After a very long hiatus, here's a new version of my home system, After the Lords of Memory.
After the Lords of Memory v0.23
If you haven't followed along:
Like many games, probably, the impetus for writing it lies somewhere between an elaborate preparation for a specific campaign and a laborious expression of my preferences.
Inspired by the wave of chopped-down, very short systems like World of Dungeons, Knave, and so on, this is me clearing the decks, keeping only what is definitely the solid core. Something small enough to share (possibly even right on game night) and clearly communicate expectations.
This is not a "complete" game. There's nothing on creatures, buying things, treasure, or moving around in the wilderness. (All that is left to the GM.) Nor is the text edited!
This version still doesn't meet all of my original design goals. As I summarized in 2019:
The core works, it's been playtested in a home game over a period of years--you can make characters, take them places, adventure, fight, advance, get injured and so on.
However, the whole point of writing this game was to enable a particular campaign style, and that hasn't emerged organically from my playtest campaign. If you read the design goals post, essentially what you get is a fairly simple, theatre-of-the-mind game where grubby villagers go forth and either die or become heroes. You don't get geographic advancement.
However, this does feel like a chassis to heading towards them once more.
First up, Rituals. One of the (aspirational) sources of geographic advancement are the secret demands that players. These were just buried by complexity. In this version, hopefully, they'll operate a little more like the player-facing quest generator they were meant to.
Anyways, here we are for now!
Love this! Reminds me of Shadowrun and Degenesis, but with much smaller dice pools. Sharing it all over social media. ;)
ReplyDeleteThanks, Matt! This owes a lot to Torchbearer/Burning Wheel, but stripped down and then heading off in a slightly different direction, much like the many lightweight d20-ish games do with B/X.
DeleteMy expectation would be that skills AND stats contribute dice to a roll. But as written only the skill dice are rolled. Oversight?
ReplyDeleteNo, that's intentional. Stat ratings influence the starting value of skills, rather than having to add them in all the time. It does mean that if stats improve, that doesn't influence skills, but I find this is in the margins in terms of effect as skills advance fairly quickly.
DeleteI have started a translation of this system (french) for my WestMarches campaign. That's what I was looking for ! I nonetheless have a comment about that Skill vs Stat issue : my character started with Sway 4, and Command 2. But rolling 4d against /+1 is easier than rolling 2d : he would be better off without the skill... Could be seen as a "learning phase" where the PC must put aside his/her instincts and habits, but that's a bit of a stretch, don't you think ?
DeleteYou're correct! Assuming you're talking about barking orders, Sway 4d/1 will generate more successes than Command 2d/0 most of the time, but this is an extremely brief learning period. 2d skills become 3d skills very quickly, especially if you're spending favor on them. It will take 3 tests and 1 or 2 favor to get to 3d, at which point you're already better than Sway 4d.
DeleteI'm probably going to be playing this, using your adventures and such. Got a character sheet to share? I think I'll use a google sheets document if you don't have one to use.
ReplyDeleteCheers!
Good luck with it. Unfortunately, no, there's no official character sheet for this edition!
DeleteI was able to run the original ALM release by putting all party members and the hired henchmen in one shared google spreadsheet. One character per column! Name, stats, skills, HP, conditions, XP, equipment, finally total burdens. Append pipe characters to things to track marks / ticks. Generating new characters was a breeze.
DeleteJust got pointed to this and it's really cool.
ReplyDelete