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The car mechanic at the end of the block is really a musclebound dwarf. His assistant is a craft-wise gnome. One of the college dropouts at the bar is a powerful wizard, trawling for guardians and apprentices between drinks. He's just recruited the woman at the stool next to him. She decided it was better to be a Legendary hero than a network administrator.
AEternal Legends (AEL) is a game of modern urban fantasy, where heroes (Legends) have adventures and perform great deeds in a fantastic world hidden from the eyes of the mundane population. While other games have staked out this territory before, most have emphasized horror over fantasy, such as with White Wolf’s World of Darkness. AEL is first and foremost a fantasy game, and high fantasy at that; it's a game about earnestly accepting and embracing the genre, rather than ironically deconstructing or questioning it.
AEL is the creation of two White Wolf freelance stalwarts, Stewart Wilson (setting) and Malcolm Sheppard (rules), and published through Malcolm's Mob United Media operation. It's a very professional work, as you'd imagine, but it doesn't feel like a White Wolf game. Largely that's because it's designed as a 'high trust' game, where GMs and players work together to interpret broad rules and ideas to make the best possible game – a very different approach to WW's more detailed and defined rules & settings.
(Here's a disclaimer, in case it matters – I know both Malcolm Sheppard and Stewart Wilson through my freelance work for White Wolf, and Stewart asked me to review AEL after giving me a free copy of the PDF. So I'm probably not a 100% unbiased & objective reviewer – but I think I'm close enough.)
Physically, AEL is a 158-page PDF (there's a POD version as well, but I'm reviewing the PDF). It's a clean, uncluttered, landscape-format file, designed to fit the screen of your PC or laptop; single column text with occasional sidebars. There's a small amount of black-and-white art, most of it full-page chapter openers with some extra pics for races, creatures and items towards the end of the book; artist Chris Huth's work is good quality, somewhat reminiscent of Geof Darrow's material. It's a straightforward, professional-looking book, marred by a number of widows and orphans that probably won't matter to many readers but that annoy me far more than they really should; things like a large-font header being at the bottom of one page and the text following on the next, that sort of thing. None of this prevents the book from being readable, but it should have been tightened up before publication.
Setting
The setting of AEL is drawn in broad strokes rather than specific details, as you might expect from a 'high-trust' game; this is a toolkit for creating your own urban fantasy campaign, rather than a detailed plug-and-play world. That said, there are baseline assumptions and details to the setting, and AEL spells those out in full.
As with any fantasy game, magic is real – and in this case, it's a power born from self-belief, from knowing who you are and having the conviction to make impose that knowledge on the world. It can't be understood scientifically, although it doesn't negate science or technology; it’s a power of will and passion, an mythic art that can only be practiced by those who perceive it and summon up that strength within themselves. There are two sides to magic, the Light and the Dark, as you'd expect in a classical fantasy world, but those sides aren't really about morality; they're about the way individuals approach magic and their own beliefs. The Light is the path of discipline, idealism and meaning; the Dark is the path of immediate gratification, cynicism and the denial of meaning. In a world of monsters and Dark Lords, that's an interesting take that feels personal and character-focused, an internal rather than external dichotomy.
There are two kinds of people in the world – the Unaware, or mundane humans in the mundane world, and the Aware, those who know that magic exists and can see its effects throughout the world. About 5% of people are Aware, a huge proportion of the population, and magic is an ever-present part of their lives.
Think about the ramifications of that 1-in-20 idea for a moment. If there are 20 people in your extended family, one of them is probably Aware; maybe your eccentric aunt actually enchants her paintings with glamour and sells them to elven aesthetes. If you work in an office of 100 people, you likely have five Aware colleagues, working together on some magical project – or warring for control over the dungeon hidden under the office's headquarters. And all of these Aware live in two societies – the mundane world of the Unaware, and the hidden magical society, half modern and half D&D-fantasy-medieval, of the local Aware community. The notion that 5% of us are actually part of a parallel fantasy society is an exciting one, and something that really separates AEL from other 'hidden fantasy' games. It makes that society large and vibrant, filled with people and yet somehow kept apart from the mundane world.
How is it kept apart? Partially because the Unaware can't perceive magic, since they lack passion and conviction, but mostly because it just is – because that's the premise of the game, and part of the 'high-trust' stance of the game is the belief that players should embrace the premise and explore it, rather than trying to break or damage it. That's not going to suit every player or group, but others will find it more than enough and stay focused on their fantastic adventures.
Aware society is different from place to place, a local phenomenon that creates itself from scratch in every city and town. There's a vague worldwide Aware community, sometimes known as the Secret Commonwealth, but it's more a loose network of alliances and information than a real government. There’s also the Ministry of Administrative Affairs, a particularly obscure and boring department of many mundane governments, that in truth is controlled by the Aware and dedicated to looking after Aware concerns – but again, it's more a story device for covering up magic and handing out plot hooks than a real society.
While some local Aware communities simply hide behind closed doors, most are based around and inside an Interstice, or Pocket Kingdom – a pinched-off piece of reality, separate from the mundane world, where magic expresses itself freely. Interstices are common, and four example Pocket Kingdoms are briefly described; my favourite is Waydowntown, the goblin market beneath Toronto, where Rail Clans fight gang wars from secret subway stations.
Finally, there are multiple races, or Clades, in addition to humans. Many Aware folk were born human, but realized their true nature upon becoming Aware, while folk born within an Interstice are born as their true selves. There are three non-human Clades, but they manifest different forms and natures depending on whether they follow the Light or the Dark – Elves can become Orcs, Dwarves can become Trolls, and Gnomes can become Goblins. All of these Clades resemble the usual stereotypes to an extent, but they all have significant points of difference too, making for a fresh and engaging mix. Only humans have the same nature whether they follow the Light or the Dark, and they appear the same no matter what they believe.
Legends
PCs and major NPCs are Legends, the heroes, villains and adventurers of the Aware - remarkable individuals who gain great power and destiny through their exceptional conviction. Legends live technicolour, maximum volume lives; they slay dragons, plunder dungeons, battle Dark Lords and generally leave the mundane world in their dust. Like the Solars of Exalted (although less powerful), Legends are characters that demand epic adventures just by existing, and players that want low-key, Average Joe characters might be overwhelmed or turned off by this; such players may find 'ordinary' Aware characters more to their liking.
I think that would be a shame, though, because the really interesting thing about Legends isn't their power level, it’s how that power comes from, and is expressed through, their beliefs and their self-image. In a world where magic is born through self-belief, Legends epitomise that power, and in playing one you decide what her beliefs are and then enforce those beliefs on the world around her. That's fascinating stuff in my eyes, a way of making internal truths external reality; that’s what fantasy is (or should be) all about, and AEL puts that idea into play with remarkable speed and ease.
To fully realize their self-belief, Legends seek to fulfil primal archetypes, or Spheres. These are something like the factions or social splats of other games, although they’re more metaphysical than actual. There are six Spheres, encompassing ideas such as Strength (fighting for a just cause) or Victory (emotion and expression); Darkside Legends follow broken versions of these archetypes. A Legend may fulfil several Spheres over her lifetime, and in doing so may become an exemplar who embodies higher, even more powerful Spheres – but only after overcoming many obstacles, both physical and metaphysical, including a battle with the Dark Lord Da'ath. These concepts are all based on Kabbalah, or esoteric Jewish mysticism, and it's an interesting choice for the game; it's a very specific take on archetypes for a broad-strokes game, but it works very well.
Character Creation
The first half of the book describes the various ideas of AEL, such as Legends, Spheres and Aware society; Chapter Four brings us into character creation and making Legend PCs. Character creation is a semi-freeform process, with characters defined by a mix of fixed and player-defined traits. It's a moderately detailed system; not quite as complex as that of White Wolf, but more so than that of the typical 'indie' game. The process goes like this:
1 - Divide points between four Attributes: Mind, Body, Presence and Ethos (self-knowledge), which range from 1 (weak) to 5 (human maximum). You also define an Edge and Flaw for the character, and marry them to appropriate Attributes – so your character may be Strong (Body) but Stubborn (Mind).
2 - From those Attributes, you determine values for secondary Traits: Health, Wits, Will, Conviction and Magic. With the exception of Health, these are spendable pools of points that are used to gain benefits, alter dice pools or use powers and spells in play.
3 - Next, define two Aptitudes for the character - broad umbrella abilities such as Cop, Academic, Journalist or Witch - and divide four points between them. There's a decent list of examples provided. You define one narrow skill/specialty linked to an Aptitude, such as Rifle for your Soldier Aptitude, and one Attribute Aptitude combination as a specific Expertise (eg duelling or dancing) for additional benefits.
4 - Define a number of Beliefs equal to the character's Ethos score. These are the core beliefs that pin down the character's identity, generally expressed as short sentences (eg 'death before dishonour', 'no such thing as a free lunch' etc). As well as pinning down the character's personality, you can gain benefits in play by following Beliefs and being true to yourself.
5 - At this point you pick the character's Clade and Sphere. Each Clade provides additional benefits, along with major and minor Legend powers; you also gain bonuses from the Sphere, such as extra dice for appropriate actions. These choices come quite late in the character creation process, and I expect that most players are going to decide on these details much earlier.
6 - Finally, you determine a Social Class rating based on background and Aptitudes, and an associated Revenue rating to represent money and equipment. These traits feel tacked on to me, unnecessary elements that don't play much part in the surrounding rules and systems. They work, sure, but they don't seem all that important.
There's a fair bit there, and it has to be said that the creation process isn't as clear or easy as it could be. Due to the way information is laid out in the book (I'll say more on this later) you have to do quite a bit of page-flipping/clicking to get the Clade info from Chapter 2, the Sphere info in Chapter 3, and the full rules in Chapter 5 to make sense of the whole process. A summary/cheatsheet would be really useful here.
Rules
Now that you have a character, the next step is working out what all the numbers mean and how to use them in play. AEL uses the 'Ready 2 Run' (R2R) system; it's a reasonably straightforward dice-pool system that, once again, is predicated on being a 'high-trust' system where GMs are expected to make rulings based on broad rules. For all that, the rules chapter uses some very precise and dry language, with terms like 'meta-synergies' being thrown about; that's not bad, not at all, but I don't know if it's a perfect match for the fast-and-loose ethos being described.
The basic mechanic in R2R is quite simple - successful dice from a pool are totalled to meet a target number (or Threshold). When your character does something, you form a pool of d6s equal to the appropriate Attribute Aptitude (if any), along with any bonus dice from skills, edges, circumstances and so on. If you have multiple applicable Aptitudes, you pick the highest and add an extra dice; if you have a rating in an appropriate Sphere, you add that to the pool too. Roll the dice and add up the value of each dice that comes up 1 or 2, while ignoring the rest – so if you roll 1, 2, 2, 4 and 6, your total would be 1 2 2 = 5. If that equals the task's Threshold (Simple = 1, Heroic = 11), you succeed.
There are some extra complications to the system, of course. Opposed rolls involve comparing the results of each characters' roll; extended tasks require the accumulation of successes over time. Some traits might succeed on 1-3, while others only succeed on 1s (although it’s unclear how many traits may use such rules). Cooperating with other characters may grant bonuses, and you can spend your Will points for extra dice; the GM is also encouraged to provide bonuses for circumstances or actions that seem particularly appropriate to the narrative.
How does this work in play? I have to confess I haven't had a chance to properly try it out. It's an interesting mechanic, since you need both successes on the dice roll and a strong enough total to succeed. Statistically, a single dice is worth half a success point ([1 2 0 0 0 0]/6 = 0.5), so you'd expect a total equal to half your dice pool when rolling. Since a Standard task is Threshold 3, characters need six dice in their Attribute-Aptitude pool to succeed reliably at ordinary tasks - which seems high, as a freshly created PCs may have that for only one focused area of expertise. Harder tasks will be much tougher, and getting bonuses from Spheres, Beliefs, circumstances etc. will be a key part of successful play. That ties in well with the themes of the game and makes for interesting gameplay; as a GM, though, I'd want to be careful that I didn't overload players with difficult situations that drained away their bonus resources too early.
Combat gets its own specialized subsystems, as usual for most RPGs, and that's a valid decision in a heroic fantasy game; if you're going to spend a significant amount of time beating up a Dark Lord and his minions, you want those fights to be fun and engaging. The combat system is relatively complex, compared to the rest of the rules, with a tactical blow-by-blow style. Characters spend points each round from their Wits pool to attack, defend or take other actions. Your Wits pool refreshes every round, but you need to keep spending points to do anything; you can also spend Will points for bonuses and defence, but these don’t refresh until the next day or session. Attacking an enemy involves either Body (melee) or Mind (ranged) plus an appropriate Aptitude and bonuses; weapons give both a bonus and determine what kind of damage is inflicted. Defence is based on Body or an Aptitude (not both), which can be enhanced with Wits or Will, and is subtracted from the attacker's pool; however, the rules don't state what Threshold the modified roll must meet. I'm assuming it's 1, but it needs to be spelt out.
As mentioned, different weapons inflict different kinds of damage, and this is a particularly complex part of the system. There are three kinds of damage – Stun, Wound and Mortal – and characters have a set of wound boxes for each type, based on their Health trait. Moreover, these aren't simple linear tracks of boxes, but stacks like stepped pyramids or triangles; the leftmost column has boxes equal to your Health, the next one less, and so on until the last track has just one box. When you take damage from an attack, you mark off boxes in the first empty column; if that track has even one box filled, you shift across to the next one. If you take more points of damage than can fit into that column, you upgrade the damage to the next type and move to the next pyramid. For instance, if you take 7 points of Stun damage, but can only fit 4 points into the leftmost column, the remaining 3 points become Wound damage; if you can only fit 2 points into that track, the last point becomes Mortal damage. If every column in every track has a box filled, your character dies; when they heal, you erase a box from each column after an appropriate length of downtime.
While the rules don't involve miniatures or tactical movement, they're nonetheless quite complex; it's not a D&D/d20 level of detail, but it's a bit of a major leap over what came before. Resource management is very important, as players decide how much of their Wits pool to devote to attack and to defence, and search for ways to gain extra dice to mitigate those decisions – performing stunts, using special abilities, or going for dramatically interesting actions to gain a narrative bonus for the GM. Not every player likes this level of complexity, especially in a game that allows broader, simpler actions outside of combat; I think it looks interesting and playable, but I can see others being turned off. And I must admit I'm a bit alienated by the damage track system; I'd have preferred something simpler that didn't involve three separate pyramids of boxes taking up a chunk of my character sheet, and didn't slow down play with constant checking and recording. I could be wrong, and I'd like to give it a go in play, but I think it goes over the threshold of complexity and detail that AEL had presented thus far.
The rules chapter ends with a section on vehicles, focusing on chases and vehicular combat. Again, it's a more complex subsystem than the basic rules, but it's good if you want to focus on those things in game; it's overly detailed for my tastes, but not to the point where I'd shy away from trying it out.
Magic
As befits a fantasy game, magic gets a chapter all to itself, just after the rules & systems chapter.
There are two kinds of pre-defined magic Aptitudes. First is Magecraft, which is traditional spellcasting. A character with the Magecraft Aptitude knows a specific Domain of magic (eg fire, travel, luck etc) that's defined by the player. Mages can cast pre-learned spells, or make up appropriate effects and cast them on the fly; either way, spells are defined using a relatively simple framework that determines the effects, power and how many Magic points the spell costs to cast. Learned spells are usually cheaper/easier to cast, but they cost XP to learn, and you can only start play knowing one by choosing it as your single defined skill. A few sample spells are provided, but not that many. (It's possible for non-mages to cast spells too, but only pre-defined ones bought with XP, and since they don't have an applicable Aptitude their dice pool for casting will be pretty small.)
The other magical Aptitude is Enchantment, the art of making magic items. It's pretty straightforward, requiring time (days rather than hours), energy (Magic points), and sometimes materials (for particularly potent items); once again, a simple framework lets players define the effects and then determines the cost and difficulty for creating the item. Complex/technological items are harder to enchant than simple items, which is in keeping with the game's themes and feel; you're more likely to see a traditional magic sword than an enchanted laptop or pistol, although such things aren't impossible to make.
At first glance, the magic rules are more complex and detailed than many other elements of the system, although not as much as the combat system. The frameworks for determining a spell's effects or item's powers and costs aren't super-detailed, but they require agreement from the GM and players over what constitutes a 'major' or 'minor' effect. That’s part and parcel of the 'high-trust' ethos, of course – but still, I'd want to have some experience with the game before I played a mage character.
GMing Chapter
If it wouldn't be in the movie of your game, don't waste time on it. Nobody stabs a Legend while he's sitting on the toilet unless there's a tangled web of evil behind the assassin. Lunch is a chance to start an adventure.
The last chapter of AEL is about running the game. It's brief, but has a good mix of specific and general GM advice, with a focus on bringing out the game's themes and motifs in play. As I mentioned earlier, AEL is about embracing the ideas of classic fantasy, rather than questioning them; modernizing them but not deconstructing them. The chapter offers three rules for GMs – Keep an Open Mind; Success Requires Struggle; Don't Be Boring. I like these; they embody an attitude that focuses on fun, excitement and challenge, rather than getting bogged down in unimportant details.
Next is a section on antagonists, with advice on using the Unaware, Aware, other Legends and monsters as opponents. There are stats for a smattering of fantasy creatures (chimera, manticore, hydra, dragon), but most creatures only exist in Interstices, as they lose their supernatural powers in the Unaware world. The chapter closes with three plot ideas (rescuing a prince, slaying a dragon, fighting a Dark Lord's forces) that could be used for a stand-alone story or as part of a campaign. Oh, and there's a character sheet, but it's not as helpful as I'd like. The Attributes and figured Traits get plenty of space, but Aptitudes, Beliefs and Spheres get significantly less. There's also no space for the Social Class and Revenue traits (reinforcing my feeling that these were tacked-on), and a box for 'Circle' which isn't a trait in the game. And yes, the wound tracks take up way too much space.
Conclusions
AEternal Legends is a terrific game, no question about it. While sparse, the setting generates ideas constantly; I kept thinking of ways in which Aware society might operate in my home city, or in the tiny mining town where I grew up. Legends are a compelling character type, and the Spheres provide a strong structure for their motivations and methods, whether Light or Dark, PC or NPC. The rules have a clear, straightforward and intuitive basis that looks robust enough to carry most kinds of action, and while I find combat to be more complicated than I'd like, it's still workable and could easily be simplified if necessary.
More than anything, I like the fundamental ethos of accepting and building on fantasy tropes, rather than denying them; of jumping headlong into fantastic adventure against a modern backdrop, rather than using the modern setting as a way of making the fantastic mundane. I also like the central conceit that magic is about conviction and self-belief, and that Legends live passionate lives of adventure because that's what makes them legendary in the first place. That's the element of fantasy that really speaks to me in myths and novels, but it's something that can be remarkably hard to capture in roleplaying. AEL inspires me in ways that D&D doesn't, for all that I enjoy my D&D games; it inspires me to think about magic as myth and passion, and ways to communicate that passion to my players.
However, that brings me to one of the problems I have with AEL – that all too often it inspires but doesn't give direction. The broad-strokes approach suggests but does not state, and sometimes I find myself wishing for something a bit more solid, something with a clear direction; something that did more of the work for me. What I would dearly love to see is a supplement (or even a web enhancement) that provides a campaign structure – a Pocket Kingdom complete with neighbourhoods, factions, fully-statted NPCs, story arcs and plot hooks. Something like that would fill the conceptual gap that I kept finding as I read AEL, the gap between idea and concrete realization.
The other problem I have with AEL is one of structure and development. I mentioned the layout issues earlier, which are minor. More problematic is the tendency to introduce rules and concepts without context, and without providing an easy way to find those rules again. While the full system appears in chapter 5, rules appear in isolation earlier in the book. The rules for Legends breaking into Interstices are in chapter 1, the powers for Clades in chapter 2, the rules for spending Conviction and for Sphere benefits in chapter 3 – and all before you know what these rules mean, and without any guideline for finding those rules again when you need them. An index and bookmarks would go some way to rectifying this, I suppose, but what I'd really like to see is a revised printing that consolidated those systems, along with reference guides for character creation and tightening of the layout issues.
In the end, though, these are relatively minor concerns; they make AEL a little more difficult to read as a book, but they don't affect the way the game plays. And that's the exciting part, that's the part that keeps us coming back, and that's the lightning that Wilson and Sheppard have caught in the bottle. AEL is a fantastic, action-packed, emotionally satisfying game to play; I'm keen to get a group going, and I recommend it without hesitation to anyone wanting an urban fantasy RPG.
