https://www.allplay.com/board-games/the-defenders-almanac/

An extensive illustrated guidebook to the besieged lands of the Commonwood and a rules-light tabletop roleplaying game for collaboratively telling short stories of animal resistance to the machine invasion ~ from T.L. Simons, creator of Defenders of the Wild and Bloc by Bloc with fantasy author Margaret Killjoy, game designer Henry Audubon, illustrator Meg Lemieur, and writer Patricia Noonan

Anyone played it? Got any tips? I realise it’s pretty recent, so maybe not…

I’m about to start a session with a new gaming group (of old friends). I’m new to DMing and TTRPGs in general (have played one session of pathfinder), two of my 4 players have a fair bit of experience playing and DMing.

I realise this is way more rules-light than pathfinder, though that’s probably not saying much - it also seems a fair bit lighter even than some PbtA based games I’ve looked at…

General advice for DMing rulse-light RPGs also welcome :)

  • naught101@lemmy.worldOP
    1·
    2 days ago

    Things I’m finding so far:

    • The world/history is good, dense and well described, fairly convincing
    • The mech invasion is (intentionally) shrouded in confusion, which I guess is good in that you can choose how it came about as you go - this potentially makes for a 3-4 mission game (3-5 sessions per mission), where the final mission defeats the mechs (or not?)
    • The game is SUPER rules light. Very few mechanics, combat is very simple.
      • Could probably do with an extra mechanic or two to foster player interaction, but maybe we’re not using the support mechanic to it’s fullest extent.
    • Some of the skills are not that obviously useful (e.g. Academics and Ecology), but perhaps I need more experience here.
    • Guidance on how to GM well, or how to build missions is super sparse. So perhaps a game better suited to a GM with lots of pre-existing story-focused TTRPG experience.