Old Men Running The World

Author: Jim Rossignol

  • The Skim: Coriolis: The Great Dark

    It is this organ’s firm and unyielding belief that one cannot review an RPG from simply reading it. You can review a manual, certainly, but you’re not reviewing the game itself in any meaningful way. You need to play it to do that, obviously.

    However you can skim and see what pops out. So this is Not A Review. It is The Skim.

    Faithful readers may recall that I have been casting about for a sci-fi spaceship game to play with one of my regular groups. One game that came under my lens during this scrutiny was last year’s Coriolis: The Great Dark. This was not so much because it was a good candidate for a spaceship game — it’s not really about that, despite containing many cool spaceships, living and dead, as we shall see — but rather because I got excited when the Kickstarter came around and then ended up in possession of a large hardback book, a box set campaign, and some dice with little symbols on where the 6 should be. Such is the TTRPG life. Anyway, I had a good look and decided Coriolis didn’t fit the bill for our spaceship requirement. But it was still pretty cool. Hmm!

    Worse, this week the guys over at Free League revealed that there’s going to be another The Great Dark book, an adventure compilation with bonus spaceship description, called The Fractured Library. I feel obliged to buy it, even though this is not a game I am necessarily going to run. So could this game end up being my Significant Game I Want To Run But Perpetually Haven’t? That RPG line that I own all the books for, but forlornly accept I won’t actually get to the table? It could be. It might be.

    Just as an aside, Kieron’s Significant Game I Want To Run But Perpetually Haven’t, I understand, is The One Ring. He has all the books! He just got another one in the post. He was pretty excited about it. 

    KG’s shelf of longing. I actually borrrowed the core rules, Ruins, and the starter set, so this is less impressive than it might be.

    Anyway, when I was planning games for this year Coriolis: The Great Dark was among the candidates for those I might get to the table, to the point where I began testing things and planning. But in the end it wasn’t the one the players really bought into, so I ran The One Ring instead. 

    With the group that Kieron isn’t part of.

    Yeah. 

    So while we’re out here wielding ironies like evil daggers from Mordor, I should note that the irony of wanting spaceships and ending up with Tolkien is almost as sharp as that of wanting to run a Free League game and ending up running one that doesn’t use a variant of the Year Zero system. Which I also really do want to run! I am so sorry, me! I apologise to past me and my future self, and you, dear reader, for this awful digression.

    What I was actually going to do was skim Coriolis: The Great Dark and see what popped out. Let’s do that bit now.

    Year Zero-powered Coriolis: The Great Dark is a sequel to Free League’s original science fiction game, Coriolis: The Third Horizon, and aside from having a slightly more evocative second clause in the title, it had a clearer sort of pitch: you are the children of intragalactic space refugees living in a dwindling asteroid city and have to do emergency space archaeology to survive. This might be understood, more prosaically, as it being a dungeon delver. Of course The Great Dark does dungeon delving with retro-futuristic diving suits and a technomagic bird instead of wizards and a ten foot pole, so that’s why we’re here. All of which is not to say that The Great Dark isn’t intending to do the all-encompassing campaign thing of a big box trad sci-fi game, it totally is — it has rules for vehicles, a giant space city with its own ludicrous map and list of factions as long as an alien’s leg, and even cursory rules for strange space artifacts and travel between the stars — but the procedure it hangs its entire space hat on is for a team of space characters using their space abilities and space equipment to explore space dungeons. And that’s fine by me.

    The vibe the Coriolis books have pitched for is important. Coriolis taps into a very potent “1970s sci-fi cover art” aesthetic that was rarely lived up to by the 1970s sci-fi novels they actually graced, and has here and there been transmuted by modern sensibilities into a fresher sort of star fantasy. Coriolis benefits enormously from the Tumblr-generation’s desire for esoteric-but-palatable sci-fi to tap into this there are strains of the classics alongside stuff that you might have glimpsed in Metabarons or Moebius, mixed with references to 19th century exploration, and so it never feels staid or rehashed. It needs to be, I think, a game that lives up to that specific mood and tone, and for the most part the books do this.

    Coriolis does some bold worldbuilding. The core book is packed with more talking to weird guys in a mask than most people could ever care about, and the campaign box goes much further still. In fact, my first thought after reading it all was about the amount of work necessary to abbreviate the official campaign to the length of game my groups were likely to accept. We’re all enthusiasts for new stuff, and so Very Long Campaigns are generally not on the table, so to speak. Keeping it reasonable would be the second task. After getting people on board in the first place. But let’s come back to that key point in a moment.

    Corio-listen to this: I rather bounced off the original book, and didn’t run it, but The Great Dark’s urgent space archaeology core has a rather more, I don’t know, indie sort of laser focus to it. Less generalised messing about in space, and more tight procedure. It’s got a beating systemic heart. That really appeals. It’s one of the key reasons I own it all today. However, and I meant this with respect, although it’s not going to read that way, the original book’s text, while fine and serviceable, had an air of being rushed which, I am sad to say, does persist with The Great Dark. 

    It pains me to say it, but the quality of the language in these books does not meet the scale of the ambition, invention, production quality, or art. The package delivers all of those things with conspicuous energy. It’s brimming with big ideas and amazing scenes. Lead artist Martin Grip’s virtuoso splattery impressionism, which first emptied my wallet for the Symbaroum books, has once again proven that it can carry an entire RPG series, although there are other artists involved here who really do astonishing work too. These books do have the usual Free League sense of lavishness. Buuut… The Great Dark doesn’t always do itself justice when I am sat in my armchair with the reading light on. There’s some bland and unadventurous writing, some of it is waffle. The whole thing needs a stern editing. And do not think that’s a general dig at Free League: I’ve read Vaesen, Tales from the Loop, and The One Ring and enjoyed the writing in all of them. But here the art and design is doing the heavy-lifting.

    But let us continue to skim. We soon discover why it got crossed off the spaceship game list. This is a game with spaceships, but is not about them. There are definitely spaceships! And it explicitly pitches the idea of space as the sea, and its vessels as the great sailing ships of yore. There’s rules for them and pictures of them and tables for doing stuff with them as they fly about. There are fricken’ star charts with currents and things, which I don’t think is a thing in space, except it is here.

    These spaceship diagrams also add to the appeal.

    So the ‘greatships’ are, by themselves, pretty great, and hugely exciting prospects for a dork like me. There’s even additional hurdles for travelling between the ship and your space dungeon for your bout of archaeology/theft. The interstitial journey is a distinct (if not explicit) phase containing dropships and surface rovers. 

    But The Great Dark is not about the crew of a spaceship going down to a planet in the sense that a Trek TV show has an away team, or Firefly had that wagon thing, or my fantasy of a game about basically being the crew of the Millennium Falcon back when they were just doing smuggling jobs would be if they somehow had a speeder. No, it’s not even about being a crew on a planet in the sense that the crew of the Nostromo is in Alien, when they go check out the alien ship, although it’s closest to that. 

    What it’s about are these cool spelunking diagrams.

    The action is the delving. And for those what is important are these “scan” maps. One of your characters does a scan and things are detected and stuff. This matters to how well the adventure is going to go.

    I suspect these actual maps will be fantastic to use whether you run this at the table or remotely, because they quantify the experience while also adding a bit of mystery. What’s down there? What if we have to come back? This is a procedure-driven explore ’em up. It’s a science fiction dungeon-delver, and a sexy one, if extremely trad RPG procedure can be sexy. (It can!) Taking damage from a reality-warping space plague called The Blight, and using the technomagical bird android thing called a Garuda to counter it, reads like catnip to me.

    It has a chapter called THE BIRD & ITS POWERS, for God’s sake.

    I love the remote-controlled ‘kites’, the space heirlooms brought from far reaches of the galaxy, the “deep sea” space suits, the idea of this frozen void populated by desperate factions who are all basically depending on each other.

    These cool character designs don’t hurt either. ‘Odd Jobber’ might be the best character class in a game like this.

    It all makes me think about how Symbaroum was about this big old forest full of ruins and didn’t have a laser-focus on surviving the big old forest full of ruins. They haven’t made that mistake here.

    However, it was turning to read the campaign box, The Flowers Of Algorab, that really brought things into skimmed focus.

    It’s one thing to read through a book of core rules and have your own vision of how the thing is going to work, and quite another to read a book that is (presumably!) how the game is intended to be run. As I said earlier, there’s a lot of material here, some of it is space dungeons, but there’s also a great deal of politics, factional wrangling, exploration and travel, but also the campaign has an extraordinary denouement which, how do I say this without spoilers, well, it really changes things for the setting in a way that surprised me. Did they really do that irreversible thing? I guess so! It’s all really ambitious stuff. I should get someone to play it!

    And so this brings me to getting my players on board for this. The second of the two campaign books, which contains a tonne of stuff about a spaceship, but also about the arm of space that the campaign takes place in, is player-facing. It is a 40-page book of spacey detail. It has a full crew manifest of the spaceship you get a ride on, even. This ‘Expedition Book’ was one of the bits of the box I was most excited about because it’s explicitly a fat hand-out that they get to leaf through (or ignore, because you know, they probably might) and learn about the setting, which is the area of space they’re in, and also the vessel that they’re going to be on board. 

    This would be ideal, except it contains some of the weakest and wooliest writing in the three books. This is where I, the GM, need it to be strongest. The language needs up to the strength of the idea and the ideas. I want my players to be reading a look up to say “okay rad, we are playing this,” because I already bought it. This should make my job easier and be a vital resource, and maybe some people would be less fussy than me about writing, but… they aren’t the players at my table, I can tell you that much.

    I have to say that if The Great Dark’s purpose was to build a game around the imagery of a long-dead space-suited astronaut decaying in a black alien space tomb, which in my imagination it simply must be, then it’s done a lot of that work. Those long-dead astronauts don’t take long to turn up in the campaign book! You can practically taste the flashlight beam scything across the ancient dust-motes disturbed by the activity of your desperate explorers. It’s a beautiful vision of a game that hits some of the notes I’ve been longing for for years. And The Great Dark does a mostly admirable job of making it seem like emergency space archaeology is something you should want to get your players excited about. 

    But I am going to have to do that bit of getting the buy-in myself, I think.

    And that’s definitely Not A Review.

  • THREEDOM: MYTHIC BASTIONLAND

    Mythic Bastionland, the latest game in Chris McDowell’s Bastionland series, was one of the best-smelling books we had ever encountered when it arrived last year. But some people suggested it mattered how it played, and that was something we could not discern from residual ink-scents alone. To find out, we rolled up our chainmail sleeves, watched John Boorman’s 1981 knight-based masterpiece, Excalibur, and then dove headlong into the lake where there was probably a sword or, if not, some sort of wretched wyrm of myth with which we might wrestle in the dark and wet.

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  • Kieron says that I should run Rifts. I probably won’t but if I did it would go like this.

    Just two RPGs dominated my imagination from 1987 to 1996: TSR’s D&D and Palladium’s Rifts. A few years ago I did go back and run a couple of D&D campaigns, with a far more competent and organised (and better financed) approach than I had as a kid. It was good! The experience reminded me that “GM” is one of my key character class abilities, and subsequently I went on to start running stuff regularly, to the point where I now produce TTRPG material as a mostly part-time job of work.

    Rifts, though, had a different story.

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  • Threedom: DEATHMATCH ISLAND

    The latest game the Old Men team played was DEATHMATCH ISLAND by Tim Denee (now working on Blades ‘68), and based on the Paragon System, by John Harper (Blades In The Dark, AGON) and Sean Nittner (AGON). It is a very handsome book with an intriguing premise: you have been selected to participate in an event that will lead to fame, freedom, and unlimited wealth. “A deadly game show set on a chain of mysterious islands.” And so we embarked under an imaginary sun to find out whether we would ultimately Play To Win, or to Break The Game.

    Yes, there are many mysteries to DEATHMATCH ISLAND. The most mysterious of them is what happened to the Mysterious Third (Chris), the silent partner of our tripartite reviewing panel? He was nowhere to be seen. Is that simply so that our Threedom title never makes sense? Or is this also part of this “Paragon System” of which you speak? Let’s gather the dicepools of clear reporting and critical thinking and find out!

    Jim: We should probably start with why you chose this game, Kieron? And where is (Chris)? Explain it to me like I’ve just woken up on a boat with no memory of how I got here.

    Kieron: Chris was off on a mysterious adventure, so we decided to grab the chance to play a game when he was away, in real life (ours), with real human beings (yours), in a real house (mine). We grabbed Deathmatch Island because it seems like something we like anyway, at least conceptually, but I’m also working on a Paragon system hack myself. I’d played AGON, I hadn’t played this – despite having read it and drawn from it already. So there was a lot in there I wanted to see how it worked at the table – because it really does take the Paragon system and tweak it in meaningful, detailed, ballsy ways, while still being very much the same beast.

    The Paragon system, as introduced in Harper/Nittner Odyssey-’em-up AGON is about a group of competitive individuals working towards a common goal. While you’re a team, you’re also looking for individual glory. “Who is best?” is a fundamental question in the game, and the mixture of storygame and competition gives its own specific vibe.

    Jim: ‘Who is best / i am best!’ became the comic mantra of our AGON play, but is absolutely both totemic and actually the rules.

    Kieron: Yes. This system resolves its challenges via a dicepool system where players roll to gain narrative authority, The GM – the Production Player, in Deathmatch Island – gives a total, and players try to beat it, with the narrative football passing in order of ascending scores. If you don’t beat the score, you go first and narrate how you fail. If you beat it, you describe how you overcome the challenge, and set it up for a final defeat. If you roll highest, you describe how the challenge is vanquished. This is interesting for a bunch of reasons, but mainly in how it compresses a lot of story into a single contest. In Agon, it could be “Does the Cyclops crush the village?” In Deathmatch Island, it’s “How does everyone do in the challenge where you’re all trying to get across the lava?”

    We’ll get deeper into how Paragon works, but it’s worth noting that Deathmatch Island really does make a lot of small, meaningful changes to it. Some of these are for the theme of the game, but others are ones which I read and decided to lift for my own work. If I was running Agon again, I’d likely work them back in. In Agon, you only lose the “health” resource if the conflict is “dangerous”. In Deathmatch Island, you always lose fatigue – but if it’s dangerous you lose its “health”  instead, which is normally only lost after fatigue is depleted.

    Jim: Immediate interesting choices for the players.

    Kieron: As such, all challenges have at least some mechanical stakes. In Agon, during the big-multi-challenge climaxes, the penultimate stage let the winner pick the domain (as in, the stat you use) of the final challenge – which mean it’s really difficult to give a climax a narrative shape, as it could be anything from a fight to a singing contest. In Deathmatch Island, the penultimate stage lets you pick which domain you get to ALSO add to the climax challenge for free – which is mathematically nearly identical, but grounds the fiction more. Most basic and charming, Agon has a system that when you hit certain injury thresholds, you gain an advance – among other things, a neat way to give the players doing the worst a boost. Deathmatch Island has the same system, but also prompts each player to gain an in-story scar when they reach it. As in, it grounds this advance in the fiction rather than just being an untethered level-up. You know this guy is a bad-ass. They’ve got an eye-patch. This is beautiful stuff. 

    Deathmatch Island is also literally beautiful. We’ll be talking about Denee’s game design a bunch, but it’d be amiss if we didn’t hit up the visual design first. 

    Jim: That, at least, is super true, Kieron Gillen. Deathmatch Island is DESIGNED. Denee is someone who really knows how to make things look polished and professional on the page, and I am not sure I own many books where the competency of things like page-design and making tables really fucking work good is quite as clear cut. It’s very Orange and White. It feels like something created with an incredibly specific vision in mind. The book, particularly as a physical object, captures the vibe so completely that it’s hard to imagine it being any other way. Triangle Agency does some similar stuff, but what’s here is more austere, sober, and disturbing, even while it is playful. To be sure, there are lot of incredibly pretty, high production value books right now, and this is not a book that is based on how good the illustrations are (they’re abstracted, and again, designed: a simple depiction of a grenade, a can of beans and so forth) all of which sells the corporatised, labelled, produced nature of the game as a fiction. This is a TTRPG where the GM (and by extension the forces that are causing the Deathmatch Island event to happen, whatever they might truly be) are literally called Production. It has the faceless, mysterious, moderately threatening banal alienness of big corporation stuff that occasionally appears in modern fiction. And to convey that in the visual design is masterful. It also evokes The Prisoner and 1960s weirdness, and it also spoofs modernity and the logic of corporate signage. We talked a bunch about how that vibe extends to the rest of the game, right?

    Kieron: Oh yeah. While I was mainly running this to see what it did to Paragon, the second it hit the table, I was absolutely in its power, trying to get it. I especially like how it grounds the game in its weirdness with things like the hand-outs – passing the players these blandly enthusiastic corporate-training influencer documents. The icebreaker questions, where characters get to give little bits of flashback to their lives. I especially like the Theorise stage, where the characters try and work out what’s going on, and depending on what they believe is true, unlocks options on the GM side to feed into these beliefs. 

    As such, the game we played was definitely towards the weird-fiction end of it – we’re all The Prisoner-heads, and so it got increasingly meta. I’m sure with a group with different loves it would have become more of a political project, or a reality TV parody, or whatever. 

    Deathmatch Island is interested in the ironic tone throughout – the contrast between one thing (the horrible violence) and the other (the sanitised branding). I love this kind of stuff – I instantly knew that I would be running it with a theme tune, that I’d play when people arrive on the island and play again when we reached the final deathmatch climax of the island. 

    “When you next hear the Hustle by Vin McCoy, the deathmatch begins. Play to win!”

    Jim: That tune is still going round and round in my head now, so it was a good choice. 

    Kieron: I did smile when another player said it got played at their new year’s party, and definitely changed the mood for them.

    Jim: In fact I’ve spent the last two weeks listening to nothing but disco, so there’s something deep awakened in me by the time we spent on this. And it wasn’t always playing to win? In the end I played to break the game. But before that, we should probably get into some details about how it played as a player. One of the things that I liked most about AGON was that after 15 minutes of character creation we felt like Greek heroes lost in a mythic Mediterranean. I think, as mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago, the possibility space is wider here. The game provides matching uniforms which can be blazers and proper trousers, or a jumpsuit. And the character creation is very much “real people”. I was a corporate trainer, for example, while Old Men Friend Olly was a piano teacher. The challenge-type dice lean into this, too: Social game, Snake game, Challenge Beast, Deathmatch, and Redacted don’t make up traditional personal stats as such, but instead represent numbers we can match with the narrative. My character’s personal journey being from Social character to Deathmatch lad was particularly entertaining, I thought. Corporate softness giving away to an “I’ve watched Rambo First Blood fifteen times” LARP posing. Which of these dice gets invoked is about the type of challenge we face, but also can be combined with others if we want to spend the Fatigue currency, and also with Advantages which emerge from flashback narratives. (And these are burned, a one-off moment of inspiration that is applied to give us a dice at the GM’s discretion. Getting a D6 because your advantage is not actually all that relevant stings, but it is still an advantage!) 

    Kieron: I thought I would not like this, but actually was really pleased with how it worked. As you say, it being very linked? Big advantage, but D6 is still not nothing. Though it does make me think about one of the sticking points of the Paragon system – in terms of the dice pool assembly. You’re meant to declare it in game, unattached to the fiction in any way, except with each player deciding if the dice apply. In Deathmatch Island, its suggestion is the on-screen text chyron – like “Trevor the Accountant, with a symbol of a machinegun popping up”. Except when learning it players always want to ask questions (or prompting if they forget) and it’s all running on the honour system anyway (as players aren’t punished if they fail to include relevancy of any of the dice when they narrate). That this advantage system is based on a question does seem to break this structure too, and seems to implie that it’s always a bit of a sticking point. 
    Of course, there’s also the core dice, those dice you always get.

    Jim: You always get your name, because that’s the core of this thing. It’s about fame! You’re on television! Probably. 

    Kieron: Oh – a minor thing I dig? When you increase your name dice due to increasing fame, the other players pick a nickname for you. That’s golden.

    Jim: This is all very satisfying because constructing a dice-pool is one of the inherently satisfyingly crunchy parts of playing such games. And it is pretty satisfying as a player, even though not all the postures it wants you to take on are instinctive: we stumbled over flashbacks and testimonials, for example, because the structure is not quite what we have become trained to expect from TTRPGs. I don’t think that hurt my experience of it particularly, but it was notable that when things clicked (particularly the “we all contributed but I was best” moments of telling the story of what happened) it began to sing. In fact, we probably ended up not quite getting to the point where that was second nature, and I wonder if the second run of things could have made that work. Because this IS meant to be played as a second run, right?

    Kieron: Yeah, second time and even more. The core game is three islands, ending up at the end of the season… but then it loops. You can come back as surviving contestants, or new contestants – and there’s aspects of the game which essentially unlock on a later play through, with some equipment being passed onto your successors, like the secret maps. Each of the Islands is big enough that you shouldn’t see more than a third of any one on any one trip through – and the GM also has different casts of contestants to throw at you, with their own different tones. I deliberately chose one of the most standard grounded ones, but there’s other casts where the weirdness of the game starts to leak in even more specifically. There’s lots of game here, even without touching on the extra-stretchgoal content. The Love Island inspired Island was calling me hard…

    No matter what, the game is always building towards that last island, where the 200 contestants are strimmed down to a handful and everything is very much Deathmatch On An Island.

    Jim: This is the bit we didn’t get from AGON, right? The actual showdown between the characters. The Paragon system leans towards “we’re all on the same team”, but there’s a player of the match, here it’s a little more cut-throat. As it says on the (corporate branded) tin, it’s Deathmatch. There’s a decision to be made at the end. The final island is one where all the surviving contenders are pitted against each other, and that means the players, too. Of course the Theorise phases, redacted areas, and access to weapons that can be used against Production mean there’s another option: to try and break the game. Whatever the reality you’ve theorised, you can decide to attack and not go into that night purely for numbers. 

    Deathmatch Island handles this cleverly by getting each of us to fill out a little card/form, privately, to say whether we are playing to win or trying to break game. We perhaps didn’t make quite enough of the discussion beforehand, as to what our characters were going to do, and whether their journey had been one that bonded them closely enough for mutual murder to be impossible, but even so it became quite dramatic. Two of us elected to break the game and one went for the win. (And I should say that my motivation here was at least in part to do with my character’s theorising that if it was a show or a simulation then to go along with the script and not attempt to do something unexpected was going to be to fail the challenge of it overall, even if you won the Deathmatch.) The character that goes for a win gets an advantage in the final battle, and in our case the two pushing to break split up so that there was a battle between win-wanter and the breaker, and then a final scene between in the surviving breaker and the win-wanter. This was hugely dramatic, I thought, and not just because I have saved my rocket-launcher for the end. It was dramatic because of what Deathmatch Island does that’s different to the other Paragon games, not just in pitting the players directly in PvP stuff, but in allowing that to unfold with a question of “is it over?”

    Kieron: Absolutely. I love all this stuff – like, the theatre of filling in the form and reveal? Absolutely my jam. Turning this slow-boil competition into open conflict? Oh yes. But what I find most interesting is that how, in this moment when characters are literally trying to murder one another, it’s actually Paragon at its most co-operative.

    It really does come down to the “Is it over?” 

    The last conflict is exactly the same as always, but after the winning player narrates how they win, the loser is asked that question. Is it over? If yes, that’s the end. If not, they describe how they escape that, but set themselves up for another downfall. The winner describes the ending, and asks again? The process repeats until the loser accepts this really is over.

    Now, when I read it first I was reading it as a way to ensure that the ending was a compromise, to ensure the winner just didn’t have agency to stomp it all over their rivals. While it is that, that’s not what it’s really for. It’s about creating this back and forth. 

    “I shoot them, riddling them with bullets. Is it over?”
    “No. I take a bullet, but drop behind cover, returning fire.”
    “I crawl closer, bullets bouncing around me, and throw a grenade, which bounces in front of you. Is it over?”
    “Hell no. My eyes go wide and I try to escape, and am thrown through the air towards you. I’m at your feet, and reaching for you with my knife.”
    “I’m surprised, and you’re on top of me with the knife. We’re face to face and I’m screaming at you. I manage to roll over and the knife bursts through you. Is it over?” 

    In Paragon, a player has agency to narrate – but this extends the key, most important bit in the whole game, to a cinematic back and forth… but the decision is already finalised. Everyone knows the score. Now we see how it goes down.

    That’s what the Paragon system really does at its core. The dice have fallen, we know the shape of what happens – now by passing the narration we get the specifics. The climax really is paragon as its best, and it sings when players are working together even as their characters are competing. Good play in paragon isn’t just describing how things are going for your character – it’s also thinking about who’s following you, and setting them up for something. It’s a game that really is about teamwork.

    That’s why the Paragon system is a tricky one, in many ways – it’s a skill folks aren’t necessarily coming to the table with. Thinking leans too atomic, but I think Deathmatch Island really does do a lot to try and ease people into that. Even the fact the looping of the game lets the players think about how they can do things next time around. Was our deathmatch ending perfect? Hell, no. But the three sessions to get there were quick enough to make us all be pretty much aware that if we played on, we’d have been really cooking.

    Jim: Speaking of cooking, I found myself wondering what Paragon games look like from here. You are making something using this ruleset. Hell, Harper just announced Ride Or Die, which is a “simplified” version based loosely on the Fast & Furious movies. It feels like WHO IS BEST really does have a future. Does Deathmatch Island, as you seemed to imply upthread, help confirm that these are correct decisions in terms of using this system to make new games?

    Kieron: Well, in our random sampling of game designers, Nittner, Harper, Denee and myself are working on Paragon games, and only you not, which means that 80% of all game designers are working on Paragon games. My sampling is perfect, do not question it.

    I think Harper simplifying with Ride Or Die speaks to something of the direction. Paragon works best when players just know it. A challenge is called, everyone assembles their own dice pool, and rolls. They look at the results, and narrate in order. If everyone knows the game, that could be invisible at the table. As it is, Paragon games stumble until that point – in our long Agon campaign, I don’t think we ever got there. So working ways to streamline seems the way to go, to make it easier to internalise and reach that point – if only to teach people Paragon, so they can then be more comfortable with a heavier game. I’m certainly doing some streamlining of my own with my thing.

    But I also don’t think you need to wait – Deathmatch Island really is a great way to try Paragon. Of all the smart things it does, that it works in a one off (one island) or a short campaign (3 sessions, three islands) is one of the smartest. You can get a genuine narrative adventure, in this fascinating system, with unique vibes, with a minimum of commitment. A deathmatch isn’t for life.

  • How to get better at improvising

    You will get better at improvising.

    This post is aimed mostly at people who GM or want to GM, but I think it goes for all players. Role-playing is, fundamentally, about improvising in the moment, which is funny because that’s also one of the most difficult things to learn, to get good at, and is one of the things people are most nervous about when it comes to TTRPGs.

    The most basic thing is also the most challenging thing.

    But don’t worry. You will get better at it. 

    You can get better at it, just by playing TTRPGs. But maybe that’s not good enough. Not in this age of self improvement and watching videos about going to the gym! No, indeed. So let’s consider how you can improve your improvisational skills, since you don’t always want to increase a skill by performing it in anger, do you? You are wise to look for other strategies!

    HOW YOU CAN PREPARE

    One of the most common bits of advice I see — and this is good advice — is to prep for improvising. Not just read the scenario and now some monster statblocks or whatever, but have other stuff to hand that you can use if you need to. This seems contrary to just being off-the-cuff in the moment, but if you want to be good enough to just create stuff off the cuff, then actually having a bunch of stuff ready to deploy as needed is a pretty good way to start. Check out Cordova’s 7-3-1 technique for a useful example of it. 

    “Before a session, I come up with 7 total NPCs, locations, and encounters. I give each of these a motivation. I then come up with 3 sensory details for each that I can describe at the table (sights, smells, sounds, and so forth). Finally, I think of 1 way I can physically embody each at the table (a distinct noise, voice, verbal tic, body posture, mannerism, etc.). I write all these things down.”

    However, this in itself is not improvisation. Cordova says it’s not prep, either. “I’m hesitant to call it “session prep,” because the point isn’t necessarily to end up with a bunch of notes I can use during the game,” he says. “Rather, the point of 7-3-1 is to help interrogate my setting so I understand it at an intuitive level.”  These things you can prepare to allow you, the GM, to inhabit the people and places you’re going to have to talk about.

    So if it’s not session or game specific prep, it’s sort of GM self-prep. Preparing yourself as a player in the game. And one thing I’ve heard a lot from GMs, wannabe-GMs, and GMs who struggled once before and don’t want to go through it again, is that this sort of stuff is THE solution to improving their game. Innumerable times I’ve heard folks express anxiety about not having read enough, or that if they had created more plans and notes, then they might have been ready for all the situations the players throw at them. And all that will help, but it’s not improvisation. It’s the intuitively understanding stuff that I think is the most important part here. And that is really practice. Ultimately the goal is to prep less, to a point where you need the thinnest sheaf of notes, and can be prepared to just find out what happens, or to not feel devalued when your prep is of no use to you.

    So here are some other suggestions that don’t involve just struggling through it at the table, and some of them are already games.

    THINGS YOU CAN DO AS EXERCISES

    Play Solo Games

    Now I admit I find solo games to be a lot like work, but the structure of them is very much like improvising on the spot. Set yourself a time limit. Don’t ponder, just do whatever it is the game prompted immediately. Getting faster at it is the exercise.

    Regard solo RPGs as exercises intended to improve both your writing skills and your improvisational flexibility, and they soon become even more interesting to play, I think. They need a chess timer or something. Read prompt: go!

    I suppose you could boil this down to: write! Writing is always good, whatever it is that you write. The gym of the mind. Especially when you try to write stuff from someone else’s point of view. But the point is here that solo RPGs are great at creating situations that you didn’t think up but now need to respond to with something sensible. And that’s improvising as a GM.

    Practice with story dice

    My kids loved these things when they were small, and I quickly realised they were getting better at improv when playing them. Initially they would look at the symbols and say “uuhhhhh…. Ummmm…” But after we’d done it a bunch of times they reacted immediately. You could practically hear those brain connection pathways being formed. So get some! Make up a story every day. Do it as quickly as you can. These are direct exercises that will improve your response time and the convincingness of your made up shit during the game.

    Pause the TV show

    Dialogue is one of the trickiest bits of a running and RPG, and when people have to pause and stop to think “what would this character say?” then it can become particularly stilted and awkward, “uuhhhhh…. Ummmm…” As with the story dice, this can be improved. Not least in intuitively inhabiting the characters. 

    Try this: when watching a dialogue sequence on a TV show, pause it mid scene and make up the next line of dialogue. Say it out loud. If one character asks another a question, supply your own answer. This is amusing for its own sake, but it will improve your response time and flexibility. Just don’t do it while your partner is trying to watch TV. Nothing on Earth will be more annoying, and you will end up in the bad place.

    Practice With Spark Tables

    If a game comes with spark tables, as Mythic Bastionland does, then practice with them. You can buy entire books full of the things, and picking a couple of these for a situation or person and then seeing what it suggests to you is great practice both for actually using the spark tables in anger, but also for having descriptions and twists on your improv generally.

    There Are Other Tools

    I don’t have anything like an exhaustive list, but TEETH-friend Pate has linked to his It’s Worse Than That tool to us on a number of occasions, allowing you to practice your Night Move responses for games like Brindlewood Bay and The Between.

    I am sure there is something similar for Forged In The Dark complications and consequences, but I am too lazy to dig it up. Hey, I wrote the rest of this article. 

    HOW TO GET BETTER AS YOU PLAY

    Play games that force you to improvise

    Ultimately you need to get better at improvising at the table. Games that require you to come up with improvised moments includes basically all RPGs, but anything PbTA-derived (so, Forged In The Dark Games, Brindlewood games, and other favourites of this parish) will force you to do it for their very most regular and fundamental mechanics.

    You can also play a GMless game. Or play games that are nothing but narrative, with nothing more than prompts. Our own False Kingdom is a pretty good example of that. I say, modestly.

    A key part of why people struggle with this stuff is that they’ve played games where they can read off the NPCs, the monsters, the encounters and so forth. And that’s all good stuff: a fine pre-written adventure is a great thing to have at the table, but the more it’s meticulously set out, the less you need to flex that muscle.

    So, for example, we ran a few sessions of Blades In The Dark where I, the GM, was not allowed to prep at all. And so I did not. Blades is pretty forgiving when it comes to this sort of play, but making no prep at all, not even mental notes, well, that was a bit of a high wire act. The players told me what they wanted to do, and I just went with it. It worked really well. After the first session the gang were extremely sceptical that I hadn’t prepared, and I can imagine this being incredibly tricky if you weren’t used to it, but maybe ease into it. Start playing Blades in the Dark instead of D&D! Take fewer and fewer notes, slowly ease yourself out of prep. You aren’t going to do a 200kg deadlift on your first time at the gym, nor are you going to go straight to pure improv as a GM. But with the right games, you can do it.

    Play some For The Queen, too, stuff like that will help everyone in the group.

    Adopt the trait

    This might be the toughest one. TTRPGs are rightfully lampooned for GMs doing funny voices, but the thing is about the voice or adopting a mannerism is that it helps you intuitively inhabit the character. Kieron likes to wave about a glass of wine when he’s Lord Scurlock in Blades In The Dark, for example. You might not be able to keep it up, it’s tough to get over the embarrassment of pretending to be a naughty goblin, and accents especially are hard, I know, but the more you adopt the character’s mannerisms, the easier it is going to be to answer as they would. I don’t know why this works, but I promise you it does.

    (I try to give my badguys Russian accents, which is heinous and maybe even unfair stereotyping (not really), but it meant I got better at the Russian accent and improvising at the same time.)

    Make the players do it

    If you are the GM and you are stuck at the table, just offload it onto your players. Having a bunch of stock questions that creates a character out of thin air. “Who is the person in this room? How do you know them? How do we know they are angry with you?” 

    There’s a bunch of other people sat at the table! Make them do it. 

    I was struck recently by someone who said that they didn’t like the Blades mode of action roll, because they struggled to think of the complications or consequences. Well, my solution is to outsource that. There’s a bunch of brains working less hard than yours at the table, and you should be making use of them. The more I have done this, the more I made the players tell the story, the easier improvising has become. And it’s the fundamental trick to making all this work, because it includes them, and it reduces your cognitive load, and ultimately it tells a story that they’re invested in, because they came up with it. 

    So yeah. Make shit up, and make others make shit up. That’s the motto.

  • Threedom: The Between

    This is Threedom, our review series in which forever-GMs Jim Rossignol, Kieron Gillen, and The Mysterious Third (Chris) get to spend a bit of time as players as we deliver each other delicious fresh campaigns of the TTRPGs that have most arousingly intrigued us and inspired us to action. Have a read of our other Threedoms here. 

    This time we were also joined by a fourth member — just to make sure the naming convention doesn’t make sense for even a few instances of the series — the designer, writer, and Minecraft-manager, Alex Wiltshire.

    Together we’ve just completed a campaign of Carved From Brindlewood gothic horror RPG The Between! 

    It was fucking great! 

  • What Powers The Man Behind Wyrd Science?

    There is some superb coverage of tabletop in the nowadays, and some of our favourite stuff comes from Mr John Power Jr. If you have encountered Wyrd Science in either electronic or paper form, then you have seen his work. Wyrd Science is the sort of tabletop coverage we deserve, with an eye to TTRPGs that pleases both myself and Gillen enormously.

    Issue 7 of Wyrd Science is out now, and it’s delightful. Below the cut I talked to Power about the new issue, but also repost the vast and rambling interview we conducted last year about how the project came to be. If you read it, and you should, there will be some tales told that you will find very familiar indeed.

    (more…)

  • Experiential Yearning And Some Sort of Space Hack?

    It’s been a while! Sorry, not really been able to post lately, but back now, and better late than never. -Jim

    What do you want out of TTRPGs? No, that doesn’t matter. What do I want out of TTRPGS? Yes, that’s the important thing. Let’s find out!

    A few years ago I was pitching a videogame to a room of swarthy videogame veterans. Beards, fortunes, you know the type. You have probably heard of these people. They had a lot of experience, and even more opinions on the experience of others. Anyway, the conversation came around to an already established game, how it was successful, and why. The general drift of things was that it didn’t matter how good or bad any individual element of the game was, because overall it fulfilled the sort of experience that gamers wanted, and had always wanted, and would always want. That, they said, was a good pitch: addressing a popular gamer fantasy. I had to agree. 

    (more…)

  • THREEDOM: Conaning it up with our One-Dice Wife in Adventures In An Age Undreamed Of

    So the grandest campaign we have played in recent times was run by the Mysterious Third (Chris) and actually featured a Fourth (Dan, who isn’t even a Forever GM!). So it’s not really Threedom at all. Nevertheless, we must make our report! Since there is much to speak of, including the origins of one of our most important in-jokes, we will be efficient and concise, probably. 

    So: this was the Modiphius 2d20 system Conan: Adventures In An Age Undreamed Of (pub 2017), an official adventure — Waves Stained Crimson — adapted by (Chris) for his regular group and then run again for our pleasure. In it we capsized, captured a ship, killed many people by accident, more on purpose, freed slaves, got hitched, rescued a lost bride, and learned dark sea magicks. Also: we did some VENGEANCE. All very Conan-y.

    Let’s get into the sinewy, muscular details.

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  • No Man Is A (Deathmatch) Island: An Interview With Tim ‘Old Dog Games’ Denee

    IMPORTANT NOTE: this interview was originally for the TEETH RPG newsletter, which is very interesting and good, and you should subscribe to it. We conducted it just as the book was being distributed. I am sure we’ll talk about Deathmatch Island in detail elsewhere, since we’re very PARAGON-y over here, and there is much to talk about. Suffice to say, it’s a fascinating implementation of what we think is one of the most interesting RPG systems, and its creator, Tim Denee, is well worth getting to know.

    Deathmatch Island
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