Briarwood
Added 2020-08-24 12:17:29 +0000 UTCI read INTO THE WYRD AND WILD last week (again) and I felt inspired by it - I wanted to make something similar but smaller, about a specific location and the broken humans that inhabit it.
A lot of my games are about concepts that can be maneuvered into a variety of locations and this is the opposite of that. It's about a small party of outcasts venturing into named woods, and the perils they face along the way. It's not comedy, and it's not horror either, which covers both of my major genres.
I've been chatting to Sean Smith - the chap who wrote Exuviae - a lot of late, mainly because he lives in my neighbourhood and we've been getting drunk in my garden once a week during lockdown. It's from those talks that I took the idea of a goal roll for NPCs - that most people aren't just going to immediately fight you, and will probably be open for a chat.
Hopefully you can take what I've made of the Briarwood here, and its strange inhabitants (I'm quite happy with the factions I came up with - those are the first thing I sketched out in my notebook and they've endured throughout), and build something interesting.
You'll also note that it's on two pages! I couldn't get it down to one and I was having a lot of fun with it, making a game with specific rules for stuff in a way that I'm not used to. So you'll have to deal with it, pal. The pages are designed to sit next to each other, so the "map" in the middle can be used as one.
- G x
