What is a Revivification Folio?
In Jack Vance’s stories of the Dying Earth, the sun, and thus life itself, is universally thought to be mere moments from a sad, smoldering demise. Yet inexplicably it continues to shine, allowing the world's hyper-verbal denizens to go on swindling and pettifogging one another.
Likewise, the Dying Earth Roleplaying Game lowly smolders but refuses to burn out. A license-ending sell-off sold so many games that Pelgrane Press’ simonjrogers elected to revive the line. Just the other week , DERPG reared its head into the RGPNOW top ten.
To assist it in its heroic refusal to lay down its elaborately-hatted head, I’m now in outside playtest on The Dying Earth Revival Folio. Unlike an innkeeper of the Dying Earth, Pelgrane is not out to swindle you. So this book is not a replacement for the DERPG core book you may have recently ponied up a ten-spot for. Nay, it is an invaluable adjunct, giving you what you need to play the game in the streamlined new Skulduggery way.
We are sometimes told that DERPG is a buyer’s favorite game he can’t get his players to try. The Revivification Folio solves that problem for you by adopting the super-fast, card-based character generation system first presented in Skulduggery. Players can jump right in without undergoing the more traditionally detailed character creation process mooted in the original book. Within minutes they are decisively ensnared.
The quick and deadly combat system is now quicker and just as unforgiving.
Magic is simplified so that the spells you wield appear on cards. In true Vancian fashion, you play the card and have used up the spell. Enchanted items can be used multiple times but are likewise presented in easy-to-use card format.
The book comes with cards to generate your first six PCs, and with notes on replacing them when they succumb to the cruelties of a decadent world.
Also included are your first three scenarios: one in which our picaresque heroes find themselves unwillingly indentured to a hotelier-slash-arch-magician, another in which they serve as guardians to a tomb-raiding expedition, and another in which they finally secure sinecures as officials in a bucolic rural village. Nothing could possibly go wrong!
Release date TBA.