Review! Wolves of God

I really don't understand why I don't see more people talking about Wolves of God. First of all, it's a Sine Nomine joint, and Kevin Crawford's OSR sandbox systems are universally beloved. Second, it's great!

Look out, it's wol--actually, it's just Gary and Paul

So I'm going to do the world and Mr. Crawford a great service, and bestow upon all of you my review of Wolves of God. Here it comes... 

So, let's start with the material side of things and work our way into matters more abstract.

Physical qualities

I was quick to order the hardcover from the Kickstarter; it was meant to be a limited run, and Kevin promised he was going to do a good job, this time. As much as I love Stars Without Number, the physical book is poorly-bound low-quality POD; it feels like it could fall apart any day.

It turns out that my faith was well-founded. The hardcover for Wolves of God is pretty compact - 5.5" x 8.5" digest bound. The cover itself is burgundy faux-leather. Overall, it's extremely high-quality: the covers are sturdy, the binding a rock-solid stitch, the paper high-gloss and offset print. Top notch, as promised. This feels like it will be around a while.

Text quality

The text itself is nice and legible, which is a great start. That sounds like faint praise, but this is routinely screwed up by brown text on a beige faux-scroll background, or similar nonsense. There is a faux-weathered page background, like a medieval manuscript, but it does not intrude, and I rather like the softer shade.

Fonts are large, and some kind of standard serif like Garamond, with some headings done in a quasi-Celtic font called Northumbria. Tables use rows with alternating shade, italicized notes are present in the margins, and bolding is used to effectively bring attention to terms. All very readable - no complains when it comes to legibility.

Visual aesthetics

One area where Sine Nomine products still have a little room to grow, in my opinion, is when it comes to the purely aesthetic qualities. For instance, chapter headings appear in the margins in these small rectangular boxes. When I saw these in the betas, I thought they were placeholders, since most of the boxes are taken up by blank space. As you may guess, I was wrong. They're not what I'd call ugly, but they are just a little bit off.

The art follows suit. The interior illustration, by Joyce Maureira, is serviceable but not particularly appealing to me. Several pieces have subjects with a luminescent quality on dark backgrounds that remind me, at its worst, of velvet paintings. I'm sure that wasn't quite the effect that she was shooting for. When it doesn't go that far, I'd say that her work exudes a pleasant warmth, but is otherwise fairly unremarkable to me.

Even stalwart John Hodgson's cover leaves me a little dry. You can see it at the top of this article. Where his pieces often have a kind of homespun rustic quality, his cover for Wolves of God feels a bit bland and lacking in detail, to my eyes. Again, not bad, but it just doesn't do it for me.

Hodgson on a better day, methinks

Nothing terrible, but nothing particularly eye-catching. Ah well, looks aren't everything. Right?

Writing style

While the art may not win this product any awards, I was very pleasantly surprised by Kevin's writing. Normally, he takes a very straightforward, even technical, approach to the text, keeping stylization down to a minimum. It often fits the open-ended generic nature of his settings; i.e. since Stars Without Number could be played with so many different tones, the rules themselves avoid implying a specific one.

That is definitely not the case here. There's even a frame story to the whole project -- these rules were recovered from an ancient manuscript of a role-playing game created by early medieval British monks. So the text is almost exclusively rendered in a voice that (supposedly) reflects the  prejudices of its time. This can be very helpful for the GM to get in character, and to understand how the world is meant to be portrayed.

Fenrir is sort-of a wolf of god, I suppose...

It's also just entertaining to read, and even amusing in many places. Mr. Crawford manages to do this without betraying the ease of use as a gaming reference. Here's an example at the start of the section describing encounter reactions:

When strangers meet it may be a peaceful thing, or it may be a season for spears. Oftimes the GM has no doubt about how matters will go; a demon fresh from Hell will not be cozened by pleasant speech, and a warband ordered to slay the heroes will not reconsider their duty for mere words. Yet often matters are not so clear as this, as the GM must decide how friendly or foesome the meeting may be.

Do I really have to explain why this is enjoyable? "A season for spears"? "Cozened by pleasant speech"? "How friendly or foesome"? And despite the wordiness, you don't get lost or miss the point.

Organization

Everything is in a pretty logical order. Despite the fact that the game is tightly tethered to a specific setting ("Dark Ages England," right off the cover), it doesn't start with a massive lesson in history and culture. Thank you, Wolves of God.

Instead, it starts with character creation, and then eases you into the systems of the game. At first, the systems are very practical, for things like skill rolls, hazards, combat and magic. The usual stuff. As it continues, the game presents the GM with mechanics for social conventions of the time, like attending a lord's court or raiding another village's cattle. 

OK, I know that's a big stretch...

The setting is gradually whisked into the rules until we reach the standard Sine Nomine content generation systems and tables.  Thus, there's a good flow to how the rules are presented, and things are where you'd expect them to be. 

Thankfully, the PDF is well-bookmarked. I wish I didn't have to bother to mention that, but sadly you can't assume that this will be case even in late 2020. Why do you hate ones and zeroes, Mothership gang?

Rules

Now we're getting to the meat. Sorry for all that preamble!

Since the revised edition of Stars Without Number, it seems to me that Sine Nomine has settled on a "house system" that gets ported to every new game. That's fine by me; one less set of mechanics to learn. It's generic, simple and functional without being particularly elegant.

I have a theory that Kevin Crawford plays at home with whatever rules he wants, and then slaps the Sine Nomine rule system on the release. The point of these rules is to maximize the compatibility of his games' content with the broader OSR/D&D universe and little else. It makes the games easy to learn and absorb, and allows you to easily borrow ideas from a wide variety of sources. 

On their own, these rules are...fine. They have an OSR spine--six ability scores, d20 resolution, HP, AC, saving throws, classes (warrior, galdorman and saint) and levels--with a sprinkling of other features grafted on from later editions, like backgrounds, skills and feats. This makes them a little Frankensteinian, since they are trying to be all things to all people. But it accomplishes its goal and moves on.

Wolves of God has some nice additions to this skeleton. Spells have no levels, although they do have what is essentially a "magic point" cost. And these spells are very low-key. Magic is not intended to be used in combat--at least, not the spells that can be cast by galdormen (wizards) and saints (clerics). There are honest-to-goodness spells to help with harvests and fertility. And reasons to cast them!

See, real low-key

The deeper you get into the rules, the more the setting reveals itself. Experience works very differently in this game than any OSR mechanics I can remember. Each class can gain Honor and Shame points for deeds that, correspondingly, bring them honor and shame. Shame counts against Honor, but you only get Shame if someone outside the party knows about it. Unless you're a saint, in which case, God knows, so good luck getting rid of the witnesses.

A character's net Honor is essentially their experience point total, and they level up as it rises; fortunately, they don't lose levels if Shame drops the net Honor below the required amount. The things that get you Honor and Shame are very appropriate to the setting, so this really forces you to get into character. For instance, galdormen earn Shame if they cast spells against innocent men, and saints earn it for killing a human! This is definitely not a game to be played in the murderhobo style!

Things get really interesting when the rules turn to mechanics for cattle raids and feasts. These sound like very mundane activities, and they are, but the rules and setting details generate a lot of opportunities for excitement and intrigue. These sorts of details remind me a lot of The One Ring/Adventures in Middle Earth, which similarly had rules for meeting important people, and more generally, traveling.

Celtic cattle raid

You can't talk about a Sine Nomine product without mentioning the extensive mechanics and tables for generating content. As usual, they are great. Adventurers will spend a lot of time visiting castles and minsters in between delving into ancient Roman "Arxes," ruins of wonder and pagan peril (i.e. dungeons). And there are fun tables for all of these, full of color, hooks and complications for meddlesome PCs.

In case you're not familiar with Sine Nomine products, I don't want to downplay this aspect too much, because it's really awesome. It's just very expected from a Kevin Crawford game at this point, which is why I don't dwell on it. If you are a Sine Nomine newbie, the idea is this: all of Sine Nomine games are built-in with systems for the GM to generate content with very little notice. The are chock-a-block with tables that form a perfect cocktail of inspirational detail and open-endedness. I'm not a no-prep GM, but you could certainly run Wolves of God in such a way, if you are so inclined. All the tools are there.

Setting

Wolves of God really comes together for the setting. As we've discussed, the flavor and details of the setting are often rendered through the rules, and even the style of writing. However, a number of sections round things out by addressing the setting directly.

Wolves immediate sets itself apart by highlighting aspects of real history that clash with fantasy role-playing as most people know it. Cities are small and few, and villages don't have "inns," "markets," or even "shops." Characters will be moving between keeps and minsters, for the most part, so they had better be prepared to pray and toil with the monks, or pledge glorious deeds on behalf of their hosts.

This is a society where social class matters deeply, and money will only get you so far. A ceorl farmer has no use for diamond tiaras, but will always find a use for a wheel of cheese. The economy is driven by bargaining behind a thin veil of "gifting," so the players can't just go exchange a chest of jewels for minted gold coins at the local money changer.

This doesn't mean that wealth is entirely unimportant. Adventurers can earn friendships from ealdormen (lords) and gesith (knights) by bestowing them with princely gifts. Even better, they can festoon themselves with these signs of wealth, and the mechanics of the game actually permit a small number of rerolls each day based on the splendor of a character's visage.

Me and the bois just doing our thing

In addition, wealth can become important when characters run afoul the law. Wolves of God describes a legal system which will seem very strange to modern sensibilities. Every man is assigned a wergild based on the station of the victim--or perpetrator, depending on the crime. This is a price that must be paid to the victim for perpetrating a crime upon them. It may also be paid to their next of kin, for even murder is forgivable if one pays the necessary fine. However, if a man is not caught red-handed, then he or she will be cleared of the crime if able to present a certain number of sworn witnesses, based on the crime. And if a criminal does not pay this fine, then he will be declared an outlaw, meaning that he may be robbed and killed with impunity.

This system sounds very strange to modern sensibilities, but it must be understood that this kind of justice was meant to be administered in a society without a police force, where the law is only as strong as what can be enforced by the public consensus. The wergild is supposed to be high enough to eventually beggar a man if he does not relent from sin.

The purpose of the witnesses is not some naive faith in the friends of the accused. It merely reflects the notion that it is dangerous to try to apprehend a man who can produce enough close friends who will stand at his side when accused of infamy!

Listen to the ealdorman with the sword or prepare to hang

All in all, Wolves of God is dripping with authentic historical color. Combined with the content generation tables, it gives you everything you need to put yourself into this world, either as the GM or a player.

Using this

Here's where we may unravel the mystery of why we see so few reviews of Wolves of God: it's hard to know exactly when to break it out. It takes a certain audience to become interested in playing low-fantasy in historical Dark Ages England. There aren't any published adventures to hold your hand as the GM, so you'd have to feel a very specific inspiration to decide to start running Wolves of God.

That's a bit of a shame, obviously, because as this review makes clear, there's a lot to love about this. I have a feeling that the Sine Nomine content tools would make this a lot easier than it would for other eccentric settings. You really don't need to be particularly familiar with the history and culture; the book has everything you need.

But the truth is that most GMs are a little apprehensive about jumping into a world with no training wheels. Now, you could reasonably adapt content from a small number of existing properties--Harn comes immediately to mind, and I've had my eye on trying to crack King For a Day for this very purpose.

But I would recommend that any GM pick this book up. If nothing else, you will be entertained. Also, it can be mined for setting details if you want to graft an authentic-feeling Dark Ages nation to your patchwork fantasy world.

Wrapping up

So that's Wolves of God. Obviously, I think it's great. If you're a GM who enjoys flavorful low fantasy, great historical detail and best-of-breed content generation tools, then you ought to pick it up.

It might not be the prettiest girl at the dance, but if you were into dancing with pretty girls (or guys...all are welcome), you wouldn't be playing tabletop RPGs, now would you? 

And if you got the physical copy from the Kickstarter, it's pleasingly durable with high-quality materials. I guess that's not an option now, though, is it? Well, you're on your own if you get the POD--just pay more attention to Sine Nomine Kickstarters in the future, OK?