I tried running Hypertellurians again. I’d run a game online with people I sort-of-knew during COVID, and this time my normal gaming crew had a gap between campaigns.
I’ll just drop this in, with only a little prep. I know what happens. It’s a simple system. What could go wrong?
Reader, lots.
My group is what North Americans might call a “beer and pretzels” group, as can be seen from previous writeups, we don’t take things terribly seriously, and some are not terribly attached to their characters.
They’ve also just come off a classic megadungeon, to an RPG that encourages a bit more diplomacy. Or at least punishes combat.
They started a lot of fights, and only got out of being murdered through their initial extreme violence being genuinely quite intimidating to the NPCs. This also meant they fought everyone they met, and got to their final fight with Argencia with nothing up their sleeves apart from being tired and battered.
Unsurprisingly, TPK.
Tools
This was almost entirely theatre of the mind, using Foundry just for some dice rolls.
Lessons learned
Hypertellurians character sheets are quite confusing1, and I think playing purely online doesn’t help. The stat damage that doesn’t damage your stats, and can roll over once but not twice took some understanding.
Most attacks missed, and everyone was a bit tired of combat. The game is quite light and silly in tone, but the combat is not.
The pre-written character sheets are entertaining and have fun perks with consequences (e.g. take damage to vomit plague, animate dead but they scream). Providing you read the text - this isn’t Old School Essentials. There might be a power in the fine print at the bottom of a satchel, no bolded lists.
These are suspiciously similar to the lessons I learned last time - one might say they didn’t take particularly well 😮💨