Review of The End: Lost Souls Edition

Goto [ Index ]

Let me preface this by saying that this is my first review. Constructive criticism is appreciated.

Let me further preface this by saying there’s a bunch of stuff at the beginning that isn’t about the text in the book; it’s my observations about the book physically. If you want to skip to the stuff in the book, it starts in the third paragraph under THE SETTING. Just so you know.

*****

I’ve been intrigued by The End since I heard about it from a friend of mine, who was desperately trying to get a hold of the first edition of this book some years back. He told me that the first edition was a game about people living on Earth after the apocalypse—the God-fearing, four-horseman, water-to-blood, Rapture-lovin’ Apocalypse that is described in the Bible. The first edition was published by Scapegoat Games (If I read the info page correctly), and failed not due to a lack of enthusiasm about it, but because the publishers didn’t print enough copies of the book to recoup costs through sales, which will guarantee failure to any publishing attempt. Thus, it became something of a collector’s item, with people who had heard about it snooping around for a copy.

Tyranny Games purchased the license about a year ago and began producing the game once more, only now using the d20 system. When I first heard that, I winced a bit—I’m not a huge fan of d20, other than for Dungeons and Dragons—but kept an open mind. I hadn’t seen the game yet, I thought. And now that I have it, here’s what I think:

THE COVER

The first edition of The End is the regular size for a roleplaying book, about 9x12 (or something like that) soft cover. Lost Souls Edition is about 6x9 (I don’t have a ruler) and about an inch thick. It’s a black, thick paper cover with “THE END: Lost Souls Edition” printed in gold foil and the hexagram of the Seven Seals of the Apocalypse embossed on it. I know it’s the seven seals because there’s a small caption underneath it reading “Hexagram of the Seven Seals of the Apocalypse.”

Now maybe it’s me, but when I saw that, I shuddered mentally. Most books that have that symbol on the front—Call of Cthulhu 20th Anniversary edition and the first In Nomine hardcovers come to mind—there are no explanations of the symbol; they’re just printed on the front. To me, that’s classy. It adds a bit of mystery to the book, like you’re opening a tome of ancient knowledge. To have the symbol explained to me on the front, well…that’s kind of like printing “War and Peace, by Tolstoy, a famous author” on the cover. It seems like I should be able to get that information inside the book, not footnoted to the bottom of the cover. (Incidentally, it is printed inside; it’s the first page you see. It’s footnoted there, too. Seems kind of redundant to me to have it on the cover as well)

The back has some flavor text, in gold foil as well. I think it would have been a much classier look had they left the text off and printed it on the first page inside the book, but that’s my preferences talking again. There’s also a large sticker on back for the bar code that, as I found out, looks like it will come off easily, but doesn’t. there’s still a small mess of torn white sticker on the back that I’m afraid to take orange oil to, lest I ruin the cover. *sigh*….

Enough small stuff—open the book and get to the good stuff!

THE SETTING

…Well, one more small stuff. When I opened the book, there’s a smell. It’s not a “musty tome from the dark corner of the library” smell, but a “chemically-induced mixing of ink, paper and glue” smell. My copy of the first Book of Madness from White Wolf had a similar smell, and it makes me uneasy. In my mind, books this new shouldn’t smell like this. Just a note. Anyhoo….

The Open Game License is in the front of the book before anything else, which is a change from most d20 books, which put it in the back. I realize that much of what I’ve been discussing isn’t a huge deal, but I’m trying to take you through my thought process. The notes on the cover, the smell, the change in format, all of these were adding up in my mind, as if there is something not quite right with this book. When I take note of small items like this before reading the book, it begins to make me wonder if the book itself may be like the rest of it.

The first three chapters of the book—titled Book of Chronicles, Book of Revelation and Book of Kings—cover the setting of The End. If you’ve read or own a copy of the first edition, this will be pretty familiar territory. In fact, it’ll be really familiar, since it’s taken right from the first edition text. I don’t own the first edition book, but all of the text in this edition reads just like I remember it reading in the first one. This disappointed me, actually; I was hoping for more details on the world. But it was not meant to be, I guess.

The Book of Chronicles is the journal of Harry Liebowitz, one of The Meek, a person who was left behind on Earth after the Apocalypse. It starts

This diary is my last hope for sanity. If the dreams don’t stop soon, I guess I’ll have to stop them. I know that if I die, my own personal pocket of hell will be over. Maybe if I write these things down, they won’t seem so bizarre when I look at them. I hope I’m right…for all of our sakes.

Not particularly inspiring fiction, by many standards. The rest of it details his travels around the southern part of the United States, trying to figure out what happened and where to go from here. As game fiction goes, it’s not terrible, but it’s not inspiring, either. Game fiction, in my opinion, is wonderful when done well, but is rarely done well. (The two exception that leap to mind as good game fiction are the piece of the failed Embrace in the revised Vampire book, and practically anything in the Unknown Armies series, which I re-read constantly just for the pure joy of reading good writing. Or the journal from the beginning of Little Fears—now there’s a journal entry that makes you feel the setting.) This doesn’t do much except give us a first-person account of life after the Apocalypse.

The Book of Revelation details the events leading up to the Apocalypse. Again, this is all lifted from the first edition, but it’s compelling material. I enjoyed seeing exactly how those vague, magical prophecies played out in the world of The End. Pull-out text boxes are written like memos and newspaper clippings. I think it helps make the reader feel like he or she is piecing together the final moments of civilization, which is pretty cool. One of the more compelling chains of events was the one that lead to the Hand of Death. The governments had distributed a fertilizer, SS-141, to farmers to help failed crops. The fertilizer only killed more plants, though, and the animals that ate them. Across the ocean, a nihilistic death cult in Osaka released an unidentified toxin into the Sea of Japan, which didn’t kill humans, but killed the fish and turned the sea bright red, ala the Sea of Blood. Then currents carried the toxin across to the U.S., where it mixed with SS-141 to release a red gaseous toxin that killed any animal that breathed it. A lot of the prophecies are made to look as if it was humanity’s poor luck and planning that led to the events of the Apocalypse, which I like. Not all of them are as compelling, though, such as the rise of the Anti-Christ. It’s seven short paragraphs long, and isn’t much more than “A guy gets some people together, tries to kill a bunch of faithful followers of God, and is assassinated by a minister.” There’s more, but it’s not that interesting, and I think it could have been.

The Book of Kings describes the world after the Apocalypse that The Meek live in. It talks about conditions in general, such as how animals have changed (God took away humanity’s mastery over animals) and how the remaining colonies are doing. This section is interesting because it tells about how people survive after the Apocalypse, which isn’t a topic many people discuss at all. It’s dull because a lot of the colonies feel like stereotypes of post-apocalyptic fiction. The Atlanta Confederation is a bunch of southern good ol’ boys that enslave women. The Swamp Rats are man-hating women who fight the Atlanta Confederation. Boston is under siege by Washington D.C., which no one knows anything about other than there is something there making other people fight Boston. There’s a normal community in the Midwest, Waco has a survival nut encampment, and so on. It doesn’t seem very original. There is the Mile High Shrine, which is founded by Gabriel, who fell after doubting God’s choice during the Apocalypse, and the Oregon Commune, which is a back-to-nature settlement that realized nature isn’t as nice as it was before, but overall the communities feel very stereotypical and not very three-dimensional.

Overall, the setting takes up about 40 percent of the book itself. Just to make it clear, none of the writing in these chapters is the fault of Tyranny Games. As I said before, this is all lifted from the first edition of The End, pretty much word-for-word. Reprinting it is nice, but I would have liked to see more of the designers’ own vision of the world.

THE RULES

The rest of the book, chapters four through nine, is taken up with the rules of the game. The Book of Genesis describes character creation; the Book of Acts describes skills and feats; the Book of Lamentation talks about how to handle various game-specific effects, such as the Blues, and magic; the Book of Numbers talks about combat and various way to die, as well as vehicles; the Book of Judges gives some game-specific tips on how to run a game in The End, and the Book of Apocrypha give game stats on the world’s signature characters.

In general, these sections of the book have more errors and misprints than the first part, but that’s because the designers had to actually write this section, rather than copying already-proofed text. There are some areas where you can tell the designers cut and paste similar text but forgot to make the needed changes, or designed a table separately from the text explaining the table. It’s not filled with errors, but there are enough so that I wish it had gone through one more editor before going to the press.

Since the game is using d20 rules, characters have classes, which made me wince again, since The End was never about fighting and special abilities. In fact, the point was that everyone is just a normal person, and classes makes me feel like people should have special abilities. Fortunately, there’s just one class in The End: The Meek. It’s the only choice, and everyone as to start out with it. It’s even appropriately powered; the hit dice are only a d2, though everyone starts first level with a number of hit points equal to their Constitution.

To balance out the lack of choice, there are several prestige classes, or Reborn Classes, as the book calls them, to help people feel like their character is special: Anarchist, Digger, Physician, Preacher, Restorer, Scientist, Shaman and Thug. Some are neat extensions of real-world skills, such as the Anarchist’s ability to live off of nature better and resist the maddening effects of ennui (I’ll explain what ennui is a little later.) Some, like the Preacher and Shaman, have supernatural abilities, though, and that sets me off. If I remember correctly, the first edition of The End didn’t have magic in it, or at least none the characters could use. I liked that, because the Meek had to survive on their own wits and skills. The addition of magic and magic-based abilities doesn’t make sense from a design perspective and a game-world perspective. From the design angle, it weakens the fact that the characters live in a world where God said they were now abandoned and had to survive on their own. From a game-world perspective, the world before the Apocalypse was supposed to be like our own. So where did this magic come from all of the sudden? God is gone, and if the characters are to be as forlorn about being left behind as the setting wants us to be, the inclusion of magic gives them hope that there may be another way to Heaven other than through God. I suppose you could twist it to say that magic is the work of the Devil, or that the Apocalypse left magical residue that talented people can shape, but the book itself doesn’t deal with that logic, which annoys me. (To be fair, the beginning of the magic section does mention that “with the closing of Heaven and Hell, traditional black and white magic has declined and/or become unstable.” That doesn’t explain where the predominance of magical abilities comes from, though.) Other than that, the classes are pretty well-balanced, and keep from adding gobs of powers that would make the characters feel safe in the world—the Thug has the highest hit dice, and that’s only a d4, so even the toughest of the Meek can only take a couple of shots from a gun before falling.

Another nice touch is that each character has a sin that must be determined before play starts. This sin is why your character was left behind. It’s never something like “I killed four people but hid from the Devil so I got left behind,” but more like someone who was good enough to stay out of Hell, but didn’t believe enough to get into Heaven. (Other religions need not worry that the designers were promoting a Judeo-Christian lifestyle, by the way. The book says that as long as you seemed to live humbly and kindly, and worshipped the most benevolent god in a pantheon, you went to Heaven. So it’s not like India is populated with millions of devout Buddhists and Hindus (Hindi?) that God skipped over.) I think it’s a good way that gives the characters some depth without requiring four-page backgrounds before you play.

Skills and feats are covered in the Book of Acts. There are quite a few skills here, but not many that are setting-specific. Medicine is broken down into Medical-Treat Wounds, Medical-Investigation and Medical-Treat Illness, and Science is handled the same way. Other than that, the skills don’t differ much from basic d20 ones. Some of the skills are labeled “I don’t want to role-play” skills, since the authors felt that situations relating to them should be roleplayed as much as possible. I agree, but felt the self-referential way they labeled them drew me out of the world they were trying to create. That could just be the writer in me, though.

Feats are more interesting, since they have feats like Make Light Source (for making electric lights) and Intensive Care. People wanting to play mechanics or physicians in The End have a lot of choices to make in this section, and there’s a general list of combat-related feats as well. My only gripe here is that some of the feats could have a more interesting name, rather than “Combat Medic 1” and “Combat Medic 2.”

The Book of Lamentations covers the game stats of various parts of the world. The Blues is the name given to the accelerated decay that has struck the remnants of civilization, as Earth slowly reverts back to an Edenic state. The real gem here, though, is ennui. Ennui is the term given for the madness that strikes people who are out of contact with other people. Since humans are social creatures, the characters have to contact other humans or go insane. I loved this idea of the first book, and I’m glad they executed it well here. Ennui ratings go from 0 to 25, and after that, you’re nuts. Starting characters begin with an ennui rating of 25-Wisdom, and the negative modifiers to insanity kick in at 11, so it takes a pretty high Wisdom score to start off with a low ennui. This both models the needs of people in a post-apocalyptic society and gives starting characters a reason to hook up, so I really like the concept. I’m glad it carried over into this edition.

The magic system, though, is what concerns me the most about this game. Derek Guder, one of the designers of the Lost Souls edition, did a review of the first edition on rpg.net, and he said the magic system felt too undefined. As he said in his review, “one man’s ‘feeling of magic and the mysterious’ is another man’s ‘Goddamnit! Why the hell didn’t they include rules for magic in this game? What were they thinking?!?!?’” I agree that the supernatural could have used more definition in the first edition, but to make magic-using classes takes it too far for me.

Not that the magic is handled like Dungeons and Dragons. Magic is divided into two types, shamanic and Word of God, with shamanic magic being far more common that Word of God magic. To use it, you have to take the particular ritual as a feat. For instance, there’s a Soul Trace Ritual that lets the shaman track an individual by focusing on a personal object of the person’s. Word of God magic has three basic feats; comprehension, manipulation, and control, as well as a feat for each Word of God that the person knows, such as Love or Growth. Word of God magic is a lot more powerful, but is also much harder to control and to learn. It’s nice that there aren’t actual spells in the game, but as I said before, I wouldn’t have made magic as accessible as the designers did. To me, it ruins the feel that you have to rely on your own skills to survive. Even the idea of Word of God magic strikes a false note in me—if it’s the Word of God, and God left, why can people use God’s Words? Fortunately, I think that a person could easily tone down or ignore the magic components in The End if they wanted to, so if a Judge (the game’s term for a gamemaster) wants less magic, it can be done without too much fuss. Be careful, though, Judges: magic is fairly powerful in The End, so make sure you know how magical you want your game, or else it could easily become a game you weren’t prepared for.

A few magical denizens and beasts are listed, and some hints are given at the plotline of the game. For instance, there are Death Vampires, created by Death so that Death wouldn’t disappear when everyone dies. This is a somewhat subtle hint—God is gone, but the Four Horsemen aren’t, and are therefore a force to be reckoned with. Likewise, some angels and demons are still on Earth, like Gabriel, and can provide plot hooks and twists for the characters.

The Book of Numbers is about combat and vehicles. Admittedly, this has always been the most boring part of rules books for me, so I kind of skimmed this part. In general, if you play d20 products, you should have a basic idea of how combat works. With not many hit points, though, combat is dangerous. A pistol does anywhere from 1d6 2 to 2d6 2, and with only a dozen or so hit points, you can die pretty quick from a firefight. This is doubly dangerous since The Meek don’t have a Heaven or Hell to go to when they die, so it’s thought that the soul just disappears when a person dies, making death a very permanent decision.

This section had a few bugs in it. For instance, the driving check has “battle damage” listed as a target number of 20, but a) the text doesn’t describe what battle damage is, and b) I think it was supposed to be a 20 to all maneuvers while driving. Small errors like this hurt my comprehension of the rules and made the book seem a little less professional. Spelling errors I can overlook from time to time, but tables need to be clearly explained at all times. (The book in general does this well, but the Driving section was a particularly bad spot, in my mind, and for someone who doesn’t like all those rule-modifying thingies, it just aggravated me more.) They also listed the damage on a nuclear weapon as 112d6. Why list the damage? Is it really necessary? If nuclear weapons are going off, it seems like more of a plot device than a need to see just how far the blast smears you across the landscape.

The Book of Judges is your basic “how do I run this game?” chapter. If you’re an experienced roleplayer, you probably don’t need to read this chapter, as the information is pretty generic. But it’s good to see something included, just in case this is anyone’s first game (You never know if any particular game will be someone’s first. Mine was Paranoia—imagine how that colored my view of roleplaying.) I’m a little disappointed that there wasn’t anything discussing magic in this section. Like I said earlier, I feel that’s probably the one thing experienced GMs may want to change in their game, and I think it would have been nice to discuss it in the back.

Finally, the Book of Apocrypha gives some back story and stats for the signature characters in the book. This section seems tacked on, and it doesn’t do much for me in the way of helping me understand the world. Everything but the stats was taken from the first edition, and I think the designers felt they should include them in the new edition, but I think it might have been better to put them somewhere earlier than the last chapter.

There’s an index in the back, as well as a character sheet and some promos for upcoming supplements. The index seems pretty slim to me, mostly a few entries for each letter, but it seems to fit the bill. The character sheet is two pages, and doesn’t have the skills listed on it like the Dungeons and Dragons sheet. There isn’t a nice list of skills anywhere in the book, which means I have to flip through it and read the whole list across several pages to see what my options are, and when creating four to six characters with only one book, that means a lot of time is going to get chewed up by people flipping through the book one at a time. I hope that gets changed soon. I would also like to see a PDF of the sheet on the Web site. That’s not up yet, nor is an errata list, but the book just recently came out, so I hope that’s in the works and will be released soon.

THE ART

I’m not a very artistically-minded person, but I thought the art was a bit under-par. Some of the pictures were hard to figure out due to poor shading or difference in line, and many of them didn’t give me the feel of The End. For instance, on page 170, there’s a blurred picture of what looks like a pi symbol on some surface. It’s in a section discussing plumbing and performance as a skill. What am I looking at? It doesn’t evoke the feeling of the setting in me, and I don’t understand how it relates to anything. Just before it, on 168, there’s a pic of two skeletal hands holding each other, which works—it evokes a sense of apocryphal hope, which is what The End is about, but I think a lot of the art in the book falls short of that goal. It’s not terrible (usually), but it could have been better

THE VERDICT

Is The End: Lost Souls Edition worth buying? I think that the worth of this book is going to be pretty hit-or-miss for people. I like the idea of the world enough that it intrigues me and makes me want to read on, but then at points it feels far too stereotypical to help me at all. As far as rules go, you have to like d20 to like the meat of this book. If you like the concept but not the system, you may want to try and find the first edition on eBay, but the Lost Souls edition took the background and text straight from that book, so it may be easier to find the new edition. If you already own the first edition, the only new material you’ll get is the d20 stats and rules, so you’ll have to decide if it’s worth the cover price of $30.

Style is nice in this book—the setting is original enough to make me go, “Yeah, this is pretty fresh.” But the parts that are stereotypically post-apocalyptic hurt it. I’d say this isn’t the fault of the designers, but it looks to me like they made no attempt to change any of it, which means they’re as responsible as the original authors were. And I don’t like what they did with the cover. Still, I believe it’s good to give this game another go. I’d give it a 3.5, but since I can’t use that rating here, I don’t feel like I’m lying too bad if I rate it a 4.

Substance is mostly d20 information, some of which needed to be edited a little more closely. Likewise, the prevalence of magic with no support for altering it made me cringe a bit. The lack of new material to much of this book is what worries me the most, though I’ll really have to see supplements before I can determine just how original the new designers can be. Id’ give this a 3.5 as well, but I have to go the other way on this rating, as most of it was taken from the original text and not edited, so it gets a 3.

If you like apocalyptic games and haven’t checked The End out yet, give it a go. If you’ve got the first edition, Lost Souls will only give you d20 material, and maybe some more ideas on magic. If you hate d20, interpretations of Judeo-Christian religion that aren’t yours or the Apocalypse as game material, you had best stay away. I think the world is original enough that you should read it, but as I said before, it’ll be hit-or-miss as to whether you’ll want to buy it.