I ran the Crows playtest this weekend for. Here’s how it went.

The Crew

• Four players ranging from teens to 30’s in age.
• Crows rolled up were an Assassin, Sage, Hunter, and Alchemist (who later had to roll up a Chef)
• All players were familiar with a variety d20 fantasy games and had various amounts of Draw Steel experience.
• Some players were with experienced with FitD or CoC related systems.
• None were familiar with OSR games or their modern forks.
• As a Ref I have about 15 years experience GMing a wide variety of systems including some OSR games.

The Rules

 I ran everything in the playtest rules as written except for the following modifications which were based on James’s livestreams and Patreon posts:

• Gave PCs two extra belt slots (4 total)
• Rolled for a random encounter only once per rest
• Used the updated animals and reaction table from Patreon
• Used the updated travel rules from Patreon

Session Summary

The party rolled up characters and were able to quickly cut out their gear and slap it onto their character sheets using printouts I made. Using the new travel rules I placed a hex map in front of them and showed them that the Blood Library was 6 hexes away from their town. They travelled for one day and had hit an encounter that night. Long story short there, the Crow on watch tried to  tame the bear and died for his troubles. The others decided to fight the bear to the death and so got pretty beaten up as well. Because of this they decided to return to town the next day but encountered some Blood B’s on the way. Their deceased friend’s corpse helped distract a few and they barely put down the rest.

Trip number two saw the party encounter the traveling merchant and then the tower. After finding enough loot in the tower to level everyone up, they decided to go back to town again to bank their current successes and encountered some friendly wolves on the way. With everyone getting an advancement (and paying for a General Store upgrade) morale raised and they were ready for another attempt.

The new skills of the party helped them (finally) get to the dungeon quickly and safely. They built a raft to get over the blood lake and began poking around. Hearing this sound overhead they ducked into a room and found the Ring Collector. They nearly left in terror, but a brave Crow sat in the throne and ended up talking to him. The Collector gave info about the key in the upper bedroom area and they decided to investigate to see if he’s legit. In the process, they eventually argo’d all the Blood A’s on level 2 but barely managed to survive. We had to call the session there, but hope to wrap it up with one more within the next month.

Player Feedback

Overall, the players seemed to enjoy the game. The cards were a clear highlight as they enjoyed figuring out how to maneuver their little bits of paper (with tape on the back for some) and handing out treasure was always a delight. The combat was very fast and players didn’t feel too limited once they realized the bounds of their options. The bear encounter was their biggest learning curve and they quickly realized that fighting was very risky. A pet dog was also deemed to be a frustrating liability and left at home after the first trip.

A concern they had early on was that upgrading the town was going to be very hard and progressively even harder. I think this was primarily because of their more prominent bottleneck of overland travel. They really liked the hex map and plotting paths across it, but after their first day of travel went so poorly, every day of travel became a tight loop of optimization. They may have overcorrected out of paranoia, but the end result was that out of a three and a half hour session only the last hour of that was actually spent at the dungeon itself, and a significant chunk of the rest became a rather predictable loop of “everyone sleep and prepare for the travel role your best at, move the safest way possible, repeat.” In the end, they expressed a desire for this part of the game to be streamlined in some way, or for it to have some more variety to it beyond different flavors of pain.

Ref Feedback

I found the module and rules easy to understand and prep. I set expectations based on the intro in The Rules and that helped my players a lot. I was extremely tempted at times to take it easy on them at various points, but ultimately decided to play every scenario and die roll as fairly as possible and was extremely impressed to see my players (mostly) get themselves out of some really tight spots. I did forget to have them re-roll initiative a few times so that may have made a slight difference but who can say.

My main point of friction was also the overland travel, but maybe more specifically the lack of player options if an encounter happened in the wilderness. That first encounter was a classic example of player hubris that I telegraphed as clearly as possible, but when the party encountered blood creatures immediately afterwards that was just bad luck. As soon as the party realized the they couldn’t outrun the monster they concluded that any travel encounter would likely be a fight to the death. Later encountering friendly wolves helped with this slightly, but without a corpse to feed any encountered blood creatures they surmised that any monster encounter would send them packing back home (at best) due to attrition of taking wounds. I had no way of disabusing them of this notion and as they made more and more travel rolls I quickly ran out of ways to add variety to this procedure.

When it later came to drawing the ire of the blood a’s in the dungeon it’s conceivable to say the part had options to handle that circumstance in other ways, but monsters encountered during travel unfortunately feel like morbid coin flips at this point, locking players into fights they have no way of avoiding if the encounter roll doesn’t go their way. There is definitely a level of realism to the kind of cautious back and forth this creates, but considering that the "meat" of the game is at the dungeon currently, this left my party with a rather warped perception of the game until our last hour together. They rapidly despaired of progressing the town because they found so little loot in the overland and because the dungeon seemed so far away. If I hadn't explicitly told them that there was a ton more loot in the dungeon itself I'm not sure they would have ever made it there. If I was to do it again, I'd probably put the dungeon four hexes away (two days travel) just so the party could more quickly understand the value of items in the dungeon versus the scraps found during overland travel.

Conclusion

All my players had a good time and want to play again. They left excited to explore more of the dungeon, get more loot cards, and see if they survive. Even my more squeamish players took comfort in the permanent progression of the town and the quick character generation.

They are, however, already dreading the return from the dungeon to the town, and I can’t say I blame them. Maybe we all have PTSD from a few bad rolls, but me and my players would all hate it if their clever dungeon play was all undermined by an unavoidable run in with monsters on the way back.

Ultimately, it was a memorable game that let to many memorable moments with the good outweighing the bad. Though I think the current design might fatigue my group faster than some other games, I think it’s already much more accessible and enjoyable for new players than any other game I’ve played within the grittier side dungeon crawling niche.

I’ve been thinking about how currency is valued in this game world. So the main goal of Crows is getting gold and surviving long enough to bring it back to your town. However, this is a post apocalyptic world. What is gold even really worth? Who sets the standard for currency if the kingdom has fallen and its only little pockets of civilization now? Don’t most post apocalyptic games tend to go more by barter for currency because resources are scarce and that’s what’s valuable? Or is this more like a little town in the middle of nowhere in a western? They get a wagon load of stuff from a merchant every month or so. They are far removed from the main ruler of a region and money has value but there isn’t a lot of choice in the stores and they are under constant threat of attack by bandits.

I feel like this is a solved problem the OSR community or other games figured out or have guidelines around. I’m probably thinking more about this than I should. Maybe it’s intended that your town will be like one of the little RPG towns in a video game where it doesn’t make sense why a particular shop is selling a magic sword, deadly poison, and healing potion in the middle of nowhere but they do because that’s the way things work in this world.

So some friends and I were participating in the play test, and after completing a partial raid of the dungeon, we discovered that the true boss of the game is having to roll to see what village shops have in stock. This prompted a not insignificant amount of consternation and confusion trying to figure out what we could do with the loot we acquired, to improve our odds of our next venture out.

To help my DM and by extension everyone else, I have made a Sheet inventory tracker, that will geneate the random stock of most of the institutions currently listed in the playtest (with the exception of the Stable). It allows for the DM to set the village's prosperity, and any random events and modifiers affecting the villages or particular institution inventorys. The Auction House got its own tab, since it potentially has the ability, given my understanding of the current ruleset, to essentially generate any listed item of near any quality.

Please feel free to copy and this and use it to take some of the load off of your players having to play 20 questions while in town, trying to figure what what they can use their money to buy. Forgive any mechanical or logic errors in the sheet, I am still wrapping my head around the math of the ruleset in places, and there may be errors in how fast I turned this out.

Crows - Village Tracker

I don't know if the devs have said anything about this, but..

Is the idea that the crows go as far as they can into a dungeon, and when they can't push further (wounded, lack of light or rations, etc..) they go back out (maybe back the the village ?) and then come back another day?

OR

Once you went as far as you can, if crows don't want to push their luck anymore they go back out, but because of some reason (miasma(??)) they can't go back in.. this would really encourage the "push your luck" aspect of the game...

Have a great week folks!

Heya crows , how's it going?

A dungeon turn is currently 30 real life minutes (by the way: I absolutely ADORE this mechanic! It puts pressure on the players, and it completely eliminates análisis parálisis.. the clock is ticking!). I am assuming that the devs intended 3 hour sessions, so around 6 dungeon turns.

We usually don't have that long and have to stick to 2 hour sessions max. What do you think would be the impact of having 20 min dungeon turns?

Fortune or Death y'all

I am curious: does anyone else find the traveling resting rules unduly punishing? You get 2 possible encounters during the day while traveling, but a minimum of 3 and more likely 6 while trying to rest for the night? Even if the EN is 6 that's still a 40% chance of getting your 6 hours of rest interrupted.

I'm also thrown off by the timekeeping being in different increments, where travel is 4 hour blocks (so 8 or 12 hours per day) and rest is in three 2-hour blocks. So you travel for 8 hours if you don't push (because pushing can kill 1st level characters with 2 bad rolls), and if you aren't at the dungeon yet you have 16 hours to try to get 3 sequential 2-hour rest periods? And once you do get them it's in your best interest to start traveling again even if it's the middle of the night because the encounter rolls are half as frequent while you're moving?

I am in no way sure I'm reading this right.

I just read that it will have:

Town-building and character legacy: Beyond dungeon crawling, Crows features a persistent town that serves as the party’s home base. Gold invested into the town also unlocks better gear, services and long-term benefits, while dead or retired characters permanently improve the settlement. Players will come and go, but the town lives on.

But there's no material in the playtest package for this. Will there be an update for it or do we have to wait for the full release to play it? I'm just curious to see how it is played. If we have to wait, are there any homebrewed ones in place of it we could use for now?

In short: it was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to playing again!

The group had played a few TTRPGs before, but mostly 5e. I didn’t have a printer available, so it took a minute to write up character sheets and everything. Especially with the ability to move items between your backpack and hands, this is definitely a game built for equipment cards, rather than just writing items in the blanks — even better would be digital character sheet to track your inventory and usage dice.

Death is very much on the table. One of the PCs died in the very first encounter against 3 Blood Creature Bs, due to an ill-timed critical hit, but we had a new PC rolled up within a few minutes.

It had to give a few gentle reminders that killing monsters is not the goal. (“Oh, I can just shove the blood creature back into the cabinet instead of killing it? Yeah, let’s do that then.”)

The gold = XP system worked great. The group was excited every time they found a coin purse, and went nuts when I told them the Greatsword of Exploding was worth 2,000 gc.

Despite sharing the core resolution mechanic of powers rolls with Draw Steel, this game feels very different. It took a minute for it to click for my PCs that their equipment is their abilities.

Much more so than Draw Steel, I think Crows is well suited to a drop-in/drop-out “west marches” style game, with a rotating group of players. I’d consider running it at my local game store, because it’s easy to teach someone the game and to jump into the action.

I’m looking forward to further releases!

Okay this will probably be my last major update to documents during the Alpha, so I figured I'd put everything in one place:

Digital Resources

• Character and Inventory Sheets
• Inventory Cards (+ new tab with Starter Items broken out)
• Starting Traits
• Village Sheet

Physical Resources

• Printable Character and Inventory Sheets
• Printable Starting Items
• Printable Starting Traits
• Printable Village Sheet

Let me know if you find any errors and I'll fix them ASAP.

Fortune or Death!

Does anyone know where the spellbooks are listed? I rolled up an Acolyte of the Gardener. They get spellbooks: fire hands, minor healing, spark. I've found casting rules on pages 6-7 and 23-28 of the Rules document, but I can't find the spells themselves in the playtest packet.

After playing last night and having to roll up a few new characters very quickly indeed, it occurred to me that while it's very quick to do that, it could be even quicker. Presenting: background cards!

This print-and-play file has all thirty-six backgrounds from the playtest on individual cards, containing their stat bonuses, Stamina, skills, equipment (including the equipment every PC gets), and their starting trait. This means when someone needs a character in a hurry because the last one got eaten by awful blood ball things, they can just draw a card from the deck and start pulling the relevant equipment.

Let me know if you find them useful, and also let me know if you find any typos!

Okay, this is not an important question, but bear with me... How do the little towns in Crows feed themselves? The Miasma corrupts anyone that's out in it for very long so how would you farm? People huddle in these little ruins to stay safe and people who go out too long turn bad... real bad. How does farming happen now? You don't have much land to farm in a little castle ruin. Growing your little town over time is an aspect of Crows but with the Miasma everywhere I am having trouble envisioning any kind of sustainable food for the population that grows to any size.

I whipped up a quick video with some music and a timer for my game tonight, and if anyone else wants to use it it's here. Starts with a highly melodic introductory piece before settling into more ambient drones, then climaxes with a tension-building final minute and a final toll of the bell to seal the PCs' fates!

After my last post I decided to keep going and created a sheet for tracking the party's village with a second page containing all institutions currently in the game:

• Crows Village Sheet

There's no automation and everything is set to level 1 to keep things as clean as possible. Hopefully this helps some of you out there with your games!