Thread by @BrainClouds

OK, so here goes nothing... gonna do a full exploration of #Giantlands. God help me.

This might be a long thread. [1/∞]

First off, some general comments...

I try not to criticize a product's price point usually, but $130 for this is honestly absurd.

Compare it to Invisible Sun, which has literally ten times the stuff in the box for $30 LESS.

The entirety of Giantlands is about as big as one, maybe two, of the IS manuals. And it has nowhere near the same production values.

Granted, Wonderfilled and MCG are miles apart in terms of RPG experience, capability, and production volume, but still.

Secondly... I don't know how to put this without being insulting or condescending... but the product isn't very well written. Honestly, it looks like it was written by someone who doesn't speak English as a first language.

Short sentences, sentence fragments, unrelated sentences jumbled together in the same paragraph, etc...

It's the sort of thing an editor worth a damn would point out, and I question how much editing these got beyond "spelled right".

I've seen a lot of amateur and first time publishing work that is significantly better written... I expected more from James Ward and a self-proclaimed "first ever narrative designer" game industry "veteran" (and I use that term loosely).

It's worth noting that the foreword - which was written by James Ward - is much better written than the rest of the game, which makes me wonder how much of the actual game text was written by Ward.

OK, so all that being said, time to start with the "Spirits Guide"... "Volume 1 of three booklets".

Yes, it actually says it that way: Not "one of three", not "1 of 3"... "1 of three".

If that isn't an omen of things to come, I'm not sure what is.

[Stepping away for a second]

[OK, back]

It's worth noting another thing...

On the COVER, he's "Gary Gygax Jr."

In the CREDITS, he's "Ernest Gary Gygax Jr."

So, yeah, that's full on milking Gary's name there.

I'm going to skip over the intro "what is Giantlands" and "what is an RPG" for now and try to get to the mechanics as fast as possible.

Giantlands is by nature a d100 game. It uses d100 for EVERYTHING... but it also says you need a d4, which I haven't figured out what for yet.

Instead of hit points, they use "Life Force".

Before even explaining what "Life Force" is, it mentions that it takes 1 day to heal 5 Life Force points. We'll come back to that, trust me.

If your Life Force points reach zero, you die.

...BUT...

Each character has three "souls" and can be restored to life that many times. I don't know how to actually do that yet.

And I'm not exactly thrilled of the choice of words here.

For future reference, the DM/GM is called the "Spirit Keeper".

I get a kick of how they mention "polite" games, and how disputes between players and DMs are pretty much going to be a given.

"Characters should die sometimes."

And I'm curious to know how "firearms" aren't "guns".

OK, Character Creation! Here we go!

STEP 1: Pick your species, sigil, chiefdom, and profession. I don't know what "sigil" and "chiefdom" mean at this point. Moving on.

STEP 2, ATTRIBUTES: Roll a d100 six times, those are your attributes. There's a mulligan rule so you can re-roll one of them until you roll better.

So your attributes can be between 1 and 100. Keep that in mind.

STEP 3, EMOTIONS: You "select" a fear by rolling a d10 and picking an archetype.

STEP 4, EQUIPMENT: You roll a d10 to determine what gear you get. Apparently you roll for everything... Want to be a badass armored road warrior but only rolled a 5 on armor? Hope you like a shawl.

STEP 5, LIFE FORCE: Add the highest and the lowest of your Mind, Body and Spirit attributes to determine your Life Force.

This means your Life Force can be anywhere between 2 and 200. That's... broad.

Life Force is also important for another reason... we'll get to that later.

STEP 6, PROFESSION: Apparently we don't choose a profession in step 1, but OK. We'll get to this later.

And that's basically it.

So there's a lot of talk about Ley Lines and Sigils... I'll be totally honest here, I've read this three times and I do not understand it. Maybe it'll be clearer in the other books or later, I hope.

Oh, here's how death works: if you have a soul left, when you drop to 0 Life Force you flip a "sigil coin". If the result matches the character's sigil, he is "reborn" in your chiefdom's temple. If you don't have a chiefdom, you die.

Oh, and you're reborn empty-handed. Since you rolled for your equipment, I can only assume you reborn naked.

Combat sequence. Ho boy, here we go.

Initiative? You don't roll for it. It's based on your Life Force. The higher the Life Force, the sooner you go.

So the combat sequence will be pretty much the same all the time. Your Life Force real low? Hope you enjoy acting LAST!

So how do you make an attack, you ask?

ATTACKER rolls d100 and compares it to *their* "To Hit" value. If it's equal or lower, they "hit" their target. Note that this has absolutely nothing to do with the nature of the target or its defenses.

If the attacker "hits", the DEFENDER rolls a d100 and compares that to their armor value. If the defender rolls equal to or lower than their armor value, the defender takes no damage.

It's worth noting that armor values can be as high as 1000, but the defender still rolls a d100 so unless their armor value is less than 100 they are pretty much immune to all attacks, regardless of what the attacker rolls.

BTW, I don't see any concept of a "critical hit."

Combat movement speed? Not a thing. Too much of a burden, right?

BTW, when you level up you gain 6 ability points you can distribute across any of your 6 abilities.

Yeah, six whole points across a maximum of 600 points of abilities. Per level, and there's a cap of 10 levels it seems.

Each ability comes with an additional list that adds bonuses elsewhere, or tells you flat out what you can or can't do.

Have a Body attribute score less than 16? Hope you don't find any locked doors...

I assumed that gems made of solid gold and silver would be more valuable because they're... well... not gems.

Equipment... Here's where I get really picky about wording.

Unless that is precisely the intent, RPGs should not use absolute words like "guaranteed" or "impenetrable" unless they're exactly that.

Unless this smoke bomb makes a sphere as thick as concrete, I don't think "impenetrable" is the word you should be using.

And I can somehow imagine a guy getting angry that his cigarette suddenly went out because some adventuring yokel fired off the mother of all fire extinguishers which has a MILE range.

OK, this is confusing because I thought you had to roll *below* the "To Hit" value.

If I'm reading this right, if you roll a 100% on the d100 the grenade could land at your feet.

Want to live forever? Become an unstoppable killing machine!

This goes completely against the aforementioned "soul" thing.

I'm still very confused about the attack order and initiative equivalent... So when it's my turn to act, but I'm attacking a Sapien, I have to wait?

By the way, I might as well mention... As far as line art goes, some of the art is really nice. But except for the species section it feels like the art is just placed randomly throughout this book.

"Talking about Professions? Let's put an image of a wolf as big as a mountain."

This has been mentioned before... If you choose the "Warrior" profession, I hope you don't roll a 7 on that d10.

That concludes my run through of just the FIRST book... I need a drink.

I got some actual work to do, so come back later for Part Two!

Part two, the "Keeper's Guide", can be found here:

https://twitter.com/BrainClouds/status/1478443612484648963

And here's book three, the "5th Age Index"

https://twitter.com/BrainClouds/status/1478475465392328717