Before we begin some full disclosure:
First, I got this copy for free. I figured the least I could do is give them a review of their product. I don’t think this has affected my judgment too greatly.
Second, I will always give a review if you give me a free game (hint hint, nudge nudge…)
Third, as I am both married and working a job with ‘manager’ in its title, I have played none of this.
IN WHICH WE BEGIN THE REVIEW
I love designer notes. They let me know what exactly the designer was, you know, thinking when they made the game. Why did you put Cyclops as a player race in a political game set on a steam-powered spaceship? Why is “fungus beer brewing” so vital and so expensive a skill? It is designer notes that can let me understand their thought process, which will let me get into the proper mindset—or maybe not argue as much with a game while I’m reading it.
I got Realm Antique after discussing Napoleonic games in these very forums. If I had just skimmed through it, I think I would assume it was merely a game—nothing truly shocking, nothing amazingly new. However, it was thanks to the first few opening pages that I understood what Realm Antique was, why it made the choices it did, and why it is a good game in its own way. Don’t get me wrong—it’s a fun game. It just wasn’t the game I was expecting…
What is this secret? Well, I’ll follow tricks from every summer paperback and not tell you until the very end. Mu. Mu hah ha…
WHAT IS REALM ANTIQUE?
Realm Antique is a game set in a world (remarkably) similar to our own, but set in the Napoleonic era. In essence, the 18th and early 19th centuries—a time of sailing ships, cannon broadsides, duels and flintlocks. In short, a great time for gaming. There’s adventure, politics, danger, and intrigue. Added onto this is a sense of some minor fantastic elements—airships being the most obvious. However, the game does leave open the fact that the world is unexplored, and there’s plenty of wiggle room for a GM to introduce their own options.
The game has a vibe similar to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which considering their both in a similar era should be too surprising. However, this doesn’t have quite as lethal or dirty of a world. Yes, there’s poor people and war, but some people are actually clean and well-dressed, and no one has yet to sprout tentacles. Again though—I point to wiggle room…
THE BASICS
Character Creation is fairly simple, and something we’ve all seen before. You roll for character’s six attributes, getting a value between 6 and 15 for each; you must also pick a career. There are, again similar to WFRP*, a wide variety of careers to pick from—helpfully divided into military and non-military. The reason I like multiple career paths like these is they help both give you plenty of ideas for characters, as well as help fill out the world. While there are no rat catchers, there are wastrels—yay for homeless PC’s!
The interesting bit about careers is that for many of the higher up positions—officers, nobles—you have to make a percentage roll to see if you can get that position. This is a rule many GM’s and players are going to ditch…but there’s a reason that rule is there. Keep reading.
Careers give you money, stuff, and tricks of the trade—aka skills. Again like WFRP*, you get the skills in the career automatically, unless you again have to roll for them (AKA ‘50% chance of operate steam engine, etc’). Money and stuff are both rigorously listed, in that you don’t have ‘Rescores: 2’, you have ’40 pounds’. This is not my personal cup of tea, but again—I understand why it was made this way. Skills are a very broad range, everything from melee-sword to operate semaphore to sing. Again, the way the creation system is designed hints at the military campaign, with officers and soldiers, or the standard ‘bunch of random people’ campaign. While it might be a bit similar if everyone’s playing soldiers, there are at least a few options in the solider paths.
Non-combative include all manner of jobs from noble to traveling entertainer to inventor. It really shows that the game has been designed to run many different kinds of games, and can handle them easily.
SYSTEM
The attributes are things we’ve all seen before—the strength one, the agility one, the smarts one—oldies but goodies. Taking that number from 6 to 15 and multiplying it times five gives you your base roll, and skills modify that. Modifiers can be added on, etc. Again, it’s simple percentile mechanics—get at or under your number in 2D10%. It’s a bit bland, perhaps, but it works.
The game notes all the ways you can die—disease, drowning, weather, falling, poison—giving you a nice realistic hint at what terrors will await your character. It handles all the basics, and looks like they were decently road tested.
The experience system is also fairly standard—you win, so get some points. Unlike WFRP, it’s not a career changing path, but a more linear progression point-buy, with skills costing more if they’re rare or tough to learn. It works.
Combat has all the goodies you need—swords, knives, muskets, carbines, even heavy artillery. Everything is fairly codified and regular, even though I personally would rarely use heavy artillery barrages; I understand why they were there.
THE WORLD
The World chapter opens up with all the advantages of playing in the Napoleonic era—literally with a quote from Dickens about ‘the best of times, the worst of times’. It shows you what kind of stories you can tell, and gets you excited about them. Then…it gets…a bit odd.
The world is Earth—only…not. First, there are airships, operating on GMfiatium hydrogen gasbags. That’s okay, being a regular of this hobby I know that zeppelins are always cool, and sky pirates are cool, and swinging across the skies to swash a buckle is just awesome, so it’s all cool. Second, Europe isn’t Europe—it’s a bit funky shaped, a bit more squarish and Spain got rammed north, but it’s still Europe.
However…the real issue for me is that the world of Realm antique is our world—almost exactly. What I mean is, there’s a Denmark in this world. Not ‘Dinnmark’ or ‘Dennmark only in Elvish’. It’s Denmark. The state, just like here. So is the Ottoman Empire, Eireland, etc. So hey, it’s just earth--! I’ll be a jolly old chap from Islia…
Islia?!
England is Islia. She still has her 13 colonies that rebelled, and the rest of history is unchanged. Yet, she’s called Islia. There are no other real changes, just the name. It’s a bit jarring. Why in a world with a Berlin did we have to change England? Like all games, we have our ‘not quite our world’ aspects. Yet this felt a bit half-baked, like we started making up new names, and then stopped. There’s nothing really wrong with it—it was surprising is all.
ART AND STYLE
I got mine in a PDF file, so I can’t speak for the binding, etc. However, the look of the book is solid—a parchment background helps reinforce the era on every page, the layout is solid, and the art is great for an independent work. It’s not going to beat White Wolf or WotC, but it presents the world in a professional manner, and hints at the characters and game you’ll be playing. The maps are particularly nice—even the one given too us in the bottled adventure that looks like someone made a map on a scrap of something. WHY THIS ISN'T A BAD REVIEW, AND WHY THIS GAME IS VERY GOOD AT WHAT IT DOES (AKA: WHAT I'VE BEEN HINTING AT FOR 4 PAGES...)
This has not been a glowing review. I may sound like I was disappointed in the game. Yet, really, that’s not the game’s fault, but my own. Remember when I said how I love designer notes? Well, these notes told me the core concept behind Realm Antique, and it’s one I agree with.
The author found that it was hard to get new people into the hobby. There were whole tomes of knowledge you needed to learn to really play, new mechanics, tricky little rules and modifiers and baggage. Most people don’t know about the hobby, and most games are aimed at people already playing. Realm Antique wanted to create a game that both new and old gamers could enjoy. Suddenly, it all makes sense.
My biggest complaint about Realm Antique is that, as an experienced gamer, I’ve seen this all before. The game I keep thinking about while reading it isn’t just WFRP, but old school, first ed. D&D. The rules mechanics are simplistic, the world is vaguely described in areas, and the world feels like it could be expanded and pushed open much wider than it is. The weirdest thing about it is, in this case, all of these critiques become compliments, and they make perfect sense as to why it was done this way.
I walked into this game hoping to find a nice, crunchy world full of really interesting new ideas—but that’s not the point of this game. The point of this game is to get a bunch of friends to try out this role-playing thing, and to have a good time doing it. I think in that regard it succeeds—the game is open to interpretation. You can do all kinds of games with it, from slogging combat to murder mysteries to political melodrama. The game’s simplistic system may not reinforce any of these games, but it doesn’t make any of them impossible, either. I can make a game where ‘Sing’ may be vital to the development of the plot, and the game’s okay with that. It’s a sandbox—just enough boundaries to tell you how to build a sand castle, but the rest is up to you and the players. For that, this game should be praised in that it has done something very hard: it succeeded at being what the developers wanted it to be. It’s an introduction to roleplaying. It’s a fun game.
Now, for the experienced gamer? It’s a handy crib sheet for 18th century gaming. There’s plenty of facts about the era, including clothing, religion, science, and the rest. This includes a list of all the major wars fought over a few centuries, clothing and fashion for noble to the poor, transportation, population census for European nations, and a whole lot else of thick meaty datum. For eight bucks at Drivethrurpg, it’s worth it. It will help you run a game of high caliber in this environment, even if you don’t use the system. The sheer fact that it helps with character creation concepts is probably enough for anyone who needs this kind of data, and it helps with many specifics of the era. I think most experienced gamers will use this as a Rifts book—I may not use the system, but the data’s all in one packet and aimed at what I need. If you use the system, I think many of us would start fiddling with it—making it more complex, adding some more wonky bits on it, etc. That’s not because it’s a bad system—just very straightforward.
If there’s one REAL thing I want to see—it’s the expansion of this game. More sourcebooks, more world data (their world, not ours), more options. This game could include almost anything—magic, other races, strange monsters, whatever you want. Now that we got new kids playing, Realm Antique could use some bling and glam to really make the options of roleplaying—especially in this era—shine. It already hints at anachrotech with inventors and scientists, and if there’s priests that means devils (and witches!). The sandbox always needs some more toys…again, though: that’s not what the game was intended to do. It could do it, though, and that’s a compliment.
IN THE END This is a good game—I keep comparing it to OD&D and WFRP and GURPS, which is good company. It wasn’t what I thought, but it’s nice to be surprised once in a while. I would definitely recommend it to anyone playing a Napoleonic world for background research, and especially for anyone trying to get some new blood in our old hobby.
THE NUMBERS Style: A solid 4 if we’re comparing it to small-press games, a 3 if looking at the pros. It’s sharp, in-style, and the art fits the theme. It also doesn’t have great swaths of clip art. It looks professional.
Substance: 3. the game gives you a great amount of raw data for the world it presents, and the mechanics work. Personally I would like to see an expanded into more foreign soil, but it does a good job of presenting what it needs to present.
END NOTES *”WFRP--in Cinci-nat-iiiiiii!” What? It’s an old people joke. No, it’s not funny. Get off my lawn.
