My 'support your local gaming houses' campaign - this is from d101 games in the UK; I saw this pop up as a kickstarter, pitching a "tabletop roleplaying game of multidimensional world-travelling fantasy" which speaks to my plane-hopping interests and the pitch also noted that the "easy-to-learn rules are built from a core loosely based on the world's first fantasy roleplaying game, tailored to fit the setting" so I was interested in something that was setting-forward, with less focus on classes and sub-classes, more on the portal-hopping.
Cover art by Jon Hodgson
First impression was of a nice self contained book, fatter than I was expecting at ~320 A5 pages and with a nice ribbon. Within we have clean lay-out, no columns, black-and-white art by Dan Barker, Jeshields and Paul Tomes. The vibe is very much a cleaned-up old-school book, self-contained with everything needed in here.
So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
In the players section we get:
5 pages in Enter the Dread Portals
28 pages in The Ysian Empire
22 pages in Character Generation
18 pages in Character Classes
15 pages in Money and Equipment
11 pages in Game Rules
7 pages in Combat
34 pages in Magic
In the Portal Moderators section we get:
16 pages in The City of Ys
60 pages in The World of Ys
72 pages in People and Monsters
11 pages in Portal Moderators Toolkit
9 pages in A Touch of the Sun
In References we get
2 pages in Index
2 pages in Character Sheet
3 pages in A Tourists Guide to Ys
So what is in here chunk by chunk?
"Enter the Dread Portals" gives us a punchy four pages with a page pitching the setting, a page on 'what is an RPG' and two pages giving the basics of the Game Rules. 'What is an RPG' includes a chunk on 'is this an OSR game' which is an interesting design insight. The basic rules are very good - clear, captures all the basics and highlights what the differences are between this and other OSR-adjacent, lower complexity games of the D&D family.
The Ysian Empire - a background section made more necessary and useful by backgrounds being key to character generation. We get brief descriptions of Ys - a city within a floating toroid, Erebus an endless dungeon realm, Marn a realm of heroic kingdoms, Nespo a place of desert ruins haunted by undead, Samara a southern Asian flavoured planet and Tethys an ocean world. Nespo and Erebus are places to adventure rather than dwell, Ys, Marn, Samara and Tethys are where PCs would likely come from. Each of these gives us locations for each of the places, a good handful of specific sites for Ys but staying at high-level description of realms and terrain for the worlds beyond the portals.
Character Generation - starting with the seven stats of Prowess, Dexterity, Vigour, Knowledge, Spirit, Charisma, Perception there are two stats generation methods - 4d6 drop lowest down the line, swap two or choose from an array. Characters choose a culture from somewhere in the Empire, roll up a past event for a little starting flavour and then pick from the 3 classes - fighter (combat focus), magic user (does as described) or expert (skill-monkey).
Where things get interesting is in backgrounds - these are descriptive but also give a bonus where applicable - all skills and proficiencies are condensed down to these backgrounds which can be +4, +7 and for Experts alone +10. Characters also have 'drives' - personal motivations - which allow a roll to be made with advantage when a drive is in play. A Patron from among the Guilds, Nobility of similar powers and equipment and spells finish things out. I like this concentration of skills - it chops off one of the drags of character creation - the second level of fiddly detail beneath the stats - while allowing distinction between characters with the same top level stats if they have different backgrounds
The three Character Classes are fairly lean - each has a table of advances with attack rank and skill rank - and common things like choosing additional background or drives at levelling up but the meat of differentiation between any two fighters or experts will be in their choice of enhancements - martial feats for fighters, tricks for experts and magical gifts for magic-users. These, layered together with your chosen backgrounds and drives give the palette to make your character whatever you want. It is a 'wide' character building system which reduces complexity to having three classes and making the basic chassis straightforward at the cost of packing all the complexity into those 'feats'.
Money and Equipment - over these fourteen pages we get a number of equipment lists that paint a picture of the different setting worlds. We also get a flag-planting second section of 'don't track encumbrance, apply common sense' - which is an interesting system-indicator of the game style expected. After the first six pages of general kit we get lists specific to Ys, Marn, Tethys and Samara which reinforce the themes of those places.
Game Rules - the core engine will be familiar to anyone in D20 space with some tweaks - difficulty increments in steps of five, succeeding by more than ten is a critical success, background bonus is applied wherever outside combat it is appropriate, an appropriate drive gives you advantage. Hazards are boxed into minor (d6), dangerous, severe and deadly (8d6), damage doubling with each step up.
Healing is slower - at d6 + level points as soon as you can rest and then d6 more with each nights rest - for calibration a baseline starting level three fighter will have 18 hp. Experience is accrued from exploration, session attendance and following your drives steering things toward the exploration and parlay-and-politicking side of things rather than slaying and looting - paralleling milestone levelling elsewhere. Downtime to recuperate and level up is recommended to make the timelines of a heroes rise more sensible.
Combat rules are again lean and straightforward - everyone moves 30 paces a round, attack and defence is the standard D&D model of dice plus attack modifer to get over defence value and inflict damage to hit points. There are some options included for advantage/disadvantage, called shots and maneuvers. Running away and Surrender is also given a page to itself which again speaks to this not being a combat-grind game. Hit points are fairly scarce - a handful of low level foes are a serious threat
Magic - 8 pages of mechanics, 25 pages of spells. Mechanics covers casting, writing and resiting magic and crafting magic items, all clear and fairly stripped back as befits an old school style system. The spell list is on one hand a nice piece of world-building through the spells themselves, on the other hand hits the perennial stumbling block for any near-D&D game of that there are many familiar and expected effects in here which hinders the finding of those world building nuggets as it seems to be just more of what one will have experienced in other retro-clones or even the original D&D editions. I have no solutions nor do I suggest that it was in anyway wrong to do the spell list this way just to recognise the difficulty of making a spell list interesting enough to let the best bits shine through.
The City of Ys section gives us eight pages on the power players and factions of the city and the balance on tables like district encounter tables, things for sale, etc. We get no more specific sites after those given in the 'Brief Tour of Ys' which leaves plenty of blank canvas for a DM to insert their own campaign locations. This does also make Ys more 'graspable' than equivalent planar hub cities like Sigil - your mileage may vary on whether this is usefully terse or unhelpfully vague.
The World of Ys - this is a mini-gazeteer section for each of the worlds - recall Erebus (endless caverns), Marn (heroic kingdoms and jungles), Nespo (desert ruins with undead), Samara (rival kingdoms) and Tethys (ocean world) - where each of these gets encounter tables and notable features. Additional things beyond the worlds themselves include the 'Strange New Worlds' tables included with Erebus which give means to randomly roll another world you can find through the twisting depths of the caverns. I like the level of detail here - 10-14 pages for each world, some good hooks but not an unmanageable amount - about the right level as I find useful.
People and Monsters - walks through interpreting the statblocks and designing monsters then gives us 69 pages with a full bestiary of everything for all levels. Most of the classic monsters are present with a slightly tilt towards elementals and undead and away from things like mind flayers and beholders. These are split out by the worlds they are found on within the setting and tagged with levels which allows encounter building. Necessary stuff for the system, about equivalent complexity to other such old school games, but beyond being setting tailored these are the usual monstrous suspects.
I am of two minds whether this gets a point off for being a new system that treads the same ground as all my other early D&D originated games without providing a nice clear conversion guide for monsters? Happy to have a new player-facing system and core way of doing things but a DM runs through monsters like sand through an hour-glass. I am sure it is not beyond the abilities of any typical DM to convert in whatever they might want from the Bestiaries and Monster Manuals they have on their shelves but it feels like a missed opportunity for a nod to the probable audience that would allow them to leverage all their existing libraries to populate the worlds of Ys.
Portal Moderators Toolkit has some good advice on playstyle - handling skill tests and character death - some house-rules such as fighting gangs and a neat 'journey builder' which functions as an adventure generator. Recent history and how to play into the settings exploration focus also help frame up how Beyond Dread Portals ought to be run. The journey builder is a good scaffold for exploring, with players getting to plot out their routes with control over where they go (danger level) and therefore length of journey involved. Tests and hazard level define the number of encounters which then creats the adventure along the way.
A Touch of the Sun - a 9 page adventure - I managed to take this to table in a slightly modified format, running with a different system, but the core elements of a good session are here. This could easily expand with 'getting to know the factions' at the front end and fluffing out the jungle exploration on the island to make more of it. As an introduction to the core setting conceit of 'riches and dangers lie beyond the portals' it serves well.
The Index does what it ought in two pages. After that we get a character sheet in two pages - a little tricky to photocopy out the second page but easily available online these days.
A Tourists Guide to Ys is three pages of starter lore for players - this is a nice 'get started' photocopy/print this and hand it out to the players to give them enough for an initial grip on Ys itself.
Over all we have something like a combination of old school D&D and a new-generation game where system and setting are fully self-contained and internally referencing. We get a well realised but not overly detailed setting and a mechanical framework to run games within it - those are baroque portal adventures and the system will be pretty familiar to any D&D player of previous editions. Most other equivalent old-school games stick to system only but the inclusion of the setting here allows the interesting character generation approach which is something that makes this stand out.
The writing style of the book delivers the rules in prose and I might have liked to see a cheat-sheet or mechanics summary on a one-pager somewhere but it is otherwise familiar stuff for most who know the oldest RPG. The self-contained system is nice, helpful in that you have everything needed to play in one book and the 'drives' system is also a nice simplification. If you decide to scrap that and use another old-school system - your players refuse to try something new - you could probably make things work.
They kicker for 'why this, why not another old-school game' is the setting - this is your distilled down, less weird Planescape - it lets you do the portal-hopping, the exploration of strange worlds and the machinations of factions at a slightly lower-fantasy point. Ys feels like a more graspable Sigil, with enough factions and complexity to be full of adventures but at a scale where a parties actions could matter.
I think the Empire of Ys and its connected worlds are a good sandbox that could be expanded out with any other planar supplements (by snapping them onto the endless tunnels of Erebus). Depending on what you want, this may be right up your alley - feels both large and full of adventure but also manageable.
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