5e Inspiration with a dash of Hillfolk

Update four years later: This page is old af! Instead, I’ve made a more comprehensive guide to how I do insp

So in our 5e game, we threw out Persuasion, Intimidation and Deception day one, in favor of using Robin Law’s Petitioner & Granter structure from Hillfolk, though that aspect of the system is better explained in Law’s chapter in the Unframed anthology.

I read it in Unframed first, implemented it and loved it so much that I also bought Hillfolk. In Hillfolk, there are also “drama tokens” that we haven’t used. The players have been like… “why?”

And, honestly, good question. I’m not at all sure that it’ll be better – our games are on rocket fuel as it is with tense talking scenes and wild fighting and vampire hunting. The petitioner/granter/tactics cycle as laid out in Unframed work as advertised, or better. We love it and we haven’t used the tokens at all.

Buuuut I’ve brought it up again and again, I think mostly for some unfounded desire to “Do Hillfolk right”, but also to get some more consequences out of the PvP talking scenes (the PvNPC talking scenes are already great) especially for the new campaign, a homebrew more epic scope campaign.

So, yesterday, I laid out the tokens again and explained them again and then… while I was talking, something so obvious struck me. Why not combine the drama tokens and insp tokens into one token type?

Here are the rules:

• The scene format of Hillfolk won’t be used. Time will pass as in our normal 5e games.
• All the NPCs together share a pool of insp that starts out empty, and there’s a bigger “endless” bank of insp at the middle of the table. Every PC have their own pool.
• PCs gain insp when their traits, ideals, bonds or flaws get them in trouble (as before). This is always from the bank.
• When you grant a significant concession (practical or emotional, but it has to be something real and big), you get one insp — from them if they have at least one, from the bank otherwise.
• You can spend two insp (giving it to the other person) to force a significant emotional concession.
• You can spend three insp to block such a force – they keep their two and get three from you.
• If you are in the scene you can give insp that you already have to your allies to help with this.
• You can also empty your own insp pool, giving it all to the bank, to get advantage on a roll, as long as you had at least one. (This is in honor of 5e’s binary “you have it or you don’t” nature of insp.)
• You keep your insp between sessions.

In Hillfolk proper, it resets to zero between every session. In our 5e game we’ve had it as going down to 1 if you have more than 1, keeping 0 if you had 0 (because you never need more than one because you empty your pool to get advantage). However, in Hillfolk on page 65 it says that when you put this system into another game (which is just what we’re doing now), you keep your tokens from session to session but reset all pools every fifteenth scene. That “fifteenth scene” thing we can skip, our pools will go to zero often enough because that’s how you get advantage — but, maybe too often?

One play pattern that that I hope will come up that is that someone with an empty pool grant a significant concession to someone, get insp, spend that insp to get advantage, and then have an empty pool to do it all over again.

This ties the dramatic and procedural scenes together in a way beyond what Hillfolk proper does — it does keep its procedural tokens and dramatic tokens separate. We will see…

We haven’t tested any of this yet, but we will — ABT, Always Be Testing!