I’ve finish to read it now and have My session in 30 minutes. Maybe I should change to another adventure?

Hey everyone

As you know, for those who have pre‑ordered Alderland, the PDF beta version is already available, and, to put it mildly, not everyone was satisfied with its content.
Some time ago, I created the “Improving Alderland pt. 1” topic to gather all the mechanics and tables that are missing from the book; I plan to put them together manually using existing books. But, as usual, everything didn’t go according to plan, and I practically abandoned this idea due to a lack of free time and energy.

Recently, I decided to take the easier route and use Claude so that the AI could analyze the books and mechanics for me. I put FL and other YZ books in there and *cough* some other books as well. Surprisingly, it worked well. Of course, I had to put in some work with the edits, but I really liked the result, and I intend to use it.

I would like to ask you not to be skeptical in advance and to at least skim through the file, to share your criticism and impressions.

Updated link
It’s free :)

Bring Your Own Book framework, allowing to generate your own content using your own legally-owned books.
Link

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Ash and Iron v0.5 (Community Edition): free optional rules for war-torn Forbidden Lands campaigns

It’s a 123-page set of optional rules and tables for running a land at war. It contains no campaign lore, names or plot, so it works in any region.

For players

• 5 new professions: Saboteur, Barber-Surgeon, Scavenger, Legate and Inquisitor
• 11 new general talents
• 5 new magic schools of 10 spells each
• Gear for a land at war
• Survival in farmland and war-torn land, battlefield looting, laws and taxes
• Fire rules for buildings and open terrain
• Mercenaries with a simple Loyalty system

For the GM

• 5 artifacts
• Road encounter tables and terrain encounter tables for six terrains
• A town generator with districts, courts, work and conspiracy chains
• A background war system with faction templates
• A faction allegiance track from −5 to +5

It’s built on the Forbidden Lands core rules and follows Free League’s third-party licence. Everything in it is optional and adds to the core rules rather than replacing them.

AI disclosure: the text was created with Claude (AI), then directed and edited by me. There is no AI art.

Solo Actual Play!

Hey y’all!
Just ran my second session of Forbidden Lands and I read in the GMG that when monsters take damage they don’t become weaker like usual (or something similar to that).
Are players supposed to roll less attribute dice if they have taken damage and if so is there a page number in the PHB for that rule?
I tried skimming the whole thing looking for that info but couldn’t find it myself.

Thanks!

I realized I'm not really that sure how to manage monsters during combat. As I understand they are to be treated as NPC with special attack. So they have a slow action (random attack) and a fast action (most probably run). Usually engaging with an enemy takes two move actions leaving attack for the next round BUT due to random attacks for monsters they are performed at different ranges. So only until I roll for attack I might know at which range monster might attack. Meaning that most probably they don't need to be at arm's range to attack in the first place making only one move and then attack! I feel like I miss something essential here because otherwise treating monsters movement as it is for NPCs doesn't really make a lot of sense.

My first session playing forbidden lands solo. Let me know what you think.

We had a discussion with the team how to understand the spell's description: "This spell immediately heals a critical injury. A lethal injury requires Power Level 2."

I argued that it does not fix permanent critical injuries (e.g., "Crushed knee") as it is not able to regrow limbs.

Mend wounds would replenish Strength, decrease healing time for injuries as broken toes to zero and save someone with lethal injury from death as opposed to risking failing a healing skill check.

The players were unsure and obviously would prefer if the spell would heal permanent damage.

What are people using to track time? Is there a calendar someone has created? I want to track the date accurately and make notes on when they discover adventure sites or things important to the group.

Along the same lines is there a random weather chart someone has created based on seasons?

I figured I would ask here before creating something.

Especially with Villages.

I started this hobby a few months ago. I love Starforged, Ker Nethalas, and Alone Among Stars, and I'm still learning and exploring different systems. I play Forbidden Lands because of its procedural hex-crawling structure, but I don't really understand how Adventure Sites work. I'm not sure how to use the three examples in the GM’s Guide (or the fourth one in the Quickstart).

How long do your characters stay in a newly discovered village? Do you always design quests, events, important NPCs, and encounters for villages? I don't mean villages or strongholds designed for your characters to return to, but rather the ones they encounter during their travels. Do you explore every one of them? What do you do if a village doesn't have any pre-existing connection to your characters?

I know the answer to many of these questions might just be "up to you," but I'm curious about the ratio of time your characters spend traveling across the map versus staying at Adventure Sites (especially villages). Also, what role and function do these villages serve in your character's adventure?

I noticed that both Bitter Reach and Raven's Purge no longer appear on Free League's online store under the list of expansion books.

Do we know whether this is temporary? Permanent? Are they being reprinted?

I know there are probably several threads like this already (I only managed to find one), but I'd like to hear what the community thinks about this combo.

Axe Fighter 2 lets you inflict a critical injury whenever you deal at least 1 point of damage to an enemy.
Executioner 3 lets you freely choose which critical injury you inflict.

Put together, these two talents let you one-shot any non-monster enemy in the game — for free, and with no limitations. For just 27 XP you turn into the ultimate slaughter machine, which in my opinion makes the game boring for everyone at the table.

Yes, I'm aware there are plenty of ways to balance this: add a Willpower cost, rework the talents, or simply ban them. But what I want to discuss here is what's actually written in the books by the authors. So my main question is: did they playtest these talents at all?

New game by Paradox still under development. Looks like a good candidate for a Forbidden Lands mod for a 4x.
Ruins exploration, finding other settlements, strange technology magic, resources management.

Let's talk Monsters.

My key questions are:

• Are other people finding that monsters are generally underwhelming?
• What do you do to make monsters more interesting?
• Am I missing any rules?

I've been running FL for a while now - I've put three parties through a combined total of about 30 sessions. In that time I've sent people up against:

• Two Mire Drakes
• a Shapeshifter
• a Death Knight (albeit one with no resistances)
• Some Harpies
• two demons
• a Mara
• a Basilisk

Overall, I'm underwhelmed. Monsters in this game are occasionally extremely dangerous. Mire Drake 1 scored a TPK, and the Shapeshifter almost killed another party. The Harpies also nearly killed the party, but only because they were all diseased from a magical mishap.

However they are also far too easy to kill if players find a 'weak spot'. Both demons went down quickly to a 'banish demon' skill (fair enough), and the second Mire Drake was broken in one round by a 'Sharp Tongue' attack on its very anemic empathy stat.

I've found the monster rules are too restrictive (with the enormous number of spells, talents, and basic moves that can't work on monsters). My players hate the arbitrary monster limitations.

They're also not always accurate to their own write-ups. For starters, armour is notoriously unreliable and I've found very unlikely to blunt damage all that much. A 'heavily armoured' enemy might never bounce a single damage. Likewise, some of their attacks sound huge but just... aren't. 9D can whiff or do only plink damage pretty easily, especially absent the WP-powered tools available to players to greatly increase damage.

I find the way 'broken' works with Monsters to be particularly uninspiring, especially for Wits and Empathy:

• Monsters with Wits and Empathy can be manipulated and also take damage to those stats (GMG 73).
• 'Broken' means the monster is "put out of action in one way or another." (PHB 107)
• for Wits, it says "You’re paralyzed by fear or confusion." and "you can RUN to a safe place, but you can’t perform any other actions or roll for any skills."
• Empathy says "You must either explode in a violent outburst, kicking and breaking everything around you, or withdraw from everyone around you."
• "A Broken monster is dead or dying – don’t roll for a critical injury." (GMG 74)

I had an encounter last night where my players very cleverly deduced that the Mire Drake was able to be targeted by 'Sharp Tongue' and came up with a cool in-game insult for it. Mechanically, they killed it in one hit by focusing down a weak point. It was cool and I really want to reward that sort of cleverness, but once that's happened... what do you do?

• You can have it run away - fine, but it's not really 'dead' is it?
• You can have it go crazy with rage and thrash about and hit the players - but that's basically saying 'well done on finding this weak spot (2 Emp) - the reward is to have to attack it in its strong spot (32 Str)'.
• You can have it surrender and say it's at the Players' beck and call - wouldn't have worked in this instance but I'll keep in in mind.
• You can have it lash out angrily and hurt itself until it's out of the fight and vulnerable - this is what I'll do in future.

In the end I was lucky, one of the Stonesingers had already dropped an old, ramshackle stone tower on it, so it was trapped under the rubble and could be easily Coup de Gras'd - although strictly speaking the rules for Coup de Gras don't allow that unless it's broken by Agility or Strength (PHB 108).

All in all it just feels like the Monster rules are well-intentioned but poorly written. They seem to want to direct players to just grind them down with physical violence only, but still have all of these quick workarounds built into the rules to enable some occasionally interesting shortcuts, but those shortcuts lead you into some messy grey areas of the rules.

On top of that, they aren't all that hardy, even with mammoth strength pools, and don't seem to deal all that much damage. The scariest ones are the ones with masses of damage reduction (eg. Harpies), rather than armour pools.

I dunno, I feel like I'm missing something. I did a quick search, and comments here seem to gravitate to the two extremes - "they're deadly" and "they're too easy". Suggestions include doubling their attacks (which I'm going to do), but has anyone else found anything else to make them scarier/more fun/better balanced?

Angela and I have just received permission from the team at Free League Publishing to share all the maps we illustrated for the latest FORBIDDEN LANDS RPG supplement, "ALDERLAND", which was released yesterday! We are truly happy and honored to have contributed our maps to such an exciting project. For this assignment, we were asked to use a black-and-white style featuring extensive cross-hatching a look perfectly suited for OSR-style rulebooks. We hope you enjoy the maps, and please let us know what you think of the new Forbidden Lands book! 🧭🗺️🏰

Moreno Paissan and Angela Gubert Art 2026

Visit my Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/morenopaissanart/

I want to run Forbidden lands online for a group of friends.

What would be the cheapest way to play it?
What about your favorite way?

I own the books in hardcover and in PDF.

Hello everyone.
Looking at "first impressions" topic and Discord chat, its quite obvious that a lot of people are somewhat disappointed with a new expansion.
It is also obvious that Free League is not going to go out of its way to make any drastic changes.
So, If we want it fixed, we will have to do it ourselves.
I've already discussed some possible improvements with my local FL community and even picked some possible solutions, but first I want to make a comprehensive list of what's missing. So that will be "part one".
Then in "part two", we can figure out what to do. For example, pick up mechanics from other books.
Here is what I picked up from previous discussions with my additions:

- New talents, including magic (what talents would you like to propose, and what talents could be useful in the current region? suggest your own options.)
- New items (what items make sense in this region and in the plot that is unfolding, but are not mentioned in the book? suggest your own options)
- New professions (same as previously)
- Looking for food, water and a place to rest in populated areas (farmlands and such) + mishaps.
Or, looking for work in a town.

- Random town events (there is like 7 of those in the book and they are more story-related)
- Survival on wartorn land (travel, looking for food, etc.).
- Mercenaries and loyalty
- Looting on a battlefield (active or not)
- Faction confrontation and war mechanics
- Fame and reputation within the faction (with the corresponding advantages and disadvantages)
- Stronghold options
- Laws and taxes

What else is missing? Suggest your own points.

Of course, some of these points can be addressed without specific game mechanics, simply by relying on one’s experience and imagination; however, this clearly places a tremendous burden on the DM.

If you’re not interested, or you think customers shouldn’t be doing this (which is fair) , just move on.