My 2021 in Review

I've decided to "borrow" another idea from Jack Shear and write about my favorite things I read, watched, and listened to in 2021. Every month, Jack writes a Total Skull post on Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque, and every year, he and Tenebrous Kate records a Best Of episode of Bad Books for Bad People. (Readers with photographic memories may recall that I previously copied Jack's Unholy Misc format for my own Miscellany series.)

The Best Things I Read

 

Genre Fiction (tie) - The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders & Fire Time by Poul Anderson

I really love the worldbuilding in City in the Middle of the Night. We're on a small, tidally locked alien world with human two cities built at the cusp of Day and Night, Xiosphant, the clockwork city, and Argelo, the city that never sleeps. Anders describes their cultures and languages in a way that makes them feel distinctive, real, and alive. The world is hostile. Whatever star they're orbiting is deadly bright, so the Day side of the planet is utterly off-limits. The Night side is dangerous, but human tech can function there briefly, and there are some interesting aliens living in the dark. The early history of the human colonies are very gameable, with the mothership sending "treasure asteroids" to crash on the surface, where teams of explorers, kitted out in environmental suits and snow-crawlers raced into the Night to recover the mineral wealth.

City must be, I think, an example of what critics derisively refer to as "squeecore". There are two protagonists. One is a working class girl, Sophie, with an obvious crush on her upper class friend. They play at political revolution, and Sophie ends up taking the fall when the police come looking for someone to execute. She only survives because she discovers how to communicate with some of the Night side aliens. The experience is traumatic, and for the rest of the book that trauma is never far from the surface. The other protagonist, mouth, is the lone survivor of tribe of nomadic people who traveled the entire length of the small globe. Now she runs with some daring black market traders who sell contraband back and forth between the feuding cities. Sophie and mouth start only peripherally connected, but the actions of one inevitable affect the other. None of the book's tentative romances are ever consummated, but several characters go to rather extreme extremes to enact their political beliefs, or empower themselves, or just do what they think is right.

Fire Time has another weird ecology. The planet Ishtar is in a trinary system, with one star like our sun, one inconsequential dwarf, and one red giant on an extreme elliptical orbit that exposes Ishtar to a century of much hotter weather once every millennium. Humans have a small colony on Ishtar and are trying to use their technology to help the native civilization survive the titular "fire time" - in every previous era, nomadic peoples from the planet's hottest regions migrate and sack the cities, which alongside predictable flooding and agricultural failures has always led to the collapse of the sedentary governments. At the outset of the book, the humans on Ishtar are forbidden by Earth to continue their plan so they can make ready in case they get pulled into a conflict started by humans on another alien planet, one with no indigenous life, where the human colony's conflict with the colony belonging to a second alien species has metastasized to the point where both homeworlds are involved, in what feels like an analogy to the actual Cold War. The plot is essentially a tragedy - a conflict on Ishtar that could be averted isn't because of politics on Earth.

I'm impressed by how many ideas Anderson manages to pack into a 200-ish page novel (compared to the 300-400 that's standard today). We get at least two factions of humans, two of the Soviet-analog aliens, two very well developed groups of Ishtarans, a half-dozen viewpoint characters, great worldbuilding around the ecological and cultural effects of the trinary stars, and especially great worldbuilding around the biology and ecology of Ishtar. The handfuls of Terran crops are the only food on Ishtar the humans can eat, and soil that grows one planet's native plants can't grow the other's. The most common Ishtaran plant is called "lia", which I imagine looking like sansevieria. There's also a third type of life on Ishtar, one that only lives in the otherwise uninhabitable regions, except during the fire time. Tauran life originally came from a planet that orbited the red giant before it got too big and too hot. Their astronauts came to Ishtar a billion years earlier and all died out. But their gut bacteria survived, and from those evolved new multicellular life, and eventually new sentience. The Tauran's are essentially made up of "left handed" molecules compared to both humans and Ishtarans; what nourishes one is basically indigestible to the others. Anderson's world is mind-expanding to imagine.

 

Literary Fiction - Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess

I mentioned before that I wanted to read this one, and last year I finally did. Famous Men Who Never Lived tells about the 100,000 refugees who come to our world from a parallel Earth that diverged around 1910 and experienced a different 20th century. We closely follow Hel, short for Helen, and some of her friends. Hel is obsessed with the science fiction novel The Pyronauts, which tells a story like a reversed War of the Worlds mixed with Fahrenheit 451. In it, Martians come to Earth in peace, bearing gifts of wonderous technology, but by accident, they also bring infectious microorganisms that lay waste to our plantlife, including our crops. The titular pyronauts, of this book within a book, are men dressed in environment suits, armed with flamethrowers, who burn away the infected plants to prevent the alien spores from spreading. Chess gives us Hel's summaries, rather than raw text from the fictional Pyronauts, but she's invented a book that feels like it should exist, and could have been written in a slightly different 1920.

While trying to find support to build a museum to the lost culture of the dead world the refugees escaped from, Hel either loses the book or it's stolen from her, and the lost book becomes a symbol of everything she left behind and had to give up. The perspectives of the other characters help to fill out the strangeness of the other 20th century, and the magnitude of the loss of an entire world. This was one I read knowing that it would confront me with my own grief about the pandemic.

 

Poetry - Eunoia by Christian Bok

The heart of Eunoia is a series of five prose poems, each written using only words that contain only a single vowel. So there's an A poem, an E poem, etc. Each poem is packed with as much assonance and alliteration as Bok could fit into them, and each includes, among other things, a feast, a drug trip, and a sex scene. Even moreso than other poems, these deserve to be read aloud, and I found the entire exercise to be a real delight.

Here's the merest sample: "Hassan gnaws at a calf flank and chaws at a lamb shank, as a charman chars a black bass and salts a bland carp. Hassan scarfs back gravlax and sprats, crawdads and prawns, balks at a Parma ham, and has, as a snack, canard a l'ananas sans safran." So good!

Nonfiction - A Game of Birds and Wolves by Simon Parkin

A book about the secret history and forgotten contributions of women doing classified work during WWII, somewhat akin to Hidden Figures, Game of Birds and Wolves tells the story of the women in the British navy who got recruited to design and run a wargame that would first discover tactics to prevent the German U-boats from sinking so many cargo ships, and second teach those tactics to the commanders of the British fleet. You learn an awful lot about the navy, women in the navy, and submarine combat along the way. 

One pleasurable discovery for me was realizing that the somewhat arcane rules followed by Romulan Warbirds and Klingon Birds of Prey in the original Star Trek series, when they use their cloaking devices, rules that don't really make sense if there's just a forcefield that turns them invisible, are the rules that govern how submarines engage in combat. Underwater they're invisible and too deep for torpedoes to touch, but move incredibly slowly, can't fire their own weapons, and are vulnerable to correctly aimed depth charges.

The Best Things I Watched

 

Animated Television (tie) - My Hero Academia & Avatar: The Last Airbender

I started watching more anime this year primarily because it fits neatly into my lunchbreak at work, but I've enjoyed the opportunity. My Hero Academia is basically a Harry Potter story with superheroes instead of wizards. It's also a lot of fun. It's set in a world where about ¾ of the population has some kind of superpower, or "quirk". These range from classic superhero powers to some real oddities, like having tape dispenser elbows or headphone jack earlobes. The main character, Deku, is born without a quirk, but wants to be a hero, and idolizes All Might, who's a Superman / Dumbeldore figure in this story. He gets a power, gets into school, and begins his journey, and by the end of season 5 the story has nearly reached the second year of high school. (The first year is, uh, eventful!) I especially like the way the world outside the school has started to open up in the last couple seasons, and am looking forward to catching season 6 in the fall.

After finishing My Hero Academia, one of my coworkers recommended I try Avatar, and I'm glad she did! If I had known how much I'd like Avatar earlier, I too might have contributed to the wildly successful Kickstarter. The world here is divided into a continent that's home to the Earth Kingdom, a major archipelago that houses the Fire Nation, the north and south poles where the Water Tribes live, and assorted mountainous islands that used to be occupied by the Air Nomads. Oh yeah, and each society has a significant and elite minority of "benders" who can control one of the elements.

The story opens after a century of war waged by the Fire Nation on all the others. Water Tribe siblings Katara and Sokka discover an magic iceberg, containing Aang, the current reincarnation of the Avatar, who disappeared just before the war started. They travel the world learning magic, initially pursued just by the disgraced Fire Nation prince, Zuko, and later by other agents of the Fire Nation. As our heroes travel, we see the cost of war, but also the reasons one might fight to retain autonomy, the importance of a peace based on coexistence rather than conquest. There are a lot of likable characters, but to my mind, Zuko is the most compelling. He's a deeply flawed person, but also the one who I cared most about what he did, and who I knew least whether he would do what I hoped. I also have to mention how much I love the animals on this show. They're all combinations, bat-lemurs and vulture-wasps and turtle-ducks and the like. They're really delightful!

 

 

Live Action Television Television - Counterpart

My only ambition in watching Counterpart was to watch a scifi spy thriller, and to see JK Simmons playing two characters in the same show. It's fair to say I got more than I bargained for! In this show, there are two Earths, one essentially like ours, and one harsher and more mysterious, for reasons that are initially unclear. The two worlds are connected by a single doorway in East Berlin, with an embassy on either side, with very tightly controlled travel and communication between the two worlds. The existence of the doorway is a secret, and so there are lots of spies on both sides trying to learn about one another and steal technology.

The show opens because someone hired an assassin on the other side to come to our world and kill certain people. Simmons' character, Howard, a minor bureaucrat who doesn't even know the nature of the secretive organization he works for, gets recruited to help out because his comatose wife is one of the targets. The assassin, Baldwin, was the first element to draw me deeper into the show than I expected. I found I couldn't take my eyes off of her; the actress's performance is electric. The other element I couldn't resist was learning more about the secrets of the two worlds, how they came to be connected, and the global flu pandemic in the 1990s that made the other world so harsh and cruel in its dealings with ours. I didn't expect how important that fictional pandemic would be to the show, or how much it would engage my emotions.

 

 

Documentary Television - Alien Worlds

If I were to add a couple more to this category, I'd recommend the glass arts competition Blown Away, or the ceramic competition The Great Pottery Throw Down, but the show that really exceeded my expectations was Alien Worlds. I'm a big fan of speculative biology, and this show doesn't disappoint, but what I especially liked was how much it was all grounded in extrapolating from the biology of Earth. The very first interview in the first episode is with the man who discovered the first exoplanet! I was also deeply impressed by the tour of the Danakil Depression.

There are only four episodes, but we see the airborne life that thrives in the thick atmosphere of a planet with twice the mass of Earth, the adaptive radiation of the same genus into different species on the night and day sides of a tidally locked world, the overflowing fecundity and complexity of the food chain on a world with a binary star, and the possible long-term future of an intelligent species on an Earth-like planet around about to become a red giant.

 

 

Film - The Night is Short, Walk on Girl

I probably watched more television than movies last year, but The Night is Short, Walk on Girl leapt to the front of my mind when I thought of things I'd enjoyed. We follow an unnamed and very charismatic young woman, a college student, as she enjoys a very long night of drinking, book fairs, and street theater. She quickly collects a group of fellow bon vivants, and a luckless grad student with an unrequited crush on her. This film really captures the joy of the night life, and reminded me how much I miss it, how much fun it used to be to go out on the town.

I have two reservations worth mentioning. First is that in the final act, a rather nasty common cold spreads among all the revelers in the film, sending all of them home to bed, and leaving the streets eerily empty in a way that looked too much like the first lockdown. One character even rhapsodizes about the rapid spread of communicable diseases as a manifestation of human camaraderie. It was impossible for me to watch that and not think about the possibility of people spreading something worse than a simple cold. 

My second reservation is that I don't really like stories about men pursuing romance with women who don't know them; the chases always feel sinister to me and the happy endings almost always feel false. By the end, the grad student guy learns how to stop acting like a stalker and start acting like a friend, and the "end" of his chase is simply that they make a tentative start at dating. But neither set of qualms is enough to knock this from its spot as my favorite movie I watched last year.

Mausritter and a Resource Management Link Retrospective

Last year, I wrote the first post of what I hoped would be a series, where I kept up with what other roleplaying bloggers are writing about resource management in their games. That initial post didn't have a planned theme, although most of the posts I looked at were talking about encumbrance, and thinking about how to assign encumbrance slots.

At the time, I made a few recommendations. I suggested that encumbrance rules should be kept as simple as possible because different kinds of complexity add up very quickly. I suggested that encumbrance should be fairly consistent from character to character - although tying carrying capacity to Strength is popular, I think that allowing it to vary from 3 to 18 is too much. I noted that using the Strength bonus instead of the Strength score is one compromise solution; another would just be to make carrying capacity the same for everybody.

I praised Goblin Punch's "triple X depletion" rule. The idea here is that if you're using a supply that gets used up over time, you track the rate of it getting used up by marking three Xs next to the item name, and the third X means you've run out. If you combine that with a rule that says small items come in bundles of 3, suddenly you've got a fairly simple, fairly consistent rule for tracking supplies.

At the time, I came down against "backpack" rules that let you trade 1 or 2 encumbrance slots for a "backpack" that has extra slots inside. My reasoning was that this trade doesn't really feel like a trade-off to me. If there's no downside and only benefit to carrying a backpack, why not assume that every character has one, and just increase the base carrying capacity by whatever amount the backpack was going to add?

I've thought about this a little since then, and I think there is a purpose that "pack" rules can serve. If you want to have a second type of encumbrance with a second and smaller carrying capacity, then envisioning this as a "pack" seems like as good a mental image as any (although maybe it would be better to think of the primary encumbrance as a "backpack" and the secondary encumbrance as a "side-bag"?) I've mentioned this idea before - Stars Without Number has special encumbrance slots for items you can access instantly in combat, Numenera has special slots for magic items, Shadows of Brimstone has special slots for single-use items, etc.

I wouldn't recommend that you try to use more than one of these systems at a time, but clearly, some rules systems see a benefit to having a second, more restrictive carrying capacity for a special class of important items. I have a few suggestions. First, if "side-bag" capacity can potentially increase, I say let it grow based on character level, rather making a better bag something you can just find or buy. A more experienced character becomes a better packer! Second, don't insist that characters "give up" any of their primary encumbrance slots in order to carry a "side-bag". Just assume that everyone has one, and set your numbers accordingly.

If you really want to create a trade-off, then say that wearing heavy armor means you can't carry a side-bag (and wearing extra-heavy armor means you can't carry a backpack or side-bag!) But otherwise, accept that you've created a system where everyone has two types of encumbrance, and don't add complication by pretending that the players have a meaningful choice to trade a couple of one type of slot for a handful of the other. The only reason to allow such a trade would be if certain character classes (like alchemists, maybe?) had a unique and special option to give up a regular slot or two in exchange for their class-specific ability to carry special materials. (Or, you know, just let them have their special class-defining feature without punishing them for it, whichever.)

 

  

 

On Discord, KingPenta of the Dice Blade blog asked me if I would consider looking back on my last post about this and reflecting on what I think works. My long answer to that question is above.

My short answer is just three words: Mausritter is lit.

  

Mausritter

 

Okay, so maybe there's also a long version of my short answer, but it's basically just me singing Mausritter's praises. If you were to take every good idea people in the OSR scene had about encumbrance, edited those down to their simplest and purest versions, and combined them into a single ruleset, you would have the resource management rules from Mausritter.

I think I've said before that I consider Into the Odd to be something like the Platonic ideal of simple Dungeons & Dragons. Both the rules and the writing have been distilled down to their very essence and presented in the tersest, most compact possible way, without sacrificing the elements that are most essential to play. I'm not saying that no one else can write something better than I2TO, but I am saying that you'd be hard pressed to write something shorter. Chris McDowell has seemingly cut out everything but the most necessary elements of D&D, and edited his own writing to be as terse as possible. Trying to compete on either of those fronts is likely to leave you with something that either no longer really feels like D&D or is no longer really legible.

Well, in the same way, Mausritter, which is built off the bones of I2TO, feels like the Platonic idea of simple resource management for D&D. You might be able to write something better, but you probably can't write something simpler or shorter without making sacrifices that change the feel of the game so much that it becomes something else.

 

And part of how Isaac Williams does it is by taking advantage of an underutilized solution for resource management - illustrated inventories.

 

Paper Elemental giving some very good advice here

Mausritter putting theory into action

Almost the entirety of Mausritter's inventory rules fit on that two-page spread. ("Inventory" is also a MUCH better word than "encumbrance", which always feels like it should be accompanied by sad trombones.) You have exactly 10 slots of carrying capacity. Armor and heavy weapons take up two slots apiece, most other items take up only one. Every item has little boxes to mark off their "usage" - torches after an hour of burning, rations after eating, weapons and armor after combat, other items after they get used in a serious way. Most items have 3 boxes, fancy electric lanterns - and by implication, any other really expensive, high-quality goods - have 6. Spells are represented as sigils or runes that you carry. Conditions such as injury and exhaustion take up an inventory slot until you take care of them.

And ... that's pretty much it. Like I said, it's like every good idea for inventory management, everything Torchbearer tries to do in its own more-complex way, edited down to just about the simplest imaginable version of itself. The art both helps you recognize the item and communicates volumes about the setting. Because you can print off and cut out your own little inventory tokens, you can quite literally organize your inventory by moving them around, and you can write-on and erase the individual tokens until they need to be replaced, without wrecking your main character sheet.

The larger size of certain items creates simple but interesting packing dilemmas - for example, light armor needs a shield, which means you can't wield large weapons at the same time. The different situations for checking usage give each item a slightly different feel, and some add an element of unpredictable risk. Improvised weapons get used up a little each combat, but for the others, there's only a 50% chance it'll be depleted. The same is true of the spell runes. Pick how many charges you're willing to risk using up and roll that many GLOG-style Magic Dice; each charge has a 50% chance of being expended by casting the spell. Although the chances are the same, to me this feels like for weapons, you're checking to see if they are surprisingly damaged, while for spells, you're finding out if they're miraculously not used up (perhaps simply by comparison to other rule systems, where weapons are always fine, and spells are always expended in casting).

 

 

 

Having slightly gotten back into the swing of this, and realized I'll enjoy it more if I organize these posts thematically rather than chronologically, you can probably expect to see more posts like this in the future, hopefully at a faster rate than once per year.

I should also note, in looking at the Mausritter website to write this, I realized that it's getting a fancy boxed-set edition from Games Omnivorous next month. The same charming art as ever, now printed on very heavy paper.

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.