three sisters

over the past few months I've been devouring audiobooks on the weekends. I basically listened to Stardust in one long stretch on a Sunday, knitting and gardening and crafting and tidying the house as I did so. (in the meantime, my backlog of podcast subscriptions is somewhere close to 100 hours. trade-offs, eh?)

there was plenty of Tana French and a bunch more Barbara Kingsolver too. and then, friend Michelle recommended Alix E. Harrow's Starling House somewhere around the end of August. I loved this book, despite its few melodramatic tendrils of YA-ness, which honestly I cannot really fault it for anyway. the ending was excellent and poignant and deep and gritty. so, so good.

I'd heard of Alix E. Harrow quite a bit, so I somehow assumed she'd been around for many years and that I was super late to the fangirl party... but nope, her first novel was published only five years ago. (I just finished listening to that one too-- The Ten Thousand Doors of January. it's a most adorable and fun adventure indeed.)

by the grace of my library audiobook app, I ended up making my way through Harrow's novels in reverse order. her latest, Starling House, first, with its echoes here and there of Kingsolver's Appalachia, sketched in words as vibrant, shadowy, heartbeatingly real and more-than-real. 

then Libby handed me The Once and Future Witches.

a fairly trite title with many echoes of its own-- will we get any scraps of Aurthurian ledgend here? 

I wasn't sure what to expect but this story drew me in completely and I was marvelously invested in all of it pretty quick. the book rotates among the points of view of three sisters. eldest, middle, youngest-- maiden, mother, crone-- each with her own ferocious sense of how the world could be, if only... 

and there is real magic. witching. spellcraft bubbling all through this alternate New England at the end of the nineteenth century. so cool. the story as a whole pulls and pries and re-weaves so many other stories into itself. I loved it. and before long it made me think of my own sisters.

I have two sisters. I don't often consciously think about the fact that two sisters means there are three of us. 

I've given us epithets before though, not realizing the cliche of it. one of us is the fearless one. the popular one. the clever one. the pretty one. the smart one. the nice one. or at least it's kind of neat to boil our essences down like that, sometimes.

The Once and Future Witches leans a fair bit on this concept for its central three sisters, and to some extent for the other trios of women who show up along the course of the plot. Bella is the wise one, the scholar, the librarian, the eldest. Agnes is the strong one, the independent one, the middle child about to have a baby of her own. and June, the youngest, is the wild one: rebellious and untamable, and most naturally talented with witching. 

three witches. such a ubiquitous trope. three itself is practically a trope, right? the rule of three. beginnings, middles, and ends. it's a sturdy, solid, sustainable prime number, lending its lovely balance to three-legged stools, three-corner hats, three primary colors, and a bunch of other things. witches. sisters. bears. pigs. amigos. stooges. musketeers. branches of government.

does one of the three being wise mean the others are necessarily less wise? or does the beauty of one necessarily outshine that of the other two? cannot three sisters be more or less equally strong?

yes and no. maybe. maybe not. it depends on how you measure these things, I suppose.

of course I also thought of Pratchett's three witches-- Esmerelda Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and young Magrat. perhaps I should reread their books to see how his version of the trope look to my 20-years-older perspective.

what would my sisters and I do if we had magical powers? so many things, I imagine. our circumstances aren't so neatly intertwined and story-arced as those of the sisters in this novel, but I do like to imagine we each have our own ferocity for changing some little segment of the world. 

and I've got brothers too. four of them. how does that change the math and dimensions of the trope, I wonder?

 

Kingsolver and current events

almost six months ago, my attention was drawn to all the conflict in Palestine more than it ever had been before. a house down the road from us began flying an Israeli flag all of a sudden. half of all the social media posts are still imploring everyone to speak up, to choose a side or else by default choose complicit cowardice. the news of October 7 and all the terrible news since has been rightly hard to ignore.

since December, my old land acknowledgements post from the summer of 2020 has been oddly popular. the basic stats in blogger tell me it's gotten more than 100 views within the last 30 days. by comparison, a typical post here in this random collection of internet musings gets fewer than 20 views and that's it. but this old post has consistently seen around 30 hits per week for several weeks now-- I'm still not sure why. is it because phrases like "colonial ruin" "violent displacement" and "racist horribleness" are highly topical these past months? I've let my proper Google analytics account languish without updates for too long, so I don't really have a way to find out.

also about six months ago, I was reading Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. a lush and lovely novel--a braid of stories all about our relationships with land, trees, animals, nature, and each other. biology. ecosystems. extinction or conservation, and all our efforts inbetween.

there is plenty I've so far remembered about this novel, but the thing I've most wanted to blog about here is a pair of sentences in the middle of it. they are sentences about Jewishness and prejudice and history.

Lusa, one of the three point-of-view protagonist characters in this story, is half Polish, half Arab. she marries blissfully into a struggling-but-resourceful family of appalachian tabacco farmers, too soon loses her husband, inherits his parents' old farm house, and faces various tensions and pressures from her local, white, rural in-laws as a result. 

I keep thinking about this line of dialogue from one of Lusa's chapters. she's talking earnestly with the one in-law, a nephew, she feels closest to. 

"That's what I was thinking, too. Families lose their land for a million reasons. My dad's parents had this wonderful farm in Poland, which they lost for being Jewish. And my mother's people got run off their land for not being Jewish. Go figure."

this pair of contradictions struck me, as I read it for the first time in fall of 2023, so much more definitively and potently than it might have at any other time.

and when did Kingsolver write this? my idle curiosity is easily answered: Prodigal Summer was published almost a quarter-century ago. in October, 2000. 

from devouring her other early novels (Pigs in Heaven, Flight Behavior, Unsheltered), I know Kingsolver has a deft way (sometimes subtle, sometimes less so) of commenting on potentially controversial political realities-- like this seemingly endless conflict in the middle east, or like the relative failings of public education, or like the impact of settler colonialism on indigeneous families, or like the nonsensical state of US healthcare systems. 

in October of 2000, I was an almost-17-year-old. what on earth did the words "Israel" or "Palestine" mean to me then? the first I only knew from a bunch of biblical prophecies and hymns, the second from Laurie R. King's A Letter of Mary (1997) and O, Jerusalem (1999), if indeed I'd really heard of Palestine at all. in neither context did I think very critically about what these stories meant. honestly, I was probably quite detached from both versions of the place. their respective peoples. they all may as well have been equally, ineffably, untouchably fictional.

halfway between then and now, I must have seen this rather haunting animation make the rounds on the internet. you've probably seen it, too.

unsurprisingly, there are dozens of new comments on that page since the events of last October.

looking into the piece again this past week, I realized that a full-length film version was produced and likewise donated to the public domain in 2018. do I have the time and spiritual energy to watch it? hopefully someday. (I've also now realized that the artist, as generous as she has been with her artwork, seems to have some not so cool opinions about the social construct of gender, so there is that to grapple with too.) 

{ the Palestinian flag, as if made of butterflies, borrowed from this kind soul on deviantart }
 

being Jewish. 

not being Jewish. 

we might say Lusa's ficitonal comments here are oversimplifying things.

and yes, I'm usually the first to say (to myself if nowhere else) there must be more to it there's so much we don't know how can anyone have a truly worthwhile opinion what's the use in trying to fully understand it anyway it's so complicated and what can I do about it or about anything, little me with my little blog and my little comfortable life?

what's truly oversimplified is any inkling of a thought that this single roundabout post regarding my country's rather terrible, rather unconscionable involvement in the horrors of this geopolitical situation is anything like enough to counter my general day-to-day silence on the topic. 

no matter how many times I might ponder bringing it up to my students or asking all the ROTC cadets how they feel about Aaron Bushnell or posting something to instagram with a hashtag like #CeasefireNow or #GazaWillBeFree... thinking about a few lines from an old Barbara Kingsolver novel and mentally wringing my hands about all the knotted historical roots of this conflict aren't enough at all. 

I don't know what could be enough. write to congress? to the president? just once? or every month? every weekend? with a few pleading letters or phone calls to these more-powerful-than-me people, can I then say I've done my part? 

I don't know. it doesn't seem like it. no number of letters or public protests, and certainly no ocean of hashtags, no matter how many, seems like enough.

so for now, current events continue to sweep across the world, sort of but not really dragging me with them. even so, we are all connected. we are all somehow jointly creating this world. the fact that I'll never be able to single-handedly fix anything on the other side of the planet doesn't mean I can safely give up, right? even if I don't-- or can't-- truly know if my impact on the sprawling web of the universe is leading to more preservation and less extinction of light and goodness, I have to keep trying. 

is it up to me to decide which side of the scale my feet are on? to judge my own quotas of light vs. dark?

for now, it is. I'm the only one who can. am I doing my best?  

two more very unfair comparisons: the semifinals

the semifinals: 
The One Ring vs Vampire: the Masquerade (5e)
and
Star Wars: Force and Destiny vs Dungeons & Dragons (5e)

initially, I imagined this could be a short post, even with the two matches put together. I'll do my best to be concise. it may not be easy.

for most of the prior match-ups, I had decently strong feelings about the winners. all that changes now. these are the four best RPGs I've ever played. to decide between them is going to be an arbitrary, subjective, and pointless endeavor. that is what it means to model a summer-autumn-almost-winter writing project on the Tournament of Books. (sidenote: the 20th annual ToB itself is very nearly underway! the shortlist of 16 was just recently posted.)

as I pondered this next step in the tournament (inbetween grading final projects and exams and such earlier this week), I thought back on my approach during the opening round, to my not-really-a-rubric, and I tied my brain into knots figuring how to quantify my sense of these games' mechanics, aesthetics, and user-friendliness. while I'd sketched out the rubric categories, I never gave them a metric. am I measuring out of 5 stars? percentage points? some other nice round number of cute somethings?

I re-read my past reviews, hoping to distill the elements I most value in an RPG and build some useful yardstick out of it. obviously, design is important to me, both aesthetically and in terms of user-friendliness. overall style and world-vibes are important, too-- I clearly go more for fantasy than for sci-fi, more for glowing heroism than for grim dystopias. (Vampire seems a glaring exception on this though. hmm...) 

additionally, I value vividness, simplicity, and consistency (not just in games but in most art, now that I think about it). I have the most fun in games that gives me nicely-defined frameworks, clear rules, and then practically infinite freedom to invent within that space. is there a more apt way to describe that? not just the logistics of it all, but the feeling? a feeling of sinking all your imagination into a marvelous, immersive vision but also having the power to make it new and yours? I hope that makes sense to at least somebody.

RPGs are especially tricky to judge because they are more than the sum of their published material. they are not static boxes; so much depends on the storyteller, the game master, not to mention the other players. if I were to judge these four in terms of how much I loved my past gameplay in each system, that might be somewhat easier. but that's not exactly what I'm trying to do here.

nor am I comparing them merely on which story or world I might like best. it is interesting that three of these four are games live solidly within circumscribed gameworlds based on pre-existing lore. D&D is the exception, and even it has more than half its roots in the fantasy of Tolkien, so. that these four have come so far mean that such specific worldbuilding feeds into the sense of vividness and definition I value so much.  

alright, alright-- I'll quit stalling. here we go.

 

The One Ring vs Vampire: the Masquerade 5e

for months I have worried that Vampire would end up against The One Ring in the final round; both were strong contenders all along, but now here they are, one fated to force the other out of the running.

Vampire has years ago earned my steadfast affection, for whatever reasons (see its prior match-up reviews for more on that), and contrarily The One Ring is a newcomer in my life.

they are so different, aesthetically and mechanically. for approachability I'll rank them as equals. both have plenty of depth and complexity, all made passably navigable with lovely book design. isn't it interesting their covers match so well? black and white and red, with barely-there serifs on those elegantly bold all-caps titles. not many RPG books come with fancy bookmark ribbons, but these both do.

The One Ring sells itself as "rules-light," which is a point in its favor given my preference for simplicity. skimming the book the other day, I did question this label a bit though. there are plenty of rules and guidelines for an epic, detailed, highly-managed roleplaying campaign, even if those rules are designed to sit in the background and let narrative take the stage. 

the striking style of Vampire feels incomparable to me, which is a point or two in its favor. but you all heard me gush about The One Ring's design. that's what makes this so difficult a match. which artfully drawn style is the best one, for me, today? the glossy, bloody, immortal danger of the urban fantasy plot? or the warm, antiqued, semi-rustic valor of the high fantasy adventure?

I still can't decide.

-

now I've written the rest of this post and proofread it twice, still struggling to make up my mind. The One Ring is gorgeous, and simple, and it ticks so many boxes for the kinds of stories and worlds I love to consume. I really hope I get to play it again in the near future, to explore it more as a full game. 

and Vampire is so evocative and unique. as I've explained before, how often do we get a framework to fight against ourselves, to struggle for a lost humanity? it's so interesting and novel to me, despite (and because of?) the potential discomfort and challenge of its dark, gritty, violent settings.

in a truly infuriating Tournament-of-Books-esque manner, I think I'm going to give up on reaching a judgement via all these relevant, fundamental aspects of the two, and grasp desperately at something-- anything-- for which I can easily pinpoint an obvious preference. if I had to choose just based on the two books' covers, for example, Vampire would win. that faux marble look and the shiny embossed title-- it's perfect.

but doesn't that seem so cheap and superficial? I don't hate The One Ring's cover, even if its use of red strikes me as garish. almost to make up for that stark and somewhat depressing first impression, The One Ring has buckets of marvelously good art in the rest of its pages-- all those chapter spreads, the little ink-scraped edging around the call-out boxes, the sepia sketches here and there. it's so neat and fitting and cohesive.

so. 

I think that's it-- the deciding factor. after helplessly trying to compare blood-red apples to elf-grown oranges all day long, I'll choose The One Ring for its artistic and stylistic consistency. that, and the timeless allure of high fantasy.

 

Star Wars: Force and Destiny vs Dungeons & Dragons (5e) 

where to begin? I love both of these games. I've played the one more than the other in terms of hours at the table, but I'm tempted to say my Star Wars roleplaying took on a quality that could easily outpace the more casual kind I have often tended toward in my quantity of D&D gameplay.

how much does that matter? 

it matters as much as I decide that it does, I suppose.

in terms of aesthetics, neither of these games knocks my socks off entirely. the on-paper designs of each feel equally solid, good but nothing exquisite.

D&D has the simpler mechanics, I think: simpler character creation, fewer charts to reference, and more straightforward dice. altogether it's not more than a few fractions of a point simpler, but it's something.

on the other hand, Star Wars has the more defined world. playing as a Star Wars character has been some of the most vivid, immersive roleplaying I've ever done. perhaps the existence of all the films helps with that, providing my brain with so much visuality to remix. perhaps it's "limits are possibilities" at work once again. Star Wars is a certain kind of story with preset rules and rhymes. that framework and direction help my style of creativity a heck of a lot.

so how do we weigh the merits of a whole multiverse of magical realms and adventure against those of a vast galaxy full of pseudo-magical, destiny-rich alien interactions? which one, for me, today, should win?

relative simplicity and fantasy win again, it seems. if I must-- and in this case I must-- I pick dragons and treasure and potions and spells over any number of futuristic laser swords and spaceships. it isn't fair, but it is my verdict.

next up, the final finals:
The One Ring vs Dungeons & Dragons

gateway dungeons

quarterfinal match 1: 
Dungeons & Dragons 5e vs Pathfinder 2e

does the result of this one seem obvious?

it feels more and more obvious to me the more I think about it. honestly, as much as I keep saying to myself, 'okay let's revisit this properly-- fairly-- as evenhandedly as anyone possibly can...' it just seems to tip the scales further to one side.

after all, there’s a whole chorus of 7 years of games and beloved roleplaying characters on one side, with just a single, simple, half-finished duet on the other. what else are we to expect? 

I will say, however, that there is plenty I do like about Pathfinder. its flexibility and openness, plus the more-pleasing-to-me organization of the book’s sections all come together to give it a bit of an edge in this fight. if I'd met this version of Pathfinder sooner, before pandemic times, and had the chance to play even half a dozen more sessions of it, this match would be much less unfair overall. I can see myself liking the system a lot. 

unfortunately, all these alternate universes of what-if maybe possibilities are not the one I'm sitting in right now.

right now, in this universe, I miss the reliable, accessible fun of D&D. I'm intrigued by all the Baldur's Gate 3 chit chat flying around (including the chit chat from these colleagues of mine who have a podcast all about video games). I have epilogues of three or four past games percolating in the dusty creative sections of my brain. I'm seriously pondering the idea of wrangling friends and family in various batches to run or help run a short one-shot adventure during upcoming holiday breaks. 

so it just has to be D&D that wins. it's not so popular for no reason, even if its general popularity does seem like a fairly self-perpetuating engine at this point. if we need a particular RPG system to serve as a gateway into the hobby as a whole, this one serves fairly well. 

which of the other 6 quarterfinalists will D&D have to face next? we shall see.

SYSTEM	Dungeons & Dragons(5e)	Pathfinder (2e)
cover tagline =	"Arm yourself for adventure."	"Advance your game."
publisher =	Wizards of the Coast	Paizo
pub. date =	2014	2019
original cost =	$49.95	$59.99
length =	11 chapters / 320 pages	11 chapters / 638 pages
my exp. level =	very much lots	some

---

 

any predictions? I have plenty, but the rules say I have to keep them to myself for now.

as an end note here, I speculate that Nyva the half-orc paladin and Damlyn the snow goblin bard would make a very interesting pair. and their systems of origin are similar enough that we could have them adventure together easily enough, couldn't we? perhaps I'll write a little vignette about them one of these days-- a short story evoking some Good Omens meets Daredevil meets The Witcher vibes, where the pure-hearted tough one and the more cynical artsy one are mostly able to follow a shared vision, but not without plenty of amusing conflict along the way. 

 

next match-up review: 7th Sea vs Star Wars: Force and Destiny

here there be dragons

opening match #8: Shadowrun 5e vs A Song of Ice and Fire 

this final opening round match-up review one has taken me a bunch of extra time for many reasons, firstly being that our mini-campaign of A Song of Ice and Fire spanned 5 whole weeks, plus a delay or two and a good session zero. thank you very much to friend Caroline for joining in on that game-- it was a most intriguing whirlwind of an adventure!

secondly and thirdly: I had been rather intimidated and hesitant about grappling with the notoriously labyrinthine Shadowrun book again. and I am a tad busier now than I was in August.

I last played Shadowrun many years ago now-- 2018ish I suppose? we and some friends ran through a short 3-session arc once in Indiana and once again in Louisiana; both were quite fun. and since 2019 I've been a fan of a narrative podcast performance version of Shadowrun called Fun City. it's good stuff. Mike Rugnetta is awesome, as are his roleplaying friends, and their voices plus marvelous sound design all come together to make the system look impressively manageable, somehow. (sidenote: I also found their Float City story arc, a pandemic side project using the indie RPG system Stillfleet, extra extra cool. someday I may need to check out Stillfleet properly. I notice it calls itself "grimdark," too. interesting.)

anyway, along with all that in-person and vicarious storytelling fun, I remembered Shadowrun being supremely complicated and overwhelming. it took me a while to work up the energy to face it again with a (hopefully, sort of, somewhat) more open mind.

the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, conversely, was totally new. I've watched the HBO show (much thanks to all the friends who ever shared their HBO subscriptions and/or couches and homes to facilitate that endeavor), read three of the Game of Thrones books, and this past summer we watched House of the Dragon, too. there is much about Mr. Martin's world that is utterly vivid and iconic. I'd say it deserves its fame. Jeremiah and I were excited to have this tournament as an excuse to actually try out the RPG system based on it all.

once more I've kept the same outline of sorts for this review: a tidy table of metadata, summaries of the few characters I've made in each system, and then thoughts on their aesthetics, mechanics, approachability, and preliminary(ish) judgements.

SYSTEM	Shadowrun (5e)	A Song of Ice and Fire
tagline =	"Everything Has a Price"	"Adventure, war, and intrigue in George R.R. Martin's World of Westeros"
publisher =	Catlyst Game Labs	Green Ronin Publishing
pub. date =	2019	2014
cost =	$59.99	$49.95
length =	11 major sections / 496 pages	13 chapters / 320 pages
my exp. level =	some	none prior

---

previous characters

sadly, I have very thin memories of my two prior Shadowrun characters. both appeared in different renditions of "Mr. Sandman vs. the Dragon," Jeremiah's tried and true 3-session adventure. and I know both were riggers, created as such on recommendation from my husband GM, for the sake of that character type's relative simplicity.

one was named Kitza and I think her character sheet is kicking around somewhere in a box... likely buried beyond any easy reference. the other was a dwarf, I think? maybe named Pablo... or something like that? I remember something about some family of his being trafficked by a megacorporation and somehow, for better or for worse, were able to crawl free from a shipping container on some crowded docks at the end of the story. maybe. 

all in all, not much to reminisce about here. onward to the fun new stuff!

new characters

when I (finally) got around to re-reading Shadowrun and wading through its differently-unique character creation system, I came up with a mystic adept half-inuit half-Japanese elf chick named Ingyaka. she's sort of secret agent-y in my imagination-- like a stealthy, nature-loving, spirit-whipsering Jason Bourne or something. since we didn't plan a Shadowrun one-shot for this tournament, I have no idea how she'd show up in actual gameplay, and indeed I confess that I called her finished enough once I'd chosen her many magic spells. the tedium of figuring out what gear and eqiupment to purchase with even just six thousand nuyen (6000¥)--the lowest amount you can possibly start with-- didn't seem necessary just to write about it for this review.

-

character creation in A Song of Ice and Fire is much less an individual affair than it is in most other RPG systems where one expects to play as a member of an adventuring party. in this particular game, players first collaborate in creating a noble house-- perhaps one as great and powerful as the Starks or the Baratheons, or perhaps one of lesser renown, one bowing at the feet of some grander pillar of Westerosi history. ours was built along these lines-- a smaller house under the protection of and bound by honor to the great and wealthy Lannisters.

we called ourselves House Portayne, a wealthy house ruling an island of silver mines just off the west coast of the Reach, south of the Iron Islands. Caroline primarily played Lady Alasta Portayne, and I primarily played her second-born child, Tobytha. we had some input on the Lord (the chaste and humble Elrin Portayne) and other children (an older brother, Ethon, and a younger girl, Joryssa), as well as some side characters associated with the family. together we came up with a name and some basic info for our family's maester, Maester Bridon (hailing from house Wylde). later on, for my second official character, I created Gwenna Fallside, a rough castle guard who quickly earns the family's trust and becomes castellan of Silverfont Castle. for a few highly intense B-plot scenes inbetween the primary roleplaying action, Caroline and I played as Gwenna and the Maester. one of us may have gotten forcibly tossed out of a tower window to their death. very Game-of-Thones-y, isn't it? the B-plots were all very neat, adding to the deep and expansive feel of the game. 

our mini-campaign was set to span the reigns of Aegon the Conqueror and Maegor the Cruel, and we knew ahead of time that House Portayne would not survive. it turned out that we were all utterly doomed to be poisoned by jealous Lannisters and chased down by pirates trying to escape the inevitable seige of our island. little Joryssa did grow up and get married off to a son of House Reed, so maybe she and her line will survive to remember her origins. exploring the long-ago past of the Song of Ice and Fire universe like this was incredibly cool, even if all evidence of our House was hopelessly erased in the end.

aesthetics

these two games both come with quite intricate worlds-- one explicitly grown from the richly detailed, sprawling civilizations in Martin's novels and the other from the remix of almost everything else a person could want to tell a story about. both are alternate versions of something like western civilization, in a way. in A Song of Ice and Fire, we have an alternate history of European geopolitical conflicts, with zombies and magic and dragons and extra murder on top. in Shadowrun, it's an alternate near-future, with ruthless megacorporations and magic and dragons and cyberpunks all the way down. 

A Song of Ice and Fire, as an RPG system, seems to me like a vast, ornate, and orderly library of fairly traditional fantasy ideas-- spacious yet organized, and more or less tidy. it may have dozens of secret passages and a skeleton or two hidden in the corners, but generally it's presentable and logical, even if there's a lot going on. its illustrations have a soft realism, not lacking in the violence you'd expect from this particular setting, but lit by torches and candles so it all seems not quite mundane, but not quite so shocking or garish either. the book's design feels monestarial, with a tinge of rennaissance, maybe a little bit fancy-Shakespearean on the edges. there is a lot of all-caps, angular and serifed, strong and delicate at the same time, perfectly high contrast and comfortable to skim through.

conversely, the Shadowrun system feels like a massive kitchen sink full of influences. some of the art reminds me of Paul Kidby's style, which does seem fitting somehow (he's the artist who illustrated plenty of Terry Pratchett's work). other pages and spreads are more evocative of comic book and/or videogame art. like I said-- it is a mishmash. in a good way.

if this system were a physical room it would be a somewhat grimy, mostly abandoned, very magical attic full of random knickknacks, old photo albums, broken electronics, weird porcelain figurines, and wildly colorful posters, all collected over many decades and now surrounded by a tangled sea of wires and cables and spikes and jewelry. it's got all the neon-and-fishnets and glossy high-tech punk style of Cyberpunk mixed in with an animistic spookiness. we could say Pathfinder and Mage and Werewolf got put in a compost heap with all the other urban, cyberpunk techno-fantasies you've ever heard of, and Shadowrun is what crawled out, dripping with lightning and breathing fire. here, orcs and elves and magic and machines coexist with normality just like anything else that ever might have evolved on the planet Earth.

funnily enough, dragons and dragon imagery show up far more prevalently in the Shadowrun book-- little tattoo-ish line-art dragon symbols glow red in the bottom corners of every page, next to blocky page numbers and footer text-- than in A Song of Ice and Fire. Shadowrun gives us 8 lines of index entries under "dragon(s)," whereas "dragon" doesn't even show up as a unique entry in A Song of Ice and Fire's (much shorter) index; over there we only see Dragonbone, Dragonglass, and Dragonstone. that's interesting, eh? what if we wanted to play Targaryens?

mechanics

summing up the game mechanics and rules for these two isn't going to be easy. but I'll do my best. at least they have one wonderfully simple thing in common: rolling a bunch of d6s all at once based on your rating(s) in whatever skill.

for character creation, Shadowrun gives you 5x5 grid of options, across which to prioritize various character elements: metatype, attribute points, skill points, magic abilities, and extra funds for gear/equipment. for each column, you can only choose from the options included at one of the 5 priority levels. 

{ the Shadowrun 5e priority table. choose one option per priority level A-E }
 

within the basic constraints of those priorities, you'll then assign ratings to 8 core attributes, a few derived stats (Edge, Essence, and Magic) that I still don't totally understand very well, and however many relevant skills you can afford. and good gracious it seems like there is an almost infinite list of skills. the actual rules even allow for making up your own skills if you find that the pre-written lists don't fit what you want to do. so how's that for flexible? if your character uses magic, a you'll also take a magic ability rating and choose some related skills and spells. there are plenty of spells to choose from, too, and they can be learned in any order.

finishing touches for your character will involve choosing qualities and spending some of the 25 Karma you start with. Shadowrun qualities work kind of like the advantages, merits, and flaws in World of Darkness-- adding positive qualities costs you a few Karma, but adding negative qualities (like addiction, a bad reputation, etc.) can earn you some of it back. Karma is one way you'll level up as your game progresses, so you don't have to spend it all at character creation, but you have to spend at least some. 

once gameplay gets going, it's pretty action focused. the whole concept of Shadowrun is that you and your party get hired as Shadowrunners-- fairly unscrupulous folks taking on dangerous semi-legal jobs on the fringes of society, hoping to get away with it every time, earn an excellent reputation, and rake in millions of nuyen (¥ = the currency of this particular dystopian future). no matter how sneaky you might be, things are bound to go wrong.

combat works using very short "combat turns" of 3 seconds each, during which each player acts according to their initiative score. for some reason, there are also 6 types of initiative depending on what kind of combat is going on-- are we in the real world, or in the matrix, or in the astral plane somewhere? the various initiative options provide different numbers of d6s, so you'll roll that number of initiative dice, add your initiative attribute rating, and that total is your initiative score. whoever has the highest score goes first, and so on, til the end of the round. then everyone subtracts 10 from their score, and those who still have a positive number can act again.

actions are divided up into free actions, simple actions, complex actions, and special "interrupting" actions. very Pathfinder-esque, overall. whatever the action or test, you'll add your ability and skill ratings, then roll that many d6s. a 5 or higher is a hit, and depending on the task difficulty, you'll need some number of hits to succeed. rolling a 1 means a glitch in whatever you're trying to do. and usually that's bad.

as your team completes shadowruns for all their shadowy clients, you'll earn cash rewards and Karma, with which you can then purchase more gear and any upgrades that make sense for your story, according to whatever you can afford.  character progression is all quite customizable. 

-

I've briefly mentioned the group House creation aspect of A Song of Ice and Fire already. once you've created your House, each player creates a character, either working from scratch or starting with one of the provided archetypes. the system here reminded me a lot of the Wrath & Glory character creations options, except there are more of them available. I do think having a good range of pre-made templates to which you then add your own flavor is really nice. 

I want to say the individual character sheet for A Song of Ice and Fire is one of the simplest I've ever seen. rather than attributes + skills, we just get one list of 19 abilities, nice and alphabetical all the way from Agility and Animal Handling to Healing, Languages, and Marksmanship, and on to Warfare and Will. scores for each normally start at 2 and go up from there. most abilities also come with a range of specialties (skill with a certain weapon, or a certain approach, etc.) that can grant you bonus dice on relevant rolls.

your characters' age will also play a major role in some of their other stats. younger characters have fewer points to spend on ability ratings, but more destiny points to start with. destiny points can be spent for bonus qualities, or they can be used in various ways during gameplay to add bonus dice or change the outcome of a scene in particularly dire circumstances. as your character ages, they'll gain more experience but also more flaws.

the system allows for free creative decision making with some things, but also gives you fun tables full of options to roll for with others. the dice may dictate which part of the continent your House is from, how established or respected they are, how much land, population, defense, wealth, and influence they have, and whether or not there's an heir or a maester or an army at your disposal. as your game progresses, you'll make House Fortune rolls fairly often to see how all those stats change over months and years of in-game time. this was some of the most fun we had storytelling the big picture-- coming up with the story of a new resource or alliance that could explain the increase of wealth for our House, or imagining the crimes or plagues that would explain a drastic dip in population added to the pure fun of rolling dice for the quantitative stats. 

on the smaller scene-by-scene scale, gameplay in A Song of Ice and Fire involves combining your ratings and speciality bonuses for each ability, rolling that many d6s, then adding up all the results. it's more math than just recognizing the 5+ dice as successes and ignoring the rest, but it also feels a little more dramatic that way too. even if you roll low numbers, if you're rolling enough dice, it might still add up to a success. difficulty levels range from "automatic," requiring no roll at all, or "easy," requiring at least 1, all the way up to "very hard" at 18 or "heroic," requiring a total of 21 or more.

critical successes are a thing only if your total roll when attacking is double the total of your opponent's defense. fumbles are optional, only if your game table is into the higher stakes of something unexpectedly awful happening when all your dice land on 1. 

there are some special rules and procedures for tournaments (jousting and other non-combat contests), battlefields and warfare (large-scale multi-unit combat) and intrigue (social combat in simple, standard, or complex modes)-- most of that is laid out in a pretty clear way as a reference.

for character advancement, A Song of Ice and Fire is an XP system, though you can also earn coin and status through gameplay. during our game at least, leveling up seemed a very gradual process. there are only three ways to spend XP in the book: it costs 10 to add or improve a specialty, 30 to upgrade an ability rating, and 50 to buy an additional destiny points. it seems somewhat limited (and expensive), but not inappropriately so.

 

approachability

neither of these games sits firmly in a category of those with cozy, simple RPG mechanics. beyond the nice, clean familiarity of the stalwart d6, there are layers of rules and exceptions and variations that make both systems at least a little more daunting for the average player. but with a good GM to guide you through it, the struggle can be minimized a great deal.

the first chapter in A Song of Ice and Fire is a primer on the world of Westeros. the book doesn't assume readers are intimately familiar with the world and in fact rehashes a good amount of the history, the map, and the vibes for us. there's enough here that you could get by without much prior knowledge of the books or show if you had to (though why that would ever be the case is a separate and valid question). 

I found it quite odd that the book uses SIF and SIFRP as its chosen abbreviations, rather than the ASoIaF that I've seen way more often out in the sea of internet discourse about the books. perhaps the 2009 publication of the first RPG edition pre-dated the rise of ASoIaF as the more ubiquitous acronym? or perhaps leaving out the articles and prepositions and conjunctions seemed more official? I have no idea, but so it goes. however odd it seems to me, I suppose it doesn't matter so very much.

the order of things may matter a bit more. the introductory chapters make sense enough-- setting, rules, character creation... but after that we bounce back and forth a bit-- chapters 4 and 5 go over general abilities and specialties, then destiny points and qualities. only then do we get into the chapters on house and lands, with all the procedures and tables for creating our house and determining its history and fortunes. that seems backwards, but I suppose the beautiful affordances of a codex mean we can reference any of its contents in whatever order we like. good crossreferences and wayfinding and beautiful visual hierarchy all make that easy enough, here.

if, despite my general pickiness about the ordering of things, I can forgive the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG book for a bit of wonky ordering, it appears that I (still, these five years later) cannot forgive Shadowrun for similar crimes. 

I hope I'm not belaboring the fact that Shadowrun is pretty intimidating as a book and as a system. the fact that there is so much detailed content pulled from fantasy and sci-fi means that it really ought to be handled and designed as carefully as possible for its readers... and perhaps they did their best? who knows. almost since I first touched this game book I have harbored persistent gripes about the mismatched non-parallel lists here and there and everywhere. on any given page, a trio of stats may be listed out A, B, and C, only to have the same stats or categories printed on a standard character sheet in the opposite order, or scrambled to B, A, C instead. why? for the sake of all the dragon-hoarded treasures in all the universes, why would anyone do this?

adding to that the relatively small text, plenty of jargon, and so many options for customization among various slightly-different categories and subcategories, I'd wager a brand new player would need to fall very deeply and very hard in love with this setting to want to tackle the complexity of learning the system from scratch. or maybe it just takes confidence to bend the system to your own creative will?

preliminary verdicts

Shadowrun, upon my revisiting it this past month, really was a lot cooler than I remembered it. one must appreciate its ambitious scope and uniqueness, if nothing else.

I found A Song of Ice and Fire quite unique as well. I'm less a fangirl of its base media, but I still think it's fair to say this game evokes Martin's novels just as well as The One Ring evoked Tolkien's for me.

my experience levels with both systems are pretty even here. both were fun gameplay experiences, both are interesting, and both are significantly different from some of the more popular or mainstream RPGs I've covered so far.

so... do I let my annoyance at Shadowrun's inconsistencies of arrangement knock it out in this first round?

yes. 

yes, I do. while I recognize my response to these things as (perhaps more than) a little bit nitpicky, those issues have frustrated my practical experience of the game in a real way. and it all could have been avoided with even the merest ounce of designery forethought or technical editing attention. that this version is the 5th edition makes it even less excusable. 

congratulations, A Song of Ice and Fire RPG. for what it's worth, I think most poeple would agree with me on this ruling, even if not for the same reasons.

what's next?  

I'll summarize my 8 quarterfinalists and articulate a few final reasons why they win in a recap post next week. after that, dear Jeremiah can help me match them up for a new round. since all the most extensive exploration and research has already been done, future rounds will probably involve much shorter, broad-strokes reviews for comparison purposes. ideally I'll cut 8 down to 4 before Thanksgiving, and from 4 to 2 shortly thereafter, so perhaps we'll crown a first ever TTRPG champion by the end of the semester. fingers crossed. 

and after that? I'm not sure. there are still so many more RPG books. maybe we do a tournament of expansion content, setting books-- like the new Tal'Dorei setting book I have barely looked at, or individual published campaign adventures? I could explore Stillfleet properly. Coyote and Crow surely deserves some attention. or it could be fun to invite a whole roster of judges besides little old me, but that would also involve a bunch more structure and planning and logistics. we'll see when and how anyone has time and energy for that sort of thing.

in the meantime, let me know-- how would you rank these 16 games if you were the tournament judge?

masked and unmasked

opening match #6:
Exalted 2e vs Vampire: the Masquerade 5e

here we have two games where the nuances of managing one's appearance and identity might matter more than anything else. what becomes of a soul exalted by the glory of an actual sun-god above all other mortals? what becomes of a soul damned to avoid every shred of sunlight for the rest of its unholy existence?

thus far I have not fussed very much over why my tournament has featured which edition of which RPG book-- it's all been dictated by what we had in our collection and nothing else mattered. we happen to own the second edition of Exalted, so that's what I'm working with. 

in the case of Vampire, things are a tad more complicated. this time, as we come to the last of the World of Darkness-adjacent gameworlds I will cover, I must note that I did have a choice. the others I've written about so far-- Werewolf: the Foresaken, Mage: the Awakening, and Changeling: the Lost-- all come from a certain line of White Wolf RPG offerings, and while we do own the fourth piece of this little quartet-- the version that would more properly complete the whole series, Vampire: the Requiem (pictured below)-- that is not the edition I'm writing about here.

{ our very red and shiny, 2004 copy of Vampire: the Requiem that we own. its tagline is: "a modern gothic storytelling game." }

I will briefly mention the older version in my account of prior vampire characters, because I have played a short mini-campaign of Vampire: the Requiem with dear friends in Indiana. however, my main focus will be on the more recent 5th edition of Vampire: the Masquerade-- the latest in a line of game systems that actually predates the early-2000s versions featured in my prior opening matches. since almost the very moment this 2018 edition of Vampire came out, I've played many more and longer campaigns in its very similar setting but fairly different game system. so despite the incongruity it adds to my set of review matches overall, we're gonna roll with it.

I've switched up the usual outline a little bit here, diving into aesthetics and mechanics first, then overall approachability, before finally summarizing past and present characters and their stories. the preliminary verdicts for this one are perhaps the most unfair of all the opening rounds so far.

SYSTEM	Exalted (2e)	Vampire: the Masquerade (5e)
tagline =	"This is the story of the Exalted."	"Death is not the end."
publisher =	White Wolf	White Wolf
pub. date =	2006	2018
original cost =	$39.99	$55.00
length =	8 chapters / 400 pages	12 chapters / 400 pages
my exp. level =	none prior	lots

---

aesthetics

Exalted reminds me of nothing so much as the Mortal Kombat franchise. its colorful comic-book style overlaps with that of Scion a fair bit. and all three feature high-powered, more-than-human characters, with tons of lore and a sense of history inexorably iterating and perhaps repeating itself; but for style and presentation alone, Exalted exceeds Scion on almost every level. the colors and contrasts are richer, the paper is semi-glossy, the page numbers backdropped with stars, and the margins printed to look a little bit like marble. across every spread is a narrow little montage of epic fight scenes to serve as a letterhead above the rest of the contents. between every chapter we get to read mini comics following the exploits of various sample characters and villains. I almost can't overstate how shiny and dynamic it all feels.

perhaps because the world and setting of this system draw on everything that is not Tolkien, everything not already over-represented among typical classical western mythology and heroics, the book cannot simply rely on readers' general familiarity with existing mythology and mythic tropes. instead, it builds everything from scratch, new and intentional and intricately detailed. all of that gives Exalted a richness and diversity I haven't seen in any other RPG thus far. I was struck, for example, by just how many women are featured as main NPCs. that shouldn't be so remarkable, perhaps, but I think it's cool. 

aspects of this game seem quite anime/manga-ish, and other aspects remind me very much of the dark fairytale destinies of The Witcher, the cut-throat vibes from Game of Thrones, and even the razor-sharp whimsy of Discworld (mostly because the setting consists of a huge flat plane of earth, but also because the gods are referenced as playing endless little "games of divinity" with the world). it all seems very robust and crunchy, like shards of lava and obsidian rocks glinting dangerously in the sun. for all the outlandish, colorful extremes, the world needs to be taken seriously. 

-

you'd expect a game called Vampire: the Masquerade to be sexy, eh? and this one certainly channels as much sexiness as it possibly can into the pages of its rulebook. glossy pages, tons of full-bleed photo-realistic art, classy serifed type in black and white and red. glints of temptation at the edges of your vision. all the angular imagery of cities. skyscrapers. crowds. bodies in motion. techno. neon. teeth against a bottom lip. stalkers or soulmates? overstimulation. stars drowning in light pollution. the scent of old money. roses. silk. touch. adrenaline. diamonds. fangs. alleyways. the taste of unknown spices in the air. leather boots. mind-control. catacombs. castles. mystery.

for me, this is a game of intense moments layered together like leaves of fine vellum, each calligraphied with dreadful secrets, risks, bonds, and sacrifices. let's take everything I said about World of Darkness in opening round #1, but add a few gallons of flawlessly immortal elegance and deep red, viscous blood. the word masquerade itself conjures so much decadence and intrigue, artifice and uncertainty; all RPGs are games of pretending, but this one leans in as close as it can and gets really meta with what that can mean. 

you cannot play this game as a good guy. it's too late for that. you'll see. once you've been Embraced (that's the polite term for what happens when your greedy vampiric Sire takes all your mortal blood and replaces it with some of theirs), you might struggle however much you want against the Beast of your inhuman blood-- but that part of you won't be silenced and it won't be controlled. your soul is Damned. what will you do with that inescapable truth?

 

mechanics

bring out the d10s once again. you'll need plenty for Exalted, and you'll need two distinct colors, at least five of each, to properly play Vampire.

Exalted's mechanics match up with those of Scion to a large degree-- similar stats, similar types of rolls, similar Willpower and Health tracking systems, similar bonuses for describing your actions as epic stunts-- but of course there are key differences that make Exalted its own thing. instead of Legend, the exalted are powered by Essence. and instead of skills in the basic categories of physical, mental, social, skills are divided up into sets of 5, each set favored most by a particular Solar caste.

creating an Exalted character is decently involved, but once you've done it a time or two it isn't so intimidating. first you'll choose a concept and a caste. there are five castes to choose from: Dawn, Zenith, Twilight, Night, and Eclipse. the Dawn caste exalted ones are fearless warriors, Zenith caste shining, charismatic leaders, and Twilight caste the bringers of wisdom and champions of scholarship. Night caste are the clever, stealthy bodyguard types, and Eclipse caste are the most political, interested in diplomacy and balance.

once you've chosen your caste, you get a certain amount of points for skills, advantages, and Charms, plus a few bonus points to spend on upgrading any of these things a little bit further. choosing Charms is the trickiest part. these are your magnificent heroic powers, setting you apart from any other semi-divine creature that might think it can tangle with you and walk away unscathed. you start with ten Charms, half of which must be from your favored skill domains. ten sounds like a lot, but every Charm comes with strict prerequisites for Essence level and skill level. your character will start with the basics and level up from there, just like in any good kung-fu training montage. (not all Charms are combat-related, but still.)

to use Charms, you'll spend points of Essence from either your peripheral essence pool or personal essence pool. these regenerate pretty quickly in game, so there is no excuse not to use them. the only side effect worth considering is the possibility for your character's Solar anima to manifest in more and more obvious forms. if you spend more than a certain amount of your Essence pool before it can regenerate (especially the harder-to-control peripheral Essence), the glorious light of the sun will start to leak through your skin and betray your exalted identity to anyone who might be watching. 

-

the gameplay mechanics of Vampire work very much like the other World of Darkness systems, with relatively small differences. the nine core Attributes are the same, but this time we get 9 skills per category (physical, social, and mental) and a more flexible approach to allocating points to those skills at character creation. however, the available advantages and merits are more limited here. a few are general (like linguistics or resources) but many are specific to vampires only (like a folkloric bane that makes one sensitive to garlic, or pickiness about sources of blood). 

crucially, vampires in this game are not lone hunters, slaking their hunger as they may and enduring a deathless eternity. unless they don't care too much about preserving their un-life, a vampire will be subject to the ancient bureaucratic traditions and structures of a Kindred society. the Camarilla is the ancient hierarchy of most remaining Kindred clans. in recent times, rebel Anarchs have tried to pull down what they see as the oppressive and unnecessary aspects of the Camarilla. which side of this conflict you find your vampire character on will likely depend on the game your storyteller wants to run. in either case, the political frictions within Kindred society can greatly add to the basic horror of waking up as an undead monster.

first step for character creation is to choose a Clan into which your character will be (or will have been, depending on you storyteller's timeline) initiated. there are seven playable clans, each with a particular vibe, in this core book:

• the Brujah, rebellious but down-to-earth scholars, poets, punks, and rabble-rousers 
• the Gangrel, most animalistic, wild and fierce as nature
  
• the Malkavians, touched by madness, derangement, and absurdity
• the Nosferatu, classically stealthy and strange, deformed by the curse
  
• the Toreador, those obsessed with beauty and hedonism,
  
• the Tremere, blood alchemists who stretch past the edges of magic and science in their search for power
• and the Ventrue, aristocratic and manipulative, thoroughly convinced that they deserve to rule the world.

there is a "clanless" option too. the Caitiff wander among Kindred society without the protection of a clan; perhaps there are pros and cons to that sort of undead lifestyle, but I have always found it kind of boring.

separate from your clan is your coterie-- the group of other player characters in the game, usually vampires of similar age, thrown together for some convenient but also compelling in-game purpose. and along with the bloodline of your clan, you'll gain access to a few Disciplines-- superhuman abilities granted by the vampiric blood in your veins. these are what let you effortlessly crush an enemy's throat, leap from balcony to gutter without a sound. this is how you read others' thoughts or intensify your charm to the point that mortals find your seductive glances impossible to resist. 

rolling anything higher than a 6 on your d10 equals success this time: nice and simple 50/50 odds in most cases. but 1s and 10s have the possibility to shake things up in very exciting ways. mostly you'll be rolling the typical Attribute + Skill combination (sometimes adding dice for Disciplines), but with some of those normal dice replaced with Hunger dice. those are the handful of whatever different color (red, the book cooly suggests). Hunger is a stat tracked during gameplay along with health and Willpower and XP. the higher your character's Hunger levels, the greater the risk for totally uncontrolled frenzy. at Hunger 4, any perceived threat or scent of blood will trigger a dice roll which if failed, may result in the storyteller taking control of your character and leading her to act out whatever monstrous impulses fit the scene. even for regular skill checks, the more Hunger dice in your pool, the more risk there is of either bestial failure (when you roll a 1 on any Hunger dice) or a messy critical success (rolling 10s on Hunger dice). in either case something unexpectedly bloody, cruel, or tragic is about to happen. 

unlike the other World of Darkness games, this one does not use Virtues and Vices-- what virtue could a blood-sucking demon find within themselves, after all? we use Ambitions and Desires as storytelling structures for each player character, instead. an Ambition is something to guide the overarching story of your game-- an ultimate goal to work towards. maybe your vampire wants to enact revenge on the one who created them, or to get permission from the Prince to Embrace a mortal loved one. smaller than Ambitions, Desires are like the stepping stones that may help you get closer to that larger goal. ingratiating yourself with the older, more powerful vampires by doing favors for them, or tracking down resources to better secure your coterie's haven, for example.

Willpower functions almost the same, but instead of adding dice to a roll, you spend Willpower to re-roll up to three from your pool. instead of Morality, Vampire works with a Humanity mechanic. a brand new vampire may start with decently high Humanity (6 or 7 out of 10), but it's likely they won't keep it unstained for long.

approachability

Exalted and Vampire both do a nice job of presenting their systems to readers in an organized and accessible way. they both have quite a lot going on, but it's all divided up into pieces and labeled pretty clearly for us. applaudable book design all around, I say.

despite being just as old as Mage and Changeling, Exalted doesn't suffer from the "let's cram our rulebook full of stylish-but-less-readable typography choices" issue. they save the stylishness for the interstitial comics and art bits, it seems. however, it is quite a dense book, with so much interesting lore poured into practically every section, you might get lost in it. I found it tricky to navigate at first, and very tricky to remember where exactly I first read about that one important NPC or that one city's specific political conundrum. because the lore is somewhat spread out among all the other information in the book, it can feel a little mushy. 

on the other hand, I appreciate how much that lore contributes to a full and logical sense of the world. it seemed a little strange that much of the introduction delves into the lives and culture of the Dragon-blooded, or Terrestrial exalted, when players can only create Solar exalted characters. but in any case, there is a great amount of detail and nuance to build on and to hook your character concepts and plot ideas into. your Exaltation isn't random or without cause-- your Soul, chosen and empowered by the Unconquered Sun in a long-ago age, is now escaping its prison and returning to a new body, transform that body with power and glory and intense purpose. it's fun to think about how your character's original form as a Solar exalted in the First Age might inform their new incarnation.

-

the lore of Vampire is a little less overwhelming. the game has the luxury of decades-worth of tropes and vibes from existing vampire media to lean on (sidenote: Only Lovers Left Alive is the best vampire movie, if we must pick one). the book lets any potential wordiness in its exposition breathe among generous amounts of negative space and provocative art. I was intrigued by and quite pleased with its three-column layout. the shorter lines thus created by such formatting makes the text content itself nice and quick to skim, so finding things throughout the book is way easier.

perhaps most notably, for a World of Darkness property, this particular Vampire rulebook can function entirely on its own. there are mentions of the World of Darkness as a setting, and this Vampire is as compatible as its older cousins with the wider gameworld (I know our prior Vampire games have featured Mages as antagonists, at least).

I should say that the gritty gothic horror and unavoidably bloody content of Vampire might not be for everyone, either. the sexiness may not be inherent to the game, but violence in some form or another is. even so, any good storyteller should be able to balance story details against what everyone is comfortable with. every game and every gamer is different. find some that you like and let everyone else do the same. 

 

previous characters + stories

other than a vague and nameless concept I once outlined for a fame-hungry Zenith caste character, I have no prior character for Exalted-- only my two new tournament characters whom you'll meet in the next section.

there are a good handful for Vampire though. ready?

very first was Eve Richards, who technically existed in Vampire: the Requiem. not the same system, but still a vampire. we played that game for just a few awesome sessions in Indiana as I was finishing gradschool. Eve was a Gangrel, with a found-family of biker chicks. I remember her drinking pigeon blood and ultimately adopting a good and loyal (and yes, okay, blood-addicted at this point) bulldog named Winston. so cool. 

in Louisiana, a Vampire game was one of the RPGs we were able to stick with for quite a while. friends Frank and Daniel and Oona and Andy and sometimes Emily would join us every two weeks to play as Seattle-based vampires figuring out their afterlives amidst overlapping alliances of older, more powerful Kindred all trying to use them as pawns. I played Sierra Adler, a Malkavian artist/photographer with a deep strain of sibling rivalry. so many things happened in that game-- too much to even try to summarize well. near the end, Sierra confronted a shapeshifting hippie-chick Mage named Thistle and mostly failed to do anything very useful against her blatant threats. our final session came somewhat suddenly and in hindsight feels comfortably ambiguous. there was a gathering. chaos. combat. flames. death. regardless of what really happened, in my gentle rewrite of Sierra's ending, she and her sire (the deeply morose Orla Grace) both met their Final Death together, each flailing to save the other from Mage-hurled fireballs.

next we have one of my most favorite characters out of all the characters I've ever played: Ms. Victoria Abigail Evanston Bell. for this game, set in 1920s Chicago, we played a few prologue sessions as mortals before falling into our fates as vampires. I styled Vic as a high society heiress trying half-heartedly to hide her tomboyish, absinthe-drinking flapper side from the newspapers. she was so much fun. our small coterie (a Gangrel Celia and Malkavian Doyle, later joined by a techie Nosferatu Ethel) helped her recognize and fight back against Vic's awfully controlling Toreador sire and survive the Valentine's Day massacre all in the same weekend. she obviously had to give up her high society life, but as consolation she opened a little back-alley cinema and dabbled in producing films herself. at one point, Vic's hunger got the better of her (see my notes on frenzy, above) and she tore apart an entire speakeasy of gangsters almost single-handedly. many nights later, as the coterie was just about to uncover more clues to the whole deadly underworld conspiracy of it all, a pack of rogue Gangrel in coyote form ambushed them in a city park. none of her friends could save Vic from being torn apart herself. so tragic.

for the same campaign story, now time-jumped into the '60s, I drew up the character Maeve Wells, an eager young Tremere whose curiosity outweighed her sense of ethics even before she was bitten. she was interested in the effects of psychotropic drugs in combination with vampire blood. the clan leaders had all kinds of ideas for experiments she could run, and Maeve was quite prepared to impress them as much as possible. unfortunately the campaign dissolved a little while after that, so we'll never know just how depraved she may have let herself become.

and finally, in addition to those three, I've got Margo Wallace. she starts out as just a teenager cocooned in a tight-knit group of wannabe-enlightened friends, bemoaning the death of the local mall and dreaming off and on about fashion design school or something. she was also destined for clan Tremere, but this campaign barely got off the ground either. maybe we'll pick it back up one of these days... 

lastly for this section-- I also dabbled in running a Vampire story for Jeremiah once upon a time. I still have pages and pages of notes and maps, tracking my ideas for the Kindred who might sneak around drinking blood and manipulating the world of Salt Lake City after dark. there were going to be secret backroom hideouts downtown and ancient cultish libraries and child trafficking rings and the ruthless redirection of refugees into very particular households... but we only played three or four sessions before I just got too intimidated by the prospect of engineering that much darkness.

new characters

I created Zaya Greane, Eclipse caste, to play in a simple one-shot session. she's a mash up of Varys from Game of Thrones, Gus from Breaking Bad, and Madeline Stillwell from The Boys, with some sprinkles of Lorelei Gilmore from the seasons where they're running the charming little Dragonfly Inn. prior to our short one-on-one session of Exalted, we spent a good amount of time developing a setting and context for Zaya. she was ambitious and very skilled with business, negotiations, and managing people even before her Exaltation. after, she would be unstoppable.

and she was. almost. in a world where Solar exalted are seen as dangerously overpowered and in urgent need of annihilation, she faced her fair share of threats. playing her had me tapping into the most determined, fearless, un-intimidatable version of myself. I unlocked secrets, forged alliances, generally struck fear into all the underlings in my service, and succeeded in humiliating Zaya's ex-lover in battle. it was great fun.

for a second Exalted character, I made a Dawn caste gladiator named Canessa. after her Exaltation she is suddenly burdened with far grander ambitions than to win every fight, battle, or war. instead, how about we take down the Empire by infiltrating the mystical center of its powers? why not? Canessa is sure she's powerful enough to find and topple the Imperial Manse. perhaps she'll find the Red Empress there and be the one to finally supplant her. that would be suitably epic, I think. 

as promised, I've taken little Briella Jameson, rock-climbing activist, and complicated her life by throwing mystical alternate realities at it. she will not have a good time as a vampire, I imagine. but anyway-- clan Brujah immediately seemed most fitting for this idealistic activist and advocate for the unhoused that I created. I did toy for a moment with making her either a Nosferatu or a Ventrue. her willingness to work in proximity to the dirt and ugliness of the street might put her in the path of a sewer rat Nosferatu, and such a transformation would be quite interesting storywise. conversely, her political connections would make her attractive to the aristocratic pullers-of-strings that are the Ventrue. but the Brujah vibes were just too perfect, so I went with it. Briella will fit right in with them, eventually. but at the moment she is too squeamish to drink from humans, too confounded to know exactly how she'll survive. perhaps she and her raccoon companion (what should I name it? hmm) will run into Eve and Winston hunting pigeons and stray cats and such, one of these evenings.

preliminary verdicts

someone asked me, as I was explaining this tournament project back at the very beginning, which game might win if I had to pick a champion right that moment, without any of this everso rigorous process. it didn't take much time at all for me to think and answer: Vampire: the Masquerade. it can't quite compete with D&D on number of characters or total hours played, but there is something about the setting and the tension and the way dear husband Jeremiah runs this game... maybe it's the mostly modern setting, giving my brain a more relatable, more seamless set of connections for my roleplaying and storytelling muscles? somehow I find gameplay in this system the most intensely invigorating. all the sensuous and visceral details, the quiet scenes of inner struggle and the obscene moments of bestial ferocity, and everything in between. this game and its stories come alive in the best way for me, somehow. I guess measuring all the deepest, most horrible selfishness of an actual vampire against beautiful little shreds of hope and humanity is really cathartic, or something.

it's definitely not fair to judge one three-hour session of Exalted against all that, but I will say that it had an intensity and sensuousness of its own, and that fed my enjoyment of it quite well. in this case, some of the same reasons I don't mesh with Scion (huge, bombastic stunt descriptions are tricky) are also at work. but at least I felt very well-situated in the game's central conflict. that helped me bring Zaya to life pretty well, and it was very fun to watch her (us?) in action.

when I revisit my preliminary judgements at the end of the opening round, we'll see how everything shakes out for real.

 

next match-up review: 7th Sea vs. Cyberpunk RED

next (and final!) new mini-campaign: A Song of Ice and Fire

two flavors of epic

opening match #5: The One Ring vs Scion: Hero

the meanings of the word epic have evolved a fair bit, as meanings and words tend to do. this word gets used in all kinds of ways to evoke the scope of a thing itself, or the scope of our admiration for the thing, or a little bit of both. anything might be epic if it finds the right audience.

I see these two games as epic in more ways than one, but also in very different ways. different flavors, we might say. one is all about epic stories and songs recounted in verbose detail, with plenty of space for lightness and heaviness and realism. it tastes like rich dark chocolate. the other is all about epic stories told in punchy, extravagant colors, with larger-than-life characters and nobody looking too closely at any collateral damage. it tastes like extra-seasoned popcorn or chips. you can probably guess which one is which already. read on to allay what uncertainties may remain.

Scion: Hero takes as its foundation perhaps the most ancient source texts in existence (if we are allowed, out of convenience, to label such pre-textual constructs as texts) and drags their mythic elements into an unsuspecting contemporary setting.

conversely (and symmetrically?), The One Ring is based on one of the greatest fantasy epics of the 20th century, set in the glorious pre-industrial expanse that is Tolkein's Middle-earth, reveling in all the beautiful intricacies such a setting could possibly inspire.

sprawling mythoi and grand conflicts crisscross through both RPG books in exciting ways. neither of these systems is dealing in small, homey stories. whatever might begin as small or homey in them must be called into larger, higher, more treacherous territories-- the fate of the world may depend upon it.

but there is still room for small stories to matter within all the dire "fate of the world" context-- and indeed those stories may matter more poignantly as a result. personal character growth and interpersonal connections shine all the more brilliantly against the fire and ashes of Mount Doom.

in a roleplaying game, of course, the balance of broad-strokes grandeur and vivid vignette all depends on your storyteller and the players and all the variable dynamics of your game table. I think plenty of both is ideal. Samwise and/or Odysseus should have space to pine for their loved ones and all the normalcy they left at home so many months or years ago. and we should be able to squabble over rations even while we choose to sacrifice our entire futures in the struggle against evil, right?

for this most epic review, my formulaic outline continues to serve us decently well: a table of metadata, summaries of characters I've made in each system, then thoughts comparing the aesthetics, mechanics, and user-friendliness of each.

SYSTEM	The One Ring	Scion: Hero
back cover tagline =	"Enter the world of Middle-earth..."	"Find your Destiny."
publisher =	Free League Publishing	White Wolf / Onyx Path Publishing
pub. date =	2020	2007
original cost =	$49.85	$35.00
length =	10 chapters / 240 pages	12 chapters / 334 pages
my exp. level =	none prior	barely any

---

previous characters

I often imagine myself as a hobbit, or at least a creature with plenty of hobbit DNA... but technically and copyrightedly, no other brand of rustic, laid-back, food-loving halfling character from any other system can actually count as a true hobbit. before this tournament adventure, I had zero experience with The One Ring system, and surprisingly enough once I picked it up I didn't make a hobbit character for myself. but I could have!

for Scion, once upon a time I created a hero from the Egyptian pantheon for a potential game we almost got going in Louisiana. her name was Yasmin, a scion of Bast-- she had bronze skin, straight black hair, and many golden bracelets, approaching the world all pantherlike and sneakily inquisitive. I think. those sketchy details and a vague sense of the interesting combat turn-taking system are pretty much everything I remembered about the game-- the one session we played was pretty neat, but it didn't go anywhere after that.

new characters + one-shots

for The One Ring, I created two new characters using the amazingly simple process outlined in the book: Fauna Briarhawk (a wandering woman from Bree, seeking treasure and hoping to prove herself more than a mere thief) and Moruthiel Gorlindir (an Elf of Lindor determined to protect those less fortunate after failing to save their best friend from an orc attack). 

we gathered a few friends (thank you, friends Jon and Jim and Angela, for joining) around our table one Friday afternoon to explore Middle-earth and do our part in the fight against the deepening shadow. in preparation for this one-shot, husband Jeremiah created three more character concepts to round out our potential party, and then, after a wonderful frame narrative introduction (in which a younger-ish Bilbo Baggins is having far too much fun telling stories to a much younger trio of Frodo, Merry, and Pippin), we chose our characters and settled into the world of the game: braving a cold winter, traveling north on Gandalf's directions, meeting around a campfire, fending off evil wolves, finding our way to a ranger's shelter to rest and feast before reaching our true destination and defending the Shire from beasts possessed by Sauron.

it was so, so much fun. a short and simple story arc, but so satisfying. I want to draw portraits of our little burgeoning fellowship: Halfred of the Shire, and Fauna of Bree, and Berúthiel of Rivendell, and Luindis of the North, and their mounts too. maybe we will all find time to continue the journey someday. after all... it did end with some mysterious clues and lingering questions of the sort that often seem to promise sequels.

- 

since I barely remembered Yasmin in any useful way, I created another two new Scion characters as well-- one in the Japanese and one in the Aztec pantheon. 

Tamiko, a scion of the goddess Amaterasu, is an artistically talented and fiercely ambitious perfectionist. she aims to honor her mother with flawless performances in all aspects of her life, no matter how long it might take. 

and Carmen, scion of the Aztec water god Tlaloc, has a talent for teaching and storytelling, reeling listeners into the webs of her supernatural influence. I gave her a companion Coatl (a brilliant flying serpent creature) named Sammy and a tiara made of shark teeth with which to summon him.

for our Scion one shot, these two teamed up with one other fledgling hero to track down an ominous threat called "The Sword of Japan." there were high speed chase scenes, a battle atop the Statue of Liberty, and confrontations with ghosts in the shipping lanes of the Pacific. for much of the session we all rolled terribly, cursed our dice, and struggled to live up to our characters' truly epic potential, but in the end there was a sufficiently dramatic show-down with one giant kaiju beast in the middle of the ocean.
 

aesthetics

The Lord of the Rings, with its lovely, poignant blend of quaint + epic, has been an undeniable classic for ages now. the world that Tolkien built with such passion and detail seems practically real, and so much of it has bled into our cultural consciousness that it almost feels impossible to talk about it as a separate entity. thankfully, I don't really need to-- this charming RPG based in Tolkien's world is not meant to (and indeed cannot) stand in for the entirety of Tolkien's oeuvre.

yet it seems to me (not that I've even read more than three lines of The Silmarillion) that the spirit of Tolkien's stories is represented thoroughly and well in The One Ring. plenty of sprawling historical, geographical, linguistic, and cultural detail shows up here, distilled just so into potent but practical homage. the world and the vibe are evoked across every inch of in the game's materials-- from its serious, hefty hardcover and gorgeous maps down to the runic borders and faux-foxing at the edges of each page. there is a coziness to it all, tucked in just right amid all the grandeur and drama of dark lords looming over the world. in context of what you already know about The Lord of the Rings, everything in the RPG has as much depth as you could ask for-- the history of the setting, the complexity of the canonical NPCs, and the possibility for epic engagement with both. and there are custom dice, too (more on those later).

I sense so much simplicity and quality craftsmanship in it. the game carves out a sturdy, down-to-earth core of hope and bravery and love, all strong enough to outlast ages of darkness, conflict, or corruption. such an optimistic mythos if there ever was one.

I will gush even more than I gushed about the chapter spreads in Star Wars: Force and Destiny about those in The One Ring rulebook. the book design as a whole is just superb: lovely columns (especially for the table of contents!), nicely spaced lines and paragraphs, welcoming little text boxes here and there. most of it is simple, cream and sepia-tones with red for contrast. the chapter breaks stand out (as they should for wayfinding, but also for beauty) with richness and drama, their style somewhat ethereal. thirteen different artists are credited in the frontmatter, along with two graphic designers. to whichever of them worked in whatever ways on the chapter break art, thank you. it's gorgeous.

final design-nerd comment about The One Ring: that horizontal table of contents is undoubtedly some of the most satisfying book design ever. just look at it. thumbnails of each chapter spread design show up again at the head each column, with details and page numbers for every chapter, section, and subsection. I could very well gush even more about that than the chapter spread art itself, if you let me.

-

it may be a bit unfair to describe the aesthetics of Scion as collage-like or patchwork, but the way it draws on all these well-worn mythologies and mashes them together seems to warrant the labels. thankfully the introductions to and distinctions between pantheons are more than cosmetic-- each family of gods is considered and described in depth, each given a bit of ideological grounding and various unique approaches to the timeless war against the recently-escaped Titans. we get chains and webs of symbolism, icons from classical-ish mythologies imbued with extra power because they feature in so many tales. a scion of the Greek pantheon might carry with them the actual Golden Fleece of legend, using it to access powerful birthrights with which to re-twist the very threads of Fate.

in this game, villains and heroes come at each other like magnets, almost without agency of their own-- Fate (or we could call it narrativium, if you like) pulls at them like a tidal force, catalyzing the kinds of epic battles that spawned the old myths in the first place. Scion wants to deal in sets and scenarios that feel huge and expensive-- like an Avengers movie on steroids. it's a splashy system, with mechanics to incentivize the splashiest of character actions. you are a divine being, chosen by gods to fight for all of reality, after all. you'd better act like it.

with all this talk of Fate and birthright, Scion seems more urban high fantasy as opposed to the grittier, darker, low fantasies of World of Darkness games. the urban darkness and tragedy in the world of Scion feels less shadowy, like the dial was turned way up on romance and drama, but way down on most of the angsty noir elements. the line art is cleaner, clearer, like polished china on display. husband Jeremiah likened its vibe to that of many golden age comicbooks, which makes sense to me (not that I've read more than 3 pages of any of those particular early 20th-century texts either). in this world, scions cannot escape their divine identities. once we're past the prologue, they know where they came from and must confront the burden of that legacy. it's very "with great power comes great responsibility," at its core.

mechanics

to play The One Ring, you'll create a character from one of 6 Heroic Cultures, give them one of 6 adventurer's Callings, then choose a few other features, useful items, and weapons. each choice begets a small handful of other choices and a very small handful of calculations for attribute ratings, target numbers, and the load you're carrying. there are just three main attributes-- Strength, Heart, and Wits-- with nine skills under each of those classic physical, social, and mental categories. your Culture will give a range of possible stats to choose from for all of these values-- no math or point-buy-ing needed. Hobbits of the Shire will typically have plenty of Heart and Wits, but lower stats in Strength; Rangers of the North will be strong and full of heart, with medium Wits. from your Culture you'll also get one "favoured" skill, and two more from your Calling-- these are skills that you'll always get to roll twice for and take the better result. 

but not everything comes with a numerical stats value-- some features are just listed, almost as mere flavor, and whether the dice get involved for those things is purely a matter of narrative justification. 

for example, a Hobbit may be Eager, Fair-spoken, Faithful, Honourable, Inquisitive, Keen-eyed, Merry, or Rustic. during character creation you'll pick two features from this list, and then, during gameplay if your character being Fair-spoken or Keen-eyed becomes relevant to any skill check, then you'd add another d6 to the roll.

the dice for this system are simple but unique-- you can get away with using any old d6s and one d12, but it might be more fun to get the custom LotR-themed dice, might it not? the only differences are that the sixes on the d6s (Success Dice) include an Elvish success symbol, and that instead of an 11 and 12, the custom d12 (the Feat die) displays the eye of Sauron, to signify automatic failure, and a glyph of Gandalf, to signify automatic success. we used mostly regular dice for our one-shot, but Jeremiah did paint two sides of a spare d12 red and white with the corresponding eye and glyph designs, so we had that extra special touch.

for each skill test, players will roll the custom d12 and a number of d6s equal to your skill ranks and any bonuses, add all the results together and if it beats your target number for that skill category, that means success. a successful roll that includes one or more sixes is an extraordinary success in some way.

the action of The One Ring is organized into alternating Adventuring phases and Fellowship phases. during the former, all the exciting journeying and decisions and combat happens. during the latter there is time for recovery, healing, character advancement, and various other downtime activities. there are structured systems in place for how the Company of player characters will Journey (everyone will share the various responsibilities involved in traveling), Council (some characters may be more skilled at influencing how NPCs will respond with regard to highly important matters), and of course, Combat.

I really like the combat system in The One Ring, though it did seem strange at first. each battle begins with "opening volleys"-- at least one round where all combatants may employ a thrown or ranged weapon as each party approaches the central field of combat. after that, everyone moves to "close quarters" fighting. during these rounds, each player chooses a Stance, engages with (or is engaged with by) at least one opponent, and then resolves their actions accordingly. we have four Stances to choose from: Forward, the most aggressive; Open, the most balanced; Defensive, the most careful; or Rearward, for ranged attacks. the Stance you choose will dictate the order in which you'll resolve your actions and whether you (or your opponents) get bonuses to offense or defense. all player characters act, those in Forward stance first, then Open, etc., and then all enemies will act, in similar sequence. 

in between combat scenes, our one-shot did include a very short Fellowship phase in which we recovered Hope points (very useful for adding dice to skill test rolls or for aiding your fellow players), but we did not touch on character advancement. for each game session you attend, you'll earn 3 Skill points and 3 Adventure points-- the two flavors of XP. you'll also earn 3 more Skill points at the end of every Yule Fellowship phase. Skill points are used for increasing skill ranks, naturally, and Adventure points can purchase new ranks in Valour or Wisdom. starting characters begin with 1 point each of Valour and Wisdom, with an associated Reward and Virtue for each. increased Valour leads to added Rewards (upgrades to equipment) and increased Wisdom grants new Virtues (increased abilities or proficiency).

-

Scion shares a few of the same underlying mechanics as other White Wolf RPGs-- we're using d10s again, rolling however many dice our Attribute + Ability stats dictate for each risky action within the game, but this time, because we are descendants of mythic, godly beings, results of 7 and higher will mean success.

much of your character is shaped according to the pantheon and patron parent you choose to be descended from. there are six pantheon options in our edition of Scion: Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Aztec, Japanese, and Voodoo. in line with whichever backstory stems from your character's parentage and divine Visitation, you get to choose a range of favored abilities, epic attributes, birthrights, knacks, and boons to enhance your godly powers even further.

you'll start the game with a certain number of Willpower and Legend points. Willpower measures the character's discipline and determination, but in Scion it works a bit differently than in the Word of Darkness games I've written about so far. rather than using it to buy more dice for your rolls, you'll trade Willpower to gain automatic success, resist mind-control if needed, or manage your actions with regard to your character's Virtues.

each pantheon comes with a set of associated Virtues (no vices this time, although each virtue does come with a downside when taken to extremes). channeling your virtue and spending one Willpower point during gameplay lets you add dice equal to your virtue rating to the roll, which is pretty cool.

speaking of cool, there is a mechanic for gaining extra dice on any given roll if you can describe your character's actions in an impressively cinematic way. this is called "stunting," and at the storyteller's discretion you might earn 1-3 extra dice depending on the epic-ness of the stunt you describe. I'm not always good at this sort of thing in the moment during roleplaying, but I think the idea of it is very fun.

the most different thing in Scion is the combat system. it's somewhat more complex while still using a familiar-enough turn-taking system. however, instead of following an initiative order or more abstractly sorting out phases of simultaneous action (as with stances in The One Ring), combat scenes use "ticks" to measure the passage of time, and characters or NPCs spend some number of ticks performing their actions. the speed rating of your chosen action dictates how soon you may act again-- a speed of 2 means you'll act again after 2 ticks; a speed of 5 means waiting 5 ticks. (that this value is called "speed" even though higher numbers mean slower/more spread-out action does throw my inner pedant into a small fit, thanks for asking, but so it goes.) add all the math and dice-counting of dodge values, parry values, armor, soak, health penalties, etc., and combat scenes can get pretty involved. 

and did I mention that Scion: Hero is the first book in a trilogy? character progression in this game is mainly measured in Legend points. Legend increases for every epic deed your character does, causing Fate to swirl magnetically around them more and more strongly. and once your Legend exceeds a certain number, you're not just a hero anymore, but a demigod. Scion: Demigod and Scion: God are the next steps in the epic journey. I've referenced the lore of those books very briefly as context for this review, and I imagine the system isn't different other than in epicness and scope, but I don't know for sure.
 

approachability

these books frame themselves very differently to their readers. The One Ring leans on its original source material a fair bit: copious quotes and epigraphs litter its pages-- at least I assume they are Tolkien quotes-- if they aren't, then they are rather wonderful homages. when they're attributed, if they are at all, it is to their in-world speakers rather than to whichever book, hence my uncertainty. in any case, the book trusts its audience to follow cheerfully along with this subtly immersive tactic. I think it works. 

mythology being the stringy mess of oral history and creative retelling that it is, Scion has no actual source texts, which means it can make its own. within this system, we are invited to remake and retell our own versions of the myths. the book spends plenty of time providing vivid, extended examples. before we can even turn to the table of contents for this rulebook, there are 40+ pages of an opening adventure-- a full-on short story-- following the sample character Eric Donner, a young scion of Thor. that's either really cool for setting the stage and illustrating character possibilities, or it's in the way of us figuring out the actual game.

character creation (and practically everything else) for The One Ring was almost dazzlingly simple-- an elegant flow chart of options without too many nooks and corners to get lost in. once I'd filled out everything on the character sheets for Fauna and for Melenthiel I just kept thinking to myself, "is that everything? it seems like there should be more."

even so, the process is a flexible one and the gameplay similarly flexible. that's the power of "limits are possibilities" at work, I suppose. the details for each Heroic Culture are described in exactly 2 pages. the list of Callings takes up less than 3 altogether. is that not impressive? 

I like that this book is organized with the specifics of gameplay before the step-by-step of creating an adventurer. that seems atypical for an RPG book, but for this it works quite nicely. character creation is still early in the book (starting on p. 27), so it all seems very simple and straightforward to get started.  even the parts that on paper look like they could get unwieldy, like the rules for Journeys and Councils, felt very smooth and easy during the game itself. I credit our Loremaster, Jeremiah, for a large part of this smoothness, along with the game's design. 

overall the cultural ubiquity of The Lord of the Rings + the beautiful, usable design of the book and the system itself makes The One Ring something I'd enthusiastically recommend as a marvelous place to start for new roleplayers. the flow-chart-esque processes of character creation might not be everyone's cup of tea, and I imagine not all GMs will be totally happy in a pre-made, relatively constrained setting, but that's okay-- you can't please everyone all the time. GMs and players who want something more home-brewed have plenty of options to choose from.

despite its pages of scene-setting narrative and its very cool example characters from each pantheon, Scion is less simple both mechanically and storywise. the terminology alone (we have boons and epic abilities, which are purchased with the same pool of starting points you can spend on boons, but aren't boons themselves, and also birthrights and knacks and virtues and what else is there?) and the rules for which particular relics unlock access to which awesome birthright abilities under which particular purview were not easy to suss out during my character creation processes. I found it somewhat fiddly.

and maybe it's that I wanted more and broader context for my own brain to put it all in, but I also had a hard time settling into the game's core conflict in a meaningful way. we get exactly 8 paragraphs introducing us to the world of Scion, the history of gods mingling with humans, warring against the Titans, "the progenitors and ancient foes of the gods" (p. 44). I found myself wanting more about just how the stated threat of Titanspawn might actually manifest in this setting.

but perhaps it can be enough, sometimes, to label one side productive and good and the other side destructive and evil and just go from there. plenty of stories come with vaguely-defined antagonists.

preliminary verdicts

these two are both competing on basically first impressions. does that make it more fair than some of the prior opening rounds?

I'm into mythology as much as any nerdy millennial who may or may not have prided themselves on identifying all the background extras hanging around Mount Olympus in Disney's Hercules. and the prospect of fighting insanely far-reaching battles with monumentally high stakes using epic, flashy powers is, on paper, pretty thrilling. but in practice, I find it intimidating to roleplay such thrilling stuff. Scion players need to be in a fearless and collosal frame of mind to do this game justice, and being improvisationally epic doesn't often come easily to me. describing stunts in writing after I've had some hours/days to think and carve out just the right words for it = yep, no problem, I can do that. describing stunts in 20 seconds or less, on the spot, while three or four other humans listen and wait for their turns? well, um, I probably need more practice with that one.

against any other RPG, Scion may have had a stronger chance. mythology is always pretty cool, and Scion does plenty of fun and awesome things with it. it's got potential.

but I'll be honest, The One Ring has pretty much swept me off my feet. it's not just the book design, I promise-- the charm and simplicity of it was just so delightful to interact with, from beginning to end. I want to play it again as soon as possible.

next new one-shot (and which William-Gibson-obsessed friend would perhaps want to join in for this one, I wonder?): Cyberpunk RED

next match-up review: Exalted vs. Vampire: the Masquerade (5e)