Returning to The Borderlands

At the core of the game is the warband: the counterpart to the classic adventuring party seen in role-playing games or novels like Lord of the Rings or mercenary units like The Black Company. Rather than playing a single character, as you might in a role-playing game, I’m in control of the entire warband.

In the campaign, I’ll travel between towns, villages and farmsteads, dealing with random encounters and events while trying to secure peace across the region.

The game is essentially encounter and combat-based, with decision-making and resource management touches. The focus of each turn in the campaign is a tabletop battle against an enemy group bracketed by pre-planning and aftereffect phases. How that battle comes about is determined both by my choices and previous events, coupled with a certain amount of randomness. The level of detail is left open for interpretation – enough so that you know what’s going on, but not so much as you feel railroaded into only one way things can be described. For instance, a lot of things/people are described in fairly generic terms, it’s then left up to you to describe them so that they fit into your narrative. You could, for instance, swap things around and rather than go medieval, you could play (and therefore describe things) as if you were a band of Ronin in feudal Japan, etc.

As I play, some of my characters will gain experience, skills, and equipment while others may be seriously hurt or even killed.

There isn’t a pre-determined end to the campaign, although the system does offer “adventuring milestones” where you could declare victory if you want to do so. I’ll just be using the default victory condition of ridding the land of the various ‘threats’ (more on that later) scattered throughout the main map regions. Once they’re all cleared, I’ll claim the borderlands as ‘safe’ and end the campaign.

The game is geared completely towards solo play, however, there is no reason why I couldn’t sit down to play with a friend (yes, I have them) – for example splitting the characters of a warband between us and playing together or having one player command the bad guys. It would also be possible to have one player act as GM while the others explore a decrepit ruin full of traps and cultists. They even offer up some tools and tricks to make it easier. I have played using all of these methods in the past and they are all great fun.

It’s a very ‘open’ system, and by that, I mean it’s open to interpretation. The author (Ivan) gives some basic (but detailed) information and then it’s up to you to flesh it out as much or as little as you want so that it fits into the narrative of the type of game you are looking for. Anyone looking for a system where it’s all laid out for you and all you need to do is roll dice on tables, etc. should look elsewhere, this isn’t the game for you. If, on the other hand, you like telling stories to go along with your dice rolling, Five Leagues could very well entertain you for quite a while.