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
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AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
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