Band of Blades

I'm currently a player in a Band of Blades campaign, an interesting system with some noteworthy bits of game design—particularly the way that it's so focused around its campaign.

To say it comes with a campaign isn't strong enough, the fibres of the campaign are woven all through the characters. More on that later!

Band plays out the story of a company of Legionnaires in a war against an undead army, on a long retreat through lands that are about to fall. Gameplay revolves around missions such as rear-guard assault actions against the advancing horde, recon forays to gain intel advantages, and negotiations (or heists!) to secure precious assets like magical relics before they're lost forever.

The system is based on Blades in the Dark, and so task resolution uses a d6 "take the highest" dice pool approach. 1-3 is a failure, 4-5 is partial success, and a 6 is a clean success. A GM-set difficulty level provides guidance on the stakes: against a Controlled roll, it's never that bad, but on Desperate rolls, even a clean success is going to feel like you barely got away with your life.

The mission characters are reminiscent of PbtA playbooks: everything, including advancement options, is on one double-sided sheet folded into a little booklet. Characters are strongly drawn archetypes, and pretty easy to roll up in the case of death. And there's lots and lots of death!

There's too much to say to summarize the whole system, but there are a few details I want to call out, first of all equipment:

Each archetype comes with a different list of items they might be carrying. There's a more complete equipment list in the rulebook, but if you're making a replacement character because your Lieutenant just got dissolved by acid spray, it's really quick. Choose your load-out level: light, normal, or heavy (which affects your movement speed), and then tick a few boxes and you're done.

This is doubly handy not only because of the high lethality of the game, but because it also uses troupe play: the specific legionnaire you play can change from mission to mission, depending on the personnel required.

Strategic Characters

The most interesting thing about Band, however, is the strategic level of play. In addition to whoever they're playing for a given mission, each player is permanently assigned a high-ranking officer of the legion: a commander, marshal, spymaster, or quartermaster.

Each of these roles comes with a playbook 'character sheet' of its own, which cleverly divides up the running of the military campaign between the players. Three that figure prominently:

• The commander is responsible for choosing where the company goes on the campaign map, and which missions it undertakes.
• The marshal is responsible for the company roster, monitors company morale, and chooses which of the many legionnaires are in play for each mission.
• The quartermaster is responsible for tracking the supplies of food, wagons, horses, undead-killing black shot, and other consumables, and makes the choice of when to dole these scare supplies out to the mission squads, and when to conserve them for later.

Commander and Marshal sheets

This is a really neat bit of design for a few reasons. One, it's a firm set of recipes that help the table cook up the specific campaign the designers had planned. The game isn't going to drift into leadership rivalries, interpersonal drama or personal quests for power, this is a game about running a military campaign.

Secondly, by dividing up the responsibilities of the company among separate players, it keeps down the cognitive load any one player has to deal with, and at the same time keeps so-called quarterbacking to a minimum.

The strategic level alone makes the game worth playing this game just to see how the pieces fit together. In my opinion, this kind of design has a lot of potential for games of all sorts.

Wrinkles

Like any game, there are a few aspects that aren't a perfect fit for me.

First of all, it's surprisingly crunchy. It's a thick book! This isn't quite a pick-up-and-play game, despite the pick-up-and-play design of the characters.

The core design is very elegant, but there's a layer of richness/complexity, lots of special rules and powers that give the party a palette of mechanical bonuses and doodads to consider using when they're resolving actions. This takes time that works somewhat against the immediacy of the fiction.

My second issue is how this complexity relates to "clocks." Clocks are GM-defined countdowns to specific events, such as an angry crowd rioting, a shaken company of allies routing, or the dwindling strength of a fortification under siege. It's a useful way of pegging a number onto a narrative outcome so that you can tackle it with the rest of the mechanics - teamwork, devil's bargains, relative threat level, etc.

At the same time, there's something slightly odd for me about the juxtaposition of such a simple mechanical signpost at the edge of the 'fiction' and all the player-side crunch. Imagine a D&D 3e party spending five minutes on how they ought to stack their buffs, feats, magic and actions to do maximum damage to Tiamat, but the GM is hand-waving Tiamat's AC and hit points.  (This is not a fair comparison.) Maybe a better image is riding a stationary bike on the holodeck. It raises the question, why do all that work?

Final complaint: with so many characters, the table quickly gets buried under character and reference sheets, and with the aggressive edge design, they all look absolutely identical at distance. It would be really handy if strategic playbooks looked more different from mission playbooks, and any distinctive iconography to help the archetypes all stand apart better.

Troupe Play

Band has given me a lot to think about for troupe play, and its mirror image, open table play. Band accommodates drop-in players extremely well. Our friend and former regular Sean has been away in Europe for ages now, but he recently swung through the city and was able to take on the role of a special character we'd recruited the session before. That was great!

On the other hand, I don't think completely open table play would work well with Band of Blades; the strategic characters really do need to hold the continuity of the mission, and a drop-in quartermaster or marshal doesn't seem like it would work.

What might be fun, though, is playing the strategic game online with a steady cast of players, but then having an open table resolve the actual missions!

Conclusion

In any case, it's a very enjoyable game, and there's a lot to learn from it. I think the built-in campaign length was chosen well, too. Normally we're rotating games in every 4-5 sessions, but this will go at least twice that long if we're going to have any shot of actually reaching Skydagger keep. This is good, as it's giving us time to see the characters as they evolve.

Next stop, Fort Calisco!

WIP: Holiday Adventure

Another post showing how these things tend to go together.

Because of the way my brain works, it's handy to be able to switch back and forth between writing and illustrating. For this reason (and also because the layouts mean I need to edit down to the letter), I tend to do a layout quite early on while assembling adventures.

Here I have the Sketchup maquette of the tribute wagon, a photobash I made as a reference for the accompanying illustration, and a bunch of placeholder text so I can get a sense of how much room I have for each topic.

2G2BT: Cracker Jack Run

I ran a playtest session of 2G2BT tonight, with a reduced group: two players, Tim playing the Rigger, and Stephen playing the Prodigy.

We continued with the Darnan Offensive campaign (the one in the PDF)—this time, they were given a "short notice" mission to go and hit an apparently stranded convoy of Fiedan tanks.

Playtesting a game that I've had on the back burner makes things feel a lot less emotionally charged for me, which is a welcome relief. I'm not delivering a newborn up for judgement, I'm showing my friends this thing I have in the garage so we can kick the tires together.

A number of things went well:

I really like the NPC group traits table, that was useful. The players' mercenary company has recently come into possession of a Troll dropship, which has four slots, and they immediately tried to press some Republic tanks into riding along with their mission.

Rolling on the table got me, 'Favored' and 'Green', which naturally translated into them having dragged long some Republic general's children on a show tour. Woops!

Later, after all the action, the players had some prisoners. The question came up as to whether the prisoners would try to escape, or what. Rolling on the NPC table got me: Locals, Vengeful. Obviously they will!

Also, the establishing roll, SNAFU, all felt very natural in play. Despite the adventure being literally a two-sentence description, it was enough to generate a nice setup. The Prodigy's weird plans move also worked out nicely.

Too Tough!

Less successful was incoming fire—the PC mechs are waaay too tough for the fire that was coming their way, and there was a lot of it. 2-armor means that the Prodigy in his Angel can basically shrug off 4d Direct fire, which isn't right.

All in all, I think this miscalibration comes from me treating mechs in the game like main battle tanks. In The Regiment, troops are mostly unarmored (they only get armor late in the game). They're going to die quickly if they take the full brunt of enemy weapons. They need to really make use of the battlefield cover, the squad's heavy weapons, and suppression fire to achieve their goals.

The way I've written up the mechs, they're like tanks, but better all around. I think they make more sense as a high-tech way to protect very highly trained elite infantry; tough, compact, responsive, and deadly. But still, they'd definitely avoid head-on shootouts with heavy tanks.

So, I think I need to reduce armor (tough mechs should have a few more damage boxes, with 1-armor being pretty rare).

Theatre of the—wait, where was group B?

The other thing is subtler, and may involve more extensive changes. Tim's fondness for the Firefight mechanic from Burning Empires is starting to rub off on me, and I think building out the moves so they are creating battlefield terrain would be sensible. Spotting useful positions (and naming them), sites of tactical advantages, that sort of thing gives a very concrete context for the ground-taking moves like assault. If I can do that without making the battlefield overly player-authored, I think it's worth exploring.

Similarly, doing damage to large number of NPC vehicles feels unsatisfying. They're anonymous, and individually not that fictionally interesting.. when they don't have a concrete position. I suppose a chess pawn is a useful analogy: all of its tactical significance comes from its exact placement.

This makes me think that the weapon systems in PC hands can be simplified a bit. There's no need to obsess over the precise AOF and cover damage dice all to find out you do 3 points of damage to tank #2 out of 6. The player engagement and fictional payoffs don't seem that great. (I remember feeling this way about The Regiment.)

I'm wondering if weapons systems could be reduced to much simpler things, mechanically. I may actually take a page from Fortnite, which I think does a nice job of making its weapons feel distinct, yet balanced. It's really handy to have a shotgun (great damage at short range, but it falls off very quickly) vs. an SMG (also deadly at short range, but the recoil makes them no use at range), vs. assault rifles (modest ROF, but accurate enough to dish it out at medium range), vs. sniper weapons (slow, awkward, require aiming, but highly damaging and able to reach at long ranges).

Also, the current damage mechanics don't do much in terms of letting players engage with the salvage rules. Salvage is important to the grind (earning cash, buying upgrades). Taking enemies relatively intact with careful disabling shots seems a thing to bring into the game.

Much thinking to do!

The Clay That Woke

I'm currently reading through The Clay That Woke, a game by +Paul Czege, and I feel the need to write about it. This isn't a review, since I haven't played, but these are my thoughts so far.

'Clay' is a newer RPG, funded through Kickstarted in early 2014, and delivered without drama later that same year. I was aware of the game back then - Paul's marketing tickled me, as from what I can tell it consisted entirely of him posting minotaur art and asking, "Shouldn't you be thinking about minotaurs?"

A game entirely about minotaurs didn't really grab me, but a few months ago I caught a podcast interview with Paul Czege that did get me thinking about minotaurs.. or at least about Paul Czege. But more on that later.

I don't know!

The reason for all this minotaur art is that—like many indie games—Clay is extremely focused: all of the PCs play minotaurs. Also, they're all male.

Clay is set in and around the "Dégringolade," the sprawling remnant of a jungle metropolis. A couple of generations ago somebody found a quartet of baby minotaurs, unique in the world, sitting on the muddy banks of a river and took them home.

Turns out they're genetically compatible with humans, and as a result of a few unorthodox and sometimes self-destructive couplings, many years later the Dégringolade is thick with an underclass of minotaur slave labor.

I'm going to stop talking about the game for a minute and talk about the book: it's a slim, softcover tome, with delicate newsprint pages but a delightfully sturdy cover. It's only 128 pages, and a large portion of it is fiction.

This is the first of a few unorthodox choices Paul has made in the construction of this game. Rather than bust out a couple of pages of What Is A Roleplaying Game and rolling straight into How To Resolve Conflict, Paul starts off with a narrative about a minotaur.

There's crumbling ruins, cruel slave masters, an endless jungle filled with deadly monsters, but while other games with this setup would quickly get around to just how much ass you can kick as a minotaur, Clay returns to narrative, over and over again, gradually building up a tone painting about the inner lives of minotaurs—their lives, what they care about, their longing and their losses.

The endless jungle around the city is filled with strange creatures, remnants of lost civilizations, even Jorune-esque magic/advanced technology, but exploration, treasure, and understanding the past all seem beside the point. The jungle is chiefly a window into the soul - a carnivorous holodeck, a dream-like realm where casual violence and everpresent mortal danger reveal what the minotaurs are made of.

The minotaurs are helplessly drawn back to the jungle, over and over again to recharge their essence and learn whatever terrible or beautiful lessons it has for them.

Terrence Malick comes to mind a lot as I read, Rudyard Kipling, too. Even a little Robert Bly.

What also strikes me, as it did when I first heard the aforementioned podcast interview, is Paul's sensitivity, his openness to getting inspiration from his personal emotional roots. Grist from his childhood, percolated through whatever dark, psychic soil role-playing games sprout from.

The narrative is there because it's necessary - it takes that long to really feel what Paul's on about. The whole book is like a plea to listen just a while longer, because when you get it, it's going to leave a mark.

The art by +Nate Marcel is gorgeous - it's not showy, but it's spot on, and provides a lot of the visual imagery that tells you what sort of place the city is.  Everyone's naked, for one thing, which reinforces the sort of prehistoric/post-apocalyptic Sri Lanka vibe, but it's thematically appropriate, too—the raw drives of jealousy, revenge, unrequited love all play out on the canvas of the characters' emotional and physical vulnerability.

——

As I mentioned, Clay has an unusual structure for a game text. I read it straight through in a few sittings, and even so, by the time I neared the end I was thinking, "How the heck would I run this?"

Many modern, Apocalypse World-inspired games are conspicuously front-loaded with cues for players and GMs alike to help them rapidly do the right things to produce genre-appropriate play. Player-facing moves, XP moves, explicit goals, all serves as simple imperatives: do these things, seek these things, and it'll all work out fine.

Clay is totally unlike this.. until the very end, at which point the text suddenly switches from painting to teaching.  Paul delivers the goods here, a series of principles that reveal the structural logic of the world. I just hope would-be gamemasters make it this far before despairing of ever living up to the flavorful standard set by the text.

There aren't a lot of rules, but what few there are are sprinkled through the text in a way that leaves me with the feeling I can only remember half of them, and the rest I will never, ever find except by re-reading the whole book. Paul has made no concessions toward traditional RPG book expectations, even going so far as using a created alphabet for section titles.. so they're no more informative than paragraph spacers.

It's neat.. but cripes! Now that I've absorbed the tone and I'm moving toward running, I want to make sure I've got exactly what I need at my fingertips. I'm dying for a quick reference or a concise SRD.

Paul is clearly aware of this - he's gone to some trouble to come up with an innovative table of contents, which is a little like an index, in that the items aren't in the same order as they appear in the book.

In fact, the table of contents is essentially a fairly sensible outline for a traditional RPG, the order you'd expect to encounter the topics in a well-organized reference text - except inexplicably, the page numbers have been shuffled, so the net effect is like trying to use a Fighting Fantasy book as a campaign guide. (Goblins.. sections 72, 84, 112, 128, 330.)

I don't want to belabor this point, as there aren't really that many rules, but it seems like an idiosyncrasy that raises the barrier to play. Stephen Hawking was famously told that every equation in his book would cut its sales by half, and I think that rule applies to indie RPGs and unorthodox layout choices. Games already have a lot stacked against them in terms of finding a receptive audience willing to devote the dozens of hours necessary to learn and try a game, so doing this deliberately is either brilliance, madness, or both.

[Update: There is a fan-made reference available, created by +John Willson.)

Paul was partly inspired by the classic, otherworldly RPG "Skyrealms of Jorune", a richly detailed world that buries the reader in an avalanche of canon. While the feeling is similar, Clay, however, has no lists of monsters, people, businesses, factions, or jungle locations.

Instead, Paul focuses on telling game masters how to generate content that serves the game's purposes. Because of this, I suspect that Clay would go very well with something like Yoon-Suin as a supplement—Yoon-Suin could serve up a lot of fine-grained texture, while Clay tells you what you're looking for and how to stitch it all together.

——

No discussion of Clay would be complete without talking about its approach to resolution, the "Krater of Lots". Instead of dice, resolution is handled by draws from a bowl filled with distinctive tokens. When a decisive moment is at hand (there's a specific list of situations that count), players toss in tokens from their supply, as does the GM.

What's neat is all the tokens are unique - there are tokens that represent the minotaur's health, how well they're adhering to the minotaurs' code of behavior, their status in the world, their innate and otherworldly gifts, and so on.  The GM's tokens represent the situation - its danger, the presence of the god-like voices, etc.

The tokens are really neat, but the text that explains them is tricky. In the text, they're referred to using tiny icons. I mean tiny. Really tiny. In a couple of places they're named, but most of the time they appear unadorned, which I find really hard to scan.

The tokens in the krater are are jumbled, then the acting player pulls out four. The specific combination explains what happens in the scene, by comparing the patterns with a reference menu, a little like Poker hands:

I think I'll have the duck

This list runs to two pages and looks overwhelming (particularly as there are substitution rules in there, where some tokens can count as other tokens once you make it so far down the list), but I've tried a few and it's fairly straight forward.

A subtler aspect of Clay's resolution how it fits into play. Rather than resolving an instantaneous action (e.g. I'm climbing the wall, do I succeed or fail?) it resolves the whole matter at hand. It's a lot like Fiasco in this respect: the audience votes on whether the PC who initiated the scene gets what they want or not, but how is not immediately obvious. Clay has many more outcomes than just success or failure, they're things like "You act with physical confidence or skill for a dramatic outcome in your favor," or "Your efforts change the mind of the opposition."

After the draw, the players continue role-playing the scene, tacitly cooperating to discover an organic way for the required outcome to manifest.

This definitely strikes me as a challenging game. How do I get the players into the right frame of mind, without getting them each to read the book? Will I do it justice? What's an intrinsic?

Hopefully I get to find out! If you've read this far, then maybe you will too.

——

The Clay That Woke can be purchased directly from Paul Czege at half meme press.

Torchbearer

Some time ago I got a chance to playtest Torchbearer, and it forever changed how I view dungeon crawls.

Torchbearer takes encumbrance, light and hunger and makes them chunky enough to use all the time, and then makes them central to game play.

The net effect is that dungeoneering feels like spelunking or even scuba diving: a descent into a place that is inherently hostile to human life, and where a misplaced tinder box or a torn backpack can mean the difference between a comfortable trip home and a harrowing tale of survival.

The core of gameplay is the same as many other RPGs, the players say what they're doing until the GM feels it requires a skill test of some sort. Characters have a bunch of skills (e.g. Fighting 3, Cooking 2, etc.) which tell you how many d6 to roll. If you roll enough 'successes' (4-6 on the d6), you've made it.

This happens inside 'the grind', the steady wearing away of the characters' resources. Every meaningful action the party carries out takes a turn. Torches last 2 turns, lanterns 4, and every four turns the gnawing of hunger worsens. If you have food or water to eat, great, otherwise you start earning Conditions.

Characters don't have hit points. Instead, injuries, bruises and all manner of mishaps are represented by conditions: Hungry, Angry, Afraid, Exhausted, Injured, Sick, Dead. Most of these come with mechanical penalties. Unlike the 1hp fighter who's basically fine, a Torchbearer character with a lot of conditions feels like a half-crushed insect crawling for cover. A badly roughed up party is a sorry thing indeed.

One tool the characters have to help with time is their Instincts. Each character gets one, an instinctual action they automatically take without having to coordinate with the others. The thief's might be, 'Always probe the ground ahead for traps,' while another character might have, 'Whenever we camp, make poultices for the injured'. Instincts don't take up a turn to carry out, so a party with well-chosen instincts feels like a well-oiled machine.

Overlaid on top of this is a large-scale turn sequence, divided into "phases". In the Adventure Phase, characters explore, fight, disarm traps, haul loot, and so on. By expressing their characters' flaws in various ways, they earn 'checks', a sort of metagame resource that allows them to camp - where they can rest, recharge spells, try to deal with their wounds and ailments, make preparations. The number of checks you earn limits the amount of stuff you can get done in camp.

This is one of a couple of places where the system isn't trying to be naturalistic, to 'get out of the way' and help you resolve situations 'that would occur', it's definitely trying to make situations occur. Going with the flow involves treating this like another tactical challenge to be mastered: when do we camp? Which tests can be we afford to blow so we can earn some checks?

Instincts are part of this. Our playtest group wound up with a lot of camp-related instincts, which was awesome: the moment we decided to camp, everyone knew exactly what we all needed to do.
This brings me to skills, one of my favorite parts of the game. Torchbearer skills form a well-designed little knot of mechanics, each referring to one another through hidden economies that make them all useful. During character creation for our second playtest party, we were actually looking around to make sure someone had Cooking skill - it's that important.

"Fine, I'll go back to look for the cooking pot."

Combat is handled using the 'Conflict' mechanic, a generalized procedure for resolving complicated situations like fights, an escape through a labyrinth, bargaining for one's life with trolls, and so on. Conflict is pretty neat, but I have mixed feelings about it.

All conflicts have a goal, which is awesome - before any fight, for example, the party has to decide what they want. Are they merely trying to drive off the stirges, or actually kill them? Or is the party trying to get away, using violence as a deterrent to pursuit? This determines what's at stake. If you're fighting to drive off the enemy you're risking serious injury and there's an off chance someone might die, but if you're really surging forward to do fatal battle, death is on the line for everyone.

Conflict resolution is handled by comparing a script of three secretly chosen actions: Attack, Maneuver, Defend, or Feint, each of which has a lead character, round robin style. (Our side's script might be Wallen Attacks with his sword, Bortle Defends by casting Shards of the Ancients, followed by Zebulba Attacking with his bow.)

As you reveal actions, they interact with the enemy's choice, and ultimately do 'damage' to each side's 'disposition', a number representing the quality of their tactical position. Attack reduces the other side's disposition, Defend improves yours, for example.

Weapons interact with this in neat ways - mutual Attack is a brutal melee that does massive damage to both sides, unless one side has bows, in which case it's turned into an opposed roll. (Always have bows.)

When one side hits zero, the conflict is over - the winner's remaining disposition determines how bad it is for them. Beating an enemy without taking damage means your team's in great shape and wins without compromise. Winning with only a point or two left feels a lot like losing.

This leads to some extremely tense moments. My players were trapped by a pack of crypt servants, and had to decide whether to try to drive them off, which is hard to do to unthinking undead, or kill them - easier, but exposes them to fatal injury. They opted for the latter, and toward the end of the fight found themselves winning but having lost a ton of disposition. This meant certain death for several of the party members, so there was a desperate last-minute attempt to weave in some Defends to prolong the fight, to secure a better position to try to save everyone.

This is awesome, but always a little abstract. This isn't a system where you lobby for an advantage for fighting from the staircase, it's a system where you script Maneuver and then characterize your maneuver as the clever use of the staircase. It's a subtle difference that requires you to direct your cleverness into the tactical minigame rather than clever use of the environment as described. If you roll with it, you get a fun tactical game; if you fight it, it chafes.

Because the GM assigns conditions based on the final disposition score, this can occasionally put the GM in the position of deciding which character(s) should die.  I tend to prefer a bit more support from the system for such brutal turns of events.

As a GM, running Torchbearer was quite eye-opening, in two ways. First of all, there is so much player-to-player conversation about the tactics and logistics of the situation. In some systems (e.g. Dungeon World), logistics become a problem when it's awesome for them to be. It's as if a narrator is saying, "On this episode, the adventurers find they're short of food.."

In Torchbearer, this sort of thing emerges from the mechanics, and so the players are the first to know.

The players know how much food they've got, they know that the fighter is hampered because he's carrying a torch as well as his sword, so the wizard has to carry the large sack in both hands, which means he can't climb the rope. They're aware of the constraints, the risks and their options, so there's a constant stream of player-to-player planning, querying, and planning, whenever a novel situation presents itself, which is music to my ears.

The consequence of this, however, is that the GM isn't fully in control of the danger level. This really blew my mind.

It's okay, we're leaving!

The constant question for a Torchbearer party is this: should we go on? If we do, will we die? Or, if we don't die, will we be so badly hurt that we can't easily survive the return journey? Have we already passed that point?

Once the party has climbed down a natural limestone curtain, crawled through a tunnel half-filled with ice water, and taken a beating while fighting some kobolds, they might already be dead.

The accumulated dangers from having to get past those obstacles, each of which has an established danger, might already be enough to kill them. This can really sneak up on you, and the sense that you're starting a downward spiral from which you might never pull out is tangible at all times.

The party, and the mechanics of injury, conflict, conditions, time and light is like a Rube Goldberg machine - you put challenges, danger and adversity in, and it might not be until half an hour later that you realize the dose was lethal.

Even between adventures there's no relief!

Adventurers are by definition dirty outcasts with no social standing, and this means that any time they're in town they're facing extortionate bills for everything - accommodations, food, replacement gear, healing, research. The speed of business is slow in dark ages fantasy, so nearly everything you try to do jacks up the difficulty of a lifestyle test. It's another kind of grind!

Adventurers are caught on a treadmill of poverty, injury, and exhaustion.. until they either manage to catch a break, or die.

The one thing you always keep is your improved skills. If you can survive, you'll inevitably improve.

(Note: I was a playtester for Torchbearer, and contributed a few pieces of interior art.)

1PDC 2015 Finalists

I'm pretty psyched that that The Lantern of Wyv made the judges' top 9 in the 2015 One-Page Dungeon Contest. The other eight are pretty jaw-dropping, so I think I'll count my blessings now!

UPDATE: Lantern was part of a three-way tie for first place!

Anna Costa's Panopticon is gorgeous and evocative. I can hear the shrieks of the djinn, see the bloodstained sand.  I confess I'm slightly confused by the geography; I think the image is an illustration rather than a map. There's lots of cool ideas in the text to use.  In play, my concern would be the sameness of thirty-three levels of it (but perhaps visitors are expected to be able to teleport or have other powerful magic).

Lorenzo Santini's Into the Awaroth Woods has amazing graphic design and cartography. There are surprisingly many interlinked clues between the various locations; I think I could run a satisfying adventure with ten minutes' notice and a magnifying glass.  The text is tiny, and the layout crushes it even further, which makes it unnecessarily hard to absorb. The encounter table is pretty, but adds little I'd scrap it in favor of more breathing room.

A Stolen Song by P. Aaron Potter (WINNER) isn't as pretty on paper, but is a fun dungeon. I love that it starts with a capsule overview of what's going on, and it's poignant. The silence effects look like fun, and I dig the joke in room E. The telescope/banshee puzzle aspect is interesting - it would be cool to seed this with a few more noise-related items.

Will Doyle & Stacey Allan's Shambling Throne of the Death Cult King is hilarious madness. I dig the idea of a party spying on the procession for several days, trying to find a way in. I think you'd have to play the zombies as really, really stupid and unable to climb onto the boardwalks, or lethal escalation would be almost immediate.  The main question - play out the probing of the peripheral floats perceptually over several hours, or just hand the players the illustration?

Carlos Pascual's *The Heist* is refreshing, in that it's for low-level adventurers.  The illustrations are charming, make describing the place easy, and somehow the overall tone reminds me of Fighting Fantasy - I suppose it's the way each encounter is an isolated thing.  The page-ordering of the elements is a bit confusing; the dungeon is broken into needlessly many pieces, and the exterior establishing shot appears 'after' the boss fight.  I love that the final trap is the way out, as long as you're not too heavily loaded.

Edward Lockheart's Furthest Farthing's Frog Pond of Existential Ennui (WINNER) is weird and dark, a disastrous encounter between an extradimensional traveller and a hapless village. If the players get to know the villagers, this could be a truly bleak experience. This seems like a must; given the rate of death by ennui, it seems the players would need to be hooked by the pervasive emo ennui, or they might leave and miss out. The black star itself is delightful, a perfect example of a dungeon toy. But.. so many questions! How can the black star come towards you? How does the frog come into play (e.g. how can it avoid being crushed by the black star as someone approaches it)?  Fun.

Joel's Bethell's Sepulchre of the Abyss is very cleanly laid out with nice, concise descriptions. I love weird environments like this with a rationale to them, it evokes the groaning of the walls and little needles of high-pressure water squirting in everywhere. I find the randomness of it a bit disappointing; it seems like a hall stocked mostly with aggressive, wandering sea creatures. The big finale is.. lots more aggressive sea creatures! Seems like it would work best in a game with detailed time/resource tracking.

+MonkeyBlood Design's Escape the Oubliette is really cool. Props to the map, which is one of the very few dungeon maps done in three-point perspective. (Was a 3D model used as a scaffold?) This looks like a sustained dose of a play style I find really interesting. The main quandary is how to inject it into a campaign? Think-for-your-life is way more engrossing with permadeath on the line, but it seems a hefty dose GM fiat is required to inject a party's established, third-level characters into the starting spot. The question isn't whether the PCs will survive, will the GM?!

None of these micro-reviews are objective, so I'll toss one for my own Lantern of Wyv (WINNER) into the pile. I dig the concept (of course), and I think the mystery of the lantern, and the fact there's no rumours about the barge is a good choice for building player curiosity. On the other hand, it does cover a lot of sparsely-populated ground - a coastal forest, a number of empty ruins, and even the lantern itself has more rooms than it needs to for room-by-room play.

And the Winner Is..

I'm going out on a limb and predicting that Monkeyblood Design takes it for Escape the Oubliette. It's tight, it's a dungeon, it's pretty, and it's awesome.

Night's Black Agents

We're playing Night's Black Agents, GMed by the ever-capable +Stephen Shapiro. We're loving the campaign, but have very mixed feelings about the system.

If you're not familiar with it, Night's Black Agents is a GUMSHOE based game where you play burned spies on the run, who gradually realize that the powers they're up against have a distinctly supernatural flavor - the Illuminati is vampires.

You Must Be Taller Than Rocky To Solve This Case

GUMSHOE was originally created to power investigative scenarios, and there's a somewhat hippie mechanic at its core: rather than your skills being modifiers, they're exhaustible pools. When you have a '3' in Forensics skill, that means you can spend 3 points out of it until you refresh it.

On the other hand, spending a point is pretty powerful - instead of rolling to find the clue, if you spend the point, you've found it. As someone clever pointed out, shows like Sherlock and CSI aren't about people trying to find clues (and sometimes failing), they're about people finding clues. There's no flailing around, only furrowed brows.


Investigative pools refresh infrequently - only once per 'operation' for the most part, so they're a precious resource. We often find we've run out of something critical. This makes no in-game sense, but it has a few useful effects:

It shares the spotlight around - when you're out of the right kind of points, someone else probably has one.

It makes for 'good TV'. It may not make tactical sense to fire a bunch of gunshots then close to melee range with your combat knife, but it's kinda badass.

I can imagine if you're devoted to a strongly character-identified style of play, this would be really frustrating: there's no in-game/fictional reason you can't use your forensic scene. I thought this would feel annoying, but it seems to line up with good play habits well enough that it doesn't feel intrusive.

For me, that was the system's big surprise - given the 'out there' core mechanic, gameplay felt remarkably similar to other, more traditional games.

If you need one (and I usually don't), a rationalization that works for me is that we're just seeing the highlight reel. Forensics 3 doesn't mean you're Sherlock homes exactly three times and Watson the rest of the time, it just means that with a bunch of faffing around not shown on screen it turns out that your Forensics skill is what gives you the big break three times, and that's all we see.

The Conspyramid

On the GM's side is a piece of brilliance, the "Conspyramid".  The GM is encouraged to structure the vampire-controlled organization as a series of hierarchical nodes - at the top you might have a cabal of ancient vampires nestled in an NSA hard room; at the bottom you might have crooked local piece, 'turned' intelligence stations, or the Serbian mob dealing drugs out of a laundry.

At first, the players are tangling with the lowest levels; clues (inevitably found, one way or another) lead them to other nodes - but also, as the PCs cause damage, the conspyramid reacts like a wounded organism, at first curious, then angry and vengeful.

Villains higher-ups start asking questions as the low-level nodes go dark, using other low-level nodes to investigate. As the party makes its way up, the reprisals escalate, until finally they're being hounded in the night by carrion-fed ghouls that hunt by scent, targeted by SWAT teams acting on mysterious orders, or facing unmasked vampires themselves.

I Shoot Him For Zero Damage

Given such a fast-moving engine for tangling with the clues left by vampiric minions, the big disappointment was the combat system.

The skills that get used in combat are treated differently than investigative skills - here, rather than 'spend a point to find a clue', you dip into (much larger) pools for one-time modifiers to d6 rolls. Want a chance to shoot the bad guy? Spend a point of Shooting.

Definitely want to hit him? Spend three, or more if it's an especially hard shot.

That would be fine if combat weren't so freaking whiffy. It's like the worst of mid-level retro-clone combat. It's so unsatisfying to spend five points of Shooting to pull off that make-it-or-break-it shot, and then roll 2 points of damage.

It achieves spotlight-sharing, but in an awful way - individual actions are often either ineffective or inconsequential, so everyone gets a turn and scrape a couple of hit points off the villain.

It's irritating enough that there's a special combat system for fighting groups of low-powered villains if you get the jump on them, which mercifully allows you to kill them without rolling damage.

Full-Auto Point Spend, Please Hold

All the little tactical action and gun porn frills are handled, but holy snot, the special cases! Everything has its own little rule, and no two things are handled the same way. Like:

Point blank range modifies damage (but not the odds of hitting, unless the enemy is charging you); long range doesn't modify the odds of hitting, but you need to spend 2 extra points of Shooting to make the shot at all. Scopes reduce this cost (but not the odds of hitting), while laser dot sights reduce the long-range point cost and modify the to-hit roll, and allow your partner two free points of Intimidation.

Depleted uranium ammo (yay!) is resolved in three different ways (boo!), depending on the target. Against armor of grade 3 or less, it acts like incendiary ammo (flip flip), meaning it can ignite fuel/explosives but has a two-round penalty to both your and the target's to-hit threshold; against hard targets (regardless of their armor value) it bypasses armor completely and does +1 damage; otherwise it acts as armor-piercing rounds (flip flip) which reduces armor by half, rounded down.

I've taken to writing down the page numbers next to each skill, piece of equipment and accessory. It badly needs a reference sheet (booklet?), then a second edition edited by a scalpel.

A 9mm pistol causes d6 damage. An MP5 with a silencer, laser sight and hollow-point ammo, on the other hand, causes a d6-minute delay.

Why?!

Try Shooting Him In The Eye With A Wooden Bullet!

It's taken us a few sessions to figure out what the combat system wants us to do. It's demoralizing to spend 5 points on a brilliant display of martial arts but do no damage, because combat knives do d6-1; you really need a gun.

But choose wisely, fully automatic weapons just allow you spend more Shooting points (literally, spend 3 more points to roll more damage). On the other hand, flash-bang grenades seem to bypass the GUMSHOE ideology completely, doing massive amount of stun damage to everyone in range.

This led to a hilarious scene in our third session, with +Tim Groth's character having crippled two flak-armored ghoul-handlers in their BMW with a well-aimed flash-bang toss, only to follow up with hilariously useless rounds of SMG fire, failing to hurt them at all.

Then it came to me. The combat system is the framework for a second type of investigation.

Seriously, why would there be this mad little table with separate to-hit and damage penalties for each body part.  (Chest, -2 to hit if the target is facing you, -4 if they're facing away, +3 damage in either case; limbs, -2 to hit, +0 damage; heart, -3 to hit, +4 damage, etc.)?

The game wants you to try it all out!

NBA encourages the GM to customize their vampires for their campaign, giving them different basis (supernatural, viral, etc.), powers and weaknesses. You can explore this space, but instead of Forensics or Streetwise skill, you use different combinations of weapons, ammunition, and called shots.  Wooden bullets to the heart not doing it? Try incendiary ammunition to the eyes!

All that grindy combat certainly gives you plenty of opportunities.

Combat As Investigation

I feel like it would be an improvement to ditch all the modifiers and whiffing, and treat combat skill usage much more like investigative skills: every time you use a point of Shooting (or Weapons, or Hand-to-Hand) you succeed, with an effect appropriate to the in-game situation:

If you're trapped in elevator with two thugs and only a pen as your weapon, a point of Weapons will let you kill one of them and take a bit of a beating from the other, getting horribly bloody in the process.

If you've got an SMG, one point of Shooting will let you cause lethal damage to whoever you have in your sights, unless you're shooting at something SMGs don't hurt, like armored cars or vampires.

Scopes, laser sights, depleted uranium rounds, are all just tweaks to the fictional positioning that let you spend your Shooting points on tougher targets, in just the same way that a 10' ladder lets you climb better.

Why not let the GUMSHOE engine do its work?

The Burning of Intermodal X LLC

Last night's session was great fun, and I think it's worthy aside to my ranting about mechanics.

We're in Serbia, following leads we've gleaned from a stolen laptop. Belgrade is seeming decidedly unfriendly these days, and we've caught the attention of the very pissed off Bonchev mob, who we've managed to figure out are working for the suspiciously pale Sergei Dragonov.

A lot of our options have been cut off or burned, including our former handlers. Licking our wounds in a safe house, we're ambushed by a pack of ghouls - incredibly strong undead things wearing GoPro cameras, which was our first scary brush with the supernatural, back in session 3.

Reeling from that fight, we decided to take the fight to the enemy. Intercepting the ghouls' broadcast signal, our hacker managed to track them back to a warehouse controlled by shipping distributor Intermodal X, where they're 'stored' in a steel vault.

In session 4, we successfully infiltrated the apartment of Intermodal Belgrade's general manager. Stephen rendered this in heartbreaking detail, down to the bottle of antidepressants in his bathroom cabinet. Dressed as HVAC repair crew, we replaced his smartphone's USB charger with one that'll inject our hacker's custom apps.

Session 5, licking our wounds from another ambush while trying to extract a burned contact, we decide to take down Intermodal and the ghouls.  We show up as exterminators (Intermodal is mostly a legit business) in a hastily repainted van, and try to talk our way in.

Fortunately, our hacker has cloned the general manager's phone by now, so when they call to get authorization for something not on the schedule, he takes the call.

Simultaneously, a surprise delivery shows up - a truck full of packing peanuts, courtesy of our hacker +Tim Groth.  While Moisha (our tweed front man played by +Sean Winslow) kills time with Intermodal's irritated security team, +Michael Atlin and I (playing the wet work heavies) head down to the basement where the ghouls are stored.

We've come prepared! You know what sorta looks like industrial pesticide-applying gear? A thermal lance.  Fsshhhhhhhhh

We jump our security escort and make short work of the pair of them, then set to burning our way into the vault. We don't need a big hole, because you know what also sorta looks like industrial pesticide-applying gear? A scratch-built flamethrower.

Rebreathers (also standard industrial exterminator gear) keep us cosy while our smoke bomb goes off; the hacker trips the alarms to cause more chaos upstairs. Intermodal starts evacuating. Thing is, there's a detail of Bonchevs upstairs, led by surprisingly pale and strong Dragonov, and it doesn't take them long to realize something is seriously wrong.

But Moisha, on the lookout, spots them coming down the external staircase - he ambushes them with a flashbang tossed through the security door, and move in with my flamethrower. Turns out that flamethrowers at the right range are like flashbangs, awfully cheaty and point-efficient. The mooks don't stand a chance, and even Dragonov goes down under the intense one-two combo. It's hideous, but then that's the job some days. 

In Conclusion

Night's Black Agents combines excellent GM advice for campaign-structuring with a hippie approach to investigation, resulting in fast-moving conspiracy-hunting gameplay; we're having tremendous fun.  For no good reason this beautifully humming engine groans under a fatty layer of mediocre combat rules in dire need of simplification.

Would play again.

Burning Wheel

For the record, my favourite role-playing game is Burning Wheel, hands down, mostly because it changed the way I look at RPGs.

The reason for this is that 'the plot' emerges, much of the time, from the players seizing the initiative and pushing towards their characters' written goals (termed 'Beliefs'). Instead of taking a psychologically (and literally) armored, 'survive the adventure' stance, PCs take risks, go out on a limb, pursue their gauche obsessions to accomplish these goals.

The GM's task is to push the central conflict, while at the same time producing character-specific challenges that reveal the characters more fully, giving them hard moral decisions, catch-22 sacrifices, and stirring up deep inner turmoil.

You can do this in any game, of course, but in BW, the reward and advancement mechanics are built around this. There's no XP for the adventure, only for driving toward your characters' goals, and for embodying your character's personal flaws and development in ways that enhance the story.

BW games start with out-of-character collaboration at the table - the group hones in on a central conflict that gets everyone fired up, and then character concepts are hammered out. Off-theme oddballs who are just along for the ride aren't welcome.

Creativity & Spontaneity

Because of this, you do need the right group. Players who want to sit back and be entertained, having their dark and taciturn ranger take potshots from the back - whether because they just can't be bothered or because they're creatively inhibited - will tend to drag things down.

Apart from their goals, the players are given additional tools to have creative input - a Circles ability, which lets them drum up useful contacts from their past (in the way that Han Solo looks up Lando Calrissian), and "wises", which lets them propose world facts.

The GM needs a lot of spontaneity to be able to roll with whatever players come up with, but on the other hand, planning is much simpler since you don't need to produce any more content than interests you (with its accompanying stat blocks, etc.). Preparing 'plot' is counter-productive, and hinders the game.

Apart from pushing the central challenge, the GM's job is to keep the spotlight on the really interesting aspects of the story. Whole months of grinding, travel time, practice montages, investing, keeping up with the bills, all are blinked away neatly.

Shaped by the Story

As I said, you can of course do this sort of thing in any game - the real advantage is that BW is trying to steer you there. One of the clever things about D&D's XP and classes is the way that they insulate the characters from the story. As long as you show up and get your XP from your cousin's mediocre adventure, you get to advance along your pre-chosen archetypal hero's journey - new feats, powers, etc.

In BW, the characters and the story develop in response to one another much more tightly. If you want your paladin steed, wizard's tower, or crazy chain-fighting ability, you're going to have to get it yourself! Characters are profoundly shaped by their experiences.

Social Conflict

The other thing that must be mentioned is Duel of Wits. BW expressly puts the dynamics between characters, PCs included, within the scope of the mechanics. Just as physical combat has detailed mechanics for important conflicts, so does social/verbal conflict.

This gives some people an allergic reaction, because it means that the other people at the table can shape things as intimate as your character's pecking order in the group. Like the other aspects of collaboration in BW, this requires trust and open communication OOC - some people might not enjoy being the group's toady, others might relish it, and this makes all the difference.

What it does do, however, is vastly expand the scope of interesting conflict in the game. You can now have parties that bicker violently but yet never get stalled - they have the conflict and move on (perhaps grumbling resentfully or simmering for a chance to turn the tables, but moving on nevertheless). You can have low-combat games where the grand conflict is a debate with the domineering village priest, who is refusing to authorize badly needed funds from Rome on the grounds that the village isn't pious enough.