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 :)
Interesting! I looked up the show, and I can see the thematic overlap, but not obviously how to make use of it. Are you thinking something like using wild animals to help in battles? Or something else? There are some abilities that are related (e.g. critter familiars, foraging for potion ingredients), so perhaps I just need to give players more opportunities to play with those.
The academics skill seems a bit less useful
I’m thinking Ecology would likely be very useful for helping to restore areas damaged by the machine revolution – the worse the damage, the harder the job. Maybe one easy roll to replant after a clearcut, a whole adventure to restore a mechanized town.
As for Academics… the use of that sort of skill in TTRPGs in general is often to enable exposition and determine how extensive that exposition is. (Basically look at how Sally’s handheld computer Nicole is used.)
Yeah, cool. Makes sense. I think I just need to play a bunch more in order to start being able to see how to use those in the context of a mission story arc