The Book of Tables play aid for Avalon Hill's Powers & Perils RPG is one of those additions that while not necessary to play the game, add a certain bit of convenience for the referee and allows the publisher to make some extra cash off their game. The Avalon Hill Game Company is now a property of Hasbro and I doubt they will be republishing any of the Powers & Perils (P&P) line, so making money now only applies to the second-hand sellers. Fortunately for me, there are plenty of them around who seem willing to take my money for a 30+ year old product.
I have recently reacquainted myself with the P&P line of products and find they have an appeal beyond the colorful box cover art. P&P is on the complex side, partially due to the numerous tables and charts used. The Book of Tables is obviously all about those charts and tables. Included in the thin box are three tri-fold reference screens with colorful illustrations, one each for combat, magic use and encounters. The reference screens and the 48 page book probably reproduce every table from the core rules and although I have not refereed a game of P&P, I can see some utility to having those charts and tables assembled in a handy manner.
I must confess to a personal fondness for tables and charts - one of my favorites in this set is the spell language table. P&P uses a magic system resembling colleges or schools of magic and there is a bonus to casting a spell if you have competency with the native language the spell was developed with. I like the idea and am borrowing this native language of magics as "color" for my campaign.
The default setting for P&P is the Perilous Lands. The above pictured box comes with three books, a map collection, a Culture Book and a Site Book and together they comprise a very detailed world setting full of material that can be mined for years of adventure. Much of the material could be used for any rules and is not tied to P&P specifically. P&P distinguishes between an upper world of the gods and demons, a middle world, the place where humans dwell and the subject of this box set, and a lower world of eternal twilight where troll and faerry folk dwell.
The Map Book is 30 pages of color maps that together cover the continent in enough detail to make a hex-crawl type campaign possible. Terrain features of all kinds are in evidence and there are deserts, jungle, mountains, plains, islands, cold tundra - virtually all the climatic regions we have on earth. For the most part the geography seems to make sense, although there are a few anomalies as often appear in fantasy maps such as a river that flows up-hill. I have seen much worse.
The 68 page culture book details around seventy cultures, their language families, relationship between barbarian nations and civilized countries, religions, histories and current political climate. The detail in this book is dense and compares very favorably with other similar products of it's day and even those of much more recent development. The peoples described here are given personality traits, a physical description and small drawing and often a real-world comparison such as "similar to Native American Plains Tribes" to help form an impression of how to referee them.
Seventeen locations scattered about the world are described in the 36 page Site Book which also includes additional cultural information.Two of the locations are only briefly located on the map and the reader is referred elsewhere for details. One of those locations, a haunted mansion, appears in an issue of the Avalon Hill RPG magazine Heroes (Vol. 1, No. 2). The other is a boxed adventure titled Tower of the Dead. The other fifteen sites cover a wide spectrum of adventure ideas and could easily be imported into other worlds, but together give a good feel for the Perilous Lands.
The sites covered in detail include a lost city of a forgotten evil race, a city of jinn, a city built around an evil demon-god, a faerry wood with connection to the lower world, a faerry castle, a dwarf citadel extending into the lower world, a dragon's lair, a valley of Chaos, a tower dedicated to Balance, a ruined city of dead spirits with a portal to hell, a temple of Law, a mountain home of an evil god, a feudal land ruled by competing wizard lords, and an island home to giants. Some of the sites are reminiscent of classic sword & sorcery and sword & planet tropes, others are more original, all lend a grim, gritty atmosphere to P&P's default setting.
System author Richard Snider, a member of Dave Arneson's Minneapolis Blackmoor group I believe, has brought an interesting world setting to the gaming community in the P&P products. The more I read of it the more impressed with it I become. The P&P RPG appeared at a time when many gamers, myself included, were searching for more realism and detail in our rules. My own preference in system rules has reverted to a less detailed, "rules lite" approach. I find much to like, however, in the P&P family of products.
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