A Song Of Ice And Fire Roleplaying: Adventures In The Seven Kingdoms [Hardcover]

Robert J. Schwalb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 2009

The King is dead! Long live the King! Freed from the grip of mad King Aerys II, Westros emerges from a bloody civil war as Robert Baratheon attempts to bring a lasting peace to the Seven Kingdoms. In spite of the promises of justice and prosperity for all, this perilous time is marked by the political maneuvering of ambitious nobles and foul plots hatched in secret councils. Villains are rewarded for dark deeds and honest men are brought low for old loyalties. Conspiracies abound, the wind carries rumors of war, and the Great Houses struggle to find their places in this new regime. And all the while an ancient evil stirs in the far-flung reaches of the north. Green Ronin Publishing is proud to bring adventure gaming back to Westeros with A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Green Ronin Publishing (March 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934547123
• ISBN-13: 978-1934547120
• Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 8.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #164,584 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great roleplaying system match for the world of Westeros., April 29, 2009

By 

Rick Douglas Janssen (Lake Zurich, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Song Of Ice And Fire Roleplaying: Adventures In The Seven Kingdoms (Hardcover)

Green Ronin's role playing system for A Song of Ice and Fire has a lot that sets it apart from other roleplaying games and really lends well to the imagery and world that George R. R. Martin has set up.

I won't go into what makes the setting itself so appealing since that type of information is available else and related much more elegantly than I could phrase it. Here I would like to highlight the strong points of what I feel to be a very rich and logical roleplaying system.

My roleplaying game of choice has always been D&D, so I will use this as a basis of comparison. Instead of 6 core abilities and a multitude of related skills, GR combines these concepts and sets up 19 abilities. An average score is 2, but could range up to 7. There are no classes in GR, but rather the player assigns experience points to abilities or specialties to form the character as he sees fit, rather than getting a lump package of improvements per level.

You "test" a skill by rolling a number of 6-sided dice equal to your ability. Every test has a difficulty assigned by the Narrator. Most basic actions have preset difficulties, but they can always be adjusted as circumstance (or the Narrator) dictates. If the total rolled on the test dice meet or beat the difficulty the character succeeds. The use of skills, combat, and even intrigue are all handled using this same concept.

In D&D there was nothing half so frustrating as having a huge attack roll only to follow up with minimal damage. That situation is mitigated with the GR system. The greater your attack roll, the more damage inflicted.

With so few abilities in D&D it was easy to buff up one or two to really excel at combat. This isn't an issue in the GR system. In combat the difficulty of your attack is your opponent's Combat Defense (similar to AC). This is basically number derived from various abilities (Agility + Awareness + Athletics). That means multiple abilities become important to avoid getting hit besides just one (as with Dexterity in D&D). Testing the Fighting ability is typically used for melee combat, but damage is usually dependant of Athletics (rather than both relying on Strength as in D&D).

The players have much more control over what happens to their characters in combat. D&D would have some situations where characters could get killed quite easily before their player could react. GR introduces injuries and wounds to give more control back to the player. While characters have relatively low Health scores (hit points), whenever they receive damage the player decides to accept the damage or take an injury to lower the damage sustain a small amount, but then suffer a small penalty for the injury until healed. Additionally, players could choose to take a wound to remove all damage sustained from the attack, but then suffer a much larger penalty. Also, wounds can take a long time to heal. If a character is reduced to zero Health the person who defeated them chooses their fate (unconsciousness, maiming, or most commonly death). Basically, the staving off of instant death gives much more opportunity for retreat or surrender rather than death.

The game system also introduces a system for creating a house to which the characters can belong. Houses can act as a pseudo character that is shared by all of the players. Sometimes characters can use house attributes to improve their standing. Sometimes the characters can invest personal rewards into the house to increase its standing in the world. And isn't that what playing A Game of Thrones is all about?

Green Ronin offers a free downloadable quick start rules to give a better understanding of the game mechanics. I highly recommend this system and hope it sells well so that future products are produced.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great product, but better wait for second printing, May 31, 2009

By 

A. Velkov (Sofia, Bulgaria) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Song Of Ice And Fire Roleplaying: Adventures In The Seven Kingdoms (Hardcover)

I completely agree with the first review up here. The book is great, the system is awesome - there is enough for tactical junkies like me and nicely done social combat system (like exalted rpg).

The only and biggest problem of this book are editing mistakes. The book is full of them, and when you see the current errata you will see that there are corrections everywhere. Even the character sheet is missing a skill. What the hell?

Better wait for second printing with implemented errata. In this current condition, the book is somehow hard to use with all that errata material.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Game System, But 1st Printing Riddled with Mistakes, September 4, 2009

By 

D. Posner (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Song Of Ice And Fire Roleplaying: Adventures In The Seven Kingdoms (Hardcover)

The game system itself is very clever and well thought out and does a fine job of capturing the feel and essence of adventuring in Westeros from George R. R. Martin's books. However, and this is a big "however," it seems this printing was rushed to market before a proper proofreading and play-testing was completed, consequently it is riddled with errors and inconsistencies and and quite a few broken rules. The core system isn't broken at all, but many of the lesser rules are. Green Ronin has been printing extensive errata on their website for the books, but it's to the point where sometimes entire paragraphs and even multiple long paragraphs have to be deleted, altered or completely replaced with new text. It's an annoyance and since errata keeps updating, it's hard to keep up with all of the changes.

I think once the second printing for this book is released, it will be a really fine product and I have warned my players off buying the current version (unless they just really need to have it). We're just going to work off the PDF version for the time being. As is, I'm willing to slog through the problems in order to play the setting, and because the core system itself is very good. I simply plan to make a fair number of House Rulings and rules along the way and already have in a few cases.

To sum up, a very good game that will greatly benefit from a second edition - hopefully that will come soon. For now, I'd suggest only collectors or really obsessive fans of the game get this version, or save some money and get the PDF instead. I really wanted to give this game five stars, but the errors are just too many at this point so it loses a star for that alone. I nearly dropped it to 3-stars because there are so many errors it almost deserves it, but I just like the core game (and of course the setting) too much - 3 1/2 stars is probably my true rating here.