Avast, maties! Lay yer eyes upon the booty I jus' gathered: Pirates (by Living Imagination) and Skull & Bones (by Adamant Entertainment and Green Ronin). Now you can live a pirates life if ye are layin low... or if ye are a landlubber!
Skull & Bones
Skull & Bones was originally written by Adamant Entertainment's T.S. Luikart, Gareth-Michael Skarka, and Ian Sturrock. However, the product was cancelled before it reached print due to lack of preorders. So the manuscript sat for a while until Green Ronin announced that they would publish it as part of their Mythic Vistas line of settings.
And, from all appearances, the manuscript has changed a little since then. The biggest indication of this is the fact that it is "3.5" ready, referring to revised edition skills and feats.
A First Look
Format: 192 ppg; softcover, perfect-bound. $27.95.
Layout and text density: Small body text font, double spaced paragraphs. The book uses only a single column throughout (which is a bit distracting) and the borders are a bit larger than I am used to.
Cover artist/comments: David Leri. The cover illustration is very detailed, and depicts a well-adorned pirate standing in front of some hideous, dreadlocked creature.
Interior artists/comments: Andrew Baker, Richard Becker, Larry Byrd, Tim Divar, Steve Lawton, Mike Swann, Joel Talacko, and Brian Wells. I also noted artwork by Toren "MacBin" Atkinson, but he was not credited. Balck-and-white art throughout. The art is of average to good quality. Some of the better art is Richard Becker's depictions of historical figures.
A Deeper Look
Skull & Bones is similar in approach to Green Ronin's Testament, also in the Mythic Vista line. Like that book, the book builds on many existing classes and other d20 System conventions as a baseline, but the end product is very different from D&D.
The setting of Skull & Bones is primarily the Caribbean during the height of piracy in the area. However, it is not exactly historical. It claims a horror slant, and extrapolates from religions and traditions of inhabitants of the Caribbean to build a supernatural horror element to the game. In essence, Skull & Bones does for the Caribbean Piracy subgenre what Deadlands does for the western genre.
The most essential element in adapting the d20 Fantasy classes to the setting is the extraction of magic. Arcane spellcasters simply are not available, and divine spellcasters are either stripped of their spellcasting (for rangers and paladins) or lose their spellcasting abilities lacking some sort of holy relic.
New core classes introduced to shore up the character selection of the setting include:
-Buccaneer: Buccaneers are the quintessential Caribbean outlaw archetype. Buccaneers are good fighters, and have class abilities that enhance their survival abilities near or at sea, and other abilities that assist them in larcenous pursuits at sea.
-Sea Dog: Sea Dogs are more the staight-up sailor archetype, but still the basis for many pirate legends depicted in sidebars scattered throughout the book. Sea Dogs are also good fighers, but have skills more focused on actual seamanship than Bucaneers do.
-Shantyman: Shantyman is essentially the replacement bard of the Skull & Bones setting. They can assist their shipmates with their performances, and also have a way of developing additional contacts (contacts are a new rule for the setting, see below.)
-Bokor: Bokor are the closest equivalent to arcane spellcasters in the setting. Bokor can invoke ancient pacts and power stolen from the Loa (deities of Voodoo) to produce wanga, which are essentially arcane spells. However, their spellcasting stops at 4th level and causes damage to the bokor.
-Hougan: Hougan are voodoo priests, and are divine spellcasters. Like bokor, they are more limited than their core equivalent, with more limited spell lists (no raising the dead in Skull & Bones) and their most powerful spells must be bargained for.
The book also provides a selection of appropriate new skills, feats, prestige classes, and equipment for the setting. The equipment section provides a whole new economic system utilizing the coinage of the day.
More telling is a selection of new rules and rules tweaks used to give the game a more Swashbuckling feel, yet at the same time, help produce the sorts of less than physically perfect specimens that appear in pirate legends and fiction. It does this is a variety of ways.
Contacts are NPCs that all PCs have some influence with. Each PC has their charisma modifier in contacts (minimum 1). PCs can get more contacts through backgrounds or class abilities.
To help define characters, Skull & Bones has mechanics called backgrounds and fortunes. Backgrounds are optional, and cost a beginning character 4 skill points. The character receives 4 ranks of skills (regardless of whether or not those are class skills) as well as a selection of modifiers to skill rolls and contacts appropriate to the background.
Fortures are a bit odd, a mixture of habits, traits, or quirks of fate associated with the character. A character can have up to 4 fortunes. Some fortunes are general, while some are good and others are ill. Any fortune a character selects can be general, but each good fortune a character selects must be balanced by an ill fortune. Each of these provides some game mechanics modifications appropriate to the type of fortune.
The first concern one might have in fitting d20 to the genre is the rapid pace at which base attack bonus outstrips AC with little armor or magic. It compensates for this by a parry rule. A character can sacrifice a future attack to make an opposed roll against an incoming attack. While this is a workable solution, I find the solution of a defense bonus as depicted in games like d20 Modern a bit more playable.
Damage in Skull & Bones is also different HP heals very rapidly, but once depleted, you aren't dead. Instead, you take damage to Con after HP are depleted. You don't track negative HP, but a lowered con affects how fast HP recover as well as other effects, such as the maximum HP the character can have. Normal PCs and significant NPCs use these rules, but some NPCs known as "canon fodder" don't have any HP and use only Con. In short, the Skull & Bones damage system has many similarities to the VP/WP system used in Star Wars, Spycraft, amd Stargate SG-1, but does so without inventing new terminology.
But this is just the first major difference in the way damage is handled. Other elements are lives, rolling the bones, and affliction.
All PCs start with a number of lives. These operate very similarly to fate points in games like Warhammer Fantasy RPG. The character really doesn't "die" when he/she normally would if such a condition arises and the character has lives left. The GM and player can explain away the way in which the character survives.
When a character suffers severe injury that would put them below 0 Con, however, they gain afflictions. If the character has only a few lives lost, their afflictions could be relatively benign, such as minor scars that provide a charisma bonus. However, afflictions can also be things like a throat wound, lost limbs, and so forth. Very "piratey" indeed.
Normally, when a character is below half of their starting Con, they fall unconscious. However, the player may elect to "roll the bones", which is somewhat risk. A character who goes below 0 Con or suffers a so-called "fatal event" must "roll the bones." They player rolls 2d6 and the GM consults a chart in the GM section. The character could lose a life and get other penalties if the roll is bad, but actually may not lose a life and gain benefits if the roll is good.
There are other pertinent rules. Fame is tracked for all characters by the GM. The characters fame can be a disadvantage if they are trying to lay low. But a character can use fame once a session as sort of a "luck" type of attribute adding to one of their rolls. The GM decides how much fame to add to the roll depending on the player's description of how they managed to persevere.
In addition to the extensive rules modifications that apply to individual characters, several rules are introduced that apply to ships and crews. Sway rules are provided to handle loyalty and leadership. The ship and crew combat rules are taken from Mongoose Publishing's Seas of Blood, and work by abstracting crews into larger units that are handled much as a single character in the d20 rules.
The GM section provides some useful advice and information for GMs running a Skull & Bones game. In addition to providing rules for the GMs purview like the roll the bones rules, it provides ideas for running the game, such campaign models in the setting (something many nonstandard d20 games neglect). A chapter on the Caribbean provides an overview of the situation in the islands during the era, and some interesting scenario hooks for each. Finally, an adventure is provided as well.
In addition to the role the Bokor and the Hougan play, the supernatural element of the setting is provided by a selection of creatures from various legends, including amazons from greek myth, and various Djal, spirit creatures that Hougans and Bokor deal with. And what vodoo game or pirate horror game would be complete without Zombis?
Finally, the book has appendices compiling major tables from the book, and index, and sidebars interspersed throughout the book providing general details (and supposed class and level) of many legendary pirate figures.
Conclusion
Skull & Bones is compelling take on running games in the "swashbuckling pirates" genre. Generally speaking, it is more suitable for playing as written than tacking on to an existing d20 Fantasy campaign, though you could mine some elements.
The rules addition do a good job at tweaking the feel of d20 to the genre, but there are a lot of minor rules tweaks that may be a bit hard to take in.
Edit: Despite the weigthiness of the rules alteration, I think that any group invested in them would find them of little consequence, and the book does a good job of doing what it intends to. That being the case, I am upgrading the score of this product to a "5".
Overall Grade: A-
Alan D. Kohler
