Mechanics
Earth of the Fourth Sun does use an unusual, if slightly gimmicky, approach to skill resolution. Resolution uses d6, but each of the six sides of represent icons:  1 skull, 1 blank, 2 stars and two special icons. When a die is rolled a skull counts as a failure, a blank counts as a neutral result and stars count for one suceess. The special icons only count towards success if you have a Mastery rank in a skill. In which case they count for two sucesses. Failures nullify sucesses, and the total number of sucesses rolled (this is a dice pool system) determine the degree of success. In most cases the GM narrates what happens based on the roll of the dice.

Now, this system initially puzzelled me. At an inutitive level it didn't seem like there was a great advantage to increasing your skill levels. After all, if generally speaking, just one success is needed to pass a test of skill is there any point to rolling two, three or four dice? When you work the stats out though there is a slight advantage to increasing skill ranks. For every dice that you roll you effectively have a 1/6 chance of success (2/6 sucess - 1/6 fail). Roll six dice and you will on average score one success. Roll twelve and you get two sucesses on average. This scale is part of the reason why skill ranks climb as high as 20. You need to be rolling eighteen dice to be scoring an average of three successes.

Which brings me to another point. That's 20 specially marked d6s to roll. I really don't want to paste or draw skulls on 20 d6s. Of course you can roll the same six over and over, so its not a particular drawback and not much worse than most other dice pool mechanics in terms of needing fist-fulls of dice.

Character Creation
Chapter one of Earth of the Fourth Sun leaps right into a nice overview of character creation. Characters are designed by purchasing Attributes, skills, magical spells and other abilities from a pool of 150 points. This strikes me as immediately reminescent of the GURPS approach, and I imagine that equally various characters can be created with the Earth of the Fourth Sun system.

The rules advise players to spend points on Attributes, Skills and Special Abilities in that order, which makes sense. Attributes cost more than skills, although buying a level of skill 'Mastery' increases the cost per level. Special abilities and traits vary in cost.

Advantages and Disadvantages are also bought from the collective pool of Character Points. Advantages cost points, whereas Disadvantages give the player bonus points to play with. This is the standard approach to Advantages and Disadvantages and carries with it the standard problem that players may buy unlikely or problematic Disadvantages specifically to get some extra points. As a side note, there are some interesting looking Advantages/Disadvantages in there, the magical Disadvantages especially caught my eye.

An important feature of Earth of the Fourth Sun is that spells are bought individually as one-off magical traits. Your warrior character could pick up 'Summon Sword of Flame' without bothering too much about investing in magic as a whole. I'd be surprised that any character in Earth of the Fourth Sun would be without at least some magic because of this. If this fits your setting, kind of in the vein of Glorantha, then I don't see any problems, if not some houserules may be needed.

Gifts are bought in the same step as spells, and represent a more powerful, but still spell-like, form of magic. Gifts are purchasable only with GM permission.

The Character Creation section rounds off with a lot of useful, and quite comprehensive, information on individual skills, spells, and attribtues; how to intrerpret Advantages; buying off Disadvantages; and some interesting quick-start templates. Basically everything you would expect to find in a published and well-playtested game.

Advancement
I presume (as I cannot find anything definite in the PDF) that character advancement is governed through earning experience points that can then be spent as characters points. This is the logical path I'd choose if I were running the game, although a section on Character Advancement would be nice. As the rules stand I've no idea how many experience points wouldbe appropriate per adventure, although I suppose that could be worked outwith a little trial and error.

Magic
Magic in Earth of the Fourth Sun allows for partially freeform spell creation, and is both expansive and well thought out. I particularily like some of the small throw-away ideas that can be found in this chapter. The idea that superstitious peoplecan unconciously 'cast' magic spells and cause superstitions to become real is almost good enough to base a whole one-shot game around.

In quite a few places the influence of GURPS appears to creep in here and there. Aspected Manna (their spelling) areas, reminded me of GURPS, as does the learning of spells one-by-one, as if they were skills. But, Earth of the Fourth Sun diverges from GURPS and many other games when you get down to the core magic rules.

Although spells must be learnt by characters, Magic in Earth of the Fourth Sun allows the parameters of a spell to be toyed along freeform rules. Characters gain proficiency in Colleges (Apportations, Conjurations etc) and Spheres (Elements, Mind etc). Spells are then devised, or existing spellsmodified,  by players on the basis of their rank in a given College and Sphere. A light spell for instance might be based on Conjuration and Energy.

The cost of the spell is then based on targets, duration, damage and so on.

This allows players to create signature spells for their characters. I like this. I think it goes a long way towards finding a good middle ground between free-from and spell-based magic.

The pre-set spells found in character generation begin to look more like suggestions than hard and fast rules by the end of the chapter on magic. That might have been good to explain early on, as I suspect that a lot of players with spellcasting characters would like to tailor their magic from the start.

Combat
Combat is handled through a round and iniative system in which characters draw on a dice pool equal to their relevant combat skill (i.e. spear). Once a character runs out of dice he can no longer take actions during a round, and will have to relky on armour to save him from atacks. This emphasis on a dice pool to draw on puts a new importance on having as many points in combat related skills as posible. Whereas with non-combat skills I can see an advantage to not bothering with anything other than one or two levels of Mastery level skill ranks, I can see a lot of advantage in loading as many levels as possible on one combat skill as you need as many dice as possible to make sure you have a large enough pool to both attack and defend.

Sucesses on attack rolls that get through the defender's parry and armour count towards damage. Nothing too surprising there although the elmination of the roll-for-damage step in a fantasy game is always nice to see.

The is a lot of extra information and discussion of rules in the combat chapter, and not all of it organised well. I spent three pages wondering what a roll of a 'Skull' means in comabt. Does the entire attempt fail? Does it negate one sucess? Turns out a Skull damages your weapon, information that could easily have been included earlier on in the chapter.

Earth of the Fourth Sun also makes use of the concept of combat maneuvers, which will give those combat-orientated players something to keep track of and work towards. A character must know a maneuver to use it, and maneuvers are bought using character points.

Setting
As far as I can tell from magic, character templates and skills, Earth of the Fourth Sun falls fairly neatly into the traditional fantasy setting. There isn't much setting detail to work with in the PDFs, so if you are hunting for a detailed or rich setting you may be disapointed.

Style
Nicely laid out. There has been some obvious effort put in to produce a game of a proffesional quality. The writing is generally easy to follow, and clearly written. About the only thing missing from a published game are the illustrations. Given that the author is something of a fantasy artist himself I'll hazard a guess that we'll see a few illustrations creeping into Earth of the Fourth Sun as updates go up.

General Comments
Earth of the Fourth Sun has a lot going for it, it also needs a little work here and there.

What I would like to see?
A section on character advancement, no matter how brief, would be an invaluable addition.

Some of the peripheral things we've come to love and expect from fantasy games wouldn't go amiss. Some monters, a few treasures, perhaps some plothooks.

Summing Up
Why would I play this game? The magic system is intriguing, and some of those magical advantages and disadvantages look like a lot of fun. Earth of the Fourth Sun is also pretty high on the scales of big games that are complete. Sure its missing a few extras.  Sure a character advancement section would be kind of helpful, but really there is so much here inthe way of detailed and lovingly crafted work that I'm willing to overlook one or two glaring ommisions. Hell, it is free, I'll just assume that the author hasn't got around to writing upthose sections yet, and check in on the site now and again.

I also imagine that if you are a big fan of GURPS, then Earth of the Fourth Sun is likely to appeal to you. It seems to hold to a lot of the design principles that GURPS is based around while managing to present a original take on magic, and maintaining a solid fantasy feel.

And finally, though I know I'm kind of cool about the resolution mechanic in this review, I'd also like to actually try it out. It's certainly original and if you were not too worried about skill progression I imagine that the mechanic would work very well.

Nothing beats a free game,

Chris Johnstone

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