Swords and Planets: a Review of Red Planet RPG

The “Sword and Planet” genre appears to be in a full-bloomed mini-revival these days. Paizo devoted an on-going series of re-released classics and one need only toss a virtual rock at many old school gaming blogs these days to hit some kind of exploration of these science fantasy themes (my own exploration of Tekumel is part and parcel of this trend).

For all that energy, I am frankly puzzled by the fact that we haven't seen a profusion of sword and planet-styled games (to date that is, there are some highly-inspired OD&D supplements and works in progress). Thus I was very pleasantly surprised to receive a few weeks back a package containing a  handy set of Barsoom-flavored RPG rules from my fellow Texan and old school blogger Clovis Cithog.

Like many old schoolers, I'm a perversely difficult audience when it comes to new rule sets. I love innovation--especially when it tends to pare down complexity, help amplify a literary theme, or provide interesting game-play situations--but tend to be stubbornly conservative and, dare I say, lazy when it comes to new game mechanics. A stripped-down D&D platform with chrome and other tricked out bits bolted on top works for me far more often then not.

Red Planet is fortunately such a beast. Weighing in at less than 70 pages and with tried and true core features like archetypical classes, level advancement, similar attributes, familiar combat mechanics, etc. I liked the fact that I could read through it and feel like I could run a successful game with it in a few days time.

It's with the crunch that the game has it's best moments, however. First of all, Clovis makes no bones about situating the game in not just some Mars but THE Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs fame. Given my own interest in respectfully exploring the public domain works of pulp fantasy I appreciated how he weaves in the right amount of flavor and setting information as a tribute to Burroughs' work without it feeling like a regurgitation.

Character generation is fun and simple with players selecting or rolling from the major sentient races of Mars: Red, Green, Thern, Black Pirate, Yellow, or Exotic. (Interestingly there are no John Carter-like outsiders here.) Each race has a preferred class (called “vocation” in the rules) and can only play a small handful of classes outside these.

The classes are a also fun and setting-appropriate range. Troopers are thoat-mounted fighters and Warriors more of the typical fighting man type. Criminals are more assassin than thief, a choice that seems to be pretty consistent with the material. Scientists are the technology users who can employ relics and have access to inventions. Extras seem to be the jack-of-all-trades class that reminds me a little of the prosaically-named Classic Traveller “Other” career.

The inclusion of a spell-casting Priest class is an exception to the rule about staying close to the source material. Their introduction seems a bit awkward to me given the near-absence of religion and magic in ERB's work. Clovis acknowledges himself the dilemma and allows for a GM to ignore or restrict the class and spell-casting rules.

Combat mechanics are a simplified d20-like system with ascending AC and an interesting 2nd-edition AD&D-ish division of effects between four categories of weapons: blunt, piercing, slashing, and energy. Rules exist for the wide range of relic and strange tech items one could employ in combat.

Rules for fliers are among my favorites in the game and remind me some of the great Space 1889 subsystems of yore. What Barsoom would be complete without PCs blasting, grappling, or ramming one in each and every adventure?

Level advancement has some interesting quirks. PCs start at 2^nd level and there are no experience points as such. Instead at the end of an adventure a player rolls a d6 in which an attribute, skill, or level is increased. Personally I am still too wed to the quantifible bean counting that comes with exp. Systems, but I like the nice randomized pay-off system that reminds me of the fun of leveling up in first edition Gamma World.

All in all a nice little system worth picking up. Distribution is pleasingly personal, contact Clovis over at Jasoomian Dreams. For $10 he will send you a copy and a free copy for a friend to boot.

Tales from Tékumel's First Campaign: An Interview with Jeff Berry

Sadly, in the past few years we've seen the sudden passing of a number of our great hobby's pioneer members. I find it doubly sad that more efforts weren't made to collect more complete oral or written histories of the early days of RPG play. (I am especially feeling that recently with Dr. Holmes, whose creative brain was even less picked over directly in the Internet hotspots, leaving us with great big question marks about his body of work.)

Recently, I had the great fortune though to interview Jeff Berry, an early participant in D&D's eldest first cousin, Empire of the Petal Throne. Jeff's own blog (named after his first character in M.A.R. Barker's campaign), can be found here. Further interesting (and highly amusing to yours truly) accounts by Jeff of EPT and Dave Arneson can be read in his Q&A sticky over at the Comeback Inn.

Hill Cantons: What's a good way to introduce you? I know that you were among the first to play in Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne campaigns and a co-author of EPT's most re-published miniature rules set. What else would be interesting to tell people?

Jeff Berry: No idea! Seriously, while I've been involved with Tekumel since 1975, I've never been part of what might be called "mainstream" gaming. I've always been a model builder and painter, and the games I've done over the years have been more or less an excuse to put cool stuff on the table.

I started playing out at Phil's (Prof. Barker, of course) sometime in early 1976. I was introduced to him by Gary Rudolph, who had seen my painted Tekumel figures at the local game shop, and I was brought out to Phil's to be more or less the guy who painted figures for Phil.

Phil had been gaming Tekumel for about two years, and EPT had been out for one; I rolled up a character, and my very first night of gaming out there was set in the Hall of the Petal Throne. Quite a way to get started, and a really good night.

There was just the one large group of eight to ten people at the time, and we soon split into the "old guard" of"'power gamers" who went on to become Prince Mirusiya's "New Men"; our original Thursday Night Group spent our time exploring Tekumel with Phil, and traveled all over the maps of the continent.

I wrote Qadardalikoi after I'd bought the line of Tekumel figures form Ral Partha; they'd taken the line out of production due to low sales, and didn't want to run a batch of the figures specially for me. They sold me the line, instead, right at the time that both Missum and Legions of the Petal Throne were both going out of print.

Phil wasn't entirely happy with either set of rules, feeling that they didn't really reflect how he thought Tekumelyani warfare was waged; he sort of challenged me to write a new set, which I did with his help and cooperation. He even did some little drawings for me, which was quite generous of him.

I'm currently at work on a new edition of the rules, called Qadardalikoi: Advance Standards!, which will bring the rules into this century; they were written almost thirty years ago, after all!

HC: Mega-dungeons have been a big topic in the more old school-oriented blogs. By giving good, interesting, culturally-grounded reasons for the existence of massive underworlds in Tekumel, EPT seemed to present one of the best examples of a deeper approach to presenting the mega-dungeon. Anything you care to share about what the underworld expeditions were like in the Barker campaign. Any memorable incidents? Funny? Dramatic?

JB: All of the above. Phil is a tremendous story-teller, and when he was on a roll he could scare the kilts off of us.

He could also reduce us to tears laughing, like the time one of the more arrogant players found a device of the Ancients deep in the Jakalla Underworld. It was a domed cylinder with a flexible metal hose coming out of one side that had a flat nozzle at the end, and two jewels on the top of the dome; one was green and the other red.

The guy pressed the green gem, it lit up, and the device started to whirr; after a couple of seconds, vapor started to come out of the nozzle, so the guy hit the red gem and the machine stopped. The guy then announced to all of us that the thing MUST be a weapon of the ancients, and lugged it all over the underworld for the rest of the night.

Sure enough, we got jumped by Grey Ssu, and the guy fires up his mighty 'death vapor' weapon to kill them. Well, of course, it didn't kill any of the Ssu; the warm moist vapor just took all the wrinkles out of their parchment-like skin, and they looked all nice and presentable. We ran for it, with the freshly-pressed and wrinkle-free Ssu in hot pursuit...

A lot of the players had real trouble figuring out that Tekumel wasn't your stock-and-standard D&D version of Tolkien "Middle Earth": it was unique, and much more in tune with Edgar R. Burroughs "Barsoom", Robert E. Howard's "Conan", and the eldritch works of Lovecraft and A. Merritt. If one had read those, which were pretty obscure at that time, one was usually able to "get" Tekumel. Phil had grown up reading those books by those authors as they were being published, and he was of that generation or world-builders.

Keep in mind that in a six-week period in the summer of 1974 he'd written EPT, rolled up 1,000 NPCs on 3 x 5 cards, and drawn up at least three levels of the Jakalla Underworld.

He could do it, as well as all the books he created in the space of two years, because he'd been writing about Tekumel since high school. I've seen the original map of Tsolyanu from the middle 1940s, and I have copies of his Tsolyani language materials and histories from the 1950s. The earliest art that we have in the collection is from 1949, and illustrates a plot-line/story arc that we played in ourselves and which is still going on.

Part II of our interview will be posted tomorrow.