Introduction

I have no idea how many people have this game, I picked it up at Gencon in a fit of trading when I was working for a publisher sometime around 1994.  I never saw it in any of the RPG shops around Denver.  But like many small press games, their popularity (if any) are sometime regional…or not at all.

Some deserve some recognition, some don’t.  Shades of Fantasy (SoF) does.  SoF is a complete game and has many concepts found in more contemporary games, such as D&D3e but lacks the polish of said games.

Character Building

Not statistics or attributes, SoF uses requisites (they are all the same but in name).  Call them what you want, but you roll a %, add in racial modifiers and consult a chart.  The requisites are strength, dexterity, stamina, will, presence, inner essence, agility, intelligence and faith.  Each requisite is adequately detailed, but there is a big disconnect between these, the races and the character classes.  It probably would have been better to put these three items for character building in a different order or provide a chart for the numerous races in the requisites section.   

Requisites and virtually everything else in SoF is handled  with a percentage roll, so you can put away all the other dice.  Some gamers like using minimal dice types, others do not so that might have some bearing on how well you might like SoF yourself.

Character Occupations (read classes) is a kitchen sink approach to game design.  There are a number of varieties of classes to choose from, though they do boil down into a few spell casting types, some rogue types and a whole lot of fighter types.  Every class has access to skills and advantages, but skills and advantages outside of your classes’ cost double.  Unlike D&D3e, advantages (or feats in that nomenclature) are bought with skill points.  Thus a fighter could improve their skills or buy light sleeper.  It does not appear there is much in the way of balance, but there are requisites to classes that must be bought to be considered that class (i.e. of class X needs skills A and B, then the player must aquire those skills in the initial character generation).  Classes are developed in levels, but being a skilsl based game there can be a fair amount of flux between characters and skills depending on how they develop.

Skills are a shotgun blast of things that probably could have been boiled down to a more wieldy number.  Skills like calm dogs is thrown into the mix with skills climbing.  Some of the nomenclature for skills is also a bit much like escapeology.  If there was one aspect of improvement that SoF needed it was tighter editing in this section to make it more streamlined and easier to use.  On the other hand it does basically work, though how to use skills and add in modifiers is a bit murky. 

Advantages are like feats in the d20 engine, but are simply purchased with skill points rather than doled out every level or three.  Some of the advantages are pretty handy like night vision or ambidexterity, others not so much.  The rule of thumb is that the better the advantage the more points it is going to cost, so that balances the usefulness versus cost aspects.  The real problem is that there are a fairly limited number of advantages, which makes the multitude of classes rather skills since many of them deeply resemble each other in advantages and skills.

Combat

Combat in SoF is very much a page taken out of Rolemaster.  That is good for gamers like me who like Rolemaster, especially at the time since Rolemaster was skill somewhat of a relevant game engine at the time.  For folks who fall into the Rolemaster hating camp, this part of SoF will really stick in your craw.  Weapons deal out a type of damage which has a small table attached to it.  The higher the table the more potential damage you can do.  So you roll damage via a percentage dice roll and consult the table.  If the hit is good enough (a 01 – 05) a critical can be scored, like D20 if you score a hit again using the same base of attack you roll a critical.  Fumbles are handled the same way.  Anyways, the critical tables are a much simplified type of fumble tables that you might find in your handy Rolemaster books. 

The rules in the combat section could have used some editing to smooth out some of the awkward bits.  However the overall assembly and explanations work well enough.

Magic

The magic portion of SoF is functional and complete, but not all that exciting.  Magic is considered a skill and thus the success of casting is based off of a role.  Like other fantasy games armor is a hindrance to spell casting, so you won’t be seeing any tanked up mages going about.   An interesting aspect outside of the fairly ordinary rules is the ability to cast higher level spells than what your character night be.  For example if a third level spell is found by a first level mage with a skill of 69% in magic there is a 20% penalty…but they can cast the spell.  The spell selections are a generic sort of affair that does nothing to distinguish SoF and I would have liked to have seen perhaps better play balance and editing thrown into this part of magic.

The Rest of The Book

After the magic section the rest of SoF is dedicated to some miscellaneous rules, monsters, campaign and errata.  The miscellaneous rules are a catch all chapter, but much of what is in this section could have been put into the combat and skills chapters and avoided having to jump around whole sections of the book.  Monsters are absolutely nothing special, mostly generic critters to throw at adventurers without having to think too hard about it.  The campaign information is light…super light.  Given there is much in the way of campaign specific ideas in character occupations and races it was a shame this section was more or less cut whole sale.  There is a mere six pages dedicated to a campaign setting, none of which contains even a rudimentary map.

Production Values

SoF is serviceable in regards to layout and design, little more.  My hunch is the author did not know a whole lot about layout and design or was using a very primitive piece of software to get the job done.  Particularly it is the combat section that suffers with charts and tables being paginated when they should not have.  The art is a combination of clip art and original illustrations by Dan Hall.  It is one of those weird occurrences where the clip art is much better than the original art (given the cover art is the former and not the latter says much).  So graphically SoF is like an Ed Wood film.  Just enough bad original art for specific concepts in SoF and a whole lot of clip art for the generic bits.

The book itself is prefect bound and has an untreated cover.  So that means even with minimal use and much bookshelf time it is a bit scuffed up.

The Good

Shades of Fantasy is a complete game with all the components in one book that is playable.

Some good kitchen sink aspects, specifically in regards to races but there are many good ideas in the book

Many concepts that can be found in modern games such as d20

The Bad

Some of the rules are written a bit odd or unorganized so the first time through with reading the game will require a number of reviews to make sure you got it right.

The kitchen sink mentality of game design, perhaps there are too many fiddly bits getting in the way of what really is a decent enough game

Overall

If you see Shades of Fantasy in the bargain bin at your local hobby store or at a con; Pick it up.  It is a fine example of a good small press game that had a lot of effort put into it by it’s creator.  You might even like it well enough to play it.