return
So I’m back, sitting at the writing desk in a plush leather chair by the fireplace with dog named Upa sitting at my feet— or at least I wish that was the case. I’m currently in the midst of preparing for the second chapter of the campaign I’m running using AGTN, and with that I’m revising some of the rules. So to make the rules talk a little more interesting, this issue will be sprinkled with the abridged tale of the first adventure we played, which I’ll call “The Finhymere Problem”.
A ranger, a witch, and a hearthkeeper meet in the parlour of The Lamplighter. They are all young and full of ambition. The local hearthkeeper spends a day taking his two new friends around Cardenbree, they sneak through the fields of a winery, visit and carouse the market, and at the end of the day, at sunset, they sit in the old amphitheatre overlooking the town. They laugh and share a meal.
On their way back to town they meet a monk—travelled from Cardenbree Convent. The monk beckons them to help the cliffside mining town of Finhymere. The town’s quarry has been overtaken by foreboding tendrils of red briori, and the tonners have found refuge in the nearby convent.
The fresh-blooded adventurers heed the call of adventure…..
the luck of the dice
So, having the wonderful opportunity to play AGTN has revealed a flaw with the mechanics of the dice that I’ve been using: A head to head dice chain, for all its neatness, has a problem with high variance. When you look at averages the math works fine, but with such massive variances it becomes difficult to predict the outcome of rolls. When a bigger dice means greater chance of success, it also means a larger variance of results, and less consistency to succeed.
So, to try and reign in the number of different sets, and to make approaches feel more consistent, I’ve implemented a new set of dice mechanics that fit into the rest of the rules fairly easily:
“When you need to roll, you always roll an Action die which is a D10. If applicable you also roll Bonus die, which are D8s. Your result is the highest of all Action and Bonus dice that you rolled.”
This dice mechanic means you always roll on the same set, and means that better approaches are more likely to have better than average results without making extreme results more likely. Looking at the probabilities in Anydice makes my brain twist into all sorts of uncomfortable shapes, so I’m not sure whether making bonus die D8s instead of D10s makes any real difference. But its definitely something to playtest.
... The young adventurers leave town and travel the 2 days it takes to get to the deserted village of Finhymere at the base of the chalky Cliffs of Cardenbree. They stay with a committed local named Tomas who shows them his cave garden. The next day they explore the mine, minds running wild as to what could have made the noises they heard during the night. As they reach the bottom of the quarry they see it, a jagged hole emanating briori, the ranger stays a second too long at the bottom of the quarry and quickly flees from the horrific mole-like creature she sees emerge from the hole.
That evening they meet two adventurers ferried across the great lake on behalf of the delver’s guild: a boyish merchant’s son who arrogantly takes control of the adventure, and a reserved delver who the merchant’s-son employs. The group stay up into the night brainstorming ideas on how to kill this creature, which the delver learns to be a mostly unknown cave-dwelling beast called a “fellmoudie”.
The next morning the merchant’s son begins to set up a trap for the fellmoudie, while the rest of the adventurers venture into the hole to investigate deeper…
skill expression
As the Sage of this adventure I often struggled to figure out what skills to ask adventurers to use. This was especially apparent when skills had significant overlap: eg Botany, Gardening, and Foraging.
I did a few things to shake up skill expression in AGTN. I added a way to use multiple skills on a single check. Added a better way to make a check without a relevant skill, I refined the list of skills to fit with the new rules, and adjusted specialisations to be kinder to players, rewarding them more for investing into narrow skills.
Augmented skill expression is primarily a way to combine knowledge and practice to express your expertise. As an example, a difficult check to harvest a cave plant could pretty feasibly use any of the skills above. With the new rules though, if you expressed the check as an augmented skill it would firmly sit into a check using the Gather skill augmented by the Craeglore skill. Similarly, a check to recall knowledge about water dwelling beasts could now be a beastlore skill augmented by the nautical lore skill.
Testing Approaches was something I knew I would have to figure out at some point: the comparison between difficulty and skill was so important, it meant that checks that didn’t test a specific skill would be vastly more difficult given that an adventurer had nothing to add to their roll. Each approach now has a defensive bonus which is calculated from your approaches. Adventurers can now add the appropriate approach's defensive bonus to any check that doesn’t test a skill.
Specialisations are something that is a lot of fun. (To me at least) Making your adventurer specifically good at poetry, or flute playing rather than having a general “performance” skill lets you make characters that feel more lived in. HOWEVER that is all well and good until you get a character who can play the flute, the guitar, and the cello, but has no skill when it comes to the piano. When you ask that character to make a “piano” check it feels awful for the player, because of course the character has picked up general musical knowledge which they can apply to the check! So to crack this “specialisations egg”, I’ve implemented a rule which expresses transferrable skills within a specialised category.
When you make a check using a skill from a specialised category, you can always choose to instead use half the value of your greatest skill from that same category.
The new specialisation categories are as follows: Sciences, Bladework, Archery, Martial arts, recreation, crafts, and artistry. There’s definitely a trade off here in realism and balance, but the pain point that I expressed above felt so bad as a player that I think its worth the trade off and will make players more likely to pick specialised skills.
... The adventurers delve into what they discover to be the Fellmoudie’s nest. As they descend carefully they come to the core of the fellmoudie’s den, rotten and crimson with briori. They continue deeper until they discover a lush cavern which houses an underground aquifer. They explore the cave for a moment until suddenly the foul beast appears behind them.
There’s a tense standoff, the ranger manages to calm the fellmoudie enough that it doesn’t view them as a threat, and the adventurers CAREFULLY edge around it before the delver caves in the tunnel behind to give them time to scramble to the surface.
Once they make it out they talk long into the night preparing for the final confrontation. In their brief encounter they learned it is susceptible to bright light, and armed with that knowledge, all 5 young adventures delve back into the den the next morning.
They are quickly spotted by the creature, which backs them to the aquifer’s edge. There is a breif and painful scuffle, but after much wrangling the adventurers manage to slice the beast’s claws so that it cannot dig, and after the ranger and hearthkeeper are viciously mauled, they collapse part of the ceiling onto the foul beast killing it and burying it in rubble.
They are now separated, the merchant’s son and the wounded ranger in the cave, and the other three are left to return to the surface and rescue them before the creature’s body, caked in rotting and ripening briori begins to reanimate.
What’s next?
So I sit here asking, what is next for the adventurers? Given time and the delver’s expertise, there shouldn’t be too much issue extracting the trapped adventurers. But how will they spend their reward? Will the merchant’s son or delver become friends with the player characters? What does Cardenbree Convent’s anniversary festival have in hold? What might happen when the hearthkeeper’s family comes to town? How might the Witch awaken her magicks? And most importantly, where will their adventures take them next?
Here is a map that tooootally has no relevance what-so-all to the paragraph above..
And so, I’m back on the development horse baybee! This was a fun one and I hope you enjoyed the recap of the first adventure, which I’m really pleased with since it nailed the vibe of the world even if the rules need more work. I’m hoping that in one of the next issues I’ll be able to go into another smaller project I’m working on, and maybe we can look a little deeper into the idea that “the adventurers are assumed to be successful”. Anyway,
Bye for now!
Felix