Woodland Warriors

I’d been keenly reading the updates from Beyond Belief Games concerning the new OSR-style game Woodland Warriors so when we were forced to break from our traditional Call of Cthulhu game (due to being a player down) we had the perfect opportunity to take it for a spin.

As I did a little proofing for the author and offered a few, very minor, suggestions, as a result my name appears on the credits page with a thank you.

If you haven’t stumbled across the game on the various old-school RPG boards, it’s a rules-lite interpretation of original D&D. The premise is that the player characters are human-like animals in a medieval world without humans; along the lines of the Redwall novels.

I’m a huge fan of the game rules which are distilled to a D6 system that retains the flavour of OD&D very nicely.

Characters are limited to level 6 (without referee and house-rule intervention) and saving throws are in the 3.0 D&D vein based on attribute scores. Combat is a blast with players rolling six-sided dice equal to their hit dice and aiming for a score of AC or better to hit. Multiple hits result in lots of damage. This is a gritty and vicious little game; a fact cunningly disguised by the friendly looking badger that graces the cover.

The players gathered and rolled-up their characters.

This took a little longer than I had anticipated as there was much procrastination from one of the players who at first couldn’t decide which Kind to play and then which class. We ended up with a squirrel warrior-wizard (Zeela), a mole warrior (Drugal) and mouse scout (Vincenzo with a Super-Mario accent). We played the scenario included in the rule book but I threw in a few early combat encounters to take test out the fighting rules.

The scenario has the characters arriving at a quarry where they speak to the foreman (foremole) about a recent attack by the legendary Owl ‘Shadow’. I started play with the characters still en route and had them rumbled by a couple of rum Stoat bandits. Before I could finish my threatening stoat drawl, Vincenzo was winding up his sling and then chasing after the fleeing stoat (mince get an extra hit die with slings so they quite often hit with a big bang). The remaining stoat was felled by Zeela and his carcass looted before it hit the ground.

Honestly, the battle could have gone either way, this time the characters had higher DEX values and struck first; had the reverse been true, it could have been nasty.

The rain let up and the characters arrived at the Murkenhill Quarry where they sought out the foremole. In the scenario, the head-mole talks with a lisp, I got a little carried away and gave him every conceivable speech impediment which made for a very confusing mission brief and much mirth I’m glad to say.

Next the characters headed off into the woods to explore the scene of Shadow’s attack. There they were set upon by a trio of weasels (the advance scouts for the shrew behind the Shadow attacks). Again Vincenzo chased one of them off with his sling and Zeela battled a second. The third was a distant sniper who shot and killed Drugal in the first round.

In the second round Drugal’s brother (who had been following the group), Frugal, appeared and was shot and killed by the sniper. There was a moments silence as a new character was again created. Meanwhile, Zeela had dispatched her weasel and made her way to the sniper’s nest where she and Vincenzo finished him off.

That was all we had time for that evening but all agreed that much fun had been had. Brad, our mole-man was a little despondent about losing two characters and also had a little grumble about the multi-class rules.

We’ve only played one session so it’s hard to get a proper feel for the game but first impressions are very good. It has a light-hearted feel but it’s clear that it is a deadly game system; life is cheap and making it to second level could be quite a challenge - as it is in any OSR game. For the next session I might have each of the players create a second character (although Brad is fast running out of brothers).

On the blood-thirsty front I wonder if it wouldn’t be a better idea for multiple hit dice to just increase the chance of scoring a single hit rather than having each hit score a die of damage. Time will tell. One thing I will change right away is the multi-classing rules. All agreed it was far too powerful and unnecessary in a game of limited advancement.

Multi-class characters only need a score of 9+ in the relevant requisites to gain all of the benefits of two classes and require only 150% of the experience points to advance.

That aside, we thoroughly enjoyed the game and will certainly play again.