Pseudo-Pseudohistorical Violence: Playtesting and Second Draft

I finally took my rules for a spin! I summarized the events of the sessions below, or you can skip straight to my takeaways. Some of them have made it into my second draft of the rules, which are hosted on my google drive. Feel free to let me know what you think, especially if you actually playtest them!

Session Recaps

The first session was run with Ester, the court wizard, and Sir Caer, the knight. The dockmaster, a subordinate of their liege lord Sir Osric, offers them a bounty of 200gp to investigate sightings of crookhorns near Drumen Knoll. In preparation Ester memorizes shield twice and ignite/extinguish once. The overexertion leaves him exhausted, slowing his movement and inhibiting combat rolls, as well as leaving him with a chance of miscasting one of his shield spells.

The pair wander around in the woods awhile, getting lost, avoiding a passing pair of people, and ending up right back at For Vulgar. Their next expedition into the forest goes well, and they end up at the foot of Drumen Knoll. Ester creeps around the ruined fort atop the knoll, and sees a gathering of four crookhorns drinking and playing music around a campfire. Another keeps watch from a partially-standing tower. Near the campfire, a worn set of stairs leads down under the fort.

After nightfall, Ester uses his spell to extinguish the flame and the two creep down the stairs. Ester casts shield and moves to kill a sleeping two-headed cockerel, which wakes and calls an alarm. Sir Caer and Ester engage a crookhorn that emerges from the room nearby, and Ester’s leg is broken and Sir Caer is seriously injured. The two barricade themself in a room and after a brief attempt at parley, during which Sir Caer attempts to challenge them to a game of chance, the two surrender to the crookhorns.

The second session I ran later that week, with a different set of two people.

Several days after the events of the first session, Phillip (court wizard) & Dallas (woodsman) are summoned by Sir Osric, who offers a bounty for the two of them to locate Sir Caer and Ester, who were last known to be investigating Drumen Knoll. Philip memorizes ingratiate, and the two set off to Drumen Knoll, making it there without incident.

Phillip casts ingratiate on a quill and approaches the archway. When the crookhorns approach, leering at their easy victim, Phillip gifts the quill to one of the crookhorns (Bert), who becomes charmed. Bert leads Phillip over to the campsite and offers him a cooked human leg. The other crookhorns are eager to bash Phillip over the head and tie him up but are willing to go along with whatever Bert seems to be planning.

Phillip sees Ester tied up nearby, frothing at the mouth and with a horribly broken leg. He asks Bert about Sir Caer, and Bert informs him that the two appeared the other day and killed their leader. Sir Caer is currently tied up in the basement.

Meanwhile, Darrel climbs on top of the rubble pile and lines up a crossbow shot at the crookhorn lookout. He fires, shooting the crookhorn’s eye out, but she doesn’t go down. Her screams attract the other crookhorns, who start rushing towards Darrel.

Darrel runs across the crumbling walls and clambers onto the tower, charging the injured crookhorn and shoving her off the edge. During this, two crookhorns approach him from the tower stairwell, while two others climb walls and tower to reach him. He throws a lantern and flask of oil at the two on the stairs, engulfing them in flames; meanwhile the other two make it to the top of the tower. Darrel attempts to charge past the flaming crookhorns and flee down the stairwell, but is rebuffed and then quickly impaled by several spears, taking him down.

In the meantime, Phillip flees down the stairs, hoping to find aid. He unties Sir Caer, but the knight is too injured to be of any help. He flees further, encountering an elf sealed behind a magically locked door, but the elf is of no help, due to the aforementioned entrapment. The crookhorns eventually find Phillip, and Bert cannot convince them not to take Phillip captive.

Takeaways

Combat, as a whole, went pretty well! At times, it was a little time consuming, but some of that was a combination of user error and poor familiarity with the rules (I was applying negative modifiers to the melee roll for injuries, which is not supposed to be a thing). I considered the possibility of having enemies use a static melee DC, but it would severely reduce the swingy-ness of combat, so I am pretty hesitant to do it. Could be a neat trick to pull out in larger scale combats, or combat between NPCs.

The magic system needs another pass. Fatigue was sort of half baked and didn’t quite make sense in the way it interacted with combat and encumbrance. My second pass is instead taking some inspiration from Esoteric Enterprises, which has rules for “overpreparing” spells, allowing the use of higher level spells with a risk of complications (thanks to a recommendation from one of my players).

The attempt at a silent takedown *almost* worked. Dallas was able to aim, so I granted an additional advantage to the roll. The attack hit, and the hit location was the head, but the attack didn't cause the crookhorn to go down. The way the rules are now, doing a silent takedown like that is really hard. I think I should definitely include some sort of rule for aimed shots, perhaps just allowing the attacker to choose a targeted appendage if they take the time to aim, or for taking a disadvantage on their roll. I could maybe even allow the injury check to be made without including armour if the target doesn’t have a helmet. Hmm, maybe I could use a limb-specific armour system…

My combat stunt rules weren’t really sufficient for the situations in session two. Instead I just ruled the stunts as a melee exchange, but instead of doing an injury check the player got to do the combat stunt. I factored in penalties and such for enemies that were already off balance (such as the crookhorn with an arrow through her eye, or the two who were on fire and trying to put out the flames). When I did the rolls I wasn’t factoring in weapon lengths, since I figured the targets might not even have properly readied weapons. I think in normal circumstances I would include weapon length. I definitely need to establish some guidelines for what characters can get away with.

Considering how disastrously both sessions went for the players, I am torn about whether or not to buff the player characters a little bit. To be fair, the players in both sessions said they could have played it safer, but felt like pushing it since it was a one-shot. Also, both parties were only two people, and being outnumbered in Violence is brutal. One solution is to get hirelings and mercenaries, but I know some players don’t enjoy managing multiple characters. I might toy with increasing the melee skill of player characters, and/or giving more consistent access to the heroic resolve dice. Either way, I think it is something that will take a few more sessions to feel out.

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