The Not-Awaited Witcher TTRPG Review by WiserOdin

[Whipstitch]

One of the nice things about "gritty" settings like Westeros or the Continent or even a Cyberpunk style dystopia is they tend to do a better job of having ambient bullshit you might want to change than more idyllic settings tend to feature. Tolkien is fun and all but apparently step one of any grand adventure is getting the fuck out of the Shire.

[Chamomile]

Not to dispute the greater point, but it's worth noting that in the time frame of Lord of the Rings everywhere else but the Shire has been slowly turning to shit for millennia. Outside of the Shire and maybe Lindon, the entire northwestern third of Middle-Earth is populated by a handful of isolated outposts dotted between a monster-stricken wilderness (it's basically D&D Land but the monsters are drawn from a way more limited bestiary), the northeast is kind of resurgent since Smaug's defeat but there's still a giant forest full of goblins and spiders smack dab in the middle, and down south Sauron's return is making orcs more aggressive, slowly wearing down Rohan and Gondor.

[WiserOdin032402]

Sorry to interrupt the discussion over high magic vs low magic and Tolkien and such. I’ve got more of this game to review. But for my two cents on the matter, it's the fact that just about everyone in the universe of Essos and whatever The Witcher calls its world are, at the end of the day, people. There aren't Faerun/Mystara-style god-wizards and deities doing massive world-splitting bullshit in the player's faces. A mage in Witcher is certainly scary, they can fuck your immune system six ways to sunday, can set you on fire, zap you with lightning, or make a golem, but at the end of the day if you stab that son of a bitch they're gonna feel it, and if you do it hard enough they die like everyone else. Geralt of Rivia dies to a pitchfork to the chest. Until that gets retconned I guess.

2.6: Willpower
Home stretch. We’re on Willpower, which is arguably one of the most important stats in the game seeing as it’s both your will save and part of your HP and Stamina calculation, so big beefy fighters want this too. This is also the spellcasting stat, but I’m not going to go into a subsystem rant about spells just yet.

• Courage
  The skill of resisting fear. At a base 10 you are a calm person and can stand up to a tough customer in a bar. At a base 13 you can stare down a vicious mass murderer and not flee when you see monsters. At a base 16 you are usually the bravest person in the room and can face down enemies you know you can’t beat. At a base 20 nothing scares you and you remain glacially cool even in the face of enormous monsters.

  Fear saves! As their own skill! THIS IS FUCKING AWFUL. You probably also need this to fight monsters so I guess I can go get fucked. And it’s used to not be intimidated by the intimidate skill.
  Hex Weaving (2)
  Hexing people or places. At a base 10 you can focus pure hatred into simple hexes. At a base 13 you know certain bits of black magic that allow your hexes to take hold better. At a base 16 you are well versed in hexes and can focus your pain into deadly ones. At a base 20 you weave hexes that make seasoned witchers scow

  Spell skill. Since nat 1’s exist in this game for everything (which normally just means an automatic failure) this also means that you can nat 1 a hex and then everything goes wrong because the hex hits you. You can do things like give people paranoia, give ‘em the good ‘ol ‘Eternal Itch’, make someone crit fumble on a 2, make animals hate them and attack them on sight, give them magical HIV, and fail to get a night’s worth of sleep. If you’re the GM, you can do way better hexes that players don’t get. These also have really specific ways to get rid of them. Like super duper fucking specific.
  

  The subject must hammer a silver nail into their door frame and hang 2 units of wolvesbane, tied with a lock of virgin’s hair, from it. Finally the subject must stand under the silver nail, set fire to the bundle of wolvesbane and virgin hair, and breath deeply

  This specific.
  Intimidation
  Scaring people, either to run them off or make them do something for you. At a base 10 you are a pretty frightening person, and rarely do people mess with you in a bar. At a base 13 you have gotten used to intimidating the people around you and can scare most average people, even some soldiers. At a base 16 you radiate malice, and even seasoned soldiers know to give you a wide berth when you pass by. At a base 20 all you need to do is give a person a single look to make them cave.

  Social skill. Makes sense that mages are good at intimidation and that tough guys are good at intimidation too. By default this doesn’t work on witchers. Opposed by Courage.
  Spell Casting (2)
  Utilizing magic in the form of spells and their simpler cousins, signs. At a base 10 you can cast basic spells or signs, but require incantations and gestures for all spells. At a base 13 you can cast signs and spells with reasonable grace, and require incantations only for complex and difficult spells. At a base 16 you are a seasoned mage and require only gestures for difficult spells. At a base 20 you use only a flick of the hand to cast even the most difficult spells.

  So this covers a wide range of spells and spell types, because this is used to cast Witcher Signs, Arcane Spells, Priest Invocations, Arch Priest Invocations, and Druid Invocations. These are all incredibly terribly useful and actually produce pretty solid results, but you can nat 1 them and get to roll on a nifty little fumble table to see how fucked you get. You roll against a fixed DC for most spells (Witcher Signs are different, functioning as scalable effects that you can spend more or less stamina on to produce bigger or stronger effects) and if you beat the DC you cast the spell. And yes, there are a bunch of healing spells that hilariously are outpaced by the Doctor’s Healing Hands skill (And we’ll get to this). Spells usually call for a roll like Block (Melee Weapons), Dodge, vs your [Base Stat x3], or Resist Magic
  Resist Magic (2)
  Resisting magical influence. At a base 10 you are often aware when magic is affecting you and can sometimes shake it off. At a base 13 you have actively hardened your mind against magic and can safeguard yourself against lesser mages. At a base 16 you know small tricks to help safeguard your mind and body from magic, allowing you to block the magic of graduate mages. At a base 20 you are stalwart in the face of magic and are rarely controlled by mages of any caliber.

  This is yet another will save, but specifically for magic. Most notably this is not something you roll in response to all magic, but to any spell that calls for it. Which is 7 arcane spells, 2 druid invocations, 4 preacher invocations, 3 Arch Priest invocations, 2 witcher signs, 1 ritual, and one rule about possession invoked by a ritual rule, out of 65 arcane spells, 11 druid invocations, 11 preacher invocations, 6 Arch Priest invocations, 10 witcher signs, and 15 rituals. Of course most of it is the important stuff that will fuck you seven ways to sunday and, of course, illusions.
  Resist Coercion
  Resisting persuasion, seduction, and the like. At a base 10 you can keep your head when being pressured into something you really don’t want to do. At a base 13 you can shut out the seductions of relatively attractive people and avoid caving to strong arguments. At a base 16 you are resilient enough to earn the title “stubborn,” and aren’t often moved by those with good reasons or impressive assets. At a base 20 when you make a decision, rarely will anything change your mind.

  If you’re a cat school witcher this skill doesn’t apply to you because you are literally immune to social skills. Also if you’re a cat school witcher you’re a twitchy psychopath and literally the reason everyone hates witchers so you can go fuck yourself you piece of shit.
  
  This is the skill for resisting social characters and outside of social combat this is what social skills roll against. Which means Fighter types with a high willpower can just ignore social characters, which is funny to me. Also this is hot garbage design-wise because you need this skill to resist mundane influence with resist magic to resist magical influence.
  Ritual Crafting (2)
  Ritualistic magic. At a base 10 you know how to perform some rituals and are fairly talented at them. At a base 13 you routinely perform rituals. At a base 16 you can undertake rituals under pressure and attain the outcome you are looking for. At a base 20 you are a skilled ritualist and can perform any ritual you lay your hands on.

  There are exactly 15 rituals and they all interact with the foraging system from crafting and alchemy. All non-witcher spellcasters get at least one, and they cover a lot of fields and are very uh...thematic. Like staring into a fire to see what’s going on somewhere else thematic. There’s a seance, there’s golem-making, there’s massive magic bubble shields, there’s removing illnesses, there’s using telecommunicators to make 1-hour phone calls, there’s looking into people’s dreams, and so on. There’s a lot of ground covered by these. They all have a prep time in rounds and, of course, have a fixed DC, ranging from 12 to 20. Golem Crafting is the only DC 20, and for good reason, there’s no upper limit on how many of these guys you can make other than finding the materials. It takes 30 seconds to do the ritual (10 3-second rounds). I’ll go over their bestiary entry later.

And so that’s it. We’re done with main skills, crafting, and stats. The biggest slog was crafting, followed by this. To be quite honest, I'm still unsure of how to feel about this game. I have a sinking feeling the current state of mainstream RPGs is what's killing my taste and making me think this is good. I don't know.

It’s time for races. Coming soon-ish. Maybe.

[WiserOdin032402]

Part 3: Race


Gamers of the den, I welcome you, to choosing your race. Which you are supposed to do first in character creation but then you wouldn’t know how good or bad these bonuses are. This is one of those sections that’s big on fluff, so prepare yourselves for some Fantasy Racism™ and a bunch of italics. Like you aren’t even prepared for the italics. Witchers are going to be much harder to cover, but I’ll try to give the gist of it here before I cover the entire chapter devoted to Witchers. As a preface, I should state that racial skill and stat bonuses go above the normal cap of 10, and the skill cap of 6 in character creation.

• Elves (The Aen Seidhe)
  Elves, or the Aen Seidhe, since ours aren’t the only elves out there, are a sad tale indeed. Heh. They came to the world not long before humans, in great white ships from somewhere. Wouldn’t call ‘em the kindest of the races but they got along well enough with the rest of us. They’re not too unlike humans: tall, thin, prone to lookin’ down on others. Only difference is their pointed ears, their seemingly eternal lives, and their bond with the land. Heh, the elves are at one with nature or somethin’. Lived off the land for generations, foragin’ for food and buildin’ great palaces. Don’t even have sharp teeth after all those years of eatin’ berries and plants. Don’t get ‘em cross though; an elf’s hell on the battlefield too. They may not wear much armor but they’re hard as frogs in winter to find in the wilderness, and probably the best archers you’ll ever see.
  –Rodolf Kazmer

  This is our narrator, Rodolf Kazmer. He’s a dwarf. You’ll see him talking just about everywhere in the book. Point is, elves are assholes, vegans, and are very up their own ass. Lore wise they hate humans. They think they were created and the humans evolved, thus thinking themselves better than hairless apes. They were also on the continent first and are being outcompeted by humans because Witcher elves actually suck and aren’t the best.
  They’re also incredible archers.
  Here are the ‘perks’ elves get.

  Artistic
  Elves have a natural eye for beauty and a talent for artistic endeavours. Elves gain an inherent +1 to their Fine Arts skill

  Who gives a shit.

  Marksman
  Years of tradition and practice make elves some of the best archers in the world. Elves gain an inherent +2 to their Archery skill and can draw and string a bow without taking an action.

  This is broken for a myriad of reasons. This lets you take archery to 22, and lets you bypass a very annoying rule. The Witcher TTRPG assumes you store bows without them strung. This means when combat starts, it’d take you until round three to start firing your bow without any preparation, because you have to draw the bow (one action), string the bow (one action), and then you can fire. I’ll talk later about how to make this faster during combat but for now that’s how it works by default.

  Natural Attunement
  Elves have a deep magical bond with nature itself. Elves do not disturb animals, meaning that any beast they encounter is considered friendly and will not attack unless provoked. Elves also automatically find any plant substance rated as commonly available (or lower) that they are seeking, as long as the substance would occur naturally in the surrounding terrain.

  This makes sneaking around easier and scavenging some basic stuff much easier. Can work well.
  
  Elves are a solid ⅔ I guess?
  PS: In writing this I talked to Longes about some witcher stuff and he had this to say about elves

  The dudes have been sitting on a slowly dying empire twiddling their thumbs and murdering humans on sight. And they know about the apocalypse and are doing nothing. And some of them are racist interdimensional pirates

  Sadly you can’t play as the interdimensional pirates. Anyways fuck elves they deserve everything they get.
  Dwarves
  Heh. My friend, rivers dry up, mountains crumble, but dwarves are a constant. We may be short compared to the elves and the humans but we’re sturdier than they’ll ever be—the definition of barrel-chested! We dwarves have been around for ages, livin’ in the mountains and plyin’ our trade: forgin’. We’re friendly enough when ya get to know us and easy to get along with as long as ya don’t piss in our faces. The humans may not love us dwarves, but they need us for our skill and our steel. ‘Sides, unlike the damn elves we don’t hold an in-born grudge against the humans. We keep to our business and them to theirs. Share a drink here and there. Heh, sadly, madness is spreadin’ quick through the North and dwarves are targets now more than ever. Lucky the humans have a hard time pickin’ out our women! Never find a prettier lass than a dwarven girl. They say the fuller the beard, the fuller the...well. Ya get my point.
  –Rodolf Kazmer

  Not really much to say here. Dwarves come from Mahakam, they’re good at business, they’re hardy motherfuckers who’ll drink you under a table. Dwarves: Fuck Yeah.

  Tough
  Spending much of their time in the mountains and mines, dwarves have naturally tough skin. As such a dwarfs’ skin has a natural stopping power of 2. This SP is applied on top of any armor the Dwarf is already wearing and cannot be lowered via weapon attacks or ablation damage.

  Welcome back to mechanics land. If you’ve played cyberpunk you know what SP is, and if you haven’t it’s basically damage reduction. Dwarves get 2 SP to each body part, meaning that even in light or medium armor these guys can take a little more of a beating than normal, given that you have to roll over their SP to deal damage to your target.

  Strong
  Due to their compact frame and propensity for tough, physically demanding professions, dwarves gain a +1 to their Physique skill and raise their Encumberance by 25.

  There’s an encumbrance system, and dwarves are better than you at it, and they can also push and lift more naturally.

  Crafter’s Eye
  With their eye for fine detail and appraisal it is hard to bluff a dwarf. Dwarves have an inherent +1 to their Business skill.

  Instant shoe-in for the merchant class, +1 to your buying and selling skill.
  
  Dwarves are cool. Play a dwarf.
  Humans
  If I were a worse person I’d vent my spleen and tell ya all the terrible things humans have done to my people and the other elder races. But I’m better than that. Worked with a lot of humans during the Northern Wars. Hell, most of the Temerian army’s humans. Humans can be fine folks. They’re varied in nature and usually a pretty resilient race. They tend to get swept up in causes and fears pretty easily, though. They’re the dominant species on the Continent right now and they know it. Heh. It’s easy to speak ill of ‘em. They just about destroyed the elder races, wiped out the vran, killed all but a few hundred of the werebbubbs, built their cities on top of elderfolk cities, and depending on where you are they’re still killing elderfolk by the score every day. But they’re not all bad. Heh, most mages are human and they may destabilize countries and plunge the world into chaos, but they’ve also made the world better with magic and science. Human are a clever bunch, and in a pinch, a human you know well will probably have your back.
  –Rodolf Kazmer

  Oh boy. It’s a low magic/low fantasy setting so humans are the dominant species, genocidal assholes, and big into science. And by science I mean magic. To give you the gist of it, humans came to the continent from Earth, which they destroyed themselves, using the conjunction of the spheres and kind of took over the entire continent. They don’t have good relations with most of the other races.

  Trustworthy
  In a world where non-humans can’t be trusted, humans look more trustworthy. Humans have an inherent +1 to their Charisma, Seduction, and Persuasion checks against other humans.

  Now normally I’d ree about this perk but then I remembered that humans own everything. It’s a situational bonus for a situation that appears more often than not, so uh...I think it’s still a fail.

  Ingenuity
  Humans are clever and often have brilliant solutions to difficult problems. Humans gain an inherent +1 to Deduction.

  You will never be a better detective than a human. Again, it’s deduction so...I still think this qualifies as a fail…?

  Blindly Stubborn
  Part of the human race’s greatest strength is its willingness to charge forward endlessly, even into truly life-threatening situations. A human can summon up their courage and reroll a failed Resist Coercion or Courage roll 3 times per game session. They take the higher of the two rolls, but if they still fail they cannot re-use the ability to roll again.

  Cue the song and dance, this is one of the best racial perks in the game. If you’re going to do social things, you’re gonna need this perk.
  
  All in all humans are solid for more social characters...or so it appears, we’ll be talking about that in the Fantasy Racism™ chart below
  Witchers
  Witchers have been a touchy issue since they were made centuries ago. Heh, but let me tell ya friend, even when they were sought after, nobody really liked ‘em. They’re raised from human children taken to one of the five Schools of the Witcher. At these witcher keeps, the children go through some kinda gruelin’ trainin’ proccess that makes ‘em into livin’ weapons. Fast as hell, trained to fight blind and hunt just about every monster any poor son of a whore’s likely to find. After a few years of this they go through a bunch of mutations. One ya hear about most’s the Trial of the Grasses. The one witcher I traveled with said only one in four kids survives this whole mess.
  
  The ones that survive are changed. They’ve got bright cat’s eyes and just about no feelin’ left in ‘em. Heard the emotion part evens out after a while. Hell, the witcher I traveled with even made a few jokes on the road. But from that moment on, they’re killers. Reborn for one purpose: killin’ monsters. And hell, see a witcher in action and you’ll see the payoff of all that hardship. Problem is they’re mutants, and if there’s one thing people hate it’s a mutant. Witchers have barely any charisma left in ‘em so most people think they’re cold, heartless murderers who’ll steal your gold, rape your daughter, and then put a sword in your gut.
  –Rodolf Kazmer

  The proverbial ‘fantasy super soldier’, made by humans to fight monsters and all that. They’re also monks and gishes, which makes them jedi. They even use special silver swords to fight things. They, along with mages, get the short end of the Fantasy Racism™ chart.

  Enhanced Senses
  Due to their heightened senses, witchers take no penalties from areas of dim light and gain an inherent +1 to their Awareness skill, as well as the ability to track things by scent alone.

  This gives you the ability to ignore a +2 to awareness DCs and a free +1 on awareness, and you can track using only scent, so uh...yeah. Get fucked stealth characters.

  Resilient Mutation
  After all of the mutations required to become a witcher, they are immune to diseases and are able to use mutagens.

  In a low magic game where curing diseases is hard this is excellent...if there were any in the game other than a few spells and a curse. However, Mutagens are in the game and you can have exactly two. These are permanent, and can do things like give you another +1 Reflex, give you +10 HP, +3 melee damage, +1 Body, and so much more.

  Dulled Emotions
  Thanks to trauma and mutation, a witcher’s emotions are dulled. Witchers do not have to
  make courage checks against Intimidation, but they have a -4 to their Empathy Stat. This cannot bring Empathy below 1.

  Yes this does make Witchers flat immune to intimidation and that does mean that yes, players are vulnerable to social skills. Too bad Witchers don’t fucking talk to anyone thanks to the Fantasy Racism™ chart

  Due to Dulled Emotions a witcher cannot raise their EMP stat above 6.

  This is just a sidebar clarifying how that empathy penalty works. This is also a fucking lie, as it’s possible through the Trial of Grasses to lower this by yet another 1 or raise it by 1, as playing a Witcher is RNG hell due to having their own unique lifepath.

  Lightning Reflexes
  After intensive training and mutation, witchers are much faster and more agile than humans. They gain a permanent +1 to their Reflex and Dexterity that can raise both stats above 10.

  Yes this does mean you can take your stat max to 11, however a really lucky witcher who takes a certain mutagen can have their reflex at 13. Is this bullshit? Absolutely. Witchers are in fact the Solo of The Witcher TTRPG. That reference only makes sense if you’ve played Cyberpunk 2020 but the point still stands
  
  Oh, you thought it was over? Oh no no no, Witchers get a whole shitload of unique perks from being a Witcher, but also come with a handy amount of penalties you could roll instead. So yes you could get a theoretical 13 reflex 11 swordsmanship Witcher who takes no penalty for wearing heavy armor but you could also roll up a fragile glass cannon who’s a twitchy psychopath with a -6 penalty to empathy, a -2 to body, and is good at Joint Attacks (Two-Weapon Fighting) which is absolutely garbage.
  
  Also the worst part of the race is it’s also a class. So if you are a Witcher you are part of the Witcher Class. Sure it’s a pretty okay class, but your ranged combat ability is nonexistent outside of some spells (if you invest in getting them at all) and you’re locked into using swords...and since this game has a more realistic take on combat that’s actually one of the worst possible options outside of the ‘Suck the GM’s dick’ option to get the super cool artifact swords.

Okay, now that we’re done with the races, it’s time to talk about the Fantasy Racism Chart™

This is the Fantasy Racism™ chart for all the playable areas in this game. It’s a small list but teleporting costs a shitload of stamina and takes forever to learn, so you’re stuck on horseback or on foot and these are big ‘ol fucking countries. Three of the five are human, as Dol Blathanna is run by elves and thus sucks by default and Mahakam is run by dwarves and thus rocks by default. The north is basically Poland, Skellige has Vikings, and Nilfgaard may or may not be a super fucking evil expansionist empire depending on your GM.

Let’s talk about the social status effects.

Equal
Characters with a social standing of equal are seen as peers. They take no penalties to social interactions but gain no bonuses either. People will generally judge them on their appearance and actions rather than their race.

Not much to say. If you’re a social character this an ideal place to be. Also given that Humans have their little racial bonus that applies in places where they’re equal, so they get a leg up.

Tolerated
Characters who are tolerated are present in society but not really respected or considered equal. They take a -1 to Seduction, Charisma, Persuasion, and Leadership with people.

And so it begins. This is infinitely better than the other two conditions that come after this one, but it’s all downhill from here. Also welcome to the world of Witchers and Mages getting socially fucked.

Feared
Characters who are feared are considered frightening to the average person. You only gain the feared social standing through mutation into a witcher or horrible scarring. You can gain the standing in specific places based on your actions, but that is decided by the Game Master. A character who is feared gains a +1 to Intimidation but a -1 to Charisma.

This is kind of an okay social status effect and technically is separated from Hated, but it normally comes bundled together, which makes witchers ultra mega not social characters.

Hated
Characters who are hated are actively despised by most people. They aren’t neccesarily outcast, but are often the targets of racial aggression and hate crimes. They take a -2 to Seduction, Charisma, Persuasion, and Leadership with people.

This comes bundled together with Feared for Witchers and Mages, and Elves just get this by itself in The North which is totally justified given the stealth archers. This makes you into the super not talking to people character you’ve always wanted to play.

All in all, while not super crippling, it’s still uh...well, a fantasy racism chart. Note how mages are mentioned? Mages are a class profession. This doesn’t apply to Priests at all. And you could play an Elf Mage if you wanted to double up on the racism points.

And that’s the obligatory race and racism talk. Honestly? Could be worse. Could be better. There’s a couple of sidebars about friendship and how party members don’t have to follow the racism chart. Whatever.

While I’m tempted to do the lifepath next I really want to talk about the classes professions...I’ll probably have my mind made up in the next week or two.

[Longes]

Guy sure has a speech pattern.

[WiserOdin032402]

The Not-Awaited Review Returns! This time with a vengeance! I’ve gotten my life back together and have a merry gift. We’re talking about Lifepath today! That’s right, the random character generation ripped straight from Cyberpunk 2020 is in this very game, as it’s actually a Cyberpunk hack that’s directly influencing the up and coming Cyberpunk RED.

Some qualifiers about this system. You do not have to roll. You may talk to your game master about simply choosing your lifepath. If you picked a Witcher you do not roll on the Lifepath table I’m covering. You will instead be rolling on the Witcher lifepath which I believe you cannot choose upon, and appears to be balanced around the fact that you cannot choose.

And a qualifier about this section of the review. I will not be covering the Lifepath for Witchers in here. The lifepath for Witchers is tied up in the entire chapter covering everything about Witchers and is tied to the Profession (Character class) of being a Witcher itself, so it will be tied up in the review of the Profession itself. The review of the Professions will be happening after this section.

Onward, to glory!

Part 4: Lifepath
4.1: Homeland and Family
The first table is below, that being your Homeland.

Homeland Table

As you can see, Elves and Dwarves get the railroad, while being Human gets you a roll of odds or evens to end up as Nilfgaardian or from the North. Now, those little +1’s? Those are free skill points that, unlike racial skill points, count towards the cap of 10 skill points (but not the cap of 6 at character creation). However, the problem is, if I were covering this book normally you wouldn’t know what the skills do until the chapter after next, which by that point you would have picked your fucking class, and you wouldn’t know how big a deal free skill points are. In fact, you probably don’t even remember that Crafting is a (2) skill, which means it costs double to level, and that means the Aedirn and Mahakam backgrounds are objectively the best deal, especially if you’re angling for a Crafter. Also, elves and dwarves getting the railroad means that they all basically get the same points.

However, a sidebar points out that you can totally be an Elf or Dwarf from a normal human nation and roll on the Homeland table, and that coming from Dol Blathanna or Mahakam is simply an option.

As you can see, it’s perfectly possible to start with a dead family/dead parents, however, not all is lost. Those tables it mentions at the bottom? You’ll have to roll on most of them. If you get Family Fate you have to go to Family Status afterwards, if you get Parental Fate you have to go to Family Status afterwards, and if didn’t roll either of those congratulations you only need to roll on Family Status.

Family Fate

Welcome to the ‘Plot Hook Chart’ or the ‘Fucked-up tragic backstory chart’. This is what you roll on when you get fucked by RNG (or, you know, you choose because at the top of this page it says you can). This can outright give you objectives that you need to fulfill as soon as possible, which can be uh...disruptive in some games.

Parental Fate

Unlike the Family Fate table, this table sometimes just outputs ‘Fuck You’ instead of a plot hook. In addition, there’s a d10 roll to see which parent bit it. 1 to 4 is your Father, 5 to 8 is your Mother, and 9 to 10 is both.

Family Status

Okay so this table is a fucking doozy. It’s got a lot of good things on it, and not all things are good for all characters. Reputation is best for Social Characters because they can dump points into Willpower and assblast someone with an opposed Face-Down roll of 1d10+reputation+willpower, with the winning party getting a +3 to influence the losing party. Getting Acquaintances or Friends is super important because that means you get free allies from the upcoming allies table. Having three common Diagrams or Formulae is important because those are rare and hard to buy, and give you a +2 on a roll to craft them and lets you know the recipe to make them. A +1 to Luck is a free point of luck that you don’t have to spend on Luck.

Influential Friend

This is just a nice table of more plot hooks with a special trinket which is nice. Got some neat flavor going on. Also I kinda fucked it by setting my zoom to 95% to try to get all of it in one picture because it’s legitimately huge

Siblings

This table is pretty much the spare character table. No, seriously.

Just like the Witcher novels and video games, the Witcher pen and paper TRPG is dangerous. If you take on a threat far greater than yourself, have a stroke of bad luck, or follow a suicidal plan, there is a very high chance you’re going to wind up getting killed off. Since this is a world without resurrection, your character is 110% dead and won’t be coming back unless someone uses necromancy to drag your consciousness back into your corpse for a few minutes.

This is where siblings come in! We suggest that if your character dies and they have siblings, you pick up as any one of them. The GM can more easily find a way to fit your sibling into the party, usually via them finding out about their sibling’s death. It also stands to reason that if your companions are nice they will be more willing to give a sibling your old
character’s stuff.

Fucking seriously. I don't even remember the last game I read that suggested the player uses their siblings as extra lives! That's so weird and retro. Also the game is correct, your chances of dying are really high when unprepared, and even if prepared. We'll cover that when we get to combat...sometime in like, 2022? Considering the rate this review is going.

However having siblings can also backfire incredibly.

If your sibling is jealous of you, can’t stand you, or wants you dead it’s very possible that they may wind up being used as an enemy against you over the course of the game. This sibling isn’t considered an enemy right away, but with the right suggestions from outside forces they may come to be a dedicated enemy. If you die and decide to play a sibling that was your enemy you can definitely do it (as long as your GM agrees). It could lead to interesting player dynamics, especially if that sibling was responsible for your first character’s death.

However, thankfully your game master has to get your consent to do this.

Okay, actually, I lied. I’m not finishing the entire lifepath. This was a lot to actually cover in one go, and Life Events is its own can of worms that gets pretty fucking bad. Like unplayable character bad, or Romance in a Tabletop RPG bad. As an aside, I am, again, sorry for getting this out so late. In closing for this section, it's a near straight rip from Cyberpunk 2020, and I personally am a big fan of optional random background generation. However, this is not optional, and has mechanical effects. Big, important mechanical effects. And we're going to see why balancing around random rolls is fucking terrible.

[Libertad]

And a qualifier about this section of the review. I will not be covering the Lifepath for Witchers in here. The lifepath for Witchers is tied up in the entire chapter covering everything about Witchers and is tied to the Profession (Character class) of being a Witcher itself, so it will be tied up in the review of the Profession itself. The review of the Professions will be happening after this section.

It's way in the back of the book. This is a big unnecessary headache for chargen.

[WiserOdin032402]

It's way in the back of the book. This is a big unnecessary headache for chargen.

What's even worse is that it works differently from the standard lifepath mechanics and it's even more swingy than the normal lifepath. I'll hopefully be posting more of the normal lifepath later today, but no matter what you get from your life events, you can end up way worse as a Witcher.

[WiserOdin032402]

4.2: Life Events
Now that we’re done with all that part of generation, it’s time to do life events. For every 10 years your character has been alive, you roll on the life event table. You roll a d10, 1 to 4 is a Fortune or Misfortune, 5 to 7 is Allies and Enemies, and 8 to 10 is Romance. There's some sort of upward bound on the table, with a side note mentioning elves and dwarves live longer lives than humans, which means they can get more out of and get fucked more by this system.

The tone of this section can be easily summed up by the opening paragraph here.

After you’ve figured out how you grew up and found your niche, you get to find out what has happened to you over the course of your life. You could get disgustingly lucky and have all sorts of friends, boons, and skill improvements, but you could also get struck by disaster. It’s all a toss-up, just like most people’s lives.

This doesn’t inspire confidence in me. Random life event generation, especially those that have a drastic mechanical effect, don’t usually end well.

Fortune or Misfortune

If you get here, roll a d10. Evens is Fortune, Odds is Misfortune.

This is insanely good and can easily save you points in character creation or get you free reputation, and so on. You want to be rolling on this table. It’s too bad you do this before knowing what skills are or knowing what class you are.

Misfortune

Second verse, same as the first. Except here you’re rolling to see how unplayable your character is and how much you lose. If you roll Addiction, Hunted by the Law (7 through 10), Mental or Physical Incapacitation, or Cursed, you’d better accept that the RNG just set you to hard mode and your character is proper fucked.

Also here is the addiction sidebar:

When you are addicted to something you feel the need for that thing every day. You must roll under your WILL each day you don’t get your fix. If you fail, you can think about nothing but getting your fix and take a -5 to all other actions. Every day you don’t get your fix you lower your WILL (for the sake of this check) by 1, making it harder and harder to keep making the checks. Any time your addiction is offered to you, you must make a roll under your WILL (modified by the number of days you haven’t had your fix) to not partake immediately. You can kick an addiction by going for 3 weeks without indulging in your addiction. You don’t need to make successful addiction checks, you just can’t partake in the addiction.

Pretty fucking hardcore rules. That -5 can get your character killed or disabled very easily.

These two tables are right next to each other in the book, and there’s this little sidebar to the left of the Fortune table that explains that stat/skill points gained from lifepath cannot raise skills beyond their maximum. Why this is here and not at the start of lifepath generation is beyond me. I’d have to chalk this up to R. Talsorian being a more indie production with this being a side project done by Cody, but that isn’t an excuse.

Allies and Enemies

This is another section of writing prompts and old school concepts haphazardly thrown at a page. I think the concept of your character knowing a few people when they start the game is nice, either having some NPCs they like or NPCs they don’t like. Really, I haven’t seen a lot of TTRPGs simply throw having allies at you right at character creation without there being a point cost or feat cost associated with them. However, this is a Cyberpunk hack, so obviously we’re rolling a d10 for odds or evens to see if we get an enemy or ally respectively.

Allies



So far so indifferent. There’s not a lot here mechanically speaking. These are all mostly roleplaying prompts for your GM to make an NPC for you to interact with. However, considering this is a uh....well Witcher isn’t actually low fantasy, it’s more high fantasy wearing the garb of low fantasy, but considering the kind of game this is, having allies itself is incredibly important from a narrative standpoint. I’ll give it a 4/10 with a ‘there was some effort’. The closeness table need real qualifiers because I need to know if I can crash at their house or if I can only call them up to go on a pub crawl.

Enemies


Roll a d10 when you get to the second table. Evens, you were the one that was wronged, odds you wronged the person you just rolled up. For an explanation of power, we have this handy sidebar:

Your enemy’s power as rolled below is more of an abstract. Think of it as a guideline or a starting point for the GM to build a villain based on that type of power. A socially powerful enemy might become very influential in local or world politics, while an enemy with powerful minions may have a troll or a small gang backing them up, and a magically powerful enemy might be a cunning mage or have a powerful magical weapon.

Which basically means fuckall because this game has magic swords that cut armored knights in half like lightsabers and mages that can wipe out small armies, people who can say the right words and basically ruin your life forever in certain areas, and if you get confronted alone by a small army of well trained and properly armed dudes your character is dead. Hell, someone just having a troll in their pocket is nothing short of devastating in combat, especially against a non-Witcher (or just anyone without a silver weapon).

Again, the skeleton is here. This could work. But the lack of any real codification of the power level other than a 1 to 10 is what firmly fucking kills it.

Romance

Lest we forget, this is a mature TTRPG for a mature and serious audience, and ergo we have a romance table. Writing romance itself is easy, writing good romance is hard. Writing good romance in a cooperative storytelling session that happens once a week on a friday? Fucking impossible. Also this section is very dark, tonally.

Happy Love Affairs

Enduring joy and true love are a possibility. But they are rare. If you achieve it, it’s assumed that you are happy together until you roll another romance of a different type. That roll then applies to your current lover.

Seriously. If the dice hate you, your character is going to have a miserable life.

4.3: Personal Style
This section is all fluff and mostly a Cyberpunk-ism. Literally this section is just a bunch of fluff tables modified from Cyberpunk 2020. I’m literally using this to pad my review a bit, not like it needs it, but still. The book has it here, I have it here.

Style, Values, and Example Names

It’s all optional, it’s all flavor. It’s nice to have, I guess.

Conclusion: This section is where the Cyberpunk-isms rear their ugly head and make it so a bad roll makes a bad character that's hard to play. While, optionally, you can choose your lifepath, the game by default assumes you’re rolling. Thank fucking god you don’t have to roll for class otherwise the character creation would be a total loss.

Coming next: Professions

[Username17]

Life paths don't have to be balanced to be interesting. A lifepath system can be a game in and of itself. An RPG is first Role Playing and then a Game. A lifepath system that tells an interesting story or helps you tell an interesting story has value even if its outputs aren't "fair." There are lifepath systems where you can functionally (or actually) die in character generation and have to start over that are still a net benefit to the game they are attached to by virtue of telling interesting stories.

I like making MechWarrior characters more than I like playing the MechWarrior game because the lifepath charts are at least interesting. And the minigame of spending Edge caps to modify events to avoid serious injuries and shit was entertaining.

These Lifepath rules are a total failure. Not because getting +1 to Craft is very much better than getting +1 to Sailing, but because I genuinely don't give a shit about either outcome. The Lifepath should be telling me things like "Your parents sold you to a Dwarf who used you as slave labor making shoes" or some shit. Not "You got a dog."

-Username17