As the death knight’s bony hands started moving, Steppan and Rider realized in an instant just how screwed they were.
They had met while guarding a caravan and decided to team up to seek their riches in the Ravenland, which was now open to explore after centuries of being shrouded in the Blood Mist. Their only lead – the legend of Weatherstone, a ruined castle said to hold an ancient king’s treasure.
The treasure might well be there, but Steppan and Rider were likely never going to see it. Instead, they had stew with a mysterious bard in the castle’s ruined watchtower; crossed a moat guarded by what appeared to have been a demonic octopus; fell down a crevasse with only a few silver coins to show for it; made a hasty alliance with a gang of mercenaries to make it through a manticore’s lair; left one of those mercenaries for dead as they fled; left the harpies alone with their stolen riches; and acquired King Algarond’s sword from his skeletal body, activating the magic that brought him and his dozens of soldiers back to undeath, cutting down another of the mercenaries.
Steppan, Rider and the remaining mercenary tried a desperate escape: jumping out the window of the king’s tower bedroom and lowering a rope from a cargo crane down to the moat and swimming away. The mercenary made it down safely, watching in peace until the poison from the King’s foul war cry knocked her unconscious. Steppan and Rider each lost their grip on the rope and fell, their bones crunching on the rocks below as the world went black.
That’s where we left the first session of our Forbidden Lands campaign. As you might expect from reading that, we had a blast. There are a lot of reasons for this: a giant map that you get to put stickers on; simple class design that still allows for customization; mechanics for interesting travel between adventure sites; stripped down, deadly and easy-to-run monster stat blocks; inventory rules that don’t make you want to tear up your character sheet; and bite-sized starting adventure sites that tell the GM only what they absolutely need to know to improvise a session.
But the core mechanic is what’s called pushing a roll. Whenever you make a skill check you roll a number of d6s equal to an attribute plus the skill plus any bonus from gear. At the start of a campaign that likely means anywhere from two to eight dice. If you roll any 6s, you succeed. If you fail (or want to succeed even harder) you can choose to re-roll any dice that aren’t 1s or 6s. After this roll, any 1s deal damage do either the attribute or gear you used. And if any of your four attributes (Strength, Agility, Wits, Empathy) reach 0, you’re out of action.
So the question the game constantly asks you is: just how badly do you need to succeed? And that’s just about the best question any game can ask.
I could go on, but the important thing to know is I can’t wait to see what Steppan and Rider get up to next. Because I looked up the recovery rules, and they’ll each wake up from their fall in d6 hours with a single recovered point in Agility and wounds that will kill them in d6 days if they aren’t healed, just outside a castle buzzing with angry skeletons led by an insane king who has just had his magic sword stolen.
And did I mention the entire boxed set is less expensive than a single Dungeons and Dragons book? And that the 152-page quickstart PDF is free?
Weatherstone is waiting for you.
Into the Fray 