Don’t take Spawn of Fashan seriously

Reviewed by Lawrence Schick

When the editor of this magazine asked

me to review The Spawn of Fashan, my
first impression was of one more medio-
cre rewrite of the D&D® rules. Boy, was I
wrong. Spawn is much more than that
—and much less.
As I read the 96-page rulebook (list
price $8.95), my initial boredom was
gradually replaced by confusion, amaze-
ment, and finally delight. At first glance,
the rules seem badly organized and poor-
ly written. The opening sections are de-
luged with pages of ill-defined jargon
and numerous confusing references to
tables apparently placed elsewhere. By
the time I reached the rules quagmire
entitled “Combat,” I could only wonder
in amazement that any set of rules could
be this bad.
Then the light started to dawn. Plow- math! players. you probably don’t have to roll on the
ing through the monstrous Tables and Women should note the introduction, mental illness table, the phobia table, or
Charts section, I began to grin, and by which states that The Spawn of Fashan the compulsion table.
the end of the book, I was laughing is not sexist. But inside we find that Using these tables, I rolled up a near-
loudly. strength, constitution and hit point rolls sighted, allergic eunuch who can hear
The Spawn of Fashan is a great parody are always halved for the fairer sex, while spirits and tell good food from spoiled,
of role-playing rules! The publisher (The charisma is always 150% of normal. but who has an extreme compulsion to
Games of Fashan, of Norman, Okla.) After rolling basic statistics comes the dig whenever there’s a chance. This sec-
doesn’t miss a trick. All the classic role- really fun part of character generation: tion alone is worth $8.95 as a party game!
playing errors are included in this book- the Body Roll Charts. To give your char- Let’s not bother with figuring our char-
let. First, Spawn uses the time-hallowed acter that extra individuality lacking in acter’s serious injury tolerance levels,
method of. organizing the rules so no- other games, you must roll on the eye- senses in the mountains, and 23 other
thing can be found without five minutes sight, smell, hearing, taste and body character traits and go right on to com-
of page-flipping. Table of Contents? In- form tables, and maybe even a few more bat, the meat of every role-playing rules
dex? Who needs ‘em? The text of Spawn if you fail some saving rolls. These tables system. Once again The Spawn comes
is written with the disdain for grammar can give your character some abilities through brilliantly, providing a classic
and spelling we’ve come to know and that are rather unusual, especially con- case of rules overkill. In a perfect parody
love from other rules and scenarios, sidering this game claims “realism” of many role-playing rules, Spawn has
(Samples: “revoltion“ is the state of be- among its assets. Wouldn’t you like to an extremely detailed, “realistic” combat
ing revolted; “radiated” takes the place have some of these traits from the sense system —written with absolutely no re-
of “radioactive.”) Even the typeface used tables? gard for playability.
is hard to read. “Periscoping vision. Character Combat is broken down into individual
The rules themselves are just plain can see around corners...” Using swings of weapons, each swipe of which
amazing: a nearly impenetrable jungle of eyestalks, maybe? may take a player as many as 14 different
modifiers, special cases, tertiary statis- “Microscopic vision.” From the actions to complete. Detail piles upon
tics, and references to references. But eyesight table. You can also get detail as the ‘players roll dice, check
don’t despair; hidden deep in this jungle microscopic smell and microscop- charts and compare, add and subtract
is a treasure of fun for the whole family! ic taste. numbers ad infinitum, while rattling off
Let’s start with character generation. “Independent eye movement.” I such marvelous phrases as “reflex hit
The basic statistics are much like those wouldn’t have a character without modifier,” “attack number,” “skin/dam-
found in the D&D rules, with a few extras it. age ratio,” “basic combat number” and
thrown in for good measure. Unfortu- “High sound good hearing.” No, “cling-to-life roll.” Sound like fun? Don’t
nately, these are just the basis for several it’s not what you think. This ability ask me; I couldn’t even figure out the
dozen other numbers. In the introduc- enables you to hear flying things armor class system!
tion, we are informed that characters in more clearly. Most games give you a ready-made
most role-playing systems are uniform “Tell what has visited the water.” fantasy world to play in, and Spawn of
and suffer from a lack of individuality. To From the sense of taste table. A Fashan is naturally no exception. Here
counter this, the Spawn rules invest your neat trick. we have the land of Boosboodle in the
character with a wealth of amusing de- “No taste.” Ahem. world of Fashan, a land plagued by the
tail. Nobody wants to know this much Then there’s the body form table, dreaded Dumb Name Syndrome. Where
about your character, not even you. Just where you have a full 3% chance of being else can you sail up The River Mazoo,
look at the character sheet: over 50 sta- a club foot. You could also be a wea- visit the towns of Jugble and Crumbudz,
tistics that must be filled in! The Spawn thered individual (?), attuned to insects, and go “North, where Melvin is Standing
of Fashan character generation is a game bald, a hunchback, or have acne, among Now.” Hey, that’s on the map, honest!
in itself, and would even boggle the other things. Don’t even ask me about Would I lie?
minds of veteran Universe and After- enlarged part of the body. Just be glad The monsters are also a million laughs,
76 APRIL 1982
especially their names. Another party plains a lot about how these rules came makes it obvious that both the sarcastic
game: try to read the monster list aloud to be the way they are. Most games have referee and the stupid player are just
and keep a straight face. Ready? Bartaln, a totally bogus description of a thrilling basically annoyed by the whole episode.
Filcornect, Larnex, Bull Makl, Cronalk, adventure filled with action and split- (For those of you still interested in party
Transgrusan, Bactrolo, Rolmtrokl, Lor- second decisions as the excited players games, a dramatic reading of this sec-
senfolo, Purtorfalm, Arl-Grats — wait, combat the forces of evil. Refreshingly, tion had ‘em rolling on the floor.)
I’m just getting started! There are over Spawn doesn’t bother to pretend that The Spawn of Fashan is a gold mine of
two dozen monsters listed in the rules, anybody actually has fun while playing humor for the discerning gaming fan,
but only seven of them are explained and it. They dare to reveal role-playing for and should be required reading for all
described. Maybe that’s for the best... the dreadful chore it can become. The prospective role-playing game design-
Like all proper role-playing games, watchword here is boredom, as Bundy ers. I anxiously await the upcoming 1982
Spawn includes an example of play to the thief goes to a general store and tries Games of Fashan releases announced in
help the referee and players figure out to buy various items that are out of stock. the back of the book, including such
how a game is supposed to go. If the Frustrated, he finally purchases a metal games as Deadlock, City Council, and
author of Spawn runs his games like the chest and proceeds to beat the shop- Bunga! Bunga! Bunga!
referee in the example, it certainly ex- keeper to death with it. The narration Would I lie?
Circe and the poltergeist is the oft-repeated DDG book, but she would certainly make an
(by us) fact that DRAGON™ Magazine is not a interesting NPC encounter all by herself in a
“hand” of the TSR “body.” We are part of the campaign that wasn’t using the entire Greek
same company as the people who create and mythos. By the authors’ admission, many of
produce the official AD&D supplements (like the entries in the DDG book are interpreta-
the FIEND FOLIO™ Tome) and accessories tions culled from a number of sources which
(like the DEITIES & DEMIGODS™ Cyclope- don’t necessarily agree with one another. Ev-
dia), but the preparation and production of idently, Katharine’s sources differed from
DRAGON Magazine is independent of the those used by Messrs. Ward and Kuntz. That
rest of the company’s operations. To make all doesn’t make her Circe any less authentic.
the AD&D™ articles in the magazine conform The poltergeist is sort of a special case. We
to what is already set down in the rules would accepted Craig Stenseth’s article more than a
defeat its purpose: We publish a lot of var- year ago, many months before our first look at
(From page 4) iants, some of which represent drastic devia- the FIEND FOLIO book. The fact that the
you that despite its flaws the AD&D game is tions from the official rules. book contained a poltergeist didn’t mean that
the best role-playing game ever. Think of “Circe No. 2” and the “type B” Craig’s monster suddenly became unusable.
Harvey Fox poltergeist as variants, if that makes them If the name confuses you, simply change it.
Montreal, Quebec more palatable. Our version of Circe (written But if you can accept the existence of two
by Katharine Kerr) obviously isn’t supposed kinds of poltergeists (and why not?), you
The biggest reason for the “duplication” of to be interchangeable with the Circe of the shouldn’t have any problems at all. —KM.

DRAGON 77
THE SPAWN OF FASHAN

The Spawn of Fashan

The Spawn of Fashan Playtest Review by Roger M. Wilcox on 08/04/02
Style: 1 (Unintelligible)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)
* LOONIES play an extremely unrecognizable variant Spawn of Fashan.

Product: The Spawn of Fashan

Author: Kirby Lee Davis
Category: RPG
Company/Publisher: The Games of Fashan Co-operative
Line: The Fashan Role-Playing Series
Cost: was $8.95 (now $50 )
Page count: 96
Year published: 1981
ISBN:
SKU:
Comp copy?: no
Playtest Review by Roger M. Wilcox on 08/04/02
Genre tags: Fantasy

Twenty years ago, Dragon Magazine printed a review of a little poorly-selling game
called The Spawn of Fashan by Kirby Davis. The reviewer was sure, absolutely sure,
that The Spawn of Fashan was a parody of role-playing games, that no game would
intentionally be this bad.

The reviewer was wrong. The author(s) of The Spawn of Fashan were serious.

The story would have ended there, except that 16 years later, the game's author
discovered that it had acquired a cult following of sorts. Despite the fact that only a
dozen copies were ever sold, faux "variants" of it were listed as the favorite game of
Loonies in that legendary list of "Real Men, Real Role-Players, Loonies, and
Munchkins" that every serious gamer has read at least once, and apparently, a group of
gamers had even considered having a Spawn of Fashan tournament. No one could be
sure whether the game was supposed to be serious or not. So, late in 1998, Kirby Lee
Davis decided to make reprints of the game available. The reprints were steeply priced
at $20 a pop -- and by the time I found out about it nearly two years later and decided I
wanted one too, the main reprint run had ended and Kirby was charging $50 per copy
plus shipping.

But I bought it anyway. I had to see it with my own eyes. This was Spawn of Fashan we
were talking about here.
And when I got that spiral-bound, plastic protected, 96-page book (with 2 page Author's
Update) in the mail, opened its hallowed covers, and leafed through to the section on
character creation, the results were amazing. Mind-blowing. It astounded me that
anyone could actually play this game at all.

The text was densely packed together and obviously designed to be read all the way
through without skipping over anything. Yet, at the same time, this turgid text
constantly referred to terms and charts that were defined elsewhere in the book. Some
of the references at least gave the the name of the chart I was supposed to look at, but
others simply said things like "[See section III and V]." The book only had nine sections
total! And worse, when I pored through the other section and found the term I was
supposed to be looking for, it required me to know things from other sections that I had
not yet read either. And even in those cases where the text was more explicit and said
something like "See the Body Roll Charts," the charts were not numbered, the page
number where the chart was to be found was not given, and there was no table of
contents or index in the book. And worse, all the charts were placed together in Section
VII in more-or-less random order, making it necessary to leaf through that entire section
every time a different table had to be consulted.

Well, okay. I took a deep breath. Sure, it was dense, but I figured the challenge of
learning these rules couldn't be totally insurmountable. And, darn it, if Jason Sartin
could put himself through the hell of learning Imagine and SenZar to the point where he
could write a review of them, then by golly, I owed a duty to the gaming community (not
to mention my own pride) to try to do the same with The Spawn of Fashan. I had to try. I
had to actually try and make this game work according to its rules, wherever those
rules were hidden in the text.

I had to create a Spawn of Fashan character.

Character Creation

Nothing will better convey the exasperation of learning the character creation process in
The Spawn of Fashan than to describe each agonizing step as it actually happened. If I
had to endure this much pain, so do you. I opened the rules to Section III, Division B,
"How to 'roll out' a character," and began slogging through the mud.

The first thing that struck me about the character creation process was that, though
there are (apparently) no player-character races in the world of Fashan other than
humans, males and females were created differently. With males, all statistics are
generated "normally." With females, the number of dice rolled for strength, constitution,
and hit points were halved, the number of dice rolled for charisma was multiplied by 1.5,
and all females had "Intuition." (But don't worry, the creators of the game aren't sexist --
after all, they emphasize that they are not sexist in Section I. Imagine me rolling my
eyes here.) Realizing this would make the character creation process more interesting, I
decided to make my character female.
I then had to look up what "Intuition" was. A note next to the term, in square brackets,
said "[see the 'Destiny' listing on the Mental Illness table]." (Great, so intuition is a
mental illness, and all females have it? But I forged ahead.) Finding the Mental Illness
table was the first obstacle, and it led me into the wonderful world of all the jumbled,
haphazardly organized charts of Section VII. If the Mental Illness table had been, say
"Table 21. Mental Illnesses", I could have at least jumped right to the 21st table, but
nooooooo. Instead, the Mental Illness table was buried in a sub-division called "The
Body Roll Charts," which were sequestered in Division C of Section VII, which was a
Division that only the Referee was supposed to see. (Not that any Referee would have
caught a player peeking at Division C, since the place where Division B ended and
Division C actually began was hidden away on the one-and-only page of the text that
was printed sideways.) At the end of the Mental Illness table was indeed an entry called
"Destined", which instructed the Referee to roll on the Destiny Table for the character. A
very helpful note below this entry informed me that "Due to the necessity of having the
Destiny Table interlock with the Referee's cultures and history, it is not given here."

In fact, there was no "Destiny Table" anywhere in the text. Apparently, The Spawn of
Fashan was designed to be "open-ended" so that the Referee could put any cultural-
specific stuff he wanted to into the game without having to violate the game's rules.
Which means that a sizable percentage of the things that have to be defined for a
character don't appear in the core rules. Division D of Section VII does give us one little
"sample" game setting, but it too lacks a Destiny Table. (The sample game setting, by
the way, was called "Boosboodle, a land just south of where Melvin is standing now." I
swear I am not making this up.)

However, in the same note below "Destined" where it said that the Destiny Table
basically doesn't exist, there was a suggestion that "intuition" could be such things as
being able to automatically dodge a number of blows ex post facto equal to 1/10 the
character's intelligence, or being able to interpret dreams, or commune with nature, or
"read minds via insight rather than telepathy" (whatever that means), or "etc.". I bucked
down, made the assumption that this was what the character-creation rules meant, and
turned back to Section III, Division B. I had a character to make, dog gone it.

After the "non-sexist" gender-differences were digested and out of the way, the very
next paragraph informed me that I had to roll on the "Human Chart [see section VI and
the Inhabited Area Charts] of the player's chosen area." This was supposed to
determine your parent's choice for your character class -- excuse me, "character-type."
Okay, flip to section VI ... nothing. The whole section is notes for the Referee on how to
develop his own campaign world. There were no Inhabited Area Charts in section VI.
The Inhabited Area Charts must be in Section VII, where all the other charts were,
right? Wrong. There were no charts called "Inhabited Area Charts" anywhere to be
found. Gah! Here I hadn't even begun to roll up my character, and already I was up
against a wall! Hmmm ... the text did say "of the player's chosen area." Maybe those
charts in Section VII, Division D, that describe the "sample" land of Boosboodle [snicker]
will have Inhabited Area Charts and a Human Chart. Well ... not quite. They have an
Encounter Chart, and an Inner Human Chart. I furrowed my brows. "Inner Human
Chart" does have the words "Human Chart" embedded within it. And every entry on that
chart looks like one of the character-types I glimpsed back in the Character Charts of
Division B as I was flipping around trying to find the Human Chart. Oh, heck, it's close
enough. I'll use this chart.

The process of finding this chart and jumping to the conclusion that it's what the text
meant by "the Human Chart of the player's chosen area" actually took me about half an
hour. The "organization" of the rules and charts takes a lot of getting used to. Seeing
that this chart had entries numbered from 1 to 100, I took out a pair of Percentile Dice
and rolled. 11. I looked down the chart, and read the line for my Parent's Choice
character-type: "8-12 / Priest -- roll for which god."

Damn.

Just as there was no Destiny Table anywhere in the book, there was no "Which God"
table anywhere in the book either. If Priest was going to be my character's character-
type, I'd be in deep trouble if I wanted to stay within the rules.

Fortunately, there was a way out. The next sub-step of character creation was to pick a
character-type and list it as my character's "childhood choice." I skimmed ahead and
noticed that I would eventually get to choose either of these character-types as my
character's "real" character-type. Kewl! All I had to do was pick something other than
Priest for my Childhood Choice, and I'd be safe.

Now, which character-type to pick for Childhood Choice? Section III, Division B (the
infamous character-creation section I was still slogging through) didn't say that I had to
choose my Childhood Choice from the Human Chart I'd just rolled on -- and I was
curious to see what other character-types there were besides the ones on that short
table. Apparently, there were a lot of them. Barbers, Carpenters, Beggers, Merchants,
Wood Cutters (ah, the thrill of role-playing a Wood Cutter!), Farmers, Metal Forgers,
Sailors, Stone Cutters, Miners, Construction Workers (do they get 2 to their wolf-whistle
rolls?), Healers, Teachers, Specialists (whose specialty must be chosen when this
character-type is chosen), Bandits, Mercenaries, Trappers, Occultists, Traders,
Creepers, Priests, Thieves, and Swayers.

One thing about these character-types struck me as I was reading through them.
Occultists had a few "trances" they could place on themselves and others, Creepers
could emit a mysterious black cloud, and priests could talk to their god, but nowhere
were there any character-types with the ability to use general-purpose magic. The
Spawn of Fashan had no magic system! This alone made it different from about 95%
of the Fantasy Role-Playing Games that were on the market when it came out.

But perhaps I am being too forgiving. The last page of the rules, which was reprinted
exactly as it appeared in 1981, talks in glowing terms of up-and-coming products soon
to be published by the Games of Fashan Co-op. None of these games ever saw the
light of day, as far as I know. They included Deadlock, "the next evolution in chess";
Star Quest, a card game whose very name is so thoroughly unoriginal that it must
already be under a dozen or so competing trademarks by companies who have never
heard of each other; City Council, which sounded like Sim City but with more
bureaucracy; and (I'm not making this up) Bunga! Bunga! Bunga!, "a total strategy game
without dice." And, of course, they also included "sequal [sic] rulebooks to the Spawn."
These would have supposedly included sea movement and encounters, "the living
powers of Fashan," even more character-types, more monsters and animals (the
"sample" land of Boosboodle in the Spawn of Fashan rulebook only has stats for 3
animals and 4 monsters), "advanced" combat (which made me cringe when I
discovered how difficult "normal" combat was later on), "and so much more." I'll bet that
one or more of those "and so much more" supplements had a magic system in it.

Anyway, the "Creeper" character-type looked intriguing, what with that Black Cloud of
Darkness power, so I chose it for my character's Childhood Choice. At least I wouldn't
have to roll on a non-existent table for which god my character worshipped. Oh -- and
there was a note in the paragraph about choosing your Childhood Choice that said you
had to be a Misfit if your Parent's Choice was Misfit. Elsewhere in the rules, it was
explained that Misfit was a character-type designed to allow the Referee to make up his
own character-types. Mercifully, "Misfit" did not appear in Boosboodle's Inner Human
Chart, so it would have been impossible for me to roll "Misfit" as my Parent's Choice.

Step Three of "rolling-out" a character consisted, finally, of getting to roll her statistics:
Strength, Dexterity, Reflexes, Consitution, Intelligence, Charisma, Courage, Courage,
Courage, and Senses. Yes, Courage occurs three times, however the 2nd and 3rd
Courages apparently only come into play if your character has some "special fighting
ability." I never did get around to finding out what this meant. In any event, for each
statistic except the 2nd Courage, the 3rd Courage, and Senses, I had to roll "five 1-6
dice" ("1-6 dice" is Fashan-speak for a d6) and discard the lowest. This would give each
statistic a starting range from 4-24. Or at least, it would if my character were male. As
you remember, for my female character, "The number of dice rolled at any time for
strength, constitution, and hit points is halved." But how do you "halve" a roll of 5d6-
discard-lowest? Do you roll 3d6 and discard the lowest, because half of the final 4d6
would be 2d6? Do you roll 5d6, discard the lowest, and divide the remaining 4d6 by 2?
Do you roll 5d6, discard the lowest, and then randomly discard two of the remaining
4d6? The rules were silent on this topic. Section III, Division D ("Definitions"), which
contains not only definitions but the actual core rules for calculating many quantities
(and thus is one of the places that must be checked whenever you're trying to get
through the rules), says under its Female entry that if only one die is rolled for strength,
constitution, or hit points, the value of that die is halved, which doesn't help in this case.
(It also doesn't say whether to round up or down, but that's a problem that pervades
these rules in many places.) I elected to roll 3d6 for her strength and constitution and
discard the lowest die. For her charisma, which required me to roll one-and-a-half times
the normal number of dice, I decided to roll 7d6 and discard the lowest die. I ended up
with the following Statistics: Strength 3, Dexterity 17, Reflexes 19, Constitution 8,
Intelligence 16, Charisma 29, Courage 14.
I wrote these down on a photocopy of the character sheet, which the rules helpfully
informed me had been included "just for fun." (Oh, thank you, Games of Fashan Co-op.,
for having such a maverick free-spirit that you elected to put something as esoteric as a
blank character sheet in your rules for a role-playing game. I'm sure that was almost as
wild a move as including a "sample world" so that people could actually use the game.)
In passing, I noticed there was nowhere on her character sheet to write down the fact
that she was female.

Now that my statistics were rolled up, I was to choose between my Parent's Choice
character-type and my Childhood Choice character-type, and circle it. This would me
my character's actual character-type. Since I had no way to "roll which god" for a Priest,
my only remaining choice was to circle my Childhood Choice and become a Creeper.

Then it hit me. I'd had to roll my statistics after both alternatives for character-type had
already been chosen!

Not even AD&D limits the player's choices in the character creation process this much.
At least in AD&D, you get to roll your abilities, then choose your character class from all
the classes available in the game. Here in The Spawn of Fashan, you rolled one
character-type, picked another with no information other than your character's sex and
which character type had been randomly rolled for you, and then you had to roll the
dice and hope that your strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc. would come close to being
useful in one of those two character-types. Having cut my teeth on games like
Champions, where I got to build any character I wanted without so much as a single die
roll, Fashan's character creation system seemed like a futile exercise in being stuck with
something I'd never want.

But, like I said, I intended to rise to this challenge. Dog gone it, I was going to finish this
randomly-generated character if it killed me.

Step Four of the character creation process involved making lots of rolls on "Body Roll
Charts." My hours in the trenches flipping the pages of this rulebook back-and-forth
meant I now had a fair idea of where to look for these charts (Section VII), so this time I
was able to find them rather quickly. The first chart, "Eyesight Table," looked promising -
- I had a 1-in-20 chance of getting X-ray vision, a 2-in-20 chance of being crosseyed,
and apparently no chance of having normal vision. Or so I thought at first glance. It
turned out there was a little note at the top saying, "SR6 if a Thief or Trapper, SR5 all
else. If SR is failed, player should roll 1-20. Referee finds result on the following table
and tells player."

SR5. What did that mean? I flipped back to Section III, Division D, "Definitions." SR did
not appear. Saving Roll, however, did, and informed me that it was abbreviated "SR."
Aha. This game used conventional saving throws, just like AD&D did. Or did it? I'd
better make sure. Hmmm ... yep, it wasn't obvious, but to roll an SR, you rolled a "1-20
die" (a d20), and this die roll had to equal or exceed the SR number. So to make an
"SR5", I had to roll 5 or better on a d20. The concept was easy and straightforward
enough, but if I'd never played AD&D I never would have been able to figure out the
Saving Roll rules as they were written. I rolled a d20 and got a 13. So the upshot of all
this flipping around was, I didn't get to roll on the Eyesight Table at all, and my character
had normal eyesight.

She also ended up with normal hearing, normal taste [snicker], normal insight, normal
intellect (not to be confused with the intelligence statistic, I guess), and normal mental
illness. However, she did end up with microscopic smell [double snicker], an
annoyance-level phobia of death, a supersticious [sic] phobia of something the Referee
would have to make up (groan), a preference-level compulsion for arson, a scarred
head (which reduced her charisma by 2d6 -- which became 3d6 since she was female),
a bony neck (which further reduced her charisma by 1d6 -- plus 1d3, since again she
was female). After the dust had settled, her Charisma had fallen from its zenith of 29 to
a paltry 19. I'm just glad I didn't roll a "sex-driven" compulsion or a phobia of
supersticious [sic] fear of bald hunchback females.

I then had to roll to see if she was left handed, right handed, or ambidextrous (she was
right handed), and then had to use the dreaded Height and Weight table, which was an
adventure in and of itself. Apparently, there are three "starting brackets" on this table
labelled "normal", "larger than normal", and "smaller than normal," although the printed
layout of the table is so bad that you can't tell that these labels refer to brackets (they
look like 3 different labelled tables). The Height and Weight table makes all sorts of
mentions regarding "the bracket your character starts off in," but nowhere in this table
does it tell you where to find this starting bracket for your character. I had to hunt
through practically the whole rule book until I discovered, in the Character Charts
subdivision of Section VII, Division B, that every character-type description contains a
paragraph of the form "Height and Weight: [larger than normal/normal/smaller than
normal]." So, apparently, your height-and-weight starting bracket is determined not by
your race or your strength or your constitution or your roll on the Body Table (which is
one of the tables among the Body Charts, confusingly enough), or by anything else
related to your physiology. Your height-and-weight starting bracket is determined by by
your character-type. Trappers are larger than normal, f'rinstance, while creepers and
thieves are smaller than normal.

Now, I can sorta understand how the average trapper you meet might be more
physically imposing than the average thief. A small person would have a lousy time
surviving in the wilderness but an easier time sneaking into small spaces, and thus
would tend to gravitate toward the profession of thief. A kind of "natural selection"
process would also weed out those people who chose the life of a trapper but weren't
burly enough to make it. But think about this in the context of how character-type is
determined in The Spawn of Fashan. Your character-type is chosen before your stats
are even known, based on what your parents want you to be and what you as a child
wanted to be when you grew up. How in heaven's name can these choices change your
body size when you finally do grow up?! Do kids who want to be trappers take growth
pills? And what if your Parent's Choice was Trapper, but your Childhood Choice was
Thief? You wouldn't know whether you were smaller or larger than normal until after
you'd grown up and had all your statistics generated. Does this mean there are insta-
grow (and insta-shrink) pills available for adults, which must be taken when their
profession is chosen? The mind boggles.

In any case, this meant my Creeper character started in the smaller-than-normal

bracket -- or she would have if she'd have been male, anyway. A paragraph above the
Height and Weight Table explained that females start in the bracket immediately below
the one they are "meant" to begin with. Two 1d6 rolls later, my lady-on-paper became 5
feet, 1 1/2 inches tall, and weighed in at 119 pounds. For a game that cares so much
about dictating how my character was built, I was surprised that there was no table for
weight gain or weight loss -- after gorging herself on pizza for six months, or starving in
a concentration camp for the same amount of time, the Spawn of Fashan system would
apparently have her continue to weigh 119 pounds. Perhaps such a chart was among
the rules destined to appear in those long-awaited sequal [sic] rulebooks.

At this point, I was finished with step 4 of character creation. So, naturally, after going
through all that, the next paragraph informed me that all rolls in step 4 are influenced by
the character's occupation (presumably, her character-type). Such as, for instance,
whether her height and weight started out in the smaller than normal, normal, or larger
than normal bracket, for instance. Oh, thank you for telling me now.

Next, I had to go back to the chart for the Creeper character-type again and look in the
"Special" section. Apparently, she gets to roll 10d6 for her Senses statistic. (It was hard
to tell if it was really ten d6, though, because a photocopying artifact went right through
the "ten.") Fortunately, creepers didn't have to roll more or fewer dice for any of their
other statistics, as some other character-types did -- if she'd have been a Trader, for
example, I would've had to subtract 1d4 from her Dexterity, Reflexes, and Courage, and
add 1d6 to her Constitution (which I guess I would've had to halve since she was a
female). Then, next to each of her statistics, I had to write down the "letter tables" for
that statistic. Apparently, different character-types use different tables for each statistic
to determine their various bonuses and penalties. Creepers get to use the B tables for
dexterity and reflexes, and the A tables for intelligence, charisma, and courage. I
glanced ahead at some of these tables, and discovered that, no, the tables were not
arranged in order with A being best and D being worst, or vice-versa. For some
statistics, table A was better than table B, and for others table B was better than table A,
and in some cases, high values on table A were better than table B but low values on
table A were worse than table B. I sighed, shrugged and said, "Hey, it's The Spawn of
Fashan."

Next, I had to determine her hit points. By this point, all the little things I'd noticed
flipping back and forth through the rules were starting to pay off. I remembered seeing a
"hit points" paragraph in the Character Chart for each character-type, so I quickly turned
back to the Creeper description and saw that she got to roll a "1-4 dice". I rolled and got
a 3 -- and then remembered that I had to halve this value because she was a Female.
Half of 3 is 1-and-1/2. Again, the rules gave no guidance as to whether to round up or
round down, but I decided that more hit points are always a good thing, and rounded up
to 2.

Next came her Learned Abilities, and her Languages. You need at least a 20
Intelligence to have any Learned Abilities, so I was safe there. However, you get one
Language for every 12 points of intelligence, so I had to dig up the Language Table. It
was easy to find, and short, and damn near impossible to make sense of. Apparently,
you were supposed to roll on the Encounter Chart for your local area (the Inner Human
Habitation Zone of Boosboodle, presumably), and just use the language of whatever
critter you rolled. The problem was, 92 times out of a hundred, this would generate a
character-type description, and I refuse to believe that occultists, traders, bandits,
"swayers", construction crewmen, etc., all speak their own language. (Even in AD&D,
only druids and thieves had their own language. Every profession having its own
complete syntax is just ludicrous.) Fortunately, the Language Table also says, "For
those of you, however, who like a more solid, individual table, I prescribe the following:",
and has another d20-based table after that.

I rolled on this table and got a 3. This meant my character could "understand the dialect
of another society on the planet" chosen randomly. Needless to say, there were no
listings of "other societies" anywhere in the rules, not even in the sample charts for
Boosboodle. I wimped out and rolled again. This time, I got a 9, which meant she could
"understand the squeekings and squallings of a local species of animal", which I had to
roll up on the Animal Chart, but by now I knew where the animal chart was and could
actually accomplish this feat. I rolled a Narq. My character can speak to Narqs. And to
think, if I had rolled better, she could have spoken to Worlongs, Bartalns, Macanda Cur,
Lantals, Tractorns, Melarks, Filcornect, Mantax, Baero, Bull Makls, or a dead variety of
one of the above animals (is there such a thing as a Bull Makl zombie?), or even -- the
mind shudders at the possibility -- something on the non-existent Bird Chart or Bear
Chart or Poisonous Snake Chart.

And I don't think I could have taken the excitement if I had rolled a 14-19 on the
Language Table, which would have allowed her to speak with a species of monster.

Next, I had to figure out a whole lot of secondary modifiers that came from her statistics.
She had a radiation roll modifier. She had something called Speed. She had a Fatigue
Rate for swings and for running. She had about umpteen other functions I had to figure
out how to calculate and write down, too. Some of these were easy and obvious.
("Obvious" being a relative term -- this is The Spawn of Fashan we're talking about
here.) One of these, Luck Factor, required me to calculate her Bank Notes, which I
wasn't supposed to do until the next step. (Yes, the basic unit of currency in the world of
Fashan is the Bank Note. It is a silly place.) Most of them required that I look at the
notes for the "just for fun" character sheet to figure out. But a few, most notably Basic
SR Modifier and the Basic Parry Modifier, were so well-hidden that I'm surprised I found
them at all. The formula for Basic Parry Mod was squirrelled away in something called
the Parry and Dodge Tables. Basic SR Mod is apparently based on a combination of
Intelligence and Courage. There are entries in the Intelligence and Courage tables that
say " N to something-or-other and SR," but it didn't click with me at the time that these
SR mods were in fact factors in determining the Basic SR Mod.

Oh -- and one of the functions I had to calculate was called Hit Point Modifier. It was
based on constitution, and in my character's case, her Con of 8 have her an HP Mod of
-1. Did that mean I had to go back and subtract 1 from her hit points? Did that mean I
had to subtract 1 from the "3" I originally rolled for her hit points, and then divide the
difference by two because she was female? The definition of Hit Point Modifier given in
Section III, Division D, only mentioned that it applied every time she went up or down an
experience level. So, once again figuring that more hit points were good, I elected to
not apply her HP Mod to the hit points I'd rolled back in the earlier part of this step.

After figuring out all these functions -- which took at least an hour, believe me, I finally
reached the home stretch: "Step six completes the character." First, I had to choose my
patron god or gods, if any. Remembering the lack of god tables in the rulebook, I
gratefully opted for "if any." Then, I got to choose the items my character would begin
the game with. Some character-types apparently get automatic starting equipment. The
Creeper, unfortunately, wasn't one of them, and so my poor character had to start out
buck naked. I then had to roll for her Bank Notes, which I'd already rolled for when
determining Luck Factor in the last step so I didn't roll for again (she got 80 bank notes),
and then ... and then, the text said, "and players formulate their Luck Factor." Sheesh!
Why did you list it in the previous step if I had to compute it here?!

And lastly, I got to name my character. Naming a character in a fantasy world can be a
daunting prospect, especially if it's not an elf (whose names must always have "el" in it
someplace) or a dwarf (whose names must always end in "axe" or "beard"). So, in
homage to the abysmally poor quality with which the rules were written and organized, I
decided to name her ... Grignr. Those of you who've read The Eye of Argon will
understand. (I don't care that the original Grignr was male. It's the principle of the thing.)

I looked up from my desk and for the first time in hours, looked out on the sunlit
landscape beyond my window. I had just done something I once considered impossible.
I had finished creating a Spawn of Fashan character!

Equpipment

Or at least, I had finished going through the six character-creation steps in Section III,
Division B. There were still some important looking blank spots on her character sheet
marked "AMC" that I felt I ought to fill in. I also realized that I hadn't spent any of
Grignr's Bank Notes to buy her initial equipment (above and beyond the "nothing" she
got from being a Creeper). I decided to kill two birds with one stone and buy her some
armor.

There was a tongue-in-cheek sample scenario in Section VIII of the book, which
provided examples of dealing with merchants. This involved reaction rolls, encounter
rolls, rolls to see if an item was in stock, rolls to see how much the merchant would try
to charge the character, etc.. I wanted none of that. I just wanted to buy her some
armor. I waved my hand and assumed that she would be able to get some armor for its
listed cost. The description for the Creeper class said they would never wear any armor
that wasn't a cloak, so I picked a hide cloak, coming in as the most expensive cloak at
75 Bank Notes.

Now, I had to write down what this gave her. It had a whole bunch of numbers
associated with it: Weight 12, AHP 45, DR 3, AMC Drop 5. AHP was its Armor Hit
Points -- armor can be damaged in Fashan. So, apparently, can weapons, if they are
attacked or used to parry. DR was its Damage Ratio, the number of armor hit points that
had to be removed from a single blow in order for the blow to penetrate the armor and
injure the wearer. (Hmm, this is sounding like a not-too-indecent system so far,
actually.) Finally, AMC Drop refers to the reduction in the wearer's Armor Class.
(Grooooan -- Spawn of Fashan has Armor Class. Well, if it has Saving Rolls and
Experience Levels, I shouldn't be too surprised. This was published in 1981, after all.)

I flipped back to Section V, on the Art of Combat, in Division B, "Preparation for

Combat," which is where it described how to calculate Armor Class. It said to combine
the AMC Drop of the armor with the AMC Drop listed on her Reflexes Table (flip back to
Statistics Charts, look up Reflexes Table, a Creeper uses table A of the Reflexes Table,
so I look up Grignr's Reflexes of 19 and find that she has a -1 AMC modifier, which for
some reason was not one of the functions I had to calculate during step five of the
character creation process). So, my total AMC Drop is 5 for the armor, and 1 for her
Reflexes, for a total of 6, right? Wrong. Each of four areas of your body -- area 1, the
head and neck; area 2, the torso; area 3A, the arms; and area 3L, the legs -- has its
own separate AMC drop, depending upon whether any armor covers that area or not.
The coverage of a piece of armor is listed on the Armor Class Chart. According to that
chart, a cloak only protects the arms, legs, and back, so her AMC drop in area 1 is 1, in
areas 3A and 3L is 6, and in area 2 is apparently 1 if attacking from the front (or the
sides?) and 6 if attacking from the rear.

However, it's not enough to know her AMC drop. The blank spots on her character
sheet call for the actual AMC of each area. How is one supposed to calculate this? The
definition of "Armor Class" says that AMC begins with 11 and goes down, but later says
that an unarmored human's AMC (not counting his reflexes) is ten. Section VI, Division
G, on the philosophy of creating animals and monsters, also says that the AMC of a
naked human is 10. Drawing upon my decades of AD&D experience, I leapt to the
brilliant conclusion that you were supposed to subtract your AMC drop from 10 to
compute your AMC. And this I did. Grignr's Area 1 AMC was 9, her area 2 AMC was 9
(4 in back), and her areas 3A and 3L AMC were 4 each.

Unfortunately, the purchase of a 75-bank-note cloak left Grignr with only 5 bank notes
left to spend. This was 3 less than the cost of a dagger, the least-expensive weapon.
Well ... what the heck. It's not like was going to be entering any Spawn of Fashan
tournaments with this character, and I wanted to try out the combat system. I could
pretend that Grignr had a dagger. Maybe she found it in the trash. I wrote the words
"she does not actually own the dagger yet" on her character sheet's item-list addendum,
and forged onward.

As with armor, each weapon's listing had a whole bunch of numbers and letters after it.
The dagger's listing read: I, damage 1-4, weight .4, length 10, parry mod -10, str req 6.
The Str Req one worried me -- Grignr's Strength was only 3, after all -- but eventually
the combat rules would kinda-sorta direct me back to a paragraph in the Strength Chart
where it would turn out that she could wield a weapon with a higher Str Requirement
than her Strength, but she'd do one-half the weapon's normal damage with each blow.
A roundabout reference to the Parry and Dodge Tables eventually told me that, if Grignr
ever parried, her dagger's Parry Modifier of -10 would be added to her own Basic Parry
Modifier of 19 for a "Total" Parry Modifier of 9. (This, as it would turn out, is a
percentage chance to parry, which as you can tell is pretty slim.)

A weapon's Armor Hit Points were supposed to be 1/10 its weight, rounded up, but none
of the weapons listed had a weight higher than 6, so that meant all of them would've
had 1 Armor Hit Point, making the "1/10 its weight" rule useless. Furthermore, one of
the items I was supposed to fill in on the weapon's control sheet was the dagger's Hit
Modifier, but no weapon had a "Hit Modifier" listed anywhere in the text. Perhaps super-
heavy weapons and weapons with hit modifiers were yet another goody destined to
appear in the sequal [sic] rulebooks.

I also had to write down Grignr's "Total Hit Modifier" with the dagger, which was the sum
of the dagger's non-existent Hit Modifier (which I just assumed, with a little shrug, was
0) and Grignr's modifier from the Weapon Usage Rules. (What, you didn't know about
the Weapon Usage Rules? They're right there in the definitions, silly! Duh! What, did
you think rules would actually appear in a rules section? This is The Spawn of Fashan
we're talking about here!) Under the Weapon Usage Rules, any character who's never
used a weapon before is at -2 to hit with it. This drops to -1 after the first successful
strike, and -0 when the character has inflicted at least 20 damage points with the
weapon and earned at least 250 experience points attributable directly to the weapon's
use. There were even spaces on Grignr's weapon control sheet where I was to write
down her "HP Removed" and "Exp With" the dagger. However, the next paragraph of
the definition said that Weapon Usage Rules do not apply to weapons a character
begins the game with. Did Grignr "begin" the game with the dagger, since she has one
now and hasn't adventured with it yet? Or did she only "begin" the game with her 80
bank notes and a nude body? On this question, as on many many others, the rules
were silent.

So, now I'd given her armor and a weapon, I'd determined her armor class over all
areas of her body, and I'd figured all the numbers you were supposed to figure for a
dagger. At last, it was time to exercise this games Combat System.
Combat

Despite the fact that there were 18 animals and 25 monsters listed on the Boosboodle
Inner Human Habitation Zone Encounter Chart (which, we are helpfully told, is code
named Bihhzec), only seven of those creatures are actually written up in the Animal
and monster Charts on the next 3 pages. I would have to choose one of these 7
creatures for Grignr to fight. I chose something called the Concor, because its hit points
were low enough -- only 1-6 -- that Grignr might have a chance against one.

A Concor, as you may have guessed from my description of the Animal Chart earlier, is
one of the few creatures on Fashan that doesn't have a name that makes you giggle.
It's a snake, a golden brown viper, that is 2d6 feet long and weighs 1/10 its length in
pounds. That would mean a 10-foot concor would only weigh one pound -- such a
snake would be awfully thin. Yet we are told that when it's on the hunt it will move to
attack characters, presumably even human characters. How a one-pound snake can
swallow a whole human is beyond me. Nevertheless, we are also told it has venom, so
maybe, if I was very lucky, Grignr would get poisoned and the combat would end
quickly.

There are all sorts of charts dealing with encounters, whether one party detects the
other, surprise, reactions, etc.. I wanted none of this. It was getting late and I just
wanted to get to the combat system. So, turning to Section V, Division C, "The Combat
Process," I discovered that my first chore was to compare the combatants Dexterities to
determine how many "phases" the snake and Grignr would get in one combat round.
The comparison formula was over in the Dexterity Chart, but mercifully, the rules
recapped it here: Whoever had the highest Dexterity got one extra phase per 10 points
his dexterity was higher than his opponent's. The snake's dexterity was listed as 16, and
since Grignr's was 17, she had the highest Dexterity, but since hers wasn't at least 10
points higher than the snakes she would not get an "extra" phase. So, with no "extra"
phases available, the next paragraph informed me that every combatant automatically
gets one phase per round. Why "Dexterity" and not "Reflexes" determined how many
times a combatant could act in a round was anybody's guess.

The next step was to determine Initiative. Combatants go in order of their Initiative only
during the first combat round; during subsequent rounds, the combatants go in order of
who has the highest Reflexes. Flipping back to the Definitions Division of Section III, I
found that each combatant's Initiative total was determined by adding a 2d6 roll to his
Detect Level. *Choke* ... his what? Darn it, gotta look up another term. Flipping to the
Definition of Detect Level three pages back, it said a character's Detect Level, helpfully
abbreviated DL, was found on the Senses Table. Sigh. Going back to the Senses Table
-- which I'd already consulted four times when determining Grignr's functions -- I found
that Grignr's Senses value of 36 made her DL 4. (Why wasn't there a space on the
character sheet to write this down?) The snake was DL 2. Okay, I now rolled 2d6 for
Grignr and got ... a 3. Cock eyes. Her Initiative total was only 7. Surely, the snake was
going to beat her to the first punch. I rolled 2d6 for the snake ... and got a 4! Yes! The
snake's Initiative total was only 6! Grignr had a chance to get off the first blow!
But before I could get around to actually doing anything, Section V, Division C calmly
informed me that I first had to calculate the "Reflex comparison" of the two combatants.
The next paragraph, at the top of page 22, "recapped" the Reflex Comparison formula
from elsewhere in the text, saying that for every 10 points your Reflexes are above your
opponent's Reflexes, you have a -1 Reflex hit modifier on your Basic Combat Number
(groan) and your opponent has a 1 Reflex hit modifier on his Basic Combat Number.
However, the Reflexes Tables on page 42 said that you have a -1 Reflex hit modifier,
and your opponent has a 1 Reflex hit modifier, for every five points your Reflexes are
higher than your opponent's. Hmmm ... I can't imagine how this little gaffe could've
slipped past the oh-so-thorough editing that had obviously gone into The Spawn of
Fashan.

Fortunately, the snake's Reflexes were 22, and Grignr's were 19, so neither rule
resulted in any Reflex hit modifiers.

Okay. We have our adversaries. We know Grignr has Initiative. We know that neither of
them has a Reflex hit modifier. So, finally, Grignr gets her phase and can attack the
snake with her dagger. "How hard?" asks the next paragraph. She can choose to (A)
make a half-assed attack on the snake for 1/2 damage, which fatigues her by half a
swing, (B) make a normal attack on the snake for normal damage, which fatigues her by
one swing, or (C) make an all-out attack on the snake for 1-and-1/2 times damage,
which fatigues her by two swings. (Remember that Fatigue Rate Swinging function I
mentioned way back in the middle of step 5 of character creation? Grignr's was 3. She
would fatigue after 3 normal swings. Or after one normal swing and one all-out swing.
Or 6 half-assed swings. Or 4 half-assed swings and one ... well, you get the picture.)
The rules for what would happened to her when she got fatigued were on the Fatigue
Charts, but I didn't bother to read said chart. I hoped this combat would be over with too
quickly for it to matter. So, I elected to have Grignr attack the snake all-out, which
counted as 2 of the 3 swings she'd get before she'd fatigue.

Okay, time to roll dice, right? Wrong. The next paragraph wanted to know what area of
the snake's body Grignr was swinging for. Attacking Area 1, the head, would lower the
snake's SITL by 2. (SITL? In a minute.) Attacking area 2, its torso, would give Grignr a 6
to hit. Attacking area 3, its limbs (what, snakes have arms and legs now?), would give
Grignr a 3 to hit and lower the snake's SITL by 1. Believe me, I was sorely tempted to
say "I attack the snakes limbs," but sanity got the better of me. I instead figured a 6 to
hit would be the most useful, and elected to attack Area 2.

Now I got to roll a die. A d20, to be exact. I rolled a 3, and hoped that rolling low was
good. Had I rolled a 1, the attack would have gone astray I would've had to consult the
Extraordinary Combat Table, and had I rolled a 20, I would have gotten to roll the d20
again, and if the subsequent roll was over 10 I'd get to add that result -10 to the 20, and
if that second roll was a 20 I'd get to roll it again, and if that third roll was over 10 I'd get
to add that result -10 to the 30, and if that third roll was a 20 ... ad infinitum. A 20 results
in an open-ended roll, in other words. This combination did not bode well for my hopes
that rolling low was "good." I then added the 6 for attacking the snake's torso, and
Grignr's -2 Total Hit Mod With Dagger (she was inexperienced with daggers,
remember?) to the 3 I'd just rolled, for an "attack number" of 7.

Look up the 7 on a chart and see if I hit? Naw, way too early for that. First, we have to
let the opponent parry or dodge! I have a hard time imagining a snake dodging, but I
have an even harder time imagining a snake parrying, so I let it dodge. Consult the
Parry and Dodge Tables! The Parry and Dodge tables didn't yield their secrets easily,
but I eventually determined that the chance to dodge was derived from the Basic Parry
Modifier. The concor listing didn't provide a Basic Parry Modifier, so I had to calculate it
using the same formula I'd used to calculate Grignr's Basic Parry Mod back when I was
creating her. The Basic Parry Mod formula is the Reflex value of the snake (22), plus
twice its Dexterity Hit Modifier.

Oh, great. The Concor listing shows a Dexterity of 16, but in order to convert this to a
Hit Modifier, I need to look it up on one of four subtables, determined by its character-
type. What character-type is a snake?! Does a Concor use Dexterity table A, B, C, or
D? A 16 Dexterity comes in with no Hit Modifier on tables A, B, and D, but is a -1 Hit
Modifier on table C. GAH!! Screw it. I'm gonna assume the snake uses some table
other than Table C, and that its Dexterity Hit Modifier is 0. That gives it a Basic Parry
Mod of 22. There.

Back on the Parry and Dodge Tables, I noticed that none of the items listed in the list of
Dodge Modifying Items applied (metal armor, cloak or robe, carrying a long weapon),
nor did any of the items listed in the Attack Modifiers apply (missile, energy blast, or grip
on defender). Thus, the snake's Total Dodge Percentage was equal to its Basic Parry
Mod of 22. The snake had a 22 percent chance of dodging Grignr's dagger. I rolled
percentile dice ... and got a 93. A clear miss. The snake failed to dodge.

Now I could see if Grignr's attack actually succeeded or not.

First, I cross-index Grignr's weapon type to the target area's AMC on the Combat
Results Table to get her "Basic Combat Number." Her dagger had that capital I written
down at the front of its listing, and that turns out to be its weapon type. The snake was
listed as AMC 6, and I decided to make a huge leap of faith and assume that it was this
same Armor Class over its whole body. (A dangerous assumption, considering what
little you can take for granted in the overly-complicated world of The Spawn of Fashan.)
The Combat Results Table turned out to be the table on that one weird sideways-
printed page. Looking up the column for AMC 6 and the row for weapon type I in said
table yields a "13", which is Grignr's Basic Combat Number for the attack.

Next, I add her Reflex comparison result to her Basic Combat Number to get her
"Combat Number." That was the Reflex hit modifier that had two different conflicting
rules for how to calculate it. Remember? Anyway, I'd already determined that that was 0
under either set of rules, so her Combat Number is the same as her Basic Combat
Number, 13.
Now, finally, I could determine if she hit the snake. Her attack number was 7, and her
combat number was 13. This means "the attacker's blow failed to strike the target with
enough skill to damage it." What we AD&D players would call a "miss." From her
decision to swing the dagger to the point where I determined that she missed, it took me
the better part of half an hour.

Fortunately, I was now getting used to the Combat Routine of Fashan, and so I figured I
might be able to have the snake counter-attack and determine whether it hit or missed
in under 10 minutes. I quickly selected a normal-strength attack and targeted Area 2,
giving the snake the same 6 to hit that Grignr had had back on her phase. I rolled the
d20 and got a 14. To this, I had to add the snake's Hit Modifier with the weapon it
attacked with. Like all the other weapons in the book, "fangs" didn't have a Hit Modifier
listing anywhere, so I assumed it was 0. I also assumed that the snake "started" the
game with its fangs and thus wouldn't get that -2 to-hit modifier from the Weapon Usage
Rules. I further assumed, as before, that it used a table other than Table C for its
Dexterity and thus didn't get a hit modifier from it. This gave it a Total Hit Modifier with
fangs of 0. Finally, I added the 6 from targeting Area 2 to the 14 the snake rolled, for an
"attack number" of 20.

Uh oh. 20. Does this modified 20 mean I have to roll that open-ended roll and add it to
the 20 if it's over 10? Gratefully, not. A careful reading revealed what I had suspected:
that the additional roll only happens when the attack die was 20, not when the attack
number was 20. I was safe.

Now, Grignr got a chance to dodge. I'd already written down her Basic Parry Modifier
(19) and her dodge modifiers from her armor (-2), so I immediately knew that she had a
Total Dodge Percentage of 17. I suppose she could have parried, but daggers had a
parry mod. of -10. Her 17% chance to dodge was better than her 9% chance to parry,
so I rolled a d100 for her dodge and got ... a 43. Her dodge failed.

So now, I got to cross the snake's weapon type with Grignr's AMC in area 2. Mercifully,
the Concor description listed its attack as weapon type F. Grignr's AMC in area 2 was 9
from the front and 4 from the back, and I made the assumption that after frontally
attacking it with her dagger, she would be facing the snake, and so would be attacked
from the front. (There are no front/back attack rules that I've found in Spawn of Fashan
anywhere. So far. They might be hidden in the world-building philosophy section or
something.) Cross-indexing Weapon Type F with AMC 9 yielded a Basic Combat
Number of 11. Adding the snake's Reflex hit modifier of 0 to this gave a Combat
Number of 11. The snake's attack number was 20 ... so that meant the snake hit!

Not only did it hit, but since it hit by 5 or more, that meant it did an extra "level" of
damage. Whatever a "level" of damage is. It wasn't really defined anywhere. I assume
that all attacks that hits by less than 5 do one "level" of damage. That assumption was
important, because the number of damage levels -- not the actual damage points --
show up in the next rule on SITL.
SITL. Serious Injury Tolerance Level. If you take at least as many levels of damage
than your SITL, you have to make a Saving Roll to keep from receiving a Serious Injury.
Grignr's SITL was one of those many "functions" calculated for her during character
creation, and was based on her constitution. Her SITL was a paltry 1, which meant that
even one level of damage would force her to make a Saving Roll, let alone two.

Next problem: Now that I knew she had to make a Saving Roll against serious injury,
what number did she have to roll to make the save? The combat rules I'd been following
were silent on this point, not so much as directing me to a chart anywhere. The
Definition for SITL referred me to the Saving Roll Tables (yet another set of charts
sequestered away in Section VII). The Saving Roll Tables blithely inform the reader that
"the serious injury SRs are printed with the Wound Table and the Extraordinary Combat
Table (and NOT here, as it was previously printed)." Grrrr. I flipped to the Extraordinary
Combat Table. It does not mention serious injury SRs. Thankfully, the Wound Table and
the Combat Effects Table, on the next page, do spell out the process for calculating a
serious injury SR.

The formula for the serious injury SR is this: Take the number of levels of damage, add
one, subtract the targets SITL, and multiply the result by: 5, if the attack was against
area one; 3, if the attack was against area two, and; 4, if the attack was against area
three. Needlessly complex? Nope, just par for the course in The Spawn of Fashan.

Okay, the attack did 2 levels of damage (because it hit by 5 or more), 2 plus one is 3,
subtract Grignr's SITL of 1 and that leaves 2. She was hit in area two (her torso), so
multiply the 2 I just got by 3. Total: 6. Grignr had to roll a 6 or better on a d20 to save. I
rolled and got ... a 9. She was safe. No serious injury was inflicted. (Had I failed the roll,
I would've had to wait until the next step, when I determined whether the snake's bite
had achieved penetration or not, before I could know which of the two serious injury
tables to roll on. But I digress.)

Now, roll the damage, right? Wrong. Even though the snake "hit" against her Armor
Class, we now have to see if the snake's fangs actually penetrated her armor. To do
this, we flip to the Penetration Tables. These tables list all the major weapons alongside
two sets of numbers. The first number is the weapon's base percentage chance of
damaging metal armor. The second number is its chance of damaging cloth armor. A
later paragraph informs us that a creatures fangs which are less than 4 inches long
should be treated as a dagger, and there's no way you're going to convince me that that
snake's fangs are longer than 4 inches. A dagger, we discover, has two entries: a lower-
powered one for when the attack does normal damage, and a higher-powered one
(marked with a dot) for when the attack does double damage. Since the snake's bite
achieved two damage levels, I assume that means it did "double damage" and should
use the higher dagger listing, which gives it a 25% chance to damage metal armor and
a 45% chance to damage cloth armor.

But what about hide armor? That's what Grignr is wearing. Is that cloth? Another
paragraph says that wooden armor is treated like cloth against blades but like metal
against blunt force weapons, and that stone armor counts as metal armor, but there's no
mention of hide armor. I am forced to assume that it counts as "cloth." I mean, people
wear clothes, and people wear hides, right? Good enough. The fangs have a base 45%
chance to damage cloth/hide armor.

We now add the maximum damage the fangs could do in this attack to this 45%
chance. The concor listing shows its fangs as doing 1-2 damage, so since the attack is
going to inflict 2 levels of damage, its maximum damage would be 4 points. That raises
the fangs' armor damage chance to 49%.

Oh, wait ... no it doesn't. Duh. Grignr's armor doesn't cover the area where she was hit
at all. You don't need to roll for penetration for an attack to an unarmored area, it
automatically penetrates. Never mind.

(As an aside, if her armor had covered her front, the snake would have a 49% chance
of doing one (1) armor damage point to her armor. If this failed, the attack would end
right there; if it succeeded, the snake would have a 49% chance of doing one (1) more
armor damage point to her armor. This would continue, one armor damage point at a
time, until the snake either missed one of its 49% roll or did at least the armor's
"Damage Ratio" in armor hit points, at which point it would have penetrated. Grignr's
armor has a Damage Ratio of 3, so the snake would have to roll 49 or under on a d100
three times, in a row, in order to penetrate. Metal armor tends to have a Damage Ratio
of 4, which means each blow that hits it has to roll up to four separate times before we
know whether it penetrated or not. As you can imagine, this would get very tedious very
fast. Oh, and the owner of the armor has to keep track of each and every Armor Hit
Point it loses from an area, and how many it loses overall, to determine when its
protection worsens and when it falls apart. Realistic? Maybe. But not fast.)

Now, at last, I can roll the snakes two d2 worth of damage (the 2 damage levels double
the number of dice). I roll a 2 and a 1, for 3 total damage points. Oh no! Grignr only had
2 hit points! Did this mean she was dead?

No, it meant she has to make a Cling To Life Saving Roll.

Back to the Saving Roll Tables.

A Cling To Life SR depended on whether her negative hit points exceeded her
constitution. She was currently at -1, and her Con was 8, so no, her negative hit points
did not exceed her Con. This made the saving roll easy. If inflicted by normal weapons,
she had to roll a 10 or better, taking her Cling To Life Modifier into account. (Her Cling
To Life Mod was another one of those "functions" I'd calculated on her character sheet;
it was handily already written down, and was -1.) She had to roll an 11 or better to make
this save. I rolled ... a 14! Huzzah! She was still clinging to life, although her negative hit
points meant she was unconscious.
Well, okay, maybe "huzzah!" was the wrong word to use here. I was kinda hoping the
combat would be over with. Because now that she was unconscious, I had to contend
with that dumb snake's venom. The Concor's description stated that the first successful
Penetration (there's that word again) of its fangs has "venom" from the Poison and
Energy Charts. Sigh ... another Chart. Fortunately, I'd seen this chart several times
while flipping back and forth through Section VII, so I had a good idea of approximately
what page it was on. (Remember, The Spawn of Fashan has no table of contents or
index, or even a condensed list of charts.)

According to the "venom" entry in the Poison and Energy Charts, "Target must make a
set of SR18s per injection, no matter how many levels of damage the blow had." What
scared me at this point was that I knew exactly what all this meant. I was to make a set
of Saving Rolls, each of which required an 18 or better on a d20, regardless of how
whether the snake's Attack Number when it hit Grignr was 5 or more better than its
Combat Number. Gah! Fashan speak! Anyway, Grignr had to attempt one of these
Saving Rolls at the end of each combat round until one of them was successful, and
every one that failed would inflict 2d4 damage on her.

I rolled a 17. A high roll, but still a miss. The 2d4 came up a paltry 3, meaning that her
hit points were now down to -4. That meant another Cling to Life SR. This time, since
the damage was delivered by something that was not a "normal" weapon, she had to
roll a 12 or better (modified by her Cling to Life Mod of -1.) She rolled a 19 and still
refused to die.

Next round: I figured the snake would just sit there and wait for its venom to finish her
off. It wouldn't have long to wait. At the end of the round, I again missed Grignr's 18-or-
better saving roll against the venom, so she took another 2d4 damage, and this time
the damage came up as a whopping 8 points. She was now reduced to -12 hit points.
This put her in the "more negative hit points than her constitution" realm, so her next
cling to life SR was at -2 times the difference between her negative hit points and her
constitution. (It would've been at -1 times this amount, except that the damage wasn't
inflicted by a normal weapon.) The difference between 12 negative hit points and 8
constitution is 4, so this would be a -8, on top of the base saving roll of 12 and the -1 for
her Cling to Life Mod, meaning she'd have to roll a 21 or better on a d20.

Well, it was an open-ended d20 roll, so there was a 2-and-a-half percent chance she'd
... nope. Rolled a 17. She didn't make it. Grignr was finally dead.

Yet even in death, she wasn't gone yet. The Definition for "Death" says that I get to roll
her "healing die" (yet another computed "function" -- Grignr's was 1d2), and this was the
number of rounds she could still be revived if someone healed her during that time. No
mention was made as to whether she had to be healed back to positive hit points, or
whether having any damage healed was enough. In any event, it didn't matter, because
the snake wasn't carrying a snake-bite kit and that meant the combat was finally over
and done with.
Character progression

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're asking yourselves, "Gee, what if Grignr had
won the combat? How many experience points would she get?"

Pfff, you munchkins.

Amazingly, in The Spawn of Fashan, you can get experience points by doing things
other than killing. In fact, you get experience merely by injuring your opponents. The
number of hit points of damage you inflict, times the experience level of a human target
or the "lair type" listed for the creature you attacked, plus the Detect Level of the target
creature, equals your experience point award. The concor had 5 hit points, a Lair Type
of 2, and a Detect Level of 2, so it would have been worth 5 x 2 2 = 12 experience
points.

You also, wonder of wonders, get experience points by hauling off treasure. You get the
"value of the coins" you find in experience points, although it's not actually spelled out
that this value has to be expressed in Bank Notes.

Finally, you can get experience points by going on a "mission." There were no rules as
to how this should be calculated, but just the ability to gain experience from something
other than killing and looting gives The Spawn of Fashan bonus points over AD&D.
Particularly since it came out in 1981.

When you get enough experience points, as you might expect, you gain a level. There's
a complete chart that appears, in all places, under the definition for experience -- it
takes 1000 to reach second level, 3500 to reach 3rd level, and progressively more
thereafter until by 18th level you have to rack up a monumental 1,200,000 x.p. to gain
another level. And, as you might expect, when you gain a level, you gain hit points.

What's truly amazing about this 1981 game system, though, is that gaining a level does
not automatically give you such things as increased to-hit chances, increased saving
throws, more powerful abilities for your character-type, etc.. Instead, gaining a level
gives you a chance to raise your statistics. It is your statistics -- strength, dexterity,
reflexes, constitution, courage, senses, etc. -- that determine your ability to attack
enemies, survive engagements, acquire languages and special abilities, etc.. E.g., your
to-hit bonus is based entirely on your dexterity and courage, and does not derive from
your level at all. Your basic saving roll modifier, likewise, derives entirely from your
intelligence and courage, not from your level.

Basically, although this is a class/level system, its mechanics are characteristic based
rather than experience-level based, and I have to applaud them for that. It's a concept
we Champions/HERO System players are well familiar with, but which was virtually
unknown by most AD&D-like role-playing games 20 years ago.
But this hardly makes up for the mire one has to waddle through just to be able to roll up
a character and engage in basic combat. The idea of running this game long-term,
especially without any real "world" modules, makes climbing Mount Everest seem like
trivial Sunday-afternoon recreation for a pampered a Hollywood starlet in comparison.

Parting jabs

The original review of this game for Dragon in 1982 stressed the humor value to be
found within its covers. The fact that the designers were serious about such an ill-
written game only makes it all the more hysterical. There are real jokes hidden
throughout the text too, such as the highly tongue-in-cheek transcript of an allegedly
real game set in Boosboodle in Section VIII, and the pun in the name "healing die," but
most of the humor here is unintentional. Like this little ironically-placed piece of "hanging
italics" in the dedication on the very last page:

"to Mr. Jim Watson and the rest of the Yukon Review staff, who allowed me to use their
materials to do the typesetting of this rulebook"

Learning the actual game should only be attempted if you're out to prove how tough you
are. The reprints may still be available from the author, Kirby Lee Davis, whose last
contact email address was at [email protected]

And always remember the last words in the rulebook:

How many Boosboodles are there in your life?

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