Once upon a very twisted time,

Grimm, Fantasy Flight Games, reviewed by N. Vivian on January 23, 2009.

The story of how I found this game is pretty cute, so I'll relate it briefly. Around Christmas, I was poking around on a friend's Amazon wishlist, when I noticed that many of his books looked very familiar. The little sneak had trolled my wishlist and added a bunch of my books to his own list. I know--the nerve! So, in retaliation, I trolled his wishlist, saw Grimm and decided that I wanted it bad enough to buy it right there. For me, of course, cause I am greedy like that.

Well, I find it cute.

Anyway, moving on, Grimm is a gaming system wherein the players play children (usually 8-12) who are stuck in the land of Grimm's fairy tales. Only these tales are twisted. Well, okay, most of the Grimm's fairy tales are twisted, but these are extra twisted, with a side of crazy. The lands are ruled over by the Rotten King--Humpty Dumpty, who, after his tragic fall, went bad. Reeeeeeeeeeeally bad--as in, the sulfuric miasma that seeps through the cracks in his shell are bad enough, they melted the former king into a puddle of yellow goo. He is married to Cinderella, who killed her previous prince for getting too grabby (she has issues about being touched by men. Dumpty prudently keeps his hands to himself), and anywhere Cinderella goes, she is preceded by her stepmother and stepsisters, who scrub the floor before she walks on it. Also, she's a crazy dominatrix-wannabe, and she carries a cat-o-nine and forces her stepmom and sisters to wear red-hot iron shoes.

Character creation is easy: the first thing you do is pick your archetype (bully, dreamer, jock, nerd, ordinary kid, outcast, and popular kid) which comes with it's own advantages and disadvantages. Each archetype starts out with its own stats, and you have 8 additional points to spend increasing those stats. Stats are divided into three groups: Core, Playground, and Study. Core attributes are just that--attributes you can't really learn, part of your core persona. These are Cool, Imagination, Luck, Muscle, and Pluck, and cost three points to increase by one level, or, in game parlance, one grade. Playground traits are the easy stuff you pick up, probably by the time you start school: Hide, Scamper, Scrap, Seek, and Throw, which all cost two points to upgrade. Lastly, the Study traits are specialized knowledge skills that are picked up through school and activities; all children are at least 1st grade in each Core and Playground traits, but since Study traits represent skills that kids can choose to learn or not, not every child will have a grade in every study trait. The study traits are 4-H, Book Learning, Boy/Girl Scouts, Country Club, Gaming, Home Ec, Industrial Arts, and Juvie. Study traits cost one point to increase. After all the points are apportioned, players chose a few talents (special abilities), then flesh out the character and work with the narrator to figure out how each kid got into the Grimm Lands. In all, it's very quick and easy; no dice, no advanced math, no list of abilities that spans pages. Once a player knows what archetype she wants to play, character creation can probably be done in a less than ten minutes.

Grimm isn't really held up on rules. Unlike some other RPGs I could mention, there aren't pages of rules for movement or distance or attacks of opportunity. My copy of the game is NOT the d20 version (yay!), so for conflict resolution, the player rolls a d6, measuring the grade of the appropriate stat against a level determined by the GM or another character in the case of contested rolls. 2-5 means the character performed at their stat's grade level. A roll of 1 means the character performs one grade below his level, and rolls again: another 1 is another grade lower and another roll, a 2-6 means the player stops rolling. A roll of 6 means the character performs one grade above his level and rolls again; as with a 1, a roll of 6 means a higher grade level and yet another roll, 1-5 means the player stops rolling. there are ways to adjust the numbers, of course, but that's the basic system in a nutshell. Quick, simple, and easy. I like it--it seems like a good system to introduce newbies to, as it focuses less on mechanics and more on the role-playing aspect. I'm fond of it, since it fits in well with my style of gaming; I'm mostly cinematic, which means I could care less about the system in favor of descriptions and how cool an action is.

Another benefit of having basic mechanics is that it leaves more room in the text to explore the Grimm Lands. Of the 200+ pages of the book, less than half are devoted to rules. For example, the way magic works is explained on pages 73-78. Pages 79-88, however, explain the different magical styles of artificers, enchanters, witches, etc. Fighting is covered on pages 52-54. It's great! The, from page 108 on, it's all descriptions of the people, places, and things you'll run into while exploring the Grimm Lands. Of course, you can make up your own stuff, but they include so much richly detailed and intricately textured material, you don't have to if you don't want to.

My favorite tidbit is about Rapunzel. Rapunzel left long ago, living with her husband and children. The tower she lived in missed her very much and was very lonely, so when a colony of spiders moved in, it was happy to see them. Their webs remind the tower of her hair, and they're company at least. One day, however, Rapunzel came back to thank the tower for taking care of her for all those years. The tower was napping when she went in, and so there was no protection for her against the thousands of spiders who attacked her, killed her, and ate her tasty insides. Soon after their meal, the Mama Spider realized just who they'd eaten, and to keep the tower from finding out, she has hundreds of her children climb into Rapunzel's skin, and walk around, pretending to be her. That's right, in Grimm, you can run into a spider-filled Rapunzel skin-puppet. I did say this game was twisted, yes?

Of course, Rapunzel is barely scratching the surface. Grimm contains a bunch of locales and people for the players to be traumatized by. It's not very kid-friendly, either. The game isn't necessarily lethal for the players (though I have no doubt it could be), but it's just one mind-bending, heart-shattering experience after another. In fact, there's a mechanic for Despair in the game, because that can be a real problem for characters in long-term campaigns.

Now, I must be honest and admit I have not played the game, so there may be flaws inherent to the system that I have not yet found. But the book itself is beautiful (lots of lovely and eerie illustrations), the text is funny even as it explains stuff like rules as stats and whatnot (it references the famous card game Sorcery: The Assemblage, for example), and the book itself is packed with details. A lot of thought and creativity went into the creation of this world and it shows. The text is very evocative; it really captures the spirit and feeling of the old fairy tales; this isn't a good place for children and it shows.

4 stars. (I may come back and edit this for playability once I've had a chance to play in (or run) a game.)

As for other books I've read thus far this year, as requested by Steve:
Mistress of Mellyn, Victoria Holt (reviewed)
Grimm, Fantasy Flight Games (reviewed)
Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy, a collection of short stories edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
How to Ditch Your Fairy, Justine Larbalestier
Zofloya, or The Moor, Charlotte Dacre
Austenland, Shannon Hale
Nobilis: The Game of Sovereign Powers, R. Sean Borgstrom