Hope, Fear, And A Lot Of Cards: A First Look At Daggerheart RPG

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Daggerheart – Hope, Fear, And A Lot Of Cards

Recently, since my Legend Of Five Rings campaign went into a hibernation for the winter takes a hiatus for about six-to-nine months (and not longer, hopefully), my group started looking for something else to play. Initially, we were supposed to follow Legend with Enemy Within Campaign (Warhammer RPG 4th edition), but then two of the coplayers got their Daggerheart rulebooks (deluxe sets, if I am correc), so we decided to give it a try...

Wait, what?

Daggerheart is a new fantasy roleplaying game from Darrington Press, a publishing company created by Critical Role, who made Candela Obscura, Tal'Dorei Campaign Settings, Vox Machina Art Books, and other products.

The First Impression

The game is beautiful. The graphics, both the actual color illustrations and the concept drawings are gorgeous. The tone is mostly heroic fantasy full of color (aside of concept drawings in the character creation section which look, to my dilettante eyes, to be pencil drawn).

The character sheets and tables are clean and readable without looking boring or ugly, and the ability cards, of which I will be speaking more later, help organize character information – the pictures on the cards are probably the darkest graphics (in the graphic sense, not their themes) in the game so far.

The Characters

The game stresses importance of Session Zero, the early meeting where the players and the game master share their ideas and expectations about the game, to make sure they see eye-to-eye about the game they want to play, the themes they want to cover and/or exclude, dividing the roles and specializations to avoid having all four coming with exactly the same build, and so on. It also involves making initial decisions about the setting – the core rulebook offers a few general frameworks that work as foundations on which the group can build their own world (we picked Five Banners Burning because the GM wanted a degree of politics in the background) and often defining what connects individual party members and deciding why they are keeping together.

Character creation is quick and simple. First you pick a class – there are nine classes, each combining two domains: Bard (Grace & Codex), Druid (Arcana & Sage), Guardian (Valor & Blade), Ranger (Bone & Sage), Rogue (Midnight & Grace), Seraph (Splendor & Valor), Sorcerer (Arcana & Midnight), Warrior (Bone & Valor), and Wizard (Codex & Splendor).
*Seraph is a basically a paladin, Guardian is the more tanky fighter, Warrior is the more fighty fighter.

Each class offers you some core features, including a way to spend Hope, access to two domains. You also pick one out of two (so far) specializations, for example druid has a rather disappointing healing specialization and an elemental-focused one, while rogue has a shadow-jumping Nightwalker and more socially focused Spider Syndicate. You get the starting specialization features at 1st level and get to select advanced abilities later on, though you sacrifice your access to advanced specialization abilities if you choose to multiclass (which gives you core features of another class).

Once you picked what you want to do, you create your Heritage, selecting your Ancestry and combining it with the Community in which you were raised. Each ancestry grants you two features, and you can make a hybrid by picking two ancestries and a single feature from each ancestry. Communities grant single features each. No mixing-and-matching here.

The ancestries in the core book are Clanks (sentient mechanical beings), Drakona (draconic humanoids), Dwarves, Elves, Faeries, Fauns, Firbolg (who are cowfolk for some reason), Fungril (sapient fungi), Galapa (turtlefolk), Giants, Goblins, Halflings, Humans, Infernis (tieflings), Katari (catfolk), Orcs, Ribbets (frog and toadfolk), and Simiah (monkey/ape folk). Each of the ancestries offers a lot of cosmetic variations when it comes to their concept art – probably my favorite part of the rulebook when it comes to graphics – presenting many different approaches to well-established ideas know from fantasy works.

Communities covered are Highborne (nobility), Loreborne (scholars), Orderborne (community focused on a conviction, faith, and discipline), Ridgeborne (community living in mountains or on cliffs), Seaborne, Slyborne (criminal communities), Underborne (those who live underground), Wanderborne (nomads), and Wildborne (forests and jungles).

After you decided on your origins, you get to assign your traits: Agility, Strength, Finesse, Instincts, Knowledge, and Presence. Your starting scores are +2, +1, +1, 0, 0, and –1. Each Almost every class has a spellcasting trait, which you will be using for tests of most of your abilities and some domain abilities rely on specific traits, so you want to keep that in mind. On the other hand, there is a selection of weapons for each trait to use, so you never make yourself incapable of fighting regardless of your trait spread unless you insist on using incompatible weapon.
*Agility vs. Finesse? Agility covers movement, speed, leaping, and maneuvers, and also bows, while Finesse is about precise control, hiding, tinkering, crossbows, and firearms.

Starting Evasion (the number that opponent needs to roll to hit you) and Hit Points are determined by your class, while everyone has starting Stress of 6. Ancestries, some class features and specialties, as well as domain cards and equipment can slightly modify this values.

You get to start with either a one-handed primary and a secondary weapon or a two-handed primary weapon selected from a list of tier 1 weapons. There is a choice for each trait, and you can even start with a magical weapon fitting your character style (returning blade, my preciousssss!).

Finally, you pick up two 1st level domain cards coming from either of two domains associated with your class. This can be spells or abilities, both active and passive.

The final step of the character creation is picking or inventing two Experiences with an initial value of +2. Those are descriptors of your characters skills, jobs, past achievements, values, and so on.

Myself, I went with a wildborne simiah nightwalker rogue, kidnapped by amoral wizard experimenters from the setting's magocratic city state, who bonded with a inferni sorceress who is their outcast scion.

The Game Mechanics

The game mechanics are simple. The players roll the Duality Dice: a pair of d12 in different colors and add them together. One of those is a Hope die (we decided on lighter one) and the other is Fear die. Depending on which die shows the higher result, the roll is said to be made with Hope, or made with Fear. If both dice show the same result it is critical success and counts as roll with Hope, deals extra damage (if it is an attack) and allows you to heal a point of Stress.

Rolling with Hope means you get a point of Hope (up to a maximum of 6). If it is success, it's a very good success, if it is failure, there are some mitigating factors. Rolling with Fear gives game master a Fear token (up to a maximum of 12), and something goes badly. If it is a success there is some consequence or side effect, if it is failure, it hurts.

You add results of both dice, and the most suitable trait and compare it to the difficulty of the roll (5 being very easy, 10 easy, 15 average, 20 hard, with 25-30 being very hard to nearly impossible results).

Before making the roll you can spend a point of Hope to add one of your experiences if it is relevant to the situation. We found it to be a dubious gamble at best: +2 on a 2d12 roll doesn't feel enough for a Hope point that is better spend on activating spells or class abilities, or even aiding others.

Various circumstances can also grant you an advantage or disadvantage on your roll. Advantages and disadvantages negate each other one-to-one, so getting more advantages is good. You roll number of d6 equal to remaining advantages (or disadvantages) with your normal Duality Dice and add (or subtract) the result of the highest d6 to the final result, which means that with at least net advantage you can potentially roll natural 30 (12+12+6) before adding other modifiers. The most common source of advantage is another character spending a point of Hope to aid you in some way.

The Combat

When attacking the players roll Duality Dice and adding a trait determined by weapon used, plusy any other bonuses they managed to apply and comparing to Difficult of the enemy, while the GM rolls d20 adding the attack bonus in the NPCs statistics and comparing to the PC's Evasion score (which is typically between 9 and 12).

On a successful  attack, the attacker rolls damage dice of their attack, determined by their weapon or spell, their proficiency (Tier 1 is 1st level and you roll one weapon die, Tier 2 is 2-4 where you roll two weapon dice. Tier 3 is 5-7 with three weapon dice, and Tier 4 is 8-10 and four weapon dice, but various effects and enhancements can increase proficiency and thus the number of dice rolled by 1 or more), and abilities used. Or whatever is listed in the adversary's description. The total result is compared to damage thresholds which is based on armor worn, character level and special abilities (e.g. starting character might have something like 6/12, though starting full plate can give 9/18 while reducing Evasion by 2 and Agility by 1). If the result is lower than the lower threshold, the target loses 1 Hit Point, if the result is at least equal to lower threshold, but under the higher threshold, 2 Hit Points are lost, and if the damage equals or exceeds the higher threshold, 3 Hit Points are lost. Critical hit increases damage total by adding a bonus equal to maximum the weapon dice can roll.

After the actual Hit Point loss is determined, the target of the attack my decide to sacrifice one point of Armor to reduce damage by one step. Judging when to accept Hit Point damage and when to reduce it with armor is part of your resource management. The starting characters have between 5 and 8 hit points, with 6 being the typical value, and are likely to have between 3 and 5 Armor Points.

Notably, like in some games but unlike your typical D&D and its clones, character cannot die unless the player choses so. When you drop to 0 Hit Points, you can either chose to drop incapacitated until the end of scene (and likely get a scar in the process), go out in a blaze of glory, taking a single action that critically succeeds and then die, or take a risk and roll Duality Dice, recovering Hit Points and Stress on a roll with Hope or dying on a roll with Fear...

In addition to Hit Points each character has 6 points of aforementioned Stress. It is primarily used to activate various spells and abilities, though certain threats and special attacks can also reduce Stress. Once you are out of Stress you will start losing Hit Points instead so keep that in mind as another resource to keep track of.

Recuperation takes form of short and long rests. During either, each character picks two options: recover Hit Points, recover Stress, repair Armor points, or gain a point of Hope (or two if another character participates in the process). During the short rest recovery and repair restore 1d4+Tier points, while the long restores all points of selected category. Additionally various ability and spell uses are restored on a short or long rest, as noted in their description.

Resting is not without its drawbacks. Whenever the party takes a rest, the GM gains 1d4 Fear tokens (+number of PCs during the long rest), which is the resource GM can use to pay for opponents' actions, trigger special abilities, and add threats unexpected dangerous circumstances.

The Spotlight

Unlike some more traditional roleplaying games, Daggerheart doesn't use a fixed initiative. Instead, the players act passing the spotlight between each other as they see fit based on the narrative and roles. The GM-controlled adversaries get to act after a player character rolls with Fear, fails an action roll, the group lose the steam and look for what happens next, circumstances demand consequences, or when an opportunity opens. Apparently that approach is problematic for some groups that are used to fixed initiative order, but we had no serious problem with that, but we are used both to games with looser initiative order (2d20, Genesys), and games that explicitly permit the GM to interrupt regular initiative (again 2d20).

Here Fear tokens that GM plays a role, allowing the GM to "steal the spotlight" interrupting the players, take an additional GM move, activate a Fear-powered ability of an opponent, or a Fear-triggered environmental quality, or add adversary's experience to the roll (if there are any).

The Domains And (Lots Of) Cards

Domains are collections of abilities, both active and passive, spells, and grimoires (which are sets of two or three spells selected as a fixed bundle, and show, so far, only in the Codex domain). Each represents a theme of sorts, and each class is linked to two domains: Arcana (innate and instinctual magic, often elemental in nature – druids and sorcerers), Blade (weapon mastery – guardians and warriors), Bone (tactics and the body – warriors and rangers), Codex (intensive magical study – bards and wizards), Grace (charisma and influence – bards and rogues), Midnight (shadow and secrecy – rogues and sorcerers), Sage (natural world – druids and rangers), Splendor (life, vitality and healing – seraphs and wizards), and Valor (protection – seraphs and guardians). This gives a great potential for making additional classes that use new combinations of existing domains, though new domains are already on the way – a playtest of Dread domain with associated warlock and witch classes is available for preview on the Daggerheart website in the Void (playtest) section.

Each domain currently offers three cards picks at 1st level, and two each on 2nd through 10th level. Standard edition comes with a complete set of cards for all domains, class specialization features (core class features are printed on the sheets instead), and two cards for each ancestry and community (as the overleap between player characters is more likely there). This is a neat way of having description of your abilities without having to reach for rulebook every time you want to check the details.

The Summary

This game is a love-child of heroic themes from Dungeon And Dragons with the more player, story, and narrative-focused aspects of Apocalypse World (and its descendants), Forged in The Dark, Genesys, 2d20 (Dishonored), and others (in fact it explicitly says so in th every introduction).

It involves some resource management in the form of Hit Points, Stress, Armor Score, and Hope tokens, and, depending on abilities picked, might also include some additional tokens spread between your ability cards, but character sheets provided handle that well. In fact, character sheets even contain handy overlook of leveling, allowing you to advance your character quickly.

Daggerheart doesn't offer a ready campaign setting (at least yet), instead relying on players and GM coming together to build a world they will enjoy, using elements and tools given by the game.

Playing the game was fun, even despite some misgivings I have about specific details of the mechanics, such as starting ability scores ranging between +2 and –1 don't quite feel like they do meaningful contribution to 2d12 rolls or character build overall (there are some domain cards which give you a number of tokens equal to one of the traits, that can be spent on using specific ability, but I haven't picked any myself), and, as I mentioned earlier, spending your precious Hope to add your character's Experience (a +2 bonus on 1st level) to roll doesn't feel like worthwhile gamble. I suspect we might end house-ruling in the future that you can do that after rolling the dice, to be less of high-cost/low-return gamble and more of a you missed by inches problem solver.

I do look forward for the next session, as we finished the last one with advancing by a level and now I want to see if that extra point here and there will feel different.

Food, Fuel, And Firearms—Twilight 2000, 4th Edition

Twilight 2000 has a peculiar place in the hearts of Polish gamers. The first iteration of this game was written in the deep eighties, when the Cold War was still going strong, constantly threatening to go hot, and potentially escalate into the Last War. The premise of the game was simple, The West and the East finally came to blows and everything fell apart. The players were supposed to be the NATO soldiers stranded in the lands ravaged by years of war after both sides exhausted their capabilities and collapsed into barely organized groups vying for survival.

The main area covered by the base game was Poland, to the delight and amusement of Polish players when the game arrived to our country many-many years later—being placed between German and Russia made it an obvious (and historically accurate) field of battle between the West and the Eastern Block. The original game was written by American creators using quite accurate maps, though names of Polish NPCs in the campaigns and other inaccuracies were rather hilarious to Polish readers (imagine being an American player reading a foreign game with the authors naming modern American NPCs along the lines of Franklin Delano Eisenhower and Abraham Washington). The first edition had such expansions as The Free City Of Krakow (probably referencing and mirroring the fact that Kraków avoided devastation in both World Wars) and The Pirates Of The Vistula River. There was even a computer game in 1991.

In just a few years, the original story of Twilight 2000 was invalidated by the history, however, when the massive social protests spearheaded by Polish trade unions led communist governments across the Eastern Block to resign and pushed the democratic reforms forwards. Poland soon afterward began cooperating with NATO and America, aiding them during the Gulf War...

The third edition was made in 2000s by another publisher, with redesigned storyline as Twilight 2013, and now it was picked up and released as a completely redesigned fourth edition by Swedish publisher Fria Ligan (internationally known as Free League Publishing), back under the Twilight 2000 name.

The Fourth Edition

In its fourth incarnation, the game turned from being a dark prediction of future to being an alternate history game. In its timeline, the Warsaw Pact fell apart, as it did in our history, both German states reunited and Poland became an ally to the NATO. Unlike in our history, the constitutional crisis in Russia in 1993, however, brought back hardcore communists to power leading first to renewal of the Cold War, followed by continuous escalation of hostilities. When the reinvigorated Soviet Russia reconquered Baltic states, and invaded Poland, the third World War exploded before the end of the second millennium.

Now, after three years of intense, devastating war, America, Europe, and Russia are in shambles. The primary theaters covered by the base game are southern Poland (again) and (newly added) southern Sweden (because Swedish publisher, duh). However, this time the publisher is aided by a Polish game company in developing additional materials covering situation in Poland.

The basic game supports playing Polish soldiers, NATO soldiers, or civilians (or combination thereof) struggling for survival in the harsh world devastated by warfare. It is not burned wasteland of Fallout or deserts of Mad Max, though (unless you really want to). While there are zones of radiation where the tactical nukes fell, the land still lives, full of forests, fields, and even some settlements—small towns and many villages avoided destruction, as did a few medium towns and a city or two. Some were rebuild by survivors and refuges. Groups of military and paramilitary forces roam around, however, as do bandits. Russian occupy some regions, while others are held by Poles, either nominally aligned with the central government that no longer exists, while others consider themselves independent communes, new states,  and seeds of rebuilding the civilization from scratch. NATO forces are scattered by some try to reorganize themselves, though without the possibility of coming home they might give up or try to fit in among the locals. It is up to players what their group will want to do? Create a new settlement and defend it? Go back home, wherever it might be, if it is even still around? Fight for survival or take vengeance on encountered Russian stragglers? Look for a new home, take over one of the existing settlements? It is all up to the characters to decide, according to their capabilities...

The Year Zero Engine, Modified

The game uses a new system, based on heavily redesigned Year Zero Engine. Each character has four attributes: Strength, Agility, Intelligence, and Empathy (with the later representing Charisma and overall social capabilities of the character) plus a special characteristic of  maintaining Coolness Under Fire.

The four attributes are combined with twelve skills, three for each attribute. Close Combat, Endurance, and Heavy weapons fall under Strength. Driving, Mobility, and Ranged Combat are governed by Agility. Recon (which combines perception with stealth), Survival, and Tech go with Intelligence, and Empathy is linked with Command, Persuasion, and Medical Aid.

Each attribute and skill has a letter code, from D (worst, representing d6) to A (d12) for attributes. D is subpar, C is average, B is good, and A is top human capability. Skills can have even a worse "level", represented by lack of code altogether.

Tests are rolled by combining one die based on the attribute code with another die based on skill code (or a lone attribute die when having a skill of "—"). Before rolling, all the modifiers are added together. Each net +1 improves the lower of the two dice by one step, to a maximum of d12, each net –1 diminishes the better of the two dice by one step to a minimum of d6. If you don't have a skill at all, the first +1 improves "none" to d6.

For example, George Goshenitz has Agility of B (d10) and Ranged Combat of C (d8), gets two +1  bonuses to his attack roll, and a single –1 penalty. The net modifier is +1, improving worse die to d10 and the player rolls two d10. If he was facing two –1 penalties and a single +1 bonus, he would roll two d8 instead.

Each die that scored 6–9 gives one success. Each die that rolled 10—12 (obviously only possible when final die size is d10 or d12) gives two successes. The successes rolled on both dice are added together for a final result. If the result is unsatisfactory, the players may declare they are pushing their roll (though not all rolls can be pushed)—and reroll dice that scored no successes. There is a catch however. Any ones on the original roll have to be kept, and all ones on the final roll inflict either damage (Strength or Agility rolls) or stress (Intelligence or Empathy rolls), or degrade condition of equipment used. Character can suffer between three and six points of damage and stress each before getting incapacitated, so one or two points of either can represent a significant threat when facing other dangers.

Multiple successes are often a good thing, either allowing you to heal more damage to wounded companions (Medical Aid), repair more damage to battered equipment (Tech), inflict more damage on opponents (Close Combat, Ranged Combat), or find more food, water, and parts (Survival).

In addition to skills and attributes, the characters also have specializations—which are mainly giving +1 bonus to a specific skill in narrow circumstances, for example you can have Rifleman specialization which gives +1 to Ranged Combat when firing a rifle. A few specialization gave more complex benefits, like Historian allowing you to roll Recon check when you visit a new location to recall a historical facts regarding that location.

The characters can be created by picking an archetype and assigning a number of codes to attributes and skills. Or you can use a lifepath method, and pick a series of careers you followed, with each making a roll to determine if you learned a specialization and got promotion, one roll to see if your attributes deteriorated due to age, and on last roll to check if you follow with another term in the same or a new career or had the war caught up with you. Lifepath creation system gives a more varied and interesting characters, though the characters are less predictable when it comes to skills and specializations.

Each character also picks a moral code, representing some sort of deeply held belief or code of honor that, when challenged can grant bonus to rolls and extra xp if followed in the face of adversity at the risk of having to scratch it and replace it if you don't follow it, a big dream you wish to fulfill, granting you extra xp when you take actions that lead to its fulfillment, and a buddy in the party.

Food, Fuel, and Firearms

The party starts with some gear determined by their last career, makes a single roll to determine what (if any) vehicle they have, and pick a number of extra pieces of gear equal to the number of party members (hint: machine gun ammo belts are the better choice when it comes to ammo efficiency compared to regular magazines). With those meager resources the party starts the game and has to cope with realities of a war zone. Finding food and water is crucial for continued playing, because starvation, thirst, disease, lack of sleep, and cold will quickly incapacitate and kill party, and without parts to repair weapons and tools, you won't get food or water. Without fuel, any vehicles the party might have (with the exception of ordinary bikes) are useless, though with parts and proper skills the characters might build a still which will let the party convert any organic matter into alcohol, widely used as (less efficient but available) fuel in the setting. Ammo is used up by firearms for hunting and defense, but it also works as the universal currency. God have mercy upon you if you picked up a weapon that uses rare caliber ammo. Lets hope you'll manage to barter it for something more common soon.

Like in some other Year Zero Engine games, the game days are divided into four shifts of six hours each that are used to handle time keeping and abstracting exploration and survival activities into a series of tasks, such as foraging for food or water, establishing camps, resting, repairing gear, guarding, providing long term medical care, etc. There are also shorter stretches of time (10-15 minutes) when exploring specific locations, and traditional rounds used in combat time.

Similar to Mutant Year Zero and Forbidden Lands, there are rules for building a long term settlement and expanding it with a series of facilities that can produce additional resources or help processes those harvested elsewhere.

Food can be a problem that is only partly solved by foraging and hunting—the local supplies are exhausted quickly giving accumulating penalties to assorted rolls forcing the party to move, unless they settle and start farming the land themselves.

The game uses a deck of cards to draw random encounters each shift - each card is marked with icons representing conditions in which the encounter occur. For example, if the party is traveling on the road and the GM draws a card marked with a forest, there is no encounter. If the drawn card had a road and a day icon, the encounter presented on the card is triggered.

Enemy patrols are tempting prey, carrying food, ammo (you replaced your fancy American weapon with a cheap but ubiquitous Soviet gun, right? right?!) , and even possibly some fuel... But they can think the same about the party and combat is deadly and ammo-expensive. Two or three hits will usually incapacitate a character, be it the PC or the NPC, often inflicting crippling or lethal critical injuries as well. One in ten critical injuries to head or torso kills immediately. Half the time critical injury to head or torso, and four out of ten limb critical injuries will kill in minutes or hours (which led to incessant wave of complains about ridiculousness of the elbow injury being marked as lethal in hours from a real-world MD playing in the party with me, even long after my combat medic character managed to save her with a series of good Medical Aid rolls, she also kept complaining about Medical Aid being linked to Empathy attribute).

The combat system uses 10 meter hexes (not to be confused with 10 km hexes used by overland map) and relies on positioning, cover, and being careful. Being shot at can easily paralyze player characters and foes alike on a failed Coolness Under Fire test (which uses the party's current morale level or the highest Command skill in the group for the second die). And if you are civilian your Coolness Under Fire will be a mere D (d6), though it can increase without the need for spending experience points after a session or two... At the cost of your Empathy. Armor tends to be weak but still plays an invaluable role in protecting against stray hits.

A single fight can easily teach the players to be very wary of engaging any enemies in the future... If they survive their first combat.

Besides the physical injuries that can be suffered from enemy attacks, deprivation and badly failed rolls, the characters also suffer stress that can lead to mental breakdown and long term psychological issues.

After The End

The game is a sort of hardcore when it comes to survival and the usual gung-ho attitude will get you crippled or killed. And if you get crippled, the difficulty ramps up quickly and kill you later. And that's the charm of the game. It can be played as survival sandbox out of the boxed set, with the party traveling from one end of the map to the other, meeting random encounters, and gathering supplies to barter after you finally reach one of the remaining towns.

Alternatively, the GM could write a more mission-oriented session, taking place in specific region with specific goal in mind. Maybe the PCs are a unit still in contact with operational HQ, maybe they are local militia with a specific task handed them by a local warlord...

With adequate map it can be easily adapted for playing in different regions and reliving other modern conflicts, fictional or real.

However, it is worth noting it is not a game for everyone, combining hard personal choices with very demanding resource management and unforgiving combat, with the character lives being at stake most of the time.

Blood Mist, Rust And Starvation: Review Of Forbidden Lands

Earlier this year, I had a pleasure of playing Forbidden Lands role-playing game, a recently-released gloomy, survival sandbox dark fantasy from Free League Publishing. The game focuses on exploration of a half-desolate region after generations of isolation enforced by a magical cataclysm.

Blood Mist And Rust
— or the history of the world as it was told to us

The setting itself is quite dour, though not devoid of hope for better future. The past history of Ravenland story involves waves of human settlers intruding on the lands of elves, dwarves, and halflings, intermingled with periods of peace and coexistence. An evil human sorcerer, Zygofer the Spellbinder led his followers in conquest against the others. Elves, dwarves, and many humans rose against him, defending their lands, the former two sending hordes of enslaved orcs to fight the invaders as their main force. Faced with the determined resistance to his vile rule, Zygofer called upon forces of darkness, unleashing throngs of demons upon his enemies. And then the Blood Mist came, blanketing the realms with a red, malignant fog that separated the land into small domains, as it ended the lives of those who dared to travel at night, with only the inhabited household and underground warrens being safe. Some of its victims were found in the morning dead without visible reason, as if they merely lost the will to live. Others were torn apart as if demons lingered within the mist itself. Only the bravest or the most foolish would venture further than half a day of travel from their homes, facing almost certain death. Except for Rust Brothers—an evil sect serving and following Zygofer, whose acolytes held a secret of traveling through the Blood Mist safely. They were the only force capable of maintaining a degree of contact between their outposts and thus some semblance of organization. The Blood Mist lasted for centuries, isolating settlements from each other for generations... Until it slowly faded recently. Mostly. A pockets of Blood Mist appear from time to time, but they no longer deny travel. Now, months since the trails became passable again, the bold, the greedy, the desperate, and the industrious start moving out of their old settlements to explore the land and the ruins of the old times.

The old threats are not gone, though, for Zygofer is said to be still alive, transformed into a demon himself. His Rust Brothers continue to haunt the land, hunting for elves, half-elves, and their dwarven allies, and attempt to subdue other people, now stronger than ever, for they can finally send mercenary forces with their mist-walking acolytes. Tribes of orcs who never forgave elves and dwarves their enslavement stay in the depths of the forests, ancient demons roam the land even now, and undead lurk in the ancient ruins.

The People Of The Ravenland

The game includes some staple fantasy options—humans, elves, half-elves, dwarves, halflings, goblins, and orcs, as well, as less classic wolfkin, though there are twists here and there. Humans, elves, dwarves, and half-elves are rather typical—with half-elves being lineages of descendants of elven and human intermingling generations ago as well, as recently. Halflings and goblins are single people divided by an ancient curse—whenever a child is born to a halfling or a goblin mother, it can be of either kin, so both live near each other and pass such children to live among their own people. They also tend to help each other—with halflings being better at things such as agriculture and crafts while goblins hunt and secretly protecting the halfling villages from threats. Orcs are playable race, though unsuitable for playing with humans (because they fought each other), elves or dwarves (because of the immense hatred held after generations of slavery followed by being thrown against Zygofer as a cannon fodder), and being at odds with other kins as well. Wolfkin are wolfish humanoid that are dedicated hunters and survivors seeing other kins as weak, unfit for the hardships of forests and mountains of the Ravenland.

The Explorers, Scroungers, and Scoundrels

The choice of kin (aka race) determines the favored attribute and an unique kin talent that allows spending Willpower points to do things such as use one skill in place of another if you can come with a good explanation (humans), recover from critical injuries after a period of meditation (elves), push a roll multiple times (dwarves), avoid being hit (halflings), avoid being seen (goblins), follow scents (wolfkin), or recover from serious wounds (orcs). Half-elves talent makes their first Willpower point spent on activation of a talent or spell count double (more about that later).

The second choice the players make about their character is their profession: druids, fighters, hunters, minstrels, peddlers, riders, rogues, and sorcerers. Each profession determines a favored attribute (again), offers a number of favored skills that can be higher at character creation, and provides a list of profession-specific talents that allow spending Willpower to gain certain benefits in line with the profession—better attack and defense for fighters, better marksmanship, bonding with animals, and dealing with matters of survival for hunters, minstrels inspire their fellows to withstand adversities, peddlers can produce unaccounted for goodies from their vast stashes, riders bond with steeds and fight mounted, rogues disguise themselves, backstab enemies, and procure various poisons, while druids and sorcerers invoke different kinds of magics.

The last major choice is the characters age: young, adult, or old. Younger characters get more attribute points, older get more skill points and more talent picks. Elves are immortal and all count as adult characters.

The game uses four attributes: strength, agility, wits, and empathy. Strength covers ability to exert force, withstand physical injury, and resist most physical afflictions. Agility is quickness and precision of movement. Wits is reasoning, memory, perception, and cunning. Empathy summarizes charisma and compassion. Attributes are supplemented with sixteen skills, four for each attribute: Strength is tied to Crafting, Endurance, Melee, and Might (exertion of pure force). Agility governs Marksmanship, Move, Sleight of Hand, and Stealth. Insight, Lore, Scouting, and Survival are Wits-based, and Empathy covers Animal Handling, Healing, Manipulation (social interaction), and Performance.

Attributes are rated between 2 and 6, with a pool of 13–15 split between four of them. Only favored attributes can be raised to 5, and 6 can only be assigned to an attribute that was favored by both kin and profession. Skills start at 0, non-profession skills can be raised to 1 at the start, and profession skills can be raised to 3 at the beginning, using a pool of 8–12 points.

The skills and attributes are supplemented with a number of general talents that anyone can learn. Like professional talents they have three levels each, granting various bonuses and unlocking new options. Unlike the former, they don't use Willpower in any way.

Finally, the character has a Dark Secret, and a Pride, a sentence that describes what he is good with—once per session when making a dice roll to which the pride could be reasonably applied, the character can claim an extra D12... But on a failure the Pride is erased and replaced after a session with a new one.

Roll The Dice, Suffer The Consequences

When you roll the dice, you create a pool of six-sided dice equal to your attribute plus your skill plus your bonus gear dice, with each source of dice using different colors (like white for attribute, red for skill, and green for gear). This is important distinction because the dice from different sources behave differently. Each six rolled is a success, and a single success is generally enough, though more successes means more damage when attacking, less damage when defending. If you failed to rolled the amount of successes you desired (which usually means rolling no sixes) you can decide to push the roll. Set aside all dice that rolled "6", and all attribute and gear dice that rolled "1". Roll the remaining dice again. Sixes are additional successes. Ones on attribute and gear dice are bad news now, though. All the ones rolled, both in the initial roll, and the re-roll either cause damage to attribute rolled or the gear used (this is why different pools use the different colors, and also why skills are so valuable—they increase your dice pools without negative effects of ones). Damages to attributes from pushing diminish the attribute like other injuries but also generate Willpower, a scarce resource that is used to power kin and profession talents and casting spells. Each roll can be pushed only once, unless you are a dwarf and spend a Willpower point to push remaining dice again. It is easy to push oneself into unconsciousness but the damage is easily healed during rest or basic medical attention. Repairing gear is harder.

Attributes can get damaged in other ways as well—mainly fighting (with combat damage dealt to Strength, unless fighting ghosts and weird demons that can target other attributes), fear (which diminishes Wits), but also various kinds of afflictions and deprivation: hunger causes damage to Strength, thirst damages both Strength and Agility, lack of sleep hinders Wits, and being cold saps your Strength and Wits. The various conditions may also block your ability to recover attributes without resorting to magic.

This can easily lead to a death spiral—failing to get enough sleep can diminish your Wits, hindering your attempts to gather food, damaging your Strength via hunger, making you unable to deal with the threats, which prevents you from sleeping...

When an attribute is reduced to 0, the character becomes broken, losing consciousness, being incapacitated with exhaustion, paralyzed with fear or confusion, or getting unresponsive until healed (or for D6 hours when you recover on your own with 1 point in the broken attribute). If Strength or Wits were broken by an attack (never by pushing and rarely by conditions, which have their own rules for fate of incapacitated character), a D66 roll is made for a critical hit using an appropriate table—blunt, slashing, or stabbing for physical injury to Strength, horror for mental injury to Wits. Some of the critical effects are temporary, some are permanent, and some are lethal, usually after a listed amount of time, though the worst (typically 65-66) are immediate...

Occasionally, when rolling the dice, the characters can get artifact dice (or more likely a single artifact die). Those are granted by Pride (once per session), high level talents (which can grant a D8 artifact dice when using specific type weapon, for example if you are a master of a bow) and magic items, and take the form of D8, D10, or even D12. Rolling 6–7 on such dice is a regular success, 8–9 counts as two successes, 10–11 three, and 12 as staggering four successes.

The Exploration And The Starvation

The game is very sandbox in the nature, with extensive rules governing traveling, exploring new hexes on the map, foraging and hunting for supplies, breaking camps, taking guard, and so on. In the exploration mode, each day is divided into four Quarters, morning from dawn to noon, afternoon from noon to dusk, evening from dusk to midnight, and night from midnight to dawn. Most exploratory activities take a Quarter and involve a dice roll—with rewards for success and a roll in one of many random mishap tables on a failure. You can easily run into a boar while scrounging for turnips, capture a sick mouse when hunting, fall into water when fishing, or make a camp on an anthill.

Counting Quarters is important, as the time is running without waiting for anyone—limited supplies need to be tracked risking starvation, thirst, and lack of sleep if you fail to manage you days well. Survival is an absolutely necessary skill in this game, as well as taking your time to carefully replenish food and water rations. Especially if you want to keep your gear in working conditions, which takes time as well.

In addition to specific food rations and gear, each character has one or more of resource dice—representing packed food and stored water (and potentially arrow and torch supply). Each time the player consumes some of the stored resources of that type, they roll the dice with 1–2 meaning the die diminishes by one step (D12–D10–D8–D6–No supply). Those can be improved by getting surplus food and water, or crafting arrows and torches. It helps and complicates things with keeping track of supplies at the same time, but generally works in players' favor, giving them chance to extend duration of their supplies for a longer time than simply tracking consumption would.

The Ruins And The Strongholds

Once the party explored a suitable location, they might claim an old outpost as their own stronghold. Or, if they have excessive resources at hand (usually when they control one or more strongholds already) built a suitable outpost from a scratch. This changes the gameplay a bit, giving a number of benefits and generating new issues. First of all, the party that has their own stronghold can gain point of Willpower once per session (two if they built a shrine for a deity they are aligned with). Additionally, they can expand the stronghold with a number of functions—facilities that that can be used to store supplies for extended period of time, procure new raw materials (e.g. quarry produces stone while garden produces fresh veggies), convert materials into supplies and gear (inn turns various fresh foods into longer-lasting food supplies while tannery allows making leather out of pelts and sewing leather armor, waterskins, and such), or grant other kinds of bonuses. A functioning stronghold has to be manned by servants, workers, and guards, though, creating constant expenses. The players have to find people suitable to work for them and secure a supply of coins to pay them (though they can man functions themselves... until the number of jobs in the stronghold exceeds their number straining their ability to go adventuring...), which can make them go exploring more, to finance their developing demesne.

The Challenges Of Fun

The game is demanding, and challenges the players on every step, forcing them to make choices that can bite them later—do I push the roll to hunt, risking my health and my gear to get food, or do I play it safe, while risking my supplies. Should we spend a few more days building a surplus so we can safely explore later? Do we press on or do we withdraw to regroup and recover? Do we try to learn what happened? Do we help the others? Are we the good guys, or the guys that survived?

All this choices are deeply entertaining, and Forbidden Lands often manages to make failures worthwhile too, adding more elements to the story of exploration and survival in the forsaken lands.

For The Rebellion! For The Fancy Dice! The new Star Wars RPG from FFG

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Star Wars

The Dice Rolling

I have been participating in a game, two games of Star Wars, using the fairly new Age Of Rebellion/Edge Of The Empire/Force And Destiny games combo published by Fantasy Flight Games for some time now.

I was rather skeptical of them initially (this is sort of understatement, actually), because of use of exotic dice that "offered plot shaping opportunities"... Thankfully, the dice are working fine—a big part of the issue was me misinterpreting (or maybe advertisement being misleading) of what the dice actually do, though I will write more about that later. The other part of the issue was "I have bag and a half of dice, I don't want to buy special dice" (the later was solved be getting a set of dice as a birthday present, still not enough to smoothly GM it in the future, the rest of people I play with have two sets each).

The games are really a single game with a few options tuned for each of the three settings, and different set of careers for each, sold as three different books. The Warhammer 40K games had much bigger differences—here they are clearly written with cross-playing in mind from the beginning.

Despite those reservations, I had no compunction about joining a game, when my long-time GM grabbed a cheap starter kit and organized a game. We got characters from the Age Of Rebellion starter kit and entered the fray (though he wrote his own adventure). The first game was a blast, though getting used to the system took a bit and we are still getting used to symbols (though triumphs and despairs are quite recognizable already). After the first session we got an option to tweak the characters we selected but continued further with them. A second group was also formed by the same GM with partial player overlap, and as for now it proceeds happily until we get bored and burned out by Star Wars.

The game mechanics are not very complex, despite the initial appearance otherwise. There are seven types of dice: three positive dice, three negative dice, and force dice. Positive dice contain positive symbols: success, advantage, and triumph. Negative dice are covered with negative symbols: failure, disadvantage, and despair. Successes an failures cancel each other, as do advantages and disadvantages. The former decide if the roll was successful (and to what degree), the later grant additional side effects, positive or negative, such as activating special abilities (Auto-fire! Zap-Zap-Zap!), scoring critical hits, gaining extra information, recovering from fatigue, or getting better position that will grant you (or an ally) bonus dice to the next roll, or in case of disadvantages causing extra strain, granting bonus dice to your enemies, or meaning you're out of ammo. Triumph counts as successes and grants bigger positive effect than regular advantage. Despair counts as failure and grants big negative effect. This allows the roll to have following results: success, failure, success with positive side effects (e.g. you shot opponent and destroyed the alarm console without triggering it), success with negative side effects (you shot an opponent and the console but it triggered the alarm), failure, failure with positive side effects (you missed the shot but you destroyed the console), failure with negative side effect (you missed and alarmed everyone). Plus the possibility of big special effects. It makes sense in play, though counting the symbols is not as fast as it could be with some other design.

The positive and negative dice are mirrored: there is one type of positive eight-sided die (green ability die) representing basic abilities and one negative eight-sided die (purple difficulty die) that represent difficulty of the action (instead of more typical fixed number of successes needed to succeed). Each of their sides contains a different combination of successes/advantages for ability dice, and failures/disadvantages for difficulty dice. The better dice are twelve-sided: yellow competence die, that represents upgrade of ability with actual skill, and red challenge die, which shows that opposition upgrades the difficulty. Each contains a combination of either successes and advantages or failures and disadvantages, but they also introduce triumph and despair symbols. The remaining two dice types are six-sided: blue boost die and black setback die, that are added to the pools to represent various conditions, bonuses, and penalties with lesser degree of impact than skill and ability. They contain successes, advantages, failures, and disadvantages, but no triumph or despair symbols.
The seventh type of die has no twin, for it is a force die with white (Light Side) and black (Dark Side, duh) dots. It is used to generate destiny pool at the start of the game, and force points when using force powers.

Rolling the dice involves creating a dice pool based on the acting character's ability scores and skills, adding difficulty dice, then adding boost and setback dice based upon internal (talents) and external circumstances (equipment, results of previous rolls, aid of others, aiming). There are some effects that allow upgrading ability and difficulty dice into competence/challenge dice, or downgrading the later into the former, like turning the Destiny tokens from Light to Dark side (players) or vice versa (GM). Creating the dice pool can be fun or it can get tedious, with all the cajoling, begging, or negotiation with GM what should get you a bonus or why you shouldn't get a penalty. Oh, and don't forget to apply your talent or equipment bonuses... This is not really that different from applying bonuses and penalties of more conservative rolling conventions, but it's really appealing visually—you actually see your bonuses and penalties as dice of different colors, which makes the experience refreshing.

The fights can be brutal, though the game cinematically assumes player characters and major NPCs don't die until a critical hit says the character died, which requires suffering multiple critical hits or a particularly lethal weapon (disruptor). Critical hits are suffered when the attacker decides to spend his advantages or triumph to deal one (the more dangerous weapon the less advantages are needed to do this, a standard blaster requires four advantages, rifle three, disruptor and vibro weapons two), or when character suffers more wounds than his wound threshold. When a critical hit is dealt, a 1d100 roll is made, with additional +10 for each unhealed critical hit, and the table is consulted. The first half of the table is mostly temporary results, the second half of the table is bad. The third half (i.e. results above 100) are terrible, with death being certain with totals exceeding 150 (and probably even earlier, haven't looked on that part of the table much). Cooperation is important, both for attack and defense. Healing wounds between fights is vital, making Medicine skill and stimpacks key resources—the later heal a few wounds as a maneuver (you can stick oneself with one and keep firing in the same turn), though their effects get progressively weaker with each use on the same day. Full bacta tank is you best friend forever if you are front-line fighter (or Duros spy), as it heals wounds and allows regeneration of critical hit results each day, instead of once a week. Each character can also suffer strain from non-lethal attack and misadventures, or deliberately take it to perform extra maneuvers or activate certain talents. Strain is recovered more quickly, with a partial recovery taking place after each scene (or combat encounter) and full recovery after a night of rest.

The characters have six quite conventional ability scores: Brawn that determines combined strength and physical resistance, Agility, Intellect (which covers knowledge and technical skills), Cunning (which is basis of deception, perception, thievery, streetwise, and survival) Willpower, and Presence. They are scaled from 1 to 6 and determine number of dice in your pools, and set some secondary characteristics such as wound threshold, strain threshold, soak, and maximum encumbrance. Ability scores are followed by 30-something skills that turn your green ability dice into more desirable yellow competence dice (more successes and advantages, chance of rolling triumphs), including the Star Wars essential skills like Gunnery (i.e. vehicular weapons), Piloting (Space), Ranged (Light), Ranged (Heavy), and for those who are playing Force And Destiny, Lightsaber.

Each character belongs to one of the species (there are multiple races per core rulebook, and more in expansions but the game misses the guidelines for creating own playable species), a career, and one or more specializations. Each game has six careers with three specialization talent trees in the core rulebook, and three more specialization in the expansion book for that career. There is some overlap between specialization in Age Of Rebellion and Edge Of The Empire, for example AOR spy shares slicer specialization with EOTE technician and scout specialization with EOTE explorer.

Career and the first specialization determine starting skills, specializations selected at the start and those purchased later determine access to talent trees. You need to learn a specialization to select any of its talents (thought there is some overlap between specializations, with many talents showing in multiple trees) but you can learn any skills and any new specializations regardless of your career, doing it outside of your career merely costs more experience points. Some talents grant you passive bonuses (e.g. Dedication, a talent that increases single ability score is usually at the bottom at each tree—they start at the top and the talents have to be purchased following the available connections), other modify effects of some maneuvers and actions, or can grant you access to completely new actions (such as using stimpack to increase ability scores instead of healing).

If you have a force career, or one of two universal force specializations you gain Force Rating 1, which you can increase with, you guessed it, right talents, and now you can select force powers, which work similarly to talent trees dedicated to specific power, such as Move, Sense, Heal/Harm, or Foresee. Force-users feel quite balanced compared with other characters due to excessive experience cost involved in developing them fully. At least until you run into an Inquisitor NPC who can kick the party's collective backsides unless they have many-many sessions behind them.

Age Of Rebellion careers are aces (drivers, gunners, and pilots), commanders (leaders of men on ground and in space), diplomats (ambassadors, agitators, and quartermasters), engineers (mechanics, saboteurs, and scientists), soldiers (commandos, medics, and sharpshooters), and spies (infiltrators, scouts, and slicers). It also offers two universal specialization: recruit to allow making more combat-oriented characters out of non-combatants, and force-sensitive emergent, which is used to represent people who discover they are sensitive to force. Yes, anyone can develop force abilities by selecting the specialization. Players are intended to be heroes. Even if Stormtroopers can easily handle them early on.

Edge Of Empire careers are bounty hunters (assassins, gadgeteers, and survivalists), colonists (doctors, politicos, and scholars), explorers (fringers, scouts, and traders), hired guns (bodyguards, marauders, and mercenary soldiers), smugglers (pilots, scoundrels, and thieves), and technicians (mechanics, outlaw techs, and slicers). It offers single universal specialization: force-sensitive exile, someone accustomed to hiding own fledgling powers since forever.

Force And Destiny careers have no overlapping specializations with the previous games, offer less starting skills, but also get Force rating 1 from the start: consulars (healers, Niman disciples, and sages), guardians (peacekeepers, protectors, and Soresu defenders), mystics (advisors, Makashi duelists, and seers), seekers (Ataru strikers, hunters, and pathfinders), sentinels (artisans, shadows, and Shien experts), and warriors (aggressors, Shii-Cho Knights, and starfighter aces). Each career contain single specialization dedicated to one of the lightsaber forms. Five of those offer talents that allow using lightsaber skill with ability score different than the default Brawn—you can make flamboyant Makashi duelist, agile Ataru striker, or thoughtful Soresu Defender... No universal specializations here, though.

Each of the games has expansion books dedicated to various careers (I think that at least half or even more careers have their own books by now), some adventures, and some non-class expansions, such as book dedicated to planets that support the Rebellion for AOR, book about Hutts and their space for EOTE, and one describing a few places of power for F&D.

Character creation of all of those games is wonderful because of a single tool available: there is an excellent fan-made character generator: OggDude's character generator. A lot of professional programs show less quality and attention to detail than this little versatile, easily editable application.

Each of the games offers a unique mechanic to help direct characters: AOR has Duty, a measure of the party's achievements that can be accumulated by supporting the rebellion in various ways to increase the party's standing within the Rebellion ranks. EOTE has Obligation, a sum of the individual character's debts, connections, and past deeds that peek from time to time to bite their exposed undertails. F&D has Morality which shows the force-sensitive character's equilibrium between Light and Dark sides of the force (joining the Dark Side has some bonuses, some penalties, and a significant power boost, but requires serious balancing to avoid losing oneself fully to the Dark Side and turning into an NPC).

To top it, the game rules are well streamlined for vehicular combat, with well developed array of planetary and space vessels. You can improve your gear and vehicles with attachments and modifications... We need to get cash for parts to improve some of our own, yet. Have I mentioned that OggDude's character generator covers crafting and modifying your equipment and your vehicle too?!

The negatives: the need for a new set of dice (or better two), getting used to them and crappy default character sheets that don't show clearly the dice you need to use for your skills (though if you can allow oneself to print character sheet each time you change stats, or simply use electronic device, the OggDude's generator comes to the rescue again).

Anyway the game is much fun, even for people that might be ignorant of the Star Wars (half of one party is composed of players who watched some of the Star Wars movies after they started playing). Obviously, after some time of playing the it will lose the status of the novelty, and we will suffer the burnout of the system and the setting, and we'll take a break from it, but no game lasts forever.