Review: Kala Mandala Playbook

tl;dr: a draft system with a setting soaked into its bones; PC's as "meddlers". Light-weight and stuffed with gorgeous art.

I saw Centaur Games launched their webstore so I bought one of everything including this playtest version of the Kala Mandala playbook; a system to go with their flavour-forward, south-east Asian inspired setting. The base premise of Kala Mandala is that you belong to a meddling association. You are meddlers. Just wandering around sticking your nose in because, to quote it, "You are a professional meddler. You are an adventurer with a legitimate career path. You have monetized your irrepressible nosiness by joining a meddlers guild" - I love it, just fantastic stuff.

Cover art by Munkao

This is a full first draft - it has gorgeous illustrations throughout already. The artifact of the playbook is fully baked but it acknowledges that the system is not necessarily fully there. Notes in the back on what has been omitted from focus (balance, economy) also provide email addresses to send in your feedback. I think it is still certainly good enough to get going - I am far happier to have it in my hands in the state it is now than to wait another chunk of time to get those aspects ironed out when they will only sometimes affect your game at all.

So what is all this stuff you get in this book?

A page on The World - a line each on Gods, Monsters, Communities, Growth and Fashion.
Two pages on Why Do You Adventure?
Twelve pages on Creating Your Character including Name, heritage and Skills.
Eight pages on What Do You Have? - gear and heirlooms.
Twelve pages on Playing The Game including Combat, Growth, Praying and Spells.
Two pages of Food and Rations.
A page on Design Notes to close it out.

Going through chunk by chunk

Approximately the front half of the book is character generation. Straight out of the gate we get the three rules of the meddlers.
1. You must get involved. It's for the best.
2. You must make money. You are a professional.
3. You must prioritize guild orders. Elders know better.

I love the tone these set - absolutely the business, so good.

Then you have all of your character creation bits, which start with name, what you like, what are your skills, what you have, what is your armor, do you have much gold or other items. All of these coming with page after page of beautifully illustrated tables to roll all that stuff up. Your main stats are just three - Strength, Dexterity and Will - generated with 3d6 each. HP (hit protection) is a d6 to start out. This is going to be swingy and give you potentially awesome characters, potentially terribly fragile ones.

Pick your heritage and then your skills are broken out across multiple pages about what each means. These main skills are fighting, magic, healing, and thieving - broadly analogous to main character classes - each of those then has a block of sub skills.

Then you get gear and inventory. Your first skill type gets you a bunch of basic stuff and after that you roll or choose a few more. You get a range of various weapons, your armor, and some other bits and pieces. Note this is not a heavily armored setting - not even shoes, most probably - each piece adds a little and you could have multiple armour elements. Finally roll some random items or an heirloom which may or may not have burdens that go along with it.

The system signals high-lethality play by having new characters being able to benefit from an inheritance - potentially all your gold and items and a bump to the skill a dead character was strongest in. As suggested by the name, heirlooms can be passed down as well.

For mechanics we get a fairly old school setup and game running guidance - only roll dice for risky actions - be careful it's dangerous - characters will not be balanced - ask lots of questions - work together. We get our time definitions - what is a round, a turn, a watch, within a day. Then it runs through the combat system, exhaustion and rest and growth or leveling up. Combat is dangerous - attacks always hit, it is just a case of can you soak damage with your armour. Blow through your HP and you are taking damage on your Strength, once that is gone you get six rounds for someone else to stabilise you or you are dead. Fighting in Kala Mandala is a high-commitment activity.

Progression is simplified to addition of skills through growth. You can also get blessings from praying, which is a nice link to the divine in the setting. You have death and retirement or what happens if your various stats are reduced to zero which combined with guidance of 'roll up and introduce a new character asap' strongly flags a certain approach to running games where characters are squishy but easily replaceable and with some continuity between characters and their successors.

Next comes hirelings and how to recruit new npcs and then there is three pages worth of magic spells which can turn up as spell scrolls and finally tastily illustrated ration types.

All together we get a quite stripped down yet relatively complete setting. I am sure with playtesting and time, people might refine some bits but I think anyone who has run old school games gets plenty to get them going. The illustrations do a lot of the heavy lifting for getting the aesthetic and setting concept across. This is a 42 page zine but if you go with the old saw of a picture being worth a thousand words then this is equivalent to a tome you would need a wheelbarrow to move.

You also get a loose sign up form for a meddling association tucked in the back cover which doubles as your character sheet. The are about A4 size so you could make a few copies so the whole table has one.

Wrap up

All told this looks good to go. I like the skills-focussed character generation with the "class" down-steam of the skills choices. There are some great ideas ideas thrown in there, like skills, and progression but also prayers and rituals as the way of doing magical things. There is lineage and heirlooms and it all points toward a less 'fire from the hip' combat-forward style and a more 'sneak in and do the ritual' style of approach.

There are design notes in the back on how so far balance has not been a serious focus nor the economy or pricing and as mentioned there are email addresses for sending feedback if you have it from play.

I would imagine most of the folk who would pick this up would be likely to house-rule whatever they are running, whether from a background in old-school gaming or just came up in the school of "tweak this on the fly" anyway so any rough spots or omissions that would surface are things that you would be adjusting to fit your game anyway.

There is a note in the back of the design notes on the pillars for design for Kala Mandala:
1. Centering east and southeast asia
2. Exploring the region's shared history and fluid identities
3. Bolstering imagination and fun.
The book as a whole drips flavour, is marinated in it, from the beautiful illustrated inventory lists to deeply embedded setting themes - in the objects and artefacts, in the dress styles of the folk in the illustrations, everywhere.

This is the character generation and system rules chassis that you then feed adventures into. Three are already available - Stirring the Hornets Nest at Het Thamsya, Deluge at Drizzle Distillery and Tragedy at Zayas Theatre. I managed to get Het Thamsya to table already and it was a great time; I can see how running characters from this playbok at it should work very well indeed.

I will be trying to run Deluge or Tragedy with this system as soon as I can.

This is the thematic inheritor of A Thousand Thousand Islands so it is also a perfect fit for those zines too if you can get them.

For another review see Snow’s Substack