It’s a strange feeling to switch from watching The Expanse S06 to Andor S01.
With the recent OGL discussion, my thoughts are back with Helmbarten, my German Fantasy 2d6 game, which was translated into English as Halberts by @frotz and @phf and play-tested by @PresGas and the three of us. I was wondering how to provide a zero-to-hero experience using it.
As it stands, you roll on your career tables, betting that you’ll survive and get better vs. strokes of fate taking you out. After a while, you decide you’re done. Your character won’t advance in levels, learn new skills, get better, or any of that. That all happened during character generation. Now the adventure begins.
In the first edition of Das Schwarze Auge (engl. The Dark Eye), which I played in the eighties and nineties, you rolled up characters and they had to qualify for classes with minimum attributes. When you didn’t qualify for any class, you were a generic adventurer – a traveller, so to say. As you gained levels, you increased your attributes, and when you finally did qualify, you picked your class.
So now I’m thinking: OK, let’s start the game after rolling attributes, no skills. I’ll call it Knives.
Knives. This is a variant of the *Halberts* game where your character doesn’t start fully fleshed out. Instead, you start as a young adult, with nothing but a knife. And you’re not trained in knife fighting.
A bit like Knaves, I guess! We share some ideas: a large list of spells for Knaves, a large list of spell skills for Knives; starting as generic adventurers. I’ll talk about the differences in a bit. It comes down to me not wanting any money and inventory management. Anyway, back to characters.
In Halberts character generation you gain one skill point per year. You can’t really pick the skill, but you can pick the career table to roll on, so you get to pick the pool of six skills one which you’ll roll. It’s not too bad.
In D&D, you can go from zero to hero in just a few games, depending on how you play it. I don’t want that for Knives. I’d still like to play this like Halberts character generation. So you get an advancement once per in-game year. If you think about advancement happening once per adventure, that makes me think we should think about this like King Arthur Pendragon: There is an adventuring season. People go on the adventure in summer, then they return home, work the fields, bring in the harvest, cut wood, help build their communities, raise a barn, study. It might work.
Perhaps we can bring in that inter-generational game that works for King Arthur Pendragon. Raise a family. Play your relatives and children. Get a land grant. Build a castle. Defend it against invasion. Build a community. I would love to see this work!
So I’m thinking: What do I need to write in order to get there?
I want to keep that medieval, coin-less world of Halberts. You can’t “buy” things. It’s much too expensive. A lord or lady gives you a gift. You render a service and you are made a knight. You are gifted your sword. You are gifted a horse. Or you take it from people, I guess. I want boons to be a thing.
Therefore, if character generation doesn’t give you skills, weapons, horses, dogs, land grants, positions in gangs, chairs at a school, jobs in the administration of the realm, then we need adventures that give you these. The document I need to write should present a social setting with lords and ladies, secret societies, magic schools, gangs of thieves, mercenary bands, each with missions you can undertake for them, services you can render for them, big and small. Each comes with rewards. Whenever you roll the Fighting skill, you get granted an appropriate weapon, if you don’t have it already.
Would that work for you? Adventure ideas, reward ideas. We could imply a setting, a map, maybe even a timeline. Perhaps the adventures we listed are all appropriate for the time before Karl Martell arrives and plunges everything into war. Then comes a different list of adventure ideas during the warring years. Suddenly, Karls, Ludwigs, Lothars and Pippins show up in the name lists.
I’m still a bit unsure about the role of treasure. If you find the Book of Redemption for Bishop Gregor, you can become a member of the secret society of the Librarian Militia of the Moon. There’s no point in getting rich yourself. The treasure you find allows you to barter for boons: land grants, titles, marriage proposals, memberships in knightly orders, secret societies, and so on. Those would also be part of the setting and adventure book.
Or, another alternative: Don’t write a setting with a timeline, a map, and names – don’t recreate that feeling for The Grand Campaign for King Arthur Pendragon. Instead, write a pamphlet expanding on this blog post. Describe what to aim for, how to do it, with random tables to help you get started. More names. More missions. More treasure. More monsters. Conflicts with neighbours. Invaders. Unrest. Rebellions. Cultists. Wars. Tables. Tables. An essay or two. More tables.
Related:
2022-03-20 A mini-setting to start your Halberts campaign
2023-01-06 Not in the mood for D&D
#RPG #Halberts #2d6 #Knives
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Essays, tables, and a worked example of putting it all together.
– 2023-01-08 04:14 UTC
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First draft:
https://alexschroeder.ch/pdfs/Knives.pdf
– 2023-01-08 22:46 UTC
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The episode on the Nibelungenlied and the Wikipedia page are inspiring me.
An English translation at Project Gutenberg. A German translation at the Internet Archive.
– Alex 2023-01-10 08:22 UTC
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Based on the German Wikipedia page:
All of this I want to see in the game.
I don’t want any gender differences in my game rules – if players bring their preconceptions into the game, so be it. My take on the story is that it is a tale of emancipation, of Kriemhild’s and Brünhild’s struggles. For the rules to make patriarchy mandatory would be misreading it, from my point of view.
I also need to mine the text for names. 😄
– Alex 2023-01-10 12:48 UTC
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I think the generator now has all the things I need for a quick setting-generator: names, rulers, rebels, leaders, monsters, villages, towns, a lake, a mountain, a swamp, an island…
https://campaignwiki.org/lake-land
– Alex 2023-01-17 14:30 UTC