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Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series is one of the great pieces of fantasy fiction. For those unfamiliar with it, it is set in a far future earth where the sun is faded and red and will soon disappear. The first book had a series of mostly unrelated short stories, although two featured Turjan of Miir, a wizard who first seeks the secret to creating life, and in a second story is a captive of another wizard. Two books were tales about Cugel the Clever, a opportunistic hustler whose plans usually failed, causing mayhem all about him. The last book featured Rhialto the Marvelous, an arch-magician, and his contentious relationship with the other arch-magicians of his conclave. All of the stories share Vance’s rich and unusual vocabulary and writing style.
Pelgrane Press released the licensed RPG for this setting back in 2001. Designed by Robin Laws, the Dying Earth RPG (DERPG) permitted players to choose which of the three types of stories they wanted to play in. The default Cugel level games featured the same sorts of vagabond schemers as Cugel himself, far more likely to be a victim of magic than a wielder of it, and whose plans were expected to fail. Turjan level games featured moderately strong magicians striving to reach their goals, while the super-powered Rhialto level games were about the petty competitions between arch-magicians, since they could easily accomplish virtually any goal they desired due to the power of their magic.
It was an odd game, in that PCs were expected to act against each other as much as with each other. The game mechanics were also unusual, with players spending ability points to reroll the die until they got a result they liked, assuming others didn’t spend their own points to overturn the roll. The game also featured taglines, snippets of Vancian dialog that players were supposed to recite at appropriate points in the scenario.
Sensing that the DERPG mechanics could be used in any situation where unethical characters pretended to cooperate while simultaneously tripping each other up, Pelgrane released a setting free version with minor improvements, called Skullduggery (2010).
The Dying Earth Revivification Folio (abbreviated as DERF) is a revision of the original DERPG with Skullduggery’s improvements. As Laws said in an interview, this may be considered a second edition of the DERPG, or as an additional setting for Skullduggery. The game comes complete with three scenarios, and they can be played as is without buying any other books. But if you are going to create your own scenarios, it’s probably a good idea to also have the original DERPG and some of the supplements.
The basic game mechanics are simple. Roll a d6; a 1 – 3 is a failure, a 4 – 6 is a success. Each value does have a slightly different meaning, but general success or failure is sufficient most of the time. Players may spend points to re-roll the die. These points come from the characters’ ability score, which is the number of points they have to spend when rolling with that ability. A more skilled character doesn’t get better results by virtue of their skill, but by their ability to re-roll the die until the desired result appears.
There are also Boons and Levies, which add or subtract from the die pool. Some of these take effect immediately (such as the levy you have to pay to counter your opponent’s Illustrious Success, a roll of 6), and some are held back to be applied to the pool at the end of the challenge (such as the boon you get for just missing on a roll of 3, an Exasperating Failure). Note that pools do not automatically replenish, so players must manage their points carefully, and decide when a failure may be accepted in order to reserve points for later situations. With a fifty-fifty chance of failure on any given die roll, players can expect their characters to be thwarted in their plans fairly often.
While there is a list of twenty-five different skills characters may have, most will see little use. The workhorses are Attack, Defense, Persuade, and Rebuff. Attack and Defense are for combat; Persuade and Rebuff are to force others, GMCs and fellow PCs alike, to do what is against their own best interests. Each of these key traits has one of six different styles. (Persuade, for example, has the following styles: Glib, Eloquent, Obfuscatory, Forthright, Charming, and Intimidating.) Each style is particularly strong against one defense (trumps), and particularly weak against another (trumped by). If you are facing an ability that you are trumped by, you pay a levy of one for every roll.
While Persuade and Rebuff means your character may be forced to agree to propositions that will reflect poorly on them, there is an additional dimension where your character will act in ways against his or her self interest. Dying Earth characters are deeply flawed, and most can be tempted to indulge in a vice or three. Characters have Resistance pools against six different temptations: Arrogance, Avarice, Gourmandism, Indolence, Rakishness, and Pettifoggery. Situations will arise in play where characters must roll their Resistance in one of these pools to avoid giving in.
Players must understand they’re not playing heroes. Characters have questionable motives, are rarely loyal to comrades, and spend as much time backstabbing and quarreling as they do trying to achieve party goals, all the while dealing with cruel, arbitrary fate and their own weaknesses. The fun in a Dying Earth game is not in facing obstacles and succeeding, but in failing amusingly, or possibly even succeeding in spite of themselves.
The rules make up half of the book. Many of these are special cases, such as how to use the system with multiple attackers, multiple defenders, or both. Most of them are the same as the original DERPG, but there are some tweaks and adjustments. For example, the original DERPG allowed players to spend their points to force opponents to re-roll; this has been removed from the DERF in favor of a much simpler “if my defense succeeds at all, your attack fails” rule. The rules are illustrated with extensive examples to help clarify the system.
One of the best adjustments involves the infamous taglines. One of the great pleasures of reading Jack Vance is his wonderful use of language. If the characters are not sesquipedalian (a user of big, fancy words), it’s not the Dying Earth. Players are issued three taglines, short phrases in the Vancian style, and they are expected to have their characters use them at optimal moments. In the original DERPG, successful use of a tagline meant experience points to boost your character. In DERF, use of a tagline buys you one or more Refresh tokens, which may be spent to replenish one of your pools. Since you’re forced to spend those pools, this new refresh mechanic should make players more eager to use their taglines, rather than seeing them as a behavior imposed on the players by the designer. In DERF, character generation is a breeze. The players pick cards at random from nine different sets. These cards define your name and general abilities, Persuade, Rebuff, Attack, Defense, Resistances, a magical item, attire, and relationships with some GMCs. Players may trade cards with each other before the game begins.
The second half of the book consists of three scenarios. Of a necessity, they use the same six “characters.” Each scenario may be run without reference to the other, or they can be run as a loosely connected series.
I consider the DERF a worthwhile improvement to the DERPG. The system has been cleaned up a bit—removing the ability to force other players to re-roll their results should speed up the system, and the new abilities to both gift points to other players and to try to siphon away their skill points provides more situations for intraparty interaction. The focus of the game is further away from traditional RPG narrative, and onto a series of connected episodes, with the journey from place to place now firmly offstage. There’s even more emphasis on players interfering with each others’ actions, which suits the Cugel and Rhialto levels of the game better. I very much prefer the new tagline system over the original, and I think the use of cards to create characters makes more sense than the old point-build system of the DERPG, which took more time than it was worth, since there were many options for abilities that were unlikely to be used all that often. For people who are interested in this setting who haven’t bought any version yet, I recommend starting with the DERF. The three introductory scenarios and more polished rules are a worthwhile tradeoff for the greater detail and wider coverage of the DERPG.
For extended play, I would argue the DERPG is necessary. The DERF has no way to create new characters, and next to no setting information. The DERPG has more information on playing at the three different power levels, a bestiary, and a more complete spell corpus. In addition, if you’re going to use the scenarios sold separately by Pelgrane, you’ll need the original rulebook. While some of the scenarios already fit the episodic nature of the DERF, others will need modification to fit the new paradigm.
The DERF has a few annoying problems that must be mentioned. There are some editing errors, mostly dropped words and one “see page xx” glitch. The boons and levies system can be confusing because it is not always clear which ones should be applied immediately, and which ones take effect at the end of the challenge. Another problem is that the required cards are not yet supported. These should be available for download (and the book says they are), but they are not yet on the Pelgrane site as of this review. You can use the .pdf to print all cards needed for the three scenarios on cardstock and cut them out, but if you want to expand the game to use the magic spells or magical items included in the DERF but not used in the scenarios, you’ll need to reformat their text onto cards of your own. Likewise the taglines for the scenarios should be reformatted to make them easier to handle than the slim strips currently laid out.
Should owners of the DERPG buy it? I like the rules improvements enough that I’m glad I did. I think the DERF structures games to better fit the episodic nature of the original stories, and I like both the rules modifications and the three scenarios, even though some of the plots have been seen before in other DERPG scenarios. It’s a better fit for Cugel and Rhialto level games than the original; I’m not sure how well it would fit a Turjan level game.
The print copy of the game (softcover, perfect bound) comes with the .pdf included in the purchase price if you buy direct from Pelgrane.
