In the interests of full disclosure: I was one of the playtesters for Albion and the author, Tim Gray, is a personal friend (as opposed, I suppose, to an impersonal fiend). I'm now writing a review of the game. If this is the kind of thing that gets you in a high dudgeon (again, as opposed, I suppose, to a low dungeon) I'd suggest just skipping the review and taking some St John's Wort (the reviewer does not condone the abuse of prescription medications).
For those remaining, what is the rest of this review going to contain? Firstly, I'm going to leave Style and Substance as 3:Average because I don't have the chutzpah to set them any higher (Maureen Lipman recently defined a chutzpah as peeing through someone's letterbox and then knocking on the door and asking them how far it went). Just from a sheer sense of devilment I'm tempted to set them higher, but temptation
is overrated. Next I'm going to describe the PDF, tell you how the sections break down and then leave you with three things that I like about the game without any attempt to persuade you that you too should like the game because of these three things.
A brief note about the system:
Nugget (Nugget is the free cut-down version of Albion's core system and
reading it will give you a better sense of whether you'd like the system or not than me expositing about dice for a while).
The bit that describes the PDF:
186 pages A4, colour cover, black and white interior. Searchable, bookmarked. What looks to be a 10-point serif font in two columns. Illustrated border and occasional art and grey-backed text sections. Decent enough but nothing that would make you go 'wow'.
The bit that tells you about the stuff that the PDF is about without being too long and detailed:
The PDF itself, barring introduction, index, bibiography, resources and that sort of thing is divided into four "books" as follows:
- The Book of Ash — Setting (about thirty pages)
- The Book of Birch — Character Creation (about thirty-five pages)
- The Book of Alder — System (about fourty-five pages)
- The Book of Rowan — Magic (about thirty-five pages)
You may notice: no GM's section. The section at the end on Resources (not named after a tree, not even named after a shrub) functions as a kind of GM's section but at less than ten pages you can appreciate it's not in depth. There is a GMs book planned to go with this the players book, but it's not out yet. Which I guess would be my criticism: what is there is good and does the job but there is a sense in which there's stuff missing.
The Three things I really like about Albion, each containing a mention of another game about which each is also true:
It's a European game and I'm a European. The game this is also true about: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Most fantasy settings — Glorantha (Runequest/Heroquest), Near (The Shadow of Yesterday), Eberron (D20), Theah (7th Sea) — are culturally American in a thousand subtle (and not so subtle) ways, I like that Albion (and WHFRP) isn't (aren't).
It's a fantasy game set in a real place. I can get detailed maps from the Ordnance Survey instead of hoping that a supplement contains a map at the scale I want. I can take direct inspiration from the real world places around me. This is also true about Unknown Armies.
Character generation contains a lifepath system that gives an idea where the character came from and an insight into their culture. This is also true of Cyberpunk.
A bit that pretends to be the conclusion but is too brief to really carry it off:
Well, that's all the things I said that I would say and I've already given away the ending by telling you what the scores would be. For those with Korsakov's: Style 3, Substance 3. I'm now at a loss on how to end this review so I'll take a cue from the record I'm listening to and repeat to fade repeat to fade repeat to fade repeat to fade repeat to fade
Review Summary