#fbl

🌌Retrowave wolf🌌

Howdy everyone ! Here's a comission i made for Algol Tear for the FBL this year !

It was so much fun to do this badge, i it's always a pleasure to do some neon / retrowave pieces !

I hope you will like it as much as i do ! ^.^

Doorsign commission done for Mel' and Gigi L'apostrophe for this year's Furry Blacklight convention :>

We'll be live in about 30 (7pm ET) minutes on my jobs twitch!

The support would mean a lot to our group as we wrap up campaign one.

(This is a post from my old Blogspot, dated July 19th, 2022)

The cover art for Free League's Forbidden Lands

My favourite back-end engine / system of any RPG has got to be Free League's Year Zero Engine; specifically the 3-colour variant. It's an ingenious way to merge narrative, tactics, exploration, management, and character mechanics into something simple and quick, yet strangely simulative. A great example of this very specific variant of the Year Zero Engine is the Forbidden Lands RPG - my first foray into Free League's fantastic game catalogue.

I first ran Forbidden Lands with a small group of only 2 players, one of whom created a travelling merchant that went by the striking name of "Morshu" (yes, that Morshu), whilst the other played "Garm"; a much more serious character to contrast the obviously goofy partnership that needed to flourish between the two party members. Garm was a cold-blooded wolfkin fighter, whilst Morshu was a rather spherical half-elf merchant. This blogpost will tell the story of the first 1-2 sessions, and what fuzzy memories I have of what occurred within them - and I'll also explain some interesting ideas the system has on display too.

Morshu. Yes, this is what I have to work with.

The Blood Mist. A catastrophic event caused by the careless sorcerers of the past wherein demonic entities were summoned from another realm alongside a thick, crimson fog. The Raven Lands, a once (questionably) peaceful area was completely covered and surrounded, and news quickly spread that anyone of whom stepped foot into its horrifying smog would never step foot out of it again. Was it the mist killing the people, or was it the creatures lurking deep within it's concealment?

Relatably as of late, this terrifying time caused the people to stay inside and to not venture too far from home if possible; the only exceptions being the Wolfkin, a race of humanoid creatures that bore canine heads; some say it was because they were born of demons themselves. Wolfkin could venture into the mist with relative ease, though only within the forests - if they dared venture into the open plains they'd be torn apart just the same as everyone else. The Blood Mist lingered and lingered and lingered, for a very, very long time...

Garm, our wolfkin fighter.

Until now. Our story begins only a few weeks after the Blood Mist had been lifted, and seemingly everything once surrounded by it began to flourish and live again. What remained was an overgrown world filled with relics and treasures of old; but the lands were unexplored, and so no-one knows exactly how safe it is to venture forth still. Desperate, many folk didn't particularly care for the dangers. They got out. They were free. After so long, a full century of waiting, or for most the very first time in their lives, they could wander their homeland once again - and rumours spread of treasures left by the unlucky folk who first discovered the danger of the crimson fog.

The party began in a rather uninteresting plane, long grass sprouting around small, winding desire paths made by both folk and animal that came before. Morshu had always dreamed of being the most well known and respected salesman in the Raven Lands, and by The Nightwalker; if these rumours about the artifacts of old still being out there were true, then they'd fit well upon the shelves of Morshu's grand shop. Garm, hired by Morshu, led the way, knowing the world well thanks to his heritage, as well as being a mighty fine swordsman for whenever a blade is required.

 After setting up a few camps and hiking across the way, it didn't take long until they came across a few other opportunistic travellers; bandits, to be exact. After a rather firm, uh, "request", for the travelling duo's food and gold. One swift glimpse of these rough looking characters would unveil their own struggles; they were starving, completely malnourished, no matter how hard they tried to hide it with their tough act.

Either way, this clear act of hostility got Garm brandishing his blade at a rather suspiciously bloodthirsty pace, and combat commenced. This is where I'll get a little nerdy about the system, as it took both players and I off guard at how quickly the encounter was over and done with. You see, in Forbidden Lands you don't have a flat stat for your "Health" or "Hit Points", instead you only have your core attributes.

Each point you have in these attributes represents a 6-sided die you roll when you perform an action that calls for that specific check. Any 6s you roll are successes. However, going back to the comment about the lack of a health track, this system simulates pain and injury through quite literally using those attributes as your health. Get hit by a club? Your strength goes down. Over-exert yourself? Your agility goes down. Terrified? Your wits go down. Depressed? Your empathy goes down. With every step, your chances to succeed go down, as you use less dice to perform those specific attribute-related actions. The scariest part? Even though you can evolve and progress your character to make them more powerful, these attributes never change. Your health never bloats. You get more options, but you're just as easy to put down as you are when you've just started out.

The attributes of Forbidden Lands. Yes, 6 is the absolute maximum. Yes, that means you'll have barely anything in any other attributes if you do that.

Now, a 6 on a 6-sided die? Anyone who's played Arkham Horror before will tell you that sounds like horrible odds, no matter your amount of dice. You do have skills (red dice) and gear (black dice) that can also come into play and help you out, but one particularly interesting mechanic is the ability to push your roll. You can choose to set aside all your 6s and 1s, and re-roll everything else. Great right? Well, every 1 you roll on your base attributes (white dice) damage your attribute as if you've been hit, simulating you pushing yourself too hard, whilst every 1 you roll on your gear (black dice) will damage your equipment, so your very blade may snap off of it's hilt mid-combat! Skills (red dice) are the only ones that don't inflict a bad condition when you roll a 1.

Now, you're probably thinking that that sounds like a horribly punishing push-your-luck mechanic, and it is a bit; however, another great thing comes of it. Every time you unfortunately damage yourself due to pushing, you gain a willpower point per the amount of damage you took. Willpower is a tracked stat you can spend to perform some extraordinary actions and even cast magical spells! So yeah, it's mean, but risking it is certainly tempting...

Anyways, that tangent went on for too long. Swords were swung and insults were hurled, and in only 2 rounds or so, it was done. However, it was done in a rather peculiar manner. You may be thinking a lot of blood was shed within that swift bit of action and that the underfed corpses of bandits painted the wild plants a deep shade of red, but you'd be wrong. You see, whilst people did indeed get hit and struck, some falling to the floor suffering from small injuries, it was all over thanks to one particularly interesting weapon - Morshu's sharp tongue.

You see, the leader was so down on his luck, and his posse was so depressed and desperate, that one mere insult from the unusually wide half-elf sent him spiralling, dropping to his hands and knees and crying, apologising as he'd gained a new Mental Horror - a personality shift. The bandit didn't want to do this anymore, and his fellow thieves surrendered as he apologised, following their leader to the end. Morshu, pleased with this, graciously donated some food to the group, forever immortalising him as a kind man in the eyes of this group, and forming a story that will spread across the Raven Lands swiftly, no doubt about it; gaining the merchant a reputation point, something that helps notify the GM which characters recognise him from the rumours in the future.

The Sharp Tongue talent and all it's ranks. The double swords are successes.

After that escapade, the party ventured forth towards a small fort in the distance. As they neared their destination, great, dark clouds rolled over the sky and hard rain fell upon the party. The cold spread throughout their bodies fast. They needed to get to this fort, and quickly. The great wooden gates were worn and unkempt, a century gone by without any care left the hinges rotted and the great wall around it crumbling. Conversation could be heard from inside, and as our beloved duo pushed their way inside, eyes glared towards the newly arrived individuals, and weapons were drawn. "Who goes there? What business do you have in Rust Keep?" a well-armed soldier spoke, biting down on every word that escaped his helmet.

After a short while attempting to convince the guards that they were safe and simply adventurers needing somewhere to stay, the guards cautiously accepted their new squatters - but only for a day, and a favour in return. Two cylindrical buildings rested within the walls of this fortress, but the guards seemingly only use one. The other building has been used in the past, but odd noises and a generally discomforting atmosphere had spread throughout it's decievingly cosy interior. Garm and Morshu can stay here tonight, as long as they investigate.

First though, the group decided to hunt and forage for some extra food for themselves and the soldiers to make a good impression upon them, and through some extra, rather well worded manipulation, some of the soldiers agreed to come along and aid them in their investigation, and Garm was even given some extra equipment to use by one soldier by the name of John, a polite man of whom was happy to help our travellers out.

The deafening silence hit like a brick as soon as the party and their soldier followers set foot into the building. Eerie. That's the only word that could describe such an atmosphere, as if this very building was once alive and breathing in the past, and all that life had been snuffed out of it. Something is definitely wrong here. No investigation was needed to find that out.

The ground floor had barely anything left; it was easy to tell that the soldiers once slept here; bedrolls and fur rags were abandoned on the ground still - just from a sound? Such swift abandonment seemed a little overkill for just a sound. Slowly but surely the ragtag group made their way up to the first floor, and awaiting them there was something truly terrifying; unorganised storage. Boxes and barrels piled up rather dangerously atop one another with rotten and rusted materials still left within.

Rummaging around in this room revealed the ugly truth however; as perhaps the rotten smell wasn't just the stored food going off, but perhaps it was more to do with the decaying corpses hidden behind the crates. Their bodies were covered in growths and doused in disgusting liquids that had seeped from the plethora of boils that had completely covered their bodies prior to their death. What's worse was that after a quick inspection, they started to move. 

Some examples of the undead from the Gamemaster's Guide.

Deep lacerations, decapitation and bolts through the skull. Combat was swift, creatures were broken in single hits and our party was smart with their decisions. Before I continue on, I want to nerd out a bit once more to talk about death in the system, and why I love it. This system is brutal, as you can already envision by just reading the fact that your health never bloats, but something that's really interesting is that it aids in the narrative even if characters get beaten to hell and back. 

Every time you reach 0 in an attribute, you break. If you break due to a physical injury, you roll on a big critical injuries table. This table ranges from broken toes, to severed limbs and of course, instant (or near instant) death. The interesting thing here is that the latter is rare. Breaking is common, but it's very uncommon that you'll just instantly die; instead it gives you a lasting effect that will linger for a while (or sometimes forever) and warp the narrative in interesting ways, as well as open up new roleplaying opportunities (especially with mental horrors, which is a table you roll on when you break from mental damage). If you do get broken, any intelligent creature will find it hard to put an end to your life. Coup de grace is not an easy action to pull off. You have to fail an empathy check and spend willpower to kill someone when they're on the ground, still writhing. There are ways to build more sadistic characters who don't follow those same rules, but for the most part, this is a super clever way of making the danger of dying a lot more interesting.

Anyways, rant over - back to the story: Every one of the undead humans that once perished here had perished once again - hopefully for good, this time. After exchanging some thanks and lugging the disgusting bodies down and out of the fort carefully, the party rested up and slept around a small fire lit in the centre of the fortress alongside the soldiers. The night passed by smoothly, and in the morning the party gave their farewells and thanks, as did the soldiers. John let Garm keep the equipment he'd given him the day prior, making him the only human Garm has ever appreciated the company of.

That's where it all ended. We finished up the game and calculated the player's experience points, which I'll happily nerd out for a bit again to explain: Experience is handed out at the end of every session, and can be spent throughout a quarter-day (6 hours) to practice skills or pick up new talents. Experience is calculated by answering yes or no to a series of questions asked by the GM. 

The experience-calculating questionnaire.

This is incredibly clever, and really encourages more activities than just killing creatures to get stronger. You may notice some oddities there too, those of which I haven't explained yet. Strongholds are home-bases you can make / capture to have a safe place to return to and manage. You can fill it with workers and all sorts of functions to help your party out. Your pride is a very specific skill your character prides themselves on. If the specific situation ever comes up and you fail your check, you can roll a big 12-sided artifact die atop that once per session. If you fail, you lose your pride in performing that task, and have to come up with a new pride for the next session. A dark secret is a specific part of your backstory that still haunts you, and the GM can throw things into the session to set it off and mess with the party. Suffering gets you experience though, so that's nice, I guess?

Before I finish up this post, I want to reveal a twist. I am a Game Master through and through, even if I adore being on the player side of RPGs nothing beats the thrill of putting all your creativity down on the table right in front of your friends and hoping to invoke emotion with every word you utter - whether it be intrigue from narrative description, or (more commonly) laughter from stupid ideas coming into fruition. That being said, I didn't do anything for this session. Not one thing was prepared, it was all riffed. This entire system holds itself up without even needing to prepare anything. Don't get me wrong, you absolutely can (and probably should), but this entire adventure was randomised to an insane degree, and it worked insanely well somehow! All the encounters, areas, hindrances, and even the weather events were randomly generated. My players were essentially taking part in a roguelike on the tabletop. I still run in this randomly generated world of mine and am confident it'll hold up, but I do run prepared scenarios within it now at least.

Rust Keep, the randomly generated fortress our party explored. See where I pulled the encounter ideas from?

I love this system. If you want a brutal, yet heavy-on-the-narrative RPG then this is a fantastic one to go for. It's great for pretty much everything. Usually with narrative games the combat is lackluster, but it'll even entertain the combat fans with its interesting systems (Forbidden Lands even has a strange, optional hidden-card combat system, which is pretty unique, albeit I haven't played with that yet.) Fantasy not your style? This isn't the only Year Zero Engine game either. There's a whole lot. Post-apocalyptic gonzo goodness, more serious, war-focused post-apocalyptic settings, Arabian Nights in space, 1800s Scandinavian horror, hell - even Alien; an official setting for fans of the movies.

...Sort of...

Over 500 pages of letters written by author H. P. Lovecraft to his friend, author Frank Belknap Long (creator of the Hounds of Tindalos) are about to be sold by a private collector. To prevent them from disappearing from public knowledge, the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society has partnered with literary scholars S. T. Joshi & David E. Schultz, and Hippocampus Press publisher Derrick Hussey to raise the funds necessary for Brown University to buy the letters and make them public.

Here's where you, gentle reader, enter the picture: You can donate to the HPLHS to support this endeavor. Click the link below for more details, and to strike a blow for the increase and diffusion of knowledge!

After a couple days work we finally have things up and running!

The link to the Discord server can be found here (If it stops working please lmk and I’ll update it)

We’ll be streaming as many live matches as possible in the server, starting with tomorrow’s Bayern/Freiburg game.

Match schedules/Team & League information etc, consider this the space to read and chat about the league, it’s teams and the players.

We also have a little score prediction game going on where the winner at the end of the season will win a team scarf of their choice!