The Classic of the God Weapons, known in the barbarian tongue as Weapons of the Gods, has long been rumoured, yet who has seen a copy? References to its mastery of the wuxia genre abound, but a complete text has remained elusive – surely Qin Shihuangdi must have burned them all, fearful that it would reveal the secrets of his secret Legalist art, the Three Kings Kung-Fu! Still, one hears that in a far away land, the Classic was found in the form of a stone tablet, long after the Predictionists had given up on it. Humble monks supposedly labour even now to make rubbings of the text, they say, and soon the land will be flooded with copies of the legendary work!
Let us ponder the Classic, then, noble readers, for how can we be called men and women of wisdom if we know nothing of it? Below is a work of an undistinguished and plodding scholar, dry and ill-penned, yet one thing is sure – he saw the great work! Can even such humble wisdom illuminate the path for us? Read on!
Weapons of the Gods from Eos Press is a stylish and fun game of heroic adventure in an imaginatively rendered vision of a mystic China, and a remarkably accessible example of the work of Rebecca Borgstrom (Nobilis, Exalted). It features great kung-fu combat, an intriguing magic setting, and a wonderfully flavoursome and characterful setting. However, some may find the relative lack of setting details (organizations, countries and NPCs) and statted antagonists problematic. Likewise, while the book is beautifully laid out in full colour, it relies exclusively on the artwork of the Hong Kong comic book on which it is based (and named for), which some will not care for. In short, it is an excellent game, with a few standout traits that may act as turnoffs (or conversely, make some gamers very happy indeed). Read on!
A full colour hardback weighing in at 382 pages (plus 2 page character sheet), Weapons of the Gods is first and foremost an impressive looking book. It has a standard two-column layout, with attractive colour page borders reflecting the “element” of each chapter: basic rules and character creation form the Book of Wood, Kung Fu is found in the Book of Metal, etc. Full page artwork begins each chapter, most of which is from later issues of the comic than those available in English – very nice if you like the Kung Fu comic style. The book has two authors: Brad Elliott (also developer of the game), and Rebecca Borgstrom. Both share the first chapter (character creation and basic rules), and split the remaining chapters between them – the conflict, Kung Fu and gamemaster chapters being written by Brad, the setting, society and Secret Arts chapters by Rebecca. The difference in styles is not particularly disruptive, but it is very apparent, especially to fans of Ms Borgstrom. Those who’ve found her work in Nobilis and Exalted impenetrable will find her chapters here much more accessible, however – her treatment of fantasy China is mythic, but no more enigmatic than is appropriate for the genre.
The Book of Wood: Core System, Character Creation and Basic Setting
The core mechanic uses a small pool of ten-sided dice (usually derived from a skill), aiming to beat a target number (usually from about 15-40) by forming sets of like-numbered dice. The number of dice in a set forms the ‘tens’ digit, the number showing on the dice forms the ‘ones’ digit. Hence if I rolled 2, 4, 4, 5, 8, then my best set would be two 4s – or 24. You can only choose one set to actually use (hence if I rolled 6, 6, 6, 7, 7 I could choose 36 or 27 but not both), and you can choose a set of one die (so if I rolled 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 I could choose my one 9 for a total of 19). Bonuses and penalties usually take the form of a flat number added to or subtracted from the final number (so if I had a +5 bonus because I was following an auspicious strategy drawn up by my genius companion, and I rolled 2, 5, 9, 9, then my total would be 29+5 or 34). In most cases, only the highest bonus and the highest penalty of a given kind (circumstance, Kung Fu, equipment) is applied.
The mechanic has a couple of nice twists that work well with the genre. When performing complex tasks, you only need to roll against the highest difficulty an action incurs – for example, if you’re trying to set Hell Clan’s camp alight with rockets, there’s no reason not to have the resulting flames depict a quote from Confucius. The River is essentially a small dice-cache you can use while in conflict to store dice from unused sets in for later use. In practice, this means that as conflicts go on characters begin to perform extraordinary deeds, with the advantage switching back and forth.
Overall, my players had no trouble adapting to this dice system in play and quite enjoyed it, particularly the River. I suspect it may grow cumbersome at high dice pools, but it’s rare to roll more than seven dice, which is easily managed. The system is fast-moving in play without lacking mechanical weight (particularly in only having to bother with the most significant modifiers), and I found it fun to GM with.
Character creation is handled using a fairly conventional points-based system, although happily Destiny (the game’s XP-equivalent) is also used in character creation. Characters choose a starting Archetype: Warrior, Courtier or Scholar. This is not a particularly restrictive choice, with slight differences in the use of some skills, and limited access to advanced techniques as a starting character – for example, Warriors unable to buy Secret Arts at Character Creation, but they may learn an Uncommon Kung Fu style. There’s little stopping a Courtier buying up on Kung Fu later on, however. Points are allocated to the five Attributes (Might, Speed, Presence, Genius and Wu Wei, the last being roughly equivalent to Perception), and to the twenty five Skills, which are fairly typical of the sorts of broad, encompassing skills used by cinematic or heroic games. Finally, the character is given 50 Destiny with which to purchase Kung Fu, Advantages, or further boost their Attributes and Skills. This is enough to build a character who would be right at home in Hero or Storm Riders – starting characters are powerful martial artists, skilled courtiers, Daoist sorcerers and other heroic types, but not yet world-shaking in their prowess.
Character creation is not particularly difficult, but Attributes aren’t intuitive for those used to the term’s meaning in other systems. Attributes give a small bonus to their associated skills, but their real use is as sources of Chi – the power used for Kung Fu. Hence their exact ratings are less dictated by whatever ideas you might have about your character’s innate talents so much as which Kung Fu you want to buy. While not a big problem, it’s likely to trip up people with their first characters.
Finally, the Book of Wood gives as much conventional setting as the game offers – and it’s not very much at all. There is a list of countries and organizations (particularly the five Great Clans of the martial arts world), of which a few are detailed in short vignettes. This is what I expect will be the point of serious objection to the game for some – while the setting-work is magnificent, it is almost entirely free of detail, and that detail isn’t even in the setting chapter!
It seems the game isn’t shooting for any more detail than you get in a typical Kung Fu movie or comic – and it gives you that handful of detail right up front. If you need more than that, I advise waiting on a purchase until further supplements or fan-work flesh out Shen Zhou – the game’s mystic China. If you prefer a wide-open setting, read on! You’re in for some real treats.
The Book of Fire – Combat
My players and I found combat in Weapons of the Gods to be a whole lot of fun. It’s not particularly complex, but it can be quite tactical, and tends to lead to reversals and dramatic battles. The principal danger with it for a beginning player is that most of its concepts are encountered from the very first battle – only a small number of concepts are introduced later through Kung Fu. The first fight for a player is likely to take a while as they find their feet.
That aside, the system has some nice touches. Attacking is a contested roll, as characters may automatically actively defend against any attack made against them. Usually only one attack is possible in a turn – a second can be added with some Kung Fu, but no more. However, each character also gets two Free Actions, which encourages athletic feats, banter and the like while also interacting with the critical system. Critical hits are very common, resulting whenever an attack beats the defence by 10 or more, and rather than doing extra damage, inflict various status effects such as Disarm, Entangle, Knockdown and the like. Most such effects can be escaped or remedied with a free action and/or chi expenditure. Combined with the River mechanic, Critical hits contribute to the back-and-forward nature of Weapons of the Gods combat.
My favourite touch is chi regeneration – each turn, a character regenerates one point of chi in each of the five colours. This naturally encourages characters to use their chi rather than hoarding it, and to switch Kung Fu styles; for instance, if you use a Crimson coloured sword style and exhaust your Crimson chi, it makes sense to switch to a Jade coloured unarmed style until your Crimson regenerates.
Despite the system’s relative straightforwardness, fights between evenly matched opponents are not overly fast. Named characters are quite sturdy in this system – they have a great deal of health, armour reduces damage, and most characters have Chi Aura – dice that can be used to further reduce damage. There is a death spiral mechanic, and minion rules allowing quick dispatching of hordes of unnamed foes, but you can expect a duel with a character’s nemesis to be an appropriately substantial affair.
This chapter also briefly covers Deeds and Virtues from a player’s point of view – essentially, in order to gain standing in the Martial Arts World, a character must perform a certain number of noteworthy deeds, aligned with five roughly Confucian virtues or their five corrupt opposites. Essentially, this looks like it’s intended to encourage players to be proactive in seeking fame and doing impressive deeds, since otherwise their advancement will be capped. I like this idea, but advancement hasn’t been much of a concern in my short playtest, so I haven’t had a chance to see it work in play.
The Book of Earth – Setting
Now, as you know from above, Weapons of the Gods sports very little setting detail in terms of places, organizations, NPCs and the like. However, it has 152 pages of wonderful setting material!
This is because, perhaps more than any other game I’ve seen, Weapons of the Gods focuses upon the flavour of the setting over details. No two games run from the corebook would share more than a handful of facts, but they would certainly share the rich and distinctive style that this chapter evokes. It gives an extraordinary view of the character of Shen Zhou, the mythic quality of its history, and the function of its society. Nearly all of it is useful for virtually any game set in a mystic China – it is not strongly tied to the comic series at all, other than gods, demons and legendary Emperors using some rather impressive weaponry and Kung Fu! For instance, I intend to run the game in the Three Kingdoms era (over a century before the Sixteen States period in which the game is set), and very little material will be inapplicable. Fans of Rebecca Borgstrom will recognise her style (it’s certainly much more elegant than the English translations of the comics), particularly in the more mythic tales of the early Emperors and the goddess Nu-Wa. The mix of mythic, epic and humorous also brings to mind Barry Hughart’s Master Li series – it is equally good at evoking a sense of wonder!
The presentation of the setting information is very interesting, too – every piece of setting is a gathered on a Lore Sheet. It is assumed that all players will possibly read and know everything in the book; however, your character only knows something if they have bought the relevant Lore Sheet (most common knowledge has a cost of zero Destiny). A Lore Sheet contains a narrative vignette (those who dislike game fiction beware, though these vignettes are self-contained and of excellent quality, very evocative of the genre), sometimes a plain-text description of the setting element, and then a series of purchasable plot hooks, treasures or secret techniques. For example, the creation myth is presented as a Lore Sheet named Pangu, which tells the tale of Pangu creating all things by engaging the Void in Kung Fu battle. The Lore Sheet then describes weapons, locations and societies related to that tale that you can entangle yourself with or purchase outright. Some plot hooks even allow you to entangle your foes in them! Lore Sheets related to society tend to have more generalised plot hooks, but not always – for instance ‘A Woman’s Life’ gives plot hooks related to marriage and pregnancy, but also specialised Kung Fu and descent from famous heroic women.
My only concern with this material is potential imbalance between players investing heavily in Kung Fu and those investing heavily in Lores. In theory, their spotlight time should roughly equal out with a competent GM. However, if in a given campaign it didn’t seem likely that raw power and plot hooks were equally valuable investments, I would personally feel safer allotting a certain amount of Destiny for advancement and a certain amount for Lores. Overall, though, the setting material is excellent. It greatly encourages proactive play by allowing players to essentially treat the setting chapter as a gaming menu.
The Book of Metal – Kung Fu and Magic
Kung Fu in Weapons of the Gods is a great deal of fun. For a start, everyone has it – every character starts out with at least enough Kung Fu to run across water and do basic wire fu. It’s also fairly cheap and quite varied. There appear to be many viable combinations of Kung Fu, so long as the character uses a variety of colours of chi. For example, a character with too many sword styles may have many techniques competing for crimson and silver chi. In a long combat, they will exhaust their resources faster than a character mixing techniques from several colours.
Kung Fu is easy to use – each style has between four and six techniques, and a technique costs a number of chi equal to its level (Flashing Blade, the first Dragon Sabre technique, a crimson style, costs one crimson chi to use). Most characters will have chi ratings of between one and five, so it’s not difficult to keep track of. Each level of Kung Fu has a colourful name, as you’d expect, but those not given to remembering hoards of names should find it easy enough to remember they have Heart Breaking Blade 3, Golden Temple Bells 2 etc.
Common Kung Fu can do some impressive things, but the real pyrotechnics and epic power are reserved for Uncommon and Rare styles (meaning quests for technique manuals and Kung Fu masters are likely to be a staple). Only high level Uncommon and Rare techniques have particularly complex or novel mechanics – most other Kung Fu is quite straight forward.
Magic is better than fun – it’s really rather special. A unified system covers tactical genius, divination, medicine, Daoist sorcery and the social mastery of Courtiers, and it is quite nifty. Essentially, the magic chapter starts with a succinct discussion of everything the Secret Arts can do, and then goes into many, many flavoursome examples of how the different arts do it. All long-term magic and other secret lore deals in Chi Conditions – weaknesses, which are a variety of penalties, and hyperactivities, which are bonuses. Every condition exists as a matched pair – it’s even possible to have the hyperactive form of Dying, gaining bonuses rather than penalties with your last breaths! Creating and manipulating these conditions is where the secret arts differ – a Predictionist or Genius might divine that a given course of action is auspicious, creating a hyperactivity in any who follow it; a Courtier may use a man’s passion for a courtesan to create a balancing weakness; a Doctor might migrate a crippling headache to an illness of the spleen, and a Daoist curse-master might use a spell to create a hyperactivity and a weakness as a matched pair from nothing. The system is simple but powerful, and very appropriate for the genre – those familiar with Exalted might think of it as akin to Sidereal Astrology, but it is a far more elegant system.
While I was very impressed by the Secret Arts, they lend themselves more to campaign play. However, both Courtiers and Daoists have access to Extraordinary Techniques, quick effects useful in the heat of conflict. While these lack the long-term power of the Secret Arts, the player of the Daoist in my game found them extremely useful – imaginative players will get a lot of mileage out of them.
The Book of Water – Gamemastering and Sample Characters
The book closes with the Gamemaster (Wulin Sage) chapter, and a smattering of example characters, in the form of major characters from the comic book. The Gamemastering chapter is quite good – it has a neat random relationship chart generator for quickly whipping up heroic rivals for your players, and rules for the Weapons of the Gods themselves! The Weapons come in three tiers of rarity, and are generally not available to starting characters – each is a storied artefact in its own right. There are truly no generic Weapons, as even the least of them has unique powers. Generally PCs do not begin play with them, and they seem to have a great impact on play. Of course, the Critical hit rules make it relatively easy to be disarmed even when wielding the mightiest weapon, so I imagine that duels over powerful God Weapons could see them changing hands multiple times. Example weapons of all tiers are presented, alongside weapon creation rules.
The minion rules are quite good – minions exist as groups, similar to 7th Sea, and come in multiple tiers of quality. They depend somewhat on their leadership for strength, so Faction fighters lead by competent officers can threaten PCs, while Mobs without leadership will be easily dispatched. However, despite not being particularly complicated, the minion rules aren’t intuitive or very clearly explained – I’m told they’ll be clarified in a FAQ. They do work very well in play.
Finally, I’m unconvinced of the value of the example characters – few people buying the game are likely to have actually read the comics, and their protagonists are skewed to the high end of the power scale. It would probably have been more useful to include more generic antagonists (of all three Archetypes), beasts and the like, or even example starting characters. However, Eos has already posted a number of antagonists in free PDF form to their mailing list, including animals, Qin Shihuangdi’s terracotta soldiers, and the Writhing Sickness Cult, an example organisation – those downloads will serve GMs new to the game (which at this point is everyone) much better, so let’s hope we see more of them!
Overall
The book does include some errata – rules for regaining Chi via an action are missing, and there are a handful of typos, but nothing egregious by the standards of the industry. Eos Press offers excellent web support, with free downloads and a very accessible developer, so anyone with access to the internet (i.e. you, noble reader!) shouldn’t have any difficulties. Hopefully we’ll see a FAQ out in time for the game’s release, or shortly after.
I’ve greatly enjoyed running Weapons of the Gods – the wuxia combat is great fun, the magic system is extremely flexible yet simple and very flavoursome, and the setting material is mythic and evocative. For my purposes it is magnificent, and I've been struggling to control the bias introduced by the sheer fun I've had playing it, in order to ensure that this is a useful review. The game is very accessible despite providing excellent mechanical support for play, and it’s looking very much like my go-to system for short games, and is definitely the next long campaign I’ll be running. While some may find the emphasis on setting flavour rather than setting detail not to their taste, those who enjoy wuxia, and those for whom magic and intrigue in a mystic China sound like fun are very much recommended to pick it up.
After all, why wouldn’t you want to rule the martial arts world?
Review Summary