A few years back I ran a campaign called Hyperdrift Stories, which combined two different games in effect. You could play as part of the starship Tempest’s crew, or you could play in a strategic game as one of the major factions in Settled Space. We got in about 18 sessions with the Tempest crew and played around 8 turns with the strategic game. Now, I want to do something like this again, but I have some different approaches. I’m running a cyberpunk campaign that is open table - anyone can join. The campaign is set in New Ashford, a mega city with many arcologies, cities buried under cities and powerful corporations locked in a strained alliance.  The abstract map of the city.  What I’ve done with this campaign is set up two systems (for now) that pertain to how you play. Downtime is handled in a very specific “ Citizen Sleeper ”-style gameplay, where each turn lasts a real-time week. In this system you can explore the city, meet new characters and manage resources. This part...

The following is a very simple method I use for roleplaying that is easy to understand and quick to play with. Whenever there is an impactful or important situation with a chance of failure or some sort of uncertainty, I like to ask for a roll. Success just depends on if you roll high or not. Generally, if you roll higher than the average of your die, then that’s a good sign. Rolls of 1 or close to 1 can be intuitively interpreted as “bad”.  Image generated with Midjourney.  With this framework I’ve arbitrarily decided that a healthy and capable human should in most situations roll a d6. It’s the baseline.  If there are setbacks or hindrances, then roll a d4.  With the right equipment, experience or training, roll a d8.  If exceptionally skilled, prepared or generally suited to the situation, roll a d10.  If circumstances are extremely advantaged somehow, roll a d12.  The advantage of this approach is that you get almost instant communication to both y...

I’m preparing to run a Roadside Picnic’ish setting soon using 2400 . There’s one of Jason Tocci’s microgames that already cover this type of setting, but I want to make some additions on top of that. The idea is to run a realtime campaign for a quarantine zone set in the year 1983.  Picture by Tobias Wahlquist , used with permission. I changed the advancement rule to match the pace of the campaign, so the notation for the character creation is slightly different too. In typical 2400 games, the skill level is expressed in dice notation.  Advancement: You can advance your skills by training a number of weeks equal to your Skill Total (add together all skill ranks) + the next rank. Advancing a skill rank grants a better skill die: OPERATORS Choose a speciality.  BUNKER RAT: Advance (rank 1) any two skills from Climbing, Navigation, Running or Stealth. Take one good outdoors outfit and choose between fair camping gear or climbing gear.  FIGHTER: Advance (rank 1) any tw...

This post is my attempt to lay bare how to play a roleplaying game using FKR methods. I will presume no prior experience. Actually, I will presume you don’t even have a roleplaying game. It’s alright, you won’t need one. Mind you, this post is still just a brief overview. Each of the topics I cover here are just barely scratching the tips of their respective icebergs.    Dreams by Rogier Hoekstra via Pixabay. Image used with permission. How to roleplay First off, roleplaying is not acting. It is not stage-play. Instead, it is about saying or doing things that you would do given a role. That’s it. It might even sound familiar, like play pretend. What you and your friends at the table will be doing is using roleplay to set up an ongoing fiction or narrative. When you roleplay, you are basically addressing the ‘facts’ that are in the fiction. Depending on your role, you could change or add facts to the fiction. If you’re in a room with a sarcophagus, you might want to examine so...

I’ve been running and playing in various 2400 and Into the Odd games lately. These are two games that exist in the rules light part of the roleplaying games spectrum. Both games are quite ruthless in their approach to combat. 2400 doesn’t have combat rules per se, but offers a catch-hall saving throw rule. Into the Odd famously has auto-hit with some damage reduction based on armor. I've got some thoughts about both games. Illustration by Richard Duijnstee , used with permission.  

So part of the conceit of Free Kriegsspiel is that the Referee depends on their experience and knowledge of the world to drive the game. That’s great and all, but what about magic? There’s no way to have live experience with that, so there’s only one way out of that. You have to know something about the world you’re running.  Magic! How hard can it be? Image by GraphicMama , used with permission. A typical corollary question of “how do you do magic?” is “how do you handle damage?” which is also a question that keeps popping up. Many newcomers to the FKR way are often already familiar with roleplaying games that quantify damage, and will likely try to find a one-to-one heuristic to deal with that. To help answer this question, I typically ask another question: “What’s the in-world answer to this?”  Many fantasy worlds already present magic systems of various kinds, such as the channeling in Wheel of Time to the element bending featured in Avatar: The Last Airbender. These world...

In the last 12 or so months, I’ve been delving deep into the FKR rabbit hole. It has thoroughly changed the way I play and let me focus more on adventures than ever before. For example, writing things like stat blocks and looking up rules are now a thing of the past. But there are some issues that I think also need to be addressed. In this post I’m going to talk about something I call the “Owl Problem”. How hard can it be? Okay, what’s the deal with bringing owls into this? Well, it’s inspired by the meme above, but related to running rules-light games. In my experience, newcomers to the hobby have almost no issue in joining a session and playing as a PC. However, as a newcomer to running a session, most rules-light games offer little to no guidance.  One central idea to free kriegsspiel is that the referee can just dispense with rules and dice in favor of relying on their experience. This worked out a lot for prussian officers, but a beginner in the ttrpg world doesn't have the sa...

 Last week I wrote about how I run games , but I felt I had more to say on the prep part, so here we are. A more detailed example of how I prep. I decided I wanted to run a sci-fi game, after finding some inspiration from recently watching Cowboy Bebop and playing the new Guardians of the Galaxy game. Since it’s December, I decided I wanted a christmas theme to it and keep it to a one-shot. I just wanted a sci-fi hit again. So I started thinking about what I wanted for this one-shot. The requirements were that it should be playable in 2 hours and feel satisfactory as a one-shot. Matt Colville once said in a video that you could roughly fit 5 encounters in a session - he was talking about 5e and probably a longer session. I think 5 encounters works for 2 hours if you’re doing it free kriegsspiel style. So with that in mind, I figured salvaging a small ship could be a neat little mission. For laughs, I decided to theme it as a sci-fi version of Santa’s sled - except it’s a spaceship...

This is a non-exhaustive tour of how I run games. I might make more posts like this in the future. I don’t think of this as a practical guide, but more of a reflection of how I think I run games.  Me, preparing for a session. Illustration by Bert ! Prep If I’m preparing for a session with new players that I don’t know well, I typically start out with some safety talk. Lines and veils, X Cards and such are features I make available. These are great to prevent uncomfortable or harmful experiences in play.  I think things through. Usually I do this whenever my brain has idle time. I might be in the shower or on a hike. What I think about are where the players might want to go, what kind of encounters there might be,  and what other events might influence the session. Thinking through these things once makes it easier for me to recall and run in sessions later.  I also map out places by making node graphs. I think they are more flexible and useful than gridded maps. I do...

Centuries ago, on the eve of Winter Solstice, the city of Rabenstadt was swallowed in its entirety and placed in the Nether. The unfortunate citizens were completely oblivious to this event, damned to relive the same day and night in perpetuity.  A day and night of a merciless blizzard, bloody riots, strange rituals and a secret revealed deep underground.  In this city, Baron Tiberius of House Hirschberg schemes to enchant the Count’s son through vampiric means. The Third Eye , a secret cult, works to complete a ritual to conjure an otherworldly material. In the shadows, devout servants from the Order of Saint Vidar hunt their sworn enemies - vampires and sorcerers.  Inspiration: Neuschwanstein Castle . Source: Pixabay . The City There are four crucial locations in Rabenstadt. In the Castle , the nobility gather for their annual Winter Ball. The wealthy citizens in the Upper District have engaged the army to keep angry protesters out. At the University , rumors have i...

 

I’ve cooked up a setting recently, which I’ve called Netherlight. Prime sources of inspiration are Treasure Planet and Warhammer (both fantasy and 40k). I want to call it “pulse rifle fantasy” in a nod to “flintlock fantasy”. I’ve been playing Netherlight using a modification of 24XX . 24XX, the SRD of the 2400 micro games by Jason Tocci, is an absolute gem of a game. What I like about it is how easy it is to run, especially with a FKR mindset. No wonder I want to adopt it as a framework for my Netherlight project. Incidentally, I stumbled on an issue when it came to making an item list for my setting. Here’s how 2400 describes its weapons: PISTOL: Upgrade with auto, DNA-lock, flechette-firing, call-to-hand, self-destruct, silenced. RIFLE: Bulky, accurate at longer ranges than pistol. Upgrade with anti-materiel, auto, collapsible, DNA-lock, flechette-firing, grenade attachment, identify friend/foe, scope. Keep in mind, 2400 is a cyberpunk setting, so it’s pretty easy to imagine how a...

So we’re well into 2021 and I decided it could be interesting to look a bit at the developments in the FKR. There’s been some coverage on Questing Beast’s Glatisant, but the mentions are brief and few. I decided I wanted to highlight a bit what’s going on, starting out with the Itch.io FKR tag .    I’ll go through each product and briefly describe them. In this post, I’ll go over 25 of them.  The order is basically “as is” on the page, so “Popular”. Note that the order will likely change over time, so I just took it “as it was” when I wrote it. Cosmogony  Gnarled Monster’s Cosmogony  is a Free Kriegsspiel wargame that deals with the creation of a world. Become gods, build civilizations and bring it all crashing down afterwards. It’s a nice pamphlet game and if you’re into games like Microscope, then this might be something for you.  24XX System Reference Documents Jason Tocci made a “killer app” when it comes to rules ultralight roleplaying games. His 2400 ...

So I am running a Star Wars campaign for my regular group these days. They are in a remote sector of the Outer Rim, looking for a spaceship that holds the secrets of the Jedi Archives. They are not alone in this sector, however. There are other factions at large. New Republic patrols, Bounty hunters, Imperial remnants, local hegemons, etc.  One faction planning an attack on another faction. So what I could do, is to just get the free version of Stars Without Number  and check out the Factions chapter. I usually recommend it to others. I have used it in several games, including the more recent Revenant Sector game I am running.  However, for this new campaign, I want to try something different. I want to Free Kriegsspiel it a bit. I’ve talked about Free Kriegsspiel in the context of roleplaying , but in this case, it will be about factions. So I am making a factions game to supplement your roleplaying game. The game is inspired by Free Kriegsspiel, Kriegsspiel Chess, Stars...