I mentioned in my previous post that I was able to play in a one-shot of Age of Sigmar: Soulbound (hereinafter simply “Soulbound”), and since I’ve also lately finished a read-through of the corebook I’ll offer a bit of an opinion about it. I don’t expect “reviews” as such to be the sort of thing I do very often, but community chatter is important in this day and age to helping games find audience and sustain life, so I’ll contribute my two cents.
First, a couple preliminary statements: I liked Soulbound, both at the table and as a read, so any criticisms are strictly friendly, and pretty much just observations. I’ll happily join a campaign if the opportunity comes up. Also, this is all based on my playing it once. I don’t have any nuanced notions about which archetypes, talents, or abilities are “broken,” how it plays at high level, or whether it handles scenarios like underwater grappling well. I played it, I enjoyed it, I read it, and here’s some thoughts about it.
As one could likely infer just by looking at the cover art, Soulbound is firmly in the “heroic fantasy” genre. There’s lightning! There’s magic! There’s… a balloon dwarf robot? Not only is it heroic, it’s super-heroic. And this is probably a “level one” party! As far as I can tell, these could be your dudes right after character creation. “Playing super heroes” is often a criticism of modern D&D, and almost certainly applies the most recent editions. These characters are competent right out of the box: fully stocked with cool talents, magic abilities, and rad equipment. By contrast (and somewhat famously), a character in Warhammer Fantasy Role Play (hereinafter simply “WFRP”) could literally start out as a penniless Beggar, armed with only a Poor Quality Blanket and a Cup.1
In this case, though, I don’t apply “super hero” as a pejorative. They are very different styles of play and player expectation, and I think the term only applies as negative criticism when a player is expecting one but instead receives the other. The epic heroics suit the mythic legend vibe Soulbound is going for; I don’t envision the characters of Soulbound doing much dungeon crawling. Or, I should clarify, “dungeon-crawling” as a style of play. These guys will head into the vaulted depths of Moria to fight a Balrog, but these folks won’t be tapping the floor with 10 foot poles and fretting about getting attacked by d6+2 skeletons if they touch a gem. Indeed, during our game we leapt into the twisted warrens of a Skaven clan on the hunt for a leader and hungry to smash minions, but we weren’t particularly worried about dying ignominiously in a rat-hole (particularly since our Battlemage was basically a flamethrower!). This heroic style is telegraphed by the whole framing device of the adventuring party too: the player characters of Souldbound literally have their souls bound to one another in some sort of lightly-described binding ritual that elevates them to folks with Great Destinies. The Gods have chosen the player characters for Greatness (although they’re not terribly clear what that Greatness is)!
But my point is this a game about high fantasy heroes that do fancy things. When I was thinking about it after the game, it’s a lot more Masters of the Universe than Lord of the Rings. Your characters aren’t necessarily singular and unique heroes the way that He-Man’s allies were (Stratos and the city of Avion aside, there was no Mekaneck or Snout Spout culture, as far as I recall), but they represent a particular faction and schtick, like Murderous Elf Knife Witch or Zeppelin Powerarmor Dwarf. This is no doubt derived from the settings origin as a tabletop miniatures wargame, where the various factions have a distinct visual and stylistic identity. In the Age of Sigmar wargame, you can presumably field whole squads of Tree Man Archers, but in Soulbound you play as an individual one that has been assigned to a group with varied talents.
The tone is almost too epic though—when I first read through the archetypes in preparation for the one-shot, I felt like something was missing. I was looking for just a modest “human fighter” type, but couldn’t find anything that quite fit. In fact, I realized there are only three ordinary human2 archetypes available: Battlemage, Warpriest, and “Trade Pioneer” (a type of miscellaneous skill-based adventurer, rather than some type of mystical demi-god). In a world populated in large portion by humans, it seemed a little odd that there wasn’t a more general warrior type (the Warpriest has kind of a clerical Divine Power aspect), but perhaps the Human roster will get expanded through later supplements. Superficially, some of the options seem to overlap a bit—Elves (or, uh, “Aelves”) come in three main flavors: Pirates, Assassins, and Mer-People, but they’re all sort of Dark and Witchy. But again, this was most likely a bit of expectation mis-match that I needed to re-frame: the game isn’t about a pulpy Conan, Fafhrd, or Gray Mouser scrapping their way through a blasted world, it’s about… well, The Avengers, or some other “super-powered” crew. We get to be humans every day in the real world, so why not be a Mohawk Dwarf Fire Barbarian or a Sorceress Tree With A Pet Centipede? Ultimately, I picked the “Khadaron Edrinmaster,” kind of a power-armored Dwarf artificer fighter dude.
And I had fun! I won’t bore you with details about the mechanics, but basically you’re thowing a handful of d6s and hoping for a sufficient number of successes. What constitutes a “success,” and the number of them needed, is something of a sliding scale. Against a Skaven Clanrat with “Average” defense, for example, my guy with his “Good” attack basically needed to roll at least two fives to succeed (I’m just making these numbers up, by the way). Facing off with a more hardy Rat Ogor, though, who might have a “Good” defense, that same roll would need three sixes for success. I was initially worried this sliding scale target number based on comparing the difference between attributes would be a bit clumsy and obtuse, but in practice it proved to be fairly intuitive and simple to learn. My guy was always attacking with five dice, but, as one would expect, he was mowing down lesser foes like a boss, and striving to injure the harder targets. It felt like it had a nice scalability. Plus, I just like tossing five or six dice at once.
Now, despite the heroic tone, my iron-shelled Endrinmaster didn’t feel completely invincible. I squared off with one of those afrorementioned Rat Ogors who hit hard, and nearly killed me. He punched through my toughness (the “shrug it off disposable” hit points), and gave me a couple wounds (the “we mean business” hit points) with one blow. I was one sturdy hit away from true death several times with that Rat Ogor, and the healing utility of the “Aqua Ghyranis” (a sort of magic water that functions as both currency and healing potion in the setting) saved my bronzed bottom for a couple turns. Had I died, I think there was still a safety net or two–I think I could’ve expended one of the group’s “Soulfire” points to bring myself back from death’s door so the characters aren’t as truly fragile as an OSR character, but again, this is heroic fantasy so the back-from-the-brink-of-death is well within genre convention. These guys are supposed to have glorious deaths in the midst of boss battles, not get smashed by the Incredible Rat Hulk in the first combat!
As for setting, I think the Mortal Realms would really support a “West Marches” style game right out of the box. The main premise of this whole world is that the Mortal Realms (a set of separate-but-linked worlds, sort of like the various “-heims” of Norse mythology) were ultimately overwhelmed by the forces of Chaos, and were reduced to wastelands of various flavors ruled by the anarchic minions of the Ruinous Powers. But, all was not lost, and Sigmar himself struck back. After centuries of seclusion and preparation, the forces of Law burst forth from Sigmar’s realm to reclaim the other planes as a massive inter-planar D-Day invasion to purge the corrupt and vile forces of Chaos and liberate the beleaguered survivors. Now, some decades into the campaign, fortress-cities dot the realms as points of relative safety amidst the still un-tamed lands. The party can naturally head into the wilderness from these cities, exploring, discovering, and re-claiming lost and forgotten secrets of yore.
One recommendation for prospective gamemasters though: you may find the Bestiary supplement useful if you’re going to run a campaign. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the Core Book bestiary just struck me as a little light when compared to its cousin in the WFRP 4e book. There’s no basic “zombie,” for example. Similarly, the core book describes the “Vargheist,” a sort of feral upgraded ancient vampire, but provides no guidance for the run-of-the-mill basic vampire that might be lurking a city’s catacombs. Granted, a creative GM can always used the tried & true methods of improvise and re-skin, but sometimes it’s nice to have some solid base stat blocks to reference… especially if you’re rolling into the game table right after work and you haven’t had a lot of time to prep because the kids have been keeping you preoccupied most evenings. That said, I haven’t actually tried running a game personally, so you might get plenty of mileage from the core book bestiary. And while we’re talking about beasts, another note for gamemasters comes to mind: there’s a lot of archetypes for characters to have companion animals right off the bat, so if you have the kind of players that LOVE familiars, get ready for lots of menagerie shenanigans!
All in all, I like Soulbound for what it is: a heroic fantasy romp across a mythic landscape to battle evil! There is no “mundane” here… it’s iron deserts, blasting volcanos, fire forests, and prismatic seas. At times, it’s a little overindulgent in its exuberance: sometimes you’ll read about how only a high ranking S’shushr could claim the right to wield one of the Seven Scepters of Tso’tha in order to command the mighty Leviahemoths and you’ll wish they’d just call a high priest a High Priest and a dinosaur a Dinosaur, but I’m willing to forgive that, even it I found it initially off-putting when I first became aware of the game/setting years ago. Like Spinal Tap, Soulbound goes to 11 whether it should or not. Sometimes I get the feeling that the setting is trying a little hard to “go to 11” and being Epic for the sake of Being Epic, but this may be explained a bit by the source material being a tabletop miniatures game that wants to be very visually catchy and colorful. Like a modern GW mini, Soulbound and the Age of Sigmar setting are rich with detail, but sometimes those details can be a little silly or annoying. But you know what? Soulbound can and should put it all out there and be what it wants to be. You be you, Soulbound. At the end of the day, I like quirky things more than boring things.
Unfortunately, my game time is a precious resource right now with one night a week, and I’m afraid I don’t anticipate running a Soulbound session any time soon myself. It’s in my mind and percolating, though, so who knows if I’ll get be stricken with an urge to run a particular campaign or adventure in the future. If I find out someone wants to start a game at my local shop on an evening that works for me, I’d love to play it more regularly. But in the meantime, I’m enjoying it as a reader.
- This is actually a downgrade for the Beggar… in the first edition of WFRP, Beggars also got a Heavy Stick and a Bottle of Rotgut Spirit. ↩︎
- There are several Stormcast achetypes: the Stormcast are immortal (or at least re-usable) warriors who were once mortal humans, making them sort of akin to this setting’s Space Marines. ↩︎