ROLEPLAYING ROOTS

Oltréé is based, roughly, on a 2013 French roleplaying game by John Grümph. It’s a medieval setting with an undercurrent of magic seems much of a muchness, but the game is praised by its fans for its sandboxy appeal and a certain OSR quality. Players take on the role of knights, hunters, mystics and scholars, attempting to solve the problems of the land as they explore it.

We asked Gümph about how Oltréé came about, “It derived from experimentations about sandboxing and shared authority tested during a Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition campaign. The question was, ‘how can I give the players some ways to create large parts of a campaign world? So Oltréé is a big toolbox with some rigid mechanics helping the narrative flow freely. It helps the GM let go of his control but gives a clear frame for the players so they don’t wander away from the game. It’s very efficient.”

While many games are happy to swap out the traditional D20 for the D12 (sometimes known as ‘The Queen of Dice’) or for a big old dice pool of D6s, here we have the novelty of the D8 taking centre stage. Completing tests in the Oltréé

roleplaying game is a business of rolling three D8s – identified before the roll as (roughly, as our French isn’t parfait) ’mastery’,

‘proficiency’ and ‘faith’ – to beat the target number between 10 and 28. Two of the numbers have to beat the score when combined, while the ‘faith’ (or exaltation) can be swapped in to help. The delicious part of this however is that the game includes exploding dice – each time a player rolls an eight, they roll again and add it on.

The world is built through hexes collaboratively, with players exploring each hex as you’d expect.

“The first step was solving the eternal problem of the journeys between dungeons. If the region is dangerous, the adventurers can’t just go from here to there without events – but the GM doesn’t always have ideas,” says Gümph “so we added a pile of cards with keywords, flavour and themes. A player takes a card and imagines the beginning of a scene using those prompts. They describe the place, the events and then the GM takes back control when it’s time for the traditional question: ‘What do you do?’”

On top of this, players are encouraged to add ‘rumours’ into the game, which the GM will decide if true or not – with one source suggesting the ‘golden rule’ is that if the GM doesn’t know the answer, it’s got a one in two chance of being true. But how do players take to the game?

“I’ve GMed the introductory adventure for Oltréé countless times,” says Gümph, “five minutes in game and the world and events were totally different from a table to another. One time, a big black dragon came down from the sky on the first event – it became the allied-nemesis of the adventurers’ party and changed all the regional dynamics in only two minutes into the game.”

A roleplaying game very much in need of translation into English, if only for its offbeat systems and gallic appeal. Time to get in touch publishers.