Fengrave, Session 1
Between the border of the Isstlands and the Shores of the Undoing sit the Conceded Territories. Offered up by the Isstlander nobilities as tribute to the Unseelie Court, an attempt at appeasement to halt further encroachment of the Undoing. Now, a wild land of ruins and lost history, home to the desperate and the outcast.
The cathedral tip had been a ruse. Senn’s contact Tarin had knowingly led them to the Hob-King’s lair in the hopes that her and her band would make easy pickings. Jarathor perished from his wounds in his sleep, and Rakk had parted ways with Senn not long after the two of them returned to Crow’s Barrow, their betrayer having fled elsewhere.
It was in the old Tavern at Crow’s Barrow where she struck up a drunken pact with Ismale, a young Urisk drifter, recently fled from the Isstlands after double-crossing a noblewoman. Ismale boasted that she knew of a long-abandoned Uaisle archive a days’ walk north, and that in return for helping her loot the place, she would help Senn track down Tarin.
The Party:
Senn, Melancholy Sellsword, Sidhe. (Lv 1, HP 3, STR 3, DEX 5, WIS 2) Boon: Noble Duelist, Scar: Vertigo. Equipped with a khopesh (parry, disarm)
Ismale, Wandering Swashbuckler, Urisk. (Lv.1, HP 4, STR 5, DEX 4, WIS 2) Boon: Frenzied Dervish | Scar: Twisted Guts. Equipped with a two-handed harpe (Heavy, Weighted, Sunder).
NOTE: The overland travel section is done in a series of 3-mile increments and uses a modified version of Luke Gearing’s hexfill procedures for Wolves Upon The Coast. The distance of the Uaisle Archive was determined ahead of time by rolling 3d6 for number of 3-mile increments. If this wasn’t a solo game I would likely hexfill a map ahead of time.
Day 1:
8am - Outset. The morning brings rain. Senn and Ismale set off from Crow’s Barrow. The Autumn sun casts long, cold shadows between the pale amber light. The fields surrounding the village are mostly fallow, grazed by the odd deer or small flock of sheep.
9am. Around 3 miles out, the fallow fields give way to woodland, where ruins of a few long-abandoned villages have been devoured by ravenous pines. Little light penetrates, and the air is still.
10am. The forest continues with no clear end in sight. Following a river, the land splits into a ravine, the ruins of an old fortress sits atop the eastern edge, overlooking the pass beneath. Senn and Ismale decide to beat a path up towards the ruin in hope of a better vantage point. A strange scent suffuses the air - Senn correctly identifies this as a mark of Goatfolk territory. Goatfolk are rarely friendly, but the pair decide to take their chances regardless. The ruin is daubed with the territorial markings of Goatfolk.
ENCOUNTER: As the duo cross the boundary into the remains of the ruin, they are ambushed by two goatfolk warriors (Lv1 | 3HP, light spear) and a chieftain. (Lv2 | 5HP, medium axe). The two warriors charge forward, each taking on one target. Senn deflects the incoming lunge - she attempts to parry, but the attack caught her off-guard, and her khopesh clatters to the ground! Ismale braces, and manages to successfully deflect, her harpe holding steady. The Chieftain, seeing an opening, lunges forward at Senn, but the attack goes wide. Senn picks her khopesh up off the floor and prepares to defend. Ismale sees an opening, and turns to charge at the Chieftain as his back is turned. Unfortunately, this attack swings wildly and also misses! Senn once again deflects the warrior’s follow-up attack. The second warrior sees an opening as Ismale leaves herself exposed after the failed charge, however she deftly swings her harpe around, parrying the charge, and cleaving the
warrior’s torso in two, its bisected body falling to the floor! The Chieftain is enraged, and turns to attack Ismale in turn, however she carries through the momentum of her killing blow, parrying the axe-lunge and once again parrying successfully - however the only manages to inflict a gouging wound on the chieftain, who howls in rage. Senn swings her khopesh at the remaining warrior, and successfully lands a killing blow, blood spattering up the nearby wall. Ismale swings again in a wide arc, and lands another blow on the Chieftain, cleaving clean through his skull! All goes quiet as the duo see no more goatfolk luring nearby.
11am-12pm. Senn and Ismale spend a while clearing away the bodies, and take a short rest in the old fort, sharing a pouch of rabbit jerky and a waterskin. The fort is high enough that it peers above the tree-line, and to the north, they see the forest fade into a vast stretch of fen, dotted with old ruins. Ismale remarks that the old fort would make a good safehouse with a bit of work. Meanwhile Senn goes in search of anything the goatfolk may have stashed in the lower levels. In among a pile of rusted human tools and junk, something glimmers. She pulls an arm-guard of ornate segmented metal plate, coated with a pearl-like lacquer from the pile of junk, and as she holds it, it hums gently. Donning it, she suddenly feels invigorated, as if having just had a good mug of ale (NOTE: This is the legendary armour-piece Fairlin’s Pearl Armguard, granting +1 to WIS).
1pm. The duo emerge from the forest into the fen they had seen from the old fort. The skies have cleared and the midday sun glares down, causing a mist to rise to around waist-height, obscuring the path forward. Ismale takes point and tries to navigate using the landmarks of some old ruins, however the further in they go, the higher the mist climbs. Before they know it, both of them stumble into a bog, and wade through chest-high brackish water and old roots. Suddenly they freeze, as to either side of them, they hear a strangulated moaning, like gravel on metal. Out of the mist, 11 bog-wraiths emerge, keening in pain from perpetual unlife,sodden rags and bones floating suspended above the water. Thankfully, so far none have noticed them. They forward through the near-freezing bogwater, taking great care not to break the water’s surface, as the keening and screaming continues all around them. After what feels like an eternity, they reach solid ground, cold and sodden
and shaken.
2pm. The fen gives way to field again. The pair find a sheltered clearing and spend the hour disrobed, leaving their clothes to dry over a small campfire that they huddle around for warmth. However, the campfire alerts a nearby band of crop goblins. Quickly gathering their clothes and weapons, they retreat to a nearby patch of woodland, eluding their likely assailants.
3pm Clothes and belongings still damp, they continue through the fallow fields, withering crops of wheat hiding their passage. However, a screeching cry from behind them signals that the band of crop goblins who investigated the campfire have picked up their trail. Ismale trips on a tangle of root and yells out in surprise. Senn picks her up, and they break into a sprint in an attempt to outrun the hunting party.
4pm Stopping for breath as the fields give way to jagged hills, Ismale spots what looks to be the opening to a cave. However, venturing inside, they begin to see carved stone, and old old, rusted sconces…
End of Session:
I am experimenting with a very simple leveling rubric, partially cribbed from Forbidden Lands.
At the end of each session of play, look back on what your character achieved. Did they:
- Train for a cumulative period of two weeks or greater?
- Survive a particularly dangerous situation?
- Vanquish a powerful foe?
- Retrieve a valuable treasure?
- Had a near-death experience?
- Fail at a crucial moment? Roll a die for each that occurred.
If any dice rolls a number higher than your current level, advance one level and consult your character’s advancement rules as usual.
Both characters survived a dangerous situation, Senn found a valuable treasure and Ismale vanquished a goatfolk chieftain, so both rolled 2d10, although in this case advancement was guaranteed as both were Lv1. Party is now as follows:
Senn, Melancholy Sellsword, Sidhe. (Lv 2, HP 7, STR 4, DEX 5, WIS 2) Boon: Noble Duelist, Scar: Vertigo. Equipped with a khopesh (parry, disarm)
Ismale, Wandering Swashbuckler, Urisk. (Lv.2, HP 5, STR 5, DEX 4, WIS 3) Boon: Frenzied Dervish | Scar: Twisted Guts. Equipped with a two-handed harpe (Heavy, Weighted, Sunder).
Closing Thoughts:
- 2d6+mod targeting 12 still holds up, and I’m more convinced than ever that it’s actually the right way to go. Checks are tense but winnable, and opposed rolls in combat really helps with mitigating stuff from getting too lethal.
- Ismale’s stats were rolled with 4d6 and then dropping the lowest. Given that Senn rolled exceptionally well with the old schema, this feels like a good way of ensuring 1st-level characters have reasonable odds of success.
- Just picking a general direction and hexfilling as we went worked surprisingly well. Again, I wouldn’t do this if I was actually GMing a game, but for the scope of the current solo games, it’s totally fine.
February 23, 2025
Preface
My usual Sunday night game didn’t go ahead, so I did something I’d been wanting to do for a while - finally use Vyrmhack for something. For those unfamiliar, Vyrmhack is a 20-page system zine put out by Charlie Ferguson-Avery a couple of years ago. It bills itself as a fantasy skirmish wargame that can also be used for more straightforward RPG fare. I’d picked it up on release, thought it looked really cool, but I didn’t have any means to play it with anybody, so slipped it onto my bookshelf and forgot about it. In some kind of twist of fate, it fell back out around the same time as I was playing around with a fantasy hack of the rules I’d been writing for Decree.
Reading back through it, I was pleased to discover it was pulling from a lot of the same influences and pushing in a really similar direction that I’d been going with Decree, and did a bunch of stuff in more fun and interesting ways than what I’d come up with. Similarly it also scratched my itch for more crunchy combat-heavy Scandi RPGs like Drakar och Demoner, Forbidden Lands, Ruin Masters etc, no mean feat in such a small booklet.
Vyrmhack uses Traveller + Chainmail style 2d6 + mod vs a target of 12 for resolving checks (this was later changed to 3d6, but I view this as an over-correction). Modifiers are your three stats - STR, DEX and WIS, plus your level if the task aligns with the character background. The create-your-own-weapon system, complete with Wolves Upon the Coast-style specials, as well as a second set of specials that trigger on criticals, is great. Really fun, very flavourful, did a great job at spicing up moment-to-moment fighting. Combat is opposed roll with easy to grok deflection / countering and you can burn stamina to push rolls or take additional actions per turn. All in all, very fun, very simple, very usable for some solo dungeon crawls.
Houserules
Note that for my solo game, I made a few changes to the rules as I felt things out. Notably:
I ported in the character ancestries I wrote for Antrin. If I can put drow and urisks in my elfgames, I will.
I used the original 2D6 resolution rules. It felt almost impossible to fail a check on 3D6 + mod as described in the updated SRD, and it robbed those actions of any stakes. 2D6 + mod vs a target of 12 carried tangible chance of failure, but not as mean as it sounds, as modifiers are generally in the 3-4 range even at lvl1.
I used Violence’s Downed rules for characters with 0HP - death is no longer instant, but characters will bleed out after an encounter unless given immediate attention.
I changed Advantage to be 4d6, taking the highest two results.
The Party, Setup
I rolled up three characters for my solo dungeon crawl: Senn, Melancholy Sellsword, Sidhe. (Lv 1, HP 3, STR 3, DEX 5, WIS 2) Boon: Noble Duelist, Scar: Vertigo. Equipped with a khopesh (parry, disarm)
Rakk, Furtive Pursecutter, Crowfolk. (Lv 1, HP 2, STR 3, DEX 4, WIS 4) Boon: Mute Assassin, Scar: Frail Constitution. Equipped with a dagger (pierce, hew)
Jarathor, Stargazing Nomad, High Elf. (Lv 1, HP 3, STR 3, DEX 2, WIS 6) Boon: Decrepit Magus, Scar: Maimed Hand. Equipped with a grimoire (Ensorcel with Thorns, Burning Visage, Fireball, Mend Wounds, Malediction)
As I was short on time, I randomised a dungeon using Watabou’s online dungeon generator, which I then dropped into Krita, and added a fog of war layer to reveal the dungeon as the party travelled through. What follows is an entirely unedited stream of consciousness of bullet points as I logged the dungeon crawl.
Game Begins
The party step into a ruined cathedral far into the wilderness. It is dark, dusty and impossibly old.
All is quiet.
Door immediately to left, locked. Senn attempts to kick down the door. The wood cracks and the rusted latch breaks off altogether.
A corridor reaches up to northwest, with two branches on the left. The first leads to a set of stairs heading down into the darkness.
All is still ominously quiet.
Down the stairs and to the right, another corridor leading north again. Through an open door, the path splits left or right.
Taking right, leads into a huge dining call, mostly ransacked. Rakk elects to search for treasure, and finds a roll of 6 lockpicks hidden in a small cache. He then speaks up that the wall back down the fist corridor looked newer than the surrounding masonry.
Heading back, Rakk deduces the wall could well be unstable.
Commanding them to back off, Jarathor casts Fireball and blows the wall wide open!
Inside, an antechamber, where a chest sits, locked. Rakk attempts to pick the lock (Dex + background) - SUCCESS! Inside, an ancient, ornate halberd (+1, std, brace, repel). Before anybody else can claim it, Jarathor swoops in and grabs it - “Clearly mine, I destroyed the wall, back off!”.
Senn and Rakk give each-other a knowing glance before moving on.
Back up the corridor and to the left, they stumble upon the lair of the Hobgoblin King (Lv2, 7HP, 3 instinct, std weapon) and his three minions(Lv1, 2HP, 3 instinct, light weapon)!
Luckily, the party are in a chokepoint so only one can attack. No ambush, so straight rolls, party roll 6 and hobs roll 4. Jarathor and Rakk retreat to larger room behind them, Senn prepares to fight the first hob. She just succeeds (8+3STR+1 background)! She cleaves him in twain in one swipe.
The other two hobs are in charging range so the second charges, however both sides fail, the hobb’s spear clashes harmlessly off Senn’s khopesh!
As the battle is happening at the chokepoint, the other hob and the King are unable to get any purchase on senn.
Realising carrying the fight herself could prove risky, Senn prepares to retreat. She attacks the second hob - invoking her Noble Duelist boon, she scores a critical hit - however the hob scores a critical defence! Their weapons clashing off each-other again! Senn turns to run (burning 1 stamina) - the hob swings for her, but goes wide (8+3)!
Jarathor steps in as Senn rushes past, and prepares to brace against the charging hob. Rakk moves to a corner and prepares to strike from the shadows.
The 2nd hob charges at Jarathor - however they both fail (8 vs 8+1), and yet again, weapons clash off each-other harmlessly!
At this point, Rakk leaps from the shadows to ambush the hob, driving his dagger into his back (8+3+1) - the hob recoils in pain and looks wounded but isn’t down yet!
The third hob and the king both advance, but are out of reach to charge.
Senn lunges for the third hob, and hits (12 vs 10), chopping his head clean off!
Rakk leaps for the second hob again, but the hob parries his dagger (13 vs 12)! However, when the hob burns stamina to counterattack, he realises too late that he overexerted himself, and falls unconscious!
Only the hobgoblin king remains, roaring in fury that his subjects were bested.
Jarathor attacks the King with his halberd, however he fails to land a hit (8 vs 11). The king readies a counterattack, burning a point of stamina. He scores a crtitical hit with his giant cleaver! Jarathor is knocked to the ground, blood gushing from a wound in his torso.
It is then the King’s turn, who turns his eyes towards Senn. He lunges for her, but she deftly deflects the attack (12 vs 12)!
Senn then follows up with a counterattack, however this is deflected in turn (13 vs 12).
Senn then gets a chance to attack again, and lands a clean hit (15 vs 8), scoring 3 damage!
Rakk uses the distraction to his advantage, sneaks behind the king and lands a hit (13), dealing two damage!
The king, enraged, once more lunges for Senn, but swings wide! (8 vs 13!). Senn then follows up with a counter, and scores a brutal hit (Critical vs 8), hooking her khopesh to gouge the king’s arm before driving it into his sternum, and raking up - a fountain of blood and offal gushing out of the bisected corpse of the Hobgoblin King.
Rowk immediately sets to work finding some old rags in order to staunch Jarathor’s bleeding. Jarathor is unconscious but stable.
Closing Thoughts
I was really pleased by how well the game went for a solo session with almost no forward planning. There are definitely some things I would like to implement for next time though, more thoughts follow:
The current treasure and monster list for Vyrmhack is very skimpy. I may end up porting in some things from other books I own in order to have some more varied offerings.
Some kind of port of Forbidden Lands’ d6 monster behaviour charts for combat to make things more fun and less predictable.
For the first session proper, I want to prep a quick setting, lay out points of interest, and come up with some kind of motivation for the party, but keep things very freeform and sandboxy.
I want to experiment some more with the target number. It is possible that I was rolling particularly well in this session, so I may experiment with reducing it to 11 or 10. I will not do is go back to 3d6. I’ve instead gone with Hunter of The Weekly Scroll’s suggestion of altering statblocking so that the lowest d6 is dropped instead of the highest.
I’m not 100% fond of the 1 level per session experience gain in the base rules, and may try and implement something a little more involved - either an experience chart or a simple leveling rubric.
Maybe try exploding damage dice? Critical hits are already brutal given the low HP numbers, but I’ve yet to see how this plays out at higher levels.
I’ll hopefully have more to blog about with regards to this in the coming weeks.
February 4, 2025
System Matters Only As Much As Your Table Needs It To.
The main issue with the interminable ‘system matters’ debate in tabletop role-playing games is that it’s perpetuated by shitheads looking to game the online attention economy for crumbs. Anybody claiming that they know better than you and your friends at the table how you should play your games almost invariably does not do so with your best interests in mind.
That is not to say that ‘system does not matter’, but that any system you elect to use should always serve the needs, wants and enjoyment of you and your friends at the table, and never the other way around. If a mechanic in a game is causing frustration or discomfort at your table, rip it the fuck out. Discard it. Designer intent be damned. Likewise, if you or your table need structure or precision where none exists in your rulebook of choice, pilfer it from another text, or even better, make something up.
Role-playing games are, at their core, games of make-believe. Systems as usually described inherently cannot be imposed on players because they are simply ideas, communicated in writing. The rules, procedures and shared imaginative spaces of role-play rely entirely on the mutual consent of their players, and anybody seeking to impose constraints on that externally, either by claiming that a game designer knows better, or that their advice will make you a better referee or player, is a fucking dweeb unworthy of your attention.
October 7, 2024
Destiny 2 is Frightened of Itself
Let me say upfront that this is a rant, and I am a huge hater, but I’m not trying to chew out any of Destiny 2’s rank-and-file developers here. They are an unquestionably talented and passionate bunch, and care about the game a great deal, as evidenced by the fact they hadn’t all walked the fuck out the Bungie office doors after suffering the consequences of close to a decade of absolutely boneheaded creative decisions by upper management.
Destiny 2’s final entry in ‘Light and Darkness’ narrative arc, The Final Shape, ended in a manner just as confused and anticlimactic as Destiny 2 has been since the decision was made to gut the entire story of the base game plus two years of expansions. The impetus from the top since that embarrassing low-point has been to make Destiny feel more like an ongoing Marvel movie.
The culmination of this is the final mission, dubbed Excision, where 12 players plus every ally they have accrued throughout the last few story expansions pile in for one final standoff against the narrative arc’s ad-hoc antagonist, The Witness. It’s very consciously cribbing from that scene in Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame - zero subtlety, just as much noise and spectacle as possible, a crescendo of hypermaximalist superheroic violence.
After whittling down the hitpoint bar of the big bad, who is now REALLY big via the medium of some Power Rangers bullshit, a gnawingly trite cutscene of heroic sacrifice plays out that you’ve seen in 100 different movies before, robbed of any impact at all by the most predictable twist you could possibly imagine. And then? You’re back at your home base, where your leader delivers a melancholy “we won, but at what cost?” monologue, while lighting a Kǒngmíng lantern. Fade scene, roll credits. The culmination of 10 years of plotting. Jesus fuck.
I’m sorry if I sound cynical here, but given Bungie employs a whole team of extremely talented professional writers and artists should I not expect a bit better than the safest, most boilerplate ending possible to a years-long story that people were really invested in? As if almost to rub your nose in it, the narrative thrust for the next major expansion is set up via a post-credits monologue. It’s fucking awful.
Really, I get it. We’re living in an era of pathological aversion to creative risk in the big-budget creative industries. Everything cribs off proven success stories because they have to. It’s all or nothing - you either make more money than God, or you flop, investment dries up and the studio goes bust, everybody is out of a job. The reasons for this trend are clearly far too complex for a peon like myself to understand, and I’m sure has nothing at all to do with CEOs taking home thousands of times more in pay than rank-and-file developers.
Destiny 2 needed to become a vehicle for MCU-style mass-market entertainment in order to sustain itself, this was how it had to be, there is no alternative, neoliberal economics will slowly kill everything you love, nobody can do anything about that and this is just how things are. Now eat your slurry you fucking worm.
Destiny 1 was a game entirely possessed by its sense of self-importance. The core group of Bungie veterans responsible for the creative decision-making in the Halo trilogy and its two spinoffs were high enough on their own fumes to just go to fucking town and make the most pompous, aesthetically ambitious sci-fi game that they could. They unironically described it as a ‘brave new world’. They took classic westerns, Andrei Tarkovsky, Terry Gilliam, Zdzisław Beksiński and Masamune Shirow as creative points of reference. They hired a fucking Beatle to assist in composing the score.
The end result was probably more David Lynch’s Dune than Aejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, as the Unstoppable Force of creative ambition met the Immovable Object of development constraints, and predictably enough, the Immovable Object won. Destiny was, as a result, a very compromised thing. But you know what? I love David Lynch’s Dune and I love Old Destiny precisely for being deeply flawed artifacts of much grander, more ambitious designs.
Years after Paul McCartney got deservedly poked fun at for his awful pomp-rock theme song, after Dinklebot and Moon-Wizards and never having enough time to explain, and Unknown Fallen Houses, these things feel… strangely endearing? They’re the faultlines at the borders where all of the rest of Destiny was crunched into form, reminders of all the naive ambition that went into the part of making the game when the possibilities were vast.
Nearly a decade of reactive course correction in the crucible of live-service software development has more or less scrubbed Destiny 2 clean of this initial character, and in its place we get something much safer, more sterile, because it had to be. The old quirks were simply too big a financial risk to countenance, as would any new creative risk-taking. The Final Shape was a pretty apt title.
June 29, 2024
In Defence of Uncertainty
I read Marcia B’s blogpost earlier today about Randomly Generated Constant Damage and Prismatic Wasteland’s response regarding to-hit rolls or lack thereof, and feel the need to defend both to-hit rolls and variable damage, because I believe they are both necessary sources of uncertainty in violence / combat / etc.
Absolutely no shade to any of the authors who have advocated for this kind of thing, but whenever I have run games for my table who have absolutely no interest in the OSR blogosphere, the response I get back from systems like Cairn or Into The Odd that do away with to-hit rolls is that combat feels boring and predictable. This is obviously undesirable. I’m perfectly willing to concede that maybe I just wasn’t narrating combat hard enough as a referee, but frankly I think I’m pretty good at that, and way less so at crunching numbers, so really I should have nailed this style of resolution.
The best answer I can come up with as to why this might be, is that stripping away the possibility of failure leaves you with something without meaningful stakes, which seems at odds with how something as risky as engaging in lethal violence should feel. Combat therefore becomes a game of attrition as characters wail on each-other to roll the biggest damage number, whittling down each-other’s health-pools until one side loses. Of course, engaged players will still try and inject some drama into this, but asking them to do so feels unnecessarily burdensome - what’s the point in expecting agency when the outcome is already determined?
Constant damage I suspect would feel similarly rigid, but instead of eliding away the uncertainty of landing a hit, you’re making a predetermined judgment about how a player-character might act in combat. Keeping to-hit in this equation could at least still hold some interesting stakes, but there is still a fairly obvious issue in that by pre-determining a weapon’s possible damage, you create strongly optimal and sub-optimal approaches - a weapon that can only deal 1hp damage is boring and tedious, and a weapon that can only max damage is… boring and tedious for the opposite reason.
Ultimately, “is this PC able to hit their target?” and “how hurt is their target by the hit?” are both questions that I want to answer when I run combat. I’m not wild about being beholden to how Gygax ran things back in the 70s, but I do think there’s a lovely straightforwardness to how those questions are addressed in D&D, i.e. ‘if successful, determine the effect’. Of course, framing it like that opens up other potential ways of doing things - maybe you go PBTA style and do a single roll of 2D6 with varying degrees of success (miss, glancing, weak hit, strong hit, deadly?), maybe you omit HP and track damage completely narratively, or through an injury table? In all fairness, this is what Prismatic Wasteland was advocating for when suggesting adding Blackjack-style hit resolution, and their blog is full of neat ways in which to add layers of unpredictability back into pure damage-roll combat.
Ultimately for my old Cairn games, I went with something as unfussy as possible in the spirit of the text, while still allowing for the degree of uncertainty my table enjoys - make every attack roll a skill check. Ask the player to narrate how they attack - if they try and slide their sword between the plates of an enemy’s armour, roll dex. If they want to swing a hammer in a wide arc, roll strength, or if they want to try with a different stat, justify it narratively first. Passed the check? Great - roll a D6 to see how well you did. It worked great.
April 11, 2024
