Author: J. Walton

Session 2 of FotF last night. Continues to be great.

Originally shared by J. Walton

Session 2 of Jason Lutes Freebooters on the Frontier last night, with Johnstone Metzger and Ariel Cayce. This game continues to be super fun to run, and hopefully it’s fun to play too.

One thing I definitely noticed: We decided to start over with new characters, since Johnstone thought his last character was kind of a dick. And there’s this thing where you roll up these random people and their random setting and the random inhabitants of that setting (and in this case: random flotsom and jetsom you washed up with in a random location on the coast), but if you forget to actually spend some time giving them real emotions and real goals and real interactions with each other, you don’t end up really caring about any of it and it becomes hard to roleplay or make choices because you don’t have enough context to do that.

So there were these few awkward moments in the beginning when I turned to Ariel and was like: “So what do you do?” way before we’d set up enough context for him to really know how to make that decision. So then we back-peddled a little bit and I spent more time actually describing the setting and the context and what the other characters were doing and how his character’s leather armor had been stiffened into a board by the saltwater. And after all that we finally had enough context to start making decisions that felt meaningful and made sense. And that was true for me-as-GM in addition to the players. There’s a certain degree of detail and context that you have to establish, even in the richness of things that come out of Jason’s excellent tables, before you can really play effectively, particularly in a game where the fiction provides the foundation for everything else (such as making moves). And I found myself, once my attention was drawn to this, having to do it over and over in this game in each new location or situation that we encountered. So that got me thinking about the role of description and detail (“i.e. make the world seem real”) even in old-school-inspired play. No huge revelations yet, though.

With that out of the way: Johnstone played an evil dark elf priest of darkness named Garsian (and he was worried his previous character was a dick?) and Ariel played a chaotic human thief named Holt Caden. Their starting followers were the human Ardith, a war-profiteer who sold overpriced goods to armies, and Devan, a semi-retired human scoundrel who had some past beef with Holt. They had all been linked to King Edlyn’s Crusade to take back the Citadel (where the world was born) from monsters, but the entire fleet was wrecked against the Cape of Chaos (a bit like the Spanish Armada or the Mongol invasion of Japan) leaving the survivors washed up as unwelcome intruders on an unfamiliar shore.

Garsian had been fished from the water by two caretakers of this semi-abandoned semi-ruined lighthouse, where the signal fire was now lit most for the local fisherman to find their way safely home. The lighthouse (and the spiders later on), I pulled from Vandel J. Arden’s “Pallid Dunes” entry in Perilous Almanacs, which turned out to be very helpful, though I swapped the order of paladins there for a couple of local fisherfolk, as per Garsian’s starting circumstances. Garsian also somehow ended up with a horse that swam ashore from the crusaders’ ships, so he rode down the beach to look for other survivors and found Holt, Ardith, and Devan. Garsian already had a plan to leave the lighthouse and push toward the Bahazirian Necropolis across the desert to search for loot, wanting to leave right away, but he failed his CHA role to rouse the group into action, since they were so bedraggled from just making it to shore alive.

Consequently, the ended up spending the night in the lighthouse as semi-welcome guests. During the watch that night, Garsian put out the beacon fire just to be a jerk and also because he was the cleric of a god of darkness, but then they failed their watch roll, so a swarming school of tiny florescent flying semi-magical creatures moved toward the lighthouse (I rolled their motivation as “going home”), circling the spire at the top. The locals said that the signal fire had previously kept them away. Rather than confront them directly, Garsian cursed them with darkness and all the lights were extinguished in a shower of sparks. Then everyone went back to bed, after relighting the beacon.

The next day, everyone set off across the desert. Garsian failed his scout roll and Holt got a mixed result on navigation, so they end up walking right into a host of “bear/ape/gorilla droppings” (rolled on the Discovery table!) which stuck to their shoes and smelled bad. Plus, they found somebody’s finger bone (complete with ring still on it) in the poop as they were rubbing it off.

Then, after finishing the day of walking, it was time to make camp for the night. Holt failed the roll for distributing rations, so I ruled that he’d let Ardith carry all of his rations and they she, for some reason, didn’t have them anymore (she ate them or lost them or buried them, something; though I probably just said she’d gotten sand in them and they were ruined). Holt berated Ardith and she went off to sulk and sleep separately from the rest of the group (as a result of a followers roll). Garsian, in turn, lectured everyone as he regretfully passed out his own rations to the group. Devan complained that it wasn’t his fault for an hour before everyone went to bed (another roll for followers).

After all that, then they failed their watch roll and got an immediate Danger with no warning. So I picked the dog-sized poisonous white spiders from Vandel’s almanac, rolling on “no. appearing” and getting 4 of them, one for each sleeper. They woke up to find themselves partially wrapped in spider-silk as the giant creatures prepared to drag them back into their collective lair (“spiders hunt in groups?” Ariel questioned), a large hole in one of the nearby outcroppings.

The fight went well at first: Holt stabbed his spider through the middle, killing it in one blow. Garsian cursed his spider with being drained of all warmth and then shattered it to pieces. The spider wrapping up a still-sleeping Devan then got spooked and started running away, partially thanks to Garsian screaming loudly at everyone. So then Holt and Garsian ran off toward the somewhat-distant spot where Ardith was sleeping. Holt got a mediocre roll on trying to make it to her in time, so I ruled that she was unconscious from the poison and wrapped up, but the spider was only beginning to drag her toward its lair. Holt stabbed at the thing’s pincers but rolled a miss, which I turned into a successful stab but dealt damage as the pincers closed around Holt’s wrist (making his hand start to go numb).

Garsian arrived, banging his long hammer on the ground to try to intimidate the spiders, but rolling a fail despite having a great CHA score. I ruled that the banging got the attention of more spiders underground, so a few more began poking their heads out of the lair entrance. Now worried about being outnumbered, Garsian and Holt seized Ardith’s unconscious/wrapped body from the spiders and began running back towards their own campfire. Devan by this point was finally awake and had worked his way out of the partial spider webbing.

In rolling to carry her back and maintain speed, Garsian failed a DEX roll and tripped on his long robes, dropping his half of Ardith. Sensing the way things were going, Holt dropped his half of Ardith and abandoned Garsian as well, booking it back to camp, away from the spiders. Getting to his feet, Garsian abandoned Ardith as well and ordered an approaching Devan to go fight the monsters, getting a mixed result. Consequently, Devan went to fight them, but in a fearful and kind-of half-assed way, taking the attention of two of the spiders, but clearly not holding his own very well and leaving the other two spiders to scurry after Holt and Garsian.

In the meantime, the two PCs finally located Garsian’s slightly-spooked horse (wish I’d had them roll LUCK for this, but oh well) and rode off to the sound of Devan’s screams. And that’s where we stopped for the night.

Pretty brutal! This game doesn’t mess around.

A couple things I’m thinking about now:

1. So far I’m liking the Journey + Make Camp + Journey + Make Camp sequence of wilderness travel, and I’m hoping that it stays fun and doesn’t get repetitive in the long run. I can see the benefits of recording each encounter in different hexes or other units of a map, though, so you can either go back to the same places or make an effort to avoid them. Otherwise, it seems like travel stays this black box where you never know what to expect, even in well-travelled routes, though I guess you get to stop rolling for familiar routes after a while. Mapping things might help determine when a route counts as familiar, though.It might still be fun to have a move that updates what’s happened in a previously-visited location, though, to ensure that things aren’t always the same as when you left them.

2. It does take a lot of gametime to roll up a new Discovery, Danger, or NPC from scratch, since you have to roll like 10d12 across different tables. I started just rolling 10d12 in an app and then going through the necessary tables all at once, which sped things up. I like the feel of rolling, but it might be easier to have some Abulafia thing that would just generate them for you. It does really show the benefit of using Almanacs, Deeps, or pre-genned adventures, even if you don’t necessarily end up using any of that content straight-up, without alteration, because it means some smart folks have effectively rolled up random stuff for you and thought about how those random traits fit together. So you can just drop those locations, situations, NPCs, or monsters right into the game. Have to say, though I really REALLY like having them broken down by location type and being relatively short rather than being in a long-form format in an alphabetized beastiary, because they’re much easier to find on the fly. Thankfully, even Jason’s Book of Beasts is arranged by terrain type.

3. In this session, it was clearer to me that Make a Saving’s Throw (FoTF’s version of Defy Danger, going appropriately back to that move’s original name in early DW drafts) is the core of what makes the game work, with the other moves not being supplemental moves or rulings per say but helpfully fleshing out types of actions that need a little more to them than what a Saving’s Throw roll would provide. Consequently, I think the other moves could be potentially open to some tweaking for different campaigns or groups (building on the concept from A Storm Eternal that all moves are basically rulings at heart), even though I think they’re some of the best moves that have ever been written for DW and provide an excellent foundation. Though maybe that’s just my biases from playing World of Dungeons talking.

In any event, great game, fun session, lots of failures, but hopefully the players aren’t too disheartened. Excited to see what happens when we maybe face some dungeons next time, at the Necropolis.

John Marron asked me if I would share this write-up here, of my long-overdue first Freebooters session. Jason had some good suggestions in the comments, which we can probably repost if they don’t show up in this share.

Originally shared by J. Walton

Actual Play: Freebooters on the Frontier by Jason Lutes 

SESSION 1 of “The Cape of Chaos” (REALLY LONG)

Last night, Johnstone Metzger and I (having lost the rest of our players due to scheduling issues and real-life stuff) started playing the adventure I’m designing for FotF, based on a long-overdue Kickstarter stretch goal. This AP doesn’t really reveal any spoilers for that adventure (and it’s kinda hard to spoil a DW adventure anyway, since it’s so different for different groups), but is more a documentation of the game so that I can remember what stuff I need to include in the adventure and so Jason can see what I’m up to. Also, it’s nice to have a record of play.

First, this is one of the first really table-centric games I’ve played in a long time, since I’ve missed out on DCC and Kevin Crawford games so far. Gotta say: I love it. It’s definitely way less exhausting to GM than some other AW hacks where a lot of the creative burden for coming up with fictional content falls on the GM (though having the option to ask the players questions always helps in that regard). Just being able to roll on tables and have it generate totally awesome and appropriate content for the game was amazing (see also: Fiasco), and it also showed me how I need to consolidate, modify, and incorporate certain tables directly into the adventure, so the GM doesn’t have to keep flipping back and forth between FotF, Perilous Wilds, the adventure, and whatever other stuff they’re using.

In any event, we decided to start with Johnstone’s character and a couple of random followers (NPC retainers) shipwrecked on the so-called Cape of Chaos. Starting him with a couple followers was basically our way of making up for it being a solo game. Plus, if he perished early on, FotF has a move for graduating a follower to full PC status, so they’re kinda like extra lives in that way.

Johnstone randomly rolled up Alzabar the 1st-level male human wizard, with 2 HP, who had a skullcap and a disfigured face, some pretty mediocre stats, was chaotic but with a strong (twisted?) sense of justice, with the vices of merciless and lustful, a magical staff, healing potion, spell components (dried newts and salamanders), and the spells of “life aura” and “fearsome door” (the spells are also randomly generated in this game, which is AWESOME).

The first randomly rolled follower was Dawn the young female commoner and cartographer, who was meek from a lifetime of servitude/oppression, an addict, had a tendency to slack off, and whose cost (for her continued service) was lucre. We decided that Dawn was the daughter of the overbearing ship’s captain (now perished in the wreck), who served as the navigator for the ship but really wanted to earn enough money to run away from her father and do her own thing. But she was sick of serving under her asshole dad, leading to the laziness and alcoholism (both also just common vices on sailing vessels).

The second follower was Calden the young male sage/scholar/wizard who was warty, envious/covetous/greedy, and had an unremarkable background, a tendency to give into temptation, and whose cost (for his continued service) was affection. We decided that Calden was Alzabar’s apprentice, traveling with him to the Cape of Chaos to research ancient magics connected with the Navel of the World, the ancient wellspring from which the entire universe was formed, which is supposedly located within an abandoned citadel on the tip of the cape.

The random character tables seem pretty awesome on first use. Yeah, we did some work to have the characters make sense, but it wasn’t that difficult and we ended up with a pretty interesting crew, even for a semi-OSR-style game where character personalities sometimes don’t matter that much. Navigating the tables took a little practice, though I think we’d gain speed and fluency with greater familiarity.

To simulate starting with the shipwreck, rather than beginning with some starting gold and buying equipment, I quickly hacked together a table to generate random mundane items and had Alzabar roll three times (a throwing knife, lamp oil, and a lantern) and each follower roll once (a hearty meal for Dawn and a short bow, with no arrows, for Calden). For the real adventure, I’ll invent a better table to generate random starting loot you pulled from the shipwreck.

We also rolled randomly, after I wrote some numbers on different spots along the coast, to generate where the characters started out on the Cape. Hilariously, Johnstone rolled a starting location halfway between two of the terrain types I had marked on the map, a blank spot in between the Blood Lagoon and a series of inlets known as The Teeth. Consequently, I wasn’t quite sure how to use the tables that I’d pre-generated (since it wasn’t really within either of those locations), so I decided to use it as an opportunity to roll up a random region using the Perilous Wilds rules. This was actually great, as it gave me an opportunity to try them out in play.

I’d already suggested that the area might be a coastline of red-colored rocky cliffs and crags, since it lay between the Blood Lagoon (colored red by algae or the local earth) and the rocky inlets of The Teeth. And, of all the possibilities, the region I rolled was called Devil + Red + Uplands or, as we decided to call them, the Red Devil Hills. I described the storm-tossed characters as waking up amidst some wreckage at the base of a set of towered red cliffs that rose in weird Badlands-style formations high above them. They weren’t easy to climb up, so Alzabar led the group down the beach to try to find a way up.

One of the coolest things about the FotF/Perilous Wilds rules is that it’s actually totally viable to just wander and see what you encounter, because the game guarantees, through it’s Discovery Tables, that whatever you encounter will be something cool that changes the fictional situation that you’re working with. In this case, I rolled that the group discovered a hovel/hut, so I described a dwelling made mostly of dirftwood and flotsom that was dug into the face of the cliff itself. I randomly rolled its occupant as Nyle (though his name never came up in play), a criminal dealer/fence with an overbite who was frugal and lewd. I interpreted this as someone who collected wreckage and storm-tossed goods from the beach and then sold them to passersby and tradesmen, but who would be stingy and unlikely to offer any help for free.

The group met Nyle outside his hut, as he was dragging wreckage from their ship up the beach and sorting it into piles. Alzabar confronted Nyle about “stealing” items from their ship, but Nyle didn’t seem bothered about that. When asked about a way up the cliffs, Nyle mentioned that he had very laboriously dug a tunnel through his dwelling up to the top of the cliffs, but that he expected something in return for allowing passage. Specifically he asked for Alzabar’s lamp oil (after a Negotiation roll of 7-9), which the wizard was reluctant to give up. Johnstone decided that Alzabar grew frustrated with this exchange and invoked his merciless trait as a reason to cast “fearsome door” on Nyle instead.

Earlier we had discussed “fearsome door” as maybe opening a portal to a terrible other place, but to a place that was unknown to Alzabar, who had definitely never tried going through the portal himself. So basically Alzabar was intending for the door to swallow Nyle and send him to some hellish place. The spell worked on a 7-9, so I had Johnstone roll a magical mishap, which ended up being the spell being more powerful than intended. I interpreted this as the doorway being larger than intended, so I asked Johnstone which of the followers would also be swallowed by the door (though maybe we should have randomly rolled, since that’s more the style of the game?). Johnstone chose for Calden to be swallowed, so I described the fearsome door opening on the ground beneath both Nyle and Calden, Calden falling in Boba Fett-style, grasping at the edges, and then the door sealing behind them both to leave one of Calden’s severed hands and a molten glassy patch of red sand behind.

Alzabar, being a wizard, pocketed his apprentice’s severed hand without too much agonizing (though, to be fair, we didn’t really build up his relationship with Calden at all, so it was hard to put too much emphasis on his demise) and Dawn freaked out, running into Nyle’s hovel and kind of barricading herself in against Alzabar and whatever the heck just happened on the beach. However, Alzabar eventually managed to talk her down, specifically by promising that he would relearn the spell (he’d forgotten it as a result of the misfire) and would open the portal tomorrow to bring Calden back and reattach his hand, because that’s the kind of thing you can do as a wizard. Dawn believed him, with some skepticism, and together they searched the hovel for anything useful, finding a two-handed warhammer marked with religious symbols that neither of them recognized (I had them roll on the random shipwreck items for this, and also roll randomly to see if the item was 10+ without complications, 7-9, with complications, or 6- not sure what move I would have made on a failure). This was a 7-9 item, with the complications being the unknown religious ties. Of course, after I invented the warhammer, I then found the random loot table in Perilous Wilds (p. 43), which I had somehow failed to find earlier. Oh well.

They then made it through the tunnel and out into the top of the Red Devil Hills, looking out over the cliffs at the ocean far below. Thanks to Dawn’s cartographic background, they were pretty sure that there was a village to the south of them, in among the inlets of The Teeth, so they set off in that direction, making the Perilous Journey move. Despite her still being a bit terrified from the magic portal, Alzabar ordered Dawn to scout ahead, rolling a 7-9 on the follower more, so I had her never stray too far ahead and thus had the journey take way longer than it otherwise would. Eventually, though, they rolled another Discovery, so I described them stumbling upon an ancient abandoned village built into the cliffs themselves (a bit like Mesa Verde, but built at ground-level, into a number of Badlands-style spires and red rock formations). I said there were several dried-out bodies of expired adventurers in some of the empty rooms of the village (thinking about the bodies of perished climbers on Everest), who had camped there or been left there by their companions. And there were a few odds and ends, but everything of value seemed to have long-ago been taken.

Since they weren’t going to make it much further today, they decided to Make Camp for the night. They didn’t really set up a watch, so I had them roll the watch move but then basically have no warning for whatever happened. They rolled a result where I got to pick a Danger, so I randomly rolled something pretty bizarre: a horde of 21 half-elves silently ambushing them. We’d already mentioned that there was a massive forest to the east, so (not being able to come with anyone else it could be) I decided that the very long-lived part-elf people who long ago built this village had for some reason decided to leave the forest and return to the village during the night, which is why they moved in such a large group. Consequently, Alzabar and Dawn woke up to find themselves tied up in a previously unknown cellar beneath one of the rooms of the village, with voices speaking in an unfamiliar dialect of elvish above them. And that’s where we stopped.

Wow. So it was pretty fun and also bizarre so far, though in kind of the best way. The random tables and high-degree of random fictional input into the game actually works really well, which is partially a tribute to how good Jason’s tables are in generating content that’s appropriate for this kind of game/setting. Even in this event, when I needed to generate stuff for a region where it didn’t feel right to use my own tables, the basic stuff in Perilous Wilds seemed to do just fine. Next time, though, I’m going to try to break out the more specialized regional tables and make sure they work too.

Also, for my money, playing FotF seems way more fun than just playing old school D&D, because the kinds of questions and moves that it invokes are more fictionally interesting to me. Plus, I actually care about the characters enough to be interested in what happens to them and the relationships between them. That said, it still feels a lot like an old-school game, despite being a DW hack.

The only thing that might be missing is a search/scrounge move that doesn’t generate food (as the existing move does) but allows you to search an area for loot or random items that might or might not be useful. It could honestly just be a sub-move within scrounge, maybe? Otherwise, it seems like it’s up to the GM’s discretion if you’re in a place where you can roll for random loot and just get it, rather than making a move to look for it. But you can imagine a search move that lets you discover loot, traps, random clues, items, information, etc. but often with complications (like setting off a trap or finding trouble instead, etc.). But it’s possible that there’s a good reason for this move not to exist or that you’re supposed to do things a different way (like Defy Danger with WIS or DEX). There’s actually a lot of moves in FotF, helpfully categorized by when you’re likely to use them, but it’ll take a while to become fully fluent in them, I think.

Anyway, that’s all until next time.