#### MAKING YOUR MISTY MOUNTAIN _Mountain Home_ by Karl Sheer is a dynamite game. It’s not without flaws, but it's one of the most playable and interesting takes on F _orged in the Dark_ I’ve read or run. I ran 23 sessions of it, including our session zero, in the first half of the year. Originally I’d planned on 10-12 sessions, but at the halfway mark of that, we knew we had to continue on. The basic pitch is simple and maybe even feels limiting. You’re running the leaders of a group of Dwarves moving to a new region and establishing a new settlement. Play alternates between expeditions, often to deal with the randomly generated events for the year (called entanglements), and an end of the year phase where you can explore the area of your settlement and construct new buildings within it. How the game opened up and developed in play honestly shocked me. I’d hoped it would have that kind of power, but assumed it wouldn’t live up to the promise. #### DIGGING INTO THE PITCH In _Mountain Home_ you play Founders, leaders setting up a new Dwarven Settlement. The settlement itself acts as a kind of crew playbook. You can choose between claiming a lost fortress, building a buried metropolis, being on an exodus from their previous settlement, or seeking to mine a new mother lode. Each has questions to help set things up and there’s a definite shift in tone between them. The choice of settlement type impacts abilities, special discoveries, and a couple of other things. Founders select from one of seven playbooks, with different special abilities, XP triggers, downtime bonus, and items. Rather than assigning dots to actions, players choose a family and apprenticeship, which offers some background detail and a set of choices for increasing actions. One of the most interesting ideas in character creation is the concept of a Personal Guild. This can be centered around the Founder’s background, craft, or simply be a friendship association. You create an ally and a rival from that guild. It’s a really neat concept, though there’s some room for improvement which I’ll come back to. The play cycle for _Mountain Home_ takes the base FitD system and tweaks it, in the process making choices tighter but also offering room for play. #### MOUNTAIN HOME VS FITD While Mountain Home sticks fairly closely to vanilla _Forged in the Dark_ , it does make a few key changes. There are some small things, like only three actions for each of the categories, plus special actions outside of those. Rather than wound levels, characters may have to mark a condition (_Dazed, Injured, Exhausted_). These each offer a -1d penalty to an action category. If you mark all three, you’re taken out. Healing these is a challenge, and only really done during the end of year resolution (_the Settlement Phase_). Burning through your stress gets you one of four kinds of _Weariness_ , a permanent role-playing prompt and XP trigger. One of my favorite tweaks for the game is that you mark xp when you protect an ally by taking a consequence for them and when you lead a group action. It’s a smart motivator that encourages teamwork. That small change really aided the play dynamic and its something I’ll probably borrow for other FitD games. Probably the biggest mechanical change (besides the structure of the settlement itself), is the concept of **Supply**. It shifts how load-out works, but not a huge amount. Supply is for an entire year, only resetting during the Settlement phase. That means you have to plan your three uses of that Supply across any expeditions, role-playing scenes, and the Settlement phase. When you use a supply, you pick from the list of items unique to your supply or a few generic ones (like the use of your guild members). Certain items may cost more than one supply and some special abilities can impact this: adding more uses or increasing the quality of a particular item. It creates real tension. That’s because of the way the play cycle works. As we played it, at the beginning of the year the GM rolls two **Entanglements** : one internal (_Mountain_) and one external (_Outsiders_). These random events present opportunities and challenges. We began the year with a round of interactions, allowing the Founder PCs to call scenes to talk to one another, interact with NPCs, or do things which mostly impacted the fiction. Then I would talk briefly about the two entanglements rolled and go over any remaining issues hanging on from before. Some of the events invite significant player collaboration. The PCs then decide on their first **Expedition**. These are the Missions of the game. The game roughly breaks these down into five types, with a unique set of set up and engagement questions. Each mission begins with a **_Journey_** roll, something I quite like as a way of setting the scene. Expeditions are the places where players will use up their supply, take conditions, and mark stress the most. And that’s really important. Most of those things can’t be cleared or restored until the Settlement Phase at the end of the year. But the players can choose to do a second expedition before that (or even third but we never saw that). That choice to do a second expedition is a challenging one. The players have to assess their resources and decide if they can make it. A couple of times they risked it and we ended up with PCs taking a Weariness. It is a great logistical question that feels heavy and interesting at the table. Expeditions offer various rewards which the game covers. Besides often solving a problem, the Founders can gain reputation, treasure, and occasionally faction status. They also potentially create more attention and disruption, raising the two Entanglements tracks (increasing the likelihood of a more significant event). I wrote up a post talking about additional kinds of rewards, which you can see here. #### SWEETNESS OF THE SETTLEMENT The **Settlement Phase** is final part of _Mountain Home_ ’s play cycle and includes the Downtime phase. It marks the end of the year–something which mentally gives the players a sense of closure and the larger span of time happening. The phase begins with players activating Claim Buildings. I’ll come back to that in a moment, but basically there are effects: like special healing or increasing reputation which are based on particular buildings. Downtime actions in the settlement phase include **_Borrowing Aid_** (very lightly described/explained so we hardly used it), **_Tending to your Fellows_** (to remove conditions), **_Indulging Obsessions_** (the means of removing stress), and **_Training_** (marking XP). But the big ticket item here is the **_Long Term Project_**. As with other FitD games these can be flexibly used for lots of happenings. But these projects include two of the most important aspects of _Mountain Home_ : **Discoveries** and **Claim Buildings**. The players’ settlement is broken into four rows and five columns. The rows represent depths from Surface to Depth 3. Each of the intersections of Depth and column have two spots where players can eventually build Claim buildings. But to do so, they first have to discover and explore them– a long term project. When they finish that project, the GM rolls to see what kind of location it is (_Earthy Caves, Iron Vein, Lava-Filled Caverns, etc_). The depth and kind of discovery affects what kinds of buildings can be constructed in those two associated spots. There’s also a set of special discoveries which can get triggered, unique to the kind of settlement being built. The other big long term project is establishing one of those Claim buildings. As I mentioned, some have requirements for where they can be built. For example a _Lumber Mill_ can only be built in a _Surface Forest_ , a _Research Library_ in an _Ancient Ruin_ , an _Iron Guildhall_ in an _Iron Vein_. These have different Tiers (up to IV); the clock for building them is 3+Tier. So with a couple of people working, a building can often be finished in a single Settlement phase. The selection of buildings is really interesting, but with room for the players to add more. Some affect the Trade roll which is made after the Downtime phase, generating treasure. Others are permanently dedicated for effects. For example, you need to dedicate a _Farm_ of some kind to raise your settlement’s Tier. There’s enough options and interesting ideas there that the players will always have tough choices– and each settlement will be different. We had players do projects to come up with the plans for new buildings (which they then spent actions building) including a Hot Springs. I would say the Settlement map, the Claim buildings, and that whole system is really the secret sauce of _Mountain Home_. It’s great and really makes adding what are effectively elements to your crew sheet feel super satisfying. There’s a lot of other good stuff here– the session zero for setting up your region and the other factions within it is solid. Those factions also engage in projects which tick forward every year. The players love finding out what they had spent time and resources on, especially rival factions. That ended up being one of the big surprises of the game: how much the characters interacted with the other regional factions and the bonds they established. Yes, they are Dwarves with a potentially isolated society, but practically they needed trade and allies to get by. #### OTHER ASPECTS & ISSUES The Entanglement charts are interesting, but in some cases a couple of the things rolled can close to one another in how they look in play. I’d like to see an expanded set of tables– or maybe some advice on how to make unique ones for your game or evolve them over time. I found myself fudging when I’d get something the same or close to the same in consecutive years. Maybe some things could get subbed out permanently or for a short time after being rolled and resolved. _Mountain Home_ has a ton of great structures and approaches. In particular I liked the **Guilds**. They’re a highly interactive way to make the usual ally/rival element of FitD have an interesting weight. But some of the rules for how these guilds operate feel a little underdeveloped or at least underexplained. We found ourselves stopping and trying to figure out the intent of the designer as to how they should be used on expeditions (often pretty clear), throughout the year, and during downtime. Guilds can suffer Harm, and I suspect that ought to be a go-to thing for the GM, especially given that some buildings and other effects work to clear that harm. But it's easy to forget that– and I literally missed it as a thing until almost halfway through our campaign. Other elements are suggested, but I’m unsure where they go. It mentions that you can lead a group action with guild, and I would have liked more guidance about how that works– do you have to spend them as Supply to have that– in that case should you not use them for an extra die or for a change in position/effect? You have to choose between these. It points to one of the places where we had problems with the rules. I would say it probably took us four sessions to get really humming and fully comfortable with play, despite all of us having played _Forged in the Dark Games_ before. Probably my biggest issue with the game in play was the order of information and presentation. While the original version I started with had TBD for all the page numbers, that was fixed later. I ended up printing out most of the rulebook and putting it into a binder. I added page tabs to help me mark out important sections. Even with that, I still found myself jumping around and trying to figure out where elements were. In places the simplicity of the layout, while clear, didn’t give me signposts for where I was. Some tables and references appeared split off from the rules which covered them, making it necessary to flip back and forth. I know some folks do great with pdfs and searching but a) you have to know what something’s called and b) that’s a challenge online when I’ve already got several tabs open and the camera running. On the other hand, the character and campaign keeper designed by the creator is really great. It has everything in it. The only flaw might be that because of its automaton, we found ourselves breaking and trying to fix certain pieces, especially around supply. As I said it took us several sessions to get our feet under us and figure out the rhythm of things. Even after multiple sessions I kept missing or forgetting things. For example when we came to Expeditions, I often forgot about the unique Expedition Engagement roll questions. Instead I fell back to the generic BitD approach. A short summary list of the types of expeditions and key engagement details right by the Engagement roll table would have perhaps reminded me. #### OVERALL _Mountain Home_ is definitely my favorite implementation of _Forged in the Dark_ — bar none. It’s a game I’ll willingly go back to. I’m already thinking about different ways to reskin it, trying to capture the magic of the original. When we hit the last session, it felt like we had played and made something significant. _Mountain Home_ supported us in creating that dynamite story. ** _More Than Coin: FitD Rewards for Expeditions, Jobs & Beyond_** ** _In the Halls of the Monkey King: Racing FitD Clocks_** ** _AP Playlist for Mountain Home_**

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