Thoughts on reading Nathan Paoletta's Imp of the Perverse

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.

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