Hey Jason -
I wonder if you have seen this - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/583799276/izirions-enchiridion-of-the-west-marches. I’m considering using it as a frame to run a Freebooters campaign - West Marches style. They seem to have parallel concepts - there’s an outpost at the edge of civilization. Beyond it is where adventure lies; and the PCs want to go there.
I wonder if you plan to discuss “West Marches” style games in your text at all?
Sorry, it took me way more than a few hours to post again 
It went poorly, alas 
They decided not to engage with the prison-dungeon for the most part. The rogue on the inside never tried to escape and instead sold the position of his companions to the torturer because he was too afraid. In the meanwhile the rest of the party meandered a lot. After playing for two hours they decided to finally check out the prison, but we ended our session there.
Next time maybe!
Here is the prison I created with the help of the dungeon tables anyway:
Dwarven Prison
size: medium (9 areas)
themes: abjuration, torture, control
alignment: evil
safety: unsafe
areas:
Entrance/Checkpoint: A circular room with a guardroom at the center. Two guards are always stationed here. Beside the entrance, three corridors branch out of this room: west to cellblocks A and B, north to the common area, and est to the barracks;
Cell block A: 8 cells in two rows. In each just a dirty pail and some hay on the floor. A lockable door made of iron bars for each. There are 3 trained guard dogs chained near the entrance of the block, were the guard usually sits. An air shaft in the last cell on the left side has been enlarged to permit a difficult crawl to the adjacent cell block B.
Cell block B: 8 cells in two rows. In each just a dirty pail and some hay on the floor. A lockable door made of iron bars for each. Signs of recent violence: a lone tooth lays in a small pool of blood in a corner of the room. The owner of said tooth is lying on the floor of his cell grumbling fiercely. He had a scuffle with one of the guards recently, and he pocketed one of the keys during the brawl. Sadly, it doesn’t open his cell. An air shaft in the last cell on the right side has been enlarged to permit a difficult crawl to the adjacent cell block A.
Common area: A huge room for the prisoner to hang out during their free time, if they have been collaborative. There are tables to play cards or dices, and space enough to walk or exercise. The main entrance to the tortures chamber is hidden behind a fake wall here.
Mess hall: A pretty large room with sturdy wooden tables and benches. A faint smell of stale food hangs in the air. On the floor there are small but frequent holes that form a regular pattern. A mechanism just outside the door of the room releases paralysing gas from this holes to quell any eventual fight. Under one of the tables there is a small piece of parchment that was stuck there with an unknown sticky substance. Scrawled badly on it there is a map of the complex (without the torture chamber) that shows the secret passage dug from the abandoned cell block.
Barracks: a series of small rooms with bunk beds and tiny warehouses. The torturer and his pet rat are usually found here, with about six other guards, give or take. There are various kinds of common gear to be found here, including ropes, manacles, batons and a couple sticks that produce a dense, acrid smoke when burned.
Abandoned cell block: this area half-collapsed a long time ago, and now is used by the prison staff as a temporary warehouse. Old furniture and broken soon-to-be-repaired-but-actually-forgotten-forever miscellanea lays scattered around. The musty atmosphere hides a bad smell of putrefaction coming from one of the cells: a long and very narrow tunnel is hidden behind some loose stones in the wall, and about thirty meters in a rotten corpse bars the way forward almost completely… But the light at the end can be seen shining in the distance.
Dump: A huge crevasse more than half filled with smelly waste. It’s easy to spot the remains of some prisoners half buried in the rubbish. Some blind, aggressive birds circle around the area and suddenly come down to fish something out of the trash. There is a trap door here that is connected to the hidden tortures chamber, but it is locked from the inside.
Tortures chamber: the door to this chamber is a big slab of smooth rock hidden behind a face wall in the common room, and is engraved with dwarves runes. The torturer has an attuned stone on himself that unlocks the door. Behind it there is a classic tortures chamber, with cages dangling from the ceiling, a table with leather straps in the middle, and various ‘instruments’ to extract the truth from prisoners the hard way. When the torture has finished is bloody work, he can dispose of the used up victim by the bolt hole that goes straight to the dump. Some valuable possessions of said victims is kept here, for safe keeping of course.
I left myself a lot of stuff to improvise, especially about the prisoners and guards residing in the cells. I also under-utilised the abjuration theme, but we are playing a fairly low magic setting right now and I wasn’t sure how to incorporate it well. I am also not happy with the common room, because I really have no clue what should be there.
EDIT: here is the map I scribbled in 10 minutes before the session…
Obviously any suggestion is more than welcome!
Ben Robbins’ original West Marches blog posts were one of the things that fed into my conception of the game, especially his use of ability score damage. If we take these three points from that kickstarter as a fair summation of “WM style”…
…Freebooters is designed primarily around the third, because that’s the style of game I grew up with in the late 70s/early 80s. The first two points are about playgroup organization, which might be worth addressing in the main text. I’ll certainly put it on the list of things to consider including.
Cool prison/dungeon!
I think I might have the cell blocks connecting to the Common Room, instead of the entrance. To move the prisoners from their cells to the Mess Hall every meal means they would have to go through the entrance chamber and see freedom right on the other side of the door.
I could see the Common room being broken into a couple of rooms.
Looking good!
Re: abjuration as a theme, maybe the warden is an abjurer who maintains warding spells as security measures – alarm glyphs at certain points, or “lockdown” spells that seal off certain areas with arcane force. Even better if the warden has a scrying sphere in their office, from which they can observe the rest of the prison. I bet if you roll up the torturer and warden as evil-aligned NPCs, their traits and motivation will give you some ideas about their relationship, as well as other aspects of the dungeon.
Here’s my proposed solution to one little problem with West Marches in FotF.
Problem
Solution: in the first session, we will create the 2-3 Lost Civilizations. We will only create a new civilization if the narrative calls for it; or if we get an 8th+ player. (8th is just a number I came up with. Feels right).
Every session thereafter, if we get new players, the new players get to add one new Region and one new Landmark to the map. GM(s) will track the regions and landmarks associated with each player, and be sure to include something related to one or more of those Frontier features in that session’s play.
With that, I think I’m ready to launch into a West Marches FotF game.
Awesome, Chris. I love it.
https://pbta.dakkaplace.com/
Partly edited after march’s updates. Still need write magic items generators and aligment and safety for dungeons.
Has anyone here run a funnel using the 00 Funnel book? What did you run and how did you and your table manage 12+ players? I’m curious to hear other’s experiences running a funnel in Freebooters.
I ran based on the original Funnel World (not sure how much 00 diverges now). I used the “Escape from the Plague Pits” starter. I ran it at a con. I believe I had 3 or 4 players. Each player created two 0-level characters. It was pretty fun.
Not sure where you got the idea there had to be 12 players?
Here’s what I would do again:
Give them pre-generated characters, instead of having them roll up. And give them 3 or even better 4 each. We spent too much time generating. Also the generation of the characters invests the players in them, so they may be more cautious.
There were a couple of times when a character should have died; and I held back. I should have killed that character right off. There’s multiple places in the funnel starter where they can meet now PCs (the jail area is one).
Creating more of a map to start (but with blank spaces) would have been useful.
Best of luck with running your funnel!
That was a mistake on my part. I meant 12+ characters not players (3-4 characters per player). I actually ran Servants of the Cinder Queen twice with different groups using 3 players per characters and it went well for the most part. Although most lost some characters or some of them went down almost immediately in the first room and the bulk of the game involved them trying to get out of the initial pit. I’d probably start it from the caves with a cave-in if I ran it again as a funnel.
I tried doing a location “siege” Evil Dead/Night of the Living Dead funnel recently online and it didn’t go quite as well. Probably most similar to Night of the Dogmen (I think that was the name of the starter in Funnel World). They were villagers fending off the undead in their village inn. Managing the number of characters became rough (maybe 4 was too many) and I admittedly probably pulled too many punches but when it came to managing characters, players were bouncing all over the place and it became easy to forget actions of other characters. I feel like in DCC, grouping initiative around a player helps organize things better (all characters go on the same initiative) but here you don’t have the same management or organization and with so many characters it feels like a continual jump from one character to the next. I tried then doing it by player (all 4 when you have the spotlight) but it then felt like an insanely long time to resolve character actions because we’re using PbtA, so instead of pass-fail “you die” pacing, you have “partial success” with more nuanced results that often take longer to resolve and don’t end up “clearing house”. They split the party as well which really complicated things. I feel like having a dungeon to literally funnel characters through rather than a location survival sort of scenario probably also helps focus it a bit more.
My reflection here is:
Just curious how other people do it. What their experiences have been.
Those are all great observations and suggestions. It’s been so long since I’ve run a DCC funnel that I forgot about the initiative rule. I’ve been running funnels with 2 villagers per player because more than that has felt too confusing just as you describe, so I might just set the limit at 2 in the rules. Alternatively, I could just add a rule that says when a player says what they do, they do so for each of their villager PCs.
If you’re curious about how I personally run a Freebooters funnel, you can see a few sessions starting here, covering the funnel portion of my current online campaign. Looking back at this now I feel like I could have done a better job of following your suggestion to “be merciless!”
As mentioned waaay upthread I’ve been unhappy with the way incident integration works. Taking @Tacoforce’s idea about using more general results and the difficulties that @Haaldaar has experienced as cues, I’ve rewritten Set Out, Pass the Night, and the Incident table. Here’s what the rewrite looks like. Maybe this will even help with @jexjthomas’ attempts to figure out how to traverse a big city in an interesting way? Also upped region safety tags.
On first blush I this this is great. I look forward to having a chance to test it in play, but there’s nothing here that really sticks out to me as worrisome. I like that it a.) puts Set Out back in to the traditional move structure, b.) gives Judges more latitude on what kind of incident takes place, and c.) the Incident table seems to make a lot of sense in terms of what you’re likely to come up against in each setting. You could also break out encounter tables from there – incidents for various climates or locations, etc. and just follow the same format. I think I like this a lot!
Comments on Pass the Night. Note, I haven’t been tracking this move in the past, so not sure what iterations have come before. But I had some thoughts.
First off, not clear who should roll this move. Does each player roll? Does each player roll during their watch? I think maybe it should be stated that if you roll +Safety, that is a roll that applies to the entire party, and the party should select someone to roll. Therefore, that applies to the Set Off and Pass the Night. In fact, you could adjust the move a bit to say “Pass the Night When the party settles into sleep, take note of the watch order, and someone in the party rolls +safety. Say why they are the one rolling.”
Second - seems like it’s pretty tough to get a good night’s sleep, even when you are in a safe area. I mean, even while in Safe terrain, they will only get restful night of sleep every ~59% of rolls. And in dangerous terrain, they’ll get restful sleep only 16.7% of the time. So that means out of 10 nights of travel, they will only regain HP on average 1-2 nights (assuming they have food the night before). And will have accumulated 8-9 points of negatives to their abilities. Is that what was intended?
I guess this encourages the players to do things that increase their safety (stay quiet, don’t light fires, etc). If that’s the intent, perhaps call it out.
Third - I can see Pass the Night being a pick-list
10+ Gain a restful night of sleep and each player picks 2
7-9 Gain a restful night of sleep and each player picks pick 1
6- Judge makes a move (implicit in moves, probably don’t need to call this out).
The reason I allowed the 6- to be open, is that Creature could be one option; but with all the other possible GM moves, maybe the GM would rather do something else.
Finally - I feel like the 9 result is a move in and of itself. Something like:
Bolster their Spirits. When you offer a song, story, exhortation, or words of wisdom preparing to Pass the Night roll +WIS or +CHA (the Judge will tell you which). Tell your story.
On a 10+ each party member gains 1 additional HP tomorrow morning.
On a 7-9, each party member gains 1 additional HP if they get restful sleep
Only one Bolster the Spirits can be tried each evening.
Thanks for the great suggestions, Chris! I really appreciate it and will take another look at that move with your notes in mind.
Hey @jasonlutes, I was wondering what you use in your online FotF game to track character sheets. Does everyone just take care of their own?
Hi @Froggy – Yeah, they do. I wrote up a sheet for taking notes on my end that looks like this, but everyone is supposed to track their own stuff.
I really like Pass the Night, generally. We’ve never found it to be too harsh, though we did very early on tweak how much HP you get back because our dwarf thief wasn’t happen with only ever regaining 1. We basically switched back to the Dungeon World rules there, though I think I might have nerfed it a little. At this point I don’t really remember, and I don’t have my move sheet in front of me. But I like how Pass the Night is structured, and we’ve never found there to be an issue of too much ability damage stacking up. For @chrisshorb I would say remember that on 7-9 there’s no reason that everyone doesn’t get a good night’s sleep–for the 9 result, it’s only if someone chooses offer a song, etc meaning it’s ultimately in the player’s hands to decide whether they’d like to suffer a night of poor sleep but granting everyone else +1 Forward. And on 7/8, it really is going to depend on what kind of incident takes place. I would probably have whoever is on watch at the time roll Stay Sharp and then go from there.* Depending on the incident, and how it’s resolved, it’s not necessarily going to end with restless sleep for everyone in the party. There’s a likelihood that it will, yes, but I think it’s a fun opportunity to play to find out what happens. Also I would just say that ability damage really isn’t that awful to recover from generally speaking. In all, I think the move fits well with the hardscrabble nature of the game. However I do recognize that allowing my players to gain back more HP from a restful night’s sleep could be a factor in why we don’t have as many problems as Chris foresees.
On that note, I do think that @jasonlutes could take another look at how much HP you do get back. I think a middle ground between the current rules and what we’re doing makes sense. I’m not entirely sure what that looks like though …
*Stay Sharp is a move that I don’t particularly like very much, for reasons discussed here and in the old G+ community: it’s passive, more akin to an old school save than a traditional PbtA move which is triggered by the PC making an action. There’s no player autonomy there at all, really. I like the results, but I don’t like that it’s a passive/reactive trigger. But I don’t know that there’s any easy fix for that. I know I’ve talked about not liking the other “passive/reactive” moves but I do understand why they exist. The old-school saving throw is pretty integral to the feel of D&D, and I can see a lot of tables liking those moves even as they don’t encourage the player agency of more active moves. Typically in my home game I just present the situation to whoever is on watch (I roll a d4 and pick whichever PC that lines up with in the watch order they provided) and ask what they do, which generally results in one of the other moves triggering.
This is neat. Care to talk more about how you use the calendar part?
I actually set up a calendar using Fantasy Calendar but sometimes feels a little more work than it’s actually worth …
