Goalsystem Delves kickstarter pays out!

[smokingwreckage]

I got my PDFs today! Goalsystem Delves is kind of a hybrid, letting you run a dungeon crawl or a points-match skirmish. That's all I know so far! The description is why I bought in. Even with a S&W game in the offing, I still wanted some unequivocally miniatures-driven fantasy action. I have high hopes!

[Last Knight]

Post a review when you've gone through it! :-)

[smokingwreckage]

Thanks for the reminder!

 

Okay, so far what I've got is this: it's a handful-of-D6 game, there's 4 traits that cover everything including your profession. Rolls are versus, whoever gets the most successes (4 or more) or "goals" wins. It's fairly minimal, but covers most contingencies; there's enough meat to play it as an RPG but it's simple enough to play gang-sized warbands in toe-to-toe versus games.

 

The RPG aspect looks good for Heroquest styled games. Monsters are rated for their abilities, which then also determines their XP value and loot value. Stats are pretty simple and most monsters or monster swarms can be figured in in minutes; you start with the "average" block and modify from there, then use existing special abilities or "eyeball" a new one in. Once you're done you also know how much treasure and XP that monster should add to the adventure. After a major adventure the players can roll for a side quest, run scams, and get up to other mischief for fun and profit. Cute.

 

Side quests and so on are done via description and dice, unless a combat ensures, when it goes to miniatures. The main "adventure" or "battle" part is written specifically for miniatures, which was a big plus for me, as I was looking for something that really took full advantage of my backlog of fantasy miniatures (and my 10,000 Bones when they get here).

 

Both RPG style play and warband style play grant XP and treasure and are cross-compatible, so it'd be ideal for mercenary campaign play, sieges, invasions, and reclaiming the dwarven halls as well.

 

One small disappointment was I haven't found as much of a treatment of mercenaries or of working your way from adventurer to captain to conqueror as I would have liked. Almost all the elements are there, they just haven't been fully integrated. Even so it's pretty ambitious in scope, and just needs some house-rules or an official expansion... or for me to discover I've missed the crucial parapgraph!

 

So far, enthusiastic thumbs-up!

[The Inner Geek]

Partially because I'm lazy, and partially because I think it'd be a nice resource on this thread, but could you post a link to the product website? Sounds like it might be a great dungeon crawler.

[smokingwreckage]

It doesn't exactly have one yet, they're still scrambling for the KS fulfilment; PDFs are out but miniatures, terrain and physical books are still a few weeks off. KS link here:

 

[Hatemonger]

The RPG aspect looks good for Heroquest styled games.

Did they put anything in for running without a GM? The Kickstarter said they 'might' make it into the rules, but I haven't seen it mentioned since. It's the main thing I was hoping for, and the reason I held off backing the project. You mentioned tables for the post-adventure town shenanigans; does the book have things for generating quests/plots? What about the dungeon itself, or encounters? Does it have monster "AI"/tactics for them to follow?

 

And what about the character advancement? I've seen a couple of the leveling tables with abilities, but one of them looked like every 4XP bumps you a level. That seems a bit low to have any kind of variance for weaker or tougher monsters.

 

The stuff you mentioned sounds great, the system itself looks fine, I'm just still not clear on exactly what's in the ~250 pages that others of these "skirmish-lite" games are doing in ~30. Heck, their own Fantasy Skirmish book is only 16!

 

I guess the more polite thing to say would be, thanks for the overview so far, can I have some more?

 

- H8

[smokingwreckage]

Yeah, it's more like "Song Of X 'n' X" with all the supplements. It has a lot of everything (except solo play), and pretty much walks you through gameplay from character creation right on through. It's not a micro-light skirmish so much as a neat RPG, and a skirmish wargame, and advancement/campaign rules for s skirmish wargame. It also has complete rules for loot, magic, and magic items. If you went with Song Of Blades And Heroes, just for example, you'd need "Blades and Heroes" plus "Gold and Darkness" plus "Deeds and Glory", at the very minimum - probably one or two more as well.

 

Solo play is not written into it and it doesn't have a random quest generator.

 

I can't tell you more about the XP system as yet because I haven't had time for another read-through.

 

Link to buy: http://www.wargamedownloads.com/item.php?item=1065&Site=TGN

[Hatemonger]

Thanks again for the description. I appreciate the comparison to 'Song', because people gush about that everywhere I read, but what I've seen of it hasn't particularly impressed me.

 

I'm a little disappointed about Delves, although admittedly because it sounds like it is just short of being the perfect game I wanted. I may pick it up anyway if I decide to suck it up and fill in the rest myself. I'd be eager to read anything else you want to post about it.

 

- H8

[smokingwreckage]

Sadly, I haven't had the chance to do a good read-through, gen some characters, and run a short game, and God willing I won't get the chance for a couple of months, since I'll be too busy on $300 an hour contracts.

 

It's way less lite and random than SoBaH (a game I don't like much to be honest). I would have liked some details on characters ascending to real temporal power, as per the rules for keeps, temples and guilds in Swords And Wizardry.