Customer Reviews

Primal Order

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The Primal Order, by Peter Adkison, was the first product from gaming company Wizards of the Coast, now best-known for their collectible card game "Magic: The Gathering"; at that time, WotC was a just-starting roleplaying game company. The Primal Order was designed to eliminate two major flaws in the then-current treatment of deities in roleplaying games; either said deities were treated as all-powerful beings (leading to a great deal of difficulty if two different gods wanted different things, AND eliminating the high-heroic possibility of direct conflict between gods and mortals, cf. Conan, Greek and Norse myth, etc.), or they were basically ordinary characters with really really really high statistics (making it hard to differentiate between a god and a buff mortal).

The Primal Order changed this by introducing Primal Energy, a form of power usable ONLY by the gods and giving them certain advantages. The mechanics of The Primal Order ("TPO") are simple, direct, and efficient, the powers involved well-thought out, and other sections, dealing with godly politics, plane/dimension interactions, and even PC deities, are all well-written and interesting, with few flaws in either presentation or consistency -- a rarity in RPG publishing.

An additional plus to TPO is that it was designed as a "capsystem" -- a roleplaying supplement that works with ANY ESTABLISHED RPG SYSTEM. This means that to use TPO you do NOT have to give up your old system, or convert your old stuff to TPO's mechanics. TPO gives conversion rules in the back of the book for roughly 20 different game systems, all very simple and easily used. (earlier editions of the book contain conversions for Palladium and AD&D; later ones had those removed at the request/demand of the respective copyright holders).

Overall, a useful and well-written addition to any RPGers' library.