IGRC Global Operations had gamer visitors from California recently. We knew we’d be playing something while they were here, but we never quite nailed down what it’d be. So over beers, Phil Lewis’ Lavender Hack was suggested. I read it years ago, probably during the pandemic. Challenge accepted! It’s a fantasy adventure, how hard could it be?

Giving my brain an exciting problem to chew on right before bed is terrible for my sleep. I was up until 2 in the morning rereading Lavender Hack. Good reminder that reading for an overview is much different for me than reading to actually use the thing. I definitely skim through bits that are hard to parse in the moment (probably because I’m dozing off), but when it’s go time and I must parse the hard bits? That’s when the weird shit pops out.

Mad Sprint

Around midnight I finished my first read-through and I was like “This game isn’t gonna give me enough to run on its own.” Ran downstairs to my office and, half-asleep, got a little panicky looking over possible settings. Worlds Without Number? It’s great, but a lot of work for what would amount to a 3-shot. Perilous Wilds? Maybe, and it’s great, but it’s a Dungeon World campaign tool and not really tuned to Lavender Hack without work. Run one of the handful of OSR adventures I’ve got? Surprise reveal: I don’t have a handful of OSR adventures on hand. I have Yochai Gal’s Beyond the Pale — also not a 3-shot!

I landed on Michael Prescott’s beautiful Trilemma Adventures Compendium Vol 1. Such a pretty production. Intentionally bite-sized, comprised of dozens of one-/two-page dungeons. Comes with a setting! And beautiful maps! So I crammed for my exam, tried to sleep, woke up early to keep cramming and making notes, and proceeded to run this frankengame for 15 hours across three days.

Lavender Hack: a deepish dive

Phil Lewis’s Lavender Hack (2019) is his toolbox to run OSR material using systems pulled from all sorts of sources. In play, it feels like a version of Dungeon World that was designed in a parallel universe. After three sessions, Lavender Hack felt to me like one revision away from an indie OSR-storygame mashup that would have dominated had Dungeon World never been published.

The Whitehack bit of Lavender Hack is in the character classes. Rather than fighters, wizards, all that, you’ve got Strong, Deft and Wise characters. Those give you your hit die size, “core concept” and “background” tables to roll on, and a set of starting and advanced feats.

The Fate bit of Lavender Hack is how it uses Aspects. Your core concept and background each give you a colorful little descriptor. In our 3-day game, one Strong was a prize fighter and third mate on a garbage barge (who ended up starting with the garbage barge), another was the youngest scion of a barbarian king and currently a radish farmer. The Deft was an assassin of the Serpent Sisterhood and a mid-tier diplomat (???). All kinds of fun hooks to cut your apophenia loose on. Finally, the third aspect is your star sign, which comes with “domains” that are, you guessed it, Aspects.

Aspects and how they hook into the rest of the game are the killer app of Lavender Hack. The party (“company” in the game) pools its resources: Gear, Light, Food and Fellowship. Each is represented by a usage die, one of my very favorite tricks that’s shown up in Macchiato Monsters, Forbidden Lands, and Breathless games like Pandion Games‘ Substratum Protocol. The core idea of a usage die is that you roll the die each time you use the thing, and in Lavender Hack, if the die comes up 1-3, the die size shrinks. Early on, when you start with a set of d10s, the odds are pretty small that the die will actually shrink. But as the dice get smaller, it becomes almost inevitable. In Lavender Hack, you have to refer to an Aspect to justify rolling and adding one of these four shared resources. It’s sharp and opens up lots of design surface for amusing dice tricks (rolling resources with advantage/disadvantage, pairs mean something special, etc.). The usage die idea also shows up via weapon and armor wear and nearly every other non-resolution roll in the game.

The PbtA bit of Lavender Hack is the actual resolution system. You roll a d20 and add the suitable stat modifier (it’s straight six from D&D, 3d6 per stat, no rerolls, no crying). An 8+ is a weak hit while an 18+ is a strong hit. Natural 1 is a fumble and natural 20 is a crit. You can bump up your roll via the aforementioned resource dice, usually to nudge a miss into a hit, or a weak hit into a strong. Obviously if all your resource dice have dwindled away, there are times – usually near the end of the adventure – where the reroll just won’t matter. There are also tricks that allow you to decrease Fellowship to increase Gear (but only to a d6) or decrease Gear to increase Light (also only to a d6).

The downtime bit of Lavender Hack comes from all over. In play, it feels a bit like Blades in the Dark, Mutant: Year Zero, Torchbearer, or any other game where there’s a discrete slice of play committed to healing, recruiting, and performing actions based on what’s available in town. It’s on the GM to figure out how much free play happens during downtime – I tend toward “more than what the book says” in other games with downtime phases, and I think that’d work just as well in Lavender Hack.

The whole campaign starts by establishing a town, each character’s class providing a different table you roll on to generate locations. The locations provide downtime actions as well as little adventure hooks based on who the proprietor is. In our game, the flophouse was run by the prize fighter’s ex-lover, which prompted a whole fun thread about the local crime syndicate.

Finally, there’s a bit inspired by The One Ring’s breakdown of journeying, encounters, and combat: in Lavender Hack, there are very clever worksheets for Wilderness Travel and Dungeons. The Wilderness worksheet assigns characters to travel roles – quartermaster, scout, cook and guide – and then tracks food usage on a six-space circle of “watches” spent. You move your food die around as a marker and roll each time you hit the food symbol. Easy! Meanwhile, the Dungeon worksheet is all about burning down light, with a similar six-space circle of “turns” spent. Every cycle of 10-minute turns is an hour (tracked on another circle of “hours”), and then every four hours is in turn another watch. The whole thing runs like a Swiss watch. I loved this bit and how it helped keep everyone on the same page regarding time and resource use.

I assume many of the clever design gestures in Lavender Hack can be traced back to some other thing but I don’t want to make assumptions about Phil’s inspirations! For example, each session you designate a “spotlight character,” who basically takes the caller role from very old D&D. Besides making the final call about what the company is doing each watch/turn, the spotlight character gets referenced for both good and bad outcomes on various other tables. The encounter table you roll on at the start of each day on the Wilderness worksheet, for example, might give the spotlight character a special opportunity to pursue their personal Goal, while another table might target the spotlight character with particular badness. 

My favorite bit of design in the whole game, which I’ve never seen anywhere else: money is abstracted into Value that is tracked on your company sheet. Different quantities of Value must be traded up or down because it’s logarithmic: five Value 1 dots equal one Value 2 dot. You can only hold on to 5 dots at any given Value. Things cost a Value, not a specific amount of money. A sword might be Value 4, but that’s a single Value 4 use (or five Value 3s, or 25 Value 2s, and so on). Extra amusement: when you buy any single thing of a Value higher than the town’s Wealth, its Wealth goes up. That’s now your new cost of living just to walk into town. Fantasy macroeconomics, baby.

Everyone in Lavender Hack starts with a randomly generated retainer. In our little game, someone got lucky and pulled the shieldbearer. They’re the only Value 4 retainer! So the question becomes: are they worth more than five (Value 3) archers? That single shieldbearer will certainly eat a whole lot less, so there’s that.

Other stuff that looked very cool but didn’t come up in our game: a Court minigame, in which any and all “factions” in the game can be approached with offers of trade and pleas for help; a whole ocean-going minigame that looks a bit like the Wilderness and Dungeon minigames; and various larger cycles of town growth, local inflation, advancement and trade.

There is a lot to like about Lavender Hack. It’s very personal and quirky. The tables are full of odd entries. I happened to recognize and appreciate almost all its influences. It covers stuff I like to see addressed with rules that generate interesting and surprising outcomes, which is more interesting to me than modeling “fairness.” It’s also messy and occasionally opaque when it comes to less-used systems.

Combat, social encounters, the resource dice cycle, all that is great. Downtime though, phew. We spent most of our final day of play squinting at and arguing about just how you’re supposed to work it all. Advancement is premised on spending money in town, and there’s a pretty strict order of operations, but there were missing bits to puzzle out. What happens if the company can’t pay its cost of living? Are you supposed to give your town locations specializations right away or only after you’ve earned advancements for the town? Does leveling up depend on paying your cost of living or individuals buying things? Do your retainers get paid before the first adventure or is the first one free?

There is, happily, a new edition of Lavender Hack coming out that’ll apparently be more streamlined and polished. “In general I’ve leaned into a philosophical shift,” Phil says. “I think for the first version, I had a conceptual framework that was still more of a simulation, even though it had abstractions, in terms of ‘Light works this way, Food works this way, then you have to rest, then you do this for a dungeon, etc.’ The ‘add a resource’ to a test was kind of a novelty.

“In the new version, I abandoned even that level of simulation in favor of more abstract tools which interact with a narrative. Every player is in charge of a different resource, and they work abstractly, but they simultaneously drive events, twists, discoveries, and escalating tension over time. Players can add resources to tests -> they degrade -> higher chances of twists, events, and even discoveries.”

He says the new edition will be out in August. Sounds like it’s gonna be pretty different!

Trilemma Adventures: a shallow wade

Trilemma Adventures started as a series of one-page system-agnostic adventure locations (mostly but not entirely “dungeons”) featuring beautiful isometric maps by Michael Prescott he released via his Patreon. In 2019, Michael compiled them, added a sprawling setting, and put out one of the great unsung – well, sort of unsung; it did win a couple Ennies in 2020 – resources of contemporary fantasy adventure gaming. I met Michael at a BurningCon in NYC many moons ago, so backing this was as easy as breathing.

I needed to hang our game off something, so I printed off the player-facing setting map to let the players browse. Based on the various core concepts and backgrounds we rolled up during character creation, we landed in an area near, but not within, “The Borderlands.” Pure vibes. I really didn’t have time to study up on Michael’s setting (which I did read afterward, and it’s terrific), but it gave me a coast line, some terrain, and some place names. We established the town of Stonetide along the shores of the Mist River, just below the Strielwall Peaks et cetera and so on. Doesn’t take much to establish a sense of place, but it takes something.

I’ve never had a chance to actually use anything from the Trilemma Adventures collection because contextless adventure sites aren’t really how I like to run fantasy adventure. Honestly, I don’t really run fantasy adventures of any kind any more. But the old ways are easy to call upon no matter how deeply buried. 

Anyway, the GM-facing version of the setting map shows where various discoverable adventure sites are located. There’s a spot on the map called “The Halls Untoward,” but no adventure site by that name. Figured it was a typo for “The Haunting of Hainsley Hall,” a one page reverse-haunted-house (the ghosts are the clients, trying to get a human squatter out of their space). Turns out “The Halls Untoward” was a fan-made stretch goal available as a PWYW from DriveThru! It’s also a sprawling megadungeon, not what we needed for a couple sessions of travel and delving.

Merging the weirdness of Lavender Hack with the system-neutral-ness of Trilemma Adventures was pretty easy, but there was still a bit of work involved. Lavender Hack’s dungeon procedure, for example, is executed in 1000’ square foot increments, rather than per-room or per-turn. Like, given enough small rooms you could explore all of them at once in a single turn. Then again 30’ square rooms aren’t that big, so it ended up being about per-room anyway. This particular adventure was also light on fighting, which I personally appreciated but players do love to beat on monsters. So a little hand-waving later, near the end of exploring Hainsley Hall and getting scared by various ghosties, they got to deal with a giant rat, and then the squatter. And then a small band of ogres assaulting a nearby town.

So is Fantasy Adventure Good, Actually?

As fun as it was to spin up something so fast and so good, I still don’t miss fantasy adventure. Some of that is due to playing Dragonbane lately – such a nice break from facilitation, although I’m starting to miss it. Some is due to the labor involved in dragging character-driven play into the hex-/dungeon-crawling genre. Running and playing both these fantasy adventure games lately has reminded me how stakes-less these games can be. Problem-solving and goblin-smashing is fine but give me a reason I care about to be doing these things!

That said: If I wanted to run, say, a Worlds Without Number-shaped fantasy hexcrawl, Lavender Hack would be what I’d want to use (and not Kevin Crawford’s house system, which makes me sleepy). The resource dice cycle generated interesting play, the mixed-success stuff is fun, the town phase grind and choices are fruitful, and it feels at least as close to indie-flavored play as Dungeon World or Torchbearer. Plus it’s more customizable than either.