I was recently invited to review the Morgalad Starter Book by John McNabb, available through DrivethruRPG.

Publication of Morgalad is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign which, like the result, is an interesting mixture of flawed ambition and success. The initial attempt at funding Morgalad sought to raise $20,000 and was a dismal failure; John reassessed his plans, setting his sights considerably lower, and succeeded in reaching the smaller target.

Morgalad is essentially a simplified version of the d20 rules built around a roll of 4d6, and aimed at generating an old-school flavor while incorporating the best aspects of the more modern game mechanics. Furthermore, character development paths can include increasing those dice to 5d6 or even 6d6 without altering the targets to be achieved.

The 4d6 mechanic

Morgalad’s game mechanics are quite straightforward. Roll dice, add any bonuses, and succeed if you achieve a defined total. This same principle is employed for skill checks, for attack rolls, for spellcasting, and for damage, where you need to better the armor of the target to damage it. There is, of course, more to the story, but that’s the central mechanic.

Using 4d6 is very interesting. Quite obviously, that produces a classical bell-curve, as shown below,

4d6 roll, base graph generated using AnyDice (http://anydice.com/). Click the image to visit the calculator.

The red line shows the 5% mark, ie the chance of a result on a d20, for comparison purposes. Clearly, your chances of rolling any number between 10 and 18 are higher than the chances of the same result coming up on a d20. This becomes significant when I tell you that the target for an Easy task is 10 or better (assuming that you have the requisite skill) while the target for an Extraordinarily difficult task is 19 or better – if you have the skill.

vs 5d6, 6d6

While the capacity to improve a character with experience by adding a modifier is clearly significant, the capacity to add another d6 or two is even more so – but not always in the way desired. That’s because 5d6 bunches the probably results even more closely toward the average (so fewer results are above the 5% line), and 6d6 is even more extreme. However, the increase in the maximum possible result more redeems the situation.

The graph below shows the results for all five target numbers:

Chances of achieving target or better on 4d6 (graphed), 5d6, and 6d6 (numeric percentages for comparison). Base Graph generated using AnyDice (http://anydice.com/). Click the image to visit the calculator.

With the standard 4d6 roll, there is almost a 10% chance of failure at an Easy task; with 5d6, that chance is less than 2%; and with 6d6, you would feel quite aggrieved at the world were you to fail such a check.

Looking at the other extreme, with a standard 4d6 roll, you have a slightly less than 10% chance at succeeding in an extraordinary task; with 5d6, that rises to almost 40%, and with 6d6, the chance is over 72%.

Spell Use

Spell use is kept within manageable limits by means of a simple energy points system – and the same points can be used by non-spellcasters for other special abilities. Most spells have an energy cost of about 15 points, while other abilities can be anywhere from 0 to 30 energy to use. Starting characters usually have something in the vicinity of 70 energy points to expend, and those are recovered after resting.

The Flaws

Morgalad is not without its flaws, I’m afraid.

The Writing

The syntax is often strained and the text that I saw, as a whole, needs a good editor. You can usually work out what is meant, but the absence of adequate punctuation is something you have to constantly struggle against. A typical example:

“Players are limited to 3 actions a standard action, a minor action, and a movement action.”

This is not the worst example I could have chosen, nor is it the best; it’s fairly typical. John knows what he is trying to communicate, and usually gets it across, but you have to decipher the text to understand it. If it were only occasional, this would probably be more forgivable, but it occurs at least once in almost every paragraph.

The Typography

My graphics design teacher once told our class, “there are more crimes committed with typography than could be accommodated in all the prisons in all the countries on earth.” I suspect she was exaggerating slightly, and employing a little hyperbole to boot, but the typography in Morgalad is appalling in places.

Some of the text is rendered in a quite legible font. Some is rendered in a fancy “handwritten” font that is also reasonably legible, but becomes visually tiring after a while, and achieves little beyond padding the page count. Chapter headings are in a singularly-inappropriate “Riverboat” font that should not be seen anywhere near a fantasy document, but at least it’s legible. Major headings are in two fonts – a fancy and totally-illegible drop capital and a fancy but more legible “handwritten” font for the rest of each word; Minor headings and some text are purely in the second font of those two. You can usually guess what the illegible letter is – a section labeled “[something]ombat” is clearly meant to read “Combat”. But it’s all totally unnecessary.

I would use the legible sans-serif font from the tables for virtually all the text, reserve the fancy “content” font for minor headings, the legible “fancy” font for the major headings and, in a larger size and greater weight (bolded), for the chapter headings. And be consistent about it. If you really want to use a hand-written font from time to time for the flavor, use the fancy “content” font in a size more visually similar to that of the plain text for the first line of each major section or each Chapter.

Repetition

A large section of the introduction simply repeats and rephrases material from the “How To Play” and is redundant. The language used is so strikingly similar that it is off-putting; I would move the introduction to precede “How To Play” and cut the second and third paragraphs from the introduction completely – more than half a page is wasted on redundant information. It would also be quite acceptable to simply mention the subject of those paragraphs in the introduction and then refer the reader to the “How to play” section.

The Terminology

The text is full of terms that have different meanings to the ones that I am used to. For example, “Cinematic” is used to describe “tactical” combat in which every blow and detail is individually resolved, instead of describing the most visceral combat structure. I could probably live with that, but there are a number of terms that seem different to standard for the sake of being different.

Dying?

It might be there somewhere, but I could not find where the rules tell players or GMs how characters get killed. Being reduced to zero Health leaves a character unconscious and incapacitated, not dead; the rules elsewhere specifically warn that characters can get killed, but there is no definition of how that happens.

Originality?

In a game system so strongly reminiscent of D&D 3.x / Pathfinder, I kept looking for the originality. There isn’t a lot of it on evidence, but what there is has been used quite cleverly. The level progression system is simple and straightforward; the combat mechanisms and spellcasting, ditto; and the alignment infraction system is both more sophisticated and simpler to administer than many others that I’ve seen. The use of 4d6 instead of a d20 has been cleverly used to good advantage, as shown by the graph above. And the way different weapon and armor materials have been applied to the mechanics is excellent.

The Success

Maybe it’s because I’ve been writing the series on Beginners lately, so it’s on my mind, but throughout my reading of the Morgalad Starter Book, I was continually struck by how similar it all was to a vastly simplified form of 3.x / Pathfinder – albeit one that uses different terminology for key concepts without changing the substance and basic principles overmuch.

The Morgalad Starter Book is the ideal vehicle for teaching new players, especially younger ones (ages 5+, perhaps?) how to play. It would also be a more than acceptable system for a novice GM to cut his teeth on. When ready for a more sophisticated approach, the full Morgalad Core Book would (I expect) provide a natural stepping-stone and progression path to the more complex systems. But I can’t help thinking that players and GMs making such a step forward would find themselves thinking that the bigger systems at least call a spade, a spade.

Convention games, in which the priority is a playable game over the full sophistication of a robust and complex rules system, would also be a very apt application of the Morgalad rules, making it easy for any player to drop into the game without hours spent studying the rules.

In many ways, the very “shortcomings” of the starter book can be an advantage. When dealing with children, even the absence of defining a “death level” becomes a benefit, making the game suitable for smaller children. All this book really needs is simpler typography and a half-decent editor to become something exceptional, an asset to the entire RPG community.

Value?

If it were priced appropriately for such purposes, I would recommend it – flaws and all – unreservedly. I would certainly keep a copy on hand for introducing family and friends to gaming for the first time. But the price is two-to-three times what I would expect to pay for a game that I expected to leave on a shelf (or a hard disc) against such a need; and that represents a caveat.

If you know that you are going to be introducing players who have never gamed before to the hobby, then it is still a worthy purchase, but if that is merely something that might happen in the future, it is probably priced out of the range of casual purchase. Similarly, if you know that you are going to GM a convention game targeted at novice players, it is a choice well worth considering – but if that’s not the case, the price is probably too high.

It is available in softcover for US $25 from Amazon in 8×11 page size or 6×9 page size and for US $9.95 from Amazon (6×9 Softcover) or DriveThruRPG as a PDF. However, the latter seemed also to be offering their “Pay What You Want” option; if that is really the case, then I would withdraw all reservations and recommend purchasing!

An Update

I offered the author, John McNabb, a preview of this review, and the opportunity to respond to my criticisms and comments.

He states that the high price on Amazon is the result of the product listing being made by the printing company that he used, and that he disagrees with it so much that he has created his own shopfront to sell copies directly at the lower price being charged on RPGNow.

I’ve updated the article above to link to both, so be careful which link you click on!

Johnn also tells me that many of the other issues I have identified are either in the process of being rectified, or have already been cleaned up relative to the version that I’ve seen, but I can only review what’s in front of me. I have no reason to doubt him, so the version you get might well be substantially improved over the review version discussed above – something to bear in mind!

The bottom line: The Morgalad Starter Book is well worth considering if you have need of it.