This is part 5 of my review of Heroes of Adventure, a work of biography as much as a review of the system. I’ve chronicled one nameless man’s polished heartbreaker product, going through his style, his mathematics, his hero design, and finally his passion for procedural generation. Now to cap it off, I’m going to look through his Monsters Compendium, the requisite bestiary for this thing, before finishing with my conclusions. I’m certainly not going to trawl through every single monster, if you enjoy that content that’s a different podcast. First, I’ll make a note again about AI art. I’m sympathetic to the view of “death to all AI art products”, both in terms of paying artists, and in terms of having coherent illustrations with soul. What AI does excel at, though, is making horrible-looking nasty monsters. Zero artist budget that this book has, still every single monster has art, weird-handed and spiky. It adds definite color to what would otherwise be a rather dry monster manual. Since I know the author loves his modularity I was interested in seeing how he builds his monsters, and needless to say there are tables available. Monster subtypes (roll), descriptors (roll), five sizes (roll), threat levels (roll), and abilities (roll our first d100, neat), all good. The ability tags are detailed in a huge table and all make sense (poison, web, slow, lucky, regenerate, etc), the old d20 monster feats basically. Which is interesting, because what is completely ditched from the process is the highly regimented hit dice building for monsters…we have a little table that gives a default set of size/hp/AC/skill die (to-hit bonus)/damage for monsters level 1-7, but there’s no formula for how these are derived. Which makes me worry that it’s gut-based at a point, that’s tough for the home hacker. It’s a wonderful set of specialized tools you have here but you left out the general ones, like a screwdriver. An organizational note; humanoid NPCs creation was actually handled back in the Referee’s Guide including stats for leveled-up NPCs. Then we’re off to the monster listings. Format is tight, packing 164 monsters in this relatively slim 64-page booklet; most pages have four monsters per page, with each entry having its compact statblock, a short flavor blurb describing it, an AI-generated little illustration, and a 1d6 “Hooks” table that basically describes how a party is likely to come upon the critter(s). This format is good, the content is…a little uneven. Sometimes the hooks look useful, but at other times it is six different variations of “you bumble into this monster”. I do like that the statblocks include “HARVEST”, which are the monster bits that can be harvested for potions and spells, that’s grisly but cool. As usual, I first flip to the humble ogre (actually, I click the link…the PDFs all have linked tables of content, good show). It’s…a lot tougher than I’m used to, but still gives us a look at a bruiser-type enemy. Level six, with a towering damage resistance 3 (that’s going to more than double its HP), a nasty d12 attack bonus, and power attack, which gives it advantage on its damage rolls. The only thing it has got going against it is the “Slow” trait, which gives it disadvantage on initiative checks. Big tough fighter, that’ll be a hard fight until your heroes are near its level, but as ever it is charmable or able to be ensorcelled, just hope your first level mage’s d20+d4 beats the defensive d20+d12. Going through the lists, you have all the usuals…elementals, giants, dragons, ogres, goblins, gnomes, hags, kobolds, harpies, ghosts, ghouls, lizardmen, golems, animals, dire critters (giant animals), demon types, manticores, zombies, etc. Biggest notable omission is orc but beastmen are present and can fill the niche (art is basically Warcraft Orc). I am disappointed by only three dinosaurs available. There are a few cryptids in the mix too, no big surprise. There is an entry for bear and an entry for “mutant bear”, which is…weird. There are eight human types (Adventurer, Bandit, Commoner, etc) but given they’re just differentiated by the worn gear I’m not sure if the value there. Final note, there are some entries for structures, which is interesting. There aren’t a large number of “new” or nonstandard monsters, but looking at what is different:
Conclusion So with all these books wrapped up, what do I think about Heroes of Adventure? Well, first of all, I’m impressed with the thing as an individual accomplishment. The Nameless Designer put in a vast amount of effort in making some extremely professional-looking books for a notably complete TTRPG game system, all with full-color art, good layout, and a good grasp of the fundamentals of what is needed to use these 192 pages to run years-long campaigns. All of this is done using his own computer and some Midjourney cycles, which is darned impressive. Moreover, he’s not trying to grab a cash from all this, given this system and all the adventures he wrote for it too are completely free on itch.io, with Creative Commons licenses. It’s a singular creator’s gift to the world, offered just in the hope that it’ll be appreciated and shared, and I think that is extremely laudable. But besides all that Mrs. Lincoln, how about the play? I think, ultimately, the Heroes of Adventure Fantasy Adventure Game is…fine. Can I imagine playing it and having fun? Of course. Could I imagine running it for a year of progress over a 1-10 campaign, discovering a compelling emergent story with my friends? Yes, if I could find four others interested in the indie system. But unfortunately, a dark secret that all reviewers of TTRPG products must admit is that these games are one of the most inherently fun and enjoyable activities known to mankind. It's actually quite difficult to not have fun with a good group of friends, eating pretzels, drinking beer, and throwing dice. Heroes of Adventure is a perfectly cromulent game engine to use for this. Unfortunately, the question any new TTRPG system released in the year 2023 must answer is “why?” There are approximately infinity game systems available now, for every conceivable level of complexity, difficulty, or depth. There are all manner of action resolution systems, dice schemes, and running procedures. Every conceivable subsystem, hack, and minigame has been released, with prices varying from “here’s my Google drive link” to “Kickstarted for $2,000,000”. It’s a glutted market, even on the relatively small platforms like itch. Even the free aspect isn’t something to really tout anymore, in this day and age paying money for a TTRPG product means that the consumer either wants a physical product, or else is making the conscious choice to donate money to creators in the hobby. For goodness’ sake the internet bullied Hasbro Inc. into releasing D&D Creative Commons. There are a few innovations here, but I’m not fundamentally seeing any game experiences that can take place in Heroes of Adventure uniquely. I think anyone wanting to pick this up a run it will have a good time, but I wouldn’t say that it’s worth the effort of a 192-page dive, plus the immense inertial resistance that is overcoming “but why not 5E?” As an aside, the funny little term “semi-compatible with OSR” needs a moment of thought. Heroes of Adventure seems to tip more to “tradgames” (think D&D 3, Pathfinder, and other d20 derivatives) to me. Characters, while admirably fragile and not the optimization-pits that 3.P can be, are generally more mechanically distinctive than those in your favorite B/X clone. Even more than that, XP being designed to reward completing quests and adventures first of all is very different than “gold=XP” as the primary leveling and advancement mechanism. The focus on hexcrawling is great, but to be honest that’s more “imagining things while looking at Outdoor Survival” than actual old school play focus. Could you play Keep on the Borderland with this system pretty easily? Probably. But it’s not really what I’d call OSR. All that being said, maybe it is worth checking this out. I’d say it’s to support independent creators, but this guy doesn’t even allow donations, it’s not pay what you want. There are a couple subsystems that I really enjoyed here, most notably alchemy and religion ones…so there are some bits of value. Worth paying $49.99? No. But it’s free, and I admire the gumption here. Certainly, Heroes of Adventure should be held up to shame cash grabs like Shadowdark or glory hounds like Cairn where someone takes their rules hack and markets it to the high heavens, the professionalism and love that went into this is just embarrassing for those products. I do hope some groups out there are enjoying this well-crafted heartbreaker…I just hope for their sakes they won’t run into an ogre early on.
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This is part 4 of my review of the Heroes of Adventure free indie heartbreaker, this time I’m focusing on the Referee’s Guide. Parts 1, 2, 3.1, and 3.2 are probably a good idea to read before tackling this one. So, the classic Dungeon Master’s Gu…er, Referee’s Guide is the second of the three 64-page core rulebooks for Heroes of Adventure, which is traditionally where the meat of the game content lies for a new system. The world-brain, the dungeon master, is the guy who is actually designing the game being played, the system is just the toolkit he’s using. So what’s in the toolbox? The Referee’s Guide here is organized…okay, going Rules-> Creating Heroes (rules for making new classes)-> Running Adventures-> Creating Adventures-> Campaign Play. I’d put the classmaking hack at the back myself, but otherwise, sure. The rules here are not fully sufficient, a DM does have to read up from the Players Hondbook as well, but it’s obviously the main focus is going to be on the designing and running side. Which is fair. Rules and the hero-hacking sections aren’t too much novel. There’s a little bit of interest in the reactions table/fate table presented to allow a lot of “I don’t know what to do, imma roll” moves on the DM’s part. The DM advice is solid if unoriginal, advocating for an even-handed relationship with the players that encourages “yes and” responses. The friendly improv advice is somewhat ominously offset at the end by the brutal wounds and wild magic tables, with lots of ways to nastily cripple a character. The hero class creation guidelines make a lot of sense, as mentioned back in part 3 the classes are basically just big buckets of feats, so the rules are “here’s your chassis, here’s the bucket, go have fun”. This is fine, but this isn’t the point of the book… …More surprisingly, the “Running Adventures” section doesn’t seem to be either. 10 of the 64 pages, so significant, but not dominant. Advice here is pretty solid again, with old-school wisdom like reaction tables, morale checks, ten-minute exploration turns, and weather tables…while there are also trad d20 bits like knowledge checks, social skill checks, crits, and advantage/disadvantage granted for plans (but not charming acting, good). I do like that Perception is not a skill used in searching, if a player is looking for a thing, the player will find the thing unless otherwise hidden. A big downtime activity table is present for time between adventures, which is nifty. Combat is theater of the mind, with “range bands” called out in the rules that are conveniently in 30ft increments so as not to render all D&D written everywhere for all of time irrelevant. The only part where I have an issue is the handwavy part in the “Rewards” section where there’s no actual guideline for wealth-by-level, just like in 5E. I understand without GP=XP (OSR) or magic item shops (3.P) there’s not a strict need for it, but fighters need to be able to afford plate armor and a golf bag full of weapons, and those aren’t free. I’m sure the sympathetic and positive DM that is the author gives out plenty of gold, but that’s a ton of homework to give out. There’s a difficulty is evaluating how easily the hypothetical literate-but-ignorant DM could use these rules to run a game from a place of pure tabla rasa innocence, completely unaware of the vast tradition of roleplaying accumulated over the last two-and-a-half generations. This huge floating cloud of tribal knowledge hangs over everything in a book like this…the theoretical Newbie DM might be missing something key that I, with my own years of experience running games, might also be missing. All this is advice, then, not instruction. Well-meaning advice though. It’s in Creating Adventures that the author’s passion lies, here in fully half of the book’s page content. He has a heart, nay, a mania for procedural generation. There are pages and pages of procedures and tables to make wilderness maps, settlements, rumors, quests, challenges, adventure sites, random encounters/NPCs, and loot/crafting resources. There are extensive procedures to use die-drop methods to make maps, to randomly generate the towns and dungeons found on it, and to fully populate them…it’s really not My Thing, but I am in awe of the sheer density of content here. Most DMs I know have their own default world, where they have vast and exhaustive (in every sense of the world) setting bibles that can generate infinite stories of varying quality, or else they play published standard settings. What we have here is something for the middling sort…a fresh-faced young DM with hope in his heart and an empty canvas in his head, who wants to put in the work to make his own world, but who is apparently afraid to plagiarize a seed from the vast corpus of preexisting worlds out there. The Microscope audience, in other words. This book is great for that kind of worldbuilding, and if the Heroes of Adventure’s default “Fallen Lands” setting is too generic for the enterprising world-maker, then the seeds and tables will support some decent flexing. Like Microscope, this is a separate game being presented here, but one I can certainly understand the appeal of. The final instructional section, Campaigns, starts as a bigger-scale continuation of the previous section, with random tables for filling hexes, opening up story/plot fronts, and designing factions, all well enough done…and then it takes a sharp left turn and over three pages outlines simple but functional rules for mass combat, business ownership, and domains. And they’re beautiful. High-level characters will inevitably be asking questions about all three subjects, and the DM equipped with these three little pages can answer. I wouldn’t make any of these a focus but I have already started using the business/property rules in my home West March game for the players who’ve built a smithy, stables, and in one case a tiny village. They’ve worked very well for the between-session investment that the gold-flush characters who’ve explored the world long for. Golf clap for the Nameless Designer. In the concluding couple pages there’s a small sample dungeon (Mezrak’s Foundry), which is frankly a necessity for any core rulebook. It’s…pretty decent. Two pages to describe a 12-room ancient dwarven foundry being used by deluded cultists to summon a chaos being they think is their god. There are factions (the cultists, their bored/deserting mercenaries, tricky chaos demons), a few map loops and secrets, tricky levers to play with, a random encounter table, and an actual order of battle. Enemies are all with stats in a tight little table. There’s also a vault with decent money and a magic warhammer, so that’s neat. I think this thing is possibly tuned a little brutally for a first-level party, my gut says it’s for a party of level 3’s. That feels like a wise choice, in this case. The audience for a sample adventure isn’t really a group of new players, it’s a new-to-the-system DM who wants to read through something to see how the system is expecting to be played. Decent adventure, good sample adventure. And with that, we’re through 2/3 of the core Heroes of Adventure rulebooks. The last part of this quixotic quest is the monster manual. After all, we’ve been working hard with the setup to play, but the probable majority of the time in this game will be the heroes trying to hit monsters… This is part 2 of Part 3 of my review of the Heroes of Adventure freebie heartbreaker labour of love/AI art extravaganza/TTRPG system, where I focus on the latter half of the Player’s Handbook. Earlier parts focused on the system as a whole and the underlying math. When last we left our hero Dave he died in character creation. It’s assumed that eventually we’ll manage to make a character that survives a couple 1-in-6 chances to die embarrassingly, so now we need to outfit him. It’s a silver standard world out there, so let’s take our slightly tarnished coins to the shop… Chapter Four: Equipment Ah, the good old shopping list. I’ll look along the lists for notable omissions or inputs, but first a bit on items…heroes can carry 12 items, plus one per strength skill die. 6 items are available at a given time, while the rest are stowed, and coins are 500 per “item slot”. The biggest difference between HoA equipment and most systems is that these things break constantly, damaged on a critical failure (natural 1), utterly destroyed if damaged again while dinged. This 5% failure rate applies to magic items, too, where enchanted items get diminished once and then start to randomly lose features. There’s a possibility of fixing things but the dangers to equipment are real. The system also uses the pretty common “shields are shattered” rule to trade a shield for a single hit’s damage. Neat. Weapons and armour are a list that won’t surprise most, although Gygax would frown at the piddly three polearms available, need about ten more at least. Weapons and armor have special feature tags that make them special…the Heavy tag in particular imposes disadvantage on magic and dexterity checks, trying to prevent thieves and wizards in full plate. Fair. There are oil flasks Dwarven Bombs available, although at a steep 300sp price they won’t be ubiquitous. Rations, as a good benchmark, go for 5 silver pieces per 2 days, so a bomb will feed you for a third of a year. Healing potions do exist, although they’re pricy at 250sp…better healing options are the healer’s kit (d6 healing x5) or bandages (d4 at disadvantage healing). All these things are in the DM-fiat world of “not easily available in small settlements”, so only towns have Ye Olde Alchemyst’s Shoppe. Finally, under “items” we do have properties, animals, and hirelings. Sell-Swords are a remarkably cheap 10sp per turn plus expenses, which means wise players will have kill squads of mercs most of the time. I do like having a hunting hawk cost 25x more than a day of a mercenary risking life and limb. Generally, I noted no major omissions on the tables here, equipment is section is perfectly fine. Chapter Five: Crafting On the one hand, this section is only three pages for crafting and alchemy, so there’s some general hand-waving happening here. On the other hand, this system is pretty great considering that’s in in the player book. Basically there’s a long list of rando ingredients and materials that have a suggested crafting or potion use, and it becomes a game between player and DM to try and use the broad but useable guidelines to make the thing that the crafting player envisions. From long experience without huge mechanical benefits only about one player per dozen will be really into this system, but that one player will be really really into the system. I might actually port this crafting system into my own games I like it so much. Chapter Six: Magic Long-term players of D&D are leaning forward now, licking their chops. Here, more than anywhere else, is where a fantasy adventure game sets itself apart from others. Any game where wizards are protagonists, they will tend to dominate the tone and action, all the more so as they advance in levels. Wise system designers will hang all kinds of disadvantages on their wizards, knowing that they’re going to be so dominant as the story advances, and they’re right to do so. Still, without magic we’re all just playing d20 Modern here, which is an awful thing, so let’s dive in. Magic is cast using the magic skill, typically with a DC 10 or a roll-off against a stat being used as the target’s save. Critical effects are applied to this skill check too, so a natural 20 will automatically amplify the spell (adding more range/bigger die/etc) and a natural 1 will mean a roll on ye olde Wild Magic table. The are no spells-per-day slots or limits, but every spell cast costs one hit point, or 2/3 if the spell is amplified/even more amplifieder, and that hit point doesn’t get healed outside of sleep at night, so that’s the limit. Taking a school of magic opens up all 10 spells in that school to cast, but unless the magician is proficient with the spell its cast at disadvantage. Each level a caster gains two spells as proficiency per school, and once the caster is proficient with all spells in a school he gains access to a miracle, a very powerful spell that permanently reduces hp by 2 and is only cast once per six months. The school list:
Overall, the spells listed here are pretty complete and seem to be decently strong and varied, with no obvious overpowered stuff beyond the twice-a-year miracles. If anything, the spells feel like they’re tuned to be on the weaker side compared to the D&D norm, with the author clearly knowing his stuff. Magical healing is a touch parsimonious; nobody is going to be outhealing the boss damage here. I like the magic fine. Chapter Seven: The Gods Seems like a weird place to put fluff at first, but it’s actually a nifty little two-page religious spellcasting subsystem that gives a list of gods, how to impress them for “piety points”, and how to ask for their divine favors (a spell that is cast using a piety point). Only one favor can be asked for per day, and it’s a religion skill check to have a prayer successfully answered. Every character can interact with this system, and remember, this is the player-facing book. I love this subsystem and I think I’ll be stealing it. The Rest The book finishes with a couple pages of pregenerated heroes and a no-frills but very functional blank character sheet. As always with a players’ book, it’s not focused on the sale of “you should play this system”, it’s more “so your DM picked this to play, here’s how”. I think the Players Handbook does a good job on this task. No player in the history of the hobby has ever read an entire player handbook, of course, but there are good systems in here for the DM to swipe and staple on the foreheads of players interested in those mechanics. Organization and presentation are fine, length is decent, content is solid…good handbook here, Nameless Designer. Now of course we need to drill down to how the game gets run… This is part 3.1 of my review of the Heroes of Adventure free TTRPG system, this time I’m focusing on the Players’ Handbook. Parts 1 and 2 are found here and here. The Players’ Handbook is organized in the somewhat unusual sequence of Game Rules-> Setting/World Information-> Making a PC-> Equipment Lists-> Crafting/Alchemy-> Magic-> Setting Pantheon-> Example Characters/Sheets. Front-loading the rules makes sense in a player-facing document, as all DMs know that players have the attention spans of espresso-addicted hyperactive squirrels on a bender…they aren’t going to sit down and read a 64-page book in order. As a reviewer and a game-runner, though, I of course will be reading this thing one chapter at a time. Moving on then: Chapter One: Rules To begin, after several pages of colorful and somewhat wonky AI art in title pages, there’s a 1-page introduction that explains the basics of playing a TTRPG and sets the mood slightly. We get a few signals (“games of yesteryear” and “semi-compatible with OSR”) that the author knows his RPG history, and then we’re off to the rules. Significant variations from tradgames we note immediately are that distances are abstracted to “range bands” in terminology but that are still 30ft increments, that hitting zero HP is immediate death/rolling on a wounds table, and most significantly that XP is awarded primarily through completing quests. A little XP trickles in from overcoming monsters (not killing per se), exploring sites, and finding artefacts or treasures. This means that play will be structured along a mission format, wandering around into fresh zones looking for the yellow exclamation points…which will be somewhat at odds with the hexcrawl language up ahead. Most of the rules are pretty standard, though, as covered in part 1…again, this is a d20 system with checks against DCs as the primary mechanic. Attributes (Agility, Command, Fortitude, Senses, Strength, and Will) are far less impactful than in most systems but get used in standard ways, and there are a few things that OSR will definitely consider sins, like social interactions leaning on Command or Guile checks. Something I always check are the combat maneuvers/grapple rules…55 words here, very simple, undoubtedly insufficient for edge cases, but I’m not going to complain. It’s a perfectly functional system. The final bit of the chapter is an example of play that shows a scenario that’ll be unsurprising to anyone familiar with a d20 system. Chapter Two: Setting …and now for a sudden shift from crunch to fluff. This chapter concerns itself with the assumed setting of the Fallen Lands, a generic continent with a Standard Ancient Fallen Human Empire, the Dying Elf Race of the Woods (Wildfolk), the Stern Mountain Dwarves (Northmen), and a very normal set of factions (The Church, The Remnants, The Druids, etc). As generic as it all is at first, I do appreciate how blank the hexmap is…the game understands what’s special about a TTRPG campaign. It’s not about a weird or wild set of hooks, the stories that emerge are personal and special not because of the setting they’re in, but because it’s “us” who are in them. So generic, wish it sparked more creativity, but I don’t count that against it too much. Chapter Three: Heroes So at this point we’ve finally caught up to where the players flipped forward to about fifteen seconds after cracking the book, we’re now looking at races and classes to make the Player Characters. It’s not immediately intuitive in all ways but there are helpful examples of character creation sprinkled throughout the chapter. First, the prospective player picks a race (or rolls for it). Nonhumans have a limit to only 1 allowed per party...they’re generally much more powerful at the outset than humans, but take twice as much XP to level as humans. Options are:
This is a game built for the current year, so of course there are also rules for creating a character’s background, but more interestingly there’s also a fairly involved set of rolls in the backgrounds to have a history that gives benefits or detriments to the character at the outset, up to gaining a level or dying, in a nice nod to Traveler. Alright, let’s try this exercise and make ourselves a character, shall we?
This is part 2 of my system review of the admirable indie heartbreaker Heroes of Adventure. For part 1, please see here.
I’m going to promise not to break out the spreadsheets, here, but I think something that gets very neglected by reviewers is looking at the math core of a TTRPG system. Designers can have every innovative mechanic in the world, but if the math says that 65% of the time your fighting-mans miss trying to stab a goblin, then your fighting mans are going to feel like bumbling chumps. Anything players have a number to; they’ll hold as more important the bigger that number is. Of course, a key OSR insight is also that skill systems will also tend limit creativity…the magic user doesn’t see a skill named “Climb” anywhere in his sheet, so there’s nothing stopping him from trying to climb. So it's important, and Heroes of Adventure has an interesting take. One of the heavily advertised elements of 5E was “Bounded Accuracy”, a response to the huge proliferation of scaling bonuses in Pathfinder and 4E that led to highly specialized munchkins running around killing dragons at apprentice-tier. The designers of 5E carefully limited the bonuses to armor, to-hit, and everywhere else, and as a result optimization got strictly curtailed. Unfortunately, on the design side that meant that the only way to scale monsters became piles and piles of hit points, making combat a rather dull affair “by-the-book”, particularly for the Dungeon Master. There’s something similarly interesting happening here in HoA, where static roll bonuses are verboten (DEF and HLTH do go up, albeit fairly gently). Instead, there are six stats-which do not directly affect combat or magic- and a small number of skills that get invested in to gain a bonus die. This does some interesting things to the system’s bounded math. The first “point” a player invests into a skill is the biggest bonus, going from 0 to a d4, which averages out to +2.5. From then on, each increased die is only +1 on average, going 3.5 (d6), 4.5 (d8), 5.5 (d10), and finally 6.5 (d12). This is a little stronger than 5E’s Proficiency bonus (+2 through +6) and a little weaker than Pathfinder’s class skills (+4 at first up to +23 not counting feats and stats). As a system with advantage/disadvantage, it’s also easy to see when having a skill is more valuable than getting advantage (assume ~+4), that’s the third skill-up going from d6 to d8. Looking at the band of results here, a first-level character with a single skill investment is probably getting 2-24 on his checks, averaging 13 (17 with advantage). A fifth level (or tenth level) character highly specialized in a skill, finagling well for advantage, gets 2-32 on his checks, averaging 17 (21 with advantage). This is a fairly parsimonious increase and given weapon damage is die-only as well (with powerful weapons getting advantage on damage rolls), we’re in a tightly bounded math zone. No multiattack for your heroes, either. Being a d20 system, accomplishing tasks in HoA is rolling a d20+skill/ability and trying to meet or beat a target DC. Most tasks are in the standard 0-30 DC band, with 30 being the nice “nearly impossible”. As a note that means that “difficult” checks at 20 are still too much for a max-level adventurer over half the time. Monster ACs (DEF) reflect that band pretty well, with level 1 creatures averaging around DEF 11, and the top level 10 creatures average DEF 15. There’s better variety within the monsters than 5E, though, which is nice. PCs start with 8 DEF and get +1 every even level, so a wizard starts with 9 DEF in robes and ends with 15 DEF, while a specialized shield-and-armor fighter starts with 13 DEF and will top out around 21 DEF with the shield focus feat ability. That’s some decent differentiation, but before you get excited note that the best monsters get a d20 as their skill die, so even the armor-focused PC will be hit a little over half the time. So the system looks like it is biased toward failure in complex skill tasks, while hitting in combat is easy. Of course absent magic and special abilities (which we’ll get to), the other half of combat is of course damage, and this is even more tightly constrained. Damage is d4 to d12, and players don’t have any way to get more than two attacks (once per encounter, in the case of martial classes). Some monsters do, but not all…which is a good thing for the heroes, because they’re gaining a paltry +2 hit points per level…which means that your level 1’s are starting at 9-16 depending on race and class, and cap out at 27-34. Meanwhile, first-level enemies will be 5 HP on average, but the top threats can crack 150. That’s, uh…yeah, this is not a game that wants you fighting dragons toe-to-toe. Noted. Critical successes, by the way, do double damage while critical failures break your weapons, so there is a little swing to be had. Shield break rules are in effect, so experienced adventurers have a wagon loaded with spare shields used to nullify a single attack’s damage. Spells are interesting, most that have instant effects are a simple difficulty 10 magic check (magic is skill, like melee combat, ranged combat, and athletics)…not too punishing, although there are no spell slots and magic-users cast from hit points, which must be annoying early on. Nastier targeted spells are an opposed check, so you better invest heavily in that magic skill because at your best you’re rolling 1d20+1d12 against the 2d20 of the biggest threats. Despite the lack of formal saves my gut says you’re looking at about the same success rate as a Pathfinder spellcaster dealing with overcoming Spell Resistance plus the target’s save. In the end, it looks to me like Heroes of Adventure’s math expects the players to experience decent success early on, with hits easy even at the endgame but increasing lengths of time in fights. The d20 skill check system looks designed to make checks reasonably challenging throughout the course of the game, with heroes getting mildly better at the skills they focus on but able to broaden their abilities considerably. On a scale of “OSR” to “3.P”, you’re looking at something in the middle of road for PC power, with lower levels more competent than a B/X starting PC but more of an OSR feel by the time the heroes max out at level 10, even weaker than CMI/name level AD&D PCs in certain cases. Interesting as the skill die concept is, it’s not going to make an immense difference in the long run. But we all enjoy rolling more dice, don’t we? On to part 3... A couple weeks ago, in my Itch.io delving I reviewed an overwritten-but-professionally-outlaid adventure called Lair of the Mutant, written for this guy’s very own heartbreaker system. I was impressed by the slick presentation and professional formatting when combined with the fact that the adventure was being given away for free compared to so many uglier products asking for money. I thought it might be an introductory free adventure like Ashes of the Sea designed to sell the game system, but then I noticed he was publishing all his stuff for free, not even PWIW. I think technically that actually disqualifies it from being a heartbreaker…those are so called because the author(s) wanted to make a profit. I’m a sucker for a passion project, and I built a story in my head of this random dude plugging away at his homebrew with his little group of friends (playtesters credited), then deciding he wants to share his creation with the world for the sheer joy of showing off his baby. It was an attractive idea, so I spent my $0 and downloaded Heroes of Adventure’s three core books and now I’m reviewing it.
As an aside, some people may find the art choice in these productions controversial; there are illustrations all over the place but it’s all Midjourney (an AI art program). Clearly this isn’t ideal, we’d all enjoy having an actual human art team working on color illustrations…but there’s a budget of zero here, with an expected profit of zero. And, wonky as the details are at times (it’s nearly impossible to get Midjourney to draw three adventurers facing the same direction, for instance), what is here is vivid, colorful, and reasonably coherent. I certainly agree with most objections to AI art, but I think this case is generally tasteful and it adds a lot of visual interest to the read. With three tomes each weighing in at 64 pages, that’s certainly appreciated. Anyway, on to the core system. It’s a d20 system, most fundamentally…I’ll get into the math core in the next section, but it’s certainly nothing strange at first. When an outcome is in doubt, players make a check by rolling a d20 and trying to meet or beat either a static number (difficulty or defense rating) or an opposing d20 roll. Abilities and skills can modify the d20 by adding a skill die, d4-d12 in the case of players. There’s advantage and disadvantage too. So far, so normal. There’s a complete lack of any static bonuses anywhere; everything is dice…the only concrete numbers are health (hit points), defense (AC), and the many many tables. HoA is a race/class system, with four races (basically human, dwarf, elf, half-elf) and twenty classes. The classes aren’t nearly so structured and strict as is often seen in later D&D, instead consisting of a few mild starting bonuses and then a whole grab-bag of class abilities that get chosen on each level-up, which plenty of cross-pollination between classes (e.g, an Assassin might look exactly like a Thief with a few levels in). Going back to the races, we get a refreshing bit of attitude where the book sternly enjoins parties to be human-majority, with no more than 1 each of the other races. It also seems a little worried about having so many classes with magic access, and recommends limiting casters. At last, we have some overt instructions for the type of game HoA wants us to run. I blame the Midjourney art in part, but there was a point early on when I began to entertain a tiny suspicion…was this whole thing written by ChatGPT? The referee advice is good but reflects the solid wisdom of a hundred OSR games (with a salting of The Angry GM’s website fed in as well). The setting is purposefully generic, a blank map designed for wilderness exploration, and everything is very reasonable but feels like someone took a blender to “good RPG design” and set it to liquefy. The strong opinion voiced that parties should be majority-human, though, that’s a human comment. So why did I get a mild AI impression? More than anything else, the passion of Heroes of Adventure is for Procedural Generation. For everything, there is a table: Character creation? Tables. Advanced heroes? Tables (leading to a charmingly Traveller-esque career system). Building encounters? Tables. Building quests? Tables. Building a town? Tables. Building a campaign? Believe it or not, tables. I was wondering if I could maybe have my own business in a midsize town populated by some odd NPCs…once again, tables. It’s a passion throughout the books here. I can certainly respect the procedural generation to help give ideas, but I do wonder if its why things look slightly more generic than expected. Then of course I also noticed that the spellings in the books were British English (humour, rumour, colour). So that of course is also very human, because everyone knows that chat AIs are American. At this point I’d probably have moved along, but there’s something else intriguing about Heroes of Adventure…the core math. Again, not a single +# bonus to be seen. This includes the skills and abilities system, too, which is fun. So next time, I’m going to break out my slide rule and look at the math of this system, and thus the type of game it expects us to run. I guess it’s interesting enough to keep me reading…part 2 |
AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
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