#185 – Valley of the Pharaohs 40th Anniversary

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You're listening to The Glitter Boys. The year is 1985. And everyone is so tired of the fantasy tropes of the medieval Europe that the market has been completely taken over by Valley of the Pharaohs and everyone's Egyptians and we're Egyptian gods and we're mutant people and we're— it's awesome. And unfortunately, that is not the alternate Earth that we live in right now, but we could have had this actually really incredible game taken off in 1985.

We could have had Valley of White Box, Valley of Red Box, the strange, like, The, the, the Valley black box that came with the CD-ROM.

Yeah. We could have had dice that you had to fill in with a crayon and it would have been a far superior game than what we got. That, that game, some acronym thing.

Something about like truncheons and flagons. Yeah.

Tunnels and then tumors.

I don't know. Yeah.

Uh, and so we're talking about Valley of the Pharaohs, the 40th anniversary edition. Uh, my Matthew, uh, Blanton?

Ballant.

Ballant. Thank you. And I will admit, I had known about this game for a long time. I had never played it, never really looked at it. I saw it come up on Kickstarter and I was like, you know what? I like some of those old crunchy things. It has something to do with Palladium. I'll, I'll back it. Sure. Why not? And then I opened it up finally, not too long ago. And I was like, where were these rules when I started role-playing? Like skills that you can learn in the game, a percentage system that goes up as you use the skills, a very diverse character creation system. It's not medieval fucking Europe. Like it's set in Egypt, which is awesome. Like, why did I not know about this game at that time?

To be fair, there was a strand of that running in the late '70s, very early '80s. RPG community, but the 500-pound gorilla of TSR just really didn't go that way. And it's great to see this book be brought back and this memory of things that could have been, things that actually were, brought forward again.

Yeah, and concepts that you only, well, okay, you don't just see them today, but didn't show up until probably the early 2000s, you know?

Well, okay, okay, hold on.

Sorry.

Before we, before we dive super, super, super deep into what this game does, first off, a little bit of history here. It's that we talked with Kevin about this when we were talking about the early, early, early days. And right after he did Mechanoids, when he was like needing a little bit of extra funds in order to get the, uh, fantasy game out. Valley of the Pharaohs was like the middle, the stepping stone.

Yep.

And it was, I believe, released as a box set. It didn't do very well. And then they kind of really didn't do much else with it.

No.

But the author, Matt Ballant, also heavily contributed to Palladium's early success through his other creations, the Compendium of Weapons, Armor, and Castles.

Oh yeah.

He did those books and that is what, like, those, them selling those books alongside the Mechanoids and other stuff at conventions. It was like, that was their bread and butter in the early days.

Yeah. I mean, Kevin said that without those books, Palladium wouldn't exist today.

It wouldn't exist without Matt Balance extra compendiums helping build that initial nest egg.

Would you mind if I just went down a quick list of the Works of Palladium books that Matt Ballant either did or contributed to?

Please, let's go for it.

Yeah, absolutely. 1981, Weapons and Armor. 1982, Weapons and Castles. 1983, Valley of the Pharaohs. 1984, Weapons and Castles of the Orient. 1984, Exotic Weapons. 1985, European Castles. 1985, Monsters and Animals. 1986, After the Bomb. 1986, I Love You Revised 1989, Compendium of Weapons, Armor, and Castles. And 1993, he was a contributor to a Compendium of Contemporary Weapons.

Yep.

Wow. I mean, like, except for Valley of the Pharaohs, a lot of those were those extra books that you help the GM run things.

Yeah. Well, help the GM run things. However, As both a player and a game master in Palladium games in my teens and 20s, I found the compendium books to be invaluable because of the detail on how armor worked or the actual real function of castles.

Right.

They're not just there to look cool. You know, they have a defensive function and how those like, you know, how crenellations work and And how murder holes work and all of that stuff. The way that different weapons— the concept of— his books introduced to me the concept of different armors and different weapons having different compatibilities, damages and resistance and whatnot. Like, like impact versus chop versus pierce kind of stuff.

It's really funny because at the same time, the compendium of Castle, the compendium series came out. I was really, really into PBS's Castle, which was this semi-animated, semi-live-action historical retelling of the building of a castle, and at the same time, explanation of all the parts of the castle.

So we're talking a lot about the other stuff that Ballantyne has done. Basically, he, he was not unimportant. He's a name that you don't really see on the Palladium books today. However, that doesn't mean in the years since he has dawdled. So year— last year, he comes out with the Kickstarter for the 40th anniversary edition of Valley of the Pharaohs, which is the book we're talking about today. And as part of that Kickstarter, we, a few of us contributed and went in at one of the highest levels that was basically like he will run a miniature campaign for us.

Yeah.

And he's doing it. We're having a good time. And through the sessions that we have with him, the way that he describes game design, the way that he talks about how he has approached to revisiting the game, how he has reconsidered the mechanics and updated them, he's a— it's from the perspective of somebody who has his finger on at least A somewhat modern pulse of game design. He is familiar with things like the OSR. He has a deep understanding of many of the modern tricks and things that people have incorporated into game design in the last 40 years. This is a game that has not sat idle on a shelf. Despite, despite it really probably having sat idle on a shelf in a box somewhere. But design principles, this game is unexpectedly modern and smooth.

Absolutely. And I was blown away when I was looking through it. I was like, wow. As I started, you know, there are things in there, there's concepts in here that are very modern that you can see glimpses of starting to show up in RPGs in the late '90s, early 2000s. And it really becomes this, this like cornerstone. And I don't know if those came out organically or a bunch of people who were in development in the late '90s and early 2000s had a copy of this sitting around somewhere going, yeah, that's a cool idea. Let's, let's, let's crib from that. And maybe not, but like so many of the games would have been that much better in my opinion. Uh, and, and very interesting.

For me, as someone who didn't have a chance to really access Valley of the Pharaohs until, uh, scans of it started showing up on Usenet, um, and I was raiding it from my college, uh, computer lab. Putting it on a hard floppy disk. I have a huge love of Egyptology and history of ancient and late period pre-Ptolemaic Egypt, and this book just hits so many sweet spots for me from a games design, from the very clear love of the source material to tiny bits and nods. And it's just an amazing product.

Mechanically, Valley of the Pharaohs, at least this 40th anniversary edition of the game, it clearly shares the same DNA as Palladium Fantasy, at least the Fantasy First Edition.

Oh, very much so. Yeah.

The stats are similar. There aren't as many of them, but they're very similar. They fill similar roles. They even have a similar scale. That whole, you know, goes up to 30 kind of thing.

The—

it has your hit points. You have d20-based actions meshed with a d-percentage-based skill system. So, you know, it is foundationally— that means it also shares its DNA with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and the way that thieves and thief skills sort of introduced the concept of the d-percentage skills that became the Palladium system.

Yeah.

But also, as Jacob has informed me from heavier discussions with him following these games that we're in, there's also, I understand, a heavy DNA of basic role-playing in here as well. Oh, very much so.

Yeah, it's, it's, it goes back and hearkens to, without getting too wonky about this, the, the early days of role-playing when you had things like Traveller, like original Dungeons and Dragons running around. Um, you had a lot of things hitting the wall, the first version of Bushido, and a lot of people were trying different things, and this echoes all of that. And one of those big ideas that was played around with in the late '70s, early '80s was the concept of skill-based progression versus level-based progression.

Mm-hmm.

And for a long time, level-based progression won out.

Yep.

My first exposure to a role-playing game that was not class and level-based was Shadowrun.

Very common. Lots of people's first exposure to it was when Shadowrun came out.

And I remember at the same time I had friends who were doing the same thing with Star Wars. I, I didn't get into— I wasn't exposed to Star Wars because I just didn't have friends who were into Star Wars. So for me, it was Shadowrun. Shadowrun was, cause I remember I saw it on a shelf. No, no, I got into Shadowrun cause I kept seeing the Shadowrun novels in the fantasy sci-fi section at Books-A-Million.

Okay.

And I was like, I kept seeing this logo over and over and I looked and it's like, okay, that's some fantasy shit, but that dude's holding a gun. What the fuck? What is this? My mind is blown. So then I went out and I bought a copy of Shatterrun. I actually, I bought a copy of Shatterrun 1st edition and then 2 weeks later went back to the store and saw that the 2nd edition had released. So then I bought a copy of 2nd edition and the first game I ran ever of Shatterrun was like a mix of 1st and 2nd edition. It was actually, it was pretty wild, but that was my first exposure as a player and a game master to this concept that You level up what you want.

Yep.

You don't have to just level everything up at a blank thing. You just put some points here and points there.

Yeah, and in Valley of the Pharaohs in many ways comes from a similar idea of how progressions should work that Call of Cthulhu, aka the basic role-playing system, came from, came from where You have to use a skill in order to improve a skill, and your advancement as a character is driven by what you do and what you focus on. And that is one of the things I love about this system.

So to put that into a functional example, When you're playing this game and you're out and adventuring in a session, and during that session, if you make use of a skill, you put a little check mark or a dot or a token or whatever it is that you wish to use to— as a note to yourself that I have used this skill this session. Success or failure, you mark a use. At the end of the session, you can nominate up to 6 of the skills that you have used to check for progression. To do that, you roll a d percentile, and if you get higher than your current skill value, then your skill goes up by like 1d4 or 1d6%. So you roll and add it to that. If you don't, then it doesn't go up.

Which, which, you know, really encourages players to use their skills.

Yeah.

Right. To use more skills and see how it goes. It also, if you're a person who favors your stealth skill and your bows or whatever, you're going to get really good at those, but your other skills are going to atrophy, which is so— it's real life.

Right?

It's very like, I know how to do some archaic woodworking stuff. I haven't used it in 20 years. So why would I be an expert at it? Because now I'm 15th level fighter.

Right.

You wouldn't be. Right? You just wouldn't be. were a 15th level cleric and you always did duck calls because that was just something you enjoyed. And you're this expert duck caller, right? And, but you, you know, but the duck calling isn't in your skillset. That's not a skill you start with. So a lot of the early games didn't even tell you you could learn skills that were part of your class. And this right up front says, want to learn a skill? Here's how you learn a skill.

Yeah.

What? That's awesome.

Buckley, I just need to say that using duck calls there, that's a foul example.

Oh, oh, oh, that's the— oh, that hurts.

Right, right. So Jacob, you were telling me something when we were having this discussion before the recording about passive learning.

Oh yeah. Now I haven't found that in the book. I've gone back looking at it, But one of the things that Matt has done in our currently ongoing mini campaign was the fact that if you're like passively using the skill, you still count it as a check. And I've seen other systems do that. For instance, in our campaign, one of my skills is wagon driving, and I spent most of our adventure driving a wagon. I not one time had call to roll that skill, but I spent the time actively doing it.

Yeah.

And the— and therefore he let me roll for an improvement on it.

Yeah.

Which I love because it gets around one of the mechanistic problems in skill-based progression where players will try to rub every skill they can against everything to earn that check. And if you just let it go passively, You don't have that trying to figure out how to break into the safe using your dentist skill.

Well, yeah, I've— so my first exposure to the concept of, to get better you must do in a role-playing game actually was Burning Wheel, where Burning Wheel— so Burning Wheel takes this basic concept And then makes it pretentious. Oh, so pretentious. So pretentious. Everything Burning Wheel does is let's take a gaming concept and then masturbate over it because that's how Luke Crane writes role-playing games. So anyway, okay, Burning Wheel, you, you also have to do and you have to try in order to get better, but based upon your current ability, You have to get X numbers of failures versus X number of successes. And it gets like, it's so complicated that you're just like, fuck you, Luke. Can't I— fuck you, Luke. Let me just mark a fucking box and get it over with. Anyway, I get it. I get that. I get why he wanted to do it that way, but come on.

Yeah.

Seriously, I don't need to fucking contemplate my navel to play a role-playing game.

I mean, it's, it's, it's something that works for some people. I have looked at Burning Wheel. I've looked at other systems that are right in that same niche of complexity, inter-skill interpolation, suddenly having flashbacks to the network chart of skills from 1st edition and 2nd edition Shadowrun.

Oh God.

Having successfully used my computer use skill to shoot someone.

But that was so— okay, that was terrible in retrospect, but it was also like, okay, that shit was fun.

Yeah. See, I'm pretty sure I was looking at this. Uh, I was pretty sure my introduction was Wedge, Star Wars. Oh yeah. And, and the system was so simple. It was like, oh, okay, I want to do this and this. And they go up by points and you spend it and allocate it. Depending on what rules you did, you'd have to train and things like that. But like they had kind of templates that you could follow, but you didn't have to. They were just examples. And, and this, this was a fan— this is a fantasy game in Egypt where you have that same premise and it's, oh, it's so cool.

Okay. So 2 points, 2, 2 points to your point. One, if you call it wedge, that's like saying JIF. Listen, just whatever you say what you want. I just need you to understand that it it's like saying GIF, but also I don't know why we're so upset about peanut butter suddenly.

I don't either.

No, no, whatever.

I know, I know, I know GIF.

Personally, I don't care, but I just want you to ponder that.

It's West End Games. It's Wedge.

So it should be Weg. Is it West End James?

Listen, there's a D and a G in there somewhere.

Anyway. Okay.

And that was when the Glitter Boys podcast ended.

No, this was the worst breakup than Oasis. But the second point is, if I remember correctly, at least the original or one of the editions of Star Wars didn't have character creation. beyond pick a template and tweak it.

Uh, I think in 2nd or 2nd Revised, they kind of did that.

I remember first getting into one when someone handed me the book and I looked through it. It's like, there isn't actually a character creation system here. Yeah.

Yeah.

I can't remember which edition it was. And they kind of like shoehorned you into it. Or maybe it was the 2nd edition that they fixed that, but I don't know. No, I agree. But the, uh, the editions that I was starting with, I was like, oh cool. You know? And it, But it opened it up a lot. Right. That's my point.

So one other thing about Valley of the Pharaohs.

Wedge.

Vap.

Vap. Vope. One other thing about Valley of the Pharaohs that I know that people like NPC and his ilk truly, truly love is the amount of random tables in this game.

I do. But, but, but, but, but they're optional. Right.

Totally optional. You're not locked into them, but if you're someone who likes them, they are immediately there.

They're there. You can randomly create everything about your character from the beginning. I love that. Love it.

Yeah.

I like the way they approach the, um, the different races, basically the Egyptian races and the Egyptian people. And they give this background. And when I'm looking at this going, oh, They're— here's your half-elves and your elves and your, your dwarves and your gnomes and your halflings. They're just dog people or bird people or crocodiles. And here's the Egyptian names for them. And they have 2 forms. They have a human form and they have the hybrid form and they have an animal form. And you're like, these are just normal denizens of the world.

And what I really love, and I wish more fucking games did this, and I don't know why more fucking games don't do this. is each of those races is drawn with a male and a female version of both the normal and the hybrid. Like, so many games don't fucking do that. They will draw like some random member of the species in some kind of a crazy angry action pose. But you're like, okay, but what about the rest of the species? What do they look like?

Yeah.

I really like that it lets you as a player look at a basic example, a person just simply standing there in the dress of the era, but they're not in some kind of a crazy action pose. And it shows you both genders of the setting.

Well, and these pictures are the exact same stance. They're holding the same things. When I was looking at this really quickly, I was like, Well, that's weird. Why do they have humans in like, oh, oh wow. And so my question is, is this part of the update or was this the original?

These, these clearly look new to me.

They look newly imaged, newly, newly like refined. So maybe they are, but again, it's, it's awesome.

So Matt mentioned a lot of the art has been updated because it would have been next to impossible to bring forward the old art. in modern— into a modern formatting thing. It just, you know, what worked in the days when we were running off mimeographs and typesetters sometimes has a hard time translating now. And unless you have the original source drawings and such, it's often very hard to bring it up.

Yeah.

That said, it keeps— while the art may be new, it keeps the spirit of the 1980s super present, and that is amazing.

Well, it's simple. Okay, this is a historical slash historical fantasy game with a setting very heavily based in our own human history here on the planet Earth.

Oh yeah.

And it goes into, like, you feel that with the art here. It is all Firmly rooted in its setting. And it's almost, there's basically, there's almost no crazy action art here. Like this is, there, there are, you know, there's like pictures of artifacts here and there and, you know, pictures of general people in the setting and what they might look like. And, and, and the action scenes are just people doing things.

Yeah.

Not like, you know, stabbing an opponent or looking angry and constipated. It's, it's all, this is a lived-in world. And that's something that I love the most about role-playing game art is when it feels like the world has people who live in it.

Yeah, very much so. Like the, a lot of the art is not focused on getting you into the sense of adventure. It's focused on getting you into the sense of the world.

So there's a few cool things that the mechanics do that I really love. And this contributes heavily to why this game is like heavy on my brain right now. Beyond playing it with Matt, beyond enjoying the experience of having it run for me by its developer, which is great. The game is, I keep thinking about it after the session. I keep coming back to it as I'm laying in bed going to sleep thinking about whatever random shit it might drift into my brain. The lack of classes, the lack of levels, the open skill advancement, the free skill— well, free, you know, you got to probably got to pay somebody for it, but the anybody can do it really whenever skill learning. But the one thing that is burnt, that is really catching me, is the way he translates things such as the Palladium hand-to-hand combat skill progression. You know, you got 15 levels and each level you get a bonus thing, whatever. The way he translates the concept of that skill progression into this system.

Yeah.

It's beautiful. He translates it to a 0 to 100 progression based upon how your skill is. So if you have the martial combat skill at 37, you can look at the table and you fall in the range where your ability matches whatever level of that would be equivalent in the hand-to-hand combat system of Palladium. It's essentially the same damn thing.

Yeah.

But translated to you simply have a skill that is martial combat. As you use it, it gets better. And it's, it's brilliant. It is a brilliantly simple way of translating concepts of level-based advancement to a simple percentile skill.

Very much so. And then tying it into things like Mats mentioned when we were, when we were talking with him about Suddenly your weapons, your combat skill has other uses. Like you can roll against your combat skill to tell something about your opponent or the guy you're looking at in the sparring arena. It, it, it makes it more than, uh, I know how to use a sword. It's, I know about sword use. And there's a difference between those 2 things.

I'm looking at like the layouts of the skills. They don't go into a lot of detail. But they give you just enough what you need. How it all works together. I'm still fascinated by some of the mechanics that they just put into this game and how early it was produced.

Something else it does is something that we even have a prior episode of this podcast about a house rule that I do that I didn't realize that this game already did.

Yep.

Your skill percentages, there are no core skill percentages. There's no base skill percentage. It's based on a combination of your stats.

Right.

Right. Now, granted, this one is a bit more complex than I prefer because sometimes it'll be like this. It'll be like 1/2 your intelligence plus 1/3 of this plus this. And I'm like, okay, it's a little mechanically— I wrote a spreadsheet for it. But the fact that it does it, I feel validated. Yeah. Yeah. No.

And, and while I understand that a lot of people will bounce off the half, third to figure it out. It, again, as someone who has a deep, deep love for the early, early days of our hobby, it is bringing back things I saw back then. Not that I recommend everyone, anyone ever try to play the first edition of Bushido, but—

I've tried.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

It's hard. It's hard. It was written by a mechanical engineer and a computer coder, and you can tell by trying to read it. If— don't try to play it unless you have a lot of Starfleet battles under your belt, because you will be needing to reference paragraph 3, subsection C, item I a lot.

If you want a system like that, that's old school enough, but not quite that old school, check out Sengoku.

Oh, Sengoku and Sengoku Dynasty. Oh God.

It's— it— I mean, it— does the same damn thing and it's still pretty complex.

Oh yeah.

It's not that arcane.

We've talked a lot about the mechanics. Uh, what is clicking with you with, for the flavor of it, NPC?

It's every aspect of this book is dripping with the flavor of the, like, you can't avoid it. There's no way to read this book as a generic game. Now, don't get me wrong. The system I think is actually quite portable. However, the book from the COVID then you open them, everything about this book is immersing you in the world. The skill descriptions are immersing you in the world. The tables of everything are immersing you in the world. It is so strongly geared towards that setting that I'm not sure I'm answering your question, but.

No.

But, but playing this game has led to me like downloading a crapload of shows about Egypt and watching them because I want to know more, you know. But, but then half of the fucking book, I think, or about half, once you get past the monsters, we'll say about a third, a third of the book is just setting information. And it is deep. It is extensive and it is comprehensive. If you wanted to know anything about I'm guessing, what is this? The, this is the, uh, New Kingdom. I think this is New Kingdom period that he said.

Yeah, it's, it's New Kingdom. So, uh, the Upper Kingdom and Lower Kingdom are combined.

So, so yeah, 18th to 20th dynasties. If you wanted to know anything about that setting and also a little bit about their mythology, well, a lot about their mythology, you could do worse than this book.

Another thing I'd like to point out is he does something that some other game designers have tried to do, but he doesn't do it all the way, and that's a good thing. He uses the Egyptian words for things like the castes, the regions you're from, your cultures, etc. He puts those words in there and then immediately provides a translation.

Yep.

But he puts it in there so you start to get the feel as you're creating the character. And that is just so wonderful.

Yeah.

When I was going through it, that's something I really appreciated. Like, it gives you your cant, gives you your lexicon, but it helps you understand it more about what they're talking about. Like, and, and you quickly are like, oh, so when you start, start doing the, uh, the reprogramming of your brain, when you're looking for this particular word and you go, Oh, well, I know that word means crocodile, crocodile person. Okay, cool. I can move on. I don't have to stumble up on that when I'm reading through the material later.

Yeah.

And yeah, like some of the layouts, like I was really impressed with how condensed spells are, like layouts perspectively for a book like this, the layouts of everything, the creatures. I really appreciated when I was looking through the monsters and I'm like, okay, so we have We have an asp giant and a baboon. The betrayer— wait, we have a baboon? So you have, you have just like, you have like regular things you might encounter in the city running around. And then you have, you know, a chimera, you have a centaur, you have these other creatures that are like, all in the same sourcebook.

Mm-hmm.

Where a lot of times you get in a main book, you're like, you get only the cool monsters. You're like, but I want normal things in my world. And players may like, actually the crocodile. We'll take most of the creatures in here. It's really strong.

As it should.

As it should. It's a Nile crocodile. These things are terrifying.

Sobek is the destroyer of worlds for a reason.

Yes, that's right.

It's comprehensive. There's so much here to use. The world is deeply fleshed out. The mechanics are approachable. The author doesn't try to do anything zingy or clever with the mechanics. So I see this a lot with historical fantasy games or whatnot, where they'll try to introduce some kind of a cool, what do you call it, trick, some kind of a, what's the word, G?

A gimmick?

A gimmick, a gimmick mechanic. There's no gimmick mechanics in this.

Right.

The other thing is while the world is very, very, very fleshed out and very well described, it doesn't fall into the trap of like everything's kind of explained and locked off and prevents players from being there, living in that space, influencing that space, which some games do. fall into the trap of when they go in too much depth, it's like you're always going to be a sideshow. And that doesn't, that is not the feel you get here.

Yeah, absolutely. And you have enough background that while, yes, it's set in the middle or the New Kingdom, it's set in the New Kingdom. You could pick any of these kingdoms that you want to run it into.

Yeah.

Right.

And there's enough detail to do that. And, and you can become the heroes of your own story.

As, as someone who went down a weird little rabbit hole a couple nights ago writing about the New Kingdom War between Egyptians and the Hittites set in the Valley of Pharaohs. I, mm.

You know, it's funny you talk about heroes because there's a mechanic in the character creation of the game called Heroic Mode. Normally when you're making characters, the assumption is you're making people, standard people who might have like a little bit of adventuring skill, but you're making representative humans of the setting.

I kept running into that.

Yeah.

It's like, if you're in the, if you're, uh, is it, is it heroic?

Heroic mode. Yeah.

It's like, like when you're rolling your attributes, it's like normally it's 3d6 or whatever it is. But if you're heroic mode, add a d6 and drop the lowest. And you're like, oh, I want cool characters. So it's, it's a built-in house rule into the game. If you want your people to just be that much better.

What I appreciate is that at the very beginning of the character creation system, the author sets forth exactly what heroic mode does. There's like a little sidebar that's like heroic mode does this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. And then reminds you of it in those relative sections, those relevant sections.

Upsized. That's what it— yeah, the heroic character is upsized. And you know it. And like you said, yeah, all the way through the book. It's not like a throwaway thing at the beginning of the book and then it just references it throughout or it only in one section. It's everywhere. I mean, from an editing perspective, that's awesome.

This is a complete role-playing game.

I would agree. Yeah, it is absolutely a complete role-playing game.

That said, boy, do I want sourcebooks.

I will—

they're— because while it is a complete role-playing game, it focuses on Egypt.

Yep.

And as a flat-out nerd for Egyptian history. I mean, like, I know about what's happening at this time with the issues between Egypt and the Nubians, the Libyans, and of course the— what is going to culminate in the Battle of Kadesh between the Egyptians and the Hittites and the move from Bronze to Iron Age. And I'm like, oh, there's— And Of course, you're also dealing with the rest of the Mediterranean world at the same time, which is coming to Egypt's doorstep in so many ways. And oh, we're on the brink of a couple major religious upheavals in Egypt at the time. And how would having races that are functionally in some ways children of the deities of Egypt involved? How's that going to change things?

Yeah.

It is a complete role-playing game that I want to see more of.

This is a book that you don't need more. You can, you can take this book and run centuries of campaigns because ultimately we're talking centuries upon centuries where there's very little technological change. There's very little geographical change. You— it is a, it is a culture that, a very conservative culture that heavily focuses on sameness. You know, they want their, they want their world to be reliable and predictable around them. So as such, you have this massive stretch of history in which you can set your campaigns and not have to actually worry all that much about nitpicking mechanical changes or skills or technology or whatnot. And the setting component in the back is nice and detailed. There's even some adventures involved. But yes, I want to see more.

Oh yeah.

I want to see a sourcebook of additional adventures. I want to see something to expand maybe around the rim of the Mediterranean. Yeah.

Very much so. I mean, if you look at the time period this thing is happening, there's lots and lots of stuff to be done. It is just this, oh my God, I just love this game so, so much.

Yeah. I honestly wasn't expecting to love it as much as I do. Like when this Kickstarter was announced, which was just like a couple of weeks or so after we had talked to Kevin and been like, what are the chances the Valley of the Pharaohs ever coming back? And he had just sort of smiled and nodded and smiled and nodded.

As he does.

And then, you know, 2 weeks later it's announced, and we're all like, that motherfucker. What the fuck he do?

Just a small aside for our listeners who've been with us and have been listening to our conversations with Kevin. I cannot tell you how many times I've looked around the table when Kevin smiles and nods at us when we're having one of those conversations, and we're all like, oh God, what's coming?

Seriously. Uh, yeah, I wasn't expecting to love this as much as I do.

And with the, you know, additional source material that you create, or, you know, maybe we'll come out with it, you have game mechanics that you can just put anywhere you want and you can go all over Africa, Middle East, you know, um, timeframe-wise, I was just looking up, okay, so when do the Romans show up? How, how, like the Roman expansion, you know, the Roman invasion, you know, like what would that do?

Ptolemaic Egypt era.

Come on. Oh, that's the Ptolemaic takeover of Egypt. That is what's got me super interested.

Oh.

Yeah, it's just like there's so much here and so much history, and it's, you know, it's a different system. It's not medieval Europe.

And if you are familiar with Palladium mechanics, this is immediately familiar to you.

Yeah, absolutely.

Oh yeah, very much so. If you're familiar with percentile systems, games of any kind. This— you'll feel it. If you've played Call of Cthulhu, you will feel right at home here. It's very, very, very approachable. You'll take a little bit of time to wrap your head around parts of it, but if you're coming from one of those starting points, you'll feel at home real quick.

This— oh my god. is a simple, approachable, basic Bronze Age role-playing game.

Yes.

That I don't have to memorize textbooks of lore to play.

Nope.

Thank you very much.

But you want to now. But, but you want to now.

Yes, but I would rather memorize textbooks of lore of actual world history than Glorantha. What?

You don't know the entire history of the Quagmire Empire in Faerûn and everything that happened back and forth? And what I'm—

I'm talking about Bronze Age role-playing. If you want to play Bronze Age role-playing game and you go online and you say, hey, I want to play something in the Bronze Age, recommend me a role-playing game. 9 out of 10 responses are RuneQuest. And you're like, motherfucker, RuneQuest is not Bronze Age role-playing game. RuneQuest is fucking fantasy superheroes. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. NPC, I could have sworn I saw you at the mandatory, uh, RuneQuest indoctrination seminars in San Francisco where you have to memorize the first 4 books of the Word of Glorantha.

Oh God.

I tried. I really did. I got into a RuneQuest game and I, somebody was like, yeah, it's You should play, it should be fun. I was like, I've been trying, I've been thinking about it. All right, cool. Joined and we started making characters. And it's like, I have no idea what any of these words mean. And I'm not talking about the fucking English words. I'm talking about the names, the gods, the places, and, and the whole character creation mechanic system is like, it just expects you to know this.

Uh-huh.

Like, the fuck is your problem? So I even went and bought the Glorantha sourcebook, which was a Valley of the Pharaohs sized book just on lore. Just on lore. Guess what? It's also incomplete. It only, it only covers certain components of the lore, completely missing other things. I started reading. I was like, oh, and I started reading that book and the book assumes you already know what you're reading.

Yep.

I was like, what the fuck?

It's not a sourcebook. It's a quick reference.

Yeah.

So it's the Reader's Digest of Super abridged version.

So all of this rant aside, this is a Bronze Age role-playing game where I don't have to memorize any of that shit. I just have to watch— I can watch a special on Egypt and, you know, pretty much spend an hour on something on the History Channel. And I know what I need to know to play this game.

Although there's better sources than the History Channel, please, for the love of God.

An hour on the History Channel, you'd be like, oh, like Egypt had Nazis. What?

What?

What?

I don't understand.

The pyramids are reactors?

What?

Oh yeah.

Let's not go down that road. So I want to talk about taking this beyond Egypt. I think that this system is so good that I want to try porting things into it.

Oh, okay.

I want to try taking this system as the foundation for any other, any Anything. D&D fantasy. Take, take some classic, uh, you know, adventure murder hobo fantasy. I think we could do it in this very easily. I want to take Rifts and port it into this. I want to take Palladium games and port them into this. I'm gonna take Shadowrun and port it into this.

Dune.

Dune. I, this dude, it's a fucking desert. Dune.

It's already there.

It's already there.

Bronze Age.

We didn't have— okay, there we go. NPC and I were chatting a bit about this before the game. But one of the things that I've been kind of fooling around with in my head is there's never been a really, really good solid game for Dune. As much as I love the one that's out right now.

It's so complicated. It doesn't need to be.

We can do it with this.

Yeah, we can. We can do so much with this. Hopefully, hopefully Matt will give us his blessing to extend it. Yeah, I want to, I want to, I want to give it a shot.

If you look at page 240 in his epilogue, he literally calls it out. You know, this is very much an old-school game which required work and effort on the part of the game masters and the players to play. All involved in a campaign of the VOP should research ancient Egypt, read books, blah blah blah. You know, it's like, as an OSR game, game masters should feel free to experiment with the game rules and suit their flavor of their group. I mean, I don't know why Um, well, I do know why, but I don't know why so many of the good games like feel that they have to put something like that in there. But I think it's for the, the people, the, the rules lawyers, the people who crack down and like, no, it's not in the book. It can't. It's like, no, no, come on, people enjoy the game for what it is.

Also, these rules are so simple. They're hard, hard, hard to lawyer.

Yeah, they are. They're very much hard to lawyer. Did you get above the score? Yes. Okay, cool. You made it. Your skill is this and you rolled not that.

Yeah. I can't praise this enough. This is one of the most surprisingly awesome things, games I've read in a long time.

Yeah, absolutely. I was, I was blown away by what I was looking at and read it. I want to use this somewhere.

I've got a hardback version. It says $60 on the bottom. I think this is a good $60. What's yours?

$40.

$40 for the soft cover?

Yep. $40 for the soft cover.

Yep.

I have both.

Yeah.

I—

well worth it.

Yeah, absolutely.

And also, I just want to say, as someone who's been a huge fan of Egyptian history, one of the first things I popped open when I looked— when I opened my copy was, where's the bibliography? What sources does he list? Oh my God, it is more— while it starts in the middle of one page and runs on to the other, it is more than a single page long. You could not have fit it on a single page. And, uh, so—

Oh, wow.

He has some, uh, let's see.

251.

251, 252. Uh, he has some of the luminaries in the field of Egyptology, uh, including not just people from the United States or England. Um, I would— he has a couple of, like, he has Hans Baumann, The World of the Pharaohs, which is just an amazing book. He even has the first one, Alfred's— Cyril Alfred, Egyptian Art. If you ever want to understand some about Egyptian art and its evolution, it's a great reference. He even has Isaac Asimov.

Okay. The Egyptians. Oh, okay. Well, yeah.

It's such a good game, y'all. It really is. There's so much good stuff here. So much to work with. maps and maps and maps. There are maps of the region across multiple eras. Just, yeah, it's so good.

As we've started doing with all of these books, is this a must-own, should-own, don't need it? Where are we coming down on it?

I think it's a must-own. Like, I wouldn't even, I would not even say that conditionally. Like, I, I try to be fair with these things. This is a must-own. This is a great game. It's a look into history, both the history of the world, but also the history of role-playing. And it's a fantastic system. I think that it can be inspiring to many people as it is inspiring to me.

I would say that this is a, a good book to have on your shelf. If you are a hardcore Palladium Rifts fan or a hardcore Palladium Fantasy fan and you're not going to change the system or whatnot, you don't necessarily need this. Um, but I could see this as a really approachable game for new players. Quickly whip out some characters. It's, it's, there's some good random rules in here and all of a sudden you're up and running in a setting that hasn't been done to death. Well, hasn't been done hardly at all to begin with.

Yeah.

Right. It hasn't been done, um, since this book that came out in '83. Uh, so it really would allow you to do it that way. So I have it. I own it. It will be on my shelf and I will use it at some point, but I'd be hard pressed for someone to say, do I have to buy this? Um, if I'm really into one other game, it's like, eh, maybe not.

For me, as someone who has a huge love of the early, early days of RPGs, as someone who has this weird Egyptology itch that I can't help but every so often going back and scratching, As someone who has, every time I've seen some game system come out with an Egypt book or an Egypt setting and seen it done so poorly and not respectful of what Egypt actually was, this is just a breath of fresh air. I am so, so glad I bought it. I nearly didn't. And oh, it's got— gonna have a place of honor.

Yeah.

I would be running games for it at WagonCon if Matt wasn't there.

Yeah.

And as NPC and I have talked about, both of us have this multiple projects rolling in the back of our head using this as the core.

Yeah, it's— I'm considering at some point running it, and I wasn't initially thinking I was going to. I don't personally think I could do an Egypt setting justice as a game master. Even after reading this, I just feel nervous about it. It's just, unless I were to continue devouring hours upon hours upon hours of Egypt kind of stuff, my personal take on a historical setting of a culture that isn't mine is I want to do it justice. And I just have high anxiety about that. But the system I could run. And if I wanted to up the fantasy aspect, then yeah, sure. I could even stick with Egypt.

I could see myself, I could totally see myself running this and the things that I would not be comfortable with, I could steer away from. You can even take the magic out of it. This does have a magic system, by the way, if you, we did mention it, you could take that out and have historical Bronze Age role-playing, right? You don't have to have the magic. You don't even have to have the, like, the fantasy creatures, right?

Completely. You can completely remove them from the game.

Absolutely.

With, with no issues whatsoever.

And you could, uh, you could totally do that. And then you are just basically, you know, any number of tropes from that age that you could run. You're warriors in the Egyptian army, or maybe you're, you're bandits or what have you. And you're running around with your Bronze Age weaponry and then kicking, kicking ass and robbing tombs. And then ending up as slaves building the next set of pyramids because you got caught, right? You know, like you could do that. And it's, it's super modular, which is great.

And it can run on a whole bunch of levels, everything from your run-of-the-mill adventuring party to political games to pseudo-supernatural quests, like one that I'm currently writing for it at the moment, which literally all is based around a person who's about to die. They know their death is coming. And they need the party's help to do enough deeds, enough sands of goodness.

Yeah, got it.

To tip the scale of their heart against the feather when they go into the afterlife.

Oh yeah. Oh, that could be really interesting.

Oh yeah. Yeah, because I mean, how do you do it but not have the fact that you're doing it for superficial reasons be, be grains of lead against the grains of white sand?

You could do the, uh, you were the tomb maker and you were imprisoned in the bottom and you escaped. Right. And so you're trying to flee, you know, flee Egypt, you know, and you're like getting away. All sorts of really great ideas that aren't medieval Europe.

Yeah. And if you're playing a Palladium fantasy game or running one especially, and you are really into the gods, the Church of Light and Darkness, which are heavily inspired by the Egyptian gods. There's so much on those gods in this book, the original, the real, our world versions that you can take inspiration from.

And most importantly, Matt, who designed the game, always gives that feeling that the gods have evolved over time, which is very much true to both real life and how the Egyptians Yeah.

Yeah. Because we're, I mean, it's one of the things that a lot of times people will forget. They'll, they'll watch The Mummy or something like that and they go, oh, that was Egypt. It's like Egypt spanned a couple of thousand years.

More than a couple thousand years.

It really was a long time. Like most people can't comprehend how long it hung around.

I am so sorry for our gaming group in The Game with Matt because they've had to listen to me discuss like how amazed I am about the intricacies of irrigation law or how the new Kingdom pharaohs actually had court-appointed— they wouldn't call them archaeologists, but they were archaeologists trying to figure out things that they knew their ancestors built but didn't have a clue why.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Great stuff. So yeah, that's Valley of the Pharaohs 40th Anniversary Edition by Matt Ballant. Matthew Ballant, sorry. Um, get it. It's great. And then come to WagonCon and play it with him.

Absolutely. Come to WagonCon and play with him.

Yeah.

Shake hands.

Any final words?

Total surprise. Pleasantly surprised by a book.

Yeah. I, I like, yeah, it's just a perfect game in so many ways.

Yeah. Cool. Well, uh, give it a read, then stop by our Discord and tell us what you think about it. And we look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for listening, folks.

Starships.

Magic.

Mystic martial arts.

Romance.

All of these can be found in A Cloak of Blades by Isaac Sher.

You might have heard my name before.

I've done a lot of voiceover work for Breakfast Puppies, and I've recently released my first novel.

It's available on Amazon as an ebook and paperback, and you can get it for free if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription. I do hope you'll support my work as you're supporting Breakfast Puppies, and it's been a pleasure talking with you today. Have a good one.

Thank you. You've been listening to the Glitter Boys, a Palladium Books fan podcast. Glitter Boys, Rifts, the Megaverse, and all other such topics are the property of Kevin Sambita and Palladium Books. Please buy all their stuff and help keep them in print and making more games. You can order directly at palladiumbooks.com, and their entire catalog is available digitally at DriveThruRPG as well. Our opening music is 8-Bit Bass and Lead by Furbyguy from freesound.org. This closing music is Caravana by Philip Gross, available at freemusicarchive.org. All sound effects used are self-made or acquired via Creative Commons Zero license. If you like what you have heard, find us on Twitter and Facebook as The Glitter Boys, that's B-O-I-S, and check us out online at breakfastpuppies.com. And also join us on the Breakfast Puppies Network Discord at breakfastpuppies.com/discord. And if you want to help us out, please spread the word and help us build a community. Thanks again for listening. We'll catch you next time.