We played four sessions of Tales of Xadia over the past couple months. Tales is the first complete and self-contained game to come out of Cortex Prime, the third generation of the Cortex ruleset by Cam Banks. My personal experience with long-form Cortex play was a rough start with Serenity way back in the day, and Firefly when Cortex came back out in revised form. I’ve played a bunch of Cortex stuff through the years as one offs – Marvel Heroic, Smallville, Leverage – but Tales was my first hands-on experience with Prime.
I’m not a close follower of Cortex games. Not sure why not! I like Cortex better than any edition of Fate, probably its closest relative. It handles PvP conflicts quite well, always a good thing because so much good tension can emerge between conflicting PCs. And the little dice game you play as you work out rolls is genuinely a fun time.
I think my hesitation is because everything that comes out for Cortex is attached to an existing license: Firefly and Marvel and Smallville and Leverage! Turns out I’m frequently allergic to license-based games. (Timely: check out Jahmal Brown’s Kickstarter for Lifted, a Cortex-based supers game completely detached from a licensed setting!)
Not that I won’t play them. We ran Modiphius’ 2d20 Dune and liked it okay (it cribbed ideas from Cortex but left out its economy, so Dune ultimately fell flat for us). I’ve played a ton of Mouse Guard and Burning Empires, although you wouldn’t be blamed for not thinking of those as licenses (they’re both based on obscure-ish comics). But given the choice, I almost always pick games that aren’t based on existing properties.
Tales of Xadia is based on The Dragon Prince, an animated series on Netflix. It’s good! I like The Dragon Prince, but I haven’t consumed every scrap of lore or really spent any time imagining what play might be like in Xadia, the show’s setting. But the show is well executed, has lots of Avatar: the Last Airbender vibes, great inter-character tensions and a visually appealing setting.
Cortex 101
Every Cortex game consists of a subset of rules from the Cortex toolbox, all of which work with any other part. As a toolbox, Cortex is smart as hell and firmly in trindie territory. Most of the rulesets don’t bother with modeling physics (a la Hero or, to a lesser degree, GURPS), but rather model thematic ideas and how they interact. If you already think about games this way, Cortex is awfully fun to fiddle with. But if you need your game to be a physics model, you’re going to be disappointed.
The Cortex transaction is straightforward: you build a pool of dice out of your various character bits, roll and add together the best two. Or the two dice that beat the other side’s best roll (usually either the GM rolls a pair of dice sized to represent the difficulty of a task, or another player starts shit and they roll to set the starting difficulty of a longer contest). Then there are some tricks you can do with plot points to buy more dice, or more effects. Big margins of success get you some game effects, and the biggest die size of the dice you didn’t use to succeed at a task becomes an “effect die” that may let you do stuff as well. It’s modestly elaborate, with several levers you can pull each time you roll (plot point spends, special abilities that trigger, and so on).
As a game-game, Cortex’s dice and point manipulation is fun even though all that manipulation doesn’t “look” like anything in the fiction as you do it. It’s the internal player feeling of pushing their luck and weighing their options, combined with how the fiction shakes out after the roll, that makes the game engaging.
A Closer Look at Tales of Xadia
System-wise, the Cortex ingredients in Tales are:
- Attributes: a typical traddy spread of character descriptions, like agility and awareness.
- Values: five different ethical categories you use in combination with Attributes. You have to decide what’s motivating your character for any given role, possibly guided by or contradicting a “value statement” that each Value has. You can also stake out goals you want to achieve, constrained by your Values – low-ranked Values limit how “important” a goal you can set attached to it, prompting you to take bigger goals for your higher-ranked Values. I dig this bit quite a lot.
- Distinctions and SFX: stuff that models your upbringing and vocation. “SFX” in Cortex-speak are neat little rule exceptions or dice tricks.
- Assets: something or someone that helps you in the moment. This is also where spells show up, although the way they’re treated in the game is super open-ended.
- Specializations: three “skills,” more or less, more narrowly defined than your vocation distinction.
- Stress Tracks: there are five hit point tracks (more or less) that give your opposition dice to roll, and can evolve into Trauma, a permanent(ish) source of Stress dice. The characters are wreathed in a ton of plot immunity mostly via the Stress/Trauma system.
There are some interesting bits missing from what experienced Cortex folks might think of as core, as well as a couple original inventions that don’t appear in the Cortex Game Handbook (the overarching source document from which all Cortex Prime games are based).
The most notable missing bit is Complications: normally when the players roll 1s, the GM gives them Plot Points (PPs) and introduces a new play factor, with a die rank attached to it and the possibility that clever players might turn those complications back against the GM. This is also how you might model an injury: broken leg (d10) means every time your broken leg might impact your ability to do something, the GM gets to roll another d10 in their pool.
That doesn’t happen in Tales of Xadia. Generally the only mechanical result of conflicts in Tales comes in the form of Stress: the character is now afraid, or corrupted by dark magic, or, yes, injured. I think it plays out mechanically similarly but it keeps outcomes focused on a narrow range of characters’ internal states. External complications might show up in the course of a Challenge, though, in which some very large goal “hits back” against a PC when it’s the goal’s turn.
The big innovation over the basic Cortex Prime toolbox is Catalysts, ie boss-type NPCs that are important to the scenario. There are some interesting emergent properties of the Catalyst rules. Most notably, there are always at least two Catalysts, typically headed toward, or in, conflict with each other but neutral to the PCs. This aims scenario design toward the PCs being interlopers into other folks’ problems in the course of their travels, interacting with one Catalyst or the other to work out their problems, or bring the Catalyst(s) more in line with what the PCs need. The game focuses heavily on social interactions because of the requirement that “Tales” (ie scenarios) have these characters.
What Do You Doooo?
There’s a lot to like about how Tales of Xadia plays out, but the setting left me cold. For one, there is no premise to the game other than “having adventures in Xadia.” It’s very much A Fantasy Game™ in that regard, quite generic despite all the nice art they use from the show. I had a hard time dredging up the setting’s essential tensions and themes: humans and elves distrust each other, human society relies on the deeply unpleasant consequences of capitalism Dark Magic, there’s a dangerous borderland separating the human and elf halves of the continent, and there are five human kingdoms that mostly get along with each other except when they don’t.
There’s a lot of material in Tales that I had no idea how to use: lengthy chapters about the dragons of the show, lists of magical creatures, little rumors attached to each of the elven tribes and human kingdoms, and a weirdly comprehensive discussion of the game’s metaphysics that have literally no bearing at all on how the game plays out. But no guidance as to what a typical scenario might entail beyond the sample scenario in the book, or what themes the game is designed to hit (other than dealing with other folks’ problems in the course of your travels). It was a good IKEA catalog of material, but incomplete instructions.
In our game, we contrived reasons for three disconnected characters (a hard-bitten Katolian explorer, a Durenian farmboy with a Dark Magic gift, and a homesick elven mage) to be searching for the lost ruins of Elarion, birthplace of humanity and the origin of Dark Magic, hidden somewhere in The Border. Pretty straightforward quest-type stuff, complicated by two Catalysts with very different plans of their own for Elarion. Every session was fun, the showdown at Elarion was pretty good (and a bit frustrating: the game doesn’t handle PC team-vs-boss conflicts very well), and after we were done I just didn’t feel inspired to cook up more reasons for these three characters to continue their journeys.
I was left with the feeling that “be a huge fan of The Dragon Prince” is the expected prep. Despite having watched the available seasons some time ago, I’m not a huge fan of the show and don’t feel inspired by the setting when it’s not centered on the show’s plot. Xadia as a playable setting faces the same challenges of character-driven IPs like Star Wars (ep IV era): if you’re not Luke, what’s motivating you? Star Wars now has literally thousands of hours and millions of words that answer this question, and Xadia doesn’t.
Deciding to play a bunch of humans simplifies the question, because now the elves can be outsider opposition and kingdom politics become more straightforward. And vice versa. What the game invites you to do, because look at these marvelous rules, is to mix it up with human and elf characters together, as of course we did. But to do that you need a real strong premise. The TV show provides one. Tales of Xadia does not.
Next up for me is digging deeper into Magpie’s treatment of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra in their PbtA game Avatar Legends. At first glance it looks more flexible and more tightly constructed around the practicalities of answering the oldest and arguably only question in RPGs: “what do you doooo?”
Playing With Canon
So how do you make the most of games that are set in pre-existing settings or properties? Depends on the game of course. Some properties are just better suited to open-ended invention and play: Star Wars is a billion-dollar industry now built around open-ended(ish) invention, and the setting is purposefully designed with lots of affordances and more canonical material than any human could consume in a lifetime. Dune is trickier, but I think Modiphius did a sharp job of creating a game where the machinations of your made-up House are always going to be interesting, despite the galaxy-spanning implications of a weirdo Space Messiah.
Some settings, I think, come with clearer baked-in story premises than others. Dune is about political ambition and space feudalism (although it really should be more about anti-colonialism in this day and age: I would play a “Fremen wreck the Empire’s shit, a theme and variations” game all day and night). Star Wars isn’t really “about” much other than the ever-present threat to personal freedom from fascists and the perpetual fallout of that (robust black markets cropping up in the face of oppression, leading crime both organized and freelance to thrive, bam, now you’re playing Edge of the Empire).
Some properties are defined by their premise, and not canonical setting material. The Terminator, for example, has an open-ended premise and not much setting: if the future wants you dead, can you fight back and make something better? Really the only “setting” in The Terminator is the ever-present threat of a malevolent AI arising in the future and inevitably deciding to rid itself of humanity. The Marvel games I’ve played reward, but don’t demand, deep fidelity to established canon – and happily, comics are notorious for tossing canon out the window at regular intervals via multiverses or relaunches or whatever. The only canon is that you have license to toss out the canon.
And of course there’s Call of Cthulhu, the most globally successful property-based game of all time, and it’s a mix of premise (what if the universe just didn’t care, and was inhabited by incomprehensible beings that humans are stupid enough to think they can bargain with?) and setting (ie the various critters and gods and whatnot). There’s a little physical setting as well, stuff like the Dreamlands and the weird alien complex buried in Antarctica. But it’s the compelling premise that keeps the Mythos games rolling, more than yet one more game of battling the Mi-Go or whatever.
Many settings (like Xadia) rely on the enthusiasm of its fandom to find its way: if you’re not a G.I. Joe fan, what is a session of the new G.I. Joe RPG “like?” What’s the premise beyond beating on Cobra baddies? Maybe that’s enough, the attraction of creating and recreating familiar thrills. Is there enough hook to A Song of Ice and Fire to make it something other than A Grimdark Fantasy Game if you’re not super into the books/show? Is the Peacekeeper government and mix of wacky muppet-alien species enough to make a Farscape game go? I’m a fan of the last couple, and even then I’m not sure I’d be eager to just keep reiterating the things I already love about them. High-fiving each other through familiar territory feels like a squandered opportunity to invent something new and personal.
Given a rich canonical setting or a gripping canonical premise, I’ll take the premise every time. But not all games are for everyone. Is it unfair to expect that a license-based game appeal to non-fans of the license? Oh totally. But I would also propose that any game needs to provide clear guidance and procedures for what you’re about to spend hours playing. Or trying to.
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‘Eow’ for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 78. For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection. For monthly links, look at The Glatizant.
Something that occurred to me just this year: having an encyclopedic knowledge of RPGs hasn’t actually made me happier. In fact it’s probably made me less happy participating in my hobby, because I don’t share the same assumptions as the players with whom I spend most of my time. It’s given me all the tools I need to understand my own unhappiness, though.
Maybe it would be different if I were playing largely online. A diffuse body of players themselves will more often cross-pollinate ideas, particularly if they’re all drawn together by the idea of cross-pollination. But that’s just not the case with the folks who show up at your home on the regular.
The same thing happens a lot when I’m running some weird indie shit at a Games on Demand-style space at a larger mainstream convention. The indie weirdos are probably down for whatever you throw on the table. But you’ve also got the not-indie folks, the trad crowd whose tickets are actually making our indie corner possible. In that case, I know the common assumptions – the traditions that comprise “trad” play – I’ll face, and build those into my pitch and explanation.
Rediscovering your own beginner’s mind is the postgraduate work of roleplaying.
Beginners are so much easier to work with. And it’s so hard to be a beginner, again and again.
Category and Rhetoric
The problem I think comes down to players either making category errors or rhetorical stands.
Rhetoric shouldn’t come as a surprise in a hobby rife with tribalism: all RPGs are D&D hacks is the umbrella claim. Stop me if you’ve already heard these bangers:
You can’t trust the GMThe GM is GodThe point of play is to make your character strongerAll games ape other mediaThrow away any rule you want
Ehh…it’s all basically folk dances, right?
More often, though, a player’s operating assumptions aren’t rhetorical. They come from a profoundly different understanding of what the activity “is.” For me, a former composition major, roleplaying is music: there’s a huge range of styles, orchestrations, methods, and structures filtered through history and venues. For others, all roleplaying is waltz music: jam that melody into a ¾ time signature whether it fits or not, play it at a dance pace no matter what, one chord per bar no matter what, and treat every single piece of music as ultimately derivative of folk dances.
The (Eight) Usual Suspects
These are the eight topics I find demand specificity at tables with experienced players, because they (experienced players) come loaded with assumptions from other games. Any one of these could be a complete essay! And maybe they will be. Just let me know if any of them sound interesting enough for another few thousand words.
Intent, conflicts, tasks and moves
Maybe the most common point of confusion I run into is what happens after players touch dice (or some other procedure-with-uncertainty). It’s especially confusing if the player is unclear why they touched the dice in the first place. What’s the cause and what’s the effect? What are the rules even for?
Some games use randomizers to determine success or failure of a specific, tangible task: that’s your straight up task resolution method. Others require players to state their intention before the roll: this is either transparency (if you’re clarifying why you’re doing a task, as you do in Burning Wheel) and/or conflict resolution (if you’re resolving an entire scene and you’ve described what you want out of it, like Dust Devils). Others use randomization to introduce surprise into the fiction, the aspirational — if not frequently unrealized — goal of PbtA style moves.
Why are we rolling again? When are we rolling? What do I stand to gain? What am I risking? Maximize my agency but don’t overwhelm me with options.
The purpose of a roll has the most room for misunderstandings and disagreements, even within genres or traditions of play. Especially within genres or traditions of play. What happens when you state your intent but a move doesn’t hit it? What if you just perform a task but don’t discuss your intent (maybe to leave yourself some wiggle room ex post facto)? What if you expect more granularity and the whole scene ends up resolving with a single roll? And so on.
There’s also the question of when you engage with a game’s procedures. PbtA moves (usually) trigger when something happens in the fiction. FitD actions (usually) trigger because the players want to achieve something. Trad games (usually) instruct the GM to tell the player which skill to roll and (usually) only when what they’re doing has a chance of failing. Lots of (usually) in there, right?
Inputs and outputs are such a fundamental bit of The Transaction and yet there are so many ways of doing both. The curse of being an experienced player is that you’ve probably developed preferences along the way.
Collaborative vs adversarial facilitation
Many games of the current era aspirationally describe themselves as “collaborative,” frequently to imply that those other games are not. But the rules may or may not support actual collaboration. Games with goals, for example, are hard to run collaboratively if the play product is supposed to feel like accomplishment. Does it still feel like winning if everyone agrees that you won? I’ll get into that one more in a future column I’m working on.
Calm down, control freaks.
There was an old Forge bugaboo about authority, broadly referred to as Mother May I. You can probably imagine what this looks like from the player perspective, constantly having to seek approval for your play choices. Lots of indie games were specifically designed to get away from traditional power structures, but it doesn’t mean the players have. Your GM might still act like a Mother, and the players might also treat the GM like a Mother! Things can get real weird when those power structures get reimposed by players because of their assumptions.
Downtime as abstract bookkeeping vs open play
Play phases are a more recent design phenomenon. You see it a lot post-Torchbearer and its Adventure/Camp/Town breakdown, and popularized by Blades in the Dark’s Downtime procedure after every Job. Rather than a constant play-the-day flow of action, the game has formal breaks where stuff happens that’s not about the adventure, or the job, or whatever.
Spend one more Coin on recovering from harm. As a treat.
Sometimes the phases are meant to be pure abstraction, or the players treat it as such: the Fellowship phase of The One Ring, for example, doesn’t really need to be played out. You take a break, jump ahead a few months, and the characters spend that downtime healing, training, and so on. And sometimes the not-adventuring phase is meant to be played out, just without the mechanical weight of the action sequences: the Investigation phase of Voidheart Symphony is my most recent exposure to this.
More often than not, the text doesn’t actually say much about how much “free roleplay” is meant to happen during these phases. Different players and facilitators will treat this in very different ways. No surprise, then, that players may be caught off-guard when they’re asked to dig into their downtime stuff. Or GMs may be caught off-guard when the players bing-bang-boom work through their checklist, eager to jump into the next procedurally dense bit of play.
Structural goals vs embodiment play
This isn’t a great description but let me unpack what I’m getting at.
Band of Blades, Fellowship, and Voidheart Symphony all have explicit goals in mind. Band of Blades’ goal is for the characters to reach Skydagger Keep while racking up the highest possible score. There’s a score! Fellowship characters will ultimately face the Overlord and defeat them. Voidheart Symphony is about facing and defeating a series of big bads who serve the Void, the universe’s visceral urge for toxic individualism. But goal-oriented games use their goals for different reasons: Beating the Game might be one, but pacing might be another.
Compare these to Urban Shadows, Mutant, or Blades in the Dark. “Get rich or die trying” in Blades is a driving motive for your crew, but it’s not really an endgame goal. Finding Eden in Mutant is a goal, but you don’t defeat Eden, you go there and see what happens. Urban Shadows has “storms,” thematically connected PbtA style fronts, that just structure what’s going on in the game’s big picture.
Cool, cool, glad you liked your 7-9.
Players looking to shoehorn goals into embodiment games are gonna have a rough time, just like embodiment players are gonna make the goal players crazy in goal-oriented games.
Vocabulary
This basically comes down to two problems: mechanical tricks that look similar but aren’t the same, and common words that mean different things (or different words for functionally identical ideas).
Why is it always clocks, anyway? Who wouldn’t want a slice of this?
Clocks, for example, got popularized in Forged in the Dark games, but the graphical presentation has shown up in other games to confusing effect. The clock in Voidheart Symphony’s Investigation phase is just counting the days since the characters became aware of the next Vassal; they can’t run the clock and achieve a goal by filling it. Those are two different applications of the same graphic design idea.
Assets are all over: sad things on index cards! But they work differently in Fate, Cortex and Dune. Easy to assume Assets all do the same thing but they definitely do not. Assets are an easy place for players to get confused and frustrated. You can invoke an Asset in Fate, for example, but you can’t assume that’s a thing outside of Fate. There are (different) economic constraints to Assets in Fate and Cortex, but not in Dune.
I ran into a problem with the word/concept of Advantage in Fellowship, where it represents an opening you can exploit against an opponent and not a third die, take the highest. Frustrating! Or Value Statements from Tales of Xadia, which look a little like Beliefs from Burning Wheel but are actually more like Fates in Tenra Bansho Zero.
(This is what I was saying at the top of the essay: encyclopedic knowledge won’t make you happy, but can explain why you’re unhappy!)
Or take skills from most any game as compared to actions in FitD games. Functionally similar, but there’s some subtle differences there worth exploiting. Actions are bigger and more thematic than skills, except in games where skills are meant to be big.
Economic incentives vs pacing
In a game with an economy of some kind – Fate Points, Plot Points, Artha, Doom Pool, Darkness Points – it can get very confusing as to what the economy is for. Sometimes economies are there to incentivize play choices, like taking a d4 instead of a better die in Cortex and getting a Plot Point in return. But sometimes economies are pacing and GM-constraint tools and don’t have any sort of incentive purpose to them, like Darkness Points in Coriolis or your scene budget in Burning Empires. I frequently need to explain what an economy is “for,” but players will explore them on their own no matter what you say.
But I don’t want all this Artha. I just want to have more than you.
Let’s also not forget that many incentive schemes do not incentivize players who don’t care about them.
Explicit responsibility and implied authority
What exactly each player is responsible for at the table used to be a pretty clear-cut thing, but lots of indie game design challenges traditional authority breakdowns in novel ways. I run into this one a lot! Players who think that, since they had a mandate to narrate their own successes in one game, that’s just how all games are going forward. Not so! Or GMs who are expected to make rulings in one game are explicitly forbidden from doing so in another.
I picked gm-less for a reason.
In some games, there’s no actual GM at all of course. But there’s almost always some version of facilitator at the table. That’s not great when other players start treating the facilitator like a GM and abdicate their responsibilities.
The mechanical weight of fiction, the fictional weight of mechanisms
Does it “matter” how you’re armed or armored, what equipment you have, what the landscape looks like? Is fiction just color or is it constraining? Does the fiction provide interesting new affordances or can you only do what the character sheet says you can do? Does the fictional positioning meaningfully change after the rules touch it, and if so, does that change what you can do within the procedure?
You think that’s air you’re breathing?
I wish more games were better at calling this out specifically. But it’s an ongoing struggle, at least in the beginning, to suss out the relationship between the fiction and the procedures in any game.
But The Rules Say…
Besides the fact the players bring their assumptions to these things, let’s not forget that plenty of game texts themselves do a poor job of clarifying their own assumptions. Designers are gamers as well, and they have their own blind spots. In other cases, they’re writing toward a specific audience with their assumptions in mind. See most everything that calls itself OSR, for example.
Treating this stuff as having any sort of meaningful shared assumptions is impractical, even with explicit textual explanation. To strain some metaphors, it’s like a baseman tackling another player as they run between bases because, hey, there’s tackling in football so why not baseball? They’re both ball games.
Closing Thoughts
It’s not a complete list of every possible unaddressed assumption, but it’s as complete as I can make it. Writing the list left me wondering, is there a lowest common denominator to this category of activity? What defines “roleplaying” and makes it stand apart from other, related activities?
Honestly, I’m not sure there’s much there, beyond “embodying and authoring a role within the constraints of an agreed-upon set of fictional criteria.” That might be it, the very minimum definition. Which, of course, means we should be thinking long and hard about fanfic and other forms that fulfill all those criteria but don’t look a thing like any RPG you might see on a shelf.
Meanwhile, I can’t help but think that it’s just so impractical to expect every player to completely discard every assumption every time and start from scratch. Going once more back to the sports metaphors, there are only so many sports you might participate in. You’d be forgiven for conflating pickleball with table tennis and regular tennis (which I did recently). But there are just so darned many RPGs, and we prize novelty in the indie space. It can be exhausting to come at every text with beginner’s eyes.
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Okay, wow. Still drilling through this pile of games and, yeah, we’re into the second quarter of the year already. But there are games to read and things to say. Let’s get into it.
Reminder that these are read-only reviews I’m doing! I haven’t gotten to play these games so they’re not deep technical dives.
Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game
Avatar Legends
PDF available through DriveThruRPG
Big beautiful blingy bundle available through Magpie Games
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “If I won the lottery, I would publish the biggest game you’ve ever seen.” Magpie Games did pretty much that. I don’t envy them! They earned more than US$9 million on their Kickstarter (lots of which went straight back to Viacom, I’m sure) but that also brought lots of weirdness. What do you do with the biggest indie RPG Kickstarter campaign of all time?
Avatar Legends is a PbtA game about playing element-bending and other extraordinarily talented people in one of five eras established in the world of Avatar: the two shows, books, everything I think. I’m not really a fan of Avatar although my daughter is, but I adored The Legend of Korra, the higher-tech sequel featuring some crossover characters with the original show. Never seen the novels or graphic novels. I’m not a hardcore fan of the series, in other words.
The design team, though. Hooboy, they definitely needed to keep the hardcore fans in mind. I have to think the vast majority of backers wanted an Avatar thing, not necessarily an RPG. The way they bridge that gap is actually pretty clever.
So I sit down with the text, right? Huge damned book. I cannot imagine a tween fan of the show ever deciphering it (although the boxed set that you can get in Target may be another matter). I have a hell of a time deciphering it myself. So much backstory. So much history. So, so many show references. I just don’t care about any of this! Stop!
But then I think about how the setting material was treated in Tales of Xadia, which was far more limited and depends, I think, on players being fans of The Dragon Prince. You know the setting and what the stories are about just by being exposed to the show (which wasn’t quite enough for me to play beyond a brief run). Magpie’s strategy on Avatar Legends is to go the other way. It is … a lot. Like, on par with Exalted or some other canon-heavy tome.
Avatar Legends lets you play in one of five eras, from a deep mythic-ancient era all the way up to the Republic City era of Korra. Tons of details. The smart thing they do is synopsize each subheader of material with a list of bullet points: actionable stuff you can use from each section. You don’t have to do a massive canon download followed by a massive canon dump on the players. Once I realized I didn’t actually have to read all this stuff, it got a lot easier going. What a relief.
Between the core rulebook and the Wan Shi Tong’s Adventure Guide the all-in backer level came with, you’ve got 14 playbooks to work with. They remind me a lot of how Brendan Conway, the lead designer on Avatar Legends, built the playbooks in Masks around clear teen-hero tropes. Where Masks does, like, “the one where you’re basically an alien” or “the one where you’re a misunderstood monster,” Avatar Legends sets up the playbooks around pairs of principles the character is constantly pulled between. Like The Idealist is pulled between forgiveness and action, or The Prodigy is pulled between excellence and community. They’re not exactly opposed! The pairs are all more like…mutually incompatible in interesting ways. Your playbook wants both things but can’t really have both things.
Besides the paired principles, the other killer app of the game is that it goes deep into techniques, which are basically conflict-specific moves. It feels maybe a little overwrought, just looking at the seven-step system involved and the accompanying deck of cards. But given the martial arts focus of the show, it’s thematically solid. You don’t use it all the time; it’s more like the special focus that happens when you enter the Fight! minigame in Burning Wheel.
You can also tell Magpie knows Avatar Legends may be many gamers’ first exposure to something that is both very mainstream and not 5th Edition. There is way more material about this style of game than most readers of this blog will need — basics like fictional positioning and hard vs soft moves — as well as, hilariously, multiple repeated very patient explanations that there are no “bending moves” in the game. If you’re a fire bender, that fictionally positions you to execute any of your moves by doing it with fire. It’s very similar to the Masks approach that says there is no “energy blast” move, but if that’s your schtick then that’s how you’ll directly engage a threat or unleash your powers. I dig it, I think it’s the most direct way to bypass the physics-model approach that could have easily buried an Avatar game under impregnable bullshit.
That said…there kind of are bender moves. But they’re “techniques” rather than core moves. Other than the name, they’re more or less moves, just used specifically in their new Combat Exchange system. So, sigh, yes if you really need to know what happens if you’re a lavabender, or whatever, there’s an advanced technique with more details about that.
Personally what interests me the most is the moves around your principles. You can call someone out or be called out for violating principles, which again feels a bit like how adults mess with your stats in Masks. I think Avatar Legends largely assumes the characters are young (although there’s an Elder playbook in the mix), but rather than leveraging the social tension between teens and adults, Avatar Legends leverages the tension within yourself of valuing two competing things, and what happens when someone pushes your buttons. And if you get pushed hard enough for long enough in one direction, you might just give up one of your principles. That’s great stuff.
The all-in delivery brought me the core rulebook, the Adventure Guide, a cloth map (no idea what to do with this, but it’s nice), a deck of cards to simplify the Combat Exchange system, a dice bag, some element-themed dice, and a bunch of blank notebooks.
Will I ever play Avatar Legends? Maybe. I mean, it’s well done. It’s clearly polished to a high sheen. Maybe too high? Magpie has become the Apple of indie games, all rounded off edges and refined to exacting standards — but I kind of miss the slightly rough edges of Urban Shadows or Epyllion. My daughter, age 11, spent an hour looking over my shoulder and got excited to see Toph and Sokka and a Sky Bison and Uncle Iroh. She’s the biggest fan in my house. But would she get the principles game? The Combat Exchange system? Only one way to find out.
Desperation
Desperation
PDF available through DriveThruRPG
Cards and box with snazzy magnetic closure available through Bully Pulpit Games
Desperation, by Jason Morningstar under his Bully Pulpit brand, is actually two card-driven storygames in one box. They both use the same system. They are both so, so bleak but also tinged with jet-black comedy. If you’ve played other Morningstar jams like Fiasco, you know what I mean.
The core mechanical conceit of Desperation is that the central creative tension when you play isn’t deciding what terrible things to say, but who says the terrible things. To repeat something I said in the intro: I haven’t played these games! So I really don’t know how it plays out. But that’s the thing the game does.
When you crack open one of the decks — either Dead House, about townsfolk caught in a blizzard in 1888, or The Isabel, about the final voyage of a fishing boat off the coast of Alaska, also in 1888 — you’re given instructions on how to arrange and shuffle the cards and an explanation of how to deploy the locations and the people who are the first cards you’ll draw. These become your map, so to speak, so you can more easily visualize who’s where.
Once you start drawing the actual story-driving cards, you decide which character will speak…and then you can continue speaking, as that character, for a bit, if you want. It’s a nice way to really storygame-ify the whole thing rather than just slapping down cards.
Games play out in an hour or two, handle up to five players, and they aren’t at all mechanically complex. Honestly, I’m looking forward to having a bad time, not a long time, with folks playing either or both of these at an upcoming convention. Fingers crossed they’re replayable! I believe they have to be, given the randomness of how the decks are assembled.
Claw Atlas (Beak, Feather & Bone)
Claw Atlas
PDF available through DriveThruRPG
Physical product available through Possible World Games
Claw Atlas popped up in the middle of 2022 to some very light hype among folks I respect. It’s an expansion to a previous game called Beak, Feather & Bone, by Tyler Crumrine of Possible Worlds Games. By backing Claw Atlas I was able to get the original game as well.
BFB describes itself as a “lightly competitive mapmaking game.” Is it an RPG? Oh gosh, who cares? If The Quiet Year is an RPG, Beak is right there with it.
Play couldn’t be simpler: You start with an overhead city map (the original game came with one, Claw Atlas adds 10 more) and choose a faction of bird people you’ll represent. The game says it can handle 10 players; there are 12 total factions between Beak and Claw. You can also just choose to play more than one faction, whatever, I’m not your dad. It’s not that kind of “lightly competitive” game. In fact I’d say it’s not competitive at all.
Through the course of play, players take turns drawing cards from a standard deck of playing cards. The suit tells you what kind of building you’re going to talk about; the value tells you how much sway your faction has in the city. You pick a building on your map, color it in with your color, and then say what folks say about the place (Beak), what it looks like (Feather) and what it hides inside (Bone). Do that four or five times, you’ve just played the game. Highest total value of cards you’ve drawn gets to end out the game by defining the map’s Seat of Power. That’s it (and that’s why it’s not really competitive at all; you have no control over the card values, just your descriptions).
I really do like these map-making games. I don’t get strong characterization out of them but it’s fun to vibe with your friends. And over time, these kinds of games do accumulate a kind of narrative as your descriptions incorporate others’ contributions. Probably takes less than two hours to play, and it’s pretty affordable. You might maybe even take what you created and plop it into a more conventional fantasy RPG. Kind of the Microscope trick where folks define elaborate histories for their games and then play a different game in that setting.
Next Week
Finally finishing this series with Haxen, Traveller’s Ironsworn, and Under Hollow Hills.
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