Kalajel Reviews: Undiscovered.

Hello everyone,

Today, I’m reviewing Undiscovered the quest for adventure by Eilfing Publishing. I remember when I first heard of this game. It was the very early 2000s, I had borrowed my friend’s Dragon Magazine, and I came upon an ad for this game. The ad boasted several things; a classless system with no level caps, characters can keep on gaining levels for adventuring, every attributes is Important and a fighter-type character with high intelligence, Spirit, Charm, or Luck would still be a successful fighter. Add to this that the game was made by a Canadian company and I was really curious to see what Canada could contribute to the world of tabletop roleplaying games, I soon bought the book. Did it stood up to expectations? Well, let’s find out, shall we?

The book I’m currently reviewing was printed in October 2001 and is the first printing of the game. I am currently unaware if there were any other printing of this book before the company went under somewhere around 2013. The book is hard cover and clocks in at 368 pages. It has a stitched spine which makes for a solid binding, though my copy seems to have a small binding weakness between pages 14 and 15, but that’s probably just my copy. The interior pages are white mat paper and the printing is in black and white, with the layout obviously done in Microsoft Word. There are several black and white illustrations by artist Robert Carlos. His art Quality is pretty good, though it gets weird sometimes with the sample character Meredith the burglar looking really weird in each of her illustration (basically being this book’s Mialee…). The book is divided into three parts, and each of them is introduced by one of Carlos’ full-page illustrations. While the book is by no mean anemic when it comes to the amount of illustrations, they feel few and far between at times. An oddity worth noting about this book is, despite being Canadian, and using the British spelling of words (defense spelled with a "c", a "u" added in "colour" and "armour", etc.), the book still makes use of the imperial system instead of the metric which is what is used in Canada…

Part 1, called "For the adventurer" contains all the rules you need for creating your character and learn how to play the game. It is the largest of the three section, composing the majority of the book, starting at page 9 and ending on page 272. Do not worry, the game mechanics themselves are not complicated. The vast majority of this section is covered by all the various skills a character can learn and their appropriate descriptions. In fact, there are so many options available in this book that in order to help game masters (using their own proprietary term by calling it "Adventure Guide" in this book) assisting several players building their characters, they reprinted this section as its own stand alone book in a black, soft cover version.

This section begins with the various character races. You have your usual fare: humans, elves, and dwarves, but those are slightly different than in your typical games. Humans are divided into the civilized and barbaric human sub-races, each with their own specialties. Elves (called "alfar") are further divided into the wood, star, and ice elf sub-races, with the ice elves being the "dark elves" of this world. Dwarves are also divided into sub-races. You have your deep dwarves, your land dwarves, and your dragon dwarves, the latter being called that as they often are in service to evil dragons. Also, all dwarves possess a minor earth-related magical innate ability. Then you have the original races. The dusters (divided into the plains and desert duster sub-races) who are humanoids with the power to transform into snakes and minor dragonkin creatures. The seraph, immortal beings highly skilled in magic. The muklags (further divided into the cave dweller, forest dwellers, and tundra dwellers sub-races) which are tall, big hairy creatures with ram horns and claws that can protrude from their knuckles. Then finally are the dracomenscs (divided into the mestron, mesmar, menim, and meluck draconmenscs sub-races) which are basically your dragon men with various abilities (some can fight using their tails, some can fight using their claws, some have a breath weapon, and some can fly). And if the AG decides those are not enough races for his game, that are always monstrous races from the Monstrous Enchiridon at the end of the book which can be used as optional character races (centaurs, goblins, merfolk, ogres, and trolls)! This makes a grand total of 23 races/sub-races available! The first thing which becomes apparent, once you’ve had the time to familiarize yourself with the game more, is how unbalanced the races are. A great example would be the star elf which have access to the fire bow spell five times per day as an innate ability. This basically gives them a period of 25 minutes per day where they can fire this magical bow made of fire at enemies. Assuming a high enough level of proficiency in bows, the damage potential for this can be insane, and even at low-levels, it will outperform pretty much anything anyone else has to offer, if only for the fact that you are shooting magical arrows of fire at enemies from a distance.

Then comes the eight attributes and how to generate them. There are two methods for generating attributes, a point-buy one, and a random one involving die rolls. The funny thing though, is that even if you use the point-buy system, you will still have to roll a d10 for each attribute to see if you remove or add between one to five points to the total of each attribute. This is weird. Seems that the whole purpose of a point-buy system is to get the scores you want. It seems that rolling a die to add or remove points defeats the whole point of the system. This means that if you use the point-buy system in this game, you need to take into account that your score might very well end up being one to five points lower than what you wanted, meaning you’re probably going to spend five more points on this attribute in order to cover for this eventuality, thus leaving you with fewer points to place elsewhere… For this reason, I much prefer that random variant where you have a base for your attribute (usually 30), and then add 5d10 to that (I know what you’re thinking: Barebones Fantasy, right? But remember this game came out in 2001). The eight attributes are as follows: Strength, Endurance, Intelligence, Spirit, Agility, Manual Dexterity, Charm, and Luck. Strength does what you expect it to do; it grants bonuses to damage and determines your carrying capacity. It also helps you determine your jogging and running speed (your walking speed having been determined by your race above). Endurance is also pretty obvious, determining the amount of Life Points (LPs) you gain each level. it also determines your travelling durations (walking, jogging, running). Intelligence gives you skill points each levels, that’s it. Spirit determines your percentage chances of learning new skills and spells when levelling up. Yes, you read that right, it is not enough for you to buy new skills, you must roll to see if you were actually smart enough to learn them… Oh, don’t worry, the skill points are not lost as you have more chances to roll again each time you level up, but still, who though this was a good idea!? Agility modifies your defense and your reaction speed (i.e. when you get surprised). Manual Dexterity modifies your attack rating and your initiative. Charm determines how many people you can lead, the maximum number of permanent magical item you can carry (as permanent magical items have the spirit of their creator which can clash with each other), and your chances to get a 50% discount when purchasing gear and items. And finally, Luck can affect your attack rating, defense rating, damage, or LPs (its all randomly rolled).

Following that is a small, one-page section about personal features such as handedness, aging, alignment, speech, and religion. Only humans begin with the Common Tongue, with every other races having to purchase it if they want to communicate with everyone else. Maximum age must be rolled and middle age determined as there are mechanical effects to aging. Alignment are graded between +20 (very good) to -20 (very evil) with 0 representing neutrality. Most character will start with an alignment somewhere between +3 and -3 which will fluctuate during play. Personality, handedness, and religion are pretty much just dressing (unless a character decides to become skilled in Divine skills, in which case religion will have a much more important part to play).

Then comes the vast skill section. Skills are divided into 3 categories, or group. Group A: Power Skills, which are your combat skills (offensive, defensive, psionic, miracles, and spell casting). You then have Group B: Percentile Skills which are your profession and background skills. Finally, you have Group C: Skill & Attribute Enhancers, which is how you increase your attributes, gain extra psionic, miracle, or spell points, increase your defense rating without purchasing armor skills and increase your attack rating without purchasing weapon skills. Skills have five skill levels (Initiate, Novice, Adept, Expert, and Master), and five levels of proficiency (from 1st to 5th). So when purchasing skills, it is possible to be a 3rd level Initiate, or a 4th level Adept, or a 5th level Master. This is an interesting way of increasing skills as it allows not only for horizontal or vertical skill progression, but also diagonally. Let’s say you were skilled in Large weapon as a 4th level Initiate, you could progress diagonally up to 3rd level Novice in order to save on skill points. Doing so might slightly lower your chances of succeeding, but a success will yield better results since you are a Novice at your skill rather than an Initiate. Oddly enough, only Group A skills progress this way. Group C are one-time boosts that you can buy once per level each, Group B skills have the same layout as Group A skills, but only have their level of proficiency from 1st to 5th on the Initiate level. After that, if you want to progress as a Novice or above, you can only do it at the 5th level of proficiency. This is odd and makes Group B skills stick out like a sore thumb. Though I understand why this was done, as it was probably difficult to think of five different special abilities for each of the many profession and background skills. It should be noted that the game is pretty liberal with their definition of "skills" as some of those skills could be considered class features or feats/talents in other games. It is also important to note that the way percentage chances are calculated, 1st level characters will rarely succeed at anything, with most skills varying between the high 20s % to the low 40s %, depending on your attributes’ values. They were not kidding when they said Initiate… An interesting thing about this game is that you can increase your attack ratings with weapons you already know by purchasing new weapon skills. I guess when all weapons use a variety of "point sharp/pointy end towards enemy", knowing how to use one weapon will probably give you a good idea how to use a different, but similar weapons... Finally, you must note that in order to use permanent magical items, a character must purchase a skill for this, making magical items in this game a bit similar to how they are in Earthdawn.

Following the skills section you have sample characters, followed by weight allowances and a little paragraph about money. You then have your weapons, armor, and equipment list. You then have the actual rules section, measuring all of ten pages long (this is how simple the system is). You then have concoctions which pertains to oils, potions, medicines, poisons, and antidotes. One of the fun things about Undiscovered is that each concoctions have a very specific recipe, which the book actually takes time to list. A character skilled in magical knowledge or alchemy will start knowing some of those recipes which the player is expected to note down somewhere on his character sheet. This means that finding new potions recipes is a treasure just as precious as gold or a magical item.

Then comes the spells, powers, and miracle sections, dealing with magic, psionic, and miracles respectively. What I like about this section is how they made all those abilities feel "different yet the same". All of them work on the same basic principle, a spell, power, or miracle will cost an amount of points to cast which are deducted from your pool of spell points (SPs), psionic points (PPs), or miracle points (MPs) depending on which ability you’re using, and each abilities come with progressively stronger spells, powers, or miracles depending on your skill level. Then comes the mechanicals distinctions. Magic is the raw chaotic energies of the universe, and a spellcaster casting spells is focusing this chaotic energy through his body, which will lower the spell caster’s Endurance as he becomes a more powerful spellcaster (a good in-game explanation as to why magic-users tend to have fewer LPs). If you get damaged or simply bumped while casting a spell, you then have to roll on this big spell disruption table which has many results, some of which can be beneficial, some of which can be detrimental, and some of which can merely be humorous. Also, spells are locked at the skill level you have attained in your Coven. You are an Adept in the Coven of Destruction? Well, you cast your spells at the Adept level, not one level lower, not one level higher (barring any special results on the spell disruption table). Miracles work in a similar manner, and depending on which deity you are a follower in, some miracles group might be limited on which level you can progress in them, and other miracles group might simply be barred to you. Any deity allows you to take totem miracles as those are ancestor worship, and no deity will prevent you from communicating with your ancestors. Just like spells, you cannot cast a miracle of a higher rank than your level in a miracle group (so you can cast quasi-divine miracles if you are an Expert, but are barred from casting divine miracles), but you can still cast the lower ranks of miracles. Also, each deity has a special unique miracles that only priests of that deity can cast. Finally, miracles cannot be escaped, as you cannot escape the gods. As for Psionic, they are more like what spells could be if you were not locked at your current skill level and had no disruption table. The main difference is that they do not have five ranks of power strength corresponding to the five skill levels, with your skill level dictating how many powers of each rank you know more than anything else… Also, for some reason, you get fewer PPs than SPs or MPs at the equivalent levels.

We move on to the gods and their holy symbols. Each god’s description is unique and interesting, and their holy symbols are not limited to some amulet worn around your neck, some gods have a tattoo or an utilitarian object (such as a scroll case) as a holy symbol, which I find original. Included in the description of each gods are their holy symbols powers (as Holy Symbol is a Divine Skill you must learn), what miracles and at which level they grant access to, and their unique miracles. Only Kronos, the father of the gods, does not have a holy symbol or a special miracle, but he grants access to all miracle groups up to the Master level. Also, when speaking of special miracles, resurrection and reincarnation are special miracles granted only to specific priests, and as such, this means death has more of an impact in Undiscovered than in many other games since it is the rare priest who can bring back the dead.

Then we have a small section about levels and character advancement. the experience table goes all the way up to level 50, but there is a small footnote which states that every level past 50th requires an extra 50,000 XP. So there is indeed no level cap, as advertised. There is also another one of those odd Robert Carlos drawings, this one of Quintacia (the example character they use all throughout their book to teach you how to make a character) and her evolution, where she somehow manages to look like a completely different person in each of her iterations… You also have Quintacia’s full character sheet in this section.

Part 2 (yes, because we were still in Part 1 this whole time!) is called "For The Adventure Guide" and is basically your typical GMing section. You have tips on how to run a game, how to award XP, an overview of the various skill groups, how to adjust alignments, rules on how to create magical items, and a selection of permanent magical items. Nothing special here.

Part 3 is called "The World of Arkas" and describe the setting used in Undiscovered. This section begins with a comprehensive history of the world of Arkas. Basically, in the beginning there was chaos. Three gods decided to create something out of that chaos and the one god who was the scholary type created this artefact which allowed to shape the chaos into something else. The gods create the world, but soon got bored of it. Then there's this other god who’s a selfish prick convinces the other two to undo what they created, which causes Kronos, the father of the gods to appear, tell them he’s disappointed in them, and that as punishment, their life force will be directly tied to the amount of followers each god has. This humbles two of the gods, but pushes the dickish one to be even more of a dick. The dickish god eventually throws a fit, breaks the artifact, and the released energy threatens to unravel reality. The two other gods sacrifices themselves in putting an end to the cataclysm, the dickish god is banished in hell, and many of the magical servants created by the original three gods become new gods, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada… Then we pay attention to what the mortal races did. Elves, dwarves, dusters and dragons, then at some points humans appear, they make kingdoms, ice elves start causing trouble, some evil empire surfaces and is beaten back, and again blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada… You then get a description of the Empire of Vrod, the capital city of Vrod, the Vrodian calendar (10 days in a week and 12 months, called moons, in a year). Then you have your typical bestiary, with some unique creatures in there (for example, the cross between goblins and kobolds produced groundlings which became its own distinct species), and you have good metallic dragons who can cast spells, and evil chromatic dragons who have a breath weapons. And finally, the book ends with a blank version of the character’s sheet.

So would I recommend this game? Yes. The system is solid, if somewhat old school (low initiative is good, with a high enough skill level, you can get a 3rd attack every 2nd round, etc.), it also has its few quirks and oddities (such as unbalanced races), but it is good. Some of the problems were corrected later, either in their e-zines (such as Spirit now granting a small escape chance from miracles as they were deemed to be unbalanced) or in later supplements (such as Borack being given the new biotic miracles from Discovering Dusters instead of the totem miracles... which every other gods allows access to...). So, if the game is so good, what went wrong? Why is Eilfin Publishing out of business? I think the main problem was bad timing. This game came out in 2001, only one year after the release of the 3rd edition of D&D. Back then, the interest for old school game had waned, and the interest was more focused on streamlined games (as streamlined as D&D 3.0 felt back then). Had this game came out a decade or two earlier (or maybe even after 2008 during the OSR movement revival), Eilfin Publishing would probably be a household name right now. Yeah, the game is that solid, despite its lot of problems stemming from being the first printing of a first edition. A criticism I’ve seen repeated in a lot of other reviews of this game is that Undiscovered is a fantasy heartbreaker. It might look this way on first glance, especially with the good metallic dragons and the evil chromatic dragons, but when you take the time to look into the rules of the game, you see hidden details which makes the world of Arkas stand apart from your run of the mill med-fan setting. A good example would be the Charm score required to have a leadership score high enough to be able to lead a nation, a big city, or an army. The Attributes enhancers can only be bought up to 15 times in a character’s career, so those scores are beyond the scope of most player characters… This means that the only people capable of leading such a large groups are the avatars of the gods, dragons, and the rare powerful adventurer who somehow managed to magically boost their Charm score to the required levels. In fact, this is even hinted at in the history section, when they mentioned that the human Emperor Vromelnod who is currently on his deathbed might very well be the very same Vromelnod who founded the Empire of Vrod nearly 3000 years ago! It is a small detail indeed, but it can change the political face of Arkas so much.

If you want to buy the game, you can get the pdfs for cheap on DrivethruRPG. However, if like me, you want to complete your collection with the AG's screen and Discovering Dusters, you're going to have to check out Ebay and expect to pay inflated prices (I got really lucky and got my copy of Discovering Dusters in a bundle of D20 books for about 30$, the seller clearly had no idea what he had). If you're planning to buy the e-zines, I suggest that you skip on the AG's screen as the new races, spells, and adventures advertised are simply due to the fact that the AG's screen comes bundled with the first 3 issues of the e-zine on a CD.