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A jam submission

Irish Pub Band Fairy HuntersView project page

A Havoc Engine Jam entry - A one shot of pub musicians and bardic magic vs fae incursion
Submitted by samfastic — 23 hours, 3 minutes before the deadline
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Irish Pub Band Fairy Hunters's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Does the game seem fun to play?#214.0074.250
Did it make good use of the Havoc Engine?#283.7714.000
Overall#313.6143.833
Did it build on the Havoc Engine and add interesting stuff?#413.0643.250

Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Enjoyed reading through this one a lot. The theme is very inventive and the lore/introduction is very cleanly-written. That, along with the large variety of prompts in each scene description, both feel like they'd make it MUCH easier for the DM to prep and run. The only things I'd personally change are some slight re-ordering of mechanics to make it flow a little better. For instance I feel like the Fae powers section would have been better located in the 'Attacks by Fae adversary's section even if it is right afterwards. That said, flowing from that, I did also like the different conditions, it adds a nice little mechanical wrinkle to the Havoc Engine.

Developer

Thank you so much for taking the time to read and for the positive comments!

Your suggestion around re-ordering makes sense 👍🏻

Submitted(+1)

The theme is interesting and fun. It feels like it's a stripped down version of Havoc Engine, which would hopefully give more space for roleplay to happen organically by deemphasizing some of the mechanical bits. That is reinforced by the periodic roleplaying prompts throughout the adventure. It seems like those drop off after the adventure gets going though, maybe there's a way to thread some more together throughout the later scenes. 

I like the idea of incorporating built in resistances to the engine and how the abilities modify stats. A few things are unclear to me though: 

- Can characters die/leave the game? The Dominated and Charmed conditions seem to have gameplay/narrative impact. The Injured condition states that fey will use injuries against the player, but it doesn't directly say if anything happens to characters when they reach 5 injuries. 

- Are there any mechanical impacts behind the instruments? They seem like they're mostly for flavor, written into the narrative descriptions for special abilities, but maybe they could be improved by using the Havoc system for equipment more directly. 

I think with a stripped down version of the havoc engine, there's more room for unique character attributes. With three stats and 1 instrument, maybe think about building out idiosyncracies for the three characters in more detail. Does it make sense for all three characters to have the same stats? Maybe they have different attributes based on their strengths. With only a few stats and relatively few dice, I worry that the session would mostly be spent trying to justify why your character's action fits the one stat you're best at rather than having a greater variety of narrative opportunity if they were personalized. 

In addition to that, maybe consider increasing the number of dice associated with the stats. The game as written takes 29 successes to complete in the shortest possible path, that assumes they're not allocating successes to defending or attacking. With smaller dice pools, I could see some of the later phases being substantially longer than the earlier phases. Maybe that's an intentional part of the pacing, but it might be something to revisit either way. 

Developer

Thanks for the comments, good feedback throughout. I think your point around the minimal stats, that it risks the focus being on justifying the actions is a good one.

No characters can't die, or leave the game, so injured has limited impact, max injury is not death (I should have pointed that out). That's a simplification around having people sit down and go start to finish in one sitting with no one left behind, so hopefully the GM can make it seem a bit scary and the players finish the game before that start to make things too hollow.

I'm definitely not sure about the pacing and number of successes, it may well be too slow at the end.