John Cooper
Explorer
FANTASY IMPERIUM
By Mark O'Bannon
Shadowstar Games
444-page hardcover, $34.95
Fantasy Imperium is a new "Interactive Storytelling Game" of historical fantasy. When Mark O'Bannon originally emailed me to see if I would be interested in reviewing his new book, I turned him down. For one thing, I've been trying to stay pretty strictly in the D&D/d20 Fantasy field, which is where I'm the most comfortable, and when I saw (on his website, www.shadowstargames.com) that this book was going to be selling for $34.95 - and therefore would no doubt be hundreds of pages long, in a new system that I was unfamiliar with - I balked. Also, I told him I was unfamiliar with "interactive storytelling games" (as opposed to roleplaying games), and probably would not want to devote the time and energy to learning an entirely new system that, quite frankly, I wouldn't be using in my own campaigns. (I'm pretty much strictly a D&D campaign DM these days.) However, he reassured me that the bulk of the book was weapon and armor artwork, and that the core rules took up all of 68 pages. Thinking that 68 pages of material wasn't too much of an effort to learn a new gaming system (and somewhat intrigued at what an "interactive storytelling game" might be - I had visions of something along the lines of the diceless Amber game of years past, which I had heard of but never played), I went ahead and took the plunge.
Silly me.
Having read through all 444 pages of Fantasy Imperium (the core rules were significantly longer than 68 pages, considering that the spell system - arguably a necessary part of the "core rules" for a self-admitted fantasy game - goes all the way to page 177, and is then followed by several other "core rules" chapters before the charts and weapons/armor illustrations kick in), I have come to the following conclusions:
Let's get to the specifics, shall we? I'll start, as I usually do, with the cover artwork. The front cover depicts a shawled woman carrying a sword in one hand and a rose in the other. (This must be symbolic or something, because the woman on the back cover also wields a sword and a flower, although it seems to be a different woman.) Greg Horn is credited with the cover art, so I suppose he did both the front and back, and he did an excellent job on both. Shading, texturing, and detailing are all fantastic, and I was particularly impressed with the woman's left hand (the one holding the rose) on the front cover, as it's in an awkward-to-draw position, yet looks completely natural and accurate. However, I suppose the exorbitant cleavage should have been a warning sign - occasionally, a poorly-done book will throw scantily-clad women on the cover to increase the likelihood of sales; sadly, this tactic often works. The woman on the back, it should be noted, is equally beautiful - regal, even - while being completely covered from neck to wrists to toes.
The inside covers are two maps of the Europe/West Asia/North Africa region, as of 1121 AD in the front and 1348 AD in the back. These are nicely done by cartographer Matthew Comfort (also credited as Assistant Editor and Additional Writing), with clearly-defined borders in different colors. (Incidentally, there are two appendices in the back with historical details of those two time periods, as they form the first two campaign eras available for the game; future releases in the line will open up 69 AD and 1559 AD as alternate historical periods in which to set a Fantasy Imperium campaign.)
The interior artwork consists of 903 - yes, you read that correctly - black-and-white illustrations by 20 different artists. Most are rather small, but there's a full-page piece at the first page of every new chapter (of which there are 17) and appendix (of which there are 8). However, while that number seems extraordinarily large (even for a 444-page book), 568 of them are individual illustrations of weapons (usually 9 or so to a page) and 209 of them are individual illustrations of armor, leaving [903 - (17 + 8 + 568 + 209) = 101] 101 other illustrations scattered throughout the book. Of these, a chunk of them are "repeats" from the armor and weapons illustrations (filling in what would otherwise be blank space), and a very large chunk of the non-weapon/armor artwork is devoted to good-looking women. It's a trend that's going to be continuing in future releases in the Fantasy Imperium line, if the ads on pages 441 and 442 are examined: the Fantasy Imperium: Storyteller's Guide cover art (also by Greg Horn) features two female fairies lounging by a waterfall, their flimsy, wet negligees plastered to their skin, and the nearest one reclining in a "spank me, I've been naughty" pose; two of the other covers depicted show a dark-haired beauty in ripped robe (with just enough material in place to cover her nipples) hanging onto a sword, and another features a dirty-blond woman whose choice of leather armor makes Red Sonja appear overdressed. Don't get me wrong, these are excellent pieces, but if this first volume is any indicator, their sole purpose may be to lure the unwitting buyer into purchasing something he might not otherwise buy had he not been distracted by the pulchritudinous covers.
Oddly enough, while much of the interior artwork is used to cover up what would otherwise be white space, for some strange reason this practice doesn't seem to carry over to the last page of a chapter. There are several pages that are five-sixths or more completely blank, which seems really odd in a book with such a great variety of artwork and a demonstrated willingness elsewhere to reuse art in more than one place in the book. I really don't get it.
As for the game itself, let me cover the good points first. I was very impressed with the staggering variety in the illustrations of all the various types of armor and weapons that I mentioned earlier; anyone playing any type of fantasy or historical game will no doubt find this material of interest and use, and most of the illustrations are very clear and well defined (for some reason, the artwork really plummets towards the end of the weapons section, when it gets into the cannons and siege engines). In fact, most of the artwork in the book is pretty well done, and if more of it was credited as to who did which pictures, I'd be more than happy to name names. There's a 12-page index in the back, which in a book of this size is a must. (Sadly, the user will be forced to reference it frequently to find where things have been tucked away, and even then he'll be left hanging more times than he would expect.) The game uses luck points, which are very similar to the action points used in the Eberron campaign world and which many seem to enjoy.
Most of the rest of what I have to say about Fantasy Imperium is negative, however. Let's start with the proofreading and editing jobs, which I mentioned earlier were some of the poorest jobs I've seen. Between primary author Mark O'Bannon, additional writers Matthew Comfort and Jordan Fike, and the first three editors I listed above (since the fourth is one of the writers), neither of them seems to have a very good grasp of the English rules of spelling, grammar, or punctuation. Here are some of the words that the six of them seemed particularly confused by:
Something you might notice about my list above is that it's alphabetized. It wasn't that hard to do, either: I just typed up each entry from the list I had compiled as I read through Fantasy Imperium, and then, when I was done, moved the entries around to put them into alphabetical order. This is a concept that escapes the authors/editors more times than not, as the spells are not alphabetized, nor are the skills, nor is most of anything else in the book. (Fortunately, there is an alphabetical list of all spells by spell name starting on page 250 that will be invaluable to any DM - sorry, Storyteller - who insists on giving this game a try.) There were also all the various other types of proofreading errors in this book, from botched punctuation (two periods at the end of a sentence, or a sentence missing any type of punctuation at the end at all), sentence fragments, sentences missing a key word, capitalization issues, all of the headers but one being in bold font, extraneous carriage returns bumping half of a line to the next line, spacing issues, and the like. Also, while "&tc." is apparently an acceptable alternative to "etc." I wish the authors would have picked one version and stayed with it throughout the book. (I vote for "etc.") Likewise, it's somewhat distracting to see "&" show up in the middle of a sentence instead of "and" - "&" is often used in titles and headers, but not in fully written sentences. There's a Stun Chart on page 34 that's just a reprint of four columns from the 8-column Injury Table directly above it on the same page! What purpose was that supposed to serve? Examples are always a good idea when demonstrating mathematical calculations, but you have to love it when an example has not one, but two mathematical errors in it, like the one on page 63. Also, it appears as if the Living Expenses Table on page 183 shows the amount paid per year, not the amount paid per month - unless all of the tables that follow are wrong.
Okay, I've carped enough about the proofreading, and I readily admit that proper proofreading rates much higher on my list than it does on most everyone else's. How about examining the game system itself, so you can get a feel for how that works?
As I mentioned, Fantasy Imperium uses percentile dice as its core mechanic, and just about everything's skill-based (including combat). Okay, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. However, the author seems to have gone out of his way to complicate matters as much as possible, so while there are quite a lot of AD&D-isms present (mostly from the late-1st-edition days, after the original Unearthed Arcana had already come out), it ends up being similar in complexity to Hero Games' Champions. You start off by rolling percentile dice for the following characteristics: Strength, Endurance (think Constitution), Dexterity, Intuition (think Wisdom), Self Discipline, Reasoning (think Intelligence), Ego, Awareness, Presence (think Charisma), and Attractiveness (think Comeliness, from 1E AD&D's Unearthed Arcana). So, now you have values ranging from 1 to 100 for each of these. Now, you perform calculations to derive the values for Combat Factors: Hits (think hit points), Stun (think Fortitude save), Morale, Winded, Exhausted, and Burnout. (As an example, your Hits value is your Strength and Endurance values added together.) You perform additional calculations to derive your saving throws against the four different categories of magic (sorry, "magick") - ceremonial, natural, extrasensory, and black magick. These are a bit more complex, as you are adding two values together and then dividing the result by 10 (although there's no explanation as to what you do with any fractional remainders: do you always round down, like in d20, or do you round to the nearest whole number?). You also roll d100+100 to determine the number of skill points you get to spend, and you choose your profession, which will determine how you spend some (or all) of your skill points. However, there are rules that allow you to spend skill points to bump up your characteristics, which means that if you put extra points into any of the first 10 areas I mentioned above, you get to recalculate your Combat Factors and Saving Throws. And, just to return to the golden, sexist days of 1E AD&D, there are rules limiting female characters to only having 75% of the maximum Strength of a man. (Mark wisely opted to make that an optional rule - although he did make it a standard rule that a female character gets a free reroll of her Attractiveness value if she doesn't roll as high as she'd like.)
There are some glaring inconsistencies with the skill rules, however. I can't for the life of me figure out why it takes a total of 70 skill points to be an entry-level prostitute, yet only 25 skill points to be a beginning mason. Likewise, it takes twice as many skill points to be a serving wench than to be a swordmaster! Does that seem odd to anybody else? In any case, you plug in the points you spend on your various skills, and when the time comes to attempt a skill, you need to roll lower than your skill rating to succeed. As you go through adventures, you're rewarded with a small handful of experience points, which can be spent on improving various skills. However, spending them isn't guaranteed, as there are rules as to whether or not an experience point attempted to be spent on a given skill actually "takes." That seems pretty crappy to me; I know I wouldn't be too happy to have all of the experience points I earned disappear due to poor die rolls when I tried actually using the dumb things. Also, there is reference to a Basic Skills Table that shows which characteristics (Strength, Dexterity, Reasoning, etc.) are applied to each skill, but the table does not seem to appear anywhere in the main section of the book; it's carefully hidden in the back, after the Index, with the character sheet - and nowhere is it annotated Basic Skills Table (or anything else, for that matter).
That isn't the only place where Mark seems to go to a whole lot of effort to make the book as difficult to use as possible. In the rules for combat, for example, he uses the passage "(see Hit Probability Table)" - which would have actually been somewhat helpful if he had put a page number immediately afterward, but he didn't. Okay, no big deal, I'll just look it up in that handy 12-page Index in the back. Well, surprise, surprise: 12 pages and no entry for "Hit Probability Table." I finally had to go flipping through the various Appendices until I happened to stumble across it. Likewise, in the few places that he does actually put references to specific page numbers, they're invariably wrong, and serve merely as a starting place to begin flipping around looking for the relevant section. (There are similar errors when referencing the Appendices; one reference to Appendix B should have been to Appendix G, which starts some 136 pages after Appendix B. Whoops!) He's also very sloppy with his chapter titles, referring to Chapter 5 as "Injuries" when it's really "Injuries & Death" and to Chapter 6 as "Morale & Fatigue" when it's really called "Morale & Healing." There's a reference to "Chapter 15: Languages & Scripts," but not only is Chapter 15 called "Weapons," there's no chapter in the whole book called "Languages & Scripts." Finally, there are numerous references to "Chapter 20: Monsters" when the book only goes to Chapter 17; I presume that Fantasy Imperium: Storyteller's Guide will pick up with Chapter 18, where this one left off.
There's a character sheet in the back of the book that I photocopied and used to roll up a sample character, to try out the character creation rules for myself as I read through them. That's how I learned how frustrating it is to have to recalculate everything when you try bumping up your crappy characteristic values, and it's also where I learned that the "Stun" Combat Factor was apparently at one time called "Shock" (which is how it's still listed on the character sheet). Also, they either forgot their use of "magick" as the oddball spelling or changed it halfway through the game's development, because it appears as "magic" on the character sheet.
Some other things that really bother me about the game system in Fantasy Imperium:
By Mark O'Bannon
Shadowstar Games
444-page hardcover, $34.95
Fantasy Imperium is a new "Interactive Storytelling Game" of historical fantasy. When Mark O'Bannon originally emailed me to see if I would be interested in reviewing his new book, I turned him down. For one thing, I've been trying to stay pretty strictly in the D&D/d20 Fantasy field, which is where I'm the most comfortable, and when I saw (on his website, www.shadowstargames.com) that this book was going to be selling for $34.95 - and therefore would no doubt be hundreds of pages long, in a new system that I was unfamiliar with - I balked. Also, I told him I was unfamiliar with "interactive storytelling games" (as opposed to roleplaying games), and probably would not want to devote the time and energy to learning an entirely new system that, quite frankly, I wouldn't be using in my own campaigns. (I'm pretty much strictly a D&D campaign DM these days.) However, he reassured me that the bulk of the book was weapon and armor artwork, and that the core rules took up all of 68 pages. Thinking that 68 pages of material wasn't too much of an effort to learn a new gaming system (and somewhat intrigued at what an "interactive storytelling game" might be - I had visions of something along the lines of the diceless Amber game of years past, which I had heard of but never played), I went ahead and took the plunge.
Silly me.
Having read through all 444 pages of Fantasy Imperium (the core rules were significantly longer than 68 pages, considering that the spell system - arguably a necessary part of the "core rules" for a self-admitted fantasy game - goes all the way to page 177, and is then followed by several other "core rules" chapters before the charts and weapons/armor illustrations kick in), I have come to the following conclusions:
1. I still have no idea what an interactive storytelling game is, or how it differs from a roleplaying game, because Fantasy Imperium seems to me to be not only a dyed-in-the-wool RPG, but makes a very strong attempt to capture as much of the first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game as possible while using a percentile-dice, skill-based core mechanic.
2. Despite having four editors (Ed Roeder, Anhao Sam, Neil Uyetake, and Matthew Comfort), Fantasy Imperium is riddled with just about the most errors I've ever seen in a book that expects to pass itself off as a professional product.
3. Despite having 140 playtesters listed on the credits (please forgive me for not typing their names here), I seriously wonder whether the game was adequately playtested, because there are some serious problems with the construction of the rules.
4. Overall, Fantasy Imperium reads as a very rough initial draft of a new game system, and (in my opinion) should never have been released to the public in its current form.
2. Despite having four editors (Ed Roeder, Anhao Sam, Neil Uyetake, and Matthew Comfort), Fantasy Imperium is riddled with just about the most errors I've ever seen in a book that expects to pass itself off as a professional product.
3. Despite having 140 playtesters listed on the credits (please forgive me for not typing their names here), I seriously wonder whether the game was adequately playtested, because there are some serious problems with the construction of the rules.
4. Overall, Fantasy Imperium reads as a very rough initial draft of a new game system, and (in my opinion) should never have been released to the public in its current form.
Let's get to the specifics, shall we? I'll start, as I usually do, with the cover artwork. The front cover depicts a shawled woman carrying a sword in one hand and a rose in the other. (This must be symbolic or something, because the woman on the back cover also wields a sword and a flower, although it seems to be a different woman.) Greg Horn is credited with the cover art, so I suppose he did both the front and back, and he did an excellent job on both. Shading, texturing, and detailing are all fantastic, and I was particularly impressed with the woman's left hand (the one holding the rose) on the front cover, as it's in an awkward-to-draw position, yet looks completely natural and accurate. However, I suppose the exorbitant cleavage should have been a warning sign - occasionally, a poorly-done book will throw scantily-clad women on the cover to increase the likelihood of sales; sadly, this tactic often works. The woman on the back, it should be noted, is equally beautiful - regal, even - while being completely covered from neck to wrists to toes.
The inside covers are two maps of the Europe/West Asia/North Africa region, as of 1121 AD in the front and 1348 AD in the back. These are nicely done by cartographer Matthew Comfort (also credited as Assistant Editor and Additional Writing), with clearly-defined borders in different colors. (Incidentally, there are two appendices in the back with historical details of those two time periods, as they form the first two campaign eras available for the game; future releases in the line will open up 69 AD and 1559 AD as alternate historical periods in which to set a Fantasy Imperium campaign.)
The interior artwork consists of 903 - yes, you read that correctly - black-and-white illustrations by 20 different artists. Most are rather small, but there's a full-page piece at the first page of every new chapter (of which there are 17) and appendix (of which there are 8). However, while that number seems extraordinarily large (even for a 444-page book), 568 of them are individual illustrations of weapons (usually 9 or so to a page) and 209 of them are individual illustrations of armor, leaving [903 - (17 + 8 + 568 + 209) = 101] 101 other illustrations scattered throughout the book. Of these, a chunk of them are "repeats" from the armor and weapons illustrations (filling in what would otherwise be blank space), and a very large chunk of the non-weapon/armor artwork is devoted to good-looking women. It's a trend that's going to be continuing in future releases in the Fantasy Imperium line, if the ads on pages 441 and 442 are examined: the Fantasy Imperium: Storyteller's Guide cover art (also by Greg Horn) features two female fairies lounging by a waterfall, their flimsy, wet negligees plastered to their skin, and the nearest one reclining in a "spank me, I've been naughty" pose; two of the other covers depicted show a dark-haired beauty in ripped robe (with just enough material in place to cover her nipples) hanging onto a sword, and another features a dirty-blond woman whose choice of leather armor makes Red Sonja appear overdressed. Don't get me wrong, these are excellent pieces, but if this first volume is any indicator, their sole purpose may be to lure the unwitting buyer into purchasing something he might not otherwise buy had he not been distracted by the pulchritudinous covers.
Oddly enough, while much of the interior artwork is used to cover up what would otherwise be white space, for some strange reason this practice doesn't seem to carry over to the last page of a chapter. There are several pages that are five-sixths or more completely blank, which seems really odd in a book with such a great variety of artwork and a demonstrated willingness elsewhere to reuse art in more than one place in the book. I really don't get it.
As for the game itself, let me cover the good points first. I was very impressed with the staggering variety in the illustrations of all the various types of armor and weapons that I mentioned earlier; anyone playing any type of fantasy or historical game will no doubt find this material of interest and use, and most of the illustrations are very clear and well defined (for some reason, the artwork really plummets towards the end of the weapons section, when it gets into the cannons and siege engines). In fact, most of the artwork in the book is pretty well done, and if more of it was credited as to who did which pictures, I'd be more than happy to name names. There's a 12-page index in the back, which in a book of this size is a must. (Sadly, the user will be forced to reference it frequently to find where things have been tucked away, and even then he'll be left hanging more times than he would expect.) The game uses luck points, which are very similar to the action points used in the Eberron campaign world and which many seem to enjoy.
Most of the rest of what I have to say about Fantasy Imperium is negative, however. Let's start with the proofreading and editing jobs, which I mentioned earlier were some of the poorest jobs I've seen. Between primary author Mark O'Bannon, additional writers Matthew Comfort and Jordan Fike, and the first three editors I listed above (since the fourth is one of the writers), neither of them seems to have a very good grasp of the English rules of spelling, grammar, or punctuation. Here are some of the words that the six of them seemed particularly confused by:
- affect (the verb, which they often spell "effect")
- after which (which they spell "afterwhich")
- apparitions (which they spell "aparitions")
- balloon (which they spell "baloon")
- ceilings (which they spell "cielings")
- Christians (which they often spell "christians")
- conferred (which they spell "confered")
- Crusaders' (which they spell "Crusader's," apparently unsure of where to stick the apostrophe to denote a plural subject)
- cryptography (which they spell "cryptogahy")
- cutlass (which they spell "cutlas")
- deceiver (which they spell "deciever" - no less than 24 times!)
- different (which they spell "defferent")
- dilettante (which they spell "dilitante" - and after having just spelled it correctly two lines earlier!)
- effect (the noun, which they often spell "affect")
- equally (which they spell "equaly")
- failed (which they spell "failied")
- God (when talking about the Christian deity, which they occasionally spell "god," forgetting the required capitalization)
- guardian (which they spell "gaurdian")
- inflicts (which they spell "inclicts")
- its (the possessive form, which they invariably spell "it's" - this is the most frequent error in the whole book, occurring no less than 70 times!)
- King's (which they spell "Kings," omitting the apostrophe)
- multiplier (which they spell "multplier")
- narrow-mindedness (which they spell "narrow mindedness")
- nine-tenths (which they spell "nine-tenth's")
- normally (which they spell "normaly")
- occurred (which they spell "occured")
- penalty (which they spell "panalty")
- People's (which they spell "Peoples," omitting the apostrophe)
- pogrom (which they spell "progrom" each time they use it)
- polearms (which they spell "polearems")
- Princes' (which they spell "Princes," omitting the apostrophe)
- receive (which they spell "recieve")
- receives (which they spell "recieves")
- receiving (which they spell "recieving")
- Richter scale (which they spell "richter scale," forgetting the required capitalization since Richter was the man's name after whom the scale was named)
- savings (which they spell "saving's," even though it's a simple pluralization)
- siege (which they spell "seige")
- spellcaster (which they spell "spellcater")
- stabilized (which they spell "stabalized")
- unfortunately (which they spell "unfortuneately")
- vertically (which they spell "verticaly")
- victim's (which they spell "victims," omitting the apostrophe)
- werewolves (which they spell "warewolves" - at first I thought this was an affectation, just to be different, but they spell it correctly elsewhere)
- years' (which they spell "year's," apparently confused by where an apostrophe goes with a plural subject)
Something you might notice about my list above is that it's alphabetized. It wasn't that hard to do, either: I just typed up each entry from the list I had compiled as I read through Fantasy Imperium, and then, when I was done, moved the entries around to put them into alphabetical order. This is a concept that escapes the authors/editors more times than not, as the spells are not alphabetized, nor are the skills, nor is most of anything else in the book. (Fortunately, there is an alphabetical list of all spells by spell name starting on page 250 that will be invaluable to any DM - sorry, Storyteller - who insists on giving this game a try.) There were also all the various other types of proofreading errors in this book, from botched punctuation (two periods at the end of a sentence, or a sentence missing any type of punctuation at the end at all), sentence fragments, sentences missing a key word, capitalization issues, all of the headers but one being in bold font, extraneous carriage returns bumping half of a line to the next line, spacing issues, and the like. Also, while "&tc." is apparently an acceptable alternative to "etc." I wish the authors would have picked one version and stayed with it throughout the book. (I vote for "etc.") Likewise, it's somewhat distracting to see "&" show up in the middle of a sentence instead of "and" - "&" is often used in titles and headers, but not in fully written sentences. There's a Stun Chart on page 34 that's just a reprint of four columns from the 8-column Injury Table directly above it on the same page! What purpose was that supposed to serve? Examples are always a good idea when demonstrating mathematical calculations, but you have to love it when an example has not one, but two mathematical errors in it, like the one on page 63. Also, it appears as if the Living Expenses Table on page 183 shows the amount paid per year, not the amount paid per month - unless all of the tables that follow are wrong.
Okay, I've carped enough about the proofreading, and I readily admit that proper proofreading rates much higher on my list than it does on most everyone else's. How about examining the game system itself, so you can get a feel for how that works?
As I mentioned, Fantasy Imperium uses percentile dice as its core mechanic, and just about everything's skill-based (including combat). Okay, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. However, the author seems to have gone out of his way to complicate matters as much as possible, so while there are quite a lot of AD&D-isms present (mostly from the late-1st-edition days, after the original Unearthed Arcana had already come out), it ends up being similar in complexity to Hero Games' Champions. You start off by rolling percentile dice for the following characteristics: Strength, Endurance (think Constitution), Dexterity, Intuition (think Wisdom), Self Discipline, Reasoning (think Intelligence), Ego, Awareness, Presence (think Charisma), and Attractiveness (think Comeliness, from 1E AD&D's Unearthed Arcana). So, now you have values ranging from 1 to 100 for each of these. Now, you perform calculations to derive the values for Combat Factors: Hits (think hit points), Stun (think Fortitude save), Morale, Winded, Exhausted, and Burnout. (As an example, your Hits value is your Strength and Endurance values added together.) You perform additional calculations to derive your saving throws against the four different categories of magic (sorry, "magick") - ceremonial, natural, extrasensory, and black magick. These are a bit more complex, as you are adding two values together and then dividing the result by 10 (although there's no explanation as to what you do with any fractional remainders: do you always round down, like in d20, or do you round to the nearest whole number?). You also roll d100+100 to determine the number of skill points you get to spend, and you choose your profession, which will determine how you spend some (or all) of your skill points. However, there are rules that allow you to spend skill points to bump up your characteristics, which means that if you put extra points into any of the first 10 areas I mentioned above, you get to recalculate your Combat Factors and Saving Throws. And, just to return to the golden, sexist days of 1E AD&D, there are rules limiting female characters to only having 75% of the maximum Strength of a man. (Mark wisely opted to make that an optional rule - although he did make it a standard rule that a female character gets a free reroll of her Attractiveness value if she doesn't roll as high as she'd like.)
There are some glaring inconsistencies with the skill rules, however. I can't for the life of me figure out why it takes a total of 70 skill points to be an entry-level prostitute, yet only 25 skill points to be a beginning mason. Likewise, it takes twice as many skill points to be a serving wench than to be a swordmaster! Does that seem odd to anybody else? In any case, you plug in the points you spend on your various skills, and when the time comes to attempt a skill, you need to roll lower than your skill rating to succeed. As you go through adventures, you're rewarded with a small handful of experience points, which can be spent on improving various skills. However, spending them isn't guaranteed, as there are rules as to whether or not an experience point attempted to be spent on a given skill actually "takes." That seems pretty crappy to me; I know I wouldn't be too happy to have all of the experience points I earned disappear due to poor die rolls when I tried actually using the dumb things. Also, there is reference to a Basic Skills Table that shows which characteristics (Strength, Dexterity, Reasoning, etc.) are applied to each skill, but the table does not seem to appear anywhere in the main section of the book; it's carefully hidden in the back, after the Index, with the character sheet - and nowhere is it annotated Basic Skills Table (or anything else, for that matter).
That isn't the only place where Mark seems to go to a whole lot of effort to make the book as difficult to use as possible. In the rules for combat, for example, he uses the passage "(see Hit Probability Table)" - which would have actually been somewhat helpful if he had put a page number immediately afterward, but he didn't. Okay, no big deal, I'll just look it up in that handy 12-page Index in the back. Well, surprise, surprise: 12 pages and no entry for "Hit Probability Table." I finally had to go flipping through the various Appendices until I happened to stumble across it. Likewise, in the few places that he does actually put references to specific page numbers, they're invariably wrong, and serve merely as a starting place to begin flipping around looking for the relevant section. (There are similar errors when referencing the Appendices; one reference to Appendix B should have been to Appendix G, which starts some 136 pages after Appendix B. Whoops!) He's also very sloppy with his chapter titles, referring to Chapter 5 as "Injuries" when it's really "Injuries & Death" and to Chapter 6 as "Morale & Fatigue" when it's really called "Morale & Healing." There's a reference to "Chapter 15: Languages & Scripts," but not only is Chapter 15 called "Weapons," there's no chapter in the whole book called "Languages & Scripts." Finally, there are numerous references to "Chapter 20: Monsters" when the book only goes to Chapter 17; I presume that Fantasy Imperium: Storyteller's Guide will pick up with Chapter 18, where this one left off.
There's a character sheet in the back of the book that I photocopied and used to roll up a sample character, to try out the character creation rules for myself as I read through them. That's how I learned how frustrating it is to have to recalculate everything when you try bumping up your crappy characteristic values, and it's also where I learned that the "Stun" Combat Factor was apparently at one time called "Shock" (which is how it's still listed on the character sheet). Also, they either forgot their use of "magick" as the oddball spelling or changed it halfway through the game's development, because it appears as "magic" on the character sheet.
Some other things that really bother me about the game system in Fantasy Imperium:
- Each round lasts for 2 seconds. Okay, that's not too far off from the 6-second round in D&D. However, just about every action you take causes you to accumulate fatigue points, which are restored at the rate of 2 points per round of rest. Can you say "paperwork nightmare?" In combat, you're not only swinging your sword at your enemy, you're also subtracting the fatigue points from your total that swinging that sword for 2 whole seconds ate up.
- Speaking of paperwork nightmares, in Fantasy Imperium you don't just lose hit points, you have to keep track of how many individual wounds you've taken, and the location and severity of each wound. Take so many head wounds, for example, and you are knocked out. I simply cannot fathom how much actual bookkeeping such a system entails.
- Speaking of the 2-second round, did you know that Fantasy Imperium lists 27 different kinds of crossbow? And that it takes up to a minute and a half to cock a crossbow after it's been fired? So you can shoot it this round, and then devote the next 45 rounds to reloading it! Doesn't that sound like fun? Do you think anyone in their right mind is going to put any skill points in crossbow use of any kind if that's what they have to look forward to?
- Every time you fire a bow, it has a 5% chance of breaking. So, on average, you'll have to replace your bow after every 20 shots. Nice. I guess we can add all of the 19 various types of bow to the list of weapons that most people won't want to bother with.
- There are rules for "pissing on arrows" (a direct quote from the book). Classy.
- PCs must make morale checks or run away from combat. Boo! While morale checks were a fine mechanic in 1E AD&D, they only applied to monsters; PCs got to decide for themselves whether they wanted to continue to fight or back off. In Fantasy Imperium, you don't get that choice.
- If a PC gets a dark thoughts spell cast upon him, the Storyteller decides what he does. So, fail a saving throw and the Storyteller gets to run your character while you sit there and become a spectator. Sound like fun?
- For 5 spell points, I can cast the spell heal injury and cure a single wound. For 50 spell points, I can cast destruction and completely destroy a city, an organization, an army, or a powerful person...because healing 10 wounds and completely destroying an entire army are pretty much the same level of power. Likewise, smite enemy kills one enemy and costs 25 spell points; apparently one enemy = half an army. I don't think it's very inaccurate for me to say that the various power levels of many of the spells seem somewhat "off."
- If the PC is hit with an imprisoned spell, he is imprisoned for 1d6 years, and every year he has a 10% chance of escaping. Wouldn't that be something that was better roleplayed out? Wouldn't you rather concoct an escape plan of your own and put it into action than roll a d10 and hope you get a "1?"
- You can spend experience points on studying new spells, but the mechanic is kind of wonky. I mean, by the rules as written, it will take me 10 days to study a 5th-level spell, but if I spend 5 xp I can learn it immediately. There's no real in-game explanation as to how this is supposed to make sense; it either takes 10 entire days of study or absolutely no time at all.
- According to the rules, you can actually die from learning a new spell.
- One of the magical amulets in the game protects you from toads. I can see the need for amulets protecting you from elementals, fallen angels, hexes, poisons, and sickness, but toads? Was this just a joke, or are toads a deadly adversary in Fantasy Imperium?
- Leprosy effects in the game are explained as "don't ask." Well, that was helpful! I guess the Storyteller has to make up his own effects for a disease that wasn't entirely uncommon in the historical eras that the game seeks to emulate (albeit with a fantasy twist).
- The game goes to a lot of effort to be historically accurate, which seems to conflict with the desire to insert magic spells, elves, dwarves, centaurs, and so on into the world. The Christian God plays a real part in the background (there are even rules as to how you can have Him create a miracle to save your bacon when needed), as do the Fallen Angels, and elves are explained away as beings that once dwelt in Heaven but left (voluntarily, not because they were cast out), yet there are no attempts to explain where dwarves, gnomes, centaurs, halflings, or fairies come from. They're just there.
