I posted the 2014 edition of my ongoing “Best of the Twenty-Teens” series recently. In it, I called 2014 “The Year of the Trindie,” which got me thinking about what trindie even means. There’s quite a lot in that space as I conceive it: conventional (“trad”) power and resolution arrangements paired with unconventional (“indie” aka storygame) solutions to long-standing problems. Or sometimes just nifty new tech.
It’s tempting to go looking for bright lines between categories of design and play. If you’ve been reading my blog at all you know I’m not here for that. I’m not going to define one game as “trad” and another as “trindie,” good grief. I’m also not particularly coming from “here’s a trad game with indie tech” angle, nor “here’s a storygame that plays pretty trad.” The cross-pollination is the point, not who came first and who deserves which bit of credit.
I’m unable to provide a perfect and uncontroversial history of these trends and designs. Sharing, stealing, and parallel development make it nearly impossible to know when an idea first appeared, or first appeared in a way anyone cared about.
In short, please read charitably and ask questions in the comments if you have ‘em.
That said: Here are some of my favorite things I’ve found in games I call trindie. If you find them, you might be playing a trindie game!
The Rules Get In The Way
I’ve used the phrase intentional design before and maybe it’s worth unpacking a bit more. This is the general trend I’m talking about: rules that purposefully create specific play experiences, and not just default to a “players try to beat the GM’s obstacles with a combination of capability and luck” frame. If you’re the sort of GM who prefers to present their story their way, new-school rules feel like they get in the way.
Personally? I love rules that get in the way. Rules can surprise me when I’m facilitating, which is both an exciting creative challenge and alleviates most prep. I’ve never had a good head for prepping with interesting combat or obstacles in mind, so those rules that are “in the way?” I’d rather put my creativity toward things other than balancing fights.
Intentional design shows up all over the place now and for various reasons: genre emulation, or strong emotional response, or enforcing tempo. Redistributing creative responsibilities in surprising ways. Gosh, even just to de-prioritize violence as the main way to get what we want.
GM Doesn’t Roll
The first game I ran into where only the players rolled was Apocalypse World. That does some interesting stuff, largely in that it leaves results in the hands of the GM, along with some guidelines (GM moves and principles). I don’t include Amber, Theatrix or Everway here because those games are entirely diceless. Fully diceless play accomplishes something different than GM-doesn’t-roll: the players generate external uncertainty and often make choices based on their rolls.
GM-doesn’t-roll today shows up in Monte Cook Games‘ Cypher system (Numenera, The Strange, No Thank You, Evil!) and Cypher-adjacent games like Invisible Sun. It’s also how all the Forged in the Dark games I’ve seen thus far handle things: the GM’s adjudication is constrained by the position and effect the player negotiated.
The cross-pollination works both ways! Under Hollow Hills, Meg and Vincent Baker’s work-in-progress about carnival performers in fairyland and solidly in the storygame end of the PbtA pool, hands the GM (the Mistress of Ceremonies, tweaking the MC role in Apocalypse World) the opportunity to roll dice for NPCs making common plays (“moves” in UHH’s frame). Storygames sometimes get re-tradded.
The Say Yes/Declare Intent/Let It Ride Triangle
One of my favorite bits of design I first saw come together in Burning Wheel was a three-fer:
- Roll the Dice or Say Yes: frequently flipped (“say yes, or roll the dice”), but the idea is mostly the same. That is, only introduce uncertainty when uncertainty is interesting. It’s a reminder that the GM can and should say yes to everything except the most pivotal rolls. To use discretion rather than calling for rolls all over the place.
- Declare Intent: this bit requires the player transparently explain their goal to the GM. The action your character takes matters in terms of consequences, but intent and action are formally separate things. This bypasses lots of miscommunications, and helps the GM shape the final resolution.
- Let it Ride: You roll once and whatever happens, happens. No rerolling until the situation changes.
These three small bits came together in a way that transformed our very trad table: Transparently explain what you want to accomplish, the GM decides whether to just say yes to that or make you roll, and if you roll, it’s one roll and then it’s over until something changes. Together, those three rules stripped out tons of arguing and dumb, pointless rolling and rerolling, and made each time we touched the dice matter.
The Triangle shows up again in both Mutant Year Zero and The One Ring. The Triangle is a fundamentally different way of engaging with the rules than “when it’s your turn, declare your character’s action and roll to see if you succeed.”
The Triangle is part of a larger trend: explicit rules about when to roll. Many, many games never define when you’re supposed to roll (outside of combat). If you do a thing, you roll, right? Or whatever other culture you grew up with. It’s a direct refutation of “we played all session and never even rolled.”
Democratized Fictional Authority
“The GM runs the world” has been such an assumed structural requirement of ttrpgs that anything else was very nearly unthinkable for decades. Decades! What would keep the players from cheating? Who will think of the children?
It turns out the children are just fine, and distrusting your players is only elemental when competition to overcome obstacles is the core play experience.
Burning Wheel is the first game that comes to mind where declaring facts about the setting can be a player thing. Skills called wises let the player declare a fact, the GM determines how narrow, rare or otherwise difficult that declaration should be, and you roll to see if the character was right or not.
Player authority over the fiction shows up in quite a few places now. A recent one that comes to mind is the Loremaster role in Band of Blades, in which the player is responsible for inventing the history of the Legion and calls upon it now and again. The Loremaster also frames camp scenes, which is the open roleplay portion of the game.
Interlocking Economic Cycles
Many trindie games have experimented with incentives other than bildungsroman character advancement, where the players chase experience points or their equivalent and enjoy a steady progression in effectiveness in power. My favorite early exposure to this was how Burning Wheel offered several different economies (Artha) to incentivize players to engage with their Beliefs and Instincts, but engaging with those thing didn’t directly advance you. Instead, you had to use the skills you wanted to advance (not a new idea), with Artha being how you avoided catastrophic failure when you used them. To advance your skills, you must engage with obstacles that were mathematically impossible to succeed at without Artha.
My latest favorite indirect-advancement thing was, believe it or not, Godbound. Not only do you earn XPs in the usual way, but you also have to spend Dominion (your divine energy) changing the world. Succeeding isn’t enough, you have to go be godly as well.
Narrative Playbooks
An interesting thing happened when Apocalypse World introduced the world to playbooks. They looked an awful lot like plain old “classes,” but played in a much more narratively intentional way. The Driver, for example, isn’t just skilled at driving The Last of the Interceptors across the wasteland, they were also emo loners. That is a result of the Driver’s moves, which had nothing to do with professional capacity and everything to do with the Driver’s narrative role in a well-known postapocalypse franchise.
Mutant: Year Zero meets this approach halfway, with classes that tell you what you’re good at but also gives you special abilities and advancement triggers that are tied into characterization. And not just “good roleplaying,” which honestly is the weakest punt in all of gaming. The One Ring hides this inside your “calling,” which looks diegetic (you’re a wanderer or a monster slayer or a treasure hunter) but is really a narrative declaration.
Relationship Maps/The Death of the Party
R-maps! Oh how I love thee. Many games now include a “I know X character because…” element, sometimes building connections between PCs and sometimes invoking an implied web of NPCs.
This wouldn’t have ever been a thing without holding environments where exploring interpersonal relationships was the core play experience. When you’re playing a unified party, relationships might evolve organically but if they don’t, nothing is lost. None of the narrative was expected to come from PCs squabbling or being friends or fucking (or, ideally, all of those).
Driving a stake through the heart of party-centered play has been one of the most refreshing things in trindie games for me. Your various ghosts and ghouls and vamps in Urban Shadows might occasionally join forces to face a common enemy, but just as often they’re dealing with each other’s daily lives. The magical weirdos of Invisible Sun are just living their lives and maybe helping each other out. The gangs, crews, and families pursuing a common enterprise in Forged in the Dark games look like a party on the surface, but they’ve got their own relationships and goals as well.
No doubt, though: unified party play is easier! Ongoing play about interpersonal relationships takes more work. The players need to not only engage with the premise, but a willingness to start trouble for themselves and others in pursuit of their needs.
Phases of Play
Conventional RPGs usually have detailed, interesting rules for combat, and then rules for everything else. You might cast a spell here and there, maybe have a special rule for dealing with sneaking or traps or whatever. Mostly pacing is left to the discretion of the GM, who would either play out the lives of the characters in detail, or if they were very adventurous and daring jump events ahead to the next conflict. I think of pacing as a point of distinctiveness between traditional GMs.
There have been games around for quite a while that helped create, even mandated, a particular mechanized pace. The earliest one I can think of is the passing of the years in King Arthur Pendragon: each winter, the GM rolls on a series of tables that inject a bunch of interesting new fictional development. It’s a completely different set of rules than the rest of the game. There may have been other games that provided this sort of set-aside mode of play but darned if I can remember any of ‘em.
The first storygame I personally ran into with distinct phases of play was Jason Morningstar’s Night Witches: you played the lives of WW2 Soviet airwomen during their days using one set of moves, then switched to a different set of moves as they went on raids at night. They were practically two different games, each informing the events of the other.
Mutant: Year Zero does the phases-of-play thing by dividing play into events in the Ark, and events in the Zone. They both use identical systems, but they’re both framed in very different ways. When you’re in the Ark, the action is usually driven by the relationship map, or by existential crises facing the mutants…that can only be addressed by sending expeditions out into the Zone. Once you’re in the Zone, the GM has tools to procedurally generate the wild and random things the mutants might find out there. The feel of the game is quite different at that point, switching to a grindy survival game. The shift in style and tempo is signaled on their return by dealing with the Rot they’ve accumulated out there now that they’rehome.
The One Ring breaks down all play into journeying, combat, or encounters. That’s it. There are no other kinds of play time. Each one has its own subset of rules that sit atop the general conflict and advancement stuff. There’s even a nod back to KAP, the Fellowship phase, where the characters explicitly stop adventuring, rest and recuperate somewhere safe, and advance the clock and the fiction a bit.
Forged in the Dark games like Blades in the Dark or Copperhead County thus far have a clear split between being on and off the job: the downtime phase. The job tempo is set by an engagement roll that drops you right into the action, and the job is over when it’s over. Then the characters deal with the fallout of their actions, get paid, manage the growth of their gang, take on personal projects. If there’s going to be any “open roleplay,” away from the pressure cooker of being on the job, this is when it happens.
Grinds
Another case of cross-pollination: when Torchbearer designers Thor Olavsrud and Luke Crane tore into B/X D&D, they rediscovered the mechanical grind of surviving a dungeon delve: light, food, water, rest and carrying capacity. These existed to create verisimilitude, but that verisimilitude created a diegetic sense of urgency. If you need to kick the players in the ass to take action, mechanical urgency is a good way to do it.
This is one of those places where old methods, I think, got a modern reframe. I suspect the old realists felt like the grind was oppressive and an impediment to beating the dungeon. I know I spent a lot of years playing D&D and just not caring what my carrying capacity was, or whether we had enough torches packed. Hauling around lamps is not heroism! Somehow, decades later, we’ve unearthed this idea as fun and motivating. Winning might be fun, but have you tried not losing?
(If that last line makes your skin crawl, you probably aren’t a trindie fan.)
Now you’ve got the constant threat of your lenders coming after you if you miss a payment on your ship in Edge of the Empire, the careful balance of food and time necessary to keep the Legion moving ahead of the zombies in Band of Blades, trying to stay hopeful enough to outrun the Shadow in The One Ring.
Embedded Campaign
One more: the game that’s designed with a campaign already baked. When was the first one? Polaris, maybe? The Mountain Witch? The idea here is that the game isn’t designed to be a toolbox for open-ended campaign play, but focused on a particular narrative arc.
My current best-in-class in the game-as-campaign category is the Eden storyline that comes with Mutant: Year Zero. Through a combination of card draws, map prep, and procedural generation, the mutants’ search for Eden gets delivered piecemeal to the players. You can totally just bump around in the Zone indefinitely when you play MYZ, but its highest and best application is watching the campaign play itself out without having to do anything specific. Other Year Zero Engine games have attempted something similar, but MYZ is still the best in my book.
Band of Blades is another game wrapping an integral campaign: the Legion is falling back toward its headquarters at Skydagger Keep, while The Cinder King and his endless zombie hordes implacably march across the world. It’s grim and dark, and very tightly structured. The Legion proceeds from location to location on a map, engaging with missions along the way. You can play, dunno, Legion adventures outside of this I guess, but most of the interesting gameplay becomes irrelevant.
Last Thoughts
I could keep going with the innovations that have happened in storygaming that found their way into mainstream, conventional ttrpgs. I left a bunch out because the piece was getting long – the rise of minigames, mechanized flags, an appreciation for fictional positioning as its own goal – when I realized that hardly any part of mainstream gaming remains untouched. Games are good and they’re constantly evolving to be even better. Even the folks who proudly declare themselves part of a renaissance of the old school are creating some genuinely creative, weird, new stuff. What a time to be gaming.
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Do you hate prepping your RPGs? I do. Well…I thought I did.
Because I have many decades of play in me, I considered prep a necessary evil. Prep is necessary so you don’t have to improvise at the table. Prep as a preventive measure. It was so deeply embedded, so baked into the activity, that I never really stopped to think about the questions this begs. Specifically: what’s the role of the GM? If I’m there to deliver an exciting storyline, then hell no I can’t improvise around that. Just making shit up on the spot, ye gawds, what if I TPK everyone by mistake? What if I forget to hit an important narrative mark? What will the players think?
Spending so much creative time in a defensive crouch put me in an awful, adversarial head space.
Sandbox-style play was an evolution, I have to think both for practical and play-style reasons: put a dragon in this cave if there would be a dragon there. It’s not your job to protect the characters from their choices. If there’s a real threat of failure, your players will feel more satisfied with their victories than if you’ve curated the difficulty to their abilities. Sure, okay.
Sandbox prep begs the same question: what’s the role of the GM? I think if you’re doing a sandbox, the GM is expected to be an impartial referee, yeah? Don’t pull any punches, be true to the reality of the challenges, evaluate reasonable solutions.
Skip ahead some years. Now we have games with yet another expected GM role.
A big swath of storygames are designed, either implicitly or explicitly, around the idea that I first saw in Apocalypse World: play to find out. Beautiful, short, crisp, easy to understand. Don’t force the characters to follow a plot, don’t preplan, let the GM be surprised alongside the players. What’s gonna happen? Dunno, let’s play to find out. The facilitator will have to make stuff up as we go.
Many storygames of the past decade are built with tools to help GMs improvise during play. Some take the dice out of the GM’s hands, requiring them to make calls about how the fiction changes based on character actions. Over in the OSR side of things, procedural tools generate content on the spot as needed. I’d imagine there’s a general assumption of sandbox-style play here, too, which takes the load off the GM to balance threats against the PCs. And then in the trindie space, you’ve got games that combine both: be okay with letting events spool out organically, and here are some procedural tricks you can use to generate content on the fly.
I still hate prep to this day. But the prep I hate? It’s the defensive kind. It’s thinking through likely outcomes, coming up with “balanced” fights, anything appearing at the intersection of math and tactics.
But what if I told you that, rather than prepping to avoid having to improvise, you can prep specifically for improvisation?
Fertilizing the Fields
When I want to run an improvisational game, either because the game requires it (PbtA) or because I just don’t have the bandwidth for conventional prep in a more conventional game, I want to make sure I’ve made my, dunno…psychic play space as fertile as possible.
Acceptable Tonal Range
I know folks play music, look at Pinterest boards, engage in all kinds of other creative media to get their juices going. Me too! I think it’s the process of curating that stuff that matters more than actually listening, looking, reading. It’s establishing a vibe.
For me, vibe comes into play when I’m thinking about acceptable tonal ranges. If I want a kinetic, high-energy action game then I’ll curate my music to that. If I want to aim for melancholy, I’ll find a sad indie folk-rock list on Spotify. But that’s all in service to implant that acceptable tonal range in my mind and my heart, so my improvisation in-the-moment serves that plan.
Understand The Rules of Genre
Different than consuming for vibe, I’ll try and track down the media that exemplifies the genre in which we’re playing. Because it bores me to tears, I mostly avoid “genre fiction” when I’m reading for pleasure. You know, the stuff that shows up free on your Kindle. But it’s excellent research when you need to sharpen your understanding of the genre in question.
For good or ill, I have found many improvisation-focused games lean hard on a shared understanding of genre, specific media touch points, and trope rules. I, personally, do not love how reliant on tropes — verging on cliche — some folks are when they play and GM. I’ll go so far as to say I personally hate treating RPGs as other-media emulators, but that’s a deep rabbit hole and I’m not feeling salty on that point today. (Maybe I’ll write more about it in the future.) But when everyone accepts a baseline of genre rules, they’re sure easy to improvise inside.
I’m certain most “naturally improv-talented” GMs got that way by being very well versed in genre. They can tap into tropes quickly. They think in terms of genre. The naturally satisfying outcomes of pattern-completion are easy when everyone knows the pattern you’re going for.
Right Tools For the Job
Not every game is well suited for improvised play. Many mainstream storygame-type RPGs are, like PbtA and Forged in the Dark type games. But even if you’re playing a trad or trindie game you can do some prep in advance to make improvising within them easier.
Know the Incentives
Big one for me: do you understand your game’s economic cycles? Do you understand the incentives at work? If I’m getting ready to run a game for the first time, I’ll do up a cheat sheet of the rules (if it’s the kind of game that didn’t come with play references) to teach myself how it works. But I’ll also sketch out the economic cycles at work. How do characters advance? How do you earn in-play currencies? What play cycles repeat themselves and how do those cycles restart?
Knowing a game’s incentive schemes usually clues me in to what players will chase. That’s a huge leg up when you’re prepping to improvise. Within a session or two, I’ll also have a better idea of what other play elements are incentivizing each player. Some players value scene-chewing spotlight time more than advancement. Others might really love helping another PC be amazing.
Situational Clocks
This is a PbtA-specific bit of advice but I think you can broadly apply it. Bear with me a minute.
I have found, quite often, that PbtA prep instructions are pretty half-assed. I’ve met so many designers who proudly declare that they run “improv heavy” games, and don’t need to prep. And it shows in their games. Since they don’t believe in prep, designers will drop “something” into a rules text because it “should” be in there – Apocalypse World, after all, has it – and not because it’s useful. The great offender here is half-assed Clock ripoffs.
Bad Clock prep is listing things that will happen as a Clock (fuse, storm, front, etc.) ticks down. I find this stiff and weird to fit into an organic game. I’ve done these Clocks and I usually end up ignoring the work I put into them. The situation on the ground doesn’t reflect the list of events I came up with weeks or months ago.
Good Clock prep is thinking through changes to the situation.
“The Honey Crips Gang burns down Dremmer’s hardhold” is a specific event. The fiction may or may not reflect a context in which burning down a hardhold makes sense. So I might instead write it: “Dremmer loses control of his hardhold to a rival gang.” It’s broader but also much easier to drive toward. Dremmer might lose control in any number of ways! Any number of rival gangs may be the cause! But the important thing is that, at that point in the clock, knowing that NPC stands to lose control of something valuable is a change in situation.
Pulling back from PbtA games, I’d say you can put Clock-like tools into play in any game. But focus instead on shifts in situation, not specific events. Imagine what play looks like when that situation comes to pass. I find that enormously easier than trying to shoehorn a burned-down house into the story.
Why, Not What
I feel like one place inexperienced-with-improv GMs stumble is not knowing the difference between an obstacle and a situation.
Dungeons? Those are maps full of obstacles. Monsters, obstacles. NPCs you need to beat by any means? Obstacles. Traps? Environmental hazards? Curses? All obstacles. Obstacles are so deeply baked into conventional roleplaying that I think many (most?) experienced players evaluate their play experience purely in their ability to overcome obstacles.
Situations, on the other hand, are organic within the fiction. They’re the context leading to the obstacles. Depending on the game, you can disregard situation. You don’t give a shit why this dungeon is full of treasure, right? I mean, unless knowing gives you a leg up in overcoming its obstacles.
Situations are unresolved points of tension. They’re unexploded bombs, tightened springs, whatever metaphor you’d like. They’re also, in my mind, constantly in motion. As situations resolve, they also lead to new situations. If it doesn’t, it wasn’t a situation.
Keep situations at the forefront of your play and your prep. The moment you’ve stopped thinking about context, you’ve started thinking about obstacles.
Situation Maps Once Again
One technique for understanding your game’s situation I’ve talked about before is the situation map. The very short version of this is:
Very clearly map out relationships between characters and organizations (follow that link, it’s good stuff), and
Labeling situations that are currently in play among those relationships. Put them in view so the players can see them too. Trusting your players to put that knowledge to good use is always more important than springing a big reveal on them, in my experience.
R-map + situations = situation map.
Armchair Psychology
Another why-not-what aspect of prepping to improvise is to have a very firm grasp of your game-fiction’s underlying motivations and pressures at work. What motivates an NPC? What goals does an organization actually have? What diegetic incentives are these things chasing? You can improvise action once you’ve got a firm grasp of the whys of your world. Always, always be thinking about the in-fiction logic of why things work the way they do.
Mixed Prep
It’s likely that, unless you’re playing a game that is entirely improvised, you’ll need to do a little of both kinds of prep. Stats for obstacles, knowing what drives your world, a clear understanding of tropes, and a clearly expressed acceptable tonal range.
I like finding a happy medium in trindie-type games where, if you need stats (because it’s the kind of game where GM assets have math), there’s a nice list of small/medium/large versions of expected obstacles: certain kinds of NPC (soldier, merchant, families), or monsters, or whatever. Burning Wheel, I think, does 1d/2d/3d NPCs, where literally everything they’ll ever roll is one, two or three dice, with an extra die for the thing they’re supposed to be good at at the GM’s discretion. This requires the GM and players have a fundamentally non-adversarial relationship, though. If you can just pull a number out of your ass, and it’s an absurdly large “I win!” value, you’ve just told the players you’re more interested in beating them than in collaborating to create a believable situation. But that’s not always on the GM, and some players will still find themselves craving adversity.
As a practical matter, unless you’re running a game purpose-built to be improvised, expect to do some of the old-fashioned prep. But do it in broad strokes, not specific, technical “builds.”
Okay But Why?
If you made it this far you might be asking yourself, why prep for improv when the best part of improv is not having to prep? I have thoughts!
Is the lack of prep really the best part of improv? There are other benefits, too: discovering your visceral creativity when you’re not overthinking it, being able to adapt to the tempo and temperature of the table, stumbling into surprising outcomes along with the players.
Prepped improv feels different than unprepped improv, in my experience. Unprepped improvisation I think is more sensitive to the unfettered table energy that can build up to the point of being manic energy. Maybe this is just me, but when I’m totally running a game off the cuff, it’s so easy to drive for more and more and MOAR excitement. And…maybe that’s not the best thing for your game. Particularly if you’re running a long series, which brings me to…
You can build toward longer play when you take control of your tempo. I suspect one secret to long-form play, which I have found frequently difficult in storygames, is that it requires discipline. If you ramp up every session to a point of manic energy, how long can you keep that up? If you hold some energy in reserve and get very intentional about tone and pacing, you may find the game wants to run longer.
Finally and not trivially, it’s a form of lonely fun that still provides dividends. Maybe you end up with an elaborate situation map instead of an elaborate village/dungeon/planet map, but it’s still nice to be able to revisit your game between sessions.
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If there’s one moment in play in any tabletop game that I dread, it’s the moment a player asks “What do I know about…?” Doesn’t really matter what the topic is: ugh! I was reminded how much this sets my hackles off after a brief flirtation with The Nightmares Underneath recently. No surprise, given that game’s OSR style: who knows what and how they know it is one of the original questions of RPGs.
Why dread, you ask? Because every method out there has upsides and downsides. And when it comes to a game that simply doesn’t address this — common in conventional tabletop games — you gotta roll your own.
GM Tells You/the Table
If you could shut up and let me tell my story, that’d be great.
This is the traditional approach, preferred by the elders since time immemorial. “The GM Runs The World” includes information about the world by default. Then it’s on the GM to decide if it’s something all characters would know, or perhaps some characters based on context like class or culture. Do you share that privately with the player’s character? I tend to just say it and rely on the other players to play toward their ignorance.
Upsides: Tight creative control, consistent authority.
Downsides: Creatively exhausting. Need to keep copious notes or have an impeccable memory.
Defer to Canon
Well actually, if you look back at the second edition of this supplement you’ll see that the tribes live to the northEAST rather than the northWEST and for some reason the editor decided to completely break established canon so now nothing means anything and I don’t even know why I bother trying to keep it all straight for you people.
The is the other traditional approach, made necessary in the case of setting-rich game settings. I think there’s something of a platonic ideal that canon leaves creative space for the GM to add their mark and make the setting their own. In my personal experience, though, you’ve got varying degrees of “canon mastery” in some games (see: Glorantha, Ars Magica, the World of Darkness, Star Wars and umpteen other licensed settings). Things can get real icky fast if you’ve got conflicting levels of canon mastery.
Upsides: Creative consistency. Everyone agrees to defer to the source material, which can put the brakes on unmitigated GM fiat. Potentially very deep material that touches on topics the GM might not have considered.
Downside: Requires a ton of brain space to keep it all straight. Might break tempo if someone needs to look something up. Creatively stultifying for some folks. Canon lawyers are the literal worst.
Player Makes Shit Up 1: At the GM’s Invitation
Make up the origins and traditions of my homeland? Right now? Here? Um.
I personally like this one, but it works best at a table where collaboration is an established expectation. It can backfire if the players are caught by surprise! I’ve sat at tables where the GM has been very iron-fisted about who gets authorship over what, and then throws this on the table. The sudden expectation, demand really, that you cough up something creative up can be tough. I differentiate this from the next method because it’s still the GM deciding when and how the players can drop some truth.
Upsides: Collaboration creates investment. Good creative challenge for the GM to fit a player’s ideas into the ongoing situation.
Downside: Lots of trust required! A bad-faith player (gasp!) can badly misuse the invitation. Pressure to “be creative” can either lead to players frozen in headlights, or bad ideas. I said it! We all come up with bad ideas sometimes. Off-tone with what’s already in place, or just boring. I’m personally willing to accept the risk, especially if the player is open to workshopping their idea a bit.
Player Makes Shit Up 2: Explicit Player Prerogative
Just don’t forget to peek out once in a while.
There are some games, typically in GM-less/GM-ful games like Archipelago and Dream Askew, where each player is responsible for answering questions about entire categories of setting elements. It’s a good method, quite a lot like having a table of GMs, with the additional wrinkle that everyone needs to feel out what is a good and appropriate contribution to what has come before. There are also more conventional games where players are tasked with answering questions tied to the character type they’re playing. Band of Blades does this with the nameless campaign roles (commander, quartermaster, etc.) when someone needs an answer about how the Legion operates, or in the case of the quartermaster, how their stuff works. In Legacy and its variants, players are asked to establish setting facts prior to play based on character choices.
Upside: Specifying what players are responsible for focuses the game’s themes. Unambiguous source for answers about categories of things, which also creates (ideally) consistency over those areas.
Downside: There can still be blanks, and the players still need to figure something out. Creative clashes don’t have an easy resolution. Same downsides as the other version of PMSU1 (bad ideas, freezing up). Game probably needs to be designed around this concept, although I could see a case for trying this out at a table willing to collaborate this way.
Everyone Hashes It Out Together
Nobody stays clean, everyone’s responsible.
In heavily collaborative games (which isn’t a design or game type, it’s a play culture decision), nothing says you can’t just open every question to everyone. I mean other than trying to wrangle as many creative visions as players, no easy answer for creative conflicts, and the very real possibility that the game just stalls out then and there. It’s the pizza topping problem: every person you add doubles the time it takes to reach consensus. (Yes pedants, that may not actually be what the pizza topping problem is.)
Upside: Potentially tons of good ideas if folks remain charitable to everyone’s input. Great ad-hoc method in any game when the GM is cool with dropping in “whatever.”
Downside: This is probably aspirational at best, and social pressures almost certainly come into play eventually. Pushy players will push for their ideas, impatient players will seek expedience over engagement, etc.
Introduce Uncertainty
I’m thinking of methods like Spout Lore from Dungeon World, or –wise skills from Burning Wheel: randomly determine who has authority! The player might want to make a tactically useful assertion, or just wants to add something they think is beautiful or interesting, but the uncertainty means the GM might fiddle with your input.
Upside: Generates creative energy. Uncertainty can be fun. Good creative challenge for the GM to fit new ideas into the ongoing thing.
Downside: Potentially uninteresting if the player is only concerned with tactical advantage. The game needs to be built with this idea, although “what do I know” can usually be roughly mapped to an existing skill or stat.
Last Thoughts
When I’m playing a game without explicit rules for determining what a character knows about something, my personal preference is for the GM to provide answers in situ based on what the character’s about. When my creative juices inevitably dry up due to the heavy ongoing load, I’ll fall back on letting the player whose character’s jam overlaps most with the topic in question provide an answer. That’s fun for me but it’s my second impulse, not my first, because I’ve got control issues.
In a perfect world, we’re playing a game where this question has been taken into account. This is well outside of trad tabletop orthodoxy, though, so you usually find it in trindie and storygame type games. My favorite baked-in approach is when the player rolls to establish the truth of something, with varying success. That feels the most like both the player and GM got a say in the final answer. I like being able to nudge ideas around a smidge.
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My home group finished our season of Impulse Drive this week. We played it entirely via Zoom, character keepers in Google Sheets, rollforyour.party for dice, and Pinterest. It was my first successful run at playing a tabletop RPG online. I learned a lot about online play, and I’m looking forward to the next online experience. I can safely say I’m over my online play fears.
Click here to read the first half of my deep dive into Impulse Drive. I describe the meat and potatoes of how the game works there. These are my closing thoughts and I make several references back to it. Go refresh, I’ll wait here.
Good? Let’s do it.
The Pleasure of a Formal Finale
Bringing our game to a satisfying end reminded me that we frequently don’t do that. Far more often I just give up on a game, get distracted by something shiny, give in to impatience. Bad habit. I’ve shut down many games that needed to push past a hump.
I’m not sure what the inflection point is. For us it was around 10 sessions. Everyone was fluent with the system (even the little-used moves), their character options, and understood my interpretation and style of using the rules. Everyone’s storylines had momentum, so players could express their characters in more subtle and less urgent ways. We understood the setting better, including its underlying metaphysics. Every interpersonal connection had solidified – the pilot and the bounty hunter’s shared interest in professionalism, the pilot’s fear of the weird alien AI’s judgement, the mystic’s connection with the AI over their outsider-ness, and so on.
Arrrrgh!
A satisfying finale is, I think, satisfying because it’s your last chance to complete patterns. But to make the finale grand, you need to be willing and able to imply very large patterns leading up to it. The pattern-completion of each move playing out is a tiny little hit of happiness, but closing out the accretion of 40-50 hours of bits? Oh boy, it’s the final jigsaw puzzle piece being dropped into place. Actual, physical relief.
One thing that makes Impulse Drive play out one (and only one) campaign/season is that each playbook’s Calamity list includes a move that will take your character out of play, one way or another. It’s a neat, variable alternative to “retire in peace.” Two of our characters, the bounty hunter and the mystic, got to end the game with them. The bounty hunter faced off against the recurring villain with one final “only one of us walks away from this” move…and against all odds, missed. Astonishing. He rolled against his best stat – +3 – and missed. It was perfect. Meanwhile, the mystic had to burn through so much Stress to survive during the grand showdown that he picked up two Calamities, which allowed him to narrate taking over his mystic order and his sister becoming an estranged apostate of the same order. Marvelous.
It’s a Crew Game, but #notallcrews
“Space adventure” is a sprawling genre, particularly in the scamp freighter vein. We had chosen the smuggler ship playbook, which is baseline Impulse Drive. While fun-loving troublemakers are easy to understand, though, I think Impulse Drive forgets the genre also centers on frequent low-level conflict among the crew: Mal and Inara’s on-again-off-again relationship, Luke convincing Han to rescue a rich girl, everyone versus everyone every episode of Farscape. Sometimes everyone’s on the same page – particularly when they’re on mission – and sometimes they’re not.
The greatest ship crew ever conceived. I will not be taking questions at this time.
PbtA type games, especially when they’re close to Apocalypse World’s baseline, are tricky to maneuver through when it comes to PvP type conflict. All my players are experienced with Burning Wheel, and BW is our gold standard for fair-but-tough PvP play. The Duel of Wits system lets the players mechanize and resolve their arguments without any GM input. Impulse Drive doesn’t offer that. The PvP advice in every PbtA game I’ve ever run, including ID, is simple: follow the fiction. But in terms of gameplay affordances, it’s easy to push against that.
Like straight AW, there are essentially two mechanized social interaction sequences: intimidation and manipulation. Intimidation is in the Go Aggro vein: make a real threat and asking the target to force your hand or submit. Manipulation requires you have something on offer in return for agreement. Those choices are fine when it comes to pushing against NPCs. They’re less good against another player, because they both demand the target give up agency. There’s no counter-offer in the intimidate, and there’s no enforcement in the manipulate. Manipulate, in fact, is purposefully quite weak: the stick is that a PC must roll to get out from under it. The carrot half – XP if you do what I say – becomes non-incentivizing for reasons I cover below.
I mean, this is just how these games work without a ton of PvP infrastructure, like you find in Monsterhearts. What Impulse Drive is quite good at, though, is mechanically reinforcing a functional team. For example, you can support each other with a great move called “Lean on Me,” which covers both direct support and emotional comfort. It’s my current favorite version of helping rules, mostly due to the move being tied into the Stress rules. Not only can you provide help toward succeeding at the roll, you can also help them recover from Stress while you do it. Very neat. There are other examples of group decision type moves throughout the game as well.
Let us contemplate the fruit-filled gap.
On the other hand, leaving that gap in place is itself a design decision. If you’re not willing to actually harm someone, and you have nothing specific to offer, what does that leave the players? I know my BW-head players want a system cudgel, and not having one reflexively bugs them. But either the game goes on, or they dig in their heels and the game stops. This is also a legitimate outcome.
Story time!
We had an excellent moment in the game, near the end, where two characters had been acting like they were on the same page but were definitely not. Tons of marvelous dramatic irony, and the players reveled in it. But when the secret agent receives orders to get the mystic out of the way so the agent’s master can do a thing, the agent drugged the mystic and flew him out of the current system. The mystic eventually woke up, liberated himself, armed up, and got ready to murder the agent. Wow! But after some mystical psychic probing, he discovered the agent was following outside orders and would never physically harm anyone on the crew. That prompted a frustrating discussion.
The mystic wasn’t willing to blow away the agent, so no Intimidate. So instead he promised to mind his own business if only the agent would fly back – it’s the only thing he had to offer. He rolled Manipulate, but the agent got out from under it by succeeding at the Keep Your Cool roll. I think it cost a Stress, but whatever. So the players were left without a clear mechanical way forward. Interesting! I could have stepped in and offered something, but the real-world social pressure of both of them knowing the cost of digging in their heels meant they worked it out on their own.
Sometimes no system is itself the system. Sometimes frustration is okay.
The Long Game
As I suspected the last time I wrote about Impulse Drive, the playbooks are set up to play through one season of a TV show. It was a show with lots of little subplots, of course. Think Agents of SHIELD: three big acts within a larger arc. But the short list of advancements (you only buy from your own playbook, unlike Apocalypse World), the rapid pace of session-based advancement when sessions are short, and the list of Calamities you’ll eventually run out of all add up to a system-mandated endgame.
Would the game be improved with a … holy hand grenade? It wouldn’t not be improved.
To my mind, that’s a good thing. Because advancement is tied to missed rolls (Dungeon World style) and you use your Hooks to invoke more frequent misses and there are end of session questions, the shorter the session the faster the advancement. Everyone in our game of 12 sessions (or so, I lost count) advanced all five stats, bought all their playbook advances except each book’s “grenade” move – for real, every playbook has a special use of grenades, of all things – and most of their loadout slots. They did that a couple sessions short of burning through all their Calamities.
Our game shifted from lots of advancement-incentivized missing via Hooks, to all the stats improving, to everyone growing beyond advancement as an incentive and just killing it with boosted stats and no more Hooks. Which, you know, awesome. Love me some good competency porn. But since the Space Master (GM/MC) makes moves in the usual PbtA ways, I found myself grabbing more “when they expect you to say something” opportunities and making harder missed-roll SM moves because they were so rare. Giving up on advancement also meant the players spent less time thinking about and updating their Hooks at the end. If they had engineered better hooks I would not have minded a slower, longer focus. Ours didn’t, not really, and once hooks stopped mattering for advancement the players didn’t care about them.
The Work:Fun Ratio
It used to be fashionable in indie circles to loudly, angrily declare: “If the game doesn’t work, play a different game.” I think that has led to weird design choices, over-explaining rules, perfectionism and general paralysis among designers. It’s also led to much better, tighter, more focused design – even in mainstream games. Trade-offs! But as a culture-of-play value? I propose a different formulation: “If the game is too much work to make fun, find a game with a better work:fun ratio.”
Impulse Drive is an imperfect game. Its Apocalypse/Dungeon World origins are readily obvious if you’ve played either game. The new bits, like Calamities, stand out as novel. The bits of design tech from other games like Blades in the Dark (Stress, scene-scaled clocks) are also easy to suss out if you’ve played those games. In other words, the more different games you’ve played, the better you understand what Impulse Drive is trying to get at. You may need to help get it there sometimes.
The work:fun ratio to make Impulse Drive not just playable but fun is quite low, particularly if you’re experienced in the PbtA space. I would not suggest Impulse Drive as anyone’s first PbtA game, but third or fourth? It’s very easy to bridge over the game’s rough bits.
Parting Thoughts
In the end, I really enjoyed this campaign. I learned a ton about related subjects as well:
Character-driven PbtA play doesn’t really interface well with Stars Without Number style sandbox setup. Still a useful tool! But I learned a lot about both PbtA and sandboxes by trying to combine them.
Fruitful voids are still a thing, and I need to give the players space to navigate them (even if they’re frustrated with fumbling around).
It takes time for folks to get comfortable with a game’s systems, characters, and setting and situation. It’s almost always worth it.
There are notable technical upsides to online play, particularly the utility of a shared character keeper and the ability share screen media. I’m never giving up on live table play but I’m proceeding with online play with more confidence.
Clear endings are powerful enough that they’re worth intentionally pursuing.
Next up: still deciding! I’m leaning toward Imp of the Perverse. Which happens to be just $20 for the very beautiful book right now, by the way.
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Here’s what I’ve been reading this month. These are (relatively) short reviews! Ideally I’ll run these at some point in the future. Are you interested in seeing a deeper dive about any of these? Let me know in the comments.
Electric Bastionland
PDF is available at DriveThruRPG
Hardcover is available at bastionlandpress.com
Electric Bastionland
Chris McDowall’s Electric Bastionland arrived on Kickstarter with lots of hype from folks whose opinions I respect. It’s based on Into the Odd, one of many OSR games/frameworks, and I like to keep up with what’s going on in OSR-land, so I backed it. The author does a really nice job of laying out the game’s goal at the end of the book: “Electric Bastionland was written to be a roleplaying game that anyone could play.” Having gone through the whole thing a few times now, I think that goal is aspirational at best. Besides, literally every RPG is an RPG that anyone can play (other than the actually broken ones).
The book, as a product, is notable in a few ways: minimalist text (nearly every procedure and subtopic is broken down into bullet points), generous spreads, and starkly evocative art. It looks and reads differently than anything else on my shelf.
The premise of Electric Bastionland is that the characters came from failed careers, now belong to a party that owes someone a lot of money, and regularly get leads on heist-able treasure somewhere in or around a surreal city called The Bastion. The debt is specifically $10,000, which implies to me that you’re meant to play until it’s paid off. The someone is determined by the youngest player’s career.
The majority of content in the book is career spreads, and setting emerges from which careers (there are 100!) are in play. There are rough aesthetic guidelines for the various established locations of the game – the Bastion (a vast, ever-changing surreal city – I couldn’t help but think of Invisible Sun here, all the way down to the 1920s aesthetic), Deep Country (everything outside the Bastion, representing backwards-thinking communities), and The Underground (a meta-location filled with intelligent machines that connects the Bastion to everywhere else, including Deep Country and The Living Stars above).
My tl;dr is that Electric Bastionland is 90% aesthetic guidelines, 5% thematic guidelines, and maybe 5% (or less) rules. There are evocative bullet-lists for each major setting, and there are strong implications of how your Bastion looks based on the characters in play. A Bastion in a game with a Science Mystic, Masked Horrorist (wut), Tuk-Tuk Driver, and Traveling Show-Person is going to look much different than a game with a Disinherited Socialite, Lone Stargazer, an Underground Weirdo (how do you fail at your Underground Weirdo career?), and a Canal Nomad. If the creative challenge of making those things make sense against a (mostly) blank slate sounds like your jam, you will love this.
As far as structured play and play advice goes, I feel like there’s just not that much there there. This is probably my own preference for other schools of indie gameplay and design talking, I’ll cop to that. But I feel like Chris’ minimalist approach is too minimal for folks who aren’t already steeped in play, and in particular in OSR play. He nicely restates some big OSR play advice ideas: talking is better than rolling dice, keep asking questions, sneaking is better than fighting. But that advice is rooted in an even larger assumption: play is about characters overcoming obstacles in an environment created by contextualizing weird aesthetic inputs.
Is that model the most welcoming for folks who have never played anything before? Is an indebted Tuk-Tuk driver more accessible than an armed wanderer looking for trouble? Normally I wouldn’t even bother asking that question, but it’s a core goal of Electric Bastionland. I mean, it might be! Whatever additional social context exists among the characters, or the characters’ connection with wider society is entirely up to the taste of the players but gets no mention in the book. This is a game about obstacles, not situations. Other than the core situation of owing someone a lot of money.
There’s other rip-roaring rhetoric baked in, like “rules are false idols” and “this book is designed for the game table, not the library.” To his credit, Chris puts his money where his mouth is: the barely-there rules are easy to ignore so, yeah, you can’t go looking to them for answers. The big spreads and bullet points really are a nice way to take in lots of ideas quickly. Other rhetorical claims are harder for me to see in the game text: make the players feel welcome, break the barriers that stop you from having fun at the table, your table should be warm and inviting. All worthy goals, for sure, but nothing about the game itself gets me there.
Are “make impactful choices” and “be nice to each other” useful advice? It makes me wonder who needs this advice. Who isn’t making impactful choices? Who isn’t being nice to each other?
Liminal
PDF available at DriveThruRPG
Hardback available at Modiphius
Liminal
Paul Mitchener’s Liminal slid under my radar when it first showed up. In fact I had backed it on Kickstarter and, to my shame, un-backed. But I’ve got a retail copy in my hands now.
Liminal is about folks caught between the mundane and magical worlds in the United Kingdom. It’s not a universal modern fantasy game like Urban Shadows; the game is specifically a love letter to England that is diverse, proud, and loves its wholesome baking shows. It’s more Dr. Who than Danny Boyle in tone.
The holding environment of the game is the Crew, to which the characters all belong regardless of their background. Deciding on the Crew’s goal is part of the setup, and there’s not a pick-list to choose from. Instead, there’s some general guidance, things like being supernatural investigators, or fighting a shared enemy (there are many factions already baked into the setting), or working with a faction as a deniable asset. The Crew then takes on cases, which are all what you might imagine: investigations, helping folks, righting wrongs, cool supernatural special ops. Crew-making is its own minigame before the game starts.
The rules bit of the game is pretty trad with some trindie bits: skill tests against challenge levels with a chance at critical success or failure. That’s fine, functional, unremarkable. Happily he’s included specific rules about failure! I cannot fathom why failure rules continue to be special and nice, and not just an expected part of success/failure based game design.
Being a supernatural game, there’s of course magic. The list is pretty much what you’d expect: blessings and curses, illusions, and so on. Spells spend a fungible resource called Will, which everyone has and can regain by engaging with their Drive. It’s a very straightforward cycle.
What stood out for me was the extensive, flavorful take on Spooky-But-Not-Miserable-England. There are lots of factions at work in the game, everything from rich-family wizard schools to secret police departments working the werewolf beat. Probably half the book is dedicated to setting ideas and locations and critters and flavor, flavor, flavor. And the character concepts are spot-on for that Dresden Files/Constantine/The Magicians vibe, with academic wizards and knights from secret ancient orders and mundane investigators who have seen too much.
It’s a modest, attractively produced game filled with charm and clear, directed play. You could certainly piece together something similar on your own, probably, using Fate or adapting Urban Shadows. The killer app, I think, is for the folks (like me!) who have tried and failed to wrestle this game together out of disparate bits of World of Darkness games. It’s all in one place, crew management and case creation and a dedicated, narrow focus on those thing.
Vaesen
PDF available at DriveThruRPG
Hardback available at Free League
Vaesen
Vaesen, Free League’s newest Year Zero Engine game, features a 19th century monster hunter society headquartered in Castle Gyllencreutz in Upsala, Sweden. The setting is historical-ish; they’re not picky about when during the 19th century you’re operating. It’s the horse-speed travel, no computers and phones, the lack of all modern conveniences that’s important.The castle bit of Vaesen follows Free League’s formula for your party’s shared enterprise/headquarters, much like the Ark in Mutant: Year Zero. As the monster-hunting society advances, you “discover” new elements of the creepy abandoned castle you’ve inherited: a hidden library filled with occult knowledge, a fish pond that calms you before you head out to investigate a mystery, a Difference Engine to help with the calculations to add new stuff to the castle.
The monsters you hunt in 19th century Sweden are fairy-tale themed, drawn from Johan Egerkrans‘ book Vaesen: Spirits and Monsters of Scandinavian Folklore. There’s a slight Cthulhu By Gaslight vibe to the cycle of play, with special fear rules and long-term damage to your mental well-being, but the threats aren’t cosmic or existential. It’s an angry farm fairy terrorizing the family that works the land, a witch no longer respected by the community she’s always served and protected, a bridge troll whose livelihood dried up when folks stopped crossing its bridge. The Vaesen are monstrous, but they always have a human-caused reason they’ve crossed over from fairy tale to menace.
Character creation looks like other Year Zero Engine games: pick an archetype, pick from a series of 3-bullet lists, define a relationship with the other player characters, done. The pick-lists are nifty! You choose a motivation (a roleplaying guideline), a trauma (helps color the world as weird and supernatural, the event that gave you “The Sight”), and a dark secret (which earns you XP if you engage with it, and gives the GM something to poke you with). You also start out with a memento, which helps you recover from conditions. It’s nice, compact, straightforward.
Instructions to create the mystery you’ll investigate are thorough and detailed, from the inciting incident that draws the society’s attention, to atmosphere-creating advice, to the step-by-step list of what will happen. The investigation is not on rails, not exactly; it’s more a rough to-do list to remember to receive the invitation, prepare for the journey, describe their arrival in this strange new place, and so on. The detail level here looks terrific, very helpful if you’ve never put together an investigation game. And tables, so many tables. You can procedurally generate nearly every aspect of the investigation if you enjoy the challenge of piecing that together.
Vaesen is a squarely trindie game. If you’ve played other Year Zero Engine games (Mutant, Coriolis, Tales from the Loop, etc., you’ll get the gist of how the game works here. It’s a simplified system, like Tales, with just one “kind” of die you’re rolling with an opportunity to reroll, if you’re willing to take a condition (physical or mental, depending on which stat you’re rolling against). It’s not risky, it’s costly, and recovering from Conditions is time-consuming but not difficult. I don’t have a sense of how disruptive a Condition actually is, but I assume it really only applies during the scene in which you’ve received the Condition. There’s a nifty bit where low-level injuries give you a defect (a small penalty with a description), while very high-level injuries will give you an insight (a significant bonus, should you survive). Otherwise? It’s party based play with a GM responsible for prepping an adventure and normal adjudication duties.
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We wrapped up a short run at Nathan Paoletta’s Imp of the Perverse this week. Strap on the air tanks and headlamps, we’re taking a deep dive.
Quick Overview
Imp of the Perverse is a horror game set in the early America of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s called “Jacksonian” but most of the period (1830-1850) takes place after Andrew Jackson’s presidency. The Poe bit provides the supernatural and tonal flavor of the game, and the Jacksonian bit provides the actual horror of this stretch of American history. The more you know this history, the more rewarding, but Paoletta provides a ton of excellent essays both about tone and aesthetics (the Poe) and the history (the Jackson).
The language is period-stylized, which was a slog when I was making sense of the systems. A modern game-reader might look for investigation but here we get ratiocination. You might expect a section called advancement but you get ontogenesis instead. Player characters are Protagonists, the GM role is called the Editor.
The Protagonists are such because they each exhibit a perversity, another old-timey word. It doesn’t mean, you know, being pervy. It’s a behavior the player feels is unseemly in excess. In our game, our Protagonists’ perversities were entitlement, morbidity, melancholy and meddling. Normal human stuff, but your Imp – a literal, personal supernatural presence – eggs you on to overindulge in those things. Those perversities also provide the Protagonists their Greatest Strength, the positive version of their perversity. So the entitled perversity is also an expeditious mind, the melancholic perversity provides poetic insight, and so on.
The Protagonists’ Imps can provide strength and knowledge, and later supernatural Edges. You might speak with the dead, or mesmerize the unwitting, maybe literally smell deceit. There’s no, like, magic or spells or anything. It’s not Call of Cthulhu in any way.
The game is about what happens to the Protagonists as they investigate and eventually defeat monsters. In this setting, monsters arise from perversities given too much sway. They started as people, alive or dead (“beyond the Shroud,” an anachronistic idea for the early 1800s but rationalized by the massive upheavals and brutalities of post-Jacksonian America) or even returned from beyond the Shroud. Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.
Imp isn’t really about that investigation, though. The Protagonists will always succeed. The more interesting emotional and thematic experience of the game is tied into what these investigations cost the Protagonists. They may find themselves slipping ever-closer to themselves becoming a monster, or shedding their Imp entirely and returning to mundane human life. Characters use up their resources faster than they can refresh them, further driving them toward their eventual monstrosity. The slope is so slippery that it’s nearly impossible to stop once you’ve started, but the promise of redemption is always there.
This is a game squarely in the storygame mold of indie gaming. Characters are measured by personality traits rather than professional capacities, most of the game plays out as a talky-talky freeform, and you only roll dice to resolve conflicts, not actions or skills.
Protagonist Setup
You use a questionnaire to create each Protagonist, Mouse Guard style. The questions are flavorful and interesting, and provide your various starting values as well as a list of relationships. Relationships are important and embed you into your community. Just add up the values, invent a few NPCs, maybe pick a supernatural Edge if you decide this isn’t your first brush with monsters.
You end up with a colorful, not especially deep, biography of your Protagonist’s implied past. The game-mechanical values can help guide play but since you arrive at them via questionnaire, I didn’t feel like the players were especially invested in playing toward them. I suspect if you know how the game works, you play toward your qualities so it makes organic sense to use them when it’s time to roll.
Monster Setup
The meat of the game is prepping the monster. It’s a big GM-facing job with lots of secret stuff you prepare in advance to unleash on the players later.
Setting up the monster was harder than I expected. You start by picking a perversity, just like for a Protagonist. But then you extrapolate way, way out from there.
There are a slew of example monsters in the book, which is a good way to go if you’re just going to dip your toes in. For example, there’s a reporter whose thirst for investigation and nosiness has led her to become a manipulative blackmailer. That’s an example of a living person whose Imp has turned them into a monster. But you can also go past the Shroud and select a monstrous spirit (a ghost that saps your self-worth, for example), or even returned from beyond the Shroud, a physical, supernatural entity (a dead philosopher obsessed with decay). In any case, the monsters are people. Ultimately, the monsters are us.
I found the monster-creation process super interesting and indirect. The process extracts a thematically interesting monster with clear through-lines back to the core “why is this a monster?” decisions. After picking a perversity, you think about the web of characters surrounding the monster — not just its targets, but folks with an interest in serving and protecting it. By the book, you actually do this before you make characters. The important bit here is establishing the monster’s status quo, the bad stuff it does without the Protagonists interfering. The next thing you do is think through how and where it operates at the start of play, as well as a couple steps ahead (its Escalations) in terms of its area (the physical or social circles it attacks), its horror (the supernatural stuff it does) and its emanation (terrible things NPCs are compelled to do because of the monster’s influence). This is all in service to having solid, consistent answers at hand when the Protagonists start observing the monstrosity and asking questions.
I say indirect because once you’ve gone through its web of NPCs and Escalations, transferring all that to the official worksheet is not a clear 1:1 process. You have to look at your answers and once again reframe and reinterpret what you’ve come up with to fit the worksheet. And then you’re done.
During my prep, I ended up with two relationship maps: One representing the community as the characters understand it, with their relationships and interconnections. The other is monster-centric, with the bad thing in the center and all the other stuff re-arrayed around it. You don’t need to maintain two r-maps, but I always like to present an r-map as a table centerpiece, something for the players to look at. Since we were playing online, I used Miro and shared a link. Then I kept the monster-centric version private, on a piece of paper.
Starting the Chapter
Imp offers only a weak holding environment for the Protagonists. While the purpose of the Protagonists is quite clear – defeat a string of monsters – the rationale for them to work and spend time together is only as strong as the players make it. There is one tool that helps: every PC “admires” another PC, and gets a free (ie not-at-risk) black die in their Exertion pool whenever a scene involves them. If I were playing with system expertise I’d contrive any reason at all to drag my admired PC into scenes with me. Every die counts! But at our table that just wasn’t part of their calculus. I assume they didn’t really sense how the economy of play would end up wrecking their characters’ abilities.
Without the players contriving reasons to have their admired Protagonists with them, the Editor is responsible for scene-framing. It can be a heavy lift! One pressure I felt against forcing Protagonists together early was that engaging the system pours on the gas: Anxiety skyrockets, investigating becomes too expensive, and the monster’s Escalations start showing up before I had even put its initial effects into play.
What Play Looks Like
Imp is a low-contact game. The majority of play time is pure freeform, with nobody engaging the system. But once you do start engaging, the game accelerates fast. I didn’t realize just how fast events would escalate in the game and was caught by surprise.
Players have only four mechanical affordances available to them. They can spend their Empathy to either make realizations about the monster or create new Relationships (which in turn can become additional black dice). They can spend their resources, community standing or their reasoning for Ratiocination (buy ever-more-expensive answers to things they’re investigating). And when a Protagonist does something involving deadly force, meaningful risk, or any use of their supernatural Edges, they make an Exertion roll. And that’s it, as far as the Protagonists go: connecting with the monster, investigating, doing meaningfully risky stuff.
The fourth system is aimed at other Protagonists. Each player has a pool of red Weirding dice. When it’s another player’s turn, you can speak in the voice of their Imp and negotiate a deal to give them one of your Weirding dice. This reminds me a lot of the Shadow role from White Wolf’s Wraith: a fun, scary, possibly boundary-violating chance to be the bad guy.
Ratiocination (the investigation aspect) is quite good: each Protagonist has a budget for asking questions, which get more expensive as Anxiety increases. There’s an incentive to ask early and often, but it’s hard for the players to even know what to ask about before Anxiety has made the questions unaffordable. But even after the questions become too expensive for you to answer, they can always get an answer straight from their Imp…at the cost of one red check. Those checks become important during Ontogenesis, the character-changing phase that comes after the monster is defeated.
Exertion is conflict resolution but for only very specific conflicts: when lethal force is involved, when they’re using their supernatural Edges, or when they’re doing something meaningfully risky. You assemble a pool of black dice from your relevant Qualities, Relationships and your Greatest Strength, all of which will be reduced by one unless you spend successes to protect them after the roll. You also get a red die if the conflict reflects your Perversity, and another if you accept one from another player speaking to you in the voice of your Imp. The GM can also swap your black dice for red dice, which is a bastard move that drives the characters toward becoming monsters.
There’s some hint that succeeding at Exertion means the player gets to narrate their own success, an old conflict-resolution thing I haven’t heard about in years. But only a hint! It’s not spelled out in the rulebook. There’s also some talk about additional successes being “better,” but if it’s on the player to narrate their own success, I’m not really sure how that works. But as a practical matter, nobody ever used extra successes for anything other than keeping their at-risk qualities/relationships/Strength.
Two dynamic values drive play: Lucidity, which represents your connection with your Imp and sets your target number (lower is better!), and Anxiety, which represents how bad things have gotten as the Protagonists battle the monster. Lucidity only goes down during the investigation, as players make Exertion rolls and want to generate more hits on their rolls. After a roll, each die equal or greater than your Lucidity is a “hit,” which you use to either succeed at Exertion or protect the qualities and relationships you put at risk to buy dice. You can then Embrace the Imp after a roll, lower Lucidity once, and count hits using your new, lower target number. Meanwhile, Anxiety only goes up, each time a Protagonist Embraces the Imp but also the first time they see the monster or its horrors, and the first time they face it directly. Each time Anxiety goes up, Ratiocination questions get more expensive and everyone (Editor included) gets an additional red Weirding die.
As the text makes clear, the point of Imp isn’t beating monsters. The Protagonists will beat the monsters every time. They literally can’t “lose” in that regard. The real game is managing your Lucidity, keeping it below 6 (at which point your freed of your Imp and go on to live your life) and above 1 (at which point you become the game’s next monster). That management mostly comes down to the checks you make along the way – black for your human-ness, red for your Imp-ness – and how quickly you use up your various stats.
Once the Protagonists defeat the monster, the game enters the Ontogenesis phase. Those red and black checks become pools of red and black dice, which the player rolls and tallies. Whichever color’s total is higher either lowers (red) or raises (black) Lucidity by one step. Then the players spend those checks on refreshing their various pools, maybe picking up a neat new supernatural power, or authoring new facts about the Shroud.
The system is an elaborate clockwork, and it can be hard to see how things will play out the first time.
Story Time!
I set our game in the Republic of Texas, 1840. Imp‘s default setting is either Poe’s Baltimore/Boston/some other East Coast city, or the plantation-era South, like Richmond or Charlotte. The pre-Old West western frontier fits into the game, but the vibe is quite different: big open spaces, long travel times between homesteads, and deep cultural divides. We chose San Antonio as the farthest-west frontier between American and Mexican societies. I have a personal fondness for the time and place, and fell down a research hole anyway to flesh it out for the players.
Our Protagonists were: a scion of a wealthy Irish empresario family, a former officer of the Mexican army, an escaped slave turned journalist from Back East, and a Methodist circuit rider arrived to convert the locals away from Mexico’s mandated Catholicism.
In terms of setup and then play, I should have more tightly entwined everyone’s relationships and NPC triangles, as well as the monster’s immediate connections. I had to weigh that against the time I wanted to take establishing the setting itself. The not-Old-West Republic of Texas was hugely fun to research but, I think, hard for the players to hook into. So I spent a lot of time trying to paint that picture when I should have been engaging them with the investigation.
Because of Imp’s weak holding environment, I had to work hard to contrive scenes for the Protagonists to show up together. The setting was novel, and I wanted enough one-on-one time with each character to get a sense of what their status quo looked like. That’s just good horror facilitation. But that takes time, and it leaves the other players with not much to do other than listen and enjoy. That’s a lot of freeform just-talking, at least at first, so the other players don’t even get a chance to speak in the voices of each other’s Imps and hand out Weirding dice. Later, when folks are making Exertion rolls with some frequency, that can happen much more. Unfortunately, at our table, it just … didn’t. I’m not sure why, but I speculate our online play environment makes it hard to telegraph when you might want to get impy.
We played two sessions. The first session was spending some time with each Protagonist to get a sense of their life in San Antonio. I ended that session with an inexplicable situation on an Irish homestead: a widow and her children barricaded inside their own home, every door and window sealed shut from the outside. The empresario and the circuit rider arrived to discover this weird scene, did some Ratiocination, and started feeling out what the heck was going on.
The second session, we engaged with the actual system quite a bit more. As the Protagonists spent time in the presence of the monster, they started spending Empathy to get solid answers about the monster’s about-ness. It was motived by the need to protect, interpreted protection as ownership, and eventually decided the only way to protect the things it “owned” was to destroy them with fire. The finale of the session featured all four Protagonists arrived at another homestead set ablaze by the monster. The Mexican army officer realized (via Empathy) the only fire that could have consumed an unsettled spirit was…the siege of the Alamo itself, a few years prior. And the officer had been tasked with burning the bodies of the Texian dead. Pretty great, very personal, grim! They defeated the monster when the Methodist priest consecrated the grounds of the Alamo where the Texian dead had been burned.
In retrospect, I really like the shape of the fiction that came out of the game. In practice, though, everyone had a heck of a time locking into how the systems worked, what they were capable of doing, and maintaining a clear player/character split. One big point of confusion was that there are lots of ways to “get answers” in a game that’s largely concerned with investigation. Ratiocination is the main way, but you can also use Empathy to understand the monster’s backstory, and several Edges are also good for getting information but require Exertion rolls to use. That all felt blurry on the player-facing side. What kind of information-gathering are we doing here?
Probably our greatest difficulty was Empathy use. The players can use it when in the presence of the monster or its horror, but I frequently had to say, non-diegetically, that yes this is a time you can use your Empathy. Or even recommend they do so. It produced good results but the players never felt comfortable invoking the system on their own. Now is a good time to get clues, now is a good time to use an Edge, now you’re going to need to Exert, now someone should offer the player a Weirding die.
We wrapped up the chapter so we could see the Ontogenesis cycle in play. Turns out Ontogenesis can knock a new character out of play immediately! I think this is because players weren’t cognizant of how the black/red checks would play out at the end of the chapter. In our game, the Methodist circuit rider mostly did black-check things and only called on his Imp once. But he was also a first-time monster hunter, and his Lucidity started at 5. He only had one red check but three or four black checks, so of course his Lucidity went up to 6, which freed the preacher from his meddlesome Imp. If I ran this again in long-form play, I would mention this early to the high-Lucidity folks so they could aim for extra red checks in play and keep their character in the game.
Last Thoughts
I really dig the aesthetics and themes of Imp of the Perverse. Love the period, even though I’m usually scared out of my gourd about getting historicity ”wrong” in play. I really like that you can dig into hard topics – slavery, racism, sexism, all the bad stuff – because of the period. Talking with my buddy Jay about how he’d run it during playtest, he name-checked The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I totally didn’t get that vibe, but I think I can see how one might end up in a more high-adventure mode evolving out of moody Poe-style psychological horror.
The clockwork of the game, with early Ratiocination leading to Empathy and eventually to Exertion and then Ontogenesis, is formally quite clever. I never had a player try to bypass the investigation by cashing in Empathy and just asking “how do we defeat this thing?” They did, in fact, eventually ask that. I think this process works so well because the players don’t know what they don’t know. In our game, I was even able to give the players that answer – find the remains of this damned soldier and consecrate it – but doing so wasn’t straightforward. The whole thing felt organic.
I found it hard to guess at what a good tempo might be. An entire session of establishing characters and setting was probably too much. Not responding more strongly to the players’ need to be in scenes together was a technique failure on my part, but I think not a universal one: some players just get more enjoyment out of listening and watching each other’s scenes for a while. I’m quite sure a second run at the game would go a lot better on that count, mostly through harder framing of characters together in scenes and tying the relationship maps together much tighter.
It’s an interesting game! And such a pleasure to play something that isn’t sitting atop any of the big indiegame platforms. It’s not PbtA or FitD or Fate. It is very much a conflict resolution-style storygame with a clear lineage back to earlier storygames. It also has some of the features and problems of those earlier games, like the need for players to take an active interest in other characters’ efforts and the need for the GM to push them through the session rather than, say, having Moves pull you along.
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I’ve been running a Burning Wheel game for the first time in years, and was reminded that swaths of the indie world might not know about this seminal work. I’ve written about it a ton, but here’s a one-stop overview.
(The) Burning Wheel
Okay yes, formally it has a “The” in the beginning. Absurdly underpriced rulebook and Codex available from BWHQ. If you find a PDF, it’s pirated and you should feel bad about having it.
Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel, nearly two decades old now (and its final
revisionedition appeared a decade ago! EDIT: Burning Wheel Gold Revised came out 2019, and made a few small but important changes to Gold, which came out in 2010), is still one of the most important indie games ever created. But as time goes by, its importance has changed. There’s a generation of indie gamers who started in PbtA and Fate and lyric games, and they have no use for its lessons. But for folks coming from an older, perhaps more conventional roleplaying background, Burning Wheel is still an indispensable bridge to the modern world of game design.Here’s why Burning Wheel still matters. And … why it doesn’t.
Wheel 101
The current generation of indie gaming fans might not even know what the deal is with Burning Wheel. Here’s a quick recap of the game’s killer apps, and why it works.
Layered Complexity
You can play the core system of the game — simple die pool tests against either a value set by the GM or against other players’ rolls — and get most of the BW experience. And then you can add other systems as they come up: authoring NPCs into the fiction, tracking one’s finances without counting money, and so on. Get good at those elements and you can move on to several minigames that address melee, ranged combat, and verbal conflicts. It’s set up like layers of an onion — well, the hub, spokes and rim of the Wheel, formally speaking — and doesn’t leave anyone behind who doesn’t want the extra complexity.
A Tight, Consent-Oriented Transaction
There are three pillars to how BW’s transaction works:
((Radically) Transparent) Intent, Task, and Consequence: To do literally anything in the game, you need to make your intent — that is, the actual desired result of your efforts — abundantly clear to the table. You can’t play close to the vest, you can’t try to “beat” another player or the GM through fictional positioning trickery. Then, the GM tells you what task (skill) you need to roll to achieve that intent. Finally, the GM is obligated to tell you before you roll what the consequence of failure is. But get this: the player isn’t obligated to make that roll. They have to consent to it. The GM can always offer a different task, but can also change the difficulty and/or the consequence. It’s very clear, above-board negotiation. Lots of players get tripped up on this transparency mandate, and it’s Burning Wheel’s first and most powerful lesson.
Say Yes or Roll the Dice*: This is a philosophical and procedural stance that not every event in the game needs to be rolled off. The GM can just say yes to anything a character tries: not just the boring stuff, but great and exciting plays as well. This intersects with the game’s advancement system, which relies on actually using your abilities and skills, so sometimes you don’t want the GM to say yes. But it’s always there, demanding the GM aim the camera of uncertainty only at what is important. When you’re rolling, it means something important is happening. That’s a useful indicator to the players.
*EDIT: Okay, this has come up a couple times online! “Roll the Dice or Say Yes” is what appears in the book. It’s always appeared in the game this way. It’s formally called “Vincent’s Admonition,” named after a rule/philosophical stance in Vincent Baker‘s game Dogs in the Vineyard. The reverse order is a old cultural artifact, repeated often enough that I still forget sometimes. But giving credit where credit is due is rare enough in gaming, so let me set the record straight here as well. As a practical matter, the point here is that saying yes is a powerful focus tool (“roll the dice” is the default trad thing and, in my opinion, doesn’t really need to be repeated other than to clarify that saying yes or rolling dice is the decision point.)
Let it Ride: Another lesson that trips new folks up, players are prohibited from rerolling for different outcomes, until the situation that led to the roll materially changes. If you rolled to pick a lock and you missed, you can’t roll again: you just can’t unlock this one. This applies to GMs as well! They can’t demand new tests for things characters already accomplished. If your intent is to sneak into the castle, you’re not going to roll once for the tower guard, once for the dogs on patrol, and again for more guards in the courtyard. The scalability of intent is a tool BW GMs use to direct and focus play, along with Say Yes (above).
These three pillars work together in a tight, consistent and fair way. Everyone has to be clear about what they’re trying to accomplish, the GM has to decide whether the players need to roll at all, tell them what they’re risking before the roll, and then the outcome is final and unchangeable once it’s over. Depending on your background, that may sound like pretty typical play or it may sound radical and unfun. (The latter crowd is wrong.)
Player-Authored Incentives
The killer app of Burning Wheel is artha: three flavors of bonus points you earn and spend various ways. The entire cycle of the game comes down to using Beliefs, Instincts, Traits and their interplay to generate artha. It’s all carrots, no sticks, so every time the player engages, they’re complicit in their own story.
Beliefs are a terrific, very difficult tech: you state things your character deeply believes in and cares about, and ideally attach a goal or action to that. So things like “I deserve to be king, so I will murder my brother the heir.” Or you can go with a Belief without an action: “God guides my hand in all things.” It’s difficult, though, because you’re asking players to commit to what they care about. Surprisingly tricky! More advanced play means writing and updating Beliefs constantly to maximize the artha you earn from pursuing, completing or conflicting with other Beliefs.
Instincts are programmatic reactions your characters can always do. These macros started, I think, as a way to protect players from bad GMing: “Always have my sword ready,” for example, means the GM never gets to say “a-ha, you’re caught off-guard!” Instincts get more interesting when they’re potentially problematic and get your character in trouble. “Always have my sword ready” is not an awesome instinct when trying to bribe a city guard or seduce royalty, right? You’re never obligated to get yourself in trouble, but if you do, you gain artha.
Finally, traits are little descriptors you mostly don’t have much control over. You’re obligated to start with some traits via the character creation system (below), and you can buy some useful ones as well. Later, though, traits get voted onto your character based on how other players perceive your play. Neat, and occasionally aggravating if you’ve been signaling something you didn’t intend. It’s hard to be given “cowardly” by the other players when you think your character was just being very careful!
This authorship sinks its claws into the players when they commit to exactly what they’re doing to earn artha. Some of that will come from pursuing Beliefs, or letting your Instincts get you in trouble, or for allowing your Traits to send play off in new and surprising directions. The result is quite different from external XP or advancement schemes that involve hitting someone else’s marks to get your cookies.
Emergent Character Complexity
This is, I think, where Burning Wheel stands in stark contrast to PbtA style and many other indie games: every character is a complex, bespoke creation. There are no templates, no classes, no playbooks. Instead you’ve got lifepaths within settings, with constraints on how one progresses from path to path. The GM can fine-tune the focus of their game by restricting settings and setting the lifepath count (3 is good zero-to-hero, 7 is towering badass), but otherwise players have a lot of options. The downside is that there are no Burning Wheel pickup games.
The game also features a use-it-to-improve-it advancement system. In practice it’s fussy to track every roll, but it’s also a powerful incentive in its own right: If you know you’re just one high-level test away, you might just go for it and accept that you’ll (probably) fail the roll and invoke the consequence. Between advancement and artha earning, the players are constantly pulled toward making life hard on themselves now, so life will be easier in the future
Finally, the other players occasionally vote to give each other new traits. If you’ve been an ardent worshiper, you might pick up Faithful (the power to pray for miracles!) or if you’ve been mean to NPCs, you might end up with Jerk. Later, if you’re jerky to an NPC and that sends the fiction off in a surprising direction, you’ll get paid artha.
The interplay of lifepaths, BITs, advancement and trait voting means every character is mechanically and fictionally complex and unique. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything close in any other game.
Rewards Mastery
Because the game is meant to be gamed and optimized and worked, players can get good at it. This shows up most pointedly in its various minigames: Fight, Duel of Wits, and Range and Cover. Each of these involve scripting moves in advance, comparing, and watching chaos ensue. It generates delicious, genuinely dangerous uncertainty. It’s also the kind of thing you, the player, can get good at. You might have a middling-fair sword fighter but they’ll be spectacular in the hands of a skilled player.
Internal Tension Is Good, Actually
Last bit: Burning Wheel’s systems come together such that intraparty conflict becomes an important source of energy for the game. Rather than a well-lubricated “party” that exists only to defeat obstacles, a typical group of Burning Wheel characters will have drives and needs that conflict with one another. This makes for great adventure fiction. A typical best practice is for players to have some BITs aimed at one another, and others aimed outward at whatever the campaign premise currently is. The very clear, aboveboard transaction I described above ensures everyone’s on a level playing field when it comes to using the system to fight (each other, sometimes) for what they want.
You Should Still Play BW If…
Should you really still care about a decades-old game? Maybe! If:
You came from D&D
Or any conventional big-book RPG background, really: Cypher, Gumshoe, Savage Worlds, Storyteller, BRP, and so on. Burning Wheel argues most traditions of “trad” play are anywhere from unproductive to actually toxic, which is a point of contention (or aggravation) for folks who don’t like the game. They’re not wrong! The game has a strong underlying philosophy, and it continues to be best-in-class for teaching trad folks what is de rigueur in much indie-style play: radical transparency, strong authorial collaboration among everyone at the table and not just the GM, that uncertainty can be good, that consent is powerful.
But it is also not shy about telling you what’s wrong with trad play too: unlimited GM authority is toxic, planned adventures are boring, and intraparty conflict should be not only acceptable but encouraged. This aggressive tone, I think, also reveals rifts and dysfunctions that long-standing play groups may have not realized they harbor. I’ve heard so many stories of groups breaking up over BW — it’s a thing.
You want to understand current (non-OSR) fantasy
Burning Wheel tech shows up in all kinds of places. Mutant: Year Zero and The One Ring in the trindie world, The Veil and Ironsworn for a couple PbtA examples, Blades in the Dark and the entire FItD family as well. BW popularized Beliefs, Say Yes, Let It Ride, use-to-advance, and lots of other ideas. Don’t know about you but I find it easier to understand and interpret game designs when I can see the underlying values.
You want to understand adventure fiction
The absolute best part of Burning Wheel, for me, is that it beautifully models a popular and game-able kind of fiction: the character-driven adventure yarn. The BIT system is for characters who know what they want and will stop at nothing to get it. It does reactive play less well, and programmed “adventures” not at all. “Going on an adventure” without anything driving that for the character will mean no artha earned, which ultimately means slow or no advancement.
But Don’t Bother If…
Ten years is many lifetimes in game design. I wouldn’t recommend the game any more if:
You’re a committed storygame nerd
If you come from a tradition of GMless/GMful play, lyric games, solo games, PbtA/BOB, or larp, and have no intention of engaging with trindie games, Burning Wheel might not have much to offer. It’s orders of magnitude more complex than any of these kinds of games, the learning curve is intense, and even a quick game demands more investment than picking up a playbook and answering some questions. The game has a huge social and psychic footprint and that doesn’t work for everyone.
Complex economies are work
If the idea of tracking multiple economies that can be spent in multiple ways doesn’t thrill you, you might not dig the game part of this game. Same with tracking each roll you make for advancement, and evaluating when you’re close enough to advancing something to warrant an unwinnable roll. The game rewards mastery but it also demands it.
You love to hack
The lifepath system is murderously difficult to hack. Individual entries need to be balanced along like six criteria, settings need to be balanced against one another, and combinations need to be exciting, interesting and sensible. It’s so hard that the next generation of Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard, uses a simple questionnaire instead.
You think player mastery feels weird
Player mastery can feel weird! In some places, BW protects you: your character can be a much more skilled and persuasive speaker than you, for example, because of how the Duel of Wits minigame plays out. This is a notorious blind spot in most trad games that rely on the actual players to talk things out, which can lead to more skilled and persuasive players getting what they want in a way that doesn’t represent their dumb, unpersuasive characters. But it can also get weird on the combat side, where players can be so good at scripting their fights that they win more often than their unskilled, clumsy characters normally would.
The Rest Of the Family
Final bit to catch everyone up! The Burning Wheel family of games includes:
Burning Empires: a very specific sci-fi adaptation, featuring comic-book-like play that closely models the Iron Empires comics by Christopher Moeller. It’s more compact in some ways, more complex in others. Most notably, BE features a tight economy of scenes for each character and the players are in semi-competition with a semi-impartial GM. The competitiveness is touchy and hard to pull off well, but produces some powerful play juice.
Inheritance: this is a mostly-freeform larp-ish game about Viking families gathered to argue over the inheritance of a recently deceased patriarch. It’s a preprogrammed scenario, and procedural uncertainty is reduced to cards that explain who wins in the event of violence. But it’s highly replayable because Beliefs drive play as hard as in the original. Good luck finding a copy, though: Keep an eye on eBay.
Mouse Guard: this variant, another comic adaptation, features simplified character creation (questions instead of lifepaths), simplified scripting (multiple versions of the same basic minigame, each with their own special takes “weapons” and such), simpler but still use-based advancement, and more focused artha generation (one Belief, one Instinct, one Goal). It’s quite a lot easier to hack, which is a big deal. But it’s also not (quite) Burning Wheel. I’m not sure you’d get the same trad-fixing lessons playing Mouse Guard: it’s not constantly telling you you’re doing it wrong.
Torchbearer: huge breakout success, based on Mouse Guard but evolved well beyond it. This is BWHQ’s love letter to B/X D&D, viewed through the Burning Wheel lens. There are some neat tricks that expand on its Mouse Guard roots: the GM is encouraged to just “say yes” to folks who come up with a “good idea,” rather than forcing them to grind through their supplies. “The Grind” is probably Torchbearer’s most notable feature: every roll burns down light, food and so on. A new edition is about to become available.
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‘Eow’ for ‘End Of Week’. Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 7. For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.
We played four sessions of Tales of Xadia over the past couple months. Tales is the first complete and self-contained game to come out of Cortex Prime, the third generation of the Cortex ruleset by Cam Banks. My personal experience with long-form Cortex play was a rough start with Serenity way back in the day, and Firefly when Cortex came back out in revised form. I’ve played a bunch of Cortex stuff through the years as one offs – Marvel Heroic, Smallville, Leverage – but Tales was my first hands-on experience with Prime.
I’m not a close follower of Cortex games. Not sure why not! I like Cortex better than any edition of Fate, probably its closest relative. It handles PvP conflicts quite well, always a good thing because so much good tension can emerge between conflicting PCs. And the little dice game you play as you work out rolls is genuinely a fun time.
I think my hesitation is because everything that comes out for Cortex is attached to an existing license: Firefly and Marvel and Smallville and Leverage! Turns out I’m frequently allergic to license-based games. (Timely: check out Jahmal Brown’s Kickstarter for Lifted, a Cortex-based supers game completely detached from a licensed setting!)
Not that I won’t play them. We ran Modiphius’ 2d20 Dune and liked it okay (it cribbed ideas from Cortex but left out its economy, so Dune ultimately fell flat for us). I’ve played a ton of Mouse Guard and Burning Empires, although you wouldn’t be blamed for not thinking of those as licenses (they’re both based on obscure-ish comics). But given the choice, I almost always pick games that aren’t based on existing properties.
Tales of Xadia is based on The Dragon Prince, an animated series on Netflix. It’s good! I like The Dragon Prince, but I haven’t consumed every scrap of lore or really spent any time imagining what play might be like in Xadia, the show’s setting. But the show is well executed, has lots of Avatar: the Last Airbender vibes, great inter-character tensions and a visually appealing setting.
Cortex 101
Every Cortex game consists of a subset of rules from the Cortex toolbox, all of which work with any other part. As a toolbox, Cortex is smart as hell and firmly in trindie territory. Most of the rulesets don’t bother with modeling physics (a la Hero or, to a lesser degree, GURPS), but rather model thematic ideas and how they interact. If you already think about games this way, Cortex is awfully fun to fiddle with. But if you need your game to be a physics model, you’re going to be disappointed.
The Cortex transaction is straightforward: you build a pool of dice out of your various character bits, roll and add together the best two. Or the two dice that beat the other side’s best roll (usually either the GM rolls a pair of dice sized to represent the difficulty of a task, or another player starts shit and they roll to set the starting difficulty of a longer contest). Then there are some tricks you can do with plot points to buy more dice, or more effects. Big margins of success get you some game effects, and the biggest die size of the dice you didn’t use to succeed at a task becomes an “effect die” that may let you do stuff as well. It’s modestly elaborate, with several levers you can pull each time you roll (plot point spends, special abilities that trigger, and so on).
As a game-game, Cortex’s dice and point manipulation is fun even though all that manipulation doesn’t “look” like anything in the fiction as you do it. It’s the internal player feeling of pushing their luck and weighing their options, combined with how the fiction shakes out after the roll, that makes the game engaging.
A Closer Look at Tales of Xadia
System-wise, the Cortex ingredients in Tales are:
Attributes: a typical traddy spread of character descriptions, like agility and awareness.Values: five different ethical categories you use in combination with Attributes. You have to decide what’s motivating your character for any given role, possibly guided by or contradicting a “value statement” that each Value has. You can also stake out goals you want to achieve, constrained by your Values – low-ranked Values limit how “important” a goal you can set attached to it, prompting you to take bigger goals for your higher-ranked Values. I dig this bit quite a lot.Distinctions and SFX: stuff that models your upbringing and vocation. “SFX” in Cortex-speak are neat little rule exceptions or dice tricks.Assets: something or someone that helps you in the moment. This is also where spells show up, although the way they’re treated in the game is super open-ended.Specializations: three “skills,” more or less, more narrowly defined than your vocation distinction.Stress Tracks: there are five hit point tracks (more or less) that give your opposition dice to roll, and can evolve into Trauma, a permanent(ish) source of Stress dice. The characters are wreathed in a ton of plot immunity mostly via the Stress/Trauma system.
There are some interesting bits missing from what experienced Cortex folks might think of as core, as well as a couple original inventions that don’t appear in the Cortex Game Handbook (the overarching source document from which all Cortex Prime games are based).
The most notable missing bit is Complications: normally when the players roll 1s, the GM gives them Plot Points (PPs) and introduces a new play factor, with a die rank attached to it and the possibility that clever players might turn those complications back against the GM. This is also how you might model an injury: broken leg (d10) means every time your broken leg might impact your ability to do something, the GM gets to roll another d10 in their pool.
That doesn’t happen in Tales of Xadia. Generally the only mechanical result of conflicts in Tales comes in the form of Stress: the character is now afraid, or corrupted by dark magic, or, yes, injured. I think it plays out mechanically similarly but it keeps outcomes focused on a narrow range of characters’ internal states. External complications might show up in the course of a Challenge, though, in which some very large goal “hits back” against a PC when it’s the goal’s turn.
The big innovation over the basic Cortex Prime toolbox is Catalysts, ie boss-type NPCs that are important to the scenario. There are some interesting emergent properties of the Catalyst rules. Most notably, there are always at least two Catalysts, typically headed toward, or in, conflict with each other but neutral to the PCs. This aims scenario design toward the PCs being interlopers into other folks’ problems in the course of their travels, interacting with one Catalyst or the other to work out their problems, or bring the Catalyst(s) more in line with what the PCs need. The game focuses heavily on social interactions because of the requirement that “Tales” (ie scenarios) have these characters.
What Do You Doooo?
There’s a lot to like about how Tales of Xadia plays out, but the setting left me cold. For one, there is no premise to the game other than “having adventures in Xadia.” It’s very much A Fantasy Game™ in that regard, quite generic despite all the nice art they use from the show. I had a hard time dredging up the setting’s essential tensions and themes: humans and elves distrust each other, human society relies on the deeply unpleasant consequences of
capitalismDark Magic, there’s a dangerous borderland separating the human and elf halves of the continent, and there are five human kingdoms that mostly get along with each other except when they don’t.There’s a lot of material in Tales that I had no idea how to use: lengthy chapters about the dragons of the show, lists of magical creatures, little rumors attached to each of the elven tribes and human kingdoms, and a weirdly comprehensive discussion of the game’s metaphysics that have literally no bearing at all on how the game plays out. But no guidance as to what a typical scenario might entail beyond the sample scenario in the book, or what themes the game is designed to hit (other than dealing with other folks’ problems in the course of your travels). It was a good IKEA catalog of material, but incomplete instructions.
In our game, we contrived reasons for three disconnected characters (a hard-bitten Katolian explorer, a Durenian farmboy with a Dark Magic gift, and a homesick elven mage) to be searching for the lost ruins of Elarion, birthplace of humanity and the origin of Dark Magic, hidden somewhere in The Border. Pretty straightforward quest-type stuff, complicated by two Catalysts with very different plans of their own for Elarion. Every session was fun, the showdown at Elarion was pretty good (and a bit frustrating: the game doesn’t handle PC team-vs-boss conflicts very well), and after we were done I just didn’t feel inspired to cook up more reasons for these three characters to continue their journeys.
I was left with the feeling that “be a huge fan of The Dragon Prince” is the expected prep. Despite having watched the available seasons some time ago, I’m not a huge fan of the show and don’t feel inspired by the setting when it’s not centered on the show’s plot. Xadia as a playable setting faces the same challenges of character-driven IPs like Star Wars (ep IV era): if you’re not Luke, what’s motivating you? Star Wars now has literally thousands of hours and millions of words that answer this question, and Xadia doesn’t.
Deciding to play a bunch of humans simplifies the question, because now the elves can be outsider opposition and kingdom politics become more straightforward. And vice versa. What the game invites you to do, because look at these marvelous rules, is to mix it up with human and elf characters together, as of course we did. But to do that you need a real strong premise. The TV show provides one. Tales of Xadia does not.
Next up for me is digging deeper into Magpie’s treatment of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra in their PbtA game Avatar Legends. At first glance it looks more flexible and more tightly constructed around the practicalities of answering the oldest and arguably only question in RPGs: “what do you doooo?”
Playing With Canon
So how do you make the most of games that are set in pre-existing settings or properties? Depends on the game of course. Some properties are just better suited to open-ended invention and play: Star Wars is a billion-dollar industry now built around open-ended(ish) invention, and the setting is purposefully designed with lots of affordances and more canonical material than any human could consume in a lifetime. Dune is trickier, but I think Modiphius did a sharp job of creating a game where the machinations of your made-up House are always going to be interesting, despite the galaxy-spanning implications of a weirdo Space Messiah.
Some settings, I think, come with clearer baked-in story premises than others. Dune is about political ambition and space feudalism (although it really should be more about anti-colonialism in this day and age: I would play a “Fremen wreck the Empire’s shit, a theme and variations” game all day and night). Star Wars isn’t really “about” much other than the ever-present threat to personal freedom from fascists and the perpetual fallout of that (robust black markets cropping up in the face of oppression, leading crime both organized and freelance to thrive, bam, now you’re playing Edge of the Empire).
Some properties are defined by their premise, and not canonical setting material. The Terminator, for example, has an open-ended premise and not much setting: if the future wants you dead, can you fight back and make something better? Really the only “setting” in The Terminator is the ever-present threat of a malevolent AI arising in the future and inevitably deciding to rid itself of humanity. The Marvel games I’ve played reward, but don’t demand, deep fidelity to established canon – and happily, comics are notorious for tossing canon out the window at regular intervals via multiverses or relaunches or whatever. The only canon is that you have license to toss out the canon.
And of course there’s Call of Cthulhu, the most globally successful property-based game of all time, and it’s a mix of premise (what if the universe just didn’t care, and was inhabited by incomprehensible beings that humans are stupid enough to think they can bargain with?) and setting (ie the various critters and gods and whatnot). There’s a little physical setting as well, stuff like the Dreamlands and the weird alien complex buried in Antarctica. But it’s the compelling premise that keeps the Mythos games rolling, more than yet one more game of battling the Mi-Go or whatever.
Many settings (like Xadia) rely on the enthusiasm of its fandom to find its way: if you’re not a G.I. Joe fan, what is a session of the new G.I. Joe RPG “like?” What’s the premise beyond beating on Cobra baddies? Maybe that’s enough, the attraction of creating and recreating familiar thrills. Is there enough hook to A Song of Ice and Fire to make it something other than A Grimdark Fantasy Game if you’re not super into the books/show? Is the Peacekeeper government and mix of wacky muppet-alien species enough to make a Farscape game go? I’m a fan of the last couple, and even then I’m not sure I’d be eager to just keep reiterating the things I already love about them. High-fiving each other through familiar territory feels like a squandered opportunity to invent something new and personal.
Given a rich canonical setting or a gripping canonical premise, I’ll take the premise every time. But not all games are for everyone. Is it unfair to expect that a license-based game appeal to non-fans of the license? Oh totally. But I would also propose that any game needs to provide clear guidance and procedures for what you’re about to spend hours playing. Or trying to.
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Amazing blog, amazing post, thank you for that <3