primeval 2d6 – Aboleth Overlords

reCalled From Action: Primeval Edition

Recently Sahh and a few other folks put together a blog bandwagon topic called reCalled From Action where bloggers describe a fight scene from a source of media, and try to frame it as if it were an at-the-table play session.

There have been several posts for this challenge so far, including Sahh’s, Havoc’s, diregrizzlybear’s, and Mr. Mann’s. I’ll try to remember to update this with additional entries that I hear of, but I make no promises, so apologies to anyone I have missed.

I will be using the fight from Berserk that inspired the challenge, the fight between ~~Harvey Berkman~~ Guts and Lord Zondark. For rulestext, I’ll use Primeval 2d6 for the resolution mechanism. I will also be posting images and describing the scene from the comic, which has hefty violence and gore, so feel free to skip this post if that is an issue.

The Battle Begins

Nausicaä FKR Session 3

Summary

A wanderer joins the party as the group continues to explore the mysterious crypt below, dismantling a trap, accessing the center of the sunken labyrinth, and finding a horror within.

hard to find the exact image of what the crypt looks like, picture this but more cluttered with ancient debris

session report follows

Nausicaä FKR Session 2

Summary

The group sets out in search of a Torumekian plane downed in the Sea of Corruption, meeting Worm Handlers and a lost little girl, and discovering an ancient crypt from the days before.

session follows

Nausicaä FKR Setup & Session 1

Since FKR style play is getting more attention I thought it would be a good time to pitch an open table game using my Primeval 2D6 system over on one of the Discord servers devoted to the style.

I met up with other members and pitched a few games – running a West Marches style game, an investigative horror game, an Ars Magica-alike, as well as a game set in Hayao Miyazaki’s setting where the Nausicaä manga takes place.

Almost everyone immediately expressed interest in Nausicaä being their top pick, so we started discussing the game, potential places to play, character ideas, and we landed on playing somewhere out “off the map” so to speak in our own corner of the world, making it easier for players to drop in and out without knowing the plot, as well as letting us handwave a lot of details.

I should preface this and probably every session that I am notoriously anti-canon. I want to draw on the imagery, themes, and broad-level assumptions of any source I’m using – Nausicaä included. So if something contradicts established lore – that’s the canon of our game. This is by no means to disrespect the source material, the creators, or the fans, but rather to allow our table to celebrate the world in the way that’s the most fun for us.

chargen and session follows

Less Rules To Do More: Advancement

Advancement rules are another aspect of roleplaying that sees heavy mechanization. Which I totally get – I agree that games are about what they reward. How these rewards are illustrated, handed out, and utilized, however, has a variety of methods they can be handled with – and like everything else in this series I think you can get away having a fully featured and rich set of rewards without explicitly mechanizing them.

Less Rules to Do More: Wounds

One of the things I have done when running Primeval 2D6 is to get rid of the more abstract notion of hit points, number of hits, etc. in favor of a more descriptive form of injuries.

This has coincided with my attempt to move all of my old school-styled gaming away from discussions of numbers and mechanics, and instead towards a discussion of the fiction as much as possible.

details follow

Less Rules To Do More: Combat Maneuvers

In my previous post I suggest removing mechanics around the important parts of the game to see if a more freeform rulings style of play will give you what you looking for, instead of defaulting to adding new mechanics.

Let’s look at one of the most popular areas to begin to add rules to games: combat maneuvers.

Less Rules To Do More

Hanging out on forums, game design communities, discord servers and the like I come across a lot of people trying to hack games, old school D&D in particular to do more than what it currently does for them.

Some examples include things like:

Differentiating between “kinds” of hit-points, often breaking out concepts of luck, stress, actual physical damage into a variety of classes.
De-abstracting armor class, clearly defining between the kinds of armor that keeps blows from hurting you, and actions you perform to completely avoid these blows (such as dodging and parrying).
Adding concrete actions and reactions to combat – rules for called shots, active parries, specific classes of strikes, etc.
Various implementations and adjustments to the magic system.
Skills in general.
More nuances to the experience systems.

This is all great – hacking is very much in the spirit of D&D and roleplaying and definitely should be done. Some really awesome games have developed out of the tradition of grabbing D&D, removing stuff you don’t like, adding stuff you do, and putting your own mark on it.

What I want to do is make an argument for removing rules to do what you want, before adding them in. This may seem counter-intuitive – how can you establish something as a priority if you don’t have a concrete rule for it?

How I run Primeval 2D6

In my last post I wrote up a summary of a Primeval 2D6 session that I ran, and I got a lot of great feedback and a lot of questions about how I run a closer-to-freeform/FKR rpg. I wanted to write a follow-up post to kind of explain the how I did as well as clarify a few of the questions I received.

not quite the crow demon, but I thought it looked funny

Cursed Rookery of the Moon Empress

Over the weekend I ran a playtest of my Primeval 2D6 system along with some sword & sorcery rules I have been working on for a while. The basic setup was that I had each player generate a positive and negative trait, a homeland, background, virtue, vice, then each player generated a pulp adventure title.

They then free form pitched their character’s appearance in this tale, along with a special ability, item, relationship or unique detail. Then the player to the right of them had their character featured in this tale, and they helped the primary protagonist out of some pickle.

The adventure was one I have ran before. Its a bit of a magical detective mystery, filled with decadent corruption and horrific monsters, it has a number of avenues a party can take. It has been interesting running this and seeing some groups go purely investigative, some purely skull-crushing, and an in-between. Spoilers for one avenue the adventure can take, if you ever want to playtest this with me.

summary follows