Saturday, October 29, 2022

HELM RPG Review

I’m only likely to review games that I get excited about on this blog. Discovering Helm made me scrap my next planned blog post and write this review instead, pausing my own game design work to fully absorb its influence.

Helm conjures a variety of ideas to me. Its resemblance to the Middle Ages is more historically grounded than most, with popelike figures prominent in its timeline. There is a smattering of Mork Borg in its sense of impending doom, but this seems more end of days as depicted in real world theology. There are Warhammer’s brutal limb-specific combat injuries. But the whole thing feels more anti-imperialist, than some sort of doom metal glorification of death and destruction.



In Helm, you play as men-at-arms, with the game clear about its inclusiveness of women, gender-marginalized persons, and LGBTQA+ people under this heading. It’s very much focused on the fighter/soldier character model. Sorcerers only appear as enemies, essentially a symptom of the corruption that characterises the setting.  Magic is not though the cause of this corruption; what is termed the Ruination has its origin in the destructive course of the Empire.

Rules System

Helm’s character creation is a standout feature for me. I’m a sucker for 2 for 1s, like the way your rolled attributes determine your starting gear in Into the Odd. At first, Helm’s system of assigning scores to different body parts sounded clunky, until I realised how this synergises with different aspects of game play.

In Helm, your head score is not merely HP for your head, but also doubles up as your intelligence. In a way that feels intuitive, your trunk score is your constitution, legs speed and arms strength. You’d think having multiple pools of HP would make combat fiddly, but this is compensated by streamlining other aspects of the game.

As in Into the Odd, damage is inflicted directly, bypassing to hit rolls. Enemies don’t even have dice rolls for damage, simply inflicting their pain stat. Players attack by rolling 2d6, the first die determining the body location of the hit, the second die the damage. All weapons deal the same d6 damage, though there is some differentiation with respect to specific manoeuvres that they can pull off.

One thing I’d like is a description of actual play for combat, to get a sense of how it all fits together. My impression is it has been well play-tested. I particularly like the frenzy die, which sets a variable bonus to everyone’s damage rolls that changes every round. With otherwise flat damage being dealt by enemies, this seems an efficient way to add swing to combat.   You can tell it has been drawn from experience of what works.

Reaction Rolls

A small aspect of the game, but one that really chimes with me. Reaction rolls are an important element of old school play, lending objectivity to the way in which encounters unfold. Beyond being a tool for the GM, they help prevent the manipulation of encounters for the sake of drama or story arcs.

An issue I have sometimes is the flat universal nature of reaction rolls, where there is no effort to tailor these to the context of a setting. Decked in the uniform of a goblin slaying order of knights, your chances of a friendly reaction from a party of goblins are the same as anyone else. Worst still is where charisma modifies your chances, as if a foppish grin is going to overcome a reputation for massacring their kinfolk.

In Helm, reaction rolls are modified by the character’s reputation and alliances. Being employed by an invading army that requires you to flaunt their heraldry is a major detriment to reactions from local militia. I associate this approach with materialism, where social factors in the game world determine outcomes, rather than personal qualities of the game’s protagonists.

Anti-Imperialism

The setting for Helm is dominated by a destructive empire, depicted in unremitting terms:

“In this day, craven nobles play at conquest and sacrifice countless soldiers to the war machine, fuelling what has come to be known as the Ruination”

This is not an evil empire of some monstrous race, but as close as you get to a homeland worth saving (the game makes clear it is beyond saving). It is a stark depiction of imperialism, which of course, works to the opposite of glorifying its war mongering behaviour.

Helm is as good a setting as I’ve come across for a game based on The Black Company novels. I’ve seen these books referenced a lot as RPG inspiration, but rarely see this fleshed out effectively. The Black Company are a band of soldiers for hire moving from one reprehensible master to another. The novels are incredibly nihilistic, with neither a tyrannical demonic queen nor the rebels trying to overthrow her painted in terms more favourable than the other.

The problem with importing The Black Company into a D&D context is that adventurers are effectively free agents, delving into whatever local ruin they hear about at the tavern. They are not obligated to follow the behest of any regional power, and can advance to a power level themselves which enables them to challenge any authority. Adventurers can always choose to be heroes, whereas the Black Company’s allegiance to coin places them in a state of terminal moral bankruptcy.

In Helm, you are not adventurers but men-at-arms, often operating under the behest of a paymaster. More than likely, this embroils you in the whole process of “Ruination”; part of the problem instead of the hero setting things to rights. The example adventure premises in the campaign book could conceivably be drawn from the Black Company’s annuals.

A mad noble has barricaded himself inside his country manor; your commander would confiscate the house with minimal damage.

Summary

I discovered Helm at about the same time as the kickstarter for Best Left Buried: Throne of Avarice. It makes me hopeful a nascent genre of anti-imperialist RPGs could be a thing. This might be me projecting, as Panic Pillow and I have been working on something along these lines in our The 2nd Age setting. A good start is depicting empire in a vaguely plausible way, without the device of good and evil kingdoms making everything nicely black and white.

I’m looking forward testing how Helm plays and checking out its published modules. Characters in Helm face an interesting tension, between the freedom of being “masterless warriors” and their loyalty to the coin. For this to work, it feels like there needs to be a sink for characters to spend their money on. Hiring and maintaining a company of mercenaries seems to fit the bill (the free Helm supplement Mercenaries is a helpful basis for this).

There is great deep dive of Helm on the Weekly Scroll podcast for those interested.

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