Hot of the press (digitally) - Keyforge

[Llew ap Hywel]

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

now available for those So inclined.

 

[Endless Flight]

Never heard of it.

 

[Llew ap Hywel]

Never heard of it.

It’s for the Genesys RPG. It’s based of an FFG card game. Not that familiar with it myself, meant to be very gonzo. I’ve picked it up for the tools in it.

 

[Psychopomp]

What tools are in it, exactly? I picked up Terrinoth as a fantasy toolkit, and Shadow of the Beanstalk as a cyberpunk toolkit, but I have no idea what Keyforge is even supposed to be.

 

[dbm]

I’d be interested to hear what you think of the tools.

I have the other books (and three sets of dice ) but it wasn’t massively successful for my group when we played it. The scaling was too narrowly banded for D&D-ish fantasy, to my mind, so I‘m interested to know if they have anything to address that specific issue here.

Psychopomp Keyforged is a pretty cool deck game, where its USP is that the decks are pre-built in a semi-random way, with every deck unique. You have three factions in your deck and each round you can only play cards from one faction. The aim is to build a line of characters then use them to ‘reap’ Aember; if you have six tokens at the start of your turn you can forge a key. First to get three keys wins. It’s interesting in that it’s a game about building, and it’s very hard to take away what someone has built but you can destroy their ability to build (by killing their units on the table).

The factions are clearly more relevant to the RPG. They are different groups of aliens, with a defined theme for their abilities. Sanctum are about defensive buffs, and have a techno-knight theme. Untamed are big, stompy monsters. And so on. I was never massively into the fluff, but the Crucible is some kind of space artifact / created world or some such. It has vaults that contain great wealth / secrets and you need to forge keys to get into them, which requires Aember. So, the over-riding theme is vault raiding in competition with other factions.

 

[Llew ap Hywel]

I haven’t had a chance to read yet but from the character creation page you have a nifty little species/race/ancestry (whatever) builder. I’ve picked it up in the strength of recommendation and it will add some tools to a game I’m planning on running later in the year. As I come across things I’ll update this post but might be awhile.

 

[Llew ap Hywel]

Ok this setting is utterly wackadoodle and I cant imagine running it...ever. However it’s a fun read.

From a practical point of view this book gives;

1. A tidy little species builder.
2. The new species already included have potential reskin value
3. New Talents - look good
4. Weapon and armour traits - spotted a few tidy ones I’ll use.
5. Equipment and vehicles - value may vary but depends on usage
6. Æmber - this needs better reading before I can decide on its value
7. Lots of adversaries to use elsewhere
8. adventure builder - nice tool but nothing revolutionary.

Other than the above there’s some good inspiration to be had if you filter trough the crazy. I‘m thinking of lifting the Demons of Dis wholesale.

 

[Llew ap Hywel]

Not even going to pretend to have read the Æmber system well enough to claim full mastery but looks like a very usable system either as a replacement magic system or a weird science system, might even be the skeleton of a supers system but I’d need to spend more time with it.

 

[dbm]

Very interesting... what sort of mechanics does the Aember system use? If it isn’t too much to cover...

 

[Llew ap Hywel]

Very interesting... what sort of mechanics does the Aember system use? If it isn’t too much to cover...

When I’ve given it a proper read through I’ll try and summarise properly.