THREEDOM: Beowulf: Age Of Heroes

Jim, Kieron and The Mysterious Third (Chris) have a regular group. We’re forever GMs, and play short campaigns where two are forever GMs no more. This is Threedom, and these our our stories. This time we report on Beowulf: Age Of Heroes.

Kieron: I’m smiling at your notes for this chat, Jim. “Oh no, we played 5E! Sort of.” The ‘sort of’ is carrying a lot of weight. Handiwork games seem to be folks really who are interested in bending 5E significantly, and there’s a lot of that here. As the basic intro Beowulf is set in the world of the Anglo-Saxon poems about a Danish hero who kicks the ass of a monster, and then its mum and then has a bad time with a Dragon (though kicks its ass on the way out). The game’s got a lot in, but its core thing is as a duet game – one GM, one player. That’s about all I knew going in – Warped 5E, literary-historical-setting, duet game. Is that a fair description?

Jim: Fair, yes! This was pitched to us by the Mysterious Third (Chris), who I believe ran this before and loves both the system and the setting. He broadly convinced us that this 5E revamp was a great idea, and that the game would support an additional hero, despite being designed for a duet. I think there was a sense that we wanted to play something a bit different with the three of us at the table, and so this seemed like a logical and timely thing to take a look at. It’s notable that Handiwork are doing the 5E thing again with 5 Evil, and so we’re playing catchup a bit.

Kieron: What did you know about Beowulf, Jim?  I thought Beowulf was the smelliest hero of the Anglo Saxons. B.O. Wulf. I had a lot to learn.

Jim: In terms of the game, I knew very little, because I actually thought we were going to BE Beowulf and fight Grendel and stuff, but that’s not what went down. And, weirdly, my beloved mother is an expert on Anglo-Saxon guff, so I should have picked up a lot from the ambient immersion of my upbringing, but I knew fuck all. My knowledge of Beowulf is mostly based on a tweet that observed that Beowulf taps into the primordial fear of beating someone up and then having to face their mum, as well as that CG thing with Ray Winstone and Angelina Jolie in it. But I get the feeling that this was a movie watched in the background while doing something else, because the recollections are dim and confused, as if I were bewitched. (Or nearly two decades had passed, one or the other.) I am genuinely surprised you knew nothing about Being A Wolf, because it seems like your stomping ground.

Kieron: I’m lying. I know a fair bit about Beowulf – the second volume of Once & Future, my my horror-action-comedy collaboration with Dan Mora, riffs on the mythology. I researched the weird ass history of the document for that (Seriously, there’s an adventure there alone). I’ve read several translations in recent years for that. The whole Anglo-Saxon period impacts Once & Future, so I’ve got a bit from there. I love the setting, and it’s clear the game does too. I’ve read bits of criticism around it – not a huge amount, but some. I am unable to look at Beorn in the Hobbit without seeing him as Tolkien’s Beowulf fanfic, with even the pun there – BeoWulf – the bee wolf – the bear, Beorn turns into a bear. But yeah. I am primed to dig this stuff.

Jim: I was going to say that setting aside the setting will allow us to talk about the system, but actually the setting loops right back into the way that the 5E stuff is built here. It is 5E in terms of stats and things, but the way it changes things is fascinating. For me the reworking of the Inspiration system based on the dice you use, and you get a choice of dice based on your character’s beliefs (Pagan or Christian, with the relevant dice being used for a success giving you the Inspiration point back) was an extremely elegant improvement on a system that D&D probably needed to work better than it does.

Kieron: The inspiration system is the cleanest example – taking the advantage system from 5E and actually making it a meaningful part of the fiction. Every advantage roll reminds you of who you are and the relation to the world. That’s great. Equally, how it models momentum, in terms of letting you pick which of your dice to use, and if you picked the religion dice, you kept the advantage to roll again. So in some cases, you’d pick the worse result just to keep the bonus, right? Also, not just Pagan and Christian! You had characters like mine who very much split the difference, and roll appropriately. Of course, that does hit up the way our play isn’t the game proper – it’s meant as a duet game and we played it with two heroes. So elements like you describe would feel significantly difference if it was only one hero. In fact, that actually makes me wonder if this was an area where the bigger party actually may have helped – we were aware of the differences between our characters in that single way at every stage. If it was just you, it may have become just how it is, and the weirdness of that gets flattened.

Jim: Yes, and we did pretty much flatten our opponents, eh? [Jim. — Ed.] But then we were heroes, right? There should be some struggle, but there also should be some flattening. But I know what you mean: we had multiple approaches available in both combat and investigation, too. We got to see more of the game this way? I do feel a bit guilty that we played a Duet game, famous for its one-plus-one structure, as a three-player RPG, but I can also see absolutely how this would fly as intended. Moreso, even, like this. Perhaps we negated some other point of it, but I think it absolutely stood up as a for-a-small-group RPG regardless. It gives you loads of room, you have to do the detective work and have a bunch of avenues to do so, but also the fighting is tuned to feel heroic with your followers as both characters and additional repertoires of ability. It’s interesting, actually, that we played this and Conan, previously, on a VTT’d battlemap, which isn’t something I do a great deal of these days, despite having gone to town on that shit the last time I ran D&D. It was fairly exciting to actually see our followers keeping the enemies busy while we dealt with the major threat. More broadly, it reminded me that this kind of game can offer some tremendous resources: the bits of key art The Mysterious Third (Chris)  used to set up the scenes really made it for me. But I was also aware that he had to do quite a bit of prep to get it working, and I think there’s always a rather different perspective on a game when you’re behind the curtain. [Chris comments that the second scenario was particularly hard work, and he consequently wrote a large feedback document for Handiwork describing the work he had to do as a GM with the clarity of objectives within it, and the density of information. He stresses that it’s a great adventure! – Jim.]The calculation of “whether all this prep was worth it” is a very different one from “i turned up and rolled an unexpected natural 20”. There are games on my shelf I want to run but have baulked at the need to do my homework. In fact, the games I want to run this year will all be homework heavy, which is a lot.

Kieron: Yeah – I think this is one bit where we haven’t seen behind the scenes, so don’t know exactly what The Mysterious Third (Chris) did in terms of gathering prep. We should ask. Or actually just look at the manual, as these were the pre-generated scenarios, so you have to suspect he lifted the maps from there? [He did, Chris mentions that Beowulf is “exceptional” at offering additional visual support materials for a GM to run it – Jim.] He seemed charmed by the adventures, and wanted to give us a selection to get the sense of what Beowulf is. As in, we got to see the basic gameplay loop – it’s a detective game where the main mystery is “how do you kill this fucking thing?” The first scenario was a pure version – perhaps the most Beowulf-y. The second one had that dual detective structure – sure, we were working out how to kill it, but we were also working out what was going on, where the monster was from and the dark secrets of these isolated communities. How did that work for you? 

Jim: As you say, the first scenario, where we essentially learned the structure of things: hearing about a monster, going there on the longboat, learning what had happened from the NPCs, figuring out how the creature had been defeated before by investigating various things on the island — that all felt more sort of classically Hero Saga, and so I sort of felt like I knew what game we were playing at that point. But the second scenario, where there were several paths of investigation, numerous clues, multiple directions for us to explore (including at least one major one we missed) and emotional and personal connections for the NPCs, well, that felt like a big step up terms of investigation and medieval detective work, and I can see exactly why the Mysterious Third member of our group (Chris) wanted to run that. I can also see why it was a challenge to prep. There was a lot in each location, with their own mystery and combat. That was clearly the game running and full speed, and as intended. However the other thing the first tale gave us was a setup for followers, the NPC helpers who are designed to scaffold the lone hero’s adventuring abilities, getting involved in the story overall. We got to see what happened when the followers suffered consequences of travel, we learned that they had personalities of their own (which we tied to abilities) and we even ended up having a recruit, taking a lad from the first isle with us, and seeing him play a role in the story as it went on. Perhaps our Forever GM natures meant that we were very comfortable with an ensemble cast, but it felt like we got a lot out of building these supporting actor stories throughout the adventure.

Kieron: Yeah. It’s really charming. Having these six people, all of whom we got to know a little – my character relentlessly being mean to the new kid after he crashed our boat! – was a joy. I was reminded of what I liked when playing Band of Blades, playing the Marshall, and writing all the little bios of the whole company. This IS basically a part of GM prep, given to a player. Beowulf doesn’t go as far, but it’s definitely more than just having a One-Dice Wife. (A running joke I fear I will not explain.) Without having played it as a duet, how Beowulf deals with followers seems to be the mechanic which most makes the 5th Edition core work. The core being, a follower can be assigned to a combat with someone, and they just tie them up… but after a certain number of combat rounds, they’ll die. So you’re not sitting there as the GM (or player) doing all these dice rolls for all these people. They’re serving a purpose in shaping a larger combat, while also having a clean decision for the player to make – can I sort these other ones out and go back to my friend? Shall I tell them to back off (and so leave the combat) at the problem of releasing the opponent they were tying down? It’s a well judged bit of design. That I wrote “friend” rather than “follower” instinctively says a lot about how much I imprinted on the followers. That we didn’t let any of them die is telling. Not on our watch. Sure, they could be the ablative meat shield of other games (like Conan, for example) but they exist enough that you would feel for them if they fell. That’s the right way to do it, and also feels appropriately Beowulf – a story where deaths really do matter, and those who fight get hailed in poetry afterwards.

Jim: If we write about our Conan campaign we will have to explain One-Dice Wife. She should be hailed in our, er, poetry. And speaking of that theme, the one thing I think we both detected and played up to, was the themes of loss and grief throughout. My character was motivated by a loss of family, but also identified with the creatures he was hunting. I did a little vignette where he hid his tears after the first creature’s slaying in the spray from the prow of the longboat as we headed back to our hall. I definitely got something out of that, and while we laughed and joked as we played, there was a solemnity to it that I really got something out of. It would have been even sharper if a follower had fallen!

Kieron: If we played longer, a big funeral scene with proper hailing would have been pure Beowulf. I mean, that’s what Beowulf actually is – a big speech from a bro, hailing a fallen bro (apologies to Headley). I think it’s interesting my character went a different way from conception – you were the big, pagan hero. I was the more morally grey, “maybe I’m loki’s kid!” character, who explicitly was into money. The money stuff dropped hard early on, as I didn’t want to do it. It felt venal, and wrong. Beowulf gets gold, but doesn’t do it for gold. I think compare and contrasting to where we’ve ended up in The Vast In The Mörk is telling – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. So – we I think we’ve covered the vibes, what we got from it, the interesting rule tweaks. What we haven’t talked about is… it’s a 5th edition hack. I haven’t played 5th edition outside of random one-offs, streaming charity games or live-stage games at all. What did you make of it all? Because I’m still trying to chew over what I make of it all.

Jim: I think it’s mostly exaggerating certain bits of 5E. It is about a hero (we should not lose sight of this being a duet game by intention, even as we added a second hero) hunting down a monster, fighting them, and slaying them. And that’s D&D as fuck really, isn’t it? And I certainly played a bunch of 1v1 D&D as a teen. Beowulf has tweaked that with lore-adjacent stuff like the inspiration stuff, which an improvement on 5E’s way of doing it, I think? I am also a bit surprised that we haven’t ended up playing more 5E hacks? And perhaps that’s by the nature of how you can use it: we had to look up a few rules in the Player’s Handbook, because you need it to play. Beowulf isn’t really standalone in that way. But also I really enjoyed it. I came dangerously close to running 5E this year, resurrecting a group based around my wife’s friends, but the key player has two young kids and then decided to move to Australia, so it didn’t happen. But it could have done, and while the only 5E I have run was some very basic takes for my kids, I don’t think I would have regretted it. The D&D muscle memory was still there, and I didn’t find myself getting challenged, or bored, particularly. We didn’t even end up grinding much combat, there was a lot of talking and detective work, and that felt good. [Note: Chris mentions that part of the reason for there being notable less of a grindy feeling is that Beowulf adds a “Defeated” to enemy stats, so they don’t need to be got to zero-HP to beat them. And they’re all different. Groups of bandits run away and so on, and this means combat has end triggers that feel good, and coherent.] The stuff I find myself not enjoying so much in D&D (elements of repetition in combat again) was the same as it ever was, but even there I found myself enjoying the VTT presentation and tactics, and the use of followers for a layer of tactics.

Kieron: The thing which always struck me is that while I’ve never played more than a handful of sessions of actual D&D in my life, how much I just know. That comes from videogames, in part, but you can handle it. I think about trad-y games (and for all the extra stuff, this is still in that space) in that I’d play them, but likely never run one again. That’s how I feel now, anyway, and we know that changes all the time… but this is something I’d more happily played if offered than straight D&D. As you say, it does quite a lot of stuff to distract you from the combat erosion. There’s more knobs to fiddle. Hell, I really like how much that (and, to stress, this is a duet game) that you get significantly different archetypes of hero to play. You were the big murderous sort. I was the sneaky wordsmith. A duet game, with just one, is a big thing… and that means there’s fundamentally different ways of approaching this. I wouldn’t be rushing back to play this  (there’s too many games) but I’m certainly glad that we did. It knows what it wants to do, and does it. At the absolute least, it got us thinking about the lack of 2-player buddy-RPGs in existence. But that’s another article, so a good time to stop. Byeeee!

Jim: I was actually already thinking a bunch about 2-player RPGs, and now I am thinking about it more. It’s an area we can explore! Actually, now that I think about it, in the ongoing editing notes for this you mentioned you’d set me up for a joke at the end and I can’t for the life of me think what it is? Something about you not having any friends? I would never make such a joke at your expense, as you know. That would simply be cruel.

Beowulf: Age Of Heroes is available direct from Handiwork Games.