Motivation part 2

Motivating characters

So, in the last post, I went on at some length about how you might be able to motivate players in your game, focusing mainly on what you do between sessions to get them excited to come back and do it all again. There were also times, I decided, when you shouldn’t overdo it, when you should just let people be.

When you do get them to the table, though, your work ain’t over. Obviously, I’m talking to the GMs out there, but this goes for players too. Because now it’s time to figure out why your character is out there smashing skulls or investigating murders or trying not to be sacrificed by some bloodthirsty, cthonic cult or whatever their weird job is.

Seems like an easy answer, doesn’t it? But it’s not. Your character’s motivation is a strange, ephemeral thing that you need to keep in your mind at almost all times to figure out what they are going to do in any given situation. You can keep your alignment, in my humble opinion. Alignment is such an archaic and ill-defined concept, it barely even begins to answer any of the questions raised by the “character” aspect of the sheet. It can be manipulated to mean almost anything. So it doesn’t really help to direct you when you are trying to decide whether you should back the werewolves or the elves (Dragon Age: Origins fans, yo!)

New characters

Games have all sorts of ways to help you figure out what your character’s motivation is going to be. At the creation stage you are picking things like backgrounds, bonds, ideals and flaws if you’re playing 5e, your drive, problem and pride if you’re playing Tales from the Loop, your Calling if you’re playing Heart. The game is usually trying to help you out. Sometimes it doesn’t have to do any more than describe your race and class, in fact. That’s often enough to set a player’s imagination alight. Before you know it, your dwarven barbarian has figured out that her driving force is a desire to put as much space between herself and the darkspawn riddled Deep Roads (I’ve been replaying Dragon Age: Origins recently, ok?) as she can, and to have fun doing it. Of course this motivation is likely to change many times during play, but if Bianca remembers that she never wants to set foot in the Deep Roads again from that moment on, all of her decisions are likely to be coloured by it, especially when she finally faces her fears and delves back down to Orzammar and the lost Thaigs to help out her party-mates in their quest to track down the origin of the darkspawn outbreak in the Korcari Wilds.

Here’s a question though. How much influence should the GM have on a player-character’s motivation. Well, like most things PC-related, I would say that there is a conversation to be had. This is often something I forget to do with my players at character creation to be honest. Especially in games where motivations are less well defined or less tied to the plot. In fact, I have received feedback in the past that I should be more willing to guide players in their choices of class in case they choose something inappropriate for the campaign, never mind motivations! But basically, what I’m trying to say is that you should always talk about it, especially if a player is interested in talking about it.

I messed this up recently and definitely reduced at least one player’s enjoyment of the first session of a new game as a result. Motivation is important! It colours everything so you should always be available to talk about what a character is doing this stuff for? Why would they want to? It’s not that they player is being awkward or a prima donna or making the game about them, they just want to feel a connection to the game through their character and they need a reason for that. Help them out, eh?

In gameplay

As I mentioned before, character motivations can change during the course of play. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if they don’t the game there is probably not much going on in it. Most sessions it is a good idea to make their most immediate motivation become “I don’t want to die!” At least once.

But this goes for long-term motivations as well. I think it is absolutely possible to retain your character’s initial motivation of “never wanting to go bak to the Deep Roads again,” while subverting that, undermining it, overcoming it. Maybe, once Bianca follows her companions back into the Deep Roads, she realises that, without here, they would have died down there, that actually, her Deep Roads survival skills are valuable and that she should help others by teaching them. I think GMs should be prepared for these shifts but players, equally, should be ready to make changes like this to their characters. Turn it on its head, fail forward if that’s what happens in the game. Push your character to do what is explicitly against their motivations sometimes and see what happens to them and the game as a result. Do the unexpected!

Heart

It always comes back to Heart these days it seems. Well, that’s because it has these great little systems built into it. The granddaddy of these systems is the Character Callings. You have a handful of them. Not too many to choose from: Adventure, Forced, Heartsong, Enlightenment and Penitent. They speak for themselves really, except maybe for Heartsong, which is the weird one that wants your weird character to follow the weird as deep as it will go into the weird subterranean other-world until you find some insight into the weirdness that’ll probably kill you or transform you beyond all recognition.

Essentially these are all the motivations your character might need in Heart. Their descriptions spell out the kind of thing in keeping with the theme of the Calling, that might have led you to delve into the red, wet Heaven. It also gives you a fun ability to reward you for choosing it, a few questions to answer to help you flesh out your character and focus you on the type of adventure/enlightenment/penitence etc you are espousing, and most usefully, both for the player and the GM, an absolute raft-load of beats, narrative or mechanical milestones you want your character to hit as your delves go on. The beat system is so useful for building a session and a story at the table together. It is particularly fun when one PC’s beat synergises with another PC’s completely separate beat or when the object of the beat comes up organically in play, without the GM being aware that it’s happening. It is motivation given mechanical and narrative form and I love it.

Seriously, go check out Heart if you haven’t already. It’s a good game. And it’s fun and gross.

That’s me for now. My motivation to write has ebbed and waned. It’s you time now. How do you like to motivate your players and characters?

Endings

It’s hard to say goodbye

It’s so exciting to start something new. There’s the anticipation for what’s to come, the tingling nervousness that transforms to delight in the beginning, the wonder at sights never before seen and actions never before taken. Beginnings are full of possibility and the feeling of freedom.

The end of something, though, can be just as exciting, but in a different way. Do you ever rush to the end of a novel when you’re about three quarters of the way through, eager to find out what happens? Maybe you’ve waited on tenterhooks for the final film in a long running series to be released, because you have spent so long with those characters and know their stories so well and you want the best ending possible for them.

That’s a lot to live up to, that pressure. And I think, in an RPG context, everyone at the table feels it to one extent or another. At least in the situation when you know the end of the game is coming. TPKs notwithstanding, achieving a narratively satisfying ending to a game, particularly a campaign that you have potentially been playing together for months or years, is hard. Of course it is. There is a pressure to tie up all those loose threads, make sure that big bad is confronted, achieve emotional closure for your characters and their arcs, maybe even leave a space for a sequel.

Not only that, but the real struggle is making it all the way to the end of a campaign! Sometimes your friends move away or have kids or there’s a global pandemic or whatever. Stuff happens. Understandable stuff, but stuff nonetheless. The thing is, of course, that just means the endings you do get are that much more precious.

How to part on good terms

One-shots

You’re there for a good time, not a long time. But that presents its own challenges to fitting in a great ending. If you have a suitably magnificent finale planned, how do you make sure you get your PCs to it in time?

Time

My answer here is easy; take a reading every thirty minutes or so to see if they are cracking through the adventure rightly or if they haven’t made it out of the frikking tavern yet. If they need it, push them along, end that scene and do a hard cut to the next one, bring in a major NPC from another scene to move things along. And if all else fails? Cheat! One-shots benefit from a breakneck pace in my opinion, and no-one will blame you if you bend a few rules to keep the action moving along. They probably won’t even realise.

Possibilities

Another good idea for a one-shot is to come up with a few possible big endings. This is obvious, of course, but it helps to think about where you might want the PCs to end up and if you have a couple of big set-pieces to choose from, that really helps with engineering the big ending.

Epilogues (1)

And if all else fails and you run out of time while they are nowhere near a satisfactory endpoint, epilogues can be a fun way to go. Just get each player to narrate the life of their character five minutes after the last scene of play, or five weeks or five years! Just as long as the events of the game have a major effect on their epilogues.

Campaigns

It’s really hard to give any advice on this. Let’s be honest, every campaign is going to be so different, even if they are published campaigns played by thousands of groups, no two of those ends will end up being the same. But, we’re here to discuss it so let’s do it.

Arcs

Character arcs are important in campaigns, long and short. Players want to see growth in their characters and not just the kind where they level up. They want to find the thing they had been searching for and figuring out that what they really found was the friends they made along the way. Sometimes they want to gain power and prestige and property to make them feel successful. Other characters change drastically due to the events of the campaign and come out quite different to the farm girl they were at the start. My advice on these is to make sure they are wrapped up in advance of the big finale if you are planning something like that. Give each character their moment in the spotlight in the sessions leading up to the end so they know they are all just as important in the building of the story together and that everyone can see them in all their glory/misery. Players remember that kind of thing forever. Its good to involve character stories in the finale too, if you can, but if you leave their big moment to then, they will rarely get the time to revel in it too much. I could be wrong about this but such has been my approach in recent times and it has tended to work out fairly well.

Threads

Loose threads can be left loose, in my opinion. There is an impulse in some games to ensure that the players get to experience everything. But, by the very nature of RPGs, it’s simply not always possible.

So, the party ran into an itinerant wizard in the third session. She asked them to explore her phantasm-infested old tower and return with certain writings that might have relevance to the overall campaign plot. But they never had time to do it or they got sidetracked. That’s just an answer they are never going to get! At least not in game. The GM could always explain where that was going after the end of the game I guess.

Of course, for narratively integral beats, I endeavour to bring them all home at the end. If they lost track of a vampire servant of the Big Bad that they were hunting through the Deep Dark Forest, bring him back in the last fight as backup for the big bad, maybe. If one of the PCs’ parents went missing earlier and they didn’t find them, have them in the cultist temple as a sacrifice to the evil demon they are summoning in the final scene. Complicate the scene! Make it so they have to rescue them!

Fights

As for the final battle, if you are even running the kind of game where you would have such a thing, elaborate set pieces, evocative or emotionally resonant locations and big fucking monsters usually do the trick. I would say, though, difficulty-wise, more enemies is usually harder than bigger enemies. One or two big monsters with lots of hit points and abilities will go down much quicker than one big guy and ten small guys. I guess I am mainly talking about D&D finale battles and other set pieces here. This is because action economy is king in D&D. So this piece of advice should be taken with advisement.

One thing that I always try to encourage is for the players to talk and cry out and banter during these bigger fights. Makes the whole thing way more exciting and personal and funny.

Epilogues (2)

I think epilogues for the PCs really work well at the end of a long campaign as well. For these ones, I generally want to know what the characters are doing a year or two down the line. How have their day-to-day lives been affected by the events of the campaign? Where are they? Who are they with?

End games

At the end of the Blades in the Dark campaign I played in recently, our GM ran us through a different game to give us a chance to ask some questions of our characters to see how things ended up for them. The World Ending Game is by Everest Pipkin. It is a cinematic game that imagines the last scene or episode of a movie or TV show. It frames a bunch of different types of ending scenes called things like “the Confession,” “the Reveal,” “the Revision,” “Tableaux.” It was a fun and alternative way to treat the ending of a game that felt really personal to players and characters both and I would encourage others to use it to wrap things up for their own games.

Conclusion

I still find endings hard but I like them more and more. I have become much fonder of shorter more contained games of specific numbers of sessions. So it is a little easier to plan for. Also, sometimes, a character’s end is the best part, just look at Heart and its Zenith abilities, they will end the character, but they will also achieve the seemingly impossible. I love this idea for a couple of reasons, it brings the character and probably the campaign to a hard stop in the most amazing fashion and it is player driven. They have gotten themselves to the point where they want to use that ability, it is their choice to use it and it makes for the best ending for their character from their point of view.

How do you like to end dear readers? Do you like to go out in a blaze of glory or do you prefer to sail off into the West and remain Galadriel?

World Building Part 2

A new approach

First of all, I struggle to get out of my old way of building a campaign world and, even a campaign. I recognised in my last post that there are definite draw-backs to it, but still, I find it hard not to do a whole bunch of preparation. I do still think that a certain amount of prep is advisable but I have been actively trying to limit the amount I do. This doesn’t work as well in some games as others. In D&D, if you don’t do a lot of prep, you might be alright but it is a real pain if you don’t have the right stats to hand when your PCs decide they are going to enter the local gladiatorial games or they want to go ankheg hunting. It slows things down a lot and hurts the overall flow of the session. But it does feel like you are pushing the plot and your PCs in a very particular direction when you do it! Is this an inherent issue with D&D? Probably not just D&D if we’re honest.

In other games, I find it can be freeing and fascinating to see how a session goes when you genuinely have no preconceptions about what is going to happen in it.

Heart

In the game of Heart I am currently running, I used a loosely written adventure that came in the Heart Quickstart Rules. We have just come to the culmination of that adventure and suddenly, the PCs are more-or-less free agents! They have done what a few NPCs have asked of them and more. They followed the breadcrumbs and now, now they are ready to take the training wheels off and head into the Heart to pursue their own dreams and nightmares. They have a couple of other leads but I am looking forwards to leaving the progress up to them from now on. I intend to largely take my hands off the wheel and, instead, rely on their own motivations to provide direction, their own relationships with NPCs to perhaps push them one way or another, even their own ideas for how the new and terrifying delves they go on might look and feel. I want to create our Heart together now that the leash is off.

Im-prompt-u

There are lots of tools out there that you can use to bring a world to life together with your players at the table. I mentioned on this blog before that we had a game of The Quiet Year by Avery Adler a while ago. In it, you get together and make a couple of establishing decisions regarding what sort of community you want to build together and what sort of genre or setting it might be in. After that, you proceed through the seasons of a year after the end of some cataclysm and before the coming of some other terror. The players use a regular deck of cards to draw on prompts from the book. Each prompt gives you an occurrence or an important decision that must be made. This way, you all draw a map together and you develop a community that includes important factions, elements of religion and social orders, abundances and scarcities, fears and loves of the populace.

I was surprised when we finished, by what a fleshed out place we had created in concert. It felt like we had the basis of a fascinating setting to start something else in. I could imagine beginning a more traditional RPG there with the same players. These players would all have had a hand in building the place, the world, its people, their relationships. And wouldn’t they be so much more invested in it?

I mentioned last time that I had made a mistake in the very beginning of the Scatterhome campaign because I had tried to play on the PCs’ devotion to their decimated homeland when they had no experience of it. They couldn’t even picture this diverse paradise island that I had in my mind. But if we had used a method like The Quiet Year to make it, we would have had the fun of playing The Quiet Year, for starters, and also, we would have a place they might have mourned as their characters.

Scale

You can go much smaller of course. In the Blades in the Dark campaign I played in recently, our GM had us use a different game called Clean Spirits to build our hideout. At the start we had to make some decisions about what sort of place it was going to be. We decided on a beached canal boat and then we worked through a series of prompts and exercises to create various parts of it. We each got to claim our own section and also collaborated to make it a place that we treasured as players and characters with its own little mushroom farm and the spirit of its former captain trapped in a bottle. Later, when we were attacked in our hideout, this made the stakes seem so much higher!

Of course, you could go even bigger instead of smaller. I know the game, Microscope, is used to create a whole history for a world that is separated into periods and events. I have no experience with it though so I don’t know how well it works.

At the table

The type of world building I like the most is the collaborative kind, I have decided. One of my players in that Scatterhome game, Tom of the Media Goblin’s Hoard blog wrote an incredible history for their character, who was a Dragonborn. Now, I had never given too much thought to the origins or current situation of Dragonborn in the setting but that was ok, because Tom had been considering it deeply. It was all couched in the back-story of their character, but it added a huge amount to the world straight away, including the fact there was an under-class of Dragonborn within the empire who were raised to be weapons at the command of their human masters, how they were raised from eggs to obey and how some escaped and went on the run. How there were bands of pirates that sometimes took on runaways like their character and how they impacted the archipelago. It was great and, although we didn’t get around to using too much of that in the game itself, the knowledge of it made a big difference to how I thought about the empire and the world as a whole.

Later in the same game, we gained some new players who decided to take their PC races from the D&D setting of Theros so we had a new island nation on our hands then, one that looked a lot like Ancient Greece and contained leonines and satyrs. Once again, their choices made that change to the world happen.

Another new character added a whole new vassal kingdom of elves to the Vitrean empire, for whom social hierarchy and feudal concerns were incredibly important. So much so that they caused a rift between his character and his siblings.

Character backstory is world-building when you leave the details of the world vague enough for players to have free rein when coming up with them. It adds to the shared world and gives them a greater feeling of ownership of it.

I personally love it, though, when someone, simply, confidently states the existence of a particular item, a specific shop or an individual NPC right there at the table. That item is going to help them get through that window, that shop sells the exact thing they are looking for or the NPC has the contact details they need. This sort of flavour is invaluable and often becomes far more than flavour. This happened in Spire a lot because you have to ask your players to make rolls to resolve situations but then leave the details up to them. They made up the dugguerrotypist, Reggie, who worked for the local tabloids and he later became an important bond to them. Same with every aspect of their casino, the Manticore, which quickly filled with important NPCs and locations that were largely player-created. It is the best feeling when these instantly generated details come into play right there and then at the table. It’s like magic.

How do you prefer to world-build, dear reader? Do you do all the work beforehand and let the players loose in it at the table? Do you build a world together first and go and play in it after? Do you let it all just happen at the table?

Trophy Gold – Character Creation

Old school play, new school rules

I have a post in which I write a little about a couple of the podcasts that most inspire me to play and write about RPGs. One of them is Fear of a Black Dragon from the Gauntlet. In it, Tom and Jason review a different OSR module each episode (more-or-less.) What I discovered early on, while listening to it was that they often did not use OSR rulesets to play the modules. Instead, they usually used Dungeon World, World of Dungeons or Trophy Gold. These are much more modern RPGs and, I think, they tend to use Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark style rules. I have only just picked up Trophy Gold in the Codex-Gold magazine published by the Gauntlet back in 2019. So, I thought I would have a go at creating a character in this much more rules-lite game (compared to OSE anyway. To see how character creation went in that, go take a look at yesterday’s post.)

About the game

Essentially, Trophy Gold is doing the same stuff as Old School Essentials or D&D for that matter. It allows you to play an adventurer or treasure seeker who is drawn to dangerous, forbidden or haunted locales. The locales will push back. Unlike its predecessors, Trophy and Trophy Dark, which were made to play one-shots and tended towards the horror genre, Gold is more geared towards campaign play. It just doesn’t worry so much about your encumbrance or confuse you with bonuses that are actually negatives. It uses elements of Forged in the Dark games in its ruleset. It is described thus in the opening paragraph:
“Trophy Gold is a collaborative storytelling game about a group of treasure-hunters on an expedition to a haunted environment that doesn’t want them there.”

Character creation

So your character is called a Treasure Hunter in this game. This is because treasure is the aim of it. Your character is there to emerge from the dungeon or forest or ruins with heaps of Gold. But is it worth it? Will they even survive it?

A blank Trophy Gold character sheet from Codex Gold magazine, 2019, The Gauntlet.

Step 1 – Choose your Name, Occupation and Background

So, in direct opposition to OSE, we are starting with our name. I like this since, we all get named long before we know anything about ourselves, don’t we? The rules include tables for names, occupations (what you do in the party) and backgrounds (what you did before your treasure hunting days) So I am going to use them.

Name: Valen
Occupation: Smuggler. Skilled in dexterity, spontaneity, stealth
Background: Retired Soldier. Skilled in tactics.

The rules encourage you to think about your background profession, why you left it and why you can’t go back. As a retired soldier, I think Valen has tired of killing at the behest of others. He left to put his skills to work for his own enrichment instead. He could never go back to taking orders now that he has tasted independence.

Step 2 – Choose your Drive

This aspect has an element of Blades in the Dark peeking through. Each character will have their own motivation for treasure seeking and I am going to roll on a table for it. But first it explains that you can stash the gold you earn from it in your Hoard. Once you get to 100GP, you can retire your treasure hunter. Blades in the Dark has a similar conceit where you get to hide away your coin in a stash until you have enough to comfortably get out of the game for good.
So, here’s my roll:

Drive: Free the serfs of Bandung Prefecture

So, I don’t know where Bandung Prefecture is but it has fired my imagination. Perhaps my ex-soldier, while on a recent excursion to Bandung, discovered a village where the people were down-trodden and despairing due to the conditions caused by their lord’s treatment of them. There Valen met a man, a former soldier, who reminded him of himself to such an extent that he felt as though saving him and bringing down the cruel and selfish lord was essential. He just needs some funds to raise a rebellion.

Step 3 – Backpack Equipment and, if desired, Combat Equipment

There is an interesting approach to equipment here. You have three different categories, Backpack, Combat and Found equipment. You can roll on a table to see what your backpack starts with or you can choose from the table if you want stuff that suits your character. Importantly, your backpack starts with three items and three free slots. If and when you need something in a given situation, you check the table of Additional Backpack Equipment presented in the rules, and, if what you need is there, simply say it is occupying one of these slots. Then you write it down and mark off another slot. This reminds me of the loadout rules in blades in the Dark. These state that, when you are going on a score, you decide if you take a light, medium or heavy loadout. This determines how many items you can carry and also how much you stand out. But, importantly, you don’t have to say exactly what your items are until you need them in the fiction.

Anyway, I’m going to roll on the table for my

Backpack Equipment: Fishing net woven of silver (!), Bottles, lead (6), Magnet

When it comes to choosing Combat Equipment, there is another rule that comes into play. That is Burdens. You start the game with a Burdens score of 1. That’s the amount of Gold you need to keep yourself on a day-to-day basis in between incursions (that’s what Trophy calls adventures.) However, it increases for every piece of Combat Equipment you choose. It will go up further as you are playing too. What an interesting mechanic this is! Yes, your armour will hale to keep you alive on an incursion but you have to spend money to repair and maintain it. Can you afford that? I like it. But after yesterday’s debate, I am definitely getting Valen some nicer stuff.

Combat Equipment:
- Armour – Breastplate, Helmet
- Weapons – Crossbow, Dagger

So, I guess that increases my Burdens score to 5.

Step 4 – Choose your Rituals, if any

You don’t have to be a wizard or anything to perform these, all treasure hunters can learn and use rituals, dangerous magic that can perform “miraculous feats.” Now, I can have as many as three Rituals to start, but, it says here that, for each one I know, I must increase my starting Ruin by 1. Let’s see what that means, exactly.
Cryptically, the rules describe Ruin as:
“…how much the world has dug its claws into you, including the physical and mental harm you’ve suffered.”
Similar to Burdens, it starts at 1 but, as stated above, it increases commensurate with the number of Rituals known.

I have no experience playing this game so I don’t know the true consequences of choosing to increase my Ruin like this, but for fun, I’m going to take three random Rituals:

Beacon – nearby invisible beings or hidden objects shine with a fiery glow
Enliven – give flesh and breath to a human effigy (!)
Germinate – compel plants to furious growth

This, I suppose, increases my Ruin score to 4.

Finally, set your Ruin, Burdens and Hoard

Easy.

Ruin: 4
Burdens: 5
Hoard: 0 (this number is always 0 at the start.)

Comparison

It’s possibly unfair to compare this experience with that of making the OSE character yesterday since they are based on two such mechanically different games. But that’s what I am going to do.

Over all, I found that the character I created in the Trophy Gold system was never going to be compared negatively, or indeed, positively, to other characters in the same system. And that is purely because it does not rely on numbers so much. You will have noticed that Valen does not have attribute scores or hit points, for instance. Despite this, the Trophy Gold character is just as unique as the OSE character. It’s just that the differences between my ex-soldier/smuggler are more descriptive than numerical.

You will also have noticed that the character creation process encouraged me to think about the character’s background while making my treasure hunter. I don’t remember this ever coming up in the OSE process.

I did a lot of rolling on tables for this process, which I didn’t foresee when I went into it. In fact, I ended up with altogether more on the character sheet than I expected from such a rules-lite system. But I enjoyed the process and found the details provided by the tables fun and interesting.

One aspect that I liked, though, was that I had to choose the Combat Equipment and Rituals. These directly affected my Burdens and Ruin scores. These are the scores that will have the most impact on the way you play the character. I read on a bit and discovered that, if Valen does not come back from his incursion with Gold equal in value to his Burdens score, he’s done… He is left in penury or sent to the workhouse. As good as dead. Not only that, but, if his Ruin ever reaches 6, he is lost to the darkness, transforming into a monstrosity himself, or he is simply dead. Makes my decision to take three Rituals look a bit foolhardy now, eh?

Conclusion

Anyway, as I said, it is not really fair to compare the two systems. One is deliberate in its devotion to the OSR and its historical roots. It made a character that probably won’t last too long but mainly due to luck. The other is more interested in the story the players tell and the narrative beats produced by the characters created. My treasure hunter also probably won’t last long, but this time it is due to my choices.

Dear reader, do you have any experience playing Trophy Gold? How did you like it?

Player vs GM

Not what you think

I have an easier time writing about the games I am GMing or the ones I am going to GM in the future, compared to those I play in. I think the reasons for this are pretty obvious, right? I have an a behind-the-scenes view of the games I GM, I have read widely on the games, maybe I have home-brewed the world, I probably have a better handle on the rules than most others at the table. As well as that, I set up the game, I send out the invites, I normally host the game, so, it makes sense.

As for the ones I play in, I am still invested in them, or at least in my character, I have usually made some effort with a backstory and personality and I want them to experience cool stuff in the game world with a bunch of other weirdos. There are probably a couple of my characters that I could spend an entire post discussing (and probably will, now that I think about it) but not before they are even made.

Anyway, that’s why I am taking the last few games from my Games I want to Play this Year list and pop them all into this one post.

Old School Essentials – campaign I think

My friend, Isaac of Black Sword Hack fame has been working his way steadily through all the OSE books he could get his hands on. He’s almost ready to kick off that campaign! Very exciting! It will be my fist time playing this system and having been a part of Isaac’s Black Sword Hack game for the last couple of years, I know how he likes to construct a grubby, fun, weird campaign world for us to muck around in.

I am not all that familiar with the ruleset of OSE, but from what I understand, it took the rules from Basic D&D and some of those from AD&D and took out all the stuff that people tended to ignore. I know it does have a race-as-class idea that is similar to the way DCC does it but, overall, it gives me much more old school D&D vibes than DCC does.

I might just go and roll up a few little guys using the OSE rules to get an idea of how it works and get in the mood for it.

Heart: The City Beneath – Open Hearth campaign

This game technically already started; I am achieving my goals, dear reader! We have only had a session 0 in which I created my aelfir Incarnadine, Forgotten-Frost-Remembered. He is called to the Heart in search of adventure (also he had to flee the City Above due to his crass and embarrassing obsession with money, not to mention his astronomical levels of debt.) He and his fellow delvers are on a mission to help a haven that we created together using the rules from Sanctum, a sourcebook for Heart that is meant for this very purpose. The haven has no name as it was deleted by a Deadwalker some time earlier. The aim is to build it up while pursuing more selfish goals before we all blow up in a conclusion of zenith ability fuelled glory.

All credit to our GM, Mike, for having the presence of mind and session 0 nous to figure out our group’s haven-based goal and get us to create it together in under an hour.

Can’t wait to start getting weird in the Heart.

Call of Cthulhu – Masks of Nyarlathotep – campaign

This one is probably a long-shot. This is actually an ongoing campaign but has been on semi-permanent hiatus since, I want to say 2022? Not sure. Anyway, this is another of Isaac’s campaigns. It was one of those things, playing with adults can mean that sometimes, real life stuff takes precedence and there’s not much you can do about it. Since then we got into other games and other campaigns and Masks has been on the back burner for a long time. Every time we get to chatting about Call of Cthulhu, we end up saying we would love to get this classic campaign started up again.

Last we left our intrepid investigators (I was playing a gangland boss from London named Grant Mitchell) they had faced down other worldly terrors in the basement of an occult shop and proved the innocence of a man falsely accused of murder. They also uncovered some evidence and information that drew them to various other places around the world in their pursuit of answers to the question of who was responsible for the murder of their good friend, Jackson Elias. Anyway, they had concluded their snooping in New York and were on a slow boat to London. It has been a very slow boat at this stage…

Magus, Pike and Drum – Playtest

It’s Isaac again! This time with an early playtest for a game that he is very much still developing. I don’t want to go into any detail here but I think I can say at least that it is a semi-historical setting and it will be using the Resistance system, created for Spire. Can’t wait to try it out. What I have read of the character classes and abilities so far makes it sound very fun and interesting to play.

OK, that about wraps it up for today. See you tomorrow with more from the Dice Pool.

Turbo Tokens

Failure is failure

Nobody wants to fail, right? We frown on failure. We take it personally, even when it is no fault of our own. It is hard not to feel that way. It might even keep you awake some nights, remembering how you fucked up that one thing and someone blamed you for your failure, even though it was largely a matter of chance. It sucks, but here’s the thing, your brain will never let you forget that one time you messed up. You will almost certainly never make the same mistake again if it’s something you can avoid, right? You will avoid similar situations, you will learn to do the thing properly or you will let someone qualified do it.

But this is not the case in D&D and other similar games. If you roll a 12 and add your +3 bonus and you miss that guy with his 16 AC, that’s it. It’s over. There is nothing you can learn except that you better roll higher next time or hit him with Magic Missile. This feels so much worse than regular failure. This is failure with no upside. There is not even a fun narrative element to it, really, unless you shoehorn one in.

So, how do you fix this? I think the answer is pretty simple actually, and it was brought to my attention by Aabriya Iyengar and Brennan Lee Mulligan.

Adding interest to failure

In the latest season of Dimension 20, Never Stop Blowing Up, the gang are playing people stuck in an 80s action movie. They are not playing D&D this time. Instead they are using a version of the Kids on Bikes system that they have previously hacked for Mentopolis and Misfits and Magic.

I really enjoy the system and it suits the seasons they use it in really well. In particular, the exploding dice element of the mechanics makes a lot of sense for a show called Never Stop Blowing Up and it makes for some brilliant cast reactions when it happens.

But the mechanic I am interested in here is the Turbo Tokens they receive when they fail at an action. In the base game, they are called Adversity Tokens and they represent the lessons learned from failure and contribute to real swings of momentum during high-stress situations.

Kids on dragons

So, I am going to try it out in D&D. Not sure what name I will give the tokens yet. I might just start with Adversity Tokens and see what the players end up calling them. The idea I have is to use them the same way as they do in Kids on Bikes, basically. They will earn one token each time they fail at something, whether it’s an attack roll or a stealth check or an effort to wow the crowd in the inn with their musical genius. That way, failure won’t feel quite so bad and they will be able to spend them later to effect other rolls. I think a +/- 1 modifier for each token spent is appropriate. They will be allowed to spend them to add to or subtract from any roll happening in the situation they are involved in. So they could add a bonus to their own attack roll, help out a fellow PC when the chips are down or subtract from an enemy’s saving throw or attack roll for instance. I foresee some interesting behaviours when it comes to the saving and spending of these. I am thinking I might need to cap the number of tokens a player can have at 10, although I doubt they’ll be able to save up that many of them really.

What do you think, dear reader? Have you ever tried doing something like this in D&D. If so, how did it go?

DIE RPG – One-shot

Comic, not comical

The DIE RPG was developed by Kieron Gillen, writer of the comic of the same name. I really loved the comic book, mainly because the premise spoke to me personally. The premise of the comic is that a bunch of young friends were brought together by the one guy who wants to GM a new game for them. He presents each of them with a special die, one d4, one d6, one d8, one d10, one d12 and one d20 for himself. In the course of play they find them selves transported to the game world. They are trapped there for months and come back changed, having left their GM friend behind.
Cut to decades later, they are all grown, with families and traumas and problems. They are all drawn back into the world of DIE for various reasons and the comic basically goes from there, following their adventures to the metatextual unreality of this fantasy realm trying to find their friend and a way home again, or not. Meanwhile, they all deal with a melange of emotional issues that lead to some very high drama and high-stakes decisions.
It is pretty fraught most of the time, very relatable to many, and despite my sub-heading it is funny sometimes.

DIE RPG

So Kieron Gillen got together with one of my favourite game publishers, Rowan Rook and Decard, to make the DIE RPG. I followed the process and remember checking out some of the early beta material. As a game, it is working to do what the comic did but at the table with your friends. You have to create a character, who is the player of the game, as well as the character they play, so there is a sort of Inceptionesque quality to it, which is dreamy and cool. Now, your player has to come loaded with various real-world problems and worries for you to work through in the game within the game as well.

I have not read much of the fully finished game, although it has spent a fair bit of time on my shelf. I recently discovered, while reading the Burn After Running blog, that it is ideal for one-shots so that’s why I really want to try to bring it to the table soon. I want to unearth some traumas for my player’s players and express them through my player’s player’s characters.

Also, please take a moment to appreciate the beauty of the products. Yum.

Wildsea – Campaign

Give your players a home

It’s pretty difficult to give your journeying adventurers a particular place they need to look after. They are always schlepping off to the next dungeon or haunted house or wizard’s tower or whatever. There are ways around this. In one D&D campaign that we finished last year, the PC’s hometown was plonked right on top of a sort of nexus of worlds, an ancient tower, buried beneath a hill, containing dozens of portals to many different planes and other prime material locations. So, even when they popped off to Sigil or Mechanus or the Astral Plane or wherever, they were always going home eventually. Indeed, the focus of that campaign was to save their little island.

But I often find it gratifying to make the home they care about quite mobile. In the first of several interconnected campaigns, the PCs stole and adopted their own “turtling” vessel (like a whaling vessel but for giant turtles. You get the idea.) as the setting was a vast archipelago they needed the transport. Of course they took it and made it their home. Not much of their adventures revolved around that boat but I liked the idea that they had somewhere to return to, no matter where their travels took them.

A-thing-to-fuck-with

It was also a-thing-to-fuck-with. I never got the chance to seriously fuck with that boat since the campaign has been on a semi-permanent hiatus for a few years, but more recently, I got an opportunity to hassle their casino. I mean, this was a different set of characters but some of the same players and it was in Spire, not D&D. The Ministry of Our Hidden Mistress bequeathed to our “heroes” the poisoned chalice of a casino called the Manticore in the Silver Quarter. They put a lot of effort into it, hired entertainment and a succession of unlucky security guards. It did not end well for the Manticore or the staff. Threats to it made for real motivation and the fact that it was a public place meant their enemies could just walk in. That was a dream. Great stuff. But it veers wide of the mobile home to care about topic.

The most recent version of the mobile home in one of my campaigns is the Cadabra, a mirror-hulled squid ship in our Spelljammer game. It’s got a ready-made crew of spirits and a checkered past itself. They have had this ship since session 3 and they are now at the point where they are repairing it and upgrading it and even adding more boats! They’re going to have a frikkin’ armada! This is great because boats are a money-pit. They answer the question, “what are my characters going to do with all that gold?” As well as the “how shall I fuck with them?” question.

And I know the feeling of home-ownership within a game. In the Black Sword Hack game I’m in, we have a flying boat, called a slater. We are unreasonably paranoid about this thing getting stolen or burnt or otherwise becoming unusable by our characters. We park it miles from the locations we are trying to get to so no-one sees it. We always leave NPCs to guard it. It is our home and it’s where we store all our opium and it’s our greatest asset. I’ll be damned if any asshole wizard is going to take it from us!

A home in the canopy

A photo of a page from my copy of The Wildsea by Felix Isaac's. It shows a picture of a ship from the game.

So Wildsea is a good fit for me and my group. In it, the players make characters who crew a ship that plies the canopy of a world-blanketing forest under the power of chainsaws! Below the leafy waves, the poisonous substance, crezzerin makes descending into it just as dangerous as diving into watery sea. The characters are made up of a wild variety of bloodlines like the beings made up of a colony of spiders, cactus folk, spirits inhabiting the ruins of ship-parts and regular old humans. It is possible to start a campaign of Wildsea where the PCs do not have a ship, but I don’t think I would. In fact, the designer of the game, Felix Isaacs, recently suggested that the best way to start is by making your ship first, before your characters even! That way, the thinking goes, you can imagine them in place , posing upon the prow or hanging from the gunwale or climbing the mast. Also, the classes in this game equate to posts on a ship so it makes even more sense when you take that into account. I really like this idea and will probably ask my players to take this approach in session 0.

A photo of a picture of a Mesmer, one of the posts from the Wildsea book.

There is no doubt that this is a weird setting. In some ways, it should act like any other setting where you get around on a vehicle of some sort across a trackless expanse. There are plenty of sci-fi games where you have a spaceship to build and look after. Death in Space is like that. Then, of course, I have given a few examples in D&D above already. But this is pretty alien. Even the concept of the post-apocalypse that is so impossibly verdant that sentient life has had to scrabble for a foothold amongst all the greenery is unique and bold. Add to that the oddness of the playable bloodlines and the really setting-specific hazards and you would be hard-pressed to compare Wildsea usefully to any other single game on the market.

A photo of a picture an Ardent character from The Wildsea book.

On top of that, the mechanics are really interesting. It is known as the Wild Words Engine

From Wildsea, Chapter 2, Mechanics:
“It’s low on crunch, focusing instead on letting narrative, character and setting develop during play.”

Isaacs has said that, despite the similarity to certain other game systems, he came up with a lot of the rules independently or was influenced more by video games than other RPGs. The basic dice-rolling mechanic is very Blades in the Dark and he has, to be fair, indicated that he got it from that game. So, you build a dice pool to roll and take the highest roll (or two rolls in the case of a Twist). But there are elements such as the Twist, which happens when you roll doubles and adds a special little something to the effects of the roll, that feel new and fun.

Finally, it feels like the GM (or Firefly) and the players get to create the world together as they play, making a place with little magic or lots of it, with high technology levels or very low, with strictly faith based societies or entirely atheist ones. This is very appealing to me.

How about you? Have you had a chance to play Wildsea? If so, what were your favourite aspects of it?

Death Match Island – Short Campaign

Postponed

So, when I wrote the post listing the games I wanted to play during the remainder of this year, I had Deathmatch Island pencilled in for this Friday. I only had one session in my calendar so I thought, “oh! It must have been a one-shot that I had planned.” But no, reader, no.

First of all, I have had to put this one on the back burner for now. I only had three players for it and one is unable to attend so I decided it’s best to leave it to a more convenient time for everybody. These are the iniquities of arranging to play RPGs with adults. Thus has it ever been. I am determined to get to it at some point soon but it’s not happening this weekend, that’s for sure.

Second of all, Looking back at the original invitation I sent out to players within our little, local RPG community, Tables & Tales, I realised I had advertised it as a three session game with the possibility of stretching to six more sessions if the players were into it. Now this makes perfect sense. The core book suggests that you can complete a satisfying arc in three sessions but, if you wanted to make it to the end of the Death Match, as it were, you would probably need nine in total, if not more. It does provide guidance for making one-shots using the system and the structure of the game but I think it would be far less meaningful to do so.

Inspirations

No-one, I think, is going to be terribly surprised by the inspirations behind Deathmatch Island. You’ve got Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, Squid Game, even Survivor of course, but, slightly less predictably, Tim Denee, the designer, also references Severance and The White Lotus, two of my very favourite TV shows from the last few years. A couple of touchstones that are, surprisingly, absent from the list are the video games, Portal and Portal 2. Many of the design choices and even the arguably, most important, decision the player characters need to make align with the choices your character makes in those games, “play to win,” or “break the game.” Of course, in all of these pieces of media, this is the central and most important choice.

The game, not the-game-within-the-game

What I am trying to say is that I was always going to back a game like this when it popped up on Backerkit. I am a fan of all of those properties to one extent or another. And, to me, the themes are never going to get old. And, although I haven’t had a chance to actually play it yet, I think that, if you feel the same about any of the media I listed above, you could do a lot worse than picking up this game.

A photo of a two page spread from my copy of the Deathmatch Island core book. — Remember – your followers are consumers, you are just the product.

Apart from anything else, it is slick. The production quality is high, as you would expect from Evil Hat Productions, and all of the extras I got from my pledge tier are great. They include booklets describing each of the Islands and each of the Casts (which, to a large extent determine the type of scenario you’ll be playing,) official-looking Competitor Registration forms that act as character sheets, player maps of each of the islands as well as rules glossaries for both Competitors (players) and Production (GM.)

Mechanically, Deathmatch Island is based on the Paragon system developed by John Harper of Blades in the Dark fame and Sean Nittner. I knew nothing about this system before I read the Deathmatch Island book, except that it originated with another game called AGON.

It is highly structured, with play occurring in clearly defined phases. It starts with Competitor Registration, in which the players create their characters, largely through rolling on a series of tables. Then you proceed to the first island.
Each island is split into Phase One, where the Competitors explore, interact and collect resources and Phase Two which is the climax, in which the Battle Royale itself occurs. Even within each phase, there are only a few set actions that can be taken. There is a fair amount of leeway regarding how you achieve the actions within the narrative, but it essentially comes down to opposed rolls from the teams as they stand on the island. Although, the rolls themselves are of utmost importance to the outcome, the players get to do a Confessional after the rolls are all done, giving them each narrative control, as if describing their actions to a camera on a reality TV show. It’s a fun conceit and one I’d like to see in action.

You play up to three islands. There is a phase of play between each island. This works a bit like downtime in Blades in the Dark and gives the PCs a chance to improve their characters, debrief, and come up with some theories about what the hell is going on. And then there is the End Game. I’m not going to go into that here.

From reading the book, the system feels sufficiently different from anything I have played before to have me really interested to find out how it plays at the table. One of the most fascinating parts is that I feel like you could replay this game on the same islands, with the same players, but choose different casts and have a very different experience each time.

I hope I get to try it out soon!
Have any of my readers played Deathmatch Island? If so, what did you think?

More Troika! – One-shots

Appendectomy

When was the last time your mind was genuinely blown by an idea, a concept, a creature or a situation presented to you when you played a fantasy role playing game? Because I don’t think D&D is providing opportunities for that sort of thing these days. I don’t necessarily blame the writers of D&D books for that; Wizards of the Coast has painted themselves into a corner that they are very comfortable occupying. In fact, because D&D is responsible for much of the public image of fantasy games for the last half century, they have dragged a lot of the hobby with them. As a result you have endless polished and glittering iterations of elves and dwarves and dragons and wizards with spell levels and clerics with devotion to individual deities and all the same monsters repeated ad nauseam. It is particularly interesting when you look at Appendix N, the appendix to the original D&D, in which Gary Gygaxstated his inspirations for the game. It has a few names you would expect to see: JRR Tolkien, Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber and Poul Anderson but you also have a few that might make you wonder about the connection to the D&D of today.

HP Lovecraft is well known as the author of The Call of Cthulhu and other cosmic horror stories but his influence on D&D might not be obvious to all. Jack Vance wrote fantasy novels but they were tinged with an element of science fiction and gonzo world building in his Dying Earth books. In fact, many of the authors represented in Appendix N were famous for science fantasy rather than straight fantasy books, just look at Roger Zelazny and Edgar Rice Burroughs. You can still see bits of that influence in Wizards of the Coast’s D&D if you think of Spelljammer and Eberron but they always feel little too clean and sanitised compared to the books those ideas came from.

What I am getting at is that the true spiritual successors to the game developed with Appendix N in mind are part of the OSR. I wrote just yesterday on this very blog about Dungeon Crawl Classics and that very much embraces those influences, but it’s Troika! from the Melsonian Arts Council that truly embodies them for me.

Stretching those imagination muscles

The cover of my copy of Troika! Numinous Edition.

From Acid Death Fantasy by Luke Gearing:
“To the East lies the Plastic Sea, a miraculous main of liquid plastic. Upon contact with living skin it solidifies, covering the coast with Coated Men dueling each other in elegant, fatal contests, having made the choice to die young and glorious, sealed in flexible plastic armour.”

From Fronds of Benevolence by Andrew Walter:
“Fletherfalloon is a floating Thinking Engine of a very basic sort, dating from a bygone age. Festooned with rotting ribbons and rusty curlicues, it hovers at varying altitudes burbling and whistling to itself.”

From Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs by Ezra Claverie:
“Water: three billion years old, frozen by the perpetual
night at the edge of the Galaxy, compressed into glaciers
of midnight blue. Taste the weight of time and solitude,
darkness and purity. With Djajadiningrat.
Hear it crackle in your favorite spirit. The sound of time
calving into an ocean of premium flavor.
Cut by natural-born hand, never by machine, never by clone.
At night’s edge, taste the infinity. Only from Djajadiningrat.
— advertisement in Ice Tomorrow (trade magazine)”

Troika! Is a city at the centre of everything, and around it gathers a host of bizarre and fantastical settings dotted throughout the cosmos. Perhaps you traverse this universe in a space-ship, perhaps it’s a Golden Barge you use. Maybe your character is a Displacement Prosthesist, maybe they are a Hyenaman Scavenger. The possibilities are truly endless and the strangenesses abound.

A page from Acid Death Fantasy by Luke Gearing. It details of the background you can choose to play in that setting, the Hyenaman Scavenger.

We had the chance to play a single one-shot of Troika! A couple of months ago and it did nothing but whet my appetite for more oddness. The adventure we played was a published one, The Blancmange and Thistle, in which the PCs encounter a hotel. Saying any more would involve spoilers but suffice it to say, if you are a fan of the unusual, that hotel is the place to stay.

The inside front cover of my copy of Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs by Ezra Claverie.

From that, I fed the PCs a hook that should, someday, when I find the time, lead them to the world of Myung’s Mis-step and the whodunnit adventure at the centre of Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs.

But I have a few others too:

Some lads on a page from Frond of Benevolence by Andrew Walter.

Fronds of Benevolence is a short, point-crawl where the PCs journey in search of an item of great importance to their friend/ruler/patron/deity, Duke DeCorticus, which will lead them “to the Rainbow Badlands, across the precipitous face of The Wall and in the very vaults of the hump-backed sky!
Acid Death Fantasy is more of a setting book but could equally be used as a point-crawl adventure. It contains elements from Dune, Planet of the Apes, others from dying earth genre books and still others from classic fantasy.
Whalgravaak’s Warehouse also by Andrew Walter is an adventure “that centres the play experience on the classic tenets of danger, resource management, exploration and player engagement agency.”

And given the fact that I will probably only get to run these once every few months, these will no doubt last me a while!

Have you had any experience playing Troika!? If you met a Slug Monarch in an awkward situation, would you help them or attack them?