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.
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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I thought it’d be a nice break from our most recent encyclopedic monstrosity to take a look at four surprisingly compact, recent-ish releases. I haven’t played any of these! These are strictly reviews, not critiques.
Rebel Crown
Available at Itch.io
At a perfect-bound 63 pages, Rebel Crown by Michael Dunn-O’Conner and Eric Swanson is the most compact iteration of a Forged in the Dark style game I’ve ever seen. Formally this was part of ZineQuest 2, even. And what a very nice “zine” they created.
Rebel Crown is even more in the boardgame/rpg liminal space than Band of Blades: you go into the game with the very explicit goal of getting a claimant to the crown on the throne, by any means necessary. The victory conditions to achieve this are explicit and mechanical. The pathway to make it happen, same.
I think, having powered through Band of Blades, I’d have a much better grasp of how to let a game like this breathe. It’s got all the standard FitD trappings: you go on missions to achieve specific goals, you have downtime between those missions, you’re constantly aimed at improving your domain (turf) by. Six regions make up the default setting, each with a slew of interlocking factions and situations (as well as an expansion, Serpent & Oak, that provides two shorter versions of the game), But there’s an explicit endgame in view, too.
Didn’t think you could do a FitD as a pamphlet but I think they did. Much of the compactness comes down to no discussion at all of the six playbooks and other reference documents. It’s a bold move! Hopefully those docs are complete enough that you don’t really need it. I could see future blog posts fleshing them out a bit down the line.
Arcana Academy
Available at Itch.io
I picked up a misprinted hardcopy of this cute PbtA game by Jordan Palmer and boy am I glad I did. Arcana Academy is Hogwarts with the VIN plate removed, featuring students exploring mysteries at magic school. It has a “for kids/families!” vibe to it but, other than the fact that you play children, it’s pretty clear you could stretch the game to handle something more adult, like The Magicians.
Arcana Academy achieves its 80ish-page size by stripping PbtA way, way back. There are no playbooks, for example: Instead, you have three Traits that give you +1 to rolls when you invoke them, and spells (duh) that are like super-Traits that evolve over time but otherwise just position the fiction according to their description: If the spell lets you talk to animals, then that’s what it does (and you’ll get a +1 to manipulate them, just like if it was a Trait). It’s very straightforward and flexible.
To me the more interesting bit of Arcana Academy is its robust system for social relationships to evolve under stress. Your connections can either deepen or fade away, and much of the game is spent on spending Sway to get characters to do things. It’s very social-intensive play, but you’re also only allowed three connections.
Play orbits around mysteries, and there are good guidelines for creating those. The mystery provides all the impetus for characters doing things (although I suspect lots of drama can be had just by dealing with your rivals and friendships), and provides structure to 6- missed rolls. It comes with a default setting, Warwick Academy, in case you don’t want to go through the trouble.
Little Monster Detectives
PDF available at DriveThruRPG (affiliate link)
I backed this for my daughter and her friends. In Little Monster Detectives by Patricia de Blas and Alvaro Corcin, the eponymous detectives — who can be the players, not necessarily invented characters — have to either chase off or help the monsters in their literal home or outside. The GM role is the “senior detective” and you actually play along in their investigation, while also facilitating stuff.
The rulebook, which is full-color, glossy, and absolutely gorgeous, comes in at about 100 pages. It’s mostly laid out like an old-timey newspaper with little notes taped to the pages, coffee-stain rings, all that. It’s quite nice to look at, and my nine-year-old devoured it in a sitting.
The game itself has a clever little “curve on a single die” thing going on: if you’re scared or injured, you take the lowest of three d6es, and if you’ve got an appropriate tool you take the highest, otherwise you take the middle. A 1 is always a miss and a 6 is an epic success, otherwise you’re rolling against a 2/4/6 target number. How have I not seen this dice rolling trick elsewhere? It’s great.
The killer app of the game is the array of props for the kids. Every character gets their own “field notebook” they then mark up with their achievements, or stickers handed out by the senior detective after the investigation. There’s little tokens, a “senior detective screen,” just…lots of bits and bobs.
Their DriveThru page indicates the game was designed with therapeutic goals in mind, that is, kids who are afraid of monsters in their house. Mine isn’t, but she’s going through a “scary/eerie” phase right now so we’ll be playing toward that. I’m not sure the elaborately produced English-language edition is available from Spanish publisher Nosolorol yet.
Cobwebs
Available at Itch.io
Cobwebs is a compact little boxed set from Adam Vass of World Champ Game Company. It’s solidly in storygame territory: three players rotate between three game-function roles to construct an ever-more-implausible story of a conspiracy surrounding a missing person. The rulebook is a tight, small 68 pages (the whole box is like 6” on a side), but the game’s interesting texture is in the nice props: a big cloth map that serves as a drop table for die rolls, a fancy little turn tracking token, tiny chrome skulls that track “threat,” and the rulebook itself, which, honest, it’s nice and grungy and very zine-y.
Cobwebs’ gameplay eyeballs like other games in this category: lots of prompts to put your apophenia to work making sense of random-ish inputs. One interesting bit is that the three players are expected to advocate for their own theories throughout play, pushing and pulling and compromising. I do like the invitation to make the conspiracy wild, too: there are several premade setups to play through, and they range from Ringu-style j-horror to a stuffy manor mystery to time-travel loops. The disappearance angle, in every case, is just the excuse to start exploring and building out the conspiracy that led to it.
The theatrics of the presentation make Cobwebs a totally worthy con game. I’m looking forward to bringing it along for the next time we get to play with strangers in rooms.
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Now that most of my local players are fully vaccinated, we’re slowly dipping our toes back into in-person play. And it is so weird and fraught.
I can’t stop thinking about all the stuff I learned to make roleplaying happen during the pandemic: video play, character keepers, Miro, screen sharing, dice rollers. I’ve developed a ton of skills in the one type of play I swore I was gonna fight tooth and nail. And here I am, a more-than-competent (I think!) online roleplayer. Now I’m thinking about the stuff that’s better online than in-person, and how I might adapt those techniques to in-person play.
Side Chats and Shared Screens
Parallel communication channels are an affordance I didn’t know I’d enjoy. Chat windows, shared Pinterest board, fun tricks with screen-sharing and voice modulation software — all stuff that’ll be effectively impossible to recreate at a table. Online play requires a lot of different kinds of work, and sometimes GMing online feel more like producing a TV show than facilitating an intimate social experience. I like it so much, though, that I’m thinking about whether a cheap flatscreen in my gaming space and a tablet to sync with it would be good, or distracting. No idea, and too expensive to try as an experiment. I could always try with a tablet, I suppose.
I’ve always hated screens at the table, so it’ll be interesting to see how habitual/fidgety players are gonna be with their phones when we can see each other. I won’t be able to sneak a peek at Twitter any more but that’s for the best.
Character Keepers and other Shared Information
If there’s one killer app in online play for me, it’s character keepers: shared character sheets, typically organized and at least partially automated in Google Sheets. I love being able to see most or all of everyone’s mechanical stuff in one place. Besides character sheets, you can also list all of a game’s moves, or equipment lists, a tab of NPCs with pictures, playbooks…the sky’s the limit and folks are constantly expanding on the concept. I’ve talked about character keepers here before. Tough to replicate at a table without introducing a tablet or laptop to the table, and that’s not a vibe I’m eager to bring.
In a shallow way, character keepers serve a similar function to name tents at a table. For at least some of my online players, keepers have been a bit overwhelming for them and they’d rather just focus on their own stuff. I’ll experiment with larger name tents, I think, where we can all see more stuff I want everyone to be aware of at the table. You can only fit so much on an index card! And everyone’s eyes are getting older. Maybe a GM screen type thing but in reverse, with everyone’s stuff aimed outward at me (and their totally not cheaty rolls hidden from my view).
I used to always do up a short cheat sheet of any new game I was about to run, as a way to learn and solidify the system. Creating a character keeper serves a similar function in my brain, with the added challenge of information design: should I put the “important” stuff higher, and what’s “important” anyway? How do I group related details? What elements can I leave off the keeper? What can I automate and how does the math actually work? Can I pretty it up without making it distracting?
Another tool I’ve enjoyed is using Miro to manage my relationship maps in real time. I don’t use a template, just a blank screen, but the fact the software reroutes connecting lines and allows you to label those lines? Pretty great. If I were more facile with my iPad + Pencil setup, I could do some very neat theatrics with in-person relationship mapping on the tablet. Since theatrics are, in my opinion, more than half the point of the r-map this is probably an area worth practicing.
What I think I’ll miss is building new Pinterest boards for quick screen-sharing purposes. No reason I couldn’t put that on a tablet, and I’ve met several players at conventions who keep big pin boards full of character art. But every time I put more stuff on a screen, that’s more screen time at the table. My intuition says that’s Bad, Actually but that might not be true. Another experiment I suppose.
Convenience and Shorter Sessions
Zoom can be hard on your brain, eyes, and body. My normal in-person tempo has always been 4-hour sessions, which is easy to break up as folks get antsy or uncomfortable, need to pee, refresh drinks, all that. But there’s that focused thing that happens when you’re on screen, and four hours feels interminable. I settled on 3-ish hour sessions, and honestly they felt great. It also was a little easier to meta-prep enough stuff for three hours of focused play.
Shorter sessions, combined with no commute time, is gonna be hard to give up. I really liked being able to just turn everything off, brush my teeth, and go to bed. Very nice. Gonna have to see if my new 3-hour tempo sticks.
The other thing about the convenience of online play is that it was so easy to pull together games from the whole wide world of players. Heck, I even ran an online con for my Slack folks, and got to meet a ton of folks I would not have been able to, probably even if cons were still live.
Unlearning Hypervigilance
Live long enough and hopefully you learn that every positive character trait can also be negative. One of the things I’m “best” at is table management: I’m very sensitive to engagement, energy level, reactions to input. I’m a pleaser. I give until it hurts. And sometimes it does! Lord knows, I have frequently brought games to a close (probably) too soon because I took the temperature of the table and found it tepid.
Turns out that’s been a mistake.
My home group played several games during our lockdown: The Nightmares Underneath (our learning game, wrong choice for our group before we knew how to play online), Imp of the Perverse, Shattered City, and Vaesen. Shattered City lasted a ton of sessions, much longer than I expected — I wrote a big wrapup deep-dive of it, made possible only because we stuck it out for so long. I’m certain that playing Shattered City online, and maintaining the vast trove of documentation that comes with it, is why it lasted as long as it did.
The flipside is that I’m hypervigilant in person. The screen makes it so I can’t quite pick up the cues I normally would. As a result, I mother-hen everyone less than I would in person. Real talk though? Reducing my hypervigilance is a change I need to bring to the table. I need to learn to ignore non-urgent cues that might normally derail the game. Tough balance to reach. Safety awareness needs to stay, panicking when someone rolls their eyes at my cheesy description needs to go.
Another factor I’ve seen is that the players are less engaged, which is good when play gets contentious. I’ve seen many moments in play where something that might have triggered an in-person argument just fizzles out because negative vibes don’t transmit through a camera. The downside of course is that it’s been really hard for my players to engage with each other the way they will at a table. It often feels like most interactions are GM-to-player, because player-to-player is hard to signal. Players actually talking and signaling to each other is going to be nice to return to.
Still A Long Way To Go
As of May 2021, our local, specific pandemic situation is pretty good, not great: 30-some percent full immunizations, 5.5% positivity in our county this week and creeping back to “high.” At one point not too long ago, my county had the highest rate of infection in the world.
Not everyone in my group is immunized yet. Combined with differing personal values and health situations, there’s some weirdness around who gets included and excluded, who attends and whose attendance forces awkward choices. I’m not browbeating anyone, but even that lack of browbeating is weird! It’s weird all the way down.
On the technical side, having to learn my way around online play has made me acutely aware of focusing my techniques for in-person play. Building and testing a character keeper is a lot more work than typing up a cheat sheet, so that taught me to be more mindful about what players actually need in terms of documentation and information sharing. Managing real-time changes to relationship maps is super fun and flashy, but it’s also resulted in losing track of old relationships and situations, something paper is naturally better for. Online shared dice rollers are fun but I also learned you should just trust folks to report their own rolls. Mostly, here a year-and-some into my online play, I’ve learned to pare back as much as possible, and that paring differs by game and by players.
On the emotional side, I’ve learned I miss in-person conventions much more than I thought I would. Those are still a long ways off. Maybe 2022? Hopefully? I read recently that we’re probably not going to get to herd immunity in the US, and we’ll just end up with a manageable cold/flu/COVID season and boosters. It doesn’t have to be that way though. I hope more folks will take their responsibilities as seriously as their rights.
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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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I have read your deep dive with strong mixed feelings over a long time. I was the lead designer of the game until Jay/Mina abruptly took over my manuscript and forced untested changes that nearly broke the game, as you reviewed. And I can prove it. It was a lawful act from her, but highly unethical and ultimately clumsy.
Shattered City was a huge effort from my part, and I think you would have enjoyed the original version much more.
Oh my gosh, I would love to have seen it. I hope you put something of your own out! We really loved what we got despite the wrinkles.