I don’t know if you know this, but I am designing a new game, and a new zine. Yeah, I know, I should focus on something, right? But listen to me, this is going to be a really good, and I will focus on this!
I am talking about my new project, Primal Quest + The Primal World of Thaia! A combo of a new streamlined rule set for Weird Stone & Sorcery adventure, that is an incredibly versatile and nuanced system that is perfect for adventure games, and a Zine for it, to develop the setting, provide adventures, optional rules and much more! The game’s influences count games such as FATE, Into the Odd, Classic OSR Systems, Modern OSR Systems, Genesys, my own stuff, and much more. Let me share with you a quick blurb about it.
Primal Quest – Essentials is a streamlined set of rules for Weird Stone & Sorcery adventures in a mythical world where humanity survives side by side with dinosaurs, aliens, and creatures more ancient than the world itself.
What Will You Find Here?
- A streamlined rule system that lets you have degrees of success, additional consequences and narrative control with a single dice roll.
- Character creation rules that are quick, intuitive and incredibly flexible, allowing the creation of distinctive characters.
- Rules for resources management, encumbrance and durability that makes the gritty primal world of stone and sorcery come to life without complexity.
- Combat and healing rules that make conflict exciting and dangerous. Combat won’t always be a good option.
- An open magic system that encourages creativity, ingenuity and makes sorcery powerful yet costly.
- Rules for making the game easy to run, improvise for, and just fun for the Referee.
But there is more! The zine, The Primal World of Thaia, will also support one of my favorite rule systems out there, Old-School Essentials! There will be new classes, new equipment, optional rules for Weird Stone & Sorcery adventure, and everything that is made for the game setting! OSE has a prime spot in my heart, and I want to support it as much as I want to support my own Primal Quest system.
Additionally, I want to share the session report of the first playtest of the Primal Quest RPG, and of some of the materials that will eventually be published in The Primal World of Thaia zine for both OSE and Primal Quest!
Content Warning: There’s description of violence, gore and other common themes of Dark Fantasy stories. I stay clear of any sexual abuse or anything like that though.
The game took place yesterday, February 10th, 2022, at a local game store called Game of Boards. Only two of the players showed up, as I invited them kind of on short notice. We arrive, spend like 30 minutes just catching up, and I start explaining the concept of the game, that it is an adventure game set in a mythical stone age, with humans, beast folk, ape folk, aliens, ancient forgotten civilizations, weird stuff, and all that pulpy, gonzo stuff I love. I tell them about the fantastic animation Primal on HBO Max, made by Genndy Tartakovsky’s, the same guy who made the incredible Samurai Jack series, and say it’s going to be like that, but more over the top. I send them a link to the playtest draft of the rules and the first thing they comment on is that you get XP just for surviving a session. “Yeah”, I say, “it’s that kind of game”, and expectations are already set.
They quickly make characters, as the characters has only 3 Attributes, 5 Tags (which are like FATE Aspects), Vitality (that’s kinda HP, but not really), Defense (like AC, but not really), and their equipment (which sounds mundane, but can really set characters apart in the game). So one of them makes like a hunter/guardian character, with a quick mind and some agility, and the other one makes a gigantic brute, with rough skin and monstrous strength but very dim witted. Since there were only two of them, and I wanted to give them some leg room, I let them each create a side quick with weaker stats and they were ready for some weird stone and sorcery fun.
The idea is to play a sandbox game in a hexcrawl style. They begin the game in a village that their tribe has erected, near a lake and a hill to facilitate defense against attackers. It is called Lakit and it’s a fishing village that also gathers fruits and vegetables in the nearby jungle and plains. Thanks to their leader, an elder shaman named Brikla, the village is a safe and welcoming community, and count other sentient being beside humans as members, including a triceratops who was healed by Brikla a few year ago and decided to stay. I tell them there’s basically 4 issues that are pressing their people.
First, their hunters are reporting that all the animals nearby are being killed by an horrendous creature that simply tears apart its prey and leaves it in a way no one can harvest any meat from it but doesn’t really eat much. Food is running low, and they don’t know what to do. One of them saw the creature, but it killed them so fast, no one really could take a look at it. Thus, they are looking for volunteers to deal with it.
Then, I told them Brikla, their leader, has been having visions in which their sacred tree god, The Tree Mother, is dying. Evil is growing inside of it. Something viscous, shiny, and dark. The vision began a few days ago, after a meteor fell a few days away from their village. She is concerned, and is looking for volunteers to investigate it.
The third hook was that a few of their people went north to trade with an isolated and reserved community in the mountains, but haven’t returned after a full month. The journey usually takes 2 weeks to complete, and they should have been back already. Both communities have been allies for as long as anyone can remember, and there’s little reason to suspect they would attack each other. Anyway, someone must look into that right?
Finally, the last one I came up on the spot to justify why the other players were not there, and said they went southeast to help another friendly community that lives in the jungle to deal with some problems there related to a huge flock of pterodactylus that were preying on their allies. It wasn’t really a hook, but more of a justification for the “where were these folks when we needed them?” kinda thing. But if they would like to follow them, I was willing to come up something for them.
The hook I had most notes about was the one about the Mother Tree dying. It would involve a weird bio technological tower that is a spaceship, some ooze style aliens that infect some classic Grey style aliens, mutated dinosaurs, earth tremors, and so on. But they chose to go north, to see what happened to some of their people.
So I explained to them that the northern village is called Morik, and it is located in the footsteps of Father Mountain, another of their gods. There were basically two most used paths to get there. One that was longer but safer, that would follow the river through all it’s length and curver, avoiding going through the fetid Froggy Swamp, as they call it, because the swamp is full of frogs, including giant ones and is always foggy. The other one was quicker, but crossed exactly that swamp. And they choose to go through the swamp, of course.
So we began our journey through the hex map. I roll on a table for Autumn and discover it’s raining a lot. So they’re wet, and there’s mud. It’s hot too. But not too much. It’s autumn and there’s no global warming yet. The first day saw them going north through the rolling hills they usually gather berries and fruits from, as well as hunt some wild aurochs when they felt courageous enough. However, as explained previously, the nearby animals are being slaughtered by a monster, and there’s little left alive. They see some of their carcasses and it’s truly horrifying. Luckily for them, there was no random encounter there, and they camp in a hill under some rocks, right near the swamp, where they will travel through the next day.
I then introduce them to the Resources rules of the game. They must consume 1 unit of Food and 1 unit of Water everyday to avoid some penalties. I also tell them everything is evaluated in units of Food/Water. Like a weapon could be traded for something worth about 50 units of Food/Water (rumors say there’s a city somewhere where people created shiny metal things they trade for things, including Food and Water). So they each consume 1 of each, and so do their sidekicks.
The next day, they enter the swamp and their strategy is to jump from hill to hill and avoid the water as much as they can. I tell them the rain is getting heavier, and the water is coming up (what a bastard I am, right?). As they walk north, they start seeing more and more frogs, and they are getting bigger. I ask for a Mind Test so they can avoid getting lost, and they made it fine, even though the rain and the fog made it really hard to keep their eyes on the mountain.
They day ends and they now need to find safe shelter. One of them decides to do that with the other one’s side kick (who is more capable in that respect), and the other one says he will try to fish. The hunter one finds a defensive and hidden hill where they can probably spend the night, and maybe even get a bit dry with a fire. However, the brute one fails badly with the hunting test, and I roll a random encounter. So this is what I tell him: “You go a little lower, closer to the water. The rain is heavy, and it’s hard to see, but you are pretty sure there’s no fish anywhere. It’s like they have ran away or something. And then you see it, but it’s too late”. I ask him to roll their Defense with a Negative Die for being surprised and he fails badly. A tentacle grabs him by the foot and pulls him hard. He falls on the floor and hits their head. They are still conscious, but wounded. I ask him to roll for the sidekick that’s there, and they are also grabbed by the monster, but it’s not so wounded.
Now combat has started, they say they are screaming for help, and will try to spear the tentacle that grabbed them to escape. They hit the creature, but don’t succeed on severing the tentacle, they are still being pulled. The sidekick, however, rolled pretty well and severed the tentacle pulling them.
Now I asked the other player for a Body Test to see if their character runs quick enough to get there before the creature acts, but he fails. It’s the creature’s turn. I say the monster is getting out of the water, and they are surprised to see that the quick and strong tentacles are a giant slug like creature, with a huge shell the side of a small tent, which has a gigantic maw filled with sharp teeth dominating its body. I ask them to make a Body roll to resist being pulled to the creature’s mouth and they fail, now the creature will bite. I ask for a Defense roll and the player, being the Brute who is super strong, asks if they can defend with their Body, and since they are near the creature’s mouth, their character will try to hold it open. That sounded rad as hell so I of course said YES, YOU CAN! So, of course he does that and it’s such a cool moment. The sidekick then throw their spear and do some more damage to the creature.
Then the other character arrives running and proposes to use his spear not to attack but to use it to hold the creature’s mount open like a pillar, so the brute can get out of there. He proposes that since that’s not really about doing damage that he uses his character’s Mind Attribute to do the Test. Again, since this is so cool I say go ahead. It works and the scene gets even cooler.
It’s the creature’s turn to act and it tries to take the spear out of its mouth but doesn’t manage to do so again, but crushes the brute with its tentacles furiously at least. And then it’s the brute turn. He rolls really really well and uses his Tags appropriately and severs the creature in half! They are disgusting now, covered in slime and blood! But hey, that was really badass!
Time to introduce another rule, animals, even though they can be weird, can be used to harvest units of Food. I roll 1d6 per Lvl of the animal (which measures how strong and big it is), and that’s how many units of food can be harvested from the creature if a character passes ona Mind test to do so. I roll 3d6 (the creature was Lvl 3), and I get 6. They harvest it well, and have more food for now, but they need to cook it if it is to last some time (which they do without much problem). Also, they hid the shell so they could come back to get it and use it as a shelter, or sell it to a crafter, and it’s hard and can be fashioned in armor, weapons or other tools (it’s treasure!).
I must say the brute was pretty beaten up, but wasn’t yet in danger of dying or being injured, which can impose conditions on characters. I tell them about the healing rules, which involves resting mostly, as healing magic is very rare. They rest, recover a little, and take turns at night keeping watch. No random encounters are rolled, but I rolled an omen of an encounter, and then I say that during the night they felt the floor trembling a bit and outside of their small cave they saw a shadow of a huge reptile that looks like enormous alligator with huge spikes on its back passing by, slowly. Giant birds flew around it and rested on its carapace. But nothing happened (thanks for their sound decision of not going after it) and they slept again.
The next day went on with little more trouble. They passed their test not to get lost, got some more food, got some more water. I rolled another omen and they saw the discarded skin of a huge snake, so that was a good warning for them. At night they were atop of a hillock overlooking the rocky hills they would travel to next, near Father Mountain. They saw something that made them apprehensive. There was smoke coming from one of the caves the people in the mountains used to hide and rest when away from home. A lot of smoke. At least it wasn’t coming from where the village is. They then left the swamp and sought another one of these shelters to spend the night.
They found one quickly with a Mind Test, and discovered there was stains of blood all around, signs of battle, a severed arm in the back, and a drawing of two people made with blood in the cave wall with many people dead around them. The drawing was of a large man with a huge axe, and a large woman with a giant mallet. There were marks of blood indicating bodies had been dragged out too. But, alas, they decided to spend the night there anyway. Not their smartest decision.
Of course, at night, as they light a fire to cook the meat they got that day, the smoke draws attention and two scouts find them. However, they roll well on their Mind Test, even though they had penalties and see them approaching, they make quick work of one of them, who is brutally killed by, well, the brute (let’s start calling him giant too, as he is really big). The attack is so devastating it breaks his spear (his attack was good, but he also rolled a setback on his Negative Die, so it broke the bone tipped spear). The second scout tried to escape, but they threw a spear on their legs, slowed it and then captured it.
What follows is not pretty, and if you have problems with torture, skip to the next paragraph, as it’s alsmost in the end. Yeah, my players are not the good guys, as rarely PCs are in Old School games. They poke the guys wound, but the guy is kind of a fanatic, they curse each other, the guy spits blood, the guy tells them anyway that their friends in the north are dead, and the ones that are not now work for them (I am watching The Walking Dead from where I stopped and I am taking some inspiration from the Negan storyline here).
And that’s how that’s how the session ended. We played for roughly 2 hours. It was A LOT OF FUN! Everything clicked perfectly and I am really excited. I am gonna look into ways to stress the system, and I am gonna start writing that zine!
Well, until next week folks! More news soon!
P.S.: Primal Quest is based on my minimalist game of endless adventure Sword Quest. Get it here, and get is Addendum here.