In the final weeks of Google Plus, a very generous patron backed the Kickstarter for Invisible Sun’s reprint for me. I promised I’d do a deep dive of the game, and the result has been my very deepest dive. Everything I’ve written about Invisible Sun is tagged here. This is my final post (available in rough draft last month to my Patreon supporters). What a ride.
We only played three actual sessions. Some of that was realizing Invisible Sun is a poor cultural fit for my table, some was the ongoing creative load of learning, prepping and running the game. We didn’t really get to close out any of the big loops of the game: nobody advanced in their Order, nobody completed an Arc. At the end I said to my players, “Either we need to commit to 20 more sessions of this, or let’s just call it here.” I still feel like we got a good look at what the game has to offer.
I’ve been keeping notes about the experience as we’ve played. The very short version is this: Invisible Sun has a lot of interesting ideas that reach beyond conventional roleplaying, from procedural design to production values. It doesn’t build on the lessons being passed around in the hothouse of “indie” storygame design, though, so in many ways it’s still rooted in conventional play and facilitation.
Invisible Sun
Here’s everything that comes in the 35 pound Black Cube. Photo from Amazon.
You want it? Amazon has the best price on it, but you only get the accompanying PDFs if you buy from Monte Cook Games.
Invisible Sun offers tons of great ideas and a few that are just not to my taste. Be prepared to do a lot of creative and organizational lifting, because the game won’t do it for you. But once you’ve spent the money, you may very well rationalize to yourself that the lift is worth it.
Character Creation is (Maybe) Too Much
Having been through creation now with two groups and then played a bit, I feel like the whole process is designed for trad players who fixate on “builds” to ease them into characterization. At my table, we’re more accustomed to storygame-style tight guidance toward particular characterizations and little consideration toward tactical builds. As we played the game, the players either needed to study The Key or just let me guide them toward tasty new abilities (secrets, spells, rituals, etc.) that narratively fit with what they’d been doing.
The character creation experience varied a lot between my players. Some really dug into long-term build plans, others wanted to see where their Arc decisions would take them. In every case, though, the characters ended up feeling like a random accretion of weird abilities without any thematic through-lines. The character sheets were no help, with abilities scattered across four pages. I think nobody actually remembered their Forte abilities, even though that is ostensibly the closest thing to a “class” you might have. Add to that your spells, ephemera, Order abilities, maybe even your secret Soul power. I’d prefer to see all that in one place, and I’d have definitely preferred a tighter thematic focus. This is the downside to the “you can build anything! No limits!” school of design.
All that said, though, the characters are undeniably interesting, at least in terms of cool abilities and their outward expression. Nothing’s standing in the way of rich characterization but nothing’s helping you get there, either.
Incoherent Opening
The opening scenario of Invisible Sun, that the PCs had been hiding in the Shadow from a reality-spanning war and returned to Satyrine after its end, is supposed to launch a whole slew of provocative, weird, yes surreal ideas at once. But it’s so provocative and weird that new players, upon their first exposure to the game, have literally nothing to hold on to. As one player described it, “it’s like grabbing at mist.”
A major component to this weirdness is the elaborate, multi-hour effort during character creation to generate a robust relationship map. You have bonds with PCs and NPCs, neighbors, and connections to organizations. It’s glorious and exciting and really embeds the characters in a lot of neat things. Will they want to advance in their Orders? Will their difficult neighbors cause problems? But when you stop, just for a moment, that social context can’t make a lick of sense in the face of the vislae living in the Shadow.
There are a few baked-in answers to those questions, hidden in the sealed GM envelope that has a bunch of answers. That’s fun for the GM – I opened that envelope immediately so I could let its answers guide me toward consistent hints – but it’s useless to the players. You have a Lovers bond with an NPC, for example: were you lovers before your time in Shadow? Are you lovers now? PC bonds are easier, I think, although even those come with historic implications that can be hard to reconcile with the opening act. What do the characters know, and when did they know it?
Invisible Sun goes out of its way to avoid answering questions that might otherwise be important: how long have the characters been back to Satyrine? How long were they gone? Who stayed back? What was life like? In our game, I went ahead and leaned into the player-level disorientation. They shook themselves awake in their own homes, with every sign that they’d simply drifted off a while and had a dream that felt like decades of another life. Meanwhile, the city they’ve come back to is in ruins and everyone around them acts like they’ve been gone a long time. It’s fun as the GM, but very hard to grab onto as players. Unfortunately this approach broke everyone’s starting Arc choice, which I didn’t realize until we started play. Retconning and negotiating and rejiggering took up a lot of creative energy, and not all my players had patience for that.
If I had it to do over again, I’d run the opening different. The sensible, reasonable solution is that their time in Shadow (and implied in the demo, We Begin At The End) was both long ago and not terribly important. But then what’s the point? I wanted it all and I couldn’t have it all. I’d also run character creation in a way that led to a more coherent sense of how the PCs are related and why they’re aimed in a compatible direction. The rules-as-written invert all that, putting PC bonds and the desideratum – that is, the thesis for why the characters are together – at the bitter end. It’s one more method of putting the players on their back foot and making them feel as unsettled and confused as their characters. I’m not persuaded that’s a functional mode of play, much less “fun.”
Author vs Player Tension
Invisible Sun has two prominent design features that conflict with each other. They’re both tied in advancement.
On the one hand, there’s a lot of effort to blur the line between the players and their characters. The character creation process is long and involved, an old trick to build investment. And the whole notion of a Shadow life very much puts you in a mind to think about being this magical superbeing living in a weird dreamland. And the end of session debrief, where you decide whether you (meaning your character, but again with the line-blurring) felt Joy or Despair about the big events of the game. That’s good tech. It reminds me a bit of how you evaluate your character’s emotional state in The Veil.
On the other hand, the Acumen economy relies on the Character Arc system. This is a strongly authorial tool. They’re a lot like Beliefs in Burning Wheel, but also subtly different. I think strong/”good” Invisible Sun play relies on the players being very hands on, and very entrepreneurial about engineering the Arcs their characters are on. We spent a good bit of time workshopping Arcs, contriving reasons to buy into the Aid a Character meta-Arc, even a bit of storyboarding into future sessions to line up good Arcs (i.e. what if we both go on a Romance Arc toward the same NPC?). That stuff is all very authorial. It’s also really hard to move between those experiences – what makes for a hot Arc, what’s interesting, how can we get in trouble? – and the behind-their-eyes stance the rest of the game wants the players to be in.
It’s an old, tedious conversation. Can you simultaneously advocate for your character’s success while engineering complications into their lives? I think you can, but it’s a lot of effort and it’s fraught with compromises and tensions. If the players don’t know what they’re feeling, they’ll get frustrated.
The Joy/Despair Reward Cycles Are A Mess
Following on from the Character Arc point above, let’s talk about Joy and Despair.
On their surface, these emotional economies a great bit of tech. We talk about our character’s feelings about big events in the session, and that keeps the players grounded in their characters’ experiences. I love it, it’s all good. But PCs start with a list of Joy and Despair flags drawn from their Forte and Order, and the GM is instructed to only pay once on each trigger. Going forward, there’s no advice on how to identify future triggers. But it’s a great way to pay the players for their characters’ setbacks. I think it’s a solid message as well: you need successes and failures in your life.
Once you’ve triggered your initial Joys/ Despairs, should they continue to be thematically tied to your Forte and Order? We tried that. But we’re also instructed that the GM can also hand out Joy and Despair for “other things.” Just like Acumen. There’s a cap to it, not more than one or two a session and an assumption that those are mostly from GM Shifts (reminder: in IS, the GM can take whatever you just rolled and throw it out, call it an unexpected success or a catastrophic failure – it works better than it sounds).
There’s something to be said for the open-endedness of leaving the expansion of your table’s understanding of Fortes and Orders to the players. That’s okay. But it never says so explicitly. I sussed it out myself, and it works okay, but this is a pretty easy paragraph that should have been included. Maybe I’m underestimating the general player population! Maybe everyone figures out to look at Forte and Order for thematic guidance.
There’s also the general issue of the only two recognized emotions being “joy” and “despair.” We stalled out after every session talking through the characters’ emotional states, because literally everything that can bring one joy might also arguably have brought you despair. Defeating and driving off a feral shepherd is an occasion for joy, but realizing an evil supernatural cat lady is loose in your neighborhood is cause for despair. Dunno, we never quite nailed that one down even as I was pleading, begging the players to give me reasons to give them tokens.
The Path of Suns is Close To Great
The killer app of Invisible Sun is, to my mind, the Path of Suns system: you draw cards from the Sooth Deck that both provide narrative inspiration and a little mechanical ebb-and-flow. I love everything about both of those things – in principle. In practice, it was semi-great.
On the divination side, 60 cards is a lot to internalize. I never got to the point where I could just look at a card and understand the vibe and imagery. There’s a whole system of connected images that’s tied to the characters’ Hearts, and that should have been a thing to think about, but I just couldn’t get it all into my head. Honestly, it takes folks years to internalize tarot as well. I’m certain there are groups out there who have done it. That said, I really liked having scenes inspired by the ongoing draws. Probably my favorite part of how the game actually plays.
On the mechanical side, yowza, there’s a lot of moving parts. It starts with needing to memorize the order of the Path of Suns because the color of the position you’ve played a card into doubles the card’s effect if it matches the sun color being enhanced by that card. Go ahead and read that sentence again, it’s a mess.
The game board and cloth versions of the Path do not label the positions, either, other than by glyph – one more weird thing to internalize/memorize. There’s a lovely poster that I had hanging up to remind us all of the color order, and maybe we could have just used that on the table, but it’s too big, even on a big table (we tried). I rolled out the fabric version because it’s quite lovely, but also a bit big. We ended up using the board, which also had the four suits (mysteries, notions, secrets, and visions) and their symbols printed around the edge.
Anyway, the mechanical impact of the Path never felt like it really mattered that much: the level of a spell might go up or down, and you might get a bonus to your rolls if your Heart is ascendant. If the card’s enhanced sun is played on its matching position on the path, it’s an even bigger bonus. Face cards had even bigger impacts, but there are six of them across four suits: 24 of the 60 cards are face cards, and they come up too often for my taste (regular tarot has 16 face cards of 78 total, as well as the Major Arcana, which isn’t a Sooth Deck thing). It meant the odds of colors mattering is close to even. But it’s all stuff you have to track! The card that ends up in the hand statue matters most, because it’s in play longer once you’ve cycled through the first eight draws.
Short version: divination good, mechanics fussy and irritating to me.
Development Scenes: Fun But (Maybe) Impractical
I discovered pretty early on that the idea of the development scene – that is, where you have players work out their characters’ private scenes away from the table to preserve table time for scenes together – was more appealing to my players than actually doing them. Every session, I’d push and remind and cajole the players into participating. I’d usually get one or two to go for it. Otherwise, at least among my group of responsible adults, they just didn’t have any play bandwidth away from the table. That probably has more to say about our relative ages, families and workloads (and probably capitalism itself) than the idea of playing outside our Tuesday night get-togethers.
I found the creative process of writing out development scenes quite enjoyable, on the GM side. I have more free time than my players, so it was a fun exercise to piece together a full scene, draw a Sooth card, and interpret the draw into the scene. It almost always sent the scene a direction I wasn’t anticipating, which of course is the whole point of the exercise. Top marks, really enjoy it as a prep tool that’s fun for the GM.
The Motivation Sandbox
I wrote about this at some length before but to swing back around: a core conceit of the game is that the players drive the action by committing to Character Arcs. It’s a very neat idea, very storygame-y, and it’s even got some interesting economic teeth to it. The biggest bite it takes is that the player has to buy their way into an Arc by committing Acumen, one of the two main advancement currencies. I think the idea is that if you’ve got skin in the game, you’re motivated to earn those back right away.
I mentioned above about the tension between the character-level play and the author-level workshopping this system creates. Another part of this is that Invisible Sun lends itself to slice-of-life play. Like, the point of showing up and playing is to bump around inside of Satyrine, feel like you’ve escaped to this marvelous, weird place. But what it doesn’t lend itself well to is a focused, intentional narrative for everyone to hook into.
There are certainly some overarching themes in the game. There’s The War, which is the big cross-cutting secret I leaned on the hardest in our game. But that’s about it when it comes to joining forces to face a canonical bigbad. My players were okay with the slice-of-life play, but we also craved that central organizing principle. The desideratum, the session 0 choice the players make regarding focus, just isn’t very good at providing that focus. We chose “power,” as in the acquisition of power, but because of the nature of the game, everyone’s power is on completely unrelated tracks. Vances do Vance things, Goetics do Goetic things and so on. Occasionally you can contrive the PCs to stumble across a cache of ephemera (single-use magic items) or a way to learn a bunch of Secrets (rule-breaking abilities) together. But mostly, thematically, the gathering of power for its own sake is both narratively empty and diegetically incoherent.
That said: if you’ve got players who are in for a relaxed-pace, sprawling story about a slice of life in a weird place, this game very much delivers on that. I’m not sure I’d want to play it for less than about a dozen sessions, just to see some Arcs play out, pick up new ones, and just watch the characters evolve as its own reward.
Smaller, less ambitious Arcs seem like the place to start in the game. The players don’t know enough about the system to set down big flags, but they need Acumen. The Foundation step of character creation has good “small” Arc ideas that help the players settle in, but we didn’t stick to that advice and our game suffered for it, I think.
Another facet of Character Arcs that became apparent is that they can serve as a spotlight dial. In some cases, the mechanical outcome of an Arc might be identical to the mechanical outcome of simply spending an economy for a new skill, spell, secret and so on. At first I thought that if you wanted to buy a new skill (say), you had to take on the Arc. Turns out that’s not necessarily the case. If you take the Arc, you’re giving yourself more Acumen earning opportunities in return for a delay in buying the advancement. Taking the Arc also obligates the GM to thread it into the ongoing other threads of the game. Basically, if the player wants the Acumen and is willing to wait, it gets added to the foreground. If they don’t, it can be a background thing. That’s pretty good. It came up a bit in our game, and every decision was different.
Does a Premier Production Result in a Premier Experience?
Okay, the big question everyone is asking: Is Invisible Sun worth the money?
I mean…yes? No? It depends entirely on your relationship to money. Do you have extra to spend? Do you need to extract maximum play value when you buy a game? Do all games need an ROI? Does all the non-play time count?
But besides the money, let’s talk about the actual product.
The four hardback books (seven total with expansions), I ended up digging these. None of them were too long, they were pretty easy to pass around, and I knew what was in the core four. Finding specific items was sometimes hard (helped with a searchable PDF), but browsing was terrific, just terrific, because of all the little hyperlink-style page/book notations in the center column of each page. There’s also some of the finest fiction writing you’ll ever read in gaming. It was a genuine pleasure going through these the first time.
The Sooth Deck was weird, beautifully produced, and kind of impractical in some basic ways. The big one, and this feels so nitpicky: it’s hard to shuffle round cards. Also kind of tricky to decode what’s on each card without a copy of The Gate in my lap all game long. The art is gorgeous and evocative, but the game-specific details are very small and hard to read. The six-fingered golden hand statue came out every session because it’s Peak Ostentation, and it’s semi-hard to get a round card to sit in the hand when necessary.
The big character sheet portfolios are not easy to read at the table. Also everyone gets another big sheet of paper to track bene pools in eight buckets. And almost everyone has other reference stuff they need: the Vance has another identically sized sheet, the Weaver has to have the effect-by-level sheet at hand, the Maker has the Maker’s Matrix, and so on. Then you have cards for all the general spells and magic widgets in the game. And if you’re using them, players end up with lots of props to manage. I have a big table and it was never quite big enough to accommodate everyone’s stuff along with the Path of Suns board in the middle. And because everyone’s abilities and Arcs and whatever else are scattered, it’s hard to just look and know what you’ve got. I feel like the folios are nice to have on your person, maybe, if you just want to browse them.
Then there’s the props. I passed quite a few of these out, I even bought a $7 pack of little decorative keys to hand out as wicked keys, but I’m not sure anyone really cared one way or the other. The “Welcome to Satyrine” trifold should probably come in a five-pack, not as a one-off item. But, like, fake business cards? Sure, those are cute. I suspect my players felt a bit self-conscious receiving these, though. And it was just more stuff to stay on top of. I enjoyed the theatrics of handing them out, but I’m not sure any particular prop stood out afterward. I never got to use anything in the prop kits (two sets of PDFs, font files and .pngs) to make in-game handouts.
The box itself is physically unwieldy once you’re playing the game. I had it splayed open on the floor next to me, and still had two drawers of materials (chits, cards, and so on) precariously balanced and a folding side table to hold the books and other bits and bobs. Every session made me feel like a greedy corvid sitting in my nest of stuff.
Three hundred-ish American dollars gets you a lot of stuff. The very prettiest edition of Dungeons & Dragons runs about half the unmarked-down Black Cube. Does Invisible Sun promise twice the fun? That is really, really up to the players who invested in it.
I’ve chatted with folks the past year that have played more than a hundred sessions of this game. They adore it, they love the puzzles, they haunt Discord servers to pick apart the game’s mysteries. I’ve also read some of the most godawful, vicious slags against Monte Cook Games for having the temerity to produce the most expensive RPG in all of gaming. These are games, among the most frivolous purchases you will ever make. I have a very hard time accepting that any game is overpriced. Most of them are indeed badly underpriced for the labor involved.
Should you go out and get yourself a copy of the Black Cube? That’s entirely between you and your wallet. For the right players, I could absolutely see years of play emerge from it. The design work in the thousands of cards alone is staggering. You could play for years and never see every Incantation show up (because vislae can get them for free, several times a session if necessary), or even a quarter of all the cards. For the wrong players, though, they’d end up spending as much as ten copies of Apocalypse World and end up with a game that’s functionally unplayable for their style and support preferences.
Thank You For Following This Series
It’s meant a lot to me. If you want to read my Invisible Sun series start to finish, here are the relevant posts:
- Coming Soon: Invisible Sun as a Game and Social Artifact
- The Key
- The Gate
- The Way
- The Path
- Setup and Session 0 is A Lot
- Session 1: Prep Never Survives Contact With the Players
- Session 2: A Motivation Sandbox
- And then this one.
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Paul,
I’ve been keenly following your GM adventures with Invisible Sun and have to admit that I’m a little bummed out that you only played three sessions, but, like you said, THAT PREP and YOUR PLAYERS!
I bought the PDF only version of the set on a Black Friday deal at drivethrrpg.com for $25, but printing up a couple hundred pages of cards is a hobby all into itself. I was secretly hoping your deep dive would tell me if my investment of hours and hours of printing all the game components was worth it. (Although I do feel vindicated when you said the details on the Sooth Deck were hard to read. I thought it was a problem with my ink-jet, and wound up rewriting all the info much larger by hand with a gel pen!)
What I’m very curious about is when you say, “(Invisible Sun) doesn’t build on the lessons being passed around in the hothouse of “indie” storygame design…” what indie “lessons” do you think would’ve made stronger? And are any of these “learnings” elements that could be added without basically turning it into a different game altogether? That’s would be in addition to your other suggestions, such as figuring out character connections first; maybe writing or painting in the color of the sun on the Path of Suns (and making the Sooth cards readable); letting players be the ones to determine if events gave their characters Joy or Despair; and somehow making the character builds more thematically uniform?
Thanks,
Larry
Hi Larry!
Thank you so much for reading the series, it’s really nice to hear from folks.
First off: I’m also bummed. Well…half of me is bummed. Half of me is a ridiculous novelty-obsessed goober who drops games way too fast in search of the next high (and stuff to write about, a nontrivial concern now that I’ve got a Patreon going). But half of me would have been pretty satisfied slowly exploring the world, just kind of live inside it for a while. My players are much less flexible in finding the fun in games, though, and they prefer storylines with action and twists and through-arcs. IS can get there but it’s a heavy, heavy lift the whole way.
Okay so INDIE LESSONS. Stuff/techniques/ideas I think would have helped the game:
Hope this is helpful,
p.
Howdy everyone! How’s your isolation going? Today was the first day of having my daughter home, figuring out some homeschooling/unschooling strategies for the upcoming weeks. We’re taking a break, so let’s talk about 2016 in indie RPGs.
This was the first year I couldn’t track everything coming out. Kickstarter became the primary funding/marketing venue for gaming, at least in my world. I stopped neurotically tracking every update to every backed project, which means I stopped paying as much attention to chitchat out of designers. All but one, that is.
If you’re following this series or want to go backward from here, the 2015 edition is here.
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
Blades in the Dark
The flagship of the Forged in the Dark design platform.
PDF and book available via DriveThruRPG.
2016: Blades in the Dark/Forged in the Dark
Honestly, I had a hard time deciding what year to plop John Harper’s Blades in the Dark. I backed it on Kickstarter in 2014 and didn’t receive the final book until 2017, but it was 2016 when I started playing from drafts released to backers. I never play games from playtest drafts, but even early looks at Blades showed me there was something interesting there.
The short pitch, in case you’ve somehow you’ve never heard of it: players play gang members in a spooky steampunk city. The focus is on the shared enterprise of growing the gang, with trope-enforcing playbooks and cinematic caper rules supporting that. The system itself feels like a mashup of Apocalypse World and Burning Wheel, a trindie game more on the indie side of things.
I’ve written a lot about various Forged in the Dark games over the years. I’ve played Blades, the sci-fi version Scum and Villainy that started as a stretch goal and become a freestanding book from Evil Hat, and most recently Band of Blades.
Is Forged in the Dark the next big design platform? There are certainly a lot of adaptations out there now! A few that jump out at me: Hack the Planet, Beam Saber (on Kickstarter right now!), Copperhead County, A Nocturne, and Brinkwood. This isn’t even close to comprehensive, just a quick list of what’s sitting on my hard drive. If you like playbooks, explicit negotiation with the GM about your effort’s fictional positioning and desired effect, a party-focused orientation, and fun mini-games that handle downtime and your party’s shared enterprise (your gang, your ship, your family, etc.), it’s time to get into a Forged in the Dark game. The original is a safe place to start.
2016 Runners-up
Invisible Sun
This infamously ultra-luxe production from Monte Cook Games
was first funded on Kickstarter this year. It’s raised a lot of questions! Does
a premium product deliver a premium experience? Is it wildly overpriced or is
the rest of the market wildly underpriced? Is a game this big really “indie?”
This is my first runner-up because a very generous patron backed the reprint of this game for me the following year, after the initial release produced a lot of hype and noise and conversation. In a very real way, the Indie Game Reading Club blog would not exist without it. I started the deep dive into the Black Cube mid-2019, and we played the game itself both at the table and online, with mixed results. My Invisible Sun wrapup is here, with links to the rest of the series.
The Black Cube is cheaper on Amazon, but if you want the PDFs you need to buy it direct from Monte Cook Games.
Masks
I had my first dose of actual play the year before Brendan Conway’s Masks came out, but I’ll list it here. Masks is a PbtA teen superheroes game, and it does superhero gaming exactly the way I want: focused on interpersonal melodrama, not the physics of interacting superpowers. I’ve put my time in on the Champions and GURPS style supers, I’ve played Brave New World, I mean…I’ve played a lot of superhero games. Which is funny because I’m not really a fan of the genre. But Masks gets me. Highest recommendation, even if you feel iffy about playing teenagers. The teen part of the game is more about their relationship with adults, rather than exploring their emerging personalities like in Monsterhearts.
You can buy Masks on DriveThruRPG.
Space Wurm vs Moonicorn
This dose of sci-fantasy psychedelia flew under my radar because of the name, but playing it blew my mind. It’s a layer that sits atop Dungeon World, and maintains that D&D-ish “fantasy party” vibe to a point, but mostly it’s about the extensive prep that goes into creating the world. SWvM is ostensibly built as a pseudo-competitive RPG – Space Wurm is trying to take over the galaxy, and Moonicorn is trying to get out from under the galaxy’s oppression – but really the good stuff is in the absolutely gonzo interplay of setting weirdness, playbook weirdness, and big scene-chewing melodrama. The game also comes with a self-contained one-shot version, with every move in the game explicitly on the playbooks. No common moves! It’s tricky for the GM to run because of that, but it’s a neat format.
I wrote a lot about SWvM back when Google Plus was my platform. I haven’t gotten everything tagged but here’s a good intro from my first session.
Get it on DriveThruRPG!
Coriolis
This Year Zero Engine sci-fi ship-crew game has an amazing setting, truly: generation ships head off to settle a far-off world, but while in transit instantaneous gateway travel is discovered, wars are fought over the gates, societies are trapped behind the destroyed gates and fall and rise over the next several thousand years, and then those generation ships arrive. It’s a very hot mix of Arabian Nights and Firefly and cyberpunk. And the production values are jaw-dropping. And I love the Year Zero Engine! But Coriolis was the first time I felt disappointed in the Year Zero Engine.
In doing something “different” for Coriolis, Free League messed with its dice mechanisms, introduced a “darkness point” economy that didn’t work, and broke action scenes into discrete “action points” that I found exhausting to engage with. I think we ran three or four sessions of this and ultimately felt disappointed in the result. Coriolis makes this list because it was the first time I realized I need to not fall in love with Year Zero Engine games sight-unseen.
Get Coriolis on DriveThruRPG.
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Thanks Paul!
Your thoughtful analysis has given me much food for thought and ideas for house rules, especially around character creation!
Now whether or not it’s a disappointment that the world’s most expensive RPG would need any sort of house rules is, I guess, a fair question, but my cost entry was so low I’m not terribly appalled. And maybe good GMs add house rules to ANY game, sometimes even unconsciously, depending on their players and the stories they want to explore…
Cheers,
Larry
Good luck and lmk how it worked for you!
Here’s what I’ve been reading this month. These are (relatively) short reviews! Ideally I’ll run these at some point in the future. Are you interested in seeing a deeper dive about any of these? Let me know in the comments.
Electric Bastionland
PDF is available at DriveThruRPG
Hardcover is available at bastionlandpress.com
Electric Bastionland
Chris McDowall’s Electric Bastionland arrived on Kickstarter with lots of hype from folks whose opinions I respect. It’s based on Into the Odd, one of many OSR games/frameworks, and I like to keep up with what’s going on in OSR-land, so I backed it. The author does a really nice job of laying out the game’s goal at the end of the book: “Electric Bastionland was written to be a roleplaying game that anyone could play.” Having gone through the whole thing a few times now, I think that goal is aspirational at best. Besides, literally every RPG is an RPG that anyone can play (other than the actually broken ones).
The book, as a product, is notable in a few ways: minimalist text (nearly every procedure and subtopic is broken down into bullet points), generous spreads, and starkly evocative art. It looks and reads differently than anything else on my shelf.
The premise of Electric Bastionland is that the characters came from failed careers, now belong to a party that owes someone a lot of money, and regularly get leads on heist-able treasure somewhere in or around a surreal city called The Bastion. The debt is specifically $10,000, which implies to me that you’re meant to play until it’s paid off. The someone is determined by the youngest player’s career.
The majority of content in the book is career spreads, and setting emerges from which careers (there are 100!) are in play. There are rough aesthetic guidelines for the various established locations of the game – the Bastion (a vast, ever-changing surreal city – I couldn’t help but think of Invisible Sun here, all the way down to the 1920s aesthetic), Deep Country (everything outside the Bastion, representing backwards-thinking communities), and The Underground (a meta-location filled with intelligent machines that connects the Bastion to everywhere else, including Deep Country and The Living Stars above).
My tl;dr is that Electric Bastionland is 90% aesthetic guidelines, 5% thematic guidelines, and maybe 5% (or less) rules. There are evocative bullet-lists for each major setting, and there are strong implications of how your Bastion looks based on the characters in play. A Bastion in a game with a Science Mystic, Masked Horrorist (wut), Tuk-Tuk Driver, and Traveling Show-Person is going to look much different than a game with a Disinherited Socialite, Lone Stargazer, an Underground Weirdo (how do you fail at your Underground Weirdo career?), and a Canal Nomad. If the creative challenge of making those things make sense against a (mostly) blank slate sounds like your jam, you will love this.
As far as structured play and play advice goes, I feel like there’s just not that much there there. This is probably my own preference for other schools of indie gameplay and design talking, I’ll cop to that. But I feel like Chris’ minimalist approach is too minimal for folks who aren’t already steeped in play, and in particular in OSR play. He nicely restates some big OSR play advice ideas: talking is better than rolling dice, keep asking questions, sneaking is better than fighting. But that advice is rooted in an even larger assumption: play is about characters overcoming obstacles in an environment created by contextualizing weird aesthetic inputs.
Is that model the most welcoming for folks who have never played anything before? Is an indebted Tuk-Tuk driver more accessible than an armed wanderer looking for trouble? Normally I wouldn’t even bother asking that question, but it’s a core goal of Electric Bastionland. I mean, it might be! Whatever additional social context exists among the characters, or the characters’ connection with wider society is entirely up to the taste of the players but gets no mention in the book. This is a game about obstacles, not situations. Other than the core situation of owing someone a lot of money.
There’s other rip-roaring rhetoric baked in, like “rules are false idols” and “this book is designed for the game table, not the library.” To his credit, Chris puts his money where his mouth is: the barely-there rules are easy to ignore so, yeah, you can’t go looking to them for answers. The big spreads and bullet points really are a nice way to take in lots of ideas quickly. Other rhetorical claims are harder for me to see in the game text: make the players feel welcome, break the barriers that stop you from having fun at the table, your table should be warm and inviting. All worthy goals, for sure, but nothing about the game itself gets me there.
Are “make impactful choices” and “be nice to each other” useful advice? It makes me wonder who needs this advice. Who isn’t making impactful choices? Who isn’t being nice to each other?
Liminal
PDF available at DriveThruRPG
Hardback available at Modiphius
Liminal
Paul Mitchener’s Liminal slid under my radar when it first showed up. In fact I had backed it on Kickstarter and, to my shame, un-backed. But I’ve got a retail copy in my hands now.
Liminal is about folks caught between the mundane and magical worlds in the United Kingdom. It’s not a universal modern fantasy game like Urban Shadows; the game is specifically a love letter to England that is diverse, proud, and loves its wholesome baking shows. It’s more Dr. Who than Danny Boyle in tone.
The holding environment of the game is the Crew, to which the characters all belong regardless of their background. Deciding on the Crew’s goal is part of the setup, and there’s not a pick-list to choose from. Instead, there’s some general guidance, things like being supernatural investigators, or fighting a shared enemy (there are many factions already baked into the setting), or working with a faction as a deniable asset. The Crew then takes on cases, which are all what you might imagine: investigations, helping folks, righting wrongs, cool supernatural special ops. Crew-making is its own minigame before the game starts.
The rules bit of the game is pretty trad with some trindie bits: skill tests against challenge levels with a chance at critical success or failure. That’s fine, functional, unremarkable. Happily he’s included specific rules about failure! I cannot fathom why failure rules continue to be special and nice, and not just an expected part of success/failure based game design.
Being a supernatural game, there’s of course magic. The list is pretty much what you’d expect: blessings and curses, illusions, and so on. Spells spend a fungible resource called Will, which everyone has and can regain by engaging with their Drive. It’s a very straightforward cycle.
What stood out for me was the extensive, flavorful take on Spooky-But-Not-Miserable-England. There are lots of factions at work in the game, everything from rich-family wizard schools to secret police departments working the werewolf beat. Probably half the book is dedicated to setting ideas and locations and critters and flavor, flavor, flavor. And the character concepts are spot-on for that Dresden Files/Constantine/The Magicians vibe, with academic wizards and knights from secret ancient orders and mundane investigators who have seen too much.
It’s a modest, attractively produced game filled with charm and clear, directed play. You could certainly piece together something similar on your own, probably, using Fate or adapting Urban Shadows. The killer app, I think, is for the folks (like me!) who have tried and failed to wrestle this game together out of disparate bits of World of Darkness games. It’s all in one place, crew management and case creation and a dedicated, narrow focus on those thing.
Vaesen
PDF available at DriveThruRPG
Hardback available at Free League
Vaesen
Vaesen, Free League’s newest Year Zero Engine game, features a 19th century monster hunter society headquartered in Castle Gyllencreutz in Upsala, Sweden. The setting is historical-ish; they’re not picky about when during the 19th century you’re operating. It’s the horse-speed travel, no computers and phones, the lack of all modern conveniences that’s important.The castle bit of Vaesen follows Free League’s formula for your party’s shared enterprise/headquarters, much like the Ark in Mutant: Year Zero. As the monster-hunting society advances, you “discover” new elements of the creepy abandoned castle you’ve inherited: a hidden library filled with occult knowledge, a fish pond that calms you before you head out to investigate a mystery, a Difference Engine to help with the calculations to add new stuff to the castle.
The monsters you hunt in 19th century Sweden are fairy-tale themed, drawn from Johan Egerkrans‘ book Vaesen: Spirits and Monsters of Scandinavian Folklore. There’s a slight Cthulhu By Gaslight vibe to the cycle of play, with special fear rules and long-term damage to your mental well-being, but the threats aren’t cosmic or existential. It’s an angry farm fairy terrorizing the family that works the land, a witch no longer respected by the community she’s always served and protected, a bridge troll whose livelihood dried up when folks stopped crossing its bridge. The Vaesen are monstrous, but they always have a human-caused reason they’ve crossed over from fairy tale to menace.
Character creation looks like other Year Zero Engine games: pick an archetype, pick from a series of 3-bullet lists, define a relationship with the other player characters, done. The pick-lists are nifty! You choose a motivation (a roleplaying guideline), a trauma (helps color the world as weird and supernatural, the event that gave you “The Sight”), and a dark secret (which earns you XP if you engage with it, and gives the GM something to poke you with). You also start out with a memento, which helps you recover from conditions. It’s nice, compact, straightforward.
Instructions to create the mystery you’ll investigate are thorough and detailed, from the inciting incident that draws the society’s attention, to atmosphere-creating advice, to the step-by-step list of what will happen. The investigation is not on rails, not exactly; it’s more a rough to-do list to remember to receive the invitation, prepare for the journey, describe their arrival in this strange new place, and so on. The detail level here looks terrific, very helpful if you’ve never put together an investigation game. And tables, so many tables. You can procedurally generate nearly every aspect of the investigation if you enjoy the challenge of piecing that together.
Vaesen is a squarely trindie game. If you’ve played other Year Zero Engine games (Mutant, Coriolis, Tales from the Loop, etc., you’ll get the gist of how the game works here. It’s a simplified system, like Tales, with just one “kind” of die you’re rolling with an opportunity to reroll, if you’re willing to take a condition (physical or mental, depending on which stat you’re rolling against). It’s not risky, it’s costly, and recovering from Conditions is time-consuming but not difficult. I don’t have a sense of how disruptive a Condition actually is, but I assume it really only applies during the scene in which you’ve received the Condition. There’s a nifty bit where low-level injuries give you a defect (a small penalty with a description), while very high-level injuries will give you an insight (a significant bonus, should you survive). Otherwise? It’s party based play with a GM responsible for prepping an adventure and normal adjudication duties.
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Part 4 of ? in the Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset series
My home group has been playing UFO Press‘ Shattered City the past several months. It’s a setting-intensive game where the collaborative world-building is a major selling point of the exercise. It’s not exactly in the same vein as Microscope or The Quiet Year: everyone still plays characters most of the time. But it’s more concerned about its (very weird) setting than almost any game I can think of since we tried Invisible Sun last year.
The two games couldn’t be any more different in approach to expressing their settings. Specifically, Shattered City lends itself to a storytelling mindset in a way that Invisible Sun doesn’t. It’s gotten me thinking about the function that world building, and engaging with built worlds, has in cultivating that mindset.
To Recap
First off, I want to make clear that when I say Invisible Sun’s setting doesn’t lend itself to a storytelling mindset, that’s not a diss. Not every game does, or should. This comes down to a very specific definition I’m working with when I say “storytelling mindset.” To recap: I’m talking about viewing play through the lens of story, with meaningful narrative through-lines, character motivations, and an authorial interest in play decisions. Playing with a storytelling mindset means making choices that are interesting and exploratory, rather than driving toward success or against failure.
On the surface, it seems like Invisible Sun should promote a storytelling mindset. Characters pursue personal Arcs and earn various advancement currencies along the way. (If you’re not familiar with the game, check out my big wrap-up article from 2020). The Arcs, though, are about incentivizing the players into pursuing plans on their own, rather than reacting to GM prompts. It’s a good goal, and my favorite part of the game. It’s an excellent on-ramp for trad players to get out of a beat-the-GM head space.
Meanwhile, Shattered City seems like it would be no good at all for a storytelling mindset: tons of canonical setting material, weird alien species, an incomprehensible backstory involving a sci-fantasy global catastrophe. But all that stuff is in service to very human concerns: the fallout of colonialist oppression, and life in a dense urban environment.
Looking at these two setting-intensive games side-by-side, I came to the realization that settings that promote a storytelling mindset for me have one thing in common: Relatability.
There’s a lot of weird shit going on here. And this is the relatable one!
A Tale of Two Cities
The thing we struggled with in Invisible Sun was that the setting and premise are so fucking weird that nobody understood why anyone does anything. The Arc system is post hoc rationalization: I’m going to Defeat a Foe (or Develop a Bond or Join an Organization) because that sounds like an interesting/fun way to advance. If you’re good at the game, you can get authorial with this approach: you can look at the vector and tempo of what you’re already doing, and gamify your own play. Out of the box, though, that’s not what my players felt. Nobody chose Arcs as a natural extension of the setting (super weirdo surrealism with a Big Secret) or the premise (you’re one of the Real People who has escaped the prison of “Earth” to return to a life of magic and privilege). The setting is filled with factions and secrets and little plot hooks, oh lord so many plot hooks. And none of it required or promoted a storytelling mindset to engage with. Again: not a diss, just a description.
Meanwhile, Shattered City puts relatable human concerns front and center. You play both a Faction and a character that represents that Faction. You build a world together from prompts specific to your Factions, and you build your characters already bonded together. And then, once play starts, everyone collaborates on various aspects of the setting as it advances through time: events from the (off-screen) war and how they’re impacting your city, what gross plans the current occupiers have in mind and who will be hurt by them, and so on. Finally, the GM designs a Crisis that represents a synthesis of inputs the players have created. The Crisis ties the whole thing together into a cohesive whole.
I’m not sure that the collaboration itself is what leads to a more relatable setting/situation in Shattered City, but it can’t hurt. I think it’s baked into the questions, and how the players work together to answer them. It’s a specific invitation to be authorial.
Players also choose what bits of the big picture they want to focus in on, and that’s got a powerful impact on relatability. Granted, focus tends to scatter a bit as each player grabs onto stuff they care about. In our game, I’ve got a player who loves to get out of the city, fight monsters, and solve problems. But everyone else comes along, and they’re still playing out the human concerns that have developed while other players are in the spotlight. I’ve got another player who makes every spotlight moment super personal and focused, and that drags my monster-fighting player back to the human stuff.
Let’s Get to the Practicals
Whether I’m trying to synthesize material from an existing setting or creating a fresh setting, it all comes back to relatability. That means:
Look for interesting tensions that already exist, or are strongly implied, by the canon. Like, in Exalted you’ve got the Solars and the Dragonborn in natural tension, but that’s all faction-level and not especially human. Sure, yes, the Dragonborn want to maintain power in the face of the Solars showing up again. And the Solars (as a monolith) have old beefs they’re remembering and acting on. But how do we turn that stuff personal, specific, and human?Factions are an easy gamer thing when you treat them like monoliths and/or sources for cool powers. But they can be useful storytelling-mindset resources: Rather than “X is at war with Y” or “A is scheming against B,” break down the relatable human incentives at play for belonging to a faction, in what ways an individual character might be at odds with the goals or values of their own faction, and how factions directly impact the lives of those around the PCs.When I scour a big canonical setting like Glorantha or The Third Horizon in Coriolis, I keep my eyes open for interesting human-relatable stuff in their histories. Guessing what biases and bigotries exist that the characters don’t even understand is the most relatable thing I can think of that emerges from history. If canonical histories don’t lend themselves to that, I get them out of my head as quickly as possible.
Prioritizing what to focus on when I build my own world, to maximize interesting tensions both on the GM and player sides, follows a similar path for me:
Find ways in the setting to highlight the tensions you find interesting. You want to feel out the choice between family and duty? Create lots of rules around family, and then lots of incompatible rules around duty. Make them perpendicular, sometimes. Do some cultures have different family expectations and rules? How is duty enforced? Stuff like that. All this starts by very intentionally working out the tensions you want to explore first, rather than just putting Cool Shit together and hoping interesting tensions come out of it. I’m gonna get into Cool Shit next.Try really hard to humanize whatever social groupings your setting will have. When I ran Imp of the Perverse, I set it in Alamo-era Texas. As I was setting-building, the “factions” that jumped out at me were the Mexican Army, Tejanos, white settlers, and slaves. I avoided hard lines like “whites and Mexicans never trust each other” or whatever. There were sympathetic characters and scoundrels on all sides. That’s just one example. I’ve found very hard, strict conflicts – supernatural good/evil morality, implacable existential foes – are the least interesting, produce no meaningful tension (because players aren’t given a choice in how they interpret the situation), and exist only to justify fight scenes.If you want history to be meaningful, look for the ways it impacts people’s lives today. That might be directly, like if the characters need to respond to a crisis, or indirectly, if your history has shaped attitudes, laws, or social alignments.
Um. What?
Cool Shit is Bad, Actually
Cool Shit will undermine and mislead your storytelling mindset. Don’t fall for it! What do I mean by that?
Badass powers/abilities/technologies: these relate to how characters achieve their goals, not why. The why is important. If you fixate on how characters do things, that becomes what the game is about: doing things, achieving, accomplishing. The why, the underlying motives of the characters, will necessarily take a back seat.
Set pieces/set decoration: places and things that look cool or are evocative are just mood boards. How does a cool place affect the people in it? How do the people reflect the cool/evocative place? If you meet a fast-talking hustler in a vast, magical, ever-changing library, the tension between the place and the expected personality is what’s important. What’s the fast-talking hustler doing in a place like this? Why would they be here? Why do the others in the place tolerate their presence?
Factions (agency/church/clan/secret society): I keep bringing this up because factions are such a common taxonomic feature in roleplaying games. What are a faction’s goals? How is pursuing those goals hard for the members? What’s the one thing that keeps everyone from backing a reasonable faction? Do they believe in reasonable things? If they’re accumulating power, what for? Factions are comprised of living beings with their own interests and incentives at play. Factions are not, themselves, people. Factions don’t want things, but their members will.
Conclusion
When I’m approaching a game’s setting with a storytelling mindset, the key feature I look for is relatability. Can I take the weird stuff in the setting and make it relatable? Does the setting lend itself to relatable tensions or is it fixated on Cool Shit?
Fixation on Cool Shit doesn’t have to be a showstopper. It just means you need to take the Cool Shit and find the relatable bits. Or force them in.
And a setting that already lends itself to relatable tensions might not be interesting to you or your players.
Relatable. Interesting. Tension. Gotta have all three. Many games only get to two at best.
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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:
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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Last week I hit the first three of too many games that have arrived, quite suddenly, on my doorstep. This week I continue working through the pile. I’ll keep going until someone stops me.
Apocalypse Keys
Apocalypse Keys is a PbtA-based game inspired by Hellboy/BPRD but over the years of development has grown into something much bigger, stranger and honestly a lot more fun. You play Omen class monsters working for a secret organization called DIVISION (it’s a complicated backronym) in a world full of magic, weird technology, parallel universes and all that. Omen class monsters have the capacity to become Harbingers, which are the big bads that threaten the world, over and over again. You won’t be surprised to hear that being an effective Omen class monster and beating Harbinger ass more or less guarantees you will eventually become the next Harbinger. And so the cycle of world-ending violence continues.
The mechanical innovation author Rae Nedjadi has introduced is that rather than the typical miss/soft-but-complicated success/success bands you get in most other PbtA games, instead you’re rolling a miss/success/oh-shit-you-succeeded-too-hard range. You do this by directly cashing in Darkness Tokens every time you roll. No stats! Sometimes you roll too well and/or spent too many Darkness Points and badly overshoot your intended effect.
Every playbook has its own method of generating Darkness. And if you hold on to too many of them after you make moves, you also probably do something bad. Oh and you’re also getting closer to becoming a Harbinger all the time by unlocking Ruin moves (think Corruption from Urban Shadows). The design is unsubtle and clear and eminently playable.
My big takeaway from looking through Apocalypse Keys is that it’s a delirious froth of exciting playbook moves designed for maximum chaos as they crash into each other. You’re either doing grievous damage to others and the environment, or creating melodramatic moments with those around you. Everything is dialed up to 10 all the time.
The campaign system involves unlocking the secrets of an as-yet-unrealized apocalypse by discovering Keys to understanding it. The GM prepares a Mystery Codex at the start of the campaign, an outline of some horrible crisis. But there’s no set answer, and the players will use their Keys to formulate a theory of how to confront the crisis through play. If they’re fast and lucky enough they can keep “the door” from opening. If not, they have to face the Harbinger behind the crisis, and then it’s a boss fight. There are five sample Mysteries and plenty of rules for how to create your own.
Looking forward to rolling this one out at a convention but it’s the kind of title I’ll bet will have a lot of tables offering it.
Blade Runner
I have been a fan of Free League’s Year Zero Engine for many years now. Our Mutant: Year Zero campaign was one of the best games of my life, Mutant: Genlab Alpha was pretty good, Twilight: 2000 is outstanding and I’m hoping to do a deep dive on it at some point, Coriolis is breathtaking even if some of its systems are wonky, Forbidden Lands is my favorite not-D&D adventuring party game, Vaesen is very promising (although my short experience with it was a little flat).
And then there are the licensed YZE games, about which I’m having a harder time getting excited.
To be fair, Alien: the RPG is actually a pretty fun romp. But what you get is a faithful treatment of the movie Alien and/or Aliens: either truckers or soldiers. The first priority is strong fidelity to the license, not necessarily providing the tools to explore the underlying ideas of the setting/license on your own. Their upcoming campaign frame, Building Better Worlds, has me excited all over again because yes I do want to see plain old colonists and science nerds freaking out and getting eaten.
Which brings me to Blade Runner: the RPG. As one of the biggest fans of the movie you will ever meet (and we’re getting thin on the ground as the movie and its fans get older and sensibilities evolve), I can imagine a pretty exciting Blade Runner game. I’m not sure the core rulebook hits the target that, for good or ill, I brought to my initial reading of it.
The killer app of the Blade Runner iteration of the Year Zero Engine is the parallel, sometimes competitive, economies of the game: Procedure Points and Human Points. Yes, that’s right, you’re either good at being a cop or being human. Like the movie, the game is by no means copaganda. (NB: If you think Blade Runner valorizes police, you’ve badly misinterpreted the whole fucking point and please learn some media literacy skills.) You get Procedure Points for getting clues, stopping crime, generally doing cop things. You get Human Points for human things: making connections, feeling things, and critically (if you’re playing a replicant cop, because the game is set after Blade Runner 2049) failing to pass your baseline test. And then you spend those points on different things at different times.
The rest of the YZE system is more or less the same as you find in Twilight: 2000 and onward. Oh and they rate things as “A/B/C/D” — just like in Twilight: 2000 — but they’re really d12/d10/d8/d6. I didn’t like replacing numbers with words in Fate and I don’t like it here either. Not a reason in the world, other than color, to do that.
Cop/human is a pretty provocative tool. (I’m gonna write more about provocative tools in the very near future!) But the rest of the book is 90% setting material, timeline, fake media and, sigh, some gun porn. There is a very slender chapter way at the end of the book that talks about how to create a Case File, i.e. a scenario. And that’s fine I guess. There are some random tables and a general structure, as well as excellent mystery-solving advice that says mysteries aren’t about putting together clues and solving puzzles, they’re about human interactions and consequences with the mystery as the backdrop. If everyone would get on board with that, that would be swell.
The fact of the matter is, is that the core rulebook is real thin on actual rules. There are some neat sections about Los Angeles in 2049. There’s a nice timeline laying out why Nexus 8s (the Dave Bautista models) are on the loose and why your team is tasked with hunting them down. It’s all there. But there’s just not much there there.
Then I get to the boxed Starter Set and man…I feel like I need to recant everything I just said.
Free League has been moving to this format, and I just don’t know what to think about it other than “I’m going to be so poor.” Their core rulebooks feel a little incomplete these days, because they assume you’re getting the Starter Set as well. I also felt this way about Alien: the RPG: the box comes with the dice and the cards and the tokens and the maps. You open up this delicious toy box and it’s like heck yeah, let’s go on a bug hunt! But without all those gewgaws? Ehhh…it’s a little flat. Twilight: 2000 I think was the beginning of this, although it’s only a boxed set. Going forward, I would not be surprised if this is just what you have to buy into if you’re gonna play a Free League Year Zero Engine game: plan on getting the box and playing what it comes with.
The Blade Runner: the RPG Starter Set is impressive as heck as an RPG production (but get the physical box, the cards and dice are worth it). There’s a condensed rulebook that contains everything except the setting material and “how to create a Case File” chapter. Honestly, it’s all you need if you’re gonna play the Case File it comes with. There’s a stack of cards, a stack of maps, some dope dice, pregens, props! I’m not exaggerating when I say the presentation is on par with Invisible Sun here. The table presence is almost overwhelming. And you don’t need-need the rulebook but also the GM kind of does for the setting and history sections.
While the core rulebook left me thinking I might maybe do a one-shot of this game at some point, the box left me actively considering a campaign. Electric Dreams, the Case File in the box, is the first of what I think will be a three-part campaign series (much like the campaign in Alien: the RPG). It’s an effective marketing thing and I kind of resent how it turns a $60 rulebook in a $110 investment if I want the “full experience.” Then again, I’m $220 in on Alien: the RPG at this point as well (the core book, starter box, colonial marines book, and the Building Better Worlds preorder that will deliver in October). It works. And I hate it.
Heironymus
Honestly? I didn’t know what I was getting into when I backed this Kickstarter. It is far weirder and cooler than I expected it to be.
Heironymus, by Laurie O’Connel and 12 Pins Press, is a Forged in the Dark-adjacent game about medieval people escaping an abstract, existential astral entity known only as The Follower. They do this by hex crawling through paintings by medieval painter Heironymus Bosch. I shit you not. Let me say it again: it’s a FitD-based hex crawl through paintings.
The contents of Bosch’s paintings are dense and weird, which honestly? I’ve seen worse sources of inspiration for OSR-style hex crawls. So yeah, if your band of travelers stumble upon the nun with a trumpet up her butt, that might be an actual and literal musical nun. In fact it’s probably just that, with whatever context surrounds how she might have ended up with this instrument inserted into her body cavity. Or it could be inspirational and symbolic. GM’s choice. But the game wants you to get real fuckin’ weird with it and just see where it takes you.
The playbooks, such as they are, are printed on bookmarks and have room to doodle in “moves” you can earn as you advance across these paintings. There are six — King, Priest, Artisan, Alchemist, Scholar, Poet — and they represent broadly medieval archetypes related to institutions, classes and authority in the European feudal state. There are four skills, there’s a simplified position/effect type evaluation, you can take a Devil’s Bargain to get another die, there’s Stress. It’s all pretty straightforward FitD. It’s just the weird and unhinged setting that really sets the game apart.
I have a long standing affection for Bosch. Here’s my ancient, bleached out print of The Garden of Earthly Delights, perhaps my first bit of home decoration ever purchased. Shout out to my fellow Gen Xers who will all remember Z Gallerie.
What struck me hardest about this weird and beautiful book is that there are very, very few art projects in this end of the indie world that are on par with the weird and beautiful work that’s so prevalent in OSR spaces. The only other one on my shelf that jumped out at me was Casketland, a PbtA-ish game that is intensely weird and personal and very artistic. Not sure it actually works! But it’s artistic and provocative. I wish there was more of this kind of experimentation in these kinds of indie games.
Next week: Avatar, Desperation and Claw Atlas!
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