If I had it to do over again, there are books I would or would not write, and creative and educational effort I would put elsewhere. Women I would have been braver about talking to, others I’d have avoided. So many dumb arguments avoided entirely. Traveled when I had the chance, cultivated more friendships, perhaps saved a friend lost far too young.
In the gaming circles I move in, time travel as a genre is either a fetish or despised. Nobody seems to be neutral on the idea of it, either as fiction or as gaming material. Me? I love it. Love. It.
It’s easy to psychoanalyze why time travel is appealing. It’s like poking at why we have favorite superpowers: invisibility if we feel guilty or ashamed, super strength if we feel weak, and so on. Probably bullshit, but still fun to poke at. So time travel? My psychoanalysis angle is that it’s about regret, setting things right, second chances. On the other hand, as gamer grist goes there’s no more interesting, challenging logic puzzle out there. And history is always a great excuse to fall down a research hole.
The reason I bring all this up is that Zinequest 2021 was a heaping serving of time travel gaming. So many projects, apparently out of nowhere! And not just zines, but full-length RPGs. I went all-in on every project I could find, and had a chance to play a couple of them at an online convention the Indie Game Reading Club put on in December.
Genre Rules
Time travel basically comes in four flavors:
- Causality shenanigans (Primer, Timecrimes, some elements of the Bill & Ted movies, Tenet),
- Punitive loops (Groundhog Day, Russian Doll),
- Tourism with dramatic irony (Time Bandits, Outlander, most of the Bill & Ted movies, Last Night In Soho, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court), and
- Set endpoints and fish-out-of-water (Time After Time, 12 Monkeys, The Terminator, The Tomorrow War, Looper)
To my mind, what makes a time travel game unique to other genres is the tension between known outcomes and the protagonist’s efforts to change them. I know there’s room for argument there: does anyone actually know any outcomes in Primer? Or Timecrimes? I think they do, or at least the protagonists think they know the outcomes. Of course the outcomes are hidden from the viewer under logical puzzles and unreliable witnesses. And there are other, weirder exceptions that are genre-adjacent (The Fountain) – it’s rich territory, seductive to a certain kind of gamer, and easy to forget that it’s human needs that drive the best stories.
Human-Centered Time Travel Is Hard
Time travel is a tough genre to play in a human-centered way, I think. Most times I’ve tried time travel in roleplaying, I’ve found player brains get too full of causality and logic and problem-solving. This happens despite the fact that all the best time travel fiction is about human needs and impulses, not logic. Yes, sure, the Primer flowchart is very fun to look at, amazing work, but the movie doesn’t work without regret and greed and humans being human. Same with Timecrimes and Outlander and Looper. Heck, it’s pretty vital to The Terminator and 12 Monkeys and The Tomorrow War, all action-y stories, but also grounded in human needs. Same as it ever was: gamers love to gamify their favorite stuff, and they end up gutting what made their favorite stuff work.
My first go at time travel gaming was Pacesetter’s Timemaster, way-back in 1984. It was all about fun, fast causality tricks – jumping back to before a fight started to cache a weapon or set a trap, leaving notes for yourself to create causal loops, looping investigations over and over, T.I.M.E. Stories style. There was an evil alien presence invading Earth’s timeline all through the past, present and future. It was great trad fun (beat up bad guys, elaborate battles, chits on maps) with some amusing logical toys to play with. After that, time travel games were few and far between: Continuum created an amazing future civilization built on time travel and gave us a game nearly unplayable due to being so very tightly designed around the logic of time travel; Feng Shui sort of, entirely about the elaborate battles and fighting over control of time-travel junctures, very little about changing the future; GURPS Time Travel, one of my last forays into GURPS but very GURPS-y in its execution.
EDIT: Jonathan Walton has an excellent adaptation of Mouse Guard available to play Continuum on his Itch page.
Then we get into indie territory, and the games get more human-focused: Spectrum, where your “party” is comprised of versions of each character from different parts of their own timelines – you may play your super-advanced self one time, a total time travel noob the next, it’s very clever. See also Epidiah Ravachol’s Time & Temp, where you play temp employees whose job is to fix time travel problems caused by other travelers. There’s also Nathan Paoletta’s older game Timestream, an early indie attempt at a character-forward universal time travel toolbox.
Causality Shenanigans
This is the most logic-intensive form, and very hard to get right. The Zinequest game Infinite March is a very bare-bones setting and game in this vein by Stephen Whitehead. The setting is the “Temporal Empire.” Feels like a minimalist take on Continuum, essentially fixated on maintaining the status quo against outside influence. Hardly any game at all to this, not sure what to do with it. Right now I would categorize it as unfinished.
Beyond that? Kevin Kulp’s Timewatch is a GUMSHOE-based cinematic adventure game very much in the vein of Pacesetter’s old Timemaster game. It uses the GUMSHOE trick – avoid investigative stall-outs by simply giving the players basic clues – to bypass figuring out what has changed and what needs to be done about it.
I’m going to toot my own horn here and hype Palimpsest, a small time-travel game I submitted to Game Chef 2018: check it out, it’s legit fun! Characters pass through a loop of events over and over, making changes to assert their desires the scene before the moment collapses and nobody else can change anything.
Punitive Loops
This turns out to be a pretty easy slice of time travel to tackle.
Procrastination Day is a deeply weird “time loop comic book rpg zine” from Bomansa Studio in the Groundhog Day vein: you play Mario, a 29 year old slacker with a cat and a fish trying to finish something called “The Project.” Doesn’t actually matter what The Project is, but Mario only has nine tries to get it done. Meanwhile, the character is trying to balance out his resources (energy, needs, motivation, karma and days), gather objects necessary to get things done (food, battle, special, and DVDs you can watch after dinner…it’s a weird game, not kidding!). And then his day begins, and the first thing he has to overcome is his own procrastination. Bonkers, solitaire, highest recommendation.
Thursday, a reference to Russian Doll, perhaps the greatest time loop story ever told, is a No Dice No Masters (think Dream Askew or Wanderhome) game by Eli Seitz. The goal is straightforward: escape the time loop you’re in. It’s specifically a one-shot game with a tight narrative arc, not as free-wheeling as other NDNM games. As with other NDNM style games, each player takes responsibility for various setting elements – time travel weirdness (responsible for ending scenes), the city itself (responsible for setting scenes), friendly NPCs (offer a way out of tough situations) and unfriendly NPCs (provoke conflict). Then you play through a Thursday, ending when the protagonist dies. Over and over, until the players end the loop through a coin toss. It feels like the game could last literally forever, or be over in an hour. As with every other NDNM game I’ve read, the meat of the game is in the playbooks and the moves one makes (sometimes by cashing in a token). Of the time travel games in my not-yet-played pile, this one is highest on my list.
Tourism & Dramatic Irony
Echoes of Chaos is a zine-sized game by Tom McGee based on Trophy Dark, which is based on Cthulhu Dark, and shares those games’ underlying simplicity. Mechanically they’re very simple: when faced with something “dangerous,” add d6es to a pool you roll based on just doing the thing, and whether you have any special professional or personal skills that would help you. Then you add d6es of a different color based on whether you’re using advanced technology or are deliberately screwing with the timeline in the past to get what you want. Outcomes are based on the single highest die rolled and whether it was a light die (cool, you got what you wanted, probably with a complication) or a dark die (not cool, you just added a Ripple and possibly an Echo – you’ve changed time yay/oh no).
Echoes of Chaos does one thing well: showcasing the players changing the future by going into the past. You’re fun-loving criminals bullshitting your way into a very expensive rich-person tour of the past: think Westworld, but actual history. Besides pursuing your personal goals – everyone has a focus on stealing a thing, doing a thing, changing something and so on – you’re having to do it all within the structure of a package tour, with a tour guide keeping an eye on the characters. It runs hard into Fiasco territory pretty quick, at least among the players at my table: they know the point of the game is to watch the future change, so they make no effort to keep that from happening. It’s very one-shotty that way, mostly getting into gonzo crime capers and racking up the Echoes throughout time.
The game could have used one more pass with an outside editor. It’s playable but there’s some ambiguity around the rules, and the setup is never quite explained all at once. But, like other whatever-Dark games, there are tons of fun tables to generate everything in the game. Specifically, the short-term changes (results of Ripples in prior capers) and long-term changes (results of Echoes throughout time) give you good ideas about how to play out the changed future.
In our game, the criminals each owed a major mafia boss a debt that could only be paid via this time travel scheme. After traveling to ancient Egypt, then the Roman Empire, then the French Revolution and finally the Wright Brothers’ first flight, they returned to a future of Stargate-style cyber-Egyptian technology run by the mafioso’s family, whose reputation is now repaired.
Cute game, very much about spending a bit of time in “the past” rather than jumping around creating causal chaos.
Another example of the genre from Zinequest is What Once Went Wrong, basically Quantum Leap, the RPG, by Craig Campbell. It’s two player only, one doing the leaper and the other doing the GMing (present in-game as the hologram assistant). The setup is entirely Quantum Leap, with the leaper tasked with fixing a problem they don’t start out understanding. Actual gameplay is a pretty trad die pool versus target number thing, and is the least interesting bit of the game. The leaper also tracks a value called Destiny, which goes up every time you roll dice and gets spent later to succeed at other tasks. The GM is also secretly tracking Leap points (rolled randomly, successful rolls generating more than unsuccessful ones), the counter that tells you when you’ve finished the adventure. No sense as to how much this Leap Point economy really drives play. It feels to me like a signal to the GM that it’s time to wrap up. There are a few story hooks at the end of the zine, looks pretty easy to jump into.
Set End-Points & Fish Out of Water
Brian St. Claire-King’s game End Times, a full length game and not a zine, was the other time travel game I ran recently. It was funded in the middle of the Zinequest that produced so many other time travel games. The setup here is that you’re playing modern-day time travelers who can swap with your own consciousness precisely 10 years ahead or back. Having jumped 10 years ahead, you’ve seen there’s an impending apocalypse. Then you jumped 10 years back to let your childhood self understand they must get ready now to fight the future. The game begins with the characters gathered to try and stop what they’ve seen.
The 10-year limitation does away with most of the logical fixation you get when you’re trying to Bill and Ted your way through problems. Rather than jumping into your immediate past or future, your timelines are fixed: every day that proceeds now, a day has proceeded in the future and the past as well. And you can’t ever directly meet yourself, since you’re swapping consciousness with your future and past selves. But you can leave notes, which is the main way time changes. And past and future characters can each one another in the present while the PCs are swapped, which is great fun because your past/future selves are the GM’s NPCs.
End Times is more human-facing than Echoes of Chaos. One bit I wasn’t sure what to do with was that every character has a “pit,” an unhealthy way they deal with the stress and anxiety of knowing the end of the world is coming. You might be a drug addict, or depressed, or otherwise self-destructive. A more interesting bit of humanity in the game is when you create characters, you also define a series of scenes from your own past and how they led your character to be how they are now. And sure enough, in our playthrough someone arranged for their past self to not do something that would get them in trouble. The net result was that one of his roleplaying keywords changed to reflect his character’s different past. Neat!
The game comes in two versions: Vajra Enterprises’ in-house ORC system (very trad skill + stat thing) and a PbtA version. The PbtA version is not a tightly constructed little tone poem of a game that achieves its goals in, you know, 6 basic moves and some playbooks. It’s the other kind, where more typical skill-based rules are rendered in the language of moves. There are sixteen “basic” moves as well as the moves each of a dozen playbooks provides. I created a character keeper for the game if you’d like to look through it. For the PbtA fans, you have a Hx-like value with your own past and future selves, which is very cute. It’s how you leverage your knowledge of yourself to get things done in the past and future, where you might become, literally, your own worst enemy.
The actual game plays pretty well, I thought, although it’s unclear to me how much long-term playability there is. I suspect you need to dial your time travel impacts up/down. The core method for determining the effects of time travel is a move called “Change History.” You roll this when changing history is either the point or the inevitable outcome of your activities. The result is that the player and/or the GM choose from a (very) long list of possible outcome categories, with the GM filling in the details of how each element changed. So like if you’re targeting an NPC in the past to change their mind about something in the future, you might change their religion, or their sexual activity, their politics, who knows?
PbtA being what it is, though, things can snowball into chaos pretty fast. I think this is where playing it as a one-shot versus a campaign pivots: slower and more thoughtful changes in time, rather than big zany changes.
I think End Times is a very smart structural approach to the genre.
The last time travel thing I backed last year is Nightfall Games’ The Terminator RPG. There’s only a quickstart PDF available, but I’ve received communication from my future self that it’s going to be a very trad approach to the material: elaborate combat rules, a subsystem for hacking, mostly gunfights with robots from the future. I guess you can either play rebels from the future sent back to save their targets, or the targets themselves. Will there be rules about changing the impending future? No idea, but based on reading the quickstart my communications from the future, there will not. Honestly this was pure fan-bait backing for me, and I do love the Terminator franchise, but I suspect the best part of this will be the various robot opponents.
No Do-Overs
If I had it to do over again, would I still have the good parts of my life today? Would it be worth risking the good to mitigate the bad? Did going through the bad make the good possible? Maybe this isn’t our first time through, and we’re already revisiting our choices. Or we’re running all possible choices in parallel, somehow communicating with ourselves. Are we experiencing our own best timeline? Scary thought: how much worse could it be? It’s A Wonderful Life is a classic for a reason, after all.
Who wouldn’t want a do-over?
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I went to my first major in-person convention this past weekend since 2020 and it was, as you might expect, really weird. But I got to run and play a lot of mostly new-to-me RPGs.
I attended Forge Midwest in Madison, WI back in April, but that’s a pretty small event. 30ish people maybe? Two rooms, five or six tables per room, not that full. The sort of event where you’ll meet everyone who attended and hang out with them more than once. This event, RinCon, is a big (for Arizona) regional gaming convention with hundreds of attendees. And because everything is weird and expensive now, they ran it in conjunction with the Tucson ComiCon, a truly massive event with attendance in the many thousands. I went down to the dealer floor a couple times and between the crowds and the costumes, I felt a little dissociated until I got out. We still have a long way toward normal.
Hotel Manhattans got the job done, tasty enough to keep my mouth happy and weak enough to not screw me up at 11pm.
Growing pains – and concerns about COVID exposure – aside, it was so nice to sit at tables with folks who were eager to dig into new games. My time was spent entirely at the Indie Arcade, a Games-on-Demand-like setup where folks stand up at the top of each slot and pitch games to folks who show up not knowing what would be on offer. There’s always a risk that nothing on offer will be appealing, but I’ve never seen anyone just shake their head and walk away. If they’re at the Arcade they’re there to try something.
I’ll dig into all these in more depth at some point but here’s a quick rundown of what I ran and played, and some initial impressions.
Nahual
This long-delayed Kickstarter by Miguel Angel Espinoza was worth the wait. In Nahual, you play shapeshifters with a direct lineage to a Pre-Columbian priesthood that was nearly wiped out by conquistadores. Those conquistadores brought with them literal angels, straight out of Christian mythology, invisible to non-nahuales and hungry for worship. Those angels largely wiped out the nahuales, but some survived. Now you, a poor Mexican, hunt and kill angels for their meat. And other byproducts. Waste not, want not I guess? It’s a very weird premise, based on the Operacion Bolivar graphic novel series by Edgar Clement. It works well as a holding environment. The characters all work together in a small business (taco truck, cantina, etc.) and they’re never not going to be poor Mexicans.
Yeah, it’s like that. A page from Operacion Bolivar for a taste of the angel-rendering business.
Nahual is Powered by the Apocalypse and is essentially a reframed werewolf story, only instead of wolves you have a connection with the spirits of an eagle, armadillo, jaguar and so on. Central American species, you see. But the rest of the structure is easy to grasp: you start out not being that good at shapeshifting, but you can risk pushing your transformation further than you’ve learned. The angel-hunting is traumatic and gross, but also you’re in a world that knows that angels are real. Rendered-angel products are a fine stand-in for the drug trade, which gives Nahual some Cartel (another game from Magpie) vibes. You’re not judged for doing difficult, traumatic labor.
In our game, an American crime lord operated under the cover of a predatory multi-level marketing business on the streets of Mexicali. He had his hooks into one of the characters’ NPC connections, having loaned the NPC money he knew they couldn’t pay back. Through play they discovered the MLM was selling angel-derived products (“wellness vapes”) for maximum addiction. So our nahuales all transformed into their respective half-human-half-spirit forms (a jaguar, an armadillo, and a snake) and busted a bit of their operation. We could have easily continued playing for many sessions just based on that bit.
As far as pure design goes, Nahual isn’t especially innovative. That’s a good thing, I think, given how weird the premise is. I ran a four hour session of the game with folks who were mostly old PbtA hands, and getting it up and running was a snap since the game doesn’t demand new skills. Unfortunately, I had old playbooks and move reference sheets from the playtest and not the latest text as it appeared in the rulebook. The game still worked well, but it was also fascinating to compare/contrast the texts and see where Espinoza made changes. In every case, I could see why a move got tweaked or described a bit differently. If you ever get the opportunity to play a game with both early and final rules, do it, if you’re interested in the design side of things.
Zombie World
I haven’t always loved Zombie World but I’ve got to say, I’ve developed a new appreciation for it as the best PbtA party game.
In case you don’t know: Zombie World is PbtA-derived but quite far away from Apocalypse World. You get three cards that describe your character and that’s it. Two of them (your secret past, and your secret trauma) are face-down until you choose to reveal them at a dramatic moment. The entirety of the game is run from decks of cards and some dry-erase boards. It is a tuned racecar of a game, designed to get you down the track of zombie survival horror as fast as humanly possible.
Behold! Most of a huge table of survivors.
I first ran Zombie World for a big table – eight players – as a lark last year. I didn’t have anything suitable on my board game shelf for an oversized game day crowd so, sure, let’s see what happens. It was a fantastic success. Everyone understands the genre, the characters are paper-thin but also evocative, and you can quickly run through little scenes of two or three characters at a time. Since then I’ve noodled a bit on big table best practices, and rolled those out for a table of seven at the convention. It was possibly even better than the first time, which honestly surprised me because we had some new folks. Despite needing to explain stuff about the underpinnings of moves and revelations we got a real solid slice of life among survivors hiding in an amusement park.
I have yet to attempt the game as a long-form small-group game! And I’m not sure I want to. Zombie World is in my party-RPG pile, along with Ghost Court (a silly romp) and Inheritance (not a romp, heavy and serious).
Night Reign
I was a player, not a facilitator, for this zine-sized game from Oli Jeffrey. I went in cold, with a pitch that sounded like a more-occult take on similar groundwork laid by Blades in the Dark. Characters belong to a secret underground rebellion composed of royalists after a good and noble king has been overthrown and now work under two secret identities. I like that bit, the idea that you’re actually having to keep it together on three different fronts. For example, I played an agent with public lives both as a backbench politician in the new parliament, and an enforcer for a crime boss.
Night Reign describes itself as “based on Trophy Dark,” which I’ll talk about a bit further down. Honestly can’t see the relationship, but the outline of the system is fairly solid. There are three card-based minigames, all variations on blackjack, depending on your character’s approach (stealth, guile or violence). Everyone’s got a selection of magic effects (devilry) they can invoke in play, but doing so may draw the attention of the god/spirit that provides that power.
Almost none of this maps to the rules!
After spending a couple hours trying to decode the rules, I think the game could have used another editing pass with fresh eyes. There are some unexplained things, the available character sheet doesn’t reflect the rules text, and there’s an economy of tokens representing Blades-style “heat” (chaos, maybe, I don’t remember) that we read as accumulating faster the fewer characters are in play. Which, honestly, makes no sense. The facilitator posted his thoughts in much more detail to Night Reign’s Itch.io page.
I’d be interested in reading the text myself but I trust our facilitator and I think it needs some TLC.
Torq
I’ve been trying to get this combination boardgame/freeform RPG to a table since the day the Kickstarter delivered. This game by Will Jobst is a psychedelic post-postapocalypse car-combat game, with packs of PC drivers traveling together between rest stops and dealing with whatever the road throws their way, then pulling back into a civilized space and playing out the stuff they do when they’re not driving. There are some pretty good tools for setting up a rest stop, and every driver has a to-do list in case you need inspiration setting up scenes.
Vroooooom! A couple huge vehicles vs a swarm of angry Waymos.
Torq itself is quite beautiful, filled with perplexing, interesting tables and little stubs of provocative text. It’s heavy on evocation and light on rules. For the freeform part I’m good with that: you end up with deeply weird rest stops (ours was a village buried under a desert of microplastics slowly fusing together under an ever-hotter sun) and the to-do things your drivers get are pleasantly straightforward. There’s a mode where you can instead play one of several bespoke premade characters, and that’s useful to read through because you end up with much stranger characters than if you just kind of Mad Max it up. One of the premade drivers is a seed collector, for example. The driver I rolled up using the game’s “arcade mode” drove a ridiculous jacked-up pickup with multiple truck nuts strung all over it; I described my driver looking like a conservative Tiktoker in wraparound shades. I was not unhappy when he burned to a crisp on the road.
The boardgame half, a GMless tactical game where the road war itself plays out, is quite abstract and pretty good … but it’s not as tight as the boardgame-iness would suggest. There’s a simple algorithm for deciding what the NPC vehicles do, but it’s underexplained. We quickly discovered that just ramming packs of semi-sentient robot cars will, big surprise, end up wrecking you as well! I think a bit of play would provide a set of best practices and rulings, assuming they stuck to it through some inevitable arguments.
Only got to play a couple hours of Torq but I’d very much like to see what an ongoing campaign might look like.
Goblinville
This is an old con favorite that I’ve written about extensively in the past. The very short version: you play small, ridiculous goblins in a human-scaled world. The actual game engine is a cunning cross between Otherkind (most prominent example being Psi-Run), the position system from Blades in the Dark, and the light/food/turn grind from Torchbearer. Shockingly tight fantasy engine that’s very easy to leverage for goblin silliness.
These guys again! I appreciate guardmice but I looove idiot goblins.
I had a 12 year old walk up to my table and I needed something age-appropriate and Goblinville, once again, delivered. Go read my previous review of it. I love this game and I wish more folks would look to it as inspiration for slightly crunchy new hacks.
Hearts of Wulin
My Night Reign facilitator offered up a couple hours worth of a Hearts of Wulin game, more a demo than a full scenario. Designer Lowell Francis sent me a copy a couple weeks back and I’ve been reading it avidly, so it was exciting to see it in play. Unfortunately, and this is a me-problem, I know almost none of the references Francis makes throughout the text. Hearts of Wulin is very much a love letter to wuxia cinema, but my experience with the genre starts with House of Flying Daggers and ends with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Unfortunately, his extensive references are wasted on me.
Just here for a good time. And definitely not to think about girls kissing each other.
That said, yeah, I get the aesthetics of the genre! And I can suss out what he’s going for because it’s all very well explained. In our little mini-scenario, we had three characters: a guard (the Bravo, more interested in fun than responsibility), the guard’s sidekick (the Student, a dour monk who’s caught feelings off our prisoner), and a prisoner (the Unorthodox, a princess who became head of the revolution). We were escorting the prisoner back to the Emperor for summary execution. There was enough time to explore a bit of a love triangle, face down a worthy foe, and foment a bit of rebellion against a local warlord.
Hearts of Wulin is in the style of PbtA games like The Veil in which you decide what emotion is motivating a roll and then choose that stat. Hearts adds a fun twist in that if you should miss a roll, you mark that stat and you can’t use it again until you’ve cleared the mark (and are nudged to roleplay toward the darker version of the stat’s “good” behaviors). Good way to keep from spamming your best stat! And it keeps folks talking about their emotions, which for this sort of Chinese action-melodrama is tonally perfect.
I’ll write more about Hearts of Wulin in the future. Very promising.
Trophy Dark
My highlight of the con was the last event I ran on the last day of the event, for a friend and a couple nice guys from the local army base who had just recently discovered D&D 5E and Pathfinder. I ran for them Trophy Dark, the one-shot version of Jesse Ross’ Trophy Gold. Both games are based on Graham Walmsley’s Cthulhu Dark, a very stripped down system that nails a countdown-to-doom vibe. You can also roughly describe the entire Dark system in just a couple sentences: collect a white d6 if your character could plausibly be good at the dangerous thing you’re rolling to attempt, another white d6 if they accept a Devil’s Bargain (ie a guaranteed complication to the situation, straight out of Blades in the Dark), and a black d6 if you’re risking your body or mind to do it. If you’re using magic you definitely include a black d6. Then you roll, and look for the single highest die, with 4-5 being “yes, but” and 6 being a straight success. But! If the black die is highest and higher than your Ruin stat (a number between 1 and 6), your Ruin goes up and you acquire a condition. If your Ruin hits 6, the forest wins and you’re out. That’s 90% of the game. There are a couple neat twists on that core, but it’s more than enough to keep things moving and interesting.
How bad could it be? Narrator: It was going to be so bad.
The premise of Trophy Dark is a band of hapless, under-equipped adventurers on their last legs head into a cursed forest that does not want them there. I drove that home for my D&D guys a couple times: if you had literally any other choice, you would not go into this godawful place. I described the forest as being like entering Area X from Annihilation. Shit is gonna get weird and you’re gonna question your life choices.
As a one-shot, Trophy Dark is designed to slowly but inevitably set the adventurers against one another. It’s a pure acrimony engine. Hopefully your players are bought into both the inherent tragedy of their situation and the inherent insanity of what they’re attempting. You work down a predetermined path of five broad situations, called Rings (like of a tree), each Ring programmed with both a threat and a temptation to ease the players into the inevitability of cross-purposes and real bad survival horror as the forest takes them over.
Guest writer Thomas Manuel will write more in depth about the Trophy games later this week. But as my first contact with this take on the system (I have run Echoes of Chaos, another Cthulhu Dark-based game but for time travel, which was helpful), I found it very satisfying and horrible. The army guys grimaced throughout! It was a good opportunity to explain to them what an X Card is, in any case.
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Hey Paul, under Punitive Loops, you might want to file “Svalbard”, from the folks that brought us Pax Cthulhiana, Two Starving Gnolls…
The optics, they’re bad.
So…I indulged in a lot of retail therapy when the lockdowns started. I backed many games. Too many, one might argue. But if you’ve ever participated in a crowdsourcing campaign, you know how it diabolically gives you multiple serotonin hits: first when you back it, later when you spend the money, every time you get an exciting update, when they charge for shipping, then the tracking number, then actually receiving the thing. It’s a tiny bit like a gift-giving holiday to yourself over and over.
It turns out I gave myself a lot of gifts. I’m sure many of you know the feeling. You also know that supply chain struggles and multiple shutdowns in China meant that a whole lot of projects got stalled out. And now here we are, the first quarter of 2023, and a veritable avalanche of games has started pouring into my house. And even though I told my spouse, the reality of it didn’t really land until box after box, envelope after envelope, started arriving.
I haven’t had time to play everything that’s showed up, but I do want to talk about what’s arrived. It’s too much to do at once, so I’ll break this up across several installments. As always, these are reviews from reading, not play. (And, yeah, I’m still doing this sort of thing, even though my Echo Sedano fiction project has been a ton of fun and you should be reading it.)
So, going from left to right, let’s begin.
City of Winter
Sort of a sequel to Ross Cowman’s Fall of Magic, City of Winter is another storygame built around a scrolling scene-setting device, narrative prompts, and jaw-dropping table presence. You “can” play these kinds of games online, but this style of game I feel like benefits so very much from the physicality of the thing. The map has texture and color that does a lot of lifting to convey vibes.
City of Winter is a bit more mechanically elaborate than Fall. In addition to the scroll, there are several decks of cards, a second, more static city map, a die, and a separate city location that appears to move in the course of play. The focus is generational this time: as players move from location to location, they’re drawing cards keyed to each location that represent traditions. Later, they put those cards into play to show how their characters are changed by where they’ve traveled. Every character is also marked by their age, and will eventually die in the course of play as the years tick over.
Besides the cards and the scroll, there’s also a flat, non-scrolling map of the city itself. Once the family arrives in the City, they’re exposed to the City’s particular traditions as they explore their new home. Since it’s not a scroll, I think you’ll feel the static-ness of the City’s locations. There’s even a moving location printed on its own card, nifty and mystical.
City of Winter looks thoughtful and reflective and I’m very much looking forward to playing a campaign of this with the right crowd.
Atlas of the Latter Earth
I think I’m not alone in reading and buying OSR material more aspirationally than practically. To be clear, Kevin Crawford’s work clicks best with me, and I have put his stuff to use in other, non-OSR games. But other than a run at Godbound a few years ago, I’ve been buying his books with little hope of running them as-written. Atlas of the Latter Earth is on that list.
My favorite Sine Nomine book is Stars Without Number, revised edition. I ran a short campaign of SWN many years ago, but my GMing style just doesn’t gel with his OSR house system. The sector generation, though, that gave me terrific Traveller vibes. Traveller was the first RPG I personally owned, way back in 1980 or so, so I’ve always had fond feelings for the format.
When he released Worlds Without Number, the fantasy version of SWN, once again the aspirations bubbled up in me. The faction game from Godbound and the setting creation system from Stars? Gorgeous, love it. It’s been a few years and other indie shinies keep distracting me.
Atlas of the Latter Earth is a complete setting book for Worlds Without Number. Honestly, I’m not sure how best to use it since my personal interest in WWN was in generating my own setting, my own factions. As an example of a fully functional deployment of a WWN game, Atlas is nice to read. WWN, straight out of the book, is not generic fantasy mind you. It defaults to fallen future fantasy, real Dying Earth or Suldokar’s Wake vibes. On those grounds, Atlas is a fine example of the form.
I mean, to be clear, Atlas is as good as anything Crawford puts out. It’s lavish, thorough, probably more raw ideas per page than you’ll ever be able to use. His setting, extra rules, monsters, all of it: chef’s kiss, no notes. Pleasantly old-school layout, which these days comes as a surprise to me given the preponderance of elaborate layout showing up in the OSR space these days. But actually using it, I think, means you’re barely using WWN at all. At least not the world-building stuff, which, well. Why bother, the world is built: thirty eight distinct regions/nations, any one of them ripe for loads of gaming. And it’s built more carefully than what I’d do.
If you’re reading this and feeling frustrated at my ambivalence, imagine how I feel! For real though, if I ever do pull together a WWN game, I’m going to need to think long and hard about what to leave out of Atlas more than what I would want to include. Personally I find the process of creating a bespoke setting and rules and table best practices exhausting to think about. Maybe it would be less exhausting if I had an eye toward setting up play for years, not sessions. It’s a big cultural gap between the OSR and indie worlds, I think. I could be playing a complete game of, say, Apocalypse Keys all in one book! Or I could spend months tacking on bits and bobs of rules from a dozen takes on the D&D meta-framework to create a just-so edition that won’t make any sense at all beyond the half-dozen people at the table.
Yeah…that does sound pretty good, doesn’t it? Hilarious and exhausting.
The Terminator
Come with me if you want to live…in circa 1998 design land.
I confess, I love The Terminator franchise and time travel in general. Seen the movies, seen the TV show, I’m all in on the big Arniebot and the whole twisty-turny alt-future timeline that sort of makes sense if you squint hard enough. The first two movies are one of the few places I’ve allowed myself the pleasure of nostalgia. So I bought the RPG when it showed up on Kickstarter, right in the middle of a slew of other time-travel stuff I also backed.
The Terminator RPG from Nightfall Games is, to be sure, really fun supplemental material for fans of the movies and show. There’s a good breakdown of the timeline and setting details, endless pages of technical breakdowns of every kind of robot you’ve ever seen on screen, bios about the major characters. And it’s a game I just can’t see playing.
System wise there are few surprises. The game bowls straight up trad alley: skill tests versus target numbers, some variation of success and failure types (messy, solid, exceptional, etc.), an elaborate combat system, gun porn. You know the game design I’m talking about, if you’ve played any sort of trad game since the 1990s. Kind of perfect, really, given the era from which the first two movies came out.
Besides gradients of success and failure, the most forward-looking rules in the game are about “hope points,” a hero point system where you get points for top-tier successes and bottom-tier failures. There’s a big menu of stuff to spend your hope on. Seems fine? I do like the range of options, they’re all cinematic and fun.
Yeah…this didn’t spark joy for me. Maybe it’s because I can envision such an interesting game based on the Terminator premise. What The Terminator RPG needs, really, is strong guidance on how to design compelling scenarios that leverage what made the movies special. Yes, sure, the movies featured terrific stunt work and bravery in the face of an implacable machine. For me, though, the excitement was the potential of the present being in dialogue with the future: what happens if Skynet does the thing? How will Skynet change if you defeat a version of it in the present? None of that is in this game. There is literally no chapter or writing at all about what makes a good session in this game, or what campaign might look like. What it does have is campaign seeds and a few scenarios.
The Terminator RPG was my most retail-therapy-y purchase of this batch. I still page through it to look at robots. And the accompanying campaign book, written by a lot of different folks with very different voices and organizational approaches, has a few nuggets if I really wanted to throw together a game.
Next Week
Next up will be Apocalypse Keys, Blade Runner, and Heironymus.
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