Beastfolk Class for Aketon

A friend recently showed me Aketon, a slimmed-down revamp of Chainmail which is rules-lite enough to count as just the aketon. Besides offering a refreshing pun to the long tradition of games named after weapons or armor, it's a neat 2d6 system that's still compatible with the majority of B/X and other OSR-adjacent material.

It's the kind of game where having 2 hit points is a lot but also not a lot at all, there's no character level limit, PCs can fight alongside a warband of hirelings without using a second combat system, and character classes are only 5 short lines of text (unless they have a special ability or spellcasting, which is another 5 lines). It's also surprisingly solo-friendly if you pull in a few tools from elsewhere, I've learned.

Inspired by the Mystara-esque Beastfolk from Land of Mist and a post I made about half-orc, half-somethings last year, I decided to take a crack at writing my own character class for Aketon.

Introducing the Beastfolk, a hybrid culture of all the orcs, goblins, and other folks who banded together after their homes were Adventured off the map by encroaching demihumans.

Beastfolk

At level zero: +1 HP, one random clan trait
Levels divisible by 2: +1 Death, Blasts, or Fear save
Levels divisible by 3: +1 HP
Levels divisible by 4: +1 to-hit if you act first in a turn
Levels divisible by 5: +1 to a random clan trait

Clan Traits

Many humanoids banded together for protection as they fled the demihuman invaders.
A beastfolk's patchwork ancestry can manifest in random and sometimes fantastical ways:

1) Goblin, +1 to thievery actions                       4) Orc, +1 reroll Death save at 0 HP
2) Hobgoblin, +1 fatigue ignored per day         5) Ogre, +1 big item carried
3) Bugbear, +1 to-hit while ambushing             6) Troll, +1 HP per rest 

(Optionally you could make it so orcs get 1 "free" hit while at 0 HP that causes another level of fatigue on top of the one they suffered from dropping to 0, but that doesn't fit within the brief format. Better if you were writing a few house rules and gave it a proper name like "Die Hard". Since both options are inspired by various orcs dying hard in the 3.P era I grew up in.)

A beastperson from Land of Mist, artist unknown,
but it's not done in Tara Quinn's signature style,
so it's gotta be either Finny or Emily Eastman.

Thoughts on Porting/Adapting/Fudging The Banner Saga to Tabletop

The Banner Saga, or Post-Apocalyptic Oregon Trail Viking Tactics DX as I like to call it, was the first video game I ever saw crowdfunded. Though I lacked the money to participate in or experience it until almost a decade after the trilogy started, it has lived in my head in some form or another ever since. I have certain gripes about the lack of interactivity with the ancestral banner that gives the series its namesake, and questions about the way some of the cumulative choices pan out across the series, but I enjoyed the moment-to-moment gameplay, story beats, and lavish artstyle throughout. Do recommend.

Often I wonder how I'd go about porting or adapting the game to a tabletop setting because for some reason I need the things I like to bleed into every other medium I like. But I never got around to trying before now because it feels like equal parts convoluted and "yeah, duh". But since I'm now the guy who spitballs Dragonlance x Talislanta mashups, it feels silly not to just go for it already.

Gameplay in TBS falls into three major categories that I will call combat, caravaning, and conversation.

Combat

Most of your time spent playing TBS is spent fighting or preparing to fight battles, in which individual characters take turns moving around a grid-based map and using abilities that reward planning and positioning. If you're familiar with the FinFan Tactics series or basically any Ogre Battle game besides The March of the Black Queen or Person of Lordly Calibur, you already know the basics.

Where TBS differs is the fact that every character has two separate "health" bars that have to be managed carefully, and a turn order system that encourages spreading the damage around, rather than defeating enemies one by one.

Because tactics video games and combat-heavy fantasy TTRPGs have so much shared DNA, I think that overall the TBS system can be ported to tabletop directly, with only minor adaptations to the turn and actions systems. The end result is something that feels quite different from combat systems where you roll dice for everything, but I think that's somewhat refreshing.

Stats

Every character in TBS, regardless of class, has the same stats in common. These are Strength, Armor, Willpower, Exertion, Break, Movement Range, and Attack Range:

• Strength (STR) is both attack power and health; you deal as much damage with attacks as you have STR, and once you reach 0 STR you're defeated.
• Armor (ARM) is a pool of damage reduction that decreases direct STR damage you suffer before being depleted. A 3 STR attack against someone with 2 ARM will remove the ARM first and only deal 1 STR damage.
• Willpower (WIL) is a pool of points you can spend on actions to improve them. 1 WIL = 1 extra tile of movement, 1 more point of STR or ARM damage, an enhanced version of an ability, etc.
• Exertion (EXE) is how many Willpower points you can dump into a given action. 2 EXE means you can spend up to 2 WIL on something at a time, etc.
• Break (BRK) is bonus damage that is always applied to attacks vs ARM, regardless of current STR level. 1 BRK means your attacks always deal 1 extra damage against enemy ARM.
• Movement Range is how many tiles you can move in a turn. Diagonal movement costs 2.
• Attack Range is how many tiles away you can attack from. 1 is most melee units, 2 is some spearmen and others with long reach, and 3 or more is most ranged units.

In addition, most characters have 0-1 Passive Abilities and 1-3 Active Abilities, depending on class and level.

Size is also a factor that comes into play, although I wouldn't call it a stat like the others. Size is usually either 1x1 tile for humans, or 2x2 tiles for big beefy Varl boys, with less common creatures taking up different configurations of space.

This facet of the game is very easy to port to tabletop. Most PCs and monsters should have pretty small, manageable stat blocks if you choose to stick with the level of individual mechanical complexity offered by in-game classes. A character could have something like this for most of their career:

Sindri Unnsbur, Human Spearman

STR 8, ARM 6, WIL 5, EXE 1, BRK 1

Move 5, Range 2, Size 1x1

Passive: Embolden - Each kill the Spearman makes encourages allies to fight harder, granting 1 Willpower to the Spearman and any adjacent allies.

Active: Impale - Skewer an adjacent enemy unit, doing normal Strength damage (100% chance to hit) before knocking it back. Impaled characters Bleed for 1 round, taking 1 Strength damage for each tile moved.

And that's it.

Talents

Alright it turns out I was lying when I said "and that's it" for character stats in this game. That's because in my first draft of this post I entirely forgot that Talents exist, and only got remound of them when I thought I was 90% done because I just so happened to scroll past a hyperlink to them on the wiki. (This is because I'm not only a bad writer but also a bad researcher.)

Introduced in the second entry in the series, Talents are secondary progression given as a reward after maxing out your stats. There are 2 Talents per Stat, but you can only select 1 to put any points in for each. That makes 10 Talents, each with 6 ranks that improve their passive benefits by some percentile value, usually +5/10% per rank. You buy the first 3 ranks with promotion points, and can find rare items that give a bonus of +1 to +3 to them in your travels.

Talents let you specialize your characters a little more, making them better at the existing combat systems without radically changing them:

• Hunker Down (ARM) grants a 20% chance to resist 1-6 ARM damage per hit.
• Tighten Straps (ARM) grants a 20-45% chance to regenerate 1 ARM per turn.
• Robust (STR) grants a 20% chance to resist 1-6 STR damage per hit.
• Artery Strike (STR) grants 10-35% added Critical Hit chance. (Double all STR damage, including WP expended on the attack. AoE attacks and attacks from passive traits can crit.)
• Defy (WP) grants a 30-80% chance to straight up ignore a killing blow but be reduced to 1 STR.
• Stubborn (WP) grants a 20% chance to regenerate 1-6 WP per turn.
• Dodge (EXE) grants a 5-30% chance to avoid STR attacks completely.
• Lucky Shot (EXE) grants 30-80% added hit chance.
• Exploit (BRK) grants a 10-35% chance to gain Puncture on an attack. (+1 STR damage per 2 ARM the target has lost that fight.)
• Divert (BRK) grants a 5-30% chance to entirely avoid an ARM attack.

The power creep provided by these Talents is mostly taken into account in the balancing of TBS, so even if your entire party hangs out unkillable at death's door with 1 STR for 80% of the battle, the battle layouts and AI are meant to remain challenging.

But porting TBS to tabletop messes with many of those finely balanced systems at least a little bit, which means that Talents could get extremely wonky late in the game. More Playtesting Is Needed to determine if you should fiddle with the values for some Talents, or just remove them entirely in favor of slightly deeper Class customization.

Class

Speaking of classes, those are the main way characters are differentiated from one another in TBS. They affect their starting stats, max stats, and abilities, and at a certain rank level (out of a max of 15) they can be promoted to one of two advanced class choices that grant them extra abilities. It's another extremely Tactics-esque part of the game, but not nearly as complex as most full-fledged examples of that genre.

There are several dozen classes in TBS, many of them unique to specific characters or party members, and many more available to NPCs only. You could port all of them directly over to tabletop without a hitch as long as you've sorted out combat (see below), but I think that would start to make combat very same'y-feeling when it's no longer just one person controlling the whole party, but a bunch of players in control of individual characters who can only use the same few moves over and over, and common enemy types become easy to identify and boring to deal with.

That's why I propose making classes slightly more complex.

At the very least, give players a few more abilities in their toolkit, and give them some freedom of choice in the matter. If you keep the trilogy's level cap of 15, consider giving them a choice between 2 new abilities every few ranks rather than just once, until they have 4 or 5 active abilities and may 2 passives by the end of their career. Lowering the level cap to something nice and even like 10 would correspondingly give you fewer abilities to pick or for the GM to design.

For example, give that spearman above the passive ability later on to reposition after using Impale, or maybe allow them to pick up a single ability from a different martial class to reflect them dabbling in other fighting styles to diversify their options.

Species

I want to include a little subsection here for something that is mechanically present in TBS, but never explicit: character species. You can never create a character in the computer game, so you're never faced with a screen explaining the unique traits each group of humanoid peoples in the game world possess. But they do influence how you use the units in battle.

(Minor spoilers for the types of playable characters available in TBS 3, if you want to skip ahead. I really wish Blogger had clickable spoiler tags as a built-in tool so I didn't have to try to parse through the solid wall of text that it spits everything into in the HTML view.)

Humans are bog-standard with the most variety of classes, unsurprisingly. Varl always occupy 4 squares because of their size. Dredge usually have a passive "Shatter" trait where dealing ARM damage to them causes a chain reaction that damages nearby Dredge allies. Horseborn have the speed and size of a horse, often moving farther than other characters and taking up 2x1 squares like Large (Long) creatures from the original print of D&D 3E. Etc.

If you decide that species is baked into class, you don't have to concern yourself with the details. But if you want to allow for character creation and customization where species and class are separate choices, it's worth keeping in mind the traits you would or wouldn't want to emphasize in your game.

For example, I'd be likely to drop the negative passive trait Dredge have because it mostly exists to add a layer of tactical satisfaction when you're fighting Dredge enemies in the video game, and it would feel kind of pointed and targeted if a Dredge PC was saddled with that all campaign; they'd already be dealing with enough extra trouble, by my reckoning.

Character Creation

I've kind of been beating around the bush on this one for a few sections, haven't I?

Character creation isn't a thing in TBS, which is completely normal for the genre. But outside of introducing somebody to a new game, just handing a premade character to a player doesn't quite light the spark, in my entirely unqualified opinion. TTRPG characters thrive more on either randomization or player customization, or a bit of both.

So if everyone at the table is creating a custom character, either give them a set number of bonus points to distribute amongst their stats (excluding Movement Range and Attack Range), or have everyone roll a small die like d4 or d6 and distribute that many points, with a max of +2 to any single stat so balance doesn't go completely out the window.

Then, either roll on your favorite random table or come up with a background for each character to finish them off. Maybe provide them with an appropriate item for it. A veteran huscarl might start with a scarred shield they used when defending their jarl from an assassination attempt, and that shield might fill the "armor" slot and provide some small passive bonus. More on items down below.

Titles

Heroic Titles are unique upgrades granted to each character after they reach rank 11, introduced in TBS 3. They buff the character with the title in some way, and they have their own renown tracks that improve them over time just like ranking up in one's class. Only 1 character can hold a given title, so in TBS it was important to match characters with titles that complemented one another, even if they might not have made the most thematic sense.

But in tabletop where each player has more agency, I think titles should instead be tied to how a given character has been played over the course of a campaign. It doesn't make much sense for the chunky varl bulwark to pick up Shadow Walker after a campaign spent being big, up-front, and imposing for example.

Personally I believe a player should have input on what title their character gets, or in creating a new title alongside the GM that would be appropriate for them. But you could also run the game so that the consequences of the characters' actions and their fame or infamy in the game world dictate what title they are known by, as an organic response to player choice. In either case there is more room for narrative consideration here that would be a shame to ignore in favor of pure min-maxing.

Items

TBS dispenses with armor and weapon slots or other traditional loadouts. Everybody can equip a max of 1 item at a time that provides some kind of passive benefit, often gated by character rank. The characters are otherwise assumed to always have all the necessities of their class; archers always have their bows, shield-bangers their shields, etc. 

That kind of abstracted, 'don't worry about it' inventory works well for what is shaping up to be a relatively rules-lite tabletop system, but at the same time there is room to expand to add customizability. Maybe increase the number of item slots to 3 or 4, with categories like arms, armor, and trinkets or accessories. Existing items from TBS can be slotted into the above, mostly as trinkets, and a few weapons and clothing can be added to round things out wherever the GM finds there's a lack of support.

... Oh hey, this chapter was supposed to be about actual combat, wasn't it?

Turn Order

Battles in TBS have a somewhat unique tempo. Where other games might use a speed stat or some other initiative system to determine turn order, TBS just uses your assigned party order. But every other turn in between your party members is the enemy's, at least until the end of combat phase called Pillage.

This creates a fast-paced back-and-forth between the player and the computer that intensifies rather than winds down the more units on one side drop; the last two remaining units on one team are suddenly much more mobile and active than they were in the first round of combat because now they have their fallen allies' turn slots, and if you didn't take precautions to weaken them beforehand, they're in a position to tip the scales the other way. I've never played it to be sure, but it kinda looks like chess from the outside.

Once the second-to-last unit on one team drops, Pillage mode activates, and all the units in the numerically superior team go in order before the lone survivor gets their single turn, making mop-up faster and easier and preventing really drawn-out and annoying last stands by either side.

The system is great for automated gameplay, but making the table keep track of two separate but threaded-together initiative cycles that will change in size over the course of combat without some kind of VTT aid feels like it could be a bit much.

That's why I offer (but don't necessarily recommend) some alternatives:

1. Add a speed or initiative stat. The character sheet for this 'game' won't be very cluttered, so one more box isn't a big deal. That value is your set position in combat order with no dueling rotations, meaning allies or enemies can come immediately before or after you, depending. This makes combat much more traditional.
2. Use group initiative. Everybody on one side goes at once, with attacks and effects resolving in the order that the party has put itself in, in order to empower players to coordinate and find a way to make the person who goes last just as valuable as the one who goes first. Maybe the whole party can spend WP up to their lowest EXE value to add a bonus to this roll.

Bear in mind that both of the above would render Pillage mode unnecessary, as well as change the metagame somewhat by removing the biggest incentive for the practice of wounding a bunch of units but keeping them alive until the very end so they don't give their turn slots to healthier allies.

Action Economy

TBS lets you move, then take a single action. Actions include STR attack, ARM attack, and using abilities, among certain other context cues. You can also Rest at the start of your turn before moving, avoiding doing anything to regain 1 WIL.

I see no reason to mess with this simplicity, except to suggest that you let characters move before or after acting. It just seems reasonable.

No Rolls Necessary*

There's basically no random chance or uncertainty involved in any actions in combat. Only a handful of abilities have randomized outcomes, like which nearby tiles get affected by certain AoE attacks, and those could easily be simulated by stealing the rules for when ranged attacks or thrown weapons go awry from your preferred ruleset, or circumvented entirely by just giving control to the caster.

Attack rolls aren't a thing either, outside of the very specific situation where a unit tries to deal health damage to another unit whose Armor is higher than the attacker's Strength. In that case every point of ARM above the attacker's STR confers a -10% miss chance (up to a maximum -80% to hit), easily resolved with a d10 roll or the like.

Overall this is the easiest piece to port to tabletop, to the point that it almost feels too simple. It's not a dumbing-down of combat, though- it just gives more room for other parts of combat to be more tactical, and lets all sides operate and strategize with a sense of confidence uncommon to tabletop, I feel.

Renown

Every enemy you deep six in TBS grants the character who dealt the killing blow 1 point of Renown toward increasing their Rank. It's essentially just combat XP and Level, but here all that matters is who deals the final point of Strength damage. In the video games this meant you have to carefully manage who struck the final blows how often, or else you could wind up with a handful of over-leveled kill-stealers and a bunch of massively under-leveled support characters.

That would be pretty annoying and cumbersome to coordinate with a whole party of live players, and unwittingly kill-stealing could disrupt the fun and maybe even cause some bleed-over, so it's best to drop that part of the mechanic for tabletop. Renown from combat encounters should be divided evenly, with unique rewards reserved for roleplaying, feats of exploration, out-of-the-box thinking, etc. and so on.

If you keep the upgrade track for characters' Heroic Titles, consider granting them 1 title Renown every time they act in accordance with that title.

Caravaning

The second biggest part of TBS (albeit a distant second as I look upon that wall of text up there) is the journey, heavily inspired by Oregon Trail and other lightly simulationist strategy games aimed at getting somewhere and managing your collection of rugged and/or hopelessly in-over-their-heads immigrants so you don't all die before you reach your destination.

I might've missed it in my playthrough a few years ago, but surprisingly I don't think TBS had any dysentery jokes.

Stats

Just like a party member, your whole caravan has stats that fluctuate during your adventure:

• Morale is the measure of your caravan's overall, well, morale. It represents your army and clansmen's mood and approval of your leadership, and it goes down from the drudgery of travel, up from resting, and up or down depending on your responses to special events. Morale gives you a willpower bonus or penalty in battle.
• Supplies are an abstract counter representing all the food, tools, weapons, and other resources your caravan burns through as it travels. Supplies are consumed each day of travel and every rest the caravan takes.
• Population is how many poor sods are following your banner at the moment. In-game they are divided up between clansmen, fighters, and varl. Fighters and varl contribute to mass combat encounters, while clansmen are the ordinary noncombatants caught up on all this mess and aren't often used directly as a resource by the game.

Let's break these down a little more separately than character stats before.

Morale

Morale reminds me of the sliding hope vs despair meters used in some LotR-inspired games, and it also mechanically incentivizes players to care about the caravan because their own self-interest and wellbeing are tied up in it.* Its 5-step scale can be kept as-is for tabletop, and whatever formulae are used to calculate it behind the scenes can be boiled down to moving ±1 along the track from major story beats.

• Poor Morale gives each character -2 WIL
• Weak gives -1 WIL
• Normal has no effect
• Good gives +1 WIL
• Great gives +2 WIL

Remember to take advantage of morale as a nonmechanical tool, too. At the end of the day it's not just a bonus or penalty to a combat stat, but a representation of the whole caravan's mood and wellbeing. Let it factor into roleplaying and the way the characters relate to the rest of the caravan in ways that couldn't be done outside of a TTRPG.

If morale is low, maybe the referee should consider the next random encounter to be an inciting incident for an argument between families, factions, or a challenge to existing leadership positions; if it's high, maybe an unexpected good outcome to an otherwise bad encounter would be merited as everyone pulls together and comes through. Use it to humanize the caravan into more than just a faceless mass waiting to die of dysentery.

Morale is a good mechanic overall, and fairly simple to adapt to tabletop. The other two, on the other hand...

Supplies & Population

The interaction between Supplies and Population greatly benefits from being automated by the game. Dividing the former by the latter with different weight multipliers added to each of the three types of caravan followers to get your running counter of remaining days worth of supplies would be a serious drag on a tabletop game, as well as very out-of-place in a ruleset that otherwise doesn't have much math.

So I instead propose going with a non-simulationist mechanic, like for example depletion dice.

Every unit of time of travel (whether it be days like in TBS, or something longer like weeks) and every extended rest to heal up or improve morale is a roll on the Supplies die, and a result of 1 reduces its size by 1 step. From a max size of say d8 or d10 it can dwindle down to a measly d4, and perhaps even further to a d2 coinflip before food runs out and people start deserting from your caravan or worse. Conversely, successfully leading a foraging party or finding a hidden trove of resources increases the die size by 1 step in turn.

Similarly, Population has a die that increases as new people join the caravan and decreases as they settle down, desert, or die in large numbers. An increase in the Population die may call for a Supplies check to see if it drops in size or not. Population doesn't require daily checks like Supplies do, being reserved for bigger events like helping to resettle a village or fighting in a War (more on that below).

The basic idea to stick to is you only need to worry about big, discrete events so you don't have to stop the game to factor in a lot of little minutia, like how many hours of passive berry picking the characters did and whether it matters or not.

Events

The meat of caravaning gameplay is dealing with the events that pop up along the way to your destination, either predetermined by the plot and your previous choices in events, or randomly drawn from a table of possible events with different triggers. Events typically have two or more branching choices to make, with the outcome being anything from an increase or decrease in Supplies or Population, to entering battle or finding items, to even losing party members if your luck is bad enough.

Like random backgrounds or optional initiative systems above, events can be largely taken from existing materials in the form of random encounter tables from your favorite supplement. You can also trawl the TBS trilogy itself and repurpose its events in tabletop form, making them more open-ended prompts without set dialogue branches to fit the new medium.

War

War is a special kind of event where your caravan encounters a large, hostile force. It is a large-scale battle between two opposing armies that you dictate the overall strategy for, which in turn determines how difficult a battle your party has to fight, which determines the final outcome of the war. In TBS there are 5 options for how to approach a war:

1. Charge! - The most aggressive battle plan that is, ironically, also the safest for your caravan. The party charges into the fray and fights off the main force, facing a tougher than average battle while caravan casualties remain low.
2. Formations! - A balanced battle plan with an easier fight for the player but heavier casualties for the caravan.
3. Hold them off! - A very easy battle for the player but pretty considerable casualties for the caravan.
4. Retreat! - No battle for the player whatsoever and some really severe casualties for the caravan.
5. Oversee! - No battle, but with an outcome that varies according to several factors like caravan strength, party strength, and any specific follow-up commands given. It's kind of like the Auto-Resolve button in the Total War series, and casualties are often close to equal to Formations! on average, at least according to the wiki.

In all of the options leading to a player battle, you have the option to stick around longer and fight multiple back-to-back fights as you draw the enemy's best away from your army as reinforcements to the current battle. You don't get to reposition or heal in between fights, but you earn increased rewards and renown, and your caravan suffers less for it.

Combat can be resolved as normal, while you can probably have the party come up with more nuanced commands than the above based on where and why a battle is being fought. Let them find creative uses for topography or feints, or anything else theater-of-the-mind'y.

At the conclusion of a War (which you might just want to rename "Mass Combat" or "Skirmish" or something because describing a single battle as a "war" feels a tiny bit silly to me even if it is etymologically justified within certain Germanic languages the mythologies of which the game takes a lot of its inspiration from) you roll your caravan's Population die a number of times determined by the referee, probably based on how nasty the enemy army is. The players can reduce the number of forced rolls and therefore make it less likely for the Population to deplete by fighting multiple battles in a row, and by giving smart orders on a macro level. Morale level may also play a role in this.

If by some disaster the Population die drops from d2 to 0, it isn't necessarily a game over. Several chapters of TBS revolve around just a few lonesome characters, lost or otherwise bereft of their larger group, and that can offer a completely different flavor of game for a time.

The Banner

It's in the title, it's on every piece of cover art, you almost always see it flapping in the bitter breeze above your caravan. It has embroidered upon it the name of everyone who has ever lived and died in the clan, their deeds and struggles, and it will continue to grow until the end of the world. The banner is a central piece of the visual language and aesthetic of the series, but aside from a few scenes where someone is mending or adding to the end of the banner, or passing it down to their successor, the banner doesn't actually factor into the story much, and basically isn't present in the gameplay at all.

I feel like that's a missed opportunity for the series, but one you can rectify and take full advantage of in a tabletop setting.

First off, emphasize how important it is in-universe. It is a symbol of leadership in many ways, always being carried by the de facto leader(s) of the caravan, exchanging hands and passing from one generation to the next at various points as the plot demands. It's not a formal symbol of the chieftain, but an implicit recognition of an individual's guidance by the whole community. We don't see it happen in the video games, but losing or allowing the banner to be damaged could be a cultural faux pas so great that it's the grounds for removing someone from leadership; "if you can't keep our past safe, how can we trust you with our future?" and the like.

Second, think of ways to gamify that value. Maybe capturing the banner is an explicit goal of the enemy in many Wars that could cripple the caravan's morale until it's taken back. Maybe risking its safety to carry it aloft can have the opposite effect in a high-stakes event. Maybe the party can't cash in their renown to rank up or acquire heroic titles until the caravan has had time to rest in safety, long enough for the weavers to add this latest chapter of the community's story to the banner and cement their trials and achievements in cultural memory. You could make a whole event out of the subtleties of language and imagery that go into each weaving, and use several of those to bookend major arcs of the table's journey.

Conversation

Just roleplay, duh.

But seriously, the depth, tempo, and tone of storytelling and decision-making is entirely up to you and the table. It's both the easiest and the most challenging thing to port over because you can no longer rely upon the series' pretty solid writing, but that's okay; this whole exercise has been to give you the tools to tell your own Saga with, not to follow in the footsteps of Rook, Alette, Iver and co.

I hope this was a readable and enjoyable deep-dive, and that you can create something beautiful from these messy building blocks.

Assuming I don't cannibalize this to create my own FKR game like I have half a mind to now that I've read this whole post over, of course.

* I don't know why I give hypothetical players so little credit in my writing. My assumption that many of them will need to have a subsystem reminding them to care about the meeples is unfair upon further reflection, and also kinda stupid considering how many stories there are of parties latching onto the tiniest throwaway NPC the referee had no plans for. But I'll keep that part in for the edge cases.

The EverQuest RPG is a Pile of Baffling Design Choices Masquerading as a Generic d20 Cash-Grab

In the past I've touched on the early-to-mid 2000s phenomenon of everyone and their auntie adapting their property to d20 rules under the OGL. D&D 3E wasn't as market-stagnatingly powerful as 5E has become, but it was the game's first true brush up against mainstream popularity, whereas in the 20th century it had only enjoyed mainstream awareness (and occasional mockery) from other media.

This 3E Gold Rush for lack of a better term happened for pretty understandable reasons; nothing quite like the Open Game License existed previously and there were many early adopters of this novel concept, pushing out a single d20 book wasn't too risky for the average publisher considering the likely return on investment, and it was a pretty reliable way to introduce your IP to a wider audience.

Or at least that's how things started.

By the mid-2000s the market had hit 3rd party product saturation, and it was increasingly difficult to distinguish oneself amid the sea of similar d20 adaptations. There was also growing consumer cynicism toward the seemingly huge number of poorly-made books shoved out in order to ride the wave of market success that was already flattening by that point. It was a little bit like when self-published e-books became really big on Amazon and other platforms a few years later: an amazing opportunity for creative freedom and art also created a sucking mire of garbage and vacuous opportunism as a byproduct.

I'd insert a joke about capitalism here, but I haven't had my coffee yet, and in the spirit of our subject today I will not be going back to make edits.

That isn't to say there weren't some good adaptations out there that made the system work for their particular worlds and fictions; there absolutely are, you just have to know what you're doing when you're bending and bashing a semi-generic, semi-simulationist thing like d20 into different shapes that it wasn't originally intended for.

I honestly don't know which camp today's topic falls into. The creators obviously cared about transferring the original experience to tabletop, as opposed to just mapping existing names to existing features and calling it a day. But their care was a hacksaw that they used to Frankenstein together a bewildering pile of design choices that borders on endearing to me, because I have a weird habit of dragging out and trashing things that I end up feeling mildly positive toward.

I should probably examine that urge soon.

Anyway, we're talking about the EverQuest TTRPG!

AKA Keith Parkinson's Greatest Hits

Beginning in 2002 and topping out at a respectable 17 publications total, the EQRPG was Sony Online Entertainment's answer to the d20 craze by way of Sword & Sorcery publishing. It was not marketed using the d20 System logo and branding however, because of the plethora of small but cumulative changes made to the game in order to better replicate the systems and gameplay loops of the 1999 MMORPG. These include significant differences in character creation, progression, and the specifics of magic and combat.

There's plenty to cover, so let's get right into it.

Character Creation

To start off, randomized ability score generation is thrown out in favor of a modified 27 point-buy system. This isn't unusual by itself, since 3E was when point-buy became essentially coequal with (and often preferred over) 4d6-drop-lowest. What's odd is that this point-buy exists alongside a conversion system that allows you to transfer your character from the MMO to tabletop. So if you and your EQ guildies decided to sit down and play pen-and-paper instead of the video game version because, I dunno, maybe your dialup is particularly bad one summer weekend since it's 2002, then you would have a relatively easy time recreating your toons if you really wanted to.

As I understand it, the stat cap was 255 back in the day, but climbed steadily with each expansion since then. So I don't think you could convert a high-level character so easily these days. Then again at that level of play you'd be swimming in number soup, so maybe that's not a real issue.

Next you pick your race, which has far more weight in this game than in others. This is because EQ, like other D&D derivatives of the '90s, uses hard racial limits on character class- the first of several "AD&Disms" we'll see. Although I will say that in this case it is even stricter than what is found in AD&D, because in those editions there was at least an assumption of ultimate DM fiat with permitting certain character options. Not so with EQ; the list of available race/class combinations is all you get, because that's all you got in the video game (at the time of publication, at least; limits have mostly been removed in recent decades).

Note the saddening lack of playable frogloks, berserkers, etc.
No content after The Shadows of Luclin got ported to tabletop.

Besides being major gatekeepers to character class, species also comes with the bonuses and penalties you'd expect of 3E. Modifiers tend to be bigger and more swingy in EQ, despite usually cancelling one another out to total ±0. For example, the magical and slightly cone-headed Erudite humans get a whopping +6 to Int and +2 to Wis, but also -2 to Dex and Cha, and a -4 to Str. Similarly the woad-covered Barbarians of Norse-Gael inspiration get +4 to Str and +2 to Con, but also receive what I like to call the "orc treatment", -2 to all mental stats. This makes each species fairly specialized to a role, which feels redundant with the class lists that already point them in that same general direction.

For 4 out of the 14 playable species, another AD&Dism becomes an important factor: percentile XP penalty. Barbarians, trolls, ogres, and the reptilian iksar all suffer varying degrees of reduced XP award in exchange for their stronger innate traits, ranging from -5% to -20%. These numbers are ported directly from the early years of the MMO, with the somewhat surprising exception of halflings' +5% bonus, which was dropped for the book. Note that these are in addition to any penalties earned from multiclassing.

I'm not fond of XP modifiers in tabletop to begin with, but these mods really make me yearn for Level Adjustment. At least that can (usually) be bought off at a later point when racial abilities cease to make a significant impact on character strength. But in EQ, these numbers are forever. And with the standard level progression going all the way to 30 instead of 20, there's a lot of room for a gap to form that limited regeneration or Large size just won't close.

This gap is even more pronounced than in the MMO, I'd argue. In EQ online every XP penalty or loss from death is ultimately a measurement of extra time that needs to be invested by you, the individual. You can keep your troll shadowknight on par with your friend's human rogue by logging in during off hours and grinding a bunch of mobs to compensate, because even though it's a very social game, it's set in a living world and you aren't limited to a single circle of friends from start to finish. But D&D is a fundamentally party- and session-based game, which creates a lot of headache for the GM and anyone wanting to solo on the side in order to keep up with their friends.

On paper it's all quite similar to the bonuses and penalties that everyone gets in the MMO however, and it seems like that's what they were aiming for in the end. Good or bad, the writers often try to reify as much material from the virtual game for the textual one as they can. At least they didn't also include the class-based XP penalties that combine with others multiplicatively? Otherwise that troll shadowknight would be taking a combined -68% hit to every single reward.

Once you've selected your species, it's time to pick a class, spend your skill ranks, and select a starting feat like usual. Unlike usual, you also receive 5 "Training Points" to spend on more skill ranks or energy resistances, or to save up for your next feat or your first ability score increase. Training Points are awarded every level, and either supplement or entirely replace the standard skill, feat, and ability increase tracks of 3E. They are meant to simulate the Alternate Advancement system introduced in the Shadows of Luclin expansion, except instead of having to wait until level 51 to start dumping experience into it instead of new levels, you get a trickle of both from the very start.

There are limits in place so you can't dump all your points in one area, but overall it's a pretty unguided and freeform system for deciding how you want to improve your character outside of class abilities. Another way of describing it could be "time-consuming newbie trap", because of the extra bookkeeping required, and the increased chances of spending yourself into a corner if you haven't plotted stuff out in advance. The things up for purchase also don't really share multiples with the amount of points you get every level, which feels odd and awkward to me? It's like when they rig the prices in F2P MMOS so that you always have slightly too much or too little in-game shop currency to buy a thing you want, except they're not even trying to sell you anything here- it's just busywork.

Once you're done with all the essentials, the rest of character creation is mostly identical to your average 3E game. Name, gender, age, etc. You're also encouraged to choose a deity, with the welcome addition of an agnostic (read: fantastical apatheism) option for certain non-priest characters.

Alignment is present, which feels kind of weird. There are planes and loosely aligned factions of "good" and "evil" in the cosmology and lore of EQ, but moral alignment remains just shy of being an objective, bracketed thing in the MMO. Not so here, where the classic 9-point alignment system exists, with the words "lawful" and "chaotic" replaced by "orderly" and "discordant" because the latter terms have slightly more currency in the lore of Norrath.

Skills

Fortunately you're not limited to spending training points to get skill ranks; those are bonus ranks you can buy in addition to your usual class amount + Int every level. And refreshingly, no class in EQRPG is saddled with 2+Int skill points per level; most have 4+Int or more, and the lowest is 3+Int. This means that your average character is more likely to engage with some of the changes that EQRPG makes to the skill list.

For the record, EQ online has skills, but they don't work anything like 3E skills. They're closer to the skills of a d100 system or maybe Elder Scrolls games, where they encompass most character actions like types of attacks or spellcasting, and improve with use. I remember back when I made my fourth or fifth burner email in a row to play free trials of EverQuest as a kid (my parents don't believe in credit cards so I could never subscribe), I found a big group of people sitting around in the Mines of Gloomingdeep spamming each other with long text macros. I learned that this was to mutually improve their language skills; however much text your character 'heard' other people say in other languages slowly trained them in that language until the language cypher was removed entirely from their interface.

Luckily you don't have to do that here, nor will you run into a scenario where you get a neat new weapon but your skill in its type is a 1, forcing you to spend hours grinding it up to par. But it does create a case in the self-imposed constraints of trying to make EQ work in d20 where the writers just didn't (probably couldn't) port things over. Instead, they worked with the existing skill system and made a few more modest changes.

For starters, unlike most other d20 systems (and all of the memes about massaging orcs or seducing dragons), EQ actually does use the automatic failure and success rules for rolling 1 and 20 on skill checks, respectively. This doesn't include Take 20 checks, of course. And I'm slightly disappointed that they don't lean into it more by including skill crits or fumbles.

The skill list itself looks somewhat different, too. Since it was based on 3.0E rules you see the usual Sense Heading/Wilderness Lore divide and things like that. But we also see some additions to the list lifted straight from EQ online, like Alcohol Tolerance, Channeling, Meditation, and Taunt.

Alcohol Tolerance (Con) is a weird skill, both in its purpose and how it's used. You don't ever make Alcohol Tolerance skill checks by themselves; instead, you make a check, consult a table to find your check result, and then gain a corresponding bonus to your character's Fortitude save vs. inebriation when consuming large amounts of alcohol.

The reason you would ever invest in this skill is because alcohol is double-edged buff food in the EverQuest universe. Succeeding at your saves allows you to benefit from the positive effects of a specific drink, such as "metabolic" bonuses to Strength or Charisma-based checks, while only suffering the minimum penalties for getting sauced; usually a stacking -1 to Dex, Int, and Wis. Credit where credit is due, the writers did not pick the low-hanging fruit of giving dwarves a racial bonus to Alcohol Tolerance.

Channeling (Con) is a rebranding of Concentration, plain and simple, but Meditation (Int, Wis, or Cha depending on class) is an equally vital new skill for all casters. It controls spellcasters' ability to regenerate mana, and to prepare spells quickly. As with EQ online, casters have a mana pool and are limited to 8 prepared spells at any time (unless you spend feats to expand that number up to a max of 16).

But you can sit and meditate to regenerate spent mana per hour based on your ranks in this skill, and you can swap one spell out for another by taking a number of full-round actions equal to the spell's level minus your ranks in Meditation, minimum 1. You don't even need to leave slots empty like a wizard in 3E. The end result is that Meditation is the skill for casters, and it enormously improves their versatility and sustainability throughout a long and varied day of adventuring.

Taunt (Cha) is... such an aggravating missed opportunity. The language of aggro, taunts, and tanking may originate with early MMOs like EverQuest, but the thematic concept of heavily armored adventurers covering for and protecting their squishier counterparts has existed since basically the beginning of modern fantasy as a medium. D&D has sorely needed something like a taunt ability to reflect this element of the fiction for years, and even today in 5E it's only beginning to approach the concept with some success here and there. Obligatory shout-out to Barbarians of the Ancestral Guardian path.

So what is EQRPG's version of Taunt? A move action opposed by your target's Sense Motive to force them to target you with their attacks for 1 round. Said Sense Motive check can get pretty high bonuses if the target is already attacking someone else, can't understand the taunter, etc. So if a wolf got the drop on your party and is munching on the wizard (AKA the exact moment you'd want a reliable taunt ability), your 1st-level warrior could be looking at a DC of up to 30, plus whatever the actual Sense Motive check result is. The skill was a valiant attempt, but a failure.

There's also a whole host of custom Trade Skill, uh, skills which are new but don't do anything especially weird, so I won't go into them in depth. Baking, brewing, and shaman-exclusive alchemy all make different buff consumables. Pottery makes everything from humble jars to magical grenades. Tinkering, exclusive to gnomes, creates all manner of technological inventions, though thankfully they avoided going the way of guns, combat automatons, and power armor. The d20 rules for crafting and using things like that always tend toward jankiness in my experience.

Feats

Obviously feats didn't exist in EverQuest in 1999, nor when they were making these books, so their role here is to give 3E players something familiar, as well as pad out the class feature lists. Returning feats are mostly identical to their 3E counterparts, some with altered math to match the new rules here and there, like metamagic feats increasing mana cost by a percentage instead of higher spell slots, etc.

This section originally went into whiney detail about how they made the baffling decision to make Weapon Finesse worse by rewriting it to be selected per weapon type, but then I looked up the 3.0E version of the feat and realized that's exactly how it used to be.

I need to stop taking the QoL updates of 3.5E for granted, as weird as that is to say.

There are a few additions that give martial characters something resembling goodies, though. In EQ online anyone with a shield can perform Bash attacks, and members of the larger species—Barbarians, ogres, and trolls—can deliver Slam attacks in addition to their normal auto-swings. Bashes deal very little damage, but they're good for interrupting spellcasting and even stunning enemies briefly. Slams do much the same, but don't require a shield. There's also a Kick used by monks, rangers, and warriors of any size that functions similarly, but for some reason that was dropped for EQRPG.

The remaining Bash and Slam feats give you a special off-hand attack and a natural weapon, respectively. It's odd calling Slam a "feat" though, because it's only available to Large species and Barbarians, and they all get it automatically at 1st level. If you're using a magic shield or have a magic piece of armor on your shoulder, knee, or other slam-appropriate location on your body (a sequence of words I never want to type ever again), they count as magic attacks for the purposes of bypassing damage reduction, but any enhancement bonuses don't actually transfer to better attack or damage rolls. 

The feat gestures vaguely toward Bash's use as a spellcasting interrupt in the MMO, but it only increases the Channeling DC vs damage taken by 2 when you use it that way. Considering a shield's low damage (1d3 to 1d6 depending on size) you may as well save your Attack of Opportunity for your normal weapon; assuming the enemy spellcaster isn't just casting defensively, which feels like an oversight made when porting the attacks over. Using both at once on top of a full-attack option is a cheap way to throw a lot of attacks at the enemy though, and it's way more efficient in terms of BAB and feat cost than going down the finnicky Two-Weapon Fighting and Dual Wield feat lines.

Classes

The classes themselves are actually pretty uncontroversial when seen through the lens I'm using here. They resemble a mix of the EQ online classes and their D&D counterparts where there are overlaps like paladin and ranger, and they are slightly more true to the EQ class where there isn't anything comparable in base D&D, like shaman or shadowknight. They rely on a lot of bonus feats (and "bonus" feats that merely unlock a feat you still need to pay training points for) to flesh out class ability rosters, but each also receives at least one list of selectable powers, stances, or other abilities unique to their class identity.

Unsurprisingly for a 3E-inspired game, pure martial classes get a really raw deal compared to casters or even hybrids (which also get full BAB and high-level stance abilities just like martials do). This is doubly unsurprising, because EQ online also tended to treat a lot of its nonmagical classes like trash. The life of a warrior is pain. It's obviously a bad design choice, but by the standards of the time it's not an odd one.

More peculiar to me is how classes and equipment proficiencies interact.

Equipment

Armor typing is essentially unchanged from 3E, but weapon proficiencies have been tweaked. Only simple and martial categories exist, but these have been subdivided into many more types like one-handed slashing, hand-to-hand (blunt), or archery (piercing). For the most part these map to the weapons each class can wield in the MMO without creating too much work deciding where weapons from other d20 books should fit, but it also creates some weird edge cases within its own core content.

One example is how rogues are proficient in piercing weapons. Since there is no one-handed vs two-handed distinction within piercing weapons, this means your average rogue knows how to wield a heavy pick or a halberd as well as a dagger. Alternatively, a shaman normally limited to "tribal" weapons can fight just as effectively with a rapier or even a spiked chain, that infamous old mainstay of 3E trip builds which somehow made it into the list.

Weapons have also been given a new "delay" parameter that is meant to emulate the different speeds that weapons swing at when you are auto-attacking in EQ online. Daggers attack more times in a minute than a mace, a mace more than a big two-handed axe, etc. The way they try to do this in EQRPG is by giving each weapon a delay number that tells you which of 6 tables to look at when you're calculating your character's BAB and iterative attacks per round. It's like if AD&D's weapon speed factor was designed to impact raw DPS instead of initiative, but it's just as annoying to track.

You also have to familiarize yourself with at least 2 or 3 of these tables, because haste and slow effects alter these delay numbers. This is in addition to adding or subtracting whole additional attacks depending on the power of the particular effect, a la 3.5E Haste.

Let's finish up the subject of weapons by talking about procs.

Procs, or programmed random occurrences, are effects placed on a piece of equipment or given by an ability that occur with a set frequency in response to X criteria being met. When you swing your sword and sometimes it blasts the target for extra fire damage, that's a proc. It's pretty clearly inspired by D&D weapon enchantments that only take effect on a certain die roll, like vorpal swords. In EQ online there is a huge number of proc weapons that each have their own formula being computed behind the scenes to determine how often they trigger their effects, usually expressed as PPM (Procs Per Minute).

In EQRPG the writers opted not to go for calculations like that, mercifully. But they still wanted to include proc weapons somehow, because they include some of the most iconic weapons in Norrath. Instead they went for a much simpler system where if a weapon has a proc effect, then every time you roll to attack you also roll against its proc DC. Rolling for a proc is a Dexterity check that scales with the relative power of the proc's effect, starting at 20 for the lowest. Proc effects exist in addition to more normal 'static' effects placed on a weapon, so it's possible to find a flaming longsword that also has frost (proc).

I kind of like this decision, but I kind of don't. By decoupling certain effects from the 'on crit only' enchantments we see in 3E, you might see them used by more characters than falchion- or rapier-wielding crit-fishers. It's tied to an ability score that people probably won't bump super high since Dexterity didn't become a true god stat until Pathfinder 1E, but EQRPG throws enough stat bonuses around that they might be semi-consistent; I haven't done the math there. But the big thing for me is that you have to roll every time you attack to see if you proc. The book recommends you pick a differently colored d20 specifically for that, and just huck both dice at once with every attack. So past a certain wealth level you may as well hand 2d20 to everyone who isn't a dedicated spellcaster.

Speaking of dedicated spellcasters, we may as well move on to that whole mess.

Magic

As I alluded to earlier with my brief gloss over classes and the Meditation skill, dedicated spellcasters are strong in EQRPG. They also require a whole lot of extra bookkeeping, because both mana pools and spell costs can rise into the dozens and eventually hundreds of points. The caps for those pools can also fluctuate throughout the day from spells, gear bonuses, or ability damage. A good comparison for what you're dealing with is the 3E psion's power point pool.

Spells go up to 15th level in EQRPG, even though it would have made sense to just throw out that legacy system alongside all of the other changes being made. Spell lists cleave very close to their EQ counterparts, usually mimicking damage, healing, CC, and buff spells as well as the two games' very different math systems will allow.

There are fewer spells with noncombat applications here than in 3E, which makes full casters slightly less godlike than say, conjuration wizards in D&D. EQRPG wizards can still do things like hop across the planes and dominate a combat scenario, but they do so by traveling to very specific landmarks from the game world and by dealing direct hit point damage, respectively. Monsters are limited in the same way, with the majority of NPC casters and spell-like ability repertoires geared toward combat. This flattens encounter design quite a bit, which is a big loss in my opinion. Although the worst part of player magic limitations to me is the truly lamentable loss of the prestidigitation cantrip.

I also wish the editors had gone through the spells a little more closely. Spells tend to be organized into spell lines with only the 1st rank explained in full, but the descriptions of spells are given alphabetically. This requires you to flip back to that first spell for reference when looking at differently-named spells over a dozen entries deep into a line. This gets especially annoying because most spells are just increasing amounts of direct damage or healing, and so much space and effort could be saved by consolidating all the different ranks in a line together on the same page.

Buff spells love to add odd-numbered ability scores, or more awkward percentile modifiers to the mix like -10% mana cost or +66% movement speed. One haste-adjacent spell I found even adds staggered bonus attacks depending on whether it's an odd or even-numbered combat round, a la AD&D fighter weapon specialization rules.

And sometimes, the writers' math just doesn't add up.

Beyond the Player's Handbook, which has been the focus of this post, there were many other EQRPG books. You get the usual GM's guide and monster manuals, some are region-specific gazetteers like Faydark or the moon Luclin, others are dungeons or adventures taken from the MMO, and a few provide new magic spells and items, or NPCs. All of it is pretty standard stuff you see coming out of any 3rd party d20 series that lasts long enough. They all follow in the footsteps of oddity set by the handbook rather than doubling down on anything, however. The weirdest thing I found in those supplements was a weirdly good, high-level spell named "Skin of the Cabbage".

4/23 Edit: Somehow I forgot to mention another bit that EQRPG does differently throughout its adventures and modules, and only remembered it while working on my post about the Diablo II games. You get experience points for completing quests in this game. This is the norm for video RPGs, but it was pretty rare in D&D prior to its experiments in alternate tracks of advancement starting in 4E.

At its core, this is extra mechanical incentivization to pursue a satisfying narrative conclusion over plain old murder and theft. Which you might think would be unnecessary in a game called EverQuest, but unfortunately it was the one to introduce the world to some of the worst MMORPG grinds ever. Quest rewards in tabletop therefore act as both a faithful mechanic and another means of avoiding what the original game is guilty of. End Edit.

As poorly as some of these systems conversions performed, and as strange or pointless as the concept of porting an MMO to tabletop can feel, I kind of applaud the writers behind the EQRPG? They could have phoned this series in so hard and made a very forgettably bad product, but they chose to try and do something with it instead. The art direction also helps; though most interior illustrations are not by Keith Parkinson, they all try to emulate the feeling of those old cover art spreads. The page borders and chapter heading plates even evoke the chunky old user manuals you used to get with every disc set. Even if it's certainly not the EverQuest, it tries hard to be an EverQuest game.

The same can't quite be said of its sequel.

EQ2RPG

After 2003 rolled around with 3.5E, there was a second surge of OGL games. Among this wave were a few "second editions" of games that had previously published under 3.0 rules that set out to update their games for the new rules. Sometimes the changes were meaningful and allowed a game a fresh start where they corrected their past mistakes and moved closer to their vision of what the game could be. Sometimes they were like the glorified textbook reprints that you have to shell out over $100 to use for a single semester in community college.

EverQuest II RPG is... kind of both?

EQ2 pushed the game's timeline forward a few hundred years and nudged it over an alternate universe or two. Set in a version of Norrath where the moon exploded and rained destruction across the planet, many familiar sights from the first game were destroyed or irrevocably altered. Entire continents were broken up into disconnected islands, prompting the early story to be focused on hopping on a boat and exploring what the world has become.

EQ2RPG (these acronyms are getting stupid, but just bear with me for a little longer) is also set in this different Norrath, but it still shares most of its 3E DNA with the previous game. It cleans up that 27-point character generation slightly, and makes Training Point prices cheaper across the board, as well as providing a few more options for it. The skills vs cross-class skills mechanic is removed, making it so that class skills are the only ones you can buy at 1st level, but everything after that is equally available. Even race/class limits are done away with.

Another big change in accordance with EQ2 online is Archetypes. The MMO genre was shifting toward a more rigid class role structure of tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS, and healer at this time, not just in the way characters performed in end-game content, but in the way they were conceived of to begin with. An example of this is the elimination of hybrid classes as their own unique category, and shoving everything else under the umbrellas of Fighter, Mage, Priest, and Scout in EQ2.

Everyone starts off as one of these 4 archetypes in the tabletop version as well, but can specialize into a class starting at around 5th to 7th level, and an advanced class specializing even further starting at around 10th. Some of these options were alignment-locked in the MMO at launch, but not so here. In fact, alignment was dropped entirely! 

In essence, classes and advanced classes are the prestige classes of 3E, but grafted onto generic starting classes as branches in a series of multi-path character trees. MMO class specs, if you will. Of course you the tabletop player aren't limited the same way your MMO character is; multiclassing is still an option in this ruleset, which creates kind of a best-of-both-worlds scenario.

Not that you'd necessarily want to stunt your progression with multiclassing; you're kind of on a tight schedule. After all, you're only just reaching your character's real class identity and fruition of the arc of mechanical growth at 10th to 12th level. That's the bottom of the valley where most campaigns die in typical 20-level D&D, let alone the 30 levels of EQRPG.

This strikes me as an odd and probably unintentional mistuning of progression, because in the source material most characters could finish with their archetype and start on their class as soon as they left the tutorial zone, the Isle of Refuge. Most GMs don't rocket you from 1 to 6 in a session or two, though; something that can be done in about an afternoon in the video game becomes something many days or weeks in the making in tabletop. In general that's fine, and to be expected; tabletop is just slower on average. But I don't think that's what the writers were intending here.

At least the starting archetypes aren't devoid of depth, thanks to Talents.

Talents are another very MMO'y term injected into the game that act as an answer to the problem of bloated, sometimes very lopsided class feature rosters. Every few levels—more frequent for Fighters and Scouts, less often for Mages and Priests—you receive a talent point that you can spend on your choice of class talent, which is a single discrete class feature. Many have minimum level requirements like feats, and also like feats a few are clearly traps that are best avoided. But otherwise you can pick the order and type of abilities you get. Classes and advanced classes also give talent points with their own pools of abilities to draw from, but you can always spend them on features from previous lists as well.

This system has no parallel with anything in EQ1 or EQ2 to my knowledge, but it's also just kind of good on its own. I liked it when Pathfinder did something similar with most of their classes, and this feels like a more drastic prototype of the same idea.

In other ways, EQ2RPG refused to advance, not even to match its online counterpart. Sometimes it even regressed slightly.

As an example, EQ2 removed all XP penalties; at launch, the only thing you'd suffer from was XP debt from dying. EQ2RPG did not remove the penalties put in place by its predecessor. In fact they added more for new species like the kerra and ratonga, and made them slightly worse for existing ones, by bumping trolls up 5% to match what they'd originally been saddled with in EQ1 online.

Spellcasting remains fundamentally unchanged from its predecessor, although they did tidy up the lists partially by condensing spell lines into the same spell with multiple ranks, like I was complaining about up above before I bothered to finish doing my research down here in the present. Where once there may have been project lightning, followed by thunder strike, thunderclap, thunderbolt, etc. you now just have 2 markedly different spells with 3 ranks each. It's a step in the right direction I think, but it's weird that they didn't go all the way with the fix.

They also decided to bring back the 3.0E rules about how weapon sizes affect what a weapon counts as in somebody's hands, instead of just going by size category alone? Not even the first EQRPG did that, and it's so weird to see it pop up now.

The sequel also feels like it had way less of a budget than its older counterparts. The vast majority of the art in this book is either a CG still lifted from the promotional campaign for the video game, or an in-game screen shot or loading screen asset. I recognized about a dozen different frames from the charmingly goofy series of new player introduction videos that SOE hosted for a while.

The usage of preexisting assets isn't bad in and of itself, or at least I don't think so; it's just that EQ2 wasn't a very good-looking game one year after launch, and its low-res and weirdly lit graphics don't do the book any favors. Especially not when the models and spell effects have been awkwardly cut out of an existing screen shot and then transparencied onto the page.

Don't even get me started on that mitten hand.

#UnpopularOpinion tract time, I always thought the extremely cartoonish kerra from the trailer for the cancelled EverQuest Next project still looked better than the soulless, plasticine meat puppets of EQ2. Stylization is like light rust resistance for your character designs. Even if they're not that good to begin with, they won't age quite as rapidly.

Another indicator of the lower effort put into the sequel by the publisher is that half the classes are missing from the Player's Guide. The Priest and Mage archetypes aren't even playable without consulting the Spell Guide that was published exclusively in PDF form in 2005, over a year after the first book went to print. Apparently Sword & Sorcery released a free PDF of some basic low-level spells on their website in the interim, but to my knowledge it's lost to link rot nowadays.

Even with the Player and Spell guide, EQ2RPG is kind of unplayable by itself. It still needs several books from the first RPG to give it the monsters, magic items, GM tools, etc. to make a working campaign with.

The creators supposedly said that going forward, all new books would support both EQ1 and EQ2. I say 'supposedly' because Wikipedia says so, but there's been a [citation needed] tag on that sentence since October of 2007. A list on the White Wolf Wiki references 3 cancelled books that were referenced in issues of White Wolf Quarterly or Sword & Sorcery Insider; these were to be EverQuest II Gazetteer: The Shattered Lands, Islands of Mist, and Kunark: Past and Present, the title of which allows us to infer that the plan to support EQRPG 1 and 2 simultaneously was real, at least at one point.

But planned or not, new books never happened. Troubled production ultimately led to the entire EQRPG line getting quietly shelved after its second edition sloughed out onto the scene. I have no evidence to back it up, but I can't imagine sales were great either. The 3rd-party d20 market had not grown less saturated during this period, after all.

The End, Finally

Like so many of my rambles, I'm not sure how to end this. I began wanting to lightly mock the existence of these books, and I suppose I did in the end. But I also grew strangely fond of this weird little experiment. It was at the periphery of a massive shift in the industry, and though I don't think its effects could be felt very far or for long, I like it for having existed. If only so that folks like me with nothing better to write about can do a bit of RPG archaeology and wonder at what came before.

One thing it did leave me with, was a question of how other people received this game in its day. EQ has always had lore and story if you look hard enough for it, but the 'role' has always taken a backseat to the 'play' in this game, whether it takes the form of exploring the relatively huge living world, earning DKP in raids, or just grouping with new and old friends.

But what stories have EQ role-players been able to tell, both on-and offline? What memories and experiences did this tabletop edition help create, rather than merely mimic? Is this game beloved to anyone out there?

And can someone please explain the Fippy Darkpaw meme to me? Weren't there like a dozen other gnolls? Why'd he get so popular?

3 In-Universe Board Games to Kill Time with

So your protagonists are nerds and hobbyists just like their players, and you have to populate the shelves of a little specialty shop the party insists on visiting. You don't need each one to have a fully fleshed-out ruleset like Three-Dragon Ante or Dragonchess, but you still need an idea to run with for each- you just need some names and concepts, and if the PCs bite, you can fudge the rest.

Well, we've got the names and concepts, and you—presumably—have the fudge.

Dvürgfest

Appearance: Frothy beer practically spills out of the box art as dozens of highly insensitive dwarf stereotypes smash their tankards together around drenched wooden tables and roaring firepits. Enormous mouths open in raucous laughter and sausage-like fingers point as one of their fellows coughs during a chugging contest and sends a geyser of aerosolized booze across the scene. A warning label shaped like a slightly off-kilter wooden tavern sign requests the utmost responsibility from any and all players in bolded Sans Liability font.

Back-of-the-Box Blurb: Oi, laddie! Ye look like ye hae a strong stomach. Why don't ye an' yer mates pull up some chairs an' a keg! What are we celebratin'? Why, Dvürgfest ay coorse! It's always Dvürgfest!!!

Contents: 12-page rulebook, 6 shot glasses, 1 reusable writing tablet, 1 fifty-charge wand of Conjure Alcohol with a 50% chance of missing 1d6 charges- the box was tampered with, and either the store manager or a customer abusing the returns policy used the wand a few times.

Prep Time: None, Play Time: Variable, dependent upon the constitution of the players.

What It Is: An Irresponsibly Good Time.

True to its name and advertising, this is a drinking game with little in the way of skill, challenge, or even chance. You pick a game from the book or set your own parameters for sips and shots on the tablet, and then get to work on your night. One player has the distinction of being the "Brewmeister" who keeps tally and uses the wand for refills, but they are not exempt from drinking either. The wand can conjure a small variety of alcoholic beverages depending on the magic keyword spoken while activating it, ranging from a potent pilsner to a highly combustible rum. The wand also has around 50 charges, which is hopefully enough for several games. There is a form and address in the back of the rulebook for ordering wand refills- you may notice the wand constitutes 90% of the cost of the game, and that just getting drinks at the pub would be cheaper.

Consequences: All participants must Save every hour of play or wind up dangerously drunk. Even the "winner" becomes decently tipsy at the end of the game. Any penalties for inebriation are in full effect, and the following morning all participants must Save with disadvantage or else wake up severely hungover.

Capital

Appearance: The letter 'C' explodes off of the box in a font several dozen sizes bigger than any other text on the box, to make sure absolutely no one misses the fact that the C in Capital is capitalized. Disembodied hands rake through a dragon hoard's worth of gold coins and jewels underneath it, surrounded by a halo of industrious vignettes depicting fleets of trade ships, smoking factories, well-to-do gentlemen, statuesque workers striking handsome poses as they labor, etc.

Back-of-the-Box Blurb: Become a merchant prince! Grease the wheels of industry with the sweat of your brow, make daring investments, and live a life of high adventure in high society with your fellow players... at least until you claim it all for yourself!

Contents: Folding board, 216-page manual, 4 sets of obnoxiously nonstandard polyhedral dice carved from the bones of an animal species that has since become critically endangered, 3 twenty-count decks of event cards, 500 building/worker/currency tokens.

Prep Time: 3-4 hours; Play Time: 30 minutes to 2 hours

What It Is: Friendship Ruiner.

The grueling setup time is the result of the game's extensive random generation rules. You don't play in the same world from game to game- each one is created from scratch with its own economic and sociopolitical variables in play. The entire global economy is simulated, with greatly varying degrees of depth and realism therein.

Players, too, have their fair share of prep work. After determining first-come-first-serve turn order, each player generates their merchant prince ("or princess!!", as the rulebook rather proudly declares numerous times, always in italics with exactly two exclamation points). To create a prince(ss), one must also create five generations of family history, fortune, inheritance, and "good breeding" that leave the player with a wealth (or dearth) of bonuses and point modifiers. To cap it off, the merchant begins play with a random starting gift/investment of money and liquid assets. These gifts are determined using open-ended polyhedral dice rolls that can explode multiplicatively, and can often (around 40% of the time) result in a player acquiring most or all of the game's currency tokens, thereby winning the game before play has even started.

The actual game is played on a rather cheap, flimsy board. (Deluxe editions of the game use carved hardwood of questionable legality that raises the price fivefold.) The board depicts the nondescript metropolis of Fortuna, studded with rings and boxes for game pieces and stacks of special event cards. Players compete in several industries while committing corporate espionage or naked acts of aggression against one another and trying to win the local government to their side. Alliances are supported, but they are designed to be fast, loose, and brief. Wealth tokens can be spent on various ventures, or wasted in acts of conspicuous consumption that give you influence points and favors among the aristo-plutocracy, to be spent later for even more wealth.

The final tally is its own game, full of byzantine rules for point calculation dependent upon world-generated modifiers, as well as any changes that occurred over the course of the game.

Consequences: At least one character will develop a deep animosity toward another—most likely the winner, or the most ruthless player—for one day thanks to this game. They must Save or else do nothing to help whenever preventable misfortune is about to befall the target of their righteous indignation.

At-Home Adventure

Appearance: The box's eerily photorealistic cover art depicts a ragtag band of misfits not unlike the PCs, gathered around a table where they are poring over books, reference sheets, and a grid board populated by figurines that resemble miniaturized versions of themselves, albeit markedly different in minor, idealized ways like height, physical appearance, or gender. The figurines seem to be coming to life, animating into flesh and blood out of their former ivory and pewter states to do battle with a group of ruffian figurines undergoing the same transmutation.

Back-of-the-Box Blurb: Enter the battlefields of Imagination!

Contents: 10 meters of grid paper, 5 sets of 6-piece polyhedral dice, 248-page "core rulebook", 129-page "referee's manual", 10 "sample adventurer" brochure-booklets, 100 character sheets, dice rolling tray, privacy/reference screen, 100 paper tokens, catalogue of ~20 optional supplement books available for order.

Prep Time: Meta-variable; Play Time: Indefinite

What It Is: Hyper-Simulationist.

This game so perfectly replicates the "real" world of the campaign that the PCs use the exact same systems and mechanics to play it that you and your players use to play them, albeit with a few terms replaced by suspiciously specific synonyms. The PCs may even create characters who are uncannily perfect twins of themselves. The board game essentially becomes a mesagame- a game within the game whose distinction from "reality" relies entirely upon a thin veil of cognitive dissonance.

Consequences: The entire party must Save or else experience a spiraling existential crisis as they begin to consider the implications of living in a world that can be simulated so perfectly. They can almost hear your dice rolling...