With a little time to explain what a roleplaying game is, Quintessence really starts with a glossary of its terms, necessary because it dives quickly into the mechanics. A Player Character has four Affinities—Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. Air represents grace, instinct, and spirit; Earth represents fortitude, reason, and resolve; Fire is confidence, passion, and spark; and Water is curiosity, expression, and subtlety. Within each, he will have one or more Approaches, ways in which deals with situations or problems. A Player Character’s attunement to each Affinity is represented by a die type, from a four-sided die to a twelve-sided die, whilst the Proficiency in each Approach indicates the number of dice rolled for it. Vigour is a combination of a Player Character’s energy, health, and motivation, and is either depleted when he suffers damage or when points are expended to undertake actions. Perks such as Soothing Voice, Lithe, and Confident will add dice to a pool, whilst Quirks like Inattentive, Fear of Snakes, and Illiterate deduct dice from a pool.
To have his character undertake an action, assembles a pool of dice equal to a pair of Approaches and their dice type and number of dice. If appropriate, Perks add dice to the pool, whilst Quirks deduct them. When rolled, results of four or more count as successes. Rolling the maximum value on any die counts as either two successes or go into the player’s pool of Destiny dice. A player can have a maximum of four Destiny dice and these can be kept and rolled on any later check. Any roll of one is treated as a fumble, in which case a success is deducted from the total rolled or a die can be added to the Guide’s Fate pool. The Fate pool works like a player’s Destiny dice in that it can have a maximum of four, which are used for NPC checks. Making the roll costs the Player Character a point of Vigour.
Action in the roleplaying game is kept track of on an Action Tracker. This is a track of boxes numbered from one to twenty and enables the Guide to determine when the actions of both the Player Characters and the NPCs take place. Some actions, such as talking to an ally or drawing a weapon take no actions. A snapshot with a rifle or a punch thrown in a brawl is a one-step action; a pointed attack with a rapier or an aimed shot with a pistol is a two-step action; and a smash attack with a mace or a targeted shot with a crossbow is a three-step action. Then the Guide counts up the number of steps on the Action Tracker and when enough have passed, the action will take place. Whilst one-step actions are faster and means that a Player Characters gets to do a lot, they do not inflict as much damage as the considered and longer two-step and three-step actions. Each action, no matter how many steps in involves, costs a single Vigour to carry out, so the player has to weigh up the cost of the faster, less damage-inflicting Actions that effectively cost more Vigour because a Player Character can do more of them versus slow, more complex, but potentially more damaging Actions that have the same Vigour cost.
Damage is determined by the number of successes rolled multiplied by modifier based on the weapon used and the number of steps that the action took. Armour reduces damage, but also takes damage itself, indicated by the number of times that the armour will successfully protect the character. The rules for combat also handle cover, which increases the number needed to count as successes; dodging and parry, which requires an opposed roll with the defender’s successes negating the attacker’s; and of course, death and healing.
Although the main purpose of the Action Tracker is to keep track of who acts when in combat, it can be used for other purposes. The most obvious is for chases and races, but another is long term projects, perhaps researching a spell or improving irrigation for a village. The latter is not really explored in the pages of Quintessence, but Endeavours, Notions, and Magic are. Magic requires a Perk as well as suitable setting theme, whilst a Notion is an idea or inspiration that is acquired through play, which can be banked at the cost of an Experience Point to be brought into play later on. The use of either Magic or Notion requires the use of an extended test, an Endeavour, that the player creates himself during play which can then be improved through multiple, successful use. The base difficulty for the Endeavour, like any action, is four, but this is increased by numerous factors, including whether the aim of the spell is to heal or harm—and then by how much, range, number of people affected, and so on. If the Endeavour is successful, then the player gets to record it. Once it is written down, the difficulty reduces by one and the next time the Player Character successfully casts the spells or performs the Endeavour, the difficulty lowers again until it reaches the default difficulty.
This Endeavour system is supported by some examples, primarily of magic use. It is a nice, simple, freeform system that allows for a lot of player input and scope for the player to develop his character as he wants. However, as good as it is, as written it feels limited to just magic and physical activities. Yet like the suggestion that the Action Tracker be used for more than combat and chases, the idea that the Endeavour mechanic be used for something else, including social situations and long-term projects, remains disappointingly unexplored.
One aspect of the rules that Quintessence does not cover is conditions. Beyond straightforward damage to Vigour, there is no advice on damage from other sources, where that is fire, falling, drowning, poison, and even fear. These are major omissions, especially more so given that they might be ones that the players might want to bring into play via their characters’ Endeavours.
To create a character, a player decides upon a concept that fits the Guide’s setting and then decides upon a Persona, Origins, Perks, and Quirks, before running him through a Lifepath. The Persona is divided between Nature, who the Player Character is in terms of personality or ideology, and Demeanour, how he appears to others. Origins can be lineage, species, community, and so on. For example, one could be Orc and the other Human, to become a Half-Orc, or one could be Italian American and the other the New York Police Department. Perks and Quirks are acquired from the Origins, and then the Lifepath consists of four life events for which the player must alter Approaches once, add Perks and Quirks once then, and choose any one of them again. The player also decides on gear, relationships, goals, and languages.
Henry Brinded
AFFINITIES
Air: d6; Etiquette 2, Intuition 2, Humour 2
Earth: d8; Grit 2, Knowledge 3, Willpower 2
Fire: d4; Optimistic 2, Obsession 2, Imagination 2
Water: d8; Inquisitive 3, Artistry 2, Shrewd 1
Vigour: 25
Origin #1: Classics Scholar
Origin #2: Quiet Antiquarian
Life Event #1: Grew up Boston Brahmin
Life Event #1: Yale
Life Event #1: The Great War
Life Event #1: My own business
Perks: Ear for Languages, A Love of the Past, Private Income
Quirks: Pacifist, Deafness
Goals: Prove to my family that my business can be successful (short term), return to college (long term), keep my friends safe (group)
The advice for the Guide covers setting and genre, running Session Zero and the questions to be asked, setting call to adventures for the Player Characters to give them motivation to go adventuring, and session planning. The latter covers its tone and pacing, types of encounters—including social, environmental, and action—and then threats to populate with them. There are optional rules for fumbles, accompanied by tables for both standard and magical fumbles, and notably, there is advice on the Guide working with her players. This focuses on ensuring that a player’s creation is not unnecessarily overpowered, but rather something that is useful and over time can be developed in an ability or spell or power that will be amazing. The advice is simply not to say no, but “Yes, but…” to ensure the vision that the player and the Guide do not clash and fit the setting. The advice for the Guide is good, but it is brief.
Physically, Quintessence is decently written and illustrated. The artwork ranges in quality, but none of it is bad and all together serves to give the book an enjoyably scrappy look.
Quintessence really sums up this roleplaying game. For there is a solid set of mechanics at its core and in the Endeavour mechanic gives players and the Guide the scope to bring powers and spells and abilities into play and develop them into signature moves. However, beyond that core, that ‘quintessence’, and the roleplaying game is undeveloped. There are hints and suggestions that the Action Tracker and Endeavour mechanic can be really flexible, but neither is as fully explored as it needed to be in order to really show how flexible the roleplaying game is clearly intended to be. Ultimately, there is a brevity to Quintessence and omissions from its rules which make it challenging to use. Perhaps a second edition—or at least a companion volume—that will fix these issues and make Quintessence the roleplaying game that the designers clearly intended it to be.
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