Let's Read Barbarian Prince - part 3, Character, Followers, Encounters, and Combat

In part 1 of my review of the game Barbarian Prince, I looked at the map and the rules layout. In part 2, I looked at the main actions that the player can take. In this current part, I plan to look at who the player character - Cal Arath, the eponymous barbarian prince - at the various NPC followers and allies you collect, and at the rules encounters and combat. This will probably be the last part of my read-through. Next I'll write a play-along as experience the game in action, and then I'll suggest ways to change - and perhaps improve! - the rules if you wanted to write your own solo adventure game that somewhat resembled this one.

 

After my last post about this, I happened to find Hex Junkie's sandbox setting using the Barbarian Prince map by searching on the OSR Discord server. 

 

I've mentioned that I kept hearing rumors about a mobile phone app version of the game. Travis Miller pointed me toward Paul's Gameblog, where there's a link to one such app for Android devices, called Road of Kings. I should note that I haven't tried downloading the app, and I can't verify if it still works.

Also, Kitchen Wolf shared a link to issue 47 of the magazine Space Gamer, where there's both a contemporaneous review of the game, and an interview with designer Arnold Hendrick about the design decisions he made while writing Barbarian Prince. For example, it seems that he was thinking about computer programming when writing the rules - and it was his intent for this format to make playing the game easier. The idea, apparently, is that you wouldn't have to memorize all the rules, because the reference codes would point you to them at the appropriate time, and because numbering the reference codes would mean you'd know exactly where to go look. Political maneuvering by seeking audiences at the temples and castles is intended to be the primary way to win the game. And something that I found baffling during my initial read (the multiple versions of surprise embedded in the combat rules) are intended to prevent the game from being overly predictable. It's a worthwhile read for anyone who's following along with this series of posts.

 

 

Barbarian Prince cover art by Frank Cirocco, copyright Reaper Miniatures

 

Player Character - In the game of Barbarian Prince, you play the character of Cal Arath, the crown prince and rightful ruler of the Northlands. Unfortunately, a usurper has killed your farther and taken your throne. You've been exiled to a foreign country to the south. You have 70 days to acquire 500 gold pieces to finance an army, or otherwise reassert your rule over the Northlands. Otherwise, the usurper will solidify his claim on the throne, and your quest will be lost.

Cal Arath is basically unmatched as a human physical specimen, although some monsters are stronger and more deadly. You have Combat Skill 8, Endurance 9, a named sword "Bonebiter" that doesn't count against your Carrying Capacity, and between 0 and 2 starting gold coins.

As a quick reminder, every character in this game has an initial Carrying Capacity of 10. It goes down by half each day you don't eat, falling to 5, 2, 1, then 0. One unit of Carrying Capacity can hold one meal, 100 gold coins, or an object you find as treasure.

You also have an attribute called Wits & Wiles, which is akin to the Skill rating in Troika, it's basically how good you are at all non-combat tasks. It's determined randomly at the start of the game, and so ranges from 1 to 6. (I've seen complaints that getting stuck with Skill 4 in Troika is punishingly bad - I can only imagine what Wits & Whiles 1 is like!) Notably, the non-combat tasks where your Wits & Wiles score matters include virtually all social interactions. One subset of my ideas for modifying the game are devoted to ways to make the growth of your Wits & Wiles rating either an in-game achievement or a reward for replaying, rather than simply randomizing it every time.

 

 

Barbarian Prince's treasure rules, copyright Reaper Miniatures

 

Followers and Allies - My biggest surprise when I started reading Barbarian Prince was the abundance of NPCs. It's a single player game, but not a single character game. You'll always control Cal Arath, but he won't always be alone. You can hire followers in town, and recruit allies as you encounter them on the road. There's a special type of follower called a Guide who can help with hunting and navigation, and I've noticed that among your potential allies, Priests and Magicians are often relevant. Depending on how you play, you might have a small adventuring party, a large company, or a veritable warband accompanying you.

Which I guess also goes to a larger point about how this game surprised me, because for that people talk up the game's sword & sorcery credentials, this isn't really a game of individual heroism as much as it is a game of politics and leadership. You might be a barbarian, but more importantly, you're a prince, a leader of men, and you'll probably win by acting like a prince and engaging in diplomacy, finding a foreign leader to form an alliance with or bankroll your mission. Remember, that 500 gold you're seeking isn't for you, it's to pay for an army to stage a counter-coup. That countryside you're exploring isn't wilderness, it's a country, somebody else's country, and it's plenty well explored already as far as the locals are concerned.

Even Cal Arath's barbarian-ness is situational. I think the gameplays up the idea that the Northlands must be a harsh land full of rough and rugged peoples to make it seem like you're Conan wandering around the Shire. The farmed areas at least are full of elves, dwarves, halflings, and yokel sheriffs eager to organize a torches-and-pitchforks brigade to round you up for hunting livestock like they're wild game - but there's a caveat that Cal Arath is only living off the land because he's fallen on hard times. He knows how to fight and hunt because that's what princes do. In his own country, he probably isn't stealing a lot of pies off of windowsills, or poaching on other peoples' land, and you have to think that if he happened upon a tower full of orcs on his own frontier, he'd come back later with an army rather than being forced to stage a daring commando raid with whatever handful peasants happened to be on-hand at the moment. He isn't sleeping rough, wading through swamps, and fighting off crypt-guarding skeletons because he's a foreigner, he's doing it because he's homeless, penniless, in exile, and desperate to raise a king's ransom quickly enough that he won't be forced to remain that way.

The point is, I was originally expecting something akin to a boardgame version of the original Legend of Zelda, and this isn't that at all.

Anyway, the NPCs you meet also have Combat Ability and Endurance scores. They also all have "wealth codes" to determine how much treasure they own, but in my reading of the rules, you can only take possession of an NPC's treasure if they die. I think this means you get their treasure if they're killed in combat. I also think it means you can't force your followers to spend their own money on food - they'll either choose to stay with you while going hungry, or run off to go buy a meal, but apparently they'll be damned if they're going to pay out of their own pockets while you, the boss, are supposed to be covering their per diems.

Your ranks of followers can grow as you meet more people. There's also a couple ways they can shrink. First of all, you can dismiss any follower at any time for any reason (with the exception of your True Love, if you have one - there will be no divorce!) Hirelings with an agreed-upon wage will also defect if you can't or won't pay their daily wages.

Next, if you don't have enough food to feed your entire entourage, you risk them defecting from your group. I interpret that to mean that if can't feed everyone, you either have the choice to dismiss followers until you can feed everyone who's left, or you can share the available food equally, but then each follower gets to decide individually whether or not to defect. Depending on your Wits & Wiles score, you might actually lose more people by trying to keep everyone.

And finally, you might choose to leave some of your followers behind when you're making an escape. If you're running away from an enemy that's chasing you, you're much more likely to escape if everyone in your party is on horseback or, better still, flying. Which they can be, if you're willing to abandon everyone who used to be a member of your party who's not on horseback!

I suspect that the primary benefit of having a large party is the advantage they grant you in combat. I'll discuss combat more below, but what's important here is that every NPC and monster behaves the same way as Cal Arath. Each character can attack one opponent, so if your followers outnumber the enemy, you can gang up on specific targets while limiting losses on your own side.

Barbarian Prince doesn't come with any kind of character sheets, or party record sheets, or anything like that. If you start acquiring a lot of followers, or if the composition of your party keeps changing because you continue to add and dismiss people, I would imagine that it can get a little messy tracking the whole group on scratch paper. I don't know if this is actually a problem, per say, but it does seem like an area where improvement is possible. This is another area where I have a few different ideas for maybe modifying the rules, or maybe even just adding props, to make things run a little smoother.

 

 

a representative encounter from Barbarian Prince, copyright Reaper Miniatures

Encounters - When traveling each day, there's a chance of having an encounter. Many of those encounters are with intelligent NPCs where you have the option to talk, evade, or fight. (There are also monstrous encounters where the creature's behavior leaves you with no choice about how to approach them.)

When you encounter an NPC like this, you first choose your approach, then roll the dice. The best way to succeed is to roll well. (Although what counts as "well" can vary. Notice that for the Swordsman, rolling a 1 means you surprise your opponent if fighting ... or that you can only escape if you have horses. Rolling a 6 means they'll let you pass unbothered if you choose to evade ... or that they get the drop on you in a fight.)

Each type of intelligent NPC has their own combination of results, so each poses their own kind of risk. It's worth noting that many of the options to talk or evade can turn into combat if things don't go your way - such as if you don't have horses, or can't pay the 10 gold coin bribe the swordsman sometimes demands. In that case, you default to a generic table of random combat results; against some adversaries the generic table is probably more favorable than their specific fight options, against others I'm sure it's worse. The "converse" result from R341 is itself kind of a generic table of talking results, ranging from them trying to kill you instantly to them offering to join up with your party for free.

The unique combination of outcomes for each NPC means a couple of things. First, it means that some NPCs might be straight up "easier" or "harder" than others. Some people you encounter might be, across the board, easier both talk to, evade, and fight than others. It also means that for some NPCs, you'll do better by talking to them, others by fighting, others by trying to sneak or run away. 

I haven't cross-referenced all the NPC tables to be sure, but my initial impression is that if a given NPC would likely be an ally in Lord of the Rings, you're probably wise to talk to them, and if they seem "scary" or dangerous, you're probably wise to evade. This seems like a nice design touch, because it means that knowledge of common genre tropes can substitute for system mastery. That is, when playing the game, ideally you won't be forced to either memorize the probabilities of all the outcomes of all the NPCs or just guess blindly about the best course of action. You'll be able to make informed choices by drawing on what you know about fantasy literature. 

It's also worth noting that most fight options create a possibility of a particular combat situation, rather than a guarantee. A result that says "surprise" for example, probably means you have the possibility of surprising your enemy, but only one of the four possible "surprise" results actually guarantees it - the others all ask you to roll the dice to find out. One of the two "attack" results offers the chance that your enemy will win the initiative, just as one of the two "attacked" results gives you the chance to strike first. In general, you'll do better on these rolls if you have a higher Wits & Wiles score. (Which means, I guess, that it's both Skill and Initiative.)

When I was first looking through rules, I was kind of shocked that a game that takes so many pains to save space and avoid repeating text had FOUR different versions of Cal Arath surprising his enemies. (I'm still surprised, honestly, that the reminder text about evading your enemies by flying away is reprinted on EVERY enemy entry, although it sure does make me want to find a flying horse when I play.) One version guarantees surprise, on grants you surprise if you roll under your Wits & Wiles score, one grants you surprise if you roll equal to or under your Wits & Wiles score, and one grants you surprise if you roll the dice and currently have fewer party members than that. Reading the interview with the designer kind of changed my mind, as did remembering that the game uses a d6, not a d20. In a d20 game, the 5% probability difference wouldn't be worth the extra text - and the risk of confusion from not having a consistent way of reading the dice might make the extra rule worse than worthless - but in Barbarian Prince, those two rules have a 17% difference in the chance of granting you surprise. I think you could still argue that that's still not a big enough difference to justify the additional rule, but it's not as bad as I originally thought.

 

 

illustration by Cynthia Sims Millan, copyright Reaper Miniatures

 

Barbarian Prince combat table, copyright Reaper Miniatures

 

Combat - Combat here is somewhat similar to D&D. Each round, all the characters on one side attack, then all the surviving characters on the other side hit back. If one side has surprise, they get one round without reprisal, and they get to go first in the subsequent rounds. Otherwise, who goes first is determined by the specific "fight" rule governing the combat. In general, you must match Cal Arath and his allies up one-on-one with the enemy, although if either side outnumbers the other, you get to decide how to distribute the extra characters, and each character only gets attack one opponent per round.

To attack, roll 2d6, add the attacker's Combat Skill, subtract the defender's Combat Skill, apply any situational modifiers, and then consult the Combat Table. Rolling higher is better here. This is seriously one of the worst written and most needlessly confusing rules in the entire game. First there's the issue of how it's actually written. Compare what I just said about the attacker and defender, and compare it to this from R220c: "To resolve a strike, take the combat skill of the striker, and subtract from it the combat skill of the target character." Mind you, that's subtract from it, not subtract it from, which has the opposite meaning.

Then there's the issue of the combat table itself. It's ... I mean just look at it. The basic logic is this - if you roll low, you will probably miss and deal no Wounds; if you roll high, you will probably hit and deal two or more Wounds. But beyond that general tendency, there's no logic to it, it's just a mess. 10 and 12 both deal two Wounds, but 11 only deals one? 16 and 18 deal five, but 17 only deals two? Why does -1 hit anything? Why does 15 miss entirely? Why does 14, and only 14, deal three Wounds? (With Cal Arath having Combat Ability 8, and with the most common roll of 2d6 being 7, this would almost be cool if there was a common enemy with Combat Ability 1 and Endurance 3 ... but there is no such enemy.)

I genuinely don't know why it's written like this. My only guess is that it must have been to ensure that you could never know the outcome of combat just by looking at the dice, you'd always have to do the math and then check the table. A low roll is probably a miss, a high roll probably a hit, but you can't know for sure without looking. A friend of mine has a theory that there are fewer car crashes in England than in the US because the roads there are so winding, narrow, and filled with roundabouts that you have to pay complete attention every second or you'll get in a wreck right away ... so you do. Maybe these rules are like that? They're so situational and specific that you know you have to check the table every time? As you might imagine, I also have some thoughts about how to modify the rules for combat.

There are a couple situational modifiers. If the attacker has any Wounds, they get -1. If the attacker has Wounds equal to half their Endurance, they get an additional -1 (so a total modifier of -2, although it's not written out like that.) There's no bonus for the defender having Wounds, but if the defender has Wounds equal to half their Endurance, the attacker gets +2. This would be easier, I think, if it were truly symmetric, and if you only kept the penalties and bonuses for when a fighter is "bloodied."

You can try to run away from combat. Unlike using the "evade" option before a fight starts, you have to take your entire party with you. To make an escape attempt, your entire party gives up their attacks, and you roll 1d6, hoping to get a 4 or higher. If the attempt fails, I believe you've still lost your attack for that round.

You can also try to make your enemies run away. Each time you kill an enemy NPC in combat, you have the option to roll 1d6, and on a 6, the surviving enemies will all run away. This is totally optional, so I guess if you think you can win the fight, you might not want to scare them off, since they'll take all their money with them. On the other hand, if you're outnumbered and might lose, frightening the rest with a bit of yelling and woad could really save the day. Enemies with Combat Ability 9 or Endurance 9 will never run away.

In Barbarian Prince, your Endurance score never changes, but you do gain wounds from combat, and heal them by spending time resting. If a character has one less Wound than their Endurance (what we'd call hp 1 in D&D), then they fall unconscious and become helpless. If an NPC falls unconscious, you get to decide what to do. If Cal Arath gets knocked out, roll 1d6. On a roll of 1-3, your followers all desert you and steal all of stuff as they go. On roll of 4-6, they'll stay with you, either making camp while you heal, or carrying you somewhere else if you want (although it takes up 20 Carrying Capacity just to haul you, to say nothing of your possessions, so moving won't always be feasible.) 

Presumably this means you can choose to just knock out your enemies instead of killing them, although the rules are not explicit on this point. I think if I were making changes, I'd make unconsciousness something that only happens to the prince.

If a character has Wounds equal to their Endurance (what we'd call hp 0 in D&D), then they're dead. If an NPC dies, whether they're your enemy or ally, you get to desecrate their grave inherit their belongings. (Despite being an outlander, you're everybody's next of kin!) If Cal Arath dies, the game's over and you lose. 

 

The daily actions provide a framework for exploring the south lands. The most common kind of random event that happens while you're exploring is an encounter with an intelligent south-lander, and the most complex outcome of an encounter is combat. If you understand those three sets of rules, then you understand enough to start playing. Next time, I'll play through a couple times, once trying to act like a barbarian, and again, trying to act like a prince. Then I think I'll be ready to offer some ideas for modifying the rules to make your own game of solo exploration.

Let's Read Barbarian Prince - part 2 Main Menu

In part 1 of my Barbarian Prince review, I looked at the map and the overall presentation of information within the rulebooks. This time I want to look at what I'm calling the game's "main menu" - r203, the list of daily actions.

The first part of my review inspired a few people to give Barbarian Prince a try (or to speak up about how they'd enjoyed it in the past!) Throne of Salt has a really thorough (and almost successful) play through, along with his thoughts about how to improve the game. Dire Grizzly Bear has a more narrative write-up of his play through. Alex Schroeder and Rended Press also spoke up with their positive feelings about of the game.

From those four, and a few other people who comments on the OSR Discord, I learned that Save vs Total Party Kill has a copy of the Barbarian Prince hex map that's been partially keyed as a community project. The Boardgame Geek page for Barbarian Prince hosts a number of new layouts for various parts of the game rules. BGG also has a page for a game called Barbarian Vince that seems to be inspired by Barbarian Prince, and plays using a special set of cards, which are available to print and play.

(Regarding these files - as I understand Reaper Miniatures' distribution agreement for Dwarfstar Games, it's okay for anyone to post a digital copy of the games, as long as those copies are free, and a copy of the distribution agreement is displayed prominently. So that would seem to permit both sharing the original files and sharing new versions with more modern layouts, as long as all the terms of the agreement are honored.)

Barbarian Prince's "main menu", copyright Reaper Miniatures

If Barbarian Prince was a video game, this would be the main screen you'd return to at the start of each day. If someone released a reprinted, boxed-set version, this would be printed on a separate sheet of cardstock that you could set out next to the map to consult every turn. This is the player's summary of the game - everything you can do unless some special event grants you a special action.

Time in Barbarian Prince is measured in days. Every day, you can take one action of your choice, then deal with the necessities of survival, and then the day ends. Each action you take leads you to a separate "sub-menu" of different possible outcomes. Let's start by looking at the actions, and then at the rules for survival.


Traveling - Each day, you can attempt to travel one hex in any direction on the map. If you have a horse, you can travel 1-2 hexes, and if you have a winged horse, you can travel 1-3. (Note that you need enough horses for your entire party to benefit from riding, and enough winged horses to benefit from flying. Also note that even  if you attempt to travel 2 hexes in one day, events may force you to stop after only 1.)

Your goal in Barbarian Prince (which I'll talk more about next time) is to find money. In pursuit of that goal, you'll spend most turns traveling. When you travel, there are four possible outcomes. First you enter the new map hex without incident. Second, you get lost and remain in your current hex. Third, you enter the new hex and have an encounter. And finally, you could get lost and have an encounter! (Even if you have horses, you might get lost and remain in your original hex, or you might travel the first hex successfully but get lost before you make it to the second. And even if you have horses, if you have an encounter in the first hex, that will usually stop you from traveling to a second hex the same day.)

Your chance of getting lost depends on the terrain type of your starting hex. You roll 2d6, and try to roll low. You have only a 3% chance to get lost while flying, and you're still likely to find your way successfully when traveling through farmland (17%) or open countryside (28%). After that, things get tricky. You have a 42% chance of getting lost in a forest, hillside, or while crossing a river, and you're more likely to get lost than not in the mountains (58%), deserts (72%), and swamps (83%). When moving through those terrains, you'll probably spend several days lost and trying to find your way into the next hex. Traveling along a road or taking a raft on a river eliminates the chance of getting lost.

The chance for an encounter depends on the terrain of your destination hex. Even if you get lost, you still use the encounter table for the hex you tried to enter. No, this doesn't really make sense, and no, I don't know why the rules insist on it so strongly. If you're traveling on a road, crossing over or rafting down a river, or if you're flying, there are special encounter tables that override the underlying terrain. The chance of an encounter happening are more consistent across terrain types. They're most common when you move into farmland (42%), less so on the road or in forests, mountains, or open countryside (28%), and they're relatively rare when you're on a hillside, in a desert or swamp, when you're crossing or rafting a river, or when you're flying (17%).

In addition to the chance of an encounter, or what the game calls a "travel event", the terrain type also determines what type of encounter you might have. There's essentially a d66 table for each terrain type, although crossing a river and rafting on the river have different tables, and the rafting encounter table is set up as 2d6 instead. The rules for Barbarian Prince are divided into two books, one for rules and one for events, and the entire event booklet is filled with the possible outcomes of these encounters while traveling. (And the possible outcomes of outcomes - many events will send you forward to a new event that can't be encountered directly. For example, 8 of the 36 possible farmland encounters are to come across a farmstead. That event listing, e009, then asks you to roll 2d6 to determine which of seven possible farmsteads you've discovered. This is part of what I mean when I say this has the feel of the "sub-menu" system in an early 1980s era video game.)

Since most of the map is ordinary terrain, a very large part of the game is traveling using the travel action. Random encounters while traveling are also the only encounters you'll have while moving across the map. Most hexcrawls in D&D are written up just like dungeons, with a division between the landmarks that are keyed to specific locations and the encounters that show up at random. Even the Judge's Guild rules for procedurally generated hexcrawls draw a distinction between "features" which are physical objects that remain permanently located in the hex, and "encounters" which are meetings with monsters or other explorers.

Barbarian Prince doesn't really make this distinction. There are castles, ruins, temples, and villages located in a few of its hexes - but while you can choose to interact with those sites, simply entering the same map hex as one doesn't trigger any kind of automatic event. You still default to the local table defined by the local terrain. And the "travel events" themselves are a mix of discovering locations and encountering people, with no obvious split like we see in D&D. One kind of cool thing is that it's possible to discover hidden ruins, hidden towns, and hidden temples while traveling, adding brand new locations to the map.


Resting - Your other main option in most hexes is to spend the day resting. There are two possible benefits to resting. First, each day that you rest, every character in your party gets to heal 1 wound. Your character, the eponymous barbarian prince, starts the game with 9 Endurance, meaning you can suffer up to 9 unhealed wounds before you die. The followers and allies who might join your adventuring party are universally weaker than that. (Pushed onto a new page, where you could easily miss it, is a note that poisoned wounds never heal from resting.) You can rest as many days in a row as you want, healing 1 wound each day, but various forms of time pressure that the game piles onto you turns the slow pace of healing into another source of tension.

The second benefit to resting is that you can send your entire adventuring party out hunting. On traveling days, only you, and perhaps a single guide, can go out on an evening hunt. I'll talk more about the rules for food later in this post, and more about the rules for hunting and starvation next time, but the important thing to know for now is that more hunters likely capture more food.

Each day you choose to rest, you still have to check for random encounters, just like if you were traveling. Having an encounter doesn't necessarily eliminate the benefit of resting, but notably, you can only heal wounds on a day when your party did not participate in combat. You can still organize a large scale hunt, though, even if you were in a fight earlier in the day. I'm a little curious to see this in play, because it seems like it would be weird to encounter a stationary location when you've spent the day resting. (For example, it'd be weird to keep running into different farmsteads with different owners on the same hex of farmland over the course of several days when you're ostensibly not moving around. I'm not sure there's a good way to implement it in this game, but something like Blog of Holding's generic encounter table would be nice here - roll d6 when you're camping and d12 when you're on the move.)


Searching for Treasure - This action isn't actually possible most of the time. You can't, for example, just enter a map hex by traveling one day and then search it for treasure the next. Your goal in Barbarian Prince is to accumulate a fortune in gold, but you do that by talking to the native inhabitants of this land where you're a foreigner, not by wandering around digging up the countryside with a shovel.

There are only two occasions when you're allowed to search. The first is when you yourself left behind a cache of gold and loot, which you might do because of encumbrance, which I'll talk about later. The other time you can search for treasure is when you've previously learned a secret that tells you there's definitely a treasure in this map hex. You learn those secrets by going into the various castles, towns, and temples on the map and gathering information. If there is a cache or buried treasure, you have a 4-in-6 chance to find it on the first try. If you roll a 5 you can't find the treasure but you can search again; on a 6 you can't find the treasure because someone else already took it.

When you find a cache, you just get back whatever you left behind before. When you find a treasure though, you get to roll 2d6, about half the results will send you directly to one of the entries in the treasure "sub-menu" within the events book, and about half will send you to a "sub-menu" of various tombs. Some of the tombs are haunted by some sort of undead guardian, and also offer a reward of gold or items after the guardian is defeated. Other tombs are the site of an immovable magic item like an altar or a magic gateway.


Exploring Ruins - Aside from the various settlements that show up on the map (castles, villages, and temples), the map also has ruins. Unlike when you're searching for treasure, there's no need to check first to see if you find anything. The other difference is in the result of the 2d6 roll. The "ruins" sub-menu is different from the "tombs" sub-menu, and in general, it's much more dangerous. The tombs might have a treasure, but they might also be empty, cursed, trapped, or guarded by a monster (and unlike in the tombs, there's no extra reward for getting past the monster). There's also a chance that the ruin contains a magic altar or gateway just like some of the tombs do.

All of the tombs and ruins in Barbarian Prince are strictly one-room affairs. Each one is essentially just a single random encounter. It would be kind of cool if there was a possibility of exploring a larger complex, for the ruins especially. I can think of three possible reasons why it's not like that. The first is that writing enough ruin locations to make underground exploration possible would have required a lot of text, and this was a sacrifice to keep the game terse. The second potential reason is that the game wants to maintain a fairly strict equation of "one encounter = one day", and multi-room ruin complexes would violate that 1-to-1 correspondence. The final possibility is the stylistic choice to limit the "depth" of wilderness locations in order to reinforce the importance of returning to a settlement to gather more information. The best way to find treasure isn't to spend more time among the dead, it's to go someplace where people live and interact with them.


Seeking News & Rumors - Traveling and resting are the only actions you can take in absolutely every map hex, but there are several actions you can take in hexes that contain settlements. The first of these is seeking out news and rumors. There are a number of possibilities, most of them positive. You roll 2d6 and add a bonus if you spent some cash. Weirdly, although higher numbers are generally better than lower, not every result is better than the one below it, so you might regret spending money that pushes you into harms way.

You might find a discount on food an lodgings, you could happen upon a caravan or a friendly magician, you might have the chance to rob the local thieves' guild or join them on a heist, you might get along well with the locals or get in good with the nearest temple (both of which give you bonuses on actions there), or you might learn a genuine secret. The possible secrets are a way to sell drugs to the priests in the temples (another bonus!), blackmail information about the lords of the three castles of the region, or the location of a buried treasure.

The possible negative outcomes are getting robbed by those darn local thieves, and attracting the attention of the local police. The lowest outcome on the table is learning nothing. Racking up bonuses on your roll might ironically be the thing that gets you robbed or arrested. Despite that possibility, there's clearly a multi-day minigame here (and even moreso when seeking an audience) of trying to accumulate enough bonuses to get the best result before moving on.


Seeking an Audience - In an otherwise extremely economical ruleset, seeking an audience really stands out for its variety. There's one table for trying to meet the mayor of a village, one for trying to meet the head priest of a temple, and three tables for trying to meet the lord of a castle, one each for the three castles on the map. The best possible outcome on each of these tables is to succeed in actually getting your meeting.

Seeking an audience is kind of risky. The local leader might sic the cops on you. You're also pretty likely to have some bureaucratic intermediary interpose themselves between you and the leader, in which case you'll need to pay a bribe, or likely suffer the consequences. If you actually do get your audience, you'll have about a 50% chance of something good happening. The "something good" in question is probably money, and in large enough amounts to actually give you a chance at winning the game. But you're equally likely to be thrown out or have them release the metaphorical hounds against you. Having blackmail info helps, but doesn't guarantee success.

(Also, it's worth pointing out, Count Drogat is clearly just Dracula. Anyone making up their own custom encounters for a game like this could easily lean into that and make it more explicit. Maybe replace Baron Huldra with Frankenstein's Monster, maybe add the Wolfman and the Creature from the Black Lagoon to the wandering encounters. Of course, that's only one possible way to adjust the flavor of the setting without really tinkering with the underlying rules.)


Hiring Followers - Like seeking rumors and seeking an audience, this is another 2d6 table. This one is somewhat skewed toward better results at low numbers, but unlike the other two, there aren't any really bad outcomes here. There is still one outcome where you don't get a hireling but do get a bonus (a -1 bonus, in this case) that makes your future rolls here better.

The results include hirelings with various Combat Ability and Endurance stats, available at prices that reflect their relative merit, a couple of horse dealers willing to sell you mounts, and a few chances to pick up hangers-on without needing to hire them. (The fact that you accumulate an adventuring party was definitely the biggest surprise about the game to me, and I'll talk about how it works another time.)

For whatever reason, you can hire followers in villages and at castles, but not at temples. Barbarian Prince kind of has a lot of exceptions like that, things that violate an otherwise general rule. They maybe make a little bit of narrative sense, but the cumulative effect is to make the rules more complex and harder to remember. I feel like ideally there would more general rules with fewer exceptions, and special or exceptional information would be confined to encounters and events.


Making Offerings - Spend money to pray at a temple, and only a temple. This is another minigame where you're hoping to build up some bonuses via several days of praying in order to achieve a good outcome. Good outcomes involve learning a secret (including the location of a treasure), having someone from the temple join your adventuring party, or having a god bestow an artifact on you that wins you the game if you can carry it to the correct part of the map. There are only a few bad outcomes, although those include being arrested for blasphemy, every day of prayer costs you more money. Again, it kind of makes sense that you can only spend money on offerings at temples, but it's still a little frustrating that no religious services are available in villages or castles.

Actually, I guess what I really think is that either all three types of locations should be more similar, or they should be more different. Making them more similar would be having the same basic actions available at each kind of site - though perhaps with different tables of possible outcomes depending on where you perform your task. Making them more different would mean that each kind of location had unique actions that can be performed only there. Right now, Barbarian Prince has an awkward mix of these two options, and I think it would be better if it committed one way or the other.

In the Firefly boardgame, some planets have markets, and some have patrons. Each market and each patron has a unique deck of cards associated with it, but they all work basically the same way. You go to the planet, look through the cards that have been dealt, and then take what you want. At a market, that means buying equipment or hiring a crew member. With a patron, that means accepting a job offer. But the variety comes from the contents of the cards in each deck; the actions "go shopping" or "look for work" are essentially universal. In Shadows of Brimstone, each day in town, you pick a particular location to visit. Each location has its own unique goods and services. You can buy weapons one place, receive medical care at another, get blessed at a third. There's little to no overlap, so the choice to go to the market versus the shrine is a meaningful one.

A final point of frustration about settlements comes from what happens when you rest there. When you travel, rest, or search for treasure in the wilderness, you have a chance of a random "travel event" each day. When you search ruins, seek information, seek an audience, hire followers, or make offerings, the "events" are whatever happens as the result of you rolling on the relevant tables. When you rest in a castle, temple, or village though, you'll have a chance of a "travel event", but it'll be determined by the terrain type the settlement is built on, not by the type of settlement, or even by the face that you're in a settlement instead of the wilderness. In a game where there are different encounter tables depending on whether you're rafting a river or just crossing it, this feels like a major omission. Having either a single "settlement" encounter table, or different ones for each of the three major types, would also help increase the unique feel of these places.

illustration by Cynthia Sims Millan, copyright Reaper Miniatures

So, every day, you take one action of your choice, then you deal with the necessities of survival. Survival in Barbarian Prince means food to eat and shelter to sleep in. If you don't have already have food by the end of your action, you are (fortunately) allowed to gather food before the end of the day. You could imagine an even more hardcore survival game where gathering food was an action unto itself, and took up entire days. Although I suppose if your hunting needs are severe enough that you need to rest in order to allow your entire adventuring party to join in the hunt, then Barbarian Prince already is that hard.

Gathering and Eating Food - Food in Barbarian Prince is awkwardly denominated into "units" instead of, you know, "rations" or "meals". Every character needs to eat one meal per day, or two in the desert. Horses need to eat two meals per day, or four in the desert, but they only need to eat meals at all if they're unable to forage. In farmland, open countryside, in forests, and on hillsides horses are self-feeding. Your animals also can't forage in a settlement, so you'll have to either provide food or pay for their feed.

If you're not already carrying enough food to eat your evening meal, you can go hunting. The hunting rules are terrible, and they're written confusingly. It's difficult to emphasize just how bad they are. You add your Combat Ability and half your Endurance (minus wounds, rounded down). Unhelpfully, this number is never given a name, but we can think of it as your Hunting Ability. Roll a couple dice so that you can subtract Hunting Ability minus 2d6, and that's how many meals you get. The way this is written in the original rules really makes it sound like subtract the other way, which would mean stronger characters hunt worse.

With a starting Combat Ability of 8 and starting Endurance 9, your character's starting Hunting Ability is 12, although obviously this will get reduced as you get wounded. If you have a guide, you can take them with you for a bonus, and if you rested, you can bring the entire adventuring party along, with extra bonuses if you have additional guides. Also if your 2d6 roll was a 12, you get injured on the hunt, take 1d6 wounds, and you might die.

If you go hunting in on farmland, there's a 2-in-6 chance that someone comes after you with torches and pitchforks, presumably because they're sick of foreigners showing up and bragging about the time they slew a Holstein Deer. Hunting in the same map hex as a settlement is impossible, so you'll either have to buy food (1 gold = 1 meal) or go hungry. Oh, and for some reason you can't buy food the first night you arrive in the settlement, only after you've started the day there. Just another charming exception hidden in the rules.

The rules for going hungry are also a little bit terrible, but mostly they're just punishingly hard. If you go without a meal, your Carrying Capacity drops by half and your Combat ability drops by 1. As the rules note, you can't actually die of starvation, because it doesn't affect your Endurance, you just become useless due to hunger. Your Carrying Capacity starts at 10, so after four days without food, you can't carry anything at all. If you have any followers or allies, they're likely to desert your party if they go even a single day without food. Horses won't desert, but they actually will die if you let their Carrying Capacity drop to 0. (Horses start with a Carrying Capacity of 30, and a human character carrying nothing weighs 20. This means that after a single night without food, the horses are too weak for anyone to ride them. If a horse goes five days without food, it'll die. There are no rules for eating your horses.)

After going hungry, eating a meal the next day removes one day's worth of hunger effects. If your fortunes have changed dramatically enough, you can eat double rations to remove two day's worth of hunger effects at a time, though no more than that. If you have any food at all, you can't selectively withhold food from some party members and not others, yourself included. You can choose to have everyone go without, or you can use up all your remaining food to "share" - which means that no one goes hungry, but they do still have to check morale or run away. Personally, I find that rule really non-intuitive, and I would either reverse it (so that "sharing" food protects morale even though everyone goes hungry) or drop it entirely (so that if you have fewer rations than party members, either everyone goes without for a night and checks morale, or you can feed some at the cost of those who went without deserting automatically).


Camping or Lodging - Compared to the rules for food, the rules for having a place to sleep at night are blessedly simple. If you're in the wilderness, you and your adventuring party will make a camp and sleep there. This costs you nothing, and requires no special effort.

Staying in a castle, temple, or village will cost you. You pay by the "room" not by the character, so it's 1 gold per night for yourself and any priests, wizards, other fancy types, and 1 gold per night for rooms that up to 2 non-magical followers can share. (Plus 1 gold for each of your horses, in addition to the 2 gold per day per animal it costs to feed them.)

You aren't actually required to pay for lodging, and there are no ill-effects to sleeping outside, but if you do, you'll have to check the morale for each follower to see if they desert, and each animal to see if it's stolen. After the rather complex rules for what to do if there's some food but not enough for everyone, I'm surprised to see that the text is silent about what to do if there's some money for lodging, but not enough for everyone. I'm tempted to extrapolate from the rules for hunger to say that you can't choose to shelter some of your party but not others. (Since there's no other penalty for not sleeping indoors, there's no reason to imagine that you spend the last of your money packing everyone into whatever hotel rooms you can afford, knowing that some might still desert despite your efforts.) Again, if I were making my own rule, my inclination would be to say either everyone sleeps outside and everyone checks morale, or only some characters sleep outside, and the ones who are left out desert automatically. (In a sense, you could choose to gamble with everyone's happiness, or voluntarily release some members from your party in order to ensure the others stay.)

In the next part, I'll talk about who your character is, what you're doing when you're wandering around looking for money, how the game manages all the followers it wants you to accumulate, and the terrible, terrible combat system. That will probably conclude my read-through, but I'll also write-up at least one play-through as well. At the end, I'll share my thoughts on modifying the rules and/or content of Barbarian Prince to make your own solo adventure.

Let's Read Barbarian Prince - part 1 Map and Layout

I recently read a really glowing review of the boardgame Barbarian Prince that got me curious about the game - both what it's like to play it, and also at a more basic level, how it works.

You may have noticed I have an interest in using procedural instructions to generate a game experience, and learning from other games that use instructions, like the roguelike genre of computer games, and the Choose Your Own Adventure series of game books.

So consider my interest in Barbarian Prince to be part of a broader interest in how to use game rules to create a certain kind of experience, either in the absence of a gamemaster, or with a gamemaster who's more like an interpretive guide than someone actually directing the action of the game.

Fortunately, since 2003, the Reaper Miniatures company made six games originally published by Dwarfstar Games available as free downloads, including Barbarian Prince, so it's very easy for us to experience, despite the game being out of print from something like 30-40 years at this point.

Barbarian Prince map by Cynthia Sims Millan, copyright Reaper Miniatures

Let's start by looking at the map. It's really gorgeous, and it's fair to say that the beautiful map is the only reason I ever heard of Barbarian Prince before reading that review.

The Dwarfstar games were a bit before my time. Same with Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival and Magic Realm and TSR's Divine Right. But the maps are so evocative that people still post about them from time to time. Like many of you, my first knowledge of the existence of those games was seeing one of their maps online.

The first Dwarfstar game I ever saw was actually Demonlord. I learned about it, roughly at the same time, from People Them With Monsters (where it was being used as the map for his Outland campaign) and from Dungeon Skull Mountain (where it was being used for his Demon Verge campaign). Following the link to learn about Demonlord first introduced me to Barbarian Prince, although at the time, the map was the only part of the game I was interested in.

In thumbnail, the thing I notice most about the map are the colors, the soft lovely shades of green and purple that help distinguish the terrain types. If you look at the enlarged version though, there are details I didn't initially see. The cross-hatched fields of the farmland, the numerous towns, temples, castles, and ruins. This isn't, as I thought at first glance, particularly a wilderness map, like in Outdoor Survival, it's a map of a settled and interconnected region.

The dimensions of the map are unusual, 23 hexes down by 20 across. Its scale reminds me of Save vs Total Party Kill's repository of crowd-sourced hex maps, but the most common size there is 20 by 20. Outdoor Survival has a big map made of 6 smaller ones, and each of those is 17 by 14. Divine Right's map is oriented the other way, and it's 31 by 34. The Land of Nod's maps of, well, the land of Nod are even bigger. Even the Demonlord map is 22 by 23. I would say that 20 by 23 is a size that never caught on, but I think the fairer assessment is that there simply is no standard size for large hexmaps.

original layout, copyright Reaper Miniatures

   

layout by jumbit, copyright Reaper Miniatures

While the map is beautiful and informative, the appearance and layout of the rules is ... not. I'm not going to throw stones at what was - for all I know - the cutting edge of information design in gaming in 1981, but I will note that by contemporary standards, it is maddeningly poorly laid out, and that's just my reaction as a reader. I have to suspect that these problems would be amplified in play. If ever there were a document that cried out for the loving touch of a skilled layout artist, this would be it.

The rules of Barbarian Prince are divided into two booklets. e000 - e199 are events and covered in the Events Booklet, and r200 - r399 are rules and covered in the Rules Booklet. No, I don't know why the rules come second. These numbers correspond to sections rather than pages (they could as easily be labeled §000 - §399, like you see in some works of philosophy) and their purpose is to facilitate easy lookup. That's how the Choose Your Own Adventure books work too, (though with page numbers instead of sections) but what it really reminds me of is computer programming using the BASIC language. All that's missing are the GOTO statements.

(I spent a couple years in high school learning to program in BASIC on Apple IIE computers. This was some time around the turn of the millennium. My high school was ... not good. In college, I gave up on computer programming in favor of finally learning to understand other people, a decision that has unquestionably enriched my life ever since. I did have one accomplishment to show for my computer classes though. Some of my classmates had copies of Drugwars on their TI-83 calculators. I was never cool enough to have a copy on my calculator, but I did write my own game of trading stocks and avoiding the SEC and IRS that had the same interface and, as closely as I could guess, the same price fluctuations and kinds of random events. The Barbarian Prince rules remind me so much of the dot-matrix printouts of my game code. As I'll discuss in a future post, there's actually a very similar logic at work. You start each day on the "main menu", then select an action, which takes you to new submenus to resolve the consequences of your selection.)

I think I know why Barbarian Prince is written this way, or at least I have a couple guesses. I suspect the primary purpose was to minimize the space required to print the booklets. By never giving more than the 4-digit code number to look up another instruction, and never retyping any text that could simply be referred to by referring to its code number, the game probably minimized the number of lines and pages they needed to print the instruction books - and thus maximized the amount of game content that would fit in that number of lines and pages.

If the designer, Arnold Hendrick, was familiar with computer programming, he might also have felt more comfortable replicating the logic of reference and look-up to organize the game he was writing. In fact, one good question is, why isn't Barbarian Prince a video game? either instead of or in addition to being a board game. I feel fairly certain the Commodore 64 or Apple IIE could have run this program, perhaps with a short chiptune MIDI soundtrack and some rudimentary on-screen graphics to show your position on the map, or the appearance of the nearby village or temple, like you see in Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego. A computer would also do a bang-up job of tracking your money, food, and time. I suppose the answer might be as simple as the fact that Dwarfstar wasn't a video game company, but it still feels like a missed opportunity. Maybe an enterprising retrogame emulator will some day fill in the gap.

Aside from the eye strain of trying to scan through so many pages of undifferentiated text though, there are a couple down sides to this organizational approach. The first is that there are some rules that are more important than others, that serve as primary references that do most of the work of directing you to the other sections you need to read. Because you need to look at these rules to play the game, it's something of a problem that playing the game also requires you to continually turn the page away from them.

It would be enormously helpful to have key rules and reminders printed out on separate reference sheets, perhaps page-sized or half-page for certain tables, playing-card-sized for monsters and NPC allies. The top "Travel Events" sheet shown above, I think, was printed on a separate sheet of paper, but a bit more of that would have gone a long was. As would some color, variations in font size, table formatting ...

To give only the simplest example, compare the original layout above to one fan's attempt at an improved layout right below it. The second layout does take up more space, it's true, but look at how much easier it is to read, and how the addition of section titles alongside the section numbers already helps to orient you to what's coming next. Notice also the way the sample hex illustration and larger title fonts helps guide you to the correct terrain type, and how the inclusion of the rules for getting lost, for triggering an event, for hunting, and for finding animal fodder actually reduces the amount of flipping around you'll have to do, even though you will have to turn a page to find the correct table.

Another problem with using references and look-ups instead of repeating text is that it makes it that much easier to run into the "infinite regress" problem that can strike any game that uses procedural generation tables. Basically this is a problem where you look up a rule or event, and it has you roll on a table, that then directs you to another rule or event, which has you roll on another table, that then takes you ... and on and on and on.

Infinite regress can be difficult enough to cope with in a really well-organized document, but the additional page-flipping and booklet-switching here seems like it has the potential to really get you lost. Short of never having one table refer to another, you probably can't completely avoid the risk of too-much-page-turning in any game that uses procedural generation, but I think the takeaway for anyone wanting to design such a thing is that these cross-references can add up quickly, and that the total will always be more than the sum of the parts. I can't know without playing it (which I will!) just how much Barbarian Prince suffers from infinite regress, but the way it's written certainly appears to create a risk.

This time I focused mostly on appearances, but I'll start diving into the actual rules next time.

Learning from Boardgames - Tokaido and Things to do on a Journey

My Friday night group recently started playing Ryuutama, which got me thinking about the kinds of things you can do on a long journey. Which, in turn, got me thinking about the boardgame Tokaido.

The Tokaido game is named after a feudal-era Tokaido road between Kytoto and Edo. (Hiroshige also made a series of woodblock prints about traveling along the Tokaido road.) 

In the game, you take on the role of a traveler walking the road by foot. Your goal is to have the most satisfying journey possible. When boardgamers review Tokaido, they usually talk about how it's unusually non-competitive; there's not all that much any player can do to interfere with another's vacation. But as a roleplayer, what sticks out to me is that Tokaido is like a resource that can be referenced for ideas for things that player characters can do on a journey, like the kind you take in Ryuutama.

So what is there to do on a journey?

Leaving Edo from the second printing of Hiroshiga's The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido

Stopping in a village - In the Tokaido game, stopping in a village is synonymous with shopping at the local marketplace. And visiting the bazaar to see the unique wares each town has to offer is certainly one possible joy of traveling. It's easy to imagine giving each village its own specialty ware - this town sells nice hats, that one makes excellent pottery, etc.


Collecting souvenirs - Collecting mementos of your travels is a pretty common practice. But beyond picking up postcards or guidebooks or miniatures of the local landmarks, Tokaido rewards you for collecting different kinds of souvenirs on your trip. You get the most points for collecting equal numbers of clothes, art objects, small gifts, and local food and drinks.

Old school D&D gives experience for acquiring gold, and some OSR referees award experience for spending it, either in addition or instead. If each souvenir acted like a minor magical item, most players would happily buy them up, even if there was no XP reward for the purchase.


Working on a farm - Several activities in Tokaido cost money, but almost the only way to get more of it is to stop in at a local farm beside the road and do chores.

The British travel show Race Across the World has opportunities for the contestants to earn extra spending money by helping out farmers, working in restaurants, assisting the staff at tourist attractions, and doing various kinds of cleaning, from buses and boats to horses and elephants.

In a game like D&D or Ryuutama, its easy to imagine a job board somewhere in town asking for help slaying various monsters, or retrieving small treasures from nearby dungeons. There could even be wanted posters offering bounties on specific criminal NPCs. In my Friday night game, Josh also hit on the rather clever idea of the locals taking advantage of the travelers' itinerant status, by posting jobs like delivering packages or retrieving purchases at various other stopping points along the way.


Admiring the view - The Tokaido game has several scenic overlooks where you can enjoy taking in what the game calls a "panorama".  Stopping at an observation point to admire the scenery is a pretty classic thing to do on any kind long journey, whether a hike or a cross-country drive. You get the most points from enjoying the same panorama from several different vantage points.

Besides just looking, you could photograph the view, or draw a sketch or make a painting. In turn, you could photo, sketch, or paint a plant or animal, or I suppose, collect biological specimens - picking berries, gathering flowers, and of course, going fishing. The other thing you could do, at a particularly lovely natural trailhead or outdoor garden, would be go on a hike-within-your-hike to take in the whole site.


Bathing in a hot spring - Stop by a natural hot spring and enjoy a relaxing bath. This one is kind of culturally specific. Some parts of the world have natural hot springs, or some other tradition of collective bathing; others don't.

What else might be equivalent to going to a bathhouse? The characteristics that seem relevant here are that it's recreational and communal, possibly a bit intimate. When I think of communal relaxation, personally, I think of something like a picnic, brunch, high tea, or happy hour. Something where the ceremony of eating is at least as important as the food consumed.

Visiting some other sort of spa might fulfill the requirements I laid out; something like going for massages, or manicures, or for makeovers. For that matter, something like trying on dresses for a wedding or costumes for a celebration could work too.

Thinking of spas also makes me think of swimming pools and gymnasiums. In turn, that brings to mind participating in some sort of local sporting event. This could be something that tests each individuals against all others (like a race), or a tournament of one-on-one contests (like tennis or dueling), or even a team sport  I can think of a dozen examples, and you probably can too. Participating in a festival, stage play, or religious ceremony could also fulfill a similar function.


Praying at a temple - Stopping in at a temple and making a cash donation is another way to earn points in Tokaido. Panoramas and hot springs are free, but temples cost money, just like souvenirs and meals. The difference here is that you get to decide how much to donate. When shopping, different goods have different prices, but you also might be able to buy the cheapest item and still have it help you most (or you could get unlucky, and have the thing you really need by the pricey one). Mealtimes are similar. But at the temple, how much you spend is entirely up to you, though obviously more is better.

It's not hard to imagine pretty direct equivalents. If religious services don't quite fit the mood of your countryside, you could substitute in tossing coins into fountains or wishing wells (perhaps with a very small chance of being rewarded for the donation?) Anything that costs money, and that calls on you to be more of an audience than a participant, could fulfill a similar role as well. Touring a museum or art gallery, watching a concert or play, attending a reading or recital, watching a sport instead of playing one, witnessing some natural phenomenon.

These are all opportunities to earn experience by spending money, and to watch some local color rather than taking part in it. These entertainments are likely to be briefer. Helping to throw a local festival could take up an entire session, simply watching a parade go by should probably be much quicker for the players.


Meeting locals and fellow travelers - To my mind, this is one of the most interesting possibilities of travel in an RPG. In Tokaido, choosing to have an "encounter" is a bit like choosing to receive the effect of one of the other sites at random. You might get a souvenir, a piece of the view, some cash, even just victory points added to your score. But in a game like D&D or Ryuutama, you could, you know, actually talk to the people you meet. Instead of just archetypes - traveling merchant, shinto priest, guide, noble, samurai - you could meet individual NPCs.

In Tokaido, you only have encounters along the road. In D&D or Ryuutama, traveling encounters are still possible, but you'd expect to have more of them in villages or at the inn. (In Tokaido, the only people you meet at the inn are the other players.) I think there could also be a useful distinction between meeting locals and meeting fellow travelers. Locals are, by definition, only going to show up at a single site, and if you want to see one of them again, you probably have to go back to that town. Fellow travelers are more unpredictable; you could meet them along the road or at any site you stop by. You never know quite when to expect them.

D&D has its rival adventuring parties, but fellow travelers are different - not so much wandering monsters as wandering allies. At their worst, they're more like annoyances or nuisances. If they're "rivals" it's more in the sense of them wanting to be better at traveling than you are. They want to get to the next town before you, or be the first ones to spot all the rare birds along the way, or show off their latest purchase that you didn't get. But most fellow travelers won't be rivals. Some will be friends, some will simply have some eccentricity that makes them interesting or memorable. Sometimes circumstances might force you to cooperate, or pool your resources, or spend time in close proximity, perhaps sharing stories to pass the time. Sometimes you'll simply be passing through at the same time.


Staying at an inn - In Tokaido, every player has to stop at every inn. In D&D or Ryuutama, it probably won't take much convincing for most players to want some time in a hotel after several nights of camping by the side of the road, especially if the hotel avoids any hazards, or permits a better quality of sleep or healing. Any kind of checkpoint or waystation, any place where tolls are collected or papers are presented could serve a similar function as well, albeit with a less friendly atmosphere. Tokaido rewards the player who arrives at the inn last, on top of the rewards that you probably accrue in the process of taking the slowest path and having the most stops along the way.


Eating a good meal - Whenever I think of Tokaido, I think of a vacation my grad school roommate once told me about, where she and her aunt planned to spend a couple weeks visiting different villages around her prefecture, trying out the local udon specialty. Apparently every village has its own traditional style, just a bit different from its neighbors.  

(Later, in a different grad program, I learned about the idea of folk culture, where some way of doing things started out the same or very similar within a region, but then the people who do that thing in each particular place start handing down minor changes to the original way, from teacher to student, generation after generation, so that the traditions of each place slowly drift apart, a process that reminds me a little of island biology.)

The idea of enjoying food from other places is pretty well accepted as one of the benefits of traveling. There are entire series about it on the Food Network, the Travel Channel, even NPR. Describing the unique flavor of the local cuisine is a simple but visceral way to make a place feel different and special. There might not be any mechanical benefit, within your game, to eating at a restaurant instead of by a campfire, but this is still an opportunity to communicate about what kind of people live in each place, what sort of hospitality they offer. And the emotional connections we all have to both food and the sharing of food means that a well-described meal really is its own reward.

Tokaido board game logo

Traveling in the Tokaido game is about following a road dotted with landmarks and deciding which ones to visit. With one exception, there is no hierarchy, and each landmark is as important as the next. This is in contrast to both D&D and Ryuutama, where towns and dungeons tend to be much more important than other sites you can pass alone the way.

I think this is because each landmark has precisely one purpose in Tokaido, while in D&D and Ryuutama, the "size" of each site is variable. We could think of size here as the number of rooms in a dungeon or major buildings in a town - or as the number of potential encounters to be had at each site. Either way, in both D&D and Ryuutama, players spend much more time at some locations than others. Some spots along the road will be like a single room to explore, or a single encounter with a monster or NPC, but others will be both larger and more time consuming. A small town or dungeon might involve far more rooms and encounters than all the singletons put together; a megadungeon or city might be larger than all the other sites of any size combined.

The closest anyone can come to interfering with another players' agenda in Tokaido is to stop at a spot they might like, forcing them to pass it by and go on to the next one, making them arrive at the inn a little faster. Inns in Tokaido are a bit like the various "safe havens" that appear in various roleplaying games, but they still have only a single purpose (enjoying a meal), rather than allowing a full range of downtime activities.

The result of each landmark having only one interaction is that this keeps you moving along the road. There's no temptation to stay at a single site, exploring all the possibilities it contains. Instead, each stop is brief, and the journey continues.

I'm not sure it's possible (or even desirable) to partition things quite so strictly in a roleplaying game, but I think it is worth trying to emulate the idea that there are many possible pleasures, each stop contains only a few of them, and greater fulfillment will come from continuing onward to further sites than from delving deeper into the offerings of a single location.

Actual Play - Shadows of Brimstone - Contacting a Fallen Fortress

Kitsune - 1st level - played by Emily
Courtesan - 1st level - played by me


Session 1
Somewhere in the hinterlands of feudal Edo-period Japan, a meteorite made of mysterious dark stone has landed in the nearby mountains. The stone can be forged into weapons and used to perform magic, but it seems to have opened a door to monsters once believed mythical, and prolonged exposure slowly warps its users. Society in this localized region has all but collapsed into chaos. Landowning families have largely retreated into their hereditary fortresses, and the countryside is filled with soldiers and criminals, all traveling in search of opportunity, gold, and dark stone.

Two companions set off on an adventure of their own - the Kitsune, a fox spirit and former guardian of a Water Temple, and the Courtesan, a skilled entertainer bearing a personal letter from the Emperor, thanking her for the afternoon she participated in a tea ceremony at the Imperial Palace, that she hoped would help keep the pair safe on the road. They first set off to investigate a fortress that had gone dark, its fields abandoned, its lanterns left unlit.

The pair entered the fortress, with the Kitsune carrying their lantern to try to hold back the darkness. Courtesan peeked into the next room. Kitsune began searching for evidence of whatever crime had befallen the place. She found a small purse of coins ... and bloodstains and a fleeting shadow that unsettled her. She drew out her ornate comb to smooth her fur and sooth her nerves.

They passed into a dojo, the floor covered with scattered salt. The cubbyholes along the walls were filled with smashed salt blocks, buckets of the stuff were overturned. All of it was mixed with dirt and sand, useless to try to collect. As the pair stooped down though, the moonlight coming in through a hole in the roof was broken up by the shadows of a flock of tengu flying overhead. Fortunately, the flock flew on without landing.

In the next room the far wall was half-filled by a massive statue of some religious icon, a large man that neither of them recognized. The Courtesan had never been a religious woman, and the Kitsune was only familiar with her fellow spirits. As they crossed the room, the shadows seemed to twist with malevolence. While they watched those, they were somehow ambushed by an enormous slug that towered over both of them. The slug reared over them, its thick coat of slime and mucus dripping onto them, but the Courtesan's hidden dagger and Kitsune's kama knives quickly ended its life. Kitsune lamented that no salt had been recovered to use against the pest. Searching the room afterward, Courtesan found dark stone, and Kitsune found a magical Ring of the Yamabushi, which she placed on her finger.

They continued down a hallway where the ceiling collapsed onto them. Kitsune dodged out of the way, but Courtesan was showered with debris, and needed to pause to bandage her wounds. They passed through another hall and into a courtyard where a curse was painted on the floor. An undead goryo, dressed and painted like a kabuki actor snuck out of the shadows and ambushed them. This fight was harder, but the Kitsune's blades struck true, shredding the creature's costume and sending it back to the underworld. In this room Kitsune found dark stone and the Courtesan located a bag of gold dust.

After the fight, the Courtesan was briefly possessed by an angry spirit, cursing the brutal end of its too-short life. Kitsune brought out her ornate comb, and ran it through her friend's hair while speaking words of comfort and encouragement. "There there," she said, patting Courtesan twice on the shoulder, "there there." They both felt a growing sense of dread as the ominous circumstances began to weigh on them.

They next entered a garden courtyard. It was decorated for a party. At last! A clue to show the pair that they getting closer to learning the fate of the palace's inhabitants! Kitsune's quick eyes spotted a secret passage in the wall, but the pair declined to enter it. She also found a pot of soup, somehow still simmering over hot coals. They each ate a small bowl and felt refreshed. Whatever had happened to the residents, it wasn't poison.

The fortress echoed with hideous laughter as they passed into the next room, another training dojo. In the far corner, they spotted a statue of a temple dog come to life and fought against it on mats meant only for practice and trial combat. The stone statue shrugged off most blows, but Kitsune used water magic to deflect one of its own attacks back on itself, turning the tide of battle. Hidden in the dojo, Kitsune found a Yambushi's charm, and Courtesan located a few ingots of gold.

At last they entered the palace's audience chamber. They realized that the fortress's residents must somehow have tried to contact the denizens of an Other World. Every creature the pair had encountered so far came from the Forest of the Dead, a decaying and mist-filled afterlife. A demonic brand burst into flames on the floor, and three crowds of swirling ghosts poured through the gaps in the hastily boarded-up back door. So this was the fate of the fortress's inhabitants! Either slain by spirits or become them. Rather than risk fighting on the burning floor, Kitsune and Courtesan lured the spirits back into the dojo. They were outnumbered and outmatched, with the ghosts seeming to draw strength from the pair's own cunning and spirituality. Although they banished one angry horde of ghosts, the other two knocked the Courtesan unconscious and cast her aside. The Kitsune's water magic helped her hold out a while longer, but soon she too succumbed to the darkness.

When the pair awoke, the spirits were gone. The fortress was still ruined, but now empty. The Kitsune's leg was injured, and the Courtesan's collarbone ached. Both felt corrupted by the unsettling evil that permeated the place. They resolved to travel to a feudal village to seek medical help, and perhaps hire some assistants, before setting out on their next adventure.


Gains
Experience - Kitsune 645 XP, Cortesan 425 XP
Gold - Kitsune 25 gp, Courtesan 400 gp
Dark Stone - Kitsune 3 dark stone, Courtesan 1 dark stone
Treasure - Kitsune found Ring of the Yamabushi artifact and Yamabushi Charm gear.


Losses
Kitsune and Courtesan were both knocked out and injured.
Because the final spirits were not defeated and no survivors were rescued, the mission was a failure.


Commentary
I've played a different version of Shadows of Brimstone before with another friend, but this was my first time as the more experienced player guiding a novice through the game. Technically, Shadows has no game master or referee, but I took responsibility for knowing the rules a little better. Since I often run D&D for relatively novice players, this wasn't such an unfamiliar situation for me to be in. I did make a couple mistakes which I'll correct next time, but overall, I thought it went well - even though we got TPKed at the end.

The gameplay in Shadows is mostly cooperative, but the acquisition of stuff is competitive. Searching a room outside of combat is a solo activity, and the searcher gets to keep whatever they find. After a battle, all players get loot, but again, it's random and individualized. Experience awards come from simply hitting monsters size Large or larger, but only from delivering the killing blow for smaller enemies. Other ways to gain XP include searching rooms, healing others characters' injuries, and casting magic spells. Among the things that account for our uneven XP awards, Emily's character staying alive for another couple rounds of combat netted her quite a bit of experience, even though she was unable to survive the ghosts.

This is a game that requires a lot of pre-play preparation in terms of punching out cardboard tokens; cutting out, assembling, and gluing plastic minifigures; and sleeving and sorting all the cards that come with. The benefit of all that is that it's very good looking, and card draws replace a lot of what would random table rolls in D&D, which both lets the game run without a GM, and probably facilitates the individualized treasure and experience point awards.

What you give up is some of the opportunity for playing the role of your character, and some of the tactical freedom to address the various tableaus you encounter. Simply ignoring whatever it is generally is not an option.

The fact that all the monsters came from the Forest of the Dead was a total coincidence, but it helped create a slightly coherent narrative out of the evening's events, and it suggests that for this campaign, we might focus on the Forest as our primary Other World-ly adversary. The ghosts were a particular bit of bad luck. Some of their combat stats are based on your characters' skills, and ours had high values in just the right places to tip this fight from difficult to impossible. If we are going to fight these things again, we'll need better weapons, and maybe an expendable hireling to help out.