Ythrek

Game: Ythrek
Publisher: BTRC
Series: EABA
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 12th, April 2003
Reviewer’s Rating: 7/10   [ Good ]
Total Score: 7
Average Score: 7.00

Okay. Be fair to Ythrek; even if a PDF is set up to be as annoying as possible it’s often easy to fix. In this case, in Acrobat, go to the View menu and move the tick from Single Page to Continuous and you’ll probably want to select Fit Width too.

This doesn’t help with the bookmarks, if you use them then the page will re-size to fit your screen length-wise and that’s no good for me. At least Ythrek has bookmarks, too many PDFs don’t.

Don’t get me wrong; Ythrek’s selling points are far more than just having bookmarks. There’s the EABA game mechanics, that’s a plus point. Even if you have to buy EABA separately, the combined cost is less than sets of core rules currently on sale.

On the other hand, it does make for an expensive PDF package. I don’t even think you need EABA to use Ythrek. This download is all about the campaign world and the interesting things to do with it. You don’t need game mechanics for that.

When the EABA mechanics do get mentioned, with the spell lists for example, the strength of EABA’s design is such that you can work out the dicey bits yourself with relative ease.

Ythrek is a low fantasy, gritty, setting. Magic is only just being rediscovered, there’s barely enough food to survive, daily life is a terrible struggle and something dark and dangerous is coming. Something dark and dangerous has been before and it destroyed the world.

Ythrek is a post-apocalyptic fantasy. I’ll admit a weakness for post-apocalyptic fantasies here and now. There’s a catch #22 in such settings though, I love the mystery of what happened to cause the apocalypse in the first place. I like digging for clues and insights to why it happened but I don’t actually like to have that mystery ruined with a solution. I know! How fussy is that?

I’m sure I can’t be the only one. Other players I know prefer to have no idea of the history of the apocalypse at all and others think they need to know exactly what happened in order to play the game correctly. Ythrek manages, perhaps coincidentally, to solve this conundrum.

Ythrek comes up with a number of different suggestions as to what caused the first apocalypse; each one compelling, each one brimming with ideas and each one as original as the last. By offering a choice of histories there’s no single background with the implicit (or explicit) backing of the author.

Barren wasteland settings such as Ythrek can sometimes make for slightly schizophrenic reading. On one hand there are large areas of empty wilderness – and therefore there’s not much to write about. On the other hand there tends to be at least one place of note, one bastion of civilization – and that’s often what the bulk of the book concentrates on.

The result is sometimes a strangely focused book, a book that tries to convey large amount of wilderness by writing intensively about the bustling civilization. This is another pit trap that Ythrek pretty well hops over. There is a core of civilization and it’s the city of Novomad. Novomad isn’t a booming metropolis though; it’s a tight knit and quirky community that is about to run out of food.

By writing about the habits and lifestyle of the people in the city – the honour duels, for example – and the problems they face, not by concentrating on Novomad as a golden hope, Ythrek manages not to wreck the post-apocalyptic flavour of the game.

It’s Novomad that makes up the bulk of the first half of the 78-paged PDF. There are six family lines that are believed to have survived through from the old days and this allows for fun and games with politics, nepotism and family specialities.

The presence of the families is directly related to the import placed on honour and therefore the role of duelling among the Novomadians. Duelling leads nicely on to how the legal system and courts of law work. We don’t stress over the details of all this. Ythrek gives you enough for a taster, enough to get going with and then moves on from there. There’s a lot packed into 78 pages.

Technology is important. Ythrek is set in a Middle Basic Era as defined by EABA and we’re told exactly what that means in this campaign setting. Magic, for example, complements basic medicine.

We’re just seeing the effective use of gunpowder; just enough to make duelling with jewellery piece pistols fashionable among young nobles. Cattle and work animals failed to survive the cataclysm and so farming is next to impossible and the transportation of goods tends to rely on magic. With problems like this issues like trade and travel are also worthy of sections of there own.

Again there’s enough text here to answer the “I wonder?” but not so much as to bore you.

After 27 pages the download’s finished describing the world of Ythrek. The chapter on the various people of Ythrek does extremely well at blending campaign information into game mechanics.

As the different tribes, the northern folk, the southern folk and the centrals are detailed we’re giving an idea of which skills they’ll have to. When it comes to noting an individual’s status within the family that’s done with direct reference to the Status game mechanic.

There are nearly as many pages on magic and spells as there are on the Ythrek world but then this isn’t much of a phenomena in RPGs. Spells are always value for money in EABA since once they’re introduced in one game they can be taken anywhere. It has to be said that the twenty or so pages of spells in Ythrek are particularly suited to the setting though.

Spells are divided up into categories: Cognio, Energo, Magio, Vito, Atomo, Macro and Animo. These categories bundle similar spells together; for example, Animo deals with spirits and Energo with the manipulation. This allows mages to specialise in areas that interest them and GMs to easily keep one set of spells rare. There are rules for learning spells, magic items and comments on the role of mages in society in here too.

The following chapter is set up to assist in the running of scenarios in Ythrek. There’s a pair of sample adventures but more interesting (for me, anyway) are the sections of help on running adventures inside the Novomad region and outside it in the wilds too.

Some possible reasons for the cataclysm are discussed here and I think they work so well that I’ve already raved about them. These suggestions are more than just throw a way comments though; the implications of each are considered.

The final chapter in the download has the equipment crunch in it, the guns, the adventurers’ gear and lists of costs too. There’s enough here to get going with and give your players a bit of choice too. I always find it interesting looking at the costs of items in world’s as harsh as Ythrek.

A sewing kit costs half as much as basic clothing does; that’s either an expensive sewing kit or cheap clothes. Perhaps it’s the needles that are expensive. I always know when a campaign world has won me over when I get into quirks like the cost of making slender but strong and sharp shafts of metal in a fantasy world.

BTRC really do well with their PDF technical skills. When this section gets on to summarising the spells in quick lists some of the entries have page references that you can click on and jump straight back to the full description of the page.

It’s worth noting as a plus point that Ythrek follows the same style guide as the EABA rules. Comments in green are examples and the ones in red are references. Colour-coded and shaped bullet points are used in the same way too; red diamonds and green discs are now a familiar sight.

I really liked Ythrek. It’s a campaign world that makes me want to run a scenario or two there. I think it’s the sort of world setting that you can come to when you and your gaming group are burnt on the typical fantasy and want to try something new.

The setting inspires to toss around a whole host of one off ideas. The product benefits from the professional shine that makes it easy to find what I want in the download in order to make these ideas works. That combination gets the thumbs up. Ythrek gets the thumbs up.