Tonight we begin Godbound, an OSR-adjacent sandbox demigod adventure game from Kevin Crawford (Sine Nomine Publishing). It’s been on my try list for several years now, but its OSR-ness sits in stark contrast with what usually gets played here at IGRC World Headquarters. Other than its D&D substrate, though, I’m not persuaded it shares much with anything else in the trad/OSR play space.
Okay sure, you get 6 stats. There are saving throws. You roll a d20 sometimes. But the premise of the game is that you’re literally divine. If you’re rolling dice, that means you’re facing something your divinity can’t just ignore. A lot of this is the illusion of scale, right? Dungeon delvers don’t roll to swipe rats out of their way in a corridor, either.
The killer app of the game is that every character is “bound” to three (or more!) Words of Creation. These are big, meaty concepts that underpin the game world: Death and Sorcery and Cities and Journeying and Fire, whatever. There’s a good list in the core rulebook, plus a bunch more in Lexicon of the Throne. There are also rules for creating more Words, but we’re sticking to the lists in print for now. The Godbound have various Gifts related to these Words, and can perform broader Miracles given enough time and power. There are also rules for invoking larger-scale, permanent changes in the world, attracting worshipers that provide more power, and eventually ascending to actual godhood.
Reading and preparing for tonight has put my go-to home-game mode of play under a spotlight. A lot of what I run these days is highly collaborative, or starts from an undefined, or lightly defined, place that’s super-easy to improvise into. Honestly? I’ve gotten a little lazy with old-timey prep. I’m very good at improvisation.
I’m going to be using Kevin’s Ancalia: the Broken Towers setting book. While Godbound is very much designed with OSR assumptions in mind – most specifically, that folks will pull rules bits out and plop them into their own campaign setting – it comes with a super juicy campaign setting of its own. Ancalia is a cartoonishly awful hellscape: 90 percent of the region has died, zombie hordes everywhere, cities gripped by alien entities and madness. If this were the ground-level reality of play, it would be unplayably grim. Luckily, our protagonists have the power of the gods themselves to make things right.
The one habit, or maybe expectation, I’m most keenly aware of is that I’m expecting the game itself to provide a tight holding environment for the characters. Being a largely trad design, though, this isn’t addressed at all by the game. The game is there to provide a model for characters projecting power into the world; there is no social or spatial context. So it’s on the players, before play, to work out why they stick together. The game says a group of Godbound is a “pantheon,” but there’s almost no mechanical or social incentive to care about that. I know my players are really unpracticed in this. And the game, being about world-changing power, is not really a good fit for “adventurers at liberty to make their fortunes, oh look a map to a dungeon” mode (like we just did last week with Goblinville). I suspect a lot of tonight is going to be me asking provocative questions and helping build a tight web for everyone to live in.
Why am I running Godbound anyway? This isn’t very indie, is it?
First off: Sine Nomine is most definitely “indie” in terms of creation, control and distribution. I kind of wish Crawford was a bit less indie to be honest: he doesn’t hire an editor and it’s obvious. The writing is enormously colorful but there’s also just too much of it. Getting through the text as a procedural document is a chore. But back to the “indie” question: it is, but it’s not a storygame by anyone’s definition. I’m not a huge fan of definition fights but I’m coming around to trying to disentangle “indie” from “storygame” more regularly.
As to why I’m running it? I’m looking to explore the sandbox environment of the game, mostly. Godbound, and all of Sine Nomine’s games, bills itself as a sandbox game. Well, that idea is awfully loose, which is fine! I have very little urge to hammer at any particular definition. The one I’m working with is: no plots, a world that exists outside the characters, reality that reacts to the characters in a consistent way.
I’ve seen many takes on how to execute a sandbox, and some are better fits to my creative talents than others. I really enjoy the connect-the-dots creative space that a good set of random inputs will provide to me. That’s good (lonely) fun. What I like less is tables without any eye toward thematic or canonical cohesion.
So far I’ve generated a couple adventure ideas from Ancalia, a couple crises from the Sixteen Sorrows supplement, and a Ruined City (again from Ancalia.) I think the idea is to have some stuff in your pocket to drop into place as the characters wander around looking for things to do in the beginning. Later, when they have plans, I can do more focused prep because by the rules they tell me what their plans are next week. It’s such a simple gesture. I’m looking forward to holding them to it, although our gameplay social space usually involves at least one player racing home before they turn into a pumpkin (he’s got an early job).
The results I got from the adventure seed generator are decidedly mixed. It’s a Mad Libs style table, with 20 seeds comprised of Protagonist, Antagonist, Thing, Place and Twist blanks, and some broad situation tying some or all of those things together. My first one, for example, reads:
”Two Protagonists are fighting over a Thing or Location, but the object or place is actually somehow self-willed and in control of the situation, making others fight to see which of them is the stronger wielder or tenant.”
That’s interesting! And it turns out, it’s pretty hard to build out from. I mean it’s not impossible or anything, the table isn’t “broken,” it’s just a matter of practice. I think, as we develop a feel for the game, these will get easier for me to generate.
The big thing about the adventure outlines is that they exist completely apart from the interior life of the characters. It’s very episodic, right? Four godlings wander into a situation and, because the game compels them, they figure out what to do about it. This is a long way away from character-driven storygaming, and I’m not sure my players are ready to shift priorities. Guess we’ll find out!
The crisis generators seem more immediately useful, because they create complex backdrops against which to play. Like, whatever else the godlings are up to, they also have to contend with this other bullshit. I rolled up two, an Infested Ruin and an Awful Curse. Those are definitely going in my pocket because it’s easy to see future uses for them. It’s more organic, to my mind, than “someone runs up to you with a problem, how do you solve it?”
My favorite generator, though, was the Ruined City stuff. This is different than a more descriptive “ruins” generator in the core Godbound book. The Ruined City tables are in Ancalia, and generate a pretty compelling setting with a couple good guys and bad guys, a setting twist, stuff like that. Again, it’s backdrop rather than “adventure.”
More coming in a couple days, after we set up and play tonight. I’m going into it feeling pretty good, but also worried that requiring my players motivate themselves for external reasons won’t be fun or popular.
Tradsplainers!
Bonus content, since I seem to attract these folks when I talk about their games. When I write about a trad, OSR, or trindie game, roll 1d8 on the table below…
| 1 | Partisan: the Partisan tradsplains by describing your gameplay in contrast with their own. Which is definitely better than yours. It doesn’t matter if their description is factually inaccurate; it’s the contrast that’s important. The Partisan always wins initiative and always spends its first turn defining your local situation out from under you. |
| 2 | Gut Burrower: this tradsplainer will latch on and not let go until a successful Block and Ban spell has been cast. Until then, it will burrow deep into your content, years back if necessary, seeking sweet meats in the form of imperfect arguments and incomplete examples. |
| 3 | The Passive-Aggressive: the assault on your post will appear only in a different venue, where you have incomplete scouting and no saving throws. Ambush by 1d4 other, different tradsplainers will occur in the next week. |
| 4 | The Ancient One: this tradsplainer uses displays of age to cow its prey into submission. These displays come in many forms: references to decades of play, systems mastered, conventions attended, “Lake Geneva,” and vast beards. |
| 5 | Reader: rather than ‘splaining from personal experience, the Reader’s attack comes in the form of Platonic ideals formed while consuming and memorizing the game’s text without any actual play context. Since all play is local, the Reader argues, the only true source of power is the Rules As Written, as well as its attendant library of errata, supplemental materials, and screencaps of discussions had with an Actual Designer (see below). |
| 6 | Actual Designer: rare and exceptionally puissant in various attack forms, the Actual Designer ‘splains gaming from knowledge contained within their very own minds. This knowledge need not ever have appeared in this or other realities. The Actual Designer’s attacks are frequently aspirational, having never been tested in battle. Actual Designers are attended by 2d10 other tradsplainers prepared to fight and die in service to their dark master. |
| 7 | The Night Circus: gibbering hordes of psychotic fiends bent on destruction, the Night Circus can appear anywhere and at any time. They are frequently directed in secret by Actual Designers or Tastemakers (see below). The Night Circus’ greatest power is in deflecting and absorbing attacks on their masters. The Night Circus cannot be beaten, only subdued a short while via overwhelming force inflicted on the controlling entity. |
| 8 | Tastemaker: these bloggers frequently overestimate their power and influence, but grow dangerous if they’ve acquired a Night Circus. A Tastemaker may also share characteristics with Ancient Ones, Actual Designers, Partisans, and Passive-Aggressives. Individual Tastemaker ‘splaining attacks grow in power relative to the attack’s likes and retweets. Beware the Hot Take attack, especially when amplified by the Night Circus. |
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Played a couple sessions of this a couple of years ago and simply loved the world changey bits. It helped that it was run by an amazingly talented GM.
I’ve recently been toying with the idea of cross-pollinating this game with Stafford’s Pendragon. This solves three issues I see in Godbound:
Roll high vs (21 – stat) and then, uh, compare margin of success to see who wins…
FIX: Roll under, highest wins is one of the most elegant game mechanics of all time.
OSR proclivities means at level 1 get ready to swing and miss, a lot….
FIX: Pendragon’s combat means something always happens because someone always wins each exchange.
No social or emotional mechanics makes Jack a dull boy.
FIX: Pendragon’s traits and passions and the bonkers behavior of Mallory’s knights perfectly fit (my personal conception of) a tale if divine hubris and calamity.
Not remotely intimating you need to do this to make the game successful. I’ve just been missing these musings over the last month and then along came your post like a lightning rod.
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
The optics, they’re bad.
So…I indulged in a lot of retail therapy when the lockdowns started. I backed many games. Too many, one might argue. But if you’ve ever participated in a crowdsourcing campaign, you know how it diabolically gives you multiple serotonin hits: first when you back it, later when you spend the money, every time you get an exciting update, when they charge for shipping, then the tracking number, then actually receiving the thing. It’s a tiny bit like a gift-giving holiday to yourself over and over.
It turns out I gave myself a lot of gifts. I’m sure many of you know the feeling. You also know that supply chain struggles and multiple shutdowns in China meant that a whole lot of projects got stalled out. And now here we are, the first quarter of 2023, and a veritable avalanche of games has started pouring into my house. And even though I told my spouse, the reality of it didn’t really land until box after box, envelope after envelope, started arriving.
I haven’t had time to play everything that’s showed up, but I do want to talk about what’s arrived. It’s too much to do at once, so I’ll break this up across several installments. As always, these are reviews from reading, not play. (And, yeah, I’m still doing this sort of thing, even though my Echo Sedano fiction project has been a ton of fun and you should be reading it.)
So, going from left to right, let’s begin.
City of Winter
Sort of a sequel to Ross Cowman’s Fall of Magic, City of Winter is another storygame built around a scrolling scene-setting device, narrative prompts, and jaw-dropping table presence. You “can” play these kinds of games online, but this style of game I feel like benefits so very much from the physicality of the thing. The map has texture and color that does a lot of lifting to convey vibes.
City of Winter is a bit more mechanically elaborate than Fall. In addition to the scroll, there are several decks of cards, a second, more static city map, a die, and a separate city location that appears to move in the course of play. The focus is generational this time: as players move from location to location, they’re drawing cards keyed to each location that represent traditions. Later, they put those cards into play to show how their characters are changed by where they’ve traveled. Every character is also marked by their age, and will eventually die in the course of play as the years tick over.
Besides the cards and the scroll, there’s also a flat, non-scrolling map of the city itself. Once the family arrives in the City, they’re exposed to the City’s particular traditions as they explore their new home. Since it’s not a scroll, I think you’ll feel the static-ness of the City’s locations. There’s even a moving location printed on its own card, nifty and mystical.
City of Winter looks thoughtful and reflective and I’m very much looking forward to playing a campaign of this with the right crowd.
Atlas of the Latter Earth
I think I’m not alone in reading and buying OSR material more aspirationally than practically. To be clear, Kevin Crawford’s work clicks best with me, and I have put his stuff to use in other, non-OSR games. But other than a run at Godbound a few years ago, I’ve been buying his books with little hope of running them as-written. Atlas of the Latter Earth is on that list.
My favorite Sine Nomine book is Stars Without Number, revised edition. I ran a short campaign of SWN many years ago, but my GMing style just doesn’t gel with his OSR house system. The sector generation, though, that gave me terrific Traveller vibes. Traveller was the first RPG I personally owned, way back in 1980 or so, so I’ve always had fond feelings for the format.
When he released Worlds Without Number, the fantasy version of SWN, once again the aspirations bubbled up in me. The faction game from Godbound and the setting creation system from Stars? Gorgeous, love it. It’s been a few years and other indie shinies keep distracting me.
Atlas of the Latter Earth is a complete setting book for Worlds Without Number. Honestly, I’m not sure how best to use it since my personal interest in WWN was in generating my own setting, my own factions. As an example of a fully functional deployment of a WWN game, Atlas is nice to read. WWN, straight out of the book, is not generic fantasy mind you. It defaults to fallen future fantasy, real Dying Earth or Suldokar’s Wake vibes. On those grounds, Atlas is a fine example of the form.
I mean, to be clear, Atlas is as good as anything Crawford puts out. It’s lavish, thorough, probably more raw ideas per page than you’ll ever be able to use. His setting, extra rules, monsters, all of it: chef’s kiss, no notes. Pleasantly old-school layout, which these days comes as a surprise to me given the preponderance of elaborate layout showing up in the OSR space these days. But actually using it, I think, means you’re barely using WWN at all. At least not the world-building stuff, which, well. Why bother, the world is built: thirty eight distinct regions/nations, any one of them ripe for loads of gaming. And it’s built more carefully than what I’d do.
If you’re reading this and feeling frustrated at my ambivalence, imagine how I feel! For real though, if I ever do pull together a WWN game, I’m going to need to think long and hard about what to leave out of Atlas more than what I would want to include. Personally I find the process of creating a bespoke setting and rules and table best practices exhausting to think about. Maybe it would be less exhausting if I had an eye toward setting up play for years, not sessions. It’s a big cultural gap between the OSR and indie worlds, I think. I could be playing a complete game of, say, Apocalypse Keys all in one book! Or I could spend months tacking on bits and bobs of rules from a dozen takes on the D&D meta-framework to create a just-so edition that won’t make any sense at all beyond the half-dozen people at the table.
Yeah…that does sound pretty good, doesn’t it? Hilarious and exhausting.
The Terminator
Come with me if you want to live…in circa 1998 design land.
I confess, I love The Terminator franchise and time travel in general. Seen the movies, seen the TV show, I’m all in on the big Arniebot and the whole twisty-turny alt-future timeline that sort of makes sense if you squint hard enough. The first two movies are one of the few places I’ve allowed myself the pleasure of nostalgia. So I bought the RPG when it showed up on Kickstarter, right in the middle of a slew of other time-travel stuff I also backed.
The Terminator RPG from Nightfall Games is, to be sure, really fun supplemental material for fans of the movies and show. There’s a good breakdown of the timeline and setting details, endless pages of technical breakdowns of every kind of robot you’ve ever seen on screen, bios about the major characters. And it’s a game I just can’t see playing.
System wise there are few surprises. The game bowls straight up trad alley: skill tests versus target numbers, some variation of success and failure types (messy, solid, exceptional, etc.), an elaborate combat system, gun porn. You know the game design I’m talking about, if you’ve played any sort of trad game since the 1990s. Kind of perfect, really, given the era from which the first two movies came out.
Besides gradients of success and failure, the most forward-looking rules in the game are about “hope points,” a hero point system where you get points for top-tier successes and bottom-tier failures. There’s a big menu of stuff to spend your hope on. Seems fine? I do like the range of options, they’re all cinematic and fun.
Yeah…this didn’t spark joy for me. Maybe it’s because I can envision such an interesting game based on the Terminator premise. What The Terminator RPG needs, really, is strong guidance on how to design compelling scenarios that leverage what made the movies special. Yes, sure, the movies featured terrific stunt work and bravery in the face of an implacable machine. For me, though, the excitement was the potential of the present being in dialogue with the future: what happens if Skynet does the thing? How will Skynet change if you defeat a version of it in the present? None of that is in this game. There is literally no chapter or writing at all about what makes a good session in this game, or what campaign might look like. What it does have is campaign seeds and a few scenarios.
The Terminator RPG was my most retail-therapy-y purchase of this batch. I still page through it to look at robots. And the accompanying campaign book, written by a lot of different folks with very different voices and organizational approaches, has a few nuggets if I really wanted to throw together a game.
Next Week
Next up will be Apocalypse Keys, Blade Runner, and Heironymus.
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