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Introduction

The Princes' Kingdom is designed especially as a game for an adult gamemaster to run for children, in an archaic island kingdom with as many or as few fantasy elements as the participants want to include. The game system is an adaptation of Vincent Baker's landmark Dogs in the Vineyard. Princes' Kingdom is a complete game in its own right, but it's worth considering Princes' Kingdom as a standalone game, a "gateway game" and as a kind of Dogs supplement.

Premise

The Princes' Kingdom is a focused design. Every player is a Prince, blood child of the ruler of an archipelago kingdom stretching across functionally numberless islands. Princes range in age from 5 to 12, and have matured to the point that the King their father is ready to send them on a tour of his Kingdom so they can learn how to rule wisely and well. The Kingdom is too large for the King to administer directly and in detail, so the King propounds a few simple Laws and, when he can, sends his children to visit individual Islands and use his authority to help solve any problems. The text anticipates that players will fall into the same age range as the characters (5-12), while the gamemaster will be an adult. The ideal playgroup is a parent and his or her children and maybe a couple of their friends.

Play consists of the Princes' visits to the Islands, the problems they find there, and how they solve them. The GM creates the Islands and their citizens. Most importantly, he creates the citizens Problems, according to a ladder schema that starts with Conceit and can escalate all the way to War and Killing.

If you think it's "unrealistic" that such young children would take such an important role in rulership, you're sort of missing the point, but compare with George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels, where quite young kids find themselves expected to govern entire fiefdoms because of their royal blood. Our contemporary notions of childhood are cultural constructions, a luxury other times and places have not been able to afford. Also, it's fun for kids to play kids with real powers and real responsibilities.

"Princes" can be boys or girls. The game text specifically states that both boy and girl children of the King are called Princes. I think this misses a bet. If little girls wrote the Preamble to the US Constitution, it would begin, "We, the people of the United States, love Princesses!" You'll find no end of feminist disquiet about Princess Obsession by little girls. As the father of a daughter, who wants his daughter to succeed in life, I can relate to some of these. The thing is, a game like Princes' Kingdom offers a constructive way to engage "the Princess problem." Because you can draw them in with the chance to "play a Princess," but then the game itself is all about doing things. That is, it can help girls associate wisdom, courage and usefulness with the Princess archetype over prettiness and fashion. The defult unisex designator, "Prince," needlessly narrows the appeal of the game to half of its potential audience.

The Book

As a package, The Princes' Kingdom is a delight. The interior design and layout are clean but engaging, the cover a rich blue framing a closeup illustration of three kids in a boat. From typography to watermark, the production is first class.

The text is pitched to a bright grade-schooler and is similarly successful. The Henley family took hand-delivery of our copy at GenCon Indy and my ten-year-old son devoured the book on the car trip from there to Wisconsin, then reread it in our motel. He had no trouble following the explanations of the rule systems and principles of play, and it accomplished its most important job too: exciting him about the prospect of playing the game. I see no reason why his reaction would be unique - it seems like any good reader in the upper elementary grades could disgest the material as presented.

The book is organized into chapters as follows:

Foreword by Dogs in the Vineyard designer Vincent Baker, blessing the enterprise, and explaining a little about how The Princes' Kingdom came to be written.

Welcome! - Your introductory matter. The GM role is called "the Guide." The game is for children and adults, boys or girls, men or women. In the first session you make your Princes and Prove them.

The Island Kingdom - Sketches out the background of the game in a few pages, and explains how it's up to each play group to fill in the details of the background together, starting with character creation.

How to play this game - A half dozen pages of what we might call "the oversystem." What players and Guide do at every stage of the game from character creation to the possible end of play for a Prince or Princes. What the characters, PC and NPC, do.

Creating your prince - About nine pages on creating player-characters.

Proving your prince - Ten pages on the second part of character creation, which gives players and Guide a first chance to use a slightly simplified verson of the conflict resolution system.

Creating islands - The first Guide's chapter, explains the procedure for creating an Island for the Princes to visit, full of issues for the Princes to solve. About 14 pages.

Friends and troublemakers - Five pages on creating and running nonplayer characters, called "citizens." The chapter includes a "proto-citizen" generator: you create batches of partially specified NPCs and flesh them out as needed in play.

Problems and fixing them - The full conflict resolution rules (15 pages). Conflicts are called "struggles" in Princes' Kingdom.

Fallout and change - This chapter explains the mechanics for dealing with the consequences of Struggles, including possible harm (including wounds) and growth (experience improvement).

Sailing through the Kingdom - Post-session activity, including guaranteed growth fallout, discussion of the just-completed session and plans for next time.

Afterword - Designer Clinton R. Nixon talks a little about the game, and about the American Friends Service Committee, which receives the profits from sales of the game.

The System

TPK's system integrates subsystems for character creation, island creation, Citizen (NPC) creation, conflict resolution and character change/advancement ("Fallout"). All of them reinforce each other to help prepare and guide play. The system uses d4s, d6s and d8s in a modified die-pool system.

Character creation involves assigning dice to your attribute (sic), Qualities and Relationships and Belongings, then "Proving Your Prince" by playing through a particular kind of conflict using a truncated version of the conflict resolution system.

A Quality is a freeform descriptor, anything from a skill to a credo. Its ultimate ancestor is the Trait system of Over the Edge - a Quality can be anything from "Strong like bull" to "I'm a good climber" to "Five years old is plenty old enough!" Your Prince must have "I'm a Prince!" as either a Strong or a Troublesome quality. A relationship can involve any person, place or thing in the campaign, from the King himself to a wise old owl. At the start of play, you can leave some of your relationship dice undefined. This leaves you free to declare relationships with Citizens (or Princes!) during play itself.

As the text explicitly notes, choosing qualities isn't just character creation - it's setting and mood creation too. For instance, choosing a "Talks with Animals" quality means that the game will have at least that much of the supernatural to it. Choosing "A teddy bear with laser eyes!" as a belonging means the game will be at least that silly. For this reason, the game instructs play groups to make characters together and to require consensus on the level of fantasy and genre-bending that chargen produces.

Your Prince's "attribute" is his or her age in years, from 5-12. The age gives you that many d6s to roll into any conflict involving your character. Your age also determines the number and cast of Qualities and Relationships you get. Qualities and Relationships can be Strong or Troublesome. A Strong quality or relationship is worth a single d8; a Troublesome one gets a d4. The younger your character at start, the more Strong qualities and relationships your Prince has, and the fewer weak ones; choosing an older starting age gets you fewer Strong qualities and more Troublesome ones. Princes have 1-5 Strong qualities, scaling down from 5 Strong for five-year-olds to one strong for 12-year-olds, and 1-3 Troublesome ones, scaling the other way. Relationships work similarly, Strong ones scaling down with age from 3 to 1 and Troublesome ones scaling up from 1 to 2.

You roll all your Age dice every conflict and as many Quality and Relationship dice as you can get to apply. (See the conflict resolution section of the review below.) The System tradeoff is: making an older Prince means you'll have a lot of d6s available every conflict, and a fair number of d4s most conflicts, but few d8s; making a younger Prince means you'll have relatively few d6s available for every conflict, but a lot of d8s most conflicts, with few d4s. Mechanically this is all about balancing character effectiveness. Thematically, the system serves two purposes: as the text says, if the King finds you ready for such adventurous journeys at a very young age (say, 5 or 6), you must be quite the extraordinary child, hence the high number of Strong traits and relationships; also, it presents the process of approaching puberty as a kind of darkening and complicaton, an outlook as old as Fable and as recent as Hogwarts.

Belongings are a soft spot in the system. Every prince has a Cloak, hand-sewn by the Queen, which denotes the prince's authority. After that, you can equip your prince with whatever belongings "seem reasonable" to you and the guide. This can be weapons, maps, books, pets, toys or whatever else you can think of. Belongings are Awesome, Okay or Cruddy, worth 1d8, 1d6 and 1d4 respectively. You get to decide the caliber of each belonging - you don't have to "pay for" Awesome belongings by taking a certain number of Cruddy ones. All sharp things have an extra d4 in their rating: an awesome sword would get recorded as d8+d4. Sharp things are the only traits that mix die types, and the only traits, other than age, that are worth multiple dice.

The last stage of creating your prince is "Proving" the character. You state one thing your prince would like to demonstrate to his or her teachers and parents before heading off to sea. You and the guide come up with a conflict that gives your prince a chance to demonstrate the quality, and play it out using a simplified version of the Struggle rules. If you win, you get to add a new, Strong (d8) quality to your prince's character sheet. If you lose, you get to add a new Troublesome (d4) quality related to the aim or to the struggle itself.

After that's done, it's off to the Islands.

Island and Citizen (NPC) creation is the province of the Guide, and the game text provides a simple system for doing it. Something is wrong at every island, probably multiple things, in an escalating "ladder of badness," as the text calls it. Conceit manifests as injustice; and leads to Disobedience, which manifests as outlaws plaguing the community(ies); which leads to Unrest, which causes a loss of liberty; which leads to False leaders and rebellion; which leads to War and Killing. The keys to Island Creation are

Start at the bottom and work your way up; Instantiate each problem level in actual citizens; Give most of the citizens reasons for doing "bad" things that a kid could sympathize with; Specify exactly what every named citizen is going to want from the princes, so play will focus on the princes; Stop when you feel you've got enough to interest your kids and fill out a play session or two, a session being as long as you think your kids can productively and enjoyably focus on play.

Above all, the game tries to make sure that you don't design an island with a "right answer" to everyone's problems. This is a bit of a tricky concept - it sure looks like the Ladder of Badness is a definitive key to not just the questions but the answers - e.g. figure out who's conceited and rebuke them; figure out who's an outlaw and bring them to justice; find the mcguffin that will dethrone the false leader etc. In practice, though, the Ladder of Badness is a scaffolding that lets you build the island, but that you kick away once construction is complete. What you're left with is a bunch of quickly-stroked NPCs who are going to be bugging the princes for specific things, and the princes are going to be free to grant their wishes, thwart or punish them as they see fit. As an outcome of play, if the princes win their Struggles, then whatever they decide is going to be "the answer" to the problems plaguing the Island.

Citizens have qualities, relationships and belongings just like princes. Since citizens can be adults or children, they have a Power ranking instead of Age dice, that works mechanically the same as a prince's age does: the citizen gets d6s equal to her power to roll into every conflict involving her. Power ranges from 6-13 dice.

There are two interesting wrinkles to citizen creation. The book provides a system for creating "Proto-Citizens" ahead of time. These are character skeletons without names or defined traits, just the die quantities. For instance, you might produce Proto-Citizen 1 with Power 10, 3 Strong Qualities, 4 Troublesome Qualities, 2 Strong Relationships and 1 Troubled Relationship. You could get all of that with a single throw of 5d8. Six 5d8 throws give you a sheet of 6 proto-citizens. Two sheets of six will give you enough for a single island.

That's your Column B. Column A is the named citizens from when you created your island. You match Column A to Column B any time during play, including right at the moment you begin a struggle involving that character. For instance, from Island creation, you know that Mayor Samantha is jealous of Mrs. Coot who runs the Flower Guides, but you don't need to decide that Mrs. Coot has the stats of proto-citizen 1 in the preceding paragraph until the very moment that one of the princes engages Mayor Samantha in a struggle. It's during play that you, the Guide, pick a proto-citizen from the list to stat up Mayor Samantha. And it's in play that you actually specify her qualities and relationships (frex, that Mayor Samantha has "Strong Like Bull" as a Troublesome quality.)

This will freak some people out. It certainly risks a hiccup in play, a loss of momentum while you pause the game. It may feel like cheating because the Guide has a chance to choose traits that the citizen will definitely be able to use in that Striggle right now, while the princes involved may have traits they can't use. (Again, Struggle talk is coming.) The "cheating" problem isn't as big as you might think. In practice, your princes are going to have more dice to bring to bear in most struggles anyway, and besides that, this is not a game where the PCs are going to be killing many NPCs. Chances are the princes will be involving Mayor Samantha in another struggle soon, and she's going to be stuck with the same traits you already assigned her. They were perfect for the last struggle, but they may be ill-suited to the next one.

So let's talk about Struggles.

When a prince wants something out of a citizen that the citizen doesn't want to provide, or vice verse, the Guide and the player(s) involved set up and play out a Struggle, TPK's name for its conflict resolution system. Either player or GM can call for a struggle at any time. One system is used for all types of action - talking, nonviolent physical contests (e.g. races and chases) and fighting of all kinds. In fact, participants can have their characters switch among modes within a single conflict, a process called escalation.

The struggle system is, for lack of a better word, narrative. It gives contestants wide latitude to improvise new facts into the fiction, whether you are a player or the guide. In one example from the book, a player has his prince refer to a preexisting law on the books of the kingdom; the very act of stating that the law exists makes it true.

The checks on narrative authority are, first, consensus; and second, the ground rules of the struggle system itself. By rule, anyone at the table can veto anyone's narration on lameness grounds. And whatever you narrate, it's the dice itself that determine whether you achieve your goals.

First, the players agree on which characters are involved. Then they agree on what's at stake: what each side is trying to accomplish. Then every participant rolls their starting dice: your age/power d6s and any relationship dice that apply. (Relationship dice apply if the object of the relationship is also in the struggle or is at stake in the outcome.)

Second the participants involved start a chain of raises and sees. On your turn, you raise by pushing forward two dice and narrating your action. Anyone affected by your raise then has to see by pushing forward one or more dice whose total equals or exceeds the total of your raise and narrating their reaction. Seeing with two dice is a "block or dodge" - it entitles the player seeing to narrate your action down to harmlessness. Seeing with a single die is called "reversing the blow" and is mechanically powerful because the seer gets to reuse that die on their next action and gets to narrate turning the tables on the raiser. Seeing with three or more dice is called "taking the blow." When a defener takes the blow the defending player has to narrate a setback and takes Fallout, a kind of damage explained later in the review.

On any raise or see you can invoke a quality or belonging you haven't used by explaining how it applies to the situation and roll the die for that trait into the conflict, using it immediately or saving it for a later go. There's a lot of room for creativity here and, to some tastes, potential for abuse. That's where the consensus veto rule comes in: anyone who thinks a narration is lame can object. The narrating player has to satisfy the objector's complaints or narrate something else.

There's another important limit, which is that you can only roll a quality's die into a given conflict one time. Your roleplaying can incorporate your climbing ability any number of times in a single conflict, but you only get your die for "I'm a good climber" once. (When the next struggle comes along, you can roll it again, once, if it applies.)

If you don't have enough dice to see someone's raise you lose the struggle. You can also Give, surrendering the stakes of the struggle, at any time. You might do this if you don't want to take the blow for the character you're controlling, or because the flow of events convinces you it would be better to lose the struggle (for in-character or out-of-character reasons). For instance, if you're playing with a young enough child that you still let her win at chess, you may want to give on a conflict for the same reason you'd throw away your queen. Or you may enjoy someone's raise so much that you think they deserve to win even if you've got good dice left. Pick a reason.

There's no round-by-round initiative, and if multiple players are in the struggle, play proceeds clockwise around the table. Guide-character raises usually threaten every prince involved in the struggle, which is powerful, but on the other side, the guide will usually have to see raises by multiple princes, so it balances out. (The guide only ever has one pile of dice, no matter how many citizens are involved in the struggle.) The procedure is convenient rather than "realistic." If that bugs you, it will bug you, but it makes the flow of play clean and manageable.

There is also an element of formality to the struggle system that's reminiscent of graphic novels or the Japanese adventure cartoons I've seen. A raise feels like a panel in a comic or the shot of the hero pointing and talking sternly. The see is like the succeeding panel or the reaction shot of the antagonist in the cartoon. This is a storytelling language today's kids speak fluently. The struggle system does make in-character conversations, when part of a declared struggle, overdetermined by the dice, though - in the text's struggle examples pretty much every line of IC dialog occasions a raise or see. There's no "roleplaying it out" distinct from the mechanical resolution.

Fallout is damage and advancement both.

Any time you take the blow, you note how many dice you had to use and whether the action at that point in the struggle was verbal, physical or violent. At the end of that struggle, you tot up the number of dice by type and roll fallout - d4s for verbal fallout; d6s for physical fallout; d8s for fighting fallout. (The kind of dice you used to take the blow don't matter. The fallout-die type is based on what your opponent was doing when you took the blow.) You may be rolling multiple die types if you took fallout from multiple types of action in the course of the struggle. Maybe you used three dice to take the blow during the argument portion of the struggle, and then four dice to take a different blow when your opponent kicked your character. In that case you would roll 3d4 + 4d8.

You add the two highest dice only, regardless of type. Depending on the total, you may suffer short-term fallout, long-term fallout, an injury or a grievous injury. Short-term and long-term fallout run to things like reducing or dropping a quality/relationship or trashing a belonging. A grievous injury means the character is dying, and calls for a healing conflict. A character only suffers a grievous injury on a roll of 16, which means two 8s have to be showing, which means the struggle has to have included fighting.

While your fallout dice are on the table, you're also looking for any 1s that come up. If there is even a single 1 showing, your character gets growth fallout. This can be something like a new quality or belonging, or a new relationship die. Multiple 1s does not get you multiple advances.

Most of a princes' advancement is going to come from fallout, so players have an incentive to take the blow now and then, particularly in talking struggles. (It's not that hard to roll a 1 on a bunch of d4s.) This gives a parent/guide a chance to look all worldly-wise and explain that, see? good things come out of hardship. In itself, a bunch of d4 fallout is only going to give a prince short-term consequences, but beware: if a prince ends up with a grievous wound, all fallout gets rolled in as opposition dice in the healing conflict. A bunch of d4s and a bunch of d8s can be a formidable hurdle to healing your child's beloved prince.

Princes also get to choose growth fallout when they leave an island. Each prince gets at least one pick from the standard growth fallout list. The player can then choose either a second choice from the standard list, or select one of a couple of other options, the most intriguing of which is a Birthday. Having a birthday gives you an extra d6 for your age dice. It also brings you closer to being thirteen years old. Aside from death, turning thirteen is the other way a prince gets removed from play, it means the time has come for the prince to return home and help his father rule the Island Kingdom.

The Princes' Kingdom in Play

Over the course of a couple months my children and I read the book, created characters and played two islands. For one session, an adult friend joined us. My kids and I had previously played a Marvel Universe RPG adventure together based on the animated Teen Titans series, and my son has played video adventure games and forum-based freeform RPGs, so Princes' Kingdom was not quite their first roleplaying experience, but tabletop RP was still relatively new to them. My son is ten; my daughter, six.

We did most of our chargen in short sessions in motels during a driving vacation after picking up our printed copy of the game at Gencon. My daughter decided her Princess would be named "Rose," since Briar Rose was Sleeping Beauty's other name. My son decided his Prince would be named "Cheese." After Proving his Prince he ended up with a Troubled Relationship with a wise owl named "Eggs."

Both kids skewed old. My daughter wanted Rose to be sixteen, but these go to twelve, not 16, so she settled on 11. My son made his prince 12 years old.

Princess Rose, 11 years old

Strong Qualities (2)

* I'm a Princess * I have a green thumb

Troublesome Qualities (3)

* I sometimes sneak off without telling people * I hate fighting * Claustrophobia

Strong Relationship (1)

* Prince Cheese

Troublesome Relationship (2)

* Bacon the squirrel * TBD

Belongings

* Princess Cloak, pink, yellow and purple (Good - d6) * Magic Wand (Awesome! - d8) * Sword (Good - d6+d4) * Shield (Good)

Prince Cheese, 12 years old

Strong Quality (1)

* I can talk to animals

Troublesome Qualities (3)

* I'm a Prince * I'm squeamish about insects * I hate the sea

Strong Relationship (1)

* TBD

Troublesome Relationships (2)

* Princess Rose * TBD

Belongings

* Princes' Cloak (Good - d6) * Sword (Awesome, shoots energy beams too - d8 + d4) * Shield (Good, w/ rollers for ease of transport - d6)

We absolutely see some real life issues coming into play here. My son really is squeamish about insects, to the point where it's hard for him to have fun outside. And the real-life brother-sister relationship is pretty well encapsulated in that Strong on one side / Troubled on the other side dichotomy. OTOH, my daughter never sneaks off without telling people and my son does not hate the sea.

We Proved the PCs on two different nights. My son chose the trait "I'm a good climber" as his goal. We set a scene where Prince Cheese was out with some friends just before sailing off on his adventure and the others started teasing him that, big-deal prince or no, he couldn't climb this here tree.

I rolled really well on my 4d6+4d8 and my son rolled really poorly on his 12d6, which meant we were facing a game issue and a family issue. The game issue was that my son was going to have a hard time winning the struggle and getting the trait he wanted. The family issue is that my son is one of those bright kids to whom most cognitive things come pretty easy, so when something does balk him, he wants to bail pretty quickly. When I was about a year younger than he is now I was knocking the chessboard over whenever my father beat me.

So he was faced with trying to learn a new skill with a problematic mindset. Figuring out for the first time how to use "Talk to Animals" to get your player-character up a tree takes imagination, and imagination is hard to come by when you've predetermined you're going to fail. I didn't want to teach him that "a roleplaying game consists of reading your GM's cues and doing what he wants," but I also didn't want to teach him that a roleplaying game is an exercise in frustration while Dad looks at you impatiently. You always have the option to give in a struggle, so if you're a GM-parent, you have an officially sanctioned method of letting your kids "win." But I didn't want to teach him the Pout Your Way to Success method of roleplaying (or life) either. So I erred on the side of over-guidance, with a note to start removing the training wheels in future sessions. We got through it, and after taking several blows, he won the struggle. By the end of it, he was telling me, "I have a great idea for our first island."

I made a note to build on the sportsmanship issue. By the time of our second island I told him, in advance of play, "I'd like to set one goal for this session and that's that you lose a struggle gracefully." And he proudly did.

My daughter proved Princess Rose in a separate session. I knew two things from the evening we had played the Teen Titans adventure together: At her age she has trouble envisioning the fictional space as distinct from the real physical space we're in as players. Relatedly, she tends to react to fictional danger and stress more like the vulnerable child she is than like the powerful fictional character she's portraying. For instance, when she played Starfire, she wanted to hide from two ordinary thugs, and when I asked her where she wanted Starfire to hide she pointed, first, behind the popcorn bowl and then, under the TV set. One of the things that attracts me to roleplaying with my daughter is to give her the chance to "try on" positions of power and confidence, so I was keen to help her do that.

My daughter decided that she wanted to prove that "Princess Rose always tells the truth." We set up a situation where Princess Rose's friend shows up at her door begging Princess Rose to cover for her: the friend was staying at the house of a girl her father forbade her to play with any more because he considered the girl "bad." I got ready to roll the dice.

"Okay. I'll lie."

This drove her brother nuts! I wanted to explain that she could indeed lie if she wanted, that it would mean Giving on the struggle, but that she'd still get a (troublesome) quality if she wanted. That would have meant getting a word in edgewise! Plus, it's a tough concept for the six-year-old brain, or at least this particular one. In general, my daughter had a hard time integrating the dice management and narrating/acting aspects of play. The dice system alone was at or just beyond the edge of her comprehension; adding the narration of raises and sees on top of that was too much.

At length we did establish an understanding of what winning and losing the struggle would mean, and we established that the ethics of the struggle itself were "really hard," as my daughter put it: if she told the truth her friend would get in trouble and if she protected her friend it made her character a liar. The way we got through it was, my son and I reminded her she was a Princess, and could give orders, so as she won the struggle with the dice she ordered the father not to punish his daughter and declared that, since the other girl really was a bad girl, her friend should indeed stop playing with her.

Note the pretty sweeping "director power" the players have: as part of the back and forth of the struggle itself, my daughter had the right to declare a fact - she is so a bad girl - and make it be true in the game world. This is the kind of player authority some people can't live without and others abominate. Make your purchasing decision accordingly.

We played two islands together by the time of this review. For the first one, our adult friend Bill joined us, which delighted my kids since they like and trust him a great deal. He cleverly created a five-year-old prince named Goose. Being five meant that, within the fiction, Goose would be naturally subordinate to the older princes. This came in handy late in the session. As Bill put it himself

Toby decided that the solution was "Plug the Volcano" and I started thinking of how to explain to him that that wasn't the right solution. And then I totally snapped back into sanity and just chimed in with a "Yeah! We're going to plug the volcano!"

It also gave him a chance to play with, and demonstrate, taking creative strong qualities and relationships.

One of the first things that happened in the first session was that Bill announced that Prince Goose refused to eat his peas at the welcoming dinner for the princes. My daughter, playing the older sister, totally ordered him to eat his peas. Prince Goose refused. I explained that this would be a perfect argument to have a struggle over. Interestingly, my son got upset at the idea, bothered by "intra-party strife." Bill and my sister were having a great time with the argument, though, and it was a great opportunity to show the struggle system in action and give my daughter the experience of being in charge.

Prince Goose ate the peas.

The second island we played with just the family. I designed it especially for my daughter, with lots of girls and women in conflict, based loosely on issues she and her mother dealt with in their brownie troop. Both children improved at managing the interface between mechanics and fiction, though it remained easier for my older child. My son gave on a struggle and my daughter really got into the jealousies and hopes of the characters. She was still shy of taking charge of situations, which gave me a chance to boil RPG stance theory down to terms a child can understand.

I could either tell her, "Close your eyes and really concentrate on seeing the island and the people. Feel how big you are etc. Now what do you do, Rose?"; OR, I could tell her, "Close your eyes and imagine that the book of Princess Rose's story is on your lap. Each page has words about [the scene] and a picture at the top showing etc. When you turn the page, what happens in the story of Princess Rose?" Which is nothing more than actor versus author stance, right? What I found was that, for my daughter, the "book of Princess Rose" offered more immediate success than getting her to visualize the scene through the eyes of her alter ego. This may be age-related or may vary from child to child.

Things I learned from play.

I'm wary of overgeneralizing from a few sessions with one specific GM and two specific children, but it's what I have to go on. Mentally correct for your own sense of your own family.

The subsystems integrate well. The chargen and proof process help teach the kids the game and produce fun, playable characters pretty quickly. I was able to create an island in an hour or so and successfully present it in play. My kids were able to use the struggle system to successfully resolve the islands' problems. The fallout system works well for short-term play.

My son had an easier time understanding and applying the system than my daughter, which I put down to age. Princes can be any age from 5-12. Can players? I think the system is much better suited to the top of that range than the bottom. I've read that the designer is preparing a simplified resolution system for differently abled children that, if it gets released to the public, might be suitable for general use too, especially with early-grade players.

Both kids lasersharked the crap out of the setting. They loaded up on swords, shields and geegaws, tending to prefer belongings to qualities when taking growth fallout, and magic belongings at that. My daughter's last fallout wish was for "a teddy bear with laser eyes!" My son kept suggesting island themes from favorite gamecube games. Mechanically, the system can handle this fine. A teddy bear with laser eyes is worth either a single d4, d6 or d8 in any given struggle. In terms of flavor, though, it gets pretty far from that winsome Arabian Nights-inspired cover painting. And I don't think my kids' preoccupations are out of the Toonami Generation mainstream.

Cf. Dogs

If you already own Dogs in the Vineyard, here are what I take to be important changes:

Attributes - one instead of four. This means that, while you can still escalate from talking to physical to fighting in a struggle, the only extra dice you'll get from doing so are the relevant quality and belonging dice. Fallout does change with escalation.

Fallout - there's no d10 fallout so there's no instant death. You do get a dying Prince on a fallout roll of 16 and need a healing conflict.

Crowd dice - sort of gone. A crowd gets the dice of a single proto-citizen, with no +2d6 per member. One wrinkle: a False Leader can add the Problem Level dice to his proto-citizen dice when backed up by his followers. The "Problem Level" is the equivalent of DITV's Demonic Influence. That caps the crowd effect at "random proto-citizen plus 5d8.""

Proto-citizen batches - Unlike in Dogs, you don't get free dice on each page to allocate to the NPC of your choice.

Helping dice work somewhat differently. The helper takes any fallout from seeing the raise, and helping dice "count" - if you give your sib a helping die and she sees with two others, your prince is taking three dice fallout.

Most of the above simplifies the game and makes it less deadly, both good principles in adapting for children. There are three simplifications that I regret, though:

In Dogs, winning your achievement conflict gets you a d6 trait. So does losing it.(You get a different d6 trait.) In Princes' Kingdom, winning your proof struggle gets you a Strong quality while losing gets you a Troublesome one. Objectively, losing your proof struggle costs you a little effectiveness. Subjectively, losing the proof struggle can feel like a loss in a way losing a Dogs' achievement conflict doesn't, which means it can be tougher on kids emotionally than the system in the parent game.

Princes' Kingdom removes the "cut your losses" provision from Giving on a struggle. This is too bad, since the cut-your-loss die provides a nice lesson in delayed gratification.

All qualities, relationships and belongings take a single die only. This simplifies and speeds up chargen. But it also means that if you play through several islands your princes' trait lists are going to get unwieldy, since players can't add dice to existing traits. While one of the options for lasting fallout is "Remove a quality from your character sheet," I have never, across a half dozen DITV towns and two TPK islands, seen a player actually do this.

Overall

This is a good game that could be a great one in a second edition. The system, taken as a whole, works. The text is on a level a bright child can read. It's an attractive package. It lets kids make fun, playable characters. It makes prep straightforward and relatively quick for the GM.

There are some minor problems and a couple of larger ones.

As a package it's, literally, thin. There's only a single example island. All of that important advice in Dogs in the Vineyard, from "Actively reveal the town in play" to the totemic "Roll dice or say yes" is condensed in TPK almost past the point of notice. If you own DITV and are approaching The Princes' Kingdom as a kind of Dogs supplement, this isn't so important. If you're buying TPK without already owning Dogs, you'll miss some material that would help you run better Princes' Kingdom games.

That's not all that's missing. As a game for parents to introduce their kids to roleplaying, it would profit from practical, playtested advice to parents about the ins and outs of gaming with children, especially children new to gaming. Gaming is a learned, imaginative, social activity. Believe me when I say that gaming with your kids is an emotionally powerful, rewarding but also tricky thing to do. Partly because the text is pitched to the kids rather than the grownup, this kind of help is missing. In particular, the lack of healing conflict examples or discussion of handling character death feels almost like a cheat. (In the book's sample struggle, one prince takes a grievous wound but rolls improbably well on his fallout dice and avoids needing to be healed.)

The game system is suitable for boys and girls. Since the game centers around managing and repairing relationships it may even, in our culture, have more immediate appeal to girls than boys. Unfortunately the text itself fails to be inviting to daughters and their mothers. The example players are all male. The example player-characters are all male. The Queen's only role in the text is to make the Princes' cloaks. Even the vast majority of the example NPCs are male, with one unimportant and annoying exception.

In discussions of the gender issue in Princes' Kingdom on RPG.net and elsewhere, various defenses have been offered, the two most prominent of which are "The designer said in some internet discussion forum that the game is about becoming a man" and "The game text was first written as a gift for Dogs in the Vineyard designer Vincent Baker and his sons." My two responses are, 1) As a father of a girl and uncle of nieces, I think the game is about nothing that girls can't relate to and don't need to learn; 2) It costs twenty bucks - ten for the PDF. By which I mean, CRNGames sells The Princes' Kingdom to strangers for money, on a website that describes it as "A game about children, adults, and ideals." Not "fathers, sons and manhood" or whatever. The game text itself specifically says girls and boys can both play.

Lastly, it's missing, and I want to be very careful to explain what I mean here, "sex." Note the quotes.

In the town-creation chapter of Dogs in the Vineyard, Section 5. Money, concludes

And that's pretty good story stuff, but, well, it just ain't sex.

which is designer Vincent Baker advising the Dogs GM that sexual issues - jealousy, gender roles, desire - are the most powerful things to build a scenario out of. I can't imagine parents using sex qua sex in their Princes' Kingdom islands - I sure don't use it myself. But the question becomes, what's the equivalent of "sex" for tweens-and-unders? What has as strong a hold on kids' moral imaginations and emotional makeups as sex does on adults? I think it might be "fairness" or "responsibility" but I'm not sure. The answer probably comes from lots of playtesting with kids and thinking about children's literature and psychology.

Whatever it is, Princes' Kingdom itself doesn't tell us. The upshot is that island creation ends up being an awful lot of political economy. (From the rulebook section on preparing the next island for your kids once they finish the first: "If the princes determined it was acceptable to take something if you're hungry, show that situation in a different light. Is it still okay to take something just because someone else has more than you?") The basis of the Ladder of Problems is politics rather than religion (as in Dogs), so you end up creating very political situations. As the man said, "it just ain't sex." Nor is it the the sex-analog for kids. If you follow me, and I sure hope you do.

So should you buy it?

Almost certainly. If you have older preteens and already own Dogs in the Vineyard, The Princes' Kingdom is an absolute no-brainer purchase. If you're prepared to help your younger kids through the mechanics, it may still be worth it. If you have girls or are a mom and can see your way past the gender exclusivity of the text, you'll find a game that girls can enjoy playing at least as much as boys can.

Even if you don't own Dogs, if you're an experienced roleplayer with grade-school children, the book is probably still worth purchasing. It would make a great gift for your gaming friends with elementary-age children. If you were willing to run the game a time or two first, it would be possible to give it to non-gaming RPG-curious family friends. The system is solid, if best for tweens, and seeing your kids get the hang of using their traits imaginatively and deciding how to sort out these troublesome grownups will make you proud and pleased. It will touch your heart, and you'll have fun yourself.