RPG Book Club July

[Crothian]

Argh!! That's right, this month the RPG Book Club has been taken over by Pirates. And every good or bad Pirate needs a place to call home so this month we are discussing Green Ronin's Pirate's Guide to Freeport.

One of the great aspects of the book is it is system less. I'd love to hear some ideas on how systems effect the feel of the game and what cool systems out there people might run this in. D&D and True 20 and Savage Worlds are the obvious choices as they have (or soon will have) Freeport books for them. Those will be easy to discuss for many people. But don't ignore the things like WoD mortal game or Call of Cthulhu/ Trail of Cthulhu. There is a great horror theme to Freeport that these books can really help with that.

Bento had a great idea of listing some questions. I'm going to start some general ones to help with discussion.

* What did you like about the setting and lack of mechanics?

* What did you dislike, or find hard to implement?

* What do you think were the main design goals the author had in mind?

* Was he/she able to reach their goals or fall short?

* Would this be the kind of game you would play?

Welcome to Freeport, don't get killed

 

[tenkar]

Damn, I actually own this... now i need to give it a good read over my vacation

 

[jdrakeh]

I've been meaning to pick this up. Provided that I get all of my bills covered this month, this might be just the excuse I need to grab a copy

 

[bento]

Looks like I finally have a reason to pick this up!

Crothian - I posted info over on True20 about the pick. Could you do the same over on GreenRonin.com?

Thanks!

 

[Crothian]

Time to answer some of my own questions

* What did you like about the setting and lack of mechanics?

The setting is very complete and has a great history. I like the feel of the pirate city and the how dangerous it is. No mechanics makes it much easier to read. I didn't realize how mechancis cut up the reading flow until I read a gaming book that had none.

* What did you dislike, or find hard to implement?

Like Thieves World I find it a little hard to show the evil that many of the NPCs would have. It is not a nice or safe place and that can be hard to show.

* Would this be the kind of game you would play?

For the first time I placed it into my campaign world and connect a backstory of a PC to it. We shall see if they ever get there.

 

[Voadam]

* What did you like about the setting and lack of mechanics?

I like the cultural crossroads aspect, the background continental war, the Cthulhu cult vibe, and that its an independent pirate themed nautical trade city.

The lack of mechanics works fine for me, the descriptions of NPCs are enough to run with as they are background NPCs. I need stats for adventures, statless with good descriptive elements works fine for inspiration and background.

I run a Freeport trilogy game using 3.5 with lots of house rules and I don't need statted stuff from this book, stats for the module are important but descriptions are the key for the background.

* What did you dislike, or find hard to implement?

Having gone to an undergrad university with 40,000 students I was originally shocked (even knowing that modern populations for cities exploded compared to pre modern times) that the population of the city state was only 20,000 people. I was not sure how big a fleet 20,000 could realistically support, for example. It is not that big a deal to me now though.

I dislike some of the attempts of humor, they just did not work for me. The makers of yellow as a minor religious group for example annoyed me.

I'm still trying to find definitive stuff on the upper classes of Freeport, whether they are all just foreign nobles and wealthy locals or whether Freeport has any indigenous nobles. I went with no indigenous but I keep coming across descriptions that make me question that this is the default.

I'm not sure exactly about the default watch details, like if they have a uniform or not.

I'm not sure on how big a fleet Freeport has.

I did not really like the world cosmology of Yig and Hastur as the cosmological center and the world literally centered around Freeport.

I didn't really care for the default northern continent.

* What do you think were the main design goals the author had in mind?

Fleshed out pirate themed D&D city with Cthulhu undertones.

From what I understand there was a specific effort to make it less silly than the direction some of the elements of intervening Freeport products directed the setting towards.

* Was he/she able to reach their goals or fall short?

I think they were met.

* Would this be the kind of game you would play?

I am actively running a Freeport game and using this book fairly often.

 

[Crothian]

What system are you using? Did you consider using something differnent?

 

[NiTessine]

Picked up the book yesterday.

Looks good thus far, though I haven't had time to read it in depth yet. I like the mix of pirates and Cthulhu mythos. I've got the original Freeport trilogy lying around somewhere in pdf as a result of some promotion I can't remember anymore, and now I want to take a closer look at it.

It looks like Freeport might also be useful with the Sinister Games "Indulgences" that I've been poring over lately.

I will post my full reckoning once I've finished reading.

 

[Psion]

Ooh, I own this one.

I haven't read it cover to cover (and know for certain, I won't have time to do so before GenCon, and ergo this month), but there are already things I like about it.

Perhaps I'll give it a second browse through, but I'll throw these two things out there:
1) Back before D20, there were some system-neutral products that I liked. In particular, the Citybook series. Those books will represent a watermark for system neutral books for me. They all had a simple little "competance" summary for all the characters. I wish that the Pirate's Guide to Freeport did something like that for it's NPCs; that would really support the idea of a system neutral gaming product better.
2) I really loved the the "On Stranger Tides" sidebar on page 247. That really speaks to the sort of game I love.

 

[Psion]

Alright, did a bit of a refresher read:

One of the great aspects of the book is it is system less. I'd love to hear some ideas on how systems effect the feel of the game and what cool systems out there people might run this in.

Well, there's D20, of course, and I did pull Freeport into my river of worlds game.

Pirates of the Carribean 2 & 3 got me thinking about a "mystical pirates" game, in which pirates tap the power of gods. The feel of 4e rituals usable by any class with the proper feat is IMO wrong for D&D, but good for Lovecraft-ish fantasy that Freeport represents. That said, I think the heavily encounter-centric design of 4e is wrong for freeport, so I'd have to do a mash up of some sort.

I had also considered using FATE/Spirit of the Century for such a game. Though (as I mention in my prior post) the book doesn't provide easily extractable statistics, FATE's aspect mechanic makes it easy to extract game statistics from flavor text.

The other major system I would consider running it with is Crafty Games' forthcoming Fantasy Craft. It has better handling of non-combat tasks and conflicts than 3e/d20 or 4e, and the moment it's published, you'll be able to plug in the Fragile Minds supplement for that Lovecraftian Horror feel.

Bento had a great idea of listing some questions. I'm going to start some general ones to help with discussion.

What did you like about the setting and lack of mechanics?

Well, obviously, the thing I like about it is it makes me feel more free to experiment with other systems, which can produce a different feel than D20 does.

What did you dislike, or find hard to implement?

As mentioned previously, lacking even "pseudo stats" like the old City Books had makes it harder to pull out stats without deep consideration of what the character should have.

What do you think were the main design goals the author had in mind?

To put it plainly, the design goal was to survive a 4e transition. Chris Pramas saw the writing on the wall, and got stung bad by 3.5. He wanted his baby to survive 4e without having to sacrifice a print run.

More specifically, the goal of the generic book is to re-sell the Freeport concept to non-D&D 3.x players.

Was he/she able to reach their goals or fall short?

Well, I have seen Patrick O'Duffy rant about Freeport being discussed in the D20 forum rather than the general forum over at RPGnet. So it seems he's got a bit of a challenge. The fact of the matter is that the existing audience for freeport is probably the core of the new audience, but those members that have moved on the games like C&C and Savage Worlds can take the setting with them.

I'll repeat that pseudo-statistics would help gamers actually use this as a gaming product.

Freeport when from being marketed to gamers who already have a setting (assuming d20 system) to players who have their own system but not necessarily setting. As such, fleshing out the main continent a bit might have been a good choice to reach those players, but it might not be too much use for existing players using d20 or their own setting.

Deities are a curious exception to this further fleshed out setting. The gods are still nameless, even deities which were named in earlier Freeport books.

Would this be the kind of game you would play?

Absolutely.

One more thought

After reading through this book and comparing it with other recent city/setting offerings, I think that Green Ronin needs to follow suit after Malhavoc (with Ptolus) and Paizo and make a player's guide. There is a lot of info about Freeport that natives of the setting would know, but this book is riddled with secret info and thus probably not best to be handing to all the players.