Can I hear about experience with Freebooters? I’ve been on an OSR kick using The Black Hack.

Can I hear about experience with Freebooters? I’ve been on an OSR kick using The Black Hack.

Can I hear about experience with Freebooters? I’ve been on an OSR kick using The Black Hack.

But I heard that Freebooters makes dungeon world more OSR-ish. Is that true? Does it work well? Are things a little more dangerous?

I plan to run Hot Springs Island using The Black Hack, but my group prefers Dungeon World. Something in between the two would be brilliant!

17 thoughts on “Can I hear about experience with Freebooters? I’ve been on an OSR kick using The Black Hack.”

  1. It definitely adds an OSR sheen to Dungeon World, with having randomly generated stats and significantly lower hit points. Progression is also much slower, ala old school games, and progression also brings much less at each level. Instead of adding one to a stat and choosing a move, it’s an either-or situation. Hit points are similarly much more slowly gained, and randomized.

  2. I’ve run a bunch of sessions of it, and it’s really great (especially when paired with some tables from Perilous Wilds). Definitely more supportive of something vaguely hexcrawl-y (without hexes) than WoDu. Really great for generating stuff as you go. Not sure I’d want to use it for a pre-planned adventure, but I normally kinda hate those, so YMMV.

  3. So do you guys recommend rolling on the perilous wilds tables in game, or have them all rolled up and planned before? I guess the real question is: does rolling on those tables slow down the game?

  4. Gerard Snow I have no idea, my buddy Dirk Detweiler Leichty is running it for us, and I’m not sure where he got the materials from.

    Richard Sardinas I will say that I believe all rolling was done right at the table, and it never felt like it bogged things down. It did, of course, take a little bit of time, but we all knew what the deal was, and it was sort of exciting to see what was going to come up on these tables. I would say as long as your players have a bit of patience, it shouldn’t be any sort of issue. We thought the rolling was fun.

  5. Adventuresmith is great. Someone also plugged all of the PW tables into Abulafia if you’re in the habit of using that site.

    David Schirduan, see Jeremy’s links to the playtest materials above for the latest (and imo best) version.

    We usually roll Discoveries and Dangers in play, but some people like to prep them between sessions. When doing it at the table I ask the players to roll the requisite d12s in order to speed up the generation process. You can see how that works at various points in this recording of a game from a couple of weeks ago:

    youtube.com – Freebooters on the Frontier – Tomb of Baltazar

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