Five Leagues from the Borderlands: Some thoughts after 60+ campaign turns

 The Thrappled Lemmings have completed their quest successfully but I feel like this is not a firm and final conclusion to the campaign. I almost want to carry on trying to complete everything that has shown up on the campaign map. My choice to end the campaign with the final level of the Temple delve was made at the start of the campaign. It was an arbitrary point to end it in some ways, but it also fits the narrative of acquiring enough wealth to retire. It is in the nature of a sandbox campaign that there is always something more to do, just like life. This is the real strength of Five Leagues from the Borderlands.

I have really enjoyed getting the campaign to this point. There was no point during the campaign where I could not be bothered. The random events, constant addition of new unexplored areas to the map, generation of contracts and quests and all the other things that happened along the way have built a  fun narrative for me. They helped make my party real as I decided how they should respond and what they should focus on. Of course, if you don't like roll and write type games, then the amount of dice rolling in Five Leagues from the Borderlands may not be to your taste. I still maintain that it is a very well constructed rules set.

While the campaign went well, there were a couple of negative things. The main one was choosing a mystic as my avatar. He was not as actively involved in winning the battles as I would have liked. As my avatar, I wanted Lysanthir to be a hero, not a supporting character. Part of this was the spells he had, but the rules are not written for wizards who use pyrotechnics and lightning bolts. Nevertheless, with different spell choices, he could have been more active in the fight and exploration. For a future campaign, I shall probably take a warrior as my avatar instead and have a mystic in support, unless supplements come out that have more offensive mystics.

The other main negative thing was that, at times, it felt like the hostile forces were too easy to beat. In part this is because I fought each hostile in increasing order of difficulty, but the party seemed to level up faster than the difficulty increased. Where my party did suffer, it was most often because I made mistakes, and only rarely because of really bad dice rolls. My willingness to use story points freely will have contributed to this. I used them to enhance the narrative rather than mechanistically. In a future campaign I might use Story Points more mechanistically and/or introduce some of the difficulty increases that the rules suggest, but then I am constant in my inconsistency and the narrative needs of the campaign could easily trump the mechanics once more.

All in all, I consider buying this game to be good value for money. I have played a lot and had a lot of enjoyment from it. That goes beyond just playing the games but to the whole process of collecting and painting the figures, making the terrain from the earliest stages of printed 2D terrain to sorting out nicer 3D terrain, and writing the story of the Thrappled Lemmings. I don't really enjoy painting figures, but this campaign has kept me focused on fettling old figures and painting new ones, and that has been a positive process with positive outcomes.

So, where next?

Lysanthir is nicely set up as a Friend/Patron in the campaign world now. He has a quest on the books, a Strange Map and some Vital Information that can form the basis of a new campaign. Wido is in a position to be a new party leader or to be a resource to be called upon for a new party. I have figures for factions that did not appear in this campaign waiting to be painted. That means that I could carry on in the same area exploring the unexplored areas, delving the undelved delves and following the unfollowed quests. I could also buy the supplement The Ancient Land of Dust and send a new party off there on a quest for Lysanthir to find out about the Serpentine Arts. I just wish this was available as a physical book and not just as a pdf. I am really not a fan of pdf documents for my gaming.

The plan is to mull over the campaign ideas for a while and see what most takes my fancy. As usual, the set-up will be a mix of what the rules say and what I think best fits the narrative. The only thing I am sure of is that I shall mostly start from scratch regarding my party so that I can try different options and see how they develop. Now, while I am mulling things over and preparing, what should I play next?