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I've been going over +Vincent Baker's Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, and I was bummed I couldn't find any printed books. So I decided that with my PDF, a sheet of cardstock, 8 sheets of paper, some clever printing of the PDF, a paper cutter, plus needle and thread, I could create my own printed book. So I did. It looks awesome. It took about a half hour. I think I'll wait until I've scheduled a game before I create any more, though. Also! +Joshua A.C. Newman's Bloody-Handed name of Bronze is in the house. Or, at least it's in my house. Good day on the RPG front.  
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"We're so pleased to be able to announce More Seats at the Table - an email newsletter designed to highlight games made by designers and creators who don't fit neatly into the gender binary, femmes, and women.
"More Seats at the Table came about as a result of a conversation between Kira Magrann and Anna Kreider about the problem of games by and about not-cismen being perceived as only for not-cismen - and they decided a good way to address this challenge would be an email newsletter highlighting the work of marginalized designers. To that end, they enlisted the organizational aid of Misha Bushyager of New Agenda Publishing and Kimberley Lam. "But we don't just want this email list to be subscribed to by marginalized designers. Cismen, we'd very much like you to subscribe, and if you find work that excites you - then we hope you'll consider either buying or using your platform to signal boost work by marginalized designers that you find exciting!" Follow the link and fill out the form to get on the mailing list. Hell, the first issue is being mailed out this Friday. While you're there, if you have the means, throw some money their way by pledging their Patreon. My review of Gregor Hutton's Remember Tomorrow:
Gregor Hutton’s Remember Tomorrow packs a lot of game into a small book. My copy is a mere 48 pages long, and there are plenty of pictures and tables and reference charts, making the whole book a quick read. And what you get for that quick read is a lot of cool mechanics that give you the tools to create a near-future cyberpunk story without any preplanning or long-term commitments. I keep looking for the place where the game cuts corners, but I can’t find any such place. Let me make clear that I haven’t played the game, only read it. The game runs without a dedicated GM. Instead, the players take turns creating scenes for the characters, and during your turn you can create one of three types of scenes. In the first type of scene, you can introduce a new PC or a new faction. Each player is responsible for a “held” PC, meaning you and you alone can play that character and drive that character to reach her goal. In addition to held PCs, players can make up additional PCs to be played by anyone in any given scene. Opposing all the PCs are various factions: organization or individuals who are trying to grow their influence in the area, who have debts to settle and favors to grant. Factions are never held, only shared. In the second type of scene, you narrate or roleplay your held PC making a deal with a faction. Your character gets to improve her situation and the faction increases its influence. In the third type of scene, you play a faction or a non-held PC trying to hurt or set back another PC. Round and round the table it goes, each player creating a new scene and playing them out. Each character has three stats, called parameters: Ready, Willing, and Able. In addition to those stats, each PC has a motivation and a goal that they need to be ready, willing, and able to achieve. Through gameplay, the players attempt to gain successes for each of the three stats. When the third stat is ticked, the goal is accomplished. When a PC is opposed by factions and other PCs, they can have those tick marks erased, making the players not ready, unwilling, or unable to achieve their goal. If you achieve your goal, the PC is “written out” of the narrative. The player of that PC can pick up the non-held PCs and factions as play continues. The other way to get written out is if one of the character’s stats is reduced to zero. Factions don’t have R/W/A stats. Instead, they have a single stat called Influence. If a faction’s influence is reduced to zero, or if it is increased enough, the faction can be written out of play as well. The game ends after the third PC or faction is written out of play. If you get too kill happy, then the game might end before your character achieves her goal, so you have an interest in keeping the characters well enough to let you be one of the three written out characters to end the game. For all the simplicity of play, there are a lot of cool elements to the game. While the character sheets are lean, there is plenty of heft to them to guide your roleplaying. The three tags of Identity, Motivation, and Goal go a long way to giving you a focused character, and the three parameters of ready, willing, and able, neatly define what your character is all about. The other thing on your character sheet is a list of positive and negative “Conditions.” Conditions walk a really cool line between fictional descriptors and currency, as you can remove positive conditions in order to give yourself an additional die before you roll, to allow yourself to reroll all your dice after a roll, or to increase your gains during a success. Negative conditions on your character sheet can be erased by opponents in order to lessen the measure of your victory when you win an opposed roll. You then, of course, have to work those details into the fiction, but doing so looks to be not difficult in the least. Factions are a cool tool to join the PCs’ disparate stories together as you work with one faction and against another in intended or unintended opposition to the other players. It looks to create a dynamic set of relationships rife with excellent drama. Edge dice are dice you earn if you win a conflict against another player while you are playing a non-held PC or a faction during a Face Off scene. Edge dice are extra dice that you can add to any roll you make, giving your character that much better a chance of success. It’s a neat reward system to encourage players to embrace the oppositional factions and make life hard for the other players. Oh, and doubles and triples rolled cause “Crosses” to occur, which means that the next scene mush include some element or ramification from the current scene. Not only is it clever to have double and triple crosses be a thing (and it is clever), but it’s a really cool way to further ensure that the PCs' stories overlap and interact. It blows my mind because it is so simple, creates no extra work or burden on the player, and it’s a fun thing to do with something that is naturally exciting (rolling doubles and triples) anyway. The concept of characters and factions being “written out” seems like an awesome tool too. It not only builds in an end point, but it allows for a number of stories to come to a conclusion (tragic or triumphant) while leaving a handful or threads unaddressed. In short, it creates something tidy enough to provide some closure to the narratives and messy enough to leave things to wonder about, and there is something incredibly attractive to me about that. Other than Remember Tomorrow, the only book of Hutton’s that I have read is 3:16. From those two works, I can tell you Hutton is a fantastic writer. There is a ton of voice and flavor, but in a way that never interferes with the instructive nature of the text. The writing itself is setting and inspiration, aligning the reader with the types of stories the game is designed to tell. The tables and charts are evocative and productive without ever being dense or difficult to navigate. The lists all come in sets of 10, so if you don’t want to just pick an item from the list, you can roll for it. There is also a motif of words joined together by slashes (winner/loser, characters/factions, name/handle ,etc.) that runs throughout the book that is surprisingly cool and effective in creating a unifying look and feel. My I-only-read-it review of +Vincent Baker's Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands:
In many ways, Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands is a typical GMless/GMful RPG. Each player controls a single character. Play proceeds in an orderly fashion around the table, each player calling for and creating a single scene to be played out during their turn. There is no prep—conflicts and tension are built at the table through play and discussion. All pretty standard stuff by now. But everything about the way that scenes and play are structured is unlike those other games. If you’ve played or read other RPGs by Vincent and Meguey, then you are familiar with their preference for guiding play through lists and options that are simultaneously restricted and open ended. Firebrands uses that same technology to great effect. As usual, let me clarify that I have not played the game, only read it. There is very little established setting for the game, but it gives you everything you need for rich situations. Characters play romantic ace pilots of battle mechs on a planet going through a great deal of unrest. The planet of Bantral was colonized long ago, but it had never been worth anything. Lately, one of its natural resources has been discovered to be profitable, so the various powers and people involved are wrangling for control. There are three basic sides in the conflict: the offworld moneyed interests who “own” large chunks of the land; the long-term colonial occupiers who are essentially nobility on the planet, having lived there for generations; and the native inhabitants who have been occupied and work under the colonial nobility. Each player’s character is aligned with one of these three factions, and all three factions need to be represented in the game. But Firebrands is not a game of war. If war breaks out, big government bodies will get involved, so everything is kept at the level of manipulations and skirmishes. The game focuses on the interactions, social and romantic, between the PCs as they meet on the battleground and at social functions. What are you playing to find out? “The object of the game is to create messy entanglements. Fall in love with your enemies, ally with your rivals, fight with your friends” (3). As a player you need to embrace the messiness and gleefully maneuver your pilots into these sticky situations. How does the game help you do that? Scenes are set up as a series of “games,” but you can think of them as specific types of scenes. There is a solitaire game that gives you a fictional situation that your character has recently engaged in (you pick from a list, of course) and pick what the general outcome of that situation was. Everyone begins by playing a game of solitaire, but you are free to play it whenever you like; for example, during someone else’s scene that doesn’t involve you at all. Whenever you play, you do not tell others what happened. Instead, at the beginning of all the other games, you are prompted to tell the other players what they “notice” about your character or what rumors they may have heard about your character. That’s how you bring this background material into the shared fiction developing at the table. It’s a cool way to allow players to find whatever messy background material they need to help them determine how to interact with the other factions during the other scenes. So here are the games and scenes you create with others during play: you can engage in an animated disagreement with one other player’s character, an argument that is moderated by the non-participating players; you can have a chase of one character by another, in or out of their mechs (called “mobile frames”); you can have a casual conversation over a meal with another character, focusing more on the social give and take of the conversation rather than the substance of the topic; you can share a dance with another character to explore the characters’ feelings toward each other; you can play out a giant free-for-all battle with everyone in their mobile frames; you can meet with another character in a duel of swords, exploring the relationship through the metaphor of combat; you can have an intimate moment of one-on-one interaction, fraught with romantic and possibly sexual tension; and you can meet on the field of battle as parts of two units of soldiers exchanging fire and death. All of the games are designed to give players the opportunities (and encouragement) to create those messy entanglements, as each game is really about the relationships between the characters, even the games about battle. And all the games are designed to structure the interaction between the players to make sure they are aligned with each other no matter how the characters feel about the other characters. Who creates what part of the fiction is carefully controlled, and the games let you choose in what ways your character will be vulnerable to the other characters by letting you choose which questions you ask or what demands you make. Some examples: In the dance, you can ask questions like: “My face is close to yours. Do you turn subtly toward me, or subtly away?” and “When the dance ends, will you stand with me or rush away?” and “This moment in the dance allows me to step close to you and linger very near. Am I welcome?” In the conversation over food, you can ask questions like: “I make an ignorant social or diplomatic blunder. Do you let me recover gracefully or do you hold it against me?” and “I hope you don’t bring _ up. Do you?” In the meeting over swords, you can ask questions like: “I overreach slightly and you have the opportunity to slip in a dirty little cut. Do you take it?” and “You knock my sword rattling out of my hand. Do you allow me to recover it, or must I submit?” The one that I currently love the most are the exchanges in a tactical skirmish, where you make demands like: “Submit now, or my forces spreads itself too thin and you pick off_____, who is straggling” and “Withdraw now, or you ambush and capture __, my scout” and “Submit now, or you catch __ in a sharp crossfire and tear them apart.” I think the structure of this is brilliant. You demand the submission or withdrawal of the opposing force or force them to reduce your soldiers one by one. And each soldier has a name and a position, and is just a poor kid trying to support their cause. Are you comfortable destroying them slowly to win the battle? And in the next scene that these two characters meet, this spilled blood will be between them, both their willingness to kill and their failure to protect their own soldiers. How can that not create messy entanglements? Once the gameplay goes around the table once, any player can call an end to the game after a scene finishes. In the end, Firebrands is about consensual interactions, the respectful give and take that creates not only a conversation but every exchange we have as players and people. The game encourages you to make yourself vulnerable through your characters, and it urges you to explore the messy aspects of being human with other humans. It’s a sharp design. I am crazy excited to have received Seco Creek Vigilance Committee in the mail today! (I messed up submitting my address, so I delayed shipping--d'oh!) Thanks, +Keith Stetson!  So I finally got to read and study +Michael Miller’s original incarnation of With Great Power, and there is so much to love about it. It is a tightly designed game and a really well-written text.
I’m a big fan of games whose narratives are born directly from the specific protagonists being played, and With Great Power does so elegantly and without a lot of work by the GM. First, an agreed-upon “Struggle” loosely defines the theme of the session. Then, after brainstorming about their superheroes, players use the Struggle to decide on the 3-6 Aspects of their character to focus on, choosing those that best highlight the Struggle. The players then choose a single Aspect that will be central to the story, which is called their “Strife” Aspect. The GM, or villain player, takes all the superhero characters’ Strife Aspects and creates a “Plan” for the villain that targets all of them. In every scene, then, the villain player knows what Aspects she wants to target, how she wants to eventually gain control of them, and how she ultimately wants to transform them through the execution of her plan. That’s damn cool, and exactly the way I like to see situation and character meet up in an RPG. Aspects in With Great Power are themselves neatly done. Characters have no stats on their character sheet. In fact, other than their name (and a drawing if you’re into that), there is nothing on the character sheet except those 3-6 Aspects. Each Aspect has its own “Suffering” scale, 5 steps from Primed to Devastated. For each scene your superhero appears in, you choose an Aspect or two whose Suffering will increase or decrease. When you increase the suffering, you get to add cards to your hands, and when you decrease suffering, you remove cards at random from your hand. The greater the Suffering, the more cards you get to draw or discard. It’s a tightly designed pressure valve as players need cards to win their conflicts and defeat the villain’s plan. The incentive is always to put your Aspects at greater and greater risk, until they eventually become Devastated, at which point the villain player takes control of the Aspect. The villain player is of course angling for the Strife Aspects for her machinations, and since Strife Aspects give players additional cards, players will want to risk them especially. It’s a cycle that pushes the characters to the point of do-or-die, and I absolutely love that construction. With Great Power also uses cards in its resolution mechanic in a neat way. I love games that succeed in creating a beat structure with in conflict, so that players play out the thrust and parry in an exciting dance of action and reaction. Michael uses cards to create a dynamic conflict with detailed fiction and exciting interactions. It’s a smart design. And then there’s the Story Arc, which is a simple mechanic that ensures that the climactic stuff happens in the climax. Whenever superhero players lose a conflict, they can choose to fill in the next stage on the Story Arc. The Story Arc has five stages, and at each stage, the villain player has fewer tricks and resources. And it is only when the fifth stage has been reached that the heroes can devastate the villain’s plan or the villain can transform the heroes’ devastated aspects to complete her plan. Just a glance at the Story Arc page will tell the players where they are in the story and in that evening’s game. It’s not heavy-handed and seems like a solid pacing mechanic. Yeah, there’s a ton of neat stuff in the game and a lot to think about. I’m looking forward to Michael creating a blogpost of his own talking about why he decided to make the new edition of the game as a complete reimagining of the rules. Outside of noting how great the Swords without Masters approach is, I don’t want to speculate. But I will say this: In the creation of the Master Edition, Michael has successfully captured the spirit and tone of the original game. The heroes look almost the same, and though they consist of Elements rather than Aspects, they keep all the same qualities and feel. The villain is still created just like the heroes and still has a plan to be thwarted, even if the plan is much looser and made up as the game goes along. Both editions create stories of melodrama, focusing on the superhero as both hero and complicated human being with difficult relationships. For example, the Personal phase in the Master Edition is strikingly similar to enrichment scene in the Classic Edition. In short, it truly is the same game, even though all the rules have been changed, which is a pretty amazing feat. I'm working, real casual-like, on a short story game for 2 people that uses M&Ms as the randomizer.
The idea is that you're out with your friend, you want to play a game, but you have no game supplies. Walk into a convenience store, buy two individual bags of peanut M&Ms, and you're ready to play. There are 6 colors or M&Ms and there are numbers concerning their relative frequency in each bag. There are typically 20-24 M&Ms in a bag. At those moments of randomization, you reach in the bag for an M&M and follow the color. There'll be special rules for mutant M&Ms, like those ones with two peanuts under the same candy coating. Other possible affordances are the size of the M&Ms (especially useful if there is an opposed event of some kind), the stamping of the white "m" on the candy, the roundness of the candy, or definite cracks in the coating. I know, you want to play right now. The mail has been poppin' this week! Two kickstarters I backed have shown up, and the fruits of an evening looking through ebay arrived about the same time. +Fraser Simons' The Veil Cascade has made its way from Canada, and it is as gorgeous and high-quality as the original book. +Robert Bohl's Misspent Youth in all it's b/w punk glory looks equally awesome. It's got a sturdy cover that looks like it can take a beating and thumbing through. +Ron Edwards's Elfs and S/Lay w/Me are two books I've had on my "to get" list for awhile, and I just happened to find good prices on them on the same night. The S/lay w/ Me is in great shape, bu the Elfs is a little brittle, but what can you do? Jacob Norwood's Riddle of Steel is a title I have been reading about for over a year and a half now, but the text is nowhere to be found, even as a PDF. The books available on ebay were always too expensive too, but I happened to find a copy at cover price, so I jumped on it. Excited to see what all the excitement was about. The book thankfully is in great shape. And finally, Matthew Gwinn's Hour Between Dog and Wolf is another title players I respect have been enthusiastic about, and since I had already spent money on the other titles, well, what could it hurt to drop just a little bit more? It's always easy to squeeze a 2-player game into an evening! Now back to behaving myself.  |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
April 2023
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