The Seven Part Pact: the First Actual GM-Full Game

I was asked if I wanted to be a wizard for a week. I said yes.

It was a playtest of Jay Dragon’s the Seven Part Pact, where up-to-seven (we did six) players are all academic wizards in a fantasy realm (Think Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) Each has a title, and an area of magic that’s their domain (think the Wizard of Earthsea). Each’s domain is also an area of responsibility, to ensure it doesn’t fall apart (think, Sandman). They form a found-family of arseholes, each a being of almost unimaginable power, pursuing their own desires and schemes and often butting heads (think Amber). Each also takes a dual role, taking the tasks often reserved to the GM in a specific area – so, for example, the Faustian as a character is about demonic magic and preventing satan from escaping… but is also plays as the The Keeper of the Chains, who is called upon to make the complications in the world.

The Seven Part Pact is a GM-full game. I think it’s the only GM-full game.

It’s about wizards, and wizards are all men. It’s about patriarchy and violence. It is a game that understands that if you make a statement of truth the point of a game is to interrogate that truth. My character claimed she was a man, even when she physically transform herself to raise her adoptive dragon egg. Eventually that egg cracked, and so did hers. It is a deeply queer game, but – to use El Sandifer’s dichotomy – is firmly in the Scab-picker rather than Hugboxer camp. It’s a game whose approach should be seen through the lens of her Palette Grid. It wants to approach troubling material.

Jay Dragon, much to her annoyance, often has her games described as “cosy”. You can see why she’s frustrated – her most successful previous games look like pastoral gardens, but with carefully placed thorns. To call them cosy does miss the flesh-tearing points.

Seven Part Pact will not be described as a cosy game, except possibly if you constructed a nest of all of its constituent bits and pieces you would be cosy inside.

This is as maximalist an RPG as I’ve ever played.

Let’s list various components.

• Each Wizard has its own unique playbook. It’s 30-40 page long.
• Each Wizard has what amounts to their own self contained board game, which is entirely unique for each wizard, tracking what’s going on in their realm.
• There is a grimoire of spells, all of which are available to every single wizard at any point in the game. It’s 200 pages long. Spells are mainly 2-3 pages, breaking down what every symbol on every dice should mean for the spell.
• There’s a fucking Orrery in the middle of the table which is used to track the movement of the stars, which impact everything in play.
• Cloaks. This isn’t part of the actual game, but we did it anyway for extra Wizard.

Just look at it at the start of play, before we set stuff up.

And flick your eyes up to the top to see how it looked in play.

Yes, we were playing in a fancy house in the middle of Bath, so spread out to have the grandeur, but this is a game that wants space (tables, floors, rooms, whatever). It’s a game which is born of looking at those incredibly luxurious, expansive boardgame experiences and thinking… why not? It is a game about hubris which feels deliciously like hubris itself.

The game’s scale is deliberately aimed to push the wizards apart – you simply don’t understand what the other players are actually doing, until something goes wrong and then everyone has to deal with it. It was to the Faustian’s immense frustration that he was spending all his time fighting the devil on his little boardgame, and the rest of us were going “Nah, mate, are you sure it was the devil? It could just be indigestion.”

I’m using the word “boardgame” throughout, as it’s the natural response – it’s what it looks like, right? It’s you playing a little (not so little) side game, but if you examine it closely, it’s not really a boardgame at all. Or rather, it’s not just a boardgame. It’s serving a dual role, more akin to the faction game in Blades in the Dark. It’s world modelling.

Here’s how mine started.

Here’s how I swiftly ended up.

I especially like how I’m tracking multiple royal pregnancies in the margins.

(Worth stressing, this is a playtest, so this is cramped DIY components which are in flux. In a game as big as this, the thing I had most difficulty with was knocking all these over any time I breathed.)

I’m playing the Warlock, whose domain is basically war and politics. I’m embedded in the court of the king, and the game is about the closeness of various NPCs in various factions to the king. Those near him will perform their actions on their card, of varying levels of usefulness (which is also contextual). They also have secrets, which can be uncovered or revealed when they reach the king’s ear, and then you have to deal with it. For example, when the Kings’ son and heir was revealed to be possessed by the Devil. Maybe the Faustian guy had a point.

So what I’m doing is both trying to make sure that the people I want are near the King, but simultaneously that the various factions are represented – because if any are removed entirely from the board, complications will ripple across the realm. While this is all mechanised (hence it can be compared to the boardgame) it also requires you to observe the rest of the game, and add people to the board depending on the changes in the world – for example, when a pirate city gets a government, perhaps it’d be a good idea for me to add an ambassador from it to the court. This sort of thing is something which you’d think is a classic GM role – mapping and recording the politics of the world.

Which gets me back to what the Seven Part Pact made me realise about GM-full games – namely, they’re just not.

Games have been described as GM-full mainly as an understandable correction against GM-less as a descriptor. The point being, the traditional work of the GM is still being done – it’s just being done by everyone.

I’d say an actual GMless is one where the structure is so robust that it takes the GM role. For the Queen is a GMless game. You draw a card. You answer the prompt.

A GM-full game is one where there is GM-tasks done, but no one person takes responsibility for them. This can be both for aesthetics or politics – Avery Adler’s No Dice, No Masters in Belonging Outside Belonging, reframing No Gods, No Master of anarchist theory. Dice are divinatory proxies for gods and GMs of all stripes are the authority of the state. The point being, we don’t need them and we can all do this together.

But no-one is doing all the work of a GM. The point is the actual GM role is distributed. So no-one is a full GM, so the games can’t be GM full, by definition.

If you wanted to, you could run a Belonging-outside-Belonging game with a single GM.

That simply isn’t true with the Seven Part Pact.

Yes, it also distributes the GM role in more traditional ways… and then carries on adding stuff, so much stuff that no single GM could run it all. The Hierophant is modelling Religion and the people. The Warlock is modelling Politics. The Mariner is modelling the natural world. The Infernal is modelling Satan’s work. The Sorcerer is playing magic cop, tracing renegade magicians and the fallout of every single other spell every wizard casts. The Sage is – get this – playing meta-GM and trying to ensure all the NPCs and the players reach their own destinies to maintain the balance in the universe. Each player is perhaps as much GM work as a GM would be doing in any other game, and together making a world more complicated and intricate than any could alone.

And where one point of all this design becomes clearer, is how they tie together.

It’s interesting to see how the gap in this machine influenced our game. We played without the Necromancer – viewed as the simplest, perhaps an introduction wizard for a newbie. Their game is basically tower defence – escort dead souls to the afterlife, prevent arsehole souls from escaping the afterlife and leading to hell on earth. Except the GM side of that equation is, much like the Warlock should be looking for changes on the political state to put on my board, the Necromancer is looking for anyone dying in the world. If they die, they end up on their board… and so another problem for the Necormancer to deal with.

That we didn’t have a Necromancer meant that we could kill people without worrying about whether it was going to lead to a Night Of The Living Dead situation.

See what I mean? One of my ongoing theories is games are most magical when they are beyond your fingertips of understanding. When you grasp the machinery, you gain mastery… but the uncertainty of how things will end up is the tension. It’s one reason why dice are interesting – the external reality enforcing its will. The Seven Part Pact is constructed to be such a complicated machine that it’s always unreal. Everyone is a mystery. They’re playing wizards, and to you – across the table – it may as well be magic.

There’s also the other flip of this interlinking machine – that this is also a game which creates spaces which are enchanting solo play. Take my own board. Throughout the entire game, the embezzling Princess spent her time a square aware from where she’d be executed she was so out of favour. While all these major events were going on, part of my brain was always on trying to keep this poor girl alive, because I had imprinted on her. I was aware if this game was played weekly, and I didn’t just spend the week either at the table or at home doing family stuff, I’d have found time to flesh out more of the characters. I did it even in the space I had, but I’d have done more.

This specific sort of solitary play is absolutely classic GM-role behaviour.

When reaching for comparisons to Seven Part Pact, one of the few was actually Band of Blades, where there’s a GM, but each player also takes a secondary role. I was the Marshall, whose job was to keep track of the health of all the soldiers in the company and their names and bios and all that. When Bands of Blades clicked into a higher gear was when the game had established every single solider in the company, and each had a little pen portrait. I had 40 or so little people I knew by name. I was a player, and doing all my usual player stuff, but I was also doing this work which gave richness to the world that that the GM likely wouldn’t have done by themselves.

My regular group was formed to play Band of Blades – specifically born of us looking at the rules for it and realising it would work best (and maybe only work at all) with players who were willing to actually commit to it, and do the work which is beyond what a game normally asks for a player.

Point being: all the people in the group were regular GMs, who were the people we felt sure who would commit to it. We made the game full of GMs.

That’s what the Seven Part Pact feels like to me. It feels like a game which is going to require an unusual level of buy-in from the players, to commit together a thing. It isn’t a casual game. It’s a cult game, perhaps in a literal sense – as I gathered in this Bath townhouse, with our artifacts, around this Orrery, it felt like a cult, like the sort of thing which had people scared of RPGs in the 1980s. We even wore cloaks. I had a fucking dagger.

It also seems that the specific type of commitment is unusual too. Normally “big commitment” RPGs are about time. The Great Pendragon Campaign, for example. Seven Part Pact is about commitment. It will work best if you are gathered together with people willing to carve that time out, and make that leap of faith into the void together. It’s entirely possible to play a short Seven Part Pact game – ours was 20 hours, so 6 or so sessions. A one shot version is being planned… but if you play it, and play it as well as it wants to be played, you have to commit. You have to read that playbook. You have to stay off your phone – except to look up spells in the grimoire.

I haven’t even touched on the spells – how the point of the size of the spellbook is to make “can you work out what to do” the major limiting factor. When the Sorcerer carved an indestructible titan from his sweet librarian assistant, I spent the walk to my home and back trying to work out what on Earth I could do about this monster if things turned bad? I was the Warlock – my job is entirely “if the pact needs someone killing, I will do it.” I stomped the streets thinking whether the transmutation spell could crack its parts, or whether it’d be better if I could open a portal beneath it and drop it to the realm of dreams, and then just kill the Sorcerer?

None of which actually was required, but the chewing over what you could do in such a huge play space is a key part of the game. I cast three spells across the whole game – but I was thinking about what spells I could have cast constantly. It lived with me across the week. My biggest regret of playing it in such a concentrated time period is that I wish I had more space to let it live with me. I wanted to give it more than I was able to give. Commitment.

I also haven’t said how beautifully written this is: evocative, precise, painting a world with elegance. To play this, you have to read it. If you’re reading this, you’ll want to read it.

Let’s end this, at least for now, as otherwise I will just start finding other angles. You have a game this big, and there’s always more to say, a GM-full game leaving you full, even pregnant.

In conclusion: I have no idea what people will make of this.

How wonderful.

Seven Part Pact will be kickstartering in 2026 (hopefully). The playtest draft is available on the $18 tier on her Patreon.