I’m still (every once in a long while) playing my own unique fusion of For Gold and Glory/Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Second Edition)/Rangers & Rabbits. It’s amazingly fun, and H. R. Hufflepuff the Badger Paladin has just purchased a steed, so I’m hoping for some opportunity to charge a foe wielding a lance. (Huff’s mount is a snailodon – think of a Clydesdale horse-sized saber-toothed snail. Total awesome sauce.)
This month, however, I’m going to discuss a game that I’ve just acquired, for free: Mazes and Minotaurs (Revised Edition). Mazes and Minotaurs is a new-ish game, but it was based on the idea of “what if the world’s first role playing game was written after watching Jason and the Argonauts instead of after reading The Lord of the Rings?” To answer that question, the good folks at Legendary Games Studio (LGS) wrote not only one RPG, but two. The first one, Mazes and Minotaurs, is more of an homage to the original D&D rules, and is all in one 74-page document. This version was apparently written in another, parallel universe, in which it WAS the first RPG. (Well, that’s the in-character story.) LGS had, as their design goal: a nostalgic pastiche of early fantasy roleplaying games, a tongue-in-cheek tribute to old-school gaming, and a complete and fully playable roleplaying game. I believe they succeeded quite well. Mazes and Minotaurs is available at http://storygame.free.fr/MM1.html, I urge you to take a look at it. Then, go to http://mazesandminotaurs.free.fr/revised.html and download the “Revised Edition,” which I’ll be discussing here. Not being satisfied with just this, though, Legendary Games Studio also produced the four books for the Revised Mazes and Minotaurs RPG: The Player’s Handbook, The Maze Master’s Guide, The Creature Compendium, and the M&M Companion. (These are from the same alternate universe that produced the “original M&M”, but in declare themselves to be from 1987.) This game is similar in nature to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game, with more classes, magic, items, and so forth than the “original” one, while keeping the same design goals of being nostalgic, a tribute, and being completely playable. Even more than the other game, though, this is very playable, and quite expansive. Character Creation The game has several steps in creating a new player character. First, you must choose a class. There are twelve classes to choose from, organized into three groups: warriors, magicians, and specialists. The warrior group consists of Amazons, Barbarians, Centaurs, Nobles, and Spearmen; the magicians are Elementalists, Lyrists, Nymphs, Priests, and Sorcerers. There are two types of specialists, Hunters and Thieves. Notice that there are gender restrictions on some classes: for example, Amazons and Nymphs must be female, while Barbarians, Centaurs, and Spearmen must be male. Priests of gods are male, whilst their counterparts of goddesses must be female. The next step is to generate ability scores. In keeping with the desire to create a game with an old-school feel, the six ability scores (“basic attributes”) are generated randomly, using two six-sided dice and adding six to the total (2d6+6), generating a number between 8 and 18. These attributes are: Might (physical strength), Skill (adroitness and martial training), Wits (alertness and cleverness), Luck (good fortune and divine favor), Will (resolve and self-discipline) and Grace (charm and appeal). Each of the twelve character classes has two primary attributes, two which the highest scores must be assigned. The other scores may be placed however the player wishes. From these scores are derived almost every other detail: hit points, melee and missile attack bonuses, initiative, base defense class, and even saving throws. After the attributes are rolled up and placed as the player desires, the modifiers for each attribute is determined. These modifiers are used to determine the other details mentioned above. For example, the Defense Class is equal to 12 plus the Luck modifier, plus 2 points for each piece of armor (helmet, breastplate, and shield.) Each class has a starting equipment list, as well as a variable amount of “starting cash.” Nobles, for example, start with a sword, dagger, shield, helmet, breastplate, and 3d6x100 silver pieces; Thieves, on the other hand, only start with a dagger and 3d6x5 silver pieces. From start to finish, including purchasing equipment, it took me 20 minutes to create a player character. This is very fast. The process is easy and fairly well laid out The biggest issue is the standard equipment list has prices, but the encumbrance of items is on another page, and not all of the items on the equipment list have encumbrance values. Unlike other systems, encumbrance is pretty important in Mazes and Minotaurs – for example, stealth attempts use the attempting character’s encumbrance as a target number. There are also not as many items on the equipment list as I’d like there to be. (This simply means that the Maze Master – what they call the game master – has a lot more work to do when his party wants to buy things.) The Other Bits The “engine” of the game is very well designed, with simple, easy to follow rules (and not an overabundance of them.) Something I like the concept of is the “weapon of choice”: when a PC uses his weapon of choice in combat, he rolls two d20s and uses the better result. (An idea I first encountered with D&D 5th Edition.) Something that would take some getting used to, on the other hand, is that all weapons use a d6 for damage (except for daggers in melee: they do d3.) The Maze Master’s Guide contains lots of guidelines for creating adventures, including a method of generating random islands (for all those ocean journeys from the myths and legends), and a helpful way of generating plot hooks. It also gives some helpful information about the gods and goddesses of Greek myth, as well as an overview of the default setting, the world of Mythika. The Creature Compendium has hundreds of creatures, folk, monsters, and humans to encounter, including statistics and drawings. Some of the entries are pretty obvious nods to other games: the Orkos (singular Orkoi) who “are barbaric and brutish humanoids who use Giant Boars as mounts. They roam in packs led by their bloodthirsty warlords and gleefully engage in acts of plunder, rape, wanton destruction and mass slaughter” easily remind one of D&D’s orcs, for example. The fourth book of the game is the “Mazes and Minotaurs Companion.” This book contains optional rules – and nothing but options. Some of the options include an alternate Amazon class, as well as a few other optional classes; an alternate advancement scheme (instead of using the default Glory/Wisdom/Experience point system found in the Player’s Handbook); and many, many other ways of personalizing your game. It’s going to be a while before I can actually play this game. It’s on the pile of other games that I’m looking forward to playing, though, joining Starships and Spacemen, Mutant Future, and many others. A very definite “thumbs up!” Grab some dice, and let’s start killin’ some goblins – er, I mean minotaurs … Sum non Satis? Commodore Tank Clark, SFMD Team Leader, 33rd STARFLEET Rangers (“The Paladins”) “Have Phaser, Will Travel”
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Commodore Tank ClarkCommodore Clark has been the Team Leader of the 33rd STARFLEET Rangers for several years. His monthly articles about games (usually Role-Playing Games -- RPGs -- but sometimes about other tabletop forms of entertainment) appear regularly in the Regulator Charge!, the ship's newsletter. Archives
September 2017
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