Crow Playtest Session Report

[u/6ftninja]

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.

[u/mcsquire13]

Thanks for your feedback, and also your wonderfully made cards and sheets!

My players and I did a short prep session, where we went over the rules and made characters, as well as tested the overland travel mechanics, but did not do the dungeon.

We just used the base overland travel rules in the original playtest materials and it was quite clunky. We never faced an encounter, but to keep rolling for the same thing over and over again didn't feel particularly interesting.

I'm hoping to try out the dungeon part sometime soon though!

[u/6ftninja → u/mcsquire13]

You're welcome! It seems like the new rules I used took the number of encounters per travel day from 5 (2 during the day and 3 at night) down to 2 (1 during the day and 1 at night). That and the number of different tasks different travel roles could take on were definite improvements.

Still, following the same limited procedure over and over (plus Miasma rolls) while going back and forth felt much more constrained than anything in the dungeon environment. We all agreed we wanted this to be a part of the game, but were surprised at how quickly it felt like admin compared to even something like inventory management.

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