We had our first actual play contact with SWvM last night and it was interesting and difficult! I haven’t burned my brain this hard since the last time we ran Burning Empires.
Prep
Before I get into the nitty gritty of how our session played out, I want to talk a little about prep.
I’ve read in a few places that SWvM is exceptionally prep-heavy, and whoever said that was not kidding. I’ve had a month since we sat down to make characters to fill out some important details, which is a good thing because I needed it! If I was focused, I could have done it in a week, maybe scattered across 3-4 evenings at an hour apiece.
How did I spend that time? Mostly thinking through how the five fronts interconnect and looking for opportunities. I very much feel like this is a skill you get good at; the next time I set this up (maybe as a one-shot at NewMexicon next month?) it’ll be quite a lot easier. But this first time through, I got pretty deep in the weeds of just what all the SWvM book provides, what it doesn’t provide, and getting creative about both the genre and Johnstone’s take on it.
I came at setup with a long campaign in mind, a fully integrated setting experience. What I didn’t want to do was get the players in the mindset that all they needed to do was line up a certain set of rolls, to just reduce the whole thing to a mechanical exercise. I started by looking over all the dangers present in the beatable fronts — in our case, Interstellar Travel, The Spice, and Religion — and picking out dangers that looked interesting. I wanted there to be one urgent, easy to hit right-now danger, but I also wanted to be able to turn on slower-burn aspects of the story. So that meant thinking about all the implications of actual prophetic drugs, for example, w/r/t an imperial government, teleportation, various religions, and secret police. That’s just one of many dangers I picked out as interesting. But I feel like it’s important to foreshadow that stuff, you know?
What I didn’t do, and totally should have, was come up with sets of NPCs, all statted out, for things I knew were going to happen. The Hostile Transport Guild’s hunters, as one small example. I’m not super-fluent with the monster choices present in Dungeon World or Adventures on Dungeon Planet, and I think you need to be to be able to find some good values.
The Session
We started out with Space Wurm and the Lover hanging out in The Mountain, the seat of the empire’s power and kind of a Forbidden City type place. The Transport Guild’s representative arrives and announces that, because Space Wurm has been holding Guild navigators’ families hostage, they will no longer be transporting imperial armies around the galaxy. And if the families aren’t released by a certain time, they’d stop shipping food to the capital world (which is overbuilt and can’t feed itself).
Pretty great start and Space Wurm felt immediately resentful and defensive. There was some parleying and threatening and, later, a fight between the Lover and Space Wurm (the Lover belongs to the same posthuman tribe as the navigators). Eventually Space Wurm took to the airwaves to call on his adoring population to rise up against those who would starve them. So now there are temple burnings, lynchings, hate crimes of all sorts being enacted in his name.
I have no idea how long the player will be able to maintain this villainy! Space Wurm is such a douchebag!
Meanwhile, Moonicorn and the Other are in mid-transit between worlds when the announcement goes throughout the vessel that any military personnel aboard the ship will be dropped off and will not be transported anywhere else. Well, due to the magic of Discern Realities, it turns out most of the ship’s crew is army, headed out to deal with spice claim jumpers on a mining world. They try to mutiny, and discover the ship is alive and listening and spaces a few soldiers to make a point.
There were a few other scenes but that’s the basic outline of our three hour session.
Thinks
Several things came together that made this a tough game for me to run:
1) The Space Wurm and Moonicorn storylines kind of require, at first, that they be shown in very different contexts. Space Wurm is safe and powerful, Moonicorn is on the ground actively rebelling. That meant long stretches of time where half my players were just listening. Which isn’t the worst thing in the world! But keeping everyone split up like that is something I need to keep an eye on.
2) I’m not nearly as well practiced in running Dungeon World as I am with, say, Sagas of the Icelanders or even straight up Apocalypse World. I know conceptually that there need to be a much higher frequency of rolls, mostly to juice advancement, but that’s not where my habits lie.
3) A lot of the new playbooks’ moves really just modify OG DW moves. For example, Moonicorn’s Full of Grace modifies all of Moonicorn’s other moves! It’s like a contextual filter that might pull in a whole other minigame with several other decisions. I like it, it’s a cool move, but it’s novel. All the playbooks have stuff like that — not moves, exactly, but modifiers to how moves work. They look like they have their own fictional triggers but it’s more like additional context to triggers on other moves. You might be Defying Danger while being Full of Grace, for example. The Lover’s Heartstrings move is another example — not exactly its own move, more a set of additional incentives to do what the Lover wants them to do. Or Space Wurm’s Bargaining, which modifies Parley. Lots of looking back and forth between several sheets of paper, piecing together interesting plays.
4) The moves didn’t move the fiction forward as much as I was expecting, but I’m 90% sure that’s because everyone’s still low on the learning curve. I was a little bummed there weren’t enough XPs earned the first session to unlock a new move, because novelty is awesome, but OTOH I’m okay with everyone learning their way around the basics for a session.
All this adds up to some things I need to figure out:
Space Wurm’s move scale is big and narrative, which means he’s not making a lot of DW-scale moves at this point. That’s going to be hard on his advancement, but then again he’s already astonishingly powerful. This is actually kind of true across all playbooks: the original DW moves are blow-by-blow in a way that SWvM moves aren’t. That’s an interesting tension, and occasionally frustrating.
Some of the moves — Revolution Now! specifically, but others as well — definitely have a learning curve to figure out how best to deploy them. The triggers and their outcomes sometimes are hard to match up.
I think that’s probably it, honestly. It’ll all get worked out.
Cool Stuff
The setting is crazy and amazing and far richer, earlier than pretty much anything I’ve run in a long time. The questions are evocative and provocative and very interesting.
I think once we’ve got a few sessions and some real momentum, the “winning” bit of the game will get more interesting. Right now, Moonicorn has no idea how to stop the Guild’s assassins and Space Wurm has no idea how to get his balls out of the Guild’s vice long enough to take control.
Happily, the “secondary” characters — the Other and the Lover — have gotten maybe more screen time than SW and M themselves. I heard some concerns that they’d feel like bit actors and they’re not, I don’t think.
The love triangle business between Space Wurm, Moonicorn and the Lover is surprisingly effective. Can’t wait to see what goes down when Moonicorn and the Lover get together, after she watched SW give the green light to genociding her people.
The Other is super interesting and weird and kind of a lot of work to get engaged with things. Some of that is the player, and some is just the extreme weirdness of the character. But I adore the Alienation economy (and Moonicorn’s Integrity!), especially when her Alienation popped and violence erupted.
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Despite weeks of reading your updates on SWvM I’m left wondering: is this some sort of Lynch-induced, Jodorowsky-injected, opening-up-the-doors-of-perception, Ozric-Tentacles-soundtrack of a nightmare RPG or…something else entirely?
It’s both.
This sounds awesome. Love it.
Man I love this game, but like you I have struggled with how I would go about GM’ing this. So I am really enjoying reading how you’re addressing it.
Johnstone Metzger Games within games within games.
I adore watching you struggle with this; we went through similar problems, and had an entire campaign and microscope session to help!
This sounds awesome. Definitely count me in if you run it at NewMexiCon!
I’m excited for this playthrough. Its interesting how many pbta games you have been running which focus on fronts. The other front heavy game being Head Space.
Does SWvMC still have end of session xp? Like from alignment and stuff? In my DW experience dinging level 2 usually happens the second session, even if someone is always rolling hot.
I do have a question about play as well. When I flipped through the book there didn’t seem to be any advice for player vs player interaction. I was of the mind that pvp was hard to pull off with Dungeon World. Hack and slash being kind of awkward. Where as AW has a community focus and more abstract moves like Seize by Force that allow for some adhoc pvp.
I guess what I’m asking is when SW and The Lover were fighting. Did the player’s reach for the dice or was it mostly a freeform argument.
Aaron Berger okay cool, good questions.
I started reading/planning/plotting probably in a similar place as you: broadly familiar with PbtA, not specifically steeped in Dungeon World. DW is different enough that I find it very hard, personally, to intuit how it works.
So, yeah, very front-heavy. I think it’s kind of similar to Magpie’s Chaos Worlds stuff. I mean fronts show up all over the place but good call on Headspace. It’s influentially similar. Say versus the halfassedness of fronts in Urban Shadows or, really, most of the PbtAs that I play and enjoy (Sagas of the Icelanders, Apocalypse World, Night Witches, etc.). On the one hand, that front focus is terrific and probably necessary for planning and interweaving all the weirdness and implications. OTOH it’s hard for my brain because it’s hard to improvise around. Again, I think it’s a skill you can develop — I’m gonna try the one-shot rules, I’m pretty sure, at a con next month and I’ll have no choice but to improvise.
End of session: yeah, same. It’s way more Dungeon World-y than I was thinking, because I was focusing too much on the SWvM moves. But now that I’ve actually played, I can see that a lot of the moves either reference the new economies (Alienation, Integrity, etc.) or rewrite original DW stuff. I do expect that level 2 will happen next session.
PvP is a little juicier in SWvM but it’s still essentially Dungeon World. Like, parley references only NPCs. But but but! There are things that nudge and influence PvP activities built into everyone’s playbooks. The Lover has heartstrings, which are incentives for those s/he Loves (term of art!) to do what s/he wants. Space Wurm treats everyone, literally everyone, as either treasure or currency, which warps Bonds pretty hard. Moonicorn’s got all kinds of weird tweaks to how intercharacter activities play out, but I believe in you is fairly straightforward and effective. In our game, The Other’s telltale heart stuff has been weird and interesting and very uh… I don’t know, kind of dom/sub.
But there are no new rules for PvP per se, no. If you think hack&slash is janky in DW, it’s just as janky in SWvM. This is definitely somewhere that my lack of deep DW fluency is tripping me up, as facilitator. I just don’t care enough about the blow-by-blow stuff, but I need to because it’s tied really hard to advancement. So I need to pull up my jodhpurs and grind out fights.
In our game, The Lover and Space Wurm’s spat was just table talk. But it was still good and effective! But not tied to rolling or advancement, really. And because The Lover’s heartstrings is one of those weird meta-moves, she doesn’t roll so therefore doesn’t stand to advance when she engages it. I’m still feeling stuff like that out.
Apologies for the babble but I’m sipping a rare coffee and I’m juiced out of my skull on the spice right now.
Yeah, PCs actually fighting each other is kind of dumb and just like D&D whoever gets low in HP first either gives in or ends up dying, basically. You sort of have to lean on the narrative success of a 7+ combat roll instead of concentrating on damage. Or just tell the players that killing other PCs won’t help them win the game. Maybe they’ll get the hint.
Parley’s also not the greatest move for Dungeon World, because seduce/manipulate is not actually a generic social move. But hey, those were the dark ages of 2012 and we didn’t have much else.
Johnstone Metzger It is reassuring to know I wasn’t missing something. I think the playbook moves are really interesting and can keep the fiction heated enough.
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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