The Character Arc advancement system, one of the more notably post-trad mechanisms of this Invisible Sun game I’m running at home, has me thinking about flags. That is, the stuff the players share with the table explicitly as “yes, this, I want more of this thing.” It’s a fundamentally authorial tool. Anyway, our current game’s got me thinking there’s something fundamentally difficult for some players when it comes to staking out their own flags. And maybe something about modern storygame design that’s let the players off the hook.
Quick History Lesson
Many years ago, Forge-era blogger Chris Chinn identified a thing he called a Flag. The original definition was an “explicit tool to help the group communicate what they want the conflicts/actions/fictional events to focus around.” Great! More explicit communication is almost always a good thing at the table, yeah? Some great tech, like Beliefs in Burning Wheel, are Flags. I’d say Beliefs continue to be the best-in-class when it comes to capital-f Flags. They’re also notoriously difficult to nail down, particularly for players who are new to the game.
Why is this? Why should freely expressing what you want the game to be about be so hard?
Other games swing at Flags. Those PbtA-style games where setting creation is the bulk of your first session? Those choices are, or can be, Flags. Sometimes we don’t think much about them that way, maybe a choice just tickles us, but it’s still usually an assertive expression of interest.
Choosing your flavor of gang or crew in Blades in the Dark or Scum and Villainy, another kind of Flag. Kind of a vague one, though, since it’s just kind of a gentle nudge toward thieving or kidnapping or smuggling, whatever. The GM in those games still has a ton of authority to deliver specific job types but the expectation is that they’ll respect those choices.
Playbook and class choice is probably the earliest Flag tech, and it’s still pretty good – but only if the player treats it as such, and not as a tactical decision. I think there’s too much room to misinterpret a player’s intent based only on divining why a particular playbook was picked. Are you playing a Gunlugger because you want fast and furious combat action? Or because you don’t want to be fucked with? Different games mandate more or less specificity here.
This last example gets at the flip side to Flags, quickly and easily identified way-back-when: Sometimes players would pick a Flag for the purpose of directing the fiction away from something. Some kinds of Flag techniques don’t allow this: Beliefs are positive assertions about your play plans. Those are hard to neg. But others certainly do allow it, and the facilitator is stuck reading tea leaves.
But why wouldn’t a player just say what they want? Great question.
Flags are Hard
Swinging back to this Invisible Sun game, the players are tasked with designing their own advancement system. Players choose Character Arcs for their characters, and those can be either prescriptive or descriptive. If the player says “ooh, Revenge sounds great, let’s contrive a reason for my character to seek revenge!” that’s the prescriptive take. But if events evolve organically such that they’re naturally getting closer to an NPC, they might decide the character is on the Form a Bond arc. The economies are identical – you have to invest Acumen (one of the two kinds of XP) to buy into the Arc, and then as you progress through the Arc you get back that Acumen and more. But they come from different places.
I’m a big fan of this system. I think it’s formally clever and provokes interesting conversations around play goals. It’s not original to Invisible Sun as far as I can tell, though: both 7th Sea and Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish Granting Engine have similar ideas.
My players, though! Getting them to proactively, prescriptively stake out an Arc reminds me so much of the teeth-pulling, fraught workshopping of Beliefs in Burning Wheel games. I keep hoping someone will take the reins and aim their character toward something exciting. I keep reassuring and begging and pleading that, yes, you say it and I’ll do it. Invisible Sun is very much a player-driven experience, with the GM there to facilitate and support more than setting out exciting hooks baited with delicious chum.
(Side thought: are hooks the flip side of flags? Are they the GM’s flags?)
Flags as they were intended – explicit tools to help the group communicate what they want the conflicts/actions/fictional events to focus around – are hard. Why? Why the heck is it so hard for players to be authorial?
Scurrilous Speculation Incoming!
I keep orbiting around a few things that might be behind the difficulty players have with Flags:
Authority and Responsibility: There are so many cultural assumptions about who’s supposed to be responsible for various elements of play. The old “players run their characters and the GM runs the world” is tragically, systemically inadequate once you’ve played D&D, like, once. I assume many players have a real discomfort “stepping on the GM’s toes” if they’re from that play culture. Not only am I (only) responsible for running my character, I cannot be responsible for anything else. I don’t do authorship, full stop.
Credibility: Lots of layers here. The GM has credibility with the players, and each player has credibility with both the other players and the GM. Does the GM rely on you to do the thing you say you’re going to do? Will you do it in good faith? Do you fear your good faith efforts will be met with a failure to engage? Oh god, do you fear a bad-faith response? When it comes to setting flags, the GM has to trust that the player will actually engage with the thing they said they’d be doing. I think there’s also some synergy among the other players, too, when they trust each other to engage with their Flags.
Systems with explicit flags almost always attach an incentive scheme to them – chasing and achieving your Beliefs earns you Artha, proceeding through a Character Arc gets you Acumen, and so on – but if you’re not incentivized by advancement, those carrots are meaningless.
Interpersonal Styles: this one I see a lot. The player pushes the hardest and speaks the loudest usually gets what they want. If you’re workshopping Flags at the table, everyone needs to be mindful of this but it’s also, tragically, totally human. Some of us are more assertive or, less pleasant, aggressive than others. And our tolerances for those behaviors are all over the place. I mean, I’ll take an assertive player over a passive player over an aggressive player every time. My unicorn players are the ones who are assertive and also know how to step out of the spotlight.
I’ve set up games via email just to get past all the nonverbal cues. Shy or passive or just polite players can easily get stomped into silence in person. Then they’re not really putting out good Flag ideas, or ideas they’re comfortable engaging with because they went along with everyone else.
Failure to Invest: since Flags get set only in context with what the game’s ostensibly about – setting assumptions, system-incentivized behaviors, explicit and implicit themes – if the player hasn’t bought into those things, it can be hard to invest themselves in a Flag. Designing a Flag, submitting it for discussion, and committing to playing it, is a substantial personal investment. Hard to make the effort if you just don’t care that much.
I think quite a few players don’t want to have to care that much, either: if they can show up, flip their brains over to game-mode for a couple-three hours, leave and unflip their brains, that might be enough escapism. Tell me what to do and what to roll.
Airtight Holding Environments
Game design’s evolution toward ever-tighter, ever-more-specific holding environments take the pressure off Flags, I think. I’d go so far as to say that tight, specific holding environment games are a separate branch from Flag-setting games.
The last really specific game I ran was Band of Blades. Can’t get much more specific than that, yeah? The players belong to a fantasy legion of soldiers in a fallback action from an implacable horde of zombies commanded by an overboss and his minibosses. It is so specific, that there’s hardly any room for players to set Flags. You choose a playbook but then the missions you choose mandate which playbooks will attend. If you’re not playing your preferred playbook, you either create a new rookie (not many choices!) or pick up a rookie or soldier that was previously played. Everything is super interoperable, there are precious few Flag opportunities, mechanical choices are largely made in service to succeeding at missions rather than making an aesthetic or ethical statement. It’s probably one reason why the game was both very easy for us to play for a dozen sessions, and fairly unrewarding in terms of meaningful roleplay. Stretching out the sessions to allow more time between mission play might have given the players more chances to explore their personalities, but they’d still have not had Flags.
A game like Apocalypse World kind of tricks the players, I think, into thinking they’re stating Flags via their playbook choices and, possibly, hidden in some of the setup questions you have to answer. Lots of PbtAs have “what does your character care about” type questions but they’re notoriously easy to ignore once the action starts. The moves snowball, events spiral out of control, and pretty soon nobody is really thinking much about those early proto-Flags. They’re not necessary when most play is reactive.
Which brings me back to Character Arcs in Invisible Sun. The game has nearly no holding environmental at all: you’re all super-magicians recently arrived in a weird magical world that is recovering from a mysterious War that nobody will talk about. Now, go live your life.
That should provide lots of room to stake out your Flags, right? Arcs offer incentives to engage with them. But it’s so wide open that the players have nothing to grab onto. The players have to trust the GM to engage with their Arcs, but the GM also has to trust the players to engage with their own Arcs. The authority of the players to buy into an Arc is explicit, that’s good. But the game is so purposefully difficult to connect with that picking an Arc feels like shooting in the dark. Just pick, don’t worry about getting it right, don’t fuss over canon, jump out of that airplane!
It took us three sessions for folks to have at least a couple Arcs. I’ve started the actual GM-facing prep work of threading those Arcs together, which in turn strongly implies a bunch of setting material that’s necessary to provide the players with challenges. Because without any challenge, we could just narrate our way through these Arcs and spend all night shopping for new spells and powers.
Safer Flagging?
I’m not sure any formal Flag procedures out there actually address any of this, other than the ones with incentive schemes. And as I mentioned above, those only work for the players who are actually incentivized by those schemes.
Honestly, I don’t have many answers here. Authority, responsibility, credibility, interpersonal style and investment are all core to the rest of gaming, so it’s no surprise that collisions or malfunctions at any level causes problems. I guess my advice (to myself, mostly) is to look closely at all those things whenever anything weird happens at the table, but specifically when I’m soliciting solid, actionable creativity. Flags, in particular, I think shine the brightest light on players who might prefer less light. Less commitment. A gentler grasp on their own reins. It’s a matter of taste, in the end, and not all players might like it.
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Another game that handles flags really well is Legends of Wu-Lin. It’s very much a game about living in a world of mystical martial arts and power warriors, but you only gain XP, called cultivation in the game, by investing in the story, by telling the GM and the other players what things you are interested in exploring. You are even given points to specifically invest and engage with other peoples “flags’ (i forget exactly what they are called in the game) which encourages the group to take some of the heavy lifting off of the GM when it comes to tieing everyone together.
Sadly its almost impossible to find in hard copy, and I’m not sure its still available legally in PDF which is a shame, its a great game and deserved more attention than it received.
Very interesting! I think Aspects in Fate are another good example of Flags, especially combined with the Compel system. You’re explicitly telling the GM what kind of troubles you want your character to get into.
Another week, another year looking back at the 20-teens and what they brought to small press roleplaying. To recap the games I’ve focused on so far: 2010 was Apocalypse World, 2011 was Burning Wheel Gold, 2012 was Monsterhearts. All huge games. But 2013 brought one of my all-time favorites, which I continue to play today.
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
Sagas of the Icelanders
This is it, my favorite-favorite Powered by the Apocalypse game of all time. Serious, melodramatic, accessible.
The PDF is available at DriveThruRPG.
2013: Sagas of the Icelanders
Sagas of the Icelanders seems like it should be a weird little niche game. It’s early PbtA. It’s got some rough edges. It’s about Viking settlers making a life for themselves in a lawless, empty land. It continues to be my all time favorite PbtA game, even above Apocalypse World itself. I have written extensively over the years about SotI, but here’s my elevator pitch: it might be the best, most accessible subject matter for non-gamers to get introduced to roleplaying. Everyone understands family melodrama, and most everyone understands violent family melodrama. I introduced my wife and many others to ttrpgs via Sagas of the Icelanders.
The game’s killer app is a split list of common moves, one for men and one for women. It’s intensely binary, reflecting the values of the Vikings at the time, even while subverting that very binary via playbooks like the Goði (a judge/priest who can learn “women’s” moves like healing, magic and coercion) and the Shield Maiden (a woman dedicated to doing a man’s job and suffering at the hands of both the men and women who reject them).
Sagas also creates/demands the most amazing relationship maps. Here’s one from my 2E playtest I ran at OrcCon, February 2020.
It’s just so great. Games are quite intense and serious, the moves constantly push the women to be shrewish and manipulative and the men to be vicious and honor-bound, nobody ends up looking “good” but the drama is palpable. Designer Gregor Vuga is actively working on a second edition, which the game desperately needs. It’s not perfect, but I’ve learned to route around the game’s quirks.
2013 Runners-up
Torchbearer
2013 was a very good year for games with staying power. Torchbearer is Thor Olavsrud and Luke Crane’s love letter to old-school (but maybe not OSR!) Dungeons & Dragons, built on the skeleton of Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard.
What if you went dungeon delving not because you’re a great hero, but because you’re a dead-ender? Why would anyone go into life-threatening environments with a slim chance of finding enough sellable garbage to pay for room and board for a bit? That’s the Torchbearer angle. As part of this narrative deconstruction of B/X D&D of yore, your characters have Natures based on their culture, with much of the game maintaining a delicate balance of not too low (your character is alienated) or too high (your character craves comfort and safety). You also have a Belief and a Goal, big explicit flags you set to pursue the game’s various economies. There are all kinds of interesting procedural nods back to B/X-style play, including a hyper-detailed grind of light, food and rest, and an admonition to the GM to just Say Yes to players who come up with great ideas on how to overcome their obstacles.
I’ve run a couple campaigns of it and played several sessions at cons. It is consistently frustrating and fun, with fun just barely nudging out the frustration. Quite a trick to combine both overcoming obstacles and addressing situations: those are different play and design goals, and few games put them both under the same roof. Terrific game, and my favorite dungeon-delver.
Tenra Bansho Zero
Tenra Bansho Zero is a huge title in Japan, and translator Andy Kitkowski moved heaven and earth to translate it and bring it to America. It’s a hell of a smart design that does lots of weird things well: tons of manga/anime tropes (mecha and ninjas and sorcerers, oh my) are thrown together into one Rifts-like setting, players constantly chase and churn little melodramatic story arcs, an inverted NPC reaction table (you roll to see how your character reacts to an NPC!) and other cool little design gestures throughout.
The Quiet Year
The Quiet Year, a post-apocalyptic map-drawing game by Avery Alder that is kind of ttrpg-adjacent, opened my eyes to the pleasures of, well, ttrpg-adjacent play. I’ve had more exposure to The Deep Forest, a fantasyland adaptation by Alder and Magpie Games‘ Mark Diaz Truman where the monsters are spending a quiet year preparing their realm for the return of adventurers (ew, yuck, ptui).
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I posted the 2014 edition of my ongoing “Best of the Twenty-Teens” series recently. In it, I called 2014 “The Year of the Trindie,” which got me thinking about what trindie even means. There’s quite a lot in that space as I conceive it: conventional (“trad”) power and resolution arrangements paired with unconventional (“indie” aka storygame) solutions to long-standing problems. Or sometimes just nifty new tech.
It’s tempting to go looking for bright lines between categories of design and play. If you’ve been reading my blog at all you know I’m not here for that. I’m not going to define one game as “trad” and another as “trindie,” good grief. I’m also not particularly coming from “here’s a trad game with indie tech” angle, nor “here’s a storygame that plays pretty trad.” The cross-pollination is the point, not who came first and who deserves which bit of credit.
I’m unable to provide a perfect and uncontroversial history of these trends and designs. Sharing, stealing, and parallel development make it nearly impossible to know when an idea first appeared, or first appeared in a way anyone cared about.
In short, please read charitably and ask questions in the comments if you have ‘em.
That said: Here are some of my favorite things I’ve found in games I call trindie. If you find them, you might be playing a trindie game!
The Rules Get In The Way
I’ve used the phrase intentional design before and maybe it’s worth unpacking a bit more. This is the general trend I’m talking about: rules that purposefully create specific play experiences, and not just default to a “players try to beat the GM’s obstacles with a combination of capability and luck” frame. If you’re the sort of GM who prefers to present their story their way, new-school rules feel like they get in the way.
Personally? I love rules that get in the way. Rules can surprise me when I’m facilitating, which is both an exciting creative challenge and alleviates most prep. I’ve never had a good head for prepping with interesting combat or obstacles in mind, so those rules that are “in the way?” I’d rather put my creativity toward things other than balancing fights.
Intentional design shows up all over the place now and for various reasons: genre emulation, or strong emotional response, or enforcing tempo. Redistributing creative responsibilities in surprising ways. Gosh, even just to de-prioritize violence as the main way to get what we want.
GM Doesn’t Roll
The first game I ran into where only the players rolled was Apocalypse World. That does some interesting stuff, largely in that it leaves results in the hands of the GM, along with some guidelines (GM moves and principles). I don’t include Amber, Theatrix or Everway here because those games are entirely diceless. Fully diceless play accomplishes something different than GM-doesn’t-roll: the players generate external uncertainty and often make choices based on their rolls.
GM-doesn’t-roll today shows up in Monte Cook Games‘ Cypher system (Numenera, The Strange, No Thank You, Evil!) and Cypher-adjacent games like Invisible Sun. It’s also how all the Forged in the Dark games I’ve seen thus far handle things: the GM’s adjudication is constrained by the position and effect the player negotiated.
The cross-pollination works both ways! Under Hollow Hills, Meg and Vincent Baker’s work-in-progress about carnival performers in fairyland and solidly in the storygame end of the PbtA pool, hands the GM (the Mistress of Ceremonies, tweaking the MC role in Apocalypse World) the opportunity to roll dice for NPCs making common plays (“moves” in UHH’s frame). Storygames sometimes get re-tradded.
The Say Yes/Declare Intent/Let It Ride Triangle
One of my favorite bits of design I first saw come together in Burning Wheel was a three-fer:
Roll the Dice or Say Yes: frequently flipped (“say yes, or roll the dice”), but the idea is mostly the same. That is, only introduce uncertainty when uncertainty is interesting. It’s a reminder that the GM can and should say yes to everything except the most pivotal rolls. To use discretion rather than calling for rolls all over the place.Declare Intent: this bit requires the player transparently explain their goal to the GM. The action your character takes matters in terms of consequences, but intent and action are formally separate things. This bypasses lots of miscommunications, and helps the GM shape the final resolution.Let it Ride: You roll once and whatever happens, happens. No rerolling until the situation changes.
These three small bits came together in a way that transformed our very trad table: Transparently explain what you want to accomplish, the GM decides whether to just say yes to that or make you roll, and if you roll, it’s one roll and then it’s over until something changes. Together, those three rules stripped out tons of arguing and dumb, pointless rolling and rerolling, and made each time we touched the dice matter.
The Triangle shows up again in both Mutant Year Zero and The One Ring. The Triangle is a fundamentally different way of engaging with the rules than “when it’s your turn, declare your character’s action and roll to see if you succeed.”
The Triangle is part of a larger trend: explicit rules about when to roll. Many, many games never define when you’re supposed to roll (outside of combat). If you do a thing, you roll, right? Or whatever other culture you grew up with. It’s a direct refutation of “we played all session and never even rolled.”
Democratized Fictional Authority
“The GM runs the world” has been such an assumed structural requirement of ttrpgs that anything else was very nearly unthinkable for decades. Decades! What would keep the players from cheating? Who will think of the children?
It turns out the children are just fine, and distrusting your players is only elemental when competition to overcome obstacles is the core play experience.
Burning Wheel is the first game that comes to mind where declaring facts about the setting can be a player thing. Skills called wises let the player declare a fact, the GM determines how narrow, rare or otherwise difficult that declaration should be, and you roll to see if the character was right or not.
Player authority over the fiction shows up in quite a few places now. A recent one that comes to mind is the Loremaster role in Band of Blades, in which the player is responsible for inventing the history of the Legion and calls upon it now and again. The Loremaster also frames camp scenes, which is the open roleplay portion of the game.
Interlocking Economic Cycles
Many trindie games have experimented with incentives other than bildungsroman character advancement, where the players chase experience points or their equivalent and enjoy a steady progression in effectiveness in power. My favorite early exposure to this was how Burning Wheel offered several different economies (Artha) to incentivize players to engage with their Beliefs and Instincts, but engaging with those thing didn’t directly advance you. Instead, you had to use the skills you wanted to advance (not a new idea), with Artha being how you avoided catastrophic failure when you used them. To advance your skills, you must engage with obstacles that were mathematically impossible to succeed at without Artha.
My latest favorite indirect-advancement thing was, believe it or not, Godbound. Not only do you earn XPs in the usual way, but you also have to spend Dominion (your divine energy) changing the world. Succeeding isn’t enough, you have to go be godly as well.
Narrative Playbooks
Not only awesome at driving, but also holding lovers at arm’s length.
An interesting thing happened when Apocalypse World introduced the world to playbooks. They looked an awful lot like plain old “classes,” but played in a much more narratively intentional way. The Driver, for example, isn’t just skilled at driving The Last of the Interceptors across the wasteland, they were also emo loners. That is a result of the Driver’s moves, which had nothing to do with professional capacity and everything to do with the Driver’s narrative role in a well-known postapocalypse franchise.
Mutant: Year Zero meets this approach halfway, with classes that tell you what you’re good at but also gives you special abilities and advancement triggers that are tied into characterization. And not just “good roleplaying,” which honestly is the weakest punt in all of gaming. The One Ring hides this inside your “calling,” which looks diegetic (you’re a wanderer or a monster slayer or a treasure hunter) but is really a narrative declaration.
Relationship Maps/The Death of the Party
R-maps! Oh how I love thee. Many games now include a “I know X character because…” element, sometimes building connections between PCs and sometimes invoking an implied web of NPCs.
Yessssss
This wouldn’t have ever been a thing without holding environments where exploring interpersonal relationships was the core play experience. When you’re playing a unified party, relationships might evolve organically but if they don’t, nothing is lost. None of the narrative was expected to come from PCs squabbling or being friends or fucking (or, ideally, all of those).
Driving a stake through the heart of party-centered play has been one of the most refreshing things in trindie games for me. Your various ghosts and ghouls and vamps in Urban Shadows might occasionally join forces to face a common enemy, but just as often they’re dealing with each other’s daily lives. The magical weirdos of Invisible Sun are just living their lives and maybe helping each other out. The gangs, crews, and families pursuing a common enterprise in Forged in the Dark games look like a party on the surface, but they’ve got their own relationships and goals as well.
No doubt, though: unified party play is easier! Ongoing play about interpersonal relationships takes more work. The players need to not only engage with the premise, but a willingness to start trouble for themselves and others in pursuit of their needs.
Phases of Play
Conventional RPGs usually have detailed, interesting rules for combat, and then rules for everything else. You might cast a spell here and there, maybe have a special rule for dealing with sneaking or traps or whatever. Mostly pacing is left to the discretion of the GM, who would either play out the lives of the characters in detail, or if they were very adventurous and daring jump events ahead to the next conflict. I think of pacing as a point of distinctiveness between traditional GMs.
There have been games around for quite a while that helped create, even mandated, a particular mechanized pace. The earliest one I can think of is the passing of the years in King Arthur Pendragon: each winter, the GM rolls on a series of tables that inject a bunch of interesting new fictional development. It’s a completely different set of rules than the rest of the game. There may have been other games that provided this sort of set-aside mode of play but darned if I can remember any of ‘em.
The first storygame I personally ran into with distinct phases of play was Jason Morningstar’s Night Witches: you played the lives of WW2 Soviet airwomen during their days using one set of moves, then switched to a different set of moves as they went on raids at night. They were practically two different games, each informing the events of the other.
Mutant: Year Zero does the phases-of-play thing by dividing play into events in the Ark, and events in the Zone. They both use identical systems, but they’re both framed in very different ways. When you’re in the Ark, the action is usually driven by the relationship map, or by existential crises facing the mutants…that can only be addressed by sending expeditions out into the Zone. Once you’re in the Zone, the GM has tools to procedurally generate the wild and random things the mutants might find out there. The feel of the game is quite different at that point, switching to a grindy survival game. The shift in style and tempo is signaled on their return by dealing with the Rot they’ve accumulated out there now that they’rehome.
The One Ring breaks down all play into journeying, combat, or encounters. That’s it. There are no other kinds of play time. Each one has its own subset of rules that sit atop the general conflict and advancement stuff. There’s even a nod back to KAP, the Fellowship phase, where the characters explicitly stop adventuring, rest and recuperate somewhere safe, and advance the clock and the fiction a bit.
Forged in the Dark games like Blades in the Dark or Copperhead County thus far have a clear split between being on and off the job: the downtime phase. The job tempo is set by an engagement roll that drops you right into the action, and the job is over when it’s over. Then the characters deal with the fallout of their actions, get paid, manage the growth of their gang, take on personal projects. If there’s going to be any “open roleplay,” away from the pressure cooker of being on the job, this is when it happens.
Grinds
Another case of cross-pollination: when Torchbearer designers Thor Olavsrud and Luke Crane tore into B/X D&D, they rediscovered the mechanical grind of surviving a dungeon delve: light, food, water, rest and carrying capacity. These existed to create verisimilitude, but that verisimilitude created a diegetic sense of urgency. If you need to kick the players in the ass to take action, mechanical urgency is a good way to do it.
This is one of those places where old methods, I think, got a modern reframe. I suspect the old realists felt like the grind was oppressive and an impediment to beating the dungeon. I know I spent a lot of years playing D&D and just not caring what my carrying capacity was, or whether we had enough torches packed. Hauling around lamps is not heroism! Somehow, decades later, we’ve unearthed this idea as fun and motivating. Winning might be fun, but have you tried not losing?
(If that last line makes your skin crawl, you probably aren’t a trindie fan.)
Now you’ve got the constant threat of your lenders coming after you if you miss a payment on your ship in Edge of the Empire, the careful balance of food and time necessary to keep the Legion moving ahead of the zombies in Band of Blades, trying to stay hopeful enough to outrun the Shadow in The One Ring.
Embedded Campaign
One more: the game that’s designed with a campaign already baked. When was the first one? Polaris, maybe? The Mountain Witch? The idea here is that the game isn’t designed to be a toolbox for open-ended campaign play, but focused on a particular narrative arc.
My current best-in-class in the game-as-campaign category is the Eden storyline that comes with Mutant: Year Zero. Through a combination of card draws, map prep, and procedural generation, the mutants’ search for Eden gets delivered piecemeal to the players. You can totally just bump around in the Zone indefinitely when you play MYZ, but its highest and best application is watching the campaign play itself out without having to do anything specific. Other Year Zero Engine games have attempted something similar, but MYZ is still the best in my book.
Band of Blades is another game wrapping an integral campaign: the Legion is falling back toward its headquarters at Skydagger Keep, while The Cinder King and his endless zombie hordes implacably march across the world. It’s grim and dark, and very tightly structured. The Legion proceeds from location to location on a map, engaging with missions along the way. You can play, dunno, Legion adventures outside of this I guess, but most of the interesting gameplay becomes irrelevant.
Last Thoughts
I could keep going with the innovations that have happened in storygaming that found their way into mainstream, conventional ttrpgs. I left a bunch out because the piece was getting long – the rise of minigames, mechanized flags, an appreciation for fictional positioning as its own goal – when I realized that hardly any part of mainstream gaming remains untouched. Games are good and they’re constantly evolving to be even better. Even the folks who proudly declare themselves part of a renaissance of the old school are creating some genuinely creative, weird, new stuff. What a time to be gaming.
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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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Reading through this, I kept coming back to the problem of setting and situation: players need something to care about, to grab onto as you put it, in order to make something so specific as a flag. In my own group, setting flags is a problem because as a group, we’re fairly impervious to setting until we’re actually playing and engaging with the setting, but by then it’s far too late for the GM to develop setting based on players’ flags.
I feel like the GM counterpart to flags is situation, but it’s asymmetrical in a way that makes it not work as well as flags do: the GM can only set one situation, and it has to suit all the players or it doesn’t do the flagging work it needs to do. Which is why game pitches are a thing: “here are a bunch of ideas I have for what play could be about; which engage you?”
I think there has to be some kind of stair-step way to get both situation and flags working together. Some way of the GM creating a Session 1 (not zero) that gets the activity going and the players’ characters contacting things they can develop opinions about, which would then be turned into flags. Lots of video games that are sandboxy give you an initial “tutorial dungeon” or “main quest” that you can otherwise ignore, but that gives you something to grab onto.
My preference for Burning Wheel is for players to have honed character concepts with cracking Beliefs, but I find myself better understanding how the book needed to say that you only need 1 Belief to start. As a GM excited to run BW, that seems like thin gruel for me to work with, but that fits with the need to kick the game into gear with something and then let the players develop cares about the game during play.
Play to find out what the players find interesting?
To bring the ramble to a close, thanks for giving me food for thought. Next time I run a game that thrives on flags, if the players are at all unsure of their flags, I’m going to let them leave them blank or mostly blank, and come with a strong set of very short rails for session 1 to launch them into the world and get them bouncing off things that they can develop a care for.
I see that happen in more traditional games all the time—who doesn’t see D&D players fixate on certain NPCs or factions or places that the DM didn’t plan to be relevant at all? Well, if I run a flag-ful game as if it has none for a short bit, and let those attachments develop, then flags are already right there in the mechanics to reward that interest!