D&D 5E FGG Lost Lands: Borderlands is 5e

[qu0zl]

Funnily enough part of the reason I'm moving to 5th ed is Frog God deciding to support it. It made me really look at 5th ed and I like what I see. I need a break from the heavy crunch of Pathfinder.

So I definitely hope that FGG do more stuff for 5th ed!

 

[silverhair2048]

I am glad to see that 5E is getting some support for FGG.

 

[silverhair2048]

FGG is 5 Backers away from 400, and a little less than $8500 from reaching their goal. If you haven't yet you may want to check out Update 10.

 

[mach1.9pants]

Very Interesting update from the Kickstarter:

Posted by Frog God Games
We've had several people ask questions about design philosophy in the Borderland Provinces. To our minds, the single and absolutely overriding purpose of a campaign world is to inspire and support fun adventures at the gaming table. It's a gaming product, not anything else. And from there ... form follows function.
People are beginning to notice that our Lost Lands books aren't a series of identically-formatted little encyclopedias covering different areas all in the same way. We could have done that. But we aren't. All of our books are individually tailored to support distinct types of adventures. Rappan Athuk is a mega-dungeon. Cyclopean Deeps is an underground "wilderness" in the Under Realms, with planar connections to strange places. Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms is a linked series of adventures. Borderland Provinces is a wide-open sandbox for traveling.
And each book, instead of following a standard format, is fitted to its purpose and free to reflect the personality, style, and goals of the author(s). Our adventure designers are the best in the world, and it would be foolish to force their creativity into limited channels just for the sake of keeping an identical format. So with that in mind, here's a bit about the individually-tailored design of the Borderland Provinces, specifically the encounter tables. For those who don't care about game theories, and just want to game on, this is the point where you say, "Hooray for fun adventures!" and stop reading.
Still here? Okay. Let's talk about encounter tables.
Since form follows function, you will see many places where we could have followed "traditional" campaign approaches but didn't. Specifically, our encounter tables in the Borderland Provinces focus on roads, and the wilderness encounter tables are abstracted as the road encounters set at a higher "risk level," with risk level being detailed in the encounter appendix. The tables are broken out into the concept of a mundane encounter and a dangerous encounter. We call this method "road and risk" as opposed to normal "terrain type" tables.
We've broken the tradition of terrain tables because the important variation in a non-hex-crawl campaign isn't terrain type. Instead, it's the mixture of what ordinary people you might meet, together with different levels of risk in non-mundane encounters. The road-and-risk system is a form designed to operate best for its function. The function here isn't terrain-based hex crawling, it is travel between interesting places.
For a fast-travel adventure (like Traveller in SF), where the travel is taking place in semi-civilized and even populated areas, our tables allow us to use the same format for any area, vary the risk level by mundane vs. dangerous, vary the risk level that will be shown in the encounter descriptions, and then refer all results to a single list of encounter descriptions. It's highly streamlined to manage risk levels and characterize an area's relative civilization and ordinary road-traffic. For the purposes of non-hex-crawl traveling, we've designed this encounter table system to perform its intended function better than terrain-based tables would.
There are other examples of how we break the mold a bit, but I think the encounter tables are by far the best example of how we have broken from traditional formats when the traditional format isn't optimal for what we're designing.

EDIT: As pointed out above

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/froggodgames/the-lost-lands-borderland-provinces/posts/1391809

 

[qu0zl]

That's a good post, they should put something like that on froggodgames.com. I struggled a bit to figure out what was what on their website beyond Rappan Athuk, Slumbering Tsar and Sword of Air. I kind of assumed that all their stuff was mega sandboxes because that's what I kept hearing about them for. That and tough old school dungeons.

Took me a while to figure out that Cults is pretty much an adventure path and I still hasn't figured out Cyclopean Deeps.

 

[Charles Wright]

The Cyclopean Deeps are where the Drow fear to tread.

 

[qu0zl]

When FGG describe it as an underground 'wilderness' does that mean hex-crawling, encounter tables or something like the Lost Lands where it's a sandbox but they're doing road/risk based travel?

I guess what I mean is, is it more of a sandbox with an over-riding plot than say an adventure path? I don't have any of the Cyclopean Deeps yet - I like the theme but I'm never going to get time to run all the FGG stuff that I already have. That said, if it was the first of your existing material that you did in 5e, I'd still buy it

 

[Mythmere1]

When FGG describe it as an underground 'wilderness' does that mean hex-crawling, encounter tables or something like the Lost Lands where it's a sandbox but they're doing road/risk based travel?

I guess what I mean is, is it more of a sandbox with an over-riding plot than say an adventure path? I don't have any of the Cyclopean Deeps yet - I like the theme but I'm never going to get time to run all the FGG stuff that I already have. That said, if it was the first of your existing material that you did in 5e, I'd still buy it

Cyclopean Deeps is not an adventure path, it's a sandbox of about 12 main adventures with maybe another 30 or so lairs, all linked by a network of long tunnels that can be explored in pretty much any order. There are actually several over-arching "plots" going on, rather than a single one.

 

[qu0zl]

That sounds really cool, thanks.

 

[silverhair2048]

This may be a little bit early but if you add the Vellum maps to your pledge and then go to get them framed. Make sure you tell the framer to use a white background or else they will be too dark to see anything.