Brazen Wolfe Tabletop

Hi all and welcome to a Saturday writeup where it was triggered by a message coming through this morning. Like most Saturday mornings I was greeted by the bombardment of notifications informing me that thee was another post in the Warhammer group that I am a member of and I was greeted by a welcome surprise.

Soulbound – the TTRPG that was released by Cubical7 in conjunction with games workshop had a humblebundle where you could get 24 books, yup, 24 books for the TTRPG for the the low price of around $25au. Now my love for TTRPGs as well as my love for Warhammer merged into one low priced bundle that supports charity – how can I say no?

To be truthful I had been looking at soulbound for some time now, not that I have grown out of love with Dungeons & Dragons or OpenLegendRPG but as a way that I can explore another format, another set of rules and broaden my understanding of what’s out there while I try and work out the best system for me when I try to create a RPG system of my own – but more on that another time when I hopefully have it more fleshed out.

So the long and short of Soulbound is really you take command of a hero from one of the forces of order, death or destruction and you take your character and fight your way through Goblins, Orruks (Orcs), zombies, ghouls, Skaven (my favourite little critters) and a whole bunch of other chaos warped things to sink and axe, hammer or arrow into.

Your hero will have a set of Skills, Attributes and talents that generate more dice for the pools which you can use to achieve actions by meeting a difficulty number (DN) and generating the required number of successes based on the requirement the GM put on the check.

In Dungeons & Dragons and many other d20 systems you have a few dice, modifiers or items that enable you to meet and beet a Difficulty Class (DC) which determines the success or fail of the action. With Soulbound you have a pool of dice that you would roll to try and beat the difficulty number with each dice. So each dice you roll has the potential to cause you to succeed and what’s more – its only a d6 (not a d20) so if you needed to roll a 4 (DN4:1) and the check, to jump a fence or barricade for example, required you roll succeed only once. Then if you roll a 3 dice on average you should be fine. This style of mechanics means the more dice you roll the more likely you are to succeed and I do have a fondness for rolling lots of dice.

Now I have only spent a hour or so skimming over the character creation guide (from the core rulebook) but the concept is looking at adding your base ability (Body- Physical prowess, Mind-mental aptitude, and Soul-Spiritual presence.. I guess) to the skills you are trained in to establish what your Melee, Accuracy (Ranged) and Defence rating is from Poor to Exceptional. The higher number your skills and attributes the higher quality your rating is and the higher rung in “The ladder” you are in.

This Ladder is used primarily to determine the difference in quality between the attackers skill and the defenders defence. This determines the Difficulty number on the attack roll to deal damage to try and defeat your opponent. This is a bit complex but once the maths is over then the system is quite.. simple from what it looks like.

I will look at this a bit more over the coming week and hopefully I may try and have a Soulbound Saturday where I post some Soulbound content where I play the game with my fellow warhammer players – well that’s the idea.

While the bundle is cheap on Humble-bundle I would suggest going to have a look at it and see if its something for you. Saving (I think) a bit over 90% of the total cost of the books that are in the bundle for this amount of content is pretty incredible.

Don’t forget tomorrow is the final writeup for the week where we take the party into the temple and confront a bunch of snakes, and their abyssal lord.

Oh, and as always, don’t forget to roll with advantage,
The Brazen Wolfe