System and Setting
New game, new blog. First blog. I’ve been thinking about starting a blog about table top role playing games, fantasy, and whatever else comes up for some time now. I don’t even care if no one reads it; it’s a space for me to work out ideas.
Anyway, I am starting a game of Whitehack 3e with the A Thousand Thousand Islands setting, in particular Lorn Song of the Bachelor. I specifically wanted a setting to interrogate the settler colonial ethos of Dungeons and Dragons by including them as a faction with prosaic interests, which Lorn Song does excellently. I have run I think 3 or 4 sessions so far, some in person and some online, but then busyness and scheduling got in the way. Hopefully we’ll be able to restart, or else I will not be starting a second game in fact, and will need to find something else to blog about.
System: Whitehack 3e
Most of my players are new to ttrpgs. I choose Whitehack for the purposes of running a game that is a) not super focused on dungeon crawling (like black hack or knave or cairn), b) that is flexible about what types of characters can be made, and c) is very simple, so I can try to run the game in an FKR-style. I’ve really enjoyed getting into Whitehack as an OSR game. It takes the mentality of abstracting the elements of dnd into a very versatile system. I like the way magic works, and the idea of building characters through concepts. It is written rather tersely, and laid out in full paragraphs, so that it can be hard to understand what the book is saying. I had to read the description for “the deft” (a class) several times before I understood how it worked. We haven’t run a full combat and I’m curious to see how easy it is. The armor system is really good, but I’m not sure about the tactical positioning moves, as they seem to go against the vibe of the rest of the game. The equipment list is really good in differentiating each weapon so that it serves a specific purpose. I love the simplified monsters; it makes it really easy.
Adventure: Lorn Song of the Bachelor
A really complete Town-Region-Factions-Dungeon adventure, which is what Keep on the Borderlands perhaps inaugurated in a module, so it will be interesting to play this for the purposes indicated above, namely to interrogate colonialism and dnd. There’s a lot of overlapping and contradictory aims among the npcs, and it will be interesting to see how my new players will react to that. Or potential new players; they need to respond to my last scheduling email 😬.
First post done!