The review is written from the perspective of a player in an Aquelarre adventure, not a GM. We had the advantage of a native Spanish GM who could translate the game for us as we went along, and could also bring the land and its peoples vividly to life, complete with a believable Spanish accent! It also features a few spoilers relating to one of the adventures included in the man rules.

Aquelarre in its current edition is a beautiful, full colour hardback. The artwork, what I saw of it, is of good quality. The rules system is a variant of the Basic Roleplaying System published by Chaosium. I say a variant, but there are some substantial differences there too.

Character generation is similar to that of Call of Cthulhu, points are allocated first to core attributes like Strength, Resistance, and Perception. There is an interesting split between Agility (read: athletics - usually running away from demons in the case of this game) and manual Dexterity, which are represented by two different attributes you need to allocate points to.

The attributes can serve as a default if you lack a particular skill. Say noone in the party has Open Lock: you can see if you can roll your Dexterity as a percentage and might get lucky. None of my character's starting attributes was over 20. Communicating (i.e. your ability to get on with others), Looks, and Culture are also core attributes. Luck seems to be a derived attribute, and you need it to be high to get yourself out of many a sticky situation. We had trouble working out how to derive hit points, but settled on the total of Strength + Resistance, which gave us a workable number, given that some opponents were dishing out 4d6 damage per hit.

Characters can then spend points on core skills - for which you get more points, and peripheral skills. I ended up with core skills in areas like Alchemy and Commerce of 60%. You can then buy secondary skills to flesh your PC out a bit, but these will typically be much lower, in the 10-20% range. This is very similar to the Call of Cthulhu skill buying process.

I was working to generate a Jewish Moneylender. Aquelarre presents players with a broad range of character classes with suggested skill sets. We ended up with a Moneylender, a Whore, a Soldier, and a Minstrel. I thought it would be interesting playing a Moneylender with a strong network of commercial contacts across the region, and the ability to tap into a solid cash flow when needed. I shouldn't have worried - money did not really come into it much!

Players can also buy extra skill points by ageing their characters from the base starting age of 19. However, each extra year can bring dire, randomly generated consequences. Two of us opted for this, but I ended up with typhoid, and my friend John (the Soldier) took a crippling battlefield wound. Needless to say, the other two shied away from this option having seen what happened to us!

Finally, Aquelarre has quite an interesting mechanic that measures how easy it is for you to deal with the presence of magic/the supernatural. As a player, you determine your Rational/Irrational ratio, based on your character's world view. For example, I started with 90/10 in favour of Rational, being a somewhat practical, down to earth figure than, say, the highly spiritual Minstrel (also a Moorish agent of some kind, it emerged!) This balance changes during the game - my Rational bias dropped to 70% by the end of it, and probably should have been a lot lower than that, given what we faced, but I still could not see how it had much bearing on my character's ability to function. Sure, being teleported into another dimension or confronted with skeleton warriors is going to change your perspective somewhat, but HOW does that really translate into other aspects of your character's day-to-day? This was never really made clear.

The Background

Aquelarre uses 14th century Spain as its backdrop, not a region or a period I'm very familiar with. Obviously, Spain was not a unified country, with a number of Christian and Muslim states jockeying for supremacy. But the focus of the game is less on the current politics, and more, seemingly on the supernatural power play going on behind the scenes.

I was expecting Call of Cthulhu goes to medieval Spain. It ended up more like Army of Darkness meets Dogma. I kid you not. Take In Nomine, turn the clock back 650 years, set it in Spain, make the characters humans, light touch paper and retire. That's Aquelarre in a nut shell.

It's a fun game, but the adventure we played did leave the feeling we were being rail-roaded a bit. There were specific solutions to each predicament we were facing, and any other plans/schemes we hatched were largely doomed to fail I felt. The adventure was a quest scenario, for powerful magical artefacts required to facilitate a rapprochement between God and Lucifer, with factions from both Heaven and Hell working against us in an effort to maintain the status quo. But we were heavily, majorly outgunned from virtually the word go. Aquelarre characters are not powerful, oh no. They're really Call of Cthulhu investigators with armour and a bit more religious mania. But they end up facing Seraphim and all kinds of other amazingly powerful supernatural creatures on a regular basis. What is a typhoid-wracked Jewish moneylender who can barely wield a dagger going to do against an eight metre tall headless giant with four arms while backed up against a boiling sea somewhere in Hell? Very little, I can tell you. Even our Soldier character, who was our primary military muscle go-to in this campaign, was hard-pressed until he discovered a holy sword which could do some really nasty things to demons. We were also bailed out of more than one TPK situation by the timely intervention of major supernatural allies - angels in the main - so you could argue, with friends like these, who needs combat stats?

We ended the campaign effectively becoming immortal, and easily destroying a conspiracy hatched by four cardinals to loot the Holy Church.

Overall, I think my choice of character was a bad one. Playing a Jewish character, you felt somewhat marginalised by many of the events going on. What was my motivation, other than to stay alive? What did Israel Anselmo-Barbosa care about the future health of the Spanish church?

Overall, a very interesting game, but not really a horror RPG. There are some horrific elements to it - the plague-stricken city of Zamora was not pleasant, believe me - but this is more of a game for the In Nomine lover who wants a change of scenery than a Call of Cthulhu veteran like me. I don't think the characters have enough depth to satisfy the World of Darkness fraternity, and they are worryingly outgunned, meaning those who like a spot of swordplay may soon find themselves generating a new character. Our party really did spend most of the campaign running, hiding, or begging for our lives. I kid you not.

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