Review of Esoterica of Mars for Cavaliers of Mars

DISCLAIMER: My heavily modified campaign has been on hiatus for over a year now so I may be viewing this product through rose-tinted glasses. I also acknowledge that the original book for Cavaliers of Mars has its share of flaws.

The book here features both adventures and resources to mine. It's pretty well laid out (in a cross between old-style WhiteWolf Vampire and WhiteWolf Scarred Lands d20 3E era way), with a focus on providing material that is instantly usable.

An example of such approach would be that a typical location entry goes like this: a title, an introduction a few paragraphs long depicting the locale, followed by short lists of action hooks, characters and hazards.

Furthermore, the lightness of the system enables presenting elaborate characters in just a few lines of text (page 14th example): Beatria Monterez, Red Martian noble duelist (Quick Blade d10, Cashflow d8, Noble Connections d6; Combat 2 Strike/1 Parry; Trouble: Quick to Anger). Red Martian is a species available to players, noble duelist is a descriptive description of one's calling, with rated features following (an average human would probably use d6 here, d10 is exceptionally high for an NPC).

The setting of Cavaliers of Mars is one of high adventure. There are mysteries, exotic and wondrous challenges, conflicts abound, and all of this set against slowly declining glory of terraformed Mars of fantasy far future. NPCs

The book content in short (the counts include full page images):

Book One - City of Towered Tombs features a set of locations in a city of Vance, a few personality archetypes followed by NPC implementations, list of political factions that could be either allies or adversaries with action hooks.

Introduction (to the city of Vance),

  • 5 pages (four of which are full page illustrations.

Chapter 1: Locations (7 locations - see above for the format), no maps or pictures. If I were to run a story set there, I would probably get a few photos of Santorini streets (minus the water, plus some photoshopped reds or sepia). The places are evocative and easy to drop into a game, though if the players ask too many questions, you need to be prepared. Personally, I would make sure to have a few ideas prepared for quick escape routes, social complications or a generic map for swashbucklers playing hide and seek.

  • 8 pages

Chapter 2: Characters (16 archetypes, plus 2-3 characters each; a character is a paragraph of stats, and then a long paragraph on their background). Among the archetypes there are: Solitary Wit, Weary Soldier, Survivor, Mistreated Villain, Malign Influence. It's easy to assemble a full cast of colorful people to make sure your PCs have someone to talk to.

  • 15 pages

Chapter 3: Factions (9 organizations; their basics, their good side, their bad side and related hooks). The information is brief and quite lacking (no organization charts, no spheres of influence or resources), but that's not necessarily an issue - there are NPCs in the previous chapter, so all you need to do is map the stuff on the fly (to make sure that you remember whom you made an employee of and with what agenda).

  • 8 pages

Book Two is a campaign (quite a lot of optional material) written in Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs fashion. It is intended to be high adventure, so expect chases, magic, plot twists, and the unspeakable and the unfathomable. I would hate to give away the story, so here are a few details hopefully sufficient to make an informed decision. The core cast sports simple agendas, but the way they may go about them aren't necessarily so. So it's easy to follow the opening of the narrative and the key question is what happens next. A GM will need to juggle groups of influence, and to this end in the group descriptions there are Action and Trouble sections, the former to create an opportunity for an action sequence (not necessarily a fight or chase), the latter to introduce a complication once certain conditions are met.

  • 17 pages

Heartily recommended.

NOTES:

  1. A GM should be ready to map the story as it goes - listing stuff touched by the PCs, so that it can be revisited later.

  2. Myself, I have been charmed by the game, and I plan to run it as soon as the C-Flood subsides to the point offline gaming becomes viable. The high adventure plays best when you can loudly articulate the tension, and envelop the players in a cacophony of the bizarre that the Cavaliers of Mars are.

  3. If the system is not wholly to your liking, consider running it with CortexPrime. The NPC stats convert practically one to one (just ignore the combat part). Generate PCs using two stat sets (Abilities and Skills, Methods and Motivations or something similar), 2-4 distinctions to describe character's story (origin, careers, inclinations and specialties), and use Talents as tags that add to an action allow for more at the cost of temporarily lowering one stat (for example, Network of Whispers [talent] added to Respect [Motivation stat] and Eloquence [Method stat] means that you rely on your informants to get juicy bits, and the information should be good enough to justify temporarily lowering a stat). Lower Resolve by one step and use as HP for NPCs. And you're done.