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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2011431" data-attributes="member: 172">Grim Tales Grim Tales is a resource for running low magic games in the d20 System. The book draws from both the modern and fantasy rules sets and can use either ruleset as a baseline for such a campaign, and includes support for a variety of eras. The book is written by Benjamin Durbin under his Bad Axe Games banner, and includes input by many ENWorld regulars, in particular Craig "Upper Krust" Cochrane, perhaps best known for his variant CR/EL rules (which appear here.) A First Look Grim Tales is a 216 page hardbound book priced at $34.95 US. The cover of the book features a somewhat Frazetta-like pictures by Ken Kelly, depicting a bare- chested musclebound man breaking out of some bond, surrounded by degenerate humanoid creatures and with a skeletal creature in the backdrop. The interior is black-and-white, featuring the talents of Scott Drourin, Andrew Hale, Jeremy Mohler, John O'Connor, Scott Purdy, and Jim Zubkavich. Scott Purdy has long been one of my favorite ink artists in d20 products and continues to be a boon to books that feature his work; his creepy feel is perfectly appropriate to the grim and gritty feel of this book. Jeremy Mohler also has a number of nice ink drawings. And longtime Bad Axe fans should appreciate the return of the distinctive Andrew Hale. A Deeper Look Grim Tales does not present a singular setting. Rather, it rebuilds the d20 system from the ground up in an attempt to make it more suitable for a grittier gaming style in which magic is much more a mystery, or even hazardous, as opposed to the tool it is treated as in many d20 system games. It also goes for a bit of a grittier feel than the norm for d20 system, while retaining a certain amount of heroic or pulp genre feel. Grim Tales is organized into sections regarding character generation, equipment, combat variants, environment, magic, firearms, horror and insanity, vehicles, cyberware, creature design, gamemastering, and an appendix with sample campaigns. Throughout the book, many variant rules are presented with "threat levels" defined with one, two, or three skulls. These threat levels describe how lethal the rules are towards PCs. One skull is fairly PC friendly, while three skull variants of rules have a stronger tendency to kill PCs. The most notable adaptation of character generation rules is the core classes. In essence, Grim Tales takes the 6 ability score based heroic classes of D20 Modern and adapts them as 20 level classes. To support these classes, the book includes most of the existing D20 Modern talents (some redundant ones reduced to singular talents that may be taken repeatedly) and introduces a number of new talents, many of them drawn from D&D class abilities (for example, flurry of blows is a talent). One problem here is that some talents lack errata that exists for the modern rules. For example, as printed, there is no reason you would want to take the ignore hardness talent as opposed to the melee smash talent. The classes also lack the pre-defined skill list that most classes use. The player basically defines their own class skill list (called "core skills") by chosing 3 or 4 skills from a background (similar to a D20 Modern starting occupation), three "career skills" (one craft, one profession, and one knowledge), and three skills of the players choice. Between the more flexible core class arrangement and skill arrangement, this makes character design quite a bit more flexible than the norm for D20 System games. This allows the rules to cover different eras more easily and prevents a flurry of new archetype classes as seen to gruesome extent in books like FFG's Darkness & Dread. The skills mostly follow the same vein as the source books, but are stripped down and made more generic, another accommodation to the multi-era aspect of the rules. There are more "category" skills in Grim Tales than in D&D or D20 Modern, and the categories are less tightly defined. The intent here is to create as little variation as possible between eras, allowing you to change the skill set to be appropriate to the era by the categories chosen for such skills (knowledge, profession, etc.) Also like D20 Modern, Grim Tales uses action points to provide characters with momentary heroic boosts. However, there are some tweaks to the action point rules as presented here borrows a bit from the action dice rules in Spycraft, for example, using a varying die size instead of a "best of multiple dice" scheme, and one of the variants resets every session like Spycraft. Other tweaks help compensate for the lack of magic in the game, allowing characters to penetrate the DR of supernatural creatures. Combat variants include the massive damage tweak used in D20 Modern and D20 Call of Cthulhu. As an example of the skull convention, the variants used are the "10 point massive damage" rule as the three skull variant and the "massive damage = CON" rule as the two skull variant. The one skull variant allows characters to add their armor modifier to their massive damage target number. Other variants include allowing armor to convert lethal damage to nonlethal damage, quick resolution for nameless NPCs. However, the book repeats quite a bit of material in the combat chapter and environment chapter. In many causes, the repeated material is highly appropriate for the sort of game that Grim Tales is geared for, it is repeated material nonetheless, and has the additional disadvantage for experienced players that it makes it difficult to sift out the actual changes. As one of the main emphases of Grim Tales is low magic campaigning, it is unsurprising that one of the biggest modifications is to the magic rules. There are no spellcasting classes per se. The ability to cast spells is a talent tree; each spellcasting level take a talent. All characters can cast spells, but spells do one dice of ability damage to the caster per level of the spell. Characters without the appropriate damage apply the damage to CON, those with it apply it to strength and can reduce it if their casting stat is high enough. As you can see, this make spellcasting a daunting proposition. The firearms rules do not try to provide an exhaustive list of weapons. Rather, it provides general guidelines to allow the GM to create specifications for weapons according to size and caliber. Another large section of new material is the horror and madness rules. These rules are one of the many rules in the book that vary according to the GM's choice of threat level. When the players encounter a horrifying creature, the player make d20 rolls (which is a will save, wisdom check, or unmodified roll, depending on the selected threat level, modified by the EL of the creature compared to the party.) The GM rolls 2d6, with several possible modifiers such as creature type and era (some creatures are more horrifying or out-of-place in certain eras), creature charisma, and the party's experience with the creature. If the GM's horror threshold matches or exceeds the PCs charisma, they suffer a penalty based on the result of their check, which can vary from long or short term insanity, merely being frightened or panicked, or having no effect. The insanity rules feature a metagame rule wherein the players choose whether they wish to fight or run when confronted with such a roll. If they choose to run, they are considered to have failed the check, but only suffer a frighten result. If they choose to fight, they make the check as normal, and take their chances. This provides a small encouragement to players to run voluntarily when they face horrifying entities. The insanity chapter also includes a variety of mental disorders in game terms. This could be a good resource for d20 System games in general, which in its existing form really does a poor job of emulating insanity. The vehicle rules draws a lot from the widely acclaimed Spycraft chase rules. Like those rules, the vehicle rules in a chase or dogfight situation provide a variety of maneuver that drivers can choose from, and the results are adjudicated by opposed drive checks. The main changes from the Spycraft rules is an addition of a dogfight category, elimination of a sharp distinction between predator and prey maneuvers, and makes separation categories more general (which makes it more appropriate for different era.) A brief chapter entitled Fantastic Technology introduces d20 rules for cyberware, something that was not part of WotC's rulesets to date, but appropriate to some sorts of campaigns that might be run with Grim Tales. The cyberware provide abilities and benefits similar to magic item. The cyberware is limited by the character's constitution and impact charisma roll, and have the potential to drive the character into a coma or murderous cyber-psychosis if their charisma is driven too low. Chapter 13 (Creature Creation) and parts of chapter 14 (Gamemastering) are derived in part from ENWorld's "Upper Krust's" variant CR and EL rules. These rules provide a very precise accounting of the capabilities of creatures. I have always felt that these rules tried to seek a level of accuracy that fell beneath the "noise fence" of the wild nature of RPGs. That said, they play an important role in Grim Tales since the assumptions about creature and character capabilities are rather different than core d20, and they can help compensate for gross differences such as lack of magic items. A character sheet is provided, and an appendix provides an example campaign for each of the three major eras covered by Grim Tales: Archaic, Modern, and Apocolyptic. These campaign samples include plot ideas, sample villains and creatures, including the lethid - a creature with a name somewhat reminiscent of the "illithid", now lost to OGC, but a step toward's Heinlein's "puppet masters". Conclusion Grim Tales is one of the most exciting new d20 products this year. It makes extensive use of open game content to realize a given game concept or feel. Compared to similar concept products (like Darkness & Dread), the flexibility of the approach provides for more character possibilities in less space. Even if you aren't running a straight up Grim Tales inspired game, aspects like the new talents, vehicle rules, cyberware, and insanity rules can make good supplements for other games. There are a few minor places that need errata, and there is a lot of recycled material in the book that anyone who owns a DMG already has. The book could have afforded to omit those sections, and used that space for more extensive sample campaigns or reduced the size of the book. Overall Grade: B+ -Alan D. Kohler</blockquote>

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