OSSR: World Tree

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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Chapter 5: Ketheria, Birthplace of Civilization

So this chapter puts another level of detail on the setting, giving us a focus on the Ketheria region, which is the top of the main trunk of the world tree, where all the prime species were created way, way back. And it was pretty way back: the history overview says that the present year is 4260. And while that's only 2840 earth years, it is still a long time. The early years get a lot more attention; the history is presented in three columns and the first two columns only go through the year 1650.

The timeline notes all kinds of things, from the developments of important magical techniques, to important mundane inventions like the loom, to significant wars, to crazy stuff like the Eater of Cities incident (the teleport gate thing that killed eight digits of people).

Then we get some more detailed write-ups of a few incidents: the first cyarr wars, the Calanchian Empire, and the great cyarr invasion. The Calanchian empire was the biggest political entity in the history of the tree, and has a deliberately comic conclusion that is almost Pratchett-worthy.
And the dwindling continued. Irrelevant emperor followed irrelevant emperor, each one with less territory and power than his predecessor. Finally, in 2889, the four remaining cities of the Calanchian empire negotiated a treaty that left the Imperial Court with neither funds nor authority. Amirzakat Tarquedon, 'Speaker of the Final Word,' Eighteenth Calanchian Emperor, quite solemnly issued a proclamation removing all four remaining cities from the empire, naming each region or public building that was no longer a part. The empire's territory was reduced to the public latrine in New Calanchia. Amirzakat ceremoniously handed his amber sceptre and his title of Emperor to the chief janitor, and stormed off to his modest estate outside New Calanchia. The latrine is still named 'the Calanchian empire' to this day, though the sceptre has long since been stolen.
The war stories paint the cyarr as organized, adaptable, determined, but ultimately outclassed. They can't match massed prime force (their complete inability to use healing magic is harsh), but taking them lightly is a serious mistake. When they couldn't storm city walls of lightning or deathless birds, they built huge mountains of earth and toppled them to bury the cities. After they lost the great cyarr invasion, they began two centuries of viking-style airship raids to salvage their pride.

Next, some detailed write-ups of regional factions, political, religious, and a few archmages. These look moderately useful for running a game in the area, but are not particularly interesting.

Then there's a close-up on Treverre, which is a typical city for the region, with 80K inhabitants. It has a city guard of 165, which seems very small, but apparently Sweden gets away with that kind of ratio, so I'll buy it. There's pretty good notes on politics, economy, law, etc. Under 'unusual laws,' it is illegal to say or imply in public that kathia (coffee-equivalent) is inferior in any way to any other beverage; like, you can't say it's less intoxicating than whiskey. Violation is punishable by public humiliation, and the law is mostly used to haze foreigners.

It's all pretty good setting detail, but I think it's kind of a lost opportunity. See, as the only region and city described in any detail, this region and city become the default campaign setting, and... well, it's in the oldest, stablest, and most central part of prime civilization; the demand for adventurers seems low. You're going to be getting a lot of odd jobs and political work, like the covering-for-adultery mission in the opening fiction. I think one of the frontier regions would have provided a lot more possibility.

Next up: "Can We Play Yet?" Finally, some mechanics. Yay?
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Chapter 6: "Can We Play Yet?"

It doesn't become apparent immediately, but it is difficult to talk about any part of this game's systems without mentioning this first: this is an Ars Magica knock-off.

It's not a verbatim rip like some of the AD&D Retroclones. Indeed, there are many points of departure. But it is clear that when the authors began designing this game, they were starting with Ars Magica and modifying it from there. I have heard rumors that people met the authors and asked about the similarities and the authors shrugged and said 'What Who-ica? Never heard of it.' I assume this was for legal purposes, because it's simply not plausible given the amount of jargon they didn't bother to change. Quite apart from the verb-noun magic system, the fact that all the nouns and verbs are called 'arts,' that the skill for doing precise things with magic is called 'finesse,' that there are 'simple' and 'stress' dice, it's an orgy of evidence.

Which is kind of unfortunate, because when World Tree was published, in the year 2000, Ars Magica was in its fourth edition, an edition which was gravely flawed. I'm talking 'wearing more armor means taking more damage' flawed. And given a few mechanical roadsigns, I'm confident that they weren't working from an earlier edition. So, right from the beginning, the outlook isn't good.


Basic Rules for Anxious Players
The chapter opens with a brief intro to the concept of a roleplaying game, and does one of the better jobs I've seen.

Then it moves on to kinds of dice, both the usual different sizes, and the distinction between simple dice (ordinary) and stress dice (explodes, possible botch on a 1). So, the first point of departure from Ars is that Ars only uses d10s, while Tree mostly uses d20s and d6s; percentile dice aren't referenced directly, but enough high-granularity percentile numbers exist that I'm pretty sure you're meant to use them. Rolls to resolve actions are mostly d20s, d6s are mostly for effect. Botch dice are always d6s (when a stress die rolls a 1, some number of botch dice are rolled, any 1s are a crit fail, more 1s are worse), so botches are more frequent and worse than in Ars.

The basic resolution system is stat+skill+d20, either against a target number or an opposed roll. And that's shockingly reasonable. Also reasonable would be the assumption that they moved to the d20 from the d10 because the numbers are generally bigger in this game than in Ars. In Ars, a serious (but not munchkin) badass is adding a stat of 4 or 5 to a skill of 7 or 8; and a moderate badass is adding a stat of 3 to a skill of 4 or 5; and the RNG is a d10. In Tree, the serious badass is adding a stat of 4 or 5 to a skill of ~15; and the moderate is adding a stat of 3 to a skill of 10; and the RNG is a d20. Though I'm not convinced that was the actual reasoning.


Timing
The initiative system is my vote for the craziest mechanic in the book. You generate your initiative score by drawing a card from a deck of playing cards (Ace goes first, King goes last). After you take your action, you draw another card and then go whenever the new card comes up. So it's theoretically possible for one character to act 13 times to another character's 1 time, and 2 or 3 to 1 is going to be fairly common. I can see why this setup would appeal to someone who didn't grasp action advantage; it's simple, quick to manage, probably causes hilarious and unpredictable combat rounds. And while it is technically fair in the sense that everyone is playing action roulette, it is going to feel desperately unfair in a completely arbitrary way to have to sit back with your thumb up your ass and watch other people act multiple times.


Magic
Ars Magica famously has five verbs (create, destroy, control, change, and get info) and ten nouns (air, earth, fire, water, body, mind, animals, plants, illusions, and magic). World Tree has seven verbs and twelve nouns, which is why it has that many creator and non-creator gods respectively. The extra verbs come from chopping 'heal' and 'sustain' effects out of 'create.'

The nouns are a little different: Animals is cold gone, they get to be affected by body and mind like everyone else. New nouns are location, spirit, and time. Location is cool, it does teleportation, bags of holding, pocket dimensions, all that good stuff. Time does haste and slow effects, also retries and retcons - not sure how well the latter are handled. Spirit affects ghosts, but is more often used to make spells smarter – discriminatory targeting, handling unclear parameters, etc.

Spells are measured in two ways - Complexity and Power. Complexity is like Level in Ars Magica - how hard it is to learn. Power is how strong it is. In Ars, the equivalent of Power is part of level; a fire spell that does more damage is higher level. In Tree, a damaging fire spell is complex based on how elaborate it's delivery is, but the damage is based on Power. Theoretically.

Spells come in Pattern (equivalent to Ars' Formulaic spells), which are specific learned effects that can be relatively high Complexity; and Spontaneous (equivalent to Ars'... spontaneous) which are made up on the fly but sharply limited in Complexity. Pattern spells also cost 1 spell point each, while Spontaneous spells cost 1d3 spell points, which is very distinct from Ars, because Ars doesn't use spell points at all, restricting spontaneous spells with a fatigue mechanic that doesn't exist in Tree. There are some other more exotic spell types not described in this chapter.

Hilariously, many spells have their own initiative. As in, you cast Make Fire on your initiative, and draw an initiative card for when the spell goes off. The possibilities for wacky consequences should be obvious.

Magic resistance works differently as well, and the short version is that it doesn't work very often. In Ars, the procedure is that you use stat+verb+noun+d10 as your casting roll, subtract the spell level, and the leftover is penetration, which is compared to the target's magic resistance total, which is (skill x5)+noun for another wizard. Which means that wizards trying to get through high resistance cast lower-level spells, and also that fire wizards are harder to affect with fire magic.

In Tree, the spell's Power (stat+verb+noun+d20) is compared to the target's resistance check (skill+d20). So, no reason not to try big spells, and fire mages burn like everyone else. Also, one side of that equation has more things on it. Talking about starting characters, someone who cares about magic resistance probably has about a 15. A mage in their specialty is probably going up against that with a 35, and in their secondary suit with like a 23. Even an amateur can easily come up with like a 12 without trying. So magic resistance is kind of weaksauce, except that the resister can blow a spell point for an extra d20; that actually makes things much more interesting, both in terms of whether or not MR will work, and in terms of resource management.


Other Topics
Two final topics - Trouble, the term for penalties (seems generally inoffensive), and a paragraph headed 'Role-Playing and Rule-Playing.' Ouch.

It's actually nothing to do with the Stormwind Fallacy. It's a fairly inoffensive reminder about rule 0, with the justification that 'rules are ultimately a scaffold to support the story which you and the gamemaster are improvising.' I really like the equal footing that phrase puts the player and the MC on, though the rest of the paragraph reinforces MC dominance on the matter.

Next up: Character Creation
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Chapter 7: Creating A Character

The presented steps for character creation are: Concept, Species, Attributes, Advantages/Disadvantages, Experience, Spells, Starting Money & Gear, Details. Let's take them in order.

1. Concept
Suggests that you have some idea of what you're trying to end up with before you begin, and provides some examples of things to try out, including some interesting takes on 'normal person.' Unfortunately also provides a huge pile of 'characterization questions,' which are mostly irrelevant drivel (favorite food is my pick for least valuable information). That's par for the course. There are a few useful questions, all towards the end: 'what kind of story would you like to experience through your character,' and 'what kind of things do you enjoy or dislike in role-playing.' Actual open consideration of things on that level, of the player as co-creator, is fairly rare and quite valuable. Nice to see it included.

2. Species
There are solid reasons for this to be step #2. Species templates have attribute mods, enable certain advantages and disadvantages, and hand out a big chunk of pre-spent experience; so getting those established before you finalize the customizable aspects of those things is helpful. Also, nice to know whether you have hands before you spend any money on handheld items.

I did compare two of the races, and the starting xp they get is not equal. Cani get 312 xp, Gormoror get 402.

Otherwise, judging relative balance is still tricky, just because of the variation involved. The main thing is that Zi Ri (who are tiny and feeble) are the obvious choice for min-maxing into magic and out of might. Worth noting that everyone has at least some minor side abilities going on. Even the most vanilla species, the Rassimel, has poison resistance and the ability to manipulate their sleep cycles.

3. Attributes
There are ten attributes, as compared to Ars Magica's eight. Ars has Intelligence, Perception, Presence, Communication, Strength, Stamina, Dexterity and Quickness. Tree has Strength, Stamina, Dexterity, Agility, Perception, Faith, Memory, Wits, Will, and Charisma.

Players get an array of +3, +2, +2, +1, +1, 0, 0, 0, -1, -1 to spread out, and can spend advantage points to get more. Race hands out up to +/-3, though +/-1 is much more common. Anyone who wants to can roll d6 for any of their attributes to introduce a random element. 1-2: -1, 3: 0, 4-5: +1, 6: +2. Their analysis says that on average you get more stats, but your losses might be in stats you consider important; which would be accurate if you weren't allowed to just not roll for anything you didn't want to risk.

4. Advantages/Disadvantages
You get 5 points of advantages for showing up, and can take up to 10 points of disads for an equal value of advantages. They come in many different varieties and values - some of them inaccessible unless the MC has adjusted how many points you get upwards. There's a bit about how some things are worth more or less to different characters: the -15 Missing Hand disad is worth -5 (1/3) to a physically inactive character and -8 (1/2) to someone like a Herethroy who has four hands to begin with. It's not very precise, but at least it's something.

They aren't actually listed until chapter 12, but I'll have a look for some particularly amusing ones:
Shifter Hybrid is a +7 Advantage that means you are the offspring of parents of different species, which requires serious magic. You can shift between the two racial templates and get a pile of extra xp. 'Many people, including the gods, consider you to be a perversion of nature and the divine plan.' Also, sterile and shorter life expectancy.
Charmed Life is a +20 Advantage that means you can't die unless some bizarre Celtic-style conditions are fulfilled (Not while inside or outside, nor while mounted or on foot, nor while awake or while asleep). Though injuries can still leave you 'horribly crippled,' so make friends with a good healer.
Bad Relationship With a God is a -4 disad that means you botch a lot more with a particular verb or noun, because the relevant god is pissed at you for some reason.
Mongrel or Bad Breed is a -1 disad that means you have an unfashionable breed expression. Nobody takes daschunds or chihuahuas seriously.
Bloodfire is a -8 disad that means you have a rare medical condition that causes your blood to ignite upon contact with air. It's... a pretty bad time.

A lot of the advantages which grant extra experience grant random amounts, which offends me. Sometimes it's something like d4x5, sometimes it's a straight d20.

5. Experience
This step managed to put me off finishing chargen the first couple of times I tried it, because it seriously asks you to distribute six hundred points between a very large number of skills. Now, it does try to break it down a bit for you, by having you distribute 20 blocks of 30 points each, between 9 skill categories. But the thing that made me realize that it wasn't actually that many decision points is that getting a skill to a level where you want to use it is ~50 points (or ~100 if you want to be something like a specialist), so it's a lot like just picking <12 skills. And two of those skills are 'your hit points' and your magic points.' So, once you throw in at least a couple each of magic and combat skills, and then basic adventuring shit like sneaking and climbing, those 600 points start feeling more like too little than overwhelmingly many.

6. Spells
Everyone starts with d6+3 Complexity 5 Pattern spells. More come from Advantages, either directly, or as part of an Experience Advantage like University Mage. Not much to say here except that high-Complexity spells get ridiculously more expensive fast, and the Experience Advantages tend to be much more efficient than direct purchase.

7. Starting Money & Gear
Starting money includes a couple of stress dice, and if you botch on either you start with no money, which is a -1 disad and you can take another +1 advantage to balance it. Not much else of note here.


Next up: Attributes + Skills
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Post by Username17 »

How would I pick a favorite food if it's an alien world and nothing tastes like it does on Earth? The local coffee equivalent isn't coffee, it's some alien plant that has similar effects, so how would I know whether my hypothetical character liked the stuff or not? Is there a big list of food to pick from?

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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Also, your character's sensorium could be that of a dog and consider vomit to be 'pretty okay tasting,' so what the hell?

The section on Treverre does have a subsection on food, with several local dishes described in more or less detail, as well as some that are common to the larger region.
One of the great dishes is the dascine: a five-layer casserole of shellfish and veal paté, bacon and lentil paté, artichoke hearts, dascine cheese, and mushroom paté. (Herethroy enjoy a vegetarian "green dascine" with a bottom layer of carrots and leeks, and no bacon.)
I think there's certainly enough to work with to come up with your own dishes for other bits of the setting. A lot of things appear to be close enough to things that really exist to be called by the same name.
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Post by momothefiddler »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:1-2: -1, 3: 0, 4-5: +1, 6: +2
This comes out to +1/3 on average and has a max of +2, so why would you ever do anything but allocate your +3, +2s, and probably +1s, and then roll for everything else? Even if you were being super cautious, why would you ever just take the two -1s instead of rolling for 'em?
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

The roll is on top of the assigned value. You don't roll instead of taking a -1, you have a -1 and you can apply the results of the roll to that.
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Post by momothefiddler »

Oh. And you can only roll on them after the numbers have been distributed?

I still don't see why you wouldn't roll on your off-stats anyway, but it does make it a bit less predetermined.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Chapter 8: Attributes + Skills

This is the chapter which tells you what things mean. It also contains a few things which are not strictly attributes or skills, and indeed leads with one: a detailed explanation of the dice mechanic. One thing this game has that Ars doesn't is an example of how bad various levels of botch should be. The example is very narrow, but it's a lot better than nothing.

More detailed descriptions of the attributes and skills follow, along with what various values in those things correspond to. Also a table of unopposed skill roll thresholds for tasks of various difficulties. All very practical.

Baseline round-scale movement speeds are listed under the Running skill, which is a little odd, but given that Running modifies that speed, it's at least convenient for that.

There are two language skills: Gods' Tongue and Languages. Languages is the ability to figure out a strange dialect based on all World Tree languages being very similar. Gods' Tongue is an actual other language, the one used by the gods, learned by priests and by scholars who use it to make their books more pretentious.

Otherwise, the most interesting skills (that aren't covered elsewhere) are Cley Base and Life Base, which determine your spell points and hit points respectively (with a small stat contribution). Not actually that interesting, but I don't recall seeing that as a mechanic anywhere before, and I like it. Though I can't say exactly why.


Experience and Training
Skills have a pyramidal cost. 1 xp in a skill gives a value of 1, 1+2=3 xp gives a value of 2, 1+2+3=6 xp gives a value of 3, and so on up to 55 for 10 and 120 for 15. This is true in chargen as well as in advancement, and that's all Ars Magica 4th.

Now, in Ars, the magical Arts are usually much higher than the mundane Abilities. 15 is a badass Art, 7 is a badass Ability. This is the case despite both working off the same cost:value setup, and is handled by giving out xp for Arts at a much higher rate than for Abilities: the same effort will give 3 xp to an Ability and 15 xp to an Art. In World Tree, everything operates on the same scale, which happens to be the Art scale.

Also ripped from Ars are the two kinds of experience: adventure, and long-term. Adventure xp is pretty simple: go on an adventure, get more xp the more challenging it was. Long-term experience exists because Ars is a very long-term game and characters might go years between adventures. I don't know how long-term games of World Tree are supposed to be, but they have the long-term material here in case you need it. Adventuring, as previously advertised, hands out xp a lot faster. Amusingly, the reason a character starts with a lot more xp than they would have earned by the long-term methods is that young children learn quickly because 'at that age, everything's an adventure.'

Some experience comes in fixed amounts, and some comes in random amounts (d6s). That's sloppy and irritating, but the number of d6s that a character will probably get over the course of a campaign is large enough that the bell-curve effect is likely to keep players fairly close. It still ticks me off.

Next up: Combat

edit: I can't count.
Last edited by angelfromanotherpin on Sun Apr 20, 2014 1:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by tussock »

After 1d6, you'd have one character on skill 1 and another on skill 3, at worst.

After 100d6, you'd have one character on skills of 15, 15, 15, and another on 15, 15, 14, with only a very slim chance of it being worse than that. The fixed experience gains leave them the same on everything else.

I'd guess you're at the greatest disparity 2-3 dice in, and then it never matters because the cost steps are going up quicker than the variance. If rolling dice makes people feel happy, which it generally does, it's totally worth it.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Chapter 9: Combat

Chapter opens with a discussion of how life and death don't work the same on the World Tree as they do on Earth. It's not explicitly about how mortality based on hit points instead of biology works, but that's my read of it. Basically, a being is alive as long as their spirit holds on to their body, and spirits are cut loose by gross physical trauma – small precisely placed wounds are less effective than great gashes. An arrow through the heart or brain is painful and hindering, but rarely fatal on its own.

The (crazy) initiative system is reiterated in some more depth, with a couple of detailed examples. Hit points are explained. So is Trouble, and you get a certain amount of Trouble for having your hit points depleted to 1/2 and 1/4. Finally, what happens at 0 hit points, and how far below 0 you have to go before you die.

The basic combat procedure is attack roll vs defense roll, and damage value vs soak value. It's a surprisingly sane setup, and only superficially similar to Ars Magica 4.

There are nine weapon skills, and the authors explicitly think that this is a sacrifice of realism for playability – which is a nice sentiment, if questionably true. Brawling is a different skill than Claws & Teeth, which is kind of bullshit; and Knife is a different skill than Edged, which is total bullshit.

The big table of weapons fills a page, and the first thing I notice is that weapon attack modifiers are *big.* +5 is basically the minimum and +10 is common. Mundane fencing weapons go up to +15 and include the attack stat (Dex) twice. Fencing weapons are supposedly only worthwhile in skilled hands – but this is simply not true, if anything, unskilled people are more likely to use them in order to get hits in. Defense modifiers from armor and shields add to the other side of the equation, so having appropriate gear or not can be more than half the RNG. Many weapons have special effects, like the Flail, which is pretty good but comes with three extra botch dice and therefore fucking up with it is much easier than with other weapons.

One of the interesting skills that I skipped in the previous chapter is Combat Stance, which does two things: it gives you access to 'combat options,' which roughly correspond to Power Attack and Expertise and similar in D&D3e, and also determines how large a variance you can choose to take. There's also an option to take an option at 'expert' instead of choosing a new option. There are 22 options, so you'd have to take your Combat Stance skill up to 44 to get them all to expert, which... probably isn't going to happen. Plenty of room for fighting-types to distinguish themselves.

If the attack roll exceeds the defense roll by enough, it's a critical hit, and has extra effects. Not sure why this comes after combat options instead of being adjacent to attack roll procedure.

There's a section on 'sneaky and unusual attacks,' which gives examples of how to adjudicate things not codified in the main rules. Apparently attacking from behind is worth +5 attack, and throwing dirt in someone's face is an attack action that gives the target Trouble 2 for 1d2 actions. I feel like the 'from behind' thing should actually be codified, but as an official example it kind of is.

There's a section on some example warriors and how they use the combat options, and what that looks like in-universe. As a sample, one example is a town guard who works with his friends to drive monsters out of town - one or two use the Hinder option to penalize the monster's attacks, and the rest use Drive Back to shove it out. This is a nice touch, and does a good job of illustrating the combat options for people who might have been unclear on the concept.

Brawling maneuvers are what this game calls the grappling rules, and (by long-standing RPG tradition) they are much more elaborate than is warranted. There is nothing resembling a unified modifier: Waylay is Brawling+Str+Dex+d20 vs Brawling+Sta+d20; Break Arm is Brawling+Str+d20 vs Brawling+Dodge+Agility+2xSoak+d20. Also, there are a pile of +/-5s and 10s for various species traits. Orren are slippery and hard to hold, Gormoror are bulky and have an easier time overbearing, Rassimel are focused and hard to distract, on and on. On some level, it feels like the game really suffers from predating the 3e PHB, because something like the bundled modifiers for Small Size would have done a lot to reduce the number of times that they say that the Zi Ri have a -10 to a maneuver because they're like 30 lbs. Also, they should probably have stuck to the whole 'sacrifice realism for playability' thing.

The chapter starts veering into 'general hazards' with Poison, Fire, Falling, Drunkenness, and the Life and Death sections. It concludes with a section called Natural Life and Death, which seems really out of place in the Combat chapter; natural healing rules, maybe, but the aging and longevity stuff clearly belongs somewhere else.

I'd like to share a couple of the little fiction headers. The first is about judicial execution in a world where people have life bars.
The execution of Prander Burrman was a simple thing. Vorpothki the executioner tied him to Nox Mortien, the ancient death-tree in the city square, and struck him with a great iron sword. At the first stroke Prander's ribs were broken and his heart crushed, and he cried out greatly. At the second stroke his bowels were shewn to the wives of his victims as they watched, and they gave him no solace as he cried out in great pain. At the third stroke his ribs were rent again, and he howled him more deeply, and then he died.

The execution of Daviniax was much more of a trouble and a labor. Vorpothki tied her to Nox Mortien, and struck with the great iron sword. And Vorpothki was in no way weaker or gentler with Daviniax than with her master. But Daviniax was a mighty warrior even as the Gormoror count these things, so that when her heart was crushed and her bowels were spilt and her ribs were rent again, she groaned no single groan, nor was she close to death. And Vorpothki hewed at her the way a woodsman hews at a tree. And she stood and cried out no more than a tree would have cried out, even as her head was broken with the force of the hewing. And only on the tenth stroke did she sink against her bonds and die. And Vorpothki was greatly fatigued, and leaned upon his iron sword as on a staff, and honored her strength with the saying that he had never before needed even eight strokes to kill a prisoner before, even in the month of the three purges.
– Albomanthy Rutter, The Bandits of Quatterly
The second is about the difference in diseases between primes and non-primes.
"We suffer terribly, Vehriman!' cried the cyarr, ambassador to the primes. "The bones of our warriors become soft as taffy, the bones of our children stretch like bamboo, our matriarchs writhe in convulsions. Sorrow and fear walk the streets of Cyanthaxela, hand in bloody hand!"
"I think I understand, Sir Pyangtyan. My sister had a fever once. She was hallucinating for a day and a half, 'til we figured out what was going on and got a healer."

Next up: Magic.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Chapter 10: Magic

A lot of the concepts have been covered already, the Verbs and Nouns, Complexity and Power, Cley (spell points), and different kinds of spell. A few extra kinds of spell are discussed: Woven spells and Ritual spells are similar to Improvised and Pattern spells respectively, but can be a lot more effective at the cost of a lot more time (and investment in a relevant skill). There are also different ways to use some of the methods. You can 'feather-cast' a Pattern spell to try to get it to go off without using up a cley (there's a skill for this), at the cost of a substantially reduced Power. Feather-casting is a mild offense against the gods, who manage the cley economy; it's explicitly compared to speeding – frequently done by even mostly law-abiding folks with no harm done, and mostly just annoying to the enforcers, who may or may not penalize you even if you get caught (though there are, annoyingly, no guidelines for what the penalties might be). Hammer-casting is the opposite, cramming extra cley into a spell for a Power boost – this doesn't bother the gods.

There is also a detailed section on Bound spells (one-shot effects tied to items), which are a way for people to get limited access to effects they don't have the verb/noun skills for, and for contingency-style effects. The most interesting part of these is activation methods. Ordinary bindings can perceive but not judge - they can target the person you point a wand at, but not 'the nearest enemy' or anything like that; or go off when you fall down after being attacked, but that will include being tackled off your feet by a friendly dog. Mages with decent spirit noun can make a 'reasoning' binding with limited judgement skills.

One thing that comes up, and that I really like, is that mundane skills factor into several spell effects. Several healing spells work better when cast by someone with higher Medicine skill than by someone with lower skill. Spells that shape metal tend to work better when cast by a smith. And so on.

Arcane Connections are another term from Ars Magica, the classic contagion magic where if you have something like a hair from the subject's head, you can cast the spell on the hair and have it affect the subject even if the subject is otherwise out of range. These tend not to be good for too many uses (there's a random chance of the connection failing each time it's used, better connections tend to last longer), so one hair from a person won't let you ping that person from your house forever.

There's also a segment on how spells don't exactly stack. Two spells that increase your soak by making your skin tougher don't stack, but either would stack with a spell that increased your soak by warping space around you. That's prone to cheesing out, but it does mean that players have an extra incentive to choose different verb/noun combos and thus diversify the party. Other effects can semi-stack; two healing spells won't be cumulative, but if they have a variable effect, you can keep trying until you max out the roll. The section is not particularly clear, which is probably going to be a real problem in play.

Then there's a detailed treatment of the magical sense, its range, and the difficulty for detecting and examining various things with it. It's very thorough, but I imagine it's kind of a pain in the ass in play to deal with like six different thresholds depending on the type of magic. I'd have gone with two.

The First Law of Magic
This section talks about how magic is a product of the gods, and the gods are ultimately people who play favorites and screw up and such. And this is mostly there to justify people forgetting spell details without having to retcon or mind caulk it. So if a player casts a self-targeting Levitate on other people a few times before anyone catches the mistake – that's totally plausible as an in-game occurrence, because the relevant god was either not paying attention or cutting an inexperienced caster some slack. It's a small thing, but I quite like it as both a setting element and a meta-mechanic.

The Limits of Magic
As in Ars Magica, there's a list of things that magic simply cannot do. And, like in Ars, some of them are kind of goofy and meaningless (not being able to target the Moon or other celestial bodies comes up... rarely). So there's no name magic and you can't compel the Gods, and very few fucks are given. On the other hand, the inability to create Cley or translate language are very meaningful and potentially meaningful respectively. Also relevant is the impossibility of getting perfectly reliable information because the god of knowledge is kind of a jerk. A couple of these limits are just repudiations of some D&D effects: no wish effects, no absolute moral effects.

Creating New Spells
The guidelines for inventing a spell are... not very scientific. Ars does it better, and indeed if you look at all the things you can do to a spell, the parts they ripped from Ars are much more concrete, while the parts that concern things introduced in this game tend to have things like '+0-10 Complexity, you know, somewhere in there.'

Something that is obviously problematic is the mechanic for permanent effects. In Ars, spells are made permanent (technically 'instantaneous') through the expenditure of a limited harvested resource called vis, the acquiring and managing of which is a whole thing in the game. In World Tree, there's no vis equivalent and permanence is a 'sustain' verb requirement and +5-15 complexity on the spell. So... once a character gets access to a permanent duration spell, they can spam it as much as any other kind of spell. That seems like it goes to crazy town in short order.

Kind of hilarious are the things where godly bias creeps in. For instance, fire spells that look like animals that aren't cats have an arbitrary complexity bump because the god of fire likes cats. Unfortunately, those preferences are hidden in spell descriptions all throughout the Spells chapter and not in a convenient compiled list in this chapter, which is just inconsiderate.

More considerate is a detailed treatment of all the verbs and nouns to clarify what they mean, and what the distinctions are between, for example, creating, sustaining, and healing. The 'water' magic actually covers everything liquid, sharing jurisdiction with any other appropriate noun, such as blood with 'body' magic and mercury with 'earth' magic. Very nice.

Enchantment
The creation of magic items is another thing that costs vis in Ars. There are three kinds of enchanting – Recipe, Pattern, and Great. Pattern makes one-shot magic items and has mostly been replaced by spellbinding, but if you have the Enchanting skill, you can use it instead if you don't mind it costing a lot more time and cley. Recipe Enchantment creates persistent magic items and is relatively easy (4 or 5 skills and/or attributes at reasonable levels, and an uncommon ingredient or two), but requires the recipe, and the families that use the recipes to get rich also guard them harder than the Chinese guarded the recipe for porcelain; a recipe is a significant quest reward.

Great Enchantment is how you get fully customizable persistent magic items. It's pretty hard and extremely time-consuming (multiple weeks of labor). It also involves multiplying things by additive percentages like this was fucking GURPS. It's a completely new mechanic that diverges from the otherwise relatively elegant and unified systems that have governed everything else. I... have no idea why anyone would choose to do that, except maybe to try to deter players from using these rules.


Next up: Spells. Chiefly the most hilarious examples from a very long list.
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Chapter 11: Spells

With seven verbs and twelve nouns, there are eighty-four basic divisions of spell, and I don't think any division has less than three example spells, and many have quite a few more. So there are well over 300 spells in this chapter, and it is the longest part of the book. So, I'm mostly just going to cherry-pick the ones that stand out as amusing or setting-distinct, with maybe a few other comments.

I haven't been using the game terms for the verbs and nouns in this review and I'm not going to start now, but I will give one example. Even the game terms are not the actual setting terms, which are all derived from the names of the associated gods, and have been rendered into a form which is more intuitively understandable to an English-reading audience. So the god of healing is Mircannis and the god of flesh is Kvarse; the in-setting term for a spell that heals flesh is a Mircannoc Kvarsedor spell; the game term is a Healoc Corpador spell.

[Air]
[Create][Air] spells have examples that go from Complexity 5 (Wind in the Face, a magical fan-equivalent) to Complexity 60 (Bird With Loud Wings, which creates an enormous bird made of lightning). On the other hand, [Heal][Air] spells only go up to Complexity 10, and are 100% about removing smells. That's a pretty good demonstration of how some conceptual combinations just have more legs than others.

As far as Complexity goes, basically anyone can manage a 5, a 10 requires very little effort, 15 is middling, 20 requires substantial effort, a starting character specialist could probably manage a 35 or 40, and 50-60 is as far as anyone is likely to get by campaign's end, depending on how long the game is.

Plan the Picnic is a spell which predicts the weather some days in advance, and comes with a reminder that precognitive spells are never guaranteed to be correct, they are simply the equivalent of very good guesses.

The highest-complexity effect in [Air] is Ashen Wind, a Complexity 80 [Change][Air][Fire] effect which transforms an entire wind into a fire about as intense as a candle flame. Not very hot, but it can still set flammable things on fire for thousands of miles.

[Water]
Snowball (Comp 5) throws a snowball at someone, but it can also throw an iceball which is a subpar but meaningful weapon. A Cup of Wine (Comp 5) conjures some wine, but unlike in Ars, when non-permanent wine vanishes, it doesn't take the hangover with it, because a hangover is mostly dehydration anyway. Dry-Not is a [Sustain][Water] spell that prevents a person from 'running out of liquid,' protecting them from dehydration effects, and also from bleeding out, although they do keep bleeding, the spell just replenishes the loss.

The highest-complexity effect in [Water] is Sea of Grass, a Complexity 50 [Change][Water][Plant] spell that turns a body of water, such as an entire lake or river, into grass.

[Flesh]
Your Corpse is a Complexity 20 [Create][Flesh] spell that makes an exact copy of the target's body, only dead, lasting for a few days unless it was a permanent variant. Hijinks ensue.

There's a Complexity 5 nail-trimming spell, but also a level 10 brutal nail-trimming spell, used to temporarily declaw things. Vanish the Unwanted Child is a Complexity 20 abortion spell, which is unfortunately not voluntary-only.

Heal the Awful Wound [Heal][Flesh]20, is the easiest return-from-death spell, and has to be administered within a few seconds after death. It's a common bound spell for adventurers, set to be triggered by the death of the bearer, though I'd be amazed if anyone who could afford it didn't carry one of those just in case. The subject doesn't get away free, they get Trouble 6 which only goes away slowly over the course of days.

The Awful Doctor's Trick [Heal][[Flesh]20 is a temporary healing spell, which not only goes away 3 actions later, but also counts against healing spells stacking, preventing most any further magical healing.

[Flesh] in general has a bunch of sexual stuff in it, to the extent that the author appeal becomes fan disservice. The Ready Adulterer makes a person infertile for a few hours, that's pushing it. But the spells to induce and prevent orgasm (Wet Surprise and Long Delights) are going too far. I mean, ordinarily I'd look at The Rebel Arm, which gives the caster control of one of the subject's arms, and just be amused; but put next to the orgasm spells it suggests a whole other layer of potential that I don't want to think about.

Save The Severed Head is a great spell, [Sustain][Flesh]20, that keeps a severed head alive (and active) for a few days, though it's very uncomfortable and some sort of palliation is recommended until the head can be reattached. The Gift of Seven Years is a poetically named longevity spell, although the minimum gift is in fact eight years, and will probably be a few more; it's a non-stacking spell, so it's not for serious live-forever types, but it does make a nice present.

The highest complexity effect in [Flesh] is Body of Endless Iron, a [Sustain][Flesh]100 effect that makes the caster immune to basically all damage for ~20 actions.

[Earth]
Very little that's particularly interesting here, except that Create a Lump of <Metal> is Complexity 25 and really does produce only an ounce or so; an individual mage's output of metal/day is very unimpressive, although it is better than the approximately zero metal produced by mining. The highest complexity effect is the [Create][Control][Earth]50 Wall of Whirling Axes, which is a specifically limb-severing Blade Barrier.

[Plant]
Pepper Strike throws ground pepper in the target's eyes, and Felon's Yoke creates a stocks around the target, so [Plant] magic would seem to be a favorite of the law. The Infinite Grenade is a [Create][Destroy][Heal][Sustain][Plant] spell that creates a spiny coconut, explodes it, then heals it, then explodes it again, then heals it again, and so on, though the duration isn't actually infinite.

The highest complexity effects in [Plant] are 35, and not especially interesting.

[Illusion]
Absence of Blade makes a person look like they are fighting completely differently than they actually are. The benefits for this are pretty modest, which is... not what my experience of fighting would suggest. Swap Appearances does just what it sounds like and is hilarious. Confusion of the Perplexed Wizard dynamically makes illusions such that spells cast on the subject appear to succeed or fail inversely to reality. So if the subject resists a spell to turn them into a pigeon, it will create an illusion of them being turned into a pigeon; if they fail to resist and are turned into a pigeon, it will create an illusion that they are unaffected.

The highest complexity effect in [Illusion] is Mage's Ghost Walks at 40, which lets the caster send the image from her body somewhere else, and experience sensations as if they were at that location.

[Space]
Notable is that pocket universes are surprisingly easy to produce; it happens at Complexity 10. Apparently the default edge of a universe feels like the rind of an orange, and the default contents of a universe are air and dim lighting. It's only complexity 15 to create a pocket universe and cram yourself into it as a combat-speed defense, though it's not the best defense, since you'll probably miss the fight, and if the enemy wins, you pop back out and they're right there. Although, opening an arrow-slit between a pocket universe and the World Tree universe is also dead simple (Complexity 10), so you might not miss the fight after all. Teleporting feet is about Complexity 15. Teleporting miles is about Complexity 30.

The highest complexity effect in [Space] is the [Destroy][Space]1000 Destroy the Universe, which destroys the universe. The spell has probably not been invented because of the skill totals required, but 'the theory is clear enough.' The text recommends that any caster have defenses prepared against beings who survive the destruction of the universe and who may be angry about it.

The second highest complexity effect in [Space] is the [Heal][Space]800 Recreate The World, which restores a recently destroyed universe to existence.

[Magic]
The Useless Spell puts a spell with no effect on a person to confuse magic sense. Spell's Resurrection is a [Heal][Magic] spell that essentially recasts a recently dispelled spell. Forget the Spell is a [Destroy][Magic]30 which causes a person to forget a spell they know, though the caster must name the spell specifically; very mean if well-researched, which it can be with Inquisitor of Spells, which lets the caster read the target's spell list.

The Loyal Servant Betrays lets the caster harvest, from a sapient spell, an arcane connection to the caster of that spell; really cool. Rewrite the Bound Spell's Orders changes the activation conditions on a bound spell; which can be very mean. This section has a lot of great metamagical effects, creative players will have a ball.

The highest complexity effect in [Magic] is the [Information][Destroy][Magic][Spirit]100 Dragon in the Magic Realm, which is a sentient magic elemental that counterspells... apparently all spells below about Power 60, everywhere. Mostly a high-level plot hook, since there's basically no way any player will ever get to cast this one.


I'll finish the rest later, this chapter's a bear, if entertaining. So, a dancing bear.
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Sorry about the gap, life's been pretty full lately. I haven't forgotten this.

[Mind]
A word or two about [mind] magic in general. It's considered evil in the prime society, because of the potential for abuse, to the extent that the sample doctor character has 'learning [Mind] magic' as a Dark Secret flaw, even though she mostly knows innocuous stuff like anesthetic spells. The god of [mind] magic is also considered evil, and in fact is a lot like the Doctor Doom of the setting, absolute ruler of a city where everyone lives in peace and harmony whether they like it or not, and publisher of hundreds of volumes of memoirs that are 1% secrets of the universe and 99% self-aggrandizing drivel. He seems to be playing a game where he can't use his godly powers directly outside of his city, but is trying to conquer the world tree by indirect manipulation through favor trading, which is not a bad plot hook source.

Fortunately, there are no specifically sexual [mind] spells. I guess the author's aren't into MC fetish.

Seeds of the Idea [Create][Information][Mind][Spirit]10 is basically Inception, planting an idea that the target will later have, and might think is their own. Also, Inception-related is Plant the Nightmare [Create][Mind]15, which causes the target's next sleep to contain a dream of the caster's design. New Memory [Create][Mind]15 is more Dark City, planting a memory in the target; it says that if the memory is not carefully consistent with the target's other memories, it may be suspected as false, which is fine, but any indication of an appropriate roll to determine that would be welcome.

[Destroy][Mind] effects include neuralizing people's memories away, but also a lot of protection against other [mind] effects. It's kind of unfortunate that the guy who can protect you from mind-reading is also the guy who can make you forget his criminal record and such. Apropos to the Den's interests, the spell Fetters of Faith [Destroy][Mind]20 temporarily destroys the target's critical reasoning facility, leaving them supremely gullible.

See the Traitor's Price [Information][Mind][10] determines what a person would consider an appropriate bribe, and there's a hilarious advanced version that adds [Create] to make them believe that they have received it.

The highest complexity effect in [Mind] is Retrieve the Soul's Memories [Imformation][Heal][Sustain][Mind][Spirit] 150, which causes the target to remember their past lives. I... forget where it was discussed, but World Tree explicitly runs on a reincarnation system. When a being is killed, its soul goes to the afterlife dimension of the creator God in charge of them to wait for reassignment to a new body. (These afterlife dimensions have been visited by high-power casters, and are described as half-assed creations, very uninteresting holding areas, closets that were never intended to be shown to people.) New souls are created all the time to accommodate the growing population, but anyone might have one or more past lives, though this usually matters very little because souls don't retain memories, and the effect that can restore those memories is so absurdly arbitrarily high-power that probably only the [Mind] God is likely to be able to use it.

[Fire]
[Fire] includes light, so in addition to all the various attack spells, light and darkness effects are also here. I have to say, they certainly do give people who want to watch the world burn a lot of cool options in addition to the usual single and area target effects. You want to be Pyro and have giant monsters made of fire eat your enemies? Lava Serpent, Angry Dragon, and Shining Salamander have your back.

There's actually only one [Heal][Fire] spell, which relights an extinguished fire. The sample [Information][Fire] spells are actually really cool, with Follow the Candle giving the caster knowledge of the relative location of a fire they touch at the start of the spell for the duration (a neat utility effect), and Tale of the Ashes allowing the caster to touch ashes and recieve a vision of everything that was illuminated by the burning of the pre-ashed object.

The highest complexity effect in [Fire] is the relatively boring Grand Inferno [Create][Fire]60, which is just a particularly big fire blast. Far more interesting and epic is the second-highest complexity spell, the hilariously compound Fur of Soaked Iron [Destroy][Sustain][Change][Create][Fire][Body][Water][Earth]40; the target's body is made as flame-resistant as iron, and floods of water wash over any fire that comes near them, and they are surrounded by a directly flame-retardant aura. It seriously reads like some hyperbolically mythic effect out of Dominions 4.

[Spirit]
[Spirit] is mostly used in conjunction with other spells to make them 'mindful,' and it shows, because the [Spirit] section is seriously one page. The only [Create][Spirit] sample spell gives a mind to a spell that could have a version with a mind (which is most of them) and can lead to some truly hilarious hijinks when shit like fireballs suddenly become capable of judgement.
Image
Most of the rest of them involve messing with the mindfulness of spells: removing mindfulness so a spell that was capable of judgement now isn't (good times), or confusing or 'mind'-controlling them.

Those spells that aren't mindful-spell-related are straight-up matters of life-and death. For instance, Spirit Tether anchors a just-killed soul to its body, making some resurrection spells easier and relaxing the time limit on others. Very useful, though I honestly feel like some other effects in the same vein might have been warranted.

The highest complexity spell in [Spirit] is Shatter the Triune Being [Destroy][Control][Spirit][Body][Mind]40, which is a death spell that directly separates the soul, mind, and body from each other, rendering the target not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.

[Time]
One of the (many) big problems of the [Time] magic is that it's interacting with the crazy initiative system and its fucked action economy. The basic effect is demonstrated in Quick Instant [Create][Time]10, which makes the target draw an extra intiative, and the inverse Lose Your Chance [Destroy][Time]10, which causes the target to lose their next action. Now, the basic idea of a caster spending an action to grant or cost another person an action is fairly sound, although these are available as Bound spells, which means that characters can use money to get a certain number of extra actions per adventure (not huge, but significant).

But then you get shit that starts granting better economy. Faster Than Time [Create][Change][Time]20 grants an extra initiative of the best-possible draw (one value higher than the target's last initiative), which can set up truly absurd action chains. It's only mitigator is that it can only affect a given target d6 times per day, which is a really annoying bit of bookkeeping. Dance of the Thrice-Great Orren [Create][Time]40, grants three extra initiative draws, and will only work on a given target 2d6 times per day. Again with the nutso power and annoying-as-hell restriction.

The retcon spells begin fairly reasonable, with a spell that lets the caster change one word they used in a sentence up to d8 seconds ago, and memories of the prior course of things become hazy what-if imaginings. That works pretty well, except of course that a lot of bound spells trigger on command words, so if you revise your sentence to 'How abracadabra to meet you,' suddenly we're in the realm of some seriously retconned activity. There's some decent stuff with re-rolls, but when you get to Make It Not So! [Change][Time]50, which rewinds the last 20 seconds for a do-over, well, that could seriously be a whole combat, and nobody remembers all the details of what's changed, and then the entire game collapses.

Don't even get me started on the spell that throws the target a hundred years into the past, because I don't even what that could mean. Is the current timeline butterfly-effected out of existence? Did that guy's meddling with the past already always happen and therefore nothing changes? There's no model for resolving any of the time travel shenanigans that question raises. I can only assume that only divine intervention keeps the world tree from being caught up in some crazy wizard time war.

There's the skeleton of a reasonable time magic set-up here. Haste effects, slow effects, and re-rolls are all workable. Even the thing where you throw a person a short time into the future as a kind of strange-flavor Hold Person is fine. But the writers did not have anything like the discipline that was needed, and instead we have effects that shatter the already-broken initiative system, end the setting, and collapse the campaign.

The highest complexity effect in [Time] is Dawn at Mid-Afternoon [Create][Time]800, which creates an instant of dawn at the moment of casting, which mostly just refills people's spell points and ends certain spell durations. The only thing really impressive about the spell is that is affects the entire World Tree, which is a crazy-large area of effect. It's said that this spell has actually been cast once, by using up a big pile of Graces, but I'm pretty sure that misreads how Graces work.


Next up: Bestiary and Herbal.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

(note: I typed this up once before and some vagary of the board swallowed it, so if I seem short of patience, that's why.)

Chapter 13: Bestiary and Herbal

We skipped Chapter 12, because that's the Advantages & Disadvantages section (puzzlingly distant from the chargen chapter) and since I already showcased the ones that entertained me the most, I see no reason to look at it again. So instead we're on to the monsters chapter, and this is pretty exciting, because if the PC races are normal what must the weird stuff look like?

But before I get to the amusing flavor, we have to face the dreadful mechanics. The stat blocks in this section are fucking terrible. Like, sub-AD&D Monster Manual in usefulness. There are exactly eight numbers in a block: Hit points, magic points, attack bonus, defense bonus, soak, damage, combat stance value, and magic resistance. So immediately we're in 'making shit up' territory as soon as someone tries to sneak past one of these beings (or vice versa) because they don't have any stealth or perception numbers. And of course, there are a bunch of useful things that an AD&D statblock told you that these don't. Things like number appearing, treasure type, and fucking movement speed.

And it's not like it's a holdover from Ars Magica 4e, which had many (many) problems, but scanty statblocks wasn't one of them. I literally just plucked a random AM4 book of the store shelf and opened it to a random page, and it was page one of a three page write-up of some magus. So there's no excuse at all for this lazy bullshit.


Common Animals
Already I'm disappointed, because these are mostly very close to ordinary earth animals; the implication is that you can slap some minor change on a normal animal and drop it on the tree.

Blossomaries are weasels with flowers instead of fur. Enstarbas are fireproof woodchuck/rabbits who use perpetually burning terrain as shelter from predators. Guntries are sheep with six legs. Pockers are chickens. Wudgeons are swans. Horses...
There are nine unrelated genera of animal that we call "horse", used for riding or pack-beasts. Two are commonly judged suitable for combat. Chargers are brave, quick, beaked and feathered, and can be vicious with their claws. Heavy horses have plates of bone under their skin; they are quite tough, but cannot be made to hurry. The others are of more economic value: pack horses have a distinct flavor of hippopotamus and they make heavy horses look fast, but they can carry a great deal.

Civilized Nonprimes
Okay, this is more like it. Ahigrane are pigeon-sized fox-headed birds with ten limbs: 2 wings, 2 hands, 2 stinger tentacles, and four bird feet. Sapient despite their size, and sociable, they seem to have little actual civilization, and are treated like pests. 'Prime cities have strict laws keeping them out.' They have half-a-dozen Arts at birth and can pick up all the rest through priests.

Akkamagga are six-legged lizards who live in the same agricultural village structure as Herethroy, and often compete with them. In their short write-up, they get more cultural description than half the prime species put together. In some places they get all the same rights and status as Herethroy, in others they get the 19th-Century Native American treatment. 'Akkamagga villages are rich enough to be worth adventurers' time clearing,' which contributes to their mistreatment. No word on what Arts they get, but they do have crazy high Magic Resistance, in the 30-60 range.

Blee are large dogs with four four-jointed arms added; each arm also has an eyestalk and a tasting-tendril. They get all Verbs and [magic] at birth, but they can only get more noun access by 'striking the death-blow' on a prime (or a couple of nonprimes, including Cyarr). They can live happily among primes, but are often treated unfairly, if only because they always have a motive for murder.

Cyarr are 'hyena-centaurs,' which apparently means an anthro-hyena from the waist up replacing the neck and head on a larger than usual hyena. Hierarchical, militaristic, fiercely honorable, controlling large territories that war and trade with the primes. They all have 'Three Snaps,' three minor spells they can cast with a snap of their fingers and without spending magic points, usually defensive effects. They get seven Arts at birth and can gain all except [Heal], [Sustain], [Time], and [Earth], and the first and last of those are real downers for them.

Gornazzits are big furry slugs that can climb on anything, including air, and remember all their past lives. They seem to be harmless herbivores, since they have no offensive stats at all, and their magic is focused on defense and escape.

Greft are telepathic two-headed anthro-rats, and one of the heads is made out of seashells. They get zero Arts at birth, but can get all of them through priests, and unusually easily. Harmless or friendly, they 'are as welcome in prime territory as any nonprimes are.' They also have a singularly useless statblock; literally every entry is either 'varies' or 'by equipment.'

Mherobump are big anthro-rhinos who frequently crave hard labor, and can often be found building stone circles or diverting rivers for no reason other than their strange addiction. They can't learn spells of Complexity 15+, and are 'allowed freely in prime cities.'

Nendrai are 'huge, unfairly quick, deviously intelligent, magically gifted, ironically cruel.' Anthro-lizards bigger than rhinos with magic tails that let them improvise [Change] spells of Complexity ~40 and Power ~80 without spending spell points, which makes them really badass. They usually live like mob bosses, leveraging their power in reasonable or unreasonable ways, and are basically boss monsters. The only nonprime who is overpowered rather than underpowered if you get to play one.

Scawn are basically Warhammer Skaven; halfling-sized anthro-rats who can change a couple of their features in their lifetime, gaining horns, or stinger-tails, or other Chaos-mutation-type things. No word on their Arts.

Taptet are halfling-sized anthro-deer who prefer to live in their own communities inside other people's countries; more often they are enserfed. No word on their Arts, but a few have the species-unique talent to make powerful potions with unpredictable side-effects.

Ulgrane are pony-sized birds with ten limbs: two wings, two venomous starfish, two paws, and four bird-of-prey talons. They live in small groups and live like sky-vikings. They seem to be strong in [Air] and [Water].

Wherriwhiffle are ten-foot long eight-legged non-anthro ferrets, and a good three-quarters of their write-up are personality description which could be replaced with 'very annoying' and lose little in the process, or just 'Tigger' and lose nothing. I have no idea how they get anything done.


Okay, the rest later.
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Post by Username17 »

Honestly, these creatures seem to lack... something. I understand that in myth, a lot of creatures are just bizarre chimeric mishmashes. But while this is insane, it has a certain style:

Image
Cherubim. Yes. Really.

Image
Manticore. Human face, shark teeth, lion body, and a porcupine for a tail.

Reading through your description of these beasts, they seem more like spitball proposals for zany chimeric beasts than actual mythological stuff. This actually seems worse than the Runequest Bestiary, which is both bogus and sad.

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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I submit that if you expect things that a person brainstormed up while on too much/little medication in 1999 to have the same kind of resonance as those things that survived centuries of the mythic culling process, you have set the bar too high. There are a lot of mythic creatures that get no press because they are extremely lame, like the Celtic Andemiloi: an earless green boar. The Manticore is awesome, but how many other things John Mandeville made up got into the Monster Manual? Monopods and Vegetable Lambs are not A-class material.

I admit that nothing in this book gets much past the level of the Wolpertinger, and that they could certainly have done better if they made any effort to incorporate symbolism at all. But the goal seems to have been to get away from human myth stock and have things that were new and strange to roleplayers.

Monsters and Dangerous Animals
Technically, in-setting, everything which isn't a prime is a monster. Nonprime is just the polite term for monsters you can negotiate with. There's a very primitive in-setting CR rating, with creatures getting rated at X warriors, where X is the number needed to safely dispose of them.

Bonstables are shapeshifting pathological liars who run escalating Bugs Bunny scams until they ruin entire cities and run off with bags of holding full of the proceeds. Not a physical threat, but a decent basis for a detective adventure.

Churshash are long-tailed ant-antennaed bears with bleeding faces and a double-row of envenomed spines down their chests; very bad-tempered. The touch of their blood induces brief intense rage at the victim's friends. Rated at four warriors, if they have some way to deal with the blood.

Helletumugs are a lot like immobile fungus beholders, except without the antimagic eye and with longer-than-bowshot range on their rays. Fifteen warriors and five healers.

Jack-O'-Hooks are masses of hooked tendrils that brachiate around the Verticals. Visually interesting, but mechanically just a big pile of attacks and hit points. A dozen warriors.

Jaran-jabows are three-headed horse-sized birds with comically small wings that fly them around anyway. The middle head is the eating head, the others are fighting heads, throwing off fire that consumes flesh and defensive spells alike. Sapient, but live in small family groups without technology. They seem to have a strange compulsion to hunt primes against their better judgement; presumably because their jerk creator god just wanted a species of serial killers. Three warriors in a fight to the death, but usually flee as soon as they are wounded or even just lose the element of surprise.

Krango are two-headed tigers, and the heads take turns sleeping. Two warriors.

Mewellicaps are six-foot-long, ten-foot-wide sky rays, and were supposed to be monster-partners for the Khtsoyis, back before the fuck-up god got anxious about his homework and just scribbled 'prime' on a different assignment entirely and handed it in. So the Mewellicaps have a strange affection for the floating heptapuses, and the two have complementary abilities, like the rays can actually fly at speed and were supposed to tow the Khtsoyis around. They also have complementary comedy personalities, with the Khtsoyis being comfortably crude, and the Mewellicaps trying awkwardly to be elegant. Mewellicaps are kind of badly hamstrung without their bros, who got the manipulator limbs in the deal, and so are reduced to living like beasts. 1.5 warriors.

Nrex are nine-foot long centipedes made of glowing green glass, and count as [earth] instead of [flesh]. About as intelligent and hostile as the xenomorphs from Aliens, they have a few magical tricks (short range teleport, conjure golden restraints, little pink lightning bolts) that make them more than just biters, and a few of them have extra juju on top of that.

Perdithornes are lynxes, half of which is invisible except for the bones, and which half that is flickers back and forth. They are pretty new creations, only slightly younger than spellbinding, which they were created to counter the use of. They make friends with other monsters, carry a few bound spells, and can dispel bound spells with their gaze.

Remorshkas are car-to-truck sized crabs with tiger legs and a tiger tail with a ball of fire on the end. Uncomplicated animal-intelligence marauders rated at eight warriors.

River-Gunch are semi-intelligent spiny hippo-bears who go apeshit if their spines are damaged.

Rongons are wild boars who are angered by the smell of primes and their only magic is a short range 'conjure hempen rope binding' effect. One warrior.

Slunders are seven-foot long venomous snakes. Nothing special or weird at all.

Zonn are basically the grasshoppers from A Bug's Life if normal people were ant-sized. Cattle-sized semi-intelligent locusts that show up in small swarms, break all your nice things, and eat all your food; and breaking and eating a few people is common as well. They use chemical warfare, spraying a stinking brown liquid on everything they don't steal, exuding a confusion gas from their skin, and inventing magical fog weapons. Two warriors each.


Elementals
This section has no statblocks at all, and it is not clear why it is different from the previous setting infodump on elementals. Elementals can basically be as physically big or as small as you want, and their powers are basically effects from the spell list for their noun, so they are very much build-your-own creatures. But a few examples might have been nice.

Mechanical examples, I mean. They have two flavor examples. Crashka is a forty-yard long pretty dumb fire serpent in charge of the rate of things burning on a branch segment. Its words burn, and the sample encounter is trying to get info out of the stupid thing without being too badly hurt. Cursed Direction is a [Space] elemental who is so terrible that a mind-wizard who read CD's mind went on to alter a flock of ducks to be carnivorous and spend each morning slicing bits off herself to feed to the ducks, just to keep from thinking about what she learned from CD. No actual indication of what CD might be capable of, but apparently it is very bad in completely vague ways.


Other Gods

The Great and Pleasant God Snadza is a minor god visiting from outside the treeverse. It runs an insular authoritarian cult, based around the idea that if you join the cult and are found worthy, you will spend your afterlife in Snadza's Great and Pleasant Paradise, a modest-sized pocket dimension attached to the underside of a particular branch. 'One demonstrates one's worthiness primarily by gifts of cley and money to the church, usually paid during drugged orgiastic celebrations.'

A wizard managed to visit the Paradise, and found it to be a vast wasteland of termite-infested dusty corridors, with only twenty-eight inhabitants who alternated complaining about 'certain gross inaccuracies in the Snadzanist doctrine' and holding termite races. Despite the wizard's report, the cult lost little of its popularity.

The Vospoleth is a refugee from another universe, having been driven out by its peers there. A thousand years ago it possessed a Cani matriarch and double-evil-mind-controlled every Cani who was loyal to her into building weird Kirby monoliths for nobody-knows-why. Refugees from this reign of weird terror told the [Fire] god, who burned the Vospoleth and all her thralls to death. A couple of hundred years ago, the Vospoleth returned, possessed the reincarnation of the Cani matriarch, and started its shenanigans again. An expedition was sent to tell the [Fire] god, who killed the Vospoleth four hundred and eighty further times, then gave one group of primes a quest to make sure that the relevant soul would not be reincarnated, and another group of primes a quest to clean up the aftermath.

It's mentioned later that one of their playtest campaigns was based around paranoia that the Vospoleth had returned again. It turned out to be a much more reasonably-scaled mind-controlling caster, but the possibility of having to deal with the god apparently made for great tension.


Herbal
There are a bunch of magic herbs, and they are difficult to cultivate because they mostly result from low-frequency conjunctions of wild magic. I'm omitting a few that are basically mundane and listed here anyway.

Axacanthus is an orchid with fire magic - throw it into a fire to make it burn twice as hot and long as usual, snort the pollen for a power boost to a fire spell; though overuse will sap your natural fire magic.

Cley Apples grow at random on any plant, and if you eat the entire thing you get d6 magic points. Closest thing to a mana potion.

Grabrell Weed inhibits the magic sense, and so can be used to camouflage magic effects.

Healing Herbs are any of a thousand species that can heal a little damage cumulative with healing spells, though it's dangerous (in a completely unspecified way) to take too many in a short period.

Pycorns are the spiny nuts of the Pycorn tree, and a very few of them harvested on the first day of spring each year will manifest a spiky blue gem that will restore youth to the bearer until it crumbles on the last day of winter.

Ulumbo is a plant with a very high magic resistance (20-40) prized by people who don't care to have their houseplants turned against them by magic.

Wenezza is a date-rape drug dressed up in obfuscating language. Not classy, guys.


Next up: Gamemastering World Tree
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Chapter 14: Gamemastering World Tree

So, this chapter. It is all over the scale in terms of quality. Some of it is bad, some of it is meh, some of it is par. And some of it... is really good. Seriously, some of the best articulations of the challenges of the GM role and how to meet them I have ever seen anywhere. When those come up, I'm going to boxquote them so they stand out more.

Character Creation
This section opens with a quote that is almost boxworthy: 'Gamemastering character creation is walking on a narrow edge. On the one hand, you don't want to stifle your players' creativity, or keep them from playing something that they desperately want to play. On the other hand, you need to keep true to the spirit of your campaign, and to prevent mistakes, abuses, and imbalances that will keep your player from having fun.' It loses points for implying the GMs possession of the campaign (and the player!), and for not acknowledging that what some people want is disruptive or contradictory. But the acknowledgement that the GM is a participant in chargen, of the conflict between individual vision and group consensus, of the reason behind mechanical concerns being 'fun,' that's all great stuff.

Artistic Vision: Theirs and Yours
Buried in some bland run-of-the-mill musing on character concepts are a few rough gems: 1) If a player is fascinated by something, do your best to facilitate it; 2) Don't be a slave to plausibility: most Sleeth live like werewolves on the outskirts of society, but there's no reason a PC can't be the first Sleeth to graduate from a university; 3) The will of the many prevails: if the players were sold on a 'best and brightest' game, 'slacker musician' is a disruptive concept that should be reworked or abandoned.

Game Balance
Some players take great joy in finding loopholes in the rules that let them be overly powerful. An easy part of your job is to catch the abuses. A hard part is to correct the abuses without making any players (especially the abuser) unhappy.
There are a couple of follow-up examples, one with a seriously min-maxed player, hilariously deficient at tasks they will never attempt; another a more gently min-maxed character, who makes at least a token investment in their deficient area.
The converse of preventing abuse is making sure that the characters are powerful enough.
There are legions of games that ignore this side of things. The examples that follow are a guy who over-invested in dance as a characterization thing who was given a discount on a dance-enhancing advantage that was costed assuming it would be taken on a life-or-death skill, and a guy who made his character so comedically clumsy as to be effectively useless at ordinary adventuring activities.


Moments in Play
Rules Issues
There's some ordinary stuff about how the rules can't be comprehensive, so feel free to improvise as long as you aren't capricious or biased, followed by:
There are some situations where you ought to follow the rules carefully - not just because they're good rules, but because the players are counting on you to be impartial. Any time a character might die permanently or be evicted from the campaign, make sure that the player can do anything that the rules allow, and knows that you are not sending him unfairly to death.
There's an unfortunate parenthetical about how if you need to manipulate such a situation's outcome, do so in a way that the player's can't see, which undermines the above excellent sentiment, even if it isn't exactly bad advice.

Then there's this amazing paragraph:
Some players are rule lawyers. They know the rules better than you do, and use every sentence to their advantage. It's dreadfully annoying. Unfortunately, they have a good point. The rules (as written, or as you have modified them) are all they have to go on. If the rules aren't solid, then all your players are lost and have every right to be upset with you.
Holy shit, right? The number of RPGs that would be improved by outright telling the GM that they are going to be rules-lawyered, and they are not going to like it, but the lawyer is right because social contract, is really close to all of them.

Unfortunately, the follow-up paragraph is a total let-down, all about not letting the rule lawyers wreck your game (because the game is the property of the GM), and maybe letting them have their way once before editing the rules. Or not, GM-as-monarch-style.

The rest of this section's subsections are about a few tricky bits of the rules, and a lot of them are about dealing with the insano initiative system and how frustrating it can be for players. It's not surprising that the system's foibles came up in playtesting, it's just surprising that they didn't do anything about it.

World View
This has several sub-sections about how to maintain the flavor of the setting, like remembering that most of the population is just four species, that magic is common and won't amaze peasants, that there's basically no stone, etc.


Campaign Issues
A few minor notes on pegging rate of xp gain (useful, if standard) to expected campaign length and handling PCs learning new spells (meh).


Designing Stories
Setting
Four paragraphs that boil down to 'include plot hooks in your setting write-up; look at the ones in our sample city to see how we did it.'

Power Balance
Starts with an acknowledgement that the PCs are more powerful than most people around, but not all people around, and goes on to address the Elminster problem.
You have to design your stories so that (1) they interest the player-characters, and (2) they don't interest too many other people. If you threaten a city, the whole city will respond - the player-characters who live there, but also the sorcerers in the academies, the the city guard, nobles and their private guards, the healers and tree-mages and smiths - a veritable army of skilled and powerful people. If you're not extremely clever, the player-characters will get lost in the crowd. That's completely appropriate for World Tree, but will make a lousy evening of gaming.
It follows up with a couple of examples of putting the PCs center-stage even in a crowd. One is the PCs at a Cani party in a big house, who walk in on an assassination attempt - the PCs who are right there count for a lot more than the badasses who could show up too late. The other is the PCs attending the wedding of the Cani they saved, with two whole clans in attendance, all of whom are incapacitated by the Cani-specific spells used by the attackers, and by the time those wear off, the PCs have established dominance in the situation and even the Cani heads-of-house are deferring to them, offering the PCs the opportunity to direct some real bigwigs around for a while.


Running Monsters
Mostly distinguishes between reasoning and unreasoning opposition, and encourages the GM to put themselves in the shoes of the reasoning opposition, to fight only reluctantly and after negotiation, to flee or surrender if things are going against them, etc.


Gods in Play
Gods are not easy to gamemaster. It's very tempting to run some amazing world-shaking story with the gods all over it. Unfortunately it's very hard to get those stories to be fun for your players.
Ancient awesome wizards are then put in the same basket as gods, and there is a note that it's possible to use these beings well, but it's hard and you should think twice about trying.


Artifacts
A note I happen to love is that a lot of the ancient historical magic items are hilariously obsolete at this point, because magic has come a long way since the dawn of time. The ancient swords of legendary kings tend to have more value as antiquities than as weapons. There are a few ancient items of great power, mostly because the gods made a lot more stuff back in the day; and there are also items that you can't get any more because they used techniques that have since been found to be hideously unsafe and abandoned.


Extraplanar Visitations and Other Horrors
A reminder that there is crazy shit from outside the universe, but given how much crazy shit there is from inside the universe, extraplanar things have some sharply limited valid uses, like suggesting that someone is abusing teleport gate technology, or a problem that elementals may need help with.


Playing Nonprimes
I covered this earlier: you can, it sucks.


On the Art of Gamemastery
The Prime Directive
Ultimately, you are a performer. Your success or failure is entirely in how you and your players, who are your audience, enjoy your game. If your players enjoy it, they'll be back for more. If they hate it, they won't be. All other considerations are secondary.

The following things encourage your players to have a good time in the long run:
Fairness: Your players are more comfortable if they know that the deck isn't stacked against them - or too blatantly in their favor.
Control: Your players should feel that they have a great deal of control of their destiny.
Action: Your players should feel that they've had the chance to do something.
Drama: Your players should feel that they've been characters in a good story.

So, know your players and their characters. Design your game with them in mind.
The above loses a couple points for referring to the players as 'your audience' instead of 'your co-authors and audience,' but not enough points to keep it out of the box.

Style of Game
Brief notes on how to run certain kinds and themes of games. Growth, Mystery, Adventure, Humor. Hilariously, they have a Punk/Gothic section, which they mention is not well-supported by the generally optimistic tone, but you can find unpleasant material with a little effort. Also, the section on Munchkin-style: 'There's a stereotype that clueless teenagers do this and older gamers outgrow it. Still, beating up gods is sometimes fun. If you play this way, you might want to keep it a secret, but that shouldn't stop your fun.'

Fairness
A reiteration of the great value of impartiality and also the seeming of impartiality.
Keep a mental record of who's gotten goodies recently. If someone's getting too few, make sure that a few show up for them. Taking goodies away from people who've had too many is a distinctly worse choice; it makes the person who lost things feel that life is unfair, and the people who never got anything are no happier either.
Gamemaster's Lovers and Friends
"You know it's gonna be a bad game when the GM's girlfriend sits in his lap while she's rolling up her character."
Notes on being especially careful when you are running a game for your significant other (or simply a good friend relative to lesser-known acquaintances), who will often have an edge just in reading your responses and persuading you quite apart from any conscious or unconscious edge you give them. Not phrased well enough to get a box, but really good as a frank handling of a subject that comes up a lot in relation to how often it's addressed in print.

Running Tense Scenes
Some notes on keeping things moving, particularly when there are natural dramatic peaks. One piece of especially poor advice is taking actions away from players who ask a lot of questions in time-pressure scenes. Yeah, pacing, but also very unfair.

Gamemaster Cheating
A couple of paragraphs on when to cheat, and how, and when cheating is pointless.

Planning a Game
On one horn, you have to plan games tightly. You are taking responsibility for entertaining people. If you don't plan things carefully, you run the risk of tripping up and doing boring or useless things all evening, alienating your players, and generally making everyone unhappy.

On the other horn, you have to plan games loosely. There's no way to predict what the players will do - certainly not in a given situation, and not always what they'll do in the long term.

So you absolutely must do it both ways.
That's followed by some brief but solid advice for doing just that.

Tricks and Traps
Basically a rejection of Grimtooth, laying out the in-setting and out-of-setting reasons why traps should be rare, plausible, and mostly nonlethal. Very refreshing.

Surprises by Your Players
A nice passage that conveys an anti-railroading sentiment, that the players will take the game in unexpected directions, and that's kind of the entire point.

Gamemaster Mistakes
A couple of common mistakes and how to address them. Letting players retcon their build if it was based on a misunderstanding, and dealing with treasure that turned out to be overly powerful (including 'deal with the new balance,' if it's not actually campaign-shattering).

Other Stuff
There's a pile of other subsections on when and when not to roll, how to round fractions, the usefulness of descriptive details, dice-light and dice-heavy scenes, and how you should (almost) never retcon your mistakes, but make it up to the wronged parties later.


That's all the real gold. What's left are campaign seeds and a few miscellaneous things, and I'll get to those next post.
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tussock
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Post by tussock »

@Rules Lawyers, nice sentiment.

But I notice a lot of that is where they point out some of the terrible flaws in their own chargen or costs or rules in general, like they noticed a lot of them, but then didn't bother to fix them because the GM is God.

Which is where the rules lawyer thing falls down. Because you're told repeatedly that the rules are stupid and need fixed (2nd edition AD&D spent an entire book and a half telling the DM the same thing, so, it's not new) and then when someone points out what the rules say they tell the GM not to be upset and just "fix" the rules again. Maybe let the player use that thing they found once if you're nice.


Which is just, fix your fucking game already. Because that's bullshit. This is why RPGs just aren't all that popular.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Campaign Settings
Despite the name, these are only two or three paragraphs each, so they really are more seeds than settings.

Ymarku, the City of Obelisks is ruled by seven cruel and tyrannical wizards, who only appear in public behind illusions (that anyone knows of), and something has recently set them at each other's throats. PCs can be in a resistance movement, or in the faction of a wizard if you want a Black Company vibe.

Trehani is a typical city, two branch layers down from the top, whose neighbor has just been annexed by an up-and-coming empire, and Trehani is clearly next. The empire is not the worst empire ever, but it is still plenty bad, relegating non-Cani to second-class citizens (at best). 'The Empire also charges very high taxes – especially for "special services," such as having the Empire conquer your city-state, or having your son impaled for treason.' PCs are agents of the city, holding back the conquest.

Semt is ninety branch layers down, the sun only visible twice a year, its branches wrapped in perpetual ice. A single kingdom ruled and inhabited by half a dozen species not mentioned anywhere else. PCs are the descendents of a university expedition whose airship crashed here two hundred years ago, and whose access to Arts that none of the locals have made them valuable, first as allies, eventually as slaves. So the PCs will probably struggle to escape (or conquer), finding belief in the better place their parents taught them about, and rediscovering the ruins of the airship.

Lekkmark is the other side of Trehani, a city ready for independence from its parent state. PCs can be agents for the revolution, or working for the other side, trying to keep it in the fold.

Ruskeia is an almost-unexplored world-branch that promises to be extremely rich. A land rush has begun, and all the usual colonial content is available, in World Tree flavor. 'Politically correct players could take this as a chance to tell a story like the colonization of America done right, paying attention to the rights and needs of the natives. Of course, most primes will think that the characters are crazy: the world was set up for the primes to take control.' (Content like that is part of why I think the racial stuff is just handled badly rather than meant badly.)

Novaerum is a succession crisis story, with the PCs supporting one of the claimants or just trying to seize power in the chaos.

Tancrane is a fringe territory recently conquered by adventurers, but those people are dying of old age, and without the force of will and personal power that held their little empire together, it is fracturing. The PCs are the nominal heirs of the conquerors, and have to handle the situation – either keeping the place together, or maybe just helping it fall apart into a stable, peaceful condition.

Ob Murend is more Wild West than Ruskeia, a frontier territory which has recently revealed some very rare and valuable copper resources. Interestingly, the first suggested role for PCs is not fortune-hunters, but as established homesteaders fending off rapacious prospectors. Also there's a strange being claiming to be a prophet of the [Control] god forming a cult that preaches (among other things) the blood sacrifice of primes.

Eamaranth is a really lazy seed. It's a slowly-expanding frontier territory, and now it's expanding again. That's seriously all you get, there's no unusual situation or hint of what the challenges might be.

The Order of the Tholos isn't really a seed at all, but a setting element. A cult to the gods most commonly seen as evil, like the [Destruction], [Location], and [Mind] gods. They engage in unethical magical research, and viciously go after anyone who opposes them. They are recommended as either classic bad guy casters, or as the questionable source of questionable magics that aren't available from reputable sources.

Scorux is a perpetually misty valley with shinies in it, and something called a zem-zem that hunts those who enter. It's more of a single encounter than a campaign seed, though I guess you could do something with it.

What's strange to me is how many of these seeds put the PCs dead-center in political positions, rather than as classic fortune-hunter or trouble-shooter adventurer fodder. Not that I object to a political game, but the mechanics are so focused on casting and fighting, and so little on negotiating or factional maneuvering, it seems like a weird choice. Early on, the whole 'adventurer' vibe is people who go off into the dangerous wilderness to find shinies for various reasons, and very few of these seeds support that.


Gamemaster Tools
Botch Tables are a bunch of d20 botch tables for various circumstances (different kinds of casting, attack and defense) that also serve as more detailed guidelines for what botches of various levels should be like. Pretty useful in a limited way.

NPC Guidelines are some minimal but useful numbers for various kinds of NPCs.

And that's the last chapter. But because it's short, I'll do the appendices as well.


Appendix 1: Character Creation Worksheet
A four-page sheet to help you get through character creation, followed by a four-page character sheet, though to be fair, the character sheet includes a fairly complete treatment of the many many combat options, which is very useful.

Some Common Enchanted Items
Some basic enchanted weapons, bags of holding, and some miscellaneous things, my favorite of which is the Endless Cheese, a continually-regenerating round of cheese which actually costs about as much as a bulk-discounted lifetime supply of cheese and is an excellent investment for an otherwise poor family.

Good Spells to Know
Lists of 5 and 10 complexity spells that are particularly useful for adventurers, and easy to either learn or improvise. A super-good chargen resource that probably should have been in the chargen section. Also a list of similarly-useful bound spells and their effects and market costs, which probably should have been in the equipment section.


And that's the book. Final thoughts to follow, maybe also some more art scans.
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I always remember this book as having a pile of amateur-quality art, with a few better pieces, which isn't fair, because the poor art is actually in a solid minority. It just stands out because it doesn't work. The lesson is that bad art will overwhelm good art in people's perceptions.
Image
Clean lines, but no depth or feeling. Decent amateur.
Image
This guy's art isn't clean, and doesn't have depth, but it's always evocative. Decent amateur.
Image
Clean, depth, but everyone seems sleepy, which I don't think is intentional.
Image
Air boats are supposed to be a big deal in the setting, but they don't get a lot of attention in the text.
Image
This is more like it.
Image
This guy's stuff is always dripping with chaarcter.
Image
I love this piece. Full plate on top of carapace? Greatsword and tower shield at the same time? Maximum unfairness.
Image
Anyway, this book is a total heartbreaker. The amount of imagination and effort that went into the setting is spectacular. And the world-building that goes on throughout the book is really impressive. The sheer variety of things they explore is great; law codes, creation myths, execution records, motherly advice, even a complete grade-school essay. And that's just the stuff I've mentioned in the review, there's a lot more. It's big, bold, different, and even fairly deep. Not flawless by any means, but awesome.

And yet the actual game is a total clusterfuck. Everything that's even halfways reasonable is cluttered up with crap. I don't think I'd even try to play it. You'd have to convert the thing wholesale to Ars Magica 5th or something.

I do have a tickle in my brain about doing something inspired by the book. Strip out the furry elements and replace them with Niven-style aliens. Do a full deconstruction of fantastic racism and a more thorough treatment of a created world. Maybe a system that works at all. One of these years...
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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History »

This has been a fun review. Thanks, AFAP.
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