You are an elite warrior who stalks the monstrosities that threaten your tribe and savage your land. With every tattoo inked in the blood of the beasts, you claim more power. With every kill, you prepare to face stronger foes. Only the most skilled and most cunning Beast Hunters survive. Will you?
Thus reads the back cover of Beast Hunters, a new two-player rpg from Berengad Games. In it, one player takes on the role of the titular Hunter, while the other becomes the Challenger, presenting the various obstacles and conflicts that the Hunter must face.
Structure
Beast Hunters is 143 pages long and is divided into thirteen chapters:
1. Introduction
2. Setting
3. How to Play
4. Challenge Negotiation
5. Conflict Resolution
6. Character Creation & Development
7. Playing the Hunter
8. Playing the Challenger
9. Adventures
10. Beast Hunts
11. Multiplayer Games
12. Optional Rules
13. Example of Play
Setting
The Chel'qhuri is a loosely-knit culture of matriarchal tribes in which everyone is a warrior of note. The most important members of the Chel'qhuri are the Beast Hunters, women and men of exceptional strength, intelligence, and character who have been fated to seek out and kill the many dangerous beasts that were loosed upon the world as the bi-product of a magical war. Upon killing such a beast, the hunter is tattooed by an elder Beast Hunter using the blood of the creature, which gives the hunter a portion of the beast's power.
The Berengad has a wide range of cultures and geography types; while the Chel'qhuri live largely in an area of savannahs and low mountains, the beasts they hunt roam much further, allowing for adventures in a multitude of settings. I especially like how the Chel'qhuri avoid a lot of the "noble savage" trappings. They use "modern" (for a fantasy setting) metal weapons, and are shown to have the capability of being just as avaricious and flawed as the other cultures around them. They regularly prey on merchants and caravans from other areas that pass through their lands, and they're generally dismissive of people who aren't Chel'qhuri, referring to them as "softlings".
Character Creation
Character creation uses a simple and elegant system that instills the characters with a great deal of depth from the very beginning. Characters are created by answering a series of questions that correspond to phases in the Hunter's life in a manner that resembles a cross between
Spirit of the Century / FATE and
Dogs in the Vineyard. From this, you determine the traits and resources available to the Hunter in the three different types of conflicts (physical, mental, and social), all of which are freeform, with no set lists to choose from.
Beast Hunters also does a excellent job of providing advice to the Challenger about how to use the traits the Hunter chooses as one of the primary sources of inspiration for adventures.
Mechanics
As with character creation,
Beast Hunters riffs off of many mechanics that have been seen in other small press games over the last few years (
Dogs in the Vineyard,
Polaris,
Primetime Adventures), but it does so with enough of a twist that it makes them its own, combining the bits and pieces in interesting ways to create a unique experience that will still appeal to fans of those games.
Each game of Beast Hunters begins with a formal salute between the player of the Hunter and the player of the Challenger. Any time the Hunter or Challenger step out of character for an extended period of time, the salute is performed again to signal that the game is on hold. The intent of this is to distinctly separate the game from all events that are ancillary to the game, and it also adds a very neat ritualistic quality to how the game is played.
Adventures are built out of a pool of "adversity points". Throughout the adventure, the Challenger will set a number of obstacles before the Hunter, spending adversity points to buy the difficulties involved in each challenge, which can vary widely in length and difficulty. The Hunter, not the Challenger, determines the size of the adversity pool for a given adventure, as well as the maximum number of adversity points that the Challenger may spend on any one challenge. Many adventures culminate in a fight between the Hunter and a beast; the nature and difficulty of the beast is determined by size of the adversity pool. Thus, in order to gain additional power, the Hunter must continually face more difficult and lengthy challenges, which adds a nice, subtle power-scaling effect to the game.
Individual challenges can be made up of anywhere from one to three phases. Each phase consists of the Challenger presenting the difficulties of the situation to the Hunter and the Hunter responding with his or her solution to the difficulty. Depending on whether or not the Challenger is satisfied with the response, he or she can either "give," ending the conflict, or move on to the next phase in which clarifying questions are asked and answered or additional aspects of the challenge are presented. At any point during these negotiations, the Challenger can choose to enter "conflict resolution". If the end of phase three is reached and the Challenger still isn't satisfied with the Hunter's solution to the challenge, conflict resolution is always the next step, and the actual fight with a beast in a beast hunt is always performed using conflict resolution as well.
It's in conflict resolution that the more "traditional rpg" aspects of Beast Hunters come out, and the dice start rolling. It does a nice job of being highly tactical, with a number of options, while keeping the system relatively simple. The Hunter and the Challenger takes turns maneuvering for advantage and building up a pool of points which can be used to place disadvantages or damage on their opponent. The same system is used for physical, mental, and social conflicts, with separate traits and damage tracks related to each being utilized. I'm a big fan of this sort of unified conflict mechanic, and Beast Hunters gets big points in my book for this particular part of the system.
More than anything, Beast Hunters' mechanics emphasize that rolling dice should only take place when it's absolutely necessary… or really cool. One of the few things that disappoints me with the game is how little distinction there is among the three phases of negotiation in a conflict. I would have liked to have seen some ritual phrases (a la Polaris) or gestures like the opening and ending salute to demark each phase, making them a bit more unique and interesting. As it is, it seems very easy for each one to just blend into the next, despite the fact that the phase during which you enter conflict resolution is very important, because it helps determine the Challenger's adversity point costs for the challenge.
Another downside is that while the book provides a number of beasts for use in hunts of various difficulties, it doesn't give guidelines for creating your own beasts. While this is something that most Challengers will be able to extrapolate from the beasts the book contains, it would be nice to have some clear guidelines for determining beasts' strengths, special powers, and tattoo abilities, especially since everything else in the book is so modular and clearly defined.
Presentation
This review is based on the preorder pdf (my print copy will arrive sometime in April) so I can't speak to the physical quality of the final book, but the design for it is beautiful. Fred Hicks of
Evil Hat Productions did a fantastic job with the layout, and
Joanna Barnum's excellent ink and watercolor illustrations evoke the setting magnificently, as do her renditions of the various beast tattoos that can be acquired during hunts. A very nice character sheet is provided as well, though I wish there was also a challenge sheet, which the Challenger could use to record traits and resources for various beasts and obstacles in the game.
The text itself is also well presented. The writing is precise while still being entertaining, and the explanations of the various rules are very clear and include a multitude of examples to make sure that everything is as understandable as possible. The book also goes above and beyond by concluding with a ten page example of play which wraps everything up very nicely. One small downside is the lack of an index, but the book is only 143 pages long, and it opens with a detailed table of contents, so most readers should have no problems locating specific portions of the text. Overall, Beast Hutners easily meets one of my central criteria for a game book, which is that even if you never get to play it, it's still an entertaining and informative book to read.
Overall
Beast Hunters is a great game. The two-player nature of the game, as well as the well-defined adventure construction mechanics make it ideal for pickup games, while the powers gained via beast tattoos and the increasing difficulty pools simultaneously scream for an extended campaign. Despite missing a few minor things in my eyes,
Beast Hunters is a near-perfect package of narrative storytelling, tactical conflict resolution, and easy-to-use rules. This is especially noteworthy since this is the first game Berengad Games has published. Let's hope it's not the last.
Review Summary