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Engel is the OGL game of Angelic beings in a post-apocalyptic Europe. Translated from the German original and distributed in English by White Wolf, the game is dense with atmosphere, tone, and theme in the tradition of the best of storytelling games. Its rules, however, fail to support the rich work of the setting. Slapped together, with painful rules for Angelic powers, and a dearth of game support for GM’s Engel fails to be all that it could be.
The Book
A 272 page hardback, Engel is a big book. It’s also art-rendered to within an inch of its life, with gorgeous maps inside front and back covers, well laid out pages (though the text in that nice layout has occasional problems), chapters that are clearly broken apart and referenced with labels on the edges of the page, and a great medieval scroll-font used to give the book the feeling of a tome. The binding is solid, and has held up better than even my Exalted books, and the book has a very well constructed feel to it.
The Art
Consistent in tone and style, Engel has some of the best art in an RPG in recent years. Not because each piece is all that great (though there are some very nicely done works) but because there is a feeling of coherency and unity to the art that fits both the world and the tone of the game and works to create a feeling, rather than just taking up space on the page with random images that may or may not have anything to do with the game. Most of the art is also large, taking up between a quarter page and two full pages, which lets it stay crisp and clear. The size of the art does not chew up space best used on text, however, as it is used fairly sparingly, with on piece to every 4 to 6 pages.
The Good
There is a lot of good in Engel. The atmosphere of the game is so thick you can cut it with a knife. Dark, rainy lands filled with superstitious peasants; choked cities ruled by amoral junklords; a towering church that looms so high above the rest of the world that its towers literally break the clouds; insectoid demons rising out of the chard lands where infernos have passed – it’s all here, it’s all good, and it’s all marvelously well brought to life by the art, fiction, and prose of the book. Engel is so stylishly laid out, with every bit of art and text contributing to the feeling of the game, that it is almost impossible to read the book and not get visions of the world and the kind of adventures that angels could have there.
Another good thing about the game is that one or two of the “big secrets” are laid out plainly for the GM. Though there are other secrets not revealed, the big one is laid out in plain terms with some basic analysis of what it means for the world and for GMs running a game. Though there isn’t enough of the later, it is still nice to see a game with a massive metaplot style secret spill that secret in the core book – it will save the screams of rage that would otherwise have come down the line. Of course, this leads into the bad that there are many other secrets not discussed, but more on that later.
Finally, the world of Engel is nicely detailed. It has details where you want details – things like the rites and holy days of the Church that all the PCs will be affiliated with. It has general guidelines for things that GMs might want to make up partly on their own – like the way that most of the cities are ruled and guarded. Most important of all, it leaves blank spaces where GMs can insert there own plots and ideas. The only place where the world detail is unsatisfactory is with the Dreamseed – the great enemy – and there we are simply left flat, without enough detail to run with.
The Bad
Engel uses the OGL. This could have been a good thing. There are many good d20 and OGL games out there, games that use the rules intelligently and to their advantage. Engel is not one of them. Doing little to nothing new with the system and lacking in substantive game information for the GM, Engel feels very incomplete as a game. I’ve been given to understand that the Arcana system from the German original was a very rules-light narrative driven system. The lack of hard game information that we see in Engel would still be an issue with such a system, but not nearly to the degree that it is with the system of the American version. Engel, it seems, suffered in translation not of its prose, but of its rules.
The system from Potestates (angelic powers) looks a lot like the Force system from Star Wars, only without the nuance and without the divide between Vitality and Wounds. To use a power an angel must have the skill for the power, and must pay a price in hit points in order to use it. The character then rolls their skill, with the level of their check determining the success and power of the skill. Unlike Star Wars, there are no complimentary or supplemental feats, just a simple skill system. This is not a bad thing (though it is a bland thing), but the use of hit points to fuel powers is problematic. Star WarsVitality recovers quickly and is set apart in the game as being relatively expendable (even when you run out of Vitality you still have Wound Points, when you run out of Hit Points you’re just screwed). Hit Point damage in Engel heals far more slowly, is far less easy to ignore, and gives them far less ability to use their powers. Low Hit Point characters are lucky to be able to use their powers more than once a day; and impressive displays of power can leave a character in danger of easy death for days afterwards. There are several ways to deal with this, either by setting it up as a tone issue (though it makes the Engel far less impressive than the setting shows them as being) or making house rules (such as making the damage subdual damage or making a point-pool system), but as it is the system is quite brutal – simple to use but problematic to annoying in play.
These system issues aren’t overly surprising either. In fact the OGL system of the game is almost completely cut and pasted from the OGL, sometimes literally. One of the worst examples of this is the Subdual Damage section on page 218 in which the direct repetition of the OGL text went wrong somehow, resulting in several odd line breaks, missing letters, broken words, and a general mess that I would harshly chide a high school student for including in a report. Now, this is the worst example of poor editing and obvious negligence towards rules in the book, and most problems are not nearly so appalling. However it does show certain endemic problems with Engel, namely that it feels rushed and that the rules had very little thought given to them. This feeling is reinforced by areas where the rules just don’t do service to the setting bits in specific areas. For example, Gabrielites are famous for their single minded spiritual devotion and link to their flaming swords – but the Gabrielite class has absolutely no special abilities, feats, or mechanical connections to the flaming sword at all. Yes they can specialize in it, but they can also specialize in any weapon and even get special abilities that let them use any weapon, which while it makes them the capable warriors they are supposed to be does not support, and even subtly undermines, the heavy emphasis the text places on their relation to their sword. In an era where we’ve seen games like Mutants and Masterminds, Slaine, Godlike, and Spycraft show what the d20 based system is capable of, Engel comes off as a rather shoddy.
The other big bad with Engel is the dearth of actual game supporting material given in the book. Of the Dreamseed, beasts serving the great enemy and the main threat of the game world, we are given only two statted examples. Yes, you heard correctly – two. But what, you may ask, what about non-statted examples? Well, there are fairly complete descriptions of the two that are statted, and passing references to a few more, maybe a half-dozen vagaries in all. The lack of game stats does not stop at the beasts either. We do get the complete stats for 5 first level Engel, but we see absolutely nothing about higher level Engel. There are only 9 described and statted NPCs (there are a few more non-stated ones), and no lists of common stats for common types. We do get full lists of weapons, gear, Engel powers, and a small smattering of maps. What we don’t get are things that GMs would need to run a long term game. Engel gives enough information on the world and the game information needed to run it to fill a Player’s Guide, but not enough to feel like a full and satisfying game. Creatures, commoners, stats, and details for all shapes and sizes are desperately needed and dreadfully lacking.
The Ugly
While the exclusion of enough information about the Dreamseed went into the bad column, as it is a fairly objective flaw in the book, I’m going to add a different exclusion to the “ugly” list. Engel is a game of mysteries and secrets, from big to small. The biggest of the secrets is given to the GM, along with a very brief discussion of how it affects the world and the play of the game. There are many other mysteries and secrets, however, which are hidden from the GM as completely as they would be from the players, giving much of the book a feeling of incompletion. Compounding this minor irritation is the large number of times in which we are told that something, including things that will be a part of almost every single Engel campaign I can conceive of running, will be revealed at a later date. Vastly irksome as that is, the problem is compounded by the issue that it isn’t all setting information that is withheld either. There are rules issues that could be important to a rules-central game that are excluded because they “will be discussed at some other time.” That this future discussion includes things like how PCs multi-class as well as covering a very likely direction for campaigns to turn (really it’s the default direction for an Engel campaign) I can only call its exclusion from the book ugly, annoying, and disappointing.
The Conclusion
Engel has a lot going for it. It is a beautiful game with some of the most fitting, well executed art I’ve seen in some time. It has verve, imagination, sweeping areas for adventure, and a very well created and captivating world with a stylish tone and good use of theme. Stylistically it is very impressive. Unfortunately it suffers in substance, execution, and as a game. The OGL rules are not used to their fullest potential and seem to have had little thought put into them. Rather than being remade to fit the game, which games like Mutants and Masterminds and Spycraft did wonderfully, Engel took an almost straight OGL cut and paste with a few poorly crafted additions that make no real attempt to do anything interesting, supportive, or evocative with the rules. Merely bland rules would have been bad enough, but the use of hit point damage to fuel all angelic powers (rather than Subdual damage or the Vitality system they clearly were cribbed from) can have a crippling effect upon a game. The exclusion of important information, such as statistics for enemies and information on multi-classing, renders Engel a fascinating world in a very stylish book that will sit very unplayed upon my shelf.
It is possible that future books for the series could fix all of these problems. There have been games that got of to as shaky a start as Engel that went on to be winners, and Engel certainly has the panache to pull through a rough start. If we see plentiful stats and game material in the upcoming Creatures of the Dreamseed, if we get more secrets revealed to the GM and more solid game material, and if we get possible alternate systems – both d20 alternates and the Arcana system of the German original – then the game could still be a winner.
On the strength of the core book alone, however, I can not recommend it as a game. It is a really good game-book to read, if you’re so inclined, but as a game it is simply incomplete.
For being stylish, slick, and wonderfully interesting Engel gets a 4 in style. For having a lackluster system and inadequate game material, it gets a 1 in substance.
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