Designer Notes: Five Years After

Posted on August 13, 2025 by dconstructions

Winston Churchill was a racist asshole but he was also neurodivergent as hell. He spent his nights during the blitz rehearsing strategies over and over of how he would leave the building if it was bombed or taken by nazi troops. He had contingency plans for his contingency plans. He was a ruminator, and he was wracked by what could happen and how he might be responsible. When he was seven years old his father let him borrow his gold pocket watch, and a school bully threw it in the river. Winston paid his own money to have six men from the village divert the river so he could search for the watch in the mud. He did not find it and his strict, emotionally distant father made him pay for the lost watch. Sometimes ruminators are built from trying to stop their parents withholding their love. They live in the “if only”, forever.

When my grandfather was 19 years old the nazis invaded his home country of the Netherlands. Resistance immediately began. One day, after the assassination of a leading figure, the nazis marched into the middle of the town square and randomly grabbed fifty men. They put the men in the middle of the square and then they gunned them down. They knew that people were helping the resistance, so they made sure everyone knew the price of that help. My grandfather was standing near a younger boy who screamed and yelled when they took his father and then when his father fell, the boy stopped screaming, and went into a kind of catatonia. My grandfather was looking at the boy, and he never, ever forgot that look.

My grandfather survived the occupation, just barely. Once he was rounded up by soldiers who intended to have him shipped to the work camps in Germany. One soldier left to get back up, and he and his two friends rushed at the nazi. My father grabbed the guard’s gun and hit him in the stomach hard, and he never forgot the look of pain on the man’s face as all the wind was knocked out of him. My grandfather survived, and left his homeland and had four children and eleven grandchildren and dozens of great grandchildren. He raised a dairy farm out of nothing but dirt and built a life. Sixty five years later, I visited him in hospital when he was quite sick. It was the first time I had been alone with him in my whole life. I held his hand and I saw fear in his eyes, the fear of dying. I held his hand and I comforted him as best I could.

Last week someone died while I was performing CPR on them.

For a long time as a young boy and young man I was terrified that when the time came to save people, I would falter and not be strong. I lived in a permanent rumination of what I would do when the time came. In my autistic fashion I would listen to The Impression That I Get over and over and over, because I was so worried that when I was tested I would fail. Turns out I shouldn’t have worried. I have carried people out of danger. I have given my last bit of food to feed another. When my grandfather was afraid I held his hand despite my fear. When my friend was dying I didn’t panic. I pulled her onto the floor and I did everything I could to save her life. But the worry goes on. I live in the perpetual fear of failure. Trying to make myself into something that cannot fail. That will not fail. And that will stop the bad things from happening. If only I had concentrated, listened, paid attention, they told me as a boy, then the silly thing would not have happened. I had to pay attention. I had to stop it before it happened. I have to stop it.

This is a blog about games. Bear with me.

I don’t watch horror movies much. I have enough horror of my own. But I keep making them. My latest game I have just announced, and it is dark. As dark as it gets. It’s called Five Years After and it’s about the apocalypse, and the nature of how we self-destruct. It’s based in part on the post-apocalyptic fears of my youth: movies like The Day After and Threads and When The Wind Blows. The nature of the game is that we begin five years after a terrible apocalypse, and then we wind the clock back and back and back, to find out how the terrible events took everything from you. Bit by bit, the things that kept you safe and happy in the world before the zombies, those things are stripped away. The fun of the game, the power of the game, is discovery: the random nature of which things you lose when tells a unique story that cannot happen any other way, and reveals things to you that you did not know about your character and could not know without playing. I think it is fun and beautiful, but it is also very bleak, because there is no happy ending. You are left with one attribute that you keep, but that is often bitter sweet or darkly ironic. The world ended and so did you.

*Threads by Barry Hines is something everyone should watch once.*

My great colleague and co-developer Peter asked me what the game was for, then, if it was so bleak. I think it’s a fair question. I have always believed that everything we do echoes unto eternity, that small things matter and that my games and my art can and will change others. That’s why we make art, really: to take our thoughts and struggles out of ourselves with the hope that it connects with other people. I also believe that art isn’t always just a good thing, and that we should justify what we put into the world, as opposed to flippantly believing that art has no power and can’t affect anyone. I keep making grim, dark games and I think I should justify that, even if I find myself unable to make anything else. Peter thought the game’s message was that you cannot change your fate, and therefore the game was defeatist and nihilistic. The game might even be adding to the wickedness of the world, then.

I think sometimes there are people who give up, who see a wicked world and decide that it’s not their job to clean it up and they might take fatalism as an easy excuse to justify that. But I think there are also people like me who think the opposite, who think that everything is their responsibility and their fault, and if they try hard enough, if they work hard enough, then nothing bad will happen, and that everything bad that does happen must be because they didn’t work hard enough or love well enough or think things through. This has only gotten worse in a world of advertising that desperately makes you feel insufficient, and the panopticon of social media, where everyone is judging you, all of the time.

Terrible things have happened to me. Things that I cannot tell you and might never speak of. Things that defy belief in the suffering they have inflicted, and the cruelty of their shape, and the callousness of those who inflicted them or let them continue. These things took things from me and they took things from the people I love and those things will never heal. Or rather, healing will not make them back to where they were, back to good as new. And yet I persist. I grieve for what I have lost but I remain and that is worth something. What I lost in the fire, I find in the ashes. Like the phoenix I was burned but did not die; I was reborn.

And there is nothing I could have done to stop this things from happening to me, and these parts of myself being taken from me. They were not my fault.

The fascists are rising over my friends in the USA. Their gestapo is snatching people off the streets and killing them in death camps. Israel is conducting genocide. The world is full of monsters and people are dying and in a way, maybe, all my games are about all of this. Relics is about how we can believe in our own potential to be good. Partners is about trusting one another. The Score is about how security is all theatre and the most powerful forces are much, much weaker than they look.

And Five Years After is a reminder that terrible things are happening and you must be brave and you must fight hard and it will cost you. But none of this is your fault. In their panic, people will blame you and tell you you should have done more to stop it. But there is always more we could have done, and more we could do. Blaming ourselves is not going to help. They did this to us. It is their fault. And now we have to be brave, and we will survive – but it is not our fault.

I don’t know if Five Years After can help us deal with the apocalypse on our doorsteps, but maybe it can, and even if it can’t, it’s what I feel and think. It’s what I want to say. It’s what my heart aches to speak of. And I hope that someone out there finds something in it for themselves.

Why I Hate Cole Wehrle

Posted on July 24, 2024 by dconstructions

I think most of us know and resonate with the prayer of seeking the strength to change the things we can, and the serenity to accept the things we cannot and the wisdom to tell the difference. Few remember that it was coined by Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent 20th century American theologist and political thinker who was trying to construct a kind of middle way for liberal Americans, one that was socialist in its ideas that poor people were not inherently evil and did not need better angels above them in society to direct them, but also one that repudiated the ideas of communism and liberal reforms like anti-segregation movements. You can view him as a fence-sitter emblematic of the worst parts of neo-liberal deference to what they demand is realpolitik, or as an idealist trying to find a straight path in a bent world. I think the fact that he is confounding to some analyses is probably why people like the prayer: stuff feels complicated, and the individualistic sentence of trying to be perfectly moral has never felt harder than today. Our new versions might be “check your privilege” and “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”.

Anyway, to get back to games, I think we are always in danger of equivocating and saying “it’s complicated” when it comes to semiotics, and yet often seem to need to. Stuff IS complicated, and never more so than when it comes to signs and signals. Everyone comes to an idea with their baggage and we cannot change that baggage, no matter how hard we wish it were not there. My partner is a lawyer, and Australian judges do not use the term Ms; she cautions her female students that if that is the battle they want to fight, it will be difficult to win, noone will flock to your banner and it will be costly no matter the outcome. She tries to model a positive view but without neglecting the terrain the women will be entering. I tend to have the maxim that you should never believe anyone who tells you something cannot change, they are almost always arguing for their own cowardice. A few years ago I was arguing hard that the term “serious games” was a terrible one and needed to change; a friend of mine said the infamous thought-terminating cliche of that ship having sailed. He was, I was happy to say, 100% wrong, and “games for change” is catching on. He was also the same person who looked at my post about how games don’t have to be competitions and remarked that once again I seemed to be tilting at windmills, and trying to ice-skate uphill, when I should just accept that it do be that way sometimes and it is what it is.

I have another friend who designed a game for the Salvation Army designed to built an understanding of how villages in poor agricultural areas can build themselves out of poverty. I asked him why it wasn’t competitive; his answer was that nobody understands cooperative games. Not in the audience he is trying to reach. He’s right. It hurts me, but he’s right. And I guess that’s what this is all coming back to: we are in a watershed moment in games and that involves dealing with the things that, right now, we cannot change. With the hand we are dealt, to use a gaming metaphor.

*Me, trying to explain why everyone else sucks but me*

I’m lucky enough to have lived through the revolution in comics when the western world finally caught on that just because a comic had Batman in it didn’t mean it couldn’t be literature. I also have enough historical connection to the 1960s to remember the same arguments being made about rock and roll and stand up comedy. All of them invariably started with a very similar argument: that the art form being derided as not serious was ancient. Ancient neanderthals drew words and images together on cave walls; they played music around the fire; they told stories to make each other laugh. The idea of this was to create a kind of ritual significance with two ends: to help a thing that felt knew seem less new to the mainstream, but also to calm down the academics at the sidelines. Yes we know, academics, that comics aren’t new, and nothing they are doing is new, but we have to PRETEND it is new because to the maintstream audience, it FEELS very new.

The people who remembered the newspaper strips about Peter Parker’s married life and the POW! BAM! of the Batman TV show were having a kind of cultural shock to see people going “no, this shit matters, and is good and is politically and culturally significant”. Some of that was amazement, a wondrous suprise to find more adult depth in old concepts. Similarly, a lot of people’s experience with board games is “we played them as kids and they were kind of … bad?” or “we played them as kids and then we grew out of them”. Wondrous day then, to find games have “suddenly” somehow “grown up” and become “good” or socially acceptable. More and more I see gamers use the term “modern” meaning “good”, with their particular choice of cut off naturally being “a few years before I started getting into the hobby”. Naturally, as someone who knows games have always been here and who has always been here myself, I object loudly from the kitchen. But I get it: for them, the world has jumped a great distance. The first animes (is that the plural?) I ever saw were Astro Boy and Battle of the Planets, the very next one I saw was Ghost in the Shell; that felt like a bullet to the brain and a very silly thing to say they were the same thing, and confusing to me how one got to B from A. Then people tried to “get me into anime” and all failed because it was super hard to get context and nobody inside was very good at giving me context.

I think, more than most folks, I need that context and a sense of a critical language to understand a medium, so I tend to want to offer all of that to those newly arrived. I have always prided myself on being what I call a dragoman. The term is one I stole from colonial history: a dragoman was the man you, a European, hired when you went to the Middle or Far East, who understood the local world and could introduce you to it safely. (A near equivalent is the term indian agent but it has historical problems.) I often remark at conventions how people from one fandom are totally lost when they encounter another, and I love to be the person stepping up to fill that gap. I love being a teacher and an explainer – not least because that’s how I interact with the universe myself. But it is also worth noting to myself that not everyone needs this. The kids are alright going straight to Ghost in the Shell or Wicked City, and it does not matter to anyone that they think the board games now are COOL because they have HOT CHICKS (or I guess trick taking mechanics, in games) and the old ones are FOR BABIES because they don’t.

But it DOES matter as a game designer, because our audience is vast, and expanding, and shifting. But also because games, even more perhaps than comics and cartoons, depend on interpretation. Games need to be swiftly understood and internalized which means the symbols and signification we use has to work with the software available, and that software is the human brain. It is true that a lot of people react violently to the idea of a cooperative game, or any other kind of ideas outside their view of what a game is. We can change that, but slowly; we have to acknowledge a lot of where we are to begin with. I hate that people think games are competition, and I am driving hard to change that, but I also (grudgingly, with no serenity at all) accept that this is a long ongoing process.

At the same time as our audience is opening up, there is also going to be an urge to not have to keep starting from scratch. Previously the game industry was so small and broken up it was difficult to have a conversation about games in game design. It had to happen instead in a critical space or the academic space. I’d argue that Friedmann Friese probably created one of the first real salvos of games about games with Copycat, so-called because he wanted to acknowledge that he hadn’t invented anything in making it. 504 was then the natural extension thereof, a game that was 504 games in one, just add your own theme. I’d also argue that the problem with both games is they didn’t really make sense to anyone but someone deeply immersed already in that conversation about innovation and euro-game mechanics. Games, because they are so dependent on understanding a shared language, are at great risk of iterating ON that language, until it becomes indecipherable to the new player. Of course everyone knows that red is life points and blue is mana points, and so on.

Here’s the thing: although all art exists in conversation with other art and its time and its context, I’d argue that really great art can and should transcend that and be universal and timeless. It’s true that Watchmen is about superheroes as they were as a storytelling medium and corporate property, but I wasn’t reading comics at the time and I can understand Watchmen perfectly without that context. It operates on many many levels. Shakespeare doesn’t always translate but so much of what he writes does, even when he was flipping scripts and commenting on other works around him. Compare that to Undertale: a video game where when you get stuck a kindly character comes and helps you pass a level. That joke only works if you’re immersed in what video games are; worse still, I could not get to that point of genre-interrogation in Undertale because I couldn’t get past the earlier levels. As interesting as a critique as Undertale was, it was not just unintelligible to the average person, it was unreachable. And that’s with nearly 50% of people regularly playing video games.

At one point I spent a few years checking which games explained that AWSD were how to move around. Almost none of them did. That had become assumed language. I wonder if we’re really close to making the same mistakes in board games.

And that – at last -brings us to why I hate Cole Wehrle. Cole, amazingly, brilliantly, is having a deep conversation about wargames and dudes-on-a-map games, and history games. But the problem I have with him is with each new game he makes, he goes further down a line of conversation that started with some central assumptions about what a war game is and why it exists. And every time he iterates on that, the conversation gets further and further away from me, because I don’t have the experience OR ABILITY to keep up with the kinds of games he makes. (Ability is of course something for a whole other column, but I need to wrap this up at least for this instalment). None of it is approachable or accessible. All of it feels like it’s about things I barely understand. At the same time, I love that he’s asking these questions and iterating over and over further down into those questions. I just wish it was about some other part of gaming that I could relate to understand. It’s frustrating to see someone clearly doing great work in this space and not being able to go with it; but more than that it makes me fear that we might, like video games did, end up in a world where we are so busy congratulating ourselves on subverting the dominant paradigms that we’ve forgotten that those paradigms have become walls that the outsiders can’t get over.

Some might look at that and go well, we’re not designing for those people, and that’s fair enough. It is what it is, and some people can’t be convinced to like a thing. I will never be able to understand the games Cole makes and I’m sure he’s okay with that, and certainly I should be. I also don’t mind when people miss the subtle levels in my fiction or game design writing…but I also want to make sure that, to some extent, they have a way in. I pitch high, but I also don’t want to be very careful not to push away. Not that setting a game at any giving difficulty is inherently pushing away! It’s also probably fine to make games where people attack other people with dudes on a map. I’m only worried about going down the silo too hard. And that designers might occasionally forget that not everyone “gets” the idea of a war game. I tried to play Arcs and immediately I was hit with the idea that the setting didn’t give me any reason to attack anyone. The mechanics did (although not strongly), but I still didn’t want to do it. Shut Up and Sit Down talk about Arcs makes its own lore for you; but at least when I’m being the space turtles I know that I’m supposed to hate those barony guys. Of course, not everyone cares about setting as much as I do, either. Twilight Imperium isn’t a better game because of this element. I think my point is, we should always remember that our audience may be seeing this thing for the first time. We can’t always design for that, if we want to go deep, but, like a memento mori, we should keep it in mind. And maybe I’m weird because I don’t want to attack people in games, but I can tell you like I said in the first article in this series: THE MAIN REASON PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO PLAY GAMES IS LOSING MAKES THEM FEEL STUPID AND WINNING MAKES THEM FEEL MEAN.

And I bring that thought to every game I design, and try to design with that as the hand I am dealt. That doesn’t mean I want Cole to stop being Frank Miller; it just means I think we need some Scott McClouds as well.

And of course I don’t actually hate Cole at all. The fact that he’s talking about this stuff in his games is amazing. I just used that title because although I hate clickbait, I also have to deal with the internet as it is. I don’t have the strength to retrain your brains not to click on outrage, and I hopefully have the serenity to forgive myself for playing to it.

The X Card Will Not Save You

Posted on June 5, 2024 by dconstructions

In 2020, running a game on camera in his popular Actual Play “Far Verona”, game master Adam Koebel described a sex crime happening to one of his players’ characters. A robot PC had gone to see a mechanic, who introduced a technological process that forced the robot to orgasm – for the pleasure of the mechanic. It was not something the player wanted or appreciated; the other players also found it unsettling to say the least. It is not surprising that the game master was male and the player female.

The game and the stream was shut down and Koebel has since mostly been out of the industry or keeping a low profile. In one of the few statements he made about the incident, Koebel explained that the cause of the problem was a lack of “in the moment” tools for controlling content.

This post isn’t about Koebel, although one has to ask how anyone could be a professional game master in 2020 and be that careless and cavalier. Or let such things go to air, because it was apparently not streamed live (and is still online, oddly). The combination of getting into that situation and not taking particular responsibility for the subject choice could suggest that safety tools would have been little help here. If post-facto editing didn’t suggest not to broadcast this moment which was if nothing else in bad taste for the audience, I imagine that the game master would not have checked consent regardless of priming, and may have overridden their use if engaged.

I am a great believer in systems and systemic approaches. I used to work in public health after all. Individual bad actors are not why safety problems occur, and only through properly adjusting everyone’s approach can we change a culture. Safety is a discipline of forethought that as can only learn through practice and rehearsal. This is why we do fire drills. Why we have seatbelts and speed limits and road rules and driving tests.

But just as nobody would treat a car roaring along at the speed limit as inherently risk-free, systems alone do not make us safe. Bad actors exist, but more importantly mistakes occur. No system is perfect and certainly no system allows us to turn off our brains and coast. But we do know safety processes can cause the latter. People will allow their dogs to act more irresponsibly at the dog park, or stop watching the dogs welfare, because there is an idea of safety inside the fence. I work as a dog trainer: safety and safety culture is my business.

As well as dog training and public health I have some experience in the kink subculture, where safety is the most important factor of all. Everyone in kink has some experience with the safety issues of kink. And everyone I’ve ever met has a story of safety being violated and tools failing to be applied correctly.

One of the biggest safety tools used right now in roleplaying games is the X card. Formally coined by John Stavropoulos in 2013, an X-card is a way for players at a table to indicate they are uncomfortable with the current nature of a scene by touching or picking up the card. The advantage of the card is it can be activated without words, which can be a crucial thing for those with social difficulties or if actual traumas are engaged or simply because it’s hard to say no, stop. The X card is a great idea. But I also think it is on its own not enough. It is at best incomplete safety culture as it is currently used. X cards are slapped on tables as a prophylactic, as if they are infallible. They may have short explanations but that’s not the same as proper training in their use. They have been used as a signal of virtue rather than a tool: games without them must be recklessly, brutally unsafe; games with them must be totally safe. And we act like they solve everything.

Understand that I’m not saying x-cards are useless or always make us complacent. But I have seen them and other tools fail. They will inevitably always fail. If we act like they are the beginning and end of safety culture, and a pathway to virtue, we’ve learnt nothing and have done nothing. Too often the x-card is not a part of good safety culture, but exists instead of one.

Safety culture is the name for the discipline of building environments which minimize our exposure to harm. (By which I mean actual harm to our physical and mental health , to be clear: the term of late is often broadened to the point of uselessness, which makes us actually less safe.) Safety is a much-studied area and we know very well what contributes to strong safety culture. Key principles of good safety include things like:

Acknowledgement of the risks that exist
Determination to change that
Understanding responsibility lies with everyone
Focussing on solutions not blame
Education and training at the core
Buy-in to all of these at every level but especially by leaders, mentors and managers
Continuous monitoring and ongoing improvement

But the good news is, the X card has all this stuff. Not in the card, but in the text around it. Go and read the whole goddamn document. I’m not sure how many folks actually have. (If you all have, write in and tell me I’m wrong). That document is long. REALLY long. Because safety culture is complicated. The most important parts to read are the latest update notes on page 3, and this quote from page 12: “The X-Card talk is more important than the X-Card itself.” Between those two things we get most of those above bullet points: that we need to acknowledge risk, that we need to all decide together to buy in on changing the level of risk, and that responsibility lies with all of us, without blame. It doesn’t quite get into monitoring and checking in (not even in the whole essay) but it points the way to other tools like the completely free TTRPG Safety Toolkit and the great book Consent in Gaming. It does not phone it in.

But the thing is, we have not risen to that. The essay and accompanying material is forgotten. I see very empty X cards in use. No links. Low explanation. I see people NOT using John’s spiel – and not because they are replacing it with something better. The X card is at risk of becoming a victim of its own success and its own succinctness. The whole brilliance of the card is that with one card on the table, we can shift an entire culture. The terrible risk of the card is we stop there. I was there when this conversation about safety began in the 90s, and I’ll be damned if we stop the train now it’s finally moved an inch forward in public acceptance. You could draw a parallel to pride flags: important, clear messaging. But easy to wave. Easy to be a t-shirt for a clubhouse instead of a process of dismantling assumptions. Easy to co-opt. Not complete proof that the waver actually gives a damn. Not the end of the process.

I haven’t read Consent in Gaming but being autistic as well as all those other things above means I’m an expert in how games are full of danger because they have the illusion of safety without any actual safety at all. So I may do another blog soon about how I think about safety in gaming. For now though, I want you to say to yourself: The X Card Will Not Save You. The buck does not stop there, and neither should you. Read further, understand safety, and deal with it properly.

EDIT: As always, I’m far from the only person who has found that a more abrupt version of safety leaves out variations – safety is rarely one size fits all. Beau Jagr Sheldon points out here that if your ONLY response is to completely remove a topic, it might feel pretty bad too.

Monkey See

Posted on May 8, 2024 by dconstructions

I’m someone who learns well from examples. Sometimes I find it hard to learn without examples. For this reason I tend to like ttrpgs that have really explicit mechanics and instructions about what we’re doing and how we’re supposed to do it. A strong brief and a strong sense of the core idea is vital to getting me on board.

This is why I’ve always been a fan of games based on pre existing media, and emulation in general. It’s also why I want my games to be filled with examples – example characters, examples of play, the lovely Japanese trend of replays, and of course prewritten scenarios and adventures. Hooks and prompts are a good start but you need to show me how to write one and show me the finished product. This might be an autism thing – we’re very emulative. And with me if I spend five minutes with a person I will be copying their accent and mannerisms. So it could be just a very me thing.

How true that is – as in, to what degree this is mostly/only a Steve problem – determines whether any of the following thoughts are useful, so I’m posting this partly as a question: how much do examples guide you in how you approach an RPG?

There are lots of ways this manifests. I don’t, for example, typically like games that ask you to come up with a concept for your character before you start chargen. Thats what chargen is for! This is why I like to do it randomly. It’s also I suppose why I don’t like games or GMs that ask me to describe what I’m doing before I roll the dice – that’s what the dice is for.

More dramatically, it prevented me from getting into D&D as a kid. A lot of silly people will demand that rpgs aren’t emulating media but that’s exactly how they were designed. The magic system in D&D was taken from the Dying Earth, the setting from lord of the rings, and the combat explicitly from the Errol Flynn Robin Hood. The alignment system was furpm the Elric books. The classes were roughly from Conan and the Fahrfhd books. The idea of going off and fighting shit in caves mostly comes from Ray Harryhausen movies about Sinbad the Sailor. Very swiftly a bunch of other insane shit was added like priests from Hammer horror films, lovecraftian demons, poorly understood ideas of medieval history and a bunch of rubber dinosaurs. And then Beastmaster came along so they jammed that film in too.

Nowadays it is probably hard to understand because D&D dominates culture so hard but that produced a combination that wasn’t exactly representative of fantasy fiction at the time. If D&D hadn’t become so insanely popular until it made these things normal it would stand out more how bizarre and chaotic a lot of it was. But more importantly it depended on being inside a subculture. If you hadn’t grown up with those books and movies, it didn’t make much sense.

Enter me at age 11, who has read two and only two fantasy books: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Hobbit. I have seen a total of one fantasy film: The Neverending Story. It will be twenty years before I see Conan, thirty before I see Beastmaster (which cleared up so much). I try to understand D&D but it’s really hard. I don’t know what any of it means. I know dragons guard gold in mountains, sure, but what the fuck is an orc?

Two years later I find TMNT which is set in a universe I understand, because I have seen Die Hard and a dozen other action films. And kids cartoons which are basically the same thing. That makes sense. I’m home.

Years later I bounce off other games which are either really open or a little harder to pin down. I cannot get my head around how to play Nobilis or why anyone would want to. I didnt really get the world of darkness (I didn’t see the crow till later). I’m currently reading Unknown Armies and until it mentioned Twin Peaks I thought it was about Elmore Leonard. And it is a bit, yes. But you wouldn’t pitch it as an Elmore Leonard game. I remember trying to play cyberpunk and nobody telling me what kind of characters to make or what they were supposed to do. My first and second characters in that game were killed by “obvious traps” because “I should have known they were traps”.

I tended to find my home in history: ars magica, call of Cthulhu, blue planet become my favourites. And genre as I said: ghostbusters and Buffy are the two games I’d save from a house fire or a meteor strike, and TMNT has my boyish heart. Now I design games where you can’t do anything but follow strict genre cues. The system simply won’t let you.

And I find a lot of games really do end up back at finding the media you know to get you started. Even if they’re in a totally unique setting – especially if they are – they come back to “have you ever seen a coen brothers film? It’s like that”. When I was working on the first 40K rpg we had an in-house brief that went: “it’s the A Team fighting Cthulhu in Star Wars”. Obviously we can’t always put these things in our texts; certainly not on our branding. But if we keep doing this, we should recognise how vital it is. How it’s the core of what we’re doing and so it should be core to the rules we write. The only reason D&D appears not to need this is it invented its own genre and rewrote pop culture around that.

Maybe im wrong though. Maybe nobody else needs this but me. Maybe everyone got world of darkness fine. Or maybe they’d seen a bunch of vampire movies to give them context. And maybe it’s about time we admitted this and put it front and centre in our designs.

Let me know your thoughts. You know, like in the movies where everyone responds to a viral post.

Review: Aristocracy

Posted on March 13, 2024 by dconstructions

They say there are two types of RPGs: large ones full of options but aren’t really about anything and need you to give them meaning and narrow ones that are really focused on being about one thing the author wants you to play so you only tend to use them once or twice. Generic, setting-agnostic RPGs are the former but even more so. It’s hard – maybe impossible – for them to be about anything without risking their chief goals of being widely applicable and infinitely flexible. It’s hard for them to even be interesting since they’re designed to be so neutral and even formulaic at times. A handy tool to do anything you want has trouble standing out – and outside of the granddaddy GURPS, has trouble selling too. Aristocracy, by Kylan Day, promises “broadsheets” that will provide setting hooks, although none have been announced yet. Also not yet visible is why the game is called Aristocracy. Maybe the plan is to be at the top of a list of RPGs, but then you’d want to be Aardvarks At Home: A Cutecore PAstoral Game of Insecure Insectivores. But I digress.

Actually, no, while I’m here, setting agnostic would mean we don’t know if we have a setting or not. It should be setting absent. But anyway.

Aristocracy works hard to stand out at least visually. For a first game, the layout is slick and attention grabbing with a good use of colour, which helps somewhat with all the page flipping needed. The art is dynamic, colourful and occasionally dazzling but again suffers from being a wide range of styles and genres like the game. To truly catch any attention, however, a universal RPG needs a strong core mechanic that’s simple but powerful. Aristocracy delivers here. Almost everything in the game is a skill roll, and skills are either untrained (d6), trained (d8) or focussed (d12). A 6 or a 7 is a success, an 8+ is a crit. You always roll five dice, so if you have no points in something it’s just 5d6 (which gives you a 60% chance of success, if you want the maths). You’ve got three main ways of messing with your dice – rerolling as many as you want, nudging a die up by one (but not off a 1, which is a botch), or upgrading a dice up a level from a botch to failure to success to a crit. You can also downgrade the other way. This allows for powers to provide three levels of dice control, but I do wonder if it’s hard to tell the difference. A reroll could at times be way more beneficial than an upshift, mathematically, and they all kind of feel the same? It would have been simpler to just give out one or bumps, say. Especially when we learn that some powers give bumps, some rerolls and some shifts, and there is no rhyme or reason which happens when. Worse, there’s no symmetry: good attribute give re-rolls, weak attributes give downshifts. Also, as clever as the dice pool system is, it’s not intuitive.Is 1/0/4 better than 0/3/2? By how much? What about 2/1/2 vs 1/4/0?

Speaking of attributes they are (sitting beside fifteen fairly standard skills) Brawn, Intelligence, Reflexes, Style, Perception are joined by Influence. This gives us a new kind of duality – we got dummy thic and twink as usual in Brawn/Reflexes, Book Smart and Street Smart in Intelligence/Perception and now we also add a Vader/Tarkin split in who got the swagger versus who pays the bills. It’s perhaps only moments of individuality like this that can set a universal RPG apart somewhat, and its a sign of the dedication behind Aristocracy that it has these touches of flair.

Another touch of flair is the mechanic where one character each session is the Lynchpin, which means the story is all about them. This is typically combined with the powers that let you alter the story or scene in your favour; by keeping this big showy things to just one person you ensure that the hacker bricking the nemesis’ laptop doesn’t happen at the same time the seductress declares they are secretly in love with them. It doesn’t play a huge part in the game as a whole but it helps communicate an important piece of information to the players (this bit is about Doug’s character) in a sly, unintrusive fashion. I wish it did do a bit more, however – it would be nice to see this have more mechanical weight to bring home what the game is about.

Skills and Attributes are also modified by Abilities, which are the Kewl Powers of the game and like the other two things, are doled out by choosing an Origin, a Species and two Careers, but before we get to those we have to learn about tracks.

Everything is tracks nowadays – what used to be clocks, and before that what we called hit points.In this case, there are bad tracks aka Danger Tracks, counting losses in health, wealth or willpower and good ones aka Progress Tracks which are like “did I find the lost tomb I’m looking for” or “are me and Mateo bros yet”. If you do an action that adds to a track, then at the end of the action you roll a d12 – roll equal or under the number of ticks on the track and you take pain equal to how many ticks you have, and then drop it back down a ways. Otherwise you keep ticking things off. This creates a very interesting dynamic where if you keep doing dangerous things it might cause you a small injury but it will absolutely assuredly cripple you if it doesn’t do that. Likewise you are generally like to pour damage onto someone until they explode…but there’s some good odds that before then, they’ll take a major injury and get reset back. That’s interesting. I guess it could get weird if you take a whole bunch of tiny near-misses and then when you get one more punch you all of a sudden collapse like a deflating wind dancer, but any loss in “realism” is balanced by being dramatically and numerically interesting.

Since everything is about successes along a track – and I mean EVERYTHING – success level always matters as a measure of volume. It’s not “oh four successes so you did quite well quite well”, because everything is a twelve-space track, so four is always a concrete number 30% better than three. And that makes all those Rerolls and Bumps and Upshifts potentially quite important. Every roll can be a negotiation with stats and math, and this makes “combat” full of choice and exciting.

I say “combat” with the inverted commas because combat is any activity that’s trying to make a Danger Track go up. or a Progress Track go down. Likewise, a Weapon is something that does the former and a Tool is something that does the latter, and here is where we get into one of the major problems with Aristocracy: jargon. Weapons are Weapons in italics for unclear reasons and an attack that uses a weapon means an actin is WEAPONISED (which I think is in all-caps because it’s a trait?). That’s fairly straight forward but everything has a tag like this and things start snowballing out of control.

For example, let’s say your group wants to hire a pilot to fly you into a volcano, but the pilot is being a jerk so your character decides they want to leave the group, go off screen and come back with a suitcase full of money and just buy the whole fricking airline. That’s either a Dangerous Combat Action which adds I guess to a Get To The Volcano Travel track, with any Danger being added to the Wealth track, unless it isn’t Dangerous at all, or maybe there isn’t a track. Alternatively, since it’s off screen, perhaps its a Downtime Action which only occurs during Downtime. In either case it might require an Extended check, because you may be doing several things. But it may not require Extended Downtime, it depends how many Downtime Actions it requires. A Downtime Action is usually just one skill roll, but what you can actually do depends on if it is a Short, Standard or Extended Downtime, and that’s a GM call. An Extended check can still happen in Standard Downtime. Now this is me trying to acquire Progress so I’m attacking my Resources Track, and I’m using a Tool to do so (I’ve got a Tool called Mommy’s Credit Card). And if you use a Tool to attack a a Progress track you do double damage, but because I’m trying to get a Big Pay Day, the Extended test acts like it has UNNATURAL ARMOUR. Okay, so let me just check what the ARMOUR ability is…(flip flip flip) and if it is UNNATURAL …okay it means all damage is reduced by 3. Is this before or after I double the damage? (flip flip flip) Not sure. Doesn’t say. And if I succeed, I get a Hoard. (flip flip flip, check index, flip flip flip, oh here it is) A Hoard is a kind of Loot that is ONE USE and can wipe out Wealth Damage or allow you to Acquire Equipment that is Rare at reduced costs. (Flip flip flip) Okay so Rare items can only normally be achieved with a Side Quest, which it turns out is just a regular Acquire Equipment roll, except it is now Extended, and can have multiple characters roll on it, so now we set up a new Progress Track towards Buying The Entire Goddamn Airline, but the Hoard “reduces the cost”, but like, how? Does the reduced cost mean it just wipes out Wealth Damage which is what it already said it did anyway? Or does it just let us roll on the track to begin with? Or does it count as a Tool? Or does it let us do it at as a non-extended task? Is the Side Quest now still Armoured, given my Hoard? Is a small fleet of planes even Rare to being with? Ask the GM. No, look at his eyes. He’s frightened. Luckily he can turn to the equipment chapter (flip flip flip) where the modern day section might indicate what makes something Rare. No dice. It doesn’t list air vehicles at all. Hang on, what if instead of getting the money first I just do a Side Quest to get the airline? Airlines aren’t listed as Rare. Let’s say one helicopter. Still no air vehicles, but we could use a Van and grant it Alternate Movement? Does that change its rarity (flip flip flip)?

It’s nice that all of this is genericised so I can reskin any item at all into a Tool that grants Progress, or even has Precision that cuts through Armour. That’s actually kind of fun, to imagine like okay, Precision removes Armour and big Pay Days are Armoured, so this person has some power that means his Side Quest heists are easy even when the Pay Days are big – so that Precise Tool might be “A Guy on the Inside”.. If I add three levels of Range to a Brutal Willpower attack, I can make anyone I can see anywhere surrender, even if they cannot see me, a power I call “Hey You Down There, Shut Up”. But if I’m reading through all the cool powers I get as a Fixer and I find out I can choose Resistance (Health) or Inspiration (Hazards) I wish it would just tell me what those things actually are. Resistance in this case means you can change any kind of damage into the brackets type, so my Fixer can turn financial damage into getting beat up. Or willpower damage into getting beat up. That’s actually a fun noir power – nobody can intimidate you, damage your finances or even run down your good name, it always just ends up being a boot to the face. Okay, so what’s Inspiration? Inspiration means I can grant allies a bump, but only during Hazards. What’s a hazard again? (Flip flip flip)

Don’t get me wrong, I think if you have intimate knowledge of this system, you can remember a lot of this. I think the designer could solve the airline problem in a second. But he doesn’t come with the book.

The other benefit of everything being generic is that you can keep some lists short. You don’t need two abilities, one for financial issues and one for physical issues: if it’s hard to wear down it’s armour, if you can get through defences,it’s Piercing.But If my raconteur gains Brutal in social situations, then all of a sudden this helpful jargon becomes vague again. Can I add it to attacks? Can I attack Travel tracks with that, even if it’s just me an my mechanic having a chat? Is it a tool or a weapon? Can it be both? And I have to remember that Brutal means more damage, instead of just reading in the stat definition – it doesn’t just say in the power “In X situations, add Y to Z”. And it’s not unified – some power ups give bumps, others rerolls, others flat bonuses. And some things on this list very specific, like Invisible, instead of some kind of Hard to Target power that slowly gets better. There’s also the ability to Portal into other dimensions which isn’t called something more abstract like Long Distance Travel (which should allow Travel tracks to…I guess cover more distance? Add Brutal?). Why is the first level of Invulnerable just being resistant to damage instead of actual invulnerability? Somethings use the jargon, some don’t, and some mix and match.

And worse: sometimes things have the wrong names, aren’t called what you think they are or aren’t explained where you think they should be. A skill will be called an occupation, characteristics will get Expert instead of Enhanced or vice versa, new skills pop up without definition, and so on.

I’m not looking for these problems. Making my first character, I decided to create a sci-fi concept which was “what if the alien from Alien was built to attack financial tracks instead of health tracks – the perfect thieving oranism.” My genetic perfection meant I always had an Accurate Tool appropriate to a task (any task? What’s a task?) but it can also be a Weapon, whereupon it counts as Brutal and Deadly. This means that if I’m using a Tool to move a thieving progress along, I have Accurate to those attacks (except it’s not an attack?) meaning I can reroll my dice, and the Tool allows me to do double “damage” to my progress. But if I attack someone’s Wealth, I do quadruple damage (because Brutal is x2, plus x2 for the Weapon) and my crits do extra damage (because of Deadly). But here is the question: when am I attacking someone’s wealth vs progressing thievery towards a goal? Or can I use it on any task related to this general area? Also, does my Poor Eyesight affect the roll, if we never said it was work that needed my eyes? I have no idea. I feel like I might be arguing with my GM a lot about both questions. I feel like my GM would be really sick of this.

So we have a system that is hard to learn, hard to remember and hard to translate into meaning, scattered across the book in pieces, and all of which are drowning in jargon you need to look up elsewhere, which is sometimes inconsistent, unspecified or unclear, and that wants to be absolutely purely abstract but also constantly relies on “the description” added by the player or the GM to know when and where and how it works..On the other hand, the intent to keep things unified is achieved. When I rolled that one of my Careers was a Summoner, I groaned because hoo boy I did not want to learn more of these rules, but the assistants rules were no longer than anybody else’s – they’re just a kind of tool. Theoretically, in this system, a spyglass and a scouting robot would work exactly the same way, and that’s fine. It was actually more complicated figuring out what a Winning Smile does – I gain Rapid Piercing Weapon to make WIllpower attacks, which means my smile ignores WIllpower Armour and that defensive actions are downshiffed against them. I can imagine what Willpower Armour might look like – the person might not like me to begin with or be on the lookout for a scam. On the other hand, they could have Willpower Absorb, or WIllpower Invulnerable, or Willpower Resistance, in which case, my Piercing is useless. Will the GM choose to give my enemies Willpower Resistance? I think he will.

And what, exactly, are defensive actions? I do not know. It is never defined. Combat is “always a contested roll” which seems to suggest that you are both attacking at once. Or both defending. And how do you defend against a smile? What Skill do I roll for that?

That was fifteen hundred words of negativity, which is a lot. But I want to be clear why I’m struggling with the game, because it has a lot of power and passion behind it, and a lot of good writing. But every time I find something I like, I find the good Lord taketh away the next moment. The three kinds of Templates you snap together to make a character – Origin, Species and Careers – are full of really evocative entries that you just don’t see elsewhere. Careers include things like Merchant Princes, World Breakers, Sorcerers and Shadows…but then things get confused when we also have Chirugeon sitting next to Hacker on the same list. Yes, it says not to use Hackers in medieval games, but that information isn’t on the table I chose it from. Species includes “Protagonist” alongside obvious cyberpunk things like Drone, Rebuild, Geneforged and Uplift – if we’re all playing modern day cops, do we all just pick Protagonist? Origin includes Socialite but no clear reason why it’s different to Fixer, or how Criminal is different to Scoundrel. Yes you can grow up On the Streets or Rich and still end up a Scoundrel, but who is born a Pilot? Why is that an Origin?

Combat also has some great stuff. Whenever you add to someone’s Damage track you roll to confirm that advance. If someone has taken three points of damage out of twelve, you need to roll a 1 2 3 to turn that into a minor effect. If someone has taken 10 points of damage you’ll convert that to a critical effect 84% of the time. So as mentioned you will rarely deal minor attacks and almost always convert to bone crunching owies. And it’s great that chapter four is full of whole bunches of options for these kinds of effects for players to choose from. Except it probably is going to slow down play to pass the book around every time a hit is confirmed. And some of them have tags that aren’t explained, and some require GM calls (I can do a coup de gras only if the target is prone but no effect causes prone as written. How do I make someone prone? Can I just say they are prone? Is it harder to hit them if I want to do that? How would I or the GM make this rule up on the fly?).

Some of the tracks are great, especially when you realize there are lots of powers that you can activate by throwing damage on those. Got the Enemeis track? Then you can get Bumps or rerolls by leaving a trail of breadcrumbs or just pissing people off. But it’s sort of misnamed because Health and Wealth and Willpower are positive things, and I guess this is a Lack of Enemies that is being whittled away? Maybe it should be called People’s Tolerance for Your Bullshit. Secrets is another great one. I desperately need to make a character who gets buckets of powerups by running their mouth off when they shouldn’t, but has some amazing healing power to stop it coming back to hurt them (Restoration (Secrets)).. And I love that this can happen just by rolling 1s on your die rolls, when doing a Dangerous action – as in you don’t know when you’ll slip up and make a mistake. Now, which actions are Dangerous? I can’t remember. (Flip flip flip)

I think it’s exciting to have all these wonderful narrative realms to attack, damage and confirm wounds upon. It does mean you have to speak of everything in the abstract instead of the specific but it allows you to model anything you want with the same rules. And it’s exciting to have a system that has all that flexibility about what might be an attack, damage and health but comes complete with crunchy modifiers like Brutal, Accurate and Deadly. I do think games like GYRO and Cortex and Fate do some of the same kind of things with more elegance and approachability and are much easier to read – but I don’t think I’ve seen anything do it with this much interesting mechanical structure. It reminds me, more than anything, of DnD 4e, where everything could be reskinned as an attack somehow. But it doesn’t actually have the satisfaction of interesting tactical combat.

But as I say, making this interesting abstract shopping list of powers apply to everything is conceptually fun and open to great builds. Having defined powers like Burst, Rapid, and Piercing means I can make every piece of equipment and every super power feel different in different ways – and I can apply that to every thing, every where. It’s like being a gunbunny in Shadowrun except the mods work for your charisma too, or your rugged individualism or your ability to walk a long way in the rainI can give my evil banker Burst financial attacks because he can attack lots of people at once. I can give an incisive reporter Piercing attacks against Secrets. I can protect myself against the wiles of saucy enemy agents by strapping on a device that gives me Armour and Defensive against romance attacks, while my nemesis, Captain Dick Longfellow, has supernaturally enhanced Style, and a Natural Weapon that is Deadly against Morality trackers. And now, finally, I can remember what all of that means – but I will forget, and have to look the damn things up again. Or get into an argument with the GM about how if I fire enough arrows it counts as a Burst not a Rapid attack, and all the king’s guards were absolutely close enough for it to count because Burst doesn’t define HOW near to each other enemies have to be.

Some of this is because of the nature of this book: a universal roleplaying game is not really a game at all, but a toolkit from which to construct an RPG, from which one then constructs a game. This is a resource of lots of rules to use to construct those RPGs. I think what would help the game would be a narrower focus. The design could pick exactly the right list of Origins, Species, Careers, plus tracks and Abilities that work for that setting, and simultarneously strip away much of the generalities, ambiguities and diversions. It would figure out exactly which tracks matter and how much crunch those tracks need and save space by cutting out every possible modulation and variation, and then maybe allowing them not to constantly be referred to with jargon. If it finally picked a cyberpunk setting, we could rob people for money instead of wealth units. And maybe see some more pregenerated characters so the skill system makes sense, or making our own can be smoother. These are in the works, so we will see where the game is in six months.

Until such products come along, I cannot recommend Aristocracy. It is certainly not more than the sum of its parts. However, it is a collection of some clever parts. The dice system is interesting, allowing lots of fiddling without ever rolling more than five dice. The idea of tempering every possible confrontation through the same mechanics and building modifying tags that work for any kind of battlefield is clever, and shows a confident design hand. The use of language in delineating the templates is deft and vivacious. At times, the reach has been audacious, even if some of the execution roughhewn. So while I don’t like the game as it is, I find myself hungry for the next thing to come. That’s worth something.

How much you like this game depends on how much work you are prepared to do getting across all that style, terminology and complexity, and then tailoring it to the setting and game you want to play, and the game is not super helpful at guiding you through either of those steps. But maybe you like things a little rough. That’s between you and Captain Longfellow.

Queen For A Day: A DramaSystem Session

Posted on April 18, 2016 by dconstructions

“The difference between you and me is I want to be the guy, and you want to be the guy the guy counts on” – The West Wing

Despite contributing to the immense Hillfolk kickstarter (by setting appears in Blood on the Snow, the companion volume), I have never had a chance to play the Drama System contained within – until last weekend. Even better, it was with five amazing players and a brilliant, unexpected set up: instead of a setting, we were given the lyrics of all the songs off Queen II, an amazing concept album of fairies, ogres, white and black queens and the seven seas of Rhye. With that as our palette, we painted.

I took the role of The Master Marathon, and decided that I wanted to be a character who had what everyone wanted – or wished he did. I decided he was the keeper of the power of Endurance, that all who wished to Suffer And Go On owed homage to him. Another player crafted Mother Mercury, also an elemental power, but in charge of hot and cold, now lost in an endless winter from which she seemed unable – or unwilling – to awaken, despite her need to be rekindled. We soon learned she was the ex-lover of the Fairy King, ruler of all the lands of fairy, but weary of his throne and eager for his son to replace thim. That sond was Sir Tristram, a young prince called the Killer of Queens. He was cursed to love the White Queen while the prophecy spoke that if he married her, she would die. Last was General Grimtooth, the King’s trusted long-serving general, also keen to retire so he can spend time with his grandchildren. King and General and Mother and Son, all waiting, all wanting things to finish forever, or start at last, but stuck in time until then, and Master Marathon keen to sell them suffering so they needed him more…

Convention Rules for DramaSystem involves setting up each character via introductory scenes where they ask another character for what they want from them. We began with General Grimtooth asking the King if Grimtooth could train his successor. Grimtooth’s player asked if the King had a name, and someone – doing that fantastic ingame improv worldbuilding that works so well – said “If you knew his name, you wouldn’t have to ask for freedom”. Boom, world creation. The King, by the way, said, in his usual wishy-washyness that it was okay but there had to be contest first to make sure Longfang was the best choice.

On the verandah of the King’s hut, styled not unlike a viking longhouse – Master Marathon begged Mother Mercury to make winter go on forever, for cold men need endurance. She said maybe, if there were other ways to awaken her senses – and what she meant was a rekindled love from her once-husband, the King, but though she begged by the frozen stream’s side, he could not give it. Meanwhile the King begged his son to either marry his love or cut her loose, so he could take the throne unhampered, but Sir Tristram refused, not while the curse hung over him and the Black Queen was still at large, plotting. He went to Grimtooth’s cave to ask the ogre for an army to crush the Black Queen, but Grimtooth refused.

Generally, as is the way of DramaSystem, everyone was being a dick.

Master Marathon, a god who just wants you to want him and needs you to need him

The GM lit the fuse by announcing the Black Queen was coming to seek alliance and continue the ongoing peace, and in the King’s ear she whispered that this would be best sealed by her marrying Sir Tristram his son. Looking down on the two royals meeting in the throne room, Master Marathon whispered to Sir Tristram that what instead was being said was the words of lovers, and Sir Tristram should urge his father to love the Black Queen freely. On the other balcony, knowing the King would visit the Black Queen to cement the peace, Grimtooth demanded Mother Mercury – for her own safety – be his spy within the Queen’s Obsidian Castle. She agreed, fearing too that the Queen would steal her King. To guard against that, she begged the King to let her accompany him in his private pegasus-drawn carriage on the journey, but he said propriety would be violated. And since he was now committed to affairs of state, seeing in their settlement a way out of his eternal agony, he summoned Sir Tristam and told him once and for all to choose the Black Queen or the White Queen, or no longer be his son. Tristam promised to choose by sundown tomorrow.

Huffy and annoyed, Mother Mercury and Sir Tristram made plans to ally against the Black Queen. Mother Mercury then found herself summoned by the White Queen, who begged Mercury for her Winter Touch to end the love Sir Tristram has for her. She had already asked Master Marathon for a gift of strength to lend Sir Tristram which he gleefully gave (for Master Marathon wished Sir Tristram to be slain by the Black Queen, causing his father to be heirless and be forced to go on forever enduring). Sir Tristram, having pledged to choose Black or White needed to ensure he would, if he wed his White Queen, not take her life, so the next morn as the procession of pegasi flew to the Obsidian Castle, he ordered Grimtooth to promise one act of total obedience when called upon. Grimtooth promised his obedience, but bristled at the order.

Seeing his bristling, I (Marathon) suggests that to protect a king’s life, it is no treason to kill a prince. Grimtooth is not at all happy about that, either. Scurrying for protection I decide to ride by the King, who orders me that, when instructed, I pass his Immortal Heart to his son. Pretty sure that the prince will be dead soon I promise to do so. Grimtooth leaves the travelling party and seeks out Longclaw, his best soldier, and orders her, if he moves to strike his masters, to stop him any way she can. Longclaw knows the only way to stop Grimtooth is with the Sea of Winter, one of the Seven Seas of Rhye, held deep beneath Two-Way Mirror Mountain, and he sends out the Blue Powder Monkeys to find it.

Having reached the Obsidian Castle, Sir Tristram walks the gardens in his grief for his terrible choice – marry the queen he loves and be sure to kill her with his hand, or marry the queen he does not and kill his love with a broken heart. But the White Queen appears and tells him his pain will end if he kisses her. He refuses, even though she says he does not love her if he denies her. Then Mother Mercury joins the party and tells her step-son to kiss for his stepmother, if not for his love. Forced to it, he kisses his love and Mercury’s spell cools his ardour. Cut to him in his father’s guest chambers in the Obsidian Castle: “I will marry Black” he swears.

Night falls and the silver moon makes the Obsidian Castle shine with black light. I find Longclaw on the parapets awaiting word of her Blue Powder Monkeys but the truth is, I tell her, that I possess the Sea of Winter. Marathon launches into a big thing about how Longclaw will dance for him but Longclaw is a soldier and just beats up Marathon and takes the chalice. Marathon however is not without back up plans, and in the Throne Room that evening he demands either Fairy King or Black Queen deliver justice against uppity ogres who dare assault his regnant person. Sir Tristram gives his Black Queen a proposal gift of Longclaw’s head, after taking it from Longclaw’s shoulders. The Black Queen accepts. Grimtooth grimaces in agony for Longclaw was his daughter

Grimtooth now begs his King for release so he can turn on Sir Tristram. I point out that Grimtooth has no successor now and her soldiers are unruly savages who attack their betters, so the King cannot let his servant free. Grimtooth loses his shit at the traitor Marathon and begins beating the living hell out of him. The King begs us to stop and I see my moment and tell Sir Tristram that Grimtooth will never be his obedient servant when he is so wild and urge Sir Tristram to establish his new kingly reign with proper justice. Sir Tristram challenges Grimtooth to a duel – and uses his promised favour from earlier to force Grimtooth to comply.

But Sir Tristram wonders if the bloodshed is too much and hesitates in battle. Grimtooth smashes the young prince’s sword and mortally wounds him. Seeing his son dying, the King orders me to transfer his Immortal Heart into his son, and I must obey. I lose the chance for the King to go on enduring, but perhaps the now scarred, dark, immortal Prince Tristram will need aid in his endurance. Determined never to harm a Queen with his hand, and shocked at his murderous ways, Prince Tristram adds to his stigmata by ordering Grimtooth take his victory prize by severing Prince Tristrams hands. Grimtooth obeys, but having harmed his prince, ignored his king and lost his daughter, Grimtooth then cuts off his own head.

In a lake of blood, the lack-handed but immortal Sir Tristram marries the smiling Black Queen, free of his curse but shrouded in blood and darkness, and with Master Marathon as his mentor.

But not all is sadness. Freed of his Immortal Heart, the King’s heart of flesh beats anew. And he leaves the Obsidian Castle arm in arm with his old love Mother Mercury, leaving the responsibilities of immortality and reigning behind to love her again. Mother Mercury is reborn, the snows break, and winter ends. What then, of the summer to come?

Perhaps that tale will be told elsewhere.

Estalia Preview #6: New Spells

Posted on January 24, 2016 by dconstructions

I have to tell you that the book is stalled again. Layout is a fiendish and complicated beastie now we’re down to the last few chapters, because it’s in those chapters that we have tables and lists and stat blocks (if anyone wants to help out, let us know! Many hands make faster work!)

What’s that you ask? Do we have new rules in all those tables and statblocks? Why, what would a sourcebook be without cool new powers to use upon your enemies? Poorly reviewed and undersold, that’s what. So no, we don’t just bring you setting information. There are a set of new monsters, new chargen tables, fencing powers and of course, new spells for the servants of the Maiden. 33 to be exact. Here’s six to give you a taste:

Apprentice to Master

Casting Number: 12

Casting Time: Special

Duration: Special

Range: You

Ingredient: A tool used to build a great temple (+2)

Description: As part of the casting of this spell, you must watch another individual creating something using a Perform or Trade skill. Until the next sunrise, you gain the skill you observed. You may use this skill as many times as your Magic characteristic, then the knowledge fades from your hands.

Arena of Reckoning

Casting Number: 14

Casting Time: Half Action

Duration: Instant

Range: Touch

Ingredients: A circlet of gold (+2)

Description: When you cast this spell, you and one target are locked in combat to the death. An immovable magical aura rises surrounding only the two of you (just enough to cover your two squares with about a foot of give around) – any others that might be caught are flung out. Aside from a Dispel spell, the aura remains totally impenetrable to anything and anyone until either you or the target are dead.

Arms of the Sister

Casting Number: 10

Casting Time: Half Action

Duration: 1 minute (6 rounds)

Range: You

Ingredients: A broken arrow (+1)

Description: When you strike, you strike with the arms of Shallya, Myrmidia’s merciful sister. When striking to Stun, you automatically succeed on the Strength test. If you strike to wound while the spell is in effect, it immediately ends.

Beacon in the Tempest

Casting Number: 9

Casting Time: Half Action

Duration: 1 minute (6 rounds)

Range: 24 yards (12 squares)

Ingredients: An owl’s beak (+1)

Description: While Myrmidia’s faithful command soldiers, they must also look to those who cannot fight. All allies within range can hear your voice as clearly as if they were standing next to you, and can understand you whatever language they speak. Your voice sounds calming and wise, and those who hear it gain a +10% bonus to Willpower tests to resist Initimdate tests, and Fear or Terror effects for the next hour.

Beautify Object

Casting Number: 9

Casting Time: Half action

Duration: 1 hour/Magic

Range: Touch

Ingredients: A paintbrush (+1)

Description: You apply a beautifier’s eye and hand to one object you nominate. The object’s Craftsmanship goes up one level (Poor to Common, Common to Good, Good to Best). You may Beautify as many objects as your Magic characteristic. Weapons enhanced in this manner gain the standard bonuses. However, Myrmidia frowns upon deception for profit and any attempt to sell items enhanced by this spell cause the glamour to immediately vanish and the deception to be revealed.

Blade for Blade

Casting Number: 10

Casting Time: Half Action

Duration: 1 minute

Range: You

Ingredients: A silvered blade (+2)

Description: When you cast this spell you can see the attacks of your enemies coming towards you as if in slow motion. You may parry as many times per round as your Magic characteristic. You may still only parry once per attack.

Boon of Surrender

Casting Number: 15

Casting Time: Half Action

Duration: Instant

Range: 24 yards

Ingredients: A ring of silver (+2)

Description: When you cast this spell, you demand that your enemies surrender (making Charm or Command tests as the GM directs). All enemies you can see within range of the spell who cease fighting immediately heal 1d10 Wounds. They also cease to be Frightened, Terrified or subject to frenzy if they were previously. Those who do not surrender suffer -10% on their next WS or BS roll. For the next hour, if the subjects of the spell attack or direct harm towards you or a number of your allies equal to your Magic characteristic, the subject loses 1d0 Wounds.

Chill Third Edition: A Review

Posted on December 3, 2015 by dconstructions

RPGs are a crowded marketplace. Particularly in the traditional mode: there’s only so many ways to differentiate the idea of simulated avatars moving through an imagined environment. And the thing we do in them almost as much as kill monsters in fantasy dungeons is kill monsters in modern day horror. Which is to say, it’s not enough for the modern-day monster killing RPG Chill to be decent, or even good. It also needs to bring something new to the table. Chill tries hard to rise to this challenge, but its successes are never quite without qualifications.

Of course, Chill is something old, not new. Chill was first released by Pacesetter Games in 1984 – an eternity ago in gaming. I never played the original so I’m not sure how much new stuff they’ve added and how much is a relic of the past. The sense I get is they’ve tried to keep as much as possible, and sometimes I fear that might have led to some preservations which might have been better culled or at least cleaned and polished. On the other hand, not all changes are improvements…

To pick an emblematic example, let’s talk the core system. Chill was one of the last of the great dividers: nowadays, it’s considered taboo but in the 80s it was commonly expected for players of roleplaying games to be able to do division and multiplication on the fly. Chill is in fact an acronym for how the system works: there are three levels of success – Colossal, High and Low – ChilL (not to be confused with California Highway Patrol, which is completely different). A Low success is rolling under your (usually above 50%) stat on a d%, a High was rolling under stat halved, and a Colossal was rolling under it quartered. New minty fresh Chill keeps the High and Low, but replaces the Colossal with rolling doubles on your percentile dice and getting a success (doubles while failing is a Botch). That means a few things, such as critical successes and failure now happen 10% of the time, which is much more common. There’s now less reason to have stats above 100%, except in the case of modifiers, (although I don’t see why you need modifiers if you have success levels), and now there are five levels of outcome to deal with rather than four. But it does mean you don’t have to divide by four. Better? Maybe. To me it feels like not much really gained and still fiddly anyway.

And there’s some more of that around. There’s a gorgeous mechanic where the game has a number of two-sided tokens on the table and the GM turns them to the good side to power up the bad guys and players turn them to the bad side to power up themselves. This allows a visual, visceral sense of how much trouble you’re in and how the tide is turning. But there are six different things that can cause or arise from token turning and they’re not written on the character sheet. Another example is every stat is linked to exactly one skill, which is rated at half your stat. A lovely idea that really helps establish setting: this is your general skill with Perception, whereas Investigation is using it specifically in genre, ie to solve mysteries and hunt monsters. The problem is they couldn’t think of specific examples narrow enough for Strength, Agility or charisma (here called Personality) so those skills (Prowess, Movement and Communication) start at your full stat. Maybe I’m a stickler for symmetry but that just feels messy. It’s the opposite of elegant.

Parts of the design and layout of the book also feel messy. Now, RPGs aren’t like normal books. RPGs are toolkits, which is to say when you open them they need to unfold like a toolbox to reveal all the useful tools close at hand, but being books they have to be lined up in a linear order. You can’t understand chargen until you know the rules but the rules don’t mean anything without knowing what the characters are and none of that means anything without a setting. Over the decades different games have solved this in different ways and none are perfect, but Chill’s approach seems particularly off-kilter. To stop you from having to learn the complexities of chargen at the start, the pregens come first, but that means you have the examples before the process (and I’ve never met anyone who likes pregens). Then after chargen we have a huge chapter on setting and the chapter of cool powers before we get to the main rules, and parts of those end up in the GM’s chapter. And because the setting chapter is entirely focussed on the organisation the PCs work for, it’s difficult to get a full sense of the game’s direction until you reach the antagonist chapter at the very end – you get a who’s who before you get what they do. The game is complete (and expansive) but you have to read the whole thing to get that, and at times it almost feels like work to unravel it.

But once you get passed the messiness, there is an interesting, well developed and at times beautiful game in here. So let’s talk about the good stuff.

Chill takes its lead from many, if not most, twentieth century horror films: evil is a real, potent force, it takes the form of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, monsters, black-eyed children, creepy old ladies and evil dolls, and all they want to do is kill people and cause pain. The players are members, or “envoys”, of SAVE, a Latin acronym for the Eternal Society of the Silver Way, although Eternal is big talk for a society invented in 1844. But that big talk is part of SAVE’s nature: it feels realistic and human. It’s not a society that somehow magically lasted all of time and whose members are almost always entirely loyal and whose goal always good. SAVE is in fact riven by internal politics disputes, frustrated by its inadequacies and limitations, and possibly entirely betrayed from within. Indeed, in 1989 their world clubhouse in Dublin was attacked in an inside job and still nobody knows how (and nobody trusts anyone either). They’re not the Watchers or the Templars or even the CIA; they’re more akin to the National Geographic Society, only without funding coming in from sales of the magazine. They’re big enough to have people all over the world and keep a mailing list going, but they rely on members to bring their own guns, cars, computers and sometimes even office buildings. And given that every time they gather information and resources in one place it gets blown up, smallness appears to be on their side.

This approach has become explicit since 2012 when a new leader emerged in Hayat Nejem, a Syrian woman who discovered the Unknown (capital U, as SAVE calls the force of evil) when she saw demonic spirits surrounding Assad. Her response was to kickstart SAVE back from the torpor of confusion and suspicion since Dublin, but with the caveat that from now on, everyone was going to use a cell structure to stay connected but anonymous. Meanwhile old schoolers want to pretend they’re still an academic gentleman’s club and are resisting the new methods, and some parts of SAVE are still off the grid and don’t know anything about leaders, new or old. Players get to build their own SAVE base and choose which group they fall into, although only brainstorming guidelines are provided, not actual mechanics.

It’s a good setting not just because it feels realistically broken and organic; SAVE is designed to be just big enough to get envoys in trouble while small enough to be completely unable to get them out of it. However, the exhaustive chapter on SAVE goes into enormous detail about some things that feel irrelevant and skims over stuff I would have loved to have seen more about. For example, there’s endless information on the first three missions and surrounding life and times of the folks who set up SAVE, and a breakdown of every central office, director and local hotspots for every continent on earth. Having a historical and global view is important to get a sense of things but unless you’re planning on setting your game outside modern day USA, most of the detail is superfluous. Especially since those sections are much much longer than stuff about the modern day and the local, comparatively, and the every day functioning also has a short shrift. I’m fascinated with the idea of a society trying to exist in a post-9/11 world while requiring its members to remain in clandestine contact with military agents inside Syria. I’d love to play either side of that equation. Instead I’m reading about haunted houses in Outer Mongolia and lengthy journal entries of some long-dead Oxford don about whom I could not care less.

Nothing is actually absent in this book, it’s just sometimes disproportionate; others hard to find. The real meat is in the rump, in the last and second last chapters. Yes, players need to know what dice to roll but the nature of an RPG is in its structure and tone. To its enormous credit, Chill knows this and devotes much to the art of crafting these elements. And I don’t just mean a long discussion on the relevant sources and the methods of emulating them using the rules. The damage rules are in this section, because it’s in those rules that GMs have the main ability to affect the characters, and drive home the horror. Chill’s setting is one where the characters are really normal people, getting the absolute crap beaten out of them by a dark force they cannot really match, but choosing to fight on anyway, and representing that is all about damage, physical AND mental. The horror checks are more complicated than Cthulhu but not as complicated as Unknown Armies, but either way are meaty and realistic. This is a game where trauma counselling is vital, and the feat giving training in it is as sought after as Great Cleave in D&D.

That sets up tone. Structure comes from the investigation model: finding the horror and learning what might be its weakness before it beats the crap out of you. Chill is a high-prep game where GMs develop a series of bread-crumbs which players can find in different avenues to get the important information. The monsters aren’t generally unbeatable without their silver bullet, thankfully, and the structure takes its key from the lesson of GUMSHOE – key clues are available even on botches, although sometimes with extraneous information. Do I want to come up with five outcomes for every investigation avenue? No, but that’s what pre-written adventures are for. The one we’ve seen (in the quickstart) is excellent at this; I hope we’ll see more of them announced soon. Even if not, there’s nothing wrong with this approach to the investigation genre, and by taking you through the process inch by inch, Chill does every bit of heavy lifting it can to help you.

They also give some help in the last chapter, the extensive bestiary, with most listings have some guidance on tell-tale signs and weaknesses, and a taxonomy that you can see SAVE actually applying in setting. Lest your players crack the code and become bored, many monsters are adjustable and the game also comes with sixty monster powers allowing you to mix and match your monsters to keep players guessing. The powers also allow you to emulate important horror tropes like descending silence, slamming doors and phones breaking, without having to give everyone complicated telekinesis. If the player character sheets look a bit fussy, the opposite is true with the opposition – the stats are streamlined down and the use of the flipping tokens also thins down what each beasty can do and when.

The tone of this review has ramped up towards positivity as it’s gone along, and that’s because the RPG works the same way. When I’d finished it, I finally got the sense of all the tools and how to use them to tell a story, but actively trying to learn that from the game proved difficult. It’s certainly not a product to give to your players to teach them. There’s no handy summary tables and back references and chargen doesn’t feel like a step-by-step guide so much as a list of information. There isn’t even a character sheet – or maybe they just took it out of the PDF?

Yet at the same time this game goes above and beyond with what detail and support it does provide. The information on the background and antagonists is exhaustive to the point of actual exhaustion. The tools for building investigative structure and intense horror are purposeful and cleverly designed. This is a game built with care, but it is also not very user-friendly or easily grasped, because there are still plenty of rough edges. It’s a claymore of a game: certainly potent but also unwieldy. And like a claymore I respect it and I think it will really suit some people’s style, but it also requires some work to master, and if I was backed into a corner, I’d pick a slicker, more convenient weapon.

In the end, the first question was around the wrong way: Chill clearly some nice new things to the table, but it also has to be good. And it is quite good, but in a crowded marketplace, you have to be great to be good, and quite good is only decent.

7/10.

Little Bit Of Smallville Chargen

Posted on May 11, 2015 by dconstructions

I do love chargen: you start with a blank page and you end with a story. Or in this case, several intersecting stories. Our setting idea was some sort of grand shadow-government alien-fighting conspiracy. Like the kind of people investigating the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Top Men are working on it. TOP MEN

The Cells Episode Two: Drink To Remember

Posted on April 20, 2015 by dconstructions

“I just bring you ideas. I leave the execution to you.” – Agent Quiver

The Citadel at night. A sepia tone tells us it is the past. Young Zak and Umbrito are boosting rundown tenements. A siren rings out and the two burst out of the door of their target. As they run, Umbrito yells “If Mok ever finds out this was you, you’re dead”

Roll credits.

The same street, maybe, but the time is now. A spirit of Carnivale lingers on the streets of the Ditchers, still recovering from the Band-Aid-esque event. “What’s Up, Ditchers” t-shirts wave in the wind – and the face on them is Zak, who walks the crowd with his white suit and his bodyguards. Zak is spreading good will and food tokens, a new system to try and curb the abuses of food banks, and Zak is the perfect face to hand them out to ditchers. But then there’s Umbrito and Joanne on his arm. They embrace and Umbrito says they should go catch up. Zak throws his remaining food tokens into the air and ditches his security in the fracas – the party boy is still here.

Back at Central, it’s also a bleary early morning. Hal and Kate sit in the dining room, having Awkward Pauses for breakfast. If their marriage wasn’t perfect before the war, and before the cells, it’s gone into a kind of shock now. Kate directs the conversation onto the suffering of the city, and how, although Hal has done some good work so far, a city has to do more than just survive but thrive, as Pavani had said at the press conference (before rushing off to find her girlfriend, or something – quick cut to Pavani finding an empty room and a left note). Hal takes this as a personal slight, and decides Kate is suggesting he resign. He ponders a sense of fated failure and stares at the bottle of bourbon on the kitchenette shelf.

Close up on the bottle, now with less in it. Reverse to show sitting opposite is now Quiver, in Hal’s seat (ahem) talking to Kate. Quiver is trying to deal with the PR SNAFU that Hal retiring would cause and asks her if she can change his mind, because their secret could push him over the edge. Kate demands he stop thinking about PR for once in his life and give a damn about her, about their future, and until he does, she will be elsewhere. After she leaves, Quiver slams his palm down on the table and the glasses clink. It’s the first time we’ve seem him anything but worried or oleaginous.

The glasses clinking mixes over to the same at Zak’s impromptu party, which has turned from a reunion of old friends into a warehouse festival. Zak is the returned hero, festooned with women and flunkies. The 37s – as they are known – are flying high: their favourite son is running the city, and there’s talk of them being deputized like other gangs to help with keeping order. On the other hand, this doesn’t look like a very upstanding gangland. There’s an extra roughness to it. We pivot from a 37 tattoo to the same sign spray-painted onto a house perhaps not far away, where Knight-Father Paige is leading a new Citadel Police Force in dealing with gang activity. The dialogue indicates that there’s been a rash of murders turning up in the Ditch and the 37s are believed responsible. Paige dismisses his crew saying he’s going home, looking at a house at the end of the street.

Back at the party, the big black cars pull up and Quiver enters, uncomfortable and unable to hide his anger as he jostles through the crowd. He tries to be polite and get Zak to cut things short before the press turn up but Zak can’t go against the flow of so much belonging. Quiver snaps and tells Zak he’s being a child and he’s sick of cleaning up after a spoiled brat. Zak gives him a push to suggest he calm down and Quiver pushes back. Zak falls off his seat and Zak’s crew respond by jumping Quiver and beating him down. Zak stumbles up, looks at the situation, and decides to go with the flow and let Quiver suffer, suggesting the gang go hoist him up a flagpole. Umbrito smiles and tells Zak to follow him. Zak grabs a drink and does so, only to be jumped from behind and thrown into a car boot.

The thump of the boot matches to the thump of the door of Paige’s house closing behind him. The house is domestic and tidy. Polished. To the point of being unlived in. The pictures on the wall show a family – Roland and his husband Alex and their daughter Joanna growing up together. Then Alex’s ashes. We follow Paige through the kitchen where he grabs a bottle of bourbon into the bedroom where he sits and drinks and pulls a picture from the nightstand and starts to talk to Alex in a broken voice.

From the quiet to sudden noise: a room full of movement and noise. Computers churn, printers bubble and data is mined. The extent of cameras and maps reveals the true extent of which the city is under surveillance. And being given a guided tour of Central Data is Lazarus Moore, who has spent the last few days finding this place, a place kept secret from the five by the General. Who sits amongst it and succeeds mostly in hiding his displeasure of seeing Lazarus. The two trade barbs. Lazarus reveals he is decades older than he appears but the General is not cowed by this and buries Lazarus in pointless data, leaving him to slip off and be briefed about the mysterious vial.

Zak’s kidnapping ends at a danker, nastier, more crime-purposed warehouse and he is dumped in front of Mok, a more tattooed and more pierced 37er than we’ve yet seen. He accuses Zak of killing his brother, but Zak says he loved Mok’s brother much more than he ever gave a damn about Mok, and suggests that Umbrito did the hit because Joanna also loved Mok’s brother. Umbrito spits daggers at Zak but Zak sells it – when his life is on the line, Zak will sell out his old friend to save himself. The gunhands turn their attention to Umbrito and a haunted-looking Zak slips away.

Meanwhile a haunted Hal drinks in a seedy bar – the seediest bar closest to Central, anyway. He finds a one-armed veteran to talk to and tries to reconnect with the city and its people, but they get stuck in the same veteran’s loop of being able to do nothing but share war stories.

Back to Zak, he runs into the street to find Lazarus in a Big Black Car waiting for him. Zak seems changed, subdued now his old life could get him killed. He apologises and confesses to Lazarus, who is playing the confessor and mentor. Zak directs the car to retrieve a bound and gagged with tape Quiver, who is being hoisted by a crowd. Zak tries to connect as the ganger of old but the wind has gone out of his sails and – on Laz’ advice – sends in the government goons to clear them out instead. Desperate for new friends in his guilt, Zak becomes the government man.

Back at the house, Roland hears someone enter and draws his gun reflexively – but it is Joanna and Umbrito, on the run and arguing. Roland dismisses Umbrito and has a big old shouting match with his daughter. He’s trying to make it what it was, but to Joanna it was broken then anyway, because she got the parent she didn’t like raising her and the one she did absent, and it certainly can’t go back now anyway. Roland accuses her of forgetting her values, her religion, her upbringing, and that of course, is her point too: she’s a different person than he wants her to be. She leaves, with no sense she will return.

Back at Central, Lazarus pours Quiver a drink as the nurse finishes his stitches. Lazarus is curious as to why Quiver is tense and offers himself to hear a confession. Quiver tries to hedge around the details but then it all comes out, the truth about him and Kate. And in the end, Lazarus offers no help or absolution, just enjoys the new information. Quiver storms off and runs into Zak. There is a soulful apology and reconnection. Zak says he’s ready to play ball. Quiver says he’s on Zak’s side, that’s his whole job. Zak says there’s a man called Mok who has taken over the 37s and needs to be stopped. Quiver says that revenge by the ex-bad boy looks bad, but suppression by the saintly soldier Roland looks good. Quiver assures Zak that the best story of all is a redemption story, about people who have done bad things but are more than their sins. He’s not talking about Zak.

Lazarus provides – somehow – a lock on Mok’s location. Quiver takes his idea to the bar where Roland has joined Hal to drink. Hal says it has to be done by the book, with a trial. Quiver says “We will make sure we have all the evidence we need” because Quiver loves double meanings. Roland likes it, he wants order. The decision is made. Quickly we cut back to Lazarus working angles, and meeting with the Cardinal (who gets a first name now, Erasmus) – he’s found out the General’s secret. We cut to the General recruiting someone explaining he has a special demolitions job for him.

Back to the operation, which is shot in parallel with Quiver performing another insurgency: a romantic dinner and seduction of Kate. A search light flashes on, and Quiver lights a candle. Roland and others point at maps, Quiver sets the table. Roland gives the “go” signal, Quiver presents dinner with a flourish. SWAT teams move in, one places a finger on his lips, and Kate does the same to Quiver. A 37 goon guard is taken out with an arm around his neck pressure hold, as Quiver moves his arm around Kate from behind. They cut the lights on the gangsters, and Quiver flicks off the light. A gangster gasps as a shot takes him in the chest, and Kate gasps for different reasons. And then an interlude.

Later, Zak stands outside the jail as the perps are led in in cuffs. Zak has moderated his rebellious white suit with an official flak jacket. Mok is the last to walk in, and the two lock eyes and stare. Back at Central, Hal pushes open the door and locks eyes with the man in his wife’s bed.

Roll credits. Zak’s theme here is Sabotage.

Next time on The Cells:

Quiver blinded by the flashbulbs of the press, raising his hand in defense.
Behind a chain fence, a protest reminiscent of Occupy shouts and marches. A reporter is heard saying “Jason King has galvanized the ditcher community”
Quiver arguing with Mr Grey. “Dammit, these are good people.”
Zak strutting in Central, in a grey suit, looking at home with power. He comes into his room to find a woman holding a baby and his jaw drops.
Mok threatening Joanna across a prison meeting table. “This goes further than you know” he says.
A building explodes in fire.
Livinia standing at a grave. She says “I’m still going to go through with it”
The General stands in a hospital room. “I might have found a way”

D-Constructions

Game Writing, Game Reviews and Game Design Thoughts by Steve D

Tag Archives: rpgs

Designer Notes: Five Years After

Why I Hate Cole Wehrle

Monkey See

Review: Aristocracy

Queen For A Day: A DramaSystem Session

Estalia Preview #6: New Spells

Chill Third Edition: A Review

Little Bit Of Smallville Chargen

The Cells Episode Two: Drink To Remember