Something I’ve learned during the pandemic is that I use roleplaying as a distraction. Sure, yes, I’ve got a weird obsession with the metasocial meaning of rules structures. And I agree that gaming can be a safe way to explore emotional and interpersonal stuff. But at least during These Unprecedented Times, I need gaming to be a distraction. I’m honestly not sure if that’s healthy or not.
I’ve always been a little obsessive with my hobbies. Hell of a play ethic, maybe not such a great work ethic. When I need my hobbies I really need them. For a few early weeks of the lockdowns, low-level depression nearly leached away the obsessiveness with play. We ran a terrific, long campaign of Impulse Drive during that same time, though, so it certainly wasn’t gone. Now that I’m over the hump, or maybe because everything feels like it’s coming to a head in the real world, I’m back in baby. All the way in.
I’m in with a new game called Shattered City, from Douglas Mota and Mina McJanda of UFO Press. This game is so very extra. But it’s the kind of extra that fills my brain, blots out unpleasant thoughts, fills my time and consumes all that nervous energy that has nowhere else to go.
The Short Version
Shattered City is the latest game in the Legacy: Life Among The Ruins branch of PbtA. The distinctiveness of this branch is an emphasis on shared world-building, the passage of time, and a lot of authorial intentionality. Legacy games’ killer app is a formal split between high-level faction play that feels a bit boardgame-y and abstract, and character-level play that’s framed by the high-level play. I’ve played both first and second editions of Legacy itself as well as a modestly down-scaled fantasy version called Free From The Yoke. Shattered City is by far the biggest and most elaborate version of all.
The game is built atop a licensed setting called Mysthea, designed by Italian game publisher Tabula Games. There are a bunch of boardgames set in Mysthea, as well as a graphic novel. I’m intimately familiar with the difficulties of working with an art-driven licensed setting, having developed Mutant Chronicles, 2nd edition (the one before the current 2d20 version from Modiphius) for Target Games. The process typically involves a lot of nonsensical rationales to make the badass art make any sense at all, much less a coherent through-line. The Mysthea setting is no exception, and when I looked through the other games Tabula has done it’s all pretty contrived. But that art, lordy, it looks great.
UFO Press calls Shattered City “crystalpunk,” which, well. You know. Everything -punk is garbage and Tabula feels like they’re very much in the “-punk = art direction” school. But to Mota and McJanda’s credit, they’ve done a heck of a job of designing a very elaborate game around audacious worldbuilding with an actual punk thread of rebellion running throughout.
The setting is a city called Montara (the eponymous Shattered City), torn apart by wars and occupations by two outside empires. There are legit well-structured takes on wartime refugees, PTSD, colonialism, ecological collapse, class warfare, all of it. The players’ Houses all stand opposed to the occupiers, but they have their own agendas. And sometimes collaborating with your colonizers may be necessary for your long-term goals. Meanwhile, the occupiers serve distant masters and aren’t in control of their own fates. There’s goofy canon behind everything – Mysthea is a floating continent broken loose from its world by a giant magical crystal, every living being on Mysthea is tied into a telekinetic force called Qoam, and so on – but honestly? So much less canonical load than old fan favorites like Glorantha or Star Wars.
The holding environment of Shattered City feels like a funhouse version of what we’re going through in our real world, with a powerfully shiny fantasy gloss. It’s exactly the kind of all-encompassing distraction I’ve been hoping for.
Extra Extra
Here’s a short list of what makes Shattered City so very extra:
- Fifteen character playbooks, roughly broken into three sets of five “styles:” civil (social-intensive), bold (action-oriented) and uncanny (magic!). You also choose a Role (leader, outsider, rebel, prophet, agent or traitor) that represents your character’s relationship to their House. If you have a hero-scale session where it just doesn’t make sense for your own character to attend, you make a Cohort, a less-detailed filler character (Band of Blades does this trick with new recruits as well). And eventually you might grow your hero into their own faction, at which point they become a Champion, which has yet another playbook.
- Eight House playbooks, representing the faction to which your character belongs. The Houses are connected via a frenemy relationship called the Venture: sometimes you’re allies, and sometimes you have dominion over another faction.
- Five Guild playbooks, one of which you choose to represent the city’s foreign occupying force. They serve distant masters but are far enough away from their capital that they can kind of get away with anything. In the full-blown version of the game, the player running the Guild is kind of a co-GM.
- Five Ancestries (species), with a couple playbooks standing in as their own species as well.
- Two sets of common moves, House and Hero, that you switch between throughout the game. There are, no kidding, fifteen common Hero moves. And fifteen common House moves.
- A library of dozens of gear tags, all of which have brief rules implications mostly having to do with obvious fictional positioning effects.
I’m not great at math but the possible combinations of playbooks, Houses and Ancestries seems like a lot. I’m kind of reminded of the frustration I have with videogames that offer a zillion possible builds and not enough time to explore them all.
The sheer volume of game design in this game is jaw-dropping. Shattered City is the polar opposite of a compact little tone-poem of a game like Monsterhearts (even taking into account the Second Skins playbooks) or Sagas of the Icelanders. A good friend snarked that UFO Press designs trad games dressed up like PbtA, and I’m not sure that’s totally wrong. There’s a ton, a ton of procedural detail. But the moves are still moves, they still respond to and constrain the resulting fiction. There’s just an awful lot of them to track. And gear tags and multiple interlocking economies.
Honestly I can’t wait to dig in.
We’re Gonna Play
So, yeah, we’re playing this. It’s just about the most difficult game I’ve run into for online play, with 56 pages of helper PDFs and, well, that list of stuff I went through earlier. And it’s got a strong collaborative map-making component, which was tricky to work out for online play.
I ended up building out an elaborate character keeper in Google Sheets, and it’s got a lot of development to go before I’m ready to make it public. We’re using Miro for the shared map, Google Docs for the setting bible that arose from the lengthy session zero process, and of course Zoom for their pretty faces and Rollforyour.party for the dice. I have three monitors and had to bounce between seven screens of information throughout our three hour setup. Hopefully we can get it down to just the keeper, Zoom and the dice roller when it’s time to actually play.
Sometimes you want a healthy salad and sensible portions. And sometimes you want to engorge yourself on a nine-course banquet. I’ll be writing about our game going forward.
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We’re a couple actual-play sessions into Shattered City, UFO Press’ latest Legacy–derived game, and it’s delivering an interesting experience. Rather than blow-by-blow whaddaydo whaddayado play, each session is a vignette. There’s a clear opening with an explicit situation, a nice little arc with miss-generated complications, and closure at the end of the session. They feel like very satisfying little one-shots happening within the much (!) larger context of the world-building bits.
Playing Shattered City kind of feels like watching a series like Tales From The Loop. There are small interactions between major characters, but big situational jumps between episodes. I gotta say, that’s doing a lot to keep me from feeling itchy and burned out! Rather than having to constantly shovel coal into the engine of The Campaign, we can just play a vignette and have it be satisfying.
Story Time!
Our first session was about an agent of the Crystal Crowned (the ageless vampire/elf/alien faction that had ruled the city and now holes up in The Last Redoubt, their
goth nightclubspooky haunted castle) tasked with taking out a big titan stomping around the countryside terrorizing a crossroads community. I was worried that our first play session took us directly out of the city setting, but it turned out great. There was some travel and exploration, hungry soldiers who had deserted and were terrorizing the inn at the crossroads, and a non-violent resolution to the titan problem — the Agent is a Warlock, and one of their main deals is being able to negotiate with giant monsters. Cool! It was also our kick-the-tires session and we went out of our way to try all the basic moves. Normally that’d mean kind of a bad/dull session but honestly, it was nice. Because it was a vignette.Totally normal plant people, not at all upsetting.
Our second session jumped to a prophet of the Verdant Priesthood, a society of tree people, who had foreseen the fruits of a great alliance between the city’s rebel underground and a cult of scumbag foreign occultists. The PC attached to the rebels is also a sibling of the prophet (the tree people are made, not born, and the process is intensely alienating in a city overrun by human-only bigots), so there was some terrific family drama baked in. And again, the vignette thing worked great: get into some trouble with the bigots, stumble into a crisis with the leader of the foreign occultists, have a heartfelt negotiation, done and done.
A Different Facilitator Mode
The vignette thing is a nice change of pace, I gotta say. It feels good to aim for a satisfying ending, if not actual closure. It feels good to not have to hustle for hooks and leads and ooh what if?! bits as I facilitate. In fact I hadn’t really realized how different my GMing headspace is when I’m in spool-out mode versus wrap-up mode. Rather than looking for ever-escalating snowballs (you know, typical PbtA), I’m on the lookout for smaller close-able loops. And sure enough, the sessions don’t end with everything on fire and everyone screaming.
Documentary footage of me GMing Apocalypse World
I think vignette play also leads to overall lower intensity. Which, you know, it’s a trade-off. I loved the big payoffs at the end of our Impulse Drive campaign. They were hard-earned. But the campaign ended when it needed to end, too, because I just couldn’t maintain that level of heat. The interest in Shattered City, I think, is in moving back and forth between the game’s big-picture tools — practically speaking, it’s a nearly-GMless game, but that fact is hidden behind the players’ faction moves — and these closed moments. It’s less intense but maybe more sustainable. Guess we’ll see!
Vignette as a Distinct Play Mode
Settling into our game’s tempo has me thinking vignette play is distinct enough to deserve further investigation. I think the demands and expectations of a vignette are their own mode, like how dungeon delves and hex-crawls are their own modes. A vignette to my mind is also distinct from a conventional one-shot because a vignette, by definition, is part of something bigger than itself. Practically speaking, a vignette might be similar to mission-based play, but only if the mission is clearly part of a larger, evolving arc.
Off the top of my head, a good vignette needs:
A concise, well understood kickoff situation. Unless you just want to have the characters riff Clerks-style, you need to nail down why the characters are together and what they’re facing. But depending on the players and the game, maybe you could just riff. I think it would be hard to nail my last point in this list: making the vignette matter to the larger work.A clear shift in focus and setting from previous sessions. I feel like the shift is an important element to the vignette, because it illustrates how this moment stands apart.A good shared understanding of the overall game/setting/arc so that players have several choices of vignette. Sure, the GM can just frame one up. But I feel like players making that choice gives them more vision and buy-in for how it’s going to play out. They can go into the vignette with a better intuitive sense of the underlying pattern that will be completed.A facilitator emphasis on small, closeable loops rather than constant escalation. (PbtA games, in particular, can easily fall prey to ever-wilder outcomes through to the end of the session.)Accepting that the vignette may be a lower-intensity experience. The payoff is in character revelations and closure, not the cliffhanger.Ways to tie the events of the vignette into the big picture. The vignette needs to matter in some way, even if it’s just to build out the setting.
And a few things I think a vignette is not:
It isn’t a play-the-day type thing, where every session covers every moment of everyone’s life. Hitting a satisfying conclusion means being disciplined and intentional about framing scenes. I think you can do this quietly but it may require a firmer facilitator hand on the tiller than you’re accustomed to.The players can’t wait for the GM to hand them shit to solve. Players need to be proactive within the session for a vignette to come together.Tightly integrated into, and contingent upon, outside events. If you’ve got some way to convey a big picture – the faction turn in Stars Without Number or the Family Phase in Legacy – then you set your vignette within that big picture and have it be meaningful and resonant. This is distinct from a session kickoff that picks up hot on the heels of the previous session, or is otherwise part of a continuous whole. It can be discontinuous.A cliffhanger. The session needs to stand on its own and feel conclusive.
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Part 4 of ? in the Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset series
My home group has been playing UFO Press‘ Shattered City the past several months. It’s a setting-intensive game where the collaborative world-building is a major selling point of the exercise. It’s not exactly in the same vein as Microscope or The Quiet Year: everyone still plays characters most of the time. But it’s more concerned about its (very weird) setting than almost any game I can think of since we tried Invisible Sun last year.
The two games couldn’t be any more different in approach to expressing their settings. Specifically, Shattered City lends itself to a storytelling mindset in a way that Invisible Sun doesn’t. It’s gotten me thinking about the function that world building, and engaging with built worlds, has in cultivating that mindset.
To Recap
First off, I want to make clear that when I say Invisible Sun’s setting doesn’t lend itself to a storytelling mindset, that’s not a diss. Not every game does, or should. This comes down to a very specific definition I’m working with when I say “storytelling mindset.” To recap: I’m talking about viewing play through the lens of story, with meaningful narrative through-lines, character motivations, and an authorial interest in play decisions. Playing with a storytelling mindset means making choices that are interesting and exploratory, rather than driving toward success or against failure.
On the surface, it seems like Invisible Sun should promote a storytelling mindset. Characters pursue personal Arcs and earn various advancement currencies along the way. (If you’re not familiar with the game, check out my big wrap-up article from 2020). The Arcs, though, are about incentivizing the players into pursuing plans on their own, rather than reacting to GM prompts. It’s a good goal, and my favorite part of the game. It’s an excellent on-ramp for trad players to get out of a beat-the-GM head space.
Meanwhile, Shattered City seems like it would be no good at all for a storytelling mindset: tons of canonical setting material, weird alien species, an incomprehensible backstory involving a sci-fantasy global catastrophe. But all that stuff is in service to very human concerns: the fallout of colonialist oppression, and life in a dense urban environment.
Looking at these two setting-intensive games side-by-side, I came to the realization that settings that promote a storytelling mindset for me have one thing in common: Relatability.
There’s a lot of weird shit going on here. And this is the relatable one!
A Tale of Two Cities
The thing we struggled with in Invisible Sun was that the setting and premise are so fucking weird that nobody understood why anyone does anything. The Arc system is post hoc rationalization: I’m going to Defeat a Foe (or Develop a Bond or Join an Organization) because that sounds like an interesting/fun way to advance. If you’re good at the game, you can get authorial with this approach: you can look at the vector and tempo of what you’re already doing, and gamify your own play. Out of the box, though, that’s not what my players felt. Nobody chose Arcs as a natural extension of the setting (super weirdo surrealism with a Big Secret) or the premise (you’re one of the Real People who has escaped the prison of “Earth” to return to a life of magic and privilege). The setting is filled with factions and secrets and little plot hooks, oh lord so many plot hooks. And none of it required or promoted a storytelling mindset to engage with. Again: not a diss, just a description.
Meanwhile, Shattered City puts relatable human concerns front and center. You play both a Faction and a character that represents that Faction. You build a world together from prompts specific to your Factions, and you build your characters already bonded together. And then, once play starts, everyone collaborates on various aspects of the setting as it advances through time: events from the (off-screen) war and how they’re impacting your city, what gross plans the current occupiers have in mind and who will be hurt by them, and so on. Finally, the GM designs a Crisis that represents a synthesis of inputs the players have created. The Crisis ties the whole thing together into a cohesive whole.
I’m not sure that the collaboration itself is what leads to a more relatable setting/situation in Shattered City, but it can’t hurt. I think it’s baked into the questions, and how the players work together to answer them. It’s a specific invitation to be authorial.
Players also choose what bits of the big picture they want to focus in on, and that’s got a powerful impact on relatability. Granted, focus tends to scatter a bit as each player grabs onto stuff they care about. In our game, I’ve got a player who loves to get out of the city, fight monsters, and solve problems. But everyone else comes along, and they’re still playing out the human concerns that have developed while other players are in the spotlight. I’ve got another player who makes every spotlight moment super personal and focused, and that drags my monster-fighting player back to the human stuff.
Let’s Get to the Practicals
Whether I’m trying to synthesize material from an existing setting or creating a fresh setting, it all comes back to relatability. That means:
Look for interesting tensions that already exist, or are strongly implied, by the canon. Like, in Exalted you’ve got the Solars and the Dragonborn in natural tension, but that’s all faction-level and not especially human. Sure, yes, the Dragonborn want to maintain power in the face of the Solars showing up again. And the Solars (as a monolith) have old beefs they’re remembering and acting on. But how do we turn that stuff personal, specific, and human?Factions are an easy gamer thing when you treat them like monoliths and/or sources for cool powers. But they can be useful storytelling-mindset resources: Rather than “X is at war with Y” or “A is scheming against B,” break down the relatable human incentives at play for belonging to a faction, in what ways an individual character might be at odds with the goals or values of their own faction, and how factions directly impact the lives of those around the PCs.When I scour a big canonical setting like Glorantha or The Third Horizon in Coriolis, I keep my eyes open for interesting human-relatable stuff in their histories. Guessing what biases and bigotries exist that the characters don’t even understand is the most relatable thing I can think of that emerges from history. If canonical histories don’t lend themselves to that, I get them out of my head as quickly as possible.
Prioritizing what to focus on when I build my own world, to maximize interesting tensions both on the GM and player sides, follows a similar path for me:
Find ways in the setting to highlight the tensions you find interesting. You want to feel out the choice between family and duty? Create lots of rules around family, and then lots of incompatible rules around duty. Make them perpendicular, sometimes. Do some cultures have different family expectations and rules? How is duty enforced? Stuff like that. All this starts by very intentionally working out the tensions you want to explore first, rather than just putting Cool Shit together and hoping interesting tensions come out of it. I’m gonna get into Cool Shit next.Try really hard to humanize whatever social groupings your setting will have. When I ran Imp of the Perverse, I set it in Alamo-era Texas. As I was setting-building, the “factions” that jumped out at me were the Mexican Army, Tejanos, white settlers, and slaves. I avoided hard lines like “whites and Mexicans never trust each other” or whatever. There were sympathetic characters and scoundrels on all sides. That’s just one example. I’ve found very hard, strict conflicts – supernatural good/evil morality, implacable existential foes – are the least interesting, produce no meaningful tension (because players aren’t given a choice in how they interpret the situation), and exist only to justify fight scenes.If you want history to be meaningful, look for the ways it impacts people’s lives today. That might be directly, like if the characters need to respond to a crisis, or indirectly, if your history has shaped attitudes, laws, or social alignments.
Um. What?
Cool Shit is Bad, Actually
Cool Shit will undermine and mislead your storytelling mindset. Don’t fall for it! What do I mean by that?
Badass powers/abilities/technologies: these relate to how characters achieve their goals, not why. The why is important. If you fixate on how characters do things, that becomes what the game is about: doing things, achieving, accomplishing. The why, the underlying motives of the characters, will necessarily take a back seat.
Set pieces/set decoration: places and things that look cool or are evocative are just mood boards. How does a cool place affect the people in it? How do the people reflect the cool/evocative place? If you meet a fast-talking hustler in a vast, magical, ever-changing library, the tension between the place and the expected personality is what’s important. What’s the fast-talking hustler doing in a place like this? Why would they be here? Why do the others in the place tolerate their presence?
Factions (agency/church/clan/secret society): I keep bringing this up because factions are such a common taxonomic feature in roleplaying games. What are a faction’s goals? How is pursuing those goals hard for the members? What’s the one thing that keeps everyone from backing a reasonable faction? Do they believe in reasonable things? If they’re accumulating power, what for? Factions are comprised of living beings with their own interests and incentives at play. Factions are not, themselves, people. Factions don’t want things, but their members will.
Conclusion
When I’m approaching a game’s setting with a storytelling mindset, the key feature I look for is relatability. Can I take the weird stuff in the setting and make it relatable? Does the setting lend itself to relatable tensions or is it fixated on Cool Shit?
Fixation on Cool Shit doesn’t have to be a showstopper. It just means you need to take the Cool Shit and find the relatable bits. Or force them in.
And a setting that already lends itself to relatable tensions might not be interesting to you or your players.
Relatable. Interesting. Tension. Gotta have all three. Many games only get to two at best.
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Before These Unprecedented Times, I used to hit the gym three times a week. Working with a personal trainer, I got into weightlifting later in life. It was fun to hit new numbers! It was fulfilling to feel strong. But lifting late in life meant I got injured. Take just a little too long off, screw up my form a tiny bit, and boom. There goes my back, or my shoulder, or a knee.
Running UFO Press’ Shattered City, designed by Douglas Mota and Mina McJanda, these past several months has been the RPG equivalent to my late-life injury-risking weightlifting program. It finally broke me, but along the way it was great to hit new numbers. It was fulfilling to feel accomplished. To feel strong.
I wrote a bit about Shattered City when we first started. Twenty sessions in, this is my final deep dive. And just in time: Mina tweeted about the hardbacks finally making themselves into the world recently.
Shattered City
PDF available at DriveThruRPG (affiliate link)
Storytime!
To recap: players in Shattered City play Houses, big important factions shaping the future of the eponymous City, Montara. In the game’s fully realized form, one player (not the GM) instead plays a Guild, representing the occupying force oppressing the city. We went all-Houses, and it was fine. But I’ll bet a motivated Guild player would be a ton of fun.
In our game, we had the Crystal Crowned, weirdo vampire-elf alien nobility who were the original masters of Montara; the Verdant Priesthood, supportive plant-people with neat plant-magicks; and the Rebel Underground, Montaran patriots pushing back against the occupiers. We decided on the Volarees as our Guild, fallen nobles looking to make a name for themselves by turning Montara into a powerhouse.
Players also play a hero of their house. We started with a Warlock for the Crystal Crowned, lots of funky powers related to the setting’s ambient magical energy; a Warden for the Verdant Priesthood, a relationship broker and peacemaker; and a Martyr for the Rebel Underground, because who doesn’t love a rebel martyr?
Gameplay was so broad and involved that there’s really no point in trying to retell any of it. They fought giant monsters, explored the nearby countryside, and eventually overthrew the Volarees. And that was just in the first “cycle.” The game is played in big strokes like that, with little vignettes within the bigger sprawl of history.
Behold! A delicious, completely bonkers r-map of our final game-state.
Since we played online, I produced a lot of documentation about our game. I built an elaborate character keeper, wrote a setting bible, used Miro to maintain the relationship map above, and so on. It might not all make sense but if you want a clear breakdown of what all happens in the course of a campaign, check out my Current Situation document.
There Is So Much (Maybe Too Much)
There are so many ways to combine houses and playbooks in this game. So much stuff. Maybe too much.
Players choose from eight houses, five guilds, and fifteen playbooks (helpfully broken up into bold, civic and uncanny themes). The Houses won’t change much but players are expected, even encouraged, to hold onto their heroes lightly and regularly introduce new playbooks. Advancement is left entirely to the players, who can just decide to advance as they play through the faction roles they take on in the course of their lives: leader, traitor, outsider, agent, rebel, prophet and agent. Once you’ve taken four roles (and advanced four times), the character either retires or becomes a Champion (which is kind of its own house).
Oh how could I forget? There are also, formally, five species in play. Those also impact play, both mechanically and culturally. Several of the playbooks are also de facto species, like the Awoken (a self-aware robot from the ancient technomagical past) and Chimera (genetically engineered byproduct of a recent war), or the Verdant Priesthood (all of whom are part plant) and the Architects of the Living City (space-manipulating aliens from another dimension). Players looking to optimize a build are going to get quickly frustrated. Not everyone is happy to run whut they brung.
Then there are the move sets. So many move sets. There are hero moves, for when the characters are doing normal roleplaying stuff. When you pull back and play more abstractly, there’s a whole other set: house moves. And to execute the biggest-picture stuff, starting and ending whole cycles, you’ve got story moves. The moves take up three tabs on that character keeper I mentioned up there.
It’s a lot to keep in one’s head. Occasionally, the moves or their attached economies will affect across scales. If the players aren’t fully invested in the excitement (challenge?) of mastering perhaps the most complex PbtA game ever conceived, it’s gonna be a rough ride for everyone.
The Moves Are Alien But Productive
Let’s talk about these sets of “common moves.” Being several designs into the Legacy concept (Legacy and then Legacy 2nd Edition, Free From The Yoke, and now Shattered City), the move sets have gotten — and I swear this is not pejorative! — weird. You need to set aside your opinions about “correct” PbtA doctrine to really evaluate them.
The takeaway all my players shared in debrief was that it was hard for them to engage with Shattered City‘s moves in an organic way. Moves don’t easily trigger from the fiction as it happens. Moves don’t snowball into other moves like one might expect. The game wants players to engage very intentionally, even boardgame-ily! But the moves’ fictional triggers are unintuitive and the outcomes that emerge from those triggers are highly abstract. My players settled on looking at mechanical outcomes they wanted, and reverse-engineering the move(s) needed to get there. That’s not necessarily a new thing to PbtA-style play — players regularly evaluate outcomes and steer the fiction toward moves — but it’s an inescapable feature here.
Let’s take a couple examples from the Hero move set, Unearth and Compromise.
Unearth reads like this:
You might expect a move like Unearth to produce outcomes like Read a Sitch (Apocalypse World), Discern Realities (Dungeon World), or even the “extend your senses” option in Let It Out (Urban Shadows). Those are all about nailing down situational details right here and now. I think there’s some equivalent to that effect in nearly any PbtA style game I can name. That’s not what happens with Unearth.
Unearth is an invitation for the player to co-develop setting details. None of the options in the bullet list are situational details, though. I mean, sure: in typical PbtA fashion, anything that isn’t a move can just be narrated. Whatever. But my players were looking for more practical affordances and I, as GM, wanted more guidance. To be sure, Unearth produces super interesting content! So it’s not a “bad” move. It’s an alien move. Alien, but productive.
Compromise is another in that category. You’d think you were getting something like Intimidate/Manipulate (Impulse Drive), or Turn Someone On/Shut Someone Down (Monsterhearts) or even Propose a Deal (Cartel). But, like much of Shattered City, the “social move” operates at a whole other level. Here’s how it reads:
Structurally I really like this. It’s how the game’s Assault move works as well: you earn objectives and suffer reactions. But you know what? In almost every case, it was very hard to fit the objectives (other than Enlist and Earn) to the fiction, and the Reactions all felt wildly out of scale. The move felt vital — there’s a lot of interpersonal work in the game — but Compromise almost never produced the types of outcomes we were hoping for. Not every Compromise outcome looks like something in the (immediate) fiction.
The House moves are also quite abstract. In fairness they need to be, given they’re driving the big-picture fiction of the game. Mostly House moves don’t have fictional triggers and don’t act like conventional “moves” other than by writing the rules in Move language (weak and strong hits, pick lists, etc.). One terrific innovation in Shattered City over its predecessors is the addition of “decrees,” an economy that lets the GM limit how long folks spend in up-high mode, and drive the action back down into hero-level roleplaying. So mostly the triggers are worded like “when you spend a Decree…”. Which is mechanical, not fictional. It’s fine, we adapted. That feature is not universally true: there’s a “react to bad things” move called Endure, kind of a House-scale Defy Danger (Dungeon World), that we literally never thought to use in twenty sessions because it didn’t trigger the same way.
The most alien bit of the House moves, in the end, is that there’s no simple move to achieve most of the game-state stuff you’d want. Like, there’s no specific move to “earn Influence” over another House. You have to come at it sideways, see, either by dropping into a Flashpoint and taking Influence as a Compromise outcome (see above), or come at it sideways via some other move. I wrote an entire reference document about this for all the economies in the game. From my GM seat, I rather liked this indirectness. But the players hated the uncertainty and reverse-engineering necessary to pursue their boardgame-y factional goals.
A Couple (Almost) Fatal Flaws
Matters of unmet moves expectations and overwhelming player options aside, there are a couple places the game for-real nearly fell apart for us.
Manifest is a Mess
The big one is a move/concept called Manifest. In Shattered City, literally everyone in the game can tap into ambient magic called Qoam. Very broadly, Qoam is telekinesis, tuned to specific aspects depending on the focus (Potent, Swift, Wide etc.) mastered by the character. That ability is addressed by Manifest, but it also shows up indirectly in other surprising places: the move used to take down gigantic Titans, the Warlock playbook, the Firebrand playbook (which switches out telekinesis for fire!), and so on.
Each player participating in a Manifest move can add their own focus to the move, and doubles the strength of “one person applying force.” Ostensibly these foci create very elaborate effects and creations. There’s an appendix at the end of the book, easy to miss, that offers sample effects at various combinations of foci. But these effects don’t reflect the “double human strength” guidelines. Like, you can create a magical automaton with three foci! That just isn’t covered by Manifest or its supplemental text.
I suspect Manifest is meant to be eyeballed, both by the players and the GM. Like, the player(s) suggests a magical effect and the GM says what foci are needed. That’s cool, it’s “a conversation,” but I feel like the GM doesn’t get enough guidance to know whether something is, you know, three-ish foci or five-ish foci or even if a particular effect is possible under the “telekinesis” umbrella. It’s setting-important and very, very loose. I think if you went into the game with the GM very clearly telling everyone “imma eyeball this,” and clarify that every Manifest is going to be “a conversation,” it might be okay.
Missing Misses
Second (almost) fatal flaw: On the mathy side, it’s just too darned easy to roll hits. And given how large-scale every move is written, you don’t see a lot of rolls in a session. Fewer rolls + rare misses = a feature to route around.
Players help on Hero moves by handing over extra dice. I normally like the simplicity of Advantage-style help, but where I’ve seen it (most recently in Impulse Drive) it’s usually limited to one extra die. Not here! We had three players, therefore four dice in many cases. You do need a Covenant (relationship) with the person you’re helping, which can be fun after a Covenant is broken and the players hustle to create a new Covenant with an eye toward future help. Assuming they can help, it’s easy to assume everyone will help every time if possible. The odds of missing on four dice is quite small — around 9% according to anydice.com, compared to 18%ish on three dice.
At the House move scale it’s even more pronounced: Allied Houses can provide two help dice! Two Allies (Allied is a game-state term of art) helping on a roll means six dice. They will never, ever miss. There’s a cute bit where the lowest die in the pool means the helping House might’ve fucked things up between the Houses, triggering additional complications, but as far as actually giving the GM an opportunity to make a Reaction (GM moves in this game) from a miss? Doesn’t really happen. Of course the GM can still make Reactions under all the typical PbtA triggers, like “when they look to you to say something” or “they hand you a golden opportunity.” But the House Moves are so abstract that it’s tough to embed the moves’ outcomes in the fiction. Golden opportunities and “waiting for the GM to say something” don’t come up in an organic way.
To be clear: we played twenty sessions. Nothing even close to “fatal” about that, right? It meant we had to master reverse-engineering our desires, working backward from desired outcomes to the string of moves that would get us there. That’s a tough vibe for folks accustomed to tighter interplay between the immediate fiction and move triggers. It’s tactical, abstract, boardgame-y.
Big Little Picture
As with the rest of the Legacy branch of PbtA, the secret of the split between hero vignettes and big-picture systems is that it tricks everyone into co-GMing. This is Shattered City’s best magic trick, and it really is magical when it fires off.
By asking the players to advocate for their factions, everyone brings more energy to their struggle than just “wouldn’t it be cool if you and I had a fight?” The players are quite invested! But almost every move demands the players come together to work through the consequences of their big-picture actions, frequently without GM intervention.
The same thing happens in the Flashpoints, where we play characters in a conventional RPG-y way. Many of the moves ask the players to create their own truths and answers (see Unearth, above). This can be a surprising cognitive load for players. More than once I’d offer ideas for moves that ask the players to provide answers. There is something weirdly different between discovery (revealing what I came up with) and invention (sharing what they come up with). Mostly my players wanted to discover what complications and through-lines I had up my sleeve.
Setting aside the aesthetics or fatigue of collaboration, the play product itself — the actual outcomes, the resulting fiction, the through-lines — is, honestly, exceptional. It was a hell of a run, our twenty sessions. Nothing else quite like it.
The Killer App(s)
There are a few other standout bits of design that stuck with me.
Covenants are a super interesting replacement of History (Hx) type mechanisms. Covenants are ranked (from 1-3) and characterized via a pair of keywords, each keyword provided by half the relationship. If you get additional Covenants with the same character, it’ll have its own keyword pair and rank. Sometimes the rank matters and sometimes the number of Covenants matters! But it’s sharp in so many ways. The big one is that the players remember why they had a Covenant in the first place. But also, sometimes you Test the Covenant, and on a good enough roll the players can narrate a new positive memory about that relationship. That may sound frivolous but it produced several genuinely moving moments in play.The grid of political relationships between factions is terrific. Factions can hold Influence over each other (which may not be reciprocal), they can be allied, they can be in conflict, or they can hold dominion over another faction. These are all mechanically meaningful, and produce a ton of interesting context.Assault is maybe my favorite one-roll combat resolution minigame in all of PbtA. On a hit you pick a tactical goal and a couple complications, and on a strong hit you pick two goals, a “better” goal list opens up, and you only face one complication. It played out great every single time we used it. The trigger includes an invocation of “appropriate weaponry,” which meant we were able to use Assault to play out an angry speech to whip up a mob at one point. The centrality of the mechanized map, constantly evolving and growing, is very powerful. I’m a big believer in having central information on a table, and Shattered City mandates the map. Every “strategic asset” is on the map somewhere (and therefore can be targeted with City moves), new locations get added all the time via move outcomes, it’s great. We used Miro to build our map, and being able to zoom in on Montara for individual buildings and neighborhoods, and then zoom out for forests and mountain ranges elsewhere, was very cool. Not sure how we’d pull that off at a real table.The Roles attached to every hero playbook. There is so much design packed into this bit of the game! Every Role is really a little mini-kickoff to their personal arc, either a thing they need to do to enable the role, or a thing that has happened that gives the GM stuff to frame around. When those interact with the players’ House choice, it’s pretty magical. So what’s that all add up to? 8 houses x 15 playbooks x 6 roles per playbook = 720 kickers? That’s kind of bananas.
In Conclusion
In the end, I think what broke me was that it was hard to care about the characters.
That’s a structural feature. The game purposefully breaks up big-picture and personal play. Players are incentivized to take, finish and move on from their Roles as the only path toward advancement. And they only get to advance four times, then it’s on to another hero of their House.
It’s hard to be a fan of an abstract organization. And while our shared history was pretty exciting, it’s hard for me to invest in “history” as its own end product, Microscope style. I was a little skeptical when we set out that the Houses are the real stars of the game, and it turned out they are. Which is not, it turns out, what we cared about the most.
I could definitely see fighting the game’s incentives and playing Shattered City in a slower, more expansive way. Setting aside advancement until you’ve fulfilled your role in good faith, rather than the one-or-so session vignette per spotlight character we went with. Treating the House moves in a more intentional co-GM way, perhaps. Like most long-form games, though, it’s hard to see myself getting back to them to apply all these best practices.
Shattered City is perhaps the most elaborate, difficult PbtA game anyone’s ever attempted. But if you’re willing to put in the work, maybe you’ll get 20 (or more!) sessions out of it too. It’s got nearly limitless space to expand a campaign into. But you have to be strong.
If you’re looking for additional thoughts on long-form play, I wrote about that in the recent past!
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