Forbidden Lands is a fantasy roleplaying game with an emphasis on exploration and survival that uses the Year Zero system from Free League Publishing. After a bit of a hiatus from tabletop RPGs last year I finally managed to scrape together a group of friends with availability for an in-person RPG. We’ve in theory been weekly but as is the way of these things it’s usually more like bi-weekly. The players are a mix of seasoned veterans and total newbies to tabletop roleplaying, and collectively we have all been having a great time. The Year Zero system is easy to understand but offers plenty of depth and the world of Forbidden Lands strikes a balance between offering a deep background to explore while also leaving space for improvisation and creativity. All of this comes in an excellent package that could be a great entry point into the hobby or, alternatively, a great new system for people who have only played D&D before. I think I’m in love, basically.
Don’t Plan, Let the Fates Decide
At its core Forbidden Lands is a hex crawl. The game comes with a map of the titular lands with a hex grid laid over top. Players will traverse this map one hex at a time, making rolls as they try to enter a new hex and potentially encountering some new horror, mystery, or just a very rude orc. This is powered by a collection of tables that determine what happens should the players fail on their exploration rolls as well as what encounters may lie within any given hex based on its terrain type. The players travel with the goal of reaching an adventure site which could be a ruined tower, a dungeon, or a (seemingly) ordinary village. The core book includes several sample adventure sites but there are also tables for quickly generating your own. All of these tables make planning a session of Forbidden Lands incredibly easy – the day of our game session I would usually roll up a few potential dungeons (possibly including some Rumors to help give the players the idea that there is something to explore in the first place) and then let the players try to navigate their way there. Play is emergent and rewards a certain willingness to go with the flow.
The party’s progress after the first half a dozen sessions or so - they are truly terrible at making it out hexes and represent this by literally drawing circles in hexes they get lost in. Little triangles represent where they rested at night. This adds so much to the experience, highly recommended - and there’s an identical map on the back so you can even keep a blank one for reference!
I’m not always the most confident GM. I’ve run countless one-shot adventures and if you hand me a scenario and sit me down at a table with no prep I can deliver a good time to that group – of that I am confident. I can even write one-shot adventures of my own. However, planning my own campaigns and delivering on more satisfying long form experiences with characters intended to last more than 3 hours has never been my strong suit. I’ve GMed a few campaigns, but I’m always nervous and worried about designing combat encounters and whether people will enjoy a given session enough to keep coming week after week. I say this because Forbidden Lands has easily been the best GMing experience I have ever had, and I really appreciate how it held my hand as I learned the game and brought my players through the experience of traveling across this world.
A key reason for this is the abundance of tables and the way that Forbidden Lands makes it easy to generate encounters on the fly with little to no prep. In the past, like many GMs, I have often found myself caught up trying to plan an arc to the campaign and then pushing my players towards that. This is never a satisfactory way to run a game, but in other systems it can be hard to improvise a satisfying experience and so the pressure is there to always have something planned in advance. Rather than putting the burden of improvisation on the GM, Forbidden Lands includes a plethora of tools that make it easy to throw something together if your players surprise you. On top of that, the nature of a hex crawl means you can see where your players are going in advance – they’re literally walking there one hex at a time. That means that while they travel, I can put together a quick dungeon for them to explore when they arrive.
I want to emphasize how easy it is to use these systems and how clearly they are laid out. I know modern versions of D&D include guides for creating combat encounters that should be an adequate challenge for players of a given level, but that usually involves flicking through a monster manual, doing math to calculate challenge ratings, and then possibly familiarizing yourself with various monster rules. It’s not impossible, but it is stressful to do while the players are looking at you waiting to do something. In contrast, rolling up a dungeon in Forbidden Lands can take all of two minutes and doesn’t require any math at all.
No Requirement for Knowledge
One challenge when playing tabletop RPGs is how to act like someone who belongs in this world, who grew up in it, and who is intimately familiar with its culture and history. You can read lore books and write an elaborate background, but most people don’t want to do weeks of research to play a game, and it’s especially hard to sell that experience to new players. Forbidden Lands neatly bypasses this by having players exist in a world that has only just reopened to travel. The Blood Mist is gone and for the first time in generations it is safe to leave your homes and travel the wider world. That means that players only need a basic level of knowledge about where they grew up – something they themselves can easily invent, as the setting invites filling in the gaps – and then players can collectively discover what is going on in the world. This really helps to marry the setting to the hex crawl gameplay and helps to get things going so that everyone can be at the table playing the game with minimal prep time.
That is not to say that there is no lore here to explore. The player’s guide (which is in my estimation the better written of the core books) is very light on background specifics but offers an excellent flavor for the setting - providing enough to get your imagination going without overwhelming anyone. There is a more complete timeline of the world’s history and details on its religion in the Gamemaster’s guide. If I’m honest, the GM’s guide was a bit of a tedious read in places – the tables and play supports are amazing but, in the end, I didn’t bother reading all the background of what happened centuries ago. These sections could feel more like doing homework rather than getting me excited for the game world. That’s not to say the world isn’t interesting, though! The story of the Blood Mist is a great hook, and the game includes interesting takes on classic RPG monsters and races – I was particularly fond of this version of goblins. Rather, I prefer to take what I find interesting and leave the rest aside for the moment, but thankfully the game does not require me to master its lore before running a game. There are campaign supplements for people who want to dig deeper into the lore of the world and engage with its background, but we had plenty of fun just wandering around the world and making our own narrative out of the bones the core books provided.
Year Zero System
In the Year Zero System player characters have core stats and skills and they make checks using pools of d6s based on their values in the skill and the matching stat. All they need to do is roll a six to succeed,. If they want, they can “push” a roll by rerolling all dice that didn’t come up one or six, usually in hopes of getting a six in the first place but possibly searching for more successes (multiple sixes can yield critical successes or do more damage in combat). However, for every 1 showing after a Pushed roll their character will receive damage, but they will also receive willpower that can be used to power class and background specific abilities. There are a few more wrinkles than that, like how you can add equipment to your dice and how skill dice generally won’t hurt you, but that’s the core.
I really like this system. It’s easy to explain and avoids the faff of adding up die roll modifiers to try and reach some target number. The ability to push to reroll is brilliant especially when combined with the fact that normal rolls contain very little risk but pushing can be disastrous. In our first session one player pushed a test and promptly rolled all 1s and his character passed out. It was hilarious and exactly the kind of emergent chaos that RPGs ought to deliver. My players now routinely chant “Push it! Push it!” whenever someone is thinking about making a risky play.
The combat also manages to avoid being too complex, although RPG combat remains for me something of a bugbear. As a player I love being part of a big RPG combat where we scrape by the skin of our teeth thanks to clever tactics and key rolls. However, as a GM I find designing these kinds of encounters incredibly intimidating and so I tend to prefer running games that focus more on mysteries, investigation, or exploration – areas I can build tension without needing to worry about the intricacies of a combat system. Forbidden Lands’ combat is interesting, and as a player I could see myself digging deep into it, but the guidelines for encounter design are relatively thin. Now, this is because this is a game where combat can be brutal, character death is always a risk, and it wants the players to think about running or solving encounters non-violently before they go all wandering murderer on everyone. I never found that combat completely ground the game to a halt, which is good, but it is also a very obvious switching of gears from the rest of gameplay – the same systems are in play, but the degree of complexity clicks up a notch or two – and for me and my players we generally preferred the game when the combat was peripheral. Thankfully there is plenty in Forbidden Lands to support that, but I would say that if you came to this review looking for opinions on the advanced combat rules you will be sorely disappointed - I haven’t even read them.
The Whole Package
The value on display in Forbidden Lands core set is staggering. Two loverly hardback core books, a supplemental booklet that I’ve gotten a lot of use out of, a gorgeous map, and some stickers to place on said map. It was the latter two elements that made me want to play Forbidden Lands in person around a table. In my campaign the party draws their progress on the map as they explore, adding stickers sometimes for specific dungeons. This gives such a satisfying materiality to the experience that wouldn’t be the same if we were playing online. The core books are a fabulous production and a joy to flip through with excellent art that really sets the vibe for the setting. You can really see the love on display in the box.
The contents of Forbidden Lands’ core box
The years 2017-2022 were something of a drought for me in terms of RPGs. I got married, started a new job, had a child, and the world ended – only one of these was strictly bad but they all consumed a lot of my time and mental energy. I managed to squeeze some gaming in, including a short lived fifth edition D&D campaign, but for the most part I wasn’t up to any adventuring. When I finally managed to assemble an interested party around a table to play some games, I pulled Forbidden Lands down from my shelf to be my first game. I’m so glad I did, this is a phenomenal system and experience, I cannot recommend it highly enough.