Raven

I phoned up the company and did a bit of complaining. I mentioned the magic system, know what the reply was?

Guy on other end of phone: "Yes, the magic can be a bit confusing. During play it took us about 3 months to get it worked out, but once you get it up and running it really works well..."

Be fair - if the guys who designed the game tell you it's "confusing," what hope is there?

And that's the aggravating point. The game rules do actually look really good (better than Games Nth edition, rules suck, I've got a level 10 Wizard with the sword of 3000 pt army slaying Workshop could ever churn out). I feel sorry for the ones who paid £15.00p for the Raven ruleset, I only paid a fiver. It's not fair - still, I'll persevere (right, where's the asprin bottle, I'm going to try again.....)

I absolutely love the rules. There are War-machines, though not all races have access to them (in fact few races have). And there are monsters - I think, even more monsters than in WFB (they are all on the last pages of the book).

Nice things in Raven:

1. Excellent magic system, you design your own spells with spell creation points taken from different categories (i.e. zaps=attack spells, Counters=dispels, Enchants=improve stats, and so on).
2. Realism: Don't worry about HeroRaven, it is impossible with the present rules. (Don't know what will happen if they publish a magic-item system though, but I suppose it will still be realistic)
3. 16 different races

Bad things in Raven:

1. The book sucks actually. I needed to read it twice before I could get a good overview of the rules. The reason for this is that the rules often use terminology that has yet to be explained in later pages - frustrating. For those of you who are fond of bright colorful illustrations, you won't find them in this book, though it doesn't matter much to me. But, believe me - the rules are good, it's just that they have made a crap book to explain them. They will need to clarify a lot, but I have also heard that they are working on it :-)
2. There is magic, but there are no magic items. I didn't notice until I read the book a second time, so I suppose I don't find it all that important :-)

All in all, I think it will become a brilliant game.

I've got Raven and like it a lot. The game offers a number of interesting features, but probably requires some gaming experience because the rules are poorly organized and edited. The information is not laid out very well, making some bits hard to find. There are also a number of instances in which an ability or such is mentioned but no description of it appears in the rules.

That said, the game has a lot of strong points. Raven troops are entirely based as stands, with stands being able to move independently or as groups. Leaders provide "tactical commands" which are used to perform the formation changes, movement, etc. Higher level leaders can transfer tactical commands to lesser leaders and all leaders may take die rolls to try and increase their tactical commands for the turn, with a possibility to lose some as well. The over all effect is similar to the PIP die rolls in HOTT/DBA/DBM, but with less chance involved. Troops may be overconfident, causing them to make spontaneous advances, and uncontrollable making them harder to control.

Combat involves rolling one die and adding in appropriate factors. Beating your opponent by a certain margin kills the stand, while beating them by less than this amount results in a recoil. Stands of troops are rated in four different combat skills, Melee, Shock, Skirmish, abd Shoot. Most troops are only rated in one or two of these. The ratings used by the opposing stand determine what type of combat will be fought. Shock combat is made when charging stands encounter an enemy and is the deadliest (to target and attacker). Skirmish combat is the least deadly (largest victory margin needed for death of the target stand), but almost any combat fought against a stand with skirmish rating will be resolved as a skirmish, allowing those stands to pick and chose their fights. Shoot combat is pretty deadly, but only so long as the shooters stay unengaged, since most missile troops have little if any close combat skill.

Stands may be further individualized by a number of abilities or drawbacks. Examples include Lethality (addsing to the score of a victor and resulting in more kills), Invulnerability (adds to the score of a loser and makes them harder to kill, Ferocity (stand in combat with higher ferocity gets a +1 bonus), Dispersed (harder to hit with Shoot), etc. Characters are mostly limited to leaders and mages. Both may be usually be upgraded to make them deadlier, but they do not act as one man demolition teams a al Warhammer. They are not that much greater than an armies other troops, and are much, much more valuable as the source of tactical command points.

Magic is very nicely done and is based on elemental influences. Spells are customized by the player as to effect, range, etc. The different elemental spheres are better at certain types of magic and success of countering enemy spells is effected by the elements involved. Magic however does not seem to be the overwhelming power in the game. In each of the games I've played, a high level magic user was involved, with little unbalancing effect. Magic does not seem to deliver any "knockout blows", but can definitely aid your forces in more subtle ways.

The games background is fairly typical if a little dark, but the army lists are really nice. The large number of abilities and traits has allowed creation of about 12 armies most of which seem to have a truly different feel from the others.

Raven is supposed to be a companion to the 25mm miniature range from Harlequin. I already have some Harlequin miniatures. I think their quality is high, and IMHO they are better than GW. So, I kind of was eager to know how their rule system would look like. Boy, was that a dissapointment!

• The book looks good. 144 pages, color cover, glossy paper.
• Contents: background, rules and armies. The rules only cover 40 pages, of which 10 pages are devoted to magic. So, about 30 pages are about setting up a battle, movement, combat, etc... which says a lot about the quality. I can't honestly remember when I have read a set of rules that were so badly written: incoherent, bad explanations, inconsistencies ...

  E.g., troops move 75 mm. However, troops with the 'fast' ability move another 25 mm, if you have 'fast 2' you move an extra 50 mm and so on. That's what it says in the rules. However, in the army lists, none of the troops have the 'fast' ability. None. They do have different movement scores, such as 2, 3, 4, 5, ... Huh? Search, search ... ahah! In the back of the book, there is a template to be used as a ruler, divided into 'spaces.' In each space is a number, along with designations such as 'fast 2.' So, movement 5 equals fast 2. There is no reference to this ruler in the main rules that I could find.

  E.g., resolution of combat: I actually had problems finding in the rules how combat was resolved. I haven't figured out how casualties are removed. I did read all relevant rules (I think). Not once, not twice, but thrice. I think I know how combat is resolved, but I'm not sure. The rules are just unclear.

• The order in which the rules are given is also pretty bad. It seems to me that they are in random order, and most of them incomplete to get a full understanding of them.
• About the game play: It's hard to see through the bad layer and discover the game, but the game itself looks ok. If I can figure out the rules in more detail, maybe I'll post something about the actual game too.

At this point, I really cannot recommend Raven to anyone, certainly not to beginning players. If you don't know a thing about miniature wargaming, you will never figure out how to play this game. I have the feeling that the guys at Harlequin had this thought: "Hey, let's put some rules together in a few days. Layout is not important, quality of writing is not important! If people buy our miniatures, they will buy our rules!"

I suggest that Harlequin stick with producing and expanding their superb miniature range. This kind of rules only discredits their miniatures.

One strange, last remark: Can anyone in a chemistry lab analyse the ink they used to print this book? Everytime I read it, I get a burning feeling in my nose and eyes, which goes away every time I put the book away. (The book came out of shrinkwrap, so I didn't do anything with it.) I've never expereienced this with any book before.... weird.