Grimm

[JoeGKushner]

Grimm is the second book in Fantasy Flight Games Horizon setting. These books are mini-systems that can be used to create new types of games. The first book, Redline, covered Mad Max style action. Grimm goes in the completely opposite direction and allows characters to take the role of Children as they move through the Grimm Lands, a land based off of the tales from the Brothers Grimm.

The book is broken up into four chapters. The first, Character Archetypes, shows what type of characters you can create. Unlike elf wizards and human fighters, your archetype is your race and class. Since your playing a human child, all races are human, but your archetype will modify your statistics based on your choice. These choices include the following; bully, dreamer, jock, nerd, normal kid, outcast, popular kid.

Unlike standard d20 games, each one of these character types is only six levels. The game is meant to be fast and the point of the game, often, is to escape. Other things round out the characters. For example, characters may not multiclass. Players get a creation feat when first created. They get starting belongings. Most likely the thing others will enjoy is that Grimm drops the alignment system and the weapon proficiency system. Kids don't have that 'deeper understanding' or right or wrong and can use any weapon or armor.

Now how do children survive in the world of ogres and witches? Well, to start off with, they're size small. This gives them a bonus to armor class and attack rolls but doesn't effect their carrying capacities. In addition, children get feats quickly, one every two levels. Another point in their favor is the armor class bonuses. Another survival trait is imagination points. The last strength that the children have is that in this system, they gain a level after every adventure. Of course not everything is coming up roses as each archetype has a flaw or weakness.

The skill list here has been reduced to twenty five. Several standard skills have been combined like Boy Scout Stuff. This skill allows you to “find your way out of the haunted forest, forage for food... bandage a wound.” Instead of Listen, Search or Spot, you've got Notice. By making these skills smaller in number and combined in nature for many of them, they've made characters more versatile. Some are still pretty old fashioned though. Take Booby Trap. This is basically Craft Traps with modifications for the Grimm setting.

Feats are broken into origin feats; city kid, exchange student, home schooled, orphan, rich kid, farm kid, and new feats. The origin feats grant a +2 bonus and another benefit with some minor modifications. The exchange student is a bit different as they only get a +4 competence bonus to resist temptation, otherwise it's something like a +2 bonus to Sneak or a +2 bonus to initiative.

The new feats range from the old standard of +2 to two skills in the form of Gifted, a template feat, to combat based feats like Combatant, giving you a bonus to damage rolls and Float Like A Butterfly, where you don't suffer attacks of opportunity for moving through threatened squares. The feats are tied into the PC's origins, as well as the setting. While some like Cut It Open, that allow you to cut open a monster's belly to free your friends might be useful for standard d20 games, it's roots like in the old fairy tales.

When characters are first created, after they select their basic archetype, skills and feats, they still have to outfit themselves. The starting equipment is similar to some of the outfits in standard Dungeons and Dragons. Children can have the devious set, including backpack, lunch, 1d3 small stolen items, pocket knife or brass knuckles. Each character also gets a focus, a special item of worth to the child. Of course everyone is going to want the baseball bat, a weapon that ignores damage reduction, although some might want the cigarette lighter as it doubles as a everburning torch in this setting.

Because children get their own armor class bonuses, one might think that mundane armor wouldn't be needed but you know what? A wooden barrel is a pretty sweet deal at an AC bonus of +6. armor is broken into three types, body, shield, and helmet. The bad thing is that you lose your innate armor class bonus when you wear any type of armor.

Other rules are important to note like the role of imagination. Children gain imagination points originally based on their archetype plus their Wisdom modifier and gain more every level. The imagination points are almost like fate or action points at lower spending levels, one or two point imaginations, in that they act as subtle ways to save the characters. At higher points, they take on obvious power by either creating armor or weapons, or healing yourself. This would work good as a quick way to get say, a second wind when combat is going against you.

Those looking to use firepower in the form of spells will be disappointed. While there is a magic system here, it excludes evocation and necromancy magic, and certain other magic schools are harder to cast. The non-firepower type spells are often the most easy to cast through incantations. Character learn these through books or mentors, making a Magic Intuition check against a set DC to see if they learn the spell. The DC has variables based on school and level. The bad thing about learning spells is that they cost imagination points equal to the number of days required to learn the spell. A quick and effective way to limit the total number of spells the party will have in their possession at any time.

About the only part lacking in the Grimm Lands is the setting itself. It's a small setting that will entertain the Game Master as he reads about some of his old childhood friends and sees how they've been twisted by these lands. They'll learn how the land itself is in essence alive and strives against the characters. How the players are basically the only sane ones in the setting. How certain favorites, like Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty have become mere traps for those foolish enough to seek them out.

The characters and ideas are rich with ideas but limited in their utility based on the space provided. The maps for example, due to the nature of the setting, can act as no more than a quick guide as the landscape changes. I'm sure that many readers will want to know what happened to X or Y. Still, with such entertaining characters as Humpty Dumpty, the Rotten King to antagonize the players with, things certainly won't be boring in the Grimm Lands.

Is the book perfect? Well, no. One feat, Street Fighter, a preerequisite for other feats, isn't listed. It's already on the website. Others have already pointed out the the declaration of the OGL portions of the book is missing. A few things could've been clearer as well.

Some won't like the limited level advancement or the whole idea of children not using modern day weapons to take out their fears as they do in the real world. That's not Grimm's set up so I can't fault the game for not going that route. Grimm also has competition from Dungeon magazine for price, but lately, Dungeon hasn't gone the detailed route that Horizon does.

Grimm uses the standard layout and art that Fantasy Flight is known for. Artists include Jim Brady, Larry Mac Dougall, James Ryman and Scott Schomburg. They manage to capture many of the elements of the setting easily enough to convey the feel to the reader. Those who love the cover for instance, will be pleased to know that the artist also does some of the interior work.

For those who want something different out of their d20 games, Grimm is the perfect solution.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Grimm is a dark world of fairy tales gone wrong. This second book in the Horizon line of d20 minigames puts the players in the role of children trapped in a nightmare world. Its residents are the familiar characters of childhood nursery rhymes and fairy tales, but few creatures here are friendly, none are harmless, and more than a few want to find out what little girls and boys are really made of...

Grimm adventure and pregenerated characters available on the Downloads page.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

If you’re looking for a brief respite from your regular D&D game, then you should definitely check out Grimm. This is basically an RPG in itself, though you will need the D&D core rulebooks to play.

Grimm offers a great starting point for playing in a fairy tale-like setting using child player characters. It is not intended to be a comprehensive setting or guidebook. I think though that this 64-page book is well worth the $14.99 price tag.

The cover art depicts a strange earthen witch-monster about to terrorize a group of children. The only problem I have with this picture is that one of the children, a girl who looks like Little Red Riding Hood, appears to just casually look to the side instead of being afraid or confronting the creature like the other two children. Otherwise, I think it is an excellent illustration and appropriate for this book.

The interior art is great. The ones for each character archetype (class) are especially picture perfect bringing out each personality in nice little portraits: the bully, the dreamer, the jock, the nerd, the normal kid, the outcast, and the popular kid. I think that it is interesting that a selection of modern children stereotypes is used for player character generation for essentially a pseudo-medieval fantasy setting. Personally, I would have preferred types that would fit the setting better, but this works, too.

Grimm includes its own set of skills, feats, weapons, and armor as well as new game concepts like Imagination Points and Incantations. I also liked the game rules on being Swallowed Whole and Despair, both themes commonly found in children’s fairy tales.

Near the end of the book are four Places of Note of which I really enjoyed reading Rapunzel’s Tower. These are locales from stories that we well know, but updated with a darker twist.

Rapunzel’s Tower, for example, is haunted by a lonely spirit which sorrowfully awaits Rapunzel’s return. The tower is soon infested with vicious spiders that later consume Rapunzel when she returns to visit for a surprise visit. The tower, however, is asleep and the spiders greedily devour Rapunzel. The spiders, who want to appease the tower, animate Rapunzel’s corpse for its amusement. Very nice.

There are also about a dozen corrupted versions of traditional fairy tale characters useable as villains: Cinderella, Mother Goose, Little Red Riding Hood, Big Bad Wolf, The Frog Prince, Humpty Dumpty, etc.

I would definitely recommend Grimm to anyone looking for something a little different, but not too way out there. Grade: A

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Because of a Grimm play-by-post campaign that I'm starting, I've recently re-read the book, which has reminded me of two things — (1) how incredibly good and innovative the work in it is, and (2) that I felt this way when I first read it, but before any reviews had been posted, and had resolved to write my own. I let both thoughts slip away as I got caught up in various other books (the Eberron releases from Wizards of the Coast are the primary culprits here), but, with Fantasy Flight's impending release of a non-d20, full-length version of Grimm, my attention has returned to the d20 mini-game. In dealing with fairy tales and their ilk, Grimm takes source material that's perfect for a role-playing game but rarely visited by companies (if I recall correctly, White Wolf's Changeling might have done something similar, but I'm not familiar with that game to say so definitively, and I think there's two AD&D modules that take off from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, although they aren't intended as serious adventures that I can remember — I know that the Ultima series of computer games had fairy tale easter-eggs and references throughout, particularly to the Wizard of Oz).

Grimm is a 64-page book, softbound, with full color covers and a black & white interior. Sixty-two pages contain the text of the game, with one page devoted to an ad for Paizo's magazines and the other to the OGL. The inside covers, both back and front, have ads for other Horizon mini-games. The cover, by Larry MacDougall, depicts two kids and, presumably, Little Red Riding Hood wandering through a forest, as a malevolent tree raises its head from the ground and leers at them. It's a nice cover and fits the flavor of the text presented. The interior art is also excellent, although I do question the incusion of a few illustrations — on page 28, the drawing of a long-haired girl with a feathered hat, claws, and what appears to be cat's ears (based on her rather feline features), which I can now only assume to be a rendition of Puss in Boots because of my interpretation) doesn't quite fit, nor does the drawing on page 37 of a girl with hoop earrings and her pet werewolf, although again, I'm beginning to see this as a subtle interpretation of Dorothy and Toto. Mind you, I like the art in these two pictures (James Ryman does very nice work), but I feel that contextually these pictures didn't work as well and required a lot of my interpretation and thought to make them fit into the text as well as the rest of the pictures. Layout and editing are clean and professional. I've noticed few, if any errors, and none that I felt strongly enough to take note of and mention specifically. As a side note, I find the layout work in Fantasy Flight softbacks to be superior to the work in the hardbacks (such as the Dawnforge and Midnight campaign settings), as the former tend to make better use of the space — there's less white space and the smaller font works better for me. A quibble, surely, but one that I thought I'd throw out there.

Mechanically, Grimm streamlines and condenses the meaty character generation of the d20 system quite a bit, with classes and races combined into archetypes, a shorter skill list, and a more focused list of feats. The base archetypes — the Bully, the Dreamer, the Jock, the Nerd, the Normal Kid, the Outcast, and the Popular Kid — work well both mechanically and as flavor-text; in essence, the whole idea of the archetype gives a player shorthand on how to play that character in a broad sense. My one complaint about the archetypes is that the Normal Kid might be a touch better than the other archetypes, especially at 6th level with the Mantle of Responsibility power, which to me seems better than any similar power granted by another archetype at that level. The nice thing about the condensed skill list (although some things are expanded — Home Ec and Industrial Arts take over certain aspects of the Craft/Profession skill, depending on how you look at it, as does the Art skill and its subsets) is the intuitiveness of it, particularly in the case of Notice, which combines the functions of Listen, Spot, and Search into one skill, and Sneak (Move Silently and Hide). It maintains the depth of the normal skill system while making it simpler — because of this and the archetypes, I've thought that a pretty decent introductory d20 game could be made from Grimm (hell, Grimm could be used). Options are good, but, speaking from experience in playing with new players, too many options can be overwhelming to a new player. Like the skills list, the feats list is more focused (although I don't, in this case, mean shorter necessarily — it's close to as long as the list in the core rules with the addition of origin feats and other new feats). I particularly like the Inedible feat (the character is hard for a Grimm Lands monster to eat) — it's evocative, funny, and fits the game really well.

As far as straight mechanical changes to the other parts of the game, there are few: archetypes grant AC bonuses (due to the deck being stacked against the PCs a bit), the elimination of alignment and weapon proficiencies, changes in the grappling rules, new rules for being swallowed whole, the introduction of imagination points, and the overhauling of the magic system. I'll cover the last two in the following sections, but these changes are simple enough to implement, and, ultimately, probably not as drastic as I'd make in my game. For instance, I'm not sure about the need for tactical combat using a battlemap or the use of attacks of opportunity in a Grimm game and would drop these items from any game I ran despite the base assumptions in the book. It just doesn't seem to be important for a fairy-tale game.

Equipment in the Grimm Lands is similar to that in D&D's core rules, but, again, it's streamlined — a much shorter list of mundane equipment exists and really special equipment (magic items and the such) are covered very quickly, encouraging story needs over mechanics. Really special equipment can include everything from fairy wands to enchanted weapons and armor to gizmos (the Grimm equivalent of wondrous items). Also included in this category are crux items, designed to exploit the flaws of monsters (and all monsters have flaws to exploit); for instance, to use an example in the book, an acidic ooze roaming the countryside might be weak against dairy products — a bottle of milk could be a crux item here. Finally, each player character receives a focus, an item special to her that she's brought into the Grimm Lands; as the text presents it, a focus functions as a security blanket for the character, giving her hope (I would actually dovetail this concept with the rules for Despair presented — kids caught alone run the risk of despairing, losing hope and imagination points — if the character lost her focus). Neat stuff, and a lot of fun.

For me, the two drastic changes in Grimm are the introduction of imagination points and the overhauling of the magic system. Imagination points, without getting too deep into the actual suggested rules for them, function like action points, except they allow for far more drastic changes in the campaign world, allowing characters to, in essence, rewrite things, based on how many points they spend. This can as simple as creating a sword or some rope to changing the weather patterns in your section of the Grimm Lands for a few hours. Imagination points can also be spent on class abilities (in the case of the Normal Kid, most any ability has to be bought with imagination points) or on spellcasting. The spells presented in the core rules can be used in Grimm (although Evocation and Necromancy are barred schools for PCs), but they take more time to learn and more time to cast, requiring an expenditure of imagination points to actually take effect. This makes spells, as the book asserts and has done with really special equipment, more of a story concept than a cool power.

Finally, this brings us to the setting — the Grimm Lands, a twisted fairy tale kingdom ruled over by the insane and evil Rotten King (Humpty Dumpty) and his retinue (his wife Cinderella, the Ugly Duckling, and Mother Goose, among others). As presented, the setting's exactly what the cover says it is, "a world of twisted fairy-tales" — Cinderella has a bit of a dominatrix vibe, Mother Goose enjoys dropping kids from great heights, Little Red Riding Hood's a vampire, and so on. Even the Sun and the Moon delight in attacking and abusing the peoples of the world. If I have one complaint about the world, it might be that, as presented, the NPCs and environments are too threatening to characters — it's a wonder any PCs would ever survive in the world, as few things would ever help them. I mean, Little Bo Peep and Little Boy Blue run a human slave trade, the Three Little Pigs are tyrannical usurers, and so on. Even Grimm Dwarves have an ulterior motive (they need a human girl to mate with). Ultimately, the GM will have to insert some sort of support network (the Wee Folk could work, as presented in the base rules) for a longer campaign (and maybe even in a shorter one) to keep the players from despairing; after all, in some ways, this world's as dark as Midnight is and the players are playing children. The rules presented in this chapter include game information for a number of NPCs (including every one I've named above) and templates talking animals and upright animals and the introduction of the villain creature type. The villain type, in particular, is a great little system for making opponents in the Grimm Lands quickly and easily. Other items covered include hazards such as Rapunzel's Tower or Sleeping Beauty' Bower. This chapter, to me the highlight of the book, gives enough information to run a short campaign and then some — using all of this in a game could be overwhelming, meaning there's enough to run multiple campaigns without ever having to cover the same ground twice.

In conclusion, if you're looking to run a game with fairy-tale elements, you couldn't do better than Grimm, especially at the price. Mechanically, it's sound, and the setting is evocative and imaginative. It's not a game you'll be able to cannibalize much from for use in a normal d20 game, but it really stretches the ends of the d20 system to create a fantastic, yet different world.

Score: 5

 

[Crothian]

Grimm

Role playing has always had a bit of a fairy tale theme for me. It seems the innocence of the stories and the development of the character and the mystery of the unknown falls right in line. The cautionary tales and the lessons to be learned though are rarely a part, but still I know a few people who should have learned something from their role playing experience. Grimm captures the faerie tale element since it is gaming in the lands of Fairy tales.

Grimm is a paper back book by Fantasy Flight Games. They are best known for their Midnight setting but have produced many solid books and are usually a safe company to go with. Grimm is sixty two pages of black and white normal pages. The book seems small at first but it does not take long to realize that everything is practically packed into this pint size product. The art is really good and has nice fairy tale images and pictures of the familiar characters.

Grimm is a game of children taken to the land of Fairy Tales. Now, that does not mean it is exactly designed to play with children. Some of the Fairy Tales are actually quite horrific and it would really not be hard to make this game a rather scary horror version of these Fairy Tales. The game uses basic d20 rules but it really simplifies them A basic understand of d20 or the rule books is needed to play other then that it is a stand alone product. The book has new classes in it and the old classes will not work for the game. The classes are child stereotypes like the Bully, the Outcast, the normal kid etc. . Each class is only 6 levels long as it is not designed to be a game about power or much character advancement. The genius about the classes though is the character learns and gains abilities as it does. The Bully for instance eventually learns that he needs to protect the weaker kids and his abilities reflect that. The skills are quite fewer with sneak and notice taking the place of a few better known skills and the introduction of things like Boy Scout Stuff and Home Ec to represent some more modern learning the kids possess. There are quite a few new feats and a small list of old feats that can be used in the game. Characters gain feats every second level instead of every third.

Imagination sis of course an important part of what kids do and the game takes that and really makes it useful. Each class gets a different amount of imagination points. These points can be spent to change the lay of land or cause small things like minor healing or a useful item to happen to be near by. It is a great little mechanic and simple to use. Now the system doesn’t work as well with magic. Instead of creating new spells for the setting they decided to allow some spells from the PHB. The spells work but not as well as one created specifically for the setting would. I really would have liked to see a better magical system.

The book takes the Fairy Tales that most people now and expands them. What happened in the tales has happened and now the children are exploring the lands the build off of the tales they know. And no one had a happy ending. Rapunzel is now dead but poisonous spiders invest the decaying corpse; a nasty surprise for anyone who climbs her still ropey like hair. Cinderella ended up killing her prince and now makes her step sisters work for her. She is now cruel and sadistic. Little Bo Peep and Little Boy Blue have joined forces and are now slavers. That’s just three examples of the dark turn they have given the Fairy Tales. It is interesting how the stories turned out but so many of them are darker then the original Fairy Tales. It would have been nice for a more of a mix but there defiantly is plenty of potential for conflict.

Grimm is a really interesting take of the Fairy Tales and offers some great rules and options for playing kids. Everything turned out a little darker then I wanted and the magic system really could have been better. However, this is a very creative product, self contained, and should offer some fun possibilities that are different from most other role playing game,

 

[Michael Morris]

This is to mark that this review was the first posted using the new system

 

[Morrus]

Great! It works!
​

 

[migo]

Grimm: Adventures In A World Of Twisted Fairy Tales

This review originally appeared on RPG.net

Grimm is a d20 setting part of Fantasy Flight Games' Horizon line. It's self-contained and only needs the 3 Core books. It's designed with 3.5 in mind but I imagine the 3.0 Core books could be used without difficulty. The premise is that you play children who have been drawn into the lands where the Grimm fairy tales took place. It was the setting that caught my attention and is the reason I decided to buy it. Grimm definitely gets points for uniqueness.

The cover depicts 3 children standing in front of a nasty looking creature that is blended with the trees. It's a neat piece of art and I recomend everyone at least take a look at the cover even if you're not planning on buying it. The internal art is all black and white, and seems to be a mixture of watercolour and line drawings. All of the art was good, and was always appropriate to whatever was being discussed at the moment. All the text was layed out in the 2 column format. Sometimes the art was placed in between the columns so they were wrapped, other times the art took up half the page, either by replacing one of the columns of text, or the top half of the page. There were no side-bars and all the game-rule boxes went across the page taking up anything from 1/8 to 7/8 of the page. The layout was consistent, and the whole book was easy to read. The writing style was good, it was descriptive but it didn't really get "in character", which is something I like - I prefer not to be spoken to by a character from the game isntead of just having the setting/system described to me. A lot of publishers could learn from the example Fantasy Flight Games has set with Grimm (and most likely their other products as well, but I haven't read them). I noticed one minor spelling mistake, but since it was repeated consistently it could just be an alternate spelling I wasn't familiar with. 5 out of 5 for style.


The table of contents just takes up a 3rd of the first page, which is fine considering the book is only 64 pages, but I'm really starting to get irritated with the tendency of publishers these days either omitting the index completely or including an incomplete one. The book is small enough that it likely won't be an issue, but it would be really nice if they'd just added an extra page in the back with the index.


The introduction explains the premise of Grimm quite nicely, I won't paraphrase as I already described it above and the description of the game is available at numerous places on the net.


Chapter 1 covers the character archetypes. Only kids can enter (or get pulled into) the Grimm lands, so all the characters are human children (no, elf, dwarf, orc etc. children). The archetypes combine class and race (each archetype has different ability modifiers) so it's not possible to multi-class as they aren't just classes. NPCs however use standard D&D classes. The archetypes are the bully, dreamer, jock, nerd, normal kid, outcast and popular kid. All the archetypes advance only to sixth level. Feats for all the archetypes are gained every even level after first for all archetypes, and each archetypes gain special powers as they advance in level. All the archetypes have powers that are in line with their theme - the dreamer can at 6th level transform into a powerful angel/knight etc. for a certain amount of time, the nerd can force creatures to obey real world laws instead of fantasy laws, and the outcast can hide in plain sight for example. The exception is the normal kid which at sixth level changes into anything but normal. It's quite a clever twist which I like, as there wouldn't really be anything else appropriate to let a normal kid do. Each archetype also has a flaw which is in line with their type, and can also be a quite serious drawback in the Grimm lands. No archetype is better than any other archetype, it all comes down to how you play them.


Chapter 2 is Skills & Feats. The skills list has been reduced to 25 skills, with several related skills consolidated, ie move silently and hide become sneak, spot, search and listen become notice, tumble and escape artist become nimbleness and survival and heal become boy scout stuff. Some new skills have been introduced in addition to the old (standalone and consolidated) ones. 32 feats from the PHB were kept and 38 new feats were introduced, 6 of which are origin feats which can only be taken at character creation, and must be taken by each character. One feat, street fighter was listed but wasn't included in the descriptions, unfortunately 2 other feats are dependant on it. It was made available on FFG's website, but as of the writing of this review it couldn't be downloaded. Some of the feats were quite cool and I'd consider bringing them over to other games, but some of them, like I'm Telling (which imposes a morale penalty on monsters for 1 round after you threaten to tell on them), Spoiled, Brat and Rotten while useful for children in the Grimm lands are completely inapropriate for almost any other game. The Inedible feat, which makes you less tempting to eat (swallow whole) and forces monsters to make a fort save to avoid disgorging you would be quite handy, and possibly appropriate in a non-Grimm game but is also a little too powerful for standard adventurers.


Chapter 3 is Facing the Darkness. It covers everything that the characters have at their disposal to survive the Grimm lands. The characters get both standard and special equipment. Weapons and armor are available to characters, although usually not at the beginning. As most characters wont have armor they get to apply their level to their defense bonus (children are also small and gain an additional +1 AC bonus).


Each character also starts out with a Focus, a special item that is important to them and acquires special powers in the Grimm lands. Some examples are a Holy Book (bible, koran, etc) which can be consulted 1/day to cast augury, binoculars which allow seeing distances over 100 miles (pretty much anywhere in the Grimm lands as long as it's line of sight), an invisible friend which is a permenant unseen servant which will reform if destroyed, or a magic marker or set of crayons which allows an exit to be drawn on any surface - the destination is unkown but it's definitely handy for getting out of sticky situations (it could of course just lead you out of the frying pan into the fire however), or an umbrella which when opens grants the benefit of the feather fall spell.


The weapons available include some standard items from the PHB, as well as some mundane items that can be used as weapons (something I'd also consider using in other games), also of note is the Polearm, which in the Grimm lands can change into any of the polearms in the PHB gaining it's special ability. Also all characters are automatically proficient with all weapons. This is essentially the same as being non-proficient in all weapons, but the children have a hard enough time as it is fighting 9HD monsters without having to suffer a -4 attack penalty. Likewise, characters are proficient with all armour they encounter (as long as it fits) armor works the same way it does in the PHB (which causes characters to lose their defense bonus to AC as well) with the exception that any armor imposes an arcane spell failure of 100% - characters don't use arcane spells but all the NPCs do, so they're balanced a bit for the characters. Some new armour has been added some of which could be transplanted to other games. Magic items are available as well (called really special items).


Enchanted weapons and armour work as they do in the DMG. Crux items have been added, which are items that can easily defeat a specific monster, but they're always difficult to come by, either because nobody knows what they are despite being very common or because they're well known but difficult to find. Fairy Wands allow characters to store imagination points (more on them later), and Gizmos (essentially wondrous items).


All characters gain imagination points, which they use for a number of things. Imagination allows characters to bend reality to a certain degree depending on how many points they spend, and also allows them to cast incantations (spells, except they work differently). Imagination points are often what will help characters survive in the Grimm lands as they can manipulate the situation to their advantage. Some examples are "finding" a useful item nearby, manipulating a monster (for example forcing it to use power attack so it's more likely to miss), or calling an ally to help (which will either appear instantly or after 10 minutes, to aid the character before going on its way).


Characters can't cast spells normally, but they can learn incantations. They can learn spells from all schools except Evocation and Necromancy. Each incantation takes a certain amount of time to learn (usually days), but spells from certain schools are harder to learn than others. Enchantment spells are the easiest to learn. Transmutation spells are supposed to be easy as well but there is disagreement with the text and tables. The text example suggests that Transmutation spells have a +0 penalty to the days it takes to learn the spell, but the table says it's +1. It takes a number of rounds equal to the spell level to cast the incantation, and the character must also spend imagination points, the amount varies depending on the spell level and the school.


Some rules changes have been made for combat, small creatures don't suffer a size penalty when initiating a grapple, but suffer the same penalty when grappling otherwise. This allows the children to gang up on monsters they would otherwise have no chance of defeating. Swallowed Whole rules have also been changed, characters can't cut themselves out, but they only take damage slowly and can survive hours, sometimes even days (or indefinitely if the creature is large enough) inside the stomach. To be able to free a character one needs the Cut it Open feat. Despair rules have also been introduced, when a child is alone for more than an hour they must make a will save to avoid falling into despair. This encourages characters to stay together. as this is their only chance of surviving.


Chapter 4 is Oh Brave New World. This is the GM's chapter and gives advice on how to run the game. I won't go into detail as to not spoil it for players. It describes the lay and laws of the land - the Grimm lands aren't like the real world, or most fantasy worlds for that matter. Encounters are also described, there's a miny bestiary covering some common fairy tale encounters - usually with some interesting and unexpected twists. Nothing is quite as expected in the Grimm lands, even for players who are familiar with the fairy tales, so there's no concern of metagaming by well read players, in fact it's likely to get them into more trouble than if they didn't know anything. The Grimm lands are after all, very dangerous.


Considering the price, the number of pages and the content, there really isn't anything wrong with Grimm. It's direct and to the point, so the low page count is certainly not a hindrance and is even an advantage. It's definitely worth the $15 ($22 for canadians) and it has a lot of material to work with. A couple of mistakes managed to slip through, but not enough to dock any points for Grimm. 5 out of 5 for Substance.

Since RPG.net uses a different scoring system, I'm just adding style and substance together and dividing by 2. 5+5 = 10, 10/2 = 5. 5 out of 5 for Grimm!