Thoughts on Forbidden Lands?

Hi everyone.

Has anyone played or tried Forbidden Lands by Free League Publishing? How did it play for you? Pros, cons? Thanks!

Love the setting. The mechanics are great. The box set is beautiful.

In play, it worked fine, except we had some trouble working out the Shifts and associated rolls. In PBP, tracking Usage dice (food, water) are now quite a bit easier with the checkbox addition to character sheets.

We also had to work around using the provided hex map. We took a picture after I had used post-it notes to number the hexes. That made communicating the moves much easier.

Yes it was a little cumbersome, at least the way I was running it, but there's a game going on now that is public that is going well so far.

Are you talking specifically for PbP, or more generally? I'm in a live / virtual campaign that's 20-30 sessions in, and I'm also a couple of sessions in to running my own game for the same group while the GM takes a breather.

Another question -- do you know other Year Zero Engine games?

I ve recently started two simultaneous games of forbidden lands on GP. Here's a link to the game forum. I'm using GIMP to implement a fog of war over the hexes the players can't see and using the zoommap feature on GP to show the map.

I've also created custom character sheets and dice roll rules for running on GP. So far it's going well, but we are literally still on the first quarter day of our adventures.

Happy to discuss further on GP or discord.

Hi, I was asking more for in-person gaming (I should've clarified), but I appreciate the opinions about how it functions with PBP gaming as well, so that was a welcome bonus.

I'm familiar with Coriolis.

Awesome. Thanks for sharing.

I'm pretty sure the newest Alien game uses the Year Zero engine, as well as Tales From the Loop. Obviously Mutant: Year Zero. I think Vaesen uses it, too, and I've heard so much good about that game.

Oh yes, Vaesen has my eye! :)

I think I'm the resident Tales from the Loop / Things from the Flood person. I have tried a tiny bit of Vaesen before but I'm considering running it at some point in the future when one or two of my current games have wrapped up.

Year Zero seems pretty good overall. And they do modify it for the different games. Alien feels pretty different from Loop despite a lot of overlap in core mechanics

There are a couple of things going on with the Year Zero Engine, Free League's "house" system. First, they tune it -- sometimes pretty damned heavily -- for the game, genre, setting in question. They change the skills and sometimes the attributes, some games have feat-like abilities and some don't, and virtually every game gets unique pushing mechanics.

Second, the different designers really have pretty different approaches. Nils Hintze wrote Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood, and Vaesen, and it shows. These are the lightest of the YZE games by a pretty good margin. On the other end of the spectrum we find Forbidden Lands and Twilight 2000, both with mechanics (but not setting) by Tomas Härenstam. Old Tommy likes his crunch more, so there's a *lot* more going on in these games, especially in combat situations.

I personally dig them all, and if you've seen Coriolis, that's not a simple take on the YZE with it's action points and all. And anyway, enough about those games generally -- Forbidden Lands.

Gorgeous books, highly recommend them. I love about 90% of the setting and especially the hex-crawl conceit, where there's an in-game reason as to why the land is unexplored. There are familiar fantasy races, but pretty unique takes on most of them in terms of what makes them tick. I love the rules and the dice mechanic, but bear in mind I not so secretly hate d20, d100 and other non-bell-curve dice results. FL is mostly a d6 dice pool, and it has a pretty finnicky thing where the color of the dice matter -- modeling your attribute, your skill, and any equipment you might be using. Deciding to push your roll (rerolling to try and get an elusive 6, watching for 1s which will hurt you or your gear) or not is a great, tension-filled thing, and it's also the only way to earn Willpower points, the game's metacurrency that powers magic and various abilities. Speaking of the magic system, it's one of those uncertain, dark and dangerous systems. Bad things can happen when you cast spells. Similarly, combat is *dangerous* and there's a death-spiral in place if you get too happy with your pushing to get successes.

I personally really like it, but I know it's not for everyone. Do you have specific questions, @sifu_g?

No specific questions. Your reply was spot-on. Thank you, and everyone else that chimed in. I feel similar to you, especially with regards to the colored dice bit.

Thanks again for the thoughtful response.

Happy to help!

I've played this once and enjoyed it. The dice pool mechanic was a fun change for me.