Like, I had to remind the players to go ahead and write down their relationship narratives. Here, it’s pure color and eminently ignorable. Way back in Mutant: Year Zero, this helped shape your Buddy choice, and was tied into the XP system. You know, stuff like “I fear X is drawn to the dark arts and I must save them” type stuff. Every profession has three starter ideas for relationships with other PCs. One twist to Forbidden Lands characters I don’t love but is probably necessary is the character relationship choices. He wanted to be a big brutish Conan-esque figure, but ended up a fast, twitchy horseback rider better suited to scouting and sniping. The player who usually grates against systems like this – he hated King Arthur Pendragon for similar reasons – grated against his fighter result. I totally get that this also frustrates players who came to the table with a firm idea of what they wanted to play. The result, I think, really puts everyone in a head of not knowing themselves or this strange world. If you proceed to adult, you roll on the profession event table (which sets the second set of skills, your talent, and some gear). If you’re a child, you roll a childhood event for your kin choice (which sets your stats and skills). The L&A version is nifty to me because it doesn’t provide perfect control over your character: you get to pick your kin and your profession, but in both cases you follow those decisions with rolls on tables. And then there’s the “Legends and Adventurers” supplement, a slender volume that semi-randomizes your PCs (and has tables for monsters and legends). You get the stats you want, the skills you want, the talents. One is to just go through the book and build a character. There are, broadly, two ways to make a Forbidden Lands character. I feel like we had built up some bad/acrimonious habits throughout 2018 and I’m still thinking about why, but one of my end of year takeaways was that I wanted to start the year with a party-oriented, everyone-against-the-world-together kind of game. It’s so interesting to me to watch how the interpersonal dynamics change from things like this. We added a fourth player to our regular group.
I think it’s gonna be pretty fun! Characters We spun up our Forbidden Lands game last night, creating four characters and doing some simple map-wandering to start shaking the system out.