Nevermore!

Or rather, always more! More Symbaroum is, that is. Free League’s RPG of somewhat dark fantasy* is our current regular campaign game, sessions taking place every Tuesday, more or less.

*Symbaroum gives me vibes of Joe Abercrombie and Steven Eriksson, to clarify my reference points for dark fantasy.

We kicked off this campaign in November 2023, at our annual weekend RPG retreat. This first session was half character creation and half introductory adventure. The setting and lore of Symbaroum are many fathoms deep, and I was keen to avoid information overload for the players. At this point I’d been reading the various books for this game for over a year, and still felt that there was so much I didn’t know, understand or appreciate. I’ve found that the best way to disengage players from the start is to swamp them with information they don’t need in order to start playing. In the case of this campaign I also wanted the players to have the same amount of knowledge about Ambria as their characters had i.e., the player information in the core rulebook. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some great material in, for example, the Advanced Player’s Guide, but I feel that these additions work better when people are comfortable with the base game.

As of writing we are 7 sessions into the campaign and have only just entered Ambria, the area of the game world that has received most focus from Free League’s published materials. These sessions have allowed us time to understand the game’s core mechanics, and slowly drip feed pieces of lore about the setting. This process has been kindly facilitated by an understanding NPC that I have appropriated from an adventure I plan to run, later. In terms of mechanics, they’re pretty simple and easily slip into the background when we’re deeply into some roleplaying. Combat, so frequently my bane as a GM, is streamlined and completely player-facing, meaning I’m not rolling dice, which in turn means I can’t be blamed for misfortunes befalling the characters. We’ve had a handful of fights, all of which went well for the PCs, except for the most recent in which two characters nearly died at the paws of vicious, predatory big cats. Combat in this game is swift and savage.

Now that we’re heading into the detailed setting of the campaign, we’re all feeling pretty comfortable with the mechanics, and feedback from the players tells me that the rate of lore-drops is about right.

Next post I’ll focus on my overall approach to this campaign, and how I plan to weave published materials around the players’ own plans.

Until then, game on!