Deryni Adventure Game, the [Hardcover]

I haven't kept up with Ms. Kurtz's Deryni saga for quite awhile now, although I was one of the original fans from WAY back in the day, when the first two trilogies were hot off the presses. Subsequent books, I felt, were very seriously lacking. However, I was intrigued anew when I kept seeing ads about this RPG manual. For about three years, it was "coming soon", and then a few months ago, it finally arrived. Worth the wait? No.

It has a fair amount of material on Gwynedd, its duchies and cities and ruling dynasty and neighbors. There's also a timeline, a bibliography, and a section listing notable characters from the books in exceedingly scant detail. There's a nice overall map. Plenty of generic medieval illustrations.

However, with the exception of one made-up character used for purposes of showing the PC generation process, there are no statistics on anyone at all, PC or NPC or from the books or otherwise. Admit it--a huge part of the appeal of picking these up is to see the stats assigned to your favorite characters. There's just nothing like that there. And while there is some information on the game world as noted above, there is very little depth, nothing new or fresh, and no insights, period. There is nothing that really suggests that this is a unique world rather than just another cookie-cutter faux-Middle Ages knock-off.

Perhaps more importantly, it is difficult to see how this RPG could possibly work. It uses the Fudge mechanics, which no one in my life has ever played. One of the combat resolution systems (optional, to be sure), is "narrative combat", which verges on diceless and would be threatening to the hardcore gamer who wants to sling a d20 and announce his or her damage. There are no monsters or extraordinary beasts and no divine magic as such, and even the arcane magic is pretty much limited to the Deryni, and they have little of it. So any campaign would basically be about fighters and thieves. And what do they have to fight? Even if they did encounter some foes, Gwynedd and environs are fairly well-settled and have definite social and legal codes that would put a quick end to random swordslingers running the streets in a bloody hackfest. And the book fails to really suggest very much in the way of viable adventure hooks or long-term campaign goals.

The source novels are basically about very high-level political intrigue, religious wrangles, the plight of crypto-Deryni, wars between nations, and romance. None of this really lends itself to standard gaming, and this book just doesn't provide the material to show how to bring Gwynedd to life as an ongoing setting. You would be far better off ordering Ms. Kurtz's Codex and using that stuff to custom-grow your own Gwynedd in a d20 system.

› Go to Amazon U.S. to see the review  3.0 out of 5 stars