I do a lot of tabletop roleplaying. No surprise, right? I imagine a lot of us have a tabletop background, whether that's a D&D game you played as a kid or a weekly game you're in now. And it occurs to me that there's probably an audience here for some of my favorite games, RPGs that are part of a relatively new school of design that are broadly referred to as 'storygames'.
Storygames are predicated on the idea that rules matter. If you play tabletop RPGs you've probably had at least one session (or heard from someone who has) where you had an absolute blast, but barely touched the dice. Or you played in a great game, but house-ruled the crap out of it so it would fit your group's preferences. Storygames are designed so that the rules support a certain kind of play, or create stories in a certain genre, so that instead of the mechanics or the dice getting in the way of creating cool, interesting things, they facilitate it. They tend to be smaller, more tightly focused games with a specific theme or premise they want to explore, or a genre they want to closely emulate, but there are some exceptions – 'storygames' a big, broad label.
There's hundreds of storygames out there, but I'm going to focus on a few that I'm particularly enthused about right now, or that I think might resonate with the audience here. Over the course of several posts I'm going to do short write-ups for:
An Intro to Storygames: Fiasco and Friends
Powered by the Apocalypse: The 'New Cool' of Storygames
What You Fight For: Burning Wheel and the Luke Crane Bibliography
Golden Sky Stories and Other Happy Games
Relationship Games: The Boss Trilogy, 1001 Nights, and Bliss Stage
This is almost meant to be a discussion thread about games in the 'new wave' of design (whether or not I've posted about that particular game) and a place to request recommendations for games – odds are, if you've wanted to play a certain genre, someone has written a storygame for it. If the topic interests you, you can also hit me up on #EFU.
First post coming soon.
I've never played Exalted. I'd like to some day.
Praise the Sun.
As someone who played Exalted 1E and 2E for around five years and backed the 3E Kickstarter for a substantial sum: don't play Exalted. Play other game systems with the Exalted setting attached to them. Exalted's setting is one of the absolute coolest and most interesting game worlds this side of Glorantha or Planescape, but both editions of the system are hot garbage that you have to actively try not to break.
What you want is Qwixalted (//%22http://aakin.net/qwixalted/doku.php%22). The short version is that before Exalted 1E was released, the lead designer put out a "Quick Start" version of the game that had all of the flavor and coolness of the setting, but a completely different set of mechanics. Those mechanics, oddly enough, were much better than the ones that actually got published. Years later it was rediscovered by the Exalted-loving portion of the RPG design community, and a fan project to flesh out the Quick Start edition began. Eventually it became Qwixalted, and it rocks.
I'll give a shout out to Stalker: The Sci Fi RPG (or as I like to call it, Roadside Picnic RPG,) a game which ostensibly operates like an extended sci fi dungeon crawl but reads like a nihilistic bit of Soviet-era fiction. Delve into areas touched by incomprehensible, long gone alien visitors in search of the valuables they've left behind - at the risk of your life and your very humanity.
I feel it qualifies as a story game for the diceless system it uses - FLOW, which is more-or-less based off roleplay and player ideas. Might be a bit arbitrary, but I think if you're gonna play a game like this it requires some trust between the players and DM.
The concept is directly based off the brilliant novel written by the Strugatsky brothers, Roadside Picnic (//%22http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic%22), itself having inspired STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, a game you've probably heard of. I highly recommend both the tabletop and the book, at any rate.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/100243/STALKER---The-SciFi-Roleplaying-Game
An Intro to Storygames: Fiasco and Friends
There's a lot of storygames out there, covering a lot of genres and play styles. Over time, some of them have become recognized as good 'gateway games' for people who either have a background in traditional games like D&D or White Wolf Studios games like Vampire, or who have never played an RPG at all. These are a few of those games. None of them are traditional fantasy or science fiction, but don't worry, we'll get to those.
Fiasco (//%22http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/games/fiasco/%22) tells stories about people with 'powerful ambition and poor impulse control' ala Pulp Fiction, or Coen Brothers movies like Fargo and Blood Simple. The characters are often people you love to hate, or ostensibly 'good' normal people who collide head-on with the human train-wrecks they encounter. If this seems like a narrow premise, well, yes and no. It's definitely telling stories in a very particular genre, but it's shocking how many different ways there are to color it. The author Jason Morningstar has put out dozens and dozens of 'playsets', which are essentially quick-start setting materials for a Fiasco session, and they range from modern suburbia to Antarctic research stations to my personal favorite, D&D-inspired scumbag adventurers flush from a dragon-slaying expedition. You can find quite a few of them here (//%22http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/downloads/%22) and lots more by googling around a bit.
It's also a GMless game: everyone has a character who they're trying to guide through the clusterfuck that's about to ensue, while other players hand you some of their limited pools of white or black dice to cause a scene to end well or poorly for you â€" while trying not to provoke you in to giving them bad dice.It's the same kind of nasty fun as a good competitive board game, but tempered by also being a collaborative effort.
Fiasco plays fast: you get complete stories in one sitting including setup, with 3-5 players. You can actually watch a full session (//%22https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_609480&feature=iv&src_vid=uuJizhyf-y4&v=WXJxQ0NbFtk#t=1m05s%22) played out on YouTube by actual actors and writers, and it's pretty representative of how the game usually goes (minus the production values). For a group that knows the genre it's trying to emulate, Fiasco is one of the best and most easily-accessible games out there, and one of the few story games to get recognition outside the narrow confines of the hobby.
So maybe neo-noir isn't your genre. That's cool. How about supers? I got your supers right here.
Smallville (//%22http://www.amazon.com/Smallville-Roleplaying-Game-Cam-Banks/dp/1931567891%22) has essentially nothing to do with the show it's named after. It's really a system that's designed to create superhero stories at the table that actually play out like superhero stories in comics. Where games designed in the 80s and 90s had characters who were really nothing more than a collection of powers (which often took literally hours to design â€" I'm looking at you, Champions and HERO System), Smallville recognized that supers are interesting because they're super-powered people, and that we're at least as interested in their motives and relationships as we are in their powers. After all, would Batman be as compelling a character without the Joker, or if he was a-okay with gunning down every bad guy he came across?
Characters in Smallville have stats like a D&D character, but instead of being measured by their physical and mental qualities, they are measured by thematic elements: Duty, Glory, Love, Truth, Justice, and Power. When you make a roll, you're rolling the die you assigned to one of those themes, plus a die you assigned to a relationship with another character who's involved in what you're doing. So when Spider-Man is confronted with the dilemma of pursuing the Green Goblin or rescuing Gwen Stacy as she plummets off the bridge, his player might be choosing between rolling Justice + Green Goblin or Love + Gwen Stacy. All the major PCs and NPCs are bound together by a web of relationships that get established during character creation, so by the time you've got the party together the GM can look at the relationship map and instantly know how to make a compelling scene for someone.
If your taste in supers runs a little more toward the Chronicle (//%22http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706593/reviews%22) / Heroes (when it was good) end of the spectrum, there's Psi*Run (//%22http://nightskygames.com/welcome/game/PsiRun%22). It's a game about amnesiacs with strange powers â€" usually played as supers, mutants or psychics â€" on the run from the Chasers, a relentless authority like a government, a crime syndicate, or a mega-corporation,. The game begins with the PCs waking up together after the vehicle they're being transported in crashes, allowing them to escape from their captors and go on the run. The PCs are trying to figure out who they are, discover what their powers do and why they have them, and what the Chasers want from them. Play occurs in a series of discrete scenes in which the characters try to answer these questions while staying one step ahead of the Chasers on a board game-like map and struggling to keep their powers under secret and under control â€" or leaving devastation in their wake and daring the Chasers to come and get them.
Psi*Run is a smaller game, designed to be played over a handful of sessions or in a one-shot. It's also notable for playing incredibly well with kids: the designer play-tested it for years with a rotating group of teens and pre-teens at her local library, so it can be a fun option for anyone with younger folks in their life.
If your gaming group is mixed-gender you owe it to yourself to check out Kagematsu, a clever little one-session game that viciously turns the tables on the usual gender dynamics in geek social groups. A wandering samurai named Kagematsu arrives in a medieval Japanese village under the shadow of some threat which will soon doom its people. Several young women in the village conspire to win his affections and convince him to stay and fight. Kagematsu is always played by a woman, while the village women are typically played by men, and each side essentially plays a completely different game. Kagematsu's player gets sweeping narrative authority: essentially she's able to say when and where the other players can approach the samurai, and how Kagematsu actually feels about them. The villager players are limited to a few 'tactical' options revolving around how they try to persuade him to stay, and are mostly reliant on trying to portray themselves in the best light to the samurai as they try to convince him to stay out of love, lust, shame or pride. The original version of Kagematsu is available for for free (//%22http://kagematsu.wordpress.com/kagematsu-rules/%22), and there's a gorgeous print version available here (//%22https://sites.google.com/site/creamaliengames/Home/kagematsu-the-rpg%22) with updated rules.
There's another three or four games I might include here, but I have to stop somewhere. I'll leave off with a game so far at the edge of the storygame spectrum that it's difficult to say whether it's actually an RPG at all â€" but it's utterly brilliant, whatever it is.
The Quiet Year (//%22http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/portfolio/thequietyear/%22) is a, well, quieter post-apocalyptic game about how communities deal with political and environmental problems. You play out one full year of a community's life long after the collapse of civilization, as they recover from a devastating war with a neighboring community. You don't control characters, per se, but the community itself and different factions within it â€" aspects of the zeitgeist, essentially. In my TQY games I've seen players 'adopt' everything from nascent religions and militarist factions to bands of village children who can't keep out of trouble.
Players take turns drawing from a standard deck of cards divided by suit. Each card prompts you to answer questions or choose events that happens during a week of the year, and decide how the community responds to that event. Each turn you add those events to a map, which starts out mostly blank and ends up as this cool artifact / record of play, like this (//%22http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/the-quiet-yarr-smaller.jpg%22) or this (//%22http://d306elsnubptue.cloudfront.net/media/susd/images/2013/8/14/a7ac870604d511e38fb2f23c91709c91_1376480143.jpg%22). Eventually the game reaches winter, where you play under the dramatic irony of knowing that somewhere in the winter deck is the King of Spades which heralds the arrival of the enigmatic Frost Shepherds. The game ends abruptly once the Shepherds arrive, leaving you to wonder what happened to them and to puzzle over the identity of the Shepherds, who in the games I've played have ranged from neighboring tribes to a flight of atmospheric survey drones unleashed earlier in the game. It's a strange, beautiful, occasionally unsettling little game that isn't up everyone's alley â€" but at $6, it's absolutely worth checking out at least once.
If the quiet, 'post-collapse' vibe isn't your cup of tea â€" if you like your post-apoc in the style of Mad Max or The Book of Eli â€" well, just wait. Because the cutting edge of storygame design right now comes from a game that is essentially the bastard child of Mad Max and Firefly. It's called Apocalypse World, and its mechanics are so hot they've almost single-handedly transformed the landscape of RPG design. Stay tuned.
Great information Lira.
I need to try out Fiasco. If only I had more time on my hands !
Also, check out Tides of Numenera, it's out now and I've played a few sessions. It's a lot of fun.
Numenera is neat, yeah. Monte Cook is at his best when he's writing settings, and it shows in Numenera. Planescape is still one of the best game settings out there, not least because it makes D&D's wonky mechanics-setting interactions like alignment actually work somehow.
You should definitely give Fiasco a shot. It plays fast: a group that knows what it's doing and is willing to rush it a little can get through a whole game in around two hours, although it's usually closer to three or four in my experience. The book's short, too, so there's not much time expended there. Watch the Actual Play on Youtube, it's great and will give you a pretty good idea of how it goes.
This is really solid. I'm looking forward to your write up of Apocalypse World, so that these ignorant plebes can learn about what they've been missing. :P
I will maintain for years to come that Dungeon World is the best thing that exists in the Fantasy Genre right now, it's so far up my alley it hurts.
I heard Numenera was a decent setting but had mechanics problems.
Quote from: Lira;362070but I have to stop somewhere.
No you don't! This is all excellent stuff, certainly a lot I wasn't aware of.
Quote from: Aethereal;362176No you don't! This is all excellent stuff, certainly a lot I wasn't aware of.
You're in luck then. Here come
words. Powered by the Apocalypse: The 'New Cool' of Storygames If Vincent Baker (//%22http://www.lumpley.com/%22) isn't the greatest living game designer, he's certainly in the top three. Nearly every game he's written has changed the way people think about tabletop games in terms of what they can do, how they can be written, how they can communicate their designer's intentions.
Dogs in the Vineyard, his game about examining religion and culture through the eyes of teenaged gunslinging wardens of pseudo-Mormon communities in a West that never was, probably deserves a post all its own that I might get to later. But this post is about his latest big game,
Apocalypse World, which is exactly what it sounds like. I'm going to cover this in more detail than I will for most other games in this series, because AW's system is open-source and has been used to make a number of other games I want to talk about, so understanding its structure lets you understand the basics of those other games as well.
A note before we begin: I'm going to talk some about the mechanics of this game, but a lot more about the theory and philosophy behind it. If you want more mechanical detail, check out this introduction (//%22http://www.rpgmusings.com/2011/08/apocalypse-world-an-introduction/%22) to AW's mechanics, and skip to the end of this post for more cool games running under the same engine.
On the surface,
Apocalypse World (//%22http://nightskygames.com/welcome/game/ApocalypseWorld%22) is about cool
Firefly-esque characters living in a post-apocalyptic community, how they relate to each other and the community, and the choices they make to survive and rebuild in a strange and dangerous world. Characters are created out of templates ('playbooks') that evoke certain archetypes of the post-apocalyptic genre: the Battlebabe is the dangerous and sexy outsider ala Mad Max, the Brainer is the creepy psychic, the Hardholder is the tough-as-nails community leader like Carnegie from
Book of Eli, the Skinner is the one beautiful thing in a desolate land, etc. You can take a look at the main playbooks here (//%22http://apocalypse-world.com/AW-basicplaybooks-legal.pdf%22) to get a feel for them. Playbooks also give access to
moves, special narrative triggers which are the only way for players to interact with the mechanics.
Here's an example of a move from the Chopper, the leader of a motorcycle gang. For reference, when you roll you roll 2d6 plus a stat ranging from -3 to +3. In this case, the stat is called Hard, which is your ability to be tough, aggressive, strong-willed, and violent. A miss means a roll of 6 or less.
Pack Alpha: When you try to impose your will on your gang, roll + hard. On a 10+, all three. On a 7-9, choose 1:[/COLOR]
They don't fight back over it
You don't have to make an example of one of them[/COLOR][/LIST]On a miss, someone in your gang makes a dedicated bid to replace you for alpha.
That italicized portion of the move is the trigger for it in the fiction. Whenever you impose your will on your gang, you make that move and roll+hard. You might roll it proactively because you want your gang to do something, or reactively because your subordinates are giving you grief and you start putting them in their place. If you have a move for it you can try to do it, and if you don't have a move for it, it simply can't be done.
This brings us to the other big interesting thing going on under the hood of
Apocalypse World. A while back Baker coined the term
fruitful void, which is any part of a game that is
intentionally not covered by the rules but which substantial rules-covered portions of the game revolve around. The important parts here are 'intentional' and 'other mechanics revolve around it.' D&D has no meaningful rules for social interactions (because let's get real here, Diplomacy / Bluff / Intimidate are half-assed, perfunctory add-ons at best), and that's intentional because the game is about killing things and taking their stuff, but it's not a fruitful void because there's no other mechanics that are based around the fact that it's difficult to have a meaningful conversation with someone in any edition of D&D.
For example, if you had a game about vampires struggling to hold on to their humanity and morality, and you had mechanics about temptation and violence and hunger but no big bold score saying
HUMANITY, that place where the Humanity score would go is your fruitful void. The game is
about humanity and morality, but it focuses your attention on it subtly. The void is fruitful because it results in emergent behaviors as players interact with the mechanics they actually have – ones that tempt them, ones that let them do violence, ones that deal with their hunger – to achieve what they want.
In
Apocalypse World, what players almost always want is to create stable, prosperous communities out of the wasteland. The tools they have to do that with are a set of 'moves' that every character has, plus the ones that their playbook grants them. These moves are, almost without exception, coercive. Violence is frequently the easiest option, and the basic social move isn't anything like
Persuade or
Debate, it's
Seduce or Manipulate. The tools the characters have are the ones they need to survive in a blasted, ruined world, but they're not the ones they
want to make that world
better. So they work with what they have, and try to make good places through means that are frequently questionable, and usually grow increasingly desperate as the game goes on. AW characters are extremely competent right from the get-go, but the irony of their lives is that what they're good at won't make the world any better: they have to grow as people and act outside their comfort zones before they can do more than maintain the status quo, or replace it with a short-term solution. Like the song says, you've got to start with the man in the mirror. (//%22http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PivWY9wn5ps%22)
This isn't to say that you can't play an
Apocalypse World game where the PCs revel in or simply endure the post-apocalypse with no aspirations toward fixing anything, but the game's rules all conspire to make you
want to try.
Here's an example from actual play. (Trigger warnings for abuse)
I recently concluded an AW game with two players. They chose what are arguably the two most socially powerful playbooks in the game: the Skinner, who represents beauty in a world that's forgotten beautiful things, and the Maestro D', who controls a place where people can forget how fucked the world is for a while. Their explicit goal was to manage the community they were a part of through social power, pulling the puppet strings of the violent, short-sighted people around them to create a better situation for everyone. Then the Skinner met Iris.
Iris had been a horrifically abused slave who discovered latent psychic powers and turned the tables on her tormentors, enslaving them to her will. She made them into a 'brood' whose minds were partially merged with hers, so she could turn parts of their psyche on and off at will, inhabit their bodies, etc. Iris was a violent psychopath with a profound fear of intimacy: even a friendly touch would set her off. Oh, and she was the Maestro D's sister, and wanted to use their establishment as a base from which to psychically enslave the region to pacify it for the greater good. From an out of character perspective she was a deliberate challenge to the Skinner. His player had modeled the character after all the worst parts of the Pick-up Artist 'movement' as a way to explore that awful phenomenon in a safe way. Iris was the ultimate challenge for a scumbag PUA: the unattainable broken woman.
The Skinner started out using the
Seduce or Manipulate move on her a lot, getting her to do things for their mutual benefit. But over time he discovered why Iris was the way she was, and began at first to feel sorry for her, then to genuinely care for her. But the Skinner playbook is about manipulating people with your beauty, your art, your sexuality, not about making real emotional connections. So while he could eventually play Iris like a fiddle, making her the PCs' most powerful (if dangerously unpredictable) weapon, he couldn't reach out to the terrified little girl in the dark cell he glimpsed sometimes when they made a psychic connection. There's no move to heal a broken mind. There's no move to make someone love you back. Finding a way to do that with the tools he had to hand, and eventually working toward a custom psychic move that could let Iris help herself, became his major character arc. That arc was cut short when the PCs finally abandoned their practice of behind-the-scenes manipulation and opted for open violence against their main antagonist, and Iris took a .44 round to the chest in the firefight they instigated. It was a scene so poignant and symbolic of the overall arc of the game that we brought the campaign to a close at the end of the session, to everyone's complete satisfaction.
So.
Apocalypse World. It's a game about cool, sexy, badass people living in a post-apocalyptic community, trying to hold on or make it a little bit better with inadequate tools. It's meant for campaign play and really starts to shine in the 5-10 session range. It has elegant, flavorful mechanics that bleed apocalyptica, and hands down the best GMing section I've ever seen for telling you how to run the game
well. If you have any tolerance for the genre you should play it. If you're on the fence, you should listen to the Jank Cast play it in one of their two campaigns: Leviathan (//%22http://jankcast.com/archives/1694%22), their first game, which is good but has some rough spots, or the follow-up game in the same universe, Black Diamond (//%22http://jankcast.com/archives/2167%22), which is fucking awesome but slightly confusing in the first episode if you haven't heard the previous game.
“So Lira,” you say, “this sounds neat, but the apocalypse isn't my thing.” That's fine. When Baker wrote
Apocalypse World, he released the engine under an open license called Powered By the Apocalypse. There's been a frenzy of development using what's sometimes called the * World engine, some of which I'll mention briefly here, each accompanied by a move from the game.
Dungeon World (//%22http://www.dungeon-world.com/%22) is for people who want the flavor of old-school Dungeons & Dragons with a modern rules engine, one that emulates the kind of things you
do in those games but gives you mechanical tools to do them that aren't literally designed by committee and burdened with 40 years of questionable design decisions.
Dungeon World takes the * World engine and tunes it for the 'adventure fantasy' genre of larger-than-life people going to strange places, fighting monsters and villains and taking their stuff. It's popcorn movie fun, beer-and-pretzels fun, for nights when nobody is feeling like doing serious character-driven drama or what-have-you. It's also great for groups who've played a lot of D&D but want to ease in to something new, because the trappings of it are similar enough to make D&D players feel comfortable despite the radically different rules.
Dungeon World also has another major advantage over most non-D&D / Pathfinder / White Wolf games: it's become hugely popular for an indie game, enough that you can reasonably expect to find other people who will want to play it instead of you having to convince your home group to try it.
(Paladin Playbook) I Am the Law: When you give an NPC an order based on your divine authority, roll+CHA. On a 7+, they choose one:
Do what you say
Back away cautiously, then flee
Attack you
On a 10+ you also take +1 forward against them. On a miss, they do as they please and you take -1 forward against them.
Sagas of the Icelanders (//%22http://redmoosegames.bigcartel.com/%22) (G+ Community here (//%22https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/102612142729669897358%22)) is about the lives of the first settlers of Iceland circa 900 CE. If your eyes are starting to glaze over, go read a little from any of the Icelandic Sagas (http://sagadb.org) first, or check out the Wikipedia summary of Njal's Saga (//%22http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nj%C3%A1l%27s_saga%22). I'll wait, while you read about a culture so obsessed with honor and shame that multi-generational blood feuds would arise over riding someone else's horse.
Sagas emulates this 'Viking blood opera' style beautifully, creating blood-drenched stories of vengeance, honor, secret magic, and the legacies we leave our children. This is the game I've got going with my home group right now, and every session has been equal parts desperate scrabble for survival, navigating extended family politics, hilariously bitter intrigue, and badass women shamelessly defying social roles. Last session was taken up entirely by a Yule party during which a marriage was arranged, another was averted by a spear-throwing contest in a storm, and a professional duelist was stabbed nearly to death in front of his family by a 5' 6” woman for stealing a kid's seal. This game rules.
(Shield-Maiden Playbook) Picker of the Slain: When you go through the corpses after a battle, roll +wyrd. On a hit, pick someone who was seemingly dead and they’re alive instead. On 7-9 they’re alive but also permanently disfigured, maimed or disabled.
Monsterhearts (//%22http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/portfolio/monsterhearts/%22)' (//%22http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/portfolio/monsterhearts/%22) description is perfect, so I'll just repeat it here: “A story game about the messy lives of teenage monsters. It lets you and your friends create stories about sexy monsters, teenage angst, personal horror, and secret love triangles. When you play, you explore the terror and confusion that comes both with growing up and feeling like a monster. It’s designed to evoke stories like
True Blood,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
Ginger Snaps or
The Twilight Saga. If you like supernatural romances, or stories of monstrosity and personal horror, or if you just like watching sexy people ruin their lives, then you’ll love this game." I'll add only that
Monsterhearts is much, much better than the material it was inspired by. This game is genuinely unsettling in all the right ways.
(Vampire Playbook) Hypnotic: You can hypnotize people who have no Strings (social currency) on you. Roll+hot. On a 10+ they do exactly what you wish and have no idea that anything is wrong. On a 7-9 the hypnosis works, but choose one:
They realize you hypnotized them;
They fuck up your commands;
Their sanity is unhinged.
Damn, I'm in love with your posts. You did all the research I should have done long ago...
I have to try out Apocalypse world, and run as part of a multi-session murderparty.
Quote from: Pentaxius;362195Damn, I'm in love with your posts. You did all the research I should have done long ago...
I have to try out Apocalypse world, and run as part of a multi-session murderparty.
After we finish up our
Sagas of the Icelanders game my players are considering going back to that AW setting with a tag team of fightin' typeswho work as mercenaries for their old PCs
. It will be incredibly cathartic for them to mow down some of the bastards they left alive in a hail of slo-mo gunfire and enormous explosions.
Interlude: Rookvale
I don't have time tonight to complete the next large writeup I'm planning on, so here's a small one for a small game: Rookvale. (//%22http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/rookvale/%22)
The best way I can Rookvale is 'dark fantasy shonen anime swordfights,' or possibly 'Final Fantasy: Tactics + Grimdark Pokemon.' You play young heroes who have taken it upon themselves to battle the demons invading their homeland by binding lesser demons to their will, working up the infernal hierarchy until they can confront the invasion's dark masters. There are no deep philosophical questions here, or any room for courtly intrigue or politicking or really much of anything that isn't tracking your demonic targets down and beating the shit out of them in awesome set-piece battles, interspersed with character development scenes. It's a game that revels in its grimdark anime aesthetic, and although I don't want much anime, I've been told that it has a lot of Bleach, Berserk and Attack on Titan in its DNA.
Mechanically, Rookvale is pretty clever. On your turn in battle you make a Maneuver using one of your skills plus any extra dice from a limited pool. Dice that come up 3, 4, or 5 give you dice to a Strike pool that you can use to deal damage or achieve special objectives (and there are always special objectives), while 6s give Charge dice that fuel your special abilities. Building up enough Strike and Charge also unlocks other combat options like taking free actions or attacking multiple enemies at once. Combat flows quickly from turn to turn, and fights tend to be flashy, highly cinematic affairs.
Early on, PCs start capturing demons and using them to take on bigger, badder demons. Summoning a demon from the crystal shard you bound it in lets you take turns as the demon with all its crazy powers, but doing so increases the Hubris it uses to resist you. Some of these things are standard demon fare - the magma-spewing Volkis, the huge freaky demon-bird Gibbering Caws, etc â€" but a lot of them are just awesome. My personal favorites are the palankins: hideously misproportioned wizard types draped in long robes that spill out across the back of three manlike figures who scuttle across the ground on their hands, bearing the palankin with them in to battle. Over the course of a longer game, the demonic invasion intensifies and spreads, and the demons themselves get nastier. Between battles the GM takes actions on the included world-map on the demons' behalf to spread their influence, inflict harm to a duchy, bring a new demon through one of their Gates, or attempt to Evolve a type of demon in to a stronger form.
Rookvale also has some interesting things to say philosophically. One of the first things you choose in character creation is Gender with a capital G, but in this setting it's more than a simple binary. The duchies of Rookvale have six genders, none of which are 'male' or 'female,' and each of which is expected to conform to certain social expectations. To make matters even more complicated, they can shift freely between those roles if they're willing to bear the social cost. Genders also give you special anime fightin' powers, so if you're not interested in deconstructing gender and sexuality you can just grab said powers and go to town on some demons. If you're intrigued by the idea of examining a society with fluid, diverse gender roles as a backdrop to kickass demon fighting, give Rookvale a look.
Rookvale is totally free, and has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. There's no excuse not to check this thing out, for the gorgeous art if nothing else. It's a great game for one-shots or a short series in between longer games.
What You Fight For: Burning Wheel and the Luke Crane Bibliography
Once upon a time there was a boy named Luke Crane. Luke played D&D and Shadowrun with his friends. Badly. Luke was a nasty, over-aggressive, nitpicky DM. Don't worry â€" he got better. And when he got better, he realized some important things about game design. First, that complex interconnected mechanics are fun when they make lots of cool things happen in the story, and tedious when they don't. Second, that you can write a game book that tells you how to play it well, instead of reading like a technical manual. Third, that when you give players a way to explicitly flag what they want to do in a game, shockingly, the game is more fun for everyone. And having realized these things, he started writing.
Luke Crane is best known as the author of The Burning Wheel (//%22http://www.burningwheel.org/%22), one of the early storygames that has since gone through several major revisions and spawned three other games that share its 'design DNA' to one extent or another. Unlike a lot of the games I've covered so far and will cover later, Burning Wheel looks and feels a lot like a traditional RPG. For one thing, it's a traditional fantasy RPG with elves and dwarves and orcs, albeit taken back to their Tolkienian roots, and a race of Men that are somewhere between medieval France and A Wizard of Earthsea. It's a big, thick book with lots of moving parts to the system, extensive and detailed mechanics for martial and social conflicts, an enormous character creation section with recognizably 'fantasy RPG' stats, and a multifaceted advancement system that is arguably the core of play. I'm going to spend a while on that advancement system, but first let's check out the basic mechanics.
Burning Wheel is a D6 dice pool system. Most of you have probably encountered something like this before, but in case you haven't, it works like this. Every roll has an 'obstacle' number set by the GM, like D&D's DC numbers but with more explicit guidance on how to set them, or by how well an opposing character did on their roll. You roll D6s equal to your rating in whatever skill or attribute is most central to what you're doing, plus an additional die for every other directly relevant skill you have. Dice that come up 1-3 are failures, 4-6 are successes. If you get the obstacle number in successes, you pass. But before you do any of that, you set stakes. Every roll in Burning Wheel has something that matters to both sides at stake â€" if it doesn't, why are you rolling for it? So before you pick up the dice, you and the GM (or the other player) decide what's actually at stake in this roll, and what will happen to the winner and the loser.
A brief aside. Burning Wheel relies heavily on a principle coined (yet again) by Vincent Baker: Roll the dice or say yes. What that means is, when a player wants to do something, you ask yourself whether you can roll for it (because there are mechanics to do so) and whether there's an interesting conflict involved. If the answer to both of those is yes, roll. If you could roll but there's no interesting conflict, say yes â€" just give it to them. They get there, they get the information, they have the thing, whatever. Roll the dice or say yes is about getting as much interesting conflict and story out of a session as possible by ensuring that you're never wasting time on trivial bullshit.
Burning Wheel has three systems for when you're embroiled in a high-stakes conflict: Fight for up-close-and-personal martial conflict, Range and Cover for group skirmishes and contesting positions at range, and Duel of Wits for social conflict. Each of these are worth a post all by themselves, but this is already going to be a long post so I'll condense it. When characters face off in an extended conflict, they aren't just rolling skill vs skill over and over. Instead, they secretly choose a set three or so 'maneuvers,' each with unique mechanics, then reveal and resolve those maneuvers one by one depending on how the chosen maneuvers match up. The maneuvers perform differently depending on what they're up against, and different skills fuel different maneuvers, so every character operates differently in a conflict. Conflicts between skilled players are full of mind-games and second-guessing, trying to figure out what set of maneuvers the other person will pick and how to arrange your maneuvers for the round to counter them.
For example, consider a Fight between a hulking orc holding a nimble elf ranger with a pair of knives at bay with his spear. The orc might write a 'script' of Push / Set / Great Strike, bullying the elf with his superior strength and weapon length to try to put him off balance (Push), then rearing back (Set) and skewering the point-ears with all his strength (Great Strike). The elf might script Beat / Avoid / Avoid, thinking to bat the spear aside to get inside its reach (Beat), then dodge madly (Avoid) while he closes in for killing blows in the next exchange. The maneuvers get scripted in secret, then revealed one by one and resolved against each other. It's incredibly tense and a lot of fun, although it's best suited to single combat or very small groups rather than huge D&D-style melees. That's a theme that runs through the whole system: Burning Wheel likes to keep things personal.
That personal touch starts in character creation, which is based on a 'lifepath' system that some of you who've played the venerable Traveller RPG might recognize. A lifepath (LP) represents a period of several years in the character's life, and the occupation they had in those years. Each lifepath gives you access to certain skills, points to place in skills from any of your LPs, stat points, resource points to buy anything from equipment and spells to reputations and businesses, and gives opportunities to move to different stations in life like going to war or joining the noble court. It's an involved process that takes a session by itself unless you're playing low-lifepath characters, but you come out of it with a good idea of who this person is and what their life has been like. Then, you do Beliefs.
Beliefs are the heart of a character, and the heart of Burning Wheel. Each character has three Beliefs, which are a combination of a philosophical statement and an action you intend to take to in pursuit of that philosophy. Here's one from one of my players in an old campaign:
The sins of my past are too great to risk the death-goddess' judgment. I will make a new body of dust and shadow to evade her grasp.
… And boy-howdy did that one go badly for him, but hey, lichin' ain't easy.
In game design terms, Beliefs are a kind of 'flag' to the GM and the other players about what your priorities are for the game as a player â€" not as a character. When you write a Belief you're saying to the rest of the table, “Here. These are the issues I want to confront. This is how you can push my buttons. Mess with me. Test me.†And when the GM does their prep, they look over those Beliefs and find ways to put pressure on them. Does that sin-stained wizard still want to become a lich if the sacrifice is greater than he imagined? What if someone were to dangle a faint hope of redemption in front of him? What happens when his desire to escape the death-goddess comes into conflict with another Belief about, say, their love for their apprentice, who will surely try to follow him in to undeath despite a fatal lack of skill?
By confronting these issues, the character enters the 'Artha cycle,' the reward system that fuels... Basically the entire game. Pursuing and resolving your Beliefs rewards you with Artha points, special expendable resources that let them manipulate dice rolls. With Artha expenditure you can succeed at rolls which would otherwise be impossible, which you need to do because skills advance through use, and you have to at least attempt a certain number of 'impossible' rolls to get better at anything. Artha spent on rolls attaches itself to the main skill or attribute you used, and when enough artha expenditure accumulates on something it becomes dramatically more powerful, achieving heroic or supernatural status. To top it off, those difficult rolls you're hoarding artha for are usually the ones that would advance or resolve a Belief. This gets you more Artha and leads to new Beliefs, which let you spend Artha and improve your character, which helps you resolve Beliefs, which gets you more Artha and leads to new Beliefs... You get the picture.
Burning Wheel is a game that's constantly challenging you. It wants you to be good at the game itself and encourages you to master its subsystems, but it also wants you to face personal dilemmas. It wants to make you have moments where you put your head in your hands and go, “Shit. This is a hard choice.†Those moments are powerful and personally meaningful because they come out of priorities you flagged with your Beliefs, and you'll remember them a hell of a lot longer than the 100th time you cleared a dungeon or shot up a megacorp office. There's a lot more to Burning Wheel than what I've covered here, like Circles system that lets PCs bring in NPCs from their past on the fly (with strings attached), the incredibly cool magic systems that feel like the best parts of A Wizard of Earthsea and pulp sword-and-sorcery, or the way non-human characters have an Emotional Attribute that gives them a built-in dramatic arc appropriate to their race, like the Greed of the Dwarves or Elvish Grief. But all of it is designed to make you confront two questions over and over again: what do you believe in, and how hard are you willing to fight for it?
And damn does it make you fight.
Burning Wheel is the game that made its author Luke Crane famous, but it's not the only thing he's done. The engine that powers BW has been modified â€" and in some cases transformed almost beyond recognition â€" to create three other games: Burning Empires, Mouse Guard, and Torchbearer.
Burning Empires (//%22http://www.burningwheel.com/store/index.php/front-page/burning-empires.html%22) is sci-fi BW set in the lovingly-detailed universe of the Iron Empires (//%22http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Empires-Volume-Faith-Conquers/dp/1593070152%22) graphic novels, with a twist. Each BE campaign is the story of a war for a particular world between the planet's human inhabitants and the Vaylen, a race of parasitic worm-like creatures who only become sapient when they inhabit a sapient host. It implements a neat structure that breaks up the campaign into the three phases of invasion (Infiltration of the planet, Usurpation of its resources and officials, and full-blown Invasion), with each phase consisting of several sessions, and each session broken down in to different types of scenes. And those scenes are limited resources. The GM and the players each have allotments of scenes for personal interactions, construction, research and development, etc. This restriction really jacks up the tension: there's no time for do-overs, so it forces every scene to matter and makes the stakes that much higher. A warning: Empires is basically Hard Mode Burning Wheel. It can be difficult to get in to if you haven't read its excellent forums (//%22http://www.burningwheel.org/forum/forum.php%22) extensively or played some BW first, but if you're willing to put up with the learning curve it's fantastic.
Mouse Guard (//%22http://www.mouseguard.net/books/role-playing-game-boxed-set/%22), based on the graphic novels (//%22http://www.mouseguard.net/%22) of the same name, is a game about mice with swords, how the world tries to exterminate them, and how they simply refuse to die. It is Redwall if you replace most of the loving descriptions of food and singing with vicious animals killing mice while even more vicious politicking does essentially the same thing. It's a 'low fantasy' setting where the world operates according to familiar natural laws â€" except that there are sapient mice, and they've established pseudo-medieval society deep in a forest. The titular Mouse Guard are a combination of knights, Tolkien-esque rangers, and FEMA agents â€" thankless heroes who exist outside of mouse society to better serve it. The Guard keep the roads between settlements open, perform disaster relief when natural events like heavy rain that humans would shrug off devastate mouse communities, and fight predators (//%22http://i.imgur.com/tk4Ii.jpg%22) dozens of times their size with tiny swords, Mouse Science (yes, this is a thing), and sheer grit. It's probably the most accessible of the Burning games because it was written with a non-gaming audience in mind, so its rules are written in a clear and careful way that makes you realize just how badly most game systems are presented.
As a sidenote, I did an extensive chapter-by-chapter writeup of Mouse Guard a while back for the SomethingAwful Traditional Games forum. If you have an account there and want to take a closer look at the game, head over here (//%22http://tradwiki.foxxtrot.net/index.php/FATAL_%26_Friends:_L-M#Mouse_Guard_RPG_.28by_Kestral.29%22).
Finally there's the latest addition to the family, Torchbearer (//%22http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/burningwheel/torchbearer%22). This is a deliberate tribute to old-school D&D, but probably not as you know it. Luke and company went back to the real old-school of the Moldvay Basic Edition and played the living hell out of it to figure out, on an academic level, why really old-school D&D was so compelling. The answer to that is long and the subject of a whole panel they did at PAX (which you should listen to here (//%22http://www.metagamemastery.com/2012/09/02/pax-12-tabletop-talk-the-dd-you-never-knew-with-luke-crane/%22) because it's fascinating stuff), but the takeaway for Torchbearer was scarcity. Scarcity of supplies, of light, of information, of hit points, of hope of making it out alive. In Torchbearer you're gritty D&D adventurer types delving for loot, but it's played dead serious: you're people on the fringe of society, doing a crazy thing for profit or out of some duty or obsession, and it's likely to get you killed. There's no high fantasy here, no heroics built in to the mechanics. It's about careful exploration and survival instead of kicking in doors and killing everything you find. It is, in short, one of the EFU-est games ever made, and you can grab it here (//%22http://www.burningwheel.com/store/index.php/torchbearer.html%22).
In the interests of making this more interactive, I'd like to try something.
Tell us a game idea you've always wanted to run, whether it's a one-sentence idea fragment or a full-blown adventure / campaign concept, or a show or book or game you want to adapt to pen-and-paper. We'll pitch game systems for it and explain why we think they're a good fit.
Any takers?
*The portal dive*
My idea for a campaign is genius. The idea is a wizards shop which sells your goods. The wizard has some kind of ability or his shop is located somewhere special or whatever, whereby portals can be opened to any plane. any time. any place.
The wizard, being smart and wizardly, doesn't jump in some portal willy nilly himself.- But hires groups of adventurers to do so.
That's where the party comes in. The wizard opens a portal to say "Mechanus" and explains what reagent he needs. Fun then ensues, and a time limit on when the portal closes begins the moment they enter. Only those who entered through the portal, can return back through it, though anything they bring with them can also travel through the portal in a special "magic bag".
The magic bag forces the player to limit what they can bring back to a few select items, or the wizards reagents.
I could help out with some of the scripting if you decide to use NWN as a platform, or maybe you would prefer to use GoogleD20, ask Jaydemoon about it (requires a webcam and mic)
I've had the idea in my head for a long time to take players through an alien abduction scenario - framing it similarly to Changeling: The Lost (except perhaps less rapey) in terms of atmosphere and tone. Hasn't progressed much beyond vague impressions, but I figure it'd be neat for a fairly brisk, narrative heavy session of roleplay.
I've entertained the thought of using this as the prelude to a full-blown conspiracy driven campaign, but it might be better to keep things short and sweet.
Quote from: Nights Bane;362431My idea for a campaign is genius.
Hah, I have
way too much on my plate to jump in to a design project. What creative energy I have left after my weekend campaigns and EFU are spent on my own games, which I may end up shamelessly promoting here at some point. I'm not volunteering to run something, just to help people find games that are a good fit for "That Thing I've Always Wanted To Run" that every gamer seems to have.
For your idea, there's two core elements I can see. First, it's an episodic structure: a series of self-contained challenges tied loosely to a larger concept. If it were a TV show, it would be less
Game of Thrones or
The Wire, and more
Stargate or
Firefly. Second, it's explicitly high fantasy â€" or rather, "D&D Fantasy," which is its own weird thing that doesn't cleanly fit any other genre.
There's a couple of obvious recommendations here. There's no reason you couldn't do this with your preferred edition of D&D going all the way back to AD&D and Basic. Hell,
Planescape was practically designed for this. But â€" and here I'm going to show my true colors â€" nearly anything you can do with D&D outside of a strict dungeon crawl, you can do better with
Dungeon World,
Burning Wheel or
Torchbearer depending on what sort of play experience you're going for. In this case I'd unreservedly recommend
Dungeon World for two reasons. First, because it's already got a supplement based around plane-hopping called
The Planarch Codex, which introduces a bunch of cool mechanics for an episodic portal-of-the-week kind of game. Second, because burden of prep on the GM to come up with new things beyond the portal every week is much more easily managed in DW than it is in D&D.
Here's an example built on a self-imposed 20-minute time limit. With this plus the guidelines in the DW corebook and
The Planarch Codex, you could run a complete session.
============================================
Outline The Patron has acquired a portal-key to the the Seclusium of Sigrid the Many-Faceted, a planar 'observatory' in a dangerous pocket of the Astral Plane riddled with astral conduits. Sigrid's magical astrolabe can predict fortuitous planar conjunctions, and the Patron wants it. Problem: so does the cult of a dead god, who want to use it to determine the precise date when their dark master can be revived.
Dangers[LIST=1]
- The Endless Void - Instinct: To dwarf mortal significance and comprehension
- Brotherhood of the Hidden Heart â€" Instinct: To awaken lost and terrible things
- Astral Ghosts - Instinct: To find a way home
- Eldritch Constructs â€" Instinct: To preserve the Seclusium
- Improbable Architecture â€" Instinct: To bar and bedevil
Custom Moves When you move through a field of astral conduits, roll+DEX. On a 10+ you avoid touching any of the long silvery filaments full of other lives and other worlds. On a 7-9 the conduits are all around you, humming with the vastness of the planes. Choose one:
[LIST=1]
- You're forced to go to ground, and you're Defying Danger if you press on before the astral winds open a way.
- You push past before the conduits seal you in, but brush against one. You're overwhelmed by vertigo and a sense of your own cosmic insignificance, but you can immediately Discern Realities about the Seclusium as though you'd rolled a 10+.
On a miss your silvery cord becomes tangled with the conduits, and the GM will make your life
very interesting. When the astral ghost of Sigrid the Many-Faceted gets into your head, roll+WIS. On a 10+ she's sticking around for a while, whispering in your head and making you see and remember things that aren't there or didn't happen. On a 7-9 the hallucinations and false memories last a while and are hard to tell apart from reality. On a miss, things get
weird. When you slay a cultist of the dead god Abraxus, the dark dreams of their sleeping god explode out of them, leaving a twisting miasma in the air that absorbs light, dampens energy, and fills the mind with horror. If you're within a sword's reach you also take 1d6 damage from the eruption of negative energy.
Quote from: Ryan;362468I've had the idea in my head for a long time to take players through an alien abduction scenario - framing it similarly to Changeling: The Lost (except perhaps less rapey) in terms of atmosphere and tone.
Oh man, alien abduction. I've never even thought of this, but come to think of it, itcould definitely make for a fun scenario. You could do a lot of playing with unreliable narrators, too, which is always fun. You've stumbled on an unexploited niche here, to the best of my knowledge, but there's some possibilities. Before I go any further, are you thinking of playing through the abduction itself, the aftermath where they're dealing with what happened, or both? And is there supposed to be any doubt about whether it actually happened?
It'd be framed as the PCs "meeting in a tavern," in this case a group therapy session for those who suspect they've had an experience with the otherworldly.
From there I'd go into backstory, describing the night of the abduction without any true insight into the abduction itself. From here we might do rolls to remember past the lost time they experienced (a popular hallmark of most alleged abductions,) jog out memories and the horrifying truth hidden in their heads. Ideally each "encounter" would end with some staggering revelation of the future.
Quote from: Ryan;362640It'd be framed as the PCs "meeting in a tavern," in this case a group therapy session for those who suspect they've had an experience with the otherworldly.
From there I'd go into backstory, describing the night of the abduction without any true insight into the abduction itself. From here we might do rolls to remember past the lost time they experienced (a popular hallmark of most alleged abductions,) jog out memories and the horrifying truth hidden in their heads. Ideally each "encounter" would end with some staggering revelation of the future.
[/SIZE]
To me this cries out to be played in When the Dark is Gone (//%22http://blackarmada.com/free-games/%22). It's a small, free game in the late stages of beta testing that's gotten positive reviews so far, although in the interests of full disclosure I admit I haven't played it. Played in its default mode, it's about a group of people (the Clients) who united by a shared experience: when they were young children, they went together to a magical ala The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, had fantastic adventures â€" and then had to come back. They've all repressed the memories, and the repression has caused their lifes to spectacularly self-destruct. Play consists of a slow-burning exploration of those memories and the wreckage that is the Clients' lives. The (very light) mechanics aren't tied to this conceit, so you could easily reskin it to a group of abductees. At the very least, When the Dark is Gone is is worth a read just to mine ideas for another implementation.
I was recently asked by my nerd friends to introduce them to EFU .. by running a tabletop campaign about it ..
Sample material from the EFU Questing Splat Book: "You enter a room. There are Netherese magic towers here, which start to strike you painfully with their blasts of arcane energy. You try to get past them, only to trigger grease traps which cause most of your party to slip and fall. You are killed."
Quote from: Lira;362778When the Dark is Gone (//%22http://blackarmada.com/free-games/%22).
That sounds perfect, thank you!
Quote from: SN;362803I was recently asked by my nerd friends to introduce them to EFU .. by running a tabletop campaign about it ..
Challenge accepted.
I'm going to be busy for the next few days and possibly through the weekend, so this thread's going quiet for a bit. Next time:
Golden Sky Stories and other games that make you feel good about life, the universe and everything.
Challenge accepted indeed!
I have this vision slowly coming together, of taking them through EFU1-EFU3 chapters in a slightly fast-forward mode.. and POSSIBLY dropping them into Numenera afterwards through a bit of a plot-derailing... Gods, so many notes from previous EFU chapters..
Not sure about the latter just yet, as I have not a chance to lay my hands on a Numenera core book just yet as paperback in Europe is stupidly expensive.
Haha, funny I did the same thing : I ran 3 games of EFU-inspired DnD about 2 to 3 months ago.
Then I got Numenera and switched...
I'm not yet sure if it will 'fit', as what I gathered about Numenera are the official tidbits released + something from reviews.
Will see when I get the book.
I have both created a simple D&D styled physical engine that runs nice and smooth, and then immediately got addicted to AW.
Or... at least the engine. Good stuff.
Sagas of the Icelanders has been out for awhile and I would like to look over a few of the playbooks before deciding whether or not to drop the money on it. Do you have any good examples, or are you willing to send over part of the file?
Also Monster of the Week looks pretty fun too.