REIGN
By Dave McAlister • Feb 23rd, 2008 • Category: ReviewsA roleplaying game of social clashes and historic decisions, in which the fates of nations and cultures hinge on the actions of a few bold visionaries.
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Dave McAlister is a dedicated geek, combining his enjoyment of roleplaying games with website design and runs UK Role Players. Dave has been roleplaying for almost 25 years now, having played and/or run most mainstream systems. His current favourite though is Savage Worlds. Dave also likes talking about himself in the third person!
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(Originally posted by The Strange Dude)
Reign is available through lulu (waiting time is about a month) or Leisure games (bit more pricey). It has been written by Greg Stolze who also wrote Unknown Armies and had a hand in Wild Talents. Available in either softback or hardback 363 pages.
The System
Reign uses the O.R.E. sytem (One Roll Engine) an intuitive easy to pick up system of mid crunch level (a less detailed free version of O.R.E. can be found here http://arcdream.com/pdf/Nemesis.pdf for FREE!). Rolls are made using a number of d10 equal to the stat plus the skill (with a few modifiers and different dice types to keep things interesting), from this roll you make sets (matching dice) the width of the roll (The number of matching dice) indicates the speed/damage of the action where as the height (the number on the dice) indicates how well you did or where you hit.
Character creation is easy to handle and offers three ways of doing things
1) Point buy system
2) Random One Roll Characters (roll 11 d10 sets give professions waste dice give random life events)
3) Semi random you can choose to set some of the 11 dice to give you the career you want then roll the rest.
The company system is prehaps this games biggest selling point as it allows you to model groups from a thieves guild to an empire and allow players to influence the outcome of thier actions.
Large groups of ‘Unworthy’ opponents are also covered allowing your pc’s to face off against large groups of mooks with no real headache for the GM.
Combat has options upon options from display kills (which force moral checks on unworthy opponents) to Disfiguring strikes (deliberate facial wounding of your opponent to make them ugly) plus the usual array of disarms, grappling and the like. Combat is however quite deadly a lucky strike can lay low the mightiest fighter.
The World
This is a strange one, the world is described as two dead bodies lying in the water (which leads to strange physical phenomena like the sea being at right angles to the ground). The Nations are given short but very informitive sections with each nation having it’s own ‘flavour’. It’s well written and thought out stuff but to be honest I’m more likely to use Reign for other things more on that later.
Support
There are already 2 supplements out for Reign which Greg is publishing using the ransom model (He puts up a short description of what’s in the supplement and ransoms it people donate money until the set target is reached at which point it’s made free for anyone to download). The Nemesis system web board also has a forum for the game and plenty of downloads.
Conclusion
Reign at heart is a fast easy to use system with some funky ideas and top class writting, but it’s strongest point is it’s adaptability the fact it can be turned to almost anything. The company rules open up this adaptability even more infact my first thoughts on reading it was Rome (the TV series) could be done so well.
I’d give it a solid 8 out of 10