@jasonlutes I have a question about this move:
Rise to the Occasion When you assume the role of a follower and embrace the life of a freebooter…
This is confusing to me, as written, I could not figure out who was doing what. It took me several reads, but I think I get what you are saying - make a follower into a freebooter, right?
How about: “When a follower embraces the life of a freebooter…”
Yes, you have it right. Thanks for pointing out that it’s confusing. I’m trying to keep all moves framed in terms of the the second person (“you”), but I’ll see what I can do to make that more clear within that constraint.
@jasonlutes ahh, I see.
How about placing that move in the follower moves section? “Watch them go” is already written from the follower’s perspective.
I was initially confused by this, too, but found the necessary context on the very next page in the verbiage for Bite the Dust. I think what’s missing from Rise to the Occasion is just the context of when/why “you” would “assume the role of a follower and embrace the life of a Freebooters.”
I’ve been dealing with bad allergies the last couple days and haven’t felt up to much, so I spent a lot of time prepping–rolling up NPCs and settlements, converting some monsters (I don’t know if y’all have seen Into the Wyrd and Wild but there’s some excellent stuff in there) etc.
And I’m glad I did, but man oh man if my players didn’t go in a completely different direction. Not that I even had any specific plans or expectations for them, things just went in a direction that I couldn’t have expected at all so I repurposed some things and we ended up playing out a weird mystery involving a village of pagans who worship one of the Old Gods being murdered by bandits who slowly went crazy due to being exposed to the secret eldritch horror at the center of the village … It was one of those nights where they suggest (without even realize they’re doing it) things that are better than anything you could have come up with yourself, so you just run with it. I’m thankful that Freebooters is such a flexible system that it can accommodate a great many different stories within the greater hardscrabble fantasy umbrella. It was a lot of fun.
Sad news, though, that one of my players feels like she might not be able to keep playing. Not sure what will happen if that’s the case, both because she hosts, and because one of the other players is her partner. Hopefully it all works out. I’m not quite ready to abandon this worl yet!
Wow that sounds like a great game. Glad you ran with what was happening. I also love that you do not regret the prep - my feeling is that it almost always pays off in the end.
Fingers crossed that the group can hang together.
I spent about an hour and a half last night prepping for tonight’s first actual play session of my new Freebooters campaign. I usually recycle old lists of dangers and discoveries I have on hand from previous campaigns, but given the different setting (frigid climate, whaling settlement, weird races), I spent the time to roll up a bunch of new encounters using the tables from FotF2E, and spun them to match this campaign’s themes/environment. I also went onto Pinterest and saved a bunch of cool images to match the discoveries.
For dungeon prep, I did my usual and printed out a few Dyson Logos maps to use for the sites of interest we generated during our session 0. Fortuitously, the PDF of a product I kickstarted (Trilemma Adventures, a set of 50 or so 2 page dungeons) arrived this week, and contained a great dungeon set on a glacier, so I added that location to our map. I used some of the tables from Plumb the Depths, but already roughly knew the themes of the two sites we had created, so I mostly just ran with that. I tend to just make lots of notes/annotations on the printed maps as my document to run from, so between the two I prepped and the published adventure, my crew has three potential dungeons to delve into, all ready to go.
I’ll post about how our first session goes after tonight.
John
Here is the Vine Horror from the first encounter in Sailors:
Vine Horror (chaotic, medium, group, stealthy): This ghastly vine grows inside a corpse, winding throughout its frame and skull, animating it. Each arm houses multiple toothy whips used to subdue and kill its victims. If an attack kills a vine horror, the host body splits open, disgorging thousands of seeds in a viscous pink fluid. These seeds will slowly creep into nearby bodies. Once infected, a corpse will rise as a new horror in 1-4 days. HP 9; Armor 1; Damage 1d6+1 (Close, Reach); Booty carried, d6 bd; dagger, short sword, 5sp; Wants To throttle and implant seeds; Moves ➤ Bind them with many thorny vines ➤ Strangle the breath out of them ➤ death tide of creeping seeds
Jason requested updates on our new FotF2E campaign, so here is one.
We had our first session of actual play for our new Freebooters campaign last night, although we got off to a slow start and ended up only getting the party to the first dungeon entrance.
One of the players was going to be late, so we did some more world building while waiting for him. We determined some more details about our home settlement, Fort Spack (Fort Blubber - I’ll go ahead and apologize to any Swedish speakers reading this for the way we are mangling your fine language, and the stupid place names we are coming up with). We determined that the keep itself was an old Dwarven tower, taken over and stocked with cannon by the Humans when they began using this area as a base for whaling. There is a shingle beach at the head of a fjord, with docks and whale processing facilities by the water and a small town at the base of a cliff. The keep itself is built in a very defensible position at the top of the cliff, and is only reached by a winding switch-back path or by a pulley “elevator” system. In the past, the town was attacked by a massive kraken that came from the sea. Besides fishing, the town gets income from nearby salt mines. There is a lot of unrest in the town (the alignment is Chaotic, and the locals value conflict and impulse…), and the biggest threat is periodic incursions of frozen undead lurching out of the interior of the island. The timing of these incursions is seemingly tied somehow to meteorite strikes.
We also determined that the nearby forest (the Vild Skog) is infested with wooden gargoyles (sort of a cross between Groot and the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz), that the town is run by a thoroughly corrupt military governor, and that the locals have a superstitious but pragmatic approach to magic.
The adventurers had heard of a number of interesting sites nearby. The Vild Skog with its gargoyles, the Eld Sten, a place of sacrifice rumored to hide buried treasure, the Haxor onda Topp, allegedly the headquarters of an old Dwarven witch’s cult and full of charms and spells, and the Tornet pa Isen, a stone tower jutting out of a glacier that a young hunter had just seen from afar. The group debated where to go for their first expedition, with some arguing that the Tornet pa Isen might be best given that it was newly discovered and probably not looted yet, but in the end, they voted to go to the Eld Sten, based on the “known” buried treasure there.
Before leaving town, they tried to supplement their meager silver in various ways. Svotja offered to chop wood at their inn (The Kraken). Thorfri sold some milk from his cow, Lilith, which is a rare commodity here. Hildrigga intimidated the innkeeper into “investing” in the expedition in the form of a week’s rations with the promise of being paid back 2 for 1. Nongelege managed to convert a local ne’er-do-well named Bjorn to his religion by paying for a prostitute for him, and went on to convince his new follower to join them on the expedition as a hireling.
The party spent their newfound wealth buying survival gear like warm clothes, bedrolls, snares and fishing gear, a tent, and tinderboxes. I offered them a choice of three routes: through the forest and south around the mountains, straight over the mountains, or a longer route through a pass between mountains. They chose the longer but easier route, and set off into the cold, overcast day.
The journey consisted of two legs, and on each leg, they rolled an encounter with a creature. The first was a half-buried undead warrior. Aeren, the Sea Elf thief, managed to sneak up to it and snatch the rusty sword out of its hand, which was thrust up through the snow, then run off before the creature could stir. The second was an ambush by a snow leopard as they pushed on through the twilight of the second day to try and reach their destination, which they dispatched after suffering a few minor injuries, adding a “somewhat mangled snow leopard pelt” to their inventory. While camping one night, a boogle of snow weasels infiltrated the camp, gnawed their way into Svotja and Thorfri’s packs, and ate 4 rations. Nongelege the Narwhal-man, had set some snares, and managed to catch one of the weasels, but after examining it, Svotja decided not to eat it.
After finishing off the leopard, they continued on by torchlight, eventually coming to the lip of a large, bowl shaped depression. They saw a number of standing stones, arrayed in a rough circle, at the base of the depression, but opted to camp again and wait until morning to explore further, which is where we stopped the session.
This is the first PbtA game that 4 of the 5 players have played, and they all seemed to grok the basics pretty quickly. They continued to enjoy the use of the Game Stamps in creating our map. I used the campfire stamp to mark where they camped along the route, and they liked the idea of having a record of their travels.
Next time, into the dungeon!
I haven’t been keeping up on my Freebooters campaign actual play reports, but the campaign is rolling along nicely. We’ve had our first PC death (in their first dungeon), our first hireling sacrificed to a polar bear, and our first downtime session back in Fort Spack. The party is now in the midst of their second expedition, for which they are much better supplied and prepared.
One bit of feedback I have is that we are having a hard time operationalizing the alignment XP moves. I’ve got 1 lawful PC, 2 Chaotic, and 2 Evil. The evil characters have no problem “inflicting harm on another for personal gain”, but the Lawful and Chaotic characters almost never accomplish their alignment goals. Given that they spend most of their time traipsing through the wilderness or delving into dungeons, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of opportunity for the characters to “impose or maintain order in the face of chaos”, or :disrupt a prevailing order".
Perhaps we’re just not interpreting the triggers broadly enough, but in our wrapping up discussions, neither the players nor I as Judge can come up with examples of those goals being accomplished in our sessions.
On the other hand, the trait XP is working like a charm. Our “Lazy” Sea Elf thief refuses to stand watch, weasels his way out of chores, and gets the hirelings to carry his gear; our “Reckless” fighter popped open a bottle of wine she found in an old Witch Cult headquarters and chugged it last session; etc.
John
If I was the Lawful PC, I’d immediately start trying to impose order on this rabble of a party.
If I was one of the Chaotic PCs, I’d go along with it for a little bit, then start undermining the Lawful PC’s authority.
Thanks for this note, John! I’ve seen similar issues in my own play groups. I’ve rewritten those Alignment goals many times, but I will reexamine them with fresh eyes the next time I make an editing pass.
D and D 5e has been moving away from alignment. Is the concept necessary?
Well, it’s certainly not necessary, but since I chose to include it as a nod to old-school play, it’s become integral to a lot of the content generation procedures, and I quite like the way it works as a narrative organizational tool. I just need to find the right wording for those XP triggers. There’s a similar issue with the cleric’s tenet/belief XP trigger, where it’s not yet firing right.
I do kind of like the idea of evil characters being able to hit their trigger more than other players and advancing at a slightly faster rate, as a comment on selfish, exploitative behavior. And I like the kind of thing that Jeremy suggests above, where characters of differing alignment within the party may be spurred to interact with each other in alignment-driven ways. I’ve seen that a fair amount in my home games, and it’s always entertaining.
There’s a system in place as well for PCs to shift alignment, which allows parties to adjust to each other if they wish. The way traits work, the boundaries between alignments are porous, so there’s a lot more gray area than might be apparent at first glance.
If you escort a group of monks into the wilderness to found a new monastery, that id’s upholding order. If you help a town drive out a criminal organisation, that is upholding order. If you take the time to organize supplies among characters accounting for encumbrance that could be upholding a form of order. On the inverse, aiding rebels, working with a thieves guild, traveling light to move quickly could all be chaotic.
Great suggestions, @Devin_Pike.
Here’s another attempt:
Good
If you helped another at your own expense, mark XP.
Lawful
If you established, imposed, or maintained order, mark XP.
Neutral
If you advanced your own interests or took action to correct an imbalance, mark XP.
Chaotic
If you disrupted or destroyed something significant, mark XP.
Evil
If you inflicted harm on another for personal gain, mark XP.
I like these a lot, as they support a few different styles of play for each alignment. That said, I don’t think chaotic is quite there. What is “something significant”? What if we just make it the opposite of lawful – if you disrupted or upended order. I think the part that makes the current trigger tough is the idea of a “prevailing order” which imo implies social structures as opposed to things like DW’s chaotic trigger for bard, which is “spur others to significant an unplanned decisive action” or the druid’s “destroy a symbol of civilization.” Both of those could reasonably be interpreted as disrupting or upending order, but NOT necessarily the “prevailing order.”
Thinking it through more, I’m also not entirely sure how I feel about neutral including advancing your own interests. It’s probably more interesting to focus on balance, defusing tense situations, helping people get along.
Thanks for the notes @jexjthomas. Yeah, the hope (backed up by guidelines in the rules) is for each group to discuss and decide what constitutes “significant” at the end of each session when XP are awarded, but it’s not an ideal choice of words. My thinking right now is that “order” is too limiting, since I think a chaotic character should, for instance, be able to get XP for something like starting a barroom brawl. But the wording above doesn’t really quite accommodate that, either. Maybe, “If you sowed confusion, mayhem or destruction for no sensible reason, mark XP.”
Neutral characters for me need to have the option to be selfish. I don’t want to force them into the role of being diplomats, peacemakers, or “balancers.”
My only issue with Neutral characters advancing their own interests is that feels like the default mode for Fantasy RPG player characters. I’m not sure why, but it feels like playing on “easy mode”. Maybe in play it doesn’t actually play out that way…
Hi Jason! I’m new to this forum but I’m looking forward to catching up on all the posts and getting into the feedback process. I’m a community DM at Pandemonium in Cambridge, MA, and starting November I’ll be running the playtest version of FotF 2nd Edition once a week for about a month. Since there aren’t too many scheduled game sessions, I’ve elected to go against some of the basic premise of the game and have already generated a region and a village/township where the player characters will begin their adventure. This decision was made to compress on some of the “session 0” work flow, but I’ve left a ton of blanks to fill, so I’m not too worried about getting players involved in the creative process.
I also wanted to commend you on the playtest material thus far, as I’m convinced you’ve created something truly special here. The Settlements & Citizens in particular has been a radical change to how I prepare any of my games across any of the fantasy RPG systems I’m familiar with (The Perilous Wilds did the same thing). Part of what I like to bring to the table is a thorough cast of characters, allies and villains and otherwise, but making them from scratch (making anything from scratch) has always been a dead-zone for me. The tools and tables you’ve constructed here have all-around been a huge help to my process.
If it doesn’t take up too much space here, I’d like to send periodic updates of my November playgroup. I’ll be using the most recent versions of the documents you’ve shared, so hopefully I can provide some feedback on any of the more pressing details you’re working through.
Kindly,
Pasha