Aquelarre Breviarium

Carts full of corpses slide through the muddy streets of a deserted city. Monks copy manuscripts silently in their cold monastery rooms. A hammer falls again and again on glowing red metal in a blacksmith shop. Fragrant flowers perfume private courtyard gardens. Grim and silent soldiers march the dusty roads in search of enemies, both infidel or faithful. This is the world of the Middle Ages, which our ancestors knew, and which shaped our present.

But beyond this human world, in the most shadowy depths of the woods, in the loneliest cave, in the most obscure cell, in the dimmest chambers of the human heart, legends live. Here, demons haunt castles, elves skulk in the forest, alchemists concoct spells, and witches laugh and laugh around their campfire in a forest clearing bathed in moonlight, as the demon sitting among them raises his goatish head and grins, directly at you, dear reader, saying, "Welcome to the Aquelarre; welcome to the coven."

The Brevarium has arrived! This illustrious tome contains a player-focused collection of rules from Aquelarre. This weighty text is a hefty 260 pages, and is made up of approximately half of the content of the full Aquelarre game.

Player characters in Aquelarre begin life in one of five kingdoms that dominated the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages—Castilla, Aragón, Granada, Navarra, or Portugal. Based on their region, characters may be of various cultures—Arabian, Basque, Castilian, Catalan, Jewish, Muslim, and many more.

The game system itself relies mainly on percentile rolls against either characteristic ratings or skills based on those (and on character experience). As this book is player-focused it deals with rules for creating characters, magic, skills, combat, and more, but does not contain the rules a Game Master would need to craft adventures, nor explicitly detailed contents about the setting of medieval Iberia.

Be warned. Like making a deal with a devil, Aquelarre is not for the faint of heart. It's not an introductory RPG for younger players. The realistic historical setting is dark. Some of the artwork is disturbing. Nosolorol describes this new edition of the game as "more medieval and more demonic than ever" and they are correct on both counts.