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Before digging into character creation it’s important to understand the basic system. Players roll 2d6, add modifiers (including any relevant attribute, combat abilities if fighting, and career if not fighting), and if they roll 9 or higher they succeed. If they roll a natural 12 that’s a success and a natural 2 is a failure. And that’s it.
Okay, so creating a character? You have four attributes: Strength (which covers lifting weights, as well as resisting diseases and poisons, among other things), Agility (includes hitting things, speed, and avoiding traps), Mind (figuring things out, casting spells, and resisting illusions for starters), and Appeal (manipulating others through banter, looks, or browbeating). Characters have 4 points to divide between the attributes, with none to start higher than 3. Although 0 is an option for starting attributes, players can also lower a single attribute to -1 for an extra point to spend elsewhere on attributes. Characters also have 4 points to divide between the combat abilities: Brawl, Melee, Ranged, and Defence. Combat abilities, like attributes, range from 0 to 3 in rating at character creation (no option to have a combat ability at -1 is mentioned). Finally we have the concept of “Careers”. Whereas other games have lists of skills like “Animal Husbandry” or “Stealth”, BoL uses a broad Career system instead. If you have a Career that’s relevant to task at hand (like a Career of “Thief” when trying to pick a pocket or scale a wall), then you can add your rating to your dice roll. Characters start with their choice of four different careers, with four points to divide between them, again ranging from 0 to 3. Careers range from slaves and farmers to gladiators and torturers to alchemists and wizards. I would point out that not all Careers are created equal. Some, like “slave”, seem more suited for character background description than any points, while others like Alchemist are so powerful that characters take on extra Flaws for each rank after the first they buy at character creation.
What’s this about Flaws? Each character has an “Origin”, a place from Lemuria she comes from. As part of that Origin she gets to choose a Boon from a list of perks people from that part of the world tend to possess. A person from Lysor might be Attractive, have Disease Immunity, Great Wealth, or is Learned. What this usually means is that in relevant situations the character can roll an extra die and keep the highest two. But let’s say the player wants a couple of Boons related to her character’s Origin, in this case she chooses a Flaw to offset the extra Boon. Being from Lysor she chooses from City Dweller, Combat Paralysis, Delicate, and Morgazzon’s Curse. Usually a Flaw results in the player rolling an extra die in relevant situations and discarding the highest die.
Honestly, the system of Boons and Flaws is interesting, but flawed. Many of them have mechanical effects that differ from the extra dice rolling. Meanwhile, some of them are more or less useful (or hindering) than others; a character that’s a Landlubber is only ever going to be penalized if something interesting happens at sea, but an Unsettling character is hindered in every social interaction. It’s not as complex as other games with comparable systems, and there’s a handy reference table in the back that collects them all, but I’d still like to see something in place that rewarded players for when their Flaws actually hindered them, rather than relying on the players and GM to remember they exist in the first place.
Languages are important enough to merit an entire page in the book, which considering it’s a short book to begin with is saying something. Like the rest of the game, languages have a very simple and straightforward system: characters speak their native tongue plus a number of languages equal to their Mind attribute plus the ranks of any relevant Careers (the one hiccup in the rules are that they aren’t clear if increasing relevant Career ranks also increases the number of languages, but I’m assuming the answer is “yes”). Literacy costs a language slot. Like I said, simple and straightforward, but I do like fantasy games that emphasize language differences without getting too bogged down in issues of fluency and the like.
Characters also start with 5 Hero Points. Hero Points are used for re-rolls, to give narrative control to players, defy death, turn a success into a Mighty Success or Legendary Success (increasing your damage, depending on how well your initial roll was), and reducing how much damage you take from an attack. Here’s the kicker though, you only get your Hero Points back when you start a new campaign, so players will probably use them sparingly. The impression I have is they’re meant as lifesavers and story changers, not something casually used when fighting puny brigands. One other use for Hero Points is that two can be traded at character creation for an extra Boon; another two (four total) can be traded in for a second extra Boon.
Advancement and experience points are handled differently from other games. At the end of a campaign (or Saga in BoL) the characters describe what they do with all the treasure they earned. If they hoard their wealth they get a single Advancement Point, but if they squander it in a style that would make a barbarian proud (whoring, drinking, and gambling being just the start) they get two or even three Advancement Points. Advancement Points are used to buy increased Attributes, Combat Abilities, Career ranks, new Boons, and to buy off Flaws; while things like Boon and Flaws have fixed costs, higher ranks of other traits have various and increasing prices.
Gear and sorcery are next. I won’t say much about gear, except it’s fairly simple and the only dice needed (for weapon damage or armor soak) are d6es. Okay, I should probably go back just a second to character creation. Characters start with 10 points of Lifeblood (plus their Strength rating, plus any points from specific Boons). Lifeblood functions like a small pool of hit points, with weapons subtracting a random number of Lifepoints and armor absorbing a random or fixed (GM’s choice) amount of damage weapons would otherwise cause. I’ll also add that armor makes magic more costly to cast, but it is possible to have wizards in platemail slinging spells, and neither armor nor weapons are assumed to degrade over time (or at least there’s no rules for ablative attacks or defenses). Speaking of spell slinging, magic in BoL is quite impressive. Spell casting takes three forms: Magic, Alchemy, and Prayer. Magicians have no set spell list, but rather pick the level of effect they want and then come up with various requirements to power the spell. First magnitude spells are the cheapest and easiest to cast, and essentially replicate the effects of a tool or weapon; the classic “magic missile” spell would be first magnitude. Second magnitude spells are more costly, beyond the ability of a single person, and draining of the magician for quite some time; summoning a boat crewed by undead is given as an example. Third magnitude spells change the world and drain the wizard for life; creating a volcano or bringing a plague to a nation would count as suitable spells.
The prayers of evil druids and holy priests garner Fate Points, which are traded in for “one time only” Boons and Flaws related to the beings they worship. A Priest of Iondal, God of Song, might use a Fate Point to gain a bonus die when trying to impress someone with a poem. Meanwhile a druid of Zaggoth, the demonic Lord of Fire, might use a Fate Point to put a Flaw on someone trying to notice the fire the druid secretly started. Alchemists create substances and devices, ranging from simple weapons and pain killers to plague cures and lightning cannons all the way up to immortality and the creation of sentient life and self-aware items. To sum up, magicians have the easiest access to quick and great power but it is costly in magical energy to the point of permanently draining the magician’s power, the faithful have access to little power but it’s comparatively easy to come by if properly role-played, and finally Alchemists have access to great and lasting power but require a large number of rare resources.
Finishing up the book is a gazetteer, a bestiary, some sample PCs, and a few adventure outlines. To be blunt, there’s enough history and setting material here to start with, but GMs and players can expect to fill in a lot of gaps. How much of this is a flaw and how much a feature depends on how much players want to add to the setting. More animals and monsters would have been nice, but given the light nature of the mechanics it’s fairly easy to add whatever is wanted. Personally, I found myself wishing that more emphasis had gone into either explaining how the various types of magic had defined the setting or why they had not. The default seems to be that Alchemy has yet to really change the world, aside from rare air ships built with lighter than air metals. Magic is recognized as a great power, but it’s rare and the threat of Third Magnitude spells seems to not really impact anything or anyone. I’m sure part of this is to capture the feel of classic sword and sorcery settings (it’s hard for me to picture Conan in a magitech mecha fighting flying navies), but it still irks me a bit. The premade adventures aren’t bad, but they aren’t anything particularly earth-shattering either. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the pre-made PCs however; they have interesting and often interconnected back stories, and really capture the feel of sword and sorcery gaming in the style of Conan and crowd.
For Style I give BoL a high 2. The writing is decent; what it might lack in art it makes up for with honest enthusiasm. The overall presentation is reminiscent of games from the 80’s, complete with misplaced fonts, wide margins, and two column layouts. It’s simple and functional, but it’s also ugly and bland, and ultimately I don’t think it’s fair to compare the retro style of BoL with games that have more modern production values. Where it does earn high marks is for its art and map. The art is very suitable to the genre, really capturing the feel of muscular men and shifty figures fighting to rescue naked women from evil cultists and monsters. And it has a map! That alone is worth something. If it bumped up the presentation a bit with better use of the margins and some editing, I’d easily raise the style on this one. As is though it doesn’t meet my sense of what an “average” product these days should look like.
Substance is a bit easier. There’s plenty here to get a group started, and the rules are well explained, but I suspect groups will quickly hit a point where the GM has to start winging it on his own. The world is very sparsely described, focusing more on large numbers of barely described cities than any actual depth, and the bestiary seems woeful under stocked. Granted there’s enough here to make it fairly easy for GMs to add their own creations and the system is such that monster creation on the fly shouldn’t be a challenge, but I still suspect groups will hit the point where coming up with stuff on their own is required sooner than they should. I’ll give BoL a solid 4 for substance; what’s here is quite good, but I really don’t think there’s quite enough. Those who like sparsely developed settings may be inclined to give the game a much higher rating though.
Conclusion: I don’t like Lemuria. I find it vague to the point that it inspires me just so I can do something interesting with it. And there is very little setting material worth mining in other games. But to be fair, I do think it captures a kind of generic (and classic) sword and sorcery vibe quite well. As a start for such gaming it’s not bad, but I think groups will quickly find themselves having to develop a large portion of the setting themselves for their games. But maybe I just want more setting than I really need. Mechanically I’m pretty impressed with BoL. It’s a light system, with a wonderful variety of magical types that actually feel different from one another. It doesn’t strike me as being very good for long term dungeon crawl gaming, with resource management and power-leveling, but I don’t think that was its primary intent. Instead I see the system as something meant to take a back seat to players getting in character and rewarding them for acting the role of drunken barbarian warriors. And that’s not a bad thing at all.
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