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Blades in the Dark GM Tools

I’ll be honest, I don’t usually think about the games I run in terms of goals, beyond a vague desire to do my best to GM competently, engage the players and make them entertaining.

Good Advice

So, like I said in my last Blades in the Dark preview post, this book is full of great advice. Today, I’m going to take a closer look at some of the advice for GMs that is not directly related to the first session or two. This is the sort of thing that will help you create the best version of your game at the table every session.

GM Goals

I’ll be honest, I don’t usually think about the games I run in terms of goals, beyond a vague desire to do my best to GM competently, engage the players and make them entertaining. Many of the other games I’ve played don’t deal in these terms at all, but I find I appreciate the project-like manner Blades employs here. It’s good to state your goals before embarking on any sort of initiative, otherwise, how do you know if you manage to achieve them? What do you use to steer your efforts?

Here are the GM Goals as stated in Chapter 7, Running the Game:

“Play to find out what happens.” This is the primary guiding principle. A concept that was introduced by D. Vincent and Maguey Baker in Apocalypse World, “play to find out” is central to Blades in the Dark. The idea here is that you have no set narrative in mind, no list of occurrences that you’re waiting to introduce to outfox or defeat the PCs, no plan at all. Instead, you let the PCs lead the way. Their own plans, desires, vices, mistakes etc. will drive the story forward in a way you could never have imagined beforehand. The GM here is just as “in the dark” as the players are about what’s coming.
“Convey the fictional world honestly.” Honestly, I am struggling with this one. The advice here is to “make the world seem real, not contrived.” Of course, this is a reasonable suggestion, but much more difficult in practice, I imagine. It pre-supposes this “vision of Duskwall in your head.” But, in a game where the GM is largely just reacting to things the players invent or decide, the vision is probably changing constantly. You’re told here, though, “don’t play favourites,” as well, so I begin to see the purpose a little clearer. The idea is that, as GM, you should not be inventing elements of the world that exclusively benefit just your NPCs, or explicitly disadvantage the PCs in ways that seem unfair. I suppose it could also refer to a tendency some GMs might have to treat certain PCs better than others. Resist that urge! Play fair!
“Bring Doskvol to life. Give each location a specific aspect (crowded, cold, wet, dim, etc.). Give each important NPC a name, detail and a preferred method of problem solving (threats, bargaining, violence, charm, etc.). Give each action context—the knife fight is on rickety wooden stairs; the informant huddles among the wreckage of the statue of the Weeping Lady; the Lampblacks’ lair stinks of coal dust.” I wanted to quote this whole paragraph because it is filled with practical, actionable advice that I would struggle to paraphrase. I have to say that this is a reasonable goal for any RPG, not just this one.

GM Actions

Two dark silhouettes having a knife fight. The dark city streets are portrayed within their shadows. — Knife-fight City – J Harper

So this is one of the ways in which you, as the GM of Blades in the Dark, can endeavour to achieve your goals. I guess these are the story-game equivalent of an OSR GM’s Random Encounter tables, weather and misfortune tables and hex maps. Essentially, when it’s your turn, you can look at the list of GM actions and choose one to keep things interesting.

Ask questions
Provide opportunities & follow the player’s lead
Cut to the action
Telegraph trouble before it strikes
Follow through
Initiate action with an NPC
Tell them the consequences and ask
Tick a clock
Offer a Devil’s Bargain
Think off-screen

I like that these are presented as moves. These are all the types of things you might do a GM in any game to spice things up, to introduce complications if its all going a little too well, if the game is getting stale. But, in other types of RPGs, they aren’t treated like the action you get to do on your turn, in fact, they are rarely dealt with at all.

Now, I’m not going to deal with each and every action here. Some of them speak for themselves and their purpose is obvious. For instance, “Ask Questions,” is very broad, but I think its fairly clear that it can be used in almost any situation to gather information, provoke actions, or even get the players involved in creating situations and the world. “Cut to the action,” is a great way to take the reins briefly to prevent plan-spiralling or similar. But I do want to look at a couple of these a bit closer:

Provide opportunities, follow their lead

This is how “play to find out” works in practice. You can’t simply allow the players to create their characters, tell them a bit about the city and ask them what they want to do. I mean, you could, but they will proceed to have a million questions. The starting situation is designed in such a way as to provide the opportunities ready-made for them, but from that point on, it’s up to the players to find them. It’s the GM’s job to present them according to how the PCs went about it. So you follow their lead. If they go scouring the underworld for leads, they might hear of a secret cache of electroplasm in a poorly guarded warehouse near the docks, but it might be inferior quality information. Or, they might read about a prestigious visitor from the Iruvian embassy with a price on their head attending the opera form a report in the newspaper. They might take very different approaches to find these opportunities and it’s up to the GM to provide what’s appropriate.

Sometimes, though, the players will come up with an opportunity all of their own. Maybe their efforts were stymied by a rival crew during their last score and they’re looking for revenge. Maybe they want to expand their criminal empire and have an idea for a score against a gang in another district. Same thing, in this case, it just saves you the trouble of inventing the opportunity yourself.

This section also provides practical tips on how the players might handle these things mechanically, what difference the crew’s heat and resources make to this process and even a step by step guide to what constitutes an opportunity.

Think offscreen

This action makes you spin some more plates than you already are as GM, but it is useful to think about. Basically, the idea is to bear in mind what is happening elsewhere that might have consequences for the action of the current scene. Maybe there is a riot happening nearby and it’s getting closer, maybe the Bluecoats are out in force on patrol tonight, maybe there are some errant ghosts in the area that might want to get involved. This is the sort of thing I do tend to forget about when GMing normally. It generally feels too much to introduce another element to an encounter in a lot of games. But in a story game like this, you want complications, and, more importantly, you want to see how the PCs deal with them. In all likelihood, they’ll have to do something that drives the story forward even more!

GM Principles

A man in a high collar holding a skull in black and white — “I knew him, Horatio” – J Harper

This is the second set of tools for you to use to achieve those GM goals. If you play with these principles in mind at all times, you should get the most out of your experience GMing Blades in the Dark:

Be a fan of the PCs
Let everything flow from the fiction
Paint the world with a haunted brush
Surround them with industrial sprawl
Address the characters
Address the players
Consider the risk
Hold on lightly

“Paint the world with a haunted brush” and “surround them with industrial sprawl” are specific to Blades, in that they are concerned with describing the city and the situation in the appropriate vibe and tone. “Be a fan of the PCs” has become a standard piece of RPG advice but it is important, for sure. I’d like to go into more detail on two of these:

Let everything flow from the fiction

You don’t need to “manage” the game.

It can be hard to let go. Especially when you have been raised on a strict diet of stat blocks, challenge ratings, 6 second rounds and proscribed consequences. But much of the advice in this chapter is encouraging you to do exactly that. Stop planning. Nothing good can come of it. You have to let the story flow naturally from the actions of the players and the reactions of the world. In Blades, after the briefly described starting situation and opening scene, every element of the campaign should cascade down from there.

Hold on Lightly

This is not a “no take backs” kind of game.

When thinking about the PCs approach to a situation, remember that goal of portraying the fictional world honestly. If you do that and are forced to rethink how you described a scene, that’s fine, you can go back and retcon it. Maybe you first introduced them to a room crowded with ghosts, but, on reflection, considering how the players told you they spent time staking out the room as an entrance to a hideout, beforehand, you decide there is just one, lonely spirit, there. Not only that, you should not be afraid to allow the players the same sort of leeway when describing their actions.

Next time

In the next preview post, I want to write about the GM best practices and bad habits as presented by Mr Harper in the book. Till then, dear reader!

Beginnings in the Dark

I want to start by acknowledging that I think this entire section is fantastic. It’s full of gold. The advice presented here is the kind of thing I would love to see in every game.

My Own Advice

In my post on beginnings I suggested a few things. It’s a good idea to start in media res. Starting in the middle helps to introduce the world to your players and helps them to introduce their characters to the world, assuming you give them enough narrative freedom to do so. I suggested using flashbacks to fill in blanks as necessary. But I also suggested that, for a longer game, you might want to begin with some in-depth scenes of the PCs’ personal lives to give everyone a good idea of what drives them.

So, how does this hold up to the advice provided by John Harper in Blades in the Dark?

Starting the Game

A leaping scoundrel in black and white. — A leaping scoundrel in black and white by J Harper.

That’s the name of the section under the Running the Game chapter in the book. No confusion. I want to start by acknowledging that I think this entire section is fantastic. It’s full of gold. The advice presented here is the kind of thing I would love to see in every game. It was definitely the kind of thing I wanted from Spire before beginning it. I was so anxious about starting that game because I really was flying by the seat of my pants. Why? Well, because I had never played anything like it before. And in Blades in the Dark, Harper is perfectly aware that you’ve probably never played anything like this game before. So he takes your little hand and leads you gently into Duskwall, nodding reassuringly and telling you it’ll be alright.

Preparing for the First Session

A map of the coastal city of Doskvol which includes the names of each of the districts. — A map of the coastal city of Doskvol

Under the sub-heading, Preparing for the First Session, you get the advice to read through the character and crew creation sections again, assuming, I suppose, that you read them already. Here, it’s recognised that the GM is going to be the one leading on this and advising the players on how to create those scoundrels they’ve got in mind. Of course, this is good advice for any GM-led game but it’s good to have it in black and white here. Related to this is the fact that during these processes, the players are going to need answers about certain factions that will be relevant to their characters and the starting state of the city. So, you’re advised to pick a few factions you’re interested in or brush up on the ones mentioned in the starting situation, “War in Crow’s Foot.” To add to this, personally, I think you want to brush up on some of the factions, personalities and organisations that affect the entire city, like the Bluecoats, the Sparkwrights and the Spirit Wardens. You don’t need an exhaustive knowledge, but the basics will be helpful to allow you to answer some world-building questions, even if they’re not directly related to their characters or crew.

Harper states here that you should get through character and crew creation and, at least start the first score in your first session. This sets an expectation and, trusting that he has play-tested this a lot, its one that you have to assume is realistic. I also like the idea of taking these freshly minted scoundrels and throwing them straight into the action. I guess my in media res advice remains solid here.

There’s a short paragraph about what you can do to get yourself in the dark industrial fantasy mood of the game. Watch some Peaky Blinders, play some Dishonoured or read some Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. I like this idea and it is something I do regularly to get me thinking the right way for an upcoming game with a very specific vibe.

Lastly, print out the character sheets and other reference sheets and get the gang together.

The First Session

A dark black and white illustration of several scoundrels on the canal, lit by a giant moon above. — Midnight on the Water, J Harper

The next section is entitled, “At the First Session: Setting Expectations.” This is always important. There are some formalised techniques to achieve this, of course. One of these is C.A.T.S. (Concept, Aim, Tone, Subject matter.) You can describe the type of game you’re going to play using CATS and, hopefully, that should help potential players to decide if they want to play it or not. Honestly, by the time you gather at the table, players should already be familiar with this stuff and know what to expect from your game. So this is not really what Harper is trying to achieve here. Instead, he’s trying to get you into, as he calls it, “let’s play mode.” He suggests a “punchy synopsis of the game” like this:

Okay, so you’re all daring scoundrels on the haunted streets of Duskwall, seeking your fortunes in the criminal underworld.

This is something I also love to do when starting a new game. I often take the blurb from the back of a book, or the summary from the first page and read it aloud, or paraphrase it to get the players in the right frame of mind so I would go further and remind them about what sort of dark, broken, victorian world this is, what the stakes are and the types of things they might be called upon to do.

Then continue:

Let’s make some characters and form a crew! Here are the playbooks. They’re the different types of scoundrels you can play. I’ll summarize them and then you can choose…

Harper goes on that the advise you to keep your explanations and rules-talk to a minimum at this stage. Introduce the players to concepts and answer questions but don’t get lost in the darkened alleys of Doskvol just yet. Instead, give a loose outline of the various playbooks and crew types, just enough to pique your players’ interests while they look through the options.

He then suggests saying something more like a sales-pitch at this point. The speech he includes in the book is real hearts-and-minds stuff,

This is a game, but it’s also something else—something really cool and unique. We’re gonna collaboratively create fiction together, by having a conversation about these characters and situations, without anyone having to plan it out or create a plot ahead of time. It’s like our very own TV series that we produce but we also get to watch it as a viewer and be surprised by what happens. You’ll say what your characters care about and what they do, and I’ll say how the world responds and just like that, a story will happen. It’s crazy. And fun.

I like this but I think I’d definitely come up with my own spiel. It’s just not me. I would definitely use this though:

play your character like you’re driving a stolen car.

Creating Characters and Crew

An Eldritch ball of light being released or cpatured by a crouching person in the foreground. Several scoundrels with a lantern in the background. — Eldritch light. J Harper

While the players work on their PCs, this section provides a set of questions to ask them. The text here does not suggest you ask all of the questions or that you ask everyone the same questions, or even that they should answer them out loud. Although I think I would try to get answers for at least a few of these to help me in making decisions as the game builds.

Here is a selection:

Why did you become a scoundrel?
The two of you have the same heritage. Do you want to be blood relatives? Do you know each other’s families?
When was the last time you used your blade? Why?
Who do you trust the most on the crew? Who do you trust the least? What’s that about? Or will we find out in play?

Harper points out here that we don’t need or really want to know everything about the characters before starting. A lot of the fun of playing a character is discovering them as you play, of course. The dynamic nature of Blades in the Dark and the degree of influence PCs can have over the world and, more importantly, the story, makes this particularly true of this game, from my experience.

You want the players to want to play their characters and to be excited about it. So Harper asks you to make sure, if anyone is not that enthused or is maybe frustrated by the process or any lack of detail that you spend a little time getting to the bottom of their dissatisfaction, providing more info if they need it, until they’re happy. You can also remind them that, if any of them find, after a few sessions that they wished they’d made a different choice here or there in character creation, then they can make the change, “no big deal.” An enlightened and realistic approach, I think, to what is, after all, just a game.

Once they reach the crew creation stage, they’ll have questions for you about the factions I mentioned earlier.

who gave them their hunting grounds, who helped with their upgrades, and who’s connected to their contact.

So, you’ll be happy at this point that you did that reading earlier. The advice here is, again, to use the factions in the starting situation to save yourself some work and associate the crew with the occurrences. This section ties things up by suggesting you skip crew creation for a one-shot, allowing the crew to develop organically during play instead.

Introduce Characters & Crew

Finally, it comes to the point the players will have been waiting for. They get to show off their cool new guys, their wee scoundrels! You get to use this to ask each player a few more questions to help clarify things or to get them thinking about how their PC might develop in play.

Some good advice here on how they should come up with their crew name. Even though they just put in a lot of work on crew type, upgrades, special abilities etc, the name can be elusive. So Harper suggests they leave that until after their first score at least. A suitable moniker is likely to come out of that.

The Starting Situation

A cityscape type view of Crow's Foot — A cityscape type view of Crow’s Foot

I love this bit the most. You could potentially run Blades in the Dark games over and over again for years, one campaign after another, and use this same formula for your starting situation, and it would never get old:

Set two factions directly at odds, with opposing goals. They’re already in conflict when the game begins. Both factions are eager to recruit help, and to hurt anyone who helps their foe.
Set a third faction poised to profit from this conflict or to be ruined by its continuation. This faction is eager to recruit help.

And that’s it. It’s not overly convoluted. Three factions and their goals shouldn’t be too much to burden the players with and there should be plenty of potential in the situation. “Keep
it simple at first—things will snowball from here.”

The main thing is to give them something to do right off the bat, rather than asking “more creative work” of them. Once again, I love this. This is the sort of advice I wanted when I first ran Spire. Instead, I think I left my players floundering right at the beginning, without a clear idea of what they should pursue straight away. We ended up really enjoying that campaign but it always involved an awful lot of talking about what they were going to do next, planning that thing and then changing minds and starting over. And I think that’s because it never recovered from that first session, and its lack of direction.

The Opening Scene

Now you get into the nitty-gritty. This is practical advice that I really wanted. What should that first scene look like? What should you give the players here? What kind of thing is being asked of them? What if they don’t want the jobs that are being asked or demanded of them?

The most important lesson I am getting from this section is that the ball is in the PCs’ court. You need to give them a decision to make and they need to make it right now! Whatever happens, they are going into their very first score right away. No hanging about, no ifs, ands or buts. Love it.

Conclusion

The section ends with an example starting situation, “War in Crow’s Foot.” I’m not going to go into it because I might just use it. But I can tell you that its exactly what I’m looking for here. It’s a concrete example of the way the GM gets things started and how you can hand it over to the players. It’s got sample scores from different NPCs and advice on how to play those NPCs too.

Having read this whole section and followed some or all of its advice, you should be more than prepared for the crew’s first big score.

Throwback Wednesday: Beginnings

Instead of a new post, please enjoy this one from last August. It deals with beginnings and how to manage them in RPGs. Its got some advice I must take into account as I embark on my recently decided upon campaign of Blades in the Dark.

A Short Rest

Once again, dear reader, I find myself a little under the weather. Maybe I just overindulged at the weekend, maybe I have been working too hard, maybe it’s the current wave of ‘rona. Whatever it is, I feel like I’ve been struck by a nasty disease and I failed my resistance check/saving throw etc. etc. So, I’m taking a break today.

Beginnings

See you with a new post soon!

Time for a Choice

From each genre, I’ll take a look at the games, their appeal, and, of course, their character creation posts to eliminate some. Hopefully, once I’ve done that, I’ll be able to come to a well-informed decision.

Decisions, Decisions

So, the characters have been created, the conclusions have been drawn, I am as familiar with the 7 games on offer as I’m going to get before actually playing them—its time to make a decision.

Before getting to that, though, I think it’s worth pointing out that this is, far and away, the most effort I’ve ever put into a decision of what game to play next. Since starting to write this blog I’ve spent a lot of time and not a little cash on new games. I’ve never had so many to choose from before. And I’m not even including the ones I’ve only got in PDF form. Long ago, as a teenager, I actually did run a variety of games; AD&D, of course, but also Gamma World, TMNT and Other Strangeness, Beyond the Supernatural, Robotech, Shadowrun. Back then, I just wanted to run the newest thing, the shiniest game, whatever had the bulk of my attention. But, I didn’t have so many to choose from, of course. There was no such thing as buying a game and never running it! I didn’t have that sort of money! These days, we are living in a golden age of tabletop games. There are so many RPGs of so many genres, utilising such an array of play styles and rulesets that it can be bewildering, overwhelming and paralysing. So, as I sail out of my majority-D&D era, navigate my way through the OSR and explore the unknown waters of the story-game, I have found this process incredibly helpful, if time-consuming. It has also been educational, interesting and fun. But there’s another aspect to this too: whatever game I choose, it’s one that my players and I will be with for weeks, hours of play and hours in between sessions thinking about. I want that to be good, or, hopefully, great!

The Competition

There are seven games to choose from, as laid out back in the original post. I could just take them one by one, as I did when writing their character creation posts, but, instead, I will separate them into genre groups. From each genre, I’ll take a look at the games, their appeal, and, of course, their character creation posts to eliminate some. Hopefully, once I’ve done that, I’ll be able to come to a well-informed decision.

Supernatural Investigations

The cover of Apocalypse Keys shows a trio of Omens defending against a humanoid with one eye six wings and a suit. — The cover of Triangle Agency

We’ve got two games in this genre (I suppose this is more a of a sub-genre, but heigh-ho, it’s my blog-post.)

Triangle Agency – this was the first character creation post I made as part of this series. I think, at the time, that was because it was the game I was most interested in. It didn’t hurt that it came in a very impressive box. The presentation is altogether impeccable. This applies also to the text itself, which styles itself as the manual to a game to be played by actual agents of the Triangle Agency. The character creation process taught me a lot about how the game would be played and was particularly successful at making, not just a character, but a personality, history and motivation.
Apocalypse Keys – this, was the last of the character creation posts I did. I’m going to cut to the chase with Apocalypse Keys; I don’t think it’s for me. It might suit some of my players, but not others. I would rather the Triangle Agency’s tongue-in-cheek take on the genre than the melodrama inherent in Apocalypse Keys.

Triangle Agency wins!

Fantastic Voyages

The cover of Orbital Blues — The cover of the Wildsea

I’m stretching the term ‘genre’ here once again. But I’m adding two games to this one anyway. Both of these involve ship creation as part of the character creation process, and a crew of misfits to go with it.

The Wildsea – Its got a fascinating setting, a rich and engrossing vibe and a beautiful presentation. This is very much a fantasy game that’s determined to get you into trouble out on the emerald waves of the Wildsea. You will spend a long time making your character, as evidenced by the length of my character creation post. There are many, many choices to be made at every step and that doesn’t even take into account the ship creation process. For the campaign I’m imagining, a maximum of about ten sessions, I feel like this is too much. I’d rather spend the time playing than making Wildsailors. But, its definitely one that I might return to someday.
Orbital Blues – This is a game set in a far flung future where everyone has spaceships but its grimy, debt-ridden and kind of sad. Its a game that’s underpinned by themes that we can easily all understand, the hell of living in a late-stage capitalist economy, the mental health toll taken by the struggle to just survive from day-to-day in the gig economy etc. The character creation really stoked my imagination and conjured images of my sad space cowboy. And it was the exact opposite of the Wildsea in that it was just so quick and easy.

Orbital Blues wins!

The Others!

The cover of Blades in the Dark by John Harper — Blades in the Dark Front Cover

Death Match Island Cover — Blades in the Dark Front Cover

I gave up trying to come up with a way to link these final three games. Slugblaster and Blades in the Dark share a system, sort of, and Deathmatch Island is based on a system that was originally created by the author of Blades in the Dark, but that’s pretty tenuous. They all do have an important similarity in the way they are played in distinct phases, though.

Blades in the Dark – This is such an iconic game and its the favourite of many an RPG enthusiast whose opinions I respect. The vibes of Blades are also perfect. Dark city, supernatural threats and heists. I think my players would love that shit. Also, the character creation is comparatively straight-forward and gives you a good idea of your character before you even start playing. This is the only game on the list that I have actually played before and, I’m not going to lie, it has an advantage because of that.
Deathmatch Island – This game is on the list because I finished a rewatch of Lost this year and because I backed it and got a lot of really cool materials for it. But it has so much more to recommend it. The premise is great, the fundamental decisions your characters have to make about the nature of their realities are compelling and the rules are simple enough to require very little time to master. However, its strength in this respect is also a weakness. I think I could easily get a small group together at short notice to play this game as a one-shot or very short campaign and I might consider it for that. But I’m not sure I want to run it for longer. Which is pretty much the conclusion I came to the first time I looked at it on this blog.
Slugblaster – Another gorgeously presented book. It has world-building oozing from every paragraph, illustration and fictional ad. The subject matter is not quite my bag though. I have no idea about skater culture. Although I am inspired by many of the touchstones Mikey Hamm names for Slugblaster, it doesn’t seem quite enough for me, I’m afraid. I also had some issues with the character creation process which I went into in that post. Maybe I’ll come back to this one someday. But, for now, it’s a no from me.

Blades in the Dark wins!

The Semis

The Lurk playbook in Blades in the Dark — Nice One Idiot

I’m glad to be dealing with a semifinal now after Ireland went out of the Women’s Rugby World Cup in devastating fashion at the quarter final stage earlier today. We’ll see a semifinal one day!

Anyway, we have three games left:

Triangle Agency – A unique take on the genre of supernatural investigation with an original ruleset and a lightly comedic vibe
Orbital Blues – A space cowboy sci-fi game of disillusionment with the universe and characters who grow through expressions of depression as they journey through the stars
Blades in the Dark – a classic supernatural, victorian heist game that has launched a thousand other games.

I have to eliminate Orbital Blues here. This is a bit disappointing, to be honest, but I have a good reason. I’m already running a Spelljammer game at the moment, as well as Ultraviolet Grasslands. That’s a lot of journeying from one place to another in a ship/caravan. I don’t want to start a new game with a similar format. Maybe if and when either of those two games comes to a conclusion, I’ll come back to Orbital Blues. But for now, it’s got to go, I’m afraid.

The Final

The Triangle Agency Normal Briefcase Edition

The cover of Blades in the Dark — The Triangle Agency Normal Briefcase Edition

So we have two games to choose from in the end, as it should be.

Triangle Agency
Blades in the Dark

I can’t choose between them. I’d be very excited to run either one. If I could find the time, I would run both. If I could find the time, I’d run every game on this list! But as they say in Highlander, there can be only one. Fittingly, It’s going to come down to a dice roll. 1d6. 1 to 3, its Triangle Agency, 4 to 6, Blades in the Dark.

Here we go!

Its a 4!

It’s time to sharpen your blades and take that Devil’s Bargain with the rest of the crew. We’re off to Doskvol…

Apocalypse Keys Character Creation

it has a very specific flavour. The PCs are monsters in the vein of Doom Patrol or the X-men. There is a lot of significance to the emotions of the characters and there is a fair bit of angst and drama involved from what I can tell.

This is the eighth in a series of character creation posts I’m using to figure out which game I want to schedule for our next campaign. You can find the Triangle Agency one here. And you can find the Slugblaster one here. You can find the Blades in the Dark one here. We took a slight detour for this one, here’s the Wildsea Ship Creation post. And then got back on track with the Wildsea Character Creation post. This is where you can find the Deathmatch Island one. You will find the Orbital Blues character creation post here. Back in this post I named Apocalypse Keys as an outside contender for the new campaign. This will be the last post in the series so I’ll be forced to make a decision on the next campaign soon.

DIVISION and Conquer

The illustrations of each of the Playbooks all together.

Apocalypse Keys by Rae Nedjadi is a Powered by the Apocalypse game in which you play members of a super-team of sorts. You are wielded like weapons by a shadowy organisation called DIVISION (which is an initialism, kinda like S.H.I.E.L.D.) in an effort to prevent apocalypses. How? Well, you gather Keys, which are essentially clues you will use to find and open Doom’s Door before the bad guy can. The bad guys are known as Harbingers and they are Omens, like you, but more world-endy.

The game is very much PBTA in its design, with a few extras. Although you roll 2d6 for most things, if you roll an 11 or higher, you overshoot, you blow the whole warehouse up instead of just the gates, your powers leave the security guard a blubbering mess instead of just plucking some thoughts from his head, you get the idea.

Also, it has some Carved from Brindlewood flavour to it too. The Keys you gather improve your chances of finding the Doom’s Door you’re looking for. For each one you get, you increase your chance that the theory you have come up with is correct and you know where to find it.

Ruin seems to have been taken from Trophy. Although it’s used a little differently. As you gain it, you get closer to becoming one of those bad guys, the Harbingers. It can also give you special Advances (abilities.)

One last thing: PCs gain Darkness Tokens as they make particular types of narrative choices that align with the emotional themes of the playbook. You spend these tokens to give you modifiers to rolls.

I think it’s important to know these things as we go into character creation for this game. Also, it has a very specific flavour. The PCs are monsters in the vein of Doom Patrol or the X-men. There is a lot of significance to the emotions of the characters and there is a fair bit of angst and drama involved from what I can tell.

Creating Monsters of DIVISION

The book provides us with a step by step guide to character creation which I love to see. It was something I missed from the process in Orbital Blues. Lets take a look:

Step 1: Choose a Playbook
Step 2: Bring Your Character to Life
Step 3: Refine Your Abilities
Step 4: Introduce Your Character to the Other Players
Step 5: Create Your Starting Bonds

As this is purely an exercise the last couple of steps probably won’t happen.

Choose a Playbook

Like other PBTA games, you choose a playbook to get started. Your character might decide to switch playbooks further down the line, depending on the narrative choices that are made at the table but most are likely to select one and stick with it. It’s like a character class in other games.

Here are the available playbooks in Apocalypse Keys:

The Summoned: a being summoned from another place. Violent, aggressive, antagonistic to prophecy, wants love more than anything
The Surge: Massively powerful but not in control. Wants help to contain it. “Explosive, uncontrollable and alienating.” Friendly fire and collateral damage and toxic relationships are the themes
The Found: Psychic amnesiac. They are very odd, but curious and highly emotional. They can have surprisingly intimate knowledge of other peoples’ inner lives and thoughts but do they know what’s best for others?
The Shade: A super intellect who cheated death. Thematically, they are for players who want to forge a difficult relationship with death and struggle with the costs of great knowledge
The Last: The last of their kind from another world. “Their power is reflective, sorrowful and hopeful.” Unsurprisingly the themes here are heavy, loss, tragedy and how these things are inevitable.
The Fallen: Elements of Lucifer, a fallen angel. “Their power is intoxicating, damaged, deceitful.” Thematically, hubris, the two sides of worship and an over-riding want for what was lost.
The Hungry: It is what it says. “Their power is intimate, transformative, and harrowing.” Getting big vampire vibes here. They are looking to feed, get truly close to someone and deal with the idea of body horror, unsurprisingly.

I could roll 1d7 to pick here, but there is one I’m drawn to most. That is the Fallen. They are all pretty goth but it feels gothiest to me.

The Fallen

I am a pale reflection of the glory I once was
I embody the hubris and volatility of the Apocalypse
My power is faded, cracked, and deceitful
My heart yearns to worship and be worshipped

Bring Your Character to Life

I’ll be using a series of prompts provided in the playbook description to do this next part.

Your Name

There are four options here:

A name god gave me with love
a name I earned through fear and terror
a name that can never be said out loud
a name you need to give someone else one day

I choose the third one, because it’s cool, honestly. The name is Duma, after the Angel of Silence. In fact, I think this character will only communicate through signing.

Your Look

There are several options here. I won’t list them all, just the three I’m taking:

a multitude of wings made of light and sound
a cracked halo that bleeds
mismatched clothing hastily thrown together

I love these touches. I imagine the halo just constantly dripping blood onto Duma’s face, forcing him to close his eyes to the horrors of the world. The wings, once flapping silently, feathery and white, now buzz and flicker like an insect’s. The clothing, whatever he could find, an old army surplus jacket, some discarded cream chinos and a pair of scuffed tennis shoes.

Your Origin

I have to choose one of these four options for Duma’s origin:

I was once a mighty god of this Earth but I was killed by my worshipers
I once claimed hell for my own but I was betrayed
I was an angelic creature destroyed by my jealous god
something else that describes how far I have truly fallen and all I have lost

It’s nice to have that last option there for anyone who has their own idea of their character’s origin. For me, though, it has to be the third one. I think Duma was silent before as a way to show his devotion to his god, but is silent now because he has vowed never to speak until he regains the trust of his god or destroys him.

Who are the Gods Who Taunt You?

I only choose one of these:

those who I betrayed seek to destroy me once and for all
ancient gods who have lost their power and ache for what is left of my divinity
twisted gods I corrupted who are now monsters of myth and legend
divine servants who grow in power as I have weakened
something else that feeds my spite and sharpens my hubris

I like the idea of other bully angels coming down to tease Duma while he seethes and silently curses them so I’ll go for the fourth one.

Your Impulse

This is an interesting departure from other PBTA games I’ve played. Usually, you have particular character goals that mostly remain static, and if you manage to achieve them in a session, you gain 1 XP. In Apocalypse Keys, you choose one of the listed Impulses each session and work to explore it. If you do, you can gain 1 XP OR 1 Ruin. I’m not going to list them all, but here are a couple that I like:

Did you bless the weak with the immeasurable glory of your presence?
Did you taunt or seduce those who would seek to destroy you?

I think, as a starting Impulse, I would go with the first of those two, just to start things off as I meant to go on.

Your Powers of Darkness

These are largely thematic flavour for your character to throw on a standard move. They are pretty much open to interpretation every time you use them.
I can choose two from the following:

Soul Venom
Fae Glamour – Just so Duma can walk around town.
Fear Manipulation
Weapons of Light and Sound – This seems very angelic.
Many Forms of Mythic Animals

I’ll take Fae Glamour and Weapons of Light and Sound

What Does the Darkness Demand of You?

This is such an important question to the character and for the Keeper to know how to interact with them. There are quite a few, so I’m going to only list the two I am choosing:

To storm heaven
to curse the one I love

Man, that’s melodramatic!

Gaining Darkness Tokens

This is an important part of the process. It will define the way I play the character to a large extent. Duma will get 2-4 Darkness Tokens every time he does any of the following:

Feel others are beneath me
React with spite or arrogance
Ask someone to worship me
Ask someone to betray another
Embody a condition that effects me

Interestingly, the Conditions I might gain as the Fallen are different to those other playbooks might get.
Here are mine:

Lustful
Raging
Forlorn
Obsessed

All extremes of emotion. Unsurprising really.

Breaking Point

This is what happens when you are full up on Conditions. If you mark all four, you hit your Breaking Point. It is unique for each playbook and it serves to illustrate your character at their most emotionally overwhelmed. You just can’t take it anymore. You must have a scene to describe what happens. For your troubles you get to clear your Conditions and get a point of Ruin.

You were once beautiful and loved, perfect and beyond despair. You are gripped with how far you have fallen, how much of your glory was ripped away from you. You are unworthy of love, and your heart screams in anguish
Describe how you use what little power you have left to bring you painfully close to your former divinity, and how it twists and consumes everything around you. The Keeper will tell you what horrors you birth and what twisted shadow of a god escapes quietly into the world.

Ooof.

Playbook Moves

Each Playbook gets one move that is only for them. Normally when you advance, you can take moves from other playbooks, but not the signature one. The Fallen gets:

Call Me Master

This is a move designed to snare other beings into worshiping you, or at the very least, doing your bidding. If it goes wrong, it might make an old enemy act against the Fallen or maybe make you display your real being, forcing you to lose a Bond, or, at worst, awaken a sleeping horror.

One More

Other than Call Me Master, I get to choose one more from the playbook description. Here is a list of those I can choose from:

Mother of Monsters – Just imagine what could go wrong…
Fleeting Divinity – Relics with your power contained in them. Use them for modifiers to rolls
Honeyed Tongue and Clouded Minds – Use this to get extras when you Unleash the Dark, such as gaining more knowledge or making lies truth
You Loved Me Once – Make an NPC one of your former worshipers. They might still be, or they might serve your ancient enemies
The Lies that Serve Me – Your mistruths can become real for a time but if you fail… you might lose that part of you that made it.

I love the idea of just declaring a new NPC or faction were once your devotees and seeing what happens. Wow, that could go so wrong in so many interesting ways. But the ways it might go right are equally interesting so I am going for “You Loved Me Once.”

Ruin Moves

I only get to choose one of these. Another option is to choose a DIVISION move instead. And, although that is of interest, I’d rather stick to the stuff that’s specific to the playbook. Also, Ruin is just more interesting to me. Here are the Ruin Moves for the Fallen:

Tremble Before Me – One of the basic moves is Unleash the Dark. It is used when imposing your will on someone. Tremble Before Me allows you to mark a point of Ruin to get a better result when you do that.
My Beloved Nemesis – When you do this, you have two options, mark one Ruin and get to clear your Conditions while explaining how your betrayer is out in the world, or mark two Ruin and have them appear in the scene! You form a Bond with them either way. If you choose the second one you form a Bond with What the Darkness Demands of You.
Desire Dressed as Faith – You can make people want to do something or possess someone. Spend one or two Ruin for varying extremes of desire.
I Will Rise Again – When you work towards regaining your old glory, you make this Move. You get to choose from a long list of steps forward you can take which include doing things like avoiding all notice, imbuing your forces with magic weapons and killing the only one who could stop you. But the Keeper gets to screw you for it.

For me, the one that works most for the playbook and the character is that last one. It feels like the kind of thing the Fallen should be working towards from the start. So I will take I Will Rise Again as Duma’s Ruin Move.

Conclusion

This has turned into another monster post, pun very much intended. So I am going to skip the Bonds for this character, mainly because I don’t have any other PCs to Bond with anyway.

There are things about this game that I find too overwrought, too melodramatic for my tastes. But there are things in the character creation process that I enjoy. The moves are great and so imaginative and evocative of the genres this game is inspired by. But it’s similar enough to Triangle Agency to put them into direct competition with each other. Also, I’d like to actually play Duma, but I don’t know if I want to GM this game…

Talk Like a Pirate

It’s almost time again for the second annual Tables and Tales Talk Like a Pirate Day Pirate Borg One-Shot or the TTTLPDPBOS as I like to call it.

TTTLPDPBOS

It’s almost time again for the second annual Tables and Tales Talk Like a Pirate Day Pirate Borg One-Shot or the TTTLPDPBOS as I like to call it. Friday September 19th is the big day, of course!

Illustration of a circuler door of gold with a skull in it. Also has the name of the adventure "the Nameless Temple." — Illustration of a circuler door of gold with a skull in it.

We had a great time last year playing a pared down version of one of the adventures in the Pirate Borg core book. I did a Pirate Borg character creation post beforehand and I gave a run-down of the one-shot in this post later.

New Options

The covers of Cabin Fever, Down Among the Dead, the Pirate Borg Starter Set and the Player’s Guidebook. From the Kickstarter page

Last year all I had was the core Pirate Borg book, which I’d picked up from my friendly local game store, Replay. Since then Limithron had a Kickstarter campaign to launch a starter set, Down Among the Dead, a proper expansion with new player options, monsters and adventures and Cabin Fever, a book of third-party creator classes, options, rules and scenarios, all great new products for their flagship game. They recently released the beta PDFs for these items to the backers and I’m so glad they did because I am going to get so much use out of them for this year’s one-shot. Check out the whole kit and caboodle here. You can still pre-order it if you feel so-inclined. I would encourage you, of course, to go and support these small indie creators trying to produce quality products during an incredibly volatile and unfriendly trading climate. On that Kickstarter page, you can also read a little about the challenges they are facing in production and shipping, if you need any more reason to support them.

Trapped in the Tropics

The Starter Set includes a bunch of maps, character creation guides, dice, tokens, reference cards, a Player’s Guidebook, and a starting adventure, Trapped in the Tropics. I really wish I had all of those little physical extras to play with at the table but they are not going to be here in time for the I’ve been looking at the TTTLPDPBOS, so I’ll have to wait. I have been reading through Trapped in the Tropics. It’s designed as a teaching adventure with great tips for both beginner GM and players. It lays out the structure of the adventure in a very easy to understand format, includes notes on tone, style and inspiration and includes advice on how to use it at the table in both multi-session and one-shot forms.

As an adventure, it’s set very much in the OSR mould. It provides potential hooks, interesting locations, important NPCs, encounter tables and enemies, without a strict plot or step by step list of occurrences. I’d love to play it as a longer form game. It looks like the sort of relatively free-form OSR module that players could really sink their teeth into and make their own. However, the one-shot option is not as interesting to me. I like parts of it, but I’m struggling to come up with anything from it that might make for a memorable finale.

Cabin Fever

Then we’ve got Cabin Fever, a standalone book of content from third-party creators that was kickstarted along with the Starter Set. This is a treasure chest of a book, brimming over with little gems like new player classes (e.g. the Angler, the Barnacle, the Sulphur,) a bone construct dice drop boss generator, some truly Forlorn Encounters (e.g. Stowaway Imp, Baroness Malaria, Parasitic Beard,) and most importantly for my purposes, a selection of excellent Pirate Borg adventures. My appetite was whetted as I realised that one of these was specifically designed as a one-shot. It’s largely a location-based, exploration adventure in the mould of Pirate Borg, with a central ship, a large number of undead and a crew full of scum. And, importantly, the adventure includes elements that I feel could make for a really great finale to our TTTLPDPBOS. It’s ideal, really. So, I’ll be breaking out the tiny fake spyglasses, eyepatches, and plastic doubloons to help us get in the spirit for “the Repentant” by Zac Goins on September 19th.

The main illustration for the adventure, "the Repentant." A skeletal head in a hood with a cricifix around at its throat. All in red, white and black. — The main illustration for the adventure, “the Repentant.” A skeletal head in a hood with a cricifix around at its throat. All in red, white and black.

What about you, dear reader? How will you be celebrating Talk Like a Pirate Day this year?

Dragon Age RPG: Amber Rage Review

So, off they went, following a magic raven, through the rain and the swamp, fording rivers, defeating enemies and stabling horses, until they got to the appointed place and the raven dropped dead.

Blood in Ferelden

There have not been a lot of supplements for the Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin. Other than a quickstart guide, a GM’s Kit and Faces of Thedas, a sourcebook filled with fan-favorite characters from the video game series, Blood in Ferelden is pretty much it. It’s a collection of adventures designed by Walt Ciechanowski, Kevin Kulp, T.S. Luikart and it came out in 2010. It contains three full scenarios and a few adventure seeds all of which take place in and showcase various regions of the land that played host to Dragon Age Origins.

It came out at a time before the Dragon Age core book collected all the rules from Dragon Age boxed sets 1, 2 and 3. Dragon Age set 1 only dealt with levels 1-5 and, indeed, Blood in Ferelden’s adventures are designed to get characters from 1st to 5th level.

I discussed another published adventure, Duty Unto Death previously. That was the first Dragon Age adventure I ran for my group and it assumed the PCs started at level 3. So that’s what we did. Not only that, but they progressed to level 4 and became fully fledged Grey Wardens before we moved on to the first adventure from Blood in Ferelden, Amber Rage. I made only a few adjustments to Target Numbers (like DCs in D&D) and enemy stats to increase the difficulty. Despite this, this level 1 adventure proved quite challenging enough at times.

SPOILER ALERT! This review is absolutely packed with spoilers. Turn back now, potential players!

Overview

Amber Rage is a 39 page adventure. It’s split into six distinct parts, each of which presents its own unique challenges for the PCs, a variety of enemies, NPCs and moral dilemmas for them to wrestle with. All of these are of varying quality.

Here’s the summary: The PCs find themselves in Sothmere, a village near the Korcari Wilds. Our group of newly minted Grey Wardens had been sent south by Duncan, their commander, to determine the strength of the Darkspawn force amassing in the south, preparing for the Fifth Blight. Sothmere was just a pitstop for them. There was a festival happening there to celebrate the building of a new fort, which gave the PCs a chance to take part in some axe-throwing, mud-wrestling, archery competition mini-games. While this was going on, the village was attacked by a band of crazed Chasind stalkers. These lads had been infected with the eponymous Amber Rage and were spreading it all over town. If no-one did anything about it, all the infected villagers were going to transform into mindless Ragers in three days! After some debate amongst the NPCs, it was decided that the Grey Wardens should go and find an ingredient in a grotto in the Korcari Wilds. This shadowmoss could be used to cure the infected.

So, off they went, following a magic raven, through the rain and the swamp, fording rivers, defeating enemies and stabling horses, until they got to the appointed place and the raven dropped dead. There they boiled up a stew and this attracted the firesprites. These guys lived in the grotto of the shadowmoss, so the PCs followed them home. Kind of creepy, when you think about it. Not only that, but they then went ahead and murdered the firesprites’ Guardian Serpent. I mean, the serpent didn’t leave them much choice, but they were invading its home after all. The real problem with this, as the wardens discovered in a sort of psychic vision provided by the firesprites later, was that the firesprites consumed the shadowmoss for sustenance, and the Serpent, ahem, excreted the shadowmoss. So, with the serpent dead, if the PCs collected all the shadowmoss they would need to cure the infected, they would be condemning the firesprites to starvation and extinction. But if they left them with the shadowmoss they had, that would give them enough time for a new Guardian Serpent to mature (this weird symbiotic arrangement was further compounded but the revelation that one of the firesprites would transform into the Serpent itself!) This was the central moral conundrum of the scenario, save the villagers or allow the firesprites to live.

The blackhaller and the burning of the villagers

Once this decision was made, they had to make their way back to Sothmere where a local judge, known as a blackhaller, had been helicoptered in to force the issue of the infected villagers. As the PCs got back to Sothmere, they had the sick ones tied to stakes, ready to be barbecued. The PCs had to make another big decision here, and, perhaps, try to convince the blackhaller to back down.

Thus ends the adventure. I skipped over some middle bits, but that is the essence of it.

Layout, artwork and maps

The layout of this thing is kind of all over the place. There are NPC descriptions separated from their stat blocks by entire pages in some instances. There are some which have the stat blocks of one NPC associated with the description of another, making it really hard to find what you need in a pinch. It’s the same with the enemy stat blocks, which are sometimes so far removed from the encounter descriptions as to make them seem as though they belong to another encounter altogether. I think one of the problems here is the massive parcels of real estate demanded by the standard Dragon Age RPG stat blocks, which presents some serious layout headaches. I had to do a lot of prep to make sure I had all of the relevant info and stat blocks on hand for any given encounter, social or combat.

The splitting of the adventure into parts, like chapters in a novel, was something I found useful. I tried to aim for completing one part each session. In the end, it did take 6 sessions to complete it.

The artwork is nice, although much of it was clearly supposed to be full colour but was presented in black and white, which was a shame.

Southron Hills map — Shadowmoss Grotto Map

The maps are great. I really liked the small regional map and the one of the grotto. I used both at the table, revealing parts of the grotto map to the players as they discovered more of it.

Decisions, Decisions

Dragon Age is built upon difficult decisions, choices that matter and have lasting consequences and you can see that’s what the writers are trying to present as the frame that Amber Rage is built on. Should they allow the little boy be killed by ragers, or his sister? Should they kill the leatherworker who’s been infected but hasn’t turned yet, or should they give him their brew that slows the infection, endangering themselves? And, ultimately, should they condemn the firesprites to extinction or save the villagers?

Josef the Leatherworker - poor bastard — Josef the Leatherworker – poor bastard

Now, this is an adventure that is written with some trad sensibilities. There are long paragraphs that examine each and every option available to the PCs in any given situation (or so the designers thought.) It presents you with the sorts of ability tests the PCs will need to make, their target numbers, the modifiers applied due to darkness or marshiness or stinkyness etc, etc. But, in almost every situation, my PCs found another alternative. They saved both children by the clever application of (checks notes) ranged weapons, They debated over the fate of the leatherworker so long that he turned Rager while they were still talking, and the shadowmoss problem? Well, they took the long view, what if they stole all the shadowmoss, killing all the firesprites in the process, and saved the villagers, but then there was another infection later and there was no Shadowmoss to help them? So they said, screw you Sothmere, we’ll only bring enough of this shit back to cure one individual fucking villager and then leave you to decide who should get it! The firesprites were happy, but no-one else was.

What particularly annoyed me about the text was this, it assumes that the party would choose to take the Shadowmoss. Almost all of the events described after the grotto involve the “fact” that they have a potential cure for the Amber Rage and others want it or others don’t want it used or something along those lines. So, those were largely useless to me. At least this allowed me to cut out swathes of what was always going to be the least interesting portion of the adventure, the trip back to town, which was staged as a series of encounters. There is a box on one page entitled, “Sustaining Drama and Varying Beats on the Journey Back.” The text in this is there to advise you to switch things up and vary the encounters because otherwise they might seem a bit samey… Could have just left them out, in my humble opinion.

They also present a number of NPCs that are either sympathetic or not, though. I can’t imagine anyone really liking Bogdan, the blacksmith, or even agreeing with him, in fact. Everyone is going to like the personable and honourable Sherrif Milo, though. So, when the players are asked to choose between the two, it’s no choice at all.

Some of the more sympathetic NPCs were the elven performers, the brother and sister duo, Oleg and Dielza. Our very own elven Grey Warden, Halvari, developed a closeness to them early on, so when Oleg was infected and Dielza was not, she promised to save him… But of course, in the end, she couldn’t. She had had to send over the single portion of shadowmoss and the good people of Sothmere were never going to cure the elf with it, so Halvari was left with no choice but to take Ole’g life before he turned and before the villagers could burn him. This was a truly sad moment that was always a possibility in the text but which was brought alive by the player in some outstanding role-play.

Conclusion

I loved the set-up for this, the festival, the mini-games (I forgot to mention a drinking mini-game from later in the adventure that was also very fun,) the moral dilemmas. But, throughout, I found myself wishing to be freed of the constraints of the text. I wanted to have been presented with the overall situation, the NPCs and some potential encounters and locations, and then let the PCs just go and figure it out. I guess I have been playing a lot of OSR recently, and it’s had an effect on my brain. In my thinking though, this would have solved the problem of the designers assuming the decisions the PCs would make, that I pointed out above.

I also don’t feel like it was quite Dragon Agey enough. It was missing abominating mages, darkspawn, spirits and demons. It could have been set in almost any generic fantasy setting without making almost any changes.

Finally, our crew of fourth level grey wardens had a very tough time with some of the only slightly upgraded combat encounters. They were lucky to have survived the evil giant crab attack and don’t even mention the marsh wolves, the mage went down twice… Actual 1st level characters would have been completely buggered, in my opinion.

Despite all my gripes with this adventure, we had a great time with it. This had a lot more to do with the fantastic bunch of Tables and Tales members and Dragon Age fans we’ve gathered, who have gotten into the game, the system, the stunts and the potential for heartache, than it had to do with the scenario itself.

My advice, dear reader, is, if you’re still interested in running this adventure, go through each part of it and prepare it your own way first. Think of potential consequences for decisions the PCs might make that the text does not prepare for, and feel free to cut out large parts of the journey back to the village.

Orbital Blues Character Creation

I’ve played RPGs where your character is supposed to be weak, where they’re meant to be weird, where coolness or badassness is the point, but I have never before played one where the entire premise is that you are a sad, potentially depressed outlaw trying to get by in a universe that’s against them.

This is the seventh in a series of character creation posts I’m using to figure out which game I want to schedule for our next campaign. You can find the Triangle Agency one here. And you can find the Slugblaster one here. You can find the Blades in the Dark one here. We took a slight detour for this one, here’s the Wildsea Ship Creation post. And then got back on track with the Wildsea Character Creation post. This is where you can find the Deathmatch Island one. Back in this post I named Orbital Blues as an outsider in this process since I’d barely even cracked it open. This was good motivation to read the book. Since then, I have read most of it and I have to say, I’m generally impressed. It’s very much in the running now.

Sadness is the Point

That’s Orbital Blues, by Sam Sleney and Zachary Cox, illustrated by Josh Clark and published by Soul Muppet. This is how it is described on the back of the beautifully realised book:

It is an intergalactic age of bounty hunters, vagrants and bleeding heart outlaws.
The galaxy is a lawless expanse, and you are an INTERSTELLAR OUTLAW. Together with your SHIP and your CREW, you must eke out a living in the frontier, and close down the intergalactic dream of freedom and success.

What this blurb doesn’t convey is that, for an Orbital Blues character, the sadder you are, the better (mechanically anyway.) Your PC is going to start with Troubles and they are going to give them the Blues and those two things just serve to compound each-other over the course of the game to give them more abilities as well as more narrative motivation.

Before I get into this, I would like to once again plug the My First Dungeon podcast. They have a complete season of an Orbital Blues actual play that has helped me to get to grips with the game, the system, the vibe and, of particular importance to this post, character creation. Go check it out here.

Start with the Concept

Character Creation chapter with poncho clad back of a space cowboy

I haven’t played a lot of games where the player is supposed to start with an idea of their character first. Never Tell Me the Odds does it, but I am struggling to think of another. Of course, a lot of players will go into every game with their concept in their heads already, but few demand it. Orbital Blues wants you to do some imaginative labour before moving on to stats and abilities.

So, let’s look at the touchstones for this game. What kinds of characters does this sort of game want you to make? Cowboy Bebop, Firefly and Guardians of the Galaxy are all pretty obvious sources of inspiration that are explicitly mentioned in the book, so I’m going to use the characters from those IPs as fodder too.

I remember watching Cowboy Bebop during its original run when I lived in Okinawa in the late 90s. It captivated me with its evocative and anachronistic world and its lowlife, flawed yet oh so sympathetic characters. I was obsessed with Spike. He was such an asshole and yet he could always surprise you with moments of genuine heart and kindness, while being forever haunted by his dark past. It’s a classic character archetype, of course, but that’s with good reason. We relate to their brokenness while we aspire to their ultra-competency.

Anyway, that’s my main point of reference, a slick-looking guy with a past he’d rather forget. I’m imagining him as a crack-shot and a card-sharp, not an arm-wrestler or a fist-fighter. This guy drinks too much and always has a cigarette between his lips.

Name

The very next thing in the process and the book, is to roll up or choose your name. There is an excellent d100 table here for this so I am not going to pass up the opportunity to roll on it. Now, this is not necessarily meant to be your PC’s full legal name. In fact, it is more likely to be a nickname or a persona and usually just a single name. There are some great names in here, including “Indiana,” “Ripley,” and “Valentine.”

I rolled a 34 so that’s Avery. Nice!

On the same page is an exhortation to “pull it together.” This means thinking about what brought the character to the life of an outlaw. What kinds of problems follow them and what might they do about them?

I’m thinking Avery, a former military sharpshooter, quit the space-corps to find his own way in life, only to end up working as a hitman for some bad people. The crime boss he worked for had some juicy blackmail material on Avery. Thinking about this from a game perspective, I would want to eke this story out during play rather than spilling it all in character creation. But I am thinking he killed the wrong person, someone known to his family, and he doesn’t want that to get back to his parents. But he left the employ of the crime boss by faking his own death. This was all before he started going by the name, Avery.

Stats

You only get three stats as an Orbital Blues character:

Muscle: speaks for itself really, Although it could be used for intimidation too. Also, it has a bearing on your Heart score, which is analogous to your hit points
Grit: How far will you go? How much can you take and keep on trucking? Your Grit determines that
Savvy: Quickness of mind and trigger finger. This is where I’ll be investing highly for Avery.

There is no dice-rolling involved in your stats. Instead, you choose one to be 0, one to be +1 and one to be +2. Simple.

Avery:

Muscle: 0
Grit: +1
Savvy: +2

This seems to suit the character concept I’ve come up with so far.

At this point, it’s worth noting that you do stuff in this game by rolling 2d6, usually, and add the relevant stat to the roll. The target is always 8.

Sometimes, if you are rolling with the Upper Hand you roll 3d6 and take the top two rolls. In contrast, if you are rolling Against the Odds you roll 3d6 and take the lowest two rolls.

You can use Exertion to spend points of Heart to add to your rolls too.

The Crew

This next part will be a little difficult for me since this is a Solo endeavour (that’s just a little space outlaw humour there.) But still, I can follow the advice presented to a certain extent. There is a colourful double-page spread of titles to help. I can adopt one of these for my own character. Once I have done that, I can choose at least one more title and decide how Avery might relate to another character with that title.

Avery has a lot of options here. There are titles such as “the Queen,” “the Freak,” “the Heart-breaker” and, of course, “the Cowboy.” But I think the one that suits him is “the Quick.” He’s fast on the draw, nimble-fingered and quick-witted.

I think there is another member of the crew who has “the Ace,” title. Let’s call them Rivers. They’re good and they know it. This pisses Avery off and wakens his competitive side.

Heart and Blues

This is an easy one. Heart, which, as I noted, is the HP score, is calculated by adding 8 to your Muscle score. So:

Heart: 8

Blues are the way you measure the effects of your character’s “past sins, personal grievances and guilty hangups.” As you build Blues points, you get to improve your character. You gain Blues points, unsurprisingly, through your Troubles.

Troubles and Gambits

A space cowboy starts with one Gambit. It’s a talent, ability or resource that can help in all sorts of situations. You can gain more during play. For every 2 Troubles, you can get another Gambit. Here are a few that I might consider taking for Avery:

Devil’s Right Hand – Roll with the Upper Hand when using pistols
The Gambler – get two points for every point of Heart spent when using Exertion while gambling

But the one I’m going for is:

Marksman – Long range attacks ignore penalties from range etc. and always get the Upper Hand when taking time to aim. It’s the one that suits Avery’s story the most

You could be forgiven for thinking that a character’s Troubles are purely narrative, maybe coming from their backstory. But in this game, you have a set list of Troubles to choose from and they have specific mechanical effects. Avery will start with one Trouble although, he could resolve it and pick up some more during play. Here are a selection of Troubles to choose from:

Devil in the Bottle – You get to answer questions like, what was the worst thing you ever did while pissed, who’s your oldest drinking buddy and what’s your favourite booze. You get Blues whenever you have to deal with a hangover or go cold turkey for a couple of days.
On the Run – Some of your questions: Who are you on the run from and why? Who helped you get away? Who was left behind? You get Blues when evading a problem, and abandoning someone else to escape.

But Avery’s starting Trouble has to be

“In too Deep – You got involved with the wrong people and did things you ain’t proud of”
- Which underworld organisation did you get involved with? The Reno Snakes is a gang that’s mentioned in the scenario provided in the book, so that’s what I’ll go for
- Who, in law enforcement remembers you? Galactic Marshall Dell Walker. He’s never believed Avery was really dead
- I’ll get Blues when I:
  - rely on a talent I learned from an old friend
  - restrain myself from the familiar old violence
  - make someone do something they don’t wanna

Equipment and Mementos

Avery gets one weapon, a memento and one piece of crew equipment.
I could roll a d12 to determine the starting weapon but I think it makes sense that Avery takes a sniper rifle given his background and gambit.

There is also a (1-18?) table for mementos but I spotted one on it that simply fits so well, its “Bounty on a former lover.” I would like to change it from “former lover” to “step-father,” though.

Finally, the piece of crew equipment: A night-vision scanner makes sense here, I think.

Soundtrack

Avery needs his own theme tune to act as a leitmotif for him at those most dramatic of moments. This is such a cool idea that reminds me of Tales from the Loop and the best actual plays. I think Avery’s soundtrack tune is Sweet Jane by Cowboy Junkies

Conclusion

I might actually come back and make a ship for Avery and his pals as well, but this post is already long enough. I’ve had fun making this character. The process asks some really interesting questions of the player to make a troubled and complex outlaw who is likely to get more and more troubled as time goes on. The rules are simple, and very easy to grasp. Character creation was also pretty straightforward, although I did find there was quite a lot of flipping back and forth through the book during character creation. But that is just a small quibble really.

For now, see you, space cowboy…

One Shot to the Heart

Fallout is one of the most fun things about Heart. Players are sick little freaks who love getting lumbered with terrible burdens. Give them what they want, I say!

A Challenge

I have generally looked at Heart, The City Beneath as a campaign-play game. It’s made for it. It has a structure to the gameplay that rewards multi-session arcs. Your character’s beats beg you to spend time to seek out the opportunities to achieve them. And that Zenith ability; everyone perversely desires that big finale, their moment in the spotlight for one last time, that explosion of ‘themness’ right at the end so they can say they really went out in style.

So, when you are asked to run a Heart one-shot, what do you do? How can you replicate the uniquely satisfying journey that belongs to the delvers in a campaign, in just one session? The short answer, of course, is, you can’t. But, can you create a satisfactory one-shot with a slightly different feel? Yes, of course you can.

You will not be too surprised, dear reader, at this point, to discover that that was the exact situation I found myself in last week. I had a special request come from one of our founding Tables and Tales members to run a Heart one-shot, so I had to give it a go.

Heart Exam

The Butcher, replete with antlers, haunted expression and meal

Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor know what they’re talking about when it comes to designing and running games, particularly their own games, I figured, so I started with them. Heart has a lot of useful tips for GMs in it. There’s advice for the novice and the veteran alike on how to run RPGs/story games/Heart. They also include separate sections for campaigns and one-shots. It’s worth noting that much of the general advice for running Heart is just as important in a one-shot context as in a campaign. The one-shot bit itself is minimal but useful.

Running Heart as a one-shot is straightforward enough. The only changes you’ll have to make are around pacing and how you inflict stress and fallout.

Pace-maker

The Heartsong Calling sitting on the edge of the bed wondering where that music is coming from.

The advice around pacing is as true for a Heart one-shot as it is for any game, you have to start fast and keep it moving. No long-winded expositions, no character-development heart-to-hearts that take thirty minutes, no hanging about. Start in media res or as close to it as possible. Provide the necessary information in summary or in flashback and get to the action. Also, you have to give them something they can do in one session, a goal, a destination, a creature to kill or a thing to retrieve. All this sounds easy enough, but it can be tricky. It has taken me quite a while to develop my one-shot technique to a point where I feel like I am almost guaranteed to get it done in one shot. You start to figure out where you need to kill your darlings to make up the time. Working that sort of thing out on the fly is a skill I have made gratuitous use of recently.

In this one-shot, I had the PCs escaping Redcap Grove as a sort of mini-delve on the way to the entrance of the actual delve which would take them to Hang Station. They had a simple job to deliver some psychoactive fungus to a Vermissian Sage in the station. But, woah, were they rolling badly… and also being little nut-jobs. The Cleaver, predictably, decided to hunt the Druids who were hunting them and it turned into a stress and fallout ridden combat. This was fun, and horrific and hilarious. Almost everyone in the combat hulked out at some point, the Witch into her True Form, the Deep Apiarist into her Awarm Form, the Cleaver into his Chimeric Form and the one remaining Druid into their Cave-dweller Form. The players understood the one-shot assignment and did not hold back. There’s no point in saving your cool power till the end… it’s all end. Anyway, because this took a little longer than expected, I ended up combining this mini-delve with the longer inter-landmark delve that I had prepared between Redcap and Hang. I essentially just combined the remaining resistance of the mini-delve and the delve-proper on the fly. This worked well, even though it meant I had to cut out an encounter with the Butcher…

Stress and Fallout

The Penitent Calling on their knees, praying for forgiveness

Mssrs Howitt and Taylor also mention stress and fallout in the extract above. You can’t be afraid to hit them hard. Fallout is one of the most fun things about Heart. Players are sick little freaks who love getting lumbered with terrible burdens. Give them what they want, I say! Fallout is one of the key ways to push PCs to act in certain ways and that pushes the game forward so it’s win-win, innit?

I took this quite literally. I made sure that the busted old crate they were transporting their dodgy mushrooms in was leaking the kind of spores that some sado-masochist might pay a large amount of coin for. Every time they rolled against the resistance of the delve or when they made any dangerous movements or just when nothing else was going on, I got them to roll Endure+Wild to resist the effects of the fungus. If they failed, they got Mind stress and if they got Fallout from that, they got one of the following:

FALLOUT: Traitor Brain, MINOR Mind – You relive a moment of regret ad nauseum. Always at the worst possible time. All actions increase in Difficulty by one step (ongoing.)

FALLOUT: What Did You Do? MAJOR Mind – You witness the effects of your worst mistake on those it affected. It is a gut-punch to the mind. When you mark Mind stress, roll two dice and take the highest (ongoing.)

This had exactly the effect I wanted. And if you engineer it right, you can use this sort of technique to bring about some really cool moments.

Pregens

Shellaine Dawn-Breaks-Darkly Character Sheet

Redeye the Cleaver Character Sheet — Shellaine Dawn-Breaks-Darkly Character Sheet

Speaking of engineering things… making pregenerated characters for this game was the best decision I made. I had to combine it with a few tweaks to the rules, but, if I were to recommend doing one thing for your Heart one-shot, it would have to be creating and assigning pregens yourself as the GM.

I created three pregenerated characters, one Gnoll Cleaver with the Heartsong Calling, one Aelfir Deep Apiarist with the Enlightenment Calling and a Human Witch with the Penitent Calling. I gave them their starting abilities, picked their equipment, I even picked their names and answered some of the questions presented in the Calling and Ancestry sections that rounded them out as characters. I even chose their names and starting beats! I left a couple of answers up to the players, namely the ones to the questions about how their characters were associated with one another. Having them answer those gave them a sense of belonging and of fellowship with their adjacent weirdos.

Anyway, the character creation took the bulk of my prep-time, easily, but it was very much worth it. Here’s my thinking: I wanted to make sure we did this thing in one session so didn’t want anyone dithering over the details, and I didn’t want to have to explain all about every aspect of a Heart character before we even got started playing. I wanted to be able to have an inkling of the beats they would reach for to make it easier on myself to improvise them in the moment during play, I wanted to be able to plant connections to the PCs lives here and their and I wanted to be able to use the Heart itself, to make it feel like the Heart was reaching into their souls and coming out with their greatest desires. The Fallout that I wrote above? I wrote that with the idea in mind that the Penitent Witch might need that to confront her greatest regret, why? So I could introduce the last ace up a Heart GM’s sleeve, the Zenith Beats and Abilities.

The Zenith

They had been hitting both minor and major beats throughout the session and taking new abilities as appropriate. I allowed them to hit as many as they wanted. I had given them four each in their pregen character sheets. But that wasn’t enough for me.

Just as they were exiting the delve and entering Hang Station with their psychedelic cargo, I asked the players to refer to the book and take a look at their Zenith Beats and Abilities. I only pulled this out near the end so they wouldn’t know it was coming. Luckily each Calling only has two Zenith Beats available and each Class only has two or three abilities. So it wasn’t too much to look up in the moment, and, as soon as I told them this, I knew I had them (or two thirds of them anyway.)

I made it clear that I would be lenient in judging whether or not they met the conditions of the Beats because I know how good it is when a Heart PC hits their Zenith. So we made it happen. By the end of the session, each of them had brought about their own personal apocalypse and it was a thing of red, wet beauty. The Cleaver destroyed and replaced the Beast in the bottom of Hang Station, transforming the landmark into a swampy forest in the process, the Deep Apiarist summoned the Heart itself into the space just long enough to squash her into a red, wet stain and the Witch brought the Deep Apiarist back from the dead, sort of, as a clone made from the Heart itself, a clone that will always return no matter how many times it dies…

We wrapped the whole thing up neatly in about three hours. If I hadn’t cut the Butcher encounter and combined those two delves early on, it might have gone another half hour. Either way, a nice, diminutive package, I think you’ll agree.

Deathmatch Island Character Creation

Today, I’ll be making a competitor for Deathmatch Island, a regular person with a normal-arse job, someone you might meet at the gym or in the supermarket.

This is the sixth in a series of character creation posts I’m using to figure out which game I want to schedule for our next campaign. You can find the Triangle Agency one here. And you can find the Slugblaster one here. You can find the Blades in the Dark one here. We took a slight detour for this one, here’s the Wildsea Ship Creation post. And then got back on track with the Wildsea Character Creation post.

Competitor Registration

Today, I’ll be making a competitor for Deathmatch Island, a regular person with a normal-arse job, someone you might meet at the gym or in the supermarket. This is not going to be a superhero, or a secret agent or a wizard. This totally ordinary person is going to be thrown into a situation unimaginable to most of us, having to fight for their lives, form alliances recruit followers and solve puzzles, with the reward of nothing more complicated than survival. And they will have to do all this with an enormous gap in their memories that relate to their lives before the competition.

I wrote a piece about the game, which will give you the basics. You can read it here. So I am going to push straight on with Competitor Registration. One of my Kickstarter rewards was a Competitor Induction booklet. This holds a player’s hand through the relatively painless registration process and also provides some tips for Competitor Players in playing Death Match island. So, let’s open it up and get started.

Occupation

The first step is rolling up my Occupation. This part MUST be rolled randomly. It will allow me to add a die to my dice pool in contests if I believe my Occupation would be relevant. The Occupation will also determine my Competitor’s Favoured Capability (the type of contests the Competitor is specialised in.) All Competitors have the following Capabilities:

Social Game – using charm and social bonds to resolve contests
Snake Mode – solving contests using deception, stealth and straight-up lies
Challenge Beast – Not just physical ability but also a talent for puzzle solving
Deathmatch – The violent option: tactics, firearms and ruthlessness
Redacted – This is the one used when the Player Competitor strays out of the bounds of the game and into restricted areas. The Production Player (GM) has ways to counter these methods…

The Favoured Capability gets a d8, all the rest get d6s. These can be improved through gameplay later.

So, let’s roll on the tables. There are four Occupation tables, so I’ll start by rolling 1d4 to determine which one I roll on. That’s a 2! Then I roll 2d8 on Occupation Table 2. That’s a 7 and a 4. That gives me:

Firefighter (Challenge Beast)

So, with this Occupation, I’m imagining someone physically fit but also intelligent in spatial awareness, environmental hazards and safety concerns.

Name and Competitor Number

The name of a Player Competitor is more than just what the other characters call them. It has a mechanical impact. Part of the game is attracting followers, getting your name out there and increasing your popularity. This is so important that you add a Name die to every Contest roll in the game. It starts as a d6 but gets bigger as you accumulate followers.

You don’t have to roll for your name. If you want to play a Competitor with a specific nationality, ethnicity etc, you might want to choose the name for yourself. But, in the tradition of my character creation posts, I’m going to roll for as much as I can. There are three first name tables so I’ll start by rolling a d3 to pick the one I’ll roll on. That’s a 3! Now I’ll roll 2d8 to determine my first name. That’s a 5 and a 7, giving me:

Sakae – a Japanese name, normally male but sometimes female. It usually means, glory or prosperity, which seems auspicious. I think I will go with he/him pronouns for Sakae

The surnames are a little more straight-forward. I just roll 1d8 and 1d20 to figure it out. That’s a 4 and a 5, which gives me:

Kogoya – an Indonesian name. Egianus Kogoya is a military leader in the “Free Papua” movement

Sakae Kogoya is, I think, a civilian firefighter from the island of Okinawa (a place I actually lived for a year in the nineties.) His mother is Okinawan Japanese and his father is an Indonesian American who came with the American military forces but stayed when he found love. He opened an Indonesian restaurant in the city of Ginowan where Sakae grew up.

Next, I just roll a d100 to get Sakae’s competitor number. That’s 095.

Distinguishing Features

There are a few random tables to determine some random features for your Competitor in the booklet. Once again, the player is free to choose from these tables or make up their own if they have a clear idea of them already. These features have no mechanical effects at all, unlike Name and Occupation. They are just to help distinguish the character. I’m going to roll on each table for the sake of randomness.

Eyes (1d20) – 19 – Beady (could also have had the likes of Glacial, Twitchy and my personal fave, Haunted)
Build – (1d20) – 20! – Willowy (other possibilities include Beefy, Towering and Average)
Hair – (1d20) – 5 – Striking (I’m imaging something that takes a lot of product and looks like something from an anime. I could also have rolled up Nest, Bangs or Boring)
Detail – (1d20) – Another frikking nat 20! – Strong hands (other options here included Unusual face, Eye-patch and Pleasant scent)

Uniform

All the Competitors start with the same uniform when you begin a game of Deathmatch Island. This also has no mechanical impact. There are six style options presented and six colours. I would say a lot of groups would want to discuss this amongst themselves and select the one that most appeals to them but, obviously, I’m going to roll for it.

Uniform Type (1d6) – 4 – Blazer and turtleneck!
Uniform Colour (1d6) – 4 – Goldenrod!

Wow! That’s quite a combo. Seems incredibly impractical. Not much stretch in a blazer and that colour is going to make sneaking extra challenging! But that’s what I rolled, so that’s what Sakae Kogoya and his fellow contestants are stuck with.

Please see below, the welcome letter that Sakae is presented with when he first wakes up on the boat taking him the ISLAND ONE.

Conclusion

Sakae Kogoya Competitor Registration sheet

And that’s it! That was refreshingly fast. You’ll notice, from the screenshot of Sakae’s character sheet, that there is a lot of empty space on it. There’s a lot that you only get in play in Deathmatch Island, so, even though I’m finished character creation, there’s a lot of room for growth, improvement and notes. I like this approach a lot. It leaves much of the character building to happen in the context of the game, rather than before you even start. It’s particularly appropriate in the scenario where your character is suffering from selective amnesia. I feel like, with this quick Competitor Registration and the relatively simple rules, you could get some people around a table and run a session of Deathmatch Island with little or no hassle or delay. The structure of the game and the way the Production player chooses casts allows you to run it with very little prep, also. This is a big tick in the pro column for me these days.

So, dear reader, what do you think of the Deathmatch Island character creation process in comparison to the other games in the series? I still have a few more I could fit in here, like Apocalypse Keys and Orbital Blues, which I listed as outside contenders way back here, in the post that started it all. But right now, I think Deathmatch Island is a strong contender, if only for the fact that I could get it off the ground so quickly and potentially complete a campaign in 3 or 6 sessions.