Review of In a Wicked Age

In A Wicked Age...

...A trainer of apes, bereft, mourning the death of his dearest performer.
...The father of a child possessed by a voracious spirit.
...A new village built on the ruins of a forgotten people.
...The bloodthirsty ghosts of those drowned in an accursed water.

In A Wicked Age is a sword and sorcery role playing game. In it, the Game Master and players use random situation-generation to create characters and front-load conflicts among the characters to create stories.

Structure

In A Wicked Age is 36 pages long and is divided into eight chapters:

1. Invitation
2. The first time
3. A chapter
4. Dice, action & consequences
5. From one chapter to the next
6. Names
7. The Four Oracles
8. Notes & thanks

Setting

Virtually all setting material in In A Wicked Age is implied, rather than stated directly. The game contains four Oracles. Oracles are collections of short sentences, such as the four at the top of this review. Each Oracle contains 52 entries, and each entry presents general people, places, objects, and situations to be used in the game. These elements are strongly reminiscent of classic sword and sorcery fiction, in the vein of Tanith Lee's Flat Earth books or Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. None of these elements are given names, however, and the relationships among them are for the players to determine.

Character Creation

Games of In A Wicked Age are divided into chapters. At the beginning of a chapter, four entries are chosen randomly from one of the four Oracles. The Oracles are: "Blood & Sex", "God-kings of War", "The Unquiet Past", and "A Nest of Vipers." The players and GM write down all the characters that are stated or implied by the four entries that were chosen. Once this is complete, each player chooses a character from the list to play. Characters can be combined, if desired, to tie the various entries together; for example, in the above list, the "trainer of apes" and "father of a child" could be the same character, if the group agreed on it. Once Player Characters are chosen, they are given "Forms" and a "Particular Strength." The Forms are Covertly, Directly, For Myself, For Others, With Love, and With Violence. Each one is assigned a die size from d4 to d12, and they are the primary traits through which the characters will resolve conflicts. Particular Strengths are skills, powers, or objects that give the characters an advantage in certain situations, and they provide bonus dice in conflicts in which they are applicable.

All characters on the list that are not chosen by players, as well as any other characters who turn up through play, are controlled by the Game Master. Non-player characters have only three Forms: Action, Maneuvering, and Self-Protection, and they may have Particular Strengths.

The players and GM each assign two Best Interests to their characters. These are motivations for the characters' actions, and every Best Interest should be at cross-purposes with at least one character, whether a PC or NPC.

Characters can, but are not guaranteed to, reappear from chapter to chapter. Most players will find themselves playing two, three, or more characters throughout the course of a full game.

Mechanics

Scenes are set by the GM, with each scene designed to show the conflicts among two or more characters' Best Interests. When one character takes a concrete action that another character opposes, the dice come into play. Player characters roll two Forms of their choice that reflect their action, and NPCs roll one Form. Both can gain additional dice through the use of particular strengths. Each player's highest single die outcome is compared to the other players' single highest die outcomes, with the second (and third and fourth, etc.) highest die breaking ties. The person with the high roll gains Advantage in the form of an extra d6 that adds to their highest result on the next roll. Conflicts last for three rounds or until one player's highest die roll (plus Advantage die) is double that of the other player's die. The players then negotiate Consequences, which default to reducing the die sizes of a character's forms.

This is an area where In A Wicked Age diverges strongly from many other games. In the game's fiction, the only outcome of a conflict is what the players agree to in negotiations. If your action is to steal my gold, and we have a conflict, you do not steal my gold unless we agree to it, even if you win the conflict. Conflict winners have tools to encourage the losers to accept actions, mainly in the form of being able to reduce the other players' dice, but they cannot force anyone to accept story outcomes that they do not want. Once characters have had two or more of their Form dice reduced to 0, however, that character is out of the game and can no longer oppose the other characters' actions. This works very well once everyone involves understands it, but I found it to be slightly under-explained in the book, with some of the example players often conceding fictional elements at the end of a conflict before negotiations were done, making it appear that they had no choice but to do so.

Players are also rewarded for sending their characters into conflicts where they are outmatched. When a character makes it through at least one round of conflict against a character rolling bigger dice, the character's name goes on a document called the "We Owe" list. The "We Owe" list determines which characters can re-appear in future chapters of the game, and it can also be used to grant an extra Advantage die in some conflicts, making it a very valuable tool.

Presentation

In A Wicked Age is black and white, with a pleasing layout, good margins and easy-to-read text. There are three full-page interior illustrations and pleasantly simple page borders and accents. The physical version of the book is saddle-stapled with high-quality, heavy paper.

The dice mechanics are presented entirely through example, with a brief summary at the end; while most games present the rules framework first and then back it up by showing examples of how that framework functions, In A Wicked Age simply walks the reader through a series of sample conflicts, explaining as it goes what the example players are doing and why. This causes some problems. While it was easy for me to follow on my first read-through, it did make it a bit difficult to go back to the text to answer questions when they arose. While having to re-read a full section of the book is not a deal-breaker because of its small size, it does make searching for information in the middle of a game a bit trickier than it might otherwise be.

In A Wicked Age also seems to have been written with role players as its target audience, as a number of its basic terms are not defined (for instance, what the abbreviation "d8" means). In addition, some the game's unique elements are not fully defined either; while most games would take at least a sentence or two to explain what each of the Forms means and how it is used, In A Wicked Age trusts that they are self-explanatory and offers no such definitions. While these things may not be issues for the majority of the people who read the game, it does raise the barrier to entry slightly.

In Play

I've been involved in seven chapters of In A Wicked Age play, two as the GM and five as a player.

Character creation is fast and simple. Players who have never played the game before and have never read the book are usually able to choose and make complete characters in 5 - 10 minutes without any problems. The two most involved elements are choosing particular strengths and best interests.

In every game I've played, the first conflict has gone slowly, with players getting the feel for a system that is very different from many other role playing games, but with the second or third conflict, the pace picks up considerably. Because a given conflict can last a maximum of three rounds, altercations resolve quickly once the rules are firmly understood.

In A Wicked Age makes a very good pick-up game, because character creation is quick and easy and the GM does not have to do any prep work. However, the game is at its best when played for multiple chapters using the We Owe list. As characters recur, a sort of "short story anthology" emerges, with protagonists and antagonists that are often surprising. In fact, playing the game was surprisingly satisfying for me. Reading the book made it seem interesting, but the game in play turns out to be much more than the sum of its parts.

Overall

In A Wicked Age is a very fun, satisfying game that is troubled by a few presentation problems. For its size and price, these problems are minor, but they may increase the difficulty for some people to put the text into play.

High Points - Quick and easy to play. Great for pick-up play as well as long-term campaigns. Low price point.

Low Points - Sub-optimal presentation of the game in its text.