Santa Vaca: A Hack of the World's Most Popular RPG

Download link is now working

Review based on DL from another site (with working download links):

This book has some excellent ideas for adapting parts of a D&D game. For example, there are some great changes to backgrounds, with new related abilities and bonuses, and dealing with the issue (that the author specifically mentions) that some default 5e backgrounds can roll character behavior that would make them evil. Classes are replaced with "guilds", which give the character social connections and roles as well as abilities; and alignments become "primal powers" which can be called upon for help.

Unfortunately a lot of the actual system based material is weak. The basic system is d20 roll-under a-la the Black Hack, but the stats have not been rebalanced to allow for this. So it is possible to make a starting character who, after about 2 weeks, will be immune to all physical damage! Spells have no saving throws, so a first level Wizard with 2 spell points can force Zeus to sleep for 10 minutes....See more The Neutral alignment's rules are incredibly confusing but appear to make it the best choice by far.

Since the author is the author of Play Dirty it's entirely possible that these are intentional and that there are supposed to be Jefferson Carter style responses to this ("maybe we can't hurt YOU, but for every wound we take, we can slash another village child's throat..") but doing this will give the game a very different feel to typical D&D, although it may be appropriate for some very old school style games.

What is awkward is what's missing. There's no rules for levelling up as a Wizard. Levelling ability scores is based on camping/resting downtime, so becomes very easy if there's any mention of a break between adventures.

Worst of all, though. There is NO BESTIARY OF ANY KIND. This means that the GM is flailing in the dark regarding how to create opponents or what abilities they might have. Again, it could be that the GM is just supposed to improvise these, but doing so is quite difficult without collapsing the system by engineering consequences.

Download link still isn't working. Somebody send some smoke signals up. Maybe that'll work.

Same Problem

The game’s title is really weird. Sacred or holy cow in Spanish is “vaca sagrada”, not “santa vaca”.

Same here. I used my publisher links to report the issue, should get attention quickly.

For some reason I get an error when I try to download. Anyone else get this?