(I had initially posted this on the Runehammer discord earlier today, but the verdict was it might be a good for the forums.)
I just ran Crown and Skull for the first time, overall positive experience but I don’t feel like I quite have the correct state of comprehension to give it a true imperial review yet- so here at least is my thoughts in rough chronological time!
I’ve been reading and re-reading though the book to try to get a vibe for the setting and understanding of the rule for a while now, but in direct preparation for needing to actually teach and run, I started running into hurdles in the book that I hadn’t noticed at first. C&S relies on concise and evocative technical writing to explain rules, which is great, however when a single word change error or misunderstanding happens it can completely change the rule, causing some resistance to learning. I assume this gets easier the more I play and the more I re-read, this is just a big ask for such a heavy tome.
We played a 3 hour session consisting of teaching, creating characters using the templates since I didn’t want to get too bogged down in customization before we knew what we were doing, and 3 or 4 different scenes. I predesigned the adventure as I didn’t want to risk randomness throwing off my precarious preparation for my first time, perhaps this is a mistake for C&S?
Initial teaching and character creation was a real highlight in my eyes- given that C&S has some radical rule departures, being able to quickly and linearly make a character (chose a name, story, buy items, buy spells), lowered the bar to entry for my players so we can focus on digesting roll under and attrition and not have to deal with the “tax-form-like” experience of calculating abilities, rolling for money, cross referencing class statics, etc. that are typical of RPGs.
My players seemed to really dig the premade setting and how baked into the rules they are. Everyone got a kick out of looking at the map, deciding hometowns, reading short excerpts from the stating town of Gardenburrow and their own hometowns got them hooked on setting tidbits outside of the blurb that I told to bring them in. This almost never happens, but outside of any explanation, world building, or effort of my own, for example, one player read about the Holy Order, saw hints of it through other passages they read and made their cleric character looped into the will of the order and its relation to the more druidic faith of Gardenburrow. Amazing. Im thinking this has something to do with the approachability of The North Holds- its nothing radical in terms of fantasy, but just enough for players to get invested, and relatable outside of purely the output of the GM’s naration. I think this is a huge boon.
I ran an encounter with corrupted wolves who attacked in the middle of town to get us all used to phases and attrition. Players loved the idea of attrition- made getting hit far more interesting and a decision point rather than “math time”. Phases did not end up really clicking with any of us just yet- maybe that’ll come with time, deadlier encounters, or more varied phases from enemies in an encounter. I also think having terrain or event dangers happen on phase tempo would be good too, just felt like something else to juggle so I skipped.
A couple of pain points from this fight: Finding the “correct” enemies to use was difficult. I felt like I needed to throw a normal/average/“balanced” fight so I don’t accidentally completely ice the party (I did that when running Torchbearer and we didn’t continue after that encounter…) or make the game seem trivially boring. I ran the wolves as 10hp and basic attrition for the most part, which resulted in combat feeling very spongy. Enemies took a while to take down, and players slowly took small amounts of attrition damage. Other RPGs might have more risky attacks coming from enemies, with the chance of an attack putting them in real danger at any swing, whereas in C&S, you’re just losing 1 “hit”. Perhaps that is fine and another context switch to get used to with C&S’s death spiral? Maybe I had too many hit points on the enemy so they stuck around too long? Maybe that was the right amount of hit points as encounters need to chip away at the party long enough to feel impactful? Example enemies in the book all had more hit points on average so this felt low initially. I later reread the monsters in the Storm Point Asylum adventure and saw MUCH lower hit points. My gut feeling is this felt like poor communication. I think in retrospect I would’ve preferred the wolves to have like 5 hit points but at on multiple phases. But again, I was trying to avoid playing with fire too much. Perhaps C&S is all about playing with fire so to speak?
A fight later on was to be with Frog-kin, but their stats seemed shockingly powerful- way more hit points, way more actions? Seemed like a lot to me. I ran them as 20hp, basic attrition for the most part, and again, same issue with the wolves- everything was very slow to kill and not entirely dangerous enough to force players out of the run-of-the-mill tank and spank combat. Maybe the solution I run the far more powerful enemies and just see what happens? Embrace the danger and chaos? I am hesitant to do that before I understand the baseline and average before I start tweaking.
Asymmetry was also difficult. Lots of rules are written in terms of what they would do to the players OR what they would do to the monsters, but as far as I am aware never both. I had a player pick up bear trap from the equipment, its explained to require Muscle to escape. Do monsters have Muscle? No. Do I just role flat luck? I guess that’s the rule? vs 6 as the default? Sure? How much damage? d8? Bear Trap was a choice pickup compared to grabbing something more well defined in its reliability like a Bow, so what Bear Trap does compared to a well defined weapon DOES matter. Same issue was seen with the cleric’s spells. The descriptions for most of the spells are very “hand-wavy” which is fine, but when life or death is on the line, I think character abilities need to have some more specificity. Perhaps I haven’t seen the light yet in the new context switch of C&S.
What I did like in terms of GM support in how interlocked the setting and story prompts are, and how it allowed for trivial plot creation. I’m usually hesitant about pre-made settings because I generally find them more work and less creatively fun then making my own setting. The North Holds felt like a great middle ground. Gardenburrow has a problem with corruption? Great I can work with that! The Frog-kin want to parlay, and it sounds like a trap? Fantastic hook, zero effort, room for creative freedom. By the end of the one-shot, players were theorizing about the injustice of the Frog Kin’s imperial actions and two-tiered society, the nature of theology in this universe, what role the elder trees play, the true source of corruption… list goes on, I didn’t have to think of any of those prompts and its clear I have creative freedom to create my own reveals and resolutions to those questions that don’t revolve around reading what the actual “canon” answer is in a lore dump. Fantastic.
At wrap up, the players said they really liked attrition as it made them consider what is important and what is ok to lose, albeit, very game-y. Having more stuff in your backpack making you more durable didn’t really make a lot of sense in universe to us but was a fun and engaging system. Quickly the players realized that a high priority should be filing their inventory with gear to give them more staying power. Is this a correct assertion? Another player suggested that you should load up on defense enough to counter the somewhat trivial penalty to Hurry, as that will allow you to get ahead in action economy. Again, is this a correct assertion? Obviously some dangers cannot be prevented by defense, so going with that strategy leaves you vulnerable to specialty attacks, but maybe that the correct player move? Are non-defense dangers supposed to be less common compared defense dangers?
I also know from experience that when players have full freedom to customized outside of predefined classes, the best strategy they tend to go for is to hyper specialized into a few key tasks such that they almost never fail or succeed exceedingly well and leave other tasks to other party members who have specialized in other tasks. Does that desire to specialize balance well with C&S’s desire to fill up your inventory/skills to maximize your “hit points” over the course of an average campaign? Or is it intended that you are able to achieve both desires? Fill your inventory/skills, and become highly specialized? This question probably doesn’t matter too much, I can see it going either way, but I’d be curious as the the game design’s intended experience!
If we play it again, I know we’ll likely want to do point buy characters instead of templates. This system seems like a “character-build” gold-mine. However this really crunchy, rules-y desire to make an optimized character seems in opposition to how nebulous SOME of the rules are written. If a player is trying to decide between different spells or items, I think it would be important to be able to make a honest comparison, but by the nature of the books succinct technical writing, only some detail is able to get empirically defined, leading to lots of GM by GM calls, which I’m imagining could be a lot to gamble when precious hero points are on the line.
I had fun, it was a great breath of fresh game-design air, and has given me lots of things to think about! What are your all thoughts? How is my Day-1 analysis? I’d love to hear you-all’s take aways!
