A Bestiary of Enchanted England is now in preview on Kickstarter. Follow now to get a notification when it launches on October 25! Creatures, lore, and plot hooks for the RPG of Renaissance wizardry (or any fantasy RPG).
The Magonomia play experience: notes from the Toil and Trouble playtest
Yesterday we ran an online playtest of the upcoming adventure Toil and Trouble by Chris Iredale. This adventure is specifically designed for beginning Magonomia players. It’s a quest to help a famous apothecary obtain rare ingredients for a magic potion, with plenty of surprises along the way (hence the title). Read on for some spoiler-free highlights of the game session.
What I like best about this adventure is that it has lots of opportunities for the wizards to use their spells. In Magonomia, every player character is a wizard with a repertoire of 11 spells. It didn’t take the players long to get familiar their spells and to start finding opportunities to apply them. The character sheet has a one or two-sentence summary of what each spell does, with a page reference to the rule book for the full details if needed. Most players cast their spells by consulting the character sheet. As much effort as we spent making a rulebook that explains things thoroughly while being fun to read, I think we can all agree the time to enjoy reading that rulebook is not the middle of a fight scene.
Because there was so much spellcasting, we got to see spells that haven’t come up much in other games. Here are some of the lesser-used spells the players employed to great effect (all of these are on the character sheets of the example characters):
Weather Lore to make it rain at a fortuitous time
Breath of Purity to clear the air of smoke, dust, and hostile gases
Elixir of Wisdom to prepare a PC ahead of time to get the most out of a clue
Balm of Protection from Fire to quickly deal with some of the toil and trouble that occurred
Reading a Stranger’s Stars to size up the villain and get the upper hand in social conflict with him
Something special about Magonomia is that wizards don’t run out of spells. They can cast a spell whenever it fits the situation, though some spells do require ceremonial casting time and/or a Fate Point.
The plot of the adventure had a lot of variety: some action, some intrigue, some suspense, and even some social interaction. It’s well put together and flows well.
The next steps are a few minor design tweaks based on the first playtest, then illustrations, maps, editing, and layout. If all goes well, we should be able to have this available for sale by the end of 2022. I know I’m looking forward to running it again, perhaps at a convention.
Magonomia is now sold on itch.io!
The digital version of Magonomia® Core Rules is now available on itch.io. All the cool people are selling PDFs there. We’re sure lots of people will love Magonomia as much as we do. The challenge before us is to get the word out about this great game! This new channel will help with that.
Bestiary playtesting update: The Hobyah
We haven’t been sitting still with A Bestiary of Enchanted England (coming to Kickstarter in October 2022). We’ve been making good use of time to add a fun in-character spin to the presentation and to do in-house playtestin of the creature’s statistics. Here’s a preview of the Hobyah by Mark Lawford! (Details are still subject to change as we do further playtesting and editing.)
A gang of wicked goblins
The Hobyah
Illustration by Teresa Guido
Beware the Hobyah! A gang of wicked sharp-toothed goblins that come out at night, they are, all a-chanting “Hobyah! Hobyah! Hobyah!” as they look for your house. They be wiry little fellows with knotty joints, pointed heads and horrible faces, and they wear all ragged clothes of them they have killed before.
But if you are to protect you and your family - this here little one yours is she - then it’s a dog you need. See, they are right-scared of dogs, ‘tis well known, and like to turn tail and run at the sound of their barking. So get yourself a dog. Like this one here. He’s for sale, you know. A good dog, an all. No messing and no fussing, but he’ll see off the Hobyah before they can break into your house and carry you away, so he will.
Nasty, horrible, nighttime goblins, about four feet in height with pointed heads, pointy-chinned faces, and rows of sharp serrated teeth. Individually weak, the gang is modeled as a Mob (Magonomia, page 138) of a dozen or so.
The Fate system makes it easy to combine multiple nameless NPCs into a mob that behaves like a single, much tougher, character. This takes a lot of burden off the GM, freeing them up to be the narrator of a dramatic scene. Our playtest was a stand-up fight between three wizards and a mob of a half-dozen Hobyah. Individually, they’re weak, but when you combine their combat statistics they become quite fearsome! Our mob was a match for all three of our example characters (Deborah, Ghida, and Aonghas) — and it would be easy to challenge more wizards by adding more Hobyah to the mob! We ended up reducing their individual damage tolerance so players can wear down that big group faster, before they run out of Fate Points. The end result is that if you do fight them, they’re ferocious at the start but then buckle if the PCs are able to hit back a few times. This feels about right: the Hobyah will mob ya! But after the playtest, the don’t have staying power any more.
The example characters from Magonomia Core Rules breaking into Ely House. From left to right: Gemini, Aonghas, Christopher Hill, Ghida al-Asturlabi, Deborah Navarro. Illustration by Steven Bachan. ©2020 Shewstone Publishing LLC.
Magonomia Example Characters updated
It’s surprising how much little details of a character sheet can make gameplay flow smoothly. Players have a lot of details they need to consider when deciding and resolving their characters’ actions and we don’t want to go searching through the rule book every time!
One of the benefits of our hands-on approach to playtesting (Andrew Gronosky, the owner of Shewstone, GMs more than half the playtest games) is we get to see what goes smoothly and where players hit a little friction—which wheels are squeaky, so to speak. One of the sticking points has been knowing the difference between which spells a character can cast immediately and which require the 10-minute ceremonial setup. We’ve updated the character sheets to clarify that, as well as answer other questions like “what equipment is my (pregenerated) character carrying?”
You can download the Magonomia Example Characters version 1.2 here, on the Magonomia wiki, or (if you’re a DriveThruRPG customer) by checking your notifications on DriveThruRPG.
Kudos to Patrick Murphy of Mad Irishman Productions for an outstanding job designing a concise, playable Grimoire (spells) page for the character sheet. Another year’s experience running Magonomia has shown us that all we need to do it take a little more time to fill in the details on that sheet. The effort pays off when new or casual players have an easier time getting immersed in the spontaneous, freewheeling and unlimited magic of a Magonomia game session!