Earlier this year I picked up Blood & Bronze, a role-playing game set in what it terms a mythic Mesopotamia. Like RuneQuest's Glorantha, it's set in the bronze age, but based on an historical environment. I really liked the art, which is evocative of the Assyrian rooms in your favorite Near East museum exhibits, as well as the idea of a setting that might be close to depictions in the Hebrew Bible, for which my secular Jewish schooling in Israel has given me a taste.
Reading it made me want to try it out, so I decided to gather some players and learn it by playtest. I was just getting into my systems obsession phase, so I wanted to run things by the book as much as possible. I also chose to run for fellow Israeli Jews from overseas, because of their slightly different perspective on role-playing, and because I felt that they would have a similar affinity for the Biblical-adjacent setting.
So I read the core rulebook all the way through. I made up a simple premise: the players were some assortment of guards for a trade caravan between Sippar and Dur Kurigalzu, two historical cities in Mesopotamia which are represented in the game. This path would take the players through a region that has random encounters set up for it in the back of the book. That would allow me to have an open table where each week I could run an encounter, learning the system and slowly populating a cheat sheet (in Hebrew).
Unfortunately, it was very difficult to run those encounters. While the book was readable enough as a static explanation of the system, it was not particularly well-organized for use in play. Moreover, the "rulings not rules" paradigm taken from the OSR movement lead the authors to present far too many encounters whose resolution is not supported by the rules - for example, there are no rules for pack animals, even though you are able to capture some in the desert, and even though that would be an important part of travel. Mass combat rules were also unavailable; it felt clunky to simply play through a mass combat, and one of the encounters I rolled involved the player characters intervening in a fight between two factions with 10 and 12 active members, respectively. Not having good rules for initiative when more than two sides are involved didn't help, either. Overall the rulebook had no worked examples to show how the system plays in practice - it seemed to expect familiarity with an old school game system, into which these new rules could then be dropped.
It was an interesting challenge, nevertheless, because the system has some unique features. Like in D&D, B&B has you roll for six innate abilities, but they are peculiarly different. For example, one of the abilities is Guile, and having a high score at it makes your character good at both fooling people socially and sneaking around them physically. This challenge to the mind/body separation paradigm assumed by D&D's three physical and three mental abilities is worth considering when thinking of what innate abilities mean, or rather, what they do for us when we are creating a character. Some classes you can choose allow you to reroll some abilities, or add to them, or swap them around.
Abilities are used in two ways: actively, they are translated into d6 dice pools, with success defined as getting at least one 5-6; the total number of dice which turned up 5 or more is significant for the rate of success. Abilities can also be used passively, as a saving throw against attacks or hazards tied to the ability; in that case, you want to roll under your ability with a d20. A significant way the active roll is used is when attacking: there is a damage dice pool that is equal to the number of successes, and these dice depend on the weapon used; they explode on maximum for most weapons.
When fighting, there are a lot of choices you can make. If you're acting in melee, you can decide to force something to happen rather than cause damage; for example, you can state that you are trying to disarm your foe rather than hit them. If your attack roll has succeeded, the foe can decide whether to accept what you wanted to do, or take the damage. That is done after knowing how many successes occurred, but before rolling for damage, so there is a bit of a gamble in making such decisions.
Armor provides a saving-throw type defense. It always soaks up the damage if you choose to use it, but you have to roll under its rating or it is destroyed, a nod to the more fragile bronze equipment available in this setting. Shields simply reduce damage from hits. Ranged attacks can be mitigated or avoided using a save on another ability, Senses.
Overall, combat can potentially be very complicated, but short and deadly. Reminiscent of RuneQuest's, albeit with more elaborate dice combinations - RQ uses roll under percentile mechanics almost exclusively.
There are two magic subsystems, each corresponding to a special material, and to a class that may use it. The Mystic may use Lotus Magic, while the Seer may use Bone Sorceries. Lotus Magic is based on lotus powder, an addictive substance. All characters can take it to suffer/gain certain effects rolled on a table; the Mystic is unique in being able to avoid the effect, instead using a dose to cast one of a variety of spells. The encumbrance system is important for the effects of this substance, because addiction is treated mechanically as follows: you are always encumbered as if you're carrying as many doses as the maximum that you have ever carried. This means that you have to limit the amount of doses you take with you to cast spells while adventuring, lest you leave no room for anything else.
Bone salt, similarly, can be used by any character to generate special effects, which the Seer can ignore in favor of casting sorceries. While it isn't addictive like lotus powder, it poses its own risks: it's a highly unstable substance, so the more of it you carry, the higher the chance that it will explode and dissipate when you are incapacitated, leaving you high and dry for the rest of the adventure - and if you have too much of it on you, the spirits in the salt will take over your body until you are healed. These systems guarantee that magic is difficult, dangerous, and interesting in specific mechanical ways.
One feature that we did not get to check out while playtesting was advancement. Modern D&D gives you experience for killing monsters or for passing certain milestones. Older D&D gave experience predominantly for finding treasure. There is no rationale for this, considering that experience eventually leads to gaining levels, which improves the overall prowess of the character irrespective of how they gained the experience. B&B does have a rationale: the way you gain levels is by gathering up sufficient treasure to sacrifice to Ninlil, the Queen of No Court, who gives you her blessing, in the form of higher levels. So your money is XP in the sense that you spend it to gain levels, similar to buying training in RQ. Another way of gaining power is covenants with different entities, a subsystem that is only hinted at in the base rules, although examples exist in some of the adventure modules and on the developers` blog. Mixing covenants requires paying additional tribute to the ones you have not been faithful to, and may lead to your untimely demise. Overall, an elegant way of handling this important but often arbitrary part of the role-playing experience.
I really do like the bronze age as a technological and social level for role-playing in, and Mesopotamia as a setting. I hope to return to it soon, perhaps even with this system. If any of this sounds interesting, I would recommend picking up the free Player Compendium, which has the basic character creation rules and a description of the various classes, and should give you a better idea of what you're getting yourself into before you buy. Unfortunately, the blog has not been updated since September 2018, and I have not seen new products coming from this publisher or line since, so do not look for long-term support. However, the base rules are there, as are some adventure modules, so there is plenty to work with if you find a group in the right frame of mind. Let me know of your experiences - I am really curious to know how other people manage to run this at the table.
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