half baked dungeons

We Played Errant

In my quixotic quest to find or make the perfect elfgame for me and my table, I spent the last few years reading books and blogs and hewing and hawing about playing games but not really running them. I finally put together a semi-regular open table with some long-time friends from our pandemic 5e game. My explicit intention was to try a variety of new TTRPG systems to get an idea of what kind of games and play we like, what systems work for us, and how to maybe diy something down the line into that special house blend.

So we are working our way through a series of “mini-campaigns” or few-shots, and typically running pre-written adventures that closely capture the way each game was intended to be played. The first game we tried was Cloud Empress using the included Bean Barge starting module. I wrote some of my thoughts for that in watts discord that I should probably get on here, but right now I'm trying to commit to writing something in blog form and gods be damned if I don't just do it I just won't do it.

The second game we played was Errant, which was the first "posr" game I ever purchased and the one that caught my eye when it first came out. Everything about this system intrigued me. The procedures! The event die! Actual meaningful downtime! I had spent so long running games with little structural support that I thought I had found the holy grail. I even plugged the negotiation rules into my 5e game (with middling success) while I was still considering ever running that system again. But that was years ago. I'm wiser now.

We started playing Errant back in October using the excellent Tomb Robbers of the Crystal frontier. As an aside, I asked how long people expected the game to run over in the Kill Jester discord, to which Ava responded four to six hours was her experience. With 4 delves into the tomb and nearly every room explored, we have clocked over 14 hours across 7 sessions. I'll start off by reviewing the adventure: it's incredible, beautifully written, and running the players through the dungeon was a breeze. Every published dungeon should take this book as inspiration. Ok moving on! (Beware: light spoilers for the dungeon ahead)

One last note before getting into my thoughts on Errant: even though it goes against OSR principles or whatever, I tried to play the system as much as I could by the book, because I did want to find out what worked for us and what didn’t. I knew going into a few-shot that I was trying to get a breadth of the rules and I didn’t want to bog the game down with homebrew. That said, I did follow blorb principles when prepping and playing, and I feel that Errant was pretty well laid-out insofar as finding rules we hadn’t come across yet.

What I love about Errant

These parts of the system really worked for me in prep and play. Somehow I will be taking bits of these with me into other games, or at least letting them inform how I prep and design the games I will be running in the future.

Procedure of Play

Errant knows what it's about, and that fact is made clear in the 4 modes of play. After only a few exploration turns we were able to understand how the procedures should be used (and played with) to navigate the dungeon. Combat was quick and dynamic, and one thing I appreciated was how easily the players could run away (after a little reminding that this isn’t d&d). Although we only did two travel turns (to rest) and one downtime turn, the whole flow really painted a picture of vagabonds risking debt to advance in an unforgiving landscape. Each mode naturally evoked and supported the movement of players through spaces and situations, without getting in the way too much. I'll get more into that later on.

Event dice

Event dice rule. They really seem to work well when the events are prepared and not improvised. I appreciate Ava putting out the Errant version for TRotCF and including a roll table for local effects.

Supply

Inventory in general was not our favorite part of the game, but the quantum supply was a great way of making inventory matter without bogging play down more than necessary.

Negotiation Procedures

Abolish persuasion checks! Like I said before this was one of the first pieces that I pulled out before ever trying Errant. I think the rules are pretty intuitive, and a nice way to give players an obvious alternative to just fighting. During one of the most intense fights where it was clear they were on the losing side, it was a great opportunity for them to convince their powerful wizard ally to change the playing field, to buy them time to release the Sleeper’s brother from the evil Stylite’s grasp.

Player Choices

All through the game player choice is presented first and foremost. Choosing when to defend with armor blocks was a personal favorite.

Lock picking

This was one of those rules where we did not understand until we played it out. What I liked about the procedures for lock picking is that it became a group activity (as long as strict time records are kept!), a real challenge that required careful consideration, and that once you know one lock, you can always pick that lock.

Automatic Hits, enhance and impair combat rules

I just thought these rules were neat, and combat was pretty fast-paced and smooth.

Ancestry and Languages

I don't care for fantasy races being mechanically defined. Other than the Empyreans, I didn’t really bring it up the whole game. The ancestry options for me were just another class ability that the players had but it was nice to have it uncoupled. Same goes for the language selection. The occult failed antiquarian knew the language of criminals, and made great use of that while investigating around Scarlet Town during downtime.

Leveling and Conspicuous Consumption

This being my first foray into gold for exp systems, I gotta say I get it now. And the way PCs have to waste their money and risk going into debt is frankly hilarious. At first we were a bit shocked by the debt our Deviant went into after they rolled, partly due to throwing them into a town rather than a hamlet or village for their first downtime. But then I reassured them that all debt is shared by the whole party!

What I struggled with

These bits were harder for us but I cannot say that they were badly designed in any way. They either took us out of play or they felt incongruent with the type of game me or my players were trying to play. When we play Errant again (and I plan on it), I’ll probably fiddle with these.

Inventory and encumbrance

We spent way too much time trying to figure out the math for this part of the game, even with the spreadsheet character sheet that did some of the calculations for us. I understand the importance of having something robust here. Treasure converts into experience and critical decisions must be made (and were made!) as the players delve deeper into the dungeon. But every time the question of encumbrance came up, we had to review the rules together, go through each player's sheet, and break away from the game to figure out the math. On some level I felt this could have been a layout issue with the sheets, but for a game with largely simple and straightforward math, managing the inventory stood out as a clear outlier.

Occult archetype casting rules

We had a similar situation as above where me and the occult needed to read the archetype rules on casting pretty much every time they wanted to cast a spell. Maybe more clarity on the character sheet would help, but also I’m not really into vancian casting anyways. My occult player has incredibly positive words to say about the grimoire system though! More thoughts on that below.

Archetypes

I have bounced off the “osr” idea of limited class design and small character sheets. We felt that something was missing in providing some mechanical complexity to the non-caster archetypes especially. In my opinion, Errant limits itself by sticking with the classic archetypes. I could see a great resource that provides guidance on building and inserting different archetypes for any genre of game, and I have half a mind to go ahead and try that next time we play Errant.

What worked fine

I won’t get too much into these because they worked for us for this game but I wouldn’t necessarily jump to put them in my own diy game. Which is to say- as we play more systems I hope to find mechanics or procedures that click more with me and my table, but would also be fine keeping them as is.

What we didn't use

the final combat of the our game

The final stand of the Stylite. The players realized quickly he couldn't drown or burn, so they were forced to take matters into their own hands...

What my players say

Now my players value and experience games in a different way than I do. For most this was their first foray into the old school dungeon crawl style of game, besides Fifth Edition. They all have different things to say about Errant as a system, and I asked them what they also liked or didn't like. Some excerpts below, especially where they differ from my own thoughts.

jb — As a player I HATE being left out of important conversations because my character rolled up shit charisma stats. The negotiation procedures brought the entire party into the conversation, using our different skills and personalities to tee up a perfect final check for our Cunning Deviant. It was some of the most fun I’ve had at a rpg table and the result had a huge impact on the story outcome of our game.

jb — Success felt rare and fleeting. And I get it. That’s sort of the point of a system where player characters are not archetypal “heroes.” However, for me, trying to roll under my stat total made my stats feel a bit meaningless. They didn’t seem to help me at all and they were just fixed numbers that bound me to a miserable fate of failed roll after failed roll. I think there’s a psychological component too that I couldn’t get over. Little number, but not too little, never felt satisfying to me.

jb — I think Errant's greatest success is creating tons of procedures for situations that DMs consistently struggle to create mechanics for. Even if Errant isn't for you, it has procedures that can be lifted and reskinned for any number of game systems with minimal adjustments.

wo — I think many of the systems are excellent. I was skeptical as hell of the grimoire rolling, and I think it is my favorite part of this game, and maybe my favorite part of any indie ttrpg I have played

At first brush, I thought the grimoire system looked stupid, and like a thing that would force me to have eclectic magic that was anathema to having any sense of character - perhaps, even, a design choice for a system distilling principles from OSR - but I found it to be a frankly ideal happy medium. The amount of choice meant that the randomness of combining aspects that created a grimoire felt real - there were certainly no redundant combinations. But being able to decide with the GM what they looked like, with suck provocative and evocative themes to pull from actually did lend itself really, really wonderfully to having a character that was both eclectic and also....had an element of consistency.

I played a failed dock worker who made a deal with a Wampus Cat at a crossroads and became Occult. That was all the OC I was loading into this. But I really wasn't interested in that person having ice magic, y'know. For vibes. But she ended up having a hilariously awful assortment of viscerally unsettling magic - the ability to explode limbs (only), the ability to foretell a creature's death and relay it to them to invoke despair, the ability to hobble people and objects with a forced passage of time. The way the grimoires have been designed, the theme was not just "in line" with my character, but emergent for my character. The grimoires helped to paint a picture of desperation and powerlessness that the narrative setting invoked, and it was easy to meet my own ideas halfway with that tone.

This game, like all OSR adjacent games in my view, is still some brand of more complicated power fantasy. That feels in some ways at odds with the ethos of Errant - i.e. "You piece of shit, figure it out". But the grimoires actually helped me find that balance point. They took an incredibly powerful occult (relatively speaking), and helped bring that into the muck and shit by saying "But what if all your power was horrifying and for sure beyond your actual control and also sometimes more horrible than it was useful".

wo — (sic) OH OH OH THE OTHER THING I LOVED IN ERRANT
THE LANGUAGE SYSTEM
LITERALLY KILL ME FOR NOT HAVING THAT IDEA MYSELF
ITS SO GOOD
I WILL BE HACKING THAT INTO EVERYTHING I MAKE GOING FORWARD