Hollyworld by Adam Ultraberg is not to be confused with Hollyworld by Greg Porter. The latter was published in 2005, but it is the former that this review concerns itself with. I surmise that Adam will tweak the name for trademark reasons before final publication. For this review I’ll go ahead and refer to Adam’s game as HW.

So you know what you have to roll to do stuff and you know that there are skills that let you do stuff. So what sort of stuff can you do? We’ll look at that today. Where this starts with actions, we’ll primarily discuss things in terms of powers as a lot of powers are just fancy actions.

You may recall from our discussion of the Core Mechanic that your target number, your chance to do stuff is four plus your skill level (4 + Skill Level). This naturally leads to the question, “What’s your skill level? For that matter, what are skills?” Well, let’s talk about that.

Previously we looked at steps for setting up your game. Where these are certainly needed, there’s only a couple of pieces that differentiates Krendel from other games there. Today, we’re going to start tearing into the guts of Krendel and something wildly different. Today, we talk about the Core Mechanic.

The chapter on Building Your Game is surprisingly short, only 5 pages. It starts on 135, after all the character stuff is finished, but it describes stuff you, as the Game Master, should do first. I feel it’s probably one of the best chapters in Krendel, and much of what it discusses is actually system agnostic.