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helenarlett-rex · 2 years

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Albedo: Platinum Catalyst vs. Hc Svnt Dracones

I love tabletop role playing games, and I love furry stuff. So it’s always been a dream of mine to have the two combined. Eventually I did manage to find some games that did just that, and even managed to convince my group of pretty much D&D only players to give them a try. Then Covid hit just as we were getting started and we had to stop meeting up for about 2 years... But now that we are meeting up for weekly games again and I finally got a chance to really try them out, I figured I would give a little comparison review of the two games. I just thought it might be fun to do considering that despite being so similar to each other, both of these games still somehow manage to be worlds apart from each other at the same time. That and I really don’t see many people talking about either of these games much... like, at all... and that is a god damned shame...

So what are these games we are talking about? Picture a galaxy populated entirely by anthropomorphic animals with access to advance technology, the ability to travel through space, and only a couple hundred years of known history to base their lives and society off of... The human race may have been responsible for their creation, but they are long gone now, leaving these gun toting space furries to find their way in the universe on their own in the dystopian society they’ve built for themselves. Which game am I talking about? Both of them actually... Both games run off of that exact same premise, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. So let’s compare them and see what we think.

Both Albedo and Hc Svnt Dracones are Furry themed, sci-fi, tabletop role playing games. Albedo: Platinum Catalyst, published in 2004, is the 25th Anniversary Edition of Albedo: The Role Playing Game, first published in 1984, which is based on the comic book, Albedo Anthropomorphics, or more specifically, the comic strip, Erma Felna: EDF, which appeared in said comic book. Why the game was named after the anthology comic book the strip appeared in instead of being named after the actual strip it was based on, I have no idea... But I should point out that Albedo: The Role Playing Game and Albedo: Platinum Catalyst should not be confused with Albedo Combat Patrol, which is a tabletop miniature war game (as apposed to a role playing game) also based on Erma Felna: EDF. (Although if you use miniatures in your role playing games, like I do, then the existence of such a game based on the same property is a life saver.)

While Hc Svnt Dracones, published in 2014, is an original property not based on anything, although it has since had at least two novels released based on the setting of the game.

I wasn’t collecting comic books yet (or even reading) in 1984 so I’ve never read the Erma Felna: EDF comics, although scans of them are fairly easy to find online so I really should at some point... And while I have both of the Hc Svnt Dracones novels sitting on my bookshelf, I haven’t gotten around to reading either of them yet either... So I’m going into both of these games with no prior knowledge of the settings other than what the game books tell me, and giving an unbiased opinion on each.

So where to start...? Let’s talk about setting.

Setting:

Both of the core rule books offer a load of information on the setting so even if you haven’t read any of the related media you won’t be lost on what the world you are playing in is like or what you might be doing in said world. And I mean a lot of information... Nearly the first half of both of these books reads like a history text book about the setting you will be playing in before you even get to any of the information on game play. Which is very useful if you are a DM, not so much if you are just a player who only cares about making your character and learning the basic rules so you can play through whatever game your DM throws at you. But I’ll talk more about that later...

Both settings are very similar in that they are both sci-fi settings, in the age of space travel, in a universe where everyone is an anthropomorphic animal and humans have long since vanished. In Albedo it’s not entirely clear if humans ever existed, but from the standpoint of a DM (called a Referee in this game) reading through the lore section of the book, it seems to be pretty heavily implied that they did at some point, and may even still exist... somewhere...

The premise is that a while back, (I don’t remember the exact number right off hand but I think it was a couple hundred years ago) all of these anthropomorphic animals just suddenly became aware... They already existed, they already had cities and societies built for them, and they were already living in them, going through the motions, but they weren’t self-aware until one day when some unseen force just sort of flipped the switch and then suddenly they all became self-aware all at once. They have no idea how, or why, or who did it, but suddenly you just had a whole race of animal people gain sentience with access to modern technology and no history. But they already have working computers with internet right there at their fingertips to tell them anything they need to know... as well as monitor every aspect of their lives and assign them with a Social Political Intelligence score based on every action they take, which determines their worth and rank in society... I don’t know how the comics read, but just by going on the lore information in the rule book, it instantly paints a very dystopian society full or people who don’t know enough to realize they are even in a dystopian society... A world where everyone has to act a certain way that has already been determined for them just to maintain their SPI score so the computer doesn’t demote their social worth to the point where they can’t make enough money to survive. Because your income is based on your SPI score... And while the book doesn’t actually try to present it as a dystopian society... It tries to present it as a militaristic society, maybe something reminiscent of Starship Troopers... the more small details you pick up on here and there the more you realize that this world is dystopian as fuck. I mean, I started picking up on little things said here and there like how physical contact with other people is considered uncomfortable and socially taboo, or how “sharing your music” with other people (or in other words, listening to music without head phones) is socially taboo, or expressing too much emotion, or walking too fast on the sidewalk, or... Basically I started getting Decision at Doona vibes, if anyone ever read that book...

Their society is also pretty racist too... The computer has just decided that some animals are worth more to society than others and so they are given a higher SPI (and in turn higher pay) just for being said animal. If you are a crow for example, it doesn’t matter what you do or how accomplished you become, you will never have and SPI as high as that horse working in the same job as you... Because he’s a horse and you’re a crow and that’s all there is to it.

But I believe the person who wrote this game may have had a military background, so that could be an explanation as to why he created such a dystopian setting while trying his hardest not to present it as a dystopian setting... I’ll take a dig at the military and say maybe the creator himself was just as unaware as the people living in the setting he created as to how dystopian it really is... Because, yeah... this game really does focus on military life. It’s a sci-fi military game. If you are looking for a game where you don’t have to play as an officer in the military, then this is not the game for you. That is literally your only option.

Hc Svnt Dracones on the other hand takes a very similar premise and uses it to create a cyberpunk game instead of a military game. In Hc Svnt Dracones the anthropomorphic animal people (called Vectors) know they were created by humans. They were first created (700 years ago) as products by the big corporations to be bought and sold, until the governments of Earth decided it wasn’t ethical and ordered a stop to it... And the corporations, not wanting to lose out on all the money they were making, moved to Mars and gave the Earth governments the middle finger... Which lead to war between the Earth governments and the corporations... which eventually led to the complete extinction of the human race and the planet Earth becoming a scorched nuclear wasteland... Leaving all of the Vectors up there on Mars to pick up the pieces and build their own society... completely under corporate control because that’s all they know... So unlike Albedo which gives us a dystopian military controlled society without even trying to, Hc Svnt Dracones gives us a dystopian corporate controlled society on purpose. Although once again, the people living in it have no idea they are living in a dystopia... Everyone believes they are living in an almost utopian post scarcity society, but that’s just a lie being propagated by the corporations to keep the masses under their control.

So for setting I’m going to have to give it to Hc Svnt Dracones. It actually embraces what it is without trying to hide it and all the dystopian stuff just works much better in a cyberpunk game than it does in a military game, in my opinion anyways... The whole mystery of where the animal people came from and why they were suddenly given sentience and no instruction with what to do from there that Albedo sets up is pretty intriguing... and could totally be used to create some pretty interesting campaign ideas... but the game isn’t really set up for you to fully explore those kind of campaigns... It’s set up for you to play Furry Starship Troopers but with no giant bugs to fight... Hc Svnt Dracones on the other hand gives you no end of mysteries in the setting to run similar types of campaigns and actually seems to be built to facilitate a mystery solving type of game, so again, I‘m giving it to that game for setting...

Character Creation:

Character creation is going to be different from what you are used to in both of these games if you are only familiar with games like D&D. You aren’t really going to be rolling up any stats. Instead they mostly rely on a point buy system with extra points being allocated determined on what species you decide to play. So it’s going to be a process of pick what animal you want to be, take the stats that animal gives you, then assign a certain number of other stat points wherever you want/can, blah, blah, blah... you’ll figure it out... probably... Actually it was a lot easier to figure out in Hc Svnt Dracones than it was in Albedo. Albedo’s rules weren’t quite as clear to me as they were in Hc Svnt Dracones and I kept flipping back and forth between pages being like, “What am I supposed to do now? Okay... How... Where is that? I fill in what? Where do I get that information?” While Hc Svnt Dracones just easily walked me through the process one page at a time, in order, until I had a finished character. Or at least the first edition of Hc Svnt Dracones did... I made the mistake of trying to start with second edition but that book was a worse mess than Albedo and after going back and playing first edition I don’t think I will ever touch second edition again...

Albedo gives you a fairly wide variety of animal species to choose from for character creation... more than Hc Svnt Dracones does actually... which is pretty nice. You rarely find yourself saying, “I want to play as this animal” and then not having stats for it... which can be a small problem in Hc Svnt Dracones leading for the need to homebrew... But Albedo doesn’t give the same kind of customization options that Hc Svnt Dracones does. In Albedo if you want to play a fox, that’s it... You’re playing an anthropomorphic fox... Just a basic bitch fox... Assign your fox stats and move on to the next step... But in Hc Svnt Dracones if you say you want to play a fox that’s only the very beginning of the process. Okay, you’re a fox... but what is your fox like? Do you have plantigrade legs or digitigrade legs? Do you have any kind of weird fur colors or pasterns? Are you just a two legged fox or are you a foxtaur? Or maybe you’re a feral (called a lateral in this game) so you know... you have the body of a normal animal that isn’t humanoid at all... Do you have any extra limbs? Implants? Surgical alterations? Are you a hybrid of two different species...? The customizing options in Hc Svnt Dracones just go on and on and pretty much covers every niche of what you would expect from the furry fandom. And being a cyberpunk game you can always pay to have more work done on yourself later on if you decide you want to change something. You can even get a sex change operation in game. And I should point out that none of it is just cosmetic. Every little feature adds something to the mechanics of your character.

It’s still a little annoying that there are so many species not covered in Hc Svnt Dracones (I think they actually fixed that in second edition but I’d have to be able to actually understand how the read that damned book to be sure...) so for example, if you were by chance a fan of my books, and you really had your heart set on playing a Dank Wildcats game, you’d be disappointed to find there were no stats for making beaver of platypus characters (both of which are actually in Albedo) but Hc Svnt Dracones does have a bit of a workaround. Because unlike Albedo, which only gives you one race option (Anthropomorphic Animal), Hc Svnt Dracones has multiple race options. You can be a Vector for standard (if limited) anthro animals, but you can also be a Cog if you wanted to pay a robot animal (or a protogen), a Cogsune if you wanted to be an organic construct (modular flesh robot), an Exonymph if you wanted to be a bug, or a Blip if you wanted to be a custom made, designer lifeform. So the Blip option would be your workaround for making something that isn’t available in the stock character creation options. You could technically use that to make a beaver or a platypus... You’d just have to go through a few extra steps...

So with all of that said, I’m going to give character creation to Hc Svnt Dracones as well. Again, I like the fact that Albedo had more species options... but the customization options of Hc Svnt Dracones are more than enough to make Albedo feel as dated as it is.

Classes:

When it comes to classes for your characters to play, there isn’t really much to say. Albedo has classes and Hc Svnt Dracones doesn’t. You would probably think that would make Albedo the winner here, but I’m not so sure... With Albedo being a military game, all of the classes are of course military themed. You pick from one of four military branches to serve in, and then you pick one of a hand full of different jobs within your chosen branch. Just like being in the military... You can even work a few jobs in administration if you want. When I was making a character for the game (who I never got to play because I was stuck as the DM) I made a platypus who worked in internal affairs. No idea what I even would have done with a character like that... but the class option was there... You can play that guy who just signs paperwork all day if you are just really itching for that hard core game of Military Life Simulator... Or you can play something more practical like an airborne ranger...

Hc Svnt Dracones on the other hand doesn’t have classes at all. What it does have is a list of different corporations you are trying to earn loyalty with and taking jobs from. So each corporation is kind of a class in itself. You have the privatized police corporation, the universal healthcare corporation, the robotics and engineering corporation, the space wizards... But the thing is, you don’t actually belong to any of those corps... You’re basically building a civilian... That’s your class, and then you are picking which of those corps to take jobs from and earning loyalty in the hopes of eventually getting hired on as an employee. You can stat out your character to be better suited to taking jobs from one corp over the other, but you are still basically just a civilian with earning a class being your end goal instead of starting out with one. But of course this gives you the option of being able to hop around from job to job and try different things out. Maybe you are doing police stuff one day and then science stuff the next. And of course there is no rule saying you have to earn all of your loyalty with a single corp. You could play multiple sides of the game and earn loyalty with multiple different corporations. You’ll just have to keep in mind which corporations are friendly with each other and which ones are enemies as you juggle your loyalties...

So for classes... uhh... It’s kind of a toss up actually. I can’t really pick one over the other. If you like having a traditional class so you know exactly who your character is and what they do, then Albedo is the winner here... The only downside is you are limited to military options only... Or if you like having the freedom to play the game just doing whatever you want and getting your hands into a little bit of everything, then Hc Svnt Dracones is the winner. I could swing either way, really. But I will say that if you haven’t experienced anything like juggling corporate loyalties before, it is a fun new experience.

Combat:

Okay... Here’s where things start to get messy... I’m afraid when it comes to combat, Albedo just loses right away and Hc Svnt Dracones is the better game. At least in my opinion anyway... And the main reason for this is that I could never fully understand how the fucking combat in Albedo worked. I played the damn game, and I still had no fucking clue what the hell I was doing when combat came along. And that’s not good when you are the DM! I started the game thinking, “Okay... Combat looks a little complicated... but that’s fine... We’ll figure it out as we play and once we’ve been through it a couple of times we’ll all get a handle on it...” We never did... Albedo tries to go for a super realistic, hard core combat system. Which sounds cool at first... I’m talking about a combat system where you get shot once and it’s time to get your ass out of the battle field before you fucking die... and then your character spends weeks to months out of commission while they recuperate in a hospital... And don’t forget to roll of this chart over here to see if you have PTSD now... And let’s hope you didn’t end up permanently crippled... That sounded kind of interesting. It makes the 8 hour long rest and you’re suddenly back to full health with no aftereffects from D&D look like a laughingstock. But there were just so many rules and charts and everything else involved that most of the time we were lucky if we could even understand how to shoot a gun. I ended up having to run a survival game on a damaged space ship with hardly any combat involved just because none of us were sure what to do in combat. And on the rare occasions when combat did occur, it was like giving guns to a bunch of drunk monkeys and then turning the lights out and telling them to take a math test. Now this may not be a prime example of the game’s combat system. It could be that my group and I just weren’t experienced enough to fully comprehend a hardcore, math heavy combat system from 1984... Maybe other people understand it just fine... But my group and I struggled with it to the point where the combat system was the soul reason we eventually switched over to Hc Svnt Dracones.

The combat in Hc Svnt Dracones is a lot easier. Roll a check for the attack. Did it pass? Congratulations, you hit the guy. Your weapon tells you how much damage it does right there in its stats. And getting hit is easy too. When you get hit, subtract the damage from your Armor’s HP. When your armor runs out of HP, start subtracting from your body’s HP. When that runs out you’re dead. Very simple. You want to take cover? Cool. Now they have to eat through the HP of your cover before they start hitting you. It’s a bit different for people who are only familiar with systems like D&D that use AC. There is no AC. There’s no, “Oh I rolled a 17, is that enough to beat his AC?” In this game if you roll an 8 or higher (8 is the universal success in this game) then you hit. That’s all there is to it. (And mind you this is not a d20 system. It’s a d8, d10, d12 system.) You either hit or you don’t, and then you subtract from the HP of whatever cover or armor is between you and your opponents soft flesh. The only extra fiddly bit to keep track of is the nerve pool. Each character has a nerve score and when combat starts you add up the nerve scores of each side to create two nerve pools. Any time you shoot at someone, they have to subtract 1 from their nerve pool. Any time you actually hit someone they have to subtract 3 from their nerve pool. If either side’s nerve pool drops to a certain percent, panic sets in and that side will retreat, or try to... So fighting to the death is less common in this game. It’s more like the old G.I. Joe cartoons where you fight until someone yells, “Cobra, retreat!” You’ll have to have some pretty heavy weaponry to flat out kill a guy before he has time to panic and run away. Or be forced to chase him down if you don’t want to let him get away...

But all that being said, Hc Svnt Dracones still has some of the hardcore aspects of the Albedo system, if not quite as extreme... Taking actual body damage is still pretty bad. Which is why you want to make use of armor and cover as much as you can... There is no 8 hour long rest in this game either. If you have someone who can do medic stuff they can stabilize you on the battlefield if you get shot, and give you some temporary hit points... But you can’t just sleep off a bullet wound. If you want to go back to full health you will have to seek professional medical attention, which usually means spending several days in a hospital and paying medical bills...

So as I said, when it comes to combat, Hc Svnt Dracones wins this round. It’s clean and easy to understand and not a system built in the 80s by someone who loved math more than playing an actual game.

Dice and Checks:

The actual dice systems for both of these games are a little different and interesting than what a lot of people are going to be used to, at least if you have primarily only played d20 systems. Neither of these games are d20 systems. For Albedo, the game uses a range of different dice for making checks (and attacks I guess...) depending on what your stats are in whatever it is you are trying to do. You assign points to each stat and how many points you have determines what dice you will roll. So for example, if you have one point in Swimming, then you would roll a d4 to make a Swimming check. If you have 2 points, you roll a d6, 3 points, a d8, so on and so on up to d12. (I believe d20s are only used for rolling damage.) All you have to do is beat whatever the difficulty score was that the DM set for the task at hand. Which could mean that you just can’t do it if say... you only had enough points to roll a d4 and the difficulty score was a 6... It was actually a pretty fun and interesting system that my group and I all enjoyed. I’d have to say the dice system was probably the best part of Albedo... as long as you weren’t in combat... And there were various other rules that went along with it, like spending points in a stat to add extra dice to your roll and things like that but I’m not going to go into the full set of rules. Just trust me when I say it was fun.

Hc Svnt Dracones, as I said earlier, uses a d8, d10, d12 system. Those are the only three dice you are ever going to use. But you’ll probably end up using multiples of each. The game is really simple when it comes to making checks. Roll 8 or higher. If you roll 8 you have passed the check. But you are going to have to assign a die to each of your 4 core stats during character creation and that’s how it stays for the rest of the game. Your 4 core stats are Mind, Body, Community, and Economy. So if you decided you wanted to be strong, have good social skills, and earning a good paycheck, you probably made Mind your dump stat and assigned the d8 to that one. Which means for the rest of the game you can only roll a d8 when making any kind of mental check. Now there are sub-stats inside each of those core stats that you will assign points to, so maybe you have three points in Mind:Strength... That means you will be rolling 3d8 for a Mind:Strength check. And on top of your stats you also have skills you will assign points to. So maybe you put 2 points in Street Smarts... So if I told you to roll a Mind:Strength + Street Smarts check, you would be rolling 3d8+2. Easy enough to understand?

The only real down side to the dice system in Hc Svnt Dracones that I can think of is that this leaves the game open to have so many possible types of checks the players can make that it can at times get a little overwhelming for the DM when trying to decide what sort of check they should be making. More than once I’ve found myself sitting there asking myself, is that going to be a Body:Dexterity + Athletics check... or is it more of a Body:Resilience + Survival check...? Or could it be a... Yeah, there is a lot of possible checks a player could make at any given time for any given task. But on the plus side, you could use it to your advantage by allowing the players to embrace their own creativity. Have them tell you want kind of check they want to try to make and explain how such a check will work for the given task. Maybe they will come up with something outside the box you never would have thought of. It’s all really going to depend on how the DM wants to run the game. If the DM doesn’t want to leave that much control in the hands of the players and wants to have a specific skill check set for each task, then the system is going to be a beast to handle. If the DM wants to let their players get creative and work out what kind of checks will work best for them with their skill sets, then the system is going to open up all kinds of possibilities.

So when it comes to dice and checks, this is going to have to be a toss up again. Both games have their own little thing going for them and both can be a lot of fun in their own way.

Enemies:

When it comes to Enemies it’s a bit of a one sided argument I’m afraid... Outside of random things like terrorists or rioters, Albedo only really had one enemy... Rabbits... Yeah... in Albedo the rabbits are the bad guys. Rabbits are fascists in this setting... Unless it happens to be a rabbit who was born outside of the rabbit home world on one of the good planets... Then they are a good rabbit but still treated like crap by everyone else because can you really trust a rabbit...? But yeah, that’s about it for Albedo... Unless you encounter terrorists or space pirates or something, you are just going to be fighting rabbits the whole time... Which is a bit of a shame. For a setting that keeps reminding me so much of Starship Troopers, it sure would be nice to have some giant bugs or some other kind of monsters to fight.

Hc Svnt Dracones on the other hand does have space monsters. There are still the normal “these are just other people” kind of enemies. You’ll fight street gangs and assassins and the cops and stuff like that... Sure... But if you really want to spice things up and give your players a serious threat to deal with you’ve got everything from alien mutants, to extra dimensional beings, to brain eating bugs, to things I can only describe as xenomorphs operating on zombie rules... Hell, at the moment I have my group facing down a flock of eldritch, reality warping, owls. I will say that Hc Svnt Dracones doesn’t have a huge catalog of monsters for you to pick from, but what it does have is sufficiently terrifying and all with enough lore behind it that you aren’t going to get tired of it after just one use. There are even actual kaiju in this game if you really want to give the party hell.

So for enemies I’m going to have to give this one to Hc Svnt Dracones.

Adventures:

I know I’ve said a lot so far so I’ll try to keep this as brief as I can. When it comes to adventures to run your group through, it’s been my observation that Albedo doesn’t have a lot going for it. There were two published adventure modules for the game, one of which I ran because it was a stranded on a dead ship adrift in space survival adventure... And that was kind of interesting... But outside of that, with the way the game is set up... There doesn’t seem to be much you could do outside of one military combat scenario after the next... I still think the lore is kind of fun. I could see myself wanting to run a game where the party gets a ship and sets off to find the creators and learn the truth of why they were made the way they were... Or maybe a game about a resistance group trying to take down the computer that is controlling their lives and telling them how to live... But the game just isn’t set up to facilitate that. It’s set up to make soldiers and to send them into combat... Which probably explains why it ended up getting adapted into a miniature war game. It’s pretty much already set up to be that as is... Despite being a role playing game, the system just doesn’t seem to be set up to facilitate role play all that well... Unless you are a former military serviceman and you just want to role play day to day life in the military so you can relive your glory days... but as an animal... I think my uncle would be all about a game like that, but it doesn’t do much for me... i mean, like I said... I made that internal affairs platypus character but then after I made her I looked at the rest of the game and realized she was a useless character I wouldn’t be able to do anything with. So I don’t know what to say... As far as adventures go, it’s my observation at least, that this game seems to be set up for a very specific kind of person... And I’m apparently not it...

Hc Svnt Dracones, to me, feels like it has a lot more potential for things to actually do. There are far more printed adventure modules, which is always nice. I think there’s like... 6 or 7 at the moment... Maybe more... My group and I have played through three of them already and that has included a rescue mission on a space station in a decaying orbit with a serial killer stalking the halls, gambling and corporate espionage at a kaiju fighting tournament, and a murder investigation in a secluded arctic science facility with Lovecraftian shit going on. And that’s just us playing printed adventures. There are so many locations to explore with so much stuff going on in them and so many different factions fighting over corporate control that I’ve already got their next 5 or 6 job offers planed out without even having to crack open another adventure module. I could literally make a job out of anything in this game and with the way characters are built, chances are the party as a whole would still be equipped to handle it to some degree.

So for adventures I’m giving it to Hc Svnt Dracones.

Books:

How about the books themselves? Construction, layout, practicality, all that... As a long time D&D player, I’m used to games like this having a lot of books to lug around and keep track of. Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master's Manual, Monster Manual, Supplement Books... Location Guides... so on and so on... So it was a weird experience for me to find that neither of these games had all of that. Although not exactly a bad one... With Albedo: Platinum Catalyst there were originally just 2 books, The Core Rule Book, and the Vehicle Book... until they re-released it as the Omnibus edition and combined both into a single book. So you have one book, maybe a little bit smaller than a comic book as far as length and width goes, but about as thick as a D&D player’s handbook. And that single book has everything. It’s your Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master's Manual, and your supplement book all rolled into one. That was kind of nice. All each person had to have was one book. One, small, easy the carry book... My complaints were that the layout wasn’t the best. Some things were hard to find and not located in places that would make sense for them to be located in. There were actually times where it would tell you to reference something else on a different page and it either wouldn’t tell you what page it was on, or it would but it would actually give you the wrong page number... I’m serious. It would say see this thing on page 173 and then I would go to page 173 and the thing it was telling me to look up wasn’t there. I’d find it later on page 162 or something like that... There’s also the issue of the lore section... which is great if you are the DM... but if you are a player literally the first half of your book is being wasted by stuff you are probably never going to read. And if you are the DM, you’re probably only going to skim it at best because it is the driest history book you’ve ever read.

With Hc Svnt Dracones you get 3 books, all of them just about the same size as a 5e D&D book... about half an inch longer in length and width... same thickness... but one of them is entirely optional and another one of them is semi-optional. You’ve got your core rule book, which just like Albedo, is everything all in one. It’s your Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master's Manual, and Monster Manual all in one book. (Albedo doesn’t even have a Monster Manual.) Then you’ve got your Expanded Rule Book, which you don’t have to have, but is useful because it gives you more options for character builds, implants, stuff like that... (Sharks are in that book. So if you want to play a shark, and you know you do, you’ll need the expanded book.) And then you have your Expanded Lore Book, which is completely optional for both players and DMs, but if the lengthy lore section in the front of the Core book just wasn’t enough for you, you can get a full book of nothing but the setting’s history and lore.

And I’m talking about Hc Svnt Dracones first edition, mind you... I tried second edition and found the book to be such a jumbled mess that I wanted nothing to do with it... But with first edition the layout was very nice. Everything comes at you in the order you need it in so you can just go through the book one page at a time from start to finish. Which is so refreshing... Why can’t all games be written like that? Just like Albedo, a very big chunk of the first part of the book is taken up by lore, but I didn’t find it to be anywhere near as dry as Albedo’s and actually found it interesting to read... I found it so interesting that I actually did by the Expanded Lore Book to get more... The rules are all laid out in ways that are easy to understand. Lots of nice full color art so you know exactly what you are reading about and get a feel for what the setting looks like... Those three books aren’t as easy to carry around as the one Albedo book, but all in all I feel like they are all worth having. Even the lore book, which is literally just that and has no game mechanics written in it anywhere, has already given me a deeper understanding of how to run the setting effectively and given me lots of ideas for further adventures and campaigns.

The only real complaint I have is that the Monster Manual section of the core book just isn’t big enough... There are some monsters in the game that are pretty important to the setting that aren’t even listed there. Like Owls... Owls are very important lore monsters... But I had to get their stats out of an adventure module because they weren’t listed in any of the books... The giant orcas of Europa don’t have stats listed in the books either, and I haven’t come across an adventure module with them in it yet... With just how small the Monster Manual section of the book is, I feel like they could have added a couple extra things in there... especially when they are relatively important to the setting...

So for books, I have to give it to Hc Svnt Dracones. I really love how compact Albedo is, but Hc Svnt Dracones is just far easier to understand and easier to find exactly what I need when I need it (other than monster stats...)

Conclusion:

So in conclusion, I’m going to declare Hc Svnt Dracones the winner and the better of the two games. Again, this is just my personal opinion... If someone out there likes Albedo better, more power to you. Both games still have their merits, but for me I just found Albedo to be a bit too dated, making it harder to understand for people who haven’t been playing since the 80s... And I found it a little too hyper specific. Hc Svnt Dracones just felt more versatile to me and would allow me to run a far larger variety of games. So that’s just where I stand.

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