Reading vsD Part 3: Combat, Magic and the Flight from Weathertop!

 The next part of this review covers the major game systems vsD employs: skill rolls, resistance rolls, casting magic, combat, health and healing and rules for stuff like travelling and equipment. While the core system is true to it's MERP/RM lineage, the influence of more current game design becomes more apparent in this chapter. There's rules and guidelines for the ad-hoc creation of safe havens or healing herbs that encourage player input and also minor stuff like "choose how you fumble". Both reminds me a lot of pbtA games.

Reading Against the Darkmaster Part 2

 I kept the subchapters about Passions, Drive and advancement for the second installment, because I want to stray a little further afield here.

In vsD, there's an interesting relationship between Passions/Drive and Achievements/Experience. Both are about getting yourself into trouble and feed into character development, with Passions being more about each individual character and achievements being more about the experiences the party makes as a whole.

Reading Against the Darkmaster Part 1

So I caved in and got me that not-quite-MERP-clone I've been eyeing since the quickstarter came out two or three years ago. I played a lot of MERP back in the days, and the gory criticals and the good adventure modules made it a fun system. For us, it was always less "play something that feels like LotR" and more "Let's play some gritty low fantasy that happens to take place on Middle-Earth."

So I was a little wary of Against the Darkmaster's (or vsD's, as they abbreviate it) stated goal to drift the whole game more towards LotR style Epic Fantasy; and I was even more wary of the idea of blending all this with Heavy Metal aesthetics (as in Blind Guardian, not as in Metal Hurlant). Both seemed to imply the danger of making vsD something overly pompous, the RPG equivalent of Zack Snyder's painfully dull and self-important takes on Superman and Batman.

I'm happy to say that it's not.

Oh, there's pompousness to be had here, especially in the art: There's brooding guys in heavy armor smiting orcish scum and beautiful-but-sad women in flowing gowns weaving mystical energies. But it all feels tempered by a certain amount of both black and good-natured humor, and by the whole game obviously not being about wading through your enemies. There's a fine balance struck between the dark fantasy melodramatics of heavy metal, the cheesiness, but also creativity of 80s movies like Krull and Dragonslayer, and the simple good-heartedness of something like Terry Brook's Shannara books or David Edding's Belgariad books, which were pretty much We're going on an adventure to save the world, because, you know, we're the good guys!

Which is pretty much saying: vsD doesn't really harken back to Tolkien as the "source"; it harkens back to a mix of 70s-90s media that has been heavily influenced by Tolkien, which serves not to dilute, but to expand it.The result is the most convincing of the slew of "nostalgic but re-imagined" RPGs I've encountered yet.

In other words, I think I like it.

So let's have a thorough read-through, shall we?