I’ll start by continuing my post in 2023 about my experience with Forbidden Lands.
I ran a session of Forbidden Lands this past weekend with a buddy and some family members. Everyone was pretty jazzed to try an OSR-style hex crawl. Here are some of my observations:
Everybody was impressed with the map of the main land that came in the boxed set. It’s a very nice looking map and using the stickers that came with it to mark points of interest as well as places where PCs died along the way is neat way to make the map uniquely yours. The journey rules work well and kept all the players continuously interested in seeing what was in the next hex over.
You need a lot of dice. The Forbidden Lands set that you can buy is really only barely adequate for one player to use at a time, and really not even that in some cases. This is a complaint I’ve always had about the Mutant Year Zero Engine games in general. Everyone needs to build dice pools using three different colored dice, you can’t just use handfuls of random multicolored D6 out of your grab bag of rollers. Luckily, I have a bunch of blocks of Chessex 12mm dice like these from my Warhammer days that work really well. I just kept three small bowls on the table and filled each with a different color block. It was still a little confusing because in a roll, you’re likely to be using some dice with special results on a 1 and some without, but it was doable.
Magic users (sorcerers and druids in the base rules) are really quite bad. In OSR games, magic-users usually start out as very fragile characters, but in Forbidden Lands the magic system itself is, in my opinion, broken. You cast spells using Willpower Points which are a metagame currency you accrue mainly via pushing rolls, which is when a player opts to reroll a check to hopefully increase successes. The player pushing a roll takes a one point hit to an attribute and gains one WP for every 1 rolled. See the problem? You have to push a bunch of tests before an encounter if you want to be able to cast spells when needed with WP, but to do that you have to take damage to stats. Recovery is slow, and stats are typically quite low, like in the 2-5 range. (Also, keep in mind that when you hit zero in any stat, you’re incapacitated.) You’re either going to be close to passing out before you cast in combat because you’ve pushed a lot to build up your WP reserve, or you’re going to be hiding with your dagger because you have no WP to cast. It’s so bad that I thought maybe I was reading the rules incorrectly or massively misinterpreting how it should work, but I looked online and this is a pretty common complaint about the system. I’m really not sure how this mechanic can ever work for anybody as written.
Becoming incapacitated with fear, exhaustion, injury, etc is very easy. Actually dying is a lot harder. Free League has mixed the OSR approach of making even martial characters prone to being to put down in a fight in one or two hits with the more modern TTRPG sensibility of replacing quick death with a “dying” status that is easy to mitigate as long as someone in your party is still able to help. It’s an effective way to make fights fast and brutal but you’re not rolling up new characters every encounter.
I loved the way monsters have different combat attacks that the GM determines with a D6 roll. It made encounters surprising even for me.
All in all, I liked it but I have serious reservations about the magic system. We may have to house rule some other WP gain mechanism.
After you mentioned the solo thing for FL in the other thread, I’m tempted.
Speaking of OSR-ish stuff, I picked up the Bundle of Holding thing the other day for the Trophy games. All push-your-luck, hopeless odds, ruination. It looks like a ton of fun, and between the books (T:Dark for one-shots and T:Gold for longer campaigns) there’s dozens of adventure bits. I even went over to DriveThru and picked up the solo rules for a couple bucks, though I haven’t cracked into them yet.
You want to know a pet peeve of mine? TTRP reviewers who don’t actually playtest the game, especially if it’s a video format and they slip out a casual “oh by the way, I’ve read through all the rules, but I haven’t had time to actually play this yet with my group.” STFU. What are you even reviewing? The physical book binding? The quality of paper stock? I want to hear how the mechanics shake out with real humans playing the game, you jackass.
I get that for YT channels grinding out videos is paramount to their success, but go find a different subject to post about. Sheesh.
Ravensbuger, the publisher behind Lorcana the Disney card game, has announced Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls which will be a combo boardgame and “lite” tabletop RPG.
In Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls (Disney Edition), players work together to form dynamic alliances of Disney and Pixar heroines, including Moana (Moana), Violet (The Incredibles), Maid Marian (Robin Hood) and Belle (Beauty and the Beast). Materializing as radiant crystal versions summoned into the realm, the heroines drive back shadows of infamous Disney Villains and restore the Realm of Light. Along the way, the team explores a brand-new illustrated world and encounters familiar characters, items, and creatures on their quests.
Lorcana and the Villainous games have been huge hits.
EDIT: Intended this as a reply to the header post. Didn’t realize how behind I am. Sorry for lack of context!
I haven’t played Forbidden Lands but have had similar issues with other games. I don’t really like systems that give a compensation for bad rolls because it often encourages players to seek out as many opportunities as possible to roll dice. This sounds like it’d have a similar issue. I like the approach Maze Rats takes where die rolls (outside combat I think) are less than 50% success usually, so players are encouraged to problem solve ways to avoid die rolls.
It also sounds a bit like the roll-to-cast style systems in DCC and Shadowdark. I think I prefer Vancian magic as a player (no real preference as a DM) because it’s emphasizing my choice for what spells to bring and when to cast them, whereas the fear of backfiring in DCC and Shadowdark casting means I couldn’t actual rely on them in a dramatic moment without catastrophic consequences. Which is good for drama. I can see why people dig it. But it just seems too anti-player-agency to me.
We did an Old School Essentials campaign last year, and I was a bit worried when two players chose to be casters (in our 4 player party). But it ended up being fantastic! 1 spell a day was not an issue due to how bananas powerful the 1st level spells are. One player had the spell “Animal Friendship”, which he used really early in the campaign in a pit viper encounter. Animal Friendship is a permanent spell. And pit vipers have poison that’s save or die. The players used that pit viper ally the entire campaign. That player had a hide back during combat for the next few encounters, but still got to command his pit viper. Plus, combats were really short anyway (and infrequent).
I think we’re gonna start a Knave 2e campaign soon on a homebrewed megadungeon I’m working on. Hope it goes well. I’ve never run or played in a megadungeon. I genuinely didn’t think it was my kind of game, but was listening to this podcast Into the Megadungeon and realized the playstyle can be more similar to what we usually run than I expected.
The good thing about the Forbidden Lands system is there is no ambiguity about casting or targeting spells. As long as you have the Willpower Points to spend you can cast and the spell will hit the intended target. The caveat being that you can have a spell mishap which may cause crazy additional effects like targeting another random person, possibly damaging yourself, or doubling the effect.
We played last weekend and we houseruled a system where the included Pride mechanic also gives WP to the player instead of just boosting a roll with a D12, also every player got 3 WP after a night’s sleep. That seemed to work pretty well as a way to give casters a bit of ammo without just getting into a Push/Fail roll spiral and I think stays true to the OSR themes of casters needing to rest and study.
There’s a teeny chance of a spell mishap affecting only you. It’s a 62-65 on a D66 roll. All the other results are in addition to the spell firing normally.
The spell backfires. An offensive spell affects you instead of your intended
target. A protective or healing spell wounds instead of healing. A shape-shift goes horribly wrong and
you become a dumb animal. A summoned undead, demon, or illusion turns against you. The GM
specifies the details.
A 66 is the worst result.
Your magic rips open a rift to another dimension, and a demon pulls you
over to the other side. Time to make a new character. Your old character
will come back as an NPC after D66 days but will be … changed.
I’m curious to see how successful this will be. People have a lot of fondness for the old WFRP rules which has remained relatively unchanged for decades, while Cubicle7’s WH40K Wrath & Glory and Age of Sigmar TTRPG titles haven’t really caught on.
The long-awaited 6th Edition of Pendragon is finally coming. (A boxed Starter Set came out in 2020 at the same time the 6th ed announcement was made.) Preview copies went out to reviewers.
“As I see it, Pendragon was so far ahead of its time the hobby is just now catching up to Greg’s innovations from nearly 40 years ago, so there really wasn’t much need to change things mechanically in any significant way,” says David Larkins, the line editor for Pendragon’s upcoming sixth edition.
“The game began as an imitation of a mythic genre, and I take great pride in how well it presents the literary and medieval world, warts and all,” Stafford writes in the sixth-edition Player’s Handbook. “In the literature, there is a struggle between the harsh reality of the medieval world and the bright idealism of the Round Table. That conflict is central to the game.”
In 2020, the studio announced its plans to release Pendragon’s sixth edition, which Stafford had been working on for the decade before his passing and considered the “Ultimate” form of his masterpiece. (“It will be my last version, simply because my age requires me to work on new material, not to revise the old,” the designer writes with tragic foresight in the book’s notes.)
When Stafford passed away, he left behind a draft of Sixth Edition totalling more than 500 pages. The “nearly complete” outline included minor reworks of many existing rules and lore, alongside brand new systems for battles and sieges. While the Chaosium team ‘polished’ the final books from the draft, Larkins assures that preserving Stafford’s distinctive voice was paramount.
“Everything you’ll read in the core books is fundamentally Greg’s writing,” Larkins says. “A great example of Staffordian prose, for example, is Greg’s definition of Knightly Skills: ‘Certain Skills are required for the office of knighthood. Few knights master them all. They mostly deal with finding, identifying, and killing people in a variety of ways, as politely as possible.’”
Many of the biggest changes address how the rules are presented, rather than the rules themselves, aiming to provide a less intimidating first experience for newcomers. This resulted in the sixth edition’s core rules being broken into three separate books focused on distinct elements: a Player’s Handbook, Gamemaster’s Handbook and Noble’s Handbook.
Other changes in sixth edition look to modernise the game without departing from its setting’s dedication to a medieval experience. While non-male knights had been included as playable characters and NPCs from the start, the new edition increases representation for non-male characters and makes adjustments to rules for aspects such as inheritance and childbirth. (Stafford cites Sixth Edition’s expanded representation of women-at-arms in historical and literary sources to head off any questions over historical “purity”.)
“Non-male knights have been acknowledged as a character and setting option since first edition. But the thing is, they weren’t well represented in the art or scenarios, and things like inheritance tended to default to an assumption everyone would be playing men,” Larkins says, adding that Sixth Edition was developed with a team of designers, writers and artists representing “a diverse range of gender identities, sexualities, and cultural and religious backgrounds”. “So a lot of that kind of work on Sixth Edition was simply making sure the stated option of playing non-male knights had some actual support in the text and the art.”
That’s a good article. I read through Pendragon when I was young- too young, really (middle school), so didn’t ‘get’ it. A podcast I listen to, Ludonarrative Dissidents did an episode on it a few months back, it was a good discussion.
Also, this is your annual reminder that Zine Month (formerly ZineQuest) is about to begin, the annual promotion of super-small TTRPG projects, is about to begin. There’s everything from 5e adventures and supplements to full little games on a tri-fold pamphlet- I’ve found a bunch of really cool little projects on there the last several years. I haven’t looked at it this year, but I’ll probably start looking through the list this weekend after it officially starts on February 1st.
I’ve never played Pendragon, but fully intend on picking up this new version when it comes out. It sounds really fascinating. I kickstarted Mythic Bastionland and have a group ready to play it when it lands. It looks like a much simpler approach to similar ideas (play as knights on quests, game takes place over a very long period of time, etc.). I’m not sure how well we’ll get on with it, but I’m excited to try it.
It looks like Crown and Skull is available for purchase. This is the new RPG from the creator of Index Card RPG. It looks like a rules-lite fantasy RPG with an involved character creation system. I don’t really like running heavy games any more, but it’s hard to find a light game that still gives lots of character options for people who want to build something specific. This might hit the bill for me in those circumstances.
It’s a point buy character creation system where you use points to buy skills and equipment. There’s no HP, instead when you take damage you have to mark equipment or skills as unusable. Looks like death happens when you have nothing more to mark off. There’s also no attributes, purely skill or equipment rolls.
There’s a digital character creator up on the website that got me interested in this. It’s fun throwing a character together. Looks like the player facing rules are all free as a PDF as well. I don’t have a group that would fit this well at the moment, but I think I’m going to pick this up because I’ve played with groups it would go well with in the past few years. And also because I love Runehammer’s DM sections in his books.
I ordered Crown & Skull as well. Just the regular hardback version. Not the deluxe embossed one. As pretty as it looks, I know it would be waste of my extra money since I’d never want to crack it open.
I’ve only ever played a session of full ICRPG, but I loved reading and trying out some of the concepts in that book. So many great ideas that can be used for almost any system.
