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Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures |
$7.99 |
Average Rating:4.7 / 5 |
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I've played RPGs before, but had never been DM until last week. Beyond the Wall gave me the perfect starting point and framework to build plots and stories around, and the playbooks were helpful for players who were completely new to RPGs. The simplified rules (compared to traditional D&D of various editions and Pathfinder) I found massively helpful, while still containing elements that I found familiar and was expecting, like ability scores, alignment, etc.
The premise of all the PCs knowing each other and all living in the same village was helpful too, and makes the world seem more real, while giving plenty of opportunities for plot hooks and motivations.
I really liked this, and after purchase I downloaded the other free materials that contain plenty of ideas for future adventures, how to build encounters, monsters, villains, and the like.
There are a few elements here and there that aren't explained perfectly from a new DMs point of view (I had to read through how hit dice worked a couple of times) or don't seem to quite work (breath weapon saving throw to dodge things that aren't breath weapons) but there are alternative rules and workarounds, or you can just adapt these as you see fit.
Overall this massively helped me to springboard back into RPGs after a break, and was a lot more accessible than many other systems I've seen.
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This is a gem aamongst OSR titles. The combination of familiar mechanics with story-game style collaboration in character creation and the game setting are lightning in a bottle. You can run this, as adveritsed, with minimal prep and have a great time. If you have the time to work on your setting/prep, it can make for a truly epic hex crawl with tons of heart.
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My group had a blast playing this game! We spent easily two hours in character creation using the playbooks to really flesh out the bonds between our characters. Once we got going, the Scenario pack (we played 'The Angered Fae') let me produce a compelling story without doing any prep beforehand. The rules are simple and logical, and the magic system is truly one of a kind. If you're tired of spending hours in prep before game time every week I really recommend you give this a shot, it's like the best parts of a narrative game such as Dungeon World (or other PbtA game) combined with the feel of old school D&D.
Honestly one of the best tabletop games I've ever been a part of. Buy this.
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I feel very satisfied with the purchase; there are many good reasons why the system has such sterling reviews.
The book is the best written I've seen (compared with D&D, DH, WoD and Dungeon World), and has excellent alternative rules options to help make the game your own. The playbooks are fantastic and have made for some fantastic roleplaying from my group, which is a nice rarity.
Beyond the Wall is simply brilliant and brilliantly simple.
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BTW is two games in one. The headline game emulates a particular genre of low-fantasy fiction by deploying Dungeon World-style playbooks and a collaborative world-building mechanic. Under the bonnet lies a very intelligently house ruled D&D engine (the only real irritation is the old school five saving throw system). The stripped down rules can be hacked into low magic playstyles quite different from the assumed setting. BTW could work for Hyboria or, of all things, Glorantha - the three tier magic system looks a bit like spirit magic, Rune magic, and ritual magic if one squints. Some iPad users may be driven to distraction by Flatland's love of the .zip file.
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BEYOND THE WALL AND OTHER ADVENTURES is a stripped-down version of modern D&D (mostly circa 3rd edition, but substantially simplified here) that will appeal to a lot of players who are less interested in the "epic" fantasy experience. If you were one of the people who felt 3rd edition lost its way with too many feats, skills, and welded-on bits of crunch, this will please you very much. The magic system is short and flavourful, dividing up spells into quick-but-risky cantrips, spells, and long-but-powerful rituals. No different spell lists here -- there's only one, no matter if you're a magician or a priest of the old gods.
Although it has three core "classes" that can be played much like traditional D&D games, and they remind me quite a bit of the classes in Green Ronin's TRUE20, to be honest, you're not going to want to play them. The authors don't even recommend it. What you want to play are can be found in the character Playbooks, which bring a lot of modern gaming ideas to the F20 experience. The Playbooks are a bit like what you find in APOCALYPSE WORLD-based games, providing you with a lot of flavour and a strong foundation to start play quickly. Make a few rolls (or choices) and you're playing right away with a well-fleshed out character. The rolls provide you with what used to be called a "Lifepath", describing the events of your character's life up to this point. Each roll gives you some flavour, and provides you with appropriate bonuses to your ability scores. You start with a base amount, and by the end of finishing your playbook, you have fully developed stats with a rationale for why they developed that particular way.
I loved this game a lot, and I recommend it to everyone! Full review at my blog: http://hightrusthighdrama.blogspot.ca/2016/05/beyond-wall-and-other-adventures-review.html
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I really like the character setup in this rpg. The bonds for the starting villagers really ties the party together and aids with roll playing.
Julian
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I love it. My kids love it. My wife even loves it. Thank you.
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I was lookng for a easy aproach to the D20 RPG genre, having tred Pathfinder which had send them "fleeing" away due to its massive complexity and sheer weight. Beyond the wall came highly recommended and surprised me with its fun and smooth character creation. Everyone was havng a real blast creating them and laughter really alerted the other residents who came out enquiring what was s funny! Great!
The players, all new to RPG, found the rules easy to grasp and this will be my go-to game for chlidren and new players forward - or perhaps for short scenarios where character generation could be taken less "serious".
Thorbjørn
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This review originally appeared on the Halfling's Luck blog.
Flatland Games recently released the second major supplement for Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures entitled Heroes Young and Old. Until now, this was a game I hadn't given whole lot of consideration. To be honest, I'd kind of written it off. I had purchased it, both in PDF and Print formats, sure. But that was more as a show of solidarity to a fellow small publisher than any genuine interest in the product itself. I saw it as yet another B/X clone.
Once again, my assumptions have made a fool of me.
I sat down tonight and really dove into Beyond the Wall and was absolutely charmed. Billed as a simple fantasy game which requires little or no prep to play, it is a game built with a specific tone and purpose - which it achieves to near perfection. The folks at Flatland Games have designed a game that really hits all the right buttons for me as a game master and as a player. So much so, that I went ahead and re-purchased physical hardcovers of both Beyond the Wall and the supplement Further Afield.
Beyond the Wall tears fantasy gaming down to its bare bones, invigorated with a humble and fresh-faced charm. Only three classes are available to players: Fighter, Rogue, and Mage. Each of these is painted in broad strokes to accomidate many classic character concepts - but that's not the true beauty of the game. While characters can be built via your standard method of rolling a few attributes, jotting down some stats, and buying your gear, the true genius of this game comes in its Playbook method of character generation.
You see, Beyond the Wall runs under assumption that all of the player characters are newly minted young heroes who all hail from the same village and share a collective background. The world outside their village is a wild and dangerous place filled with fey creatures, fell dragons, and other creatures of legend. Using the Playbook method of character generation, each of the players generates a character based around a broad concept associated with a chosen class. A Fighter is a Would-Be Knight or Village Hero, for example. From that concept, a set of base attributes are determined and then modified by randomly determining a character's background before he became an adventurer. This background will increase the character's attributes, provide skills, determine equipment, and even help narrow down how a character's class features are chosen. But it never feels like railroading. Instead, with each roll a character is born in what can only be described as organically.
More importantly, a character's background builds connections and even modifies the statistics of other player characters in the party. So, for example if you are a Mage who was the Witch's Prentice, your background might say that you helped protect the witch from an angry mob and a boon friend stood by your side. This boon friend, who according to the Playbook is the PC sitting to your right, will receive +1 to their Strength because of events in your background. This ensures building a group of wide-eyed young adventurers who automatically will have a shared background and sense of trust. The statistical bonuses provided by these kinds of things adds a mechanical gravity to show, in game, that these experiences matter.
These character backgrounds play an even more important role than just uniting the PCs. As characters are created and important places and people in their lives are revealed, the group has a nearly blank village map in front of them with only an inn at the center. You're the son of a blacksmith? OK, draw where his shop is on the map. You like sitting under a strange old oak and telling stories to young children in the village? Where's the oak? A grizzled old mercenary took a shine to you as a boy? Where is his cottage? Each piece of your background gets naturally integrated into the village as each player character develops that background - so by the time character creation is done you've got more than just heroes - you've got heroes who have something to fight for.
Then we come to the way that Beyond the Wall does its adventures. They're certainly not your traditional "kick in the door, slay the monster, get the treasure" adventures. No, these are scenario packs - and like everything else in this game they are woven into the fabric of the players and their village. An example in the core book is The Angered Fae. In this scenario, one of the fey lords who lives in the wilds beyond the village has cursed that village and its up to the player characters to undo the curse. But not by plundering his magical keep. Each aspect of the adventure is determined via quick roll tables, giving every play-through of the adventure an original origin, story arc, and resolution. The key, in this case, lay in who exactly angered the fae in the first place. But the Scenario Pack leaves that chart blank because the referee is expected to fill it in with some of the NPCs generated in each player character's background and then randomly determine who angered the fair folk. Each aspect of the adventure: Who caused the curse, how it manifests, how the Fairie Lord confronts the village, what the players must face when traveling into the wilderness to the borders of Fairie, and what the Fairie Lord asks them to do to set things right is all determined via random aspects that fit a central thematic element and are designed to tie directly into the characters' village and backgrounds. It creates a natural sense of investment for players and keeps the referee's job simple, as these elements can be determined on the fly as the game unfolds.
Beyond the Wall really strikes a chord with me. It gives me that sense of wonder and enchantment I really enjoy in my fantasy gaming. By melding OSR staples with mechanics that create both player investment and charming adventures it goes beyond being another retro-clone and becomes something truly unique. I can easily see it being used to help bring new gamers into the hobby. Its simple choice of classes, quick and robust character creation system and easy to learn mechnics make it a very, very approachable game. But its simplicity is deceptive, as this game is easily capable of being used for on-going campaign play in addition to the fast-playing zero-prep single night of adventure.
The cover art is by the always amazing John Hodgson, who never fails to evoke the magic and mystery found in the wild places just beyond the horizon and the interior art is primarily pencil sketches which have their own wonderful charm. The book is available in premium quality hardcover (which I highly recommend) and PDF. I feel like this is a real gem among the endless stream of fantasy RPGs currently available and it really deserves a lot credit. Clearly it is a labor of love.
This game is a love letter to the stories of Ursula Le Guin and Lloyd Alexander, all with a healthy helping of good ol' fashioned fairy tales. I seriously can't recommend it enough - it suits my style of gaming pretty darn well and I look forward to running it in the future. You can learn more about it by checking out the Flatland Games website and RPGNow Storefront.
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The short and sweet of it.
Beyond the Wall is an OSR RPG that is designed to be "zero-prep". The designers, citing family issues, real lives, and general growing up wrote the game so that the characters, scenario, and world could be built and played within a single session. To accomplish this lofty goal, the game provides some basic tools: character packs for the players and threat packs for the DM.
Playbook: The Best Innovation.
Although the game provides traditional "build your character" rules (role 4d6, pick a class, et cetera), the real innovation is Character Playbooks. The playbooks offer a "life path" during creation. For each stage of the character's youth, the player randomly determines what happens through a dice roll. The results fill out the character's stats, round out the town, create lore, and provide motivation for the scenario. If something truly interesting catches the player's eye, just once, they can select something as opposed to accept the dice roll.
Each result adds lore and bonds between characters that the players should be encouraged to expound upon. This answers one of the most awkward moments in party creation: How are you all friends?
The use of these playbooks are so innovative and refreshing, that I want to create Playbooks for every other RPG I play.
Threat Packs
The threat packs integrated well with character creation. The DM takes all of the information that the players spout and uses it to shape the story. The threat packs even have some blank random tables that are filled in during character creation that decide critical plot events.
In my test game, a cult moves into town and they are probably up to no good. All the NPCs the players created were put on a table to determine who betrays the party (the random roll elected Harold the talking pig, no less). While a list of character's prized possessions and a random dice roll determined a secret object that the cult needed to complete their ritual. We now have an enemy with a motivation.
And the result?
Basically it worked. Character, town, and scenario creation took 45 minutes. Everyone went to go get a beer while I labored away and put the finishing touches on the scenario. We then played for 3 hours and all had a really good time.
Should you buy this?
Yes. It is a narrative driven game and designed to be really simple. If you want more crunch, you are going to have to go somewhere else. To me, the real innovation is the shared story telling environment within a D&D-like framework. Not only are the characters interacting in the world, but they help shape its construction. This felt like a fresh take on D&D. The idea of the shared character, town, and sandbox creation (covered in Further Afield) are worth the price of admission.
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I like the old-school, simplified DnD-style, and have always been a sucker for lifepath-style character generation. This one is definitely going into our rotation.
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I just read though the core book and the material is amazing! Ok, the system is very D&Dish (reminds me of a cross between Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Swords and Wizardry), but the idea of the playbooks and the scenario packs are brilliant. It's a wonderful and inspired way to bring in new players and offer a challenge to the old timers. The playbooks and packs alone is worth the price of admission. I'm definitely going to give this a spin at a convention in the future. I want to go back and cover more detail, but for now I will say that the game is worth it. Even if you play another OSR inspired system (or the original D&D) the materials here really add something.
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This dame was a breath of fresh air for me after years of Pathfinder and other rules heavy systems. In BTW the GM and the players create the village (or campaign world if you get the expansion) together in an ingenious fashion and immersion is so to speak built in. Whether it's for a no prep pick up and play game or for a campaign that is low on checking rules and charts but heavy on the player interaction you should definitely check out Beyond the Wall. At the price what do you have to lose?
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If your gaming groups focus is character driven and shared world building then this is the perfect game. The concept of play books and scenario packs is a genius idea that more rpg's should consider in their support products. I'm looking forward to any future products that will be released for this system!
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