what i love about grey ranks

I just finished reading +Jason Morningstar's Grey Ranks, and it is a beautifully designed game.

Here's a brief overview of the things I love about it:

I love that character creation and character discovery happen together in the first chapter of play. A full game plays out over 10 chapters through 3 full sessions. The first chapter is divided into three parts: character creation, the first mission, and the finishing of character creation. You first establish enough details to know how to play your character. Then after you run a diceless mission, you establish what your character cares about and what their reputation is among the other PCs—or in other words, you figure out why you play your character.

I also love the built in death spiral that is avoidable, but only with some miraculous rolls of the dice. It is almost inevitable that the losses will pile up and the characters driven toward losses both personal and political. As it was in history, the Uprising is a lost cause. We are playing to figure out what our young characters can make of it and what it will cost them personally.

I love the way growth and change is mapped in the game. Characters’ reputations begin as negative traits that can eventually be turned into a positive opposite to show their growth. Similarly, the grid that is the center of play maps the constant ups and downs that makes up the trajectory of the character’s emotional state.

I love the support the game gives the players to create missions and personal scenes. Between Radio Lightning (a radio broadcast that precedes each chapter of play with a bit of data about what is the state of the Uprising on that specific day) and the selected situation elements (derived by where your character is on the shared grid) and what has already happened in the story, players have everything they need to create unique and gripping scenes. It is especially cool that elements can be reused and reintegrated into the story to create natural call backs and recurrences. It’s such a simple and effective way to create such a literary technique that it borders on brilliant.

I love the use of Reputations to give you larger dice and the use of the Thing You Hold Dear to give you rerolls. These tools create a natural changes in both the characters and the narrative. Players will feel the natural desire to use them followed by pleasure in seeing them enter the fiction both thematically and dramatically. One by one, the Things Held Dear will fall in the name of keeping back the darkness. Players would have to work actively against the system in order to not have a beautifully and painfully tragic tale of loss and coming of age. Everything in the rules takes you where you want to be.