Eldritch RPG Kickstarter

I'm glad to see that Dan has launched the Eldritch RPG: Revised Edition Kickstarter campaign. It's a heck of a good game. The exclusion of monsters, traps, and treasure in the original book did ding it a bit. Even so, we've had a lot of fun with Eldritch. The Kickstarter will set things straight. I liked it enough to create my own character sheet, so no empty rah-rah-you-should-back-it! stuff here.

After our first spin, here's a look at some of what I said about Eldritch:

The combat was very rapidly resolved and very, very descriptive. It's an interesting take not to roll to hit but to roll to see how much "potential harm" the target must mitigate. As points were whittled from the various defense pools the narration flowed. @RPG.net

The game has structure but isn't rigid.

As GM it feels okay to wing it which is nice. But the system doesn't force that kind of style. It just doesn't feel like you're going to destroy the session by accidentally making things too difficult. I'm lovin' it. @RPG.net

Magic doesn't often play a large role in our games, even when it's so-called traditional fantasy. But that doesn't mean that we don't like a little fantasticality.

Desperately Althea and Jip run from the orc hunting party. They find an outcropping of rocks where each is large enough for trees to grow on top of. The climb is difficult and Althea makes her way to the top while Jip hides in a crevice and the situation becomes a siege with the ranger defending the top of the giant rock.The orcs chop down trees and use them as makeshift ladders to scale their way to the top. By one and by two they push themselves atop but are mowed down by accurate bow fire even in almost complete darkness. Finally a single orc makes his way to Althea and is about to strike when the rest of the orc hunting party arrives. In that moment the thief scrambles to the top to help his friend. 

The chieftain who is an NPC challenges the PC ranger for initiative and wins. He lobs a gas globe filled with sleep gas to the top. It shatters causing the ranger and the remaining orc to lose consciousness. The gnome thief gets woozy but stays on his feet and scrambles down the back side of the rock and watches from a bear den the mistreatment and shackling of the ranger. 

The sleep gas had 2D12 effect and the targets had no chance of getting out of the radius reducing both the orc and the ranger's resilience to zero. They were out. 

Immediately the orcs got down off of the rock with the shackled ranger in tow. They began to set up camp in a shallow cave using cut trees as lean-tos to cover themselves from the coming day's sun. 

Jip the thief used cantrips (1 spell point each) to make the sound of small animals moving through the woods to draw the dogs off while he used another spell to call hundreds of carpenter ants to pull the shackle keys out of the cave and into the sun so that he could sneak up and take them in hand himself. 

From there he freed his friend and they barely got away with their lives; wounding the orc chieftain enough for him not to want to stick around as the sun became too much for him to bear. 

All in all, the magic system was VERY easy to run and adjudicate. We didn't run into any snags. It felt right. @RPG.net