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…
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