Author: Todd Vanhooser
Year: 2010
Players: Two or more
Ages: 12+
Category: Fantasy RPG
Pages: 174
Retail Price: $35.00 softcover, $12.00 PDF
Adventures Under the Laughing Moon (AUtLM) is a roleplaying game written by Todd Vanhooser, an author local to the Phoenix area, and is based on his Laughing Moon Chronicles series of books – although truth be told, I believe only one book has made it to print as of this writing: The Barren Twelve. The game introduces players to the world of Mythren where magic and danger are a part of everyday life. Prophecies warn of magical persecution and the rise of ancient powers. Shadows of evil threaten the lands as a call for heroes is sounded. The era in the history of Mythren in which the game takes place is the age of prophecy where magic is forbidden and a multitude of gods look to increase their presence, and of course power, in the world.
Let’s start off with what’s good about the book. First of all, the book is very nicely presented with plenty of well-done artwork as well as photography throughout. Everything is laid out in an orderly and logical fashion as well and the writing is alright.
Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the end of the kudos…
As Elliott will attest, I’ve no doubt owned and read through at least a hundred RPGs in my day – minimum. In that time I’ve seen some great ones, a multitude of average or mediocre ones, and few that were steaming piles of crap. Oh, I think I still lose sleep over those horrific RPGS. I have to say AUtLM barely falls into the middle category while teetering on the brink of slipping over the edge into the final “bad” category. I’m not saying I would lose sleep over the system though although the more I think about it the closer AUtLM moves toward that terrible ranking…
As I mentioned there’s loads of artwork and photography throughout but the problem here is there’s just too much of it. In my review of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (MHRPG), a little while back, I talked about that fine edge a core rule book walks regarding an art to text ratio. MHRPG came damn close to crossing that line but, in the end, didn’t and I felt the buyer was getting enough content where it wasn’t an issue to prevent anyone from buying the game. Here, on the other hand, AUtLM honestly comes across as a bit of a gyp as not only is there too much artwork but the text font used is way too large which obviously artificially inflates the page count. Reading through the rulebook I felt the art was being used to mask the fact there isn’t a whole lot of game here. Or in a visual sense imagine sitting down in a restaurant and ordering a steak. When that steak arrives you find yourself looking at 2 oz. of meat buried under a pile of parsley. Sure, the garnish is nice but that’s not what I sat down to eat…
Or to use an old advertising tag from Wendy’s: “Where’s the beef?”
I’ll take a guess if you were to take all the graphics out of AUtLM and produce the text in a standard sized font you’d be looking at seventy pages or so, tops, instead of 174. I might even be shooting high with that seventy page estimate and I’m even including the various charts in my calculations. As a comparison I busted out some other RPGs from my collection, old and new, to take a look and nothing I paged through came anywhere near the ratio of graphics to text found in Laughing Moon. Even those that have a lot of art say like the aforementioned MHRPG or Legend of the Five Rings, still provided enough there there. L5R is especially crammed full of info in spite of the fact nearly every page has excellent artwork.
As far as the actual mechanics of the system, actions are based on a twenty sided die with various different dice used for damage and such. Characters have various attributes, skills, and so forth that you need to roll less than to succeed. AUtLM uses what is known as an exploding die mechanic (although it’s not called that here) regarding damage dealt, spell effects, and what not whereas if you roll the highest number on that particular die you get to reroll and add the new result to your original roll. There’s no indication if you get to reroll again if you hit the max on your second roll though. This is an example of much of the incomplete feel of the rules themselves as concepts of how to actually run the game seem to be glossed over or completely not present.
Here we have the basic fantasy character attributes, skills, and so on so nothing new there and AUTLM uses a “fate” system known as Bandu here that represents luck, good karma, whatever given to each player at the beginning of each session that they can use to make rerolls and add bonuses to the results. Once again, nothing that hasn’t been resented in loads of ways before. All the usual suspects are here as well as far as fantasy races and character classes too. Around seventy pages or so (including all the aforementioned graphic filler) are devoted to what I would consider the character creation process and make up the great majority of the book. The creation process isn’t well spelled out for new players either. Keep in mind this is coming from someone who’s played dozens of systems and read through many more and if I have a hard time wrapping my head around a concept this has to mean something.
The rest of the book is extremely light when it comes to other aspects and actual gameplay. The magic section is very sparse – surprising in a game with a fantasy setting – with each level having three sample spells included for your perusal. I understand a magic supplement was just released but for an initial core book to only have twenty one spells and a handful of magic items is kind of a cheat. The monster section is about the same with thirty monsters with most receiving about a paragraph of description and stats.
The section devoted to game play is all of twenty pages covering money, leveling up, critical hits, and so on.
The last thing I’ll touch upon is the setting itself. As in there isn’t a whole lot of info about it. The history of the game world is three pages in length with a few pages of adventure nuggets to mine as well. That’s about the extent of it. I don’t always base an RPG solely on the mechanics of the system as I don’t believe the “crunchiness” matters all that much in the end. There are plenty of titles out there based in fascinating settings that didn’t come packaged with the greatest of gameplay rules. Luckily, I have enough experience to run through a system to keep what I like, modify what I’m up in the air about, and cut or replace what I don’t care for in the end. AUtLM doesn’t even have enough info to even know what the setting actually is outside of the fact practicing magic has been outlawed.
The feel I get from AUTLM is of a group of friends who like role playing games, although maybe they haven’t played a whole lot of different ones, getting together and deciding to write their own RPG. The rules are heavy on the character creation side while providing very little in way of a magic system, character advancement, monsters, or the meat and potatoes of actually gaming the system. In the end I feel I’m looking more at the beta edition of an RPG as opposed to a finished product. Better yet, it’s more of a base concept of a game and not even a beta.
At the end of the day, when I review a role playing product, much of my final verdict is based on answering a very simple question: is this a game or adventure I feel like I want to play? Is there something interesting or compelling that – even though I might not want to run it – would make me look forward to sitting down at the table with that product? I have to say nothing with the core book for AUtLM jumps out at me to demand my attention. I know two new supplements have been, or are in the process of being, released. Both look to expand upon magic (arcane and divine) in the world of Mythren as far as I can tell. I’m certain most of this info should have been included in the core rule book but gamers interested in AUtLM are being asked to purchase these separately.
All in all nothing noteworthy is being brought to the table with Adventures Under the Laughing Moon in any way, shape, or form. The system itself is extremely poor as far as formulation, the mechanics are a mish-mash of concepts better utilized and presented in other games, while there’s only the barest of bones when it comes to an actual setting for the game world.
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