Second of three reviews from the latest convention

I’ve got a fraught relationship with Westerns. Specifically, it’s hard to keep the Western genre in my head separate from the history of the American West. It’s a long-standing thing going back to when I worked professionally in game design. It’s evolved into both “this is gross propaganda” and “but also I really like it” in my mind. “It’s okay to like problematic things” is defined by this very bit of cognitive dissonance.

Mix my love/hate relationship of Westerns with my love/hate relationship with Arthuriana and the Matter of Britain? It’s a dime sized target! That dime could land heads (aggressive revulsion) or tails (ecstatic delight).

This is the second of three weekly reviews from what I ran at RinCon: Inevitable by Zachary Cox, published by Soul Muppet.

Inevitable is an Arthurian-Western mashup about doomed knights standing by their oath to the sickly boy king whose death will mean the end of the magical kingdom of Myth. The knights are also cowboys, see, but not real cowboys who have to work ranches or run cattle drives. More itinerant gunslingers, wandering Eastwood-esque People With No Name. There are also sorcerers, bandits, holy folk, a whole passel of adventure-going types.

Setting and Premise

The setting is Myth, a pseudo-England with a pseudo-Camelot called Knightsholme as its capital. This kingdom is mostly a dusty wasteland, evoking the wide open vistas of The Searchers dotted with the lonely cursed towns of High Plains Drifter. There is a young, sick boy-king, an overprotective Queen Regent, an inner circle of Errant Knights and an order of semi-loyal Mystics. The knights have rune-carved six-shooters, and dusters over plate armor.

None of this makes much logical sense at all, nor is it meant to. It’s an aesthetic, a vibe, a fairy tale. There’s a small nod to rationalization via a third, under-discussed genre beneath everything else: the ruins of an advanced civilization with radioactive city ruins named things like Progress and Hubris. Wizard towers are actually old high-rises! It sort of works but it’s also beside the point. If you didn’t find yourself thinking too hard about Thundarr the Barbarian you’ll be just fine here.

The premise of the game starts from the principle that all prophecies come true. There’s been a prophecy about the boy king, whose death will mean the end of Myth. The knights are all sworn to protect the king, so Myth falling is bad! There are smart ideas hidden throughout the game about whether protecting Myth is actually worth it. The kingdom is very old and very conservative, a bastion of old-line nobility. Is it worth protecting a glorious past if it’s also a shitty past?

To keep Myth from falling, Errant Knights and their cohort do battle against one of several thematic Dooms. Each Doom is a villain, with servants off doing terrible things to hasten the fall of Myth. The Knights may eventually defeat a Doom! And then there are five others waiting in line.

Although the game is premised on the inevitability of the prophecy and the fall of Myth, there are a couple ways one could actually “win” against its fall. Whether you’d want to play that long is a question I want to dig into a little later.

Tone and Delivery

The writing throughout Inevitable is solid and frequently Arthurian. There are portentous statements in bold script, and tons of florid descriptions of locations, beasts and villains. The rules-y bits shift to a comfortable, clear voice. The entirety of the book is a pleasure to read.

The art feels largely Western-inspired, or at least leans heavily on the mashup element. Lots of knights in ten-gallon hats, saloons with hard-drinking magi, every kind of wacky steampunk pistol you can imagine. Native American imagery is nonexistent, which fits with the (spaghetti) Western genre on which the game draws. There’s a poncho in there somewhere I think. Not much else that gives either vaquero or French trapper vibes. It’s gunslingers with swords.

While the game makes virtually no effort at all to rationalize its aesthetic or grapple with deeply problematic American history, Inevitable does one thing thematically very well. It starts with the name of the place itself, Myth, and extends into the official capacity of Taleweavers to burnish the kingdom’s story and the reliance on Reputations as a measure of characters’ ability to act. It’s all about propaganda, top to bottom, and the role of story in cultural- and self-identity.

Westerns, as a genre, are the propagandist creation myth of the United States the way the Matter of Britain is the creation myth of Britain. That part is smart and good. Did this game combine those issues how I would have? Probably not! But that’s okay.

You can also just roll with the vibes, which are so front-and-center that they’re systematized in the game. There are very good guidelines on how to deliver unified aesthetic notes throughout, pick-lists of ideas and images, just a great broad palette of stuff to slather all over the place. Vibes-forward design has been a thing for some years now, but Inevitable has the best example I’ve seen yet of exactly how to do that other than looking at art and ignoring references in an appendix. A notable improvement over Orbital Blues, a previous Soul Muppet game with a similar vibes-forward design.

The System

Inevitable is structured around playing through a series of quests, each ending in a Showdown with a villain. It’s inorganic and stiff, and I know in a longer-form game I would strain against this by introducing side-scenes and downtime free-form play. But to defeat a Doom (i.e. the big bad at the end of your campaign frame), you need to defeat a series of Showdowns leading to this final confrontation.

Quests are broken into scenes, and scenes can end with a Challenge. Every scene’s Challenge is a one-and-done roll, ye olde conflict resolution like from the early Forge days! You build a die pool from your Reputations, single words chosen during character creation by which your character is known in Myth. You throw in more dice for equipment. Finally, roll the whole pool and evaluate it Forged in the Dark style: if any die comes up a 6, you win, and get a Showdown Token. On a 4-5 as your best die, you win and get a token, but also get a complication. On a 1-3 as your best die, no token, you fail, and face a consequence.

There is no formal discussion as to what a fictionally or mechanically appropriate consequence is, and it’s the single biggest weakness of Inevitable. Later, there are capital-c Costs that come along with a Quest’s final Showdown roll, but all that’s provided is specific colorful examples, not systematic guidelines. Inevitable could have used a page, or even a sidebar, of hard examples of consequences. As it is, the text literally says “anything is possible” and “GM and player agree on consequences together, until they settle on something interesting and appropriate.” Not great. Pretty exhausting in play.

The Showdown roll at the end of the Quest is different. Instead of relying on Reputations, the players pool the Showdown Tokens they’ve been gathering via other scene challenges, and reduce the Threat (ie the target number) of the bad guy they’re facing. Players can also gain a bonus to their roll – a single d6! – by accepting a Cost for their character. The harsher the Cost, the more it’s worth. “I die” might be +5, while “I run out of magical ammo and have to go find more” might be a +1 or +2.

Character creation is terrific, and I had a lot of fun cooking up examples of every character type for a one-shot I ran at RinCon. Every character has three Reputations: one for completing a great deed, one granted by a friend or ally, and one granted by a foe or rival. So you get a nice mix of glowing and not-glowing reviews. In play, you can only use each Reputation once before the Showdown and hope you get a token out of the roll!

The real meat of the characters is in their Abilities. The Errant Knight, ostensibly the leader of any Quest called by the king, has the least interesting Abilities but also carries the most responsibility. Mystics and Godsmen have access to a loose fictional-positioning type of magic, and so on.

As written, there’s no character advancement – PCs start at their peak! There’s an option to gain more Reputations or Abilities in return for growing the Threat of what they’re facing next. Seems okay. Taleweavers, one of the playbooks, also have an ability that grants and changes Reputations of other characters.

Lots of Blanks But You Can’t Ignore The Canon

One place I felt real tension was in the idea that you could run a game so vibes-oriented that you could create much of the setting unhindered – just barf forth lots of lonely plains and dusty main streets – while also internalizing lots of canonical NPCs, locations, history and Dooms.

There’s the royal family (three members), the Mystic Order (five plus six apprentices), notable Godsmen (three), the order of Errant Knights (a dozen!) and their squires (six more). Phew. There are also a dozen regions described. A half-dozen-or-so examples of big bad critters. Same number of magical artifacts. And the five Dooms and their retinues.

The kicker is that all those NPCs refer to each other as well. And every character type refers to a half-dozen of them, and all their implied interrelationships.

Reading through the first time, I thought “oh hey, what a nice selection to dip into as needed.” In practice, this doesn’t work at all. The setting is as lore-heavy as anything else I’ve ever run, because you really should know this stuff. The players will ask! You can’t make characters without knowing it!

It’s no Middle-Earth or Star Wars, but this is also my first contact with an entirely new setting. And while there are some Arthurian easter eggs hidden throughout, it’s not a 1:1 mapping. There’s sort of a Morgan Le Fay, there’s sort of a Green Knight, and so on. Probably because I came to the game loaded to the gills with the Matter of Britain after a years-long dalliance with King Arthur Pendragon and my own work on an Arthurian game, I spent a lot of time looking for the eggs. There aren’t enough to be useful.

Last Thoughts

As a one-shot, Inevitable was my favorite event of the convention. All three of my genre sweet spots in one game? Westerns and King Arthur and Deep Fallen Future? Could not ask for a better mix.

Despite the exhaustion of negotiating consequences of each challenge roll, the game moved along okay. One-roll conflict resolution is an older but decent and fast idea, but you don’t get a lot of texture out of the resolution. Using FitD style die pools to generate yes/yet-but/no outcomes is probably as good as conflict resolution gets, but you’re not accumulating lots of little fictive bits or managing resource burn — other than the fact you can roll each of your Reputations only once per quest. My suspicion is that if my abiding love of my Big Three Genres up there ever ran dry, the system would provide very little inspiration.

That said, there’s a lot of good material in Inevitable to draw on, but to draw on it you gotta read it and give yourself time to synthesize. I do love to read and re-read canon-heavy stuff sometimes. And sometimes I just wanna make stuff up on the fly. The system doesn’t give me much, the setting needs some time to percolate, but you could always just fall back on an Eastwood movie and fill it with undead.