House Rules for Forbidden Lands
Why Forbidden Lands?
So, several of my friends started playing HeroQuest (the boardgame), not ran by me. It's been fun in and of itself, but it's not the point of the post. I wanted to start running a game for a smaller group of people than my basically abandoned 5e campaign that I started a while ago. The HQ game gave me two players, one of which has never played a TTRPG. I offered up numerous games to try out, and they settled on Forbidden Lands due to the emphasis on survival and "boardgamey" nature of overland travel.
Why House Rule?
FL is a pretty good system as it is, and was one of the first games I ever looked into when looking outside the D&D 5e sphere. Since joining the purple OSR discord and being exposed to different play styles and blog posts, I realized I had never really run a "world-first" game where the fictional reality takes precedence over the rules of the game. This is an extremely intriguing concept to me and I was drawn to it instantly, especially since I had only ever experienced more abstract ways of playing. I come from a "can I make a skill check" background, both as a player and GM. I want to move away from this, and towards interaction with the fictional reality rather than relying on dice rolls.
So, I want to make house rules to FL since that's the game I agreed to play, but the rules as written create friction with the primacy of the fictional world. I want to stick pretty closely to the framework that already exists in the game, but without gating abilities that everyone should reasonably be able to attempt behind Talents, basically the Forbidden Lands version of Feats. The most egregious example of fictional friction that came up during our first session was when trying to cook the deer my players hunted. Per the FL Player's Handbook:
"The MEAT can be cooked by a CHEF (see page 74) or at an INN (see page 168), and is then turned into an equal amount of FOOD. You can eat MEAT raw – you then consume a unit of MEAT instead of rolling your Resource Die for FOOD. You need to do this within a day, or the MEAT will be spoiled."
Huh? Players can't cook unless they spend XP on the Chef talent? This makes no sense to me. Other talents are not as big of a deal to me as they are currently written, but I want to expand the system to allow attempts at things that require a Talent, probably with some risk involved. This post will be updated with my actual codified rules as I write them :)