Icarus and For The Queen double-game session

I had a free day midweek, called a few folks over (Dave, Gene, Spencer), and we had an RPG night. We were all open to the “what”, and decided on two shorter games that could be played in sequence: Spencer’s own Icarus, and For The Queen.

Part One: Icarus, a game about collapse

Icarus is a storytelling game about the collapse of a great civilization. In some ways it shares some similar premise to Caroline Hobbs’ Downfall, which I’ve written about previously, but in most ways it is quite different. Part of the premise is that the civilization is also building a tower of some type, whether as a symbol of its achievement, or for some other greater purpose. And this tower is represented physically with a stack of dice that grows in the center of the table. Much like Dread, which uses a Jenga tower to provide tension in the horror RPG space, the dice tower also provides a level of mounting tension, as its collapse marks the downfall of the civilization.

Our civilization was close to falling… we made it 8 cubes high.

I’ve seen Spencer run the game at Strategicon Games on Demand and at our Story Games Glendale meetup, but I couldn’t join due to other game-running responsibilities.

As in many of these games, we could come up with our own scenario, but some initial ones are provided by the game, and we were opened to whichever one needed testing or sounded interesting. Spencer mentioned one called The Red Prometheus, which starts with “As the first major city on Mars…” If you know me, that’s all I need. I love any game set …IN SPACE!

The game comes with a number of small decks which provide story prompts and such. Some are used to help create our individual characters (Motive cards), and others are provided as prompts to determine the various strengths and weaknesses of the civilization. Much of the initial world building is collaborative, which I generally love, and worked very well in our game.

As the game progresses and things increasingly, and quickly, snowball into increasing amounts of desperation and chaos, many Aspects get put down on the table. These basically track difficulties that are present and get uncovered as the story progresses. The table takes on look of a mind map, intentionally. Keeping this as organized as possible is one part of the game that should not be ignored! It might be worth ensuring that the notes are clear and concise (similar to how you write cards in Microscope RPG, if playing with rules as written).

We had a really interesting story involving the martian colony propagating the myth that Earth was long dead, and various amounts of telepathy and mind communication, mixed in with lots of resources constraints, trade wars, and politics versus the free press. But as it happens in this game, the end is pre-determined: The civilization will fall. Story-wise, ours worked out to coincide with the Earth space corp invading our great city. In all, the game took just over 2 hours or so, which left us with enough time and energy for a second short game.

Tracking all the craziness… it’s a snowball affair.

Part Two: For the Martian Queen

The next game we decided to play was For the Queen. (I’ve written about this wonderful game in a separate blog post which is worth reading, if you haven’t already.) The wonderful part of this session was that Gene haphazardly suggested that we should run that in the same universe, and so we did exactly that: 100 years in the future, and a Martian queen from the scattered martian tribes heads to the Earth colony to broker a treaty.

I won’t go into the details of the game, but will say that it worked brilliantly as another way to play For the Queen: As a bit of world-building around an already existing campaign or game. We already had established fiction around mind reading and some other factors around our Mars world, and this just gave extra depth to our game and dynamics.

In fact, I found this so easy to tack on as a second game, that I did this again in another RPG session as a two-shot with two short games, a month later.

A change in format for this blog journal

Hello internet! It’s been hard to update this blog consistently, but I’ve been doing it somewhat regularly (with some gaps) for 3.5 years now, and I enjoys it, so no, I’m not going to stop now.

However, I’m gonna change my format a little. In the past I’d write mostly about game conventions, and when I did so, I’d write a post per day, and other long entries. Because of this, I found myself sometimes confronted with a large task, and therefore keep putting it off, or writing about a part of the day, but not getting around to writing the rest of it until much later.

I really like Sean Nittner’s actual play blog, where he posts thoughts on specific games he’s played. I have decided to go with that more granular approach, and post about individual games, as this bite-sized writing may better suit my writing habits, and be easier to maintain.

Although this post goes out today (on September 12th), I’ll probably be retrofitting prior games I’m still updating to this format. Welcome to the past. Or future. Or whatever.

Gauntlet Hangouts: Swords Without Master - Remnants, Year 2 Spring

I’ve been interested in Swords Without Master for years now, but until this game, had yet to play. Swords Without Master was originally released in Epidiah Ravachol’s zine Worlds Without Master, issue #3. Mostly I’d heard of the reputation that this was a seminal story game that played out stories of sword and sorcery with touchstones from Conan, down towards the strange mix of spells and pseudo-tech of He-man.

I finally prioritized this goal of playing by reserving my weekly “night out” to play in a Gauntlet Hangouts game put up by Pat Perkins, who has been doing an ongoing series of this game. I was pleased to see that I’d be playing with my friends Lu and Ary, so that was just icing on the cake! (We had a fourth, but he had to drop due to technical issues.)

Pat started by asking us about our favorite cartoons growing up. We had answers of He-man and TMNT, Scooby-Doo and Thundarr the Barbarian, and mine being the D&D Cartoon and Gummi Bears.

We quickly made some characters, which involves you first choosing an eidolon, a real-world object, image, or other thing that provides you an image of our “rogue”. Pat sent over a Pinterest board of images, and I quickly found a fantastic image of a character I’d like to explore. It was great seeing the other player images, as Lu chose the bird-like head of a strange staff, and Ary had an eidolon which was the picture of a weird grub/insect. We spent the first part of the session fleshing out these characters with their traits (things defined as “All That Deserves A Name”).

As an example, my character was Roalla, and my important qualities included: Hoor tongue, a strange hallucinogen, Pouri the ever-present life-force that elludes which is my source of strange magic powers, and Numericology, the study of the math that binds the universe, which I had studied in some college in the past, before my travels.

This image served as my eidolong for Roalla

Lu’s character was literally a staff which controlled the mind of the poor wizard who had last grasped it, and Ary’s was a strange insect-worshipping grub-riding barbarian, of sorts. Overall a very interesting and strange party to start!

Eidolons for Ary and Lu’s characters

Pat gave us a few options as quests to embark on, and we chose one that would involve finding a hidden cemetery. I won’t go into the details of the quest, because someone has done the work for me! Thanks Pat for your great game writeup (follow that link for those details). Additionally a link to the actual play video - again beautifully curated by Pat - is down below for your viewing pleasure, if you are interested.

So, instead of going into write-up of game details, I will go on to say my impressions of the game itself and its mechanics. I think one of my friends on the Gauntlet said it best (maybe Sid?): It’s crunchy. Crunchy for a story game. There’s a surprising amount of game mechanics that you have to deal with, such as the on-going realization of Motifs which players and GM re-incorporate in scenes and inform the pace of the game, and the dice results which dictate the tone (Glum or Jovial) as well as a set of other conditions during ties, and low rolls. But that said, all these things just tell how you in what manner to “story game”, almost like a set of scene prompts. So, yes, there is a bunch of stuff going on, but it really boils down to being very conversational. It definitely leans towards having a high creative load (similar to Fall of Magic, as an example, even though that game is the furthest from crunchy). It a;sp appears to allow the GM to be very reactionary, and very much in a conversation with the players, in a similar way to games such as Ten Candles (and to an extent like some PbtA and other “conversation” games).

I’ve since read the rules of it (having purchased the zine issue some time ago), and it’s definitely not something I can run without referring to them, at this point, and would require a bit of taking my time with the game the first time around. (Probably worthy of my special cheat sheet treatment, in fact!) Normally I get very excited to run a game, after I’ve played it, but in fact I’m a little more interested in playing it some more. I know Epi runs a Sunday Morning Swords type thing, but that schedule doesn’t really work out for me… but perhaps one day soon.

Here’s the video for those interested:

Gauntlet Hangouts and Dialect: Children of No God

I’ve been recently chatting with a newer Gauntlet member named Noella. We connected at one point around atheism and the idea that they were looking at starting a secular group at their university, and we chatted a little about the Secular Student Alliance.

And then Noella put together a Gauntlet game around this very topic, of sorts… a game of Dialect, the RPG about language of a community in isolation and how that language eventually dies off. Except instead of using one of the pre-made Backdrops, Noella made a new one called “Children of No God”, that explores a community of non-believers, surrounded by those that are religious. Here is the pitch from the Backdrop:

Everyone believes in some God or Gods here, except for us. We’ve banded together against the religious hegemony. We are the non-believers, the atheists, the agnostics, the humanists, the secularists, the non-theists, the rationalists, the free thinkers. Maybe our beliefs are the same, maybe they are all different, but we share a common goal. We foster intellectualism and debate, but most of all we keep each other safe.

A nice little combination of two things I’m very much interested in: role playing games, and atheism (in its various forms: humanism, secularism, and so on). I’ve written about playing and running Dialect before, so won’t repeat the basics of that game again here.

We ended up with 5 total players: Noelle, Sabine, Mikael, Gene (who was playing his first Gauntlet game!) and myself. We quickly found a rough setting for our game, going with some nameless city in the Roman Empire (prior to that whole Christianity thing, with polytheism being abundant). Our three Aspects included:

1. Our non-belief: “See to Believe”, the premise that we needed to be shown a thing before believing it)

2. A sanctuary / meeting place: We settled on a specific “park”

3. A random aspect: We went with a tradition of everyone from our various backgrounds and cultures bringing and sharing foods, and wrote down “potluck”.

We decided we’d have rough groups in our community of skeptics (who were associated mainly with bakers), rationalists (mostly wine makers), and general freethinkers (who were called “eaters” since they comprised of everyone else, and therefore fed off the potluck). It was an interesting choice to associate these schools of thought with these broad categories of people, even if it was strictly true, just to see what traditions and prejudices would form based on this.

Character generation is one of my favorite parts of this game, where you each get 3 cards with archetypes, and choose one of them as the basis for your character. I went with the Celebrity, which states that I choose one of these aspects that my celebrity is based on, and the rest I don’t really care about. I could’ve chosen the non-belief as my main aspect, but was interested in seeing where things would go if that wasn’t my priority, and went with “potluck”. My character was Vesta, and she had been using the potluck to source different foods and cooking styles, and impressing people around town with her culinary expertise and experimentation.

We had Aries the Sage (Sabine) who was wise and good at giving advice to those in the park, Flavius the Ruler (Gene) who believed that the park was part of our problem (as he couldn’t control it), Claudia the Healer (Mikael) who actually thought our un-belief was the source of our problems, and Evander the Magician (Noella) who was assigned to the group from the religious authorities to help convert them back, but was in fact going through his own crisis of faith.

Within the first few rounds we established words (through discussion and role play) that included the word Death as “Chelis” (a corruption of Chair-less… someone missing and an empty chair), “Clear” as a word meaning Wonderful (a clear day meant we could meet at the park), and “Bake” in the Norwegian pronunciation meaning Work (as we work must be seen to be believed, and the products of that work were bread from our bakers, a large source of our tribe). More words were to come, and after about 2 hours of play we had finished the first age, and were ready to explore what happens as time moved on, and things shifted in the community.

A view of the Roll20 page early on during the first age of the game.

The second age came with the complication that the authorities were on to us in a bad way, and to blend in we’d have to work together with another minority religious group. In this case it was the Temple of Dionysus, and Potluck turned into a proper Feast… instead of an unstructured sharing, we now had a production of food, and rituals, meeting weekly instead of sporadically. The second age also comes with more complex concepts of language, such as Portmanteau and Euphemism. We had the word Traiter as “Eyer”, for example, but the Portmanteau took this and Work / “Bake” and created “Bakeyer”, the work of being a traitor… acting shady. This originally came about due to people being untrustworthy as spies for the government religious authorities, but quickly became used as a word that the minority religious group used to say we atheists were shady, and then just as quickly became a word (in the third age of the game) that we used for ourselves as an honorable term. It was fascinating watching the meaning change so quickly from scene to scene, in a way that felt authentic.

The third age of the game brought the death (Chelis?) of our language and community, and some fairly sad moments as characters were disavowed of their marriage due to their non-belief, or not able to express their culture and words due to changes and removal of allowed vocabulary by the community. We had a few sad epilogues at first, but also some hope. A young teacher and daughter to the leader of the minority religious group actually teaching about some of our traditions we thought would be lost.

In the end the game exudes this melancholy feel (that I’ve experienced every time I’ve finished the game), and just gives you food for thought for days to come. It once again reaffirmed that the game is a sort of immersive and strange experience that I highly recommend people try.

Noelle did a great job running their first Gauntlet game, keeping the game well-paced so it fit within the 3.5 hours or so that we needed. I’ll be honest that I’d have loved more time to experience some of the scenes and really get into character, but that would’ve also made this a 2-session game.

The experience of using Roll20 for the cards was hit and miss. Some of the writing on cards or putting them on the “table” wasn’t trivial, but then again the shuffling and dealing cards worked exceedingly well. It’s definitely a tool I’d like to become more familiar with, however I have to admit that using Google Hangouts, Google documents, and RollForYourParty does most of the things I need.

A more finalized view of our game.

Noella has posted the Backdrop, and so here it is: Children of No God backdrop for Dialect.

For those interested, the video was recorded and you can view the actual play. Unfortunately you don’t get much of a view of the game board as we’re playing, but the above screenshots should serve to give you an idea of how it looked.

Gateway 2018: GoD Kids Edition - Fall of Magic for kids

What is Fall of Magic

If you don’t know what Fall of Magic is, there’s no simple way to put it: You should. It’s one of my all-time favorite story games, beautiful in its simplicity, and gorgeous in its form-factor: an actual scroll that you play on, with exquisite coins. (Note that you can purchase the PDF version to play online, or if the scroll version is out of your price range!)

This role playing game is something you can play with people from hardcore RPG fanatics to those who’ve maybe heard of “D&D”. It’s not everyone’s jam, because you have to be ready for extremely light mechanics and heavy story bullshit-ery, but man-o-man have I had some excellent experiences with this game with people of all experience levels. But I’ve written about it (and the soon-to-be-released Sci-Fi hack Autumn of the Ancients) before, so I won’t gush too much longer on that score.

Gaming with Kids

At Strategicon - our local LA convention - I’ve been running Games on Demand: Kids Edition, for over a year now. We get anywhere from 2-4 GMs who come ready to run games that are kid-friendly, and have consistently been getting about a dozen 8-12 year olds (my own daughter being in that zone) showing up to play role playing games. Some say this is what they’ve most been looking forward to. Games have included Tiny Dungeons, Goobles and Goblins, The Warren, The Deep Forest, and more.

But this time I ran Fall of Magic…

The Session

There are a few things that went exceedingly well here, and lessons to be learned. I’ll break it down into a couple of paragraphs.

As always, definitely have your safety tool conversation. Some of these kids are pros at this point, and I did that thing that Kate Bullock mentions in this Gauntlet GM Masterclass episode, where instead of explaining everything about the X-card, for example, I had them tell me about how it works, and then I’d flesh out anything they were missing. Best thing about explaining the X-card and safety tools to kids? They just get it. Unlike some adults.

Let’s start with an introduction to some of the characters (where they often decided to use their own custom names). Unfortunately I don’t have them all because some of them ran off with their gorgeously drawn index cards, and I didn’t take a picture until too late! There were at least two transforming cats, a literal fox, and definitely some elements from Harry Potter and similar pre-teen fantasy novels and movies. Here’s a flavor for some of them:

• April the Scholar of Istallia

• Fire the Ranger of Mistwood (“I use soreds and bows”)

• Nihao the Apprentice of Ravenhall

• Luna the Fox of Mistwood

One of them played a Golem, where the golem was a girl made from shadows.

It’s important to note that most of the kids wanted to commit only about an hour or two maximum for the game, because they had competing interests at the convention (you know, shopping at the dealer room, painting minis, etc). But, once we got going, they just got into it. In the end we played for 3 hours.

I’d recommend being pretty loose about maintaining the (few) structures in the game. As an example, I took away the standard way of playing the Magus. Instead of the Magus accompanying them on the journey and them taking turns playing it, I just played the Magus as a sort of Head Witch of the magic school at Ravenhall - a trope they were comfortable with - and used the Magus to give them the quest of heading to Umbra. As I’ve done in other sessions, I allowed them to define rumors about the Magus, so that I wasn’t just making up my view of this character, but more a conglomeration of their various ideas. This also allowed them to just play their own characters, which is I think, cognitively, about where you’d want it for this game.

We played in the first location (Ravenhall), but I knew we wouldn’t have time to explore too much. So another change we made was to just fast forward to locations that the players wanted to explore, for example those that their characters were from. To that end, we played a large scene in Mistwood that ended with the forest burning behind them, and then moved on to Istallia and the boat that would take them across the sea. Finally, we had a finale in and around Umbra, where magic was born.

I want to talk about Mistwood burning, because it was one of my favorite parts. One of the kids was very much into wanting to drive some conflict into the story, and was trying to introduce some elements around that (like an out of control fire). At first, the others were trying to solve this problem using their various skills and narrative abilities, but you could see that the first kid was a little frustrated at that. I stopped the game for a moment so we could have the meta-conversation. What was she trying to see in the scene? She explained to everyone that she wanted to see conflicts, and we had a quick discussion, and everyone was on board with it. So, instead of solving the problem, I asked everyone, “OK, you are trying to fix this situation, but you fail. What does that look like?” And they all just ate it up, and had some fantastic story elements around the struggles and failures involved. I am particularly proud of that moment in the game.

We had six players initially, but one had a competing, scheduled interest after the 2 hour mark. The other five got to the end, and so we did a round of epilogues to round out the story. And wouldn’t you know it, they were dark as shit. These kids spared no feelings, and almost all the characters came to a pretty grim or unhappy ending, with lost souls, or lost abilities to transform, and even one death. But holy crap did they appear to have a good time. As did I.

My little story weavers.

All said, this game can totally work for kids, but I’d recommend simplifying a few of the (already simple) mechanics to accommodate their interests.

In action, early in the game.