Role-Playing Games | 

   Shadow Bindings, inflicted on the world by Joseph Teller & Kiralee McCauley

   A review by Mark Damon Hughes <kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>

   Overview: A few good ideas in the sourcebooks, but the system is incompetent and annoying, and is not worth the time to even read. Rating: Terrible.

   The first thing anyone will notice about Shadow Bindings is that it's poorly edited, written, and organized. Almost every page contains juvenile spelling and grammatical errors. Unless a game is truly compelling in some other way, this alone is enough to make me ignore it, but I waded on, much to my regret...

   The organization has special problems. First, it's a set of web pages. There's nothing wrong with this when done right, but the embedded hyperlinks are not otherwise marked, so it can only be accurately used in digital form. If you print it out, you'll just have underlined phrases every so often. Even if you read it online, some of the links are missing. Also, the background color is a nauseating bright cyan, which makes it nearly impossible to read online unless you know how to make your browser not use their colors.

   Second, large sections of the game are actually in the world books, which will inevitably lead to contradictions and duplicated work, and makes life difficult for anyone attempting to use it for their own games. Ironically, the first worldbook "designed specifically for them", is one of those broken links. I had to go wading through the rest of the site to find one of the worldbooks.

   Third, the sections are not rationally broken up into different pages, instead they appear to have just written it stream-of-consciousness and then broken it up into different pages, but it doesn't even have links to most of the files, so you have to hunt around for the link embedded somewhere in the text, which gets you to bind2.htm and bind3.htm, but not to the other three files. The only way to find the rest of the files is if you download the entire thing, or hunt through the partial index for things that you haven't seen yet, or just guess at filenames. This is probably the *WORST* web design I have ever seen. Naturally, they didn't even write their own HTML, they used Wordperfect (and we all know how great HTML produced by word processors is!)

   The first file contains the *TWENTY-FIVE* primary attributes and 6 calculated stats necessary to characters. I used to believe that in most cases the quality of a game system was directly proportional to the number of stats in the game... but this is just obscene. 12 of these are very intrusive personality traits; they're more intrusive than even Pendragon's, which at least managed to tie its traits to its setting, but these are for a purportedly universal system. You can assign any score of 1-20 in these, except in the ones which have proscribed values in the text; high scores are almost always good and creative personality traits, while low ones are insipid and banal. The total of these 12 is then used to determine sort of inversely how many points you get to spend on physical attributes, forbidding characters who are creative and vibrant from having powerful bodies, while the mentally twisted get to be fast and tough.

   The second file starts with the advantages & disads that "apply in most worlds", including several variants of "Beast Friend", etc., and vampiric "Blood Thirst", "Haunted By Uneasy Spirits", and so on. Apparently the authors have a different conception of what "most worlds" means, or they live in such an addled state that they think those things are real. Many of these refer to "skill pool A" through "skill pool F", which leaves you completely confused as to the value of these things until you reach the third file...

   The third file, the last one actually linked into the rest, has the blandly-named (in spite of their slogan "Who Ever Said A Multi-Genre RPG Mechanic had to Be Generic and Bland??" - apparently the *authors* did...) skill pools A-F, which are actually:

     A= Scientific, Academic & Bureaucratic
     B= Physical Training
     C= Social Skills & Knowledge
     D= Esoterics, Religion & Occult Knowledge
     E= Artistic Oriented Skills
     F= Mechanical & Technological Skills

   Why didn't they just use those terms throughout? Because they wanted to torment the victims, er, readers, one supposes. The pools are based on the totals of five to six stats, but the skills themselves don't seem to have any relation to the 25 stats you arranged around.

   Of course, there are no example skills in the skills section - and those in the sourcebooks aren't explained, they're just listed (and there's hundreds of them, down to the level of "Baseball", which defaults to Thrown Weapons - apparently only pitchers need the Baseball skill), <sarcasm>because of course all skills are self-explanatory from just their names</sarcasm>

   The rest of the third file is some vague comments on equipment (why is this in the skills section? Because they have no organization!), but no actual equipment listings - "In general players should customize their equipment by culture, and purchase what they can with price lists for their culture. This should be done quickly as it is not a major part of the character creation process, unless the equipment is vital to the character concept." - <sarcasm>Boy, that was useful! Sure glad they told me that!</sarcasm>.

   Then there's skill use, which is percentile rolls of 5% times the skill rating of 1-20 - except that the example disagrees and says it's 4%. Why didn't they just use a d20 for skill resolution, if everything's in 5% multiples (as later sections show that it is)? Incompetent game design that will just annoy players, is all I can figure.

   Then in the same file is combat, a bunch of hazards, and morale rules. I won't go deeply into these, but they're obsessively complicated, and yet at the same time do not provide much real detail or realism. You can make an aimed attack at a body part, but the critical table covers all body parts, so you'd just have to reroll over and over until you got something in the right area. The effects of these criticals is also not explained, you're just expected to guess at their meaning, apparently. There's plenty of combat modifiers, but they're all multiples of 5%, eliminating the sole value of using percentiles.

   The fourth file is more hazards, healing rules, tables of technology levels (which are again high in complexity but low in practical detail), and object damage. What do ANY of these sections have to do with each other? Why are they in the same file? Why are these hazards not with those previous?

   The fifth file is magic levels, but no actual magic system, three entirely different experience systems, a footnote on supernatural abilities, and a glossary that tells you nothing useful.

   Finally (I think), the sixth file is a bunch of errata and missing rules that they couldn't be bothered to integrate into the rest of the game, even though they have the files right there.

   The game as a whole is a festering mass of ill-concieved notions implemented haphazardly. The organization is completely randomized, and will waste all of your time if you ever attempt to use it in actual play. It's horrid in print, and it's only marginally better online, if you can convince all your players to put it on their laptop computers.

   Recommendations: don't taint your computer with its presence, and the only valid reason to print it out would be to burn it in protest. Just walk away and play a better game.

Last modified: 98Aug23
Written