Review of The Godsfall

Saturday, June 21st is Free RPG Day ‘14 and with it comes a slew of new and interesting little releases. They can usually be divided between tasters for new games that will be released at Gen Con this forthcoming August and support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera. In general, the tasters for the new, ‘hot’ games are highly anticipated and on the day itself, in high demand, but come the day, it would be remiss of us to ignore the less-in-demand titles. Many of these it should be made clear, are worth your time and effort to make it to your friendly, local gaming store to get hold of a copy.

The Godsfall is a demonstration for new RPG called The Godsfall which is set in a fantasy world that has suffered the fall and apocalyptic impact of a deity. That god continues to sleep where he fell and it remains a mystery why he fell and what would happen were you to awaken the Sleeping God. Civilisation would have fallen in the wake of this disaster, but the last surviving knight, rallied the survivors and made a last stand in the shattered city against the rampaging monsters and marauding demons. The knight would become the Emperor and the city, Emperor’s Stand, and from there, the Empire is rebuilding and exploring anew. It sends out parties to explore the Wildlands, hoping to make contact with survivors and perhaps the threats that remain in the wake of ‘The Godsfall’.

As a demonstration, it introduces the new setting, the new rules, a set of six pre-generated characters, and ‘The Thieves of Eagle Rock’, a short scenario. This is a lot to pack into a twenty-page digest-sized booklet. The setting for The Godsfall barely receives a page and the rules three before the booklet is onto the pre-generated characters, and the nine-page scenario.

Mechanically, The Godsfall uses pools of six-sided dice. For the most part it adheres to a ‘Roll Many, Use One’ roll. If a character rolls at least one die equal to the target, he succeeds. Combat is more complex and involves both attacker and defender rolling their dice pools and matching the results, one die at a time, from highest to lowest, with higher results cancelling out the lower. Any dice left over are each counted as a success and each success inflicts a point of damage. For the most part, the mechanics feel simple enough, and any gamer with any experience should be able to understand how they work.

The six pre-generated characters include an Elfish Monk of the Temple of Heaven, a Machandrian Druid of the Society of the Leaf, a Tengu Wildlands Courier and Storyteller, a Merman Necromancer of the banshee Bog, a Free-born Ogrish Imperial Breaker, and an Orcish Knight of the Academy of Science. Each is ready to play, nicely illustrated, and comes with a description that includes some background. Each also has some quite fun features as to what they can do. For example, the Monk is capable of ‘Endless Cloud Walk’ as an action if he can make a Mysticism check, which allows him to walk across water, up walls, or leap straight up, whilst the Merman can animate corpses by placing a sliver of his consciousness into his body. It is odd though, that no human player character is included in the six as that would have given a baseline against which the others could be compared.

The adventure, ‘The Thieves of Eagle Rock’ is quite short and sees the characters hired to discover why caravans travelling through Snake Pass to the fertile lands beyond have been attacked. Unfortunately, the adventure is underwhelming. It ends really without the characters having learned why who the attackers are and why they are attacking the caravans. Which is fine if there was an obvious sequel, but for a demonstration scenario, the players do need answers. Instead, they are left feeling that their efforts have been to no avail. Physically, The Godsfall is reasonably well presented as is. The artwork is nice, the writing a little too tight in places, and the initial tone tends towards the preaching. Unfortunately, as an introduction to a setting and an RPG, The Godsfall underwhelms… The problem is that there is not enough of the background explained in the booklet. Indeed, the background included in this review was garnered from the publisher’s website rather than this book and for an RPG that promises “deadly encounters against Lovecraftian horrors”, “a wild frontier torn by the fall of an elder god”, and “epic foes in a world sundered by an apocalypse”, well to be honest, as a scenario, ‘The Thieves of Eagle Rock’ is banal.

Another issue of the lack of background in The Godsfall is that it leaves GM and player alike to wonder at the setting—and not in a good way. For example, the Machandrian Druid of the Society of the Leaf pre-generated character is actually a humanoid spider, but this certainly not mentioned, except on the website. Similarly, the Orcish Knight of the Academy of Science possesses Archaeotech devices, but nowhere is it mentioned that technology plays a part of the setting and there is no detailing what this technology is.

Whether or not The Godsfall will be at least an interesting RPG remains to be seen. Unfortunately, whilst it is not unplayable, where The Godsfall demonstration for Free RPG Day '14 should at least leave us intrigued and serve as a good introduction to the game, it leaves us asking questions that it should have answered.