Progress through stories in your quest to rid the land of evil.
Who doesn’t love a bit of old school D&D-style storytelling? Throw in a vaguely eastern European fantasy setting with gothic touches, vampires and werewolves, and I’m sold. So I really enjoy Folklore: the Affliction, an unapologetically old-fashioned gaming experience from Greenbrier Games. Some younger gamers may find the idea of scribbling information on character sheets weird and clunky in a modern boardgame, but us old timers will smile and shake their heads and say “we remember the days…”, and then nod off with a cup of hot cocoa resting on our bellies.
It may happily embrace basic, dice-heavy combat and card-drawing wilderness travel, but Folklore: the Affliction, mark my words, is still a lot of fun. I was lucky enough to get the Mythic pledge for the recent reprint, so my version has a whole lot of extras like miniatures and cloth character mats, but the real meat of this game is in the story books. I’ve only played one chapter, but it was a very amusing evening’s entertainment which, at one stage, saw our two characters desperately trying to open a tomb door while zombies burst up from their graves and swarmed us. Yeah, it’s mostly just rolling dice, but turn your brain off and your imagination on and you’ll love it. There are many, many hours of story content available in the core game, the Dark Tales expansion, and online, but if you really get into it, there’s even a 60 page Adventure Creation Kit book so you can create your own adventures.
So grab your dice, your crucifix, and your wooden stake. You’re going to need them adventurer!
By the way, this summary and reference is the 300th I’ve created.
This is fantastic!!! Is there any way I can get a file with crop marks and bleeds? I would like to print and bind one for my adventuring.
Sorry, I didn’t set it up with bleeds as these are almost always printed out on home colour printers.
Your link to the “The Joy of Unboxing: Folklore: the Affliction” links to “joy-of-unboxing-big-trouble-in-little-china”. Can you fix that?
Sorry, fixed!
Great work on this (as always with an EoG summary). My group have been playing FL:TA for the past year and the structure/disorder of the rule book has been one of the most annoying aspects of the game (beyond the minor annoyances of the 1st printing like missing equipment cards etc – fixed in the second KS, which I missed; something to remedy with the new expansion on KS). One thing we have been doing though is running a GM – none of the other players are RPGers so this is a soft landing for them, and allows some creative balancing in the game (and more vicious monsters hell-bent on mayhem when things seem too easy for the players! }:-[ Thanks again.
Cheers Bart. Yes, it’s a great way to introduct people to RPGs. How are you finding the difficulty level? I’ve found it a bit punishing for 2 players, but we do keep coming back to it (and we haven’t got past Dusk level adventures yet). You’ve found it getting easy, really?
Sorry, missed this question – I had a few situations of having to ‘balance’ the game (as the narrator/pseudo-GM), but by the end of the first story journal some of the PCs were powered (overpowered?) prompting more creative use of the enemies as NPCs.
Yes, I think a bit of in-game tweaking is a good thing for everyone’s enjoyment!