Deeper in the Game

I backed Defy the Gods a while back, but as is often the case, I didn’t bother reading the PDFS or any preview stuff until I got my hardcopy today. And I’m very hyped! This game is taking a lot of good ideas from other games and mixing them well.

First, while I’m only just a little ways into the book, the writing and layout is clicking for me in a perfect way. A pitfall I’ve found happen here and there with games is when they do too much handholding/explaining, and you end up making some aspects of play seem exceedingly more complex than they actually are. (I love Tenra Bansho Zero, but… those GM advice sections feel this way). In Defy the Gods, it’s enough, and not more, and it’s just right. We get a break down of the larger systems in play and then go into the specifics of how to apply it.

It’s labeled Queer Sword & Sorcery, and does a great job of setting up that it’s the combination of society and the gods that oppose your existence. The safety section clearly talks about setting up the dial of how your oppression works in play; whether it’s highly coded and made distant or blatant and clear about the nature of queerness and hate. Honestly the safety section is one of the best I’ve seen.

Second, this game has a perfect cycle of drama and pacing built in. It’s a fantastic Mesopotamia, with your heroes doing bronze age sword & sorcery stuff… but deeds which are too great draw the attention, jealousy and ire of the gods. As you play, if you roll too high, you build up Fire, and Fire brings the Gods upon you. As you fight and defy them, go long enough, you might become one was well, which is explicitly explained that it is your superhuman power eroding who you are as a person… (Speaking of Tenra Bansho Zero…).

Unlike most PBTA games, your character is built on Epithets, or player defined traits; aspects of yourself that define who you are. Gaining power replaces them. The people closest to you can grant you new ones, as well, for they know you better than most. Betraying these Epithets also wounds them; denying who you are has costs.

I’m barely into the book and very excited. Also! There’s a whole index for the artists in the back – thumbnails of the pieces they did, page reference, the artist’s names and links to their websites/socials. I had never seen something like this before, but it’s an incredible and great idea.

If you find my blog entertaining and valuable, consider supporting me on Patreon.

I had picked up GILA games Dragon Slayers a while back and just hadn’t gotten around to reading it. Which is a shame because I think this game actually does a lot of really clever things in a very understated way.

Gameplay-wise, I think Dragon Slayers hits a lot of buttons for what many modern D&D players want who aren’t already served by a more complex gridfight game like Pathfinder:

• Bespoke mechanics for your character
• Light tactical play, but fast and less complex tracking
• Go on adventure, fight monsters, return.
• Easy set piece battle design, easy monster tracking for GM

You’ve got a number of character classes, each designed to interact with their own custom rules, but each set of custom rules is not terribly complex. One of the cool things is that every character class has some Support Actions – things they can do in a fight to aid another character, and every class has a Camp Action which is a benefit they grant during the rest.

This is one of the things that helps ease a long standing problem with D&D-ish games, of party balance. By making all these things built-in from the start, you don’t have the problems where “people made bad choices in their build” that can make early play less fun.

Taking a page from PbtA style design, each class is basically 80% complete; you pick a couple of skills and such and have a few advances you can take to customize and improve the character. This also means it’s very easy to pick up and play for this game, which makes it much easier as an entry level game for players. (I think the GMing isn’t complex, just that this is clearly a game that assumes the GM will have some minimal experience elsewhere first).

Combat uses the idea of zones, making it easy to scribble out an abstracted map on the spot if need be. Characters can Move & take two actions, just that they generally can’t repeat the same type of action twice, which means there’s more incentive to do Attack/Support Move and set up team actions between each other, or do small stunts and such.

Zones also work pretty well for the setting up effects from monsters. DS’s take on the red dragon has a brutal but exciting mechanic; whatever zone the dragon enters is destroyed; presumably the combination of fire blasting everywhere, flailing tail and smashing claw. The players need to move to another area or they will eat heavy damage by the end of the turn. It’s cool, simple mechanics like this that pretty much guarantee fun set piece battle action in play.

Now, the game does note that it doesn’t have a deep advancement path, which I think is something a lot of modern D&D people want, because they usually also want months or years of play as an ideal. For that reason, I think the game as it stands fills a better place as a short term play game or an intro for many people to action roleplaying. Hopefully supplemental material or fanhack stuff will be made in the future, or, if you’re that deep into it, you can probably build it out yourself, though I think the class stuff is probably the harder part to create as far as the way the game works.

I’ve just moved it up on my “play soon list” because I’ll be seeing friends in town and a pick up game might be exactly what we’re looking for.

If you find my blog entertaining and valuable, consider supporting me on Patreon.

I had crowdfunded Threadcutters and just recently got the physical copy. In this game, you’re playing supernatural assassins who are running hits on supernatural entities that control one of the four worlds. It feels like a meeting between John Wick, White Wolf, Persona videogames, and Machineries of the Empire.

Each assassin gets blessings from some of the Arcana of the Tarot, these give you abilities that so many times per mission you can enact an effect, such as knowing a character’s fears and darkest secrets, issuing a command that will be followed to an NPC, and so on. Then, for the actual hit after you get the target isolated, the game shifts to tactical grid combat on a 6×6 grid and you have separate gifts specifically for this portion of play.

Each potential target gets a full section of personality/history and a full adventure, designed to be played in a single session. A specific grid map for the showdown is included as well.

The game uses Tarot Cards, and has a particular mechanic I think is interesting… normally if the card is upright, you get a positive outcome, and if it’s reverse, you get a negative outcome… BUT, if the thing your character is doing is a perfect thematic match for the card, you get the positive outcome anyway. Since each hit has a shared, partial Tarot deck in play, loaded towards the suit of the world you’re in…. so it makes sense as players to slightly adjust your plans and methods to favor the methods of the place.

Well, this is like the 13th or 14th game on my “I want to play this soon!” list, so I recommend folks go check it out.

If you find my blog entertaining and valuable, consider supporting me on Patreon.

I picked up a copy of Fallen Blades / Endless Stars and only just got a chance to look at it today.

While both Galactic & Going Rogue give you those great Star Wars heroic / tragic structures of fighting an evil empire in space, Fallen Blades / Endless Stars focuses in on the Jedi thing and does two things:

• First, gameplay is a touch more traditional – players focus on using their resources, skills and clever play to overcome the problems put forth – build advantages, roll dice.
• Second, it focuses in on the internal conflicts as much as the external; each level of power you gain two more oaths you’re expected to fulfill, and these oaths can conflict at times.

This second part is pure gold. For example, you start with “Protect all members of the Order” AND “Protect the citizens” and, well, obviously situations are going to come up where you can’t do both. The interesting part within this is that there’s no mechanical enforcement to violating your oaths; just that your Sith-equivalents are looking for violators to bring in on their side and your own order is set to hunt down heretics… This feels very strongly like the conflicting orders of 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars and the morally broken code of Dogs in the Vineyard. A very slick, lightweight Narrativist game here.

The pressure cooker
There’s an ongoing pressure mechanic where the GM is rolling every session to see if one of the hunter teams has found where you are, and if you manage to kill them, they will escalate. In later play, you must take on apprentices to restore the order; which also brings more attention of the enemies, and the chance they might convert your students to their side as well. The pressure and the stakes never let up, and there’s a great line where the game says “The empire always finds you. If you don’t want the empire to find you, destroy the empire.”

Light, Fast, Robust
This isn’t a “beginner’s RPG” – it’s expected that the group knows how to run/play a traditional RPG – the GM will set scenes, the characters will mostly work together to solve problems and angle for advantage, it’s a tiny 40 page game, 14 of those pages are full charts to random generate details as needed and the rules are very simple.

There’s special rules for duels which are pretty fun; both combatants roll 2d8 in secret, assign one die to be an attack die, and one to be a defense die. Each combatant has 5 special cards to choose from that modify what happens next – the cards have a priority order, so some effects can only work if you think you can survive long enough for the later priority to activate. It’s light, fast and good, and just a touch easier to navigate than Errant’s great dueling rules.

If you find my blog entertaining and valuable, consider supporting me on Patreon.

I picked up Trespasser which is a paranormal, post apocalyptic military RPG (specifically zone fiction & military moe). Influences include Stalker, Roadside Picnic, Forever Winter, Girls Und Panzer, and probably a bunch of other things I’m not up on.

Apparently sometime in the future, there’s a big war and despite the hypertech being thrown around, one valley, Corte Largo, is spared – because it has a floating fortress in the sky, Damocles, that calls down strikes with laser targeting systems any time anyone or anything tries to invade.

However, a small number of individuals, Trespassers, have snuck in to try to pry pre-war military and scientific secrets from this place, guided by mysterious operators known as Conductors, who seem to have telepathic/psychic powers.

You play the Trespassers trying to run missions, perhaps for their respective forces outside, perhaps for their own reasons. Many of the chargen options point to characters who have been mindwiped, artificial clones, failed Conductors, and other somewhat weird types being sent into this place. This game also feels like a spiritual cousin to Lacuna, in that you’re playing agents sneaking into a forbidden territory with it’s own set of rules and information and goals given by higher ups you can’t fully trust.

Mechanically it’s fairly light; a simple pass/fail system, combat uses an action point system of Stamina. I feel like the game mostly flies on the setting and concepts, with a light mechanical combat as the mainstay of the systemic part. The ideas are intriguing but I’m guessing the general experience of play depends mostly on the GM’s ability to frame and push the weirdness and clues and there’s not much advice in here. So… it’s going to depend a lot on what you come into the game with and your ability to manage that.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a cool setting and a fun premise, and can structure clue play on your own it might be worth grabbing.

If you find my blog entertaining and valuable, consider supporting me on Patreon.