The Dee Sanction - review

I've spent the last few posts talking about my campaign for The Dee Sanction. But I haven't reviewed the RPG itself, so here goes.

TL;DR—lovely setting, but I'm not sold on the system.

High Concept

In The Dee Sanction, the player characters are Agents of Dee, practitioners of magic rescued from execution by John Dee and working for his secret organisation to avert supernatural and magical threats. You could think of The Dee Sanction as an Elizabethan version of BPRD or the Laundry, but with the weirdness toned down. What separates The Dee Sanction from Call of Cthulhu, Liminal, The Laundry and similar RPGs is its setting: Elizabethan England.

Physically

Physically, The Dee Sanction is an A5 68 page, perfect-bound book with a colour cover. The internal layout is (generally) two columns in a small but clear font, with occasional black and white artwork. The paper is matt white, and despite the small font, the high contrast means it is easy to read—even with my crappy eyes.

I'm delighted that The Dee Sanction is so condense. As I've said elsewhere, I find most RPGs extremely overwritten with too many words, and that's not a criticism I can level here.

As an 80s fanzine contributor, I have a soft spot for A5 booklets with black and white art. The Dee Sanction presses a lot of my buttons. It feels like a fanzine with 21st-century production values. The occasional artwork is nicely atmospheric, adding to its feel.

I find it interesting to compare The Dee Sanction with Liminal, another recent British roleplaying game. While Liminal has an upmarket glossy feel and gorgeous artwork, some layout decisions (long paragraph lines, low contrast between text and background) meant I found it harder to read than The Dee Sanction's simple elegance.

That's not to say The Dee Sanction's layout is perfect. In particular:

• Too many terms are in bold, including Die/Dice, Agent, Player and GM. Unfortunately, that means some pages look like they have measles, making it hard to find the terms I needed.
• The bullet point font is often (not always) different from the main font, which to my eyes looks wrong.
• Page 45 is a single column of text. I found it harder to read than other pages, confirming that the two-column approach was the right choice. (I'm guessing page 45 was an error.)

Agents of Dee

Character generation first requires choosing your attributes (which The Dee Sanction calls 'resources')—Physicall, Intellectuall, Supernaturall. Then you select an occupation, a damning association (a secret society or organisation), a focus (an occult tome), and your slight magical power (or 'favour of the angels'). These are all rolled on tables filled with evocative descriptions—the tables in The Dee Sanction are a definite highlight. You then choose abilities and round off your character with some belongings and a name.

One omission from character generation—there's nothing about the characters' crimes and backstory, nor questions to bond them with other characters. For example: 

• Who introduced you to your damning association?
• How did your focus help you learn your magic?
• What were you doing when you were arrested?
• Who betrayed you?
• What impressed you about the other agents when you first met them?
• How do you practice your magic?

I did that anyway, but I was surprised not to see it in the book.

The PCs feel different to your usual RPG hero. They are commoners whose lives have been touched by magic and drawn into Dee's organisation. They aren't heroes, but ordinary folk undertaking hazardous missions.

Here's a character I created for our game.

Friar Philip Dickinson of Totness

Portrait from the wonderful
artflow.ai

Philip had just become a monk when the monasteries were dissolved. He fell in with the Goodly Servants of Light (his damning association), who introduced him to the Problemata (his focus).

Intellectuall: d6, Physicall: d4, Supernaturall: d8

Abilities: Architecture, mechanics, quote and verse

Damning association: Goodly Servants of Light (belief in the prophetic focus served in the construction and scrutiny of monuments to channel the wisdom of the Almighty).

Favours of the Angels: Flurry (cloak, smother, blind)

Stuff: Verse for a gloomy part-song, bracelet, shovel

Mannerisms: It's always better to music... (Dickinson plays the crumhorn)

Setting

Setting an occult investigation game in Elizabethan England is genius. And although there's much detail in the game itself, simply imagining an Elizabethan occult spy game is pretty much all I needed. That, plus a bit of Elizabethan period detail (taken from Shakespeare in Love, Elizabeth, or even Blackadder) was enough for me to run a game of The Dee Sanction.

And there's plenty to draw from—this is the time of Shakespeare, the Spanish armada, the gunpowder plot, catholic conspiracies and so on. (Wikipedia is a great help.)

I found a couple of off-notes, though.

• I found comparing Mr Garland to Al from Quantum Leap or Rimmer from Red Dwarf to be jarring in tone. I played Mr Garland as sinister and mysterious, appearing with a sulphurous smell.
• It's not clear how Dee organises his agents. Does he have many? Or are the PCs on their own?
• I abandoned the Black Seal amulets as they felt too much like magical mobile phones. I prefer to isolate my PCs and make it challenging to contact Dee.

But overall, The Dee Sanction's setting is delightful.

System

The heart of The Dee Sanction's system is rolling a die depending on your attribute (er, I mean resource). So, for a mental challenge, roll Intellectuall. If you roll a 1 or 2, you fail. Otherwise, you succeed. The die you roll depends on the level of that resource—anything from a d4 (50% success) to a d12 (83% success). If the challenge is easy or tricky, you can 'step up or down' the die accordingly.

(I ended up using a more graduated scale, as I described in this post.)

I was surprised at how competent this makes the Agents: an average PC (d6 in everything) succeeds 66% of the time (assuming no stepping up or down). In my game, this occasionally gave the players a sense of security in their rolls that jarred with my mental image of 'ordinary folk.'

The Dee Sanction suggests that instead of dice you can also use playing cards. While this is a great idea to make the game more inclusive, it makes the rules fussy. I don't know how many GM's are likely to use playing cards instead of dice, but the game would be clearer with just dice.

Inevitably, combat is the trickiest part of the rules, and unfortunately, it's not explained well. Here's how combat works:

• When an agent attacks, they roll against their Physicall (stepping up or down depending on their adversary's potency). If they succeed, they do 1 hit of damage—providing their adversary doesn't succeed in an armour roll. (Agents rarely have armour.) If they falter, then they roll 1d6 on their adversary's consequence table. That may result in the agent taking damage.
• When a creature attacks, the agent rolls to defend (again using Physicall, and again adjusted by their adversary's potency). If they falter, then roll 1d6+2 on the consequence table (which probably means taking damage). If the defence succeeds, nothing happens. (Unfortunately, enemy attacks are not explained in the combat rules; they are a page later under 'The Nature of the Enemy'.)

Combat is therefore asymmetrical: the players roll both to attack and defend and risk taking damage on both rolls. However, they only do damage on their attack. This isn't as unfair as it sounds—in fact, combat is heavily weighted towards the players as the PCs only falter (fail) on a roll of 1 or 2, and even then, they may not take damage.

Unravelling: Unravelling is The Dee Sanction's version of sanity rules, and is a mixture of immediate reactions and ongoing effects. It's simple and evocative.

Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation is the scenario that comes with the rules. It's a solid investigation set on a Polish farm cursed by the fae. The atmosphere is dismal and bleak, there are no happy endings here.

The investigation is solid, but it could just as easily be for Liminal or Cthulhu Dark. The Polish setting was a surprise—I would rather have seen something set in London, or even just rural England.

While my players loved the bleak setting, I was disappointed by Lost in Translation. It doesn't reflect The Dee Sanctuary's 'covert Enochian intelligence' tagline, and it didn't show off the system. We made very few dice rolls, and combat only occurred when the players dragged Slavomir from his farm. (They decided not to engage the main villains of the scenario, which was wise but somewhat unsatisfactory.)

Lost in Translation took us between three and four hours, so it is a good length for a convention, but I wished it showcased more of what The Dee Sanction is really about.

The mystery of tradecraft

Unfortunately, Lost in Translation does not elaborate on what I found to be the most mysterious element of The Dee Sanction: tradecraft. Tradecraft is a pool of resources from which all the PCs can draw. It comes in several categories: access, conspiracy, kit, magic, system, vigilance. At the start of each adventure or mission, the PCs choose one tradecraft, which lasts for the entire adventure.

So far, so good. But you need the correct tradecraft tag to defeat strong monsters. As powerful creatures have several tradecraft tags, it will take several missions to deal with them.

Unfortunately, I struggled to make sense of choosing the right tradecraft at the start of the mission to defeat the monster. That's different from other games where the clues to destroy the monster are seeded within the scenario, and I couldn't understand how that works in play. 

I ignored tradecraft in my short campaign (and I note most of the published scenarios so far don't use it).

Version 0.9

The Dee Sanction feels like it needed another round of proofreading and editing. For example:

• The rules for taking a chance (p.13) are in character generation rather than the system section.
• It isn't clear how best to use the names table on p.62. It uses a range of 2-24, which suggests 2d12. That gives you a bell curve around Ralph/Allen/Dorothy/Fortune—but John and Elizabeth are at the extremes.
• Lost in Translation could be clearer—for example, at two points, their angelic guide is described as a compass when it isn't described as such when it is first introduced. I worked out what compass meant, but I had to read it twice. Also, the map isn't as good as other illustrations—an annotated pen and ink sketch would be clearer and more in keeping with the rest of the book.

Summing up

The best things about The Dee Sanctuary are its setting and character generation. The system is fine, but agents seem too competent to be ordinary folk.

Despite its faults, The Dee Sanctuary formed the basis of one of the most memorable campaigns I have ever run, and I have a lot to thank it for.