Beast Hunters

From StoryCodex

1 Author
2 Pitch
3 Summary
4 Play Reports
5 Reviews
6 Resources

[edit] Author

Christian and Lisa Griffen

[edit] Pitch

You are an elite warrior who stalks the monstrosities that threaten your tribe and savage your land.

With every tattoo inked in the blood of the beasts, you claim more power. With every kill, you prepare to face stronger foes.

Only the most skilled and most cunning Beast Hunters survive.

Will you?

Beast Hunters provides you with all of the tools you need to create characters and run games in the evocative setting of the tribes of Chel'qhur. The game uses innovative mechanics for the negotiation and resolution of social, mental and physical conflicts that allow the players to use their creativity to come up with their own actions and solutions. Beast Hunters is based on a limited budget and freely adjustable difficulty level for the challenges in the game and includes numerous beasts with 15 custom tattoo designs, adventure seeds, detailed advice for how to play and run the game, and more.

[edit] Summary

Beast Hunters is a game about about tribal hunters who seek out and slay magical beasts. They use their prey’s blood to inscribe ritualistic tattoos into their bodies, thereby claiming a portion of the beast's power.

On the player level, Beast Hunters is all about challenges. It focuses on introducing, negotiating, and resolving challenges in a way that gives a lot of opportunity and control to the player who faces them.

The game includes several innovative mechanics to achieve these purposes. The Challenger, who provides the challenges to the Hunter, runs each adventure with an amount of adversity points and a limit on how many she can spend on each challenge. Both of these values are determined by the Hunter before the beginning of the adventure. The Challenger spends the points on the fly, based on fixed costs for different aspects of the challenge, such as higher resistance, traits, resources, and special effects. This budget system allows for spontaneity and flexibility on the side of the Challenger and automatically provides pacing for the game flow.

Players have the option of negotiating how their characters overcome challenges. If necessary, they can move to a conflict resolution system in which the player controlling the Beast Hunter describes specific actions, based on the character’s traits and resources, that help the character gain an advantage in the challenge. The Challenger offers a certain amount of advantage points for the action, based on how creative, cunning, and cool it is. The Hunter can then accept the points or risk rolling the dice for a higher, but potentially also lower, result. Both the negotiation and the advantage point offering system promote innovative actions and grant the Hunter a limitless array of options.

The focus of this Story Game is the narration, i.e., what people at the table are describing in the fiction. Most dice rolls can be circumvented if all players involved enjoy each other's contributions.