The Secret of Zir'an
In Short
The Secret of Zir'an presents a unique and creative world full of action and adventure. Players who enjoy the idea of a high magic Indiana Jones campaign set in a world on the brink of war will love this setting. The system offers speedy task resolution and gives players opportunities to creatively contribute to the game beyond die results.
Unfortunately, a printing problem and a few rules hiccups prevent this from being a perfect product.
The Physical Thing
The Secret of Zir'an is a hardcover book retailing for $39.99. 286 pages of material can be found between it's covers. Paper quality is above average and the book is bound well. The interior is black and white with art pieces ranging from average to great. This book contains a good index.
The book had a printing mistake that can make it difficult for some people to read. There are runes behind the text which, in some chapters, contrast with the text. I recommend flipping through a copy to see if you're one of these people before purchasing it. I had some difficulty but found that good lighting helped a lot. The two worst chapters have been placed on Paragon Games website for free download.
The Ideas
The game world of Secret of Zir'an resembles Europe in the 1920 to 1940 era, but with a dash of magic thrown in. The political entities in Zir'an are detailed and believable, and offer a wealth of adventure. Each country has its own write up, which includes enough detail to give a sense of the nation but without so many that the GM and players can't add plenty of their own content.
Zir'an is a game that embraces the idea of the player characters being adventurers. There has been an apocalypse in the not so distant past, and a large part of the game can be investigating ancient ruins and uncovering the secret history of the world. While there are plenty of other things to do in the game world, it's just such a great world to be adventuring explorers that it's hard to imagine another type of game.
Technology is driven by Rune Magic, one of the two types of magic in Zir'an. Rune magic is so prevalent that rune mages are as common as plumbers or electricians and their work is similar. While they might only know a few common runes each, they are the backbone of society. The world is highly magical. Trains, planes, and automobiles can be found here along with shotguns and swords.
The standard fantasy races are here. Elves, Dwarves, and Humans exist under different names. Beast people and giants, the Gogachi, are the two more atmospheric additions. While I find the three standard races to be on the bland side, the two new races are very intriguing. The Gogachi are particularly interesting because they are simple by the standards of other races, but their minds are able to handle complex mathematics and games better than anyone else.
The world makes me think of the Final Fantasy video games, the movies Indiana Jones and The Mummy, and the comic book Planetary.
Under the Cover
Character Creation
Character creation is a multi step process that is moderately to very involved for new roleplayers but poses no difficulty to old hands. There is no randomness to character creation. The Secret of Zir'an offers three levels at which the campaign may begin, and depending on which level is used the characters receive a certain number of points to spend. It begins with a selection of attributes from a point pool. Derived attributes are determined and then a few more points are spent to increase derived attributes.
Character race is then determined, followed by homeland. These two values do not have to match, which is to say that an elven character may come from a human kingdom. From a character's homeland, or Origin, they receive a starting skill package.
In addition to the games attributes and skills, there is a third category called aptitudes. Think of aptitudes as “sub attributes” which put limits on how high skills can go.
Without going into too much detail, one of the attributes is Intelligence (covering raw cleverness), one of the aptitudes is Personal (covering things relating solely to your character's physical abilities, such as Ranged Weapons but not Socializing), and one of the skills is Rune Magic (covering casting rune magic spells only). This may sound a bit complicated, but it is not in play.
All tasks in the game are resolved with a 1d10 roll, usually with +attribute +aptitude +skill attached to it. So if a character was a Rune Mage and wanted to cast a spell they would roll 1d10 and add Intelligence, Personal, and their Rune Magic practice to the roll. Once all of these values are written down on a player's sheet all they need to do is simple addition.
Skills come in two forms: Finesse Level and Practice. The Finesse Level of a skill in the game represents unrefined potential. A real life example would be a person fresh out of university who knows a lot about their field but hasn't had any hands on experience yet. They have the potential to accomplish great things, but they're not as good at everyday stuff as someone who has been working in their field for years (but who lacks their understanding of theory).
Finesse determines whether certain special combat moves can be done with skills, bonus spells and other abilities with Rune and Shadow Magic, and a host of other benefits. Practice is the value that is actually added to the die roll. Here are a few examples to help you wrap your brain around this idea.
Expert Rune Magic, Practice 0 – This character is an Expert Rune Mage, pretty darned good at rune magic, but with a practice of zero they will be adding Intelligence + Personal + 0 + 1d10 to their rolls. Lots of theory, lots of potential, not much experience.
Basic Rune Magic, Practice 4 – This would be a great example of the electrician rune mage. This character only knows the most basic runes, but has had years using them. Intelligence + Personal + 4 + 1d10 for this character to cast runes.
On the whole, Finesse Level is far more desirable than Practice. It gives more options, more powers, and is much cheaper to buy in character creation than with XP.
After determining their attributes, race, and buying a starting package players buy packages from their Region and pick skills and aptitudes. Players usually buy several of these, examples including things like Smuggler or Rune Mage. Once they're done spending points on these, they spend points on advantages and disadvantages. Finally, they turn the points they placed into their skills into levels of Finesse and Practice.
The System Generally
One of the inventive things that Zir'an does is that it allows characters to turn incredible successes in one area into success in another area. The system even allows one players grand success to help out another player. For example: Two characters are trying to climb up a wall. One of the rolls an incredibly good success, and so automatically allows the other to succeed by helping them up the wall. Example 2: A character wants to pickpocket a guard. She seduces him, and does such a good job of it that she automatically picks his pocket without having to roll.
The system tries to give players more options with regard to describing their characters actions and being creative than a lot of other systems do. I like it!
The system also makes a distinction between Stressed and unstressed conditions. When a character is Stressed, they have to roll in order to succeed at their tasks. A character is Stressed in combat, when there is a time limit, or under other adverse conditions such as in a blizzard. When a character is unstressed, if their Finesse level exceeds the difficulty of the task they automatically succeed. I like this because the system is trying to do away with unnecessary rolls.
Combat
Combat is inventive and fun. Characters have their Speed rating, and spend Speed to perform actions. Everyone takes an action, then the round repeats until everyone runs out of Speed. Speed is used for movement, attacks, and swinging from a rope. At first, using speed will be clunky but with practice it will be quick and painless.
Special moves are performed almost by accident. When a roll is really good, the difference can be used to purchase special attacks, extra damage, or armor penetration. So, if a bad guy rolls 10 points higher than they needed to in order to his a character they might tack extra damage onto their attack.
There are a variety of interesting armors and weapons presented in the game. The way armor and a weapon's armor penetration works is a little bit complicated, but with practice shouldn't pose much of a problem. Armor provides an strong benefit, which may be seen as unfortunate by those players who don't like envisioning their explorer decked out in protective gear.
Combat was overly complex for me. I wanted more fast paced action, but found that the sheer amount of minutia really slowed down the pace of a battle. Tracking movement and otherwise cool stunts, such as swinging from a rope, was somewhat unpleasant to. In play it seemed like the players that were doing the most neat things got the fewest actions and were the least effective.
Magic
Rune Magic splits magic up into different categories based on the lost gods (who left the world long ago). The Finesse level of the Rune Magic skill determines starting spells and whether a rune must be drawn on paper, in the air, or simply imagined. Casting runes imposed a non-cumulative penalty on the Rune Mages actions. What this means is that if the Rune Mage cast two spells that gave a -1 penalty, four spells that gave a -3 penalty, and ten thousand spells that gave a -5 penalty they would be at a -5 to all rolls.
One of the interesting things about rune magic is that characters learn individual runes but can cast them in different ways. They might, for example, just scribe simple ones on paper to use quickly in battle. Or they might create giant Glyphs that increase the power and range of the runes effect.
Shadow Magic works in almost exactly the same way, only the effects are a little more generalized and there are fewer of them.
In play we found both types of magic to be a little too strong, because of the lack of any penalty for continually using magic and because of the low buy in cost to become a mage. A common method of dealing with this, should you find it to be a problem, is to have cumulative penalties for casting spells.
Adversaries
There is a small but useful section on monsters in this book, including several different types of Shadekin which are the standard evil adversaries in Zir'an.
My Take
I love the Zir'an world and think the system is inventive but overly complicated for my tastes. My group, which consists of old roleplayers and newer ones, used it for five sessions then converted to Tri-Stat. My biggest problem was that it was too involved for me to teach to our newest member, who had never played RPGs before. However, for a group of roleplayers who can handle learning a new system that has some up front complexity Secret of Zir'an is a real gem.
Review Summary