Messages from the Far Havens

My Swedish fantasies have been further extended to another light and inventive take on BRP, ‘Hjältarnas Tid‘ (The Age of Heroes). Without any translation available in English, this became my first foreign language RPG purchase. I was enamoured by the description of the BRP style game in this thread on RPG.Net.

There were a few moments, and no more, where I vascilated on the prospect of a personal translation via Google Translate. How quick would it be, how much text scraping, how comprehensible the result? Translate has a limit of 10MB and the file was likely to be larger (it was). Ah well, I would step forward and discover…

My conversion method was to open the PDF using Google Docs and then use Tools/Translate to shunt the text into English. This was a little ungainly, as I had to split the PDF to get all of this done, but in the end I had a first stab at the text, though some of it was obscured by formatting exertions in the more complex laid out pages from the source PDF. No worries, I had enough to start to look at the game itself and enjoy what I had purchased. 

I like what I have found. This revised and updated version of the game includes all the elements in the original box. At 137 pages, this was a perfect size game for me. Not too much, and indeed just enough to get to know it quickly to consider whether it will get to the table. It will. Perhaps excited by the re-emergence of Chaosium’s Big Gold Book of Basic Roleplaying, revised, reformatted and licensed for free open development for your own projects, I became, as is typical of me, sidetracked by this much earlier iteration, riven deep in the scandi tradition, with tendrils intersecting to Trudvang, Forbidden Lands and Dragonbane (at least).

Clean and charming layout and art

Hjältarnas Tid, roughly translated as ‘Age (or time) of Heroes’, has all the base core of BRP that you would expect, and as such takes me home and back to the 80s, with a core rule system that very much defined my early and formative roleplaying. The familiar d100% skills were there though with a slightly different number and lables. At 27 adventuring and 8 combat skills, we are taken to some early RPG design, with copious numbers, far higher than modernity would deem entirely wise. It’s alot less than RQ: Glorantha of course, but that’s not really saying anything.

The game may have BRP DNA, but has taken many new directions that sprice up the old faithful nicely. If you are familiar with the relatively new ‘The Troubleshooters‘ RPG then you know what this game is all about, being devloped and produced by the same designer and company. The designer feels he really got it fully right with Troubleshooters.

So, what makes this iteration of a trusted game engine so special? Here are some highlights:

• Attributes as skills : the old 3d6 set of attributes are gone and replaced by skill percentages to be used in Challenges straight away. In fact the old attributes are just enmeshed in the skill listing.
• Doubles and Blackjack : a success is just the usual roll equal or less than your skill. An outstanding successwill be a success bu the dice are doubles. A woeful failure is greater than skill and the dice are doubles. With opposed rolls, as many are, the higher successful skill roll wins.
• Open and Closed Difficulties :  A standard skill roll is required in a ‘Challenging’ situation. If the circumstances allow, it might be an easier situation. In this case Open the roll, usually by one or two steps. If it were two steps, then if you roll and fail, but the digit die is a ‘1’ or ‘2’, then you succeed. If yet more difficult then you Close the roll. Again, say by two steps, then if you roll and succeed, but your digit die is a ‘1’ or ‘2’, then you actually still fail. No modifiers, just an interpretation of the digit die. Elegant.
• Character Traits and Relationships : These narrative pieces of text can be expended during a game session to flip the die result, swapping the tens and units around. Useful!
• Guard and Health : instead of just hit points, characters (and others) have Guard. This is a quickly replenished resource that encompasses momentum, luck, desire and fatigue. Damage is taken off Guard first, before slow replenishing  Health is touched. Oustanding success attacks will damage Health directly. Guard also fuels special abilities that come through Kin and Profession.
• Debt : wizards struggle with the damage that they cause to the natural order when they cast their wrending spells. Each spell has a cost that accumulates Debt. A wizard’s threshold is equal to their Wyrd skill. If they ever transgress this total, then they become wraiths, locked in other dangerous realms, yearning to return.
• Zones : 2d20 style zone areas define the battlefield, supporting a more ‘theatre of the mind’ approach to combat encounters.
• Exploding damage : the game uses d100 and d6. Damage dice explode on a 6. I can hear the screams of exultation and despair already. Armour is rolled soak.
• Opposed Rolls for Combat : Attack and Defense rolls are compared to see what the outcomes is. So, if you are defending then you don’t just want to succeed, you also want to roll as high as possible to improve your chances against the opponents attack roll.

Early days and I may only have scratched the surface. The suggested Kin are nicely written with some very different takes in places, which is always refreshing. Once I had finished several skims through the book  was pretty sure that I wanted to run this game. It would have been nice to have had some more character options and some more magic spells, but there are always compromises when you go for an approachably sized book.

Wait though. What? There are supplements…?

Yes, at the low PDF prices I did buy them. I mean you’d be daft not to, right?  Right? 

Hjältarnas Väg is a whole slew of character options, providing more kin, professions and special abilities. There’s more guidance in this short book too. Handily, the core of the relevant text from the main game has been included and spruced up to the expectations of the supplement, putting everything in one place. There’s also a new skill: ‘Craft’. Using Relationships as a further pool of Traits is also introduced in this book.

I know even less about Magins Väv, except to say that with more than 80 spells and a whole host of traditions, this book will handily round out magic in the game. I shall risk garnering a surfeit of Debt to understand the blasphemous knowledge locked within.