It is this organ’s firm and unyielding belief that one cannot review an RPG from reading it. You can review a manual, certainly, but you’re not reviewing the game in any meaningful way.
However you can skim and see what pops out.
This is the Skim, and this is what we got from skimming Mythic Bastionland.
IN A SENTENCE
Kieron: It’s OSR1 hexcrawl2 Pendragon3 in miniature4 (complimentary5).
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Reviewing role-playing games is a controversial business. There’s some people who believe you can make a meaningful judgment about a game by careful consideration of its manual, and there’s other people who understand that’s nonsense.
You don’t need to read a game to review it. You can just look at its cover and make all the judgements you want. Of course, some people say you shouldn’t judge anything by its cover. Those people sound like the sort of people who didn’t have all their games stolen on the way home from Gencon on the train back to my home.
That’s me, by the way. That person is me.
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I was probably making a cup of tea, as I usually am.
I just stared into the middle distance and thought “all role-playing games are either High Art or Fanfic” with a force that made me know that it was fundamentally true – which meant, on some level, it must be fundamentally false.
All dichotomies are false. You can never take this too seriously, as it’s a classic The Map Is Not The Territory trap.
However, given a certain definition of Fanfic and High Art, I think it’s can be a useful map. When I say “a certain definition” I mean “Mine.”
Or, at least, the ones I’ve stolen.
(more…)I was recently in a pub, talking to a friend about their collapsed game of Dungeons & Dragons. I was somewhat frustrated by their tale of woe – perhaps the most common tale of woe. I imagined all these decades of people wasting time, just waiting for that one player to be free on Friday.
I decided to solve their problem by writing a patch for the 2024 edition of the D&D Players handbook.
Print it out and slide it in after Page 8.
This is probably overkill, but it breaks my heart, and made me laugh. You can’t resist yourself sometimes. It is actively strange that RPG folks write rules about everything, but have avoided giving actual advice on basic play culture ideas. Generations after generations of players, falling into this particular trap. No more, I say.
Go! Print out! Stick it in manuals worldwide. This can be a better world, or at least one where people go down dungeons and fight kobolds more often.
It may work on other RPGs too.
I wanted to include it on the page, but I ran out of space, but a recent episode of Fear of a Black Dragon discussed this topic at length. If you want further inspiration, you can listen here. The segment starts 19 minutes in.
Thanks to this homebrew toolset which made the homage easy. It’s genuinely astounding work. Also, thanks to Stephanie Hans for letting me use her art from DIE RPG.
I’ve released a new game zine! You can grab How Do Aliens Do “It”? here, which is a pay-what-you-want-or-not Carved from Brindlewood game about Alien teenagers in a repressive, information-scarce society gather to share what each of them knows and try and work out how doing “it” works, and how they feel about that. It’s a playful game which tries to approach big stuff lightly, and I’m really happy with it.
And for those who want to know the process, here’s the designer notes (which are also in the game)…
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Look, ma, I can do clickbait titles. I’m a real boy content generator now.
I wasn’t going to call the article that. It’s very much what I’d use if I was 20-30 years younger on Youtube and forced to try and engage with that hellscape. Instead, I am on a blog: an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age. I don’t need to do it. I am, because while the blog is a lightsaber, it is a lightsaber made of shits and giggles.
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These originally occurred in the DIE Arcana beta. I’ve tweaked them a little to give any perspective born of bringing the game to completion.
The early drafts of DIE RPG were mostly written in a mode which Grant described as Uncle Kieron leaning over to you in the pub and ranting enthusiastically. Some of that remains in the final book, as one can’t purge that level of avuncular horror that easily.
However, one thing I don’t talk about explicitly is what I was trying to actually do. And so this is basically me answering the question “Hey, Kieron, wtf you doing here, man?”
My primary aims were to:
These broke down in a few areas.
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I played Lauren McManamon and Jesse Ross’ Girl Underground a couple of years back, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It’s a Powered By The Apocalypse (PBTA) Portal Fantasy game , where the group play a girl who arrives in a fantasy world, meets some chums, travels across the world, learns some lessons and eventually clicks their ruby slippers and goes home.
In short: it’s a Wizard-of-Oz-’em-up.
It’s an excellent game. This article isn’t going to be about that.
It’s going to be about the one element which didn’t quite work for me, and where that took me.
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I wrote the original version of this as a way to explain how to prep an adventure session in DIE. It ended up being something much more about the fundamental structure of an adventure, full stop. You strip everything away, what does an adventure look like? DIE generates a lot of loose ideas, so giving some ideas of how to organise them felt important. Eventually as the core DIE Rituals game actually comes with a self-organising structure, it became less essential to the book, and so was cut. I was never quite 100% happy with it, but everyone else seemed to find it useful, especially folks who I was primarily aiming it at (as in, new folks.) I’ve tweaked it a little here to be less purely DIE – I think these basic structural shape is a useful way to think of prep in any game which works in this mode.
DIE Rituals has a standard format – a series of necessary encounters you complete before reaching the final encounter. It’s written with a self-creating structure – a check-list of necessary encounters you work though, turning the questions to the players when you don’t know what happens next and so on.
However, especially in a longer DIE Campaign, you may want to have a plan for a session, to arrange your material in something you can use, and the players can find their way through.
In practice, it’s merely a more elaborate version of: “Where are they at the start? Where are they at the end? What’s to stop them from getting from the former to latter?”
This is how we conceive of the various “Elements of an Adventure”.
Firstly, Happy New Year.
Secondly, welcome to Old Men Running The World.
Over the years we have each amassed a bunch of RPG writing which has no decent home online, and should have one. We’ve become aware that we both basically talk RPG stuff each and every day, and we think doing some of that talking in public may be worthwhile. We’re also aware that we both have Hypergraphic Tendencies, and a safe platformn for that overwhelming impulse also seems like a good idea. We have things we’d like to say, and so a place to say it seems reasonable. This is that place.
(When editing DIE RPG, and cutting another huge and sprawling essay that really was extraneous, Grant Howitt liked to say: “Kieron – you have a blog.” Well, no, he didn’t have a blog, not a real one. But now he does. So you can and should blame Grant.)
We’ve got a huge backlog of stuff to post, but we didn’t want to overwhelm the site at launch, so picked a handful of articles to give a taste of our flavours and obsessions. But this will grow and change. We probably will write something about a game other than Trophy Gold eventually, for example. Jim has a whole lot of interviews he’s done with interesting figures in RPG. Kieron really does have a bunch of old DIE RPG stuff to do, too. And there are some new thoughts we want to pull together into an essay shape for publishing here.
Some of our stuff for this place will probably appear via our respective newsletters first. Or it might not. But it is the relative ephemerality of the newsletter that has, in part, inspired this place. So it will appear here eventually, and make this place a home and an archive.
In short, we’re here, we’re thinking in public, because we think thinking in public is both fun and occasionally useful.
Thanks for popping in.
Kieron & Jim.
