As a first solo foray into TOR (using Strider Mode), I absolutely love it. It has very interesting mechanics, and the more I think about them, the more I like it. TOR in particular has a Target Number which is derived from the core Attributes (Strength, Heart, Wits), so what your character is natural makes a task easier or more difficult. Skills allow you to roll a number of d6s equal to your d6 level, so the more skilled you are at something, you’re more likely to succeed. I love how these two work together for the same end result, but are separate from each other. Also only by having a higher skill can you get a higher chance of getting a special success, as the attribute only effects the TN. Furthermore you always roll a Feat Die (a d12 essentially), numbered from 1-10 and having a face with the Eye of Sauron and a face with Gandalf’s Rune, which give a Misfortune or Fortune respectively. So different situations can increase or decrease the number of Skill dice, and they can also make the Feat Die be rolled at advantage or disadvantage, and the great thing about it is, that they will impact different things in the game!

Heading to the next part which is combat. I loved it. A skill roll modified by opponents Parry is made. Each character has an Endurance rating which one could think of as Hit Points, as they can take you out of combat. Each hit you receive will reduce your Endurance. Damage to Endurance is fixed, modified by any special successes rolled, and you only drop unconscious at zero. Only Wounds have the opportunity of killing a character, and that’s where armor has it’s place, as it can prevent this. There are many special successes that can be utilized by the heroes or their adversaries, and the heroes also have four (five in solo) stance to choose when fighting. There is no significant Death Spiral, with the major penalty is the risk of becoming weary if your Endurance drops below your Fatigue and Load rating. I won’t go into any more details, I just found that combat may look complex, but actually is very streamlined, with as few rolls as possible, but at the same time providing a great varied experience.

TOR has several bookkeeping stats, which all play a major role in the game. You need to keep track of your Fellowship, Endurance, Load, Fatigue, Hope and Shadow. Sounds like a lot, but they all provide a different result. Your character may start going down the shadow path, or lose hope, or become tired and need to rest, etc. These all provide an experience as close as one can get to the Tolkien books. The authors also chose terms whose name rings familiar to the LOTR trope.

The next part I adored was the Journey system. Another smart way to run hex based journeys. An event will always happen, the question is when, and what event. So depending on how good you’re at travelling, you may make the journey with fewer events or as many as 1 per hex, making you earn each hex with hard adventuring. I love how this system could also work with a hex crawl generator (like the hex power flowers), and with any success based RPG ruleset. It’s something I’ll keep on my toolset for the future, as it works great for solo, and is much better than asking the Oracle or rolling on random encounter tables.

As to the presentation, I have the hardcopy book and the art and quality of print is absolutely stunning. Production value is great, and the whole book is very evocative. Love it.

Having used various solo tools, oracles and engines over the past few years, I was really curious as to how Strider mode plays.

The experience of Shawn Tomkin in this is evident. Utilizing the Strider Mode doesn’t feel like you take an Oracle and put it on top of the game. Instead it connects to TOR so seamlessly, it feels like TOR was meant to be solo played. It has a Fortune and an Ill-Fortune table which you can use when you roll something good or bad on the Feat die (during regular ruleset rolls), so you can always get an Intervention of sorts while playing. It has a Telling Table (a Yes/No with Extremes, Oracle), and a Lore Table which has 72 each of Action, Focus, Aspect words. These words fit a lot in the theme without being explicit (for example it has Fell, Gloomy, Fellowship, which all bring out the Tolkien vibe), and then it also has a Revelation table for when the Eye of Sauron is fixed on you (another great mechanic!). Finally it has 7 Journey Event tables (6 entries each) which really create opportunities to adventure, essentially expanding on top of the existing Journey system and making it solo. I think it shines here.

So, it doesn’t work with Scenes or Actors. This may be an issue in the long run, if you want a more arching adventure and meaningful encounters. On the other hand, this brings a more gamey vibe out, where things happen on your way to your quest (the initial mission, but they need not be relevant). This follows up a lot the Hobbit vibe, where the party faced a multitude of dangers that were mostly random, before arriving at their quest at the lonely mountain.

I haven’t finished my first Journey yet, and have only accumulated several disjointed journey events, making my trip look like a book or journal. Having a defined enemy (Sauron), clarifies things a lot in solo. Because as I foresee now, the missions will be relevant mostly to the enemy, and depending on the location and the Eye Awareness, you may get extra enemy events. On the other hand there are ample situations for random events.

Overall I love it, and it can play very fast. Actually it plays a lot faster than most of the other solo adventures I’ve run in the past, and a great advantage is that I rarely had to pause for a long time and think how to interpret a situation. The rolls and results were straightforward, and the process streamlined, I really felt like playing the game, than having to write my story. I can’t tell how it will progress. It’s very deadly, but gives you the opportunity to get out of a bad situation if you need to. Recommended.

The Dark Eye is a nice crunchy system. I liked how it featured a death spiral with the Pain Conditions based on the wound thresholds, but at the same time it was smooth enough that it wasn’t game breaking. I also liked the skill checks where you roll 3d20, compare to the respective attributes and apply your skill points to succeed. It’s quite different from any other RPG I’ve tried, but a nice mechanic. And… now it struck me as to what does this skill check system accomplish. The obvious connection is that of the governing attributes, it’s nothing new, we’ve seen it in several RPGs before (Harnmaster, BRP derivatives, D6). It does it in a new way so that you don’t have to pre-calculate the attribute factor, but by rolling 3d20 it’s done on the fly. Okay sofar. The not-so obvious mechanism is the QL. Say you have 8 Skill Points to succeed which represent your skill level and expertise. What this means is that you can “save” a failure and turn it into a success, but also that higher levels of success are only available to people who have skill expertise. There just isn’t a way for untrained people to have a high QL, because they won’t have enough Skill Points available to start with. All this, without hindering their attribute-based chance of success. Which is pretty neat. It allows for talent to show, but only a trained craftsman can do something exquisite. Otherwise it’s just not possible. Other systems have tried something similar with Success Levels, but it’s not the same, because Attributes and Skills are entered in the same success chance pool, whereas The Dark Eye, keeps them separate. I loved the Latin-style spell names on the Magic rules. They give a nice touch compared to the blunt descriptions we’re used to. Combat left me wanting more. While it did have pain conditions and critical successes, and dodges and blocks, and the damage resolution made sense, I would like critical hit tables or hit locations, and stronger criticals. I mean if you have all this crunch, it’s best to have the complete effectiveness out of it. I understand that there is a Companion book that adds some things like that, but with a 400+ pages big core book, I’d expect it there.

I got this because I really enjoy playing RPGs solo, and I wasn't dissapointed.

I enjoyed the oracle, with integrated random events, though for me what really stood out was not the oracle, but the Scenes mechanic. This is what sits at the heart of Mythic and gets an adventure going. I revolved my game around this, and then let Mythic take over.

A neat book, dense with information. Recommended.

Nice little indie fantasy implementation of the Traveller/Cepheus SRD. The character generation system really stands out, with the professions mini-game telling it's own backstory for your PC. It's great just for this. However the system falls short on other regards. Combat feels clunky, equipment is unbalanced, some rules defy common sense, and a bit more proofreading would help. Nonetheless, it does work, and considering it's based off such an old sci-fi game engine, that's a feat on it's own.

A well written scenario for Five Leagues from the Borderlands. It's laid out in 7 Chapters, and you can progress without reading the next part, keeping the surprise levels interesting. There aren't any punitive choices during the scenario (e.g. if you did X in Chapter 2, suffer Y in Chapter 5), rather going with the flow of the rolled events.
In my playthrough I got really stuck during the first chapter due a LOT of bad dice rolls, but thankfully, some skills in my party helped alleviate that a little. It has variety in it's encounters (terrain, enemy) and variety in addressing the situations at hand. It is meant for a new warband, so there are times where my battle hardened party (~7 sessions in) had it too easy and with some good dice rolls, after the first Chapter, it was mostly a walk in the park. The associated loot also is quite nice. It gave me many solo play sessions to deal with.

Recommended!

Low fantasy... check. Warband management with advancement elements... check. Skirmish wargaming...check. Solo player focused...check.

Five Leagues from the Borderlands succeeds at all the above and even more. This is a choose your own miniatures skirmish wargame with careful balance and some innovative mechanics.

It's low fantasy. The implied setting is medieval western Europe, where magic and monsters are rare. Elves, dwarves, orcs, undead exist in the game at just the right dose to make it interesting. Don't expect wizards riding dragons, shooting fireballs against laser shooting smilodons. It's poverty and ignorance. This is the middle ages, spanning from dark ages to rennaiscance.

It has warband management and you advance each and every one of your members. Rags to riches. Gutter urchin to warlord. You chose their unique gear, armor, weapons. The campaign turn reminded me heavily of old school computer games. They have just enough stats to be interesting and varied without becoming cluttered. There is a clear Follower and Hero distinction and you really want your members to advance to Hero status. Though as the publisher states, you make the game your own.

The skirmish part is very well designed. The average battle plays with around 15 figures for both sides, touching the upper solo limit capacity for me. I had a couple of battles at around 18 figures, which started as cumbersome, until first blood. The game plays really fast, and I always managed to finish a combat session in one seating, 1-2 hours at most, but I also take photographs and notes while playing for my blog reports, which severely increase game time.
The melee exchanges system is just brilliant. It gives an ebb and flow to the combat, with many different results and interesting outcomes.

The solo aspect is what really sealed the deal. The initiative mechanic is so easy to implement that I never looked back. Of course it wouldn't be a solo game without tables. All solo rpg players seek them out, and Five Leagues has them plenty. Tables for encounters, tables for random events, tables for backgrounds. Wherever you need a table, there is one.
Resolutions happen on the spot. There is only minimal notes for future reference.

Five Leagues won't win any stars on artwork or layout. There is just enough pictures to make things distinct. The rules are clearly laid out, and any rules interpretation confusion is usually minor, and usually hunted down on the regular updates. Bookmarking is at the bare minimum. There is a table of contents, with hyperlinks, but that's all there is. I'd like to see some pdf navigation bookmarks and an index at the end. This is a game which wins at gameplay, not at presentation. Though I must admit I've seen improvements over previous versions.

Coming at the game updates. I've followed Five Leagues for the past year. The updates are regular, and there is slight rules tinkering and extra content. The rules changes are either an improvement, or an 'one or the other' case. I haven't found a rule change that got me disappointed.

This is a skirmish wargame with rpg elements, not the other way around, and it's excellent at it. Grab your fantasy miniatures, grab your dice set and go hunt some outlaws ravaging the farms around the village.

5/5 Highly recommended!