So, I'm finally ready to finish my series on vsD; on to vsD's GM chapter, which gives some generally good advice on game-mastering and designing scenarios and tools to deal with stuff like war and battles, powerful magic items, or the taint of the Darkmaster, an also presents three possible Darkmasters. None of this is groundbreaking, but again, vsD keeps its sight firmly set on creating highly thematic rules and tools for an epic fantasy rpg.
General Advice and Scenario Design
The general GM advice basically boils down to "Don't cheat!", "Talk to each other and make group decisions - it's everyone's game" and "everyone, including the GM, should enjoy themselves and feel comfortable." As far as I am concerned, these are very good general guidelines. They come with their own pitfalls, of course (making group decisions about how much drive should carry over from one hero to the next in generational play, for example, sounds like something that could lead to bad blood ...), but if you don't want to go too much into detail, I'd say this is as good as it gets.
The main part of the this chapter is about scenario design. VsD suggests starting small by creating a scenario that somehow connects to the player characters passion, seeing what works and creating the broader setting and mythology from there. The takeaway here is not to overthink things, to prepare only what you need and to let yourself be carried by where the campaign goes. Since vsD's rules support this "build your own epic fantasy story as you play" well through stuff like the Haven rules, this makes a lot of sense; and it's also good advice to new GMs, who might otherwise feel overwhelmed by the task of creating a saga on par with The Lord of the Rings. There's tables for stuff like NPC quirks, optional reaction roll tables, mook rules and advice on how to adapt vsD's kins to your campaign ... all in all, it covers the bases pretty good.
Warfare in vsD
This chapter starts by asking the GM to think about the role both warfare in general and a specific battle are to play in their campaign. Is an ongoing war just an obstacle for the PC's when trying to reach their goal? Then it can be treated like all other dangers, as the PCs will try to avoid getting caught up in battles, or if they do get caught up, simply surviving them. If war or a specific battle is a key element of the game, however, we need a way to figure out how the PCs influence it's outcome.
VsD doesn't provide any mass battle rules; it simply asks the GM to pick a number that represents how difficult it will be for the PCs to turn defeat into a victory, based on the relative strength of the two armies. That difficulty number basically is the number of interventions the PCs must succed at to turn the tide. If the difficulty is 0, the heroes really just have to do something, anything, to tip the scale in their sides favour. If the difficulty is something like 7, they'll have their work cut out for them ... hold a breach here, crash a siege tower on enemy troops there, kill their Wraith general and maybe also find that routed elven riders and bring them back into battle, and that just might do the trick. It's basically about the players coming up with a suffient number of sufficiently cool command missions and the GM awarding victory points for their efforts.
While this is everything but crunchy, it seems like a good way to keep the game focussed on the heroic deeds of the characters and making individual successes and blowbacks count. If the GM is transparent about the numbers of victory points that can be earned by a mission, there's a real chance of earned victory (or failure).
Interestingly, RAW; if you choose to use the warfare rules for a battle and the characters then do nothing, their side will always lose.
The chapter about Warfare is followed by a few optional rules for stuff like high-powered campaigns beyond level 10 or true low-magic campaigns; for the latter, vsD provides the Sage class, which is basically your Game of Thrones maester - a learned woman or man who might just know a smattering about actual magic. Then it goes on to ...
Rewards
Here, vsD once again stresses that the best way to get the characters involved in adventures is playing to their passions, and that, conequently, the main reward will be drive points, followed of course by XP. Putting material rewards front and center is discouraged (and made difficult by the abstract wealth system); however, it should be mentioned that this doesn't prevent you from playing a character who is motiviated by material gain. Just give her a passion along the lines of "I'll show everyone that a gutter-rat like me can make their fortune out there", and the GM can play to that.
Magic items, the other classic material reward in RPGs, get a larger section, which greatly expands their thematic relevance to vsD's genre. Basically, you can get the usual bonus items, magical focuses for wielders and XY-slaying weapons. The interesting options here are to make items cursed (for example, an item might be "Madenning", giving you a new passion and preventing you from earning drive from any of your other Passions) or to discover new properties of items as part of your Heroic Path (which I discussed earlier). Finally, Items of power are magical artifacts with their own volition, which can be loyal or disloyal to you, depending on whether you further their goals or not. This category is clearly designed for stuff like the One Ring or Stormbringer, although the example provided is a more benevolent artifact, a blade that want's to unite the elven peoples. None of this is revolutionary new, but once again, it does a very good job at thematically expanding the old MERP mechanics.
Bestiary
And finally, monsters! These include the essential LotR-creatures by any other name (tree-people are called Aenths) and the more mythology-inspired RPG staples like giants, dragons and undead. Interestingly, werewolves are a type of demon here, which is probably another piece of Middle-Earth mythology that found its way into vsD. There's an interesing take on dark elves (basically Elves that have become jaded by eternal life) and some unexpected creatures rooted in folk stories like the boggart (a kind of evil halfling), the nightmare and the redcap. Player races like orcs and trolls are also represented in the bestiary.
VsD takes a slightly asymetrical approach to statting NPCs; they only have broad skill category values, and they don't use magic points to reduce bookkeeping. They're also categorized as either Common, Elite or Antagonist, with Elite NPCs suppposedly on par with PCs of the same level and Antagonist NPCs being superior opponents that the whole group will need to work together to take down.
The Bestiary is followed by the spell Grimoire, which I will skip since I've talked about magic before. In the next and final installment, I'll discuss "Shadows of the Northern Woods", a series of three adventures included in the core book that remind me of MERP in all the best ways!
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