Terminator Quickstart Reviewed

 The new Terminator RPG is doing a kickstarter that finished today.  The quickstart was available free on DTRPG so a bunch of us thought we'd try it out to decide how much we wanted to pledge.  Let's take a look.

Content

With 43 pages of content, this is a reasonable length for a quickstart.  It's not bookmarked, or clearly divided into chapters or sections, but what you do have is an introduction to the game and rules, a sample adventure, and seven pre-gen characters.  Attempting to break it down any further is something of a challenge, but here goes.

We start with some general information about what an RPG is, what the quickstart is, what the kickstarter is all about, a rather odd inclusion about hacking rules, and something really useful: what dice you need to play it with.  (Several d10s.)

Next comes an overview of characters, explaining stats and skills and what these represent.  It does mention that the full rules will include a much larger skill list - which worries me slightly, given that there's already a pretty long list here.  Then there's traits - an assortment of advantages and disadvantages to add colour to a character.  This is quite brief, only including traits found on the pre-gen characters, and again it's clarified that the full rules will have a much longer list.

So far everything's been pretty clear, but on page 6 we get to rules and mechanics and it's here things don't go so well.  The game uses the same S5S system as SLA Industries, and presumably if you're familiar with that game you're not going to have any problems with this one, but for our group of complete noobs, this section was not well written.

It starts out well by explaining passive skills - you don't always have to roll, if you have a sufficiently high skill and are not under duress.  It covers how to determine target numbers, and then gets onto actual skill rolls.  While we did not find this particularly intuitive, it does provide a number of examples which help clear up any confusion.  It briefly covers the Fate mechanic - basically a small pool of points that can be used for rerolls or to add to rolls.  These get spent after making the roll, which obviously I thoroughly approve of.

There's also a fear mechanic, which makes sense given the nature of the setting.  Terminators are supposed to be scary.  This part isn't particularly clear though - it explains fear ratings at length with some clear tables, but when and how you make a fear roll, and what counts as success, is buried in a paragraph.  Fear then ties into Willpower, which has not previously been mentioned, and it seems like all the interesting effects of fear actually come out when you lose willpower, which can be lost in a number of situations, of which losing fear is just one.

I'm not saying it's a bad mechanic, but trying to dig through it in the context of a quickstart was definitely a challenge, compared to the smooth way that stress and panic work in the Alien RPG.  Not that any of that mattered in the end, given that our characters all rolled so well on every fear roll that we had to assume we were all completely accustomed to encountering terminators.

It also notes that players and directors (once again, god forbid anyone just calls a GM a GM) should try not to get hung up on counting points too much, which given what a crunchy system they've just thrown at us, seems a little out of place.

Page 11 brings us to combat, starting with initiative.  The roll is pretty simple, but then it gets into the declaring of actions, having the slowest initiative go first so that faster initiatives can react to their decisions, and then resolving the actions with the faster initiatives going first.  There's a reason hardly any games do this kind of thing, and in the playtest we immediately threw this part in the bin in favour of the normal acting in order of initiative.  I get that it makes for more tactical combat, but when you're claiming to be a game focussed on the story, that isn't supposed to be a gun-fest, this level of crunch feels entirely unnecessary.

A list of possible combat action is given, which mentions that it's reduced from the full list to keep the quickstart adventure running smoothly, but then goes on to include rules for charging into combat and a movement system that I still don't understand.

Next up is the actual combat rules, covering hand-to-hand combat and ranged combat.  Again, for what's supposed to be a slimmed down rules-lite version for smooth play, there are a lot of examples of modifiers, defensive maneovres, rules for cover and aiming, and firing at engaged targets.  It's not bad, but it's a lot.  And buried within it is the target number for combat skill rolls, which is 10.  It took us a long time to find that.

And then there's damage, which is a whole different subject and once again comes with a stack of modifiers related to margin of success, strength of the user for melee weapons, and rate of fire for ranged weapons.  Again there's a note mentioning that this isn't the full rules, which also includes different types of ammunition.

Armour comes next, and on the face of it is a simple damage reduction.  No problems there.  However, weapons can also inflict armour damage, which reduces the armour's armour resistance.  Once armour has lost half its armour resistance, it halves the damage reduction.  So effectively your armour has hit points as well as you.

At least hit points are fairly simple, with 0 hit points meaning death.  Although of course there are also wounds and conditions and these are further tied into the character's Endurance skill.  Again it's a slimmed down list, and it's not bad, but it's a lot.

Hope points provide a nice cinematic edge, giving characters access to a variety of dramatic feats like making an impossible shot, being extremely brave or brushing off an injury.  They look potentially fun, although I can't find anywhere how many hope points you're supposed to have, and this feels like yet another complication that could have been left out of the quickstart.

And then we come to hacking.

One of the criticisms often levelled at Cyberpunk 2020 is that the netrunner is effectively playing an entirely different game to the rest of the characters, to the point that most GMs won't even let you play them.  At least some editions of Shadowrun apparently suffer from the same problem.  It's clear that making hacking fun is a challenge, when the two giants of the cyberpunk genre both struggled with it.

Of the various efforts to improve matters, Cyberpunk Red still leaves the netrunner somewhat disconnected from the rest of the game, although it's still a significant improvement over 2020.  Carbon 2185, which uses the D&D 5e ruleset, simply recasts the hacker as a wizard with power over electronics, which works well enough in that context.  The Sprawl, using PBTA, has a custom set of moves for hacking but encourages the GM to have this happening parallel to the rest of the action or keep the spotlight moving, which just about works.  This game though...

No.  Hacking mini games are only fun in single player CRPGs.  They were terrible in CP2020 and they're terrible here.

Four or so pages of hacking later, we get onto weapons and gear, for some reason known here as hardware.  This is nicely laid out with a variety of weapon stat blocks with all the information you need.

There's a short section on how to GM (or direct, as it would have it) the game, and then on page 29 we get to the sample adventure.  Thematically it's fine, with a group of resistance fighters having to make their way to a Time Displacement Device and get at least one of them back in time.  In practice I found it didn't really capture the feel of Terminator, not least because there's just so many sodding terminators in it.

Terminators are like daleks.  One is terrifying.  Lots of them is irrelevant.  I also didn't like how fast they're supposed to be.  I don't recall Terminators in the movies being particularly speedy.  What made them scary was their relentlessness.  You could run, but eventually you'd have to rest and all the time it would be catching up with you.  Terminators are persistance hunters like humans, not pursuit predators like cheetahs.

Our GM did his best to play up the horror elements of the scenario, but ultimately this ended up being far more of a comedy game, that we enjoyed in spite of the rules and adventure, not because of it.

Finally we come to the pre-gen characters.  Here the quickstart nails it with a diverse set of characters with interesting backstories who fit well into the Terminator setting.  I would absolutely watch a movie starring this bunch.  I picked Harper, the heavy weapon specialist, and was surprised to find myself with a character using they pronouns.  They had enough personality hooks in their character bio to give me something fun to play up in the scenario, and a solid set of skills.  I'd happily play them again.

The character sheets are largely fine, but fall down in two specific areas.  There's nowhere to put a weapon's stat block, meaning that in combat we were constantly having to refer back to the hardware section for details like damage and rate of fire.  And the skill lists only include the skills the character has ranks in, and doesn't say which attribute its based on, making unskilled rolls unnecessarily complicated as you have to look up in the skills section which attribute to roll instead.

Presentation

The cover is a fantastic picture of a burning terminator, and each page header shows a strip from an image of a terminator, black and white except for the glowing red eyes.  It invokes an unsettling feeling of being watched the whole time, and adds nicely to the mood.  Otherwise, there's minimal art - two full colour images illustrate the sample adventure and the burning terminator is reproduced near the start.  Nothing to complain about here, and it should be reasonable for printing.

The two column layout is pretty standard for the form factor, and is readable on my screen.  Headings and asides are styled to break things up well.  Just a shame the rules section isn't split up better.  Bookmarking would have reduced the amount of time searching for things in the rules, but that's also not present.  Be ready to do a lot of scrolling.

What can I do with it?

You can run the sample adventure.  If you really want to.

More importantly, you can get a very good overview of what the game system is like.  Despite any complaining I might have done above, I do feel like I really know what kind of game this is, and exactly how much I want to spend on the kickstarter, which is the whole reason we decided to try this quickstart out in the first place.  So in that respect, it's absolutely succeeded.  Good work.

Conclusion

As a quickstart, this does its job.  By the end of the game, all of us were confident in selecting what level to back the kickstarter at.  The only things I'd change are to add bookmarking and put the weapon stats on the character sheets.

Pretty much all of my issues here are with the game system itself, which is a crunch-fest worthy of Cyberpunk 2020 at its most ridiculous.  I can't help comparing it to Cyberpunk Red, which still manages to keep a high level of crunch and tactical combat while taking out so much of the complexity that made its predecessor hard to play.

I also can't help comparing it to Alien, which uses its stress mechanic to bring the rising tension in a far more effective way than we experienced here, and also represents its iconic monster in a way that feels true to the source material.

CP Red has demonstrated that you can update extremely crunchy 1990s mechanics to something that works for modern day gamers.  The SLA Industries 2nd edition kickstarter claims to have done the same thing by introducing a new system, but I'm just not seeing it - unless the original SLA Industries was significantly worse.  There are modern features like the fate points, but the system itself still feels straight out of the early 90s.  A solid VTT implementation would certainly reduce the pain, but you shouldn't need a VTT to make a game playable.

I'm looking forward to playing in the Terminator setting, but it won't be with these rules.

When Shadows Fall Quickstart Reviewed

When Shadows Fall is the latest quickstart I've got my hands on (via Kickstarter), so let's take a look.

Content

At 23 pages, this is a rare thing: a quickstart that can genuinely be described as quick.

Section 1 gives a couple of paragraphs on the game setting, then goes straight into the rules.  We get an introduction to character abilities, difficulty levels and how the core dice mechanic works.  There's a full page on combat, another covering physical aspects like armour, injury and fatigue (the latter of which doubles as the system's push mechanic), and a third on mental aspects.  While it's clearly stated that these are not the full rules, there's enough to run a game.

Section 2 gets further into the game's setting, with some more details of what's meant by the Shadow, and a few examples of the kind of antagonists that might be encountered in the game.  It's the briefest of introductions, which gives a good feel for the game's flavour, but not much suggestion on what a scenario might look like. Fortunately this is followed by...

Section 3 is a sample adventure.  It's a simple mission spiced up with a number of complications, which serve as a reminder that this is both a post-apoc game and a horror game.  It's not very long, and probably won't take more than a couple of hours to get through, although it's open-ended enough to be the start of something longer.

Section 4 is a set of sample characters.  These actually provide a bit more setting information - their previous occupations serve as a reminder that the game's apocalypse is a very recent event, and their backgrounds give some examples of recent events.  A slight oddity in the equipment lists is that two of the characters have daggers.  Not impossible (I mean, I own several) but an odd choice compared to a kitchen knife.  Edged weapons aside, the characters are flexible enough to be used in a wide range of scenarios, and have a good spread of abilities, with enough information to play straight off the page.  They're also diverse in gender, race and sexuality - always nice to see.

Presentation

The document is entirely monochrome, using a cloudy grey background for most pages and some black and white photography overlayed with a similar texture for section headings.  While nothing particularly spectacular, it's pretty atmospheric - looking at this I can certainly picture a world of grey concrete and overcast skies.

The PDF doesn't seem to have any bookmarks, but it does have a hyperlinked contents page, which should help reduce the amount of scrolling.  While I'm not sold on the two column layout, it's certainly readable on my desktop screen.  I'm not sure it would be good for printing, as I can't find any way of turning off the background image.  Not much of an issue at the time of writing, when coronavirus means pretty much all gaming is online, but something to consider when things get back to whatever normal turns out to be.

The character sheets are very obviously an early version - not particularly well laid out, but readable enough to be used as-is if you don't mind getting the background image when printing.  I assume the finished book will come with something prettier.

In terms of ordering, I would have liked to have the setting information before the rules, but otherwise no problems here.  If you're trying to avoid reading the adventure because you're going to be playing it, having the character sheets at the end is pretty convenient.

What can I do with it?

You can run the sample adventure.  There's enough information to run it straight off the document.  Unfortunately, it's not really long enough for a convention scenario, so if you want to use it for a convention you'll need to add some of your own material.

You can run your own game.  You can also make new characters, if the five at the end aren't enough.  While you'd have to improvise a lot with the setting, the rules given here, while not complete, are sufficient for actual play.

You can decide whether it's worth backing the kickstarter.  Unfortunately, right now it's only available to people who've backed the kickstarter, but if you're debating whether to back at digital or physical level, it'll certainly help with that.

Conclusion

Ultimately there's not enough setting information to do much more than the sample adventure, but it delivers when it comes to introducing the rules.  As someone who's not a fan of the Savage Worlds or Cortex systems, I was pretty wary of a game inspired by them, so being able to see that it differs enough from those systems to overcome my dislike was definitely useful.

The author has taken inspiration from the Liminal quickstart in putting this document together, and given that Liminal is my gold standard for quickstarts, that definitely bodes well.  While I don't think it's as good as Liminal, due to less setting information, it's achieved its goal in that between this and a sample game I've been convinced to up my kickstarter pledge to a physical book level and am looking forward to playing some more.

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.

Cold and Dark Quickstart Reviewed.

Continuing through my collection of quickstarts, here's one I downloaded from Modiphius - Cold and Dark.

Content

At 76 pages, this is really stretching the definition of 'quickstart'.

We start with an explanation that this is in fact a slimmed down version of the original game.  We immediately learn that some character options have been condensed down, which I'm not sure I like, but at least this is explained.

Past the credits page is a glossary.  Literally a page and a half of this document is given over to explaining acronyms.

Next up we have six pages of timeline, telling us everything significant that's happened in this game setting.  One feature I like is that the dates aren't absolute - they're all given relative to the present day.  The first event happens at +12 years.  What I like less is six pages of something I personally find pretty dry when we haven't even been told what kind of game this is yet.

On page 12 we finally get to the introduction.  This is good stuff.  It gives a brief introduction to the setting, nailing down the genre we're dealing with here - dark and gritty sci-fi.  There's just enough information to let you know if this setting is your jam.  It's definitely mine.  Onwards!

The character creation system is introduced here.  While the explanation at the start says that character creation is not included, it nevertheless gives a list of attributes and skills.  For some reason it decides to call these aptitudes and abilities rather than attributes and skills, but I understand what they mean so I'll give them a pass on this one.  Less forgivable is their decision to rename the GM and player characters to AI and Avatars.  This is my hill and I will die on it.  I'm looking at you, Chaosium.

Next we have an explanation of actions and rolls, which looks like a pretty standard dice pool system, beyond the fact that it uses d8s rather than the more usual d10s or d6s.  Nevertheless it takes three pages to fully explain the dice pools and various edge cases, which seems like overkill for something that's supposed to be a condensed version of the game.  And even then we're not done, as it continues with some specific rules for using strength and for security systems.  Inexplicably, despite the dice rolls being introduced on page 14, it's not until page 18 that we're actually told what dice result actually counts as a success.

We then get a few pages on the rules you really want to know - combat, damage and healing.

Despite the claim that character creation rules have not been included, we get six character archetypes described.  Apparently there are nineteen in the full game, although they're not listed.  The six we see are a pretty decent selection though, hitting most of the character types I'd expect in a dark scifi setting.

Page 30 kicks off a bunch of setting information.  Now I can see why we need that glossary.  The amount of acronyms here make it kind of hard to read, which is a shame, because when I do manage to find a low-acronym passage it's pretty well done, covering government, law, society and technology.  Really though, there's far too much stuff here.  Fifteen pages!

We're past the halfway point.  Page 45 introduces yet another acronym, but it turns out we're now into the gear section and about to learn about the power armour/space suits that everyone in this setting has.  There are some nice annotated images to go with them.

A few random images later, we have a page about The Dark, basically this game's version of a sanity mechanic.  A staple for any dark and gritty sci-fi setting.  Odd that there's only half a page on it.

Page 55 brings an introductory adventure.  This immediately links to a separate story on another PDF - odd choice, but with this document already being the size it is, I'm not going to fault them for keeping it separate.  Expecting me to read a separate story on top of this giant document before I can bring the game to the table is a bit much though.

We have a set of five pre-gen characters - the crew of a heavy freighter, the Valhalla.  Based on their names there's some racial diversity represented here, and two out of five are women.  They all come with a decent paragraph about their history and personality.  I'd be happy to play any of them.

There's one slight oddity in this adventure as the captain is not a playable character.  There are reasons why she's an NPC (or NPA, as the game insists on saying) but having recently dealt with the fun of hidden agendas in the Alien RPG, I'd be more inclined to make her playable and assign her to someone I trust to play her with an extensive briefing.

There's a full deck plan for the Valhalla included here.  This is really excellent, and could be used in a wide variety of situations.

The adventure itself is a solid example of a sci-fi horror adventure and I'm actually really keen to get this to the table.  It's got evocative scenes, and plenty of examples of appropriate rolls to make in different situations.  Most of it involves exploring a derelict ship, for which a schematic and location descriptions are provided.  I would have liked a deck plan for this part, as significantly more of the adventure will take place on this ship than on the Valhalla, but at the schematic gives some idea of the layout.

We finish with the character sheets for the five pre-gens.  These take only half a page each.  Finally something concise!

Presentation

This is a good looking PDF.  I wouldn't be surprised if it looks a lot like the original game, with attractive page borders full of hints of artwork.  There are three different credited artists, and it shows in that there's some variation in the art style.  Some I really like.  Some has gone a bit too cheesecake for my liking, but at least there's reasonably portrayed women as well.

There's no sign of bookmarking, which for a PDF of this size is pretty terrible.  The layout is two-column, which is fine for the print edition but not good for scrolling on a screen.  It's black text on white, so apart from the dark page borders it should be reasonably printer friendly.  The sample adventure is low on art beside the deck plan and schematic, so no hindrance to printing that section.

I don't like the ordering at all.  Stuff like the glossary and timeline have no business being at the start of the document.  This could be vastly improved by having a properly hyperlinked contents page at the start, then leading with the introduction, and shunting the glossary and timeline to appendices.

What can I do with it?

You can learn the entire history of this game's setting and a lot about its current situation.  If you really want to.

You can run a game.  While I haven't tried this one out yet, I'm confident the sample adventure has everything you need to get it to the table, and I fully intend to run it at upcoming events.

You can learn enough about the game to get a feel for whether you want to buy it.  At this point I'm honestly tending towards no.  While dark sci-fi is absolutely my jam, I'm not sure this is bringing anything to the table that I can't get from Coriolis or Alien, or even Mothership, and none of those require me to own multiple d8s to play.  But supplementary materials like more pre-written adventures?  That's definitely something that could interest me.  Even if I end up running them in Alien instead.

Conclusion

This isn't really a quickstart.  There's just too much stuff in it, and it's a slog to get through.  It's not sold the game to me at all, despite being totally on brand for my own taste in RPGs.  I would love to see a signficantly stripped down version of this document, well laid out and bookmarked, because despite the somewhat negative tone of this review, I think there's a game behind here that many people would enjoy, and a better quickstart would really help to get it out there.

Liminal Quickstart Reviewed

I've just downloaded a bunch of quickstarts, and it seems like these could do with reviewing.  The criteria are going to be different to reviewing a full game.  I'll start with Liminal, since I know this one pretty damn well by now.

Content

At 51 pages split into five chapters, this is a pretty substantial quickstart.

Chapter 1 is an introduction to the game.  We start out with an explanation of what kind of game this is, and an introduction to the setting with some of the key factions briefly described.  This is followed by a brief explanation of how characters work.  By this point you can probably tell if this is a game that's going to interest you.

Chapter 2 is a set of sample characters.  They cover a wide range of skills and special abilities, despite being almost entirely mortals, which goes some way to emphasise that playing regular humans in this game can be just as interesting as the more supernatural options.  They come with a bit of flavour text and a description of what their special traits do, so have all the information you need to play with them straight off the page.  They're also ethnically diverse, and three out of four are women, which is nice to see.  This is clearly not just a game about white men.

Chapter 3 is game rules.  In a few short pages, all the key game rules are covered - core mechanic, combat, damage, healing, and a few specialist bits and pieces.  There's enough here to run a game.

Chapter 4 is setting information.  It focusses entirely on London, which makes sense.  Given that the game's primary inspiration is the Rivers of London series, you're going to want to have enough information to play a game in London.  It details how the hidden world and the mundane world interact and influence each other, piling up plot hooks as it goes.

Chapter 5 (which is mis-labelled as chapter 4) is a sample adventure.  The expansion of the HS2 terminal at Euston Station provides the hook here.  It's a pretty simple monster hunt in two parts, but manages to introduce a significant number of the setting's major players in a short space of time while giving the players plenty of room for roleplay.

Presentation

This quickstart is liberally ornamented with Jason Behnke's art, with both full page plates and half page chapter headings, making for a visually stunning document.  Worth taking a look just for this.

It's laid out in single column format, convenient for screen reading, and the PDF is fully bookmarked.  The only obvious flaw I've found is the mis-numbering of chapters.  With the exception of the art, it's also pretty printer-friendly.  I chose to print out the sample adventure for ease of running at the table, and was able to avoid printing any of the art.

The chapter ordering strikes me as odd.  I would have liked to swap the order of chapters 2 and 4, with chapter 4 immediately following the introduction to expand on the setting and the sample characters preceeding the sample adventure.  This would also put them straight after the explanation of what P-Division is, and since the sample characters work for P-Division, having that explanation first would make sense.

What can I do with it?

You can run a game.  Specifically you can run the sample adventure, and I've run it five times now.  While you might want to expand on it a bit by nailing down some of the details, it's got enough to run it straight off the document.

You can decide whether you want the buy the game.  The included setting information is enough to inspire a lot more adventures, and by the time you get to the end you should know whether you want more.

Conclusion

In short, this quickstart does exactly what a quickstart should do, introducing the game in an easily accessible fashion, and it's the standard against which I'll be comparing other quickstarts.

The Everlasting Reviewed

Generally I'd like to play a game before I review it, but realistically this one's never getting to the table.  So here goes.

Setting

I've recently been introduced to the concept of heartbreaker RPGs.  Games that were clearly a labour of love by someone trying to improve on some aspect of their favourite game.

I suspect most people who've played World of Darkness games will at some point have had the same thought: since all these games have the same setting and system, could we combine them all together to make one great big awesome game with vampires, werewolves, mages and changelings all together.

Those who've tried it will know that the answer to this is no.  Changeling magic is embarrassingly underpowered compared to mages.  Vampires are completely incapable of getting along with werewolves.  I've played in an online chat and forum based game that wasn't a disaster, but only because the four games were ultimately kept pretty distinct with only minimal crossover.

The Everlasting is a heartbreaker intended to fix this.  While it's split into four individual games, each of them is compatible with all the others by design, while at the same time still working as a standalone.  The setting is the Secret World, parallel to the real world but full of magic and supernatural beings.  It's pretty similar to the World of Darkness, obviously, but the wider variety of player character types forces it to expand further.

The four books each focus on a specific area of the Secret World.  The Book of the Unliving has the vampires you'd expect, subdivided into different types depending on bloodline.  What's particularly interesting here is that the author has done his research, and the bloodlines are all based on different vampire myths from around the world.  It gives them a grounding in the real world that I found was missing from Vampire: The Masquerade.

As well as vampires, this book also has revenants and ghuls, again based on real world mythology, and giving a bit of variety to the creation of your undead horror-hunger character as you find yourself needing to feed on human flesh or human life force rather than blood.

The Book of the Light introduces a variety of divine character types.  You can play an angel, a minor deity called a daeva, or a grail knight, which brings in Christian theology, a whole bunch of Pagan mythology and the legends of King Arthur.  For some reason this book also includes werewolves, which stick rather closer to traditional tales than the complexity of the WoD werewolf.

The Book of the Spirits provides options for sin-eating gargoyles, Native American inspired manitou, and spirit possessed people.  The Book of the Fantastical has the faeries, dwarves and orcs you'd expect.

The meta-fiction doesn't get in the way too much, just stating that a recent event called the death-knell (which coincides with the Chernobyl incident) has released a bunch of demons onto the earth.  From there you're pretty much free to create your own story.  Or rather to...no, we'll come to that later.  For now, I'll just note that as modern fantasy settings go, this one is incredibly detailed and very well researched.  It's obvious how much love the author put into this, and it's got loads of potential for telling interesting stories.

System

For this section I'll be primarily looking at The Book of the Undead, as a lot of this is repeated pretty much verbatim in each book.

It starts out well enough.  You've got attributes and skills, which determine how many dice you have in your dice pool...

Wait.

This game doesn't have one system.  It has five.

System 1 is your standard WoD style dice pool.  Roll x dice, count successes, ones cancel out successes.  The biggest problem here is that it uses d12s.  As any RPG enthusiast will know, dice come in standard sets.  The 7 dice polyhedral set, blocks of twelve standard or thirty-six small d6s, or a set of ten d10s.  d12s just aren't something your average gamer owns in significant quantities, unless it's part of a truly massive set of dice.  I've been a gamer for about 15 years now, and I have a whole bag of d6s and d10s, a bunch of specialist dice like fate dice, but only four d12s because they're part of the polyhedral sets I own.  Sorting out dice for this game is going to mean having to buy a bunch of individual dice.

Not that this matters, though, because the system that the author actually wants you to use is card draws.  Never mind that drawing 5 cards from a deck has radically different probabilities than rolling 5d12, plus there's a whole different thing that happens if you draw a King.  Still, you probably own a standard deck of playing cards, so there's that.

There are also rules for using percentile dice, because that's totally comparable to a dice pool, and for complete freeform with no dice or cards, simply comparing your combined stat to a difficulty modifier to see how plausible something is.

And then there's tarot, which is pretty much the same as the standard card draw except you all have to have your own deck because you're going to start by drawing three of the major arcana and use them over the course of the game to steer events.  This I actually like, as it gives the potential for narratively interesting things.  The bit where it tells you the proper uses for the cards, and how players should be punished or shut down for using them in other ways, not so much.

So this is all completely bonkers.  You're being clearly pushed in the direction of card draws over dice, but at the same time it says that each player can use whichever system they prefer.  So it's entirely possible to end up with all five going on at the same table.

The game is trying to be all things to all players.  As a result it's just an incoherent mess.

But leaving that aside, we have character creation.

Here the book does something right.  A brief, step by step summary of character creation, with chapter references for the different 'races' within the game.  It's succinct, easy to follow, and should have been front and centre instead of being inexplicably relegated to a set of sidebars, but nevertheless it's excellent.

Characters are built on a point-buy system, except when they're not.  Number of points are given for each section, but there's also an option to do a card draw, do some maths with the result, and use that instead, should you want to make things considerably more difficult for yourself and run the risk of wildly imbalanced PCs, which given that the whole point of this game is to create a set of PCs that don't have the wild power imbalances of the different WoD games seems like a strange approach to take.

Card draws aside, the character creation is really focussed on creating a character who's more than just a set of stats, giving you a set of questions to consider, and a selection of example beliefs, outlooks, passions and other aspects to really flesh them out.  It fits the kind of game this is intended to be.

One thing that's pretty innovative for a game that originally came out in 1997 is the destiny and backlash points.  Destiny points work like fate points in Fate or bennies in Savage Worlds.  They can be awarded for good roleplaying, and are used to improve rolls or alter events in the PC's favour.  Backlash points are used by the GM to turn successes into failures or cause trouble, and are awarded when the PCs do evil things with magic.  There's a certain amount of accountancy required, as each PC has their own individual pool of backlash points, but it's a workable system.

Things turn wonky again when we get to the combat system.  Every character has a speed rating.  This does not determine initiative order, however, but tells you which turns within a combat round you can act upon.  A round has 10 turns, and a character with, e.g. speed 4, can act on turns 3, 5, 8 and 10.  Which could be just about bearable, if it wasn't for the fact that different actions take different numbers of turns.  Then there's opposed roles, difficulty modifiers (just in case you really need to have a sword fight while swimming) and a set of base difficulties for different weapon types, because if you thought this was going to be like WoD with a set target number to beat on your dice pool, you are sorely mistaken.

Naturally there is also a page of rules for freeform combat, plus instructions on how to make this involve far more maths than necessary.  At this point, I've had enough.

Style and Substance

Physically, The Everlasting is in standard large RPG size.  Unusually for large books, they're all paperbacks (although I understand later editions were available in hardback).  The covers have nicely detailed colour paintings.  The internal art is all black and white line art, nothing special but all perfectly servicable and quite respectable for something this old.  All except the Book of the Fantastical have nicely decorated page borders (and that book is a bit of an oddity, having basically been produced as a fan project when for some reason it wasn't going to get released).

But now we get to the actual text.  And if you thought the rules were kind of nutty, this is the point where the game goes totally off the rails.

I have a pet peeve in RPGs, and it's games that use their own terminology instead of industry standard terms.  Everyone knows that unless you're playing D&D (in which case you have the DM or dungeon master), the person running the game is the GM, or game master.  There's no need to mess with that.  And yet many games do, whether it's World of Darkness with Storyteller, Call of Cthulhu with Keeper, or Apocalypse World with MC.

And yet, while I don't like it, I can see why they did it.  WoD was trying to demonstrate that it was a different type of game to D&D, one focussed more on stories than killing monsters.  CoC, which also renamed PCs to Investigators, was trying to tell you something about what kind of character and story the game involved.  AW was trying to indicate how the GM plays a rather different role in that game to what they do in a more conventional RPG.

The Everlasting, however, has absolutely no excuse for what it does with standard RPG terminology.  The GM is now a Guide, and the PCs are Protagonists and that's only the start of it, because this game doesn't have rules, it has guidelines, it doesn't have campaigns, it has Odysseys, and lest you were thinking this is some kind of game you're playing, it's not an RPG, it's an interactive legendmaking experience.

Mind you, to know what you're in for on this front, you only have to look at the credits page.  Rather than the usual writers, artists and designers, you will instead find credits for things like Limner of Tome Cover, Illumination Administers, and Wise and Noble Oracles.

At this point you won't be surprised to find that each book contains multiple lexicons: a general one, one for the rules (sorry, guidelines), and one for each different type of character, erm, protagonist, as apparently absolutely nobody in the Secret World can just use normal words for anything.

And it spells magick with a k.

There's a few pages of fiction at the start of each book, and as game fiction goes it's OK - although somehow I thought that the one from the Book of the Unliving might actually be about unliving characters, rather than focussing mostly on daevas.

Credit where credit's due, there is a nice section about how to construct stories which translates pretty well to any RPG.  In accordance with how this book normally works, it's relegated to a sidebar.

And finally, the bit where the game, OK, legendmaking experience isn't just off the rails, it's off the cliff and into the sea.  Chapter 13: Legendmaking.

To truly do justice to how completely batshit this chapter is, I'd have to reproduce the entire thing.  As it is, I'll just share a couple of things.

Multiple pages are given over to the subject of lucid dreaming, with explanations of why you should, and instructions on how to achieve it.  All this is somehow supposed to help you...honestly I'm not sure.  I think you're supposed to do your own story in your sleep?  It doesn't seem to have any link to the rest of the book.

And then there's the ritual.  This game genuinely includes an opening and closing ceremony for game...legendmaking sessions.  Everyone has lines to say, and significantly coloured candles are to be lit.  A sample:

Guide:
Let us walk now, past the shadows of the flame that cast upon the cave's wall, beyond our mundane world.  Our protagonists shall be our representatives.  They shall symbolize a deeper truth than our everyday activities.  Let us close our eyes.
There is more to reality than what we see.  More than what we hear.  Can feel it?  Look with your imagination. Listen for the spirits in the air.

Any Single Participant:
And so it begins.

If I tried this with my regular gaming group, I think I'd be eaten along with the takeaway.

Summary

There are some great ideas in this game.  The setting is exceptionally well researched and full of potential.  But the whole thing is so bogged down by both its desperate attempts to appeal to everyone and the layers upon layers of jargon, mysticism and overall pretentiousness that the idea of actually taking it off the shelf and playing it is unthinkable.

Someone liked it, enough to get the Book of the Fantastical out there when it wasn't going to happen, plus the two add-on books that I don't own.  The setting has enough going for it that you could probably extract the character types and import them into a different game engine and end up with a half decent game.

But as it is, it will remain, forever, a heartbreaker.

Although doubtless it would have its own word for that.

Liminal Reviewed

Given the number of games I've played, it's about time I had a go at this review business, and since I've just run my second game of Liminal that seems like a good place to start.  I'm going to look at three areas: Setting, System, and Style and Substance.

Setting

Liminal is an urban fantasy RPG whose primary influences are very obviously Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.  Look a little deeper and you'll see hints of The Dresden Files, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Alex Verus, and a bunch of other urban fantasy works from both page and screen.  Chapter 1 has a list of inspirations, including quite a few I haven't read or seen.  As well as urban fantasy, there's also a section on non-fiction and folklore.

All of this adds up to an author who loves urban fantasy even more than I do, and has really done the research.

The player characters are the liminals of the title.  The internet tells me that liminal means 'occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.'  An accurate description for characters who exist at the point where the hidden world of fairies, magicians and monsters meets the mundane world we all know.  The types of characters you can play will be familiar to anyone who's played the Dresden Files RPG - clued up mortals are joined by changelings, werewolves, wizards and dhampirs.  Where I think it scores slightly over that book is that it gives multiple suggestions for human characters and how they might fit into the hidden world.  Humans really feel like a viable character concept here, on equal grounds with the weirder stuff.

The setting is what I'd call 'generic urban fantasy' except in one key respect: it's heavily rooted in the UK, in a way you won't find in The Dresden Files.  With both key influences being set in London it's no surprise that there's a lot going on there, but the game doesn't neglect the rest of the country.  Manchester, Glasgow and Belfast don't normally get much of a look-in in either RPGs or urban fantasy, but here they are alongside the more obvious choices of London and Oxford.  And it's not only cities.  The UK is full of weird little places - Portmerion and Puzzlewood are just a couple of examples from the book.

What all this adds up to as I'm reading is a world that feels lived in.  The hidden world sitting side by side with the mundane.  This isn't Buffy, where pretty much everything takes place in one small town.  While London is big enough that you could run a full campaign there, the design here immediately makes me want to send characters travelling around the country, because there is nothing generic about the locations here.

What is rather more generic is the design of the vampires, in that you can pretty much design your own, assigning them whatever abilities and limitations you see fit.  There's a few standard models you can use, but there's nothing to stop you going full Dracula, or just making up your own.  Having run a pre-written adventure featuring vampires, I felt I could have used a little more guidance on how they were supposed to work, but for your own campaign there's nothing wrong with a bit of flexibility.

In summary:

While the urban fantasy elements are nothing you couldn't find in another game, and could sometimes benefit from being a little more specific, the way the whole thing is rooted in the UK is what makes this setting distinctive and compelling.  And with upcoming supplements based around fleshing out different parts of the country, this seems likely to only get better.

System

The entire rules section of the game takes thirteen pages.  At its heart is an uncomplicated mechanic.  2d6+skill versus a target number, normally 8.  Two dice, for me, is the right balance between overly swingy and overly normalised.  A skilled character will succeed most of the time; a character using their particular speciality is unlikely to fail.  Beat the target by 5 and you get a critical success, and the book gives examples of interesting bonuses beyond just 'you do it really well'.  The same applies to failure, which doesn't necessarily always mean not succeeding in the task if something else would be more interesting.

Players always want to assist each other with rolls, and there's a simple mechanic for both individual assistance and group tasks.

Combat is all reassuringly familiar.  Initiative rolls, attack rolls and damage rolls are all present and uncomplicated.  Beyond that, pretty much anything is handled by +2 or -2 modifiers.  Various examples are given, but ultimately it's the GM's call.

And finally, the push mechanic, which is a feature I'm seeing more and more in games recently.  You can spend will points to add successes to a roll, and best of all, there's none of that nonsense about having to apply them before you make the roll.

Character creation is a simple point buy, with separate pools for skills and traits.  An initial skill cap (plus diminishing returns from a 2-dice system) ensures players start with a reasonable range of skills.  Three pages cover the basics, with the rest of the character creation chapter giving details of the skills and traits, plus the set of character concepts mentioned above - anyone unsure about creating a character can use these concepts as templates, but full customisation is equally viable.  The only reason I'm not already coming up with character concepts is because I know I'm going to end up in the GM's chair for this one.

In summary:

A system that's familiar enough to pick up quickly and as complicated as it needs to be, while using the dice you already have.

Style and Substance

Being in possession of some bloody heavy RPG books (I'm looking at you, Pathfinder 2e) I very much appreciate a book that doesn't require additional luggage to transport around.  The print version of Liminal is a 285 page hardback in trade size rather than the 'this is literally bigger than my laptop' size of most RPGs, so will fit very nicely on the shelf next to Blades in the Dark.  At this size, reading it cover to cover is entirely realistic.

It feels well-manufactured, with a lovely matt finish on the cover and a ribbon bookmark.  The internal art is gorgeous, with full colour plates starting every chapter, and a mix of colour art, black and white pencil-style work and modified photographs illustrating the text.  This is a seriously good looking book.

I ordered the book from Modiphius, who immediately sent me a PDF download.  The quickstart guide and character sheet are also available as free downloads.  The book itself doesn't include a character sheet, but realistically, none of us are photocopying our gamebooks any more and the separate download is a sensible choice.  The PDF version is fully bookmarked and has linked page references, and the trade format means it's a good size for online reading.  I often like to have multiple pages open simultaneously so a PDF that's as easy to use as the book is a win for me.

The quickstart does exactly what it says, with enough information about the setting to get you started, and an adventure with pre-gen characters.  I've run this adventure twice now, and it's both entertaining and a good introduction to the rules.  There are two more adventures in the main book, plus several more in PDF form for very low prices.  On top of that, the book has a chapter on how to be a GM, including guidance on how to construct an adventure.  When it comes to running this game, the bar to entry is pretty low.

In summary:

A good looking book that you'll want to show off, with all the utility features it needs.

Conclusion

If you like urban fantasy, you're going to love Liminal.