Blade of the Iron Throne

Blade of the Iron Thone is a Kickstarted successor to the Riddle of Steel. I haven't played either Riddle of Steel or Blade of the Iron Throne and I'm not sure I ever will. Primarily I was interested in Blade to have access to its mechanics as I never picked up Riddle of Steel.

The basis of the system is a dice pool builder of d12s that are aiming for a target number of 7 to be considered a success. The systems mainly aim to manipulate either the number of successes required to complete a task and the number of dice that are added to the pool.

The basic concept is pretty sound, this after all is basic the World of Darkness system with a dice that is easier to roll.

Unsurprisingly there is a substantial focus on combat and simulating small melee battles, there are even different hit location charts for different kinds of attacks. Interestingly there is more abstraction than I was expecting and more emphasis on a fictional conceit of looking at discrete units of interesting action. It isn't as dry as I was expecting, although armour does model three types of damage so there is certainly a level of detail which the system revels in.

Magic also gets a bunch of specific systems with an idea that magic-using is corrupting and sorcerers need to manage risks as well as rewards. I was also surprised here as you don't get the normal endless, droning list of spells with their specific triggers and effects. Instead you get these broad "mysteries" around themes like cursing and enslavement. This definitely moves things to a more mysterious and flexible form of magic that is both more unpredictable than Vancian conventions and more powerful in terms of where it might take the story. Crunchy but not dull.

There is a default setting in the back of the book but the ethos being invoked here is very much the Conan stories with freebooters encountering sinister and strange things at the fringes of civilisation and bloodily fighting for their lives at the heart of it.

Overall its still hundreds of pages long and I'm not sure I have the motivation or the audience to discover its nuances but it does seem to be occupying a sensible middle-ground between Burning Wheel and Dungeons and Dragons clones.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Troika!

Most OSR community is based around Dungeons and Dragons, however like a lot of Europeans my first encounter with roleplaying or fantasy gaming was not through D&D itself by through reflections of those who had read a copy or heard of the idea and created their own. Like a lot of early British roleplayers my nostalgia is really for Fighting Fantasy, a formative experience that was notable different in tone from American fantasy while being composed of much the same tropes. Troika! is an attempt to create a retro-clone that brings together Warhammer and Fighting Fantasy into a simple rules system that bakes weird fantasy into core of character creation in the same way that the Ratcatcher career did in the 1980s. The basic mechanics are pretty simple. Mainly 2d6 are used and the basic characteristics are Skill , Stamina and Luck . If you are attempting something against the environment you try to roll under your Skill on two dice, if contested you roll and add, aiming for t...
Read more

Ruma: Dawn of Empire

Ruma is a Powered by the Apocalypse game about a Roman Empire that is facing off against supernatural threats summoned by it barbarian neighbours. Players take the role of characters who are confronting those threats. The rules introduce Latin-flavoured playbooks that reflect various roles in historical Roman society and within the Legions. Irritatingly Ruma introduces some alternative names and spellings for the various countries and peoples of its world. It tries to put some fictional distance from history but not in a way that adds to the historical roots. While flawed as a narrative campaign Hunters of Alexandria did a better job of blending the historic and supernatural fantasy of its world. Apocalypse World, as a ruleset, seems appropriate to the environment, the Empire is powerful but besieged by threats that seek to overthrow it. Characters will win big eventually but the costs will be high. Ruma's fundamental problem for me is that I'm not sure why this isn...
Read more

Cabal

Cabal is a game about sinister conspiracies trying to seize power through a corporation or organisation. Mechanically it feels weirdly like a game where a group of players share a single Runequest character and try and make them a Rune Lord. The company has various attributes that are rated on 0 to 100 scale with points being spent at generation time and then the players going on missions to try and raise the value of the attributes by between 1 and 5. The target value is also used to set the difficulty and provide the mechanisms of opposition. The game uses a GM to manage the opposition and provide the colour to the missions. Something that feels like a design cop-out. The game does make some interesting use of the fact that the players take on the role of individuals in the company and therefore you get to play very different characters and the risk of them dying is lessened by the meta-reward to the organisation. However it also has an experience mechanism that makes chara...
Read more