
Your character is a prism
Character creation begins with psychoanalyst questioning. Why are you here, what drives you? Tell me about your childhood. Did you fancy your mother? I felt like it was going to ask me to point at somewhere on a doll. You then pick allegiances, made up from faction (which side of the war), religeon, classes and an organisation (such as a gangs and so on). Each carries a "disposition", which is a positive/negative level of influence. The Knights Templar love you now but after you've gutted a hundred of them while they slept, they may not invite you round for tea and biscuits again.Skills (facets of a character that grow over time) called Expertise and are grouped together Communication, Knowledge, Melee, Ranged and Vigor. There's a big old list to help you pick and the groups are what you roll against, a bit like Attributes but not.

Finally, your character is fleshed out by depleting Wealth with stuffs. I have a frankly filthy fetish for equipment lists and Nights of the Crusade satiates it. You can buy servants, books (with spells and skills inside), formulas (for alchemy) and intoxicants (for stoners). It is nice to see stoner culture getting RPG representation.
Gameplay
The core mechanic is Expertise group plus modifiers versus a target number (called the Apex) with criticals on a 1 and 10. There are slightly different systems for combat and non-combat, the difference being the actions you perform and the outcomes. For example, if you're negotiating (typically non-combat but not for my energy-lance-it-from-orbit-negotiation player group) then actions include Appeal, Dismiss and Fortify; the outcome being your argument is accepted.Combat has initiative (called Awareness Test) and you can do a number of actions a round. You choose from a list of actions that include every sort of combat you might want. Injury is descriptive ranging from "That tickles! Oh, you meant to hit me..." through to "Can someone unscrew my helmet so I can scrap my brains off the inside".
Flavour is added through details like Hostile Stance, where your character tries to get into the right mood for slotting someone up a treat. Hostile Stance is an opposed action and can give modifiers in either direction. A lovely touch. On one side you might have had a bad day and want to take it out on the poor target. On the other hand, you may have got laid that morning and rather just eat a big lunch and doze the afternoon away.
The trauma of hacking foes into bite-sized giblets must also be taken into account, there's a wonderful table that reads like one of my players' medical report. In a long term campaign, your character is likely to turn bonkers but it will be fun watching them do so.
The importance of story

Symbols of Power are another neat mechanic that allows your character to grow in importance. You buy Symbols of Power with Pearls of Wisdom and see you equip your own Fief (patch of land) with libraries, marketplaces and so on.
Depth
Excellent writing and research is married perfectly in Nights of the Crusades. The world of the Middle East during medieval times is illustrated with descriptive text throughout. The imagery is good but it is the snippets of story that describe the lives of real people that bring it to life. I can imagine crafting a war weary Knight longing for the green grass of Normandy or a "Desert Loving English" Lawrence-of-Arabia character obsessed with desolate golden sands and war. Huge effort has gone into describing the horrors of medieval war and life with sensitivity, care and a style that draws you in.A little more reference

My other concern is with naming. When designing a game, you must strike a balance between naming things in line with the theme and using standard roleplaying terms. If you name everything with standard terms, your game reads like every other. If you make up a bunch of new terms in keeping with your theme then this acts as a barrier to experienced players getting to grip with your game. For example, I would like Expertise areas to have more middle-Eastern sounding names, "Communication Expertise" sounds like the sort of thing a business analyst would write.
The beautiful layout is a little low in contrast in places, and one or two of the sketches should probably be omitted. I would tend to put weaker art toward the back of the book. Also, the map (which has scale in days - great!) needs to demonstrate the difference between land and water.
Production wealth
Nights of the Crusades is a paid-for-product that is given away for free. It is clever marketing - but no trick. The core rulebook is not a taster product but a fully fledged roleplaying game that will offer thousands of hours of play. I view the extra modules more of a donation for thanks than a crutch to make the game walk. The mechanics include a few unique touches but is a familiar description-heavy roll-versus-target number affair.It is the setting that glows. Every sentence leaps from the page and stops you. Makes you think. What was it like living back then? What if the One Thousand Arabian Nights were true? To spawn those two questions alone makes the game a success.
2 comments:
Sounds like a very interesting system and setting! I may have to check this one out. Love me some djinnbustin'.
And a great review Rob!
Thanks Jens, definitely have to give this one a read - it's so thick with setting you'll be scraping it of your retinas.
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