The Gaming Den

So, Maiden Saga, by Aishling Morgan, is an e-book RPG made for roleplaying in the world of the Maiden Saga book series. Here is the blurb for the first of these books:

When Elethrine, Princess Talithea and their maid, Aisla, threaten to spank sorceress Ea, they are punished by being transported to a distant part of their world. This book charts their journey home through a series of erotic indignities and humiliations.

Classy stuff. The cover art hints at racial stereotypes and titillation. Emphasis on tit.

Then we get a short bit of fiction about slaves, and then the introduction, which has this charming bit:

The content is unashamedly erotic, some might even say perverse, so if you believe in cold baths, good clean fun that an author should close the bedroom door when things start to get fruity*, then you should probably go away, now. If you’re still with me, then I hope you enjoy the ride. The first thing to take in is that this is not our world but a fantasy. Nobody was axed, raped or devoured by demons in the making of the Maiden Saga RPG. So - Rule 1 – leave your 21st century morals at home.

In fact, leave as much of the modern world behind as you can. This is a world of barbarian giantesses, lecherous slavers, avaricious dwarves and worse, so if you want to play a mild mannered clerk who believes that everybody could get on if they just sat down and talked for a while then you probably will get axed, raped and devoured by demons, and serve you right.†
* This is not necessarily a euphemism.
† Game Masters please take note.

It then tells you about the world itself, which is pretty standard, but sounds nice, and there's nothing inherently wrong about it.

Now we get told about your stats. You have Glory, which is sort of XP and also Social HP and self respect and social standing. It's a reward for success.

Then you have your 4 basic attributes: Experience, Dexterity, Intelligence, Constitution.

Then eight extra attributes: Power, Allure, Pride, Craft, Greed, Guile, Wisdom, Wealth.

Between the twelve attributes you have 100 points to distribute - each stat has a minimum of 1 and maximum of 20.

Your starting Glory is (total of basic attributes)/10 (round down). So if you put a 10 in each, that's 40/10 = 4 Glory.

Here's how conflict works:
Roll a die to determine who selects the attribute you fight with. No really, "roll a single die" to determine it. One person chooses the extra attribute, the other person goes first. You roll a pool of d6 equal to your extra attribute, and each 6 rolled subtracts 1 from their attribute. Then its their turn. Keep going until one person hits 0 or fewer. They then lose, and the winner gets 1 Glory and can basically dictate how the scene plays out.

The loser can choose to spend 1 Glory to restart the Conflict, choosing another stat.

Now we learn about the different cultures of people - not races in the sense of orc and elf, just different places people come from, with the genetic tendencies and (more importantly) what their societies dictate. It then points out how each of the cultures values a different extra stat above all the others and it is their "primary drive", so there is one that values Wealth above all else, and a totally different one that values Greed. Don't ask, I'm busy drinking.

Each culture is developed across the four books of the Maiden Saga but the brief descriptions and key words below should be used when considering the character and likely reactions of each people. In keeping with the nature of the books, the stress is on eroticism.

So here we have the cultures:
-Aeg: very tall and strong, pale and red-haired. Ferocious fighters and enthusiastic raiders, but they don't like fighting "unworthy" foes. Primary drive is Power. They're your barbarians from every fantasy source ever. Picture has a lady with a battleaxe and a see-through bikini. Apparently they can't even understand the concept of slavery. Sometimes they fuck goblins or fae. They like strength and stuff, so courting and brawling are very much the same thing. Actually, same with fucking and brawling. Prostitution isn't done, apparently. Also they don't have a shame thing about sex.
-Mund: close cousins of the Aeg, but not as big, and pale-haired. So non-Germanic Norse, but I didn't say that. They are "hearty and practical but often aggressive". Their religion is totally the Norse one and they have berserkers. Primary drive is Pride. Slavery is anathema to them. They are more reserved than the Aeg, but still quite rough. "Both men and women are intensely proud and extraordinarily sensitive to humiliation, while virginity is an obsession. Highborn girls live in towers and wear iron girdles beneath immensely elaborate dresses". Men literally have to scale the towers, strip them naked and ravish them, and the girls have to fight them off to the best of their abilities. No really. Also they love flagellation, and lesbianism is a common but shameful secret.
-Hai: these are the Romans, complete with the style of dress, their more golden tones and their love of pageants, gladiator fights and political intrigue. Slavery is "rare". They take sex for granted, enjoying each other openly and with few inhibitions. They consider it rude not to satisfy each other in the evening or at a small social gathering between friends. Nudity is commonplace and erotic spectacles are part of every pageant and circus. They don't really have taboos. Primary drive: Allure.
-Ythan: the picture looks like a racist caricature of an ancient Greek. Bald, fat, wearing the toga thing, whip in one hand, wine jug in the other. They are apparently heavily interbred with dwarves, and they lack grace and beauty. They breed slaves for export, and their Primary Drive is Craft. They don't find each other attractive so have to use stimulants and musks.
-Makea: the picture is of a swarthy Gypsie/pirate. With a big nose. Slavery is commonplace and their primary drive is Greed. Sex is practically a financial status thing to them - to buy sex shows you're rich enough to be better than the person you're buying it from. The most successful have groups of concubines. They love erotic games that force friends or lovers to degrade one another, and "they are inveterate sodomites". I am not making this shit up, it actually says that. Time for a refill.
-Oretes: okay, it's sort of an Asian culture thing, but the picture is of a scantily clad dancing Gypsie girl. Primary drive is Guile, slavery is institutional. Sex is a pretty standard affair for them, but often used for intrigue, to cause scandals, so there's an elaborate system of brothels. They have a mild nudity taboo, so titillating clothing is preferred. "Oral sex, and particularly rimming, is used to display status among the Oreteans and therefore considered humiliating for the giver."
-Vendjome: the picture for this looks like a sleazier version of the Ythan, but apparently they're related to the Oreteans. Slavery is economically essential (all foreigners are automatically considered slaves if they haven't the paperwork, slaves are seen as animals), and the primary drive is Wealth. They mostly just like raping slaves, and don't really care about the gender.
-Aprena: oh wow, the dark skinned people... we have a near-nude black woman with a massive afro. Primary drive is Wisdom, and slavery is unacceptable. They have few taboos, and nudity is the rule. Prostitution isn't really done, but it's normal to have sex with someone as a way of saying thank you. Because they hate slavery, it's their favourite secret taboo fantasy (and with it, bondage and all that).

The setting also has dwarves, trolls, goblins and nymphs. I'll show you a picture of a goblin, it's priceless. AND NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

I bet you can't wait for part 2, right? Yes, I've already had enough that typing is hard, and typing the captcha to upload that pic was especially challenging.

Surely this RPG has robust and functional grappling rules, yes?

You know, the Spartans had a similar law. When a man and woman wanted to marry, they would arrange for the woman to walk alone at night and the man had to sneak out of the barracks, find her, wrestle her to the ground and fuck her, and spartan women knew how to fight, then get back without being caught because every single part of that was a punishable offense. The point being that Spartans wanted their men to be sneaky as well as strong.

So if you start with a 20 in Greed and 20s in all but one of your primary stats, then you have a Glory of 7 and will literally always win a Greed match and always lose any other match, right? But because you can call do-over eight times and your opponent can call do-over like 4 times tops, you always win. Am I missing anything? Seems like the system is so amazingly easy to break that I already did it.

-Username17

Um, Frank, I believe you're missing the fact that the game is glorified spank material/foreplay.

Prak_Anima wrote:Um, Frank, I believe you're missing the fact that the game is glorified spank material/foreplay.

I don't think that is any excuse for a game to have bad mechanics.

-Username17

Ogre: you are going to be so disappointed.

Frank: I wish I could say you missed something but no, you seriously have nailed it.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Prak_Anima wrote:Um, Frank, I believe you're missing the fact that the game is glorified spank material/foreplay.

I don't think that is any excuse for a game to have bad mechanics.

I'll regret this when I'm sober, but I once jokingly made a Spanking supplement for D&D as part of a very specialist community. It was at least fucking balanced and not so easy to break, and not completely deterministic.

I'll continue once I refill my glass.

Deterministic Spanking would be a good name for a band.

Also, everyone hates Makeans. Just thought I'd mention that. It says it in the book. Racism is a part of the setting, not just inherent in the writing - so at least they admit the world is really fucked up in that regard.

"The game master may need to step in to stop any abuse of the system". In other words, they're too lazy to make a solid system, so if you can't make a good story to justify your broken character, the GM just says no.

NOW they tell us that the above method is for "stranger" characters, and that for a normal character you have 64 points and it's 1-10 for all stats before racial mods - 36 bonus points each, assigned haphazardly.

Also, characters from the various cultures can have specialist attributes, basically extra traits they buy. For instance, the Aed can buy "magic" (all MTP it seems) for 30 points. Mund can take a berserk fury for 20 points that multiplies their Power by x4 when really mad. Hai can take Charm for 20 points, halving enemy Power and doubling their own Allure.

You can buy the trait of another culture for double points.

Now it points out that the game isn't "nice" and PCs are supposed to have their own goals and work against each other as need be. It says you should have some kind of bonus for winning the most Glory per session, or "Better still, if the company is sufficiently depraved, forfeits may be employed, in whatever manner players deem fit."

I'm not sure whether to be horrified, or to approve of games that suggest the players all fuck.

Now it tells us that basically any encounter or whatever is a Conflict (the challenges in my first post). It tells us that if it's PC vs NPC, the PC always chooses the attribute (yes, things just got even better Frank) and the NPC always rolls first. This system is so fucking lazy that I am having another drink.

K wrote:Deterministic Spanking would be a good name for a band.

...it totally would.

Okay, now they tell us something important: know how it's way better to be a "Stranger" because you can have a 20 for a stat? Sorry, you lose out here because characters of cultures get their Primary Drive.

If you're using your Primary Drive, then you can add dice together to make sixes - if you rolled 1, 1, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 6, you'd have 1+5, 2+4, 6 and 6 for four "hits".

For teams, every member of the team gets a percentage reduction of their result before you add them together - 20% for 2, 30% for 3 and so on.

For actual physical combat, you seriously have a table to look on, with culture x weapon type to determine a number that is added to your Power plus Experience for the roll. You also get bonuses (regardless of culture) for various armours/shields, and then another table (based on culture) for bonuses if you are a guard or soldier or other experienced combatant.

Also you can spend one Glory to just run away at the start of a conflict rather than fight it out.

Now you can actually get damaged and die in physical combat. Check it out:

As a combat is played out, characters are likely to be damaged. This is expressed as a reduction in their Game Points in Constitution at the rate of 1 for every double your opponents throw, and vice versa. A triple means 2 points, a quadruple 3 points, five of a kind 4 points and six of a kind 6 points. If fighting as a group, then before the combat begins add together the characters’ Game Points in Constitution to make a pool. Recognising that players generally prefer their characters to stand alone, such a group will usually involve one PC and one or more NPCs. At the end of the combat the remaining points must be redistributed between the characters involved in the original proportions, although a PC is always allowed to retain 1 point. If there aren’t enough points to go around, one or more characters are dead and out of the game. In the event of a group of PCs not having enough points to go around, then those who started with the strongest constitutions take precedence. If two are equal, they must roll, with the highest total the survivor.

That seriously looks like it's saying characters with higher Con die first. I assume that isn't what they mean by "take precedence" though. Fuck this, MORE ABSINTHE. I hate this game.

I have to admit, I'm the kind of anal retentive person who kind of wants an actual system for any roleplaying, regardless of the number of hands that are above the table, so I wasn't excusing the lack of a good system...

And it occurs to me that this is looking like the opposite end of the "Shitty game system design" spectrum from FATAL. Both are fucking horrible, but one is simplistic to the point of barely being a system, the other is so overwrought and complicated, that I still want to try it, just to see how long character creation would take.

...yeah, I fail to find words to describe what I just saw and read.

Koumei wrote:
I'm not sure whether to be horrified, or to approve of games that suggest the players all fuck.

I'm horrified. The players in my games have typically been ugly dudes or lesbians. I have never met a gamer that I would want to have sex with ever.

Sucks to be you Ted. All three of the women who have touched my jibblies I met or got closer to through gaming. Of my current group, I may just be desperate, but I wouldn't necessarily mind fucking any of them.

I have never met a straight single female gamer in real life.

That's your problem. They tend to be bi.

bi people are crazy. I should know, im bi myself.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Prak_Anima wrote:Um, Frank, I believe you're missing the fact that the game is glorified spank material/foreplay.

I don't think that is any excuse for a game to have bad mechanics.

-Username17

That may be the best thing I've read all day.

Prak_Anima wrote:That's your problem. They tend to be bi.

Or, at the very least they're not about to let breasts or penises get in the way of a good orgasm.

Ted the Flayer wrote:bi people are crazy. I should know, im bi myself.

Us pansexuals are even crazier.

whatever wrote:Or, at the very least they're not about to let breasts or penises get in the way of a good orgasm.

Pretty much.

Koumei wrote:Also, everyone hates Makeans. Just thought I'd mention that. It says it in the book. Racism is a part of the setting, not just inherent in the writing - so at least they admit the world is really fucked up in that regard.

Out of morbid curiosity, do they explain why? I'm slightly curious if the game prioritizes hatred for ass-fucking, slave holding, greed, degradation or just having a big nose.

No it just says everyone hates them, almost as a footnote. I'll continue the review tonight, and won't that be delightful?

For something called Maiden Saga this is really dissapoint, Riddle of Steel has more erotic conflict resolution mechanics than this.

From the sounds of it, except for the crazy Rapunzels with chastity belts, no one is a maiden long enough to create any sort of saga anyway.


Maybe people hate the Makeans for their ass-backwards social system. Being inherently greedy and wanting to spend money on sex seems like a contradiction in terms to me.