I’ve decided to read through the 3 Usagi Yojimbo RPGs, and I’m going to move backwards through time, starting with Sanguine’s second edition, which was funded via Kickstarter and released in 2019.  I didn’t back the Kickstarter because I had heard unflattering reviews of Farflung, Sanguine’s other foray into Powered by the Apocalypse rules structure.  Also, while I’ve been reading the comic books since 1986, I can’t think of any of my friends who would like to play the game, so putting money into a potentially bad game with no real prospect of playing it didn’t seem like a great idea.
 
But then Epidiah Ravachol created a little twitter thread regarding the game after he had gotten his copy.  Epidiah is a huge fan of the first edition, so I was eager for his thoughts about this edition.  He talked about a few of the game’s features (such as dividing the conversation into “casual,” “dicey,” and “combat” “moods”; the way story points become support points so that as you use the points to do awesome things you are then set up to help your friends do awesome things; and the way moves build upon each other in combat by giving you bonuses if your next move is also a combat move), and it was enough to spur me to action.
 
Please note that I have not played the game as of this writing.  Everything here are simply my thoughts on the rules as I have read them.
 
My reading of the first 30 pages or so did not go well.  I was put off by a number of things that weren’t specifically about the game.  First, there is no acknowledgement section of games and designers that inspired this edition.  In spite of using a ton of Meguey and Vincent Baker’s language, there is not one mention or nod to them or Apocalypse World.  I’m used to the indie game publishing scene, which is very big on acknowledging influences and inspiration.  And sure, Apocalypse World is pretty big, but it’s still tiny compared to the big games in the hobby, and I still encounter roleplayers regularly who have not heard of it.  To use the language of moves, +1 forward, playbooks, and even MC for the gamemaster without giving credit is underhanded.  In addition, the game disconnects moves from the fiction in a way that sent me reeling (or at least making diatribes in my marginalia).  For example, players declare their characters will use their negotiate attribute and then roll the dice to see what they can do.  The results are essentially either getting characters to do what you want or getting a character to believe some deception, which are two very different things.  The move is not triggered by trying to deceive someone or trying to convince someone to do a thing, which adds an extra layer of work or knowledge, undermining the very thing that makes moves so effective in RPGs.  Another example is the move Buddhism.  On the result of a 7-9, you are given the following “menu” of options: “Perform strong doctoring on a sickly person. Or, invoke a strong aspect of Buddhism (banish spirits, etc.). Or, take five minutes and spend 1 support to remove 1 impairment from a friend. Or, give someone +1 back to a roll they just made. Or, spend 1 support to give someone +3 back.”  Buddhism is essentially 4 moves in one.  You can doctor an NPC, you can perform Buddhist rituals for narrative effect (banishing spirits is the only example given), you can spend some time with a fellow PC and remove an impairment, or you can act quickly enough to help a roll just made by them.  On the one hand, I can see the argument that creating this one move instead of 4 is an act of concision.  On the other hand, it demands that the players know the 4 things that the Buddhism move does and turns them into mere actions with effects rather than things that spring from fiction and then propel the fiction forward.
 
I’ve seen some criticism that the designers don’t understand the pbta engine, as its popularly called, but I don’t think that’s it. This is a purposeful reimagining of how it works, but it removes everything that makes the engine worth using.  The fictional triggers are removed and the gears that tie the move back into the fiction after the dice are thrown are equally removed.  There are no GM moves, which means the GM does nothing in response to the dice except to interpret them and to offer an occasional hard bargain, make a ruling due to the situation, or declare a compromise. 
 
While I’m bitching, let me also say that the game presents the history, culture, and map of Japan in one of the least useful ways I’ve seen in an RPG.  It’s block after block of text (yeah, with pictures and a few bullet points), but it’s all pretty mind-numbing and it needs to be plunged for inspiration rather than offering it up.  Each section comes back to back following character creation and preceding the MC section.  In addition, the game gives you a 26-page summary of various characters from the comic books, but they are presented in alphabetical order with tidbits of advice thrown in for incorporating the characters into your game.  In the end it neither makes for a pool of inspiration or an easy-to-access resource to grab something you’re looking for.  In other words, the information is fine, but the presentation is not the reader’s friend.
 
Okay, so that’s all my complaining.  Let’s get to the good stuff, because in spite of my extensive whining, there is some good stuff.  The game has a cool approach to combat, on several different fronts.  The game considers positioning in battle in a brief but meaningful way by saying that a character is either exposed, flanking, covered, or out of the combat.  When you’re exposed, you are vulnerable to the enemy, but you can demand their attention, meaning that they can’t disengage with you at will.  While you’re flanking, you are not the person all the enemies are attracted to, but nor can you demand their attention.  Covered means that you are protected from enemies, but you can’t engage with them directly.
 
Then, when you’re engaged in combat, each playbook has a fighting style and a weapon chart that tells you which weapons are within that style.  In and of themselves, the styles don’t mean anything: the chart of what a 6-, 7-9, 10-12, and 13+ is the same for each style.  But when you are using a weapon within your style, you get extra combat options when you roll a 10 or higher.  For example, if you are using a bo staff, and it’s within your style, and you roll a 10 or higher, you can declare that you will use its “retreat” feature, which allows you to make a strong hit and then fall back to a covered position.  Or if you are using a Daikyu bow, you can use the “aim” feature, which means that you don’t do any damage this turn, but next turn you get a +6 to your attack with that bow.  These little features can make for all kinds of dynamic combat as you sweep, grapple, riposte, bind, retreat, and overextend yourself.  The only weird feature in this approach is that you can’t declare one of these features as your intent since you can only use them on a strong hit.  So you don’t say, “I’ll hit the thief with my bo staff and retreat to the cover of the building”; you say, “I’ll use my bo staff” then roll and see what you get, fashioning the fiction in response to your results.  It’s not a bad way to play, but I imagine it can cause players to stumble who like to declare their intention before the dice are rolled.  Same with that +6 with your bow.  Your intention may have been to shoot a enemy, but the strong hit might make you change your mind, not fire, and take aim instead.
 
There are actually a lot of bonuses to your future attacks, like that +6, during combat.  The reason for that is that enemies are rated by the MC as weak, strong, or grand, and if you want any chance of landing a blow on a grand enemy, you’ll need a 13 or higher with your two 6-sided dice.  When you roll to attack, you don’t add an attribute; instead, you roll +story points, which you accumulate as you play, so the farther you are in the story, the better violence will work for you.  It’s a clever idea, even if I’m not a fan of the way story points are distributed (each adventure gives a story point to all characters after each act of the story, essentially—meh).  I’m not usually a fan of giving enemies a rating as a GM, but I think the weak/strong/grand division is easy and natural, and I can see using it without a problem.  There’s even a system for assigning points to an encounter so that the PCs chisel away at the points to overcome the enemies.
 
Combat is a series of turns, with the PCs making their attacks, and then the PCs rolling a “response” to the enemies’ return attacks.  It’s a workable system, and a necessary replacement to MC moves.
 
I also like the damage system, which is inspired by a lot of indie games, going back to Sorcerer. There is no hit point system.  During combat (or possibly other situations), PCs get “setback” points, and each time a PC receives a setback point, they have to roll minus their current total of setback points.  Depending on the final score, some number of their attributes might become “impaired.”  When the attribute is impaired, it doesn’t necessarily hurt their ability to do things, but if the player ever rolls doubles using an impaired stat, a negative event happens, hurting the characters narratively.  As your setback points rise, you are more and more likely to have impaired attributes.  If you setback attribute is ever impaired and you roll doubles making your check against setback points, then your character suffers grievous injuries or is taken out in some way.  It’s a system that has a built-in curve to it and a nice element of chance.
 
There are 4 adventures outlined at the end of the book, and each one is fine and useful.  I feel like the game could have benefited from using more indie techniques to make scenario-building a fun element in and of itself.  In a lot of ways, the Trollbabe system of scenario-creation would be perfect for the game as the players point out on a map of Japan where they want to go next.  As in Trollbabe, the PCs are a set of outsiders walking into a relationship-web and interfering with the goings on there as they see fit, usually in the name of righteousness and helping the weak.  Of course, as an MC of this game, you can crib Ron Edwards’s and others’ techniques, but it would seem reasonable to build something directly into the game to empower young MCs, especially since the game seems to be directed toward them at times, if I’m reading the tone of the writing and advice correctly.
 
So my initial thought on reading the game was I’ll never play this.  But having sat with it, thought about it, and played it through in my head, I’d definitely play this game, especially as a light-hearted hero romp.  I’d be interested to see how the moves join together and how players navigate the relationship between the moves and the fiction.

This is one of my read-only reviews, by which I mean I have not taken the game to the table or watched any APs.  And more than a review, this post is a way for me to gather my thoughts about the text and the game.  If it’s useful to you or if you want to jump in with your own thoughts about it and have a conversation, that’s awesome.
 
In The Imp of the Perverse, players create monster hunters in America during the Jacksonian era, which is defined in the game as the 20-year stretch between 1830 and 1850.  The premise is that the “Shroud” that separates the world of the living and the world of the dead is susceptible to strong human passions: “Human passions sometimes pierce this barrier, inviting the terrible things that we still remember as monsters” (13).  The eponymous imps encourage the living to feed their strong perverse passions to breach the Shroud.  The PCs are in a position to perceive, understand, and fight these Shroud-shredding imps and the human beings they corrupt because they have imps of their own.  In any given session, the PCs investigate, pursue, and eventually defeat a monster of perversity.  The question posed by the game is this: what will become of your PC in this pursuit?  Will they rid themselves of their imp, thereby rejoining human society in full and leaving their monster-hunting days behind them, or will they indulge their perversity too often and become one of the monsters in need of hunting?
 
It’s a great concept and a cool world.  When I first heard the pitch, I thought of Ron Edwards’s Sorcerer and wondered if this wasn’t a kind of hack of that game.  Human beings given special powers by demons while their humanity is on the line is a fine summary of both games.  But while the games have a similar focus, they play dramatically differently.  Inspiration may have come from Sorcerer (which I was surprised to see is not in the list of inspirational games in the appendices’ Ludography), but the games are very different.
 
As you can probably tell from my above summary, this is a game about characters and the changes they undergo from their experiences in the hunt.  When you first build your PC, you bedeck them with a set of stat pools, ranked traits and relationships, a greatest strength and driving perversity, and a meaningful past.  In the course of play, you spend those pools, risk those traits and relationships, draw on your greatest strength, and lean on your perversity in order track, understand, and finally banish the monster.  Those resources you draw on don’t automatically refill and reform between sessions.  Instead, relationships can be broken or their nature can shift, and its up to the player (and the dice) to decide if they are repaired or lost.  Resource pools can be drained.  Your greatest strength can be worn away.  Your perversity can grow.  Your defining traits can wax, wane, disappear, or be replaced by new ones.  The thrill of playing a character in this game is to watch how it changes in the face of the horrors it fights, and all the mechanics are designed to affect those changes.  It’s really cool.
 
I love the way Paoletta does character creation in Imp.  He has what he calls a “survey” for creating characters, which is a list of options concerning different fictional features of your character.  Each one of those choices affects your stat pools, traits (called Qualities), and relationships.  Generally speaking, I think this is an excellent way to build a character: choosing fictional features which then create mechanical teeth.  Specifically in this game, I think Paoletta has a fantastic execution of the practice. 

Players start by choosing a career for their character. In order to avoid having a monstrous list of careers, each with their own accompanying mechanical details, Paoletta creates 8 broad categories: careers of affairs, arms, exploration, leisure, letters, opportunity, service, and survival.  Not only does this allow him to have manageable categories, it’s a neat way for a player to  get into their character and begin to build a guiding concept. This is such a simple solution, but it’s one of the features of the game that got me really excited.  When your character can be anything, it’s overwhelming.  Reducing those to 6 choices on each survey lightens the creative load while simultaneously giving you things to think about.  For example, let’s say your struck by the idea of having a character whose career is one of service, you know that their service gives them financial resources (Quality: Resourceful 2), an employer (Relationship with whom you serve 1), and a place within the community your work (Standing with your community +2).  So to flesh out those choices mean that you choose your employer and your community, which helps you narrow down your work and the idea of who your character is naturally flowers from that.  That’s great tech.
 
After you’ve chosen how your character’s gender presents itself, what kind of family you come from and where, and if your married or have children, you have most of your mechanical features in place.  You then decide on your characters “greatest strength,” what defines them as a protagonist, and what their core perversity is, what their defining flaw is that compromises and threatens their humanity.  According to the rules, deciding on these features is part of a “workshop” during character creation.  During the workshop, everyone shares what they are thinking and the group helps shape those choices so that they are productive for the game and clear to all the players.  That clarity is key, because in play, each player will be able to play the role of your imp insofar as they can tempt you to embrace your perversity within a conflict in order to get more dice and increase your chances for success.  Character creation is already supposed to be done as a group in its own session, but this workshop feature ensures a necessary conversation and corresponding understanding.
 
Finally, you decide if your character is new to hunting monsters or already experienced.  This choice gives you a supernatural power if you’ve hunted before, and no matter what you choose, it establishes your “empathy” and “lucidity” ratings.  Empathy is a resource you can use to gather information about the monster, an advantage especially late in the game.  Philosophically, it represents the fact that you, as a fellow sufferer of an imp’s perversity, have insight into what the monster is going through and into the why and the how of their actions.  Lucidity measures your humanity.  Lucidity is a number between 1 and 6.  If lucidity ever hits one, you have lost your humanity and have become a monster of your perversity.  If lucidity ever hits 6, you have shaken your perversity, ensured your humanity, and retire from monster hunting.   
 
Once you’ve created your character, everything in play, as I’ve said, is designed to change your character sheet.  But before I can talk about that, let’s talk about the main mechanics in the game: exertion and ratiocination.  You make an exertion roll primarily “when you impose your will upon the world.”  I love this trigger.  Note that “[y]ou do not need to roll when an outcome is simply uncertain” (67) or risky, which is the measure so many other games use to decide when a resolution mechanic kicks in.   To define exertion as imposing your will upon the world, it does a lot of work to clarify the fiction and the nature of the conflict.  To impose your will upon the world is to say that you have a desired outcome and a desired course of action to attain that outcome, so the nature of the conflict and part of the stakes is defined to even call for the exertion roll.  Moreover, this definition allows all kinds of actions to trigger the exertion roll, not just violence.  To argue with someone to change their mind is to exert your will.  To persuade someone to let you in is to exert your will.  To threaten someone to stand down and keep what they’ve seen to themselves is to exert your will.  And in this context, risking your various Qualities, relationships, and greatest strength create details in the fiction beyond their mechanical function.  So if I’m arguing with someone to give up a secret and I bring in my relationship with my son, then I would have to have a reason that that relationship is relevant.  Or if I bring in my Unhappy quality, I need to make it relevant to the argument.  In this way, Qualities and relationships move from things on my character sheet to active fiction, and a resource for me to lean on to flesh out a scene, not just things to check off to accomplish something.  To bring those things from my character sheet into my conflict also means that I am risking them.  To risk a relationship means that I might lose that relationship or that the nature of the relationship might change.  So not only are you warned not to risk something if you’re not willing to lose it, but once again those things become clear stakes in the conflict.  It’s fantastic design because these elements on your character sheet are first, fictional details, second mechanical teeth in the gears of the game, and third resources for things to say during play.  Staring down at your character sheet in the middle of the game will almost always give you something useful to say.
 
When you exert yourself, you create a pool of black and red six-sided dice by what you risk, if you’re helped, and what influence you allow your imp to have.  You roll that pool, and every dice that is as high as your lucidity score or higher is a success. If you are unhappy with your number of successes and can create at least one additional success by lowering your lucidity score, you can do so, driving your character into the arms of their imp in the name of success.  The closer you are to human, the harder it is to exert yourself, so the game encourages you to embrace your imp in a substantial but subtle way. Once you have your pool of successes, you can spend them.  You must spend one success to achieve the thing you set out to do, if you want to.  You can spend successes to protect the qualities and relationships your risked to improve your dice pool.  If you choose not to spend a success doing so, that quality or relationship is reduced by one rank.  If it is reduced to zero, it is gone, and you can interpret what that means.  Well, actually, relationships are protected to a degree, so you don’t have loved one dying on you or leaving you every time you roll.  Instead of reducing the rank of the relationship, you have the choice to switch the nature of the relationship, which has cool fictional effects, but I won’t go into that here.  What Paoletta achieves by this system is something you can see him striving for in Annalise.  In Annalise, players create orthogonal stakes for a conflict, so that the player must chose which stakes to win and which to lose.  The system in Annalise was derived from Vincent Baker’s Otherkind dice, which Baker developed into Apocalypse World moves.  Paoletta developed them instead into what we see here in Imp of the Perverse, and it is a elegant and impressive development.
 
Now to get us back to the idea that the character sheet is always changing.  In play, your resource pools deplete; your qualities, relationships, and greatest strength drop in ranking; and your lucidity slides down toward inhumanity.  All the while, you are putting checkmarks, red and black, in your “Ontogenesis” circles at the bottom of your character sheet.  Once you have defeated the monster and concluded that game’s session, you can spend those checkmarks to refill your pools, bolster your relationship (or start new ones), build up your qualities (or create new ones), and reinvest in your greatest strength.  At this point, you don’t just try to rebuild the character you began with.  You are forced to ask yourself, “how has this experience changed my character?” And with that, you spend your points and see who your character is now.  The odds of you ending where you began is close to nil, so not only does your sheet change during play, it changes significantly between monster-hunting sessions.  Paoletta says at the beginning of his text that this game isn’t about whether or not you can catch and defeat the monsters; you can and will.  The question instead is what will become of your character.  And to that end, every mechanic in the game comes back to the character sheet and how play affects it. 
 
Finally, after you spend your checks, you roll black dice equal to the number of black checks you had and red dice equal to the number of red checks you had and add up each pool of colored dice.  If the black dice total is higher, your lucidity shifts up one.  If the red dice total is higher, your lucidity shifts down one. What this means is that there is one step that is not entirely in your control in terms of your lucidity shift, though you can shape your odds during play by seeking black or red checks through the actions you take.  Because you can only shift one space, you know that having a 3 or 4 lucidity will not push your PC out of the game, but flirting with a 2 or a 5 presents the risk that you will hit 1 or 6 during Ontogenesis.  Of course, this also means that you can drive you character to monsterhood or usher them to full humanity by your choices during play.  And the coolest part?  If you lean into your imp and drive your lucidity into the ground, your PC will become the next monster of perversity the other PCs have to hunt.  How’s that for an incredible character arc?  And if you want to stay in control of your character, even as a monster, you are invited to GM that session.
 
Imp of the Perverse is full of cool design choices.  Beyond those design elements, the structure and layout of the book is excellently done.  This book has one of the best introductory chapters I’ve read in terms of clarity of purpose and vision.  Each chapter that follows has an express purpose, and while it is not a thin book, it is never unfocused or wandering.  In addition, Paoletta writes with exacting clarity and fills the book with footnotes (in the style of 19th-century books) that are constantly directing you to relevant sections.  That feature, along with a thoughtful index makes the book an excellent reference book as well as an instructional book.
 
The other great challenge the book faced was giving players the historical and cultural information needed to play the game and be inspired to run the game.  The chapters on Jacksonian Gothic America are top shelf in terms of giving you enough information and enough inspiration to want to charge ahead without weighing you down with burdensome facts.  It’s a delicate wire to balance on, giving us enough information to feel confident and enough ignorance to bolster than confidence, but it does it with grace.  Dividing the small time span into three sections and the country’s geography into three sections of its own proves to be an effective way to break down the themes and focuses that the game in interested in focusing on.
 
If I were to make any complaints about the text they’d be minor.  Paoletta occasionally flirts with Poe-esque prose, and while he manages it well, it is too infrequent to do more than sound weird against the backdrop of modern writing.  I understand why he didn’t want to do the whole text in that voice, but the occasional use just misses.  My other minor complaint is that the examples in the menagerie and ready-to-run sections actually served to weaken my sense of inspiration instead of strengthen it.  Some of the creatures are similar, which makes the possibilities feel limited, given that ideas are repeated in a mere 12 monsters.  And I know it’s minor, but I was put off by the fact that every monster and scenario was created by a man.  My understanding is that they monsters and scenarios were offered tiers during the Kickstarter for the game, so Paoletta shackled himself a little in that respect.  Still, a little curation and invited guests could have fixed the problem.  Like I said, it is a minor one, and I feel rather petty pointing it out.
 
Imp of the Perverse is a cool game and a fun text.  It is neat to see a game born from the concepts of the Forge but with the modern sensibilities of design, so that the mechanics and the fiction are tightly and nicely intertwined.  Paoletta is at the top of his form in this game.

​Bacchanalia is a card-based story game designed by Paul Czege and Michele Gelli, and produced by Narrattiva.  The game began as “Bacchanal,” which Czege designed for Game Chef one year, which used a bunch of colored and different-sized dice.  Gelli then helped turn that into a card game.  At least, that’s my understanding, so if I have that wrong, please let me know. The cards are beautiful in their own right with Claudia Cangini’s full-color art.
 
In the game, players create a character who is a subject of the Roman empire and who currently stands accused (rightly or wrongly) of crimes against the empire.  They are currently hiding in the town of Bertinoro from their accusers and the Roman soldiers who pursue them.  Simultaneously, they are separated from their lover with whom they are trying to escape.  The other thing you need to know is that it is a game of sex and violence, decadence of all sorts, as the gods Bacchus, Venus, Pluto, and Minerva are also present in Bertinoro to indulge in their own desires.  Bacchanalia is a GMless/GMful game for 3-6 players, and each player is telling their own story, though the different tales can overlap and crisscross as they are all taking place in the same town.
 
This is where I need to make clear that I have only read and studied the game, not played it, so take my observations and thoughts for what their worth.
 
The mechanics of the game are cool and unique.  Each player begins with a set of three cards on the table in front of them (these are called Deus cards).  These cards determine which gods might have influence over your scene.  Bacchus, Venus, Pluto, Minerva, your Accusator, the Miles soldiers, the Satyrs, Vinum (wine), and Amans (your lover) are all possible influences.  This set of three cards changes--sometimes dipping below three, but seldom rising above three—through play.  During your turn, you draw cards from the main deck, which is made up of cards that match the possible influences of the cards before the players.  What you draw determines which of your cards is the “ruling Deus” for your turn.  Having determined who the “ruling Deus” is, you consult a chart and see how your cards change, and what needs to happen in the scene you narrate for your character.
 
The stories you tell are told in simple narration form.  There is no freeform roleplaying during the scenes.  Given the prompts and restrictions of your ruling Deus, you need to develop your character’s story, treating the other players as your audience.
 
The game cleverly controls the themes and focus of your story by restricting you to ten types of scenes as determined by your ruling Deus.  Those scenes will primarily bring you into a close encounter with those who pursue you (and the violence they intend), bring you together with your lover, or prompt you to describe scenes of sexual decadence.  This is a game that will benefit greatly from players knowing each other or at least creating their play space so that everyone is comfortable and willing to make themselves vulnerable.  Guarded play will likely end in “safe” stories or disingenuous acts of violence and sex.
 
The game ends in any number of ways.  You can escape with your lover to safety.  You can save your lover but be destroyed by the forces that hunt you.  You can simply fall prey to your pursuers without saving your lover.  You can lose yourself to the wine-fueled revelries.  Whether you are telling a love story or a tragedy can only be learned through play.  That is always a feature that I love in a storytelling game.
 
I really can’t say enough about the mechanics of the cards.  There’s a lot happening with them, but never in a laborious or confusing way (once you wrap your head around what’s happening, of course).  Certain ruling Dei make you discard a Deus and some make you pick one up (from the center of the table or from another player) so that the various Deus cards are shifting about the table.  If you have Pluto, then it is likely that your accuser or the military will soon follow behind them.  Venus will likely lead you to your lover.  Bacchus and the Satyrs are interested in wine and debauchery.  Only if you have the Amans Deus card can you hope to have the Amans the ruling Deus, which is the only way to escape your pursuers entirely with your lover.  I imagine plays sends the Amans card floating around between players as they vie for the opportunity to save their character.
 
The cards also provide a cool pacing mechanic.  There is a single card in the deck of 62 that you draw from called the Parcae, or the fates.  Whenever this card appears, you narrate a twist in your story and shuffle it and the discarded cards back into the main deck to refresh it.  The Amans Deus card doesn’t enter play until the Parcae card has surfaced once, so there will always be a number of scenes before the lovers can even enter the story.  Then, as the Parcae appears multiple times, the severity of the encounters with the military and your accusers increases so that once the Parcae has appeared 3 times, and the Miles is your ruling Deus, your character will meet their end at the hands of the military.  It’s a simple pacing tool, but both effective and beautiful how it is left to chance to appear, just as its namesake would suggest.
 
One of my favorite mechanics is that you can hold onto a drawn card for a turn if you want to.  Doing so gives you a chance to influence who your ruling Deus will be the next turn (though of course it is no guarantee).  So let’s say you have the Amans Deus card, and you want to save an Amans card that you drew this turn, hoping to make the Amans Deus card your ruling Deus next turn so you can escape with your lover.  You “bow” the drawn Amans card (what would be called “tapping” is Magic: the Gathering did not copyright the term) to signify you are holding onto it.  When you “bow” the card, you need to “incorporate[e] in[to] your narration a recognizable character or a peculiar location or object previously described by another player” (emphasis in original).  In this way, the game forces your story to overlap with another player’s story by introducing some recognizable element from their story.  This simple act will make the stories truly feel like they are happening in the same world at the same time.  It’s the only time the game forces you to make such a connection (though of course you are free to do it in your narration any time).  It’s a cool feature and a cool way to make “bowing” a significant act.
 
This game was published in 2012, well before the recent spike in card-related RPGs, and it uses cards in a way I haven’t seen before or since.  If you’re interested in card mechanics in RPGs, this is well worth checking out. You can still order physical copies here: http://nightskygames.com/welcome/game/Bacchanalia.

Eero Tuovinen’s Zombie Cinema was published in 2008, but I got my copy a few years ago from Indie Press Revolution, so it seems to still be in print.  The game comes in a VHS case, and presents as a small board game that’s simultaneously a story game.  The rules are short and direct, and the board is pasted onto a thin 5x7 canvas.  The game is intended for 3-6 players and it plays out in a single session.  The story you tell through play is that of a zombie survival horror film, Tuovinen taking his primary inspiration from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
 
The game has some really neat mechanics, but it is a product of its day, which seems weird to say a mere decade later.  Let’s start with the cool stuff.
 
The board of the game has a single track.  The zombie token begins at the earliest point of the track, and the player tokens begin 5 spaces ahead of the zombies and 4 spaces from the end.  Each space describes the limits of the zombies’ power, so when the zombies are in the first space, we are told that “Zombies appear only indirectly: rumors, delusions, and newscasts, for example.”  As the zombie token moves forward through play, the zombies appear first individually, slow, and limited, and as they progress, their numbers grow as do their determination, effect, and abilities.  It’s a great way to pace the zombie pressure to match the typical zombie pic.
 
The other cool thing the board allows you to do, and this is for me the golden tech of the game, is that scenes resolve by moving players forward, backwards, or nowhere at all.  The game is GMless/GMful, and players take turns setting scenes and pushing for their own character’s survival.  Each scene can potentially end in a conflict between characters.  If it does, the characters who win the conflict get to move a step forward, and the losers have to take a step backwards.  This means that your survival is dependent upon pushing others under the zombie bus.  That’s cool and on brand.
 
Conflict resolution is also neat.  Each player has a uniquely-colored token and a matching uniquely-colored d6.  At the time of conflict, the player initiating the conflict puts their dice forward.  If the other player yields to the first player’s demands, they hold their dice and no conflict occurs.  If the other player wishes to engage in the conflict, they too put their dice forward.  Then the other players have a chance to affect the outcome of the conflict.  Non-involved players can either pass, ally themselves, or support a side.  If they pass, they hold onto their dice and stay out of the conflict.  No matter how the conflict resolves, that player’s character is staying put.  If they ally themselves, they add their dice to one side of the conflict.  In doing so, they tie their fate (and token’s movement) to the side they ally themselves with.  To support, the player places their die on top of the side they are supporting.  This is a meta-action, in that the support is the player expressing their support for a side, not the character.  The character doesn’t have to even be in the scene (or still alive) for the player to support one character.  The supporting player’s character’s token is not affected by the outcome of the roll.  Then both sides roll their pools and the player with the highest single die wins.  The die mechanic is a good way to keep everyone involved and to let each player decide how they want to participate.
 
The system also means that if you want to save your character, you need to seek out and participate in the conflicts in the scenes.  It’s a smart way to make players happily create the drama the game wants to see.
 
The zombies move ahead every round and can never be sent back, so there is an 8-round clock on the game.  In addition, in any conflict in which the dice tie, the zombies take another step forward, so the odds say a game will average 6-7 rounds, with a minimum of 5.  The zombies, combined with their naturally increasing threat levels, makes for an excellent timer.
 
The main troubles from which the game suffers, in my opinion, is that it does nothing to share the heavy fictional lifting with the players.  This is what I mean by the game being a product of its time.  In the last 10 years, indie designers have learned all kinds of techniques to help create character relationships and material for scenes.
 
Let’s start with character creation.  The game has three sets of cards (9 in each set, 27 all together).  To create characters, players draw one card from each set and will have a history, demeaner, and general appearance.  Seems good.  But the game does nothing to tie the characters together, so unless you have experienced players who know that the drama will benefit from ties and past relationship, expectations, and desires, you will end up with a game of strangers with nothing to talk about in any given scene except the zombies outside their door.
 
Similarly, scene creation is left to each player during their turn with the simple prompt: “The active player makes the call on the time, location and participants of the scene like a shot in a movie.”  That’s it.  That’s all you’re given.  There are no mechanics to help with the pacing of your story beyond the abilities of the zombies, nothing to create interpersonal drama.  I can easily imagine a game in which every conflict results from character’s screaming at each other in life-and-death hysterics.  It’s up to the players to create a thoughtful set of interactions, which is great is you are with experienced and thoughtful players at the top of their game.
 
The character cards are problematic in their own way.  One of the character roles is “Ethnic Minority”: “Black, brown, yellow, red, faceless stereotype. Fulfill them or not.”  Yikes.  I get that in white American cinema, the token character of color is a thing, but there is no reason for your game to continue that.  Similarly, having that card suggests everyone else is white.  Ugh.  Another card is “Dependent”: “Cannot live without others.  Cripples, handicapped, elderly.  Can do something, though.”  And of course one of your character’s defining traits can be “Mental Problems.”  There’s a whole lot of cringing there.
 
I haven’t ever played the game, and I don’t see myself ever playing it at this stage, especially with Zombie World out there.  All the same, this game is designed to scratch a different itch than Zombie World does, and it has some innovative ways to get there.  The problems with the game can be pretty easily solved with updated character cards, a relationship/history feature, and some basic scene-creation and conflict-creation support.

I bought The Bullwinkle and Rock Role-Playing Party Game off Ebay after Epidiah Ravachol posted a Twitter thread in which he explained (partially) why he is a big fan of the game.  The mechanics and setup sounded really interesting, so I wanted to see for myself how it worked.  I found a still-shrinkwrapped boxed set for less than $25 and ordered it.
 
Not surprisingly, Epidiah was right: this is a really cool design for a roleplaying game.  Many games have tackled the problem of introducing non-storytelling gamers to a storytelling game (I am of course using terminology from the 21st century, as the only words in the 80s for the kinds of games we played were RPGs), but this game has a great solution.  First, they broke the game into 3 different games, to get players adjusted to what takes place in a roleplaying game.
 
The first game uses the deck of 108 cards. The cards each have a person, place, thing, or event that happened in one of the Rocky and Bullwinkle episodes, such as “A ball of string”; “Pongo Britt, President of the Frostbite Falls Foistboinder Co.”; “Inherit something valuable!”; or “Explosive Mooseberries.”  Most of the cards have an additional phrase, mirroring the punning and general wordplay of the series the game is based on. For example, “A close shave” has the subtitle “Or, just in the nick of time!” Players then select a storyline from the booklet entitled “Stories.”  The players read the opening situation, the characters involved, and the ending of the story, and then deal out 5 cards to each player.  (Smartly, the players then have a chance to throw out any cards they don’t want and draw back again to 5, a feature that similar card games would do well to emulate.) Then the players take turns progressing the story from the opening situation toward the ending, using the cards in their hands to inspire where they take the story. When they use an element from the card in their hand, they lay that card down and pass the storytelling to the next player. When everyone is down to their last card, game play pauses and the players think about how their card could get to the ending.  The players who think they have a clever way to do it have a short competition to see who will finish the story and then wrap it up.
 
This game takes all of two and a half pages to explain and served (I would guess) as the inspiration for games like “Once Upon a Time.”  The game introduces a lot of key aspects of play.  First, players can choose from any type of story from the show, meaning a Rocky and Bullwinkle story, a Fractured Fairytale, Aesop and Son, Peabody and Sherman, or Dudley Do-Right.  Then players have a non-competitive, no-stress way to create a story together using the cards to lead them to say funny and surprising things.  The goofier the story gets, the more fitting it is to the genre.  Finally, the players learn to use the cards liberally as inspiration, not as exact things. So, that shaving card can be a literal shaving razor, a close call, someone getting cut by something sharp, or anything else the player wants to interpret it as.  There are no rules for nixing someone else’s interpretation, so the card-player is the final arbiter of their contribution.
 
The next game using foldable standees and introduces players to playing single characters in the creation of the story.  Just as before, a story is picked from the book, but this time, they care about the opening situation, which characters are involved in the story, and what each one of those characters wants to achieve through the story, dividing those goals into things the good guys want and things the bad guys want.  Players get a hand of cards, just as they did in the other game, too.  This time, however, they choose one of the characters from the story and put the standee up in front of them.  On one side of the standee is a picture of the character they are portraying, so everyone can see who you are.  On the other side is a list of “powers” your character has and “Useful Sayings,” which are mostly catchphrases from the show, such as Rocky saying “Hokey Smokes!” or “Again? That trick never works!”  The “powers” list tells you how your character acts in a story and what they can do.  For example, Rocky can “fly,” is “nimble and quick,” and has “amazing trust.”  The first says that any time the player wants, they can narrate Rocky flying.  The next says that he can perform amazing feats of getting there in the last second.  The third says that Rocky will believe people, even the villains if they are in disguise, have good intentions and can be trusted.  You can see that the first gives them something fun to do, but the last two are about narrative conventions and fun ways to get the character into and out of trouble.
 
I haven’t seen the show in eons, but the powers and sayings refreshed my memory even though it’s decades old and put me in the mindset of the show.  A player looking at the cards in their hands and the back of their standee will have all kinds of ways to decide what to do when they are prompted.
 
The other difference of the second game is that there is a Narrator.  The Narrator is a standee card like the character cards, and the players take turns being the Narrator.  The Narrator standee has a picture of a microphone on the one side, and a list of things the Narrator can and should do on the other.  First, they can draw a card and discard a card if they want to.  This is a great mechanic for keeping your cards fresh while still making them have weight.  Second, there is a list of questions for the Narrator to ask as they please, and these questions basically set up the content and crisis of the scene: “Where is your character and what is he/she going to do?” “To what or whom are you going to do that?” “When are you going to do that?” “How are you going to do that?” “Are you going to let him/her get away with that?” “How are you going to stop that character from doing that to your character?”
 
I think the Narrator card is amazing because it is an entire GM course on one card, and the player doesn’t even know they are GMing.  Their only job is to ask questions and call for spins when those conditions are met.  Yes, a spin.  The game does have a resolution mechanism that kicks in when characters do something with “a real chance of failure” or when they “do something to another character” or if “there’s a disagreement between players.”  Each character has their own spinner, a little cardboard card with the classic plastic spinner in the center.  On each character’s card is some percentage “yes” and some percentage “no,” so that every spin results in a pass or fail state.  The Yes/No ratio on each card skews heavily toward the No, which means that characters will be messing up regularly.  Why? Because messing up is hilarious fun when you are telling a goofy story, and it is especially relevant to telling the type of stories on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show.
 
In my conversation on Twitter with Epidiah, it occurred to me that the game uses all these game features that we associate with board games in play: cards, character standees, and spinners (and there are even plastic hand-puppets for being really goofy).  In a lot of ways, I think the game is trying to make players comfortable with standard game pieces so that it feels like what they are doing is playing a more normal game than they really are.
 
What I see in this game that is so impressive is how it breaks down the activities of roleplaying into these simple component parts and lets players jump in with little prep or pre-discussion.  The GM tools are amazing, and the breadth of inspiration given to the players means that they will always have something fun and interesting to say when it’s their turn to speak.  Hooking this system up to the Rocky and Bullwinkle show is brilliant because the show models interesting failure and is so goofy in its nature that players will not likely feel self-conscious during play or feel the pressure to make the “perfect” move.
 
If you like storygames and like thinking about their design as creating interesting conversations, you can get a lot out of reading Bullwinkle and Rocky Role-Playing Party Game.  It has influenced how I am thinking about things, and it even had a major influence on the game I designed to completion the other week.  It’s a really rich game.

I’ve been playing RPGs for about 40 years.  I’ve been studying RPGs for nearly 4 years.  I’ve been noodling with design stuff for only about 2 years, but until now, nothing has ever made its way into a finished game.
 
I was inspired by Paul Beakley’s #OnRampJam (https://itch.io/jam/onrampjam-igrc) and started working on my design shortly after her announce the jam.  The premise of the jam is this:

​Not surprisingly, I had Apocalypse World on the brain (when don’t I have Apocalypse World on the brain?), but I also had the Bullwinkle and Rocky Role-playing Party Game on my mind and the way it uses cards to give the players something interesting to say whenever they need it.  Also back there was Sandman: Map of Halaal, and its use of cards to introduce mechanics to the players.  Finally, I had recently read John Harper’s 5 Minute One on One game, which I thought was a brilliant way to introduce new players to the hobby.
 
With all that, I knew I wanted a card-based game and I wanted to use the detective genre to cast as wide a net as possible.  Who doesn’t love watching/listening to/reading detective fiction?! No one I’d want to play with, I think.  I didn’t want to have any character creation, and I wanted the player, just by looking at the cards in their hand, the cards on the table, and the situation in their head to have something fun and exciting to say.  I wanted the new player to not only be able to play the game but to actively build the fiction with the GM.
 
Originally, all the cards were going to be on the player’s side, but then I decided the GM should have a hand of cards that functions similarly to the player’s.  This arrangement would make it clear that both players were equal participants in the game, with a different focus but with the same basic tools.  As I developed the game and talked it over with Ann, my wife, I decided that the game could not only serve to introduce new players to the hobby, but if the GM cards were done well, it could be a game to introduce experienced players to the role of GM.  I loved that idea and ran with it.
 
The resulting game is “Dorm Detective” (a weak pun on the phrase Dime Detective—I’m not proud).  Because some cards needed to have a front and a back, the resulting document is 8 pages long, which when printed out are 4 double-sided pages.  Since the jam was specific about the 1-2 page length, I decided against submitting the game to the jam.  So instead, I thought I’d share it here.
 
I am not a graphic designer, so there is nothing fancy in the layout or presentation. It took me 12 hours to lay it all out as it is.  I can’t imagine how long designers take to make their stuff look appealing in addition to being playable.
 
I welcome your thoughts and feedback, and will be happy to answer any questions!
 
Thanks for reading!

​With the 3rd season of Stranger Things released, I pulled Kids on Bikes off my shelf to give it a read.  This is the first game book in this genre that I have read--Tales from the Loop is so damn big (but beautiful, of course)!  The art in Kids on Bikes has its own beauty (Heather Vaughn has a cool, moody aesthetic going on), and the book is strikingly lean, a mere 55 pages of rules and procedures.  I was impressed with (and appreciative of) how concise the rules are; nothing is sacrificed in that concision.
 
The game helps you tell stories of small-town mysteries of the Stranger Things variety, though there’s no reason the rules couldn’t be used for more mundane stories, like Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys stories.  Actually, there’s no reason the rules couldn’t be used to tell any type of story in a small town because the rules of play don’t consist of anything more than a resolution mechanic.
 
Characters consist of 6 stats, and each stat is given a die size—d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20.  When your character attempts to do “something that runs the risk of failure” (27), you work out which stat your character is relying on to accomplish the thing, and then the GM assigns a target number for you to roll against.  If you roll at or above the target number you succeed in your attempt.  If you roll below the target number you fail in your attempt.  The more you miss or exceed the target number, the worse your failure or greater your success.  There is a chart to guide GMs in creating target numbers, and a chart to guide the players in interpreting the degrees of success and failure.  That latter chart also dictates who has narrative control over the success and failure.
 
That’s really the heart of the game once characters are created and the scenario is underway.  There are no special mechanics for investigating a mystery, spying, meddling, questioning others, or anything else.  I’m not a fan of creating target numbers as a GM, and simple success/failure mechanics leave me uninspired.  The authors give advice to GMs not to let failures just mean the end of a line of inquiry, but there’s no mechanical way to make failure mean anything other than “you don’t get what you want.”
 
That said, the game has a nice character creation system that builds your small town and places your characters into a web of relationships with the other PCs and the various NPCs that get created in the process.  You choose strengths (which have mechanical weight) and weaknesses (which are purely fictional) and answer both relationship questions and personal questions in what looks like a fun session zero.
 
The most innovative element in the game’s design is the creation of the “powered characters.” After the game begins, the GM can introduce a new character with powers (yep, just like Eleven).  The powered character doesn’t belong to any specific player.  Instead, the GM writes aspects or traits on index cards and distributes them to the players.  Each player has control over those aspects on the cards they get.  Through play the GM can reveal more about the character simply by handing out a new trait or aspect.  So the players might only know that the character is shy, quick to anger, likes kittens, and hates confined spaces when they meet him.  Those trait cards give the players what they need to play the character however they want within those bounds.  Then as powers or other aspects are revealed, players gain control of those new aspects as well.  The appendix in the book provides a list of aspects and powers to help the GM create powered characters without stress.
 
The GM section devotes a good deal of time to safety and healthy, open conversation among the group.  It also walks the GM through the process of mining the information revealed in town and character creation for hooks and story ideas.  It’s a solid suggestion, and happens to follow my usual process—I thought it was well explained with the authors’ typical concision.  What the game doesn’t give the GM is any tools for making story creation or running the game any easier.  With a resolution system and some advice about story creation and working with players and controlling pacing, the game leaves the rest up to the players.
 
In short, the game has a great setup, a workable resolution system, and some fine advice.  That’s probably all any experienced gamer needs to have a good time, but it’s certainly not all I want a game to offer.  

Magpie has finally sent out rewards for their Zombie World Kickstarter, and the game should be widely available at this point to the public.  I say “finally” not because they were long overdue, but because I was excited to see the product.  I had not read any of the draft and early rules that Magpie shared through the Kickstarter, so reading through the rules and cards were my first experience with the game.  There is a lot to love here.
 
There has been a lot of experimenting with packaging and presentation in the RPG field lately.  We’re seeing a lot of games being published that don’t take the form of a single book.  Star Crossed comes packaged with a set of tumbling blocks, printed cards and character sheets, and a pamphlet of rules.  The King is Dead has individual play booklets and various optional sets of cards.  The Companions’ Tale is a card game with a thin booklet of rules.  While these innovations eat up a lot more room on our bookshelves, they all cut down drastically on the amount of time we have to invest in learning to play the games.  And of course they emphasize the “game” part of the title role-playing game, making these games look like other games sold in small and medium boxes.
 
Zombie World makes it so that you do not even have to print anything out.  If you have the box and its contents with you, you can play the game without needing so much as a pencil.  (Well, okay, you might want to have a set of dry-erase markers, but you can make do with the one provided if you’re a patient and friendly group.)  The rulebook is a small and beautifully produced 5”x6.5” booklet of 33 pages.  Unlike Star Crossed, Zombie World doesn’t avoid the RPG title or terminology, but it does avoid giving overelaborate instructions, assuming a base familiarity with RPGs or assuming that a base familiarity is unnecessary.
 
The game comes with 8 glossy cardstock character sheets that can be written on with dry-erase markers.  Because your character’s details come primarily on the playing cards that are the center of the game, there is very little information that players need to write on their sheets.  There are 4 stats, a stress track, a space for you name, and an area to write the names of the various NPC allies you have.  Other than that, the card includes two basic moves, and a place to put your character cards associated with your past (pre-zombie occupation, your present (job within the enclave of survivors), and your trauma (that you suffered surviving for as long as you have).  Players also get a glossy card with all the other basic moves they’ll need for the game (yes, the game uses Apocalypse World mechanics, but it doesn’t market itself as a pbta game).  The moves are divided into basic moves on one side of the card and zombie moves (meaning, moves you make when dealing with zombies) on the other side.  Anything else you might need to play your individual characters are included on those set of cards I already mentioned with your past, present, and trauma.
 
The GM gets their own glossy card, with the order of play and a few specific rules on one side of the card, and a set of lists on the other side.  Those lists are things like useful items that will probably enter the fiction at some point, places characters might visit, and names for NPCs.  The card also includes two of the moves the players will commonly make, for the GM’s convenience.
 
The rest of the game exists in a series of decks of regular-sized cards.  There is a deck of pasts, presents, and traumas.  Your past begins in the face-down position, and the card gives you instructions on what you have to do within the fiction to reveal your card in play.  Once it is in play, it gives you a bonus under certain thematically-relevant conditions.  Your present begins play face up and can consist of a variety of things.  You might change a stat because of your role, or you might have a special move that you have access to.  All present cards give you a unique way to clear stress from your stress track.  Like pasts, trauma cards begin face down.  As long as they are face down, you can use that information to guide your roleplaying, but they don’t have any mechanical effect on play.  You can reveal your trauma anytime you want once you’ve brought your character revealing the trauma into the fiction. When you reveal it, it might, like your present, affect your stats or give you a special move.  Moreover, while it is revealed, you get a new way to clear stress (though that way is typically by engaging in that traumatic behavior) or some other tweak to how your character plays.
 
There is also an enclave deck.  At the beginning of play, you choose which enclave your survivors will be living in.  Each enclave consists of two cards.  The first card gives you a couple of moves that are unique for that location.  The second card has a list of options for your enclave, lists of scarcities, populations living with the enclave, surrounding geographical features, and possible advantages.  At the beginning of play, because characters are made, players take turns selecting items from the lists to define the specific advantages and drawbacks of their chosen setting.
 
There is an advantages deck that has one card for each possible advantage listed on the various enclave cards.  When they players choose an advantage, you pull that card out of the advantage deck, and it will let you know how that advantage affects the fiction and play, usually giving you a special move for when you try to make use of that advantage.
 
There is a Fate deck.  These card each have two uses.  Each card has a quick relationship detail.  After the enclave is created and characters are sketched out, the Fate cards are handed out between players to randomly assign a relationship fact between their two characters.  The Fate cards are also used as a way to kick off a session by providing an immediate crisis that the enclave is facing.  Whenever the situation is settled and a new status quo develops, the GM can draw from the Fate deck and see what new crisis tilts the enclave’s equilibrium.
 
The last two decks are used the most frequently once the players enter fictional play.  The Survivor deck is the main deck used in resolution.  The deck consists of 11 cards.  There are 6 misses, 3 edges, 1 triumph, and 1 opportunity.  A triumph corresponds with a 10+ in regular pbta games.  Edges are like the 7-9 result, and misses are misses.  The opportunity is a miss, unless the player wants to mark a stress on their character; if they do, then the opportunity counts as a triumph.  So whenever cards need to be drawn, the 11 cards are shuffled and the player draws a number of cards equal to their stat for whatever move they are making.  You can then play any one of the cards you drew (typically the best card, of course).
 
The Bite deck is the final deck.  It has 15 cards in it, and it is drawn from whenever a PC has a close call with a zombie.  The deck has 5 “safe” cards (you’re safe), four “something breaks” cards (which gives the GM permission to break something in the environment to worsen the characters’ situation), four “more zombies” cards (you get it), and one “bite” card.  If you draw the bite card, your character is going to die, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.  The GM and player can work out when and how that happens together, but it will happen before too long.  The bitch of the bite deck is that it is not shuffled after each draw.  It is shuffled once at the start of the session, and then it is not shuffled again until the bite card is drawn.  Right?
 
Situations for the game write themselves, so there is no prep needed by the GM.  The enclave has weaknesses, the characters have drives, and there are hordes of zombies in the outside world—things can take care of themselves from there.  In one-shots, the story is about these particular characters surviving (or not) in the zombie apocalypse.  In campaign play, the story is about the enclave and how it stands or falls no matter how many individuals pass through its halls.
 
There are a lot of things I love about the way the game is constructed.  I love that past and trauma cards remain face down until you want to introduce them.  So you can reveal or hide them for a number of reasons.  First, you can use them to fuel your roleplay, hinting at things if you want or not if you don’t.  Second, you can reveal them at a dramatic moment, if you choose.  Third, you can reveal them solely because you want the benefit they offer.  Finally, you can choose not to reveal them and not to let them inform your roleplaying.  You don’t get to choose your past or trauma; they are just given to you.  So if you get a trauma you don’t want to play out, don’t.  If you never flip the card over, it never enters the fiction as a fact, and you can have whatever past and trauma you imagine for your character.  And when you don’t flip the card, there is implicit tension there as other players wonder what they don’t know about your character.  In addition to all these cool things, the help or interfere move makes you draw cards equal to the number of face up cards the player you are helping or interfering with has.  It’s a quick and easy way to see how well the enclave knows your character, how vulnerable and exposed they have been made in this apocalypse.  And since you can gain multiple traumas through play, you can conceivably have someone draw 5 cards to help you, which is one hell of an incentive to be open.
 
Traumas are also a neat way to have your character exist thematically in this apocalyptic world.  Every time something goes wrong, you have to mark stress, because this is a stressful world.  When you mark your fifth stress, you erase all your stress and take a new trauma.  If you ever draw a fifth trauma card, your PC becomes and NPC.  But each trauma can also make your character stronger or more effective in some way, so gaining stress and trauma is not a frustrating experience for players.  As such, the game rewards you for leaning into the thematic content of the game.  In addition, the more trauma you have, the more tools you have to clear stress, so there is a self-correcting tool to let you slow down the traumas you’ll have as you go.  To make matters better, the means for clearing that stress makes for excellent drama.  For example, one trauma is “xenophobic.”  To clear stress once you are xenophobic, all you have to do is “barricade a place and someone is left outside.”  Oh shit.  That’s awesomely horrible.
 
In addition to trauma of course, you can be taken out by other means.  PCs do not have hit points or a harm track.  So the only ways to be removed from the game outside of trauma is if you draw that bite card or if you draw a miss when you suffer serious harm.  Suffer serious harm is a harm move for non-zombie violence, and it’s a really well-designed move.  If the harm you suffer isn’t serious, just play it as an inconvenient and quick-healing wound.  If it is serious, then you draw cards from the Survivor deck.  The number of cards you draw is determined by how intentional the injury was (was someone trying to kill you?), how lethal the source of harm was (were you shot with a gun?), and whether you had any protection (were you wearing a flak jacket, by chance?).  In the worst case, you draw just one card, which gives you more than a 50% chance to miss, and on a miss you die.  Those are serious stakes.  Death in this game is necessarily always on the table.
 
The basic moves are wonderfully conceived as well.  Your move to influence someone else demands that you “get in someone’s face.”  There is no seduction or manipulation, only savage aggression.  But my favorite basic move is the do something under fire move: “When you try to avert disaster, say what you’re trying to prevent and draw Survival.  On a Triumph, you manage it.  On an Edge, you pull through, but it will cost you.  The GM will offer you a hard bargain, ugly choice, or Pyrrhic victory.”  To me, the beauty of this move exists in the wording of the trigger: avert disaster.  You know exactly when to make this move and when not to.  Are you trying to do something hard?  Who cares!  Is that hard thing a desperate attempt to avert disaster?  If you fail, will disaster befall you and your friends?  It’s such a clear fictional marker and it avoids the abuse or over use of the move to cover situations for which it is not intended.  I love it.
 
I haven’t had a chance to play the game yet, but I’m very much looking forward to our next one-shot night!

Recently I reread Robin D. Laws’s essay “The Hidden Art: Slouching towards a Critical Framework for RPGs,” published in Inter*Action in 1994.  In it, Laws proposes ways to approach critical analysis of RPGs by looking at how film was analyzed and criticized from the time it was a young art form to when it became a readily acknowledged artform of its own.
 
I first read the article three years ago when I was beginning my journey into RPG theoretical thought.  I hadn’t yet read much of Ron Edwards’s essays from the Forge or Vincent Baker’s “anyway” blog posts, and I was excited about what this field that was new to me would yield.  At that time, I was impressed by Laws’s writing and voice, but I didn’t get much from the essay, primarily because it didn’t discuss analysis of the sort I was interested in.  Approaching it now, however, I was struck by how insightful he is, and how he misses the central question at the heart of what he discusses.
 
Laws gets a lot right in this essay, and is at times prescient about where we have come.  His proposed political analysis of D&D is one I see people discussing (and arguing over) still today (notably without any credit to Laws):

Laws looks at auteur theory in film and wonders if such a thing could apply to RPG design.  Laws’s interest in auteur theory is connected to genre in film, but one could argue that there is most certainly something of an auteur belief system that grew up in the indie scene as certain game designers have unique approaches and elevated status.  Laws wonders,

This kind of analysis is certainly happening now and has been going on for some years now.
 
But as much as I enjoy looking at Laws’s successes, I’m more interested at the moment in his failure in this essay.  In comparing RPG studies to film studies, Laws observes that to discuss RPGs we need to figure out what it’s language and grammar is, just as film critics needed to discover the unique language and grammar of film:

What Laws lands upon as a possible grammar of RPGs are the mechanics of the games:

That’s of course a clever approach, and a reasonable one.  But it misses what is the core element of RPGs, the very medium of RPGs.  Films unique medium is a two-dimensional moving visual frame.  In RPGs, that medium is not mechanics, but conversation.  RPGs exist only in the exchanging of words and thoughts between the members in the group.  Mechanics are engaged through the conversation and become the subject of conversation and in turn shape the conversation and how a game plays out at a table.
 
Obviously, the observation that conversation is the medium of RPGs is not my own insight.  I first learned it from Baker’s “anyway” blog, and the topic was central to conversation happening on the Forge.  I do not know to what extent that thought is just an accepted fact, to what extent it is disputed, and to what extent it is unknown.  I think it’s funny when I hear people talk about pbta games as though they are unique in having something central called “The Conversation,” as though the conversation is a construct created by Apocalypse World and its successors.
 
So what struck me in my reading of Laws’s essay this time through is that we now have the answer to the question, what is the medium of RPGs?  And the answer to that question allows us to launch again from where Laws brought us in his essay and think about what is the “grammar” of that conversation, as created by various RPGs.  Comparing Eisenstein’s editing to Orwell’s mise en scene has parallels in the conversation that happens at an RPG game.  How is the conversation divided?  Who introduces new information into the fiction, and how, and when?  Who can introduce backstory, and how, and when?  How often does one player talk, and for how long, and what is the nature of their statements or questions?  All the rules and procedures of the games shape and affect the conversation in the same way that camera placement, lens selection, film choice, and editing affect the visual created for a film. That analogy moves from being a merely interesting idea to a productive line of thought, or at least it does in my head.
 
Perhaps I am having revelations and thoughts that are commonplace and old hat. That happens.
 
The lesson for me in this is not to think of any piece of writing as having been “read.”  You will always be in a different place in your own head and experience each time you read a thing, so revisit and reread and rediscover.

I never read the Fighting Fantasy books when I was young, didn’t even know they existed.  I first learned about them in the last three years as I’ve been digging into RPGs and narrative games.  For plenty of game designers, these solo adventure books were early inspiration, and having finally read one of them, I can understand why.  I decided to start with the Sorcery! Series because I didn’t intend on reading a lot of these books and I remember reading about this particular series on Vincent Baker’s “anyway” blog when someone in the community brought it up in a discussion about magic systems.  When someone brought it up again the other day, I decided it was a sign to dive in.
 
The trick of this specific set of five books is that you play a sorcerer (surprise!) with a spellbook of 48 spells, only it is unsafe to bring the spellbook on your journey, so you have to have your spells memorized when you play.  Each spell has a three-letter name, which is related to the nature of the spell, some closely related, other more obscurely.  The fireball spell, for example, is HOT, and the lightning bolt spell is ZAP.  DOZ lets you slow down an attacking creature to one-sixth its regular speed.  Of course, you might forget and think it’s a sleep spell.  Some spells don’t require anything other than your stamina (one of your character’s stats in the game), while others require a general or specific ingredient.  One spell, for example, requires sand, while another needs a Bracelet of Bone.  The Sorcery Spell Book lists all 48 spells roughly in order of relevance, each with a picture; the name of the spell; a description of the spell, its limitations, and any ingredients required; and the cost to your stamina to cast it.  It’s a simple, but nicely designed book.  While it sucks that you have to shell out the extra money for it if you want to play a wizard in the regular game books, it’s a neat little artifact and makes it easy to not cheat, if you want to follow the rules of the book.
 
When you come to an entry in the game books in which you are asked if you want to cast a spell, the book gives you five of the three-letter titles, but not all of the options are real spells.  So you need to know, which spell you want to cast, what it’s called, if you have enough stamina to cast it, and if you have any ingredients necessary for the casting.  When you make a wrong choice, you have to spend the stamina anyway, so it can be costly to make a mistake.  If you choose a spell that doesn’t exist, you lose more stamina than any actual spell option, and sometimes the time you waste can cost you in injuries or even death.  The game books are designed to be played even if you don’t have the spell book, so there is always a non-magical option.  They were kind enough to flag the six most common spells, so that if you memorized nothing else, you can know those six spells, two offensive, two defensive, and two that manipulate other creatures.  Those spells are the most flexible, but also the most costly, so if you can remember more spells, you can gain advantages, but you never suffer penalties if you don’t.  All these elements together create a clever design that doesn’t punish you for being lazy (or not caring), rewards you for putting in the effort, and has a sliding scale for how much you can memorize so that it is challenging without being daunting no matter what your skill.  I made a few mistakes that cost me (I forgot the levitation spell required a jewel-studded medallion!), but never fell for a spell that didn’t exist, and felt damn clever about it.
 
The adventure itself, The Shamutanti Hills, is really well done.  I was expecting something close to the Choose Your Own Adventure books, which I did read plenty of when I was a kid.  I enjoyed those books, but I was often frustrated by the drastic turn that harmless decisions could make.  (All I decided to do was talk to the old man and I somehow ended up dead?!) By introducing stats and die rolls, the Fighting Fantasy books avoid these surprise catastrophic twists (for the most part) because there are ways for the reader/player to absorb the danger and decide which risks are worth taking.  The entries themselves are pretty short, so you get the fictional details and are given a set of choices.  Each step is pretty incremental so the story doesn’t take large leaps very often.  And when danger comes, you have a Skill stat, which tells you how good you are at fighting, a Stamina stat, which lets you measure how much you can endure before exhaustion and death, and a Luck stat, which lets you take chances and push your luck to a greater effect at a greater risk.  It surprised me how much was gained by including these simple stats to the game.
 
Skill goes up and down rarely.  You use the stat for combat, and if you lose your sword (which I did), your Skill might be drastically reduced until you can replace your weapon (it cost me my character’s life when he got into a fist fight with a wolfhound in the night), but other than that, it’s pretty steady.  Stamina is a kind of Hit Points, and it goes up and down a lot.  In this particular game book, you are on a journey and you have to keep track of your provisions and rest.  If you go a day without eating, it takes a toll on your stamina.  If you go a night without sleeping, that too hurts your stamina score.  Getting hurt in combat and casting spells also reduce the score.  Eating, sleeping, and healing methods can increase your stamina.  My favorite stat, mechanically speaking, is Luck.  You begin the game with a d6+6 of Luck (so 7-12).  Every time you “test your luck,” you roll 2d6.  If you get your luck score or lower, you succeed in the test and get whatever benefit you’re looking for.  But after each test, you have to reduce your luck score by one.  It doesn’t take long to take a decent Luck score to become a true gamble, and I love the simplicity of the mechanic and the curve of difficulty.  You’re probably safe for the first couple rolls if your stat starts high, but soon, you sweat it.
 
In addition to those stats, as I said, you’re keeping track of other things.  This particular book has you on a journey through wilderness, so keeping track of your provisions is important.  You also have a supply of gold which you can use in the various towns to get a safe night’s sleep or buy new provisions, and sometimes equipment too.  You also keep a list of your supplies, so you know if you have spell ingredients or things to bargain with.  In addition, you have a box on your character sheet for keeping track of “bonuses, penalties, curses, etc.”  I was surprised what this little box did for a solo adventure game.  Because you can keep track of things, the fictional events in the book can easily have lasting repercussions.  At one point I entered a town suffering from the plague and contracted the disease.  As a result, every morning I had the disease, I had to reduce my stamina by 3.  So even though the entries of the story never brought up my disease, I had to face it in the fiction in my head.  How cool is that?  The book didn’t have to do all the work because there were stats and a place to keep notes.
 
The last little mechanical thing that is really cool is that you are allowed one bequest from your god, Libra.  At any point in the story, you can call on your god, even if the entry you’re at doesn’t give you the option, to revitalize all your stats (put them all at their starting value) or remove a curse or disease.  Moreover, at certain points in the book, the list of options includes praying to your god for a miraculous escape from an impossible situation.  But you can only use the bequest once, so choose wisely.  It’s a neat get-out-of-jail free card and it made the game more enjoyable to have that in your pocket.  I used mine when I was in the climactic labyrinth and found myself about to drown without recourse.  I had forgotten about it when I was suffering from the plague, but I was glad I didn’t use it before I really needed it!
 
Those are the simple mechanics, and they raise the Fighting Fantasy books so far above the Choose Your Own Adventure books that I can’t even see them from here.
 
The story structure is well done too.  In Shamutanti Hills, you are heading on the first part of your quest through the titular hills.  The journey takes (not that you know this at the beginning) five days, and the narrative is structured by those day breaks, so that no matter what adventure paths you take, all readers will be at the same place at the end of the third day, the end of the fourth day, and the end of the adventure (assuming they survive, of course).  Each day has a number of paths so that you will have one major encounter no matter what path you take, and how much you want to engage in that encounter is mostly up to you.  Sometimes you’re in the thick of it whether you want to be or not, but usually when you play it safe, the book lets you have low stakes in your adventure.  Of course, the rewards are commensurate with the risk, but the option is always yours.
 
I particularly love that there are separate adventure paths even within paths so that you can play the adventure many times and have radically different experiences.  If, for example, you end up in the Goblin caves (instead of the Elvin village or running into the Headhunters), you may encounter an ogre, or a goblin boss or a cave-in.  When you finish that particular encounter, the story puts you back on the road to your journey, so there is no way to see everything.  The only way I know about all these possible paths is that I made a chart of every path because I was curious to see how the game was structured.  As you would think, the possibilities are great at the start of the game and narrow as you work your way toward the end, so that everyone end up in the same climactic scene no matter where they go (assuming again that you survive).
 
To make your specific path meaningful, the designer put in a bunch of referential items and passages so that you can have these Aha! moments.  For example, if you buy an axe from a merchant in the first village, you can find the creator of that axe in the fourth village and return it to him for information and gifts.  Or you can find a key in the goblin caves and find the cage that it opens later in the adventure.  Cooler still, because the book was written as part of a four-book series, your specific adventures here in book one will affect things in book two!  For example, if you spare the assassin his life, he’ll offer you something special in the city you are headed to, and you are given an entry number to check out once you arrive in that city in book two to meet up with the assassin and get his assistance.  Or a character might tell you to call on his friend when you get to the city and give you his three-letter name, so that when that name appears in a spell list in the second book, if you choose it, you call on his friend.  These little moments, simple as they are, make the world feel large and full of life.
 
As you can tell, I was impressed by my experience.  I played the book more as a study than for play itself and found myself having a great time and tickled by what the art form could do.
 
The writing is direct and descriptive, which is just about perfect.  Nothing too flowery, but I could always get a sense of space and environment.
 
The only disappointment in the book is the horrible racist portrayal of the headhunters.  They are bad, bad, bad, and I would love to see them stricken from the book.

“Sixteen Sorrows” is a supplement designed by Kevin Crawford for his game about “divine heroes in a broken world,” Godbound.  I don’t play Godbound, I haven’t played Godbound, and I haven’t even read Godbound.  I came to “Sixteen Sorrows” from a podcast I’ve been listening to when someone referred to the text as something they go to when they are looking to throw together a rough outline of an encounter to bring into play in a fantasy RPG.  From what I had heard, Crawford has a talent for useful tables, so I picked the book up on that recommendation.
 
Wow.  This book is impressive at every level.  It is direct, thoughtful, inspiring, and imminently useful.  It is designed for Godbound, but the situations it creates are portable into any game and any genre (though the tables are geared specifically for a world of sorcerers, bandits, petty lords, and struggling peasants).  Because the characters of Godbound have godlike powers, the situations that this supplement sets up are vast in scope, dealing with famines, plagues, ethnic wars, natural disasters, and invading armies.  But for games without such mighty protagonists, the same situations can either serve as the problematic backdrop that generates smaller challenges, or they can themselves be scaled down to an appropriate size, so that the “mad demagogue” becomes a mayor instead of a king.
 
The book wastes no words.  There is a short introduction and then each sorrow is given two pages: a page of explanation, and a page of tables.  The explanation pages contain thorough explanations of the problems and things that you need to consider in building the situation.  They are insightful, well-written, and useful in helping you apply the concepts to what you’re creating.  I found Crawford’s clarity of vision itself inspiring.  He has a talent for breaking down a complicated social situation into its basic elements and then communicating how to fiddle with those elements to build up a compelling and intriguing situation.  Even if this book didn’t have a single table to roll on, these explanations and analyses would be well worth the price of the book.
 
The tables have a reasonable number of entries, and each one can lead to a different story.  The real piece de resistance, though, is the “Adventure Seed” table.  Each sorrow has an adventure seed table that offers up 5 possible situations that call for you to pull from the various tables provided.  Here’s an example from “Evil Sorcerer”: “An Antagonist takes the guise of a Friend, secretly working to convince the PCs to destroy a rival Antagonist, yet setting them up to be betrayed afterwards through the power of a Thing they possess.  A Complication hints at the truth of the matter, however, if the PCs decide to investigate the source of the Complication or its fine details.”  So from there, you grab two antagonists from the Antagonist table (or roll for them), a friend from the Friend table, a thing from the Thing table, and a complication from the Complication table, and let your imagination work out the rest.  Here’s what I grabbed: “A gifted local wizard embittered against the people takes the guise of a community priest who inveighs against the wizardry, secretly working to convince the PCs to destroy a rival half-crazed wizard who pacted with the Uncreated, yet setting them up to be betrayed afterwards through the power of a grimoire of theurgic invocations or deep magic they possess.  But the fact that the half-crazed wizard’s help is crucial to local authorities hints at the truth of the matter, however if the PCs decide to investigate the source of that needed help or its finer details.”  That gives you everything you need to start putting the situation and relationships together.
 
This is a reference that has a lot to give, and I expect it will be occupying my brain-space for a long time to come.

I’m looking today at the 2018 publication of Avery Alder’s Dream Askew and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Dream Apart.  This is a look at the text and mechanics, not a review or play report.  In fact, I have not played either game, so take that for what it’s worth.
 
The two games in the collection are presented at “two points [that] make a line” (161)., and the book devotes a chapter at the end of the book to creating your own game using the same system.  The uniting similarity in the subject matter of these games are that they create stories “about marginalized groups establishing an independent community just outside the boundaries of a dominant culture” (161).  Alder’s poetic name for this type of story is “belonging outside belonging.” In Dream Askew, players play characters in a post-apocalyptic quee community that exists on the edges of “the society intact.”  In Dream Apart, players play members of a fantastical 19th-century Eastern European shtetl.
 
Dream Askew was originally  a hack of the Bakers’s Apocalypse World, and it still wears that heritage on its sleeve, or, its playbooks.  But the belonging outside of belonging system is markedly different from the other games powered by the Apocalypse.  First, there is no GM or MC (or there are many GMs and MCs if you prefer to look at it that way), and second, there are no dice.  Alder calls the system, for obvious reasons, “no dice, no masters.”
 
Replacing the dice is a simple token economy.  On each playbook characters have a list of strong, regular, and weak moves.  Any time a character makes a weak move, the player gets a token, and any time the character makes a strong move, the player must spend a token.  Regular moves neither gain nor require tokens.  Weak moves “show us your character’s vulnerability, folly, or even just plain rotten luck,” and strong moves “are the moments when your character’s skill, power, astute planning, and good luck come to bear and transform a situation” (31).  Weak moves “illuminate how the character role copes with stress, fear, and scarcity,” while strong moves “showcase how a character claims power, what instincts they have well-honed, and what value they bring to their community” (166). Each character also has a “lure,” which encourages other players to have their characters interact with your character in a specific way.  For example, the stitcher’s lure says, “whenever someone comes to you with something precious that needs fixing, they gain a token.”  All lures reward players with tokens.
 
In lieu of an MC, these games each provide six “setting elements,” which tell the players what aspects of the world are important to each game.  The setting elements are picked up and put down as needed, with each player being responsible for only one element at a time.  The elements are a neat design.  Whenever an element is picked up for the first time, including at the start of play, the player who picks it up marks two “desires” from a pick list, which defines the specific nature of that element in this particular game we’re playing.  For example, the pick list of desires for the setting element “Outlying Gangs” in Dream Askew is this: “territory, unspoken fealty, splendor, the smell of fear, home-cooked meals, mutant blood, somewhere safe to sleep.”  So every time you play Dream Askew, there will be outlying gangs at play, but the nature of those gangs will shift each game as one player characterizes them with two items taken from the list.  It’s a great way to define the element and tonal range of that element while at the same time allowing room for taste and, of course, replayability.  Setting element playsheets also have a short list of moves to help players figure out how to have the setting express itself in the fiction.
 
There are a ton of things to turn over and analyze here, but I want to jump to what is most surprising to me.  The up-to-now standard way of doing things in GMless/GMful games is that the system must take over some of the duties that have traditionally belonged to the GM, such as spotlight control and scene construction authority. Many games have relied on turn taking to ensure that each character gets an equal number of scenes and to designate who is responsible to setting each scene.  No such system exists when you’re “playing the dream.”
 
Players are encouraged to begin play by “idle dreaming’:

Eventually the process of ideal dreaming results in the players finding a scene they want to play out or an area of the world they want to explore through play. The players work out for themselves which scene they will play and where it will begin. There are no mechanics in place for who speaks when to establish what in the fiction.  The expected (and required) negotiations rely on players being generous with each other and fans of the other characters, which is what many elements of the design are made to do, create that space of shared kindness, respect, and curiosity.
 
In addition to have no system for scene creation, there is no system for who talks when as the scene unfolds.  If your character is in a scene you can make their moves.  If the setting element you hold is relevant, you can make setting moves, and if the setting element you hold is not relevant, you can look at the unused setting elements to see if they are and pick them up instead.  In addition, players can ask questions and throw out suggests at any time.  The character playbooks and setting elements are about what to say, not when to say it.  Even Archipelago III has a more defined system for when and what players can say through its ritual phrases.
 
The complete lack of rules governing the conversation is shocking to me because it is so unusual.  But it makes perfect sense for telling this kind of story, right?  The world of Dream Askew has the possibility of being anarchic (in the political sense) and that is, I’d argue, the ideal state of things, where there is no power structure but equality and the rules that govern are those of respect, kindness, and love.  Alder’s system works to create that at the table, or at least create the space for that to happen at the table.  Alder makes sure there are safety tools in place, allowing players to pause play to deal with problematic content, encouraging players to ask questions so that they understand game concepts or concepts in the fiction that are unclear to them, and permitting players to gently correct each other to share subject information during play.  In addition to these tools, each game comes with a recipe related to the game so that players can eat together and connect as a group of human beings before playing the game.  For the game to work smoothly and safely, players much have the means to feel safe, comfortable, and united to some degree.  Even removing the dice is to an extent a safety tool.  Your character can only enter into trouble and hard times as you dictate them.  You say when they are weak and you say when they are strong.
 
It’s a cool design.
 
The vulnerability of the design is of course the same vulnerability of anarchic societies.  They are vulnerable to strong personalities taking control.  They are vulnerable to a group of timid players tiptoeing around scenes, not wanting to mess things up or get things too dirty.  Every game system is of course vulnerable to players; that’s part of the thrill of our hobby.  Players are always what makes the game fantastic or disappointing, and a system needs to support players to be at their best and make it difficult for them to be at their worst even if it can’t stop them.  There is a vast amount of trust in Alder’s design, and it puts that trust in its players and attempts to build that trust between its players, and then it relies on that trust to make the game the experience everyone wants it to be.
 
My guess is experience with the system will vary widely, both between groups and between individuals.  For some, it will be everything they have been looking for in an RPG; for others it won’t provide the gas and random inputs they want to create stories that threaten to run out of their control.  But that’s a good place for a game to be, or any piece of art.  Those who love the work will find it and be thankful it’s there.  Those who don’t have plenty of other places to turn to.

Cat is the third John Wick game that I have read, and like all of his other books, this one is an enjoyable read.  Wick exceeds at creating clever worlds with strong interior logic and humor.  Cat reminds me of Orkworld in that the big lure of the game to me is less in its mechanical workings and more in its fictional setup.
 
Cat is about “cats who protect their owners from monsters they can’t see.”  Players play cats in our real world whose owners suffer from the insidious attacks of Boggins.  Boggins are invisible to human eyes, and in the game, they are the physical representations of the troubles we experience—self doubt, depression, guilt, worry, etc.  In putting together the world, Wick makes sense of the odd and funny behavior of cats and dogs and humans.  It is a lovingly created game and a love song to the cats in our lives and our special relationships with them.
 
The mechanics of the game are simple and functional.  Characters have a set of stats that cover the various actions cats might do in any given session.  Cats have special traits called “reputations” that help them do those tasks.  Between their trait dice and their reputation dice and any advantage dice they might pick up from narrative positioning or GM good will, the player puts together a pool of dice to see if their cat succeeds at their risky task.  Evens rolled designate a success; odds denote a failure.  The player counts up their number of successes and see if they meet the number needed.  Worse comes to worst, players can use one of their cats starting nine lives to guarantee an automatic success.
 
There are rules for fighting, suffering wounds, and healing.  There is a subsystem for magic and a set of 8 tricks (cats perform tricks with magic, not cast spells) that can do things like make you always land on your feet or magically slip through a closed door.
 
The rules are simple, designed to allow for improvisational play by both the players and the GM (whose roll is called “the narrator”).  The game text comes with several starting situations with the idea that little other preparation is required to move into play.  Everything else, then, just needs to be functional and easily applied to make play as smooth as possible.  Players are here to be cats, not to marvel at the mechanics of the game.
 
That said, there is one mechanism that I find clever.  Cats get scars as their form of injury.  The way you determine your scars is this.  After you roll, if you don’t have enough evens (successes) to overcome your task, and if the failure risks injury in one form or another, then you look at your dice pool and find the lowest odd number that you rolled.  That number is the number of scars that you take.  This little device seems to be the reason to use even and odds (rather than, say, the more common 4 and up versus 3 and under).  I have never seen that done before, and it makes the system of odds and evens worth it.  If you roll a large pool & you surprisingly fail, you’re likely to have a low odd so the scars are minimal.  When you only roll a few dice, the chances for large scars is more subject to the swing and luck of the dice.
 

I don’t know who or what directed me to Sebastian Hickey’s 2012 storytelling/map game Chronicles of Skin.  The rules of the game are available for free download at DriveThru, but the game is played with cards, and those cards are not available there.  So far as I know, the game is no longer in print, and the only place I know of to get a full copy of the game is on an Italian website, but I’m assured that the cards are in the original English.  If you’re looking for them (and/or a download of the Skin sheet), you can find them here: http://www.coyote-press.it/shop/skin/.
 
The game itself guides the players in telling the forgotten history of a great civil war between two cultures who were once united under a single leader.  In the first scene of play, that leader dies, and the schism begins.  Play then covers two or three additional pivotal moments from the war before it is discovered who won the war and what legacy the victors have left.
 
The central element of play is called the “skin”—this is a single page that holds the information about the two cultures at war and the 3 or 4 important locations in the realm.  Players draw on the map (I call it a map, but it’s less a geographic in nature than abstract in its representation), creating pictorial representations of the character of each of the cultures and the locations of their story.  As play progresses, the important events of each locations are added to the map, along with representations of the numbers who tragically fell there.  At the end of play, the skin becomes an artifact of play, a complete pictorial representation of the story that unfolded in play.
 
To make understanding the game as easy as possible, the rules include two versions of the game.  The Chronical version allows players to have complete artistic control over all the elements of play.  The Sketch version gives players the basic elements of the cultures and locations at the outset of play.  Play itself is also more structured in the Sketch version in order to introduce players to the unusual mechanics in the game.  The main mechanics during scenes come into play not when you way what the character you are playing does, but when you attempt to make another player’s character take action.  This simpler version is also a quick version, making the play experience a 90-minute game rather than a 4-hour game.  Unlike most basic versions that appear in RPGs, the Sketch version looks exciting to play even for experienced players.  (I say “looks” because I have not been able to play the game yet, though a friend was kind enough to sell me his physical copy when I made inquiries!)  I could see playing this version as a way to play quickly with new or experienced players and still have a great time.  I would not feel the need to skip this version to get to the good stuff, which says a lot about the way the game is constructed.
 
The two cultures are always called the Croen and the Iho.  In Chronicle play, the players use a set of rune cards to decide the nature of each culture by deciding the following things: each culture has an “aspect,” or some defining trait; a “belief,” a superstition or prophecy that’s important to the culture; and a “rule,” a privilege or crime that dictates conduct.  Once these three traits have been decided for both the Croen and the Iho, another card is used to determine the “unity,” an important person or mythological figure that is central to both cultures.  The rune cards each have four images, one for each of the four categories (aspect, belief, rule, and unity)—e.g. an anchor, a crown, a spider, a flame—and the players use that symbol as inspiration for whatever trait they are determining.  The rune cards are a neat prompt that gives players something tangible to bounce off when creating a trait.  Moreover, any single player is responsible for one small decision so the risk of creative paralysis is minimalized, and the resulting culture is both unique and something that everyone had a hand in.
 
The game is built around this idea of giving the players a handhold and then asking them to create something small to add to it.  The locations, for example all have names: Chikugo, Seraphim, Cross, and Byzen.  The players can then build off these names to create the places that they would like to see in the story.  So if you want a battle on open farmland, you might create the Byzen Plains.  Another might create the Chikugo Coast, or the Gates of Seraphim, or the Cross on the hill.  Players can look at the traits for the Croen and Iho that they have already created as further inspiration, so if the Iho are said to be fire-eating enchanters, a player might be inspired to create Mount Seraphim, an active volcano and a holy mecca to the Iho.  First the game gives you something, then you build on it, then it gives you something more, and you have that and everything that came before to build from.  Things grow organically and creativity leads to more creativity.
 
Play itself takes the form of a scene at each location on the map. Players take turns being the “scribe.”  The scribe has certain responsibilities that a GM might have in a traditional RPG.  The scribe sets the scene and decides which of the two cultures that scene will be about.  Then, once the scene is set, each player flips over a character card, and the character card tells them a bit about the character and leaves the player to fill in the detail.  The card gives you a name, a general rank (meaning high rank, medium rank, or low rank) in the social order, and then names a specific cultural trait and notes whether that character embodies (or benefits from) that trait or rejects (or is negatively affected by) that trait.  For example, a player might flip over Babyss, a low ranking Iho who supports, embodies, or benefits by the Iho aspect.  That gives you a lot of information to piece together a character who would belong in the scene the scribe has set.  You know who they are, where they stand in the power structure (especially in relation to the other characters), and you know what they believe in and embrace or what they reject and fight against. 
 
The rules for play are stricter in the Sketch version than in the Chronicle Version, but in both versions players take their primary actions by either choosing to “puppet” another character or by introducing an “event” that happens within the scene that then requires another character to be “puppetted” in response.  To “puppet” is merely to tell another player what you want their character to do.  The player can either accept this action or reject it.  If the action is accepted, it happens.  If rejected, there is a resolution mechanic that decides if the action happens or not.
 
All of this means that characters are handled very differently than traditional RPG systems.  First, players play 3 or 4 characters in the course of the game, and they manipulate other players’ characters.  It’s a clever way to make sure that everyone is invested in what every character says and does without letting players step on each other’s toes in gameplay.
 
The secret to making this work is to have a functional system of negotiating between players.  First, because players are always playing different characters, they have no reason to be overly invested in the actions of this particular characters, so agreeing to another player’s suggestions is made easier by that alone.  Second, everyone takes the same action by manipulating other characters so no one feels singled out when their character is targeted.  Then there is the important aspect of asking if the player accepts this dictated action.  This act of asking is echoed at the end of each scene when the scribe describes a tragedy to befall all the characters in the scene.  The scribe describes what the tragedy will do to a specific character and then asks the player if the character “will succumb to the tragedy.”  The player has the ability to say yes or no. 
 
What this system does, in effect, is make it so that two players need to agree to any significant action within the scene.  And rather than structuring it so that you ask another player for permission to make your own character do something, the designer structured it in a way that feels more natural to get someone else’s permission.
 
Behind all this negotiating, to give the negotiations weight and the resolution system meaning when it is used, is a token system.  Each player begins with a small number of tokens.  You must use a token (if you have one) to puppet a character or create an event, and then if your proposal is rejected, you can use tokens to increase your chance of winning the resolution.  These tokens, however, do not create an economy because you do not give your tokens to other players or win their tokens from them.  Instead, tokens that players bid go to what is called the “Tragedy Pile,” where, at the scene’s conclusion, the tokens are used to determine how many died in the tragic event that concludes each scene.  The more contention between players, the more dramatic the scene can be assumed to be, and this drama naturally results in a higher death toll.  And since tokens can be gained as play goes on, they make for a natural pacing and escalation mechanism as more tokens are spent in later scenes to allow for more drama and result in greater tragic loss.
 
When a scene concludes and the bodies are counted, everything is summarized on the map through pictures.  The elements from the scene are sketched onto the map as are the symbols for which cultures were involved in the scene.  The tragic end is also represented pictorially, and each token that ended in the Tragedy Pile is represented with a symbol from the culture that the dead belonged to.  At the end of the game, then, the map is an artifact with the entire history of the game represented on it, from the summaries of the cultures to the events of the four scenes.
 
Every aspect of the game is thoughtfully constructed.  I love the way the game gives productive and inspiring prompts while still trusting in the imaginations of the players.  I love the way that scenes unfold with this interesting give and take between players that actively affect the dramatic outcome of the scene.  I love the way the GMing responsibilities are spread out in a scene to allow everyone to be a player and no one to be an arbiter.  And I love the nod toward the politics of history in the way the game ends.
 
Once the 3 or 4 scenes have played out and the dead are counted, there is a system for finding out who won the war.  Once that is determined, each player takes turns in a kind of epilogue.  In the epilogue someone says how one of the traits from the culture that lost contributed to that loss.  Someone says how one of the traits from the culture that triumphed contributed to their triumph.  And finally, someone details how the winning culture’s traits has made the world a better place in the years following the war.  The players who a moment ago were impartial scribes trying to discover what happened have become the descendants of the victors of that war and are creating the teleological arc from that victory to now, explaining how the winners and losers were determined by their very traits, and how the winners have benefited the world through their winning.  It’s an incredible representation of the fact that history is written by the winners. If the game did nothing else, this aspect would impress me.
 
But it does so much more, and I’m excited to bring this game to the table.  I promised the friend who sent me the physical cards that I would write up an actual play report when I play, so I’ll be sure to share that here too as a follow up to this post.

Somehow Vincent Baker keeps creating incredible games.  I’m never shocked by what he puts out, but I am often in awe.  There are artists in every medium whose work you feel resonates with your soul more powerfully than other works, and something about the way I think about stories and gaming is deeply thrilled by the work Vincent puts out.  But if you’re here on my website, you undoubtedly already know that.
 
If you follow Vincent’s Itch.io page, or if you back his patreon,  or if you follow his Twitter, you will have seen that he has put out a set of games recently that have one player and a pair of “volunteers” who take several of the jobs of the traditional GM.  The first such game he published was “The Wizard’s Grimoire,” which he created for a game jam.  Shortly after that he created “The True and Preposterous Journey of Half-a-Fool” for another game jam, and then “The Barbarian’s Bloody Quest” as a complementary piece to “The Wizard’s Grimoire.”
 
In “The Wizard’s Grimoire,” the player creates a “conjurer, scholar, rogue, and ambitious minor wizard” (that’s one character) who is “bold, cunning, virtuous, and ambitious, in measure,” and who has come into possession of “The Signature of Aibesta of the Two Courts,” being the grimoire of said Aibesta. To create your character, you have to answer a set of six questions.  Each question presents a situation and a pair of responses, and which stat you mark is determined by which response you choose.  For example:

​In this way, because of the options the questions give you, you end up with having scores that range from 0 to 3 in four stats, with the points between them totaling 6, and no more than one stat having a 0 and no more than one stat having a 3.  When I played, I ended up with a wizard who had a virtuous of 0, bold of 1, ambitious of 2, and cunning of 3.  It is a super cool way to create stats because you have something specific to look at (your imagined character reactions to imagined situations) as opposed to just juggling numbers.  If you don’t like the numbers, of course, you can go back and retool your answers, but in doing so, you have to be able to imagine your character taking those actions, so your image of the character will necessarily have to match the numbers as they fall on your character sheet.  It’s fun, easy, and effective.  What more could you ask for?
 
Your character has 7 “exertions,” or what would be called “moves” in Apocalypse World:

Essentially, you can read a person, use magic, read a situation, exert yourself physically, do something sneakily, act violently, or endure whatever befalls you, which Vincent calls “submitting to circumstance.”  Each move uses your stats to calculate your move score, and each ends up being between 1 and 5.  When you exert yourself (make a move), you roll a single six-sided die.  If you roll your target number for that act or lower, you hit.  If you don’t, you miss.  For example, all wizards start with an exert yourself magically rating of 1.  So if you attempt to use magic, you have to roll a 1 to hit.
 
Each exertion is written out as a move, telling you what to do on a hit and what to tell your volunteers on a miss (more on that in a moment).  One of my favorite features of this system is the clever way that Vincent uses pick lists with this single die roll.  When you exert yourself empathetically to study and understand someone (i.e. read a person), you have a pick list of four questions you can ask.  But you can only ask as many questions as the number you rolled.  So, if you have an exert yourself empathetically rating of 4, you hit on a 1-4 and miss on a 5-6 and ask a number of questions on a hit equal to that roll.  But if you only have a rating of 2, even on a hit, you can never ask more than two questions, because your character is just not that good at exerting themself empathetically.  It’s awesome and clever and I love it and want to name it George.
 
Your goal as a player (it’s a Baker game; of course you have a stated goal) is 

Yes, that’s just a more fun way to play, but for this game it is absolutely necessary, because in this game, the player is driving all the action, and the volunteers are tasked with merely responding to what you do.  It is never incumbent upon them to say anything unprompted.  Here’s how the text explains it:
 
For each session, you’ll need to find two friends who’ll volunteer to play against you.  They can be different volunteers each time; it’s your responsibility to bring them up to speed and give them what they need to know in order to play.  Be sure to hand them a copy of the ‘Volunteer’s Guide,’ and put ‘A Bestiary’ out for them too (2).
 
In that Volunteer Guide, volunteers are thanked for playing, and told:

Play then is driven by the player saying “I do x,” and then asking questions, leading or otherwise and letting the volunteers make up whatever they want.  The player has to seek out trouble because it’s not incumbent upon the volunteers to create trouble.  In fact, the player needs to come up with fun trouble to entice her friends to come up with fun responses.
 
This act of flipping the wheel on the narrative car so that the players are by default the drivers and the “GMs” are by default merely responding is what makes this game so amazing.  It’s like the perfect training ground for players to make their character a true protagonist driving the action.  And it’s the perfect way to bring in friends who are RPG-curious by asking them to play with zero pressure and letting them just make up fun stuff and quit whenever they want out.  And they have another volunteer with them so there is no pressure on them to be entirely responsible for anything.  You could of course play this as a two person game with someone who doesn’t need the extra volunteer (which is how my wife and I have been playing), and I can see this being played with 4 or 5 volunteers each enjoying the sport of getting the player’s character into a worse and worse bind.
 
The other brilliant part (so many brilliant parts!) of the game is that it is designed for, essentially, campaign play.  The titular grimoire has sections that you as the player aren’t allowed to read until your character unlocks them.  Presumably your skills at magic improve, what you can do with magic expands, and you run into all kinds of story seeds and trouble.  The grimoire pages have specific things you need to do to unlock each section, and merely unlocking a section will take several sessions of play, which means that you have a LOT of playing you can do from these mere 11 pages of game.  To make matters even sweeter, Vincent released an expansion grimoire called “The Three Scrolls of Jorvelte of the Wild Crown,” which comes with the game if you purchase it on his itch.io page.
 
The other bit of brilliance is the page of “Spawning Circumstances.”  These are 14 starting situations that you pick from for the first 14 or so sessions.  Each one puts your wizard in the middle of action facing a situations that demands a reaction from you.  In this way, the creative burden of getting things moving is lifted from your shoulders by the game so you can start giving your volunteers things to react to without sweating about it.  Once you are underway, of course, you can create your own starting situations as your wizard has progressed and knows more about the world and what they want.
 
It is a perfect pick-up-and-play game with tons of fun, inspirational material to get everyone on the same page and having a blast.  My wife and I are taking turns, she playing the Barbarian version of the game (“The Barbarian’s Bloody Quest,” which also comes in the same itch.io purchase, and in which the barbarian is hunting down wizards in search of the wizard who killed his parents) on her turns, and I playing the wizard on mine.  Both our characters exist in the same world, but our paths won’t be crossing (at least not for a long time).  We have some sessions that are only 20 minutes long and some that are an hour and a half, depending on your energy and the way the dice rolls and our luck holds out.
 
I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want.  I want to be able to play this game in restaurants with my friends.  I want to be able to play it with folks when we meet up to have a picnic and throw a frisbee.  I want a card version of this game in which all the information is broken up into cards so that I can carry them around in a pack with a d6 and bust it out whenever there’s the time and inclination.  A card for each exertion.  Printable card-sized character sheets.  The Volunteer Guide and Bestiary information on cards.  A card for each section of the grimoire.  A card with each spawning circumstance.  Look at the cards, tell a story, roll the die, laugh, ad infinitum.

After I finished Dictionary of Mu, I had Sorcerer on the brain and wanted to see another setting supplement to compare the Dictionary with.  I had purchased of copy of Jared Sorensen’s “Schism” a while back and figured now was the perfect time to explore it.
 
The strength of this setting is the ferocity of Sorensen’s vision.  This game presents a harsh world with protagonists who have been brutalized, tortured, experimented upon, outcast, used, and dismissed.  The players play characters who have health-ruining psychic powers that isolate them from the rest of humanity and make them prey for those who wish to use their powers for their own ends.  Sorensen describes the game’s ideal play in chapter six:

And here are a collection of phrases Sorensen uses to describe how the GM should describe the world throughout play:

Indeed, one might.  I quoted that section at length because I think it exemplifies some of Sorensen’s best writing and captures the heart of what feelings he wants this game to evoke in play.  And I think it’s that strong vision that makes readers remember this game so strongly and fondly.
 
The actual rules are cool, and it is interesting how much it changes Sorcerer’s central mechanics.  Demons are not demons in this game, but the psychic powers that the PCs wield.  They do not have independent characteristics or desires or needs.  Instead, they are a well-conceived and delineated list of powers that all have a price to pay.  The powers are not statted up like demons; the only stat they have is “power” which is derived from the PC’s “origin” stat, which replaces the “lore” stat in the original game.  Players decide how their character got their powers or first discovered they had powers and give it a score just as lore has a score.  That origin stat become the power stat for each psychic power the PC wields.  Your cover is how you are being used or how you are employing yourself by using your power, and instead of having covens, each PC starts play belonging to a cabal, either by force or by choice.
 
The cabal is central to the game.  In the sixth chapter, Sorensen lays out his vision for how he expects most games of “Schism” will go.   In this vision, characters begin as part of a cabal and then discover how the cabal is using them.  They then have to escape from the cabal and are consequently hunted by the cabal.  As they use their powers and face their immediate problems, the PCs’ humanity plummets and the character dies according to play.  In fact, the player is instructed to imagine their character’s death during character creation.  Players are not beholden to this vision, but it gets them thinking of their character’s arc from the moment of their birth.  When the character’s humanity hits zero, the player gets a session to bring that character to a satisfying death, giving them a chance to go down swinging, seeking or rejecting redemption.
 
It’s a neat interpretation of the Sorcerer system, and it shows how far the system can be used to tell the story of powerful characters who have to decide how far they will go to get the thing they want or do the thing they want to do.
 
Naturally, I have gone back to reread Sorcerer after reading these supplements and am finding even more there than the last time I read it.  I can see why it inspired so many interpretations by so many designers.

Judd Karlman reprinted his Dictionary of Mu in late 2018, and I received my copy early this year.  I had a ton of other books on my to-read stack, so the Dictionary ended up on my gaming shelf.  Two weeks ago, however, I discovered Judd’s recent podcast, “Daydreaming about Dragons,” and I found myself enjoying his voice and perspective so much that I pulled the Dictionary off the shelf and moved it to the top of the pile.  And I’m glad I did.
 
Dictionary of Mu is a supplement for Ron Edward’s Sorcerer, which means that it essentially is a setting with its own rules particular to that setting.  The supplement takes the form of, surprise surprise, a dictionary, covering the various locations, events, factions, and personae in alphabetical order, so that the world comes into focus through definitions and references between entries.  Occasionally, the conceit is laid aside so that the author can address how the rules of play are affected by the narrative elements in the entry.  Similarly, demons and sorcerers are statted up to allow for easy incorporation of those figures into your own game.
 
Cleverly, Karlman gives his dictionary a narrator, Oghma, son of Oghma, who hails from the city of Mu’s Bed. Oghma, who refers to himself in the third person only, is an old and cynical man who warns his reader about the dangers of the world and points out where his knowledge comes from first hand experience and where it founded only on rumors and stories.  His marginalia makes the story that unfolds three dimensional and flavorful.
 
The world described is the world of Marr’d, a harsh red planet that is a fantasy version of our Mars. While no map is given, the geographic features and their rough relationships to each other, are detailed, named, and populated in the dictionary.  There are feline humanoids on the Chryse Plains; a gorilla-like people who mine Mount Olymon; the great city of Mu’s Bed located near the canyon called Mariner’s Gash, ruled over by a witch-king; and the red wastes where no one dwells.  There are religions and legends, slavers and lost sciences, and a whole world sketched with enough inspiration to set your imagination to work without bogging you down with details and canon.  It’s smart and engaging and full of possibilities.
 
But the book is of course more than just setting material.  To use it in a Sorcerer game, the text defines humanity as “hope for the future” (146), and the sorcerers are those characters ambitious enough to try to make that future a reality, but powerful and dangerous enough to leave destruction in their wake.  Demons are defined as “the spirits of the dead,” and Marr’d is brimming with said dead spirits.  Even forgotten ideas and notions can be spirits.  The books gives you whole new lists of trait descriptors to fit (and help define) the world.  The book relies on (and makes use of) the added rules that Edwards introduces in the first Sorcerer supplement, Sorcerer & Sword, so if you’re planning on planning, have your copy handy.
 
My favorite part of the book are the little flavorful additions that Karlman has thrown in.  In the text itself, Oghma encourages whoever is reading his dictionary to make further marginalia in the book so that a complete telling of Marr’d can exist.  Karlman brings this feature into play with his advancement rules: 

​That’s just cool as hell.  Additionally, 

​There are humanity-affecting rules for forming friendships, becoming a hero to another P.C., and falling in love.
 
It's a neat book, a neat world, a neat supplement, and a fun read.  Whether you’re looking for inspiration, material to game with, or simply an entertaining diversion, I recommend you pick up a copy of the Dictionary of Mu.

This is a textual review only. I have not been able to play the game itself.
 
Drowning & Falling, published in 2006 by Jason Morningstar, is a short satirical text and a distinctly indie RPG that pokes loving fun at certain traditional games.
 
In the “designer notes” at the back of the book, Morningstar recounts the inspiration for the game, a comment made by Andy Kitkowski in a story-games.com thread:

Morningstar “took it as a design challenge, setting out to craft a game that was focused on nothing but drowning and falling with the tenacity of a pit bull” (60-61)
 
The game text pokes plenty of fun at D&D and its ilk (or at least I feel safe in assuming it’s D&D, since Morningstar never names the game, only refers to it as “the first RPG I ever played, which came in a white box and changed my life for the better” (61)).  It makes fun of our desire to break down a character into a number of traits and our desire to roll dice by creating characters with 15 traits total, all of which are generated randomly with dice: “If you have fifteen dice handy, you can roll all your traits in one gigantic mega-throw!” and “If you want to have some kind of equitable and balanced point-allocation system, go ahead and get your friends’ buy-in and make one up—but know that you’ll be missing out on rolling a bucketful of dice” (10).
 
The game pokes fun at the notion of alignments and the idea that they simulate anything in real life, or that they are mandatory in “a complete role-playing system”:

​​Similar themes can be seen in the explanation for why there are rules for stealing your fellow players’ characters’ stuff: “The whole thing is tremendously counterproductive but, in the interest of maintaining realism, rules have been provided” (46).

The game pokes fun at contradictory rules and explanations as they appear in texts:

​But as humorous and as fun as the text is, it’s not technically a satire because satire is not typically born from a place of love, and Morningstar approaches this topic as he does all the topics he approaches in his game design, with love.  Moreover, the game is not just humorous.  Drowning & Falling is a bona fide playable game, full of goofiness and laughs, but a genuinely entertaining and well-designed game, and one that is systematically about as far from traditional D&D in play as you can get.
 
Drowning & Falling is a GMful/GMless game, in which, after each player creates a disposable character to drown and drop, each player is dealt a set of playing cards, which they then use to create between two and eight encounters of varying difficulty.  Each encounter of course must involve a danger of drowning or falling.  Players then use a set of their character’s stats to try to overcome the challenge.  The process of deciding on stats at first seems ludicrously laborious, but it calls on three of the people at the table (including the player of the character facing the challenge and the player who created the challenge) to arrive at a final number in a way that is interesting and communal.  In play, that decision process becomes part of the fun rather than a laborious task and it’s all a source of the jokes and laughter that result from the game.
 
While drowning and falling sounds like it may get repetitive, the structure challenges the players to come up with new interpretations of those acts, which can push the game in all kinds of unexpected directions.  The text gives the initial inspiration talking about characters having a falling out, or drowning in self-pity, or falling off the wagon, or drowning in guilt, or falling in love. 
 
In some ways the game throws shade in two directions, as it is a fiercely indie game.  While it wears its joke about D&D on its sleeve, it also pokes fun at the hyper-specificity of indie designs.  There is a sidebar, for example, that asks the question “What if a character gets strangled or burned?”  Here’s the answer:

​I picked up the book expecting to laugh, but I didn’t expect an actual playable game for some reason.  In hindsight I should have known better.  It is a fun text, with a fun game, with fun art.  The PDF and copies in print are available on Lulu.com.

Bunnies & Burrows was published in 1976 by Fantasy Games Unlimited and written by B. Dennis Sustare & Scott Robinson.  It is a “Fantasy Adventure and Role Play” game in which the players play rabbits a la Watership Down.  But where Watership Down is a drama about a community searching for a home, gameplay in Bunnies & Burrows uses the basic model of hex crawling established by the earliest of RPGs, complete with dungeon-like burrows and caves for the rabbit PCs to explore.  As an RPG it is unmistakably a product of its time, but there are a lot of interesting elements to the game.
 
Here’s how the text describes the game and gameplay in the introductory section:

You can see from that summary how the game leans heavily on its fantasy RPG predecessors with one-to-one analogs and similar play structures.
 
The whole rulebook is a mere 36 pages, but it packs a lot of rules and information between its covers.  The main organizing principle of the rulebook are the 8 “characteristics” that define a player character’s abilities:

In addition to each characteristic having an innate value, each characteristic has a level:

​
​Although there are “professions” for each PC (the equivalent of classes in D&D), rabbits do not level up by profession.  There is no such a thing as a 5th level Herbalist, for example.  Instead, as the PC performs task that use that characteristic, the player makes a note of it, and at the end of the session, they can roll for a chance to increase the level of that characteristic, although no characteristic can increase more than one level per session.  Call of Cthulhu picked up this approach a few years later when it was published, though it implemented the idea differently.
 
Each characteristic is associated with a specific rabbit “profession.”  Fighters primarily care about strength, runners primarily care about speed, herbalists primarily care about smell, scouts primarily care about intelligence, Seers primarily care about wisdom, mavericks primarily care about dexterity, empaths primarily care about constitution, and storytellers primarily care about charisma.
 
Since the characteristics, both in their innate score and in their level rank, are the main measure of a PCs effectiveness, the rulebook covers the entirety of what a PC can do in game by going through the characteristics one at a time.  Although the game uses d6s during character creation, percentile dice are the main tool for resolving conflict and uncertainty.  But other than using percentile dice across the board, there is no standardized resolution mechanic.  Instead, each thing a rabbit can do has its own rules for determining a character’s success.  So as the rules cover each characteristic, they say what the rabbit can do, how to resolve questions of whether they can do it or how effectively they can do it, and what special advantages the profession associated with that characteristic has. 
 
Once the characteristics cover how the PCs can engage with the world, the rulebook turns to how the GM creates the world with which the PCs can then engage.  As noted in the first part of this review, play takes the form of a hex crawl.  The GM is advised to make out a map and populate it with warrens, caves, traps, predators, and anything else of interest.  The players then move their characters through the map and discover what the GM has laid in store.
 
The minute by minute pressures on the PCs take the form of energy and food.  By the rules, everything a PC does expends energy, and eating various foods gives the PCs energy when they can then spend.  At 0 level, as all rabbits begin, the maximum energy PCs can have is 2.  Hopping for an hour uses one energy, sleeping for a night uses one energy, and eating grass uninterrupted for 10 minutes gives you one energy.  Moreover, fighting another rabbit takes 5 energy.  You can go in debt to do what you need, but negative energy translates into hit point damage, so fights are especially costly for young rabbits.  So while exploration is the name of the game over the course of a session, the moment to moment concern is how much energy do you spend and how much energy can you harvest. You can see the bookkeeping that this system mandates. 
 
There’s a lot of bookkeeping in general for the GM:

That last line cracks me up, because it sounds like the designers are victim to their own design.  That’s not even the first time the designers take that tone.  In discussing the saving throws, the text says,

The designers are admitting that the rules they created don’t quite work the way they want them to in every situation, so they lean on the GM to “shade” things to make them work alright in spite of the rules.  I realize that this was not an uncommon problem or solution in the early days of the hobby (and in fact can still be seen in some games being published today), but all that says to me is that they got tired of working with the system to make it right, so here, fix it for us in play.
 
Curiously, along the same lines of the designer trusting the GM to compensates for faulty design, the thing that the designers love most about play is left to the players to create through emergent play without help from any game mechanics:

The development of individual personalities of the rabbits and the development of the cultural and physical world are the real magic of play, according to this insightful passage by the designers.  How high you can jump, how much you can carry, how the GM has laid out her map—none of those things build your personality of create legends & beloved NPCs.  I love that the designers are able to point to exactly where the magic of play lies, and I understand why they didn’t see any problem with the fact that none of their systems are designed to bring those moments of magic into existence, but, man, imagine how great a game they could have created if they designed specifically toward that experience.
 
There is actually one rule that actively contributes to this world building that the designers love.  To learn a new language, the rules dictate that you need to find a speaker of that language and, determined by your instructor’s intelligence, you need to spend some number of hours studying with your teacher at no more than one hour a day.  So if you want to learn the language of pics, say, you need to have a relationship with a pig willing to teach you, and you need to spend a lot of time with this teacher.  Those fictional demands make fertile ground for the kind of fun the game wants to produce.
 
Seeing what the designers want the game to do makes sense of a statement in the text’s introduction that originally had me scratching my head: 

​Why wouldn’t you want players to know the rules of the game?!  Now, I think it has less to do with worrying that the players will know which herbs can do what and more about having the players focus on the fiction of the game rather than the mechanics, because the magic is in the fiction, not in the rules of play.  The designers don’t want players worrying about how well they can do something; they just want them to make their characters act and react as the fiction carries them along.

​Ghostbusters is one of the seminal roleplaying games of the 1980s, popular and influential, so I decided it was time to give it a read and a study.  The game fancies itself as a rules-light game, with a minimalist structure—just enough to function well and smoothly, with as few rules as possible: 

​The main element that streamlines the game’s rules is that characters and creatures don’t have any kind of hit points, which means that combat is simplified, the weapons list is simplified, and there is no need for a “monster manual” of any kind.  All of that exists as a mere matter of fiction and fall under the providence of the GM (known as the “ghostmaster” in the game).  The other main tool to streamline the rules is to put a lot of power in the GM’s hands, both in making decisions about how things work and in creating fiction to steer play, as you’ll see throughout this review.
 
Characters meanwhile are defined by four “traits”: brains, moves, muscle, and cool.  Players are given 12 points to divide among the four traits, giving each a minimum of one and a maximum of five.  Within each trait, the player can designate a “talent” that the character is especially good at.  Talent lists for each trait are provided for players to choose from, although they can make up their own at the GM’s approval.  The rank of each talent is three more than the trait with which it is associated, so a character might have 3 brains and 6 puzzle solving.
 
Talents are a neat trick at giving characters particular strengths while keeping the overall number of traits low.  Moreover, character’s particular interests and characteristics come into focus through that list of traits.  Two characters can easily enough end p with the same or similar trait points spread, but their talents can vary widely.  This feature is especially prevalent in the stats for NPCs.  For example, a “libidinous doctor” in the cast of characters section at the back of the Operations Manual has these stats:

​The talents go a long way to bringing a character to life in your head through a few deftly worded phrases.  A mere glance at the talents lets you know how to play this character.  The examples of talents in the game call on tropes and stereotypes, which haven’t aged well, over all, but the technology is still excellent.  Jonathan Tweet used it in Everway, Robin D. Laws uses a similar technique in Hero Wars, and many other games have picked it up as well.
 
The rank for each trait and talent are indicative of the number of d6s rolled in any test involving them.  For any challenging action, the GM determines a target number (the general guidelines given in the text are 5 for easy tasks, 10 for normal tasks, 15 for hard tasks, and 20 and up for nearly impossible tasks).  The player rolls the dice in their character’s trait pool, and if they meet or exceed the target number, they are successful.  If two characters are competing against each other or are in a direct fight, they roll their relevant traits and the highest roll wins.
 
Pretty simple.  And pretty unexciting.
 
To make it more exciting, the designers created the “ghost die,” a regular d6 with a ghost symbol where the number 6 should be.  Whenever a player rolls dice, one of them (and only one of them) must be the ghost die.  Whenever a ghost is rolled, the die’s value is zero, and the GM has permission to make a troublesome (and humorous) outcome, even if the dice pool roll overall is a success.  It’s a simple and exciting way to throw uncertainty into die rolls beyond the question of success and failure.  The ghost die is particularly suitable to the tone of the game, which is comical and even cartoonish at times, so the ghost die gives everyone at the table permission to be especially silly in their narrative descriptions.
 
The other major mechanical element of the game are “brownie points,” which take the place of experience points, hit points, and other character resources.  Characters begin play with 20 brownie points.  At the end of any scenario, the GM decides how many brownie points to reward: half as many as they spent if the characters did not accomplish the goals of the scenario, as many as they spent if they achieved the goal only, and one and a half as many as they spent if they did an especially good job.  In addition, each character has one of five personal goals (sex, soulless science, fame, serving humanity, and wealth), and if they take actions to meet those personal goals, they can get additional brownie points.  If at any time a character is desperate for brownie points, the player can reduce one of the character’s trait permanently by one rank to give that character 20 brownie points.
 
Brownie points can be spent in a number of ways.  Before a player rolls for their character to accomplish a task, they can spend brownie points on a one-for-one basis to get extra dice for that one roll.  If a character has the points, they can spend 30 points to permanently raise a trait by one rank.  Brownie points are also spent to avoid personal injury or fallout from a poorly done action.  When a character faces a tough fate or physical danger, the GM can charge the character brownie points to avoid death or permanent injury.  Is your character falling from a rooftop because of a bad roll, mark off 5 brownie points and describe how you comically make it to the ground safely.  Players are encouraged to be as comic and entertaining as possible as the rules permit the GM to return brownie points for especially entertaining narrations.
 
While characters can eventually increase their traits, the game doesn’t envision that as the main point of growth and change.  Change occurs primarily through the fiction, as the GM is encouraged to make NPC return in subsequent adventures and to make PC decisions have lasting consequences within the fiction.  The franchise’s rocky relationship with the EPA and other government regulatory bodies as well as the fiscal dangers of running a franchise.  The franchises are central to campaign play, and they exist entirely within the fiction (by which I mean there is no mechanical aspect to them, no stats, traits, or numbers of any kind).  Similarly, when the books offer solutions to broken play, those solutions are themselves anchored in the fiction.  For example, if the PCs develop a piece of scientific equipment that allows the characters to shortcut the drama of play in future adventures, the text suggests using “Crusader Koalas from Beyond Space and Time”:

​There is a whole set of fictional solutions to players trying to out-clever gameplay.
 
The rulebook is a fun read as the tone matches the intended tone for the game.  That said, the particular source of a lot of the humor is cringeworthy and painful, as it is clear that the text was written in the 1980s by a set of white men.  The GM is repeatedly advised to play up characters’ accents for humor.  Every woman is a target for the PCs, especially  characters with the personal goal of “sex,” who are trying to get a date with anyone to get the extra brownie points at the session’s end.  Yes, characters roll their moves trait to score a date, and the difficulty of the target number is supposed to increase with the hotness of the woman they are targeting.  These are not a couple of misstatements in the texts, but a whole and consistent focus on things that should not be the source of humor.
 
The boxed set gives players a lot of tools to play the game, including 3 scenarios and 21 scenario seeds.  There are dozens of pre-created NPCs that can be pulled out when needed (and yes, that’s plenty more uncomfortable tropes and characterizations, so prepare yourself).  It’s a thoughtful (when the content itself is not thoughtless) set of tools designed to bring new roleplayers into the hobby, quickly getting them running and creating their own scenarios.

​I’ve recently decided to support Bully Pulpit’s Drip project.  Their most recent game released to Drip supporters is a “semi-larp, structured freeform” game called “Deep Love.”  The game is now available on DriveThru at https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/266580/Deep-Love?term=deep+love.
 
I haven’t played in any larps and have read only a few larp texts, so this is something new for me, but after reading “Deep Love,” I’m excited to read more.
 
The game is designed for exactly four participants.  Here’s the setup:

​You need two spaces to play the game, one to represent the deck of the Ready, the ship carrying the bathysphere, and a cramped space (a closet or bathtub is recommended) to represent the bathysphere itself.  Play consists of four 20-minute dives of two players in the bathysphere with the remaining players on the Ready, with five-minutes scenes back on deck between dives.  During the dives, players in each space communicate with the players in the other space via walkie talkies or cell phone for two specific reasons: 1) to give instrument readings in the bathysphere, which are recorded in a logbook by the players on deck, and 2) to describe the mysterious underwater sea life they are witnessing, which the players on deck are encouraged to draw.  Here’s what the rules say about the sketches: 

​Like so many of Jason Morningstar’s games, “Deep Love” is anchored in a specific setting and a specific timeframe that requires a lot of knowledge from the players in order to bring those things to life.  Thankfully, one of Jason Morningstar’s many talents is providing such information deftly and succinctly in a way that doesn’t place much cognitive load on the players.  Each player gets a sheet that summarizes who your character is and what your relationships with each of the other characters are.  On the back of that character sheet is a unique list of descriptors for describing the imagined underwater sea life that they see out the bathysphere.  The player just grabs a few descriptors from each category to describe some fantastic underwater creature.  In addition, the game comes with a set of checklists for each dive so that the players understand the physical demands and dangers of the diving machinery.  And not only is there a logbook for recording all the instrumental readings from the bathysphere, there is a set of graphics for the six instruments at various underwater depths, tracking oxygen, sea temp, sea pressure, as well as humidity and temperature and pressure in the cabin.  The players on the deck have a list that tells correlates the time into the dive with the depth the bathysphere should be at, so they can report the depth and ask the divers to report the instrument readings.  It’s all such a clever way to create the “realistic” details needed to bring the setting to life without requiring the players to know anything about diving, 1934, or these people when play begins.
 
What strikes me most about the game as I imagine it being played is the gentle mix of freeform conversation and required tasks.  Characters have motivation to talk to each other, to discuss their relationship and their friends and to figure out what they want from both.  At the same time, there is stuff for the players to be doing while they talk.  Not only can the activities provide refuge for the players if they need a moment to think or process, but the activities shape the conversation and constantly provide new input and circumstances.  In any 20-minute dive, the players in the two spaces will talk to each other eight separate times: four times to discuss instrument readings, and four times (twice for each diver) to describe the sea life out the window.  On average then, each pair needs to interrupt their conversation every 2.5 minutes to converse with the other pair.  And you don’t know when that interruption is going to come, which makes the conversation that much more charged and potentially fraught.  And of course, if you want to break the conversation you’re currently in, you can instigate the next call to the other team.  It’s organic and simple and beautiful.  It’s what screenwriters do all the time, putting conversations in the context of activities so that each interrupts and colors the other.
 
Complicating matters more, and putting in a bit of the uncontrollable, there is a deck of eight “Trouble” cards.  At some point during the dive, the diving players draw a card from the Trouble Deck to symbolize some complication that occurs at that time.  Nothing is life-threatening, so players don’t need to worry about dying in the depths, but each one can affect the conversation and the length of the dive.  Cables can break, sending the bathysphere spinning; electrical failure can occur, leaving the divers in utter darkness except for the bioluminescent life out the window; communication can fail between the bathysphere and the Ready.  It’s a neat little jolt that affects play without disrupting it.
 
The other thing I love about this game is the nature of everyone’s relationships.  Everyone here loves and likes everyone else.  And while everyone is sorting out their feelings, they’re concerned for everyone else’s feelings.  The result is a dramatic but loving game.  This will not produce a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf story (though I’d love to see that game too!). 
 
You want to play the game after reading the text in order to know how the events and relationships could play out.  The game sets up an interesting situation with interesting dynamics, and no matter what happens, it’s bound to be a neat tale.  I would like to see this movie, and I would like to play this game.

​Black Stars Rise is an in-development-slash-incomplete game by Sage LaTorra & Adam Koebel, available for free download at http://black-stars-rise.appspot.com/.  The short set of rules assumes the reader is already familiar with Apocalypse World or one of the many games it inspired.
 
The players create contemporary, small-town, common people who get “caught up in the strange, dark truths of the universe.”  Think Call of Cthulhu or X-Files without the mandatory investigative angle.  The idea of the game is to put the characters in a strange situation and play “to see how they come out of it.  They may try to get out, try to get to the bottom of it, or just try to survive—whatever makes sense to the player characters.”  Character playbooks are half-a-page long, with occupation as their main structuring principle.  Each playbook provides three stats, four or five playbook-specific moves, a list of relationship bonds, and details about the character’s income status and recovery needs.
 
The innovations of the game, and the things that are to me most exciting, come from 3 main design elements. 
 
First, the four basic moves are printed on individual cards, and are two-sided.  The main side is the same for all players, so everyone begins with the same basic moves.  But, instead of having any kind of harm clock, wounds are tracked by having to flip over one of the player’s basic moves cards.  There are three or four different versions of each wounded move, and players don’t know how their specific character reacts to being wounded until they flip that card over.  The wounded versions of the moves are all similar to the regular move, but rescaled, so that a 10+ wounded is similar to the 7-9 result of the unwounded move, and the 7-9 is similar to the 6-.
 
I love the very idea of using of cards to communicate basic moves.  They remind me of the cards in Sandman: Map of Halaal.  The cards always tell the players what options they have and lighten the cognitive load of the players.  Then the idea of using the affordance of a back side to the cards to shift the move while simultaneously marking a wound is both elegant and clever.  Moreover, there’s a direct correspondence between taking the injury and changing your move—when you flip that card, you are aware that the injury your character has suffered negatively impacts their ability to do these basic things.  When all the moves are wounded, the player knows that their character is hanging by a thread.  Finally, the shifting of the move allows for a  kind of death spiral which makes wounded characters less effective and more likely to suffer further wounding.
 
The second innovation is the “charging” of relationships.  When a character makes a move for the benefit of another character or somehow “take[s] concrete actions to reinforce a relationship,” the player who took the action can mark the relationship as charged by placing a check next to it on their playbook.  At any time that that character makes a move involving the “steady” stat, they can spend that charge to reroll and keep whichever roll is highest.
 
I really like this mechanic for its simplicity.  First, it says that our steadiness is directly related to our connections within the community.  Second, it encourages players to make moves in support of the other characters, which keeps every character from simply protecting their own asses.  Third, a reroll is a neat reward for these actions.  It’s not a guaranteed success, but neither is it as ho-hum as a +1 or an advantage die.  It feels significant without being overpowered.
 
The third innovation is the creation of a “break” deck.  Black Stars Rise deals with mind-shattering other-worldly strangeness.  But instead of having a sanity clock or check, the game’s rules occasionally tell a player to draw from the break deck.  Each card describes a condition that the traumatic event imposes on that character from here forward.  Obsessions, fears, dreams, hallucinations, and the like are given mechanical and narrative weight, and everything you need to play it is right there on the card.
 
Playing sanity breaks in Call of Cthulhu is always challenging because it is disruptive in some cases and easy to forget in others.  You want them to have weight without killing play, and it can be a difficult line to walk.  The break cards are a wonderful solution to this problem, and I found myself very excited by the possibilities of the deck.  This is something I want to import into other games and create new breaks to go in the deck.
 
The game’s only weakness is its incompleteness, which means that GM aids are in short supply.  But there are far worse sins than asking the GM to do some heavy lifting.

​I want to talk about Vincent and Meguey Baker’s game Bedlam Beautiful.  The game isn't officially released yet, so let me take a moment to explain how the game works.  (Sorry to talk about a game that isn't released, but when I wrote this, I thought it was--oops!)
 
It’s a three-player game, and like Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, Murderous Ghosts, and The King is Dead, it is a booklet-based game.  During play, each player has a copy of the book, which contains the rules, explanatory information, and lists from which the players can choose during their turn.  Here’s how the text summarizes the division of play: 

​
​Okay. The conceit of the game is that the “player” plays a person (she’s referred to as “she” in the text) who has been institutionalized in English Victorian period, named Mad Maudlin.  The system and the disease players portray characters visiting Mad Maudlin.  Only, none of that is true.  As the text says, “The player’s true character and circumstances are ambiguous.  It’s appropriate for all of you to speculate and imagine what they might be, but there is no way to know for sure, and no need to assert your opinions” (3).
 
So yeah, you cannot know what the reality is even as you play the game.  Talk and speculate amongst yourselves if you like, but no amount of asserting will make a thing true because the “truth” isn’t relevant to the game.  What is important is that Mad Maudlin is searching through the cast of characters portrayed by the system and the disease for her true love, Tom O’Bedlam.  But the player is never certain who the system and the disease are playing at any given moment.
 
To some extent the game is a deduction game.  The game is played with 13 playing cards, each card representing a specific character.  At the beginning of each round, the system and the disease draw a card from the small deck, check their booklet to see who that card represents and what that character’s goals and nature are, and then set a scene from the list of options in the booklet, placing Mad Maudlin and this new character together.  On Mad Maudlin’s turn, the player selects a question from her list and asks it of the character played by the system and the disease, who in turn selects an answer from their own list.  The exchanges go back and forth until the Mad Maudlin character asks to be left alone, shuts up, lashes out, flees the scene, or chooses to stay with the other character forevermore.
 
Here’s each player’s goal as described by the text:

​
​That’s the back and forth of play.  The system and the disease go through the 13 character cards, trying to get the player to shut up or kill as much as they can while the player wants to discern which character is Tom O’Bedlam and choose Tom as her love.
 
There are so many interesting things to talk about with this game, but the one I want to focus on is the difficulty of winning the game, and how the rules give the player a fair shot in what is inarguably an unfair world.
 
Just looking at the goal of the game, it is hard to see how the player could ever win.  The system and the disease players control all the information that the player will ever receive.  They portray all of the characters and can decide as they please how to respond to the player’s questions.  They could easily mislead the player into thinking Dr. Walter Freeman (“the inventor of the transorbital, or ‘ice pick,’ lobotomy”) is her Tom O’Bedlam, or trick her into killing the “real” Tom O’Bedlam.  So what is to prevent that from happening?  A number of things, really.
 
First, the system and the disease are played by two players, not one.  This is not because they are separate entities.  The text repeatedly makes clear that the distinction is one of name only; remember, “There is no need, you see, to distinguish them.”  The system and the disease players are not supposed to play the separate rolls, one the system and one the disease, but to both together be both the system and the disease.  Similarly, even though the system and the disease keep separate scores as determined by the player’s actions, the game makes it clear that it doesn’t matter which of the two wins, only that the player loses:
 
“Report the final total victory scores: ‘—for the system, -- for the disease.’  If the system’s score is higher, the system wins; if the disease score is higher, the disease wins.  A tie is possible.  It makes no difference” (10).
 
So the two players play one role, and when playing the characters in the scene, “They must agree to their answer and give it promptly” (2). With this construction it becomes clear that it’s important to the design to have two separate heads making decisions as the system and the disease.  The game could be a two-player game, but the designers want the system and the disease to be a split entity even though they act as one.
 
The second feature of the game that gives the player a chance at winning is related to the first.  The system and the disease are given contradictory rules for behavior.  On the one hand, they are told their goal is “to provoke the player to shut up forever, or to kill, and the more the better.”  But on the other hand, they are told to follow the instincts and natures of the individual characters that they play: “They take upon them the role of the figure represented by the card” (2).  The system and the disease players are asked to try to get the player to shut up or kill while simultaneously playing Tom O’Bedlam and the other figures true to their nature.  These two requirements of the system and the disease clash, if not outright contradict each other.  Not only are the system and the disease player then one player with two minds but they are tasked with serving two masters.
 
This dissonance provides a crack into which the player can slip to sway the system and the disease to get them to sympathize with her, to take pity on her, and even to root for her against their own game-dictated interests.
 
The player’s lack of power is made clear by the setup, obviously, but also by the questions she is allowed to ask of her interlocutor.  All she can express is what she’d “like” her companion to do, and then ask if her companion will do it.  What she asks for in all her questions is sympathy, support, love, kindness, and acceptance.  To these repeated requests, the system and the disease players, both, have to repeatedly be awful to the player.  So is it any surprise that when the system and the disease have permission to be kind to the player while playing, say, the gentlewoman or Tom O’Bedlam or any of the more gentle-seeming figures that they seize upon it, giving nudges and signals to the player about whom to trust and whom not to trust?  Each game becomes something of a social experiment between the players.

​Before There Were Stars . . . is a boxed game (I suppose it’s categorized as a board game although there is no board) by Smirk & Laughter, the non-backstabbing-games division of Smirk & Dagger.  I don’t normally analyze or review board games, but this game is really a story game masquerading as a board game, and it’s a cool one at that.
 
The central component of the game is a set of constellation cards.  Represented on each card is a set of two to four d6 faces, with the pips of the dice creating the stars of the constellation, around which is a sketch of the thing the constellation represents.  Each constellation has a name, a narrative element to be used in the myths that you will create through game play.  Some example cards are The Volcano, The Desert, The Angel, The Spy, The Chest, and The Child.
 
Each player has a “Story Card” with four story prompts, one for each round of play.  The four prompts are “In the beginning . . .” “At the dawn of civilization . . .” “A great hero emerges . . . “ and “At the end of days . . .”  Each round consists of three phases.  The first phase is called the stargazing phase.  In the stargazing phase the top 5 cards of the constellation deck are turned face up.  Players then take turns rolling 12d6 and select one of the constellations whose die faces match the dice available to you from your roll.  If there are no matches available, you draw from the top of the deck.  The cards chosen are replaced after each selection so that each player always has five cards for chose from.  After each player has two cards, the stargazing phase ends.
 
I like the mixture of choice and limitations that this setup provides.  On a good dice roll, you can pick any of the constellations you want.  On a bad roll, you get no choice at all.  Usually, you’ll end up somewhere in the middle.  Either way, you have reasonable constraints that create excitement and pressure on a minor scale which makes the player think critically about their choices.  Further, you will naturally pay attention during other players’ rolls, especially if there is a constellation you are hoping will still be there when it’s your turn again.  These pressures and constraints can lead to players creating combinations and storylines that they would never come up with without them.  That element of being able to surprise yourself is critical to good story game.  Or at least, it can be.
 
Now the storytelling phase begins.  Taking turns, each player takes a moment to think of the story they will tell using the two constellation cards they collected and the story prompt for that round, and one by one they tell a short, simple myth in about 60 seconds.  Here’s the example from the rulebook: “In Chapter 1, Melodee has chosen the Constellation BOOK and VALLEY.  She gets ready, starts the timer and begins, speaking in a voice that all can hear . . . ‘In the Beginning, the All-Mother poured all of her knowledge into a gigantic book, so that she could one day share it with her children.  But as all was still void, there was nowhere to raise her family.  So, she took the book in her hand and opened it at its center.  The pages unfurled, forming a great valley, where her children could now grow and prosper.’”
 
The 60 second timer is not a strict measure.  Players can go way under or way over the time if they wish.  The 60 seconds is a good target, in that it emphasizes that the players are not expected to develop anything overly complex or detailed, and it is designed to keep the pressure on any given story low.  It seems counter-intuitive to use a timer to relieve pressure instead of building pressure, which is why I think they created a special timer app for the game.  The image on the app is of people around a campfire under a star-filled sky.  As the time counts down, the star wheel overhead and the sky lightens until it looks like morning when the timer reaches zero.  As the timer progresses, you hear the sounds of crickets and peepers and other night animals, a kind of white noise that serves to create the atmosphere of stories told communally around a campfire.  Once time is up, the night animal sounds give way to a chirping bird announcing the rising sun.  All the sounds or unobtrusive and pleasant, rather than alarming.
 
After the storytelling phase is the appreciation phase, in which the players reward the other players for the stories they told.  We’ll come back to that in a minute.
 
These three phases repeat for the four rounds.  In the subsequent rounds, you select two additional constellations that you must use as the basis for your next story following the prompt for that round.  But in addition, you must also re-use a minimum number of the cards you used in previous rounds.  Bringing in these earlier cards allows you to stitch the elements of your myth together so that the body of your myths have internal consistency and narrative echoes.  It’s a neat and easy way to unite what could otherwise be four disparate tales.
 
Now, back to the appreciation phase.  This phase amounts to a scoring system which lets the game have a “winner.”  Here’s how the scoring works.  There are three types of plastic stars that come with the game: blue, yellow, and gold.  Each star is worth 2, 3, and 4 points, respectively.  These stars sit as a pool in the middle of the table, and after each round, players get a number of stars equal to the number of players minus one.  There is a chart in the rules that tells you how many and what kind of stars each player has access to depending on the number of players playing.  The players then pass around color-coded cloth bags and drop a star in each bag that is not your own, essentially scoring the other players’ stories.  The stars and their points are not looked at until the end of the game, so they do not act as feedback, but as unknown information.  After the final appreciation round, before points are totaled up, each player gives a moon token to one other player that they feel had the “best story moment” and tells what that moment was.  This is the only organized praise and spoken feedback of the game.
 
The stars and moon are specifically said to celebrate the “best story moment” rather than the “best performance” or the “best story” so that any singularly gifted storyteller doesn’t end up with all the points.  So you can point out a cool or surprising moment, a neat way to combine unexpected constellations, an awesome callback to an earlier event—whatever impresses or surprises or delights you.  I really like the idea of distributing praise this way, though I’m not crazy about points being tied up with it.
 
I get why the stars are hidden information until the end of the game.  You don’t want players getting discouraged that their stories are getting few points, because that would be no fun.  But that’s part of the problem with rating your fellow storytellers using points, isn’t it.  As soon as points are on the table, you are asking the players to care about those points and to strive for those points.  If they follow your lead, then their pleasure and purpose is wrapped up with those points.  If they don’t, then the points are useless and just muddy up the gaming experience.  I would rather see something like the moon token exchange happen after each round so that players are getting constant feedback and encouragement.  I’m sure that that happens naturally anyway (“Oh wow, that was cool!” “I love the way you tied those together” or even stunned and impressed silence) but I’m all in favor of mechanizing that feedback.
 
Before There Were Stars . . . is a well-designed, neat game, with sharp, simple rules and quality components and art.  It’s a great quick game for players who love stories and storytelling.

I’ve been excited about Companions’ Tale since I first learned of its existence. I love map games, I love story games, and I love stories of competing narrative authority.  Unreliable narrators and the mutability of reality through the lens of human experience both fascinate me.  Companions’ Tale has it all.
 
In Companions’ Tale, you and three friends tell the stories of a land and one of its heroes by sharing the adventures of the companions who have accompanied that hero.  No one plays the hero, and the hero never has their own voice; instead, they are an empty center whose shape and substance is determined by the competing actions, words, and stories of others.
 
The game takes place over 20 rounds of play, consisting of a prologue, three acts, and an epilogue.  Each act is made up of 6 rounds: an historian phrase, four story rounds, and a biographer phase.  Finally, each story round consists of each player playing one of four specific roles: the cartographer, the companion, the witness, and the lorekeeper.
 
In the prologue, each player answers a question about the world, then draws a representation of their answer on a communal map.  This round covers basic aspects of the world, establishing the major geographical feature of the landscape, the most prized virtue of the people who live there, some central beliefs, a basic power structure, and the nature of magic or technology in the world.  It’s a solid way to bring the fictional world to life in a few deft strokes.  The structure allows each player to have a say in the matter while never arriving at a group consensus.  Most story games want to avoid running by consensus to keep the fiction from being developed by committee, which can quickly suck the life and excitement out of the game.  But Companions’ Tale is specifically interested in keeping players from reaching consensus because the game probes the way people experience the world differently, often forcing their interpretation of events on others.  To this end, players are invited through the various roles available to them in play to comment upon and “correct” the other competing narratives.  (I mean “competing” in a Darwinian sense, not in the sense that some games are competitive.  There is no “winner” in a game of Companions’ Tale.)
 
After the prologue, the players play through the three acts.  Each act begins with the Historian Phase, in which each player chooses a place on the map and details an historical event that has occurred there.  To give the players guidance and to make the events thematically connected, the players first draw a single Theme Card from the Theme Deck that all the historical events must reflect.  Some sample themes are hunger, justice, anticipation, captivity, and creation.  There are 36 theme cards. 
 
The Historian Phase serves two major purposes.  The first is to build out the world to give the players more material to use in the fiction during the rest of the game.  The second is to give another outlet for players to correct or comment upon what other players have created on their turns.  This purpose might seem ill-served by the mechanic at first blush since the players in the Historian Phase have to introduce a newly reveled historical moment (rather than, say, revising or updating a previously discussed historical event), but players can create histories that undermine, support, or mitigate what other players have previously established on their turns.  This second purpose is especially served by the Historian Phases of the second and third acts.
 
After every player contributes something in the Historian Phase, the story rounds commence.  There are four roles assumed by each player in the story round.  The cartographer is in charge of translating things said by the other players onto the communal map.  They go first in the round, and during their turn, they must select a singe event from the last round and make adjustments to the map as they see fit.
 
The companion player goes next.  Their turn is always the longest and most significant.  They begin by selecting one of the four companion cards face up in the middle of the table.  The companion cards each name a relationship that the companion has with the hero, such as ally, lover, rival, childhood friend, rescued, mentor, etc.  There are 18 companion cards.  After the player selects their role, they draw a card from the Face Deck to see what the companion looks like.  The Face Card is just what it sounds like, a deck of cards with faces.  The 20 face cards are beautifully illustrated.  Then the player draws two cards from the Theme Deck, the same deck that the players drew from in the Historian Phase, and select one of the cards to be the theme for the story they are to tell.  In addition to have a broad theme, each Theme Card has one or two story prompts, such as “Once, a new domain of knowledge was released into the world”; “Once, a judge’s wrath exceeded the slight“;  “Once, blood paid for blood”; and “Once, heretical forces held sway over the land.”  Having a relationship, a look, and a thematic story prompt, the player tells a brief story from the companion’s point of view about an adventure the companions shared with the hero.
 
The next role played is the witness.  On their turn, they select some region of the map different from where the companion player set their tale and gives a few “facts” about the goings on in that area since it was last talked about in the game.  These “facts” can build off what has come before, elaborating on, revising, or contradicting what other players have said.  This keeps the world growing and developing as well as creating new material for future scenes.
 
The final role of the round is the lorekeeper, who describes some aspect of culture in the realm, such as a song sung, myths told, murals painted, or sports played.  Presumably the player will draw on the material that has come before, but that is not required by the rules in the rulebook.
 
The roles rotate each round until all the players have played all the roles.
 
The act concludes with the Biographer Phase, in which each player assumes the role of one of the hero’s many biographers by selecting a companion controlled by another player and describing “something unfortunate, amusing, or scandalous about the other player’s companion” (11).
 
Act II plays out the same way as Act I so that at the end of the second act each player has two somewhat fleshed-out companions in front of them.  Act II again plays out the same was as the two previous acts except that instead of selecting a third companion, the companion player picks one of her two already-existing companions to tell her tale.  Moreover, instead of drawing a new theme card, the players shuffle together all the theme cards previously used in the Historian Phases and the players’ companion rounds, including the theme cards they didn’t select, and use that new deck from which to draw her two possible theme cards.
 
Once the third act is played out, then a brief epilogue round is played, in which each player says a few words about the last time their companions ever saw the hero.  The player can choose to provide an epilogue for one or both of their companions.
 
Neat, right?  Over the course of the game, you develop a world with 12 historical events that provide the groundwork on which the other stories can be built and a colorful narrative for a hero as seen through the eyes of eight companions and the deeds of eight adventures.  The companions themselves have presumably put their best feet forward and have been undercut by three biographical revelations about them.  And of course you have a map that marks all of these occurrences and details.
 
All that is what I can see from having read the rules, looked at the cards, and imagined play.  There are concerns I have about how play will play out which I can’t address without actually playing the game (which I want to do and plan to do).  For example, we are advised as players to push things to a crisis in the second act by “introduc[ing] some growing threats that will set the world into chaos for Act III” (12), but how to make that happen is left up entirely to the players.  There’s not a separate set of cards or story prompts that naturally escalate conflict or create lasting threats.  Similarly, the third act is supposed to bring things to a climactic close (“If the world is not teetering on the edge of disaster, now is time to give a healthy shove” (13)), but that’s mere play advice without anything mechanical to help or make that happen.  Now, it could be that it’s natural in play that this all comes about, but I don’t see any reason why that should be so.  But it might.  Only play will tell.
 
The design mitigates my concerns to some extent by attempting to create throughlines and consistency in the stories and the world.  The map of course creates physical relationships for everything added by the stories.  Then using a theme card during the Historian Phase creates unified thematic backdrops for the history of the world.  Having players use existing companions and draw from already-seen Theme Cards in the third act increases chances that the stories will be able to recall earlier events and concerns smoothly.  Perhaps in play, these tools are sufficient to make the second act build and the third act resonate.  Again, only play will tell.
 
Another concern I have is that while the game gives the players some good material to tell their tales when acting in the role of companions, it still puts a lot of pressure on the player to turn that prompt and relationship into a story to share with the table.  I can imagine players seizing up, wanting to impress the other players but not knowing how to get there.  For example, you’re the hero’s ally and you have the theme of debt with the story prompt, “Once, a substantial debt was overdue.”  Now tell a story.  That is certainly great material, but is it enough to let you say something that excites, surprises, and pleases yourself, let alone your friends?  Part of the difficulty is that you are responsible for this free-standing story in its entirety, so even this small task can be challenging.  A lot of games lighten the load by spreading elements of the narrative across the table so no one player has to do all the heavy lifting.  There are some friends I’d be nervous to invite to play the game because even though I know they’d love everything else about the game, that moment of being in the spotlight alone would be unpleasant for them.
 
I love that the game calls into question what history is, what maps are, and what biographies are.  Each one of these art forms can pretend to be the capital-T Truth, impartial and imperial.  The game lays bare that human hands and hearts shape each of these arts, creating artifacts that are then handed down as authoritative things.
 
I expect the game will inspire other to further hone this idea.  Companions’ Tale creates a fun romp in which many hands change the map, many mouths shape the biographies, and many minds affect the official histories.  In our real world, of course, dominant forces decide the orientation of the map, the subject of biographies, and the content of history books.  There are many places to take this idea.