Lampblack & Brimstone: Freebooters on the Frontier – Page 20

Exiting a Dungeon

so I’m running Caverns of Thracia using Freebooters but I want to do it as an open table game whereby each session is a single trip in + out of the Dungeon. This means that sometimes we run out of time to do the extraction phase. Hence I have adapted Jeff Rients excellent Triple Secret Random Dungeon Fate Chart of Very Probable Doom and procedure into a set of 3 possible moves the PC’s have to make depending on the level of danger they are in at the time we have to stop the session.

When you exit a dungeon well equipped, though a known route with few known dangers, roll + WIS on a 10+ you survive without incident. On a 7-9 pick one from the list below:

One item from your stuff is gone, randomly determined.

You pick up an extra wound – take d6 attribute or HP damage

One of your hirelings doesn’t make it

You have to use up your luck, lose a point

on a miss, mark XP and something terrible and unforeseen happened, roll 1d10 on the escape consequences table.

When you exit a dungeon without essential equipment, through an unknown route or with vile danger en route, roll + LUC on a 10+ you survive but pick one from the list below. On a 7-9 the GM picks two from the list below:

One item from your stuff is gone, randomly determined.

You pick up an extra wound – take d6 attribute or damage

One of your hirelings doesn’t make it

You have to use up your luck, lose a point

on a miss, mark XP and something terrible and unforeseen happened, roll 1d12 on the escape consequences table.

When you try to escape a dungeon when captured, trapped or seriously out of your depth, roll + nothing, on a

10+ You lucky dog! You manage to somehow escape the dark forces of the dungeon. You return to civilization, naked and half-delirious.

7-9 as above but you are horribly mutilated physically or mentally during your release, pick two:

Perma-burn a random attribute by 1d6

Lose one point of WIS and re-roll your alignment and traits

6- mark XP and something terrible and unforeseen happened, roll 1d20 on the escape consequences table.

Escape Consequences Table (Modified from Jeff Rients original at http://jrients.blogspot.ie/2008/11/dungeons-dawn-patrol.html)

1. Maimed. You escape but suffer the effects of a random critical hit. Also, 50% of your stuff is gone, randomly determined.

2. Opportunity for betrayal. Pick one other character who got away safe. Roll 1d6, 1-4 he takes your place and has to roll on this chart while you escape, 5-6 you both suffer the fate rolled by your victim.

3. Held for ransom by seedy humans. A member of the Thieves Guild can arrange release for 1,000 coins per character level. 1 in 6 chance the money disappears.

4. Captured by monsters. Escaping comrades know the level you were captured on and the type of monster holding you captive.

5. Captured by monsters. Escaping comrades know the level you were captured on, but not the type of monster involved.

6. Captured by monsters. Escaping comrades know the type of monster involved, but not what level to search.

7. Captured by monsters. Unseen monsters spirit you away to an unknown location.

8. Lost in the dungeon. GM sets your location each session. Re-enter play if the party finds you.

9. Also dead. Your body is irretrievable due to dragon fire, ooze acid, disintegrator beam, etc. but your stuff is still around for some other jerk to nab at a later date.

10. Alas, you are no more. If any comrades escape they are able to bring your remains and your stuff back to civilization.

11. You and your stuff are sacrificed to the loathsome ___ Gods in order to gate in d6 ___ Demons that are added to the dungeon.

12. A gorgon or somesuch has petrified you. Escaping characters know what level to search for your statue.

13. Magically transformed or transfixed within the dungeon, your location is known only to the GM.

14. A fate worse than death. Drafted into the ranks of the monsters. Roll d6: 1-2 undead, 3 lycanthrope, 4 charmed, 5 polymorphed, 6 other.

15. Pining for the fjords. If any comrades escape they are able to bring your remains back to civilization, but your stuff is lost.

16. Dead as a doornail. The general location of your body is known to any surviving comrades.

17. Your stuff has become part of a ____‘s hoard and your body part of it’s supper.

18. That is an ex-character. The location of your body is unknown to all.

19. Bought the farm. Your body and possessions irretrievable due to dragon fire, ooze acid, disintegrator beam, etc.

20. No longer on this plane of existence.

http://jrients.blogspot.ie/2008/11/dungeons-dawn-patrol.html

Racial traits

So, we had a bit of an issue in our game with infra/dark/?vision. We had a hobbit and 2 elves. I said the halfling had none but the elves could see in the dark (as per Moldvay) – my halfling player was unhappy. But this points out to me that it is a missing element from the game since the racial traits don’t list any of this. OK, the rule may be to ask questions of the players and find out how your world works but I still think that some prompts in the rules would be good eg I like DCC’s phrasing of “heightened senses”. I personally think this is more important than being light of step and balance – which interacts in a weird way with DEX saving throws. (My halfling thief is getting a bit of an inferiority complex about the elves).

I’ve been doing some more work on my dark fantasy treatment for Freebooters on the Frontier, which I’m calling…

I’ve been doing some more work on my dark fantasy treatment for Freebooters on the Frontier, which I’m calling Mistmarch.

First up, I’ve written the third of the magical traditions: the knotty sorceries of the Witches of Pelethé. Link here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11JLR4BX6do9nj-82AIOcgBFSFkoIjHgCTlsNc6288pY

This document also includes a revised draft of all the traditions. Thanks to critique from David Perry I’ve carved each table down from 20 entries to 12. They generate more provocative spell names, now, and spit out fewer clunkers.

And secondly, here’s the introductory text for players:

Listen, oath-breaker, and I will tell it. The mists have lifted, the storms have stilled, the fires have died. This is the Age of Stone.

For a thousand years the wall has stood. Giants built it to guard their primordial thrones. Behind it, giants swore oaths to giant-lords, who swore oaths to the gloomy Mountain-King. But a generation ago, the earth heaved and the wall cracked. Those first souls who ventured through found its sentinels long-dead: mounds of great, graven bones.

Joda, the Queen of Nails, had long dreamed of the jeweled halls of the giants. Forsaking her king, she led her armies beyond the wall. Her champions accompanied her:

The Knight-Judge Laurentine, the Queen’s executioner.

Noske Knee-breaker, last of the giant-killers.

The Abbess of Owls and her prisoner: Bernhardt, the Living Saint.

The Six Sisters and their seven masks.

The leveler of kings, Eiron the Rhymer.

Twice-hanged Scholovander, the thief of days.

And the wanderer Spiral, who promised nothing.

They soon learned that not all the giants were dead. Some the Queen drove from their halls. Some she nailed to the grey hillsides. But the Mountain-King had champions of his own: the titanic Knights of the Chalice. The Queen’s March ended in ruin beneath a trembling sun, brave soldiers ground to paste.

Now, the Queen’s folly is condemned, and the lands beyond the wall forbidden. To all except you, oath-breaker. There is the gap, grey with mists. There is your new home. Go, and trouble us no more.

Negotiate Terrain

Negotiate Terrain

When you negotiate strange or arduous terrain on a Perilous Journey, each member of the party rolls + an ability suitable to the terrain (the Judge will say which).

On a 10+, You manage yourself well through the area.

On a 7-9, You’re exhausted from the constant effort; burn 1d4 from the ability used.

Examples: Hacking through underbrush (STR), recognize landmarks if you’ve been this way before (INT), trudging up a mountain (CON), jumping over crevasses in broken land (DEX), keeping a constant eye out for whip vines (WIS), not driving your companions crazy on a road trip (CHA).

Here are some alternate/custom Magic User moves to use if you prefer to see more spells overall.

Here are some alternate/custom Magic User moves to use if you prefer to see more spells overall. These might be available at first level, or as one advanced move, or replacing Arcane Research (with some more tweaking). Critique is welcome.

Postulate Spell

When you spend at least a few hours distilling magical potential from an arcane tome, artifact, or place of power, forget all memorized spells, roll a new spell, and memorize it. Use your name in place of “Wizard Name”.

Cast Ephermeral Spell

When you cast a spell not in your spellbook, use Cast Spell as usual, but On a 10+ you also burn the spell into your spellbook.

Lost to the Ether

When you forget an Ephermeral Spell, it is gone forever.

Freebooters on the Frontier, 2nd edition

Freebooters on the Frontier, 2nd edition

Okay, thanks to everyone taking the time to answer that poll, it looks like Freebooters 2e will be the next project toward which I will focus my game-brain. I am excited about that, and eager to make the game better in every way possible. To that end I would love to hear from anyone who has played FotF and has an opinion about how to make it better. Specifically, what problems have you encountered in your own games, and what suggestions do you have for addressing these problems?

FotF 2e will be self-contained (i.e., you won’t need Dungeon World to play it). Right now my plan is for a 5-booklet set. Each booklet would be comparable to the original FotF in length (24 pages). Yes, I want to evoke the old D&D white box vibe.

My current plan for the set is:

Freebooters on the Frontier (the basic rules, revised and improved)

Advanced Freebooters (additional classes and other optional rules)

Civilization & Savagery (tables and moves for cultures, settlements, and NPCs)

Overland & Underworld (tables and moves for wilderness and dungeons)

Beasts & Booty (tables and moves for monsters and treasure)

My goal in revising Freebooters on the Frontier is to create a fantasy role-playing game that successfully fuses the improvisational survivalist adventure of early D&D with the improvisational fiction made possible by the Apocalypse Engine. The PCs should feel motivated primarily to accumulate loot, and fight monsters mostly out of necessity. I believe that by making PC death a real possibility (by starting with relatively weak PCs, not fudging rolls, and relying heavily on sensibly-interpreted randomized content), the drama and satisfaction of watching PCs survive and grow over time is heightened.

It’s also important to note that I want to avoid feature-creep on the basic rules and keep them as slim as possible. The Advanced Freebooters book will have room for additional classes and all the cool house rules people have concocted.

Here are some issues of which I’m currently aware and intending to address:

PC hit points

Does the cumulative HP rule make PCs too powerful relative to the monsters they face, given that monsters follow the basic Dungeon World rules? Has PC HP been a problem at your table? My current plan is to write new monster rules for FotF that expands their HP range. The intention would not be to have encounters that scale to the party, but to allow for bigger, older, scarier monsters to have more HP. Alternatively, I could scale down the roll-for-HP move.

Exploration moves

As +David Perry has pointed out, the interaction between Scout Ahead and Navigate can be confusing, and I’d like to improve the overall procedure for travel both aboveground and below. Ideally, the same set of moves could be used in dungeons and wilderness, but I tried various versions of that when I was writing/playtesting The Perilous Wilds, and none of them were satisfying. The two modes of exploration are so fundamentally different that they call for different sets of moves. If that’s the case, I want to come up with a tight set of moves for each of these types of exploration.

The Cleric

Some folks have said that clerics are the least interesting class to play. Why is that, and how could the cleric be made for interesting? I like Maezar’s idea of rewriting the Divine Disapproval table to a 2d6 roll instead of 1d12 roll, in order to reduce the swingy nature of that table (and I think I would keep 1d12 for the Arcane Accident table because it underlines the chaotic nature of sorcery).

The Magic-User

Rob Brennan has that noted that the “Cast a Spell” move may have some issues, in terms of not leaving enough room for making a GM move on a 6-.

Any opinions on the above stuff? What other potential problems have you encountered in play? What new things would you like to see folded into the mix?

Another magical tradition for my dark fantasy Freebooters game, in the same style as this one:…

Another magical tradition for my dark fantasy Freebooters game, in the same style as this one: https://plus.google.com/108011757230733144917/posts/jLv4R8TEFi2

This time, I added a cut-down custom spell template table (to prevent some clunky configurations of the words I picked), and a minor tweak to equipment and spell generation to emphasise the tradition’s focus on staves.

It’s interesting seeing how classifying the same word as either a Form or an Element changes the outcome of spell generation. I moved ‘Hound’ back and forth between the Form and Element lists before settling on Element. Freebooters is an enormous amount of fun to fiddle with. Very keen to see what you do with the second edition, Jason Lutes!

The Wanderers

In ages past, a tribe of winds was driven from the vaults of heaven. Among them were the Wending Wind, the wise Serpentine, the Weeping Wind, the Graven Wind, the Wind of Pyres, the Thief-Wind, and the Ravelwind. Banished to the corners of the earth, the Pariah Winds withered and died.

But here, centuries later, come the Wanderers: grey-cloaked; bearing staves; never lingering. The wizards of Aulderley, with their close smiles and their secret speech.

A Wanderer always begins with a staff as a magical focus. When rolling her initial spells, she may change one of her Form words to “Stave”.

Wanderer Spell Template Table

1. [Element] [Form]

2. [Form] of [Element]

3. [Form] of the [Adjective] [Form]

4. [Form] of [Adjective] [Form]

5. [Wizard Name]’s [Adjective] [Form]

6. [Wizard Name]’s [Adjective] [Element]

7. [Wizard Name]’s [Form] of [Element]

8. [Wizard Name]’s [Element] [Form]

Form

1. Aspect

2. Bane

3. Boon

4. Breath

5. Charm

6. Company

7. Hall

8. Glyph

9. Incarnate

10. Mantle

11. Mastery

12. Portents

13. Oath

14. Road

15. Seeming

16. Sight

17. Spell

18. Stave

19. Spear

20. Word

Element

1. Ages

2. Blight

3. Bronze

4. Change

5. Fury

6. Hound

7. Might

8. Moon

9. Oak

10. Pyres

11. Quicksilver

12. Rain

13. Roads

14. Secrecy

15. Sense

16. Stones

17. Thunder

18. Will

19. Winds

20. Wrath

Adjective

1. Binding

2. Bright

3. Exiled

4. Ensorcelling

5. Far

6. Fleet

7. Graven

8. High

9. Howling

10. Last

11. Ravelling

12. Restless

13. Serpentine

14. Singing

15. Thieving

16. Weeping

17. Wending

18. Wild

19. Wise

20. White

Looking for usability feedback and suggestions on my Google Sheets FotF character sheet.

Looking for usability feedback and suggestions on my Google Sheets FotF character sheet. The first tab is editable if you want to play around with editing it as you would while playing. Gray cells are computed and shouldn’t be edited.

Further dark fantasy noodlage!

Further dark fantasy noodlage! This time, a tweak to the cleric class. This one is partly motivated by D&D clerics being weird as shit and me not knowing what to do with them, and partly because religion is such a critical part of a fantasy setting’s tone. I want something a little gothic and baroque.

The Pray, Bless and Curse moves in the FotF cleric class are fantastic. I’ve limited my change to the Disciple move, and plugged it into the existing system. This version grant two domains rather than one because (a) I’ve added weapon restrictions, and (b) some of the domains are narrow or favour colour over practicality.

Disciple

You belong to a holy order of the Peregrine Church. Choose your sect from the list below and record its domains. Invent and record the tenet of your order which you deem the most important.

The only weapons you know how to use are the staff, the sling, the cudgel, the dagger, and one more associated with your order’s saint (often, it’s the weapon that martyred them).

The Crescent Order of Saint Beliphas the Bookbinder. Ink-stained scholars and historians, frequently reviled. Domains: Lore and the Moon. Arms: the spear.

The Owls, an order of St. Vigea of the Watchpost. The Owl, in her cloak of feathers, is teacher to the ignorant, pardoner to the penitent, and wolf to the heretic. Domains: Truth and Winter. Arms: St. Vigea’s followers may carry a sword, but only as long as they forsake armour (the truth is two-edged, and its weirder must not fear its cut).

The Ashen Order of St. Colchis, the Lampbearer. Silent shepherds of the lost: black-fingered and often blind. Those who Stray from the Path. Domains: Fire and the Wild. Arms: a forester’s axe.

The heretical followers of St. Bernhardt the Smith, who gather in fire-flickering caves to perform rites of toil in honour of their Living Saint. Domains: Craft and the Winds. Arms: a smith’s hammer.

The Rooks, an order of St. Astea the Gravedigger. A smiling sect that tends the dead, watches barrows, and salts graves. Domains: Protection and the Dead. Arms: the bow.

I have a bunch more notes on these guys, but I think the above is probably more than enough for players to deal with in character creation.

How much would it break the game if, on every level up, players choose one of: increase an ability score, roll HP,…

How much would it break the game if, on every level up, players choose one of: increase an ability score, roll HP, or gain a move?