OSSR: Darksword Adventures

[angelfromanotherpin]

Conclusion of the Game
I don't know if this section got its name because you hand out XPs at the end of a session or because this is the last chunk of rules. In any case, you get XP for the following unnecessarily-capitalized things:
HEROIC DEEDS
COMPASSIONATE ACTS
USE OF ABILITIES
CREATIVE USE OF MAGIC
ACHIEVING ADVENTURE GOALS
INVENTIVENESS
ACCURATE AND CREATIVE PORTRAYAL OF CHARACTER

There is no particular explication of these categories. How 'using abilities' is distinct from 'creative use of magic' is distinct from 'inventiveness' is not addressed. It's clear that this list was brainstormed up and never edited. That said, I do appreciate the place this list was coming from, which was clearly not the AD&D-wargame place. What text we do get is confused and contradictory. One example is that of a druid who 'turns aside from the quest to help a sick child' earning 15 xp for COMPASSIONATE ACTS. Later on, they recommend an arbitrary limit of 5 points per act.

There is also a recommended hard limit of 50 points per player per session. I kind of like the implication that if you don't happen to be into COMPASSIONATE ACTs, you could just fill up your session's max on categories you are into. What I don't like is the implication of how long it takes to advance.

Back when the classes were being listed, one thing I didn't mention is that they were all statted up as Station 1 lowbies. What is Station? It's a little muddy to explain. On the one hand, Station represents the experience half of your magical skills. A magic skill has two components: Talent, and Station. A person with Talent 15 and Station 1 has the same spellcasting roll as a person with Talent 1 and Station 15.

But your highest Station is also your character Station, which is very much your level. Whenever your highest Station increases, you get a level-up where your Resistance, Renewal, Capacity, and Lifewell all go up, as well as one of your non-magical stats. Indeed, we get a little spiel where Station is supposedly an in-setting term that people introduce themselves with, like Circle in EarthDawn (that this appears in exactly none of the novels or even the fiction in this book is apparently an oversight).

Here we get into the problem: it's never explicitly stated that your characters are supposed to start at Station 1 in all their magic skills (and therefore at Character Station 1), but it is strongly implied. Which is kind of amazeballs bad, because the sample characters I've been basing my average person math on are Station 10 (one is specifically a spoiled 16-year old, the other is an underachieving field hand). I have difficulty grasping what Station 1 is supposed to represent. Grade schoolers?

Worse, to get from Station 1 to Station 10 in a single magical skill costs a cumulative 1190 xp, or twenty-four sessions worth. In twenty-four game sessions, you can be as good at one kind of magic as an underachieving field hand. To be as good as that guy in all his magic skills would take fifty-four sessions. It's mind-boggling. I can only assume that the recommended XP/session and the advancement cost table were written separately and never compared.

I'll be skipping Appendix I, it's just stats for a bunch of significant characters from the novels, and there's no point. The system's too fail to judge them as accurate or inaccurate representations.

Next Up: Appendix II – Adapting to Other Game Systems (not included: adapting to other game systems)

[JigokuBosatsu]

Well, PCs being Station 1 compared to Station 10 mooks is a good way for the MC to keep them minding their Ps and Qs. I guess.

And the conversion part is going to be good. I remember thinking that part was ridiculous back in the day.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Appendix II: Adapting To Other Game Systems

The title is inaccurate. Like, I could harp on how relentlessly this section of the book refuses to live up to any word of it, but it's obvious that there was just a complete disconnect between text and title. The second paragraph explicitly passes the buck of doing system adaptation to the reader. What we get instead is four pages of how AD&D characters might arrive in Thimhallan and what the setting's response might be. (There is some pretense that they are not talking exclusively about AD&D, but it is wafer-thin.) It's not an uninteresting thought experiment, but since the two games use completely different rules and there is exactly zero effort made to bridge that gap, a thought experiment is all it is.

I'm tempted to skip over the whole thing because of how irrelevant it is, but there are some problems with the scenario I think deserve pointing out, so here we go:

1. The PCs stumble across the magic portal that the old-timey wizards used to go to Thimhallan from Earth. Apparently it's permanent and now wandering all of reality, I guess? Non-magic-users cannot pass through at all by themselves, but magic-users are drawn to the portal by visions offering sanctuary or power as their alignment suggests they would enjoy. The magic-users 'will' try to persuade the other party members to come through with them, and if unsuccessful will abandon the party to enter the portal themselves. The use of 'will' implies that there is no saving throw to resist the portal's lure.
2. Going through the portal drains 1 level. Dick move, guys.
3. Once in Thimhallan, there are basically two options and it is basically DM's choice because they decide where you land and you don't have enough information for an informed choice anyway.
3a. Be in the one city in the world where technology is not forbidden. They want to take all your equipment for study. If you are diplomatic, you can probably ally with them and maybe quest to get home?
3b. Be anywhere else and sooner or later get picked up by the secret police, at which point you are all under arrest for the use of levers and wedges, and some of you are under extra arrest for mugglery. The sentence is one trillion years dungeon.
4. The only people not put in the dungeon are clerics. Clerics lose most of their powers in Thimhallan because of separation from their gods, but they develop catalyst abilities instead and will be turned over to the church, where they may have the opportunity to help their friends. I don't think it makes any goddamn sense for clerics to get catalyst powers in Thimhallan. People born with that power are declared priest-caste, not the other way around.
(On a side note, Druids are also supposed to lose their AD&D druid-powers and acquire Thimhallan druid powers. Which is weird because Thimhallan druids are supposed to be biomanipulation magic-users, while druids are supposed to be nature priests. Although, Thimhallan arcane healing and creature-shaping spells would be cool loot for an adventure.)

I think both the 'ally with tech-city' and 'escape from oppressive regime' scenarios could be made enjoyable with a little effort, even if the latter involves an unfortunate amount of being kicked around by the authorities. But again, there are no guidelines to bridge the system gap.

Next Up: Final Thoughts

[angelfromanotherpin]

Final Thoughts
I have no idea how this book went to print in such an incomplete state. It reads like a first draft, with contradictory takes on the same subject next to each other, waiting to be reconciled when the authors next talk to each other, and unimplemented design document goals sitting there in plain sight. Was there some sort of deadline that they flubbed? Did they just stop giving a shit?

When Ron Edwards coined the term 'RPG heartbreaker,' he had a very specific thing in mind: a game with genuinely innovative ideas, in system and/or setting, whose potential was squandered because the author had no context for RPGs besides D&D. Darksword Adventures isn't that, but it is heartbreaking because it had a relatively sound resolution engine, an innovative magic system, and died aborning of neglect. Sure, even if the game was finished, it would have serious issues in, for example, its advancement system. But it could have been as relatively functional as most RPGs of its time; and I would have played it, because the setting's a lot more interesting than the novels that were written for it.

[JigokuBosatsu]

At the very least, this setting fixes the "fighters suck" problem because in-universe they do?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Kind of. As far as ass-kicking goes, a muggle with spear and armor is actually going to fuck up an ordinary mage. Muggles are born with high-but-non-leveling Resistance and most mages are bad at combat spells, so that's a really bad match-up if you aren't a warlock. As usual, where muggles get outclassed is in problem-solving, because the flexibility of a Jedi's TK or a Magician's matter-reshapery is just nuts.

[Iduno]

Out of curiosity, you mentioned the crafting stuff. How does it compare to doing the same with magic? Can you even reshape/create matter in useful shapes (weapons or armor)?

[JigokuBosatsu]

Ah, I meant as far as the fluff goes. You're absolutely right mechanically.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Out of curiosity, you mentioned the crafting stuff. How does it compare to doing the same with magic? Can you even reshape/create matter in useful shapes (weapons or armor)?

In the fluff, magic shaping is mostly inferior to mundane crafting, chiefly for reasons of speed. It's said that a magician will spend days or weeks shaping a chair from living wood so that it is not only beautiful, but also a live plant when you get it; while a technologist can spit out a serviceable stool in less than an hour, and also doesn't have to spend any of his magic energy doing it. There are philosophical costs, like killing the tree, but in terms of raw practical results, tech is the way. The exception is that magic can do some things that tech can't do, like just cold turn a stone wall into water and such.

In the crunch, there's no valid answer because what text you get points you at the rules for turning people into pigs, and those have an undefined duration so there's no way to know if the base cost to do something is the cost to do it for one round or forever. From what little information we do have, the rules don't match the fluff at all, because a technologist needs to go on two quests to make a spear and no spell takes longer than one action to cast.

As far as using shaping magic to create devices, that seems to have been too heretical to contemplate.

[fectin]

I have no idea how this book went to print in such an incomplete state. It reads like a first draft, with contradictory takes on the same subject next to each other, waiting to be reconciled when the authors next talk to each other, and unimplemented design document goals sitting there in plain sight. Was there some sort of deadline that they flubbed? Did they just stop giving a shit?

That is very much the Weis and Hickman jam. You said this was their least popular trilogy? Ha! Not hardly. This rabbit hole is deep. Generating pseudo-RPG campaign worlds and novels was always their thing, and you could always hear the dice rolling in the background of their novels and taste the GMPC thrusting down your throat. Sometimes they publish the rules after: Dragonlance, this, Starshield, etc.

But the worlds they built kept being compelling, and enough of the characters had enough moments of genuine pathos that their books kept being readable. Despite this, their standard mode reads like a campaign log at best. And if you look at their solo projects, it's abundantly clear that their writing never suffered the insult of editing.

[angelfromanotherpin]

You said this was their least popular trilogy?

It's actually impressive that you can 'forget' the exact words I wrote (and then misquote them) when the words in question are in the thread you're posting in. That's talent, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

[fectin]

Are you really quibbling over the difference between "popular" and "successful"?

[Iduno]

Are you really quibbling over the difference between "popular" and "successful"?

I think they're saying neither of those words are in the bit you quoted.

[Chamomile]

Are you really quibbling over the difference between "popular" and "successful"?

I think they're saying neither of those words are in the bit you quoted.

"Least successful fantasy IP" does, however, appear in the first line of the first post.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Are you really quibbling over the difference between "popular" and "successful"?

This is fascinating. I know you went back to my actual text to check what you got wrong, but apparently you only checked as far as the first word that didn't match and then shat out a response without even finishing the clause, let alone the sentence, to see if you had fucked up more than once in four words.