Product– Knight: An Avalon RPG quickstart
System- Knight: An Avalon
Producer– Antre Monte Editions
Price– free here https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/all-about-games-consulting/knight-rpg
TL; DR– Power Rangers meets Dark Horror with NEON! 97%
Basics– Let’s cancel the Apocalypse! Knight: An Avalon RPG is a near modern day retelling of Camelot with men and women donning power armor to kill horrors out of the dark. Let’s break this down.
Basics- This is a d6 rpg. Your character has five aspects with three characteristics under each aspect for a total of 15 skills. When you want to do anything, you total the correct aspect with the correct characteristic and roll that many dice. Each even result is success and each odd is a failure. If you hit the correct amount of successes determined by the GM for the thing you are attempting to do, you succeed. A good aspect is a five and your off aspects are about threes with your characteristics ranging from one to three most of the time. The normal difficulty is three successes. No success at all is critical failure, while all success is a great feat/critical success.
Combat- Combat is round based and mostly theater of the mind. You have initiative which is 3d6+ an initiative score. Each round a character gets a move and an action with some reactions. When you attack a target you are aiming at the defense score for melee and at a reaction score for ranged combat. Here is the fun meat and potatoes of the game. You are not just a dude with a gun fighting horrors, you are a guy/gal in power armor. Your power armor has a force field that subtracts from all damage dealt to you. After that, you have armor points which act as the armor’s hit points and for every 10 the armor loses, you lose one of yours as you get battered around in the suit. Once the suit’s taken enough damage, it retracts and you’re just a guy/gal fighting the horrors of the dark!
Suit powers- Your suit has powers as well and these are fueled with the suits energy points. This works just like magic points in any RPG as you spend as much as you want until the suit is tapped out and you’re just left with your guns, fists, and harsh language.
Hope- Hope is sanity in this game. As you experience the horrors in the dark, you have to make checks to see if you lose hope. If you lose all your hope, you effectively die as you just become an agent of the darkness.
Heroism- Story candy! Heroism is the story candy of this game where you get it for story reasons or just being the guy/gal to buy pizza that week. It lets you reroll dice, avoid dying, not lose hope, or any other cool thing that the GM lets you do.
Alright, thats the basics, let’s dig in.
Mechanics or Crunch– This game plays like a strange version of Shadowrun and that’s a good thing. This is a VERY crunchy game with piles of d6s being thrown at a problem. I like that. Some things feel a bit inconsistent, like choosing DCs. When I want to do something opposed by a bad guy, the DC is half their relevant ability, but you do not do that for their defense stats. That feels just a tiny bit off. Not enough that it will keep me away, however. 4.5/5
Theme or Fluff– Want gritty power rangers with rampant evils of capitalism and magic crap all over? Yep, I do too. That’s what this game feels like. Do you remember the 90s TV cartoon where football players went back and were working for Merlin with magic power armor? Mix that with a little Clive Barker and TONS of neon light tracery, and you get this. Yes, I want that. 5/5
Execution– This is well done and almost perfect for a crowd-funded project. There is a 30+ page book with art, a basic walkthrough of the game, and a short adventure WITH five premade characters. My ONE issue is that there is no hyperlinking. But it’s 30 pages and free. If I wanted to play it with friends, it took me 30 minutes to read through cover to cover and have enough of an idea how to play and run. That’s a hell of an introduction. 5/5
Summary– I grew up in the 90s and am a sucker for any power armor heroes. I also loved the Matrix and Dark City. This is that in a blender. I have some slight reservations about how numbers are calculated, but that’s not enough to keep me away. This is one to check out as it’s free, and in my opinion well worth your time. 97%
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