Monday 20 October 2014

First Preview of Aperita Arcana

The good folks at Ebon Gryphon Games, who have already brought us the fantastically useful Collectanea Creaturae bestiary for the Monsters & Magic frp game are up to a second supplement for M&M.

Aperita Arcana adds a lot of new character classes and sub-classes to the main ones from the core M&M book.

The nice thing about Monsters & Magic is that character classes are not simply a bland collection of die modifiers, hit dice, allowed armour/weapons, or numbers of spells per level. In M&M, each character class is fleshed out by a series of traits and advancements that it may use but, again, not as mere 'plus sometings' but as narrative tools to enliven your role-playing experience (and kick ass — that's the magic of the Effect Engine).

Anyway, as a backer of the Collectanea Creaturae Kickstarter, I have received my preview PDF copy of Aperita Arcana, and I am simply astonished at the quality. I was expecting a number of new character classes and sub-classes (see my previous post), but there's much much more in Aperita Arcana:

  • Chapter 1, which is 62 pages long without the art, does detail the new classes and sub-classes, followed by
  • Chapter 2 with new races, and with new twists for the already-existing ones, but there's more:
  • Chapter 3 with lots of new spot rules and advanced rules for the Effect Engine,
  • Chapter 4 with equipment,
  • Chapter 5, new rules and variants,
  • Chapter 6, sample cults, examples of religious organisations...
  • Chapter 7, a lengthy discussion about the magical tropes in fantasy,
  • Chapter 8, Magic Items,
  • Chapter 9, Spells.

It thus appears that Aperita Arcana, which had initially been advertised as a small add-on to the Bestiary, has eventually become a kind of big "PHB+DMG+DDG" supplement — to use classic fantasy parlance.

Much like I believe that Collectanea Creaturae, because of the way it gives examples of monsters' motivations etc., is a must-buy supplement for any classic fantasy GM, I also believe that Aperita Arcana is a must-buy for any GM who wants to spruce up their classic fantasy adventures.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you! Aperita Arcana is more-or-less Latin for "Unearthed Arcana", and that's what we were going for -- the same sort of "okay, we're going to give you a whole bunch of new stuff to play with" grab-bag approach.

    Along the way, a lot of that turned into essays on How to Do Stuff, because there's no one right way, and we wanted to give support for whatever sort of campaigns people want to run and play!

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