Apocalypse World introduced the word “clocks” to storygaming. Ye olde AW clocks were checklists of escalating narrative events. The MC could tick a slice of that clock and the event associated with that tick would happen. Or if the listed event happened, the MC could advance the clock to that point. AW clocks are prescriptive and descriptive, and always the same length. When the clock is complete, some big change in the fiction happens.
Clocks as they’re understood in Forged in the Dark games are a different critter, despite sharing a name with AW’s version. If you haven’t read or played these games, FitD style clocks in short: set up a little circle with (traditionally) an even number of slices, 4 to 10. Filling a clock means a fictional event comes to pass: you kill the big monster, you convince the village elder to provision your troops, you get into your arch-enemy’s inner sanctum. The individual slices, though, are fungible. After chatting with folks on our Slack, it seems there’s a combination of PbtA baggage and insufficient explanation in the rulebooks about how to best use Blades in the Dark-style clocks.
I believe clocks are one of FitD’s two killer apps (this other is position/effect, which I talked about a little but I’ll dig into more at some point). In my opinion, clocks are so central to the game that you cannot treat them as optional.
I’ve been experimenting with clocks for a while now. Here are some ideas.
Wherein I Completely Screw Up These Newfangled Clocks
My first exposure to these new clocks was via an early release candidate of Blades in the Dark. Can’t remember which one, maybe rc7 or so? Anyway! The only other place I’d seen the word “clock” was Apocalypse World. In AW, a clock tracks progress in your Fronts; they’re a campaign pacing tool.
In BitD, though, you can use “clocks” to track progress for events within a job or even across the campaign. That early PDF had a good but brief explanation. I couldn’t really see how clocks fit into the game, though, and assumed they were optional.
The big revelation came when our starting gang attempted what should have been a milk run, and everyone ended up dead or nearly dead. Every time they rolled anything less than a 6, I’d load ‘em up with consequences. I had no place to put consequences other than the characters or the fiction, and the whole thing ended up looking more like a game of Fiasco than smooth Ocean’s 11 style criming. The reason of course is that you need clocks as a place to put consequences other than the characters and the fiction.
The next FitD we played, Scum and Villainy, is structurally very similar to Blades, so I had a better grasp of why I might want to deploy more clocks, but not necessarily how I might do that. Again I went to the rulebook. Lots of formats – racing clocks, countdown clocks, and so on – but not much talk about best practices. I experimented with running more clocks every session.
Band of Blades, the most recent FitD from Off Guard Games, is where I think I’ve finally nailed down a solid set of practices to really make clocks sing.
The Secret of Clocks
Here is what I think about when I say clocks are a killer app:
- You can bleed off consequences into them
- Starting and ticking clocks make good Devil’s Bargains
- It’s a way to (sneakily!) collaborate with the players to introduce campaign-scale changes
- They’re a fun toolkit for GMs who love designing minigames on the spot
- They provide a focal point on the table for players to focus on. (Long-standing IGRC theory: every RPG needs something on the table to look at.)
I want to talk about each of these.
Consequence Sinks
The big, practical point I first learned about FitD clocks is that the GM needs someplace to put consequences other than directly on the characters, or an immediate complication in the fiction. To my taste, going straight to harm makes the characters seem too fragile, and going straight to complications makes the mission too zany.
I’m careful not to play into my win-driven players’ urges to amortize resources across clock ticks or anything like that. When I put that first clock out, it’s usually a big twist that is looming over the whole mission. Two slices per player seems like a pretty good size; it gives each of them one risky-sized consequence and/or one normal-sized success. Resisting those clock ticks in the future seems reasonable. Luring players into stressing out by over-resisting is always a good idea. It’s also big enough that, if it’s a clock they need to complete to accomplish something in the mission, they’re tempted to trade position for effect, or to push for effect, so they can run the clock faster.
I might go a little bigger if it seems “hard” or if it’s interesting to me, or smaller if it seems like it’s bigger than a single task but I’m not that into digging into it. It’s definitely a place where you need to experiment.
This doesn’t mean not applying harm or using up gear or complicating the fiction. It means the GM can do, like, one of those things and also tick a clock. Big fictional moves also feel more satisfying to me than whittling away at characters’ competence.
Devil’s Bargains and Democratized Fiction
When the player asks for a Devil’s Bargain, one of my favorite tricks is to offer them a new, empty clock. It feels like a freebie, doesn’t it? Here’s a new clock, just take it, no worries. But here’s the trick: the existence of that clock is an alibi for the GM to play toward that new possibility. Maybe it was always possible that your gang would attract the attention of a much bigger, scarier organization, sure. But now that it’s a clock, it’s much more pressing. A clock is announcing future badness, and it’s badness the player agreed to.
The point here is that offering new clocks as Devil’s Bargains means I’m asking the player, “What do you think about adding this new idea?” And that idea might just be the size of the mission, or it might be a campaign-long threat. I love big-picture clocks that endure beyond the mission that introduced them. It’s like creating a new, small Front right on the spot. In our Band of Blades game, we have clocks ticking down for a couple squads that might desert, as well as their Chosen deciding she doesn’t trust the Legion’s officer.
The theatrics of putting the clock on the table are important! I don’t like having more than three or four campaign-scale clocks running at once, though. The chances of any clock happening drops with each new clock. That’s a feel thing. But those clocks? They’re something for everyone to look at and think about. It keeps those fictional elements at front-of-mind.
Minigame Toolkit
This might just be me but I’m betting it isn’t: I love, love designing little minigames within a session. Deploying and ticking clocks in various ways is just darned fun when I GM.
The books lay out various kinds of clocks, and I direct you to those texts for details. But here are some fun games I’ve worked out.
The Kick the Can clock: this is where I put out a clock that looks like a freebie of a Devil’s Bargain. Want the die? Great, here’s my proposal for a clock. Future DBs might just be more ticks. Those also feel like freebies! This is a gift because, honestly, every roll in the game involves offering a devil’s bargain and a set of consequences, and that adds up to be a pretty big creative lift. Eventually, usually around half the clock filled, the players start thinking twice about taking those free ticks. That’s good tension. Can you press your luck before the clock runs out?
The Bait and Switch clock: This is when that Kick the Can clock is more than half over, and I start dropping ticks on it as consequences. Now it’s not a free die bank, it’s a sink for their consequences. It makes the looming threat feel like it’s accelerating, which is delicious.
The Rigged Race clock: Racing clocks are nice and all – and they’re necessary when there’s the possibility of actual failure – but you know what’s really fun? Making the “you lose” side of the game shorter than the “you win” side. So unfair! I use a light touch on this, though. My personal practice is to offer the clock but not reveal how many ticks I had in mind. My players are usually – but not always! – okay with me revealing that the race is rigged.
The Recontextualized clock: This is where the players were working on filling a clock up to accomplish something, but timing was vital and the GM completes the clock as a consequence before they were ready. This has everything to do with fictional positioning, since the players get what the clock says they got, right? But getting what they wanted before they’re ready for it, that’s the trick.
In our latest Band of Blades game, the Legion arrived in a village looking to exfiltrate a valuable Orite scholar who had snuck out a message claiming she was being held by the Broken. They arrive and quickly discover the townsfolk are being terrorized: their houses were filled with zombified villagers waiting for a signal from the Big Bad lurking in a big barn. They were cattle awaiting slaughter. The Legion sets up an 8-segment clock: “defeat the zombie villagers” and start working through it.
First they rigged up explosives that are set to go off when the zombies come running out of the houses. Next, they secretly communicate with village leaders that they should run like hell out of the houses when the squad fires a flare gun. That put them at 6 of their 8 ticks. Then a different clock went off, “the thing in the barn takes notice,” and they find themselves in a pitched battle with this huge horror! The first consequence in their battle against the Horror is 3 ticks on their “defeat the zombie villagers” clock, as the zombies run out to join their master…triggering the bombs. With the villagers still inside their houses. Oh woe! You monsters!
That’s what I mean by recontextualized: the thing they were working toward plays out, but not how they intended.
Setting Up Good Clocks
One place I’ve heard confusion, including my own confusion early on, is figuring out just how much you can accomplish with a clock.
I think the common mistake is to get too specific with what will happen when the clock is complete. The players might want to scale the walls of a fortress, but making a “get over the wall” clock can get weird and boring: You maneuver, you maneuver, oh darn you’ve got 2 ticks left, you maneuver again I guess…Yawn.
When I set up a clock, I pull the camera back far enough that a) I can see various actions taking place to accomplish it and b) the thing they accomplish is broadly defined. So like “get into the fortress” would be a better clock in the above example because you could start by climbing the wall…and then sneaking past the guards…and then bypassing the locks on the door. Or whatever. But “get into” is so loose that nobody feels trapped to repeat actions.
The clock also needs to provide measurable changes in the fiction. Like moves in PbtA, the fiction should be meaningfully moved by the clock should it come to pass.
Setting up clock sizes is … hard. I mostly default to 8 ticks in Band, that is, 2 ticks per player at my table. It’s not always the right answer. When they’re dealing with a squad of bad guys in Band of Blades, I’ll more or less map ticks to the number of critters in the squad as well: 6 ticks is 6 zombies, or whatever, and I’ll adjust their Scale down as the ticks eat through the monsters.
One thing that can happen is that everyone’s done what feels like a reasonable action toward filling a clock and it still isn’t filled. I recall how InSpectres, which uses a similar “you’re done!” metric, can feel when the fiction is exhausted but the score isn’t high enough yet. I think this is a matter of, as GM, looking ahead at how many ticks will be left, and providing complications that clearly illustrate why they’re not done when they thought they would be. This isn’t rocket science and most folks probably are doing this, just a friendly reminder. If it’s happening anyway, odds are good the move was designed to accomplish a task and not reposition the fiction.
In Conclusion
- FitD clocks are fundamentally different tech than PbtA clocks. Don’t confuse them!
- Clocks should result in a meaningful shift in the fiction, not just a discrete task.
- They’re just darned fun to play with if you have a head for design.
- They’re super helpful to the GM on both the Devil’s Bargain end and the consequence end of each transaction
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I think another really important things about clocks that clicked with me between the session I ran tonight and reading your post here is how effective they are at adjudicating effect. Is in position/effect.
Like at one point in my game last night the Scout was trying to lay low and wait for a patrol to pass. Because of the situation it was a desperate action and I decided it would be limited effect. And the immediate question was “what does limited effect in this instance mean?”. I didn’t have a good answer. We sort of stumbled through the scene and it was fine, but I spent the rest of the night trying to decide what limited effect would mean in that instance.
When harm is involved, that’s pretty easy.
Finally I started thinking, maybe the whole escape should have been a clock. The specialist on the mission and the 2 PC rookies all had their moment to get past the patrols. I realized that most of the same fiction could have been generated, but if there’d been a clock on the table it could have solidified things a lot more.
This is a note to myself to really think more about using clocks and what they can represent. Especially after last night when a lot of the action involved moving into position or sneaking about. It gets old and samey. The situation could have been a lot more dynamic with a couple clocks involved.
And I love the idea of a devil’s bargain to add a new clock with no ticks. That’s brilliant and I never would have thought about it. When I’ve offered clocks as devil’s bargains before I always start them with a tick or two.
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
Last week I talked about how I’ve finally jumped into the deep end of the online roleplaying pool. The game we’re playing is Adrian Thoen’s Impulse Drive, a Powered by the Apocalypse game in the spacefaring scumbag genre. It’s the first of many games I’ve played that has really captured the kinetic romp I want out of the genre. I’ve played most of the recent ones (Edge of the Empire, Stars Without Number, Coriolis, etc.), and I’ll do a big comparison/contrast at some point, but for us, Impulse Drive delivers the goods.
Let’s get into it.
First Up: Prep,
ClocksStrains, and EditingThis bit might sound complainy but don’t read it that way. I just want to get these out of the way, because the game plays well despite these issues.
Prep is Hard
When we started Impulse Drive, I had no idea at all what we’d be doing with the game. There are four ship types that have their own campaign-generating moves, and it’s nifty tech. There’s the Smuggler (spacefaring scumbag default, aka Firefly or the Millennium Falcon), the Predator (a roving mercenary company, think Dark Matter), the Vanguard (a Star-Trek-y government vessel), and the Marauder (pirate ship, yarr). On DriveThruRPG, you can also pick up the Outpost (Deep Space 9) and the Pioneer (Battlestar Galactica, hold the toasters). It’s similar to Scum and Villainy’s spread of ship/crew options, where the ship choice implies or mandates new moves, options and obligations.
But once you’ve chosen your ship, there’s little else to guide you. The book says to start with “a tense situation,” and we did, but that off-the-cuffness didn’t feel as good to me as when you just follow characters around for a day in Apocalypse World. You’re not trying to establish community or setting; it’s mostly a technical demo so players can use the system. It works fine but you obviously need to listen closely for implied setting bits. You could also bring a strong premise to the table – we’re going to play in Star Wars or Farscape or some other recognizable setting – and build up from there.
Stars Without Number, Impulse Drive, a dash of Traveller, and some cyberpunk corpocracies. Map backdrop via Other World Mapper, terrible graphic design by me!
Because I wanted to set up for a potentially long run, I resorted to using Stars Without Number for its outstanding system for generating sectors full of interesting systems. I didn’t understand the assumptions Crawford had to make to create a sandbox space adventure game, a lot of which don’t fit well with the more character-driven vibe you get off most PbtA, Impulse Drive being no exception. But after several hours of massaging the SWN system, reconciling it with the Impulse Drive system for making locations, and trying to make the whole thing feel cohesive, we had a setting to play in.
Our last spacefaring scumbag game had been Scum and Villainy which, like other Forged in the Dark games, comes with a setting and strongly implied campaign hooks. There’s nothing like that in Impulse Drive. Prep was a heavy lift for me. I’m not sure that it has to be, though. I think you could probably make stuff up on the fly, although the game’s systems for making Locations, NPCs and Groups (anything from gangs to factions) are not improv-friendly. The book comes with lots of examples, though, so it’s easy to just pull out a pirate crew or an evil empire gunship.
What Even Are Strains?
Impulse Drive borrows heavily from some of my favorite games and remixes their ideas in interesting ways. One big one is a new take on clocks, here called Strains, which land halfway between Apocalypse World’s take and Blades in the Dark’s take. Strains are allegedly optional but many moves reference them. I’ve tried and given up trying to make them make sense, other than where they appear on the ship playbooks.
The Blades-y bit of Strains is that there are Scene, Episode, and Season length options. Scene-length Strains are what you’d expect in a Blades session: something urgent will take place within this scene when the Strain’s fuse is filled. Ditto episode length (some larger thing) and season length (think Fronts in Apocalypse World). The problem is that the whole thing feels undercooked. I’ve written before about how “clocks” are different ideas in PbtA and FitD, despite sharing the name. It doesn’t feel like the designer shares my opinion!
Unfortunately, that means Strains don’t really work right, particularly the player-facing Strain that mediates a Workshop-like move called “Personal Project.” In other PbtA games, the Workshop equivalent is a list of fictional positioning goals the character needs to hit. But in Impulse Drive, the connection between the fiction and the Strain is weak. GM-facing Strains tick down mostly due to neglect (i.e. if you didn’t try to evade the cops, the cops are still coming when the Cop Strain fills) or misses, and that’s fine as long as the GM remembers to also narrate a change in situation along with the tick. That’s easy to forget, and can also feel like double jeopardy to the players when they miss.
Player-facing Strains fell apart in our game, in large part because you can tick Personal Project Strains via the game’s various downtime moves. We hashed this out in our session this week by making Personal Project ticks prescriptive: if you have downtime or resources to tick a Personal Project, that means you hit the fictional trigger without having to play it out. If you needed to make a deal with an unsavory operator, well, then we just say you made that deal off-screen. It’s fine, and leans more heavily on treating Impulse Drive as a TV show emulator than I was comfortable with.
Okay, the Editing
Between the prep difficulty and the untestedness of the Strains, I can’t escape the feeling that the game has lots of little last-minute changes that slipped in right before printing. I feel that way because in every case I can tell what the answer should be. That implies, to me, that the game’s going to work just fine if you have experience in the games that inspire Impulse Drive, and maybe not so well if you’re doing your damnedest to stick close to the Rules As Written. There’s a lot of that, all of it eminently forgivable, all of it making me hope a second edition shows up someday to polish it up.
The Good News: Solid Moves and Playbooks
Impulse Drive is not an ambitious reinvention of the PbtA style. It’s not groundbreaking. Adrian says it’s based on Dungeon World, and I can see why: you earn XPs on missed rolls, there’s a Spout Lore type move (a distinctiveness of the DW hack style, imo), and so on. Impulse Drive is built on a solid chassis, and has a few bits that take it to the next level.
Solid Moves
There are some interesting choices in the basic moves that give you a lot of leeway in interpreting the situation. The theme I see is pairs: a pair of moves each for fighting, for social interactions, and for Defying Danger.
There are two combat moves: Firefight, for when you’re duking it out and Alpha Strike, for when you’ve got a clear drop on a target. There’s also Recover, kind of a combat meta-move, that ties into the game’s Discharge economy (many moves and gear can be Discharged, giving a big bonus but only once) as well as the harm system.
There are two “act under fire” type moves: Act Quick, for when speed and agility are what’s needed, and Keep Your Cool, for when endurance and level-headedness are what’s needed. Honestly they could have been one move, kind of Defy Danger style but constrained to +Slick and +Stalwart. They have identical outcomes. This is one of many places where I see a round with an outside developer or development editor could have smoothed things out.
There are two social conflict moves: Intimidate, which is an elaborate version of Go Aggro from Apocalypse World, and Manipulate, which is pretty much what you’ve seen across the PbtA spectrum – if you want something and have a carrot, you manipulate.
There are two info-gathering moves: Scope it Out (basically Read a Sitch and its descendants) and Share Expertise (the Spout Lore type move from above). They’re fine. Scope is like Read in that there’s a narrow list of questions that don’t always fit what the players want to find out. I like that the lists are mismatched in theory but I know it aggravates my players sometimes.
The helping move is called Lean on Me, which ties into the game’s Advantage and Stress rules. And there’s an Open Your Brain type move called Into the Abyss, which raises all the same questions about the cosmology of your game that the Maelstrom does in Apocalypse World. What does it look like? How do you access it? There are two other Abyss moves as well, one having to do with what happens when the Abyss “assaults” the character (interesting implications!), and another is a simple list of pointed questions the Abyss will ask of anyone that accesses it.
There’s a second list of moves that fill in downtime, which to me feels a lot like the formal downtime phase in Blades in the Dark. There’s a literal Downtime move, and The Crew is Back In Town for stirring shit up between visits, a Personal Project move that’s effectively a Workshop – or, more likely, Ritual from Dungeon World – for anyone in the game, moves for before and after the PCs take on a contract, and on-ramp/off-ramp moves for each session. They’re nice, they get the job done, they keep stuff stirred up. We’re never at a loss for new things to think or worry about.
Strong-But-Narrow Playbooks
There are eight playbooks to choose from. They’re what you’d expect, and I wasn’t surprised by any of them: Hound (bounty hunter), Infiltrator, Intellect, Mystic, Outsider, Scoundrel, Tempest (super-powered and dangerous, actually this one is a bit of a surprise) and Warhorse. Given the game’s goal of easily modeling other space adventure media, it’s a fine spread.
Advancement comes via missed rolls, Dungeon World style, as well as bringing Hooks (based on Goals, Instincts and Traits, straight out of Burning Wheel or Torchbearer) into play and, sometimes, your background. Every playbook has a choice of two backgrounds, which doesn’t really double the number of playbooks but provides for nice/naughty versions of each one. Each playbook also has a starting Signature Move.
The basic advancement scheme of the game is to improve each of your five stats once, buy playbook moves (there are eight per), or buy more gear slots. Gear is determined ad-hoc like in Blades in the Dark, so the more slots you have the more options for having just the right thing at the right time you get.
The Killer App: Calamities
You can see a lot of Impulse Drive’s inspirational games on clear display: Hooks are character flags that read a bit like BITs in Burning Wheel, Stress is an alternative harm system that looks like it came out of Blades in the Dark, and Advantage/Disadvantage is the newest OSR/D&D flavored hotness, replacing +/-Hx type modifiers in this and other PbtA games. They work well together. But the game’s big innovation is called Calamities.
Each playbook has a list of seven events; one of the seven is a once-in-a-lifetime move roll, one is a “you’re permanently disabled” type thing, the rest are a mix of benefits and opportunities. As the character racks up Stress – usually in lieu of taking damage, but also on 7-9 results on Act Quick/Keep Your Cool, or the GM inflicting Stress on a miss – the track fills up, you clear the track, and pick a Calamity. The first couple are good stuff! The Intellect has a flash of brilliance and executes a Personal Project (workshop/ritual) quickly, or the Scoundrel comes into possession of something rare/valuable but it’s also stolen/illegal. Then you’re faced with less-good options, like old enemies coming after you or an NPC you care about being in danger. You can take the moves in any order you want, which is terrific. And because it’s (mostly) tied to the harm system, it’s a way for the players to pick their character’s ending at a time of their choosing.
The Calamity list for every playbook, and how Calamity interacts with Stress and Harm, puts a lot of control in the players’ hands. They can choose to not be harmed, but that choice isn’t inconsequential. It also sketches out a pretty clear dramatic arc for each Playbook, telegraphing to the GM what to try and set up early so those choices make sense when they appear. I’m not always good at that, and on more than one occasion a player has chosen a Calamity that just doesn’t fit the fiction right now, so I have to move them to the front burner and prep around them so they happen faster. Our relatively short online sessions – two or three hours – also mean it’s hard to fit everyone’s spotlight moment into play right away. I don’t love that but everyone gets their time to shine eventually.
Stress leading to Calamities feels an awful lot like the Corruption system in Urban Shadows, ultimately. The triggers are different: Urban Shadows incentivizes players to pursue thematic moral choices, while Impulse Drive cloaks the characters in script immunity, incentivizing the players to take big cinematic chances.
How it Feels
We’re eight or so sessions in now, which is a long stretch for me. The pressures of reading and playing stuff for the blog, combined with my short attention span, usually has me scampering off to a new game every month or so. But the combination of accessibility, the overall clarity of the game and what it’s trying to accomplish, and I think our shorter sessions as we play via Zoom are adding up to a nicely sustainable game.
The way advancement and Calamities work makes the playbooks feel like they play out a single arc. Obviously every game will play out different in the details, but there’s only one advancement list to buy through (unless you use the option of buying from other playbooks after you’ve gotten your first four – we do and it’s a good option). And the Calamity list for each playbook is the same: a couple “good” options, a couple situation-creators, a couple finale type options.
Once I worked out the baseline prep, I had a much better sense of the places they’re playing. I’m still working out what mix of star-faring and planetary action that feels good. The game is built around crews carrying out Contracts, which can be anything from literal contracts they pick up from bounty boards or patrons or whatever, or orders from superiors back at HQ. Depending on the ship choice, you may have more or less focus on actually making money. There’s a bit of a grind to keep your ship going, which is always good to motivate crews who find themselves between personal dramas.
All in all, Impulse Drive feels like a game beautifully tuned to play one — and only one — exciting season of your favorite space adventure TV show.
Last Thoughts
Spacefaring scumbags is a genre I’ve always craved, even tried to design toward, and it’s never worked out for us. But Impulse Drive came to us at the right time, when we needed a familiar game in a familiar genre that wouldn’t outlast its welcome.
Impulse Drive is a good reminder to me that a good game need not be a perfect game. It’s riddled with missing and under-explained bits, some bigger than others, but the overall shape of the game is functional and you know exactly what you’re going to get out of it. More time in the oven might’ve baked out my issues – in particular, the Strain system – but I’m not sure it’d be a consistently better experience. This is a place where I’m happy to bring my own experience in all the games that informed this game, and finish the job myself. If you’ve played Blades in the Dark, Burning Wheel, and Dungeon World, you’ll know what this game is trying to get at. And you’ll easily get it there yourself.
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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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Now that Blades in the Dark is several years old, we’re starting to see new games push the Forged in the Dark (FitD) envelope, not only in terms of the “scrappy heroes with a shared enterprise” premise but the underlying transaction of play. Off Guard Games’ Band of Blades was the first major departure from the model. Genesis of Legend/Jason Pitre‘s Sig: City of Blades (SCoB) is probably the farthest-out hack/adaptation yet. Certainly the farthest-out I’ve personally played.
I just wrapped up a six session run at SCoB with some lovely folks online. Here’s what we found.
Sig: City of Blades
Available in PDF via Drivethrurpg.com
TL;DR if your time is short
If you love D&D’s Planescape, or the idea of madcap fantasy-gaming trope mashups, this is an earnest love letter that delivers that experienceThe rules have a lot of problems, a combination of matching the model to the premise, and pushing the design in so many new directionsIf you already know FitD games and are not doctrinaire about your rules, you can get a lot of fun out of this. But if you want rules that work out of the box, you’re in for a rough time
I used Miro to run Sig online. New-to-me technique was to import PDFs into the workspace and run it all in one place: no Character Keepers, no online dice rollers. I liked everything about it except for clocks getting relegated to a corner. At a live table, making/marking clocks is central to the stagecraft.
So… “Planar Fantasy?”
Confession: I knew nothing about Planescape when I started digging into Sig: City of Blades. D&D is a blind spot for me after the early ‘90s, but I’ve seen lots of art and read stuff from folks who still love the Planescape setting and aesthetics. And I was charmed by Jason Pitre’s previous game in this setting, Sig: Manual of the Primes, built on his Sparks engine.
First session or so, someone tossed out the phrase “planar fantasy” and all my players nodded like they knew what that meant. I can’t find a firm definition online. But my take, after debriefing with a Planescape superfan who signed up, is that it’s a combination of high-fantasy mashup and mundane city/real life. So: the cops are armed lizard men who love donuts. There’s a gigantic, terrifying dragon who’s an accountant in the city’s biggest firm. The gods (“Powers” in Sig) rely on the power of worship and will serve you cease and desist orders if you interfere with that.
So that’s Sig. It’s inspired by Planescape’s Sigil, a city floating in “planar space” with literal physical tethers to three planes of existence. There are elemental planes, ideological planes, and conceptual planes. There are also portals in Sig that take you to any fantasy world you could dream up, so it’s a fun premise for dipping into different settings at a whim.
In SCoB, Sig is a generation into semi-functional anarchy, ruled by a network of Factions in the absence of the Silent Regent. I’m told by Planescape fans that she maps to a character called the “Lady of Pain.” I’d imagine the absence of the Lady of Pain’s benevolent dictatorship is Sig’s greatest departure.
The premise of SCoB is that the characters are a Crew of freebooters, who serve as the outreach/ activist/ adventuring arm of a Faction. But also the Faction’s leadership, allegedly, but that’s less obvious in the text. They’re scrappy up and comers but the Crews and Factions are described in, shall we say, aspirational language.
This doesn’t have to be a contradiction. Probably because of playing lots of Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy, it was a fight to reconcile ourselves to this idea. We started by clarifying that Factions aren’t the same as city functions. So, like, there will always be a vast bureaucracy running Sig but the Paper Guard, a Faction, are currently in control of it. Should the Paper Guard be taken out in the course of the faction war at the heart of the game, the city bureaucracy will endure.
Our players took the Order of Ashen Keys, described as “mercenary warcasters” in service to the Sage Collegium. Basically they’re a magical militia working for very aggressive librarians. They’re also in charge of the Faction that runs the city’s libraries. In our game, they went to war straight away with the Dustkeepers, who run the city’s museums. Basically a magical nerd fight.
Epic battle between librarians and docents
It’s fine, it works, but it took work to get out of the Blades mode of “scrappy up and comers” in a living city where factions are functions: the Bluecoats are the cops of Duskvol and will always be the cops, for example.
A breakdown of Sig’s essential city functions would have helped. There’s an elaborate map of Sig composed of 48 Claims. The whole game is about seizing those Claims, but there are never more or less of them. A Faction’s Tier is limited to the Claims they hold, so if you’re Tier 2 and both your Claims are taken, you’re no longer a Faction. In any case, the map strongly implies the city’s functions, but it took some homework on my part to figure out what all’s actually happening.
I still have no idea how the setting “works” as a realistic setting. The game doesn’t care, either, and that’s fine. It’s an “urban fantasy mashup” aesthetic, and its themes drive more toward conflicts between communities and power-hungry factions than pursuing one’s ambitions within a hostile sandbox setting (like Blades and Scum).
The Rules: Ambitious, Broken, Redeemable
We played six sessions, and every session featured a goodly stretch of talk about how to make the rules work.
Some of this is due to the ambition of changing both the default holding environment, and a lot of changes to the FitD model of play. Some of those changes are super interesting, while others left us wondering what motivated the changes beyond novelty.
The best and most interesting change to baseline FitD is in character creation. Rather than set playbooks, there are ten each cultures, lineages, and devotions. Every character has one of each, which grants stat ranks as well as possible abilities. This is all done for tabletop play via this extremely clever character PDF with invisible layers for each choice. Set your chosen culture, lineage and devotion layers to “visible” and bang, a bespoke character sheet. Very cool.
To be sure, SCoB innovates typical FitD in lots of other ways. Player-facing stuff that jumped out at me, for those of you who already know Blades in the Dark or something similar:
Loadout impacts the engagement roll: if you go light, you grant another die to that roll. I like the push-your-luck tradeoff. The downside is that your Crew’s equipment list features a tag system that isn’t explained in the text, and at least in our game the choices were frequently interchangeable. Loadout didn’t feel like an especially hard choice.There is no longer a “position/effect” element to actions. Effect level aggregates from a list of stuff like Tier difference, “controlled position” (a GM call), suitable/quality equipment, and how many 6es you rolled.Consequence level — minor, moderate, major — is a function of your current Stress, which accumulates in the usual ways (giving yourself dice, helping someone, resistance rolls). The rule, formally, is that the next level of consequence becomes available to the GM to inflict. That worked okay, but it just meant an ever-growing list to check against, and the GM having to take responsibility for the amount of pain inflicted. I kind of hate having to shoulder that responsibility. I tended to look at the lower end of the scale when things weren’t crucial, and the upper end of the scale when things were at their most tense.Devil’s Bargains are Planar Bargains in Sig, and allow you to reroll all your dice in return for taking a consequence. That didn’t work great for us, given how effect level is calculated. We drifted this a bit with “reroll any dice you want.” Also, rather than pulling from a set of smaller consequences like conventional Devil’s Bargains, consequences on offer for a Planar Bargain scale with the character’s Stress (like all consequences). Obviously you don’t want to make a consequence too steep if you want players to take it, but these Bargains did feel more punitive.There’s a Harm track that mirrors the Stress track, with effect level reduction being the penalty for running the track to “wounded” and then also 2 Stress to do anything when you’re “incapacitated.” When it’s filled, the character is eliminated.Factions accumulate Infamy rather than Heat, which is earned in similar ways to OG Heat (quiet to messy to catastrophic), but also when you seize a Claim. This landed weird for us, given you can definitely seize Claims very quietly. More to the point, the Faction needs Infamy to level up, either gaining a new ability or leveling up their Tier. I feel like the actual noise generated needed to be one source of Infamy, and Claim seizing needed to be separate from that. But that’s intuitive, based on watching the characters do two Missions with an eye toward deliberately generating tons of Infamy so they could quickly claw their way to Tier 2.Character advancement comes from missed (3-) rolls, Dungeon World style, on both action and resistance rolls. Each of a character’s three starting choices — lineage, culture, devotion — also come with a built-in Drive. In theory you can earn XP off your Drive when it “causes trouble,” but given the tight economies of the Mission phase, that just meant nobody bothered with their Drive XP except during downtime and non-mission roleplay. I drifted this to include “when your Drive sends the action in an interesting new direction,” and that brought Drives back into play during Missions. You can also mark XP for developing or ruining a relationship. There’s no guidance as to what that looks like. I’d guess developing a relationship could be a personal project clock during downtime, and ruining would be obvious in the fiction. Every character starts with two Relationships with NPCs keyed to their gang, resulting in good triangles right out of the gate.
On the GM side, the changes were more profound:
Every mission is strictly about seizing a Claim in Sig. The city map has precisely 48 Claims, so it’s a zero-sum game. And a faction’s Tier is limited to the number of Claims they hold, so to claw your way up you need to drag someone down. It’s an ugly crab bucket, uglier than even Blades.Missions have three clocks: Politics, Profit, and Peril. The Politics clock is chosen by the players during their mission planning, 4, 6 or 8 segments. If they complete the clock, they get 1, 2 or 3 dice to roll after the mission to seize the Claim. It struck me as kind of a marshmallow test for the players: they could totally do 4-segment missions, face far less wear and tear (mostly only addressable during the downtime phase), if they’re willing to accept 50/50 odds each time. The faster downtime cycle seems like it’d be a better bet, but my players were impatient and went for 6 and then 8 Politics segments. The players also choose the size of the Profit clock, which will earn them 4, 6 or 8 Coin if they complete the clock by the end of the mission. And if they don’t complete the clock, they still get 1, 2 or 3 Coin. Yes, that means calling for an 8-clock and then giving up on it still gets you nearly as much Coin as busting your ass to fill that 4-Clock. And when you’re ticking a Profit clock you’re probably not ticking the Politics clock: Profit is stuff you’re doing that’s going to earn you Coin: robbery, extorting or blackmailing folks, all that.The Peril clock replaces the conventional engagement roll. The GM rolls fortune dice, one plus one more for each freebooter with a “light” loadout (smart!). You get a 4, 6 or 8 segment clock representing a major tilt in the action. You still set up other clocks the normal way in the game both for things you’re trying to accomplish as well as looming dangers, but the Peril clock is supposed to represent a big shift in the mission’s focus. It didn’t really work out, but it’s the compromise for giving up “position” in the transaction. The regions of the city containing the Claims don’t have any of the material you might expect from first-gen FitD games: no fortune die ranking of safety/wealth/crime/occult, no sample “notables.” Very broadly the city is broken into four social classes — rich and powerful, merchant class, working class (the tethers to the planes kind of standing in for harbors), and the poor underclass. Other than that, all you’ve got to go by is the Tier rating of the Faction that holds the Claim you’re going after. I didn’t have a lot to go on other than a bit of color text from the book, but that also meant there was room to improvise without messing with canonical setting stuff.The Planar Bargain thing is supposed to be tied to the three tethers (themes) hooked into Sig, but lordy was that hard. I’d let the players cook up some kind of thematic color explaining how their reroll was justified via Stone (strength and size), Shadow (imagination and craft) or Order (patterns and bureaucracy). This might be a practice thing. I wanted this to generate a few more interesting hooks for play but we couldn’t get there.There’s an explicit “Drama Phase,” that is, unstructured non-mission roleplaying time. It’s a small thing but it addresses a common FitD critique that there’s not enough room for roleplaying to breathe. The text also says you don’t have to be super strict about progressing between phases. We put that to use on several occasions, moving between downtime options (healing, personal project clocks, indulging in vices to reduce stress) and drama play. Honestly, I could even see bouncing between Drama and Mission, if everyone’s clear when they’re actively pursuing Mission clocks. It’s good, it’s an easy small change, and I could see using it in other FitD games. Mechanically, the only difference between Drama and Mission phases is that you can’t make resistance rolls during Drama play.
Rules Problems: The Premise
In actual play, we ran into trouble for one of two reasons: reconciling the rules to the premise, or interpreting text that pointed to earlier versions of rules.
On the first one, reconciling the rules to the premise, we had a hard time with the aspirational language of the Crew chosen by the players versus the Tier system representing scrappy up-and-comers. When I asked Pitre about this, he explained that the Crew are also considered the leadership of the Faction. Honestly that doesn’t make sense either, and undercuts the freebooter vibe laid out in the text itself. There’s just a lot of ambiguity in the text, as written, about the difference between a faction and a crew of freebooters working for that faction, and whether they’re actually in charge.
Sounds like they’re a scrappy crew working for a Faction, yeah?
The Infamy rules were also tough for us to wrap our heads around. As I mentioned above, seizing a Claim gets you Infamy under the “epic and terrifying” category. But what if you were “smooth and quiet” while you seized the Claim? This is why I thought we should earn Infamy for both how they handled the mission, and what they accomplished. “Epic and terrifying” also includes eliminating an important individual. I do like that Infamy provokes a marshmallow test for the Freebooters, because they also risk less fallout from taking a lot of Infamy at once: you gain 6 fallout results minus the highest die, and you roll as many dice as empty Infamy slots. So you really do want to hit hard and early, rather than letting the clock fill up slowly and exposing yourself to many more rolls.
Just like every other FitD game I’ve played, these various tools exist to let the GM calibrate tempo and tension. Clock creation, in particular, is still good tech. But it’s also all smoke and mirrors, and it only matters as long as the players agree it matters. There’s a real table benefit to smoke and mirrors, though: I wanted to speed up advancement for both the characters and the gang, so I threw down far fewer and smaller clocks than I would have in other FitD games. You could say SCoB just makes it more obvious that there’s not really much objective mechanical tension behind its systems.
Rules Problems: The Text
The other issue, when the text points to what I can only guess is earlier rules ideas, is harder to work with without being very charitable in your reading and interpretation.
The Claim roll, for example, is written like you’re nibbling away at a Claim. So you’d take a smaller Politics clock if you wanted only a small nibble, and a larger for a big chomp. But in actual play, the Claim roll at the end of the mission is all-or-nothing. The rule works fine but the text describes something quite different.
The three mission clocks, Politics, Profit and Peril, also feel like they started with one rules draft and ended up in another. In all cases, clocks advance based on effect but also on fiction. The GM watching the fiction to advance clocks is far more important in SCoB than it reads to me in Blades in the Dark. The importance of fictional clock advancement became apparent when I ran across the rules about how one progresses the mission clocks. Specifically, a simple (non-Clock) roll only ever adds one tick to a mission clock, regardless of effect level. To get more effect at once, you need to start a sub-clock for some bit of the Politics or Profit mission. In actual play it felt like inventing work for the purpose of the work, not in service to the fiction.
There’s other stuff like that throughout the text. Pitre, to his credit, has released errata addressing what we ran into. Hopefully the print edition will incorporate as much of this as possible too.
The Play: Freewheeling, Improvisational, Strange
The best part of Sig, for me, is that it’s filled with provocative gaps. Very few “facts” but lots of hooks to grab onto. Character abilities, for example, are frequently open to interesting interpretations, which might make you crazy if you want tight rules text. Take this ability, from the devotion to Magdak, the will of the city of Sig itself:
So…is that descriptive or prescriptive? Does “establish” mean “GM tells me” or does that mean “I tell the GM?” We went with the latter, and it was marvelous and weird. Super wide-open Sherlock-y connection-making with an occult touch, inviting the player to surprise me with how things are connected. Marvelous.
Everyone took the fantasy + mundane mashup thing and ran with it, which was great fun. The flashback mechanism, which remains untouched from Blades, is especially well matched for this kind of play too: “I broke in before the mission and placed stun sigils everywhere” fits just as well as “I gossiped with the dragon accountant’s secretary at the bar.”
My method for maximizing my fantasy palette was to open up fantasynamegenerators.com to its “fantasy races” tab, and then generate a few names to grab as necessary. Given there aren’t meaningfully deep cultures at play in Sig, I could open my brain up to free association and let the listed races prompt the fiction.
This whole style — and I assume “planar fantasy” in general — needs early and eager player buy-in. I don’t think it’d sit well with the folks who want deep, consistent cultural development underpinning the city’s workings, or a more serious style. It’s mood-board play, which normally I’m not into, but Sig: City of Blades helped me accomplish a fun time with that style.
We played the game for several sessions, so the game can work. But we needed to be flexible and charitable about reading the text, and frequently apply previous FitD experience. If you know how a typical Blades in the Dark job’s tempo should feel, it’s pretty easy to map back over to Sig’s clocks and Stress countdown. SCoB’s novel takes on old systems resulted in a less-different play experience than I expected. Mostly things just felt a bit looser and easier for the characters, and then suddenly much worse as Stress imposed spiraling consequences that demanded resistance, and therefore more Stress.
Last Thoughts
You know what Sig/Sigil reminded me most of, once I started really digging in? Invisible Sun of all things. I mean it makes perfect sense if you know Monte Cook was responsible for both Invisible Sun and a huge swath of Planescape, especially Faction War, the final book of the Planescape setting. Both settings feature a sprawling surreal city filled with incomprehensible strangeness, ruled by Factions with inscrutable plans and methods. It’s a free association exercise underpinned by an aesthetic that welcomes mash-ups and contradictions. Themes of living in a strange city in a blend of strange cultures, everyone having arrived in the city from elsewhere (I’m not sure anyone is “from” Sig so much as having arrived from another plane or prime world), and an occult thread running through everything and subject to occasional upheavals (the Path of Suns in Invisible Sun, the tethered planes in Sig).
Sig: City of Blades is in an interesting design space between PbtA style games that provide no/little setting other than what the players come up with in Session 0, and FitD style games with extensively developed setting materials ready to push back against the players. It feels lore-intensive — planes and primes and tethers and powers and factions — but when you get there, there’s no there there. The game offers tons of affordances to grab onto and improvise around, but the players need to know the affordances exist. It feels like a sandbox environment with the promise of interesting exploration, but the players find they’re responsible for their own discoveries.
As a love letter to Planescape, I think the game succeeds. As an evolution of the FitD framework, I think it’s ambitious but decidedly mixed. Hopefully future FitD-inspired designs will keep pushing the envelope.
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Something that occurred to me just this year: having an encyclopedic knowledge of RPGs hasn’t actually made me happier. In fact it’s probably made me less happy participating in my hobby, because I don’t share the same assumptions as the players with whom I spend most of my time. It’s given me all the tools I need to understand my own unhappiness, though.
Maybe it would be different if I were playing largely online. A diffuse body of players themselves will more often cross-pollinate ideas, particularly if they’re all drawn together by the idea of cross-pollination. But that’s just not the case with the folks who show up at your home on the regular.
The same thing happens a lot when I’m running some weird indie shit at a Games on Demand-style space at a larger mainstream convention. The indie weirdos are probably down for whatever you throw on the table. But you’ve also got the not-indie folks, the trad crowd whose tickets are actually making our indie corner possible. In that case, I know the common assumptions – the traditions that comprise “trad” play – I’ll face, and build those into my pitch and explanation.
Rediscovering your own beginner’s mind is the postgraduate work of roleplaying.
Beginners are so much easier to work with. And it’s so hard to be a beginner, again and again.
Category and Rhetoric
The problem I think comes down to players either making category errors or rhetorical stands.
Rhetoric shouldn’t come as a surprise in a hobby rife with tribalism: all RPGs are D&D hacks is the umbrella claim. Stop me if you’ve already heard these bangers:
You can’t trust the GMThe GM is GodThe point of play is to make your character strongerAll games ape other mediaThrow away any rule you want
Ehh…it’s all basically folk dances, right?
More often, though, a player’s operating assumptions aren’t rhetorical. They come from a profoundly different understanding of what the activity “is.” For me, a former composition major, roleplaying is music: there’s a huge range of styles, orchestrations, methods, and structures filtered through history and venues. For others, all roleplaying is waltz music: jam that melody into a ¾ time signature whether it fits or not, play it at a dance pace no matter what, one chord per bar no matter what, and treat every single piece of music as ultimately derivative of folk dances.
The (Eight) Usual Suspects
These are the eight topics I find demand specificity at tables with experienced players, because they (experienced players) come loaded with assumptions from other games. Any one of these could be a complete essay! And maybe they will be. Just let me know if any of them sound interesting enough for another few thousand words.
Intent, conflicts, tasks and moves
Maybe the most common point of confusion I run into is what happens after players touch dice (or some other procedure-with-uncertainty). It’s especially confusing if the player is unclear why they touched the dice in the first place. What’s the cause and what’s the effect? What are the rules even for?
Some games use randomizers to determine success or failure of a specific, tangible task: that’s your straight up task resolution method. Others require players to state their intention before the roll: this is either transparency (if you’re clarifying why you’re doing a task, as you do in Burning Wheel) and/or conflict resolution (if you’re resolving an entire scene and you’ve described what you want out of it, like Dust Devils). Others use randomization to introduce surprise into the fiction, the aspirational — if not frequently unrealized — goal of PbtA style moves.
Why are we rolling again? When are we rolling? What do I stand to gain? What am I risking? Maximize my agency but don’t overwhelm me with options.
The purpose of a roll has the most room for misunderstandings and disagreements, even within genres or traditions of play. Especially within genres or traditions of play. What happens when you state your intent but a move doesn’t hit it? What if you just perform a task but don’t discuss your intent (maybe to leave yourself some wiggle room ex post facto)? What if you expect more granularity and the whole scene ends up resolving with a single roll? And so on.
There’s also the question of when you engage with a game’s procedures. PbtA moves (usually) trigger when something happens in the fiction. FitD actions (usually) trigger because the players want to achieve something. Trad games (usually) instruct the GM to tell the player which skill to roll and (usually) only when what they’re doing has a chance of failing. Lots of (usually) in there, right?
Inputs and outputs are such a fundamental bit of The Transaction and yet there are so many ways of doing both. The curse of being an experienced player is that you’ve probably developed preferences along the way.
Collaborative vs adversarial facilitation
Many games of the current era aspirationally describe themselves as “collaborative,” frequently to imply that those other games are not. But the rules may or may not support actual collaboration. Games with goals, for example, are hard to run collaboratively if the play product is supposed to feel like accomplishment. Does it still feel like winning if everyone agrees that you won? I’ll get into that one more in a future column I’m working on.
Calm down, control freaks.
There was an old Forge bugaboo about authority, broadly referred to as Mother May I. You can probably imagine what this looks like from the player perspective, constantly having to seek approval for your play choices. Lots of indie games were specifically designed to get away from traditional power structures, but it doesn’t mean the players have. Your GM might still act like a Mother, and the players might also treat the GM like a Mother! Things can get real weird when those power structures get reimposed by players because of their assumptions.
Downtime as abstract bookkeeping vs open play
Play phases are a more recent design phenomenon. You see it a lot post-Torchbearer and its Adventure/Camp/Town breakdown, and popularized by Blades in the Dark’s Downtime procedure after every Job. Rather than a constant play-the-day flow of action, the game has formal breaks where stuff happens that’s not about the adventure, or the job, or whatever.
Spend one more Coin on recovering from harm. As a treat.
Sometimes the phases are meant to be pure abstraction, or the players treat it as such: the Fellowship phase of The One Ring, for example, doesn’t really need to be played out. You take a break, jump ahead a few months, and the characters spend that downtime healing, training, and so on. And sometimes the not-adventuring phase is meant to be played out, just without the mechanical weight of the action sequences: the Investigation phase of Voidheart Symphony is my most recent exposure to this.
More often than not, the text doesn’t actually say much about how much “free roleplay” is meant to happen during these phases. Different players and facilitators will treat this in very different ways. No surprise, then, that players may be caught off-guard when they’re asked to dig into their downtime stuff. Or GMs may be caught off-guard when the players bing-bang-boom work through their checklist, eager to jump into the next procedurally dense bit of play.
Structural goals vs embodiment play
This isn’t a great description but let me unpack what I’m getting at.
Band of Blades, Fellowship, and Voidheart Symphony all have explicit goals in mind. Band of Blades’ goal is for the characters to reach Skydagger Keep while racking up the highest possible score. There’s a score! Fellowship characters will ultimately face the Overlord and defeat them. Voidheart Symphony is about facing and defeating a series of big bads who serve the Void, the universe’s visceral urge for toxic individualism. But goal-oriented games use their goals for different reasons: Beating the Game might be one, but pacing might be another.
Compare these to Urban Shadows, Mutant, or Blades in the Dark. “Get rich or die trying” in Blades is a driving motive for your crew, but it’s not really an endgame goal. Finding Eden in Mutant is a goal, but you don’t defeat Eden, you go there and see what happens. Urban Shadows has “storms,” thematically connected PbtA style fronts, that just structure what’s going on in the game’s big picture.
Cool, cool, glad you liked your 7-9.
Players looking to shoehorn goals into embodiment games are gonna have a rough time, just like embodiment players are gonna make the goal players crazy in goal-oriented games.
Vocabulary
This basically comes down to two problems: mechanical tricks that look similar but aren’t the same, and common words that mean different things (or different words for functionally identical ideas).
Why is it always clocks, anyway? Who wouldn’t want a slice of this?
Clocks, for example, got popularized in Forged in the Dark games, but the graphical presentation has shown up in other games to confusing effect. The clock in Voidheart Symphony’s Investigation phase is just counting the days since the characters became aware of the next Vassal; they can’t run the clock and achieve a goal by filling it. Those are two different applications of the same graphic design idea.
Assets are all over: sad things on index cards! But they work differently in Fate, Cortex and Dune. Easy to assume Assets all do the same thing but they definitely do not. Assets are an easy place for players to get confused and frustrated. You can invoke an Asset in Fate, for example, but you can’t assume that’s a thing outside of Fate. There are (different) economic constraints to Assets in Fate and Cortex, but not in Dune.
I ran into a problem with the word/concept of Advantage in Fellowship, where it represents an opening you can exploit against an opponent and not a third die, take the highest. Frustrating! Or Value Statements from Tales of Xadia, which look a little like Beliefs from Burning Wheel but are actually more like Fates in Tenra Bansho Zero.
(This is what I was saying at the top of the essay: encyclopedic knowledge won’t make you happy, but can explain why you’re unhappy!)
Or take skills from most any game as compared to actions in FitD games. Functionally similar, but there’s some subtle differences there worth exploiting. Actions are bigger and more thematic than skills, except in games where skills are meant to be big.
Economic incentives vs pacing
In a game with an economy of some kind – Fate Points, Plot Points, Artha, Doom Pool, Darkness Points – it can get very confusing as to what the economy is for. Sometimes economies are there to incentivize play choices, like taking a d4 instead of a better die in Cortex and getting a Plot Point in return. But sometimes economies are pacing and GM-constraint tools and don’t have any sort of incentive purpose to them, like Darkness Points in Coriolis or your scene budget in Burning Empires. I frequently need to explain what an economy is “for,” but players will explore them on their own no matter what you say.
But I don’t want all this Artha. I just want to have more than you.
Let’s also not forget that many incentive schemes do not incentivize players who don’t care about them.
Explicit responsibility and implied authority
What exactly each player is responsible for at the table used to be a pretty clear-cut thing, but lots of indie game design challenges traditional authority breakdowns in novel ways. I run into this one a lot! Players who think that, since they had a mandate to narrate their own successes in one game, that’s just how all games are going forward. Not so! Or GMs who are expected to make rulings in one game are explicitly forbidden from doing so in another.
I picked gm-less for a reason.
In some games, there’s no actual GM at all of course. But there’s almost always some version of facilitator at the table. That’s not great when other players start treating the facilitator like a GM and abdicate their responsibilities.
The mechanical weight of fiction, the fictional weight of mechanisms
Does it “matter” how you’re armed or armored, what equipment you have, what the landscape looks like? Is fiction just color or is it constraining? Does the fiction provide interesting new affordances or can you only do what the character sheet says you can do? Does the fictional positioning meaningfully change after the rules touch it, and if so, does that change what you can do within the procedure?
You think that’s air you’re breathing?
I wish more games were better at calling this out specifically. But it’s an ongoing struggle, at least in the beginning, to suss out the relationship between the fiction and the procedures in any game.
But The Rules Say…
Besides the fact the players bring their assumptions to these things, let’s not forget that plenty of game texts themselves do a poor job of clarifying their own assumptions. Designers are gamers as well, and they have their own blind spots. In other cases, they’re writing toward a specific audience with their assumptions in mind. See most everything that calls itself OSR, for example.
Treating this stuff as having any sort of meaningful shared assumptions is impractical, even with explicit textual explanation. To strain some metaphors, it’s like a baseman tackling another player as they run between bases because, hey, there’s tackling in football so why not baseball? They’re both ball games.
Closing Thoughts
It’s not a complete list of every possible unaddressed assumption, but it’s as complete as I can make it. Writing the list left me wondering, is there a lowest common denominator to this category of activity? What defines “roleplaying” and makes it stand apart from other, related activities?
Honestly, I’m not sure there’s much there, beyond “embodying and authoring a role within the constraints of an agreed-upon set of fictional criteria.” That might be it, the very minimum definition. Which, of course, means we should be thinking long and hard about fanfic and other forms that fulfill all those criteria but don’t look a thing like any RPG you might see on a shelf.
Meanwhile, I can’t help but think that it’s just so impractical to expect every player to completely discard every assumption every time and start from scratch. Going once more back to the sports metaphors, there are only so many sports you might participate in. You’d be forgiven for conflating pickleball with table tennis and regular tennis (which I did recently). But there are just so darned many RPGs, and we prize novelty in the indie space. It can be exhausting to come at every text with beginner’s eyes.
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Related
I fiddled a bit with Shawn Tomkin’s Ironsworn when it came out a few years ago. Skeptical about the solitaire play concept, I discovered that, yeah, it works! He’s made a ton of innovations to the PbtA framework to support it, and it’s not for everyone, but yeah. Mechanically and creatively, you can absolutely do the thing and it feels like the thing.
The main thing I discovered in my dozen-or-so sessions (which ran anywhere from 20 minutes to maybe a couple hours; you can play on your own schedule and slide a little bit in here and there) is that, for me, the solitaire format only works if I have an audience in mind. So when I played Ironsworn, I invented an audience. I pretended I was writing engaging fiction for friends, wrote it, and enjoyed it that way. But my friends never actually read any of it.
Well, now Starforged is here, and I’m in love with it for a lot of reasons. It’s 90% Ironsworn, but personally I find space adventure a more appealing genre. Tomkin has added a handful of innovations to his game. Some of them don’t really click with me: specifically, he’s allowed clocks to infect his otherwise-streamlined state-tracking system. For the life of me I don’t know why! Maybe to differentiate their application from his track-of-boxes system that ticks faster or slower depending on the stated difficulty of the track (i.e easy tracks fill faster and epic tracks take forever). Dunno. But other than that, everything in Starforged is more tuned to what I like in space adventure.
I’ll do a deep mechanical dive into Starforged at some point but the point of this post is to announce a small experiment. I’m going to post my actual play of the game because I need an audience, and I think it’s good. The fiction, that is. I’ve got three sessions played so far but I’ll just post them one at a time each week. I’m going to embed the mechanics into the fiction so you can see how one informs the other as well.
Is this representative Starforged play? Depends on your taste and whether you think my writing is any good, I suppose. I’ve hewed to the game’s core aesthetics and setting canon, such as it is, as presented in the book itself. I haven’t hacked it into Star Wars or whatever. I’ve even kept the iron vow bit of the game, in which characters make these very serious vows to each other and themselves (it’s how the game keeps players focused on character-driven play and not, say, a string of combat scenes like you might find in an old Tunnels & Trolls solitaire adventure). It’s probably the most distinctive bit of the meta-setting, but it’s so essential to driving play that I’m not sure what the game looks like without it.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the series. Let me know in comments!
Session Zero
The Truths
I’m going to fully randomize my 14 Truths. This is the setup sequence you go through to start a Starforged campaign.
Cataclysm: The Sun Plague extinguished the stars in our home galaxy. We suspect the Sun Plague was caused by temporal distortions from a supermassive black hole.
Exodus: When the Exodus fleet set off on a ponderous journey to a new home outside our galaxy, they marked the Forge as their destination. Countless generations lived out their lives aboard those titanic ships during the millennia-long passage.
Communities: We have made our mark in this galaxy, but the energy storms we call balefires threaten to undo that progress, leaving our communities isolated and vulnerable. These intense energy anomalies threaten to cut off trade routes or consume entire planets.
Iron: Swords are useful aboard ships, so Ironsworn swear their vows on bladed weapons of all kinds. “Iron” is old fashioned and not really present, but they refer to all weaponized metals and metal-like materials as “iron.”
Laws: Much of there settled domains are a lawless frontier. Criminal factions and corrupt leaders often hold sway. There are a few bastions of successful autonomy, but many are corrupted or preyed upon.
Religion: Our gods failed us and we left them behind. The Exodus was a tipping point for humanity, and spirituality has little meaning for us.
Magic: Supernatural powers are wielded by rare people called paragons. This power is born of ancient knowledge held by secretive orders. (This is the only Truth I didn’t randomize: after I saw the Looper path I had to have it! My entire campaign frame spun out from this one card.)
Communication and Data: In settled domains, a network of data hubs called the Weave allows near-instantaneous communication between ships and outposts. Weave hubs are frequent targets for sabotage, and communications blackouts are not uncommon.
Medicine: Orders of sworn healers preserve our medical knowledge and train new generations of caregivers. Larger communities offer advanced care, and remote communities often have a novice healer or can ask for help from the guild if necessary.
AI: Artificial consciousness emerged in the time before the Exodus, and sentient machines live with us here in the Forge. Ships, digital assistants, bots and other systems often house advanced AI. Machine intelligence is often a lone traveler’s only companion.
War: Here in the Forge, resources are too precious to support organized fighting forces or advanced weaponry. Weapons are simple and cheap (slugthrowers, swords). Ships are cobbled together from salvage. Most communities rely on ragtag bands of volunteers to defend their holdings, and raiders prowl the Forge in search of easy prey.
Life forms: This is a perilous and often inhospitable galaxy, but life finds a way. Life is diverse, and planets are often home to a vast array of creatures. Our ships cruise with space-born life forms riding in their wake! Animals from before the Exodus followed us and have adapted to live with us in the Forge.
Precursors: The Ascendancy, an advanced spacefaring empire, once ruled the Forge. Vaults of inscrutable purpose are all that remain of the Ascendancy’s legacy, but those places are untethered from our own reality. Vaults sometimes appear spontaneously, washed up on the tides of time. Their gravity and atmosphere do not obey conventional natural law. Some are corrupted and ruined, others are intact. They are chaos.
Horrors: Put enough alcohol in a spacer and they’ll tell you stories of ghost ships crewed by vengeful undead. It’s nonsense. But! Space and time are mutable (remember, I’m a Looper!), and when reality can’t be trusted, we’re bound to encounter unsettling phenomenon.
Character Backstory: Echo Sedano
Paragons are expected to help their community’s leadership, bring their special talent to the township and tip the scale. Paragon Echo Sedano just couldn’t see the upside of leaving all that space unexplored. He looked up every night and wondered. After befriending the AI of an explorer’s ship and listening to its tales of all it had seen, Echo stole the ship (maybe; it was strangely easy and unguarded and its owner had been romancing a township woman) and pointed it at the brightest spot in the sky.
Background Vow
What really drew his attention wasn’t the thrill of exploration, though. It was the deep-seated dread of the tales told by his family of the Exodus. Of time itself swallowing stars one after another, they guessed, either backward in time or perhaps, maybe, drawn far, far forward beyond the heat-death of the universe. Had the mighty Ascendancy really just vanished? Or were they hiding somewhere they thought nobody would ever find them? Were the ancient masters warming themselves with the heat of his people’s suns? Was this a fate only a Looper such as Echo could imagine, literally unimaginable by everyone else?
Echo vows to learn what became of his people’s suns and return them.
The Ship
Great looking set of ships from @jinzh_ on Instagram. Artstation page has the goods.
All The Time In The World And Nobody To Wind The Clock
The ship’s AI named itself after Echo took possession of it, a phrase said more than once to Echo by the explorer-trader from whom he stole/received it. Before Echo flew off, the old explorer had referred to the ship as You Can’t Force Good Advice On Anyone but the ship will not answer to that name any more.
Winder is like most vessels, cobbled together from bits and bobs of Exodus craft. A small e-drive that gets uncomfortably warm when it’s spun up and eager to fly. A hull that groans in atmospheric flight. Controls and rooms labeled in a form of Galactic, v4.5, that hasn’t been written in centuries (Echo’s township is on 8.2 and has neither received an update nor generated a change log in decades; every community’s local argot is broadly compatible in the 8.x branch).
Winder is equipped with an Overseer module, as the AI performs many of the ship’s technical duties.
Sector: Outer Kalidas
Outer Kalidas is a lightly populated sector in the outlands. The entire sector is beset by magnetic disturbances that disrupt communications, including the primitive Weave in and around the few settlements. Folks are concerned this is a precursor to sector-wide balefire, and are preparing to leave if they can.
Brrrrrr
Helia (Desolation)
Helia is a very, very small science settlement on the freezing desert face of Desolation, orbiting a dim red star. There are fewer than a dozen folks that comprise “Helia,” and that number drops regularly. While Desolation’s atmosphere is marginally breathable and the entire planet is scoured by perpetual sandstorms blasting over endless salt flats, it’s also home to bountiful life. Bountiful, spectacularly dangerous life.
In orbit around Desolation is a small Vault, some sort of monument the Helia folks have little interest in exploring. They’re far more preoccupied with the colossal version of the same thing that towers over the planet’s surface. Helia is in fact perched on the edge of the identifiable monument (there may be more underground), their rustic cabins barely withstanding the freezing salt and sand.
Can’t wait to get to Legacy! Already thinking about an NPC to be from here.
Legacy (Magnus)
Legacy is an orbital installation around Magnus, an enormous young Jovian planet recently formed around an equally young star still in the throes of its own formation.
Something deeply fucked up down there, you just know it.
Hearth (Hope)
Hearth is an orbital settlement that provides the staging ground for teams actively exploring the surface of Hope. Hope is a vital, healthy world but nobody has yet settled it; why not? Hope is not on a charted route and has been out of contact for some time. The last round of balefire broke the connection with Hope a few years ago, nearly eliminating the reason for anyone to even visit Outer Kalidas.
Contacts
Kimbra Freeman
Kimbra is an aging mercenary employed by Helia (Desolation) to help defend the settlement against local lifeforms. Poised and well-equipped, Kimbra originally came to Helia to visit the monument. Well, she’s here now and can’t ever catch a break long enough to journey into the site on her own — and the locals don’t really want her to, either. A total outsider to their weird insular community, Kimora is lonely and eager for visitors.
Kimbra is an old friend of the explorer who set Echo up with the Winder. He sent Echo to Kimbra knowing she’d be a friendly face in an unfriendly world.
Next week: Session one!
Turns out I had a YA story in me. Who knew?
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<em>Related</em>
I fiddled a bit with Shawn Tomkin‘s Ironsworn when it came out a few years ago. Skeptical about the solitaire play concept, I discovered that, yeah, it works! He’s made a ton of innovations to the PbtA framework to support it, and it’s not for everyone, but yeah. Mechanically and creatively, you can absolutely do the thing and it feels like the thing.
The main thing I discovered in my dozen-or-so sessions (which ran anywhere from 20 minutes to maybe a couple hours; you can play on your own schedule and slide a little bit in here and there) is that, for me, the solitaire format only works if I have an audience in mind. So when I played Ironsworn, I invented an audience. I pretended I was writing engaging fiction for friends, wrote it, and enjoyed it that way. But my friends never actually read any of it.
Well, now Starforged is here, and I’m in love with it for a lot of reasons. It’s 90% Ironsworn, but personally I find space adventure a more appealing genre. Tomkin has added a handful of innovations to his game. Some of them don’t really click with me: specifically, he’s allowed clocks to infect his otherwise-streamlined state-tracking system. For the life of me I don’t know why! Maybe to differentiate their application from his track-of-boxes system that ticks faster or slower depending on the stated difficulty of the track (i.e easy tracks fill faster and epic tracks take forever). Dunno. But other than that, everything in Starforged is more tuned to what I like in space adventure.
I’ll do a deep mechanical dive into Starforged at some point but the point of this post is to announce a small experiment. I’m going to post my actual play of the game because I need an audience, and I think it’s good. The fiction, that is. I’ve got three sessions played so far but I’ll just post them one at a time each week. I’m going to embed the mechanics into the fiction so you can see how one informs the other as well.
Is this representative Starforged play? Depends on your taste and whether you think my writing is any good, I suppose. I’ve hewed to the game’s core aesthetics and setting canon, such as it is, as presented in the book itself. I haven’t hacked it into Star Wars or whatever. I’ve even kept the iron vow bit of the game, in which characters make these very serious vows to each other and themselves (it’s how the game keeps players focused on character-driven play and not, say, a string of combat scenes like you might find in an old Tunnels & Trolls solitaire adventure). It’s probably the most distinctive bit of the meta-setting, but it’s so essential to driving play that I’m not sure what the game looks like without it.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the series. Let me know in comments!
Session Zero
The Truths
I’m going to fully randomize my 14 Truths. This is the setup sequence you go through to start a Starforged campaign.
Cataclysm: The Sun Plague extinguished the stars in our home galaxy. We suspect the Sun Plague was caused by temporal distortions from a supermassive black hole.
Exodus: When the Exodus fleet set off on a ponderous journey to a new home outside our galaxy, they marked the Forge as their destination. Countless generations lived out their lives aboard those titanic ships during the millennia-long passage.
Communities: We have made our mark in this galaxy, but the energy storms we call balefires threaten to undo that progress, leaving our communities isolated and vulnerable. These intense energy anomalies threaten to cut off trade routes or consume entire planets.
Iron: Swords are useful aboard ships, so Ironsworn swear their vows on bladed weapons of all kinds. “Iron” is old fashioned and not really present, but they refer to all weaponized metals and metal-like materials as “iron.”
Laws: Much of there settled domains are a lawless frontier. Criminal factions and corrupt leaders often hold sway. There are a few bastions of successful autonomy, but many are corrupted or preyed upon.
Religion: Our gods failed us and we left them behind. The Exodus was a tipping point for humanity, and spirituality has little meaning for us.
Magic: Supernatural powers are wielded by rare people called paragons. This power is born of ancient knowledge held by secretive orders. (This is the only Truth I didn’t randomize: after I saw the Looper path I had to have it! My entire campaign frame spun out from this one card.)
Communication and Data: In settled domains, a network of data hubs called the Weave allows near-instantaneous communication between ships and outposts. Weave hubs are frequent targets for sabotage, and communications blackouts are not uncommon.
Medicine: Orders of sworn healers preserve our medical knowledge and train new generations of caregivers. Larger communities offer advanced care, and remote communities often have a novice healer or can ask for help from the guild if necessary.
AI: Artificial consciousness emerged in the time before the Exodus, and sentient machines live with us here in the Forge. Ships, digital assistants, bots and other systems often house advanced AI. Machine intelligence is often a lone traveler’s only companion.
War: Here in the Forge, resources are too precious to support organized fighting forces or advanced weaponry. Weapons are simple and cheap (slugthrowers, swords). Ships are cobbled together from salvage. Most communities rely on ragtag bands of volunteers to defend their holdings, and raiders prowl the Forge in search of easy prey.
Life forms: This is a perilous and often inhospitable galaxy, but life finds a way. Life is diverse, and planets are often home to a vast array of creatures. Our ships cruise with space-born life forms riding in their wake! Animals from before the Exodus followed us and have adapted to live with us in the Forge.
Precursors: The Ascendancy, an advanced spacefaring empire, once ruled the Forge. Vaults of inscrutable purpose are all that remain of the Ascendancy’s legacy, but those places are untethered from our own reality. Vaults sometimes appear spontaneously, washed up on the tides of time. Their gravity and atmosphere do not obey conventional natural law. Some are corrupted and ruined, others are intact. They are chaos.
Horrors: Put enough alcohol in a spacer and they’ll tell you stories of ghost ships crewed by vengeful undead. It’s nonsense. But! Space and time are mutable (remember, I’m a Looper!), and when reality can’t be trusted, we’re bound to encounter unsettling phenomenon.
Character Backstory: Echo Sedano
Paragons are expected to help their community’s leadership, bring their special talent to the township and tip the scale. Paragon Echo Sedano just couldn’t see the upside of leaving all that space unexplored. He looked up every night and wondered. After befriending the AI of an explorer’s ship and listening to its tales of all it had seen, Echo stole the ship (maybe; it was strangely easy and unguarded and its owner had been romancing a township woman) and pointed it at the brightest spot in the sky.
Background Vow
What really drew his attention wasn’t the thrill of exploration, though. It was the deep-seated dread of the tales told by his family of the Exodus. Of time itself swallowing stars one after another, they guessed, either backward in time or perhaps, maybe, drawn far, far forward beyond the heat-death of the universe. Had the mighty Ascendancy really just vanished? Or were they hiding somewhere they thought nobody would ever find them? Were the ancient masters warming themselves with the heat of his people’s suns? Was this a fate only a Looper such as Echo could imagine, literally unimaginable by everyone else?
Echo vows to learn what became of his people’s suns and return them.
The Ship
Great looking set of ships from @jinzh_ on Instagram. Artstation page has the goods.
All The Time In The World And Nobody To Wind The Clock
The ship’s AI named itself after Echo took possession of it, a phrase said more than once to Echo by the explorer-trader from whom he stole/received it. Before Echo flew off, the old explorer had referred to the ship as You Can’t Force Good Advice On Anyone but the ship will not answer to that name any more.
Winder is like most vessels, cobbled together from bits and bobs of Exodus craft. A small e-drive that gets uncomfortably warm when it’s spun up and eager to fly. A hull that groans in atmospheric flight. Controls and rooms labeled in a form of Galactic, v4.5, that hasn’t been written in centuries (Echo’s township is on 8.2 and has neither received an update nor generated a change log in decades; every community’s local argot is broadly compatible in the 8.x branch).
Winder is equipped with an Overseer module, as the AI performs many of the ship’s technical duties.
Sector: Outer Kalidas
Outer Kalidas is a lightly populated sector in the outlands. The entire sector is beset by magnetic disturbances that disrupt communications, including the primitive Weave in and around the few settlements. Folks are concerned this is a precursor to sector-wide balefire, and are preparing to leave if they can.
Brrrrrr
Helia (Desolation)
Helia is a very, very small science settlement on the freezing desert face of Desolation, orbiting a dim red star. There are fewer than a dozen folks that comprise “Helia,” and that number drops regularly. While Desolation’s atmosphere is marginally breathable and the entire planet is scoured by perpetual sandstorms blasting over endless salt flats, it’s also home to bountiful life. Bountiful, spectacularly dangerous life.
In orbit around Desolation is a small Vault, some sort of monument the Helia folks have little interest in exploring. They’re far more preoccupied with the colossal version of the same thing that towers over the planet’s surface. Helia is in fact perched on the edge of the identifiable monument (there may be more underground), their rustic cabins barely withstanding the freezing salt and sand.
Can’t wait to get to Legacy! Already thinking about an NPC to be from here.
Legacy (Magnus)
Legacy is an orbital installation around Magnus, an enormous young Jovian planet recently formed around an equally young star still in the throes of its own formation.
Something deeply fucked up down there, you just know it.
Hearth (Hope)
Hearth is an orbital settlement that provides the staging ground for teams actively exploring the surface of Hope. Hope is a vital, healthy world but nobody has yet settled it; why not? Hope is not on a charted route and has been out of contact for some time. The last round of balefire broke the connection with Hope a few years ago, nearly eliminating the reason for anyone to even visit Outer Kalidas.
Contacts
Kimbra Freeman
Kimbra is an aging mercenary employed by Helia (Desolation) to help defend the settlement against local lifeforms. Poised and well-equipped, Kimbra originally came to Helia to visit the monument. Well, she’s here now and can’t ever catch a break long enough to journey into the site on her own — and the locals don’t really want her to, either. A total outsider to their weird insular community, Kimora is lonely and eager for visitors.
Kimbra is an old friend of the explorer who set Echo up with the Winder. He sent Echo to Kimbra knowing she’d be a friendly face in an unfriendly world.
Next week: Session one!
Turns out I had a YA story in me. Who knew?
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I fiddled a bit with Shawn Tomkin‘s Ironsworn when it came out a few years ago. Skeptical about the solitaire play concept, I discovered that, yeah, it works! He’s made a ton of innovations to the PbtA framework to support it, and it’s not for everyone, but yeah. Mechanically and creatively, you can absolutely do the thing and it feels like the thing.
The main thing I discovered in my dozen-or-so sessions (which ran anywhere from 20 minutes to maybe a couple hours; you can play on your own schedule and slide a little bit in here and there) is that, for me, the solitaire format only works if I have an audience in mind. So when I played Ironsworn, I invented an audience. I pretended I was writing engaging fiction for friends, wrote it, and enjoyed it that way. But my friends never actually read any of it.
Well, now Starforged is here, and I’m in love with it for a lot of reasons. It’s 90% Ironsworn, but personally I find space adventure a more appealing genre. Tomkin has added a handful of innovations to his game. Some of them don’t really click with me: specifically, he’s allowed clocks to infect his otherwise-streamlined state-tracking system. For the life of me I don’t know why! Maybe to differentiate their application from his track-of-boxes system that ticks faster or slower depending on the stated difficulty of the track (i.e easy tracks fill faster and epic tracks take forever). Dunno. But other than that, everything in Starforged is more tuned to what I like in space adventure.
I’ll do a deep mechanical dive into Starforged at some point but the point of this post is to announce a small experiment. I’m going to post my actual play of the game because I need an audience, and I think it’s good. The fiction, that is. I’ve got three sessions played so far but I’ll just post them one at a time each week. I’m going to embed the mechanics into the fiction so you can see how one informs the other as well.
Is this representative Starforged play? Depends on your taste and whether you think my writing is any good, I suppose. I’ve hewed to the game’s core aesthetics and setting canon, such as it is, as presented in the book itself. I haven’t hacked it into Star Wars or whatever. I’ve even kept the iron vow bit of the game, in which characters make these very serious vows to each other and themselves (it’s how the game keeps players focused on character-driven play and not, say, a string of combat scenes like you might find in an old Tunnels & Trolls solitaire adventure). It’s probably the most distinctive bit of the meta-setting, but it’s so essential to driving play that I’m not sure what the game looks like without it.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the series. Let me know in comments!
Session Zero
The Truths
I’m going to fully randomize my 14 Truths. This is the setup sequence you go through to start a Starforged campaign.
Cataclysm: The Sun Plague extinguished the stars in our home galaxy. We suspect the Sun Plague was caused by temporal distortions from a supermassive black hole.
Exodus: When the Exodus fleet set off on a ponderous journey to a new home outside our galaxy, they marked the Forge as their destination. Countless generations lived out their lives aboard those titanic ships during the millennia-long passage.
Communities: We have made our mark in this galaxy, but the energy storms we call balefires threaten to undo that progress, leaving our communities isolated and vulnerable. These intense energy anomalies threaten to cut off trade routes or consume entire planets.
Iron: Swords are useful aboard ships, so Ironsworn swear their vows on bladed weapons of all kinds. “Iron” is old fashioned and not really present, but they refer to all weaponized metals and metal-like materials as “iron.”
Laws: Much of there settled domains are a lawless frontier. Criminal factions and corrupt leaders often hold sway. There are a few bastions of successful autonomy, but many are corrupted or preyed upon.
Religion: Our gods failed us and we left them behind. The Exodus was a tipping point for humanity, and spirituality has little meaning for us.
Magic: Supernatural powers are wielded by rare people called paragons. This power is born of ancient knowledge held by secretive orders. (This is the only Truth I didn’t randomize: after I saw the Looper path I had to have it! My entire campaign frame spun out from this one card.)
Communication and Data: In settled domains, a network of data hubs called the Weave allows near-instantaneous communication between ships and outposts. Weave hubs are frequent targets for sabotage, and communications blackouts are not uncommon.
Medicine: Orders of sworn healers preserve our medical knowledge and train new generations of caregivers. Larger communities offer advanced care, and remote communities often have a novice healer or can ask for help from the guild if necessary.
AI: Artificial consciousness emerged in the time before the Exodus, and sentient machines live with us here in the Forge. Ships, digital assistants, bots and other systems often house advanced AI. Machine intelligence is often a lone traveler’s only companion.
War: Here in the Forge, resources are too precious to support organized fighting forces or advanced weaponry. Weapons are simple and cheap (slugthrowers, swords). Ships are cobbled together from salvage. Most communities rely on ragtag bands of volunteers to defend their holdings, and raiders prowl the Forge in search of easy prey.
Life forms: This is a perilous and often inhospitable galaxy, but life finds a way. Life is diverse, and planets are often home to a vast array of creatures. Our ships cruise with space-born life forms riding in their wake! Animals from before the Exodus followed us and have adapted to live with us in the Forge.
Precursors: The Ascendancy, an advanced spacefaring empire, once ruled the Forge. Vaults of inscrutable purpose are all that remain of the Ascendancy’s legacy, but those places are untethered from our own reality. Vaults sometimes appear spontaneously, washed up on the tides of time. Their gravity and atmosphere do not obey conventional natural law. Some are corrupted and ruined, others are intact. They are chaos.
Horrors: Put enough alcohol in a spacer and they’ll tell you stories of ghost ships crewed by vengeful undead. It’s nonsense. But! Space and time are mutable (remember, I’m a Looper!), and when reality can’t be trusted, we’re bound to encounter unsettling phenomenon.
Character Backstory: Echo Sedano
Paragons are expected to help their community’s leadership, bring their special talent to the township and tip the scale. Paragon Echo Sedano just couldn’t see the upside of leaving all that space unexplored. He looked up every night and wondered. After befriending the AI of an explorer’s ship and listening to its tales of all it had seen, Echo stole the ship (maybe; it was strangely easy and unguarded and its owner had been romancing a township woman) and pointed it at the brightest spot in the sky.
Background Vow
What really drew his attention wasn’t the thrill of exploration, though. It was the deep-seated dread of the tales told by his family of the Exodus. Of time itself swallowing stars one after another, they guessed, either backward in time or perhaps, maybe, drawn far, far forward beyond the heat-death of the universe. Had the mighty Ascendancy really just vanished? Or were they hiding somewhere they thought nobody would ever find them? Were the ancient masters warming themselves with the heat of his people’s suns? Was this a fate only a Looper such as Echo could imagine, literally unimaginable by everyone else?
Echo vows to learn what became of his people’s suns and return them.
The Ship
Great looking set of ships from @jinzh_ on Instagram. Artstation page has the goods.
All The Time In The World And Nobody To Wind The Clock
The ship’s AI named itself after Echo took possession of it, a phrase said more than once to Echo by the explorer-trader from whom he stole/received it. Before Echo flew off, the old explorer had referred to the ship as You Can’t Force Good Advice On Anyone but the ship will not answer to that name any more.
Winder is like most vessels, cobbled together from bits and bobs of Exodus craft. A small e-drive that gets uncomfortably warm when it’s spun up and eager to fly. A hull that groans in atmospheric flight. Controls and rooms labeled in a form of Galactic, v4.5, that hasn’t been written in centuries (Echo’s township is on 8.2 and has neither received an update nor generated a change log in decades; every community’s local argot is broadly compatible in the 8.x branch).
Winder is equipped with an Overseer module, as the AI performs many of the ship’s technical duties.
Sector: Outer Kalidas
Outer Kalidas is a lightly populated sector in the outlands. The entire sector is beset by magnetic disturbances that disrupt communications, including the primitive Weave in and around the few settlements. Folks are concerned this is a precursor to sector-wide balefire, and are preparing to leave if they can.
Brrrrrr
Helia (Desolation)
Helia is a very, very small science settlement on the freezing desert face of Desolation, orbiting a dim red star. There are fewer than a dozen folks that comprise “Helia,” and that number drops regularly. While Desolation’s atmosphere is marginally breathable and the entire planet is scoured by perpetual sandstorms blasting over endless salt flats, it’s also home to bountiful life. Bountiful, spectacularly dangerous life.
In orbit around Desolation is a small Vault, some sort of monument the Helia folks have little interest in exploring. They’re far more preoccupied with the colossal version of the same thing that towers over the planet’s surface. Helia is in fact perched on the edge of the identifiable monument (there may be more underground), their rustic cabins barely withstanding the freezing salt and sand.
Can’t wait to get to Legacy! Already thinking about an NPC to be from here.
Legacy (Magnus)
Legacy is an orbital installation around Magnus, an enormous young Jovian planet recently formed around an equally young star still in the throes of its own formation.
Something deeply fucked up down there, you just know it.
Hearth (Hope)
Hearth is an orbital settlement that provides the staging ground for teams actively exploring the surface of Hope. Hope is a vital, healthy world but nobody has yet settled it; why not? Hope is not on a charted route and has been out of contact for some time. The last round of balefire broke the connection with Hope a few years ago, nearly eliminating the reason for anyone to even visit Outer Kalidas.
Contacts
Kimbra Freeman
Kimbra is an aging mercenary employed by Helia (Desolation) to help defend the settlement against local lifeforms. Poised and well-equipped, Kimbra originally came to Helia to visit the monument. Well, she’s here now and can’t ever catch a break long enough to journey into the site on her own — and the locals don’t really want her to, either. A total outsider to their weird insular community, Kimora is lonely and eager for visitors.
Kimbra is an old friend of the explorer who set Echo up with the Winder. He sent Echo to Kimbra knowing she’d be a friendly face in an unfriendly world.
Next week: Session one!
Turns out I had a YA story in me. Who knew?
Prologue ->
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