No country for old kobolds pdf download

On a miss, your efforts at camouflage make you stick out like a sore thumb. You immediately draw the atten- tion of nearby enemies. When you make a successful Attack, roll your damage die twice and use the higher result. On a , hold 1. Spend 1 hold during the combat to negate damage from a single attack directed toward you after rolling the damage.

Your sweet moves have put you out in front of your friends, leaving you exposed and vulnerable. Scout: When you scout ahead, you always spot the 44 target before they spot you. Sharpshooter: You have excellent aim and always hit the most vulnerable parts of your enemies. On a 6 or less, your mark is aware of your theft! On a hit, you disarm the trap or open the lock. On a , your tinkering garners unwanted attention.

Trip: You are trained at ankle-biting. On a hit, you trip the target unit, and it gains the prone tag. On a miss, your efforts place you directly in the path of the largest foe in the area; you have to scramble to avoid getting trampled! Turn: You can attempt to hold undead at bay with your holy symbol. On a , a single undead minion cowers or flees.

On a , you get a vague notion of what is 45 to come, but lack specifics; take 1 hold. On miss, your god laughs at your request and your mind grows cloudy, take -1 ongoing to WIS rolls until you perform a sacrifice on their behalf. Voice of the Wild: You can communicate with and attempt to command animals. On a They both look awfully mad!

Think of yourself as the conductor of an orchestra; your decisions set the pace of the game and give the players events and pressures that complicate their lives.

The players, in turn, tell you how they respond to the obstacles and problems you describe. First, your Agendas, the overar- ching goals you have as a GM, help you determine the feel and emotion of your game. Second, your Principles, a set of rules for your contributions that help drive your Agendas, tell you when to pull certain levers in the game to help drive home the story and fill the kobolds lives with excitement and peril.

Finally, your GM moves give you concrete things to do when you need to push the story forward. The Countries send droves of heroes to murder the kobolds and their kin. Nearly everything is larger than kobolds and longer lived. The core idea of No Country For Old Kobolds is to give personhood to kobolds, giving your players something to think about when their next first level adventuring party goes out to slay a kobold or fifty. Now switch the camera around and give your players that same experience from a new perspective.

Life is a struggle to keep the rest of your village alive, and the missions should reflect that harsh reality. However, sometimes things work out for the kobolds. Sometimes they warn off some adventur- ers, kill some others, and trick a few as well. Maybe they reset a want clock or luck out when breeding. Soon the misery will come crashing down on them, and the cycle will start again.

Your job is to keep the wheel turning. Play to Find Out What Happens. This is, at its heart, a game of collaboration. Overplanning will lead to a poor experience for you and your players. Let wants and pressures 48 and their associated moves inform the fiction. The system is robust enough to continually provide avenues for exploration without the need to plan ahead. Instead of building rails, put down guideposts, using your moves, external pressures, and wants to create problems that lead to drama.

Countries are always going to raid the village, external pressures are always just off camera, and wants are always needing to be fulfilled. Draw maps, leave blanks Start each game by drawing a map; it orients and gives everyone a simple way to express the world around them.

Use the blanks in the 49 map to create the fictional adventures the kobolds find themselves pursuing. How high do those mountains tower? How do you get past the great wall? Use their family names to address their clan. Always refer to players by their current kobolds name or family name. This is a simple way to draw players into the fiction and really get them living in the skin of a kobold. Make moves that follow the fiction Moves are one of the main ways you as the GM will interact with the players.

Each move is a simple statement that prompts you to add, delete, or modify something in the fiction. Whenever the fiction calls for it, make a move that makes sense to you. If the players look to you to know what happens, make a move that seems appropriate.

See pp. Use wants to drive the story Wants are central to the game; constantly remind the kobolds of their fragile existence. And when the PCs fail, tick the want clocks that drive the story in a direction that interests you.

But external pressures can be used when- ever you need to keep things moving. Remember that by creating them the players have expressed interest in seeing them in the fiction.

Give the kobolds personhood The players will run through a number of kobolds during their adventures. Help them resist this cynicism. When a kobold dies,. Make their death a pertinent detail in the fiction. Mourn them and remember their kobold life. Keep the game fast and light Kobolds lives are hectic and fast, and you should reflect that in game play.

For the most part, missions should only last about an hour. Include a few combats and a few things to overcome in each mission, then move on.

Keep the game moving at all costs. These moves will help you move the fiction along and add tension, prompting you to say interesting things to keep the game moving. When you make a move, describe what happens and how it affects the kobolds and overall story.

You always want to choose a move that makes sense to you in the moment. Instead it probably makes more sense to add ticks to an external pressure clock so that a pressure comes to bear immediately. Village population is the most criti- cal resource in the game and also the most difficult for the players to manage. By inflicting harm upon the village, you will ratchet up tension and create an imme- diate threat that the kobolds must deal with before they can take any other actions.

Add ticks to an external pressure clock This move helps you ratchet up tension or immediately bring a pressure to bear. Use this move when the kobolds lives are going a little too well or when they seem directionless. Feel free to mark 52 more than one tick at a time—as many as three!

Deal damage to a kobold If all else fails, deal some damage. You can tell a kobold that they suffer four points of damage or have them roll dice to deter- mine how much damage is done. As always, make sure the damage you assign follows the fiction. While this move is specifically about dealing damage, other moves may also deal damage. They are going to run into units that use stealth or that volley from range.

Anything the kobolds can do others can as well. If some kobold is constantly using Bigger Ass Sword to cut through problems, throw them into some deep tunnels 53 where that big ass sword becomes more of a hindrance than a boon. Nothing comes for free. Show the kobolds an opportu- nity—additional stockpiles or perhaps some fancy weapons— and then tell them what it will cost to get it. Maybe they will need to sacrifice a unit of village kobolds to spring all the. Put the kobolds in a spot Kobold life is harsh; carelessness and ignorance constantly land them in tight jams.

Always be willing to make it a little worse. Maybe the floor is trapped, or the river is fat with flood waters making the crossing dangerous, or there is a bugbear nearby they overlooked earlier. Tell them what will be required and see if they want to go through with it. Sure, you might be able to make a temporary peace with the Minotaur, but only if you leave half your party behind to be made into slaves!

Is it worth it? Maybe they can fight their way out instead? No better time to get some sweet vengeance than when the kobolds are already involved in another fight! Display the might of one of the Countries The Countries that surround the village are always going to be more powerful than the kobolds. Maybe they block the river upstream creating drought conditions in the village. Maybe a country decides it wants the land the village keeps its grub worm farms on and torches the whole thing, forcing a shortage of scale rot medicine.

If a Country can solve a problem by extermi- nating a kobold village, no one will demand that the kobolds be preserved.

Use a Country or Unit move Countries and units all have moves that you can use throughout the game. If a unit has a healing ability, you can bet your bottom dollar it will be healing its compatriots to make the fight a lot tougher on the kobolds. Golden Opportunities A golden opportunity Is a moment in the fiction when the kobolds attempt something obviously outside of their abilities or so foolhardy that they would have no hope of success.

When you are presented with such a moment by the players, you get to make a GM move, as hard as you like. If they run headlong through a door in the Keep of the Leech Men without first checking to see what is on the other side, then their carelessness has given you a golden opportunity!

Put the kobolds in a spot by springing a pit trap and forcing each PC to make a Duck, Cover and Squirm in order to avoid falling in! If they try to fight a Great Red Dragon in melee, then their stu- pidity has given you a golden opportunity! External pressures are constructed during the first session or whenever a move specifies. Each external pressure has three parts: a description, a set of inputs, and a countdown clock.

The players describe the pressure, but the GM manages the other components. The Description Players always generate the initial description of an external pres- sure, a brief sentence or two that describes the primary attributes of the pressure.

You may find that the description calls for a new unit to be introduced. See the Using Combat and Units section pp. The forest children who use magic to push the forest into the village. The Clock The second part of an external pressure is the clock. External pres- sure clocks have three segments; when all three segments are ticked the external pressure will come to bear. In that moment, the rabid owlbears strike or the goblin miners set off their latest controlled demolition. Each time a want clock is reset, tick an external pressure clock and let the players know how their kobolds sense their approaching doom.

That will tick up the Tornadoes pressure! Your elder calls you all to the center of town, pointing to the sky as he recites the prayers of wind!

The Inputs Inputs are ways for external pressures to come to bear in play after the clock has ticked to three. You can create these on the fly or come up with a list so you can randomly roll to see what happens.

Here are four Inputs for the Goblin Miners we created earlier. The miners have been dynamiting the hills near your water source. The water is tainted, poisoning some of your people! Lose 1 population. A neighboring Country has hired the Goblins to mine on your borders.

What are they looking for, why must you have it? The miners have destroyed a great deal of your territory with strip mines causing famine that saps your resources. You should vary the impact of external pres- sures: some may have social impacts, some may impact the supply of a want, while others may change the standings between two Countries. External pressures are not the only things you can throw at the players—far from it—but they are the only threats with clocks.

The questions that are asked about each Country during the first session pp. You should ask a ton of questions about them as the players start to explore. There is a list of questions at the end of this section to get you started pp. Remember that every want must be collected from one of these Countries, and the nature of these wants will inform you about the Country.

Are they giant moth grubs? Do the Lizard Men ride those giant moths? What sort of land do these berries grow on? Country Name Country names will usually provide you with lots of story fodder. Why was the name chosen? What sort of fighters do Yaun-ti have? How do the Goblins feel about the Dwarves in the neighboring Country? What sort of homes would Eagle-men build? Are they paranoid of their overbearing Fascist government? Are they hyper-local and libertarian?

What does that mean for the kobolds? The Champion will be the most powerful unit produced by the Country and determines the kind of units that are common in the Country. If the Greatest Champion of the People of the Golden Sea is a mighty paladin named Ingrid, then you might consider creating knights that serve her or fighter priests that fight in her honor. This question creates one of the external pressures, and it directly 60 informs how the people of the Country view kobolds.

If the Centaur Pirates want the skins of kobolds to make sails, it tells you a great deal about how they will treat the kobolds. If they instead take kobolds as slaves they would be more likely to have roving bands of slavers routinely entering kobold territory. Country Moves Country moves are created by the GM and should speak to some. Examples: Those fucking elves!

Adds 1 Pressure to village Examples: Gold, A rare plant: what is it, why? No Country for Old Kobolds basic nature of the Country. It will usually define some unique feature of the Country and attach it to some lever in the game.

On a , you take 1d4 damage from venting steam and flame! On a 6 or less something precious to you catches fire! The fiction informs the creation of the move; the move acts as a lever that creates more fiction.

Each of these moves allows you to add distinct hazards and complications in each Country. Using Village Wants Wants are constant throughout the story. Use a clock for each want in the village, and use player failures and your moves to advance the clocks.

When a clock reaches , the village loses one population; when it reaches , they lose another. When the clock reaches midnight, the want has become so critical that 1d6 population are lost. Inform the fiction with these clocks! Has the village been remiss in providing their dragon guardian with gold and gems for its hoard? Then talk about how it gets upset, storms through the village eating and burning those 1d6 kobolds! If they choose to ignore a clock, you are obli- gated by your principles to bring that want to bear.

Wants should drive their play! The Ticking of a Clock Ticking a want clock is one of your most important collabora- tion points for the game. The flow of want clocks helps drive the overall storyline by defining the priorities of the kobolds. Ticking a want clock is the same as asking the players a question. This immediately makes answering his question a priority for the kobolds! Focusing on a single want clock will ratchet up the tension as the loss of population becomes a real threat.

Evenly distributing ticks across all want clocks lowers the overall tension and allows the players more freedom to play around in the story.

Manipulating Wants Wants and want clocks are major levers in N o C ountry F or O ld K obolds , making them great source material for custom moves.

Wants are constantly reset throughout the game, so using the reset as a trigger allows you to be fairly certain the move will get rolled multiple times per session. For instance, I might theme a campaign around disease and prevention. To model this I want to implement a Cure Disease move which gives the kobolds a chance to cure diseases, but might aggravate another want clock when a success with consequence or miss are rolled.

Units can be a single monster or a group; individuals and groups work the same way, making kobold swarm tactics or hordes of soldiers a lot easier to deal with mechanically. Units are also very simple which makes creating them on the fly a lot easier. Units have two stats; hit points and damage.

Hit points tell you how much damage the unit can take; damage is the die the unit rolls when dealing damage. Note these stats get added even if they are a negative. So if warfare is -2 and the players recruit a unit of kobolds from the village using the Teamwork move it will receive a -2 penalty to its dice rolls when rolling for damage. Obviously, units can only attack other units or characters within their range. The positioning of unit cards or index cards on a map can help track who is in range of whom or you can just wing it and simply look to the fiction to tell you where every- one is positioned.

Feel free to use miniatures if you enjoy them, just assume most kobolds can move about three squares, medium. You often need to create units on the fly, assigning stats as they come up in the fiction. Luckily, unit creation is easy! For a normal human some- where around hit points is probably about right, but for a full size dragon it might be more like The table Average to the right shows the standard Dice Damage progression of damage dice and 1d6 3.

Move up or down this ladder as you see fit to best suit 1d10 5. Smaller 2d6 7 weaker units are going to be on 2d8 9 the upper part of the ladder; 3d6 Anything 3d10 A minotaur unit might have the move Gore Everything in Sight! A dwarven unit might have the move Fists of Stone! An elven unit might have the move Rain of Arrows! These moves work like other GM moves pp.

Converting Units from Dungeon World Converting from D ungeon W orld is fairly easy: simply take any monster from D ungeon W orld and pull out the moves, hit points, and damage. Just pick and choose which ones to use and drop the rest. If you feel like the orcs your kobolds fear would be more powerful than those in Dungeon World, then create wholly new stats. The more outrageous the action, the more exciting the repercussions of those actions, and the more memo- 68 rable and fun experience the action will be for your players.

To facilitate that experience, you need to keep a few things in mind. Keep it moving. That cleric unit is probably healing someone; that rogue is probably trying to hide. Keep the units active. Keeping everything visible to the players makes things run 69 faster and helps build trust.

Keep it open. Do they not agree with the group? Does their kobold want to use different tactics? Let them. Keep the players involved. To make combat as interesting and effective as possible, you need the players to help you create a vivid world. One of the best way to facilitate player engagement and get them involved is by asking this sort of question. Momentum While running combat another element to keep an eye on is momentum. In sports, momentum is the idea that your play can dictate the pace and tenor of the game, giving you advantage over the opponent.

In N o C ountry F or O ld K obolds your players are your teammates and the opponent is boring, rote combat. Failures 70 on the part of the players and liberal use of golden opportunities on your part will provide more than enough adversity for the players to overcome.

Not everything needs to be a full combat with rounds and struc- ture. Sometimes you can just have the players roll a couple of moves to completely resolve the situation and move along—not everything is combat. A combat round dilates time in a game, immediately slowing the pacing to a crawl. You need to use combat as a seasoning, not a sauce—sprinkle it carefully instead of pouring it on. When you use combat, try for short bursts throughout the story instead of a constant slog. Just use these big set piece battles sparingly.

Tag Reference Tags are fictional descriptors or properties of units, items, PCs, or pretty much anything else. Tags like near, far, and knock back all describe different properties of the thing to which they are attached. Here are a few examples of tags used in this book.

If you want to create more tags, go for it! One-Shots and Campaigns This section outlines how to run one-shot adventures as well as longer term campaigns. It outlines the basics for gearing up to run each type of game and gives you some tools to help the game keep moving. One-Shots N o C ountry F or O ld K obolds excels at one-shots, three- or four-hour sessions that let you tell a complete story about a kobold village. Follow the introduction script provided in the First Session section pp.

Use the elder kobold the players create at the start of the session to push the players toward their first mission or use an external pressure to force an encounter with a threat. The game will start to roll on its own once the players start making choices and rolling dice. Easy Mission Creation While there are tons of different ways to structure a mission, a simple three act structure can help you keep the game focused: get the kobolds into the Country and dealing with the inhabitants, get them to the thing they need, and get them out.

In a four-hour session, you should be able to run two or three of these missions with breaks and instructions. Act 1 Exposition minutes During the first act of the mission, ask questions about the Country the PCs are exploring. The answers to these questions allow you to estab- lish the overall feel of the mission and Country.

Instead of jumping to a combat, you might want to let the land provide the first encounter: 72 maybe they kobolds are forced to cross a lava pit by jumping from pylon to pylon or climb a mighty tree to gain access to the upper levels of the Elven kingdom. Act 2 Rising Tension minutes During the second act, start ratcheting up the encounters and difficult decisions. The players will likely be nearing the location of their want and will face the mid- and upper- tier inhabitants of the Country.

Act 3 Climax minutes At this point, the kobolds who are still alive have reached the location of their want and will likely face the Country Cham- pion in order to gain access.

A particular favorite of mine is an encounter with an adventuring party! At this point, it is likely the players already have a plan to reset their next clock. In a three- to four-hour game, the players will probably have time to reset two to three wants. They are also likely to go through a few generations of kobolds and earn a few advanced moves for the village. Campaign Play In campaigns, you want to let the kobolds begin to work on eliminating, absorbing, or nullifying the other Countries.

Let them weave the intricate webs that generations of kobolds can construct over months and years. Families can intermingle; you can allow prerequisites to come from either parent in this case. As the GM, use the time between sessions to flesh out new Country moves, champion moves, units, external pressures and new questions to ask about the world.

Each session will change the world in some way; reflect this flux in the questions you ask the players at the start of each session. What issues has this caused? Which Country did the dignitary belong to? Who are they? If they make enemies their children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren probably have to deal with them. If another player wants to GM a session, simply turn the reins over and create your own kobold family.

Because the majority of the world and threats are already created, there is no need to do additional prep. Modules Modules place the PCs in a pre-generated world with specific challenges and themes. They allow you to play in new and inter- esting scenarios—post-apocalyptic kobolds, space opera kobolds, modern-day kobolds—anything you can think of where kobolds might show up. Each piece will be explained in more detail later in this section.

A full copy of this module is available in the final chapter of this book. Deciding on a theme 76 Modules can support nearly any theme you want; kobolds are remarkably easy to plop into the middle of all kinds of chaos!

You could have a Mad Max themed module, a sci-fi module, a city- based urban fantasy module, or anything else you can think of. The sky really is the limit here, so go wild. A Village Elder Everyone needs someone to look up to! The village elder is a handy character for the GM to have.

It gives them a character to use if they need to get the kobolds moving on one task or another. It also gives some additional flavor to the village. If you don't want to define the village elder simply call out the need for the GM to ask the following question before the game begins. Who is the oldest Kobold in your village?

How old are they and how did they get so old? To con- struct a Country, simply answer each of the questions on the Country Card and extrapolate from there. Modules are not meant to lay out every detail for the players and GM. Humans who had crossed the great seas to escape the persecution of the old empire founded the Duchy of Uplandia well over a thousand years ago.

Initially they stayed 77 well to the north of the kobold villages that dotted the current south- ern border, but as their population grew—and their Country flour- ished—they expanded further and further south, driving out the kobolds who once called the land home.

Now your village is the last of its kind on the southern border. The people consider your kind no more than vermin and most Uplandians will try to kill a kobold on sight—though they are well aware of how dangerous a large group of kobolds can be and will often use traps and snares to thin out a group before approaching. In years past, there was good money in trapping kobolds thanks to the large bounty placed on kobold hides by the Duchy.

These days, though, the Duchy no longer rewards. You can be sure, though, if popu- lations grow to too great a number, the Duchy will be willing to reinstitute the bounty to keep its people safe! What crops do the people of Uplandia grow? What does the land look like on the southern border?

Do they still exist? You should create at least three, but there is no upper limit. Some challenges may require the kobolds to have certain abilities 78 to overcome them; others may simply initiate a scene that the players will have to negotiate. The southern borders are dotted with old hunting lodges and there are still lots of traps and snares littered throughout the region. There is at least one kobold village on the northern border of Uplandia. If the kobolds discover it, they can try to negotiate a peace and trade treaty with these kobolds.

Feel free to create more! I expect to have the books available for purchase sometime early March. Depends on customs etc. No problem at all. The books are currently in route to my distributor and should be available in the next couple of weeks. Hi Steve, sorry to bother you on this again, where can I buy the print edition? Hey, sorry for the delay. Patrick H. I really wanted to like this game.

I really tried to like this game. I love games with incompetent disposable characters because they're a lot of fun. Or at least I love them when they're a lot of fun. My core complaint is that [ Carl A.

I've finally had the chance to read through all of the rules for this and I love it. Great use of the Dungeon World system. First off, who hasn't wondered what life is like for the weakest of the the intelligent denizens of the average fantasy w [ See All Ratings and Reviews. Browse Categories. Rule System. Apocalypse World Engine. BRP Basic Roleplaying. Modiphius 2d Savage Worlds. Product Type. Core Rulebooks. Non-Core Books. Other Tabletop Games. Gift Certificates. Publisher Resources.

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Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in No Country for Old Men may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.

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