It’s always good to see a new British roleplaying game and they are so infrequent these days that we sometimes give up on ever seeing something come from a British studio that can hope to rival any of our American cousins. But at Euro GenCon ‘99, we were surprised and excited to learn that a relatively new British company, Tree House Publishing, were about to launch their very first excursion into the hobby with an epic new title, Suzerain!

As anyone who was at Loughborough in ‘99 can tell you, the demo games of early playtest Suzerain were something to be seen (and heard) and were a talking point throughout the entire event. Now; a year later, and Suzerain has finally been released on an unsuspecting world, and it may well herald the dawn of not only a new millennium but also a new era for British roleplaying.

In Suzerain you (and we do mean YOU!) play an Avatar of the gods, sent back to the mortal realms to put right wrongs and see that good prevails over evil. You choose which of the Pantheons or Domains your character will originate from (from ancient Olympus to Valhalla and other realms) and are then sent back to avert the pending Apocalypse, Armageddon or Ragnarock, that is about to befall the mortal world. Playing yourself can be something of a tricky thing in roleplaying. Although the rules do suggest that you give it a try and recreate yourself in the game, it may be a little off-putting to old time gamers but could well appeal to newer gamers or those just starting out in the hobby.

The gods have a limited perception of the mortal world. When you get sent back you are rarely given all the facts and will often miss your target somewhat. This ‘Quantum Leap’ style being thrown in at the deep end is one of the joys of Suzerain. The ‘Maelstrom’, the home of the gods, exists outside time and space giving the entirety of history as the canvas on which to create. Paradoxes caused by the actions of both the players and NPCs are avoided by reasons that seem a little spurious but this isn’t a game that worries overly about technical matters. A certain amount of suspension of disbelief will make playing Suzerain far more enjoyable.

Character generation is a simple affair on the whole and you can, within a few minutes, be ready to play once you have worked out your Avatar. Combat and other skill actions are handled using normal, everyday playing cards rather than dice, but gamers being gamers do need something to do with their hands in a game session, and on the whole we did find this rather an un-innovative idea, and the addition of dice based rules could have gone a long way to help things out.

The rules are lite in the extreme and it is obvious this is meant to be as freeform as possible. Liberating in many ways, frustrating in others. The mechanics, such as they are, are buried within a lot of chat and without an index are a pain to reference. You almost get the feeling they would rather you ignored the rules. A big emphasis is put on setting the mood, designing and constructing scenarios, being a GM etc, etc. , probably more than in any game yet released. It does state the obvious at times, repeat itself occasionally and comes over as a little patronising but there are useful nuggets in there that only a master GM would know already. It is hard to shake the feeling you are about to put on a play rather than run an RPG though.

Six scenarios are given to get you going, but for the most part they are a touch linear and do little to emulate the possibilities given in the reference section. Most are two or three minor scenes with combat at the end. Admittedly four of them are meant to form a short campaign, but even together the players have little choice in where they are going. The exception is a high tech assassination attempt that the players have to foil, and from having run it several times we can say it is never the same twice and packed with atmosphere.

Also included in the lavishly set out hard bound book, are the full live action roleplay rules for Suzerain, which are again simple to pick up and easy to follow, though why they were included in the core rules is beyond me, as they would have made an excellent supplement if expanded a little more.

This section also sits slap bang in the middle of the book rather than as an appendix which seems particularly odd. For those who haven’t live roleplayed and may want, to it gives useful advice describing calls and some do’s and don’ts. For those who don’t and never will, it is a quarter of the book wasted. Even more so when it is padded out with photos of a bloke in jeans repeated several times wearing a variety of ‘post-apocalypse’ accessories. Additional photos of weapons not to be taken to live roleplaying sessions, duh, and a step by step guide to making a Celtic cross ‘telesma’ seem even more like padding.

Losing a lot of this stuff could have severely reduced the cost of what is, by gaming standards, a rather expensive book. More on the background would have been preferred. The NPCs and Dominions are covered very briefly with many details like the powers avaliable to them either brief or non-existent. Case in point are the Voids, kind of anti-gods, who we are told have their own unique powers and abilities but sadly not what they are. There is enough there, just, to get you going and obviously this stuff will be in future releases but there is no reason more information could not have been included.

The one thing that really strikes home about Suzerain however, is the excellent almost Renaissance art work that wouldn’t look out of place in one of Leonardo De Vinci’s lost codexes. Some truly stunning and breathtaking images accompany the introduction and highlight the various Domains from which your player can hail. If you are a stickler for black text on a white background though, the layout will annoy you. It isn’t overly intrusive and the text is large and chunky enough to be legible, but occaisonally you have to look twice to read things clearly. They have pulled all the stops out designing something that is as much a work of art as an RPG, but do we really need a slipcase for a hardback book?

Less chat and less emphasis on presentation could have made this more affordable. A good start to a new system in other respects though not without its flaws, Suzerain is one to watch out for in the future.