Game: Ssethregore: In the Coils of the Serpent Empire
Publisher: Paradigm Concepts
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 7th, March 2005
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10 [ Really good ]
Total Score: 8
Average Score: 8.00
Ssethregore: In the Coils of the Serpent Empire is much easier to read than it is to pronounce. Ssethregore. If it has a snake-like hiss about it then the tongue-twisting name has done its job. And yeah; the tag line “In the Coils of the Serpent Empire” does rather like the cat, er, snake out of the bag.
This is an Living Arcanis product from Paradigm Concepts (as Living Arcanis products tend to be).
We get 160 pages for about US$25.00 but In the Coils of the Serpent Empire is especially efficient with text and white space. There’s a lot of text – forgive me for not measuring exactly – but it looks at least one grade smaller than usual. There’s not a lot of white space. This isn’t one of those RPG supplements which pads out on the illustrations. In fact, if anything, Ssethregore is light on the artwork. I wish there were illustrations for most, if not all, of the many races mentioned in the book.
Ssethregore: In the Coils of the Serpent Empire details the long and eventful history of the Ssethric races. These are the lizardmen and snake people – and we’re not just talking about trogs and naga here although they’ve involved too.
To summarise too much of the Ssethric history would be to risk spoilers. Historically the Ssethric were a religious race – and they still are. It’s just that their first gods appeared to abandon them at a terribly crucial time. Clerics lost contact with their deities and thus all their powers. This is not a good thing to discover on the eve of a titanic battle against a rebellious slave race. The Ssethric empire was huge at one point, the military might (naval too) and magic power was immense. Races which didn’t naturally become part of the Empire – like the Naga – either became slave races or were ground to extinction. Some races, like the Halflings, were trickier to exterminate. The trickiest of the Ssethric tended to be thwarted by the Serpent Empire’s ability to magically engineer and evolve warriors designed to overcome their enemies’ natural strengths. And with this magical genetic creation there is now a plethora of races. The Ssethric are certainly not the force they once were on Arcanis and it’s hard to imagine them managing to create new races in this day and age and in some ways that’s a counter spin to the mood and flavour much of In the Coils of the Serpent Empire evokes. More significantly, perhaps, the history of race creation helps explain why there are so many dangerous races kicking around.
The history of the Serpent Empire comes to a close about twenty pages in… at which point the geographic tour takes over. The geography is interesting; these snakes and lizards are currently focused in certain niche areas. Sure, yeah, you guessed – they’re in the swamps, but they’re elsewhere too (spoil protected on behalf of evil GMs everywhere).
If you’re desperate for crunch then you might leap in joy when you turn the page of Chapter Three: Races of Ssethregore. In fact this chapter is not splat. Here we have an anthropological overview of the key races in the Empire. The Ssanu snake-men, of course, are vital. There are different groups of Ssanu, tribes or clans known as Pits. Pit Crotalus has a different origin and outlook to Pit Sseth, for example. There are plenty of different types of Ss’ressen too; at least a dozen clutches of these lizardmen. The cold blooded warriors are the backbone of the Empire. A side box provides stat modifications (+2 Dex and -2 Intelligence) and character sheet tweaks needed to play lizardmen from the Black Talons clutch as player characters.
Allowing the players into the Empire in the role of player characters is a nice move. Here the Black Talons are probably best seen as anti-heroes rather than either heroes or villains. Characters can also play Ashen Hide and Ghost Scale from the Lizardmen and Troglodytes too. There’s a wider range of races in the book but not always the accompanying stat-blocks. I’m quite pleased by this! In some cases we already have suitable stats in commonly available d20 books and in order cases we’re dealing with dead races. It’s such a common pit trap for GMs – to play the old “actually the XYX aren’t extinct!”
The Sentinels of the Blazing Wyrm are a new core class. It’s a nice class, mixing magic with combat and will appeal to many gamers. I don’t think a new core class like this is necessary though, I’d rather keep the fantasy classes as abstract as possible and so will treat the Sentinels of the Blazing Wyrm as an unusual luxury. Chaoshammers (The Followers of Zedok), Crocodile Lord (Acutus), Disciple of Jeggal Sag, Drakhen, Sse’thric, Harbinger, Ironscale, Laksiri, Order of the Iridescent Scales, Marauder, Miliarius, Pit Fighter, Plethorax and Sse’thric Inquisitor are prestige classes. There’s space in this tightly packed book to review the role of common core classes too.
There are a couple of pages for new feats – an exotic array given they are best applied to snake-men and lizardmen. A few of these feats double up with titles like “Greater” or “Improved”.
Religion and Magic are merged into a single chapter. Here we look at the original (and perhaps missing) deities and the new Varn deities which are currently popular. Deities and magic cross over in the Domain system, namely: Dream, Holy, Poison, Murder, Rage, Refuse and Saurian. That’s quite an interesting mix. Rage, Refuse and Saurian are particularly original. There’s no shortage of new spells for these new domains.
Ssethregore: In the Coils of the Serpent Empire finishes in the usual d20 style. We’ve new equipment and new monsters. Sometimes these sections have the whiff of “filler” about them that is not the case here. By the time we’re into the tailing end of this supplement we’ve heard numerous mentions of certain monsters and have whole legions of alien warriors to equip.
Ssethregore: In the Coils of the Serpent Empire succeeds in creating a menacing threat. There’s absolutely no doubt that the Serpent Empire was once huge and very scary (you may well be fed up of their military success by the time you close the book) and could well be again. The danger, though, is that this is a sizable dynamic to toss in to your Living Arcanis without enough forethought. A possible brooding threat could turn into a top heavy weight which suddenly tilts your campaign to one side.
Ssethregore is an unusual d20 book. It manages to create a campaign setting out of the usual trappings of fantasy and yet create something different. As a result I rate Ssethregore as a valuable addition to any Arcanis collection.
