Mage Hunter is a new (as of this posting) fantasy RPG from Guy Sclanders from How To Be A Great GM. Unlike other RPGs I’ve reviewed, Mage Hunter is not a D&D 5E derivative. About the only thing it inherits from D&D is the six second duration of a combat round. Since it is not a D&D child, I’ll depart from my usual approach of just describing how it is different than D&D. For this review, I’ll provide an overview of the important and interesting rules.
Mage Hunter is a diceless RPG, which sets it apart from the d20-, d100-, and d6-based systems which are used by the most popular RPGs. Amber, based on the books by Roger Zelazny, may be the first popular, diceless RPG. Other similarities between Amber and Mage Hunter are few.
The core mechanism for Mage Hunter is Action Points (AP). Just about everything is based on AP. Spend AP to perform any action with a chance of failure. Spend AP to don armor. Spend AP to cast a spell. Remove AP when your character takes damage. Characters start with 30 AP and gain more as they gain experience. Understand AP, and everything else is just details.
Spending AP to succeed in performing an action is a push-your-luck gamble. The GM sets what D&D would call a difficulty class (DC) for each such action. Standard DCs are 1 AP for an easy action, 3 AP for a moderately difficult one, and 5 AP for a hard one. The GM does not tell the player the DC explicity but may hint at it. If the character does not spend enough AP to match or exceed the DC, the character fails. A benevolent GM, or one that wants to keep the story moving forward, may describe a partial success or a success with a consequence. If the character spends enough AP, the action succeeds. Spend more, the character can get additional benefits. In combat or other contested actions, whoever spends the most AP wins. Spending an excess number of AP deals additional damage.
Skills: Mage Hunter includes 34 skills that a character can utilize. A character can start with up to eight skills, two each provided by their birth, education, discipline, and reason to become an adventurer. More on those later. A character can add up to six skills during their career as an adventurer. Skills include basic character building blocks like melee combat as well as more esoteric ones like forgery. Unlike D&D, in which a character not trained in a skill can still attempt an action based on that skill, a Mage Hunter character cannot. Having a party large enough to cover a wide selection of skills is of great advantage to Mage Hunters.
Species (Races/Lineages/….): The selection of Mage Hunter species is relatively small. Like most fantasy RPGs, that selection is Tolkienesque, with humans, elves, dwarves, and orc. Mage Hunter also includes a variant of gnomes that are sentient, mobile plants and Go’Atti, which are satyr-like goatfolk. Each species has a set of four abilities from which a character gains one - although one of the human abilities is to gain an ability from any other species. Some of these abilities will be familiar to D&D players, such as the dwarven dark sight or the orcish ability to remain conscious when they should otherwise be knocked out. Others are more unusual, such as the gnome’s ability to heal any injury quickly if sunlight or water is available.
Birth, education, reason to become an adventurer: These three items form the backstory of the character. Mage Hunter provides nine options for each. A player is free (with GM’s permission) to create their own. Other than roleplaying value, the benefit of each of these items is the skills each provides. A character’s birth, education, and reason to become an adventurer each provide training in two skills. This allows players to take two different approaches to creating their character. The first is to come up with the character’s backstory and then to choose the options that match that backstory. This is the best roleplaying option but could lead to options which provide overlapping or less than useful skills. Instead, a player can decide which skills their character needs, choose options with those skills, and retrofit a backstory to those choices. Neither of these approaches is entirely satisfying. Some of the other RPGs I’ve reviewed offer greater flexibility, with the cost of some more complexity in character creation.
Discipline: The fourth source of skills in the character’s discipline. A discipline is the equivalent of a D&D class. Mage Hunter provides three, not necessarily evil spell user disciplines, four warrior disciplines (including a non-combatant thief type), and four evil spell users (mages). The game is called Mage Hunter, after all. Characters can be the hunted, rather than the hunters. Each discipline provides a special ability available to all with that discipline. They also provide other discipline abilities, one of which can be selected at character creation. As characters progress, they gain more discipline abilities and have the opportunity to gain a second discipline.
Character progression: Completing an adventure gives a character a reputation point. Gaining reputation points gains the character reputation levels. Gaining reputation levels can gain the character new skills, new discipline abilities, and more AP. Characters max out at 25 reputation points and a reputation level of 10.
Heroic Actions: A character has a number of Heroic Actions (HA) equal to their reputation level. HA can be used instead of AP for skill checks, to get some luck, or to perform a heroic action. Heroic actions include things like taunting to force all attacks onto the character for a round, to instantly fix a faulty device, or to move away from immediate danger. Spending HA on luck means that the character or party will happen on something useful, gain some beneficial information, or otherwise have something good happen. The more points spent, the better the effect.
Combat: Combat occurs in two phases. Each character or monster can act in one of the two phases. Figuring out who goes when and what a character can do in the first phase to affect the second phase (e.g., a character acting in the first phase can defend against an attack launched in the second phase but not vice-versa) is the most non-intuitive mechanism in Mage Hunter. It would probably take a few combats to get used to it.
An attack does damage if the target does not defend or spends fewer AP to defend than the attacker does to attack. An attack does a standard amount of AP damage, plus one for every excess AP spent by the attacker. A melee attack does 5 AP. An unarmed strike does 3 AP. A ranged attack depends on the weapon. Bows do 4 AP. A crossbow does 5 AP. A trebuchet does 60 AP. A character reduced to 0 AP falls unconscious. A character wakes up from being unconscious after 8 hours. An unconscious character that takes any damage dies. A resurrection spell costs 1000 coins and 100 AP.
Magic: Magic is simple, relative to magic systems in other RPGs. Anyone with a magic skill can cast any spell, assuming they have enough AP. Spend the AP, cast the spell. Spend more AP, maybe get some extra effects. A spell caster can counter a spell by spending at least the AP used to cast the spell. Counterspelling uses phase timing rules similar to defending. A spell that lasts multiple rounds can also be broken by spending AP. The list of spells provided is not extensive. A lengthy ruleset for creating new spells is included.
Conclusion: Mage Hunter is a complete, fairly simple RPG. It would be quick to put together a party and get started. For just those reasons, I do not think it will be the go-to system for many tables. It seems like a system that a table might dip into for a few weeks for a change of pace. Players focused on roleplaying and social interaction might like the lighter ruleset. Those same players may chafe at the limitations of character development. Combat-focused players would probably quickly tire of a system that is even more streamlined than D&D 5E. Magic-focused players may enjoy it the most, with the extensive spell creations rules. Players who love chucking dice would, of course, hate it.
Mage Hunter is not a bad system. I’ve criticized other systems (looking at you, Pathfinder Core) for being too complex. Mage Hunter may have gone too far the other way. It just does not seem rich enough to capture the attention of many RPG players for long. Maybe Guy will publish a worldbook that fleshes out the realm he envisions. The brief description of the Blood Mages make them seem like really cool villains. That needs to be capitalized on.
Den of the Red Wolf 