RPGPundit Reviews: The Epic RPG


This is a review of the Epic Role Playing Game Manual: special revised edition.  By Dark Matter Studios; written by Chris Organ, Kent Davis, Andrew Merz and Andy Monroe. This review is of the print edition.

The Epic RPG is, on the face of it, yet another fantasy game. There are already a lot of these on the market; and of course the number 1 spot for this kind of game is already taken by Forward... to Adventure!

So what hope is there that the Epic RPG will be a worthwhile RPG? How could it possibly compete against a game as wonderful and complete as FtA!?

The answer is that it does the same thing (high fantasy adventure) in a very different way.  If FtA! is for old school fans of Nethack, classic ("basic/expert") D&D, and Tunnels & Trolls; then the Epic RPG is more of a game for those who are fans of Runequest, GURPS fantasy, or AD&D with all the fixins.

The author of the Epic RPG claims that Epic is a "flexible and open RPG that fits the needs of gamers instead of imposing unrealistic and illogical rules on them in the form of dogma".  Um... ok... a little bit heartbreaky for my tastes. But hey, it goes on to say "Rules should be altered at the Guide's (GM's) discretion to fit the situation at hand".  Well, I can certainly agree with that. So, ok, the game is trying to set itself up as a toolkit system; and sort of "realistic". We'll see if they follow through.

Character creation in the Epic RPG is a fairly intensive affair, where you create your character from childhood on up. There are a number of random tables to assist in the character creation process; which the GM can choose to make random or just choices for selection.  Characters choose a race, the status of his parents and siblings, his social caste from birth, his family background career (which gives him some skills); then rolls for random childhood events, then what career he apprenticed in (again, more skills), then random apprenticeship events; and all this before you get your attributes!

I should add, the random events tables (childhood and apprenticeship) are the coolest things in this game. They're what I'd be most likely to use about this game in a fantasy campaign, regardless of whether or not I used the Epic RPG.
And yet, at the same time, they're a bit TOO random. Some of the combinations of social class/career/random events doesn't quite make sense. This would usually be reparable by a bit of GM judgment though.

After doing everything I listed above, the next step would be to work out your attributes; which range from 1-10 and can be determined by rolling them on a random table, or by point allocation methods. The attributes give a bonus/penatly based on the attribute value, ranging from -4 (for a rating of 1) to +4 (for a rating of 10); which is applied to a wide variety of actions/checks. Seem complicated? It does to me, but hey, some people live for this stuff.

After your stat, we get yet another really cool random table (did I mention that random tables are probably the most entertaining and useful thing about this book?); this next table is about unusual character traits, which are more specific to the game than random background events, but its still a good table.
All of the random tables I've mentioned so far are full blown d100 with 100 options tables, so you certainly don't have to worry about the risk of repetition.

Finally, to round out the character you choose your occupation from a list of "guilds".  One major annoyance in the layout of the book is that while all the rest of character creation is in chapter 2 (and chapter 1 is just a brief introduction), the guild and all details about what they do or give you is waaay down in chapter 16. In short each career has its own list of skills and a few other special features.  These careers are often VERY setting-specific to the default world of the Epic RPG, the world of Rullaea; creating a big gap in the character creation system if you decided to try to run Epic in any other game world. Fortunately, there's some guidelines for how to fill this gap by creating your own careers in the "Campaigns" chapter, which I'll talk about in a little while.

Finally, your character gets an "Ethos", which is the alignment mechanic of the game. Ethos is divided into three components (disposition, morals, and motivations); these can be rolled randomly or chosen, and each component has 10 different options; meaning that alignment becomes more of an overall personality guide to what your character is about, what he values.

Finally, I should note that the first chapter has some rules for creating older, more experienced characters. The default is what I just described: your character would be just starting his own adventuring career, having just finished apprenticeship.  But there are guidelines to make characters who are journeymen, experts, masters or grandmasters, with equivalent raises in age, money, and skills.  I would have thought this would have been the perfect place for yet another bitching random table of "events that happened to your character on adventures before the campaign started"; but no such table was included, sadly.  I guess the author ran out of juice.


The game mechanics of the Epic RPG involve rolling 2d10 and adding the results together, plus the bonuses from skill ranks and attribute modifiers. Double 10s are criticals, double 1s are fumbles, which apply not just to combat and magic but to all skills as well. There is an experience point system for improving your skills, and the cost of each skill is determined in a rather byzantine fashion by crossreferencing your attribute that governs the skill with your current rank in the skill on a table, to determine how many xp points you need to achieve the next rank.

There are 33 skills in all, but many subskills (specialties) for each one; specialties are bought to give a specific bonus to one area or facet of a skill.  Characters can also buy masteries and grandmasteries in a specialty, each of these give them special abilities related to the skill specialty.  So for example, "Statecraft" is a skill.  It has specialties in Governing, etiquette and law.  Taking a mastery in "governing" means that "the character has a aquired a noble title", while taking a grandmastery means that "the character gains the title of minor royalty" (and no, there are no intermediates; apparently your character goes from being Joe Peasant to being the Viscount of Left Irrelevancia to being a fucking Prince of the Realm).

I will note also that combat and magic are both skills too; so there are skills in Melee (with masteries and grandmasteries granting special strikes or defences), and skills in the various types of magic.

The Epic RPG moves on to the equipment section, with very detailed lists of materials, weapons, armour, etc.  including the good old Glaives and Fauchards in the "pole arm" section; things I hadn't seen since the old Gygax days of AD&D1e.

I should mention something about layout.  The game is relatively thick on writing and short on images, but what images it has are very nice.  In the goods and services chapter, for example, it has a spectacular picture of a plate mail, and images detailing the differences in weaves for armor materials.

At its heart, combat in the Epic RPG is fairly simple. You declare actions first, then every character rolls initiative (per turn), and actions are resolved. In one turn a character can move, make an attack or skill or magic roll, defend, and block with their shield.  Special actions (anything not on the above list) are divided into "single" or "full" actions, meaning that doing them makes you forfeit either your attack or your defense or your move (if its a "single action"), or it makes you forfeit all other actions (if its a "full move").

So in principle, the combat is simple. However, in practice there are all kinds of rules for special maneuvers, special conditions, modifiers of all sorts, criticals and fumbles, unarmed combat, damaging objects, etc etc. This all makes the game pretty "rules-heavy" if you add all the various mechanics. The rules aren't too difficult to follow, but they are certainly complex, and the game will appeal more to those who enjoy these kinds of rules-heavy systems with clearcut mechanics for a wide variety of actions rather than the looser "figure it out as you go" way of rules-light systems or the unified mechanical resolution of more abstract streamlined games.

My feeling about the Epic RPG is that there isn't anything particularly wrong with either the rules or the setting (which I'll talk a little more about later); they're not great, but nothing bad about them either.  The really GOOD stuff in the Epic RPG, however, are the elements that are neither directly rules or directly setting, precisely the stuff that you can take and apply to any fantasy RPG.

In the chapter after Combat, we get to one of the best chapters of the game, the "Campaigns" section.  This chapter is rare in its quality for a subject so often approached in RPGs of all kinds; the authors have really outdone themselves in detailing advice on how to craft and construct a good fantasy campaign. You get some details about Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey in there, you get step by step guidelines (though not really mechanical guidelines, just a checklist) on how to create new careers for your campaign (this is particularly important if you're going to run a game with the Epic rules but not in the default setting), and then you get to details on how to run an adventure.

There's some good outlines of how to create "premise" for a campaign; and then for the adventures, you have a whole checklist of sorts for running an adventure, including yet another really cool set of random tables to establish adventure plots, and plot twists. There's material for creating setting backdrop for an adventure, random tables for detailing events that occur to the PCs during long gaps between adventures (very useful table!), and finally more standard material on travel, experience and training.

After this you get a chapter on treasure, which is also better than your average fantasy RPG's "treasure chapter".  It includes a LOT of details (and a LOT of cool random tables) for determining regular and "imbued" items (magic items); among the particularly cool tables is the table for the origin of relics, which lets you create a background legend for any relic you find. The items themselves are pretty standard for fantasy games, but the detail given to their descriptions, the sidebars detailing some sample relics, and the overall attention given to the writing of this chapter make it well above the norm, and once more there is stuff here that would be useful to someone who was running any type of fantasy game.

The next chapter details mass combat rules (warfare), and the rules given are quite complex and rules-heavy.  I must admit that I find myself uncertain how balanced they would be in actual play.  The rules remind me somewhat of the mass combat rules that were found in the Rules Cyclopedia D&D, though more detailed. Again you get some cool random tables, like tables for random events on the military campaign (do your armies get bad weather? the Plague? or new mercenaries coming in to offer their services to add to your forces?). Again, the rules are quite complete; perhaps too much so for someone who isn't partial to rules-heavy mechanics.

The next several chapters detail the various magic systems in the Epic RPG.  Magic in the game is divided into Alchemy (magic that uses chemical formulae to manipulate magical liquids, gasses, solids, or chemical reactions), Mentalism (psychic powers, which include psychic sensing, telekinesis, empathy, telepathy, and psychic combat), Metaphysics (which, contrary to its name deals not with airy-fairy nature-of-the-universe stuff but with magic affecting thermodynamics, electromagnetism, gravity, radiation, and atomic manipulation), Philtrology (which invovles the creation of potions and poisons), "Shen" (kung-fu physical mastery with a bit of the Tao/Force thrown in for good measure), and Theurgy (the most traditional fantasy magic style, casting spells, conjuring, divination and curses).  Each one of these styles of magic has an entire chapter dedicated to it, and each has literally dozens and dozens of spells. On the whole, the magic system and the various styles of magic are very detailed and creative, and relatively balanced. Generally speaking, magic is cast with the appropriate magical skill roll, with each spell having a different difficulty, and costing "quintessence points" (basically mana). Magic is certainly a big part of the Epic RPG, covering well over 100 pages of material.

The last section of the Epic RPG details setting information, regarding the default setting of the RPG, Rullaea. Rullaea is a fairly standard fantasy setting, a region on the rise after a long dark age.  One interesting detail is the absence of the regular Human/Elf/Dwarf/halfling layout, or just typical substitutes. Instead, Rullaea's playable races are basically two: human (with a number of human racial stocks to play) or Celari which are described as "half-human, half-tree". These humanoid treants are sort of a mix in personalities between elves and dwarves (with the sylvan elements of elves and the stoic emotionalism of dwarves).

There's a good amount of detail with gazeteer-style entries about each kingdom, county, or duchy in Rullaea, economics, religion (the dominant religion of the setting is something called Pentonism, a vaguely new-agey religious philosophy without deities that appears to have been somewhat inspired by real-world Buddhism, but in fact comes out reading a bit more like gnosticism than anything else), a couple of evil cults, the calendar, great wonders of the world, and mythologies. Descriptions of the human racial groups includes sample names, appearances, fashion, cultural values, and even cooking habits.

The setting, aside from some of those interesting quirks mentioned above, seems pretty bog-standard, and the various kingdoms and counties seem a bit repetitive.  The most interesting special feature in the setting is a huge underground river that is supposedly only one part of a vast network of underground rivers, through which at least one kingdom conducts trade.  That's pretty clever.

What's also clever are the various guilds and organizations, which are not just fluff but, due to the rules for character creation, an essential part of the game process. It is assumed that your character belongs to one of these groups, because that's part of how the character is made. These organizations range from orders of mages to mercenary bands to a group of professional military flute or drum players (!) to assassins to pirates, chivalrous knights, lawmen, spies, merchants, dog trainers, hunters, scouts, paladins (yes, apparently quasi-buddhist gnostic philosophies can have paladins, and they look curiously crusader-esque), priests, sages, secret conspiracies, rangers, and various different orders of warriors.
I've rarely seen any RPG do such a good job of integrating the idea of Setting groups and organizations into the game itself in such an immediate and accesible way.  The Forgotten Realms book comes close, but I think Epic does it better yet. Except, of course, that it more or less OBLIGES your PCs to belong to one of these groups (and they won't all be from the same group), so that might not be entirely to the liking of a GM who wants his PCs to be the typical disconnected party of freelancers.

The last chapter of the book is entitled "excerpts from the bestiary", which is really just that, excerpts. Its a small chapter with stats for a few monsters, but far from a complete guide; just six pages and 12 monster types. That makes it about the only part of the book that isn't really thorough.

Over all, the Epic RPG is a fine product, a good game, but I can see that it would not be to everyone's tastes.  The system is fairly heavy on the "crunch", lots of different options and mechanics to fiddle around with, even though the underlying core mechanic is simple and effective.  The magic system is very creative, but also complex; and the setting is perhaps not the strongest suit of the game, but it certainly gives you some ideas especially regarding the organizations and guilds.

The good: The awesome random tables that are found throughout the book. The way you build up a character stage-by-stage so that you'll already have quite the background set up by the time the character is complete.  The toolbox-nature of the game mechanics.

The Bad: Falls slightly on the rules-heavy side for my tastes, too many options might facilitate min-maxing.  The bestiary was an afterthought. Also, some of the random tables require GM oversight to avoid getting silly/unreasonable combinations. The setting is a little bland at times, and where it differs from standard fantasy it still meets with mixed success.

The Ugly: Nothing; this game is a game some people will really enjoy, and others will still be able to find quite a bit of useful stuff to mine for their own fantasy games and campaigns.

RPGPundit

Pundit -

Thanks for a great and fair-minded review!  

I very much liked the analogy you drew between the FtA! and Epic and the other respective games.  Quite apt, I think.

It's funny you mention the lack of a table for adult-life events in the extended character creation.  I've been running a lot of older and more skilled characters at Con games recently, and I've noticed it myself. For the games, the pregens already exist, but we roll up and riff on their life events at the table to create stronger relationships and better sense of the characters.  The tool we recommend for this process in the Game Manual is the Apprenticeship life event table, and it does include things like spouses and children, but I've been feeling the need for an even more "aged" one.  I'd pay money to have characters roll something like: "Your child's spouse is a deadly rival."  or "Develop nose and ear hair, -1 BTY" or "Elected to public office"

Thanks, too, for the good words regarding the integration of organizations into setting. It's one of the most important parts of the game to us, and the relationships and tensions found there are a big-ass source of opportunities and spurs to adventuring.

Nicely done, Pundit.  Good to see another nice, thorough, mainly on-the-mark review about a very, very good RPG (and one I wish would get more players around these parts, damnit!).