Lords of Creation - Skills

The skill system of Lords of Creation is one of the more unusual elements of the game.  The game provides a large list of skills, with each skill broken into 5 levels.  Each level of a skill carries a "name" that indicates the capabilities of that skill at that level.  For example, the Detective skill is broken down into four levels as:

1. Police Connections
2. Basic Criminology
3. Wiretapping
4. Advanced Criminology
5. Futuristic/Magical*

The named level of a skill gives an indication of what the character is capable of doing with the skill.  The game advises that if a character has a skill level that indicates he can do something, then the skill should work automatically.  For example, a character with Detective - 1 would have Police Connections, which means he automatically gets access to small favors from his friends in the police force like checking addresses or tracking a license plate, and he also gets a number of criminal informants who answer questions "for a price".  Essentially this "skill" mostly operates like a perk would in other games (like Champions or GURPS).

Lords of Creation - Creating Characters

After the one-page intro section, Lords of Creation moves to what I often considered the most important part of an RPG during the days of my youth - character creation.  When I first started gaming I would often sit and create character after character just to get the hang of a new system.  I don't do that so much anymore, mostly because the character creation process in modern games isn't as much fun.  Often character creation in games these days boils down to a process that is only slightly more fun than filing my annual income taxes.  I think that this is because most modern RPGs have taken their character creation process directly from Champions, where no randomness is allowed.  While this allows players to realize the exact character they have in their heads, the character creation process loses aspects that I have always found fun - that bit of randomness that spontaneously generates a character you would never in a million years have conceived of yourself.  This is one of the things I love about the new Gamma World - the random character creation process that has a bit of a "throwback" feel to earlier days.

Like most games of its time, Lords of Creation has a semi-random character creation process.  Every character has five basic attributes that feel very familiar to folks who grew up on D&D - Muscle, Speed (which covers "muscular coordination and manual dexterity"), Stamina, Mental ("intuition, logic, and willpower") and Luck.  The first four of these map to 5 of the six standard D&D attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution and a mix of Intelligence and Wisdom), and are generated with scores between 2 and 20 for new characters.  Which again makes for very familiar territory, though unlike D&D the scores are generated by rolling 2d10 rather than 3d6.

Lords of Creation - Intro

While many modern games will open up with a piece of game fiction, back in 1984 intros like that were rare.  It was more typical to open up with a "What Is Roleplaying" introduction, which is what Lords of Creation gives us here.  This would have been a perfect place for a blurb telling us what the game is about, but we don't really get that.  The closest we get to that is:

LORDS OF CREATION is a role-playing game of science fantasy, fantasy, science fiction and high adventure that explores the farthest reaches of the imagination.  Game adventures take place throughout time, space and other dimensions.  The game is designed for both experience role-playing gamers and beginners. All that's needed to play are these rules, the dice included in the game, and your imagination!

Lords of Creation - Opening Moves

To start my examination of Lords of Creation, it's probably best to begin at the beginning.  In this case, with the Cover :

There we go - right from the cover we know that this is going to be a genre-mashup game.  We have a couple of adventurers wandering through an obvious portal between worlds.  On the one side a fairly standard fairy-tale kingdom complete with menacing dragon.  On the other some kind of pock-marked alien landscape with a robot standing sentinel.  Our adventurers are clad in strange garb - one is a man who is maybe supposed to look like his clothes were designed during the Italian Renaissance carrying a blaster pistol, and the other is a woman who looks to me like a starship pilot casting a lightning bolt.

Lords of Creation

So late last week the following showed up in my mailbox:

Lords of Creation!  The copy is pretty beat up, but both books are complete and mostly intact.