Interesting Tension

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1. Thought provoking post- most enjoyable.

   Cheers,

   Pete.

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2. Part 2 of ? In the Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset series

   I used to work as a tour guide. The guy who owned the company was a Marine and an aspiring novelist. He had some amazing stories, as many thoughtful military folks do. On a multi-day through-hike gig, he was explaining how he was going to write his next story: “The hero is gonna be like me but, you know, way cooler and more competent.” Literally everyone on the trip, from the other guides to the guests, all shook our heads. Gritted teeth and everything.

   Nah, brah. That’s not storytelling. That’s…something else. Charitably, I think he was just ignorant about why we’re drawn to narratives.

   Everyone knows this, right? At least I had assumed everyone knew. This aspiring novelist friend just didn’t. Going forward (this was about 15 years ago) I no longer make that assumption, particularly among gamers. Especially among gamers whose play training has taught them to prioritize winning, even if that was never their play goal.

   Part 1 of the series was an essay for GMs/facilitators/MCs to think about narrative tension: how to find, apply, build and resolve it. So I’m going to talk to players next about how to cultivate a storytelling mindset on their side of the game.

   But First: Games Are Not Stories, Stories Are Not Games

   Here’s a big one I want to get out of the way, something I should have covered in in part 1. There are some important differences between conventional storytelling, and cultivating the mindset of storytelling to enrich or direct roleplaying.

   The big one, for me, is that stories are written by authors, who have a whole range of tools at their disposal that we (conventionally) don’t at a table. The most important tool in my mind is that stories – short stories, novels, screenplays, theatrical work – are written from start to finish, revised, and delivered complete to an uninvolved audience. An audience has a very different relationship with the work, right?

   By contrast, players have a very different relationship to gameplay than an audience does to a story. Not quite author, not quite audience, kind of both. There’s uncertainty in the outcomes, and alchemy in how this particular table of players’ inputs will combine.

   Okay. That’s out of the way.

   Characterization Is About Transformation

   Okay, so you’re a player and you want to cultivate a storytelling mindset. I would propose this means thinking about characters as being in perpetual transformation. Characterization is about transformation. That’s my assertion and I’m sticking to it.

   I’ve seen advice over the years to come up with a catchphrase or mannerism but that seem like the bare minimum, a quick coat of paint over your character’s stats and abilities. It’s garbage advice that has nothing to do with storytelling.

   The reason I want to talk first about stories ≠ games ≠ stories is that authored stories have a beginning and an end. They end eventually, at which point a character’s transformation is over. But since games ≠ stories, we need to think about transformation a little differently. We need to build in ways to make transformation durable. Hell, we need to make transformation perpetual if we go with the default RPG assumption that campaigns proceed “forever.”

   (NB: “Play forever” is a terrible assumption and I would argue the reason players treat a character as a tactical asset: this is my playing piece, and it gets more effective over time as the challenge escalates. And it speaks in a funny voice.)

   But what about comics and sitcoms? Yup, definitely, there are genres and forms where characters essentially remain unchanged. Everything they do is an expression of essentially unchanging character rules: Wolverine is a cynical smartass with a heart of gold, Seinfeld and Newman are frenemies bound by fate. I would contend that their characterizations are still about transformation! But only within the scope of an episode. Their transformations are temporary, and we return to the familiar starting positions at the end. That’s fine, and I would propose that intentionally leaning into that is a fine approach. It is, in fact, probably the default “how to roleplay” approach when all you have or want is mannerisms.

   Still with me? Storytelling mindset characterization in an RPG means having the capacity for ongoing transformation, ideally (but not necessarily) arriving at a clear finale.

   Internal vs External Characterization

   Here are a couple ideas to think through:

   Internal characterization is about the attitudes, beliefs, goals and emotions of the character. Everything inside their skull.External characterization is about how the character acts on those internal elements to change their world.

   Internal characterization is super interesting to me because there’s a necessarily blurry zone between the invented headspace of a character and the actual headspace of the player. Where’s the line? Is there one? Do you wind up your character and then let them toddle off on their own, playing in as principled way as possible? Are you ever really capable of being hands-off? Is every character really just a funhouse projection of the player?

   I don’t have answers for these questions and I suspect it’s different for everyone. Some folks are more able to hold multiple conflicting ideas in their minds, or being dispassionate observers, or strong advocates.

   External characterization is where the rubber meets the road. Your character believes in something just plain wrong (by design, so they can transform their beliefs), so what happens when they act on it? What about pursuing their goals, or bringing their values into conflict? How will they change the world, and how is the world changing them? (A topic for another day!)

   This is all pure storytelling mindset play and flies in the face of tactical play, so make darned sure the other players understand where you’re coming from.

   A Few Techniques

   Now that you’re sold on the power and purpose of storytelling-mindset character play, how do you do it? Here are a few approaches.

   A Litany of Flaws

   If you’re trying to characterize with a storytelling mindset, start by thinking about the ways in which the character is flawed. If you’re looking to bolster the character’s strengths, you’re coming at it from a winning mindset. A storytelling mindset can, I think, be described as playing to lose. But in the losing, the character is transformed and their flaws are transformed. Maybe not cured! But transformed flaws will certainly look different.

   First off, think through their internal flaws. Make sure however you’ve built your character’s internal landscape, it’s capable of transformation through play:

   Let them believe things that are wrong, like, factually incorrect.Put them in conflict with other characters’ values.Embed your character in their world: how do they feel about current events? What goals do they have relative to how their world impacts them?

   Next, think about the flawed ways characters can act in service to their internal flaws. Incorrect beliefs, conflicting values and setting-grounded characteristics will probably prompt you to play your character in a way that might look irrational, so make sure the players at the table understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. If everyone’s on board with a storytelling mindset, “it’s what my character would do” shouldn’t be a problem.

   Answer Questions

   One of my favorite characterization tricks comes from GMful games like Montsegur 1244 and Inheritance. In those games, the player is directed to work toward answering several questions about the character’s underlying motives and values. You don’t just, you know, answer them though. You spend time exploring the questions, by showing rather than telling.

   For example, in Montsegur 1244, the lord of the castle, Raimond, has three questions that direct his play: “Do you regret offering Montsegur as home for the Cathars?” and “Why is your left leg stiff?” (intended to bring his history into play) and “Who of your beloved ones is most dear to you?” (so you’re forced to think about how you relate to your family, and choose a favorite).

   In Inheritance, the priestess Gefjon has beliefs and goals (because it’s a distant relative to Burning Wheel): “My daughter will marry whom I choose” (to force action against another character), “I laugh at any fool who defies the Norns/Odin” (because someone else in the setting is gonna do that) and “I will punish the kinslayer” (putting her at odds with the patriarch of the scenario). Different approach, more goal-oriented, but still results in her transformation through play.

   You can do this in a plain old tabletop rpg as well. After character creation and situation/setting setup, most games (at least informally) have the players introduce their characters, right? I mean, that’s at least good practice. During that step, ask the other players what questions they have about how your character thinks, what they believe in, or what their goals might be. Don’t answer those things right away! Write them down, and come back to them through your play. Write them down not only to remember, but to solidify and commit to answering them.

   In those example games, the questions are carefully designed to generate maximum friction. That won’t happen at your table but it’s still a good exercise.

   If you’ve got a good sense of your game’s narrative arcs, or if your facilitator has identified that you’re ending or starting an arc, revisit your questions. Maybe you’ve answered them to your satisfaction? This is an internal thing that ideally you’ll express at the table (either through verbalized internal monologue or through your character’s actions).

   Purpose-Built Games

   Some games are built with character transformation already baked into gameplay.

   Burning Wheel is still, to my mind, best in class for transformative play. The interaction of Beliefs, Instincts and Traits (BITs) is incentivized with an elaborate currency: for being influenced by the BIT, or when BITs come into conflict, or when a BIT is resolved. The table regularly votes to give one another Traits (not always flattering ones!) based on how they’ve been played. Those Traits evolve into better, more mechanically toothsome benefits. And the GM is tasked specifically with challenging the characters’ Beliefs, which is a terrific, organic way to accrete a situation around the characters.

   Tenra Bansho Zero has an economic incentive for players to address and resolve Fates throughout a session. Fates are a lot like Beliefs, but in TBZ the goal is to churn through them fast fast fast. The vibe is melodramatic and occasionally chaotic, much like anime.

   Legacy and other games that derive from it are tuned to show off character transformation. The game is played both at a very high level to show the passage of time, and up close and personal to highlight moments of the characters’ lives. But they advance by taking on new “roles,” and after they’ve taken four of them it’s time to move on. So there’s both a structure and an incentive to come at the character in terms of transformation.

   Keys-based games like The Shadow of Yesterday, Lady Blackbird or Cartel offer a direct advancement incentive for playing toward the “Key” (basically a lengthy pre-created Belief), or a one-time larger incentive to refute/cash in the Key and choose something else.

   Other games come with clear end-points, allowing the player to charge hard toward a particular transformation with a satisfying ending.

   Apocalypse World was the first game I ran into that offered “retire in peace” as an advancement. It’s a direct refutation of the “play forever”/”play until the PC is killed” mold, and is surprisingly powerful in the hands of players who want to complete an arc for their character.

   Burning Empires has all the same good transformative stuff as Burning Wheel, plus a couple options for a clear endgame: either at the end of one of the three phases, or after playing all three. The game will end, and however the character ended up is how they ended up. You can play that intentionally or just step back and watch what happens when you’re principled about playing toward your character’s BITs.

   And still others are actively bad for this kind of transformative character play.

   Band of Blades I found hard to play with transformation in mind. The bulk of play is about getting through the campaign, and you explicitly don’t play the same characters from session to session. Each mission in the campaign is tuned with one or two playbooks in mind, and you’re as likely as not to be playing a recruit rather than your own character. Probably if you slowed down play and didn’t try to push a mission every session, there may be more time to explore character transformation.

   I find the overall mechanical vibe of Forged in the Dark games – the mission/downtime split, the emphasis on competency as the main advancement goal – to be not-conducive to characterization, much less transformative characterization, but I think that’s on me. The Stress mechanic of many of these games, in which your character is permanently damaged when they’ve gained too much of it, is transformative but also uniformly negative and itself immune to further transformation. Your character’s “reckless” or “unstable” or whatever becomes a mannerism, a shtick.

   In Circle of Hands, the players create a shared pool of characters and are prohibited from playing the same character twice. Formally it’s an interesting exercise in seeing what different “writers” do with the same character, but since there’s not much to go on other than directly observed play, we found it hard to create any sense of continuity from player to player. The internal tensions weren’t conveyed between plays.

   Read The Table

   Last thought: not all games work well with players trying to bring a storytelling mindset to their play. A game focused on tactics and overcoming obstacles is probably not improved by players working on their characters’ transformative journeys. I mean, maybe it can be! But that’s a table-culture thing. I would definitely not push an internal transformative journey at a table that didn’t agree to it.

   As with all storytelling mindset play, you can’t pre-play the outcome. That’s the main space between writing a story and playing a game. Playing to find out introduces risk and uncertainty, to both external and internal narratives. Lean into that uncertainty and let your characters surprise and dismay you.

   Part 3 of the series will be about how players decide what to care about. Because caring about things is central to cultivating a storytelling mindset.
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3. 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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4. Now that Blades in the Dark is several years old, we’re starting to see new games push the Forged in the Dark (FitD) envelope, not only in terms of the “scrappy heroes with a shared enterprise” premise but the underlying transaction of play. Off Guard Games’ Band of Blades was the first major departure from the model. Genesis of Legend/Jason Pitre‘s Sig: City of Blades (SCoB) is probably the farthest-out hack/adaptation yet. Certainly the farthest-out I’ve personally played.

   I just wrapped up a six session run at SCoB with some lovely folks online. Here’s what we found.

   Sig: City of Blades

   Available in PDF via Drivethrurpg.com

   TL;DR if your time is short

   If you love D&D’s Planescape, or the idea of madcap fantasy-gaming trope mashups, this is an earnest love letter that delivers that experienceThe rules have a lot of problems, a combination of matching the model to the premise, and pushing the design in so many new directionsIf you already know FitD games and are not doctrinaire about your rules, you can get a lot of fun out of this. But if you want rules that work out of the box, you’re in for a rough time

   I used Miro to run Sig online. New-to-me technique was to import PDFs into the workspace and run it all in one place: no Character Keepers, no online dice rollers. I liked everything about it except for clocks getting relegated to a corner. At a live table, making/marking clocks is central to the stagecraft.

   So… “Planar Fantasy?”

   Confession: I knew nothing about Planescape when I started digging into Sig: City of Blades. D&D is a blind spot for me after the early ‘90s, but I’ve seen lots of art and read stuff from folks who still love the Planescape setting and aesthetics. And I was charmed by Jason Pitre’s previous game in this setting, Sig: Manual of the Primes, built on his Sparks engine.

   First session or so, someone tossed out the phrase “planar fantasy” and all my players nodded like they knew what that meant. I can’t find a firm definition online. But my take, after debriefing with a Planescape superfan who signed up, is that it’s a combination of high-fantasy mashup and mundane city/real life. So: the cops are armed lizard men who love donuts. There’s a gigantic, terrifying dragon who’s an accountant in the city’s biggest firm. The gods (“Powers” in Sig) rely on the power of worship and will serve you cease and desist orders if you interfere with that.

   So that’s Sig. It’s inspired by Planescape’s Sigil, a city floating in “planar space” with literal physical tethers to three planes of existence. There are elemental planes, ideological planes, and conceptual planes. There are also portals in Sig that take you to any fantasy world you could dream up, so it’s a fun premise for dipping into different settings at a whim.

   In SCoB, Sig is a generation into semi-functional anarchy, ruled by a network of Factions in the absence of the Silent Regent. I’m told by Planescape fans that she maps to a character called the “Lady of Pain.” I’d imagine the absence of the Lady of Pain’s benevolent dictatorship is Sig’s greatest departure.

   The premise of SCoB is that the characters are a Crew of freebooters, who serve as the outreach/ activist/ adventuring arm of a Faction. But also the Faction’s leadership, allegedly, but that’s less obvious in the text. They’re scrappy up and comers but the Crews and Factions are described in, shall we say, aspirational language.

   This doesn’t have to be a contradiction. Probably because of playing lots of Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy, it was a fight to reconcile ourselves to this idea. We started by clarifying that Factions aren’t the same as city functions. So, like, there will always be a vast bureaucracy running Sig but the Paper Guard, a Faction, are currently in control of it. Should the Paper Guard be taken out in the course of the faction war at the heart of the game, the city bureaucracy will endure.

   Our players took the Order of Ashen Keys, described as “mercenary warcasters” in service to the Sage Collegium. Basically they’re a magical militia working for very aggressive librarians. They’re also in charge of the Faction that runs the city’s libraries. In our game, they went to war straight away with the Dustkeepers, who run the city’s museums. Basically a magical nerd fight.

   Epic battle between librarians and docents

   It’s fine, it works, but it took work to get out of the Blades mode of “scrappy up and comers” in a living city where factions are functions: the Bluecoats are the cops of Duskvol and will always be the cops, for example.

   A breakdown of Sig’s essential city functions would have helped. There’s an elaborate map of Sig composed of 48 Claims. The whole game is about seizing those Claims, but there are never more or less of them. A Faction’s Tier is limited to the Claims they hold, so if you’re Tier 2 and both your Claims are taken, you’re no longer a Faction. In any case, the map strongly implies the city’s functions, but it took some homework on my part to figure out what all’s actually happening.

   I still have no idea how the setting “works” as a realistic setting. The game doesn’t care, either, and that’s fine. It’s an “urban fantasy mashup” aesthetic, and its themes drive more toward conflicts between communities and power-hungry factions than pursuing one’s ambitions within a hostile sandbox setting (like Blades and Scum).

   The Rules: Ambitious, Broken, Redeemable

   We played six sessions, and every session featured a goodly stretch of talk about how to make the rules work.

   Some of this is due to the ambition of changing both the default holding environment, and a lot of changes to the FitD model of play. Some of those changes are super interesting, while others left us wondering what motivated the changes beyond novelty.

   The best and most interesting change to baseline FitD is in character creation. Rather than set playbooks, there are ten each cultures, lineages, and devotions. Every character has one of each, which grants stat ranks as well as possible abilities. This is all done for tabletop play via this extremely clever character PDF with invisible layers for each choice. Set your chosen culture, lineage and devotion layers to “visible” and bang, a bespoke character sheet. Very cool.

   To be sure, SCoB innovates typical FitD in lots of other ways. Player-facing stuff that jumped out at me, for those of you who already know Blades in the Dark or something similar:

   Loadout impacts the engagement roll: if you go light, you grant another die to that roll. I like the push-your-luck tradeoff. The downside is that your Crew’s equipment list features a tag system that isn’t explained in the text, and at least in our game the choices were frequently interchangeable. Loadout didn’t feel like an especially hard choice.There is no longer a “position/effect” element to actions. Effect level aggregates from a list of stuff like Tier difference, “controlled position” (a GM call), suitable/quality equipment, and how many 6es you rolled.Consequence level — minor, moderate, major — is a function of your current Stress, which accumulates in the usual ways (giving yourself dice, helping someone, resistance rolls). The rule, formally, is that the next level of consequence becomes available to the GM to inflict. That worked okay, but it just meant an ever-growing list to check against, and the GM having to take responsibility for the amount of pain inflicted. I kind of hate having to shoulder that responsibility. I tended to look at the lower end of the scale when things weren’t crucial, and the upper end of the scale when things were at their most tense.Devil’s Bargains are Planar Bargains in Sig, and allow you to reroll all your dice in return for taking a consequence. That didn’t work great for us, given how effect level is calculated. We drifted this a bit with “reroll any dice you want.” Also, rather than pulling from a set of smaller consequences like conventional Devil’s Bargains, consequences on offer for a Planar Bargain scale with the character’s Stress (like all consequences). Obviously you don’t want to make a consequence too steep if you want players to take it, but these Bargains did feel more punitive.There’s a Harm track that mirrors the Stress track, with effect level reduction being the penalty for running the track to “wounded” and then also 2 Stress to do anything when you’re “incapacitated.” When it’s filled, the character is eliminated.Factions accumulate Infamy rather than Heat, which is earned in similar ways to OG Heat (quiet to messy to catastrophic), but also when you seize a Claim. This landed weird for us, given you can definitely seize Claims very quietly. More to the point, the Faction needs Infamy to level up, either gaining a new ability or leveling up their Tier. I feel like the actual noise generated needed to be one source of Infamy, and Claim seizing needed to be separate from that. But that’s intuitive, based on watching the characters do two Missions with an eye toward deliberately generating tons of Infamy so they could quickly claw their way to Tier 2.Character advancement comes from missed (3-) rolls, Dungeon World style, on both action and resistance rolls. Each of a character’s three starting choices — lineage, culture, devotion — also come with a built-in Drive. In theory you can earn XP off your Drive when it “causes trouble,” but given the tight economies of the Mission phase, that just meant nobody bothered with their Drive XP except during downtime and non-mission roleplay. I drifted this to include “when your Drive sends the action in an interesting new direction,” and that brought Drives back into play during Missions. You can also mark XP for developing or ruining a relationship. There’s no guidance as to what that looks like. I’d guess developing a relationship could be a personal project clock during downtime, and ruining would be obvious in the fiction. Every character starts with two Relationships with NPCs keyed to their gang, resulting in good triangles right out of the gate.

   On the GM side, the changes were more profound:

   Every mission is strictly about seizing a Claim in Sig. The city map has precisely 48 Claims, so it’s a zero-sum game. And a faction’s Tier is limited to the number of Claims they hold, so to claw your way up you need to drag someone down. It’s an ugly crab bucket, uglier than even Blades.Missions have three clocks: Politics, Profit, and Peril. The Politics clock is chosen by the players during their mission planning, 4, 6 or 8 segments. If they complete the clock, they get 1, 2 or 3 dice to roll after the mission to seize the Claim. It struck me as kind of a marshmallow test for the players: they could totally do 4-segment missions, face far less wear and tear (mostly only addressable during the downtime phase), if they’re willing to accept 50/50 odds each time. The faster downtime cycle seems like it’d be a better bet, but my players were impatient and went for 6 and then 8 Politics segments. The players also choose the size of the Profit clock, which will earn them 4, 6 or 8 Coin if they complete the clock by the end of the mission. And if they don’t complete the clock, they still get 1, 2 or 3 Coin. Yes, that means calling for an 8-clock and then giving up on it still gets you nearly as much Coin as busting your ass to fill that 4-Clock. And when you’re ticking a Profit clock you’re probably not ticking the Politics clock: Profit is stuff you’re doing that’s going to earn you Coin: robbery, extorting or blackmailing folks, all that.The Peril clock replaces the conventional engagement roll. The GM rolls fortune dice, one plus one more for each freebooter with a “light” loadout (smart!). You get a 4, 6 or 8 segment clock representing a major tilt in the action. You still set up other clocks the normal way in the game both for things you’re trying to accomplish as well as looming dangers, but the Peril clock is supposed to represent a big shift in the mission’s focus. It didn’t really work out, but it’s the compromise for giving up “position” in the transaction. The regions of the city containing the Claims don’t have any of the material you might expect from first-gen FitD games: no fortune die ranking of safety/wealth/crime/occult, no sample “notables.” Very broadly the city is broken into four social classes — rich and powerful, merchant class, working class (the tethers to the planes kind of standing in for harbors), and the poor underclass. Other than that, all you’ve got to go by is the Tier rating of the Faction that holds the Claim you’re going after. I didn’t have a lot to go on other than a bit of color text from the book, but that also meant there was room to improvise without messing with canonical setting stuff.The Planar Bargain thing is supposed to be tied to the three tethers (themes) hooked into Sig, but lordy was that hard. I’d let the players cook up some kind of thematic color explaining how their reroll was justified via Stone (strength and size), Shadow (imagination and craft) or Order (patterns and bureaucracy). This might be a practice thing. I wanted this to generate a few more interesting hooks for play but we couldn’t get there.There’s an explicit “Drama Phase,” that is, unstructured non-mission roleplaying time. It’s a small thing but it addresses a common FitD critique that there’s not enough room for roleplaying to breathe. The text also says you don’t have to be super strict about progressing between phases. We put that to use on several occasions, moving between downtime options (healing, personal project clocks, indulging in vices to reduce stress) and drama play. Honestly, I could even see bouncing between Drama and Mission, if everyone’s clear when they’re actively pursuing Mission clocks. It’s good, it’s an easy small change, and I could see using it in other FitD games. Mechanically, the only difference between Drama and Mission phases is that you can’t make resistance rolls during Drama play.

   Rules Problems: The Premise

   In actual play, we ran into trouble for one of two reasons: reconciling the rules to the premise, or interpreting text that pointed to earlier versions of rules.

   On the first one, reconciling the rules to the premise, we had a hard time with the aspirational language of the Crew chosen by the players versus the Tier system representing scrappy up-and-comers. When I asked Pitre about this, he explained that the Crew are also considered the leadership of the Faction. Honestly that doesn’t make sense either, and undercuts the freebooter vibe laid out in the text itself. There’s just a lot of ambiguity in the text, as written, about the difference between a faction and a crew of freebooters working for that faction, and whether they’re actually in charge.

   Sounds like they’re a scrappy crew working for a Faction, yeah?

   The Infamy rules were also tough for us to wrap our heads around. As I mentioned above, seizing a Claim gets you Infamy under the “epic and terrifying” category. But what if you were “smooth and quiet” while you seized the Claim? This is why I thought we should earn Infamy for both how they handled the mission, and what they accomplished. “Epic and terrifying” also includes eliminating an important individual. I do like that Infamy provokes a marshmallow test for the Freebooters, because they also risk less fallout from taking a lot of Infamy at once: you gain 6 fallout results minus the highest die, and you roll as many dice as empty Infamy slots. So you really do want to hit hard and early, rather than letting the clock fill up slowly and exposing yourself to many more rolls.

   Just like every other FitD game I’ve played, these various tools exist to let the GM calibrate tempo and tension. Clock creation, in particular, is still good tech. But it’s also all smoke and mirrors, and it only matters as long as the players agree it matters. There’s a real table benefit to smoke and mirrors, though: I wanted to speed up advancement for both the characters and the gang, so I threw down far fewer and smaller clocks than I would have in other FitD games. You could say SCoB just makes it more obvious that there’s not really much objective mechanical tension behind its systems.

   Rules Problems: The Text

   The other issue, when the text points to what I can only guess is earlier rules ideas, is harder to work with without being very charitable in your reading and interpretation.

   The Claim roll, for example, is written like you’re nibbling away at a Claim. So you’d take a smaller Politics clock if you wanted only a small nibble, and a larger for a big chomp. But in actual play, the Claim roll at the end of the mission is all-or-nothing. The rule works fine but the text describes something quite different.

   The three mission clocks, Politics, Profit and Peril, also feel like they started with one rules draft and ended up in another. In all cases, clocks advance based on effect but also on fiction. The GM watching the fiction to advance clocks is far more important in SCoB than it reads to me in Blades in the Dark. The importance of fictional clock advancement became apparent when I ran across the rules about how one progresses the mission clocks. Specifically, a simple (non-Clock) roll only ever adds one tick to a mission clock, regardless of effect level. To get more effect at once, you need to start a sub-clock for some bit of the Politics or Profit mission. In actual play it felt like inventing work for the purpose of the work, not in service to the fiction.

   There’s other stuff like that throughout the text. Pitre, to his credit, has released errata addressing what we ran into. Hopefully the print edition will incorporate as much of this as possible too.

   The Play: Freewheeling, Improvisational, Strange

   The best part of Sig, for me, is that it’s filled with provocative gaps. Very few “facts” but lots of hooks to grab onto. Character abilities, for example, are frequently open to interesting interpretations, which might make you crazy if you want tight rules text. Take this ability, from the devotion to Magdak, the will of the city of Sig itself:

   “Pattern Sight: Your service to Magdak forges links to the Divine Pattern of the Plane of Order. On a successful Reveal roll you can establish the connections between people, things, or events.”

   So…is that descriptive or prescriptive? Does “establish” mean “GM tells me” or does that mean “I tell the GM?” We went with the latter, and it was marvelous and weird. Super wide-open Sherlock-y connection-making with an occult touch, inviting the player to surprise me with how things are connected. Marvelous.

   Everyone took the fantasy + mundane mashup thing and ran with it, which was great fun. The flashback mechanism, which remains untouched from Blades, is especially well matched for this kind of play too: “I broke in before the mission and placed stun sigils everywhere” fits just as well as “I gossiped with the dragon accountant’s secretary at the bar.”

   My method for maximizing my fantasy palette was to open up fantasynamegenerators.com to its “fantasy races” tab, and then generate a few names to grab as necessary. Given there aren’t meaningfully deep cultures at play in Sig, I could open my brain up to free association and let the listed races prompt the fiction.

   This whole style — and I assume “planar fantasy” in general — needs early and eager player buy-in. I don’t think it’d sit well with the folks who want deep, consistent cultural development underpinning the city’s workings, or a more serious style. It’s mood-board play, which normally I’m not into, but Sig: City of Blades helped me accomplish a fun time with that style.

   We played the game for several sessions, so the game can work. But we needed to be flexible and charitable about reading the text, and frequently apply previous FitD experience. If you know how a typical Blades in the Dark job’s tempo should feel, it’s pretty easy to map back over to Sig’s clocks and Stress countdown. SCoB’s novel takes on old systems resulted in a less-different play experience than I expected. Mostly things just felt a bit looser and easier for the characters, and then suddenly much worse as Stress imposed spiraling consequences that demanded resistance, and therefore more Stress.

   Last Thoughts

   You know what Sig/Sigil reminded me most of, once I started really digging in? Invisible Sun of all things. I mean it makes perfect sense if you know Monte Cook was responsible for both Invisible Sun and a huge swath of Planescape, especially Faction War, the final book of the Planescape setting. Both settings feature a sprawling surreal city filled with incomprehensible strangeness, ruled by Factions with inscrutable plans and methods. It’s a free association exercise underpinned by an aesthetic that welcomes mash-ups and contradictions. Themes of living in a strange city in a blend of strange cultures, everyone having arrived in the city from elsewhere (I’m not sure anyone is “from” Sig so much as having arrived from another plane or prime world), and an occult thread running through everything and subject to occasional upheavals (the Path of Suns in Invisible Sun, the tethered planes in Sig).

   Sig: City of Blades is in an interesting design space between PbtA style games that provide no/little setting other than what the players come up with in Session 0, and FitD style games with extensively developed setting materials ready to push back against the players. It feels lore-intensive — planes and primes and tethers and powers and factions — but when you get there, there’s no there there. The game offers tons of affordances to grab onto and improvise around, but the players need to know the affordances exist. It feels like a sandbox environment with the promise of interesting exploration, but the players find they’re responsible for their own discoveries.

   As a love letter to Planescape, I think the game succeeds. As an evolution of the FitD framework, I think it’s ambitious but decidedly mixed. Hopefully future FitD-inspired designs will keep pushing the envelope.
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5. If you want to clarify to yourself the things you love about roleplaying games, play a session of your minimum viable game. Start with as blank a slate as you can manage and feel for the missing pieces.

   There are a few games that excel at completely improvised roleplay, but the list is shorter than you think. There are lots of “generic” RPG systems or platforms out there, but in most cases there’s still prep to be done: working out stunts in Fate, spec’ing out opponent values in GURPS or Hero, whatever. I recently got to play a couple games of Mana Project Studio and Fumble GDR’s Not The End, which was a fine example of this minimum viable game genre.

   Not The End

   Not The End

   PDF available at DriveThruRPG

   Hardcopy available through Mana Project Studio

   Sometimes you just want to wing it, you know? Particularly at a con: I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get a bug up my butt and I’m like, “I could really use some space horror right about now.” Or “time travel, awesome, but man it’s a hard genre to just improvise around.” You didn’t prep anything, didn’t want to prep anything, you just want to sit and play a game with some friendly strangers.

   Not The End, from Italy-based Mana Project Studio and Italian podcast Fumble GDR, has turned out to be outstanding for this kind of play. It’s also most definitely not for everyone. It’s close to a perfect Rorschach Test of a game, the absolute minimum to provide prompts and structure to your play and hardly anything else.

   Not The End’s central trick is that to test your character – you run tests at the usual time, when something is risky and the outcome is uncertain – you draw from a bag filled with colored stones. The GM sets the test’s difficulty (how many GM stones are going into the bag) and danger (how many of the GM’s stones you need to draw to be taken out of the scene). Then the player looks over their traits and also throws their stones into the bag. The player, knowing exactly how many of the GM’s and their own stones are in the bag, then decides how many stones to draw, from 1 to 4. The decision doesn’t have a fictional position. The point of the exercise is to make the player feel the danger, weigh how much they want to do something against how dangerous it is to even try.

   If you hit the danger number of GM stones, well, you’re out. But you only need to draw one of your own stones to succeed. Mostly you end up with lots of “yes, but” type outcomes. A single player stone means success, with additional stones providing either additional benefits to the success, or a marker on a trait they used for a future bonus. The player decides how the GM stones they drew get used, either assigned to “adrenaline” (the next draw you make will be four stones) or “confusion” (tally up the total number of stones in the bag, the GM randomizes the colors, and then you draw), or handed to the GM with an instruction to receive a Misfortune (a negative trait that will drop more GM stones into the bag when the trait impacts the action) or a Complication (the GM introduces a twist that increases the difficulty or danger of the situation).

   One fun twist: if, after you’ve drawn the number of stones you’re committed to but want a better result, you can call the whole thing “risky” and automatically draw a total of 5 stones. Then you give the GM their stones, who then gets total freedom to do with them as they wish.

   So lots of push-your-luck, a fun player-facing bit of tension that reminds me of Epidiah Ravachol’s Dread (and later, Alex Roberts’ Star Crossed) with the Jenga draw, and tons of free-wheeling characterization around character traits.

   The Character Hexes

   Character sheet from one of our not-Jurassic Park games, before terrible things started happening.

   The bag-building push-your-luck system is the most novel bit of the game, but character creation is worth talking about as well. You start with an archetype, a broad short description of your character based on the premise you’ve agreed to. We played a “go investigate a rescue beacon that’s been set off on not-Isla Nublar where a not-Jurassic Park catastrophe took place decades ago” premise, so the players picked things like trail guides, scientists, trophy hunters, and hackers as archetypes. Easy enough.

   The next ring of hexes around the archetype are your Qualities, adjectives that describe your archetype. And then finally, the outer ring is Abilities, specific things your character is good at. If you look at the sheet, you’ll also see that many Abilities have pairs of Qualities connecting them. The idea is to be inspired by interesting or surprising match-ups of Qualities: you might be “Cunning” and “Frightening,” and those things point at “Interrogate” as an Ability, as one example from the book. The connections mean nothing mechanically, but they prompt interesting thinking around how to describe your character.

   Not The End isn’t the first game to feature freeform trait creation, of course. And to make the most of a game like this, you need to want to be constrained by your traits. It’s all too easy to weasel your way into anodyne phrases like “Driven” or “Brilliant,” thinking rightly that they’ll be useful darned near every time. But that’s pretty boring to play because you’re gonna go back to those easy choices over and over. I think for competitive players, Not The End isn’t a great tool.

   That said, talking out your traits at a free-wheeling table can get everyone on the same page. As a pregame conversation starter, I thought the character creation process was a fun exercise. But sometimes it can be hard to calibrate just the right adjective or verb, something with an interesting texture that can be useful but not every time.

   Not The End has a slick little advancement system as well, and you can even make it fire off in a one-shot environment. At any time, you can declare a test you’re about to make is “Crucial” before you make it (they recommend once per session). Then you make the test and change something on your character sheet to reflect how the test played out. You can add another trait to your hexes, you can swap a trait with something that better reflects how your character has changed, you can take a Scar (kind of an anti-trait that gives the GM a stone in the bag, but also gives you a place to put drawn GM stones), or learn a Lesson. I love the Lessons! It’s a deck of 54 cards with special game-changing rules, three lessons per 18 different themes. Might be a new hex for you to put a stone in for some benefit, might be some change to the normal rules. I dealt random Lessons out to players for our one-shots because they’re fun toys to have available.

   What About Long Term Play?

   I don’t have direct experience with how Not The End may play out across sessions. The character advancement rules are exciting to me, and I do think with the right table you could see some interesting evolutions happen. One trick I keep thinking about is how you might add a couple Abilities and later backfill the Qualities that point toward them. Or you might make meaningful edits to your traits that just feel good at the table. But none of this is aimed at making your character “better.” It’s all about adding texture and description.

   If I were to run Not The End in a long-term game, I would look at stricter lists of Archetypes, and possibly Qualities and Abilities. Or perhaps make Abilities contingent on particular Qualities, and make Qualities contingent on certain Archetypes. You could easily hack out something like a playbook/class system with this! And you might end up with a more clearly defined set of Traits that vibe right with the tone and style you want to play toward.

   Being able to tune your tonal range is a strength of a freewheeling trait type game, but it inevitably runs up against the players who want their characters to be better. Everything is a tradeoff in games, and this is no exception.

   The Stories Book

   Coming from a graphics-intensive publisher, Not The End is gorgeous in PDF and I assume will be just as gorgeous as a physical artifact when it delivers. But there’s a second book for the game, Stories, which looks even more lavish.

   Stories includes 15 settings/scenarios/premises. I worked from the Evolution Island set for my test games, and it was … okay. Not great! I never quite understood whether we should be leaning more toward survivors on the island during the dinosaur catastrophe, or many years later returning to the island. I mean, it’s not a big deal, I made a call and adjusted accordingly. But all the scenarios in the book feel undercooked. In some cases it’s clear the story got edited but didn’t go through a final review, with missing NPC references or stubs of storyline just hanging out there. In others, you get a fascinating setting but no actual scenario. But it’s packed with interesting ideas, more colorful and weird than most anything else you’ll find on the shelf. And that’s another strength of coming up with your own Traits: whatever setup you dream up, you can easily come up with natural-language descriptions that just plug into the game and work.

   Forsooth! It is a mech and some knights. Still totally don’t get anime.

   One of the sample scenarios from the core rulebook has since been expanded into a freestanding game, Kickstarted, and is now available in PDF: Knights of the Round, an Arthurian-esque anime-style game featuring high schoolers piloting mechs. Yeah it’s as bonkers as it sounds. The Sax’on Empire is, apparently, the primary enemy of the heroic Bret’ons. Oh yes.

   Other Tools In This Toolbox

   Not The End is, of course, not the only way to improvise a session of play with minimum viable rules. Here are some others I’ve personally played, and how they compare to NTE:

   Archipelago

   In this four-player GMless (or “GMful,” if you prefer) game, players decide on a premise – the assumption is a journey between two places, not sure why – and figure out how to break the game up into four broad areas of authority. When I played this, we told the story of a rolling ultramarathon across the country and the misery the runners were going through to finish. So we broke the game up into things like “the road,” “the weather,” “the other runners” and “the race officials.” Whenever we had a question come up about those things, the player in charge provided an answer. The game is mostly driven by cards with random prompts, as well as a set of ritual phrases to nudge folks toward or away from certain outcomes (for safety or creativity reasons). Easy, affordable, I always have an Archipelago deck in my con go-bag.

   The discussion of how to divvy up narrative duties feels creatively related to working out the traits (archetypes, qualities, abilities) in Not The End. In terms of actual play, Archipelago requires more collaboration than Not The End but also requires the players to share at least some understanding of the scenario or premise, since there’s no authority figure there to provide canonical answers.

   Primetime Adventures

   In this GMed game, the conceit is that you’re playing out a TV show. Everything in the game is framed in TV terms, with the GM as Producer and everyone taking a character in the show. The premise itself is what makes the game so wonderful for pickup play, assuming you’re dealing with folks who have ever watched television. The game’s core economy revolves around Fan Mail, little beneficial tokens you pass around for cleverness and principled character play. Like Not The End, Primetime Adventures features free-form traits, and all the strengths and problems those entail. Truly one of the most innovative of the previous generation of indie games.

   I think the big difference here is the metaphor of play. PTA is a TV show, with all the abstraction that comes with that. It uses card draws to work out resolution, and that felt to me less like the Jenga-like experience of the player manipulating their own risk-taking threshold. It’s also quite exterior-focused, if that makes sense, because of the TV show metaphor: how do scenes look, what actors are present, what does the show require? Different than looking at your character’s description and working out how they perform from that.

   Fate Accelerated

   This extremely stripped back version of Fate also features freely created traits (called Aspects here) and a little ecosystem of Fate Points that go either into manipulating the narrative through adding new scene elements, or paying players to invoke existing elements. Lots of fictional-positioning manipulation. When I’ve played Fate, it feels very much like the Aspect-creating bit of play is about directing the game’s camera, as it were, toward things to make them “important.” Fate also uses little bonuses called Stunts, which are combinations of a small bonus used in a specific situation. Stunts strike me as something an experienced GM would be able to quickly describe back to a player who had a vague idea, and not necessarily a barrier to a truly improvised session.

   Go Explore!

   Here are some others I have not played, but the IGRC Slack community brought up. If you know more, write back and tell me about it!

   UniversalisSimple WorldCartomancyArium: Discover (and Arium: Create, a worldbuilding side game)Vice & VirtueCharmPDQ

   So About That Rorschach Test…

   With nothing more than a handful of descriptors and a way to inject unexpected outcomes into unresolved moments, here’s what Not The End highlighted for me about my roleplaying baselines:

   It’s hard to get everyone on the same creative page under time pressure. Probably the toughest challenge of a literal “hey you want to play a summer slasher story? Great, let’s go!” event. Much to my chagrin, mood board GMing would probably help here.I personally like specificity because constraints prompt creativity. Of course it’s a continuum, extreme constraint just strangles everything, but NTE’s amount felt good. I’m also reminded that some folks naturally prioritize effectiveness over specificity, and that’s a tough circle to square.When I’m forced to improvise across many hours, my brain naturally either goes toward tropey cliches, or wanders so far afield into weird territory that all that “same creative page” nonsense I worked so hard for goes out the window. This is a place where I appreciate PbtA style moves or other rules that prod the conversation toward surprising places (and makes me sigh in resignation when those rules just further reinforce tropey cliches – turns out I’m already pretty good at that).Having some kind of randomizer at hand to inject uncertainty is good for me. I liked the visceral feel of the uncertainty as well, although the fact it’s semi-isolated from actual character competency feels a little weird to me. Not a show stopper! But it’s a distinctive style of play.Of the myriad ways to structure The Conversation of roleplay, I really do like prioritizing description over competence, adjectives over stats. But I also like the process of confirming that everyone at the table is there with me, or can quickly throw up a flag letting me know they’re not. Which, honestly? Is absolutely fine as long as I know. And a game like Not The End is quite good at highlighting that gap.Gosh is it nice to not have to think about how to mechanically balance threats. I’ve never loved the math side of trad gaming and all that it entails: does this threat feel dangerous? Will it straight kill the characters? Do I care about a fair fight or are we gonna let the players decide that for themselves?
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6. 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.

   If you just apply the tiny hex wrench correctly, you won’t have to call the store to figure out which move to take.

   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.

   Imagine yourself sitting at that table, no two chairs matching the rest of the decor. The horror!

   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.

   Bed, square bed, square brown bed, square brown bed with weird side edges, ah here we go…

   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.

   More engaging than a pure encyclopedic listing, probably expensive as hell to create from scratch for a mere RPG. Ah, nostalgia.

   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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