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, Clocks Strains, and Editing
This 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.
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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Prior to the stay-at-home orders of the past couple months, I had never played a tabletop RPG online. I blame a combination of fear and snobbery: I already hated seeing myself on screen and hearing myself on podcast recordings, and I didn’t want to have to adapt my beautiful and perfect skillset (ha). It always seemed like a compromise, something almost as good but not the real thing. Non-alcoholic beer, sexting, the Lord of the Rings movies.
Well, given a lockdown of uncertain duration, I had to either get off my ass and learn things or set gaming aside for a few months. So I got off my ass.
I’ve been running Adrian Thoen’s Impulse Drive online for my regular in-person Tuesday game group for a couple months now, and I’ve learned a lot. We have a long way to go and so much more to learn – I’m constantly bugging Gauntlet superstar Rich Rogers for advice – but I’ve picked some stuff up. If you’re facing a similar plight (or want to know more about Impulse Drive!), read on.
The First Time Is (Never) Magical
I’m grateful I started playing online with a game I had less investment in. Our first go was The Nightmares Underneath, an interesting OSR/PbtA hybrid fantasy game from Space Wurm vs Moonicorn designer Johnstone Metzger. I like his aesthetic! And I’ve had good luck with a couple OSR and OSR-adjacent games in the past, specifically Kevin Crawford’s Godbound and Stars Without Number. Heck, I even occasionally run a B/X game for my daughter.
Well, The Nightmares Underneath didn’t work out for us. It’s got a lot of weird bespoke systems, but more importantly I was also learning my way around Zoom and staring at myself on camera and juggling shared screens. But it was a chance for me and my players, only one of whom had ever played online before, to figure stuff out. It lasted a session but the experience was invaluable.
Here’s what I’ve put together so far.
Character Keepers
I had no idea what a Character Keeper was until Rogers introduced me to the Gauntlet’s vast library. The very short version: they’re shared Google Sheet documents to track character data. That’s it. But spreadsheets are a whole realm of document I know next to nothing about. I had no idea they could be so pretty! And functional, holy cow. There are some character keepers – like the one we’re using for Impulse Drive – that do so much behind-the-scenes math and interactivity they’re practically apps.
One of about a dozen tabs with everything we could ever need to run our game.
The longer version is that character keepers have evolved into campaign managers, with tabs for every kind of data you could imagine: NPCs, locations, timelines, whatever. My players have enjoyed having everything at their fingertips – and each other’s character data specifically – that we’re thinking about how to replicate this at the table. I don’t love screens at the table but it’s something I might go for.
One fact my total reliance on the character keeper has highlighted is that I need to be mindful of the range of players’ setups at home. I have three screens (ridiculous, I know) and a rocket-fast gigabit connection, but I’ve also got players on laptops with sketchy wifi. So I’m trying hard to keep things simple on their end, no matter how elaborate my setup is here.
…But Also Paper
I tried following the advice of my gaming bestie Mad Jay Brown, who uses Trello to manage his various online campaigns, specifically Into The Mad Lands. He’s a (literal) pro at this! But he’s also accustomed to using Trello for project management in his non-gaming life. His brain works in a Trello-compatible way. Mine does not.
I still use a notepad and paper to track stuff in the game. On occasion I move my notes to a shared Google Docs file. Different games might need different management tools, so I’m still on the lookout for one that might work for me. Paper and pencil is a tough form factor to beat, though.
Zoom (Or Something Like It)
I know the pandemic has shoved several videoconferencing platforms into the mainstream, but Zoom is the platform I settled on. Why Zoom? Mostly because people I know and respect with tons of online play experience are happy with it.
I’ve been using Zoom for a couple months now and it’s good. The company had some squicky privacy policies they were forced to address early because of the explosion of civilian videoconferencing, but the audio and video have been bulletproof.
I also love the shared whiteboard functionality of Zoom. There are lots of similar free-standing solutions out there – Jamboard, Kumo, Padlet, Miro – but I like that it’s already right there, ready to be used. I purchased an inexpensive drawing tablet so I can doodle more naturally. Excellent tool when I need it. It’s a fairly robust drawing program (freehand, shapes, text, colors, pen widths and colors, all that) that exports a .png when you close. You can even run multiple whiteboard pages at once. If I could share and import whiteboards from previous sessions it would be ideal. Maybe it can, and I haven’t figured out how yet.
Sharing Screens
The Abyss! Aieee!
Besides the whiteboard/drawing tablet thing, I’ve fallen in love with sharing visual aids. I’ve got a Pinterest board where I dump inspirational images, for one. There’s a move in Impulse Drive called “Into the Abyss” that’s very similar to “Open Your Brain” from Apocalypse World, for example, and every time a player invokes it I share this marvelously spooky animation while the move plays out. I also have carefully “cast” dozens of NPCs, which helps me characterize. I share images to set the mood for locations, to show off alien artifacts, kind of everything I think might come up in a session. I haven’t tried sharing audio files yet, and it seems like more trouble than it’s worth, but I might!
I lost the theatrics of drawing a big sprawling relationship map but image-sharing has mostly made up for it.
Shared Dice
This one’s a matter of taste: As a practical matter, I know many experienced online gamers prefer to just let players roll dice at home. I really like the theatrics and tension of everyone watching dice roll, though! So we’ve been using Shane Liebling‘s rollforyour.party, a free and very handy site that generates a unique URL each time you open it. Share that URL with your players and boom, you’ve got shared dice. No clatter or animation, but I still like to see the results.
Shorter, More Structured Sessions
The big surprise for me was how exhausting videoconferencing is. I’ve never had to do it professionally. My wife does, and she has to take big breaks after her hour-long slogs. Well, our first and only session of The Nightmares Underneath was a full four hours! A combination of excitement that we were actually doing the thing, and getting to see all my friends again for the first time in a couple weeks, made me drag it out too long. Bad idea. I also forgot to account for potty breaks.
Combined with struggles with an unfamiliar system, I just felt wrecked and frustrated afterward. One of my players, who spends many hours a day on Zoom professionally, asked that we back it down to three hours with a bio-break around the halfway point.
The shorter session has been really good for play quality, I think. I start the meeting 30 minutes early so folks can log in when they want and shoot the shit. Then it’s time to focus on play. I have the clock in my face at all times, so I can adjust the tempo and scene-setting more carefully. I don’t let scenes run too long, while also making the scene (hopefully) more specific and framed: here’s where you are, here’s what’s going on, who’s there, who’s joining you? When we’re at a live table, I often let scenes meander and breathe a bit. Mostly that’s good, and we don’t notice because it’s not exhausting. They might get bored, but that’s a different issue.
Clearer Social Signals
The other skill I had to learn fast was clarifying who I’m talking to at all times. Literally everyone on the screen is seeing the same thing when I talk, right? They can’t tell who I’m looking at. I’m embarrassed to say how many times this came up: I’m looking right at Jason but somehow everyone thinks I’m talking to them. Dumb!
There’s so much missing bandwidth when you’re online, right? No meaningful body language. No directing my voice and face toward specific players. The very slight delay between video and audio throws me off all the time. It’s hard to feel the table, you know? So we’ve all learned to be much more explicit. This also has highlighted an ongoing issue at my table, where one player character will zip off to do something on their own, and neither I nor the other players will think to contrive a reason for other PCs to be there. Because I’m already having to direct my cues toward specific players, it seems a lot easier to remember to ask who else is there, if anyone wants to tag along, and so on.
Next week, I’ll go into depth about Impulse Drive and how it’s working out as our first successful online campaign.
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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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Something I’ve learned during the pandemic is that I use roleplaying as a distraction. Sure, yes, I’ve got a weird obsession with the metasocial meaning of rules structures. And I agree that gaming can be a safe way to explore emotional and interpersonal stuff. But at least during These Unprecedented Times, I need gaming to be a distraction. I’m honestly not sure if that’s healthy or not.
I’ve always been a little obsessive with my hobbies. Hell of a play ethic, maybe not such a great work ethic. When I need my hobbies I really need them. For a few early weeks of the lockdowns, low-level depression nearly leached away the obsessiveness with play. We ran a terrific, long campaign of Impulse Drive during that same time, though, so it certainly wasn’t gone. Now that I’m over the hump, or maybe because everything feels like it’s coming to a head in the real world, I’m back in baby. All the way in.
I’m in with a new game called Shattered City, from Douglas Mota and Mina McJanda of UFO Press. This game is so very extra. But it’s the kind of extra that fills my brain, blots out unpleasant thoughts, fills my time and consumes all that nervous energy that has nowhere else to go.
The Short Version
Shattered City
Available in PDF from DriveThruRPG.
Physical books soon!
Shattered City is the latest game in the Legacy: Life Among The Ruins branch of PbtA. The distinctiveness of this branch is an emphasis on shared world-building, the passage of time, and a lot of authorial intentionality. Legacy games’ killer app is a formal split between high-level faction play that feels a bit boardgame-y and abstract, and character-level play that’s framed by the high-level play. I’ve played both first and second editions of Legacy itself as well as a modestly down-scaled fantasy version called Free From The Yoke. Shattered City is by far the biggest and most elaborate version of all.
The game is built atop a licensed setting called Mysthea, designed by Italian game publisher Tabula Games. There are a bunch of boardgames set in Mysthea, as well as a graphic novel. I’m intimately familiar with the difficulties of working with an art-driven licensed setting, having developed Mutant Chronicles, 2nd edition (the one before the current 2d20 version from Modiphius) for Target Games. The process typically involves a lot of nonsensical rationales to make the badass art make any sense at all, much less a coherent through-line. The Mysthea setting is no exception, and when I looked through the other games Tabula has done it’s all pretty contrived. But that art, lordy, it looks great.
UFO Press calls Shattered City “crystalpunk,” which, well. You know. Everything -punk is garbage and Tabula feels like they’re very much in the “-punk = art direction” school. But to Mota and McJanda’s credit, they’ve done a heck of a job of designing a very elaborate game around audacious worldbuilding with an actual punk thread of rebellion running throughout.
The setting is a city called Montara (the eponymous Shattered City), torn apart by wars and occupations by two outside empires. There are legit well-structured takes on wartime refugees, PTSD, colonialism, ecological collapse, class warfare, all of it. The players’ Houses all stand opposed to the occupiers, but they have their own agendas. And sometimes collaborating with your colonizers may be necessary for your long-term goals. Meanwhile, the occupiers serve distant masters and aren’t in control of their own fates. There’s goofy canon behind everything – Mysthea is a floating continent broken loose from its world by a giant magical crystal, every living being on Mysthea is tied into a telekinetic force called Qoam, and so on – but honestly? So much less canonical load than old fan favorites like Glorantha or Star Wars.
The holding environment of Shattered City feels like a funhouse version of what we’re going through in our real world, with a powerfully shiny fantasy gloss. It’s exactly the kind of all-encompassing distraction I’ve been hoping for.
Extra Extra
The entire book is full of stuff like this.
Here’s a short list of what makes Shattered City so very extra:
Fifteen character playbooks, roughly broken into three sets of five “styles:” civil (social-intensive), bold (action-oriented) and uncanny (magic!). You also choose a Role (leader, outsider, rebel, prophet, agent or traitor) that represents your character’s relationship to their House. If you have a hero-scale session where it just doesn’t make sense for your own character to attend, you make a Cohort, a less-detailed filler character (Band of Blades does this trick with new recruits as well). And eventually you might grow your hero into their own faction, at which point they become a Champion, which has yet another playbook.
Eight House playbooks, representing the faction to which your character belongs. The Houses are connected via a frenemy relationship called the Venture: sometimes you’re allies, and sometimes you have dominion over another faction.
Five Guild playbooks, one of which you choose to represent the city’s foreign occupying force. They serve distant masters but are far enough away from their capital that they can kind of get away with anything. In the full-blown version of the game, the player running the Guild is kind of a co-GM.
Five Ancestries (species), with a couple playbooks standing in as their own species as well.
Two sets of common moves, House and Hero, that you switch between throughout the game. There are, no kidding, fifteen common Hero moves. And fifteen common House moves.
A library of dozens of gear tags, all of which have brief rules implications mostly having to do with obvious fictional positioning effects.
I’m not great at math but the possible combinations of playbooks, Houses and Ancestries seems like a lot. I’m kind of reminded of the frustration I have with videogames that offer a zillion possible builds and not enough time to explore them all.
The sheer volume of game design in this game is jaw-dropping. Shattered City is the polar opposite of a compact little tone-poem of a game like Monsterhearts (even taking into account the Second Skins playbooks) or Sagas of the Icelanders. A good friend snarked that UFO Press designs trad games dressed up like PbtA, and I’m not sure that’s totally wrong. There’s a ton, a ton of procedural detail. But the moves are still moves, they still respond to and constrain the resulting fiction. There’s just an awful lot of them to track. And gear tags and multiple interlocking economies.
Honestly I can’t wait to dig in.
We’re Gonna Play
So, yeah, we’re playing this. It’s just about the most difficult game I’ve run into for online play, with 56 pages of helper PDFs and, well, that list of stuff I went through earlier. And it’s got a strong collaborative map-making component, which was tricky to work out for online play.
I ended up building out an elaborate character keeper in Google Sheets, and it’s got a lot of development to go before I’m ready to make it public. We’re using Miro for the shared map, Google Docs for the setting bible that arose from the lengthy session zero process, and of course Zoom for their pretty faces and Rollforyour.party for the dice. I have three monitors and had to bounce between seven screens of information throughout our three hour setup. Hopefully we can get it down to just the keeper, Zoom and the dice roller when it’s time to actually play.
Sometimes you want a healthy salad and sensible portions. And sometimes you want to engorge yourself on a nine-course banquet. I’ll be writing about our game going forward.
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Before These Unprecedented Times, I used to hit the gym three times a week. Working with a personal trainer, I got into weightlifting later in life. It was fun to hit new numbers! It was fulfilling to feel strong. But lifting late in life meant I got injured. Take just a little too long off, screw up my form a tiny bit, and boom. There goes my back, or my shoulder, or a knee.
Running UFO Press’ Shattered City, designed by Douglas Mota and Mina McJanda, these past several months has been the RPG equivalent to my late-life injury-risking weightlifting program. It finally broke me, but along the way it was great to hit new numbers. It was fulfilling to feel accomplished. To feel strong.
I wrote a bit about Shattered City when we first started. Twenty sessions in, this is my final deep dive. And just in time: Mina tweeted about the hardbacks finally making themselves into the world recently.
Shattered City
PDF available at DriveThruRPG (affiliate link)
Storytime!
To recap: players in Shattered City play Houses, big important factions shaping the future of the eponymous City, Montara. In the game’s fully realized form, one player (not the GM) instead plays a Guild, representing the occupying force oppressing the city. We went all-Houses, and it was fine. But I’ll bet a motivated Guild player would be a ton of fun.
In our game, we had the Crystal Crowned, weirdo vampire-elf alien nobility who were the original masters of Montara; the Verdant Priesthood, supportive plant-people with neat plant-magicks; and the Rebel Underground, Montaran patriots pushing back against the occupiers. We decided on the Volarees as our Guild, fallen nobles looking to make a name for themselves by turning Montara into a powerhouse.
Players also play a hero of their house. We started with a Warlock for the Crystal Crowned, lots of funky powers related to the setting’s ambient magical energy; a Warden for the Verdant Priesthood, a relationship broker and peacemaker; and a Martyr for the Rebel Underground, because who doesn’t love a rebel martyr?
Gameplay was so broad and involved that there’s really no point in trying to retell any of it. They fought giant monsters, explored the nearby countryside, and eventually overthrew the Volarees. And that was just in the first “cycle.” The game is played in big strokes like that, with little vignettes within the bigger sprawl of history.
Behold! A delicious, completely bonkers r-map of our final game-state.
Since we played online, I produced a lot of documentation about our game. I built an elaborate character keeper, wrote a setting bible, used Miro to maintain the relationship map above, and so on. It might not all make sense but if you want a clear breakdown of what all happens in the course of a campaign, check out my Current Situation document.
There Is So Much (Maybe Too Much)
There are so many ways to combine houses and playbooks in this game. So much stuff. Maybe too much.
Players choose from eight houses, five guilds, and fifteen playbooks (helpfully broken up into bold, civic and uncanny themes). The Houses won’t change much but players are expected, even encouraged, to hold onto their heroes lightly and regularly introduce new playbooks. Advancement is left entirely to the players, who can just decide to advance as they play through the faction roles they take on in the course of their lives: leader, traitor, outsider, agent, rebel, prophet and agent. Once you’ve taken four roles (and advanced four times), the character either retires or becomes a Champion (which is kind of its own house).
Oh how could I forget? There are also, formally, five species in play. Those also impact play, both mechanically and culturally. Several of the playbooks are also de facto species, like the Awoken (a self-aware robot from the ancient technomagical past) and Chimera (genetically engineered byproduct of a recent war), or the Verdant Priesthood (all of whom are part plant) and the Architects of the Living City (space-manipulating aliens from another dimension). Players looking to optimize a build are going to get quickly frustrated. Not everyone is happy to run whut they brung.
Then there are the move sets. So many move sets. There are hero moves, for when the characters are doing normal roleplaying stuff. When you pull back and play more abstractly, there’s a whole other set: house moves. And to execute the biggest-picture stuff, starting and ending whole cycles, you’ve got story moves. The moves take up three tabs on that character keeper I mentioned up there.
It’s a lot to keep in one’s head. Occasionally, the moves or their attached economies will affect across scales. If the players aren’t fully invested in the excitement (challenge?) of mastering perhaps the most complex PbtA game ever conceived, it’s gonna be a rough ride for everyone.
The Moves Are Alien But Productive
Let’s talk about these sets of “common moves.” Being several designs into the Legacy concept (Legacy and then Legacy 2nd Edition, Free From The Yoke, and now Shattered City), the move sets have gotten — and I swear this is not pejorative! — weird. You need to set aside your opinions about “correct” PbtA doctrine to really evaluate them.
The takeaway all my players shared in debrief was that it was hard for them to engage with Shattered City‘s moves in an organic way. Moves don’t easily trigger from the fiction as it happens. Moves don’t snowball into other moves like one might expect. The game wants players to engage very intentionally, even boardgame-ily! But the moves’ fictional triggers are unintuitive and the outcomes that emerge from those triggers are highly abstract. My players settled on looking at mechanical outcomes they wanted, and reverse-engineering the move(s) needed to get there. That’s not necessarily a new thing to PbtA-style play — players regularly evaluate outcomes and steer the fiction toward moves — but it’s an inescapable feature here.
Let’s take a couple examples from the Hero move set, Unearth and Compromise.
Unearth reads like this:
You might expect a move like Unearth to produce outcomes like Read a Sitch (Apocalypse World), Discern Realities (Dungeon World), or even the “extend your senses” option in Let It Out (Urban Shadows). Those are all about nailing down situational details right here and now. I think there’s some equivalent to that effect in nearly any PbtA style game I can name. That’s not what happens with Unearth.
Unearth is an invitation for the player to co-develop setting details. None of the options in the bullet list are situational details, though. I mean, sure: in typical PbtA fashion, anything that isn’t a move can just be narrated. Whatever. But my players were looking for more practical affordances and I, as GM, wanted more guidance. To be sure, Unearth produces super interesting content! So it’s not a “bad” move. It’s an alien move. Alien, but productive.
Compromise is another in that category. You’d think you were getting something like Intimidate/Manipulate (Impulse Drive), or Turn Someone On/Shut Someone Down (Monsterhearts) or even Propose a Deal (Cartel). But, like much of Shattered City, the “social move” operates at a whole other level. Here’s how it reads:
Structurally I really like this. It’s how the game’s Assault move works as well: you earn objectives and suffer reactions. But you know what? In almost every case, it was very hard to fit the objectives (other than Enlist and Earn) to the fiction, and the Reactions all felt wildly out of scale. The move felt vital — there’s a lot of interpersonal work in the game — but Compromise almost never produced the types of outcomes we were hoping for. Not every Compromise outcome looks like something in the (immediate) fiction.
The House moves are also quite abstract. In fairness they need to be, given they’re driving the big-picture fiction of the game. Mostly House moves don’t have fictional triggers and don’t act like conventional “moves” other than by writing the rules in Move language (weak and strong hits, pick lists, etc.). One terrific innovation in Shattered City over its predecessors is the addition of “decrees,” an economy that lets the GM limit how long folks spend in up-high mode, and drive the action back down into hero-level roleplaying. So mostly the triggers are worded like “when you spend a Decree…”. Which is mechanical, not fictional. It’s fine, we adapted. That feature is not universally true: there’s a “react to bad things” move called Endure, kind of a House-scale Defy Danger (Dungeon World), that we literally never thought to use in twenty sessions because it didn’t trigger the same way.
The most alien bit of the House moves, in the end, is that there’s no simple move to achieve most of the game-state stuff you’d want. Like, there’s no specific move to “earn Influence” over another House. You have to come at it sideways, see, either by dropping into a Flashpoint and taking Influence as a Compromise outcome (see above), or come at it sideways via some other move. I wrote an entire reference document about this for all the economies in the game. From my GM seat, I rather liked this indirectness. But the players hated the uncertainty and reverse-engineering necessary to pursue their boardgame-y factional goals.
A Couple (Almost) Fatal Flaws
Matters of unmet moves expectations and overwhelming player options aside, there are a couple places the game for-real nearly fell apart for us.
Manifest is a Mess
The big one is a move/concept called Manifest. In Shattered City, literally everyone in the game can tap into ambient magic called Qoam. Very broadly, Qoam is telekinesis, tuned to specific aspects depending on the focus (Potent, Swift, Wide etc.) mastered by the character. That ability is addressed by Manifest, but it also shows up indirectly in other surprising places: the move used to take down gigantic Titans, the Warlock playbook, the Firebrand playbook (which switches out telekinesis for fire!), and so on.
Each player participating in a Manifest move can add their own focus to the move, and doubles the strength of “one person applying force.” Ostensibly these foci create very elaborate effects and creations. There’s an appendix at the end of the book, easy to miss, that offers sample effects at various combinations of foci. But these effects don’t reflect the “double human strength” guidelines. Like, you can create a magical automaton with three foci! That just isn’t covered by Manifest or its supplemental text.
I suspect Manifest is meant to be eyeballed, both by the players and the GM. Like, the player(s) suggests a magical effect and the GM says what foci are needed. That’s cool, it’s “a conversation,” but I feel like the GM doesn’t get enough guidance to know whether something is, you know, three-ish foci or five-ish foci or even if a particular effect is possible under the “telekinesis” umbrella. It’s setting-important and very, very loose. I think if you went into the game with the GM very clearly telling everyone “imma eyeball this,” and clarify that every Manifest is going to be “a conversation,” it might be okay.
Missing Misses
Second (almost) fatal flaw: On the mathy side, it’s just too darned easy to roll hits. And given how large-scale every move is written, you don’t see a lot of rolls in a session. Fewer rolls + rare misses = a feature to route around.
Players help on Hero moves by handing over extra dice. I normally like the simplicity of Advantage-style help, but where I’ve seen it (most recently in Impulse Drive) it’s usually limited to one extra die. Not here! We had three players, therefore four dice in many cases. You do need a Covenant (relationship) with the person you’re helping, which can be fun after a Covenant is broken and the players hustle to create a new Covenant with an eye toward future help. Assuming they can help, it’s easy to assume everyone will help every time if possible. The odds of missing on four dice is quite small — around 9% according to anydice.com, compared to 18%ish on three dice.
At the House move scale it’s even more pronounced: Allied Houses can provide two help dice! Two Allies (Allied is a game-state term of art) helping on a roll means six dice. They will never, ever miss. There’s a cute bit where the lowest die in the pool means the helping House might’ve fucked things up between the Houses, triggering additional complications, but as far as actually giving the GM an opportunity to make a Reaction (GM moves in this game) from a miss? Doesn’t really happen. Of course the GM can still make Reactions under all the typical PbtA triggers, like “when they look to you to say something” or “they hand you a golden opportunity.” But the House Moves are so abstract that it’s tough to embed the moves’ outcomes in the fiction. Golden opportunities and “waiting for the GM to say something” don’t come up in an organic way.
To be clear: we played twenty sessions. Nothing even close to “fatal” about that, right? It meant we had to master reverse-engineering our desires, working backward from desired outcomes to the string of moves that would get us there. That’s a tough vibe for folks accustomed to tighter interplay between the immediate fiction and move triggers. It’s tactical, abstract, boardgame-y.
Big Little Picture
As with the rest of the Legacy branch of PbtA, the secret of the split between hero vignettes and big-picture systems is that it tricks everyone into co-GMing. This is Shattered City’s best magic trick, and it really is magical when it fires off.
By asking the players to advocate for their factions, everyone brings more energy to their struggle than just “wouldn’t it be cool if you and I had a fight?” The players are quite invested! But almost every move demands the players come together to work through the consequences of their big-picture actions, frequently without GM intervention.
The same thing happens in the Flashpoints, where we play characters in a conventional RPG-y way. Many of the moves ask the players to create their own truths and answers (see Unearth, above). This can be a surprising cognitive load for players. More than once I’d offer ideas for moves that ask the players to provide answers. There is something weirdly different between discovery (revealing what I came up with) and invention (sharing what they come up with). Mostly my players wanted to discover what complications and through-lines I had up my sleeve.
Setting aside the aesthetics or fatigue of collaboration, the play product itself — the actual outcomes, the resulting fiction, the through-lines — is, honestly, exceptional. It was a hell of a run, our twenty sessions. Nothing else quite like it.
The Killer App(s)
There are a few other standout bits of design that stuck with me.
Covenants are a super interesting replacement of History (Hx) type mechanisms. Covenants are ranked (from 1-3) and characterized via a pair of keywords, each keyword provided by half the relationship. If you get additional Covenants with the same character, it’ll have its own keyword pair and rank. Sometimes the rank matters and sometimes the number of Covenants matters! But it’s sharp in so many ways. The big one is that the players remember why they had a Covenant in the first place. But also, sometimes you Test the Covenant, and on a good enough roll the players can narrate a new positive memory about that relationship. That may sound frivolous but it produced several genuinely moving moments in play.The grid of political relationships between factions is terrific. Factions can hold Influence over each other (which may not be reciprocal), they can be allied, they can be in conflict, or they can hold dominion over another faction. These are all mechanically meaningful, and produce a ton of interesting context.Assault is maybe my favorite one-roll combat resolution minigame in all of PbtA. On a hit you pick a tactical goal and a couple complications, and on a strong hit you pick two goals, a “better” goal list opens up, and you only face one complication. It played out great every single time we used it. The trigger includes an invocation of “appropriate weaponry,” which meant we were able to use Assault to play out an angry speech to whip up a mob at one point. The centrality of the mechanized map, constantly evolving and growing, is very powerful. I’m a big believer in having central information on a table, and Shattered City mandates the map. Every “strategic asset” is on the map somewhere (and therefore can be targeted with City moves), new locations get added all the time via move outcomes, it’s great. We used Miro to build our map, and being able to zoom in on Montara for individual buildings and neighborhoods, and then zoom out for forests and mountain ranges elsewhere, was very cool. Not sure how we’d pull that off at a real table.The Roles attached to every hero playbook. There is so much design packed into this bit of the game! Every Role is really a little mini-kickoff to their personal arc, either a thing they need to do to enable the role, or a thing that has happened that gives the GM stuff to frame around. When those interact with the players’ House choice, it’s pretty magical. So what’s that all add up to? 8 houses x 15 playbooks x 6 roles per playbook = 720 kickers? That’s kind of bananas.
In Conclusion
In the end, I think what broke me was that it was hard to care about the characters.
That’s a structural feature. The game purposefully breaks up big-picture and personal play. Players are incentivized to take, finish and move on from their Roles as the only path toward advancement. And they only get to advance four times, then it’s on to another hero of their House.
It’s hard to be a fan of an abstract organization. And while our shared history was pretty exciting, it’s hard for me to invest in “history” as its own end product, Microscope style. I was a little skeptical when we set out that the Houses are the real stars of the game, and it turned out they are. Which is not, it turns out, what we cared about the most.
I could definitely see fighting the game’s incentives and playing Shattered City in a slower, more expansive way. Setting aside advancement until you’ve fulfilled your role in good faith, rather than the one-or-so session vignette per spotlight character we went with. Treating the House moves in a more intentional co-GM way, perhaps. Like most long-form games, though, it’s hard to see myself getting back to them to apply all these best practices.
Shattered City is perhaps the most elaborate, difficult PbtA game anyone’s ever attempted. But if you’re willing to put in the work, maybe you’ll get 20 (or more!) sessions out of it too. It’s got nearly limitless space to expand a campaign into. But you have to be strong.
If you’re looking for additional thoughts on long-form play, I wrote about that in the recent past!
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What is it about gamers wanting to find their Forever Game? That one game they’re always going to be happiest playing, the pinnacle against which they will compare all future games, the one they think about when they’re playing anything else.
We just wrapped up a long, like around 20 sessions long, campaign of Vel Mini’s Fellowship. It will not be our Forever Game, but 20 sessions of a PbtA game is my record (followed by Impulse Drive at 13 sessions, a dozen sessions of Shattered City, and lots of 6-10 session runs of many others). So what made Fellowship so durable over so many sessions? And why wouldn’t it be our Forever Game?
Overview
Fellowship is about characters presenting a unified front against a shared enemy. It’s very us-versus-them, Three Musketeers, party-centered play. The first book presents a set of playbooks straight out of Lord of the Rings (halfling, elf, dwarf,
Gandalfharbinger, etc.) and three options for the Overlord you’re opposing. The Overlord might be seeking ultimate power, or world domination, or widespread destruction. Those choices all give the GM an extra move they can make to display the Overlord’s villainy.Once you get out of the first book, the overarching game goes completely bonkers.
In Inverse Fellowship (an adaptation of Inverse World) the PCs are exploring a weird world via some kind of vehicle (a ship or blimp or giant drill, whatever) and dealing with individual local bosses making their communities miserable. The playbooks are all over the place: angels, beast-people, magical collectors, robots, people made of rain. Rather than facing existential doom, the characters decide on their agenda – seeking adventure, fame, fortune, progress, and so on – and guide their play that way.
In A Fellowship in Rebellion, the Overlord has won and the characters are joined in rebellion to overthrow the baddies. There are a slew of new playbooks again – you can be a dragon, and why would you choose anything else? – as well as The Rebellion itself, a shared resource that grows and changes alongside the characters.
Finally, Generous Fellowship is a thick book packed with new playbooks, a complete and updated compendium of threats and set pieces (combinations of threats) from the previous three books, and so on. Just tons of additional content.
All of this stuff works together. In our game, a straight party-vs-Overlord setup, the fellowship was comprised of two playbooks from the first book and a third from Generous, they acquired a scrappy airship (from Inverse) from allies to help chase the Overlord down, and they regularly ran into threats that first appeared in Rebellion. All told it’s about a thousand pages – no joke – of material you can mix and match. Honestly it was a shock when the four books showed up on my doorstep: how did such a sprawling game slip under my radar this whole time? The PbtA space is vast and contains multitudes.
Shape of Play
Party-versus-evil is bog-standard roleplaying, right? Very traditional setup. And if you stuck to the first book you might think you were better off playing Free League’s excellent new edition of The One Ring. But hooboy Fellowship does a lot of interesting things of its own. It is in fact probably the least interesting when you’re just trying to channel Tolkien. Middle-Earth is barely even the jumping-off point.
The most distinctive aspect of play is that Fellowship mandates the players do most of the creative lifting throughout the game. Every player has absolute authority over their own character’s setting materials, for starters. If you’re playing an elf, then you’re who I go to for answers about elves. If I trip up and start defining things that’s not the vibe you wanted, then you get to tell the GM to shut up and let them know how it actually is. This of course demands incredibly good faith play, and I suspect it would quickly fail for players who abused this authority to make challenges trivial or the setting silly. We didn’t stress-test this part of the game. It took a couple sessions for everyone to warm up, but when they did, I was left with very little worldbuilding to concern myself with. I just took notes so I could reincorporate later.
There are tons of evocative little ideas scattered throughout the four books, without ever suggesting a meta-setting that’s “real” we needed to defer to. Every playbook has four “what kind of X are you?” choices, for starters. In our game, the dwarf chose to be “stoneborn:” your kin have more in common with the earth and stone than they do with flesh and blood. Your armor is your bare skin, solid as stone. When you stand on solid ground, you cannot be knocked off your feet or moved unless you want to be, and you can stop anything trying to get past you and so on. We took the color as fictionally positioned and “real” in the game, and given the heavy emphasis on fictional positioning the whole game requires, it’s a good play. The dwarves are literally made of stone, cool.
Advancement in Fellowship is easy, trivial even. At the end of each session you answer three questions (things like did you deliver a setback to the Overlord and did you learn something about the world), and for each one you get an advance. Leveling up is one thing you can spend that on, but the twist is that the Overlord also advances. And pursues their plans. And just gets worse and worse. In our game, once they got over the excitement of those first few advances, the players got much more circumspect about when and how they advanced. It was really in their hands the whole time, which was super interesting compared to the typical advancement-chasing that happens in other games.
Another very cool twist to characters is that, after a bit of advancement and depending on the events of your game, the players can choose advanced Destiny playbooks that provide new moves. Given how easy advancement is, Destiny playbooks show up pretty quick, and then everyone is kind of a dual-class chimera. Our Elf became an Elven Elite, the Dwarf became a Knight, and our Outsider (an Earth human dropped into fantasyland) became the Chosen One. Those choices in turn have even more implications about the setting we create together.
Much of the game is spent with the fellowship deciding which of two (and later, possibly, three) plans the Overlord has cooking to pursue. The Overlord is always working to secure a Source of Power (which then gives them a new stat and makes them a bigger pain in the ass) or trying to crush a community (because the Overlord is a jerk). If the players help a community with their problem – which may not have anything to do with the Overlord! – they gain Fellowship (capital F) with them, which comes with a nice permanent benefit along with all the relationships and world-building that happened along the way.
If the Fellowship destroys a Source of Power the Overlord has, they destroy the stat that goes along with it, and if they seize the Source they themselves get the new stat! By “stat” I mean a single word that describes some aspect of the Overlord. In our game, our Overlord was Invincible (literally cannot be hurt), Unknowable (nobody knows her plans or actions) and Mythical (nobody but the fellowship believes she even exists). It was a killer combination and at first glance seemingly unbeatable, yeah? But imagine if the fellowship acquired the thing that made the Overlord Invincible. Oh baby.
Last distinctive bit of play I have to call out is how the game handles long journeys. Travel is a very much unsolved problem in RPGs, or rather there are many solutions of varying quality. In The One Ring, the characters gain fatigue and lose hope as they’re exposed to the land’s ambient evil. In Mutant: Year Zero, the characters have to balance supplies against the harm of wandering the blasted Zone. In grindy overland OSR-style hexcrawls there are various economies to stay on top of so you don’t arrive at your destination too exhausted. But in Fellowship? Each player describes a hardship the fellowship faced and nominates a character who addressed it. No duplicates, everyone describes and everyone solves. And in the end, the Overlord player (the GM) describes one last scene as they arrive at their destination. The outcome is mechanically similar – resources are spent, injuries suffered – but the game essentially tricks the players into co-GMing the game. It’s my current favorite journeying system, just marvelous but also susceptible to bad-faith play.
In our game, there was just no telling if any given problem was going to be a simple roll-off or escalate into something truly dire that changed their plans en route. The players even started getting clever with the kinds of problems they faced: initially a chasm or a yeti, later things like internal social problems with armies and refugees they ended up with. Because of the complexity of the characters, it was hard to preload problems with “easy” solutions. And given the vagaries of the dice, sometimes small problems would grow and grow and then they’d stumble into their next destination wrecked.
So the fellowship spends its time evaluating what it knows about the Overlord’s activities, deciding where their priority will be, journeying to deal with those things and facing hardship along the way, all to fight against the Overlord’s efforts while creating relationships where they can. Every time the fellowship stops to rest they give the Overlord time to regroup and strengthen. Every time they slow down to eat a meal they’re gnawing through their supplies. Deciding when to slow down turns into one of the hardest decisions of the game, which is delicious. The game always ends up with a final conflict with the Overlord and the fellowship always prevails, but the road to get there is wildly variable. And in our case, it took 20 sessions to line up their ducks in a row to take the swing.
A few other mechanical bits worth mentioning:
The Bonds between characters have lots of uses beyond Hx-style help/hinders. Like, you need a Bond with a PC to provide them with hope, which is a third die (take the highest two). But also the Overlord can have Bonds with characters and vice versa, and those all have various rules. Bonds are as easy to form as simply saying you have, but despite that ease it was still hard for the players to remember to do it.Stats are the core of the whole game. The characters’ stats get damaged through play, meaning they roll with despair (three dice, take two lowest) if they ever have to use it. The NPCs get mechanical or fictional benefits by virtue of their stats, and also use their stat list as hit points more or less.There are lots of subtle cycles of moves and resources, either being spent or replenished, that can feel like a lot to master. The game rewards players who take the time to master it: they keep more gear replenished, their stats get healed faster, the Overlord doesn’t pull ahead too far. As long as at least one player takes the time to do this, the ones who don’t shouldn’t be punished. Woe be to the play group that just doesn’t want to learn, though.
Finish Them!
My favorite single rule in the game is Finish Them.
Rather than having a tactically detailed conflict system, players bounce between three moves: Overcome (to avoid harm already incoming via soft moves), Get Away (to just leave the conflict), or Keep Them Busy (kind of the catchall move but doesn’t do much on its own, not exactly). None of this stuff wins fights! But all of it is in service of the goal of making the Finish Them move.
Finish Them is the only way to harm or defeat an opponent, including abstract opposition like curses and obstacles. To make the Finish Them move, the player needs an advantage. Advantage is a term of art in this game that’s different than hope/despair in that, rather than giving you a third die to roll (a confusing point given “dis/advantage” is what you call that third die rule in many other games), gives you permission to make the Finish Them move. It’s positioning the fiction such that you have the clear upper hand.
You can get advantage three ways: describing what you’re doing that gives you the upper hand, spending one of your companion’s stats and explaining how the stat provides advantage, or making the Keep Them Busy move and giving someone else advantage (a detail that appears only in the rulebook and not the helper page, huge oversight!).
The first option is both the most fruitful and the iffiest, depending on the player. I had a player who simply could/would not engage with the conversation in good faith. There’s some mother-may-I to the conversation, granted, but opposition to that lies at the intersection of the GM’s style and player trust. I was generally permissive, I thought, but this player wanted to know what move to make so they definitely, procedurally gained an advantage and didn’t need to sell me on their idea. I get that. It’s a style thing not everyone loves. But when we did have the conversation I thought it was quite productive – particularly when I could push back and say “no, you don’t have the upper hand yet” and then expand on the situation as I understood it. It gets everyone talking about the conflict, and that’s a good thing because every word brings you closer to the same page. There’s some dysfunction around the edges of any mother-may-I system but I’m not sure the answer is more rules.
Durability
Where Fellowship shines is in its durability in the face of long-term play.
Twenty sessions is no small thing. Vincent Baker once described Apocalypse World as really coming into its own at around six sessions, and in my experience PbtA games rarely last more than a couple sessions past that. Six to eight sessions is my personal “PbtA campaign length” duration. So how does Fellowship pull this off?
I think a lot of it comes down to the required creative collaboration. Everyone’s invested in the world we’ve made because we’re all making the world at once. There is no big lore dump, there are no secrets or obscure details one might trip over. I know I was always curious to ask about each player’s slice of the game. It was much less load than I’m accustomed to, and I’m generally very okay with taking the reins and just doing all of it. This was a nice break. Relaxing.
The Destiny and Ship playbooks provided nice new toys to play with at just the right time in our game. The Ship, from Inverse Fellowship, isn’t required at all but it’s a very cool new game within the game to play: a crew to manage, upgrades to make, it levels up for crying out loud! Destinies are similar in that there’s the prospect of playing with a bunch of new moves ten sessions in, and sooner than that if you’re willing to ramp up advancement. There are also fictional requirements for the Destinies and the GM needs time to angle play toward those. That’s not required, either: the players can shop Destinies on their own and then use their Command Lore privileges to angle their own fiction toward, say, earning fellowship with beast-people or demons. But in our game, it was already a lot to ask of the players to dig into those thousand pages. So I pre-shopped the Destinies, which gave me ideas of where to aim the Overlord’s efforts. If I wanted them to become a Dwarven Champion then I’d need a reason for the players to earn fellowship with the Dwarves, right?
Another big part of the game’s durability is the formal structure of the Overlord always pursuing two missions, and those missions being public knowledge. It was an excellent prompt for me to constantly think about what the Overlord wanted, although at no point does the GM ever define the Overlord’s master plan – they just keep planning and planning until they’re defeated. Eventually, in our game I always had at least two leads to pursue and frequently more than that, so the players never felt like they were at wit’s end as to what to do next.
I will say that the characters eventually became so elaborately powerful that I had to present elaborate challenges to keep up with them. In our game they picked up five fellowships and everyone advanced six times – four on their initial playbook, then unlocked a Destiny, then I think everyone took one more move on their Destinies – and that was more than enough for them to defeat entire armies and overthrow nations. Not that it was easy, just that it was possible.
So, no, the game can’t last forever. Eventually the Overlord’s cheaty advantages will not stop the characters. And I think that is the truth of Fellowship’s durability: Everyone knows the game will end. It doesn’t have to be the game you return to for years of your life. You can dedicate a few months knowing you will get to the end. You can stick it out a few sessions longer than maybe you would have if you thought it’d just go on and on.
Why Not Forever?
Even after so many sessions, there were elements of the game system that I never quite wrapped my arms around. Overlord Bonds were a big one: every time the Overlord advances, they define a new bond with some outside group (including the Fellowship). There are some narrative privileges that go along with creating bonds with non-Fellowship bodies and I have no idea why those need to be called out, since the GM is expected to provide those kinds of inputs anyway.
There’s also the NPC stat system, which I mostly loved. In play, at a moment’s notice, I could throw down an NPC, or group, or whatever, and decide if it had one to four stats. Since stats are hit points, it’s a nice way to stagger out and structure lengthier confrontations. Personally I’m a huge fan of any system that lets me both improvise and provide some teeth to conflicts. But in this case, the premade opposition (and there are tons of options in Generous Fellowship) always had stats that did things, that had mechanical weight. When I’m just dreaming stuff up in situ, my stats don’t do things. They were just one or two word descriptors. The result was that the opposition was never quite as stout or as interesting as when I just pulled something out of Generous, or pre-built a baddie out of existing stats. But Generous is a big book and it’s hard to find good entries quickly that I could reskin on the spot.
The rules around groups are close to great. When you have three or more individuals, you have a Group. When you have thirty or more you have a Gang. When you have three hundred or more you have an Army. And then there are rules for how you engage with each of those scales. This is terrific for abstracting out big fights, and for breaking fights down into smaller skirmishes over time (if you damage the “army” stat it becomes two gangs, etc.). But also things get a little hazy around the edges as both players and GM start staging up lots of gangs and groups and armies against each other. In our game, the Fellowship had spent most of the campaign slowly gathering assistance from various aggrieved communities, frequently winning followers or going back and begging for help, Battle of Five Armies style. That’s great and very exciting, and ended up with either an Army of mixed forces, or a whole mess of Gang and Group cards sitting on the table. So far so good.
Here’s where things get iffy. Groups engage with two players at once, gangs engage with everyone at once, and armies engage with an entire location at once. Gangs and armies can also only be harmed if you have the area or dangerous tag available. Well, there aren’t a lot of ways to establish tags out of thin air – it’s not a move thing that I ever saw – so there’s the very real possibility that, by the rules, you either Finish Them or nothing happens (because you didn’t have the right tag). There’s also the question of how, say, two gangs interact. Does my gang engage your gang? Do I need a gang to engage with your gang? If I have an army and you have a couple gangs, is everyone still engaged with everyone everywhere? Interactions between these sizes aren’t spelled out very well. We stumbled around more than once trying to line up a Keep Them Busy roll to produce advantage (are enough of us keeping them busy?), or making a Finish Them roll (are enough of us committed to finishing them?).
Beyond these bits, there are design decisions I frankly didn’t understand but also they didn’t interfere. Like, there are some explicit rules about managing “spotlight” in the game. There are some useful tidbits in there, good reminders to make sure the players get time to shine, but the tidbits are presented in a very These Are Rules You Must Follow kind of way. Like how the Overlord can command the spotlight as long as you want: good guideline, let the bad guy chew the scenery, but why is this a rule?
Another example is the breakdown of “story types” told in the course of play. Mini breaks out four stories: downtime (characters just hanging out in a space, one scene each then move on), journey (discussed above, truly one of the game’s killer apps), “a proper challenge” (focus on a goal and how to achieve it), and “the showdown” (when the Overlord, a General, or a Source of Power appears and the rest of the game stops while they deal with the threat). Again, these are all good guidelines for pacing and tone, but presenting them as capital-r Rules feels constraining and weird. Although honestly, looking back, our play more or less fell into this tempo naturally. Our Downtimes may have lasted more than one scene per character and our Proper Challenges might have gotten intermingled with Downtime moments. I know our final Overlord showdown kind of bounced between a formal Showdown and Proper Challenge.
Truth be told, I have nothing but quibbles on any of these points. Absolutely none of them are show-stoppers nor is anything “broken” in any meaningful way. I still have some questions about the text but lord knows we played plenty of sessions despite those questions.
Finally, there are just so darned many pages of information on the table and I frankly cannot imagine refactoring all this into an online character keeper. This is a mechanically sprawling game. Every character gets four pages per playbook, on par with Space Wurm vs Moonicorn and just a heck of a lot to stay on top of. If I had to do it over again, I would print the playbooks one-sided and just give players four sheets of paper. Earn your Destiny and that’s a fifth page to manage. And in our game, adding the Ship playbook added another four pages. Meanwhile the GM has six of their own pages. The ephemera the game creates is pretty overwhelming, particularly for the players who don’t want to be nose-down in their paperwork. And this is before anyone ever has copies of the basic moves (two more pages). It is not a streamlined little tone-poem of a game.
I think folks will find the game either very mechanically integrated, or overmechanized for what we’ve come to expect PbtA games to feel like. Given the very high water mark set by Shattered City and the other Legacy games from UFO Press, I would say Fellowship is well below that threshold. But it’s also not real “loose,” and overlooking inconvenient rules can sometimes lead to unintended consequences.
That said? Spend three or four sessions really leaning into its ins and outs and Fellowship is intensely rewarding. Rather than deciding which rules to overlook, treat them all seriously. Work at including everything every time, and the game’s many subtle economies and cycles come into focus.
Fellowship may not be my Forever Game, but it’s definitely my At Least Once More Game.
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