The Gaming Den

I don't actually know what the requirements are for something to count as Old-School for the purposes of these reviews. World Tree came out in 2000, but it has a distinctly old-school feel, mostly due to low production values and craziness. I seriously got flashbacks to the old 1e DMG reading this thing for the first time, because it was full of black and white illustrations and because the world it describes was as alien to my mid-college mind as the one implied by the DMG was to my grade-school mind.

This is not to say that it's bad. I have an abiding and unironic affection for the setting of World Tree. It's just so far from the bog-standard World of Warcraft fantasy setting, and even farther from the naturalistic fantasy of George Martin and his ilk. No elves! No dwarves! No humans!

It's also unapologetically gonzo-high fantasy. I'm talking enchanted city walls made of snakes that are on fire high fantasy. And yet it connects those heights to down to earth concerns with stuff like this little excerpt (which is the header fiction for the poison section).

The Code of Hastrobaldus Mores wrote:For subjecting a prime to Itchy poison, the poisoner shall be struck thrice with a scorpion whip, and fined. For subjecting a prime to Twitchy poison, the poisoner shall be struck thrice with a scorpion whip and thrice with a burning log, and doubly fined. For subjecting a prime to Howly poison, the poisoner shall be struck thrice with a scorpion whip, killed thrice by beating with a burning log, healed each time at his own expense, and trebly fined.

Now, history shows that I'm just a sucker for magical law codes, but the way that piece establishes resurrection magic as a for-granted and accounted-for part of the setting kicks my ass.

Anyway, enough pre-ramble. The game is by Bard Bloom and Victoria Borah Bloom. They got 'editorial assistance' from two people who are also listed as playtesters and one person who is not. Only two writers with three editors is actually a very good sign. Less encouraging is their special thanks to FurryMUCK, especially since the cover looks like this:



Yeah, it really looks like an anthro-furry setting in the mold of Albedo or Ironclaw. And that can be a real turn-off for a lot of people. I will say that there is no particular sexual content in the text and that the art is mostly modest and non-fanservicey. It's like all the BDSM subtext in Claremont's X-Men - people who are into that sort of thing might get aroused, but everyone else can just get on with the story.

This is about as sexualized as it gets.

This is about normal. For the art and the setting, not in general.

The table of contents divides the book into fourteen numbered sections, as well as unnumbered sections that include the appendices, the indices, and bafflingly also a few of the fiction pieces. I don't know why you'd want to look up the story of Flokin and the Baker more than any other piece of setting fiction. Section 6 begins on page 104 and is amusingly titled "Can We Play Yet?"

The first piece of fiction is a full page, and is all in italics, which is a little distracting, but is also a good signpost for the reader, because all in-setting text in the book is in italics. It's not great when you're looking at whole pages of it, but it is consistent, which is worth a lot.

The story is about an adventuring party and has the same combination of high fantasy and grounded perspective that is the setting's signature. There's a cani (anthro-dog) woman who's married and also pregnant from an affair, and is afraid that the father's distinctive breed will give the game away when the puppy is born. She knows a ritual mage who can guarantee that the puppy only expresses the mother's breed, but the mage has demanded a magic macguffin as payment. The cani has talked her doctor (who is the narrator) into fetching the macguffin for her. The doctor rounds up a college buddy and some pro adventurers and offers to pay them in bound healing spells. They all go wandering over the edge of the gigantic branch into 'the Verticals,' which is the term for the sides of the world tree branches where you mostly walk on vegetation growing out of the side like parallel bars.

The story is not entirely comprehensible for a first-time reader, but I think it's close enough that the bits you don't get are more intriguing than confusing, which encourages you to find out more; so, a modest success.

Next up: The World Tree

I think Frank defined Old School as 10+ years old.

I use 10 years as my benchmark. Or "An edition ago". Whichever's more recent.

Chapter 1: The World Tree

This chapter is very short and serves as a primer on the physical setting. It is also kind of dense with necessary setting conceits, so this overview is going to make the chapter seem longer than it is. It opens with a creation myth which I really like: the world was made by seven gods who dreamed together: five had good dreams, one dreamed of adventure, and one had nightmares. Now, that myth is a lot less mythical than the term implies, because those seven gods are actually visible most of the time; but I'll get to that in the Astronomy section.

I should also note that the layout of the book is two-column pages with like half-inch margins. It is clear and also good that they'd rather spend their spare space on art and big headings than on gutters.

Arbology
Anyway, the world is a ridiculously big tree. More than significantly bigger that the Earth. In setting scientists estimate that world tree trunks are 'between three million and six hundred million miles long, if they are finite.' For reference, 3 million miles is almost seven times the diameter of the sun; and 600 million miles is greater than the distance between the sun and Jupiter. Hundreds of trunks are visible, more are guessed at, and they are about two hundred miles in diameter. If ordinary gravity were in effect, the whole thing would be a singularity in short order.

The tallest trunk is called the main trunk, and the nine branches around the top of it house the center of known civilization. The branches which come directly off a trunk are about fifty miles wide and tens of thousands of miles long. The tops of branches (called 'the Flats')have soil and rivers (fed by rainfall) and a lot of more reasonably scaled vegetation. The Verticals are jungly cliffs with outcasts and beasts. Underneath the branches are worse things. The leaves are hundreds of miles long and dozens wide, which seems weird in scale to the branches, but as almost nothing lives on them, they can mostly be ignored.

One term that comes up a lot is 'prime.' This goes back to the creation myth. So, seven gods made the tree and everything on it, and the last thing they made were the prime species, which are the PC races, individually called primes. There are eight prime species because the gods were meant to make one each, but one god wasn't happy with his first effort and got another god to help him out with another one. That one god is a general fuckup and is responsible for a lot of the shoddy design and monsters of the World Tree.

The primes have civilized two dozen branches and colonized 30-40 more, though they don't go down very far because leaves block the sun and the climate gets unpleasantly cold. But that's still a lot of territory, although the branch dimensions make it weirdly linear territory because a single branch is at least as long as the circumference of the Earth, but less wide than Hawai'i island. I don't think the ramifications of that are developed much, which is a shame.


Astronomy
So on some level things are already crazier than a sack full of weasels at a Bolivian hoedown, but when we get to this section, it gets kicked up a notch. For instance, the sun doesn't rise and set, it circles the sky at 18 degrees from horizontal. It resembles a crystal sphere, and 'dawn' is when the crystal starts to fill with fire, 'noon' is when it is full and starts to wane, and sunout is when it goes out. That whole process takes 18 hours and takes 9 hours to start up again.

The seven creator gods are usually visible in the sky, just hanging out. They can look like celestial bodies, or giant primes, or... other things. I guess it would be existentially comforting to know that they're there and paying attention? Two of the gods have never moved and are used as the basis for celestial directions. Other directions are basically the Discworld directions: trunkward and outward defined by the tree, rollward and roll'gainst defined by the motion of the sun.

There are many stars, a toroidal moon, a small close silver moon that has been visited, something called the star-serpent which seems to maintain the brightness of the stars, and three beings called 'the fencers' which look like animated trees having a swordfight all over the sky.

Basically, looking up in this setting mostly just gets you trolled, but there are a few seeds for the MC to start with if you just crank up a Levitate spell and let it ride.


Common Materials
There's very little mineral material on the tree. Cookware is mostly magically fireproofed leather. Things that would be iron in most worlds are usually made of Meng nut, which is comparable to low-grade iron in strength and hardness, but more flammable. Glass, ceramics, metal, and stone all exist on the world tree, but are rare and expensive.


Magic
Magic is 'as miraculous and unremarkable as electricity on Earth.' Children start doing minor magics in much the same way that they start to talk, a concept that is kind of terrifying; and most adults have half a dozen formal spells. It gives some examples of spell effects in the world, some being pretty mundane (smiths have to conjure their metals ounce by ounce), and others being gonzo (sentient wax-sculpting spells seal the hollow tree trunks used to supply water to cities).


Time
There's a fairly detailed calendar, but I'm not going to go into details except to say that it's 2/3 as long as an Earth year, which is kind of annoying. Also, they have an extra season in the middle of autumn (so there's a first autumn and second autumn). This extra season is called 'Surprise' and is randomly either hotter than summer or colder than winter. This is a bit twee, because while it is certainly weird and different, I don't feel enough attention is paid to the ramifications of such a thing.


Languages
Everything born on the World Tree knows the Common tongue, though nonsentient creatures can't understand most of it. The Common tongue is crap though, 2000 words, no past or future tenses, no plural nouns. There are dozens of better languages, and since they're all based on Common, none are more different than English and French, and most are less different than that.

Also there's some alternate pronoun nonsense. Neuter beings are 'it,' beings which aren't male, female, or neuter are 'zie.'

Finally, there's some pretense of the World Tree languages existing as a thing which the authors have had to struggle to translate properly, noting that most of the natives can't make b or f sounds, and that 'cani' is just a convenient stand in for a dog noise that's not really representable in roman characters. It's a small thing, but I would have appreciated them skipping the pretense. The reminder that the primes aren't human and don't make human sounds is cool, but it could just have been a reminder. Nobody wants to be told that Frodo Baggins' real name is Maura Labingi, but it was translated for their convenience.

Next up: The People.

Chapter 2: The People

This chapter opens with a half-a-page fiction and I can't even get past paragraph three. It's not grabby.

But it does go on to admit that the racial descriptions are brutally reductive stereotypes.

... if we described terrestrial species in these terms, we would count all humans as a single species - the physical and cultural differences between a typical white American man and a typical !Kung hunter-gatherer woman are minor compared to the differences between a Herethroy and a Cani. We would say that humans are social, egotistical, and rarely make plans for the long term. On the whole this description is true, but there are plenty of individual humans who are antisocial, not egotistical, and only concerned with the long term. Don't expect the World Tree stereotypes to be any more accurate about an individual.

The 'physical' differences part might be true, though I think the 'cultural' differences part really isn't. That's not surprising, really alien cultures are difficult to portray.

Also, we have some general demographics. Neat. So of the eight prime species, the Cani (dogfolk) make up 24% of the population, the Herethroy (cricketfolk) make up 35%, the Orren (otterfolk) make up 19%, the Rassimel (raccoonfolk) make up 22%... and we're out of percents. The other four species are essentially a statistical rounding error, adding up to less than one half of one percent all together. Gormoror (bearfolk) are 0.2%, Khtsoyis (air-heptapuses) and Sleeth (non-anthro panthers) are 0.1% each, and the Zi Ri (cat-sized dragons) are <0.01%.

That's not really represented in the art, by the way. The art is heavily weighted towards Cani and Rassimel (proportionately, it's probably more weighted towards Zi Ri, or else there wouldn't be any Zi Ri art, but there still isn't much of them). Considering that they're a plurality, I'd have expected to see a lot more Herethroy. It's not a very big deal, but the art does set a lot of the baseline expectations of the setting, and there really aren't any visuals of large numbers of Herethroy. In social and marketplace scenes, they're barely present.

Each of the prime species gets a multipage writeup with subheadings for appearance, social structure, art, diet, moral attitudes, a few others depending on species, and finally a general breakdown of attitudes towards the other species. It's actually very helpful.

Cani

'You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kneecap you for status.'

The dogfolk are extremely social and instinctively loyal; any group they're with for a few weeks they become loyal to, which I imagine could lead to some nasty Stockholm syndrome effects. They are very sensitive to status and have a whole ritualized status-challenge culture. They tend to have big group-marriage families with a dozen or so co-spouses. Like dogs, they have very acute smell, but no concept of 'unpleasant smell,' so Cani foods are often fermented or spiced beyond the endurance of other primes. Cani are the dominant prime species because they organize and hang together in a way that none of the others do.


Gormoror

Gormoror tend to wear a lot less than the slinky-dressed bug girl, but not in a fanservice way.

The bearfolk are a lot like DS9-era Klingons: they basically live a violent and overly dramatic tribal lifestyle. They have a special word-of-honor they can give, and if they break it, for a year they have a kind of psychic stain that other Gormoror can see. They can be mind-controlled into breaking it, and it counts, but they have an innate resistance to mind control.

Gormoror also have a significant sexual dimorphism, which shows up in their game stats later. Males are larger and more bear-like, females are more enduring and human-like.


Herethroy

'Hey, wanna box?'

Art for the Herethroy is all over the place. Some of them have Jiminy Cricket eyes, which are just disproportionately large human eyes, others have big ol' compound insect eyes. The description here does not clarify, though I assume it's Jiminy, because they don't seem to have distinct vision from the other peoples.

They have a compromise skeleton, a carapace with some internal bones as well. Spines and ribs are fused to the carapace. They are warm blooded, and have six limbs - two arms, two legs, and two that can serve as either. They frequently wield something like sword, shield, and quarterstaff. The carapace counts as moderate armor they can wear actual armor on top of, so they seem kind of unfair in combat.

They have a fairly interesting four-gender set up I'm not going to go into. They are strict herbivores, which I mention because the Cani and Gormoror despite appearances are omnivores. They usually live in tiny hamlets of 50-100 people, which also act as an extended family, but don't organize on any larger scale.


Khtsoyis

Dapper heptapus mobster. Hell. Fucking. Yes.

First product of the fuck-up god (his second try was the Gormoror), the Khtsoyis are a lot like monsters that just happen to be classified as primes. Seven-limbed octopus-like floating weirdos with five stalked eyes who have active camouflage and a limited healing factor. They are a little dim, but they seem dumber because they have tiny lungs and have to pause a lot in the middle of speaking. They have a stereotype as Titus Pullo-like good-natured thugs. They have a strange affinity for clubs and can wield three at once.


Orren

The otterfolk actually change shape to full otters when they go in the water; they also have a crazy adrenal burst which can help in combat. Faddish and not very serious, they tend to commit themselves intensely to something for a couple of weeks, then move on to the next thing.


Rassimel

'I am very serious about wealth redistribution.'

The raccoonfolk are characterized as obsessives - each has their own 'thing' that they pursue compulsively. Otherwise they don't have much going for them but being fast learners. They are a little like the 'humans' of the setting - few special abilities, but more skill points - but as you'll see when we get into the rules, skill points include magic, so they aren't a sucker's game.


Sleeth

Once you go horizontal, you never go back. Unless you're one of those bipeds and just stand back up again.

Sleeth are non-anthropomorphic cats, about 5-6 feet long. They're kind of terrifying against poorly-armored opponents because they have three claw attacks (claw/claw/rake), but they aren't big attacks, so armor can kind of stop them cold. They have a limited innate TK effect to make up for their lack of hands. They are almost pure carnivores - they occasionally chew grass or something. They have a rep as cruel, vicious, and untrustworthy, and many of them deserve it. Most live like werewolves in the wilderness in small bands.


Zi Ri

Pictured: A questionable evolutionary strategy.

Zi Ri fill the elf niche in the world. About thirty pounds of little dragon, they do not have a maximum lifespan, and do not age. A dozen of the Zi Ri from the making of the world are still alive. Not having a lot of physical prowess, they tend to focus on magic, and living a long time, the oldest ones are the archetypal archwizards of the setting. They have a weird immortal perspective, patient and hesitant, and also don't really 'get' leadership - they don't make good leaders or followers. They are resistant to fire and can breathe a little jet of fire - but it's not a very good weapon against anything larger than a mouse. They're all hermaphrodites.

edit: extra thoughts
It's strange, because while on average there's a lot more differential between these species than the D&D races, the more divergent ones kind of lampshade how samey some of them still are. Like, the Cani, Gormoror, Rassimel, and even Orren are all just 'animal-person with a some light thematic elements.' I think it comes down to body layout. Like, the Herethroy's extra limbs make them interesting to think about in a way that the Gormoror's honor nonsense doesn't; same with the Sleeth's quadrupedalism and the Khtsoyis'... everything.

I suppose it was probably intentional, so that people who just wanted to play as a human-like body-type and not have to worry about another layer of strangeness would still have some choices. To me, it feels like a missed opportunity.

And yeah, while the descriptions do flesh out the different societies and cultures a lot more than I have, they aren't really that different, and some of them just cold don't have particularly distinct cultures at all; Orren and Rassimel really just have personality stereotypes, and Khtsoyis and Zi Ri don't have enough population to maintain cultures of their own - even Sleeth and Gormoror only have something like a distinct culture because they mostly live in tiny bands outside the cities; and those cultures are pretty thin.

Not everyone can be Larry Niven or Doc Smith, but I feel like most everyone can read those guys for some really good distinct non-human perspectives. And there isn't much sense of that.

This chapter isn't over, but I think the next section deserves its own post.

Non-Primes
This section opens with a grade school social studies essay on 'Why It's Best to Be Prime.' It's a really neat piece of world-building, but if it sounds disturbingly similar to a paper that might have been produced by the Hitler Youth... yes.

There are thousands of non-Prime sapient species on the World Tree, and they basically get the orc and goblin deal from Order of the Stick: specifically created to be less cool than the PC races and to provide conflict for those PCs who can't take on giant awesome monsters yet. Dick move, guys.

Primes have some distinguishing features: they can use all the magical skills without special effort (most non-Primes need to quest to get access to all the skills, and some can't get access to certain skills ever), their mageriums - an astral organ used in magic - looks like the World Tree (non-Primes' mageriums look like normal trees), and diseases for Primes are mostly gentle, non-fatal, or both (non-Primes get fantastically horrifying plagues).

Primes often believe that non-primes are unimportant: that they were put on the World Tree for the benefit of the Primes, and they can be killed, looted, exploited, or whatever as desired. The premise is true: the non-primes were created as subsidiary species. The conclusion is a matter of ethics, not science or history: a thorny philosophical issue that confronts adventurers when the enemy scawn surrender and beg for their lives.

It's pretty fucked up, and I'm not quite sure what to think. It almost reads as a critique or deconstruction or confrontation of classic RPG race-based bigotry, which would be really bold and interesting. But I think in order for it to succeed as that, it would have needed to include a frank discussion of how to address that kind of theme in play, and it doesn't. There's plenty of humanizing and individualizing of the non-Primes, but also lots of othering. In the DM section, there's a section on playing as a non-Prime, and the upshot is 'you can, but it sucks.' There's barely any notion of balance: you get to have less magic, fewer skill points, and the fuzzy end of the prejudice lollipop in exchange for... maybe a few slightly more exotic tricks than usual.

I want to believe that it's a failed attempt at deconstruction and not a successful attempt at prejudice, but whatever the motivation, it comes off as a straight presentation of a world where some people were just cold made more special than others. And they run with it in a way that makes me as uncomfortable as certain kinds of 19th-century literature. It's not actually as bad as The Last of the Mohicans, but it's not a lot better.

On a side note, prime status is totally recognized by some non-primes. There's a species called the cyarr who believe that if they can exterminate one of the prime species, they'll be made into primes themselves.

Gods
The opening fiction here is a critique of the earlier creation myth as inaccurate on several details for the sake of poetry, by a grumpy scholar who wants it either censored or revised to reflect modern theology.

This section is a listing of the nineteen gods and a paragraph or so of description for each of them. Wait, nineteen? Yes, the seven creator gods invited twelve more to help them manage the place. The two groups are kept separate and are usually referred to as the 7+12 gods, rather than the 19. That ties into the magic system later. I'm not going to get into them, except to say that the gods are very much in the mold of the Greek gods; messy, flawed, full of personality.

There's also a section on Elementals, which are servants and pets of the 12 gods. Elementals are available at basically any level of power, and a lot of them are basically craftsmen who keep the world running, and they are also very much like people. It's a totally appropriate story hook to have a local air elemental fall into depression because his girlfriend dumped him, and now your local weather patterns are all fucked up. It's mentioned that the air elementals in particular work very hard to keep the weather something like earth normal despite the absurdly crazily different generating conditions.

Next up: The Adventuring Life

How come the races with tiny populations, like Zi Ri, are better than NPC races?

EDIT: come on, give us more details on gods!

Longes wrote:How come the races with tiny populations, like Zi Ri, are better than NPC races?

Better by what measure? I mean, the cyarr are moral agents who love their children and all that. It's why I used the term 'more special' above when referring to primes.

Zi Ri as a species wield power out of all proportion to their demographics because they have some very old individuals who can summon self-aware clouds of poison gas which speak words that set people on fire, and one of them actually did that in response to a cyarr challenge, driving cyarr civilization off an entire main branch. A random Zi Ri might or might not be a match for a random cyarr, but wiping out the Zi Ri basically isn't going to happen while they have archmages as old as the world who will never stop ovulating.

Okay, a few bits from the god writeups.

The goddess of change is the big sister of the god of destruction (the fuck-up). Everyone thinks she's better suited to be in charge of destruction than change, but she had to give destruction to her little bro to get him to participate in making the world.

The god of knowledge is a frivolous prankster, and as a result 1-in-20 knowledge spells just obviously troll the caster, or simply fail.

The goddess of flesh is real focused on healing, much more actively than the actual goddess of healing. She founded the healer's guild, and several times a week she will heal the grievously wounded and/or raise the dead somewhere on the tree: her price for this is seven years of heroic activity (fulfilling this price is listed as a good adventuring motivation). She is apparently qualified to be a creator god and has participated in the making of other worlds.

The god of plants made the first weapon on the tree, a simple spear used by Herethroy to repel an attack on Day 11; it's currently in a museum. He has spent the last 30 years as an unmoving statue, and there's a lot of speculation as to whether he's napping, imprisoned, or lost a bet.

The god of water has the absurd name of Merklundum Harnipsundum the Dog who Killed a Fish. His only notable interaction with primes was a one-time insistence that his name not be abbreviated. He has no high-power elementals to handle high-level matters while he sleeps, and some aspects of advanced water magic are poorly managed as a result.

Can you give some more specifics on the game balance of races, please? Or, does that come later when you get into gameplay mechanics?

I find this book interesting, and would like to learn more about it.

Re: The seven years of service thing. Does the game have systems in place that actually make a campaign likely to last seven in-game years?

AndreiChekov wrote:Can you give some more specifics on the game balance of races, please? Or, does that come later when you get into gameplay mechanics?

Yeah, I haven't even touched mechanics yet (spoiler warning: they are not very good). I'll be honest, it's hard for me to judge balance between the races, partly because I haven't played with the system much, but mostly because a lot of it is genuinely hard to judge. Each race starts with a pile of pre-spent skill points, and I can't even be assed to check if it's the same amount for each of them, let alone judge the relative utility of the skills. Khtsoyis and Sleeth have a pile more warrior-relevant advantages than other people, but neither can really wear armor and Sleeth don't have thumbs. I will try to put some more thought into it when it comes up.

Blicero wrote:Re: The seven years of service thing. Does the game have systems in place that actually make a campaign likely to last seven in-game years?

I'll talk about that when we get to systems. On some level, I'm not really sure why it would matter, it's just a motivation.

Well, if the system was at least on par with 3.5, then I would probably play it at some point. As it is, I might just steal a bunch of ideas.

angelfromanotherpin wrote: The god of knowledge is a frivolous prankster, and as a result 1-in-20 knowledge spells just obviously troll the caster, or simply fail.

The god of plants made the first weapon on the tree, a simple spear used by Herethroy to repel an attack on Day 11; it's currently in a museum. He has spent the last 30 years as an unmoving statue, and there's a lot of speculation as to whether he's napping, imprisoned, or lost a bet.

The god of water has the absurd name of Merklundum Harnipsundum the Dog who Killed a Fish. His only notable interaction with primes was a one-time insistence that his name not be abbreviated. He has no high-power elementals to handle high-level matters while he sleeps, and some aspects of advanced water magic are poorly managed as a result.

This sounds like a hilarious and great cosmology.

This sounds very much like a fun setting. Not sure how well that would translate into gameplay, but a very fun setting.

Chapter 3: The Adventuring Life

For the most part, I think the book is really well organized, but it puzzles me that this chapter comes before the chapter that tells you what regular society is like.

It talks a little bit about adventuring motivations: necessity, profit, etc. One interesting mention is experience. It is a recognized in-world thing that going off on dangerous quests makes your numbers go up faster than simple practice or study. I actually really like the idea of a university student who starts his adventuring career as a way of cramming for finals.

There's also some weird advice about finding other people to adventure with, which is weirdly bisociable as in-game and also out-of-game advice for finding other players. It's weird. I do like the conceit it raises: that most adventuring parties are folks with real jobs who are roped together through family and friendship connections before they go off into the yonder.

There's a list of the most common kinds of adventures people go on, which is nice. There's also a list of issues that adventurers have to deal with: leadership & decision-making, keeping watch, marching order, and so on.

There's some discussion of travel methods and overland movement rates, mostly notable for the flying ships and teleport gates that are the main ways of moving between branches. Teleport gates aren't all that - they only go so far, can't be built within a mile of each other, and suck spell points out of the traveller; but it still beats walking.

Currency is mostly hexagonal amber pieces called lozens. They have a few anti-counterfeiting effects, but mostly if you're a mage who could conjure amber, you could make more money for less work. General price guidelines are discussed, with the majority of the space going to the cost of spells: having them cast for you, having them 'bound' (like a potion) or 'boxed' (ready-to-learn). This is awkward because it brings up a lot of terminology, both setting and game mechanical, that hasn't been introduced yet.

Next up is a list of valuable things, things that count as 'treasure,' basically. A lot of them are exotic metals or metal substitutes, but also perfumes, spices, magic. Graces and glories are tokens of divine favor that help with casting spells related to the relevant god and make good macguffins. Also, slaves.

Wow, I had actually never noticed this before, and I don't think it shows up anywhere else in the book. It's... not utterly dreadful: civilized people tolerate voluntary indenture and relatively gentle serfdom and condemn harsher forms. The sentence 'there are tricky moral issues here' is the only acknowledgement that this is a loaded issue. It's also pretty tasteless to have slavery actually listed under 'valuable things' and not 'crimes' or something. At least it only talks about primes as slaves (Cani's instinctive loyalty makes them particularly desirable) and doesn't go into the matter of non-primes, which could get really ugly. Not well handled.

There's a discussion of some weapons and armor, notable for some setting-specific conceits, such as the fact that nobody throws metal daggers (too valuable), serpent rapiers (spellwrought magically flexible swords), the use of bows to deliver bound spells, and the comparative use of various species' claws and teeth. The most expensive armor is not metal, but world tree amber, which is much harder to work and not actually better; it's a status symbol.

The chapter ends with some in-world adventuring advice from various people to various other people. Some of it is inapplicable ('don't join the Crimson Flowers'), some is practical, if basic ('You'll need a good healer'), and some is just amusing characterization ('You also oughta take a magazine. Sometimes the wizards just sit and talk for days and there's nothin' to fight').

Next up: Civilization

Chapter 4: Civilization

This chapter (and also the next one) are more detailed world-building. It's clear that a lot of thought and attention has been put into this, and now that the reader is grounded in the basics, they let rip.

Universal History
This section is about the history that is common to every piece of prime civilization - mostly the very early stuff. It's quite cool. For example, time is measured from the morning of the creation of the Herethroy and the Sleeth, forty-eight of each of whom were created simultaneously in the same location. The other primes weren't created until later: the make-up exam Gormoror are the last, about five years later. But its clear that the tree and even some non-primes were in existence up to 55 years previous to the first primes.

There's a lot of humor, too. One story involves a Khtsoyis discovering that a goddess isn't harmed by clubbing, and doesn't stop clubbing her, until she teaches him how to make beer, which distracts him.

Some important magical discoveries and their ramifications are discussed. Apparently one of the great disasters was teleport-gate related; ten million primes died, ultimately because of violations of the 'not within a mile' limitation. That... seems like a lot, even given that it occurs 1500 tree years after prime origin. Then again, with so much territory, I guess population growth could have been explosive.


Science and Technology
World tree science is described as natural philosophy - cataloguing and describing the world more than delving into it. There's a nice little footnote which states that despite the world being created, evolution is totally happening in it.

Chemistry is weird because there are basically only twelve elements (one per non-creator god). Physics is mostly Newtonian, except for gases, which are straight fiat: air pressure doesn't change with elevation, air doesn't scatter light, etc. Many parts of normal physics are missing; there's no electromagnetism at all. Biology is strangely neat compared to Earth biology, because everything is created - no vestigial organs, the bipedal species' spines are better designed for upright activity than human.

There's a bunch of magical discussion here, most of which I'm going to skip because it gets into a discussion I don't want to have until systems show up. Everyone has a magic sense, which functions something like smell. Magic points are called Cley; ordinary people have like 6, pro casters will have 20-30. Cley refresh at dawn, and a lot of the short fiction pieces involve people managing or having difficulty managing their cley.

Children learn how to improvise spells around 5 or 6, and even though they can't do much, apparently miscast spells are the leading cause of child death. Unsurprisingly.

There's a good example of a person and the number and kind of spells they might know. The example carpenter has four carpentry-related spells, a plant-based attack spell to take advantage of her strong plant magic, a painkiller spell, a dish-cleaning spell, and a contraceptive spell.

Practical technology is remarkably good, considering. One weakness is that mass production is disdained, because of the elitist attitudes that magic breeds; because no number of lesser casters can, for instance, raise up the city walls that an archmage can, it is considered more important to have a few really skilled craftsmen than a lot of lesser ones.


Theology
Technically there are several theological sub-headings under Science & Tech, but the subject is quite long and distinct enough that I'm putting it under its own heading. A lot of this is non-explicitly a guide to how to include the gods in the game. One of the most important principles is that the gods basically always make things about the primes; in short, they shouldn't hog the spotlight.

There is actual religion (and even qualified atheism) on the tree. Priests are more important for non-primes, who can get them connected to gods and thereby magical skills they are otherwise severed from. Priests are a good source of quests. If you want a miracle or a macguffin, priests can figure out which god you need to kiss up to, and how best to do so.


Sociology
This is a discussion of the kinds of governments, nations, laws, crimes and punishments, organizations, and so on. The short version is that there's a lot of variation, but most places are relatively small city-states, because the long narrow terrain makes it hard to have a large nation. Laws tend to be at least vaguely based on the Code of Reluu (the god of control), which is unfortunately just half a dozen vague principles; local customs and popular opinion tend to contribute a lot more, so a lot of places have bizarre and hilarious laws.

Wars tend to be fought by relatively small bands of elite fighters over very limited goals, like possession of a village or mine. This is partly because of the general elitist bias, and partly because adequately protecting large numbers of people from AOE spells is difficult; this has actually changed recently due to Bound Spells, but experiments on the efficacy and efficiency of larger bodies of men are still preliminary and inconclusive. There have been some total wars, but the result has mostly been to reinforce how preferable the limited engagements are.


I think it's a remarkably good and useful chapter.

Next up: Ketheria, Birthplace of Civilization

Thanks for doing this. It's fascinating.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:The example carpenter has four carpentry-related spells, a plant-based attack spell to take advantage of her strong plant magic, a painkiller spell, a dish-cleaning spell, and a contraceptive spell.

Is this common? That is, are even noncombatant members of comparatively civilized areas going to have sufficient need for personal protection that it's worth spending a notable chunk of very limited magical resources on it? Is any random settlement 80% militia? Given that non-primes don't automatically get magic, does this remove the (admittedly overused) "small town is besieged by orcs" idea?

Well, that spell is prefaced by 'if she lives in a dangerous area.' That could mean a frontier town menaced by monsters or a bad neighborhood in a big city. Basically, in a situation where a person might reasonably own a gun, they might reasonably know an attack spell. Technically you could probably get a large militia together, but the philosophy of quality over quantity discourages it; most towns have a modest town guard to maintain order and repel monster attacks and such.

Also worth noting that non-primes don't automatically get access to all kinds of magic; they basically all have magic of some sort. And they actually do tend to favor mass attack in the way that the primes don't, so 'small town besieged by cyarr or whatever' is totally available.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Well, that spell is prefaced by 'if she lives in a dangerous area.'

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Also worth noting that non-primes don't automatically get access to all kinds of magic; they basically all have magic of some sort. And they actually do tend to favor mass attack in the way that the primes don't, so 'small town besieged by cyarr or whatever' is totally available.

Gotcha. Cool, then.

Finding this totally fascinating for some strange reason.

Wars tend to be fought by relatively small bands of elite fighters over very limited goals, like possession of a village or mine. This is partly because of the general elitist bias, and partly because adequately protecting large numbers of people from AOE spells is difficult; this has actually changed recently due to Bound Spells, but experiments on the efficacy and efficiency of larger bodies of men are still preliminary and inconclusive. There have been some total wars, but the result has mostly been to reinforce how preferable the limited engagements are.

This seems to be crazily reasonable for a RPG --- also, isn't it how things are moving in real life, as well?

This is like exclusionary furry clique: the game. I understand that you have a game for furries, but why the mad hate for people who want to be a horse furry or a man-shark or a sexy skunk woman? I am all for coherence in world building and making a world with eight races is a lot more in that direction than kitchen sink bullshit. But once you throw open the doors to furrydom, you really have gone full kitchen sink and there's no going back.

The whole "prime" deal doesn't just seem like an unfortunate repurposing of offensive racial supremacist jargon - it seems like a deliberate attempt to shit on their own potential fanbase. They seem to hit most of the popular furry species, but even then they are missing horse, rabbit, and skunk. And while I haven't done a full survey of furry fandom or anything, my impression is that if you totaled up all the weird fringe shit like gryphons and goats and mice that you'd have a voting bloc that could at least compete with a heavy hitter group like dogs or cats.

I just don't understand the motivation to make a game for furries that also tells people that they aren't allowed to play a real character if they want to be a rabbit-furry or a ferret-furry or kangaroo-furry. It seems like this book is the actual act of one group of furries flipping off another group of furries and then taking their ball and going home.

-Username17

You have probably put way more thought into the marketing of this thing than the authors did. I strongly suspect they just brainstormed up a number of races roughly equal to the number in a D&D PHB and then stopped. Probably because they wanted to do a fairly long and distinct write-up for each one, and even at eight they were kind of struggling.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:You have probably put way more thought into the marketing of this thing than the authors did. I strongly suspect they just brainstormed up a number of races roughly equal to the number in a D&D PHB and then stopped. Probably because they wanted to do a fairly long and distinct write-up for each one, and even at eight they were kind of struggling.

I genuinely don't think it's a coincidence that the races are:

• Thri-Kreens from D&D.
• A literal stupid tentacle rape joke.
• Six types of furries that are all in the top twenty most common furry types from their friends at FurryMUCK.

That's just writing in the fursonas of their six favorite furries. And while I understand doing something like that, I don't understand announcing that all the other furry subtypes are subhumans. From what I know of the community, them's fighting words. We're talking about a community for whom it is demographically important that some people are anthropomorphic foxes while a non-overlapping group identifies as "kitsune."

-Username17