A sprawling ruin of an ancient city that has been overrun by monsters, hiding the treasure of ages . . . that’s a description that fantasy role-players are very familiar with. One of the greatest inspirations for this narrative comes from Tolkien’s stories of Middle-earth, and the lost mines of Moria. In many ways, Moria inspires the modern narrative of the mega-dungeon.

Moria has been addressed in previous RPGs, including the original Middle-earth Role Playing, and Decipher’s movie-based Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game. Different RPGs have addressed the topic from different directions, and with different constraints. The One Ring RPG has been well regarded as one of the best representations of Middle-earth in RPG form, and The One Ring 2nd edition now has its own product to address Khazad-dûm and its environs.

Disclaimer

I received a review copy of Moria: Through the Doors of Durin from Free League, and I have received previous review copies of The One Ring products from Free League in the past. I have not had the opportunity to play or run the material in this product, but I am familiar with The One Ring and have run an ongoing game of it in the past.

 The One Ring – Moria: Through the Doors of Durin

Lead Writer Gareth Hanrahan
Solo Play Shawn Tomkin & Matt Click
Editors Francesco Nepitello, Michele Garbuggio, Lorenzo Perassi
Cover Art Antonio De Luca
Other Art Antonio De Luca, Federica Costantini, Michele Galavotti, Giuditta Betti, Andrea Tentori Montalto, Alvaro Tapia
Graphic Design Christian Granath, Niklas Brandt, Dan Algstrand
Layout Dan Algstrand
Maps Francesco Mattioli
Proofreading Brandon Bowling
Line Manager Francesco Nepitello
Project Manager Tomas Härenstam, Martin Takaichi
Brand Manager Robert Hyde – Sophisticated Games
Event Manager Anna Westerling
PR Manager Boel Bermann

Inside the Gates

This review is based on the PDF version of this product. In this form, the book is 236 pages long. The book has the following sections:

• Introduction
• And at the Gates the Trumpets Rang (campaign focus, context, and rumors)
• Journeys in the Dark (modifications to the journey rules, events, and Eye Awareness for Moria)
• Fell Foes (stat blocks and factions active in and around Moria)
• The Mansions of the Dwarves (details on various important locations and encounter sites)
• Appendix (historical context, other events regarding Moria, turning some historical events into adventures)
• Solo Play in Moria (rules for exploring Moria in solo play, managing a team of delvers)

The artwork in the book matches what has been established in other The One Ring 2e products, with stylized borders, red, black, and brown ink, color paintings introducing the individual chapters, and gorgeous, detailed line art inside the chapters. In addition to the standard artwork, including the same style of location presentation seen in other products, there is a detailed two-page spread of Moria from one side to the other, included in the endpapers of the book. There are two tracking sheets to organize information used for the solo implementation of the game included as well.

Employment Opportunities

The One Ring uses patrons to help point the player characters towards different goals and missions. This product continues that tradition. Characters aren’t cut loose to determine how to explore Moria entirely on their own. There are a number of potential patrons detailed in the book. Most of these characters are dwarves with different agendas, and patrons that are not adopted by the PCs may end up as rivals. There are also other potential patrons, as there is a certain wizard that is very interested in Ring lore and learning the secrets of The Enemy for his own  purposes.

Characters aren’t just thrown into Moria with the intent to reclaim it. Patrons have specific goals and objectives. PCs may be tasked with any number of things that require them to enter the ruins:

• Rescue people captured by the orcs to work the mines
• Recover specific treasures meaningful to a patron
• Find libraries of ring-lore left behind
• Recover a cache of mithril
• Find a lost location
• Gather information on factions and locations for future planning

The feeling that reclaiming Moria is a long term project, one that won’t be accomplished after a few missions, is reinforced with the presentation of the site. There is also the unfolding dread provided by the hints of the Balrog. Before it ever shows up, the PCs are likely to find clues to where it has been, and to see some of the terrible things it has done in the past.

I’m Not Like Other Dungeons

It may not be surprising to anyone that has already engaged with The One Ring as a game, but Moria is not presented in a typical “mega-dungeon” style. There aren’t huge maps that show rooms and locations chained from one side of Moria to the other. Instead, there are several important sites detailed. Due to the massive distances between locations, there are modified journey rules to show what awaits a party of explorers moving from one section of Moria to another.

In order to navigate from one section to another, the PCs will need to learn some information about one of those locations, and its relative position to other locations they know about. Characters that attract the attention of The Eye while exploring Moria experience Revelation Episodes keyed to the story of Moria, including Dire Portents, Orc Assault, Terrors in the Dark, and Ghâsh (the Orc word for fire, indicating an encounter with the Balrog, either up close or at a distance, or with the Nameless Things that have crawled up from the depths).

For all of those locations the PCs might find between the important, established locations, there are random tables for generating chambers. These include tables to determine the physical description of the rooms, what condition the location is in, and how challenging the room is to explore.

Getting into Moria in the first place can be tricky. There are a number of ways into Moria, and there is a table showing where these locations exist, as well as what NPCs or factions from which the PCs might find the entrance. Different entrances are going to place the PCs near different established locations. Some may drop the PCs near an orc guard post, while others may lead them to a location that has been long abandoned.

There is a special redout that the PCs can find that has been hidden from other factions. This is meant to be a special event for the PCs, and it provides them with a place to rest and regroup within Moria itself. I really like this development. It’s a fun reward and an interesting development for a group of PCs that have been doing the work to find out more about the ruins.

More than Moria

Various locations are detailed around Moria. These act as staging locations for expeditions, as well as locations where PCs can encounter NPCs that may provide them with additional information. There are details on the Dimril Dale, including locations like the Mounds of Azanulbizar (the burial mounds established after the great battle against the orcs, the Dimril Stair (the great waterfalls of the dale), and the Mirrormere (a magical lake that can reveal the destiny of the person gazing into the waters).

There are also locations in the mountains beyond Moria itself, like The Citadel of Barazinbar, a location now overrun by orcs, but which served as a surface outpost of the dwarves, and a staging ground for their evacuation of the halls when Durin’s Bane attacked.

Peoples and Personalities

In addition to locations and events, there are a number of personalities and factions introduced. Exploring Moria isn’t just finding lost locations or surviving obvious threats but revealing some of the ongoing stories there.

The orcs are divided into three factions. There is a charismatic orc matriarch playing all of the factions against one another, who is potentially willing to deal with outsiders. The Moria faction of orcs also counts a traitorous dwarf among their ranks, who is planning on claiming Moria as his own once he helps Sauron conquer Middle-earth.

There are humans that have captured a small outpost within Moria. There is a quirky human merchant willing to gossip and share stories that might drop clues to important developments. A wary old scavenger knows some of the ways in and out of Moria, if the PCs don’t spook him, and the son of the Master of Tharbad is seeking to plunder as much of Moria’s wealth as he can.

One of my favorite NPCs is the man-sized crow that acts as an information broker and spy, sometimes giving out useful information, but usually helping one faction or another set up an ambush on their rivals. He’s also just a bit concerned about Thoradel, the leader of the giant eagles that have set up watch on Moria since the Battle of Five Armies.

While it’s not exactly a roleplaying encounter, I also really appreciate the inclusion of a newly defined creature of legend, the monstrous centipede Angolath. They could have gone back to the well of creepy giant spiders, but instead, they introduce another similar, but different creature, which represents the concept of the horrors of the deep crawling up to the surface.

Historical Information

The core assumption of this product is that the campaign will start around 2965, about 24 years before Balin’s expedition to reclaim Moria, and about 54 years before the Fellowship passes through Moria and Gandalf confronts Durin’s Bane. That makes it about 117 years since Gandalf passed through Moria, and about 15 years before Aragorn passes through for the first time. King Dáin has forbidden any efforts to reclaim Moria at this time, meaning there will be no large-scale efforts by the dwarves, for fear of being in defiance of the king.

While exploring Moria, the PCs can learn more details about the attack of the Balrog. This wasn’t just a straightforward assault. As the dwarves attempted to use their defenses against it, the Balrog went on a rampage of terror, doing things like poisoning whole sections of Moria to kill the barricaded dwarves.

There are some potential truths that may or may not be used by the GM. Some of this involves the potential of Durin’s Bane being something other than a Balrog, or of Durin’s Bane being destroyed and replaced by something else. The Balrog’s motivations are also addressed, including the conjecture that the Balrog hasn’t joined Sauron’s efforts because it still sees its true master as Morgoth, and may even be plotting ways for Morgoth to return from the Timeless Void.

The Appendix to the book expands on some of the historical events, such as the disconnect between Balin’s foothold and his optimistic appraisal that he would be reclaiming Moria and what the outside world would know. It also looks at what Gandalf and Aragorn were likely to encounter during their travels through Moria, as well as outlining a scenario for PCs to undertake a rescue mission of Aragorn, in case the group wants to make Aragorn’s trip through the Road a bit more interesting, and to involve the PCs in a historical event.

New Toys

There are a number of new rules elements for groups to play with. There is a new culture of dwarves, representing dwarves not of the line of Durin. There are rules for Mithril, from what it weighs, how much its worth, and what abilities it can grant to helms, shields, or weapons. There are also several new magical treasures, including gems, rings, war horns, staffs, and circlets.

Beyond the singular creatures introduced, there are several new threats detailed. There are stats for the Orcs of Udun, those who venerate the Balrog. There are dwarves afflicted with the delusions that Moria is as it was in elder days. There are ash-wraiths, carrion bats, ring-wights (undead corrupted the dwarven rings), and stone toads. The marrow-eaters, creatures that have followed the Balrog up from the depths, remind me just a wee bit of deep ones.

We get stats for Durin’s Bane, the Balrog, but the assumption isn’t that the PCs are ever going to be able to go toe to toe with what is effectively a demigod. There are a few artifacts included that are noted as being helpful if you do want to stage a battle where the PCs may attempt to throw down with the eternal flame demon.

All By Yourself

Free League published a supplement for The One Ring called Strider Mode, allowing players to use the rules to explore Middle-earth using various oracle tables, which was partially designed by the creator of the Ironsworn game. There is an extensive section for solo play that is similar to, but more focused, than Strider Mode, in this product. At 37 pages long, this is much more detailed than the Strider Mode supplement.

Solo play in this case isn’t just a way of playing the regular game but with one player. The assumption of these rules is that you are portraying a dwarf sworn to Balin during the reclamation of Moria. You create your primary character, but then also develop a team of additional explorers for  you to control.

Rules touch on a variety of topics:

• Gathering allies with different talents
• Assigning quirks to expedition members
• Mission planning
• Exploring, taking harm, and managing fatigue
• Random lore tables
• Fortune and ill-fortune tables for random events and developments
• Battles
• Duels
• Solo Journey events
• Specialized Fellowship Phase events for solo mode and reclaiming Moria

The other members of your expedition don’t track their statistics as granularly as your character does. Instead of individual points and scores, there are condition tracks for these characters. Several statistics you generate will be created for the group, as a whole, rather than for the individual. In many cases, the group is acting similar to a single character, with conditions assigned or removed based on the resolution of actions.

The goal is to build a team of 12 allies, advanced to Hardened experience, and then use that team to undertake one last, major push into Moria. In the end, after helping Balin establish this foothold in Moria, everyone will be wiped out. This helps you tell the story of Balin’s expedition, but it’s not a story you can win. You’re working toward telling the story of the high point of the reclamation, which you can seed into the game as details at a later date.

Speak, Friend, and Enter

 This product takes what could be an intimidating, sprawling location, and makes it into a place with a compelling story that provides a home for an extended campaign in The One Ring. 

There is a lot in this product to like. Not only does it give a comprehensive, but not overwhelming, overview of Moria, it also makes Moria even more engaging by connecting locations and events to memorable NPCs. For those GMs that are overwhelmed with a place to start a campaign in this time period, this provides a focused narrative that is firmly rooted in the timeline of Middle-earth, with enough room for the group to create their own details. Even the solo play rules push toward the same objective, filling in details to a story where we know the beginning and the end, but not much of the middle. This product takes what could be an intimidating, sprawling location, and makes it into a place with a compelling story that provides a home for an extended campaign in The One Ring.

Drums in the Deep

There isn’t much that doesn’t work well in this book. For players not invested in solo play, it does take up a significant portion of the book. This is going to provide solo players with a lot of value, but many of the oracles and event generators, as well as the structured story of Balin’s refounding efforts, could have been worked into the standard rules as well. The larger campaign length adventure narrative is largely left to the solo rules section, with the group rules focusing on telling an emergent story based on what missions the PCs accept and what mysteries they unravel.

Strongly Recommended–This product is exceptional and may contain content that would interest you even if the game or genre covered is outside of your normal interests.

Moria: Through the Doors of Durin does a lot of things right. Not only is it going to be a solid campaign experience for people playing The One Ring, serving as an example of what the game can be and the kind of stories it can facilitate telling, but it is also a great example of making dungeon adventures into campaigns with life and personality. GMs of The One Ring will receive a toolkit to explore Middle-earth, and people that don’t currently play The One Ring may still get some ideas about how to present dungeon sites, history, factions, and the faces of those factions.

Join Jared as he gets together with Rob Heinsoo. In between moments of being an excited and extremely enthusiastic fan, Jared talks to him about 13th Age and all things gaming!

Links:

13th Age Kickstarter (still accepting late pledges)

Last month, I had the chance to be on an episode of the Gnomecast with Phil and Ang, where we talked about why players might “turtle up” during a game and what you, as a GM, can do about it. During the discussion, I came to the conclusion that most, if not all, of the reasons someone might turtle comes down to a lack of trust – either in themselves and their abilities or (just as likely, if not more so) in the person running the game.

The memes of the megalomaniacal dungeon master viciously plotting ways to torture their players are real and funny, but they’re not really the norm when it comes to actual game tables. The players versus GM mindset is an older play style that’s fallen out of fashion, and instead, we all work together to build our campaigns.

And trust is a major component of that play style, too. So how do we – as GMs – earn our players’ trust, and more importantly, how can we make sure we keep it? Trust, after all, is a valuable commodity (and yes, I realize the problems implicit in referring to it as a “commodity”…money is the root of all evil, late-stage capitalistic hellscape, yada yada). It’s probably our most precious resource, not just in roleplaying games but also in all of our relationships.

It’s so important, that I thought it deserved a series of articles on Gnome Stew where we could dig deeper into what it takes to earn the trust of your table and what you should do with it once you have it.

Now, I’m not a therapist, and this series (probably) won’t help you fix that fight you just had with your significant other (if it does, though, let me know), but I do know a thing or two about learning how to vibe with the people at my game table, and I hope some of those lessons can be helpful to you too, so let’s dive in.

IT’S ALL ABOUT SOUL LISTENING

With all due respect, to the great profit Billy Joel, when it comes to building trust at your table, the first step is always learning how to listen.

Your players are going to tell you a lot of things – about their characters, about their day at work, about their kids or their pets, about how they’re feeling today – and not all of those things are going to be told to you directly or even spoken out loud. So, for those of us out there who (like me) must sometimes be beaten over the head before we notice subtle cues, what are the things we need to look for in order to improve our table listening skills?

BACKSTORIES

First, start with their character’s backstories. These are often wishlists full of clues as to the kind of stories they want to tell with you.

• Orphaned rogue who vowed vengeance? They’re probably looking for a story with a little grit and maybe (just maybe) a chance to unharden their heart and learn to forgive.
• A noble knight on a quest to save the king’s daughter? They’re looking to tell a traditional adventure with a hint of fairy tale whimsy seasoned to taste and maybe a dash of temptation to fall to the dark side for flavor.
• Archeologist wizard in search of ancient magics? They want to uncover deep history and learn ALL about the lore of your world. (Treasure this player, and do not let them leave your group.)

Even the lack of a backstory or a backstory that’s just a few tags cobbled together in a loose sort of list will give you an insight into what your player wants. Maybe their lack of backstory means they’re unsure of their character’s place in the world, or maybe it means they want a game that’s not so tied down to the past, and they’re looking to build their story as they go.

OR it could just mean they’re a busy person with other things going on in their life, and they didn’t have time to do any more than a short list of character tropes. That doesn’t mean they’re not eager to play – but it is something you need to listen to and incorporate into how you run your game.

And while we’re on the subject of that busy player? Maybe offer to hang onto their character sheet so they don’t have to keep track of it between sessions. Maybe make contingencies for the fact that they’ll probably miss more sessions than they’ll attend. Maybe talk to them about joining you for one-off board games instead of an on-going campaign. Your mileage will vary based on the situation, but a little effort on your part could go a long way towards making not just the busy player but everyone else at your table feel seen and heard.

CHARACTER BUILDS

Next on the list is how they build their character. If backstories tell you what kind of stories they want to play in, their builds tell you how they want to play out those stories.

What skills do they pick? What powers and spells? These are more than just mechanics you have to account for when prepping your encounters. These are signposts, pointing you at the kinds of problems they want to solve in the course of your game.

Skill lists are easy wins here – high diplomacy? They wanna talk their way out of or into situations. High stealth? Plan for at least one heist. But if you’re running a crunchy system like Pathfinder 2E, look at their class feature choices and feat selections. The monk that’s taken the power to slip out of a flanked position when attacked? They’re begging you to flank them because they’ll feel cool as hell when that mechanic triggers.

Are your players meticulously plotting out their level-up choices three or four levels in advance? They’re hungry to engage with that granola-like system crunch.

On the other hand, some players couldn’t care less about planning ahead. They’d rather just pick the powers that sound cool or the ones with the most flavor (as opposed to the ones that tip the math in their favor). Don’t ignore these blissful buckaroos blindly bounding toward that cliff like the Tarot’s own fool.

If you’re non-planners are stoked about a certain mechanic choice, reward their excitement by making sure it appears in the game. It’ll be a fun challenge for you to work it in, and it’ll be the highlight of their session when their narrative flavor choice pays off big.

BODY LANGUAGE

This is likely the trickiest listening skill to learn, because the nuances of body language can be so varied and hard for a layman like myself to describe, but also because so many games are online now-a-days. That doesn’t mean, however, that learning to read your players body language isn’t an important skill to at least practice, even if we don’t master it.

Obviously, there are the big moves like crossed arms, frowns, and downcast eyes. These can mean your players are disengaging with the current story for one reason or another.

Dice-stacking, phone-checking, and general fidgeting are other classic signs of boredom, but they could just as likely be the mild stimulation a person needs to engage. (Personally, I have two modes when I’m in the player seat – meticulous note taking or incessant doodling. If my hands aren’t working, my ears aren’t listening.)

Of course, there are the subtle clues, too – nodding along with descriptions, leaning in when the action gets intense, lots of eye contact, or even anxious nail biting. These smaller gestures can mean a lot of different things, and I can’t tell you exactly what because I don’t know the folks at your table.

You do, though, and if you pay attention, you’ll start to get it.

As for the online arena, you’re limited by your technology, but if you start paying attention, you’ll begin to pick up on things like vocal inflection, tone of voice, and even the speed at which they reply to comments. If all else fails, you can check in every hour or so to take the table’s temperature.

WHEN THEY KNOW YOU HEAR THEM

When you start listening to your players, they’re going to take notice. They’ll know that when they speak up, you hear them, because you hear them even when they don’t speak up.

That will give them the confidence they need to engage with your story in new and exciting ways. Ways you might not have anticipated but ways that I promise will be rewarding AF.

But listening is just the first step. Once you’ve earned their trust, you’ve got to keep it, and in the next article in this series, we’ll look at ways you can maintain the trustworthy relationship you’ve created by sticking to your promises as a GM (the explicit ones you’ve stated and the implicit ones you didn’t say out loud).

Until then, hit us up in the comments and let us know about a time when you realized you really trusted your GM (or if you’re a forever GM, a time when you knew your players really trusted you).

From the beginning of the hobby, there have always been many different methods to randomize how an uncertain event transpires in TTRPG. Because it is uncertain, there is a chance of failure. Because we have been trained from our very beginnings in life to seek success, many of us fear failure. What if I told you failure is a much more interesting outcome? (at least in TTRPGs)

For some, it might be a bit controversial. Getting to land that crit in the final boss to send them to their final slumber might be epic and rad af, but there are amazing stories to be told as well through failure. In fact, in many cases I would argue these stories are even MORE interesting than those that come out from successes.

Some time ago, I encountered this video from Dropout and Dimension 20’s Sam Reich, talking about why he prefers failure over success in TTRPGs. And you know what? I agree with him. So for that, I piled up all my reasons why and put them into this article. Feel free to debate with me in the comments if you believe I am right or not. How do stories begin in media? They start with a problem. How does the problem occur? That is because there was a failure either from one of the protagonists or the world itself. That is what creates a story interesting enough to deserve to be told. A story of a protagonist overcoming the odds after a failure, getting to learn from it, or maybe the other way around, succumbing to a path of corruption coming from that first domino piece. All in all, what is it that kickstarted it all? You know it – the failure!

Failure in life

There’s no better starting point than one’s own experience to begin my argument. We all experienced failure in our lives, in a bigger or lower scale. I am no different. In fact, you can search for some of the interviews I was done in the space, and you will find me talking about many of my failures. But I grew stronger from them all. I learned. I like to think I am a better person because of it, and will not trip with the same stone again. We all love the underdog story for a reason. We can see ourselves represented in it because (except for some crappy people) we have all been there. That is what makes our story interesting to tell. We better discover ourselves and get a good story from it through our failures.

Botching your check

A Natural 1, botching your roll, dropping the Jenga tower… however it is in the game you are playing that you get the worst possible result. Our character is going to have a terrible time. Look back in your memory lane to your most memorable moments in TTRPG. I am CERTAIN that at least one of those involves botching a roll. It may have derailed your whole campaign possibly. It has THAT level of impact at times. Not that a success may not have it, but failures are even more unexpected than successes, and that tells brilliant tales in my opinion.

Picture a normal battle against some bandits occurring. Basic, simple. Now, they place them in the middle of a gala, and have a ranger’s fire arrow start a fire due to a botched roll. By the next round, you are fighting bandits while rescuing people in a raging inferno of a mansion. That encounter went from boring to incredibly exciting only from the result of a roll. I am sure that will leave some consequences that will turn into an unexpected and incredible story going forward. As a simple example, the player characters may now be sought by the law for the disaster they caused, forcing them to become criminals from a mafia organization.

Learning and Character development

As stated before, I find nothing is better than failure as a learning experience. When you create your perfect cyborg in your futuristic game, it is when they get hacked due to a failure on their part and start to doubt their humanity that true character development starts for them. Overcoming a problem (success) may have plenty of impact in character progression, but where would that all be without a previous failure on the character’s part that put them there?

Degrees of success and failure

Part of these problems occur due to the binary types of results most of the popular TTRPG offer. You either succeed or fail. There is not much of an in-between point according to the rules. If the GM adds one, that’s more of a house rule or optional rule. However, nowadays we have plenty of narrative-first games like Powered by the Apocalypse games that bring with them the chance of more often than not moving the story forward, but with something else going wrong or happening. These degrees of success and failure are added into the games to solve this problem by adding more failure into the mix, instead of being mostly a 50/50 chance, or granting more success than failure.

Conclusion

As you see throughout the article, I have provided several reasons why I believe a botch is more interesting than a critical success. I tie it with how failure works in the narrative of a story, and indicate how a moment of utter failure helps in most cases characters and the setting around them grow in ways it wouldn’t normally. There are great things to come out of successes and critical successes, of course! I just want to open this debate and see what y’all have to say from your experience.

So… what’s your take? Do you believe I am a GM that likes seeing my players suffer? Do you agree with me wholeheartedly? What’s your position in this debate? Let me know in the comments below!

King Arthur Pendragon: Chivalric Roleplaying in Arthur’s Britain was first published as a boxed set in 1985. It featured concepts that weren’t common to RPGs of its era, including extensive rules measuring a character’s personality traits and goals, and a focus on generational play, as characters age, raise a family, and then begin adventuring with the children of their old player characters.

This approach is meant to promote the long view of Arthur’s legend, from Arthur’s coronation to the end of Camelot and the issuing of Arthur into Avalon. The exact years have varied in different editions, but in general, this is going to feature the progression of years from 510 to 566, providing over fifty years for heirs to come into their own and form their own families.

The game was a mainstay of Chaosium until 1998, when it moved to Green Knight games until 2004. It then moved to White Wolf until 2009, then to Nocturnal Media until 2018, and came home to Chaosium. I’ve already looked at the Pendragon 6th Edition Starter Set here on Gnome Stew, but now, I have a copy of the Pendragon: Core Rulebook for Pendragon 6th Edition.

Disclaimer

I received the Pendragon Starter Set, the Pendragon Core Rulebook, and The Grey Knight adventure as review copies from Chaosium. I have not had the opportunity to run the game, but I have spent some time with solo scenarios to get a very broad idea of gameplay.

 Pendragon Core Rulebook

Author: Greg Stafford
Creative Director: Jeff Richard
Pendragon Line Editor: David Larkins
Development: Veli-Matti Pelkonen & David Zeeman
Design & Layout: Simeon Cogswell
Copyediting & Proofreading: Roberto Mandrioli, Keith Mageau
Licensing: Daria Pilarczyk
Cover Artist: Mark Smylie
Interior Artists: Andrey Fetisov, Eric Hotz, Jaime Garcia Mendoza, Josep Perez, Eleonor Piteira, Agathe Pitie, Dimitar Stoyanov, John Sumrow, Wicked Dual LLC
Cartography: Matt Ryan
Heraldic Artist: Katrin Dirim Border Designs, Marginalia, & Graphic Elements: Simeon Cogswell, Kalin Kadiev, Ash Stellmach
Input to this Edition: Ellie Akers, Cedric Alesandre, Jeff Erwin, Scott Hall, Matthijs Krijger, Sven Lugar, Kurt Over, Robert G. Schroeder, Nick Tolimieri, Gintaras Valiulis, Malcolm Wolter
Original Material by: David Larkins and Roderick Robertson (Battles), Gintaras Valiulis, David Zeeman, and David Larkins (Brawling), Ellie Akers (Horses), Malcolm Wolter (Creating Heraldry), Matthijs Krijger (Blessed Birth, Favors, Becoming Mad), Robert G. Schroeder (Being Knighted), Veli-Matti Pelkonen (Creating Heraldry, Childbirth and Survival, Personal Events, Valuing Favors, Infirmity)
Contributors to Earlier Editions: Frederick Blayo, Bill Bridges, Heather N. Bryden, William Dunn, D. Hudson Frew, Sharon Grant, Darren Hill, Doyle Wayne Ramos-Tavener, Sam Shirley, Peter Tamlyn, T. Michelle Trout, Anne Vetillard
Playtesters for this Edition: Aaron Gorfein, Adam Hubbard, Alex Drusts, Alexander Bjursell, Alexander Marcus, Alisha Hammer, Anne Valentino, Brian Hammer, Cedric Alexandre, Craig Kellner, David Schimpff, David Zeeman, Desiree Valdez, Fergie, Gavyn F. Duthie, Ian Hynd, Jade McLellan, Jacob Hilker, Kenny Stewart, Nathan Isaak, Rainy McDonald, Ryan Vodden, Santiago McDonald, Sean Musgrave, Søren Hjorth, Steve Fontaine, Suzanne Stafford, Sven Lugar, Tim Leonard, Tom Salas, Wayne Coburn, Zechariah W. Cline, Zev Trubowitch

The PDF for the Core Rulebook is 258 pages long. Much of the artwork is meant to emulate the art of the medieval era. There are lines that define columns in the book, often providing two wide columns with a third thinner column for ancillary commentary, but in other parts of the book, the two columns expand out, and the thinner third column appears in the center between the other columns. The pages themselves have a light brown, “weathered” look to them.

The book is divided into the following sections:

• Welcome to Camelot
• The Game System
• Creating Your Player Knight
• Traits and Passions
• Skills
• Aspirations
• Combat
• Weapons
• Armor
• Horses
• Injury & Health
• Wealth, Treasure, and Trade
• Solo Scenarios
• The Winter Phase
• Notes on the New Edition
• Coat of Arms Generator
• Pre-Generated Characters

Before we get into the book proper, it’s probably worth looking at the purely mechanical differences between Pendragon 6th edition and previous editions. Here is the high-level summary:

• Derived characteristics have changed how to determine healing rate, movement, and brawling damage
• Skills have been reorganized, with Folklore absorbing Faerie Lore, Read/Write changing to Literacy, Recognize absorbing Heraldry, and weapon skills have become broader (all types of swords under Sword, Charge for mounted combat, daggers defaulting to Brawling skill, and wooden shafted weapons splitting into Hafted or Two-Handed Hafted)

Not a very heavy lift if you are converting characters from previous editions or using adventures or campaigns from those editions. Most of the changes in this edition revolve around how and what is presented.

How it Unfolds

For many games, you can identify if the game introduces mechanics first, then setting material, if it introduces character creation before mechanics, and if they present a smaller starting area for a campaign before they present broader world information. Those general trends don’t quite capture how the Pendragon: Core Rulebook is organized.

I’ll be honest, I got a little lost at the beginning, jumping from the general concept of the game and the setting, to getting very specific charts about duties and pay, and game rules that get introduced without being fully defined. The book gets a lot clearer as we move into the game system and character creation, but there are some random bits that I was surprised to see tucked in there, like the map of the Salisbury region and most of the information you’re going to get about your starting location. It can get a little involved to digest the sections on combat, healing and recovery, and upkeep during the Winter Phase.

It’s not that there aren’t tables and bullet points to summarize and clarify rules, but they often get bunched together instead of appearing directly next to the topic to which they referred. The format isn’t unattractive, although it feels strange. The lines should draw your eyes to the paragraphs between them, but somehow they don’t do that for me. I’ve seen much more cluttered or disorganized books, but there is something about the look and the pacing of this book that makes it difficult for me to focus on what to look at when I glance at the page.

The Game System

The core resolution mechanic is very simple. Characteristics and Skills have a score associated with them. If you roll below the number associated with that Characteristic or Skill, you are successful. If it’s an opposed check, the person that rolls under the Characteristic or Skill, but is the closest to the score, wins the contest. For example, you have two people with a 15 in Gaming playing a game against one another, and one rolls a 14, while the other rolls a 10, the character rolling the 14 wins. The GM can determine that a task is easier or more difficult due to circumstance and apply a bonus or a penalty that is applied to the number of the Characteristic or Skill.

Results can have Critical Successes, Successes, Failures, and Fumbles. These results are determined in the following manner:

• Critical Success–you roll exactly the value of the Statistic being tested
• Success–you rolled lower than the Statistic being tested
• Failure–the roll is higher than the value of the Statistic
• Fumble–the roll is a natural 20

Characters have the following characteristics, which are rolled for broad actions not covered by a particular skill:

• Size (SIZ)
• Dexterity (DEX)
• Strength (STR)
• Constitution (CON)
• Appeal (APP)

In addition to covering actions that aren’t already handled with skills, Constitution is used to determine a character’s Healing Rate, the amount of hit points recovered when the character can rest. Strength and Dexterity together are used to determine movement rate. A character’s brawling damage is figured using the character’s Strength and Size.

What’s My Motivation

All of the above is pretty standard for a lot of roleplaying games, and it’s even similar to Call of Cthulhu, except the ratings are expressed on a d20 instead of a d100. What makes Pendragon unique are the traits and passions assigned to a character, which also engage with the “roll under” mechanic of the game.

Traits exist in pairs of opposed values. Each trait has a score, and the total of the two traits in a pair must add up to 20. For example, if you have Energetic 12, your Lazy trait will need to be 8. The trait pairs in the game are:

• Chaste/Lustful
• Energetic/Lazy
• Forgiving/Vengeful
• Generous/Selfish
• Honest/Deceitful
• Just/Arbitrary
• Merciful/Cruel
• Modest/Proud
• Prudent/Reckless
• Spiritual/Worldly
• Temperate/Indulgent
• Trusting/Suspicious
• Valorous/Cowardly

The character may roll against one or both sides of the trait pair to resolve a situation involving traits. For example, if a character is trying to show how enthusiastic they are for a proposed plan, and they are testing Energetic, they would do the following:

• Pick which side of the trait pair they want to roll first, unless they have a 16 or higher, in which case, that side of the pair is always rolled first
• If the character gets a critical on the trait being tested, they act according to that trait, and may get a +5 bonus to another roll related to this trait later on
• If the character gets a normal success, the character acts in accordance with the trait
• If the character fails, they check the other trait that they didn’t test first
• If the character fumbles, they act according to the opposite of the trait they tested, and may get a +5 to a related roll later on
• If they rolled that failure on the first test, and they need to roll again, if they get a critical, the result is the same as if they rolled a critical on the first test—in other words, if you roll a critical when testing either side of the trait pair, you strongly act according to the trait being tested
• If they roll a success on the other side of the pair, they act in accordance with the other side of the pair of traits
• If they fail the second trait check, they act however they want
• If they fumble the second trait check, they act in accordance with the original trait, and gain the +5 to a relevant roll down the line

This can get a little murky. There is only one roll, against the first part of the trait pair the player chooses, if:

• The roll is a success
• The roll is a critical
• The roll is a fumble

If the roll is a failure, then the process starts all over again, but testing the other side of the trait pair. To continue with our Energetic/Lazy example above, the character trying to show enthusiasm decides to test Energetic first. The scores are 12/8, and they roll a 13, meaning they fail the Energetic roll. They roll on the Lazy side, and get a 7, meaning they are successful, but because they are rolling for Energetic, they then act in accordance with their Energetic trait. If the character had rolled a 13 on the Energetic side, then an 8 on the Lazy side, they would act in accordance with being Energetic, and gain the potential +5 bonus to a relevant roll later. If they rolled a 20, they act in accordance with being Lazy, and gain a +5 bonus to an action in the future that may coincide with this. If they rolled an 11 on the Lazy side of the pair, that’s another failure, and the PC can act however they like. If they roll a 1 through 7 on the follow up Lazy roll, it’s a success, and it means they act in accordance with the Energetic trait, with no particular future bonus. My personal feelings are that rolling on the second trait, and then reversing the results because of the first trait that was tested, is a little bit confusing and unintuitive.

The game gives some examples of when to have a player roll against their trait. Those examples include:

• Decision Rolls–player determined when they don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other
• Test Rolls–when a character encounters a situation that may push their moral or ethical boundaries, they make a test roll to see if they take action that will prevail or fail against the test
• Game Hint Rolls–when the GM determines that a trait may give a character insight into a situation, they determine what trait is likely to help, and ask characters to test that trait
• Influencing Others–a character may test their trait against another character to provoke them to action

An example of using a trait to influence another character might be a character using their Prudent trait against another character’s Generous trait to convince the character to withhold funds from an ally.

When a situation is particularly difficult or tempting, the GM may have a character roll one of these tests to determine what the character does, because the situation is so overwhelming that they act according to the dice rolls rather than the player’s wishes. The text mentions that most of the time, characters shouldn’t have to make checks to determine their actions, but the GM can determine that some situations trigger ingrained behavior. Something to wrap your mind around is that for Decision, Hints, and Influence rolls, you may want to succeed, but depending on the action the GM has in mind, you may not want to succeed in that Test roll that may cause your character to do something that you can’t mitigate.

That means that you are expected to lose narrative control of your character in some circumstances. Beyond having their normal Trait ratings, some characters might have a Directed Trait, meaning that under a narrow set of circumstances, the character’s balance of Traits are effectively different than they are normally. For example, a character might have Modest/Proud balance of 10/10, but have a directed Trait of Proud (Horsemanship) +5, which means when dealing with their ability with horses, the character is treated as having a balance of 5/15. Obsessions are more pointed Directed Traits that may come as the consequence of adversity or misadventure. Characters that are in the presence of their Obsession can test their Obsession versus their Honor score, and potentially remove or reduce their Obsession, or if the dice really don’t like them, may end up doubling the score of the Obsession.

This is a very interesting way to define a character, and I can see its appeal, but I can also see some pitfalls. The rules say that you shouldn’t have your players make a Test roll too often, but some of the example Test rolls are extremely proscriptive. In other words, when a character fails their Trusting Test, most of the examples frame this as the GM telling the PC exactly what they do as a consequence of this failure, rather than asking the PC, “what does it look like when your character is driven by Suspicion in this circumstance.”

The other suggested uses sound like interesting tools to use in the game. I like the idea of having a character whose Cruel trait is higher than their Merciful trait being allowed a chance to determine how terrible the vicious opposing warrior will be if they take control of the land. They know what they would do in that situation. I also like the concept of players proactively using these traits to push and pull the actions of NPCs, especially in courtly situations. A character might convince a rival to ride off to war by challenging their Reckless trait against the rival’s Valorous trait. Pushing a character to act in this manner can cause their trait balance to shift, and doing something similar over time can push someone from one extreme to the other.

There are some knightly categories that a character can enter if they meet the requirements for those categories. One of those categories is Religious Virtues. The game explains what traits are considered virtues for different religions, including Christian, Pagan, Wodinic, and Heathen. The rules don’t spend a lot of time explaining the differences between these religions, other than knowing what groups of people are likely to follow what religion. For example, Saxons are a Wodinic people in the setting. I understand the concept, but I am also a little hesitant to define real-world religions based on traits that could be considered reductive if they weren’t being used in the context of a specific genre.

Similar But Different

Passions are similar to Traits, but they aren’t arranged into opposed pairs. There are four kinds of Passions in the game:

• Fidelitas (relationship to leaders, followers, and peers)
• Fervor (hate or love for individuals or groups)
• Adoratio (devotion to a person or a greater power)
• Civilitas (feelings toward the conventions underpinning societal norms)

A GM may ask for a Passion roll when the PC runs into the subject of their passion, and a player can ask to make a Passion roll when they are in a crisis and their Passion is relevant, or when they are in the direct presence of the manifestation of their Passion. As long as the character’s Passion is less than 16, it’s mainly used to determine if a character gains a bonus to a Skill or Trait, which can range from +5 to +10, but can also lead to a character being lost to Madness if the Passion roll is critically failed.

If a character’s Passion is 16 or higher, when they encounter the object of their Passion, they must Test the Passion in a similar way to Traits. As with Traits above, the examples given in the book don’t involve asking the player, “what does it look like when your Passion takes over,” but rather, it gives examples of some very harsh, extreme actions determined by the GM. I was actually pretty uncomfortable with a few of the examples. Two Hatred Passions are used in examples, one being Hatred (Saxons) and the other being Hatred (Family). The Saxon example had a character slaughtering women and children non-combatants that were Saxons, and the (Family) example used the example of not defending a woman being beaten who is a member of the family you hate.

I could get behind this mechanic if it weren’t for everything being so hard-framed. Because some of the Arthurian legends involve tragic situations like a knight slaughtering innocents in a bout of madness, this mechanic tries to automate those kinds of moments, instead of collaboratively working with the players to tell a story.

Skills, Tools, and Situations

There are a lot of nuances to how various situations are resolved, and I’m not going to go into too much detail other than a high-level look at what processes and mechanics exist in the game surrounding skills and equipment. When taken step by step, everything is fairly simple to resolve, but there are many steps, some of which change depending on context. That means it’s important to slow down and make sure to hit all the beats. Some of these detailed processes involve situations like:

• Combat (melee, missile attacks, combat modifiers, multiple opponents, and mounted combat)
• Injuries & Health (major, minor, and mortal wounds, aggravation, chirugery, first aid, and natural healing)
• The Winter Phase (solo scenarios, personal events, economic circumstances, aging, horse survival, training and practice, family rolls)

Combat doesn’t utilize initiative. Everyone engaged in a fight that can act against each other declares their actions, and then roll to resolve those actions. Characters can make mounted or unmounted attacks, including reckless attacks and self-sacrifice, they may choose to disarm a foe or defend themselves, or they may choose to pull their punches, as just a few examples of the combat options. If someone is making an attack against another opponent who is making an attack, the results of Critical Success, Success, Partial Success, Failure, and Fumbles will be different than if one combatant chose to defend while the other attacks.

When a character scores a hit on another character, the armor value of the character that has been hit is subtracted from the damage done to the character, and depending on the level of success, the character might also get their shield in place to remove additional damage. Different weapons have special traits that also come into play based on the level of success or failures. For example, hafted weapons have more of a tendency to break because of their longer wooden hafts.

A character’s wounds can be minor (less damage than the wounded character’s CON), major (damage from a single source greater than the character’s CON score), or mortal (a single blow does damage greater than the total hit points of the character). Characters may suffer from Aggravation, based on a chart provided. Characters acting with Aggravated wounds can cause more harm to themselves just by doing general tasks. Chirurgery is needed to treat more serious wounds, and First Aid can be used in the field. Once per week, a character that has been resting can recover Hit Points based on the CON score.

The basic conceit of the game is that characters only have one major, noteworthy adventure per year, although that adventure may be only a few days long, or encompass multiple months. When the characters have finished their adventure, they enter the Winter Phase. In the Winter Phase, characters make Tests versus events on a table, to see what kind of successes or failure characters have had as they visit court, manage their holdings, visit holy sites, etc. Characters adjust their Characteristics if they cross certain thresholds as they age. They determine if their horse survives, then resolve family events and tragedies.

I like the Winter Phase rules, and I like the idea of quickly resolving “offscreen” events to see what has transpired for the rest of the year. As you get older and your stats start to lower, you may want to consider shifting toward the character’s child as a player character. I also suspect that the Winter Phase of Pendragon was a strong influence on the Fellowship Phase of The One Ring.

My least favorite part of the Winter Phase is the Child Survival chart. I understand that child mortality was an issue in the 500s and the 1500s, but it really doesn’t sit well with me to resolve a serious situation like that with a random die roll.

Aspirations, Progression, Honor, and Glory

Character Honor can move up or down based on player actions, and sometimes based on the Tests the character might roll. Characters that lose all of their Honor are out of the game. Some actions might be secret, and the player notes how much honor they would lose if that action ever came to light.

Glory is what your character earns by completing quests and doing important deeds. Because there are a number of actions that can be triggered based on Tests and how situations are resolved individually, Glory isn’t likely to be the same for everyone in the party, and when characters roll for their family details, they may inherit a varying amount of Glory from their family’s reputation. For every 1000 Glory, in the Winter Phase a character can increase a statistic, lower a Passion, or influence some family events.

If you succeed on a roll in a particularly important situation, the GM may tell you to make a check next to that Trait, Passion, or Skill. If the character has a check next to one of these, and they have time for training in the Winter Phase, the character rolls against that number. If they roll above the number (i.e. fail), they get to add a point to that Skill, Trait, or Passion.

Characters that meet certain criteria may become specialized knights. The examples given in the Core Rulebook are Chivalrous Knights, Religious Knights, and Romantic Knights. It may take a player a while to meet the requirements, but the Requirements and Benefits of a Knight of the Round Table are also included. If a character qualifies and becomes the form of knight for which they qualify, they gain modifiers to different aspects of their stats, like doing extra damage, increasing their healing rate, or gaining extra Glory under certain circumstances related to that style of knight. The qualifications for these forms of knighthood might involve minimum total numbers in a handful of Traits, or a specific Passion, for example.

The Setting

One thing I want to touch on up front is that there is a concept mentioned in a few places, “Your Pendragon May Vary,” which is meant to empower players to draw from the Arthurian sources they are most comfortable or most interested in using. This is stated and reiterated, however, a lot of the book presents the setting in a very authoritative manner and warns against deviating too much from the assumptions of the game, for fear of losing some of the experiences the game is designed to emulate. The effect is that you are told you can change things, but you aren’t encouraged to change too much.

This section isn’t going to be as long as you might think. There is an outline of what goes on in the setting according to the timeline, but those are very broad strokes. There is a lot of information on what the game considers to be the baseline assumptions of the society it’s presenting, but not a lot of information on NPCs, plots, story hooks, special locations, or other information. We get a map of the region, a section explaining what the bonuses and passions are for characters from this region, and a sidebar on Salisbury that consists of three paragraphs, and another sidebar detailing the local ruler of the region.

As for assumptions, there is a lot to take in. It makes sense to portray Britain as being dangerous, chaotic, fractious, and violent at the start of the campaign, as Arthur is solidifying his reign and making changes. Some of the descriptions lean hard into establishing what is definitely an era that could be called the Dark Ages. There is a section mentioning that peasants will kill each other over a handful of walnuts, proving that commoners are so violent and savage that they need the nobility to keep them in line. Because the world is so violent and dangerous, the narrative frames commoners as intentionally trading freedom in exchange for protection, as if it was an informed transaction rather than a societal construct enforced on a class of people. It is mentioned that a knight that ignores the wicked commands of a wicked ruler is, themselves, wicked, because they aren’t doing their duty.

Then there is the section on the role of women in the setting, or rather, multiple sections. When the game gives permission to include women knights, it also takes great pains to mention how ahistorical it is for there to be women that are knights in the mythical kingdom of Camelot. While it does mention collaborating with your players to determine how well accepted women are in the knighthood, the text is also quick to point out the maximum number of women that should be in the knighthood even if they are well regarded. The discussion on the role of women is less flexible. It groups women into three categories, ordinary, important, or extraordinary. It then mentions that women within those designations may be handmaidens, wife/mother/widow, heiresses, lovers, or nuns. It notes that allowing women into the knighthood should balance the “perceived passivity” of women in the setting.

I think you can present a lot of the information in this chapter about assumptions without some of the more authoritative tones. There is often an appeal to historicity, but the problem with that is that Arthur’s Camelot is folklore, and the game intentionally imposes elements from 1000 years ahead of the timeline into Camelot, slowly, over the course of the timeline. This is history flavored fantasy. A lot of the assumptions stated as factual also rely on interpretations of the era that have been challenged in the intervening decades since the 1st edition of this game. While a lot of the historical elements are compelling and provide texture and depth, some of it is laid on very thick, removed from much nuance.

Gazing Back into the Past

The game is very rich, and very opinionated. Having a specific perspective can be a good thing to establish clarity and purpose, but it can also run the risk of directly challenging the reader to align or disengage. I haven’t played older editions of Pendragon, but I do own PDFs of Pendragon 1e, as well as Pendragon 5.2. Because of this, I was curious to see what the previous editions look like compared to this one.

There isn’t a lot of mechanical change. The presentation from Pendragon 1e to Pendragon 6e is clearer and more streamlined. But there is some similarity in tone and presentation. Pendragon 5.2 has a different feel to its narrative. It still frames some of the rougher aspects of the assumed timeline, but it is less definitive in stating what will and will not cause the game to lose its focus. While it’s still a formal game text, there is a treatment of why the game does what it does and why, as well as a longer look at the differences between styles of Arthurian stories.

5.2 still has very similar reductive language about the role of women and the narrative importance of those characters. There is still some admonishment to disengage at least some of your modern moral assumptions when engaging with the setting. The greater discussion of what the game is trying to do and how it is doing it, however, makes it feel a little more flexible and nuanced. Instead of vaguely mentioning what’s historically accurate in a setting that assumes the norms of both 500 AD and 1500 AD, the book spells out that the reason the level of technology shifts rapidly is to show how far ahead of Europe Arthur’s Camelot is because if his progressive changes, and specifically addresses the ratio of progress spread across the timeline.

The other striking thing about comparing 5.2 to Pendragon 6e is that you know more about the assumed setting of the game. Before going into mechanics or character creation, the 5.2 rules discuss the Saxon conflicts, Vortigern, and Uther’s brother Aurelius. It has character profiles for several important NPCs, like Uther and Merlin, and shorter descriptions of other important NPCs like King Lot, Nimune, The Fisher King, the Saxon king Aelle, and Archbishop Dubricus. The broad regions of Britain, who controls them, and what they are like, is addressed, as well as some general information on Europe, including quick mentions of the state of France, Ganis, Gaul, italy, and the Byzantine Empire.

Looking at Pendragon 5.2, it makes something clear about the Pendragon Core Rulebook. It’s more of a Player’s Guide than a Core Rulebook. It has very narrow options for starting characters, and extremely thin setting information. Most of the GM advice is about broad tone setting techniques, but other than the mechanical effects of progressing the timeline, there isn’t much about what a campaign, short or long, should look like, other than referring to the Great Pendragon Campaign. Most notably, if you want antagonists, you’re going to have to build them based on your assumptions of how character creation works.

Knightly Aspirations

 Just looking at the Pendragon 6e Starter Set, the options in this book may come across as disappointing considering the pregenerated characters in the boxed set range from across Britain and even include a Byzantine knight. 

The text of this book shows a great love for Arthurian legends, and it’s hard not to feel that enthusiasm and internalize it if you have any love of the folklore surrounding Camelot. Pendragon has some very innovative mechanics to define a character’s personality, beliefs, and bonds. Some of the ways in which Traits and Passions are presented are very enticing to me. I want to see what I could do with those mechanics in concert with players that want to engage with them as well. I enjoy the concept of advancing the timeline meaningfully after each adventure and appreciate that some of the Winter Phase rules exist to fill in those gaps between one adventure and the next, adding more story to the character in the various vignettes of the solo scenarios.

For Dole and Sorrow

The flow of information in the book is a little confusing, and the stylistic choices have personality, but don’t contribute to clarifying some of the information as it’s being unfurled. Many of the rules make sense when you take them in bite sized chunks, but the more granular rules elements tend to run together without pausing or summarizing. The discussions of religion and gender roles feel reductive and don’t provide enough context for why those discussions work for the game, and other than saying “your Pendragon may vary,” there isn’t much of a discussion about safety and campaign calibration. The references to different sourcebooks to handle nobility and extended family, and leaning on the Great Pendragon Campaign as the defining text for how campaigns should work undermine the concept that this is a Core Rulebook. Just looking at the Pendragon 6e Starter Set, the options in this book may come across as disappointing considering the pregenerated characters in the boxed set range from across Britain and even include a Byzantine knight. The boxed set showed greater diversity of people as well as cultures.

Tenuous Recommendation–The product has positive aspects, but buyers may want to make sure the positive aspects align with their tastes before moving this up their list of what to purchase next.

If you are a big Pendragon fan, this is going to be your baseline upon which the rest of the line is built. If you haven’t been exposed to Pendragon and want to know what’s so special about the game, I think you’ll see some of it in this book, but you might not get as much context as you need to really appreciate why the game has become as well regarded as it is. The starter set is going to give you a little more of a glimpse at the breadth the game could have, but you’ll need this book if you want to play those characters in ongoing adventures.

You can tell this book is a labor of love, both love for Arthurian legends and love for roleplaying games and innovative concepts. But it also feels resistant to modern concepts in a bid to call back to a cleaned-up reiteration of the original 1985 rules and concepts. It’s a flawed restatement of a game that has earned its place in the pantheon of foundational RPGs.

Join Ang, along with guests Carl Lehmann and Alex Thomas where they talk about organizing and running multi-table games! These can be a lot of fun, but require a different kind of organization and coordination.

LINKS:

Symphony Entertainment Discord

Symphony Entertainment Twitch

Untold Stories Project

Victoriana 5e Kickstarter

I love a campaign with a good central plot, but as much as I love those, some of my favorite times and revelations at the table come from the B-plots; those small scenes and stories that are tailored to one or a few characters. I find a place for them in nearly all my games. Over the years, I have a formula for working them into my games. So let’s talk about it…

What are B Plots? 

The B-plot, according to Google, is a subplot or secondary narrative, that runs parallel to the main plotline (sometimes known as the A-plot). In RPGs, these are little side scenes or stories that you work into the session. While they can occur at nearly any time in a story, they tend to appear more when the A-plot is not actively being worked on. This could be before or after the A-plot or during a break in the A-plot. 

A B-plot can center on a single character or a group of characters. My preference is 1-2 characters, otherwise, it’s creeping up on an A-plot. More about that in a few min. 

In the games I run, the B-plot gets 1-2 scenes before we move back to the A-plot. However for a full table of 5 players that may be 5-10 scenes, in which the entire session could be just various B-plots. I am comfortable with that for my home games, but in a one-shot or convention game, I may not run a B-plot and if I did I would not go past 1 scene per character.

What do they do? 

The B-plot can do a few things for your players and the session. Here is a short list:

• • Spotlight Time – When you create a B-plot scene focused on just one character, you are creating spotlight time for the character. You are dedicating a portion of the game for them to shine, to have the attention of the GM and the table. 
  • Depth of character –  Often the A-plot is about some larger thing happening in the world, and while the characters will grow by their interaction with the A-plot, with the B-plot you can narrow in on just one character and focus on their personal stories. The things you make up for these scenes and the actions the character takes will help to make the character deeper. 
  • Engagement – Combining these first two things…spotlight and personal stories create player engagement. The player will become more attentive and will be emotionally engaged. This will raise the quality of play at the table for that player and everyone else.
  • Experimentation – A-plots have a lot riding on them, and need to progress for the main parts of the campaign to be successful. Not B-plots. B-plots can be nearly anything, something taken from the character’s background, a wish the player had, or a GM thought experiment (i.e. I wonder what they would do if someone tried to steal their staff?). You are free to try stuff out, and if something doesn’t work, no worries it was just one scene in the game, you can find something new next session.

Some Tips for Good B-Plots

These are just some of my tips for making a good B-plot. They may or may not work in your game, story, campaign, or group. Like any buffet, take what looks good… 

• Simple – I keep my B-plots simple; few twists, no red herrings. They typically have a single large goal for the whole plot. For example: Chad will discover his uncle is embezzling from the family business.
• Episodic – My B-plots are episodic, meaning that whatever scene or two is played in that session, incrementally moves along the overall plot. In future sessions, the plot will be moved further until its conclusion. For example: In tonight’s session, Chad will see his uncle skulking around in the office after closing. He will have a chance to confront him or observe.
• Not tied to the main plot – My preference is for the B-plot to be something independent of the A-plot so that the player feels free to do what they want without worrying that it will affect the whole group. It also gives a break or a beat change from the A-plot.
• Only a Scene or Two – Most of the time, I have about a scene-worth of material prepared for this, and then break it into two parts to keep the spotlight moving.
• A B-plot for everyone – Every player character in my game gets a B-plot so that everyone can have some spotlight time.
• Phone A Friend – Sometimes, I like a B-plot to be for a single character, but if they want to pull others into a scene I welcome and at times encourage it.

Where to fit the B Plot?

I have a preference for where I put my B-plots. This is not the only way to do it. It is my preferred way to do it. 

I like B-plots between A-plot stories (not sessions). After an A-plot story has concluded, after any leveling up, and before the next A-plot story starts, I like to put in a round of B-plots. It looks something like this:

• Session 1: A-Plot Story 1 (start)
• Session 2: A-Plot Story 1 (middle)
• Session 3: A-Plot Story 1 (end), Experience, Advancement, etc
• Session 4: B-plots & Start of A-Plot Story 2
• Session 5: A-Plot Story 2 (middle)
• Etc

This way we have finished an A-plot story, the characters have progressed, and in most of my campaigns, some time will pass before the next A-plot story starts. This place, where time has passed, is a perfect place to put in these B-plots. 

It is not the only structure that works, it’s just one that is easy because the A-plot is out of the way. Depending on your game there may be other places where those could occur. For instance, if your starship was on a long warp jump, in the middle of the A-plot, you could switch to B-plots to see what the characters are doing during the jump, and then return to the A-plot as they come out of warp.

Just A Small Plot… it’s Wafer-Thin

B-plots are a nice break from the main plot of a campaign and are a great way to spotlight and build engagement in your players. Good B-plots are simple and incremental, moving along a larger plot or question, a scene at a time. An easy place to place B-plots is between larger A-plot stories, but with some creativity, you can fit them into other parts of the story.

Do you like B-plots? What is your favorite B-plot in a game you have played/run? Where do you like to run your B-plots in your overall campaign? 

After you have your story arc put together, you’ll notice that the PCs will need clues and information to get between the various plot points. The first bit of information they receive is the story hook. This launches the whole adventure. If the story hook doesn’t grab them, then the adventure screeches to a complete stop before it gets up to speed. You don’t want this to happen.

Your opening salvo of information needs to be timely, pertinent to the PCs, actionable, achievable, and not too horribly risky at first glance. Once you have momentum in the story, your future bits of information can be helpful in nature, but if you can make each piece of information along the way as vital to the PCs as the opening story hook, all the better.

Timely

If your opening story hook does not have a sense of immediacy or urgency, it’s going to fall flat, be ignored completely, or the PCs will decide to “deal with it later.” In gaming terms, the “deal with it later” category is a death knell for an adventure hook as now it becomes a casual side quest that will most likely be forgotten. Get the hook in their face and demonstrate to them how urgent the hook is.

Pertinent

Even if the plot hook is urgent, it needs to be pertinent to the PCs. A plot hook of “A scout has discovered that the goblin tribes are going to attack the village on the other side of the range of hills in a week,” will most likely not entice the PCs into action. Sure, it’s timely. They have a week to stop the goblin incursion, but it’s going after “that other village over there” not the village the PCs live and breathe in.

However, if the PCs have NPC connections to that village on the other side of the hills and it’s a four-day travel to get there before they can setup defenses for the village, then you have a pertinent and timely hook.

Actionable

Make sure the story hook has some action in it the PCs can take. If they have an unmarked, barely decipherable treasure map to a section of the world they’ve never seen, heard of, or can get to, that treasure map will go in someone’s pack until such time they feel like figuring out where the treasure map leads.

In my example above about the goblin tribes attacking a nearby village, the PCs can take a variety of actions to save their NPC friends in that village. They can travel to the village and setup defenses. They can venture into the nearby wilderness to directly confront the goblins and disrupt the tribes’ abilities to mount an attack.

Regardless of what actions the PCs can take, make sure the action that is similar to “I go to the capital city and beg the king to send his army to defend the village,” is off the table. Make sure the king or capital city are too far away to be of assistance. Make sure any “powerful wizard” (you know the ones I’m talking about) are conveniently out of town or away on vacation or some such. This will allow the immediate, pertinent actions to land squarely in the PCs’ laps.

Achievable

When presenting the story hook, make sure the PCs have a clear, understandable, and calculable chance of success. If “the goblin tribes” are too much, maybe scale it down to “a goblin tribe,” but definitely don’t use “all twelve hordes of demons from the underdepths below are going to wipe out that village.” Of course, if the party is higher level, then multiple goblin tribes may be what the adventure calls for. Likewise, if the party is very high level or has a great deal of competency and/or prowess, maybe they could face down all twelve hordes of demons.

Regardless of what power level you’re playing with in your game, do not throw the impossible (or something perceived as impossible) in front of the players. This will almost guarantee that they will call upon someone or something more powerful than themselves (like the king’s armies or that vacationing mega-wizard) and this will then make it “someone else’s problem.” You’re trying to create a cool story with obstacles for the party to overcome, not for them to circumvent by recruiting others to blow up the obstacles for them.

Risk

If a venture is not risky, then it’s a travelogue with lots of walking (or riding a horse or transporting in a spacecraft). There will be risk involved. The risks you are going to plant in front of the party do not need to be called out in the story hook. The risk should be implied in the presentation of the hook, but you as the designer and/or GM do not need to lean hard into this area. Here are some segments of sample hooks that imply risks. Can you figure out what risk (or risks!) these segments imply?

• The night of the lawless purge will arrive in the city in four nights, and you’ve been hired by a noble family to secure and protect their home.
• The treasure map you’ve found clearly marks the loot’s location as being in the center of a cemetery in the ruins of a large city five days horse ride to the north through the Gray-Finger Forest.
• The full moon is coming in five days, and your faction’s benefactor was bitten by a werewolf last night. You must find the cure before the full moon or prepare to kill your benefactor.
• A pyramid has risen from the sands outside the city, and demonic forces have poured from openings on all sides. While the demons aren’t approaching the city, they are disrupting trade, travel, and supply trains. Also, the largest oasis in the area happens to reside immediately next to the pyramid, and water supplies are running low. You are the city’s best, and perhaps only, hope of chasing the demons back into the pyramid.

See how easy that was? Of course, a hook can have more elements to them than my above samples, but I was trying to illustrate risk more than any other component of a hook.

Momentum

Once you have your initial story hook in place, you need to continue dropping clues that will get you and your PCs to the next section of the story in the adventure. This is where designing the adventure from back to front makes setting clues and hints easier. If you’ve followed my advice on this topic, you already know what is happening next. You just need to establish a set of clues that will point the party in that direction.

What kind of clues work as continuing story hooks? Well, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait around a few more months. This is the fourth installment of this series, and I do a deep dive on the clues, rumors, and connective tissues of adventure design in the eleventh installment. I apologies for you having to wait until then, but it’ll be worth it. I promise.

Upcoming Months!

The first set of information you established for your adventure was mood, tone, and theme. In the upcoming months, we’ll be breaking down the thematic elements of adventure design. Namely, I’ll be looking at thematic environments, thematic bosses, and thematic mooks across the next three months.

Since the beginning of the hobby, starting at a tavern has been the most cliche and stereotypical beginning for medieval fantasy campaigns in TTRPGs. They are that way for a reason! Taverns are meeting places for all different kinds of people to group up and find missions to get started. The tavern keeper always has some gossip or information to give, maybe some rats to kill in the attic. There is always that mysterious person in the shadows as well, ready to approach the group of wacky individuals and make a team out of them. I, however, come here to offer you something that is far better (in my opinion) than the tavern beginning, and it can easily be applied to any TTRPG.

The Wedding

Note that even though I say a wedding, many sort of similar parties apply. A “fiesta de quinceañera“, a funeral, a bachelor party, or any sort of meeting that encompasses people from different areas connected to one same person or group of people works fine. All of these usually have events going on during the meeting in which everyone is invited to participate. Apart from that, people are put in groups or they self-gravitate into forming smaller groups of people to chat with. Once they are all together in one same spot, within the same subgroup, it’s time for something to go wrong or have someone recruit the group.

I tried this approach at the start of two of the last campaigns I ran: one for Pathfinder 2e, the other for City of Mist (which you can see in a soon to come Spanish Actual Play by RolDe10). The Pathfinder campaign involved the wedding of the Emperor’s right-hand man, having all party members meet up and put into one table together with one NPC that was going to be important to the story. During the event, there is an assassination attempt on the Emperor’s right-hand man, and the story starts from there. For City of Mist, all player characters meet during the “fiesta de quinceañera” (an event celebrated in Latin America when a woman turns 15) and the birthday girl never appears, because she was kidnapped. Both events are kind of similar, having the players meet at an event without knowing each other (or having a few connections with each other), and something happens that kickstarts the campaign.

The best tutorial

Both times I ran this kickstart event for a campaign, I was teaching the players how to play the game. At the same time, they were getting to better know their characters. These meetings usually have events going on in them. It is pretty usual for weddings to have games, or have the classical “grasp the flower bouquet”. Think of them as the first checks or interactions the players will have with the system. It’s a no-risk situation that players always want to participate in because they are just fun. Even if they decide to have their character not participate in it, that also shows the kind of character the player is playing.

In Media Res

In media res, which is Latin for “in the middle of,” means dropping the players into the action from the very start. I have tried this several times, and it has never failed me. It immediately hooks the players and gets them into character. Being in the middle of a celebratory event, you can have them start in some low-risk but action-heavy event, such as dancing with an important NPC, or carrying a plate full of food as a waiter. Once you have them there, they describe their character, what they are doing and how, and they make a first roll. Players get to know a bit about the system immediately, allowing them to better know how their actions have consequences.

Campaign Kickoff

Once the big meeting has occurred, and all the key parts of the campaign have been introduced (players and important NPCs), it’s time to show what the campaign will be all about. This can happen by having something or someone break into the meeting, or by having an NPC approach the player characters to fill them in with information. As I said, I used both an assassination attempt, and a kidnapping as past examples and both worked excellently. Having a knight of the king break in, having the mother of the birthday person abducted by an alien, or having an NPC approach the PCs because they did extremely well in an event that transpired there could work just as well.

The 4 steps to make it work

In essence, this meeting will be separated into 4 different steps:

1. In Media Res Start. Start with a bang to instantly drop the players into the game. Have them rolling from early on and you will have them interested in no time.
2. The First Meeting. Players are put together at the start of the meeting. Maybe there was no one else they knew at the party so they are put with each other, maybe it’s a mere coincidence. Note that not all player characters must be together at the start, but it is recommended most of them do. That way it is not as difficult to put them together to continue the campaign.
3. The Mini Events: Just like minigames, the mini events are risk-free reasons for the players to interact with the system through their characters, as well as getting to know important NPCs. In funerals this may be doing a whole oratory about the now deceased person, in birthday parties hitting the piñata, etc.
4. Campaign Kickoff: Have something happen that sets the player characters in motion to work together for the duration of the campaign.

Conclusion

Simple, right? Next time you start a campaign, no matter the game system, try doing so with a wedding or similar event! You will see in no time how great of a campaign starter it is. It will also catch your players by surprise, who might be expecting another tavern beginning!

Have you ever started your campaign with a similar event? If so, let me know in the comments below, so we all can inspire each other campaign starters!

Join Ang, Josh, and Phil as they talk about GMing for Turtles. No, not those charming reptiles with a house on their back, but the players that end up not wanting to engage with what you’re putting down in front of them!

LINKS:

Sandra Taylor’s ‘Structuring Life to Support Creativity

2024 D&D

Daggerheart

Meguey Baker

What are Jared’s weaknesses? Epic fantasy, check. Space opera, check. Pirates and swashbuckling? Absolutely.

Considering all the above, it may not be a surprise that the product we’re looking at today, Sundered Isles, is a high-seas swashbuckling supplement for Ironsworn: Starforged, which itself was an updated version of the fantasy RPG Ironsworn. Ironsworn must be evolving entirely based on my taste in adventure genres. Allow me this brief moment of pretending the world revolves around me.

Sundered Isles is not a stand-alone game and requires Ironsworn: Starforged for its core rules. It does provide additional character resources, new moves for resolving circumstances unique to the setting and genre, and a host of new oracles.

Disclaimer

I received my copy of Sundered Isles from backing the crowdfunding campaign for Ironsworn: Starforged. I have not had the opportunity to run or play Sundered Isles, but I have played a lot of the solo rules for both Ironsworn and Ironsworn: Starforged.

Credits

Sundered Isles Writing And Design Shawn Tomkin
Additional Writing, Proofing, And Editing Matt Click
Lead Artist Joshua Meehan
Cover Art Bryant Grizzle, Joshua Meehan
Interior Art Bryant Grizzle, Joshua Meehan, Nello Fontani, Phill Simpson, Reza Bagheri, Shawn Tomkin, Vyacheslav Milinchuk, Yifei Li
Icon Design Nathen Græy
Cultural Consultant Liam Stevens
Safety Tool Development And Consultation (FOR STARFORGED) Kienna Shaw, Lauren Bryant-Monk
Consultant For Disability Sensitivity (FOR STARFORGED) Mark Thompson
Digital Tools Ayethin, Nick Boughton, rsek
Illustrated Character Sheet Design Galen Pejeau

Our Booty

The digital version of Sundered Isles includes the following:

• Character Sheet
• Playkit
  • Moves Reference
  • Navigation Chart
  • Connections & Specialist Page
  • Combat Challenge Page
  • Treasure ledger
  • Character Sheet
• Asset Sheets
  • 8 pages of asset cards, 9 to a page
• Asset Sheets (Singles)
  • 63 pages, one asset card per page
• Guide Book
  • 132 pages (facing pages printed as single pages)
• Guide Book (Spreads)
  • 261 pages (each page separate)

The Guide Book PDF is in color, with multiple images of ships at sea, swashbucklers, and weathered maps. The pages with assets and moves are color-coded to help delineate what phase of the game is related to the section at hand.

Navigating the Book

The book is divided into the following distinct sections:

• Adventures Among the Isles
• Getting Underway
• Oracles
• Moves Reference

The first section of the book is dedicated to converting concepts imported from Starforged into ships at sea, as well as introducing some rules modifications when performing similar functions. The second section presents the base assumptions of the game, in a modular format that allows for different elements to be added or subtracted. It also covers the creation and managing of factions, setting tone, and establishing content to include or exclude. The last two sections are some of the most extensive parts of the book.

The Oracles section includes the tables that are the heart of the solo game and games without a GM. There are Oracles to help determine what’s going on, how plots develop, as well as the fine details. The oracles are divided into the following tables:

• Core Oracles
• Seafaring Oracles
• Weather Oracles
• Ship Oracles
• Island Oracles
• Overland Oracles
• Settlement Oracles
• Faction Oracles
• Character Oracles
• Shipwreck Oracles
• Cave Oracles
• Ruin Oracles
• Treasure Oracles
• Miscellaneous Oracles

The Moves Reference section collects the mechanical meat of the game in one place. While each type of move isn’t used in every game, the moves are grouped in a manner to make it obvious where to look. The Moves are grouped in the following sections:

• Session Moves
• Adventure Moves
• Quest Moves
• Connection Moves
• Exploration Moves
• Combat Moves
• Suffer Moves
• Recover Moves
• Threshold Moves
• Legacy Moves
• Fate Moves

As an example, if you are exploring the isles and mapping new trade routes, you may be using rules in the Exploration Moves section. If you get into a duel with another pirate captain, you will be using the moves in the Combat Moves section. In both cases, if you fail and the move indicates that you have a consequence for failure, you will find the different moves showing consequences for exploration and combat under the Suffer Moves.

Quick Overview

While this product doesn’t present the core rules, for those that are curious, let’s examine how you determine what happens in Ironforged-derived games.

Characters have five stats. The stat you use to resolve a roll is detailed in the move description. Characters have multiple tracks to manage, which include Momentum, Health, Spirit, and Supply. As characters are injured, demoralized, or use up their resources, their Health, Spirit, or Supply goes down. There are specific moves you can attempt to recover each of these resources.

Whenever a character attempts to do something, if it matches one of the moves in the game, you reference the rules for that move. Resolution involves rolling a d6 and two d10s (not percentile). If your d6 + the relevant ability is greater than one of the two d10s, you get a weak hit. If it is better than both d10s, you get a strong hit. The d6 is the Action Die, and the d10s are the Challenge Dice.

If you are familiar with Apocalypse World-derived games, the move structure should sound familiar. The moves are arranged with results for total success, partial success, or failure.

Momentum is a resource you can burn, which lets you swap your Momentum score for your Action score. You can have negative Momentum, and in that case, when the integer equals your action die score, it is negated.

While there are many moves that are resolved immediately with a single roll, anything that is meant to represent a significant challenge involves creating a progress track. Your success on some moves allows you to mark a number of boxes. In some cases, you can attempt to complete the task before reaching the end of the track, but the more boxes you fill in, the more reasonable the difficulty of the move to resolve the action measured by the track.

Progress tracks are different lengths based on the amount of effort required to resolve them. The challenge ranks are:

• Troublesome
• Dangerous
• Formidable
• Extreme
• Epic

Dueling a skilled opponent may require a dangerous progress track. Sailing from port to port trying to track down the location of a fugitive could be a formidable task. While a task like a duel with a hostile opponent will be something you work on until it’s resolved, a task like hunting down a fugitive would see you roll each time you put into a port, in between resolving other actions and engaging other action tracks.

Characters have Assets, which are discreet rules that introduce different moves related to that Asset, or that modify the rolls you make for existing moves. There are several categories of Assets:

• Vehicle–details of vehicles you possess
• Module–new parts you can add to modify your vehicle
• Path–your core talents that represent your profession or archetype
• Companion–NPCs that accompany the player character
• Deed–new abilities you gain for performing specific momentous events

Sundered Isles assumes that you are using some of the assets from Ironsworn: Starforged. While some Assets, like Engine Upgrade, may not make sense, others, like Heavy Cannons, function the same whether you’re firing cannonballs or energized plasma.

Setting Assumptions

If you are familiar with Ironsworn or Ironsworn: Starforged, you may be used to the format in which the setting is presented. The setting assumptions are more about facilitating play by determining the active tropes. Some tropes are more important than others, and the game assumes some specific truths about your character. There are several places where the game asks questions and presents some possible answers.

Player characters are assumed to be privateers. There is a starting ship, and if you aren’t playing solo, all of the PCs operate off the same ship. You may or may not start to acquire other ships under your command, creating your own fleet. There are assumed to be multiple factions, including an expansionist empire of some kind. While the game assumes diverse cultures living on various islands, the tyrannical empire hasn’t colonized the region and exists as a threat to fight against.

While those are the thematic elements that are assumed, there are a few specifics, but those specifics can exist in different contexts. There are two moons, Cinder and Wraith. The interplay between the moons causes the tides to be less predictable, allowing for more variability that can come from various moves. The islands are assumed to be spread out into three broad regions, the Myriads, the Margins, and the Reaches. The different regions can facilitate different aspects of play, from piracy, exploring ruins and locations, charting new routes, and finding new islands.

One of the biggest decisions is what Realm you are adventuring in. The options provided are the Seafaring Realm, the Skyfaring Realm, and the Starfaring Realm. The Seafaring Realm resembles a setting not unlike the Age of Sail adventure stories featuring pirates and privateers in our world. The Skyfaring Realm still assumes that your players are heroic pirates, but they fly skyships between floating cities that rose to the sky when the surface of the world suffered some great calamity. The Starfaring Realm assumes that islands are floating in the void of space, and that you can use a magical version of a sailing ship to travel between islands and asteroids, a wee bit like Spelljammer.

There are a ton of tables for fleshing out different aspects of the setting. They include the following tables:

• The Sundering–how the setting came to be how it is now
• Relics–what remains from before
• Modern Era–what does technology look like
• Iron Vows–what does it look like to swear a vow to complete a quest in this setting
• Navigation–how do people navigate and what are their unique challenges
• Empires–how powerful and active are the imperial powers you fight against
• Piracy–how do pirates behave, and are there wider trends
• Religion–how do people interact with the divine or the supernatural
• Magic–how magical is the setting
• Beasts–noteworthy creatures that are special, but not legendary
• Horror–terrifying legendary elements of dread

In addition to these setting details, there are also tables for origin stories both for your character and your ship, potential curses you may be dealing with, random islands you may find, the details of different beasts the PCs can encounter while exploring, and what the various active factions are. The factions are organized into the following categories:

• Societies–shared traditions and/or ways of life
• Organizations–groups working toward a common goal
• Empires–what the villains of the setting look like
• The Cursed–people bound together by supernatural misfortune

Compared to Starforged, Sundered Isles introduces new resolution frameworks to reinforce the themes and tropes of seafaring and swashbuckling. This includes a multi-step process for naval combat that involves closing on ships, engaging, and boarding. There are procedures for tracking your wealth, repairing your ship, and exploring caves and ruins. As with other elements in the various Ironsworn games, none of these additional procedures are mandated, and there are single roll resolutions for most of the scenarios that have more detailed procedures. You may use individual moves to close in on and loot a standard merchant ship but decide to use the full procedure for naval combat when encountering the imperial dreadnought that serves as the flagship of one of the oppressive nations pushing into the region.

The game has a few assumptions about who you are and how you operate, and some of these assumptions are reflected in how the moves work. You are assumed to be heroic pirates. You may not be angels, but you aren’t bloodthirsty killers. You are assumed to be in opposition to the expansionist powers in the region, which helps to present you with some guilt-free targets for your piracy. When you explore ruins, you are not looting the ruins. The moves are focused around finding out who lived here, and what happened to them. Instead of looting, you may end up finding the descendants of that culture to share your findings.

The wealth rules are simple, tracking a wealth level from 1 through 5, and providing situations where you lower your wealth level to perform tasks like doing regular upkeep or repairing damage to your ship, and increasing when you loot a target vessel. This wasn’t the first time I was reflecting on my 7th Sea 2nd edition games while reading these rules, and I appreciate that there is just enough to the wealth rules to make them meaningful, and to remain logical in their abstraction. You can make wealth rules too minimalist, where the questions about the lack of rules cause more problems than a more detailed system causes.

The Oracles

You can engage with the rules for quite a while without consulting the oracles in the game, if you know exactly what you want to do, and what you want to include. Sometimes, even in solo play, you have some ideas of what you want to accomplish to establish your character in the setting. However, the Ironsworn games have a reputation for their oracles. These are the keys to being able to either play solo, or to play without a GM. While the PCs still need to have a broad idea of what they want to do, they can still be surprised by rolling on the oracles to learn the nature of their challenges and the evolving story of the world outside of their immediate quests.

The Core Oracles can be used to give you momentum. These include what kind of action the PCs need to take, what the theme of the current adventure should be, what kind of descriptors you should add to more mundane elements, and what the focus of the adventure should be.

Sundered Isles includes a new wrinkle, the Cursed Die. If you want to introduce more sinister elements to your game, but you still want them to come into the narrative at surprising times, you add a d10 Cursed Die to your d100 rolls. If the Cursed Die comes up a 10, instead of rolling on the regular oracle tables, you instead use the more sinister results on the Cursed Oracle tables. For example, while the standard weather results may include things like stifling heat or raging storms, the Cursed Weather oracle may result in blood rain, mist that displays the crew’s darkest secrets, or shifting clouds of pulsing arcane energy.

Something true of all the Ironsworn games is that these oracles can be used even if you aren’t currently using the Ironsworn rules. If you’re running a fantasy game where the characters are sailing dangerous waters, or even if you’re playing a semi-historical game set in the Age of Sail, if you want a mass of adventure seeds and random thoughts to trigger your own creativity, these oracles serve that function very well.

Wind in the Sails

 Engaging with the game shows how well it hangs together, but the Oracles are a great gateway to get eyes on the inside of the book. 

If you’re already a fan of the previous Ironsworn incarnations, this is going to provide more of what you already enjoy about the system. The Curse Die is a solid addition to the rules. It adds another dimension to the utility of the oracles, and it provides pacing for your nasty surprises when you don’t want to trust your gut instincts on how often you should be introducing nasty escalations to the narrative. The oracles are useful beyond their functionality in the game and can be used for all manner of thematically similar games.

Becalmed

This game knows what it wants to do, how to resolve things, and how to introduce more elements to the game to represent new narrative additions. While that’s not bad, at times it can be a little overwhelming. Even with the clear organization and color coding, the fact that the game has that level of organization in the first place can sometimes be off-putting to someone new to the system. Reframing the exploration of ruins as solving the mystery of the lost culture is an approach I appreciate, but while I can envision complications for adventure stories, it’s harder for me to picture emergent mysteries as satisfying.

Recommended–If the product fits in your broad area of gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase.

Ironsworn is an interesting conglomeration of gaming concepts, from adding elements of Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games to providing solo and GMless experiences. While it does those things well, from the outside, it can sound like a bit of an experimental activity. Engaging with the game shows how well it hangs together, but the Oracles are a great gateway to get eyes on the inside of the book. They are consistently full of interesting options, and those options just beg for you to roll a die and see what comes up.

If you want adventure fuel for your fantasy privateer game, or even if you may want an alternate way of telling stories in existing swashbuckling settings, you shouldn’t be disappointed with this purchase. Even if you only have your fantasy crew take to the waves intermittently, the oracles alone may make it worth the price to you.

The fates are conspiring against me, working in the background to tempt my inner dice goblin to indulge his baser instincts. How else would you explain the plethora of shiny math rock kickstarters, fundraisers, videos, and freakin’ cool STL files that have made their way across my feeds as of late? Surely it can’t be some cold, unfeeling computer algorithm. No, it must be fate, and it must be my destiny to find a way to master all of these funky weird dice.

Seriously, though, the last few months, I’ve been thinking about dice a lot. Specifically weird dice. It all started back at the end of 2023, when my husband gave me this awesome dice spinner for Christmas.

It’s beautiful. It’s fun. But most important – it’s weird, and I love weird. So I started thinking about how I could use this weird artifact for more than simply generating a random number. A die (or dice depending on how you’re counting it) so unique deserves a special place at the table, in my opinion. Using it for every random guard’s sword swing or royal vizier’s bluff check would lessen the impact.

This train of thought took me to a lot of offbeat places I didn’t expect – like spending a week musing over the act of building a Cortex system dice pool and how just choosing the stats you’re going to roll with in that game becomes a kind of role play experience on it’s own – but ultimately it coalesced into philosophizing about the purpose of dice.

Because if we really dig into the raison d’etre of the math rocks it becomes clear that they’re not just randomizers. They are tension-makers. Suspense-creators. Engines of uncertainty.

That’s how all the systems tell us to use dice, isn’t it? When you don’t know what will happen, when you’re playing to find out, when success is uncertain – roll the dice.

Dice are the unknown. They’re luck. They’re – dare I tempt it by saying – fate.

Incarnate.

And fate can be fickle.

When we’re rolling dice, we’re taking a chance, and chances are dramatic. Chance creates tension, and when I understood this, I knew how to best use not just my dice spinner, but a bunch of different kinds of dice in weird and unique ways.

Below, you’ll find five weird ways to up the tension at your table using dice. I’ve collected these ideas and arranged from least to most weird. I’ve also tried to include links to the inspiration for the methods when I could provide them.

HIGH – LOW – EVEN – ODD

Credit for this one goes to my old college roommate (thanks, Jeremy!). I don’t know if he came up with it first, but he’s the first GM I’d ever seen use it.

The process is simple, take a D20 (or whatever die your system uses) and point at a player (preferably the one attempting to do the risky action that required a die roll) and say, “High, low, even, or odd.”

Let them call it. Roll the die. If they managed to call the roll, the action goes in their favor.

Essentially, it’s a coin flip and it works well in situations where pure luck determines the outcome of an action. But this works better than a coin flip because the player feels like they have more agency. Not much, but four options are better than two even if the math works out the same. Plus, it plays into dice superstitions such as “I never roll high” or “I really don’t want to ‘waste’ a twenty on this.”

If you really want to play with their emotions, grab a D20 from their dice jail and call for a high-low-even-odd roll. (This is the most evil version of this roll, and is only recommended for GMs who are willing to tempt every god of fortune at one time.)

ROLL UNDER A CUP

Inspired by Liar’s Dice, Yahtzee, but mostly this video on the Quinns Quest Patreon. (It’s a fun video and I highly recommend watching it if you can.)

Imagine this: the rogue has split off from the party to scout the villain’s keep. They’re sneaking through darkened hallways and creeping around corners, when they run into a guard patrol. You call for a stealth roll, BUT you tell them to roll under a cup (an opaque cup. Otherwise this doesn’t work) and tell them not to look at it until you say so.

Then you cut back to the rest of the party. You run a scene. Maybe even an encounter. All the while, the rogue’s player is staring at the cup. Wondering if they’ve been spotted.

When I heard Quinn describe this method, I immediately ran out and bought a set of special little bowls for my home game. I can not wait to watch my players squirm under the tension of not knowing if they succeeded or not.

And yes, you could just roll in secret, but then the answer is an ephemeral result in your brain, not a tangible die sitting just out of reach.   

ADD SOME DESPAIR (Dice)

Adapted from Edge of the Empire/Genesys.

Lots of games have their own custom dice – like Edge of the Empire’s Task dice or Fate’s Fudge dice. You can easily steal the special dice and import them into your game to add a little spice along with some nuance.

When a character goes to hack a computer system, toss them an Edge of the Empire difficulty die to roll along with their D20 and interpret the resulting narrative complications as you would if you were running that system. Or have them roll a Fudge die. On a minus they set off the alarms, on a blank they succeed with a “yes but,” on a plus they get extra information.

Sure, you can bake these gradients of success into a normal D20 roll based on how far below or above the target number they roll, but adding a special die points a huge ass spotlight on the action. It adds another layer of importance to the action and dials up the tension along the way.

ROULETTE DICE COUNTDOWN

Inspired by my Christmas present.

I timed it, and with a really good flick my roulette die will spin for about one and a half minutes, but that’s just an estimate. I’m not certain exactly how long it will spin. And what does uncertainty create? That’s right. Tension.

So, imagine this: you set up a scenario where your players have a limited amount of time to make decisions. Let’s say the jackbooted troops of the evil empire are hunting them through back alleys, trying to catch them before they reach their hideout. The group has to either act together or separately, but they only have until the spinner stops to tell you their actions. You set the stakes and give them the parameters of the situation, and then you start the spinner spinning.

“You have until this stops spinning to make your actions. The result on the die will represent the evil empire’s perception check to find you. Go!”

Will the empire succeed? Who knows! You don’t. Your players definitely don’t! All you know is that there is a limited amount of time to choose.

Now THAT’S dramatic.

SKILL-BASED DICE TOYS

Inspired by these incredibly awesome 3D prints.

These 3D prints turn standard dice rolls into actual real-life skill checks. They take the nail-biting challenge of those old tilt and spin puzzles where you try to navigate a ball bearing through a labyrinth without dropping it through a hole and combine them with either a D20 or a D6. The more dexterous you are at guiding the ball bearing through the maze, the higher your roll result.

Tons of fun on it’s own. Especially if you use it for something like disarming a trap or activating a complicated magical puzzle. But what if you added in a push your luck mechanic?

“The room’s ceiling is coming down and will crush you in three (real time) minutes. If you can ‘roll’ a 13 on this skill-based die, you can unlock the door and escape. But if you get a 17 you can stall out the mechanism completely and find the secret passage that will let you bypass the rest of the dungeon’s traps. If you get a 20…well something extra special will happen.”

These weird dice rolls can add spice to your sessions, drawing attention to pivotal rolls and heightening the tension to astronomical levels of excitement, but do remember to use them in moderation. After all, if every roll you call for has its own gimmick, they’ll lose their specialness real fast.     

I’m also still trying to find ways of adopting these methods for online play. The “roll under a cup” method can be replicated in the Foundry VTT by having your players make blind GM rolls and then you can reveal them in the UI when the timing is appropriate. Including Genesys or Fudge dice into the system could probably be done with a moderate amount of coding, depending on the VTT. Mailing your players care packages with the 3D printed skill dice could be an interesting way to add mystery to the session as well, but it of course has its own limitations.

Would you use weird dice like these in your games? How? Let us know in the comments.

Join Ang, JT, and guest Andy Jaksetic as they talk about the art of pregenerated characters. They cover everything from why you would want pre-made characters to what details you need to give your players.

LINKS:

Untold Stories Project Twitch

Untold Stories Project YouTube

Victoriana Kickstarter

Worlds Without Number

Planning in RPGs is not a fun activity, so don’t do it.
Planning in RPGs is necessary so that we don’t get our characters killed.
Both of those statements are true.

The optimal way planning should work in your game is somewhere in the middle of those two statements. The optimal way is a combination of genre and play style. And if we were to discuss what that looked like up front, we could define how much planning was necessary for the game we were playing, so that our games had the right amount of planning, minimizing the un-fun-ness (take that Bob, our editor), and making it effective enough to keep the characters alive (at least most of them). Let’s talk about how to do that.

Is Planning Un-Fun?

I think so, and I say that as a person whose day job is planning things, and outside of work I plan everything else in my life. In RPGs, planning is just not that fun of an activity. It often consists of the table coming up with ideas and then saying “…but what about this?” going around and around in circles. If you are a player participating in the process, it can be a bit draining, but if you are the GM, waiting for the players to come up with a plan, then you are just sitting there on the outside. It is not how I want to spend my gaming time.

Is Planning Necessary?

Having a plan is a good idea because it aligns the group in terms of their goal and how they are going to achieve it. It allows the group the time to figure out how to best use their resources (equipment, powers, etc). These things greatly increase the group’s chances of being successful and surviving. 

The Components of a Plan

Let’s take a few moments and discuss what makes up a plan. A good plan has all of these, and lesser plans lack detail or are missing some of these parts: 

• The Goal/Objective – A plan must have an objective. What are we doing? This goal should be shared by the entire group. Are you going in to steal the money? Or are you here to rescue your ex-wife from the Prince? If you are not on the same page about the goal, the group may pursue different goals, split up their resources, or at worse come into conflict.

• Milestones – The smaller objectives you need to achieve to build up to the goal. It could be disarming the alarm system, or stealing a key from the guard. Some milestones will be in temporal order while others may occur at any time.

• Information/Intelligence – plans run on information. You can’t plan if you don’t know where you are going, what to expect, how many guards, the terrain around the location, etc. When you lack information you start to make guesses (see below).

• Risks – Risks are the things you don’t know but think are possible. Risks can be things like a hidden alarm system. Or something like, “What if we can’t take out the guards quietly?” In addition, Risks have a probability (how likely they are to occur) and an impact (how big of a problem it is when they come true). A lot of people who are bad with risks spend too much time worrying about how to handle low probability/high impact risks over high probability/lower impact risks. 

• Mitigation and Contingencies – Hand in hand with risks are Mitigations (how do we make risk less likely to occur — lower probability) and Contingencies (what do we do if that risk comes true — lower the impact). You can manage neither, one, or both of these. The trick is deciding for each risk what you want to manage. 

This is why Planning is difficult and may not be fun. It is a lot to manage and done well it takes time – time that you are not playing the game. 

The Trust Issue 

The reason that people tend to over-plan is that they fear that there is some piece of information that if the players knew before they put their plan into action, would ensure the success of the goal or prevent excessive harm/death to the characters. To combat this, players do one or both of the following: 

• Collect as much information/intelligence as possible; at times to excess. 
• Perform excessive Risk mitigation — naming risks, and coming up with mitigations and contingencies. 

In fact, as a GM, you will know this is happening in the game when these two actions take over the session. When characters feel like they know enough, is when they are ready to switch from planning to action. 

Genre and Playstyle

Before we get to the social contract part of this… we need to discuss two more things. 

Some Genres have plans as one of the tropes. If you are running a game about thieves and heists, or a military game about Spec Ops missions, then those genres require some degree of planning. These games are also best served by mechanics that help compensate for suboptimal planning or help mitigate the lack of planning that occurs at the table. Look at how Blades in the Dark and other Forged in the Dark games remove the need for extensive planning by using mechanics to simulate good planning done by the characters rather than the players.

The other thing is play-style. Some groups get off on playing the cat and mouse game, where the GM comes up with a plan and twists and the players face off to come up with a plan to outsmart the GM. Others want nothing to do with planning. Whatever brings your entire group joy, then there is no wrong-bad-fun, as long as you all, as a group are on the same page.

The Social Contract of Planning

The truth is that not all RPGs need the same level of planning, but unless you establish that fact, most players will assume they do. 

Some genres do not lean into detailed plans. Superhero games often rely on bold action and powers to overcome problems, not intricate plans. Pulp games also favor action over plans as well. So as you establish your game, consider what the genre and your setting should favor and then combine that with your play style. 

An example: My players had recently finished a Night’s Black Agents campaign. It was a game where planning was key, and the game had some mechanics to support planning. The players knew not to move from planning to action until they had enough intel. They would sometimes spend a session collecting intel and making a plan. Currently, we are playing Mutants in the Now, a game inspired by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game and comic. In our most recent session, the players were working on a plan for how to attack a Yakuza hotel where some mutant animals were being trafficked. They started to work on a plan worthy of Night’s Black Agents when I reminded them that this game was more action-based. They quickly simplified their plan to “We rappel to the top of the hotel and fight our way to the bottom while rescuing the other mutant animals along the way”. A perfect plan for the setting and genre. 

The key to having players not over-plan is trust between GM and the player. As the GM, I am telling the players that I am not going to punish them for choosing a simple plan. For the players, it is trusting that I am not withholding some key piece of information that would break their simple plan. 

That is not to say you cannot have a twist. The twist is a time-honored trope in all plans. The twist is the unexpected thing that the players have to deal with in the middle of executing the plan which can cause the plan to alter it on the fly. The difference is that what I am promising, as GM, is that the twist will not up-end or thwart the plan. Rather it will be a fun surprise that the characters can deal with.

This is the social contract of planning as a group, for the game you are running (genre and mechanics) and the way you like to play (style). Agree with how much planning is necessary for this game, in general. You can come up with things like this:

• This game is about a sci-fi Spec Ops team, and the mechanics are gritty, you are going to want to have a good plan before executing an operation. 
• This game is about mutant animals fighting other mutant animals and criminals, you don’t need more than a simple plan, as most things you encounter are going to be resolved by fighting.

By doing this you are creating expectations for the whole group on how you should handle planning. This is the social contract that you agree to and guides how you play. Establish this in Session Zero and you can set the tone for planning in your campaign, and help keep planning to exactly what it needs to be for your game.

A quick note. Even after you establish a level of planning as part of your game, you can have a story where you change the amount of planning for that session. All you have to do is indicate to the players the change so that they can reset their expectations.. 

Plan Out Your Planning

Planning is not always fun in games, and it can be worse if you are over or under-planning based on the game you are running. But like most things in RPGs, if we do some upfront communication and set some expectations we can dial in planning to just the right amount for the game we are playing. 

This expectation along with any planning mechanics that the game provides can make planning far less tedious while being effective, and make for an overall play experience. 

How do you handle planning in your games? How do you set those expectations with your players? What planning tools do you use or what planning mechanics do you employ?