Read me first!

Welcome everyone!

Golden rules
Be courteous, respectful, and avoid offensive or derogatory posts. Communication among all should be polite and one of mutual respect.

This is a game. It is supposed to be fun. All other rules are only to help us know how to work together to have fun. If it isn't fun, something is wrong and we need to fix it.

Conventions
I use the following formatting conventions. Of course, you don't need to follow that in your own posts, but maybe by knowing my conventions it will make it easier for you to notice what I'm highlighting.

- "Character communication is in bold"
- Character thought is in itallics
- Dice results and combat actions are usually underlined
- Sometimes, I use colors for additional emphasis, like on a characters name. In general, I use the following colors:
-- I use blue for people and factions
-- I use green for relevant places and locations that you can go or may want to know about
-- Finally, I use red for relevant risks, issues, challenges, problems, rewards or special situations that the group is facing or may face in the near future.If you don't know how to format your post, there is this helpful formatting guide from Adam. Moreover, the "quote" button underneath most of the posts can help you learn new tricks and formatting tips by copying other people's BBCode.

Streamlining the game
PbP games can be much, much slower than a traditional tabletop experience. When it takes almost a week just to draw initiative, if we do it "by the book", we may give up long before we finish the first combat. So, we need some house rules to speed things up. This post will have all our house rules.

They are not set in stone, though.

Feel free to talk about it in the OOC thread and if you and most of the players don't like one of them we can surely change it or reach a compromise.

House rule 1 - The Dice
Unlike in a regular tabletop game, feel free to roll a skill anytime you think there is a risk or interesting result in failure. Feel free to do so even before I ask, so the game keeps moving. If the roll was not absolutelly necessary, I'll simply hide and ignore the dice, allowing you to perform whatever action you wished and described.

But don't worry if you don't know what skill / when to roll. I'll ask it or may even roll it for you sometimes, so we don't have to wait.

If you don't know how to roll the dice in Gamersplane, there is this helpful guide from Naatkinson.

House rule 2 - Initative and post order
When conflict begins, the GM will draw initiative for all participants - (PCs included). In a brutal game like Forbidden Lands, having a higher iniative is a significant advantage in combat. But you don't need to wait for your turn to post your actions for the round. Unless you have a very strong reason not to, you should post your actions for the current round in the game threads as soon as you can. I, as the GM, will also, occasionaly, post NPCs actions before or even in between player posts, whenever that's relevant and I'm able to.

If we follow this house rule, when everybody has already posted, I will sort all results acording to the order of the iniative cards in a "round results" summary post. It will include the results of what happened, NPCs actions and the beginning of the next round. After the "round results" summary post, everybody should post their next round.

This way, players don't need to wait for days for someone higher in the initiative to post before they do and we can move the action as fast as possible.

PS: We can always retcon things if something was inconsistent because of post vs initiative order... But don't worry, this almost never happens.

House rule 3 - Pushing rolls
As usual, if you are desperate to succeed with a dice roll, you can choose to push it. This means that you count all the dice that did not come up as a six or one, click to edit your post and you add a new roll to it with "Pushing roll - Melee attack" (or something like this) as the reason in your roll.

Moreover, you cannot push rolls if you're not desperate to succeed, as described. Use your common sense, we just want to prevent "farming" Willpower. For example, you cannot push a failed roll for FORAGE if you have plenty of food.

This is actually not "new" or a house rule per se, but rather a suggestion on how to translate the regular Forbidden Land rules to our PbP medium.

House rule 4 - Advancement rules
With PbP, sessions can be as long or as short as we want them to be. It can literally take months or just a couple of posts. It really doesn't make much sense to use them for XP.

As such, following the guidelines from the Forbidden Lands Book of Beasts for similar situations, instead of awarding Experience Points at the end of a session, we will ask the following questions about the previous day. For each of the below questions that the group can collectively answer "yes" to, all PCs and Companions will receive one XP:

✥ NEW: Did the group finish a game thread (numbered chapter)?
✥ NEW: Did the group start exploring a new adventure site together?
✥ NEW: Has the group completed (explored all relevant locations) in an adventure site?
✥ NEW: Did the group defeat one or more monsters or NPCs as a team?
✥ NEW: Did the group flee from one or more dangerous monsters or NPCs?
✥ NEW: Did the group find treasure (1 gold or more)?
✥ NEW: Did the group build a function in the stronghold?
✥ NEW: Did anyone in the group activate their Pride?
✥ NEW: Did anyone in the group suffer from their Dark Secret?
✥ NEW: Did anyone in the group risk their life for another member or companion?
✥ NEW: Did the group perform an extraordinary action of some kind?

The GM has the final word when it comes to how much XP each character should get.

House rule 5 - Pride
With PbP, sessions can be as long or as short as we want them to be. It can literally take months or just a couple of posts. It really doesn't make much sense to use them as a time unit. Because of that, we will use chapters (numbered game threads) to say how often you can activate your pride. This is the rewriten rule:

Other house rules
Although not strictly related to PbP and streamlining our game, some house rules where proposed and accepted by the group. They're described below.

They are not set in stone, though.

Feel free to talk about it in the OOC thread and if you and most of the players don't like one of them we can surely change it or reach a compromise.

House rule 6 - Repair items
The rulebook is not clear if tools are necessary to repair items, just to craft them. It makes sense that they are necessary but, on the other hand, I don't want you to carry spare weapons or a lot of tools. Damaging items are quite frequent, after all. As such, we will use the following rules:

1 - Like crafting, advanced items require special talents to repair (see boxed text below). Simple items can be repaired by anyone. 2 - Tools and functions are not necessary to repair an item, but are useful. If you have them you will receive a +1 Gear Bonus (D6) for each tool that you use and is necessary to craft that item. As usual, the tool can be broken if you push its Gear dice and roll "1" (a skull). Each Function necessary to craft (ex: Forge) adds a D8 Artifact Die when used to repair. The Function cannot be broken nor damaged if you push that roll.

House rule 7 - XP, catching up and character death
This game's XP is now tracked in two ways:

- Total XP: The overall XP the character or companion has earned.
- Unspent XP: The XP currently available for talents and skills.

In the event that a new player joins the group, another companion is introduced, a character dies or someone falls behind the group in total XP for any reason, the following rules apply.

Starting XP for New PCs or Companions:
Any new PC or companion (due to character death or not) will begin with half of the group's highest total XP (rounded down).

Catching Up to the Group:
If any player character or companion has less total XP than the group’s highest value, they will gain 1 extra XP per day until their total XP equals the group's maximum.

House rule 8 - Maximum Encumbrance
You can temporarily carry more than your normal encumbrance limit, with some penalties and necessary Endurance rolls (see pg. 37 of the Player’s Handbook for more detail). As always, depending on the situation or the terrain the GM may also apply modifiers to that roll.

Even over-encumbered and succeeding in those rolls, the absolute maximum a single player character can ever carry is determined by the following formula:

Maximum Encumbrance = (4 × Strength) + (2 × Bonus from Pack Rat, if applicable)

Strength: The character's base Strength attribute. Don't use the temporary rating reduced by taking damage.

Pack Rat: If the character has the Pack Rat talent, the bonus given to regular encumbrance from this talent is multiplied by 2 and added to the max encumbrance calculation as well. (ie. An over-encumbered character can carry an extra 4, 6 and 10 extra items, depending on the talent's rank)

Player characters can never carry more than this limit.

House rule 9 - Languages
Each character can learn a number of languages based on their Empathy and Lore skill levels:

1 - Languages Known: A character knows 1 language per point of Empathy plus 1 language per level of the Lore skill (Wits is not included in this calculation).

2 - Learning Additional Languages: If the Lore skill is increased through XP at any point, the character can learn an additional language by training. To do this, they must:
2.1 - Spend XP to increase their Lore skill, as usual.
2.2 - Already know some sentences in this language or train with a teacher for at least a Quarter Day.
2.3 - Succeed on a Wits check (similar to learning a new talent).

3 - Reading and Writing: In this medieval fantasy world, literacy is rare. Most people, including many adventurers, cannot read or write and rely solely on spoken language. As such, learning to read and write is a significant achievement and is not free. So, instead of learning a new language during character creation or after increasing Lore, a character can choose to learn one rune or alphabet. If one or more languages the character knows uses this alphabet, they gain the ability to read and write in those languages.

Example: If a character has Empathy 3 and Lore 0, they can speak two languages, such as Ravlandic and Eori, and learn the Alderlandic (common) alphabet. By knowing this alphabet, they can read and write in both Ravlandic and Eori, as the character can speak them and those languages use it. However, even if they knew how to speak Elven, they would be unable to read and write in it, as Elven uses a completely different set of runes.

4 - Understanding Unknown Languages: If the character encounters a language they do not know, they can attempt to understand parts or fragments of it by making a Lore roll for written text or an Insight roll for speech. Success on this roll may provide partial understanding or clues about the speaker's emotions and intentions.