Coriolis Wednesdays
Extremely Initial Impressions
Okay! My week of endless awesome gaming has finally come to an end with Coriolis last night. Regular Tuesday crew plus very special guest star Ralph Mazza!
The experience was all over the place and I don’t want to put too much weight on anything since I’m coming off a week of near total exhaustion. Tl;dr it was fun-ish and I might need to do some homework to fix some possible deal breakers.
The Essential Economic Cycle
The big takeaway, I think, has to do with the essential engagement cycle of the game. That is: make a roll, engage the prayer mechanism, pay the GM a darkness point, deal with the GM’s bullshit, repeat. It’s been modified from the very excellent semi-rich dice of Mutant: Year Zero and I have to think it’s because the designers didn’t actually understand or appreciate why MYZ works. It’s been simplified for Coriolis and maybe broken in the process.
In MYZ, a single 6 is a success no matter what, and you have the option to “push” once and reroll all your misses. If you do, you might get more 6es (yay!) but you’re gambling against getting 1s, which are damage you need to deal with. Depending on which of the three die colors they show up on, that’s different flavors of bad: broken gear or mutation flareups or whatever. It’s a neat choice and more importantly it feels like a choice.
In Coriolis, a single 6 is a “limited success” and 3 or more 6es are a “critical success.” I kind of read between the lines and actually made this slightly gentler by making 2 successes an unadored just-plain-old success, treating a single 6 as the only “limited success” and applying complications. This is already 90% supported by RAW if you look at how the skills are written. So my small tweak in no way changes the basics. Anyway. Instead of “pushing” there’s “praying,” which lets you reroll all the misses and gives the gm a Darkness Point (DP).
Given the die pool sizes, it’s awfully hard just to get a single 6 much less multiples. So either you’re fucking up an awful lot or you’re praying a lot.
There were a few thoughts on this from the players.
One is that if you’re praying all the time, it’s not really a special thing or even a choice any more. I think that’s accurate! But I think it’s also an aesthetic call. Like, maybe praying all the time is expected and the GM is supposed to have a really healthy supply of DPs. It’s not meant to be a juicy choice like it is in MYZ.
That leads to the point of darkness points.
In Coriolis, there’s a lot of stuff the GM is specifically constrained from doing, both mechanically and narratively, because they have to buy those moves with Darkness Points. In some cases it’s tactical stuff: my NPCs can’t take reaction moves like parrying or opportunity attacks. There’s even nastier stuff on the narrative side: I can invoke a character’s Problem as I see fit for a DP. I can inflict various maladies. I can complicate scenes with a list of stuff that, as I read it, I’m not allowed to without DPs.
That would normally be a really interesting twist to me! And that’s how I read it initially: if the players don’t feed me DPs and just accept failure consequences (or limited success complications), there’s a whole menu of problems that I cannot inflict on them. But I was playing with Ralph Mazza, an implacable system-destroying terminator from the future, who pointed out that the players don’t actually have that much power to starve the GM because there are other ways to generate DPs than prayer: Traveling deep into space, and being exposed to horrible shit. As the GM, I can engineer the situation such that I’m still getting DPs — not as many, perhaps, as when the players are also freely praying and don’t give a fuck. So I don’t think that’s the whole story.
There is a whole lot more DP flow in combat scenes though, since the stakes are so high. Probably it still breaks close to even: each time a player needs a few more 6es to generate a crit or whatever, they pray and I immediately spend on reloading or reacting or doing all the other PC-only stuff I have to pay for.
It feels, at a very high level, like the economy is not quite dialed right. But I’m not sure! I’d like to see another session or two where the players are maybe stingier with the prayer and figure out what they’re doing narratively to generate DPs anyway. Stuff like facing horrors and flying deep into space, both of which are, you know, the things they signed up to do. I’m not sure if it’s an actual perverse incentive or just a hard choice to face: doing their job inherently attracts the attention of Darkness.
Space Travel RAW Is Fucked Up
My absolute favorite thing about MYZ is how the Zone spools out. The PCs head out into the Zone, I randomly generate and draw and otherwise engage in procedures, and the world grows in an interesting, organic way. It’s a sandbox that the players give a shit about, and that’s a dime-sized design target they’ve hit.
It looked like the travel stuff in the Atlas Compendium was going to try and achieve that vibe. You decide what kind of space they’re traveling in, roll on some encounter tables, roll again to see how the NPCs feel about you (friendly, angry, whatever) and, you know, just kind of procedurally work your way through a journey.
Well so the cool thing in MYZ’s zone generator was that you might not actually encounter anyone, or it might be a weird phenomenon. There were several axes around which you’d generate your square mile blocks. In Coriolis, though, you roll for an encounter every two hours if you’re in heavily traveled space. EVERY TWO HOURS. It takes about a day per AU to travel, as far as I can tell (it’s super iffy). Am I really rolling 12 times a day? Really? And the various tables are way chock full of ships and people. If I’d actually done that, it’d be an endless circus of crap. Not a good look.
I’m gonna need to fiddle with that system because as written, it’s not interesting at all. The travel tables need to make encounters more meaningful, I think.
There’s also an undiscussed thing in the system where it seems like space travel is supposed to be a meaningful, interesting choice BUT it might also be that space travel is kind of skipped over ’til you either get to your destination or get into a space battle. There’s system support for both, which I felt like kind of didn’t do either one very well. I much preferred the feeling of making the trip its own set of situations and problems. The DP system supports that as well, giving me opportunities to introduce technical or supernatural problems along the way if I have the budget for it. Or, one assumes, being forced to leave the PCs alone if I don’t. But again, I can kind of fiat my way into getting at least a few DPs because of the depth or length of the trip.
Adjunct issue: it feels like money and upkeep is supposed to be a driving motivator for the PCs, but there’s not a whole lot of support for that. There’s an interesting table that describes upkeep costs that vary depending on where you perform your maintenance (more civilized = cheaper, which is good!). But there’s also a thing where portal travel is so fucking terrifying that you’ll most likely split the navigation costs with a caravan of ships. That’s a great image, very desert trader caravan-feeling, but then there’s nothing procedural to tell you how big or how often a caravan might be, particularly headed somewhere obscure. It’s fine, no big, I can totally just eyeball that. I just wish they’d made a bigger deal out of it because I think it would have been interesting.
My gut tells me they tried to make it interesting by introducing caravans and bulk haulers (like, you’d literally just get hauled through the portal) into possible space encounters. You know, the one you roll for every 2 hours. Dumb, boring, I think we can do better.
Weird Holdover System Problems
Coriolis has exactly the same system problem as everything else Free League has done: they never, ever consider the rules in light of the players using them against each other. The PvP stuff just falls apart and it’s an awful mess.
The game introduces a system called Reputation, which produces relative bonuses and penalties between characters. I think it’s straight out of Mutant Genlab Alpha, which has an identical system. If you’ve got more rep than your target, you get bonus dice equal to the difference. If you’ve got less, you LOSE dice equal to the difference. That is a two-die delta per difference in a roll-off that’s intended to be a versus test.
We had a situation where the rich scientist ship owner character (Rep 7) needed to order the plebian humanite pilot (Rep 1) into cabin confinement. Under RAW, the captain got +6 dice and the pilot got – 6 dice. That is ridiculous. I think I’m gonna have to just give the higher-rep person the bonus and call it good. I’m totally fine with rep being a heavy mechanism but a 12 die difference means you might as well not even roll.
There’s some math-lazy shit in combat as well (had to have a fight to see how it worked!) that bugs me but I don’t think breaks the game. It might. The most egregious is deciding whether to aim a shot or open up with full auto. Aiming gives you bonus dice, and given the extreme likeliness of prayer, you’re gonna get a good outcome with a big pool and a single reroll. Automatic fire lets you reroll all you want without praying (cool) and if at any point you rolled a 1 your clip is empty and you need to reload (also cool). But it costs you 2 dice. And obviously, the bigger the pool the more likely you’ll empty your clip even on the very first roll. That seems like a terrible choice.
That stuff doesn’t even bug me. We’ll just fine tune it until we get where it feels like a better choice.
Last Thoughts
The vibe is marvelous. It’s also highly stylized, to the point where it’s pretty dissonant, I think, for the players to live in a world where everyone wears caftans but also modern spacesuits.
It might turn out that the game really does want everyone praying all the time, but then I think it becomes very hard for the players to meaningfully push against that to keep the darkness from creeping into their lives. I’m interested to see if the players will start pushing against rerolls in the hopes of keeping my DP budget lower. It might also be that if they knew what I can’t do without DPs, they’ll face a more educated decision.
I miss MYZ’s richer dice. Coriolis feels…impoverished. Might in fact fiddle a bit and see if maybe I can reintroduce more of that vibe, like 1s are DPs I earn but only if you pray, more MYZ style. Hell, maybe go full MYZ: 1s on the attribute dice are DPs, 1s on the skill dice are yes-but complications, 1s on the gear dice break the gear. (Oh shit Ralph I think I fixed it!)
Oh Yeah Storytime
Our group is an explorer crew, with a trailblazer, scientist and engineer as PCs and a soldier and computer/sensors nerd as NPCs (played last night by Ralph, who came up with such an awesome backstory OMG I can’t even).
They got hired by the Foundation’s archaeological institute to go check out a wreck they’d acquired in a distant system. The wreck was of a cruiser from the Portal Wars era, like 600 years old, that had gone missing and just decided to show up.
Some marvelous competency porn scenes (thank you so much for that turn of phrase Jonathan Perrine ) en route. By the time they started their big slog waaaay out to the gas giant zone I’d accumulated a very tasty DP pool, which I then used to start dicking with the crew: bad sensor array, weird spooky signals from a nearby black hole, then aw dang their ship’s quirk — faulty thrusters — meant the ship entered an uncontrolled tumble for a while. The ship’s engineer fucking hates space and spent lots of time barfing. The trailblazer occasionally gets possessed by … things … when he’s out in the dark so that’s amusing. The scientist is a drunk. The soldier wants to shoot people when they barf or act crazy or drink too much so, you know.
Then haunted ship hijinks ensued, concluding with a freaky ass twisted column of ancient crew bodies gathered in the ship’s caverous bridge, and then a fight with a strange humanoid made of nanites, maybe.
I was reminded of how much better this kind of game is when I have time to prep. Thanks to New Mexicon all last week I’d had like an hour to doodle down and immediately forget a bunch of ideas.
Continuing next week! Bring a snack because I’ll probably write too much again. 😉
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1. That “limited” or “critical” but no “normal” success thing bugged me when I first saw it and still bugs me now that you reminded of it.
2. I’m really surprised that the random encounter system doesn’t employ the DP economy at all. I mean, why have encounters be different from any other GM move?
3. Do you feel like you needed to do this much hacking with MY0?
Mark Delsing
I’m fixing 1. Totally trying the dice thing next session.
2. That is a SUPER GOOD CALL. Love it. I’ll figure it out.
3. That’s a great question because it might have! I remember struggling with PvP stuff in particular. In retrospect I feel like it was mostly RAW but if I went back to my posts I’ll bet there were tons of tweaks. Like, I remember fiddling with Zone encounters because they’d forgotten to tell you exactly what multiple 6es meant on those rolls.
I have witnessed Ralph turn his great and terrible attention upon young, tender games taking their first walk in the sun.
I love reading this kind of reflection. Sounds like a fun time, too, mechanical issues aside.
Coriolis is also a nostalgia project for Free League. I was originally released by another Swedish RPG developer in the early aughts. That earlier RPG is where Free League got their name. Some of their choices I think may come down to being a homage to that earlier game. They saw holes they wanted to fill but also were okay with the basic gameplay.
The space encounter every two hours is suppose to be in heavily trafficed areas, like Coriolis itself or the portals near the center of the system. This kind of makes sense because travelling from Coriolis to Kua is less than a day trip. In deeper space the game suggests once per week or once per day. In either case I missed the tactile sense of zones from MY:0. There was something nice about rolling something up marking the map and maybe there beings some npcs and then I would scribble notes about what that group is up to.
A solution I think would be to simplify the encounter into a traffic jam. That there are a bunch of different vessels and how does that play out? but that still doesn’t flesh out a sector of space as I would like.
The idea that I couldn’t touch certain knobs or levers without DPs was one of the things that gave me trouble running the game.
I thought there WAS something in there about gaining DP for time spent in space, right? Or was it just going into deep space?
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Pin emoji.
Aaron Griffin there is, and it’s more if it’s uncharted. I’m not sure what your asking/saying?
Paul Beakley Sorry – comments popped in between what I read and what I was replying to. It was Mark Delsing’s second point – that you can tie encounters to DP. I was trying to remember if you gained DP for time in space – if so, it might make sense to just do away with random encounters and always spend DP for encounters? I dunno, just riffing based on my memory of the game.
Going full MY0 dice would be easy. I ranted about it somewhere and got push back and so wrote it up and said…”like this”.
I passed my “don’t tell Paul how to run his game at his own table” save…mostly…
The madness with the number of encounter rolls stood out to me as just as crazy as in The One Ring RPG. “Are you telling me, that the four of us are going to have to roll four times each? Per day? For five days? Why don’t you just dish out 1d3 Encounters and some fatigue and/or Shadow points and spare us the idiocy of pointless rolling for 20 minutes?” There simply has to be a better way to solve these things.
Ulf Bengtsson we talked quite a bit about comparing Coriolis travel to The One Ring travel. We had no problem at all with TOR, everyone totally bought in, and I’m not sure why tbh. Maybe it’s because individually we’re making the rolls and tracking the outcomes? Maybe because stuff like fatigue and madness was kind of variable between characters? The DP economy in Coriolis feels way different than that, unfortunately. I think I would have preferred that.
I do feel like it’s a dialable, polishable procedure though, that I can come up with something that’ll work, be interesting, and present a real threat/challenge/opportunity.
Paul Beakley We hated that part of TOR. Repeating the same die-roll over and over again was boring, pointless and borderline insulting. If you roll a die once it can be exciting to see if you get a six. If you roll it 20 times you can almost guarantee the six will come up and the whole thing is just a waste of time. I want the shortcut here. Less boredom. More action.
Ulf Bengtsson interesting. That’s quite different from my experience. The travel rolls really served their purpose for us. Which was: keep reminding players they are not big damn heroes riding for glory, no one has fun hoofing it across half a continent; grinding them down so they were already part way to beaten when Big Deals happened, making the decision to engage or run meaningful, and to provide opportunities to seed flavorful bits in between big set pieces — moments of danger or travelogue items.
In the end, rather than travel being just a generic way of fast forwarding between action scenes, the travel rules made the action scenes just periodic bits of danger between the real adventure of travel. Which felt very Tolkien.
Hi! Great write up, reflections and critique. I’ve run a couple of sessions of Coriolis and got much the same problems, and the strange thing is that this post is the first real, structured and thoughtful critique I’ve come across on the game. I threw out or tried to hack some of the mechanics almost straight away when we began the first session, like the rules for reputation in manipulation rolls and the somewhat iffy space travel times/encounter rules.
I’m VERY interested in the solutions you (and Ralph Mazza) come up with to the ”core problem”: DPs and praying!
Your MYZ hack with different effects on different dice that come up on 1s seems cool! However, maybe such frequent gear problems may feel more at home in an apocalyptic game than in coriolis? Or wait, maybe it wouldn’t be so frequent after all. Also, if complications are mapped to rolled 1s on skill dice (which seems cool!), should one do away with the RAW rule that complications happens on a limited success?
L. D. yeah, I would do away with the “limited success” thing and move complications to the skill dice. I think it’s 100% reasonable to have an outcome of “success with a DP and a complication.” I’m also intrigued by the additional decision before prayer, you know, looking at the 1s you’ve already rolled but aren’t suffering: can I handle giving away a DP? Am I okay with a complication?
I haven’t played it, but I feel like, in response to L. D.’s comments about frequently-broken gear, that might actually be appropriate for the established setting. Ships that are held together by prayers and space-duct-tape fit both the rough-and-tumble sci-fi and the “1001 Nights” seat-of-the-pants adventure motifs.
Adam D yeah, on that note: I might build durability into the tech level of the gear as well. There’s already a primitive/ordinary/advanced thing going on. That might also be 1/2/3 breaks the thing can take before it needs to be repaired? Or go backwards, yeah? That fancy-pants advanced computer can only take 1 gear break, but your chunky metal sword can take a beating!
There are also other cool things that can be done with 1s on gear besides breaking.
Ammo, collateral damage, injuring the mechanic, triggering a complication like a radiation leak or low fuel. Basically treat 1s like PBTA 7-9s with the harshness of the “but” tied to the number of 1s.
I would do all the dice like this with gear vs ability dice differing only in the flavor of the “but”.
In MZ0 Skill dice are free of complicating 1s, bit that’s an easy switch to flip. Maybe 1s on skill dice represent how much you need to than the icons for their blessings, representing a certain amount of prayer / sacrifice / devotion that must be met. If not met, prayers stop working…or something like that.
Subbing a lil’ late but still interested if anything else pops up.
. Benoît FELTEN
One of the things I did when I ran Coriolis to address the successes thing, was revert back to MY0 and make any 6 rolled a basic success and then additional 6’s rolled could be spent adding scope or asking relevant questions. That helped and cut down on the number of prayers needed. Then if I wanted success with a complication I would just spend Darkness to add that.
And ugh, the economy of Bir is what ultimately killed the game for me. The game does want you to spend to maintain the ship, to supply it, to pay of your debt on in each year, to pay for portal travel, to pay to carry weapons on station, and so on. But it also never really establishes how much a crew should be charging to do these missions. Before the game kinda died I was pretty close to abstracting bir into a BW like Resources stat with Cash dice or something.
Colin J we’re dialing all that in right now too. I’ve just about got it figured out.
(There’s also the 1/9th tithe if your characters are fulfilling their religious obligations.)
People in the Arabian Nights are praying all the time
Yeah, Coriolis feels like a good idea not quite baked. I have some issues with the setting as well, a bit too “Firefly but Arabic” and not much depth of drawing cultural trends from 1001 Nights and early arabic society (not to mention narrative structures). For those who speak French there’s a really interesting thread about orientalizing Coriolis on a french forum here: casusno.fr – Orientaliser Coriolis – CasusNO
I meant to do this before 12/31 but, well. Y’all have read plenty about my malware woes. It’s under control for now, but I’m looking at maybe, possibly reinstalling at wordpress.com and letting them deal with the server headaches.
Here’s what I played and my year-later takeaway, nice and short for potty reading:
Epyllion
Played, didn’t run. I really enjoyed it! But a couple things still jump out at me a year later:
As lovely as the friendship crystal mechanic works (short version: you give away your supply of tokens to other PCs when they act on the flags you’ve put on them during character creation, then either count them up when helping or spend them on the “moon magic” move), I still remember it being especially punishing for groups that aren’t great at paying attention to each other. Basically, you end up spending a lot of energy playing toward other folks’ flags but if they’re not paying attention, it’s easy to feel resentful about spending that energy. Given how my year played out, I very much think this is a phenomenon of my home group. I hope to address this more specifically in 2019.
I have no idea how the long game plays out. I chased advancement really hard and got to the next age. It’s fine. I did notice that advancement choices are pretty narrow. I feel like everyone’s playbook will end up looking like everyone else’s playbook across play groups and experiences.
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No Thank You, Evil!
I played a good amount of this with my daughter early in the year but we haven’t played in months, now. Honestly, I’m kind of itchy to get her to try something with a little more mechanical complexity. That’s totally on me and if I’m being honest with myself, it’s probably not what she would enjoy. But I think about running NTYE and it bores me. The narrow, short formula absolutely works! But it’s a narrow, short formula for play.
Probably the next thing we’ll do with it is move her to the highest character sheet level. She graduated from triangle to square in January, and that might have been the last time we played.
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Burning Wheel
2018 has obviously been a long fucking year because I completely forgot we played Burning Wheel! I played, didn’t run. It was nice. I’m also clearly not the target demographic for this game any more. It’s just such a heavy load, both on the GM side and the player side. Lots to manage. We didn’t do a great job of really workshopping Beliefs, and our campaign reached a point where we’d just kind of…done what we came to do. Was that my short attention span? Maybe!
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Bluebeard’s Bride
Played this at NewMexicon 2018 and it blew my mind. It’s super weird, very arty-farty, not at all a conventional RPG in terms of agency and bildungsroman and long meaningful campaign play. It’s a one-shot featuring a series of horrific vignettes, everyone plays an aspect of a single character and takes turns in the driver’s seat, and it’s so squicky and weird that it’s just impossible (or perhaps just in poor taste) to try and describe actual play. Very high on my list of best games of the year.
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Sagas of the Icelanders
Another NewMexicon 2018 game. I ran this, because I always run it. SotI is on my very short list of games I’m so good at, I can make the game do anything I want. It is a lovely experience every time.
This particular game was a “spotlight GM” event that I ran. I remember it being funnier and more Fiasco-y than it usually is. Worked great and I’m adding that mode to my quiver for future runs.
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Masks
My first run at Masks and it was super fun. My buddy Kit ran it at New Mexicon, and he is to Masks what I am to Sagas. The game does some really interesting stuff about supers relationships and completely dispenses with Champions style physics modeling. It’s terrific, loved it, want to run it here in 2019.
I had another opportunity to play Masks later in the year, at Rincon 2018 with Jason Corley running it. I played a more conventional character and it was a more conventional experience, which is great because you don’t have to push the envelope every time.
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Golden Sky Stories
Actually a fantasy adventure hack called Fantasy Friends. GSS is cute but not my jam: it’s heartwarming and affirming, you basically bid points to get things done and then do heartwarming and affirming things to get those points back. I mean it’s nice! And Nick Hopkins did a really good job running it. I was just ehh on the whole model of play afterward.
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Coriolis
Coriolis was my only real heartbreak of 2018. I adore, absolutely love Mutant: Year Zero from Fria Ligan, and Coriolis is built on the same engine. The game is packed with interesting history and social context, the setting is super interesting, characters look neat. I mean just on reading the text, I was all in. But the game has a huge glaring problem at the center of it: a GM-facing economy called Darkness Points.
What I discovered was that I grind against the DP economy in every imaginable way. First off, there’s a huge list of bad shit the GM is “allowed” (?) to launch at the players by spending DP. I read that to strongly imply, or mandate really, that nothing on that list is in my toolbox without spending those points. Then what really killed me was that I can effectively earn and keep unlimited DPs, and the players can’t do shit about it. Even playing hard toward the intent of the system, this is I think intentional! So there’s no meaningful decision making, no tension, nothing. It’s a list of things I feel like I can’t do but actually can do because I’m spending an effectively unlimited number of points.
I will say, though, that Coriolis has an extremely nifty spaceship combat system. Each player takes on a specific on-board role and everyone’s contribution matters. It’s great.
Otherwise, the game left me restless and irritated. What a shame, because it’s so very beautiful. And it appears I only ran three sessions of it? Ye gawds.
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The Veil
I tried to run The Veil but it catastrophically failed for us within an hour of the first session. When I had read the rules, the playbooks stood out as weird and very specific and I thought “oh wow, everyone is so strange!” And they are. But once you figure out where each playbook comes from, escaping the tropes and references becomes nearly impossible.
For us, I think, we worked hard at not doing that. But the moves, oh the moves. Designer Fraser Simons made a fairly lengthy argument explaining his approach, which was to build the moves in a very broad way. I like the idea in principle, but lordy in practice we just couldn’t get a handle on how anything was supposed to work or how any given move’s outcome was supposed to look in the fiction. The whole thing felt very abstract and it wore everyone out in about an hour.
But! But but but: I think The Veil may be best in class for how you create your cyberpunk setting. Each playbook has a very specific set of questions and inputs, so that any given playbook mix produces a wildly different and unique setting. We really liked this. The Veil produced a setting I’d be very happy to play in! Just with a different game.
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Scum & Villainy
My surprise hit of the year was Scum & Villainy, a sci-fi take on Blades in the Dark. I’d had the pleasure of playing once before at a private con earlier in the year, but I was so exhausted that the playbook felt like an incomprehensible wall of jet fighter controls.
I gotta say, now that I fully grasp how the GM-player transaction works in Bitd/S&V, it might be my favorite. Even more favorite than Burning Wheel! I really like how the negotiation bounces back and forth: how well positioned are you? How difficult is the thing? How hard do you want to try? Are you willing to take an additional consequence? Love it to pieces.
Our run at Scum petered out because everyone advanced to a point where there was really no more mechanical tension to the game. This is something I was worried about in Blades as well: the Resistance mechanism (short version: if you suffer consequences you don’t like, you can resist them at a cost to your stress) is such that eventually you can just do anything and everything and practically never suffer for it. I don’t love the realization that so much of the play juice was coming from the mechanisms, but in S&V it did for us.
It did get me thinking about versions of Blades where maybe you don’t get better, but the scope of your action just gets broader. Dunno. It was a good experience, very fun, just ran its course.
Oh and I ran it at RinCon 2018 and completely forgot! Pitched it, explained it, ran it, easy as pie. S&V is definitely on my short list of pickup one-shot games I’m happy to run without any prep.
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The King is Dead
This is Vincent Baker’s diceless, GMless game of fantasy intrigue built on the PbtA framework. I absolutely love this! And it may be my favorite of his games, even more than Apocalypse World itself.
The core of the game is that everyone gets a copy of the same rules book. You sketch out sexy young princes and princesses in a Game of Thrones-ish setting. And then you start picking little mini-games to play out scenes. You start with a game called “muster and intrigue,” which adds a little fictional context to the setting and gives you a card. The ostensible object of the game is to win the crown by any means necessary. You do that by building a good hand of cards, with more and better face cards worth more than numbered cards.
I’ve played this game twice now. The first time, we just rolled with the minigames and didn’t worry much about the underlying card game. It was really fun that way! But the second time, when I ran it again at Rincon in Tucson, I really charged hard at the card game. It was even more fun that way, because it forced me to play really strategically and think bigger-picture. My game basically shifted from playing Arya to playing Cersei.
Highest recommendation.
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Palimpsest
Okay, I pretty much never brag on myself but I’m going to now: I am super proud of my Game Chef submission this year, a little time travel game called Palimpsest. The premise is that three different time travelers converge on a small but vital moment in history, and try to make events conform to their wishes before uncertainty collapses and that moment is forever set.
I’ve run it twice, it was fun twice. It could stand a bit of polish and definitely some art direction, but this was the first time I’ve ever submitted a Game Chef and thought to myself “oh heck yeah, this fucker has legs.” I’m gonna publish it in some form down the road. But for now, here it is:
Download here
Legacy
Oh boy. The last game I ran this year.
It did not end well.
It started with such promise: a game about generations passing through time. A game about building up communities, rather than scrabbling for short-term wins.
It ended for a lot of reasons. Some had to do with the game itself: Mechanically, Legacy was overwhelming to everyone. There are move sets for your character and your family and the common moves and the story moves and and and. There are multiple economies. There is room for really unpleasant coercion via the game’s debts system. But beyond that, Legacy demanded everyone walk away from deeply ingrained habits of character monogamy, agency, and campaign continuity.
It was just too hard. It ended on a really sour note and we haven’t run a game since. That was early December, I think? It’s been a month.
It did, however, give me a lot to talk about.
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