As part of Virtual Grogmeet 2026, I offered to run a session of the Nimble RPG on Foundry VTT. Although I am more of a KSR (Klassic Swedish Roleplay) kind of gamer, the level based ascending power bubble and expanding hit point design nonsense continues to appeal for a hero to superhero fantasy experience.
One of the advantages of Nimble is the simplicity of conversion/substitution from existing D&D and adjacent adventures. I just grabbed something appealing that came with some useful looking VTT maps. Before long I had The Deepwood Bandits ready to go.
I’ll keep this update largely spoiler free, as the experience was so good that I’d like to run the adventure again, possibly a few times. Nimble is a surprisingly feature rich tactical game for such a tight page count. Class mastery is a thing, with the ascending levels generally giving you something extra every time. It was rather nice to see the return of the 4e Warlord in the shape of the Commander, one of a number of design decisions that spoke of my old favourite, even if coincidentally.
It was fearless to create 3rd level heroes, giving a much richer array of actions and features for my players to get to grips with in a very short amount of time. It certainly gave them plenty to go at, with their totemic abilities providing mechanical and consequential depth to the roleplaying and narration of their character actions. Still, it was a fairly deep end approach, that just about worked, in large part thanks to a top group of players who were happy to explore the game with me as we played.
Starting the game with a huge canvas of up to 30 actors stretched the ‘rules tight’ claims of the game. I am so used to wrapping a game in 3 hours that I was surprised that I would easily have gone on for over the maximum 3.5 hours. That opening scene is quite a set piece!
The Foundry VTT implementation is very strong indeed and great fun to use. It’s safe to say that I was finding my feet as a first time out, and I needed a stronger depth of knowledge of the hero classes, but even then we forged on at a good pace. Were we playing a mini campaign (and that would be all kinds of fun if I had the time and the fortune to secure this marvellous set of players) I reckon we would be in complete command of the class features and the slick interface in a couple more sessions.
I’m very taken with the game and glad that I have backed the forthcoming updated version. It’s going to see a lot more play.
I’ll leave you with some thoughts from my players via some select quotes:
Live action report from our Nimble session, winning the prize for slickest Foundry implementation ever seen.
Slickest Foundry implementation sounds like a challenge! The Nimble Foundry system is very good and hard to beat… and I need to get inbuilt video running in my Foundry setup.
I enjoyed Nimble and would definitely played that again. I’ve grabbed the Quickstart rules from https://nimblerpg.com/pages/start
.. thanks to @First Age and to my fellow players for a great first Nimble session. Lots of fun even if the range of spell options for the Mage did cause me some analysis paralysis (…. er, um, another Fire Dart I think…)
And neither of my pep talks / intimidation / HR Reviews had the desired effect. It was very good, I think it works in the VTT as it seemed to me a lot of things to juggle without it.
Really enjoyed it. Intrigued by Nimble, although heroic fantasy isn’t usually my bag, but seeing the system in action and the excellent Foundry system… I’m tempted.