In Short
Inklings of Power, the first supplement for the imaginative Lesser Shades of Evil (LSOE), focuses on bringing mass combat, epic scenarios, and incredible new lands to your game. The ideas are interesting across the board, and while I have a few objections I feel like this is a worthwhile addition for a group looking to engage in epic battles, command armies, and impact the world on a global level. Inklings preserves the same wonderful feel of a long fallen world that LSoE introduced, and it’s impossible to read without coming up with a few wonderful campaign ideas.The Good: As with LSOE, the author is very imaginative and offers a lot of just plain cool ideas. The semi-plotted campaign suggestions are epic in scope and will no doubt inspire a GM pushing towards a high powered campaign.
The Bad: The mass combat system may not meet every group’s needs. It’s not always clear what to do with the setting and adventure material. The additions here are mostly for high-end play. While the end game scenarios are neat, they could be better presented.
The Physical Thing
At $24.95, this 122 page black and white softcover showcases above average production values for the cost. While the formatting could be improved, the artwork is wonderful and does a perfect job of bringing this incredible setting to life.Under the Cover
Inklings presents new character options, a mass combat system, and epic campaign hooks. Let’s examine each of them in turn!The new character options are the easiest to begin with since they are such a small portion of the book. The new Master Abilities are varied, but several of them tie in well with the mass combat rules introduced here. Guerilla Fighter, for example, is a downright neat power that enables a smaller force to gain significant advantages when going up against a much larger force. On a more personal note, I love Words of Madness which causes a person who listens to your advice to suffer anguish points. The abilities are varied and most folk will find one or two that are of interest for a given character.
Legendary Abilities are also introduced. These Abilities require two Mastery ratings that together total 14+ and an expenditure of 50 Power Points. Each Ability is complex and has multiple different types of uses, often taking up half a page or more in total description. Each one tends to focus on a certain character theme to amplify that theme to god-like status. For example, an incredible fighter might take Warmaster which enables them to act as a Force on the battlefield. This means that the character can fight armies one on one using the mass combat rules, truly an amazing power. It’s worth noting that not all Legendary Abilities are equally powerful, but they are all interesting and there’s a nice mix to choose from.
The mass combat system is surprisingly detailed, starting out with a variety of different considerations not always presented in such systems. Cost of maintenance, speed of movement, and a variety of different recruitment techniques for mobilizing an army are all featured at the start. Characters are likely to come at building an army from very different directions, and once created each army is likely to have notably different considerations. The mere composition of the army alone is likely to vary significantly considering the wonders and horrors of genetic design.
With those considerations in mind the reader next turns to the combat aspect of the system. A Force has Health, Melee Strength, and Support Strength. Each of these is determined through a fairly simple multiplicative formula. For example, to determine the Health of a Force simply multiply number of soldiers by Soldier Health. Size and individual unit toughness are factors as well, thereby acknowledging that a gigantic sky worm is a little tougher than the equivalent army of humans. With Health, Melee Strength, Support Strength, and the nature of the force all determined there are just a few more details to pay attention to. First, a Force must have a commander and the commander is very important. She makes Battle tasks which can influence the flow of battle and if she is defeated then the Force takes a severe penalty. Finally, it’s best to go ahead and calculate Casualty threshold and Battle Effectiveness for the Force. These are percentages of the overall value and reflect how the Force changes as it receives casualties from battle.
With that in mind the actual combat is fairly simple. Commanders roll to determine which Force acts first, and that Force may either attack or retreat. An attack involves the commanders of the two Forces rolling opposed Battle tasks to determine the result. A base success for the attacking Force results in 60% of maximum damage being dealt, with more or less potentially being dealt based on a higher or lower success threshold. A variety of modifiers can play into these rolls, such as defensive positioning or darkness where one side can see in the dark. Of course, the biggest of all modifiers is any piece of advanced technology, such as a gravity or electromagnetic item, which can decimate an entire opposing Force.
While there are many other possible modifiers and considerations to take into account, that is the mass combat system in a nutshell. I see it as having two major strengths. First, the army commander is absolutely essential to success and because of this the PCs are always the ones at the center of the action (assuming each PC has a Force). Second, the combat system is simple to resolve and not terribly difficult to set up. It’s a nice compromise between giving attention to individual entities while preventing large battles from taking more than a few minutes of game time.
It does have a few flaws as well. Those that want some amount of tactical maneuvering will not find it here. The leader’s Battle roll represents all possible tactical maneuvering, and there’s little a clever player will add to the situation. More notably, whichever side goes first has a powerful advantage. Inflicting casualties on the other Force will lower their combat effectiveness making them less capable when it’s time to deliver a return blow. Ultimately this is really just a matter of the better tactician winning out, but nevertheless some may find it bothersome that the battles tend to be one side goes then the other goes rather than a mutual exchange.
The rest of the product details various play scenarios which tend to have mass combat in mind. With over half of the book focused on this material, there’s plenty of interesting ideas here though the reader definitely needs to be on top of the setting to get anything out of them (I had to refer back to the corebook). The general assumption behind most of this material is that the PCs have grown incredibly powerful and stand ready to function as the Kingsways of the future. With that in mind the characters will inevitably find themselves in a situation where they must find a way to deal with the remaining powers of the world.
The great thing about these scenarios is that they are heavily integrated into the setting and, in many cases, also introduce new setting material. The setting for LSOE is one of my favorites and I find many of the ideas here to be just as cool as those included in the core book. That said, I find the material to be a little jumbled. Sometimes, while reading, it felt as if the author knew what he was striving for but the entries themselves were a little disorganized. This is definitely an area where the reader will have to pick through setting bits and ideas to inspire existing campaigns, but where few readers are likely to use most of the content in a given entry.
