Third time lucky
Familiars – 32 pages.
by Andrea Sfiligoi
Published as a PDF for $5 USD by Ganesha Games ganeshagames.blogspot.com
Review by Colin D. Speirs c.speirs [AT] equus.demon.co.uk
Disclaimer: The copy reviewed was supplied free by Ganesha Games (who also insisted that this fact be mentioned).
Andrea Sfiligoi's new company Ganesha Games made a bit of a splash in 2007 with his fantasy skirmish game "Song of Blades and Heroes" (SBH). A light, simple game that is lots of fun and with some scope to develop your band of heroes. He has now gone into "proper role-playing" with this game of magical sidekicks.
The first thing to strike you is the bright cover, gradiated pink background with a female mage sitting in front of a mixed selection of creatures and a lurking rag doll. I seem to remember that the cover was designed so that if it couldn't attract female gamers, then at least it would not alienate them. On an unscientific sample of 1 (my wife) the feeling as the mage was not in a bikini struggling against impossible odds then that would do it by itself.
The setting is a fantasy world where magic is illegal, so the many mages must work in secret, working through the eponymous familiars, spirits bound into animal or rag homunculus form, to carry messages, fetch materials, spy and other errand. The mages are not limited to just one familiar, and so can have familiars in different forms, each of whom has the natural ability of the host body, like a bat's echolocation or a toad's ability to travel with ease by land and water. The mages work in peril of the Inquisition, the familiars in peril of natural and supernatural predators.
The game is very much playable straight off the printer. The PDF contains the system, character generation and development, some world information, though not much it has to be said, actions including combat, dangers, a character sheet and a sample adventure. Special abilities, or Gifts, which include natural animal abilities, like flight, are described and each animal archetype has a list of gifts they can learn later, e.g a Lizard can learn to Heal, but not learn to Fly. At least not until a Homunculus tries to make it a glider.
The system is a simple one whose core mechanic covers a mere column and a half in a reasonably sized font. Skill checks are rolls on 2d6 modified by attribute and circumstance to get over a target number. Opposed rolls are won by the creature who can roll the highest. It is a very simple, and fast mechanic that suits the nature of the game well. Combat makes this mechanic a little slower, but not massively, and the idea that damage is an effect rather than a number of hit points is a good one. Familiars also have some "Divine Intervention", or rather human intervention, in the form of "Help Us, Master/Mistress" points but that help is not always assured and although these are expended they can be bought back with experience.
The text is clear and the font big and readable even with my terrible eyesight. The illustrations are in a kind of mid-eighties RPG style line art that I really like. My only quibbles were that I would have liked more world information no weasels, stoats and ferrets in the supplied beasties . However neither of these are deal-breakers. The game costs just $5 USD and there is enough information to be getting on with and there is a campaign supplement in the works.
There is, as far as I can tell, just one factual mistake. The beasties section describes shrews as rodents, rather than insectivores (old style) or Soricidae (latest fashion), though he has corrected that on the new familiars yahoo group. The reason for that is, apparently, partly because the Italian for shrew (Toporagni ) literally translates as "Spider mouse", which I think is quite delightful.
In the mid 1990s and for while thereafter there was a fashion amongst some RPGers for "story-telling" role-playing games. I didn't like them. The mechanics often turned out to be too arch and self-knowing. I played a couple of sessions of Familiars where the characters, a homunculus with a miniature sword, a cat and a bat, had to stop their master becoming food for a vampire while he conducted a complex ritual. They achieved this after a fraught chase, luring the local Inquisition thugs to the Vampire's lair thus ridding the world of a vampire without exposing their master.
Without characterising itself as a story-telling RPG I think this is exactly what Mr. Sfiligoi has created here with "Familiars". It is playable as dark and dangerous, or for cartoonish for laughs or as a mix, and he has done it well. He has finally created a story-telling RPG that I like and am damn happy to reccommend
