RPGPundit Reviews: Barbarians of Lemuria

This is a review of "Barbarians of Lemuria: A Sword and Sorcery Roleplaying Game", written by Simon Washbourne, mythic edition 2.7, published by Beyond Belief Games.

This is as always a review of the print edition, an attractive-looking hardcover featuring a full-color image of a Conan-esque barbarian with a half-nude girl draped at his side, fighting some kind of tentacle creature. The interior is also full-color featuring many attractive illustrations. The book is 211 pages long.

The rulebook gets right to business. You get a brief description of what Sword & Sorcery is about, which frankly is nothing special. I mean, honestly, is anyone going to buy this book who isn't already familiar with what S&S is about?!

But after that you get right into the base mechanic and other material. The basic mechanic of the game is based on a simple 2d6 mechanic in the style of Traveler: a roll of 9+ is a success, 8- is failure. A natural 2 is always failure, a natural 12 is always success. You can also get bonus dice, which means you roll 3d6 (or 4d6) and keep the best two, or flaw dice, where you roll 3d6 and keep the worst two.
It's also explained later on that a roll of 12 which would have been a success anyways is called a "mighty success" (a critical). If you spend a hero point on top of that, it become a "legendary success" with even more effect. Likewise, if you roll a 2, and take it to be a "calamitous failure", you gain a hero point. I hate that last part, it's just bad storygamey design. All kinds of things, starting with overall difficulty level, can modify the roll.

Character creation is also simple, and not random (unfortunately, in my opinion, but at least the simplicity helps with that). Characters have four main attributes (strength, agility, mind and appeal); you get 4 points to divide among these (you can't have more than 3 in an attribute at first), you can also reduce one ability score to -1, though it's not recommended. -1 is "feeble", while 5 would be "mythic".
Next you have four combat abilities, which also get 4 points between them; these are initiative, melee, ranged, and defense. "Lifeblood" are basically hitpoints and these are a derived stat (10+/- your strength attribute). Characters also get "hero points" which can be used to 'dig deep' and get to reroll a check, increase the effects of a success, or to recover quickly from damage.

Hero points can be used, as per the game rules, to allow the player to define 'some bit of information' about the environment around them that essentially alters reality; the example given is of a character being trapped in a cell spending a hero point for there to be a loose stone in the wall. This is utter storygaming bullshit of course, which destroys immersion in the sense of a living world that doesn't cater to one's own whims.
Hero points are renewed at the start of each session.

Instead of skills, the game has 'careers'. Characters will start with a number of ranks in four different careers. Careers can be things like 'thief', 'mercenary', 'alchemist', etc.

There's also backgrounds based on origins (regional), which give a character boons (which provide bonus dice), and optionally a character could also take a flaw (or give up a hero point) to gain extra boons. Flaws cause 'penalty dice', which work as the opposite of boons (you roll 3 dice and remove the highest number).
A number of regions are described (places like the Beshar Desert, the Fire Coast, the Klaar Plains, etc). Each region has a list of possible boons, flaws, and names for characters. Professions also have their own lists of boons and flaws.

The section on gear does not include price lists. Instead, the book advises to simply let players have anything reasonable that they think their character should have based on their career. Likewise, there are no rules for encumbrance, because heroes shouldn't have to bother with that. The author tersely claims that if you want resource-management you should go play another game.

This strikes me on the one hand as somewhat emulative of the kind of S&S stories the book wants to copy (Conan is cited as a specific example, stating that he or Red Sonja or Thongor "never went shopping"). On the other hand, this creates a potential nightmare of mother-may-I shopping and potential player-manipulation, and can damage immersion if you wonder where your barbarian is carrying a dozen torches and ten thousand gold pieces wearing nothing but a loincloth.
Armor is divided into broad categories (light, medium, heavy) and each category provides a different die of protection that reduces damage. It seems that contrary to the earlier bluster about emulating S&S, no explanation is given for why Conan wouldn't be going around in heavy armor.
Weapons are divided into broad categories as well: unarmed does d3+half one's strength, light weapons do the lesser result of two d6s (plus strength), medium do 1d6, heavy weapons do the better of two d6s. Characters with strength less than 0 can't wield heavy weapons.


Combat in the game is fairly simple: you roll 2d6+(agility or strength)+(melee or ranged)+any modifiers-target's defense. There are several combat options described, like two-weapon-fighting, defensive stance, full defense, offensive stance, all-out attack, or bypassing armor.
All in all, combat is very straightfoward and easy to grasp (as are most of the rules thus far).

There's a basic sort of mechanic for resolving mass-combat, on land and sea. It involves a process of determining army qualities and events on the battlefield, while PCs get to choose between doing special "heroic actions" during a battle turn.
Stats for sample ship types are included. There's even a section on flying boats.
All in all, the mass-combat is adequate. It's decent especially because it doesn't fall into the trap so many other mass-combat systems (other than the one in Dark Albion, of course) fall into, of being too complicated. But it may seem a bit too abstract for some people.

At this point we get into a gazetteer of Lemuria. It includes a lengthy background history of the setting (which like many S&S settings is a type of fantasy post-apocalypse), a description of the 'twenty gods' of Lemuria, and the dark gods (including Dark Lord Hadron). Then we learn about the many races of the setting (each with suggested boons, flaws, and names): Blue Giants, Grooth (beast men), Kalukan (asexual one-eyed headless giants), Morgal (vampires), Slorth (woman-headed serpents), the Sorcerer Kings, and the Winged Men.

About ten pages is dedicated to different areas in Lemuria, along with some partial maps, but no complete map of the setting is found in this section; instead, you get a little map of the setting way in the back, nearly 100 pages later. This strikes me as an odd (and impractical) choice.

The section on "Beasts of Lemuria" covers about 34 pages in all, detailing a variety of weird and unusual creatures, with some great and evocative illustrations. As well as the general monsters, there's a specific section for "the Bloodless" (who are basically Undead), and for "Demons", with a few examples.
Then there's also a brief section called the "Lemurian Lexicon" which details a number of names of people and things, important characters and magical objects. These are only described by very brief, one or two sentence, summaries. No stats or anything like that, but good for ideas regardless.

The "Mysteries of Lemuria" chapter begins with a set of mechanics and explanations of Alchemy. Alchemists make alchemical objects, and to do so they use a mechanic called "craft points". You have a number of these points equal to your skill rank in Alchemy, which are granted each adventure and accumulate. You spend these to make alchemical objects (some of these also may require more than one adventure session to construct). A roll is also required, which if you fail means all the points you invested into the construction are lost. Some examples of potions and devices are presented, but it's implied that other alchemical objects besides those listed could be created.

Priests and Druids practice devotions, which grant them "fate points", these points can then be spent on themselves or others as bonus dice to represent the favor of the gods, in areas relevant to the domain of the god they have chosen as their patron.

Magicians have Arcane Power points, with which they can cast cantrips or spells of 1st, 2nd, or 3rd level of magnitude. Magic in this game is quite difficult, particularly the higher-magnitude spells; the book also makes it clear that magicians are more often NPC villains rather than PCs. That said, a dedicated magician could certainly be effective. The magic section details general levels of possible spells, but there are also a few fully-detailed spells.

The chapter ends with a description of a few weird secret-societies in the setting.

Then we get a section on how to run campaigns, which are pretentiously called "sagas". Most of the advice is relatively cliched, to say nothing of when it's outright wrong (as in, saying that the game is "about telling a good story").

You also get the advice to make treasure utterly abstract. In fact, you're told to laugh at your players and call them 'accountants' if they ask just how much treasure they earned. This strikes me as beyond pretentiousness.

Advancement also depends on characters spending or wasting away all their treasure. I understand that this somewhat follows the path of some of the Sword & Sorcery genre, but it also creates a situation where you enforce one particular interpretation of the style.  A more creative game designer would have provided various options, certainly "blow all your money for advancement points" could be one of them. Advancement points can be used to improve abilities, combat abilities, career ranks, get more boons, buy off flaws, or gain followers.

NPCs in the game are divided into three broad categories: Rabble, Toughs, and Villains. Rabble are easily-dispatched typical people; they only have 1-3 lifeblood points; a rabble magician only has 1 arcane point (enough to cast a cantrip, basically). Toughs are intermediate characters, well above Rabble but seriously inferior to PCs; some templates are provided for different sorts of Toughs (gladiators, guards, assassins, sergeants, barbarians, archers, etc).

Villains are considerably more powerful; they have Villain Points instead of hero points, which they can use in the same way plus a couple of other options (to make a "timely escape" or to use rabble as their 'meat shields'). Some 5 Villains are provided, fully fleshed-out, as examples. You also get some sample adventurers.

Some adventure-seeds are provided, and several short but fleshed-out adventures. You also get a number of tables for generating random adventure ideas, this part is actually quite clever. It includes some composite titles for adventures, random tasks, random careers for an important figure in the adventure, random locations, random objects of importance, random introductions to the adventure, random villains, random gods that might be involved, random complications, random twists, and random rewards.

The back end of the book includes three pages of handy reference tables, and character sheets.

So, what to conclude about Barbarians of Lemuria?  Well, I'm not going to pretend it doesn't have its good points. It's a very straightforward system, easy to use, and to get a clear understanding. The setting is very definitely sword & sorcery; if you wanted to be very nitpicky you could say it's somewhat cliched, but I would argue that a setting for a game like this SHOULD be full of cliches.

But there are also some bad points. Almost all of them are because of, or related to, the storygame influences on this product.  The immersion-breaking elements where Players are able to edit out details of the world. The pretentious assumption (extending to literal instructions to mock your players) that somehow resource-management is a bad aspect of play.

If there's a redeeming faculty, it's that a clever GM could fairly easily edit out the storygaming atrocities (and the pretentious tone of the author) from their game and run this as a much more 'straight' (if rules-light) RPG.

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