especially the bits on the pitfalls that risk making the game less interesting. The next time I try to design a homebrew setting that includes magic, I’ll definitely go back and read that section – no matter what system I plan on using. This said, let me underline again what that section of the book is. It’s the author saying : “You might want to use your own setting instead of mine. Here, let me help you. Here’s what I thought about when I came up with my setting.” It’s not only cool, but it somehow feels humble.
In the same spirit of design transparency, another part of the book is dedicated to “character design strategies.” Here, the author basically lays his cards down on the table and ponders the advantages and disadvantages of various character creation choices. Specialist versus generalist. Strong attributes versus strong skills. It’s very useful insight, considering that Greg Stolze designed the ORE system and is therefore the best person to lay out the mechanical implications of each choice. The end result is that you end up fully equipped to make sure that you create the kind of character you want to create, in a way that’ll make the system support that character concept.
Okay, when I said earlier that I wasn’t going to cover the bestiary, I sort of lied. That’s because there are a few pages of GM advice on how to run animals. While the initial idea of a section on animals bored me at first, I ended up finding it quite fascinating. Basically, what you get is a mix of a debriefing on how actual animals react to humans, and some advice on how to make encounters with animals interesting. Once again, it’s a section I’ll be likely to refer to in the future, no matter what game I run.
Speaking of beasties, I really need to cover the meta-game implications of ghosts in the setting of Heluso and Milonda. Basically, people turn into ghosts whenever they are killed while defenseless. While ghosts are insubstantial in the truest sense and cannot harm people physically, they can shout or be visually annoying. What’s really cool though is the meta-game rationale behind this. As the author spells out for us, the ghosts create an in-game rationale for mercy, which in turn makes villains and PCs more durable. Because the players don’t want a ghost yelling loudly when they try to sneak around or getting in their line of sight when they’re about to shoot an arrow, they’re more likely to let your villain live another day. Conversely, the villains now have a perfectly rational reason to shove the PCs into elaborate death traps rather than killing them right off. Again, it’s Greg Stolze’s design transparency here that makes it so cool. If he hadn’t spelled out the meta-game reason for ghosts that clearly, I might have missed how cool they are.
Finally, there’s one last bit of advice provided in the rulebook that’s unusual both in content and execution. There’s a whole section of the book dedicated to running romances. What’s really interesting here is that in addition to advice on how to make it interesting, the section addresses meta-game issues. Like the fact that not everyone might feel at ease playing that sort of stuff. Or how to make sure that the spotlight falls on everyone, and not just the player who’s roleplaying the romance. Overall, it’s pretty solid advice, and it’s once again something I’ll refer to in the future, no matter what game I run.
Ultimately, all those mixed bits contribute just as much to the quality of Reign as the ORE system, the setting, or the company rules do.
The Bottom Line
Style-wise, Reign is a mixed bag. Based on its art and layout alone, I’d rate it as a four. Considering the photocopied look, it’d go down to a three. But when you factor in the quality of the flavour text and the overall clarity and tone of the writing, it goes up to a five. So there you go.
On the substance side, there’s not even one iota of ambiguity. Even if the setting wasn’t so easily discardable for those who aren’t interested in it, the rest of the book alone would’ve earned Reign a five in substance. Considering that the setting is not only discardable, but that the author actually provides helpful advice on adapting Reign to other settings, I’d rate it as a six. Alas, RPG.net’s rating only goes up to five, so there you have it : five.
All in all, Reign is a hell of a buy. Hopefully, this review will have underlined why it’s a hell of a buy above and beyond the company rules. If you’re interested in running a game that involves “companies,” this is a game you can’t pass up. And if you’re interested in running a fantasy game that doesn’t involve companies, Reign is still an option you might want to consider.
Happy gaming,
Jocelyn
