Till the Last Gasp is a new release from Darrington Press by designer Will Hindmarch, with additional design work by Alex Roberts.  It’s an RPG packaged up like a board game with board game elements, like dice, tokens, cards, glossy paper settings, and folding cardboard playmats.  The game is designed to help players tell the story of a climactic duel between two characters who have decided that there is no other way to settle their differences.
 
The first dedicated dueling game that I had seen is “A Single Moment,” by Tobie Abad.  That game is specifically about two samurai warriors who were once friends in a fight to the death.  Play itself consists of flashback scenes that create the narrative behind the duel, how the friendship fell apart, what lines were crossed and trusts betrayed.  In those flashback scenes the players accumulate Edge Dice that they then bring to bear in the final scene, the actual duel.  The duel is played out in a single scene and the winner is determined by the die roll.
 
Jim McClure took “A Single Moment” and reworked the game into Reflections.  In his remaking the game, he extended the flashbacks to focus on five specific moments that the friendship becomes unraveled (The Time We Were Friends, The Time You Crossed the Line, The Time You Failed Me, The Time We Strived for Peace, and The Time It Came to Blood).  To create drama and surprise in the scenes—and as a way to give players a reason to make the decisions they make during play—McClure created hidden agendas for each player in the scene, a secret thing they are pushing for or tying to achieve during play.  Success in those goals resulted in more dice for the final confrontation.  While the game itself still focuses specifically on samurai, there are proposed expansions at the back of the book for using the game to play gunslingers, or battling pirates.
 
Till the Last Gasp is designed for any dueling pair: wizards, psionics, supers, gunslingers, pirates, samurai, robots, whatever!  The dueling pair does not have any set past, so they can be long-time enemies, fallen friends, ex-lovers—whatever you want.  Also unlike the preceding dueling games, Hindmarch chooses to focus on the duel itself, rather than on the backstory.  But that doesn’t mean that this is a strategic or technical game. It is above all a game that creates a story even as it asks you to focus on the fictional actions of the characters right here and now.
 
The game begins by establishing your characters, where they are, and why they have come to this place where only a duel can resolve their issues.  The box comes with a number of pre-made characters and locations, and the instruction booklet includes a couple of pre-designed situations to get you moving quickly if that’s the way you want to play.  All characters need are five things: what they are known as (their name or title), what they are notorious for (their reputation, true or not), what they are recognized by (key facets of their dress, physical appearance, or demeanor), what their overt motivation is (why they claim they are involved in this duel), and what their hidden motivation is (what really drives this feud, whether the character themself recognizes it or not).  The booklet lists 20 options for each of these facets allowing you to either roll them up or to be inspired to create your own characters.  Notice that there are no statistics or anything other than fictional positioning required for characters.  That means that this game can be ported into your other RPGs if you desire.  You can bring your characters from another game to play out their duel in a meaningful way.
 
Next, you have to establish the stakes of the duel.  Are you fighting “To the Defeat” (one character loses the rules of the duel), “To the Exile” (the loser of the duel is banished), “To the Turn” (the winning character convinces the losing character to join them in their cause) or “Till the Last Gasp” (the loser of the duel also loses their life).  At any point in the duel, the players can agree to escalate the stakes up the chain.  Or, any player individually can choose to deescalate the stakes.  It’s a lovely safety tool built into the game’s design.
 
The last thing selected before play begins is an Objective card for each player.  Each card lists 4 objectives that that player will want to complete during the battle.  Some objectives will take multiple actions (like landing 3 hits on your opponent), and some can be done in a single turn (like escalating the stakes of the duel).  Each player is dealt 3 Objective cards and selects one for this duel.
 
The duel itself takes place in 4-6 rounds.
 
Each player has 10 Edge Dice (d6s) and a Duel Die (d20).  At the beginning of play, they “ready” 5 of the Edge Dice, but putting them in the Offensive pool or Defensive pool.  At the start of each round, the players do two things.  First, they select their starting stance and they select how many dice they want to roll to determine how many actions they get to perform this round.  Each player has a set of Stance cards.  The player can be Bold (playing offensively), Wary (playing defensively), or Quick (playing between Bold and Wary).  Each stance gives the player access to a set of actions.  Each action costs a number of action points to perform.  Striking your opponent might cost two action points.  Changing your stance to a different stance will cost two or three action points depending on what stance you are currently in.  The setting cards consist of four locations, and some of the locations give you access to location-specific actions too.  You can move to another part of the setting or destroy part of the setting using action points.  The dice you roll will determine how many action points you have to spend. In the round.  You each take turns spending action points and narrating part of the duel.  When you are out of action points, you can roleplay your character, but you can’t take meaningful actions like those stated above.  Then when both players are out of action points, you go to the next round, select your starting stance, and roll your dice pool to determine how many action points you have for the new round.  Note that you can only “ready” new dice by using an action to do so, so your die pools will naturally dwindle during the game, giving you fewer and fewer options, making each round brisker and more deadly as you spiral to the finish.
 
Once you have played to at least the 4th round, and once you have accomplished at least 3 of your 4 objectives, then you gain access to the “End the Duel Decisively” action.  The first player to reach these goalposts and pay the action points to take the action gets to narrate how the battle resolves according the current stakes.  That player can certainly narrate their character winning, or they might find it more fitting to have their character lose.
 
The last element of the game is the Drama Cards.  This is a deck of cards with narrative prompts.  They tell you to reveal what your character is thinking or remembering.  They prompt your character to taunt or plea with their rival.  Sometimes the cards will make you or your opponent change their stance, gain or lose action points, or affect the other mechanisms of the game.
 
My son and I played the game last night and had a wonderful time.  The box says that the game goes for 60-90 minutes, but it probably took us 2 hours to play from the opening of the box to the end of our duel.  Future games will likely take less time now that we are familiar with the rules.  We used the included pre-made characters and selected the Aztec Arena as our setting, making our story something of a sci-fi wrestling match between an established talent and the rising star.
 
The mechanisms of play all interlock smoothly together to make play exciting, surprising, and easy to play.  Objectives give you reasons to do things and make decisions.  We moved around the setting not only because it was good for the story, but because it allowed one of us to mark off an objective.  We changed our own stances and our opponent’s stances because it was flavorful and because we could mark off an objective.  Even when my son forced me into a rattled stance to keep me from being able to replenish my Edge Die, it was fun for both of us.  I didn’t feel like they were keeping me from playing as you could feel one character keeping the other character on their back feet.  It had the elements of tactical play without ever making anyone feel like they needed a strong tactical position to play and enjoy themself.  And the Drama Cards did their part beautifully.  Some actions let you draw a drama card, some force your opponent to draw a card, and some make you both draw cards.  The cards act both as wild cards (will they affect the game state?!) and as much-needed role-playing prompts that let us indulge in character and backstory.  Players can choose exactly when and where they want the Drama cards to get used in play which allows them to steer those moments.  And the cards prompts (at least the ones that we saw) were never daunting.  They didn’t demand us create too much backstory or character at any one time.  No one had to sit thinking for a while to answer a prompt, so the momentum was never injured by these draws, only ever enhanced.  The result of everything working together was a visual tale full of character and conflict that arced nicely from beginning to end.
 
It had been a while since I was able to partake in an RP experience, and it was lovely to get to play with my son and laugh and ooh and ahh at their character and decisions.  Till the Last Gasp is a cleverly designed game that scratches several different gaming itches.  If it sounds like your kind of thing, you should give it a try!

I picked up this book at a local game store for a handful of reasons.  First, I was looking to buy something –that’s no small thing in itself.  Second, the book itself is very beautiful—it has a lovely color palette, is full of maps and tables and art, has pages that fold out, and even has a few vellum pages that allow the maps to layer.  Third, my wife has a long-lived love of the original movie, and I was looking for something the two of us could play one-on-one in short bursts over the summer.  Because of all those beautiful features, the book is not cheap, coming in at about $45 for a 300-page, hardbound, digest-sized book.  Actually, the quality is not the sole cause of the high cost—there is a lot of game material in this book, a whole world created and parceled out to be the focus of high adventure.  You get a lot for your money here, and for that reason, the book is reasonably priced.
 
The game itself is related to a lot of OSR-type RPGs.  You have an adventuring party; you use a full set of polyhedral dice; play roles are divided between a GM and players; your characters are defined by their skills, strengths, and weaknesses; your characters track their health and suffer consequences when their health is low; your character has traits that help them achieve tasks or allow them to do things they otherwise couldn’t do; your character’s equipment matters and is limited by the rules of the game; your character has a particular cultural background that informs what they know and what they can do; there is an experience system by which your characters improve over time to be more powerful, more efficient, and more effective; you roll dice when your character attempts to do something with an uncertain outcome, with the roll determining success or failure.  Play itself is a matter of the GM setting the scene, players saying what their characters do in response, and the GM having the world respond to those reactions in kind.  Gelflings are fragile creatures, and some of the encounters are dangerous, so the facts of the game encourages players to play cautiously to protect their characters, even as those same characters are heroes, set up to save all of Thra from The Darkening.
 
At its root, The Dark Crystal Adventure Game is a game of exploration.  While players are expected to be familiar with the world through the original movie and, more pertinently, the Netflix limited series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (the same time period in which the game is set), the specifics of the world and the regions explored are necessarily a mystery to the players. The map of the world takes into consideration maps that have come before, but the geography is entirely new.  Moreover, the quest presented to the players depends on the players not knowing exactly where to go.  The players are given a map of the world, divided into 22 regions, with only major cities and areas marked.  Your character may have bits of information about the world depending on what type of Gelfling they are, but that information is only general.  This design decision, I assume, is so that the players can experience the same sense of surprise and wonder at Jim Henson’s world even when they are playing inhabitants of that world.

The mechanics are stripped down and rather straightforward, using a lot of techniques developed by indie designers.  For example, the damage rules are elegant and simple.  All health is given a die size for its rating.  Gelflings all have a d6 health.  When you take a wound, you reduce your die size by one.  So a single wound brings a Gelfling to a d4.  If you take a wound at d4, then you roll a d12 on a random injury table to find out your fate, which ranges from getting a scar to losing a limb to death.  Combat is less exciting, consisting of a series of rolls to determine if you hit or if you dodge a blow. The GM does not roll, but the player does roll separately for attack and defense.  So the first round you try to wound your opponent and the following round you try to avoid a wound yourself.  The one little spice to the combat system is that fighters are trained in either finesse or ferocity, attacking with brute strength or dexterous sword play.  The cool thing about that is that some creatures can only be wounded by finesse because their armored shells can withstand brute force, while others can resist finesse but suffer against ferocity.  As a result, you’re not ever just good at killing all things.  Whether your battling or trying to overcome an obstacle, everything is a Test, in the language of the game, with a target number determined by the GM.  Your skill or ability determines what size dice you roll to accomplish the goal.  There is also an advantage and disadvantage system, like so many games now, that allows you to roll two dice and take the higher roll or force you to roll two dice and take the lowest roll.  In short, the mechanics work and are well designed but not especially noteworthy.  There is little in the game that requires you to use these particular mechanics and you could just as easily use whatever system you want to play within the world presented in the rest of the book.
 
The bulk of the book, a full 200 pages, are used for the included adventure.  That’s a funny way to put it because it is itself designed to be a single adventure, though you can certainly use the content in whatever way you choose.  The basic setup is that all the player’s characters have come to the Mystic Valley for one reason or another, where they are  informed that in order to save Thra from The Darkening, they must gather up a seed from each of the seven great trees and return them to the Mystic Valley within the next 99 days, or a great calamity will befall Thra. Then the characters are let loose to wander Thra, find the trees, collect the seeds, and return as the days tick on.  The designers can’t expect you to commit to memory all the ins and outs of the entire world, so they designed the book to be easy to reference and work with on the fly.  Each location in the world, be it a full region or a single encampment is given a two-page spread, clearly labeled and easy to navigate.  If too much information is required for the spread, the pages will fold out to give you the extra space needed without ever breaking the two-page layout for what follows and precedes.  The locations are essentially nested within each other to make moving from one place to another easy.  What I mean by that is that each region is given a two-page spread.  The 6-8 locations of interest within a region follow that two page spread, and if there is sub-locations within those, they follow the location they are subordinate to.  So, for example, there is a spread for the Silver Sea, that tells me what the 6 locations within that region are.  I also get a random encounter to use within the Silver Sea while characters are traveling from one location to another.  Then each of those locations are presented as 6 separate two-page spreads that follow the Silver Sea spread.  So when the characters to the Dreaming Isles, I go to that spread and have everything I need for that part of the adventure there.  And when they leave the Dreaming Isle, I turn back to the Silver Sea spread for everything I need until they arrive at their next location within the Silver Sea Region.  When they leave the region, I just turn to the neighboring region and repeat the process.  If you’ve given a cursory read through the book, then all that should be required to orient yourself is two minutes of skimming.

Obviously what is presented in so small a spread are just the bare bones.  You get the names and motivations of any anticipated NPCs and the details of any special items.  Then it is up to you to make that part of the adventure as detailed or as high-level as you want.  You can quickly talk your way through an encounter to get to the next location, or you can slow down and role play the entire conversation, bringing the NPCs to full life.  You can have a whole session take place in a small market or fly through a whole region in a couple of sentences.  The designers had fun connecting characters and regions and events so that the NPC you meet here has ties to a family in this other region over here.  The wandering creature you can encounter here belongs to this shepherd who is looking obsessively for them over here.  You can play it as randomly as you liked, using the tables either for inspiration or strictly by the die roll to see how the world comes into focus over time.  Reading through the spreads you get a full sense of the world and all the connections holding the place together, making it dimensional and alive.  Even just as a read it’s a fun experience.
 
And now for the coolest part of the game.  Remember those 99 days that the players have to complete their mission.  You, the GM, actually have a calendar by which you track those 99 days.  You can play out the passage of time through reason, but each region lets you know how many days it takes to cross the region, so simply moving will push that clock forward.  Dotted on the calendar are days marked in purple, and when you reach one of those days, you choose a region to experience The Darkening.  At the beginning of the game, only the Plains of the Castle, where the Crystal Castle sits, are Darkened.  And as the purple days are reached, the Darkening spreads to a neighboring region, which you can choose or decide randomly.  Each location spread includes a purple box that tell you how the region is changed when it’s Darkened.  Typically, creatures become more ferocious and NPCs become ruder, more selfish, and even violent.  Weather can get severe and crops can fail.  To me, that’s an exciting feature, because even reading through the spreads, you have no idea what the region will be like when the players’ characters finally get there.  And the more time passes, the more trouble they will encounter.  It’s a game-wide clock that adds life and excitement to the whole setup, in my eyes.  And the design of the calendar is cool, as they made the sheet into a GM note page, where you mark what NPCs have been encountered, what regions have been Darkened, and any notes about things you want to remember to bring back later in the game.
 
I mentioned earlier that the game has a built-in experience system.  The system itself is unremarkable, but one aspect about it I do enjoy. Each skill a character can have has three levels of mastery: trained, specialization, mastery.  The only way to attain that last rank, mastery, is to spend XP to have an NPC train you.  So players are encouraged to save their XP and talk to NPCs to find out whom they can learn from.  When they meet the right person and have the XP available to them, then they can train with them in the fiction and attain the mastery rank. It’s a minor feature of the game, but I think it’s cool.
 
Originally, I planned on using the rules as written to run the game with my wife, but I’m tending away from that now, primarily because the test system really only cares about success and failures.  That’s never a design that excites me, but it can be especially disastrous with one-on-one play.  For an example from the adventure, there is some random encounter that has the characters come across a trap and fall into a pit if they don’t roll some target number.  With 4 or 5 characters, one of them is likely to succeed in the roll and then they can work to get their friends out.  With one character, if you whiff, you are then stuck in a pit until some NPC character comes along to help you out or until you roll a successful roll of some sort to escape.  The latter is unexciting. The former is predictable. Neither makes for a fun session. 
 
I put off writing this review because I was hoping to put in a number of sessions before I did so. Life has intervened with my play plans, so I’m writing this now before I forget the system.  I might write a follow-up when I finally get to play.  Even without playing, the reading and the journey in my own mind was enjoyable enough to cover the cost of admission, for me.  If this is up your alley, it’s probably worth checking out.

Alas for the Awful Sea marks Hayley Gordon’s and Vee Hendro’s entrance into indie TTRPG publishing.  The game was Kickstarted in 2016 and saw print in 2017.  While it does not use the powered by the apocalypse branding, it does use “The Apocalypse World Engine,” as credited on the copyright page.  In fact, the game hews pretty closely to Apocalypse World in moves and play, not especially surprising for a freshman effort by designers.
 
The real and lasting draw to Alas for the Awful Sea, for me at least, is the setting. Players take on characters who crew a ship through the British Isles sometime in the mid-19th century. The weather is cruel, the sea is dangerous, and the people and times are equally hard.  In preparation for the game, the GM creates a town with two or more groups in conflict with a number of “currents”—“connected and interwoven problems and situations, exploring one centra conflict.”  The GM is encouraged to tie the PCs into the town by creating connections, and then the PCs interact with those conflicts and currents as they see fit.  In classic Apocalypse World fashion, GMs are encouraged have a set of backstories and concerns, but no plot, playing to find out what the PCs make of the difficult situations presented them.  Over the course of the game, PCs visit various towns as the world of that group is slowly fleshed out.  The advancement system is designed to anchor the characters to the developing world, to call on previously gained knowledge and previously encountered NPCs.
 
The setting is thoughtfully reduced to six bullet points to guide the GM:

​Each one of those points is expanded upon following a short introductory chapter.  It’s a powerful description of the world, and as I said earlier, one of the most compelling parts of the book. Between that section and the later chapters on folklore and the history of the times, Gordon and Hendro do an admirable job bringing the world to life quickly and easily.  You do not need to be a historian to understand the troubles and challenges of this world.  You are encouraged to take this historical setting and fictionalize it, a job made easier, by the encouragement to bring regional folklore into your game, not as colorful background, but as present reality.  For the most part, the presence of selkies and ghosts is the job of the GM, but the mechanics do make it all tangible for the players through the game’s version of Apocalypse World’s psychic maelstrom: the beyond.  PCs can use the move “sense the beyond” to apprehend the other worldly mysteries GM’s are prompted to include in their scenario.  It would be nice to see the folkloric aspects integrated more fully with the rules and procedures of the game, but there’s nothing lost by setting all that on the GM’s shoulders.  The chapter on folklore is just a collection of creatures, spirits, and places that you can bring into your games.
 
As has been popular in a few other games inspired by Apocalypse World, the PC character sheet has two halves to it.  Each player picks a position on the ship (captain, boatswain, sea dog, stowaway, etc.) as well as a “descriptor,” a narrative background or impulse that defines the character (the lover, the kinsman, the believer, the creature, etc.).  These two selections give you your special moves and a set of prompts for creating the relevant details for engaged play.  The moves are competently made, but there is nothing in here to surprise or advance the art.  Where I think the game does do something innovative and interesting with regard to the PCs is the advancement table.  An advancement is given for each PC at the end of each “tale.”  At that point, they get a pre-determined advancement (such as an improved basic move, a familiarity, or new bonds with other characters), and one of their choice, including the option to create a new move for that character.  The list shows that the designers had a clear understanding of what they wanted to accomplish through advancement and how they wanted play to develop over time.  Each option makes the previous tale mean something going forward.  Your character learned something knew, met someone important, improved in a skill, or changed significantly in some way.  As a result, future tales will involve reaching back to the experiences that have come before in order to be more effective going forward.  Importantly, improving stats is not an option in advancement. This is not a game where the characters will become smarter or stronger.  It’s one in which they will learn and grow.
 
The other aspect that I think is will done is the half-page GM sheet, and specifically, the list for “Making Things Worse.”  Instead of telling players to “be prepared for the worst” as the Bakers do in Apocalypse World, Gordon and Hendro tell players that “The GM makes things worse,” a phrasing that I did not think improved upon the original.  However, they broke down GM moves for making things worse in an interesting and productive way, noting that the GM can “complicate the moment,” “change relationships,” or “complicate the future”:

​That’s a clean and useful guide for thinking about ways to, indeed, make things worse.  It shows a clarity and vision that we see develop and grow further in the games that Gordon and Hendro go on to make after Alas.
 
The book comes with a pre-made tale in the final section of the book.  This tale, which shares its title with the title of the game itself, makes it clear that Gordon and Hendro have a talent for creating scenarios, but it also shows that the GM tools provided with the game are limited and will need creative expansion by the GM to be fully playable.
 
As I mentioned earlier, GM prep involves creating a town and a number of “currents.”  There are sheets to aid the GM in creating them, as well as a list of appropriate conflicts to sit at the heart of all these troubles.  Interestingly, we are never given the town or currents sheets for the included tale.  Instead, we are presented the tale much as you would find in a purchased module for any number of other games.  We are presented narratively what the PCs will encounter and how NPCs will react to them. We can deduce the various conflicts, but they are never named.  We can piece together what the currents might be, but they are never laid out for us.  That’s because, I’d argue, the town and current sheets are merely organizational tools, and incomplete ones at that.  The reason I call them incomplete is that the final tale of the game does much more than you are ever prompted to in the worksheets. Namely, you have to create a relationship map.  The reason Alas for the Awful Sea works so well as a tale is because all the characters and relationships cross the various conflicts and concerns. 
 
Relationship maps were first introduced in Ron Edwards’s Sorcerer supplement Sorcerer & Soul.  In it, he proposed that open-ended scenarios could be created by structuring not a plot, but a background story full of characters needs, wants, and baggage.  That is precisely what Gordon and Hendro put together here.  I anticipated running the scenario for a friend I’ll be introducing to roleplaying soon, and to get a better grip on the tale, I turned it into a relationship map, and everything ties beautifully together.
 
Ideally, the GM tools of the game would give you guidance if not tools for tying the various threads together via a web of relationships.  What we are given is certainly workable, but it reminds me of that joke about the old instruction for drawing an owl, in which you first draw a circle and an oval; then a couple of lines for the shapes of the wings, legs, and eyes; and then in the final step you are told to draw in all the details that make this collection of lines into an owl, the caption of which in the joke is, “draw the fucking owl.”  It is probably too much to ask first-time designers to create such tools, but without an innate understanding of them, GMs will most like just draw their adventures from the published tales or work through trial and error to see what works.
 
I haven’t got to play the game yet, but I’m hoping to soon. I’ll start with the included tale, and if it goes well, I’ll venture into creating a town and currents for myself and see what it takes to go well.  While there is nothing to amaze in this short volume, there are a few treasures that make it worth the reading, assuming you are already interested in its basic offering.

​Here’s how the SAGA rules work in the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, first published by TSR in 1998.  The system was first used in TSR’s 1996 DragonLance Fifth Age, but Mike Selinker made some significant changes to the system from the second game.  I’ll be pointing out differences as I go.  If you’re interested in a thorough explanation of the system as it appears in the DragonLance game, check out my related post.
 
The heart of the system is still the Fate Deck.  The deck has 4 main suits, each corresponding with a character statistic.  The green suit aligns with Strength, the red suit aligns in Agility, the blue suit aligns with Intelligence, and the purple suit aligns with Willpower.  Each of those 4 suits has 20 cards, with their values spread out in a bell curve. In each of these main suits, there is one 1; one 2; two 3s; four each of 4, 5, and 6; two 7s, one 8, and one 9.  The average draw, then, will be a 5, and over half the draws will be a value of 4, 5, or 6.  This curve removes some of the swinginess of the DragonLance’s Fate Deck, which has 8 main suits of 9 cards each, valued 1 through 9.  Moreover, the deck (and game) is simplified by cutting the number of stats (and therefore suits) in half.  Now, instead of having one suit for acting and a different but related suit for reacting, you just have the one suit no matter how you are using that stat.  Whether you’re using your agility to move swiftly through a crowd or dodge an exploding arrow, you just need the one stat.  And just has the DragonLance Fate Deck has a ninth suit, the Marvel Fate Deck has a fifth suit, the Doom suit.  This last suit has only 16 cards: one 1, one 2, two each of 3 through 8, one 9, and one 10.  The average draw will still be a 5, but the Doom suit has more built-in swing to it, and it allows of course for the only 10 in the deck.
 
During play, each player of a Marvel hero has a hand of cards drawn from the Fate Deck.  The hand size will be between 2 and 6 cards, depending on the character’s “edge.”  Edge is the game’s way of measuring experience and resourcefulness of a character.  Captain America and Dr. Doom both have the highest edge available, whereas new and inexperienced heroes will have lower edges and fewer cards in their hand to choose from.  When your character goes to perform an action which might fail and might lead to trouble, the GM will determine what stat is being drawn upon to complete the action.  A character’s stats range from 0 (inordinately weak) to 30 (cosmically strong).  3-4 is the average human’s stat, with 7-8 being professional levels of natural and learned abilities, 10 being the maximum unaltered human potential, and 12 indicating the maximum enhanced human potential.  As you can tell from that, the number indicate an exponential curve rather than a flat one.  Once the stat is determined, the GM decides the level of difficulty for the action.  Difficulty levels also curve exponentially, represented by numbers in increments of 4, maxing out at 40.  An easy task is rated at 4.  An average task is 8.  A daunting task is 16.  A superhuman task is 24.  A godlike task is 36.  An impossible task is 40.  With the stat and the difficulty determined, the player can then play a single card from their hand and add the value of the card played to the score of their appropriate ability.  If that total matches or exceeds the difficulty number, then the character achieves success.  If that total fall short of the difficulty number, then the character fails to meet their objective.  So, if Captain America, with a strength of 10, uses his strength to, say, lift something or punch someone into next week, the player can add one card to it with a value of 10 maximum, bringing the total to 20.  So how does Captain America achieve a task that is “superhuman”?
 
There are two ways to increase your total for incredible achievements.  The first is the use of trump cards.  A trump card is any card whose suit matches the suit of the action.  So if Captain America is using his strength, and the player plays a Strength card, that is considered trump.  When trump is played, then the player gets the value not only of the trump card played, but additionally, they get to flip over the top card of the Fate Deck and add the value of that extra card to their total.  Better yet, if that flipped card is also trump, then they get to do it again, and to continue to do it until a non-trump card is flipped.  This allows for critical successes.  The other way to play extra cards is tied to the character’s edge score.  Edge scores range between 0 and 4.  I said before that Captain America has the maximum edge score, so he has an edge of 4.  Players can play cards whose values are equal to or less than the character’s edge score for free before playing their one main card.  So if Captain America has two 3s, a 5 and an 8, then the player can play both 3s before playing the 8, giving Captain America 14 to add to his strength score of 10.  And if that 8 is trump, then on average he’ll flip over a 5 taking his total to 29 (or whatever the actual value of the card is).  From that, you can see how edge measures a characters resourcefulness and experience.  It not only gives them more cards to choose from—which means they have a greater chance of having cards in trump for any given action—but it lets them make better and more use of their smaller cards.  A character with an edge of 1, only has a hand of 3 cards and can only play 1s for free when performing an action.
 
Every action in the game is tied to this same system. Powers are given “intensity” ratings, which are exactly like ability scores, and each power is given a suit so trump remains consistent for them.
 
When an action is opposed, things get even tougher.  It is an easy task (so, a 4) for Cyclops to shoot his optic blast at a villain, but the villain gets to add their score to the target number if their doing any thing other than taking the blast.  So if Sabertooth is dodging Scott’s blast, then the GM add’s Sabertooth’s Agility score of 10 to that easy’s 4, bringing the total up to 14.  In fact, it’s harder than that.  The Fate Deck isn’t just for players to draw from.  The design of the game hooks the Fate Deck into most mechanically significant exchanges.  I’ll explain how in just a moment, but first let’s touch a little upon the SAGA system design philosophy.
 
When William Connors designed the system for DragonLance, the idea was to center the mechanics on the heroes of the story.  As such, all actions were structured from the PC’s perspective.  To this end, the GM never drew a card when an NPC attacked one of the PCs.  Instead, the NPC’s success or failure was determined by the PC’s reaction.  That same philosophy is carried over into Mike Selinker’s iteration of the ruleset.  When Sabertooth claws at Captain America, the success of that attack is determined not by the actions of the NPC or the GM, but by the reaction of Captain America.  Captain America would make an easy resistance using his agility to dodge the attack, but Sabertooth’s strength of 10 would of course be added to that difficulty.  If Captain America’s player has the cards to successfully dodge Sabertooth’s attack, then Sabertooth misses altogether.  If Captain America’s player doesn’t have the cards, then those claws hit their mark.
 
We can talk about damage soon enough, but let’s first look at all the other ways the Fate Deck is used in play, especially by the GM.  First, each card has an “aura,” either a positive, negative, or neutral value.  This variation is spread evenly throughout the 96 cards, so there is a 1 in 3 chance of drawing any particular aura.  The GM can use this to answer questions that they want to declaim responsibility for but for which there still needs to be an answer.  What’s the weather like?  Do I happen to hear what they said?  Does the bridge hold up under all this weight?  The GM can flip a card and see if things are favorable, unfavorable, or neutral for our heroes. 
 
Second, when players play cards from the Doom suit, the GM pulls those cards out of the discard pile and places those cards in front of them.  At any time, the GM can use those Doom cards to increase any one difficulty score by that much, giving the GM a pacing mechanism for building up to important and difficult climactic moments.  When a player makes use of that 10 of Doom card, the players all know that it can come back to bite them in the ass later.
 
Third, and finally, the GM makes use of the Fate Deck during combat scenes.  The combat scene is the heart of any given game of Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game.  Having read several published adventures, I can tell you that they are set up with scenes of combat at all the turning points.  At the start of each round of combat, called an “exchange,” the GM flips over the top card of the Fate Deck and lays it face up on the table.  First the GM reads the aura.  If it’s positive, the heroes get a second wind and heal up before blows are exchanged.  If it’s negative, then the villains get a second wind and heal up instead.  A neutral aura has no effect.  Next, the GM is invited to create an “event” inspired by the card.  Each of the 96 cards has the unique picture and name of one of the characters from the Marvel Universe, and each card has a unique phrase, appropriately called an “event.”  Some example event phrases are “Personal Tragedy,” “Rescue, “Out of Control,” “Rookie Mistake,” “Explosion.”  The GM can use this event phrase to introduce a new element to the exchange, complicating or changing the focus of the battle.  Or alternatively, the GM can introduce the character pictured on the card into the scene, bringing in a new villain or another hero.  It’s a neat way to keep battles from become stale exchanges of powerful strikes until someone passes out.  And better yet, each event phrase is tied to a particular “calling,” which is part of each character sheet.  Every character has a central calling, a reason they suit up and go out to fight the bad guys.  Captain America is an “idealist,” The Human Torch is a “gloryhound,” Spiderman has “responsibility of power,” and Mr. Fantastic is an “explorer,” just to name a few. When an event matches a hero’s calling, then the hero must address that event, because it speaks to their very purpose for being here.  Anchoring events to callings is a clever reminder to the GM to hook these things directly into the interests of the character, and therefore, presumably, into the interests of the player who chose to play that character.
 
This summary of the mechanics has already taken up way more space than I would have liked, but let’s finish it out and talk about harm.  Heroes do not have hit points or any such equivalence in this game.  In fact, except for abilities, edges, handsizes, and intensities, everything on the character sheet takes the form of words, not numbers.  So when a hero gets haymakered by a villain, you don’t have to write anything down.  Instead, after you calculate the damage of a blow taken, you discard cards equivalent to or greater than that damage.  So if Captain America fails to dodge that swipe by Sabretooth and ends up taking 8 points of damage, the player needs to discard cards from their hand that total up to 8.  Normally new cards are drawn from the Fate Deck immediately after the old ones are played.  Injuries however change that.  If they have an 8, they can throw that one card, and their handsize is reduced by that one card until the fight is over.  Or they can throw a 3, a 4, and a 1, and reduce their handsize by three cards until the fight is over.  Or, lets say, the player has two 5s, three 6s and a 7, then the player is forced to discard two cards to meet the 8 minimum.  In this way, the player’s handsize gets whittled away through combat, depleting their resources and options until they have to discard their last hand and pass out from exertion or their wounds.  Again, you can see how starting with a handsize of 3 (which means an edge of 1) limits a characters ability to hang in through a battle.
 
Whew! We got through the summary, hopefully in such a way that you can imagine play.  There’s a lot here that I like.  If you read my review of DragonLance Fifth Age, you’ll get my general thoughts on the design and focus of the system.  Instead, I want to talk here about a couple features of the design that I didn’t get to touch on before.
 
How does having a hand of cards affect play?  That’s an important question and one that has occupied a good bit of my thinking lately.  Please note that what follows are mere speculation since I have not been able to convince anybody to play a session or more of the game.  There are several things that I think would be cool about having a hand of cards to look at while we play.  The first and most obvious is that I can look at my hand and see exactly how my hero is feeling at this moment.  If I have a fist full of strength cards, I know what kinds of actions I’m going to be successful at.  If I have a fist full of low cards, I know that I’m going to start out relatively weak and hope to draw into better cards.  If I have a number of high cards, I’ll know that I can start trouble and write checks that won’t bounce, as it were.  In fact, the cards allow me to engage in a little play strategy.  I might take on low-risk stunts to use the low-value cards from my hand safely in an effort to get bigger and better cards of the right suits before trouble comes looking for me.  And I really love the notion of watching your hand size shrink before your eyes as the battle progresses.  You can visually trace your limitations, needing to martial and deploy your resources carefully as the battle draws to a close.
 
On the other hand, I can see some negative impacts during play.  When I’m roleplaying using dice, I might play around with the dice, but I’m not necessarily focused on doing something to roll them.  When it comes time to roll the dice, I’ll gladly do so, but I’m happy to take my time getting there.  I imagine the pressure and desire to use the cards in your hand is acutely stronger because you are looking at specific resources just begging to be used and exchanged for different one.  This naturally encourages us to move through the roleplaying as quickly as possible to get to the fight.  There’s nothing innately wrong with that, of course, and in fact, this game is wisely set up to have all the mechanics geared toward that same thing.  All aspects of roleplaying, of character interaction and expression, are left entirely up to the players and their imaginations. In other words, they are given no mechanical teeth.  There are no mechanics for social interactions or any activity that doesn’t involve your abilities or powers.  It occurs to me that it is no coincidence that this feature was used for a game in which you are expected to play with established characters in an established universe.  We don’t need to learn who Wolverine is as a character.  We don’t need to explore the depths of Storm’s character.  We are already supposed to know them in order to play them.  We can shout out catch phrases and do our best impressions of their swagger and quirks, and then lets get to them being awesome and punchy!  The same thing can be said about the DragonLance game too, really.  The characters there may be brand new and created by us, but we know the type of people they are: heroes.  The gameplay is not designed to discover characters through play, but to express their heroism through play, which is best done through overcoming conflict than through a lot of talking and socializing.  Those other elements might be expected, but they are flavor and at the discretion of the players, not enforced by mechanics of play.  With all that in mind, it’s not really a negative, as my first sentence of this paragraph says, but a design decision to keep focus on the use of those cards.  That pressure to play cards from your hand is part of the design itself, not an unfortunate byproduct, I think.
 
I also give credit to the designers (of both games) for taking advantage of the affordances of their main mechanics.  Skills in this Marvel game have an impact by lowering the difficulty score by a single rating (meaning 4 points).  Hawkeye’s skill with archery makes shooting an enemy a zero difficulty rather than an easy difficulty (before adding in the villain’s opposing scores, of course).  If you are one of the world leaders in a particular skill, then any card you play while using that skill is considered trump.  That’s just elegant and clever design.
 
Finally, I want to say how surprised I was to see how closely this game is related to the original Marvel Super Heroes roleplaying game designed by Jeff Grubb in the 80s.  It became clear to me at some point in my reading the text that Mike Selinker sees his design as being a modernized take on Grubb’s game, drawing both on the spirit and the mechanics of the game.  The tone nods to Grubb’s use of Spiderman and other Marvel characters as specific voices to explain the rules of the game.  There is even an appendix for converting your FASERIP characters to this new system.  If you don’t buy any of the Roster books, but have the old rosters from the earlier edition, then you have everything you need.  Selinker is not bound by anything that has come before, but it is clear that he takes advantage of all the resources Grubb provided.  The list of powers is hardly an exact match between games, but it is clear that the one is used as the foundation for the other.  Skills are a clear offshoot of Talents from the 80s.  In a lot of ways, Selinker saw his game as a second edition of the same game, not just a reinvention of the wheel.  I found that endearing and cool.

​There were several reasons compelling me to pick up a copy of TSR’s 1996 DragonLance Fifth Age game. The original trilogy of novels holds great nostalgic value for me.  While I don’t think I ever played any of the D&D modules from the ‘80s, I owned a few and enjoyed reading them.  I’m also a sucker for card games and love to see how RPGs utilize cards instead of dice.  That this game used a custom deck was all the more intriguing.  And finally, I heard great things about the expression of the fate deck in the Marvel version of the system and wanted to be able to compare the two iterations.  All these things sent me to ebay to hunt down a reasonably-priced edition of the boxed set.
 
While my excitement was high, my expectations were actually quite low.  I am entirely immersed in the indie side of TTRPGs and have been for six years.  Neither D&D nor fantasy games call to me these days.  I expected to dig through the rules and find a gem or two worth admiring.  To that end, I was glad to see that the main rule book is digest-sized and a mere 128 pages.  But what I found there surprised and delighted me well beyond my expectations.  Many parts of the game’s rules and design read as early iterations of ideas the indie design scene worked on throughout the first decade of this century.
 
First, the GM and their characters don’t engage directly with the mechanisms of play and resolution.  If an NPC attacks or acts on a PC, then the game looks to the PC’s reaction to determine the success or failure of that NPC’s action.  We see this today in games like Apocalypse World, where the MC doesn’t roll dice, facing all the mechanical interactions toward the players.  Apocalypse World does so (in part) to center the PCs as protagonists, putting them in the driver’s seat of the narrative as it unfolds.  While DragonLance Fifth Age still positions the GM, literally, as the “Narrator,” giving the Narrator the responsibility of the “plot,” an unfortunate convention that the game does not escape, the designers specifically center the PCs as actors and reactors because they are “heroes,” and regardless of what happens within the narrative, it is their story.
 
To describe the other early inventions at the core of this game, I need to take a moment to explain its central mechanics.  At the heart of play is the Fate Deck.  The Fate Deck is made up of 8 suits with values 1 through 9, and a ninth suit with values 1 through 10, making the deck of total of 82 cards.  Each of the main suits correspond to an “ability” score on the PC character sheet.  The ability are split evenly between physical and mental abilities, and then halved again within each of those divisions.  So the physical abilities are divided into coordination and physique, and the mental abilities are divided into intellect and essence.  Coordination is made up of agility and dexterity, physique is made up of endurance and strength, intellect is made up of reason and perception, and essence is made up of spirit and presence.  While each of those 8 abilities can be used as the basis of a character action, they are paired up so as to be active and reactive.  For example, if you are making an attack with your sword, you will use your strength; if you are responding to an attack by an enemy wielding a sword, you will use your endurance.  Likewise, if you are using you are making a magical attack, you will use your reason; if you are resisting a magical attack, you will use your perception.  Each of these abilities will have a starting value of 1 through 10, with 5 considered the human average.
 
Players have a hand of cards at any time, all drawn from the same Fate Deck.  The size of their hand is determined by their “reputation,” which represents their experience as heroes.  The more experienced the hero, the more resourceful they are.  Starting characters often give their players a hand size between 2 and 5 cards.  When a player declares that their character is taking an action, and the Narrator says that such an action has the potential for failure, they turn to the cards.  First, they determine what suit is appropriate for the action.  Climbing a wall might require strength. Moving across a narrow ledge might require agility.  Then the Narrator determines a difficulty rating for the action.  The difficulties range from easy to impossible, and they move in 4-point increments.  So an easy action requires a 4, an average action an 8, a challenging action a 12, all the way up to an impossible action requiring a 24.  The player than plays one card from their hand, adds the value of that card to their ability score, and compares that totaled number to the difficulty number.  If they meet or exceed the difficulty rating, they succeed in their action.  So, if a player’s character has an ability with a score of 8, they can succeed in an average action without playing any card.  When an action is opposed, then the difficulty rating is beefed up by the ability score of the thing opposing the action.  So let’s say you’re fighting an ogre.  Swinging your sword is an easy action, giving it a difficulty rating of 4.  But an ogre’s physique ability is 13, so that gets added to the 4, giving you a total of 17 to hit and damage the ogre.  If you have a strength of 9, you’d better have an 8, 9, or 10 in your hand to land that blow.  And when the ogre swings at you, you can try to dodge his club, which is an easy action, again a 4, which is added to the ogre’s 13, again giving you a target number of 17.  Now you look at your agility score (for dodging) and play a card to add to it.
 
The final element to consider in these actions is the suit of the card you played.  It the suit of the card matches the ability you are using to make your action, then that suit is considered trump and you get a bonus.  In the examples above, if you play a card of the strength suit to hit the ogre, or the agility suit to dodge the ogre, you have played trump.  When you play a trump card, you get to flip over the top card of the Fate Deck and add the value of that card to your action’s total.  Better yet, if the flipped card is also trump, you can flip the next card as well, and keep doing so until you hit a non-trump card.  This method allows characters to achieve seemingly impossible tasks, although the odds are never in their favor.  Still, if you have the 9 in your trump suit, you will draw an average of 4.5—let’s just call it a 4, which means that you have 13.  If your basic ability is high, you can get just shy of impossible at 24.
 
You may have noticed that I haven’t yet spoken of the ninth suit, the one that doesn’t correspond to an ability score.  That suit is the suit of Dragons.  It offers more power by going higher than all the other suits, to 10, but it also threatens to harm you.  If trump allows for critical successes, then the Dragon suit allows for critical failures, or what the game gently calls a “mishap.”  When you fail an action in which you played a card of the Dragon suit, the Narrator is given permission to make your failure particularly painful.
 
Whenever you play a card, you immediately draw a new card, so you won’t run out of cards by taking actions.  Bigger hands of cards help by giving you more options and access to greater odds of having a high card or a trump card in the action you’re taking, or to avoid being forced to play a Dragon card when failure looms, which is how hand size represents experience and resourcefulness.
 
To return then to the innovations of the game, now that you understand the basic mechanics, actions are essentially player-facing moves, reminiscent once again of Apocalypse World.  The rule book lists a number of common actions, such as breaking down a door, telling a convincing lie, picking a lock, or intimidating someone.  When such a thing happens in the fiction, the players can turn to the move, see the typical difficulty, the typical ability used, the opposing ability if there is one, and the common fallout from mishaps.  The players are taught by the rulebook how to create their own actions, and adventure-specific actions come with each published adventure, just as an MC for Apocalypse World will create custom moves for locations or certain NPCs.  I was stunned by the similarities.  Of course, the actions in DragonLance are restrained by the idea that they can only denote success or failure, so actions are inherently less interesting and playful than Apocalypse World moves, which are interested in branching narrative paths that come out of any given move.  The other important difference is that Narrator’s are encouraged to keep hidden from the players the specific difficulty rating for the specific action at hand, whereas the targets and results of moves are apparent to all players.  This hidden information is intended to spice up gameplay by keeping players on the edge of their seat to know if they put forth enough effort to succeed at their task.  That doesn’t particularly appeal to me, but I can easily see how looking at your hand and seeing that you will either succeed or fail before a card is even played can suck the wind out of a moment of resolution.
 
Another cool achievement by the DragonLance designers is doing away with hit points altogether to measure your heroes health.  Instead, the designers take advantage of the affordance that the hand of cards provides.  When a hero sustains an injury, they must discard from their hand cards that total up to the damage taken.  These discarded cards are not redrawn until the character can heal up.  When a player has zero cards in their hand, the character is out of commission, passed out, dying, whatever.  This makes for interesting choices and a cool kind of death spiral in play.  If you need to discard 8 points of cards, and you have, say, 5 cards that are 2, 2, 4, 4, 8, you have a tough decision to make.  You can lose the 8, only be down one card, but have a fistful of mediocrity; you can ditch the two fours, keep three cards, one that is good and two that are woefully unimpressive; or you can throw the two twos and a four, be down three cards but have a strong card and a medium card left for the fight ahead.  The fewer cards then restrict both your ability to achieve and your ability to resist.  This feature reminds me of nothing so much as the dice penalty for injuries you see in Ron Edwards’s Sorcerer.  Bad wounds can have long and serious effects.
 
The cards mean that you can also stop keeping track of gold and silver coins.  DragonLance is not about delving in dungeons and scrounging for money.  It’s about heroics.  So instead of a place to count your currency, you have a wealth score that you can use like any other ability when attempting to buy things, like you see in Burning Wheel.  All of these achievements are impressive, I think, because they show that the designers knew what they wanted the game to be about and shaped their mechanics and procedures to reinforce that.  The pressure to follow traditional design is always strong, but I can imagine it was even more so for a fantasy game, especially one that began its creative life as a D&D module. 
 
I could go on and on.  I didn’t touch the magic system, which attempts to allow wizards and spiritualists to create extempore spells.  I didn’t talk about the elegance and ease of using weapons and armor in combat, keeping the math simple.  I didn’t talk about how all this simplicity allows the main rule book to include a 15-page bestiary (on digest-sized pages, remember) that covers just about everything you need.  I didn’t talk about the way the cards are used to help the Narrator get quick answers to questions about smaller things that the Narrator wants to declaim responsibility for but that the table still needs to know.
 
It’s not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a thoughtful game, a well-designed game, a focused game.

​I picked up Mothership moved entirely by the hype surrounding it.  I’m a big fan of the inspirational source material behind the game, and the entry cost is eminently reasonable, even for a printed copy of the zine-sized text.
 
But alas, the game is not for me.  As a game coming out of the OSR movement, it’s not badly designed.  The rules for skill checks, advantages and disadvantages, panicking and combat all appear to be serviceable.  At the same time, they don’t have anything particularly unique to say.  Combat has the standard elements: determining surprise, rolling for initiative, having limited actions you can make on your turn, making an opposed roll to hit.  It adds on stress and panic, like bringing Call of Cthulhu and D&D together, and the two features are yoked together pretty well, but that’s about the only part of the game that involves horror.  There is no particular vision about what horror in space is about, what it is in the larger genre that makes it compelling.  There is no reading or interpreting of the genre, just the standard game parts bolted onto one chassis.  To me, the most compelling part of the text is the art, which does a wonderful job of setting a tone and presenting a vision more unique than the mechanics of the game illustrate.
 
This version of the game is only half complete, I know that.  In fact, the full game is being Kickstarted even now.  But where the designer is comfortable leaving holes indicates what the designer feels can be handwaved without affecting the central concerns of the game.  If the elements were essential, they would be integrated with the rest of the design.  Take money, for example. We are told that “everything in Mothership from fuel to food to weapons and ammunition costs Credits.”  This makes it sound like Credits is a central driver and economy of the game.  But then the rest is handwaved.  You get a list of jobs you can do, adventure seeds, but nothing else is developed, presumably because the eternal hunt for more Credits is an excuse for getting the PCs into trouble and then making them return to trouble session after session.  The game borrows the aesthetics of truckers and blue-collar workers in space, but that’s as deep as it goes.  It’s window dressing.  It happens to be loveable and groovy window dressing, but window dressing all the same.
 
 Horror and Sci-Fi genres, individually, are each rich and roomy genres, with space to make observations and declarations about our world and our humanity. Mothership is a missed opportunity.  

I didn’t know what to expect from Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game.  I had heard some people say that it was more of a board game than a roleplaying game.  Others said it had some innovative mechanics and was actually fun to play.  Still others just dismissed it as a weird tangent to the hobby, not part of the larger movement of design and play.  I found a cheap and battered, but complete, copy on ebay a while back and finally got to read it.
 
I found the design of the game to be surprising and exciting, personally.  I was too young to be a fan of the show, so there’s nothing nostalgic in my excitement.  I haven’t gotten a chance to play it, and I doubt that I will, but it has given me a lot to think about. 
 
First, there are indeed characters you play during the game.  The character sheets provide all the relevant stats for 9 major characters of the show.  Each character has numbers Power, Persuasion, Coercion, Seduction, Investigation, and Luck.  Power and Luck are single numbers representing the character’s ability to exert influence and escape consequences, respectively.  The other four stats correspond to the main actions each character can take, and they come with both an offensive and defensive number, measuring their ability to be persuasive, say, and resist persuasion themselves.  The character sheets for each character are almost identical, each sheet show all the major characters’ stats on the front of the sheet, and all the rules succinctly stated on the back.  The only difference between the sheets is that the character’s specific stats are placed in bold at the top of the sheet, a brief summary of their character and background in the show is given, and the “Personal Victory Conditions” for each of the three scripts included with the game.
 
Let’s talk about those scripts and those “Personal Victory Conditions.” Scripts are equivalent to adventures or modules in other roleplaying games, or variants and situations in board games.  Each script gives you a fictional situation for the game, with a specific setup, a list of which major characters are involved, what minor characters and what plot devices will be in play.  Each script is like an individual TV episode, with its own beginning, middle, and end.  At the start of play, the Director gives a general setup for the fiction of the story.  Then, in private, the director gives each player the specific story and goals of their major character.  The game then plays out in five or fewer scenes, and at the end, any player who met their personal victory conditions is considered a winner.  Personal victory conditions all involve “controlling” a number of assets—those minor characters and plot devices I mentioned earlier.
 
Minor characters, plot devices, and organizational characters (characters with official titles but not individual names—so, an FBI agent, a Texas Railroad Commissioner, and so on) are all printed on individual cards.  Plot devices are just names: Ellie’s Letters, Spanish Land Grant, Saddlebag full of Krugerrands, Cowboy-Redskins Football Tickets.  These are the MacGuffins characters are fighting over to control.  The minor and organization characters come with stats for all the major actions of the game so they can properly assert and resist persuasion, coercion, seduction, and investigation.  Some of these cards begin the game on the table face-up, so everyone knows that they are in play; some begin face down, known to some and not to others, driving those players who are not in the know to investigate to find out who these pawns and powers are; and some are brought in by the Director during the game to introduce new developments and tensions.
 
As I indicated, play progresses through scenes.  Each scene consists of a number of phases.  First, in the Director Phase, the Director gives out information to the group and to individual players, possibly handing out new minor characters or plot devices.  This is just an information phase, but that information can easily tilt the landscape of play.  The Director also sets up how long the Negotiation Phase, the phase that follows, will be at this time.  The Negotiation Phase allows players to talk among themselves and make deals.  The players can trade assets (minor characters, organizational characters, and plot devices), form alliances, make plans, and generally agree upon whatever they can.  Players are allowed to take other players away from the table in order to make their deals in private.  Finally comes the Conflict Phase, in which everyone takes action.  You can try to gain control of minor characters by persuading, coercing, or seducing them away from their current allegiance; you can investigate face-down cards to find out what secrets you aren’t in on; you can even attempt to get another major character thrown in jail if it is known that they have committed an illegal act and you have some form or law enforcement under your influence.  When the dust settles, the next scene begins with the Director Phase and it starts all over again.  At the end of the final scene, you look at what you control and what you need to control to “win” and see how you did.
 
As you can gather from my description, this is a strategic and competitive game.  The amount of roleplaying anyone engages in is entirely up to the players involved.  It would be easy to play an entire game without once speaking in a character’s voice or building up fictional scenes for your actions.  In fact, the one example of play given in the game books shows the players engaging in nothing fictional, focusing entirely on the pieces of play as pieces of play.  Nothing in the rules or procedures force roleplaying.  But only the focus on achieving your goal might inadvertently stand in your way of actively creating fictional scenes.  The rules prohibit the number of actions you can take during the Conflict Phase in order to reflect that what is transpiring is a single scene (or more accurately, I suppose, an act).  Your character can only be in one or two places per scene and only affect one character or plot device where they are.  So you can easily set up that moment of conflict within the fiction and play it out before rolling the dice to see if you are successful in your act of persuasion or coercion or seduction or investigation.  I think it would be quite cool to see that in play.
 
The game immediately put me in mind of Fiasco.  Each player has a character driven by their own ambitions and debts, all connected to each other by a web of relationships, fighting over the same limited pool of resources.  The plot devices are just “objects” in Fiasco’s language.  That Saddlebag full of Krugerrands, for example, could fit into any number of Fiasco playsets.  The tone is obviously different, leaning more towards soap than tragicomedy, but the basic idea of play is strikingly similar.  Mechanizing the attempts to gain influence over minor characters through persuasion, coercion, and seduction, is a neat idea, and their execution is admirable.  Let’s say you are trying to persuade Ralph Bentocher, the senator’s son, to intervene with his father in your interests.  You take your offensive persuasion skill (if you’re J.R., that’s 20) and subtract from it your target’s defensive persuasion skill (Ralph, poor soul, only has a 7 to resist), and get a number (in this case, 13).  If that number is 0 or 1, you automatically fail. If the number is 12 or higher, you automatically succeed.  If that number is between 2 and 11, you roll 2d6 and see if you can roll equal to or less than that number, you succeed.  Additionally, your minor characters can work on your behalf, using the same actions, to increase the amount of influence you can exert in any one scene.  And you can use your major characters Power score to help give your lackeys a boost in their efforts.  So when Ralph talks to his father, the force of J.R.’s name is behind his own roll to persuade.  I like it.
 
This is just a side point, but the way the personal victory conditions are described in the various scripts also put me in mind of Fiasco.  Here is what J.R. must control at the end of “The Great Claim” script to win:

​The comments give you both flavor and humor, grounding the bits of paper on the table with the fiction of the game.  Moreover, it tells you how J.R. thinks and how he manipulates the world.  I find their short lists energizing and compelling, making me want to play and engage with the fiction.
 
The game has me thinking about ways to have enjoyable play while major characters have interests pointed directly at each other, where the heart of play is conflict between characters, not in the form or physically battling, but in the form of influence and manipulation.  There’s a lot here to feed the mind.  If for some reason I was just burning to play a game like a Dallas TV show, I would just create a Fiasco playset, but it would definitely be playing Fiasco in Dallas’s world.
 
There’s one other cool thing I’d like to point to before wrapping up. There is a section in the books that tells you how to create your own character stats, and I think their method is interesting enough to share:

​Two things I want to point to here.  The first is that those original stats, the unseen ones, are a perfect breakdown of the descriptors of the characters in the show.  To some degree or another, all the characters are intelligent, charming, unscrupulous, attractive, full of nerve, and powerful.  To then turn those characteristics into the verbs that are their actions is common enough in roleplaying games, but that step is often left for the players to calculate.  You typically determine their stats and use their stats to determine how effective you are at doing a thing.  There’s something cool about that happening behind the scenes here.
 
The second thing that I want to draw your attention to is the imbalance of power between characters, which the game embraces without apology.  None of the characters have comparable stats.  They are not balanced to make sure that Lucy and J.R. have the same chance to do the same things.  That’s a bold move, and one RPGs have been wrestling with for a long time.  The way Dallas addresses that imbalance is to give each character personal victory conditions in proportion to their character’s ability.  Lucy doesn’t need to control nearly as many things as J.R.  In fact, some of Lucy’s win-conditions often line up with another character getting what she wants, which means, Lucy can team up with certain characters to each achieve their shared goals.  Weaker characters will team up against more powerful characters and alliances will shift as power shifts during the individual games.  It’s built to keep play dynamic and interesting.

​There is no surprise in the fact that I missed this little RPG boxed set when it came out in 1999.  I was only an expectant father, and I had missed the Pokemon craze of the 90s entirely.  Moreover, the box hung on racks like any other boxed cards sold for CCGs at that time.  Nothing on the box tells you that it is an RPG or related to RPGs.  I didn’t become aware of the game until earlier this year when someone on the gaming Slack channel I frequent shared pictures and his thoughts.  It sounded cool enough to pick up off ebay for $10 and see for myself.
 
The box comes with an instruction booklet, an assortment of Pokemon cards, a d6, checklists of all available Pokemon cards, two tokens for flipping, and a set of counters for tracking wounds. 
 
Play is designed to imitate the Pokemon video games, in which a young protagonist is given their first Pokemon by a professor and then they head off across the land to gather more Pokemon and train up their skills.  After covering the basic rules, the instruction booklet includes an adventure to walk first-time players and Narrators through the game.  The Narrator is the game’s GM.  They assume that a parent will play the Narrator to their children and their children’s friends.
 
The designers—who, sadly, are unacknowledged in the booklet—successfully seized on the two things at the heart of the Pokemon video games: exploration and Pokemon combat.  The first, exploration, is achieved by the adventure itself, outside of any dictated rules or procedures of the game.  The text of the adventure prompts the Narrator to ask questions about the physical world during play.  For example, in the first scene, the protagonists go to Professor Oaks lab to get their first Pokemon.  The Narrator is told to ask, “The lab is part of a larger building. What does the lab look like?”  Also: “There are computers and machines in the lab. What else do you see?” This invitation to the players to partake in the describing and building of the fictional world is a beautiful way to have the children talk about the exciting parts of the world that occupy their imaginations.  The players can surprise themselves and each other with their observations, their memories, and their creativity.  It leaves room for the adult Narrator to be taught about the world by the enthusiasts in the room (if indeed the parents are not themselves enthusiasts).
 
The adventure itself is impressively long, well beyond the basic opening scene and battle that I expected.  The adventure is varied and gives the players different challenges and experiences, and it introduces them to popular characters from the show and game, like Team Rocket, Police Officer Jenny, and Brock.  Players catch wild Pokemon, find a rival, and battle a gym master.  Pokemon solve non-combat problems.  The only disappointment is that Wizards of the Coast never produced the additional sets that were intended to follow this one, with more Pokemon cards and more adventures.  Had I had this game when my son was 8, he would have been thrilled to his Poke-loving heart to have played.
 
The combat mechanics are surprisingly elegant, given how complex they could easily become.  The price for avoiding that inviting complexity is that you don’t have cool features like Pokemon attack types having special affects on other Pokemon types.  But before we look at what’s missing, let’s see what’s here.  The Pokemon cards are two-sided.  Half of each side is an illustration of the Pokemon.  The Pokemon’s Hit Points are in one corner, falling primarily between 7 and 10.  Each side shows a different attack move.  The attack move has a name, the odds of success, and the amount of damage it does.  The odds of success are written as the numbers on a six-sided dice.  For example, on one side of one of my Bulbasaurs is a Tackle attack, which succeeds on a 5 or 6, and which deals out 4 Hits.  When I declare Bulbasaur is using their Tackle, I roll the d6; on a 1-4, Bulbasaur misses, but on a 5-6, Bulbasaur hits and does 4 damage to their opponent.  Some attacks have an added special ability.  On the other side of Bulbasaur, for example, their Leech Seed attack does 1 Hit on a roll of 3-6, but in addition, the player gets to flip a coin, and on heads, Bulbasaur can attack with Leech Seed again.  Because within the Pokemon universe Bulbasaur has more attacks than Leech Seed and Tackle, you can have multiple Bulbasaur cards, each with different learned attacks.
 
At the time the game was made there was no way to turn your Bulbasaur into an Ivysaur or to teach them more attacks.  And since the game was quickly discontinued, we’ll never know what they planned to do in future expansions.  I can see why they would want to keep the game simple at first, and grow it in complexity with future products, and the designers clearly left room in the game for that growth.  I would love to have seen where they took the game.

I had time last night to flesh out one more idea I had for a checklist NPC.  This one demanded a different format.

​If you get a chance to play it, I'd love to hear about it!

The Stranger on a Train
 
A chance meeting. A sharing of troubles. An idea. You solve his problem, and he’ll solve yours.
 
He solves your problem:

• Quickly
• Quietly
• Neatly
• Thoroughly
• Violently
• Dramatically

You pick two, and the GM (or another player, if there is no GM) picks one
 
His problem requires:

• Strength
• Fortitude
• Cunning
• Ruthlessness
• Subtlety
• Numbers

You pick two, and the GM (or another player, if there is no GM) picks one
 
If you delay in solving his problem, the stranger will attempt to prod you into action. You pick the first prodding.  The GM (or another player, if there is no GM) will pick the second prodding.
 
[ ] He shows you where you’re vulnerable
 
[ ] He invades your privacy, suddenly and fiercely
 
[ ] He demonstrates his reach into your life
 
[ ] He threatens you with blackmail
 
[ ] He shows up when you least want company or distractions
 
If you have not acted shortly after his second prodding, he creates a new problem for you, worse than the one he solved.

Paul Czege has been creating so many cool modules for the MOSAIC Strict format.  I knew that sooner or later I would be too inspired not to create something myself. The tipping point finally came this week as I was thinking about Paul's latest NPC modules that consist of a single checklist of 11 items. 

"This One Boy" was Paul's first such NPC, which you can find on his itch page, here: https://paulczege.itch.io/this-one-boy-for-mosaic-strict. 

I also recommend checking out his "Man in the Suit" NPC, here: https://paulczege.itch.io/the-man-in-the-suit-for-mosaic-strict.

My first entry (and I'll say "first" because I have a dozen other ideas in my notebook which I hope will find fuller expression in the near future) is The Driver.  Take them for a spin, and if you do, let me know how it goes!

​

The Driver
 
They know these streets as only a dedicated transplant who loves their new home can.  Adventurous and eager to help, they make their living taking people from point A to point B, talking and connecting with everyone who moves in and out of their back seat.
 
You have their number and can call on them four times before their other commitments make them unavailable to you. Check off items from the list below and play them out when the time is right.
 
[ ]    They take you across town at breakneck speed to get you to your destination on time, against all odds. You arrive queasy and unsteady
 
[ ]    They happen to be near and available when you need a quick getaway. You leave something at the scene in your haste.
 
[ ]    They give you unasked for advice.
 
[ ]    They take you to an expert or purveyor that you don’t know how to find. You accidentally leave something in their car when you go.
 
[ ]    They take you someplace unusual to impress a date.
 
[ ]    They take you someplace that you can lay low and hide, perhaps their father’s home.
 
[ ]    They wait for you while you run in. The meter is running.
 
[ ]    They take you to someone you don’t know you need to see.  They have a favor to ask you in return.
 
[ ]    They give you the number of someone you should talk to. You know that eventually they’ll give your number to someone else.
 
[ ]    They try to hook you up with their brother-in-law’s friend.
 
[ ]    They follow another vehicle to its destination, unerring and undetected.
 
[ ]    They refuse to take you there for personal reasons, but tell you how to get there via public transit.

​Spectacular Settlements, by Nord Games, is a system-agnostic tool for creating settlements of all sizes for your fantasy roleplaying game of choice.  The book was funded for publication through Kickstarter.  I became aware of it when I saw the latest Kickstarter by Nord Games, Dangerous Destinations, and I wanted to see if I liked the kind of work they had done in their previous publication.  I found an affordable copy through ebay. 
 
Of course, affordable is a relative.  Spectacular Settlements is a $45 450-paged, full-color, glossy-papered, art-filled, hardbound book.  The book has high production value, but it is a big, heavy tome to have sitting on your shelf.
 
There is a lot of useful information here, and I found a lot of great insights about why and where settlements pop up and the nature of settlements.  But all that information and insight is arranged with a specific use in mind.  If you are using the book in that anticipated way, then you’ll have what you need.  Pulling the information out, if you’re not interested in using the book as it’s designed, is a lot of work.
 
So how is it designed?  It is set up as a kind of lonely-play world-building book.  You want to make a settlement for your world, so you open up to the type of settlement you want, print out a worksheet for that type of settlement, and then follow the steps in order.  The steps are a series of tables, using an assortment of dice from a d4 to a d20.  The tables are built so you never have to back track and adjust a decision you have already made—in this way, every table looks forward.  To keep information from becoming contradictory at the whim of the dice, earlier rolls will give you bonuses to add or subtract from upcoming rolls.  For example, your roll for population density will affect how likely crime will occur in the settlement, with thicker crowds making everyday crime more likely.  You roll for every detail, in what I assume is an effort to make your settlement as complete in your mind as possible.  Often those contradictions, when they occur, are the little gems that make your settlement unique.  As an example, I rolled up a trading post in which the population’s wealth was “impoverished,” but where the conditions of the trading post were “immaculate.”  (You roll for the condition earlier, and it gives you bonuses to rolling on the population’s wealth table.  That contradiction, along with other unexpected rolls, was the seed that helped me build out an interesting background for the trading post.
 
The larger your settlement, the greater number of tables you have to roll on.  For a capital city, you are rolling up specific districts found in the city, and specific shops that exist in each of those districts.  You’re rolling for type of governance, who’s in the market place, what your government prioritizes, who are some famous residents, what the houses in each district are like—it’s a lot of detail.  And not all of that detail is designed to lead to inspiring contradictions or intriguing facts.  And that’s my first criticism of the book.
 
You could make the argument that you roll for what interests you and let the rest go, but the tables are setup to interact with each other, as later tables are regularly influenced by older ones.  The tables are not built for a la carte treatment (though you can make them behave that way), and they are not built for inspiration.  Some tables are more inspiring than others, and some tables are just facts you note on your sheet, mere data that will likely remain inert in play.  Do you care how the entry to the whatever district is guarded if the characters never go to that district?
 
And that leads me to my second criticism.  The tables are not easy to find or consult on the fly.  I suppose you could ask for a 10-minute break to roll up a district once the characters have decided that they want to go there, but that doesn’t seem like a fun option.  So you can either roll up the entire settlement before play (or between sessions), or you can just make things up on the fly, which is what you can do without the book anyway.  It would be great if there was a section of the book designed to use the tables in a way other than settlement construction from start to finish.  Or alternatively, it could have a set of quick tables for a quick-and-dirty construction without breaking from play.  Instead, at least 100 pages of the book are pre-constructed settlements that other people have created using the methods provided.  I personally have no use for such a collection.  An example or two per settlement makes sense as a way of showing how to turn all your information into an interesting settlement, but what do I need with 8 settlements mapped and built for worlds other than mine?  I got the book to make settlements of my own, not use other people’s creations.
 
And while I’m talking about page-length, the book could be further shortened by judicious use of space.  Tables are spread out in the layout in a way that fluffs the page count unnecessarily.  I feel like this tome could be a tight and useful 50-100 pages if it were given a new layout and the examples were all removed.  There are even almost 50 pages of “interesting NPCs” that I don’t have any use for.  I love supplements of this sort, but I don’t want them taking up more space on my shelf than the games I need to make them useful.
 
The good news is that Nord Games is introducing a paperback version that removes all the examples and unnecessary extras to give you just the table and information you need to create settlements.  And as I said, I found the information very useful in thinking about and constructing settlements.  So I’ll be very glad to trade in my $45 hardbound monster-text for a slim, useful $20 paperback.
 
This book, the way it’s intended to be used, will be most useful at the start of a campaign, when nothing is known about the world.  In order to build your settlement, you naturally have to know something about neighboring areas. In rolling up your city, you might discover it’s flooded with refugees escaping the two warring kingdoms to the South.  The rumors and current affairs of the city are there to give characters immediate hooks to start exploring or investigating.  Once a campaign is running, characters are likely to have enough momentum already, and the world enough flesh on its bones, that such inventions will be at best unnecessary and at worst distracting.  Of course, if you’re not worried about using the cities you bring to life and you just have fun creating new places whether or not they’ll be used in a game, then there is plenty of fun to be had here.  It’s not built to be used the way I would like to use it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not built the right way for someone else’s purposes.

 
Space Aces: The New Guidebook is another offering I picked up during Kickstarter’s ZineQuest.  It’s a 24-page, full-colored zine that consists of 4 pages of rules and the rest of the pages are filled with tables and art.  The booklet is well-made, printed on high quality paper, and looks to produce good, campy fun through episodic, goofy adventures.
 
The rules are pretty disposable, consisting of standard RPG fare: a set of stats that give you a number to add to a die roll to determine whether you are successful or not.  You roll two dice when you set out to do something “risky, dangerous, or uncertain”: a d20, which measures your success or failure, and a d6 that determines whether you get a benefit or pay an extra cost.  Essentially the d20 determines the yes/no, and the d6 determines the but/and.  Success and failure are determined by deciding first how difficult it would be to accomplish the thing being attempted, and the game gives you 4 levels of difficulty: easy (5+), tricky (10+), hard (15+), and epic (20+).  Your stats let you add anywhere between -1 to +3. 
 
I’m not sure how any of those percentages work out, but to me that’s beside the point.  The question I ask is this: how interesting of a question is “how hard would this be to do?”?  While I’m not a fan of GM-decided target numbers in general, the real problem is that the question isn’t interesting and it seldom leads to exciting conversation at the game table.  The accompanying question is, “can I do this thing?” and that’s not especially interesting either.  Those two questions have been central to RPGs since the 70s, but are they really worth sustaining?  The author tries to counter for these uninteresting questions by including the d6, because the questions, “what good comes out of this?” and “what extra troubles come out of this?” are much more interesting by their nature.  Unfortunately, there are no structures to make benefits and costs inherently productive or interesting as they are left entirely up to the GM (or the table if there is no GM).  Costs are potentially tied to the rising action of the game through a mechanic called “heat,” which increases every time a cost is rolled on the d6.  The higher the heat, the more consequential the cost should be.  But again, what that means is really left to the players.
 
I know some of that sounds harsh, especially for a game that is so light on rules.  But having sparse rules only means that they should be tight and compelling.  An easy comparison is to look at Lasers & Feelings, which has much shorter rules, but which accomplishes the same ends with more interesting conversational prompts.  In fact, the basic episode tables reminded me of the Lasers & Feelings setup tables (and I can only assume Space Aces was directly inspired by the game, but there is no list of influences or inspirations within the text itself, so it can only remain an assumption).
 
That tables are where the zine really shines.  There are a lot of fun tables, and some of them are really well-honed lists of options.  Some of the lists and individual options are pure silliness, but that is one of the stated goals of the text.  There is one odd feature of the lists, which is that most of them are set up to require 2d6, the first to determine the column, and the second to determine the row.  Since the mechanics of the game run with 1d20 and 1d6, it seems like it would be a more natural fit to use them both for the tables as well.  This quirk also put me in mind of Lasers & Feelings, which uses only a d6.  It seems like this zine could easily be about additional tables to expand and shape your Lasers & Feelings game, and as such I think it is an incredibly fun and useful booklet.  In spite of the fact that I can’t ever see myself using the rules of the game, I can see always knowing where it lives on my game shelf so that I can have ready access to the tables.

 
Dungeons & Dilemmas was Kickstarted during 2020’s ZineQuest, and the physical copies were sent out a year later in March of 2021.  The stated purpose of the 56-page zine is this: “Dungeons and Dilemmas presents a process for building dungeon scenarios that are more emotionally engaging and morally complex while retaining a focus on exploration, action and adventure” (1).  Burneko makes it clear that this is not about making less combat-centric dungeons for your fantasy roleplaying, but about giving those combat scenes more meaning in play.  The booklet does an admirable job of achieving that end.
 
Drawing inspiration from the town creation rules in Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard, Burneko begins by laying out 6-step process for creating the backstory of a dungeon so that it can present layers of meaning and history for the exploring players to discover and delight in.  Then, once you are brimming with ideas for visual motifs, encounters, and other elements, Burneko outlines a quick way to create the dungeon layout as an abstract cluster of room in order to help you plan out where information about the dungeon’s storied past should go, and to help you decide where encounters and treasures are best laid to ensure the “narrative” of the dungeon unspools well without ever having to dictate where the adventuring party goes.  The third chapter is about using the tools of the dungeon to effectively communicate the layered past: room content, traps, items, monsters, and NPCs.  The fourth chapter helps you use these same ideas to build a single dungeon out into a longer campaign of adventure and discovery.
 
The writing is cogent and direct, saying exactly what it wants to say without wandering off on tangents or spilling on to fill pages with inessential information.  The book, while far from short, is compact and tightly packed with precision.  There’s a lot of useful information in these pages, and there is a lot for the imagination to chew on.  I personally don’t run dungeon adventures—or at least I haven’t for a long time—but I’m always interested by what’s going on in that area of design.  Burneko’s technique is a fun way to focus your thoughts and ideas into a taut bundle of excitement.  Anything that makes the solitary fun of adventure design gamelike in its approach is offering a lot to its readers.  It reminded me a lot of Vincent Baker’s The Seclusium of Orpheus of the Three Vissions, another guide that makes a kind of game out of creating a wizard’s tower to be explored by a party of fantasy adventurers, though in layout and presentation the two books are vastly different.
 
Dungeons & Dilemmas even comes with an adventure created using the techniques presented in the zine.  It’s a fun adventure, and it’s easy to read it and see how each of the prescribed steps make up the final adventure.  The one thing I would have liked to have seen was a great explanation in that example adventure about Burneko’s own thinking about the potential paths within his abstract room diagram.  That part of the discussion in the first half of the zine is by far the most complicated to parse, and I was hoping to see it clarified by way of example, especially since I found the concept so interesting.  It’s not a big loss, but it is a missed opportunity to make concrete his exciting ideas.
 
The PDF is available through DriveThru and Burneko’s itch.io page, and it’s worth the $8 he’s asking for it.

​As with most of my reviews of game texts, this is a review of the text itself, not the game.  I haven’t played the game, and any meditation I may make about game play is pure speculation, extrapolating from the rules and imagining them in play.
 
I almost didn’t back Cartel on Kickstarter, primarily because it didn’t offer a softcover print of the book.  First, I prefer the feel and weight of paperback books, and I have no need for my books to be art objects on the shelf.  Second, I prefer the price of paperbacks, and Cartel’s hardcover was going to cost $50, way more than I wanted to spend on a game I didn’t have any intention of actually running.  Yeah, I could get the PDF, but my own policy for Kickstarters is that if I’m not willing to give shelf space to a project, I won’t back it—it’s a safety valve to keep me from backing projects just to be a part of a cultural moment.  In the end, I decided the hardcover was worth the money for three reasons. The first is that Magpie Games makes well-designed and well-produced games.  The second is that Mark Diaz Truman understands pbta game design at every level.  The third is that I listened to the episode of podcast +1Forward in which Mark was interviewed about the game, and the social moves he described exactly like the kinds of moves I was looking for in a game.  So I paid out for the hardback.  Having just finished reading my copy, I have no regrets.
 
As a physical object, the book is beautiful.  The art, the layout, the colors, the glossy paper—it all makes for a gorgeous object to look at and touch.
 
In introducing the game, the book’s biggest challenge, I knew, was going to be giving the reader enough information about the drug wars in Mexico in 2007 to feel comfortable bringing that world to life in the fiction of the game.  It’s no easy task.  Too much information, and potential players will balk at the amount of information they will need to be true too.  Too little information, and potential players will feel at sea and never attempt bringing it to their friends.  I’ve watched Jason Morningstar handle this same challenge with his historical games.  And just as Morningstar has a talent for giving players solid details, cornerstone concepts, and permission to stray from “reality,” Truman demonstrates a gift for boiling down the cultural and historical moment to a few, critical but handleable concepts.  He presents all the pertinent cultural and historical information in one chapter that can be read in 30 - 60 minutes.  At the end of it, I felt like I had enough of a grasp on the information to call my friends together for a game.  Yeah, I’d probably read it once more through and take a few notes before the actual game day, but all my concern evaporated after reading that one chapter.  Better still, all that information is reinforced in the playbooks and moves, making it an interwoven feature, rather than an acetate background on which play will animate a story.
 
There’s a lot in the game that Truman handled with that same deftness.  The playbooks have a lot of hooks to create and grab onto the fiction of gameplay even as they are slender packages of information.  Character llaves (like keys in The Shadow of Yesterday and “Lady Blackbird”), enlaces (like Hx in Apocalypse World), playbook moves, and playbook  extras all work to create characters who begin play in a powder keg of relationships, responsibilities, and secrets.  The PCs are tied to each other, but even when they have shared interests, they have conflicting self-interests, so that the characters can never fully trust each other.  Character creation looks like a quick and relatively effortless process that gives all the players a ton to work with and an exciting entre into play itself.  Truman even provides the MC with three questions for each playbook to serve as a starting point for them to start developing the opening fictional positions of each PC.  There is no handholding, but it’s clear that the game is here to make sure you launch as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
 
As for those moves that I was originally interested in, they did not disappoint.  Because secrets and the way they affect relationships lie at the heart of the game, a lot of the moves deal with the way that characters deal with other when they are both hiding things and paranoid about things being hidden from them.  So instead of having a move to charm or deceive someone, there is Justify Your Behavior.  Any time you explain what you are doing or what you have done, you have to roll the move, and the results tell you if your audience believes you or not.  So you might be telling the truth, but still you might not be believed.  On the other hand, there is a move for Getting the Truth out of someone, which is similar to Going Aggro in Apocalypse World, only you are rolling to determine how much wiggle room the person you are trying to get the truth out of has to lie.  The moves do a fantastic job of pinpointing those moments in an exchange that things can go haywire: making a deal with someone, trying to explain yourself to someone, trying to get someone to do something for you, trying to accost someone, trying to spend money you might not have.  The best pbta games target their moves carefully; they know that for this particular game, everything that is not a move is just talking, you saying what your character does, and me saying what my character does.  The move jumps in when you describe your character doing something that the game says is an important moment in the game, a moment that the rules will take temporary control of and give back to us with a bounce and new momentum.  There are plenty of moves in Cartel, but each one is placed with machined precision.
 
Cartel has a stress mechanic, which a lot of other RPGs have made a go at, but which I think Cartel is uniquely successful.  Those other RPGs use stress as simply a different harm track, a way to measure a resource.  While stress is definitely a resource to measure, Cartel makes a full stress track mean something, not by having the MC take control of the character or anything like that, but by making a full stress track limit the options a PC can make.  If you trigger Propose a Deal when your stress track is full, you have to take whatever they give you.  If you try to Justify Your Behavior with a full stress track, you won’t have any choice but to be truthful.  With a full stress track, you have nothing to gamble with, which puts you in a painfully vulnerable position, so players have excellent reasons to trigger their stress moves to keep their characters limber and capable.   And of course, triggering your stress moves means creating more drama and story to propel play forward.  With a lot of moves in pbta games, you don’t really mind missing or hitting, both are going to be interesting and fun.  With stress moves, I imagine you feel that desire to roll a hit—and a strong hit—more keenly than at any other time, because a miss means that you engaged in the behavior without getting any relief, and that means you’re going to have to something else that you don’t want to do.
 
Finally, the heat moves are another great set of moves.  They trigger when you are ever doing anything in public or potentially exposing yourself to the authorities, and given the nature of the drug wars in Mexico, you are going to be triggering these moves regularly.  The fictional triggers are fantastic: “when you avoid suspicion while handling business in public . . .,” “when you try to leave a messy crime scene before the authorities arrive . . .,” and “when you flee from los federales . . .”  The move and the roll will decide whether these moments are glossed over or become major elements of the fiction.  They are fantastic.
 
I don’t watch narcofiction, although I’m a big fan of the larger genre of crime fiction.  I haven’t watched Breaking Bad and don’t have much desire to.  That said, I would gladly play this game, mainly because it looks like genuine fun, and secondarily because I want to see all the gears working and listen to the hum of the engine.

​I backed Alice Is Missing on Kickstarter, and my copy arrived only yesterday. While I didn’t follow the Kickstarter closely after I backed it, I was eager to read the details of the game to learn how it worked.  It’s a neat silent larp, in which all the players play their characters through a phone chat group as they investigate (or just talk about) the disappearance of their mutual friend, Alice Briarwood. Tonally, Starke took inspiration from Life is Strange, Gone Home, and Oxenfree.
 
Please note that I have not played the game yet, only read it thoroughly and imagined play.
 
The quality of the game pieces is excellent.  The box is sturdy and the box art, by Julianne Grepp, gorgeous.  The bulk of the game is a set of 70 or so tarot-sized cards, which are beautifully done and printed on high-grade stock. I like to sleeve my game cards, and by removing the box insert, I am able to store the whole game in the original box even with the sleeved cards, which is a nice feature.

​The rulebook is stylishly laid out, easy to read, and on good paper.  There is one odd quirk about the rulebook: it gives you most of the information you need twice.  The first 22 pages of the booklet is a summary of everything you need to know to run the game. The final 26 pages are the “Facilitator Guide,” which is designed to walk you through the steps of being the facilitator, but essentially repeats everything from the first 22 pages.  The main motivator seems to be the desire to give the facilitator a step-by-step guide to setting up and running the game, including sample passages to read to the players at each step of the game.  The impulse is laudable, but the final execution makes for an inelegant and awkward read. 
 
The game itself looks cool and fun.
 
The first part of play is character creation and setting the narrative stage. From the printed-out stack of missing-person posters, you randomly pull who your Alice is for this game.  Once this is known, each player takes one of the five character cards.  The only required character is Charlie Barnes, “The one who moved away,” which the facilitator always plays.  Charlie had moved away from Silent Falls, the small Northern California town where our story takes place, and has recently returned to live with his father.  The character card tells you your name and your relationship with Alice (best friend, older brother, secret girlfriend, and one with a crush). To this bare-bones information, each player gets a Drive Card, which gives you a basic way to behave, such as: “you fear the worst for Alice. Jump to conclusions, make conspiracy theories, and blame yourself for her disappearance”; or “you want to keep everyone calm. Crack a joke, distract from the chaos, do everything to can to bury your true fear.”  With this basic sketch of your character, you begin to flesh out who Alice was by answering the prompt included on your character card.  For example, “What kind of teenager is Alice? (Quiet, Jock, Popular, Valedictorian, Stoner, Etc.)”; or “What about Alice do other people sometimes find annoying but you appreciate?” Once Alice is sketched out, you return to your Drive card and use the prompts there to form your character’s relationship with two other player characters. One card offers these two relationships: “I know how you really feel about Alice” and “We’ve never gotten along.” Another has these two: “I don’t think you like me,” and “I’ve always wanted you to be my friend.”
 
All of these prompts are well chosen to give strong starting situation.  You get everything you need to know to start moving ahead while still having plenty of room to create characters and fuller relationships through play. The two cards—the Character Card and the Drive Card—do a lot of heavy lifting in a quick and easy fashion.  In addition, there is enough here to create replayability, though the game suggests not playing with the exact same group, which seems reasonable.
 
The final step of character/world creation is to look at the 5 suspects and 5 locations that will recur throughout the game.  Having laid out the cards in two rows, the players take turns picking one of the cards and explaining why that person or place is suspicious in Alice’s disappearance.  This is a clever way to introduce everyone to these recurring features of the narrative and to give everyone a reason to be wary of them.  Naming all the ways the world and people around us are dangerous and unknown has an additional psychological impact, placing the players in a shared mood and mindset.
 
After you have used the cards to create your characters and their world, you are ready to play out the mystery of Alice’s disappearance.  The mystery takes place over 90 minutes, with a countdown clock available for download or on Youtube.  The countdown video comes complete with a soundtrack.  Since no one will be speaking, the music should have a significant impact on the mood during play.  The facilitator has a stock message to send the group chat at the start of the 90 minutes, the narrative reason for us all to be chatting in the first place.  Then clues are uncovered by different players at predetermined times via Clue Cards.  One appears when the countdown hits 80 minutes, another at 70 minutes, then 60 minutes, then 50, then 45, 40, 35, 30, 20, and finally the climax hits at 10 minutes, with the flurry of texting and the final fallout wrapping before the clock hits zero.  Each clue has you reveal a suspect or a location from their respective decks and prompts you to create a bit of narrative the implicates them.  At some point one of the revealed suspects becomes THE suspect and one of the revealed locations becomes THE location.
 
The clue cards are a clever way to control pacing, as the prompts begin by creating rumors and slowly bring the suspects and their threats closer and closer to our characters.  You see that at the center of the game, the clues come every five minutes so that revelations come fast and furious.  In a 5-person game, each character will have something big to contribute to the conversation from minute 50 to minute 30.  Overall, the prompts are as solid on the clue cards as they are on the character cards.  Some prompts make heavier narrative demands on the players than others, but there were only one or two prompts that I found intimidating, especially if I had to create it while getting texts from others and trying to figure out how to impart the information organically. Most of them ask for simple but effective bits of story. For replayability, there are three clue cards for each countdown time, so each game you play will have different prompts. 
 
Up to this point, I tried to be as specific as I can without spoiling any specifics about the story elements.  From here forward, however, I’ll need to spoil the story in order to discuss the games limits and to talk about it thematically and politically.
 
*Spoilers ahead! Turn back now if you don’t want to know the story content of the game.*
 
Starke has to perform a balancing act between the narrative possibilities of the story and the speed and ease of setup.  Alice will always have been taken by one of the 5 suspects in some twisted or malevolent plot.  Even though Gone Home is an inspiration, you do not have the possibility of a lover’s elopement. Similarly, none of the 3-5 players can have had any roll in Alice’s disappearance.  To allow for all or any of these possibilities would mean all kinds of development during character and world creation and radical changes to the clue card prompts.  Or, at least I think it would.  At the very least, it would need to allow for a much wider range of 10-minute cards.  As it is, it’s cool that Alice could be in any state of health, and it’s cool that one of the players will become tied up with Alice’s fate, but I’m greedy, and seeing something awesome often makes me want to see it even more awesome.
 
The ramifications of these limits go beyond aesthetics.  In the end, you will always tell the tale of a high school girl who was kidnapped/lured/entrapped/misled by a hostile member of the community: an authority figure, an ex, a rich kid (which I think “popular” always means), a bully, or a creeper.  The authority figure and rich kid will always point to the powerful, but bully, creeper, and ex are unmoored.  These could easily be the poor or disenfranchised of the community, especially since the player’s biases are not given any checks by the mechanics of the game.  All of this means that the game is open to repeating harmful tropes and storylines.  Putting in checks to these impulses or cutting off certain possibilities wouldn’t be too hard to do, but those adjustments are better made at the design level than hacked by the players.
 
Along these same lines, Alice is a unambiguously gendered name, which means that we are repeating a tale of violence against women without any opportunity to tell a different story.  Other names are ambiguously gendered allowing for the full range of pronouns and relationships.  I’m not sure if this is harmful or problematic, but I think it is unnecessarily limiting.
 
Regardless of these limitations and possible problems, the game is focused and well-designed.  It’s one of the few larps that I feel can easily pull me into larping.  It would make a fantastic introduction to the hobby.

I recently lucked into a copy of Freemarket.  All I knew about the game before reading it was that it was created by Luke Crane and Jared Sorensen, that it was sold in a box, that prints of it were rare (and therefore expensive), and that the game contained considerable amounts of jargon.  That last fact I gleaned from an old talk that Vincent Baker gave about Apocalypse World, in which he said that the discussion on the Forge surrounding Freemarket informed his decision about how much jargon to include in his own game.
 
With that handful of facts, I approached the game.  From the box cover, I gathered that the game had something of the cyberpunk aesthetic, as it presented a futuristic cityscape teeming with people and neon signs.  Within the box is a landscape-oriented manual, 150 pages long and in vibrant blue, yellow, purple, pink, and green.  There are 6 individually boxed decks of card, five identical “challenge decks” and one thin “technology deck.”  There are four thick cardboard sheets, each with eight round tokens to be punched out.  There are four completed character sheets on glossy 8x10 paper, a pad of full-color character sheets, and a pad of paper labeled “MRCZ and Backup Profile.”  All this fits snugly in the quality box, and together they give the box considerable heft.

​Now a look at the fictional content of the game. The setting is the “Stanford Torus-style space station parked at the L5 lagrange point of Titan and Saturn” (4), commonly known as Freemarket.  The station houses roughly 80,000 people, though it was originally built for 10,000, reconfigured to fit 40,000 comfortably, and then modified once again with state-of-the-art technology to its current build.  The station is packed, but no one goes without. In fact, Freemarket is a utopia, an anarchic one at that. “There are no laws in our society, yet there is no crime and no death” (4).  A computer with artificial intelligence, named The Aggregate, runs everything smoothly and efficiently, maintaining not only the physical space, but monitoring the physical needs of the inhabitants, known as Freemers, as well. Each Freemer has a “key”: “a nanological digital interface implanted into the nervous system,” allowing “communication with the station and other users.”  Moreover, “it monitors your health and your flow.  It runs all the software you need to interact with station technology” (5). You see that mention of “flow”? That’s the currency aboard Freemarket.  On the station, there is no money, and every Freemer gets food and a bed to sleep in. The economy is not financial, but reputation-based, a kind of social capital.  When you make friends, give gifts, and find other ways to demonstrate you are an asset to the community, The Aggregate increases your flow.  When other Freemers complain about you, cease to be your friend, or you act destructively toward the community, you lose flow.
 
You can use your increased flow to better your reputation, but to improve your living quarters and your access to station resources, you need to team up with others. Like-minded individuals can form a group with a defined purpose.  Once that group registers with The Aggregate, they are assigned some basic equipment and room to operate.  As you prove that you can do what you set out to do, and that you can provide services to the community, and that you are attractive to other Freemers who then want to join your cause, the Aggregate will award you more space and more resources.  Those organizations at the top tier can have as many as 256 members, individual living quarters, and top-of-the-line equipment to work with. If you want to live a more luxurious life than the common Freemer, this is the only way to do it.  These groups are called Multiregional Cultural Zones, or MRCZs, pronounced individually as “mercy” or collectively as “mercies.”
 
Obviously, the world of Freemarket is placed in the future.  We know from the manual that Mars is settled (mostly in underground facilities), that there is a base on the moon called “Liberty Station.”  We have regular access to “nanological” material (called “smart” material), which allows us to create body enhancements that interface with computers, like the “key” installed in each Freemer.  Bodies can be built from scratch, and living creatures can be “printed” from this smart material.  Even our memories can be broken into data, and new “memories” can be constructed entirely from data without the need of an experience.  These advances make death lose its meaning.  The Aggregate keeps a backup of your profile, and if you die, your body and profile can be reestablished.  Another advantage of being in a top tier MRCZ is that more of your profile is backed up, and it is done more frequently.
 
That’s the fictional world that the game is set in.  My summary may be long for a review, but it is short for an RPG with a specific setting.  Crane and Sorensen developed the setting to the exact extent it is needed in order to play the game they wanted to design. Once they set those hard parameters, they leave everything else to the players. You can probably tell just from reading my summary of the setting what characters consist of and what they do during play. Each player creates a Freemer, and the play group together creates a MRCZ. You can make that MRCZ about anything you want: you can be a team of negotiators, a team of cultural influencers, a team of farmers, data hackers, singers, or artists. There is no limit to the kinds of stories you can tell as long as you play within the utopian construction of Freemarket.
 
I mentioned earlier that the art on the box had a cyberpunk aesthetic, and there are indeed several cyberpunk elements, but the game is certainly not cyberpunk. One of the key elements of a cyberpunk story is oppressive and competing corporations that our heroes fight against. When Freemarket is called a utopia it is not ironic. The rules state specifically that The Aggregate cannot become an oppressive actor with an agenda of its own. Printers can’t create human-animal hybrid monsters. Characters who do not contribute positively to the world will find their flow zeroed out and are likely to be voted off the station, never to return. No, this is a utopia for real, and you are playing to find out how your PCs and their MRCZ can fare in this world.
 
The rulebook never actually says what you are “playing to find out.” I’ve borrowed that phrase, of course, from Vincent and Meguey Baker’s Apocalypse World. Apocalypse World and Freemarket were in development at the same time and were published in the same year: 2010. It may just be a coincidence, but the mechanics in both games create a similar play experience, which makes me think that the designers or both games were trying to accomplish similar design goals, each with a vastly different approach.
 
While both games are set in the future, the worlds couldn’t be more different. One is a utopia, while the other is dystopic. One is a world in which all your needs are provided for, while the other is defined primarily as a world of scarcity. But after that, both games lean in similar directions. Both games, for example, attempt to create extended campaign play that is driven by the desires and actions of the characters, rather than by the machinations of the GM. Freemarket achieves this goal by using MRCZs as a way to ensure that all the PCs have shared interests and ambitions.  Through character creation (and MRCZ creation), the players must come to an agreement about what this particular game will be about. Then, once everyone is on the same page, the GM (called the “superuser” in Freemarket) starts introducing “trouble” for the characters to respond to. The system for creating that trouble is neat. At the time of character creations, players give their characters a number of long-term memories and one short-term memory. Each memory must have three of the following five elements: “a person, a MRCZ or group, a place, an object (or piece of technology), or an action” (20). The superuser takes all these memories created at the beginning of play and takes one element from a memory of each player and brings them together in a new event.  So, for example, I might take character A’s uncle from one of their memories, and join it with character B’s pet monkey from one of their memories along with a stage performance taken from one of character C’s memories.  Using these elements, I can start play by having A’s uncle approach the group hoping to borrow B’s monkey for an upcoming talent contest.  The NPC has something they want from the PCs, and the NPC’s interest necessarily involves at least two and up to all the PCs. Sessions begin and end with the making, erasing, and utilization of memories, so the players can always shape what will be a focus of play by curating what elements their memories provide.  The superuser, meanwhile, can’t and needn’t make big overarching plans, forcing them to always construct events and play from what is happening right now.
 
Freemarket’s mechanics are tightly constructed. Each gear of the machine has its place and interacts precisely with its neighboring parts. Conflict is resolved using the decks of cards I mentioned earlier. To explain the ins and outs of conducting these “challenges” would take me more space than my summary of the setting, so I won’t go into any detail, but the challenges consist of drawing cards from your challenge deck and scoring points; the player with the most points at the end of the challenge wins. On your turn, there are a variety of moves you can make, letting you draw more cards, or turn non-scoring cards into scoring cards, or removing your opponent’s cards, or drawing from the special technology deck. The challenge process uses strategy, but not so much that it would be offputting to someone who prefers non-strategic play. In the process of playing out the challenge, every part of your character on your character sheet influences your options and your final outcome. As I said, it’s a tight design and well thought-out.
 
For all the sharpness of the design, I don’t find myself inspired to bring the game to my friends for playing. Part of it is that the world isn’t particularly exciting to me. When I look at the range of different stories we can play out, I don’t feel my blood rise in the heat of excitement. Another thing that falls flat for me is the narrative side of challenges. As a card game, challenges are cool. As a narrative-building moment in the game they are less interesting. In the end, the only part that really matters is the outcome, so the narrative back and forth that gets stapled onto the card play runs the risk of being uninteresting or unimportant, or both. The third aspect of the game that dowses my enthusiasm is the vagueness of what it is that we’re playing to find out. The cycle structured by the rules is that you push to improve your MRCZ tier so that you can improve your accommodations and resources as you become a greater part of life on the station.  That progression smacks of the expand-or-die aspect of capitalism, ironically.  True, you can just stop expanding, and you won’t die—but the game will.  Without the quest for expansion, there is no unified desire driving your group and making them a team. The trip along the way may be exciting, but where we’re going is not.
 
There’s a lot about the game that I didn’t get to touch: the economies of flow and data, the 14 experiences and the types of stories they suggest, the use of memories in character development. If you have questions, I’ll be happy to answer them. If you have thoughts—either from your own experiences with the game or not--I’d love to hear them!

s with most of my posts about RPG games, this one assumes that you are familiar with the text.  In a traditional text, what I say would count as spoilers, but in an RPG text, they are just assumptions.
 
I picked up Ars Magica second edition primarily because of my interest in the inspirations that led to the construction of Apocalypse World.  I knew that the Bakers had played some version of the game for many years and that their experiences there informed a lot of their game design that followed.  And of course, the ludography in Apocalypse World notes that the system for hardhold construction was inspired by the covenant creations in Ars Magica.  In addition, I came to Ars Magica because I’m interested in the history of RPGs and like to look at the games that shaped the very landscape of the art and hobby.
 
When I look at Ars Magica, I see a lot of little clever details.  There’s the neat feature that when you roll your stats, another player rolls against you.  There’s the yoking of stats so that you split one bonus as equally possible between two related stats, ensuring that they are both low, high, or mediocre together.  There’s the use of the old notation on a d10, in which the 10 was noted as a zero, to make two different kinds of rolls, a simple roll and a stress roll.  There’s the use of personality traits to give mechanical grip to acting against character.  But it is not because of these details that the game draws its power.  Nor is it the main mechanics of conflict resolution—which is a variation of roll+stat+bonuses against a target number (called an “ease factor”) or an opposed roll--that inspire fondness for the game.
 
The game draws its lasting power and influence from a few things, most of which are commonly discussed when talking about the game.  The first is the idea of troupe play and the characters that are created.  When a player sits down to play, they create their Magus, a Companion, and a Grog.  The grogs all become communal characters, not owned by any specific player.  The magus and companion are specifically yours.  Then when a game or series is about to begin, one player plays their magus, one player plays their companion, and everyone else plays grogs.  In fact, the players playing the magus and companion can play grogs as well.  Which characters are involved is the result of deciding who is most appropriate for a given adventure and who most wants to play their character at this moment.
 
This fluidity of character play is tied directly to the second feature that makes this game special: that the long-term story created by all the sessions of play is the story primarily of the covenant itself.  While the individual characters are important and hopefully meaningful to the players, the game is designed at cover decades of play.  There are specific rules for aging, overcoming aging, and dying of natural causes.  Magi can spend whole seasons if not whole years studying their art, and while they study, others adventure to advance the cause of the covenant.  Many games since this one have tried to make a community the focus of play, but this one really nails it because it does so indirectly.  While players concentrate on their characters and their long-term goals, the cumulative affect of play is that the covenant develops its resources, grog live and die, companions contribute and develop different relationships with the different characters.  A table of 3 players has nine playable characters in the covenant from the first session and most likely a host of NPCs who have the potential to each become playable characters in their own right.
 
And the third thing, which is intimately related to the first two of course, is that the covenant exists in a specific and interesting world.  Tweet and Rein-Hagan place the game in a fantasy version of Europe during the middle ages.  It’s the world as we know it, but it includes magic; it is, in short, the world as it was conceived by those who lived in the middle ages (or at least that was how the authors saw it).  Magic beasts, we are told, should resemble those of medieval tales and literature, not those of the modern imagination.  The big addition is of course the Hermetic Order of magi and their shareable system of spells to understand magic.  We know that this approach was popular because there are supplements to explain the order, its rules, and its magic.  But within the core book, there is only a sketch of how things stand.  But that sketch is both evocative and full of everything you need to know to get up and running.  It’s enough to inspire and it gives you permission to fill in all the gaps and create all the local rules you want for your specific game.  Magic as the Hermetic Order understands it has rules and is predictable to a certain extent.  And those rules are reflected in the rules of spell casting and spell creation within the game.  The authors wisely noted that there is a lot of magic in the world the Order doesn’t understand, so magic as used by the beasts and demons of the world do not have to follow the logic of Hermetic magic.  The game does an impressive job of walking the fine line between being inspiring and overbearing.  I can see exactly how it grabbed players imaginations and let players create their own world with zeal.  Even when players like the Bakers put down the rules themselves, they played within the world, because the world is wonderfully realized with a ton of potential for stories and drama, ready to be lived in and explored without strangling creativity with preconstructed elements.
 
I found the presence and treatment of religion to be amusing from my perspective in 2020.  It feels like either the authors were wary of judgment from the religious right here in America or that they were genuinely concerned with giving proper respect to the Christian church.  While the magi are not aligned with the church, and while there is friction between the magi and the church, there is not direct opposition.  In fact, the game treats demons and the devil as real antagonists and the Hermetic Order, to which the main characters must belong, rejects Diabolists, magi who use devils in their magic.  In this way, magi and the church are united in their common enemies of demons and diabolists.  Beyond that, the church is given real power through the use of dominion, land under the church’s protection that negatively affects the power of magic and diabolists’ power.  God has real power in this world, and there is no way to play within the world and reject Christianity as mere philosophy.
 
The power structure is rounded out by the inclusion of faerie magic, which is a neat way to introduce the fantastic beyond the church and demons.  I like how the bestiary in the main text structures brownies, elves, dwarves, and other fantastic creatures as variations of faeries.  It allows you to bring your D&D knowledge into the medieval world, allowing you to eat your cake and have it at the same time.
 
This is not a game text that I finished reading and wanted to play.  The main mechanics are relatively dull.  There is a ton of math for every action from basic combat to complex magic, and I don’t need that in any gaming conversation I want to be a part of, though I understand that others do.  But I did end want to play within the world of the game.  I liked the way it viewed magic.  I liked the way it created covenants. I liked the way it told stories over such a long arc of time.  In the end, I think, I would rather hear people tell the story of their campaign and their covenant that play out the experience itself.

​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.

​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:

​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:

​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:

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, 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.

​One More Thing is a short two-player storytelling RPG by Nathan Paoletta.  One player takes on the role of the Detective, and the other the role of the Murderer.  The story that play produces is supposed to mimic TV detective stories like you would see in an episode of Columbo or Murder She Wrote or The Rockford Files.  As such, it is a foregone conclusion that the Detective will solve the crime and the Murderer will be brought to justice, so play is not about whether or not that will happen.  Instead, “[y]ou play to find out how the Detective builds their case, how the Murderer reacts, and how the audience feels about the Murderer in the end” (from One More Thing’s rulebook, page 2).
 
There are essentially two modes of play.  The game comes with 5 pre-conceived murders with specific Detective and Murderer characters.  For a no-prep game, players can pick up their respective pamphlets, gather up the included clue cards, and start playing.  The other mode is to create your own characters and unique murder to play out, creating your own clue cards at the beginning of play.  Play time ranges between 1 or 2 hours, according to the box.
 
This is where I give my ever-important statement that I have not played this game or seen it played.  I am talking about and reacting to the written and packaged material in the boxed game, so take my opinion for what it’s worth.
 
I backed One More Thing because, first, I trust Paoletta as a game designer, and second, because I’m always interested in ways designers make investigative games.  When the game arrived in the mail last week, I had every intention to read the rules right away in anticipation of playing the game that evening with my wife, Ann.  But as I read through the rules, I found my enthusiasm waning.  It waned not because of any fault of the game, but because it wasn’t asking questions that were of great interest to me, and because it isn’t designed to surprise the players in the ways I was excited to be surprised.
 
Both players know how the murder happened and who was involved.  In the case of pre-constructed play, the information is shared between players at the outset.  In the case of creating your own murder, the players work out the details together.  Each player then takes turns describing a scene for their character, choosing a scene type from a list of 4 types.  The player chooses the scene type by deciding either what they would like to see in the fiction or what they would like to accomplish in terms of the game played on the board.

​The board is a 10” square that sits between the players with a basic grid on it.  Along the bottom, the grid tracks how much evidence has been entered into play, and along the Y-axis, the grid tracks how much sympathy the killer has from the imagined viewing audience.  Both axes run from 1-6.  So your character can be unsympathetic and careful to leave behind only a few clues, sympathetic and careless with the evidence they leave behind, or anywhere in between on either axis.
 
The evidence that enters the fiction can exist in three different states.  If they are in the clue card pile, then the evidence hasn’t yet entered into the fiction.  A card can then be turned over and placed in front of the detective.  At that point, the evidence has clue the fiction, but the detective has not yet interpreted the clue for the audience to tell us why it is important.  Once it has entered the fiction, the detective can use a turn to enter it into evidence, which means that they have interpreted the clue to indicat how it implicates the murderer.  Once the clue has been entered into evidence, the marker tracks up the X-axis.
 
Each scene type available to each player has a range of possible outcomes.  The murderer’s sympathetic standing can rise and fall, clues can be found, and clues can be entered into evidence or removed as evidence.  As the murderer you can try to control how sympathetic your character appears, or you can choose not to.  As the detective, you can choose how you want to enter clues into evidence to tighten the screws on the murder.  As long as there are a minimum of two clues that have been entered into evidence, either player can call for a final scene in which the characters confront each other and the detective lays out the evidence to get the murderer to confess.
 
Like the good designer he is, Paoletta knows precisely where the play happens in his game, and he constructs One More Thing carefully to allow for one set of possibilities and to exclude others.  As I stated earlier, my problem with the game is not the design but with my lack of interest in where the play happens.  A lot of the scenes are set up to be either descriptive only or with limited roleplaying, and within that roleplaying there is little room for narrative surprises.  The cat and mouse game can only explore so much when the mouse can never actually get away and in fact has to want to be (or at least resign themselves to being) caught.
 
It’s tricky to structure play within tight confines.  To do so is to bank on targeting the right part of play.  Paoletta uses similar restrictions in his recently-released RPG Imp of the Perverse.  In that game, it is similarly guaranteed that the monster hunters will identify and defeat the monster wreaking havoc in the game world.  That particular restriction I don’t have any problem with because I think the question it poses through those limitations is an interesting one: what is your character willing to do to achieve that end?  That’s an interesting question and gets at the heart of why I play many of the RPGs I play.  I want to know who these characters are.  Not just who they think they are or who they tell themselves they are, but who they are as revealed by the decisions they make.  In much of One More Thing, the characters main decisions happen before play, revealed in why the murderer murdered and why and how the detective investigates.  Undoubtedly how the murderer responds to the detective on their trail will tell us something, but it feels to me like small potatoes.  Maybe in play, I’d be delightfully surprised how it actually unfolds, but I can’t really see it from here and the possibility doesn’t seem great enough to want to put aside other evening activities to give it a whirl.
 
I see a lot of game designers fascinated with genre and emulating genre conventions in their game design to, of course, mixed results.  It’s an interesting question what you choose to leave open to be revealed through play and what gates you seal off to channel play in your desired directions.  Here, the genre convention of the detective outsmarting and catching the murderer is a severe restriction.  I can see that the issue of sympathy was included to give the murderer player something to shoot for or care about in the decisions they make during play, but it’s not a particularly riveting question, especially since it doesn’t matter in any sense.  Sometimes a sympathetic murderer is just what you want, and sometimes a murderer with few redeeming qualities are the thing. 
 
I often think about a blog post of Vincent Baker’s from “anyway” called “Conflict Resolution sans Stakes.”  Here’s the lengthy passage that I keep running over in my mind:

​There is value in games that have the room to live both within a larger genre while defying narrower classifications.  In the case of these three Bruce Willis films, you don’t know which type of story you’re telling until the game is over and the dust has settled.  The elements of randomness and bounce as well as the range of possible responses by the players keeps things up in the air and full of possibility, which naturally breathes life into play.
 
Now just because I love this aspect of roleplaying doesn’t mean that every game needs to provide that possibility—I’m not trying to be prescriptivist about this.  I find that very few games can be reduced as tightly as One More Thing while still allowing enough breathing room for excitement.
 
The rulebook breaks up the two ways to play the game, so when I found myself disappointed by the pre-constructed way to play, I hurried on to the build-your-own murder play.  I love the simple tables and tools Paoletta gives you to construct your murderer and murder; it’s a tool I plan on using liberally in my other roleplaying.  But once the murder has been created, both players come up with clues and everything is known, for the most part.  All the creative play happens before the game itself happens, at which point you are in a simulated writer’s room to see how to tell the tale of how this murderer gets caught by this detective.  It would be at the point that play is set to begin that I least care to play it forward to see what happens.
 
Obviously the game has given me a lot to think about, and for that I am grateful.  I have no regrets about backing the game.  The pieces of the physical game, from the box to the board to the character sheets to the tokens are all top notch, so if this game excites you, it is well worth getting the physical set, which Paoletta now sells on his website, www.ndpdesign.com.

I don’t remember where in my readings I first became aware of Ganakagok.  I found this copy, from the 2006 publication of the game, labeled as the “Second Edition”, on ebay for a reasonable price.  It has sat on my shelf for two years now, and something brought it to mind, so I pulled it out and gave it the read it deserves.  There is a more recent version of the game available as a PDF at Indie Press Revolution and all downloads are at ganakagok.com. I haven’t read the most recent version, so I don’t know what rules might have been changed, added, or removed.
 
As usual, let me preface my thoughts here by noting that I have not played the game, so take my thoughts for what they are worth.  I have read the book through twice and played it out in my head, but not everything works at the table the way it does in my head, and certain interactions between parts of the game might not occur to me.
 
The basic idea of the game is that you are exploring the fantastic lives of a handful of the inhabitants of Ganakagok in a time of change.  Ganakagok is a giant iceberg that has been wrought by some ancient force to have spires and caves and numerous mysteries.  The people who live on Ganakagok are called the Nitu and are a quasi-Inuit people.  Ganakagok and the Nitu have always existed in a permanent night under a sky of spinning stars.  But now dawn is coming, and players play to find out what will become of these specific characters, the Nitu people as a whole, and Ganakagok itself when the dawn arrives.
 
The main unique element in the game is a deck of custom-made tarot cards, which the game calls the Ganakagok Tarot.  It’s a 52-card deck made of 4 suits with 13 cards in each suit, just like a regular deck of playing cards.  The four suits are Tears, Flames, Storms, and Stars, and the cards run from 2 to 10, the face cards being the child, the man, the woman, and the Ancient.  Each card has the following information on it:
 

• It’s rank and suit (Two of Tears, Ancient of Stars, etc.)
• An easily recognizable graphic indicating its suit
• A few words summarizing the meaning of the suit
• A few words summarizing the meaning of the rank
• A title unique to that card, both in the fictitious Nitu language and in English (the Two of Tears, for example, is uktiukota kibaka – school of fish)
• A predominant illustration of the title
• A unique meaning of the card (“to court or become friends,” “to celebrate; to feel joy and express it without reservation,” etc.)

​The tarot is not a gimmick within the game. It is the main feature in just about every aspect of play, from character and world creation to scene setting to scene resolution.  All this information on the cards allows for a range of inspiration for and interpretations by the players. The information also guides the tone and theme of the game by constantly having the language, imagery, and mythological structures of the world before the players.  It’s not just a cool device; it is put to excellent use in the game.
 
Ganakagok is designed for short-term play.  To this end, White put in a pacing mechanic that ushers players through the stages of the game, though players are given some control over how quickly they move through those stages.  At the outset of the game, the GM lays out 4 cards from the tarot, each representing one of the 4 spiritual powers that rule the Nitu people’s world: The Stars, The Sun, The Ancient Ones, and the Ancestors.  The cards are kept face down before the players, but the GM uses the information on the card to determine the general length of the 4 stages of the game: Night, Twilight, Dawn, and Morning.  As players have their scenes, they can put points into the current stage, and when those points meet the threshold determined by those 4 opening cards, the game shifts to the next stage.  Before going on to the next stage, one of the 4 face down cards is revealed, and the player who revealed it, uses it to divine something about the role of the spirit in the great change that is happening.  In other words, we learn at that moment what the Stars want to happen, why the Ancient Ones build Ganakagok, what the sun intends to do—or whatever questions the players want answered at that time.  It’s a neat way to have the mystery about what is happening revealed slowly and organically, with each revelation potentially influencing the scenes and play that follow.  There is no pre-planning required, and that creative burden is spread among the players.  It’s a simple, neat, and effective system.  Finally, when Morning arrives, the game ends, and there are mechanics to determine the final fate of the players’ characters, the Nitu people, and Ganakagok itself.
 
Characters are tied directly into this big change.  Character creation begins with three cards from the deck, which players interpret to decide 1) how they know the great change is coming, 2) what they hope the great change will bring or prevent, and 3) what they fear the great change will prevent or usher in.  This is the starting point for learning who your character is, and everything else stems from it.  Those cards also tell you what “good medicine” and “bad medicine” your character begins play with.  Medicine can be spent at this point to build your character and the world.  Good medicine can give you important items, relationships, knowledge, and access to the spirits, while bad medicine gives you limitations, fears, troubled relationships, and sins that weigh on your soul.  By the end of character creation, you have your character positioned in relation to the oncoming change, to the other PCs, to the village you are all a part of, and to the landscape.  Additionally, a loose map has been constructed and a basic relationship web within the village are constructed through this process.  As play continues, the maps (physical and relationship) will be added to and changed.
 
I really like the character creation process.  Like a lot of Forge games of this period, Ganakagok relies on point systems to “buy” facts and details of the world and your character, which I have not traditionally been a fan of, but here the point system is both simple and meaningful.  Yeah, the same thing could be accomplished without points, but because the points tie into the cards and because there is a simple way to adjust those points while you build your character, I think it works well here.
 
So character creation positions your character and the world as it exists in the Night, the status quo before the world begins to change.  As play begins, 4 more tarot cards are flipped and interpreted to answer the questions “What is happening in Ganakagok right now?” and “What is happening in the village right now?”  This begins to upset the status quo and gives the players something immediate to respond to on their turns.  From that point on, scenes are meant to bring situations of change and choice as the normal relationships and routines are upset. Game play is turn-based, and during your turn, you let the GM know what your character is doing or wants to do, creating a quick sketch of a scene.  The GM then flips a card from the tarot deck and interprets it to create a situation that is designed to become untenable.  You play out the scene until you can identify what White calls the “fateful moment,” the decision or action whose outcome will have meaningful ramifications.  He’s careful to separate fateful moments from conflict.  Sometimes those two are the same thing, but to resolve a fateful moment is not to resolve the central conflict in the scene.
 
Resolving fateful moments is the most involved part of play as it involves cards, stats, dice, manipulation of those dice by spending points on your character sheet created by the good and bad medicine you spent earlier, and a process for determining narration rights.  It all hangs together, but the process is rather involved.  I like that all players can be involved in the process, not just the player whose character is involved in the fateful moment.  I also like that the event is resolved in two stages that lets the fateful moment arise, take steps toward a resolution, meet a whole bunch of influences to push the resolution toward individually desired outcomes, and then have a final resolution.  The staging of the process is cool, and if played well, it can lead to all kinds of cool narrative details that turn the fateful moment into a capital-E event.  But there is nothing to require that kind of connection between the points and fiction, so I imagine some play can devolve into point spending without the narrative build.  I can also see all the point-shifting that happens being a potentially annoying back and forth that detracts from the excitement rather than builds on it.
 
That whole back and forth relies on a somewhat adversarial relationship between the GM and the players, the players using their good medicine to help their own cause and the GM using their fiat points to create complications.  This is always a difficult line to walk because the GM is given no motivation other than being an adversary, creating complications for complications’ sake.  It requires a GM with a good sense of when and where to put pressure and when to say its enough.  The game provides its own limitations by dictating how many points the GM has to spend, but the randomness of it all means that the GM may have too many or not enough points at time, preventing a potentially powerful scene from reaching its promise or building up a scene that is better left alone.  Good and experienced players might never have a problem, but we can’t all be good and experienced all the time.  It’s unclear by the rulebook if the GM is supposed to go as hard as they can whenever they can, or if they are playing to some other purpose.  Clarifying that purpose (both in the rules and through the mechanics) would go a long way to alleviating this potential problem.
 
A scene resolves with a pool of points for one of the players to spend, which they can use to 1) improve their own character or their situation, 2) help out another character, 3) advance the stage clock toward entering the next stage, 4) shore up points for a positive or negative ending for the villagers, or 5) shore up positive or negative ending for Ganakagok.  Sometimes the player will have a lot of points to spend, and sometimes they many only have one point to spend.  This is the part of play it’s hardest for me to imagine in action, since those are a lot of choices with probably only a few points to go around.  On the one hand, I like that you have to chose between benefiting yourself now or your people in the long term, and I like that you can control whether the clock advances or now, letting you speed up or slow down the overall game.  On the other hand, that has to feel like a Sophie’s Choice sometimes which I imagine often leaves the player dissatisfied.  That means the tough decision is good, but the dissatisfied feeling is not.
 
The text itself is good.  There are a lot of visual aids and examples, which I appreciate.  The rules themselves, however, are difficult to follow as presented.  I read the book through twice not just to make sure I understood but to understand at all.  There are a lot of moving pieces and the way that a mechanic acts and interacts are not all explained in one place.  The good news is that they are all explained, and it all makes sense.  I didn’t end my second reading with any questions about how the game worked.  The only bad news is that it was work to get to that understanding.  I imagine that much of the most recent edition is about making the game easier to understand and grasp on an initial reading.
 
There’s a lot about the game that’s exciting and that I’m eager to see in play.  I’m especially excited to see the tarot cards in action and to go through character construction.

I don’t normally post about the shorter games I read, although I do occasionally, when something strikes me, I suppose.  Lizzie Stark’s “In Residency” is a 48-page text for a larp, which was shared on the Bully Pulpit patreon page.  If you enjoy Jason Morningstar’s games and brain, I highly recommend backing their patreon at the $5 level.  You get access to games and works in progress and other interesting posts.  Starting last month, they shared some of the work of Jeeyon Shim, with whom Jason was collaborating.  This month, the featured collaborative artist is Lizzie Stark, and to kick things off, they shared this game along with the transcript of an interview of her by Jason.  So that’s how I came to have and read “In Residency.”
 
I have never played in a larp and don’t have any intentions or desires to do so, but I love reading the texts of these thoughtful American Freeform larps.  At their most evocative, which “In Residency” most certainly is, the reading is like watching a preview for a really good movie.  You see what the themes are, who the cast of characters are, what the nature of the conflicts are, and all the space for drama and emotional play—all in these little bits and flashes that you tie together with your imagination.  The premise of “In Residency” is that the players play a group of artists who have earned residency at the elite artists’ colony Brython.  Each artist within the game has a past trauma that is the foundation of the piece or pieces of art that they are working on during their tenure at the colony.  The game itself takes place over two days a week or so apart and consists primarily of the social half hour before and after dinner during which the artists mingle, flirt, share stories, and generally come together after their long day of isolated creation and before their long evening of the same.  The characters will get drunk, seek attention, have affairs, and it will all culminate in someone burning a work of art.
 
One of the things I love about reading this kind of larp is that everything is laid out so simply and directly, disguising all the hard design work it took to make it that way.  The basic structure and needs are quite simple really.  You need to give the players characters who are primed for drama, with existing relationships, insecurities, concerns, etc.  You need to give the players something for the characters to engage with and discuss at a superficial level in order to reveal the good stuff.  You need to build in the thematic content into the characters, their backgrounds, and their conversational topics in order for it to blossom in play without any conscious effort on the part of the players.  “In Residency” does all of that elegantly and compellingly.
 
The characters all have a particular artistic form that no other character shares exactly.  There might be three writers, but one will be a poet, another a novelist, and a third a playwright.  Each character summary is brief, but full of who they are as artists and who they hope to be as artists.  In addition, they have relationships in the outside world in various states of growth or decay.  And each character has a unique trauma that fuels their work.  This is all information quick and easy to deliver or put together before play, but it gives all the players a rich background to influence their decisions during play.  Additionally, each “day” of play is begun with a guided meditation by the organizer or organizers.  This meditation is only 5 or so minutes long, but it gets the players thinking about the non-played day of artistic labor that preceded the social events of the evening about to be played.  The meditations focus on objects and each artist’s trauma and the struggle to turn that material into art.  It’s a simple but effective way to engage the players in what has immediately preceded the scene about to be played.  It gives the players still more specific material to bring to the scene as they discuss their day of creation, their struggles and triumphs.
 
A lot of work is also done to give players permission to play into their characters’ weaknesses and make bad decisions.  They are encouraged to do so outright, but they are also given information about the artists’ colony that also sets the stage for interpersonal risks.  For example, all the players are told that their characters each know someone who has been to an artists’ colony before and that it is common knowledge that everyone has an affair with someone during their stay.  And of course, play begins with a workshop that covers safety techniques, getting to know your character, and getting comfortable acting in potentially silly ways in front of each other.  One of the things covered during the workshop are the various mechanics, which include how to slip away to have an “off-screen” affair and how to skinny-dip in game, because, yeah, there is skinny-dipping in this larp! Talk about a fun way to encourage flirtation and interpersonal drama.
 
I had a ton of fun reading this larp, and if this were the setup for a movie, I’d have already bought my ticket.

This is the best full-length RPG text I have read in a long time, since maybe Paul Czege's The Clay that Woke.  It's not an easy manual to read in terms of trying to understand game play, but it has so much to offer, that I don't mind its difficulties at all.
 
Before I go into details, let me state first that I have not played the game, only read the text twice.  These thoughts are not about actual gameplay but about the text itself and the way I understand the mechanics from that reading.  Take this evaluation for what that's worth.
 
I was excited about getting to read Champions Now for a number of reasons.  First, the second edition of Champions was the first RPG I spent my own money on.  My older brother had brought D&D and Traveller into the house, but Champions was mine.  Sadly, I was only 10 years old and couldn't figure out how to run the game or find anyone to run the game with, so I was stuck building characters and having an occasional battle between them.  Given that history, I was excited to see what Ron Edwards would bring to the game.  He had stated that the first generation of Champions games, editions 1-3, were his favorite, and I knew that this edition was his own rendition of what that game would evolve into if they were guided by his own thoughts.  And I'm quite fond of the way Edwards thinks; even when I'm not in full agreement with him, I always enjoy his perspective and insight.
 
Edwards is a good writer, but I always find that I need to approach his texts slowly and with patience for two reasons. First, there is a lot of thought behind each sentence to the point that, to employ an overused metaphor, each sentence is the tip of the iceberg of his thought.  Second, Ron does not like to repeat himself, so you only get that one chance to understand his meaning.  This book lived up to those expectations.  What makes Edwards's books such excellent reading is not only his writing skills but his analytical and research skills as well as his total conviction in the conclusions he draws.  Everything about Champions Now is drawn from his thorough knowledge about comic books and their history, specifically the comic books of the 70s. Other superhero games focus on superheroes across media and time, as a genre.  But in Champions Now, Edwards is interested in the way superhero comic books were made in the oversightless days before superheroes and their stories were controlled by corporate interests and creativity-choking generic conventions that make everything safe and consumable.  As he says:
 
"For three or four decades more, as the corporatism gelled and its lowering gaze turned more attentively toward the little pamphlets [i.e. comic books], creators dodged subordination here and there, but less and less.  As of the 1990s, the paper no longer smelled bad, and that was the beginning of the end.
 
"By the 2010's the ultimate villain Doctor Franchise has won.  The comics are engineered adjuncts for other media, a clever way for customers to pay for the advertising, like buying t-shirts with logos on them.  Although a movie can be a good movie and a TV/Netflix show can be a good show, their superheroes are solid commercial fare, with no garbage and no diamonds.  They are comfortably dramatic, broadly enjoyable, intelligently reminiscent or deconstructive - and nothing more.  They have suffered the inescapable death of legitimacy" (5).
 
That passage is a great example of both his conviction and his writing. If you follow Edwards work, you already know that he prefers garbage with diamonds in it to anything reliably good.  Diamonds really only appear in garbage, where mistakes can be made and brilliant ideas are allowed to bubble forth.  And that's his guiding principle in constructing Champions Now.  If you run your game following his rules and your own taste, free from genre and pre-constructed plot points, you will have not only a solid game, but these amazing moments of creativity and originality that lift your game experience far above what you could get otherwise.
 
The rules themselves are exciting.
 
Before you get to any character building, you have the two guiding statements.  You, the person who is planning on gathering people together and GMing them through some series of sessions, begin by creating two statements about the game you are going to play. There is no special setting for the game, and you are assumed to be setting your game in the world as it is today, just as the comic books that inspired the game were set in the concurrent world.  Similarly, there is no set genre, mood, or tone for the game.  So your two statements become the guiding aesthetic principles that anchors all the players to the same rough vision.  Your first sentence is "one solid bit of content about superpowers, heroes, or villains," and the second is "one solid bit of fictional style and specific types of problems" (32), along with a city or location in the real world.  So to give an example from the book, the guiding statements might be: A superhero stands for something and means it, and you got your family in politics; you got your politics in my family, set in Hartford, Connecticut.  Another example from the book is, powers require effort, pain, practice, sacrifice, and dedication, coupled with military life and careers in Portland, Oregon.  These statements are your responsibility, and then the other players take them and create their heroes.  They don't need to run anything by you in creating the heroes as they are guided by the two statements, free to make their own interpretation as they please.  This is an incredibly simple tool that has ramifications throughout the rest of the game.  It becomes a constant touchstone as the villains, in opposition to the heroes, are tied to those statements, perhaps challenging them, twisting them, or taking them to their logical extremes.  And since all players get to express their own interpretation of the statements through their characters--both in their creation and in the way they are played--everyone's creative energy is channeled through the statements, even as they tug at and play with the other visions.  The other great thing about creating such statements is that it demands that the GM has some “take” on the game about to be played.  If you as the GM can't find two statements your excited about, then you probably shouldn't be running the game, because you won't have the excitement and personal interest to make it all hum.  This is a first-rate bit of tech.
 
The powers themselves are a list of basic powers with additional lists of advantageous and limiting modifications so that you can build any power to work in whatever way you want.  More importantly, the fiction you create surrounding those powers is inviolable, so you can describe it in whatever way you want, regardless of the way you constructed the power. In later versions of Champions, once it was made to be a part of the Hero System, powers and the system became the main focus so that everything in our world could be built by those power definitions, and if you could build it right, it would be that thing.  Ron wants none of that.  In Champions Now, the fiction is always the thing itself, and the powers are merely the mechanical teeth that let the fiction grip the dice.  As he explains it, using the concealment power, it's not that having Concealment lets you describe creating a brooding pool of shadow; it's "because you generate a brooding pool of shadow, you can use the game-mechanic called Concealment" (44).  That distinction is enforced again and again in the rules, especially in the way that it means that a single power can be built in a number of different ways depending on how you want your fiction to be enforced by the mechanics. Your armor might give you a blast power, but it's up to you how you build your powers to how that armor is treated by the mechanics.  Can it be broken and stripped from you?  Can it run out of juice and die on you?  Is it essentially inviolable?  At first, I was overwhelmed by the math and possibilities, but before I had finished my first read-through, I began to see all that the system allowed for and got excited about its application.  And I say that as a person who doesn't care for much math in my RPGs, so that's saying something.
 
The “Now” of the title refers to a “rule” in the game.  I put “rule” in quotes because there are no mechanics that force “GMs” to use the technique, but to call it a bit of advice or a mere technique is to underscore the importance Edwards puts on it.  The essence of the “Now” is to create a living, breathing world of consequential actions.  At no point does the GM plan for an event or engineer a “plot.”  Instead, the GM is to look at the world of PCs and NPCs (including institutions and large-scale forces) that the players themselves introduce when they create their characters and to ask him-/her-/themselves what those entities are up to and how are they responding to what has come before.  For the PCs actions to have meaning, they must have ramifications, and the evidence of those ramifications comes in the way the world responds to them and pushes back.  GMs are urged not to try to force the game to follow generic conventions (even at the level of, say, trying to put in a big battle in the second half of a session), but to let the “story” take care of itself as a matter of hindsight.  Keep in the Now and everything else will take care of itself.
 
I would love to see mechanics that make this kind of play happen, but they are not in this book.  Instead, the game is constructed to make that style of play natural and easy.  Characters come with a stack of choices that essentially build the world and the Now, giving the GM a ton of things to hold on to.  Similarly, the villains the GM creates, through the process of building them just as the PCs are built, also contribute material to the Now, including how they will respond to the PCs.  As Edwards notes in the text, the character sheets, both for the heroes and the villains, are everything that is needed to perpetuate play.
 
The main tool on those character sheets are the “Situations.”  The original Champions called them “Weaknesses,” but Edwards wisely changed their title to reflect their actual purpose.  The player decides what aspects of the heroes lives are to be the subject of the story by selecting 100 points worth of Situations for their character.  Do you want your hero’s secret identity to be a driving part of the narrative, pick that situation and get 15 points for it.  Without picking that situation, you can still declare your character has a secret identity; it just doesn’t factor into the narrative in any interesting or meaningful way.  This lets you build not only the character you want but give permission upfront for the what about their character might be the meat of any part of the narrative.  Villains likewise have situations that let the GM know how they will interact with the narrative and the heroes beyond simply having goals that are occasionally opposed.  It’s elegant and easy, and the list of possible situations creates reliable dramatic channels that create, without trying, the kinds of stories the game will naturally tell.
 
The main thing discovered in and through play is what is your character about, what are they willing to push themselves for, to fight for, to risk their lives and their loved ones’ lives for.  Learning this not only comes through the general decisions the players make on behalf of their character, but in all the tools the game gives them to show that determination.  Chief among those tools is Endurance.  Most things characters do, especially in battle, cost endurance, so characters need to choose wisely how to marshal that critical resource.  Better yet, activities that use Endurance can be “pushed,” meaning that you can sink extra Endurance into an action to hit harder, run faster, strike more accurately all to get what’s important to you.  This mirrors those best moments in superhero comics and it immediately makes the players’ decisions meaning and consequential.
 
At the highest level, Edwards does a great job organizing his chapters, introducing concepts in a compelling order that builds logically and powerfully as it orients the reader to what is important within the game.  However, in spite of that, there is bad news.  There is no index, and information is scattered throughout the book, tucked in here and there so that you'll have a lot of moments where you remember reading a thing but have no idea where to find it again.  If you have an electronic file and least you can do a word search.  If you're reading on paper, you'll have a job to do.  On my second read through the book, I created an index of my own with information I figured I would need or want later. 
 
In addition to having no index, it feels like the book was never given to a reader who had no familiarity with the game for the purposes of feedback.  There were a lot of confusing moments that I thought would be clarified down the road but never were.  I had to do a lot of detective work, bouncing
back and forth between the rules and the example character builds.  In the end, 99.9% of the information is all there, but you can't just casually pick it all up; you have to work for it! Or at least I did.  Because I was interested in the material and the book, I found the work enjoyable if minorly frustrating.  I expect a more casually-interested reader will not want to deal with the struggle.
 
The other thing that I imagine is a difficulty is communicating all the rules well enough to my friends for them to play the game.  Obviously, the rules of play can be explained during play, but there is a LOT of information players need to know and understand in order to even build a character.  Hell, even if you were to give preconstructed characters, you would need to explain a ton of the game in order for them to use those characters well in play.  The downside to having incredible freedom in building powers and characters, and the downside to having battles be determined by strategic play, is that players need to understand all the subtleties that allow for those strategies and that power.  If this kind of thing revs your motor, you are going to purr all night long with the joys of the system, basking in the satisfied feelings that comes with system mastery and the endless possibilities the rules present.  But if you can't find the friends to share that excitement, you're going to be like 10-year-old me making a few characters by yourself and dreaming of possibilities.  Online play and groups that help you connect with other players are not uncommon now, so perhaps this won't be a problem for many. Also, Ron has an Adept Play Discourse channel where people can find other people with whom to play the game.
 
I don’t much play superhero games, and I don’t much care for either mathematics or strategy in my RPG play, but I am genuinely excited to run this game for my friends.  Beyond that, I really enjoyed the act of reading and thinking about this game and the way it works.  I expect its success will be pretty niche, and that is a shame, given all it has to say.

​Here we are with Greg Stolze’s Usagi Yojimbo game, the first of the breed, published by Gold Rush Games in 1997 and using the Fuzion system created by Mike Pondsmith and the folks at Hero Games.  Of the 3 RPGs based on Stan Sakai’s IP, this one is the simplest and the quickest read, while still holding all the flavor or Usagi’s world.  It’s not a super-exciting system, but it does have a few cool features.
 
Let me note that I have not played this game, only read the text, so take my thoughts and evaluations for what their worth.
 
This is my first time reading a game using the Fuzion system, so I was interested to see what it entailed.  Basically, or at least in this game’s version of it, it’s a roll+bonus.  Your character is made up of stats and skills.  The four stats are physical, mental, combat, and movement.  Those stats will start out ranging between 3 and 8 here.  In addition, there is a pre-set list of skills that define how well you can do certain things.  Because this is Usagi’s world, you character has a species (dog, cat, rabbit, fox, etc.) and an occupation (bodyguard, wanderer, monk, etc.) that give you bonuses to your stats ands skills along with special powers.  After you make those basic decisions and, you have a small pool of points to finish off your character by buying skills and stats.  In the end, your stats will range between zero (if you put no points into buying them and got no bonuses due to your species and occupation choices) and 8 (technically, the numbers go as high as 10, but the game limits how much you can begin with.  Then, during the game, when you go to do a thing and want to roll to see the results, you roll 3D6 (always) and add your relevant stat and relevant skill scores.  So let’s say you have a 5 combat and a 4 kenjutsu skill (that’s skill with a sword), you’d roll 3D6 and add 9.  If it’s an opposed roll, as it would be in combat, you compare your total with your opponent’s total, and the highest roll wins.  If it’s an unopposed roll, the GM sets a “task number” for you to hit to be successful, scaling that number to reflect the difficulty of the task, with 14 being easy and 26 being nigh impossible.
 
And that’s it for the basic mechanic of the game.  It’s a rather uninspiring system, from the concept to the stat names.  On the plus side, it’s really easy to understand and use.  Like all the other Usagi RPGs that would follow it, this game saved its most exciting mechanics for combat. In order to create dramatic rounds of one-on-one dueling, Stolze creates a little rock-paper-scissors set of strategies at each combatant much choose from in any given round.  The three strategies are “total attack,” “cautious attack,” and “total defense.”  Depending on what your opponent chooses, the outcome varies from no one takes damage, to someone takes double damage.  Stolze recommends using a selection of playing cards for each combatant so that choices can be revealed simultaneously, each suit representing a strategy.  That sounds fun, and it allows for dramatic pauses in the conversation that mirror the full-page panels in the comic as both characters stare each other down before battle.  This technique will go on to be developed even further in games like Burning Wheel, but this is a cool, stripped down version that can make for solid battle scenes.
 
The improvement system is simultaneously wishy-washy and interesting.  The game doesn’t come down with a single method to say “this is how you gain experience.”  Instead it offers several without a strong commitment to any.  And the way you spend experience points to improve your character is as dull as the skill system.  But one of the suggestions that Stolze makes for gaining experience is actually pretty fun and could serve to fuel a story in addition to improving a character.  Here’s the single sentence pitch: “To improve a skill, or gain an ability, you and your Game Master agree upon three tasks which will educate you in that ability or skill.”  So you say to the GM, I want to improve my physical stat, what can I do?  Then you can work out, say, that you’re going to climb the three highest mountains on Honshu, or you’re going to challenge the best wrestlers in three of the various towns you pass through, or whatever else strikes your collective fancy.  It’s a great way to give characters drive and purpose, and it’s both simple and malleable.
 
I also give the game credit for knowing exactly what it is.  All your skills play directly into your ability to find trouble, avoid trouble, or cause trouble.  We don’t need to worry about encumbrance, drowning, falling, or any of that jazz.  Everything beyond the event horizon of trouble is left to freeplay.  You aren’t in danger of building a cool character with a bunch of suggestive skills only to find out that you don’t use any of them and should have buffed up your combat stat instead.
 
I really like the look and layout of the book.  There are a lot of panels using Sakai’s art, and it’s pretty easy to find what you’re looking for, in part because the book is so short.  The whole book is about 90 magazine-sized page, with lots of pictures.  Stolze keeps it light on history and setting information, to his credit.  While there is plenty to draw on within the text itself, he clearly expects you to be familiar with the comics, the world it depicts, and the kinds of stories it tells.  Sadly, there are no tools for the GM, only advice.  Standard fair for a game in the late 90s, but disappointing all the same.
 
I’d happily play or run this game.
 
I think my favorite iteration of the three Usagi games is Jason Holmgren’s first edition for Sanguine, but I do prefer the way this version strips out all the small stuff, leaving healing to between adventures.  In all the versions, the systems put all the heavy lifting on the GMs and give them very little tools to lighten the load.  I hate to say it, but there’s still room for a fourth Usagi game.

Note that this review is based on having read the game thoroughly, but not having played the game.  I hope to play the game soon, but as of this writing, I have not.  So take this for what it’s worth.
 
If you read my review of Sanguine’s second edition of this game, you know that I wasn’t overly impressed.  This version, however, I find much more intriguing, and I find the mechanics much more exciting. 
 
There is still the cumbersome section on the history, map, and culture of Japan, all of which were cut and pasted pretty much in their entirety from this edition to the second edition.  I was glad to not have to reread those sections as they are a huge information-dump without connection to rules, mechanics or gameplay.  The information itself might be useful but the presentation makes neither for ease of learning now nor ease of reference later.  In 2005, this failing would have been in line with standard RPG practices, so I don’t fault this book as much as the second edition, which had nearly 15 years of progress to learn from and chose not to.
 
Where this game really shines is its dice mechanics.
 
Each character has the same 5 “traits”: body, speed, mind, will, and career.  Each of those traits is given a die size: one gets a d8, one gets a d4, and the rest get a d6.  Career is a unique trait, insofar as its die size applies not to itself, but to the set of “skills” that are associated with that career.  So if you are a bodyguard like Usagi, you get your career die applied to the weapon skill of your choice, to the leadership skill, the literacy skill, and the observation skill.  In addition to the career die, you give skills “marks,” which simply mean that you have a point in that skill.  Those points are translated within the game into die sizes.  So one mark is a d4, two marks is a d6, three marks is a d8, four marks is a d10, and five marks is a d12.  If you go over five marks, you get a second die for the skill, starting with d4 and working your way up again until you add a third die, and on and on.  So if you have a the skill in observation from your career, that gives you one die, and you have an additional 6 marks in observation, then in addition to the career die you get a d12 and a d4.  So when you roll for your observation skill, you’d roll 3 dice to see if you’re successful.  We’ll get to what that means in terms of play in just a moment.  Beyond your traits and skills, characters get a set of “gifts,” which are either narrative advantages, combat advantages, or packages of additional marks in related skills.
 
Alright. Remember those three dice you get to roll for observation in our example character.  Let’s say their career is a d6, so when they make an observation, they have 3 dice associated with that skill: the d6, d12, and d4.  When skill checks are made, they are made using the skill dice plus the relevant trait dice. So if our example character is making an observation skill check because they are watching out for would-be assassins on the road, they might use their mind trait coupled with their observation skill, given them their d6, d12, d4, and let’s say a d8 for their mind trait.  All die rolls in the game are opposed die rolls, by which I mean your dice results are always compared to other dice results.  In this case, the GM might roll dice for the would-be assassin, taking, say, their speed trait (d6 we’ll say) and their stealth skill (let’s say it’s a ninja with the stealth skill career dice of d8 and 5 marks in stealth, giving them a d12). Both players roll their dice pools and compare the results.  The dice are not added up, but looked at individually.  If the player has the highest single die roll, their character sees the ninja before they attack.  If the GM has the single highest die roll, then the ninja is there before the PC can prevent it.  In the case of a tie, the game leaves it in the GM’s hands to make a “complication,” which means that neither side has a clear victory.

Once it’s decided how the contest goes, then you look at the remaining dice.  If everyone of your dice scores higher than your opponent’s highest die, you get an “overwhelming success.”  If, on the other hand, everyone of your opponent’s dice scores higher than your highest die, then you get an “overwhelming failure.”  It’s an elegant system that makes the roll exciting, easy to understand, but with just enough mental work to make the moment of comparison and evaluation exciting.  And this basic system allows for some neat variations.
 
For example, if everyone of your dice is a 1, then you have “botched” the job and especially bad things befall you. In itself, that’s a pretty bland additional rule, but the beauty of it becomes apparent when you think of all the dice you are rolling.  When our example character rolled 4 dice to observe the ninja, there were very low odds that she could botch the roll.  If, however, the character trying to make the observation didn’t have a career that included the observation skill, and only had 2 marks in the skill, then they would be rolling 2d6 instead, which has a much higher chance of botching the job.  Or lets say they didn’t have the observation skill marked at all and only had a d4 assigned to their mind trait, then to make the observation, they would role a single d4, giving them a 25% chance in botching the job.  So where you put your marks and your career dice make a difference in both your chances of success and chances of failure.  Stylistically, that’s pretty cool.
 
The other neat variation comes in during combat.  When you roll to swing your sword (or fire your bow, or throw your shuriken, or whatever) you make the same kind of skill check: the dice associated with your weapon skill (both mark dice and career dice) plus the die associated with your relevant trait versus your opponent’s dice.  Only in this case, success means a single hit.  Extra successes, by which I mean additional dice of yours that are higher than your opponent’s highest die score, translate into extra damage and “criticals.”  Each weapon has a list of critical effects which you can apply your extra successes to.  So if you’re fighting with a chain, for example, you can use the critical to entangle your opponent.  What this all means is that the greater your skill, the more dice you will roll, and the more chances at doing critical things.  If you have no skill in the weapon of your choice and you are only rolling one die for your relevant trait, your roll, no matter how good it is, can never achieve more than basic damage.
 
This approach to dice seems to me inspired by Sorcerer, but since there is no acknowledgment of influences or inspiration, I can’t be sure.
 
In addition to these basic dice rules, the game has neat additional combat rules that determine how a character can react to attacks and how gifts affect the die rolls.  For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into them here, but the game’s rules make combat a narrative and tactical experience for which play slows down naturally into a slow motion unfolding of action and mayhem.  In fact, the text encourages you to use miniatures and a map to keep the game state clear during combat, and since the game cares about distances you can run, reach of weapons, and keeping tracks of whether you are “focused,” “reeling,” “flanking,” or whatnot, it seems like good advice.  And as a miniatures war game, I could see this being really fun.
 
But of course this isn’t a miniatures war game, but an RPG.  At no other point in play, however, do things naturally or mechanically slow down to create drama outside of combat.  In running the game, you can put all kinds of things that require skill checks, but its clear that the climactic points, by design, will always be combat, which brings me to the less exciting parts of the game.
 
Yeah, there are encumbrance rules, climbing rules, falling rules, rules for destroying property, and rules for making purchases.  None of these rules are bad in themselves, but they are limited to success and failure and have little to do with narrative drive or story creation.  Let’s look at healing as an example.  On the one hand, characters don’t have hit points, so that’s cool.  They have a set of conditions that mark how healthy they are, from scratched to wounded to crippled to incapacitated to devastated.  That seems concise and narratively-focused.  But to heal from one state to another, you need to make successful healing rolls. A LOT of healing rolls.  To move from wounded to no injury takes 10 successful healing rolls.  Considering that you can roll 4 dice at once, plus the person nursing you to health and roll and if you have a doctor, they can roll as well.  That might take you two attempts to heal.  How many successes do you suppose you need to heal from devastated to merely incapacitated?  1200.  Yeah, 1200 successes.  Who the hell wants to roll dice that many times or play out that many months of healing?  If you want to keep damage that real, then just say you need to jump 6 months of in-game time if you want to be like that.  Better yet, follow your original guiding star and make your game follow not the limits of physical healing but the nature of stories told in the Usagi comics.  Characters in Usagi either die or have a few minor injuries; that’s it.  In short. while the game’s design does a lot to create the feel of the comics, there are these odd hangovers from what an RPG “should” include.  I suppose it’s a predictable state of affairs for 2005 in a non-Forge-inspired game.
 
This is definitely my favorite version of the game, even for its shortcomings.  To play it, you just have to do what GMs have been doing since the hobby began; use your own energy and skill to make the game interesting and meaningful outside of combat.