by GeoffreyB

I once rolled a GeoffreyB previously rolled d3 = 3.

by LVampa

Does having a running non-resetting market run into issues with "stale" listings? Local virtual flea market are ongoing, but require quarterly activity/updating or it is deleted by admin. This may create more work but may generate interest.

by leroy43

Character generation in The Fantasy Trip: Legacy Edition (TFT) is relatively straightforward, which given that combat can be nasty, brutish, and short, not to mention fatal, it's nice to be able to whip up a character in minutes. Notwithstanding the ease with which characters can be created, for the harried game master (GM) that needs to fill out parts of the world, whether it be a spontaneous side quest to a market town, or to hire a mercenary to fill in while a character recovers from a nasty battle, this book handily give the GM a set of twenty experienced pre-generated adventurers to drop into any situation that requires one.

The slim dozen pages between the retro-feel art cover house these characters, who range from 33-41 points, from Avasmal Zohol,
33-point human factotum, age 33 to Tis Staknisk, 41-point human master thief, age 33.

For context, a starting character in TFT will have 32 points, typically starting with a base of 8 in each of the three core stats (Strength, Dexterity, and IQ), with 8 additional points shared out between them. Typical skill rolls are at 3d6 vs. the relevant stat; at 10, 3d6 is a 50/50 chance, so each additional point allocated makes a big difference.

The characters have names, stats, some background information, and are pre-populated with equipment and talents. However, as the description on page 2 notes, none of these veteran NPCs are mages. "These adventurers are all "mundane," in that none have spells or magical aptitude assumed. They are designed to be interesting, rather than optimized. Not all use their full allocation of Talent points, either, allowing for some customization. The number of points used is listed in parentheses after the talent header." (emphasis in bold mine). This leaves room for the GM to make adjustments on the fly or tweak to suit the current situation.

Available separately from the booklet itself are 4x6 index card versions of the characters as well as cardboard tokens that can be used on the hexagonal tactical display. You can of course use any standard Fantasy Trip counters or miniatures to stand in for these characters.

The big question for any kind of supplement like this is "who is this for?" I argue that it's ideal for the new or novice GM that is running a TFT campaign to have in their back pocket. That said, there is value here for the experienced GM too, if only for inspiration.

by Damdael

I got interested in gamebooks a couple of years ago. First I found joy in playing books from Season 4 Graphic Novel Adventures and then I fell in love with Legendary Kingdoms books. Since then I've played through nearly fifty gamebooks. I try to write reviews of the books I've played in order to lure others into this rabbit hole. In my reviews I try to have comparisons to other gamebooks and place the books I review onto my ranking list so that readers can find other books to try out.

First Impressions:
- This adventure is quite short at just 45 paragraphs and it was devised as a way to promote the full Dark Moon Rises gamebooks. You could get the adventure essentially for free if you signaled interest in the upcoming Kickstarter campaign for the books. To my knowledge the adventure is only available digitally and there is no printed version. Or should I say was available because I don't think you can get this from anywhere currently as it was intended to be a VIP exclusive.
- The cover artwork looks inviting and pretty good for a freebie with the ruined fort basking in pale moonlight with a single lit window towards the top. I just don't know for sure has the cover been made by an artist or generated by a machine. Probably by the latter.
- There's very little interior artwork among the paragraphs. Just a couple of coloured battlemaps.
- The font of the text on the pages is pretty large and a clear font is used. It should be easy to read even with somewhat poor eyesight.
- As the title page and the back cover state, this is a sidequest and can't be played without the main book (either the free sample version or the full book). The series specific campaign and monster behaviour rules are found in the main book for example.

Rules:
- You need to know D&D 5ed rules. The adventure is compatible with both 2014 and 2024 rule versions. Owning the Player's Handbook is recommended though you can make do perfectly fine just by googling. You get to do things you'd get to do in a 'real' D&D campaign. You will fight monsters, manage your equipment, level up, attempt skill checks, cast spells and whatnot.
- The series specific rules are in my opinion quite easy to understand and logical even if there are five A4 sized pages of them. You play with a party of four. The book recommends you play with one player character per player and add readymade NPCs until you have the required four. The NPCs are simplified versions of regular PCs with fewer abilities and no inventory but they have more health and spells than PCs. You can play with more than one PC per player but it's a lot of management. There are some slight limitations like you can't have any method of flying.
- About half of the rules are related to the management of battles. There are basic battles and full battles. The basic battles are simple, as the name implies; you must have at least one party member in melee at each time and the monsters usually will target that character bar some exceptions. You can use all your abilities and spells in basic battles but there are simplifications like AoE spells will hit all enemies and there is no movement or cover mechanics. The basic battles are usually relatively fast to resolve and exist to sap some of your resources like health or spells or work as penalties for springing traps.
- Full battles are played on printed battlemaps (or digitally or on grid paper) with minis and with all the actors and moving parts usually take some 30-60 minutes to resolve. There are Brute, Skirmisher, Artillery and Special behaviours for the enemies. Brutes will for example move towards the closest party member with the least amount of movement possible and then attack with melee attacks.
- The rules nor the choices at the end of the paragraphs do not cover every possible thing you can do and ability you can have in the D&D 5ed ruleset. The rules state that if it feels fair you could use some ability in some situation then you may do so. For example Eladrin's Fey Step could be used to get over a pit in the floor even though the book would list jumping over as the only option.
- The rules also don't define clearly do enemies coup de grace downed heroes. Personally I played so that enemies only attack party members that are concious.

Artwork:
There's very little of artwork in this short sidequest. There are the covers and a couple of battlemaps but that's pretty much it (and the back cover is just a zoomed in bit from the front cover). The artwork is sharp and realistic looking which I like. It looks professionally made. Perfectly ok considering the promotional and freebie nature of the product but nothing more.

Playing:
This section is reserved for my worthwhile thoughts while playing the gamebook. I've kept my observations mostly vague in order to avoid any big spoilers but I've spoiler tagged most of this section just in case because I've written about the order of fights and other minor details.

- I came to the sidequest with level 3 heroes from the main book. My party includes paladin and cleric PCs and Millah and Dietrich NPCs.
[o]- Whoa, in the first fight you need to defeat 262 health worth of enemies and 208 of that is mundane damage resistant and has AC15. I think that's like four times as much as in the most recent fight over in the main book and that's not even taking into account the damage resistance.
- The fight was very tough. All my characters were down to like 5 health in the end and that was after using three healing spells to prevent characters from keeling over. It was also a somewhat boring fight. The map features don't really do anything besides block line of sight and with the high health enemies it took about 80 minutes to solve the fight.
- Found the first item requiring attunement in this campaign. The rewards you can get in this sidequest certainly aren't bad.
- I walked into some nasty traps. I failed to notice all the warning signs the book gave me which a more knowledgeable D&D player might have recognized.
- Another fight against some nasty enemies. Dietrich missed his attacks for the first four rounds. I admit I despaired and thought about resetting the whole fight when my cleric dropped to 0hp during round seven but I happened to deal two crits in a row afterwards and that killed two enemies and saved the situation. Still the fight went on for many more rounds and Millah went to 0hp too after sustaining a crit from the enemy boss. Finally I got all the adds down and positioned my two remaining characters so that the boss had to ranged attack my AC21 paladin safely behind 3/4 cover while Dietrich slowly peppered the boss down with Eldrich Blasts. It felt a bit like cheating but I played completely in line with the enemy behaviour rules.
- The battlemap for the second full battle was also a bit boring. Besides room walls and a bit of clutter limiting line of sight there wasn't anything special or memorable on the map.
- This sidequest was really tough. I had to squeeze out every single ability/spell and health of my characters in order to beat it. I even used all the healing potions I had found thus far in the campaign. I could have retreated in many points as the book offered the option to do that after every challenge but why would any adventurer worth their salt do that?[/o]

Playtime: 3h 21min

Positives:
- You can think this sidequest as an optional challenge. There are some nice rewards available but the risk of defeat is high. It's good that they've designed the gamebook/story in it so that you are offered the chance to retreat in multiple spots if your health/available ability situation is looking grim.
- The amount of choices in major decision points (there aren't many of those since there are just 45 paragraphs) is excellent. The story offers you three different routes of entry into the fort and later in another decision point you get as many as six different options to choose from. Some of the options hinge on your characters having certain special abilities / spells.
- Skill checks carry meaningful consequences. If you fail in a skill check to force open a chest for example you won't get a second try (and will miss out on some loot) or at minimum you will spring a really nasty trap that will consume a bunch of your precious resources.
- I count the D&D ruleset that the book uses a major strength. You aren't limited to a couple (or just one) class choices and a few spells/abilities like in many other gamebooks. Fights are much more interesting than in gamebooks that have very simple combat rules like Fighting Fantasy or Graphic Novel Adventures gamebooks.

Neutral:
- This sidequest is really difficult. Much more difficult than the main gamebook, The Pilgrim's Road. If you are struggling in it then you have no chance in this little sidequest.
- I love fights with minis on battlemaps but the maps in this sidequest don't really have meaningful special features so they are not as interesting as they could be. Basically the maps just have room walls and other line of sight limiting features but that's all.
- It did take over three hours for me to play through this sidequest which isn't bad for a basically free professionally written short story but almost all of that time was spent on fights. It doesn't take much time to go through the story and location exploration bits. Having played through this it doesn't feel like this short sidequest is something must-have if I consider just the story aspects. And the extra loot / xp might cause the difficulty of the campaign become too easy (remains to be seen).
- There isn't much artwork. Most likely because this was a promotional product released before actual game development and art asset creation.

Negatives:
- The cover artwork and story do not match. In the cover there's this enticing lonely but lit window up on the top floor of the fort. You'll look at the cover artwork and think 'I bet there's some treasure up there or the lair of a necromancer or something and you'll need to fight or sneak your way up there'. And when you step into the fort... [o]there's just the ground floor with ruined walls and no sight of a second floor.[/o]

Minor Issues:
Didn't spot any. All the paragraph links I picked led to where they are supposed to.

Verdict:
I find it hard to rate this gamebook. It's not a standalone product which I'm used to review and rate. It's a much more difficult sidequest than what is the difficulty of the main gamebook. It does have aspects I like; the amount of choices in decision points is excellent, skill checks aren't just for show and using the popular D&D ruleset is a major selling point. I love fights with minis on battlemaps but the maps in this sidequest aren't as interesting as the maps in the main book. You'll also spend most of the time it takes to play through this sidequest staring at those maps since you'll be having some ultra long fights against some very durable enemies (and those kind of fights haven't been the best fights in any game). There's very little artwork and what's there contradicts the story.

It isn't as exciting as the main gamebook but it's a neat little sidequest. Especially since it was given for free. It has been made professionally but lacks the polish of a book that has been developed longer. Looking back I think I enjoyed the challenge but many players might find it slightly too hard. With those thoughts I think Fort Holdfast gets a rating of 7 on the BGG scale from me. I'll place it to slot thirty-seven on my gamebook ranking list for now.

~ Damdael

by Zerbique

Just so you know: since the beginning of the week, over 60 projects in the "Tabletop Games" category have launched on KS. Less than 10 are actual board games.

This is getting out of hand, and sifting through the board games out of the sea of projects, and the solo games even more, is proving increasingly difficult. Therefore, I may miss a lot of smaller, indie projects in the future. This is unfortunate, but as long as Kickstarter won't do a separate board games category, we will keep being flooded with 5e D&D scenarios, zines, STL files for figurines, or whatever.

by gonecase

Related Item: Mausritter: Sword-and-Whiskers Role Playing

Welcome Jules and Chewie! Glad to have you on board!

by gonecase

Three sided coin flip gonecase previously rolled 1d3 = 3 ( )

by pdzoch

QOTD FEB 3: If you could make your own dream system right now (and had the motivation/license to do whatever you wanted) what would you make? What would you copy from other systems?

by pdzoch

A question suggested by [user=GrimoireOfJank][/user]:

If you could make your own dream system right now (and had the motivation/license to do whatever you wanted) what would you make? What would you copy from other systems?


Do you have a question you want asked as QOTD? Post here!
And if you want to find an old QOTD: The big QOTD Summary and Subscription Thread Volume 3

by NonaKnowsGames

Related Item: Longshot City

Welcome aboard! 2/5 seats taken here 🙂

by jmayDET

An item RPG Item: Unearthed Arcana 2016-09-12: The Ranger, Revised has been added to the geeklist Character Sheet Geeklist - The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall

by PoorJester

An item RPG Item: Death on the Reik (2nd Edition) has been added to the geeklist PoorJester's Warhammer 4e UA & TEW Campaign