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| He Fights On! |
Seven Voyages of Zylarthen (2014/2017)
by Oakes Spalding
Published by Campion & Clitherow
The list of
old-school games is long, and even an incomplete
catalogue shows a confusing multitude of clones, hacks, and homebrews. Most
of these systems need no enthusiastic introduction, since they shall mostly
entertain a single gaming group; nor do they deserve scorn for mostly the same
reason. A few have met success as standard systems to play some sort of D&D:
OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, and lately Old
School Essentials, while a few others serve a more specialised
audience. The differences among systems are both impossible and useless to
elucidate, since they are usually minor variations with little functional
difference. You know two or three, and you know most of them.
There are a few publications
in this category which are worthy of special attention, and this review is
about one of them: Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, a hidden gem of
old-school gaming. In this post, I will outline in more detail why this first
unassuming game deserves recognition, but here is the essence. Seven Voyages
is a thoughtful, in-depth reimagination of 1974-era Original D&D that
operates with individually subtle changes to the rules and their
interpretations, but through a multitude of small tricks, creates a coherent
new game out of the smaller pieces. The end result is a legitimately
interesting “alternate history” OD&D with good editing and numerous
innovations which add up. On a personal level, I also consider the game to have
resolved the few fundamental disagreements I have with D&D’s deeper design
decisions, and done so with taste and respect for the original work.
(Note: there are
two versions of the game; an original release from 2014, and a revised one from
2017. There are slight but notable differences in the attack tables, and
details such as bows attacking twice but ranged weapons getting substantially
nerfed.)
* * *
The Basic Idea
Seven Voyages
of Zylarthen mainly builds on LBB (Little Brown
Booklets)-only OD&D. Sticking to the booklets as a general principle sidesteps
one of the issues afflicting other attempts at retro-cloning the original game:
once you start to include concepts from Greyhawk and the other
supplements, your game starts to converge towards AD&D or one of the B/X
systems, losing the qualities which makes the 1974 rules distinct and coherent
in their own right, and making them look like a poor, disorganised prototype of
later, more complex systems. In its core rules, Seven Voyages sticks to
its guns, and while it is not obsessively concerned with conceptual purity, it
puts down a good, practical argument for playing this version of LBB-only OD&D
on its own merits.
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| The Golden Age of Illustration |
The unity of
vision is also apparent in the game’s presentation. Without being obsessive
about it, the game is well edited (something OD&D is not), written with clarity
and a sure hand that remains legible as a reference, while using just enough
flavour to give it character (something OD&D struggles with). It looks like
the OD&D booklets in its choice of typesetting and simple one-column
layout, but benefits from the hindsight and polish of the last few decades. It
also benefits from using the art of a single artist, Victorian storybook
illustrator John Dickson Batten, for its artwork. These pieces, sometimes
altered or cleverly cropped to fit the depicted concepts, but always selected
with a firm taste, are the best example of using public domain art I have seen
in a game supplement. They give Seven Voyages a cohesive feel and a peculiar
identity, they illustrate how we ought to imagine this or that aspect of the
rules, and they give the work an implied setting that is true to OD&D, but
which is also of its own.
Seven Voyages
has its personal voice, its own carefully selected
reading list, and its own take on the OD&D setting. It is less
knights-and-wizards pseudo-mediaeval and more a marriage of Sindbad-style
oriental stories, Victorian fairy tales, plus a decent helping of Greek
mythology and swords-and-sandals sensibilities. To this are added the works of Anderson,
Burroughs, Dunsany, Howard, Leiber (lots of it), Tolkien, and Vance (plus that one
Van Vogt story with the proto-displacer beast). ERB’s Mars books become an even
more prominent influence here than on OD&D, based on incorporating materials
from the unofficial Warriors
of Mars supplement. This is a good reading list, but it is the consistent
application of their repercussions through the rules which make them
effective. These changes to the OD&D base range from smaller, cosmetic
changes (a silver-based monetary system) to interpretations (ability scores are
considered a kind of “heroic range” above normal human capabilities, the gods
are limited “petty gods”) and a few fundamental changes with considerable
downstream effects (radically reimagined classes, the central combat table).
* * *
Character
Creation
Seven Voyages
of Zylarthen’s differences from OD&D
start to emerge at character creation. The six ability scores are rolled with
3d6 in order, but unlike the D&D lineage, these scores are understood to be
a cut above a common man’s capability; so even a 7 or 8 would represent some
sort of heroic ability. In an audacious move, the infamous female Strength rule
makes an appearance: women roll their Strength on a 2d6, but add a point to
every other ability score. Beyond proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Seven
Voyages is most based and redpilled, this rule is a useful gatekeeping test
to weed out communist furry infiltrators. Communist furries will shriek and
curse most loudly; while smart and chadly gamers will clearly realise that
ability scores do rather little in OD&D-based games, and that +1 to all of the
other abilities gives a higher probability of actually hitting the rare bonus.
It must be noted that the author himself has had second thoughts about the rule,
and in the 2017 revision, a similar optional rule goes into effect for male
Wisdom, with interesting consequences shown later. The most common role of
ability scores is in fact to give characters an XP bonus; and unless a player
is dead set to play against type (completely possible without disastrous
consequences), a +10% XP bonus is reasonably easy to obtain for just about
anyone.
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Congratulations, You Have Just Offended
the ________ Community |
True to its
influences, the game makes a large change by removing the Cleric as a playable character
class, and adding a radically reworked Thief who bears more resemblance to
light, lucky swashbuckler characters like Ali Baba, the Mouser and – yes – even
Conan than the classical Bilbo-style burglar. We thus have a lineup closer to
the norm of sword & sorcery tales. Yet even these classes are changed in comparison
with their original form.
- Fighting-Men should be mostly familiar
with more hit dice, faster attack progression, and the ability to use the full
range of weapons and armour (this will confer advantages that we will come back
to later). This is not as straightforward as it sounds thanks to the expanded
combat rules, particularly thanks to the rule granting multiple attacks, but it
is still the same character type.
- Magic-Users are mechanically unchanged,
but their spell list (like OD&D, extending to six spell levels) is a mixture
of traditional M-U, Clerical and Illusionist powers, each level offering 20
known spells. The resulting combinations make for quite interesting character
types; you could play the snake-charming yogi with his cure light wounds and
snake charm, the mesmerist using colour spray, dancing lights,
and ventriloquism, or the traditional sleep/magic missile combat
bot. The slow advancement of M-Us is compounded by their need to obtain new spells
and write them into spellbooks, a costly endeavour which shall further slow
down their advancement due to the game’s XP scheme.
- Thieves are an entirely new
class bearing the same name. Instead of percentile skills that improve with
their level, they benefit from a smattering of fixed special abilities: the
ability to unerringly hide in shadows, but only if unencumbered (this
means carrying almost nothing beyond a dagger); luck (allowing them to reroll,
or forcing an opponent targeting them reroll one die per combat); a flat
4:6 chance to pick locks; a hefty surprise attack bonus (more later on how this
works); familiarity with thieves’ cant and safehouses; and the small but useful
ability to squirrel away 500 coins without incurring encumbrance.
All of these
classes have fancy new level titles, and Seven Voyages uses them in a
matter of fact way in the rulebooks. At first, this is funny and weird (you can
hopefully tell a Thane from a Tregetour, a Mirabilist from a Mouser, and a
Chirosophist from a Courser); then it becomes annoying (is that referring to a
fifth-level Fighting-Man or a sixth-level one?); and finally, natural. There is
a definite learning curve to it. You can also play the usual humanoids with the
usual level limits As in pre-Greyhawk OD&D, Hp is exclusively rolled
with six-siders, you just roll more or less of them for certain levels. Unlike
OD&D, player characters do not necessarily die at 0 Hp, but roll on a
random table with 1d20, with results ranging from instant death to fatal
wounds, permanent injuries, serious wounds requiring surgery (this needs a 500
gp surgery kit) and/or rest, and – rarely – just getting knocked out for good.
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| 4:6 of Poking an Eye Out |
All things
considered (and this is without the benefit of playtesting), the Thief is
lovely, but seems a bit too good to be true. While restricted in armour, they
have decent Hp and saving throws, moderate fighting ability, and a rapid
advancement scheme. A fourth level Dodger will have 4d6 Hp, the ability to
fight with most weapons save the bow, and have Thief abilities at their
disposal, while a fourth level Knight will have 4d6+1 Hp, fight with a +2
bonus, and have the ability to wear heavy armour – while reaching this level
2000 XP later. In OD&D, Thieves advanced quickly because they were fairly
weak, but here, this is no longer the case. All Zylarthen classes are
slightly stronger than the OD&D baseline, but the Thief is very strong
indeed – comparable to an elf, but with rapid advancement and no level limits. I
might be tempted to switch the progression of the class with the Fighting-Man’s
and call it a day.
Where
advancement is considered, Seven Voyages of Zylarthen awards experience
for two sources. This is an excellent choice. It adopts a minor variant of the
LBBs’ monster XP scheme, which was later tossed out in Greyhawk for
being unreasonably generous – this, coincidentally, makes it just right for
modern campaigns, which are not 24/7 affairs. XP is awarded on a 100 x level
basis, then adjusted downwards if the party is adventuring in an unreasonably
easy environment (e.g. a party of 3rd level characters adventuring
on the 2nd dungeon level receives only 2/3 of the calculated monster
XP, but they would gain full XP for descending to level 4). The second source
of experience comes from treasure spent after adventures, on a 1 silver
piece = 1 XP basis (in keeping with the silver-based economy). This rule, which
is essentially identical to one I have implemented in my campaigns, is a good way
to remove excessive gold from the party, as well as emulating swords &
sorcery tales and “Arabian Nights” style adventures – which also tend to
feature spendthrift heroes who can easily blow through a large fortune and
continue without a penny to their name.
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Targeteer or Talismanist?
Your Life May Depend on it! |
The final stage
of character creation concerns equipment and encumbrance. In contrast to
D&D’s mountains of gold, Seven Voyages sticks with the silver
standard. Beginning characters receive their customary 3d6*10 sp, but equipment
prices have been readjusted. Beginning characters will no longer be running
around in plate mail (500 sp), and even mail (200 sp) or fine horses (200 sp)
shall be out of their reach. Most NPC Fighting-Men in Zylarthen will be
lightly armoured in the style of the Ancients, and only elite armies will be
kitted out in heavy gear. Magic-Users shall receive their first-level magic
book for free, but will have to spend 2000 sp per level on books for
higher-powered spells.
To all this is
added a neat slot-based encumbrance system rated in dots (o). Items are rated from one to several dots, each occupying a single
space in inventory; a few will count as “zero items” for the first item and one
for subsequent ones (e.g. dagger, a set of clothes), and tiny ones will incur
no encumbrance at all. This is all rated on a 1-20 scale depicted on the
character sheet, and filled up as you go, from unencumbered (0-5 o) to light (6-10 o), medium
(11-15 o), and heavy (16-20 o) – with consequences for movement and other activities. Since even
a shield is ooooo and mail is ooooo o, and weapons tend to go from oo to ooooo, carrying items and loot will be a major consideration during play.
Thieves, in particular, will need to travel lightly, especially if they wish to
hide in shadows. They may wear leather (o) with a helmet (o) and
carry a buckler (o) along with a sword (o), but this leaves a single slot to stay “unencumbered”, or six to stay
light. This is not too easy to do with dungeoneering gear. (Notably, the Reference
Sheets include 18 ready-made equipment packages you can roll for on a
class-by-class basis.)
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| Two Third-Level Characters |
Combat and
Magic Rules
Seven Voyages
adds a more complex combat system to OD&D, and implements
a radical innovation in combat resolution. Instead of an attack chart broken
down by level and AC, all PC and NPC attacks are conducted on a weapon vs. AC
matrix. This was a central mechanic in Chainmail, but was only brought
back for D&D in an awkward fashion – something for the hardcore pocket
calculator types. Well, there is nothing complicated about this table: the
simple genius of it is that you roll your d20, add your class-based modifier if
any (this is the “Man +2”, “Man +5”, etc. of the character advancement table),
and look up on your character sheet to determine which targets you will beat.
As easy as pie, and it introduces a nice difference between weapons: spears and
polearms are very useful against lightly armoured opponents but less so against
armoured ones, while maces, hammers and battleaxes can crack plate a tad easier
than a sword. There are further differences:
- Weapons are ranked by “weapon
class”, from 0 (unarmed) and 1 (dagger) to progressively longer implements like
spears (10), polearms (11) and lances (12). This establishes initiative order
in a double fashion: a man with a spear shall attack a man coming at him
with a sword before his foe can reach him, but this advantage will not be in
effect in subsequent rounds when the fighters have closed in. In fact, if
initiatives are tied at this point, the man with the smaller, quicker sword can
stab the spearman before it is the spearman’s move!
- While all weapon damage is 1d6
by default, some get a -1 damage penalty vs. large opponents (daggers, axes and
bludgeoning types), and some get a +1 bonus (longswords, spears, polearms and
lances).
- Weapons may be broken on a
natural 20, or when slaying a powerful or heavily armoured opponent (this is a
simple saving throw based on item cost and the opponent’s armour – yes, that spear
will break on you, so make your spear-carrier bring a spare or two).
- Finally, weapons have a
frontage in feet needed for effective use, limiting the number of combatants per
rank (daggers, axes, spears and smaller swords require 3 feet, maces,
longswords and hammers 5-5, and the mighty battleaxe and morningstar need 10).
- Missile attacks
are governed by slightly different rules. In the first version of Seven
Voyages, they may be fired once per round; and in the second, they can be
used twice, but they are harder to hit with, and plate is essentially
impervious to missile fire by anyone except a 7th level or more
powerful Fighting-Man. In either version, archery must be declared at the start
of the round like spellcasting, prevents movement (except for Elves, who can
“move and fire” in the Chainmail fashion), and may be disrupted by successful
hits.
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| The Main Combat Tables |
This is the gist
of the basic combat procedures, but Seven Voyages introduces a handful
of more complex optional rules and special cases, from disarming or driving
back a foeman to handling fire and pots of burning oil. These are
well-considered, reasonably simple, and useful to add to a campaign. Some of
the more interesting ones are…
- Critical hits, rolled on a
natural 20s, will inflict two dice of damage, but a weapon break roll is
called.
- Extra damage dice may be added
at the price of a -5 attack roll penalty each. This makes sense of the Thief’s
+9/+16/+24 surprise bonus: it allows a Thief to strike surely, or inflict
several dice worth of damage with a sure hand.
- Mounted combat gives +2 vs.
non-mounted opponents, and +4 when charging – reflecting how useful horses can
be on the battlefield.
- Multiple melee attacks are
possible against grouped opponents with a lower HD – one per HD of the
attacker, up to four. This rule may not be combined with extra damage dice, but
it makes Fighting-Men particularly effective (even Magic-Users can also take
advantage of it from level 3, if they are particularly reckless).
- Helmets are struck on any
unmodified 7, and any character who is too stupid, too poor, or too Magic-User
to don one, will be struck automatically with an extra damage die. Ouch!
- Shields (and M-Us’ staves) may
be sacrificed to block a single successful strike before damage is rolled.
Thieves’ bucklers, which otherwise grant the same protection, are not useful for
this purpose.
- And yes, there is Turning
Undead. As Seven Voyages has no Cleric class, any character may
attempt to turn undead creatures by presenting a true holy symbol. Except… the
Turning Undead roll is modified by high and low Wisdom. If you will remember, men
in the 2017 version of Seven Voyages of Zylarthen have only 2d6 for
their Wisdom roll, so as a cascading effect, there is a very good probability
your all-male adventuring party will not be turning too many critters above the
ghoul/shadow level.
Magic in Seven
Voyages is reasonably close to its OD&D antecedents. As mentioned
before, Magic-Users will need to expend considerable effort on obtaining
spellbooks (each of which may hold 12 spells of a given level), and filling
them with new spells. The game covers six levels of spells, combining the
Magic-User spell list with some additions from the Cleric, and even a few from the
AD&D Illusionist. With 20 spells per level, this is a decent selection, and
returns to OD&D’s cleaner idea of magic where the likes of teleport,
disintegrate, geas and stone to flesh represent the apex of spell
power. Still, I must confess a slight dissatisfaction: where the game was bold
in moulding most character rules to its intended tone and assumed setting, the
spell list is rather bare-bones. We have the perennial favourites, but not much
in the way of new, colourful stuff. It is a decent baseline, but not more than
that.
* * *
Monsters and Treasure
Before Greyhawk
and the other supplements, D&D was a game with a very different menagerie
than we now recognise. Nowhere are found later dungeon favourites like the beholder,
the owlbear or the rust monster; some, like gelatinous cubes, are only referred
to as possibilities, while insects and animals are left to a single vague
description noting that “These can be any of a huge variety of creatures
such as wolves, centipedes, snakes or spiders.” (OD&D, vol. 2, p. 20)
The bestiary is therefore a mish-mash of Tolkien creatures, monsters from
classical antiquity and British folklore (but almost none from mediaeval
bestiaries except the gorgon and the cockatrice), standard undead, and a few
slimes, goops, and blobs. How a LBB-derived game builds its own monster roster
is therefore a very interesting dilemma.
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| Stalking U |
Seven Voyages picks and chooses from the expanded OD&D and AD&D roster,
but does so by putting its own stamp on this eclectic bag of material. Here, Mr.
Spalding works magic with seemingly familiar ingredients and a little editing:
much of what you see will be known D&D fare, but there is often a neat
trick or small flourish that adapts the monster to the game’s implied setting. Consider
the monsters which could not be included in the rules under their proper name for
legal reasons. They are still there, but new: we have the dreaded phaetonian, “a
rare and sometimes extremely malignant being, native to the planet Jupiter, […]
a levitating mass of pseudopods and eyestalks, framing a huge central eye”
(this surely describes a sordid creature from a less known Greek myth), shift panthers
“shifting” electromagnetic waves and attacking “out of an ever-present
hunger to devour a protein substance usually found only in bone marrow”
(inspired by the Van Vogt story), tentacle men “rumoured to live in
inaccessible ancient communities many miles beneath the earth”, or solians,
“native to the interior of the Sun but sometimes encountered in the deepest
depths of the earth”, terrible winged beings which are only coincidentally
identical to OD&D’s balrogs in their statistics.
Then, a second
group of monsters are adapted from the game’s main source materials: there is a
whole procession of Barsoomian imports, from thoats and banths to the
intelligent Martian species (including a few of their radio-era technological
devices – radium pistols, disintegration rays, mechanical brains, and the
like). Robots and androids, mentioned but never actually described in OD&D,
make an appearance in their pulp era “mechanical men” forms. Gods and goddesses
are described in a very D&Dish mixture that takes a little from Babylon to
the Kalevala (although not given stats – the entries describe their potential
behaviour in a game campaign). These divine beings are fallible and flawed “petty
gods”, and the game leaves open the possibility of a greater Creator existing
above them all (this theory was quite widespread among the educated classes of classical
Greece and Rome).
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Roc On!
(Not Even the Last Fight On!
Themed Joke Here) |
We find some odd
decisions I am still ruminating on. The game’s general rules are consistent in
using a d6 HD and damage die (some larger monsters of course do multiple dice
of damage), but in the Book of Monsters, the rule is broken multiple
times: undead roll d12s for Hp, lycanthropes roll d10s, and Martians roll d8s. This
is a deliberate choice, and fairly weird, since some undead then have their HD
reduced – skeletons and zombies are ½ HD, wights and wraiths are 2 HD – but some
don’t, as mummies are still 5+1 HD, and vampires 7 or 9 – rolled with
twelve-sided dice. That is just brutal, especially when you WILL fail to turn
them due to your low Wisdom (see above). Then there are important adjustments:
monsters are all assigned a correct AC that matches up with the way they would
be armoured, and not just in the sense of “stronger critter = better AC”.
For all the work
on the monsters, nowhere does this volume deliver good stuff better than in its
treatment of human NPCs. D&D’s well-known “man types” are supplemented with
Vikings, amazons, assassins and, most crucially, soldiers of various troop
types and compositions. This is a very useful entry, outlining differences
between, say, peltasts, Varangians, koursors and turcopoles (troop types which
give the game a great flavour), with their typical equipment, organisation and
morale, and adding a quick table to see how the army is currently faring,
whether it is a friendly or foreign force, and whether they are hostile towards
the surrounding countryside, and, thus, the party.
- For example, we may find
ourselves face to face with hoplites equipped with spears plus swords or axes,
wearing mail and shields, consisting of 500 men, with a morale bonus of +0, currently
victorious, and (since we are in the wilderness) being a foreign group who are
not currently hostile.
- The next military group, then,
will be a mixed force of three types: 160 irregulars (they will only carry
spears, various small arms, and wear leather with -1 to morale), 120
crossbowmen (crossbow, sword or axe, leather, +0 morale) and 240 turcopoles (mounted
crossbowmen, also equipped with shields, +1 morale). They are on an exercise, a
foreign force, and not hostile.
We also have a
type affectionately and aptly called “Evil Men”. Most Evil Men are just
character types allied with Chaos. Here, we have the initially dubious-sounding
pleasure of relearning those level titles, which once again shows that
this is a based and redpilled game for true connoisseurs. It would not do to call
an evil fifth level Fighting-Man a Defender; no, he (or she) is in fact a
Rakehell, on his or her way to becoming a Villain! Likewise, the party Thief
will be a Sicarian (but not yet a Phansigar), and the Magic-User a
prestigious-sounding Hecatonarch. Better learn these, because they will be
referred to on the encounter charts in Volume IV.
However, the
most fascinating part is undoubtedly the section dedicated to NPC spellcasters.
As it has been mentioned, Clerics were removed from the roster of playable
classes, but they are surely found in the adventures? This is indeed the case,
and they are not given short shrift – along with Druids and Witches, they
receive their own specific powers. It is all very creative, and here is how it
goes:
- Evil High Priests or
Priestesses (as well as their Lawful counterparts) are not spellcasters per
se, but they receive around two to four formidable powers. For example,
Thromekthes, 8th level Evil High Priest of The Spider God, will have
laser eyes and wind walk; while Iomene, 13th level High
Priestess of Artemis, shall have commune, mass hypnosis, and weather
manipulation. Regular priests are not spell-casters, just powerful men with
4 HD and an aura of divine favour.
- Druids are “priests of a savage
nature religion”, casting Magic-User spells, as well as having the ability to
turn into small animals.
- Witches are ridiculously
high-level relatives of the giants, possessing a dangerous magic staff only
they can use, with good odds for a crystal ball as well. They have their
own power list, including formidable things like indefinitely controlling
the seasons within their domain, ensorcell a major item, or vanish/appear
familiar places where and when they please.
These, alone,
make the game’s second volume worth the price of admission.
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| Fight O... ooooh NOOOOO! |
Fewer good
things may be mentioned about Volume III. As already discussed, the player
spells are decent but not special. However, it is the magic item section where Seven
Voyages drops the ball. This, I think, is a blemish on an otherwise very
imaginative and thoughtfully constructed game. Not that the treasure section
does anything worse than a competent LBB clone with a bunch of additions from
the supplements and the advanced game, or that its magic item selection is poor
– the problem is that it does not do anything more, which we might have
expected from the previous materials. Perhaps age and too much familiarity with
eyes of charming, horns of Valhalla and horseshoes of Zephyr have
made us cynical. But this was a great opportunity for more exotic fare dreamed
up by the author, and the opportunity was not exploited – more’s the pity.
* * *
Campaign
Building
The game’s final
volume is a relatively slim one. It is not a full treatise on constructing and
managing Seven Voyages of Zylarthen campaigns, and leaves out some of
the flourishes found in OD&D (castle construction, ship-to-ship warfare,
and airborne combat are omitted). However, it is a decent collection of tools
and instructions for setting up a campaign, while also pointing to further
useful material (Philotomy’s Musings and A Quick Primer for
Old-School Gaming – Wayne Rossi’s Original D&D Setting, another
contender for inclusion, is mentioned in the appendix).
Guidance for
adventures in the Underworld follows the good advice of the LBBs, and gives
concise but useful instructions to make good dungeons. (A sample level, and the
relevance of level connections illustrated on a sidecut connection map might
have been nice.) It retains OD&D’s focus on doors being stuck and hard to
force open, something that adds significantly to gameplay. It also provides
sensible falling rules for pits: while shallow ones will not kill a character,
deep pits force a save vs. death for every 6 Hp of damage to avoid breaking a
limb.
The dungeon
encounter charts use the “dipper”
approach of OD&D, where monsters drift up from the lower level charts,
although instead of the original game’s six depth levels (which could soon get
very nasty), we have twelve, with a bit of a cushion. Thus, the Level 1 chart
will have monsters from charts A, B, C (these are relatively easy man types and
lesser monsters), 1 and 2. By the time you are down to Level 5, you can meet 7th
level monsters like elephants, basilisk, mummies, and white apes. The tables
are in the general well done, with good variety (this is an underappreciated
area of game design, but one which needs pointing out), and theoretically
includes Gods and Goddesses on the lowest levels.
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Less Complicated Than
it May Seem! |
Wilderness rules
are basic in the 2014 version, and much expanded in the revision. Movement is
conducted in 30-mile hexes (very much unlike the “OSR standard” six-mile hex,
or the five-mile hexes used in OD&D), and, in the revised version, follows
an interesting dice-based system. To be able to enter the neighbouring hex, the
party must roll under their adjusted daily movement rate with an 1d20, or they
will remain in the hex for the day. The basic rate will be 10, first modified
by mounts if they are available (camels add +3, ponies +4, and light horses
+7), then adjusted by a multiplier derived by the terrain type (roads and clear
terrain allow full movement, the likes of woods and deserts cut movement to ½,
and swamps or mountains to 1/3). Weather conditions further cut down this rate:
great heat and heavy rain to 75% of the previous value, light fog or snow to
50%, and a blizzard or torrential rains to 25%. That is, your company mounted
on light horses might start with 17 points, but passing through woods would
reduce this to 8 – you may be able to travel to the next hex that day, but it
is more likely it will take two days, or even three if you are unlucky, or if
you are forced to hunt for food (-2 modifier). One risk here is that without
provisions, the characters will soon gain dots of “virtual encumbrance” at a
rate of oooo per day without food, and oooo oooo oooo (yes, 12 dots) without water, which may be reduced with a
successful adversity check to ooo and oooo oooo, respectively (and then you just die at 35 dots). There is an
interesting “man vs. nature” mini-game here that’s not usually a part of
D&D, compounded by particularly brutal odds of getting lost on unfamiliar
terrain. The whole system is also applied to air travel (riding a hippogriff or
a giant eagle is the gentleman’s choice) and various ship types, which are
affected by wind strength and direction.
 |
More Than an Hour
Well Spent |
A good set of
outdoors encounter tables (which are reasonably cross-pollinated, e.g. rolling
on the “Arid Plains” table sometimes throws in a group of “Flyers”, or
something from the nearest different terrain type) is then followed by a
section titled “How to Create a ‘World’ in Under an Hour”. This is,
essentially, a methodology for setting up wilderness sandboxes, with a focus on
creating a fun map conductive to adventure... by exploiting a random generation
function in Hexographer, and
then adjusting to fit. While it is tied to a legacy version of a specific hex
mapping tool, this is a fun mapping method you can mess around with at work
home while setting up your coastlines and islands, placing forests and mountain
ranges, and finally peppering it with points of interest, but in no way does it
take “under an hour”. My effort, at least, lasted about a long evening, until I
feel into my bed, dead tired but reasonably happy about what I have wrought.
The booklet
concludes with a section on monster languages. This aspect of play receives unusual
attention in Zylrthen’s rules, down to establishing language families which
are an entry noted in the monster stats. You have the common “Type A” language,
then more specific families such as the Barsoomian “Type B”, elemental
languages (“Type E”), a type spoken by dwarves, elves, goblins and treants (“Type
M”), and even “Type J” languages, referring to isolates and minor alien/lost
languages which are not spoken outside a very small circle. This is a quite obscure
area from my perspective, but obviously done with a lot of thought – so, if
languages are your thing, this is a variant worth considering.
* * *
Supplement I:
The Book of Spells
I would be
remiss not to mention the game’s first, and to this date only supplement. This
addition came out in 2017, and makes an effort to double the number of spells
in the game from 150 to 296, and “to continue the process of “re-imagining”
the original fantasy adventure game”. This was not a good idea. Certainly,
this booklet adds “more stuff”, mainly by plundering the Druid spell list and
extending the Magic-User spell range to 9 spell levels. But it does not really
add to the imaginary range of Seven Voyages; it does not make it more
distinct and rich – in fact, it makes it weaker.
 |
| Don't Fall For This One |
The real strength
of the game is found in working with a consistent LBB-based framework and exploiting
the possibilities of this system. The rules carefully weighed what to
incorporate and what to leave out. Supplement I, like OD&D’s Greyhawk,
leaves behind the consistent and neat world of a tightly designed game, and
starts to look like a game with bolted-on bits. In OD&D’s case, this was the
beginning of the road towards AD&D, but for Seven Voyages, there is
no compelling reason to move in this direction. A six-level spell system, just
like a 9- or 12-level advancement system, is neat: it sets a sensible barrier
to the accumulation of power, while letting players reach that level over the span
of a long campaign. Self-contained, closed-end advancement systems close a can
of worms that was opened with Greyhawk and then never properly addressed
until Ryan Stoughton on ENWorld developed the E6
variant. While some character might realistically hope to aim for disintegrate
and invisible stalker, nobody will ever reach the level of power to
cast enchant boats or the white puff ball spell, and for NPC Arcimagi,
we do not need a spell to describe how they enchant a boat – they just do.
The Book of
Spells, therefore, is not something that was really
needed, and I seriously doubt it really adds much to the game. Although… it
does expand the list of High Priest and Witch powers, from 12 and 20 to about
40 each. These may be useful to consider for your campaigns, but I would not
add the rest. The lesson is eternal: if something is already very good, it is
better not to mess with it. Seven Voyages of Zylarthen does not need to
grow in this direction. What is Campion & Clitherow up to? Mr. Spalding has
published an Almanac of Fantasy Weather, probably a useful utility
product if you are very deep into climate models, but no adventures or
setting material for the game have seen the light – and more’s the pity.
* * *
Conclusions
As it may be apparent
from this long and detailed review, Seven Voyages of Zylarthen has
struck me as an excellent old-school game, and precisely the kind of release
that old-school gaming needs. It is something that builds on the rich
traditions of gaming with respect, yet with a powerful vision to personalise it;
it is funny and charming where needed, and intelligent in its re-imagination of
the LBB rules. It lets the original game shine with a new polish. Of course, it
does not replace it, and it may be that you will need a healthy appreciation of
the OD&D spirit to appreciate it to its fullest. Certainly, the broader “OSR”
has barely acknowledged its existence, and that is no accident: this is really
a game of another time, belonging more to the Fight On! and Knockspell
era than what came afterwards. It is not without flaws or rough edges, and it
is the definition of niche.
 |
Why, yes, this OSE game looks nice...
But have you heard of Seven Voyages? |
However, Seven
Voyages of Zylarthen wins on its strengths, and what a glorious victory it
is! It manages to recapture something, something of that elusive playful
spirit and infectious imagination that you can see in OD&D. If you are an
old hand at playing D&D, Seven Voyages is different and distinct
enough to feel like a new game, or to let you view the original game through
a different lens, and to gain newfound appreciation for how elegant it
is under the bad art and worse editing. This is D&D fantasy by way of
Sindbad and brass cupolas, glittering seas and Harryhausen-style Greek myths,
depicted through the repurposed illustrations of a Golden Age illustrator. Yet
it is not a mere question of exploring a set of aesthetics, but craft: imaginatively
modified (or just skilfully selected) mechanics supporting that vision, and
going all the way to make it happen. It can, therefore, be cherry-picked for
good ideas (and it has plenty), but it is the whole that truly makes it
excellent. And remember: one man, Oakes Spalding, fixed weapon vs. AC, which was
written off first as complicated, then as outright
broken. That deserves respect.
This is,
obviously, not a playtest review; but I intend to remedy this with a campaign later
this year, as I see these rules as uniquely suited for the world of Fomalhaut
(with a few house rules); as they would also be excellent for the Wilderlands, Lankhmar,
Planet Algol, or some similar
sword & sorcery setting. Bring it on, and let’s not forget: that Wisdom
score is rolled with 2d6, no exceptions and no excuses.
This publication
credits (at least some of) its playtesters, who seem to be the author’s
children, in the dedication. Sweet!
Rating: ***** /
*****
