From Spencer Campbell’s GILA RPG’s, home of the LUMEN system, comes HUNT – a diceless one-shot system of doomed beast-hunting knights. It’s a flavourful mix of shared narration and tactical combat, and well worth checking out if you want a one-shot narrative system to use at a convention or game night.

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Full disclosure – Spencer sent me a comp copy to review, and (eventually) I ran this for a group of 3 players and then wrote this. I don’t generally get review copies sent, and am always careful to manage expectations about my reviewing style (I won’t write it up if I don’t like it, and I don’t review anything without playing it) – and the delay to posting that can cause. As it is, HUNT has beaten me to the review by having it’s first supplement, POX, out – I haven’t had a chance to check that out yet.

I’ve blogged before about running LUMEN system games, but as this uses the almost totally different LUMEN 2.0 system, that post is pretty irrelevant to this review.

The Fluff

You’re the last members of an order of knights, charged with one last mission to bring glory back to your order. You’ve all sworn different oaths – stone, echoes, wood, or sky – and chosen different legendary weapons – spear, sword, scroll, or shield – and are heading into the forest to kill a beast. The specifics of your order and their fall from grace are answered collaboratively at the start of the game, and the choice of oath and weapon constitutes most of the character generation.

Because of the tight focus – you’re going into a forest to slay a monster – the shared questions about the order at the start get you on the same page quickly. The oaths, in particular, are very inspiring, and the art is excellent – the visual style and descriptions of each really set the scene for consistent narration. Each oath and weapon contains other prompts to build on, and we found we had very interesting, descriptive knights very quickly.

The Crunch

As a diceless system, this is two games in one. The journey through the forest consists of spending points – from Valor, Haste, or Guile – to overcome obstacles which occur through three levels of forest challenges. There are suggested scenes, and I added some others based on the PCs backgrounds, and the oaths and weapons have various tasks that the PCs should try to accomplish as they make their way through the forest. 

All this runs nicely along, but it did feel as if we had a few too many points to have actual peril at this stage – you start with 5 points in each approach, and face a total of 9 challenges – leaving you with 6 spare, even if every knight has to spend for every challenge. In future I might make some of these require multiple spends from players to resolve, but this feels a bit stingy when a lot of the flavour is about how powerful the knights are.

Following this, we come to the fight with the beast. This takes place on a 6 x 6 grid, with the knights and beasts having their own moves they can make each turn to seek victory. This was, in our experience, tightly balanced – they just scraped victory, and really had to think about their moves. Depending on the number of players, different beasts are fought – which balances them against the opposition – so I’ve no reason to doubt it’s like this each time.

The One-Shot

This is literally specifically designed for one-shots; we got a tight 2-hour online game out of it, although I’d imagine you could run at a less breakneck pace and fill a convention slot with it. The resolution at the end was satisfying, and there’s guidance for both a knight victory and a knight loss which makes both I’m sure feel interesting.

As for replay value, it’s a tricky one. I think my group probably consider it ‘done’ now we’ve completed it – and I don’t think there’s enough to play different oaths or weapons and have that significant a different experience. The beast will be different with different players, for sure, but it’s likely the forest section would be similar on a replay. Maybe POX, the recently-released supplement, is the answer to this – adding a new structure and extra oaths and weapons? There’s also quite a few third-party supplements – I haven’t checked these out, but they look to add that replay variety you might crave.

Which sits a bit oddly with the final game, because that might well reward a replay. My players felt like they were scrambling to work out how their powers worked for the first few rounds of the fight, and trying to get a handle on what the beast could do as well. Is this deliberate, or accidental? For me, I like a tactical system that I can fumble about sub-optimally on, but some of my players felt a little cheated. And, if I run again with the Lithe beast (the 3-player opponent), I’m certainly ahead of the game in knowing what it can do.

So, a great little game, worth $10 of anyone’s itch.io money – and a really beautifully designed book, which I should say again – consistent in layout and art in evoking an interesting and distinctive world. Strong recommend, if this is the kind of game you – and your play-group – will be excited by.

Have you run or played HUNT? Have any other diceless games you think I should review? Drop me a line in the comments.