Review: Lineage: Epoch Edition by Wash Your Hands Games

Once again, I'm interrupting the Guide to Goblins series--which I think now it's safe to just call a biweekly series. This time, it is to bring you another review of yet another solo RPG--but this time, after reviewing two solo games that I really enjoyed (Quill and Classified!), I finally bring you a review for a solo game that I didn't love.

Lineage: Epoch Edition is a solo journaling game that was released in 2023 as an updated version of their earlier "Lineage" game (which I had not played). In Lineage: Epoch Edition–which I'll be referring to as just "Lineage" for most of this review–you play as a chronicler, recording the history of a royal family through the generations, constructing a family tree for a ruling dynasty as it rises, reigns, and eventually falls. It's a worldbuilding tool as much as it is a game, which certainly differentiates it from games like Quill or Classified!.

I love worldbuilding and worldbuilding tools, and I've had this game on my to-play list pretty much since it was released.

Lineage: Epoch Edition is available as a PDF title via DriveThruRPG.

This article includes affiliate links, which allows me to get a small portion of the price you pay, at no extra cost to you or the creator.

Mechanics Overview

Lineage has a pretty simple core mechanic. You only need d6s to play, as well as whatever mode you want to use to record your history. I used GenoPro, a fancy family tree software that I got years ago and which I use for a lot of my NPC family trees, but you can definitely do this with a notebook and pen, or a Word document and some sort of image editor.

You start with a ruler, rolling 2d6 to generate a sobriquet--that nickname that tells you something about the ruler, like William the Conquerer or Ethelred the Unready. Those "the _____" are sobriquets. A lot of this game involves rolling 2d6 and consulting a table, and the order of your rolls matters. A 5-4 is different than a 4-5.

You similarly roll to determine the nature of the ruler's spouse, the number of children your ruler has who survive to adulthood (the system is built to average around 3-4 potential heirs, but you don't need to track the offshoots that don't end up inheriting the Crown), and then the number of historical events you'll be generating for your ruler (only 1d6 here to keep it from getting unwieldy). I'll talk more about heirs later in the review, but something I did like is that the system does make it possible for you to have 0 heirs, sparking a dynastic crisis.

Once you've figured out how many events you need to play through, you repeat that same "roll 2d6 and consult a chart" mechanic for each of those events, getting a prompt for what happens during your monarch's reign. Once you've figured out those events and recorded them--writing a little paragraph for each in your role as court chronicler--you roll to determine how your monarch died. Then, you pass off the title of monarch to your oldest eligible heir, and repeat the process, going back to step one with figuring out sobriquet, marriage, and children.

Complications

A few things complicate this. The first is that you go through three phases for those historical events. You start out in the kingdom's "rise." Some of the events in this phase transition you to a Golden Age. Then, you switch tables--there's a whole new set of 36 event prompts to consult for the Golden Age. Other events might transition you back into a rise, while others move you to your kingdom beginning to Fall--a third table of prompts. Once in the Fall, your kingdom might recover back into a Rise or a Golden Age. This provides a lot of different options for you for events, and I think I probably could have played through my whole run without repeating events if not for my dice deciding that I was going to roll the same event four times in a row. I started just rerolling if I got a prompt that I had already seen or that did not make sense, but that is not the fault of the system.

The second thing that complicates the events is that, over the generations, you build up Instability, Weakness, and Dishonorableness. Events or sobriquets or spouses could all raise any of these. If any of these scores gets too high, you start getting additional events event monarch that can lead to things like violent revolution that overthrow your dynasty. These attributes only rise--once popularity is lost, it cannot be regained.

Is It A Game?

Lineage does not really play like a "game". Yes, there's a failure state: a score getting too high and your dynasty being overthrown. But there's essentially no choice in the game, no opportunity to exert any agency. Events happen; succession happens; unrest builds. You cannot do anything to influence the course of events except change the way you narrate them. There's no way to influence the rolls--Classified! lets you pick which skill you want to use in a certain context, which is limited agency but some agency nonetheless; Quill lets you pick if you want to try to augment. Lineage doesn't have even these limited forms.

In this way, I think it succeeds in giving you the feeling of being a court chronicler. You have essentially no power to shape events. But it does limit the game's feeling of being a game.

The Good

So, let's get into the actual review and my opinions.

Comprehensive (in some ways)

There are a lot of prompts in this game. Three different 36-prompt tables to roll on based on the different eras. There's a spouse table, a sobriquet table, a death table, and tables for each of the three different accumulating "bad scores" if they reach too high. There's a princely lines table, for summarizing what happens if you need to jump to a nephew or more distant relative. I did not see every option on all these tables during my playthrough, which feels good! It means that there's room for more.

Plus, this variety of tables captures a lot of different parts of a ruler's career. Marriage, heirs, events, reputation, and death are all important, and with the exception of some things that would make time a little more concrete, I did not feel like any part was missing.

Heirs

This game handles the delicate balance of medieval life well. You likely have a lot of children, but many of them die. The rules have you roll 2d6 to determine your number of children, and then 1d6 of them die in childhood. If you roll more on that 1d6 than on your 2d6, oops, your rule is going to jump family branches. There's an option on the spouse's table for never marrying and having no children, as well.

This gives you an impetus to have a more exciting and interesting list of rulers that is not all direct parent-to-eldest-child succession. The best stories that were developed in my playthrough were moments where succession was not smooth.

There are some points I wish had more clarity. Some of the events relate to an heir becoming sick and dying. Is that one of the ones who survived to adulthood, potentially picking off one of your actual named heirs and impacting your succession plans? Or is it just a narrative for the death of one of those 1d6 dead children? And while I liked the 2d6-1d6 mechanic, I do think it skewed towards having too many surviving children, which limited the more interesting lateral successions–maybe 2d4-1d4 would have been better?

The other thing that this game does is that you only care about the rulers. You'll name all your heirs, but they don't matter if they don't inherit. Their children certainly don't matter, which keeps your family tree tidy, rather than tracking an exponentially ballooning royal lineage.

Some Interesting Emergent Narratives

Though I'm about to jump into a bunch of things that I did not think worked with the game, I don't want to deny that this game did give me a few interesting stories. The Mystic Advisor who promised knowledge that would unlock a golden age in exchange for the queen's grandchild's life was a great and evocative prompt, particularly when the next event I rolled was that the Queen's husband was ensorcelled by an unpopular advisor. I had these be the same advisor, creating a sort of Rasputin-like character. That was great, and the promised grandchild ended up being the only heir to the Queen's son, leading to a series of lateral jumps through siblings as the next King was left childless after the promised grandchild was given away for nefarious purposes, and then his sister was childless.

So some emergent narratives got mechanical support, which was awesome! But, transitioning to the negatives, I wish there was more of that. The series of messy lateral successions overseen by a scheming mystic advisor feels like an opportunity for rising unrest or turmoil in the country at the end of the Golden Age his knowledge brought about, but the mechanics just stopped telling that narrative, and the country ended up in basically the same place mechanically (regarding the stats like Unrest or Dishonor) as it was prior to the Golden Age.

The Bad

Non-cohesive

I wish that this game connected more. I hit an event to enter a Golden Age with my first monarch, and by my third, we had entered a Fall. We cycled back around to a Rise, and then another Golden Age, before returning to a long fall. The Fall events are "worse" prompts, but they don't increase any of those "bad scores" that would move you toward your dynasty actually collapsing. Instead, my kingdom staggered along as "falling" for like eight consecutive kings, while never actually getting worse or closer to its demise.

Similarly, it feels weird to be getting the sobriquets "the Conquerer", "the Able", or "the Saint" while your kingdom is supposedly falling. If your kingdom is falling, you probably don't want an able king. Or having a "the Able" should return you to glory, or a "the Conquerer" should put you back into a Rise or a Golden Age. It just felt very disconnected for my kingdom to face rebellion after rebellion, numerous rising bandit armies, and several defecting spymasters, all without even raising your Instability score and pushing you towards demise.

Even something like tying sobriquets to the events table that you're rolling on, and allowing a particularly able ruler or a restoration of a Golden Age to cause your Instability score to decrease would help here. Connecting the different tables so that a Conqueror king would see events related to conquest, and a king ruling during a fall would be facing a downward spiral toward a potential overthrow, would help the game feel more coherent.

Unclear Timelines

This game leaves a lot of things vague, which for me really hurt its utility as a worldbuilding tool. I don't just care that King Laucian died of leprosy, I care that he died young, leaving a teenager in charge of the throne. If I'm generating four events for his reign, are those events all happening fast? Or are they spread out over four decades?

All of these elements were left completely up to my imagination, rather than having any mechanical support. If this is a worldbuilding tool, I want it to help me with worldbuilding! If I'm picking which king had a long reign or a short reign, if I'm arbitrarily deciding that the heir who inherited was young or old or in his prime when he took over the throne, then why wouldn't I just write my family tree without Lineage?

Some of this might be fixed by some third-party supplements that have been produced that I did not use. Serial Prizes produced For the Ages (available on Itch.io) as a supplement that helps solve some of these issues, but I don't want to have to use third-party supplements for the game to fulfill what feels like a core part of its stated goal.

No Agency

As I said already, there's no opportunity in this game to shape the events of your playthrough. As Dishonor rises, there's no opportunity to skip over a notoriously dishonorable heir--maybe even increasing unrest to decrease your dynasty's dishonorable reputation. This would require more of that cohesion that I addressed in the last point, but giving you some decision points to actually influence the course of events rather than just reporting on them, would take this journaling game into the game sphere.

It made this game, in my experience, just not... fun. I ended up with a family tree that was helpful, but I did not have fun playing it. Your mileage may vary; the game has generally positive reviews when I've looked at other reviewers. There's a reason that I picked it up. But for me, I just kept rolling and wondering if this was it. I wanted to make some decisions, to have choices to fight against the tide of unrest and work to preserve my dynasty, and I just never had the opportunity to pick anything for myself.

Overall

Was Lineage an effective worldbuilding tool? In some ways! I got a family tree out of it, and that tree did have some interesting stories baked in. It had a lot of boring successions and rulers as well, but that is also apt for a royal dynasty. Those interesting stories were emergent, things that I had not intended on when I started, which was great.

But the worldbuilding that it produced never really felt cohesive. Why did some of my best rulers (according to their sobriquets) rule during a period of the Fall? Why did the dynasty "fall" for so many consecutive monarchs, but unrest never increased to drive us closer to revolution or overthrow? Why did some of those good-sobriquet rulers see events that should indicate mass dislike? I'm pretty sure that a king who ruled over (and must have suppressed) several different rebellions would not be considered "the Serene" to posterity.

For the story to work, I had to put in a lot of extra support through the writing. Much of the onus of interesting monarchs fell on my shoulders with no mechanical backing. And if a tool is going to make me do 95% of the creative invention anyway, it feels like the tool is not accomplishing its mission to inspire me.

This would have been fine if its shortcomings as a worldbuilding tool were made up for by being a fun game, but Lineage's complete lack of agency or opportunity to influence the course of events made it little more than a dice roller. There were no decision points, just writing prompts that happened to you.

I think this system has the potential to be great. A system with more interlocking between its pieces would also be easier to great decision points for. If those "bad stats" were more deeply rooted in the system instead of feeling somewhat tacked on, if they fluctuated up and down and you had moments where you could actually have some choice between two bad options, I think the system would be great.

But right now, Lineage: Epoch Edition needs a third iteration to click, at least for me. The game has its moments, yes, but on the whole, it struggles to succeed as both a game or a worldbuilding tool. It needs to have more decision points to be fun and to be a good game, and it needs more cohesion between what is generated in one place in the system and what is generated in another to be an effective worldbuilding tool.

Want to give it a shot yourself? Maybe you disagree with me! You can pick up Lineage: Epoch Edition as a PDF title via DriveThruRPG.