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"Promised Sands" Review
By
Gary McBride
I first saw “Promised Sands” produced by BBRACK Productions at GAMA this year and my interest was piqued. Any small gaming company that is releasing a new non-D20 fantasy RPG always interests me. After all, it seems so clearly foolish given the de facto D&D D20 dominance that someone must truly believe in their system to actually attempt a printed book fantasy release. Either that, or they are ignorant of the state of the industry. The guys at BBRACK however did not seem clueless. They seemed to have their proverbial ducks in a row. So when Benjamin Rogers, a head honcho at BBRACK, offered me a chance to review his book I leapt at the chance.
Production Value
“Promised Sands” is an almost four hundred page softbound book with a list of $36.95. It is a fantasy RPG set in T’nah a magical, post-apocalyptic, vaguely middle-eastern desert environment. The book is well put together and durable for a soft back. Although I’ve only had the book for a few days at this writing, I have pawed through the book extensively and have yet to encounter any binding issues. The cover is full color and attractive. If I have anything bad to say about the exterior layout, it is that there is too much text on the back cover and a couple annoying grammar errors involving a migratory 'k' (‘new’ instead of ‘knew’, 'knock' instead of 'nock'). Definitely a small gripe.
Interior art layout is, unfortunately, not so good. The interior is entirely black and white drawings (many pencil). Some are sharp and high quality. Some simply aren’t. The book suffers from the oh-so-common problem of first release RPG books of having loads of medium quality art. The credits list thirty-four contributing artists. The result of this great number of artists is that the style and quality vary wildly across the book.
Text layout is generally good. The text is double columned and readable. A centered bold header separates each section and real effort has been made to eliminate widow and orphan text. The book is quite readable. It is surprisingly well edited and I found little in the way of grammatical mistakes. For first edition small press RPGs this was refreshing. I could point some minor mistakes in layout, but really I had no trouble getting to the meat of the game.
In a world where I have paid forty bucks for a book a full hundred pages shorter, the price point did not seem unreasonable.
Mechanics
The basic dice mechanic for the game is novel but not revolutionary. The game uses the ‘Trinary System’ for all resolution. You roll 3d10, the first two dice are percentile roll that determines success or failure and the third d10 is the Effect Die which determines how dramatically you succeeded. One bit of weirdness I noted early on about the system is Attribute rolls. Attributes, to quote the book “are seldom above 20”, but yet you still make them using the basic ‘Trinary System’. As a result, even the strongest character would fail a strength check 80%+ of the time. This seems very odd. There is a Lifting skill however, so I suppose they want strong characters to take that skill in order to lift heavy objects. But this creates some odd possibilities. You can, theoretically, be good at lifting things but unable to break things. Punching and Kicking are also separate skills, so you can easily make a character that is no good at kicking open doors, but can handily punch them down. It seems to me that there is a simple fix to this. Implement a system not dissimilar to Call of Cthulhu’s multiples for Attribute rolls. But regardless, it would involve tinkering with their system.
Combat is straightforward and typical. You roll initiative against your reflexes. This establishes the order. You have a number of actions (3 or 4 seem typical) and everyone takes turns highest to lowest taking one action until all their actions or exhausted. That is one round of combat. The rules for damage try to be more realistic than your average roleplaying game. There are rules for head trauma, shock, nerve damage, bone damage and blood loss. The overall effect of this is that combat is fairly lethal especially if you play with the advanced damage resolution system.
An oddity of the system is the large number of skills. This is a game with a Bluff skill, a Con skill, a Deceit skill, a Misinformation Skill and a Persuasion Skill. What is the difference? To quote from the text:
“Bluff is the ability to keep one’s face and demeanor completely unreadable – especially when lying.”
“Con is the skill of deliberately lying in a convincing manner to the advantage of the liar.”
“Deceit is the skill of deceiving someone through carefully chosen misinformation to avoid a specific lie.”
“Misinformation is the ability to plant, foster and grow lies in an effective manner and toward a specific goal.”
“Persuasion is the art of convincing someone else of your perspective, ideology, opinion, or anything else you wish to convey” (including, I would presume lies and misinformation).
This jumble of skills to me is wasteful and confusing. Yes, they are all slightly different. But surely, some (or all) of these skills could be combined together. Another example is Hide, Lurking, Stalk, and Stealth. Locksmith and Pick Lock. I could list more.
The occupation system has some oddities. For example a Vhzine (or scholars) includes sub-occupations of Politicians, Questor (a finder of hidden secrets), Medic, Caregiver, Doula (midwife’s apprentice), and Quack. These seem very randomly lumped together to me. And honestly, several of the occupation paths seem very unheroic. Does anyone really want to slowly build up their Doula to the advance occupation of Midwife (detailed on p. 212)? Couldn’t this have been safely omitted or perhaps like in D&D 3rd lumped in some variety of NPC occupation? Another unheroic occupation path: Field Hand (p.107) to Farmhand (p. 214) to Farmer (p.226) finally culminating in the Elite career path of Overseer (p. 234). It even gives as a sample character template Fisher—Student. Now certainly, you can play a more traditional warrior or wizard or thief. But these non-heroic worker paths take up a lot of space and to me, they feel like padding.
The magic system is interesting but dense and difficult to penetrate. A brief summary would have been nice. There are two kinds of magic: Ido and Qai. Ido (which is sort of wizardry) creates Mahya (spells, basically) which are made of pattern verbs to create a noun or an effect. It sort of reminds me of Ars Magica since there are almost no premade spell effects. In fact only 12 “fixed Mahya” are given in the game. Qai is more like clerical magic. It only affects living things. Pure Qai heals. Tainted Qai hurts.
Setting
My biggest complaint, however, with the entire game is not with mechanics or production value. Instead it is best summed up in a single paragraph. From page 89 under occupations:
Gear: You wear a djellab and sirwahl with a long flowing bisht or pelerin – or you may wear a nashl. It is rare to see a Maroc without ghutra or agahl. Maroc – especially those with potent ability – do not like their faces to be seen. The sarik is the most common form of footwear.
I like to believe that I am a literate well-read person, but upon first reading that paragraph is utterly impenetrable. I had to hunt down what these terms meant. Some of them (maybe all?), I was later informed are actual middle eastern clothing items. Regardless, their description in the game book appears a full 300 pages away (page 387). I had to stop and turn to the index to understand exactly what this paragraph is trying to convey. The book is full of this and not just about clothing.
Another example, on page 175:
Any Rusahn can carry a shard of Qai crystal for use as qainos, but anyone caught with a Qai crystal in the shape of a blade had better be Qyen or Azili…or else.
The races, the cultures, the occupations use non-standard names extensively. Spells aren’t spells. They’re “mahya”. The dwarves aren’t dwarves. They’re “Andw’ahr”. The fighters aren’t fighters or warriors. They’re “kril”. A valid character description would be an Andw’ahr Kon’ahr Kril, or perhaps better known as Dwarven Miner Warrior. It would be okay if there was a glossary or every time an exotic term was used it was in italics and referenced what it was translated. However, after a few hundred pages of constantly introducing new terms for cultures, races, items, occupations, skills, and backgrounds it can grow quite wearisome. Let me give a concrete example in the paragraph I referenced above of how to fix this.
Gear: You wear a tunic (called a djellab) and baggy trousers with a long flowing robe or cape – or you may wear a more formal robe (called a nashl). It is rare to see a Maroc without a headdress or veil. Maroc – especially those with potent ability – do not like their faces to be seen. The sandal is the most common form of footwear. See page 387 for more detailed descriptions of these items.
Slightly longer, yes, but much more readable.
There is one section of the book that I truly enjoyed reading and found valuable. The Legends section (p. 247-253) is full of interesting tidbits about the world and is rife with adventure possibilities. It’s well written, engaging, creative and well suited to be stolen and adapted to other games. It is also far too short at only seven pages. I also liked the section on contact archetypes. It provides a list of typical contacts for your players to know and interact with. It is a useful tool for creating minor background characters on the fly. Alas, at just under three pages it too is very short.
The flora and fauna section has some bizarre inclusions. This desert-based game has statistics for the beaver and the chicken (called a bruckbird). It does have one very cool concept for a monster – a technomagic self-reproducing robot called an Iph. The monster section continues the tradition of renaming the familiar. The dragons are drachen. The ogres are uzmek. The monster section is better about this sort of thing however than the rest of the book. The manticore is called a manticore. The uzmek has (“ogre”) after its name. If only they had done this throughout the rest of the book.
There is one pointed omission from the game – magic items. This is a game where wizards can cast fireballs and where priests can heal and where dragons and ogres are on the prowl, but yet there are no magic swords. There are some high tech items left (called otec) in the world, but even of those only a handful are described. I guess I can see this as a thematic choice, but the game doesn’t explain the omission at all.
There is also no sample adventure. Less experienced GMs who pick up this book might very well be puzzled as to what exactly a typical Promised Sands adventure might entail. But being as this game is obviously intended to be picked up by more experienced gamers, this seems a small complaint.
Summary
I wanted to like this game. Though far from the worse thing I have ever been handed to review, still, it needs lots of work. Clean up the occupation system and the skill list. Call a spade a spade. Purge the jargon. This would be a really great start. Until that is done, I simply cannot recommend actually playing this game.
But let’s face it. You’re probably never going to play this game. If you buy this RPG you’re probably just looking for good ideas to steal and incorporate into your own game or perhaps even for just a good read. This is the open secret of the RPG community – most games that get bought are never played. Is this four hundred pages of text worth the money in this context?
It pains me to say that no, it is not. The good ideas that are in this book are all too often choked out by jargon. I simply did not enjoy reading this book. It is, ultimately, as simple as that. The back cover asks us “Are you the one to claim the Promised Sands?” After reading the book, I am certain that I am not.
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