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Graphics & Layout
This core rulebook is a 192-page hardcover with a well-bound lay-flat binding. The pages are glossy, printed on a fairly thick stock of paper.
The overall design of the book is pleasing to the eyes, but not overdone. Graphical borders run along the tops and bottoms of the pages, but don't overpower it. Almost all of the artwork in the game, including these borders, is sophisticated grayscale work. It's all quite attractive. There's a small smattering of plain black & white line art, which doesn't fit with the rest of the style of the book, but is thankfully rare.
Constantly running along the top right of every page, and also marking each new chapter, are quotes from Jack Vance's four Dying Earth books. Despite their ubiquity, they're fairly unobstrusive, and do an excellent job of getting you into the language of the game, which is quite unique.
The character sheet is plain, but mostly utilitarian. There were, however, two notable absences. One is the lack of space for specific adventages and disadvantages that players acquire based upon their styles of combat, persuasion, and magic. The second lack is a space to list "trumps" for those same main abilities.
Helpfully, versions of this character sheet are available online, so there's no need to copy from the book.
Ease of Use
Overall, the rules are well-organized. They're easy to follow as you read through them, and the only places I ever had to reread the text for clarification was in a few sections of the character creation section, but those questions were largely resolved via an example provided in the text.
The rules were also quite easy to reference during gameplay, once you remember which order the 13 chapters are in (something which was innately obvious to me by the time I was ready to run my first game).
Notably missing from the book is a set of gamemaster's aids to, for example, list all of the skill trumps, list the names of the 6 levels of success and failure, list some standard reasons for specific levies, books, or penalties, list important standard rules, etc. At a few times during the game I GMed, I decided to ignore trumps rather than try and figure out what trumped what, and my decisions about levies, boons, and penalties was a bit more off-the-cuff than I would have liked. At least the list of trumps can be found in an appendix also downloadable. I suspect the rest would become more intuitive with continued gamemastering of this RPG.
Before closing out on "Ease of Use", it's worth noting that the rulebook is, quite simply, fun and easy to read. It's funny in a moderate way that doesn't spoil the rulebook's purpose as a rulebook but does make it a quicker, easier read.
Trueness to The Dying Earth
Before closing out a Style assessment of The Dying Earth, it's necessary to consider how well it actually adapts Jack Vance's books into a roleplaying medium.
Historically, I feel like most licensed RPGs have done at best halfway jobs of adapting their source materials. Games like MERP and Stormbringer, for example, I found to be perfectly enjoyable systems, but respectively they never shouted J.R.R Tolkien or Michael Moorcock to me. Some other games, such as WEG's Star Wars have been slightly better, at least getting the dramatic feel right, but true successes at adapting not just a background, but also an ethos and a style have been quite rare. (I think Victory Game's James Bond 007 is one of the few exceptions.)
I say all of that so it has some real meaning when I say that The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game is one of the best adaptations I've ever seen of a literary property to the roleplaying field.
The whole game of Dying Earth seems to be centered around giving the true experience of the books. For example, the experience mechanism is based upon quoting "taglines", which are short speeches in the manner of the books. The fine art of persuasion is an integral part of the rule system, and it thus encourages people to engage in rhetoric just as occurs in the original stories. Various resistances measure a player's ability (or inability) to be seduced by vices. For Cugel-level campaigns there are rules for regularly losing wealth, while in higher-level campaigns, you get retainers who are either skillful, but troublesome, or unskilled, but helpful. It's all as it should be in The Dying Earth.
Really, the whole rulebook just screams Dying Earth, and that puts you into the mindset as a result. Playing so truly to a background world takes work, as I'll discuss more when I talk about the game design, but the Dying Earth gives you all the tools and encouragement you could need to do so.
(If you're unfamiliar with the Dying Earth books of which I speak, you may wish to rush out at once and buy Tales of the Dying Earth--the complete collection, in North America--or Tales of the Dying Earth--the complete collection, in Europe. The book is a fun, episodic read, kin to Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique and predecessor to Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun.)
Adding up all the pieces, I'd say that: The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game has a utilitarian and largely beautiful layout, though it's all grayscale; that the rulebook is largely accessible and easy to use; and that its rule system overall does a superb job of adapting the source material. As a result I'd rate it's Style at above average, with "4" out of "5" total.
The Game System
As with most game systems, The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game centers around two cores: its character models and its task resolution. I've discussed each below.
Character Models
Modeling the Character: A Dying Earth character begins with a couple of standard, freeform descriptions that you'll find in many a roleplaying games--such as name, description, mannerisms, and costume. The Dying Earth then procedes on to numerical descriptions. These rated attributes are divided into four broad categories: abilities, possessions, resistances, relationships, and magic.
Each numerically-rated attribute uses the exact same scale. It starts at 0 and runs up to a soft cap based on the power level of the campaign--10 for a "Cugel"-level campaign, home to scoundrels; 15 for a "Turjan"-level campaign, home to wizards; and 20 for a "Rhialto"-level campaign, home to arch-magi. (And I say "soft cap" because abilities can actually go higher, it just gets more costly.)
Abilities describe your ability to do things. The most important abilities are Persuade and Attack, along with their opposite numbers Rebuff and Defense, as well as the ubiquitous Health. About 20 additional abilities are available for purchase, from Driving and Seduction to Pedantry and Wherewithal.
Possessions describe your ability to hold on to items.
Resistances describe your ability to avoid temptation in the form of arrogance, avarice, indolcence, gourmandism, pettifoggery, and rakishness.
Relationships describe your ability to get other people to help you out.
Magic describes your ability to cast cantrips and spells alike. It costs twice as much to purchase or raise as any of the other attributes.
Each attribute rating has, alongside it, an attribute pool, which is initially equal to the attribute rating. Attribute pools form the core mechanic of the game, as we'll discuss in a second. With everything from spells to relationships to traditional abilities all using the exact same rules the simplicity and expandability of the game is assured.
There's one complexity, which is that the "most important" attributes all have a bit of extra definition. Persuade, Rebuff, Attack, Defense, and Magic each must be defined by a "Style". This style gives you advantages and disadvantages versus other styles of the same attributes, and also gives you other bonuses and penalties. Each of those five attributes has six styles to choose from.
For example, one of the styles of attack is speed, which is particularly effective against the dodge defense, and particularly ineffective against the misdirection defense. It also makes it easier for you to win initiative in combat and cheaper for you to make multiple attacks in a round.
The above description fairly completely describes how what I consider to be the "basic" game (which is to say Cugel-level play) works. For magicians you get a few extra adjuncts for your character, via a manse, which is defined by a simple construction system, and retainers, who are mini-characters all their own. For archi-magi you also get magical servants in the form of sandestins. Together manses and retainers seem to offer considerable color to the game. The manse system is somewhat freeform in its description, while the retainers and sandestins for the most part use the same core attribute description which underlies the rest of the game.
Overall, because of its consistent character model, The Dying Earth characters are simple and easy to understand, and this simplicity also makes the rest of the mechanics fairly intuitive to use.
Character Creation: The act of creating a character is quite simple. You have a set number of points to spend, which you divide between all those different attributes. It's more costly to buy magic, and more costly if you want to go above your campaign's soft cap, but beyond that everything's consistent. A little bit of guidance is provided for how you potentially should spend points, but even more guidance would have been better--e.g., some notes on how much to spend in each of the main sections.
Character Advancement: This is one of the most innovative, and likely one of the most resisted, parts of the rules. Basically each game each player receives 3 taglines--two appropriate for the adventure and one he picked himself from a list. These are sayings like "The question of locomotion proves intriguing!" and "For me the causality is unconvincing". Each player should try to use his taglines during play and is awarded experience points for doing so--between 0 and 3 each, depending on how dramatic, appropriate, and evocative his use was.
These taglines serve several interesting purposes: They help keep players in the mindset of the unique speech of the Dying Earth books; they give players goals to move toward; and they also give players warnings of what they might be facing. Overall I find the idea intriguing, but know some players will be resistant to them, while others might have troubles getting up the self-confidence to use their taglines in play.
For these latter types of players, The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game does offer a few less innovative alternatives for experience.
Task Resolution
To start with, Robin Laws makes a very helpful distinction in his mechanics which he also used in Hero Wars. He breaks character activity down into two main, abstract types: actions (meaning without opposition) and contests (meaning with opposition).
The great boon of creating this type of abstract structure is that you can do anything within your game. Older RPGs often had a very complex combat system, and that was the only serious game system which allowed contesting with opponents. By abstracting a contest system, you have the ability to instead have players contest in anything. The game rules contain some special discussions regarding contests in persuasion, combat, and magic, but it's just as easy to contest in gambling, or even living rough:
"I would declare, dearest associate, that I am able to subsist in this wilderness with but this flimsy woolen pad to sleep upon, a cup of water each day, and what grubs and insects I may unearth within arm's reach of my sleeping pad."
"Though I suspect this is indeed true, for your ability to subsist as the lowest churls is renowned, I scoff at your need for a moth-eaten woolen pad, for a real survivalist such as myself communes with the Earth by laying full upon its loamy bountifulness."
Action: The core mechanic for an action is simply this:
- Roll a die. On a 1-3 you fail, while on a 4-6 you succeed.
- If you fail you may spend a point from your attribute pool to reroll the die. (Repeat as necessary.)
- On a "1" you actually experience a dismal failure, and immediately lose 2 from your pool, and instead must pay 3 to reroll.
- On a "6" you actually experience an illustrious success, and add 2 to your pool.
Three simple rules allow this roll to be modified:
- A boon grants points to your pool. Some trivial actions and contests carry a boon on each die roll, effectively offsetting any penalty for rerolling.
- A levy takes points from our pool. This typically marks a difficult task, and the points tend to be debited every time you make a roll, making rolls and rerolls both costly.
- A penalty is an orthagonal method of increasing difficulty; it's a minus to your die roll, thus making illustrious success impossible, making dismal failure more likely, and overall decreasing the probability of your success.
Boons and levies are, for the most part, how difficulty is modeled in the game. (I personally find the addition of penalties a bit excessive, because they require gamemasters to think, "is this a difficult task, requiring a levy, or a really difficult task, requiring a penalty ... or should I just use a bigger levy rather than a penalty.")
Despite this, the core idea behind actions is simple: You try and roll for success, rerolling until you either achieve success, run out of points, or decide you want to save the rest of your points. Victory and defeat are thus somewhat placed in the hands of the players and weighted heavily toward characters with increased levels of skills.
Tallies: These are effectively a variety of actions--what you could call extended actions. In a Tally, a time-limit is set (e.g., 3 rolls), and each roll is alotted a value, which will be applied to a running tally (1: -5; 2: -2, 3: -1; 4: 1; 5: 2; 6:5). Just as with normal actions, you can reroll each individual "roll" as you see fit in order to achieve the highest total when all is said and done.
Contests: Finally we come to Contests, the interactions between characters. These add a few new concepts, but generally follow the rules laid out previously for actions.
- Rounds are the core division of contests. Each contestant will get at least one opportunity to act within a round.
- Initiative is determined by the highest pool in the appropriate attribute. For example, in a fight, the character with the highest attack pool goes first.
- Exchange is the subdivision of a round. An active move is made by the player with initiative. He rolls the appropriate attribute, rerolling as necessary, just as with an action. If he succeeds, the defender then must make a reactive move, also rolling until he achieves success. At this point, the active contestant may pay a levy of 1 to reroll and overcome the defense. Then the reactive contestant may pay a levey of 1 to reroll ... Etc. At some point either the action or the reaction succeeds because one of the two contestants decides to stop spending points, and at that time the consequences of the action are determined and the exchange ends.
- Illustrious Success marks a special case. If your opponent rolls a 6 you must pay 3 points from your pool to overcome it, at which point he then gets a new roll automatically.
- Additional Moves occur after each contestant has taken an action, based on order of initiative. For a levy of 1 any player may take a second action. Following this any player may take a third action for a levy of 2. Etc.
- Wallops define one other rule of contests: if you are at least 5 better in the ability than an opponent you may spend 5 points to immediately defeat him. He gets only one roll to attempt to stand firm, and he must roll a Illustrious Success("6").
Core Contests: The above rules generally define contests. However, a slight bit of additional color is given to the core 3 abilities: attack, persuade, and rebuff.
As already mentioned, each of these abilities has a style, and the rulebook mentions certain advantages each style gives which should be duly recorded by the player. However, each offensive style also "trumps" one other defensive style, and vice-versa. A character trying to use a style against its trump suffers a levy of 1.
So, for example, the Contrary Persuade ability is trumped by the Charming Rebuff ability. If a Contrary character is trying to convince a Charming character, he'd thus lose one point from his pool on every roll.
Refresh: The final core rule regards how you get your points back into your pools, as they'll generally decrease as the game goes on.
Each attribute has an individual rule for how it refreshes. For most pools these refreshes are either a restful night or a restful day (and I actually suspect most gamemasters will generally refresh things each morning, rather than trying to keep track of the refresh for 30 different attributes, with the exceptions of a the less common attribute rolls, which overall have much more distinct refresh rules). The resistances refresh by engaging in the activity you had resisted (e.g., avarice), while relationships refresh by your helping out the person in question.
Specific Systems
The above abstract game system offers most of the explanation for how all the specific skills work. However, a few additional comments are worthwhile:
Persuasion: This is really the core system of the game. The rules suggest roleplaying it out as you make your rolls, and I found this very enjoyable, and was surprised to discover that I had players who played right along.
Combat: Rules for weapons are really simple; basically, if you have a weapon you're familiar with, and your opponent doesn't, you get a boon of 1. Likewise each of the weapons has a slight advantage and disadvantage; I told my players they could either use that paired set or throw it out, depending on the complexity they personally preferred.
The rules for missile combat are the one thing in the entire rulebook that's not elegant. There's modifiers for size and range which are referenced and crossreferenced before the results of a normal contest can be figured out. I generally agree with the rules' statement on missiles: "Missile combat is undramatic and the rules needed to simulate it are more complicated than most. Its role in the Dying Earth stories is minimal. Sensible GMS will arrange adventures so as to avoid missile combat whenever possible." After having a few game sessions under my belt, I also suspect it'd be pretty easy to freeform missile combat with the normal contest rules without having to look things up.
Magic: The rules for casting spells follow the same rules for actions (or contests) that you find elsewhere. There are some minor blessings, curses, and physical effects which are almost entirely off-the-cuff, as well as a listing of spells at two power levels (straightforward and complex). The spells are all very true to the book--interesting, quirky, and sometimes humorous. Some of them also operate at a very high power level which will keep gamemasters on their toes.
For the higher level campaigns there are also rules for designing magic items, creating new spells, and dealing with the all-powerful sandestins (basically, genies). Some of these rules, such as those for making enchanted items, are more complex than the general rule set of the game, but you'll be looking up the rules out-of-game, and so the complexity level is fine, and in fact adds some fun variability to the game.
Sandestins are ... interesting ... because they can do just about anything, but often warp the effects back upon their masters. Kind of like Wish spells back in classic D&D. I can't entirely imagine how they'll work in gameplay, but they're only used at the highest power-level (the Rhialto-campaign), so you can use them or not as you see fit (and it's my general estimation that most people will be playing Cugel-level campaigns within the Dying Earth).
The Game Design
The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game is, in my general assessment, a "storytelling" RPG, which means that it centers around telling a great story as much or more than it centers on building up powerful characters. It's the same general category of game that I'd place HeroQuest, Paranoia, and to a lesser extent Ars Magica and Pendragon within. Players will still make characters, grow attached to them, set goals, and slowly improve their abilities, but it's clear this is not the only focus of entertainment.
The Dying Earth accomplishes this storytelling via two main methods. First, it molds character action subtly through use of taglines and blatantly through use of resistances. Second, it dramatically shifts the focus of play toward character interactions by its emphasis on persuasion and rhetoric over combat. And, it does a good job of accomplishing these storytelling goals; I can't remember the last game I played where both the gamemaster and the players engaged in so much in-character dialogue as in my Dying Earth playtest.
As is common with many storytelling games (and as a partial result of the aforementioned constant IC dialogue) The Dying Earth can be tiring to both run and play. As a gamemaster you have to make a real effort to maintain the correct atmosphere. Beyond that it's quite honestly more difficult to run a game centering around character interaction than one centering around combat; you're more frequently called upon to be an actor, and less frequently to be the rules arbitrator.
On the other hand, there's clear benefit to this, because you have the opportunity to tell stories that may resonate for years to come. Over my twenty years in roleplaying, there are a few combats that I can remember, but many more character interaction; just from my one session running The Dying Earth I can still hear persuasion contests bouncing around in my head.
Beyond all this, The Dying Earth is a simple and elegant system. It use a consistent world model and a universal resolution system. The entire resolution system is highly abstracted, which is a good and a bad thing. It's what allows that simple elegance, and supports a character in quickly freeforming rules, but it also causes the loss of some detailed specificity that you'd find, e.g., in one of Rolemaster's very complex charts.
Other than its consistent modeling, the characters in Dying Earth are pretty standard. They're point models based on a skill system, which seems to have become the best-liked in recent years.
Content: The Rest of the Book
The rules take up the first 6 chapters, or the first 117 pages of the rule book. The last 75 or so pages contain:
A short Equipment list, which is concise, but felt a bit lacking.
A chapter on Player Tips which was a hodge-podge of advice and character improvement rules.
A chapter on GM Tips which was an excellent set of suggestions on how to create Dying Earth adventures. Particularly interesting and innovative was a list of story elements that should be in most adventure (e.g., "odd customs", "crafty swindles", "foppish apparel", etc.). If writing a Dying Earth adventure, I'd consult this every time, but I wouldn't have thought to create the list in the first place.
Three chapters of background contain Places, Personages, and Creatures. These all offered fairly dry descriptions of many things found in the Dying Earth books, with game stats as appropriate.
The authors of these sections clearly tried very hard to be true to the original books by stating clearly what was "fact" and what was "speculation". I particularly liked the creature descriptions they had lots of scholarly conjecture that the gamemaster could follow up on as he sees fit. For example, three conjectures concerning the chug were, "The chug is a form of Sandestin", "The commonly-held behavior that the chug is a type of sandestin is false. ... A chug is a chug is a chug", and "Chugs are demons".
My only complaint regarding this section is that there isn't enough reference as to which people, places, and things came from which Jack Vance stories.
I'll also comment that the general fill-in-the-blank attitude of these chapters, wherein only information from the Vance books proper is presented, and the gamemaster is left to fill in the rest, generally underlines how this game is a complex one that will likely best attract advanced gamemasters and players.
The final chapter of the rulebook is The Cooks of Cuirnif, an adventure for Cugel-level characters. It's generally a fun adventure that the players enjoyed when we playtested it. However, the adventure writeup is somewhat skeletal, leaving a lot in the hands of the gamemaster as to what happens when and how.
Overall, I'd give The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game a "4" out of "5" for Substance, with the last point withheld only because this isn't a particularly groundbreaking system. Some of the stuff, such as the "tagline" system is interesting and new, but Laws had done much of the rest before. In particular you can find much of the same game design philosophy, in somewhat different form, in Hero Wars--but Laws has improved on many of his core systems in this iteration, which is smoother and more consistent.
Conclusion
The Dying Earth Roleplaying game is an RPG that does a superb job of capturing the feel of Jack Vance's foundational fantasy books. If you've always wanted to engage in amoral behavior under a wavering sun, this is your opportunity.
As an RPG, The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game is a strong entrant onto the storybuilding branch of the RPG tree. However, it may be slightly better suited for experienced gamemasters and players. Though the core system does a very good job of maintaining simplicity, the burdens of maintaining theme, mood, and frequent character interaction could be trying for a beginning gamemaster.
