Unveiling Viking Lore and Adventure: A Glimpse into Songs and Sagas by Fari RPGs
(A free copy of Songs and Sagas was provided by the creator. No money exchanged hands. All opinions expressed are our own.)
In any indie game store, one can find shelves upon shelves of role-playing game manuals- sometimes huge, ponderous tomes that can often cost a commoner their day's wages - not to mention any supplemental material that brings the game up-to-date with your friend's podcast. But not all games are made alike, and for every tome of meticulous RPG wisdom, there are smaller games - sometimes printed in thin paperbacks, or distributed as a single-page PDF via your favorite click-and-share websites. And then there are those that reside between even those two examples.
Songs and Sagas, by Fari RPGs, is a recent example of such a game. The PDFs are easily accessible but, if a crafty referee would like, it's printable as a single-page pamphlet that features rules for nearly everything you need to start playing with a group of like-minded friends.
If there was ever a group known for their "songs and sagas" it would be the Vikings (I mean… Saga is a Scandinavian word, isn't it?), so don't be surprised that the game naturally takes on the flavor of a lost Edda. In it, you take on the role of exiles, stricken from memory, guided by gods and spirits to venture beyond the mist, to chart the land, and cleanse the shadows.
What follows is typical of most RPG fare - crafting something of a shared narrative with your friends, and rolling dice to determine uncertain outcomes. And while it doesn't break any ground, it's served by simple and direct rules. Songs and Sagas fancies itself something of an OSR title, that is an old-school revival game - hearkening back to the earliest days of modern tabletop role-playing, focusing on rulings instead of rules, and smart players instead of characters with high stats. This is most evident when glancing over the character sheet, which features only 4 base attributes, and a few spots to track things like your inventory and armor. Notably, Fari RPGs provided a spot to note your character's pronouns - setting it apart from many OSR games. Let's face it. The OSR community suffers from ongoing problems created by a few bigots who scoff at the idea of preferred pronouns.
When preparing for a session, players might be surprised to find the requirement of a deck of standard playing cards. Though playing cards are not rare to find at many TTRPG sessions, their use here allows the table to tap into a larger degree of variance, which allows the rules to remain tight and the game fast-paced. A typical game will see the deck used to determine the dispositions of enemies and NPCs, combat initiative, the fruits of rest, the characters' attribute modifiers, and determine the risk of an occupied region. Cards can also be burned by the player to allow for certain advantages as the narrative unfolds, allowing you to push back against fate and succeed where you might have otherwise failed, or present an item you might not have carried as though it was always there for just the moment you needed it.
In larger games, character creation can often take a whole session unto itself. You must not only determine your attributes but also select from a laundry list of magical or supernatural abilities that set your character apart from others. That isn't to say it's boring, it can actually be one of the most entertaining parts of a game. But in Songs and Sagas, in keeping the rules light, there are really only three distinct aspects to any given Character. Of course, you can name and describe your character however you wish, there are no limits to the parts left to your imagination. But the parts that most directly impact gameplay are your attributes, your guardian spirit, and your armor and weapons. Attributes are obvious to anyone coming into Songs and Sagas with other TTRPGs under their belt. These are your statistics that modify your dice rolls and are applied discreetly as the game unfolds. Strength is the measure of which your character can crush, lift, or strike. Dexterity: the measure of which your character may run, aim, and sneak. Willpower: how your character perceives, analyzes, and focuses. And Heart: how your character persuades, commands, and honors. All characters also feature a "resilience" score, which represents their health points, for lack of a better term. But that is determined by your Guardian Spirit or Vanori.
The Guardian Spirits are a representation of what makes your character unique to play compared to a friend's across the table. They are a spirit of the wild and a messenger of the gods, and depending on what you pick can influence your attributes, determine your maximum resilience, and give you a special ability. The game presents six options, but notes you are not limited to only what the game offers. Unsurprisingly, the Vanori take on the characteristics of common beasts: bear, wolf, raven, elk, ox, and owl. The abilities they grant run the spectrum from increasing your armor, forcing enemies to roll less, or allowing a short rest to be treated as a long rest.
Armor and weapons should need little explanation. But in a departure from the world's greatest role-playing game, Songs and Sagas represents both as a dice of varying shape. Armor can be represented with either a d4 or a d6, allowing you to roll the appropriate dice and subtract the total from incoming damage. Weapons are represented by a d4 - d12. Predictably, combat is dictated by the performance of "trial" rolls, something any TTRPG player will have encountered before, simply rolling a d20 to overcome a certain threshold to either succeed or fail.
Exploration seems to be the primary tenet of Songs and Saga, providing a whole page to fill in your own hex grid as you uncover the details of the mist lands, even including nearly a whole page dedicated to the rules of solo gameplay that can be enhanced and served by several well-rounded, randomized roll tables for things like threats, quests, people, and even weather. But beyond determining the risk level of the hex you occupy, and maybe applying some of the content from the randomized roll tables, exploration occupies a surprisingly small portion of the overall literature. The game already relies so heavily on the players to be the main engine of the narrative and gameplay, it only makes sense the same could be said of exploring these shadowed lands.
Ultimately, what you have with Songs and Sagas is nothing new. It's not breaking new ground. And it's not particularly inventive. But its light rules are presented in a dense format, allowing players to have everything they need right in front of them should they try their hands at exile in the lands beyond the mist. The presentation lends itself to a more experienced player than a complete beginner, but there is nothing that should upset or push a beginner away from the hobby, either. One could see how, if the creators had the inclination, this game could be reduced to a single page, or even enhanced to occupy a small zine. Its austere presentation lends itself to information density, thus fast pick up. But the game lacks any real sense of tone or voice. One doesn't need an art budget to establish such things either. Tom Bloom, the creator of Lancer, dropped a one-page RPG, almost as a joke, that is absolutely dripping with tone called Goblin with a Fat Ass. Yes, it's silly, but try it. It's fun as hell and almost delivers as much as Songs and Sagas but with far less text.
If we do the math, Songs and Sagas clocks in around 2,200 words. That doesn't include anything on the exploration pages, such as the randomized roll tables, that's just rules. That's an impressive number whether you are looking at the full-scale printouts, or the single page, front and back, pamphlet printout. Artefact, a solo journaling game we've covered on the blog before, comes bundled in a really nice-looking, easy-to-follow book with approximately 36 pages in PDF. Without getting into the minute details of text density, spacing, etc, Artefact is approximately 5,000 words in length. Granted, that is over TWICE the size of Songs and Sagas. But it's also NOT BIG when held against other contemporary TTRPGs, and it drips with tone, a few pieces of beautiful art do a lot of heavy lifting. But even if you took half the game away, a possibility since half the game is just "characters" you can play, the sense of tone is still there, the game has a voice that sets it apart from all others.
The closest game I have in my library to Songs and Sagas, in terms of this ever-ephemeral tone I speak of, is probably Runecairn. It is a Viking-flavored RPG in which the gods have died and the players must adventure and quest in this new world. The core rules are 48 pages in PDF, cover to cover. That's not much longer than Artefact, though it does clock in at about 10,000 words, that's nearly five times as much as Songs and Sagas, and twice as long as Artefact. Of course, you can establish anything you want when you have five times the amount of words to do it with. But many of those words are laundry lists of items and weapons and their descriptions, well-defined character skills, monster stat blocks, and gameplay features. Take all that away and the game still has voice. Clever use of public domain illustrations certainly do a lot of heavy lifting, but that brings me to the point I hope is clear is that Songs and Sagas, while certainly not deficient in any meaningful way, would not need to do much to really bring the game alive and add new dimensionality.
Though they don't use any public domain images, it bears mentioning Songs and Sagas does feature a Spotify playlist which you can listen to HERE. And aside from the opening track (in this author's opinion), it does seem like it might be good table music for an austere journey into dark and forgotten lands.
But Artefact, and many games from Mousehole press, have custom-made scores, composed just for them by Christopher Michael Roberts which you can listen to on his Bandcamp by clicking HERE. So…
But don't let a small thing like mood, tone, voice, or whatever you want to call it, stop you from trying the game. You can check out what Fari RPGs is trying to do on their website by clicking HERE. It's entirely conceivable that just like many aspects of OSR, Song and Sagas is meant to stay out of the player's way, to tap the contents of its player's imaginations, and allow each person to build their own "psycho-tone".
Fari RPGs have proven capable of creating many full titles in the past, including things like Stoneburner, which appears to be a full-length book complete with original art. Perhaps releasing Songs and Saga under an open license, allowing creators to write and release their own content using Songs and Saga rules is accomplished more easily with a "blank slate", that is, a ruleset with an artistic void waiting for creators to imprint itself upon them. If releasing something under the ORC license was the chief goal of the project, which would not be uncommon during the game's projected release time due to Hasbro shenanigans, then Songs and Sagas has done an admirable job of creating something easy to implement, mold, and shape to your own designs.
Check out Songs and Sagas for yourself and see.
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Thanks to our Inn at the End regular, Rett, for writing this week’s communication. You can find out more about Rett and his motley interests and wide-ranging talents by visiting HERE
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