We start out with a fairly useful Table of Contents as well as a short authorial forward before getting to the Mechanics section, where we have a rather large amount of new material. New Master Abilities, a few additional options for combat and experience awards, Mass Combat rules, guidelines for PC created Fell Kingdoms (and attacking said Fell Kingdoms), and the long promised Legendary Abilities.
The new Master Abilities are fairly simple and straightforward. If anything, they seem a little more mundane than those presented in the main book, but as additional options they’re fine. The Legendary Abilities are a bit of a kicker for me. On the one hand, some don’t feel very Legendary at all (three of them are just variants of letting you have an army, which seems like something a PC could acquire through simply roleplaying just as easily). Others however are much more impressive, and some even add an element of Player fiat to the game. The Black Rose Legendary Ability is perhaps the best example of this, allowing PCs to force any NPC to love them fully and madly, even the powerful Kingsways. Unfortunately, most aren’t as powerful or game changing. I suspect that to some extent I’m spoiled by other epic games, but I figure that in a game like LSoE, where characters can create and rule floating kingdoms or command multiple bodies at the same time, that something called a “Legendary Ability” would be more impressive. It’s not that they’re bad, they just aren’t (on the whole) very inspiring. Especially after the core rules introduced non-Legendary abilities that let characters kill or control people by knowing words genetically programmed into humanity.
The Mass Combat rules are an interesting mechanic, wrapped in some odd elements. Basically, you take an average soldier and figure out his Health (how much damage he can take and how resistant he is to it), his Melee Damage (how much damage he does in “close” combat), and his Support Damage (how much damage he does at range), and then expand on that based on the number of similar troops in the force. And since a force can have multiple types of soldiers, and soldiers can potentially range from a handful to hypothetical millions, the numbers involved can get very high very quickly. And once you have these numbers, the competing force leaders roll to see who is more successful in the battle. Health numbers decrease, Damage amounts drop, and so on. It kind of reminds me of the board game Risk or other RPG mass combat rules from the early 80’s in that it’s simple and fast, but it also is a surprisingly robust means to determine large scale battles in a fairly impartial manner (rather than relying on GM fiat). And even better, examples are given every step to help explain and show off the new system. That said, there’s also some light rules (almost general guidelines really) for keeping morale up, assembling the army, maintaining their upkeep and so forth. I like that an attempt is made to acknowledge such factors, but most GMs will probably end up winging it. As an example, “a character needs one day to raise a number of militiamen equal to his Domination rating X5 and make them ready for battle.” Assuming a character with Domination 10 (the absolute maximum), and an army of 100,000, the character would need over 5 years to assemble his army. More likely the character’s Domination would be lower, and assembly of the army would take even longer. I know it’s a low-tech fantasy setting, but this an example of something most groups will end up house-ruling to something more expedient. As a quick number-crunching tool it’s pretty good, but those looking for detailed and realistic systems will probably be disappointed.
Ending this section are some guidelines and considerations for both creating and destroying Fell Kingdoms. Once a servant of Ravencross reaches a high enough NOTO score, he is promoted to the rank of Fell Prince. The more notorious (and higher NOTO score) the Fell Prince, the more points he gets with which to buy elements for his own private Fell Kingdom. This is nice, as it fills in one of the gaps left from the core book (i.e. what do you do with NOTO/RECO scores), but it leaves a small gap of its own. Namely, can NOTO gains be used to further expand a Fell Kingdom, and can cheap features be “cashed in” to buy more expensive ones as the characters become earn more notoriety? I can house rule answers easily enough, but I wish a bit more development had gone in to it. Those who gain RECO by opposing Ravencross get no comparable support in this supplement.
In the GM’s section we get a slew of Rumors, some Secret Orders, and four different campaign changing “essays” detailing how a GM might use the Kingsways in his game. The Rumors strike me as a weak mechanic. PCs spend money to dig up rumors which may or may not be true; ideally cash is a secondary concern to the characters, but it still feels like a weak way to get them involved with a story. Other games would call this section “story ideas” and leave it at that. The Secret Orders range from small dock worker guilds to Angelion cults. Basically they feel like fluff heavy outlines of forces for GMs to stat out and throw at the PCs using the Mass Combat rules. As a grab bag, GM’s will likely find at least a few rumors and groups they enjoy and can flesh out for their own games. The four essays are fairly stand alone looks at how to use each of the Kingsway children to essentially destroy the world. Or at least wage the biggest wars the setting has yet to see. Oddly enough, despite being “signature NPC” heavy, I didn’t hate this. In most cases, it’s clear the children are on the way out, and that the PCs would likely soon be the only ones fit to fill their shoes (for better or worse). The wars and such are just symptoms of the Kingsways fading away. Somebody once said, “if you stat ‘em, somebody will kill ‘em.” All the signature NPCs are statted, so make of that what you will. And unlike some campaign changing metaplots I’ve seen, these four different approaches are actually pretty easy to tweak, ignore, or combine as desired.
Wrapping up the book we get detailed looks at three Fell Kingdoms, the Dream kingdom of Corvus, the Purple Island, and the Kingdom of a Thousand Meadows. Dream is a playground for the mad Ravencross, and filled with faeries and parties and absolute hedonistic selfishness fit for an atheistic insane godling and his posse. It’s also where Corvus keeps his mighty warforms, which are statted out (and not so subtly meant to be defeated by the PCs). The Purple Island is a kingdom of worms, scorpion men, and an extremely misogynistic angelion. It’s not bad, but it feels like a place for players to either destroy or else sneakily invade; an old-school fantasy dungeon dressed up as an island basically, which could make for an amusing “dungeon crawl” for angelions. The Kingdom of a Thousand Meadows is probably my favorite, simply because it’s a stronghold built to protect and imprison Elizabeth Kingsway, the matriarch of the family, and possibly one of the most interesting characters in the setting. She’s seen her family turned into inhuman constructs, seen them war with each other, and lived through centuries of watching their egomania. And it’s broken her. But any characters that could reach her could gain great sway over the rest of the family, and more.
Truthfully, IoP is a mixed bag. The content feels crammed together for the sake of getting it all out, but some of it doesn’t feel quite finished. The long awaited and mysterious Legendary Abilities largely felt like overhyped Master Abilities, some of the material promised in LSoE to be in IoP wasn’t, and the Rumors and Secret Orders feel like something used to fill pages. On the flipside, the look at the Kingsways is excellent, the new Fell Kingdoms are interesting, and the Mass Combat rules are a nice simple addition. It’s not a perfect supplement, but it’s a decent one.
For Style, I’ll give it a high 3. The artwork is quite good (if small), and excepting one odd full-page spread on page 6 (more of the Victorian era stuff that felt out of place in LSoE) the artwork is very reflective and specific to the setting. That said, the book feels cluttered, there are several typos, and some phrasings by the author that jumped out at me. But between advancing production values, layouts, art and so forth, IoP doesn’t seem as good. The overall effect is that book is actually a low to mid average, but with very pretty art and borders.
For Substance, I’ll give it a high 3. There’s some really good stuff in here for GMs of LSoE and even some stuff GMs of other games may enjoy. But there’s also parts that were supposed to be present and are not, as well as the grab bag nature of it all. And some elements that are here feel underdeveloped, while GMs and players interested in the Kingsways and the Mass Combat rules will find this book much more useful than those not interested in such.
