Kamarathin - The Kingdom Of Tursh (Setting book from D3 Games)

ghost-angel · August 6, 2009

The Upside:

Kamarathin - The Kingdom Of Tursh is a Fantasy Hero Setting book. Kamarathin is a low to mid level Fantasy world, this sourcebook focuses on Tursh, a large feudal kingdom in the world. It also provides the basis of rules and concepts in the world for furthe supplements to build upon.

Chapter One - The Kingdom Of Tursh. Diving right into the books focus, a history of the land is given from the Scale Wars to the present day. The Scale Wars is a classic good versus evil type war common to Fantasy settings. A dividing line of "It was better before, but greed caused us to fall" story. The history is detailed enough to give GMs something to work with, and vague enough to let them alter it to their specific needs. The chapter goes on to describe all the elements of a culture and region. Climate, currency, calendar, government, military, law, common languages, and such. All the elements needed to give Players and GMs the information to run a game in the setting are present.

Next is a description of each major region in the Kingdom. Divided roughly in half by a great wall, literally, it goes through the Eastern and Western Duchies in turn. The East is considered the civilized Tursh, a pseudo-Renaissance Europe in feel and culture. The West is uncivilized, full of tribal lands, barbarians, and other dangers. Dividing them is a very real wall. The other division in the country is religion, which is a series of sects to the God Of Light and Justice. Some benevolent, some intolerant of any others. There's enough information on various micro-cultures, religious differences and other assorted aspects you could set an entire campaign in Tursh with this alone. Which is what the book set out to do, and succeeded nicely.

Tursh has enough familiar elements to real world common knowledge of Medieval and Renaissance Europe to help gamers, and enough differences to prevent it from being a historical clone. It's an interesting land, full of court intrigue, dangers in the wilds, adventure, and openness to explore. Overall the the set up here looks to be a lot of fun.

Chapter Two - Religion. Religion is no small matter in Tursh, amongst the New Religion that has its many sects, the Old Ways with its druidic set up, and the various spirit worships of other races. All of these combine to make a melting pot full of potential. And this chapter details all the major aspects, from racial shamans of the dwarves and wolf-people, to the various sects of the Humans.

The chapter provides both Setting information and Game Mechanics, side by side, to help give the Hero System the feel of the setting, stripping out the genericness the Rules tend to have and giving them a very specific feel. A good job was done in the area.

Chapter Three - Surrounding Nations. Moving outwards from Tursh, the book examines the surrounding nations in brief next. It gives just enough detail to interact with them, but none get nearly the level of detail that Tursh has in Chapter one. Brief histories, rulership, currency and predominate religions and cultures are provided.

The best part of this chapter is that it does not simply describe a bunch of other similar countries to Tursh - Kamarathin is thankfully not a Europe with a different map. Each nation is radically different, some aren't even nations so much as regions no one can take over due to unruly locals. Merchant enclaves, warlords, anarchy, well organized and advanced civilizations, religious nations, matriarchies, and pockets of other races all are found outside the borders of Tursh. Each one has enough detail that an enterprising GM can fill in any blanks they might need to give a realistic feel to people from other lands.

Chapter Four - Magic. This chapter goes into the non-religious Magic of the lands. There are two main forms - a pretty standard Mage type, split into those who go to the Academy in Tursh and Hedge Mages who don't (and are outlawed). The other form of Magic is Blood Magic, using relics left over from before the Scale Wars to facilitate magic from within the caster instead of shaping outside forces as other Mages do. Blood Mages, as the name implies, use their own blood and reliquaries to cast magic. It hints that the blood of others is possible to use, but it comes at a great price, but does not go into details.

The flavor of the magic system in Tursh is inspiringly fresh. While based on the idea of four elements, it also incorporates symbols taken from constellations in the sky, mixes them giving them a bias of male or female, and creating twelve different types of casters, each with their own unique properties and spells. It gives a very Feng Shui feel to an otherwise European style fantasy world. Of all the various magic systems I've seen created for Fantasy Hero campaigns this is one of the most interesting. It provides a host of roleplaying opportunities you don't normally see in magic systems.

Chapter Five - Character Creation. Finally the book ends with the Mechanical How To of the Hero System and how it is altered and used in campaigns taking place on Kamarathin. Old Hero Gamers will note that the DEX Characteristic has been split into three different Characteristics, with resulting changes across Combat Values, and Skills, that give a wider range of agile characters.

This chapter also provides information on the major races of Kamarathin - wolf-people, dwarves, halflings, goblins, and two human cultures. Each one provides a related real-world similar culture that groups can use as a jumping board to familiarize themselves with new cultures. But it thankfully doesn't clone them, just borrows liberally.

Also here are Professional Packages Deals, several optional aspects and Talents a Character can take and cultural pieces one can use.

The setting is extremely Skill intensive, and this becomes both it's strength and it's weakness. All the various skills add a great deal of depth and flavor to the setting - but it makes the Package Deals (that the book notes you are required to always take in full in almost all cases) prohibitively expensive. Especially given the suggest starting point total for Characters. So many points are sunk into Packages Deals (especially if you want to play a spell caster of some nature) that customizing characters to suit your vision is difficult at best, nearly impossible at worst.

I love the richness of the Package Deals, but they really needed to be broken down into pieces a Character could take to show their Path towards a given profession or archetype. If the setting has a weakness, this is it.

The Downside:

There are actually several things that surface as problems with the book, both minor and major.

First, the books organization leaves something to be desired. Chapters two and three should have been flipped. Provide all the setting information, Kingdoms, and world, first. Then go into Religion and Magic and Character Creation. One of the biggest issues I had with the book was physical presentation of Package Deals - each element was listed in a flat alphabetical list - dumping several different aspects of Character Creation Mechanics into one pile. Disadvantages, Skills, Talents, Skill Enhancers, Powers are all just in a list with no apparent thought given to Order. Transcribing them to a Character Sheet will be difficult and annoying.

Second, as I noted, everything is extremely expensive. In some cases you can't actually take more than one Package Deal, good luck being a non-human mage. If that was on purpose the setting needed to be more explicit with campaign expectations and design ideals.

Lastly, and this I consider to be the largest omission a modern gaming book, especially a setting book, could make: No example Characters and no Index. With all the terms running through the text, the names and places and so on I'm shocked an Index isn't included. And with Package Deals driving many, if not all, the character archetypes, I would have expected an example NPC or two to help the GM and Players out with some campaign expectations.

The Otherside:

The setting is, quite simply, lush and detailed. My imagination was easily sparked into wanting to create a Character and run in the setting. It doesn't look or feel like many of the Fantasy settings I have encountered over the decades, the way that cultures mix here could provide endless hours of fun without becoming monotonous - no "oh look, another King in another feudal style kingdom" is present here. Other cultures and lands truly are different.

If you want a well thought out, well designed and very rich Fantasy setting you could do a lot worse than Kamarathin. I'd definitely recommend it as a break from mundane High Fantasy.

Curufea · August 6, 2009