Promised Sands

I'm afraid I don't have time to give a full review of this game  (I only finished reading it yesterday) before I leave for my "Currently Smoking: Canada" tour, but I still wanted to say a few things about this game.

In brief, I liked it. I know the game got a lot of criticism from different angles (but mostly from RPG.net), usually on the basis of three different criticisms:
1. That the game is a "fantasy heartbreaker", or that its a poor system.
2. That the setting is bizzare or incomprehensible.
3. That the layout is poor.

In my opinion, none of these are completely true.

For starters, I don't see much of anything that could call PS a "fantasy heartbreaker"; the system is more related to WFRP than it is to D20 or D&D. It has a number of really brilliant innovations (Character creation is a little intensive but makes for very full characters in the "Prior history" style of Traveller; The magic system was cool enough that I ripped it off for Amber, the career system is right out of WFRP but, if anything, cooler!); and as for the system being "poor", again I disagree. The system is complex; complex on a level of GURPS or Shadowrun.  But its not incoherent. If you get the bells and whistles of the admittedly rules-heavy system, it does make sense, its not "broken". At its most basic, the game is essentially a percentile check system in the style of WFRP or BRP, and you can easily houserule away some of the more complicated elements to get a more streamlined basic system.

The setting itself is, I think, a big part of the reason it went down poorly on RPG.net, and why I think elsewhere it could have a lot of appeal.  The RPG.netter crowd were kind of expecting PS to be an "arabian fantasy" world. And it certainly has a strong arabian flavour, but it also has a ton of other stuff they didn't want to see. What they wanted was Caliphate Nights, which is fine and good, but what Promised Sands Tnah setting actually delivers is closer to an Arabian version of the Wilderlands!
Yes, Tnah is Post-apocalyptic Fantasy at its best.  The setting is basically Earth (without ever saying that its Earth) thousands of years after some kind of terrible disaster, that also brought a kind of magic to the world. Civilization fell to pieces, terrible mutant creatures emerged all over the place, all of society went back to the stone age. Then you had a group of Wizard-kings (the Maroc, who have the cool spell system) show up and create an empire. At first they're good dudes, but end up being corrupt and terrible, so they're overthrown by another group of wizards using a different sort of magic (Rusahn, who are basically Jedi, cool (albeit crystal) swords and all).  Later on, you get a vast classical empire, the Renizant, plus a big empire of Dwarves (that is, the race in the game that are essentially like very warlike Dwarves, though they're not called that). Those two empires rise up, reach their peaks, and eventually fall back down. At the time the setting kicks into the game, the Renizant empire is long gone, only their Trade Guild still exists, and basically you have a bunch of little city states, a little remnant of the old dwarf empire, and a whole lot of wild horrible wasteland. Only now you also have a bunch of humans who have started coming up out of the ocean, from domed cities that survived the apocalypse, using technology the likes of which hadn't been seen in milennia on the surface.

Its totally old school!

Is it weird? Yes; it uses a lot of arabic and pseudo-arabic terms and ideas. It occasionally overuses lingo, replacing words that would be familiar to gamers (Dwarf) with in-house terms (Suvik) just because. The setting is definitely not Greyhawk. But its no more gonzo than Blackmoor or the Wilderlands, and no more culturally unusual than many other "WTF?!" kind of settings. Hell, I had a MUCH easier time "getting" everything in Promised Sands than I did Tekumel or Glorantha (which I still don't really get). Promised sands is comprehensible if you read it, and bother to understand it, and its all in one single book.

Finally, the layout: yes, there are some parts of the layout that are pretty sloppy. It makes things a little difficult, to be able to effectively create a character, you have to flip around quite a bit. In comparison the WFRP manual, or D&D, Promised Sands definitely needs some help in being more organized. But again, its not missing anything in there. And there are some elements of the layout that are good: the artwork, in particular, blew me away.
The cover of PS has a picture of a two-tailed scorpion; its probably the WORST piece of art in the entire book. In a way, its not particularly bad either, because it tells you a lot about the game: at first glance, you look and see a scorpion, it takes a second look to realize its actually a "mutant" with a second tail. But that neat trick aside, its still the least interesting drawing in the whole book. The inside of the book is a cornucopia of spectacular artwork of a fantastically professional quality, its a feast for the eyes.
The illustrations, beyond that, are USEFUL.  They almost always relate directly to whatever that page happens to be talking about, giving you all kinds of perfect visual cues for setting material. Hell, the gazeteer section of the book has incredible cityscape drawings of every single city detailed in that chapter, right there on the page, so that right after you describe the place to your players, you can pass it around and let them see for themselves.  And holy shit, those drawings tell you this is a cool place to adventure in.

So of course, Promised Sands is not a book without flaws. But it in no way deserved the savaging it got in some circles.  If you dig P-A fantasy (which I love), and you don't mind that its a little away from the typical medieval or conan stuff, and a closer to the product of an unholy union of 1001 Nights crossed with Warhammer (and really, who the fuck couldn't like that?), and if you're not scared of a rules-heavy system, you really ought to check this game out. At nearly 400 pages, its also definitely got everything you need to run a full-blown campaign, none of the "incomplete corebook" syndrome here.

Like I said, I'll give a more specific, chapter-by-chapter review of this game when I get back home in May.

RPGPundit
 

I agree with you 100%, i am relitivly new at gaming, i have only been gaming for the past 2 1/2 years and i learned to love gaming through Promised Sands. One of my High School teachers, Mike Rennaker, one of the developers of the game, acctually got me started in it. I thought that it was weired at first as i was reading through it, then we played a quick game at school one day for an English class and i thought that it was one of the coolest games i have ever played in my whole life. And now i am running my own games and i am introducing people to the world of Role Playing, people who would never had even consider playing or people who thought gaming was "nerdy" or "geeky". so i would like to say agin that i agree with you compleatly, and i would also like to say the Promised Sands is the best RPG that i have ever played, and i have played D&D, D20 Modern, and D20 Future, and i have to say that i like the 3D10 system way better than i like the D20 system by far. to me the 3D10 system is way easier to understand than the D20 sytem will ever be. Somthing eles i would like to say is Promised Sands is more of game were you live your charecters life, and not so much as a combat based game like D&D and the D20 games are and i lve that about PS.

Quote from: RPGPundit;85311Promised Sands

I'm afraid I don't have time to give a full review of this game  (I only finished reading it yesterday) before I leave for my "Currently Smoking: Canada" tour, but I still wanted to say a few things about this game.

In brief, I liked it. I know the game got a lot of criticism from different angles (but mostly from RPG.net), usually on the basis of three different criticisms:
1. That the game is a "fantasy heartbreaker", or that its a poor system.
2. That the setting is bizzare or incomprehensible.
3. That the layout is poor.

In my opinion, none of these are completely true.

For starters, I don't see much of anything that could call PS a "fantasy heartbreaker"; the system is more related to WFRP than it is to D20 or D&D. It has a number of really brilliant innovations (Character creation is a little intensive but makes for very full characters in the "Prior history" style of Traveller; The magic system was cool enough that I ripped it off for Amber, the career system is right out of WFRP but, if anything, cooler!); and as for the system being "poor", again I disagree. The system is complex; complex on a level of GURPS or Shadowrun.  But its not incoherent. If you get the bells and whistles of the admittedly rules-heavy system, it does make sense, its not "broken". At its most basic, the game is essentially a percentile check system in the style of WFRP or BRP, and you can easily houserule away some of the more complicated elements to get a more streamlined basic system.

The setting itself is, I think, a big part of the reason it went down poorly on RPG.net, and why I think elsewhere it could have a lot of appeal.  The RPG.netter crowd were kind of expecting PS to be an "arabian fantasy" world. And it certainly has a strong arabian flavour, but it also has a ton of other stuff they didn't want to see. What they wanted was Caliphate Nights, which is fine and good, but what Promised Sands Tnah setting actually delivers is closer to an Arabian version of the Wilderlands!
Yes, Tnah is Post-apocalyptic Fantasy at its best.  The setting is basically Earth (without ever saying that its Earth) thousands of years after some kind of terrible disaster, that also brought a kind of magic to the world. Civilization fell to pieces, terrible mutant creatures emerged all over the place, all of society went back to the stone age. Then you had a group of Wizard-kings (the Maroc, who have the cool spell system) show up and create an empire. At first they're good dudes, but end up being corrupt and terrible, so they're overthrown by another group of wizards using a different sort of magic (Rusahn, who are basically Jedi, cool (albeit crystal) swords and all).  Later on, you get a vast classical empire, the Renizant, plus a big empire of Dwarves (that is, the race in the game that are essentially like very warlike Dwarves, though they're not called that). Those two empires rise up, reach their peaks, and eventually fall back down. At the time the setting kicks into the game, the Renizant empire is long gone, only their Trade Guild still exists, and basically you have a bunch of little city states, a little remnant of the old dwarf empire, and a whole lot of wild horrible wasteland. Only now you also have a bunch of humans who have started coming up out of the ocean, from domed cities that survived the apocalypse, using technology the likes of which hadn't been seen in milennia on the surface.

Its totally old school!

Is it weird? Yes; it uses a lot of arabic and pseudo-arabic terms and ideas. It occasionally overuses lingo, replacing words that would be familiar to gamers (Dwarf) with in-house terms (Suvik) just because. The setting is definitely not Greyhawk. But its no more gonzo than Blackmoor or the Wilderlands, and no more culturally unusual than many other "WTF?!" kind of settings. Hell, I had a MUCH easier time "getting" everything in Promised Sands than I did Tekumel or Glorantha (which I still don't really get). Promised sands is comprehensible if you read it, and bother to understand it, and its all in one single book.

Finally, the layout: yes, there are some parts of the layout that are pretty sloppy. It makes things a little difficult, to be able to effectively create a character, you have to flip around quite a bit. In comparison the WFRP manual, or D&D, Promised Sands definitely needs some help in being more organized. But again, its not missing anything in there. And there are some elements of the layout that are good: the artwork, in particular, blew me away.
The cover of PS has a picture of a two-tailed scorpion; its probably the WORST piece of art in the entire book. In a way, its not particularly bad either, because it tells you a lot about the game: at first glance, you look and see a scorpion, it takes a second look to realize its actually a "mutant" with a second tail. But that neat trick aside, its still the least interesting drawing in the whole book. The inside of the book is a cornucopia of spectacular artwork of a fantastically professional quality, its a feast for the eyes.
The illustrations, beyond that, are USEFUL.  They almost always relate directly to whatever that page happens to be talking about, giving you all kinds of perfect visual cues for setting material. Hell, the gazeteer section of the book has incredible cityscape drawings of every single city detailed in that chapter, right there on the page, so that right after you describe the place to your players, you can pass it around and let them see for themselves.  And holy shit, those drawings tell you this is a cool place to adventure in.

So of course, Promised Sands is not a book without flaws. But it in no way deserved the savaging it got in some circles.  If you dig P-A fantasy (which I love), and you don't mind that its a little away from the typical medieval or conan stuff, and a closer to the product of an unholy union of 1001 Nights crossed with Warhammer (and really, who the fuck couldn't like that?), and if you're not scared of a rules-heavy system, you really ought to check this game out. At nearly 400 pages, its also definitely got everything you need to run a full-blown campaign, none of the "incomplete corebook" syndrome here.

Like I said, I'll give a more specific, chapter-by-chapter review of this game when I get back home in May.

RPGPundit