Ronin – First Read

Like much of popular culture, the world of tabletop RPGs is subject to trends. In the case of RPGs, those trends are about systems. Countless designers have tried to make their game into a ‘system’ that others will have their dreams on. Many have failed. The most recent design to succeed at this task is Mork Borg. 

I have no experience with Mork Borg, a game with a punk/metal aesthetic and an apocalyptic setting from the Stockholm Kartell. There are countless games coming out using Mork Borg as their backbone and Slightly Reckless Games have produced a tale of Samurai in their game Ronin. It is designed by Sacha Lightfoot with graphic design from Dominic Riozzi and art from Brandon Yu, Chema Gonzalez, and Tonon Revolver.  

First Read articles represent me going through the book in question for the first time. It is my initial impressions of the mechanisms, themes, and setting presented within its pages. I have not played the game at the time of writing.

The bold cover of Ronin featuring a Samurai committing Seppuku makes it clear the tone of the game from the outset. I will be talking more about ritual suicide in this piece but I will hide those sections so you only have to read them if you want to. They will be marked later in the piece. 

The world of Ronin is one of Japanese legends and myth, but not set in Japan. The island of Kage no Shima is our setting. Wreathed in eternal night from an eclipse, the people despair at ever seeing the light of day again. The Shogunate hold up in their palaces and fortresses, ruling with an iron fist rather than helping the people. The people see demons and monsters in the hills, and forests. Only a few samurai will venture out to challenge these threats. The player characters. 

That’s a pretty decent pitch. The way Ronin presents itself though is all over the place. Mork Borg has a certain aesthetic to it that Ronin attempts to emulate. I quickly became irritated with the constant font changes, artistically sweeping texts, and piecemeal bits of description. A map early on in the book typifies what I am complaining about, with the names of locations being hard to read with the busy background. There are individual pieces of art and graphic design that do shine but overall it feels like there is no singular vision here.

Organisations that operate across the island are very loosely described with some having ‘mysterious’ motivations. It’s fine for me as the GM to keep a factions motivations from the players. I want the designer to trust me with that information though. Give me something I can get my teeth into. How do I use these factions in my game? 

By the time we get onto creating characters I can see a dichotomy forming. Mork Borg, as I understand it, is meant to be a light and adaptable system. Ronin wants to at once be a light and adaptable system and be its own game. It walks an awkward path trying to be both. 

You get a brief overview of how to create characters. You’ll need to go searching in the book for the equipment lists and weapons and armour as there are no page references to help you here. There is an index thankfully. Abilities, which are your core modifiers for dice rolls, are generated through a roll. 

A yellow boxout below this brief visit to character creation town, tells you characters can be any race, creed, or gender. It’s your honour that defines you. 

However, honour seems optional. 

Just after this boxout are a set of ‘Optional Rules’. The first of these is choosing a class. The book then spends 20 pages telling you about these optional classes. 20 pages out of a 124 page book. Does that sound like the amount of space you give over to something optional? Even the company’s own character creator, which is pretty good, only creates characters with a class in mind. That’s not optional. That’s fundamental.

The game goes on to the details of honour. This is effectively a stat that at 10 or above you are honorable, meaning NPCs are more likely to treat you well. If you character dies and is honorable, your next character will get a +1 bonus when rolling for Abilities. 

The tenets by which you gain or lose honour are described for each of the classes. If you are creating a custom character you can choose your own. This is another 5 pages dedicated to ‘optional rules’. I honestly don’t see why you would buy this and not use the classes. 

Honour at once seems to be a key focus of the game, and not described enough. Yes it means people are better disposed to you, but it doesn’t ever go as far as to describe what that means, or even give you any examples. There are no examples of any of the play of the game throughout the book, bar a scenario at the end. 

Each class comes with +/- adjustments to abilities, a bunch of equipment, and powers that you can have. There seems to be a simple truth here that creating a custom character would just be worse than creating one through the class system. You would get more motivation as to what your character does, have a sort of niche protection, and come with a pre-packaged set of honour tenets. There is also a decent amount of humour and fun in some of these abilities that alleviate some of the darkness of the setting.

We finally get to the core of the system on p.68. It’s a d20 + Ability score against a difficulty rating. Roll equal to or over and you succeed. The default difficulty is 12. 

I’m going to talk about Seppuku, ritual suicide, next. You don’t have to read this section at all if you don’t want to. It is on p. 70 of the book should you wish to avoid it and the book does warn you it is coming up on the previous page

Death doesn’t necessarily mean the end in Ronin. You can effectively fight your way out of hell. This gives all player characters two lives effectively and I could see it being a cool moment in play. 

We now get to combat which is a simple system where only the PCs roll to determine the outcome of the action. Creatures & Enemies do not. In fact it says 

‘Creatures and Enemies don’t roll dice in combat’ 

When we get to creatures later on they have attacks with dice attached for the amount of damage those attacks do. They also have damage reduction for their armour, again expressed in dice. Don’t I roll these in combat? The answer seems that I do of course, but to say one thing and then have the opposite implied is the sort of thing that drives me up the wall. It’s ok to use more words to get your ideas across.

Other mechanisms are spread over the next few pages. Monster morale, duelling, healing, meditation are all here. A neat little idea called virtues gives players a little leeway in manipulating dice rolls and surviving combat that refreshes on the regular. 

The bestiary I mentioned earlier has some really nice illustration and a good description for each creature to give you some idea of how you might use it. You also get a scenario called Blood Rains over the Crimson Jungle to run your Samurai through right at the back of the book.

In the inside back pages is a pretty useful summary of all the rules you need to run the game. Honestly I would recommend going here rather than trying to pick your way through the book. 

Ronin feels so chaotic in the layout and design that I wanted to know if this stems from the source. I picked up a copy of Mork Borg, thanks to the credit that some of you have given me at DrivethruRPG by buying through affiliate links. I quickly realised that Ronin’s main issue is that it is too faithful to the source. It is like a cover band just playing the song straight rather than doing their own interpretation. It falls flat. Mork Borg does things in a very particular way, and with some reasons behind that. Copying that verbatim here just leads to a mess.

I think Ronin does have more going for it in terms of character motivation to act over the equivalent in Mork Borg. It just doesn’t walk its own path with conviction. All this ‘optional’ class choice should have been core to the game, giving me a better sense of what it wanted its players and GMs to do. The graphic design I find chaotic, not stylish, with some decisions there making the game literally unreadable. 

Keep this in mind RPG designers: RPGs need to be a useable text. They can be stylish as well, as I show in my recent first read of Orbital Blues. Just don’t forget this is an instruction manual for your game. If you don’t tell me what you want in a clear and straight talking manner, how do you know the experience I have with your game is what you wanted? I would like the entire RPG community to stop cooing at pretty art, and talk more about useable texts. We can have both, but the latter is the thing that leads to great games and fantastic sessions. Isn’t that what everyone wants? 

I was given Ronin for review. My thoughts and opinions are my own