Eldritch Role-Playing System Core Rules Book

(From PlayingWithMyWeiner.com) [Full disclosure: One of the co-authors is a family friend, and he ran us through the Quick Start Rules several months before the book was released.] Your d12 doesn't have to cry itself to sleep anymore (nods to Rich Burlew of Order of the Stick). The Eldritch Role-Playing system has a place for that sad die, and all of its non-d20 friends. Eldritch is a new fantasy tabletop RPG published by Goodman Games. A classic sword-and-sorcery title, Eldritch comes with a serious pedigree. Eldritch creator Dan Cross is the author of Volume V: Insidiae of the Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds Series, and worked with Gygax on a number of projects. Cross and Eldritch co-author Randall Petras have deisgned a simple, but elegant system. Eldritch is skills-based, with a point buy distribution. The available races will be familiar to anyone who played 1st Edition AD & D, and won't come as a surprise to anyone gamer who hasn't. Action and combat use most of your standard bag o' dice, with players rolling more and higher-sided dice for each level of skill they have in an ability. Each ability can be improved through three levels in sort of a "journeyman, apprentice, master" system, with each level providing an additional, progressively higher die to checks. Any basic ability - running, jumping, standing still - can be attempted "untrained" with the tiny d4. This eliminates the "I want to climb the ladder", "You didn't take ranks in Climb" problem that plagues players with overly-hidebound DMs in other systems. Combat is fairly unique. There is no "automatic" hit. The attacker rolls the number and level of die for her attack (e.g. a d4, d6 and d8 for a Master archer), and then the defender chooses an active defense such as dodge, roll, or standing his ground. An attacker needs to wear down the physical or magical defenses of a defender before dealing damage. These defenses are skill-based and their "pools" can deplete and replenish over time. This makes a great deal more sense than "Oh look, I rolled a 20. Your armor fails." (Really, how does the entire world of D & D survive all these saving throws against wardrobe malfunction?) There is one central "body of magic" in Eldritch, called Arcanum. Players can specialize to gain Mastery as a priest, psychic, etc. Cantrips require little energy to cast, full spells cost considerably more. The most interesting part of the Eldritch magic mechanic is that players are actively encouraged to create their own spells. There is a functional but limited spell list in the book, but there are also detailed rules on how to branch out into your own personal Arcanum. The Eldritch sourcebook is a quick read. 96 pages, softbound, with five chapters and an appendix. It is clearly written and contains grayscale illustrations where needed. Upon reading the sourcebook, one thing becomes very clear - this is a source book. There are some adventure ideas and a preview of the official campaign setting, but w

I bought Eldritch soon after it was released, as I am generally drawn to non-d20 RPGs of any sort. I was also interested to see what Dan Cross et. al. had done with the system. I knew Dan's work from some of the Troll Lord Ganes products and so he was at least a solid and known quantity. Also I thought it was a good sign that Goodman Games was publishing Eldritch as GG has a good reputation numerous thriving game lines. Overview: The cover by Peter Bradley is fantastic. He continues to impress and I hope we see more of his work as time goes on. I did not particularly care for some of the interior art but that is a matter of personal taste, you may feel otherwise. The art was functional and didn't distract. The layout was nice, utilizing sidebars and examples where needed. Though it was on the plain side. Now this isn't a big deal for me, I don't need or really want a load of spiff in my RPG rulebooks, but it will doubtless seem drab to some of you. It is focused more on function and readability than eye-candy. The editing suffers a bit as there are page reference errors, which are annoying, but not fatal in my opinion. No text will ever be perfect, particularly from a small press. There are several assumptions made in Eldritch, principally that those reading the book are not novice RPGers. The text is clear on this score from the outset but it would have been nice to see it be just a tad more user-friendly in this regard. Some have groused that the book is not a complete game, this is not the case. It is a complete game in every aspect. It just doesn't spoon-feed you. It lays out the structures and allows you to fill in the rest, the text has sections on spell. magic item and monster creation. But I suppose most folks do not want to put in the mental elbow-grease needed to gen up a magic system, etc. Well, I am sure that those aspects may be forth coming. Though, you do not need more than the corebook/.pdf to play the game. There are additional materials avaialbe on the website that I found useful, particularly the GM screen. All free for download. The screen made running my first game a lot easier. The System: I have read the other reviews and many seem to fault the system for noe bieng a "rules-lite" system. Well, from my reading Eldritch never purports to be such, in fact it states plainly that it is rules-transparent rather than rules-light. The meaning here is that the rules, all the rules for play, are presented clearly for use by player and GM alike. As a result it is not difficult in know what is "going on" in the course of a game session or how certain things might be expressed in game terms. That is not to say that there isn't a mild learning curve due to the alphabet soup of terms used. To some this may detract but in my opinion it makes no greater demand on the would-be player/GM than any other system out there, and far less than most. The system presents the "standard tropes" in the way of playable races and classes/professions. bu