Reign

Solis Cover

Reign is an RPG by Greg Stolze. It uses the One Roll Engine (ORE) and focuses on leadership and the interplay between factions. It comes with a default fantasy setting, but is suitable for adaptation to other settings.

System

Basics

Rolls are made by roll die pools of ability+skill, similar to WoD games. However, instead of counting successes the player counts the number of matching sets; for example, rolling 7 dice and scoring 1, 3, 5, 5, 5, 8, 8 would be a result of two sets, 3x5 and 2x8. Higher numbers are more effective in some ways, while broader sets (sets with more dice in them) are more effective in others.

Character Generation

Chargen operates on a simple point buy method, purchasing attribute points, skills, abilities and advantages from the same pool. You can take Problems for your character, these do not add to your build points but give you bonus experience every time they inconvenience you during play.

Another item of note is the Passions optional rule. Each character can have a Mission, a Duty, and a Craving. When the character is doing something that serves these ends he gains +1 die to the roll for each that applies; if he tries to do something that harms these ends he takes a -1 die penalty to the roll. Passions can conflict, allowing these bonuses and penalties to offset.

Gameplay

The principle feature of Reign is the Company system, which allows players to work for or take command of large or small organisations and pit them against one another. A dawn raid by the player characters to sabotage an enemy shipyard, for example, may reduce the enemy nation's Might by 1, allowing their own nation a better chance of making the roll to win tomorrow's sea battle.

In this way the PC's adventures can directly affect the political landscape of the setting while at the same time the conflict between different Companies can affect the PC's adventures. This makes very open-ended campaigns possible, with the die rolls at the company level providing inspiration for events at the PC level.

It also opens the way for a certain amount of ad-libbing by the players. For example, if the PCs have decided they want to make a raid on a neighbouring country and reduce their Treasure value by one, the player could make up an explanation for how they intend to do this ("The museum in Takesh on the southern border is said to contain the golden relics of A'kun. We can be there in three days' ride.") The GM can then go and plan out the raid on the museum, with both GM and players understanding what the precise mechanical results will be if they succeed.

Setting

The default setting is Heluso and Milonda, a continent made from two divine lovers lying side by side and embracing in the ocean. It has a number of quirky features included in an effort to make it different from typical fantasy. These include:

• Men ride sidesaddle for fear of infertility. Thus, all cavalry units consist of women.
• Demons are not infernal, but alien elemental creatures from the earth's core. They 'possess' people by killing them and physically 'pouring' themselves into the person's hollowed-out skin.
• Killing someone who begs for mercy results in him coming back and haunting you until you go nuts.
• The most powerful monster is a grasshopper the size of a city that leaves meteorite-scale craters whenever it hops. It can only be killed from the inside.

Reign on /tg/

Relatively few anons are familiar with Reign, but opinions expressed by those who are have been uniformly positive.

A couple of anons are purportedly working on a Reign adaptation of Reign of Steel