After a successful Kickstarter project, Green Ronin Publishing have put out a second edition of their Blue Rose role-playing game. Inspired by the works of romantic fantasy from authors such as Mercedes Lackey, Tamora Pierce and Diane Duane, Blue Rose was originally powered by a variant of the D20 rules that Green Ronin called True20, and this new game uses the company's house system called the Adventure Game Engine, or AGE. The rules themselves are descended from the company's licensed role-playing game based upon the franchise of the Dragon Age computer games.
The design team of Steve Kenson and Jack Norris manage to bring the inspirations of the original Blue Rose game into the newer AGE system. Since Kenson worked on developing the True20 system that powered the first edition of the game, this makes sense. Blue Rose is a self-contained book that doesn't require any other AGE system book for play. It isn't just a matter of pushing the existing world of Aldea into the AGE rules, however. The rules of Blue Rose are set apart from games like Fantasy AGE by the incorporation of some first edition rules.
Conviction is a mechanic that was an important part of the first edition of Blue Rose. It is a narrative control tool, not unlike Fate Points in Fate Core, or a number of other role-playing games. Spending conviction can do things from helping your character in combats, to helping them better survive the effects of those combat situations. Fate point mechanics are good ways to create a cinematic, swashbuckling tone for a game because they can help to mitigate the impact that poor dice rolling can have on such a game. Few things can as quickly ruin a campaign as the randomness of dice rolling undercutting the fact that characters are supposed to be doing flashy, larger than life things and failing because the player rolled a one.
The 3d6 dice rolling for the task resolution systems of AGE does also help to get rid of some of the whiff factor of the original rules, which used the standard D20 mechanic of rolling a single d20 die for task resolution. A part of the reason why rules like the original Conviction rules sprang up around D20 variants was because of the fact that d20-based resolution can often be binary in its results: you succeed or you fail at a task. More often the result is failure, and slows down play while a task is attempted over and over, looking for the needed success. A 3d6 resolution mechanic can also add granularity to resolution attempts, making it possible to add degrees of success that can make results more spectacular, or more horrible, than a simple binary "You Succeed!" or "You Fail!"
The AGE stunt mechanic can also add more long term verisimilitude to task resolution. Rolling doubles on two of the three dice can earn your character stunt points which can be spent later one to add flourishes to future tasks on behalf of your character. There are a number of ways to utilize stunt points, from magic to interactions to other character abilities.
Characters are class-based, and informed by the three generic classes that were used in the original game (which in turn were adapted from material published in the Unearthed Arcana book published by Wizards of the Coast for the Dungeons & Dragons 3.x rules), and updated to the current rules. The Fantasy AGE rules do use a similar set up for the game's classes, but the design of the classes in Blue Rose is to my eye a bit more generic than those rules. This isn't a bad thing, because there are a number of ways to differentiate one character from another in these rules. Where the classes give the basic niche of your character (magic for Adepts, fighting for Warriors and skills and knowledge for Experts), the customization for characters comes with focuses, talents and specializations. These are all things from the AGE rules. Focuses are focused, specialized areas within the abilities of your characters that make them better at specific sorts of tasks. Talents are special abilities available to characters. Specializations work in a way similar to how prestige classes worked under the D20 system, they represent a specialized capability or profession within the more general classes, they also unlock talents that would not otherwise be available to a character. Where you have the generic Warrior that represents the idea of the fighter-type of characters, you can show how your Warrior is different from another in your group by picking things like the Berserker or the Champion specialization for your character. These specializations are how you build upon the wider, and more generic, niche of your character's class, and customize that niche into something more unique for your character.
If you've played a D20 game, the talents will be mechanically familiar to you because they work not unlike that system's feats. They give characters special abilities and special rules exceptions that let them do extraordinary tasks within a game.
There are also human cultures and non-human races that are available to characters. The non-human races are flavorful, and offer a number of meaningful role-playing opportunities to players. They are unique to the setting of Blue Rose, and while they are obviously inspired by fantasy concepts like elves and orcs, they manage to bring new ideas and interpretations of these archetypes to the gaming table. Vata, for example, clearly aren't elves (despite filling a similar niche within the world), but at the same time they aren't the "Nope. These totally aren't elves." approach that you get in a lot of games. They are original concepts that do not derive their concepts from running down the archetypes. This is a welcome change in RPG world building.
All of these character options work to add uniqueness to characters without adding a lot of complexity to them. Despite the AGE rules drawing inspiration from the D20 system, and some ideas from earlier editions of D&D as well, they do so in a much more streamlined manner than the D20 rules manage. There are as many special cases for GMs to remember in the AGE rules, and there aren't as many character options for players to wade through either.
Another mechanic that has come over from the first edition of Blue Rose would be the Corruption rules. Corruption is something that fits into the theme of the romantic fantasy that the game emulates. In a way it is a mechanical implementation of the oft-quoted Bob Dylan song lyric: "to live outside the law, you must be honest." Taken from his song Absolutely Sweet Marie the idea is something that you often see in heroic fiction, and comic books. The idea of Corruption is that the darkness of the world, which is literal in a world where magic and supernatural creatures are real, can taint even those who are the most good, tempting them to follow a darker, and sometimes easier, path. These are conflicts that you see in a lot of romantic fantasy, and in settings like that of the Star Wars universe, with its internal and external conflicts between the Jedi and the Sith. Embracing this Corruption is easier for characters in Blue Rose sometimes, but "easy" isn't always the best path for heroes.
The Corruption mechanic ties into Callings, which are another character option. Callings aren't as simple as talents or specializations, because they address how a character fits into the world of the game, or into the overall story of the campaign that a group is playing through. Following through with the ideals of a Calling is how a character earns Conviction. Callings will tell you how your character moves towards their long and short term goals. Like with Corruption, Callings are an idea carried over from the first edition of Blue Rose and help to show how your character is a part of the game's world.
The setting of Blue Rose, the world of Aldea, is where the game really sings. Rather than relying on the same tropes that inform just about every other fantasy game on the market, or call back to the same set of inspirations (whether drawing upon Tolkien or Howard or Moorcock), the game instead looks to the tropes that are important to romantic fantasy. Obviously, romance is one of these things, but gender and sexuality can also play important parts of romantic fantasy. Romantic fantasy not only elevates the women who are characters out of the secondary roles that they often fill in more traditional style of fantasy, but they make them the protagonists of the stories as well. Yes, Jirel of Joiry exists. Yes, Red Sonja exists. Yes, there are women-lead stories in high fantasy and swords and sorcery fiction. No one is saying that these characters, these stories, do not exist. The problem is that for those genres they are still the exception rather than the rule. There are still more stories and movies with male protagonists than female ones in these genres. That is one of the strengths of romantic fantasy, and the draw of it for a lot of people who do not identify as traditionally male in any number of ways.
It isn't coincidence that this review is "coming out" after the weekend that many celebrate Pride around the world, and in the same week as the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that triggered what we would eventually come to know as Pride. Blue Rose normalizes homosexual relationships in the same way that heterosexual relationships are normalized in other fantasy settings. In worlds where shape shifting, magical fleshshaping and magical artifacts that can impact gender or presentation are so common, it shouldn't be such a strange idea that people would be free to adopt the gender, or genders, with which they identify themselves, even if they are not born that way. On the world of Aldea, like in many real world religions, not all deities conform to the binary standards of gender, and because of that the people who worship those gods should not be required to do this either. Obviously some cultures are more accepting of this than others, but overall the world is one that has much, much more of what is called an egalitarian nature than what you see in a lot of fantasy worlds. The idea that the existence of magic or werewolves in a game is okay, but somehow men marrying one another, or individuals choosing the gender (or genders) with which they identify, "break fantasy" is a strange one for me.
There are a number of lands that fill the world of Aldea. The lands of Aldis are assumed to be where player characters are from, while the antagonists are typically those people from the Theocracy of Jarzon or Kern, which was once ruled with a brutal hand by a Lich King. All three of these countries are outlined, but Aldis is given the lion share of description. A couple of other countries are outlined as well, and the nomadic culture of Roamers is talked about as well. The world of Aldea is well described, and everything that you might need to explore the world is contained in the Blue Rose book.
The designers did a great job of customizing the AGE rules to fit the Blue Rose game, and making sure that the new game lives up to the legacy of the first edition. I was a fan of the first edition of Blue Rose, not just because of the well-designed rules, but also because of the unique setting. I don't think that fantasy role-playing games push at the boundaries of the genre in the same way that the fiction does. We need more boundary pushing in RPGs across the board, if we ever want to see the fanbase expand and grow in new directions. Games like Blue Rose are an integral part of this boundary pushing and growth, and we need more well-made games like this.
