Testament: Roleplaying in the Biblical Era

 Oh, no, I've finally done it. I've read the book that's going to get me canceled once and for all. Testament (Scott Bennie) is a book devoted to roleplaying in the mythic history of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Levant c. 2000 BCE - 135 BCE and my feelings about the source material are . . . complicated.

Maybe I'd get into less trouble if my feelings were predictably negative. Grr. Me atheist! Me no like bad book! Me feel scared at reminder that majority believe it real! And then you'd all nod your heads knowingly and say, "Atheists are notoriously bad at religious nuance. Let's just let him tucker himself out and put a new monster manual on his pillow for when he wakes up."

Sadly, I am capable of at least a little bit of religious nuance, but only at that awkward level where I know just enough that I cannot easily be forgiven for screwing it up.

Nuance #1 - this book is about Judaism, not Christianity. I'm not going to claim to have picked up on this on my own, because the text outright says as much, particularly when it is counseling us not to use anachronistic Christian elements. Which leads inevitably into potential screw-up #1 - a lot of the stories in this book, I experienced first-hand as "Christian" stories. And I don't know how contemporary Jews teach their children about the book of Joshua, but I can say that early 90s Mormon Sunday school pedagogy on this particular subject was fucking traumatic.

And so, I actually really enjoyed this book, in general - its technology level, its stakes, its anthropological complexity, the general mythological vibe of its spells, classes, and monsters. But I absolutely do not want to create a PC who will lay siege to Jericho, conquer the Canaanites, and chop down Asherah poles. In fact, I'm kind of tearing up just thinking about it.

Which brings us to Religious Nuance #2 - D&D's notorious alignment system being deployed with a soul-destroying recklessness I've never before encountered (and hope never to see again). It could quite justifiably be argued that it would be antisemitic of me to express skepticism that Joshua, Samuel, and David are LG, CG, and LG respectively, but in my experience, every Christian who's ever told me how great these guys were has been intellectually and morally bankrupt like you wouldn't believe.

The best way to resolve this cultural contradiction? Don't think about it. That's right, I am literally advocating that you spend precisely zero mental effort trying to figure what alignment prominent Biblical figures would be. There is no payoff. It won't make running a Testament campaign any easier. Best case scenario, it's only a hate crime against cultures that have been extinct for a thousand years.

That's not a flaw that's unique to this book. Alignment has always done this - allowed a simplistic editorial tag to elide the complexity of human behavior. It has always been best practice, even in a setting like Forgotten Realms to just lay out a character's past actions and current motivations and use those as a guide to future roleplaying, leaving any moral judgements for the audience to make for themselves. Testament merely serves as the ultimate example of what can go wrong if you don't. Saul was cursed by God to lose his kingdom and have his family fall into ruin because he took one prisoner and did not kill one-hundred percent of the farm animals in a town he was ordered to utterly destroy, and Samuel was the one to deliver the Lord's rebuke that absolute obedience trumps every other moral, political, and practical concern. Now, try to put that on your little 3x3 meme grid.

So yeah, there may be some unresolved religious trauma there. On the other hand, easily-missed meta-narrative-tag inside a dense 3.0 statblock aside, Testament actually does a pretty good job of being even-handed and secular. It divides its history sections between the four major nationalities (Israelite, Canaanite, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian) and each section sort of advocates for its subject's point of view (though none would actually rise in my mind to the level of "anti-Israel," even when you might expect the Canaanites to raise an objection or two). Ramses II also gets to be Lawful Good. Which does make the sidebar where the book discusses the historicity of Exodus and names him as a leading candidate for the Bible's Pharoah a little awkward.

Alignment. Not even once.

I think the book's big problem is the same one that plagues many historical games set in less contentious time periods - there's only so much you can change canon events and still have it be a historical game. You're not going to have a game where Benedict Arnold successfully invades Canada, leading to America becoming an imperial dynasty instead of a republic, and you're not going to have a game where Moses dies during the Exodus, leading to . . . whatever the fuck that leads to (I didn't have a good idea for this second one because it wasn't my example, it was the book's). This weakness is especially apparent in the chapter about Israel's history. It's mostly a recap of various Bible stories, giving us information on the exact stories in each time period that we're not going to be able to tell.

So, putting aside any thoughts of using Moses' character stats (yeah, he's a multiclass Paladin/Levite Priest/Prophet of the Lord) to run him as an end-boss for a Midianite campaign, what use is left for this book if lurking around the edges of major events is unsatisfying and alternate histories are potentially problematic?

I think it would probably be really good for creating pre-classical Southeast Asian and North African-style cultures in a secondary world. It goes into some pretty good detail about clothes and food and architecture, and the way religion dovetails with a society's cultural expression and shared morality. It gives you a real sense of the importance of calendars and what textured religious or imperial conflicts might look like. The magic classes are interesting and flavorful in a way that you wouldn't normally account for in a general-audience rpg. The Levite Priest class gets the ability to talk to serpents . . . and some special anti-serpent class features. This amused me greatly. ("I only learned your language so I could tell you how much I hate you.") But more than that, it's not the sort of connection you'd make when building a cleric for a made-up god. And the spells themselves are similarly connected to a different set of priorities and values than corebook D&D. You probably shouldn't go so far as to make not-Israelites, not-Canaanites, etc but it definitely got me thinking about different ways people could be.

Getting back to the subject of nuance, I'm not sure I can untangle the three major strains of Big Feelings that Testament inspires. On the one hand, it's a well-executed implementation of some fascinating folkloric concepts from some of history's most influential cultures. And the part of me that appreciates religion as a cultural practice and narrative tradition really appreciates it. No other book on my shelf does fantasy quite like this and as a purely secular form of entertainment (as per the blurb on the back cover "You've read the book, now play the game") it looks like a lot of fun.

On the other hand, this is a very deliberate bit of representation for a marginalized minority religion. As even-handed as it could be with Israel's historical rivals, this is very much a game about Jewish history and religion. And I think it's good that something like this exists, but I have no idea whether Testament is an appropriate and respectful example of "something like this." I just have no context. It seems okay, but then I think about recent discussions in D&D circles about the offensive appropriation involved in Liches' phylacteries and here we have a game where you can play characters who have phylacteries in the original sense of the word . . . Obviously, these two things aren't the same. They're likely not even comparable. But is the second one okay? It seems like it should be, but I've had similar intuitions be disastrously wrong in the past.

Finally, on no hand, because it's kind of an asinine way to feel (on multiple occasions, the book itself enjoins me to not do this), we have a book about some very specific stories that certain hegemonic religious nationalists both in the contemporary United States and various other places historically have frequently used in some odious ways (to pick a mild example - forcing classrooms to post the Ten Commandments). And aside from suggesting that the Canaanites were regular people instead of total monsters, there's very little in this book that would challenge those people. The thing that would upset them most is probably just the use of "BCE" for dates.  It's probably too much responsibility to put on a silly rpg book, of course, but that just means it's definitely too much responsibility to put on me as a GM.

So what's my final verdict? 

Um . . . 

I like reading fascinating things for the blog, and on that account Testament did not disappoint.

Ukss Contribution: The best part of this book was the spells chapter. It was just banger after banger, from mundane utility like Create Bricks to the slightly silly but undeniable useful like Dance of Nakedness (it doesn't make someone actually naked, it just negates their armor and equipment bonuses as if they were naked).

And the best part of the spells chapter was the alternate uses for the Bestow Curse spells. Highlights include:

• Enemy of Pack Animals (your donkey, horse, or camel will definitely attack you if you let your guard down and if they don't they'll just run away)
• Hated by Children (random kids will spit on you, curse at you, etc)
• Scorpion Attraction (yep, all the damned time)
• Flame Prone (get too close to any open flame and make a reflex save to avoid catching fire)
• Nameless (people forget your name . .  .unless it's to associate you with wicked deeds and scandal)

However, none of these things really feel like a setting element to me. So I'm going to go a little farther forward to the nearly as delightful magic items chapter and pick the Ziz egg. A Ziz is a magical crane with the curious ability to wade in water of any depth (its monster description says "even if it is standing over the deepest ocean, the ziz's legs extend to the sea floor") and if you get your hands on one of its eggs, you can use it as a "natural magic item" to cast powerful control water spells. Just be careful, because if the egg breaks prematurely, it will create a massive flood.

I'll probably also toss in the Phoenix as a freebie (it's mentioned that the Ziz is the only bird that doesn't "pay homage" to the Phoenix) because I've got this vague idea about a set of giant, element-themed mystical birds.