RPGPundit Reviews: Wayfarers the RPG

This is a review of the Wayfarers RPG, created by J. T. Swill and G. Vrill.  This is a review of the print edition, published by Ye Olde Gaming Company.

In a certain way, this game finds itself a little prejudiced coming as it does after my review of Alpha Omega, at least in the "production values" sense of the world. Alpha Omega was kickass in that respect, and Wayfarers is much more of a regular effort. But, BUT, there is one very notable thing about Wayfarers right off the bat that all my players agreed kicked ass: the cover.

Wayfarers is a big (435 page) complete fantasy RPG; its softcover, and seems well bound.  The cover, however, has got to be one of the most brilliant choices for an RPG cover I've seen in a long time.  It depicts, in a fairly old-school 80's-art style, some kind of epic battle; with some wizard in the background using some kind of plant control spell to strangle a demon-dude, a warrior in the background charging at a group of mooks, and, in the foreground, an obvious Player Character-type person hacking the shit out of a huge humanoid Bear-Man! The human has a bigass sword, the Bear Man has a sword and a sickle, and they're locked in a death struggle, complete with spurts of blood flying... shit, that is one awesome cover.  It tells you right away what the overall genre and atmosphere of this game is meant to be.

I mean look at this (though it doesn't do it justice as a picture on computer, you have to see it as part of a book to really appreciate it):



And what is it meant to be? Why, an Old School game, but not a clone, with lots and lots of optimization options. The back cover (not as impressive as the front cover due to a notable lack of Bear-Men) states the "Wayfarers makes it possible" to "play a wizard, mercenary, priest or rogue, or to create a distinctly unique persona".   It boasts that the game has "dozens of skills, four types of magic, and over 500 spells".

So yes, its that kind of game.  What could be unflatteringly called a Fantasy Heartbreaker. In fact, the manual and rules are set up in a way very very remiscent of the AD&D 1e books, except for being all in one manual, and being quite a bit more orderly.  Still, you can clearly see the homage.

And essentially, Wayfarers IS AD&D 1e, with the addition of a TON of house rules, and the subtraction of a couple of details.  That last bit is what ultimately makes me personally not very turned on by it, and makes me question how successfully it will end up appealing to the "Old School" crowd, because the things they took out of their "houseruled" version of AD&D are precisely the things that I think appeal to Old School gamers.

But first, what they added in: well, for starters, they added in a coherent skill system, neat combat rules, character creation that gives total control to the player.  That last one should give you a hint of what they took out: Classes, and virtually any element of randomness.

I get the feeling that Swill and Vrill really hated the unreliability of a random roll in character creation, and hated being bound to a particular class.  So they removed both of those barriers, and created a point-buy classless game that is nevertheless recognizably D&D (more recognizeable as D&D, I would say, than 4e D&D is).  Even so, that doesn't really change the fact that the reason a lot of people play Old School D&D these days is for the simplicity of things like classes, and because they love the less-controlled feeling of randomness.

So ultimately this may not be all that good for their chances for success.

Before I get into the meat of the game, let me note that the interior art also has a number of good images (none as awesome as the Bear-Man cover, though), all in b&w, with a good mix of art-styles, but all with a suitably 70s/80s old-school flare. Lots of stuff that hints at both epic fantasy and sword & sorcery.

So, creating a character: you have the basic races; Dwarves Elves, Half-elves, Half-orcs, Hobgoblins, Humans and Orc. No halflings or gnomes, which is already something of a difference from D&D. Attributes are Agility, Endurance, Intellect, Presence and Strength (with Wis and Cha basically being combined into presence).  Agility (dex) affects initiative and hitting with an off-hand weapon, Endurance (con) affects health (hit) points per level, Intellect (Int) affects initial languages and bonus spells for hermetic casters, Presence affects bonus ritual and faith spells. Strength affects your damage with melee and missle combat and armor impedence.   And each attribute also has a base modifier for skills related to that attribute.
You buy attributes with a point-buy system.

Health points (HP) are equal initially to your Endurance, and initially has a dodge score (AC/defense) equal to their Agility. In place of saving throws there are physical and mental resistance checks, which are affected by the sums of certain logically related attributes to determine a modifier.  There's lots of nice charts and tables in this game, its only a pity that virtually none of them are random.

Skills are also bought with points, and are divided into two kinds: disciplines and proficiencies.  Disciplines include things like "ambidexterity", spell levels and access, more health points, increasing initiative, dodge, physical resistance, attributes, gaining multiple attacks, or weapon mastery.  In other words, Disciplines are basically all the abilities that in regular D&D would go up wholesale within your class. In Wayfarers, there are no classes, so what abilities you have, and which ones go up, depend on where you spend your initial and future points.

You DO have "levels" in the game. Essentially, you gain points in each adventure, but can only spend them once you reach a certain number, and that marks your going up in level.  These points will be divided between proficiencies and disciplines, and besides that you get a few extra automatic Health Points. So what it really does is have a point-buy system, but it creates strictures as to when these points can be spent, essentially limiting how and how quickly your character can grow.  It seems like a pretty smart way of putting some controls on the otherwise chaotic free-point-buy concept. Additionally, different disciplines have different skill point costs, and some require certain other skills as prerequisites (for example, "critical hit" requires 1 rank of Weapon mastery as a prerequisite.

It would be hard to judge without actual play, but it seems to me like what this system means is that players will either end up creating characters that will be very focused in one area (weapon fighting, or spell casting) or they will be creating characters with very low-level abilities in a variety of things; but of the two choices specializing will almost definitely be the way to go.  In essence, it seems to me that this really means that there isn't all that much point in getting rid of the class system in the first place!

Anyways, Proficiencies, as you may have guessed, are skills. The skill list is pretty typical (with stuff like Animal handling, Dweomercraft, extra-planar knowledge, healing, perception, performance, rope use, or wilderness lore).  But what is quite interesting is how they resolve skills.  Each rank you take in a proficiency allows you to roll 1D20 for a check, but you only keep the highest roll, modified by your related attribute bonus or penalty.  DCs are between 5-20, with natural 20 being an automatic success and a natural 1 automatic failure. So if you have Rank 2 in lock-picking, with a +2 bonus in Agility, and have a DC9 lock in front of you, you would roll 2D20. If the results are 5 and 11, you keep the higher of the two, 11, modified by your bonus to give you a total of 13, meaning you picked the lock.
You can do a non-proficiency check in something you lack a skill in, but then you only roll 1d10+mod, seriously limiting your chances for success.
Its simple and elegant. I like it.

After you get all the basic stuff down, you have to arm up your character.
In the game, armor works as damage absorption, with common leather absorbing 1 point of damage, and plate mail absorbing 1d8 damage. Shields give you +1 point of absorption.

Weapons are essentially identical to D&D style weapons; with fighting men characters buying discipline ranks in "weapon mastery" to give them extras to-hit or damage with one "class" of weapons.  For example, Hand axes, clubs, hammers, maces, machetes, and morning stars are all "Class A".

Combat is pretty recognizeable too. You roll 1d10 for initiative, and roll 1d20 plus bonuses to hit, having to beat the other guy's Dodge score. You roll damage and armor absorption is subtracted with any remainder being done to hit.. er, health points.The two-weapon fighting rules seem to strongly favor fighting with two one handed weapons, rather than fighting with a two-handed weapon or fighting with a weapon and a shield (with its puny 1 point of damage absorption), unless you have really atrocious Agility.  But basically, two-weapon fighting gives you an extra attack at the cost of not getting that one point extra damage absorption from a shield, and having a mere -1 penalty to hit with your "on-hand" weapon.

Combat has relatively little space dedicated to it, compared to character creation.  And both are considerably less developed than the part that Swill and Vrill clearly cared most for, their magic system.

There are four whole kinds of magic in Wayfarers: Hermetic and Faith, plus Hedge magic and Ritual Magic.

Hermetic magic is your standard wizard magic, complete with having to memorize spells, 8 "spell levels", and spells like Water Walk, Blink, levitation, Dispel Magic, Fireball, and Gate.  When you spend to buy each rank of a discipline in Hermetic magic you gain access to a certain number of spells of that level plus more spells from lower levels.

Spells are fully detailed, complete with spell school (ie. evocation, alteration, charm, etc), Components (material, verbal, or gestured), range, casting time and damage.

Hedge Magic is related to Hermetic Magic and "tends toward artifice and the enchantment of objects, or alterations of perceptions"; so you're talking about illusionists, alchemists or "bard magic" here.  Hedge magic spells are also memorized, but there are only 5 spell levels.  Spells include things like "enchant armor", "charm animal", "Sleep", "Invisibility", and "polymorph".

Faith magic is basically priestly magic, and priests do not need to memorize specific spells in their repetoire. However, priest spells have domains, and a given deity will only give access to certain domains. Faith Magic has 8 levels, like Hermetic Magic, but Priests will have access to only three domains, with one being primary (letting them potentially learn spells up to level 8 with those), another secondary (casting only spells up to level 6) and the third teritiary (allowing only spells up to level 3).

The four domains are Benefaction, Damnation, Revelation and Tellurgy.  Some spells are heal minor wounds (benefaction), Call lesser fauna (tellurgy), Curse (damnation), Animate plants (tellurgy), pain touch (damnation), Improved Psychometry (revelation), Destroy Undead (benefaction), or Wrath (damnation).

Finally, ritual magic involves connections not to god but to other-planar beings, for classes like shamans, druids, warlocks or witches. Ritual magic does not need to be memorized, but depends on the use of "spell points", which limit how many spells one can cast. There are 5 levels of ritual magic spells, with examples like Familiar, Summon Lesser Monsters, Serpent Staff, Swarm, or Summon Undead.

Note that armor affects the use of Hermetic or Hedge magic, but not Faith or ritual magic. So "clerics" can use armor freely, but "wizards" can't.

The GM's section of the book begins with recommendations for how many points to award as Xp per session (3 to , guidelines for how to handle profieciencies (lots of very good detail here for each proficiency), general rules on feats of strength, spell books and gaining new spells, handling combat, light and vision, travel and movement, and then we get into the magic items.

Finally, RANDOM TABLES! Fuck, yeah! There are a ton of magic items, generally being similar to AD&D's magic items, with lots of random tables for providing them. There are some interesting miscellaneous items and cool relics here (not as cool as the Artifacts from FtA!, but hey, nobody's perfect).

Next there are some optional rules.  You have optional character races, including Cambions (half-demons), Gnomes (there they are!), Goblins, a weird race called Harkumen, Ogres, ratkin, reptilians, and sidhe (fairy folk). No Bear-Men though, which is a real bummer.

There are optional skills, which seem to have been placed in the "optional" category mainly because they might be game-breaking (or at the very least, severely game-changing).  Rules on damaging armor, fire damage, friendly fire, firearms; lots of fire-related stuff.

Then you have some very detailed rules on creating NPCs, which, while certainly faster than having to flesh out NPCs with the regular character creation system, doesn't seem to be simple enough to fit my tastes. And finally, some brief descriptions of the Outer Planes, complete with a totally cool image of a summoner calling up some horrendous thing from beyond that Man Was Not Meant to Know.

Next you get the "Catalogue of Creatures"; the monster section with a huge list of 70 pages of monsters, most of which will be familiar to D&D players, including some golden oldies like the Catoplebas.
Oh, and there are bugbears, but no Bear-men.  If that monster on the cover was a bugbear, its the coolest fucking bugbear I've ever seen.
Only a few of the monsters are illustrated, with of course the required image of the sexy succubus.

The last 100 or so pages are dedicated to the default setting of the game, the World of Twylos. As one might expect, the setting is quite detailed, with lots of history, deities, guilds, languages, perspectives on magic, cultural aspects, and details of specific areas. Plus you get some special magic items specifically tied to the setting, extra monsters specifically from the setting (no bear-men there either, it seems), and some guides for running campaigns in Twylos. You even get a glossary of names, places and words from Twylos. And a full-page map, that is a little too vast and with print that's a little too small for my aging eyes.

Twylos is very clearly the very played-in homebrew setting of the designers. It has all the advantages and disadvantages of that.  The advantage is that it doesn't feel generic at all. The main disadvantage is that I found it pretty hard to digest and get into it all. There was really nothing about it that made me feel that it was more awesome or more special than other fantasy worlds; I'm sure it'd be a fun setting to play in, but I don't really see it as a huge selling point for the book itself.  Still, a GM that pored through the setting material would find lots of potential ideas for adventures or stuff to port into his own campaign, even if he didn't actually want to use the campaign world as a whole, so that's a good thing.

The appendices at the end of the book include a list of advice to GMs, things to do and not to do.  I tend to disagree with a lot of their suggestions (ie. DO roll your dice in the open so players can see it, DON'T ever split up the party).  But they do add the rejoinder that these dos and don'ts can be broken at times.

You also get a good table of random monster encounters by terrain type, a quick reference list of all the spells, and a set of lists (sadly, NOT random tables) for furnishings, tools, jewels, terrains, types of "civilized places"; quick references to most of the major charts in the rules, and an index. A sample character sheet is included at the last page.

On the whole, Wayfarers' strengths are that its complete, very detailed, and well-put-together.  The system takes some very good things from D&D, and adds some very good house rules.

Its major weakness, however, is in how it chooses to alter the D&D concept into a point-buy classless system.  The way they do it is very clever, but I can't help thinking this will cost the game in terms of popularity.  In my own case, I really want to like this game, I really do; but I know that as is, I would not play it.  I get the feeling that a lot of the Old-school crowd out there would be turned off by these same things too; while the point-buy fanatics out there might not play the game because its still too close to D&D.
If I could recommend one thing to Mr. Swill and Mr. Vrill, it would be to make sure their next edition of Wayfarers, if there were to be one, should include both their existing point-buy mechanics AND the more conventional set of random rolls and class-structures for those of us who like that sort of thing more.

Meanwhile, if you happen to be the kind of gamer who would love traditional D&D if only it had a more open classless character-creation system with less randomness, you'll really enjoy Wayfarers. Plus, its got a Bear-man on the cover!

RPGPundit

Good review!
Does the name
This is just the sort of book I'd buy... mostly for the cover... read it through... and enjoy it without having any intention of ever playing it.
Sad to hear the setting isn't anything special and that there aren't any bear-men.

I've been informed that the Bear-man in question is in fact a Gnoll.

RPGPundit