Tolen Mar

Nowadays, I find that most RPG sorcerers are played as combat mages. No matter what their ostensible motivations, every mage has fly, invisibility and bear’s strength prepared as the primary spells. These aren’t the ominous wizards consorting with dark and terrible powers – they’re fighters by any other name.

RPGs aren’t the only examples of this change in presentation. As much as I enjoyed the wizard-fu of the Gandalf vs. Saruman fight in The Fellowship of the Ring, I had the nagging feeling that direct combat was beneath a wizard of Saruman’s stature. Building elaborate towers and operating monstrous breeding programs was more in keeping with the idea of the aloof, ambitious sorcerer. However, that image doesn’t have a lot of flash.

The Scrolls of Skelos, written by Vincent Darlage and Ian Sturrock, is a supplement for the sorcerous arts in the Conan RPG published by Mongoose Publishing. Magic in Hyborian world is not a casual affair of fireballs and magic missiles; rather, magic is a path to corruption and madness, with all spells involving complex rituals, sacrifices and invocations, and with the sorcery losing humanity as a consequence of tempting powers.

In other words, magic is a force to make even the hardiest barbarian blanch.

The supplement enhances the magician’s power and possibilities for horror by providing new schools of magic, new feats and kills, and offering rules for crafting magic items. In keeping with the themes of Howard’s work, the more potent the magic item, the larger and more immobile the item. Also, unlike the standard D&D games, magic items aren’t simply crafted on demand. Any magical item is a treasure fit for the royal vaults, not something to be bartered or bought.

As the authors wisely point out, any sorcerer powerful enough to craft an item doesn’t need the money.

The GM advice has always been a strong suit of the Conan line, and this book is no exception. The authors revisit the Rules of Sorcery, which describe the abilities and limits of magic as a path to power, offering new explanation for these limits in the context of the game world and in pursuit of game balance. They also explain the relationship between summoners and demons, between sorcerers and kings, and between sorcerers and adventurers.

If the classic Conan sorcerers interest you, there are extensive profiles of the major characters, along with suggestions for how to incorporate them into campaigns. This section was probably written for the core rulebook, because there are lingering cross-references to an “upcoming” Scrolls of Skelos. (For all the flack Mongoose has taken for their lax copy-editing in the core book, this was the only gaffe that I noticed.)

Finally, the book has a comprehensive list of magical monsters and beasts, both “natural” and constructed. The chapter is sub-titled “By-blows of Blasphemy,” which sums the game’s approach to the magical/supernatural quite nicely. Conan has always been closer to Lovecraft than Tolkien.

The Scrolls of Skelos is a solid addition to the Conan RPG library. The focus on one particular style of magic necessarily limits the book’s usefulness in standard campaigns, but if you wanted to make a wizard in his tower truly mysterious and unsettling, flip through this book and give it a try.

After a long run of PS2 sequels that improved on their predecessors, I have to say this:

The Rise of the Kasai sucks.

Well, it doesn’t exactly suck, but it is a tremendous letdown, failing to improve or innovate on the excellent gameplay of Mark of Kri while inflicting a half-baked story on the players and forcing a two-player game design to suit a single player experience.

There is one area where Rise of the Kasai surpasses Mark of Kri: art direction, especially the Polynesian-styled charcoal sketches that introduce the cut-scenes in the game. Gorgeous!

Let’s start off by revisiting the original game:

In The Mark of Kri, you control Rau, a young barbarian warrior tasked with protecting the bearers of the Mark of Kri. Each Bearer has a birthmark that represents one fraction of the spell that summons the demonic Kri. Should all the marks be gathered, they could be used to invoke the demon.

Throughout the game, Rau sets off to find the different bearers. Each level, he learns to use a new weapon, and is given a series of challenges by his mentor, Baumusu. When Rau completes the challenges, he unlocks an arena where he can further practise his skills and unlock movies, cheats, and extra costumes.

Combat is handled brilliantly in this game. The player uses the right joystick to sweep the screen with a targeting beam that tags opponents with a Circle, Square or X button. Then, the player just presses the appropriate button to attack the tagged opponent. As players earn better weapons, they can tag 3, 6 or 9 different opponents at a time.

Rau also has a bow and arrow set for ranged attacks, set up in the traditional first-person shooter view, can sneak up on unwary opponents for a brutal stealth kill, and can even disarm opponents and kill them with their own weapons.

However, combat is not its own reward in Kri; stealth and archery are usually the best way to go. Defeated enemies don’t drop power-ups and there is no score or currency to accumulate. Combat is actually a punishment for poor gameplay, but no less exhilarating because of it.

Now, let’s look at the sequel:

In The Rise of the Kasai, Rau is dead. The player travels to the recent and distant past, controlling one half of a pair of characters. For any given level, you can choose between Rau and Tati (Rau’s sister, a Kri-marked warrior); or Baumusu and Griz (another Kri-marked warrior). Basically, Rau and Baumusu are the huge brawlers, which Tati and Griz are the scrawny, stealthy rogues. Each warrior has a ranged weapon, a light weapon, a staff, and a heavy axe/club weapon. Tati’s ranged weapon is a poison mushroom that can be thrown and detonated as a grenade, which is pretty cool.

At the start of each level, you choose which of the two characters you want to control, and you cannot change until the next level. Each character goes off on their own mission, occasionally crossing paths in the middle and at the end. Unfortunately, this means that your carefully laid plans for a stealth attack are ruined by your “partner” charging headlong into a group of sentries, who then summon wave after wave of guards.

That’s annoying, but not as annoying as looking at the level challenges and seeing that fully half of them must be completed by the other character, which means you have to play through each level twice to start the unlocking process. That’s a cheap way of extending the playability of the game.

In addition, at the start of each mission, a message appears listing your goals. The messages are generic, rather than specific to the character you are controller. When the messages are written in a “Rau, do X while Tati does Y” they’re okay, but when they say “Help Rau/Tati” instead of “Help your partner” then it’s a little jarring. Would it have been that hard to edit the messages so that they at least appear to be specific to your character?

Unlike Kri, there are boss fights in this game, which is an improvement. Unfortunately, the boss fights are repetitive: you’ll fight a tentacle beast three times and a flying dragon twice. Sure, the scenarios are well put together and are certainly challenging, but a little more variety is in order.

The final boss fight is the weakest part of the game, not because the fight isn’t a challenge, but because it exposes serious flaws in the storyline in the game. Tati bears a Mark of Kri, and is gradually becomes evil over the course of the game. Rau is trying to protect his sister from the sinister influence of the Mark.

At the last level, Tati and Rau sneak into the walled fortress of Haasu, the stronghold of the evil wizards who want to summon Kri, yadda yadda yadda. There are whole swaths of the stronghold that remain to be explored (I can see switches and power-ups in the distance) when Rau and Tati encounter the Big Bad Wizard.

The Big Bad Wizard offers Tati a choice: turn to evil and betray Rau, or die alongside her brother. A message appears asking the player to choose between betraying Rau or not.

The first time I played this as Tati, I chose not to betray Rau. There was a cinematic as the wizard summoned Kri to attack us, I helped Rau defeat it after three or four attempts, and the game was over.

The second time I as Tati and chose an evil path. There’s a different cinematic, but then the final battle is exactly the same, except that Rau attacks Tati. If I let Rau kill Tati, the final boss fight starts over; if I have Tati kill Rau, the final boss fight starts over.

The third time, I controlled Rau. The exact same message appeared asking Tati if she would betray Rau, but I had no control over the choices. The Yes and No options flickered, and then settled on No. There was a slightly different cinematic with Tati reminding Rau how to defeat the final boss, and then I saw the concluding cinematic.

Much of the narrative tension in the game surrounds the question of how Rau was killed and whether or not Tati would turn to evil. However, these are moot questions, because the only path to victory in the game lies in Tati choosing not to betray Rau. You basically have to keep playing until you figure out that you don’t really have a choice in the game.

I was hoping that turning to evil would grant Tati access to the unused parts of stronghold. Perhaps she’d have to run away from Rau, who would then become the final boss. The interesting story possibilities are squandered by the game.

Why did they bother to add those extra switches and power-ups if they weren’t meant to be used? Did the developers run out of time? Was it a trick to ensure that players would be surprised by the timing of the final boss fight?

The very end of the game is an epilogue that shows how Griz and Baumusu find and rescue the infant Tati and the young Rau. It’s not a particularly difficult level, but I don’t think it’s meant to be.

So, I now have to decide if it’s worth my while of replaying through the game with different characters to start completing the various challenges and unlocking the various arenas and rewards. I’m not convinced.

If you enjoyed The Mark of Kri, then The Rise of the Kasai is certainly worth renting, but nothing more.

Wow, here’s a blast from the past. In addition to our shared subscription to Dragon magazine back in the day, Scott and I also shared the Best of Dragon compendia, which reprinted the best articles from the previous couple of years. Any one issue of Dragon only had a couple of articles or columns that interested us at the time – the rest either dealt with other games in the TSR line, or was grognard-filler about weapon specialization, or medieval combat tobacco or somesuch nonsense – but each Best of Dragon issue was pure gold.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. The first collection was pretty lame, but that wasn’t the first issue I had ever purchased. The first one I picked up was Best of Dragon Vol. II which covered cool NPCs like the anti-paladin (now enshrined as the blackguard in the SRD), variant vampires and lycanthropes, rules for becoming a lich, and the mind-bending rules for incorporating tesseracts in the game.

Vol. I has the distinction of being the first back issue of anything I ever bought. The hobby/game store in St. Bruno found an old copy and put it out on the rack after Scott and I got into AD&D. That volume collects really old stuff, like rules for the first Metamorphosis Alpha, new ranger and illusionist classes for basic D&D (or possibly the White Box edition, which I didn’t know existed then), and a humorous short story that I remember adapting as a play for the Grade 6 end-of-year show (held a day earlier than normal, much to my dismay, but that’s a subject for another blog post).

Vol. III was the pure gold: descriptions of the nonhuman pantheons; advice for playing gnomes, dwarves, elves, halfling and half-orcs; rules for raising dragons, making dragon armour; rules for cantrips – zero-level spells for magic-users and illusionists that actually emphasize role-playing rather than power-gaming; and a couple of new races and classes. Most of this material was reprinted in the Unearthed Arcana sourcebook, which, along with the Monster Manual II and Oriental Adventures, marked the beginning of the end of my involvement with the game. I couldn’t stay ahead of the power or publishing curves, so I sold my stuff and let it go.

As you know, five or six years ago I decided to re-assemble my AD&D collection with everything I had ever owned or wanted to own within a certain range. One of the last items to track down were the Best of Dragon volumes.

After a most annoying eBay transaction with a vendor who kept misplacing my mailing address after he received my money order, I finally have all four of the compendia. I flipped through Vol. I and it was as dull as ever; Vol. II is now more interesting for all the columns by Gary Gygax justifying elements of AD&D that have since been thrown out in the third edition of the game; I haven’t read the other two volumes yet, but I’m looking forward to them.

This may well be the last sourcebook in the Lord of the Rings RPG line by Decipher. This slim hardbound volume is overpriced at retail, but I picked up a used copy on eBay.

Fell Beasts and Wondrous Magic details information about magical and mundane monsters in Middle-Earth, presents rules for creating and adapting new monsters, and ends with a list of magic items and the rules for crafting wizard staves. Magic is such a low-key affair in Middle-Earth that there aren’t many items simply lying around for adventurers to find. In D&D terms, a +1 longsword would count as an item of wondrous magic.

Like the other books in the line, this volume features gorgeous sketches and full-coloured stills from the movie trilogy. The writing is both crisp and accented with a Tolkien cadence, which I’ve always found to be.

The monsters presented in the volume are all standard Tolkien fare, with two glaring exceptions: werewolves and vampires. I don’t ever believe I’ve heard of either of those fantasy staples in any of Tolkien’s works, and they don’t have any place in a Middle-Earth game, to my mind. Just because Tolkien inspired D&D doesn’t mean D&D monsters belong in Lord of the Rings. What’s next, beholders?

It’s a shame that Decipher squandered their RPG resources and never managed to complete the sourcebook based on the Return of the King, thereby rounding out the RPG collection. While the game doesn’t hold a candle to Iron Crown Enterprises old system, that system was based on the full volume of Tolkien’s written work; Decipher’s system is based primarily on the films, and their version is an excellent cinematic introduction to role-playing.