The name's Davenport. I review games.
I'll tell you up front that I was pretty damn skeptical about Clowns: The Disturbing. I didn't think any game mechanic could capture the sheer terror of those smiley-faced bast-
"Arrrrrr!!! Avast, ye swab! Prepare t'be boarded!!!"
"*squawk!!* Prepare t'be boarded! Prepare t'be boarded! *squawk!!*"
Uh... Hiya, Todd. I'm kinda in the middle of a review, here. Nice parrot. You been runnin' with scissors again…?
"Nay, ye scurvy landlubber! This be my piratin' eyepatch! I've a new piratin' roleplayin' game fer ye t'review: Bloode Island! Arrr!"
"*squawk!!* Bloode Island!! Bloode Island!! *squawk!!*"
Catchy name. But, uh, like I said, I'm a little busy at the moment with this review, so…
"Ye'll review no game but mine, or I'll cleave ye from stem t'stern! Arrr!"
"*squawk!!* Stem to stern! Stem to stern! *squawk!!*"
You do know that's a plastic cutlass, right, Todd? Now, I've really gotta get back to Clowns, here…
"I'll hear no more o' yer bloody clowns, or I'll have a mojo on yer arse quick as lightning! Arrr!"
"*squawk!!* On yer arse! On yer arse! *squawk!!*"
A 'mojo'…? (Bird's gettin' real annoying real quick, by the way, Todd…)
"Aye! This be a game o' voodoo an' piracy! Arrr!"
"*squawk!!* Voodoo an' piracy! Voodoo an' piracy! *squawk!!*"
Hmmm… Voodoo and piracy, huh? Kinda like that Tim Powers book, On Stranger Tides? Always liked that one…
"Aye, ye bloody barnacle-boffer!"
"*squawk!!* Barnacle-boffer! Barnacle-boffer! *squawk!!*"
'Barnacle-boffer'? Look, at least stick to real pirate insults…
"(Oh… and arrr!)"
"(*squawk!!* Oh and arrr!! Oh and arrr!! *squawk!!*)"
*sigh* I'm about ready to send someone to the 'Oh arrr'… Okay, tell you what, Todd: You ditch the parrot, I'll ditch the clowns. Deal?
"Aye! A deal it is! To th'brig with ye, Polly! Thar be reviewin' afoot!"
"*squawk!!* %#@^!! %#@^!! *squawk!!*"
You kiss your Ma with that beak, bird?
CONTENT
Chapter One: Introduction
This brief chapter first explains that Bloode Island is a completely new version of the 1PG game of the same name, not a "sequel", then gives an overview of the setting: a pastiche of 300 years of Caribbean piratical history. Like Deadlands, when forced to choose between "historically accurate" and "cool", Bloode Island goes for "cool".
Chapter Two: Character Generation
Bloode Island uses the XPG system, which was first seen in Mean Streets. I will refer you to my review of the latter for a detailed analysis of the system and will cover only the noteworthy differences here.
Skills
Several such differences appear in the skills section of this chapter. The Athleticism skill from Arrowflight makes a return appearance in slightly modified form as the Agility Feat skill, for example, to be used for the kind of stylish stunts that play such an integral part of swashbuckling adventure.
* * * * *
Playtest: I made a very big mistake in neglecting to highlight the importance of this skill to my players, and none of them took it. As a result, the boarding action in our playtest sea battle was a farce. Without some GM fiat on my part, 2/3 of the PC boarding party would have dropped ignominiously into the sea. I cannot emphasize this enough: If you want your character to be the next Sea Hawk, take the Agility Feat skill.
* * * * *
Armed hand-to-hand combat is divided into two skills: Fencing, for long swords, and Melee Weapon, for everything else. While I was pleased to see Fencing broken out as a separate skill, I was disappointed in the execution. Fencing gives a character access to three weapons from the equipment list: the foil, the rapier, and the saber. Of those three, the saber also can be used with the Melee Weapon skill. Even that pirate's favorite, the cutlass, falls under Melee Weapon. So, it really only makes sense to take Fencing from a character concept standpoint. Mechanically, it's just this side of pointless. The game would gain a lot in flavor if it would import some of the fighting styles from Arrowflight, such as Gallant and Swashbuckler.
There are more interrelationships between various skills in this version of XPG than there are in Mean Streets. For example, the Education skill gives a bonus to Cultural and Natural Sciences at higher levels, and Mojo (used for magic -- see Chapter Four below) has Lore as a prerequisite.
* * * * *
Playtest: These spotty connections made character creation just slightly slower than it was in Mean Streets, insofar as I couldn't just pass along the list of skills and let the players purchase what they liked based upon skill names alone. Unfortunately, I didn't realize this until after I'd already let the players buy directly from the list, forcing us to re-do some characters to account for bonuses and prerequisites. This isn't a major problem by any stretch of the imagination, but it did catch me off guard.
* * * * *
Starting Wealth
Unlike in Mean Streets, starting wealth in Bloode Island isn't based upon profession, but rather upon either a random roll plus modifiers for the Wealth trait or upon player/GM agreement.
* * * * *
Playtest: The random method can produce some implausible (but not necessarily inexplicable) results. The wealthiest character in our group by far, for example, was an African bokor (magician). I just decided that a ship's bokor must be a valuable position indeed.
* * * * *
Character Concept Ideas
As the section title suggests, these are only ideas for character professions, not fully-statted archetypes. This is not to say that they don't contain valuable information, however. On the contrary, the historical detail behind some of the character concepts was very enlightening. For example, the chapter distinguishes between "buccaneers", who were French and Spanish hunters of wild pigs and cattle on Hispaniola who turned to piracy when the Spanish drove them off, and "corsairs", who were primarily religiously-motivated privateers in the Mediterranean raiding the shipping lanes of "heathen" countries.
Note that the presence of roughly half of these character types on a pirate vessel, such as Clergy, Scientist, Settler, and Trollop/Wench, would require a bit of an explanation.
Chapter Three: Game Mechanics
Again, the basic game mechanics are identical to those in Mean Streets. The only real difference I noted is that hits that do damage less than the target's SHRUG now have no effect at all.
* * * * *
Playtest: Combat remains very quick and very deadly. No exchange of blows lasted more than 3-4 rounds during my game's boarding action.
Factoring in wound penalties and the generally equal level of competence between the PCs and their opponents, I found that getting in the first blow was decisive as often as not. This seemed very swashbuckle-y in our trial combat, but only because the PCs were the lucky ones. To be honest, there's not much in the mechanics to encourage over-the-top derring-do. The single DESTINY point characters receive, which allows a single binding re-roll, didn't do much to take up the slack; instead, it simply gave the characters a single chance to try again to make up for their low ability scores.
In short, my players got off easy. If I were to run the game again, I would start them out with more DESTINY points, let them spend as many as they like on a single roll, and let them take the highest result. That, I suspect, would make the game feel a bit more Errol Flynn-like.
* * * * *
Ship-to-Ship Combat
Naval combat in Bloode Island is a highly abstracted affair. Ships have three Active Stats -- Speed (SPD), Maneuverability (MAN), and Guns (GUN) -- and three Damage Capacities -- HULL, SAIL, and CREW. The captain uses SPD or MAN as a modifier to a Nautical Sciences roll, depending upon what he wants to do. Firing involves rolling against the ship's GUN rating and applying the margin of success as damage, with the margin of the Nautical Sciences maneuvering roll added to the Target Number. Whether the damage goes against the HULL, SAIL, or CREW depends upon whether the captain orders the guns loaded with cannonballs, chain shot, or grapeshot. A ship with no HULL left sinks, and MAN and GUN are limited by SAIL and CREW, respectively.
Ship-to-ship combat occurs in two-minute turns, allowing plenty of room for human-scale three-second turns in which the PCs can act.
* * * * *
Playtest: From my trial naval battle, I quickly discovered that sheer size and firepower rule the day. Note that GUN determines the chance to hit and damage. MAN modifiers are pretty low, so maneuvering is unlikely to be decisive unless one captain's skill is much higher than that of his opponent. And MAN can't be used to "dodge" incoming fire, so all a ship can do is soak damage and hope the other guy sinks first, or make a run for it. In short, the defeat of the Spanish Armada -- English fast galleons against larger and heavier armed but slower Spanish war galleons -- wouldn't have turned out so well for the English had they been using this system. (During a conversation on this subject, Todd Downing pointed out that the superior range and quality of the British cannons and the speed of their ships made the difference. However, since the Bloode Island mechanics account for none of these advantages in naval combat, I must stand by my original statement.)
And speaking of making a run for it, because loss of SAIL affects MAN but not SPD, we found that the PCs' pirate ship couldn't slow down its fleeing quarry.
It's also impossible to distinguish between individual cannons or parts of ships, so a PC couldn't commandeer a cannon and fire at the ship's cabin, for example. There's also no clear way given to handle an exchange between ships and shore batteries, although one could be extrapolated. Furthermore, crewmembers are completely immune to ammunition other than grapeshot, and PCs are completely immune to any damage during ship-to-ship combat. (Well, unless you want to treat them as part of the ship's CREW rating, or unless you count the possibility of their ship sinking.)
In short, I found the naval combat system to be sufficient for a battle happening in the background, but I wouldn't want to rely on it for an exclusively naval encounter. I think I'd prefer a more unified mechanic for that. The system as it stands gets the job done, and I appreciate the simplicity, but it feels a little too much like a game-within-a-game to me.
* * * * *
Chapter Four: Mojo
Bloode Island doesn't set out to be a full-blown fantasy setting so much as a historical setting with an optional fantasy seasoning. To that end, magic is kept relatively low-key so that its absence won't harm the setting and so that its presence, such as it is, will seem, well, magical.
Magicians must purchase the Occult asset and the Lore and Mojo skills. Mojo determines not just how well the character can perform magic, but also what he can do:
- At Mojo 1 or higher, the character can create medicines and other drugs.
- At Mojo 2 or higher, the character can create charms and read oracles.
- At Mojo 3 or higher, the character can sense spirits.
- At Mojo 4 or higher, the character can summon and control spirits.
- At Mojo 5 or higher, the character can cast spells.
Note that as in Mean Streets, the maximum starting skill level is 4. So, it's not possible for a starting character to be a spellcaster.
* * * * *
Playtest: I nuked that restriction in my playtest in order to try out the spellcasting rules. And besides, one of my players really wanted to play a bokor. I don't think allowing this was particularly unbalancing, given the focus required in point allocation.
* * * * *
Perhaps the impossibility of creating a spellcasting character with the core rules relates to the lack of any rules regarding starting spells. The subject simply isn't addressed.
* * * * *
Playtest: To keep from bogging things down, I allowed the bokor's player come up with spells on the fly and decided upon their acceptability as they came up.
* * * * *
Charms generally just give a +1 to a given skill, and oracles can read one secret about a target or tell the target's future once per month.
Spirits of all sorts are identical mechanically, differing only in what they know (and hence can tell their masters) and in the fact that ghosts are able to materialize and physically attack. Intangible, invisible, and able to answer just about anything within their sphere of influence and locate anyone anywhere in an hour on the outside, spirits require some GM fiat to keep under control.
That's nothing compared to the GM fiat required for drugs and (especially) spells, though. In both cases, the allowable effects depend entirely upon the GM's judgment, as do the difficulty of the Willpower + Mojo roll to create them. There are no guidelines on difficulty -- only a handful of sample drugs and spells, and the advice that GMs should factor in the complexity of the formula/casting and the power of the drug/spell into the difficulty.
* * * * *
Playtest: During the naval battle, the bokor wanted to cast a spell to put the entire enemy crew to sleep. Checking the sample spells for an offensive spell to use as a guide, I find only Evil Eye, which has a -2 difficulty modifier and inflicts a slowly fatal wasting disease with an (apparently) instant casting. Based on this, I ruled that taking an entire crew out of a fight ought to be pretty difficult and slapped a base -7 penalty on it. Through some negotiation with the bokor's player, we finally decided that the bokor would have to sing and dance for two rounds before the spell went off in exchange for reducing the penalty to -5. (Disclaimer: These penalties are from memory, as I forgot to save the chat log for our online session.) She missed her first roll, spent her one precious DESTINY point to roll again, failed again, and found that the fight had ended before she could complete another casting.
I found the judgment call-based difficulty levels and the pass/fail resolution to be simple, if a little anticlimactic. There aren't any repercussions from failure, and there's nothing other than limits on components (assuming they're used up by the spell) and time to keep the magician from trying again and again. On the other hand, I appreciated being able to come up with spells quickly and easily.
Assuming that my judgment call on spell difficulty was correct, it seems that magicians in this game are in the same boat as those in Pendragon and Castle Falkenstien: there's not all that much they can do to affect a battle, but given enough time, they could pull off some pretty impressive feats. That seems about right for a game that wants to keep the emphasis on cutlasses and cannonballs, not lightning bolts and fireballs. And adjusting the level of magic an individual campaign involves little more than reducing spellcasting penalties.
* * * * *
By default, the game presumes that magic is "primitive" in origin: voodoo or native islander shamanism. However, the extremely loose nature of the magic system makes this mostly a matter of trappings -- creating a Hermetic magician wouldn't be all that difficult, for example.
That could be a benefit or a flaw, depending upon your preferences. As a "voodoo" system, it seems a little too dry -- the main nods to voodoo are in the requirement of an effigy to affect targets beyond line-of-sight and in the loas being the power behind actual spells. And unfortunately, the loas themselves are neither explained nor described, missing a great opportunity to add more flavor to both the system and the setting.
The chapter also suggests allowing clerical powers with the same mechanics, simply replacing Mojo with a Faith skill. I'm a bit more dubious about that than I am about using Mojo for non-voodoo magic.
* * * * *
Playtest: One player created a highly religious corsair and gave him Faith. I had a difficult time reconciling the various Mojo power levels with Catholicism. Spells, assuming he'd taken a high enough Faith score, would be easy enough to handle as miracles, but what's the Faith-based version of making drugs? Consecrating holy water? And granted, the spirit-binding power might be re-interpreted as spirit-banishing, but that would still give clerics only half the power of the equivalent Mojo power.
* * * * *
The chapter includes rules for zombies and their creation as well. The rules take a compromise route between "real" drug-induced zombies and the walking dead, making them either the living drained of all but a spark of life or else the dead instilled with just that spark. Any weapon short of artillery does only a WR of 1 against them. I don't much like that approach, personally -- it seems to me that if you're going to have to hack a zombie to pieces, an axe would be more useful than a dagger or a musket.
Chapter Five: A History of the New World
Not being an expert on the subject myself, I can't vouch for the quality of the information in this chapter. (In terms of its historical accuracy, at any rate.) The quantity, however, is superb. The book efficiently dishes out details on Caribbean history, natives, economics, European powers, and geography, as well as enlightening information regarding the piratical lifestyle. In fact, as informative as this chapter is, the only complaint I have is that any licenses taken with real-world history aren't identified as such. (And that, of course, doesn't really have any bearing on play, know-it-all players aside.)
Chapter Six: Bloode Island Bestiary
The book's bestiary clocks in at a highly respectable 34 entries. As befits the low-and-optional-magic nature of the setting, all but three of these are mundane animals, and the remaining three are merely larger, smarter individual versions of mundane animals -- a giant octopus, anaconda, and crocodile, for the record. The creatures use abbreviated stats -- Combat Value (COM), Weapon Rating (WR), Shrug, and Wounds -- along with a brief listing of any special abilities. (COM serves as both the creatures' attack and defense scores.) I can certainly see the value of this shorthand approach, but the lack of any Intelligence or (especially) Perception stats and skills is a mistake, in my opinion -- such abilities as tracking and stealth seemingly are left to GM fiat.
I should also mention that what could be called the "Killer Parrot" syndrome from Arrowflight makes its reappearance here: Due to the stat scale bottoming out at 1, even small, weak creatures have the capacity to be unaccountably deadly. For example, an effort to model the strength of a parrot's beak renders the parrot nearly as dangerous offensively as a cutlass-armed pirate, and a monkey's teeth and agility make it as dangerous as the average dagger-armed rogue. For Arrowflight, the creators explained that creatures in that fantasy setting are larger and more dangerous than are their counterparts in our world. I'm not sure what the explanation is here. At any rate, the deadliness of mundane animals helps take up the hazard slack from the largely absent supernatural creatures.
Chapter Seven: A Pirate's Cove
As a base of operations for PCs in a game of swashbuckling piracy, Bloode Island is nearly ideal. Named Isla Sangre de Cristo by its discoverer, a lost and shipwrecked captain in Columbus's second expedition to the New World, it was eventually stricken from the charts when it could not be found again due to a navigational error. As a result, it was the perfect hideout for the English pirates who stumbled across it many years later. Those pirates were led by the Admiral, a.k.a. Sir Francis Drake, who regretted the nasty, ruthless turn piracy was taking and longed for the days when pirates were the "brethren of the sea". He set out to make Bloode Island (as the newcomers re-named it) a new start for those old days, making peace with the natives, building a city, and establish an equitable government. In short, the island provides a safe and friendly harbor for "good guy" pirates, while the setting as a whole allows for pirates of the bloodthirsty bilge-rat variety as well. It would be a fine example of a setting designed with gaming in mind as it is, but the way in which it's smoothly integrated into a (pseudo-)historical setting is brilliant in its simplicity.
Aside from the history of the island, the chapter covers the island's geography, population, and politics.
Chapter Eight: Bloode Island Notables
Here the book details six of the more interesting and noteworthy inhabitants of Bloode Island, devoting between 1/2 to 1-1/2 pages to each:
- Admiral Sir Francis Drake, the leader of Bloode Island who may or may not be the legendary privateer of the same name. (Likely not in a no-Mojo game, given the age that would make him.) His forward-looking goal is to create a republic on the island free of European control, but having to work with a society of pirates makes that a rather tricky proposition.
- Oba, Drake's Mojo Man, the Merlin to Drake's Arthur. Even in a no-Mojo game, the superstitious fear he holds over the pirates gives him great power.
- Giulio Rainaldi, the foul-mouthed and insufferably arrogant Italian architect who's found his niche -- sort of -- in building the island's fortifications.
- Colly Purse, the retired pirate who founded the Skull and Cutlass, the most profitable tavern on the island.
- Captain Adam Sussex, the noble-hearted and quixotic pirate dedicated to destroying the slave trade.
- Captain Black Jack MacReady, the ruthless pirate who manages to stay within the letter of the rules of Bloode Island while engaging assorted atrocities. Perfect for an ongoing villain.
Chapter Nine: NPC Stats
The book includes a dozen fully-statted NPCs of various sorts, ready to use for the busy GM: Barkeep/Innkeeper, Bokor, City Official, Law Officer, Marine, Merchant, Native, Noble, Pirate, Scientist/Inventor, Thief, and Wench. And because each one uses the standard point allowances for beginning characters, they may just as easily be used for quickie PCs (an advantage over the NPCs in the corresponding chapter of Mean Streets). However, the very fact that they are the equals of beginning PCs also goes to illustrate the notable lack of swashbuckling competence one might expect PCs to have over their opposition.
Chapter Ten: In Davy Jones' Locker
Like all Deep7 games so far, Bloode Island comes with a ready-to-run adventure. And because it is an adventure, it's time to switch over to the ol' swipeable spoiler text. Spoilers begin here:
The adventure begins on a pirate ship (surprise, surprise) as the characters participate in boarding a French merchant vessel. What is rather surprising is that the ship turns out to be on a scientific expedition to test out an experimental diving bell. Presumably, the characters accept their captain's offer to take the bell as their share of the loot, despite pirates' superstitious fear of Davy Jones' Locker. (The PCs get a gentle nudge in the form of one character's convenient recollection a former ship of his that went down in a storm carrying South American artifacts stolen from the Spanish who stole them from the Indians.) That will require them to find a ship of their own, which will give them a chance to interact with the folk of Bloode Island.
Once the PCs get a ship, they'll get to experience the joys of primitive underwater salvage. Assuming they survive the related hazards, one of two things will happen next, depending upon whether the GM is using Mojo in his game: either the dead pirates on the sunken ship will rise as aquatic zombies to attack the PCs and pursue the diving bell to the surface, or else the PCs will find that Black Jack MacReady has taken over their ship while they were down. (The text notes that a truly sadistic GM might inflict both on a hapless group.)
Either way, the adventure gives some nice opportunities for players to get to know both the system and the setting.
* * * * *
Playtest: My playtest comments above were based on this scenario, so I won't rehash them here.
The most noteworthy omission in the adventure from an introductory standpoint is ship-to-ship combat. The initial combat begins with boarding already underway, and the MacReady scenario, if it's used, has the PCs' ship already boarded. So, I required the PCs to chase down and engage the French ship before boarding it.
The scenario makes two assumptions that need to be considered before using it.
First, it assumes that the characters will be good at fighting and swimming. While that may seem like a reasonable assumption for a pirate game, keep in mind how many of the character concepts don't necessarily fit those criteria. For example, one character in my group was a Wench. I talked her player into making her a particularly combat-oriented Wench, thankfully; otherwise, she'd have been sitting on the sidelines for the key scenes.
And second, the adventure assumes that the players will take the diving bell and put it to use on the sunken pirate ship. In the case of my group, that wasn't a safe assumption at all. One character was simply apathetic about the idea, one wanted to try ransoming the diving bell to its wealthy European sponsor, and one -- the bokor -- was suspicious of such a gadget on general principles. The game ground to a halt as they debated what to do.
* * * * *
[End Spoilers.]
Appendix A: Costs and Equipment
After an understandably small sampling of armor and a generous listing of clothing and general gear, the appendix covers firearms and hand weapons from the mundane (e.g., blunderbuss, flintlock pistol, boarding axe, cutlass) to the more exotic (e.g., multi-barrel musket, volley gun, pistol dagger, sword-breaker). The only flaw in the selection isn't directly related to the selection at all -- it's simply that, as mentioned previously, the stats of the two Fencing-exclusive weapons aren't really enough to make the Fencing skill worthwhile, in my opinion.
STYLE
The cover didn't really grab me, but the interior art is almost uniformly excellent. Like Arrowflight, the book uses engravings to good effect in giving a historical feel. Although much of it appears to be clip art, the original artwork is also of high quality. (And, at any rate, I'll take good clip art over shoddy original work any day, so long as it fits.)
The pirate-themed borders give the book a nice, unified appearance, and the font choice and layout make the text very easy on the eyes, with the art serving as accent rather than focal point. (The text does overlap slightly with said borders in at least a couple of places, however.) For such a small book, I was pleased to see that it included both an index and a glossary of pirate terms, and a ship registry sheet as well as a character sheet.
The writing efficiently conveys the relevant historical and fictional details while seasoning those details with the excitement of the genre. (Granted, much of that may be attributed to the excitement inherent in the genre.) At any rate, the book had me itching to draw a cutlass even without the use of a mood-setting "How to GM this Game" chapter. Typos were few and inconsequential.
CONCLUSION
As was the case with Deep7's Mean Streets, I found this game to have a nice price-to-content ratio -- it's not going to fare well against 7th Sea, for example, in terms of sheer quantity, but it's a very good buy for the completely playable package it provides. My only qualms regarding the game are the magic system, which could use a bit more spice and explanation, and the combat system, which doesn't really support the kind of swashbuckling derring-do that the text encourages. While these may seem like rather fundamental flaws for a pirate/voodoo game, I think the necessary changes fall more into the realm of "tweaking" rather than "revamping" -- some more spell rules here, a few more character points and/or Destiny Points there. So, if you're interested in a historical fantasy pirate game in the same vein as On Stranger Tides and want to save a few doubloons, Bloode Island may well be worth your while.
SUBSTANCE:
- Setting
- Quality = 4.5
- Quantity = 4.5
- Rules
- Quality = 3.0
- Quantity = 4.0
STYLE:
- Artwork = 5.0
- Layout/Readability = 4.5
- Organization = 5.0
- Writing = 4.5
- Proofreading = -0.5
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