[Review] Reign Enchiridion

I ordered Reign: Enchiridion the other day. It's a digest-sized version of the game Reign, a tome which I have not bought or read because I can't be bothered with 300+ page rulebooks any more, and because other peoples' precious settings usually bore me and certainly won't be used. Reign: Enchiridion has all of the setting guff excised and is, basically, a generic rule-set for running fantasy games with the One Roll Engine to go alongside Nemesis (for horror) and Wild Talents (for supers). It's also only around 100 pages long and is A5-sized, which as we all know is how God intended game books to be.

For the price, it's an excellent product. The core mechanic for ORE is a model of efficiency and usefulness; intuitive to use but very flexible and friendly towards strategic and tactical play without being overly crunchy. The book contains tools for creating schools of magic and random generators for monsters, spells, and advanced skills and combat methods. It provides options for doing character gen through point-buy and random generation. And there is a nice unity throughout: anything that you do, whether creating a character or generating a mystical martial art, is done by simply rolling a fistful d10s and looking for matches. It also has a small but significant boon: decent shield rules.

There are some niggles. The author, Greg Stolze, is clearly somebody who has drunk the White Wolf koolaid when it comes to "story": his GMing advice is all about plot immunity for players and giving them orgasms (at one point, it is recommended that you "give the player a chance to strut" by having enemies deliberately play to his strengths; at another, you are told that death is the consequence for failing to cast a certain type of spell..."but never for PCs"). There is an abstract wealth mechanic. (Insert roll-eyes smiley of your choice here.) And I'm not a fan of "worthless enemies", a concept that was either lifted from 4e D&D or inspired by it: having a different set of standards for the PCs and NPCs when it comes to combat is the way of madness, or at least meaningless games. But those are to be expected from a game system that was written in the time and context in which this was, and are easily ignored.

On balance, it is a good, quick-to-learn generic fantasy system that is much more elegant than the other examples I can think of and much easier to learn. Since the ORE system already has a variant for Call of Cthulhu-type horror, that means it now ticks two of my main gaming boxes (non-D&D fantasy and Call of Cthulhu-type horror); that's not bad for about £8 incl. p&p.