I hope you won't mind if I cut right to the chase: this article is going to be a review of two products. Here is product the first:
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| Yeah, it's Warlock! |
If you haunt the front page of DriveThruRPG like I (unfortunately) do, then the Warlock! RPG cannot have escaped your attention during the last year or so. In case you didn't know, it's awesome. I'll rhapsodize below.
Here's the other one:
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| Gradient Descent for cool-kid Mothership |
This one is Gradient Descent, an adventure/setting for the Mothership RPG (which I reviewed earlier along with its first adventure, so check that out). Although it's another hot and sexy RPG that has captured eyeballs and zeitgeist, the situation is a bit different because it's not actually out yet.
Yes, yours truly is an RPG insider. Well, actually, I just backed the Kickstarter and thus got my hands on the early release of the PDF. It's been bouncing around my hard drive for a couple weeks and I just got around to reading it. And you know what? It's a banger, in the parlance of the day.
So if you're just looking for information about what to buy, you can stop there and put there both on your list, especially if you're into old-school British fantasy role-playing (i.e. Warlock!) or space-faring sci-fi horror (i.e. Gradient Descent). They both get my rousing approval, so if that's means anything to you, consider picking them up if you're a tabletop RPG GM.
But if you need to hear more to determine if these are right for you, or you just like to read this sort of thing, then follow beyond the fold.
These are two different beasties, so I'm mostly going to talk about them in isolation. Why one article? Because they're both terrific and I felt like it.
Warlock!
In case you're not familiar with the elevator pitch of Warlock!, here's the game in a nutshell: 1st edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay combined with Fighting Fantasy, adapted for d20 resolution. That description gets you started, but those could be combined for good or evil. Fortunately, Warlock! blends its influences with perfection.
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| The role-playing...she is delicious! |
Mechanics
Just like in Fighting Fantasy, PCs have Stamina, Luck and Skill. However, instead of a single Skill trait, Warlock! PCs have thirty. These take the place not only of skills, classes and specializations, but even basic attributes like Agility and Intelligence. All endeavors roll off one of these thirty skills.
All skills rolls are made by rolling 1d20 and adding the skill level. On a roll of 20 or more, the character is presumed to succeed. In opposed contests, both characters roll and the high roll wins. Very simple.
Combat is also simple, but it has some distinctive ideas. Combat rounds are thirty seconds long, almost as long as the AD&D 1e minute-long combat round. Both sides roll initiative, the winning side choosing the first character to act, then the losing side choosing the second, and they alternate until all characters have acted. It's simple and not driven by character speed or skill, but it creates interesting tactical choices that players have to answer together.
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| This guy can be found in the notebook covers of every teenage boy who can draw |
Melee attack rolls are an opposed test, as one might expect, but what is less expected is the fact that the defender inflicts damage if he or she wins the contest! The attacker has a +5 bonus to the roll, which is obviously a huge advantage, and yet a highly-skilled melee combatant can injure multiple opponents in a round due to their failed assaults.
Damage is rolled based on weapon with no character-based modifiers. An attack roll that is three or more times greater than a defense roll results in double damage, however, so one could imagine strength considerations to have already been calculated in a character's Sword skill. Armor reduces damage by a roll based on the armor's level of protection - I'm not sure why I don't see this obvious and elegant mechanic in more games, so it's refreshing here.
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| So is he carrying an open bottle of booze, or is it poison for his spiked mace? |
The results of Stamina loss depend greatly on exactly how much is lost. As long as a character remains above zero, Stamina loss is considered to consist mostly of fresh wounds, grit and exhaustion. Half of whatever is lost will be regained after a few minutes of breath-catching, while the rest is regained after a night of sleep.
But once Stamina drops to zero or less, a character will suffer serious critical injuries for most any attack, and these are gruesome consequences rolled on tables that depend on the type of attack used. This mechanic is extremely similar to how Wounds are handled in the old WHFRP 1e rules.
Character progression also mirrors the idea of Warhammer, with characters joining careers that define which skills they can spend experience points on. Basic careers allow a character to raise three skills up to level twelve, and two other skills up to level ten. Advanced careers, which are a little harder to get into, allow three skills to be raised up to level sixteen, and three others up to level fourteen. It costs one experience point to raise a skill by one point and five to switch careers, and a PC should earn between one and three points per session.
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| Some vintage British 80's fantasy RPG art...this one from personal favorite Dragon Warriors |
Magic is dead simple. To attempt a spell, a character must have a copy of the magical scroll and have learned to cast it. A round is spend casting, and the character spends a set amount of Stamina. Then, a casting test is rolled, and if the character succeeds, the spell goes off.
Look and feel
What else is there to say about Warlock!? The organization is clean and old-school, with heavily-seriffed typewriter fonts and an emphasis on brevity over detail. Do the rules say you can set a different target number than 20 for skill rolls? No, but they don't say to not do that, and an old-school GM knows that this means he or she modify without concern.
The art is very much in the style of grimy 80's British fantasy art. Like pornography, you'll know it when you see it.
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| Objectively awesome |
More examples are required:
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| Woodcut-punk? |
Creators
Let's talk about authorship a little late in the game. Warlock! and all its various compendiums and supplements are written by Greg Saunders, who obviously needs help with his amphetamine addiction. Artist Mustafa Bekir seems to be the one and only artist for covers and interiors. But if two fellows are so talented, why dilute their labors with those of lesser men? Still, I hope they are getting enough sleep.
What I've said is true for the Warlock! core rules, but also true of the compendiums and adventure materials which have been provided for this line by Fire Ruby Publishing. Well, the adventure setting might be a little thin, but if you're getting started, leave that for last and you're in for reliably high-quality tabletop role-playing content.
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| It's a little off, but that's part of the charm of this style |
To give you an idea of my enthusiasm for this system, I'm current running Deep Carbon Observatory (the revised edition - worth its own review) converted to the Warlock! mechanics. So far, it's been rock solid, although combat seems to take longer than I would have expected.
Do you need this?
No. One of the unique characteristics of good role-playing is that the rules are not central to play. But that's not Warlock!'s fault; that's simply an attribute of role-playing rules. For me, this game is a breath of fresh air, and it does a lot of things that I look for in my game mechanics: Warlock! inspires, it moves quickly, and it possesses strong verisimilitude, but most importantly, it gets the hell out of the way.
Gradient Descent
So, that's Warlock! - let's move on to our second subject: Gradient Descent. This is another Mothership joint, and it bears all the markings. Let's talk about that for a second; I'm going to get into authorship a lot sooner on this one.
Creators
The author of Gradient Descent is Luke Gearing. Looking over his previous works, I see a couple of familiar titles: Fever Swamp for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Acid Death Fantasy for Troika!, and Pound of Flesh for Mothership. My impression of these works is remarkably similar: they all show great promise, have tons of style, but they didn't quite hit it out of the park for me.
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| Mothership welcomes you to Happytown! |
Let me explain. They are all full of hooks and challenges in very colorful settings, so there is nothing wrong with any of these works. They're all high-quality material, but for content like this, what pushes things into the S-tier are those little sparks that naturally drive the players to adventure. It's hard to describe, but when the hooks and faction conflicts seem designed to just suck players in, then you've really got my attention.
The fact that none of those previously-mentioned works seem to hit that level isn't a shortcoming; it just means that it's on me, as the GM, to tie things together and sell the hooks organically. That's fine, but I get really excited when that's all baked into the material as-written.
But so far, I've just been talking about Mr. Gearing, but this is by no means a one-man show. In fact, this product bears the indelible stamp of the Mothership brand, consisting of:
- Very artistic and varied layouts
- Abstract and schematic maps
- Lots of "linking" between elements
- Absolutely no love for the digital format
I'll get into what all these mean, but for now, the point is that this product has that Mothership smell in a big way. The interesting thing is that all these decisions affect not only the aesthetics, but the usability. Mostly in a good way! This is Design.
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| Purrrrdy... |
It's kind of funny, because my brief experience with the Mothership Discord channel suggests that creators are very open-ended about content, being actively resistant to nailing down a broader setting. I think they were being slightly disingenuous with this, because even while they are willing to embrace a wide variety of (conceivably contradictory) setting elements in different products, the Mothership brand carefully curates a certain aesthetic, and not everything is going to fit within that (stylish) universe. But no matter, because I think they are genuinely committed to the idea of avoiding any kind of "setting canon."
In retrospect, I see Mothership and its supporting content as a direct descendent of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess aesthetic, taking it to the next level. It's gritty and bloody, but stylish as hell. The mechanics are simple and grounded - it's the aesthetics of adventures that set them apart. The published "official" adventures have a shared sensibility without a dictated shared world - it's assumed that a good GM will take the materials they want and find a way to make them work together.
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| Welcome! |
Anyway, this should have a point, and this point is this: it's interesting to see the people involved with different Mothership projects. Luke here has dipped his toes into the universe by collaborating on Pound, so he knows what the shoot for, at least in general terms.
A few people from prior projects show up here: Mothership maestro Sean McCoy shows up for "Layout/Design," while stalwart Jarrett Crader is, once again, the editor. These two appear on every major Mothership project, so their participation is obviously crucial. It's telling that the central roles of a project driven by design would be charged with layout/design and editing, is it not?
Looking at Gradient Descent, their input must have been very significant. This has all the Mothership hallmarks, but not only that, they are used to positive effect. These are not merely aesthetics. Usability comes into play. I have no idea how a person could reasonably map a space station as large and complex as CLOUDBANK using traditional RPG methods. It would keep Dyson Logos busy for a year! As fascinating as that sounds, we can't tie up such an important man on a single project, no matter how inspired.
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| Scenic vacation spot in Mothership |
The adventure itself
And let me tell you, Gradient Descent is inspired. Remember a few paragraphs back when I said that Luke Gearing's previous adventures, interesting as they are, never set those hooks on fire? That's not a problem here. I like GD a whole lot more than Pound of Flesh, actually. Sucker for indie-punk aesthetic OSR RPGs, I've kickstarted the entire line since the Questing Beast review of Dead Planet.
Speaking of which, Gradient Descent is the first Mothership product since Dead Planet to conjure its particular magic. The adventure just pops off the page, begging you to throw various dilemmas and temptations at your players. Mysterious technological artifacts that verge on magic? Rogue AIs that make you doubt your own memories? Tense negotiations with greedy mercenaries? This material just sings.
What do I mean by that? I mean that the material on the page suggests to me, as a GM, situations that players will feel compelled to react to in ways that I cannot predict. Can there be anything more wonderful? This is why I GM. When the players come up with something far stupider than anything I could have conceived of - or even better, far more clever than I as GM could have imagined - I achieve a kind of satori. This is the central purpose of GMing.
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| Are these the spiders from Mars I hear so much about? |
So what's it all about? The backstory to Gradient Descent is that an industrial android manufacturing plant called CLOUDBANK was essentially taken over by its rogue AI, and this sprawling space station is now full of dangerous android factions and advanced technology developed by the AI. Furthermore, this station is surrounded by a blockade of plundering "troubleshooters" who extort any would-be explorers, coming and going.
One of the surprising things about Gradient Descent is that it's essentially a sci-fi dungeon crawl. The station map describes a couple hundred separate locations with dangers and treasures, as well as multiple entrances. The GM is encouraged to run CLOUDBANK as a location that PCs can visit multiple times, reloading and resting between expeditions. Sounds like a classic dungeon to me!
Aesthetics
Speaking of that map, by the way, the Mothership gang is up to their old tricks.
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| A loving marriage of style and substance |
These guys have pioneered the use of schematic maps that eschew spatial proportionality in favor of focusing on the adjacency of different locations. Some previous efforts have put style ahead of legibility in pursuit of this approach, but Gradient Descent hits the sweet spot. If you look at the screenshot above, you may notice that the map is drawn in the style of electrical diagrams.
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| See, like this but with more "weathering" |
Despite this heavy stylization, this map is extremely readable. It's very easy, looking at it, to tell what is connected with what, and how. For actual details about the locations, you just need to read the entries, which keep things down to the bare details that the GM needs, with bulleted lists, bolded terms and plenty of page references.
A life of its own
And CLOUDBANK isn't just a static location with random encounter rolls. There are factions, including Monarch itself, with their own agendas and plans. Over time, these plans will or won't come to fruition, based at least partly on how the PCs interact with the facility. The text does a good job of laying out these factions and the long term consequences of their activities.
Not everything happens in the factory itself. There's also a nearby station for independent salvage teams (like the PCs), and there's the cordon of troubleshooter to confront parties when they come and go. And these locations have their own factions with agendas that will bear on the adventure.
Do you need this?
If you're GMing Mothership, then yes, you really need this. I'm not sure if Gradient Descent is actually better than Dead Planet, but at the least, it's the best adventure written for the system since that instant classic.
In my review for MS/DP, I griped that it was hard to know how to run a Mothership campaign without a little more content for that line. Dead Planet, as great as it is, doesn't naturally lend itself to a broader sci-fi horror campaign -- Dead End is more like it, ammirite?
So what, I pondered, would a Mothership campaign look like? Gradient Descent finally gives me a kind of answer to that question. I know, a great GM doesn't need published adventures, but by definition, most of us are not great GMs.
In summary
Anyway, that wraps up this mash-up review. In case it's not clear (maybe you skipped right to this paragraph?), I recommend both of these products unreservedly. Warlock! is a great British OSR fantasy treatment, and Gradient Descent is a wonderful sci-fi horror dungeon crawl. I can speak about the former from actual play at the table, and I'm hoping to run some unfortunate players through the latter as soon as I can.
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