Yes, I know that I already did this one. But let’s be honest, that post was mostly me squeeing over how adorable Twilight Sword is. Which I stand by, don’t get me wrong! But I feel like the game deserves my ongoing attention, and that means giving it a proper once-over so I have it all down. Because the sad truth is that anything I don’t write down these days, I forget in two seconds flat.
So back to the monster-infested yet gorgeous lands of Radia again! Like a particularly tough boss, we’re making another run at it!
Right from the start, we get told that this is a game inspired of video game RPGs about a beautiful land under threat by a horrid Scourge that must be saved by valiant Champions (that’d be you!). In it, you will mainly do three things: fight monsters, explore the land, and do nice things for people. All three will raise Hope, which will stand against the Despair that the Scourge feeds on.
The game system is called Created at Twilight, or CAT for short, and is based on a d12 roll-under mechanic. A roll of 1 is a critical success, a 12 is a botch. You can roll with advantage (roll 2d12, take the lowest) or disadvantage (roll 2d12, take the highest), but if you should have advantage and disadvantage at once they cancel out and become a normal roll. The game is played in rounds, but how long a round is depends on the situation – in combat, a “round” is a few seconds, but when dealing with more leisurely activities it might be minutes or hours instead. That matters, because some effects lasts for a number of rounds, and that goes regardless of what a “round” technically is at the moment. Ooooh, I like that, actually… though I think it might not apply anymore when you’ve got hours-long rounds, because it says to not let the time frame get that slow while there are temporary effects burning down? Yeah, I feel it’s a little ambiguous. On the other hand, other effect just lasts “until some time passes,” with precisely what that means being up to the GM.
So, let’s set about creating a Champion! First we need to pick an Origin, which doesn’t actually do anything in game terms but gives us a quirky backstory. You might be an Unknown everyman hero, a Chosen who seemed nondescript before being appointed to heroism by a spirit, an Heir to a legacy of heroism, a Stranger who come from a far-off land (or from our own world, perhaps, for some isekai goodness?), or even an Awakened who just sort of woke up from a deep sleep and can’t exactly remember who you were before you nodded off, only that the world was very different then. Mmmm… I’ll go with Awakened. What can I say, I can relate to needing a downright epic snooze from time to time.
Next, you choose your Kin, of which “human” is not one; they don’t exist in this game. The closest thing is Humas, and they have pointy ears and a generally quirky appearance – think Legend of Zelda. They get the ability to reroll failed rolls by spending Stamina. Kedis are cute little cat-people who are good at dodging and landing on their feet. Pengus are big, burly Viking penguins who get extra Hearts (which is what HP is called here) and resistance to cold. This game has Viking penguins, thus it is Awesome. Strixen are oddly shaped humanoid blobs of darkness. Who often wear hats and are good at arcane magic.
So… they’re Final Fantasy Black Mages, I guess, though since I’ve never played one of the games with one of those in it, my closest reference is Black Mage from 8-Bit Theatre, which is, er… probably not what the game aims for. Anyway, the final Kin is the Toluna, who I don’t know if they’re inspired by anything, but they’re basically big, red-skinned surfer dudes and dudettes with cute little horns.
They’re the opposite of the Pengus, since they are good at resisting heat and get extra Stamina.
Hmm. They all have their charm. I don’t want to be completely boring and just be a Strix spellcaster. My next choice would be a Pengu spellcaster, but unfortunately there is a sample NPC like that in just a few pages, so again I’d feel really derivative. Mmmm… but you know what, I’ll go with a Pengu anyway, and just not be a spellcaster. Because Viking penguins are still the best thing ever.
Ways! They are your classes or occupations. The Way of the Blade is about being a meat shield with a big claymore or something and hitting hard. The Way of Magic is about casting offensive and illusion spells, and the Way of Light is about casting defensive and healing ones. The Way of the Wild is about archery and wilderness savvy. The Way of Shadow is about sneaking around and hitting people when they’re not looking. The Way of Song is about being dashing, charismatic and inspiring. So… Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Ranger, Rogue and Bard, basically. You get to pick one of the Feats for your Way to start with, and one more each time you level up. Your Way also decides your starting gear.
You gain Hope (XP) as a party, and whenever you hit an even multiple of 4 you take another Feat. You can take it either from your current Ways or, if you only have one Way, you can cross-class to another Way by taking a Feat from it. The party starts with 1 Hope, because they inspire some Hope in the populace just by embarking on their quest, apparently. Heh. That’s nice.
I’ll go with the Way of Song and say that my dude is a skald who slept under a hill alongside an ancient Pengu king, but recently he woke up without knowing why. He dimly recalls that the king was meant to awaken in the land’s time of greatest peril, and that seems to be now, but the king still sleeps and he’s awake instead. To make it worse, he can’t actually remember anything of his actual life, only the stories he used to tell, and he’s not sure how fictional they are. I’ll call him Rolf Clearcaw and give him the starting feat of Battle Song, letting him super-charge his allies through music. He starts with either a shortsword or a rapier (let’s make it a shortsword), a musical instrument (a horn, we’ll say) and 3d6 of the game’s standard currency, the Zin.
There are eight Abilities that you roll against to do stuff: Strength, Agility, Vitality, Perception, Will, Knowledge, Charisma and Stealth. You can either distribute a set amount of points between them, but I’ll go with the easier option offered and just assign a spread of 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8 and 9. Hmm… I’ll say that Rolf has Charisma 9, Strength 8, Knowledge 8, Vitality 7, Agility 7, Perception 6, Will 6 and Stealth 5. He’s a bit low on Agility for the Way of Song, but meh, I figure he’s in it more for the wisdom and eloquence than the fancy footwork. Besides, I’ll probably branch out into the Way of the Blade later to make him a proper warrior-poet.
We also learn about Hearts and Stamina. Hearts work just about the way you expect, you lose them when something chews on your leg or hits you over the head and when they run out you go down for the count. Stamina can be spent to power certain Feats, and can also be spent to for advantage on a roll, or cast a spell more than once per day. Rolf has a number of Hearts equal to 10, plus his Vitality of 7, plus 3 for being a Pengu, so a total of 20 Hearts. He also has 3 Stamina. Both can be improved during the game by finding special powerups called Heart Stones and Stamina Stones, apparently. Heh.
Players can gain Boons by doing things the GM thinks is especially cool. A player can only have one Boon at the time, and can only spend one Boon per session even if she gets a new Boon immediately after using her last one. A Boon can be spent on turning a roll into a critical success, recover all your Stamina, or save a character (who can be yourself but doesn’t have to be) who’s about to be knocked out and restore a few Hearts to him. At the start of the game, one randomly selected player starts with a Boon.
Also, once per session any player can burn 1d4 Hope to immediately gain and use a Boon. This can bring Hope into a negative number, apparently. Hmm, I have concerns about this – I immediately imagine a situation where the players just give up on ever leveling up and just award themselves a Boon per session! I’m probably worrying about nothing, I admit, it would be a pretty suboptimimal way to play the game, but… I just have no confidence at all in the ability of players to not make the game boring for themselves and then blame the GM for it!
Combat! It has nothing very surprising for anyone who’s played D&D, but it’s still a bit crunchier than you might expect from the game’s candy-coated presentation. First off, distances are abstract – something can be Close (within striking distance), Near (within a few steps), Far (within stone’s throw) or Too Far (within sight). Melee weapons can usually only attack Close, thrown weapons can attack Close or Near, and ranged weapons can attack Close, Near or Far, but roll with disadvantage when attacking Close.
Every round, you get a movement, an action, a reaction, and a free action. You can use your movement to move within Near from where you are. If you want to move within Far, you have to dedicate both your movement and your action to it. With your action, you can otherwise attack, cast a spell, activate a Feat, assist an ally, try to push a monster over so it becomes prone, attempt to flee the fight, or do some miscellaneous thing that the GM still thinks is too involved for a free action. To attack, you roll Strength for a regular melee weapon, Agility for a Finesse melee weapon, or Perception for a ranged weapon. If you succeed, you roll weapon damage, and the result is subtracted from the target’s Hearts, with Armour absorbing points if the target has it.
With your reaction, you can attempt to parry (with Strength) or dodge (with Agility) one attack per round. You can devote your action to full defense to get advantage on your parry or dodge roll. You can dodge most attacks, but you can only parry attacks if you have a weapon ready, and you can only parry ranged attacks if you have a shield ready. With your free action, you can do things that the GM declares too small to warrant a full action. One thing that explicitly is a free action is readying a weapon or item that you have previously equipped. You can only have three weapons and items equipped at the same time; anything else you’re lugging around is in your pack, and you need a regular action to dig it out before you can equip it. Two small weapons of the same type (like paired daggers) counts as one for purposes of equipping, and one heavy weapon (like a greataxe) counts as two.
Champions can be afflicted with status effects, which are things like Poison (roll Vitality to avoid losing Hearts each turn), Blind (you have disadvantage to Perception rolls and rolls to attack or dodge – not parry, though, apparently), and Silence (you’re unable to cast spells). Status effects usually last a set number of rounds, or otherwise a Champion can get rid of one by taking a short rest when not being in immediate danger, or she can get rid of all of them by taking a long rest in some comfy location like an inn or a friend’s house. You can only take one long rest per day, and only one short rest in between two long rests, though. A long rest also restores all Hearts and Stamina, while a short rest restores some of each.
Two especially important ones are Wound (you have disadvantage to Agility and Strength) and K.O. (you’re out cold – you can’t do anything, and if you for some reason have to make a roll, you automatically fail it). A Champion who gets brought down to 0 Hearts automatically gets the Wound status effect and has to roll Will to avoid also taking the K.O. status effect. A Champion who reaches his negative Vitality in Hearts automatically takes the K.O. effect. When you get a chance to remove an effect, you always have to remove K.O. first… which sounds good, except I can’t help it notice that being on fire is also a status effect, so, errrrr…
Anyway, no matter how much punishment a Champion takes, he can’t actually die; even if every character in the party goes down, the monsters will just take them captive or steal all their gear. Character death can be made a house rule in a campaign, but then it has to be adopted before the first session, and the players have to be unanimous. Mmmmm… I’m still digging this rule. Not having to worry that your players will TPK themselves by acting like a bunch of suicidal lemmings… sounds lovely and peaceful… Also, it’s noted that monsters will not usually pursue if an entire party of Champions runs away, so that’s always an option as well.
Monsters work a bit differently than Champions. First off, we’re reassured that while monsters may look like self-motivated beings, they’re actually soulless manifestations of the Scourge who exist only to spread misery, so it’s fine to kill them. A nice touch, that. But even aside from that, Monsters don’t have Abilities, and they are in fact oddly mechanical in combat – the GM doesn’t have them do what seems strategically sound, but instead each monster has a list of combat moves that it either executes in sequence or that the GM rolls for every turn. There are even guidelines for who the monster attacks with each move. Huh. Interesting. I know Godbound has an optional system much like it, but I didn’t end up using it much because I felt like it was too lethal already – it wasn’t the sort of system where I wanted a monster to randomly make a gazillion attacks against the most injured player (yes, I am totally the sort of wussy GM who worries about not hurting the players too much, haven’t you figured that out yet?). Not sure if this works better, I know I saw at least one review by someone who did find the system problematic in practice, though it’s true that it is very appropriate to the being-inside-a-video-game feel of it all…
Anyway, monsters only sometimes need to roll to attack, in which case that specific move has a score for them to roll under; most of the time, they just deal damage or inflict some sort of effect, and it’s up to the Champion to parry or dodge if he’s got a reaction to spare for it. Also, some attacks may be unblockable or undodgeable. Furthermore, a monster isn’t necessarily limited to a single action per round, but may have two or more, in which case they roll for initiative for each action they get.
In addition to regular monsters, there are Boss monsters who are even tougher and more complicated. There is also apparently colour-coded monsters who are themselves a bit meaner than the regular variety, but we don’t learn anything more about them here.
Equipment! You have gear slots equal to twice your Strength. If you try to carry more items than you have gear slots for, you get disadvantage on all actions. Some items take up more than one gear slot. You can also use beasts of burden, either horses or giant chickens called “cocodori.” They can carry 10+ slots of gear, with a rider who’s not encumbered taking up 10 of those slots. If you need to drag even more stuff around, you can have them pull a wagon.
The currency of the land is the Zin, which comes in different colours. 100 Green Zin is 10 Blue Zin is 1 Red Zin. Shopping for stuff can be done in towns, but there are also wandering merchants who might show up anywhere (though their prices are higher). There is a fairly short and comprehensive list of regular items you can buy, with most of them having a definite in-game effect, either giving you advantage on something (e.g., a cooking set gives you an advantage to cook food) or being a requirement for something (e.g., a fishing pole is required to fish).
Weapons! They have damage, reach, and a few special tags like Accurate (+1 to attack rolls) or Versatile (can be used in either one hand, or in two hands to get +1 to damage). Projectile weapons require you to keep track of how many projectiles you have, though you can keep 99 projectiles in a single gear slot. Heh, that’s a fun touch. Arcane weapons can shoot magic bolts. Boomerangs are a thing, they return to your hand after attacking with them unless you botched. Most weapons come in both an expensive regular form and a cheap “old” form with slightly worse stats that’s likely going to be what you start with. Heh. Again, I see what you did there.
Armour! Which doesn’t just cover things that block damage, but also snazzy outfits that give you bonuses on charming people. Light summer clothes can also make you resistant to heat, while thick winter clothes make you endure cold better. There’s also a Mystic Robe and a Priest Robe that gives you a bonus to arcane magic and blessings, respectively – which is good, because you can’t do either of those while wearing actual armour armour unless you have a Feat that says otherwise.
We get three special items: the grappling hook, the surf board, and the paraglider. You can explicitly pull any of them out and use them in the same action. I kind of love that the last two are just sort of there, like they need no justification.
Durability is an optional rule. If you include it, weapons get damaged and lose durability when you botch while using them. You can also choose to intentionally damage them as the cost of rerolling a damage roll. You can have a weapon repaired for 50 Green Zin to restore its durability by 1, but you can only do that once in between every time the weapon gets damaged, so they will still likely degrade over time.
Food and potions! You have to eat a meal every time you take a rest or it isn’t properly restful. You can also eat between meals (though that is not what my dietist tells me, oddly enough) to get benefits depending on the exact kind of food; some restore Hearts (Healthy), others Stamina (Invigorating), others still give you resistance to heat (Refreshing) or cold (Spicy).
Cooking is a whole thing. First, you need ingredients, which you can forage for in different environments – you can fish if you have a pole and a nearby body of water, for instance. You make a roll to hunt or gather, and at a success you get a random ingredient. Each ingredient has a quality (Healthy, Invigorating, Refreshing or Spicy) and a die type. You can combine up to 5 units each of 2 different main ingredients and roll a die of the ingredient’s type for each unit. If the ingredients have the same quality, you add the results together, if they have different ones you roll them separately. You can also add whatever you’ve got handy as secondary ingredients, giving you +1 to the roll for each unit of additional stuff to a maximum of 5 units. Then you compare the result to a table for the appropriate quality, and that gives you the effects of eating the food. You have to roll Charisma to cook properly, and if you fail you halve the number of dice from ingredients.
Potions work almost exactly like food, except that instead of yummy foodstuffs found in nature, you brew them from icky parts left behind by slain monsters, and when you botch the cooking roll (which is Knowledge and not Charisma) you don’t just get something vaguely edible but have to roll on a mishap table. Anyone can enjoy cooking, but potion-brewing is best left to the professionals!
I love it, it’s super-cute. I’d be inclined to give bonuses on the roll depending on how well-designed the meal was so it wasn’t just about piling random foodstuffs together… but then again, piling random foodstuffs together can be the genesis of great cuisine, so it might be best not to stand in the way of the players being creative in the kitchen.
Magic! It comes from the eight elemental spirits: Fire, Ice, Water, Wind, Thunder, Earth, Light and Dark. Each of the six lower elements is strong against one other element and weak by a different one. E.g., Fire is weak against Water, but strong against Ice. Elemental enemies take double damage from the element they’re weak against, half damage (rounded up) from the one they’re strong against, and no damage from their own element. Light and Dark work differently; they are both strong against each other, so Light attacks do double damage against Dark creatures and vice versa. There is a theoretical ninth element called Twilight that’s strong against everything, but there are no canonical Twilight effects; it’s the sort of thing that a GM has to explicitly write into his campaign, as an ultimate weapon for the players to quest for.
There are three kinds of spells: arcane spells available to the Way of Magic, blessings available to the Way of Light, and common spells available to both. Each Feat for the Way of Magic and the Way of Light comes with the chance to pick out one or more new spells to learn, on top of its regular effects. If you know a spell, you can also perform “cantrips,” which are small, mostly-cosmetic magical effects that can be justified as limited versions of the spell. There aren’t any hard-and-fast rules for cantrips, it’s all about what the GM will allow – the idea just seems to be to let magic-using players show off a little without bogging down into specifics.
When you cast a spell for the first time in a day, it becomes expended. You can still cast expended spells, but they cost you Stamina – the first casting of each spell is “free,” as it were. Spells cast with a crit on the spellcasting roll also don’t get expended or charge you Stamina. You can recharge one spell when taking a short rest, and all spells when taking a long rest. That’s a pretty neat way of introducing a sort of “soft” Vancian casting, I feel.
In my earlier cursory readthrough, I claimed that all spells have a limited effect even when you fail to cast them. This, I note upon reading the spell list more carefully, was overstating the case. Some spells work like that, but a lot of them really can just fizzle if you’re unlucky.
Arcane spells are usually either damage-dealing (like throwing fireballs) or illusions (like turning invisible, or changing your appearance). There are also some flashy utility spells, though, like teleportation, or creating a magic bubble around you that lets you breathe underwater or float harmlessly to the ground from great height. Blessings are more likely to restore Hearts or Stamina or remove status effects, though there are a few Light-aspected damage blessings. Common spells are ones that aren’t strongly flavoured as either “sorcery” or “miracles” – telekinesis of various sorts is common, and so are some hypnotic ones like controlling a monster’s actions or making it go to sleep.
Magical items can cast one spell per day without the need for a roll. It’s suggested that magical items use the durability rules even if other weapons don’t; they’re supposed to be something you break out for special occasions, not something you use all the time. Also, to use a magical item you must first attune to it, and once a Champion has attuned to an item, no one else can ever use it.
Heart Stones and Stamina Stones are, as mentioned before, a thing. When you attune to a Heart Stone you get 3 more Hearts, and a Stamina Stone gives you 1 more Stamina. After they’ve been attuned to, they disappear. They’re said to be the tears of the spirits, shed long ago. Aww, that’s nice. Scrolls are another single-use item, they can cast a single spell same as a magic item does, only they only cast the spell once, then crumble to dust. They also don’t need attuning.
There are also weapons that just have an additonal elemental damage applied to them, for use against elemental-aspected enemies of the right sort. Those don’t require attunement, though, so you can swap those among the party if you want. Fire and Ice-aspected weapons also have the bonus power of giving you protection against cold and heat, respectively.
There is some GM advice, which is the usual – you’re not actually against the players but only provide them with reasonable challenges, you need to be flexible, you should involve the players and let them make the adventure theirs, you know the drill.
When something is happening that will take an unspecified amount of time, you can use a “countodwn roll.” That means that you roll a d20 at the end of the session, and if you get a result of 1 or 2, it means the job is done. If you roll 3+, you roll a d12 at the end of the next session, a d10 the scene after that, and so on. Fair enough. Not quite sure this is something that happens often enough in my games that I’ve felt the need for a mechanic for it, but okay, it’s simple enough.
Champions will be given Quests to prove their mettle. They can have several Quests lined up at the same time, in which case they should keep a Quest Log to keep track of them. Heh. Anyway, a Quest will always involve some subset of the following three Deeds: helping an NPC, exploring a dangerous location, or beating a Boss monster. For them to count as different Deeds, they must be unrelated; if you enter a castle to save a princess from a firebreathing lizard, that’s still just one Deed. Well, what would a Quest with several Deeds even look like, then? If they have to be unrelated, wouldn’t it be easier to have them be separate Quests? Oh well. Upon completing a Quest, the party will get 1 point of Hope for every Deed it contained, with a +1 Hope bonus if it’s the party’s very first Quest. Each completed Quest also reduces the area’s Despair by 1.
Landmarks to explore should be visible from a distance and visually distinctive, so the players realise that they are supposed to go there and explore them. There’s a couple of random tables for rolling up landmarks, with rumours and secrets and nearby people, but, well, Shadowdark this ain’t, they’re pretty modest. Still potentially useful, mind. There’s also random content for treasure chests of various sorts.
NPCs who aren’t monsters get stats of the same sort as Champions, though they tend to be somewhat weaker. The players also aren’t supposed to fight them if they have any reasonable alternatives, being true heroes and all. Still, tragic misunderstandings do happen. There are also Kokkoros, who are weird little muppets with squeaky voices who are believed to be forest spirits driven from their lands by the Scourge. They are meant to be played as lovable but mildly annoying, and can be a source of Quests and rumours. They don’t have stats, being pretty much incapable of meaningfully helping or hindering a Champion. They do get random tables for some instant quirky personalities and appearances, though.
Travel! You have to roll for two random encounters per day of travel, or one if you have a local guide. You can take a long rest every night and a short rest in between the encounters. The dice you roll for random encounters depends on the area’s Despair rating, with lower Despair resulting in a smaller die. Interestingly, it’s stated that any random encounter table should have results of 1 and 2 be strokes of luck that make the journey easier, and 3 and 4 be the worst possible results, with every higher result being progressively less dramatic. So lower Despair doesn’t so much mean that travel is safer but that it’s more eventful, for good or ill? Not sure I understand the reason for that…
Weather! It comes in three forms, hot, cold and storm, with each one having several levels of severity. In a mild storm, you just can’t light a fire and surfaces are slippery, while in a severe one someone is going to get struck by lightning sooner rather than later. The worst kind of hot and cold weather both cause you to steadily lose Hearts, though of course you can downgrade hot and cold severities by wearing the right clothing or gulping down Refreshing or Spicy food or potions. So if you’re going to brave a scorching desert or a frozen mountain peak, preparation is key, basically.
Making camp! It requires you to be safe from monsters (either because there are none around, or because someone is standing watch), to be sheltered from the elements, and to consume a meal. If you can fulfil all three, you can take a long rest. With only two, you can only get a short rest. I’ll assume that this is the only way you can get long and short rests, and that it just wasn’t spelled out when they were mentioned in previous chapters? Might need to check more carefully… Well, either way, while camping, each Champion can perform one action, like cooking, foraging, scouting, standing watch, or casting spells.
Campaign-making, in general terms! A campaign of Twilight Sword takes place in “the lands” which are divided into a manageable number of distinct regions. The lands are always a fundamentally good place that has fallen on hard times due to the coming of the Scourge. Precisely what the Scourge is can differ – it might be an arch-villain of some sort, but it might also be a looming natural disaster or a baffling mystery.
Each region in the lands has a Despair rating that starts at somewhere between 3 (for regions where the problems are still relatively mild) and 5 (for regions that have fallen almost completely to the Scourge). As the players complete Quests in a region, they raise their Hope and lower the region’s Despair, as previously described.
The GM can lock plot developments behind specific values of Hope and Despair. Developments of Hope are almost wholly positive and indicate that the people come to trust the players more. Developments of Despair, on the other hand, can seemingly be making things worse, like the monsters gathering for an overwhelming attack… so again we have the idea that lowered Despair can actually make things more tense and dangerous. I think the idea might be that at high Despair, the Scourge is complacently sure of its eventual victory, but as the players chip away at its forces it starts bringing its A game? However, at 0 Despair the Scourge’s hold on the region has been broken, the players no longer have to roll for random encounters when traveling through it (an effect that is described as “fast travel.” Heh), and the grateful people throw a party of some sort for the players where they get to talk to everyone they’ve helped and are gifted with sweet loot.
If a campaign is explicitly going to be about ending the Scourge once and for all, the Scourge will have its own Despair that starts at 10 or more (which must be less than the sum of the starting Despair of all the regions of the land). Every time Despair decreases anywhere, the Scourge’s Despair also decreases, and when it reaches 0, things come to a head. The meteor prophesised to end the world comes crashing down from the sky, the dark spell on the villain’s fortress dissolves to let the Champions in, the monster horde lays siege to the capital. Either way, it’s time for a final Quest to save the lands!
Patrons are special NPCs who seem to be grooming the Champions for their destiny. They have regular stats, but are always a little bit stronger than the Champions are at the moment. However, they only show up to help sometimes; whenever the Patron pulls the Champions’ fat out of the fire, the GM starts a countdown roll for when he might appear again. There is a sample Patron called the Wanderer that’s… well, he’s Gandalf if Gandalf was a giant penguin, basically. Which, don’t get me wrong, is awesome.
We get a very brief description of the game’s default setting of Radia. There, the Scourge is an evil knight named Vardas who killed the King and usurped the Twilight Sword which kept the elements in balance. Now his monster armies are rampaging across the land. There are eight regions, including the fairly mellow and pastoral Aramilla Valley and Lumino Plains where the Humas live, the wild Tolanga Coast where the Tolunas surf, the scorching Sagratta Desert where you find the Kedis, the frozen Pennpen Mountains where the Pengu perch, the ravaged Zavosta Gully where the last of the Strixen are holding out against the monsters, the dark and scary Morgova Forest, and Radiosa Castle, where Vardas broods on his evil. All of them have three distinct landmarks, though I do feel like I’d need a little more to actually run a game here. But then, that’s why I also bought Lands of Radia, and will get to it in time.
Finally, we get a section on monsters. A monster card consists of a 6 moves the monster can make, along with a Threat rating (which also determines how many actions the monster can take per round), its Hearts, Stamina and Armour. They can also have special moves that they can take in place of their regular moves, at the cost of Stamina. When the party hits Hope 8, more powerful Blue Variants of the monster types begin appearing, and at Hope 16 even more badass Red and Black Variants turn up. Variants have increased Hearts, Threat and/or damage. There are also Elemental Variants who deal elemental damage of a certain type and is strong, weak and immune to damage of the associated types, as mentioned under magic. Monsters disintegrate when killed, and may leave old weapons, monster parts for use in brewing potions, or treasure chests behind.
Bogoblins are, well, goblins – they’re small, annoying and like to gang up on people. Grim-bogoblins are undeade skeleton bogoblins. Vampire bats are, well, hostile blood-sucking bats, and wulfors are relentless demon wolves. Lizalisks are lizard folk who fight with spears and have poisonous bites. Oozes are gooey slime creatures who can “envelop” your weapons, which seems to mean that they take them from you and swallow them, though the weapon will be found among the gore if you kill the ooze. Calamors are flying, rock-spitting squid things.
Among Threat 2 critters, we have borkors, who are horned boars with oodles of brute force. Trollos are big, dumb trolls with clubs. Glaciators are our first elemental monsters, in this case they’re ice golems. Hornexes are giant wasps who are Thunder-aspected. Toluros are big crabs with shells that make them annnoyingly resistant – they’re Earth-aspected, but they are considered resistant to all elements. Weeverns are fire-breathing dragons.
Tartalors are our first Threat 3 monster, and are big cyclopes who have the distinction of all their attacks being unblockable – they’re just too brutally strong to parry. Wizzorbs are weird sorcerers whose heads are fish bowls with fish in them. Dreadvines are toothy, flesh-eating plants.
Bosses are unique monsters who all have a special gimmick that requires them to have several pages of rules. Boss-bogoblins are big, fat bogoblins who lead an entire swarm of lesser bogoblins who bother their enemies and can be used as makeshift projectiles in a pinch. Brutaurs are big centaur things that turn into Enraged Brutaurs when they hit 0 Hearts, with a different move set and stats. Rokkos are stone giants whose arms are made up of three distinct creatures: the right arm, the left arm, and the crystal on top of their heads that is their weak point but which you’ll need to climb to reach. The Dragor, finally, is a giant fire-breathing dragon that have different stats and moves depending on whether they’re in flight or standing on the ground. It switches from one to the other whenever it suffers a critical hit.
So that’s it! I still love this game a lot, and I’m definitely planning to run it sometime. The automated enemy moves is clearly the mechanical sticking point, and I’d need to actually try it out to see how it worked in practice. In most other ways, though, it all seems to be set up to run very chill, casual games in a world that’s endearingly silly. Which still soothes my soul.