Part of the Other Campaigns series.
SubVersion actually recently finished their Kickstarter campaign which I took part in. The game looked like it had a lot of potential, and it's similar to Shadowrun, one of my favorite games of all times (setting, more than the system). I got pretty involved on their Discord channel, helping with proofreading. Glenn and I decided we were going to do a beta test. Initially Glenn was going to run it, but then it switched and I picked up the GM seat.
As I don't know the system well, and I had the chance, I decided to run an adventure written by the guys at Fragging Unicorn (the guys writing the system and setting). Its written as a con adventure, so it should take about 4 hours to run (that's the standard). We're 2 sessions in, and about 2.5 hours (short sessions, slow because of lack of system knowledge, etc). I figure we're about half way through, maybe a bit more?
PCs[]
- Eddie the Yeti - Yeti pugilist and school teacher
- Jareth - Elf Doctor
- Ruduk - Goblin Tinkerer and Tech Guru
Story[]
The adventure we're playing is "Diviner".
An NPC finds an elf woman unconscious in an alley and gets the elders to try to help figure out what happened. The PCs are able to stabilize the elf and get her to a hospital where she regains consciousness. They find out she was investigating some kind of magic tracking system that can tell "fae" from "elf" and they start looking further into it for her.
Community[]
We had spent the time during Session 0 to create a community, and we're using it to a tiny bit, but with the adventure we're playing, it hasn't come into play much.
The community as created actually came out pretty cool. The players live in the "Mercury Retrograde" arcology. Mercury Retrograde is a manufacturer of anti-grav systems.
Feedback So Far[]
We're all pretty happy with the system. It's obvious at some points that we're still in beta; sometimes it even feels more like alpha, but that's where we're trying to help the guys at Fragging Unicorn. The dice system is a little quirky, but works. Sometimes I feel like there's too many possible dice modifiers, but so far it hasn't been a problem.
I REALLY like what they're doing with goals, values, and impulses. These are a great replacement for alignment, and they help with role playing a lot, especially if you mess up one of your values, as you try to redeem that value (or not). I also really like what they're doing with "community". Every game (is supposed to) have one, and the players build it. This is one of the places where they need more filler, so there's more options for building, but the potential we see there is fantastic. It gives players a reason to be good guys instead of murder hobos, or dirty mercenaries. It's a tiny bit like Blades in the Dark's "crew" but also very different. It builds in a level of politics that I like in a game. I can see having each Kaernest game choose between either a crew or a community, but I feel like community fits more with the ideas I've had for the setting at this point. I had originally been thinking something like the "House" from "Chronicle"/"Song of Ice and Fire", but that doesn't really fit for Kaernest. Community does.