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Thanks. Nothing too complex (i.e. the survival elements) and I'll go light on them in combat. It's more to get them (and myself to be honest!) familiar with the basic mechanics in addition to the basics of roleplaying in general that doesn't involve a controller or keyboard.

 warboss wrote:
Thanks. Nothing too complex (i.e. the survival elements) and I'll go light on them in combat. It's more to get them (and myself to be honest!) familiar with the basic mechanics in addition to the basics of role playing in general that doesn't involve a controller or keyboard.

In session 0, after they make their characters, draw out a little map of a cave with some woods outside of it, and have the group fight a Grey bear.

Just a pre game test fight so that everyone can get an idea for how the mechanics work so that when they play the actual game they understand the risks before leaping into a fight. I did that with my most recent group and when one of the players was crushed to death in a bear hug they all realized how dangerous the game can be.

I think that's a great way to start generally but in this case time is limited and they have effectively zero experience with RPGs and even just making up a character and explaining basic rules would take up most of the roughly three hours we'll have. I'm basically piggy backing this onto a "kids" (they're 16-24... but always kids to me!) family birthday get together. When I simply mentioned tabletop roleplaying a few months ago, one of them said he had no idea how you could make it work without a PC or console. I sent him a link to Critical Role but no idea if he actually watched ti.

I'm going to bring some very simplified sample characters (midway between the NPC stat block and a normal character sheet) and throw them into a very simple adventure similar to what you're suggesting. Basically, the mists have receded and a set of ruins that was just out of range for a safe day trip is showing signs of activity (torches in the distance) for the first time in centuries and excited villagers are heading out to check it out. I'll start with a basic intro to the mechanics and tenets of roleplaying in general and then offer them a small nugget or RP'ing in town before they need to set out for the ruins. It'll basically be a tiny dungeon (three or four rooms) with a minor environment obstacle, some rats, a minor puzzle, and a pair of restless dead.

edit: After writing it out above, I'm thinking that I may have to pare it down further for them to feasibly finish it in time with some sort of satisfying conclusion. One other thing I didn't mention is that I'm not bringing in magic just yet to not have another set of mechanics to explain to just one person.

It was fun and definitely interesting. It'll take some getting used to with the push mechanic damaging players so easily though. Coming up with narrative ways they're taking attribute damage was a bit odd. I did like the various splits of damage between attributes, skills, and equipment.

Thematically/narratively, how do you repeatedly justify stat damage from pushing? Do you use the same reaskning or always mix it up? A player yesterday was repeatedly getting paper cut almost to death just trying to get a success in his primary role (archery hunter shooting his bow) due to bad rolls. Due to the brevity of the session both ingame and IRL, we weren't able to take a rest to heal it and I could see him getting discouraged a bit more each time.

I generally explain it as a ind of exhaustion. You get tired of thinking on a problem and need to let yoru brain recharge. You burn out on other peoples problems and start getting snippy with people. Muscles get sore, you need sleep.

Yeah, I definitely want to try it again but this time with more experienced roleplayers (as in any level of experience whatsoever!) to see how they react to it. It was fine with me as GM but obviously I wasn't invested in the skeletons and swarm that I threw at them.

 warboss wrote:
Yeah, I definitely want to try it again but this time with more experienced roleplayers (as in any level of experience whatsoever!) to see how they react to it. It was fine with me as GM but obviously I wasn't invested in the skeletons and swarm that I threw at them.

Yup. And the danger and survival elements of the game only really have a place in something longer than a 1 shot. PCs suffer over time. Are broken down by lack of resources and degrading health from critical injuries. That needs room to breathe.

 Lance845 wrote:

Yup. And the danger and survival elements of the game only really have a place in something longer than a 1 shot. PCs suffer over time. Are broken down by lack of resources and degrading health from critical injuries. That needs room to breathe.

Very true. I basically ignored the survival elements for this time limited one shot as I already had enough to teach them. They were even sheepishly asking if they could talk to an NPC I was obviously setting up for roleplaying (literally having one NPC tell them "Hey, you should go talk to Avaris... he's actually been there long ago!"). I don't think they were the best focus group to further degrade by fleas and cold.

How did YOU enjoy it?

Here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DX5ImjDRZ5YHQC8kXLctAmJVaaQcGVRu?usp=sharing is the section of my G Drive with some assets I made. Has character sheet (one with my house rules support and one without) some GM screen sheets and card images I made and had printed for monsters/randomtables/spells and what not.

Happy to share them if any of that is useful to you.

 Lance845 wrote:
How did YOU enjoy it?

Here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DX5ImjDRZ5YHQC8kXLctAmJVaaQcGVRu?usp=sharing is the section of my G Drive with some assets I made. Has character sheet (one with my house rules support and one without) some GM screen sheets and card images I made and had printed for monsters/randomtables/spells and what not.

Happy to share them if any of that is useful to you.

I did enjoy it but I do have concerns. I've always been partial to graduated success resolution over the more typical binary with possible crit you find in d20 systems. My biggest concern is the gradually degrading character but I fully admit that I did NOT test it out in a fair scenario given that the system is built with the expectation that a rest will return some or all of that damage. At first glance, I was a bit hesitant due to what seemed like a scarcity of opposed rolls but simply having a higher stat that takes more time to whittle down is a sort of sliding scale difficulty as is the imposition of penalties to the dice pool instead of requiring a certain number of successes in the first place. I appreciate the link and will take a look at it tonight!


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edit: Do you primarily play in person (and print out the various guides/cheatsheets) or use them online instead? Are those customized off of the various card packs they offer? I appreciate the links.

Finally got to play this game (twice so far) and it's been a fun change from D&D. It definitely scratches a different itch that D&D leaves ignored. The "self harm" from pushing rolls (you can reroll but you risk taking equipment and stat damage on 1's) is alot more frequent than I expected but resting/sleeping heals it all up just as quickly. I like the stricter encumbrance rules as well as using up valuable resources like food/water/arrows in an unpredictable way that doesn't allow you to micromanage those aspects unlike in D&D (assuming that you're not completely ignoring it in the first place of course!).

Forbidden Lands has caught my attention recently and I like the ideas in this RPG a lot, in particular the gritty, low fantasy, post-apo setting. As much as I liked playing Baldur's Gate 3 with my wife, the story and characters were totally unrelatable for me due to this crazy drive towards MOAR EPIC GODS DIMENSIONS WORLDENDING and stuff

I am preparing some games in the FL and I am wondering if I am missing something about the Blood Mist. It is pretty important as I want a game where characters explore a post-apocalyptic world that had no contact or travel for hundreds of years.

Why didn't people travel in wheeled houses for example? Or built strings of dwellings at appropriate intervals to link communities. I'd think it would be pretty high on any local lord's list of priorities. From what I've read so far it seems like everybody accepted that travel longer than half a day was impossible, but why not travel a day at a time hitting Blood Mist-proof safe spots? When faced with such a problem, creative problem-solving suddenly died in the Forbidden Lands? What am I missing?

Simple population density might be the answer to some of those questions. Most communities are small so it doesn't make sense to break off in such a recently universally dangerous world where the mists and the creatures would kill you guaranteed in living memory before they receeded until the town size or conditions become untenable/worth the risk. You need a critical mass of people to form a true community and the general feel of terror likely would cut down on the number of people willing to brave the risks on a whim instead of simply staying put where it's relatively safe.

As for gypsy style caravans being the solution, they may not work to keep the dangers at bay in the mist. Just because something seems like an exception doesn't mean that the mystical forces/energies that resulted in the mists will fall for a loophole just because. You're not going to stump an unnatural magical potentially malevolent worldwide force with a question about the speed of an unladed swallow either. That's just my opinion though and some questions in a setting aren't meant to be officially answered.

In the end, it's up to the players and GM to fill in those answers and whatever works for your group is what's best.

Cyel wrote:
Forbidden Lands has caught my attention recently and I like the ideas in this RPG a lot, in particular the gritty, low fantasy, post-apo setting. As much as I liked playing Baldur's Gate 3 with my wife, the story and characters were totally unrelatable for me due to this crazy drive towards MOAR EPIC GODS DIMENSIONS WORLDENDING and stuff

I am preparing some games in the FL and I am wondering if I am missing something about the Blood Mist. It is pretty important as I want a game where characters explore a post-apocalyptic world that had no contact or travel for hundreds of years.

Why didn't people travel in wheeled houses for example? Or built strings of dwellings at appropriate intervals to link communities. I'd think it would be pretty high on any local lord's list of priorities. From what I've read so far it seems like everybody accepted that travel longer than half a day was impossible, but why not travel a day at a time hitting Blood Mist-proof safe spots? When faced with such a problem, creative problem-solving suddenly died in the Forbidden Lands? What am I missing?

::cracks knuckles::

This has come up a lot over the years. Here is the gist of it.

The book is written from a very human perspective and as such seeing other details is a little buried in the other kins lore sections. There are 2 major components of this to keep in mind. 1) Population density is generally very low. Villages and such generally have hundreds of people, never thousands. 2) The isolation wasn't QUITE as isolated as it is made out to be.

So for starters lets look at what the Blood Mist ACTUALLY is and what it ACTUALLY does.



Now. With that in mind lets address who is not affected or to what extent people are affected.

Wildlife was entirely unaffected.

Elves: Weird immortal sentient alien rocks in flesh golems don't actually have homes. The elves were entirely unaffected. Especially in their northern woods around the Still Mist. But elven traders can travel the entire breadth of the Forbidden Lands and link different settlements by doing so.

Dwarves: Entirely unaffected while underground. The dwarves have deep roads that connect their different settlements. Anything within 1/4 days travel (2 or 3 hexes depending on equipment (horses) and terrain) is fair for dwarven trading outposts).

Wolfkin: Entirely unaffected IN THEIR FORESTS. Outside of the woods there are big issues. (Fangwood and something else in the south southeastern part of the map).

Goblins: Entirely unaffected IN THEIR FORESTS and fringes of their cousins settlements.

Orcs: Mostly Nomadic people who have only started to take over abandoned or captured settlements to become "civilized" under the direction of the Urhur's chieftain. Being normadic as long as they are in camp they are fine.

Galdane Aslene: Also nomadic peoples. See Orcs.

The Rust Church: Members of "true faith" travel the blood mist without fear. Unaffected. Their influence gets significantly weaker the farther east you get.

Raven Sisters: Mostly nomadic people who have stayed on the move to flee the Rust Church. Mostly unaffected.



So... The real victims of the blood mist are farmers and settlers. People who started in villages and stayed in villages. Born and raised in villages. That is "home" and as such it is the one place where the blood mist did not hurt them.

But communities still had contact. Mostly from intermediaries. Dwarven ore traded for human food stuffs by elven merchants. Aslene breeding and selling horses for trade goods. Missionaries demanding tithes. etc etc...

When considering if an individual falls victim to the mist it is important to ask what would that person feels and would the mist pounce on that? Kids in a nomadic camp are told to stay within the camp or the mist will get you. Alien Elves don't think anything of it. Dwarves all feel at home underground.

Oh, that's a lot of useful info, thank you for that!

Maybe means I'll need to rethink the starting hook of the campaign (a variaton of the Water Chip/GECK main quest from first Fallouts) because ot isn't as postapocalyptic I imagined it to be.

Well, with those low population numbers you can still think of the GENERAL isolation. The nomads are not maintaining a keep. And any military power of a local lord cannot travel far to collect "taxes" to maintain their fighting force. If disease hits a billage hard they could be wiped off the map before anyone knows.

As much as the vast majority of communities have some monthly or so outside contact the residents of those communities have NO idea what is beyond the horizon.

I tell players the map they are given is from before the blood mist. Yes there is a castle marked on that hex. Nobody has any idea if that castle is still there or who or what occupies it now.

The vast majority of the population are rediscovering the Raven Lands for the first time in hundreds of years with only rumors, stories, and legends of what is/was out there to drive them.

 Lance845 wrote:


I tell players the map they are given is from before the blood mist. Yes there is a castle marked on that hex. Nobody has any idea if that castle is still there or who or what occupies it now.

Oh yes, that's what I want to do as well, with the map being misleading on purpose in many cases.

Still, if I plan the main town of a local aeldorman family to whom the village of PCs belonged, to still exist, it will be hard for me to explain why the authorities never contacted the village, when, as you say, the isolation was never of the kind we see with, say, Vaults in Fallout after the bombs fell (and which was the impression I got after reading about the setting, with it being mentioned explicitly that travelling farther than 1/2 half of a day away from home is asking for trouble).

Also I will need to make the disappearance of the Blood Mist uneven across the land to explain why the village of PCs is only now getting a chance to come out of isolation and at the same time to let PCs meet relatively organized communities on the outside (once again, akin to opening the Vault and realizing that life has been going on outside for some time already). But that's a solution I already have.

Actually the vaults in fallout isn't a bad analogy. The vaults DO have contact with the next vault over. But it's only rarely and to exchange people to prevent too much inbreeding.

Remove the inbreeding aspect because village populations are large enough to maintain breeding populations. Increase the frequency of visits from decades to months.

Just like the vaults the people IN the vault are unlikely to ever see anything outside the vault.

The mist lifting would be uneven.

Getting around the whole raven lands doing that would take a few years.

But... The game by default starts about 5 years after the mist lifts. Thats 5 years of people who spent generations watching any loved one who ventured too far get taken and never seen again. Most people after generations and living and dying on their land have no interest in leaving either. And crotchety old alderman won't want the younger upstarts to leave either.


Personally i started my games with a cold open. The players already mid mission a few hexes away from a village so they could first learn the mechanics in the mini adventure, then learn travel to get to town, then rp and pick up new plot hooks.

I plan to gett PCs out of the village on a "water chip" quest - the river that has always been the main water source for the village has turned into a trickle so, even though no Blood Mist at night is still a relatively new thing, PCs need to travel upriver to investigate. Discovering old and forgotten things along the way, they should eventually arrive at the nearest bigger town to find out the river has been dammed to flood the lands of a competing faction. This rough outline + random encounters should be enough for my players and me to play a couple of sessions and to find out if we like the game and the setting.

Thanks again, Lance. That was a lot of useful advice