The King Is Dead
We played this last night. It’s interesting! And pretty good. There are some things that keep it out of the “great” category for me, though.
The King Is Dead is a GM-less RPG about royal succession, sex, violence, sexy violence, and melodrama. Everyone plays a “warrior prince or warrior princess” of one of five Houses, each with a claim to a recently empty throne. Characters are made up of a handful of mechanically neutral traits, and you can refer back to a short bullet list about each House for more playing guidance. You pick one trait for yourself and then everyone else picks one for you. It felt to me like highlight stats in Apocalypse World, and I have to assume that making monkeys dance for your pleasure is a Vincent Baker slash Meguey Baker thing.
The game is comprised of several mini-games, with an overarching card game running through the whole thing. The cards are used to determine a “winner” (it’s a soft win but important, more on that in a minute) at the end of the game, as well as resolving battle vignettes if you should find yourself going to war. It’s got a Song of Ice and Fire vibe, so war and violence and all that is kind of inevitable.
We played just about all of the minigames, either out of curiosity or because the fiction led us there. I got the feeling that, in any given session of TKID, probably you won’t swing around to any game a second time around. They take a little while to play through, especially with new players, and once you’ve done it the novelty wears out. I think we repeated one game, A Conversation Over Food, because the fiction made sense and the A Reunion game led us there mechanically. Oh, and there’s a “stir the pot” game called Intrigue and Muster, where you pick from a list of stuff and introduce a new event into the ongoing fiction. The game starts with that, but if it’s your turn and you don’t have a firm idea of where to go, it’s kind of the default game to play. I think we went to it three times in our 3 hour session.
Most of the games end up fiddling with your cards, which I didn’t pay a ton of attention to because I was personally chasing fiction rather than a win. But when you have an RPG with win conditions, things can get…weird. (See also: Burning Empires, Rune, Agon, arguably 3:16, and so on.)
I think it’d be easy to dismiss the card game as unnecessary, but I get the sense that you can and maybe should let that game drive your play, at least a bit. It’s a measure of your current position in the race for the throne: the player with the most face cards and aces will be crowned, while the house with the most suits present in their endgame hand will be the “house ascendant,” with some inputs on how the post-game plays out. But getting into that “I must win this” head isn’t a great place when you’re also trying to play a GM-ful/less game where everyone needs to collaborate in good faith. It can be done! But it’s not a natural fit.
In our game, we had five players, one from each of the five houses. You can also play rivals from the same house, but for variety’s sake we spread it out. They’re all Europe-y: fake England and fake Spain and fake France and fake Scandinavia maybe and uhhh fake Other England kind of. Some of that’s just in the names, I think. Easy to hook into in any case.
Every game starts with a game of Intrigue and Muster, played by the player who starts with the highest card. (Everyone reveals their highest card, which is great because it makes everyone’s ears perk up knowing where the aces and kings are.) That first pick set the tone for our entire game, so it’s really important! In our case, the player chose an event where House Luneste (overseas weirdos) starts converting folks to a new, very modern religion. Everything else kind of spooled out from that.
The next game was An Animated Disagreement, in which my princess of Sandoreale went to confront her buddy, the prince of Antyre, about why he was allowing his folks to be converted. There was some hard framing there on my part, and it took a pretty long time to get Antyre’s player to understand that I, another player, needed to get him, as a player, to agree that there’d be a disagreement. His instinct was to compromise, find a middle road, and I was like no, NO, this is fighting, we need to fight. So I kept upping the disagreement until I hit his “oh hell no” wall. In this case, I went to him demanding that he put the converts to death immediately.
After that Dillestone threw a state dinner and we played A Conversation Over Food. The rules to set that up and execute are a little hard to follow, but we muddled through and went around a couple times. Mostly this was an opportunity to make soft moves to telegraph future intentions, which I tried to model by having my Sandoreale princess linger over the Luneste princess just a bit too long and wouldn’t Stealing Time Together sound nice in the near future?
So that’s where we went. Stealing Time Together is my favorite of the minigames, because it’s a nicely tense, sexy sequence. You start out by deciding if the meeting is illicit, which we decided, yeah, because of the same-sex thing: my church would punish me and expel the foreign princess to her own country. Then it’s on everyone else not in the scene to decide if you’ve been intruded on. Which is very interesting. The back-and-forth is great tension-building because, well, if you got into the scene you probably kind of do want to take it to its conclusion, but different conclusions produce different effects in the card game. Not unexpectedly, my most-trad least-experienced player in the group made crude jokes and generally acted out his discomfort, while also getting antsy about “why are you even having this scene, I thought you were trying to win the throne?!” Making allies, friendo. It worked: I later was able pull my lover into a wartime alliance.
Probably the most emotionally fraught bit was when a player did an Intrigue and Muster and had the angry crypto-Vikings come to Dillestone (the former king’s house) and bend the knee, which forced him to give up his best card to Dillestone. He was next, and immediately called for the Sword to Sword game, which is the personal combat thing. It was great! But we had some problems with Sword to Sword. In talking with others who have played this game, we’re not alone.
The premise is great: everyone decides who has the upper hand in the fight, and then the weaker party begins by selecting one of several opening plays. It’s all narrative: I give you an opening to make a dirty move, do you take it? Stuff like that. After it’s gone back and forth three times (and therefore it’s the stronger fighter’s go), a second list of moves opens up.
The main issue we had with Sword to Sword is that it’s super-fraught with mortality-type anxiety in the players, combined with the I Must Win aspect of the card game. It’s very high stakes, so it’s hard to hold the game at arms’ length and play it in good faith. There’s also, procedurally, some vagueness as to what exactly ends combat and who calls it over. Sometimes the moves are super literal: I’ve got my sword to your throat, do you submit or flee? Submit and flee are both explicitly combat-ending events. But then there’s the “I give you an opening to make a dirty hit, do you take it?” and that’s…less explicit. This matters because the way the combat ends tells you what happens to your highest card. Like, if it’s cool for me to say “oh jeez, yeah, that dirty blow wounds me, I’m calling it over,” then I just discard my best card. That’s a tactically better option than “welp, you forced me to submit or flee,” which gives your opponent your best card. You also have to judge for yourself what ended the combat, which is hard to evaluate. In our combat, Antyre got in a dirty hit early but when he had the chance to force the “submit or flee” closing option, he totally took that because he knew he’d get Dillestone’s highest card.
There are some solutions we batted around after arguing for a half-hour, along the lines of banishing “accomplished at arms” as a trait (literally everyone is a “warrior prince/princess” in the game, that sure sounds like everyone should be accomplished at arms by default), explicitly allowing either side to announce when they’ve lost and how (so there’s some flexibility in how the endgame plays out), or explicitly requiring keywords be invoked by the moves you make (way less flexible, and it also reduces the combat minigame to a non-tense fight if the better fighter’s player shows up intent on winning that fucking card game).
There was also a matter of the forced ending – flee or submit – directly violating the losing player’s sense of his character. He just didn’t see either option as acceptable for principled character reasons. I suggested he could X card the attacker’s combat-ending move and ask him to choose something else, even something where his stalwart character just dies, but X-carding in that moment feels ultra-fraught to everyone involved because it’s just so hard to tell how much good faith went into that decision. Was it editorial or tactical? Ugh. This is why adding competitive elements to RPGs is weird.
The resulting fiction of the combat was marvelous, though, with Dillestone and Antyre now sworn enemies. Oake tried to make nice with his pal Prince Dillestone, but that didn’t go well because of the ongoing bad feelings. And then we hit the end of our time slot, so I invoked the War minigame, explaining that I wanted to take advantage of the rift between Dillestone and everyone else.
The War game is also fraught and weird. You build a bigger hand of cards by cashing in your single highest card, which is great because just starting a war is a costly gamble. Terrific. Then you and your opponent bid cards from your enlarged hands to defend “things at risk,” chosen from a list keyed to each side’s House. It’s colorful but also kind of meaningless, since unless you engage with War you never look at what’s at risk prior to the war, and there’s no fictional investment in anything on that list. Like, my warrior princess allied with her lover at the outset and then defended her elite cavalry, which was at risk in the first vignette. I did that purely for showy fictional reasons, and it felt good to do so, but after that, literally nothing that was called out as “at risk” felt like anything either of us cared about. Mostly I just burned through low cards while my opponent opted to not bid (which is a choice if you have the fewest cards).
In War, you can also sue for peace at any time when it’s your turn. So instead of having one of your fictional bullet points called out as “at risk,” you say the “terms of peace” is what’s at risk. Then you bid like normal, and the winner gets to dole out cards to everyone who participated. Tactically we couldn’t figure out why we wouldn’t sue for peace as our first action, other than I guess to wait until we’d burnt down their cards, but I’m 100% certain we were both tossing our lowest cards on the earlier vignettes because we just didn’t care about the bullet points. And on the fiction side, there was just kind of a lot of shrugging that thus-and-such castle was about to fall or so-and-so’s veteran cavalry was facing death. It was my least favorite of the minigames but I’m still thinking about whether I overlooked something important.
Ah: since this was the end of the game, I think that altered my perception of the importance of the push-your-luck element of War. If we’d had another hour or whatever to play, I may have been left with a really weak, small hand. I’ll have to see if that’s an important consideration. I think it’s probably okay if each player has to decide how low to go in terms of hand size before someone either cries uncle or demands an endgame bid.
We played through other stuff too: the Reunion, which rolls immediately into other social games, Trials by Contest, which are super weird in terms of fictionally framing these trials (like, your opponent can demand you throw her a feast at your expense, which is hilarious but also…did a few weeks just pass by?), and An Animated Disagreement, which has the best audience participation element. The only games we didn’t play were A Chase and A Dance. Next time!
Based on feedback from folks who had played before, and my own reading and spotting areas I could tell might need some help, I did a few extra things:
Put out big paper for a shared map. My understanding is that the final game will come with a deck of cards full of locations and other map features, but it felt like it would be good to have everyone grounded in the geography of the place. So I threw out a super rough coastline (the dead king is the “Sovereign of the Seaward Coast,” and one of the Houses is explicitly from overseas) and went around to everyone to have them add details and brief descriptions of their home turf. Unfortunately, when I got to the War minigame, I saw there are already lots of locations already defined. I wish I’d known that first, and playing again I might consider dotting the map with them. Dunno. Setup is pretty snappy and that’d slow things down.
Emphasized the X card as an editorial tool. My home group doesn’t really know much about the X card and it’s not part of their play culture. I explained that, given the GMlessness of the game, if we need to object to something, the X is a good way to go. I pushed it hard during the setup, where we’re giving each other traits. It’s super easy to get a trait that doesn’t fit the (very rough and early) mental map of your character. It was useful to veto traits if they were too off-key.
Emphasized that everyone needs to be asking questions all the time. This is mostly a GM tool, but for my players who don’t GM much, it’s not a habit of their play. I was kind of facilitating, so I was asking lots of questions, but I also tried to ask questions about questions, like “so what do you want to know about this dinner, Prince Oake?” or whatever. Still, it was kind of too easy for folks to blaze past the fictional positioning and try to get into the minigames’ resolution.
Telegraph future hard moves with early soft moves. I did this a couple times, like making goo-goo eyes at another character over dinner to set up for a sexy liaison later. I think that’s super-important, whether you do it diegetically or authorially between the players, like “I really need to corner you privately so we can talk alliance, howzabout A Reunion since you’re next up to choose a game?”
Constantly dragged everyone back to the fiction. This is largely due to the looming spectre of winning and losing that hangs over an RPG where you can win and lose. I have Burning Empires damage, what can I say? But it feels so, so important in this game to de-emphasize that aspect in order to keep minds focused on what’s actually happening in the fiction. That said, it might be a mistake to do so. The game does a good job of nudging folks toward escalation, because in the escalated high-stakes games you have a chance to grab other players’ highest cards. That feels like a facilitating touch I’ll need to evolve and adjust based on who I’m playing with.
Things I will do different next time I facilitate:
More informed consent about what’s at stake in any given minigame. The card game is pretty opaque but also important-ish to some players. I think it’d be important, before committing to any game, to talk about what you stand to win or lose.
Make House tent cards. I want to take the bullet list for each House and put it on the back of a pre-printed tent card, so you can always look at it to help guide your play. Our handmade tent cards were just trait lists and names, and folks were constantly thumbing to the back of their booklets.
Ditch “accomplished at arms” and assume everyone is. This will force more of a conversation at the table about who actually has the upper hand in Sword to Sword, which feels fruitful. The table was split on this solution, though, mostly along competitive lines. Those of us who were just chasing the fiction kind of didn’t care, and thought it’d be totally fine and even good if there was some asymmetry there: if I’m pulled into mortal combat and I won’t have the upper hand, I may very well choose to bail early with a wound instead of making them choose the one boring closing move over and over. But I want to experiment so that’s what I’d do at least next time.
Maybe write a minigame cheat sheet to make the card game less opaque. Everyone wished they knew stuff like “which game should I go for if I want to take their better card?” or “How do I get more cards into my hand right now?” I’m not sure if the card game’s opacity is a bug or a feature. I do feel like with two or three plays you could play The King is Dead super-tactically, which might be fun. I have no sense of how tightly designed the card aspect of the game is, but I hope it’s tight!
Bottom line: we had fun, with some caveats. Despite hammering away at good-faith play and following the fiction, there’s still the pressure of trying to win the card game with opaque tools. The Intrigue and Muster “add more stuff” game has to be used with a very delicate touch, otherwise I think it’d be super easy to have too much stuff. I think a physical map is absolutely vital, but nowhere in the game is there any discussion of that. If folks try to improvise around the narrative they’re given for any particular game, I think it’s easy to get lost and not know how to respond. We don’t love how the most consequential games, Sword to Sword and War, play out. And everyone needs to bring an instinct for melodrama and conflict, not peace-making and compromise. But when the game works, I think it works really well and in a way I haven’t experienced yet in GMless/ful play.
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I love the idea of a game made of minigames (Diaspora and Burning Empires are where I get that from). The playing -to-win thing… it sounds like the other side (but just as rocky) of my experience with Fiasco where a player tried to “win” in the fiction.
Adam Schwaninger it’s a hell of a thing to ask players to hold both the fiction and the winning in their heads at the same time.
TKID bills itself as a “roleplaying party game” but I would not inflict this on inexperienced or trad-first players.
Have you played Firebrands, the predecessor to this?
J. Walton I haven’t! But I have the files. What are your thoughts on it?
Hello
I haven’t played King is Dead, so it’s hard to compare them. Firebrands is diceless and mostly non-competitive, so I’m just wondering how some of that stuff translated over. Honestly, I really like the mini-games style design of Sundered Land and Firebrands and keep hoping it’ll become more of a design trend.
Thi is amazing and informative, thank you so much.
(While I process this post – is there a Paul Beakley write-up of your Burning Empires take somewhere? That game fascinates the hell out of me, the group I was playing with crashed out of it two sessions in but that was enough to feel the deep weirdness of its approach.)
Morgan Davie oh gosh, maybe somewhere? It was kind of my gateway drug into indie games so it’s been a while.
Paul Beakley google has provided… an RPGnet review!! rpg.net – Review of Burning Empires – RPGnet RPG Game Index
So I hear Paul Beakley likes GM-less competitive RPGs…
2006! Please be gentle.
Ralph Mazza it’s on my list!
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Just played it a few days ago at GoPlayNW facilitated by ET, and played with Yoshi Creelman and gene astadan. Holy crap was it a great session, but we only had 3 hours and it felt like we needed so much more time to do it justive.
Played Firebrands first and then The King Is Dead. In Firebrands, we loved the games, but felt the outcomes, especially of skirmish and solitare, didnt have enough teeth. TKID adds those teeth, but then we felt the same way you did about the competition. It’s a hard problem. +1 about having cheatsheets telling you what games to play to affect the card situation.
I meant to do this before 12/31 but, well. Y’all have read plenty about my malware woes. It’s under control for now, but I’m looking at maybe, possibly reinstalling at wordpress.com and letting them deal with the server headaches.
Here’s what I played and my year-later takeaway, nice and short for potty reading:
Epyllion
Played, didn’t run. I really enjoyed it! But a couple things still jump out at me a year later:
As lovely as the friendship crystal mechanic works (short version: you give away your supply of tokens to other PCs when they act on the flags you’ve put on them during character creation, then either count them up when helping or spend them on the “moon magic” move), I still remember it being especially punishing for groups that aren’t great at paying attention to each other. Basically, you end up spending a lot of energy playing toward other folks’ flags but if they’re not paying attention, it’s easy to feel resentful about spending that energy. Given how my year played out, I very much think this is a phenomenon of my home group. I hope to address this more specifically in 2019.
I have no idea how the long game plays out. I chased advancement really hard and got to the next age. It’s fine. I did notice that advancement choices are pretty narrow. I feel like everyone’s playbook will end up looking like everyone else’s playbook across play groups and experiences.
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No Thank You, Evil!
I played a good amount of this with my daughter early in the year but we haven’t played in months, now. Honestly, I’m kind of itchy to get her to try something with a little more mechanical complexity. That’s totally on me and if I’m being honest with myself, it’s probably not what she would enjoy. But I think about running NTYE and it bores me. The narrow, short formula absolutely works! But it’s a narrow, short formula for play.
Probably the next thing we’ll do with it is move her to the highest character sheet level. She graduated from triangle to square in January, and that might have been the last time we played.
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Burning Wheel
2018 has obviously been a long fucking year because I completely forgot we played Burning Wheel! I played, didn’t run. It was nice. I’m also clearly not the target demographic for this game any more. It’s just such a heavy load, both on the GM side and the player side. Lots to manage. We didn’t do a great job of really workshopping Beliefs, and our campaign reached a point where we’d just kind of…done what we came to do. Was that my short attention span? Maybe!
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Bluebeard’s Bride
Played this at NewMexicon 2018 and it blew my mind. It’s super weird, very arty-farty, not at all a conventional RPG in terms of agency and bildungsroman and long meaningful campaign play. It’s a one-shot featuring a series of horrific vignettes, everyone plays an aspect of a single character and takes turns in the driver’s seat, and it’s so squicky and weird that it’s just impossible (or perhaps just in poor taste) to try and describe actual play. Very high on my list of best games of the year.
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Sagas of the Icelanders
Another NewMexicon 2018 game. I ran this, because I always run it. SotI is on my very short list of games I’m so good at, I can make the game do anything I want. It is a lovely experience every time.
This particular game was a “spotlight GM” event that I ran. I remember it being funnier and more Fiasco-y than it usually is. Worked great and I’m adding that mode to my quiver for future runs.
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Masks
My first run at Masks and it was super fun. My buddy Kit ran it at New Mexicon, and he is to Masks what I am to Sagas. The game does some really interesting stuff about supers relationships and completely dispenses with Champions style physics modeling. It’s terrific, loved it, want to run it here in 2019.
I had another opportunity to play Masks later in the year, at Rincon 2018 with Jason Corley running it. I played a more conventional character and it was a more conventional experience, which is great because you don’t have to push the envelope every time.
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Golden Sky Stories
Actually a fantasy adventure hack called Fantasy Friends. GSS is cute but not my jam: it’s heartwarming and affirming, you basically bid points to get things done and then do heartwarming and affirming things to get those points back. I mean it’s nice! And Nick Hopkins did a really good job running it. I was just ehh on the whole model of play afterward.
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Coriolis
Coriolis was my only real heartbreak of 2018. I adore, absolutely love Mutant: Year Zero from Fria Ligan, and Coriolis is built on the same engine. The game is packed with interesting history and social context, the setting is super interesting, characters look neat. I mean just on reading the text, I was all in. But the game has a huge glaring problem at the center of it: a GM-facing economy called Darkness Points.
What I discovered was that I grind against the DP economy in every imaginable way. First off, there’s a huge list of bad shit the GM is “allowed” (?) to launch at the players by spending DP. I read that to strongly imply, or mandate really, that nothing on that list is in my toolbox without spending those points. Then what really killed me was that I can effectively earn and keep unlimited DPs, and the players can’t do shit about it. Even playing hard toward the intent of the system, this is I think intentional! So there’s no meaningful decision making, no tension, nothing. It’s a list of things I feel like I can’t do but actually can do because I’m spending an effectively unlimited number of points.
I will say, though, that Coriolis has an extremely nifty spaceship combat system. Each player takes on a specific on-board role and everyone’s contribution matters. It’s great.
Otherwise, the game left me restless and irritated. What a shame, because it’s so very beautiful. And it appears I only ran three sessions of it? Ye gawds.
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The Veil
I tried to run The Veil but it catastrophically failed for us within an hour of the first session. When I had read the rules, the playbooks stood out as weird and very specific and I thought “oh wow, everyone is so strange!” And they are. But once you figure out where each playbook comes from, escaping the tropes and references becomes nearly impossible.
For us, I think, we worked hard at not doing that. But the moves, oh the moves. Designer Fraser Simons made a fairly lengthy argument explaining his approach, which was to build the moves in a very broad way. I like the idea in principle, but lordy in practice we just couldn’t get a handle on how anything was supposed to work or how any given move’s outcome was supposed to look in the fiction. The whole thing felt very abstract and it wore everyone out in about an hour.
But! But but but: I think The Veil may be best in class for how you create your cyberpunk setting. Each playbook has a very specific set of questions and inputs, so that any given playbook mix produces a wildly different and unique setting. We really liked this. The Veil produced a setting I’d be very happy to play in! Just with a different game.
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Scum & Villainy
My surprise hit of the year was Scum & Villainy, a sci-fi take on Blades in the Dark. I’d had the pleasure of playing once before at a private con earlier in the year, but I was so exhausted that the playbook felt like an incomprehensible wall of jet fighter controls.
I gotta say, now that I fully grasp how the GM-player transaction works in Bitd/S&V, it might be my favorite. Even more favorite than Burning Wheel! I really like how the negotiation bounces back and forth: how well positioned are you? How difficult is the thing? How hard do you want to try? Are you willing to take an additional consequence? Love it to pieces.
Our run at Scum petered out because everyone advanced to a point where there was really no more mechanical tension to the game. This is something I was worried about in Blades as well: the Resistance mechanism (short version: if you suffer consequences you don’t like, you can resist them at a cost to your stress) is such that eventually you can just do anything and everything and practically never suffer for it. I don’t love the realization that so much of the play juice was coming from the mechanisms, but in S&V it did for us.
It did get me thinking about versions of Blades where maybe you don’t get better, but the scope of your action just gets broader. Dunno. It was a good experience, very fun, just ran its course.
Oh and I ran it at RinCon 2018 and completely forgot! Pitched it, explained it, ran it, easy as pie. S&V is definitely on my short list of pickup one-shot games I’m happy to run without any prep.
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The King is Dead
This is Vincent Baker’s diceless, GMless game of fantasy intrigue built on the PbtA framework. I absolutely love this! And it may be my favorite of his games, even more than Apocalypse World itself.
The core of the game is that everyone gets a copy of the same rules book. You sketch out sexy young princes and princesses in a Game of Thrones-ish setting. And then you start picking little mini-games to play out scenes. You start with a game called “muster and intrigue,” which adds a little fictional context to the setting and gives you a card. The ostensible object of the game is to win the crown by any means necessary. You do that by building a good hand of cards, with more and better face cards worth more than numbered cards.
I’ve played this game twice now. The first time, we just rolled with the minigames and didn’t worry much about the underlying card game. It was really fun that way! But the second time, when I ran it again at Rincon in Tucson, I really charged hard at the card game. It was even more fun that way, because it forced me to play really strategically and think bigger-picture. My game basically shifted from playing Arya to playing Cersei.
Highest recommendation.
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Palimpsest
Okay, I pretty much never brag on myself but I’m going to now: I am super proud of my Game Chef submission this year, a little time travel game called Palimpsest. The premise is that three different time travelers converge on a small but vital moment in history, and try to make events conform to their wishes before uncertainty collapses and that moment is forever set.
I’ve run it twice, it was fun twice. It could stand a bit of polish and definitely some art direction, but this was the first time I’ve ever submitted a Game Chef and thought to myself “oh heck yeah, this fucker has legs.” I’m gonna publish it in some form down the road. But for now, here it is:
Download here
Legacy
Oh boy. The last game I ran this year.
It did not end well.
It started with such promise: a game about generations passing through time. A game about building up communities, rather than scrabbling for short-term wins.
It ended for a lot of reasons. Some had to do with the game itself: Mechanically, Legacy was overwhelming to everyone. There are move sets for your character and your family and the common moves and the story moves and and and. There are multiple economies. There is room for really unpleasant coercion via the game’s debts system. But beyond that, Legacy demanded everyone walk away from deeply ingrained habits of character monogamy, agency, and campaign continuity.
It was just too hard. It ended on a really sour note and we haven’t run a game since. That was early December, I think? It’s been a month.
It did, however, give me a lot to talk about.
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This is it! We made it! These are the last three reviews from the pile of games I’ve been working through the past several weeks. As always, my caveat: these are reviews based on my reading, not play … although this week, Under Hollow Hills will get a deeper treatment because I actually have played that one a few times now.
Haxen
Haxen is available in PDF from DriveThru.
He also has a few physical zines left at Itch.io.
Designer Michael Elliott describes this little eight-pager as “a single-player post-apocalyptic exploration RPG.” Haxen hits the mark admirably well and in a very, very compact edition. It also lists itself as based on Blades in the Dark and I have a harder time seeing that. It’s pretty compelling, though, and I’ve had a chance to play it for a couple hours.
The contrivance for your map-making is that you play a Haxen, folks who head out into the wasteland left behind by the “sorcerous rich” to bring back knowledge and salvage to your community. You pick one of five backgrounds, and those provide the teeniest bit of narrative color and fictional positioning to anchor your play. My first Haxen is Kazark, a Barbarian who uses “lasers & wires” as their edge (a Haxe) when they wander around. You also receive a prophecy from your commune of something you might witness. The procedures of the game left me with “flower mystery.” Weird, evocative, one more thing to hang my imagination on.
Haxen has a very narrow scope of activity but you always have a system at work as you play. There’s no real “free play” unless you’re narrating alongside the system to yourself, maybe in a journal. I thought about it! It reminded me a bit of a very, very simple iteration of what Starforged does (see my fiction work-in-progress, Echo Sedano, for an idea of what that game guided me toward). As you wander around a blank hex map, you’re either doodling new things onto the map or dealing with the thing you’ve just doodled. You can explore, overcome, move or aid when you interact with the map, and then those actions will in turn trigger other tables to look stuff up on.
The nifty dicelessness of the game comes down to the “rune matrix,” a 6×6 grid of three randomly assorted runes. Sometimes you’re instructed to mark off whatever rune you want, but sometimes you’re instructed to mark the next one in order, from left to right and top to bottom, if you need something truly random. The runes aren’t evenly distributed: there are only 6 “good” runes but 18 “bad” runes, so if you use up the “good” runes for “good” outcomes on your actions, you’re also making it impossible to end the exploration on a happy note. Your commune will only welcome you home with open arms if you’ve been very, very careful cashing in the “good” runes. But then you can also erase your marked runes for the next time you exit the wastes.
It’s not a “tight” game by any means, and once you start picking apart the rune matrix some of the magic kind of goes away. So…don’t be like me. Just let the fiction guide you and you’ll have a good time (right up to the moment your explorer gets disassembled by a feral nanite swarm). My barbarian, Kazark, traveled too deeply into the wastes — about a third of the hexes — and now he can’t take the Exit action because there aren’t enough runes left on the matrix to mark. So he’s going to wander off into the endless raging lightning storms, terrified after an orbital laser summoned forth by one of the sorcerous rich in their mountain fastness annihilated everything around him. Poor guy! Next one will be better off, I’m sure.
Haxen strikes me as a perfect little lunch-break activity. You can play for as long or as little as you want. You track a mix of permanent (ie things you’ve named) and impermanent notes on the booklet itself. It’s a really nice little package and well worth $5 at Drivethru. No weird formatting, you should be able to print and staple your own copy quite easily.
Traveler’s Ironsworn
Available in PDF from DriveThru.
I am a huge fan of Ironsworn and Starforged, its sci-fi second edition. Doodling up an Ironsworn-based hack like my buddy Keith Stetson did with his western Badlands is high on my list. So when third parties release Ironsworn stuff, I always like to check in on what folks are doing.
Traveler’s Ironsworn, by Colin Klöcker, is a supplement that boils the game down to eight color-coded cards and, optionally, a version that works on your phone. I haven’t checked out the phone edition yet. The cards themselves are fine. I guess I’m looking at the reference book that Starforged came with, which is my gold standard for a portable-yet-complete reference. The dry-eraser character and other sheets, that’s good stuff and I wish I had something similar for Starforged.
What’s more exciting to me is that it also comes with eight additional custom reference cards. There’s some very nifty stuff in these cards: a bunch of new tables for Ironsworn: Delve, the dungeoneering supplement for the original game, a system for make more mechanically interesting foes including tags and a “challenge die,” some oracles for cooking up new Vows if you’re running short (read my Ironsworn breakdown to see what I’m talking about), and whole new ways to generate more detailed characters, settlements and cultures. There’s even a whole new setting, Haarland, that’s boiled down to a few paragraphs and tables. The references for the original game are good and useful, but the supplemental stuff is genuinely nifty. Recommended but I’m not sure how to buy the professionally produced materials. You can get a PDF of the whole thing on DriveThru and make your own.
Under Hollow Hills
Available in PDF from DriveThru.
Available in softback from IPR.
I’ll instantly back anything and everything The Bakers put out. They have continuously pushed the envelope on what PbtA games can be, and even their wildest experiments are still eminently playable and engaging.
Bad Kickstarter habit of mine, and a confession: once I back a thing, I fire-and-forget. I rarely check in with updates until it’s gotten more than a year late. I might get curious about the holdup, or I might feel grateful that I’ve got breathing room before it arrives. Not Under Hollow Hills, though! I eagerly downloaded everything they released as it came out. Consequently, UHH was the last game I played at my last in-person convention early in 2020, OrcCon in Los Angeles. The lockdowns started a few weeks later.
The final text of UHH is in some ways much more than I had hoped for, and in other ways surprisingly…shallow, maybe? But that’s by no means a criticism. The premise of the game is quite specific: you are performers and crew in an old-timey magical circus that passes between the fairy and mortal realms. Think: Caraval, The Night Circus, Something Wicked This Way Comes. The tone throughout is perfect, a mix of whimsical and low-key menacing. Or, perhaps, simply alien. Fairies play by different rules than mortals. Being a fairy means you can play at life and death; being a mortal means insults might not literally kill you like it will a fairy, but a hilarious gag involving a giant hammer will definitely literally kill you. Even as your very closest fairy friends laugh and laugh.
An UHH game follows an outline: the carnival is going to perform somewhere, they will arrive and get the lay of the land, and then the performers will plan and then execute a performance tuned to the interests and needs of the time and place. Then they’ll move on to the next show if there’s going to be another . Someone described it as a fairyland Muppet Show when we played.
So…why would you want to play The Muppet Show week in and out over months, perhaps, of a campaign-length tour? Because the playbooks are just staggeringly provocative. If you have picked up fairy tale lore through Western-cultural osmosis, you’ll readily recognize the archetypes: the witch, the animated pot/broom/whatever, the jack-o-lantern, the unsettling and beautiful seer, and so on. Instead of PbtA-standard moves you get plays, as in “how are you going to play this?” Everyone’s a hustler and a con artist, and everyone’s got operatic-scale needs and entanglements because why would fairies do anything by half-measures?
I think, like all the Bakers’ best work, UHH plays best with players who are willing to be performative and loose with their characters’ emotions. Their Game of Thrones-inspired GMless game The King Is Dead, for example, is spectacular when you’ve got players who are eager to crank the melodrama to 11: huge emotions, huge betrayals, seething hatreds, all that. UHH’s theater-nerd melodrama arises from the intersection of plays and bindings. That is, moves and relationships. The bindings are both very hot and very specific. The Boondoggle Hob, for example, just grates against someone else in the troupe — explicitly for no reason at all! It’s just a thing they have to do. Gotta hate on someone. The Crowned Stag has a dalliance and/or a bad breakup in their bindings list. Probably the majority of interplayer interest emerges from these bindings — I mean, the shows they put on are great fun but the context disappears when the performers move on — but everyone’s got to be in on the joke.
There aren’t many rules-rules to the game beyond when and how to make your plays. Every playbook has four distinct plays and everyone shares ten obvious plays (ie the common moves list). There is no advancement other than a constant churn of descriptors that the characters are shifting between their summer and winter forms (or, for the mortals, their free and careful forms). What the game text has in abundance is lists, enough lists to choke the most avid OSR fan, and for very similar reasons. There are more than a dozen “occasions to perform,” each occasion has long lists of NPCs and backstories, outlines of events, and so on. You could play, say, the Betrothal playset a dozen times and never repeat a set of choices. A traveling magical wedding band.
As a one-shot, UHH is one of my favorites in the PbtA style. The performance cycle is nicely self-contained, the bindings aim the characters at each other in fun and immediate ways, the Occasions outlines are easy to work through in 10 minutes while the players pick playbooks. Show planning can take an hour but it’s a fun and productive hour at that: I had to nudge my players along because they were having such a good time planning the outline and beats of their bit. I’m very interested in what long-form UHH looks like when the circus goes on tour. I’m betting those bindings get deeper and more interesting over time, and you may see interesting threads between places and personalities on both the fairy and mortal sides of the setting.
One interesting bit that was added after my 2020 plays of the game was “circus power.” That is, once per performance, each character can exert the power of the circus itself. You might create some lasting change in the audience or a specific audience member. You might direct the circus itself on a new path. You might allow the place and circumstance to fully express itself through your performance. It’s all pretty abstract but also thematically meaningful. It gives the circus more teeth, makes it something more than The Muppet Show.
Anyway, hell of a game and a fun text on its own merits. Their stuff is always so weird and provocative. Under Hollow Hills is very high on my list to play long-form this year.
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