So, it comes in a box. And it has really nice maps. I like maps.
But is it any good?
I'll admit it, I bought this game because of the box and the maps. It reminded me of the old Forgotten Realms box that started me on my first DMing experience. But I was also hoping to find a new fantasy RPG. I'd grown tired of DnD and WFRP, my other fantasy staples. I wanted to recreate the simple, fun games I'd had back in the early nineties and Prophecy looked like it might just do the job.
It would be almost a year later before I got a chance to play the game. In the meantime I'd had a chance to read it thoroughly and I quickly noted some pros and cons. I convinced a few of my friends to give it a try, though with reservations from some of them. Actually, they only had one real problem with the game (see the description of the Felinor, below), but decided to give it a chance anyway.
What you get in the box:
A Player Manual, A Game Master Manual and a Continent Superius Reference Manual (essentially the campaign setting book), a Game Master Screen (flimsy, pretty worthless), four 22” x 28” maps and a pair of percentile dice.
The Game:
The players are adventurers - a small group of people who have decided they don’t want to spend the rest of their lives working on a farm or at a trade. They want to hit the big time, see the world, meet new races and steal their stuff. Players can choose from one of four Prime Races: the Comnar (human, more or less), Gelling (Halflings), Nelvan (cross between elves and Vulcans) and the Felinor (umm… I’ll come back to them later. In the ‘cons’ section). The option to play one of the sub-races (humanoid-monster types, think goblins, orcs, etc.) is there, but whether you can play one or not is at the GM’s discretion. Their stats aren’t balanced against the Prime Races and few would fit in well in a city or town.
The players choose a starting profession. Technically, this is supposed to provide the PC with a vague starting point and is not supposed to be a straitjacket for the player. For example, the Warrior profession can be anything from a particularly strong farmer to a professional soldier. Once the game starts, a PC can develop his skills as he chooses, so a warrior could easily start learning stealth or survival skills. However, some of the professions, such as the True Mage or the Alchemist, have such specialised powers that it would be almost impossible for a player to develop them over the course of the game. If you don’t start off as a Mage, becoming one later on is too time-consuming and difficult. Also, the last profession, Vagabond, seems to be a catch-all intended to include anything not covered by one of the others. Personally, I think the professions could have been left out of the game altogether. The non-magic-using ones have very little influence on character creation and none on character advancement. There isn’t really anything to stop a Woodsman from starting off with the same skills as a Warrior, then focusing on skills commonly taken by a Skulker.
The game uses a percentile system. Attributes (such as Strength, Agility, Endurance) typically start off at about 50. Players then choose a number of skills and roll a d10 for each, adding it to the relevant attribute to get their skill level. Each skill has a default penalty (usually -10 to -20); if a PC lacks the skill then they can still attempt it, at the relevant attribute minus the default. However, if the GM decides that another skill the PC has is similar, he may choose to allow him to apply the default penalty against that instead. For example, a player needs to make a Survival: Plains test. Because he lacks the skill, he would usually roll against his Intellect (50) -15. However, the GM decides to allow him to roll Naturalist skill (60) -15 instead, as the skill is similar. Once you start to use a skill, it is added to your character sheet and you can choose to improve it with xp. So, after this test, the PC would add Survival: Plains (45) to his character sheet.
There are three types of magic-user in the game: Alchemists, Artifact Mages and True Mages. Anyone can be an Alchemist or an Artifact Mage, but very few people can be a True Mage. This is actually reflected in character creation. Comnar can’t be True Mages at all. A Gelling character only has a 1% chance of being able to wield True Magic, a Nelvan 10%. All Felinor can use it. This is something that may irritate some players, especially if they want to play a ‘wizard’ character, but don’t want to be a Felinor. A kind GM might allow someone to play a Nelvan or Gelling True Mage without rolling, but otherwise they will have to use one of the other two magical professions.
True Magic seems fairly simple. The powers are divided up into Spell Chains. In order to be able to cast a spell, you must have all of the prerequisite spells in its chain. For example, before you can learn to cast Apathy, you need to be able to cast Sleep. Before you can know Sleep, you need to know the Calm spell (which has no prerequisites). So the spell chain is Calm > Sleep > Apathy. Each spell also has a Stage (level); the higher the stage, the more difficult it is to learn and use. As you go up a chain, the stages usually become higher. So, a True Mage could focus on learning lots of low stage spells, or else concentrate on one chain, learning fewer, more potent spells. A starting Mage would probably be able to learn 6 stages’ worth of spells (for example, 6 stage 1 spells, or 3 spells along one chain - a stage 1, 2 and 3). For ease of reference, each spell lists both its stage and the number of total stages needed to reach it (Convulsion, for example, is listed as Stage 4 (7), because it is in a 1 > 2 > 4 chain).
Artifact Mages are people who have chosen to use magic items to gain access to magic. All races can do this, though the practice is frowned upon, especially amongst the Comnar. A magic item does not need a spell’s prerequisites. This means that an Artifact Mage will probably be able to cast a single powerful spell, instead of the more versatile, but less powerful selection available to a True Mage. In order to gain access to more spells, the Artifact Mage needs to collect more magic items (not an easy task), or convince a True Mage to create them for him (probably even more difficult).
Alchemists use the magical properties of some ingredients, known as reagents, to create potent mixtures. 15 reagents are described in the setting book, including details on where they can be found and what powers each has when used on its own. There are also 47 mixtures presented. These are combinations of reagents (and other substances) that can be used to create magical objects, such as a healing balm or a poisonous clay sculpture that will kill the first person to touch it. Acquiring reagents and learning how to make mixtures are an important focus for Alchemists (and a perfect source for adventures).
Almost all actions in the game are made against a skill or an attribute. Every time someone passes a skill check, they place a tick against that skill. Once the ticks against that skill exceed the skill level, the ticks are removed and the skill goes up by one. For example, someone with a Sword Skill of 50 gains 51 ticks. The skill goes up to 51 and the ticks go down to 0. Once another 52 to ticks are accumulated, the skill will go up to 52. This would be a slow and arbitrary xp system, if it wasn't for down time. Time spent training during down time gives the PC additional ticks to spend on skills or attributes, allowing him to focus on those abilities he wants to increase, without having to use them repeatedly during game time.
PROS
Game philosophy: Prophecy seeks to create a realistic fantasy setting, but without the gloomy grittiness of games like WFRP. The players can raid dungeons, kill monsters and loot everything in sight, but emphasis is placed on realistic dungeon design, monster ecology and treasure placement. The Game Master Manual emphasises that dungeons should exist for plausible reasons. If there are monsters inside it, their presence should make sense - why are they there? Where do they get their food? Is there enough room in the dungeon for all of them? There is no magical handwavium in this game. If there is treasure, it should be appropriate. Very little of the loot in the game takes the form of gold and gems. Taking equipment from fallen foes or stripping animals of their saleable hides, claws, teeth, etc., are more common. Finding a decent sword or stripping a suit of leather armour from a foe are perfect examples of the kinds of treasure starting PCs can expect to find. Altogether, this creates a coherent, believable world.
The xp system: My players quite liked the xp system. The fact that you improve your skills as you use them makes sense and provides an extra sense of accomplishment every time you pass a test, while the down time xp allows you to control the advancement of your character. Remembering to add a ticks mid-game takes some getting used to, but I haven’t met a player yet who wouldn’t go the extra mile for a point of xp.
The setting: Prophecy has a rich setting, with numerous different countries and wild regions for you to introduce your players to. The continent of Superius has a completely original ecology - none of the animals of our world are present, but instead it is inhabited by a menagerie of weird, wonderful and often horrible animals and monsters. The bestiary gives some details on the natural role and habitat of these creatures and what spoils an adventurer could expect to get from them. There are plenty of secret societies, faiths and factions for the PCs to be opposed against (or members of).
The maps: They are pretty. I like maps, ‘nuff said.
CONS:
The layout. The declared reason for selling the game in a box was to allow them to split the rulebook into three separate books, the Player Manual, the Game Master Manual and the setting book, Continent Superius. The Player Manual should have all the information a player will need for his character. Unfortunately, this is not the case. A lot of useful information on the PC races is in the Continent Superius book, in the bestiary section. The spells and most of the rules for alchemy are also in the Continent Superius book. The GM Manual mostly contains advice on running a game along with rules for armour and weapons and certain aspects of the combat system. Note: I said certain aspects of the combat system, not all of them. For some reason, about half the rules for combat are in the Player Manual. What’s more, much of the other half of the combat rules are scattered throughout the GM Manual, in the weapons and armour section. An example of a combat scene, from start to finish, would have been useful.
Starting funds: The default number of kallets (gold pieces) the players start out with is very small. I was nice to my players and allowed the two characters with the Bowcraft and Fletching skills to start off with a free bow and some arrows that they had made themselves. The other characters had to carefully choose whether they wanted a rusty short sword or some armour in the case of the Skulker, or a rusty short sword or a selection of alchemical reagents in the case of the group’s Alchemist (she eventually chose the sword, meaning that the Alchemist couldn‘t actually perform any alchemy). One of my players has been attacking enemies with a spade. Now, I understand the intent behind this. The players are supposed to start with nothing, giving them something of a ‘farm boy’ feel. But it both severely restricts the viable character concepts they can use (“Yes, I’m an ex-mercenary, though it might be hard to tell because I don’t have any armour and am armed with a dagger…”) and the type of adventures they can go on (“If we kill 500 more rats for the city council, we should be able to afford some leather armour! Yippee!”). This is especially true because of the harshness of the combat system: armour is really required if the PCs are to survive very long. GMs who want to give their players a bit more flexibility and survivability would be advised to double the number of starting kallets.
The Combat system: After playing one session of Prophecy, I set about completely changing the combat system, as I found the Prophecy system to be completely unworkable. Combat is split into one-second rounds and tries to reflect every aspect of combat realistically. Unfortunately, this results in a fairly slow and frustrating game. The biggest problem is the ‘Ready’ rule. Essentially, after swinging a sword or firing an arrow, a weapon must be readied - that is, you need to recover from your swing or reload your bow, etc. Slow, heavy weapons take longer to ready than light, fast ones. While you are readying, you are vulnerable to attack, as your weapon is out of position to parry. This means that for every round a PC makes an action, he can expect to spend one or more rounds not doing anything except take hits. Highly skilled characters can reduce the amount of time required to ready, but this just makes the game more frustrating for other players. Keeping track of readying is a nightmare if you have even a handful of NPC antagonists.
For example, in the first fight my players faced, they fought a number of drexin (essentially goblins). The drexin arrived on the scene at a rate of about 3 every round. Their attacks had a ready time of 3 (so after making an attack (1 round), they wouldn’t get to attack again for 3 seconds/rounds. Two of the PCs were armed with bows (ready 4), two were armed with short swords (ready 1 and 0 for the skilled swordsman) while the fifth decided to stay out of the fight (wise, as she was the one armed with a spade, which I decided would have ready 2). On the first round, all the PCs attacked, as did the 3 drexin. The next round, one of the PCs was able to attack, while the rest were readying. The first 3 drexin were still readying, but the next 3 could attack. The PC who could attack struck at a readying drexin as he was vulnerable, and the new drexin were able to attack the readying PCs, who were also open. The next round, two of the PCs were able to attack, 3 new drexin could attack while the others could not (though the survivors from the first round were closer to being ready than the later arrivals) and the two archer PCs were still trying to reload…
At this point, keeping track of which drexin would be able to attack in which round started giving me a headache and half the players were starting to look really bored. The game suffers from a variation of the ‘multiple actions’ problem which is seen in some other games, but which most modern games have learnt to avoid. Giving some players more actions than others focuses too much time on them at the expense of the rest of the group. In my opinion, this combined with the book-keeping required to note who would be ready when makes for an unplayable combat system.
The damage system also needs work. Prophecy actually provides a number of optional damage systems, none of which seem to work very well. The ‘simple’ option is a basic hit point system - the PCs take a certain amount of damage, then die. This is quite deadly, as both PCs and NPCs end up battling to the death. The more complex system involves hit location charts and a complicated damage system that is difficult to keep track of (each location has a maximum damage it can take, being damaged results in penalties to certain actions but not others, etc., etc.). This system is less deadly, as an opponent is more likely to be incapacitated before he is killed, but requires a lot more book-keeping. There are special rules for damage to armour, head blows and stuns, crippling wounds, excess damage, carry-through damage, bleeding (including rate and duration of blood loss and a blood loss cap) and shock. This may all be very realistic, but it slows combat down to a snail’s pace.
The holes in the game: Scattered throughout the game are inconsistencies and omissions in the rules. For example, some weapons are better at punching through armour than others. This is reflected by their having a higher damage rating against armoured targets. However, this can mean that they will actually do more damage to a lightly armoured opponent than an unarmoured one. Another issue is the difference between skilled and unskilled tests. Some skill tests have higher penalties when attempted by an unskilled PC (for example, someone trying to fight with a weapon in each hand fights with a -10 and -20 penalties to his two attacks, but this is reduced to - 5 and -10 respectively if he has the Dual Weapons skill). However, as soon as someone tries a skill, they can add it to their skill list and they no longer count as unskilled. Another potential problem is the down time xp advancement. A player adds ticks to either skills or attributes during down time. However, unless he has an instructor in a skill, the number of ticks you can add to either skills or attributes is the same. Bringing up an attribute brings up all the skills that use that attribute, so clearly you are better off increasing attributes over skills. Most of these problems can be fixed easily by tweaking the rules, but they shouldn’t really be there in the first place.
CATS: The Charts and Tables Section (CATS) at the end of the Player Manual is a collection of all of the charts and tables you should need for the game. Unfortunately, a lot of them aren’t really explained, or even mentioned at all, throughout the books. What’s more, the CATS are the only place you can find these tables. If, for example, you are looking up the rules for weapons, you will be referred to the CATS for individual weapon stats. This results in a lot of flipping back and forth, as you try to comprehend what the rules are telling you with examples from the CATS. The rulebooks don’t actually tell you what page of the CATS the table you are looking for is on, which also doesn’t help.
The Felinor: I’ve left the worst till last. The Felinor are one of the four Prime Races, the most magically accomplished of the races. Only 10,000 of them still survive; the majority of their people were wiped out in a terrible war. So, what is so bad about them?
They are cat girls. Stunningly beautiful cat girls who give off pheromones. They all feel a religious obligation to dress nicely (but conservatively, something which is rarely depicted in the artwork). They are incapable of feeling any kind of attraction towards anyone but their ‘soul mate’. Once they find their soul mate (who must be a virgin) they create a soul bond with him. A Felinor will die if her soul mate leaves her, sleeps with anyone else or dies himself.
Right.
I wasn’t sure if my reaction to the Felinor (which was not entirely positive) was fair, but to me they seemed like a clumsy attempt to create a race that would appeal to female gamers, made by someone who had a poor grasp of what female gamers actually like. So I asked three of my female friends to read the Felinor section. Each of them read it separately, yet their reactions were almost exactly the same - confusion, laughter, groans and general derision. The section on the (very rare) male Felinor was even worse. Trained to be warriors and to defend the womenfolk, he has to live with the fact that almost any female Felinor would die to protect him, as he is vital to the survival of their race. One of my friends described the two genders as something that might be found in fan fiction written by a twelve-year-old girl. What’s most irritating about the Felinor is that they are completely unnecessary. They could be completely dropped from the setting if it wasn’t for one fact - they are the only race who can use True Magic 100% of the time. This means that, unless you change one or more of the other races, the Felinor are the only race you can be if you want to be sure you can play a True Mage. Of course, if the Felinor annoy your GM as much as they do me, he would probably be amenable to letting you play a Nelvan Mage without having to roll for it, if only to keep the hawt virgin cat girls who like to cook (did I forget to mention that earlier?) out of his game.
To sum up: The Prophecy system is riddled with holes and the combat system is unplayable, but my players enjoyed the setting enough to convince me to keep running it, though I’m going to have to create my own combat system from scratch. I love the setting (especially the bestiary), with the exception of the Felinor. I really think that both the system and the setting have real potential, but the game really needs to be rewritten to take advantage of that. The layout of the books is awful, though apparently the stand-alone Player’s Manual now available solves some of that. Prophecy could make a good alternative to DnD and if they ever release a new edition, I’ll probably give it a look. As it is, I’ll essentially be using a homebrew system with the setting.
I give it a 2 for style - the layout and rules need work, but I liked the artwork and loved the art. For Substance, I'm giving it a 3. It lost a point or two for the Felinor alone.
