Sometimes I find myself in the mood to peruse a lore*-heavy game rather than work my way through a book-book. Ugh, fiction/non-fiction, so much work! I want a short, easy imaginative jaunt just long enough for a bathroom break. Or I’m between campaigns and I’m hoping for inspiration.
(*Lore for the purposes of what I’m going to talk about is all the fictional context of the game: locations, political and cultural groups, personalities, social trends, history, current pressures. I wrote a longer thing a while back about how to transform this sort of material with an eye toward story and not just facts.)
Not all lore-heavy games present their information the same way, or demand the same level of fidelity or commitment from the players. Due to my current interests and buying habits, I’m realizing they don’t make lore-heavy games like they used to. Specifically, lore today serves a different, more practical and focused function than ‘90s-era lore dumps. Once upon a time, I would just love to browse a setting+system+world and imagine the platonic play-ideal I could get if only the players knew everything as deeply as I did. Of course it never really happened. I think I was wishing for something bigger than that, more a shared faith or culture.
That’s not where games are at now. Recent examples: I cracked open Haunted West and boy is there a lot of setting, but mostly it’s real-world history lessons with a sprinkling of cryptids and weird west stuff. I can’t browse Haunted West because I can’t find any context to grab onto. Same with Coyote and Crow, which is nearly as huge. I’ve read Crow cover to cover and I still can’t figure out what society looks like beyond a futuristic utopia, or what thematic distinctiveness I might bring to a session of play. The game text offers a lot of history that highlights how the setting is different from our own, some notes about technology, but beyond that I just can’t find the context that would give me something to grab onto.
Suldokar’s Wake is an OSR-adjacent attempt at hitting the old style of lore-intensive play and it’s as good an attempt as I’ve seen in any game of the past 20 years: originally published as four zines, the third issue was dedicated to fleshing out all the most important parts of the game’s canonical setting, while making all of it game-relevant and tying it into its (very weird and bespoke) character options.
Modern indie games more often emphasize shortening the on-ramp to play as much as possible. It’s a laudable goal, and practical given the thesis that RPGs compete for our attention in a very crowded arena – why commit to weeks of reading when you could just boot up Elden Ring and have weird lore fed to you through play? But there have been trade-offs. I refute the hardest-edged indie rhetoric that says nobody has time for lore, and none of it matters if you don’t use it at the table. Similar to but different than the (much quicker) mood-board prep method, agreeing to defer to an outside body of lore is another sort of social ritual. I 100% guarantee making the effort to learn and internalize a game’s canon matters at the table – not better or worse, but different.
Six or twenty sessions of collaborative setting-making is a different way to engage with shared lore. It’s great, I love it (we recently wrapped up 20 sessions of Fellowship, which is all about collaborative lore creation), but it’s also a different experience than everyone deferring to a third party.
The lore I most often come in contact with in modern indie games fits broadly in three categories. They each have tradeoffs and strengths.
Lore as IKEA instructions: functional, minimalist, gets the job done as efficiently as possible. Blades in the Dark is the ideal example of this in my mind, as are most indie games that lean hard on players filling in the gaps (i.e. “play some Dishonored and watch Peaky Blinders”). It’s not “fun” to read, but this approach is eminently practical at the table. There’s a similar approach across the entire Forged in the Dark family: vibes guidance, and lots of quick setting bits explaining faction or setting features.
Another example that pops to mind is Electric Bastionland, which you can sort of browse in the beginning but mostly delivers its “lore” (such as it is) by whatever classes appear in your game. Shattered City did a great job of feeding a very weird setting to the players via playbook and faction choices. And Mutant: Year Zero and its follow-on games all feed the setting to you via their baked-in campaigns, which is great while you’re playing the campaign.
Lore as an IKEA catalog: Evocative, lots of context, an invitation to imagine yourself in the space. This is old-school heavy lore like you’d read in the first edition of Exalted or Shadowrun. Indie gaming has mostly left this approach behind – and boy do I miss it! It’s impractical at the table, demands a lot of time to go through (probably just the GM, as is typical for these games from that era), and requires critical reading/thinking skills to turn into useful material.
Now, of course there are endless piles of lore-heavy RPGs coming out all the time. They are, almost without exception, very trad offerings. Fragged Empire, Trudvang Chronicles, and Symbaroum all come to mind as recent-ish examples. All games I love to browse through sitting on the pot, and none of them will get played here. Eclipse Phase, Coriolis, Lancer and the new 2d20 Dune all have catalog-like browsing qualities to them as well (the latter having probably the most concise lore dump of an otherwise shockingly lore-intensive setting I’ve seen in a while).
And let’s not forget the Monte Cook Cinematic Universe, starting with the chonkiest boi of the batch, Invisible Sun. I still really enjoy browsing (and, sigh, buying) the game’s stuff, tons of context and interconnected ideas. MCG is probably the most committed to the form and succeeding at it.
Other examples include lush art spreads like you see in Coriolis, the deep-dive regional breakdowns in expansions for The One Ring, and evocative maps anywhere and everywhere. Of course what counts as “evocative” is up for debate! For my purposes, I found the district map of Satyrine from Invisible Sun (and all that accompanying art) far more evocative than the precise, facts-only hex maps of Glorantha’s Argan Argar Atlas.
Lore as IKEA warehouse kiosk: comprehensive, contexteless, pure reference. The canonical example in my own mind is The Guide to Glorantha. If I need to look something up it’s terrific, but you don’t browse the kiosk unless, like, you need to look at every bookshelf in the warehouse side by side. Gun and vehicle porn pages like you see in Cyberpunk RED and Twilight: 2000 are here as well. While some folks might get a tickle in their tummy looking over pages of guns (yikes, seek help) there’s no fictional context there to work with.
This is not a form that really sees much use any more. I tend to think of much older games with vast, established settings requiring this treatment: Traveller, Harn, Skyrealms of Jorune. More recent examples include the creature list in Tales of Xadia, the wonderfully detailed timeline in Modiphius’ treatment of Dune, and the third book in Unknown Armies 3E: just a list of stuff, without broader context.
To be clear, this is not a comprehensive breakdown. There are so many ways to present a setting, premise, or holding environment. But I feel like this catches a lot of broad approaches – and the main point is, it’s all about IKEA, either what’s in the warehouse (the game content), what you’re thinking about getting from the warehouse (your campaign planning) or what you brought home (actual play at your table). And I think we’ve given something up by eschewing the heavier formats. Funny thing about official lore, though: as much as anyone says these games are our own, it’s often (socially, practically) hard to treat big lore as optional. Imagine an official Apocalypse World setting book, with absolutely no changes to the game system.
You know what kind of real-world lore treatment I’ve never seen in gaming? Coffee table book guidebooks that came out in the ‘80s and ‘90s for many of the biggest genre series. They must have been wildly expensive to create, but just imagine a game world equivalent to the Atlas of Pern, or the more recent Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern. Lush illustrations, detailed maps, slices of life from the setting, an excuse to just lose yourself in the fictional world.
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I have the Suldokar’s Wake books on my shelf and enjoyed reading them. I bought them, well was given one of them as a present, because Whitehack is my go to game. I haven’t run a game though, or played in one; it seems a pretty daunting system to start using. Have you played it?
I’ve been struggling with how to make it accessible and fun for my players. Feels like the inaccessibility is maybe on purpose! But no, not yet.
‘Eow’ for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 76. For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection. For monthly links, look at The Glatizant.
We played four sessions of Tales of Xadia over the past couple months. Tales is the first complete and self-contained game to come out of Cortex Prime, the third generation of the Cortex ruleset by Cam Banks. My personal experience with long-form Cortex play was a rough start with Serenity way back in the day, and Firefly when Cortex came back out in revised form. I’ve played a bunch of Cortex stuff through the years as one offs – Marvel Heroic, Smallville, Leverage – but Tales was my first hands-on experience with Prime.
I’m not a close follower of Cortex games. Not sure why not! I like Cortex better than any edition of Fate, probably its closest relative. It handles PvP conflicts quite well, always a good thing because so much good tension can emerge between conflicting PCs. And the little dice game you play as you work out rolls is genuinely a fun time.
I think my hesitation is because everything that comes out for Cortex is attached to an existing license: Firefly and Marvel and Smallville and Leverage! Turns out I’m frequently allergic to license-based games. (Timely: check out Jahmal Brown’s Kickstarter for Lifted, a Cortex-based supers game completely detached from a licensed setting!)
Not that I won’t play them. We ran Modiphius’ 2d20 Dune and liked it okay (it cribbed ideas from Cortex but left out its economy, so Dune ultimately fell flat for us). I’ve played a ton of Mouse Guard and Burning Empires, although you wouldn’t be blamed for not thinking of those as licenses (they’re both based on obscure-ish comics). But given the choice, I almost always pick games that aren’t based on existing properties.
Tales of Xadia is based on The Dragon Prince, an animated series on Netflix. It’s good! I like The Dragon Prince, but I haven’t consumed every scrap of lore or really spent any time imagining what play might be like in Xadia, the show’s setting. But the show is well executed, has lots of Avatar: the Last Airbender vibes, great inter-character tensions and a visually appealing setting.
Cortex 101
Every Cortex game consists of a subset of rules from the Cortex toolbox, all of which work with any other part. As a toolbox, Cortex is smart as hell and firmly in trindie territory. Most of the rulesets don’t bother with modeling physics (a la Hero or, to a lesser degree, GURPS), but rather model thematic ideas and how they interact. If you already think about games this way, Cortex is awfully fun to fiddle with. But if you need your game to be a physics model, you’re going to be disappointed.
The Cortex transaction is straightforward: you build a pool of dice out of your various character bits, roll and add together the best two. Or the two dice that beat the other side’s best roll (usually either the GM rolls a pair of dice sized to represent the difficulty of a task, or another player starts shit and they roll to set the starting difficulty of a longer contest). Then there are some tricks you can do with plot points to buy more dice, or more effects. Big margins of success get you some game effects, and the biggest die size of the dice you didn’t use to succeed at a task becomes an “effect die” that may let you do stuff as well. It’s modestly elaborate, with several levers you can pull each time you roll (plot point spends, special abilities that trigger, and so on).
As a game-game, Cortex’s dice and point manipulation is fun even though all that manipulation doesn’t “look” like anything in the fiction as you do it. It’s the internal player feeling of pushing their luck and weighing their options, combined with how the fiction shakes out after the roll, that makes the game engaging.
A Closer Look at Tales of Xadia
System-wise, the Cortex ingredients in Tales are:
Attributes: a typical traddy spread of character descriptions, like agility and awareness.Values: five different ethical categories you use in combination with Attributes. You have to decide what’s motivating your character for any given role, possibly guided by or contradicting a “value statement” that each Value has. You can also stake out goals you want to achieve, constrained by your Values – low-ranked Values limit how “important” a goal you can set attached to it, prompting you to take bigger goals for your higher-ranked Values. I dig this bit quite a lot.Distinctions and SFX: stuff that models your upbringing and vocation. “SFX” in Cortex-speak are neat little rule exceptions or dice tricks.Assets: something or someone that helps you in the moment. This is also where spells show up, although the way they’re treated in the game is super open-ended.Specializations: three “skills,” more or less, more narrowly defined than your vocation distinction.Stress Tracks: there are five hit point tracks (more or less) that give your opposition dice to roll, and can evolve into Trauma, a permanent(ish) source of Stress dice. The characters are wreathed in a ton of plot immunity mostly via the Stress/Trauma system.
There are some interesting bits missing from what experienced Cortex folks might think of as core, as well as a couple original inventions that don’t appear in the Cortex Game Handbook (the overarching source document from which all Cortex Prime games are based).
The most notable missing bit is Complications: normally when the players roll 1s, the GM gives them Plot Points (PPs) and introduces a new play factor, with a die rank attached to it and the possibility that clever players might turn those complications back against the GM. This is also how you might model an injury: broken leg (d10) means every time your broken leg might impact your ability to do something, the GM gets to roll another d10 in their pool.
That doesn’t happen in Tales of Xadia. Generally the only mechanical result of conflicts in Tales comes in the form of Stress: the character is now afraid, or corrupted by dark magic, or, yes, injured. I think it plays out mechanically similarly but it keeps outcomes focused on a narrow range of characters’ internal states. External complications might show up in the course of a Challenge, though, in which some very large goal “hits back” against a PC when it’s the goal’s turn.
The big innovation over the basic Cortex Prime toolbox is Catalysts, ie boss-type NPCs that are important to the scenario. There are some interesting emergent properties of the Catalyst rules. Most notably, there are always at least two Catalysts, typically headed toward, or in, conflict with each other but neutral to the PCs. This aims scenario design toward the PCs being interlopers into other folks’ problems in the course of their travels, interacting with one Catalyst or the other to work out their problems, or bring the Catalyst(s) more in line with what the PCs need. The game focuses heavily on social interactions because of the requirement that “Tales” (ie scenarios) have these characters.
What Do You Doooo?
There’s a lot to like about how Tales of Xadia plays out, but the setting left me cold. For one, there is no premise to the game other than “having adventures in Xadia.” It’s very much A Fantasy Game™ in that regard, quite generic despite all the nice art they use from the show. I had a hard time dredging up the setting’s essential tensions and themes: humans and elves distrust each other, human society relies on the deeply unpleasant consequences of
capitalismDark Magic, there’s a dangerous borderland separating the human and elf halves of the continent, and there are five human kingdoms that mostly get along with each other except when they don’t.There’s a lot of material in Tales that I had no idea how to use: lengthy chapters about the dragons of the show, lists of magical creatures, little rumors attached to each of the elven tribes and human kingdoms, and a weirdly comprehensive discussion of the game’s metaphysics that have literally no bearing at all on how the game plays out. But no guidance as to what a typical scenario might entail beyond the sample scenario in the book, or what themes the game is designed to hit (other than dealing with other folks’ problems in the course of your travels). It was a good IKEA catalog of material, but incomplete instructions.
In our game, we contrived reasons for three disconnected characters (a hard-bitten Katolian explorer, a Durenian farmboy with a Dark Magic gift, and a homesick elven mage) to be searching for the lost ruins of Elarion, birthplace of humanity and the origin of Dark Magic, hidden somewhere in The Border. Pretty straightforward quest-type stuff, complicated by two Catalysts with very different plans of their own for Elarion. Every session was fun, the showdown at Elarion was pretty good (and a bit frustrating: the game doesn’t handle PC team-vs-boss conflicts very well), and after we were done I just didn’t feel inspired to cook up more reasons for these three characters to continue their journeys.
I was left with the feeling that “be a huge fan of The Dragon Prince” is the expected prep. Despite having watched the available seasons some time ago, I’m not a huge fan of the show and don’t feel inspired by the setting when it’s not centered on the show’s plot. Xadia as a playable setting faces the same challenges of character-driven IPs like Star Wars (ep IV era): if you’re not Luke, what’s motivating you? Star Wars now has literally thousands of hours and millions of words that answer this question, and Xadia doesn’t.
Deciding to play a bunch of humans simplifies the question, because now the elves can be outsider opposition and kingdom politics become more straightforward. And vice versa. What the game invites you to do, because look at these marvelous rules, is to mix it up with human and elf characters together, as of course we did. But to do that you need a real strong premise. The TV show provides one. Tales of Xadia does not.
Next up for me is digging deeper into Magpie’s treatment of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra in their PbtA game Avatar Legends. At first glance it looks more flexible and more tightly constructed around the practicalities of answering the oldest and arguably only question in RPGs: “what do you doooo?”
Playing With Canon
So how do you make the most of games that are set in pre-existing settings or properties? Depends on the game of course. Some properties are just better suited to open-ended invention and play: Star Wars is a billion-dollar industry now built around open-ended(ish) invention, and the setting is purposefully designed with lots of affordances and more canonical material than any human could consume in a lifetime. Dune is trickier, but I think Modiphius did a sharp job of creating a game where the machinations of your made-up House are always going to be interesting, despite the galaxy-spanning implications of a weirdo Space Messiah.
Some settings, I think, come with clearer baked-in story premises than others. Dune is about political ambition and space feudalism (although it really should be more about anti-colonialism in this day and age: I would play a “Fremen wreck the Empire’s shit, a theme and variations” game all day and night). Star Wars isn’t really “about” much other than the ever-present threat to personal freedom from fascists and the perpetual fallout of that (robust black markets cropping up in the face of oppression, leading crime both organized and freelance to thrive, bam, now you’re playing Edge of the Empire).
Some properties are defined by their premise, and not canonical setting material. The Terminator, for example, has an open-ended premise and not much setting: if the future wants you dead, can you fight back and make something better? Really the only “setting” in The Terminator is the ever-present threat of a malevolent AI arising in the future and inevitably deciding to rid itself of humanity. The Marvel games I’ve played reward, but don’t demand, deep fidelity to established canon – and happily, comics are notorious for tossing canon out the window at regular intervals via multiverses or relaunches or whatever. The only canon is that you have license to toss out the canon.
And of course there’s Call of Cthulhu, the most globally successful property-based game of all time, and it’s a mix of premise (what if the universe just didn’t care, and was inhabited by incomprehensible beings that humans are stupid enough to think they can bargain with?) and setting (ie the various critters and gods and whatnot). There’s a little physical setting as well, stuff like the Dreamlands and the weird alien complex buried in Antarctica. But it’s the compelling premise that keeps the Mythos games rolling, more than yet one more game of battling the Mi-Go or whatever.
Many settings (like Xadia) rely on the enthusiasm of its fandom to find its way: if you’re not a G.I. Joe fan, what is a session of the new G.I. Joe RPG “like?” What’s the premise beyond beating on Cobra baddies? Maybe that’s enough, the attraction of creating and recreating familiar thrills. Is there enough hook to A Song of Ice and Fire to make it something other than A Grimdark Fantasy Game if you’re not super into the books/show? Is the Peacekeeper government and mix of wacky muppet-alien species enough to make a Farscape game go? I’m a fan of the last couple, and even then I’m not sure I’d be eager to just keep reiterating the things I already love about them. High-fiving each other through familiar territory feels like a squandered opportunity to invent something new and personal.
Given a rich canonical setting or a gripping canonical premise, I’ll take the premise every time. But not all games are for everyone. Is it unfair to expect that a license-based game appeal to non-fans of the license? Oh totally. But I would also propose that any game needs to provide clear guidance and procedures for what you’re about to spend hours playing. Or trying to.
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There’s an adage about innovation I think about sometimes:
Doing an old thing in an old way means you’re competing with the established order. Doing a new thing in a new way, phew, good luck with that! True visionaries sometimes pull it off.
There’s a kind of game I adore but also confounds and frustrates me when I read it. They’re new things being done in new ways. Given how the indie scene worships at the altar of novelty, it’s a surprise how rare this actually is.
I’ll read a pitch and the first thing I’ll think is “what the heck?” And then I’ll read up on the details, the setting or the premise or whatever, and it’ll escalate to “what on Earth?!” Finally I get into the meat of the thing, the place where the rules, premise and setting come together, and I’ll be fully in WTF territory. I love it.
I love when a designer has to say “okay but hear me out” about their work. If it’s too unfamiliar, I feel alienated and bounce off it. There still needs to be an invitation, something accessible about what I’m reading. Then, sure, I’ll hear them out. Eagerly. New but not too new.
Runequest’s Glorantha is the gold standard of this sort of personal passion project. Deeply weird, very specific. You could play standard fantasy adventures with Runequest (among the first alternatives to D&D), but if you were doing things in Glorantha it was its own world.
Hear Me Out games are still coming out, of course. There’s a whole lot more of everything, though, so they seem less common. This train of thought came to me after reading Wythe Marschall’s Stillfleet recently, which I’ll talk about more in a bit. After gnawing on how to describe these kinds of games, I landed on:
The settings are typically big, ambitious but also not “like” anything else. They’re an anti-kitchen sink. You just can’t easily use the setting to tell another kind of story or to play another game. Media touchpoints aren’t central to the pitch.
The premise is something divergent from “doing adventurer things.” Or if it is about being an adventurer, the reason is rooted in something specific. There’s some underlying reason or theme behind why characters take action in the world.
The system specifically supports the premise and is firmly embedded in the setting. It doesn’t need to be unique, although they often are. Uniqueness is a personal judgment anyway – I’ve seen a lot of games in my time, and there’s very little new under the sun. I’m thinking more about specificity. Systems, like settings, where you couldn’t easily reuse them for something else.
Here’s a sampling of this kind of game from my shelves. They’re challenging, personal, and utterly unique. None of these qualities mean they’re good! You might not want to be challenged, or lack a playgroup ready to take them on. Their personal vision might not jibe with yours for some reason, aesthetics or politics or whatever. Novelty, I think, is overvalorized anyway. The most successful of these games are accessible, and the most critically “good” ones are the most distinctive. If you get both you’ve got a winner. The following are all winners in my book.
Stillfleet
Available in PDF from DriveThru
Or back their current Kickstarter and get the hardback! It is gorgeous.
The setting
It is one hundred million years in the future. Twenty years ago a cosmic event closed off your vast alien space station community from a sprawling interstellar empire (that sprawls atop other long-passed interstellar empires, thousands of years upon thousands of years back in time to today). Now the cosmic event is over and you’re free to travel. But nobody uses spaceships or warp drives or any of that. Instead, you use a variety of wormholes to get from here to there.
If the setting “feels like” anything, Stillfleet is somewhere in the zip code of Farscape, Lexx and Red Dwarf. Technology can do whatever it needs to and be justified, aliens can look and act like anything at all, and the text throughout feels breathless and under-explained like episodes of those shows.
The canonical setting is the various worlds that are suddenly accessible again. But the real setting material is time itself, the hundred million years of history and all the overlapping technologies and cultures you can justify with it. There’s also a component of the future coming back to mess with the game’s present day. It makes literally any technobabble thing possible. The technobabble stuff is structured around five broad technical styles, and within those styles there’s a grade of how intense or specialized something is, from common consumer goods to highly experimental military tech. I thought it was a great way to quickly eyeball how to rank the stuff you invent, or invent stuff by getting inspired by what might be possible.
4 out of 5 WTFs – the book does a terrific job of pushing and structuring how culturally, technologically, and ideologically strange the universe could be in 100 million years.
The premise
You work for a spacefaring corporation modeled on the Dutch Indian Trading Company. They are all about excavating that hundred million years of history for profit. The Co., as it’s called in the text, is venal, greedy, and short-sighted. So on the surface it looks like you “go on adventures,” yes. To start, you either go dredge up valuable things out of hulks (the still fleet of ships from a bygone era that can’t fly anywhere anymore and just hang in the skies) and rocks (colonies and homeworlds of a thousand species, with Terra itself the crown jewel). So really the game is about how to live with yourself working for the fuckin’ greedy Space Dutch one hundred million years in an incomprehensible alien future.
There’s some good guidance for how to set up a “venture,” that is, an assignment from the Co. There’s a whole ritual of meeting with a refactor from the Co., who goes over the job requirements and whatever they think you’ll need to succeed. This is of course never enough, either incomplete, outdated or misleading information. So you pump your refactor for the real information, which you might get or not. And then you gear up and go do the thing, jumping through a wormhole off to who-knows-where.
It reads to me like the game relies not on the ventures being the most interesting bit of the game, but on receiving bad/conflicting orders from unreliable employers who don’t value your life. Eventually you may find yourself working for alien gangsters, tech-priests from the deep future, immortal superbeings from a fallen civilization, or a highly secretive competing Co. that probably is just as scummy as your Co. but in different and interesting ways. But in all cases, you ask the question: should I even be doing this job?
2 out of 5 WTFs – fairly straightforward adventuring to start, and unreliable bosses are familiar territory. The Co. is productively dysfunctional, with plenty of internal conflicts of interest to aggravate the characters.
The system
The interesting bit of the system isn’t in its resolution. It’s a pretty straightforward pass/fail thing, a die size versus a target number, where you can boost your roll by spending Grit. The real game is Grit management, which is how you power almost everything you’ll do. You’ll need to spend it carefully, earn as much as possible via advancement (a very simple “gain a level after every venture” system, marvelous, go play 20 times and max yourself out), and dig around for other ways to generate, protect, and enhance your Grit. It’s Grit all the way down.
There are a bunch of Co.-specific character classes plus a few types of employees the Co. finds useful but won’t hire many of. So a party of, say, five characters might have three or four standard jobs – rangers, scholars, that sort of thing – and one or two (at most) “weirdo partycrashers,” as they’re called in the text. And then there are, gosh, many many alien species you could be (humans are central, still, one million years in the future for reasons that may or may not be revealed in the text).
Now let’s talk about the Advanced Powers.
This is, I think, the heart of the game. There are five lists of 20 powers arranged by function or theme: communications, physics, and so on. Then there’s the Hell Sciences, which is just hypertech magic. There are six lists with 20 powers each. What is that, 120 total powers to pick from? It’s bonkers, but it’s also very well structured. If I had to name a successor to the storied, troubled legacy of Palladium’s Rifts, it’d be Stillfleet.
Every Advanced Power has its own rules and the occasional mini-game. Each one is very much like a Move in a PbtA game (with at least one plagiarized directly out of Apocalypse World, unfortunately). I think you’d either need a table of players eager to roll up their sleeves and figure out awesome “builds,” or be willing to be given whatever weirdo power the GM thought they ought to get next, or rely on the app to randomly generate characters and run whutcha brung. Advancement is pretty quick, so everyone will end up with a strange, wacky package of stuff that may or may not be embedded in a session’s fictional outcomes but are very much embedded in the strange, wacky setting itself.
3 out of 5 WTFs – you have got to see some of the game-breakingly wild stuff on offer as you advance characters, uncover tech, discover alien races and worlds.
The Wildsea
Get it on Itch.io
Or back the current Kickstarter and get the hardback! Also gorgeous.
The setting
Three hundred years after an eco-cataclysm has engulfed the world in poisonous living matter – trees, grasses, vines, slimes I suppose – sailors set out upon a sea of fast-growing, ever-changing plants. Humans are still a major species, but there are others now and they’re super weird: cactus-people, fungus-people, a hive mind of tiny spiders that dress themselves in clothes (or skin). There are others and they’re super weird too. The theme throughout the text is “look at how darned weird everything is! So weird!”
Besides the eco-punk aesthetics of the setting and characters, there’s a mystical through-line of spirits, restless ghosts, maybe even gods – or at least worship of the leviathan creatures (?) that lurk under the canopy. There’s a playable species of spirit-animated old world junk assemblies, for example. And there’s a technomagical concept called “arconautics,” capturing and employing weird stuff via familiars, alchemy, even incorporating it into your own body. This is all very colorful but also primarily expressed via fictional positioning: there aren’t any arconautical skills or abilities, you just say that’s how you’re doing things. There are weirdness-compatible classes (“posts”) that include sidebars about how to make them more arconautical in the fiction.
Interestingly, there are whole categories the designer has called out as optional and ignorable: spiritual, magical, and technological topics are called out and can just be straight-up disregarded! This points, to me, to the places where the setting vision is core and the game-able add-ons that aren’t.
Throughout the book, The Wildsea is self-conscious about its weirdness: strictly a stylistic observation and not a ding. The production and presentation reminds me of big ambitious ‘90s-era games that set out to Create A Transmedia Property: Deadlands, Vampire, Crimson Skies, and so on. The art and layout is absolutely top-notch, vibrant, clear, energetic. Great character portraits, great chapter openers that set the tone and style.
4 out of 5 WTFs, by virtue of having very few media touchpoints. Like, the cactus-people feel like a callback to China Mieville’s Bas-Lag books, but that’s obscure-ish and, ew, novels.
The premise
Gameplay is centered on being the wildsailor crew of a ship plying the wildsea. You pick a goal or focus for your crew (exploration, salvage, trading etc.), build a ship to support it, and head off having adventures. Society is broken up into settlements of varying size, either tiny outposts on the tips of mountains poking out of the plant life, or groups of rafts slung together anchored to some bit of old world detritus that might be stable, or even bigger cities build on, around and under mega-trees that dwarf the rest of the canopy. But the main point here is that there aren’t nations, not really. Just lots of small places to visit.
This is the most conventional bit of the game, adventurers going on adventures in a setting devoid of broader political or cultural conflict. 1 out of 5 WTFs.
The system
This is where The Wildsea is the most interesting to me: it’s heavily inspired by Forged in the Dark, where 6s mean success, 4s and 5s are mixed successes, and 3s and less are misses. He’s stripped out the position/effect infrastructure for the most part, or just handed that over to the GM to make calls ex post facto. Honestly I wish it was a cleaner FitD implementation, personally, because I think it does what it does well.
The standout resolution bit for me is how the game treats aspects – that is, traits, gear and companions, each one with a sentence or two of rules. So many rules! You get them from your bloodline (species), origin (upbringing or history) and post (job or class). These things each get tracks, typically two to five boxes long, and this is how you track your character’s damage. Fill up a track, and that aspect can’t be called on. You can also develop those aspects by changing their rules by shrinking or growing their track. Looking forward to seeing this advancement and evolution scheme in action.
There are other interesting gestures in the rules: gathering and then risking resources to gain advantage on rolls, mires that represent emotional harm you’re susceptible to, drives that let you clear mire, gain resources, or advance in small and big ways, milestones you work toward to make substantial changes to your character. Lots and lots of little tweaks that add up to a heavily drifted FitD game. But drifted FitD is not the only, or even most important, innovation in this game.
Structurally it looks like the game borrows a lot from The One Ring: there are scenes, montages and journeys, and they all follow different rules. Scenes are about exploration, combat or interaction. Montages are sort of downtime-ish, a way to gloss over narratively broad ideas without having to hit any particular beats or dialogue – a way to take on larger tasks and projects. Journeying across the wildsea is its own minigame, with a preparation bit, encounters along the way, and your eventual arrival. Everyone has a role on the ship (helm, watch, engine and so on), and they all have moves and rules. Journeys are where you get to use most of the neat ship rules you worked out in/after character creation.
All this stuff, really, is how I run games anyway. I felt the same way about The One Ring! But it’s still nice to see laid bare like this.
2 out of 5 WTFs for its heady mix of bits and bobs we’ve seen in other places, all under one cover and drenched in weird aesthetics. But I’m most curious to see if it all comes together as playable and interesting, and what emerges from this particular set of parts.
The Clay That Woke
Get the book and a free download of the token art (you’ll have to DIY them) directly from Half Meme Press
The setting
Paul Czege’s game about minotaurs in a weird-fantasy setting is maybe the most WTF of them all. There’s a lot here, despite the book being a slender volume (particularly compared to the first couple mentioned). Buckle up.
There are two settings for this game. The first is the Dégringolade, an ancient city, the remains of a metropolis of a lost civilization. There are bits and bobs of details but hardly any canon at all; it’s really vibes guidance, to create your own Dégringolade. Huge statues, arenas, temples, enormous trees towering over everything, every location and tradition described in terms of the millennia they have existed. Hints of strange almost-familiar creatures. But this isn’t the kind of game where stats and facts are the most important thing.
The second location is the Jungle, which is literally everything outside the Dégringolade and encroaches into the city at every weak point in its walls. It’s real bad for humans, but it’s energizing and restorative to minotaurs.
And where did the minotaurs come from? Four infant minotaurs were pulled from the mud of a river and all the minotaurs – a vast, male-only slave underclass today – are their descendents. How? Who knows! It’s not important.
3 out of 5 WTFs for deeply weird vibes but not a lot of detail. The book isn’t conventionally structured with a “setting” chapter and a “gear” section and so on, rather it’s a stream of consciousness as you move from setting overview to fictional interlude to character material to actual rules. I came away from my reading, years ago now, filled with a blur of impressionistic material.
The premise
Everyone plays a minotaur. All minotaurs share some characteristics: they’re all male, prohibited from having names (to start), trained/required to uphold a code of conduct called the Silence, and if they’re Silent long enough they may enter a dangerous – and contagious – state called frantic. If you’re frantic, you produce a swath of destruction en route to the jungle, where you’ll find your peace again and maybe talk to some gods.
Since The Clay That Woke is about something, its about-ness is paramount to every detail of play. You aren’t adventurers going on adventures, you’re male-coded monsters (and oh boy there’s a lot of full frontal nudity in the art, there is no subtext here) living within an intolerable code: working for justice, never referring to women by name, forsaking want, burying your emotions. Of course the game is all about pushing those buttons. It’s Being Masculine, the RPG. But like…the challenges of being a man, not indulging in toxic masculinity.
5 out of 5 WTF. But hear me out! Games that are laser-focused on their theme and message can produce such interesting play. And Paul Czege is a proven creator in this space – if you haven’t played his classic My Life With Master, you’re in for a treat.
The system
The game doesn’t have a resolution system per se or is even particularly concerned about how characters do things, or their success in doing so. There are four kinds of minotaurs: leaders, philosophers, advocates and soldiers. Each kind starts with its own set of tokens, little wooden discs with symbols on them, and a sheet explaining how you spend and earn them. When you reach an inflection (a dangerous situation, violent conflict with beasts and NPCs, unnatural encounters, and arguments – and only those situations), you go to the Krater of Lots. A Krater is a bowl you’ll be pulling your discs (lots) from. You put in some chits, the GM will put in some other chits, you stir ‘em up in the bowl, and draw four.
There’s a whole elaborate order of operations about how you spend those tokens afterward, but you have to take the first pattern that you’ve completed. Sometimes you’ll complete a couple, if you hit a small pattern of just two or three symbols. Outcomes aren’t mechanically specific beyond saying if an event resolves “in your favor” or if something worse happens. You might not even fulfill any pattern, which means instead you’ve had a foreshadowing of things to come but no resolution. The Krater of Lots is an oracle to be interpreted, a ritual to be enacted, not a system to be mastered or beaten.
I find the GM prep of the game another interesting bit of system. Specifically, the GM populates their Dégringolade with problems drawn from their own observation of our real world. So not existential problems like climate change, but more social and personal problems that nag at you. A prominent example in the book is an NPC called FriendBeast, who wants to be your friend but actually collects personal information about you to sell to others. You could take anything like that for inspiration: liberal circular firing squads become right-minded friends who start ruining each other’s lives on religious purity grounds, or transphobic activists become morality police who demand to become observers in everyone’s bedroom. Who knows!
5 out of 5 WTFs. All the WTF. It’s very weird, very cool, utterly unlike anything I’ve come across before.
Other Games In This Style
If you’re looking for other recent personal passion projects to explore, consider the following.
Heart and Spire
PDFs available through Rowan, Rook & Deckard’s shop at DriveThru
I totally intended to write more about this and I will in the future, but I’m already close to 4000 words! Next time. This anticapitalist fantasy duet is firmly in the Hear Me Out category. Wild, alienating setting, evocative playbooks, fairly conventional gameplay. 3 out of 5 WTFs overall.
Coyote & Crow
PDF available through DriveThru
Hardback available from the publisher
This Diana Jones-nominated sci-fi game of an indigenous/First Nations future where Europe’s rapacious colonization never happens has a terrific setting, a playable premise (characters are traveling marshals employed by a benevolent government), and conventional gameplay. 2 out of 5 WTFs, and it’s the most readily accessible thing on this list.
Suldokar’s Wake
PDF available from DriveThru
Hardback available through Lulu
Another deep, deep fallen future setting like Stillfleet, Suldokar’s Wake is centered on a single planet with many layers of past civilizations under its surface. Everything about the game is strange, from its inaccessible-seeming setting (weird civilizations, but they mostly aim toward established fantasy tropes in the end), to its resolution system (fairly straightforward OSR-style play, but you have to internalize a whole new math paradigm of values you’re trying to not roll), to its compellingly WTF advancement system based around “graphs” of upgrades depending on your character type. Oh and you can go on adventures for the purpose of finding new graphs! 4 out of 5 WTFs, still thinking about what a session would even look like (and how to make its distinct character stand out from conventional OSR play).
Orun
PDF available from DriveThru
Afrofuturist troubleshooters trying to make the galaxy a better place. Think Star Trek without the paternalism of Starfleet Command. Lots of interesting history leading up to the setting, an elaborate setting to cram into your head filled with factions and superstructures and psychic virii (oh my), very Afrofuturist. Straightforward stat (auras, in this game) + skills from a short-ish skill list, where your aura is also used to fire off nifty abilities (and lowers your stat, making it harder to do skill things). 1 out of 5 WTFs on the grounds of it being an eminently accessible setting and a straightforward system. Great introduction to the larger Afrofuturist tradition!
Nibiru
PDF available on DriveThru
You live in a vast, millennia-old space station that’s probably not what it appears. Characters are vagabonds, people whose memories are lost when they start play. Why have they lost their memories? Who knows! But the conceit is that you’re simultaneously working through your adventure while remembering bits and pieces of your past, Memento style. The setting of Nibiru is real weird, with lots of maps and descriptions of the station’s various regions. The game has a thread of Bronze Age aesthetics throughout; the region you play in is called the Assyrian Vault, for example, its citizens are called arku and are ruled by a ruling council called the Tallaktu. And so on. The learning curve feels like a vertical surface to me! I’m not sure the game has a play premise per se other than to be an amnesiac exploring a strange place and trying to remember themselves. System wise you’re throwing fistfuls of d4s (the least loved die), but that’s not where the juice is. The real interesting bit is how you manage your mental status, ultimately leading to remembering things from your past while also collecting symptoms of deeper problems. 3 out of 5 WTFs, mostly for the setting sprawl.
Libreté
PDF available on DriveThru
You play children surviving in a city where all the adults have simply vanished. The conceit is that characters accumulate bile, a diegetic sort of poison that drives the kids to strive but also can enrage them and push toward a Lord of the Flies type scenario. The setting is way-spooky, an abandoned city constantly being rained on, populated by mind-reading creatures made from that rainwater that think scared kids are real yummy. The text pushes toward some real dark themes! If you want to (re?)live a traumatic childhood, Libreté has you covered. 2 out of 5 WTFs, where the Hear Me Out is “okay but what if playing a terrified, violent kid was fun, actually?”
Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland
PDF available on DriveThru
This strange, beautiful book from Handiwork Games gained a bit of notoriety early on for being an art-intensive artifact that leaned into Midjourney-generated art that was then personalized by creator Jon Hodgson. There’s an all-human-made edition available but I got the AI one and the work is pleasingly weird and spooky. But that’s not the main reason to look at Maskwitches. Based on a very simple house system called The Silver Road, Maskwitches channels an unknowable stone-age-ish society set in a region we now call Doggerland – a real place! It’s the land that’s now under the North Sea, about which we know almost nothing. Kind of a shamanic take on Atlantis. Your character is a Maskwitch, a mystic protecting their community from spiritual threats. You’ve got masks, which you can gain and exchange and provide your powers, and amulets, which can’t be exchanged but are the main way you defeat spirits. There’s very little setting other than what’s conveyed through the unreal, dreamlike art of the book. Ethereal, strange, worthy. 4 out of 5 WTFs.
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