(Header image from Jeff S. PhotoArt at HDCanvas.ca)

“You all meet in a tavern…”

Yes! This is exactly what I wanted, just a classic dnd experience with some new designer philosophies. I had in front of me a classic ranger character sheet, with interesting abilities that I chose myself by applying stickers from a wide range of build options. I knew I was going to feel heroic!

I loved the set up of this game. It was the first game I got to play at DragonCon, being run by the designers of the game! Everything felt lush, high quality, and professional. I had a small mini that looked like my character, sitting in a tavern with all these other classic adventuring archetypes.

As he set up, the designer/gm promised us fast paced combat, interesting decisions, and strong narrative. He lit a fire in our hearts as he told us how this game brought a whole new plane of design to the OSR sphere, including their skill systems, spell casting, and most importantly, the Epoch Die.¹

Before we even started the session I had opened a tab on my phone and started a late pledge for this game. It sounded like it nailed everything I wanted for an impromptu in-person game. Look and feel of Dungeons and Dragons but with less friction. Perfect.

Then we started to play.

The Design

Into the Lair is clearly derived from D&D 5e. It is a classic d20 + modifier roll over system, and each character had 6 stats and 3 saves derived from those stats. There is some amount of streamlining with just the ability scores, not mountains of skills to look through. I will take that.

Each character then has special abilities coming from their class and archetype, including ones I got to choose from a pack of stickers. That was genuinely fantastic. There were interesting choices for the abilities, the stickers themselves were fun, and it was 100x faster than trying to write all the abilities down. Major points for the stickers.

Those abilities let you do a lot of interesting things. The game uses zone combat, and many of the abilities focused on smashing enemies across zones, or teleporting in and out of sticky situations. My ranger could pin an enemy to a wall and let a teammate deal more damage to them, or make a called shot and crit on an 18, 19, or 20 instead of just a natural 20.

And speaking of crits, instead of crit successes dealing double damage, you get to pick a super charged ability card, and can use it at any point during the rest of the combat. This was way more tactical than just a bit of extra damage, and the crit decks matched the themes and goals of the characters. Good design!

The Epoch Die is probably the coolest piece of mechanical design in the game. On any roll, including skill checks, attack, and damage, you can add a d6 from a limited pool of Epoch dice. The dice replenish on a nat 1 and after a long rest. This was great! You are incentivized to use them so nat 1s aren’t wasted, and it makes those critical failures feel much better.

The Sand

(Image from the Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones)

There are few things that ruin a game experience for me than empty promises. While Into the Lair has some objectively good improvements over D&D 5th edition, it doesn’t move far enough to fix my main complaints. Very quickly the same pervasive issues in dnd began to cause friction in this game, like being given a shiny new car only to find its engine filled with sand.

• Combat was punishingly slow. It took us an hour and a half just to get through the tutorial combat. I was often waiting 15 minutes between turns.
• There are no special rules for fighting hordes, and we only had one PC with an AOE, so combats with more than a few enemies just took forever as we picked things off one by one. I would never run horde combat in this game.

• The GM kept telling us how well balanced all the classes were, but that was manifestly no true. Just like in dnd5e, magic is way overpowered. The aforementioned character with an AOE was the wizard, which, fine, that should be their job. But she *also* did 41 damage to a single target in one attack, more than double what any of the rest of us could do. Our job basically became “protect the wizard and pray they roll high.”

• MISSING ATTACKS STILL SUCKS! I want to be a hero, let me be a hero! Nothing is worse than waiting 15 minutes for a turn, setting up this cool attack with my shiny ranger abilities, then whiffing and having to wait. The Epoch Dice softens this a bit by giving you a small cushion if you almost hit, but I was still missing often enough to be mad about it.

These issues were all exacerbated by the fact that the upfront pitch promised smooth, fast, and dynamic combat with balanced characters and none of those things were true. I was exhausted by the end of it. It is somewhat concerning when a game convinces you *not* to buy it.

I feel bad for writing what feels like a such a negative review, but I am just frustrated because of how much I want to like the game. The art is amazing and evocative, and their central game design tenets were exactly what I wanted, but the game just didn’t deliver. For me, this was a real fantasy heartbreaker in a previously unexperienced form of the word.

The only circumstance I think I can recommend this game is if you really like the art (which is fantastic) and want a box set to pull out for new players a moments notice. But even then, I think other games work better. The Cairn box set is beautiful and built on a system that I think is much more streamlined and better for new players. If you really like the stickers, Daggerheart‘s cards serve a similar purpose and are reusable.

This game is just not for me.

-Brett

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1. They pronounced this “epic” and I hated it. I looked it up afterwards, and that is technically correct, and it’s only pronounced “ee-pok” in the UK, but it just kicked me out of the game. It felt so peak millennial in nature. Like, “Yo that attack was epic bacon sandwich bro!” I know it is a minor nitpick, but it genuinely bothered me. ↩︎

Acknowledgements

You can late pledge to the Into the Lair crowd funder here.

Thank you to the team at Epoch Saga Games. I am glad people are making the games they want to make, and I am glad they were able to find a large enough audience to have a successful crowd funder. I wish them the best on their continued journey with the game.

Thank you for the folks at DragonCon that I got to play this with, and especially to TundraFundra for hosting me and listening to me rant about this game for three days.

And of course, a huge thanks to kraftpaperhat for doing all of the branding for Secret Sunday Sampler. He recently created some background textures and additional designs I am hoping I can incorporate into the blog. He is the best.

P.S. It feels odd to give a game a negative review, especially one that was done to a level a quality as this. It is far beyond my capacity to ever put together a game that looks as nice as Into the Lair. It would be easy to just write this bad review off as “Well what does he know, he has never designed a game,” and honestly, if you are someone in a position to enjoy Into the Lair, then I hope you do. RPGs are fun.

P.S.S. I think there is a lot of overlap between parenting skills and GMing skills. Lots of time spent checking in with the table, managing spotlight between players (kids), and trying to gauge emotions and evaluate engagement. Plenty of accepting excitement and redirecting it to something more positive. I really really want to say that GMing has made me a better dad, but I don’t think it has. Maybe I just need a few hundred more hours and I will get there.