For the past two years, and more rapidly over the past few months, I’ve been developing a tabletop game.
Ahadi is a synthesis of my loves both in and outside of the TRPG medium. It draws from history, wargaming, nation-gaming, and political simulations to create a game about the tools of power in the same way that D&D is about dungeon crawling or shadowrun is about extremely violent gig work.
And friends, it is going to be great.
I’m a huge fan of Dimension 20. A good friend pointed me at Fantasy High and I’ve been hooked since. The cast is great, Brennan is one of the best Actual Play DMs I’ve seen, and the production is gorgeous. One of my long term goals is to run one fight in Lancer with the production values of a single Dimension 20 combat.
So I watched and greatly enjoyed Tiny Heist. But its finale brought up an issue familiar to many in the TTRPG scenes. Namely, during the climactic Heist, the fact that the game was Dungeons and Dragons was a detriment to the way the game was played. The game would have played more cleanly were it in a system better suited to heists, as shown by the car chase that follows which does play more cleanly.
The basic reason for this is that Dungeons and Dragons does not have a heist system and attempting to play out a heist using the existing mechanics kind of sucks.
This isn’t new to anyone in TTRPG writing or design, and is a common refrain in criticisms of Dungeons and Dragons and games like it. However, I feel like it’s a lesson more commonly espoused through insults and at odd angles rather than explained in a straightforward manner, something I hope to correct.
Sorry for the lack of updates last month, I’d signed up to run a game I’ve designed at Big Bad Con, and as a result had to put my nose to the grindstone to get it done and playable in time for the Con! Fortunately I’ve basically finished, and a playtest version of the game is up on DriveThruRPG and Itch.io. With that in mind, I encourage you to check it out and read on!
Last month I attended the Battle by the Beach, a two-day Infinity tournament at Mythic Games in Santa Cruz. It was my first Season 11 tournament and a hell of a way to kick off the season. I had a blast and, because I had a blast, I thought it best to share the results with all of you!
The Science Fiction and Fantasy genres treat Muslims extremely poorly. When we show up we’re terrorists or racist stereotypes. Decadent harems, brutal terrorists, backwards weirdos, and worse. Orcs are thinly disguised as us to represent how the author is scared of brown people, aliens are associated with us to represent how the author doesn’t think we’re human, and always, always, terrorism and religious extremism are at the fore and put entirely at the feet of religion. Politics, economics, culture, and other factors that define the Muslim world are ignored. I haven’t even started on the news.
As a result, the SFF genres often don’t function for Muslim audiences. Stories that are meant to be about escape, about visions of the future, about warnings and social commentary, all-too-often end up being banal reinforcements of everyday bigotry we face on a regular basis.
For the most part, Infinity manages to avoid that. HaqqIslam is one of the better representations of an Islamic faction in Science Fiction by a non-Muslim writing team. It clearly tries, it presents a Muslim society that is genuinely pretty great without being perfect, it provides a variety of Muslim characters with their own stuff going on and has a bunch of extant conflicts to work with. It iterates to deal with problematic content in a way that indicates that the writing team cares about getting this right.
But.
There are significant issues. You can see some of them here, where a cursory glance at Haqq lore by Muslims results in people immediately pointing out problems. While the faction as a whole is significantly better than those snippets the mistakes it makes are important to a Muslim audience.
The nature of those issues trends less clearly problematic than those of many of Infinity’s competitors. You don’t have Cthulhutech’s overt bigotry, nor Shadowrun’s decision to mark all of Africa under the control of cannibal ghouls. Instead, you have elements that are clearly issues for Muslims, and those knowledgeable about the history of those elements outside of Infinity, but seem like non-issues to non-Muslims who haven’t studied the Middle East or Orientalism.
When I got into Infinity someone quoted me a go proverb. “Lose your first fifty games as swiftly as possible.”
If nothing else, I have excelled at following that advice. I have been absolutely destroyed by players vastly more experienced than me. I’ve been crushed by a veteran of the Interplanetario, the World Cup of Infinity. My weekly game is against a friend comprehensively more skilled than me. I have dozens of defeats, many of them crushing, some of them close. My victories have only recently become anything close to regular.
And I’ve been having a blast the entire time.
So let’s talk Infinity
Supplies are low. With nothing coming in food can be hard to get in San Lazaro. Medical supplies, moreso.
But you’re in luck, Seeker spotted an overturned supply truck a few blocks away. Swarming with Crazies, sure, but you can handle that. Stick with your team, play it smart, and they’re not too dangerous.
Mist covers the intersection when you arrive. You can see the shambling forms of Crazies as you approach, but they’re not the real threat. The real threat are the other shapes in the mist, dark silhouettes creeping from cover to cover, just as hungry, just as desperate as you. Maybe they’re bandits, maybe they’re law enforcement, maybe they’re just normal people, ones you might work with in better circumstances.
A rifle shot rings out. A crazy drops, while the others snap towards the sound. Loping into the mists, weapons in hand. Whoever these strangers are, they’re probably not going to let you at the food without a fight.
This is the setting of Omicron Protocol. An in-development skirmish wargame by Dead Alive Games. Set in 2050, in the fictional city of San Lazaro, at the beginning of a cybernetically-styled zombie apocalypse. I was lucky enough to participate in a demo of the system on the 20th, and enjoyed it enough to write about it.
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Fear The Swarth 