I've been percolating on an idea and I was wondering if there would be interest in it on this forum. The players would be traveling fantasy adventurers who stumble upon a small village at the start of winter. Their leaders have died, fled, or proved useless, and it quickly becomes clear that the village will not survive without the players' assistance.


I'm thinking that the game will be free-form, though I would also take any advice on systems that might suit it. The game would be largely (if not entirely) about managing a community in a crisis that is entirely incapable of handling their current situation on their own.

Is this something that people would be interested in playing?

It's not for everybody, but Fate has really neat conflict resolution mechanics.  Social encounters can be just as engaging as combats, too.

I think the most pertinent question is why are these villagers so incompetent?

Are they children left after a plague? Wives left after an incredibly aggressive recruiting campaign lacking exactly half the skills required to keep he settlement intact? Dealing with hitherto unknown climate or creature events? A leper colony or community of mentally disadvantaged folks abandoned by the monks or family supposed to care for them? Most small villages aren't highly hierarchical, so you'd need a small town in a strongly stratified society before lack of leadership was any kind of problem.

I think this would work better conceptually as a freeform if the PCs were part of the community: built-in reasons to care about the villagers, understanding of the local landscape, magic access etc.

If you're after a tale of higher-level/higher class folk swooping in to save the day and go again you probably want D&D or Pathfinder, where that's a standard kind of plot with plenty of mechanical support for threats and combat.

In reply to Ski-Bird (msg # 2):

That's a really neat idea. Using a slightly hacked version of Fate Accellerated would be a great way of simulating a village! Using approaches like Toil, Scholarship, Force, and Guile would be a fantastic way to represent different ways to advance the village in this difficult time.

In reply to tibiotarsus (msg # 3):

I was thinking that rather than incompetent, they are left in a position where they can't weather their current crisis. Their leaders are gone, their food stocks are insufficient, and their village is in disrepair. Perhaps a war or natural disaster has made things worse than they could have forseen!

You're right, perhaps things would work better as having members of the community rise up to lead their village through difficult times.

The reason I don't want to use D&D or Pathfinder is that I see this as being more about a challenge of management than combat, so I don't think those games will suit particularly well.

I am talking about my D&D 3.5 experience, but it hardly is about just combat.

You can use diplomacy to convince people, bluff to deceive them, use craft checks to craft things and profession checks to, for example, determine the best way to grow food in a field.

Depending on the level, a cleric can cast Create Food and Water if the villagers are hungry.

The good thing with the scenario given is that the protagonists will not have to seek for trouble. Trouble will come to them.

In reply to TenFoldMore (msg # 5):

Indeed, but the nature of such would have a considerable impact on the gameplay: a snow-isolated village dealing with devastation due to barely surviving a winter forest fire is a different game to a village nearer other villages dealing with a rogue bear or fantasy critter, and a different story again to surviving plague in town whilst survival farming, or about a village without adult men because the King of Angland got irritated by the province trying to get their land back. This is all presuming a generic NW European landscape, to boot. Go beyond that and you're telling a different story again...a group of Saami-like nomads working out how to divide labour and also lift the curse on their reindeer from that crazy bog witch before all the cows miscarry horrible half-alive monsters is one thing, a community living on an island with very little but their sweet potatoes, fish and the local penguin colony to live on, when their village is collapsed by earthquake and everything's covered in ash from the volcano responsible and winter is two months of just rain...that's completely different variables without even touching magic.

So. You're good at interesting high concepts, for sure, but I think you might need to work out more detail either in this thread or elsewhere before you can really sound out interest in what you're doing and what system would fit it (which is a dealbreaker in itself for some people). If you want more strategy-with-occasional-combat than character interaction, go with a traditional shallow-world fantasy system. If you want to focus on community itself, especially if dealing with nomads or a non-generic setting, Fate's Ehdrigohr might be useful. If you're most interested in crafting monstrous threats or telling a more Walking Dead type story, maybe look up Shadow Theory. These are just suggestions, I'm not pushing any of them.

Cone of Negative Energy has published a set of rules surrounding a village struggling to survive in the deep of winter. It’s titled Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Night Of This Cold Winter. I’m not sure if linking directly to the game’s sale page is permitted here, but a quick search on DriveThruRPG should take you straight to it.