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Overall

Reviewing Reign is a bit of a trick. We're really looking at the end result of three very different "authors" coming together, and each contribution deeply affects at least one of the others. If one fails because of another, is the game a failure? I don't think so, but I will try to ameliorate some of my more negative observations by clearly identifying where the issue lies because, for the most part, it's not because of the vision or product delivered by Greg Stolze or his artists.

There are three entities under review here, then: there's Reign as an intention — the writing from Greg Stolze and the original artwork from Daniel Solis, Dennis Detwiller, and Langdon Foss. That material is informed by the choice of a fairly generic engine, the One Roll Engine (ORE) that provides the core mechanics. Finally all this is filtered through the printer to its final form and even there the boundaries are not clear-cut — Lulu is ostensibly the printer but Lulu sub-contracts the actual printing to someone else again.

So what I got, in the end, can start as pure genius both visually and verbally and wind up badly damaged by intervening entities. If no one had goofed it wouldn't be an issue, but there are goofs.

Presentation

Reign comes in four flavours — hardcover or softcover and cover art by Daniel Solis or Dennis Detwiller. I got myself the Solis hardcover, so that's what I'm really reviewing here when I talk about presentation. More importantly, understand that my "star" rating is based on the book that I have in my hands. You might get a better or worse printing.

The cover itself is printed beautifully — a nice glossy wrap in rich colour. The artwork is downright delicious — Solis delivers a thematically and chromatically consistent work that blends bloody red shades, his calligraphic style that practically defines some of the setting cultures, and martial imagery. This game is going to be about fighting and, more importantly, conquering. I'm sold.

The cover wrap itself, however, is a little inept. The wrap is rotated by a fraction of a degree, exposing gaudy colour registration blocks at the top edge. It's not important, but it is distracting. Honestly if the cover art sucked it would be a lot less irksome. But the cover art doesn't suck. It's outstanding. The registration error becomes less of an eyesore and more of an affront because it's not just ugly in and of itself, but it deigns to damage Solis' artwork. I'm probably making too much out of this. Your cover likely won't even sport this flaw.

Lulu's printers are not working at amazing resolutions when printing artwork. They deliver body text just fine — the fonts used for the main text are efficient, pretty, and well set. But the interior artwork has not been given quite the same treatment and is instead fuzzy and, as with the cover, poorly registered on the page. The result is unfortunately a little sloppy looking. Worse, some of the artwork is in fact text — there are story snippets printed throughout that are presented in a quaint fantasy-esque font but these are printed at the unfortunate artwork quality instead of the type quality. With most of the art that's fine, but text does not suffer resolution degradation well and the result is, while legible, fairly ugly. That this colour text, badly rendered, then takes up an inordinate amount of space is a further insult to the reader that could have been avoided by reducing the amount of text (not all of it is brilliant) and increasing the whitespace a little.

On the upside, the main text typography is understated and extremely legible — a well chosen simple roman font. It is marred by a large number of editing errors — extra words, missing words, homonyms, deleted spaces between words, and related minor errors that really should not have made it into the end product. I don't normally notice such things, so there have to be quite a few to get my attention. The fact that the typography is elegant magnifies these clunky errors.

I can't help but wonder what the presentation quality of this game would be under a real publisher — the vision of the artists and authors might have been more effectively delivered and the overall package would be stunning as opposed to nifty. Lulu just can't do justice to what the authors intended and a professional copy editor could have cleaned up a lot of jarring text errors in one pass.

The structure of the content is worth mentioning because it is occasionally innovative and overall very effective. The setting chapters, for example, are delivered interleaved with the rules chapters which makes reading straight through a bit more fun than it would be otherwise and it doesn't seem to inhibit the utility of the book — there is an index (though it's a bit meagre) and the setting chapters act as landmarks. It would be nice if they wer printed with strong bleeds to the outer margin so that you could identify them with the book closed — as landmarks they would be much more powerful that way — but even as they stand it's an effective design.

Rules chapters have a nifty mechanism at the top margin — a series of diamonds, one for each page in the chapter, with the current page filled in. At a glance you see where you are, how much material is in the chapter, and how much material is left to read. I'm not sure this is useful during play, but it was a nice reference while reading straight through and at the same time it costs no otherwise useful space and is kind of pretty to boot. I'm a sucker for shiny things.

So how do I rate it this presentation? It's four-star intent with two-star delivery. I have to give it three stars but the potential is much greater.

Contents

Okay, the meat and potatoes — what happens and how fun is it? Well, the underlying engine is clever — crunchy and simple at the same time. This is the One Roll Engine (ORE) which proceeds with great niftiness and heads straight into powerful and fun territory. Any action that needs resolution rolls a number of ten sided dice (go out and buy a shitload now — ten per player is a good bet) equal to a relevant skill plus a relevant stat. Five or six dice were typical in our limited playtest. Now look at what you got.

The ORE encodes several dimensions onto two axes of result. Well three if you count funny, but I'll just work with the two that are obvious. When you look at your roll you pull out sets — matching numbers. Each set has a Width (the number of identical numbers in the set) and a Height (the number replicated in the set). Those are your two primary axes. When attacking, the width of your set indicates the strength of your impact and the timing of the impact in the round. The Height indicates the hit location of the impact and provides a secondary timing index for tied Widths. See, ORE gets a little daring by encoding more than two dimensions onto these two axes for many actions, which has some improbable artifacts but it's not fatal or even annoying. In this particular case it means that more opportune attacks (resolving sooner in the round) are also more lethal. I can live with that but it's jarring. Certainly the elegance of ecoding everything in one roll is worth it.

The engine pays off in tactical crunch when players decide what actions to perform before rolling, and there are plenty of options to make this interesting and powerful. Sure you can attack or dodge or parry. But you can also run in an effort to split up big mobs of bad guys. Or you can perform two maneuvers at the cost of a die from your pool. You can drop a die from your pool and set another one at a fixed number before rolling, indicating a called shot (that's really smooth). Once everyone has stated their actions and rolled their pools, you pull the pools out in their tactical order — wide ones go first, so if you dodged and only get a set of two then your bandit's four wide attack snages you before you every got a chance to dodge. Spoiling maneuvers like dodging and parrying let you use your set (called, sadly, "Gobble dice") to remove dice from your enemy's successes (assuming you were fast enough) and, if they have multiple attacks that can be a tough choice. Do you spoil that four-wide leg hit or the two-wide head hit? Should you save some for the other bandit?

And yes, we have mook rules. Mook rules are usually trivialising but I will go so far as to say that the mook rules in Reign are possibly more engaging than simple character versus character combat. The GM rolls one huge dice pool for all the mooks, pulls out his sets, and decides *after the roll* what to do with it. The players are now tactically engaged in spoiling, taking out mooks (which also spoils rolls) and, if they are smart, maneuvering to split the group of mooks up to reduce its effectiveness. This system rocks. Big fights with a trio of heroes facing a dozen bandits goes fast, fun, and feels tactically relevant. There's plenty of running around, throwing dirt in faces, and straightforward bloodshed. Morale is encompassed in the system allowing the mob to sue for peace and the details of what happened to each subtracted mook is left to the narrative — your heroes don't need to be savage mass murderers if you prefer to narrate flight, incapacitation, and surrender instead of decapitation. There are some special maneuvers (like stunts in other games) where a good decapitation can be used to force a kind of morale check though — in fact the maneuver Display Kill can be a reall fight ender in an otherwise touchy situation. Nothing like ritualised dismemberment to put the fear of the gods into the remaining bandits.

Character generation comes in several flavours. There is a point buy system which is balanced against a random system, and the random system leaves room for direction by the player. In general I'm not much of a fan of point buy systems and neither are the other players at my table, so it didn't get much exercise.

The random character generation system has you roll 11 dice and you're done. That's kind of cool. Each set in the pool indicates a profession by its Height and a level of achievement by its Width, and there's a chart that details all of the advantages you get for being a Lowly Sage or whatever. The waste dice that don't go into sets trigger little special events that have associated traits as well. In the end you have a completely described character and an unordered set of lifepaths that you can arrange to form a story. Generally they do form stories and it's easy to make them sing. If you want to push fate around a little, before you roll you can set some of your dice to whatever number you want in order to guarantee a noble upbringing or some facility with magic or whatever. Basically you are assuring yourself of some lifepath choices. Exercising just a little bit of direction over the random generation system actually scratches the itch to "cheat" and the result is very satisfying.

Unfortunately, it's not very broad. In particular there are not nearly enough choices in the waste dice event lists and the result is a high probability that two characters out of four used to be the king's master cobbler. The game really should come with a full set of charts for each setting kingdom to be complete. Even the core lifepath charts could benefit from being kingdom specific and reduce the creative load on the player a little. These quibbles are not enormous, though — the end result was fun and effective and if you want to tailor make your characters there is always point buy.

Magic is inadequately fleshed out but the tools are there to develop the existing system more or to elaborate your own. I kind of think this is a feature as it makes this more of a toolbox, and I like toolboxes. Magic in particular is something I like to tinker with per culture, sometimes using completely different mechanics for different kinds of magic. I would love to see this section explored in more detail and what there is is evocative and fun — it's just not broad enough. There are schools of magic that are very specific and colourful but it's a small handful of extremes with limited scope. It's just doesn't feel very rich, but extended play may shout otherwise.

Now a game called "Reign" had better be about ruling people and here is where the game really builds something novel and fun. Along with the player characters, players will collaborate to create a "company". This is a kind of shared character representing the organisation that the player characters are part of and are empowering. The company has its own stats and operates at a monthly level conducting its affairs whether they are military, political, nmercantile, or a combination of these things. Character action can be used to influence the big monthly rolls in the company's interests, allowing you to zoom in and zoom out to different scales of conflict as the story unfolds.

This is fun and functional, but there are some deeper implications that head into the territory of awesome. The idea that a company might be the contiguous character with player characters being more transient opens up a wide array of possibilities — character death is reduced in impact (you've been spending experience points on the company as well as the character, and the company survives you) and increased in meaning (dying for your cause now hurts less and pays off more than any other system I've played). This is really really heavily cool. The core point of investment for players can be the company and they can choose to see their characters as smaller parts in the story about the group. Character death has never had more opportunities to be fun and meaningful. Which is good, because the combat system is pretty lethal.

The setting proper is interesting though some of the material seems contrived or naive --- foreign tongues are uninspired and cultures appear to be pastiches of real world cultures, sometimes just with gizmos bolted on to appear to be different. Example? Ulds seem pretty German or possibly Swiss but with "dark complection" bolted on. Truils look like native Americans with "caucasian" bolted on. Dindavarans are clearly modeled on Chinese or Japanese medieval cultures with the primary difference being more frills than fabric. That's okay — it's easy to get a grip on the cultures when you have a real-world reference to hang on to. It might even be better than something that might be more novel and artistically satisfying and yet never quite speak to the players for being so alien.

My gut feeling is that this system will generate awesome one-on-one games. The opportunity for great stories is enhanced in one-on-one here because many of the themes in Reign are real spotlight-hoggers — leading a small group of rag-tag do-gooders to take over a corrupt king and rule in his stead; a ship full of poor sailors banding together to eke a living trading between cities growing to a corporation with political clout enough to attract the attention of kings; a young prince growing into his birthright; a mercenary cadre that sells victory and power to the highest bidder and is eventually faced with the prospect of replacing instead of defeating governments. Each of these has potential for group play but when you put one player character in the spotlight as the instigator — and leader — of these events, I think you get something pretty special that isn't well delivered by anything else I've played.

There's a lot of cool material in Reign. It's a fun mechanism and the kind of play it's streamlined for is novel enough to be engaging and it's delivered effectively. More than all that, though, this game looks like it has legs. Especially wh the company element, games in Reign look like they can last a long long time, far exceeding character lifespans. That's really cool — a solid campaign game is refreshing from the indie scene which often emphasises fast episodic play. What we have here looks like fast campaign play, heavily driven by player interests in the form of their company. That's frankly awesome. We may have here what amounts to a pick up game in terms of GM prep but that can easily run a contiguous story through several character lifespan and, I suspect, years of actual play time. That, in the end, might be the real selling feature for me.

It would be just a little too exuberant to give Reign five stars for content. There are certainly flaws and they are substantial but I don't think they do much harm to the underlying game, which is at once fun, playable, and more fun. The mechanics are such that once you grasp the essence of pools and Gobble dice, you can wing practically anything without having to research the rules, and that's a big selling feature for me. The less the rules get read mid-game the more game we're playing, and Reign appears to deliver a great deal of gaming. So, four stars for content and an ache for half stars because I'd rather it were higher but there's no higher to go without claiming Reign is perfect.

It's close enough, though.