Forbidden Lands Companion

An unofficial Gamemaster's aid for Forbidden Lands

The rule, at the moment it applies.

The Companion watches the clock, the weather and the party. When the book says someone must roll, it tells you who, what and on which page. Before the moment has passed.

See what it does

  1. Nobody is keeping watch. If an encounter comes, the threat is up close before anyone notices it.

    PHB 149–150

  2. This is hike #3, a Forced March. Everyone rolls Endurance. Failure costs Agility and gains no hex.

    PHB 146

  3. Cold: Kesh. Roll Endurance once per day. Each failure is 1 damage to Strength and 1 to Wits.

    PHB 111

  4. Tamsin leads the way to the burnt mill. Survival, with +1 for clear skies.

    PHB 147
The Travel screen, mid-journey. Tap it for a three-minute tour of the whole app.

Two things go wrong at the table

The journey becomes “you arrive”.

Forbidden Lands is a game about the wilderness. The Quarter Days, the hikes, the pathfinder and the watch are the game. Under pressure they shrink to a single sentence, and the land stops mattering.

Conditions are narrated, never rolled.

“You're getting cold” is not the rule. The rule is an Endurance roll, damage to Strength and Wits, and no recovery until they're warm. When nobody remembers, nobody rolls.

The Companion fixes both the same way. It speaks up at the right moment, and it always gives the page.

What it does

Travel

The journey happens one Quarter Day at a time, the way the book runs it.

  • Plan the Quarter Day. Hike, Lead the Way, Keep Watch, Forage, Hunt, Fish, Make Camp, Rest, Sleep or Explore. The app calls the rolls that follow.
  • Over thirty reminders watch the party and the clock: forced marches, darkness, cold, hunger, thirst, sleep, nobody on watch, a pathfinder who is also keeping watch.
  • Weather every day, on the Ravenland calendar, with its seasons, and the modifiers applied to the rolls it touches.
  • The hex map. Name where the party is going, and the journal records every hex they cross.
  • An end-of-day checklist for food, water and sleep, so the day can't close with a debt unpaid.
The Rules tab, open on the Quarter Day economy. Each activity is listed with who can combine it with a hike, and a table of hiking distance by terrain.
Every rule card carries its page. Search by the words you remember hearing.

Encounters and combat

From “something is there” to the last blow, without leaving the tablet.

  • Encounter checks by the book: the terrain's D66 table from the Gamemaster's Guide or the Book of Beasts, and who sees it coming.
  • The range-band board. Arm's Length, Near, Short, Long and Distant. Tap a fighter, tap a band, and the shooting modifier is right there.
  • Initiative cards for everyone in the fight, drawn for the monsters and read out by the players.
  • A bestiary of monsters with their attacks, and a critical injury table for each kind of hit.
The Combat tab. A manticore and a bandit stand at Short range, the four adventurers at Near. Initiative cards run down the right-hand side.
A manticore at Short range. The board is the range, so nobody has to measure.

The party, and the people they meet

The paper sheet stays the truth. The app keeps only what guides play.

  • Adventurers kept lean: kin, profession, talents, conditions, and whether an attribute is Broken. No mirror of the sheet.
  • Backgrounds: childhood, formative events, Pride, relationships and how the party met.
  • Dark Secrets stay folded. They are marked GM only and hidden until you tap.
  • A Pride reminder when a roll fails, while the Pride is still there to use.
  • Roll a person in one tap: a name, a trade, what they want, what they hide. Keep them and they come back next session.
Ylva the orc fighter's card on the Party tab, showing her childhood, formative event, Pride, what she thinks of each companion, and a folded Dark Secret marked GM only.
Ylva's background. Her Dark Secret stays folded until you ask.

The record

What happened, where, and the story of it afterwards.

  • The journal files every hex the party crossed, and every encounter met there, fought or not.
  • The session log keeps rolls, encounters and days as they happen, plus the lines you type.
  • Session stories. Record a session and it is retold as a short story, in a tone you choose: grim and spare, heroic saga, light-hearted fantasy, fireside folk tale, or your own words.
  • Secrets stay secret. A story is told that an adventurer carries a Dark Secret, never what it is.
  • Take it with you. Download any note as markdown.
The Notes tab. The record of days 363 to 365, retold as two paragraphs of story about an ogre, three bandits and a hard search for water.
Three days of rolls, told as the story of them.
The Journal tab listing hexes crossed. Hex AA17 is open, showing three encounters met there and one fight won.
The journal, hex by hex.
The People tab with a rolled person: Garmelda, a constantly smiling human trader who wants to get a message to someone she should not know.
Garmelda the trader, one tap old.
The Settings tab. Story tone buttons: grim and spare, heroic saga, light-hearted fantasy, fireside folk tale, your own words. Below, a button to export the campaign.
Pick the voice your stories are told in.

The players roll their own dice.

The app calls for rolls, adds up the modifiers and reads the result you give it: successes, banes, a push, negative dice. It never rolls for an adventurer.

Built for the table, not the desk.

Tablet first, with big targets and no pop-ups. Works offline once installed. Keyboard keys for the busy moments: A advances the quarter, E checks for an encounter, D opens the dice. Campaigns live in your browser, with a backup file whenever you want one.

House rules look like house rules.

The book is always shown as the book. Where you play it differently, the change sits behind a setting and is marked as homebrew on every card it touches.

It ships bare. You bring the books.

The Companion contains no text from Free League's books. Out of the box, the rule cards, encounter tables and bestiary are empty. The engine is all there: the clock, the reminders, the dice reading, the board. The words it quotes are not.

You fill it from the books you own. Add a rule card, an encounter, a monster or a table by hand, and the app asks for the page it came from, so every card still points back to the book. What you add stays in your browser, for your table.

The Companion in three minutes

If the player does not load, watch it on YouTube.