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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Survival Gear
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?
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
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.
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.
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:
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?
I have a few adventure modules from the early days of my D&D career. A couple that hark back all the way to AD&D first edition and several more for specific settings like Dark Sun, Ravenloft and Planescape. I have a few for D&D 5E as well. But the thing is, I have never been that enamoured of them. Almost from the start I found it too restrictive to run a pre-written adventure. I had the feeling that I had to get everything right, according to the text and that, if I put a foot wrong, I would mess up the whole experience for the players. To be fair, that was absolutely the case in some instances.
Instead, after I had read a few published modules and run some of them, I was able to see how it was done. So, I wrote my own adventures. Usually these were pretty loose things with nothing but a beginning, a main villain and some encounters filling the middle but only a vague idea of where it was going. Honestly, my method has not changed all that much in the intervening years. Anyway, this approach allowed me to improvise much more freely and I think my players generally felt they could do as they wished, within the constraints of the setting, rather than the strictures of a preset narrative.
I still don’t run published D&D scenarios or campaigns much, even if I do occasionally buy them. I ran Storm King’s Thunder a few years ago and was equal parts appalled and underwhelmed by it. It’s a full campaign that took us the guts of two years to finish. During that time much of our play-time was spent farting around the Sword Coast, trying to remember what the PCs’ motivation was while having more-or-less random encounters and a few pre-written, essential ones. It was meant to be a sandbox but the area felt too vast and the individual locations too ill-explained to be easily useable without a huge amount of work by the DM. And so little of it felt important to the overall plot! On the other hand, when it gave me the chance to be creative, and come up with content that was entirely my own, I loved it. And, generally, those were the most memorable moments from that campaign, even if I do say so myself.
Modular construction
So why do I want to run individual modules for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG from Goodman Games? More masochism? Could be, oh reader mine, could be. It might actually be a mistake. I probably won’t know until I try it out.
But here’s the thing, the modules I am thinking of have been written some time in the last ten years for the most part. They are modern, with modern themes and sensibilities in mind. They are structured for a modern RPG player and they are, generally, nice and short.
So, they are modern, meaning they have plenty of opportunities for the PCs to make important and potentially game-changing choices and very few instances of railroading. Also, they assume that the players, at least, have all agreed to be there to play the game and so they are not written with the utmost consideration given to how to get the PCs to do what the adventure wants them to do.
Themes and sensibilities are important. A lot of the older adventures make colonialism look good and normalise a sort of fantasy racism that is simply unacceptable. It wasn’t acceptable then and it isn’t now. But now, at least, the consumer won’t put up with it.
Structure and length kind of work hand-in-hand. A lot of these have a fairly loose structure where many events can occur at any time within the beginning middle and end portions of the modules. And they are short enough to play in an evening or two for the most part. Here are the page lengths for a sampling of the DCC adventures I own:
The Sorcerer’s Tower of Sanguine Slant – 25 pages The Laughing Idol of Lar-Shan – 17 pages Blades Against Death – a massive 32 pages The Croaking Fane – 16 pages
Easy to read and easy to prepare with great maps and fun artwork too.
Also, these things are metal AF. Here are a few extracts:
From DCC # 77 The Croaking Fane
“The transept ends in a small altar, atop which sits an idol depicting a grotesque frog with razor-sharp teeth and talons. Its mouth is full of the mangled bodies of sentient races – humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, and even ogres hang askew in it maw; limbs dangling between the giant’s teeth.”
From DCC # 74 Blades Against Death
“You draw aside the clacking curtain to reveal an emaciated crone, her white eyes staring into nothingness. A third eye is tattooed on her forehead and seems to blink when she wrinkles her face.
From DCC # 77.5 The Tower Out of Time
“A grotesque wonder occupies this bright chamber. Three fleshy slabs stand at acute angles around a monstrous, bulbous mass that resembles an exotic jungle flower. Each slab bears a small, hairy anthropoid creature. Numerous crimson tubes extend from the horrible flower, greedily siphoning the life blood from these creatures.”
Finally, DCC has this rather unique phenomenon called Level 0 Funnels. I am mildly obsessed with them and am itching to get one to the table. You play one of these adventures in lieu of traditional character creation. Your players each roll up 4 or 5 0 level characters, essentially peasants with no special abilities or magic or anything (they might have a pitchfork or a pig) and you send them all into a dungeon. Any that survive the experience get promoted to first level. And some of these modules are pitting 0 level characters against the sort of things the average D&D party might think about facing at like, 10th level.
I haven’t even gotten into the rules of DCC really. Suffice it to say that they are close enough to D&D that most players will not have a hard time learning them. I’ll probably do a deeper dive on the rules another time.
So, have you played DCC? If you did, did you play any of the published modules for it? What did you think?
Maybe I’m giving away a bit too much with the title of this scenario. What do you think? I mean, look, here’s the thing; when we set up Tables and Tales a few months ago, I was curious about the kinds of things new members were into. One of them said they liked Indie Mascot Horror. Now, let me tell you, dear reader, I did not know what that was. Since then, I have learned that it refers to video games like Five Nights at Freddie’s and Poppy’s Playtime. I had obviously not played these games but I looked into them a bit and got the vibe. I thought about the types of RPGs that would be good for those themes and tropes. It did not take me long to decide on Tales from the Loop.
Tales from the Loop
If you have never seen the artworks of Simon Stålenhag, do yourself a favour and go check them out. I have taken some photos of his work from his art book, Tales from the Loop and embedded them here but they don’t do the work justice. When I first encountered his work several years ago, it filed me with wonder. He created such a realistic depiction of a past that was largely recognisable to me from my own childhood, interspersed with or shockingly dominated by futuristic architectures and sci-fi wonders. His work excited my imagination like only RPGs had in the past. So when I discovered that Free League were producing a Tales From the Loop game, it didn’t take me long to pick it up. It took a little longer to get it to the table but when I did I discovered that the players loved it.
Tales from the Loop is a game about the 1980s that never was. It posits a world in which some astounding scientific breakthroughs occurred in the ‘50s and ‘60s so that, by the time in which the game is set, they are not considered so strange. You have your robots and your hovercraft and your infinitely renewable energy. But most of that stuff is considered mundane in Stålenhag’s world. Not only that, they exist alongside the ‘80s mainstay technologies like Walkmans, cassette tapes, VCRs and Soda Stream. In Stålenhag’s artwork this created some beautifully uncanny images. Most were set in the region of Sweden known as Mälaröarna, where the Loop project was based. This is where the world’s largest particle accelerator was built. Though it is not necessarily directly responsible for the many strange occurrences in the region, the people who populate such a scientifically rarified place usually are. Scientists and administrators and students flocked to the region and started families there. So many of Stålenhag’s paintings involved kids; a toe-headed child threatening an old Volkswagen van marked “Polis” with a giant robot under his control; a pair of woolly-hatted kids digging in the Swedish snow and gazing back at their homes, dwarfed by the cyclopean, other-worldly cooling towers used to release heat from the core of the Loop itself, the Gravitron; a little kid in cold weather coveralls leading his grandfather through the snow to a mysterious sphere, left abandoned in the countryside, its purpose and provenance forgotten. These were the inspirations for the RPG.
The game came out at the height of the popularity of Stranger Things, which helped it gain a lot of traction I think, and then it even had its own, unfortunately not so popular, spinoff TV series, which I, at least, loved.
In the RPG you play kids between 10 and 15 years old. You get to choose a Type from such classics as the Computer Geek, the Hick and the Weirdo. You also have to choose some really fun things like your Iconic Item, your key relationships and your favourite 1980s song.
Once you have your Kid, you and your friends can go out and investigate weird shit on your bikes. Stuff like, where are all the birds gone? What are all the adults doing gathered around that weird machine in the field? What’s that dinosaur looking claw print in the snow? You know, normal kid shit.
Roll mechanics
Tales from the Loop uses a version of the Year Zero engine, and, in fact, it was the first game I played using that system. It’s really straight-forward and intuitive, easy to learn and resolves situations quickly. “Situations” are generally and collectively referred to in the text as “Trouble” with a capital “T,” appropriately enough. For many, the Trouble you got into and out of when they were kids are some of the most enduring and treasured memories. In the game, you combine your ability dice and your skill dice into one dice pool and roll them all to try and get at least one 6. Since you only use d6s in this game, that’s the highest you can roll. The more 6s you roll the better, generally.
The only issue my players and I had with the rules is the Extended Trouble mechanic. The way this works is that, during the final showdown, encounter or whatever, every kid says what they are going to do and the GM tells them how many successes they will need to succeed fully. Then one player rolls all the dice in one enormous pool. Generally, if they don’t succeed fully but they still have a few successes, they might achieve what they were trying to but one or more kids will earn conditions or even become Broken. But, in play, we found this approach to be unsatisfying. Each player wanted their own cool moment to roll for and the all-or-nothing approach meant that they couldn’t attempt to take any rectifying actions if and when they saw things going wrong. Anyway, suffice it to say, we won’t be using the Extended Trouble rule next time.
Mascots and Murder
Here are the very basics of the scenario I have planned: Although the first Loop was in Sweden and much of the book is written as though it is the default setting, they do actually provide a second potential setting in it. That’s Boulder City, Nevada, the “Best city by a dam site,” which is a reference to its proximity to the Hoover Dam. There is another Loop in this region and all of the scenarios presented in the core book can be transposed very easily to the desert, believe it or not. This is where the kids in this scenario will be from. It is summer in Boulder City so it’s going to be so sizzling hot that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk. This will be a nice change as all the other Tales from the Loop games I have played were set in Sweden in autumn and winter.
Some teens have gone missing from Boulder City. Although their parents don’t seem too worried about it, our intrepid Kids are going to solve this mystery as they track down the source of the eerie, carnival-like music out in the Nevada desert and figure out what the connection is.
I have had fun writing this scenario, even though I have gone over it and over it to get it right. So, it’ll be ready to play in a few weeks.
The Tales from the Loop core book has some very useful advice for writing and structuring a scenario for it yourself. As long as you stick to that, you’re unlikely to go wrong. This is not actually the first one I have written myself, using these guidelines and, I can tell you, it works really well.
Have you played Tales from the Loop? What did you think of it? If you had to run a particular game for Indie Mascot Horror vibes, what would it be?
Having managed to get through so many games in the first 7 months of the year, you know what? I reckon, if I really make an effort, I think I can fit in up to ten more different games before New Year’s Day. I’m particularly looking forward to a few more one-shots. For those of you who’ve been keeping an eye on this space over the last couple of weeks, you’ll know I have a soft spot for them.
Lists 4
Here we go. Like previous lists, I’m just going to split them between those I want to run and those I want to play in.
To be honest, a bunch of these games are ones I already have in the schedule. I’m hoping to get Tales from the Loop started in a few weeks and I have Death Match Island in the calendar for next Friday. Even the ones I want to play in include a couple that are almost good to go.
The murder-hobo days are largely done, I think. Although I’m sure there are still plenty of tables out there slaying every poor goblin that crosses their paths, it seems to be a pretty old-fashioned play style, uniquely and deliberately violent, especially when the “monsters” are sentient creatures with cultures and desires and rich inner lives. I didn’t know it when I was a kid but there’s no doubt that the impetus to enter an underground lair and kill every orc you found in there was a product of some highly colonial cultural fallout. Those guys are green so it’s ok to take their treasure and their lives, right? Or, my king/lord/boss/priest told me those guys were evil; better get them before they get us! You are far more likely to be able to deal with an encounter without violence, and that’s cool.
Harpin’ on
Do my players do this? you ask, reader. Well, yes and no. The Deadwalker from our Heart game made friends with a Heartsblood beast the other night. It was a giant snail with the face of a drow (except for the eye stalks and the rows of sharp little teeth.) his name was Shelby. Of course, they sort of bonded over the killing of a harpy couple. Harpies in Heart are very interesting, by the way. They remind me of the Khepri in China Mieville’s Bas Lag books. The male harpy is just a big bird, about the size of a cat. Now, when he is looking for a mate, he’ll collect up a load of trinkets, bones, body parts, small creatures and occult relics and place them in a circle while, like a minah-bird, he speaks words he has heard others say. These tend to be words they have heard recently from people like the PCs, which is fun. Anyway, this ritual summons his potential mate through a portal from some dreadful, hellish dimension. And she is the terrifying figure of a woman but with talons where feet should be and wings instead of arms and the intestines of some poor bugger dripping, bloody from her beak-like maw. She is very violent and hungry. This encounter was only going to end one way. Luckily, it was the PCs who came out the victors, although it was touch and go. And hey, Seeker made a new friend in the process! Cute little Shelby.
Surprised to see it turn weird
The subtitle there is a reference to a star I got from Isaac in our last D&D session when they discovered the brainless hobgoblin body and the triplets with gossamer threads attaching them to something else in this dungeon they have just entered. They have been encountering a lot of other sailors, mostly humanoids and their servants recently. That’s often the type of game it is because they are dealing with other ships and their crews a lot. They have usually resorted to violence in most instances in this campaign so far. Maybe that’s my doing since the encounters have often started off violent from the monster side. And they did try to befriend that one Neogi sailor who had been left behind by his mates. So they get humanitarian points for that.
So, in this dungeon, I thought I would take the opportunity to make it a bit weirder. After all there should be alien things in a space game. I can’t go into too much detail, but suffice it to state that I am excited to see how the players and their characters react and what they do.
Spiteful owls and slug monarchs
What I find, in general, is that the weirder the monster you introduce, the more likely violence is gonna to be the answer. This is, I think, often a fear response. Or maybe it’s an assumption that, the weirder the monster looks, the less likely it is to be reasoned with. These are often understandable impulses, actually. I mean, there are also the monsters that are totally mundane, like the flock of owls in the Troika! Adventure, The Blancmange and Thistle. They had come in through a window and were harassing a hotel employee. My players did not hesitate to cull those wild birds. To be fair to them though, the text does name them “spiteful owls” and they attacked anyone who entered their stairwell. So maybe they deserved it.
A couple of floors further up in the. Blancmange and Thistle, they encountered a Slug Monarch trapped in the stairs, embarrassed and very much in the way. They used some demonic water to awake a terrible hunger in him and that got him moving. He was a bit more dangerous in this state so they did have to fight him off but then they just escaped up the stairs where he couldn’t follow. It was a relatively non-violent solution to a simple problem involving a rather gonzo monster. But maybe they just treated him better than the average slug because he was a monarch?
Maybe I should stop psycho-analysing my players and their characters.
We have been enjoying the Blade Runner RPG immensely in the last few weeks. The blade runners are into the second day of their investigation of the murder of Sandor, another member of the LAPD Rep Detect Unit who happened to be a Nexus 9 replicant. So far, it has gone pretty well for them. They have had some incredible luck with dice rolls that even revealed certain clues I was surprised about. Due to uncovering these, I think they are coming up with the basis of a solid theory for what happened.
Here’s the thing: this is an official case file, produced by Free League. I would imagine most people playing Blade Runner have run this scenario; it comes in the starter set. And the details of the scenario, the NPCs, the locations, even the events, to a certain extent, are set. There is a lot of freedom for the PCs to pursue leads when and how they want but the perpetrator/s, their reasons and motivations and the major players in the case are the same for every table.
Now don’t get me wrong, we are really enjoying this format. The setting and the themes and the ways the scenario intersects with them are very well done. But it is hard not to feel like it’s on rails, right? The answers will always be the same although each group might do something different with them.
Of course, maybe that’s true of any prewritten scenario, no matter the genre. There is always a lich at the end of Tomb of Horrors. Strahd is the big bad in Ravenloft. That kind of thing goes without saying. So, what is it about the mystery that makes this seem less free-form? I guess it’s that finding the answers is the whole point. In Ravenloft, the point for the players is probably the fun of exploring Barovia and the castle. They are enjoying the scares and the combat and all of that.
But in the end maybe it doesn’t matter. Of course, my players don’t know the ins and outs of the clues or the perps or the mystery until they find them. So it’s still mysterious to them.
Building with Brindlewood
Of course, there are other ways to do mystery games. The one that comes to mind is Brindlewood Bay by Jason Cordova, of course, and the games that have been Carved from Brindlewood, like Public Access and others. In these games, there are plenty of pre-written and published mysteries but, significantly, they don’t have solutions.
In an inventive and fascinating twist of game design, Brindlewood Bay’s solutions emerge during play. There are elements of investigation, role playing, narrative building and straight up dice rolling that result in your characters either coming up with the right answer or the wrong answer. Or, you have the familiar PBTA option of a correct answer but with some complication on a middling roll of the dice.
I have not yet had the chance to play one of these games but I would love to. I want to see if it is more satisfying than the sort of game where your solution is written in stone.
Have you played any mystery games that made you excited to play them again? Send me some recommendations!
, do yourself a favour and go check them out. When I first encountered his work several years ago, it filed me with wonder. He created such a realistic depiction of a past that was largely recognisable to me from my own childhood, interspersed with or shockingly dominated by futuristic architectures and sci-fi wonders. His work excited my imagination like only RPGs had in the past. So when I discovered that Free League were producing a [Tales From the Loop game](https://freeleaguepublishing.com/games/tales-from-the-loop-rpg/), it didn’t take me long to pick it up. It took a little longer to get it to the table but when I did I discovered that the players loved it.
Tales from the Loop is a game about the 1980s that never was. It posits a world in which some astounding scientific breakthroughs occurred in the ‘50s and ‘60s so that, by the time in which the game is set, they are not considered so strange. You have your robots and your hovercraft and your infinitely renewable energy. But most of that stuff is considered mundane in Stålenhag’s world. Not only that, they exist alongside the ‘80s mainstay technologies like Walkmans, cassette tapes, VCRs and Soda Stream. In Stålenhag’s artwork this created some beautifully uncanny images. Most were set in the region of Sweden known as Mälaröarna, where the Loop project was based. This is where the world’s largest particle accelerator was built. Though it is not necessarily directly responsible for the many strange occurrences in the region, the people who populate such a scientifically rarified place usually are. Scientists and administrators and students flocked to the region and started families there. So many of Stålenhag’s paintings involved kids; a toe-headed child threatening an old Volkswagen van marked “Polis” with a giant robot under his control; a pair of woolly-hatted kids digging in the Swedish snow and gazing back at their homes, dwarfed by the cyclopean, other-worldly cooling towers used to release heat from the core of the Loop itself, the Gravitron; a little kid in cold weather coveralls leading his grandfather through the snow to a mysterious sphere, left abandoned in the countryside, its purpose and provenance forgotten. These were the inspirations for the RPG.
The game came out at the height of the popularity of Stranger Things, which helped it gain a lot of traction I think, and then it even had its own, unfortunately not so popular, spinoff [TV series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop), which I, at least, loved.
In the RPG you play kids between 10 and 15 years old. You get to choose a Type from such classics as the Computer Geek, the Hick and the Weirdo. You also have to choose some really fun things like your Iconic Item, your key relationships and your favourite 1980s song.
Once you have your Kid, you and your friends can go out and investigate weird shit on your bikes. Stuff like, where are all the birds gone? What are all the adults doing gathered around that weird machine in the field? What’s that dinosaur looking claw print in the snow? You know, normal kid shit.
## Roll mechanics
Tales from the Loop uses a version of the Year Zero engine, and, in fact, it was the first game I played using that system. It’s really straight-forward and intuitive, easy to learn and resolves situations quickly. “Situations” are generally and collectively referred to in the text as “Trouble” with a capital “T,” appropriately enough. For many, the Trouble you got into and out of when they were kids are some of the most enduring and treasured memories. In the game, you combine your ability dice and your skill dice into one dice pool and roll them all to try and get at least one 6. Since you only use d6s in this game, that’s the highest you can roll. The more 6s you roll the better, generally.
The only issue my players and I had with the rules is the Extended Trouble mechanic. The way this works is that, during the final showdown, encounter or whatever, every kid says what they are going to do and the GM tells them how many successes they will need to succeed fully. Then one player rolls all the dice in one enormous pool. Generally, if they don’t succeed fully but they still have a few successes, they might achieve what they were trying to but one or more kids will earn conditions or even become Broken. But, in play, we found this approach to be unsatisfying. Each player wanted their own cool moment to roll for and the all-or-nothing approach meant that they couldn’t attempt to take any rectifying actions if and when they saw things going wrong. Anyway, suffice it to say, we won’t be using the Extended Trouble rule next time.
## Mascots and Murder
Here are the very basics of the scenario I have planned:
Although the first Loop was in Sweden and much of the book is written as though it is the default setting, they do actually provide a second potential setting in it. That’s Boulder City, Nevada, the “Best city by a dam site,” which is a reference to its proximity to the Hoover Dam. There is another Loop in this region and all of the scenarios presented in the core book can be transposed very easily to the desert, believe it or not. This is where the kids in this scenario will be from. It is summer in Boulder City so it’s going to be so sizzling hot that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk. This will be a nice change as all the other Tales from the Loop games I have played were set in Sweden in autumn and winter.
Some teens have gone missing from Boulder City. Although their parents don’t seem too worried about it, our intrepid Kids are going to solve this mystery as they track down the source of the eerie, carnival-like music out in the Nevada desert and figure out what the connection is.
I have had fun writing this scenario, even though I have gone over it and over it to get it right. So, it’ll be ready to play in a few weeks.
The Tales from the Loop core book has some very useful advice for writing and structuring a scenario for it yourself. As long as you stick to that, you’re unlikely to go wrong. This is not actually the first one I have written myself, using these guidelines and, I can tell you, it works really well.
Have you played Tales from the Loop? What did you think of it? If you had to run a particular game for Indie Mascot Horror vibes, what would it be?](https://thedicepool.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/img_3376.jpeg?w=1024)
, do yourself a favour and go check them out. When I first encountered his work several years ago, it filed me with wonder. He created such a realistic depiction of a past that was largely recognisable to me from my own childhood, interspersed with or shockingly dominated by futuristic architectures and sci-fi wonders. His work excited my imagination like only RPGs had in the past. So when I discovered that Free League were producing a [Tales From the Loop game](https://freeleaguepublishing.com/games/tales-from-the-loop-rpg/), it didn’t take me long to pick it up. It took a little longer to get it to the table but when I did I discovered that the players loved it.
Tales from the Loop is a game about the 1980s that never was. It posits a world in which some astounding scientific breakthroughs occurred in the ‘50s and ‘60s so that, by the time in which the game is set, they are not considered so strange. You have your robots and your hovercraft and your infinitely renewable energy. But most of that stuff is considered mundane in Stålenhag’s world. Not only that, they exist alongside the ‘80s mainstay technologies like Walkmans, cassette tapes, VCRs and Soda Stream. In Stålenhag’s artwork this created some beautifully uncanny images. Most were set in the region of Sweden known as Mälaröarna, where the Loop project was based. This is where the world’s largest particle accelerator was built. Though it is not necessarily directly responsible for the many strange occurrences in the region, the people who populate such a scientifically rarified place usually are. Scientists and administrators and students flocked to the region and started families there. So many of Stålenhag’s paintings involved kids; a toe-headed child threatening an old Volkswagen van marked “Polis” with a giant robot under his control; a pair of woolly-hatted kids digging in the Swedish snow and gazing back at their homes, dwarfed by the cyclopean, other-worldly cooling towers used to release heat from the core of the Loop itself, the Gravitron; a little kid in cold weather coveralls leading his grandfather through the snow to a mysterious sphere, left abandoned in the countryside, its purpose and provenance forgotten. These were the inspirations for the RPG.
The game came out at the height of the popularity of Stranger Things, which helped it gain a lot of traction I think, and then it even had its own, unfortunately not so popular, spinoff [TV series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop), which I, at least, loved.
In the RPG you play kids between 10 and 15 years old. You get to choose a Type from such classics as the Computer Geek, the Hick and the Weirdo. You also have to choose some really fun things like your Iconic Item, your key relationships and your favourite 1980s song.
Once you have your Kid, you and your friends can go out and investigate weird shit on your bikes. Stuff like, where are all the birds gone? What are all the adults doing gathered around that weird machine in the field? What’s that dinosaur looking claw print in the snow? You know, normal kid shit.
## Roll mechanics
Tales from the Loop uses a version of the Year Zero engine, and, in fact, it was the first game I played using that system. It’s really straight-forward and intuitive, easy to learn and resolves situations quickly. “Situations” are generally and collectively referred to in the text as “Trouble” with a capital “T,” appropriately enough. For many, the Trouble you got into and out of when they were kids are some of the most enduring and treasured memories. In the game, you combine your ability dice and your skill dice into one dice pool and roll them all to try and get at least one 6. Since you only use d6s in this game, that’s the highest you can roll. The more 6s you roll the better, generally.
The only issue my players and I had with the rules is the Extended Trouble mechanic. The way this works is that, during the final showdown, encounter or whatever, every kid says what they are going to do and the GM tells them how many successes they will need to succeed fully. Then one player rolls all the dice in one enormous pool. Generally, if they don’t succeed fully but they still have a few successes, they might achieve what they were trying to but one or more kids will earn conditions or even become Broken. But, in play, we found this approach to be unsatisfying. Each player wanted their own cool moment to roll for and the all-or-nothing approach meant that they couldn’t attempt to take any rectifying actions if and when they saw things going wrong. Anyway, suffice it to say, we won’t be using the Extended Trouble rule next time.
## Mascots and Murder
Here are the very basics of the scenario I have planned:
Although the first Loop was in Sweden and much of the book is written as though it is the default setting, they do actually provide a second potential setting in it. That’s Boulder City, Nevada, the “Best city by a dam site,” which is a reference to its proximity to the Hoover Dam. There is another Loop in this region and all of the scenarios presented in the core book can be transposed very easily to the desert, believe it or not. This is where the kids in this scenario will be from. It is summer in Boulder City so it’s going to be so sizzling hot that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk. This will be a nice change as all the other Tales from the Loop games I have played were set in Sweden in autumn and winter.
Some teens have gone missing from Boulder City. Although their parents don’t seem too worried about it, our intrepid Kids are going to solve this mystery as they track down the source of the eerie, carnival-like music out in the Nevada desert and figure out what the connection is.
I have had fun writing this scenario, even though I have gone over it and over it to get it right. So, it’ll be ready to play in a few weeks.
The Tales from the Loop core book has some very useful advice for writing and structuring a scenario for it yourself. As long as you stick to that, you’re unlikely to go wrong. This is not actually the first one I have written myself, using these guidelines and, I can tell you, it works really well.
Have you played Tales from the Loop? What did you think of it? If you had to run a particular game for Indie Mascot Horror vibes, what would it be?](https://thedicepool.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/img_3375.jpeg?w=1024)
The Dice Pool 