The Green Knight RPG-- a Quick Review

The Green Knight: a Fantasy Roleplaying Game is not at all what I expected. I'm not entirely sure it's what I wanted either. It's a tie-in for the upcoming-but-delayed movie from A24 (a movie I'm really looking forward to), and is billed as a "Starter Set."

The production values are good, and the box is nice, if a bit emptier than expected. Just a short quick-start booklet, a handful of character sheets, and a pretty cool black-and-green D20. 

The game is certainly not a D&D clone like I half-suspected. It more closely resembles a suped-up version of Lasers & Feelings and other minimalist narrative-style games. It would fit right in with a lot of the RPGs on itch.io. Keep in mind that I actually like minimalist narrative-focused story games.

Your main stat is "Dishonor." It goes up and down steadily over the course of play. When you attempt a dishonorable action, you want to roll under Dishonor to succeed. When you attempt an honorable action, you want to roll over. Specialization in skills and attributes modify the roll up or down. Each class has a handful of special abilities on top of this. It's all very simple. 

There are no Hit Points or anything, and combat is very abstract and narrative. If you hit 20 Dishonor, you're character's story is done. You can "atone" to reduce your Dishonor score, but it's pretty costly for your fellow players.  

The included adventure is pretty linear and kinda'-sorta' railroady. But I can let that slide for a quick-start intro game. It focuses solely on the PCs traveling to the Green Chapel to meet the Green knight, with a handful of encounters to delay them. It would probably work pretty well for a short convention game. 

I don't hate this game, I'm just kind of "meh?" about it. 10 years ago I'd have been all over this game. Right now, it's just not really my flavor. As this is a "starter set," I'm very curious what a full version will be like, especially for Arthurian adventures that don't revolve around the Green Knight. 

As it stands, I think I'll stick to Romance of the Perilous Land or Wolves of God for my Arthurian fixes. 

Far Away Land RPG

As with a number of people in the RPG blogging community, Erik Tenkar's recent posts about the Far Away Land rpg by Dirk Stanley convinced me to buy the thing. My hardback copy of the Tome of Awesome came in the mail a week or so ago, and I was finally able to thoroughly absorb it this past weekend during my down-time at BASHcon (and there was a lot of down-time).

"More like RAAARR Away Land, amirite?"

I remember checking out the Far Away Land Kickstarter back when it was funding. I thought the  bright, simple art was charming and evocative and imaginative (it reminded my a lot of my friend +Leighton Connor's art. You should check it out!) I'm not sure why I didn't back it. I might just not have had the money at the time, or I might have been too distracted by Fate Accelerated to think about purchasing another game. I dunno.

But now I have the Tome of Awesome, which combines the Core Rules, Creatures Vol. I, Companion Rules, and Tales of Awesome. It's a whole lotta' book (270+ pages).

The game uses a pretty simple three-stat system with a d6 dice pool mechanic. Roll a few dice, take the highest and compare scores. Pretty simple, nothing too amazing, but functional. There are also simple rules for magic and gear. The Boons, Flaws, and Abilities make sure that each character, while numbers-lite, is distinctive. The game is designed to make characters quickly and get them out into the world, exploring and fighting monsters. I can get behind that.

And I can fit an entire character plus illustration on half a sheet of paper...

For me, though, the Tome really shines when it gets into the actual world of Far Away Land. It's a wonderful mash-up of sci-fi and fantasy in a world where humans are a newly arrived race. Hive-mind Lincoln clones, bear-riding nuns, immortal psychic snails, alien invaders, magical robots. It's all the best parts of Jack Kirby, Tom Scioli, and Adventure Time (so, yeah, Jack Kirby).

There are evil giant robots called Ten-By-Ten-Men. TEN-BY-TEN-MEN!!!

The book details some nifty group world-building mini-game, but also includes a decent gazetteer of many unique places in Far Away Land. There are a lot of hex maps with big unexplored areas and evocatively-named mystery places to tantalize the GM's imagination.

Far Away Land delights me. I think it will work well with some of my Skype games when I want to play some gonzo fantasy but don't want to deal with all the details or "baggage" of D&D.

Also, the game seems nicely hackable. I am fascinated with the idea of using Far Away Land for Carcosa.

Let me tell you what really sold me on this game, though. It's Dirk Stanley's amazing semi-animated shorts for Far Away Land. My favorite, Episode 5, details the Boom War. Check it out!

Why I'm in Love with Dungeon Crawl Classics (a pseudo-review)

Dungeon Crawl Classics has been on my radar for some time now (mostly because my friend BradMcDevitt does a lot of art for it) but it's only recently that I actually gave it a fair look. I remember looking through the beta test document and being totally turned off by the extra-funny funny dice (d5, d24, etc) and the seemingly needless complications brought by the gigantic spell effect charts attached to each individual spell. It all seemed needlessly complex and weird for the sake of being weird, so I avoided the game and stuck with Labyrinth Lord.

Some time passed, and DCC continued to pop up in the blogs I read and in Google+ discussions. The things people were doing with DCC sounded wonderfully strange and interesting—plane-hopping, alien frog gods, mutant sorcerers, cybernetic satyrs, all sorts of crazy-awesome stuff. Still, the book (even the PDF) were too expensive for me to casually pick up--not when I already had five or six perfectly serviceable OSR games in my collection.

Then the price of the DCC PDF dropped to $5 for DriveThruRPG's GMs' Day Sale. I really couldn't pass that up. I dropped a five-spot, uploaded the thing to my fancy new Kindle, and read the thing. Then a week later I went and bought the hardcover.

Oh my god, I love Dungeon Crawl Classics.

This isn't a review of DCC; there are plenty of those out there. Let me just tell you what sold me on the game.

The book is beautiful. Goodman didn't skimp on art. The book is chock full of illustrations by a number of artists, including classic D&D artists Jim Holloway and Erol Otus. I especially love Petter Mullen's full-color two-page underdark illustration in the back cover of the book.

Joe Goodman's writing is a delight to read. He is so very obviously excited about his game, and he badly wants to share it with you. Every paragraph could easily start with the phrase “Oh man! And then you get to...” It's infectious and charming.

The Funnel looks damned fun. I've always had a soft spot for 0-level characters. I like the story of peasant nobodies working their way up to heroes. I also love the merry slaughterfest of dozens of nameless plebes. The Funnel gives you both.

Mighty Deeds of Arms make warriors bad-ass and non-boring. In my experience with most (certainly not all) D&D-type games, playing a fighter usually degrades into “I roll to hit. Now I roll for damage” with little embellishment. Just a series of blows after blows. With Deeds, a warrior can (try to) do something amazing and cool with every single attack. Sundering weapons, shattering armor, knocking a defender prone, carving a Z on a guard's chest—all that is covered by Mighty Deeds of Arms. I love this. It makes every attack interesting. In a game that lacks a lot of customization options, developing Signature Deeds seems like a great way to make every fighter distinctive.

Magic is dangerous and weird and awesome. Wizards don't casually cast spells. Wizards channel the barely-controlled forces of primal chaos through their fragile bodies and souls. Spells are unpredictable and dangerous, but powerful. The risk of corruption and mutation is ever-present. It takes guts to play a wizard. When I (hopefully) run DCC, whoever plays a wizard is gonna get a high-five from me.

The system is familiar but different. Despite the vast number of random charts, DCC is relatively math-free and looks like it would run pretty smooth, especially for those of us who don't like a lot of fiddly rules. It's technically based on D&D 3.x, but it's heavily tweaked. When I eventually pitch DCC to my home group, I'm going to need to tell explain to them that while it's based on D&D, it plays different, especially in chargen. A 3rd-edition D&D character is a machine that you build, choosing bits and bobs to add and make it work better. A DCC character is a flower you grow, starting with a small seed and then nurturing it guiding it in play into something greater. Which leads me to...

Quest for everything! Hey player, do you wish your character could do something that it can't right now? Go quest for that thing! Sure, you're a cheesemaker-turned-cleric, but you really want to learn acrobatics. Well lucky for you, there's a circus is town. I bet they could teach you some tricks over the next few months. I'm sure those vaguely-sinister clowns won't cause any trouble. Wish your human could see in the dark? I bet there's a demon somewhere that would give you elf-eyes in exchange for just one small favor. Want to be as strong as Hercules? Why not go find Hercules and ask him for tips personally?

There's so much more that I love about DCC, but these are the things that stand out. Other than a single session on Google+ a year or so ago (well before I owned the book, and I didn't really understand what the heck was going on), I haven't had a chance to play DCC, much less run it. After I wrap my Dresden Files FATE game, I am probably going to pitch this to my home group. I hope I can convince the 3.x/Pathfinder veterans to give it a try.

My Tiny, Petty Quibble with Fifth Edition

I honestly like what I've seen of Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition. Depending how much the Player's Handbook changes things, it's shaping up to my favorite version of “official” D&D.

I like that it tossed out a lot of what I felt was unnecessary dross and bloat of the last 2 ½ editions. I like the simplicity of the new system. I like the lack of math. I love the simple elegance of Advantage/Disadvantage.

I like the binary “you have it or you don't” nature of the very short list of skills.

I love that D&D 5^th Ed pretty much adopted the magic system from Adventurer Conqueror King.

I love, love, love Backgrounds. They remind me of Kits from 2^nd Edition and goshdarnit I liked Kits!

I even like using Hit Dice to heal and recovering all your HP after a good night's rest. It means no one is “forced” to play the healer (says the guy that actually likes playing clerics).

But...

After games like Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Carcosa and Dungeon Crawl Classics, D&D 5^th Ed, as presented so far, looks so... darn... boring.

After alien, demon-bound elves, dangerously mutative sorcery, 1^st level Summoning spells that can shatter the universe with a bad roll, and so many robots, D&D 5^th Ed comes across as so safe and dull. High Elves safely slinging magic missiles at goblins and Mountain Dwarves swinging warhammers at orcs. Ho hum...

Gentlemen, madam, we meet again.

Now, I understand that D&D is presented as a vanilla, mostly-setting-free system, but so was LotFP and DCC. I know we've only seen the Basic PDF and a couple of adventures, but I really doubt that the upcoming core books are going to tweak up the weird. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong.

Can't I just “strange-up” and "danger-up" a potential D&D 5^th Ed game on my own? Well, yeah, of course I can, and it would be really fun to do, too.

But for now, while I really like the new version of D&D, it doesn't just doesn't get excited.

I mean, I'm still 80% likely to order the core books, but...

FATE Core -- Initial Impressions

FATE! Boom! Right there, baby!

I helped Kickstart Fate Core, and my copy of the hardback came in yesterday! Yay! I love the Fate system, and I've gotten a lot of fun out of Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files RPG. It mixes mechanics that are at the very top of my "crunchinesss" limit with enough soft story-game elements to tweak that part of my gamer brain. Aspects are wonderful things that I've successfully tacked onto things like BECMI D&D.

So I was excited to get a new, cleaner, meaner, easier-to-grok version of Fate. And now I have it in my hands. Sure, I've had the PDF for a while now, but I really hate reading PDFs of any great size. I waited until I got the dead-tree copy before trying to absorb the game.

The physical book just looks great. It's 6x9 inches, which is my favorite size format for RPG books. The hardcover has a nice matte finish with a satiny feel to it. The pages feel good and sturdy (better than the print-on-demand paper I'm used to these days) with very dark blacks. The illustrations throughout are nice, clear grayscale and not muddy at all.

The new version of Fate isn't too different from the old version. Most of the major changes seem to be to terminology, getting rid of a lot of jargon and replacing old terms with more intuitive names. What used to be called a "Tag" is now a "Free Invoke." "Invoking for Effect" is now just called "a player compelling their own aspect." The number of  Aspects has been reduced to five, and the skills list has been trimmed down. Some old skills have been combined into one skill. For instance, Fists and Weapons have been combined into "Fighting." "Provoke" combines the elements of several old social skills.

Blocks, Assessments, and Maneuvers don't seem to be a thing any more. They're all are more or less absorbed into what's called "Creating an Advantage."

Good, clean step-by-step guidelines for creating stunts are here, too. We've also got helpful guides for creating game settings. It's very similar to City creation from The Dresden Files RPG.

I'm still making my way through the book, but I love what I see so far. It's got me excited to start a Fate game. I'm not sure how easy it will be to retrofit the new rules to our existing Dresden game. It probably wouldn't be too hard, but I'm very eager to see what Dresden Files Accelerated has to offer.

I've been hoping to run some classical fantasy once my home group is done with Stars Without Number. It might be easier to talk them into some Fate fantasy rather than Labyrinth Lord or LotFP. Some light heroic fantasy inspired by the 8-bit and 16-bit video game RPGs I loved back in the day? Perhaps...

Actually, a Fate Core version of Funkadelic Frankenstein sounds really damn tempting.

Houses of the Blooded: Wilderness [Flip-Through Review]

I've been a big fan of John Wick's Houses of the Blooded RPG ever since it came out. In fact, I went to my first Gencon in 2008 just to purchase it. Dude signed it and everything.

I only got to play it a couple of times (with my wife and her gal-pal playing a wicked pair of evil twins), but it was great smoky fun. As is the way of things, my interest in the game waxed and waned over the years as time passed and new games came and left my radar.

But I'm all excited about HotB again. Wanna know why? Because this thing came in the mail this morning...

We already had the skulls.

Yup, that's the paperback version of the new Wilderness supplement by Jesse Heinig. I backed the Wilderness Kickstarter (because I will back just about anything that John Wick Kickstarts) and today I got my dead-tree copy in the mail, plus a nifty new patch to put on my hipster-gamer messenger bag.

I haven't had a chance to read it thoroughly, but I have flipped through it, scanned passages, and read bit and pieces that grabbed my immediate attention. This here is my “Flip-Through Review” of the book.

I'm used to print-on-demand books at this point, and Wilderness is pretty high-quality. It's in the 9”x6” format that I prefer these days. The cover features dark text on a dark leather background, like a beast hiding in shadowed camouflage. The claw marks remind me of Werewolf: the Apocalypse, so take that as you will. The paper is a nice light beige color that gives the thing a “old and feral” feel and is of a decent weight. The black ink is a bit shiny in places, though. Sadly, some of the wonderful ork illustrations that look great in the PDF come out kind of muddied in print. That's PoD for you.

Flipping through, let's see what's in this thing. We have a new house, the Boar, with it's virtue of Tenacity. That will be a nice addition to the Horse in Josh Roby's Coronets but Never Crowns. The Boar are grungy mountain men living independently in the wilderness. Nice.

We've also got some new wilderness regions for your provinces, including volcanoes. Volcanoes! They cause a lot of trouble in your lands, but you can use them to harvest gems, smelt metals, and collect obsidian. Obsidian's useful for demonology. Wait, what? Demonology?

Yeah, demonology is in here too. Learning to summon demons is wicked easy but carries a hefty price. A first glimpse of the demons of Shanri remind me of the demons in Sorcerer. You summon them, you ask them to do something, they do it, trouble happens.

We've also got rules for unblooded adventuring parties. The aspects system in HotB lets these commoner troubleshooters take on the classic tropes of fighter, thief, wizard, etc. with a Ven twist. The book also talks about unblooded adventurers that toil and fight their way to nobility, becoming blooded “dirt nobles.” We've also got some stuff in here about the hedge magic used by commoners.

And then there's orks. So much information about the monsters of Shanri. We have new ork powers. We have write-ups of various ork species, including my favorite pulp villains, Serpent People. We have rules for ork vassals, and (holy katz!) rules for ork player characters. I thought the HotB core book was lacking in ork information. This book certainly seems to remedy that.

We've also got some new evil Suaven, including Mahl, Mother of Monsters, who's wicked awesome creepy.

The HotB core book has often been criticized for its poor organization (and I would sadly agree). Wilderness seems much better organized. The ork stuff is all in the ork section. The unblooded stuff is all in the unblooded section. Etc Etc...

I'm excited to have this book in my hands, and I can't wait to read it thoroughly. It's a fine looking book and, most importantly, it makes me want to play Houses of the Blooded again. Even with just a quick flip-though, I've already got a lot of ideas to drop into a HotB game.

• A dirt-noble tries to arrange a good marriage between her son and one of the PC's daughters.
• A neighboring domain whose noble has gone mad, letting “civilized” orks settle his lands.
• A visiting noble causes a scandal when he brings his ork bodyguard to a party.
• A gregarious demonologist is all-too-happy to teach a PC how to summon demons for just “a small price.”

Now that I have Wilderness, Houses of the Blooded has jumped into my queue for games to play after Monsterhearts wraps up.