RPGPundit Reviews: The Zantabulous Zorcerer Of Zo

The game I'm reviewing today is the Zantabulous Zorcerer of Zo: A Fairytale Roleplaying Game, by Chad Underkoffler, from Atomic Sock Monkey Press. I'm reviewing the PDF edition.

Zorceror of Zo, hereafter abbreviated as "ZoZ", is a rules-lite RPG (using the same rules mechanics as Truth & Justice) that is set in a fairytale world, made for running a slightly weird kind of game in a world that is a mix between the brothers grimm, a kids cartoon, and something really gonzo.  I have to say, the game itself isn't bad.  However, it should come with a big label on the front cover: "Warning, half of this book is the Author telling you about his Campaign".

I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing.  I mean hell, Amber could be accused of much the same thing, as its positively CHOCK FULL of descriptions and examples culled from Erick's actual play.  However, there's something about the way its presented in "ZoZ" that makes it far less appealing.  It took me some time to figure out what that was, since the intent by the author is very clear: he wants his accounts to be helpful to people in their play, and not just show off what a cool campaign he ran.

I think the difference is that in Amber, Erick spaced out lots and lots and lots of short AP examples (mostly posted as dialogue) in the actual sections they were relevant to.  So in the Combat section you might find an example of Actual Play in the section under "Fighting an opponent who outmatches you", where it details an example of that exact situation.

Whereas in Zorceror of Zos what we have is a book divided in two: the first half is the setting, system, and rules.  The second half is a long diary, divided by each game session played (including even the actual fucking dates that that the game was run, as if that would be important in any way to anyone but the author!), where he goes on and on about his campaign.  So it feels, in the end, like an overload. Does it have some useful stuff? Sure.
But to get at that useful stuff you have to bore your way through a lot of irrelevant, sometimes narcissistic material that I can only conclude is included in the way it was either for the glorification of the author or (and I suspect this is the more likely reason) for padding.

But let's look at the strengths of the book for a bit now: first of all, the production.  If the print book is anything as nice as the PDF, that's a very well-done book indeed. The cover is really great, full colour and classy.  The layout is quite comfortable and professional. The illustrations in the book are all very clever, sometimes cutesy poo, often very funny cartoonish drawings that bring to mind the illustrations of a particularly clever childrens' book, absolutely ideal for the product.

The game system is also a "plus" for the kind of game we're dealing with.  ZoZ uses the "PDQ" (Prose Descriptive Qualities) system.  There's nothing too Forgey here, PDQ is essentially a fairly conservative rules-lite set of rules in the spirit of Jonathan Tweet's "Over the Edge".  In the system, characters are created with a set of qualities that describe their character (like "acrobatic", "naughty", "good at finding clues", "Princess", "Singing", "well travelled"; etc etc), anything that represents either something that the character is (ie. "my character is a princess") or something that they do ("my character can sing well"). These qualities are either average (+0 modifier), varying levels of good (giving a bonus of +2, +4, etc), or they are a weakness for the character (in the case of negative qualities, that give a -2).

Task resolution, all task resolution, is handled by rolling 2D6.  Difficulty levels are connected to the quality levels (so an "average" task (DC 7) is connected to the Average trait (+0 mod), a "good" task (DC 9) is tied to the Good trait (+2 bonus)).  Your character can automatically perform any task that is under his trait level; so for example, a characte with a relevant trait of "good" (say "good at tree climing" +2) could climb an "average" tree without even having to roll, unless there was some other situation that created a modifier.  He would have to roll against the DC under normal circumstances only if the Tree was of "Good" difficulty or higher.

Situations can modify the task's difficulty, raising or lowering the level of difficulty.  Once you've figured out the difficulty, if you need to roll the DC of the task is the number that you must equal or surpass in your roll for success.  Its as simple as that.  There are some slightly more complex mechanics for combat, but aside from this the mechanics all work in this way.

There's a couple of additional mechanics, actually: Hero points and Learning points.  Hero points work much as these sorts of things work in any game, you spend them to give you modifiers to your checks. Unfortunately, here's where one of the only slightly Forge-y elements come in, the author has chosen to say that players can also use hero points to dictate certain "details" of the setting, so that you can spend a hero point, for example, to make your character have a lucky break that saves him, or have an NPC who had befriended the hero earlier come in and save him.  This isn't an awful violation of the GM-player relationship all things considered, so I'll let it pass.

Learning points are the XP of the game, and curiously, they're earned when a PC fails at a check.  For this particular genre, I find it strangely appropriate.  If we were talking about D&D or Superheros or something, I'd be outraged; but one of the themes of Fairytales is a young hero learning from their problems and mistakes and eventually beating a problem that initially defeated them (often a problem they created themselves).

I'm not by nature opposed to rules-lite games.  This game is a great example of a rules-lite set of rules used in the right circumstances.  I mean hell, its a game about Fairytales! It wouldn't make sense for such a game to use anything more rules-heavy than PDQ. And PDQ's rules are good, solid, leave little up to interpretation, and most importantly they don't rely on gimmicks or any kind of werid or annoying story-creation mechanics or other such bullshit.

The setting of the game is not particularly original, but then it shouldn't be original. It should be precisely what it is: a pastiche of all kinds of concepts of the fairytale genre.  So what you get is a funny crazy world full of ogres and magic, talking animals and living toys, handsome princes and lovely princesses, evil witches and trolls, and in the middle of it all the Jade City, ruled by the mysterious Zorcerer of Zo (who, you may have guessed, is a lot like the Wizard of Oz).

If anything, the setting might fail in being too structured, as the author used the specific fairytale world he created for his campaign (you know, the one he can't shut up about?), a world where he detailed a number of specific kingdoms with specific creatures and places.  So anyways, if you want a specific world already set up for you to run, ZoZ provides that. Personally, I think that the author could have put a little less time and space into the specific world he created, and a little more space into making a toolkit for creating your own fantasy Fairytale world. Not that the author has been completely remiss in that, mind you, there's certainly quite a lot of material for framing your Fairytale campaign, and the whole "campaign log" could certainly be extrapolated to give a GM a lot of ideas for how to frame his own Fairytale world if he didn't want to use the default, but I think that there could have been a bit more work taken into explicitly focusing on a world-creation toolkit and a little less into talking about Chad's particular world and particular campaign.

The game is certainly chock-full of game advice, most of it fairly good.  One of the things the game is geared for (and the author includes a few mods for) is running the game with small children; there are guidelines for playing with pre-schoolers, younger kids (1st or 2nd graders) or older kids (3rd graders and up).

Now, many of you will know that I oppose on principle the idea of roleplaying with pre-teens; its almost always more for the pleasure of the adult than for the kids.  What's more, there's something creepy about it: to me, playing an RPG with kids is a lot like playing Poker with kids: you get the feeling that the adult doing it is only doing so because he can't get any adults to play with him.  Playing RPGs with a young child is only likely to make a negative impact, wherein the kid will want to discard RPGs when he hits the teen years (the years where he SHOULD be getting into RPGs), because its "that dumb thing I did with my dad/uncle/weird guy down the street/whatever when I was a stupid kid".

RPGs aren't for children.  RPGs are for teenagers, for annoying college students who generally don't do it right, and for the occasional superannuated adult nerd who can't get over it.

That said, if you're going to commit the mistake of roleplaying with the kids around you, I suppose ZoZ is a relatively suitable game to play with younger kids, inasmuch as something as wrongheaded as playing RPGs with children can ever be suitable.

Then we get to the interminable Campaign Log.  Just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about here, the Campaign Log begins on page 101 and takes up the entire rest of the 182 page book (including the appendicces, which mostly consist, I kid you not, of the GM's prep notes for each session he ran).  That means that approximately 45% of the book consists of a campaign log.

The log includes details of what happened, and highlited boxed sections called "Behind the Curtain", where the author explains his GM motivations and commentaries for the events of the session. Again, its not useless by any means, but it does feel like just too much and written in a way that is far too impractical, unless your goal is to admire the guy's campaign.

So, to sum up:

The good: The game itself is pretty good; the system works well and is appropriate to emulation of genre, the layout is excellent. The setting is a good mix of fairytale and weird gonzo.  Also, the title is pretty cool.

The Bad: The GM advice has to be filtered from a large and slightly narcissistic campaign log. Also, the author could have put a bit less setting material about his specific world, and more about how to design your own.

The Ugly: 45% of the book is a freaking campaign log. If you're the kind of person that really loves listening to some other nerd telling you about his awesome-cool game session, you might consider that a plus.  If, like me, listening to that sort of thing makes you want to stab a pipe tool through your ear and into your brain to make the hurting stop, then its not so much of a plus.

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It looks like my decision to go with the Questers of the the Middle Realms alternative was the right one

I got a broken link from the link above.  What's worked for me from the main page is:

http://www.therpgsite.com/?q=node/693

Quote from: jhkimI got a broken link from the link above.  What's worked for me from the main page is:

http://www.therpgsite.com/?q=node/693

Yep -- all of the automatic links from forum entries to blogs articles of any sort are currently broken, it seems. Oh, hey -- great "debunking Blue Rose myths" article, BTW. Makes me wish I would have looked into the game sooner.

Quote from: jdrakehYep -- all of the links from forum entries to blogas are currently broken, it seems. Oh, hey -- great "debunking Blue Rose myths" article, BTW. Makes me wish I would have looked into the game sooner.

Where was this article?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditWhere was this article?

RPGPundit

D'oh! You mean John Kim's article -- there is a link to it in your "Enemy Shows Himself" thread.

yup, never mind, found it now.

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