In today's post I present you the review of the role-playing game Maegtal, written by Hector R. A. (Twitter | ArtStation) in Spanish and freely available through DriveThruRPG under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Introducing Hector R. A.
Before starting to speak about Maegtal I will allow it's autor to introduce himself and his game:
I was born in Oviedo in 1974, I consider myself a dilettante who had always been in contact with art as a ceramist sculptor, art historian and, more recently, photographer, mattepainter and illustrator.
In my daily life I have a common job which allows me to live without luxuries and gives me time for my artistic and role-playing hobbies as well as other geek stories.
Since I get to like role-playing I have always created things. In the nineties I was the winner of the first role-playing games contest by Líder magazine and finalist in the second one. I publisehd in a fanzine and was creating material at the slightest opportunity. Maegtal is my third game, the most elaborate by far. Maegtal is a brutal survival game I began to gestate in year 1993 with Joaquín F. C. One more among the games appearing in the college role-playing scene. It was born from a little idea which didn't have much to do with what the game is right now. I already had experience in creating my own systems and venturing into cerating Maegtal was easy.
It has gone for many changes until being what is today. From something not far from a kind of D&D, I went simplifying it and retaining the darkest, removing totally unnecessary material. After a pair of previous versions, the tame is something I'm proud of.
It's a game with it's own system, settled in an unreal human prehistory, dark, brutal and terrifying, A very dark adult game, not suitable for those players who play with a calculator in hand.
It has a lot coming from archaic literature, from songs like Kalevala, Mahabharatta, Gilgamesh epic and so on, but taking it all much further back in time... Perhaps you will notice, too, I like lovecraftian terror.
There's much literature in the game, like micro-stories, short stories, poems.
All development, drafting, composition and art work is completely artisan. And this is something I've wanted to share. Under no circumstances do I intend (nor have I intended) to profit or obtain benefits from the game.
In my daily life I have a common job which allows me to live without luxuries and gives me time for my artistic and role-playing hobbies as well as other geek stories.
Since I get to like role-playing I have always created things. In the nineties I was the winner of the first role-playing games contest by Líder magazine and finalist in the second one. I publisehd in a fanzine and was creating material at the slightest opportunity. Maegtal is my third game, the most elaborate by far. Maegtal is a brutal survival game I began to gestate in year 1993 with Joaquín F. C. One more among the games appearing in the college role-playing scene. It was born from a little idea which didn't have much to do with what the game is right now. I already had experience in creating my own systems and venturing into cerating Maegtal was easy.
It has gone for many changes until being what is today. From something not far from a kind of D&D, I went simplifying it and retaining the darkest, removing totally unnecessary material. After a pair of previous versions, the tame is something I'm proud of.
It's a game with it's own system, settled in an unreal human prehistory, dark, brutal and terrifying, A very dark adult game, not suitable for those players who play with a calculator in hand.
It has a lot coming from archaic literature, from songs like Kalevala, Mahabharatta, Gilgamesh epic and so on, but taking it all much further back in time... Perhaps you will notice, too, I like lovecraftian terror.
There's much literature in the game, like micro-stories, short stories, poems.
All development, drafting, composition and art work is completely artisan. And this is something I've wanted to share. Under no circumstances do I intend (nor have I intended) to profit or obtain benefits from the game.
Background of the game
As has explained Hector in the introduction, Maegtal is a game taking as a basis human prehistory and protohistory and recreating it with a dark and terrifying touch based in possible reactions of primitive men to the natural environment they lived in and how, from those experiences, they interpreted it to create fables and myths helping them to explain the reality surrounding them. To create this mithology hae used as a base narratives like Kalevala, el Song of the Nibelungs, the Theogony, the Mahabharatha, the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Iliad.
The characters we can play in this game are, thus, members of the first tribes and primitive clans which began to wander the world, slowly discovering the marvels and terrors stalking them and encourage us to experiment the situations and feelings they surely where exposed to: the visceral fear to forces of nature and the unknown, personified in the form of the Heir Molat, which represented gods, first creatures inhabiting the world and nightmares dwelling in darkness.
Character creation
In Maegtal there aren't predetermined character classes as in more classi role-playing games, so it can be created as the player desire.
To create a character the following steps are followed:
- A character's biography is written, these will determine the skills learned while living to the present time.
- His Age is decided (minimum 12 to 30 years old maximum, beginning to getting older at 25), this will determine the amount of 10-sided dice he may distribute among Character Statistics (CS) and the learned skills.
- In case of CS Age/2 dice (rounded down) will be distributed.
- In case of skills as many dice as his Age will be distributed, bearing in mind that it can only exceed in 1 dice the CS ruling it (in case of two CS the average value of both is taken).
- Some of this skills (Dance, Sing and Trance) can only be used effectively by characters being shamans.
- To finish the character a series of secondary characteristics are determined: Will (his desire to improve), Encumbrance (how much the character can carry) and Kaa's Blood (an exclusive CS for witches and shamans which will define how powerful they are dealing with Heir Molat).
| Skills | |||
| Skill | Statistic | Skill | Statistic |
| Animals | DEX | Memory | MD | MS |
| Attention | MD | Parry | DEX |
| Balance | DEX | MS | Plants | MD |
| Charm | MD | Probe | MD |
| Climb | DEX | STR | Ride | DEX |
| Craftsmanship | DEX | MD | Search | MD |
| Conceal | DEX | Signals | MD |
| Dance ⭐ | DEX | Sing ⭐ | MD |
| Dodge | DEX | Stealth | DEX | MS |
| Fishing | STR | DEX | Swim | STR |
| Fool | MD | MS | Tell | MD |
| Heal | DEX | MD | Tracks | DEX |
| Instruments | DES | Trance ⭐ | MS |
| Intimidate | STR | Traps | DEX |
| Leadership | STR | Weapons | By used weapon |
| ⭐: Only available effectively for shamans and witches | |||
|
STR: Strength
CON: Constitution DEX: Dexterity MD: Mental Dexterity MS: Mental Strength |
|||
Basic game system
The basic game system consists in rolling as many 10-sided dice (D10) as the sum of the value of the skill and the value of the ruling statistic, the outcome of this roll will be compared with the action difficulty and if it is equal or more the character will have achieved what he set out to do.
| Difficulty | Skill roll | Statistic roll |
| Very easy | 1 | 1 |
| Easy | 9 | 5 |
| Regular | 17 | 9 |
| Affordable | 25 | 13 |
| Average | 33 | 17 |
| Complicated | 41 | 21 |
| Remarkable | 49 | 25 |
| Difficult | 57 | 29 |
| Very difficult | 65 | 33 |
| Skill Difficulty = (Statistic Difficulty x 2) - 1 | ||
if the character don't have the proper skill to carry out the action he willhave to roll with the stat, although sometimes it will be only possible to use stats, so in the latter case the difficulty of the right column of the previous table will be used.
The basic system also admits the chance of obtaining critical and fumble outcomes:
- Criticals are obtained when the outcome is equal or superior to the rolled dice multiplied by 9 (for instance: 27 points in a 3D roll).
- Fumbles are obtained when the outcome is the minimal possible (for instance: 3 points in a 3D roll).
- With 5 marks in a skill this increase its points in 1D (without restrictions due to his basic value).
- With 3 marks in a característica this increase its points in 1D.
Besides all this the game also have a chapter devoted to adventure preparation and a set of 4 examples to begin with.
Alternative game system (Roll of 16/13)
Maegtal also offers a more fast alternative game system named Roll of 16/13, consisting in the following:
- Absolute values of stats and skills are used (for instance: 4 instead of 4D).
- The roll is carried out with 2D10 and sum up to the outcome stat and skill points.
- In the case of skill rolls the character is sucessful obtaining 16 or more.
- In the case of stat rolls the character is sucessful obtaining 13 or more.
- Criticals are obtained with an outcome of 20 when rolling 2D10.
- Fumbles are obtained with an outcome of 2 when rolling 2D10.
Sample character
As part of the game Hector also offers Dahum, a sample character I have done the layout again with the author permission to offer as a download translated in the three languages of the blog:
| Download links | ||
| Spanish | 4Shared | |
| Catalan | 4Shared | |
| English | 4Shared | |
Inspiration sources
The background of Maegtal is enough interesting to inspire you to create your own plots, but you may also be interested in the following suggestions:
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| Quest for Fire (1981): Wikipedia | IMDB | |
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| 10,000 AC (2008): Wikipedia | IMDB | |
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| Alpha (2018): Wikipedia | IMDB | |
One of the classic films surely can give you ideas is Quest for Fire (1981) (Wikipedia | IMDB), directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, adapting the homonimous book written by J.H. Rosny in 1911, telling the vicissitudes of the Ulam tribe to keep lit the small flame that feeds their fires and how, after accidentally putting it out, being forced to find a replacement in a quest where they will end learning the necessary technics to light it.
Then we have 10,000 AC (2008) (Wikipedia | IMDB), directed by Roland Emmerich, based in pseudoarcheology theories and works like Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) by Graham Hancock (based at the same time in the book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) by Ignatius Donnelly), to show us a hypothetical and very advanced primal civilization, able to build monuments like pyramids, coexisting with more backward primitive tribes. Of course the film don't have any scientific foundation, but seeing that in Maegtal there's also the possibility of using copper weapons and exists the metal alloy giving name to the game nothing stops you to create adventures with this possibility, after all is your gaming table.
To finish with films you may see Alpha (2018) (Wikipedia | IMDB), showing us the possible beginning of wolf domestication by humans, a fact leading to the coming of nowadays different domestic dog races.
Regarding something to read here are a pir of recommendations:
First of all the novel El Primer Heroi by the journalist and writer Martí Gironell, telling how the young Ynatsé travelling Europe and Near East during Neolithic, departing from actual Banyoles and visiting places like Stonehenge or Çatal Hüyük in a certainly epic trip.
I also recommend if you have the chance to read the graphic novel Mezolith, written by Ben Haggarty and illustrated by Adam Brockbank, telling the life of the Kansa tribe in Great Britain 10,000 years ago and how one of his members, the young Poika, comming of age and and self-knowledge. I had the chance to read the original version in English and I assure you that it is an authntic delicacy surely you will like. In Spain is published by Diabolo Ediciones: Mezolith y Mezolith II. Sueños y pesadillas de la Edad de piedra.
Finally the author of the game recommends various music authors and groups of black metal, viking metal and nordic folk scenes which may be useful as soundtrack to set the mood of your gaming sessions and which I link below with some of their musical pieces at Youtube:
Conclusions
Maegtal is a game that will interest those persons willing to create and referee adventures of our ancestors hapenning in ancient times and in fact, as you surely may suppose reading this review, I liked it very much, so I decided to award my seal of distinction.
This entry it's also available in the following languages:
Castellano Català
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