Category: Recommendations

The Feeling of Dungeon World

Hirelings to Heroes

My good friend Tom. recently kicked off a Dungeon World campaign. I’m a player in it. It’s got a very particular flavour and premise that places the players in the position of being the hirelings of the “real” adventuring party. And so it was at the start. But, before we had a chance to yell, “WATCH OUT FOR THAT FLESHY BOI MAN THING” the tables were turned and the PCs had to dig deep and find something heroic inside themselves or have the entire group die horrible deaths in the depths of the first dungeon. I would like to give a big shout-out to Tom’s awesome in media res beginning in a massive organic mouth with eyes on the inside and little flesh monsters. It rocked.

My character is Craobh Beag (pronounced something like Kreev Byug), a Kyrfolk (think minotaur whose bull half was a Highland) druid. Had a lot of fun with the shapeshifting and his generally chaotic nature. You can check out Tom’s post about how they built the world we’re playing in here.

A shaggy, red-haired straight horned cow in a field.
This is what my Dungeon World character looks like except with two legs and more vines. Highland cow by Nilfanion – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7868883

Old School?

But what I want to write about today is what the game evoked for me. As a player of a certain age, my first introduction to RPGs was the red D&D boxed set back in the late eighties. This was fairly normal at the time, as I understand it. It really was magic. I don’t remember too much of the mechanics of playing that game. My memory is reliably questionable. But I have a distinct memory of the feeling of it. The wonder of imagining my little dwarf swinging his wee hammer at monsters in some unnamed dungeon, having real adventures! I’d played choose your own adventure books like Fighting Fantasy and Zork before but this was entirely different. There was no way of save-scumming by keeping a finger on the decision entry page so you could go back if you didn’t like the outcome. The consequences felt consequential and the world was wide open. No limits!

When I think of old school games, I think these are the feelings they should elicit. Fear of threat, concern for real consequences, appreciation of truly impactful decisions, a sense of freedom in an open world and an enjoyment of the fantastic. I want to be fearful for the life of my character. I need to know that the decisions I make can have a truly terrible or wonderful impact on the world in some way. Now, there are a lot of differing opinions out there as to what constitutes an OSR principle. Some of them involve the inclusion of resource management, others disregard that as non-essential but insist that they should be ‘rules-lite.’ Anyway, let’s take this list I lifted from Wikipedia that comes originally from Matthew Finch’s A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming (2008.)

  • Rulings from the gamemaster are more important than rule books. Concoct a clever plan and let the gamemaster rule on it.
  • Player skill is more important than character abilities. Outwit the enemy, don’t simply out-fight them.
  • Emphasize the heroic, not the superheroic. Success lies in experience, not superpowers.
  • Game balance is not important. If the characters meet a more powerful opponent, either think of a clever plan or run away.

I think we can see that these four pillars of OSR games cover a lot of the feelings I want to get out of them. A sense of the fantastic is noticeably absent. But that might be something specific to me.

Dungeon World (2012) by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel supports this type of play so well. It ticks all these OSR boxes! Now, obviously, I have only played the one session of it so far, but I have to tell you, the first of the stars I sent to Tom after that session was this:

right at the top I have to say that this is the closest I feel I’ve gotten to experiencing the feeling of playing old school dnd in a very long time. Despite the system being slightly different, it’s close enough that it feels familiar. More importantly, it’s the overall atmosphere [Tom] has created with a pretty traditional dungeon scenario with puzzles and traps in a recognizable fantasy setting. It really brought me back.

It’s an odd duck, Dungeon World. It is very much a PBTA game. You have bonds and moves and holds and degrees of success/success with consequences when you roll your 2d6. But you also have D&D’s core abilities, alignment, HP and magic spells. You even have classes like Dungeons & Dragons. The standard races are human, elf, dwarf and halfling (Tom has tweaked the list of available races or cultures in their campaign. Once again, you can read more about that in their own words here.) So, this is how it retains the flavour of D&D without the ruleset. LaTorra and Koebel could have made a dungeon exploration game that was far more Apocalypse Worldy. I mean, do you really need the D&D style stats? No. Is alignment necessary? No. But we are trained to understand that the fiction presented by those things is reminiscent of a particular type of game that we want to experience the feeling of again. Well, that goes for those of us who have had that feeling before. For others, who maybe never played anything but PBTA games and are loathe to dip their toes into OSE or DCC or even actual D&D, it offers them a chance to do that.

So we were on a storm-wreathed cliff-side, and we were being led by a ghost dog we had just befriended. The ghost dog walked through the air to the other side of the cliffs as though the rope-bridge was still standing. But the bridge had been cut in the middle. Still, we knew the undead doggie was trying to direct us to where we needed to be, so we used a combination of moves (shapeshifting into a forest bird), equipment (lots of rope, which our paladin ended up losing as a consequence of his actions) and luck (mixed success) to make it across to the other side (even though the self-same paladin decided it would be clever to tightrope walk across and nearly plummeted to a nasty death as a result.) This one scene involved most of the pillars of the OSR that I quoted above.

Old as new

Sometimes I find I just have to write about games like this, that are brand new to me, even though they have been out for over a decade. I’ve done it with OSE and Dragon Age too. This might seem a little redundant to some, but the way I look at it is that, if it’s new to me, it’s new to someone else too. I have to remind myself that somebody discovers OD&D every day. I only first tried a PBTA game about three years ago. When it comes to RPGs, there are trends and movements and there is always something new coming out. And there are quite a few people publishing articles on them. But I don’t think that any reason not to write about games like this that I am enjoying and enthusiastic about right now, no matter how old.

Dear reader, we have literally, only just begun our Dungeon World adventure and I am hoping to write more about it and the other games I’m currently involved in over the next few weeks. There are so many! I am looking forward, next, to discussing Trophy Gold, run by Isaac, and a new project/event that Tables and Tales is cooking up too. So stick around for more!

The Dice Pool at One Hundred (Posts)

Progress

The last time I wrote a post like this one was waaaaay back on post number 30. That was a mere month after I started thedicepool.com. I used it as a sort of check-in with myself. I decided, at that point to quit posting daily as a way to make this more sustainable and to increase quality at the expense of quantity. I thought, at the time, that I would be able to spend days working on a single blog-post, researching, editing and polishing. In practice, that has happened only rarely. Normally, I spend most of the week skiving and then, with my self-imposed deadline looming I pull on my blogger’s hat, think of a topic and wheel my office chair up to my desk to actually write it in an hour or two.

I do wish I could more consistently plan, write, edit and post. Mainly because, the posts where I have done that are usually the ones I’ve been most proud of. I would include my series on Between the Skies, and the post about my experience with After the Mind the World Again. Both of these prompted their creators to contact me directly and After the Mind the World Again got a mention from Thomas Manuel on the Indie RPG Newsletter making it my most viewed post by a pretty wide margin. So, I’m going to redouble my efforts to spend more time on posts to produce something I can be more proud of.

Saying that, I am happy with some of the progress I have made with the Dice Pool Dot Com. Joining the Wood-paneled Web Ring run by Stu Horvath or Vintage RPG fame, was really cool. I would love to see more sites join Wood-paneled actually, as I really believe in it as a less corporate form of online community-building. If you’re reading this, dear reader, and you have a site that you think would be a good fit, go check out the web ring at the link above and contact Stu for an invite. I know he’d be thrilled to add a new member.

As well as that, I may not have won any prizes, but I was happy to be a part of the 2024 Bloggies. I think the dice pool came in about 7th place in the Debut Blog category, which, having read the other entrants who came higher than me, felt about right, to be honest. In fact, it was the exposure to all of these amazing blogs by people with similar interests and the desire to write about them was the best part of the Bloggies adventure for me. It got me thinking about the sorts of topics I’d like to write about, gave me ideas for riffing off other bloggers’ posts and made me think about the value of blogging in general. By the way, Clayton Notestine of the Explorer’s Design blog won the overall Platinum Medal for this post: The 1 HP Dragon. You should go and read that and subscribe to his awesome blog. Some really thought-provoking ideas in it. While you’re at it, go and check out Murkmail, who won the Debut Blog prize. They have grown enormously during 2024 and the blog is well worth a read.

What a week!

I say I want to spend more time working on blog posts, but, if I continue to have week’s like this one, I’m not sure how I could. Here was my gaming schedule for the past week:

  • Monday: The Darkest Dungeon board-game campaign in person
  • Tuesday: Dungeon World: Hirelings to Heroes Session 0 – on Discord
  • Wednesday: Dragon Age RPG, Duty Unto Death in person in our local game shop, Replay
  • Thursday: Dungeons and Dragons: Scatterjammer online
  • Friday: Dungeon World: Hirelings to Heroes Session 1 in person
  • Saturday: Trophy Gold: Hester’s Mill Session 0/1 in person

That’s six gaming sessions in the last week if you include the Darkest Dungeon game, which, obviously, is not an RPG. But I make the rules around here and I say it counts. I have loved it, honestly. It’s obviously not sustainable and something’s got to give, but I got so much from all of these. Some nights I might have been a bit tired or just not feeling it. But here’s a thing I learned a long time ago: playing games is a form of relaxation. It’s fun, or, at least, it’s supposed to be. Even on nights where I was at a low ebb, the game would actually make me feel a whole lot better than just sitting in front of the TV.

This sort of week would not be possible without Tables and Tales. All of these games were with members of our small but dedicated local RPG community. If I look back at the last year and consider the best thing I have achieved it would be Tables and Tales. Obviously, while acknowledging the fact that this was a team effort from the start and not even my idea. That credit goes to Isaac and Tom. I have been very proud of whatever meagre contributions I have managed to add. Dear reader, if you are an RPG enthusiast and you don’t feel like you get enough opportunities to get a group around an actual table I can’t recommend this enough. We started with a small group of friends but then I advertised for players for a game on the local game shop’s Discord. That was the proto-community along with Tom and Isaac and some of their own friends and workmates. We set up our own Discord to announce games and get members to sign up. From that point members invited other friends and family and before we knew it, we had enough people to allow us to play games six nights a week.

As for the games themselves, I have discussed some of them at length already. My experiments continue with my Spelljammer campaign. Most recently, I have started to use the tables in Between the Skies to come up with some weird space shit to throw at the PCs. I’ll write about that once I give it a chance to percolate a little bit. I just recently wrote about our Dragon Age game. It is likely to be wrapped up in a couple of weeks. Might see about continuing into a campaign with this band of Grey Warden recruits though. As for Trophy Gold and Dungeon World; these are both brand new to me and the group. So far, after one full session of each, I can say I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them. I have a lot of thoughts and I’ll definitely be blogging about them soon. The Darkest Dungeon campaign has had trouble getting going but we’re trying to stick to a schedule now. It’s tough and unforgiving and gives me a lot of OSRy ideas.

Dear reader, if you have stuck around for the last one hundred posts, thanks! I appreciate your patronage. Go tell a friend about thedicepool.com and then come back to enjoy the next hundred.

Dragon Age: Duty Unto Death

The Basics

You might recall, dear reader, that last year, I threatened to put together a game of the Dragon Age RPG. I even wrote a couple of blog posts about the game which you can find here. Well, I’m back to tell you that I’m not just all talk. Sometimes I really follow through on plans to play games. Myself and four other members of Tables and Tales started playing the short scenario, Duty unto Death for the Dragon Age RPG a couple of weeks ago. We’ve had two sessions so far.

The first was mostly session 0 stuff. Only three of the players were able to make it to that one, but those that did make it all created their own characters. My post on Dragon Age Character Creation stood me in pretty good stead for this. We ended up with an Antivan Wayfarer warrior, a Dalish Elf (which my computer keeps autocorrecting to Danish Elf) rogue and a human Apostate Mage (who is short and hairy enough to pass for a dwarf, thus fooling the silly templars.) Our final player joined us for this week’s session so, in order to allow us to get started as quickly as possible, he selected one of the four pregens that came with the scenario. He chose another warrior, this time a Surface Dwarf who makes a decent tank.

The group has a varied experience of both RPGs and Dragon Age. We have at least one super-fan of the video games. They know the lore inside-out and knew exactly what they wanted to play when they signed up for the game. The others all have some knowledge and several have played Dragon Age Origins recently. As it turns out, the scenario I chose is set right before the events of that game and features at least one major character from it, so that’s worked out really well.

We’re using our newly renovated independent game store, Replay as the venue. I haven’t been back there with a group since about this time last year, but since they have greatly expanded their gaming space recently, and because they are open late on Wednesday nights I wanted to give it a go. As always, the staff were welcoming and the place was great. The renovations are still under way but they have done all they can to accommodate players all the same. I can’t wait to see it when it’s done.

Tabletop

Wil Wheaton's head and shoulders in front of the Tabletop logo on a red brick wall. He is a guy in his thirties with brown, short hair and beard. He is wearing a brown t-shirt with "the Guild" on it. The closed caption on the screen reads: "WIL WHEATON: In 1983, I played my first role playing game and"
A screenshot from the intro to Tabletop with Wil Wheaton.

Does anyone remember the Wil Wheaton Youtube show, Tabletop? It was part of the Geek and Sundry network for quite a while but it looks like the last video is about seven years old now. Anyway, it mainly focused on introducing people to board games but this one time, they got Chris Pramas, the creator of the Dragon Age RPG to write a scenario they could play on the show. So Wheaton wrangled up a bunch of his show-biz pals and they made two half-hour videos of it. This was eleven years ago so it was a pretty early example of an actual play. And it was really good! It taught you the basics of how to play the game and entertained you at the same time. You can find the first episode here, Tabletop: Dragon Age RPG. If you are one of my players and you’re reading this right now, please don’t click on that link!

The illustration is of three heroes, an elf with a bow, a dwarf with an axe and a human mage battling a horde of undead. The words Dragon Age are at the top and the title of the scenario, Duty unto Death is at the bottom where it also indicates that it is an adventure for characters of level 2-4.
The cover of the Duty unto Death adventure for the Dragon Age RPG.

So, the scenario he wrote for it was Duty unto Death. They released it sometime after the show went live. He has included in the published version a few notes on how the game went on the Tabletop show, where the players surprised him, how he improvised certain encounters, that sort of thing. They are fun and possibly useful little asides. It’s short, teaches the basics of the game’s rules well and has lots of Dragon Age flavour in it so it was perfect for my purposes. There are quite a few other published adventures for Dragon Age, but most of them were much longer and would have required a lot more prep time on my part, which I don’t have right now. Duty unto Death is about 8 pages long. It’s not especially involved and doesn’t get into some of the tenets of the game. There is not much in the way of exploration or, indeed, social encounters. But, I feel like it’s doing what it sets out to do very well.

So far, our heroes, a group of Grey Warden recruits, traveling in Ferelden, have been left to their own devices by their leader, Duncan. Fans of DAO will know the name. It was fun to drop it in the intro. Anyway, he had introduced them to the duties of the wardens, gave them a few lessons about darkspawn and the blight and that buggered of to the Circle of Magi. He asked the recruits to head to a village to meet another Warden from Orlais. On the way, they got into a fight with a couple of darkspawn, tipping them off to the possibility of a coming Blight.

Cunning stunts

The Combat Stunts table from the Dragon Age RPG. It has 15 entries including "Skirkish - You can move yourself or the target of your attack 2 yards in any direction for each SP you spend," "Defensive Stance - You attack sets you up for defense. You gain a +2 bonus to Defense until the beginning of your next turn," and "lethal bloW: You inflict an extra 2d6 damage on your attack." The table shows the Stunt Point cost of each stunt on the left hand side and has the descriptions on the right.
The Combat Stunts table from the Dragon Age RPG.

That first battle was very instructive. It was the first time any of us had really interacted with the rules so we were all learning a little. After the first round, they had barely scratched these two Shrieks. It felt bad, like the worst sort of D&D, attritional combat, except for the highlight of the mage casting Walking Bomb on one of the bad guys. In the second round, people started rolling doubles and the stunts started coming. Sandor, the Surface Dwarf, added two extra dice to his damage with a Lethal Blow, almost smashing one of the darkspawn, and we were away. The players started to play more tactically, utilising their minor actions to add bonuses to their attacks by aiming, or bonuses to their defence by getting their guard up. They were utilising their class features almost immediately. I was surprised and genuinely impressive to see how instinctively my, admittedly very savvy and clever players, took to the mechanics. The combat ended with that Walking Bomb paying off, the Shriek went boom and took the other one with it, covering the entire party in black gore.

By the time they got to their destination, and found themselves in another fight, this time with some Devouring Corpses making a nuisance of themselves in the inn, it felt like they were old hands. We had to leave it in the middle of that battle since Replay was closing and we all had to go home. All in all, it has left me wanting more! Can’t wait for the next session.

Making Room for Roleplaying

Pay off

Twelve days into 2025 and I find two of my Gaming Resolutions are already paying off. Numbers 1 and 2 on my list went like this:

  1. Make those stars sparkle and make those wishes come true: I was first exposed to Stars and Wishes this year when I took part in my first Open Hearth games. For the uninitiated, at the end of a session, a GM might ask their players for their Stars, i.e. stand out moments, moves, characters, players etc. and Wishes, in other words, what they would like to have seen happen in the session, what they wanted more of or less of or what they would like to see in future sessions. For a GM, this is an incredibly useful tool. It allows you to see what your players like and what they dislike. But, I find, too often, I don’t always re-integrate the stuff that came up in players’ Stars and Wishes. And I know, for certain, that when I do manage to apply what I learned from feedback, it has made my games better. So, how am I going to do this? I have an idea, that I literally just came up with, to create a spreadsheet to record each player’s Stars and each player’s Wishes from every session of every game. I’ll add in some columns to record potential ways to add more of the good stuff and ways to fix the problems that were revealed. Another column will summarise players’ reactions to the solutions. If it needs more tweaking, another column will detail that. I think this could be an invaluable tool to improve my games and will be there as a record so I don’t forget.
  2. Brighter stars, wiser wishes: Sticking with the Stars and Wishes theme, I’d like to get more useful feedback from it. One of Tables and Tales’ fantastic founding members, Shannen, used a few methods to get more valuable feedback from her players in a game earlier this year. She requested feedback through DMs on our Discord. Why? Well, most people are pretty nice, actually. They tend to not want to offend anyone or say something in front of a group that might embarrass somebody. So, if you take the process away from the table, they might be more likely to tell you what they really think in private. We were just discussing this last night and, along with that, we all agreed that Stars and Wishes in the Discord chat for the game is way more valuable than having people just tell you them at the end of a session, when players are often pushed for time, or before they have had a chance to think about it and provide something really useful. So, my second resolution is to get written and private Stars and Wishes from now on.

Well, we had our fortnightly D&D game on Thursday night for the first time since our December break and everyone had great stars and wishes. They shared them on Zoom with everyone (it’s an online game.) But later some of them also shared theirs in our Discord chat as well. Tommy brought up a couple of really important points. One related to one of their favourite experiences of Wildspace in the game recently and how they would like to see more of that. This is the sort of thing that is easily actionable for me. With solid examples of the type of play people want to see more of, I can work to emulate that in the future. That was the easy one, and I am most grateful for it. More difficult might be their other wish: how do you get more meaningly relationships between PCs, as a GM?

Hands off

A halfling rogue, a femme elf druid and a masc human ranger in a forest presented at a slightly dutch angle.
An illustration of three adventurers from the D&D 5E 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide. They’re probably just about to have a long talk about their feelings. Little Bombo, there, is sick of Lilithidella’s owl always trying to fly off with him as a snack and Roger has been pissing off Lilithidella ’cause he keeps using all her shampoo.

Just butt out? Right? I could just stay out of it. I don’t need to always be sticking my oar in, do I? I think that’s fair. GMs have a lot of jobs to do already, so if the PCs start getting into a conversation that might very well help to build or break their relationship, the GM should just take their big nose and get it out of those PCs’ business. But, of course, listen, eavesdrop and take note. You never know what you might be able to use later.

Sounds simple, right? But to be able to do this, it means leaving room for it to happen. Even if you don’t necessarily encourage this sort of relationship-building exercise, you still need to make time where it could potentially happen. This is one of those unintended consequences of having a game based on a ship. You have built-in downtime while they travel. In fact, the first time they set off on their squid ship, I asked them if they wanted to take some time to get to know one another. Now, this was a band of adventurers who had been thrown together by the vagaries of chance and the unseen hand of powerful NPCs. None of them knew each other at all mere hours before lift off. And some of them had dark secrets. So, the suggestion was met with muted trivialities and outright lies, largely.

Instead, they got to know each other through their actions and words during their adventures, often in the most hilarious ways! Personal relationships were formed between certain of them in a pretty natural way. But there is a clear desire to make similar connections between other PCs. So, I am wondering how to leave space for that. There is an extended wild-space journey coming up, starting in the next session. This might be the best opportunity I have had to hand them that chance. My current plan is to simply ask how they are spending their time aboard ship during the voyage and hope they grab the reins themselves.

Hands on

Large white block letters spell out the name of the book, THE ELECTRIC STATE. They are overlaid on top of an illustration of a huge cartoon-cat-headed robotic drone, damaged and smoking hanging over an overpass beneath a slate grey sky.
a portion of the front cover of the Electric State RPG from Free League. The massive cartoon-cat-headed drone is so pooped after dealing with all the Tension in his party that he decided to take a break by hanging over this here overpass. Illustration by Simon Stålenhag.

But I can’t help thinking about the mechanic in a game I recently read, The Electric State. The Electric State is a road-trip game, so it has the journeying aspect in common with our little jaunt across fantasy space, if not much else. I think the designers looked at this genre and wondered how to bring recurring NPCs into it. I might be totally off the mark with this supposition but there is something about an adversarial or beloved NPC that comes up repeatedly in a campaign that players just love and the “on the move” nature of a road-trip game means that you might have to really shoe-horn in those characters to an extent that might feel very un-natural. So, instead of relying on your NPCs to cause stress and interpersonal drama, the game makes it so that the PCs have to be creating the Tension themselves. Tension is the name of the mechanic and it is required to allow your PCs to recover lost Hope (one of an Electric State character’s two tracks, along with Health that measures how they’re getting on.) Your PC has a Tension rating with each other PC, and vice versa. These ratings are likely to be unbalanced, i.e. Viv might have Tension 0 with Juan, but Juan has Tension 2 with Viv. This extract is from the core Electric State book:

To each of the other Travelers, you have a Tension score ranging from 0 to 2.
0 No tension, no question marks or unspoken thoughts or feelings.
1 Suppressed or contained irritation, love, interest, or other feelings and thoughts.
2 Uncontained strong emotions, such as rage, love, or even fear.

When you lose Hope points through play and you want them back, you have to contrive a scene with another PC with whom you have Tension. This might be an argument or a heart-to-heart talk or an emotional breakdown, but whatever form it takes, you both reduce Tension with the other PC by 1 point (if possible) and you regain a point of lost Hope. Of course, this means that, if your character does not have any Tension with any other PC, they have no way of regaining Hope points. So it is in your best interest to ensure you have some interpersonal drama at all times.

Dave Thaumavore, in his review of the Electric State, tended to think that this Hope-Tension feedback loop did little more than encourage manufactured drama between PCs. Of course, that’s the idea. The game is made to do that. It is certainly no coincidence that the mechanics work that way. But I can see his point. Will it feel too contrived? Will it be a pain for players to try and come up with new ways that one of the other characters has pissed off their own character all the time? Not sure. Haven’t played the game yet, but I’d willing to bet it would get bothersome if the campaign went on too long. Now, I will say that the Electric State is designed for short campaign play, so maybe it would be fine.

My question now is, if I wanted to try and tack on yet another non-D&D sub-system to this game, how would I do it with something like Tension? I could just take the Tension mechanic wholesale and give everyone a Tension score with everyone else. And then ask them to work out there shit in their downtime hours, so building more interesting and deeper relationships. But what motivation could I give them to do this? There ain’t no Hope points in D&D. But, maybe if two PCs deliberately get together to have a scene in which they reduced their tension, they could each take a boon, like a point of inspiration or temporary hit points or some other special effect only available to them when they work together next time.

Maybe the real question is, should I adopt this sort of mechanic just to encourage intra-party roleplaying? Or should I just keep out of the way?

Any thoughts or suggestions will be greatly received, dear reader!

After the Mind the World Again

Disco Elysium

Have you played Disco Elysium from the much lamented Za/um studio, dear reader? It’s one of those seminal, cult-classic games that shifted my thinking on what video games could be. It’s a mystery game but, is it, really? Even if it is, is the mystery the one presented? Is the goal to find out who killed that guy hanging from the tree in the yard behind the Whirling-in-Rags? I suppose it is, but only up to a point. When playing it, you quickly meet and pass that point, much to the frustration of your ever-suffering partner, Kim Kitsuragi. Psychologically freed of the mundane requirements of your character’s job as a police detective, you can finally get to work on the real mystery; finding yourself. In many ways, the game is a protracted character creation session. You have to do everything from defining his political and romantic persuasions, coming to understand his opinions on art, exploring his relationship with vices of all kinds to just figuring out his name. How does the game handle these revelations? Well, largely through the personification of various aspects of your Detective’s personality. These take the form of his stats, Intellect, Psyche, Fysique and Motorics and the various skills associated with them. They speak to you, often in deranged or idiosyncratic voices representative of their own, niche fragment of his personality, and try to get you to look at the world from their highly rarified perspective or to act based on it.

It’s a unique game. It’s also a unique experience that left me with so many interesting thoughts and questions. One such question was, could you make a TTRPG out of this? The answer is, you can certainly try.

After the Mind…

The Character Sheet screen from Disco Elysium. It shows each of the four main stats, Intellect, Psyche, Physique and Motorics and all of the skills that are associated with them in a grid on a black screen with white text.
The Character Sheet screen from Disco Elysium. The TTRPG stats are not as complicated as this.

Last night, I got together with four other members of Tables and Tales to play a session of After the Mind the World Again by Aster Fialla. The front cover of the game uses the tagline, ‘A murder mystery role-playing game.’ This is not an inaccurate description. However, I feel like the subheading on the next page is getting closer to the facts:

A Disco Elysium-inspired murder mystery TTRPG about a
detective and the voices in his head

In this TTRPG, the inspiration comes not from the fascinating world or the city of Revachol, it doesn’t come from the richly drawn characters of the video game, or even its ubiquitous politics. It comes, instead, from the essentials of the gameplay. In other words, the shit that’s going on in the Detective’s head and how it affects the world around him. You see, this is a GMful game that requires five people exactly, one of which is the lone player with the other four acting as GMs. Each GM represents one of the four stats from Disco Elysium, Intellect, Psyche, Fysique and Motorics. They are collectively referred to as the Facets. One of their responsibilities is to describe various features of the world the Detective moves through. Intellect has responsibility for nerdy people, art pieces, journals, etc. Meanwhile, Fysique gets stuff like buildings, a good strong state, and brawny folks.

At the start of the game, the player comes up with a name, pronouns and presentation for their Detective, as well as their role (they might not be a cop, but a PI or an insurance adjuster or something else.) Each of the Facets also gets a turn here, though. Psyche gets to describe the Detective’s face, while Motorics comes up with aspects of their style and an unusual object in their possession, for instance. I found this very fun, as did everyone else at the table, I think. I even commented that having others make your character for you in other RPGs could be just as fun!

Once that’s done, each of the Facets answers a couple of questions designed to form a baseline for their relationships with other Facets at the table. After the Mind the World Again is Powered by the Apocalypse, so this sort of character building question should be familiar to anyone who has played a game like that before.

Then they get started making the Neighbourhood. You go around the table, starting with the person who most recently played Disco Elysium, and get everyone to answer one of the five questions presented in the book that should give you an idea of the type of area this murder has taken place in.

Once you’re done with that, the Detective tells us a little about the victim and then each of the Facets introduces a piece of evidence from the crime scene. Intellect tells us about any Prior knowledge that’s relevant to the situation, Psyche describes a Person of Interest at the scene, Fysique comes up with a Landmark, in this case, where the murder occurred, and Motorics gets to reveal a clue, something tangible at the scene.

From that point, the Detective starts the investigation, describing what they are doing in the fiction, triggering particular Moves, using the Facets’ stats to make rolls and making Deductions in an effort to solve the murder. This is in line with the Detective’s Agenda:

  1. Explore the world to its fullest.
  2. Make the most of your Facets.
  3. Play to find out the truth.

This is complicated by the fact that each of the Facets wants the Detective to act in different ways, offering sometimes conflicting options and sabotaging each-others’ efforts as they try to have the greater influence on the sleuth and the investigation. Facets’ stats can be boosted or reduced in various ways, often by the actions of the other Facets. Its important to note that the Facets’ Agenda is not focused on solving the murder, rather than constructing an interesting experience:

  1. Create an intriguing world for The Detective to explore.
  2. Highlight the differences between the Facets.
  3. Play to find out what happens.

The Detective investigates, and the Facets Declare Evidence as particular features are described in the world. It’s up to the Detective to combine two pieces of evidence to Make a Deduction. When it comes to that point, they ask the Facets for explanations as to how they fit together. Whichever Facet’s explanation is chosen is the truth and the Facet gets a +1 to their stat, while also getting the opportunity to reduce the stat of another Facet by the same amount.

The investigation is structured into a Deduction Pyramid, which is split into four tiers. On the bottom tier, there should be eight pieces of evidence. These should be combined when the Detective Makes a Deduction so that, you end up with four Minor Deductions on the next tier up. These Minor Deductions should then be combined to come up with two Major Deductions on the penultimate tier. Finally, those Majors need to be combined to come up with the Solution to the murder, sitting right there at the top of the Pyramid.

There are several other mechanics in the game, including one to ensure that the Detective does not simply always choose the explanation of the same Facet all the time, which is clever. A Facet’s stat cannot go above +3 or below -1. If that does happen, the Facet gives the Detective a Condition and goes back to the default value of 1.

…the World Again

A screenshot of the aftermath of the Detective from Disco Elysium punching a twelve year old kid. The scene is in the yard of the Whirling in Rags hostel. A man in a green jacket and yellow flares stands over a prone kid who he just punched. Kim Kitsuragi, dressed in an orange jacket and brown baggy, tapered trousers looks on.
A screenshot of the aftermath of the Detective from Disco Elysium punching a twelve year old kid.

None of us had ever played a game quite like this one before. Obviously, some of us had played PBTA games in the past, so the mechanics were nothing frighteningly new. At points, I even felt echoes of a game of Avery Adler’s The Quiet Year that most of us played last year as we took turns describing the world around our Detective. That Detective was an amateur sleuth named Bruce with a fabulous moustache, a flight jacket, an obsession with whiskey and a curious ability to identify any wooden model aircraft he might come across.

But, sharing GMing duties with three others at the table is a unique and sort of chaotic experience. At the start, it’s actually a little difficult to get into gear. I was playing Motorics and I found I had to be constantly checking my playbook sheet to remind myself what features of the world were within my domain, what my GM Moves were and when I should use them. There are features in there that you might not expect so you have to watch it and you can’t use your GM Moves just whenever. Since all four of us Facets were feeling like this, it kind of stuttered into life as a session, once the character creation bit and the initial set-up of the mystery were done. Meanwhile, Bruce, played ably by relative TTRPG noob, Jude, had to come to terms with the fact that, when it came to any of the really important decisions, he had to give up control and ask the Facets for options before settling on one version of the truth or selecting a course of action.

As we got into the flow of it, though, and as some of us became more lubricated by the liberal application of fine Spanish lager, we found the conversation that was the game began to come much more instinctively. We were interacting with the mechanics and deliberately fucking each other over for stat points, while Bruce began to explore the small, dead silent village of Battersfield and investigate the murder of local baker, Barbara Devons. Evidence has been declared in abundance and two deductions have been made! Bruce managed to finally make it out of the Bakery to explore the office, the bare flour cellar and even the gay bar across the road. Unfortunately, we had to leave the case unsolved after the four hour session. Hopefully we’ll be able to pick the trail back up again soon.

We ended up having a really fun time with After the Mind the World again. The stand out scene for me was when Bruce was interrogating Jenny at the crime scene and all four GMs jumped in to answer in particular ways that they thought reflected their own domain within the one NPC. It worked surprisingly well, even though I’m not sure that’s how it’s supposed to work at all.

I would say that there is no way to play a full investigation in a single three hour session without rushing through scenes and maintaining the sort of laser-focus that Harry Dubois does not exemplify in any way. The character creation and making the mystery section took over an hour alone before Bruce ever rolled a die in anger. If you’re going to give it a go, plan it for two sessions.

Do you think you would like to give this game a try, dear reader? Or would you rather go back to Martinaise and collect some tare in a plastic bag while pondering that old wall again?

Gaming Resolutions 2025

New Years’ Resolutions

‘What do I want to change about myself?’
That’s the question I think most people are trying to answer when they come up with their New Years’ resolutions. The answers? Invariably, they are something like, I want to lose weight, I want to be healthier, I want to learn a new skill, I want to pick up a good habit, I want to read more, I want to watch less TV. Right?

For me, this kind of thing rarely works. The failure has little, if anything, to do with the challenge itself, usually. It’s about the arbitrary nature of it. You decide to make this change on New Years Day because its a new year, not due to any external or internal catalyst. To me, it robs the resolution of the weight of a meaningful promise to myself. And it’s not just me. By the the second or third week of January, the ruins of broken and abandoned resolutions litter the landscapes of our lives.

So, here’s another question, that you might be asking at this stage?
‘Why are you writing a blogpost entitled “Gaming Resolutions 2025” then, Ronan?’
It’s a very good question, dear reader, and you deserve an answer. To answer, I’m going to examine my gaming resolution of 2024. It was, in fact, my only resolution. At the close of the year I had been working on a Resistance System game for a few months. It didn’t have a name but the idea was that players would play magic users in the modern era. They would form a party and work together to achieve certain goals for their secret magical society while also attempting to outdo each other in power, reputation and knowledge. The central mechanic was centred around sacrifice and I was going to design Fallouts appropriate to that. I’d come up with some classes, skills, domains, resistances and the idea for unique mechanics by December 2023. So, my resolution was to finish working on that game and move on to the next one. That was, pretty much, the death-knell of my work on that game. I think the last work I did on that was in April, 2024. And that work was token, cursory at best. One thing I know for certain is that that promise to myself was too big. The game was too big, the amount of work it demanded of me was too much and the prospect of doing it was a little too stressful.

So, instead, this year, I am going to commit to getting a bit better at certain things, instead of committing a lot of time and effort to complete a project I didn’t even really know how to start. And these are all things that I have been thinking about for some time, stuff I have wanted to implement for a while to improve my play and the games I am involved in. So, it doesn’t feel so arbitrary.

So, without further ado, here are my…

Gaming Resolutions 2025

  1. Make those stars sparkle and make those wishes come true: I was first exposed to Stars and Wishes this year when I took part in my first Open Hearth games. For the uninitiated, at the end of a session, a GM might ask their players for their Stars, i.e. stand out moments, moves, characters, players etc. and Wishes, in other words, what they would like to have seen happen in the session, what they wanted more of or less of or what they would like to see in future sessions. For a GM, this is an incredibly useful tool. It allows you to see what your players like and what they dislike. But, I find, too often, I don’t always re-integrate the stuff that came up in players’ Stars and Wishes. And I know, for certain, that when I do manage to apply what I learned from feedback, it has made my games better. So, how am I going to do this? I have an idea, that I literally just came up with, to create a spreadsheet to record each player’s Stars and each player’s Wishes from every session of every game. I’ll add in some columns to record potential ways to add more of the good stuff and ways to fix the problems that were revealed. Another column will summarise players’ reactions to the solutions. If it needs more tweaking, another column will detail that. I think this could be an invaluable tool to improve my games and will be there as a record so I don’t forget.
  2. Brighter stars, wiser wishes: Sticking with the Stars and Wishes theme, I’d like to get more useful feedback from it. One of Tables and Tales’ fantastic founding members, Shannen, used a few methods to get more valuable feedback from her players in a game earlier this year. She requested feedback through DMs on our Discord. Why? Well, most people are pretty nice, actually. They tend to not want to offend anyone or say something in front of a group that might embarrass somebody. So, if you take the process away from the table, they might be more likely to tell you what they really think in private. We were just discussing this last night and, along with that, we all agreed that Stars and Wishes in the Discord chat for the game is way more valuable than having people just tell you them at the end of a session, when players are often pushed for time, or before they have had a chance to think about it and provide something really useful. So, my second resolution is to get written and private Stars and Wishes from now on.
  3. Summaries in the chat: I don’t know why I don’t already do this for every game. It proved pretty useful in the Blade Runner game I ran earlier this year. In that one, I had a single document that I updated after each session so the players could easily keep track of what happened session by session. I always write up a summary after every session anyway, so taking the extra step to share it with the players is obvious really.
  4. Take bigger swings: As a player, it can be tempting to take the safe route. After all, you don’t want your precious little guy to get hurt, right? WRONG! I have decided that it is far more interesting if your character makes the decision to put themselves on the line to save a friend in dire need, or to make the foolish decision to prioritise monetary gain over their own safety or to just do something cool instead of something sensible. I don’t necessarily think this style works in every game (I’m thinking of our current game of the One Ring, for instance) but where it does fit, I think it’s far more rewarding.
  5. Get out of my comfort zone: I have a type; the gruff voiced, slightly grizzled veteran. That’s who I’m playing in two different ongoing campaigns right now and I am beginning to think I’m predictable. I don’t always play that, but it happens often enough that I can recognise it as a pattern. So, I have decided to make a conscious effort to play other types of characters. I am convinced it will lead to more fun and surprising experience for me and hopefully for my fellow players.

What about you, dear reader? Do you have any habits you want to break or strings you’d like to add to you role-playing bow? Let me know in the chat!

And finally, Happy New Year! Here’s to many more sessions and great experiences around the gaming table in 2025!

Games I Got to Play This Year Part 2

Wrap-up

It’s an end of year wrap-up. Everyone’s doing one. Check out the last post for the campaigns I have been playing in the last few months. This one’s for the one-shots.

One-shots

  1. Pirate Borg – the link above will take you to my post mortem on this one shot. It was a great time, in all honesty. My first foray into running any kind of Borg, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy and instinctive every part of it was, even the ship-combat, which was new to everyone at the table. If you are interested in pirates, light cosmic horror, or just gnarly old school gaming in an alternate history version of our own 18th century, you’ll enjoy Pirate Borg in all likelihood. By the way, I also did a character creation post on this one.
  2. Troika! – Whalgravaak’s Warehouse – Ok, look, full disclosure, this is supposed to be a list of one-shots but this is technically more like a really spread out short campaign where we get together to play a one-shot of the same game every once in a while when we can all afford the time. Know what I mean? Anyway, in the first one-shot of these two consecutive one-shots, the PCs found two different ways into this warehouse, abandoned by its wizardly owner centuries previous. After crawling this “dungeon” for a bit, they made friends with a thin mutant, and their monkeys got to play with the worm-headed hounds that lived in a nest in the warehouse somewhere. They made short work of the Cacogen they’d been sent to murder and we wrapped up the session. In the second one-shot in this series of one-shots, three of the band decided to continue to explore, making more friends, this time with a large cadre of mercenaries who had been sent to deal with some cultists. They then set fire to some rope, captured some minuscule soldiers in gremlin-jars and climbed a mountain of onions. This is the kind of nonsense the PCs get up to in games of Troika to be honest. This is standard. If this sounds too gonzo or weird, you are in the wrong place. The Eternal City of Troika is not for you. You should probably try somewhere more normal. From my point of view, and, I think, that of the players, if you lean into the bonkers aspects of the setting and you are willing to go along with the more outré elements of the system (the random initiative mechanic stands out) you will probably have a very good time with this game. It’s great for one shots. Or two shots if that’s your thing. Might turn into three shots, actually.
  3. Honey Heist – this was another one of Isaac’s games. He ran it on a night when another game fell through. It was very last minute but we were still able to get a crew together. Jude, Tom and I rolled up some friggin’ bears with criminal backgrounds and went to do a heist at the biggest honey convention in the UK, in the NEC in Birmingham. We tried to do a TED talk, we disguised ourselves as massive bees and we crashed a van. You know, typical bear stuff. Another absolute belter of a one-shot, this one. It’s the definitive one-page RPG by Grant Howitt of Spire and Heart fame. Isaac and Tom had picked up the printed form of a bunch of these one-pagers at UKGE and Isaac had been looking for the opportunity to run one of them. This game was obviously made to create wild swings as you use either you Bear or Criminal stat and try to avoid going too far on the bear side or too far on the criminal side. This forces you to take risks and do stupid things to drive the heist forward or, more likely, sideways. Tom did a brilliant write-up of the session on their blog here.
  4. B.D.S.M. Below Dwelling Sewer Mutants – Yet another game run by Isaac at short notice. It is a mutie-eat-mutie game by Neonrot and you can get it here. The premise is pretty straight-forward. You are a mutant. You are probably unpleasant in some way. At the start, you have a mutation that may or may not be useful in certain situations. You can progress and grow by eating other mutants to gain new mutations along the way. If you like that idea, you’re in for a treat. I think it is probably a game that works best in one-shot play. We had fun with it and I think most tables will.
  5. Cthulhu Dark – Roadhouse Feast – I went into quite a lot of detail on this one in the post I linked above so I won’t go through it all again. Suffice it to say, I really enjoyed running the Cthulhu Dark game for the first time. The scenario itself was great but, to me, it is the simplicity and the ingenuity of the system that really shone. If you are into cosmic horror games and you haven’t tried Cthulhu Dark, you should give it a chance.
  6. Liminal_ – I promised a report on how this one-shot went some time ago and here it is. We had four players (known as the Disoriented) for this one-shot plus me as the the Architect. As I thought we would, rather than have the players play themselves in this Liminal Back-Room nightmare, I had them use the character generation tables in Death Match Island. This worked really well to come up with some distinctive, memorable characters quickly and with no fuss. They started off all in the same public building. Since one of them was a district attorney, we agreed it should be a court house. One of the others was there as a witness in a case and the other two were, in an unlikely turn of events, cousins who had been called for jury duty on the same jury. That is pretty much by-the-by, although it did come up in conversation later. Thy all stepped into a room together and found themselves in a building of nightmares. Now, you have to roll up the rooms as they open the doors. There are a couple of d100 tables in the book that are crammed with inventive and horrific room descriptions. The first door they opened led into some sort of creepy, dank cave system; the next into a mouldering bowling alley that was was canted at a 45 degree angle; the next opened onto the abandoned bridge of a ship, rocking in a dreadful storm and with a trail of blood leading off through one of the other doors. I made a mistake at the very start, where I allowed the players to open a couple of doors and then decide which one they would go through. The rules state that, if you open a door, you have to go through it. This felt a little restrictive to me, in a role-playing game, but we proceeded in this way and the players were good sports about it. As we progressed, rolling on the Room and Entity tables, it felt as though, at times, they really wanted to see what the hell was going to come next. Isaac said afterwards, that it felt a lot less subtle than he had thought it would and I have to agree with that. When you think of liminal space horror, it often is just empty corridors and abandoned hotels and the like. Sometimes a strange entity might make an appearance, but it’s the spaces themselves that are supposed to be innately creepy. Some of these rooms we rolled up on the tables felt that way, like the corridor with missing persons posters of the PCs on the walls but a lot of them were straight-up horror like the one with nurse-entity (I think?) chopping a guy up on a slab (it was ok, he was into it!) Also, I think this is something I would be careful with: when you roll a random entity, they sometimes don’t seem to fit, thematically, with the room that you just rolled up. I think it is ok to re-roll if that happens. I didn’t do that and once or twice, felt like they collided awkwardly. Now, these are nitpicks, really. In general, we had a good time with this, the players loved playing their pretty normal characters in these horrific scenarios, just running blindly from threat to dreadful threat. We used both the regular room table and the guest room table (the entries here were written by some industry luminaries like Johan Nohr and Tim Hutchings.) One of the best things about that experience for me was that I was just as surprised, horrified and disgusted as the players were! One of the challenges then, of course, was that it was my job to quickly read, interpret and present the room to the players without taking too long, stumbling over the words, reading them too much or generally fucking up. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite make it to the end of their mad dash through the back-rooms. The PCs still have a few squares of fatigue to be filled in. Hopefully we’ll be able to pick that up and finish it off someday.
  7. Mothership – Moonbase Blues I wish this wasn’t in the one-shot pile but heigh-ho. Sometimes your GM moves away and leaves your characters stuck on a moonbase that is probably trying to kill them. I mean, there was someone or something there trying to kill us. I was under no illusions that we were likely to all die out there, I just wanted to know how. Anyway, the one session we had of this game was great. Full props to Joel, our GM, for putting so much time and effort into he prep for it. He had a series of recordings that he played for us at key moments, he had handouts and provided us with cheat-sheets. It was a great experience. Also, I loved playing my character that I created in the post I linked above, Victoria Ibanez, the Corps’ finest. I’d love to get to play her again. Mothership is a great system with compelling mechanics and one of the best character creation experiences out there. If you need any more convincing, you should go and check out Quinns’ review of it.

Conclusion

So, that’s it. Those are all the one-shots that I got to play in the last few months. I didn’t get to play many of the games I wanted to, but I sure did have fun not playing them. Next year, I am continuing the theme of not playing the games I listed in that post by starting the year off with a one-shot of After the Mind, the World Again, a Disco Elysium-inspired, GMful mystery game and, Dragon Age, which, I have at least discussed at length on this very blog here and here. Honestly, I think it was useful to set out goals for the games I wanted to play. I may not have gotten to play any of them if I hadn’t done that. So I will continue to write about things I want to experience on the blog and see what happens.

I will be posting more intermittently as we come into the holiday period now. I will be travelling to visit friends and family a lot and won’t always have the chance to post as regularly as I would like. So, in case this is the last post before the end of the year, I wish you the very happiest Winter Solstice/Hogswatch/Western New Year.

BTW

Here are links for where to buy each of these games:
Pirate Borg
Troika!
Honey Heist
BDSM
Cthulhu Dark
Liminal_
Mothership

Games I Wanted to Play this Year

Review

So, how have I done with that list from earlier in the year? At the time I wrote that, on the 28th July, I thought, Time-shmime! Who needs it?! Not me, that’s who. I’ll breeze through this entire list of ten frikkin’ games. But, of course, that was assuming a lot.

Assumptions

The first assumption that was happily crushed was that we had a smaller number of GMs willing to run sessions in our little community, Tables and Tales. Up until then, only three of us had run anything so I assumed that would continue. When a fourth and even fifth GM raised their hands to take the helm, I was delighted. That’s what I had always wanted in our space. From what I can see, if GMs were water, most RPG communities would be dying of thirst. Even in the much larger Open Hearth community, you tend to see the same dozen or so members announcing new games all the time, despite there being a membership in the hundreds. Given the size of Tables and Tales, five active GMs represents a pretty large percentage of our total player-base. On top of that we have had a couple of board game nights too. The long awaited and pretty fun Darkest Dungeon board game is, honestly, very close to the video game (actually, I’m told by friend of the blog, Media Goblin it’s closer to Darkest Dungeon 2 in rules) but also pretty close to an RPG so we gave it a go.

Assumption number 2: I have a pretty stable schedule, which meant that I could run games almost every night of the week if I had the wherewithal. And there were weeks there when I was playing, either as GM or player, in four or five sessions. Turns out that was not sustainable. For one thing, obviously, I started writing this blog, dear reader. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love doing this and it’s not like it takes that long, but if I want to blog, I need to do it in the evening (even though I am typing this on the train to work right now because its a busy week for me and my evenings are taken up with pre-Christmas socialising.) Between that and various other work and family commitments that came up, it was simply impossible to maintain that sort of schedule.

Reality

Even taking these points into account, I managed to play a lot of games in the last few months, just mostly not the ones I expected to. So, let’s have another look at that list:

GM

  • Tales from the Loop – Mascots and Murder – Short Campaign – Nope, didn’t happen. This one is still simmering away on that back-burner, ready for promotion to the front of the stove-top any time now. It had to be shelved to make way for other games and other GMs. Like I said earlier, I was perfectly happy to do it.
  • Dungeon Crawl Classics – individual modules – Haven’t managed to get any of these to the table yet, I’m afraid. But, I have a plan for this one. I have had to re-arrange my schedule a bit to allow it. Our local game shop, Replay, has been undergoing a big refurbishment in the last few months. Once it’s done, they will expand their number of gaming tables a lot and I am hoping to get in there on a Wednesday night to run some DCC Level 0 funnels. My preference would be to get some newbies to sign up for these sessions and hopefully gain some new members for Tables and Tales in the process. The new year will be the perfect time for this, I think.
  • More Troika! – one-shots – Achievement unlocked! Although, technically, it was more like two sessions of the same game, rather than multiple one-shots. I did a blogpost on it! We went to Whalgravaak’s Warehouse, one of the Location based adventures made for Troika. So far it has been very fun. It’s a dungeon crawl, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s a warehouse. And the rooms and creatures and general vibe are beautifully weird in the way only Troika can do it. So far, the PCs, a Monkey Monger, a Wizard Hunter and a Gremlin Catcher (there was also a Landsknecht who has since moved to Spain) have murdered the Cacogen they were sent there to murder, made friends with a thin mutant, captured entire detachments of microscopic soldiers in gremlin catching jars, discovered a desert other-world on top of the warehouse and, um, set fire to a load of old rope. Brilliant craic altogether.
  • Death Match Island – one-shot – You know what, I just completed a rewatch (maybe not “rewatch” since I never watched the entire thing in the first place) of Lost, the whole thing. All six seasons. All 5000 episodes. I think I was in mourning for the lost Death Match Island one-shot that should have been. This one was a scheduling issue. Those of you out there who play RPGs (and if you don’t and you’re here, welcome! You must be confused…) will be aware of the difficulties one often encounters in getting four or five adults together in the same room at the same time. Honestly, I am surprised this problem doesn’t come up more often in Tables and Tales. Anyway, having just finished that Lost marathon, I am 1000% ready to play this game. It’s not quite the same and it would definitely not run for 678 sessions like Lost would if it were an RPG but it has the same heart and the same mystery box feel to it. And I want that. That’s what I want.
  • The Wildsea – campaign – Just go read my blogpost on My First Dungeon’s campaign of the Wildsea. I desperately want to play this game. Honestly, whether I got to be a player or a Firefly, I would be excited. But, really? I’m not sure when I was going to fit this one in this year. Another campaign? Dunno what I was thinking.
  • DIE RPG – one-shot – I finished listening to the My First Dungeon Wildsea campaign and just started listening to the DIE one. They have a great episode that is mainly Kieron Gillon being effusive for an hour about his, admittedly very cool, game and I enjoyed it. But then I got into the Session Zero episode and I immediately wanted to play it. I want to run this for my friends and have them play real-world people with real-world problems working it all out it in a fucked-up fantasy world of their own creation as characters of their own creation. I really want it. Maybe next year.

Player

  • Old School Essentials – campaign I think – So this one has not happened yet. I think it is, at least partly, due to the fact that Isaac, of Lost Path Publishing has been running other shit like crazy in the last few months instead. I hope it wasn’t my OSE character creation post that put him off running the game (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. I’d really be flattering myself to imagine I had that much influence on anyone.)
  • Heart: The City Beneath – Open Hearth campaign – Our GM, Mike, brought a whole bunch of us together (There were six PCs at the start) to hopefully save the landmark known as Nowhere from being consumed by the Heart. This was a real learning experience for me as it was only my second time as a player in the Resistance System (see the section on Magus, Pike and Drum below for my first experience.) I discovered that, if left to our own devices, players (for “players” read “Ronan” but not just “Ronan”) are apt to take the hand when there is no form of initiative to govern the order or frequency of actions in combat. It was a lesson learned early in the campaign due to one player’s proper and timely use of Stars and Wishes after the very first session. Saying that, I had a brilliant time playing my Incarnadine, Priest of the God of Debt, alongside a Heretic, a Cleaver, a Deep Apiarist, a Vermissian Knight and a Deadwalker. We often had opposing desires and drives, which made the role-play fun, and the GM came up with lots of weird and interesting situations, NPCs, enemies and locations for us. Forgotten-Frost-Remembered, my Aelfir Incarnadine, got to reach Tier 4 of the Heart and retire(!) at least in his head.
  • Call of Cthulhu – Masks of Nyarlathotep – campaign – Not really sure if this was anything other than wishful thinking when I wrote this, to be honest. This post explains that it was always going to be a long shot to get this campaign started again. But someday, I would love to get Grant Mitchell back on the trail of the mystery in this thoroughly classic campaign.
  • Magus, Pike and Drum – Playtest – This is Isaac again. He has a great basis for a Resistance System game set in the English Civil War that never was, and this is it. There were four of us gathered around the table for this playtest at the end of the summer. I genuinely had so much fun with it. Gráinne was my character. She was an Irish noble and she had some very fun abilities (some of them were a bit too fun with a few too restrictions, it was decided, as a result of this playtest.) What was important in the game is that we solved the mystery in very short order, after scaring the shit out of the mayor and not blowing up the town. But what’s really important is that we provided Isaac a lot of valuable feedback to feed back into his new game. Can’t wait to play this one again, hopefully in the near future. I hope to write a lot more about this game as it develops.

Conclusions

So there you go. Three out of ten. Not great. But! I experienced so many other games instead of the ones I didn’t get to in that post! And I got something out of all of them. I’ll tell you about them in the next post (or the one after if I don’t have time to write the rest of the week and just post some more old fiction on Sunday instead.)

My First Dungeon

Actual Plays

My experience with actual plays comes from an unexpected angle. D&D is for Nerds by the Australian Sanspants Radio network was the first one I listened to. I had heard tell of Critical Role but, even then, it intimidated me with its sheer length and the fact that it was in a visual medium. Listening to podcasts while out walking or commuting is one thing, sitting down to watch a four-hour episode is something entirely different. Although, during lockdown and the long period where I was working from home and didn’t go out much I did start to get into Dimension 20 on Dropout.tv. Honestly, it was the clips on Tik Tok that got me started on that. I’m glad I did get a Dropout subscription, in fact; it’s still the best value streaming service I’ve got. Anyway, The D&D is for Nerds nerds put together something much more manageable in length, that I could listen to on my pod-catcher of choice. It helped that it was funny and that I quickly developed an appreciation of the characters and the world that they inhabited. I don’t listen to these so much anymore. In fact, I don’t listen to a lot of actual play podcasts these days. I am far more likely to stick on a show about TTRPGs instead. I have introduced two of my favourites in the past, in a blog post. But here’s another, Talk of the Table is a production of Many Sided Media, who also produce Bitcherton.

Talk of the Table is presented by Brian Flaherty and Elliot Davis. These guys are RPG professionals and creators in their own right (Elliot Davis has a game on backerkit right now! Go check out, The Time We Have) but they use this platform, normally, to interview other creatives in the industry, whether they are game makers, artists, actual play performers or something else related to the hobby. Some of those I have enjoyed recently were episodes where they interviewed, Mörk Borg design genius, Johan Nohr, TTRPG video essayist and creator, Aaron Voigt, and Blades in the Dark forger, John Harper. Flaherty and Davis have a pleasant, approachable style and a genuine and excited interest in the works of their guests. It makes for a great “podcast hug,” as Blindboy Boatclub would put it.

My First Dungeon: The Wildsea

The Cover of the Wildsea Corebook by Felix Isaac

Anyway, listening to this show made me aware that they had an actual play podcast called My First Dungeon on their network. So, I thought to myself, I could listen to these guys playing RPGs, probably. It turned out they had a few seasons available when I went looking. These include seasons of DIE (which I will definitely be going back to listen to,) Orbital Blues, the sad space cowboy game, and Paint the Town Red, their most recent offering. But the one that caught my eye was their relatively recent season of the Wildsea.

If you have been around for a while on the blog, you might remember that the Wildsea was one of the games I was hoping to play before the end of this year. This vain hope has been utterly dashed at this stage of the year, but I am still interested in running it at some point. I have been reading through the book, on and off for a few months. What I have discovered while doing this is that it’s got a lot to it! There are so many different parts that go up to make each character, and each one of these parts brings with it a whole plethora of aspects and there’s a lot of new terminology to learn and the world is so wild and different… So, it has felt daunting to even know where to start with it.

Now, there’s one thing I think a good actual play can do, and that is teach the game. If they do it well, they can even tell a compelling story at the same time. Or maybe the compelling story is what helps you to learn. I feel like Dimension 20 had that effect on me when it came to learning to play 5E better. I knew it pretty well before I started watching those shows but by the time I had consumed like two or three seasons, I had a much more intimate knowledge of minutiae like spells and abilities that I did not previously feel I needed to have a keen grasp of as the DM. So, I went into My First Dungeon thinking I might, at the very least, get that experience from it. And you know what? I did.

From Session Zero of the Wildsea campaign, I was taking the elements I had only read about, the things that had seemed quite abstract, and I was applying them to the frame of the characters and the basics of the world.

From Session One, I already felt like I had a pretty good grasp on the way the mechanics worked. Tracks, aspects, dice pools, advantages, cut, twist: I understood them at a more than intellectual level.

And here’s the other thing about this series that grabbed me from the get-go, I liked these characters! I was invested in their rolls and the ways in which they used their aspects to express themselves and to succeed. I appreciated the players’ willingness to play to their characters’ weaknesses as well as their strengths, and the way they used the mechanics to bring about their failure when they thought that was narratively appropriate or necessary.

Finally, I think that each of the players in this actual play brought this game to life together. All of them put a lot of effort into building not only their characters, but also the shared world, through dialogue and backstory and by narrating the outcomes of their actions or negotiating with the other players for the best Twists. They do all this while maintaining a seemingly instinctive focus on the overall themes of the game, past lives, secrets of the lost world and secrets of the characters themselves, resurfacing.

I’m sure editing and production have a lot to do with this, too. If every table had an editor we could make it feel like our narrative beats and adherence to theme were foremost in our minds at all times. But seriously, I have to give a lot of credit to producer, Shenuque Tissera and Brian Flaherty who did the editing and sound design, while also being one of the players! There’s additional music and SFX courtesy of Artlist.io too. The voice effects and leitmotifs for the various characters are incredible and really work to spotlight individuals when that’s needed. Interestingly, this is a core part of gameplay in the Wildsea that has gone unmentioned on the show, as far as I remember, at least. Focus, “a sort of narrative spotlight,” according to the book, is a basic element of the Wild Words Engine and it is there to make players remember to pass the torch on to other players. I am sure the main reason it’s not mentioned is that these pros don’t need the reminder and that the sound design, editing and production are to such a high standard that it renders the concept unnecessary. Speaking of sound, there is also a musical surprise in every episode that I won’t spoil…

Here’s the full cast:

Firefly (GM): Elliot Davis

Brian Flaherty

Abby Hepworth

Noordin Ali Kadir

Kendrick Smith

J Strautman

Go check them out!

The Heart of the Matter

Not entirely seat of your pants

A portion of the inside cover of my copy of Heart: The City Beneath from Rowan Rook and Decard. Illustrations by Felix Miall

The philosophy for some Heart GMs seems to be, don’t you dare plan your Heart campaign or sessions. Like, just sit down with your players, make some weirdos to do some delves and then decide on a starting place. That might be in media res, as the PCs meet one another while hopelessly lost in Labyrinth or it might be at home in their shabby-chic apartment in Derelictus. From there you might just ask them what they want to do next and, when they tell you, just try to keep up with them! This is a valid way to play the game, I think, as long as you have either an exhaustive knowledge of the landmarks, adversaries, plot hooks and people of the Heart, or an effective and suitably weird set of random tables. If you approach it from this direction, the players are going to have the most input but the GM is going to have to improv a lot and do a great deal of work on the fly. It also presupposes a certain degree of setting knowledge on the players’ part, I think. This can be stressful and a lot to expect of everyone but I am pretty sure this is the preferred method of a lot of Heart GMs.

A portion of an illustration of Derelictus, the City Between by Felix Miall. Heart: The City Beneath, page 136.

Another option, of course, is to plan everything, start, middle and end. This is totally do-able. The book provides plenty of fodder to feed your hungry campaign. It describes dozens of landmarks and provides you with lots of plot hooks to get the PCs interested in pursuing the thing you want them to. So you can have them all meet in a Derelictus tavern where they overhear something about a plot by some Gryndel to pursue a valuable quarry into the Heart, plan the first delve to take them after the Gryndels only to find the quarry in Grip Station, near death but with a dire warning for the whole city that an army of Angels rises from below and a request for the delvers to spread the news to the Temple of the Moon Beneath, plan out the next delve to there, etc. etc. This sounds very much like a traditional adventure module for the likes of D&D. And that is all well and good. It allows a very strict control on the part of the GM and makes for a plot the PCs can uncover. But it will certainly lead to some railroading and could well make for potential dissatisfaction for the players and the PCs as they feel they have taken a back seat to the narrative planned out so perfectly by the GM. This method will ignore the great strength of Heart, it’s freeform potential, the loose structure inherent in the Beats system and the story being told by the delvers’ choices and their rolls and the Fallout that comes out of them.

A portion of an illustration of delvers planning a delve by Felix Miall. From Heart: The City Beneath, page 103.

So, how about somewhere in between? It seems sensible to meet in the middle. You make your weirdos, then you all discuss what sort of game you would like for them, GM and players together. Or you could take those two steps the other way around. Either way, you have an idea of the sort of story you all want to tell together and you all take responsibility for making that happen. This is with the understanding that what you think you want at the start might very well change after one or two or five sessions. That’s when you realise that, while you thought you wanted to help out that Haven you came across at the end of your first delve, it turned out what you actually wanted all along was to physically explode in such a way as to take out as much of the surrounding entities as possible so you could all travel to the afterlife together, an offering to your Goddess. And in pursuit of these elastic goals, the GM comes up with a loose web of places, people and objects that the PCs might have a chance to interact with. The GM will probably do this, at most, in between each session, with several ideas of where the story might go in the two or three sessions afterwards, but with no expectations.

A portion of an illustration by Felix Miall, of Grip Station, a Tier 1 Landmark. From Heart: The City Beneath, page 138.

Here’s what Messrs Howitt and Taylor have to say about it under the section entitled, “Stop Planning” on page 109 of the Heart core book:

Flexibility and adaptiveness are the keys to success. When you prepare, think in terms of characters, broad concepts, motivations, snatches of ideas that you want to play with. The world doesn’t exist until you speak about it at the table. Sure, you might have thought about it – you might even have written it down in a notebook – but until the players interact with it, it’s in total flux. The players just turn up every week and make it up as they go along. Why can’t you?

The quantum campaign made up of Shrödinger’s delves. And this about sums up the type and degree of prep I have been doing before each Heart session more recently. It’s more fun for me to do it this way too. I get to be surprised by what the players do and I get to discover the Heart along with them a lot of the time.

From Haven to Terminus

Yeah, that’s the name of our Heart campaign. It’s coming to an end this week. I guess the name gives away quite a lot of my thinking behind it. I was finding it hard to let go of the traditional module style of prep at the start. Yep, I decided to make a bold statement about, not only where the campaign would start, but also where it would end up. Now, this wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I had a very vague idea of a Campaign Frame for the game, that’s all. I used one of the plot hooks described in the Derelictus section of the Heart core book. Verrex, a retro-technologist with his tumble-down workshop situated on one of the platforms of Haven Station wanted the delvers to track down his robotic double, V01. The construct had expressed an interest in visiting all the Vermissian stations in the City Beneath, so he suggested the PCs use that as a guide to finding him. That was it. Everything in between was entirely up in the air, but it gave them a loose path and a potential final goal.

A portion of the illustration of a Gnoll Incursion Team by Felix Miall. From Heart: The City Beneath, page 188.

That was, of course, until I decided to employ the adventure presented in the Heart Quickstart guide, Drowned. Now, I am not going to spoil any of this adventure here but what I will say is that it lays out a very particular path ahead of the PCs, with the havens they will reach at the end of each of the numbered delves, the NPCs that will push them on from one place to the next and a big old final set piece. Now, since all I had before making this decision was a loose Campaign Frame, a little concreteness was actually welcome. It allowed me to see how to do things like come up with my own delves, use Haven NPCs to best advantage to help drive narrative and try to attach the PCs to someone or something only for them to find a way to betray or deceive them. But, after five or six sessions of following the adventure, I became aware of how the campaign had ended up on rails. I wasn’t providing them with options, I was forcing them down the path laid out by Drowned. I have found it hard to get out of this frame of mind since then, although I have tried to follow the advice from the book that I quoted above.

The delvers just reached Terminus, having taken a near-lethal shortcut through The Source, one of the Eight Heavens. The Junk Mage is banking everything on a meeting with a gnoll in Terminus who can teach them how to use the Nexus Device there to enact their will upon the entire city, The Vermissian Knight has pumped his mystical train armour full of soul power, the better to resurrect the entire inter-dimensional subway network, and the Deadwalker has just had his Zenith wish to combine his essence with that of the Heart itself thwarted by the Vermissian Knight who says he will not stand for his “human servants” abandoning him until his work is done (he’s an aelfir obvs.)

How will it end up? We’ll find out soon. But whatever happens, I am now pretty sure that these amazing players are going to surprise me yet again.