Thoughts oN Reading Eric Nieudan's Macchiato Monsters

​Here’s a fact about me: I don’t much enjoy playing dungeon-crawling games.  From 1977 to 1990, Dungeons & Dragons was about the only game that I played, and I had a great time doing so.  But after I was introduced to Fiasco in 2015, I fell down the rabbit hole finding all the incredible indie RPGs that had been made since the turn of the century, and I haven’t had much interest in returning to D&D and all the fantasy games it inspired.
 
Here’s another fact: I own and have read a ridiculously large number of OSR texts, especially for someone who doesn’t enjoy dungeon-crawling games.  So many designers I admire in the indie scene have been excited by the developments in the OSR scene that I keep picking up recommended books to see the source of that excitement first hand.
 
That’s how I came to Macchiato Monsters.  A designer I was talking to was building his own system, and he mentioned that his leaping off point was Eric Nieudan’s text.  I immediately ordered a printed copy from Lulu.  Having read it, I can see why the designer was inspired.
 
First, my usual caveats.  I have not played the game, only read it, so value my opinions accordingly.
 
To quickly talk about the physical book, I really like the feel of this slim 60-page.  It’s flexible but durable with solid binding.  The layout is interesting and the artwork is beautiful.  My only complaint is that the print is rather small for my aging eyes.
 
On my first read through, I vacillated between excitement at the possibilities of the game and boredom at the commonness of the game.  On the one hand, this is a very traditional game.  You make characters to go on an adventure.  You fight or avoid monsters, get treasure, die or thrive, and eventually purchase property or a business.  You have the standard six stats introduced by D&D and use them to answer questions of success or failure while a GM makes the calls about what stat to use and whether you have advantage or disadvantage.  In the usual OSR mode, character mortality is dangerous high, and characters are warned away from fighting unless it’s absolutely necessary.  All the same, in the section titled “Fights, and how to avoid them,” there is combat information but no actual mechanics for avoiding fights.  It is in all these ways and at those moments of reading the rules that I felt uninterested in how the game worked.
 
What I found thrilling, however, is all the creative and suggestive content in the tables throughout the book.  Character creation is really cool.  In addition to your six stats, you give yourself a “trait,” which is just a descriptive word or phrase about who you are, what you do, what you have, or where you come from.  Here’s where you can create your race or species, class or specialty.  Just pick a word, and when that trait is relevant in a roll, you roll with advantage.  Character creation is not only quick and easy, but it allows you an impressive range of character types in an easy and elegant manner.  But for me, the thing that really shined, is the way you determine your starting equipment.
 
There are 8 tables of 20 elements each.  You role a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and a d20 each and those six results are your pickable options from the tables.  The items get more powerful, useful, and effective the higher you go, of course.  Let me give you some examples though, because the lists are a fantastic collection of narrative possibilities.

​Bread and ham, ragged cloth bag, sock filled with pebbles.
Jar of snail soup, old ox, rolled up carpet, 2 sacks, crowbar.
Road bread and salted trout, large net, bounty letter, manacles.
Live hen in a cage, bedroll, torches, cook’s tools, tarot cards.
Fish cakes and wine, bag of coffee, con man’s tools, rope, loaded dice.

​Those details like the bounty letter, the sock filled with pebbles, the tarot cards, the loaded dice—they all suggest a past or an interest, and they turn this would-be hero into something interesting.
 
One of the tables at character creation is “Heirlooms & Heritage.”  Here are some entries for it:

​A shiny button, handed down from one generation to the next.
Half a map to . . . treasure, maybe? Hard to say until you find the other part.
Mom’s sword.  It has a name, a story, and maybe a minor magical power.
A big inheritance from a distant aunt. Comes with a condition.

​All of these entries have the potential to provide rich context for your character as well as possible plot hooks and clues to who they are and why they are adventuring in the first place.  One of the suggestions in the game is to roll up your equipment first and then build your character, which is precisely how I would do it because those items all point to a character that you might never have thought to create.
 
The tables are all top-notch.  There are a number of table for figuring out what monsters or NPCs are doing when players encounter them, what they want, and how they’ll react to the PCs.  There’s a table for hirelings and their abilities, which suggest whole storylines in themselves.  There’s a table for what could happen while you are camping.  A sampling:

​Scouts. Monsters or troops are spotted in the area. Just passing through?
Spy. An outsider is caught spying on the town.  Who do they work for?
Fire! Something or somewhere is destroyed.  Was it really an accident?
Supplies.  A caravan or hunting party brings in valuable goods.

​You can see that each of these possibilities could launch whole storylines.
 
The book ends with pages of random tables to creating plot hooks, items, NPCs, monsters, warring factions, and random locales.  Each option is brimming with ideas and possibilities.  These final tables are in a format I have never scene in which a magnificent range of information is generated by a single d6 and a single d8.
 
So even just reading the book filled me with excitement and fantasies about what stories could be launched by all these disparate elements.  This excitement, however, kept running into the ho-hum resolution system that was about doing tasks, defeating enemies, and working to make your dude stronger or more efficient.  As Nieudan says on his opening page, play is about the “player intelligence,” “resource management,” and “deadly fights.”  These narratively rich materials are mere color for what the core of play is about.  The tension between these two things is perhaps most clearly seen in the way XP works:

​Characters level up after reaching a number of goals equal to their next level. For instance, a third level character needs to accomplish four goals to get their fourth level.
 
Each goal is defined by players and Referee together. Some examples: clear a goblin nest, rescue a lost knight, find out who killed the innkeeper, explore a portion of wilderness, bring back enough gold to fund the next expedition, travel through a haunted forest, steal the duke’s signet ring.

That first sentence had me ready to play the game.  Yes, you have all these narrative hooks, and the players can decide what they want to accomplish! But then that following paragraph makes clear that the goals are plot focused; they are what the adventure is about.  And in case you didn’t get the meaning of that second paragraph, there is a boxed text to clear things up:

​Character goals. To allow for some character driven action, you may let each player have a goal that is unique to them.  I would not allow more than one of these active at any time.  Only one goal can be reached during a given session.

Character goals, the stuff I thought it was about, is a carrot thrown to the players, one thing you can work on while you follow the mission at hand.  It sucked all the air out of the text for me.
 
That said, this is still one of the few games I would turn to to play a dungeon crawl game.  I said that most of the in-play mechanics are unexciting, but there is one mechanic that I think is truly well done: the risk die.  The risk die is a way to keep track of resources without ever being reduced to bean counting.  Its mechanical core was undoubtedly picked up from the Black Hack’s usage die.  The idea is that an item is given a die size, and whenever that item is used, you roll that die.  On a 1 or a 2, then you reduce the die by one size.  Whenever you roll a 1-2 on a d4, that signals that you have run out of the item.  Nieudan changes it slightly by making the reduction happen on a 1-3 instead of a 1-2.  But the true innovation I see here is that he applies the concept of the usage die to risky situations, creating what is effectively a clock that winds down at unexpected rates.  So, for example, your encounter table for a certain area can be assigned a risk die, with d12 suggesting a safer environment and d6 suggesting a more dangerous environment.  That encounter table has less harmful and even advantageous encounters at the top of the table and more dangerous and troublesome counters at the bottom.  As the die is stepped down, the encounters are guaranteed to become more and more difficult.  Once you roll a 1-3 on the d4, some significant and troublesome event happens and the die resets to its original size.  This simple mechanic creates rhythms and escalations effortlessly and unpredictably.
 
I’m really glad I picked up and read this book.  There are a lot of ideas it inspired in me that I think I’ll be chasing idly for some time.  And I’ll be returning to these tables a lot, I suspect, as a model for capturing big possibilities in limited details.