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Fireborn Gamemaster's Handbook
Fireborn is an rpg system that starts with a pretty cool concept: You are an ancient dragon reborn into the modern world as a human, but with most of your magical potential intact. In practice, there are a bunch of nice selling points and a bunch of issues, as well.
(Note: I only have the gamemaster’s handbook, which doesn’t contain the character creation rules or most of the actual mechanics. So most of my comments on mechanics are extrapolated from the NPC information and rules variations presented in this book.)
There are several particularly clever ideas here. For one, the system is specifically presented as duel-setting, with the scions (reborn dragons) in modern London slowly remembering their past lives as dragons in the mythic age during the story. There’s an entire section of the book dedicated to running flashbacks and working them into stories, allowing the players to have fun as badass, world-shaking dragons in between being mostly standard squishy humans. Also, broodmates (such as the PC party) automatically have a telepathic link, which solves the problem of metagame conversation / “talking as a free action”.
The Gamemaster’s Handbook itself, for that matter, has a lot of really nice setting details that could probably be used well with a different system: All of the flashback advice and general plot ideas, certainly. It includes an entire chapter on the magical denizens of modern-day London (by neighborhood!) and another on mythic-age Atlantis (including history, notable NPCs and maps). The magical items are mostly system-independent, and would work in most rules-light systems where balance is enforced by the GM rather than by splatbook sprawl and lawyering.
The biggest problem, honestly, is that I get the feeling that the original idea was cribbed from World of Darkness by someone who didn’t quite understand why WoD worked, and then the more talented folks who built out the worldbuilding got stuck with some of those initial ideas. The magical energy is called “karma” and the evil version of it is “taint”, both of which honestly strike me as hokey. Taint comes from human sorcerers screwing up their magic, which means...it’s basically paradox. It’s also both the power source for the big bads of the game and the source of angst (it makes supernatural creatures go mad!), and having a game mechanic as your primary source of angst doesn’t really work for me.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that the system design appears to be “World of Darkness for people who like D&D”. There are a lot of corner-cases to the basic rolling mechanic, and apparently combat involves multiple sorts of actions, long turns, and “stances” that change how many available dice you have. If you want a storyteller system with really complicated, layered combat...why not just play Exalted?
Bottom line: I like the book (especially given I paid $4 for it at I-Con), and the settting details are good stuff, but I see no reason to hunt down the other books so I can use the system as written. More likely, I’d use the setting, have the scions be mechanically a World of Darkness race (possibly demons, possibly mages) and change a few of the hokier names, and let the players build their flashback dragon forms using the Bygone Bestiary.
(Note: I only have the gamemaster’s handbook, which doesn’t contain the character creation rules or most of the actual mechanics. So most of my comments on mechanics are extrapolated from the NPC information and rules variations presented in this book.)
There are several particularly clever ideas here. For one, the system is specifically presented as duel-setting, with the scions (reborn dragons) in modern London slowly remembering their past lives as dragons in the mythic age during the story. There’s an entire section of the book dedicated to running flashbacks and working them into stories, allowing the players to have fun as badass, world-shaking dragons in between being mostly standard squishy humans. Also, broodmates (such as the PC party) automatically have a telepathic link, which solves the problem of metagame conversation / “talking as a free action”.
The Gamemaster’s Handbook itself, for that matter, has a lot of really nice setting details that could probably be used well with a different system: All of the flashback advice and general plot ideas, certainly. It includes an entire chapter on the magical denizens of modern-day London (by neighborhood!) and another on mythic-age Atlantis (including history, notable NPCs and maps). The magical items are mostly system-independent, and would work in most rules-light systems where balance is enforced by the GM rather than by splatbook sprawl and lawyering.
The biggest problem, honestly, is that I get the feeling that the original idea was cribbed from World of Darkness by someone who didn’t quite understand why WoD worked, and then the more talented folks who built out the worldbuilding got stuck with some of those initial ideas. The magical energy is called “karma” and the evil version of it is “taint”, both of which honestly strike me as hokey. Taint comes from human sorcerers screwing up their magic, which means...it’s basically paradox. It’s also both the power source for the big bads of the game and the source of angst (it makes supernatural creatures go mad!), and having a game mechanic as your primary source of angst doesn’t really work for me.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that the system design appears to be “World of Darkness for people who like D&D”. There are a lot of corner-cases to the basic rolling mechanic, and apparently combat involves multiple sorts of actions, long turns, and “stances” that change how many available dice you have. If you want a storyteller system with really complicated, layered combat...why not just play Exalted?
Bottom line: I like the book (especially given I paid $4 for it at I-Con), and the settting details are good stuff, but I see no reason to hunt down the other books so I can use the system as written. More likely, I’d use the setting, have the scions be mechanically a World of Darkness race (possibly demons, possibly mages) and change a few of the hokier names, and let the players build their flashback dragon forms using the Bygone Bestiary.
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John is an insane man in Minneapolis. The players are the various voices in his head.