As with all of my reviews this is based on a read-through and some playing about with dice only. In short, this is not a playtest review.
Mechanics
Earth of the Fourth Sun does use an unusual, if slightly gimmicky, approach to skill resolution. Resolution uses d6, but each of the six sides of represent icons: 1 skull, 1 blank, 2 stars and two special icons. When a die is rolled a skull counts as a failure, a blank counts as a neutral result and stars count for one suceess. The special icons only count towards success if you have a Mastery rank in a skill. In which case they count for two sucesses. Failures nullify sucesses, and the total number of sucesses rolled (this is a dice pool system) determine the degree of success. In most cases the GM narrates what happens based on the roll of the dice.
Now what puzzels me about this are two things. One: the skill ranks can climb as high as 20. That's 20 specially marked d6s to roll. I really don't want to paste or draw skulls on 20 d6s. The second curious aspect of the system is that the player is allowed to roll as many d6 up to his total rank as he wishes. So, if you are Rank Three in Streetwise then you can choose to roll 1, 2 or 3 dice. This, I think, highlights a mechanics issue. There is no particular advantage to rolling more dice. In fact increasing the dice pool only only opens you up to a higher degree of sucess or failure. It does not make you less likely to fail a test of skill.
Character Creation
Chapter one of Earth of the Fourth Sun leaps right into a nice overview of character creation. Characters are designed by purchasing Attributes, skills, magical spells and other abilities from a pool of 150 points. This strikes me as immediately reminescent of the GURPS approach, and I imagine that equally various characters can be created with the Earth of the Fourth Sun system.
The rules advise players to spend points on Attributes, Skills and Special Abilities in that order, which makes sense. Attributes cost more than skills, although buying a level of skill 'Mastery' increases the cost per level. Special abilities and traits vary in cost.
Advantages and Disadvantages are also bought from the collective pool of Character Points. Advantages cost points, whereas Disadvantages give the player bonus points to play with. This is the standard approach to Advantages and Disadvantages and carries with it the standard problem that players may buy unlikely or problematic Disadvantages specifically to get some extra points. As a side note, there are some interesting looking Advantages/Disadvantages in there, the magical Disadvantages especially caught my eye.
An important feature of Earth of the Fourth Sun is that spells are bought individually as one-off magical traits. Your warrior character could pick up 'Summon Sword of Flame' without bothering too much about investing in magic as a whole. I'd be surprised that any character in Earth of the Fourth Sun would be without at least some magic because of this. If this fits your setting, kind of in the vein of Glorantha, then I don't see any problems, if not some house rules may be needed.
Gifts are bought in the same step as spells, and represent a more powerful, but still spell-like, form of magic. Gifts are purchasable only with GM permission.
The Character Creation section rounds off with a lot of useful, and quite comprehensive, information on individual skills, spells, and attribtues; how to intrerpret Advantages; buying off Disadvantages; and some interesting quick-start templates. Basically everything you would expect to find in a published and well-playtested game.
Advancement
I presume (as I cannot find anything definite in the PDF) that character advancement is governed through earning experience points that can then be spent as characters points. This is the logical path I'd choose if I were running the game, although a section on Character Advancement would be nice. As the rules stand I've no idea how many experience points would be appropriate per adventure, although I suppose that could be worked out with a little trial and error.
Magic
Magic in Earth of the Fourth Sun allows for partially freeform spell creation, and is both expansive and well thought out. I particularily like some of the small throw-away ideas that can be found in this chapter. The idea that superstitious people can unconciously 'cast' magic spells and cause superstitions to become real is almost good enough to base a whole one-shot game around.
In quite a few places the influence of GURPS appears to creep in here and there. Aspected Manna (their spelling) areas, reminded me of GURPS, as does the learning of spells one-by-one, as if they were skills. But, Earth of the Fourth Sun diverges from GURPS and many other games when you get down to the core magic rules.
Although spells must be learnt by characters, Magic in Earth of the Fourth Sun allows the parameters of a spell to be toyed along freeform rules. Characters gain proficiency in Colleges (Apportations, Conjurations etc) and Spheres (Elements, Mind etc). Spells are then devised, or existing spells modified, by players on the basis of their rank in a given College and Sphere. A light spell for instance might be based on Conjuration and Energy.
The cost of the spell is then based on targets, duration, damage and so on.
This allows players to create signature spells for their characters. I like this. I think it goes a long way towards finding a good middle ground between free-from and spell-based magic.
The pre-set spells found in character generation begin to look more like suggestions than hard and fast rules by the end of the chapter on magic. That might have been good to explain early on, as I suspect that a lot of players with spellcasting characters would like to tailor their magic from the start.
Combat
Combat is handled through a round and iniative system in which characters draw on a dice pool equal to their relevant combat skill (i.e. spear). Once a character runs out of dice he can no longer take actions during a round, and will have to rely on armour to save him from attacks. This emphasis on a dice pool to draw on puts a new importance on having as many points in combat related skills as posible. Whereas with non-combat skills I can see an advantage to not bothering with anything other than one or two levels of Mastery level skill ranks, I can see a lot of advantage in loading as many levels as possible on one combat skill as you need as many dice as possible to make sure you have a large enough pool to both attack and defend.
Successes on attack rolls that get through the defender's parry and armour count towards damage. Nothing too surprising there although the elmination of the roll-for-damage step in a fantasy game is always nice to see.
The is a lot of extra information and discussion of rules in the combat chapter, and not all of it organised well. I spent three pages wondering what a roll of a 'Skull' means in comabt. Does the entire attempt fail? Does it negate one sucess? Turns out a Skull damages your weapon, information that could easily have been included earlier on in the chapter.
Earth of the Fourth Sun also makes use of the concept of combat maneuvers, which will give those combat-orientated players something to keep track of and work towards. A character must know a maneuver to use it, and maneuvers are bought using character points.
Setting
As far as I can tell from magic, character templates and skills, Earth of the Fourth Sun falls fairly neatly into the traditional fantasy setting. There isn't much setting detail to work with in the PDFs, so if you are hunting for a detailed or rich setting you may be disapointed.
Style
Nicely laid out. There has been some obvious effort put in to produce a game of a proffesional quality. The writing is generally easy to follow, and clearly written. About the only thing missing from a publishablequality game are illustrations. Given that the author is something of a fantasy artist himself I'll hazard a guess that we'll see a few illustrations creeping into Earth of the Fourth Sun as updates go up.
General Comments
Earth of the Fourth Sun has a lot going for it, it also needs a little work here and there.
What I would like to see?
Fix the dice mechanic. Unless I am missing something major, the dice mechanic creates a just plain odd progression in which better skilled characters do not have a better chance of sucess. Granted, a better skilled character is capable of achieving a greater degree of sucess, i.e. overcoming higher ranks of difficulty, but a character with skill 2 has the same chance of rolling one sucess per dice as a character with skill 8.
Maybe I am wrong, but from my understanding of them, the mechanics need a bit of an overhaul. I'd recomend that the author post his mechanic on the Art of Game Design (http://forum.rpg.net/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=11) and get some feedback. Could be that everyone will love it, maybe not. Either way, I'd be interested to see other people's take on the core mechanic.
A section on character advancement, no matter how brief, would be an invaluable addition.
Some of the peripheral things we've come to love and expect from fantasy games wouldn't go amiss. Some monters, a few treasures, perhaps some plot hooks.
Summing Up
Why would I play this game? The magic system is intriguing, and some of those magical advantages and disadvantages look like a lot of fun. Earth of the Fourth Sun is also pretty high on the scales of big games that are fairly complete. Sure its missing a few extras. Sure a character advancement section would be kind of helpful, but really there is so much here in the way of detailed and lovingly crafted work that I'm willing to overlook one or two glaring ommisions. Hell, it is free, I'll just assume that the author hasn't got around to writing up those sections yet, and check in on the site now and again.
I also imagine that if you are a big fan of GURPS, then Earth of the Fourth Sun is likely to appeal to you. It seems to hold to a lot of the design principles that GURPS is based around while managing to present a original take on magic, and maintaining a solid fantasy feel.
And finally, though I know I've kind of opened fire on the resolution mechanic in this review, I'd also like to actually try it out. It's certainly original and if you were not too worried about skill progression I imagine that the mechanic would work very well.
Nothing beats a (good) free game,
Chris Johnstone
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