The dungeons of Fear & Hunger stand before you...
Fear & Hunger (F&H) and
Fear & Hunger 2: Termina (Termina) are dungeon crawl RPGs with a lot of meat to pick from and use. The first game is set in a classical megadungeon called Fear & Hunger while the second is a city crawl through the afflicted town of Prehevil and its many minor dungeons.
Many people describe these games as "games that hate you" due to their sheer difficulty. And yeah, these are very challenging hellish crawls set to tear apart the unprepared. But if "Nethack and Silent Hill inspired survival horror dungeon explorer" tickles your neocortex or causes an ominous humming sound to emit from your cerebral cortex then check it out. Oh and take those warnings on the game page and in the game seriously, the world of Fear & Hunger is extremely dark.
Spoilers ahead! The game is best experienced blind.
Alright with that out of the way, I want to highlight some things from my experiences playing the games so far:
Fear & Hunger
Puzzle Monsters
Most of the combat encounters in both games are against one creature, you'll very rarely be fighting two or three at the same time. The reason for this is because it only really takes one foe to absolutely ruin an unprepared party.
Combat in F&H has the party deciding which body part of the enemy to attack aside from a few abilities that vary their locations or hit everything. You can cut off a cleaver wielding arm to stop a devastating hacking attack, cripple the legs to stagger the enemy and expose their head, keep rolling the dice trying for a lucky headshot, or just concentrate on the torso to take the monster out directly.
The first encounter with a new enemy is always tense. You have no idea what it does and need to be careful. After a few encounters you start to figure out the best ways to to cut down some of them and start getting into the groove of understanding the best approach, but bosses are always a terrifying encounter. Are they going to go for my limbs? Attack our sanity? Inflict conditions?
Let's take one of the most common horrible encounters: the Guard. Spoilers ahead.
Standard guards wander around the early levels of the dungeon. They're generally slow and easy to avoid, but if you get locked into a fight with one then you need to have a plan. Almost every encounter with an enemy will have the players take their turns first (something something agility), so we take a look at this guy and consider:
1. There's a big cleaver in his left hand. That thing looks like it could inflict bleeding or even chop a limb.
2. The "stinger" between its legs is bad vibes, I hate it, and I am afraid of what it will do.
3. There's the other arm, which is really big and looks maybe longer than the cleaver arm? That could be a problem.
So what do we go for first? There's an optimal way to handle these guys with almost no chance of taking damage and I'm not going to spoil all of it, but this visual representation is something that could easily be explained at a table to represent a monster your players will encounter. Without any input from the player, the guard will do the following things:
1. The cleaver will slice at a party member and sever a limb and do damage.
2. The stinger might do a high damage piercing attack.
3. The big right arm might initiate a Coin Flip attack. Coin Flips attacks are something like Save or Die attacks. Crucially, this one can be entirely avoided if all of the characters guard before the attack comes. Failure to dodge or guard it is going to probably kill one of your characters early on.
And this is just an example of one of the many monsters in the dungeon. Again, each of them have a variety of attacks, are made up of components that can be targeted to disrupt these attacks, and have standard attack patterns.
Running Away
Not encountering something (seeing it on the world map and running around it) or running from an already started battle are some of the best options for combat in F&H. Why risk resource expenditure when you could just not encounter the creature? Much like at the table, sometimes the best choices it to run away. Or to talk! Many creatures have unique interactions where you can try talking to them, distracting them, confusing them, trivializing or ending encounters early. Although for others, talking might just be a waste of your turn- it's up to the player to make the judgement call.
Actually I think this is why so many people find the game so challenging early on. Much like a 5e trained table, they see a monster and must go fight the monster. Running away or choosing to not encounter it isn't an option people think of with these sorts of games, and there's definitely a few thrown in early on that are intended to teach players that running away is not only viable, but sometimes the best choice.
Fighting a monster doesn't always reward the player with much here either. Looting the body of a crazed cave gnome might turn up a shilling? But was it worth getting bleeding on two of your characters and an infection on one? There's no experience system here, F&H embraces the diegetic advancement system of finding equipment,
Resources
Much like your tabletop dungeon crawling experience, there are resources to be spent and carefully used here!
- Food: In the dungeons of Fear and Hunger, you get hungry quickly! Just entering the dungeon makes you get hungry faster. There's a pervasive, oppressive influence (with an in universe explanation) that constantly drains the party. Food items need to be scrounged, prepared into recipes, and used carefully to avoid starving in the bowels of the dungeon.
- Mind: Mind is a sanity mechanic that drains over time as well, and if a character reaches 0 mind it's game over for them. In F&H, it drains faster when you're not using a torch which ties torch management into this resource loop. In Termina, Mind can be slowly regenerated by hanging out in one of the two "safe" areas where you can relax and chat with party members. Mind is also used directly by spellcasting in both games and managing mind is critical for a spell heavy run.
- Health: Health is a big one. It's the discrete number of hit points you have but you're also going to be managing the variety of status effects that you can be afflicted with. An infection from an attack in an arm or leg will kill a character over time and has to be treated with a healing item- or the limb needs to be removed. Speaking of limbs:
- LIMBS ARE A RESOURCE TOO: Lose both your arms and you're reduced to tackling. Lose your legs and you're slowed both in battle and on the world map. There are also ways to get your limbs back which you can only discover through searching the world and understanding its magic systems.
- Time: In F&H you have about thirty in game minutes before a character tied to several of the possible player characters' backstories dies. In Termina, the entire game takes place over three days with different events and character activities happening across the town. Termina in particular also ties time into its saving mechanic. There are several ways to save your game, but the easiest one is to rest in one of the usable beds throughout the city, advancing time and also gaining access to the game's advancement system.
- Restoratives: These are the things that cure your conditions and heal your characters. Herbs are scattered around the maps, and if you find a recipe book you can make these herbs and other resources into a variety of healing items.
- Battle Items: Termina has more of these, including one of the best additions which are glass shards you throw into enemies' eyes to blind them and make their attacks miss. But there's also things like explosives, saw blades, traps (usable on the overworld screen too), poisons, and more. Each of these add new ways to deal with encounters aside from just the tried and true hack and slash.
Books and Lore
People have been discussing usable lore lately, and F&H as well as Termina are great case studies of how to sprinkle lore in. Facts about the dungeon and its inhabitants mostly come from discussions with the few NPCs or from reading old books scrounged from libraries scattered throughout the dungeon. There's very little exposition in general and things need to be pieced together. Or not. Some of the lore is tied into usable books that teach recipes for food or consumables, some of it teaches lore about the gods of the setting while also teaching the character about what magics they can grant and how to earn their favor.
What little "fluff" lore there is directly explains or adds context to things encountered in the world. An old film reel might give insight on some creatures encountered in Prehevil. A heretical text could contextualize some religious misgivings. A serial killer's diary helps with a puzzle in the world. In general, F&H is much more sparse on the texts it offers and I think this is something really easily translated into tabletop gameplay:
- If your players examine a bookshelf they might just find it filled with nothing interesting. But if there is something there, keep it index card sized in length and tie it into something intractable in the world itself.
Closing Statements
There are plenty of other aspects of the games I haven't touched on here, and I'm still playing them so there may be more to chat about later. For me, F&H and Termina are really interesting dungeon crawls with a bunch of neat bits to take and cannibalize. The content is something that is probably too much for some people, and that's okay. Not everything has to appeal to everyone.
Much of the process of getting good at either game revolves around you the player failing forward, dying and learning the patterns of attacks or where traps are, embracing the roguelike inspirations of the game. If I was running something at a table, I'd be more explicit with broadcasting attacks than either of these games are to at least give a chance. There might be some room though for running a game in an extremely deadly world that rewards the players for learning things about the world with each run, that's something I'll chew on for awhile. There was a mechanic from the 5e Hardcore Rules supplement called Zymer's Candle which allowed characters to burn a candle in a room and then as long as one of them can run back and extinguish the candle within an hour of it being lit then time reset to when the candle was first lit, creating an in universe pseudo "save and reset" method.
There's a good deal of very powerful magic available throughout the games in limited supply, such as regrowing limbs at ritual circles or powerful spells that can be cast or the Empty Scrolls which can grant any item in the game. All of this can be strong very early but only if you the player understand the mechanics and how they work in the game world.
I quite like Termina for its diversity of cast and backgrounds as well as some of the choices it forces you to make. Its time mechanic though is a bit weak, as time only advances with sleeping in a bed it means a skilled/lucky player can do most of the game in one segment of time. F&H's time mechanic after that initial 30 minutes is really more of a timer for how long you can keep yourself fed and your sanity up.
If any of this interests you and if you can handle the subject matter, I highly encourage giving these games a try. Both of them I bounced pretty hard off at first and only after coming back and sinking an hour or so into them was I hooked- so I encourage new players to not get discouraged at their many inevitable deaths.
Miscellania:
- Using a heavy blunt weapon on a monster's limb to disrupt their attack
- Spells that affect vision are incredibly powerful
- Spirit Boards that can be used to lead to useful items or to deadly traps
- A book that transports you to an end game area temporarily
- Learning how to talk to cockroaches to turn a boss into a quest giver
- An overwhelmingly powerful wizard broadcasting an attack that will kill you for four turns unless you run away
- A sword that kills you just after you pick it up unless you teleport away (like with that book)
- Enemies that flee if you damage them enough
- Sequence breaks and multiple progression paths (there are several ways into Prehevil besides the main locked gate- or that can make that gate irrelevant)
- Doppelgangers of party members
- Maps that swap out in different runs allowing variable pathways
- PRHVL Bop, a cozy jazz bar in an awful city. It is the Whirling in Rags of Termina and like the Disco Elysium Whirling I love it dearly
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- Multiple paths to different levels of the dungeons
- Hell plane alternate versions of areas with gates that you can use if you appeal to an old god
- Nemesis enemies that have a chance to spawn on any map and chase the characters
- Other adventuring parties getting absolutely wrecked by the dungeon
- A sword that possesses you if you go too crazy
- Enemies that don't kill the party but leave them afflicted
- Limited Wish scrolls available from the very first floor of the dungeon and usable if you learn the secrets of how they work
- Disguises that fool simple enemies
- The Irrational Obelisk
- Spectral enemies immune to normal weapons (sounds obvious but they're very frightening to the unprepared here)
- A cryptid that trades you powerful items for children
- Multiple vendors within the dungeons
- Enemies that fight each other (usually seen on the overworld)
- A fucked up moon
