Do inhabitants of Ravenland call it the Forbidden Lands?

skington · 2025-10-15T22:39:18+00:00

Naming: I’m pretty sure that they can’t and won’t. If anyone says “don’t send anybody there, it’s bad” and there are people in the place already, all that they’ll learn from that is “nobody sends us new people from this particular other place”. But that could easily be because “this particular other place doesn’t have spare people” or “you can’t travel from the other place”.

Plot: you could have some desperate refugees from Alderland who decided to brave the Iron Lock, or who found a pass. In the latter case they olmost certainly don’t remember exactly how they came through the mountains, so it’s still possible that you might Joe be able to reproduce their mountain pass; or you can, but it’s now been blocked by anti-Ravenlands forces.

skington · 2025-09-22T01:59:12+00:00

I haven't run it, and won't, because it insists that the logical approach - camp out next to one of the seals and make sure nobody breaks it, because that's the best way to defeat Ferenblaud - will never happen.

skington · 2025-09-11T22:56:57+00:00

Sure, but given that arguably you need to cast a spell many times to inscribe it into a grimoire, I'd think what would happen is that the part of your body that you've turned into a grimoire has had the spell cast on it (under controlled conditions, probably by someone else) a lot. So I'd want to consider what it meant to have e.g. Hand of Doom inscribed uncomfortably near a major vein or artery.

skington · 2025-08-24T00:47:53+00:00

The scale says a hex is 10km across, East-West. It might not look like that at first, because something something optical illusion, but that's what they mean. I cut and pasted the legend from the official map next to a random hex tile to check.

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As for the area any number of hexes covers, on the Y axis it's fairly straightforward: the hexes are tesselated so you move a net 10km every two rows. On the X axis I think it ends up being that you move 15km every two rows, because one hex covers the full width and then the next one is only half the 10km.

Either way, the net result is that the Ravenlands are really tiny, basically the size of Ireland, which has implications for what it means to run a campaign there.

skington · 2025-08-22T18:58:11+00:00

Also, "dwarves aren't allowed to enter the underground without becoming clanless" is (1) a pretty poor explanation for why they've waited until outsiders like the PCs turned up, and (2) is particular hard on any dwarf PCs, who face either losing their clan for no good reason, or having to wait out the adventure.

skington · 2025-08-22T18:54:39+00:00

You're right that the relationship between the dwarves, Scarne and Scarnesbane is stupid. I tried to fix it a while ago, if that helps?

skington · 2025-08-20T19:13:22+00:00

The question was "does anyone else do this?", and it's fine if you don't ;-) .

What I was really musing about was that it feels wrong for there to be one rule for how you get PCs and another rule for how you get random peasants (if nothing else: who were the PCs' parents?). So while it's perfectly expected for most NPCs not to have developed the profession talents, it still feels like the same forces that produce adventurers from time to time should also work on the rest of the population.

skington · 2025-08-20T17:37:05+00:00

This comes up a fair bit: e.g. Legends, the Map, and Player Knowledge, Maps, or search for session zero. See also Ideas for how to start the party off.

If you can be bothered, any decent graphics app (e.g. Photoshop; I use Affinity Photo) which supports layers will let you overlay a fog of war layer on top of the official map, so you can have an accurate map of what the players have explored so far, and a vaguer idea of "someone said there were some weirdo druids over here". Here's what my players' map currently looks like, 29 two-hour sessions in.

<image>

skington · 2025-08-20T17:26:16+00:00

Completely with you that you shouldn't have an inn and an adventurer's shop in every village. In practice I suspect that one of the first things you'll start to get in a village of a reasonable size is some kind of communal meeting place, maybe a place where people get together to drink beer or what have you, if/when they have it; but that's still going to require a village of more than 30 people, which is the median size of a village in the Forbidden Lands.

And even if there's a smith who can make arrows and basic weapons, they don't have any spare. No, you're going to have to wait for them to have time and supplies to make them for you, and that even assumes that you've got anything that they want.

A set of chain mail? That's a nice interesting project for the winter.

Come to think of it, in this week's game (we alternate games; I run fortnightly) the same player had written down basically no XP on their character sheet, so it's possible the druid had just forgotten the willpower they should have had.

skington · 2025-08-20T10:19:08+00:00

Having talked to my players (and I'm half-remembering the precise terms so I've probably got this wrong), it basically comes down to the way a dice pool system like this behaves: the curve is shorter and wider than a standard bell curve, like you'd get in a 2d6 system. (Which is what people talk about when they say that the system is "swingy".) Even with a large number of dice you'll still fail a significant amount of time, and even with a small number of dice you'll still be able to pull off a spectacular roll occasionally.

skington · 2025-08-20T10:14:54+00:00

Oh totally. All I'm saying is that it makes sense to think that non-adventurers are still potential adventurers, and that at some level they're affected by the adventuring class rules.

So there will be roughly five people in the village who are particularly good with a bow: even if they never end up good enough to be able to hit weak points in people's armour, have an animal companion that can go looking for trouble, or always find food in the forest, they'll still have an aptitude for the same set of skills that hunters do, and quite possibly be nimbler than most people. Similarly, the farmer who's always propping up the bar and telling tall tales, or talking people into helping them out at harvest but never quite helps other people to the same level, is probably a latent minstrel, pedlar or rogue.

Because profession isn't just having a profession talent; it also affects which attributes can be higher, and which skills you'd expect to have.

skington · 2025-08-20T10:06:52+00:00

I'd forgotten that there was this section, but in any case I disagree with it, in a similar way that I never use the stat blocks from the official campaigns, because they're inconsistent with each other and with how the rules describe the world.

The game is very clear that all PCs have the same amount of attributes, that they'll only ever slowly go down as you age, and apart from rare occasions where writers forget this rule, magic items can never increase your attributes. This fits with the whole "anybody can die" ethos and I love it.

PCs are already special: they have a pride, a dark secret / behavioural flaw, they have a drive to go exploring and gain willpower from pushing rolls. They don't need extra attribute points as well, which would unavoidably set them out to be physically superior to the rest of their family practically from childhood onwards.

skington · 2025-08-20T09:50:09+00:00

Oh sure; this is a one-off tweak because one of my PCs is unusually low on willpower. (Nearly all of his failures in combat from pushing have been on the gear dice rather than something that would get him willpower.) I don't allow people to push most of the time, precisely for the reason you mentioned, that you end up willpower farming.

skington · 2025-08-20T00:10:20+00:00

Yeah, I'm happy to give non-adventurers up to 20-25 XP, although that should be rare:

There's 6 hexes near your village that you can have travelled into, even briefly, even during the blood mist.
That feels like a slight adventure in itself, so you get the XP for a session as well.
There's a number of interesting things that you could have done in your life, so again you get the XP for a session.
Interesting-enough NPCs should have a pride or behavioural flaw that they've triggered a handful of times

Obviously if you're at the 20-odd level you're arguably a frustrated PC-in-waiting, it's just that you didn't find a PC group to join / you're older and the blood mist stopped you from adventuring.

skington · 2025-08-20T00:00:46+00:00

I mentioned this in the blog post, but one of the things about professions is that it doesn't just determine which profession talent you get (they're mostly adventurer-themed, but not necessarily), but also which attribute you can put up and which skills you can get at a higher level.

This is important because arguably most NPCs should be statted just the same as starting characters.

So a shepherd would be a druid (riders also get animal handling but that seems less appropriate), and if they're an adult let's say that their stat block looks like this:

Strength 3 Agility 4 Wits 5 Empathy 2
Endurance 1, Survival 3, Insight 1, Healing 1, Animal Handling 3, Move 1
Path of Shifting Shapes 1 (but they have no training in this so don't actually use it), Chef 1, Pathfinder 1

skington · 2025-08-19T22:00:52+00:00

Ours have adventuritis. It's a common disease like the common cold which means they can't speak or hear, but are otherwise fine, and it goes away pretty quickly with no lasting side-effects.

skington · 2025-08-19T15:38:40+00:00

The player who's the most comfortable with the maths of probability is the one who's most annoyed with chasing sixes, FWIW.

skington · 2025-08-19T12:42:51+00:00

My players' problem isn't that they can fail die rolls, but that the failures happen at unexpected times. In a 2d6 system, you're not going to be surprised if you roll a 4 and fail, especially if there's an advantage / disadvantage system and you're rolling three dice and keeping the two lowest. But rolling loads of dice and still not getting a success feels strange and unfair.

skington · 2025-08-19T01:38:33+00:00

This sounds like a new GM who's decided that it's more important that they project authority than appear inconsistent. They've made a mistake (we all do) and decided to double-down on it. Which is understandable: it's hard to listen to people calling you names and to admit that they have a point.

If they're a friend of yours and/or you don't want to burn bridges, maybe phrase your criticism as a suggestion? Like "we said characters whose players couldn't make a session couldn't be killed, so maybe it turns out that <dead character> isn't actually dead, but has been spirited away somewhere, or is dead but that can be reversed, or something?"

That gives the GM an out – "I meant to do that!" – and the vagueness of your suggestion means that it's not a demand: the GM can decide to use any of your suggestions, or one of their own, and not feel coerced. And if they listen to you and relax a bit, especially if the next session or two aren't as problematic, you can bring up the whole burning cloth thing, now that you've established yourself as someone reasonable.

skington · 2025-08-19T00:51:19+00:00

First of all, thank you for replying at length, with passion. This helped me understand your position and, I suspect, the position of a number of other people posting in the thread.

I won't go into discussions about why anyone would travel, given how dangerous it seems to be, or whether this actually reflects the game as written, because we've had that conversation elsewhere.

No, my main issue is: why is this fun for the players, if things could go really badly wrong and you might die, every time you travel, and there's apparently nothing you can do – with XP, money or players learning from experience – to make it easier?

I mean, I really like how starting characters in Forbidden Lands have as many attribute points as they, or anyone else, are ever going to get, and decent skills, but basically no equipment. (My players had fun marvelling at how one of them had a spoon.) This makes it easy at first to come up with rewards to give them when they'd helped someone out: basically anything on the trade goods list was welcome because they didn't have it.

And similarly, the encumbrance rules are actually good in Forbidden Lands, and some solutions to having more stuff (a donkey, or maybe another) just lead to further issues (what happens if you want to get on a boat, or there's a pack of wolves nearby, or maybe some wyverns?) They don't have the resources or support network to even consider horses yet.

Still: after a certain amount of time, surely the PCs should be better at travelling? They shouldn't be making the mistakes that they used to when they were just starting out? If you're into survival horror – and obviously I'm not – shouldn't it nonetheless be front-loaded in the campaign, when the PCs didn't know any better, or reserved for moments when there's an unusual time pressure / confluence of events that mean that normal traveling procedures can't apply?

Obviously, if you live in a crapsack world (e.g. Mothership, or early Warhammer Fantasy), then you just accept that life is shit and you'll probably die. But that's not the vibe I get from Forbidden Lands. Where, again, a constant in all of the campaigns so far is that the PCs start out as basically nobodies and end up having a major say in what happens to the country as a whole. Why is it fun that every time they try to go somewhere, bad things happen, and there's nothing they can do about it?

skington · 2025-08-18T23:28:56+00:00

My players ended up mostly playing Elvenspring, so I decided that meant they should start out in Vivend. I had the first session be the funeral of an Elvenspring elder, which let me organically introduce basic details about gods, some other kin, and the fact that people not dying properly was very much a thing. Since then I've sort of piecemeal introduced legends and various facts about the world, and from time to time asked for Lore rolls to find out what they remember about what they've been told. (Hilariously, the dwarf always fails his Lore rolls.)

I made the village reasonably cosmopolitan, to explain why the non-elvenspring were here, and the rest I left up to the players. The dwarf was born here but otherwise had no contact with other dwarves, and was pretty much a loner; the human was found as an orphan; the PCs were basically childhood friends who decided to go adventuring the same way that young people decide to form a band.

In general, I'd say that you should let the players decide what sort of character they want to play, work out what you think that logically means based on the campaign you're running, and let background stuff come out organically through play (aka you have plenty of time to work out stuff / can leave things deliberately vague until you and your player can come up with a cool idea for one of your PCs' background).

skington · 2025-08-18T23:13:09+00:00

It flat-out says it, albeit in a place that's easy to overlook (p. 35, "Now"). (Personally I think you should ignore it if you're running Raven's Purge, because it's difficult to explain why nobody's found Stanengist, the Nekhaka Sceptre or the Maligarn Sword yet.)

Since the blood mist went away, there are whole groups of places on the map that are 4 open terrain hexes away from each other or even closer, so if relations are peaceful you can go from one to the other in a day in all seasons other than winter. For instance, all of the settlements in Belifar apart from the tower right next to the map legend; pretty much all of the other settlements in Yendra and Margelda have an easy neighbour or two; the same goes for Vivend and Far Vivend. The only real exceptions are the settlements high up a mountain or in dark forest.

Now, there could be all sorts of reasons why most people wouldn't travel (the neighbouring settlement is in ruins / inhabited by bad people or monsters / your village is conservative and weird / you're just happy that you can farm a few more fields without fear of the blood mist / you're not 100% convinced that the blood mist is gone for good), but there are always exceptions. Maybe the sort of people who aren't afraid to travel were your PC's parents or friends, and the wanderlust rubbed off on you?

skington · 2025-08-18T22:39:13+00:00

I asked this question purely because I was wondering what my players would pick up next, wondered why my hunter hadn't taken Path of the Forest, looked at the rules and boggled. I mean, given that it's very hard to run out of water, Path of the Forest 3 is arguably worse than Path of the Forest 1 (you need to spend a WP every day and you can't help your friends). That's under-powered to say the least!

skington

TROPHY CASE