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Children of the Sun: | ||||||||||||||||
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hildren of the Sun is role-playing in the world of Raevich, a place where wizards have unlocked the secrets of science, where knights with rifles hunt demons on motorcycles, and where the seven other intelligent races still remember the atrocities carried out by the elves. In short, it is a blend of familiar worlds, both real and imaginary. The background material of this basic book concentrates on the Kingdom of Krace, the greatest realm in Raevich now that the victorious allied armies have ravaged the elven island of Lysirial.
Players pick their characters from one of the eight races. The Avendera are leonine, the Banfilidh are two-foot-tall plant people, Hu'Kra are ursoids, the Luparathi are lupine, the Thorqua are shelled reptiles, and the Zheol-Jhe are aquatic. Humans and elves are their traditional selves. The players' characters are talented members of these races, which means they can learn magic and that they can call on magic points to boast their abilities, particularly in times of stress. There are nine primary statistics, three for the body, three for the mind and three for social interactions. The values are expressed in a number of dice, and the dice are of different sides—the more sides and the more dice, the better. Skills are a straight addition to the appropriate statistic roll, but they also describe how well a roll succeeds. A character with seven levels in tracking will learn more from a successful tracking skill test than will a character with two levels, even if they both roll the same score.
Magic in Raevich comes in two flavors. There is the straight-up magic, where mastery of various techniques and a pool of magic points allow characters to cast from a huge list of spells. The other flavor is Aetherial Mirrors, which are essentially various magical artifacts constructed along scientific lines so that anyone, talented or not, can use them. If a talented character touches another and that second character grows claws and fangs, that is magic. If a non-talented character turns on her radio to hear the King's latest address to the nation, that is Aetherial mirroring.
A brand-new world with a familiar feel
The game system that used in CotS is called the Token System, after its most important component. Tokens combine with magic points to give the game its unique flavor. Every character and every non-player character gets a token. No character ever has more than one token, but spent tokens refresh at the beginning of the next round, as do magic points. Magic points are spent to make characters better at things they can already do. Tokens are used to let characters do what they want to do when they want to do it.
In a traditional system, characters dice to see who goes first, then act or react depending on the order established. In CotS, players still dice to establish an order, but tokens allow the order to be usurped in special ways. If, for example, a character is attacked by a Bole Wyrm, she could use their magic points to increase their chance to dodge, but she would not need to use her token. Dodging in reaction to an attack is a normal part of play. If, however, the character wishes to prevent the attack altogether, say by hiding before the Wyrm sees them, then she needs to play their token. Even though the Wyrm has a token of its own, it cannot play the token to counter a token played on it. If there was a second Wyrm, though, it could play its token to attack before the character could hide. At that point, if the character had a friend, she could play her token, and so on. It is less confusing than it sounds, and allows players to overcome bad die rolling with actions.
The learning curve in CotS is moderately steep. If players can grasp that Raevich is a traditional fantasy setting with modern elements mixed in, then the battle is half won. The players won't know the names of the places and history of the civilizations, but they will understand the basics that everyone got together to beat the elves and that the nations and races are now struggling to live peacefully with each other. There are monsters to fight, dangerous wilds to explore and robbers to apprehend, but there are also treaties to be negotiated, trade routes to be flown and plots to be exposed.
I love airships, hard-boiled detectives and long spell lists. Children of the Sun contains all three of these elements and combines them with a fluid and responsive resolutions system. It is well worth a look for players who like a little science with their fantasy. — Eric
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