Quote from: Heavy Josh;1131812What sort of materials are transferable? Please!

It uses the base engine of SWN, and has a neat 'Low Magic' system, which is pretty easily transferable. It also has example of an alternate skill list and serves as a good demonstration of how to use the core system in other contexts. Its also got more Focuses and serve as a good way to make your own.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1131830It uses the base engine of SWN, and has a neat 'Low Magic' system, which is pretty easily transferable. It also has example of an alternate skill list and serves as a good demonstration of how to use the core system in other contexts. Its also got more Focuses and serve as a good way to make your own.

That much I know.  Are the caester generation tables transferrable to SWN? Thanks!

Quote from: Heavy Josh;1131877That much I know.  Are the caester generation tables transferrable to SWN? Thanks!

You can even use the bestiary.

I backed "Wolves of God" on the KS and ordered my hard copy from DTRPG over 2 months ago.
I gave up on it arriving (they even sent a 2nd copy, they were very nice about it), as I've had loads of problems with DTRPG physical books arriving at all or a VERY long wait.
So after over a 2 month wait and basically just forgot about it, it did actually arrive yesterday.[ATTACH=CONFIG]4772[/ATTACH]

All other books from Sine Nomine were in a full hardback A4 type size.
I was surprised to see a much smaller A5 sized book arriving.

Still, the binding quality is good so far and it is a pretty convenient size.
Not sure how that'll pan out in usage when actually running a game.

Checking DTRPG, it clearly describes the size, so it wasn't a mistake.

The binding is very tight and I worry that in order to read everything, I have to spread the book open quite a bit, so I wonder if the spine will snap over time.
Particularly as the text runs fairly close to the middle of the book, which would be fine if it were a full sized book, but in this smaller size, it makes a difference.

The print quality is great, pages feel solid and binding, whilst tight, hopefully will hold up.

It's probably the last RPG I'll be buying for a long time, maybe I won't ever buy an RPG again (certainly not from DTRPG anyway, with those terrible delivery times and poor reliability), as I don't run them very often anymore and I have plenty of RPG material.
If anything I'll be getting rid of stuff I know I won't be using anymore.

I'm in much the same boat. I'll likely buy anything else Sine Nomine puts out, but otherwise my gaming purchases will be few and far between from here on out because I simply have so much to work with at this point.

I love the size of that book, though I do hope the issues with the binding and print don't cause trouble down the road. I'm still waiting on my copy of the deluxe version, so I'm curious to see how it holds up and if it has similar issues.

That's a nice looking book!

Here's a quick Mini-review I did on Youtube
[video=youtube;viahHyu3WXg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viahHyu3WXg[/youtube]

Quote from: Brand55;1131762
I fully plan on raiding the GM tools for some of my other games, as is par for the course with just about anything Sine Nomine puts out.

That was more rambly than usual for my Speech-to-Text nonsense.  Apologies.

Short version: I'm picking through the free Sine Nomine stuff available now; nDervish has a good summary about what domain management stuff is in the various books on the first page; who uses what and what are your recommendations?  I'm doing some sandbox worldbuilding, I was starting to use ACKS, but for a D&D 5e - and I've been dicking around a little with the Immortals Companion for domains.

edit 2 - Turns out at some point I bought An Echo Resounding.  It's my read for the night.  The DTRPG sorting tool thing did me some good this time.

This book is more and more tempting...

Quote from: RandyB;1145662This book is more and more tempting...

Each to his own, but for me, $60 is WAY too much for such a tiny book. That's a full-sized book price.

I agree that $60 dollars is too much, but I do not regret having backed the Kickstarter. I've been reading through my copy for the first time over the last week, and I'm this close to starting up a game of it. It is a functional remake of B/X D&D with simple classes. I like that it has class-specific-deeds-for-XP rather than gold-for-xp. The setting is fleshed out with region-specific event tables, a hex-map of England, equipment and treasure tables, minster and monk generation (minsters being abbeys basically, which one should use for a quest-base), tables for generating Caesters (ruined Roman towns and cities, inhabited by brigands and monsters, that serve as the dungeons of this setting), and monster entries. 

The relics and potions lists are quite good, with flavourful entries baked in the setting's themes. I will name two and summarize their nature.

Dwarf-stone: an oily black stone the size of a child's fist. As long as it is worn on the bearer's skin, he will suffer no sickness nor plague.
Antique Garum: a fish-sauce "grown only more potent with the years". It can be applied to anything to make the object soft and edible (but distasteful to any English palate), or thrown to the ground, upon which time the stench will overcome any who smell it, save a Roman, who will no doubt appreciate the odour.

I was pleasantly surprised by the monster lists. I bought into the game for its historical setting, and I worried that a monster list would muddy the water. The entries are good though. Crawford has trimmed the Monster list down to those originating in Anglo-saxon lore. It has ents, sure, but they are not Peter Jackson's walking trees, nor even Tolkien's forest shepherds, but simply a man-and-a-half size of reclusive giant "melancholy with the sorrow of a race whose hour has passed". There is a kind of ent "infested with sorcery", called the eoten. Unlike ents they cling to their kind's lost power, using their strength to play at lords over those they can dominate.

There are dwarves, kind of, but more like the dwarves one hears about in Wagner's Ring Cycle. Dweorgs they are called, and they are twisted little men who desire after women, dwell in deep and hidden places, and craft beautiful things of wood and cloth and metal. They are cruelly strict in their hard bargains, unleashing any of a hundred plagues upon those who anger them.

My heart fell however, when I read "Orc" on the next entry. Not this cookie-cutter mediocrity!
Thankfully, these orcs are not Tolkien's, but again taken from an older tradition. They are human corpses animated by the spirit of a damned soul. This is more like the "orcneas" from Beowulf (where Tolkien took the name), which is possibly derived from "orcus", the name for Pluto god of the Underworld, and "nea", which is a corpse. Together, this makes something like "devil-corpse". I appreciate the attention to detail in entries like this.

There are several monsters that will be familiar in theme (but not always in detail) to the modern gamer: Merewife, Werwulf, Wraith, Ylfe, Haeg, demon, Draca. As well as creatures unfamiliar to most readers: Dru, Helrune, Fifel, Nicor, Pukkel, and Wudowose. Unlike certain bestiaries (*cough*5e Tome of Beasts*cough*), these are taken from the same culture and are internally coherent. Overall, I'd say that the monsters in this setting feel like if someone went back to the Anglo-saxon folklore from which Tolkien drew many of his ideas and presented those in an 8th century context for the modern player... Probably because that's just what Crawford did.

The setting is largely historical, as I have mentioned, with the most notable departures being:
1. The reality of magic, miracles, and monsters.
2. The presence of Arxes in many of the Roman ruins. These are magically-sealed demi-planes into which some of the last of the Romanish-Britons trapped themselves rather than be slaughtered by the Anglo-saxons. Inside these sealed places the legacy of Rome lives on, mixed with Hellish taint, and after long years some of these Arxes break open again, releasing their corrupted and malformed inhabitants. Some of the creatures that come out may be very human in appearance and nature, while others may be unrecognizable.

These Arxes are a little weird for me, but one could certainly excise them from the setting without missing much. You might like them, and I might come around. I don't know. *shrug*

There is a Splendour mechanic: a set of rules that determine how much individual items lend to the air of wealth when carried or worn by a character. This affects how many re-rolls a player gets per day for their character (from 0 to 4) and uses a math-friendly scale (from 0 to 16+).

I have one major complaint. Crawford loves to write. This maketh not for quick reading! The game rules are light, but stretch over 341 pages. To be fair, the game is complete: with everything the GM needs to run a game: character creation, rules, equipment, setting detail, good random generation tools for said setting, etc. And the writing is narrative and witty. (The conceit of the book is that it was written by an 8th century English monk and roleplayer.) This helps, but at times I found myself turning the page on yet another wall of text and gnashing my teeth at the lack of tables and charts to summarize some of this endless verbosity.

A minor complaint of mine is that I would have enjoyed a level of abstraction in the game's currency. Most items in the game are listed by their cost in pounds, shillings, and pence (librae, solidi, and denarii for the Roman nerds). One pound is 60 shillings, one shilling is 4 pence. It is a whim of mine that I have been steering towards abstracted wealth in RPGs for a while now, so this was a disappointment.

Thankfully, the game does not expect the players to find or spend much coin (the treasure tables contain goods and relics, no coin). The English barter, the monkish author says, leave penny-pinching and change-making to the Franks!

Overall, I think the game is a lovely capturing of the culture and beliefs of the period. In stark contrast to the mixed-bag, anything-goes metropolises of the biggest fantasy worlds out there, the setting is made up of villages containing about a hundred people. The only gathering places that contain a thousand to 4 thousand inhabitants in the whole country are the trading-markets of Londinwic, Hamwic, and Gipeswic in the south, and Eorwic up in Northumbria. But these are not capitals or towns or places of power, merely markets and camping places. They ebb and flow with the season and the flux of foreign traders.
The typical party will be fairly homogenous in culture and belief as well. Again, not your standard fantasy party made up of orcs, halflings, and half-elves, each from far-scattered regions of the world.

I found it refreshingly firm on its sensible stance towards obeying social customs, and not resolving all problems with the sword and seax. The monsters are good, the world-generation useful, and I look forward to running the game soon.

Oh, and the feasting table is good fun, and the book has a good index.

Quote from: Trinculoisdead on October 12, 2020, 06:15:05 PM
I agree that $60 dollars is too much, but I do not regret having backed the Kickstarter. I've been reading through my copy for the first time over the last week, and I'm this close to starting up a game of it. It is a functional remake of B/X D&D with simple classes. I like that it has class-specific-deeds-for-XP rather than gold-for-xp. The setting is fleshed out with region-specific event tables, a hex-map of England, equipment and treasure tables, minster and monk generation (minsters being abbeys basically, which one should use for a quest-base), tables for generating Caesters (ruined Roman towns and cities, inhabited by brigands and monsters, that serve as the dungeons of this setting), and monster entries. 

The relics and potions lists are quite good, with flavourful entries baked in the setting's themes. I will name two and summarize their nature.

Dwarf-stone: an oily black stone the size of a child's fist. As long as it is worn on the bearer's skin, he will suffer no sickness nor plague.
Antique Garum: a fish-sauce "grown only more potent with the years". It can be applied to anything to make the object soft and edible (but distasteful to any English palate), or thrown to the ground, upon which time the stench will overcome any who smell it, save a Roman, who will no doubt appreciate the odour.

I was pleasantly surprised by the monster lists. I bought into the game for its historical setting, and I worried that a monster list would muddy the water. The entries are good though. Crawford has trimmed the Monster list down to those originating in Anglo-saxon lore. It has ents, sure, but they are not Peter Jackson's walking trees, nor even Tolkien's forest shepherds, but simply a man-and-a-half size of reclusive giant "melancholy with the sorrow of a race whose hour has passed". There is a kind of ent "infested with sorcery", called the eoten. Unlike ents they cling to their kind's lost power, using their strength to play at lords over those they can dominate.

There are dwarves, kind of, but more like the dwarves one hears about in Wagner's Ring Cycle. Dweorgs they are called, and they are twisted little men who desire after women, dwell in deep and hidden places, and craft beautiful things of wood and cloth and metal. They are cruelly strict in their hard bargains, unleashing any of a hundred plagues upon those who anger them.

My heart fell however, when I read "Orc" on the next entry. Not this cookie-cutter mediocrity!
Thankfully, these orcs are not Tolkien's, but again taken from an older tradition. They are human corpses animated by the spirit of a damned soul. This is more like the "orcneas" from Beowulf (where Tolkien took the name), which is possibly derived from "orcus", the name for Pluto god of the Underworld, and "nea", which is a corpse. Together, this makes something like "devil-corpse". I appreciate the attention to detail in entries like this.

There are several monsters that will be familiar in theme (but not always in detail) to the modern gamer: Merewife, Werwulf, Wraith, Ylfe, Haeg, demon, Draca. As well as creatures unfamiliar to most readers: Dru, Helrune, Fifel, Nicor, Pukkel, and Wudowose. Unlike certain bestiaries (*cough*5e Tome of Beasts*cough*), these are taken from the same culture and are internally coherent. Overall, I'd say that the monsters in this setting feel like if someone went back to the Anglo-saxon folklore from which Tolkien drew many of his ideas and presented those in an 8th century context for the modern player... Probably because that's just what Crawford did.

The setting is largely historical, as I have mentioned, with the most notable departures being:
1. The reality of magic, miracles, and monsters.
2. The presence of Arxes in many of the Roman ruins. These are magically-sealed demi-planes into which some of the last of the Romanish-Britons trapped themselves rather than be slaughtered by the Anglo-saxons. Inside these sealed places the legacy of Rome lives on, mixed with Hellish taint, and after long years some of these Arxes break open again, releasing their corrupted and malformed inhabitants. Some of the creatures that come out may be very human in appearance and nature, while others may be unrecognizable.

These Arxes are a little weird for me, but one could certainly excise them from the setting without missing much. You might like them, and I might come around. I don't know. *shrug*

There is a Splendour mechanic: a set of rules that determine how much individual items lend to the air of wealth when carried or worn by a character. This affects how many re-rolls a player gets per day for their character (from 0 to 4) and uses a math-friendly scale (from 0 to 16+).

I have one major complaint. Crawford loves to write. This maketh not for quick reading! The game rules are light, but stretch over 341 pages. To be fair, the game is complete: with everything the GM needs to run a game: character creation, rules, equipment, setting detail, good random generation tools for said setting, etc. And the writing is narrative and witty. (The conceit of the book is that it was written by an 8th century English monk and roleplayer.) This helps, but at times I found myself turning the page on yet another wall of text and gnashing my teeth at the lack of tables and charts to summarize some of this endless verbosity.

A minor complaint of mine is that I would have enjoyed a level of abstraction in the game's currency. Most items in the game are listed by their cost in pounds, shillings, and pence (librae, solidi, and denarii for the Roman nerds). One pound is 60 shillings, one shilling is 4 pence. It is a whim of mine that I have been steering towards abstracted wealth in RPGs for a while now, so this was a disappointment.

Thankfully, the game does not expect the players to find or spend much coin (the treasure tables contain goods and relics, no coin). The English barter, the monkish author says, leave penny-pinching and change-making to the Franks!

Overall, I think the game is a lovely capturing of the culture and beliefs of the period. In stark contrast to the mixed-bag, anything-goes metropolises of the biggest fantasy worlds out there, the setting is made up of villages containing about a hundred people. The only gathering places that contain a thousand to 4 thousand inhabitants in the whole country are the trading-markets of Londinwic, Hamwic, and Gipeswic in the south, and Eorwic up in Northumbria. But these are not capitals or towns or places of power, merely markets and camping places. They ebb and flow with the season and the flux of foreign traders.
The typical party will be fairly homogenous in culture and belief as well. Again, not your standard fantasy party made up of orcs, halflings, and half-elves, each from far-scattered regions of the world.

I found it refreshingly firm on its sensible stance towards obeying social customs, and not resolving all problems with the sword and seax. The monsters are good, the world-generation useful, and I look forward to running the game soon.

Oh, and the feasting table is good fun, and the book has a good index.

Thanks for the review.  Crawford should hire you, because you probably just made him a sale...

BTW, here's a great documentary about the end of Roman Britain, it gives some great background context to the Wolves of God setting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glKe9njOB24

Neat! I'll check it out.

Yeah I don't mean to pander the product, it's just a promising game. I started off reading it with the apprehension that I wouldn't have enough ideas for an adventure of my own, but the book feeds you a lot of usable material. The minster generation in particular is good for jump-starting a campaign.

Last night I was reading the Caester (Roman city ruins) generation rules. They're good: fully automated point-crawl generators based on an hour-per-square exploration rate. There are Arx (enchanted dungeon-pocket-plane) generation rules as well. I've just come off an extensive playthrough of Caverns of Thracia, so my enthusiasm is dampened for dungeon-crawling, but people who are fans of early England and classic D&D, this is a potent combination.

Quote from: Graewulf on August 20, 2020, 10:16:41 AM

Quote from: RandyB;1145662This book is more and more tempting...

Each to his own, but for me, $60 is WAY too much for such a tiny book. That's a full-sized book price.

Jesus Christ!

The Old School Companion is $29.95, and that's including the PDF.