My review of Further Afield

Further Afield is the first supplement to Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures, by Flatland Games. It's the largest and most ambitious supplement to date.

The collaborative sandbox campaign

Further Afield offer a very interesting and easy way to manage a collaborative sandbox campaign. In the continuity of the basic book, his objective is to allow the GM to generate with the players a campaign setting with the least possible preparation. The book therefore propose to involve players in the creation of a campaign by allowing the characters to present two major places of interest that they have heard about, and to place them approximately in the region. Each player then describes what their characters thinks they know about it, and the GM makes a secret roll to see if the information is right or inaccurate. Players can incorporate elements who interest them into the campaign, while leaving the GM in control, and it's a very good idea.

Further Afield therefore offers some tables to generate major and minor locations and to place them on the map. The major locations are generated by the players' ideas, the minor locations only by the GM.

New Threat Pack: The Bandit King

The Bandit King is a new Threat Pack for Beyond the Wall, inspired by the Threat Packs presented on Further Afield. The Bandit King can be a Pirate King if you prefer (I use the Pirate King version on my Caribbean style campaign).

The Bandit King is a charismatic chief who have rose in power in the last years. He has gathered around him more and more men, filthy rogues, thieves, robbers or scums to form a real threat for the all region. The Bandit King has appointed some officers, and each officer has created his own band of bandits who serve the Bandit King.

The Bandit King begin with 3 bands of several bandits (2d10+20 bandits HD1), with some veterans bandits (1d6+2 bandits HD2) and an officer (HD4). One of this bands is the Bandit King's band (double all the results, but the officer is the Bandit King HD6).

Each band is named by the name of his officer, for example Rothar "Silver Hand" band is an appropriate band name.

At the beginning of the campaign, the Bandit King has an Imminence Rating of 4. If chosen at the beginning of the campaign when the character creation occurs, you will need to use this table below. At least one player character need to roll on this table during creation.

New Cantrips: Imbue Feelings (intelligence)

This new cantrips is often possessed by the Faes. To use it, the caster must be close to the target and have visual contact with it. The caster can amplify or mitigate a specific feeling in the target, for example fear, love, courage or despair. He cannot create it from nothing.

The target can resist thanks to a saving roll against the spell, with the possible bonus of wisdom allowing him to resist mind control. The effect lasts a whole scene, and the target does not realize that his feelings are affected in a strange way (witnesses of the scene, on the other hand, may notice it).

The magician can amplify the feeling to the extreme (or reduce it to nothing) by taking a malus of -3. The caster can, with a malus of -5, make the spell last a full day.

A Beyond the Wall playbook: The Revenant

Originally created by Ralph Lovegrove for his campaign Beyond the Waves, this is the Revenant Playbook, a rogue-mage tied to the sea and the deads.

Sometimes the Dead fail to make the crossing to the Far Ocean. Instead they sail on and on, finally washing up on a shore where no-one knows them in a new form. The Wise will say that it’s because they have an unfinished life, and that the Ocean has granted them a second chance to make it whole before they voyage again. Ghosts appear as young children on a beach or shore, with no explanation as to who they are or how they arrived there. They will have eyes from violet to grey, the color of a storm. The ghost child will wander the beach until the villagers adopt it, which is usually immediately and without question — to do otherwise invites bad luck such as storms, drownings and poor fishing yields. Often ghost children are regarded as some judge-ment from the Ocean for misdeeds, though they are also a blessing for childless families.

You can download the PDF here

Random spell and ritual tables for Beyond the Wall

Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures is a fantastic game, and I like making some tools for my use when I prepare an adventure, or when I need a quick idea.

A random spell and ritual table is necessary because spells and rituals spreads in many books. In the tables, you'll find only the official spells and rituals (except the spells and rituals who are tied to a specific thread pack). This list will be updated when a new Beyond the Wall book is released.

A simple Battle-grid combat

Sometimes, I want to run a fight without having to draw an exact map of the terrain. It's specially true if I want to describe the scene in a theatre of the mind style. I plan to test a battle-grid for helping me to run this style of simplified fights.

For this, we need a battle-grid to help define zones (lines) for allied and enemy side. For each grid we need :

• a Front Line (one for each side)
• a Rear Line (one for each side)
• a Far Line (one for each side) - spelled Back Line on my picture below

We don't use measures of distance, nor 5 feet grid. 6 zones will be fine, you can draw them on a blank map or make something fancy.

A battle-grid on my landing page on Roll20

My review of Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures

I've discovered an RPG gem some month ago: Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures. I'm actually playing two campaigns with this game (as a GM) and I think I can review it now :)

Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures is a recent roleplaying game based on Dungeons & Dragons B/X but with some twists and a different low fantasy sensibility. One of the objectives of this game is to play with no prep (or a minimal prep). Really, it's a success. You can really create rich characters with the character playbooks and playing one of the scenario pack on the fly without having much work, on a single evening.

Theme

BtW is inspired by the works of Ursula K. LeGuin, Susan Cooper, and Lloyd Alexander. It's more a game about young people struggling for saving their homes and becoming heroes than a classic sword & sorcery game about becoming rich and powerful. The character creation and rules enforce the theme, and it's really refreshing. It's good for bringing young players at a gaming table because they play the young good people, protect their family and friends, and discover the dangerous world beyond the wall of their village. It's more low fantasy than D&D, and magic is less powerful and flashy, more subtle.

Characters

In BtW, character creation is made with all the players at the table, because they create their characters with bounds between them and are invited to create important NPC and locations to the blank village map provided. Each player picks a playbook (they are more than 40 playbooks at this time) and each playbook invite the player to roll on 7 tables to generate the character story, stats and skills in the same time. After the character creation process, all the PC have a nice background with bounds to other PC and NPC. The gamemaster can exploit this created background, NPC and locations to launch his adventures.

Technically in BtW you can play three core classes, but mix two of them for many different flavors. You have the warrior, the rogue and the mage. The warrior is what you expect, with some knacks to choose for personalization. The rogue is a better fighter than in D&D B/X, and without surprise it's a skill monkey. A rogue can be a thief, a scout, a hunter or any specialist who rely on the mastery of many skills. The mage wields the power of three magic types: cantrips, spells and rituals, but he is not bound to arcane or divine spellcasting, because magic is magic, it's subtle so it's difficult to say if a god really sends you spells or if your magic comes from another source. And the mage can use any weapon (no armor) and have d6 HP, so... it's useful from the beginning.

Rules

BtW is a nice mix between old school and modern rules. From old school D&D B/X you have the 6 stats with the classic modifiers (-3 to +3), you have your base attack bonus, XP progression chart by class, simple combat rules and the old 5 saving throws. Monsters are equivalent to B/X one, with HD and the like. From modern games you have the skills (+2 or +4 bonuses for some stat checks, who are roll under a d20), you have fortune points (sort of destiny points for rerolling dices and stop bleeding to death).

The magic system is really nice and different. A mage can cast cantrips, not potent but useful spells which don't count in your spell limit by day, but requires a stat check to not cast a fumble! A mage can also cast regular spells, who are levelless. You can cast as many spells a day as your level, and doesn't need to read your spellbook each day for memorize them, so it's not Vancian magic. And a mage can cast rituals, who are very long to cast (1 hour by level), need a stat check, but are very powerful and doesn't count in your spell by day limit. The rituals have a level, so for learning and launch a ritual, you need to be of the ritual level.

There are no complex rules here like tracking encumbrance. All is easy to understand, easy to teach, and open to quick and safe houseruling.

Conclusion

Beyond the Wall is really a nice game and my favorite OSR game at this time. The playbooks are incredibles and Flatland Games give us many free supplements for playbooks and scenario pack. The game is more a fantasy game than a sword & sorcery one, more Tolkienesque than D&D in my mind.

Thanks for reading!

Beginning a new blog

Hi fellow RPG gamers!

Foremost, I think I need to present myself. I'm a French gamemaster who play RPG since 1993 (AD&D 2nd edition). In my gaming life, I've playing countless tabletop games like Rolemaster, BattleTech, Nightprowler, Dream Ouroboros and many other games. I came to the hobby when I was 13 if my memory is good, at school and I always liked to create worlds, characters and adventures.

I now work in data management in a big company in Brittany, but my brain is always full of adventures, characters, wonders and magic.

With this blog, I want to share with you some of my thoughts, inspirations and rules about roleplaying games and specially about the old school roleplaying games. They are my second true love (after my adorable wife) and I like discussing about them.

Three years ago, I discovered the OSR movement, and my flame is renewed. I hope to share it with you on this blog :)