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Review of The Swallower of Souls Quickstart Rules & Introductory Adventure
Blurb from the publisher: 'Cosmic fantasy roleplaying in the post-historical age!
In the last centuries of the Fifth Cycliad, a great malaise began to descend on the lands of humankind. The great civilisations of the Earth, which for aeons had seemed on the verge of slumber, now finally began to rot from within. From the edges of the world, the ever-present enemies drew close, their hungry claws poised to tear apart the delicate flesh of a fruit a hundred millennia in the ripening. And all around, a cry arose for Heroes, to stand against the dying of the light, and save the world from the sins of its past.
The Swallower of Souls is the Quickstart Rules and Introductory Adventure for The Chronicles of Future Earth, the brand new cosmic fantasy roleplaying game from Mindjammer Press. Set in the far, far future of our planet Earth, it's a game of sorcery and demons, of fallen civilisations and ancient technologies, of monsters and mysteries and mind-shattering dimensions. This Quickstart provides everything you need to play - a modified version of the Fate Core rules, specially tailored for cosmic fantasy roleplaying, six pregenerated characters, and an action-packed adventure in the Eternal City of Kados, spanning one or two sessions of play. We hope you'll join us and help us produce this brand-new game line!
Some said it was the end of days. Some said it was only the beginning. These adventures tell the history of that time yet to come. These are the Chronicles of Future Earth...'
What you get: Your EUR 11,99 or USD 13,99 or GBP 9,99 will buy you the full-colour 64-page The Swallower of Souls Quick Start Rules And Introductory Adventure for The Chronicles of Future Earth game line in both softcover and pdf format.
For those not in the know, Chronicles of Future Earth had been in print for years as a Chaosium product using the BRP system. Following the kickstarter near the end of 2018 however, the campaign setting changed both publisher and system. It has now moved to Modiphius and uses Fate Core. None of the kickstarter products have been published and delivered at the writing of this review (the expected delivery is April 2019). The present item is the only one available for the setting and system.
Those who prefer the pdf version only can obtain it free of charge. You read that right: if you don't care about the printed product but still wish to take a look, you can do so without paying a single cent.
Contents: The Swallower of Souls Quick Start Rules And Introductory Adventure contains the necessary material to immediately start playing in The Chronicles of Future Earth campaign setting. The setting describes itself rather concisely:
The Chronicles of Future Earth is a far future cosmic fantasy roleplaying game. It's set in our own Earth's farthest future, tens of thousands of years after the collapse of a hyper-advanced civilisation, a world which has reverted to the worship of powerful and mysterious gods, where magic is real, non-humans live alongside humans, and where mediaeval cultures now rule amid the ruins of a once star-spanning technology.
The game centres on the Venerable Autocracy of Sakara, the greatest of the Springtide Civilisations and the oldest empire on Earth. It's situated in what's today the western half of North Africa and the Iberian peninsula — but the Earth is in the grip of an Ice Age, and the coastlines and climate have changed. The Autocracy is temperate for the most part, cold and windswept in its farthest north, subtropical in its south.
Sakara is fifteen thousand years old, ruled by a godlike "Venerable Autocrator" who incarnates forever in a line of "Avatars", ruling unseen from a vast crystal citadel in the capital of Kados. The Autocracy is decadent and slumberous, lost in the observation of traditions so old that everyone has forgotten why they're there. So much history has passed that no one even bothers recording it any more; they believe nothing new can happen, in this world of superstition, ignorance, and decay.
It's a world waiting to be swept away. Ancient evils are on the move again, lethal dangers which have slept for millennia. A few months ago something awoke be¬neath the city of Korudav, precipitating a huge explosion called the "Firecloud", which killed thousands and brought the city to its knees. Since then Chaos Beasts have roamed the northern marches, killing and infecting and turning rich farmland into hellish waste.
In the capital, political intrigues and ancient rivalries rage, vying for petty human advantage before cosmic events threatening to destroy the world.
The game's rules are based on Fate Core, a flexible role-playing system that can accommodate any genre. Each character starts with ten skills, which may range from +1 to +4. The game's four peculiar six-sided dice (two sides +, two sides -, two sides blank), are rolled against a static or a rolled difficulty. If the number of skill plus roll is equal to or greater than the difficulty, the roll succeeds. Depending on the difference between roll and difficulty more interesting effects might take place. Like in other RPGs criticals and fumbles exist. Stunts allow the characters to break the rules or achieve exceptional results, e.g. by having better defenses or speak more languages. Each character has seven Aspects (a narrative descriptor) that sum up who he is. When in a pertinent situation, he can use Fate points to get a +2 bonus linked to the Aspect, reroll a failed roll, invoke it for an Effect, cause a minor change in reality (e.g. stating that you carry an item that you never did before), etc.
Fate Points are the game's meta-currency. They can be used to invoke aspects or to improvise a stunt. Skill rolls are used when performing actions. Actions include attacks, defends, manoeuvres, and overcome actions. They can be resolved either through one person rolling, or through contests.
Players may suffer from Stress, of which there are four types: physical, mental, status and wealth. Only the first two are used in the present quickstart. Stress is only lost temporarily and resets to zero after each conflict. Consequences are a way for a character to avoid taking Stress, even though each character can only receive one mild, one moderate and one severe consequence. Their effect is that they add an Aspect to your character that can be used by the GM. Obviously enough, they do not recover immediately.
The quickstart rules also present the ten gods of the setting (the Gods of the Great Compact), each of which relates to a different mystical principle. Magic is divided into Divine Magic and Socrecy. The first relies on prayers, the second on spells. Players may also summon demons or incarnate their god's powers by becoming avatars.
The book provides six pre-generated characters: a legionnaire, a priestess, a psionicist, a sorcerer, a savage insectoid, and a light-fingered bard. Two out of the six characters are human. Humans share the planet with the Jeniri (the cerebral guys) and the Esteri (the enforcers, which in this adventure resemble Athas' thri-kreen). Both of them branch out into different sub-species, even though that is not immediately visible in the present product.
The 28-page adventure takes place in Glorious Kados, the ancient capital of the Venerable Autocracy. People have gone missing, and it is the PCs goal to find them. In an optimal scenario, they will also sort out why they have disappeared, setting certain wheels in motion. The adventure describes numerous locales that the heroes may visit and engage in activities, rumors, a dozen random city encounters, and five different suggested scenes. The adventure can be played as a one-shot either in the constraints of your normal group or as a convention event. It is rather open-ended. GMs with time and love for the game can extend it to a bigger, two-session affair, allowing the players to explore the city and its sights even more.
The book ends with a one-page index.
Spoiler warning: As much as I am not going to describe, let alone detail the adventure, parts of the scenario might be revealed while discussing the strong and less strong points of the book. If you intend to participate in this scenario as a player, stop reading now.
The strong points: I wanted to invest in The Chronicles of Future Earth ever since it was a BRP product, but never really managed to. From the glimpses the present quickstart offers, I might have been missing out! I will not hide that I enjoy the work of Sarah Newton; her world-building on the Mindjammer RPG is of the highest standard. In this campaign setting, the tone is mythical, mystical, fantastic, with high-tech allusions at the same time. Even though the settings with collapsed civilizations have been done quite a few times by now, what I see registers as different. It feels like reading an oriental fairy tale with heavy genre modifications, an over-the-top theme which however is familiar at the same time. I have the same anticipation I did when I was first reading Don Lawrence's Storm comic decades ago, combined with rethemed and repurposed déjà-vus from the incredible Dark Sun of D&D 2nd edition. The decadence is unambiguous, and change is inevitable. Weaved through all the magics and divine powers something is brewing, yet are things to become better or worse?
Like with most Fate products out there, the present one appears to have been tweaked to better suit the premise of the setting. It is still a quick system, even though my initial impression is that this will overall turn out to be a crunchier version than the one encountered in Mindjammer. Easy example: there are four different types of stress instead of two, social class matters and is engrained in the system etc. I don't know whether the setting's publication under BRP in the past has anything to do with it, I do however welcome the approach. If you have never gamed with Fate, don't worry about it a bit. The system explains itself in under 14 pages, and it is extremely straightforward. A GM will need no more than a read or two to know precisely what is going on, while a player will sort it out through learn-as-you play in the first five minutes of play. Yes, it is that easy.
Very few products out there include as much information in their pre-generated characters as the present one. One can infer how a character is to be role-played through the descriptions, even though I would have enjoyed a bit more advice on that in order to get a better grip of the setting. This is even more the case for the one Jeniri and the one Esteri character.
The adventure is effectively a partial sandbox and locale-based, showcasing solid elements of an investigatory adventure within in a city landscape. The characters will visit numerous and diverse places. It provides only the blueprints and short descriptions, yet in the hands of a competent GM it can punch substantially above its weight. I never expected such a short adventure to list forty (!) different locales, the main bad-guy area excluded. The Fate Core approach and the fact that the GM can control the flow with random encounters and minor diversions also help the adventure to feel alive and substantially more complex. The scenes are very different from one another and some of them end up rather spectacularly. The culmination is a hard confrontation against [redacted], and it is not afraid to be lethal. The book's exact quote is the following: 'It's the final climactic scene. It's okay if everyone dies horribly. Have fun!' Admittedly, one doesn't see that often in a quickstart.
The art is very different from the one accompanying fantasy RPGs. It impossibly colourful, powerful, and kitsch in a positive way. The clothes, headgear and accoutrements the characters wear screams of 1980s in every positive way when it comes to the indiscriminate use of colour and disrespect for matching elements. It is sure to bring a smile to the face of those who remember those times. The action poses are a bonus; everybody everywhere appears to be doing something important. I will not lie: even though it is not strictly speaking my cup of tea, the art has largely shaped my perception of the setting. I am looking forward to seeing more.
The book makes an optimal use of its space through a layout and font size that cram the most material possible within its pages. That makes me very happy for this product and extremely sad at the same time about Modiphius' approach to editing. How come this product reach perfection, when the Star Trek game line ignominiously suffers from the extremely inefficient LCARS display?
The pdf is again an exercise in perfection, and in line with Modiphius' releases in practically all its RPG products. Everything is right where you expect it to be, including bookmarks for every single chapter and sub-chapter, as well as the boxed texts that are out of the standard narrative. All the links in the table of contents as well as the index are live. The art is kind of brighter than the one in the print edition; I presume the high quality of the printed version's gloss paper has something to do with it.
The price is unbeatable, seeing how the pdf alone is free. If you are like me however and you wish the officially printed material on your table, it costs no more than a couple of coffees.
The weak points: The obvious caveat first: seeing how this is the only product I have perused up to now for The Chronicles of Future Earth, I might have misjudged its direction as a whole based on the particulars of this adventure. The review of the next product in the line will tell.
Many of the Fate Core rules that are referenced are not used in the adventure. Character generation is not included, thus one cannot build additional characters to the ones already provided. Adventure design is impossible. Thus, the present Quickstart can only take one that far. From there on he will need the main rulebook, which is not out yet.
In such a short amount of pages and taking its nature into account, the adventure does not cater for everything. The GM has a lot of work to do when it comes to coming up with secondary and tertiary NPCs on the fly, descriptions for internal areas and shops, small maps (even though they are not needed strictly speaking) etc. In other adventures I would have insisted more on this point, this is however the setting's quickstart adventure, and has to devote some space to the setting...
...which still comes out as insufficient. I wish I knew more about the setting; I don't even know what the world looks like, seeing how the adventure provides a map only for the city it takes place at (admittedly an extremely inspiring map setting-wise, no matter how impractical it is). The few paragraphs here and there give the reader a feeling of being force-fed, of things happening too fast due to lack of space. Again, this is not abnormal taking the book's nature into account and the main rulebook will sort things out. It is however fair to say that I do not have the clearest of ideas on what the setting tries to achieve.
The increased crunchiness of the system and the lethality of the adventure might put some off. I do not mind. This is only one of the Dark Sun déjà-vus that I mentioned already. If it applies to the whole setting overall as opposed to this single adventure, it actually counts as a positive.
Conclusion: The Chronicles of Future Earth as they get framed in The Swallower of Souls show great potential. Free or very cheap, depending on your preferences and wallet-depth, the quickstart comes out as teasing and exciting, with a solid system and an investigative city adventure that culminates in a major confrontation. I am counting down to end-April when the core rulebook comes out.
For more info on The Swallower of Souls and The Chronicles of Future Earth overall, visit the Mindjammer Press and the Modiphius Entertainment websites at https://mindjammerpress.com and http://www.modiphius.com respectively.
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