First time playing: Symbaroum

I picked up the Symbaroum PDF when Fria Ligan were doing a one-day free giveaway, but hadn't actually got round to looking at it.  Then our Coriolis GM asked if anyone was interested in a one-shot.

We were offered a selection of pre-gen characters.  I picked up Magdala, the barbarian witch, because she was a witch.  Last time I played a witch it was in Pathfinder, when the APG came out and we wanted to try out the new classes.  She was an early casualty of the Player Massacre of 2010.  But back to Symbaroum.

I love dark Germanic flavour fantasy, and I've played Warhammer FRP a couple of times, but I always feel like it suffers a bit from the fundamentally comic nature of some of the races.  Mohawk-wearing dwarves and pie-obsessed halflings don't make for a dark and gritty game.  (See Diversity Hires for what the last game of WFRP I played was like.)  Symbaroum gives me the same flavour but without the comic elements.  The playable races are humans, changelings, ogres and goblins, who feel far more like they wandered out of some ancient fairy tale than the standard Lord of the Rings style party.  The world feels smaller, and a little claustrobic, but there's certainly room for a campaign in there.

The system is uncomplicated - just a row of stats to roll under, and a few special abilities - but still feels flexible.  My first level witch has only one spell, but each spell can be cast at three different levels with different effects.  There are no spell slots.  The only limitation is that each spell cast gives her an amount of temporary corruption, and with that amount being rolled it can vary wildly.  With a threshold to avoid crossing, each spell becomes a gamble.  In one stroke, the game has both done away with Vancian magic and given magic more thematic flavour.  I love it.

Besides magic, I'm also enjoying the fact that the monsters don't roll to attack - the players roll to defend.  This is a mechanic I've only recently encountered in games (The d6 Hack, specifically) and I like it a lot - just as much fun for the players but with fewer dice rolls.  Some of the mechanics are being slightly hidden from us by the VTT (Fantasygrounds appear to have excellent support for Symbaroum) but I can see enough to know I'd be just as happy playing this on a real table.

Like everything else I've seen from Järnringen / Fria Ligan, the art is gorgeous and evocative.  No surprise to see there's an art book available, and a bunch of it has made it onto All Rolled Up products as well.

We played the one-shot introductory adventure, The Promised Land, and enjoyed it so much we agreed to come back for more.  So we're now diving into The Copper Crown, and I eagerly look forward to what terrible places it will take us to.

Pretty much the only criticism I've seen of Symbaroum is that there's not a lot to it, and that's all from early reviews.  There's a bunch of extra stuff available from Modiphius, which hopefully fills in any gaps.

In short, if you like dark fantasy and aren't wedded to WFRP, this is definitely worth playing.  Especially if you managed to pick it up for free.

A Dark Path

D&D and its sibling game Pathfinder are, basically, heroic fantasy games.  They're not the games I would instinctively look at for running a dark fantasy campaign.  I'd be going for something like Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, or maybe one of the newer arrivals like Symbaroum.  But that doesn't mean you can't use them for dark fantasy.

Our current Pathfinder campaign is doing it pretty well.  Here's what I think is making it work.

1. Player buy-in

This is absolutely crucial.  If you've been following my game write-ups you might have noticed that the characters created by the Thursday group can be a bit...wacky.  However, with this game the GM was up front that he wanted to run a dark and gritty game and we've made characters to fit in with that.

2. The right setting

There's nothing wrong with the nice temperate biome where Standard Fantasyland appears to exist, but things just don't feel that dark when you've got the glory of Fantasy New Zealand spread out in front of you.

Our current campaign takes place in a region that's a mix of boreal forest and tundra.  The cold is constant, and snow can be as big a threat as any monster - bigger, even, because you can shoot a wolf but you can't kill the weather.  Our people are foragers, and we value the Greenwood where we make our home as much as any god.

This doesn't come up much from a mechanical point of view.  Our characters are mostly human, all from the same tribe, and know how to survive in harsh conditions.  Only in extreme circumstances are we making rolls for survival.  But the narrative threat of freezing or starving is constantly there.

3. A formidable threat

Death isn't scary.  Death is an inherent part of Pathfinder.  Characters die, you make a new one and carry on.

You know what's scary?  A monster you can't fight.

As the saying goes, if it has stats you can kill it.  But at the level this thing is at, we might as well be up against Cthulhu, and anyway, being killed by it is the least of our concerns.  What matters is the corrupting effect it's having on the inhabitants of the Greenwood.

War is threatened from multiple sides, and if it happens it will be devastating.  Our homelands ravaged, our way of life destroyed.  Entire tribes, including our own, could be completely wiped out.  One of the city lords is pushing for war, and right now he's winning.  Killing him won't help - at best someone else will take his place, and at worst we'll be blamed and the war will happen faster and be our fault.  When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die, but he's a master player and we don't even know the rules.  How in the world are we going to stop him?

We might be amazing at taking down appropriately levelled monsters, but in the face of the current situation we are small and weak.

4. Loss of control.

Characters are very accustomed to having their bodies damaged.  The same can't be said for their minds.  It's one thing to fight a monster, but quite another when the monster is possessing you and forcing you to hurt your friends and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

We encountered some kind of ghost that was able to possess one of us and take control.  I'm not sure who had it worse; the one who critcally failed and could only watch helplessly as the ghost puppeted their body around, or the one who merely failed and could fight back each round - but still failed every time.

We all lived.  But that came at a price.

Losing hit points isn't scary.  Helplessness is.  Whether on the small scale, with the ghostly possession, or on the large scale with the monster we can't fight and the politics we can't stop.  This Pathfinder campaign is darker than any game of WFRP I've played, because between the players and the GM, we're playing it that way.