Hi Pasha, and welcome! I’m glad you are finding the playtest stuff useful. Your approach to prepping for those sessions sounds smart. Please feel free to post updates here, and I would of course love to hear any feedback you might have.
Freebooters on the Frontier 2e Discussion
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Hm, yeah. It’s definitely a challenge to write triggers that fit so many different interpretations. For instance, for me, a chaotic character would not be very likely to sow confusion, mayhem, or destruction for no sensible reason because they’re less The Joker and more fundamentally opposed to law/order/governance. That trigger feels way too “chaotic evil,” y’know? How do you accommodate those who would much rather prefer to be chaotic good?Or express that sort of idea of chaos from Moorcock, the idea of possibility unfettered by laws and rules. “Upend order” works for me precisely because it is not limiting; it feels broad enough to encompass all of those playstyles, whereas the trigger you share here feels like it only rewards one particular playstyle. What about something like “when you sow discord or upend order in ways big or small,” something like that?
I think the idea that neutral characters can be selfish makes sense too, though it definitely feels like that’s kind of the core principle of what it means to be evil in this system – putting your own interests ahead of others.
Gosh, I guess I’m starting to realize why the 9 alignment system was invented.
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Indeed. But I am NOT going THERE 
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@jexjthomas, To be clear, I totally get what you’re saying and appreciate your input on this. I will keep working on it.
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Yes, it is best not to.
So, spent several hours today working on prep because there’s a real chance my players are going to make it into the big city tomorrow. We’d been talking earlier about Freebooters in an urban setting, and how that might look different, and the main thing I’ve been doing is populating encounter tables for each district. Pealinn, the capital of the kingdom of Ihmisten Kot, has ten, so it’s been a lot of work and I’m still not even close to done.
The way I plan on handling things in terms of traveling through the city, in order to make it feel convincingly large, is adapt Set Out as the way you get around. I was considering writing a custom move, but at the end of the day, why fix what ain’t broken? So instead of writing something new, I just re-skinned Set Out very slightly:
Traverse the City
When you move from one city location to another, say where you’re headed. The Judge will indicate 1-3 potential routes, their known advantages and drawbacks, and the number of twists and turns comprising each. Choose which route to take.
When you navigate a twist or turn , roll +safety (this would be the safety of the district you are starting in, or the city as a whole if you are just entering the city for the first time).
It’d be the same results table as Set Out, I think. I don’t see any reason why it’d need to be any different.
So let’s say you’re traveling from one district, The Warren, to another, The Garden of Faith. The Judge offers two potential routes:
You can head right through the heart of The Warren, which is going to be probably 5 or 6 twists and turns because The Warren is pretty much a maze of alleyways and tenement buildings at odd angles, but the city guard doesn’t have nearly as much of a presence here as in other districts, and the ones that are there are pretty corrupt and amenable to bribes.
OR
You can push through The Warren into Guild Street. It’ll be fewer twists and turns–3 to get out of The Warren, but only 1 to get from Guild Street to The Garden of Faith–however Guild Street is FULL of guards, and by now they probably know what you look like.
The players really don’t want to run into the fuzz, so they choose to stick to The Warren even if there’s a higher likelihood of getting into other kinds of trouble. The Warren is dangerous, so they roll 2d6+0 at the start of each leg (er, set of twists and turns? idk.)
If they’d chosen to go through Guild Street, the last leg would be 2d6+2, since Guild Street is safe. I’d probably use threads or clocks to keep track of the individual sections–three knots/segments for The Warren, and then one knot/segment for Guild Street.
And then, like I said, each district has its own set of encounter tables:
The Warren
Poor District (Warrens), Dangerous, Person (Outlaw), Lawless, Cramped/Overcrowded, Wattle and Daub, Brink of Collapse, 3-4 Levels
Impressions
- A loud din–people arguing, fishmongers and street merchants, children playing or crying
- Tall, decrepit buildings, overfull with dirty residents–people essentially stacked atop each other
- Narrow and twisting alleyways that confuse and offer dangerous secrets
- The smell of burnt coal hanging in the air
- Vermin skittering away from the light
- Men and women offering various services for a price
Creature
1d6 Creature 1 A mob cheers on the execution of a criminal in the street for a petty crime 2 A False Beggar in a pile of rags 3 A mischief of giant rats scurrying down an alleyway 4 Proselytizer handing out pamphlets and spreading the word of the people’s gods 5 A textile worker on her way to the Silk District 6 A gang of toughs leaving a run-down shop laughing, celebrating, and counting coins Discovery
1d6 Discovery 1 Overcrowded tenement building, children playing outside among the evidence of squalor 2 The scene of a ghastly crime 3 A tavern, THE SLEEPING RAT , with no barkeep, people serving themselves drinks 4 A stable with sickly horses and goats 5 A group of young nobles hurrying out of a sodden hut; they seem to be nervous and drunk 6 Evidence of an underground lair, hiding the outlaw Mirva Threetongue Obstacle
1d6 Obstacle 1 A fishmonger dumps a cart of rotten fish for scavengers to clean up, blocking the way forward 2 A maze of alleyways populated by wandering livestock (mostly goats) 3 A ditch full of stinking refuse 4 The alley dead-ends just after a “helpful” sign points visitors in the wrong direction 5 Peasants recovering crates and barrels off the back of a crashed cart 6 A mob of peasants demanding the head of a local politician Hazard
1d6 Hazard 1 An open grate in the street leading to the fetid sewer 2 A player’s clothing attracts a band of thieves 3 A brazier is knocked over; the fire spreads and quickly becomes uncontrollable 4 Crowded streets mean cutpurses and pickpockets abound 5 Swarms of biting insects hover around the rotting corpse of a goat 6 Loose planks on a 3rd-story walk connecting two buildings
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Wow @jexjthomas looks amazing! It would be cool to have a set of generic tables/outcomes that could be mix and matched to create Urban districts.
Feels like something cool for a crowdsourced Codex issue.
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The Dortoka: City on the Sea of Glass book for Vagabands of Dyfed is pretty helpful with this, but the settlement location table, along with the incidents tables, has made putting these together a lot of fun and not too time-consuming. (Okay, it’s still pretty time consuming.)
Are you able to articulate what kind of thing you’re thinking?
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Ooh, I passed on Dortoka - maybe an error. I’ll have to check it out. I do see they use a pointcrawl method, which may be more appropriate to FotF. I was thinking a bit more fleshed out city, see below.
You know you have a city. The city has various city tags. That’s already established by Perilous Wilds, and also DW.
From there, you expand out. If you have X tag, you then get 1d3 districts per tag. The districts then roll up on the classic FotF 6d6 tables maybe or 6d12 tables. There could be some overlap, which is ok - if you end up with 2 “thieves quarters” then you can either make it larger; or make 2 distinct districts with different flavors, or even competing factions/districts.
(Example, if you have defenses: Garrison, you’ll probably have 1-3 districts devoted to soldiers. This can lead to districts such as Practice Field, Red Light District, Barracks etc).
Finally, each district can in turn be given tags, or to avoid overburdening that word, “personality”. This can also be rolled up, perhaps based on the city tag, or as a sub-table below the 6d12 table - perhaps another d6 table per district.
(example above, Practice Field can have any one of the following personalities: Overgrown, Muddy, Tidy, Small)
If one were to get really into the nitty gritty, there could be some sort of adjacency algorithm as well that constrains and assists in mapping the city. In addition, the borders between districts can be randomly rolled (wall, river, major road, things just sort of blend, etc).
The reason I say crowdsourced is because while the structure may be relatively easy to build out, the specific districts and personalities of the districts would benefit from coming from more than one mind.
Does that make sense? And maybe that’s already covered in Dortoka?
[edited to change “their” to “there” - English major dontcha know]
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Just a quick thought on the alignment topic.
Why not including a new campaign creation step with something like:
- What does it mean Law, Chaos and Neutrality in this world?
These concepts have never been well defined in D&D due to the different meaning they traditionally had in fantasy fiction compared to current language.
For example, is Law related to a particular dinasty or kingdom? Is Chaos a force driving madness and destruction like in the Warhammer world? Are Chaos, Law and Neutrality divine influencers that can summon their own champions like in the Elric saga?
These details would prevent the “vanilla chaos and law” from D&D where Law is just a social value related to every power structure that enforce their law, wich is really not inspiring nor realistic. You know, the chaotic = rebellious, lawful = conservative. That has always been bs to me because every rebellious forces normally aspire to estabilish their own order, not pure chaos obviously. Normally rebellion is not an end in itself. Metaphysical Chaos and Law instead, is more easy to get, more epic, more tied to the setting, and more awesome 
lol
Knowing exactly what is Chaos, Law and Neutrality in your campaign would also help alot in simplifying the alignment advancement rule. That way you could keep triggers simpler like “act on behalf of (Chaos, Law, Neutrality if it is a thing)”.
Then if you ask me I’d ditch Good and Evil for good but I don’t think this is an option for the system right now so well, I’ll be patient 
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Chris, I like a lot of this. Some of this does seem to be covered in the Settlements & Citizens supplement, though–a city always starts with 1 government district, 1 poor district, and 1d6+1 additional districts. Then you roll to determine type, feature, and problem. I do actually think the features and problems could be a bit more robust to offer different kinds of things going on in any given district. But it’s been a very useful tool!
I really love the idea of some sort of system to assist in mapping the city. Dortoka does it with dice (kind of like Vornheim-lite) but I’m not super impressed. As it is, I just use Watabou’s Medieval Fantasy City Generator and fill in the districts.
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I think if we take your comment here and apply to D&D, it uncovers how flimsy the old 5 alignments system is and how it fails to describe human values. And most of all it’s a very moralistic attempt at describing human nature. Even if it looks apparently simple or even elegant, it really is rather sketchy, incoherent, and it doesn’t serve the cause of promoting personality traits other then stereotyped ones. It doesn’t even describe classic epic stereotypes, just a native ones from the rpg media itself that doesn’t appear anywhere else. It is infact noteworthy that Tom Moldvay left out Good and Evil from his edition of the game, leaving only Lawful, Chaotic and Neutral.
Then there’s always people that used those little words in clever ways to describe something better, but I think it’s despite and not thanks to this system.
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I love the idea of only Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic tbh. Goes back to that Moorcock influence …
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So my players didn’t quite make it all the way into the city just yet, buying me two more weeks to pad out those encounter tables. They wanted to follow up on some loose threads from last session, and discovered that Antero’s Gauntlet, the pro-human nationalist zealots were making in-roads in the human and halfling village of Setraja … and the mayor was at the center of the whole thing!
Then they hit the road, encountered a dying root troll, which our cleric turned all the way into a tree by laying on hands, and managed to pass the night with no more than a nightmare of the party dog being taken over by the blight. Some very amazingly awkward keeping company as well.
Then they made it to Pealinn, only to find a sprawling camp of Tyroshi refugees running from the blight that has taken over their land. The biggest discovery of all is that among the refugees are ghosts, people who were magically protected from the blight whose souls remain anchored to the earth when their bodies die…
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Yeah me too. But I wouldn’t force an approach on Jason. More so that he made Traits as a tool to design a better version of the old 5 alignments system.
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Maybe along with the world creation stuff there’s just a discussion of what these alignments mean in this world, with a few options/examples and the ability to write your own?
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That could be really cool. But again, the mechanic should be modified to work along with Traits that are personality attributes and currently doens’t fit all the chaos as methaphysic force stuff.
Interesting idea, to build tables off of tags, @chrisshorb! That got some wheel spinning. I think the system I have in place is currently working (though I agree with @jexjthomas’ note about looking for ways to make the results more robust), but I will mull this over the next time I go through the settlement generation stuff.
@il_fabbro and @jexjthomas the idea of having table-specific alignment discussions is great. I think I would likely bump that kind of thing (along with custom character species, etc.) to the Advanced Freebooters book, and stick to the current setup for the basic rules.
Yes, the idea of categorical, moral-spectrum alignment has its issues, but I hope the way it’s framed in Freebooters will come across as a bit tongue-in-cheek. So far I’ve found that it has a lot of mechanical/narrative value, and I think the traits and built-in ability to shift alignment give it some degree of nuance. In any case, it’s fairly easy to house-rule that alignments have no application beyond dictating initial traits. Related aside: when you roll up a level-zero villager for a funnel, you start with two random traits, and don’t declare alignment until you graduate to level 1.
@jexjthomas, love the urban encounter tables! Very City State of the Invincible Overlord. What method did you use for rolling up inspiration for the entries on the creature list, specifically? Did you use the settlement event tables for any of this stuff?
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Thanks! And I guess I need to check that supplement out now!
I knew I wanted it to be more people than “creatures” per se, so I mostly thought about who or what would be hanging around that particular district, and I rolled some dice on the NPC occupation table and a few other places. While I didn’t even think about using the settlement event tables–that’s a really good idea, and I’ll have to use it for the next batch!–I did take a lot of inspiration from the settlement location tables for all of these, not just the “creatures.”
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Devin_Pike - I agree with all of those. Unfortunately, those are not the kinds of activities my players tend to get up to in a Freebooters campaign. They are mostly doing rather inept wilderness traveling and delving into old school style dungeons. I like Jeremy’s ideas above, but it’s still a little tricky to work that kind of opportunity in when most of the action is dodging traps and fighting monsters.
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