RPGPundit Reviews: The Forward... to Adventure! Gamemaster's Notebook!
("FtA!GN!")

This is a review of the FtA!GN! sourcebook written by.. oh look, written by me! Obviously, those of you concerned by little things like objectivity should consider yourselves notified that, as both the reviewer and the author of this book, I might have a very slight personal bias.  Keeping that in mind, here we go:

First things first, let's deal with all the parts of this book that the RPGPundit had nothing to do with. FtA!GN! is a 300 page sourcebook for the "Forward... to Adventure!" ("FtA!") RPG (which I'll note, was also written by me), and published by Flying Mice games.  The illustrations and layout was handled by Mr. Clash Bowley.

Now, some of you may recall from earlier reviews of Mr.Bowley's work that I often pointed out that there were some issues with layout and structure in his books; I'll quote a fellow gamer of mine who commented (looking at FtA!GN! and IHW:Dragons, two of Bowley's latest projects) that Clash certainly seems to get better at layout every time.  In the FtA!GN! book, the layout work is very professional, and there's little to see as negative about it, aside from a few typos here and there (and a couple of page errors, like the FtA! "cheat sheet" at the back of the book being labelled as page 53, when it should actually be page 301).

The book is a big thick softcover manual, well printed, with a nice full-colour picture of a Floating Eye in a dungeon on the cover. The back cover has a collage of full-colour versions of some of the photo-influenced images that appear inside the book in black and white.  In all, these images do a good job of both highliting some of the things you find in the manual, and capturing the overall "feel" of the atmosphere the book evokes.

Inside the book, you find a good number of black and white illustrations, all in the style common to the Flying Mice books, plus a number of cartoony-style images that are evocative of the 1e AD&D DMG illustrations, and two different maps of The Setting, one produced by Sithson, the other by John Morrow.  The humour in the cartoons is quite cheesy, but amusing mainly for its nostalgic reference to earlier RPG books.  Tables abound in the supplement, which have all been quite well laid-out.

Ok, now in terms of the actual content: FtA!GN! is a very mixed bunch of materials, literally including everything AND the Kitchen Sink (there are rules for encountering Kitchen Sinks in the dungeon, an homage to the Nethack computer games).

Aside from that you get new races, new material on classes (and a new class), guidelines and rules on gameplay, new equipment, new magic rules and spell lists, NPC guidelines, wilderness guidelines and random tables for terrain and settlement design, guilds and organizations, crime and punishment, caravans, rules for gunpowder and sci-fi weapons and items... whew, and that's just the first 150 pages!

The book can be roughly divided in two halves: The first 150 pages are the additional gamemaster material for generic use in the FtA! game.  The second 150 pages detail a game setting called.. The Setting. Shit, couldn't the author have picked a more creative name? Here you get detail on the overall geography, the different regions and cultures, and later material on the Planes and planar adventuring, and finally a number of new monsters for the FtA! game.

This hodgepodge method has, as its great advantage, that virtually everyone will find something of use in this book. There's a lot of stuff here, a lot of random tables too, that you could easily use in any fantasy RPG, and not just FtA!.  On the downside of this, you are also likely to have some material in this book that you will never end up using, depending on what your priorities are.  The Setting material, for example, is obviously most useful if you wanted a new fantasy setting to run FtA! with. If you aren't looking for that, you might find some material in there that will give you some good ideas for your own setting, but obviously a lot of material will go unused.

The next question would be: how good is all this stuff?

First, the races: the races included are all listed as "optional", depending on GM approval to be played.  Some of the races seem highly impractical for certain kinds of games (the Drakes, for example, are not humanoid at all; and the Goblin and Kobold races detailed might not be suitable for a game in a setting where goblinoids are meant to be utterly xenophobic and not likely to be found in even an "evil" fantasy city that has non-goblinoids in it). Some of these races are also more powerful than the "standard" races: Centaurs are quite nasty if well-built.  Also, if one wants to be a min-maxer, these new races (like new races in sourcebooks often are) will tend to be more vulnerable to abuse; Lizardmen, for example, are quite prone to that.  Then again, the races here are as much meant to encourage a GM's creativity than to just be a fixed number of new additions.

The notes on classes give information about how the different base classes of FtA! can be focused to create specific archetypes. The Warrior class, for example, can encompass your basic melee fighter, your archer, a knight, a swashbuckler, a ranger or a paladin.  The material in FtA!GN! on this subject doesn't change anything, it just gives more details as to how a player could craft the class (based on the class's ACT/PAS check options and Melee/Missile combat options as well as skill point allocation) to fit the archetype he wants.  Not exactly advanced material, but it could be useful to help out some players.

This section also introduces one new class: the Monk. This class represents a non-magical kung-fu martial art monk from a eastern-style monastic order (the class having an in-context rational in The Setting's material). The lack of "mystical powers" for the monk might seem jarring to D&D-trained players at first, except that it becomes clear that if its mystical monks you want, you can craft (and are shown how to do so) a mystic-monk from the Warrior-wizard or Wizard classes.

After that we get to the FAQ section, where some questions are answered regarding the rules of FtA!  I suspect some of this stuff is actually "stealth erratta" on the part of the author... sneaky on his part, but useful answers for FtA! players.

Some new optional rules are presented: the "close damage" rule alters the nature of combat (giving the slightly-disadvantaged side of a very close fight a bit more of a chance), and the roleplaying award rule is simply the incorporation of a longstanding house-rule the author has used in most of his RPG campaigns.

Next, we get to the equipment section, where the very first thing out the door is the author cheating, by reprinting (in a slightly altered, expanded format) the "Random Alcoholic Drinks" table he had previously posted on his blog (and his RPG forum, and then reposted on his blog, and probably again on his RPG forum.. shit, the fucker sure is proud of that random drinks table). Fortunately, this is complemented by a set of rules regarding drunkenness, which only makes sense if you're going to offer the PCs a bunch of new alcoholic drinks with silly names like "Madame Roland's Bitter Mixture" or "Bishop Abelard's Bowel-Bashing Cocktail".
Next you get some rules for making armour out of dragon scales (another homage to Nethack?), and some good little tables for random jewels, gems and ancient coin types. Then you have musical instruments, and rules for poisons, and finally tools for the Craft skill.

After that, though, the author indulges in a couple of pages of utterly self-serving tripe, detailing some very specific information about Pipes and Tobacco, something that a large number of readers will probably have very little interest in (even though they probably should). This section is kind of amusing though, as you get the feeling even if you're not a pipe smoker that the section is full of in-jokes that pipe cognoscenti would recognize. Anyways, its only one and half pages of text more or less, so you can just skip over it if you don't like tobacco and pipes in your fantasy world.  Of course, if you don't, what kind of a monster and/or idiot are you?

Then we get a couple of very cool tables: on non-magical scrolls by famous Shadowrun RPG writer Jong W. Kim, and random Pointy Hats by well-known German (and amateur loony) Settembrini. After that, there's magical locks, and the aforementioned rules on kitchen sinks. Be careful with those kitchen sinks! You might summon up a water elemental from the pipes by accident.

After a brief section on dungeon lighting, you get quite possibly the weirdest few pages in the book, in what is clearly another homage to Nethack: rules on "fine dungeon dining":  This is a list of every single monster in FtA! and FtA!GN!, and what happens when a PC eats its remains! I mean really, is this sort of thing necessary?! What kind of demented Player goes around eating the corpses of monsters he's killed??  Well, granted, there's that one monster corpse that will make you go up 1 level the moment you eat it...

The chapter closes with Skyrock's "eerie room phenomenon" random table. T

The section on Magic starts out similar to the one on Classes: it details each type of spell list and what kind of Wizards would be likely to dedicate itself to that list; giving the GM and players a lot of guidelines as to how to personalize the style of their wizard PC. After that you get two new spell lists: Summoning, and Necromancy. The book's author has privately confided with me that these two spell lists are found in the FtA!GN! book as opposed to the main book because the nature of these magic lists tend to be more the type of magic that NPC wizards (often evil wizards) would be likely to use, though I personally suspect it was also done in order to add another really cool element to coerce FtA! players to buy this sourcebook...  whatever the true motive, if you want to learn how to become a lich, you'll have to get the FtA!GN! sourcebook.

The NPC section begins with basic "monster-type" stats for the PC races (if you need to know what the average human peasant or barbarian tribesman or the average elf or dwarf is like). Then you get character builds, very generic ones, for each of the classes at several different levels. For example, you get the statblock for a Rogue at level 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 13, 16 or 20.  This is great for quick-reference if you need to know what a given rogue (or warrior, or rogue-wizard) the PCs bump into will be like.  Unfortunately, to actually make this standard template into a fuller set of stats for a more detailed and personalized NPC for long-term use, the GM will still have to do a bit more work. This section also has useful tables on random NPC personality and random wizardly eccentricities.

After that you get a chapter with overland travel rules, explaining travel times and the likelihood of your PCs getting lost on their journey. Next you get some detailed random terrain tables, with each type of terrain (ie. Forest) having a number of random tables for determining "sub-terrain" (ie. a forest might have some wooded hills, a valley, rocky hills, lowland swamp or a ravine), random tables for trails, water sources, ruins, dungeon entrances, mystical sites,  and random animal encounters.  The latter aren't exactly random "monster" encounters, you're as likely on the trip to run into an "encounter" with hummingbirds or frogs than with Orcs or Wyverns.  You get similarly detailed tables for forest terrain, tundra, badlands, grasslands, desert, plains, swamp/jungle, hills, and mountains.  Readers who aren't absolutely obsessed with random tables might find this section to be random-table-overkill, but the nice side of these tables is that one need not use them all; a GM can easily cherry-pick the tables that he finds worth rolling on, or simply just pick results without rolling at all.

The Settlement creation rules allow for a random structured system to create random villages, towns and cities, with criteria for size, markets (ie. what you're able to find at the local market), settlement alignment, government, law level, and random special aspects that make the settlement unique.  The setup for these rules is clearly meant to be reminiscent of Traveller's random system for creating planets, with a similar "barcode" system of quick reference.

Then you get some detailed tables on random City encounters and random Tavern details. Then some rules on taxation and currency exchange, meant to help the GM whittle away at some of that PC wealth. Rules are also given on how to sell items and hire spellcasters.

Next you have a section on Guilds and Organizations, which details a number of sample groups that the PCs can either belong to or encounter in their adventures. Information is given on membership requirements, fees for membership, and benefits of membership. Sample groups include the stereotypical Thieves Guild, Assassin's Brotherhood, Loremaster societies, Craft Guilds, Universities (medieval style), Wizards' Colleges, Illusionist Schools, the Druids, Templars, Monastic orders, a sample Priesthood/Church, a Pirates' Brotherhood, Rangers, a more or less "evil"/xenophobic Knight group, and military orders. Plus, there are guidelines for creating your own groups.

Next you have some detailed mechanics on handling Law and punishment; with rules given for different crimes, along with trial rules and sentences if you lose the trial.

Caravan rules are next, and we're back to the random tables, detailing what you're likely to find in a random caravan.

Gunpowder rules allow you to introduce renaissance-style firearms to the FtA! game, and there is a brief list of Science-Fiction items based on alien/long-lost technology rather than magic. These range from the bog-standard laser pistol/rifle or medipack, to suspciously familiar items from pop culture like the "Energy Sword", Force Field Belt, the "Flying Ring", or the Sonic Lockpick.

At this point we get to the second half of the book, The Setting.  To briefly summarize the nature of this campaign setting, The Setting is essentially a medieval/early-renaissance European world, which had its equivalent to the ancient Roman empire that rose and fell, and was pleasantly rolling along with various kingdoms and feudal states when the region was suddenly devastated by an invasion of barbarians reminiscent of the Mongol horde.  These barbarians wiped out the vast majority of civilization, only one large kingdom and a handful of city-states managed to hold them off.  The mongols spontaneously ceased their invasion when the majority of the horde unexpectedly converted to a foreign religion with obvious similarities to tantric/tibetan Buddhism. The "present day" of the setting takes place 100 years after all that; the middle region of the Setting is a vaste wilderland filled with ruins and a handful of struggling cities, still rules by the Barbarian hordes (who are slowly becoming more sedentary and taking on elements of civilization), ruling over the surviving cities of their territory as tributary-slave cities.   The western coastal region has the last surviving "old kingdom", which is based on real-world Poland, complete with a very powerful nobility and relatively weak King; and with a monotheistic religion (based more on the old Sol Invictus/Mithras religion than Christianity).  The eastern coastal region is relatively wilder, but has one very large metropolis city-state that is slowly expanding its power and becoming a kingdom in its own right, and another large city that acts as a wild Pirate-city.   The far north is rough barbarian lands, with elven forests, humanoid-infested hills, a small halfling confederacy, and an evil Ice-Wizard growing in power and threatening to become the next devastating menace to all the land.  The far south is full of wild foreign kingdoms, ancient civilizations, a land full of Giants, and a kingdom of intelligent Gorillas in the southern jungles.  There's a bit of everything, and some of it is fairly gratuitous (you get the feeling that the Gorilla Kingdoms are there just because gamers really dig intelligent Gorillas), but the central parts of the setting are actually quite coherent and almost read like an "alt-history" with a lot of inspiration from various social/historical/ideological concepts from our own world.

The Bowlands (the Poland-equivalent kingdom) get a very detailed treatment, including a relatively detailed breakdown of all the 130-or-so Noble houses of the kingdom (complete with heraldic shields for each of them), lots of information on the politics of the kingdom (the quasi-democracy of the Sejm, the parliament and the powers of the Sejm versus the non-hereditary King's powers), details on different regions and (a bit further on) lots of information on the monotheistic religion of the Unconquered Sun.

You also get a lot of information on three distinct Elven cultures in The Setting (the insular and powerful "high" elves, the friendlier "forest" elves, and the more barbarian-like "Hill" elves in the south), the Dwarves and their fading strongholds (yes, Dwarves here are getting fatalistically-shafted like in so many other fantasy settings), and halflings are especially interesting, being a mix of your folksy friendly Tolkien "shire" halflings and some truly hardcore kickass fighting forces making sure that they defend what's theirs (their land, the Comark Valley, borrowing some elements from the historical Swiss cantons).

The growing city-state of Landrest serves as your waterdeep like basically-good metropolis, with a big mix of cultures and religions and lots of interesting places to visit (plus, its close to the ruins of Arcadia, the "rome" of this setting, and supposedly the single-largest dungeon-setting in the whole world).  A bit further north you have the frontier city of Hyporbria, which gets a shorter treatment but is basically your lawless northern-frontier town, full of barbarians, rogue wizards, and close to some hardcore nasty threats like the Ice Wizard. Down further south on the coastline you have the Pirate city of Diablo's Point. Its your Port-Blacksand-esque basically-evil metropolis, and the section on this city has extensive material on pirates (including a ton of entertaining pirate NPCs with names like Dancing Gus Slasher, Green Anne, or the dreaded Dwarven pirate Gnorri The Crook-bladed), as well as lots of details on the warring gangs and dangerous non-pirate NPCs of this cut-throat city.

The section on the central "Tribelands" of the Hong barbarians (the mongols, essentially) is less detailed in terms of geography, leaving a lot of room for the GM to create his own cities, use the random settlement tables, and fill in some home-made material.  What it does detail extensively is the culture and nature of the various clans that make up the Hong, some of which have become sedentary, others that cling to the nomadic lifestyle, many that fight with themselves, others that have blood-feuds with neighbouring kingdoms (especially the Bowlands), and a few which have refused to convert to the new Great Wheel (buddhist) religion and follow their old darker gods. A random table is provided to determine what any non-hong town or settlement has for a relationship with the local Hong overlords, creating lots of potential for adventure as some settlements might be in open revolts, others hopelessly oppressed, some might work in a friendly relationship with the Hong (and turn against any PCs out to cause trouble for them) and a few will be full of traitors and collaborators willing to try to turn a hapless adventuring party over to the Hong.

The section on the southern areas are much less detailed, leaving more room for GM-additions and making it clear that these are the distant lands mid-level PCs might go adventuring to, but they include an undead-filled desert ruled by an evil godlike undead being in a lost pyramid, a babylonian-style civilization complete with ziggurats, a valley full of barbaric Giants (and Giant Killer Chickens..?), and the aforementioned Gorilla Kingdoms.

Extensive details are given to three of the dominant religions of The Setting: the monotheistic Unconquered Sun religion; the Great Wheel philosophy, and the older Druid and Hong pagan religions. None is presented in an entirely good or entirely bad light, and you won't find a lot of material related to rules here, instead you'll get a lot of info on ceremonies, practices and feast days.  Fluff, not crunch.  In fact, the entire section on The Setting has very little system-stuff in it, meaning (I suppose) that if one found The Setting interesting but didn't particularly care for the FtA! system, they could also purchase FtA!GN! as a setting-sourcebook for use with any other fantasy RPG.

The penultimate chapter deals with the Planes of existence and Planar adventuring. The Planes here are very much oriented toward high-level play, but some areas are not inaccessible to lower-level players.  Extensive rules (and, of course, lots of random tables) are provided for alternate material planes, allowing for the setup of a low, mid or high level play of dimension-hopping adventurers. A ton of keen material is provided with pre-made adventure seeds for different unusual material plane settings. The Astral and elemental planes are very detailed as well, and are certainly less hospitable to lower level play, but some details are provided facilitating survival in these environment, and some interesting elements are provided that give fuel to potential adventure/campaign concepts: astral sailing ships sailing the Astral seas being just one example.
The outer planes are detailed more briefly, and are built on a Law/Chaos axis (though these are only two facets of the icosahedron-shaped shell of the universe, where the outer planes are found, so others can be created... and yes, the FtA! universe is shaped like a D20). And beyond the icosahedron? That's the territory of the Cthulhu-esque Unspeakably Old Ones, also briefly detailed.

The last section is the new monsters chapter.  The monsters provided here are fairly varied, but many of them have a more tongue-in-cheek quality than the monsters found in the main FtA! setting.  Those that are relatively less silly in this list are clearly inspired from the Nethack computer game the author loves so much.  Without going into too much details, here's a list of the monsters included: Alarm Fungus, Astral Mole, Catmen, Chaos Creatures (this is an expanded and more varied entry than the Chaos Creature entry in the main FtA! book), Drake, Dungeon Hippo, Evil Robot (non humanoid and humanoid,  including varieties that seem to have pop-culture influence, including pepperpot-shaped robots bent on exterminating everything in their path, and a not-quite-evil humanoid robot that drinks, smokes, and steals everything in sight), Floating Eye, Floating Sphere, Gazebo (and Dread Gazebos!), Giant Attack Pandas, Giant Egg Monster, Ice Wolf, Jabberwocky, Leprechaun, Time Entity, Vicious Killer Chicken, and a Great Old One.

FtA! was designed as "toolkit" style game, and FtA!GN! takes that to the maximum, providing three hundred pages worth of material for a GM to pick and choose as he sees fit.  Clearly, it will be the rare purchaser who will be able or interested in using absolutely everything in this book. Instead, the book is meant to be used and re-used on a game-by-game basis, the GM being able to reference and easily adapt the material therein for individual utility.

Again, keep in mind the bias of the reviewer, but hopefully this review is fair enough that it will give everyone a fair idea of what's in the book, and leaving it to each person to judge for themselves whether there will be enough there to make it worth the purchase.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Brigham Anniversary Pipe + Comoy's English Mixture

Both the FtA links are broken in your sig, Pundit.

Yes, Unfortunately, Clash's site is down.  I'll update my .sig to go directly to the Lulu page I guess.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;279802Yes, Unfortunately, Clash's site is down.  I'll update my .sig to go directly to the Lulu page I guess.

RPGPundit

It's up again.

-clash

Overall it sounds like an interesting game system. Maybe I missed it: are there any preview downloads to examine?

If only I wasn't up to my armpits in playtests and retro systems at the moment I'd give it a try. Seems like there is an explosion of game stuff piling up on my desk at the moment.

It looks like there's no "previews" per se on Clash's site; but if you were to look through my blog entries (or the pundits' forum here) you'd find a lot of additional material and stuff from the design process of this book, that ended up in the finished product.

RPGPundit