Forbidden Lands’ Hidden Progression System

I was sitting with the Forbidden Lands GMG, working on my secret Bronze Hack project. And then it all clicked – the whole progression curve appeared before my eyes. It was one of those “Eureka!” moments each designer wants to pin down. And that’s what I’m doing now. Well, a few hours ago. But let me tell you how to use it – and then, why it matters so much.

It’s Not a Sandbox for the Kids Your Age, Go Break Toys Somewhere Else!

Forbidden Lands doesn’t have such a concept as a “level”. Plus, it’s a point-buy character progression system, with a lot of utility/downtime Talents to train that don’t really convey much to the character’s power level. I love it because it’s very organic. And it reminds me of my long years spent in the province of Morrowind. But it’s also a problem. Why?

Because without any reference point, the GM is left with just wild guesses. And I’m not speaking about the combat, not yet. Just one find too valuable, looted too early in the campaign, breaks the game by enabling the party to buy themselves too many resources, thus trivializing the system’s core survival game. It, then, quickly becomes bland, and there’s really no good way out of such “broken gameplay”. The party’s too resourceful for the challenges they can handle themselves, but since combat balance doesn’t exist in FbL, a pack of zombies with one brain-eater too many can TPK very efficiently. So it’s tough to counterweight that [3d6 gold find] early into the campaign.

How to Progress Through the Forbidden Lands – With Treasure Chests

Before I go into the “whys” and “hows” of my new discovery, I want to give you the method you can put to use right away. I call it “Treasure Tier Game Progression” (ttGPr ????). It’s all in the core rulebooks already, and you just have to keep an eye on a few things while preparing for a session:

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1. Assess at which stage of the campaign your party is at, roughly.
   • Are you just starting out? How many “big scores” the players hit? Do you feel they’re the underdogs or that they barely find any challenge?
2. For every three adventures/dungeons/intrigues, etc., the players have won, move your campaign one tier up.
   • By “winning” the adventures, etc., I mean overcoming some significant challenge (by force or by other clever solutions) and getting away with a reward.
   • The tiers align with the loot tables: Simple, Valuable, Precious – Carried and Lair counting as separate tiers.
   • If some of the loot your party’s found was exceptionally good, you can count one such “major win” for two or three “minor ones”, depending on your game.
   • For the first stage of the campaign (Simple Carried loot), one or two wins are enough to move on to the Simple Lair loot.
3. While preparing the next adventure/session, use only loot tables up to the current tier of your campaign.
   • It’s generally good to spread the treasure a bit, using lower-tier, carried finds throughout the scenario/site while keeping the “finds in a lair” ones somewhere where the party’s got to strive to get to.
4. Roll for treasure! But with a twist.
   • If you’ve just started the current tier of campaign (e.g., your party just hit their fourth victory and thus entered the “Valuable” tier in the last session), then roll two d6s while doing the d66 Valuable Find table and keep the lower tens digit.
   • If you’re beyond the third adventure of the current campaign tier, also roll two d6s for the d66’s tens digit, but keep the higher result this time.
   • You can also adjust the moments to use that “better-loot-probability” to fit your intended rate of progress.

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This way, you nudge the odds in sync with the game’s natural progression, the narrative ups and downs. Really. It will help your campaign flow smoothly from challenge to challenge with a more satisfying pace. In my campaign, the players getting lucky on one “Simple Find in a Lair” roll became virtually unconstrained by the food and traveling equipment. I wished then they’d rolled closer to the middle of the table and were able to taste the harsh journeys through the Ravenland before taking on some “fancy” quests.

Why does it work that way? Well, to tell you that, I’ve got to get back to the beginning.

The Unexpected Windfall

As I said, I was sitting comfortably, moving on away from combat in my Bronze Age project. Combat’s unbalanced in YZE (by design, I suppose), so I gave up on that and went scouring through the random loot tables and putting everything into Excel. I mean these ones:

I wanted to get a grip of how exactly the treasure is dealt, mechanically. I thought that, if I find out the average value of treasure at each tier, I could figure out what treasures to put in my system and when. Really, I was trying to make my own “Silver and Gold” system just like The Angry GM did for D&D 5e. Because it’s a damned good one – both for narrative and mechanical flow of the game – and a great lesson in worldbuilding, too! So I quickly typed those tables into a spreadsheet, ran some numbers, and…

Can you see it already? No? Let me explain further.

The Hidden Progression Code of Forbidden Lands

Look at the overall average expected values (EVs, counted in copper pieces) above. They form a nice progression curve. Simple Carried finds are meagre, and that’s good for the early sessions. Because that’s campaign-play thinking. And early on, the treasure should be hard-won and scarce.

Then, Simple Lair is a huge outlier, considering the sudden spike of the relative potential loot value (just look at the % difference between the lower and upper ranges in this tier!) But that’s also great. It means the party spends most of the time looking for their Big Score. And once they find it (odds slightly below 1/6), they can easily pay for training, mounts, equipment, and head on to the next tier. Then, on the “Valuable” tier, the curve stops climbing so fast. This means the meat of the story, the real challenges they face. And then, once the party’s ready, they can crack open the “Precious” tier and go all-in for the campaign finale.

Am I talking about character improvement, or gear’s?

Both.

Why Treasure Curve IS Character Progression, Exactly?

It’s something I started introducing in all my other games some time ago. It’s called “Training”. Not “buying new skills” as in the World of Warcraft. It’s doing something to earn a character upgrade. Not just “spending a Quarter Day” but actually doing something concrete. It’s also time-consuming, like days or even weeks. I’ve hinted at it in the “Crafting and Crits” a long time ago. It’s good for pacing, it’s good for immersion, and it’s good for engagement. Turns out, it’s great for gauging progress as well!

If the players get to take actions and have time to upgrade their characters – and if those actions cost them money – then treasure progression is, effectively, character progression. But even if you don’t do my “Training” thing, the gear can be upgraded much faster than Skills and Talents. And it does make a difference.

The Old Man and the System

Ok, I might not be that old, certainly not Hemingway’s Santiago-old. But I’ve run and played RPGs since 2005. In 2018, when the Forbidden Lands came out, I was immediately pulled to it. The rough, gritty world and deadly rules with a huge dose of survival and exploration were exactly what I wanted from a fantasy game.

I ran a few campaigns and a healthy number of one-shots in FbL. And I’ve always run it RAW, except for my weather generator, Daniel Sell from whatwouldconando.blogspot.com, inspired me to design (you can download it here). You can read all about my longest, 2-years campaign, The Lush, the Wench, and the Goblin, praising its sandboxy nature. I just love this system so much!

The Fantasy Made Right

Never before and never again have I seen that much of an immersion in the exploration. The heatwaves felt scorching during our treks across the western ridges. The cold winters were really to be reckoned with. The monsters are deadly as hell and really keep the players on their toes. (Shoutout to our sorcerer who lost his foot in the first fight of a campaign and had to improvise a cane to even follow with the rest of the party!) The myths and legends felt magical –wondrous and weird at the same time. And magic itself? Lethal (both ways) but not a button-press wish-box. Plus, the Year Zero Engine enables some crazy level of gameplay that I really love to use as a GM.

Despite that, some of these things made me feel outgrowing the Ravenland. Isn’t that sad?

Wanderlust and Call of the Sea

For a time, I disconnected from the Forbidden Lands. I ran my course. Maybe there were no fish to be caught in the Ravenland for me anymore? But I felt the pull still. The Raven was calling me. I wished to experience the strife against the fantasy world again. Immerse and wander through it.

But I couldn’t get back to what became too worn, too constraining. Homerules and hacks started to pop into my head on their own. Thus began my big project that I’m going to call the Bronze Hack for now. But that’s not the point here.

Because one issue remained unresolved. It was still bugging me, even when I sorted out all other things I wanted to tweak in the FbL:

How to Kill a Dragon?

Though I recommend everyone with a knack for history, literature, and mythology the 1995 book by Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics, reading it wasn’t a solution I needed. Frankly, I was just moving on after doing what I could and straight to the little aspects as far from combat as possible. Oh, and what was the issue, anyway?

It was the total lack of any progression curve, guidelines, or gauge whatsoever. “You play, you get XP, you upgrade your character.” And that’s it. But how does the upgrade transfer to challenge, difficulty, pacing, and tension? How can I plan any adventure or campaign that’s not involving

“Let’s scout ahead and run the heck away unless we’re dead-sure we’re not getting ran over.”

as the solution to the scenario’s main challenge.

It’s NOT Station: Ravenland

I know many of you feel like this is heading right on the steel-hard railroad. I assure you it’s not!

It’s not the open-ended nature of the Forbidden Lands that I grew tired of. It was its unpredictability that started to get in my way. I made several good scenarios that I’m quite proud of, but designing them was hard. It was meticulous and required a lot of back-and-forth thinking and page-flipping. I don’t mean that death shouldn’t be on the line when combat starts. It’s just that it feels better when fights vary from one another. Not all have to be fought at the death’s door.

Instead, what I was looking for was a way to measure – and gauge – progress in a long-term play. To be able to actually plan something ahead, something more than the first “next encounter” of the next session. Because, honestly, running off-the-cuff all the way was taxing like hell. Especially with my newly-found neurodivergent traits that started to also pull me down as a GM.

“Challenging” DOESN’T Mean “RNG-fiesta”

Forbidden Lands is a game about an unforgiving, hostile world. It’s brutal and it’s unpredictable – and that’s exactly what I love about FbL! But it also leaves me, the GM, with only guesses. The lethality and constant strife against elements and monsters are what gives the game its kicks. But I, as a GM, would like to have some sort of control over this. Some setup-and-payoff, foreshadowing, telegraphing… All that makes the games even more memorable and satisfying. But it also needs a way to control the pressure or just predict it. Relying only on good rolls in combat and bad ones outside of it to make the game fun can become dull very quickly.

And correcting the course of action on the fly? Until you’re not adjusting the combat’s first roll that turns up to be a “6×6” AoE, it might be fine. But, really, if you’ve got to fudge dice to keep the game interesting and not frustrating, the dice seem like an issue to me. One such adjustment and poof! – the suspension of disbelief is gone.

Tools for Polishing the Diamond

I ran Forbidden Lands as-written for years. I’m even getting good at that “adventure design” thing without railroading it or making it all cakewalks or all TPKs. But I know it’s been a long and rough road. And many folks who’d otherwise have liked the system are turned down by a simple lack of a tool for that. I know because I talked to them. And I care for that, because Forbidden Lands does many things that I’ve never seen any other game do.

I want to help it shine like it ought to. Do you?

Let me know whether you had similar problems as I do you like the game as it is. And give me feedback on how my system worked out for you!