Yora
2018-01-06, 02:06 PM
There is so much RPG material out there with more being released seemingly every week that most of it passes by me completely unnoticed. Sharing what we got and our impressions of it seems like a great way to spread awareness for what is out there and how it could be interesting for us.
Today I got myself my very own copy of Symbaroum and the Midlands sandbox setting.
Symbaroum is a system and setting, which I both find really interesting. The setting is a northern European wilderness that used the be the lands of a great ancient empires which has now been long swallowed up by a vast and dark magical forest. After a neighboring kingdom was destroyed by evil sorcerers, the survivors journeyed north to rebuild their society, which puts them into conflict with the local barbarians and the supernatural elves that rule the forest. Somewhat generic as a concept, but very nicely presented and well executed.
The system is classless and defines characters by eight attributes (though class-like preset packages are presented), and are then heavily customized with special abilities that come in three upgrade steps and each allow characters to use different attributes in some situations or gain additional benefits from successful rolls. The rolls are a fairly simply d20 roll under check that is modified by the opponents modifier. All rolls are made by the players, so they roll under their accurate value modified by the opponent's defense modifier to attack, and roll under their defense value modified by their opponent's accurate modifier when getting attacked. In the same way, when a PC lands a hit, players roll damage against a fixed armor value, while when an NPC lands a hit the players roll armor against a fixed damage value. This is fairly simple but has the minor downside of always having to tell the players the relevant stat of their opponent. ("Roll attack against -1.") Since the game doesn't assume combat to happen very often compared to other games, and the stats don't tend to change much over time (advancement is mostly special abilities), it doesn't feel too bad to me, but I think it could have been done better.
Magic is quite fun, as there are no limits to how many spells you can cast, but you constantly need to monitor your corruption level. While your corruption level is over half your maximum, your character becomes visibly warped by the harmfull effects of magic. When it reaches the maximum, the character turns into a bloodthirsty monster. Knowing spells and rituals will permanently increase your corruption level, while casting spells increases it only for the duration of the scene. Characters can compensate for this by advancing in the traditions of Witchcraft, Sorcery, Theurgy, and Wizardry. This way, the corruption caused by knowledge of spells and rituals belonging to the tradition is negated and corruption caused by casting those spells reduced to only 1. If you fully advance in your tradition and only learn spells that belong to it, you can cast a pretty good number of spells in every scene. If you branch out a lot, then you already start each scene at relatively high corruption and each spell you cast can increase it by quite a lot. And in addition, attacks by some monsters can also corrupt you, so you always want to have some safety buffer too.
While I'll be using my own setting, I'll be running my next campaign with this system.
Midlands is a small-ish OSR setting in a somewhat similar European Sword & Sorcery style. Small-ish because in addition to the 90 pages of description and player options it has another 270 pages of monsters, random tables, and 50! adventure setups. Each of these outlines a location, a situation, and some NPCs that are involved in it, covering on average about 4 pages, inlcuding a map. This is the most out of the box playable looking sandbox material I've ever seen. Each ot these should have enough stuff in them for a whole session and could easily be the start of something much bigger depending on how the players act. And I only paid 8.30€ for the pdf, which I think is dirt cheap for this amount of content. I bpought it on a whim having heard of it for the first time today, but this is exactly the type of material that I can use with little modification for my next campaign.
Today I got myself my very own copy of Symbaroum and the Midlands sandbox setting.
Symbaroum is a system and setting, which I both find really interesting. The setting is a northern European wilderness that used the be the lands of a great ancient empires which has now been long swallowed up by a vast and dark magical forest. After a neighboring kingdom was destroyed by evil sorcerers, the survivors journeyed north to rebuild their society, which puts them into conflict with the local barbarians and the supernatural elves that rule the forest. Somewhat generic as a concept, but very nicely presented and well executed.
The system is classless and defines characters by eight attributes (though class-like preset packages are presented), and are then heavily customized with special abilities that come in three upgrade steps and each allow characters to use different attributes in some situations or gain additional benefits from successful rolls. The rolls are a fairly simply d20 roll under check that is modified by the opponents modifier. All rolls are made by the players, so they roll under their accurate value modified by the opponent's defense modifier to attack, and roll under their defense value modified by their opponent's accurate modifier when getting attacked. In the same way, when a PC lands a hit, players roll damage against a fixed armor value, while when an NPC lands a hit the players roll armor against a fixed damage value. This is fairly simple but has the minor downside of always having to tell the players the relevant stat of their opponent. ("Roll attack against -1.") Since the game doesn't assume combat to happen very often compared to other games, and the stats don't tend to change much over time (advancement is mostly special abilities), it doesn't feel too bad to me, but I think it could have been done better.
Magic is quite fun, as there are no limits to how many spells you can cast, but you constantly need to monitor your corruption level. While your corruption level is over half your maximum, your character becomes visibly warped by the harmfull effects of magic. When it reaches the maximum, the character turns into a bloodthirsty monster. Knowing spells and rituals will permanently increase your corruption level, while casting spells increases it only for the duration of the scene. Characters can compensate for this by advancing in the traditions of Witchcraft, Sorcery, Theurgy, and Wizardry. This way, the corruption caused by knowledge of spells and rituals belonging to the tradition is negated and corruption caused by casting those spells reduced to only 1. If you fully advance in your tradition and only learn spells that belong to it, you can cast a pretty good number of spells in every scene. If you branch out a lot, then you already start each scene at relatively high corruption and each spell you cast can increase it by quite a lot. And in addition, attacks by some monsters can also corrupt you, so you always want to have some safety buffer too.
While I'll be using my own setting, I'll be running my next campaign with this system.
Midlands is a small-ish OSR setting in a somewhat similar European Sword & Sorcery style. Small-ish because in addition to the 90 pages of description and player options it has another 270 pages of monsters, random tables, and 50! adventure setups. Each of these outlines a location, a situation, and some NPCs that are involved in it, covering on average about 4 pages, inlcuding a map. This is the most out of the box playable looking sandbox material I've ever seen. Each ot these should have enough stuff in them for a whole session and could easily be the start of something much bigger depending on how the players act. And I only paid 8.30€ for the pdf, which I think is dirt cheap for this amount of content. I bpought it on a whim having heard of it for the first time today, but this is exactly the type of material that I can use with little modification for my next campaign.