Review of The Age of Heroes

Provided with a working draft of the first Moebius Adventures book, I was tempted at first read just to put "Phaedrus" down. But then I realized the greatest truth of all-- any book that has a spell called "Weapons to Weasels" has a few things going for it. [Description: Weapons to Weasels transforms any non-magical weapon in the spell area into a weasel... See Weasels for biting/scratching damage.] We'll see what the playtesters say as to how it holds up, but here's a capsule review based on just reading it.

The primary issue with this work is it is highly derivative of AD&D. Or, if you put it in a nice perspective, it's AD&D done right. First, it's classless. In fact, the spectrum of characters is much broader (alignment is kept but handled nicely, and characters learn skills through schools rather than by rulebook fiat.) Much work has gone into issues of charactization, world history, and social setups. There are creation myths, portrayals of the gods and their cults, religions for everyone, origins for the different races, and a well-thought out underlying schema. Also on the plus side, there's a decent introductory scenario, with good motivations and reasons for the mayhem. They also provide a good profile of the local town and its residents with nice characterization bits. Their system of magic schooling at last makes sense, gives wizards a background, and works out as far as casting goes (basically, it works with always a slight chance of failure).

Spells are derivative of AD&D, heck, a lot of it is. It's almost as if the authors thought 'wait, rather than work with the patchwork that TSR hath wrought, let's build something similar, but build it from the ground up with the way we want it to be." A worthwhile goal, and if it were released back in the 1970s, it could have been the One True Game. At this point, though, I'm trying to figure out who the audience is (and stand by while I quickly insult most of my readers...) It's enough like AD&D that non-D&Ders will avoid it out of prejudice, and different enough that AD&Ders won't switch because then they'd have to learn how to cheat under a new system.

Plus, I have quibbles with the mix of random and choice based character creation. In particular, the Fate table has way too much sway, randomly blessing you with a bonus or cursing you with ailments at the touch of a die. And all the flaws I see in AD&D (spell lists with too many loopholes, too many stats, and so on go, but that would just be personal taste.

Actually, given the thoroughness of the character generation and the detail of the world, I'd just as soon sell it as a live action system for groups like Nero. Would I buy the final game once it came out? Probably not, but I'd definitely pick up some of the scenarios they write for it. Great world, wonderful setting, nice logic, but not my cup of tea as far as amount of rules and character generation. Not original, but well done.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 3 (Average)