OSSR: The Riddle of Steel (and successors)

[angelfromanotherpin]

Chapter One: Mechanics

The book opens with a forgettable flash-fiction, a what-is-an-RPG section, and a what-kind-of-RPG-is-this-one section. That third one bears some examination.

This is as true of this book as it is of the Riddle of Steel; it's clear they were following the original's structure. The flash-fiction is less forgettable because it's an excerpt from one of Karl Edward Wagner's Kane stories, and at least has some flair.

Also, from here until the appendices, the book has an elaborate double-page art border, with a topless woman at top left and another at bottom right such that literally every page has tits on it. I don't disapprove in principle, S&S has a lot of exploitation in its DNA, although I would have appreciated some equal-opportunity exploitation; all the dudes are sensibly dressed.

Anyway, this 'what kind of RPG is this' section is 90% a microessay about sword & sorcery fiction protagonists, which is not really adequate as an introduction, but probably does get you thinking about your prospective character, which is worth something.

After that it's straight into the mechanics. For some reason, BotIT rolls a pool of d12s, a die that almost nobody has in pool-sized quantities. The section opens with a very promising mention of a fixed TN of 7, and a fairly reasonable table that includes something like a take 10 option.



Almost immediately afterwards, the fixed TN starts being walked back. Combat TNs are set by your weapon. Magic TNs are set by your Sorcery priority. There are Assets (virtues/flaws) that can change the TN of even general rolls. Now, they don't get as crazy as Riddle; the highest TN gets is 12 (and that only shows up once) and the lowest any TN gets is 5. And rolling on a d12 means that these TN shifts matter less than they would otherwise – but they're still not great. Still, it's progress.

The skill mechanic is different, but somewhat strange. Instead of your skill rating being a decreasing TN value, it is an increasing die pool. Each skill is associated with one or more stats, but they are not added to a stat for a roll – instead, the number of skill dice one can roll is capped at one less than twice the relevant attribute (so a stat of 3 lets you use up to 5 skill dice). Attempting to perform an activity covered by a skill without having a skill rating is a raw stat check needing twice as many successes (using the somewhat confusing WW term). While faking a skill is harsh, it is still pretty common for having a skill, at a low rating, to be worse than not having it.

Eight pages in and we have a significant inconsistency, and it's kind of one that RoS had as well. In another holdover, it's not always clear what activity counts as covered by a skill or why. Climbing is a skill and therefore difficult to perform untrained (news to babies), but acrobatics/gymnastics are not covered by any skill and are therefore easy to do without training. It's weird.


On the other hand, because skills are their own semi-stand-alone rating, the WW-style 'what skill levels mean' table is more meaningful.

We get a sidebar that would seem to belong in the chargen chapter, about how stats and skills range from 1-8, each PC can have one stat and one skill at 9, and no two PCs can have the same stat or skill at 9. Also, NPCs can have scores of 9 that overlap with PCs, but only one per campaign ever. The intent seems to be to preserve PC specialness, but it's oddly specific.

We get specific mechanics for opposed and extended tasks, although the various components of an extended task (# of accumulated successes needed, time per roll) have very little guidance and seem to be basically ass-pulls.

There is also a new mechanic called Complications that takes the place of a botch rule. If you fail an unopposed check by two or more needed successes, or don't roll any successes on an opposed check (provided you had at least 5 dice), you get a 'botch or bad fumble.' 'However, instead of penalties, catastrophes, or comedic moments of embarrassment inappropriate to individuals as formidable as the PCs, such results create "Complications".' A complication appears to be a minor but meaningful misfortune that increases drama or tension; the example is a kidnapper who experiences two: his horse not being where he left it, and his face recognized by a guard.

This is pretty great, not just because it explicitly says that PCs are supposed to have narrative stature and be treated as such, but also because it implies that complication-like events are outside the MCs purview unless he is empowered by the PCs' low rolls. It's creating a set of expectations that are very different from the ones that were established early in RPG history and sort of became the default. Incidentally, this game's name for the MC is 'Referee,' which comes with its own set of different expectations. I'm not sure it'd stick in an actual game, but it certainly has a better chance than seneschal.

Stat descriptions come next, and the list has been pared down to a relatively-lean six, and not quite the D&D six either, because constitution has (instead of being sawed into three stats) been crammed into strength, and dexterity has been split into two parts (one for gross actions and one for fine actions). The whole thing is illustrated by this magnificently overwrought diagram.



We are also introduced to this game's version of Spiritual Attributes, which are called Passion Attributes and remove a lot of the weird distinctions and restrictions of the original mechanic. In this game instead of having Conscience and Passion and Destiny and so on, you have four Passions and Drama. The Passions are streamlined SAs as used in RoS, that give bonus dice when pursuing them, and Drama is minor narrative currency that lets you designate a love interest or mandate a small lucky break or whatever. While it's clear that you earn Passion points by pursuing the relevant passion, it's not clear how you get Drama points.

Anyway, chapter one. It's frustrating that they have been unable to quit variable TNs, and that the skill system has some definite weirdness in it. But it's still so much better than its predecessor, not just in mechanics but in attitude. It's not just the 21st-century attention to player-empowerment, but the sense of enthusiasm for each part of it.

Next up: Chargen

[OgreBattle]

what would be the simplest replacement for variable TN in this system?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Bonuses/penalties to dice pools, like SR4.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Chapter Two: Characters



Character creation is priority-based, like Shadowrun Riddle of Steel. Bizarrely, the priority table that is the crucial visual guide to this whole process is on the last page of the chapter, so it isn't helping a new reader understand anything. Also, the priorities have been named 'talents,' which is unhelpful. Still, initial confusion only lasts for one or two readings, but the actual mechanics are forever; let's look at them.


This table belongs at the beginning. Not hard.

Well, the second-to-last thing in the chapter is actually the designers' guidance on how to build your own talent priorities table, in case your game world didn't include Sorcery or did include Social Classes or Fantastic Races or whatever. It's not the best because they are super-sold on the 'six picks/A-F rating' and what it means if you want to add a category without swapping out another one is unaddressed, but it does tell us where they were coming from, which was this:

Your D-pick is appropriate to Joe Average. Your E-pick should be one (1) 'unit' worse than that (Where a unit is worth two attribute points, six skill points, or one 'Asset'). Your F-pick should be two (2) 'units' worse than your E-pick (or -3 from your D-pick). Then your C, B, and A picks are +1, +2.5, and +5 'units' above your D-pick. This neatly avoids RoS's 'you are on average below average' problem, and should allow for some decent comparisons.

I have two immediate concerns. The first is about the Assets column. Yes, they seem to have rounded up from 2.5 to three for the B-pick but then not rounded down again for the A-pick, but I'm much more annoyed that they chose to call their merit/flaw expy 'Assets' (an unambiguously positive term), and then went on to distinguish them as 'good' Assets and 'bad' Assets, which is just very bad communications. The second is that a point of Proficiency costs as much as a point of Attributes, but you effectively gain a point of Proficiency for free with every two points of Attributes, if that's what you want. So valuing those equally seems questionable.

What about the picks that aren't just a pile of numbers?

Culture
This replaces Riddle's social class pick, and is quite thematic. Very few S&S stories are much concerned with social class, they tend to a rough-and-tumble world were authority and wealth are seized and held more than inherited; but Howard at least was super-invested in his own take on civilization vs barbarism vs savagery, even if the distinction between the latter two was pretty much skin color.

The baseline D-pick of Civilized provides nothing. This strikes me as a negative design space, because while it's easy to say that the pick which is supposed to be worth nothing also consists of nothing, it seems like being 'civilized' should have at least some minor characteristic traits and putting those here could put some definition and life in the setting.

Going up the ladder, the C-pick of Hillman/Nomad provides +7 skill points in survival-related skills. This is slightly more skill points than the C-pick in Skills, but they are thematically-restricted – so of course if your concept involves those skills, be a hillman/nomad instead of civilized and have a very small advantage. Doesn't seem bad, although it does hurt the distinctions between the columns.

The B-pick of Savage interestingly uses the more-derogatory term for what is a very Howardian concept of a person made personally strong by eschewing the soft comforts of civilization. You get +3 stats (specifically Brawn, Daring, and Tenacity, although they're very close to fungible) and the same +7 skills of the C-pick. This works out according to their chargen math as a mixed stats/skills pick, but isn't super interesting or more than mildly thematic. A Howardian barbarian package would be a lot more about innate internal qualities, like a danger sense and a resistance to hypnotism and so on.

The A-pick is Enlightened, the sort of platinum-age everyone's-a-philosopher huge-monument-building peoples whose cyclopean ruins are often wandered through, and whose debased descendants are often encountered, but who are very rarely seen in person in the literature. They get +3 stat points (Tenacity, Sagacity, Heart), +14 skill points, and a good Asset, which is just under-value by their own formula, and also pretty boring. The only interesting thing is that they are able to take the Occultism skill without being a caster; that has some potential.

Being from an E-Decadent culture gets you -1 Tenacity and then either -1 Brawn or a bad Asset. This does not add up because one Asset is supposed to be worth two stat points. Being from an F-Degenerate culture gets you -3 stat points and two bad Assets, and that adds up to being one stat point harsher than it should be by simple math. I don't know whether they miscalculated or just wanted to make Degenerate not worth it, but either way it's a shame because it's not a bad RP hook. On the other hand, it's real easy to fix.

So the Culture pick actually is mostly a pile of numbers, just diversified compared to the other number piles. It's kind of boring and a missed opportunity and the math is bafflingly off in a few places.


Sorcery
The D-pick of Mundane is again nothing. Then things get weird.

The C-pick is Dabbler, or caster-minus, and my first question is this: is access to the magic system, even at the lowest level, really worth only the equivalent of two stat points? Or one Asset? Or six skill points (which is a single pretty-good mundane skill)? It seems unlikely, although on some level we won't know until we examine the Sorcery chapter. It's possible that at Dabbler-level, the risks of sorcery are such that you genuinely just don't use it very often.

The E-pick is supposed to be as bad as the C-pick is good. Cursed is a simple +2 TN to resist Sorcery. I don't yet know how much Sorcery even involves resistance checks, but even in a vacuum, this is a downside that might come up a lot or not at all depending on how many adversarial sorcerers are in the campaign. So it's very hard to judge how much that might be worth.

The F-pick is Doomed, which includes the TN penalty of Cursed and also comes with a curse. (Why, when you have two states, one of which involves an explicit curse and the other does not, would you choose the one that does not to call 'Cursed?' Congenital syphilis?) Anyway, the curse involved is very powerful, effectively unremovable, and comes in one of two kinds: one tries to kill you in a specific way, the other tries to destroy everything you hold dear.

That second one has some really unfortunate interactions with the Passion Attributes, since it essentially applies whenever your Passions would apply, and is a bigger negative modifier than they are a positive modifier. You still use the Passions for XP, so you still have a strong incentive to pursue them, but you wind up at an effective mechanical penalty for doing so. It's almost an entirely alternate method of playing the game, which is at least interesting.

The first version of the curse, the death-by-specific-means one, has really variable effect depending on how it's defined, and it's unfortunately never stated who gets to define it. If the player gets to define it, they could name one of the absurdly unlikely riddle-deaths from Celtic myth and be basically unaffected. If the Referee gets to define it and is thoughtless, it could be something like 'in combat' and the PC is completely screwed. Ideally you'd do something thematic like 'by drowning' or 'by a snake' and then the PC just has a weakness that shows up reasonably often and they try to avoid it and it's probably fine, but there's no indication of how you're supposed to get there.

The higher ranks of sorcery (B-Sorcerer and A-Mysteriarch) give better casting TNs than Dabbler, and better access to the various kinds of casting. The short version is that there are six 'lesser mysteries' and two 'greater mysteries,' and Dabblers can have two lessers, Sorcerers get six lessers or three lessers and one greater, and Mysteriarchs get all of them and a cherry on top (an Arcane Secret that lets you combine two mysteries for a signature effect). You do have to split your Proficiency points between the mysteries you know, so having expanded access is not everything.

Honestly, it just feels like the Sorcery column is on a different scale than the other columns. I think if they did something like the revised Riddle-of-Steel model where F was mundane and the other below-caster ranks were lesser supernatural powers, then paying 2 stat points to go from a moderate power to caster-minus might feel more reasonable. But they were solidly committed to a D being Joe Average, which gave them very little room to maneuver.

---

It's hard to know exactly how chargen sits as a whole without a better understanding of how sorcery or Assets work, so I'm going to withhold judgement until I cover those. At this point, my complaints are relatively minor. You can plan out recognizable baby versions of classic S&S figures, and that counts for a lot.

The rest of the chapter is an example of character creation and a few roleplay tips.


Next up: Training

[OgreBattle]

Culture providing things that the other columns provide is muddling

[OgreBattle]

A) Do one all-in attack
B) Have enough dice left over to steal initiative if you don't have it

'The quick-draw' is where most people start, and is a valuable tool that can be very effective (especially if you're a genetic superman), but it's not by itself the optimized way to play. The Counter maneuver can end you. And once you start playing around Counter, the rest of the game shows up.

Is there any "Guide to Riddle of Steel combat" online? I've seen combat examples and /tg/ fight threads, but no strategy guide.

[angelfromanotherpin]

(Oh geez, I should really finish this.)

I don’t think there is such a guide. If one (or anything close to one) ever existed, it probably died with the original ROS forums. I’d go over to grandheresyforums and ask if anyone has or is willing to produce one.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Chapter Three: Training



Skills
Skills are modestly better than RoS, mostly because of Table 1.0 back in chapter one, but also because they aren't filled with fiddly exceptions and modifiers. The big sticking point is that the skills are still divided up weirdly, with niche shit like Dancing next to vital shit like Sneaking, both costing the same to improve.

Special mention goes to the Skills that require an A-C Sorcery pick. Detect Sorcery, Omen Reading, and Precognition are all cool things to lure a caster into caring about their skill points.

Assets
Most Assets are available in 'good' and 'poor' and are also boring as fuck. e.g. The Abrasive Asset gives you a -2 TN on intimidation checks (if it is Good) or a +2 TN on negotiation checks (if it is Poor).

The real question is: is a Good Asset worth 2 attribute points (as established in chargen); and the answer is... very rarely. Most of the time, you get better results by rolling more dice than fewer dice at a lower TN. Unless you are hyper-specializing by taking your relevant stat to the max anyway, you are better off keeping your stats and ignoring the Assets.

There are some exceptions, of course, because the Assets are not very well balanced. Being Dreaded, for instance, makes enemy attacks cost extra combat pool against you, makes your Sorcery harder to resist if your target is aware of you, and gives you -1 TN on intimidation checks. It's pretty great even if you don't have Sorcery to get full benefit!

Proficiencies
This game has 11 melee Proficiencies instead of 13, mostly due to having removed Rapier and Case of Rapiers, although they have done some fiddling with the others. Missile Proficiencies have not been changed.

Maneuvers
The list of Maneuvers and their descriptions include the two or three from RoS's expansion book, and I am told by people (who care more than I do) that there are some tweaks here and there that are incremental improvements.

Progression
This section begins with a longer explication of Passion Attributes, including the very helpful note that your PAs are not just what your character cares about but should explicitly be what you want their adventures to be about. Also, the Drama PA gets explained and it's such a different beast from the rest of the PAs that I'm amazed that they lumped it in with the rest of them.

The Drama stat is very much a narrative currency stat in the vein of Edge or Fate Points. This is another mechanic that RoS introduced in its expansion book, replacing the 'Luck' SA. It has a number of uses, from forcing a large percentage of successes on a noncombat roll to requesting a particular scene be included in the session. Drama isn't acquired by pursuing drama like the other PAs, but by entertaining the group, and by making spectacularly good or bad rolls.

Alas, actual advancement is still of the bullshit WW-style scaled-costs-trap variety. I am continually amazed that people who seem otherwise sensible keep doing that.


Next up: Melee

[angelfromanotherpin]

Chapter Four: Melee



This chapter is very much the same as the RoS chapter, and I'm just going to highlight a few things that stand out to me.

Limelights
This is a more codified version of what RoS recommended where you focus on one player's fight for a few rounds, then switch to another player to see what happened in the meantime. It's supposed to be 'cinematic,' and it was bullshit because RoS rounds were really short and represented an inelastic period of time. Invariably, one player would finish off their enemy in one pass and want to help someone whose 'next' few rounds had already been resolved and then time bent in half.

BotIT addresses this by abstracting the length of rounds to 1-to-5 seconds, creating a much greater window of plausibility. This also helps out the ranged combatants, who are still effectively taking a few rounds to ready, aim, and launch their attack, but all of that is now simply 'one limelight.' In-combat spellcasting is in a similar position.

The issue of NPCs is muddy. NPCs very rarely get their own limelight, but are usually attached to PCs and act in their limelight, and can only interact with a PC that they share a limelight with. It's not very clear, but I think the general upshot is that groups of NPCs that outnumber the PCs are somewhat hosed from coordinating themselves to exploit the advantage of numbers. Which is reasonable, being outnumbered sucks in this game.

Hit Location
In both these systems, every attack is a called shot to a general area, and then a specific area is determined by a random roll. In RoS there was an advantage that let you modify the hit location roll, and it was very effective. BotIT replaces that with a more conventional called shot mechanic where you spend combat pool in advance to place a hit more precisely.

Damage & Soak
The old supertank problem is addressed by having the relevant stat add half its value to damage and soak, meaning that a physical superman's physique counts as leather armor instead of mail, which is much more reasonable.

Barbarian Chic
There's an optional rule that gives you a couple extra dice in combat if you're functionally naked, which is good genre simulation and also a nice consolation prize for probably being screwed.

Miscellany
As in other places, some rules from the RoS expansion material is included here as core, including rules for jousting and fighting quadrupeds. Notably absent are hit locations for giant snakes, which seems like a real oversight.


Next up: Travel and Health

[OgreBattle]

Barbarian rule is nice. The bunches of hit locations seems the most fiddly part of RoS style games

[angelfromanotherpin]

Chapter Five: Travel and Health


This chapter is a bunch of relatively dull miscellany before we get to the tantalizing Sorcery chapter.

I. Travel, Scene Framing, and Scene Requests
This game deliberately dispenses with long-distance movement speeds or travel times, suggesting that all of that be abstracted and glossed over with the equivalent of a quick cutscene. It's not the worst idea, but it does hurt player agency in 'do we get there before the enemy army' situations. I think that needed to be addressed, even if it was just a quick-and-dirty 'when in doubt, decide with a relevant skill roll.'

Scene Framing and Scene Requests involve use of the Drama point system, where players can force scenes they aren't interested in to end, or put scenes they want to see on a sort of 'coming soon' list. It's a really excellent amount of direct narrative power for players. (Possibly its proximity to the travel section is meant to imply that this is how you resolve questions of travel time?)

II. Encumbrance
This section is optional and minimalist. A character's Brawn does not help them, all people have the same carrying capacity. Count up how many items you're carrying - some items are negligible, collections of things in a container usually count as one item, and a particularly large item counts as two items. Too many items means that dodging and footwork cost a scaling amount extra from your combat pool – there are no non-combat concerns. This is pretty reasonable genre emulation.

III. Health
Tracking wounds and their effects is almost as fiddly and harsh as in TRoS, and shares the problem that a wounded PC may be out of action for a very long time, and differing levels of injury among the PCs can make for awkward sessions. There is still no proposed solution for this. You might be able to use Drama to put a 'miraculous recovery' scene of some sort into the works, I guess. I think they would have done well to abstract the recovery system for the same reasons they abstracted overland travel.

There is an optional rule where PCs and named NPCs get a chance to reduce the severity of their wounds after a battle, discovering that they are 'not so bad.' I'd recommend using it because it substantially reduces the amount of dealing with the recovery system you'll have to do.

The rest of the chapter is falling and poison. Falling has been changed to be more dangerous, poison has an okay unified system with a condition track, but only accounts for poisons that kill. I feel like it wouldn't have taken much to include poisons that paralyze or cause hallucinations, both of which have significant presences in the genre.

Next Up: Sorcery!

[angelfromanotherpin]

Chapter 6: Sorcery



Do we finally have something like a reasonable magic system to go with our technical fencing simulator? Maybe!


Casting and Containment


In Riddle of Steel, calculating your casting pool was quite elaborate - there were almost as many casting attributes as ordinary attributes, they were derived from every attribute except Social, and which ones you used varied based on the kind of spell you were casting. BotIT is much simpler - you have one casting stat (Power), which is derived from your Brawn, Sagacity, and Tenacity, with up to three extra dice for knowing a wider range of the Mysteries. Your Power is then added to your rating in the Mystery that you are using, and that's your casting pool.

One upshot of this is that sorcerers now have a stereotypical set of stats, and also a stereotypical set of deficiencies. Those deficiencies specifically make them poor swordsmen, rogues, or facemen; and they will consequently want to associate with such people to cover their weaknesses. Since that's what most non-caster PCs will be doing anyway, there's built-in incentive for PC and NPC sorcerers to work with the muggles.

To actually perform sorcery, you divide your casting pool into two - one for the casting roll that will actually produce the sorcerous effect, and one for the containment roll that mitigates the consequences of touching sorcerous energies. That part is also how it worked in RoS, but I didn't go into it in that review because the system was totally fucked before one got to that level of detail. This division somewhat echoes dividing the combat pool for attack and defense, which I think tied into RoS' (failed) conceit of having spellcasting feel similar to melee combat.

Hits on the casting roll have two effects; each one makes the sorcery more powerful, and each one becomes a potential point of Taint to be dealt with. Hits on the containment roll reduce these potential points. Because excess containment hits have no benefit, you want to keep your containment roll as small as you reasonably can, but even being very conservative is still going to fail containment in a significant minority of cases. You cannot be safe, you can only manage the risk, and must judge on a spell-by-spell basis whether the effect or the containment is more important. I like that.

The consequences for Taint are quite manageable - unlike Riddle where any failed 'containment' led to premature aging and (more importantly) potential unconsciousness, Taint mostly just slowly accumulates, applying a scaling penalty to your casting pool and social rolls. It's definitely undesirable, and it goes away slowly (1/12 hours), but you can cope with a pretty fair chunk of it, especially if you have someone else to talk to people for you.

Containment rolls are unusually easy to crit-fail - if you don't block at least half of the incoming taint, your
spell is Uncontained. The default result is like any other botch in the system, a Complication, only with sorcerous flavor. The referee can optionally include a very minor injury, which would be better if there were any guidelines for when it would be appropriate. Finally, if the sorcerer has a particularly large amount of Taint when the Uncontained casting occurred, half of that Taint can be converted into a Curse on the sorcerer.

So the casting mechanic seems pretty reasonable, but what actual effects do we get for risking Taint?


The Lesser Mysteries


Cursing is either a five minute ritual with a sympathetic connection to the target, or one Limelight if the victim is within 'a stone's throw.' The casting roll is resisted by the target's Tenacity, with a Sorcerer able to substitute their Power (with a bonus if they know Cursing themselves). If not resisted, the hits on the casting roll become the curse's rating.

A generic curse subtracts its rating from any roll to avoid dire consequences which are unhelpfully not defined but probably include melee defenses. Whenever such a penalized roll fails, the curse loses 2 points off its rating. More specific curses have minus 1-3 rating when they are created but are much more resilient and comprehensive in their effect. e.g. If you curse someone to 'be executed by the state,' that curses' rating will support any attempt to frame that person for a capital crime, any attempt to prosecute them for a capital crime, any attempt by police to murder them, and so on.

Curses can be lifted by the Mending mystery, or by appeal to a deity through a faith-related Passion. There is an optional rule to allow a dying sorcerer to always get off one last curse.

The only thing that bothers me is that while generic curses don't stack, there's nothing to keep someone with your voodoo doll from just putting new specific curses on you as often as they happen to be willing to risk the Taint. I don't think it's particularly overpowered, just a bookkeeping nightmare.


Enslavement is good old mind control. You need to make eye contact, and your casting roll is opposed by the victim's Sagacity or Tenacity. As with Cursing, a Sorcerer can resist with their Power, and a bonus if they know Enslavement themselves. Success means that the target becomes entranced and helpless for as long as the sorcerer maintains eye contact. Once entranced, they can be victimized mundanely (pocket picked, throat cut) or further controlled, either given a simple short-term command or convinced that one nearby thing is actually something else; both require a further roll that may allow the victim to regain their senses.

I don't know how I feel about this one without seeing it in play. It has some pretty sharp limits, but it's still very exploitable and makes sorcerers extremely dangerous in one-on-one situations. The biggest problem I have at first glance is that there are no rules or guidelines for making or keeping eye contact, nor for fighting while keeping your eyes averted or closed. That omission makes me wonder how much playtesting this Mystery got.


Mending has two modes: healing (of injuries, sickness, and curses) or direct infliction of pain. You choose one mode to specialize in when you learn the mystery. Now, it seems to me like pain infliction is a sucker's game because healing from injuries is fucking priceless and just hurting people is cheap-to-free. The big advantage to pain-infliction is that you can incapacitate someone without any risk of killing them.

The healing mode both reduces how wounded you are and how much time it will take to heal any wounds that are left over. It is literally a game changer, given how harsh the natural healing rates are in this system. The only fly in the ointment is that once you've been Mended, you can't benefit from another casting until all your current wounds have healed. Deliberately giving someone a minimal Mend to prevent them from getting a better one is amusing dickery, but very niche.


Prophecy requires a divinatory ritual which can take a lot of different forms. If possible, I suggest using a fast form like casting the bones over a long form like drugged visions, because how long the ritual takes seems to make no difference. Prophecy is divided into two kinds of questions, broad 'Will X go well' questions, and narrow 'who-what-when-where-why is X' questions. The broad question has a yes/no answer that is determined by GM fiat if the answer is obvious, or by a die roll modified by casting successes if inobvious, and either way generates an Omen value of 1 that is a bonus/penalty die towards the going well or not of X. Specific questions just require a certain number of hits on the casting roll based on how obscure the answer is.

The omen system is so minimal one wonders if it's worth keeping track of, and I'd prefer if the player could just pick yes or no and the casting roll required hits based on the scope of X, but it seems harmless. The specific-question system needs better guidelines for how many hits are required for what level of obscurity. The text literally says that 'the more specific type of question... is not as easily cast into rules.' Which seems like a confession that they just gave up.


Scrying could also be called Astral Projection. It takes ten minutes to an hour to enter a trance, and then you send your immaterial POV out, for either a short duration with a ludicrous flight speed or a longer duration with a merely ridiculous flight speed. Such a projected POV can be detected with the Detect Sorcery skill, by other Scryers, by other disembodied spirits such as ghosts, and perhaps by demons and similar. There's talk of ghosts and demons possibly interacting with the projection, but no rules for it so it seems unlikely.


Witchfire, despite its name, is the generic magical ranged attack that could as easily be a glowing arrow or force lightning or red eyebeams as actual fire. Used sustainably, it's underwhelming, dangerous chiefly because it's hard to understand how to defend against (needing a difficult surprise test, an easy Precognition skill test, or possession of the Occultism skill). On the other hand, if you're willing to risk or accept an Uncontained casting, things get very dangerous. The big problem with Witchfire is that bows exist, and Witchfire fundamentally doesn't do anything that archery can't. All the rest of the Lesser Mysteries (except arguably Cursing) do things that mugglery simply cannot do, so it's tough for Witchfire to compete without some similar asymmetric advantage.


Next Up: the Greater Mysteries and Arcane Secrets

[Orion]

That's a more interesting and playable list of effects than I expected them to come up with, honestly. Thanks for sharing it.

[Shiritai]

Interesting. So if you can curse someone with "execution by the state", could you curse someone with, like a job promotion? Something like "I curse you to be a middle manager, where you will taste true despair! Muahahaha!" Or even simply "cursed" with immortality?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Using Cursing to produce what are effectively blessings is obviously against the intent of the text, but there's definitely a lawyerly argument that could be made for it. The problem is that it would probably accomplish very little because the whole structure of the system assumes that curses are bad. A curse's rating is either subtracted from the subject's rolls to avoid the doom, or added to the rolls of other people working to bring the doom about. So 'cursing' someone with immortality would impede their suicide attempts and assist their doctors, but it wouldn't help their melee defenses or survival rolls or anything because those are rolls that the subject makes in support of not dying, which are unaffected.

[OgreBattle]

This sorcery section looks solid for Howard stories, seems faster than combat

[angelfromanotherpin]

The Greater Mysteries


Goety is demon-summoning (and banishing). It's difficult to judge, because the book only has one sample demon, and although there are guidelines for building your own, they aren't exactly rigorous. Also, an enormous number of things are determined 'by the setting,' including ritual time (from about an hour to over a day) demon default attitude and the minimum required blood sacrifice. The result is that Goety's value is going to vary wildly depending on the Referee at your table.

Necromancy is calling up the spirits of the dead to get information from them, which would seem to have serious overlap with Prophecy. It has more requirements (you need a name and one of remains/possession/place of death), but it provides a lot more information per cast, and it has a very detailed set of modifiers to see if the dead spirit knows the answers. So the necromancy writeup is the exact thing they seemed to give up trying for on the Prophecy writeup, which is... odd.

One of the most entertaining things about Necromancy is that apparently all dead people gossip together in the afterlife, so you can theoretically get any dead person's knowledge out of any raised spirit, although this is much less reliable than asking them about things from their own life, for which spirits seem to have total recall.


Arcane Secrets


Arcane Secrets are special sorcerous techniques which are the juiciest quest rewards available to high-grade casters. A-grade sorcerers start with one, which is nice. You can't learn any of them until you know at least one of the Greater Mysteries, and each requires one or more specific mysteries to learn.

Abomination requires Goety and Mending, is used to modify a fetus into a mutant, and requires a lot of time. You have to bespell the mother every week of the first trimester, and then wait for it to be born, and then the ababynation matures at five times normal speed, and your campaign is still probably over before anything useful comes out of knowing this particular Secret.

The Acolyte's Claw requires Goety and Mending and lets you use sorcery as a martial art, adding your Goety rating to your Brawl proficiency, and making your empty hand hit either like a mace or like a knife that all but ignores armor.

Animate the Dead requires Necromancy and is a 30-minute ritual that turns a normal corpse into a walking corpse. There is no limit to how many a single sorcerer can have animated, and they all obey him to the limits of their very low intelligence. This one's a real game-changer, it makes a proficient necromancer into a national-level threat in a hurry.

Bind The Soul requires Necromancy, with which you call up a spirit as 'normal' and then (with an hour-long ritual) cram it into a willing or restrained living person, evicting their native spirit unto death. You can also cram them into a walking corpse if you have one. It's a sort of resurrection, but the resulting person is usually deranged to a greater or lesser degree depending on your casting successes. If you crammed them into a walking corpse, the corpse's required obedience to you is still in effect.

Blight requires Goety and Cursing and reduces a county-sized area's yearly crop yield, possibly down to nothing. Excess hits on the casting roll can extend the duration into further years or affect more counties. It's very nasty, but not particularly useful to heroic adventurers – it's mostly good for extorting rulers.

Chariot of Sorcery requires Goety and Necromancy and lets you enchant a vehicle. The process takes 1-4 weeks, and you spend hits on the size of vehicle you can effect and the enchanted effects, and it lets you make a flying boat or a walking hut or a horseless wagon or such. Because the only real cost is the time, you can have a collection of magic conveyances including spares to trade. Cool and practical (if you ever have the downtime), although badly upstaged by Portal.

Eldritch Effigies requires Goety and Enslavement and requires one Limelight to cast, splitting the sorcerer into as many copies of themselves as they get hits on the casting roll, lasting for about half an hour. There are a lot of restrictions on these dupes, who must remain nearby to each other, must all engage in roughly the same activity, and only one can cast at a time (which will render the others passive because they can't engage in that activity). Technically only one holds the caster's 'essence' at a time, but the essence moves around more-or-less at will and even killing the essence-holder with a single blow won't prevent them from shifting to another bod. When time is up, you pick whichever dupe you like best and the rest vanish. Seems bonkers for survivability or if the caster has even moderate combat ability.

Firestorm requires Cursing and Witchfire and turns your witchfire into a true AOE that can literally kill thousands per cast. Again, knowing this Secret makes a sorcerer become a national-level threat.

Hand of Doom requires Goety and Necromancy and is a death-spell that kills by yanking a body part from the person to the sorceror's hand, be it head, organ, or whatever. It's got some real upsides if your target is a well-armed and well-skilled conventional fighter, but for the most part it's like Witchfire - cool, but death is pretty cheap and you're probably better off putting your resources elsewhere and letting the swordsmen kill fools for you.

Master the Beast requires Goety and Enslavement and is another Limelight-cast which conjures a large number of animals and forces them to do the caster's bidding. It doesn't last very long, so it doesn't make you the same sort of national-level threat as some of the Secrets, but you do break personal-level combat over your knee when you sic tens of crocodiles on your enemies.

Mold the Flesh requires Goety and Necromancy and is a Limelight-cast that lets the caster take on an animal shape. Simple and practical.

Plague Wind requires Necromancy and Mending and takes a several-hour ritual to create a deadly plague and afflict an area with it. A lot like Blight in that its chief use is extorting rulers.

Portal requires Goety and Necromancy lets you open a teleportal between two locations. This usually takes an hour, but if you're willing to take a risk, you can do it in a single Combat Round. I think this is probably one of the all-round best. From a strictly adventurer standpoint, you have an asymmetric advantage on primitive travel times and past primitive static defenses, but on a larger scale you are a strategic asset that kingdoms would go to war to possess.

Shake the Bones of the Earth requires Goety and makes building-damaging earthquakes with an hour or two's ritual. This one can be practical for adventurers, because sometimes the enemy has inconvenient fortifications.

Whisper My Name In Fear requires Prophecy and Scrying and gives you knowledge of when anyone speaks your name, the name of the speaker, their exact location, their general identity (profession if nothing else), context of the speech (hostile, reverential, plotting) and also the names and general identities of the people being spoken to. This specifically does not distract the sorcerer, who receives the info-packet in a neat and unintrusive manner. Even referring to the sorcerer obliquely is no guarantee of bypassing this Secret, requiring a pretty hard Cunning roll to do so in a way indirect enough that it won't count. Not the best for pure action stories, but great for an oppressive villain sorcerer, or even a PC sorcerer in a high-intrigue game.


Bonus: Duel of Wills


Sorcerers can engage each other (but not muggles) in immaterial combat which functions a lot like a simplified melee combat except that you're using your spell pools instead of your proficiency pools. Some of the Duel of Will maneuvers favor particular mysteries, so there's even potential reason to not use your highest spell pool all the time. Duels of Will require mutual willingness to participate, so you can't be sucked into it by an obviously superior caster – but then again, the stakes for a Duel of Will are relatively low (it's hard to be killed in one), so if your opponent is an obviously superior caster you may want them to be wasting their time in mental battle with you rather than siccing tens of crocodiles on your friends.

Losing a Duel of Wills means being knocked down, stunned, made vulnerable to the winner's casting, and possibly injured to some degree depending on the finishing move.

Looking back to Chargen, I think that the tradeoff between either two stat points or being a low-grade caster is actually one you could reasonably come down on either side of. Being low-grade means that you're going to have to throw a lot of your spell pool into casting and not have much left for containment, and so you'll very likely pick up taint which will penalize your spell pool, leading to a vicious circle. It's a choice between the small-and-reliable advantage of extra dice or the large-and-unreliable advantage that a few Mystery uses can provide. I'd have to try out a few builds to say for sure, though.

Next Up: Sword and Sorcery Gaming

[OgreBattle]

Sounds good for a Ninja Scroll or early Naruto type game. Is Hand of Doom usable against demons and brown bears?

Any spells for flight, invisibility, teleportation or force walls? Or just enhancing physical attributes like jumping good and bouncing swords off your chest.

[Thaluikhain]

Random question, was "Sagacity" a commonly used stat name at the time? Shortly after this, GW's Inquisitor game came out using that name, wonder if it's a coincidence.

[OgreBattle]

On fixing the Riddle of Steel & Successor's problem with all-in first turn attacks that are likely to crush any defense...

Well first, the goal is 'realism' so realism can be used to justify changes. The simplest change is that the first exchange from a distance where a fighter needs to take a big step or multiple creeping shuffles to get within attack range is much more telegraphed to defend against. It's coming from a further distance. After that, when a fighter doesn't need to take a step to land a hit, is when a flurry of attacks will overcome a passive defense.

So the simple change is that the first attack that engages with someone is at a penalty.... like -X equal to a reach penalty of 2 meters / 6 feet-ish

[angelfromanotherpin]

Chapter Seven: S&S Gaming



This chapter is broken into two major subsections. The first is a treatment of the Sword & Sorcery subgenre as distinct from the better-known fantasy tropes; it's perfectly serviceable. The second is the Referee advice section, a test that so many games have failed.

II. XX Tips For Running Your Blade Game!

Keep it Exciting: This is distinguished as the goal, not a tip. The text expands it to 'exciting, entertaining, and surprising.'

1. Go... Get... Some... Books: The book has an annotated bibliography of its source material, and this tip is not just to read some, but also to encourage your group to do the same. Condescending wording aside, its true that there's nothing like the primary sources for understanding a genre, and even fantasy fans can't be counted on to have read any S&S.

2. The Fray's The Thing: This tip is somewhat confused. It says that 'every attack in combat should be as creative and detailed as possible,' but also that 'Blade combat should be fast, fluid, and constantly jumping.' The problem, of course, is that nothing bogs down combat quite like demanding people be 'as detailed as possible' with their attack declarations. It's an overcorrection from the tired 'I swing' tropes, but Blade doesn't even let you say that, because every shot is already a called shot with a specific maneuver, approach, and method.

3. Do It With Style: This tip is maddeningly self-referential. There are games (mostly swashbuckling-inspired) that spend whole chapters explaining how to earn your slow-walking badass shots, and this tip spends four sentences saying 'be cool by being cool' at you. Useless.

4. Subtlety is Not a Virtue: This one's pretty good. A lot of players instinctively have their characters respond to dramatic developments with stoic self-mastery – but that's actually boring as fuck to watch. Overact. Be melodramatic. Chew that scenery. Fuck yes.

5. Everyone Has a Past: I have trouble figuring out what this tip is even trying to tell me. My best guess is 'a PCs Passion Attributes are sourced in past events, and NPCs connected to those past events exist and might show up.' But it's seriously incomprehensible.

6. Don't Loot the Bodies: 'It's crass.' Fuck you, either you trust your own abstract wealth system to incentivize behaviors or you should have put more work into it. And honestly, if someone is at the Dead Broke step, they should be scrabbling for loose change wherever they can find it.

7. The Entire World's a Cliché: Play to tropes. Sure.

8. If it's Not Important, it's Off Screen: Don't make players RP out grocery shopping and such. It's not a thing I've ever had a problem with, but some groups apparently do, and it does sound intolerable.

9. A Game in Motion Tends to Stay in Motion: If a session bogs down, inject some energy. They actually go to the Chandler quote about throwing armed goons at slow parts. It's not bad, although I'd have made a point that some things that might seem static do count as dramatic motion.

10. It's Not Just About Combat: This grapples with the classic problem that the rules for combat are super-detailed and time-consuming and the rules for everything else are not and so whether they like it or not the game is primarily about combat even if the actual play is not. At the same time, emphasizing the non-combat activity to provide context and stakes for your stabtimes is solid advice.

11. Mooks - Set Dressing That's Fun to Beat Up: Don't be worried if the PCs mow through unnamed enemies. Yes, solid.

12. Eat Your Mooks – They're Good For You: This is a very specific recommendation to represent unnamed enemies with pieces of candy on a dish, and the candy goes to whoever kills them. It's a fun little gimmick, but that's all it is.

13. Let Your Players Shine: Full quote:

Most of what the heroes do in novels or movies would never work in real life anyway, so don't apply the "real life" rule to your players. Blade characters regularly bend the laws of physics to do the things they do. Roll with it.

Now, you shouldn't let your players get away with things that are obviously impossible or just plain stupid. But don't trip them up with rules technicalities or reality checks.

It's a good sentiment. I think it needs a bit more nuance to be really good, because 'real life' and 'rules technicalities' are usually a significant part of a group's shared expectations, and you don't want to tread on those thoughtlessly. At the same time, very few players object to rule-of-cool lenience.

14. Let Your Players Fail: The philosophy that success only has meaning if there was a legit chance of failure and that it's important to respect the RNG is a valid one and I respect it, but I also understand that it's not for every table.

15. Great Villains Never Die; They Come Back in Sequels: This is a weird one, because I think it's actually out-of-genre. I struggle to remember any recurring villains in the S&S I've read. I also think that this tip is a great way to step on your player's sense of accomplishment and also undermine the harsh-and-deadly world that's been built up. Worse than useless.

16. Paint a Picture: Take the time to set the scene and describe things. Basic, but decent advice.

17. Let Players Roll the Dice: Increase player engagement by having players who aren't in the limelight roll the dice for the NPCs. Double value because it prevents Referee fudging. Solid.

18. Keep Your Villains on Their Toes: Remember that antagonist organizations will often have ambitious or feuding members that can be exploited. Very yes.

19. Give Your Encounter a Hook: Make scenes (fight or otherwise) memorable by including distinctive surroundings. Yes, good.

20. Give Your Players Small Secrets: This is a strange one to me. It wants you to include lots of trivial unanswered questions that players can find out the answers to if they want. This seems to conflict with Tip #8 and also with the genre. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser don't follow their neighbor who sneaks out every morning just to find an answer that's trivial and mundane because that would be boring. I can see a game where this sort of technique might work, but it's not the one that's set up here.

Final Word: THE IRON RULE
Full quote:

These rules are yours, and you are invited to make them even more so by customising them to your heart’s content. Add, change, and ignore what you like. There is however only a single rule that cannot be altered while still playing Blade and this is the Iron Rule:

When we encourage “you” to make these rules your own we are referring to the gaming group, not the referee. The gaming group has every authority to change the rules; the ref on his own has none. He doesn’t own the game he is refereeing, the group does. If he wants to change a rule, ignore a rule, or add a rule, he has to run this by his group, and if the majority of the group (himself included as but one member among several members of equal rights) repudiates this change, the change cannot be enacted.

The ref has but one special authority over the rules: He can veto any rules change proposed by any of the players. It doesn’t matter if the majority of the group wants to change one of the rules presented herein, if the ref isn’t comfortable with such a change, the rule still stands.

So that’s the Rule of Iron. The group as a whole may change the rules as it likes, the ref without the group’s consent may not.

If every RPG replaced Rule Zero with this, the world would be a better place.

The tips are a mixed bag, but I think the bad ones are the result of enthusiastic confusion more than anything else. The good ones are genuinely good, and the overall spirit is definitely in the right place.

---

Since I'm not going to go into the setting chapter because I cannot pretend to care about one more Hyborian Age knockoff, that's basically the book. It is a substantial improvement over the original, but somehow never grabbed me enough to play (and I played a number of RoS games, trying to make sense of it).

There have been two more attempts at successor games. One, Song of Swords, seems to have stalled and died in 2017, producing only a document too incomplete to be worth reviewing. The other, originally titled Band of Bastards and later renamed Sword & Scoundrel, was still in movement as recently as May of this year, but seems to have been somewhat derailed by all the things. Their document is complete enough for me to take a swing at, so I will. Later.

[Emerald]

5. Everyone Has a Past: I have trouble figuring out what this tip is even trying to tell me. My best guess is 'a PCs Passion Attributes are sourced in past events, and NPCs connected to those past events exist and might show up.' But it's seriously incomprehensible.

Where I've seen similar advice before, it's basically been about tying personality traits in with backstory events. "Joe Warrior fought in King Bob's army for a few years but now is doing his own thing, and also Joe Warrior is a lone wolf type" is less useful as a roleplaying prompt for the player and hook for the GM than "Joe Warrior joined King Bob's army because he believed Bob was a true and worthy king, but his problems with authority eventually resulted in him being drummed out for insubordination," as the latter helps prompt the player when deciding how Joe Warrior might react to a corrupt ruler or an overbearing mercenary leader and gives the GM ideas for bringing in some of Joe's old army buddies or the sergeant who kicked him out.

How relevant that advice is for a genre where plots tend to be more episodic than overarching, villains are rarely super-personal and almost never recur, and characters tend to be less fleshed-out in general, compared to high fantasy works that tend to be more intertwined and character-driven, is of course an entirely different issue.

[OgreBattle]

Ah this is the one with the boobies on every left side page, I saw it yeaaars ago.

The Iron Rule is a good one, bought the PDF to read through it again.