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Full disclosure I was playtester for the Monsterberg Adventure.
When I ran it I was playtesting it according to the letter of the book, which is great but not necessarily how it’s meant to be run. Monsterberg is more a toolbox that gives the GM loads of options. The biggest plus of the adventure is definitely Jean, he is always easy to talk about the setting and easy to reach over the forum.
Monsterberg is what I refer to as historical +, so everything is beautifully researched but with historical fantasy elements, so there’s magic, but magic the way they thought it worked.
I would definitely suggest a session 0 for combat and explaining the system, this is also a good opportunity to decide how you want to set how dense you want the rules and what your own version of Monsterberg will look like. This also gives you a chance to set expectations on “genre”, Monsterberg is not a marvel film, it’s more like Ocean’s 11 crossed with Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series. Where some systems don’t want you to preplan the operation and prep and let you go backwards and hand wave you have the thing you need or did the right thing that’s not how Monsterberg works. Monsterberg is about doing things “smart”, you prep, you evaluate risks and play the best strategy to get out alive. Minmaxing is encouraged to achieve this. If you don’t get this into your players you won’t get 100% out of Monsterberg.
We ran it in roll20, if you want to use the adventure we built just write me I’ll send it over. At first we built macros for the attacks etc. this worked really well but added a lot of time to our prep. personally I’m a bit of a free wheeler as a GM and once the npc sheets were updated and streamlined it was a lot easier to just run it as dicerolls, it’s more a question of preference. If you want details on how to add macros for attacks in roll20 just check the Codex Integrum forum where’s there’s a guide with the code already added.
I would suggest you run through with players how you can get more dice into attacks and into damage before the game and have a printoff sheet of these options. If you use them they will really add an element to the game. Anybody who has fired a rifle will know how much of a difference shooting prone on a bipod vs standing makes etc. I would also have a discussion with your players how much lethality you want in the system and adjust to meet it. Monsterberg is not ‘Lethal” system per se, neither is it a dnd slogfest.
My players took a while to adjust to this kind of in-between damage system where things could take a few turns to die or just one depending on crits. For next time I would probably prepare a range of “damage results” to kind of tell the players whether it was an actually damaging wound or not.
If your players are uncomfortable with foreign languages make sure to name things for them to reduce their shyness, you can use google or wikipedia to find out how to pronounce things. it doesn’t really matter though nobody’s the Polish pronunciation police. But Monsterberg should feel a bit weird and foreign, it’s a weird and foreign place for the PCs too.
KEEP TRACK OF DAMAGE, MONEY, SUPPLIES REST ETC this is something that is pretty important to the Monsterberg vibe. Monsterberg this helps keep the players feel a bit more immersed and constantly problem solving and feeling grounded in the world and under threat, which is what Monsterberg is all about.
to recap. If you are looking for a hyper realistic setting with easy tools that can you can adjust to your needs then Monsterberg is it.
This is an overall writeup from the POV of GM.
First of all if you are reading this as someone not playtesting the campaign keep in mind that running this I was sticking to the letter of the law for the adventure so that shaped a lot of it. Monsterberg has enough info to go off script if you need to and is very open to modding to taste.
I would definitely suggest a session 0 for combat and explaining the system, this is also a good opportunity to decide how you want to set how dense you want the rules and what your own version of Monsterberg will look like. This also gives you a chance to set expectations on “genre”, Monsterberg is not a marvel film, it’s more like Ocean’s 11 crossed with Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series. Where some systems don’t want you to preplan the operation and prep and let you go backwards and hand wave you have the thing you need or did the right thing that’s not how Monsterberg works. Monsterberg is about doing things “smart”, you prep, you evaluate risks and play the best strategy to get out alive. Minmaxing is encouraged to achieve this. If you don’t get this into your players you won’t get 100% out of Monsterberg.
I didn’t do any of this careful preplanning, I just went full speed ahead with no prep for the players seeing if I could ride this badboy into the dirt.
The results were pretty positive for the system, the players figured things out quickly and the result of some of the holes we found were very quickly addressed by Jean. If you are running a session talk to Jean about it, he hangs out here all the time.We ran it in roll20, if you want to use the adventure we built just write me I’ll send it over. At first we built macros for the attacks etc. this worked really well but added a lot of time to our prep. personally I’m a bit of a free wheeler as a GM and once the npc sheets were updated and streamlined it was a lot easier to just run it as dicerolls.
I would suggest you run through with players how you can get more dice into attacks and into damage before the game and have a printoff sheet of these options. If you use them they will really add an element to the game. Anybody who has fired a rifle will know how much of a difference shooting prone on a bipod vs standing makes etc. I would also have a discussion with your players how much lethality you want in the system and adjust to meet it. Monsterberg is not ‘Lethal” system per se, neither is it a dnd slogfest.
My players took a while to adjust to this kind of inbetween damage system where things could take a few turns to die or just one depending on crits. For next time I would probably prepare a range of “damage results” to kind of tell the players whether it was an actually damaging wound or not.
If your players are uncomfortable with foreign languages make sure to name things for them to reduce their shyness, you can use google or wikipedia to find out how to pronounce things. it doesn’t really matter though nobody’s the Polish pronunciation police. But Monsterberg should feel a bit weird and foreign, it’s a weird and foreign place for the PCs too.
KEEP TRACK OF DAMAGE, MONEY, SUPPLIES REST ETC this is something that is pretty important to the Monsterberg vibe. Monsterberg this helps keep the players feel a bit more immersed and constantly problem solving and feeling grounded in the world and under threat, which is what Monsterberg is all about.
“Regarding ditching or replacing Hit Points
I don’t think that is necessary. So many games submerged themselves in the murk of delving deeper and ever deeper into modeling wounds and damage effects, hit locations and so on, most of which doesn’t matter in a real fight and is hard to control anyway. If you wound someone severely enough, as in badly enough to sever a limb say, or run them through, they are probably going to die. The fight is about injuring the other person or people, and avoiding serious injury yourself.For me Hit Points are only a problem when somebody has so many of them that they are nigh invulnerable (ala most versions of DnD, at higher levels). Codex has a Severe wound system, which I think lets you model the maiming type injuries (if you want to) pretty well. But most of the fun (for me) is in the fight, in the part leading up to the significant wounds.”
The issue with hitpoints is
A) no feedback to the player, a succeeded or failed constitution check tells a story about what happened “the bear takes 10 damage” does not tell a compelling story of what happened. One player just did something but in effect nothing happened, the player then feels powerless.
B) All or nothing, there are only two possible outcomes… nothing, or completely over.
C) increased system load. You already have dice pools that are cool and adding and managing this resource is core game and the funnest bit of it. Hitpoints take you away from the fun bits of the game that use easy amounts that can be held in the head (1-5) and add a resource that is trickier to handle and requires pen and paper book-keeping (1-50)We both know toughness and ability to take damage vary between players, people and luck. People can take insane damage and keep going or drop from nothing. I agree hitpoints can do that, but they can become very math based. I’m always pro simple and close to reality and to me that’s how it works usually – someone gets hurt – they are either tough enough to keep going or it effects them, the tougher they are the less it effects them.
Daily Dice Pools
There is already a rule for Free Dice based on Temperament which can be used for combat or skill checks, though they are not required for either. This is layered in as a bonus over the normal game mechanics in other words. If I’m reading your thing correctly a PC would only be able to fight once in a day or use skills until resting again? I think that is a bit draconian! I’ve been in a fight more than once in a day, I think most people in their jobs have to use their skills once in a day (unless they have really good hipster jobs!)Not quite, you get free dice pools to use in the check equal to your skills in that level. Take “rucking”, if the character has 1 level in rucking they get a free dice to use to roll the check every time they make the check, if they hike hard in the morning and again in the afternoon they get a free dice every time. For the soft courtier with no rucking skill just doing it will cost two daily dice and make the player then search for a good place to rest where they can get their dice back. Characters with “fight” 3 would get 3 MP dice per round and could then use their daily dice for MP as well or for soaking damage. The group liked the feel of combat having resource management, but missed having it in non combat.
REST Check
There already is a Rest system in the Players Guide, which I think is a bit less complicated (one chart to look at and one die roll needed for wound recovery only)Yeah we like the concept, but wanted it to be a bigger part of the game. Now it only matters for your hitpoints and therefor only if you lose hitpoints.
Got two more sessions over the last two weeks.
So first off there was the session with the Babe or the Woods. The players got to the babe fairly uneventfully. One of the players managed to find a shady character with some baggage and lumpy burlap sacks at the bar. The party dealt with the spider fairly easily. Once they started to use wrathful strike and work tactically. One of the players wrapped it in a sheet to immobilize it.
The session with the duke was mostly the players trying to figure out who the black magician is. They also met the duke and narrowly avoided getting arrested due to one of the players mouthing off to the Dominican Abbot. The Dominican issue seems to be following them, and almost become a running theme.
Third session in the bag.
Players found the mudslide and fully examined it, they found signs of gunpowder. At the ferry i inserted a Father Superior who had confiscated some occult items, the players had fun roleplaying in order to steal the magic items. Johann was pretty direct about it and it was only through good diplomacy roles that an incident was prevented. The players generally showed pretty good tactical sense throughout the entire section. I used Lothar being upset about the raucous on the ferry in order to give him reason to send them ahead to scout the road without their mounts. The fight resulted in the mounted crossbowman getting thrown. I applied the following metric. If the horse got injured the rider needs to apply a riding check, result of 15+ horse is ok, 10-15 they lose one MP dice keeping it under control, 5-10 3 mp dice, 1-5 they are thrown. The crossbowman took two hits from the PCs and was pretty much out of the picture. The Lancer charged and was parried. Then two players shanked him with knives and he got taken out pretty quickly. For future I would suggest giving characters moving at a canter 2 free active defence dice and galloping characters 3 passive MP dice. The players are starting to enjoy the system. I find it odd how hard the concept of dice pools for attacks and defenses can be to grasp for players.
Yeah I guess it throws me as my instinct is that in onset the character with the higher reach bonus should always get first action.
Second Playtest done. I wanted to get things a bit more solid before i moved on.
Two players couldn’t make it.The party got along the road to the Inn. I gave the players some chance to entertain themselves on the road. Nils went and hunted a deer. I’m coming to terms with the plethora of skills on the sheets. I have them create a narrative and roll for every skill the narrative uses and if any of them is over 20 with modifiers it gives them a extra dice on the next roll.
Nils first hunted a duck because he couldn’t find a deer. Then he tried again and left a sacrifice for the fairies with the duck blood and he saw a deer. He doesn’t manage to sneak up on it silently, but gets a shot off as it makes a break for it. He rolled a 20 and hit for 16 damage. The deer was a small one so only had 10 hitpoints. I gave Nils a point of exhaustion for catching up to the party carrying a deer.
They came upon the Inn where some peasants were having a wedding and there was a wrestling contest, at first Nils couldn’t be convinced to join. He tried to swindle the groom into buying the deer as potion to increase his virility. This attempt fell flat on it’s face. Johann in the meantime was getting the wrestlers even more drunk. Nils was eventually convinced to wrest and won the contest. Not hundred percent sure we did all the wrestling right but it worked.
After that I had them to watch duty on Lothar’s cart where they got attacked by Silesian bandits. The macros worked a treat. I think I’m still not great on how initiative interacts with multiple players and spears. Reach bonus should affect initiative in combat but what about multiple fighters and when they aren’t in fight range yet?
The bandits threw a javelin and wounded Hans. Johann then blew is head off. The fight went pretty quickly especially as the Bandits don’t have any feats on foot. NPC feats are tricky to remember for me. I think it’ll come with time though.
Overall a fun game and getting into the swing of things.
Yeah mea culpa in the jean thing,
My plan is to do this play through for experience and record a second play through for marketing. Possibly with a roll20 adventure that you can buy.We are using the 3.5 sheets that roll20 has, Sam setup a few macros for codex after that session. They work pretty well.
Sam did have to manually enter stats into the character sheet though.
I can give you GM access.Here’s a recording of the session we did
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v1aUOrkzpGCJBygrcTkIBGWneq6eLFj-/view?usp=sharing
I have now updated the roll20 with some of the things I found myself wishing I would have added
1. price lists from the markets out of the book
2. The rumor table
3. The duelling laws
4. The players introduction
5. The profile of the Duellist and his martial feats
6. Prices of Meals at the tavern
7. Art for the different locationsIf you want to use the roll20 use the link and make a free profile, I can then add you as DM
https://app.roll20.net/join/9735360/cc8jzATwo rounds,
Szabla vs. Longsword. First round everybody whiffed their attacks. Then Paul rolled a twenty on an active defense. He then used point control to roll 2+1 attacks and rolled a natural 20Ok so first session done and dusted.
I’m playing with 4 PCs who are fairly experienced with RPGs and two of them know 3.5 a bit. I ran the game over roll20, if you want access to my roll20 server where I prepped things just tell me. Might make things a bit easier and I’ll be adding the materials I missed in the previous session to the roll20. Hopefully by the end I’ll have a full roll20 version of the campaign book.
It went really well and the guys jumped into it. They were a bit confused what languages could be used at what time. They also decided to get themselves hired as bodyguards for a merchant caravan which I went along with as it was a really logical idea. With some good rolling they got hired. They were really good about gathering info and following their backgrounds. I think the background really helped them spread out.
I tried to get one of the PCs into a fight in the marketplace but they just moved. I solved it by having one of the mercs in the tavern knew them from Hungary and had a beef with them. One of the players immediately filled in that it was over a card game.
One of the players tried to bluff their way into taking over the duel as they also had a longsword (I used the halberdier NPC as the antagonist).
Takeaways for me.
– Give prices in Gulden and Kreuzers
– Prep your antagonist profile and write down their feats in a separate document
– Have your players make up a document compiling all their feats that they can add to their character sheet.
– Give the players moments to ask them what they want to doWe will be uploading our recording of the session soon so you can watch the session.
If you want to use the roll20 tell me
