Colonial Gothic (2007)

Rogue Games

Date Reviewed: 6-24-11

Critical Kobold Rating:        (3 out of 5 Dice)

 

This Ain't In the History Books!

     Colonial Gothic is a supernatural horror role playing game set against the backdrop of the American Revolutionary War, circa 1776. The American Colonies are staging a war of independence against Great Britain, but there’s another battle of far greater import taking place in the fledgling nation. A battle against… eeeeeeevil. For many years, an ancient force imprisoned in the land has been awakening, spreading nastiness and corrupting nature. The Native Americans have known about it for a generation or more, and have fought against the unnatural force with their shamans’ magic. Now some of the American settlers are realizing that something’s not right, that the nights in this new land are far more dangerous than the colonists once believed. Players will flesh out the roles of explorers, soldiers, Indian scouts, scholars, shamans, missionaries and more to take up the fight against the horrors born of the emerging evil force haunting the land of America.

     I have a weak spot for good games of supernatural horror. (Really, what true goblinoid doesn’t like a little horror, eh?) I especially enjoy alternate-historical settings, because they supply just enough real-world background to make the supernatural all the more disturbing. Colonial Gothic does a tidy job of providing a complete role playing game system with a detailed background and just the right touch of spookiness to give me the happy wiggles. The game uses Rogue Game’s streamlined 12° System, whose mechanics are simple but practical and perfectly suitable for the game style. And speaking of game style, the backdrop of the Revolutionary War era gives a game master ample choices for campaign ideas. Even without adding supernatural elements to your Gothic game, you can create adventures based around exploration, battles or missions related to the War of Independence, trading or hunting adventures, diplomatic missions with the Native American tribes, or any of a dozen scenarios based off of the settling of new towns or the blazing of new trade routes through the frontiers of the colonies. The game offers something about everything for anyone interested in historical gaming during this time period.

Let’s Whip Up A Minute Man!

              Fighter                Thief              Cleric              Rogue

     To get you started, you design a character based off five prime attributes. Once your PC is created, these five stats won’t change, so choose wisely, young frontiersman!

     Might, Nimble, Vigor, Reason, and Resolution are your attributes. Most of those are pretty self-explanatory, but Resolution may require clarification; it’s a character’s willpower, and also the stat that determines how well a hero reacts when faced with supernatural scariness. A high Resolution will allow said heroic Colonial to stand toe to toe with a towering, slavering monstrosity out of his worst nightmare, while a low Resolution will give our trepid hero the heebie jeebies when the wind blows through the trees at night.

     Colonial Gothic uses a point-buy char gen, which means you have 55 points to place into your stats as you like. Take some care when doing this, because you’ll pick skills later, and skills will have the same base score as the ability stat that they’re based on. For example, starting off with a high Reason trait will make your PC better at any skills based on reasoning. Such as, say, Healing. Which may be useful in a game about supernatural horror in the frontier wilderness.

     I’m just sayin’, is all.

     Anyway, once you’ve allotted your trait points, you may pick a background. Backgrounds are rather like broad character classes, and simply act as a starting point for your PC idea. You can be a colonist, for example, and choose a subcategory such as urban colonist or frontier colonist. Perhaps you’d like to play a freed slave, or German immigrant. Maybe you’re a British Redcoat officer, or a Shawnee brave. Whatever sparks your tinder, really, and if there’s not a specific background you like, you and your GM can create another rather simply. Besides giving you a starting point for inventing an identity for your PC, backgrounds allow you to choose a free Trade skill, and usually offer a bonus of some kind to either an attribute score or some other skills related to your history. For example, frontier colonists can choose to add +1 to either their starting Resolution or Vigor, because they have a reputation for being hardy and resilient folk.

     Three more traits that will be determined once you set your five attributes are your Vitality, Faith, and Sanity scores. Vitality lets you know how many grievous musket ball wounds and tomahawk whacks you can take before keeling over. Faith is your belief in a higher power and can save your bacon in a crisis. Sanity of course dictates just how much freaky frontier horror you can witness before you lose it and run screaming off into the night, never to be seen again. (Not alive, anyway… heh heh!) During the campaign, encounters with suitably horrific things or sights will cause you to make Resolution checks, with failure resulting in Sanity loss. Too much sanity loss and you start to develop mental hiccups. That’s when the real fun begins.

Lastly, an optional but cool personal touch: starting players invent four short sentences, called Fate Cards, which are plot hooks relating to their characters’

Goth chicks are hot!

backgrounds. These can be anything, from cryptic to specific, that gives insight into what skeletons your PC has in her armoire. You might jot down something like, “No one knows  that you abandoned your men to die on that battlefield. At night, you’d swear you can feel the eyes of your lost men watching you from the dark.” Or maybe something like, “Your father raised you as a strict Quaker, but after your parents’ death, your aunt gave you a pendant belonging to your mother, in the shape of a magic circle, with runes inscribed along its surface.” Or possibly, “Dude, you really hate Limburger cheese. Like, seriously, man. It sucks.”

     These will be used as the campaign progresses, at the players’ discretion, to affect the current plotline. For example, perhaps a PC noted on a Fate card that they had been attached to a merchant crew based out of Virginia a few years previously. If during an adventure the party finds itself needing transport down to South Carolina, that player could choose to play the Fate Card, and therefore ask for assistance from his former shipmates, and the GM could work that into the storyline.

     Other than that, you just need to grab some basic equipment common to 18^th century citizens of the colonies, and you’re ready to go! Most Colonials didn’t have much in the way of individual possessions other than a reliable weapon, their clothes, and some packs with camping gear, so you won’t find extensive lists of personal goods to buy. But everything technologically available to everyday Revolutionary folk is available in the game. Dutch long pistol? Check. Mohican short bow? Check. Powdered wig? Check. Scented wig powder? Check!

     That’s it! Your party is off and ready to face the challenges of living in the wild 1776 frontier wilderness of Massachusetts!  Even if that frontier entails real witches whose magic will cause your eyeballs to boil from your skull! They were truly exciting times, the 70’s.

So, Just Out Of Curiosity, How Do I Fire This Cannon, Anyway?

     The game mechanics work thusly: when your character attempts something, from speed-plowing the turnip fields to exorcising demons from the townsfolk, you roll two twelve-sided dice. If the sum of your roll is lower than the target number, you pulled it off. And yes, that’s the entirety of the resolution mechanics. For every single thing you do.

     The target number is based on your attribute or skill scores. Of course, the GM may impose penalties or reward you with bonuses as appropriate. Modifiers rarely run more than +2 to -2 individually, but stacking them can make things rough. Trying to fire a long rifle using one hand, while you ride by on a galloping horse, at an opponent who’s diving behind cover in the darkness is going to accrue serious penalties! That’s where Faith comes in. During any task check, you can declare that you’re using Faith. If you then bungle your roll, you can use as many Faith points as you need to make up the difference. You can then turn that failure into success, but your Faith pool is lowered by that difference for the session. If you don’t have enough Faith left to meet the target number, you lose the points anyway, and fail. As the Chickasaw tribe saying goes, “Tough noogies.”

     Combat is straightforward, too. Try to slash your foe with your tomahawk or blast a gunpowder barrel with your wagon-mounted rampart gun to set of an explosion, and you hit either one if you roll beneath your appropriate fighting skill score. Unarmed damage is equal to half your Might score. Damage is calculated variably for ranged weapons (flintlock pistols do 1d12), and is a standard modifier to your Might attribute for melee weapons (a war club does Might +4 damage).

     Faith can also be used to keep you from tottering over the brink of death. (Although, really, how many times could that happen to a band of brave frontier adventurers hunting supernatural monsters using only black powder weapons?)  If at any time you take enough damage to snuff your brave Catawba shaman, you can spend Faith points to stay alive and gasping, albeit at one single Vitality point. Using your Faith this way reduces your Faith pool permanently by one. Costly, but probably worth it.

     Colonial Gothic can be played on a somber, realistic or gritty note, such as Call of Cthulu, where the characters are unexceptional people who walk into exceptionally dangerous situations. Death and insanity are not only possible, but probable unless the characters are very careful and well-prepared. However, the authors state that it’s really intended to be a relatively cinematic game. This means that your characters should be larger than life, and the action should be intense and rollicking. Fights could be fast and frenetic, and PCs could be swinging from rafters and vaulting onto horses and firing a blunderbuss in each hand as they dive through windows to pursue fleeing demons. Unfortunately, combat tends to be seriously lethal in Gothic. Three good solid hits over the course of a game from a vicious beastie’s claws or the arrows of a Pawnee war party can turn an erstwhile hero into a bleeding heroic corpse on the hillside. If you’d like your game to be of the more cinematic variety, and plan to have musket shootouts and predatory supernatural antagonists as common occurrences, then there are guidelines in the rules for making starting PCs more powerful with more points with which to buy attributes and skills. GMs should decide ahead of time what type of action and how much of it they want their campaign to entail, and allow beginning PCs to be designed appropriately. 

     After PC creation, the remainder of the book is divided into useful GM game material, and some basic history of the time period from 1585 to 1776 so you can flavor your campaign to taste. One of the chapters covers magic, which if you play the game as written, as a supernatural version of the real world, will be indispensible. Players can have access to the magic information and powers by choosing some of the Occult skills available, such as rituals or alchemy.  Magic in Colonial Gothic is performed by enacting rituals which have a wild variety of effects from healing to cursing to lighting things aflame, or perhaps summoning darker powers to do your bidding… and which hopefully won’t eat your soul in the process. While magic can be used by heroes for good ends, much of the magic in Gothic is of the creepy evil type. Warlocks brew poisons and forest hags manifest shadowy monsters to terrorize the countryside, all of which your heroes will be confronted with in the course of defeating the insidious nastiness that makes the civilized townsfolk cower in their cabins after sundown.

A vicious wendigo. Or possibly Lady Gaga.

     Another chapter details several of these paranormal entities that skulk the frontier of the colonies, from zombies to ghosts to vampires to worse. In the world of Colonial Gothic, the human evildoers often disguise their villainy as the works of the supernatural, so it’s not always easy to tell whether the thing that ripped Farmer Vance to pieces in his barn was a bloodthirsty werewolf, or just Widow Luntz down the lane who’s been dabbling in witchcraft.

     After each foray into the Revolutionary world of the gothic, players receive between one to four experience points to jazz up their characters with. You can either buy new skills or raise skills you already have, or learn new magic rituals if you’re a dabbler.

The GOOD

     Colonial Gothic is a short, sweet, complete game in one handy book. There’s just enough background information to allow players relate to the setting without it feeling like you’re reading a history textbook. The flavor is menacingly supernatural, but the exciting setting leaves plenty of room for perfectly mundane adventures as well.  The 12° system is simple and intuitive, and easily applied to any task on the fly so that it blends seamlessly into the background.

The NEUTRAL

     The art in the book is really cheap-o. I’m pretty sure it was all public domain stuff. (The authors’ credits affirm that much of it is clipart.) It does manage well enough to give you a sense of the stylish outfits popular in the late 1700’s, but let’s just say there’s nothing here that’s going to catch your attention. If you’re the type who enjoys illustrations that help get you in the frame of mind to immerse yourself in your game worlds, you’ll probably be looking stuff up online or in art books for more skillfully and colorfully done, more evocative images. Or just watch Last of the Mohicans and The Patriot.

The EVIL

     The only caveat to my joy with Colonial Gothic is the issue of proofreading and editing. Readers should know that I have the original, first edition rules, and Rogue Games has since put out a revised and expanded edition which may have corrected the issues I’m about to mention.

     Rogue Games produces some awesome game ideas, but like most of their products, Gothic could have used some judicious editing. For example, there are two slightly different explanations in two separate chapters of the book as to how Faith points function to preserve your PC’s life… and then one line of text on yet another page actually implies that there’s a third manner in which this works. Now, as it happens, you can choose which of the two described methods you’d like to use, as one is more cinematic than the other, but nowhere in the text does it indicate that this was intentional. I assume the authors meant to have one unified method of using Faith, but simply ended up with two different and contradictory versions in the book. Sloppy, amigos. Aside from that, there are a few random mis-formed sentences and the occasional incident of odd grammar, but nothing else that hinders a reader’s understanding of the material.

     So that’s the lowdown. Now, grab your Kentucky long rifle, Zeke. There are reports of zombie Redcoats prowling the woods near Raleigh, and Running Deer and I are off to see what we can do about it! Right after I get my wig powdered.

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