Lex Arcana Core Rulebook

Lex Arcana, 2nd Edition

by Leo Colovini, Dario De Toffoli, Marco Maggi

LEX ARCANA IS THE ALTERNATE HISTORY ROLE-PLAYING GAME SET IN A ROMAN EMPIRE WHICH DID NOT FALL

The Emperor needs you! Join the Cohors Auxiliaria Arcana, enter the world of Lex Arcana and dive into the mysteries and dangers of ancient Rome.

You and the other Custodes will travel to the four corners of the land, investigate terrifying threats, recover lost relics, unearth forgotten secrets and fight legendary supernatural creatures.

The Core Rulebook includes:
• Full rules to play Lex Arcana
• A full world to play in
• 12 pre-generated Custodes
• Rules to make and advance your Custos
• Advice for the Demiurge
The ancient world bestiary
• Two extensive introductory adventures: The Long Winter Nights and The Mothers of Cenabum

From misty Britannia to the immense rivers of Babilonia, from the Egyptian deserts to the beautiful beaches of Italia, the adventures awaiting the Custodes are as numerous as the Empire the Cohors Arcana must defend is large. For the glory of Rome and the Empire without end!

Genres: Fantasy, Alternate History

300 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Kristoffer Liland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating setting

[Benjamin]

How? A Bundle of Holding purchase, including the core book and
* the Quickstart rules/adventure
* Encyclopedia Arcana (reference for Roman empire and time)
* Aegyptus
* Dacia & Thracia
* Italia
* Mysteries of the Empire (adventure anthology)

What? The Roman empire never fell, thanks in part to divinatory magic wielded by the Cohors Arcana, a magic-adjunct to the army; but now things are getting worse and the Emperor has empowered the Cohors to investigate all sorts of dark cults and rumblings at the border.

You are in that cohort -- a fighter, augur, scholar, explorer, or diplomat -- able to either wield divination magic or just prepared to deal with the weirdness of the world, including monsters, forbidden cults, dangerous barbarians, etc. Because you are in a special class, you have also been trained with special abilities, and because you are blessed by the Roman gods, you also may have access to other special abilities. Also, the major magic that the Cohors uses is all different flavors of divination -- so much less "I cast fireball" and much more "I ask the gods if this is a good idea."

Mechanically, your character has points in stats and skills (and maybe specialties); and you roll against a difficulty number, with success conditions from "marginal" to "extraordinary," depending on how high over that difficulty number you roll. And if you roll the max, then you reroll and add the results together. Curiously, your stat+skill is your Dice Pool, which you can apportion to different sizes of die. So if you have 8 points, you could roll 1d8, 2d4, 1d5+1d3. (I think there's a limit to 3 dice as a max.) Why would you want to roll 2d4 vs. 1d8? Well, if you're hoping to get your die to explode by rolling the max, then 1d8 has a 12% chance of exploding, but 2d4 only has a 6% chance -- but you also have a 0% chance to roll a 1.

Yeah, so? Let's get this out of the way: Dice Points are likely to slow down a game until the players are familiar with probability, which may be never. It's an interesting way to get around the die rolls being too swingy, but I really think it's a weird/bad idea that will just have people constructing probability curves.

You know what else is kinda weird these days? Imperialism. Not to reenact the Life of Brian scene, and with respect for the advances of Roman science being exported to other parts of the world, it's a little weird to have an adventure that's like "let's stamp out this local religion." I found myself much more sympathetic to the Cohors when their missions were, say, to stamp out local dark cults in the heart of the empire or just straight up fighting vampires in Thracia/Dacia.

That said, the premise is solid, and easily answers the questions "who are the PCs, what do they do, and why do they do it together?" They are elite agents of the Empire, dealing with supernatural threats, mission after mission.

In fact, the premise works so much that I have to wonder why they decided to make this an alt-history game where the Roman Empire didn't fall. That feels superfluous to the game itself. I almost have to wonder if the game writers being Italian isn't a factor here, which may explain the under-examination of Empire, and also why sometimes you get lines like a description of a snake as "the king of tutti the snakes."

Also, as much as I like this being a low-powered fantasy for the PCs, the fact a lot of their magic is divination feels... I don't know, but like Dice Points and this being an alt history, it feels superfluous and annoying to deal with. Like, in all the adventures, there's some notes about when the PCs could do divinations and what results that would yield, and it almost always seems like a cheap trick for the GM to keep the PCs on track.

So if I were running this, drop Dice Points and maybe drop divination as a PC ability: have the big temples in Rome get the warnings and send out the unpowered PCs to check it out, X-Files-style.

A few comments on the other books:
-Encyclopedia Arcane — 232p about the history and society of Rome, with some little bits of gameable material (mostly in the forms of stats and random encounter tables)
-Island of the Dead Sand — short adventure that is essentially “land on a deserted island with the monster from Alien” — I hate this so much.
-the region books all seem fine, with slightly different moods (mostly in the Thracia/Dacia book), but more of the same. (I do love that the Egypt book has a table for random encounters in the Library of Alexandria.)
-the adventure anthology is fine, showing a few unusual adventures (though the adventures in general here and in the region books seem really interested in dark cults).