Wes Baker

No rating because while I think the game is well written and very comprehensive, it's crunchier/heavier than I'd prefer.

It has a lot of things going for it:

- A dramatic resolution system where even the smallest die can turn into a big success
- A simple initiative system that makes it easy to know when you go
- A built-in system of hindrances that give players something to roleplay
- The ability to easily move between genres

So why three stars?

While I like the idea of raises, it's division. It's not particularly hard or anything, but reduce complexity wherever you can. Second, there's a lot of hidden complexity in some of the weapons, automatic guns in particular. Last, there are just so many other systems that are as simple that can borrow some of what makes Savage Worlds good: grab a deck of cards for initiative, add some kind of meta currency, and roll for a disadvantage at the start and you've gotten a lot of the good parts with none of the weird parts.

It's also worth mentioning that while I appreciate that they need to make money, most of Pinnacle's Kickstarters heavily push towards $100+ pledge levels with all sorts of bits and bobs. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it just rubs me the wrong way.

This review comes from reading and not playing. Ideally I would have played it, but I only have so much time in a given week.

Warlock! is a mixture of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (with it's career system and lack of levels) combined with some OSR elements, a d20, and some more modern sensibilities.

For skill checks you'll roll a d20 and add the relevant skill and attempt to get a 20 or higher for a success. Anything less is failure. There's a defined set of 32 skills along with career skills (which are the average of a given career's relevant skills and used when nothing else makes sense).

When you create your character you'll start by picking some beginning skills. You choose ten skills to start at 6, ten skills to start at 5, and everything else starts at 4. Keep in mind though that a skill at 6 only has a 30% chance of success! After that you'll roll for stamina (effectively hit points) and luck (which serves as a saving throw of sorts, except each time you test it, you deduct 1 from your luck for the rest of the adventure (recovering it afterwards).

You'll pick a career and have 10 more points to invest in career skills. Careers define a set of five skills that you can advance in as you gain experience. With the beginning careers there's two skills that allow you to advance as high as 10 and three that can advance as high as 12. After advancing at least three skills to 10 or more you can move on to advanced careers that have 6 skills: three as high as 14 and three as high as 16.

Along with your skills, stamina, luck, and career you'll get some basic possessions and career possessions, and pick some character traits. Then you're off to the races.

Combat is made with opposed rolls with the attacker getting a +5 bonus to their roll, so sure your character might start with a 6 in short blades, but that +5 makes it an 11 which gives you a 55% chance of success. Whoever rolls highest in the roll gets to roll for damage (ranging from 1d6-2 to 2d6+3). Armour reduces damage by 1d3 for light armor, 1d6 for modest, and 2d6 for heavy. When an attack hits it will always do a minimum of 1 damage. Critical hits only ever happen if stamina is reduced below 0 and from there you roll a 2d6 on a chart, adding how far below 0 stamina the victim is. For example: you hit a character with 2 stamina for 4 damage, they roll a 1 on their light armor so you do 3 damage. 2 stamina - 3 damage = -1 stamina. This is a critical hit and you'll roll 2d6+1 on the critical hit table.

Initiative is handled by each side rolling a d6 and highest going first, with ties being rerolled, but then it goes back and forth from the winning side to the losing side, with each side choosing a character who hasn't acted yet. I like that wrinkle from B/X D&D.

Recovery is much faster than in other OSR games: characters recover half their lost stamina if they can rest for 30 minutes. A full night's sleep recovers the rest. However, critical injuries take much longer to recover from.

Magic is probably the most interesting to me, mainly because Wizards typically have fewer hit points in D&D to balance their greater strength in offense, but here everyone has the same stamina roll. Instead, in order to cast spells you must sacrifice a certain amount of stamina, whether you're an arcane caster or a divine.

From all of this, I'm definitely intrigued, I think it could make for a very fun romp through a medieval city. I really like how careers are handled and how simple it is (as I typically bounce off of anything too complex). I'm looking forward to running a small arc of this at some point in the future.

This is a relatively big dungeon (for a session-length module) with a bit of a preamble and a big hook for future adventures.

You're newly minted heroes, looking for a village that needs saving and this village has seen various creatures skulking about, killing livestock and people. This is not the highest paying job I've seen, but hopefully the 50gp and the promise of a good adventure lures your party to this town. If it does, you'll meet with the “Parliament of Eng” and be told about the killings which turn out to be a combination of impalements and a traveler torn apart.

Marrow's Farm

A bit of poking around leads to Oggo Marrow's farm, someone who lived here in the time when the fae realm was friendly to the humans. He has his superstitions (salt and iron filings across his doorstep) and will help the party if they take care of the thing killing his livestock. He describes the creature:

Big it is, with eyes that burn red in the dark. It leaves cloven hoof prints in the mud around me pen, but they vanish when the sun rises. It kills with a single blow, stabbing me animals to death. In the morning, thee's not much blood around as there should be, leaving I's to think it sups on gore.

If the party decides to help Marrow, they can hang around at night and await the beast who turns out to be an Unseelie unicorn, a normally placid beast turned vicious by its Unseelie nature. Once killed, Marrow will tell the party about how Eng used to be and about the mound near the Ivy Wood, where the fae creatures would appear after coming to our world.

The Faerie Mound

This is the dungeon proper, though the dressing may not feel like it. You're certainly in the mound, but when looking up, you see a dark night sky and stars glittering. Moss covers the floor and there's a lot of natural vegetation in here.

Players have potential to go full murder hobo, sneak around, or role play why they're there. They can put on disguises, split the party and have the elves go ahead, or find disguises within the mound. The sheer number of routes the players can take makes this one of the more interesting dungeons I've read so far (which admittedly is not many, so take this all with a grain of salt).

I think my favorite interaction in the entirety of the mound is the dwarf slave you find: Fimbulfambi. He was captured by a group of fae and brought before Prince Ashheart (the faerie who started this whole mess). The prince then condemned him to toil in his smithy making weapons for the Unseelie fae. That's fine, but what makes this NPC interesting is his burning rage. If you save him and let him come with you, there's a very good chance (DC 18) that his rage will get the better of him and he'll rush the prince and attempt to kill him.

One more thing worth mentioning (though there's a lot of other good parts here) is during the fight with the prince there's a chance the PCs will become cursed by him. The prince will then stop the fight and negotiate his release in exchange for lifting the curse. If captured and threatened, he will lift the curse, but if the party believes him and takes him where he wants to go (the exit from the mound to the fae realm), he'll have his lackey Herne the Hunter attack with his Faerie Mastiffs.

Final Thoughts

There's more here worth mentioning: a lot of the loot disintegrates outside of the fae realm, time may or may not have passed while they heroes were in the mound, there's a bwca (a smaller faerie creature similar to a brownie) who will likely help the party who talks in rhyme.

When I read this one, I was a little miffed by how short the preface was to the mound. It seemed a bit like a railroad, and maybe it is, but once inside the mound, your players have a bunch of options. They can go full tilt or they can play it cool, use their wits, and come out of the bargain with few scars and more riches.

Taken on it's own, this book is not a great introduction to the Cortex system. This book is a toolkit with a basic set of rules that you add things to until you're happy with your game. The problem is all of the options are thrown at you pretty early on. You do get an example of how dice are rolled and the basics, but then you're thrown in the deep end.

However, at roughly the same time, the publishers of Cortex came out with the play test material for Tales of Xadia and that is a much more focused “book” (something like 50 pages) and a better example of how Cortex can be run. Instead of presenting itself as a ton of options, Tales of Xadia is a specified set of mods that make a cohesive whole. Having that as an example of how a Cortex game can be run really helped things for me. That being said, I think there's some benefit to reading the main book for a little bit, getting confused, and then reading one of the current settings to clarify things (either Hammerheads or Tales of Xadia).

As for the system itself, it's clever. Everything is a die pool of d4s, d6s, d8s, d10s, and d12s. Typically your pool will consist of 3 or more dice. You'll roll them and add two together to get your result. From the remaining dice you can pick one as the effect die where the face doesn't matter, only the size of the die. The bigger the die the greater the result (e.g. a d6 is a middling success, but a d10 is pretty fantastic). From there things expand outwards quickly, but once you've picked your mods, it seems simple enough.

One thing to note for GMs out there is that there is no bestiary, but you don't really need one. By default there's no hit points (there's a mod for that) and since traits are all represented by dice it's easy to make something up or just add dice to the dice pool (in the case of mooks).

I'm looking forward to trying this one out, though it'll likely be with my sons. That being said, I think it'll be easy to adapt for kids and look forward to seeing how they handle it.