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(Note: At a couple points in the review, I mention clash bowley but don't capitalize his name. I decided that since his name appears that way in the book it would be rude not do it the same way in my review. Hopefully, Mr. bowley is not offended at my decision!).
I admit, when I first opened Forward...to Adventure! (FtA!), the high-fantasy game from clash bowley's Flying Mice, Inc., my first thought was “Oh. Another one of those games”. You know the sort of game I'm talking about – the “orc and pie” throwback game to fill the void created as Dungeons and Dragons™ has moved into newer iterations. Most of them do a pretty good job of capturing the old-school feel that many of us remember from the halcyon days of our gaming youth. Not many of them bring something new to the table, though. I was not at all sure that this game would either. As it happens, I was wrong.
Forward...to Adventure! is indeed an old-school throwback. The eponymous author “The RPG Pundit” says as much in the book's forward (which is as entertaining as any I've ever read).
It would be a mistake, though, to toss this game on the pile of similar games as "just another old-school retro clone". FtA! has plenty of wrinkles to keep your attention and make you think before you hurl that fireball or dive into that pile of orcs.
The Basics
One of the things to like about FtA! right at the beginning is that even though it is a complete game in itself, it's not a huge book. Even with magic items, a few extra charts, and a full bestiary, it clocks in at 162 pages, including a well-done character sheet. The binding feels nice and solid and it lays relatively flat on the table. The layout is a simple two-column affair that's easy to read and printed in an easy to read font. Since this is a throwback sort of game, there are plenty of charts. Even those are very easy to read, with alternating grey and white backgrounds for each row of information. The only place I was put off by the way the type was set is in the multi-page chart for equipment. Everything there is center-justified, which makes it a bit tougher to read than it needs to be. It wouldn't have hurt anything if that chart had been left-justified like the others.
I'm not generally a fan of art in my game books, but I like how the illustrator, clash bowley, approached the art in this book. Each chapter is preceded by a full page black and white illustration and there are a few more full-page works scattered throughout the book. The bestiary gets the smaller works and, before you ask, yes there's a tasty little picture for the nymph. Well done, clash! None of the art gets in the way and there's just enough to give you something after reading a few pages of text. I'm not quite sure how bowley got the particular “photograph meets watercolor” look but it might have involved photographs of people at a Renaissance Fair or SCA meeting, and a good bit of nifty work with Photoshop™. You might think that method would produce something horribly amateurish, but bowley has skill and I like the results he got.
The System
The heart of the FtA! system is the d6. For most things, you roll 3d6, add your modifiers, and beat either a difficulty number or the number your opponent got with a similar roll. It's a simple mechanic that's easy to grasp. Onto that basic mechanic, the author has added a couple interesting bells and whistles that make the game different and more exciting than I had expected.
First, each player has two attributes called Active (ACT) and Passive (PAS). You use the ACT number when you are actively using an attribute and the PAS number when you aren't. These numbers are determined by your class, and they do make skill checks more interesting. For instance, a check to see if you hear the footsteps of an approaching creature would use your ACT number if you told the GM you were standing at the door. If you were the thief picking the lock on the chest, you'd use your PAS bonus. This allows the potential for everyone to be involved in a roll and makes sense. I’m not entirely sure if other games have used an approach like this, but I like how it works here.
Second, players can get more bonuses to their skill checks by attempting stunts. Stunts are pretty much what you think they are – trying to do something tougher than normal in order to get a better than normal result. The author leaves stunts largely freeform so that the player can suggest nearly any stunt they can imagine and the GM can decide what that stunt will gain the player and how hard it will be. There is a pretty healthy list of suggestions, though, so if the GM doesn't want to improvise stunts, sticking to the list will provide plenty of interesting things for the players to do.
Third, you have a certain number of Adventure Points, which you can spend to add a d6 to a roll. That's not very different from what you'll find in other games, but it's a nice little thing to have. I admit I find a game a little bit lacking if it doesn't have something like this in it.
The Combat
Combat is different from most throwback games. FtA! uses a phase system and opposed combat rolls (3d6 plus various modifiers, including one for your weapon) to get through the hacking and slashing. But then there’s a twist.
The real good stuff happens when an attack hits. For ranged combat, damage is simple. If you beat your opponent's defense roll, the amount by which you beat the roll is your damage. The defender subtracts armor and that's how much damage is applied.
Melee, on the other hand, is a far more interesting affair. In melee, each individual on each side of the combat makes their rolls and adds the totals together to get one big number. The defenders do likewise. If the attackers have the bigger number, the difference between their roll and the defenders' roll is the damage. The GM then divvies up the damage among the defenders. So, if the attackers get a 100 and the defenders get a 70, the GM gets to divide 30 points among the defenders in any way that makes sense. Sometimes, that means that everyone will get a near-equal portion of the damage. Other times, though, the GM will decide, based on that the players did in that phase of combat, that some players will more in a position to get more damage than others. Say, for instance, the big burley fighter charged in singing a war chant while the others fanned out and moved in a bit more cautiously. The GM could decide that the fighter had attracted more attention from the enemy and so would take more damage.
This means that there's going to have to be a good level of trust between players and GM. The players are going to have to believe that the GM isn't going to focus on them unduly and the GM is going to have to trust that the players aren't going to try to weasel out of their share of the damage if they've earned a little extra attention. On the other hand, this provides all sorts of opportunities to players to move in and out of melee, cover each other's backs, and think of the battlefield as an opportunity to deliver damage and to vary their own exposure to damage. The GM can see this as a way of showing the players who the opponents consider real threats and who they seem to be ignoring. Combat now becomes a more interesting process than the simple back and forth of decreasing health numbers. I have to say I like the concept a lot and I'm very interested to see how it works in play.
The Characters
The author says he wanted a game where you could create characters in five minutes and he accomplished that task pretty easily by using a tried and true method. Making a character is as simple as rolling your attributes and using the bonuses like you would in a d20 system (or divvying up an allotment of bonuses), picking your race, picking your class, determining your alignment, and equipping. You might spend a little extra time picking the skills you want, and players who agonize over choices like this won't get a character made in five minutes, but the rest of us will find it simple and quick. Oh, here are your race and class choices:
Races: Human, Barbarian Human, Elf, Dwarf, Orc, Halfling, Half-Merman Classes: Warrior, Rogue, Wizard, Rogue-Wizard, Warrior-Wizard
Okay, how many of you thought “I want to play a half-merman warrior-wizard”? It’s okay. That’s the first character I built after I finished the character chapter (and it took me about ten minutes, but I was moving pretty slowly to make sure I had everything right). His name is Bblorit and when I get the chance to run the game, I’m fairly sure he’s going to show up as a villain.
Since we are talking about a throwback-type game here, FtA! does have an alignment system, but it’s not quite what you expect. Each character chooses at the outset among Law, Chaos, and Neutrality. Once they’ve chosen, the player rolls d6 and puts that number in their starting alignment. At the end of each session, the player and GM determine which alignment the player hewed to most closely and the player rolls a d6 and adds that number. If at some point a character gains 25 points more in one alignment aspect than in the others, they get a bonus when dealing with other members who are similarly aligned and a penalty when dealing with those of the opposite. If the character reaches 100 points and is at least 25 points ahead of the other two aspects, they may well attract the attention of a god (or however the GM wants to describe it) and find themselves in possession of a special ability as a paragon of that alignment. I like the simplicity of the sliding scale, which makes alignment a relevant part of the character. Of course, the system is such that if you don’t like it, you can toss it out and you won’t break the game.
Character advancement is as simple as character creation. Every time you complete an “adventure”, you advance. Each class has certain things they get every time they advance, which you add to what you already have, just like in the class-based systems with which we are all familiar. What constitutes an adventure is up to the GM, but it seems to me that the normal conventions would apply here. If you’re doing a dungeon crawl, then you advance when you finish crawling. If you have to free a village, you advance when the villagers cheer you and give you a goat in appreciation. Each class has their own particular slate of goodies when they advance and there aren’t any real surprises there.
The Magic
Since FtA! is a high-fantasy throwback game, there is most definitely a magic system here. It’s not fancy, but it is different from what you’d expect and it is the only part of the game about which I'm unsure. Spells are divided up into lists of related spells (Air, Curing, Sensing, etc.). Casting a spell requires a casting check where the difficulty is based on the level of the spell. So far, this isn’t new ground. Ware that casting check, though. While the spell will happen as intended if you’re successful, you’ll take physical damage (d6 plus the level of the spell) if you don’t. If you happen to fumble the casting check, very bad things will happen to you. Casters walk the line of having the awesome power of strange and awesome power at their fingertips and knowing that misusing that power can cost them dearly in internal organs.
I’m not at all sure I like this. It seems to me that as a caster character advances, the attributes they need for their casting check are not going to increase as quickly as the difficulty to cast a moderately powerful spell. That means that the higher-level spells are going to be legitimate risky propositions, with an fair amount of damage being the result of failure. It’s not likely that a caster will die from the damage, unless they’re casting a spell with a level a lot greater than they, but casters will have to be careful with their spells. I’ll need to see this work in play before I make a final decision, but it seems to me that being a caster in FtA! is a dangerous proposition, especially at lower levels (since the spells are not particularly powerful at low levels). Then again, what’s power without risk? Higher level spells do pack a punch and perhaps the pursuit of such power should come with appreciable risk.
Starting spellcasters get the first spell each from the lists they’ve chosen which means that unlike other old-school fantasy games; you get two spells instead of your customary one. Every time you advance, you get another spell. It’s possible to learn from more than the original two lists, but that requires finding a teacher (and spending a skill point when you next advance) or finding a spell book (which will cost you two skill points on your next advancement). That may seem expensive, but Wizards do get the biggest budget of skill points as they advance, so there is some balance there.
The Rundown
On the whole, I liked Forward…to Adventure! From the very first moment you pick up the book and see that illustration of a gate opening up to a bright day, you know that you’re standing on comfortable ground. However, there are enough wrinkles to the game to keep even the most jaded greybeard grumbling over how those kids have to have their fancy Adventure points and what’s with the magic checks and you’d better stay off my yard you hooligans!
You can bag your copy in PDF form for $12.00 or a softcover version from Lulu for $21.80. The price is more than reasonable for a complete game that’s likely to grow on you’re the more time you spend with it.
