It's been a while since I've reviewed anything for RPGnet, partly because most of the books I've gained in the last few years have been written either by a) me or b) people I have to work with. Still, over the last couple of years, my ideas of what constituted good game design have changed.

So. Pierre Kakos (the writer) and Brad Ellison (of Eos Press) made an open offer of free review copies of Lesser Shades of Evil a while back, and I thought, why not? It had at the time been so long since I'd seen anything entirely new that I was interested in expanding my horizons, and a game that had been made out of one man's effort — and pocket — and then picked up by a professional publisher seemed to be the thing.

But would I like it?

Honestly, no. And yet, it's really rather good. Allow me to explain.

First Impressions

I got a PDF, so I can't speak for stuff like the binding or the physical presentation. The front cover bears a piece of OK digital art. The pages are all on a fancy sepia background that looks like parchment, meaning that it would have been an ink-drinking bastard to print out. Which I didn't. Anyway, buying the book wouldn't cost any less than printing it.

And you'd be getting your money's worth in terms of word count. It may be well over 400 pages in length, but you'd get none of that nonsense with huge margins or blank space. It's all filled.

On the good side, the book is decent-looking (although I don't much care for the cover art). I understand that Pierre went and bought the art from the various artists himself, which adds to the professional look of the thing, mostly. Sometimes the art looks a bit clip-art-y, though, which is inevitable, given that at least some wasn't specifically commissioned but was taken from existing portfolios.

Still: the chap got proper art from artists with names and reputations and stuff. You've got to hand it to Pierre for having the stones to contact Larry Elmore and go, “Hey Larry, how much?”

Importantly, the art choices are (mostly) consistent in maintaining the game's atmosphere: it's dark, baroque and sometimes bizarre. If there are questionable art choices, there are certainly no more than in many books produced by full-time professionals.

The writing is fine, on the whole. It gets a bit portentous in places and starts to wobble under its own purpleness, but never really makes you cringe. At no point are terms like "GM" for "Games Master" explained. The writer expects you to have played other RPGs before, which — I shrug — is actually a pretty realistic expectation. No one's going to come to this one fresh.

There are a fair few spelling errors, comma splices and malapropisms (like the frequent use of “slayed” for “slain”, or, for that matter “killed”), but, friend, I write for White Wolf. You think that really bothers me? Unlike many other games with editing no better, Lesser Shades of Evil was not produced by that cast of dozens they have there. Bearing that in mind, it's a pretty good job.

The organisation can be a bit wonky in places: for example, two of a character's ten stats (Beauty and Fear) get their first explanation more than a hundred pages after the rest of them get introduced.

The Setting

Lesser Shades of Evil (hereafter LSOE, because I am lazy) is a post-apocalyptic fantasy game, with a sci-fi rationale. Inasmuch as, although it's got the trappings of medieval fantasy, all the magic is actually the result of genetic engineering and super-technology and stuff.

The premise is that at some point in the future, a scientist named Ambrose Kingsway manages to make his family immortal by encoding them into these little golden balls which can control numerous different bodies. So even though the bodies die, they just keep on going.

The newly immortal Kingsway family play God in that Old-Testament-Genocidal-Nutjob sense, bringing about Armageddon and then re-making the human race in their own image. Yay for them.

Anyway, after creating their new Eden, our family of genocidal nutjobs create a whole master race of body-snatching, body-swapping immortals, whom the game calls Angelions.

In a nutshell, the Angelions run the world in a kind of benevolent dictatorship for a while, until they have a massive falling out and have a big war. Which is where the game's timeframe really kicks off, with the war over, some Angelions dead, some disappeared, and the rest divided up into four factions. They're the Dagonheir, who are the faithful followers of the original genocidal nutjobs, the Fell Lords, who are minions of the dark Angelion lord Ravencross, and who are big on creating nasty gribbly monsters, the Sybas, who still control areas of the earth and who are basically out for themselves, and the Phantomas, who wander the world without anyone really knowing whose side they're on.

Essentially, from the start of the book, you'd think the game was set up for you to play an Angelion.

You'd be right.

Sort of.

The Mechanic

It takes a while for the game to get round to the mechanic, but basically, it works like this: you work out your Proficiency from adding a stat to a “Mastery” (which is a very general cross between a skill and a special ability). There are ten stats (Finesse, Intelligence, Perception, Power, Presence, Temperance, Vigor, Beauty and Fear) and five Masteries (Wisdom, War, Domination, Deceit, Passions).

You look up your Proficiency Level (PL) on a table, and — this is the clever bit — the table gives you, depending on the number, a dice pool (in the game, it's called a “packet”) that's either composed of D6s, D10s, or D20s. You get to pick which dice packet you roll, and the best number you rolled is your roll result, which should be higher than a Goal Number set by the GM.

Part of me thinks that it'd be interesting to see how that turns out in play. It seems slow and clunky, but I think that maybe it'll become intuitive if you play enough - it's based upon a simple enough formula (it works out as a Proficiency Level number of D6s, PL minus5 D10s, or PL minus 10 D20s).

There are various tweaks to this.

• Take “Spill dice”, for example, meaning that if you roll the top number on a die, you roll another one of the next higher type, which is nice and open-ended. Spill dice can't spill, but it does mean that you have a (small) chance of rolling a 10 on a D6 packet and a (smaller) chance of rolling a 20 on a D10 packet.

• On the other hand, if you have a PL of 0 or less, you have to roll 2, 3 or 4D6 and take the lowest number as your result. Yikes!

• You can sacrifice dice from a D20 packet to give you bonuses that take your potential roll result over 20, which may be necessary in some extreme cases.

• Every full 3 over the GN gets you an Added Effect (basically a critical mechanic, but with potentially lots of criticals), which again adds in another consideration when picking your dice pool.

I'm undecided as to whether the system is brilliant or nightmarish. The kind of player who spends ten minutes mulling over the probabilities of which dice packet to roll (and I have played with at least one of those) could make the game absolutely excruciating.

And, well. It's cute, but what purpose does it serve? I mean, you basically have the option of trading in lots of dice that roll low for a fewer dice that roll high. And that's flexible and clever. But what does that represent? In a meta-game context, you're sacrificing one probability for another. Now you could rationalise it as a character going all-out for a better result with a higher risk, or hedging his bets for an all-but certain result on a less-spectacular level, which is thematic, inasmuch as you're presumably supposed to be playing a character (likely an Angelion) who is very aware of who he is and what he can do. But it's not spelled out. It's just put forward as different ways to throw dice, and I think Pierre missed a trick there.

There's nothing actually wrong with the system.

It works; it seems to have the obvious holes worked out (the rules give every sign of having been thrashed out through actual play). It's just... that whole thing with the adding up, table-checking, counting dice, rolling and checking to find the best one is frankly a bit fiddly for me.

Combat

The combat system is detailed, as one would expect with this kind of game. Every roll in combat works on the same principle as everything else: find Proficiency Level, check table, pick dice pool.

Like Initiative. You roll a dice packet based on the Proficiency total you get from Intelligence War. The roll result is your Initiative. Fair enough. If you get more than 10, you get more actions (which means that you're almost certain to roll D20s if you have the chance, because you want those extra actions).

It's an Attack/Parry system. You roll, the defender rolls; if you win, you roll damage.

Which gets rolled with the same system again. The opponent loses a number of Health points equal to your roll minus the opponent's Toughness. If you don't roll over Toughness, you don't cause any damage.

So, let's recap.

You have to do the whole thing where you add up stat Mastery, check the table, choose a dice pool, roll and check for the best one, and roll any Spill dice you might have, and then do that again with the Damage, taking the Damage Level stat of the weapon, adding one for every Added Effect you get, and picking a dice pool, rolling, and checking for spills... and then find that you might not even have scored a hit?

This is the part where you have to imagine me wincing. In fact, I'm wincing again as I read that back through before posting it to RPG.net.

Anyway, as it stands, combat looks like a headache. A migraine, in fact. This isn't taking into account all the complications, of which there are many, ranging from the mundane (complex grappling rules — yay) through to the extreme (the monstrous damage option, which allows certain weapons to deal out damage totals in the hundreds, and which is at least in keeping with the setting).

Anyway. It's only after the combat rules that you get to character creation.

Characters

So character creation depends on a complicated point-buy system. Depending on the power level of the game, you've got between 100 and 500 points to make a character with.

The characters are divided up into the various factions, most powerful first. So, from the most powerful down, you can play:

• an Angelion (belonging to one of the four factions, Dagonheir, Fell Princes, Sybas or Phantomas);
• an Archfiend (a bio-engineered abomination);
• a Rogue Golem (an ancient sentient robot);
• an Awakened Mortal (someone who knows that there was a world before the Angelions turned up, and that it's not really magic);
• an ordinary (or heroic) Mortal;
• a Fellkin (basically a mutant who might, depending on your whim, might resemble any of those odd humanoids in that folklore and fantasy they have there).

The best thing about character creation (which is no brief process) is that its focus moves away from skills and knowledge and stuff and towards more unusual stuff. Your character — even if he's a bog-standard mortal, is special, and has characteristics than make him completely unique. For example, if you choose Wisdom as your main Mastery, you can pick the ability to spot lies, or to create words or symbols of power. The skills and stuff take care of themselves. I like this.

In fact, that's far too mild. I think it's a work of genius, and it's the single best thing to come out of the game system. I think it might have been done before somewhere, but it doesn't matter. Here's it's done well. It's the one mechanic that really fits the setting (as opposed to the others, which are generic, if novel).

As for the character types, themselves, well, the game gives you other options, but you want to play an Angelion, really.

One of the big pitfalls in writing a game single-handed is that any one person is more interested in some setting aspects more than others. I've fallen prey to this. Essentially it means that one kind of character or background element gets your attention a lot more than others, because it's been more thoroughly fleshed out. And it's the one that interests you the most.

And so it is. Fellkin, Awakened, Archfiends and Rogue Golems are all really interesting ideas, but they're pretty much shoved to the side next to Angelions, who, let's face it, are a concept Pierre is really interested in. the very fact that "humans" are called "mortals" (a pet hate of mine) is sort of a pointer to their subordinate place in the setting. The Rogue Golems and the Fellkin are great ideas, especially, but they just don't get as much space, and if you want to play one, you're going always to be playing second fiddle to the Angelions, unless your GM is running a no-Angelions game, and to be honest, I can't see much reason why anyone playing the game would really want to play that kind of a game with this, since the Angelions are one of the things that make the game unique.

But there's a bit of a problem with the Angelions. They are almost wholly unsympathetic. The Dagonheir are faithful to the Kingsway clan, who were, lest we forget, genocidal loons, albeit genocidal loons from whose viewpoint the background text at the start of the book is written. The Fell Princes are nasty and all gribbly and demonic. The Sybas are essentially selfish, and the background text and sample NPCs give examples of them using humans in all sorts of unsavoury ways. The Phantomas could, I suppose, have a Robin Hood thing going on, but they aren't really fleshed out in comparison to the others.

But having said that, ultimately, playing flawed characters is the point, and Pierre never once pretends that they're nice people, or even admirable, which is at least refreshing. I just wish that there was some kind of mechanic to reflect the consequences of a character's behaviour. But that's personal preference creeping in. Many gamers have plenty of fun without such a thing.

The World

As far as the rest of the game goes, characters have plenty of places to go and plenty to do. A metric shedload of flavoursome artefacts and relics precedes a world gazetteer that's full of wild ideas and interesting concepts.

I'd go into it in more detail, but a) necessarily it's all GM stuff and b) this is already a long review and I'd be here all day. Suffice to say that the whole fantasy-that's-really-sci-fi angle is mined in creative and unusual ways, with floaty island kingdoms and ersatz fairy realms and all sorts of inspiring stuff. And Pierre tells you what to do with it, with solid (if not revelatory) gamesmastering advice.

Evaluation

I'm finding this one hard to evaluate.

Let's recap.

• I really, really, really don't like the system. It goes against everything I enjoy in a game, and just reading it gave me visions of wanting to hit one of my players as for the seventeenth time in the session he'd say: “No, wait a minute. If I choose D6s, then my chances are... but on the other hand, I could take D10s and...”

No, thank you. Really, no.

But. As a system, it's robust; on the page at least it works, and it has all the signs of being heavily playtested. People have played this game. People have tinkered with this game and made it work. If you can cope with it, you may find it perfectly serviceable.

• The game is weighted, no matter what Pierre's conscious intentions, towards you playing Angelions, who are fundamentally nasty (or at best amoral) characters. I have nothing against playing nasty characters (I'd be a hypocrite if I said otherwise, given the stuff I've had published) but if I do, I always like to have an in-game kickback that measures what being nasty does to you (or to others), and LSOE doesn't have that.

But again – personal preference. LSOE does have (for want of a better term) an alignment mechanic, and the Masteries serve as both skills and personal backgrounds. It's just... I shrug. It's not as appealing as it could be.

• The world is richly imagined and full of flavour. Even bearing in mind previous considerations, by the time I got to the end of the book, I was thinking that if I didn't find the system so horrible and character creation so unappealing, I'd run this like a shot. Sure, some things have silly names, but — duh — fantasy game. Everything drips flavour and story, and unlike so many fantasy worlds out there, it gives players stuff to do which could completely change it.

• The game's complete as is. There's the promise of supplements at the start of the book that made me go “uh-oh”, but honestly, you can run the game with what you have.

Will you have fun with it? Put it this way:

If you like games that are rules-light and fast to play and set-up, or if you want your character creation to take ten minutes or less, or if you like games that have in-game mechanical consequences for your characters' actions, or if you want to play the goodies, or if you just don't like medieval fantasy settings, even ones that are really SF settings in disguise, move along. There is nothing to see here.

But. If you like complicated systems with lots of rules and numbers; if you like the idea of the pick-your-own dice pool mechanic; if you like bleak-but-wild fantasy or science fantasy settings; if you like number-heavy points-buy character creations, Buy This Game. Go to Eos Publishing's website and order a print copy.

What are you still doing here? Go on. Go now.

I fall into the former category, I'm afraid. I would not play this game. It's not for me. But it may well be for you, and if you're the kind of person for whom it works, get it. I don't think you'll regret it.