Monday, June 22, 2015

Savage New Acquisitions

As people may of may not know I am greatly invested in the Savage Worlds game engine, which I fell in love with after one game of Deadlands:Reloaded, a game that gave me more enjoyment as a player than any other I've played in for over 20 years.

Characters are built using points to buy "die types" for basic attributes like strength and agility, skills like fighting or swimming and edges like Quick Draw and Charismatic. Points are strictly limited and in short supply, so the opportunity to get more by taking on hindrances like Short Sighted or Mean is a welcome feature of the game. This gives Savage Worlds a similar character build to GURPS without the need for a degree in tax accountancy or a spreadsheet program (and, of course, without the richness that system provides).

It has its problems like any RPG rules engine does, most notably when it comes to the magic system, that many feel lacks the "oomph" of a proper High Fantasy setting.

There is some justification for this. The spell lists are deliberately foreshortened compared to other systems, and presented in a generic format intended to be padded out with "trappings" to give individual iterations of a given generic spell special feel and side-effects. One can, for example, easily imagine the difference in feel between an area-effect spell with an electrical trapping (call it "ball lightning") and one with a nuclear trapping (call it "ridiculously broken").

The spells are also of less over-the-topness than other systems, which means that problems can arise when it comes to player expectations. My gaming friend Will grumbles that a Deadlands:Reloaded Mad Scientist cannot make an ornithopter that would fly for more than a minute or so, and he's right unless the GM imports a certain "edge" from the Slipstream setting (or invents one of his/her own to do the job).

There is also the problem that in combats the game tends to be one of invincible players right up to the point the mulligan points ("Bennies") run out, at which point it can very easily become TPK time.

The GM must be aware of and cater for these shortcomings in the system.

What makes that worthwhile is the sheer number of settings that this engine has been pointed at. Deadlands was perhaps the first and remains the flagship setting, but one can also game in the Space 1889 steampunk setting, the Rippers gothic horror setting, pirate settings both with and without high fantasy elements, 1930s Saturday Space Serial settings, any number of fantasy settings. The list goes on.

Most recently, Pinnacle Entertainment have released a Lankhmar sourcebook and a book of adventures for that setting. Lankhmar is, of course, the city in which Fafhard and The Grey Mouser met and had so many adventures in the short stories and (one I think) novel by Fritz Leiber. I loved the books and so could not resist picking up these offerings in the hope that one day I can get the apathetic youth I'm surrounded with to play in that urban setting.

The books are lavish affairs, as so many of the Savage World books are. At least, they look like they should be lavish affairs. This represents one of the first times I've bought electronic only, having realized my house can hold no more books

And anyway, I usually do most of the referencing of my game books while on my interminable commute, which means reading e-versions on my laptop. I often need to synthesize an adventure from two or more books, and the lack of space while traveling makes using paper books impractical even before the extra weight they represent is considered.

Besides which, I have a tendency to start regarding the books as a treasure to be kept from the hands of others, who will handle the glossy-paper with grease smeared hands without a thought. I realize this is a problem, a minor obsession, but I can't do anything about it. I often make up player manuals with copied pages in greaseproof plastic sleeves for the players if they need such a beast. The players can paw that without triggering my "book anxiety".

I also took the chance to obtain electronic copies of The Path of Kane and The Savage Foes of Solomon Kane, adjuncts to the excellent Solomon Kane RPG (also based on Savage Worlds) that provide adventures and NPCs to star in them and which I already owned in hardback. The chance to run Solly Kane has come up and the price was right. I've been looking for these books for some time in an affordable e-package. I bought an e-copy of the rulebook years ago. Now I'm champing at the bit to get a Solly Kane game up and running.

I also chose to obtain a copy of the second edition of the One Ring rulebook.

One Ring is set in the time between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, mostly in Rhovanion. It aims to provide a different sort of game experience to D&D and its fantasy clones, concentrating on roleplaying and highlighting the difficulties of going from A to B over long distances in the wilderness. It is, in other words, what Wilderness Adventures should have been in White Box D&D.

I've agonized in the past over how to represent the epic levels of privation expeditions int The Wild should have without the need for soul-destroying shopping lists and endless Constitution tests. Well, the people at Cubicle 7 have engineered that into One Ring very neatly, taking a cue from old school wargames by using the concept of attrition and melding it all very nicely into an RPG that to me has a very "Tolkienesque" feel to the whole approach of adventuring. No "kick in the door and steal the treasure" game this.

Naturally, I can't get anyone interested in playing.

The game originally came as a player manual, a GM manual, a couple of maps (one for the players, much like the one that came in the back of The Lord of the Rings, and an identical one with a hex grid and a key for the GM to calculate actual distances) and some dice in a slipcase. The second edition, tidied up a little and somewhat re-arranged, now comes in a single book. If your taste runs to a less adrenaline-powered RPG you might like this game too.

You can download these and many, many other titles from DriveThroughRPG.com, my e-seller of choice these days. Paper copies can be had through your LFGS for the asking.

Resources:

One Ring RPG A system for playing epic adventures in The Wild
The Savage Worlds of Solomon Kane The core rulebook (does not require the purchase of Savage Worlds)
The Path of Kane Adventures for Solomon Kane
The Savage Foes of Solomon Kane Major foes for your SK game, and adventures in which to showcase them.
Lankhmar sourcebook for Savage Worlds (requires the Savage Worlds core rulebook to play
Savage Tales of the Thieves GuildFourteen adventures for Lankhmar-based campaigns