I would like some advice on running a game of Freebooters On The Frontier. The players in my face-to-face group are pretty new to RPGs, and so far we’ve played a campaign of Apocalypse World 2e which they all loved. For our next game, they’ve expressed an interest in a dark & gritty fantasy, sword & sorcery game. As they feel comfortable with AW / Powered By The Apocalypse, I thought that Freebooters + Perilous Wilds would fit perfectly, as straight-up Dungeon World seems a bit too big-picture heroic for want we want.
My question is… do my players or I need to read and understand Dungeon World first before playing Freebooters successfully? Or will our experience with Apocalypse World 2E be enough to allow us to ‘get’ Freebooters without any experience of Dungeon World?
Also, I’ve bought the PDF of Freebooters and the soft-cover of Perilous Wilds, but i’ve heard talk of a FotF 2nd Edition. Is it available anywhere?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Just answered my second question by finding a link to a dropbox containing the FotF2e playlets docs!
Great questions! I’d say that familiarity with DW isn’t strictly necessary and would probably be more important for the GM/Judge. There is an excellent community-made guide to running DW that’s floating around, pretty sure you can find it on the official DW site. That could help, but honestly the biggest thing is adapting the the idiosyncratic D&Disms of DW, that Freebooters attempts to refine. This is things like hit points instead of harm, damage dice, hit dice, and, in Freebooters but not DW, ability damage and burning luck. If your main point of reference is AW, these things might not just be hard to get used to but actively frustrating or not in the spirit of the game you want to play.
That said, if your group has some familiarity with traditional RPGs, particularly D&D and its ilk, the adjustment shouldn’t be too terrible, and I def think Freebooters would be a better fit for a sword & sorcery type game than DW proper.
You might also be interested in AW: Fallen Empires which is basically reskin that Vincent did as a backer reward for AW 2E. City of Judas and The Sword, the Crown, and the Unspeakable Power may also be worth a look.
apocalypse-world.com – apocalypse-world.com/AW2ndEdFallenEmpiresPreview.pdf
Thanks, Jeb!
Yeah, I would second The Sword, the Crown and the Unspeakable power… that said, FbotF plus Perilous Wilds is pretty awesome if you want a explore the world and get loot style game.
Maezar’s 2d12 take on the system is pretty sweet too.