Through Sunken Lands

 

I’ve run a bit of Through Sunken Lands since acquiring it. A good few sessions with the Sunday group and now with my midweek group. I posted about running Beyond the Wall as a low prep second game but we ended up playing Through Sunken Lands instead. 

It is built similarly to BtW, with collaborative playbook character generation and random table scenario packs but the focus is on a Sword and Sorcery milieu. Instead of the pastoral fantasy of BtW we have a set up invoking the works of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Lieber and Michael Moorcock. So far, so good. 

There are nine playbooks and three scenario packs included, some setting detail, a bestiary and rules (combat, spell lists, experience, battle rules, journeys.)

The playbooks are nice and flavourful and the collaborative character generation works well, albeit the shared city generation is not as effective as the shared village from Beyond the Wall. It’s still useful but the bigger nature of the city means the players have less influence over its totality. The scenario packs do the job, I’ve run two out three presented, giving you an at the table prep experience that produces a satisfying adventure. This, like Beyond the Wall, is very much the focus of this book. 

The setting detail is adequate but what is missing ultimately are the tools for longer term play. There are some nice touches here but there are not even any random encounter tables for either the City or any region of the wider world. The book does signpost the campaign tools from Further Afield as being compatible with TSL, which they are, and the implementation of Threats and the shared sandbox elements would go a long way here. Although there’s enough here to run a campaign, it’s not the focus of this book.

Through Sunken Lands does, exactly like Beyond the Wall before it, a very good job of evoking the feel of its milieu and provides all the tools for a group to get an evening’s play starting literally from scratch. It has proved popular with my players (especially the magic users amongst them, who love the magic system) and I enjoy running it. 

Beyond the Wall has additional material to support the core book and Through Sunken Lands has been missing these extra elements. However with the release of The Sorcerous and The Weird; and the upcoming Of Glory and Peril this looks to be well rectified. 

Ultimately I’m a profound enthusiast for Flatland Games material. Beyond the Wall is great, Through Sunken Lands is great too. We’re continuing with TSL albeit in tweaking the setting to my own tastes but the core of it is as described.  (One of the nice touches in the core book is they do a map of the city and the world with their own brand names on them and also provide blank versions for GMs like me who are burdened with a grand imperative to not run anyone else’s material.)

Going Even Lower Prep for a Second Game

Jon Hodgson doing his thing

I’m looking at running another game on Tuesday. The Grim North continues on Sunday nights and the Tiny Prep method is keeping things ticking over nicely there. However as soon as something starts working it’s time to fuck it up, so now that I’ve established I have enough time to run one weekly game I shall try and run two. 

At Dragonmeet this previous year and probably every other year proceeding, those of us that meet up there have expressed our desire to meet up online like we used to in the G+ days and ply a game or two. This week we’re actually going to get our act in gear and do it. 

In order to manage this with the minimum impact on our time, we’re going to play Beyond the Wall in the manner the book intends. So using playbooks to generate characters and a shared village setting; and then using a scenario pack for the evenings adventure. It’s a good way to get things going with zero prep beforehand. I’ve used Beyond the Wall a couple of times in this manner and Through Sunken Lands as well. Through Sunken Lands being the Moorcock/Howard/ sword and sorcery genre take opposed to Beyond the Wall’s Prydain/Earthsea/Dark Rising presuppositions. They’re both good games that do exactly what they set out to achieve and it’s nice to have something like that in your back pocket for such as occasion. 

Beyond the Wall had campaign tools in Further Afield and while I have not employed them at the table, they look sound. If we decide to extend Beyond the Wall past a couple of sessions I’d be interested to see how they work out.  

Beyond the Wall

 Beyond the wall is good. It’s aims are to create a game that emulates the fantasy of Ursula LeGuin or Lloyd Alexander. So Earthsea and Prydain. Both good choices for inspiration in my humble opinion. While at heart it’s a B/X clone it has a number of additional things going for it that I really like. 

Beyond the Wall is designed to be brought to the table with zero prep. I’ve run it twice with this exact amount of prior work and it’s been great at the table. 

Character Generation is achieved by means of playbooks and involves collaboration between players and GM to build the PCs home village. Basically each playbook is a set of random tables that tells you something about your character and allows you to add a location or NPC to the village map. It’s cool. It immediately ties the PCs to one another through pieces of shared history and to the setting because it’s their home and they are helping create it. You get packs like Young Hunstman or Witch’s Aprentice or Assistant Beast Keeper. 

Meanwhile the GM gets a scenario pack, also a series of tables. This allows the GM to tie into the players ideas by populating tables with the NPCs and locations they create and rolling for a series of events that take place in the build up to the scenario as well as the contents of the scenario itself. The scenario pack also gives you a few useful bits like monster stats and suggestions for how to use them and also a big list of thematic names (which is always handy.) Included in the main book are a few scenario packs such as The Angered Fae or The Witch’s Mistake. 

In a series of rolls and about an hour you should have characters ready and a scenario prepped and a collaborative world built. Well, it’s a village but it’s pretty much the world of the PCs because they are young heroes starting out on an adventuring career.

I’ve run Beyond the Wall twice, intending to use it in the manner it suggests. So we sat down over a Google meet session and did characters and a scenario pack. It took two sessions of two hours to resolve the mystery of the Angered Fae but we also created the PCs and their village and I did no work outside of the sessions. So a success for Beyond the Wall. 

The second time I ran it, our scheduled session of Alien wasn’t ready for the table for IRL reasons so I offered to run BtW at short notice. Again I turned out a scenario pack, the Opened Barrow, and we used the same characters from the prior game, which was by now months in the past. I did add a new player and it was simple to get them to roll on their tables alone to generate stuff for their character and the village with one minor alteration (PCs get a bonus from one of the other players’ seated next to them at the table playbook so we determined this randomly instead.) Again I did no prep. I already had a lot of stuff to tie into from the previous game. One PCs ambiguous romantic involvement with another, now absent, PC’s betrothed. The absent PC now having gone missing in game plus the stuff from the scenario pack and I had loads to work with. Another couple of sessions worth it turned out. So for filling in at the last minute I was very happy with it. 

I’d like to run a full campaign of this at some point as there are campaign tools in the “Further Afield” supplement that also look very handy indeed.

What is Best in WFRP 1st Edition?

 The TL;DR version: Careers and Critical Hits.

The careers system is great. You have class, which is pretty much nonsense but is broken down into the various careers and with that simple role you are baked into the setting. I mean they’re not all gold but I reckon if you find yourself playing a boatman or a rat catcher then you know you’re not going be carrying any jewellery to a big volcano any time soon. In my own game of WFRP I strived to maintain a low key, low fantasy vibe. An aesthetic typified by the Joseph Manola as “alcoholic gamblers knifing cultists in back alleys.” This is WFRP to me. The player characters in my game were a trapper, a muleskinner, a member of the town militia and a thief; who were all raised in the same orphanage and found themselves caught up in the machinations of a chaos cult that was tearing itself apart.

So you get a big chunk of setting right there in character generation. After all what other game allows you a small but vicious dog as part of your starting equipment? Conveying the setting in character generation is just good design. See Troika, Electric Bastionland, Apocalypse World or Beyond the Wall for a modern interpretation. I mean you could skip Apocalypse World and it wouldn’t be the end of the..

Then we have critical hits. In combat, the damage one receives is first taken from one’s wounds score until that reaches zero or below and then we roll on the critical hits table for some graphic description of the inevitability bloody result. Generally it’s time to spend a Fate point so we can retcon that result into just being unconscious or whatever but the players love rolling on those tables when they’re  dishing it out. I did too when playing through Castle Drachenfels recently. I kept chopping arms off things like vampires and daemonettes (not so much with the aggressive, evil furniture we kept duking it out with. Seriously we fought a bed, a cuckoo clock and a sarcastic door..) 

One thing that’s mechanically nice about WFRP combat is you roll percentile dice to hit and then reverse the digits to give your hit location. So you roll a 35 to hit and that becomes a 53 which means *checks table* you strike the left arm. Well done.

I mean the magic system is garbage and the psychology rules are super harsh but we’re playing WFRP because we love the Grim (Old) World of Perilous Adventure, not because of its elegant mechanical superiority.