Hillfolk
Alex walks through the basics of Hillfolk from Peregrine Press.
Hillfolk is a wonderfully weird little story game with a lot of fun mechanics geared towards facilitating interesting player-centric story and conflict. Today we're going to take a look at what I like about the system and how it offers a reasonably unique take on playing a particular kind of player-conflict dramatic storytelling.
(n.b. most of the links in this post are affiliate links)
Background
Hillfolk is a delightfully weird tabletop RPG created by Robin D. Laws and published by Peregrine Press in 2013 following a successful Kickstarter. You might know Robin as the creator of the Gumshoe system (of which Trail of Cthulhu is composed); he's done a fair amount of innovative mechanical things through his career and Hillfolk is no exception.
Like Gumshoe before it, Hillfolk contains the rules for a general system called DramaSystem which it dives right into at the beginning of the book. Following that, you are introduced to the default setting in "The Land and Its People" chapter. At the end of the book, there are a full list of alternative settings you can use the DramaSystem with, ranging from "Hyper-capitalist Robots" to poets who want to one-up each other in 1700s London.
The Book's Presentation
The layout and typography for this book are great, the design is simple and easy to read. I particularly enjoy the color scheme and how legible the text is on it. The artwork, too, adheres to the same pallet, keeping sepia tones throughout. There's a little line at the top of the page which has a small hill drawing on it that I love.
There is also a very subtle change when you get to the additional settings chapter, where the primary color changes from a brown to a blue clearly separating it from the rest of the book. Likewise, the "hill" disappears from the title line since it's no longer talking about the "Hillfolk" part of the game.
It's really nice, I really like how they did the layout.
The DramaSystem and how the game plays
For a system with only 50-some-odd pages of rules, there's actually quite a lot to cover here, so I'll try to be as brief as possible.
What you need to play
This game actually requires a fair amount of stuff even though the mechanics are pretty simple when you get the hang of them. You need:
- A deck of standard playing cards to resolve procedural scenes
- Poker chips or beads
- Tokens colored red, yellow, and green. One of each for each player.
- A fourth colored token, multiple per player.
- Index Cards and scratch paper
You'll note the absence of dice. That's right, dice are not involved in the resolution mechanic for this game. I personally think that's a miss due to the complexity involved in procedural scenes, but we'll talk about that later.
Character Creation
There are 18 steps in Character creation, with some steps repeated, but each of the steps are fairly short. The process is reminiscent of Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games in that there are a series of questions and answers, starting from the general "who are you" type questions along with "what are your desires", relationships / wants of the other player characters, dramatic poles. The only "mechanical" portions of the process are your action types, which are widely broad skill categories like "Fighting" and "Making" which you rate as strong, weak, or middling.
Overall the process takes a fair amount of time since you're taking turns and adding to the setting as you go. When you're done, you wind up with a relationships chart that looks pretty similar to the Cortex Prime relationships map (if you've played Smallville this whole process will feel familiar).
After all of that is completed, you can then move on to running your first set of scenes.
Dramatic Poles and Desires
One key element of a Hillfolk (or DramaSystem) character is their internal emotional desires and their dramatic poles. The desire is usually something simple: forgiveness, acceptance, power, and the like. Something you can sum up in one or two words. It's at the core of why they do what they do in the setting and the scenes you're calling.
The dramatic poles are as opposite as you can get them, and they represent your character's inner conflict. You need these to gain bennies (which are distinct from "tokens", the primary currency). Basically they're used as a role playing tool to gain a mechanical reward in the secondary metacurrency.
Dramatic and Procedural Scenes
Hillfolk breaks the action of play into two distinct scene types: dramatic and procedural. Procedural scenes are what you might think of as "standard action" from other tabletop games. You might be going to fight a neighboring village or sneaking past a bear to get through a cave. Anything that the action is focused on achieving a "practical, external goal" is a procedural scene.
Dramatic scenes, by contrast, are focused on achieving an emotional reward for your character. Perhaps my character wants to finally get recognition from my rival, played by another player, embarrassing them in the process. To do that, I'd call a scene with them in it and use my tokens to gain narrative advantages over the other player. In turn, they can counter using those same tokens (more on that in a second).
As this is a game built around drama, it expects you to call dramatic scenes way more frequently than procedural ones. Which is good, because I think that the procedural scenes are mechanically weaker than dramatic scenes.
Dramatic Scenes
The "default" scene type in Hillfolk is all about trying to fulfil your character's emotional desire and use their dramatic poles to influence how they act out that desire.
During this scene, there is a big pile of tokens (of that fourth color mentioned above) sitting in the middle which will change hands multiple times in the scene. If the players have bennies, they can spend them during the scene to do a wide range of things, including gaining more of the sweet fourth color tokens.
Every scene consists of a petitioner and a granter; the petitioner wants something from the granter. Sometimes this is stated aloud when framing the scene, sometimes you just start the scene and act out stating the desire. You earn tokens by either granting the request (gain a token for the granter) or by being refused (by the petitioner). You can spend tokens to force the granter into a concession, but not necessarily full approval. The scene continues until everyone at the table thinks you've reached a dramatic conclusion, with either the petitioner getting what they want, or the granter rebuffing them.
Usually the petitioner is the player who is currently in the spotlight and the granter is either another PC or an NPC (called recurring characters) controlled by the GM. The person calling the scene can specify whose present from the outset, but if some other PCs wish to crash the party they may spend tokens or bennies to do so.
Relatedly, if the scene caller wants to pull a PC into a scene and the PC does not want to participate in it, they can spend a token to avoid joining (and if there's a safety tool violation, no token is necessary of course, because the scene will need to be reframed in the first place).
Overall, dramatic scenes are very free-form and there's not a lot in them mechanically aside from the give and take of the tokens.
Procedural Scenes
Procedural scenes, on the other hand are both more mechanically complex than dramatic scenes and also much less common. This is a strange interaction since the system presented for resolving procedural scenes is far more complicated than dramatic scenes. I suspect they spent a fair amount of time on it both designing and play testing it, because well… Let me describe it.
You remember the red, yellow, and green tokens from before? The GM picks how hard a task is in secret, and assigns a colored token to it. Red's the easiest, Green is the hardest. They then draw a single card from the deck which is the "target card". Each player describes what they plan to do, spends a colored token, and draws a number of cards according to the spent token (green = 2, yellow = 1, red = 1 and the GM can eliminate any player's card). Any players not in the scene may also spend tokens to draw cards to help. The objective is to draw a card that matches the number (or face) on the card if the GM picked a green challenge, the Suit if yellow, or the color if red. Spent tokens are put to the side and cannot be used until you've used each of your three tokens. This carries over between games.
Once everyone has drawn a card and an outcome determined, you go around the table narrating the results based on how close your card matched with the GM helping to support the narration.
Overall, the system's not too difficult. I've certainly seen more complicated systems in games. But it is a fair amount of work to figure out where the odds are going to land and how you should manage your tokens if you want to have great odds of success. On a Green difficulty challenge, you have a 3/51 chance for every card you draw of success (the target card stays on the table) — which the GM can eliminate if anyone used a red token. It's pretty hard to calculate how well a scene is going to go in either direction due to the information asymmetry.
The best part is as players you do not know the difficulty of the challenge because the GM hides their token until the end. It's only based on the GM's narration and a little "surprise" so there's an added surprise element at the end.
I think the information asymmetry is my biggest problem with the procedural resolution mechanic, for scenes that theoretically should be happening only rarely. Other than that, it's simple enough to remember how to do it once you've done it once or twice though so it's not a major burden overall.
I'd probably have done it with dice though, using the character's strengths and weaknesses defined at character creation.
But wait, what about those strengths / weaknesses?
Glad you asked, dear reader! Those are only used in player versus player resolutions.
If a fight breaks out and a character is strong in fighting while the other character is weak in fighting, the strong character wins. Full stop. If equally matched or strong vs middling, you draw against each other (based on spending a procedural token) and try to get the high card. Any face cards give you a narrative advantage.
That's even more complicated than the simple resolution magic, but again not too difficult to remember.
What I like about Hillfolk
As I mentioned at the beginning, I really love the design of the book. It's simple and elegant and easy to read.
What I like most, however, is how the dramatic scene resolution system mostly gets out of the way of telling the story. Very similar to how Microscope scenes play out in practice. The character creation is very tuned to support the drama portion of the system by setting up relationships between the characters and dramatic poles to influence the character's behavior. By giving them a desire that can only be fulfilled by the relationships to the other characters you create a system that makes for great storytelling.
The additional settings presented in the book are also excellent, and you can adapt the DramaSystem to many other kinds of settings / scenarios easily. It's easily one of my favorite resolution mechanics for playing character-centric player vs. player drama.
What I'd change
I've been a player in Hillfolk / DramaSystem a few times now, and I think having done it enough times I'd change the resolution mechanic for Procedural scenes to use something dice-based. Most likely I'd adapt the rules from the 24XX SRD to make a rules-lite mechanical resolution system and play the scenes pretty much the same way. Less fiddly card-matching, and more action.
Overall
Hillfolk is a fantastic entry into the pile of dramatic storytelling games and one that does a particular kind of storytelling very well, but it suffers a bit (IMO) from its framing around procedural scenes. It's got a lot of similarities to other systems (Cortex, Microscope, PbtA, Amber) and seems to draw inspiration from a lot of them.
I like it, and it comes off the shelf when I'm in the mood for interpersonal drama games. Usually, though, we're playing a low-player-conflict collaborative storytelling game, and the lack of that interpersonal drama means that there are other systems better suited to the game we'll be playing.
In short, it's a game that's great at the thing it was designed to do, and if that's the kind of game you're playing it's excellent. If it's not, I'd reach for something else.
