This is not prescriptive. I don’t know your setting, the rulesets you may have used in the past, or your players. But I do know that FKR can intimidate people, mainly by two factors: the difficulty in understanding what it is (here’s my attempt at explaining it) and the fear that it’s extremely demanding on the referee. That you aren’t cut to run FKR style unless you know your setting/genre as well as a Prussian officer knows war. I want to dispel that bullshit.
FKR’s difficulty doesn’t need to be another misconception in the hobby, like that playing in Glorantha demands complete knowledge of the setting and a degree in Comparative Mythology.
(A short note on playing in Glorantha: ignore every idiot who thinks the above and wants to gatekeep the setting. Your Glorantha Will Vary. A suggestion on how you can start: sit down and watch a bunch of Harryhausen films for inspiration. Grab a short summary of Glorantha for names and basic information. Do an extremely simple adventure like a small dungeon or breaking into an enemy camp or a small investigation or whatever, or grab an acclaimed module like Borderlands or Griffin Mountain. Run that and add information as your campaign progresses. It’s that simple.)
So, here’s my suggestion on how you can start FKR once you know the principles:
- Think what setting, or at least adventure, you want to run. Take simple notes on that, or just grab a module. You can write down setting principles that players must know, but don’t worry about anything beyond what seems relevant to the immediate game.
- What rulesets do you know well? Look at the adventure you want to run and think if anything on those rulesets could help. Select what procedures you think would work. Ignore how they fit together because they don’t need to. If you are running blackbox (few to none player-facing rules), nobody will have to learn anything. Think of them based on what they help abstracting that is directly present in the fiction. When selecting procedures, consider if they seem like they would “force” your decisions as referee in a certain direction (storygames may sometimes do that). If they would but you still think they would be useful, remember you can ignore them as soon as they conflict with the world or your decisions, it doesn’t matter if you used them so far. When in doubt, you can do a coin toss. The principles of the world will be your conscience.
- Character creation is important in FKR for the players to grasp the setting. If you don’t know what character creation procedure to use, here’s a suggestion: use the Olde House Rules method of asking each player to write down 30 words about their character (there’s also the Heroquest method of 100 words). That will help both sides to understand what the character may do and where they fit. You can of course use any creation method you wish and fit them to the selected procedures.
- Start playing. Note down rulings you made. See what procedures work and which gave you trouble. Note down small things about the setting that the table seemed interested in to develop further later. Sit down later and consider all that.
It’s that easy. Think of yourself not as the Free Kriegsspiel Umpire, already perfect in their knowledge of the game and the simulation, but as someone slowly training to be an Umpire, carving their own way. It’s just a game. Don’t fret it. And if you use all these suggestions to run FKR in Glorantha, let me know.
Quick edit: it can be helpful to see actual play reports of FKR. While I’m late on doing mine, here’s three blogs with quite the collection (the links go directly to the posts tagged as play reports):
- https://aboleth-overlords.com/tag/actual-play/
- https://www.revenant-quill.com/search/label/sesh%20report?m=1
- https://undergroundadv.blogspot.com/search/label/Session%20Report?m=1
Roll to Doubt 