In my vagabond way I happened to stumble across BareBones Fantasy (BBF for short). Whereas Crowfield started an attempt of a fantasy campaign that mirrored the play experience of Traveller, BBF is attempt to convert the old Star Frontiers rules to fantasy. I should probably do a review of it at some point.

Like Star Frontiers, BBF’s core mechanic is the percentile roll. As I said before, I hate percentile rolls. Hate them. I feel that most percentile rolls can be converted to d20 rolls, making everything simpler and faster. Because BBF has a semi-permissive license, I decided to spend some time to convert the game to use the d20 instead.

One neat thing that BBF does is say that any roll of doubles is a crit. If the roll would have been a success, then it’s a critical success; a failed roll would be a critical failure. For example, if Jalice’s lock-picking chance is 68% then a roll of 66 (or 55, 44, 33, etc.) would be a critical success while a roll of 77, 88, or 99 would be a critical failure. While this makes crits a little too frequent for my liking, I like how the scale slides based on the character’s skill as well as the intuitive “doubles = crit.”

It’s impossible to translate that to a d20. Rolling a single die rules out doubles. Ways of adjusting what numbers are crits based on skill level while keeping the crits to 10% (or less) of the rolls also proved impossible.

That led me to think about other ways to do it. The idea I finally came up with was a paradigm shift: Why do crits have to be random? Let the player decided when they’d want a crit!

Crits on Demand

The system would work like this. Whenever the player wants/needs a crit they simply declare “I’m taking a crit.” He has to declare this before the dice are rolled.

If the roll is a success, then it becomes a critical success and the player has to forfeit one experience point.

If the roll is a failure, it becomes a critical failure (i.e. a fumble), but the player gets an experience point as a consolation prize.

Going Off the Idea

I toyed around with that idea for a few days, but I think I decided that I don’t like it. From a gamist perspective it sounds ok, but I think the joy of a crit is the way they pop up unexpectedly. When you invoke one yourself, I think that the thrill of the spontaneity will be lost.

Am I right?

What Wrong with the Sun?

Remember that hex in the Dreadwood where the party shrinks down to a fraction of their size? This is like that, but with two differences:

• It’s in the Firelands.

• It messes with time instead of space.

Sundial photo by liz west / CC BY

Crowfield: To Orc, or Not To Orc

I'm torn on whether or not to include non-human races in Crowfield in general. I'm doubly torn on orcs.

More Fire for the Firelands

After last week's post, James contacted me and said “I am open to the real world. It’s just that sometimes it’s a lot of work for very little return.”

Well, said, James. I couldn’t agree more!

This week I’m throwing reality completely out the window in the name of fun. Hopefully James will approve!

Heating Things Up

The Firelands is a desert. An oppressively hot, mostly lifeless sea of sand and dust. Nothing grows outside the life-giving oases. Without water, a man will perish¹ in the unbearable heat.

It’s not a realistic, earthly desert. It’s a pulpy, exaggerated, swords & sorcery desert.

You know how I make a desert even more pulpy, exaggerated, and swords & sorcery-esque?

I add lava lakes. And volcanoes. But mostly lava lakes.

Crisis in Crowfield

As we established in previous posts, Crowfield is a large town that doesn’t grow its own food. It used to rely on the surrounding villages (the Baron’s fiefs) to supply the town with what it needed. But those villages are gone now, so Baron Crowfield needs to secure new sources of food for his people.

The question is: How much food do they need?

And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying: “Come, and see.” And behold a black horse, and he that sat on him had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard as it were a voice in the midst of the four living creatures, saying: “Two pounds of wheat for a penny, and thrice two pounds of barley for a penny...” [Apocalypse 6:5-6]

James mocks me (kindly) for the amount of math I use when I’m designing a world. James is going to mock me for this post.

I try not to be a slave to realism, but I do let it influence my game world. James probably has a point. I should ignore a lot of the realism stuff and concentrate on the fun stuff, but that’s not who I am. I think having these little facts in the background, out of the players' view, makes the world feel more realistic.

Starships in Crowfield?

This week’s post was supposed to be about a trade system. It’s not. I had the basics worked out, but once I started to apply the details I could see the problems in my design. I need to work on it more. So this week’s post is going to be about starships…

…Kinda.

As I’ve said before, I want Crowfield to feel like a fantasy version of a Traveller merchant campaign. In that kind of campaign the players¹ travel from star system to star system across the inhospitable, barren reaches of space. At each system they try to buy cheap cargo that they can sell for a profit at the next port.²

In the Crowfield campaign, the “star systems” are “oases” and the “inhospitable, barren reaches of space” is instead the “inhospitable, barren desert of the firelands.” And the starships? Those are beasts of burden.

Mapping Around Crowfield: Rough Sketch

Short post this week.  I'm actually out of town getting married!

Last week we talked about the map around Crowfield.  I drew up a quick sketch in Gimp.  It still needs rivers and roads and such.  And mountains.  Mountains surround the Firelands.

The Frostlands are actually on a very tall plateau (thus the snow may have more to do with altitude than latitude).  They are surrounded by maddeningly tall, sheer cliffs.

And there are non-settlement things (like ruins and lairs) to place on the map.

Anyway, the tan color represents the Firelands, white for the Frostlands, and the green is the Dreadwood.  The stars mark settlements, and the one in the center is Crowfield.  

The two maps are identical other than the grid (or lack thereof).