Hello and welcome to the Weekly Scroll Podcast.
My name is Ryan. And I'm your favorite wise
wizard. Yes, yes you are buddy.
Yes you are. And today we, we are going to be
going through Whitehack White Hat RPG 4th edition, 4th
edition, not 3rd edition, which is, which is I'm holding up
behind 4th edition, but in fact 3rd edition or 4th edition.
That's what we're going through today.
We'll talk about it. We have a bands, we're.
Going to talk about it as we often do on this show.
We're going to talk about a game.
Well, I, I mean, I wish we did it more often because it feels
like we haven't actually done our review in forever.
I think three of our last four episodes were interviews and our
numbers are dropping since we're doing one or two episodes a
month. So we should get back into it.
And today, for those who might notice, not like I actually will
put the episode on today. It's Friday.
This is going to be our new day, about 45 minutes sooner.
Yeah. So we'll be doing, we're doing
that on Fridays and we're going to be trying to get side quests
up and running again here sooner than later as well.
So we're, we're, we're getting back to content.
We, we've had, you know, we, we life happened and.
Life has been happening. We've had some changes, you
know, we're new people now. Yeah.
So my name is now Blunter, not Hunter.
So. Please blunter.
Blunter so. Blunter Your favorite wise
wizard blunter. Yeah, yeah.
Jokes. OK, we're going to do that.
We're going to breeze. Listen, we're not going to
breeze through this one because my God, we'll get, we'll get to
it. We're going to do most of the
game. Prior to that, though, we have a
couple things we want to talk about.
First and foremost, this morning the Innies dropped their
nominations. And here's the thing, the Innies
exists. It's fine.
Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're an
embarrassment. And but when our friends are
nominated, we like to talk about it because it's good for our
friends to be nominated. A number of people that we have
either had on the show or our regular guests or are actually
part of the show at this point are nominated for innings this
year. So we wanted to at least chat
about those a little bit. So I have a list.
We'll breeze through some of them and we'll get going.
I think. I think it's up.
So first and foremost, right off the bat, best adventure, long
form. What's that say right there?
That's right. The Bloom, Space Penguin Inc,
Josh Mansky, Goblin Archives, as well as a bunch of other people.
Josh Clark, Christian Sorrell, Zach Hazzard.
A lot of people made The Bloom happen.
The Bloom's fantastic. We talked about it here on the
show. I think we ran it on the show.
I don't know if you were in. Were you in?
I wasn't in that episode. Yeah, yeah.
So we actually, we got to play some stuff.
We got to do it. Obviously we're big Luminar
horror fans here on the show. You know, we we've had the
writing seminar Parthogenesis of Hungary Hollow currently has
like maybe a day left on it to go back That and Josh Domansky
is officially part of the weekly scroll as our resident side
quest GM. And best friend.
And and bestest a friend and and the bloom was printed by Space
Penguin Inc, who you know is a homie since we literally see
them every month on our regularly scheduled not cat
chat. So I think that's actually going
to be next week or the week after two weeks from now.
I think that is the that is the first one from Space Penguin
Inc, but that is Josh Matthew Goblin Archives.
That's liminal horror with the bloom.
The second one specifically for Space Penguin Inc, we're going
to Scroll down. Scroll down to best Monster and
Adversary VR Dead from Space Penguin Inc.
That's Daniel Hallinan. That is one of the initial
releases, one of the primary releases when Space Penguin Inc
first started. It is Space Penguin Ink's first
birthday, I think maybe yesterday, the day before.
So they were having a sale on all the original stuff, which VR
Dead was one of them. So awesome for not one, but two
zines published by Space Penguin Inc this year, nominated for an
any. This segues into a couple other
things too. First, staying here in Best
Monster and or Adversary, we have a regular guest of the
show. It's been on I think three times
with the Rune Caring Bestiary from Colin Lesora by owns Beard.
It is wonderful. I have multiples now because
after the last campaign I bought another one.
It's right there. But do you have one of those?
I don't. Oh, remind me.
That's why I want a second one. I'll throw it in the box yeah
Love, love connoisseur, love everything they do love the room
can be scary. The Warden Saga remastered is
fantastic and like I said, I I got that as an add on with with
the Warden Saga remastered. So that's great right there.
That is another regular that we've had on the show who you
will see again on the show. Anytime they do anything, we're
going to have them on as long as they are willing to come on and
talk to a couple of assholes and then.
Who's the other asshole other than you?
Oh, Josh, and also a lot, a lot of a lot of times on here you
will see Salvage Union. Yeah.
And guess who? Guess who edited Salvage Union?
I I couldn't even begin to. I've never met a dude who edits
everything all the time. It couldn't be Jared so.
It could. Of course it couldn't be, but
guess what it is? Jared.
Crater, I think Salvage Union's nominated for I think three of
the innies on here and that means your crater would get an
any if any of those go through. What else we got here?
Oh, front of the show. Alex T what's up?
No, finish what you're saying. Oh, front of the show.
Alex T with best art comma cover across 1000 Dead Worlds.
Black Oath Entertainment, The artist being Vladivir Maniukan.
Beautiful cover for 1000 Dead Worlds.
I can actually click over to it. It's this right here.
Fantastic, gorgeous, amazing cover.
I got the special edition version, so I didn't get this
cover, which does make me sad a little bit, but that's
fantastic. Yeah.
So I think obviously some other great names here on the knees
list. You know, we got ultraviolet
grasslands, we got the new imperial dictum from 4 from
Warhammer. We got ether Reich nominated for
a bunch of awards. Well deserved.
That book is fucking amazing. We'll be going over that at some
point, as well as another a a bunch of other cool games and
stuff on here. So make sure you know, I mean
the Indies. The if Josh wins for the Bloom
is the closest will ever get to an Indies since he's technically
part of the show. Because in order to be a podcast
and be submitted to the innies you have to like make a
highlight reel and submit it in since we don't even edit.
If we don't even edit our episodes I'm sure shit not make
it a highlight reel so you will never see us on the innies.
I will say this year, looking at the nominations, I am a lot
happier with a lot of the nominations of seeing this year
as opposed to last year because I remember reading last year
mean like I'm just not even going to, you know, Yeah, but
yeah. Oh, oh, there was, there was one
I forgot that I wanted to mention.
Yeah, the Hex crawl toolbox from Games Omnivorous.
Oh yeah, of course. Nominated for like 3 innings as
well, Best Cartography as well as a number of other products.
So obviously we're huge fans of the show.
Andre's been on the show or we're huge fans of games.
I'm nervous. Andre's been on the show.
Everything they do is fucking magic.
Amazing. That's another one.
That's how you got to check out. But a lot of really cool stuff.
It does. There's a nice spread of things
on here. I mean, Shadow Dark and stuff's
on here because it goes all the way back to last year.
That was obviously going to get some stuff, but a lot of really
interesting things and it'll be interesting to see how that
plays out, you know, and. Who would you vote for best game
this year? Ryan?
Who's your vote for best game? Best game or best product?
No best game your. Choices.
Where's the best game? No, I want to see it.
It's under best free game and product and above best layout
and design. Best game.
Is it? Is it Shadow Dark RPG?
I don't know. I don't, I don't know.
I'm gonna keep that opinion to myself, I guess.
I've not I've seen, I've seen Outgunned a bunch.
I've not got a chance to read it yet.
I haven't read. I've read a lot of stuff from
Mana Project Studio. I really like the stuff that
they do, but I have not got a chance to read Not the end yet.
I've read COBOL, Date My Baby anyway.
And so as of right now, of the ones I've read, it would be
Salvage Union or Shadow Dark. And we haven't even got a chance
to go over Salvage Union on the show.
So we will see, I guess we. That's the thing we should do.
Yeah, it's it's on my shelf. I actually got like the special
edition, a bunch of stuff. I finally got the years ago.
So no, I got I got everything product of the year is really
interesting. There's a lot of good stuff in
here. Cyberpunk augmented, obviously
we we think that's fantastic. Ether Reich, love Ruiner and
Deckard Etherics amazing. Koroko's really interesting.
I love mouse all press. They do a lot of good stuff.
Not the end. We talked about that.
You've played Outcast over Raiders and I do have the box
set for that. That's interesting.
I got. The box, I actually, I gave the
box set as a gift to the the GM that ran for me.
Yeah. And then we got Outgun, Salvage
Union, Shout Out Darker again, who were all nominated for Game
of the Year. Valley of Flowers is is a book
that I want really bad. I don't know that one.
I know it's been sold at a bunch of places.
I was going to snag it from the Cairn shop from the guy I want
to grab that one. The covers amazing and everyone
that I know that's Reddit said it's fucking beautiful.
I'll have to check that out. And in Vampire the Last Grade
5th edition. I have zero interest in Vampire
the Last. Grade.
Yeah, that's it. So that's it.
As far as Indies goes. It's really nice to have people
that we have chat about on the show to have products we've
talked about on the show getting nominated for Indies.
It's nice that not because we talked to them, obviously they
might have hurt their chances more, but it's cool that people
we enjoy and the stuff that they make being recognized and being
nominated, which is really cool. So a lot of cool stuff there.
A couple of things going on right now that we want to talk
about. Crumbling Keep is having the
Greedy Goblin Summer Sale July 4th of July 8th.
It's really great. I love what Crumbling Keep does
They do. Lately they've been doing a lot
of small things. They do a bunch of mark work
stuff. You can get bundles through this
too, where you can get all of the 5E bundle or all of the
Markberg bundle or all that. So that, but they're 25% off the
entire store for a couple of days.
Love James. It's been on the show before.
We've talked about marching order.
They've played as a guest character, just really fantastic
person and all the stuff that I've got.
I even got some 5E stuff from them because they actually do
fun, interesting stuff with it. And I could just play with a
different rule set, but a lot of the monster, a lot of the OSC
and Merck forks F they've been doing lately is fantastic.
So grab that and they are. They just finished the Tech
Romancer mothership pamphlet. I did see that.
Yeah, crowdfunding, they dropped a little preview in in some
messages for us about a new project coming up mid-july.
Very excited for that. So we'll definitely talk to you
guys about that when they announced that so.
That's just listen if you go ahead.
Finish your thought. No, I was gonna think you did.
I was gonna transition. Y'all are interested in what we
were talking about is literally crumbling.
Keep.com nice and simple. There you go.
That's probably what we should do is the websites because not
everyone's on the Youtubes. And then the last one, last but
not least, very much not least is Red Solstice Issue 5 is out.
Yeah, so that's that is from Stella Conjure again now a a
resident, a member of the podcast.
A resident joke. Our Yeah, a member of our side
Quest crew. It is up on itch right now at
Red Solstice dot itch dot IO. You can find all the issues all
the way up to and including issue 5.
The cover for this one slaps. I'm not even going to describe
it for your podcast. People just go fucking buy this
shit. And not only that, I was told by
Jert Space Penguin, Inc, who has been publishing, who published
the last issue and I think will be a publishing red issue, Red
Souls, from now on, that the print of issue #5 will be going
up on the shop next week. So a lot of good stuff there.
As you said, Congrats to all the indie nominees.
We'll see what happens when those people win the homies, you
know, going to get the WS and then check out Kremlin Keep
sales and Red Stulsis. As I said on Red Stulsis, Red
Solstice, the PDFPDF available on itch now.
But I do believe if if you wait for the print run, the PDF will
also be sold through that as well.
So either way, support Stella. She does amazing things and the
red Stulsazine is fantastic. And that is that's it.
That's what we got. That's that's it.
That's the yeah, that's the show.
See y'all later. Yeah, that's it.
That's what we got. I did not bring up my docs, so I
will do that real quick because my goodness, we'll need it.
But we'll just keep everyone entertained while you do that.
I have it so we're good and my dark mode is not turned off.
OK, so white hat 4E that's happening.
As I said, yeah, I have it right here in my hands.
You know what's weird is you can't find like any of the
previous editions anywhere. It's really obnoxious.
It's fucking obnoxious, I'm not gonna lie.
So I was trying to find the PDF 3 so I could bring the two up
together and really reference them together.
You can't find it If you if you go find white hack on drive
through through the website, through everything, three is
gone. You can't find the book
anywhere. You can't find 2, you can't find
one. So if you don't have the
previous editions, I guess you just don't get them.
I guess I don't. But I have the new edition here.
It's a print on demand version. I will talk about that in a
second. I do have the 3rd edition here,
which is not a print on demand edition.
And it's beautiful. It's a nice print.
It's a beautiful dusk jacket. It's look at that fantastic Gray
hardback. Really love the 3rd edition.
Like a real book. It's it was fantastic.
Yeah. So what the fuck is Whitehack?
So Whitehack was written by Christian Merstrom.
Yeah, Merstrom, who also wrote Solar Cars Wake and Tober
Landed. But you might have heard
mentioned before it is a game that Johann or did the layout
for. It's absolutely beautiful.
If you look at that and then you look it into the odd and then
you look at Mark Borg, you're going to think it was all done
by different people. No, same creative dude.
But that book's been out for a while.
But this book, White Hack first came out, first edition came out
in 2013 and this is the 4th edition.
It is a 10 year anniversary edition 'cause it came out in
2023. To paraphrase Whitehack
development is an Whitehack is an ongoing development project
with new additions coming out once there is enough new
finished material. 4th addition offers significant improvement
in almost all areas and also broadens and deepens the scope
of the game compared to previous editions.
There is on the website a lot of resources, the website being
like, I don't fucking know, white hack.com or something if
you want to look at it. Oh yes, sorry.
And then, yeah, I will say the one thing I will say is I'm kind
of disappointed this is the POD edition.
I can only imagine this is, I mean, this is obviously the
easiest thing to do for the creator.
You don't have to fuck with distribution or anything like
that. But the whole shiny cover thing
kind of, I don't know, bums me out.
It's it's a, it's a new addition.
Is white hack rpg.wordpress.com? Boom, there you go.
Kind of bums me out. It's APOD.
It's a it's a 10 year anniversary.
You know well you want to make sure the anniversary edition's
the glossiest cover you can possibly make so.
There you go. I I don't know, hopefully,
maybe, maybe they'll do maybe they'll do another print run.
I don't know. But anyway, so we're doing we're
we're talking white hack RPG. Do we want to get some thoughts
out of the way early? Yeah, yeah.
You want me to start? Yeah, like gent, like let's not
all of our thoughts. There's a lot of.
Things about this game that I like.
There's several things in this game that I like.
That's a good that's that's a good one.
Just that's a good way to start it.
I. Prep.
I prepped that opening earlier. I was like, what am I going to
say that's appropriate for my feelings?
Like, there's a lot of things I like about this game.
Yeah, there there are. I really, really enjoy the
overarching concepts and a lot of the intent behind the design.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it does.
I'm I will say this, it is giving me flashbacks to the
horrors of reading Blades in the Dark, which is not a good
feeling. It was almost.
It was almost exactly. I bounced off of it in a very
similar way. For those of you listening, Ryan
actually wrote a rule summary and I read two other people's
rule summaries as well. So I have a fairly decent
understanding of this game and also shout out the two rule
summaries that I read. I should have.
No, no, no, I have. I have all that info.
OK, but yes, OK, well then I might as well.
I'll, I'll, I'll read that info then so are.
Those people who educated me. Madison and Milton, they're the
two people. Milton, I don't know.
I don't know Milton is, but they are all over the Whitehack site.
They they really love Whitehack. Apparently they did a rule
summary of 3E and then 4E and and then Madison did another
rule summary after that. Milton is from the last readout,
last readout blog readout like REDOUBT.
So it's the dash, last dash readout.blogspot.com.
They did a lot of they did the original rule summary and then
Madison's rule summary is on. Oh, maybe I had not pulled that
one up, but yeah, I know. Oh, no, I have it over here.
That's what I was doing. The complete rule summary.
This is Madison, and she is at Social Dash.
Rooster dot itch dot IO. Want to give a big shout out to
both of those people? It's listen, I'm not dumb.
I like rules. We read rules a lot when I am
dumb. Very.
Yeah, I very rarely have to Google rule summaries of a game
so I can be like, how the fuck do I read this?
You know? And this is one of those times.
And I very rarely have to take more than one sitting to read
their entire rule set, no matter how how big it is.
I can eat, I can cruise like a 3-4 hundred page rule set in one
sitting if I need to. I bounced off this so many
times, so many times. And and I'll give, I'll give
further, I guess, opinions as we go.
But again, yeah, let's just get into it.
Let's just let's just let's just get into it.
You know that's probably a good thing to do, right?
Maybe. Yeah, so let me let me hide
this. Nope, it's not the one I want to
hide. It's the one I want to hide.
So White Hack 4th edition. It's interesting the character
sheet, this is the one of the this is like a character sheet
for the game as the cover of the game, which I thought was neat.
So if you look like 4 digital at the top, that's like class and
base like it's all the thing. Whatever, right?
So what for those in Pocket land, we have hopped over to the
cover. It's a fine cover.
I actually honestly wish that the like purplish pink color
from the PDF was the one that was on the book, but this is
closer to the same white and blue as the original edition, so
I guess that's why they did that.
But it is a series of arrows both up and down, like order,
chaos, above, below, reason, magic, et cetera, et cetera.
White hack. And then it has a Roman #4 at
the top left, meaning it is the 4th edition.
It is also from Drive through RPG, so it has DRM, which sucks.
This is one reason when I get the option of drive through an
Itch, I'll always take Itch. But this is a what, 148 page
book? 144 page book, Something like
that. Again, written by Christian
Merstrom. There's not a whole lot of I
assume they did everything. There's no one else listed
anywhere for anything. There's a games by Christian
Merstrom page. It's white hat sold A car is
awake and October landed with all of the various editions and
expansions everything all listed by date very very well laid out
like very, very gives you all that you need.
And this is for for their family.
Always wonder if there's anything I'll say right off the
bat because there were times where I was like, man, why?
Why like these? If you're, if you're using a
rule, just use what's common in the rule.
Just call a saving through a saving throw.
And then I realized bar through this, it does talk about in the
change document, they removed all the OGL aspects, obviously
after the OGL debacle of Wattsy and fuck Wattsy.
So some of the things like save values used to be saving throws
in 3rd edition are now save value, defense value, things
like that. Double positive and double
negative, yeah, which I assume used to just be advantage and
disadvantage. Oh, I'm curious because I hate
that usage, so let's. See, I hate it as well.
So let's this. Definitely was one of those
things where as I learned like as I really internalized their
keywording for stuff as I'd read it, I would replace the their
term with like what The thing is called on everywhere else it's
called. The thing.
It's called the thing. Yeah, just call the thing thing.
3rd edition had the positive double rolls and the negative
double rolls too, so that's obnoxious.
So all right, let's get into it. OK, let me pull up.
We can. Do this.
Yeah, let me pull up my summary. I'm just going to.
That's what I'm reading too.
I have, I have the book open and the window and in your summary
and the window next to it. So I will say, you know, we're
going to criticize this a lot, but the digital tools amazing.
So there's bookmarks and the table of contents is all
hyperlinked. But not only that, each page
that you go to has a, the page number at the bottom and then a.
So the page number links you back to the table of contents
and the number next to it links you to the index page at the
very end that refers to key terms.
So if you go to the like, if you want to look at like alignment
on the index page, it takes you to 42 and then 42, if you click
that on the bottom of that page, takes you back to the table of
contents. It's very easy to maneuver
around this document. Yeah.
So you're saying if I go to the bottom of the introduction page,
these are also hyperlinked? 1 takes you back to the index
and then click anywhere else and the number takes you to its area
in the appendix. Yeah.
And the index, yeah. So the first number takes you
back to the actual page number, itself takes you back to the
table of contents. And the secondary number is a is
referencing the index. And if you click that, it takes
you to the index, so. So the digital tool is
fantastic. The digital tool is great, yeah.
You don't get those digital tools in the book, though.
You don't. But luckily you have you have a,
there's no. Bookmark.
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 'cause
I, I could not keep staring at the just just bright white
whiteness of this document and it's DRM, so I couldn't edit it
to flip the colors on it or anything without doing some,
some shit I didn't want to. So I sat down with the book that
doesn't have the digital tools. So the digital tools are
fantastic. But here's, here's I'll say I'll
do an early critique and we'll talk about it as we go.
Hyperlinking right, right. A maze, right, does not make it
not a maze. It just makes it a hyperlink
maze. You know what I mean?
Like just because something is is hyperlinked and you can
navigate around in the pages doesn't mean that's what's on
the pages. It's easy to understand or is in
an order that is understood. Like this is such a a series of
contradictions in this book. The things that I'm like, I, I
think this so many of these things are done so well.
And then so and then there's just I I don't know if it's just
I don't even know what it is. I don't even know how to
describe it, but well, I'll say it many times as we go.
I'm going to use strong words like hate a lot.
I do enjoy this game. I think the concepts are
fantastic. I just, you know, I don't
critique in a lot of Grays, so I don't hate.
I don't really hate. There are a lot of really good
concepts in this. They do get mired in like this,
like over mechanized, like over engineered aspect where it's
like wow, keeping up with all this at the table would be what
quite the challenge. And even like pulling the
individual rules out of the text in and of itself is a challenge.
Yeah, I will say if I if I had to describe this game in one
word, the one word I would describe it with is over
engineered. Yeah, absolutely.
And I also think that like as we go through real, like the people
listening will hear us talk about it.
But the, this book was clearly written by somebody who's been
writing this game for 10 years. So they will say rules in a way
that maybe if I'd been reading the game for 10 years, I'd
realize it was a rule. And they do, but they forget
that. It's not like that's not like
this book is. Let's just get into it.
So anyway, so there's an introduction page or chapter,
which I love. We'll get into that in a second.
There's a section on character generation.
We're going to go through that. There's a section on the core
rules. We're going to go through that.
And then and that hits you to about 66 pages.
And then there's a section of optional rules.
We're going to skim through that.
And then there's a refereeing white hack.
We're going to barely touch that.
And then there's monsters and artifacts.
So we'll touch on. And then there's the appendix.
Again, all of this is extremely well like that.
The table of contents, fucking good God, good job.
Again, bookmarks, hyperlinks, everything's hyperlinked.
There's a list of tables. So every table you possibly want
hyperlinked right in the table of contents, fantastic.
There's a list of figures. So all of the you can take care
of that. All of the figures in the book,
all the examples, all of the the, I guess I'll call them
graphics are hyperlinked in there.
Like everything is done in there.
And that gets us to like 140 ish pages.
Again, the digital tools Immaculate like couldn't
literally can't ask for any more from digital tools like anything
else would be going in a layout because it'd have to be like
color coding and shit like that. But as far as like inline
hyperlinks everywhere where there are number listed, we'll
take you to the number. As Hunter said, every single
page is hyperlinked to the appendix and to back to the
table of contents, which is fucking fantastic.
Yeah, great, great fucking. Inline hyperlinks as well.
Did you say inline hyperlinks? Yeah.
Oh, they're so good too. Yeah, they're great.
And I I didn't find a single broken one, did you?
I, you know, I didn't search them as I I usually the ones
like are all these fucking working?
But I insert them nearly as in depth as I usually do so.
OK, so there's gonna be a lot, so let's get cracking.
So all right, introduction. I love, I love the whole
introduction chapter. I think it's really good.
I think it's great. I read it actually too usually
honestly, I'm the one who skips the introduction chapter and
jumps in the game. I read it.
I thought this is great. I really liked, like the first,
not the first second paragraph. I just really like.
I was like, yeah, fuck yeah, that's what I'll do, Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's really good.
It's really well done. We're going to go through a lot
of this actually. So let's go ahead and do that.
So the way the book is laid out, it's laid out like a like it's,
it's like a novel, I guess. I mean, it says chapter one at
the top. It says introduction in big
letters. And then underneath the
introduction it has it says where the readers introduce the,
the perspective. So when you get to
characterization, the same kind of thing where the character
learns who they are or whatever, blah, blah, blah.
Like it's an interesting way it's laid out.
As I got all the way through the introduction, I thought I was
going to love this book. Then I hit the actual.
Stuff. I was really excited in the
introduction. I was like, oh this is going to
be so cool. Yeah.
And then and then how, how things change.
So going through a lot of the introduction, Whitehack is a
game where you get to play a character in a fictional world.
The referee put you in a situation.
A lot of this stuff is genetic, blah blah blah blah blah.
Homunculus is blah blah blah rules challenge you, blah blah
blah blah blah. Some of the concepts of the game
start to come out though in this initial pair, this thing that I
like, I'm saying blah blah, blah, read this.
It's really good. It really gets you into the
mindset of what Christian right was trying to self-conscious the
Christian or Christopher. I think it was Christian.
Yeah. Christian Merstrom.
OK, so it really gets you into the mindset of this game because
one of the things is people try to call this the OSR, and I'm
the first one to say the OSR is dead.
It officially died in 2019. And now it's just a marketing
term. The the word, the word OSR is
genericized just like Kleenex. It means nothing.
It just means your standard dungeon game that's not D&D, but
this game is not that there are. A lot of.
There are a lot of story game elements that are that are
brought into it using some of the BX stuff, but it is not by
any such imagination anything that I would call OSR.
And some of this introduction tells you a lot about why it's a
little bit different. So the rules challenge you by
telling you how to handle certain events that deal with
combat and things like that, but blah, blah, blah, let you
collaborate on world creation. That's one of the first steps.
I was like, oh, this is interesting.
It also lets you collaborate a bit on game world creation,
either something new that you build together from the ground
up or as part of an existing world that you settle in when
you use your characters groups, which are her species
affiliations applications. The entire book uses her she her
pronouns, cool, love it and uses group, species, affiliation,
vacation, whatever you can create or add.
Twit is already known about the setting.
That right there, not OSR. You're literally in game world
building with your groups and affiliations.
That's some story gaming shit right there and I really enjoy
it. Dicer crucial resolving stuff,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then we get to an about the book
section. This gives a little bit more.
The book contains a complete role-playing game with its roots
in the original rules tradition. It is designed to run just about
any material from 1974 onward with literal little or no
conversion and there is a bunch of conversion rules in the back
of that are great. This is the 4th edition of the
book. All of the book is for the
players and referees alike. Even the monsters and artifact
can be considered rumors or lore.
And then this is something that I'm going to reference a bunch
of times, and I'm going to say remember that about the book
section. So you guys listening, you, all
of you watching, remember this moment, OK?
The book is designed to be read from cover to cover.
I will reference that multiple times.
But it also has an index and an extensive table of contents to
help you quickly find your way. Sometimes a word or phrase has
been put in bold. This follows from experience
rather than principle. Marking things that have proven
to be easy to miss. Not keywords, not not rules or
anything, just random shit is bolded because over the course
of ten years, something's got easy to miss.
We'll also reference that a bunch of times, right?
There's a whole section here on it.
New to the hobby? It's a great section.
If you're new to the hobby, it's great.
It says welcome. Like, I know this can be
intimidating. Guess what?
Everyone that's done this before you has felt just like you, and
I love that. I think they do a really
fantastic job of being like, this is what this game is, this
is how you're going to feel, it's OK, there's people around
you. There you go, enjoy it.
I really like it. In a way, complete beginners are
the closest this book comes to a default reader because no one
comes into it with preconceptions from previous
games. Cool, right?
And then there is a quick rundown for experienced
newcomers, which means people that have played TTRBGS before
but are new to this game. So this is where I really start
my breakdown of stuff, right? So I think this.
Is where you start breaking down, like internally, yeah.
I not, I'll tell you I literally I can tell you this is that
moment where I I noped out the first time.
I'll I'll let you know where it is.
So basically what this says is in a in a small space is like,
what is this game? Right?
Somebody say roll under system with Chris fumbles advantage and
disadvantage. They don't call it that.
That's what it is. There are groups and classes
which are not the same thing, which are a very important part
of how this entire game works, which is really amazing in
concept and we'll see how it works.
We'll we'll talk about it. So using your groups, your
classes, all of the stuff you triangulate, a lot of stuff like
magic and things like that. Basically, the game is designed
to be dumped onto any setting and you can be anything you
want, any way you want, which is a cool concept.
And when we get the character generation Hunter, we'll talk
more about that. I will.
Yeah. So players have influence over
setting creation and development, which we've already
talked about a little bit. This is really interesting.
I did read some reviews where they said that, you know, when
you try to bring a game like this into a setting that's very
built already, there can be some friction with that, which is
interesting. So this setting I think is
really, this is really good for a very broad stroke setting
where you can allow some room for building as you go.
It has that little touch of microscope or archipelago in it,
which it which I think is really neat.
It encourages procedure, procedurally generated content,
which also helps with like building the world as you go.
You can just roll stuff and have it go.
There's low player and monster HP with, but there's a rule
about damage reduction, which we'll get to.
And then there are a bunch of optional rules that are kind of
optional, and some of them should just be in the rules.
They're just weird. Some of them should just be
rules. Yeah, a lot of them should just
be rules, and that's the entire rundown of the game, which is
cool. I wish every fucking game should
have something like this, right? This is what this game is.
It's a role on our system that uses this kind of shit.
There you go boom. This is what I'm talking about
where I say let give me something about the rules before
we get to character generation. So I understand character
generation. This is exactly what I fucking
mean. I don't need every rule, but
character generation. A little bit of that would be
would be great. And there's a whole section here
to the veteran white hacker. It's just talking about there's
some corrections or some tweaks, whatever it happens.
There's a section here on conversions with links to
everywhere else, which is fine, I do think.
And I will say that I this book was designed as PDF, not as a
book. I would probably say that's
completely true A. 100% because like the number of times that
it'll be like, here's here's this thing happens, check out
this page. And it's like, just tell me on
that page what you're talking about.
And the book is not hyperlinked. Like I can't just click and then
click back really quickly, you know, but this conversion starts
a bunch of that flip to page, this flip to page that do this,
do that, whatever, that's whatever.
How to roll and read the dice. We're not I, I don't, I don't
care. Terminology is OK.
So there's pages and pages of terminology, bolded terminology
with definitions of what they are.
Like an ability is some kind of trait that lets the character do
something unusual. Each class has special
abilities. Here's here's one of the issues
I had that I was like oh dope. Bolded keywords.
So the entire book. Nope, Nope, Nope.
Do you think any of these are keyworded as we go through?
No, they're not. No, I know that they're not.
And it's terribly confusing, so. Yep, so because the words that
you have definitions for that are important to know are not
folded, random shit is bolded because the author felt like it.
That's the first time I'm like, why?
You're doing so good. The layout's not bad.
Like, it's very well structured. Yeah.
And then. And then why just have random
stuff bolded but multiple pages? Fumbles, HDHP, harm, cost,
quality, species, XP, all that stuff.
Two full pages of terminology right off the bat.
And then something I thought was cool too right off the bat and
then realized later I really didn't like it.
There are I believe 9 examples of play. 1234 5-6.
I'm scrolling 7899 examples of play across a bunch of pages.
Right? I was like dope, had so many
examples of play. This is amazing.
We always talk about it. You would never have too many
examples of play, right? Right.
We'll come back to this. We'll come back to this.
I do want to say right off the bat on page 22 is the first time
I was like, oh, this is interesting.
So fighting suits of armor, there's a little.
Map, yeah. And you like this?
I'm not a fan. I do like this actually.
What is this called again? The ASCII mapping which is like
a cool reference also to like old like rogue like PC, DOS
games like it's just a a method of mapping using symbols on on
your keyboard. Not even, not even just mapping,
like drawing pictures and shit. Yeah, I always use it for
mapping so. Yeah, but I mean people, people
use this kind of stuff to drop like like 100 line pictures of
Johnny Depp and shit in ASCII, you know, I mean with like.
I mean, yes, that is also a thing.
So this thing is made-up of like dashes and periods and like the
the. It's not called a tilde, but
it's like the wiggly the wiggly thing and like up arrows and
equal signs and stuff like that. You you like it?
I'm an idea fan. I think it's 2023 and you could
just draw a graphic because I don't mind this one.
But this one actually has like the armor suit listed as A and
player character listed as P, but just the later ones where
they don't. Have the later one that has
nothing and you're just like, yeah, just assume what this
means. I, I do, I do see what you're
saying. I mean, personally for me, if
I'm going to use this, I'm going to have a key on the side every
time. That's just like, hey, I mean, I
might use the same symbol for the same thing every room, but
I'm still going to have a key up.
But yes, I do know the example you're Speaking of and that, and
that is a little like, OK, even for the ASCII stuff, I really
like it. But even though I'm like, when I
first look at it, I'm like whoa fuck.
Like having a key, it's like super necessary.
Yeah, I mean, if you have XS and OS on the map, just tell me what
the XS and OS are so I don't have to stare at it 10 times to
go. Wait a minute, which one's in
reach and which one's not in reach?
Oh fuck. Technically they're both 10 feet
away from it. So this is so there's only two
really big parts of the book. We're going to go over
everything else we're going to breeze here like we did with the
introduction. One is character generation,
which is Hunter, because that's just we have, we have somehow
over the course of 160 episodes just fallen into the habit of
Hunter as character generation. And I do core rules.
That's just how it works out. I I really enjoy the core rules.
I don't really enjoy those character.
Generation. Yeah, so it works out well for
us. These are the only two parts of
like the seven chapters we're really going to dig deep into,
so buckle your butts. All right, I, I feel like this
getting up here. I have a feeling right now like
I'm about to give a speech for a project that I'm unprepared for.
OK. So no, OK.
I have the notes up and everything, like I have a
comprehensive guide on everything.
It's just like going through this.
It still feels like, dude, I run every game that we like.
Not every game we read, but a lot of that we've read.
I've run them now at least for one shots and like dude I could
not run this game right now. I, I, I have, I have read this
one cover to cover. Whitehack 40 is what I'm holding
up. I've read this cover to cover
like three or four Times Now. I have read 3rd edition cover to
cover at least in total once, and then other parts of it a
bunch of times just to try to get some context for it.
I have read the two rules summaries that we have from
Milton and from Madison. I've written a rule summary, I
have outlined the entire introduction character, I have
outlined almost this entire book, and I have no fucking clue
how to play this game. OK, I have the notes, so I'm
going to read it. I'm going to do I'm going to do
my best guys. It is very funny because I do
have Ryan summary up and Ryan pleaves his own comments in
yellow and sometimes the. Red is my thoughts, yellow is
direction for you. Oh, like red is just.
And sometimes they're just like they're just like I had this,
although also color inverted earlier.
But that's why I'm like whatever the colors are.
But sometimes Ryan's just like what the fuck is all of this?
OK, so generating character, we do start with one of our
favorite things ever, which is a numbered list.
On generating character, there are 6 steps.
The first one being pick a preliminary name and rule your
basic attributes. You do rule 3D6 for each of your
attributes in order. Those attributes being I'm just
going to go through each of the list numbers and give better
detail than let's lay that later.
It's strength, agility, toughness, intelligence,
willpower, charisma. Very easy to understand.
I think we have a shared opinion about willpower feeling weird
and it's used in this game. Feels like it should be wisdom.
After that you pick a character class.
If your last character died, the referee may offer you a rare
class which is in the optional rules.
I, I actually fucking love that. I do actually love that.
OK, I might let my player characters play as whatever
whenever, although I do see giving them a reward on death to
death to do something like outside of the norm is cool.
I think the middle ground is I don't think they should be
optional classes, I think they should just be in base game
classes but that you only get them after you die and it's like
a reward for dying. So like that's a lot of play.
I wouldn't make them school. I would just say you only get
them after you die, which I think is dope as fuck.
Yeah, I think that's a really cool idea.
Yeah. You're going to roll the harm
dice, which are your hit dice to get your characters harm points,
which is HP. Again that this I believe it was
hit points before but they took the OGL out and this is an OGL.
That's why it's annoying, but I do understand.
I actually I think harm Points is fine.
I think it's fine, I think. It works pretty.
Well, it said hit protection. Yes, I actually prefer this to
hit protection. I think this works great.
It's a great. It's still HP as well, which I
think works in favor favor. Yeah.
So we were just on the harm dice.
Yeah. And then every level you get to,
you get to re roll with more dice and you always keep the
higher between the new and old score, which seems logical and
good. After that, you're going to add
a species of vocation and affiliation groups.
If you want a species group, you normally need to pick it now, as
in like your whole, yeah, it's a thing.
We'll go over things, roll your starting funds and buy your
equipment, which I love. Also always the best start, like
I love equipment buys. And then, yeah, color the save
and give the character an identity, name, age, gender,
etcetera, of your preference. And we'll get to my loose
understanding of that any moment now.
Actually, there's some example characters.
They are, they're example characters.
So that's pretty cool. I mean so much like I don't
understand why they do this because they do this numerous
times. So like this is where I first
was like, wait, I don't get it. And then I started thinking and
again about the examples of play in the introduction chapter.
And I was like, well, what? Wait a minute.
Why are they all the way back in the introduction chapter?
And why are all of the example characters here in the beginning
of the chapter, but not like an example of characters like as
you run into the next character kind of thing, you know?
I also love how illegible they are.
Like it's just like, it's just several lines of like numbers
and like, I mean, obviously it doesn't make sense to be parsed
that, but just like, do tab down on some shit, you know?
Yeah. Yeah, well, not only that, but
that's what I'm saying. It's like we have, I have no
fucking clue what D FM, VAB, any of that means at this point.
We haven't encountered that at all.
But I'm going to read like 10 example characters.
I'm like, what am I supposed to get from this right now?
Because don't forget, we're reading this cover to cover just
like just end to end, you know? But no, like, yeah, so that's
that's this. This was my first like and.
Then we have a list of example names.
Once again, it's genuinely painful to read this box.
I don't the none of this is decipherable just because it
just is so squished together there.
I'm sure there's some cool names in here, but just like it just
seems like one long run on sentence.
Yeah. And then we have the just the
description of attribute scores. Yeah, like I said, it's it the
basic attributes that they fall into a lot of game.
You know them and I don't need to explain them to you because
you know them. Strength is strength, agility is
agility, toughness is toughness, intelligence is intelligence,
and willpower is the one that's kind of like the wise character
class, when we get to it, is really focused on willpower and
it has to do with magic. It feels like it should be kind
of wisdom. It's will focus and awareness.
Yeah, yeah, even when you read it.
Yeah, Focus awareness. The wise is using it from magic
abilities like. That's.
That's, I mean, that's wisdom. Yeah, Willpower is my ability to
mentally push through a thing or like put up with something, you
know, I agree. Wisdom is my ability to to know
enough to by experience to stay aware of myself and my
surroundings and know when to do things.
But yeah, it doesn't really matter.
Those are the stats. They're perfectly serviceable.
That's the classic six, more or less.
Yeah. And now we get to the using the
character table. So there are three different
classes and they're fairly asymmetric and they're leveling
up. All of these tables describe the
advancement and what you get for each level of these classes.
The three classes being the Deft, the strong, and the wise.
And these are fairly open-ended. You could be a wise knight, you
could be a strong wizard. But yeah, so each level requires
an amount of XP, which Ryan and I both think is is fairly high,
fairly horrendously high. It's pretty insane.
Like it's really pretty bad. Like I think the level 5 for one
of them already asked for who does the most, like 18,800 XP
for Y's advancement at level 5 which is a lot.
And and now and yeah, the Y is it only is capped out at 10th
level. And how many?
How many? How many XP for YS?
Oh, at 10th level, yeah. 601,000 Yeah.
That's what what? Chop, chop, chop a water chop a
couple of those zeros off there, but what are we doing?
I have no idea. Like I, I saw your note on it
first before I really, because I was kind of just going through
it and I wasn't like itemizing everything.
And I saw your note. I'm like, what are you talking
about? And then I went and looked, I
was like, oh, holy shit, dude. You need over half a million to
level up to 10th at For the strong, you know, or for the
wise. Yeah, it's.
Like they're big numbers. My note I'm rereading what I
wrote on this. My note is what the fuck is with
those numbers on the class table?
Holy shit is what I wrote. That's for all the people that
say we swear too much. There you go.
Yeah, another great note. There's a lot of rules here that
could be even better formatted as bulleted lists, or even
better as the example character sheets with things pointed out
that that would make too much sense.
Well, let's, let's talk about that real quick right here
'cause this is the first time we're we're, we're going over
this and this is how the rest of the book is gonna be right?
So like this is. A good indicator actually.
Yeah, so page 31 using the character class tables like.
Let me actually read the sentence out.
So like like. Yeah, read like the middle
paragraph, like to halfway through that.
Each level requires an amount of XPHD is the number of 6 sided
harm dice. You roll hoping to increase the
characters HP. You roll all HD at each new
level using the new total if it's better than the old HP
score. Note the attack and say value AV
and SV. Which by the way, it does not
keep doing that with AV. And I like it's like, yeah, on
the character sheet slots are for some of the character
abilities and groups are how many, many groups the character
can belong to in a mechanical sense.
Page 41 raises give the character an extra attribute
point freely allocated at even levels.
The rare brave class can also choose to reduce an attribute
one point instead. So that's a lot of data.
There are there are definite rules in there, and if you're
listening along, maybe it was easy to decipher because you're
hearing me say it. But written as a singular
paragraph, there are five or six rules in that paragraph.
Yeah, and that's how the entire book is written.
It's written as if it's a novel like and the only thing bolded
in an entire thing was you roll all HD at each new level.
It's the random bolding of the things that the things are
important but not not like attack and say value important
keywords that are actually like rules, mechanics, language not
bolded. Like I described this as reading
this book to my I was talking to my girlfriend about it because
obviously we live together. So we talk about things and I
was talking to her. Like reading this is like
hearing somebody with ADHD and I know because this is me explain
a system that they've been working on and they're very
excited about to you in a fairly non linear fashion.
Like, they know everything so well, and it all becomes this
big jumble of data because they're so intimately familiar
with it and they're so excited to tell you about it.
It's funny that you came up with that example because how I
literally like was at work. I was like, how do I describe
this? How do I describe this?
And I was like, oh, I don't know
how to describe this. This is what reading this book
feels like. Because I'm telling you the next
140 pages are like this, That where it's rules.
Language like that, with no spacing, no bullet points, no
separation. Where some languages rule but
some isn't, and you'll be parsing out paragraphs to figure
out what's rules or not. Because nothing's bolded, very
little is italicized. It'll reference back to stuff
earlier that you didn't even realize was a rule you thought
they were. Just talking about.
The game all the time and the way I was going to describe this
is incredibly similar. The way you're just going to
describe it is as if I, if I, if I wrote this system right, it's
as if I walk up to you and just ramble it all to you in one
sitting. Straightforward, no pauses, no
stops for clarification, barely taking a breath, all of it at
one time, beginning to end and then walking away before you can
ask any questions. And you're supposed to somehow
absorb all of that at one time. And that is reinforced through
the way that it's written. And also even the layout which
is just basically 0 pictures, so 170 pages of single column
paragraph novel style, pure white, just desert in all
fucking directions of just lostness.
Like that's how it feels to try to read this book.
It's just it. It's just never ending stream
into your face with no clarification at all.
I will also say that if for those of you who are listening
along that paragraph that I did read that we've been kind of
ranting about for a minute. The only bolded part of that
paragraph is you rule all HD at each new level.
But every part of that is a rule.
And like for me, the raises is referred to here and it's, it's
where it's explained. I actually totally missed it the
first time and I saw these charts and I kept scrolling down
and I think it brings up again later on, but it's right there
actually. And if it was bolded and bullet
point I it would be less hard to grasp onto.
And I will say that also like the.
Slots. But this this every.
This is a paragraph that is 123456789.
It is 9 lines long in a in a paragraph as if it's a novel,
right? Every single line is a rule.
It's and referencing another rule, but it's written as if
it's like prose. So you're parsing everything
right and again, instead of just like bullet pointing it.
And this is describing how to fill out the character sheet.
Why? So in the earlier edition, like
in the 3rd edition, they actually had a character sheet
at the end of character generation at the very least.
So yes, the character sheet is at the back of the book right in
this. But if you're saying this goes
here, that goes there, this goes here, why not just have a
character sheet up and instead of having nine lines of rules
there, just have like a thing that points to where AV goes and
write what AV is a thing that goes to sway value and write
through SV is like this book is written in a way to put the
information out in the least number of pages, but not in a
way that is meant to understand it.
Yeah, it is just a stream of data.
It is not instructions. That's what this one is, anyway.
Moving on. So of these three, so yeah, they
are asymmetric character classes.
They get different things at each level.
They require different thing. And conceptually I love that.
That's one of my favorite things about the Electro archive.
The three different classes work differently.
That's actually an amazing example of how to do that.
And this is not. But I do conceptually like that,
and I like things about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'll say I love the way that these work, but let's get
through the classes and the groups and then we'll be able to
talk about how they triangulate. So these are all very
open-ended, but but the first one being the deft, this is the
this is the type of play that relies on skill and technique.
The examples they gives are, you know, thieves, spies, Rangers,
assassins, but really you could be a deaf knight at level one.
You choose a vocation, but you do not mark it next to an
attribute for this location. You always roll positive double
S when equipped and doing something in line with that
vocation. Positive double S meaning it's
advantage. You roll twice and take the one
that benefits you more, and if the vocation is relevant, you
may swap positive double S for double damage.
Great. Those are Ryan's notes on it and
not how it's hidden in the text. Yeah, but you also gain a slot
associated with two attunements. There's one slot with two
attunements. The attunements are.
What's the slot hunter? What is a slot?
It's never, and actually I would argue that you get 2 slots, an
active slot and an inactive slot.
One attunement goes into each slot.
One attunement is active and another one is inactive.
You spend a day switching these out.
Basically the attunements are tied to a teacher item vehicle.
It's something narrative that you're especially good at or In
Sync with. One of the things for the
Ranger, I think it said like their home ground or like their
home environment. So when they're traveling
through a similar environment, like they could take it like
it's better for them or like a specific weapon or maybe like a
Marshall style from a teacher. It's very open-ended.
And I do like how open-ended that is.
How this is explained leaves a lot to be desired.
Yeah. So using attunement requires
active focus for each slot. One attunement is active.
Yeah, yeah. And one is inactive.
That's two slots. That's an active and an active
slot. No no, no, no, because you get 2
slots and in each slot you get 2 attunements.
Yes, one of. Which is active and one is
inactive. So if you have two slots, you
can have four attunements actually, one in the foreground,
one in the background. You still don't know what a slot
like. It's a it's just a place where
you put things. It's a place where you stick
stuff in. Very true.
Yeah. OK.
Where was I? Yeah.
Switching takes using a team, requires active focus.
Yeah. OK.
I'm, I'm, I'm going with this. Switching takes a day spent
practice if you're warming back up on a different set of skills
or something. Yeah.
They can be invoked once per day to give special rules for
difficulty. Basically, for these hard tasks
succeed and nigh impossible tasks are treated as a regular
role. So it just lets you put your
character push past what a normal person would do.
And I think that's cool and I think that's a strength.
Lost attunements can't be replaced.
How do you lose an attunement, Ryan?
I don't fucking know. I don't either.
I've no idea. I've no idea.
But I can tell you that they
remain as. Keywords.
What's a keyword? Fuck if I know.
And they give plus one to related tasks or attacks.
Maybe that's what the keyword is.
So if you lose an attunement, which may somewhere be somewhere
in this book, I I've admitted admittedly and have not absorbed
as much of this book as I'd like to have.
But if you lose them, they become a keyword that adds plus
one to related tasks or attacks. I assume it means it's a roll
under system. So by plus one do they mean like
plus one to the difficulty that you have to roll under?
That's how I assume. Oh, OK, we're going to go with
that. Oh, that's so funny.
I didn't, I actually didn't read all of your notes right here,
but it does say what is a keyword.
Yeah, we're still going through the DEF.
The DEF get -2 attack value with non attuned 2 handed melee
weapons because their death kind of the incentive incentifies you
to use one handed weapons. If you're going to use A2 handed
weapon, you need to be attuned to it.
You get plus one damage and DF is defense from even I'm still
like from off hand weapon. If the vocation is combat
oriented, we'll get to vocation in a second because it's
technically a separate thing, but it's part of this.
Yeah. And you can't use slot abilities
or swap positive double S or double damage if using shield or
armor above hard leather because once again, this is supposed to
be like the death class supposed to be like lightweight and
movable. I also, I don't know, some of
these are a little weird because like if they are really
open-ended classes, I could be a deaf knight.
I mean, I guess I could be using leather.
It's just not above hard leather.
I don't know the thing. Yeah, so, so, yeah.
So for those, again, that aren't, aren't looking at
YouTube right, or aren't, aren't on our VOD that are on the
podcast, the way that this page is laid out is at the top.
There are two big words to say the deft.
And then everything that we just went through was an incredibly
minimized version of literally just paragraphs of text,
paragraphs and paragraphs of text with some italics and
that's it. With some things italics.
The only thing bolded on the entire page is special rules for
difficulty. And I'm not saying everything
has to be bold or anything like that, but what I'm saying is
this is literally 12345. It's six paragraphs of singles.
So no, no two columns, no nothing.
No. Break between stuff.
No, no, anything of literally just again pure data spit out
with no, no Britain like just I don't understand.
I've never seen a book written this way.
Like am I Have you ever have you literally ever seen a book where
it literally is just like here is like, oh, here is like AA15
line paragraph of just just just it just goes.
It just goes and goes and goes. I don't understand.
I feel like I've never. Seen like Blades in the Blades
in the Dark. No dude, I'll even say blades in
the. Dark actually, Blades is more
lightweight in its writing than this, I'll say.
Blades in the Dark did it a a much better job because they
would actually stop. They would have explained her
stuff. The problem with Blades in the
Dark is that they that they, they, I would understand what
they were saying right at the beginning and then they would
still explain it for 10 pages. That was the problem with
blades. It's like, I fucking get it,
bro. And again. 330 pages later,
yeah. You wrote a 300 page book that
could be 100 pages. I understand.
I get it. I know how to play Blades in the
Dark. When I finished Blades in the
Dark, it was just slogging through 10 pages of trying to
figure out if it was important or not.
It never was. Just so you guys know out there
never is. This is literally like no, so
because I even because this is and then we can move past this.
But like, I even want to bring up these are my fucking notes,
right? It's literally 123.
It's like 3 big dots with some inner dots in it.
And like like 123456789 there's like 11 bullet points with some
notes bullet pointed in it at all.
That is the class. Not only not only is that done
through literally an entire page top to bottom and just pure
narrative single column text, right?
But why does a class have this much shit?
I don't know. What's even funnier is that
actually the strong coming up, which is next one actually does
have three bullet points in the in the in the paragraph.
And they're well used because they explain important things.
But yeah, so the next one of our three, I don't think they're
called classes. I can't remember.
What They're called classes. Yeah, they're all classes, OK,
because. Class and implication.
So for class, the next one, the strong, this is your like
warrior, guard, brigins, knight, the person who relies on combat
skills and physical prowess. Things that really stand out
here are they have special conflict rules.
They have conflicts. Loot.
Yeah, Oh yeah, The player notes how the conflict was special.
It should stand out either as a yeah, I mean.
Please skip this. Yeah, basically.
Wrote. 5 notes for the strong were fuck no like.
We're not reading. Basically these guys get custom
looting rules, which is interesting because and, and you
put it in your notes here, they're not like they're not
going to brew potions and shit. They're like the strong person.
So putting custom like loot and substance rules, I don't I don't
understand. So real quick here it works.
Is you the the the strong character gets loot right?
And those 3 loot options are special conflict, substance and
supernatural right? Right.
Special conflict means that when you beat somebody you can like,
you get something from them, which is like experience or
something. So you learn shit.
That's the loot you get from beating someone.
You learn shit substances, you can harvest something from them
and supernatural is that. You get like an ability.
You can take an ability. So the loot is just something
you take from the things you kill right?
I just thought substance was weird 'cause I'm like of all the
classes why is this strong? The one that can harvest poisons
and shit from dead bodies? Like I get it because it's loot,
but like between deft wise and strong strong's the last one I
would think would have like either the the wiseness or the
deafness to harvest poison. I just thought it was weird but
I do like the conflict. Loop 1 on this where like
because I think in a very story gave me away.
Oh, I learned something and that's considered loop dope, I
like that. Yeah, I like the supernatural
ability. Like you're such a great warrior
that you go into combat with something and you win against it
and you're like, that's how it did that.
I can do that now too. That one really the special
conflict, I'm like, that's whatever to me.
I think it's fine. The substance one I don't get
and the supernatural I'm like, that's actually a great feature
for a combat like specialized character, you know?
Love that. Love that one.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Moving on to the Wise. The wise is of course the Hunter
class. You can cast, you can perform
miracles, which is very much a catch all term for anything.
Hunter means Hunter as in the person that's.
Talking not a hunter as in. The person that hunts, yes.
Yeah, yeah. You can perform miracles through
arcane negotiation with forces in your environment.
This is Wizards, cultists, exorcists, magic and miracle
people. Miracles are assigned a wording.
A wording, characterification and desired effect are used to
triangulate a cost in HP because you do use your HP to fuel your
magic. There's a lot of this term
triangulation which just finding this like center fairpoint
between like the the strength of what you were trying to do and
what your character is good at doing.
I think the wording's fine. I don't have a problem with the
triangulation, but that's they're going to say it a lot.
I do like the triangulation though, and once we get through
the groups and and stuff like that, I think it's really neat.
That's something. It is a, it is a good thing.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, players say what they want
to do. Referee suggests a cost, the
player lowers the cost with drawback, drawbacks and
ingredients. I do like that kind of exchange
of like, well, what if a little bit of a drawback, what if a
little negative thing or hey, I have this thing to offer into
the ingredient of this to make it more powerful or make it easy
to be more powerful. Further from triangulation means
a higher cost. I mean the triangulation point
being where your sweet spot is, you go in above that, it's going
to it's going to cost you more cost guidelines based on
magnitudes there is a table and yeah, yeah, reference
traditional effects, the magnitude tables fairly simple.
It's zero. Simple, standard, major,
powerful. And yeah, that's the thing, you
may save one as the the wise may save once per day.
Spend 10 minutes detecting and using local energies, making a
single effect one magnitude cheaper.
Cool cool. You can use the local Ley lines
to power your magic. I'm always down for shit like
that. Yeah, you can't attempt miracles
with initial Max cost above current HP because that would
kill you. If the cost is set above level,
you must save or it double S Potion, bombs, scrolls, etcetera
work the same but first cost double S Permanent magic lowers
HP and hit dice or rolled for new level.
Makes sense Matt. Your health fuels your magic, so
if you have a permanent piece of magic set out, it's going to
permanently affect your health. Yeah.
Why is heel HP lost twice as fast?
But only in the way that it refers to here?
I'm reading a note so I'm really skimming the the greater thing.
But they do heal at double the normal rate of healing, which I
think is you roll if you roll, if you do nothing for 48 hours,
you heal fully. But if you don't on a six hour
rest, you either roll 2HP on a success roll or one HP on a
failed. And we'll talk about what that
looks like more later on. Scrolls.
Yeah, anyone can use scrolls, but Wise can slot effects with
six successfully trained intelligence rolls.
There's they get more as they go, but wise gets -2 attack
value with non slotted 2 ended weapons because they're a magic
user. If they if they are using
weapons they should be slotted. They should be attuned to them.
You +2 which one's SV is that save that's save against magic
and mind influence abilities and +2 HP cost before doubling when
using shield or armor above leather because if you wear
armor you're bad at magic. Yeah, so you just read through
the Wise. Did you sit at the table and
play the Wise right now? Fuck no, I could not.
I have no idea what's going on honestly.
And I fucking read this dude and I read these tables like the
levels of traditional magic effect.
I think is a is a fine table really guides you on like stuff
to know, but no. And I also read the wordings
part too, and I'm like, OK, that one's pretty easy.
It's really just. It's really just like a
descriptor of. But again, my point with the way
that this is written is it's written to put the the the data
onto paper, but not written in any way shape or form in any way
to actually instruct you on how to play the game.
There is no thought in the way that this is written to actually
having you understand the words that are written here in a way
to actually pick the mechanics into action.
It's literally just a data set, like punched out of a computer
onto paper. Like, like, I don't.
I've never seen a book written this way.
I've never seen a book that has no, not not the tiniest bit is
written to explain anything. There's no explanation here
whatsoever. It's just, it's literally an
entire page, top to bottom, hundreds of words, just pure
rules texts with zero stop to help you understand what any of
it means or how any of it works. Written in such a way where you
like, you don't even know when to pause to double check.
Like it's insane to me. Yeah, Matt, Like, do you want to
talk about the magnitude and the and the quality?
Because it's not just Ley lines. There's actual specific tables
and stuff for the energy you're using for spells with your
magnitudes and. Stuff so yeah, magnitude is is
it's just how powerful the effect is what you're doing like
for zero it's you know you're very like trivial hedge magic
slotted scrolls or simply effect boosted by a limiting condition.
The next one's simple this is a minor harming or healing
illumination unlocking very simple stuff standard is going
to be generating force fields, breathing water, light,
telekinesis like you know basic stuff.
A major is teleporting, animating, dead powerful is
resurrection kind of makes sense.
There is the scale of it definitely means a thing and and
makes sense in a way. Yeah.
Then you have your quality, which is very much the type of
magic that you're using and not something that needs to be a
role table. Also, I don't know, quality is a
weird descriptor for this because it's really type, right?
It's not like quality needs speaks how good it is.
I know what they're mean by quality.
Like I get I understand it. It's just a weird.
It's a weird, you know? Quality is a a mechanic's term
for certain aspects of it too. Like you have to like when you,
when you're like attacking and look at that in a little bit,
like the quality is like, well, you have to roll, like the in
between you have to roll and stuff.
So it's just a weird, I don't know, Yeah.
Yeah. And then, yeah, levels of
traditional magic, this is more examples like one through 10 of
like what it would be. It's it.
It's there. It's yeah, it's just levels.
Like one is like the easy little tiny shit and 10 is literally
like world changing shit and it's 10 levels in between.
And it's really cool. Yeah, let me pull this back up.
I pulled up something. Else creating magic words.
I said we should just talk about this because I actually really
like this. I can go through this if you
want, or you can go through it. Yeah.
So I'm just gonna read it. Yeah.
Arriving magical words can be, you know, miracle wording is
fun. They can seem hard.
Getting help from your Co players and referee usually just
trick. If not, here are the five steps
you can follow. So the five steps to wording
your miracles. The first, create the energy
concentration table and pick one concentration to decide what the
miracle is mainly about. Yeah.
So that's the table. You just check to see the table.
Is it necromancy summoning information?
What is it? Yeah.
Yes, and then you decide. If your wording is to be broad
and costly but often used, their example is good.
I love using fire magic as an example because it's so easy to
grasp flames. Very broad and easily
applicable. Or if it's specific and cheaper
like summoned dire beast that does a thing that just summons a
dire beast. Flames can do a lot of fun thing
and then your wording could be the name or title of some
creature, which I think is a cool idea.
Another option is the name of an item that you're I guess
something you're using or body parts.
The all seeing eye, but also some other things like corny
rhymes. It doesn't really matter.
This is just like the invocation of the spell more or less.
Use the Oracle on the next page, perhaps in combination with an
idea from the traditional magic effects table if you have a hard
time coming up with them because there there is an Oracle table
coming up. Boy, I don't like this.
I love this, I love this. Do you really?
I love it. I don't think you understand it,
but I think when I explain that you're going to love.
It I think The thing is like, it's just, it's so nebulous to
me. I think it's just the key
terminology using just like slips off my brain.
I'm going to I'm going to run through this real quick and I
think you're going to love it. OK, so one you check the energy
concentrable table and pick a concentration.
This is coming up with your magical word.
So you're going to come up with one right now.
OK. All right.
You're going to do this so number.
One. Which one's the energy
concentration table? It's the one that says energy
four and then underneath it says energy concentrations at the top
of level traditional magic effect.
OK, gotcha. Pick one of those.
Pick one. I don't care.
Pick one. Necromancy.
OK, three is your quality for that.
Remember that. So you have necromancy, write it
down somewhere. Necromancy.
Three, OK #2 you decide if the wording is going to be broad and
costly or specific and cheap. OK, Because don't we do
triangulating? We were triangulating.
So the like think, think Necronodalis, right?
As your memories were broad, you could do more stuff with it.
And as you failed, they got more specific, so you had to do less
stuff with it. But they were cheaper and easier
to use. Same concept, right?
So would make sense to me. Necromancy.
You've not you've so far have not lost me Necromancy or can
you speak with dead? OK, speak with dead is is is mid
specific. So write speak with dead by your
necromancy. Do that.
OK, so your wording can be the name and title of a someone
creature da da da da da da. So you're you don't need to
really worry about this or flamboyant expression doesn't
matter. So your wording is specifically
speak with dead. You've already got #3 down
right? OK #4 use the Oracle next page,
perhaps in combination with an idea from the traditional magic
table. You don't really need to do
that, right? If you had a hard time coming up
with good words, OK. But on that next table, in the
miracle wording tables, there are 123.
There are four D20 tables, so that's 100 words that you can
roll on as inspiration for coming up with magic words,
right? OK.
So then number five, once you get something decent, eyeball
the wording for a moment for getting the previous steps.
If there are some changes, you can do whatever.
So the referee is encouraged to allow minor adjustments.
So you have speak with dead right now and your quality is
three. OK, yeah.
So you're roughly going around like level traditional magic
effects, like you're roughly in like a three area blessing,
cursing, sensing directions, minor telekines, kinetic stuff.
You're like 3 or 4, whatever. I would agree.
So when you are actually supposed to cast magic, and
we'll get to that under the attack and roles table, right?
Right. Where we're at now is a
triangulation, right? So when you pick your vocation
and your group with your wording for your magic word, right,
we'll get to vacation the groups in a second.
If you are a wise character and you pick a wizard and you chose
necromancy, that is very close to your vocation, right?
And if your group is the League of Necromancers, that's
incredibly close to your group, right?
So the cost, which is always your HP to cast your magic will
be cheap as fuck because it's exactly.
In line with everything. But if you pick something that's
wise like doctor or some shit, and you pick a group, that's
like the life people we hate dead magic, right?
Like university, your matching is going to be super expensive
because it has nothing to do with your vocation and has
nothing to do with any groups you have.
So it's a triangulation of you, of your class, your vocation and
your group to see how expensive what you want to do is.
But you can change it all the time, right?
Because to speak with dad is very specific.
But if you had just picked like, you know, death, right, you
could move that all around that triangulation as much as you
want. So yours is a lot easier because
it's very specific. But for broad stuff like one
word spells, similar something you might have read before,
right, That's going to be all over the place.
So sometimes it might be really cheap and sometimes it might be
super expensive. So I do like how free form the
magic is, but it only makes. Sense.
Yeah, it's terribly written. It only makes sense also though
once you pick a vocation in a group too.
Yes, like I'm we're missing two major, like fast three major,
no, two major facets of this right now.
We're missing for this green miracles.
I would also say that the reason I didn't realize that was the
energy concentration table is because it doesn't say it above
it. It says it below it, below it,
But the but the magnitudes table says magnitudes at the top and
the traditional magic effects table says traditional magic
effects at the top. I hear you, but yeah, I think.
That and the Oracle thing threw me off 'cause I'm like but OK.
Like that's not a step, that's a.
If you are unable, if you feel unable to word, use the Oracle
table. Yes, but that's that's.
Exactly. That's the whole thing.
There aren't five steps here. There's like two, right?
Three is just two says decide your wording. 3 says.
You can word it this this way, but that's just part of Step 2,
right #4 does not need to be a step.
It should be a a box on the side that says, or a thing in
parentheses that says. If you're having trouble, check
the Oracle and #5 should just be double check, talk with your
referee, make sure it feels good.
It should be three steps, right? And one is just check it.
So actually come up with a magic word is pick an energy
concentration, write down the word.
That's how to do it. And that's it Doesn't need five
steps and a whole page. Yeah, I completely agree.
Yeah. This is fine.
I mean that that I I do like things about this magic system.
I would. I love the freeformness of it.
I thought you would. Love the freeform.
I mean, you know, I love freeform magic.
I love that I can just do whatever kind of magic that I
want. I sometimes default to an easy
one. But you know who who doesn't?
Right? Doesn't.
Yeah. OK, so moving on to groups, this
is where we kind of get into like character specifics.
There are a lot of things that your character is made of beyond
just the wise and the the deaf and the strong.
And these add some little particulates that you're you're
better at or good at or that, you know, help with the
triangulation of cost of things. So group everyone gets at least
two and you write it next to an attribute and it gives positive
double rolls on that attribute roll if the group is applicable.
Attributes can have two groups. You can move one group at every
new level. Each ash root of 5 or less gets
extra groups because it's a 5 or less and you fucking suck at it
and you need all the help you can get.
So basically the group is kind of like what you do in your job
within like your. Kind of.
Well, there's three different types of groups.
Right. So you what you get is a class
and and and groups, but you pick three groups.
Perfect. Yeah.
And then? This is the overarching, yeah.
This overarching, yeah. Yeah, the overarching to the
underarching to another overarching thing.
There's a lot of different realms of arches in this.
Yeah. And species.
Hey, you know what species is? It's your character species.
What type of thing is your character?
This is chosen the character creation it it can have physical
and cultural traits. And yeah, and it's written by
two attributes. And also, you know, at the DMS
discretion it could be or the referee's discretion, sorry.
It can be used to negatively affect your character.
If you only have one parent in your back story though, you only
get one attribute, which I guess, well if you're an orphan.
No, it makes I mean it to me again.
I really like these. I think it's just because I read
them so much and summarized them so much that it makes sense
because you have to just ignore 90% of it.
Yeah, that's very fair. Basically what it says.
I don't think it's bad. I think this is too many things.
I think we're getting into the realm of too many things.
I don't hate this. But then we're gonna go to
vocation next. Yeah, and it's just too many
things. But basically, if we break all
of this down right and keep it and push it a little bit more
OSR, right? Roll 36, You roll your stats.
What's your highest stat? Let's say you what kind of
character you wanna be a wise stat or like you wanna be a
wizard, The highest stat you happen to roll is, we'll call it
wisdom. All right, you with me now in
the OSR section actually. It's a willpower.
So a willpower, right? And then the next thing you're
gonna do is pick, pick your race.
Right. Go human, right?
I'm a yeah, I'm a, I'm a moon elf.
OK, so you are a, a moon elf with high wisdom right now.
So next thing you're going to do is you're going to pick your
class, we'll call it that, We'll call it class, and you go
wizard, right, right. OK, that's your vocation.
And the next thing you're going to do is you're going to spice
up your wizard a little bit by picking a school of magic.
But specifically not like the type of magic, I mean, a school
of magic, the Camelot school of magic or whatever, right?
Who happens to focus on necromancy.
That is all this is. I think that is exactly the same
thing. But when you say it like that,
it sounds like a lot less stuff. I mean, basically what's
happening is that you're making a broad character with stats and
then your groups, your species and your vocation.
You tag next to your stats and whenever those come into play,
you are better at rolling that thing.
You roll a double positive. That is it.
That's that's all that this is. And I know that internally, but
every time I read this I forget where I am and I'm very confused
by it. But from a mechanical point of
view, you just have a bunch of stats with tags next to them
that you can use when applicable to make roles easier.
And this is how you customize a character.
But see how much simpler it is when we say it like that?
Yes. And that is literally where you
said exactly it. Because if you actually go to
the group section, because I think you jumped over that a
little bit and the group, shoot, everyone gets two groups, right?
Right. At least two.
But if you pick a different species, you get 3, right?
You write the next to the attribute, you write the groups
next to an attribute and it gives you an advantage if that's
applicable. The attributes can have each
attribute can have two groups written next to it.
And then each attribute of five or less, you get an extra group.
So if you roll and your whatever your willpower is 4, you get
another group. But if that ever goes above 4,
you lose a group. So basically all it is is
exactly the character thing that I set up.
But if you're a group, if you're a group, which means if you're a
species, your affiliation or your vocation.
If your job. Your species international lawn
mowers Union and if. You got to mow a lawn, you get
advantage. That's all it is.
So it's a very overly complicated, terrible way of
basically taking the standard OSR style of play and macroing
it out to remove all aspects of setting specificity so that you
can drop it onto, It basically becomes a template that you can
drop onto any setting, which I can tell you right now, I, I can
think of 50 people that could write what I just said a million
times easier than how it's written in this book.
Yes, yeah. That's how that's how this game
works, is it's very broad archetypal removal of all
specificity. So you can drop it anywhere.
And it's just pure rules language that you can adapt in
anything that you want. And all you do is pick a Class,
A species, a job, and so homies you hang out with and then you
have a character. We should I I'm a hack this
game. I'm not called the Blanco hack.
Yeah, and just, I don't know, just rewrite it all.
Oh, I'm. Really, I'm not going to change
a single thing, I'm just going to rewrite it all.
So there's a notebook edition of this game too that I was like,
oh, dope. I I'll look at that because
maybe that's just a whole rules for offense version.
No, it's just got blank pages so you can write in your own like
campaign journal into it. Oh, very cool.
Yeah. So funds and equipment, I think
is where we are. We we we touched on vocation.
Y'all get it? It's it's a thing that you it's,
it's wizard was my vocation, right?
That your. Job is the class and then the
vocation. Your job is, you know, it could
be whatever it could be, you know, pig farmer.
I think that actually is an example of maybe.
It's a wizard, is the example. As pig, pig farmer was an
example, I felt like that was somewhere.
Yeah. And so the.
Only thing vocation specifically gives you is anytime that you're
using your vocation, you can attempt any normal thing that
would make sense for a wizard to do, you just get to do.
But then anything that's like almost impossible, you get to do
a regular role for. You get to do a regular role
for. Basically it's just one up on
the success chart. Did we not talk?
About this earlier, I don't think so.
Oh, OK. And then affiliations are just
the homies. They're just groups and they
give you shit. That's it, That's it.
Guilds, tribes, you know all that stuff.
Yeah, So funds the equipment. This uses the default CR for
crown. But yeah, obviously if you have
a, you know, sci-fi or futuristic, you can use credit.
It doesn't really matter. It's it's once again, it's a
generic term. Yeah.
So this is a gear by system. Oh yeah.
There's a weird role mechanic for this, right?
Yeah. You have to.
Basically you have to succeed on a task roll, and if not, you
just get a default amount, right?
I do like it. I do like it.
I don't hate it. Yeah.
So you roll D20 under or equal to a save value or to your.
Best attribute? To your save to get your best
attribute times 10 as starting crown for equipment by and if
you fail this role you just hit 3D 6 * 10.
Which could theoretically be higher.
It could theoretically be higher.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, statistically it
probably it probably won't be higher than your highest stat,
but cool. I like that works really well.
There is equipment prices and stuff on page 61 unencumbrance
you're allowed to carry 10 I that regular items plus five in
a backpack. Yeah, there's heavy items count
as two minor objects count as half.
You know coins and gems and things 100 of them can be
slotted into one slot. Yeah and then it restricts your
it limits your movement if you go above your, you know,
encumbrance rules. Yeah yeah.
And then defense value. Yep.
It's not value you. Just mark it down.
You just mark it down. You just.
Mark it down if it's. Five.
It's five there. You go yeah, if it yeah, it's
your armor cool and I. Look at the armor in the court
rules. Yeah, and here's gear list.
There's there's, there's gear here for you to buy.
Yeah. Languages.
Everyone speaks common, which is a just good, you know, plus
species language. You can get extra from various
sources sources, group language. I think that was a cool one
because I love the idea of thieves.
Can't you know, or like like carved in symbols to places.
You can get a bonus for having a high intelligence and then the
rare class clever also gives you a bonus language identities and
saves. Yes, so you add a color to a
character save by giving it a double edged modulation.
These are keywords. Actually it doesn't call them
that but a word or phrase like gambler, old, not on my watch or
whatever. Guardian ancestor.
This effects how the character saves, either improving or
diminishing her chances. It also adds character.
This is basically like a character flaw or feature of
your character that you can use occasionally or might work
against you in certain saves. It's a flavor for your
character. It's.
Flavor so that that is this is I think is AI don't know if
Christian is Swedish first in the language, but they by color
they mean like add character to which.
Means that's what they do, color.
Substitute flavor instead of color there.
And all of this makes so much more sense.
You're just flavoring your character.
You're giving him something cool.
You're adding in something that like narratively you can the the
referee can say that you might get advantage or disadvantage
because of later. Old will sometimes give you
advantage because you're experienced.
You're you're a wizard old man. You've been there before.
It also might give you disadvantage because everyone
you're gonna run a mile. Yeah, because you're old.
That's all that they mean. There is add flavor.
Write a cool keyword next to your write A tag.
One might call it even though I never would.
That's all I mean. I love tags.
I hate the word tag. Just call them keywords.
That's all that means. I think that's good too.
It's. Fine, I love it.
I love it. So much of this is actually good
or fine. It's just like, I mean, I don't
know, I I understand a lot of this fine and talking to with
you, I'm like, OK, wait, no, OK, I got it.
Yes, that's that's the problem with this entire book is I think
I would really like it, but I know I will never play this game
because I will not sit down to parse it.
Yeah. I would only get I'm.
Not going to put my table through parsing this out because
they're going to have to read this too.
No, because what I would need to do to get people to play this is
I would need to rewrite the entire book in a way that's
actually understandable and then hand it to my players.
And I'm not taking that time. I've already written the summary
like, and the thing too is why is why are Milton Madison
writing rule summary? Why isn't there one in the book
for all this shit anyway? All right.
I mean, it's a technical communication have that time.
Yeah, yeah, Cool rules. We're going to breathe this
quick. We're going to hit a bunch of
them, and then we're going to move on.
So there is some really cool stuff in the beginning of this
that I really, really like. I do want to read some of the
introduction to this. I think, again, this is where a
lot of it, I, I, I one of the things I love about this game is
like the thought behind it, the intent behind it is fantastic.
What they're trying to do is great.
The way that they communicate it is very poor in my opinion, but
what they want to do is great, and I feel like once you
understand it, it's really cool. It's really fun.
Again, it's the OSR. If you throw in some story game
elements and then pull it back to macro just as a rule set, not
as a game, but just as a rule set.
That is a template that you can overlay any setting that you
want if you think of it that way, and then use a lot of the
intent that the designer writes into a lot of these
introductions. This is really, really
interesting and fantastic. Again, I just think it's
communicated poorly. And I think the longer this
goes, it's going to get more and more poorly communicated because
I feel like, again, this is somebody that's been staring at
the same rule set for 10 years, that understands it intimately
and has forgotten how someone who's never read it before will
read it for the first time. That's, I think the biggest, the
crux of the issue here is that they understand the, the, this,
this just, again, 150 pages of just pure data that is sprung
out there, but cannot fathom someone who's never looked at it
before understanding it. So I, I do want to go through
some of the core rule stuff and then we'll go through that.
So before learning the system, it should be stressed that
knowing when to not use dice is just as important as knowing
when and how to use them. Think of the dice as the rule
and the rules as another participant when it also has to
say in how things play out. But who doesn't get more
spotlight than anyone else at the table?
For example, if your character comes to a dead end and starts
looking for a hidden door that her map says is there, the
solution is not a role to see. If she finds something, tell the
referee where she looks, and if it is the right spot, she finds
it. Well, I I want to punch people
in the throat. If the second they encounter an
issue, they ask if they can roll the dice.
It makes me rage. Just play a game.
It's it's a it's a game of imagination.
All right, This is a great part. Yeah, that's what I wrote.
That's what I'm saying it or if the party happens, I don't need
a second. A second one.
Right. So doing this makes it possible
for you to to be or get good at the game.
Get good, right. This is good, yeah.
If you just roll dice, none of your skill or lack of it can
come into play. Then again, you should be able
to play a character who is good at things that you are bad at
too. For example, if you like riddles
but you can never figure them out, a die roll for your wise
explorers Intelligence could give you a solid clue.
That way you're able to understand it.
That's what the dice are for, right?
The the the the the referee adjudicates the game right and
the dice help make those decisions with the rest of the
players and referee in a conversation right in White
Hack. The space between dice and
player skill is where the referee rules on difficulty and
where the characters groups, abilities and miracle wordings
come into play. It is also when an emergent game
world can grow. Where emergent game world can
grow. This doesn't make this doesn't
make the game loose. The increasing number of
precedents will pull system setting and gaming group
together like tightening a screw.
That paragraph is the best paragraph in this entire book.
It's amazing. It really is.
It is exactly. It's a how it's it's it's
emergent game play is what this is supposed to be like.
The as you run into a ruling, you rule on it, and now it's a
rule for your table as a group can alter the way the world
works the first time you interact with it because you
have defined an aspect of the world with it.
That is what this game is saying in an incredibly roundabout way.
So anyway, we're going to cruise.
We're going to cruise through the game.
The the game. If you guys haven't already
noped out. Thank you for sticking around
with us because we already thanks.
I'm coming up on the point where I literally threw this book away
from me for the first time experience.
Guess what, you can get it. Teachers, schools, library
searches, all that you can get it right.
This is This is literally the line that I Nope doubt on when
training is access to learning resources and opportunities to
reflect games. One XP per spent crown.
When training is supplied by an affiliation group, there's a 10%
XP bonus, and a tenth of the payment is also regarded as part
of any member fee or tax. I slammed a shot and threw it on
my bed and said I'm done for the day.
I was like like you literally just got done saying that it's
emergent and all this other shit and now you're telling me XP per
CR per 10% XP bonus per 10th of pay to affiliation group.
I'm done. I'm fucking done.
That was the first no bout for me right there.
I chewed all the two character creation, ripped my hair out.
I got to there and said I can't. I can't do core rules today too,
right? I whatever XP you pay for it,
you can. Teachers and groups can.
You can learn, you can learn things from them.
That's it. Well, XP also comes from quest
and killing monsters. Boom, obviously done.
Boom, all right, save by experience.
This is a very weird section because this literally is just
how saves work. I don't know why it's called
save by experience, but this is the saving throw section.
It's weirdly placed and the header is weirdly worded.
That's what that's where my notes were.
It would be better placed in the next section.
The task roll skills and quality just put saves in there too.
It'd be better placed in there. And I do think that's where it
is in in three. I might not be wrong.
Basically you roll the D20 less than or equal to your save value
and if it's success and, and that's your save and that's a
success. D20 roll under in a save.
Resistance and vulnerability, use advantage and disadvantage.
That's it. You can be resistant to shit,
you can be vulnerable to shit. That's it.
A save D20 roll under boom, you got it.
Good job. Task roles, skills and quality.
OK, so a task role is literally just D20 roll under, roll under.
It's it's equal to or under an attribute.
That's how it works. The face value of a successful
die can indicate the quality of success.
OK, so the higher the successful value, the better.
So basically what this says is roll under, but as close to the
number you're trying to get as possible, right?
And a crit is if you hit the exact number right.
So if your attributes 14 and you roll A14, boom, you crit right?
If you're if you're so if you're save is or the save is right.
If you're save is 14, you roll 13, you do it really fucking
good. High super high quality like.
Exactly. But if you, if you, if you say
that regardless of difficulty, if you, if the save is supposed
to be a 14, you roll like A5, you do, it might not look too
pretty. That's how the shit works.
It's it's mixed success narratively.
That's all it is, difficulty. Helping I I did like this rule
when I was first coming around. I was like oh this is cool.
I love D20 rule launder, but I often feel like it's missing
that like like degrees of success essentially.
I I also love creating when you hit the stat on the dot.
I think it's a great way to deal with quitting on D20 roll under
and I really do. The first time I read the like
the quality of success, I was like, that's just another thing
for me to worry about in this game that already feels busy in
my head. But like, I do really like that
rule. Yeah, yeah, I, I that's, I don't
like, I I just thought that that's how all the games worked,
but apparently they don't. And if you're not going to do
something like this, do it like Max Lander does in himbos their
degrees and. You always want to go back to
where I'm like, that's a great way to deal with like having
Nick. Fantastic, fantastic, higher is
better. Blah.
I wrote. There's little to no explanation
of what quality crit and fumble actually mean or look like.
So obviously we know what the crit and the fumble looks like,
but like not not to any degrees. Basically they said like I get
that a lower quality right, but what is the what's the
difference between A1 and A2 then?
You know, yeah, a crit fail versus like the worst possible
fail. That's not a crit.
There's no again, there are no if if it guess what, if it's an
example to play. That was 48 pages ago.
I don't I'm not What? What?
Right. Difficulty helping extreme
scores. OK, so difficulty means that
situations that are more difficult or easier than normal
may subtract or add 2 or more to the attribute used.
Basically ±2, right? That's the if things something's
difficult or not, right? Extreme scores or scores roll
below 1, so you can't ever do that.
Any points above 20 May be added to the quality of success.
So this is one of the things that bothers me, right?
So specifically written in that it says any points above 20 May
be added to the quality of success.
You crit on 19 OK every other time that that.
So basically if you roll over 20, OK, you can add this.
It's called surplus everywhere else in the game except for in
this spot that specifically states the fucking rule,
including the example of play and Auctions, which uses the
same rule everywhere else in the game, calls it a surplus.
The spot here in the section explaining how it works does not
call it a surplus. Come on, come on.
And if you go over a 20 because you can't, there's no, your
attributes can't be over 20. Like basically if you somehow
roll like a 24 or whatever, you crit on a 19 because that's the
exact number. That's all it means.
So again, I looked later, I tried to figure out what the
fuck a surplus was. And then I came back and
realized, oh, any points above adding to the quality of success
is the surplus, even though it doesn't say surplus here, come
on, come on, you can help. I don't know how, but apparently
you can help because it talks about helping in this section.
It literally says like when a character gets help from others.
That is a rule. That's a rule right there.
This is what I'm talking about. I'm going to read this for the
for the homies on the thing. So if the referee decides the
tasks more difficult than what it normal than what is normal
for its type, like moving silently up a very creaky stare.
Or if it is easier, like when a character gets help from others,
she may tell the player to subtract or add 2 or more to the
attribute used in the task rule. That is the help rule.
No italicize, no bold, no even. Like when a character gets help
from others is the help rule. What now?
Help exists in the rule set apparently.
Come on. Skills, trained roles and pairs.
So skill is when written next to an attribute.
Groups provide positive double S, right?
So if you have a skill, it's when a group is next to an
attribute, when it is applicable, when the group is
applicable to what you are doing, you roll the vantage.
Boom, easy peasy, right? Trained roll.
This is the same thing. Some tasks work, require pop
proper training to complete. If there's a relevant group
somewhere on the table anywhere, it doesn't need to be next to
the attribute you're rolling for.
But if somewhere on there is a group that is applicable to what
you're doing. So say you're rolling strong and
you need to pick a lock and you have the lock picking Academy
written as somewhere on there, right?
You still you have a trained role then.
So then you can actually roll to attempt a task.
A regular task is used, right? If it's next to the relevant
attribute, you get advantage. OK, so if it requires a trained
role, it has to be somewhere on your sheet or you can't even do
it. And if it is next to the app
you're using, you get advantage. Easy peasy, right?
With no relevant. If you have no relevant groups
and you're trying to do a trained role, you roll with
disadvantage. That's it.
So you either have disadvantage, a regular role, or advantage
depending on if you have any training in at all.
So you can do anything you want, but if you're not trained at
all, it's disadvantage pairs. Rolling a pair in a successful
positive double result is an additional benefit.
Basically, if you like, if you roll three and three on your
advantage role, you'd like, it's double S, you get special stuff.
It's like a 60% chance anyway. Yeah, that's it.
Contests. I literally wrote, just read it.
That's what I wrote next to it because my goodness.
OK, it's pretty short. In contest, the parties roll and
compare their results. The better result category wins.
OK, this is fine. It makes fine sense, right?
So while being in the same category counts as a tie, I
don't know why they're called categories, right?
The basis is the order from best to worst is successful, positive
pick, crit, success, failure, fumble, failed, negative pair.
So basically what they're saying is that it doesn't matter what
you roll. As long as you matter.
To that category you roll in. Basically it's like poker.
This is basically saying that like a full house is better.
Than that's exactly what I thought about this on training.
It's like, oh, OK, so full house, better four of a kind and
whatever, you know. So that's what matters.
It doesn't matter. And then it says for a more
granular comparison, you can let the higher roll win within each
category. So you can actually technically
roll higher somehow. I don't know.
But basically it's a list of the best possible ways you can roll
dice categorized, and whichever one you get in, regardless of
the number, if it's a higher on the category of type of roll you
can roll, you win. Versus just being like, you roll
2D6, out roll 2D6, and whoever rolls highest wins.
Why wouldn't you just do that? Let's do it.
So I have a question about this. This is a roll under system, so
for a positive pair you would need to roll 2 dice under.
Oh, you mean in contest or in regular?
In contest. Oh, in contest, it doesn't
matter. You're compare, you're going
against each other. OK.
Yeah, perfect. Yeah, you're just rolling like
that's what that's how I read this is it?
This isn't a task roll. It's a contest roll.
So you roll two, I roll 2, and then we figure out did I fumble
in that? Hierarchy of rights And then
like if we both rolled positive pairs and I rolled 2 eighteens
and you rolled 2 fours, I. Know it would, it would still
have to be a task roll because it specifically says success
fumble everything like that. So we're still.
Yeah, you're right, we do. Have the my original
interpretation is right. So OK, so when it says higher if
you rolled double fives which passes you for task and I rolled
double threes was passing me for task, who wins that one?
You do. So.
So as written, it's the same category.
So technically it would be a tie, right?
But it says for more granular comparison, the higher role
within the category wins. So you would win on the 55.
Okay, yeah. I'm just thinking like roll
under it always incentivize you to go low but this one is roll
under. But also, the higher you go
under, the better the quality is, so I'm just making sure the
logic stays linear when it does. The next thing says, note that
contestants may have or lack groups and can use different
things. So it says sometimes you don't
even have to roll the same attributes.
Two parties trying to convince a third might use different
things, one using logic, another using charm.
So I would roll logic, you would roll charm.
But again, it's AD 20 roll on our system, so it's just against
ourself basically, you know what I mean?
So like a success for me and a success for you are different.
I take good issue with that. That's fine.
Yeah, OK. This.
Next one. Fucking terrible.
It is with my entire being. Hate everything about it, don't
understand it. You know, you remember when we
read a Zag and they basically turned social rules into was it
poker? No.
Blackjacks, yes. Something like that, yeah.
And this was not going over. Yeah, yeah.
Blackjack. Yeah.
So we were like, this is neat. I wouldn't use it, but there are
social rules here and people that want social rules, that's
cool. And I.
Understood that one. Yes, this honestly I I don't
understand and then the thing that.
Draws in most. It's so out of the left field.
It's insane. And the thing that gets me to is
like, like one of the things that it talks about is how it's
like so much easier and like I can't even remember what it is.
Like it's it's super cool because it's easier.
It's auctions are cinematic and time saving.
I'm like how is India not? Fucking time saving.
This is what I don't understand. I don't understand it because
you're bidding, you're bidding. OK, so this is, this is how
auctions work. This is how auctions work for
because I, I literally, I read this, I read the example
auction, I read all of it and I'm like, this is not cinematic.
You're engaging with the dice completely away from the
narrative, but occasionally talking about them within the
context of the dice. Dude I literally wrote this is a
fucking mini game. Where did I write it on here?
Oh, you did? It's a fucking mini game.
It would completely destroy all
momentum and immersion. That was my note on the on the
page here. So this is how auctions work.
Fuck the screen over there, I'm bringing my notes.
OK so all everyone rolls the D6 right and adds it to the
attribute you're trying to roll. OK so let's say willpower for
you doesn't matter right? So your say your base willpower
is like 12. OK, roll AD 6, you get a three,
you hide that number, right? But your number is a 15, OK, OK,
so this is a number you have to roll under to win.
So if if you if, if you if your number is 12 and you roll the
three, your number is a 15, OK, the first person makes a bid.
A bid is the number you must roll over to win.
So there's you have to roll in between, right?
Right. Yes.
So your high end is 15. Yeah.
So now you're bidding. Tell me a number that you think
that you can get over. So say you pick three, you're
saying that you're going to get over three, but under 15.
Right. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't pick
one because the person who picks one wait.
Wait, wait, I'll get to that. I'll get to.
That OK, I'll get to that. OK, I'll get to that.
So yeah, let's see. I'll see 3 then.
Yeah, I got a little perfect above a three, but below my
secret. Your secret number, right?
So now I now the next person can bid and then everyone goes
around saying, well, I bid 4I bid 5I bid 6.
So basically you're narrowing the scope, you're narrowing the
band in which you could win. OK, there is a bid called A1 bid
where someone can just say one that is it, OK.
But the only time you can do that is on your first or last
one. So basically, if someone says
one bid, they're done, they're done bidding, and then everyone
can keep going until someone decides that they win.
OK, eventually let's say that somebody over there picked one
and I say 8. Yeah, a crazy 10.
I win with an 8, I win with an 8.
OK, so then after we're all done, I bid an 8.
You bid a three, they bid A1. OK, so now I have to show my
dice, say it's a four, OK, and my stats a 14.
So now I have to roll between an 8 and an 18 in order to win the
auction. OK, so I rolled and I fail.
OK, now you were the next highest bidder.
So now you have to roll between a three and a 15.
Say that you fail this asshole, the one bid, basically this
though the one bid is the price is right.
This is $1.00. Yeah.
So they hope that everyone else goes 200 Shields and then they
get it right. But here's the problem is if you
go to the auction example right is an example of of two people
chasing somebody. Uh huh.
OK, two people. Two, you and me both chasing one
person. Uh huh, that's exactly why I
would use this rule. Right.
So here's here's The thing is we're being against each other,
right? But if either of us fail, we
both fail because as a group, that means that person gets
away, right? Yeah, right.
No, I understand what you're saying.
So why would so why would we bid against each other, pushing the
number up so that we one of us fails and we both lose the
person? I don't know.
I mean, that's a crazy example for this one.
It is an insane example, but I think the more insane thing is
that this rule exists. It's it's ridiculous because
honestly, in that example, people are going to be like,
well, you have to buy into the narrative of the game.
I don't want to play fucking bitty blackjack like this is
poker like I don't want to play. I don't want to bluff poker
bullshit to Ding narrative. The example is in the contest,
by the way. It would be a contest if the
person we were chasing was also part of the bidding, perhaps.
Oh no, no. Contests and auctions are two
different sections, bro. Contests or You versus me
auctions are the whole separate thing.
The auction, not the contest it is, but this is more an auction
if everyone was including the no.
Because what an auction is, is basically taking the place of a
skill challenge. And then as you bid, somehow
you're supposed to like feed narrative into your bids to make
it cinematic. And I'm like, no, it's not.
You're playing a mini game. You're stopping the game to to
pretend to play another game. And then again, in the example
of play at the end, they literally go, so wait a minute,
if one of us loses, we both lose.
And like, yeah, and then they like off the bid or some shit.
And I'm like, so then realistically what you would do
is just we would both one bid. So we both so, so like one of us
succeeds. Why would we even try?
Like, why would we bid up? Because.
And then basically again, an example is like, oh, well, like
I like basically then you're bidding on how bad you are at
running after somebody to make your bid harder narratively.
Yeah, no, I know. So yeah, that's auction.
Fuck that. Tactics and auction don't do it.
Extended auction use don't. That's all I say.
We can just. Yeah.
Common special cases. All right.
Picking a lock, sneaking or hiding, searching.
There's rules here for those things.
Common special things, right? That's that's it, right.
Traps can be handled like locks. This isn't a Julie to roll this
arm. There you go.
Stuff like that works. You got picking lock, sneaking
or hiding, searching traps, bashing a Chester door, pushing
a stuck door. That's it.
Time and movement. Guess what time exists.
It's fine. Right around.
Oh my gosh. Look, it's actually bolded with
an R next to it. As all keywords should fucking
be. It is.
Interesting at this part. Like occasionally at random it
has it laid out like it's actually rules.
Like a real rule, like real rules, like actually real rules
is how those fucking books should be.
I'm just getting mad now. Minutes, hours, months, years,
whatever a round is. Is that SO1R?
In combat round there's actions. You can quaff a potion and do
stuff AD 6 rounds. Is basically what what the quote
UN quote like turn is or whatever now.
So if you want to get something out of your backpack, pick a
lock, do whatever, you just roll D6 to how many rounds it takes
for you to do it. 10 minutes is fight, loot, rest, do whatever
you want. 60 minutes is like burning a regular torch.
Whatever, it's time. There's time listed.
It's fine. There's travel times listed
based on bad weather and night travel and and plains and
mountains. Guess what, that's their indoor
movement. Guess what?
There's a movement table. It exists.
It's roughly what you think it would be, and it's listed by
humans. Things smaller than humans.
If you're crawling, if you're normal weight, if you're
encumbered, either heavy, severe, or massively encumbered,
it's like the distance you can go.
So 30 feet or six squares if you're a normal human, and 10
feet or two squares if you are a small massively encumbered
person. That's it.
There you go, straining and boosting movement.
This one's kind of interesting Strength roll while carrying a
heavy or worse load. Basically, if you are
encumbered, you can try to roll a strength check in order to
basically boost yourself and strain yourself to to move
faster while encumbered, right? On a success, you move as one
category lighter within the current time unit.
So if you're trying to do like an hour for an hour, you get to
instead of being as severely encumbered, you'll just be
heavily encumbered. You get to move up on the chart
one right? But if you fail the next, so the
next time unit again. If you're using hours, then for
the next hour afterwards you tried and failed and you're just
burnt out. You can't move at all.
That's the problem with trying to strain.
They were hit in combat. Here we go.
Combat. It happens.
Attitudes and parley. Yeah.
Basically the GM decides how people feel about you, right?
There's a reaction table. Furious, hostile, negative,
neutral, positive. Happy.
It's there. Boom.
It's a 3D6 table if you want to roll it.
Or the they just decide initiative and surprise.
Guess what? GM decides if you have surprise,
right? If you're going to roll
initiative, it's D6, and it can be modified by agility.
There are earlier rules where especially in the depth section,
where having increased agility gives you bonuses.
So if your agility is over 13 or more at base, you get a + 1
bonus. That's not this rule, that's
just in the game text somewhere. I don't remember it somewhere.
If it's yeah, if it's sixteen or more, you get a +2.
So your agility is just AD six rule unless your status higher
than 13 or 60, and then it's D6 plus one or D 6 + 2.
That's it, right? And then if it's tied, it goes
into this old BX style. Whichever like action type
you're doing gets to go first. So missiles go first, then
melee. Missiles beat melee.
Light beats heavy, drawn beats undrawn.
So if everyone rolls like A4, instead of re rolling just two,
if two people aren't 4 and I'm trying to shoot you and you're
trying to hit me, I get to shoot you before you try to hit me.
I kind of like that. I dig that a little bit because
we're not, we're not altering our actions based on it.
We're going at the same time. It's just that one will beat the
other. Me hitting with an arrow will
happen before you run across the room and punch me.
You know what I mean? That's it.
If you hold, you can actually for an entire turn doing
nothing, you can then change your initiative to a six because
your initiative stays. If you roll a 3, it's a 3, but
if you hold for an entire round, you can move it to a six.
If you want to meta game it, everyone can just say fuck it
for a round and all be sixes and then all get to go first, but
then your last, but then your first and your last.
So it doesn't really matter. It's just if you have a shitty
initiative and you want to be the one that goes to the
beginning of the round, you can do that.
You can always hold to lower your initiative.
And if you do, you go before the next person or like as they act
and be like before they do that. I do this thing.
Boom, that's it. If you're surprised you can only
move and ready weapons, you can't take an action and you
don't even roll until the next round.
That's it. That is initiative and surprise.
Moving on to attacking. So attacking is just D20.
You add or subtract any bonuses or penalties of the characters
AV and make a task roll. It's just a standard task roll,
so less than or equal to your attack value.
Right? But to hit, the roll must also
be successful and exceed the target's defense.
So if my attack value is 15 and the character's defense is five,
I have to roll under 15 but higher than A5.
Boom. That's it.
That's how the temporals work. Perfect.
Love it. Yeah, it's a roll over under
system, right? Legacy armor systems.
There's a chart here that basically looks like a Thego
chart. My notes for this one.
Huh. No.
So we're moving on action steering around.
So action steering around. So.
Oh shit, I grabbed the wrong thing.
No one, no one looked at the man behind the curtain.
Close your eyes. Good thing it's so well
hyperlinked because I can just go.
It is very well. Quick to combat attack, steering
around. All right, let me grab my notes.
I'm gonna drag this over. OK, so an attack.
OK, so there are a series of things that you can do in in
while you attack. OK, you can do you can make an
attack, you can make an average move, sometimes modified and get
small action. So for those that have played
the most PR game in the world or whatever, basically you get an
attack, you get an additional action, and then you get like a
bonus action. OK, so attack, secondary action,
bonus action, right? Oh, I'm sorry.
You get an attack, a move, and a bonus action.
OK, they're interchangeable, but only left to right.
OK, right. So that means that like for
example, if you, you can sacrifice an attack to make two
moves in a small action because your move, an attack means
basically two moves and a move could be too small actions, but
it can't go backwards. You can't make a, you can't
exchange small action for move or move for an attack like it's
it has to go left to right. So you can always sack an attack
to do 2 moves or two moves or a move to do 2 small actions.
Basically fine action economy. I like it.
I like the options that you don't get whatever.
I might even steal that. That's really neat.
Melee and reach. It exists. 5 feet, 10 feet.
Who cares? This is the ask you what I'm
talking about. Reach, No reach.
OK, dope. OK, now I get it. 5 feet is the
slashes, 10 feet the slashes, whatever.
Free attacks and disengaging people get them.
Fighting takes focused. If you literally do fucking
anything, you get yourself open to a free regular attack, which
is basically an opportunity attack, right?
Regardless of turn, regardless of anything.
But people have a set number of these free attacks.
Strong makes 2, everyone else gets one and then you're done.
So basically it's the opportunity attack.
Strong gets two done. Missile attack specifics.
Attacks with ranged weapons get a -. 1 AV for each increment
above the weapons range, right? So every weapon has a range, and
if you go above that range -1 all the way up to Max of a four
in order to try to hit, if you fire into a melee right, you
have to succeed. You have to exceed the defense
value by a + 4 or you hit somebody else.
Boom, that's it, that's how it works.
Crits and fumbles, they exist, you roll on them.
Crits do double damage, stacking with def double damage, and if
you were a one on a damage die or one or two on a boss fight,
you get to also roll on the crit table and then fumbles, roll on
a fumble table. That's it, Boom, that's how that
works. Combat advantage, This is one.
I'm like, which one's X, which one's O?
Whatever. Basically, if you find yourself
in combat advantage, right? By the way, combat advantage has
been mentioned about five times before this, and most of the
time it never referenced where the fuck combat advantage is.
If you find yourself in combat advantage, it's not actually
advantage like as we know it, it's not positive double rolls.
It's just a +2 to your armor to attack value and damage, so +2
to hit and damage if you find yourself with combat advantage.
And it stacks all the way up to double or triple.
So plus 2 + 4 + 6, that's what you can get with it.
And this, this basically is telling you that you also get it
what what flanking looks like if you have reach, which means just
means your circle is one more square away from your X boom,
good job. Conditions and concentration,
they exist, they suck. If you have one, it's bad for
you. Good job.
OK. Basically, the referee
interprets unregulated cases using combat advantage, free
attacks and stuff like that. So there's no explainer for it.
If someone's blinded, you just decide what that means, and
that's fine. I'm fine with that.
And then the referee, yeah, the referee dictates what that means
based using free attacks, combat advantage, extra damage, stuff
like that. How that works?
That's fine. Boom.
Good job. OK, special combat options, they
exist. Charge, defend, fight
defensively, grapple trick. The thing I love most about this
is that it's not hidden behind feet.
It's not class specific. Anyone can do these things.
They're fucking great. Charge, run 15 at somebody in a
straight line and you get -2 to the to their defense value and
-1 to save versus special attacks on your next turn.
Love it. Great good job grappling,
pressing, protecting all that's great Weapons and armor, guess
what, they exist. Every weapon does D6 and it's
either plus 1 + 2 or -1 -, 2 or a flat D6.
Love it. It's amazing.
They're special features and you're.
Super OK with this part, you know, like it keeps numbers very
consistent. Like especially in this.
Your HP is fairly low so plus one is meaningful -2 is
meaningful. Yeah.
And then you get things like two handed D 6 -, 2 damage in melee
for a javelin. So there's special features,
right? It also gives you a weight next
to it. So there's regular and then like
medium or heavy, something like that.
Basically like one handed or two handed or, or something minor or
or heavy. It's regular minor.
Heavy. There's a range and then there's
a rate of fire, and then there's crowns.
How much it cost? The rate of fire is interesting.
So basically, let's take for example the crossbow.
It says 1/2. OK, so if we Scroll down the
rules a little bit to rate a fire, which is this, this not a
box at the bottom again, this is written like a novel or a
textbook. So it's literally like a, it's
written as if it's like like a, like a like when there's like a
little comma, one comma. Yeah, like down at the bottom.
I don't remember. It's called like a citation.
It's like a citation. Yeah.
So it says minor means there's two can fit in one slots with a
small item. Regular is one slot and heavy is
2 slots. Rate of fire is a rate of fire
in shots and then rounds. So fire in the first round and
spend any remaining rounds reloading.
So basically for like crossbow says 1/2 so you fire in a round
but it takes two rounds to reload as.
Opposed to this musket which is you fire around, takes 4 rounds
to reload. 4 rounds of reloading exactly.
So that's exactly what that means.
I like that. It's interesting.
I think it's cool armor. It goes from cloth at one
leather, hard leather, chainmail, split mail, full
plate 123456 and then shield gives you a + 1.
So if you have chainmail at four with a shield, your armor value
is five. So when things are trying to hit
you, they hit above your defense value of five.
That's it. Boom, good job done.
Damage, HP, and death. It's right there.
There's consequences to it. When a character is hit, you
roll damage subtracted from current harm.
If HP is still positive, nothing happens, but the character's
closer to getting in real trouble.
If HP is 0 or negative, use the table below.
At zero, you're knocked out into your healed -1 You're also
injured -2 to -9 You also have to save or die in D6 rounds and
-10 instant death. So if you ever go -10 you're
dead. That's it.
A successful first aid attempt stops bleeding.
There you go. Save against incoming damage.
So this is the thing that everybody gets once per battle.
Anybody can try to make a successful save, right?
Reducing the incoming damage by D6, which at low levels can
literally save your fucking life.
Everyone can do this, that's how it works.
If the save fails, you take full damage and you are dazed from
the attempt, which means until after your next turn you can't
do shit except move five feet and everyone has combat
advantage against you. That's it.
Boom, good job. Also, hey shout out being bolded
and bullet pointed, you know? Crazy, crazy how that works and
you can actually understand what this fucking means, right?
Healing, basically. It sucks.
It sucks to get hurt. This game is brutal.
It does, yeah. It's, it's the healing is pretty
minor and brutal and, you know, all of the lies heal better, you
know? Yeah, yeah.
So basically it says a character was not gone below 0 HP will
restore all harm points within 48 hours of rest.
I want to point something out too.
All harm points completely after 48 hours of rest.
It is not a healing rate. Rate is italicized.
That means it's important, right?
But a static side effect of prolonged rest and isn't
affected by wise expedited healing rules.
So healing at base is not a rate, remember that.
So basically if you did not go below 0 in combat after 48 hours
of rest, fully healed. Otherwise it's one HP every
evening and morning. So it's two HPA day.
Or you can have two HP if you succeed on a on a toughness
roll. And then you can also bind
wounds to reduce one D 6 -, 3 HP if you are trained in something
that helps you bind wounds and you succeed.
But fumbling causes one HP injuries and and disadvantage.
So if you hit negative HP, you get an injury that is equivalent
to carrying five extra items. So basically it takes up
inventory slots, right? And.
That's a lot of inventory slots, too.
Yeah, it's half your inventory slots.
Well, that's a third, Yeah, and you also heal at your usual
rate, but only to HP of one. So literally you only get back
to one and you don't heal anymore until you find somebody
that can heal you. Narratively, I like that.
Basically, if you go below your HP, you're basically dying and
all they will do is be able to stabilize you and then they have
to get your stabilized body to somebody that is trained in
helping you, like a physician or a healer.
It's my necromantic Wizard could help you, but only after you
die. So yeah, exactly exactly.
You can also choose to take a permanent disadvantage which you
note on your your character sheet.
Basically you just mark it down and then you just have
disadvantage all the time. Like when you have it's a
negative double roll if it's applicable, boom done.
There's also weapons that have knockout.
It just knocks you out. No injuries, no nothing.
Magic interference and healing. So why is heals different?
OK, because magic interference is weird.
Basically you can't the the way this has had to be an edge case
that people kept doing and they said fuck that.
So basically what this says is you can't heal yourself for the
HP you're spinning on magic because I don't know if we said
it before magic. The cost is your.
HP yes. Good.
OK, you can't just use magic and then heal yourself with magic
because you just create a loop of low level magic and healing
where you never actually lose any HP.
You just can't because it's called magic interference and
magic don't work that way. That's fine.
I'm totally fine with it being like it doesn't work because I
fucking said to don't try to break it.
Here's my problem though. OK, habitual miracle workers
paying HP like the Wise get constant benign interference.
That's a side effect. They regain HP at twice the
natural rate of others. I'm gonna roll up real quick,
just for a second. Oh, they never call that a rate
higher up, do they? They never say.
It specifically says it is not a healing rate, but a static side
effect. So if healing is not a rate at.
All yeah, it's talking about the 48 hour rule is not a rate.
That's that's a natural side effect.
So the one HP every evening and morning is the rate or whatever
2 HP if they succeed on the roll.
Got it. I was very mad about this.
I'm glad you clarified that for. Me, the character recovers.
It never refers to this. It never refers to the actual
rate as rate. I just inferred that if you get
one HP every evening, morning if you fail or yes, you're.
You're completely right. I didn't read it that way and I
was very mad that I was like, you say it's not a rate and then
you say it's by the rate. So basically instead of one in
the morning, you get 2. In the morning wise can't rest
for 24 hours and get fully recovered because that's not a
rate, it's a natural prolonged effect of resting.
Basically what it's saying is like the normal of you get one
every morning, one every evening, the wise gets 2 every
morning and two every evening. Yes, or they get four and four
if they pass their toughness rule.
Exactly. Boom.
Ghost form. If we're talking about something
that should be an optional rule, it's this.
Yes, this should be an optional rule.
Why is it? Why are?
Bases. Why are bases in the cool
classes in optional rules but ghost form isn't?
So Long story short, how does ghost form work?
Guess what, if you die, you can just be a fucking ghost and you
get all of your HP that you had in life, OK And anytime you want
to do anything, anything interact with the world at all,
you have to spend HP and it does not recover.
So once you you can only basically interact with the
world until you've used up all your HP and then you are
literally a ghost that can do nothing because you cannot
interact the world anymore. That's it.
So the higher level you are when you die means the more you can
interact with the world. One thing I don't like about
this is it says you can't go through doors, and I'm like
that. If I have a ghost, they go
through goddamn doors. I'm.
Not doing that. It's like that's so dumb.
Also why is this not? I know he just said it but like
this is this is one where like Oh yeah like if someone invoked
this optional rule I would probably let it fly, but it is
weird that it is here. As opposed to the other the cool
classes and stuff. Anyway.
We're almost through core items. I'm just saying I did this twice
as fast as you did character is all I'm saying.
Also, I wasn't talking while you were talking to me because if I
was talking while I was talking it would take twice as long too.
So using magic items, guess what you can.
And if you want to throw shit, it's a missile attack like
powders, You want to throw it 5 feet, whatever, who cares.
Cursed objects, guess what, they exist.
It's mostly a narrative. Players can do it like referee
does whatever. Reading a scroll?
Guess what, you can do it. Effects, parameters, and cost in
HP are set. The use requires a trained
Intelligence role modified by the HP cost, and it's -10 to the
role if the language is unknown but pronounceable.
And unless noted, scrolls take 10 minutes to use.
That's what all of this says. And then there's literally like
a, a whole, like a role result, fumble, fail, success, double
success, crit. There's a result for how it
works. And there you go.
That's how it works. Go for it.
Poison and drugs, they have a primary, secondary effect and
they should always have remedies, possibly addiction and
withdrawal effects to it. Boom, they exist.
They exist in the world and they exist the way you probably think
they do. That's it.
That is the core rules. Do you want me to chew through
the rest of this in the next 10 minutes or what do you want to
do? I don't know, let's touch on
what optional rules do you want to touch.
Well, let's just Why don't I buzz and you stop me when you
want? Yeah.
Using traditional material. Guess what?
You can't. There's variants here for
adapting it. Boom.
Good job crawling dungeons and hexes.
Guess what? You can.
There's rules here too. You.
Can absolutely. That's another one that I think
it's weird that this is not cooked in as a hex crawl.
Yeah, yes. Well, I think I think I think
because that implies some setting aspects to it, like.
Does. Yeah, you're right.
You're right, right? Which pulls it out.
Hirelings and retainers. They exist.
It's fine. There's more.
Rules from later on too sounds. Yeah, morale checks.
It's weird. It's an optional because when
you get to the monsters it specifically talks about morale.
Yeah, they have morale like they have the stat.
So it's not an optional. They have the stat exists
already baked in. Yeah, So I don't know why it's
an optional miniatures in terrain.
You can use them. Good job.
You can use them traditional magic if you want to.
Basically it tells you how you can switch back to like Vantian
magic. Why would you?
Why would what the fuck would you?
Hey, you want your magic to be less fun and variable?
Here's. The thing I can I, I can see of
all the things I love freeform magic.
You know that the magic that I'm fucking around with is very
similar to this magic. I can see people bouncing off of
it because of the, the, the the choice paralysis of just being
too freeform. I I can totally see that and I
can see people leaning back into it.
So fine, whatever true miracles. Basically it's saying that you
can just get rid of magic and make magic.
All magic scrolls and miracles really.
Miracles. Super low magic setting.
I like it. There's a whole fucking thing
here for it. Other traditions can't read.
This. What's up?
I am read this part. It's fine, who cares, We're
moving on. Combat in ships.
Do it. Find stuff on ships.
Here's an ASCII image that I have no fucking like whatever
mountain. Hey look, it's got to change on
this one. Yeah, but fuck that.
I'm sorry. Those are thick clouds.
Why are they on the ocean? These are mountains.
I don't. Know Canyon?
Yeah, dope. Fine, it's fine.
Crafting, code breaking and hacking.
Guess what, you can do it. You're good.
Good job, modern and feature weapons.
This is neat. I did think that these are
really cool. We're not going to talk about
it, but it talks about burst and Full Auto ammo rolls.
Look at all of the italicized bolded stuff on here.
The the the, the bullet points off to the side here.
Why is everything after character creation about halfway
through core rules suddenly become a rule book?
I don't know is it that this stuff is the later iteration
add-ons OK? Because honestly, there's some
cool. Stuff here the rules here for
like suppressive fire and stuff I thought were cool.
So good, so good. Honestly though, they just made
the deft 2 pages and bullet pointed most of it.
I would have immaculately like the classes in general out of so
many less problems with this book.
Yeah, they they were like this book is like 30 pages shorter
than last one. I'm like why, why, why why?
Anyway, scale. You can have scale, that's
totally fine. Good job.
Do that. Corruption was an interesting
rule. Basically it adds madness,
radiation, the influence of chaos, and stuff like that.
You actually add a new thing in like ACL and instead of spending
HP you can just spend corruption in order to do some certain
things. I love that.
I would use that in a fucking heartbeat.
You know my Ad's born ass is using corruption rules.
Well, I think that really fits into that, that you can put this
on any setting and it works and like, Oh yeah, that's how you've
a corruption aspect to your setting.
Radiation with a cool. Yeah, yeah, Madness, radiation,
corruption, like, yeah, dude, that's that's super dope.
And then there's a whole CL chart here, so CL1 to 3/4 to 6/7
to 10 and then 10. Plus it shows you a minor effect
in behavior versus like a major permanent effect.
Things that you can hide, things you can't hide.
I really love this. I think this is a fantastic
rule. Whole thing about corrupting
magic, basically the same thing. Yeah.
But like, this is the part where it talks about you pay for
miracles and corruption levels. CL instead of HP Really cool, I
love that a lot. Customized attributes and
implants. Basically like losing a hand,
always roll for the closest attribute for the task at hand,
things like that. If you want, you can customize a
character attribute array to better suit the setting.
So if you want to customize your attributes it talks about how to
do that blah blah blah blah blah.
Beyond levels. Can you go beyond 10?
Sure, who cares, whatever. Divine aid and debts are neat,
but there's not a whole lot to it.
A lot of its narrative and and referee discretion playing with
aspects. So basically basically at level,
starting at level 10, you can control limited aspects of the
game world. So you like ends books, whether
guards like you just like control aspects of the world,
right? Which you kind of do from the
beginning. Rare character classes, dope
ones. Which one was your favorite?
I don't know. I think, I think the fortunate
because I really like the idea of like manipulating like
essentially luck, you know, like once a day you become really
fortunate about something. Like I'm also rereading Wheel of
Time and match from coffin is like the guy who can just roll
dice and he always rolls well and like, yeah, look at that.
So I, I don't know, I really like leaned and.
You see, you seem like a mad guy.
Actually, I'm more of a pair. Any bar guy.
That guy has the coolest of the abilities so.
Yeah, but you, I'm sorry. You're the you're the shy.
Yeah, that's not. Who I am, I'm definitely more a
match from Coffin. You're a Matt.
Yeah. So anyway, so the characters are
the brave, the club and the fortune.
So just like the wise, the deft and the strong really feed on to
an attribute. These feed on other attributes
or things, right. So the brave is about courage
and your ability to stand fast. There's again, this one actually
has like numbered lists and and shit, whatever.
There's a clever, it's about thinking but not being smart.
It's about thinking about doing things in different ways.
So you will get bonuses to doing things in unorthodox ways with
non combat related problem solving.
That's really clever. This is going to be a difficult
class for people to kind of, I think vibe with a lot trying to
think of ways to do things differently.
So I understand why this one's a little bit more of an advanced
class. I do think it is a more advanced
class for the way you have to craft your mind around it.
But once again, like I don't understand why this one,
literally the entire class is laid out in numbers.
Like the clever can do this, they can do that, they can do
this, they can do that. Like one through 9 very easily.
Understandable, right? But the base classes in the
earlier part of the game aren't. I don't fucking understand it.
It's two page spread. Just do the class at the
beginning like this. What the fuck.
Like this makes me mad. These make me generally fucking
mad. Like these are so laid out, so
much better. It's laid out.
So much better. It makes it so easy to read and
understand these classes versus the other ones where it's it is
it generally is mad the fortunate, like you said.
Well no, the fortunate it talks about being bored with an
advantage and stuff like that. But then you're still are using
like the the fortunate can be have royal heirs, rich and
influential merchants, one per game session.
They may use their good fortune in a major way.
So it's not like using luck. It's literally being born rich
and then being able to use your. Rich, I know it's like
fortunate, but like I would probably spend.
It, you know, you could totally do you could totally do a lot of
class. There are some special classes
that basically they're just races.
There's the Dragonite, which is like amphibian refugees.
So it literally it it basically walks you through like creating
your own kind of species and the things that you could have with
it. That's cool.
The marionette is just dope, like these scarecrow people that
were supposed to. This is fucked by the way.
Marionettes, sometimes called scarecrows, are man sized
servant puppets infused with souls from dead humanoids.
So it's a soul from a dead person put into a.
Puppet. It's a colon.
Yeah, it's the soul of a dead person.
So as in a person's soul is put into a yeah.
And then they were originally made to serve as edutants,
bodyguards or field medics, but in times of peace as butlers and
worker versions have also been produced for the rich.
So you're dead, your soul is put into a wooden puppet, and then
you are forced to work for the rich people.
That's so fun. Like, it's so fun.
I don't have these everywhere. This one and I think Frost Jaw,
I mean, all of these are a little like setting specific.
It almost feels like you know. Yes, the Dragonite 2, but I
think that's the point when they one of the reasons they put
these in because they literally talk about the special classes
being humanoids, humans, you can do a bunch of stuff, but it also
it also teaches you at the beginning how to make them.
So these classes are more examples, not just like to do
it. It says list your advantages,
list drawbacks, supply XP requirements.
It it teaches you how to build them.
And then basically these are just three examples.
The third one is the frost giant.
Like you said, they're just they're tall giants.
You get like plus 7HP and stuff like that.
Bases are really cool. We're not going to dig into it
because we can have a whole episode on this, but basically
it's your home base. You can have one, there's like a
base identity, how to have your base identity and building a
vehicle, who the leader is, all that kind of stuff, your
equipment, your resources, all of that.
There's a zero state to your base where it basically talks
about like the intactness of it. Like if your hole is intact in
water and what it means when it becomes like not intact anymore.
Intervention costs and stress. So as your base starts to
crumble or be attacked, there's whole values for the base and
the consequences based on like the stress your base comes
under. And then if your base is
compromised, if it's threatened, it's destroyed, all those kind
of things. Here's a there's even a base
sheet that you can use. Yeah.
Then there's refereeing Whitehack.
We're going to skip most of this because it's just, it's it's
relatively generic. The only kind of interesting
part is this intro part. Running in the game of Whitehack
means relying to a degree on your knowledge of the fantasy
genre. Don't let it worry you.
While the rules provide structure and means of
resolution, their main purpose isn't to help children make
things up together long before they can read playing game or
make believe. You may need a reminder, be it
on YouTube. This is such a this is where I
was like what are you even saying?
On the contrary, the rules are mainly there to make things more
challenging. The game text imposes
restrictions on storytelling and purposely presents oppositions
for the gaming group to handle. Tell the player that.
Tell the players that. In Whitehack, the goal is to
tell a story, but now you are deliberately risking failure by
abiding by the written rules, the dice, and the internal logic
of a game world. I'm not going to read the rest
of it, but that's how it goes. It's a roundabout way of saying
things that I agree with, but from a very different side that
I don't necessarily like vibe with, but it's fine.
Refereeing bare bones referee a gym, referee a game.
There's a one to six. It's better structured than the
vast majority of the beginning part of the book, but there's a
base rules. There's some finer points to it.
It talks about settings and even gives you like like ways to use
settings now versus before civilization versus wilderness
hacking your notion of normal switching or mixing genres.
There's a lot of doing stuff, playing with history, using a
literary setting, adventures, predefined stories versus
dungeon maps versus mind maps, building up phases, the way you
can play the games of prelude, preparation, travel,
exploration, confrontation, basically how to structure your
adventures. There's a whole mind mapping
thing here which find whatever, how to construct dungeons like
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. This is more refereeing stuff.
Blah blah blah, random tables. There's a modifying table
results basically on that it basically says you can go up or
down one or whatever randomizing input rather than output.
This is an interesting one to read it.
We're not going to lots of tables.
How to run a campaign, Sandboxes.
How? Reputation game.
Yeah, reputation game is interesting.
That's fun to read. A lot of this is just fine.
If you've played games for any period of time, For the most
part, you've run these macros is the thing that is fine, and I'm
not going to go over read it. If you like it, I want to use
it. It's interesting designing
macros. Basically it's the archetypal
stuff that you can use, like the secret police.
And running the secret police is like an archetypal thing within
your world, whatever. So build macros and do shit with
that. Monsters and artifacts.
Did you want to touch on monsters at all, or let me just
keep doing what I'm doing? Up to you.
I'm letting you drive, you know. Monster table entries, basically
you have defense, you have harm dice, you have a movement, and
then you have an Lt. which is this entry together with the
monster HD configures your loot roll.
I do really love that. I do love the way the loot roll
works. Monster keywords.
So when it actually references keywords, the first time you see
the word keyword is on like page 30 something under.
I think it's a deaf class, right?
It does not tell you then to go to page 117 or anything to
figure out keywords. You have to go to the back of
the book in the index to find keywords, and where keywords are
explained at all is monster keywords.
Keywords can be used as characteristics, right?
As miracle wordings or his abilities that you either script
in advance or improvise on the fly.
Why are we seeing this at page 117 under Monsters?
Why so much of this you know? What the fuck like?
And it even then explains for miracles and abilities alike, a
good idea is to have the monster pay a few HP.
Like I just so monsters can do miracles and they can pay HP and
do all this stuff, whatever, fine, there's some monster stuff
here. Here's my other problem with
like keywords. It says there are keywords and
you can do stuff, but then when they're listed in the example of
things here, it's listed under special, not keyword whatever.
There's a whole bunch of monsters, amphibians, bears,
whatever. For example, a Gollum right?
Or a a a basilisk 6 HD, 5 defense, 20 movement, +2 H on
the loot roll and it has a petrifying gaze.
Good job. Dope.
That's a monster like I don't understand why characters are so
much more advanced, but like that's that's it.
It's crazy. Monsters save AV damage and XP.
They have all of those good job. And then this teaches you how to
build a monster with it. Task role, morale role.
OK, so loot role. Loot role.
I do really like this. So loot rolls can be used when
you are unsure what, if anything, a monster has on them.
So failures and fumbles render loot according to the below loot
table, right? Success on the other hand gives
you roughly the maximum plus something extra.
Chris let you read the line below if there is one on the
loot table. So basically so the the if you
go back up to the monsters, a bunch of them have a listing
next to them. So skeleton has an R that's
regular. OK, So then when you want to
roll on the loop table, you would say R for regular, right?
If it's a failure, it's mundane or something expected, right?
If it's success, it's something valuable, right?
And if you crit, it's valuable and rare because you weren't
valuable and rare. You get to go one down perfect.
It's dope. I think it's really interesting.
I really like that this. Actually fairly straightforward.
This is. Usable table stuff with clear,
concise directions. I write the.
Book like this my fucking God. Boss Monsters is actually also
dope, fighting with the boss monsters school there's a lot of
different things they can do, emitting aura and stuff like
that. The way that the HP works is
different too, like when it's reduced to two or less by a boss
attack you must say that one HP or take damage.
Like there's a whole different thing on how to like fight
bosses and have stages to boss fights that I think is it.
Feels a lot more cinematic and it makes it feel a lot different
from regular fights. Yes, this is something that I
would use in all my games. I think this is really fucking
neat. Really interesting.
Partitioning is a thing. Basically bosses can split
themselves up into lesser parts and then there's a values for
like what the parts get, whatever.
Example monsters. I also think it's really funny
one of the one of the notes I wrote here is there are no
detailed descriptions of trusty spells.
Iconic creatures are well known magic items in Whitehack.
It's the first line at the beginning of monsters and
artifacts. OK, there are none.
There are no iconic creatures or magic artifacts.
Example monsters, first tribe, org Rock snail, spike rat,
talking head, the twisted unzel, white dragon boss, white cloak.
I'm sorry there's no examples of iconic creatures though, like
Dragons, right? Magic artifacts, they exist.
There's a list of them here. Guess what?
There's no list of them though, but they're either.
It's interesting, we were just talking about Wheel of Time and
there's a white cloaks. There's an obvious Wheel of Time
reference right here. Literal white cloak.
Literally a religious. Order with political ambitions.
I'm like this is a little. Bro if you look at 3E and the
picture of the white cloaks and the quote underneath it, it
literally is like just if I was like this dude obviously has
read this dude has obviously read fucking Wheel of Time
because it literally is. I'll show it to you some other
time, but there's literally a quote here.
I'm like, those are the white cloaks.
So they're just those. Yeah.
So artifacts there are concepts so like antidote potion, boots
of old, crow hat, demon contract but.
Crow knot is a Gray knot, by the way.
Yeah. There are not well known magic
items though. There's no list of those but,
but here we go with the list. Yeah, it's the well known crow
hat, you know. Yeah, yeah.
It basically it's just a bunch of artifacts listed here,
artifact questions and examples questions and then examples.
There you go. Archibald the eternal torch,
Cavau crystal, no iconic items up ghost box, shadow mark
appendix. Here's like an example adventure
and then troubleshooting the game.
I do like this section. I think this is a good section.
The character seem yeah, the character seem weak or die too
often. A couple paragraphs on how to
fix that. Is it hard to agree on things?
A paragraph Miracles are too open-ended paragraph fights are
too static. Characters are too rich or poor,
open to paces, require too much of A referee.
And I like this part 'cause it's like 10 years of people asking
questions and then just being like, here's the answer to your
question. I love that.
I think it's great character character sheet.
An example of this would have been great like third pages ago.
The D20 spin table. I like you literally put a
pencil down and spin and it'll just land on it.
Love that. I think that's cool.
D6 too. So you can literally play the
game without any dice if you want Index.
It's all hyperlinked and whitehack.
And Whitehack. Bro, all right, we're going to
be under three hours on this. Just barely.
Review scores. Obviously we're doing a whole
book. If you've never listened to us
before, we we review the game, we read through it, and then we
apply numbers in a way to kind of take our shitty opinions and
quantify them. There are 5 scores to book
reviews. It's clearly a book.
It's like 160 pages. Each score can get up to five
points for a Max total of 50. I think the highest we've ever
gave is a 44. Art and layout is the art and
layout of the book visually, visually, how it looks, right?
Usability is a usability, which means digital tools.
If if if if if things are in the correct order.
How easy is it to find things that you need?
The rule set is the core rule set of the game.
Do we like it? If it's a hack?
Do we like how well it's hacked? Originality is literally how any
aspect of his original art layout like rules, anything
value is bang for your buck. How much does it cost and or how
much do you get for what you pay for the book, right art and
layout. There's no art.
There's none. There's.
No art and the layout is center column black on white.
It's getting a 5 for me buddy. IE. 4/4.
I struggle because I think that it is.
If there was literally fucking anything to break it up a little
bit more, I'd be fine with it. I'd be fine with it.
So but the whole thing, the whole thing is written bro.
There's no art visually. There's no art So so but but but
I don't think I think the book, even if you look at three, I do
like. But here's The thing is even in
three, the only art that they have are these like these pages
that have like a circle with some with a with a with a quote
underneath it. I love those.
Even that in here, I'd be fine
with it. Honestly, I don't mind.
I don't mind it. Here's the thing, layout wise, I
don't mind. I don't mind single.
If I look at one page of this I it doesn't bother me.
But it's the default layout. It's the the paper I turned in
for 8th grade. You know, on Microsoft Word.
I'm fine. I'm I'm I'm middle for this.
Like I've seen worst layout because it is structured in a
way that like I've I've we've seen worst layout.
I mean I'm Max 5 on this one honestly.
Max 5. I'm actually genuinely, I'm out
of four, so OK. Let's go 4.
Let's go 4 because visually I yeah, you know what?
Visually I struggled at the repetitive.
Yep. If you read this as APDF,
especially especially if you don't have the little like lines
between as you scroll, it is 160 straight pages of pure white.
Yeah. Top and bottom.
Yeah, you're right. OK, Four.
Oh, that's not that's not the score section.
God, I feel like it's been so long since we've done this.
Yes, 4. Usability.
I'm so torn on this. So I'm torn on this as well,
because there are really great hyperlinking tools.
That is a fact. There are bookmarks, that is a
fact. But it is written in such a way
that it is almost indecipherable unless you really go through it
line by line and learn to ignore certain statements until later
on when you have better context for them.
The book has no bookmark. A book?
No. The book.
The physical. The physical PR.
D has no bookmarks. There's no bookmark.
There is no holding your spot. The order of things is fine at
best, at best at best, but the rules are, like most of the book
has them, hidden inside of paragraphs with that other
contain other rules. Not till the very end where they
actually start, like bullet pointing and appropriately
bolding text. Yeah, Which rule is that you're
holding on? Can you just barely see it?
This is the strong. Yes.
So it's just. People to usually see what a
spread looks like and my my camera's a little blurry so all
you see is 2 is is one page and one page of pure black.
This is the rules. So for users. 60 pages of this.
I'm going to five. This is this is.
This is what magic looks like. OK, this is the deaf class.
Don't even worry about. Don't even worry about this
because this does not optimal. This is the class.
This is the page that you have to read to know how to
understand the Deaf class. This is it.
Look at that. OK.
That's great, great. Through that wall of text.
I mean, so I I could go here's my math.
Here's the thing. I think this game is completely
unusable when you could go through I think it's completely
unusable. And what's bumping it up to A5
is how good the hyperlinking and bookmarking.
I completely I, you know what? I I completely agree.
I think that the this is the this is the thing that makes me
so insane is you could not, you legitimately cannot make a more
navigable PDF. Good fucking job, genius fucking
work. The amount of time that went
into that, I applaud the author. It's fucking fantastic.
But as I said before, hyperlinking a maze does not
make it like, not a maze. It's still a maze like you can't
you can't what I was maze was my way to make use a much nicer
word than the words I was going to use for hyperlinking.
You can't ask for better digital tools like you legitimately
can't. The the the hyperlinks on every
page that takes you to the index in the table of contents.
Fucking fantastic like. Yeah.
Like, but yes, I'm sorry, I have read the deaf class so many
times and I could not run a deaf character for once.
You I wrote an entire summary of the deaf of the deaf character
and I've no idea how to run a deaf character.
Like it's so hard to parse. And like, like we said, like the
help rule is literally like an an example in a different rule,
like, And then why again does like all of the why again does
like the vast majority of the stuff like after core rules
become more readable and character creation by itself is
so into like the magic wording is like two.
It's it's two, it's two things, but there's five, I don't know.
Yeah, five at best. I like you said, like honestly,
I can't use this book. Like, I can't, like I, like I
said, I would have to if I wanted us to play this game, I'd
have to rewrite the entire book and give it to you again.
Rule set. I like the rules, you know.
I I do I like the rules that I understand.
Yeah, I like the rules a lot. I think there's some stuff in
there like like the auction I've fucked that that's never touched
my table. I think there's a lot of other
stuff in in between that like I think is a little too crunchy
for my table personally. But but overall I don't think is
awful. I'm at, I don't know, my
perception of going through this game is coloring my my.
Always we have to try to be objective.
I I think for rules that I'm at about a six, I think they're
good. Maybe even A7.
I think the rules are really good.
I think there's stuff that needs to be pulled out, but I think
actually playing this game sounds fun.
It sounds open-ended, it sounds customizable, and I really like
that. Yes, I think the concepts are
fantastic. I love it.
I do like the triangulation of yes and groups and species and
all that stuff. Again, I feel like it's an, it's
an OSR game that had a little bit of story game stored into it
and then pulled out to a macro view, right.
So that you're at a slightly higher conceptual level than
like being actually in it. Yeah.
It would be great if they kind of just push it back down like
it's it, it, it, I think it's trying to be heavier than it
needs to be. And you can succeed at the task
without making it so nebulous, right?
But I love, I love some of the stuff in here.
I do love some of the stuff in here.
I do hate a couple of things. I would never go near auctions.
And then I like, I like most of it.
This is a game where I'm I, I struggle because I think I will
never play this because I will never take the time to do what I
would need to do to make it playable for me.
But if I did take that time, I think I would enjoy it a lot.
Six or seven, your call. I'm going to go 7 because I
think conceptually because conceptually I think I think
conceptually I love what this game is trying to do.
I just don't like the way it communicates it.
Originality. I again, I think conceptually I
really love a lot of what they do.
Yeah, I don't know that I have a lot to say about this one.
I mean, it's a it's generic overview system, but like, you
know, it's been around forever. It is incredibly original.
Like a lot of things are now derived from this.
A lot of stuff that I like actually is derived from this.
So yeah, A7, I don't know. Seven.
That's what I already had. That's what I already had.
And value I mean. Here's the thing, you can use
this with any tabletop game adventure module possible
because it can just be stripped of everything.
I know you said there's examples where there's creates a little
friction, but I think that friction is where a lot of the
system would actually happen and I'm down for that.
You know, I like a good time. And As for the cost of the
actual book, I'm not even sure what it is.
I got you. So the Lulu print on demand
hardcover version and I'm holding my hand right now is
currently 2990. If.
You want the notebook edition, which as I said, leaves a lot of
like open note pages. So you can like basically like
write your campaign in the book as you go through.
It is $40. I'm not even going to count back
because I don't fucking. I'm not going to use that.
And then there is a paperback version that is 1995.
You do not get the PDF with any of these.
That is just the book. What?
Yeah. So then the PDF version is on
Drive Through RPG for $15. So for a print on demand
hardcover for a print on demand, no, I don't mind this for a
print on demand hardcover, OK. For print on demand and
paperback it would cost you $35 and then for hardback and PDF it
would cost you $45. I can see the book in your hand
and I honestly just think that cover is I want to cover.
Oh I I don't like the POD cover. If it.
If it if it was a print like this.
Yeah. That's crazy.
The 3rd edition is fantastic. I, I, I'm sad that this even
came out. And I'm sad we didn't do this a
year ago when I wanted to because I feel like this book
would like. Yeah.
Anyway, I don't like it's print on demand.
It's kind of crazy that this book Print on demand cost $30.
Yeah. Because once again, Death in
Space cost $35 and it has foil and thick pages and three
bookmarks and like all sorts of shit, it's a little expensive.
I will say the PDF for $15 I am. I would I would pay 20.
It's 10 years of development for a game.
That's fine. I'm.
Fine with that I. Also think it's a little crappy.
It's like, oh, you got to buy PDF separately, but So what do
you think like a six on this? Well, so, OK, so, so that is
just, once again, it's value, not cost.
So that is just the cost of the book.
But if you go to whitehackrpg.wordpress.com and
go to the stuff section, there is literally graphs on like
what's new in, there's pages on what's new.
There's character sheets, there's base sheets, there's
bullet points on explaining the game, there's Foundry VTT Models
module, there's the white hat ghost box which is like a whole
thing unto itself where it talks about like, there's a whole
section on like author commentary put together from
Milton. OK, cool.
So he went to like a ton of. Stuff, Yeah.
So the the the available version for Foundry required only.
I'm gonna click on the newest one and I it looks like it's
free. It's an unofficial system for
White hack, unaffiliated but. It looks like it's for me, man,
yeah. Free VTT module and then what
else do we have here? Errata sheets the the multiple
rule summaries written by Milton and Madison once again, the last
read out and socials. I'm I'm so sorry, Madison.
I forget what that one was. I do want to say it one more
time because that is the one I use more than Milton's.
Hers is just based on Milton's. So Madison is social dash
rooster dot itch dot IO. Madison, you were a fucking
godsend because I would not have gone through this core rules
without you. Thank you so much.
That's once again that is a social rooster on itch.
So yeah, I mean there's there's a lot.
And the thing too is like there is all of that stuff for 3rd
edition is still here too. And 2nd edition is still here
too for I do think it's got a lot of really amazing resources.
So for the people that can't actually play this game, I would
be stoked as fuck for this. I can only imagine even though
there's not a third party license, you can just do
whatever because that's not written in the book at all.
I'm saying probably at least a 7 on value for this.
I think like the book itself for POD might be a little bit
expensive, but I think what you get for 10 years of development
is decent. So I think A7 is solid for this.
Cool 7. All right, so that is we're at 2
hours and 59 minutes and we can get the heck out of here. 4 + 5
+ 7 + 7 + 7. That is a 30.
That's the score. That is a score.
I, I, I talked to Hunter about this before.
I think we are now O for four on our classic game reads.
Most of what we do is indie games and that's what we're
going to focus on. But sometimes we will read older
games that a lot of the Indies we enjoy are based on, right.
I did not enjoy reading White Hack.
I did not enjoy reading Blackhack 2.
EI think I would really love 1 E, but Blackhack 2E's push to
turn it from rule set into a game was not a good thing
because I'm kidding Apocalypse World.
I did not like reading that book, but I did not hate it as
much as Blades in the Dark, which is honestly now my second
most disliked book that I had to read because this one has become
my first. I think they're tied. 1A1B so
we're over 4 on the classic books that a lot of the games we
enjoy are hacked on, which I'm that disappoints me.
I want to find a good one. Our plan for right now next week
is to do mock gato monsters, which is a terrible name for a
great game that actually mixes white hack and black hack
together. We will talk about that next
week. Once again, Chuck out a check
out Kremlin Keep Stuff and the Goblin sale.
Check out Red Solstice over on Red Solstices itch page from
Stella Condrey. And don't forget that Space
Penguin Inc is having a sale right now and Red Solstice will
be on there next week. And go vote for all the homies
for the innies. Bye bye.