OSSR: Darksword Adventures

[angelfromanotherpin]

Aw yiss, it's the RPG that really looks like a mass market paperback novel, based on the Weis/Hickman duo's least successful fantasy IP. What could go right?

Weis & Hickman are of course best-known for their work on Dragonlance, which exploded in the mid-80s, causing the pair to become rockstars in the RPG world. The Darksword trilogy was their 1988 follow-up, and it was a dud. Despite containing a number of interesting ideas, it made no impact and left no impression. You see its narrative DNA in basically nothing that came afterward.

The First Page
The very first page of this book has a teaser, just like the paperback novel it resembles. The title is YOU ARE THE DEAD!, which is catchy, and it immediately launches into an intriguing, but utterly uninformative, in-character introduction to the book, which has the conceit of being an in-setting document. This is beautifully-illustrative of one of the book's fatal flaws: lack of clarity.

See, at the end of the Darksword trilogy, the magical land of Thimhallan is invaded by modern technological Earth. The conceit is that Darksword Adventures is written by a priest from Thimhallan as a way of informing people from Earth about his world and people to increase public sympathy for the conquered Thimhallanites. This is problematic, because it means all the setting text is in-character, and at no point is the premise laid out in plain terms.

Thimhallan is a world where (almost) everybody is a spell-casting magician, and technology is considered mysterious, frightening, and forbidden. The Thimhallan word for magic is Life, and those born without the talent for spells are considered to be 'Dead.' Although the world resembles a classic high-fantasy adventure setting, it is closer to a magical dystopia. While there are royalty and nobility who are superficially in charge, the world is actually ruled by an alliance between the church and the secret police, who ruthlessly quell all threats to their power.

It's perfectly okay for a novel to introduce its setting gradually and leave significant chunks as implied-only, but an RPG setting guide really needs to get concrete, especially when it comes to the fundamentals.

Acknowledgements
Among the people thanked are 'all the people who playtested our game: Peter Hildreth, and Mike and Kathy Luzzi.' Literally three people.

Contents
(Included so you know how much is left to go in this review.)
• Introduction
• Preface
• PART I – WILDRETH'S WANDARIUM
• PART II – ORACLE OF THE DEAD
• PART III – THE MYSTICAN
• PART IV – THE CHRONOCON
• PART V – PHANTASIA
• APPENDIX I – Major and Minor Characters
• APPENDIX II – ADAPTING TO OTHER GAME SYSTEMS

Introduction
Breaking character, the actual authors welcome the reader, talk about how the book is both a setting guide (for the few who wanted to know more about the world after reading the trilogy) and a complete role-playing game. It seems like they intended that the mass-market paperback format would be less intimidating and more accessible/affordable to new players than TSR's products. That obviously didn't work out, but I think it was worth the try.

Preface
The preface is a twee but actually rather charming 9-page story about how the fictional-author priest uses a role-playing game (augmented by the bored court illusionist) to edutain the ADD prince that he's tutoring. This exists chiefly to explain why the in-setting book has RPG rules in it. Alas, it does a poor job of communicating the connection between the make-believe and the rules, so compared to the usual 'what is an RPG' blurb, it is both inefficient and ineffective.

Next up: Wildreth's Wandarium

[angelfromanotherpin]

Wildreth's Wandarium
This majority of this section of the book is a 113 page novella, telling the story of one Petar Wildreth, who loses everything under suspicious circumstances and after many adventures, gets it all back. Along the way, he visits many of the more notable locations in Thimhallan and provides paid-by-the-word levels of detail about them. The most interesting thing about it is that it's clearly intended as a propaganda piece about how the church and the secret police are stern but ultimately benevolent – but reading between the lines, it's very easy to see that they arranged the whole thing to use Petar as a pawn to expose a cell of subversives, then set him up as a grateful person of influence for later use. It's surprisingly well-done in that regard. As an introduction to the world as a playable setting, it's only middling.

Weirdly, even though the story ends with its eleventh chapter, there are two more 'chapters' which are obviously not part of the story. The first is a chapter describing a few important places that Petar didn't get to, and this is written in a frank, plain, 3rd-person omniscient style, completely at odds with the faux-author conceit, containing information he almost certainly wouldn't have access to.

The last chapter is the monster manual, although the stat blocks don't mean much since we've seen no system material yet. There are a lot of classic beasts with small twists for the setting, and I'll go through some of the more interesting ones. I should mention that a large portion of these creatures owe their origin to being created by the magicians for warfare in the setting-defining grand conflict called the Iron Wars.
Basilisks are not limited to living targets when turning things to stone. They are engineered creatures, intended to help with construction projects. Attempts to employ them in war have ended badly because they're dumb and unpredictable in the use of their power.
Centaurs were people who volunteered in war to be altered in body and mind into killers, but after the war could not be turned back. They have formed true-breeding raider bands and hate ordinary humans.
Darkrovers were shaped from dogs for war. They resemble two-legged dogs, and have some magical powers varying by breed.
Dragons come in several varieties: Gold, Night, Sun, Sand, Sea, and Stone.
• The Dragons of Gold are the original model and also devoted pacifists, fighting only with blinding light and very sad songs that incapacitate the enemy.
• The Dragons of Night are creations loosely inspired by the Gold (after the Gold were too disgusted by war and withdrew), have an insanity gaze, a combination sleep/charm spell, and have a starfield in their wings that they can launch as burning motes. If exposed to sunlight, they become comatose and have a visible charm in their head, the touching of which makes the dragon 'loyal for life' to the toucher.
• The Dragons of the Sun are engineered counterparts to the Nights. They have a burning stare, a heat aura, and a combo charm/insomnia spell which seems just straight less-good than the Nights' sleep/charm. Their charm is only visible in darkness, which also paralyzes them with fear.
• The Dragons of Sand are basically small sandworms used to undermine fortifications and seem to have nothing in common with the others.
• The Dragons of the Sea are sea-serpent kinda-pacifists, in that they don't attack people directly. But they will swim into a harbor and cause the tide to rise until the city is flooded, or swim in such a way to cause a whirlpool to sink a ship.
• The Dragons of Stone are ridicubig, invulnerable, and absorb stone with a touch, devised as fort-breakers. They are also ridicustupid, barely aware of other beings, liable to tread on their friends, and controlling them is extremely taxing and short-lived. I suspect they are the result of some sort of Pentagon Wars boondoggle, because there was already a dragon for sieges without all the downsides of this one, and also conventional walls are only kind of relevant in magical wars anyway.
Dugruns are the orc-figures, shaped from apes for use as fodder in the wars.
Mindfog is a sapient cloud of poisonous gas that has the power to read your mind and make an illusion of your heart's desire appear in the center of the cloud.
There are no vanilla horses left in Thimhallan, all of them having been turned into other creatures in the wars. Unicorns are the most notable of such, being ferocious and having powerful battle magic in their horn, which can be severed and wielded by a human to significant effect.

Something that's confusing is that a lot of the creatures are described as having some particular tricks, but their statblock actually gives them much broader magical abilities. For instance, it looks like the Mindfog could do any of the telepathy and illusion magic effects, not just the very specific trick they are depicted using.

Next up: Oracle of the Dead

[JigokuBosatsu]

Oh lord. I remember loving this book in junior high, and I recall it being vastly better and more interesting than the dumbass Darksword series itself. So I am interested to see your commentary.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Oracle of the Dead
This section of the book is relatively short, being only 29 pages, and is entirely taken up with the fictional history of the setting. It's actually pretty okay. The whole thing where condescending wizards abandon the ignorant-and-violent muggles and journey to their own magical world with blackjack and hookers, only to discover that the ignorance and violence were inside them all along... I'd buy that for a dollar (and did).

I notice that the Council of Nine great wizards who come up with the plan is 77.77% white dudes, with only one woman (Circe) and one person of color (Chow-Li). I know it was probably ordinary 1988 lack-of-representation, but in 2019 it seems like a subtle dig that the authors of this doomed and arrogant experiment are mostly famous white men (Merlyn, Mannanan Mac Lir, Taliesin, Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, and Francis of Assisi are the others).

I can't be arsed to do a full close read to see if there are any particular problems. I will note that humans are on Thimhallan for ~830 years, and the council takes place 73 years before that, and William Shakespeare is on the council, so the muggles that invade them are at least late 25th-century, which explains all the lasers.

A small but appreciated touch is that while the big defining war of the setting took place almost 200 years before the 'present,' the Second Rectification that establishes the Church/Secret Police alliance and signature power structures of the novels takes place only 20-odd years before the present. Weis and Hickman have a tendency to write power structures that have been stable for hundreds of years, which is often difficult to swallow, so it's nice that they haven't done that here.

That was short, I'm going to roll right into...

---

The Mystican
This 'part' is divided into three 'chapters' each of which is, I shit you not, two pages long. And like half a page of each is the chapter title, which uses big font and a lot of whitespace. I have no idea why they were so desperate to pad this out. The chapters could just have been subheadings and it would still have been very short, but it would have been a lot less mockable.

The first part is a little discussion of what magic (Life) is, which is basically the Force. It also introduces some technical terms, and then lies to the reader. See, the text claims that while a wizard is particularly proficient in their own specialty, 'All those who enjoy Life in our world share in some part of all the Mysteries.' Even if they're leaving out the obvious exception (the catalysts) we will soon see that many of the casters have '–' listings in various magic skills and can not, in fact, attempt anything in those areas.

The second part talks about the use of magical energy as the medium of economic exchange. This makes some sense, everything is done with magic, so it's the ultimate in fungible assets. You want a flower, you give a conjurer the magical energy to make the flower, plus a profit margin of some sort, and so on. There are also coins minted by and redeemable with the church (for reasons that will become clear momentarily).

The third part talks about how you get magical energy, and there are three ways. First, everyone slowly accumulates magical energy naturally. This represents a sort of UBI, which would help explain the generally high standard of living in Thimhallan. Second, you can pass magic energy around, so someone can give you theirs. Third, you go to a priest.

See, the church is based around a specialist magician-type called a Catalyst. These people are magically feeble themselves, but have the unique ability to channel ambient magical energy from the world into other people. So because the money is based on magical energy, every catalyst can hand out huge piles of cash. (This is the source of the church's power.)

There's a lot of talk about catalysts charging for their services, which doesn't make a lot of sense on the surface because what would they charge you? They make the money, which is what they're giving you, and which they can't really use themselves. The book never makes it clear whether they ask for favors or something, but I have no idea what else they would want.

Anyway, there's a price list, and I want to compare it to the UBI and see what happens. An unremarkable civilian generates 240 quanta of magical energy per day, and I'm not going to use this book's stupid denominations for magicurrency, so I'm just calling them ¢.

The first thing I notice is that basic survival is very cheap. A (poor) meal is 5¢, and a substandard inn stay is 5-12¢/night. So if you're willing to live on the equivalent of ramen and government cheese while staying in a flophouse, you can just do that indefinitely. And you'll still have like 90% of your daily allowance left over to try to improve your situation. You can get a basic set of clothes for like 165¢.

The second thing I notice is that non-basic survival is disproportionately expensive. A (good) meal is 100¢. (There is also 'travel food' you can get for 100¢/day, or 500¢/week) A moderate inn stay (the next level up from substandard) is 2000-3000¢/night. An actual outfit is 500-2000¢.

The third thing I notice is that coins and bank accounts are kind of necessary, because while Joe Magicman makes 240¢/day, he can only personally hold 1000¢ in his body before any further gains spill over back into the environment. That makes paying for things that cost >1000¢ problematic without currency. It's mentioned in the Wandarium that the church does do banking, so that's addressed.

I don't have a lot of economic sense, but I think the non-subsistence prices are inflated in a way that's unsustainable without at least some people getting regular infusions of cash from the catalysts (and therefore providing a regular flow of favors for the church). It does make sense that the religion that runs the economy would engineer a situation where its absence would cause a crisis, especially since they also hold everyone's savings.

(Fuck, the politico-economic dynamics of the catalyst/magician divide would be a much better story than the actual trilogy.)

Next Up: The Chronocon

[angelfromanotherpin]

The Chronocon
Chronocon is not a word, but if it were it would have something to do with time and records, and you might expect it to be attached to a history. Except that we already got the history and this is the introduction to all the various kinds of magic-user you can be. What bothers me is that there are a number of better titles for this part of the book in its introduction. Magic is broadly divided into nine 'Mysteries,' and the whole is referred to as 'The Circle,' and there's even a reference to 'The Orders of the World,' any of which would be a more apt title than Chronocon.

Anyway, while every other part of this book calls its subdivisions 'chapter,' this one calls them 'cantus,' which is a latin word meaning song or perhaps incantation. This appears to be solely for pretention purposes, since this isn't a setting where all-is-song or anything. Each cantus briefly introduces the different character classes within it, gives some relevant history, and then there are one or two flash fictions to give you some idea of the daily experience of a class. Many classes do not get a flash fiction. Finally, there are starting statblocks for each of the classes.

Cantus I
... is the Mystery of Fire, otherwise called Witchcraft, and is the combat magic. That makes no etymological or mythological sense at all, and I assume comes from a misunderstanding that the term warlock had anything to do with war.

For me, the big problem with this chapter is that the warlocks are divided into two classes – the secret police and the warmasters – and even though the warmasters are explicitly described as being more talented and receiving extra training before they're allowed into the world... they are statted with substantially less magic than the secret police. Seriously, a warmaster gets 29+2d10 points of magic skills, and a secret policeman gets 65+5d10. It's not remotely close.

Also, fully 20+1d10 of the secret policeman's magic skill points are in Spirit magic. This is a) more than they have in Fire magic (15+d10) and b) equal to or more than most Spirit magicians get in their specialty. I don't even. It doesn't even make in-fiction sense, if the secret police were also the psi-corps, they wouldn't have to do all the shit we see them do with deep-cover agents and duped catspaws.

Cantus II
... is the Mystery of Earth, and desperately needed an editor. We're told that the Mystery is divided into three stations: Magic, Alchemy, and Wizardry. And directly under that is a list of four classes: Conjurers, Magicians, Alchemists, and Wizards. Conjurers are the first one on the list! It gets worse.

See, the fluff draws some very clear distinctions between the first three classes: Conjurers specialize in making things out of thin air, which is fast and expensive; Magicians shape materials which already exist; Alchemists change one material into another. But in the crunch, Conjurers get a special bonus to 'conjuration' and Magicians get a special bonus to 'permanent conjuration,' while Alchemists get their bonus to 'dealing with the alteration of an already-existing object.' It's just incoherent.

So the first three are supposed to be the working-class craftspeople, shaping the consumer goods of the world, but the Wizards are supposed to be the aristocracy, using their talents to 'shape societies.' And... they don't do that. They're unimpressive generalists, notable chiefly for having the most combat magic outside of the Warlocks. They don't even have an impressive social characteristic, because this game doesn't have a social characteristic.

Yes, AD&D has more robust social mechanics than this game.

Cantus III
... is the Mystery of Water, which has to do with biological magic. Its classes are a druid, a different kind of druid, and a shaman. Weirdly, the first druid is a farmer, the second druid is a healer, and the shaman is a better healer, so the terminology is hopelessly confused because the two classes that share a name are not the two classes that share a function. Also, if there was a defining trait associated with the word 'shaman' it would be communicating with spirits, which is in another mystery altogether.

Also, the fluff contains restrictions that don't seem to be present in the rules. The healing-druids are explicitly restricted to 'accelerating the natural defenses of the body' while only the shamans can directly close wounds or annihilate disease with spells, a distinction that's simply absent in any rule text.

Cantus IV
...is the Mystery of Air, and I finally have to address the fictional names for these wizard types. See, literally every one of these classes has a Thimhallanian name, which I have avoided using because they don't communicate anything and are also objectively dumb. For instance, the word for secret police warlock is Duuk-tsarith. But the classes in the Mystery of Air don't have earthly names. One is the 'weather master,' but the other has no other term than 'kan-hanar' to identify it. Although their schtick is levitating things, so I'm just going to call them Jedi.

Anyway, the Jedi mostly serve in the social role of 'trucker,' levitating platforms that are called carts (and probably would be carts if the fucking wheel wasn't heresy) from town to town because this is theoretically cheaper than using the teleport gates called Corridors. I'm going to do the math on that when we get to the system, and I bet it actually isn't.

Weirdly, the weather masters actually have very little air magic, because apparently weather shaping is earth magic (to go with all the other shapings). Coherent authors would have either carved out an exception for weather shaping to be air magic, or else not listed an earth magician under the Mystery of Air, but here we are.

Cantus V
... is the Mystery of Life, aka the catalysts. Again, this is a cantus in dire need of an editor. It opens with a list of three classes, but it has four statblocks, which is explained by the latter two classes being unified into a single one after the Second Rectification. So two of these classes are only for games set somewhat earlier in the fictional-history, fine.

The first class, the one that's supposed to have remained unchanged, is called the Conduit Master. A conduit is the spell that transfers magic energy from the ambient into a caster, so that makes sense. But then their stat block clearly indicates that their specialty is the opening of Corridors, the setting's teleport gates. That is an actual function that catalysts perform in the setting and it would make sense that there are specialists at it, so it just seems like the class name is a big typo that's repeated multiple times.

The second class, the now-defunct Enlighteners, actually gets a lot of magic skill points in non-Life magic, which is weird because as catalysts they have very little magic energy to work with. Their role is completely unexplained.

The third class, the now-defunct Directors, actually looks most like a classic catalyst, with a big pile of magic skill points in Life and '–' in everything else. It distresses me that while the Corridor-openers have a Life Magic score of 10 for most things and 25 for opening Corridors, the Directors have a Life magic score of 30+d10 for all purposes and crush the Corridor-openers even in their specialty.

The fourth class, called simply Catalyst and meant to represent the latter-day priest-caste, is almost exactly a crappy Enlightener, with lower all-around magic skills and not more Life to show for it. On the other hand, I would say that they are roughly balanced against the Corridor-openers, so if you just ignore the two defunct classes, it kind of works out?

Cantus VI
... is the Mystery of Shadow, the Illusionists. These guys actually look about right, they have a bigger pile of illusion magic than anybody else gets, and a smattering of other skills at low levels so they can do a little bit of real stuff to keep people guessing. I think the only problem I have is that the setting really doesn't explore the impact of realistic illusions on the world. They stand in for art and some special effects, with one instance of a smuggler using them to get his contraband past security. D&D is over a decade old when this is written, the authors have no excuse for not knowing how much can be accomplished with illusions, a little imagination, and a lot of ruthlessness.

Cantus VII
... is the Mystery of Time, with only one class: the Diviners. Always rare, the Diviners were all killed in the Iron Wars, somehow not seeing their own deaths coming, so this class is for gaming in the past only and not very interesting in general. Looks fine at first glance.

Cantus VIII
... is the Mystery of Spirit, and this is another one that needed an editor. The opening lists the classes and their supposed functions: Necromancers speak with the dead, Enchanters are 'responsible for the spiritual health and well-being of the dead as it affected the living' (whatever that means), and Theurgists dealt with 'direct intervention with [God].' None of them have a flash fiction to explain any of that more closely, so let's go to the statblocks and see what they say.

The Necromancers actually seem fine. The Enchanters unfortunately get their special bonus when 'altering the thoughts and desires of another creature' and are plainly just D&D mind-influencing enchanters rather than having anything to do with spiritual health. The Theurgists appear to be just generalist Spiritists, not apparently having anything to do with God at all.

Spirit is another discipline that went extinct during the Iron Wars, so again, historical use only. Although, I recall that it turns out that one of the characters from the trilogy is a latent Necromancer, so I guess it's a guideline if you wanted to do something similar.

Cantus IX
... is the Mystery of Death, which in this case is just technology, whose practitioners are called Sorcerers apparently for no better reason than the name sounding more sinister than most other names for spellcasters. The text explains why this is counted as a Mystery, which is that at their peak the Sorcerers were the makers of magic items, wands and golems and so on (which might have been remote controls and robots, who knows). After the Iron Wars, the discipline is so persecuted and degraded that even making a sword is a rare accomplishment.

The basic Sorcerer is a low-grade generalist with a pile of skill points in Tools & Crafts. How that stacks up to actual magic, I guess we'll see in the rules segment, but it does have the asymmetric advantage of not costing magic energy to use.


The Chronocon closes out with a section titled 'Postludium,' a latin term for the concluding part of a musical piece, because why not. It has a convenient list of the nine mysteries and their roles that would more traditionally and usefully have gone in the introduction rather than the postludium, but that's really the least of my concerns at this point.

All-in-all, this whole section is mostly notable for having a lot of glaring discrepancies between the fluff and the crunch, often right next to each other where you wouldn't think it would be possible to miss.

Next Up: Phantasia

[Harshax]

I notice that the Council of Nine great wizards who come up with the plan is 77.77% white dudes, with only one woman (Circe) and one person of color (Chow-Li). I know it was probably ordinary 1988 lack-of-representation, but in 2019 it seems like a subtle dig that the authors of this doomed and arrogant experiment are mostly famous white men (Merlyn, Mannanan Mac Lir, Taliesin, Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, and Francis of Assisi are the others).

The authors have been cited in their works and in person for racist jokes regarding miscegenation. It has nothing to do with the culture insularity of the industry's primary demographic.

[JigokuBosatsu]

In this context "cantus" would be better translated as "chant" which makes more sense considering the priest being the author of the framing device.

And I am having some lovely nostalgia/cringe vibes from this. I'm now starting to remember that I was reading this book in TAG class and questioning what the fuck I was doing with my life.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Phantasia

What is Phantasia?
Phantasia is the name of the in-setting RPG in Thimhallan that the faux-author used back in the preface, and at this point it feels to me like that extra layer of fiction is really harming the accessibility that this game was supposed to be providing. It literally does the 'Cops & Robbers with rules' intro, but instead of Cops & Robbers, the game it references is 'Dugruns & Dkarn-duuk,' which you have to have been paying fairly close attention to the previous material to have any idea what it means. It's less of an introduction and more of a pop quiz.

What follows is a few pages of perfectly serviceable direction for what a game session might be like and what the 'gamejudge' and players need to do to prepare, and then we're thrown headfirst into some hand signal nonsense. See, the idea is that you're probably going to buy this book in an ordinary non-gaming bookstore in '88, and not have any idea how to get the d10s the system is based on. So there's a whole thing where the player and gamejudge throw hand signals at each other RPS style to simulate a d10. Left unanswered is why a game whose schtick was supposed to be accessibility wasn't designed around d6s in the first place.

It's possible that Weis & Hickman aren't great at game design, guys.

Next we get an explanation of all the game statistics we've been seeing since the monster manual, an extremely brief traditional example of play, and finally we get to the basic resolution mechanic. It has the very accessible and also very-plausibly-originating-in-a-science-hating-magic-world name of Comparative Probability Standard (CPS).

The CPS is in some respects totally reasonable. Any action where the outcome is in doubt has some number (like a character's Strength) acting as the Force and another number (like a rock's Size) acting as the Resistance. You compare the two to find a differential, roll a d10, and look up your degree of success (or failure) on a table. The system is more or less universal, which puts it a step ahead of AD&D's multikludge, and it provides five possible degrees of outcome, which is better than most games manage. Those degrees of outcome are Total (100% success), Almost (75% success), Reasonable (50% success), Off (25% success) and Canceled (0% success), which is abbreviated as TAROC several times in the text, which is why I remember it as the TAROC system and not the CPS.

It does suffer from bad presentation, where in the middle of explaining the system, the authors go on an absurdly long tangent to fully-explain the hand signal RNG, which turns what should be short and punchy into something arcane and meandering.



This subsection ends with a note on scale and the part where this book is in-setting cranks the insanity all the way up again. See, part of the worldbuilding of Thimhallan is that they have their own system of measure for distance. Fictionally, that's fine, it makes sense that the wizards who abandoned Earth for their own colony might establish their own standards for their new society. (Although it's a little odd that they have eccentric units for distance and not for time, apparently the magic world has the same day-length as Earth.) But when the players are required to think about distances in these made-up units, and especially when the basic round is made 7.2 seconds long so that 1 mila per hour converts readily to 2 metra per round... we have gone off the deep end.

This whole section's pretty dense, I'll get to the next subsection in another post.

Next Up: Rules of Phantasia

[JigokuBosatsu]

Okay, here's what I'm wondering, and maybe it's been covered in an OSSR, but why is Dragonlance more popular than, say, Record of Lodoss War? Weis and Hickman aren't good writers, and their game design with Dragonlance was just "a D&D campaign." Other than there not really being anything like it back in the day, and most of us being dumb kids who were thirsty for D&D-related stuff.

[Thaluikhain]

Okay, here's what I'm wondering, and maybe it's been covered in an OSSR, but why is Dragonlance more popular than, say, Record of Lodoss War?

Dragons of Seasonal Day/Night Cycle being a big hit, presumably.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I understand how popularity works, I guess I was being facetious in that it shouldn't be more popular.

[Thaluikhain]

Ah, thought you meant "not good writers" as in not good RPG writers.

As to why the Dragonlance novels were so popular...no, you've got me there, stock LotR rehash with lots more exclamation marks, some waffle about balance and introduced kender, gully dwarves and tinker gnomes.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Okay, here's what I'm wondering, and maybe it's been covered in an OSSR, but why is Dragonlance more popular than, say, Record of Lodoss War? Weis and Hickman aren't good writers, and their game design with Dragonlance was just "a D&D campaign." Other than there not really being anything like it back in the day, and most of us being dumb kids who were thirsty for D&D-related stuff.

I think you underestimate Dragonlance. AFAIK, it was the first published D&D campaign that actually leaned into the epic LOTR-style storytelling with huge armies and a sweep of history and so on, rather than the more Gygaxian 'rando tomb robbers' vibe. The closest previously-published thing that felt at all epic-questy was the now-classic GDQ series, and even that was bare-bones by comparison. Yeah, a lot of the setting details are risible, but the framework was something that a lot of people were clearly hungry for in a D&D context. It didn't hurt that the modules were actually pretty good for canned adventures.

As far as the novels go: success and quality are often completely orthogonal. We live in a world where someone wrote Mormon Jesus as a faux-vampire who trawls high schools for teen girls and it became multiple best sellers. And then someone wrote a terrible fanfic of those characters having an incredibly abusive relationship, filed the serial numbers off, and that also became multiple best sellers. And both of those got multiple major movie releases.

Weis and Hickman are not good writers, but they're okay – and more importantly from a business viewpoint, reliable. And that put them miles ahead of other people writing D&D fiction in '85, so they captured the audience for that kind of story and they'd keep it until Salvatore became the hot new thing.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I maintain my inclusion in the class of "dumb kids who were thirsty for D&D related stuff".

[Grek]

How does a hand singal RNG even work?

[angelfromanotherpin]

How does a hand singal RNG even work?

Badly.

The GJ and relevant player both simultaneously make a number with each hand, and generate a d10 result based on the difference between the two totals.

Difference:	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19
R-Number:	10	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1	10

• Personally, I think that the snaking the die result up and down is irritating and unnecessary, when you could just use the tens digit of the difference.
• Also, their system doesn't actually have a way to throw 0, so you can't actually get a differential of 19 unless you houserule that you can just not throw with one hand.
• Also, the example I quoted and the actual TAROC table you'll be using to look up your results on disagree on which number certain differences mean.
• It does create an element of bluff, which is kind of interesting.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Rules of Phantasia
There's some mostly-recapitualtive preamble, but it does list all the stats in brief, which I'll do here as well:
Combat: Attack, Defense, Health
Physical: Strength, Dexterity, Movement
Information: Intelligence, Intuition, Senses
Shape: Form, Size, Resistance
Life: Renewal, Capacity, Lifewell
It's uncommon for an RPG to have Attack and Defense be completely separate from Strength and Dexterity and such, but it's a defensible choice.

Combat
Then we roll straight into the combat round procedure:
The initiative mechanic is unusual. Everyone declares intentions (in no particular order), then initiative is rolled, then actions resolve. Also, the most common result is that all actions resolve simultaneously. There's also some weird shit where when PCs are on opposing sides, seating order is supposed to matter, but it's not clear if this is just a convention or if it actually reverses situational modifiers to init, such that if you're sitting on the GJ's left it's advantageous to be ambushed.

An attack uses the attacker's Attack vs the defender's Defense in the TAROC table, and the MoS determines what fraction of the attacker's base damage is subtracted from the defender's health. The takeaway is that attacks very rarely have no effect, although they can be reduced to chip damage.

Base damage is also determined by Attack score. The human average Attack score is 50, which does 10 base damage (and is most likely to do 3). So two average people beating on each other are going to take ~17 rounds to murder each other, which is pretty horrible padded sumo. It's partially justified because that is specifically unarmed combat (remember that even primitive weapons are verboten in the setting). A sword is worth +25 Attack, and base damage scales a lot faster than the attack score. At 70-79 Attack, base damage is 40 and likely damage is 10/round, which is much more reasonable.

Now of course, since PCs are assumed to be casters, they're probably going to spend a lot more time fighting with magic than with their useless meaty ape-bodies, but it's actually important to get this system out first, both because a lot of enemies are going to be using it, and because the magic system ties back very closely to the base systems.

Other forms of combat that get called out: Ranged, Possessional, and Nonlethal. Ranged combat has very harsh penalties for range, moving targets, and cover; this might be to keep magic attacks from insta-killing PCs, I'm not sure yet. Possessional combat is about struggling for possession of an item, which I think should probably have used the physical stats instead of the combat stats. Nonlethal combat is a bit clunky: when you attack to subdue, you only do half damage, the other half accumulates as a subdual total; whenever the subdual total increases, it is rolled against the target's remaining health to see if they pass out. This is actually even worse padded sumo if you're doing it barehanded, but might be functional if you're using stun bolts or something, we'll see.

Natural healing is painfully slow. 1 point of Health per day. Also, a person can't heal naturally if Health is dropped to 3 or lower. Fortunately, small amounts of healing magic are extremely common among the classes, so it's unlikely that a PC group will be SOL on this front.

Physical
Strength tests are not handled very well, alas. Even with the TAROC system's default of some degree of success, it's just not reliable enough. However, grading on the 1985 curve, I think it actually does better than most of its contemporaries.

Dexterity tests are actually handled pretty well. Difficulties skew high at first glance, but again, the default is some degree of success and 'partial success' is most often 'success in a prosaic manner, penalty to your action next round,' which seems perfectly reasonable.

Movement isn't really tested, it's value is only used to help determine base damage for collisions.

Information
Intelligence is used to get exposition about undefined setting details. For instance, everyone knows the basic Dugrun information in the monster section, but you can get answers for practical undefined details like 'do they swim' with Int checks. My biggest problem with this section is that the Off result is misinformation and the Cancel result is no information. Bad information is worse than no information, so those results should be switched.

Intuition tests have two uses: sensing impending danger, and reading another person's intentions. It is notable for having no suggested difficulties. There are suggested difficulty modifiers which are very strange in that the more emotional a person is, the more difficult they are to read, and the more dangerous a situation is, the harder it is to sense the danger, both of which seem backwards. Once again, Off is misinformation and Canceled is no information.

Senses tests are spot and listen checks, which are mostly okay due to the default partial success, but do have some very unfortunate edge cases at the extremes of ease and difficulty where the system can return not being able to figure out that a person is a person at a distance of 5 feet. This is excusable to some degree because you're not supposed to roll for trivial mundane tasks like that, but it's still not great.

More importantly, there's no stealth system, which is just an inexcusable oversight for an adventure game. You have to cobble it together yourself from the pieces that have been provided, and to be fair you have a lot of pieces to work with, but that just makes it stranger that the authors didn't do it themselves.


This chapter continues to be dense, I'll cover the magic system in another post.

Next Up: Magical Abilities in Phantasia

[EightWave]

What follows is a few pages of perfectly serviceable direction for what a game session might be like and what the 'gamejudge' and players need to do to prepare, and then we're thrown headfirst into some hand signal nonsense. See, the idea is that you're probably going to buy this book in an ordinary non-gaming bookstore in '88, and not have any idea how to get the d10s the system is based on. So there's a whole thing where the player and gamejudge throw hand signals at each other RPS style to simulate a d10. Left unanswered is why a game whose schtick was supposed to be accessibility wasn't designed around d6s in the first place.

If you note they're actually making each person throw a d20 to replicate the results of a d10. This is so bizarre the hardest part of figuring out the system was understanding you were always expected to use two hands to produce numbers from 1-20 each time and that the arcane hand symbols where you're expected to remember that a thumbsup is five and all five fingers out is nine wasn't a stupid way to throw 1-10 if your other hand was busy. No, you're seriously supposed to remember that double devil horns and rock plus finger gun are both ways to roll 16.

In my thought process of "I wonder if snaking the numbers up and down accidentally makes some numbers better to throw than others. -> Nah, it's still 1-10 twice no matter what -> wait, it's 1-10 twice, why am I throwing 1-20 with my ten fingers? -> Wait, there's only five levels of success, why am I throwing with ten fingers at all?" the majority of my time was just spent thinking about "Why is thumbs up a five? Would I ever remember that?"

It's possible that Weis & Hickman aren't great at game design, guys.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Magical Abilities in Phantasia

The gist is this: magic does the same shit as your Attributes, as described in the previous section. In some ways it's just another way to interact with the base system. Throwing a Fire Flower is just using magic to generate an Attack value. Levitating a boulder is just using magic to generate a Strength value. Divination is just using magic to generate an Intelligence value. That's a pretty good conceit, but I don't have a lot of faith in the execution. We also get a reiteration of the untruth that all PCs have access to all magical forms. A lot of those classes still have '–' ratings, guys.

We also get some terminology, that reuses earlier terms in an inconsistent way, and those terms get definitions which are contradicted almost immediately. It's a fucking mess that needed an actual technical writer. It's not hard to puzzle out what the meaning is, but the actual text is just a pile-up.

Equally bad is the formatting for spell procedure. It's actually hard to describe. It begins with a simple and comprehensible list of the five steps. Then it promises to go through each step in detail. Then...

Okay, the title of step 1 (Determine the Attributes of the spell) is reprinted in 12-point italic font, and what follows is 20 pages of describing all the ways to do that in all the schools of magic, with multiple headings in 12-point all caps and sub-lists which are also in the same 12-point italic font... and then the original list picks up again at Step 2, again in 12-point italic font, such that it looks like a previous list just went from step 4 to step 2. I feel like I'm still not doing justice to how confusing this layout is. Look under the spoiler for another attempt.

1. Determine the Attributes of the spell you are casting.
FIRE: ATTACK & DEFENSE
Example:
ATTACK
DEFENSE
MAGICAL ATTRIBUTES USING FORCE AND RESISTANCE
AIR: MOVEMENT
Strength
STRENGTH
Dexterity
DEXTERITY
Movement
MOVEMENT
WATER: HEALING AND LIVING CHANGE
Healing
HEALING
Living Change
A: Determine Specific Attributes that the PC wants changed
Maximum number of Attributes changed
Example
B: Determine the Positive and Negative numbers of changes to make
Maximum number change in score
Example
C: Determine the spell's total value
Example
EARTH: STANDARD CHANGE
STANDARD CHANGE
TIME: INTELLIGENCE & FARSIGHT
Standard Intelligence
STANDARD INTELLIGENCE
Senses
SENSES
SPIRIT: TELEPATHY & EMPATHY
Telepathic Intelligence
TELEPATHIC INTELLIGENCE
Intuition Spells
INTUITION
Persuasion spells
PERSUASION
SHADOW: ILLUSION
The Five Levels of Shape
1. Attributes and Lycanthropy
2. Sex
3. Species
4. Genus
5. Kingdom
LIFE: LIFE TRANSFER
CORRIDORS
CONDUITS
1. Open the Source Conduit
2. Open the Output Conduit
3. Adjust Catalyst's Strength
4. Close all Conduits
Too much power
2. Calculate the spell's Force and Lifecost
3. Expend Magic for the spell
4. Determine the success of the spell
5. Determine the result of the spell

So the style is atrocious, how's the substance? Well, let's go through the actual spell procedure for a simple attack spell. The caster will be one of the sample characters, who is pretty okay at battle magic but not actually a Warlock, and the target will be an orc dugrun:
1. Determine Attribute: The determine attribute and determine cost steps seem like they could go in either order. Sometimes you look at a rock, figure how much strength gives you an acceptable chance to move it, and then let it cost whatever it costs. But sometimes you look at a dugrun and just want to hit it as hard as you can. In this case I'm going to do the latter and let the cost determine the attribute.
2. Determine Cost: Our caster has a Capacity score of 360, which is how much magical energy he can spend on a spell 'without being damaged by its use.' I can't actually find any consequences for exceeding capacity, so I'm just going to treat it as a hard cap. The big chart tells me that Attack is conjured at 2 magic energy per point, so a blast that costs 360 energy generates an attack value of 180. That's a lot. The base damage for an attack score of 180 is 15,000, and even a glancing blow will deal 1500 damage, enough to kill the target Dugrun 40 times over.
3. Spend the Cost: Simple subtraction. The sample character has 1000 energy in his pool, so he could throw out another blast like this, and a third that's almost as big, before being tapped out.
4. Determine the success of the spell: This is a roll of Relevant Magic Skill vs Target's Resistance, and the success determines how much of the spell's intended Attribute actually manifests. Dugruns have a decent resistance and our boy isn't a pro, so the probability breaks down to 1/10: 100% (180), 2/10: 75% (135), 3/10: 50% (90), 3/10: 25% (45), and 1/10: 0%.
5. Determine the result of the spell: Now there's a second roll, which is an attack roll between the Attack that the spell wound up having and the Defense of the dugrun. The big swing is whether the spell was knocked down to 25% or less. At 25% (45 Attack), the blast is less effective than an average person's punch, likely to do about 2 damage. At even 50% (90 Attack), the blast is 90% likely to kill the dugrun and 10% likely to badly hurt it. At 75-100%, that Dugrun is DNS toast. Even factoring in some reasonable ranged penalties on the blast, there's still a 70% chance of OHKO.

So high-commitment magic combat is very much rocket-launcher tag, and the most important defense is having a high Resistance relative to the attacker's Battle skill. Which you probably will have most of the time, unless you're fighting Warlocks. Our sample character has battle magic skill 13 and Resistance 20, for instance, while a warlock of similar rank would have skill in the 26-35 range. Which makes in-setting sense, because they're supposed to be the monopoly of force.

Now, while you can use battle magic to create a large Defense attribute in the form of a force field or something, it's actually a very poor counter to magic attacks. First of all, you can't raise such a defense as a reaction. If someone declares they're going to blast you and you try to raise a shield in response, that's your action for the round and it's only going have any effect if you win initiative. Second, Defense doesn't reduce the base damage of an attack, and it's very possible that a full-strength attack is going to have a minimum damage that will still finish you off. Third, putting any duration on a Defense spell will at minimum double its cost (or put another way, halve its effectiveness), and then there's an extra effectiveness penalty on top of that for no apparent reason.

The only upside is that the target for a Defense spell usually isn't resisting, which makes it way more likely that they'll have the full effect of a spell.

Let's say that our dude sees that a fight has broken out and takes a round to put up a defense before he joins in. Well, he probably wants the shield to last at least 1 Turn (which is 5 Rounds). This increases the cost by x5 and also gives it a -10 effect penalty. So 360 magic energy divided by 5 becomes 72. A point of Defense is 2 magic energy, so that generates 36 Defense, which is then penalized by 10 for a Defense of 26. Even though he's very likely to get the full effect by rolling his skill vs 0 Resistance... 26 Defense is substantially lower than the average naked human's defense of 50.

Wow, defensive magic is actually completely useless, even if you're a Warlock. You'd think that even with literally three playtesters someone would have noticed this.

As a last note: There are no effect modifiers for attack spells, to make them AOE or DOT or anything. You're encouraged to put whatever special effect you want on your magic, so your attack spells could be fire bolts or ice spears or whatever. But they literally only do instantaneous single-target damage. I get that you might not want to go into a big pile of modifiers like Champions did, but the source material obviously does have multi-target bursts and they would be pretty easy to implement.

More detailed analyses of the non-battle magics will have to wait for future posts.

Next Up: Movement magic, possibly also the healing/life-shaping stuff.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Movement
Strength:
I want to start by saying that it is honestly shocking how often this book lies to the reader. The example of using a movement spell to conjure Strength is to move a boulder that is blocking the road. This is said to be preferable to the cost of lifting all the floating-platform-carts over the boulder, which makes sense. But if you look at the actual costs, giving something a land speed and giving it an air speed are the exact same cost! Since the 'carts' are already enchanted to move, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to float over the obstacle at no extra cost.

Anyway, Strength comes in at the cheap rate of 1 magic energy/Strength, so an unremarkable person can generate 360 Strength for a single action, which is a lot. The strongest creature in the book, the ridiculous Dragons of Stone, only have a Strength of 175. One problem is that using conjured Strength for anything other than a single round's effort is subject to the ridiculous duration rules. The force that a person can sustain over 5 rounds is down to 72 (which is still a very strong man's output). But you only get real bang for your buck in 1-round increments.

It's worth noting that even though inanimate objects have a Resistance of 0, even a Movement specialist is likely to have their spell go off at 50-75% of effect.

Dexterity:
The example of a Dexterity spell is a whole crew of Jedi casting a spell to give their 'carts' Dex 60 for three hours. This sounds pretendous, let me do the math. Dex is 2/point, so base cost 120. Three hours duration is x30 cost and -25 to skill. So it takes ten Jedi jointly-casting at their full capacity to give one cart above-average human agility for 3 hours. And even then the skill penalty makes it really likely that they're going to get 45 or 30 or even 15 Dex and have a moderately-to-very clumsy cart.

I should note that so far, all the examples of spells we have seen are 'conjurations.' This is not the previously-established in-setting term 'conjuration' which means creating objects out of thin air, but a separate game mechanic term which means generating attributes starting from nothing. When a person casts an Attack spell, they get no benefit from their own Attack value. When a person casts a Strength spell, their own Strength is irrelevant, and so on.

I mention this because the Dexterity section mentions casting Dex spells on a wall to make it easier or harder to climb, in a way that really sounds like it's adjusting a value of the wall, which is the purview of a separate game mechanic term: 'Alteration.' I suspect this is left-over from an earlier iteration of the system, because there is literally no indication of how this non-Alteration alteration effect would work.

Movement
The difference between a Strength spell and a Movement spell seems pretty fine; they both make things move. The obvious difference would be that one moves things according to the caster's will, and the other allows something to move by its own will. But in fact it is caster's discretion whether the caster or the target guides the movement. Hm, it seems like if you wanted to get a boulder out of the road, it would be much easier to give it a small movement rate and move it than to generate the pile of Strength required to shove it.

Anyway, how expensive is it to move a wheel-less cart-bed from one town to another? Let's say the two are ten miles apart – can an average Jedi get from A to B with a single casting? A 360-cost spell will give it Move 360 (250 feet/second or 170 miles/hour) for one round. This will move it 1/3 of a mile in 1 round, but that's only 1/30th of our goal. Does using the duration rules actually let us get farther? Let's check the durational breakpoints.

Duration	Speed	*Time	=Distance	Success?
5 rounds	34 miles/hour	36 seconds	0.34 miles	Nope.
50 rounds	21.25 miles/hour	6 minutes	2.125 miles	Nope.
1 hour	17 miles/hour	1 hour	17 miles	Yes!?

I am surprised to discover that if you put the duration up to 1 hour, you actually can get from town-to-town in one casting. Even with the -25 skill penalty knocking you down to probably 75% speed, you're making 12.75 mph, which is more than enough. But you can't afford to go much less than all-out on your casting. Like, you could save some magic energy if you aimed for 13.3 mph, on the assumption that you'd get knocked down to 10 mph and still make it, but that would leave no room for any delays at all. It's not clear what the apprentice Jedi do besides hand over their magic energy to the people who can actually cast big enough spells to accomplish things.

What's never addressed is how much a 'cart' can carry. Apparently you don't have to magically supply the Strength to lift the contents of the cart, so I guess it's down to the toughness of the wood?

Healing & Living Change
Healing:
Healing magic is pretty straightforward. 2 magic energy for each hit point to be restored, and the amount of damage taken is the Resistance. That's actually pretty harsh, and at first glance makes it look like most people can only heal minor injuries at all – which would be fine. Except that what it actually means is that unskilled people try their heals like 1-4 points at a time, because unless they total-fail they will still get a point or two through, reducing the difficulty for the next batch, and risking very little of their reserve. That's not terrible, except that it turns healing into a prolonged roll-fest.

The whole system is, however, outside of the magic-does-the-same-thing-as-your-stats spiel. There is no stat that heals you.

Living Change:
This is the real interesting part because it's our first exposure to the Alteration effects. It turns out there are a lot of problems with them! In fact, the section is filled with so much contradictory text, that I'm not sure I can do a proper example or analysis.

• At one point it says that Living Change doesn't use the usual casting roll, which would mean that skill in biology magic was meaningless for these spells. But in other places it says there's a skill penalty for more extreme change types, and there's a TAROC table for what happens when your skill roll isn't total success, so I think it very much is supposed to have a casting roll. Contradiction.
• There are three different tables telling you how much various alterations are supposed to cost, and one has an obvious typo, but as printed, no two of them agree. Contradiction.
• We're told that alteration spells can be made permanent for an extra cost, but the mechanic for that is mysteriously absent and also the obnoxious duration table I've been using so far is specifically labeled for conjuration only. Alterations as written only have an undefined duration.

The system looks like it could be pretty juicy, letting you spend relatively small amounts of magic energy to boost your stats in modest but potentially very relevant ways. It's much more energy-efficient to become a werewolf and get +20 Attack than it is to repeatedly conjure 70-Attack blasts. Or it might be if werewolfism had a duration. As printed, it's too unfinished to be usable at all. Even by my own low expectations, I am disappoint. If it did function, the obvious winners to boost would be Resistance and Move, both of which are very useful and also by default scaled much lower than other stats.

Standard Change
The basic Earth Magic (also the 'Air' magician's weather shaping) is very much applying the Living Change rules to objects. And so it's completely nonfunctional. What did the playtesters even do that left the basic craft function of the game in an incomplete state?

Also worth mentioning, there's zero mention of how to make an object appear out of thin air, even though that's definitely an in-setting thing with an entire class devoted to it.

Next Up: Divination, Telepathy, and Illusions

[angelfromanotherpin]

Intelligence & Farsight
Standard Intelligence:
This is Conjuration for Intelligence, where you generate an Intelligence stat from nothing and apply it to your questions. Again, it can exceed what's possible for the actual stats, gathering information directly from the past or future.

There's a little discussion of the difficulties of predicting the future in multi-author fiction, and the text comes down on the side of 'be annoyingly vague.' The actual example is that there's a cave with a Night Dragon in it nearby, but the players might not go into the cave. So the text recommends that a divination about the future be 'you may face a Night Dragon.' Instead of the more accurate, useful, and authentically prophetic: 'IF you enter the cave of many stalagmites, you will face a Night Dragon.'

I should mention that this section is also incomplete, because there are supposed to be magic skill modifiers that make looking into the future more difficult than looking into the past which is more difficult than looking into the present. These are absent. They seem to have backdoored it by having different magic energy costs for those circumstances, so that you're generating a lower intelligence total for your roll. For instance, divining about the present of an object on hand is 4 energy/point, about its past is 6 energy/point, and about its future is 10 energy/point.

So an ordinary person maxing out a cast gives them 90/60/36 magic Int, provided they don't get that cut down to 50-75% on the casting roll. Which they very likely will, because unless you belong to the currently-extinct diviner class, the classes are pretty evenly split between 'almost no divination skill' and 'literally incapable of divination spells.' And then you're rolling whatever Int you have left against the quite high 'knowing things' difficulties. So you're unlikely to get much useful intelligence.

As a last note, it's weird that knowing about the future is handled by conjuring Intelligence and not Intuition, which is specifically the 'I have a bad feeling about this' stat.

Senses:
Senses is much more straightforward, you just conjure up a Senses score and use that instead of your naked ape eyeballs. This one is hit hard by the harsh duration mechanic and also by not being able to exceed the limits of the Senses stat. On the duration side, if you apply any meaningful duration your conjured stat is reduced to well below human average even before your casting roll. On the limits side, you can't scry through walls, or give yourself darkvision (except by pumping Senses to overcome the very harsh darkness penalties), or anything. Even if you had the magic skill to use it effectively, it would just be a very expensive 7 second-use telescope.

Telepathy & Empathy
Telepathic Intelligence:
This is like Standard Intelligence, except that you're taking info out of the thoughts of a person instead of out of the timeline. That's bad, because the timeline doesn't have a Resistance score. Also...

Okay, in the big table of spell effects, one column is labeled 'Force.' This is supposed to mean 'Force Modifier,' but until now it hasn't mattered because literally every entry until now is just the letter V, which is unexplained and meaningless. I think they meant it to mean 'varies,' which would still be meaningless. Anyway, the Telepathic Intelligence spells have the entry 'Equal Victim's Intelligence + V.' Even if you eliminate the meaningless V, what the fuck is that supposed to mean. Is my magic skill set 'equal' to the victim's Int (rendering my actual skill useless)? Is their Int a positive modifier? That would be strange because the text states that the subject's Int resists the spell, but there's no minus sign anywhere. So I think we have another contradiction.

I mean, the sensible thing would be to follow something like normal procedure, where the subject's Resistance opposes the casting skill and the subject's Intelligence resists the conjured Intelligence value. But there's no way to read the actual text in a way that supports a process that sane.

Intuition:
The text says that this is, like Senses, literally just making a big Intuition score for a normal Intuition roll. And then it has the heading for an example, and no example under it. But since the Intuition rules are profoundly incomplete anyway, it doesn't make much difference.

Persuasion:
This is a spell that creates an entirely new attribute, called Persuasion, which is used for mind control effects. What I want to know is: why isn't Persuasion a normal attribute? You have a perfectly good universal task resolution system, why isn't social persuasion a default part of it?

Anyway, Persuasion spells also have the baffling 'equal to Victim Intelligence' listing in the Force skill modifier column of the big spell table. And this time the text literally tells you that this means to subtract the victim's Int from the Force of the spell, which it misunderstands as the conjured Persuasion value and not the magic skill of the caster. It really looks like this book's two authors did not agree on what certain fundamental game terms meant.

Again, the sensible and consistent way to do this would be:
1. Make a Persuasion value.
2. Roll magic skill vs target's resistance to see how much of the Persuasion value is actually generated.
3. Roll Persuasion vs target's Int to see how persuaded they are.

Instead of either of the following suggested by the text:
1. Make a Persuasion value.
EITHER
2a. Roll (magic skill minus target's Int) to see how much of the Persuasion value is actually generated.
OR
2b. Roll magic skill to see how much of the Persuasion value is actually generated, then subtract the target's Int from it.
3. Roll Persuasion vs I-don't-know-what. Zero, maybe? Are we letting Int double-dip?

Next Up: Illusions

[angelfromanotherpin]

Illusions
Illusions bypass conventional magic resistance and are resisted directly with either the Intelligence or Intuition of the viewer (when do you use one or the other? 404!). That's real bad for illusionists, because those stats are on different scales and Resistance scales lower. A competent illusionist is throwing around 31-40 magic skill, and the average human has both those stats at 50 and a Resistance of about 20. At a -10 to -20 differential, it's actually not possible to get a 'fully convincing' result.

Worse, the illusion casting results table gets confused halfway through about what it's supposed to be resolving. See, since the roll is opposed by the viewer's acuity, it should only be determining how convinced the viewer is by the illusion. And for four of the five outcome levels, that is clearly what it is doing. But Off says that the illusionist produces an entirely different illusion to the one they intended (bunny instead of dragon) and that... shouldn't be possible?

None of which actually matters, because illusion spells are costed in the following way: Pretend you're casting an actual spell that would do the thing you're creating an illusion of. Ignore all modifiers except duration, and reduce cost by 90% because it's not real. Unfortunately, like 90% of in-setting illusions are 'create an image out of thin air,' which would refer to the 'create a thing out of mid-air' spells that don't exist. And the other 10% are disguise spells that would mimic transformation effects that are completely nonfunctional because they don't have durations.

So the illusion system seems to fail on every possible level. Which is a kind of exceptional performance.


Life Transfer
Corridors
Corridors are teleportation channels that can't be made anymore because they were made by the diviners and the spiritists who are extinct now. Because it makes sense that you'd use precognition and telepathy to create teleport gates, right. However, they are all over the place, and while the exact positions of the portals are up to the GJ, you can expect to find one reasonably nearby as long as you aren't in the middle of nowhere (and even then, a lot of places used to be inhabited).

It's not 100% clear, but it seems like the procedure is:
1. Spend magic energy.
2. The catalyst rolls skill vs 0 to see how much of that energy goes into the corridor.
3. That energy total is rolled vs a calculated difficulty to see how well the corridor is opened.

The big deal is that as far as I can tell, the most energy that can be spent is like 100 per catalyst (each catalyst having an invariable Capacity of 100) because nobody else can use Life Transfer. So if you want to use a corridor that's at all difficult, you're going to need multiple catalysts and probably a trip to the church.

Corridor difficulty is set by several factors, and the text and table (of course) disagree on what those factors even are. The text says distance, inhabitation, and security; the table says distance, obscurity, and description. I don't even know what description is supposed to mean! It has entries for 'in the same structure' (no mod), 'in the same town' (x2), and 'raw wilderness' (x100). So I can't even complete my experiment to see if it's cheaper to use a corridor or a floating platform to go from town to town, because the cost of using a corridor to go to another town (the single most common use, I might add) is undefined!

This game was 5e-style vaporware before 5e did it.

Conduits
Opening a conduit is two rolls: one to get access to the source of magic energy, one to see how much of that energy you can give to your target. There is a third roll each round of transfer to see how fatigued the catalyst gets. This is the only fatigue mechanic in the game.

The first roll is has a pretty high resistance if you're trying for ambient magic (minimum 40) and the target's Resistance (~20) if you're trying to suck power out of some victim. Average conduit skill is like 21-30, which is okay. As a combat tactic, its obviously real good to pull magic energy out of your enemies and give it to your friends, which suggests that high-commitment combat is optimal vs catalysts – they can't steal magic energy you've spent already.

The second roll is against 0, +5 per five feet the receiver is from the catalyst, which explains why catalysts prefer direct contact with their subjects.

The most likely result is that a catalyst is going to be able to access 400 ambient magic energy, give it to their subject at a rate of 200/round, and lose like 5 Strength out of 48. It's worthwhile and pretty sustainable. I guess conduits were so fundamental that they couldn't be left unfinished like so much else was.

Next Up: Technology

[Iduno]

Interesting ideas and hilariously bad implementation? Always entertaining.

I'm guessing the testers managed to kill an Orc and called it a day.

[angelfromanotherpin]

If the implementation were merely bad, it would be less frustrating. It's unfinished. Most of what actually got written was fine, or poor-yet-tolerable. But so much content just isn't written that the game as a whole is actually unplayable.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Technology
This section leads off with a table of technological devices: weapons, armor, vehicles, medicines, tools. And each has a numerical rating which either adds to or in some cases cold replaces the relevant stat.

1. Using a handgun gives you a flat attack of 70. This is less than an average person with a bow and arrow, who has 50+30.
2. Because the system is so flat, calculating the best (bonus-based) weapon is trivial: it's the spear. It equals or exceeds any other weapon's bonus, and is usable in melee and at range. Making the Darksword a sword was a noob's mistake.
3. Armor bonus scales much lower than weapon bonus. A spear's bonus is +30 and plate armor's bonus is +15.
4. Aeroplanes are listed with a Move that looks high at first glance but calculates as 56.5 mph.
5. I know it's probably never going to come up, but spaceships are given a relatively low Move which is their speed 'through the ether' which is a kind of hyperspace. The number means almost nothing, because there's no more context to it. Except that because it's lower than the aeroplane's Move, and crafting is based on the raw numbers, hyperdrive is actually easier to make than airfoils.
6. Medical devices are listed as providing a bonus to or replacement number for the Healing attribute, which still doesn't exist.

The follow-up is a table which tells you how difficult it should be to try to make any of these devices, which is solely based on how large a bonus they give. This gets hilarious.

1. Because it's an effective weapon with a bonus in the 16-50 range, a spear requires 2 rare components, and a quest with a recommended distance of 50 miles. A spear only has three components, and one of them is a stick.
2. Because armor scales lower, plate armor falls in the 11-15 range and is substantially easier to make than a spear, requiring only one rare component and no quest at all.
3. Making a hyperdrive is in the 51-100 range, and only somewhat more troubling than making a spear, with three rare components and a quest of 100 miles.

(Side note: whichever of the authors wrote this section didn't know that Plutonium isn't naturally-occurring.)

The only excuse for this content is that this RPG is supposedly an in-universe product of the technologically-illiterate Thimhallanites, and all the laughable results are just their wild guessing about how levers work, maybe? That would be a different sort of fuck-up, letting the framing conceit undermine the actual product, but it would explain the bizarre and inexplicable spears-are-higher-tier-tech-than-plate-armor hash.

Not Appearing in Darksword Adventures: The Darksword
Leaving aside that the protagonist of the Darksword books was apparently a noob for making a sword rather than a spear, there are no mechanics at all for darkstone or the Darksword, so in case a player technologist wanted to try making the magic-absorbing signature item of the setting, your group is on its own.

On a related note, one of the most important spells the Warlocks use to pwn people is Nullmagic, a spell which suppresses a person's spellcasting, which is a pretty big deal. While it's mentioned more than once in the fiction and in scenario notes, actual rules for it are simply absent.

Next up: Experience and Advancement