Ok, let's do this; though I should really not be wasting my time with this given that (as no doubt the Swine over at YDIS will be tickled pink to know) I've just been hired on a permanent contract with a major website to do some major writing work based on the quality of my blog and RPG writing. More on that in a couple of weeks, folks. But in any case, let's give this stupid fuck's hatchet job the attention it utterly does not deserve:
Note: I edited this so it conforms with forum rules. Edited text is in brackets.
Apparently not well enough, you ridiculous fuck.
Reading Arrows of Indra was not a pleasant experience for me. [Like most of you here] I do not believe the OSR is entirely creatively bankrupt. I love D&D, I’ve run 2nd edition, Basic and 3.5 and even a one-shot game of Carcosa in the past, and I like the philosophy of old school gaming in general. I believe there is room for innovation in the OSR and that people use retroclones to explore new ground(i.e adventures, settings) with an old system. Arrows of Indra made me question this assumption. Maybe the OSR is pointless and we should have let D&D die along with TSR.
I'm fairly sure that last sentence is the only true statement of your beliefs out of that entire paragraph. Since, for starters, you clearly don't know or understand the general principles of the OSR.
The cover(which is nice and well-executed) allegedly contains a depiction of a [cis-gender] character... but this is hard to verify and not immediately obvious.
You mean to say transgender, right?
In any case, I'll write more about just how much of an ass you are for this part sometime soon. I'll leave it for now.
He follows it up with the obligatory stupid disclaimer where he informs us that it should not be taken as an authoritative source on anything [Hindu related], with the addendum that he does not advocate any caste system and acknowledges ‘the equality of all regardless of circumstance.’
It was only obligatory because it was absolutely predicted (and of course came to pass that) you and your fellow pseudo-activists tried to self-servingly attack AoI as though I was endorsing caste systems or any number of other equally stupid claims of outrage over things you wouldn't give a shit about at any time that it didn't serve your purpose of trying to 'take me down'.
The we have random family generation (which they mention is important in Arrows of Indra so I guess it is then) and this little gem.
“When the number of surviving siblings have been determined, the GM should roll randomly to determine which point in the birth order that PC is found; for example, if there are 5 surviving siblings, the GM could roll d6 (with a 1 indicating the PC is the oldest, 2 the second oldest, etc). If the number of surviving siblings is less convenient for a simple die roll the GM should pick the method that works best.”
I think he might be on to something here. The next [GOSH DARNED] rule section anyone writes should just have ‘THE GM SHOULD PICK THE METHOD THAT WORKS BEST” plastered a several hundred times across each page, The Shining Style. I want to make merry and mock Arrows but it is so uninspiring even its failures are pedestrian. It fails not by the virtue of its grasp extending its reach, it fails by having no reach and by being made by a [PROUD AND NOBLE DEFENDER OF RPGS]
So... you're an allegedly experienced player of OSR games, and yet you don't get that from the OSR perspective "rulings not rules" is not only a feature-not-bug but one of the GUIDING PRINCIPLES of the movement?
I guess that shouldn't be a surprise since you go on to pretend that sticking to tradition and not reinventing the wheel for gaming mechanics are somehow failings rather than the entire point of OSR design.
THIS IS THE REVERSE OF WHAT A NEW RACE SHOULD BE LIKE. A new race should bring variety and role-playing opportunity and mechanics should reflect that. If your new race amounts to an elf with a bollywood coat of paint and two paragraphs of background slapped on you should rework it until it is something new.
Your claims of OSR street-cred are becoming increasingly ridiculous here, but you certainly are showing yourself to be a likely candidate to be well versed in hipster indie-gaming design ideas from the Forge. The proof of this is in the way that you think mechanics are the way to make something different (bwah hahaha) and are somehow what defines roleplay. Since in Forge games things like setting are a completely meaningless facade for a set of mechanics for story-creation, I guess I can understand how you would have focused on the mechanical similarity between a Dwarf and a Yaksha, and ignored completely the detailed descriptions of each race that point out just how different they are in action. That's because over in the OSR, we don't use mechanics to show how to roleplay different, we just fucking roleplay it.
The worst thing is that Pundit claims this is a deliberate choice so it would be ‘familiar’ to DnD players. Yes. Pundit deliberately chose
Yup, I absolutely did. Because that would serve the dual goal of pointing out how the underlying concepts of myth could be familiar to anyone who is already steeped in the (western) mythology of D&D (rather than thinking that these creatures are unapproachable concepts that we have no base for understanding), while the descriptive material would make very clear how at the same time they are an exotically different presentation of some of these similar concepts. Elves, Dwarves, Vanara, Yaksha, Gandharvas, etc. (even hobbits) are all fairy or nature spirits in their mythological core, and thus comprehensible to anyone who is already familiar with some of these models (e.g., western elves or dwarves), but in the particulars of behaviour and presentation a Dwarf is not a Yaksha and a Vanara is definitely not a Hobbit.
He is giving you something nearly identical to something that already exists, and he is charging money for it.
AoI is more different than Lamentations of the Flame Princess (which is awesome, mind you) and way more different than ACKS or Adventures Dark and Deep or Labyrinth Lord; but yes, what you wrote above is pretty much what the OSR does. The only real variation (and a source of debate within the OSR) is just how "nearly identical" you want it (and you might have missed the past and recent arguments on this, though given that you're clearly obsessed with me I strongly suspect you haven't, but I actually fall on the more radically innovative side of the spectrum).
In many ways Arrows of Indra is a mirror-universe EoPT
I don't know if I'd go that far, but of course just recently someone who actually played with Barker and loved AoI felt that AoI would make a great Tekumel ruleset, and felt that the professor would have liked it a lot.
derivative where EoPT was original
Only inasmuch as any OSR rpg is "derivative". Again, you seem confused because you keep suggesting this as though it's a dirty word.
EPT was definitely original, no one could argue that. Except of course inasmuch as big parts of it were already mechanically 'derivative' of OD&D. As indeed, you could say of pretty much every RPG in history, if you look at the very broad skeletal structure of what an RPG is (though of course in EPT's case, it was more than just broadly derivative in some areas).
uninspiring where EoPT was overflowing with creativity etc.
I suppose that this is a matter of taste. If you feel that six-legged aliens are more 'inspiring' than the mythology that has driven an entire culture for the last 3000 years, I guess you're entitled to think that.
Arrows of Indra lacks depth, and nearly all the background material is just a thin veneer covering yet another retroclone.
You don't seem to know what "retroclone" means; but that's not surprising given that you don't know what "OSR" is about either. Let me put it this way: no one actually in the OSR would ever claim AoI is a 'retroclone' (a few might claim that AoI is not a 'true OSR' game, but that's another story).
And I'm afraid you have it backwards (again, as a consequence of having your brain so poisoned that you don't understand old-school and barely understand roleplaying games in general, it would seem): the background is not a veneer for the mechanics; the mechanics are a veneer for the background. That's how it works in RPGs. It's one of the big differences between RPGs and storygames.
If you just want a retroclone, get one that is free. If you want an original setting, look elsewhere.
Well, technically speaking, I can't argue with either of these points. If you actually want a RETROCLONE (that is, an OSR game intended to be a nearly-flawless and direct copy of a specific old-school D&D ruleset/edition) I would definitely suggest you get a free one. I'm not a big fan of retroclones; I invented the term "clonemania" to describe the fever for them that erupted a few years back.
As for original setting, yes, if you want an 'original setting' you should definitely look elsewhere. AoI is not meant to have an original setting at all. It has a setting that is absolutely and explicitly based on the legendary "Epic India" (the collection of places and kingdoms of the Mahabharata, some of which existed in history but not quite the way portrayed in the legends, and others which probably never really existed at all).
[BORROWING] mechanics from better games and incorporating them into itself is also very Arrows of Indra.
Totally. It's very OSR, in fact. Its part of what's made the OSR so successful, compared to the creative bankruptcy of 'tiddlywinks-as-game-resolution-mechanic' reinventing-the-wheel gibberish of the storygames/indie movement. That's why some storygamers are now desperately trying to reinvent themselves and their games as OSR games (even though they're not), why the most successful (the only really successful) game to come out of the storygames movement in the last few years is based on dungeon-crawling and is so orthodox that it's not a storygame anymore, and why Ron Edwards is frantically trying to rewrite history to pretend that he was the inventor of old-school gaming.
Alignment has been changed to Holy, Neutral and Unholy, and covers one’s standing with the gods(Holy means the gods like you Unholy means the Asura’s like you). That’s okay and reflects the setting a bit better.
I'll only comment here to point out that this is an endemic example of why this review is hatchet job: it glosses over some of the most significant portions of AoI (including most of the setting, and everything that is relatively innovative in the game) in a sentence or without mention at all, while grossly exaggerating and elaborating on something that is a secret to no one (that OSR games are mechanically derived from old-school games) to try to give a totally false impression of the product.
But hey, I guess that's why I've been sent literally hundreds and hundreds (maybe into the four digits at this point?) of free RPG products to review (there's 13 books on my desk right now waiting to be reviewed, and at least 5 more in the mail that I know of), while you have to pirate PDFs from 7chan.
Next comes the vaunted skill system, which [PUNDIT] is quick to add is new, which either makes him [VERACIOUSLY HANDICAPPED] or simply unaware of the definition of the word ‘new’.
Again, a perfectly understandable confusion on the part of an asshole who has no idea what he's talking about. "New" here is in the context of the OSR, as in "new" meaning "different from standard old-school D&D".
We get a hybridized d20 system for the skill resolution which works reasonably well. D20+ability score bonus+Proficiency ‘score’ roll against DC 10, 15 or 20.
As Pundit mentions, you get both ‘background’ skills based on your randomly generated caste(e.g proficiency-esque skills like brickmaking) and class skills(class abilities for the anyone except the monk I mean Yogi) for which you roll randomly each level.
This innovative new approach is so undeniably brilliant, M.A Barker resurrected himself, read arrows of Indra, was blown away and invented time travel so he could put pretty much the same system in EoPT(page 18). Of course Barker calls them ‘original skills’ and ‘professional skills’ and you roll randomly for which skill group you select them from(Unlike AoI, which uses random dice to determine which skills you get based on caste) and to his credit Barker did change the way you get new skills each level.
Having not recently pirated EPT as you appear to have done, I can't actually confirm everything you write about it here. But I'm about 99% sure from my recollection of the last time I did read it that Barker didn't use a system cribbed from the D20 OGL (he was percentage based?).
But I had read EPT a while before writing AoI. Is your next stunning revelation going to be that I "stole" Hit Points from D&D, or Ascending AC from D&D 3.0?
Priests need skills to cast spells(though some of the skills they get per level just allow them to learn things like languages, a design Barker cynically copies in his hack-job Empire of the Petal Throne Indra-clone).
You haven't gone all the way down the rabbit hole yet, my friend! While its true that Barker came back to life and copied the notion that Priests should be familiar with Languages from me (and Theology? I don't remember if Barker asked to borrow that too or if it isn't in EPT), you should also note how the ancient founders of the Vedic Priesthood actually traveled through time (soma was a really powerful magical drug, after all) and got the idea that priests should be erudite lore keepers from me and Barker while we were having turkish coffee together (me smoking a pipe, and him chewing on a cigar)!
Yes, the entire concept of Vedic Brahmin knowledge-training was clearly inspired (via time-traveling Brahmins) by Arrows of Indra, in a stunning case of temporal paradox.
Or, you know, Barker and I both have priests learning things like languages and theology because we were both copying ancient India. It might be that too.
Most of the skills give the user the ability to conduct rituals, which are mostly defensive or utility based spells that take several minutes to cast and require incense. When you randomly get a particular spell-like ability you can generally use it once per day.
This is a [TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY DIFFERENT] from priest skills in EoPT, which are mostly defensive or utility based spells that you can generally use about once per day. No tier system in EoPT, simply a line of skills and the order in which they are to be taken though.
Again, this obviously has nothing to do with ancient Vedic priests conducting rituals. Nothing.
On to the Siddhi skills(different from a wizard, Siddhi’s cannot wear armour and are bad at fighting).
Yeah, again, totally NOT like in Ancient India, where ascetic magic-users regularly went around wearing +5 plate armor and beating the shit out of people with swords. Why, the Buddha himself had a +5 Frostbrand.
a really cool skill that is the first skill on the first table called Asana, that allows you to freeze your entire body in place or hold your breath for an extremely long period of time(1 breath per day).
Of course that time-travelling asshole Barker has to ruin things again by making Control of Self the first skill magic users get in his hack-job Arrows of Indra Clone(page 21), which allows them to hold their breath for extremely long periods of time and freeze their body into place.
Yeah, and nothing at all like Asana, the first and most basic skill of Raja-Yoga, which allows skilled practitioners to stay frozen in place and hold their breath for extremely long periods of time.
The real question here is whether that fucker Patanjali ripped off Barker or myself!
And he also has the gall to make most of the magic user abilities spell-like abilities with a mixture of defensive, offensive and utility based powers that can generally be used 1/day. And of course Barker bases his last power, the Grey Hand(p. 21), a touch spell that destroys a target utterly and is usable 1/day, heavily off of [Edited out, doxxing -Admin-] THE BHAIRAVA-MUDRA, a touch spell that destroys a target utterly but with a saving throw that is usable 1/day.
And nothing at all like the siddhis who could develop the power to kill instantly. In some cases not even needing to touch a victim!
Fun fact: one infamous shiva-yogi recently claimed to have this power, and a noted Indian skeptic challenged him to a Televised test where the yogi in question would kill the skeptic on live tv using only his power. The yogi failed, of course. It just goes to show how much more interesting the woo-woo guys are in India than here in the west, where the best we can manage is Uri Geller pretending to bend spoons.
Lest I be accused of anything but the utmost diligence, the equipment section is next. It is mostly unoffensive and contains pretty much exactly what you would expect in an equipment section for mythic India. Of interest to some of you might be the listed price for concubines and various other slaves, where special mention is made of the existence of ‘kliba’ or cis-gender concubines. Delicious.
Delicious indeed that you mention the inclusion of third-gendered characters in the section on slaves, but not the section of description they get in the Setting chapter (including the level of acceptance they had in Vedic society and the heroic roles kliba PCs can play, like the one on the cover you maligned). But hey, this is a fair review and not a pathetic attempt a character assassination, right?
This section gives EoPT a break and instead borrows the weapons vs AC from AD&D 1st edition.
First, it's pretty different (in that its far more streamlined and easy to use) than anything in the AD&D 1e rules. Second, you still keep saying this like its a bad thing and not the entire point of making an OSR rules-set. I really don't have the time to explain to you what the OSR is (though you clearly know and are just willfully choosing to ignore that knowledge, given how utterly obsessed YDIS is with destroying the OSR), but if you were actually going to write an honest review of an OSR game it would have been great if you'd done a little less pretending to be an ignorant fucking piece of shit about it.
Of particular interest to historians might be the encumbrance system, which is streamlined and very easy to use and stolen from Star Without Numbers GODDAMMIT I WANT TO READ SOMETHING NEW GIVE ME SOMETHIOQUIIOUDHFISHDFOIASJF
Really? that's news to me. I thought I was 'stealing' from LotFP. Not exactly the same of course, but LotFP totally opened my eyes as to how to correctly do an encumbrance system. In spite of having received SWN for free and having written a lengthy review of it, I have to admit that right now I don't even remember what the SWN encumbrance system was like (you'll have to forgive me, like I said, I've been sent hundreds and hundreds of RPGs to review, and SWN was quite a long time ago). Maybe SWN 'stole' their encumbrance system from LotFP? Or maybe LotFP stole it from SWN? Well, either way, I'm sure you and your gang will be jumping onto the Mystery Machine to go solve that case right away in your apparently unending quest to reveal the shocking fact that Old School Renaissance RPGs borrow Old-school ideas from each other.
Moving on to GM procedures, this section amounts to little more then house rules and minor modifications to B/X and AD&D.
Well, you're partly right, of course. They are from my house rules, definitely. And those house rules do come from things I've picked up in B/X (or rather, the RC D&D), AD&D, Majestic Wilderlands, LotFP, DCC, D20/3e, and several other places, as well as a few things that (as far as I know) were a product of my own inspiration.
Golly, the OSR was Old Man Jenkins all along! And he would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you darn gang of fucking morons!
Notably missing are rules for underwater combat as well as mass combat, an essential part in emulating Indian Myths(the latter, not the former).
Maybe the first authentic and non-asinine criticism you've had in the entire review! Congratulations. I guess if you spray out a steady stream of bullshit, some turd is bound to actually hit the mark at some point.
Anyways, since AoI assumes party-level adventuring, it doesn't have a mass-combat mechanic. But this being the OSR, I'm sure anyone who actually buys AoI to play it (rather than pirating it to try to slander its author in a particularly ridiculous manner) will end up using.. sorry, STEALING!.. the mass-combat rules from another RPG.
In a few months, they'll even be able to use (after some houserule/mods) the mass-combat rules I'll be including in Dark Albion! I look forward to seeing what kind of ridiculous claims you make about that one (that my setting seems suspiciously to have been totally ripped off from Shakespeare, perhaps? Or that there are curious and shady similarities between my 'Rose War' setting and George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones, perhaps?).
On to the big selling point, the Gazetteer of the Bharata Kingdoms. This section is a lot less painful then the rest, but that also makes it the most tragic. Because this could have been a very good setting. Instead it is decent at best. I blame this on one central flaw; It adheres too closely to the Mahabarata(or whatever it is based on), at the cost of playability, maybe because Pundit didn’t feel confident enough in his abilities as a writer to put other shit in there. The Bharata Kingdoms as a setting needed more hooks and more shit going on. What is there is good, there is simply not enough of it, and some of it needs more description.
I can't really argue with a totally subjective statement. And surely, if I had another 100-200 pages of space, I might have added a lot more local-detail full of even more adventure hooks. But I suspect again that you are operating from a non-OSR point of view here. I think OSR-gamers (as compared to anti-OSR fuckwits) who look at the setting material in AoI as it currently stands will likely feel its got a plethora of material to set adventures in and similarly enough space that one isn't inundated in metaplot and culture-wank that prevents the GM from putting his own stamp on the world.
When the gazzeteer is good, its pretty decent; most of the rulers for each kingdom are described and have various histories, feuds and other stuff that makes them reasonably interesting(a bad-ass emperor(Jarasandha) that seeks to sacrifice 100 kings to Shiva in order to complete some sort of ritual that will allow him mastery over all the worlds, a Rakshasa King, An Asura King who is a total pussy and loyal to the emperor out of fear etc).
Ok, I feel like I have to make a confession here. This hard-hitting review is prompting me to come clean: I have to admit I didn't think up any of this.
I'm sorry. To everyone I've disappointed, I'm sorry. I didn't invent any of this stuff; it was totally ripped off, 'stolen', if you will in a blatant act of plagiarism, from a number of ancient texts I didn't quite cut-and-paste from but I might as well have. Unlike the rules-system, which is a construction from a variety of sources, compiled by me and not a clone of any other rules-system as such, the setting is a total and complete ripoff, of a non-western culture.
I was so sure I could get away with it too, but there you go, the truth must come out. All those awesome NPCs in there? Krishna, Arjuna, Queen Kunti, all the various gods, all the cities, I didn't invent a single fucking one of them. I even ripped off things like the legal code and gender norms! Its shameless, and I have no excuse.
What also happens sometimes is that you get a region where Shiva or Rama did something cool and now it is a wasteland with no reason to go there.
Really? Where the fuck is that? I can think of a place where a god did something cool and now the whole place is a super-dangerous desert or ruin that is full of (roughly mid-level) peril and potential for exploration and treasure-seeking.
But as we've seen, you and I seem to have very different ideas of what defines 'creativity'. I imagine you'd think that something like My Life With Master is 'creative', and not drivel.
What about dungeon world? Derivative theft from D&D and Apocalypse world? Trying to rip off the OSR? Or greatest storygame evar?
Overall, while what’s there is decent, it needs more.
Can't ultimately argue with that. Its why I still have in mind to get around to writing one or more regional sourcebooks. I'll be excited to hear your damning critique about how my sourcebook on the Indus river valley blatantly rips off Indian geography.
Next up is the dungeon section, or Patala underworld, a gigantic cave structure with seven lairs that runs all the way to hell, filled with Asuras, Nagas and other cool shit that you can beat the shit out of. This section is undeniably badass and I am mostly positive about it.
I'm surprised you're not claiming its just "a blatant ripoff of the 'random dungeon generation' rules in the AD&D 1e DMG appendix of the same name". Is it that your clown-like absurdity only goes so far, or are you just too ignorant of AD&D rulebooks to have thought of that one?
4th layer is ruled by Mayu, Asura lord of deception and architect of hell. He used to build gigantic floating death cities and now his entire clan has been imprisoned in the 4th layer, a labyrinth filled with architectural marvels and he likes to corrupt and torment visitors until they go insane. My first though was ‘why the fuck am I reading about cities that have already been destroyed? That sounds kickass. Why wasn’t I there? Fuck!’
Because settings have a past. Also because I am only 'stealing' from Indian myth, and Indian myth didn't all happen at the same time.
Also, if you were an OSR GM, your first thought would have been "Fuck, those cities must have crashed SOMEWHERE."
There’s a bunch of tables for generating random caves, tunnels, contents and different encounter tables for each level. This section is very useful but the random encounter tables are strange. We would expect the encounter tables to get progressively harder as you descend into the underworld, instead they actually get slightly easier as you descend, which is an odd choice.
Again, because I'm 'blatantly ripping-off' Indian mythology, and that's how it is in the mythology.
Random quest table bears an unerring resemblance to the one from EoPt(p. 41) but I am inclined to let it go since the quests are very vague and general.
Really? I was thinking Traveller. What about Caravanserais, did the ancient Indians rip those off of Barker, or me?
Next comes the monster section and it is bizarre(and not in a good way). People have pointed out the monsters are derivative(goblins, giants etc.) and Pundit retaliates by hiding behind mythological accuracy. He mentions 84 different creatures specifically taken from Indian mythology. What we actually get are 84 creatures, 40 of which are mundane or giant animals, reptiles, vermin or humans(bandits, barbarians etc.). We get giants, goblins, living dead(zombies), animate statues, air deva’s(air elemental), earth deva’s(guess), Fire Spirits(yup), Ghost ; Bhuta(like a ghost but indian and with the same stats) and skeletons. That’s 49 creatures we have seen before, not sufficiently different either mechanically or flavour-wise to qualify as different.
Yeah, its funny how ancient mythologies of all kinds have living dead, goblins, nature spirits, and humans! Crazy.
Why isn’t the random monstrosity generator(there is a random creature in it, which also doesn’t count) used to generate Asura’s?
There could have, maybe should have been, a random Asura generator.
I tell you what: I'll write one up if I make an AoI source/setting book at some point, and then you can accuse me of having 'stolen' it from somewhere because its an OSR product and not a game that uses jenga for task-resolution.
Another bizarre case is the Preta, a super interesting creature from Hindu myth(looked it up on wiki) that Pundit actually went out of his way to make mechanically identical to a ghoul.
I didn't have to go out of my way. There are a variety of different represenations of pretas in the 3000-year history of Vedic/Brahminical/Buddhist/Hindu religions/cultures, but 'basically ghouls' is one of the most common.
This is symptomatic of Arrows of Indra as a whole. It doesn’t turn D&D into something cool. It turns something cool into D&D.
AH.
OK.
I didn't think you'd go and out-and-out admit the fundamental flaw in your review, in your general intellectual philosophy as a gamer, and I daresay in your inherent value as a human being: you don't actually think D&D is cool.
Well, kudos for you for coming right out and admitting it. You should probably have just said so up front, rather than lie to people at the start of your review, though.
It’s almost as if it was made in some kind of alternate universe totalitarian world government controlled by a council of TsR Gygax androids where everything that deviates from the accepted parameters of D&D is ruthlessly supressed.
Good for you. It must have been a relief for you to just admit your hate for D&D. But that's quite a jump, from subtle statement to outright spittle-throwing hatred in just one paragraph.
-The Herb section. (Potion section with the serial numbers filed off). Curing Herb. Endurance Herb(gives con bonus). Herb Against Cold. Herb of Invisibility. Herb of Swiftness.
Yeah, because magical herbs are in no way described in the Vedas, including the Rig Veda, the oldest holy book in the Hindu canon and one of the oldest in the entire world. You know, like Soma.
Oh, and curing herbs. And endurance herbs. And herbs that grant swiftness (though I think that one might actually be in the Atharva Veda; its hard to remember, since there's 107 herbs in the Rig Veda alone, and then more in the Atharva and Yajur Vedas), invisibility (technically, that one isn't from a 'herb' but from a powder derived from a killing, drying and crushing a certain snake).
-Minor Sutra’s! Like scrolls only they replicate enlightenment powers(which mostly replicate wizard spells).
Well, I'll admit that making them one-use items is anachronistic. That can be house-ruled though. You know, "Rulings, not Rules".
-Wonderous Items. Mostly derivative garbage(e.g gauntlets of ogre power in a dress, rope of climbing, plentiful cup that is a decanter of endless something), with a handful of decent items. A flying chariot of the gods. A magic wicker basket with a palace inside that is impregnable against all but the most powerful magic(If it’s a Daern’s instant fortress clone, it’s at least well disguised). A third eye that lets you control winds but not to hurricane strength.
I've skipped over the rest of your bullshit to here, just to point out that the whole deal (that you are assuming is just "ripped off D&D") is actually about "all this shit FITS into the Epic India of myths".
I mean for fucks' sake, you don't know what a Vimana is, or where it comes from, and you think you qualify to judge this stuff?!
But that's actually beside the point; the point isn't to argue from authority here, but that you fundamentally misunderstand/reject the design goal on the one hand, trying to argue that AoI should be as different as possible from D&D for its own sake even though that's NOT what an OSR game does; and lack the knowledge of the mythology to realize that this isn't just about filing the serial numbers off of D&D but rather showing just how much D&D there is in 3000-year old Indian mythology.
-A magic item and weapon section with an emphasis on bows that is not worth the price of admission but is not actively offensive either. Be prepared to gaze in awe at magic things that inflict 1d6 extra fire damage. A child could have thought of that.
And here is something that so brutally demonstrates your (almost certainly intentional) catastrophic lack/refusal of comprehension. You gloss over the entire significance of the Bow to Indian heroic culture on the one hand, while on the other complaining about 1d6 fire damage as a mechanic on the other, and not grasping how much of an moron that makes you. You think tradition is bad, we got that. You think an arrow that requires you to change a plot point or generates a narrative theme would be better than fire damage, and that "scene resolution via tiddlywinks and interpretive dance" is so much more sophisticated than rolling 1d6 for damage, we got that to. What you don't get is why that explains how utterly vacuous your ideas are, and why my side is winning and yours is losing.
And…close off with a decent overview of major religions. Recent amount of detail is given. No information of Asura princes and their rituals. Lame. Guessing its Unholy acts and perverse reflections of what the gods want. Whatever. Two appendixes, dealing with higher level play(what you would expect in B/X only without siege rules or mass combat) and one detailing future events in the Mahabharata. Not likely to see much use, but more interesting then 80% of the book.
And I love how, in the truest example of the spirit of your utterly unbiased reviewing, you sum up 15 pages of book material and tons of mechanics (divine intervention, divine quests, cost of living, housing, land management, name-level rewards, schools of philosophy, organized crime, merchant/business mechanics, taxation (relatively historically accurate), royal attention, marriage/children and inheritance, crime and punishment (directly taken from the vedic law codes), and a brief but detailed outline of about 20 years of potential campaign history) in a dismissive paragraph.
Overall, while Arrows of Indra is undeniably functional, it is uninspired, derivative and falsely advertised. Pundit’s claims of only having to read the product to get a grip on Mythic India gaming
I think this very review proved the contrary. The fact that you DON'T LIKE that you can run OSR-D&D in the Mythic India setting doesn't disprove the fact that AoI shows you exactly how to do it (well, one way to do it). And since you gloss over or dismiss most of the setting material (a significant chunk of the book) you in fact make no coherent argument as to how or why this would be inadequate for an experienced OSR GM with little to no knowledge of Indian mythology to be able to take AoI and run a successful Epic India setting game.
The few nuggets of creativity buried here and there do not save it from a likely unmarked rpg-grave at the bottom of a pit.
Before Bedrock switched companies and had to resubmit it on rpgnow, AoI was a silver bestseller. In the month or so it's been back on, its already a copper bestseller again. Its print book sales have been good enough that there's interest in more product (that I don't have time to do right now), and its distribution is good enough that just today Chris Kutalik pointed out to me that AoI is one of the only smaller-print OSR games he's actually seen on FLGS shelves.
Just because you wish I was unsuccessful doesn't make it so.
I would pay perhaps $3.50 for the setting and underworld sections. The GM section should be free on a blog.
I'm sure Bedrock is hugely interested in your pricing advice. Meanwhile, the royalty checks I've been getting, as well as the general praise from the OSR, has me crying all the way to the bank.
My recommendation is you spend your 10$ on reference works for Indian Mythology(you can read the Mahabharata and probably others online for free btw), download a free copy of labyrinth lord, OSRIC or swords and wizardry, and make your own setting. You can do better then this drivel.
If anyone feels they can, I'd urge them to do so! I certainly don't pretend that I'm the only person who could possibly have made an India-themed OSR book! I'm just the only one that did.
But you know, if you were to actually write a game, rather than just use it for your own play, I'd suggest doing more than just the Mahabharata (do you even know the names of any other Indian epics? Maybe the Ramayana rings a bell?), and spend a couple of decades studying Indian religions and culture as well as mythology.
Or then again, maybe not, because then you'll get idiots whose entire repertoire of Indian knowledge comes from curry houses and bollywood movies trying to tell you there are no goblins in Indian myth.
RPGPundit