Reavers! A Wolves Upon the Coast Campaign

Wolves is Not Easy. That is Not a Bad Thing.

Wolves is not an easy system to run. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In &&& Treasures there is a grimoire called the Sevenfold Path Beyond the Gate. It is described as

A series of eight near-transparent vellum scrolls. All reference on another extensively - particularly the first. This acts as the gate. The opening acts as a cipher for all the rest - without enclosure, the space is rendered infinite and impossible. Only by passing and re-passing through the gate is the reader/practitioner able to circumvent the need for the gate.

I can't think of a better way to describe running Wolves as a hex crawl. It is amazing and it gets better the longer you run it and mess with it. It also commonly requires opening 5-6 pdfs in a single session.

For example I had a player in a recent session "rescue" a group of petrified children from a cockatrice. They then met a druid Conar later who as per a house rule as a druid knows 1d6 spells (but only has material for one). One of those spells was Stone to Flesh but he had no knowledge of how to acquire The Tears of a Petrified God or Demon. A player about 9 months prior remembered a session where they had found this strange hunched stone statue that cried when it rained and immediately set out to gather these tears to see if they would work for the spell. I had no knowledge of this. This hex was one visited in Canyon's half of the campaign before I became a co-GM. I never touched the hex nor read it. It was an amazing moment to me.

The issue is that there is no reference for many of these things. You have to dig through the text to find this stuff. You will be flipping back and forth endlessly in order to find these references and it is enjoyable to many. I personally don't like this aspect as much and would greatly enjoy if Luke would add references to what hex is being referenced at times but I can understand if he decides not to do so.

It is a challenge but it is definitely juice worth the squeeze because every village, lair, NPC, spell, and bit of lore is so intertwined that it makes for a natural feel to the world and you feel that the world has a culture and players find themselves being pulled into it. The setting is a puzzle that slowly gets pieced together as you interact with it. The changes the PCs make end up feeling natural like they belong.

It is amazing but hard to run and if you have any experience GMing and want to improve as a GM I recommend this system/setting to you.

#Thoughts #Wolves-Upon-the-Coast