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Fellowship is is, to my mind, the premiere fantasy PbtA, improving on the foibles of Dungeon World.
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Apr 5, 2021 02:24
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Demon_Corsair posted:Has there been a new contender for a generic fantasy hack to replace dungeon world? Fellowship gets recommended a lot, although I'm not sure I'd call it totally generic fantasy; I feel like it wouldn't serve very well for a stereotypical "dungeon crawling murderhobos" story, since it's built around a specific sort of heroic fantasy vs. the Big Bad arc. (If anyone's played a successful Fellowship murderhobo game, please correct me!)
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Apr 5, 2021 02:25
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Fellowship's 2nd edition has the answer, just replace the Overlord with the Horizon and tadah your Fellowship game is all about exploring new places, meeting interesting people and perhaps taking all their stuff
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Apr 5, 2021 03:11
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HerraS posted:Fellowship's 2nd edition has the answer, just replace the Overlord with the Horizon and tadah your Fellowship game is all about exploring new places, meeting interesting people and perhaps taking all their stuff That sounds exactly up my alley, I backed a systemless exploration hex crawl that I wanted to try with dungeon world. Too bad I never got to play fellowship v1 before getting v2 😂
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Apr 5, 2021 03:29
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Demon_Corsair posted:Has there been a new contender for a generic fantasy hack to replace dungeon world? Dungeon World ate up a lot of oxygen around that. The Bakers were working through something called "Storming the Wizard's Tower" that they more or less set aside when Dungeon World showed up because of the degree to which it did what they were trying to do. Stonetop looks extremely promising on that front; it hews extremely close to Dungeon World in places, maybe uncomfortably close depending on what you hate. It's much more focused around a type of gameplay that is developing and protecting the titular settlement, but honestly, AW hacks are better the more they're specifically about something, like Fellowship is good because it's about fighting the Overlord/biting the Horizon.
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Apr 5, 2021 06:25
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That's the thing. I don't think you're probably going to find a better PBTA game for generic fantasy than Dungeon World, because the reason Dungeon World isn't a particularly good PBTA game is that it's generic fantasy. Stonetop looks great but is a specific type of fantasy. Same with Fellowship, although aiming it at the Horizon is closer to what's being asked, I expect. That said, there's a supplement (by the same people who are publishing Stonetop) for Dungeon World called Perilous Wilds that's probably pretty well suited for hex crawl type stuff. And it's not like Dungeon World is terrible, it's just not great.
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Apr 5, 2021 06:37
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Stonetop's author, Jeremy Strandberg, also previously wrote Homebrew World, which incorporates several changes that he also made in Stonetop but sticks far closer to standard DW, with more familiar classes (albeit with all their moves overhauled) and a generic fantasy non-setting. It is also free. (Of the many "DW but different/better" games, I also quite like Chasing Adventure, which is available in a free version as well as a $10 full version that includes more material for actually running the game. CA drifts a little further from DW than some of the others by completely changing the damage system and dropping HP, in addition to more common changes like revised moves, backgrounds instead of races, and use of advantage/disadvantage.)
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Apr 5, 2021 07:29
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The Ironsworn RPG and it's expansions might be okay-ish for dungeon crawling but I only know it by reputation.
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Apr 5, 2021 07:31
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Demon_Corsair posted:Has there been a new contender for a generic fantasy hack to replace dungeon world? There's a few complete overhaul hacks of dungeon world that people have been saying are very good (Freebooters on the Frontier comes up a fair bit, it's getting a 2nd edition that's it's own game that's gonna push it more towards old-school D&D tonally + mechanically). Stonetop also looks VERY promising (though it'd need a bit of hacking to change the setting from 'iron age village called stonetop' to something more generic.) For my money though, I'd say Fellowship has been the better fantasy game from day one. Though worth noting like how Apocalypse World is pbta mad max and Dungeon World is pbta Dungeons and Dragons, Fellowship is pbta for fantasy novels - so tone and pace are very much that, rather than murderhobo stomping ground. Macdoo fucked around with this message at 13:00 on Apr 5, 2021 |
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Apr 5, 2021 12:55
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Stonewall looks rad as hell. I wish they had gone with bronze age over iron age, but that's just a personal preference. Too bad I missed the end date by a week. Guess that's what I get for not staying on top of the Kickstarter thread. I think fellowship will be perfect tonally for any of my fantasy game needs. I have blades in the dark for gritty criminal games. Now to just sell my group that it isn't actually a lord of the rings game.
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Apr 5, 2021 14:33
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Our GM pitched a Galactic Empire version, so that will be fun
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Apr 5, 2021 17:08
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My group did a one shot in Firebrands over the weekend because we had a missing player. Legitimately: it completely ruled. One of the best TTRPGs I've played, A+++. The "games" structure, lack of GM, and near total lack of randomness all made it an absolute blast in practice and Meguy Baker knocked it out of the loving park. From our position, the sexuality (and specifically the "stealing time together" game) were kind of uh not good. My gaming group is not the sort of group that is comfortable discussing sex with each other in even clinical terms. If I were to do it again, I'd replace "stealing time together" with like, "a night on the town" or something else that's platonic but still gets across "this is purely leisure/recreation, no tactics."
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Apr 5, 2021 17:41
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Demon_Corsair posted:I think fellowship will be perfect tonally for any of my fantasy game needs. I have blades in the dark for gritty criminal games. In my experience the best luck I've had doing this is showing people the book 2 (and book 3, and soon also book 4) playbooks. Like yeah book 1 has the elf and dwarf and orc and halfling, but then you get to book 2 and you've got the angel, the furry, the mecha pilot, the slime. It also lets you have a cool ship to travel around in as a communal playbook you all invest in together.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:14
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fellowship is great but your players need to really be on top of things, which can be intimidating to some groups as the collaborative part of collaborative storytelling gets swung a lot further away from the GM than people are used to. its important to note about it however that the flavour of fellowship is decided in session 0, and it can be anything at all based off how its playbooks work. if you want the dwarves to be robots from the future thats entirely possible. also, has anyone played broken worlds here..?
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Apr 5, 2021 21:32
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pog boyfriend posted:also, has anyone played broken worlds here..? Yeah did a campaign of it not too long ago. It was fine, very much a "AW with the serial numbers filed off" level hack. I played a Fated Human, we had a Law Angel and a Hunger Human. The Hunger had...much better tools than the rest of us. We forewent I think all of the optional rules. The biggest changes from base AW are that the combat is substantially more complicated and recuperating is pretty "mechanics forward" (this being the "Rest" move, it wound up being a very very big deal). The combat complexity I don't think added a lot. It was easy to compare to the Avatar hack, Legend of the Elements, as they're both very "western media that is very heavily wuxia influenced," and LotE's combat changes were just better and would have made a better K6BD hack. As a piece of expanded lore about K6BD? Fantastic, since it's concerned a lot with a bunch of stuff that the comics have little reason to get into. Did cause a bit of a fun mismatch in the K6BD thread since the game has angels, humans, servants, and demons as all equally capable PCs even in combat, and most people in at least the K6BD thread do not operate under the assumption that even a very competent human could kick the poo poo out of any angel at all.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:51
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gnome7 posted:In my experience the best luck I've had doing this is showing people the book 2 (and book 3, and soon also book 4) playbooks. Like yeah book 1 has the elf and dwarf and orc and halfling, but then you get to book 2 and you've got the angel, the furry, the mecha pilot, the slime. It also lets you have a cool ship to travel around in as a communal playbook you all invest in together. I love the up sell. I was already planning to get book 2 and eyeing at least a pdf of book 3, so you already had me hooked. I don't suppose there is a hard copy bundle available for them? The trick will be mapping a hex crawl with a fairly defined chunk of the world onto something as freewheeling and cooperatively narrated game like fellowship. But I think that mostly just required buy-in for the players.
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Apr 6, 2021 00:15
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Fellowship can handle “you guys are now over here“. When it might not do well with his “you’re in a dungeon, exits are south and east“ since core classes can break through a wall from level one.
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Apr 6, 2021 22:25
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gnome7 posted:In my experience the best luck I've had doing this is showing people the book 2 (and book 3, and soon also book 4) playbooks. Like yeah book 1 has the elf and dwarf and orc and halfling, but then you get to book 2 and you've got the angel, the furry, the mecha pilot, the slime. It also lets you have a cool ship to travel around in as a communal playbook you all invest in together. Going to second this. I firmly hold the belief that base book-1 Fellowship is a disappointment that doesn't follow through on its core promise ("you're the author of your people! also you only get one archetype to author with some variants in details, but if you want even one bit of an archetype you gotta take it all!"), but books 2 and 3 are interesting games I would be willing to play. Not least for divorcing roles from the innate race being played. (Hmm, I feel like I've seen this somewhere before.) Haven't actually played it to see if that bears out, but that's mostly on my regular group a) not playing much at all recently, b) not gelling at all with PbtA. Last I was able to play was Legacy 2e for a few sessions, and while I like the system, bad experience on account of the group. That was... probably two years now.
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Apr 6, 2021 22:52
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Customizing the race is vital though. I’ve had halflings be talking cats or vicious cannibals, orcs be sentient mold people who absorbed things to fight with them, or adventure capitalists... elves mermaids or self-important space ship captains who live so long because of cryo-sleep.
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Apr 7, 2021 05:08
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BlackIronHeart posted:The Ironsworn RPG and it's expansions might be okay-ish for dungeon crawling but I only know it by reputation. In terms of PbtA fantasy though, I've actually had pretty good experiences just re-skinning normal AW and running it more or less as-is.
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Apr 9, 2021 17:55
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Don't know if this was already discussed here but, Is there a DUNE hack somewhere? I was looking for something with the kind of "troupe play" seen in Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, where you play both a faction high-up plotting & scheming and some lowly pawn executing those plots. But I 1) never played Legacy so I don't know how well it does that premise and 2) don't know if there are other "chassis" in PbtAspace that could do Dune better. I also looked on the new Modiphius game but I'm not a fan of 2d20. Also, what would you think would be important for a Dune PbtA hack to have? P.S: I came upon Planeta Deserto, a portuguese World of Dungeons hack for Dune that's pretty cool, even if too minimalist for what I want here. It's very neat regardless and I recommend a look if you're a Dune fan and can read Portuguese: https://www.bibliotecaelfica.org/mundo-de-masmorras/mundo-de-masmorras-planeta-deserto/
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Apr 20, 2021 19:24
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gently caress me, Stonetop looks pretty. And yeah, the more I ran Dungeon World, the more I felt like the game just...wasn't that great. It feels unfocused and kind of halfway between PbtA and D&D while not exceling at either. I had to make all sorts of weird rulings and adjustments when I was running my campaign.
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Apr 20, 2021 21:49
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lessavini posted:Also, what would you think would be important for a Dune PbtA hack to have? Politics
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Apr 20, 2021 21:52
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Step 1: make sure you and your audience know if you're doing the part of Dune everybody knows (the first book and/or the movie and/or the video games) or if you're doing the broader series, and if the broader series which books you consider canon because you want to have fights about Brian Herbert before you sit down at the table.
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Apr 20, 2021 22:18
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Small Brain: Frank Herbert is Canon Big Brain: Brian Herbert is Canon Galaxy Brain: DuneFan1991 is Canon
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Apr 20, 2021 23:13
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Figure out how you are going to deal with betrayal, double-crossing and assorted surprises. It's a fine line to walk and you don't want to do your players (or fellow players) dirty.
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Apr 20, 2021 23:28
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lessavini posted:Don't know if this was already discussed here but, Is there a DUNE hack somewhere? Closest one I know of would be The Sword, The Crown and the Unspeakable Power which is specifically designed to emulate the "distributed cast of powerful people" feeling of Game of Thrones. You could easily hack it to be more dune-like. I'd say legacy is a great bet for it too Unfortunately own and have read but haven't played either so couldn't tell you which would work better unfortunately
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Apr 20, 2021 23:37
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In Dune your move categories would probably be something like scheme, travel, and knife. Bene Gesserit characters must substitute "be so far up your own rear end for the last several thousand years that you can only succeed by accident and even then it's still not really what you wanted" for any scheme move.
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Apr 20, 2021 23:43
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Tulip posted:Step 1: make sure you and your audience know if you're doing the part of Dune everybody knows (the first book and/or the movie and/or the video games) or if you're doing the broader series, and if the broader series which books you consider canon because you want to have fights about Brian Herbert before you sit down at the table. Tevery Best posted:Figure out how you are going to deal with betrayal, double-crossing and assorted surprises. It's a fine line to walk and you don't want to do your players (or fellow players) dirty. Play would be organized like in Legacy, where each session has a faction phase where players assume the role of some high-up making some strategical planning and maneuvering.... and then go down to the agents phase where the players assume the "agents" of those high-ups in the field. (well, at least that's what I remember from Legacy haha). Playbooks would be separated in 2 types: a faction/high-up one, and a pawn/agent one. The former would be something like: - The Atreides, - The Harkonnen, - The Corrino, - The Spacing Guild, - The Tleilaxu, - The Fremen, - The Bene Gesserit - The Ixian and the later would be: - The Mentat, - The Witch, - The Suk Doc, - The Smuggler, - The Survivalist, - The Assassin - The Warrior etc. Mix and match to your heart's content. Perhaps create specific synergies like, say, the Corrino faction would confer the move "Sardaukar" to the Warrior/Smuggler/Survivalist, or a Tleilaxu can give a "Fance Dancer" move to the Assassin/Suk Doctor/Mentat, etc. and voilá. Now we only need basic and special moves. Edit: Oh and the art for the playbooks. I would put JODOROWSKY DUNE art on those, so really out there and psychedelic stuff just to shock. haha lessavini fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Apr 21, 2021 |
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Apr 21, 2021 17:36
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Pollyanna posted:gently caress me, Stonetop looks pretty. I'm totally stealing Struggle As One for general-purpose use and nobody can stop me.
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Apr 21, 2021 18:08
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:In Dune your move categories would probably be something like scheme, travel, and knife. Knife Voice Water Soul ? (Water is your brains, and Soul is to open your mind when you get high with Melange) lessavini fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Apr 21, 2021 |
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Apr 21, 2021 19:41
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lessavini posted:I would default to the book 1 with the Atreides arriving at Arrakis to be the new manager of the planet. This seems to me the point with most potential for intrigue. But I would guess anything prior to God-Emperor is game. I would steal the take that the Dune video games and board game use, where its a period before the books and the Emperor is giving all the houses a fair shake at Dune to fight over it and whoever produces the most spice gets to hold Dune for a few years. That way you can have Atreides, Harkonnen, Ordos, etc. all running around on the planet with different cities controlled by different houses.
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Apr 21, 2021 19:48
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Yeah, that would also be a very cool start.
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Apr 21, 2021 20:05
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lessavini posted:I like it. How about these for stats: Instead of Soul, I'd do Sand as a travel/survival thing. When you get spice high you're rolling either Water (personal/ancestral insight) or Sand (group consciousness / external insight). Knife/voice and water/sand could even exist as spectra instead of discrete numbers.
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Apr 22, 2021 00:05
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Sand is nice, yeah.
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Apr 22, 2021 01:18
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Or Spice Roll Spice to travel safely or sense danger
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Apr 22, 2021 01:30
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Zaphod42 posted:Or Spice Probably be more in line with the fiction if Spice was a resource rather than a stat, but yeah.
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Apr 22, 2021 02:13
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Probably be more in line with the fiction if Spice was a resource rather than a stat, but yeah. It's definitely something that can go up through exposure, but I don't know that it would ever make sense to "spend" spice.
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Apr 22, 2021 08:01
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Shanty posted:It's definitely something that can go up through exposure, but I don't know that it would ever make sense to "spend" spice. You'd need a word other than "spend", yeah, but isn't one of the themes that it's addictive, that it allows you to do certain things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do, but that you need a built tolerance to get to that stage?
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Apr 22, 2021 08:07
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all this talk of spice is making me think of a spice girls hack where each stat is a spice girl name Roll Sporty to act under pressure
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Apr 22, 2021 08:08
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