Pyramid Review: Mythica Rules Engine

Pyramid Review

Mythica Rules Engine

Published by Roc Games

Distributed by Deep7

Written by Peter Raines et. al.

Beta PDF; $7.95

Mythica is Roc Games' debut release, downloadable from their website. As a debut release, Mythica leaves me drooling in anticipation of Roc Games' future products. They really did come to the table with new ideas, and I hope they can infect the hobby with some of their creativity.

The game, as stated in the PDF rulebook, is rules-light and stresses roleplaying over combat. Peter Raines and his crew have filled Mythica with different widgets that encourage roleplaying. Mythica is meant to be playable in any setting imagined by the GM. Currently players must make do with their own home-brew worlds, but Roc Games should be releasing campaign worlds soon. While a little advanced for newbie gamers -- who may ignore game balance -- Mythica is a wonderful game in the hands of slightly experienced and advanced players.

Character generation uses a GURPS-like point-based system. Nothing new here. When wanting to use a skill, the GM assigns the attempted task a difficulty rating. The mechanic that determines success has a bit of a twist. Different difficulty ratings require different numbers of die rolls. A simple task succeeds when any one of three dice rolls higher than the skill value. Other difficulty ratings require different total successes on different numbers of rolled dice. Instead of searching for another +1 to add . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: January 12, 2001

Copyright © 2001 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.