Anyone read “Green Law of Varkith”?
I’m about 3/4 through, and although I like a lot about it (especially wanting to attach it to a Planar Codex intrusion-by-Dis type campaign), I don’t understand the central fictional conceit at all.
What does the institution of guilds have to do with combating the scourge of Heroes, at all? As in, how? If “The Five” had been a guild, would they not have rampaged? If Varkith had had guilds, would they have changed the fact that The Five demolished their /standing armies/? “The Green Law exists to prevent any individual from growing too powerful” – but how does it do that?
What does it mean “to be alone, is to be exiled”, and how does that translate into “everyone must join a guild”? The lawkeepers are supposed to hunt down the guildless, although imperfectly: how? What disadvantages are there in being in a guild, anyway – why would anyone?
Additionally, the game text recognizes that the PCs are “unique” (and, implicitly, “heroes”), in a setting built around brutally repressing heroes. How do these two things interact? So far, it doesn’t seem to.
I get it, I get it; it’s just an excuse to force everything into a guild-centric mold, cause that’s what the game supplement is about. But internal to the fiction, I just don’t get it.
I had a similar (though less well-formed) reaction. Interested in other’s takes as well.
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Having just finished it, I’ve got mixed feelings. My questions aren’t answered in the end, and the central question is really representative of the book as a whole:
It’s interesting, it’s evocative, on balance it’s probably worth purchasing, but it’s just sort of … sloppy? Inconsistent? It feels like it may have been written by multiple talented people without an editor keeping them tightly bound to a central vision, or maybe one person wrote it at a rapid clip. If you hack it apart into pieces, there are a lot of fictional gems worth using, but it seems to trip over itself in the details (or, you know, /in the central conceit of the setting/).
I’m not sure it’s worth-while to write an extensive critique, but the funny thing is that that’s the feeling I’ve walked away with: a product I enjoyed, I don’t regret purchasing, but I have a laundry-list of criticisms for. And the criticisms aren’t minor nitpicks, either.
I’ve had multiple positive experiences with Magpie Games in the past, so this isn’t a deal-breaker, but I don’t feel like I’d grab one of their books again without a few reviews first.
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