Game Recap: The Goblin Tomb
I played my first real game of Shadow & Fae, a quick one-shot, last Saturday, and I think it went smashingly well! For posterity's sake, here's the Recap.
In the Tomb
Upon investigating an ancient tomb, Miss Mindy the Bard, Old Yeller the Dogfolk Monk, Amira Schmidt the Acrobat, Paul Blart the Frogfolk Barbarian, and P. Bettleby the gnomish wizard encountered a small band of goblins.
One of the goblins attempted to shove Blart down the stairs, but ended up rolling down himself, and was effectively bludgeoned to death by Old Yeller and Amira at the bottom.
2 More goblins fell to the party, and as Amira threatened the two remaining goblins with her bloody staff, they surrendered. The party accepted this surrender, and in return the goblins gave them a key to continue to the next room.
In that room, the party found a dark hall. Old Yeller rushed to the other end, and found a skeleton sitting in a chair. Excited about the bones, he ripped off the skeleton's leg.
The skeleton—of course—sprang to life! Severely hobbled by its missing leg, it screamed, bringing to life a few more skeletons which had been entombed along with it.
Old Yeller took a serious blow from the creature's Mourning Star, and fled to deal with some of the other skeletons along with Mindy and Amira.
Bettleby used "Reduce" to shrink the skeleton to half its size. Still, it's fury remained fully in tact.
Blart, seeing a crunchy snack, used his tongue to nab the small skeleton, and attempted to swallow it. The skeleton fought on anyway, half-in, half-out of Blart's mouth.
With its companions destroyed, and constrained in the frogfolk's mouth, the skeleton activated the strange jewel it held, which quickly grew hot.
Blart spat out the skeleton, who was now laughing maniacally as the gem grew bright, then exploded.
Blart ducked out of the way, and Amira performed a stunning backflip out of danger. Yet Mindy, Old Yeller, and Bettleby were left bleeding by the blast. Old Yeller recovered quickly, but just as quickly Bettleby succumbed to his wounds. Mindy seemed lost despite the best efforts of her friends, but at last a flicker of life returned to her, and the survivors left the tomb, still mourning the loss of Bettleby.
GOOD STUFF
I love the "Maneuver" mechanic. Basically, instead of having Move / Action / Bonus Action, you have a Maneuver and an Action. Action does all the regular 5e stuff. Maneuver can be a move, or it can be any action that changes the situation, such as grapple/shove/etc. Fumbling a Maneuver results in a dramatic reversal—the thing you attempted to do to someone else happens to you! This resulted in some dramatic moments, like the goblin falling down the stairs.
Characters feel simple but diverse, and we built a whole party in a little under an hour, then completed a 2 room dungeon in another hour.
STUFF THAT NEEDS WORK
I'll preface this section by saying the fact that we as a party can work on rules together is fantastic. If we don't like something, we can change it.
Death felt a little dragged-out. This was mainly due to the fact that the party had 0 healers (well, we did, but we forgot. Then she was the one dying.) I think just having slightly more healing available would fix this.
"Aid" was a little confusing. Basically, you ready to help someone, then, before they act, you roll a check to make it work. If you succeed, the person you're helping gets +2, or +4 on a crit. This felt maybe more complicated than fun. If we like, we could just go back to "Gives Advantage".
Bettleby definitely felt underpowered, like he was hoarding that one Magic Dice as much as possible, so we'll beef wizards up a touch.
Overall, we had a blast, and I'm excited to see what the future holds!
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