RPGPundit Reviews: Spears of the Dawn

This is a review of the Old-school RPG "Spears of the Dawn", by Kevin Crawford, published by Sine Nomine publishing.  It is a hardcover book, with a nice full-colour cover, black and white interiors with original (nice) black and white illustrations, about 175 pages.

Spears of the Dawn is the latest game by Kevin Crawford, author of absolutely genius RPGs like Stars Without Number, Red Tide, and Other dust. Even before opening this book, I'd be willing to bet my best pipe that I'm going to think the game is great; his track record is just that awesome.  What I really found more interesting was that Crawford had chosen to do an old-school RPG in an African-Inspired Setting right around the same time that I had decided to do an old-school RPG in an Indian-Inspired setting (Arrows of Indra).  So you'll have to forgive me (Kevin most of all) but I just can't resist making this something of a comparative review.

Ok, so now that I've read it, on to the review:


First of all, the basics: Spears of the Dawn is an old-school "OSR" game, which is to say roughly based on the old-edition D&D rules.  Its system is extremely similar to the system Crawford has used in his previous games (at least, SWN and Other Dust) to the point that they'd be pretty well fully compatible; and very easily compatible with any other old-school D&D product.

So the basic stats are the D&D stats, and there are classes, hit points, combat is basically similar, experience points, saving throws, etc. You do get a few variants (like re-rolling all your hit points at each level and keeping the new total IF it is higher than what you previously had), but largely, we're talking your standard system here. The rules are very straightforward, and at the end of their section include one page of very basic "conversion notes" for other OSR games and a page of "quick reference" for rules.

Where things vary are with the system of origins and skills. Characters choose an origin, which first requires choosing one of several cultural backgrounds (all humans, there's no demihuman PCs in this game). You have the Kirsi, who are valiant horse-riding warriors; Lokossa who are a highly-regimented jungle-dwelling culture; the Meru who are savannah-dwelling nomads; the Nyala, a decadent civilized people; and the Sokone, who are a culture of civilized merchants.

Each culture comes with a selection of ten or so different origins, things like "Kirsine sunrider", "Lokossan runaway", "Meruan scout", "Nyalan hollow prince", "Sokone thief", etc.  These flesh out a character's background while at the same time providing a selection of skills.
The skill system is the same as in SWN or Other Dust, based on a 2d6 roll, adding skill bonus and attribute bonus, which can be resolved against a difficulty number, opposed checks, or extended skill checks.

Now, what strikes me as very interesting if we compare "Spears of the Dawn" to "Arrows of Indra" is how in one sense they are quite similar products (both non-European settings for an OSR game) but in some crucial areas it seems Crawford and myself made very different design choices when it came to how to approach it.  For example, when it came to decisions about elements like Race and Class, I had tried, strictly within the framework of the spectrum of authentic Indian mythology, to stick as close to what would imitate the D&D-standards as possible.  On the other hand, Crawford got rid of non-human races altogether, and while his four classes are not alien to AD&D standards, and while he doesn't go off into some ultra-weird territory, sticking close to the standard was also clearly not a as high a priority.

There are only four classes in Spears of the Dawn (the origins, however, provide a very good amount of variety within those classes): Griot, Marabouts, Ngangas, and Warriors.  Griots are a kind of bard, they are "praise-singers" (who sing the praises of great men at important moments and occasions) as well as erudite lore-keepers and counselors.  Marabouts are similar to clerics, in that they are "friends of spirits" who serve these spirits/gods.  Ngangas are magicians who control a sorcerous force called ashe.  Warriors are obviously your standard fighters, though I'll note that to balance out the powers the other classes get (the magic of the Marabouts and Ngangas, and the might-as-well-be-magic songs of the Griots) the warriors get to choose special combat techniques from a list at every odd level.

The styles of the different groups of humans and the names of the classes hint at another important divergence: While Arrows of Indra is a setting based 95% on a snapshot of one particular place and time in mythological Indian history, Spears of the Dawn is a pastiche.  Its map (a simple but nice black and white hexmap) is not based directly on any given place in our own world, but rather is a general location in which to put a mishmash of cultural influences that existed (in real life) in a variety of very different times and places throughout African history.

Why this difference in strategy? Well, when I was first starting to write Arrows of Indra, I had a choice to make about this, and I had considered a more-generic "pastiche-style" setting, but gradually came to reject that in favor of focusing very much in-depth on a specific Epic period in Indian mythological history (the Mahabharata period).  And I suspect that the reason why I rejected the pastiche method is similarly the reason why Crawford accepted it.

In my case, I realized that I'd be crazy not to take advantage of the immense wealth of material and information available for an already established world setting that would immediately resonate with people (the same reason, say, why Greg Stafford set Pendragon in the actual Arthurian legends, not in some generic fantasy world).  It was fortunate for me that the Mahabharata is this rich fountainhead of myth, with a setting that seemed made for adventuring and captured 95% of the rich tropes one could associate with India (leaving about 5% anachronism).

On the other hand, Africa is much more complicated. While India has a variety of cultures and narratives, it has one big "dominant" narrative in the ancient epics (in the same way the West has Arthurian legend, or China has Romance of the Three Kingdoms).  Africa doesn't have this, there's no single-source of rich setting to place your game in; instead there's a huge variety of different cultural mythologies and tropes that occur scattered all across time and distance. You can't just pluck out one single snapshot and make it really feel like "Africa" (maybe you could get one and make it feel like "Ethiopia" or like "North Africa" or like "Central Africa", etc. but not the whole-hog).  So with Africa, I think Crawford was probably required to go with a pastiche.

I'll note that this is in no way a criticism; a pastiche done well is capable of being really fine (I'm a huge Mystara fan, after all), and Crawford does a very good job of his.  I'll note that he makes a point of going all the way, since he's doing a pastiche anyway, and showing off just how much diversity in culture and background there really is.  People who are thinking a very stereotypical kind of "Africa" of that older kind of cheap American movies, of just jungles and tribesmen, will be surprised to see a lot of what is found in the setting.

There's quite a bit of attention to detail in terms of incorporating setting; weapons and armor being a good example.  You get unusual weapons like "fighting bracelets" (essentially spiked bracelets used for combat), and armor types are meant to run the gamut of what would have been available in Africa in the various periods represented by the various cultures, and with the climate considerations of an African environment considered (armor causes penalties to attack rolls due to heat exhaustion unless the PC has sufficient precautions).  There's plate mail (called Royal Armor) but it is exceedingly rare. In case this matters to you, AC is descending; sort of: the attack roll is done by a D20 plus combat bonuses PLUS your opponent's armor class, and any roll over 20 hits.

The monetary system is based on the rather dull-sounding "trade ingot"; which is probably a more sensible choice than trying to force some kind of intense accuracy in working through what would have been the economic systems of such disparate cultures.

I have to admit that I'm not enough of an expert on the incredibly varied forms of African religion, magic and mysticism to really judge how much Crawford has done his homework in the "magic" section.  I can however make two very educated conclusions: the first is that his system is an extremely limited view of the incredible variety of esotericism found in Africa, and the second that whether or not in this area he has explored it accurately (and I would guess he has, within the limited context he's chosen to present), its a system that certainly feels coherent and functional within the game (which, to me at least, is by far the most important thing).

In the system, both the higher-end songs of the Griot and the spirit-workings of the Marabout are part of nature, whereas the ngango's ashe powers are in a sense transgressive of nature, thus having different effects.
The magic system is not strictly "vancian", and works differently for each magic-using class. The Griot has a pool of "inspiration points" that get expended over the course of the day as he uses his songs. Marabouts select their spells from different spheres, and do not need to memorize but have a per-day limit.  Nganga magic is partly ritual-based, and partly based on sorcery they can prepare beforehand as "nkisi" (essentially memorized spells) and have a per-day limit of how many of those they can have prepared at a time based on level (so the closest to the vancian system); however, a PC can choose to prepare more than his normal limit but must then make a skill check to contain the power or risk a catastrophic detonation of all his prepared spell-power.

Each type of magic has a fairly detailed section in the book, with a very adequate number of spells (or equivalent) for a PC's needs; each style of magic comes out reading as very different from the others, which is quite a good thing.


Now we get into the setting. I've noticed something about Crawford's settings: just like he is one of these RPG writers that has no problem re-using a good system in all his games, he seems to likewise have no problem re-using certain setting elements.  Specifically, just like Stars Without Number, Other Dust, and Red Tide, "Spears of the Dawn" takes place some time AFTER a cataclysmic event. Of course, the reason he does this is because its a great setup for an old-school sandbox setting to have.

In the case of Spears, it is decades after a war that left most of the setting in a state of ruin, particularly the two most powerful nations (the aforementioned Nyala, and the Egyptian-like Dashur, who are now all NPC undead in what is, ironically, the most stereotypical author choice thus far in the entire book; even the name of the nation "Dashur" is the name of a famous Egyptian funerary complex).  
The "Spears of the Dawn" were the groups of professional Egyptian-undead slayers, but so much time has now gone by that the Spears themselves have degenerated from being an elite corp of the multicultural anti-pseudoegyptian coalition into being pretty well any gang of dubious adventurers that go around calling themselves that (ideally while still raiding Dashurian enclaves and tombs, but often while doing whatever they want, in true PC-group style).  The concept of the "Spears" works as a way to allow a multicultural PC group to operate in a setting that otherwise consists of many very highly regimented cultures that often don't get along with each other.

Because in many ways there is even less knowledge and more misconceptions about Africa as a setting than there is about India (or China or other places), Spears of the Dawn doesn't skimp on the cultural detail section.  You get ten very packed pages just on culture alone (plus tidbits all over the rest of the book); things like life in general, social interactions, family, marriage, gender and sexuality, law, food and drink, climate, and religion which gets a couple of pages just to itself (including lists of the various spirits, as well as the "Sun Faith" which has clearly taken the place of Islam in this pseudo-african pastiche). After that you get another 10 pages or so on specific details about the individual cultures, a couple of pages per culture.

After this we get into the section on how to run a campaign, where there's a reposting of by-now quite familiar material; namely some of the best advice ever printed on how to run a Sandbox campaign.  Added to the standard advice is some advice on how to handle the potential lack of familiarity with a medieval-African pastiche; wherein Crawford wisely advises not to make a big deal out of it, and to work with what your players know as a starting point (and explicitly stating what was already implicitly obvious, that the notion of the "Spears" is set up as a means for PCs to be able to interact with the setting while violating a lot of its pre-loaded social complexity).

Next up come some very interesting rules for kingdom-level campaigning; with mechanics set up to measure various conditions in the kingdoms' makeup.  This is similar to but not quite the same as the system for communities in Other Dust.  Being modular, it could be ignored by GMs who don't want to involve mechanics in that level of setting-play without any detrimental effect on the rest of the game. There are basic setups for how kingdoms currently stand in the sandbox (one might be ascendent, another exhausted, and one may be a "traitor" nation turning toward the service of the Dashur undead cult); there's also random tables for kingdom-level events or developments.

There's also several pages about how to set up an adventure, including some random tables to help out in that regard, too. Round about this section is where the rules on giving out XP are presented also; in a break from the typical D&D conventions, XP is awarded pretty much by GM fiat (following some guidelines) and is not directly tied to treasure-finding or monster-killing. Oddly, I think, the suggested guidelines are set up so that PCs would level about once every two adventures, which seems WAY too fast for my tastes (and, I think, for typical old-school tastes). But since its all relatively arbitrary its easy enough for a GM to change that any way they want.

After this there's a whole series of "one-page templates": sets of tables all connected to a single theme on each page, to be used in designing specific adventure details.  There's templates for "ruined dwellings", "social conflict", "tomb houses", "Eternal cults", "urban palaces", "noble clans", "city streets", "criminal groups", "lost shrines", and "cavern complexes". The tables certainly have enough to be useful, particularly if fulfilling the intention of the templates by combining the results from the different tables and fleshing them out.

The bestiary section contains rules and tables for making up your own monsters, plus a little over two dozen monsters statted out.  These range from African animals (rhinos, for example) to fantasy creatures (evil fairies, witches, giants, ghosts, etc).  I admit my own knowledge of African mythology isn't complete enough to confirm that whether all the creatures in the list are from actual mythological sources, but I assume this is likely.
This is followed by a large section on treasure (with treasure tables) and magic items; the latter being suitably African in style.  There's also rules on how to spend treasure, plus hiring professionals, hirelings, and construction.

As with all of Crawford's products, Spears finishes up with a bunch of very helpful random tables, including random adventure elements, character names, quick NPC generation, culture generation, quick reference for magic, quick culture reference, some generic maps (about 5 pages worth of half-page maps for locations), and character sheets. As a bonus at the end there's a two-page adventure, and then a bibliography.

So one thing I'm not going to do is to try to reach a final conclusion as to whether Arrows or Spears is the better game at what it does.  I think both end up doing the very best job within the framework they've chosen, and in presenting the setting they're trying to present.  Arrows of Indra might be bigger on detail of historical/mythological setting, but again, that's because (I would bet) its a lot easier to work with India than Africa. On the other hand, with Arrows I took a look at the bigger picture but have to admit that (while I was no slouch) Spears of the Dawn has me beat when it comes to the depth of specific sandbox work at the local scale.  Both probably could jointly take credit for being the most authentic presentation of non-European cultures in a D&D setting; and the real point I'm making in talking about both of them here is that together, I think they mark a new kind of age of awesomeness when it comes to making non-European settings that are based on something other than popular misconceptions and old movies.

If you're an OSR gamer, then there's no question you'll enjoy Spears of the Dawn, either on its own, or as a supplementary material for your existing campaign.  It'll be the most authentic and most interesting fantasy Africa you've ever seen. If you're not, there's still a very good chance that you'll be interested in this game if what you're looking for is an authentic and well-written Fantasy Africa setting; you'll find Spears has done it better than any game thus far.

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