Fatherfog First Impressions
Fearful Fun In The Fog
Fatherfog is the latest offering from Tuesday Knight Games, being a fairytale horror adaptation of the Mothership "Panic Engine." I was already a big fan of Mothership, and I had been running a playtest of a fairytale horror recently in my Perils & Princesses game. So, I was excited when I first heard this was coming, and I'm happy I was able to get it to the table this week for a one-shot to test it out. This post is just some of my first impressions of the game based on that one-shot. I'm not attempting to do a full review yet without playing it more, but if you want more comprehensive thoughts about the game, you can check out the review posted this week over on Playful Void.
What Is This Game?
At the most reductive level, this is just a fantasy reskin of Mothership. I say that positively, as I love Mothership, so having someone else do the work of translating the system to a fantasy/fairytale setting is awesome. You play in a world engulfed in a fog that is always shifting the landscape, making it dangerous to move around, and exposing you to the worst dangers from Fairytales as you try to move around. While there are adaptions to this new world--the foghouses that offer shelter on the road, or foglines marking out safe paths--it's dangerous just to go about, let alone to travel into places with actual monsters.
In place of the Mothership classes, you have Workers, Philosphers, Strangers, and Hunters. Of these, my favorite is the Stranger, slightly inhuman beings that emerged from the fog, unnerving but also helping their human counterparts. This is the perfect adaptation of the Android archetype to fantasy, and one of my players had so much fun playing a person with no eyes and an always open grinning mouth, both seeping fog at all times.
What, specifically, you're intended to be doing in a given campaign is left a bit vague still. It says you're going out seeking "hope" in the fog for your village. But it's not really clear what that means. Until TKG starts releasing adventures to flesh it out more though, there's plenty to go on just from fairytales. For this session, I ran an adventure focused on seeking magical apples to heal a king's daughter, based on one of the Grimm's tales. And as with Mothership, I think the ambiguity helps to let people tailor the game to their own tables and let the game be fleshed out by the community as they publish adventures alongside the publisher.
Let's Talk Mechanics!
Mechanically, the game is very similar to Mothership, but with some key differences that I really like for adapting it to this setting. Rather than building up Stress, you lose Hope over time, and have to roll to avoid Despair when things get really bad. This is basically the same as the Stress/Panic system, but I think it's thematically really good.
Combat functions more or less the same as how many have already been running things for Mothership, but it's more explicitly spelled out procedurally how to describe the situation, call for rolls, and inflict harm on failed rolls. This matches how I'd already been doing it for Mothership, but I think it makes it easier on the Referee here to know how to do things.
One big change on that front though, is that it's a lot easier to kill and be killed. Damage numbers are big on both sides, and combat is intended to be over in just a few rounds. It's also much easier to die. When you're reduced to 0 HP, you get to make a Body save, but if you fail, that's it. No wounds, no death table, just out. In my one-shot, we had one character die in the very first combat. She only had 31 HP to begin with, lost 18 HP making a critical failure trying to fire an arrow through a magical barrier, and then lost 28 HP from an attack by a Griffin. But everyone had a great time. It's particularly fun that you get to meet Death as a character in those final moments, and we had an awesome scene of her feebly trying to bargain for her life while impaled on Griffin talons with death flying alongside her in the air. It's awesome.
There's more explicit overland travel rules, which fits for this type of game, although I did actually find myself wanting more here. In my one-shot I ran it as abstract travel through the fog, with a 25% chance each hour that they would find one of my keyed locations. But I'll be interested to see how TKG formats things in their adventures. It feels like it's not intended to be run based on maps of any kind (hex or point or whatever) but I'd personally like to see some more meaningful choices for how to navigate around through the fog. I didn't think of anything myself for this first adventure, but I'm sure there will be something in the future. There's also specific resting actions, which are good in that they provide concrete benefits for keeping watch or resting, but I also felt like there wasn't enough differentiation there between the options, and I would like to see other choices besides those ones. It feels like the perfect place to incorporate more downtime activities, such as crafting or potionmaking or research, and I hope that gets some more attention in the future.
Skill and stat progression is also very different than Mothership, where it's more or less impossible to improve over time. Here, you get to improve your stats or saves every time you you rest at least 4 hours. You can also buy new skills at 5 skill points each anytime you rest. You'll earn a few skill points for each session, plus 1 every time you keep watch, so it seems like those would rack up quickly. But, that makes sense to me, as I wouldn't expect any character to last long here with how easy it is to die.
Overall Impression?
I really like it, and so did my players. While we planned last night as a one-shot, they immediately asked if we could play more in the future. They also really like Mothership as a system, so having another option for how to play with those rules is great for us. I'm really looking forward to seeing where this game goes, both with what TKG puts out, and also with how the community contributes. I heard from someone at TKG yesterday that they're already starting to accept third party publication submissions, and I'll be planning to put what I ran for this one-shot out as a pamphlet in the next few weeks.