Black Void Quickstart Reviewed

About time I did another quickstart review.  Black Void is available from Modiphius.  Let's have a look.

Content

This quickstart comes in at an apparently minimal 33 pages, although don't be fooled into thinking it's lighter than the previous quickstarts I've looked at.  Quite the opposite.

We start out with a bit of backstory - useful, since the name Black Void isn't exactly telling us a lot - which in combination with the cover art does give me some idea what's going on here.

Then we have a contents page with some introductory information.  Useful stuff like what kind of game this actually is, and already I'm getting the impression this is to fantasy what Coriolis is to sci-fi.  Plus there's the information you really want to know - what kind of dice does it use?  (The answer is d12s.)

After this, the document is broken down into four sections: character creation, equipment, playing the game, and the arbiter's guide because god forbid anyone just calls a GM a GM any more.

The character creation rules presented here are a slimmed down version of the actual rules, but there's still plenty going on here.  First there's eight traits (what a certain other fantasy game would call attributes) and a set of talents you can add on to higher traits, with two options given for each trait, so a decent amount of customisation is available.

There are two pools of points for character creation: one for traits, and one for literally everything else, including talents and everything further down the page, all under the heading of abilities.

The first ability after talents is backgrounds, which come with a mix of flavour and mechanical benefits.  Hard to say how useful any of these are at this point, but the flavour does give me a feel for what kind of game we're looking at here.

Next is attributes, which you can only get if you picked up the half-blood background, which lets you have things like wings and claws.

Then there's powers, which I was expecting given that we're in a fantasy setting.  With this being a slimmed down version, we're not seeing all the powers here, but the one they've chosen to show us is blood rituals - literally sacrificing creatures to imbue yourself and others with power or practice divination.  Not everyone is going to like this, and I think that makes it an excellent choice for the quickstart.  If the idea of blood soaked oracles puts you off, best to find out now.  If it does appeal, you're going to want to know more.

Finally we have skills, split into general skills and combat skills.  Nothing particularly notable here, although it's worth mentioning that most skills have several associated traits.  I'm not quite sure what this means mechanically at this point, although my guess is when you add up your bonuses you decide which trait goes with the skills.  Stealth can use agility if you're moving silently or intelligence if you're analysing patterns of guard movements.  It's an extra layer of complexity but certainly an intriguing one.

Then there's a couple of pages on various bits and pieces - health, movement, wealth, and rather more unusual things like sanity, enlightenment and wastah, which the internet tells me is an Arabic word that roughly translates to 'clout' or 'who you know'.

The equipment chapter is limited to weapons and armour, and has thankfully listed things with generic names like 'sword' and saved words like 'scimitar' and 'talwar' for the flavour text.  The Middle Eastern theme of this game is really shining through but they're not putting up linguistic boundaries to play it.

And fittingly we're now on to chapter 3: playing the game.  Finally we get the dice mechanic - d12 + modifiers versus a target number that's normally 7.  And here's where it gets confusing, because you don't add your trait, you add your trait modifier, which ranges from -3 to +2 with a trait of 3 being 0.  And skill ratings do seem to add on directly, but not having a skill means -3.  And then there's further modifiers for bad weather.  Hopefully this is laid out more clearly in the main book, because the table that appears here is not helping.

Once you've actually figured out what you're rolling though, things are pretty straightforward.  There are some combat manoeuvres that resemble the feats from certain well known fantasy games, but otherwise not too much complexity.  It's a pretty clear level of crunch, and I've got a good grasp of how much I'm likely to enjoy it.

A single page on the subject of sanity and fear saves, and then we're on to character advancement.  I'm not entirely convinced this is necessary in a quickstart document.  At the point where you're engaging in character advancement, surely it's time to buy the book?

The arbiter's guide section is pretty standard stuff, except for some reason this is where you'll find the tables for crits and fumbles (here called exceptional hits and mishaps - why is everyone so desperate to rename standard terms?)

Well, that was quite a slog.  What you won't find here is a sample adventure or any pregen characters.  These are available in separate documents which are linked at the end of the quickstart.

Presentation

In short, it looks great.  It's got a ton of art, from full colour illustrations to black and white sketches, and it all brings the setting to life.  The page design is gorgeous.  The layout is clear and easy to read.  The only hiccups are the skills and talents pages, where the two column layout used everywhere else inexplicably turns into three columns.

What it would be like to print, I'm not sure.  Even if you can not print the page backgrounds, there's still full colour art on quite a lot of pages.  For screen use however, it's a fully bookmarked PDF and everything is very easy to find.

For what's in this document, the ordering is fine.  I think I would have liked some more setting info at the start, and maybe the basic mechanics so I knew what I was doing when going through the character creation section, but that's pretty minor.

What can I do with it?

You can get a feel for what kind of game this is and whether it's relevant to your interests.  You can't actually run an adventure with only this document - there's just not enough here - but you can pick up the two other documents and use those to run an adventure in conjunction with this, and I might just do that.

Conclusion

Much like Cold And Dark, there's too much in here for it to really be called a quickstart.  I would be inclined to ditch a lot of the character creation stuff in favour of including the pre-gen characters in the document, and focus on the rules needed to run the sample adventure.  However, it's done its job of getting me interested in the game.  Assuming I enjoy running the sample adventure there's a good chance of me buying the main book.  So on that basis, it's done its job.