Thoughts on the Electrum Archive
H.R. Millar. Illustration from E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It. 1905.
I've just concluded a micro-campaign of The Electrum Archive, a science-fantasy roleplaying game by Emiel Boven and Ava Islam. I wanted to write up some impressions of the system, the setting, my practice as a GM, and of the micro-campaign structure we adopted. My response to the system ended up being longer than I first thought, so I'll break this up into two posts as well.
This is emphatically not a review. I haven't spent the requisite editorial effort to weigh my conflicting opinions and synthesize them into a coherent whole. This is a mass of impressions and notes that I am putting forward in the interesting of sparking conversation.
You can find links to my six play reports below:
The Electrum Archive
On paper, TEA is the perfect index of media I love. It's clearly a mechanical descendant of Into the Odd and it takes direct inspiration from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - all influences I constantly find myself folding into my own RPG writing. In fact, my first impression on cracking open the game was that so many of the ideas expressed within felt like they had been pulled from fantasy heartbreakers I had left in my drafts.
In practice, while I enjoyed my time with the game, there are a few issues that make me unlikely to come back.
The Good
I loved TEA's magic system. Spells are composed formulaically from random rolls on tables of adjectives and nouns a la Ben Milton's Maze Rats. The players had Controlling Charm and Slow Malady and were frequently testing ways we could interpret those terms into the scene. Assigning spells an ink cost (aka a monetary cost) both gives the players license to cast big impactful spells from a relatively early point in play and burns the cash they do find at a regular rate. I found the guidance for interpreting what constitutes the different tiers of spell extremely useful for adjudicating on the fly - some of the best of such writing I've encountered.
The backgrounds available to starting characters provided an excellent entry into the world and felt consistently relevant to the fiction. I was on the GM side of the table, but it seems like a nice way to carve out some ownership and self-expression from the random results of your Attribute rolls.
I really enjoyed language mattering in play. One character could read Lahmaic Script, which ended up being surprisingly useful for reading ancient inscriptions or making guesses at the sigils displayed by Elder computer terminals. Caring about deciphering the meaning of text gives the game an Indiana Jones vibe - the good archaeological intrigue parts of Indiana Jones, at least. The Interpretation Roll is a perfect example of when to break away from a universal resolution system. It gives you just the right amount of lead as a GM for when your players inevitably ask you what runes or markings say and you haven't actually prepped the exact text.
I liked the expression of zones used here. This felt like a distillation of ideas I had read before in other games and blog posts, but felt concrete and actionable for the players in a way other versions I have encountered do not. I almost always prefer theater of the mind combat, so this mostly came naturally, but the explicit rules text requiring the GM to lay out the different spaces where action is going to happen is useful.
And I can't say enough good things about the setting. I'm increasingly finding that I do my best work improvising within the framework of a larger lore bible. Orn has enough detail in its factions and geography that I was able to pull specifics as necessary, but also felt like it had enough blank spaces to leave me room to improvise without someone saying "well, actually..." I ran my entire campaign in an area marked on the main map that was just a proper noun between two places detailed in the gazetteer, but I think you could do the same in Titan Port (which is detailed in Volume II) and still have room to make your own spaces and characters.
The Bad
These are rules that kept coming up that had deep and pernicious impacts on the game and the player characters. Your mileage may, of course, vary. Note: I'm spending more wordcount on these concerns, but really I think they balance out just about equally with all the good elements I've described above. I just want to be specific.
I come to TEA with a lot of hours spent GMing Into the Odd and its successors like Cairn and Mausritter (which are explicitly cited here as influences). As a result, a lot of my criticisms of TEA are lensed through a comparison to those systems. I don't mean to say that ItO is necessarily a better game, just that TEA frequently borrows from it and the noticeable changes it makes almost always feel like they are for the worse.
Initiative
Initiative doesn't technically exist in TEA, but the same idea is handled by rolling a d10 under your weapon's Speed score. If you aren't attacking, you roll versus 5 instead. I do like the dimensionality this adds to selecting what weapon to use. Admittedly, I played a few sessions before I realized that the rules explicitly say "attack with a weapon," so technically doing something like tripping someone with your staff would happen at the 5 speed, not the staff's speed.
The issue is that this adds a bunch of stalling to the otherwise snappy combat system. Players need to declare their actions, considering the hidden information of the enemy's intent, at the beginning of each round. They need to do that before anyone even rolls initiative and the combat actions themselves are so brief, that you spend about 75% of your time considering and 25% playing it out. I'd prefer a system that gets the roll out of the way quickly so the players who are going after can plan their turn asynchronously.
Additionally, this creates an ambiguity of what happens if a character's action is invalidated. If you roll on your dagger's Speed but every enemy you could move to is downed, can you instead apply first aid to a friend? My first instinct is yes, but this creates some knotty and negative incentives. I wish the game addressed this with explicit rules text.
Note also that NPCs are unaffected by weapon differentiation - a greatsword wielding goon moves at the same time as their friend with a dagger. It feels a little clumsy.
Hit Points
Hit Points in TEA feel like a real problem. Attacks always hit, so your character with 2d4 starting HP is at serious risk from any given d8 attack from a sword. Unlike in ItO, however, when your character hits 0 HP they are automatically knocked out of action. They roll a d6, surviving with a critical wound on a 4+. No STR saves or ability loss, or any other "wounded but still in the fight" range. Additionally, HP is restored by 2 on a short rest with the possibility of an additional 1d6 with an Archive test. Compare this to restoring full HP by catching your breath in this game's forebears.
The result of these changes is that player characters are extremely (I think unreasonably) brittle. Now, you might say that's fine; combat is dangerous and to be avoided after all. Personally, I follow the truism that injured characters are more interesting than dead ones. I want the capacity for a fight to suddenly turn lethal, but I much prefer the shifting priorities of taking a wounding blow and needing to beat a hasty retreat. Wounded characters have to make interesting choices about returning to camp to rest. Dead ones just get replaced in the next convenient scene.
TEA's interpretation of HP feels to me like hedging, like not committing to the abstraction of HP into "Hit Protection" enough to actually see where the narrative goes, but also not letting HP be "Health Points" and thus materially result in wounds and fatigue.
Archetypes
I was a GM for this game so I have a different relation to the classes than the players, but my impression after play is that the Warlock is the real heart of this game. Spell Names are a signature mechanic that are deeply tied into the excellent lore and well supported by explanatory text and flavorful roll tables.
Vagabonds, the fighter equivalent, have a real issue that there abilities make them significantly better at fighting than the other classes, but fighting is so deadly for all the aforementioned reasons that it is still a mistake to be in combat in the first place. Having a class that only gets to use its features in a fail state is a real drag.
Add to this that unlike the other classes, their features are really gated by rests. In every major fight, our vagabond expended most of their grit points in the first round to take down a major threat and barely survive the enemy's retaliation. Then they basically needed to take a day off to get back to fighting trim. It feels like a bit of 5e design leaking in to a game that otherwise isn't interested in (or amenable to) this kind of resource management or character sheet-based play.
I have less qualms about the Fixer (née thief or specialist). They have an extremely compelling structure for their features. They can take any number of Skills, then later "master" them to unlock a more advanced version. I could see this being the structure of entire classless game all by itself. Fixer features are nice, but seemed consistently boring and frequently only really mattered in combat. A reroll is useful, but it doesn't paint a picture in the way the warlock's spells or vagabond's maneuvers do. Swapping items from your bag is cool (and likely extremely abusable), but not a character defining trait.
Overall, if we are going to go down the road of classes filled with proper noun features, I want those features to make a big impact on the story when they come up and I also want them to not solely function in combat. This does feel like my issue most likely to be addressed by subsequent volumes though.
The Not To My Taste
These are rules that I found don't align with what I want out of a game or that just didn't come up. I don't think they have structural flaws in the same way.
Toolkits
I understand the allure of toolkits - placeholder items with three usage dots that you can use to retrieve an appropriate item when needed. They solve the problem of needing to buy a bunch of gear in town, but still apply some resource limitation on the players. It's an extremely persuasive paradigm that I associate with Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark, but that has cropped up all over in recent years.
My issue with toolkits is that they kill the scrappiness that having a crowbar, a ball of twine, and a mirror require. Caring about inventory items is why Cairn and Mausritter can get away without differentiating characters by their classes. There is a scrappy and inventive mode of play that comes from looking at your inventory and needing to make the tools you have work. Toolkits expand the circle of "tools you have" to basically all carry-able objects, especially in a party of three or four players where you likely have one of each handy.
Again, this feels like a weird combat-focused leakage. Weapons get an additional dimension of detail despite the fact that combat is too dangerous to engage in regularly. I'd rather that dimensionality was applied to other tools the party might have in their possession. Or rather, I think the attention that wasn't spent here instead got spent on systems I don't like, so I am chafing at the absence.
Travel Rolls
The travel roll procedure simply did not function in my campaign. As it stands, players are supposed to roll a d6 to represent the number of days of travel before they encounter something on the road. When the appointed day arrives, the GM (I believe, but this isn't specified) rolls on a table of Travel Events which mostly effect travel time but occasionally trigger an encounter.
My issue is that my players frequently were travelling in increments of a single day. This is obviously a problem I made for myself by focusing on a smaller area rather than the grand travel suggested by the provided map of Orn with its weeks-long routes. I also exacerbated the issue by giving the PCs ready access to a sand skiff, cutting their travel times by 2/3. I think this system would work better if you stuck with the two to four days of travel that seems implicitly suggested by the locations described in the Regions section of the book.
Conclusion
Overall, I don't want to come off too harsh on The Electrum Archive. I had a great time running it and it seems like the players had a good time visiting Orn. I make these notes not to bash the game or even really to request changes, but to clarify my own thoughts as I continue to go about designing and GMing games in this approximate space.