You can also find this review in video form if you prefer to listen!

I made this! And today I’ll be telling you all about it.

Over the last year I’ve been having a great time playing DM Scotty’s EZD6, and while I love fantasy my favorite settings tend to be dark and gritty. I’m also a big history nerd, so I combined the two into The Four Horsemen, an EZD6 playset for pulp historical and dark fantasy roleplaying set in the period Thirty Years War – that’s the early sixteen hundreds.

If you’re a fan of the three musketeers, this one should be right up your alley.

I picked the time period because it’s a very chaotic time in European history, and with so much going on there are tons of stories to be told. Most of the world is known and reasonably connected at this time, so you can play characters from pretty much any background or ethnicity you like as long as they’re human, though if you want to play a party of samurai or first nations warriors out in western Europe, you might need to come up with a suitably convincing backstory.

Now, I did provide a timeline of the thirty years war in the book, but I kept it at a very high level because I wanted to focus on the rules, feel and gameplay – this is not a history book. Sure, historical events are described and they are correct to the best of my research, but it’s not the right book for you if you’re trying to cram for a history exam tomorrow – you’ll fail.

In terms of rules, the Four Horsemen builds on the EZD6 core rules, so if you already have a game or two under your belt you should already have the basics down.

Out goes Karma, in comes Stress

The main change here is that there is no karma in this playset; instead, it uses the stress rules from DM Scotty’s EZDeath6 horror rules. In brief, instead of spending karma to boost a die roll like you do in the core rules, you can take a point of stress to do the same thing, but if you stack up too much stress you will suffer a strike of damage.

Karma works great for big heroic adventures, but I find that stress fits the gritty and dangerous atmosphere I was going for so much better. During the playtests, players were being even more cautious than usual, and the choice to take a point of stress was never an easy choice.

No Magic. Not for players, anyway

The second big change is that players do not get any kind of magic. You can play The Four Horsemen as a dark fantasy with supernatural elements, but magic should always be mysterious and threatening.

It’s up to you as a rabble rouser whether you want to include magical treasures but you should definitely sprinkle them in very lightly. In EZD6 core, players can pop potions of healing like candy, but here a potion that can practically take you from death’s door to full health would be a rare and incredibly valuable wonder.

Now you might be thinking that the life expectancy of characters in The Four Horsemen is significantly lower than your regular EZD6 characters, and you wouldn’t be completely wrong.

While all characters survived the playtests, each game ended up with at least one character hanging on by the skin of their teeth. The greatest difference is in healing time, which can force some hard choices on the players.

Players still heal a lot faster than real world people – a chirurgeon and a good night’s rest can get someone back on their feet real quick. If they need to act fast though, things can get dicey. Let’s say the party gets into a fight, ends up pretty beaten up, but they discover that something bad will go down tomorrow in the next town over.

In the core rules, they could just magic up some healing and rush over as good as new. In the four horsemen, they’re going to have to decide whether to take the risk and go over with their resources depleted, or take a rest to restore some of their energy and risk being late for the big event.

If you mix in disease, which can leave a character impaired for days, your players will have a fair bit of thinking to do.

Armor, weapons, mounts and lackeys

That said, I modified the armor system slightly so any character can wear any armor; heavy armor is no longer the exclusive province of the warrior. Heavy armor and shields do restrict some of the abilities of the rascal path, but they’re still able to use them if they want to.

I have also introduced rules for masterwork weapons and armor that give extra boons when used to give characters a little extra edge, but of course those can also be used against them.

Speaking of weapons, The Four Horsemen also includes rules for firearms like muskets and pistols. Both of these have an improved crit chance and can cause devastating damage although they can blow up the hands of extremely unlucky shooters.

They also have a slow reloading rate, so you need to be very tactical in how and when you use them because you most likely won’t be able to get many shots off in a fight.

Weaponry is all well and good but it’s not very useful if you can’t get around so I’ve also added rules for horses and horse quality. You get three levels of quality, with better trained horses being easier to control and less likely to panic.

Mastering the art of horsemanship allows your characters to deliver devastating cavalry charges, so you really want to take care of your mount. Or, you know, hire someone to look after them using the rules for lackeys.

If you have the coin, you can easily find followers who will look after your mount, carry your stuff, cook your food, and do whatever tasks your character can’t be bothered to do for themselves.

Aspects

One last thing I’d like to touch upon is the list of aspects.

I think aspects are criminally underutilized, so I hope the list of 30 in The Four Horsemen will provide some more inspiration for their use. They’re mostly social or occupational aspects and come with suggested boons and roleplaying hints. Obviously you don’t have to use these, but having some aspects along these lines helps fit your character into the world.

I rounded off the book with two adventures. The first one, A Rough Night In Stahlbruck, gets the players involved in a dangerous plot. The second one, The Beast of Hamelyn, introduces some supernatural elements to the game. They can be played as standalones or in sequence, but either way my playtesters and I had a great time playing through them so I hope you’ll find them equally entertaining.

If all this sounds interesting to you, you can find The Four Horsemen on DriveThruRPG in pdf and softcover.

Let me know what you think!