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Something interesting happened to me when I was at Origins: I realized that nobody necessarily regarded me as an authority on what made a good role-playing game or not.

It was kind of a funny sensation to actually meet the people whose games I’d reviewed. Raven c.s McCracken was very nice to meet, for example, and he even let me know that they were working on another edition of Synnibarr – and that’s an edition that I’m looking forward to, ‘cause Rifts seriously needs the competition. I met the guys at Green Ronin press and got to gush over the author of Mutants and Masterminds. I met Benjamin Rogers and got to hear his enthusiasm about Promised Sands firsthand. And I went to the Misguided Games booth and got to talk to the authors in person; and they were kind enough to give me a review copy of both Children of the Sun and the new supplement, Krace: The Southlands, which I’ll get to shortly.

And I saw a lot of ideas that I didn’t think were particularly smart. Trying to tell somebody in person, though, especially when you’re standing face to face with them, is kinda difficult. (For example, “Prison Bitch”, the non-collectible card game – yeah, I don’t know if I need to go into any more detail about why that’s a bad idea from the very beginning.) I began to question my credentials; whether my ideas could be differentiated from anybody else’s at the con.

Then I rememebered that I’ve been playing for about sixteen years, and reviewing for four, and that kinda reassured me that I could at least tell a good idea from a bad one.

So, for example, I wanted to like Children of the Sun a lot more than I actually did – the cover illustration alone, for example, a computer-rendered depiction of a weird machine, gave me the impression that the game was going to grab some of the unique weirdness of, say, Tribe 8 while adding on enough steampunk elements to make it something entirely new and strange.

It isn’t like that. It’s basically D&D with a confusing, counterintuitive dice system, some furries, and a fantasy analogue to World War II welded to the side of the whole thing like a refrigerator clumsily bolted to the side of an F-15. It repeatedly mentions Jules Verne and the steampunk ethos as an inspiration, but fails to take advantage of any of those elements, instead adding on some fairly undistinguished firearms and some modern-day items without really thinking out how they fit into the world as a whole. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t do anything that I haven’t seen before, and it does them with substantially less style.

Let’s start with the opening fiction, where we see the opening Normandy beach scene of Saving Private Ryan through a fantasy filter – you know, people dying left and right, panic sweat, people drowning in their own armor and so forth. Games Workshop does this all the time, where they see a movie, then think “Damn! We should convert that into Warhammer 40,000!” – and then you’ve got Cruellagh De Ville for the Dark Eldar, or, on a more positive note, Cityfight.

But the story doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. For one, amphibious landings are actually pretty easy, since you have destroyers hanging off the shore pounding the living shit out of anything that dares move – and if the defenders have static defenses, then forget about them right off the bat, they’ll be bombarded flat. The beach that you see in Saving Private Ryan wasn’t bombed as planned and the naval support wasn’t there either, which is what made it the bloodiest beach of the entire war. It’s when they got inland, amid the hedges, that it got really, really nasty.

For another, there’s nothing about the story that says anything about the setting as a whole. We don’t understand the reason why they’re being sent up the cliff, or why the resistance is so fierce, or why they’re bothering to invade this place in the first place – we just think “Oh, Saving Private Ryan with elves and magic.” The game claims to be dieselpunk, but the game’s opening fiction doesn’t even brush up against the idea of dieselpunk. (For that matter, what era dieselpunk is supposed to derive from is a mystery to me as well – steampunk is Victorian, but diesel? The thirties? The seventies, with diesel cargo trucks? Modern-day? Dunno.)

The setting is…decent enough, as settings go – it ain’t no Tribe 8, but it’s better than Synnibarr. The writing does tend to stutter in parts – for example, check this paragraph:

Angered by the betrayal, the Avendra conceived a plan of desperate cunning. They retreated into their great underground vaults, with the Twisted close behind, then attacked them remorselessly until their armies were extinct from the face of Raevich.

Now, who was wiped out: The Twisted, or the Avendra? And for that matter, how would you fit entire armies of the Twisted into the vaults of the Avendra? And for that matter – the Avendra are retreating because their supply lines are cut by jealous humans, but if they can destroy the Twisted without the human’s help, then why did they need the supply lines in the first place? The Avendra are portrayed as a mythic race that disappeared into legend after they defeated the Twisted, but the way that it’s written, you can’t tell what’s going on.

For that matter, there’s a persistent, simple Manichaenism throughout the entire history that turns me off. The humans stab the Avendra in the back; the elves torment and murder a Thorquan “blind prophet” who warns them of destruction at their own hands; the monolithic Church persecutes and condemns wizards, and the elves who later take over are fascists. The heroes are so simon pure as to eliminate any possibility that they’re fallible. Perhaps it’s meant to be mythic; it comes off as clumsy and uninteresting.

Anyways. The elves eventually wind up with their own kingdom, Lysirial, and use a nearby island as a dumping ground for convicts. After the noble, good, and kind ruler of GreenIsle – later to become Krace – kicks it due to “heart failure”, an evil, selfish and tyrannical ruler taxes the daylights out of GreenIsle’s residents and then tries to invade his homeland. Once he gets kicked back to GreenIsle, John Krace, a noble, good and kind man, rallies everybody by his side after his wife is raped and killed…

…and I’d just like to stop now to point out that the “They killed his girl – now it’s PERSONAL!” cliché has crossed the line from simply being a cliché to being a malevolent antiplot.

Anyways, shortly after a weird metaphor – the evil ruler’s reign comes apart like a “wolf hit with a cannon shot”, which I can’t imagine being a common metaphor anywhere but the Shoot A Wolf With a 155mm Self-Propelled Artillery Piece game that you see at the carnival – John Krace basically becomes Robin Hood, raiding against the evil ruler and doing good. Of course, he comes off as a wooden character – heck, here, read:

There they built their base of operations, and began raiding their enemy of taxed gold, attacking army trains of supplies and small groups of horse and foot men sent to destroy them. They were fierce attackers, never sparing an enemy soldier for any reason. They were also gentle invaders, treating the civilian population well. Any man caught pillaging was hung; any man caught raping was pulled apart by horses.

Now consider: You catch one of your men raping. You have maybe half an hour to get out before the local militia rides down on you and kills you. Do you stop to have him pulled apart by wild horses, meanwhile considering that he has friends in your own militia and that his gory public execution may alienate them? And that getting the horses set up is going to take time? And that he’s going to be pleading for his life the whole time?

I don’t like this. I don’t like the sloppiness of thought that went into this, or the failure to think things through in a real-world context. If you’ve read George R.R Martin’s Song of Ice And Fire series, you can see a perfect model for Krace’s activity in Beric Dondarrion and his group. No, not everybody can be as good as Martin – as a matter of fact, it’s damned few who can be as good as he is. But this just reads almost like bad fanfiction. I hate to say it, but there it is.

Anyways. Krace wins it all, then abdicates his position to his friend Aetheri and legs it, creating another absent father-figure a la Wraith’s Charon and Vampire’s Caine. Lysirial goes nuts and becomes a fascist state, herds non-human into camps. GreenIsle, now renamed Krace, eventually winds up fighting Lysirial after a Phell Knight –

MACLENNAN’S SECOND LAW:

Enough with the damned “I’m going to swap k for c and ph for f” and so forth. I swear, if the trend keeps up, we’re going to start seeing every letter replaced with K so often that our game books will look like a transcription of dolphin noise– “K’kk kk kk k k kk’kk kkkk!”

Anyways. Lysirial is fought by Krace and a bunch of other nations, which results in the devastation of Lysirial and a number of technological innovations, including the airship, electricity, machine guns and blood transfusion.

Of course, one thing that I missed is why Lysirial would fight to the bitter end the way that they did. Germany’s reasons for fighting to the bitter end was basically collective insanity, but the same case isn’t made for Lysirial – for example, the rulers of Lysirial bury casks of explosive fuel under their cities, then blow them up as the allied forces approach, costing the lives of “hundreds of thousands” of people – presumably elves. It can be argued that Hitler killed a lot of German people, but if you’re an elven supremacist, how in the hell do you rationalize sacrificing hundreds of thousands of elven lives in order to destroy a few thousand non-elven troops? And, for that matter, after you do that twice, why wouldn’t the allied troops just avoid the cities entirely? Or try to trigger the explosion from outside with ranged artillery?

I don’t know. I don’t think that there’s a good explanation for that. Maybe I’m wrong.

That being said, there’s still a sizable disjunct between the game’s stated ambition and how it actually comes off. Diesel would suggest a setting which is really heavy on gears, oil, smog and dirt – China Mieville’s transcendent Perdido Street Station, with its endless chemical spills and ultracorrupt government, strikes me as a good example of dieselpunk. Children of the Sun feels like it started off as somebody’s homebrew D&D world that somebody decided would be good with guns and radios. There isn’t even a discussion of what kind of impact that the introduction of radios would have on an environment – and even the most casual student of history can tell you that being able to communicate with anybody across the globe is a major change.

There’s nothing in the setting that really suggests any impact from the inclusion of technology. Arcanum, although I didn’t get very far into it, was littered with little details that reminded you that you were staring at a steampunk environment; CotS’s artwork is very generic fantasy – you could stick it into any D&D book and not have it look out of place. So I’m not sure why the book claims to be a dieselpunk game when its fundemental setting fights against that conclusion at every turn. Ultimately, the game fails to live up to its basic premise, which is a pretty serious flaw considering the competition that it has in D&D 3.5.

The races of the game: Three different flavors of furry – lion, wolf, and cat – turtle-people, octopus people, elves, humans, and the Banfilidh, who have some of the best artwork in the book. (The Banfilidh are essentially human-shaped constructs made out of plants – one of them is a mass of small vines with a human face seemingly plastered over the front. That I like.) There’s a lot of animal analogues and not a whole lot of reason to have three different “furry” races.

So: To the rules. Essentially, there’s three different kinds of resolution mechanisms; quality, resistance and peril. It’s a little bit like Tribe 8 in that you roll a particular number of dice – say, 3d4 – and then take the highest result. If you roll the maximum result, you take that number and add it on to the new roll. As it was in Deadlands, I believe that this makes the d4 better than a d6, just because you’ve got a better chance of rolling a d4 and then adding on another d4 than you have of rolling a six on a six-sided dice. (Of course, the last time I reviewed Deadlands, I wound up in a month-long argument with somebody over statistics and my lack of expertise in same, so perhaps I’ll just leave that to one side.)

There’s a couple of problems with this, however. The actual target numbers that indicate your margin of success are buried about halfway into the book – I had a bad time finding them because they don’t look substantially different from a lot of the other charts in the book. Once I had found them, though, I found myself wishing that I hadn’t. As a matter of fact, I found myself yelling “What the fuck?” when I was reading through the resolution system.

If I’m reading the task resolution system right, you cross-reference your skill level simultaneously against your dice type and the number of dice that you’re rolling – so somebody who’s rolling 4-6d6 has the same difficulty numbers as somebody who’s rolling 3-4d8. Once you cross-reference those two things together, it gives you a target number range for the GM.

You know, I’ve been through a lot of role-playing games, and I have to say that this strikes me as so counterintuitive as to defy reason. I should not have to double-check two different factors in order to figure out something as simple as a simple target number.

And I know that this is going to cause controversy, but fuck it; I’m not a stranger to that. Here’s MacLennan’s First Law:

MACLENNAN’S FIRST LAW:

If you are creating a fantasy game or setting, you had better have a goddamned good reason not to go with the d20 system.

‘Cause, as far as I can tell, this system is not worth learning.

If you need to consult a chart to get something as simple as a target number – when, in d20, you can simply say “Okay, impossible for the unskilled, probably somebody with a lot of experience could do it – DC 27” and have it rest there. In a splendid example of topsy-turvy, the target number is determined by the player’s abilities, rather than by the setting at hand. And while the DM does pick the final number, there’s usually only five points of difference – say, 11-16 – that he can pick from. And, with the “exploding dice” situation, a GM could wind up setting what he thinks is an impossible DC only to see the character meet it and then excel – Legend of the Five Rings had the exact same problem.

That means that if six characters jump across a ravine, then the GM is going to have to determine the difficulty number for each one of them, altering it up or down according to how hard he thinks the job is – and it’s all going to be rule of thumb anyhow, since the GM probably doesn’t know the odds matrix of rolling over 12 on 3d6 + 3 and keeping the highest, rerolling the maximum. That’s going to slow the game down – yeah, pretty much to a crawl, I would imagine.

It’s nonsense. Yeah, there’s a variety of reasons why d20 doesn’t necessarily work for every system, but there’s literally hundreds of games that thought that they were going to be able to beat D&D at its own game, and wound up decorating the Plain of Failed Role-Playing Games with their own bones instead. In my mind, having to learn a new system every time you pick up a new role-playing game is like having to learn an entirely new operating system every time you buy a computer.

I’m sure that this is going to provoke controversy in the sassback forum below. I don’t care. Those of who you do, commence to jigglin’.

Combat is a little bit better, but not by much. You and your opponent both roll dice, with the defender’s total roll subtracted from the attacker’s; if the result is positive, then you’ve hit. Rolling damage is easy enough, but you have to exceed your opponent’s Strain rating in order to actually inflict a wound. To tell the God’s honest truth, Dan Davenport does a truly excellent job in his suplerative playtest review in summarizing the combat system and how it works; you’d be best to go to him for a clear and trenchant explanation of how this bizarre system works.

I do like how the system allows for the sudden infliction of brutal injury if your strain limit is suddenly and overwhelmingly beaten; as Davenport points out, you multiply the result by ten and apply the result from a chart, something like Mordheim’s post-battle injury charts. I like the way that your hit points directly apply to your attributes, and how you wind up getting weaker and weaker as you take more and more damage. I think that it’s an interesting homebrew system.

But I think, by and large, that the system is going to pop up so many quirks and oddities in actual play – especially when guns get involved – that it serves more as a source of interesting ideas that don’t pan out rather than an actual, playable combat system.

There are some good points. For example, in a social confrontation, you roll to remove the other player’s social dice; whoever runs out first winds up frozen to the spot, which might be a mechanic worth borrowing for those who don’t want to role-play confrontrations in, say, Vampire.

Magic: Every PC can do magic in some form or another, which the game breaks down into different schools and categories. Of course, instead of making it freeform and flexible, like Mage’s Spheres system, or Tribe 8’s superb I’d-have-sex-with-it-if-it-was-a-person Synthesis rules, we get a sizable list of different spells that you can do. You can boost the effects of each to do something new with it, so that you’re not stuck with the same effect every time. Since you refresh your pool of magic points at the end of every turn when you’re in combat, I imagine that there’s little disincentive for players to basically blow every magic point they have every turn, which might make combat a little magic-heavy. Well, really magic heavy, but since I haven’t playtested this thing, I wouldn’t know for sure.

There’s also rules for creating arcane engines, which are basically technological devices – or, at least, they would be if the book didn’t have them powered by magic. The gadget system looks interesting enough, adding together various factors – circuitry ratings, engine ratings, situational and durational ratings and so forth in order to get a final number, which is what you have to beat in order to actually create the item. They’re pretty decent rules for magical item creations, but they don’t really have anything to do with science, per se.

The Art: Really tends to vary a lot. The character portraits are nice, but they look somehow subtly wrong, as if the muscles under the skin don’t look right. I believe that the artist mentioned that it was the first time that she’d ever drawn humanoids instead of normal animals, and while she does a decent job of it, it just winds up looking subtly off. The watercolor plates – look, I’m not an artist, but the facial expressions are all very similar, the compositions flat and unimpressive, and the color work is just…weird. Meanwhile, a lot of the black and white plates in the book show a good sense of composition and some truly nice work, so go figure. The color waterplates of gods of CotS just shows a bunch of normal people, without any particular indication that they’re gods other than the book’s telling me so. I realize that these are probably artists in the early stages of their careers, so I don’t want to rag on them too hard, but, uh…they’ll probably do much better work in the future.

So, is Children of the Sun worth buying?

Not really, no. The system is wonky without really adding anything, the setting says that it’s one thing while being something else entirely, and the game, as a whole, just doesn’t work. I believe that Misguided Games can do some excellent work, but this just isn’t it.

-Darren MacLennan