I’ve heard a lot of good things about this game, so when I noticed it was on sale at DriveThruRPG here before Christmas, I weakened; I bought the core rules and read through them over Christmas. That all predates my New Year’s resolution to stop trying out new games, so technically I haven’t broken it yet!
In a nutshell: Sandbox hexcrawling RPG from Free League with modern rules but Old School vibes. Point buy character creation, dice pool task resolution, death spiral wounding. 500+ pages spread across three books.
This is a big game, so I’ll just hit the highlights.
What’s in the Box (or Download)?
- Players’ Handbook (212 pages)
- Gamemaster’s Guide (268 pages)
- Legends and Adventurers (40 pages) – this provides random tables for creating characters, legends, and monsters.
- Map and stickers – the map chiefly shows terrain types, and you’re supposed to mark things the players discover with the stickers. The map is double-sided so you can use it more than once. That doesn’t work well in PDF, but you can always export it into an image editor and mark it up there.
The Premise
For 300 years, the Blood Mist has killed anyone who strayed outside by night, and so for generations, everyone has stayed close to their village. Now, the Blood Mist has gone, and the more adventurous community members (that’s you, that is) are venturing out to explore the Forbidden Lands and see which of the legends are true.
Core Mechanics
When a character tries to do something, add the relevant characteristic (range 1-6) and skill (range 1-3) and maybe a die or two for having the right gear. Roll that many d6; if you get at least one 6, you succeed, more 6s improve your success.
If you don’t like the result, you can push it; reroll all dice that did not score a 1 or a 6. The number of ones is how much damage the relevant characteristic takes and how many Willpower points you gain; you use those to cast spells or invoke certain talents granted by your kin (ancestry, race, whatever) or profession (character class). Actually, whether you get Willpower or damage depends on what kind of die scored a 1, but I won’t go into that beyond saying you need to be able to tell them apart.
Initiative order is determined at the start of a fight by drawing a card from a deck of 10; it does not change by itself but sometimes you can swap cards. Each turn you may perform one slow and one fast actions, or two fast ones; if you need to roll dice for it, it’s a slow action. Resolve an attack by the attacker rolling to hit, the defender rolling to dodge or parry, then the defender rolling to see how much damage his armour soaks. Each point of damage that gets through reduces Strength by one point, if that reaches zero you are Broken – incapacitated and suffering a critical injury.
Character Creation and Advancement
Choose a kin (out of 8), a profession (out of 8), a path (basically a subclass – three per profession), and an age, which determines how many points you can allocate to the four attributes and 16 skills. Kin and profession each give you a talent (edge, advantage, feat, whatever) and you can pick 1-3 more; profession largely determines your starting gear. You also choose your Pride, your Dark Secret, and your relationships to other party members.
You get one experience point for each item from a list of 10 you can tick off in a session, and improving a skill costs 5 xp times the new level. Talents have three levels – for magical talents, this is the maximum spell rank you can cast – and improving one costs 3 xp times the new level. Attributes are not improved.
Things I Like About the Game
- The kin and the relationships between them.
- Resource dice for food, drink etc; when you use some of that resource, roll the die, on a 1 or 2 it is reduced one die type. This is better than tracking how many iron rations and pints of water you’re carrying.
- Wounds, fear and environmental effects work in similar ways, by reducing attributes, generating a death spiral by reducing your dice pools.
- The random encounters, which are not just monster statblocks, they are also mini-aventures in their own right.
- Monster descriptions each include a random table for what the monster does each combat round.
- The example adventure sites; one village, one castle, one dungeon.
- The map and stickers. There’s a lot of replay value here, as it could take several campaigns to explore the map fully, and then you can do it again on the other side.
- The designers realise that many groups already have a favourite setting, and tried to make the rules easily portable to other worlds. I’m not sure how well they succeeded, but they get points for effort.
Things I Don’t Like
- Rolling to dodge, parry, or absorb damage. These are mechanics I dislike in all games; that’s just me, YMMV.
- Crafting rules. Something else I dislike in all tabletop or computer games.
- The complexity of the combat, travel, and stronghold rules. Especially the stronghold rules.
Conclusion
I think of this game as the love child of Original Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying 3rd Edition. It has a lot of really good ideas, and I can see that it would work well as a solo game, like most games that rely heavily on random encounters and events.
While I might someday be tempted to play it solo, it’s too complex for me to run as a group game. So, for the moment it returns to its slumbers on the hard drive.
Halfway Station 3.0 
Comments on: "Review: Forbidden Lands" (9)
Andy said: “Rolling to dodge, parry, or absorb damage. These are mechanics I dislike in all games; that’s just me, YMMV.”
Is it the added rolling?
The only way I see that working is if you have to bake in parts from the defender when the attacker attacks.
It would have to work a bit like below:
Attacker gathers up whatever relevant things from attacker (skill, attributes or attribute modifiers, environmental modifiers) and put negatives in from the defender for their defensive benefits (high dex, armour of varying qualities/types, toughness, training in defensive positioning/movement, positive buffs on the defender) so that dice are taken away or successes are harder to achieve or a target number is varies by the defensive side’s factors.
If you don’t factor in the defender’s benefits, two defenders defending from your attacker will treat them similarly and that seems not ideal.
Exempli Gratia:
Case A)
Your Fighter takes a swing at the Orc. Your attacker (Fighter) is modified by his skill, his attributes, maybe any weapon type variances, and any magic or other things like environmental factors (slippery floor, for instance) and the Orc just has a standard target number or a set number of successes needed.
Case B)
The Fighter side is the same as above, but the Orc is wearing a scavenged Elven chain. If the standard target number does not integrate that or the number of successes needed (or the difficulty of scoring a success doesn’t change), then the Orc’s special armour is not covered.
How do you prefer to bake in varied qualities in a defender? Target number, count of successes, value needed to cause a success, or nothing at all?
I’m all for speed and simplicity, but not at the expense of not having some variance in the defender’s quality/defensive ability.
Two clarifications… first, I prefer target defences to be static numbers so there are fewer die rolls and simpler arithmetic; those numbers can be adjusted to allow for circumstances or equipment before the fight, but I don’t want to roll for it every time, especially as the GM where I’m doing that for maybe a dozen orcs each round. Second, I think my dislike of rolling to dodge or parry stems from games of RuneQuest and GURPS I played in, where 80-90% of combat rounds were a complete waste of time because the attacker would hit, and the defender would parry, over and over again. People who know more about melee combat than I do tell me that’s realistic; I say it’s boring, and also frustrating because you think you’ve succeeded and then suddenly you haven’t.
There is that. Harn is a d% sort of system (D100) and there dodge or parry are critical because most of the time you have no armour. In Harn, if you have the money to own it and you’ve got the need (you don’t come into town on Sunday in your armour) and you are in the employ of someone in the top 3%, then you might have it on, but that’s a lot of caveats.
Foreigners showing up with armour or anything bigger than a hatchet or a dagger is going to get the attention of the guards.
My armour (as a yeoman) was a padded tough torso clothing/armour and a shield. Most of the time, your 35%-45% chance of blocking mattered.
I do get the ‘fewer rolls’ and I guess if I was wanting anything for people who aren’t engineers and software designers, the math thing would be a valid concern. Opposed rolling takes a lot of time and that kind or removes a sense of urgency…. if the fight takes an hour.
Long, involved, crunchy fights take sooo much time.
I played Mutant year zero, which is pretty similar. When you chose to dodge it sacrificed your attack, so it’s not really an ADDITIONAL roll. It also only succeeds on 6’s (and if you push it can result in your gear breaking). I found it only made sense if you were built for defense and tried to lure the big bad onto you while your friends wailed on them/others.
I too looked at playing Forbidden Lands. Very compelling characters and creatures, and a clever sandbox setup.
Ultimately, I shelved the idea.
FL seems very demanding on GMs. Partly, this is inherent in sandbox play. Anything can be encountered at any time, so the GM must be familiar with all aspects of play. Difference is, I’m well-versed with D&D, and so can “wing it” with little trouble in a random hex crawl. Contemplating that with FL gave me anxiety. I was never even clear where to start.
You might be approaching sandbox play from the deep end. You bury your starting location nowhere in particular (players don’t know what the world is like). Then you control what monsters, npcs, factions they may encounter. It’s also very freeing to be able to suddenly add a new group/monster/individual bc it seems right. You don’t need to meet the canon.
I find a lot of set campaigns to be more stressful in the hopes of meeting the canon and appropriately channeling ‘the vibe’ of the setting.
I think what Andy meant was:
Roll a bunch of dice attacking, but defender has to roll and tally dice too (either to dodge or soak or whatever) versus attacker rolls a bunch of dice versus a static defensive value (only ONE person needs to roll and dice, not two, in any exchange of pleasantries).
In my experience, the more people roll dice, the more you run into: Cocked dice, dropped dice, people who like have to look up the same dice pool’s contents every turn (very short memory?), and then a lot of people have to manually had to group the D6s into 10s to help their counting and sometimes it could take a looong time to get the number.
One roll, by one player, with no counter rolling is MUCH faster. And since that goes both ways (when the player is attacked, they don’t roll a defense roll, that’s a static value) so you literally half the rolling (1 roll vs 2 in every exchange either way) AND you miss the ‘are you done yet, can I roll now?’ time that happens while the attacker figures out their dice and tallies them and the defender waits to see if they need to roll (which also slows things down).
In high crunch systems like D&D, you can easily see 65-80% of a session in combat time. Even in simpler systems that only have 30% of session in combat time, cutting the resolution by half the number of roles is a huge gain in speed and moving the story along.
===== the worst dice pool overload you’ll see ======
I’ve played games (a 4E game with some add ons) where the character I was caretaking (player wasn’t able to finish campaign) had 5 shots per turn (assuming he didn’t use a 3rd level ranger spell that allowed you to fire one shot at any target in sight and range…) and each of 5 shot had 2D20 (attack and crit confirm to avoid rolling them in sequence) + the damage dice at the same time so as to avoid another sequential roll for each attack included d8 for the arrow, 2d6 for magical adds to damage that were elementally aligned, and 2d6 I think for some sort of Ranger or Assassin power. The entire 5 shot standard round of fire involved 35 dice. (The one that let you shoot everyone in range and sight probably went over 100 dice but it happened rarely).
I took pencils as pens and laid out 5 pools of 7 dice (attack d20, crit confirm d20, the 5 damage dice). When the characters turn started, I’d grab each pool and roll them in their pen and then I’d look over the 5 pens for the colour coded attack d20 – if numbers weren’t high enough, didn’t bother with tallying the damage pool or crits.
I got fast, but I threw waaay more dice than anyone else, even the wizard with the massive energy AoEs. It was silly. We treated that carry as some sort of rapid fire anti-infantry weapon….. (quad 50 used in Vietnam)…..
I followed the argument. I was just noting that this system there is some mitigation of the problem. There’s no addition for one (adding up dice takes some people a lot of time), each attack cycle doesn’t always involve multiple rolls (defense costs actions vs being automatic).
Another notable mitigation in this system is the die pools and ‘hir points’ aren’t huge. A body/health/str of 6 is huge. That’s 6 successful hits one can take. And you death spiral as you get wounded (a lot of systems you are fully effective until you die…..much less reason to contemplate running away).
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