Immortal: Millennium (1999)

Precedence Publishing

Date Reviewed: 9-13-2002

Critical Kobold Rating:    (3 out of 5 Dice)

 

Oh, my god... Wait! That's me!

Overview

     NOTE: This review covers only the core rulebook in the Millennium Edition. (I swiped it for free at Origins a few years back.) There are several aspects to the game that the authors stated will be covered in forthcoming sourcebooks or editions. Precedence Publishing has since gone out of business. The rights to the game now belong to the original designers, under whom it’s been released in its third edition, called Invisible War.

         In Immortal, characters begin as seemingly regular guys going about their regular business. But, as so often happens after a few mocchaccinos, eventually they realize that they have powers far beyond mortal ken.

     They are actually the manifestations of immortal avatars who have undergone a ritual in order to stave off the boredom of living through unlimited years…. they’ve given themselves voluntary amnesia and are living life as a human.  Eventually, the PCs will discover that they are faster, stronger, smarter, and sexier than the mortals they walk with, and over time their latent memories will surface, giving them spells, powers, abilities they never knew they harbored. Cool, eh?

“Immortal: Millennium is about classic mythology set loose in a near-future vision of our own world. The characters are the literal gods of past ages reawakened to battle against ancient enemies.” 

(Core rulebook, p. 14.)

     But then again, they’ll need those godlike powers. You see, many eons ago, the naughty Sanguinary, a most evil beast, was cast out from its own dimension of pure thought and into our material universe. While in a mortal form, it was shattered into zillions of pieces, scattered around the world. These pieces, called Voxes, are each sentient bits of the Sanguinary’s consciousness. For 65 million years, the Sanguinary has been trying to reform by uniting all the Voxes. When this happens, whoa, baby! Nastiness is in store for the universe.

     This is just a part of the milieu background. The short version is that the PCs will have to realize their full godlike potential while striving to find the agents of the Sanguinary and making sure the Voxes don’t all get together. Now, the spice to the mix is that anyone possessing a Vox (or more accurately, being possessed by one) is an immortal, who may also have powers capable of controlling humans, altering reality, or even kicking your omnipotent butt.

MECHANICS

     The game uses all the funny-shaped dice we gamers know and love. The three PC core attributes are called Auras. These are Body, Mind, and Spirit. Aura scores are dice types, not specific numbers. For example, your Mind Aura may be the die "d8", rather than the static number “6”. When performing any task requiring smarts, you roll a d8 to determine your specific Mind score for that task.  The *fewer* sides your die type has, the better your ability. So someone with a Body Aura of d8 is at the height of human strength, while a sickly child may have a Body of d20. 

     If the difficulty (or Target number) of a task is simple, it may be a “14”. You would have to roll the appropriate die and get  lower  than the Target number to determine success. A mere mortal using a d20 would have some chance of failure (rolling 15-20). But if your godling PC has a d8 in the Aura in question, you can’t possibly roll more than 8, and therefore automatically succeed at the task. Simple, simple! 

"Yes, I am but a regular car wash attendant, like any other mortal man! BEHOLD! We have a wax application special this week!"

     PCs have classes of sorts. Each godling must choose a Calling. These correspond to Zodiac signs, and each is related to some basic template for the PC, such as Empaths (Capricorns), Slayers (Sagittarius), Tacticians (Leos), etc. These Callings determine your primary skills (such as Blade Combat, Mathematics, or Business). In PC creation you may choose other skills, or choose a specialized "Focus" within skills (such as a Blade Combat Focus of "Fencing", or maybe "Broadsword").

     Oh, there’s more! Each PC also has a  Himsati , a Sanskrit word meaning “form that injures”. This is usually an animal form, but it could be almost anything. This is a shapeshift form that your PC might take when fighting, or going about on Halloween, or what have you. Going into Himsati form also engages even more powers inherent to their spiritual forms, called 'Natures'. Natures can be spell-like powers, or natural animal abilities, depending on your Himsati.

     Since your PC is immortal, you do have all those avatars of past lives in your head. In fact, you get to choose how many lives you’ve lead! This can give you important extra skills of knowledge during the game, but it has a downside: the more avatars you’ve got rattling around in your head, the greater the chance that you’ll freak out at an inopportune moment as all the hundreds of thousands of years of memories come crashing into your consciousness. That’s a bad thing, if you’re not powerful enough to handle the sensory overload.

 The GOOD:  

     This is a very interesting idea. The premise that PCs are truly gods is bold, and the material seems to support the powers logically. The dice mechanics and the flow of play seem well thought out, and very simple. Even combat and contested actions are resolved quickly, so as not to get in the way of the game play. 

     The book is less than 100 pages long, and a good bit of that is devoted to such things as explaining role playing games and LARPs to novices, giving the Narrator (DM) tips for running games, and a sample PC sheet. For its length, it’s surprisingly complete. Simple without lacking useful info, which is a hard balance to reach. 

     One other especially good thing to note about the book, though (and the reason it caught my eye at the con), was that it's chock full of photos of a young Claudia Christian, who is Babe-0-Delic! She’s a fine actress, and looks damn sweet as an immortal. (Chicks with weapons… Anyone who knows me knows I can’t resist ‘em.)

 The NEUTRAL: 

     As solid as the book is, I don’t care for the “more info on this topic will be presented in another book” scenario that pops up more than once here. I've gotten burned with that line before from game publishers. There’s nothing missing from this book that’s critical to play, but there are some intriguing topics brought up that aren’t then addressed in this volume. (I suppose it may be moot with the newer edition (Invisible War), but Immortal: Millennium was published this way at the time, and I honestly don’t know if the promised “future sourcebooks” ever saw print before the former publisher went under.) 

   It’s also unclear to me if this would make a good long-running campaign. It seems like it could be a clever diversion, but the scope of the setting and the very concept make it seem prone to power slides. I mean, unlike most rpg’s, characters here don’t just become god-like in power, they actually start the friggin’ game as gods!

            The EVIL: 

            The PCs have serious advantages over mere mortals, right from the start. I know they’re godlings, but the Aura scores start off at levels most humans can’t achieve in their entire lives. Plus, mortals don’t even get gnarly abilities like "Wishgiving", "Terrible Countenance", or (my favorite), "Spew". This means that the only real opponents worth throwing at your immortals are other immortals; lesser beings simply don’t stand much chance in a contest of any sort with PCs. I think the climb to power should be a bit more gradual, the awakening of the PCs’ godly might a bit more subdued than the game currently encourages.  If the first real opposition your group encounters is Ra, it’s kinda’ hard to follow that up with a biker holding a knife.

            The color commentary in the book comes in the form of e-mail messages between immortals, stuck in the margins near the relevant text. The font in these things is eye-strainingly bad, and the white-text-on-black format doesn’t help matters. 

            And while there are some excellent cleavage shots of Claudia in a nice sepia color, there certainly could have been more.

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