Couple months ago I introduced
Sol and Luna, characters I made for trying out
The Dolorous Stroke rules system. In the meantime, I've prepared a short adventure, painted
a couple more gaming pieces for it, and at last played it – with my brother Ivan
as the player and myself as the GM.
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| Area 1: The Windmill. Luna finds a dead soldier and is attacked by a hostile tree-man. |
I did not use the setting from the Dolorous Stroke book, preferring as usual to
set the story in my own (Isles of Brume), where Sol and Luna are both members of a mystical
order named Knights of the Firmament. The order is dedicated to a
demon named Giger, who allegedly dwells in a subterranean palace beneath their
keep. The knights travel around the Isles, spreading Giger's cult by doing
great deeds, including interfering with schemes of other demons (using their
followers for such tasks is is nothing out of the ordinary for demonkind). Ivan was free pick his knight from the two available, and he opted for
Luna.
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| Area 2.1: The Well. Luna gets a chance to miraculously heal some of his injuries. |
Luna's personality, gender, physical appearance, morality
and motivations beyond the mission to spread Giger's religion were up to Ivan.
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| Area 2.2: Wolf Den. Luna helps two soldiers, Hunald and Kottar, defeat a pack of wolves. The soldiers join Luna. |
I mapped out several areas for him go through, like
a dungeon. Monsters and allies await in different areas, with order of
exploration impacting what is found. I used
50x50cm quarters of my modular board for the areas
within the woods. Since the model count is really low, this was enough space
for the action. I intended for it to be contained in the forest, but we
ended up having part of the adventure take place in two other locations (village and local lord's keep)
because it made sense for the narrative. That part was improvised without
miniatures and boards, but since it it involved mostly talking to NPCs and no combat at all- that
was perfectly fine.
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| The plan. |
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| Stats for Luna and one of the monsters. The book has a decent guide for coming up with stats for custom characters. |
After the first combat, one thing became evident: combat rules in this game look really
cool on paper, but when you actually play - a fight can get tedious and go on for ages. For those who haven't got the rulebook: each character needs a standard poker deck, divided by suits into four piles. Two of those piles are 'Blood' and 'Injury'. When a character loses a round of combat and gets struck by the opponent, they lose a certain amount of blood cards from their pile (when these run out they're dead), and flip a card from the Injury pile to see if they've received an injury (such as 'Left leg ruined' or 'Smashed ribs' - each with its own extra effects). These injuries make fights more cinematic, and I like that. However, I feel that
13 hit
points (Blood cards) on each character/creature is too many to keep the game flowing well.
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| Area 2.3: Luna finds fellow knight Sol, and learns the method to destroy the threat deep in the woods. |
I immediately introduced house rules and some scenario changes for subsequent fights: most characters
and monsters started out with reduced number of 'blood' cards, and some were
automatically killed when they received any injury. That tweak helped. There is another reason why I wouldn't give each character/monster their own full deck of cards - it takes up way too much physical space. And I found myself limiting the number of miniatures I'm using in a scene not to go over the (not so large) number of poker decks I own, which I think is not a welcome sort of limitation.
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| Area 3: The Treasure - a large construct of wood and bone, guarding the witch's buried treasure. |
The system has its good and its bad sides. The bad are generally fixable with some tinkering. It has more in common with pen&paper RPGs than with tabletop wargame systems I'm used to (which is not surprising since it was meant to lean heavily on the narrative side, according to the author).
The creature in the woods was successfully destroyed in the end, but not without Luna sadly losing both of his two newly-acquired soldier friends. All in all, it was fun to play for both of us.
