I get offered more product to review than I possibly have time to read, other than superficially. Sometimes that product is already commercially available, sometimes it’s the center of a fundraising campaign, sometimes it just comes out of the blue. While I would love to give every review it’s own post of prominence, reality dictates that this can’t always happen – and sometimes, I don’t have all that much to say about a product, anyway. The best compromise is to deal with a few different products at once – and so to today’s article…

Book Cover, Royden Poole's Field Guide to the 25th Hour

Click the cover image to buy from Amazon – but read the review first!

“Royden Poole’s Field Guide To The 25th Hour” – Clinton J. Boomer (Broken Eye Books)

I was reading a blog post earlier today in which the author claims to refute the 7 most common reasons not to use swearing in fiction. In fact, he only refuted three, maybe four of them, though he did carve out exceptions to another one or two before overgeneralizing those into whole-of-argument rebuttals.

Sometimes, a character is in such an extreme emotional state that it is unrealistic for them not to scream and swear. And sometimes, a character’s personality is such that they would resort to profanity far more readily than most. Those are the only two valid reasons for ‘colorful language’ in a story, or in a game.

So I was a little dubious when offered this for review. Here’s what the Editor-In-Chief of Broken Eye Books, a small indie press located in Seattle specializing in weird speculative fiction. told me about it:

Royden Poole’s Field Guide to the 25th Hour is over-the-top game designer Clinton J. Boomer’s return to the world of weird urban fantasy he created in The Hole Behind Midnight. It’s a collection of short, foulmouthed, irreverent, darkly humorous tales following the diminutive and foulmouthed private investigator Royden Poole as he dives further into the mysteries of this strange place we call reality. This psychedelic urban fantasy is an intricate mix of pop culture and mythology, literature and history.

The magic in the setting draws its power from “pop culture, mythology, literature, and history” but it’s set in the modern world. The novel The Hole Behind Midnight delves into the magic in more detail. In the novel, the Cthulhu Mythos, the Greek Pantheon, Peter Pan and Wendy, and others all make appearances.

There is a lot of cursing, though.

Available for pre-order (April 1 release) at Broken Eye Books and Amazon.”

A blending of “pop culture, mythology, literature, and history”, and delving into the “mysteries” of “reality,” both sounded quite intriguing, but a number of elements were off-putting – “Weird Urban Fantasy,” a “foul-mouthed,” character, and “humorous” stories made for a trio of red flags, simply because most swearing in fiction and media is totally unnecessary and distracting.

The ‘My Cousin Vinnie’ experience

Quite a long time ago, I was writing something for one of my campaigns, half-watching something on Television (probably Formula 1) at the same time. When whatever the program was ended, I was deep in a train of thought and so left the idiot box to babble in the background. What started playing was a comedy – most of which leave me stone cold – that I would never have watched under normal circumstances, “My Cousin Vinnie”. Much to my surprise, it gradually wrenched my attention away from what I was doing and held me riveted – when I wasn’t laughing out loud.

One of the first movies I bought on DVD was, consequently, “My Cousin Vinnie”. I was a bit surprised that it had an R rating but not excessively so – there were a number of sexual innuendos and references, not to mention Marisa Tomei’s ‘biological clock’ that would have definitely earned it a PG-13 at the very least. It wouldn’t have taken much to nudge it over the line. When I watched it, however, I found that it was so saturated with blue language that had been cut out of the version aired on television that it was hard work trying to work out what the characters were talking about. The characters may have been more realistic (in terms of a New York lawyer and his girlfriend) but the story was being swamped by the delivery system.

I gave away that DVD, and recorded the version that had been edited for television the next time it aired. I still have that videotape. And I leaned a valuable lesson about the value of swearing in media and fiction.

Getting back to ‘Royden Poole’s Field Guide To The 25th Hour’:

You know what? Exactly the same thing happens to me when reading – make that ‘attempting to read’ – this book. The characters are clearly delineated, and there’s enough buried meat in the content to make it interesting – but I found it very hard work to notice any of it because it was all delivered first-person by the ‘foul-mouthed’ Private Investigator.

If anything, I found, it’s even harder work dealing with this issue in written form, because in recorded media, you at least have tone of voice and visual context to guide you as to the meaning. In a literary work, you have to create all that in your own head as you read.

So if non-stop heavy swearing puts you off, give this a miss. If it doesn’t, and the subject matter intrigues you as much as it did me, give this some serious consideration. And always remember the “My Cousin Vinnie” experience.

The book is now available from Amazon in paperback and kindle formats.
Reduced-size image – click on the thumbnail to see the full-sized version in a new tab

The ePic Character Generator

In March I was contacted by Alex Fehertavi of . I Don’t think I can introduce their product half as well as he did:

“Our program is a realistic character illustration application, which can be a great aid for the fans of role playing games. With ePic you can easily create highly customized avatar portraits and tokens without having to draw them yourself. You can use these images to make your adventures come alive, illustrate your stories or use them as avatars in your games. The app is free to download, there is a number of free character packs, and we’re constantly updating our program with new ones that can be purchased.
Another example from the ePic Character Generator (greatly reduced in size). Click on the image to visit the site and see many more.

I’m always interested in tools to help my players and myself visualize what’s going on, so naturally, I paid attention to this one. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in a position to give it a spin at the time – the laptop I was using as my primary computer runs a non-Windows OS, and the browser predates the whole concept of Apps. In fact, I’m still not in a position to give it a test-spin; while I now have a windows-based PC, it doesn’t have a functional internet connection since it refuses to recognize my modem.

So I can’t say much about ease of use, or anything like that. But I can state that the results I’ve seen range from excellent to fantastic, and they appear to have a small but enthusiastic and active band of supporters, as evidenced by the entries into their monthly competitions and forum.

In particular, the support for characters beyond the mainstream (Elves, Dwarves, Humans) and beyond Fantasy / Superhero games gives this software a utility that other programs often don’t posses. The program is free to use but automatically watermarks images until you buy the Pro version. The creators make their money from sales of additional “character packs”, which vary in price from $4.99 to $8.99, and come bundled in various packages. These are all available from the website or through Steam.

One way in which the ePic Character Generator differs from most others is in the terms of use: “Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, subject to the following restrictions:

  1. The origin of the material generated by this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you created the original artwork.
  2. You can re-use any material generated by this program with or without any modification in your own products, but an acknowledgement of the pictures are generated by the “ePic Character Generator” in the product documentation is required if using the non-pro version.
  3. You may not resell any material in any form without adding custom value.”

If you want to use the image on the cover of a book, you can – or as an interior decoration. Or on a CD cover. Or to announce a birthday party. In fact, you can export the finished image into a PNG file with or without the background and use it anywhere you see fit. The only restriction is that until you buy the Pro version, you have to say where the image was created. You can’t get much fairer than that! If you’re interested in the ePic Character Generator, click on the image to the left.
A cropped excerpt from the Pythòs teaser at Starlit Games, where you can sign up to their newsletter for updates and special previews. Just click on the image and scroll down to sign up.

Pythòs

And so, to my feature review of the day. After I published Use The Force, Fluke: Who’s On First This Time? a few weeks ago, about the Initiative House Rules that have developed in the Star Wars campaign, I was contacted via Twitter by Gareth Johnson (@SGKeep aka Sir Gareth the GM on Twitter), who asked “What if I told you that I’m developing a game system with simultaneous action mechanics, instead of initiative?”

Now, I’ve never claimed to hold any sort of monopoly on good ideas, and just because I hadn’t been able to think of a practical solution to the problem, didn’t mean that no-one else ever had. Nevertheless, my total inability to see such a solution gave me a few qualms. So I replied, “I would be interested but wary of inherent impracticality of the GM fielding half a dozen PC actions & more NPCs at the same time!”

SG then reached out to me privately to give me the chance to review the game in question, “Pythòs”, or at least parts of it as it stands at the moment. Pythòs is currently in alpha-test, fairly early in its development cycle, so it’s unfair to hold it to the same standards as a full game; there will be changes made before full distribution commences.

SG subsequently sent me PDF extracts from the Character Generation and Combat sections of the game rules, and those are the subjects of today’s review.

I’m not going to get too deeply into issues of presentation, because that will almost certainly have evolved considerably by the time of publication. I know from experience that, while you’re thinking about that side of things long before you begin putting the text together, and even acting on those thoughts and plans in terms of commissioning art, no decisions are actually made final until you see how they all play together on the page. As the old saying goes, “no plan survives contact with the enemy”.

Positives

There are a lot of things about Pythòs that I liked, to greater or lesser degree, which I shall now commence gushing fulsomely about:

  • Character Generation is smooth, simple, and yet nuanced and sophisticated.
  • Stats – called abilities in the text, there are four of these, with quite possibly the best descriptions I’ve read in any RPG, ever. With a minimum of verbiage, the text states what the Attribute is, and what it is used for. Bonus points for color-coding each of them consistently throughout the text, (though I think a more fuchsia color might be easier to distinguish from the red than the orange currently in use).
  • Level Progression/XP places equal weight on defeating enemies (in combat or not), success in difficult tasks, and achieving challenging goals. 100 XP gets you another character level, but because what you earn is a function of the challenges that you had to overcome, the size of “1XP” is relative – what might earn you 20 XP at first level earns you nothing, or a trivial amount, 3 or 4 levels later. If characters want to progress further at the same pace, they have to continually seek out fresh challenges; eventually, a point of stability between the level of risks that the players are comfortable embracing and their current capabilities would be achieved, and progress would slow. At that point, which would be different for every group dynamic, the game becomes more about roleplaying these existing characters and less about crunching the system.
  • Damage Conditions are more sophisticated than D&D/Pathfinder and encompass the concept of lasting impacts on the character by means of thresholds of damage that are simple to track but still effective. However, since the actual consequences are “GM’s Discretion”, there exists the potential for ill-will (real or perceived) and interpersonal real-world conflict. Some examples/guidelines would be useful, or better yet, some actual advice on how to adjudicate these decisions – just to take some of the personalities out of the equation.
  • Mana is used to create magical effects using spells or to activate magical artifacts. This naturally caps the amount of magic that can be brought to bear by any character while providing a mechanism that can be manipulated to balance magic-based character types. I very much like the way Mana is handled by the Pythòs system.
  • There is a functional system for Extreme Efforts which permits characters to be more than the sum of their on-paper limits – I’ll get back to this in the “negatives” section to follow.
  • There is a simple but effective Levels Of Failure subsystem that GMs can choose to implement or not. This optional rule is very well done.
  • At first glance, the Skills (called Talents by the game system) appears too short, but this is because many functions are conflated into a single ‘archetypal’ ability. On closer analysis, there are just enough that characters will be forced to pick and choose what they get good at without bogging the mechanics down. There’s not a lot to dislike in this section, but there are a couple of issues that I would like to see addressed, as you’ll see in the negatives column.
  • Combat is sufficiently complex that it will not be mastered and min-maxed tactically quickly, but simple enough that players and GMs can grow in confidence and ability in the system. Easy to learn (especially if you keep a crib sheet handy), hard to master.
  • Description is a defined phase of the combat round, ensuring that everyone is on the same page when deciding what actions to perform.
  • Decisions are indeed made concurrently, so there is truth in SG’s “advertising” of the fact.
  • There is a simple but effective Fatigue system that looks like it would work quite well, limiting characters without constraining them.
  • Attack Resolution follows a standard procedure regardless of the nature of the attack.
  • There are (rudimentary) rules for Improvised Weapons and Shields. I would like to have seen some guidelines/advice on making these decisions.
Negatives

As you can see, there’s a lot of elements of Pythòs that I deemed worth singling out for praise, even though the game system is still a work-in-progress. This is not an unreserved commendation, however. There are a few things – some trivial, some niggling, and some substantial – to discuss. Some of these are oversights; some are mistakes, and some are ideas that may not have occurred to SG.

  • In the Damage and Dying section, when discussing Recovery, there is no mention of natural healing. None.
  • In the same section, Bonuses To Endurance subsection, there is a logical issue that is insufficiently discussed. If a character suffering an Endurance Penalty receives enough accumulated damage to kill or achieve some other character status (just barely), what happens when that Endurance Penalty is lifted or wears off? The implication of the rules as written is that the character comes back to life. Ergo, ‘Penalties to Endurance’ can’t be handled in “exactly the same way” as bonuses to Endurance. Common sense tells me what was intended and how I would handle this, but there are pedants out there…
  • The “Bonuses to Will” section should be followed by a “Penalties To Will” section, even if it only states that there should never be any. I think it more likely that there would be situations in which such a penalty was appropriate, and there should be rules to cover them.
  • In the kudos, I applauded the rules permitting extreme efforts, called “Mortal Efforts” by the rules. That’s a term that sends a mixed message when discussing superior abilities (i.e. above those of typical Mortals). There is also the implication that attempting such an effort risks killing the character, something that is not suggested by the actual rules. The problem is that the term describes a capability that only “mortals” have, but the the term “Mortal Effort” already has a different meaning to the one that is intended in this context. A better term might be “Heroic Effort.”
  • In the Talents section, it is not clear how a character can get Expertise Bonuses.
  • Also in the Talents section, there is the potential for an optional rule that I would consider worthwhile. You should be able to choose (permanently) to be better at one specific application of the Talent (+x) in exchange for being penalized -1 in all other applications of the Talent. This should be coupled with a mandatory +1 improvement in the Talent by whatever the mechanism for skill improvement is, in effect canceling out the penalty and “channeling” the entire improvement in capability into the Specialty. There should also be a cap to how many of these you can have (say, 3 base – by race and/or character class) and +1 to the limit each character level. It’s my feeling that the broadness of definition of the Talents mandates such an option, enabling a character to be better at making speeches than they are at persuading others in a 1-to-1 or ‘haggling’ situation.
  • The logic used to determine the sequence of combat maneuver resolution is confusing. One character can use a Maneuver to close up on an enemy, but before he can attack the target, at the same time, that target can move away, out of melee range? I would have expected a quite different resolution sequence:
    • Free in which any updates, effects, or alterations to the combat situation / environment occur, eg eruptions, water level changes, spells wear off if their duration has expired, etc – anything that is not a direct consequence of a character action or a free action accompanying such an action.
    • Defensive in which characters prepare to be attacked. Bonuses or penalties resulting from Defensive actions last until the Free phase of the next combat round, and may persist at the GM’s discretion. For example, once you have taken cover, you can perform some other action next phase while still being behind cover.
    • Maneuver in which characters who are in motion move. These should not occur simultaneously, but in sequence of slowest to greatest movement speed, with some form of tie-break, permitting faster characters to intercept slower ones.
    • Attack in which all attempts to alter the status of another character are resolved – whether that’s running them through with a blade, chopping off a piece of their anatomy with an axe, beaning them with a shield, casting a spell on them, or shoving a healing potion down their throat.
    • Other for anything else – turning a dial, pulling a switch, whatever.
  • There’s a problem with the Fatigue rules in that humans can go as much as week without food and suffer no substantial ill-effects but die in only a few days without water; yet, starvation is mentioned as resulting from not eating for a day, and water consumption is not mentioned at all.
  • A second problem with the Fatigue section is that the impact of temperature extremes is not mentioned. There needs to be some system for handling this.
  • A third Fatigue problem is the one that kills more swimmers at Bondi Beach than any other: sustained effort. Unless you are specially trained and prepared, and naturally gifted, you can only swim for so long. This is implied to some extent by mention of “Forced Marches”, but the assertion that the causes listed are only examples isn’t strong enough and doesn’t go far enough.
  • Finally, to the great innovation I was looking for, the secret to simultaneous resolution of combat stages: Write it down. This was something of a disappointment, to be honest. A typical fight in the Zenith-3 campaign might involve 4 PCs, 2 NPC allies, 6 NPC enemies of significance, and 20 flunkies of less importance, plus an unknown number of non-combatants. Every 6-second combat round, if run by these rules, would require the GM to write more than a page of notes, making a whole bunch of decisions while keeping the overall situation, as each character understands it, in mind. Compare that workload with ANY form of sequencing in which A acts and the action is resolved, then B acts/reacts and that is resolved, and then C acts/reacts and that is resolved, and so on, and the difference is quite clear. Yet, this is not the end of the world – one simple tool and a couple of tweaks would take this out of the impractical and into the more practical.
    • First, groups should be treated as though they were “one individual” or “two individuals” rather than 20 or 30 individuals – they make decisions and function as a block. The decision as to whether a given bunch of characters should be the GM’s prerogative, but the default should be to function en masse.
    • Second, abandon the writing down, at least in part. Instead, use combat counters made of cardboard of some sort, color coded by the type of action to be undertaken. One side is nothing but the color, the other specifies what the action is but not the target – that still has to be written down. This enables the GM to simply glance around the table to get a sense of what characters are doing, and permits the simultaneous resolution of all actions of a given type by downsizing the scope of the task. This infuses what is standard practice in many board games into a RPG combat.
  • Oh, all right, one more – an afterthought – Aborting An Action. It should say, somewhere in the rules, that you can give up whatever you were planning to do at any moment; that doesn’t give you another action that round, it simply means that you aren’t doing whatever you were going to do. Otherwise, pre-specified attacks would continue to rain down on a character who is surrendering as a free action when their damage total reaches critical levels.
Pythòs – the conclusion

For a product still in Alpha-test, Pythòs is impressive. 14 kudos and 11 brickbats is quite a good score, especially since all 11 of the criticisms are correctable with a little tweaking, if Gareth chooses to do so.

I specifically want to draw his attention to my 2014 article, The Application Of Time and Motion to RPG Game Mechanics, which I think might be tremendously helpful to the ongoing development of Pythòs.

I’m looking forward to hearing that the game has progressed to the point of being ready for a Kickstarter fundraising, and will be very interested in seeing what the finished product looks like. If you are as interested as I am, why not click on the gorgeous image above and subscribe to the newsletter? This is one fundraising campaign that you won’t want to miss!


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