Robot Viking

Stoking the flames of revolution? Or just melting down some silver to make bullets?

Rogue Games released the revised edition of their Colonial Gothic RPG this week, and contributing writer Joe Grabianowski (no relation to me) has a full review (ok, I’ll admit it, he’s my brother). The colonial era was a trying period in reality, with brutal wars, political upheaval and a merciless wilderness that brought death to the doorstep on a regular basis. But what if there were creatures out there?

This revised edition of the Colonial Gothic core rulebook is my first look at the Colonial Gothic role playing game, so unfortunately I am not able to comment on how it compares to the previous edition. Nonetheless, as Robot Viking’s resident history nerd, I jumped at the opportunity to check out this game. Colonial Gothic assumes a world where magic is a reality and all the things that go bump in the night are very real threats. The setting primarily revolves around colonial North America from the earliest settlements to America’s War for Independence. In fact, depending on what year you set your campaign, the rebellion can play an important role in your adventure. One of the general character creation guidance questions is whether your character is for or against the revolution. This is just one potential hook out of many. The game can take you into the bustling Boston Harbor where something evil is dragging ships down to the ocean depths or out on the frontier where your character can face both mundane and supernatural dangers like brown bears and the infamous Wendigo, who has a taste for travel weary humans.

The idea of adventuring in the New World during this time period even without ghosts and goblins is intriguing enough, but Colonial Gothic adds a deep thread of mystery and the supernatural to the mix that will keep gamers rooted in a somewhat familiar setting but with new unusual characters, creatures, and plots to discover. The New World was already a powder keg of peoples, cultures, religions and nations before the inclusion of magic and the occult. Colonial Gothic includes the supernatural creatures and entities brought over from the Old World. Everything from demons, witches, and devils to Apotamkin, Ewah (6 feet tall and hairless not 3 feet tall and covered in fur), and Honochenokeh, will test your character’s wits and sanity.

Colonial Gothic employs the 12° system. Essentially the system uses a roll of 2d12 and a Target Number that is designated according to your skills and the difficulty level of the action or attack you wish to accomplish. This does not seem particularly innovative at first glance; however what sets it apart from other role playing games is the “degrees” of success and failure. In Colonial Gothic you aim to roll beneath the Target Number. For instance, the Target Number is 10 and I roll a 3. That is a successful roll and there are 7 degrees of success (because I beat the target number by 7).

The Game Master then has the opportunity to be creative with those degrees. Keeping with the example, say I want to jump from one roof of a house to another at night and it’s raining. The GM can take the degree of success into consideration with his description of the result. So instead of the GM simply telling me that I successfully landed, the GM describes how I landed so quietly that no one in or around the house heard me. With that in mind, it works both ways. Say I have 7 degrees of failure. Then the GM really gets to have some fun and come up with nasty results, such as slipping and falling off the roof for d12 damage, or the whole neighborhood wakes up including the guards I was trying to elude. I really like the “degree” of flexibility that the core mechanic allows for and I am sure many other gamers would too! In short, the 12° system facilitates fun and creative gaming (and also gives you another reason to use those d12s you have laying around).

Unlike other role-playing games where it is immediately obvious that your character is heroic and powerful, Colonial Gothic allows you to be just about anyone you want, from a sailor to a magic-user. Generally your characters are investigators rather than battle-ready soldiers. That is not to say that it would be impossible to run a hack and slash campaign, but Colonial Gothic probably works better with a more Lovecraftian type of story. In fact, one could describe Colonial Gothic as Lovecraft meets your colonial history book.

Character generation is a pretty basic system in which you buy skills and use experience points to specialize in existing skills or add new ones. One unique feature is the use of Fate Cards. Fate Cards are designed to add flourishes of characterization and encourages role-playing among the players. Each player has several cards with some sort of factoid about your character that may or may not influence certain decisions or events in the game. For example, your Fate Card says, “I shot a gun out of the hands of a British soldier who held my father captive.” If your character is faced with a situation where she needs to make a called shot, then you might play this card supposing that the GM will give you a bonus to your roll. This, like the degrees of success, is another opportunity to be creative and encourage role-playing.

The art and design of the Colonial Gothic rulebook differs from many RPG books in that it relies primarily on actual artwork from the period to create the proper atmosphere. Woodcuts and engravings from the colonial era set the stage beautifully.

Personally, I am already jotting down notes to start running a campaign where I will be taking the players into New France and exploring the mysteries of the Huron Feast of the Dead. With that said, there is a mountain of content in the rulebook for gamers to pour over and use in their adventures, along with about 300 years of history to play with. Colonial Gothic gives you the tools to root out its deepest, most ancient evils!

You can order Colonial Gothic Revised from Indie Press Revolution for $24.99.

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