Last Tuesday we played our fourth session of Forbidden Lands. My heart was -- is -- so heavy. But on we played. Last week I decided to go all-in on FL's procedural generation and ditch everything attached to the Raven's Purge campaign. It eliminates my prep time and lets me discover the world alongside the players. That real-time discovery… Continue reading Fiddling While Rome Burns or Drawing the Magic Circle Anew (probably both: Forbidden Lands session 4)
Last night we ran our third session of Forbidden Lands. After hewing closely to the game's campaign materials last session (The Hollows, a sample town in the Gamemaster's Guide) and grinding against, well, everything about it, this time I decided to run the game more in the vein of Mutant: Year Zero. That is: zero prep, generate everything on the… Continue reading Push Me, Pull You
Yesterday I had an unexpected opportunity to run two similar games side by side. My friends Ralph Mazza (Ramshead Publishing, created Universalis, Blood Red Sands) and Jahmal Brown (indie con rock star, wrote Clockwinders for Fate Worlds, writing Cortex Prime: Supers) were in town for a week of gaming and escaping their icy wastelands. We had been batting… Continue reading A/B Testing: The One Ring vs Forbidden Lands
A couple things have been nagging me about Forbidden Lands since our first session. They are entirely tied up with the fiction, not the procedures. First: the creators went through a lot of trouble to design a multi-faceted, robust, living setting. It's like a mini-Glorantha in some ways. There are detailed demographic breakdowns on the map,… Continue reading Forbidden Lands: Cultural Context
The first in a series of writeups about our experiences with Forbidden Lands.
