Settlement Events second draft

Settlement Events second draft

Settlement Events second draft

Here’s my first complete pass at a nested d12 version of the basic Settlement Event table, along with a new Basic Move (“Pass Time”) that triggers rolling on it, and 3 moves in a new “Downtime Moves” category. The idea is that events are triggered by freebooters making the Pass Time move, instead of the traditional way of rolling once per day/week/etc.

The Downtime moves — “Craft,” “Recover,” and “Train,” are gated by the Pass Time move, and give freebooters things to do in between expeditions. None of them have been tested, so I’m open to suggestions (especially with Train — is this approach wrongheaded?)

It’s interesting how switching from d100 to d12 and compact nesting changes the way I approach the content of the tables. For the better, I think, as it forces my word choice to be more suggestive and less prescriptive.

John Marron, J. Walton, Maezar, and anyone else who wants to playtest this, please do. Just note that “Pass Time” should be added to the existing Basic Moves, and the old moves “Poisoner” (Thief), “Proselytize” (Cleric) and “Arcane Research” (Magic-User) will need to be rejiggered as Downtime moves in their respective playbooks.

Note that none of the supplemental tables are done yet, so if you do throw this into play you’ll need to wing that part. I think there’s enough here to work with, though. Plus, less time spent rolling dice!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zahe2u9ryc8oyln/FotF2e_playtest_downtime.pdf?dl=0

15 thoughts on “Settlement Events second draft”

  1. Excellent! We’re doing initial setting generation tonight, so I’ll see if I can work these into our new campaign (we’re playing biweekly, so may be a while before they come up).

  2. OK – just skimming the downtime event tables, they look great! I can see this adding a lot to the campaign beyond just exploration and dungeon delving, and really bringing the home steading to life .

  5. A quick, uneducated and untested read later, I love these. I had a question about the Craft move:

    So supplies will depend on the item being crafted, and their availability is to be negotiated on a case by case basis? Could you buy them at a settlement? If so, I feel like I’d benefit from a guideline to base their cost on.

    (I could see adding another downtime move to some settlements allowing players to pass time to gather appropriate supplies. Wood in a forest-village, herbs in a marsh-hamlet, gold from the rivers near a prospector town. That might be a fun way to differentiate settlements. This is something I like from the One Ring game, where different sanctuaries allow access to different downtime benefits.)

    The craft move opens up some fun options for treasures, too. If you discover a chunk of thunderbolt iron, you can use it to Craft a weapon that ignores 1 point of armour, or has the effective against sky elementals tag.

  6. Looks good but why roll 3D12 when there are many less results? OK I know this allows you to adjust probabilities but is that really needed for a random fictional push? (Repeating pushes are less effective for me to improvise around).

    Additionally I find it much quicker to reference a table in which each value occurs once. A table that has a regular pattern is next best in terms of ease of use, tables that have irregular patterns are hardest. A trick that Kevin Crawford uses that might be applicable is to structure the table with multiple types of dice eg d4, d6, d8 so that I can easily roll them all at once without having to decide which will be read 1st, 2nd, 3rd (as with 3D12).

    Also, my players would probably like a 4th downtime move for listening out for rumors or digging for info/research.

  8. Nice! I’ll start with this at my next game. I can’t imagine it needing any serious testing… it’s great and ready to go in my opinion.

  13. Andrea Parducci, as Chris has said, this will be part of a future KS project. I have two other L&B projects that are higher priority right now, so Freebooters 2e is a ways off yet. But I will be posting material here for folks to try out as I make my way through the first wave of drafts.

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