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## [Game] Lions of the North

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Kemper Boyd
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  Posts: 75
  Joined: Thu Feb 09, 2012 8:44 pm

### [Game] Lions of the North

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Post by Kemper Boyd » Thu Feb 09, 2012 8:58 pm

Hi everyone,
I decided to come to this forum to tell about the game I'm currently designing and collecting funds for through Kickstarter.
Game is called Lions of the North. It's a pretty traditional RPG as far as the rules go, you roll dice, you have attributes and skills and so on. So nothing fancy in that way.
I set out to create something that would go a bit off the beaten path for RPG's . One of the things I feel strongly about is that there's too much derivative works on the market, always someone re-inventing Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire or Call of Cthulhu. Or something with steampunk.
Post-apocalypse was the genre I chose, since I had been reading a swedish game called Mutant and a few other "after the nuclear war"-types of games. And frankly, most of them are really alike: you got mutated animals, you got pre-war guns, robots, radiation.
Instead I looked to the history books for inspiration. I found quite a bit of interesting stuff about the Baltic region, like pirates, the Hanseatic League, the struggle between emerging states. Then, since I dislike misogyny, I wanted to make a game with certain feminist issues addressed by default.
Enough ranting for now.
You can check out my development blog at http://lionsofthenorth.wordpress.com/ .
Thank you for reading
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Judging__Eagle
  Prince
  Posts: 4671
  Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
  Location: Lake Ontario is in my backyard; Canada

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Post by Judging__Eagle » Fri Feb 10, 2012 10:15 am

> We at Goblinworks never found a post-apocalyptic Role Playing Game that we thought was more based around fantasy than science-fiction pulp. Lions of the North combines gripping player-driven story telling with Northern European mythology, a detailed and highly imaginative setting and all the classic heroism from fantasy literature without tired old tropes.
> We've set out to make a game that finally encompasses all the great things about post-apocalyptic fantasy stories - Myth, heroism, legends, enlightenment, swashbuckling and fighting unknowable foes but we can't do everything ourselves. We need your help to make this game a reality so please click the pledge button.

so... I guess you've never played D&D?
In any case, what crunch have you got finished or hashed out so far?
The action resolution mechanic is interesting for simulating a RL sort of story; with a flattened success progression, more dice doesn't mean an other 50% of a neew hit, but more like 13% of an additional hit.
On opposed checks, 'value' of dice result helps determine winner.
On some levels, I really like it. It's much more gritty.
Last edited by Judging__Eagle on Fri Feb 10, 2012 10:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Kemper Boyd
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  Posts: 75
  Joined: Thu Feb 09, 2012 8:44 pm

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Post by Kemper Boyd » Fri Feb 10, 2012 12:20 pm

> Judging__Eagle wrote: so... I guess you've never played D&D?
> In any case, what crunch have you got finished or hashed out so far?
> The action resolution mechanic is interesting for simulating a RL sort of story; with a flattened success progression, more dice doesn't mean an other 50% of a neew hit, but more like 13% of an additional hit.
> On opposed checks, 'value' of dice result helps determine winner.
> On some levels, I really like it. It's much more gritty.

I'm actually something of a D&D fan, I've played Forgotten Realms, Eberron and Planescape, though I'm not playing in any campaigns right now. However, I think D&D has some fundamental flaws in that a level-based system doesn't really always represent character fluff accurately. Take AD&D fighters for example: even if a low-level fighter should be a veteran, most wild animals can wreck a fighter like he'd be a simple peasant with no experience.
Crunchwise, most of the design is done, if not yet ready to be presented in a coherent manner. My main inspirations are One Roll Engine and the system used by The One Ring RPG, which I admit freely.
I'm a big fan of the concept that character stats can be a robust mechanic for representing character fluff: if you want your scout-type character to have keen eyesight, a skillfull tracker and a great hunter who's also good at wilderness survival, it means that the character isn't just skilled, but also really really good at the things that define him. For example, you could do a character like this with a varying amount of actual skills but a heap of traits that ensure he has a great chance of success at the thing he attempts whenever he's not opposed by anyone else. Traits essentially give you automatic successes. It's the core of the system, really: when you're good at something, you don't need to even roll most of the time. You only roll when it counts.
There's actually two major forms of play in the game: a swashbuckling mode and a gritty mode. When you play gritty, you have no access to your extra pool of dice that you can use in the swashbuckling mode. There's no way to soak damage per default, for example. You get hit by a musket ball, you take damage. However, if you use the swashbuckling mode, you can use your extra pool of dice to get a damage avoidance roll to represent how you dodged an attack.
Other things I'm working on right now is a system for duels and how it interacts with the combat system. I think everyone likes to have a nice crunchy ruleset for duels whenever it's dramatically appropriate. However, I also want a fast basic combat ruleset, since too crunchy combat might either become too lethal or too slow for the players.
For those who really like the idea of magic I have something too. Essentially, you have hedge magic and charms which kind of equates to what was the historical view on what magic did: bless crops, put a curse on someone's livestock, evil eye, so on. Simple to learn, easy to access, but limited utility.
Then there's magical disciplines which are dangerous to use, hard to learn (mechanically, they cost a lot of points when you create a character) but boy howdy are they powerful. That's what you use when you want to turn into a blizzard to freeze your enemies to death, or when you want to make the dead speak. I got a post about magic here: http://lionsofthenorth.wordpress.com/20 ... and-power/
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