Monsterhearts Homebrew: the Brownie

Avery Alder's Monsterhearts is one of my favourite roleplaying games of all time.

I love everything about it: the genre and tropes it revolves around, the heavy focus on inter-party drama and intense and messy character relationships, the idea of keeping a story "feral", the ways it took the principles of Apocalypse World and leapt boldly forward with them (Hx into Strings, the evolution of moves that affect agency over a character's emotions, etc).

Most of all I love how unapologetically it puts forward its insight: supernatural teen drama/romance is, and has always been, queer as hell.

I've read it cover to cover more times than I can count; I've played in campaigns from online to 8-hour convention contexts; I've GMed it a few glorious times and have plans for more; and I even had the privilege of reading and giving feedback on some very early drafts for the Second Edition.

Monsterhearts is a game that I love.

And so being a game designer and somewhat of a nerd, of course I set out to write a bunch of homebrew content for it. I've written a handful of custom Skins for the game, informed by my desire to see an integration between monster archetype / high-school drama archetype / pattern of teenage dysfunction.

Until now these Skins have all lurked on my hard-drive gathering dust, but now that I have a blog it seems a shame not to share them.

Apologies that they aren't properly formatted and laid-out: that's not one of my skill-sets.

If I can talk my friend John into it, I might try and pull something of the sort together for people who want consistency of appearance with the standard Skins.

So:

The Brownie

Your friends and loved ones mean everything to you – you cannot imagine a warmer glow of satisfaction than knowing you’ve helped them nor a worse feeling than watching them suffer when you can do nothing to intervene. You chase that feeling of approval and thankfulness, delighting in service and praise and willing to shoulder burdens that are none of your business just to feel needed and useful and wanted. 

Stats

Hot -1, Cold -1, Volatile +1, Dark +1

Name

Abdul, Alexis, Deacon, George, Leto, Ophelia, Paige, Sergius, Stuart.

A servant’s name, a forgettable name, a weak-sounding name, a peasant name.

Look

ragged, casual, servile, polished, mismatched

needy eyes, watchful eyes, insecure eyes, protective eyes, demanding eyes

Origin

diminished house-spirit, born to serve, searching for purpose, oath-bound, indentured for a term

Your Backstory

You have one friend who is very dear to you. Declare one person to be one of your loved ones. Give them 2 Strings on you. Take one String on them. 

You were there for someone in a moment of emotional vulnerability. Ask them what secret they confessed to you, and you gain 1 String on them.

Brownie Moves

You get this one and choose two more:

[x] Family of Choice. You may have any number of loved ones. The first is chosen during your backstory. Every time you choose another loved one, give them 1 String on you. Whenever you subjugate yourself to the needs of your loved ones, carry 1 forward and gain the condition needy.

[ ] Love Hurts. Every time you forgive the ones you love for hurting you, and make excuses for them, gain a String on them.

[ ] Invisible Helper. When you defend someone you love without them ever knowing about it, mark experience.

[ ] Bond of Service. If you and another character have a total of 5 or more Strings on one another, gain 1 to all rolls against them.

[ ] Shoulder to Cry On. You crave to be useful, and feel that is all you’re good for. When others dump their emotional problems on you, roll with dark. On a 10 up, they lose all their conditions, and you choose one: mark experience, carry one forward, or gain a String on them. On a 7-9, they choose one:  they lose all their conditions or they gain a String on you.

[ ] Self-Sacrifice. When you leap into the way and take the blow instead of someone you love, roll with Volatile. On a 10 up, you take the harm instead of them, but reduce it by 1. On a 7-9, you take the harm instead of them. On a success, gain a String on the loved one who you saved or give them the Condition guilty.

[ ] Unloved and Unwanted. When you are needy and then gaze into the abyss, carry +1 forward to your roll. 

Sex Move

When you have sex with someone you cannot help but crave their approval. Add them as one of your loved ones (including giving them a String on you) and then trigger the Shoulder to Cry On move even if you have not taken it.

Darkest Self

You can’t bear the ingratitude of the people around you – you bleed and sweat and slave away to make their lives easier and they dismiss your efforts as invasive and unwanted? Make them realise how much they need you - destroy every good thing in their life until they need you back to fix it. You escape your Darkest Self when you go too far and harm one of your loved ones, or when you admit that they never asked for the level of devotion you gave them.

Advancements

-Take another Brownie move

-Take another Brownie move

-Take a move from another Skin

-Take a move from another Skin

-You belong to an Obeisance of Household Spirits

-Add 1 to Hot (max 3)

-Add 1 to Cold (max 3)

-Add 1 to Volatile (max 3)

-Add 1 to Dark (max 3)

Playing the Brownie

Needy, taken for granted, overlooked, craving importance. The Brownie is about trying to take all of your loved ones’ problems onto yourself for the rush you get from approval and being needed and useful.

You are at your strongest when helping others: Family of Choice makes you much more effective when you are pursuing the interests of your loved ones, and if it involves giving away some Strings then Bond of Service can also turn that into a strength. Unloved and Unwanted allows you to take the needy Condition and make it work for you.

Love Hurts, and Shoulder to Cry On can all provide a source of Strings to fuel Bond of Service and allow you to push back against your loved ones if they are trying to shut you out or prying where they shouldn’t. Invisible Helper provides a handy source of experience, as can Shoulder to Cry On if things go well.

Self-Sacrifice is your move of last resort, endangering yourself to protect your loved ones and either gain Strings on them or give them a Condition that you can leverage into them needing a Shoulder to Cry On.

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If you'd like to support me to keep creating material like this and working on other RPG/game-design projects, check out my Patreon to help me do more cool stuff and get access to monthly Q&As, early-access playtesting of my story games, or a place on the credits list for any game I make).

Across the Endless Sea: First Playtest (#4)

(Across the Endless Sea is a storygame I’m writing, blogging the process here to entertain and hopefully get some advice/feedback. For the introductory post that lays out the design goals of the project, look here.)

It's been a while since I've last written about this project, and in that time a fair bit has happened! 

After finishing up the Aspect playbooks, I press-ganged my housemates into service as additional sources of ideas and rolled right on to designing the Threat playbooks.

At the present moment they're fairly barebones: some open-ended options for the aesthetic and the dangers that can be chosen for each encounter and then a summary of the Threat player's side of the encounter rules. 

I then spent a leisurely afternoon going through the various choices presented by the Aspect playbooks (the tales known by the Voice, the warnings known by the Eyes), some randomly-selected inspirational tweets from @str_voyages, and the imagery that's been coalescing in my head around this setting for years to extract a list of 35 encounter prompts.

As it stands I think that number is a little thin, but I didn't want to force ideas.

In the end I think I'll probably end up aiming for 50, ten from each Threat (Dwellers, Islands, Travelers, Waters, Weather).

More importantly, with all the basic elements needed to run the game in place, I ran a playtest!

My housemates and I sat down after dinner, and we ran through the game. Nothing caught fire, no friendships were destroyed, and everyone seems keen to play again and actually finish so I'd call that a rousing success!

To be a little more serious, it was a very enlightening process. 

There's certain things that didn't occur to me but that it's clear the game needs: a list of names (to establish a shared feel), a sheet to summarize the resources of the People, a more detailed outline of exactly how the encounter process works.

It turns out that to someone who isn't living in my head, the procedure I wrote isn't quite as clear as I thought. Who knew...

On the plus side, the core game is great. The resolution mechanic works great, and won over even those who were skeptical about a lack of dice; the game seems to have some real replayability given that I knew all the prompts ahead of time and was still engaged and surprised, and the setting and mood of the game was a real hit. 

To return to my original design goals for a moment, here's where things are at:

• I want it to be GMless, not least so that I actually get a chance to play it (unlike anything else I write).
• Done! It's definitely GMless, though I do want to see other groups run it or my group run it with me taking a back seat to figure out if it's clear enough without me to explain.
• I want it to be inspiring, the text capturing a mood to put the players in the game’s tone and mood.
• Big success here. Everyone was very invested in the setting, and adding in some great stuff.
• I want it to be invisible, a framework that helps create great stories and guides creativity in organic and unobtrusive ways.
• This is where a lot of work still needs to be done. There's the promise of an invisible system, but the explanations of mechanics need a lot of clarifying/expanding to get there.
• I want it to play with ideas of collaboration and opposition in RPGs/storygames, allowing fluid movement between the roles of environment and explorers.
• Another big success. Everyone tonight got a turn at both, and seemed to enjoy moving between the two roles.
• I want it to leave a space open for groups to shape their emotional landscape: longing, or bittersweet, or joyous, or desperate, as the group deems appropriate
• Assessing this will have to wait on more playtesting and more folks playing it. Early signs are good? 
• I want to be able to release it for first-stage playtesting on my Patreon by the end of April

On this last point I'm actually a good month ahead of schedule! 

Even though there's work still needed, I'm happy to say that the game in its current state is already complete enough for preview playtesting on my Patreon. Hopefully by the end of April I'll have the entire thing done!

Next steps: write the new material needed, playtest a whole bunch more, and talk to my dear friend John about layout and making it look nice.

Stay tuned for another post sometime in the next fortnight...

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Want access to the playtest preview documents to give the game a run yourself? 

If you'd like to support me to keep creating material like this and working on other RPG/game-design projects, check out my Patreon to help me do more cool stuff and get access to monthly Q&As, early-access playtesting of my story games, or a place on the credits list for any game I make).

All Things Under Heaven House Rules: Character Creation

So, my Twitch campaign has finally launched! The first session and first GM Prep session are up, and I'm feeling pretty good about it. The players are keen, the characters are really cool, and I feel like we're set to dive into some cool content and world-exploration. 

Ironically, it's at this time that it's looking like the home game is going to take a step back for the next month or so, but I guess that's the way of things. 

Things diminish, things increase: such is the will of Heaven.

Today's post is the first of a number in which I am going to share homebrew content I've created for All Things Under Heaven.

That will eventually include the races, the journeying mechanics, the fortunelling mechanic, the revised death and dying rules the campaign uses, the town development rules, etc - everything that may help people to follow along with the campaign or to run their own All Things Under Heaven game. 

For today, like the campaign itself, I think I'm going to start at the very beginning.

Character Creation:

(I'd like to acknowledge Steven Lumpkin and the phenomenal West Marches campaign he ran for Rollplay some years back. It represents a major inspiration for this game, and the mechanics presented here owe a great debt to him for inspiration and occasional wholesale borrowing).

Rule Zero

You are an adventurer because you feel a strong call in your bones to action. The boredom of a calm life doesn't appeal to you – you are driven to leave behind the safety of civilization and explore the wilds: to make your name, to make your fortune, to accomplish some passion or goal. Regardless of what drives you, you are driven. You choose where to go and what to do. There will be a handful of obvious choices, but you don't by any means need to take them. The adventure is in your hands.

Adventuring Motivation (replaces Alignment, )

Why are you adventuring? Choose a motivation, or tell the GM your own. At the end of each session, if you did something clearly in support of your motivation, tell the group. If everyone agrees, you gain XP equivalent to your share from a Moderate encounter of the group's CR.

• Personal glory
• Protect the weak
• Seek the truth
• Challenge the strong
• Study the arcane
• Tame the Wastes
• Increase your wealth/fame

Skills

In place of the Arcana and Religion skills presented in the Players Handbook, All Things Under Heaven uses the following Skills:

• Cosmology measures your ability to recall lore about the workings of Chi, the cycle of the elements, the arrangement and nature of the universe, the categories into which magical and unusual things fall, and the details of magical practice.
• Folklore measures your ability to recall lore about superstition, beliefs and ritual practices among the common folk, legends from the local oral history, and your capacity to recall information about similar entities or situations when encountering the strange and unusual.
• Theology measures your ability to recall lore about the gods of your people, the gods of others, Celestial beings, religious history and the history of the gods, and your ability to participate in and perform religious ceremonies.

Additionally, it adds the following Skills:

• Etiquette determines how well you remember the manners, customs, and values of different peoples, and how well-versed you are in important cultural practices like poetry, calligraphy, tea-ceremony, etc.
• Geography measures your ability to recall lore about the geopolitical borders of kingdoms past and present, various routes for trade and travel around the world, and the processes by which local weather and geology give rise to regional biomes.

History (replaces Backgrounds)

Each one of us comes from somewhere. We have a past that has shaped us; people who have helped or hindered us, raised or abandoned us, loved or hated us; lessons we have learned or mysteries we still puzzle over.

The characters are no different.

Every character has a History made up of the following: a one-or-two-word description of their previous life (Acolyte, Criminal, Soldier, Wanderer, etc.), three skill proficiencies they have previously acquired, any combination of tool proficiencies and language proficiencies that adds up to two, and a Speciality Knowledge.

Speciality Knowledges make a character a source of information for the group in relation to a subject related to their past. They give the player a direct means of interrogating the fiction, and also allow players to signal to the GM what kind of content they are interested in.

Mechanically, they work as follows:

The player, in consultation with the GM, identifies a subject related to the character’s History. The player can, spread out as they like across sessions, ask the GM a number of freeform questions about the subject (as if they had access to a Book or Library) equal to their Intelligence modifier.

The GM will also identify a form of research (studying local folklore, getting to know the local terrain, reading holy scriptures) that allows the player to replenish one question while visiting town.  

All Things Under Heaven: Announcement & Introduction

All Things Under Heaven is a D&D 5th Edition sandbox and hexcrawl campaign in the tradition of Ben Robbins’ Grand Experiment, and Rollplay’s previous West Marches and ongoing Court of Swords campaigns.

I have been running it IRL for my home group since August of last year, and I am pleased to announce that starting this week I will also be running an online campaign via Twitch.

All Things Under Heaven will run weekly on my Twitch channel on Saturday 10am-2pm AEST (Friday 7pm to 11pm Eastern; Friday 4pm to 8pm Pacific; Friday 6pm to 10pm Central), and will be accompanied the following morning by a GM Turn in which I perform upkeep on the setting and ensure it is reacting dynamically to player actions.

***

All Things Under Heaven is a campaign that is very much in the weirder and more wondrous/inexplicable vein of fantasy that was common before responses to Tolkien became formulaic and neatly “high fantasy”. 

It features a strong emphasis on exploration and investigation, characters acting to change the world and being changed by it in turn, deep and layered lore that the players can peel back as far as they desire, and characters struggling against great danger to navigate a world that holds endless opportunity but is wilder, fiercer, older, and far stranger than they are.

I would like to acknowledge the brilliant work of Stephen Lumpkin on Rollplay’s West Marches, which was a major inspiration for the feel and mechanics of this campaign and some of whose ideas about character motivation I have adopted.

All Things Under Heaven is set in a mythic Asiatic-influenced world that draws inspiration from China and neighboring regions (Japan, India, Korea, Thailand & Vietnam, Indonesia, Hokkaido & Siberia), but does not attempt to present a coherent fantasy analogue to any one country or period.

It is a response to the diverse cultures and mythologies of Asia, one that is informed by my background in anthropology and history and aims to come from a place of respect and informed research and avoid appropriating or exoticizing traditions from that area.

It is inspired by the legendary history of China presented in the Bamboo Annals, the series of novels The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox by Barry Hughart, recent works of media that respond respectfully to Asian cultures and mythologies like Avatar: the Last Airbender and Kubo and the Two Strings, anime that include Princess Mononoke, Mushishi, and Sword of the Stranger, and wuxia films like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Another major inspiration is the work of Adam Koebel on Rollplay’s Court of Swords, which provided an excellent example how to respectfully invent a fantasy world that blends but does not misrepresent or appropriate the mythology of another set of cultures.

***

I'm very keen to share this with you all. 

My test stream last weekend went well, and I think the audio/video should be nice and clean. The overlay looked fantastic, especially for something made by a novice (me) on GIMP. 

My new players for this incarnation of the campaign have cooked up a fantastic set of characters (far more ambiguously-motivated than the IRL group, too...) and I look forward to sharing their adventures with you.

See you on the stream!

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Updates & Progress

It’s going to have to be a short blog today, since all kinds of other stuff is going on.

When I set a twice-weekly schedule for this blog I thought it would be manageable. Largely, it has been.

When I then fixed certain days to that schedule, however, I never realized how hard it would be to keep to them. Wednesdays & Sundays has become Wednesdays & Weekend/Mondays, which isn’t the end of the world but I’d like to get a little more regular about in the coming weeks.

That said, a lot has been going on so I think I have a little bit of an excuse.

So:

• I finished the first draft of Across the Endless Sea! I just need to get it formatted as a single document and convert it to PDF, and the playtest preview will be going out on my Patreon.
• The weekend just gone I ran my first Twitch stream, and made many fruitful mistakes. Unfortunately, my screw-ups in the world of forgetting-to-record-other-people’s-audio means that y’all will never see the character creation ‘session’ for my new campaign, but at least it wasn’t the first session I mangled!
  (A post about my weekly Twitch campaign is going up on Wednesday with all the details about that).
• I somehow got suckered into another game design project, working with my good friend John Hughes on a system for anti-Lovecraftian humanist takes on cosmic horror in the tradition of Australian systemlessgaming.
• I need to dedicate more time to working on my con game for June. Hopefully that can be this week’s project.
• I was blown away by the response to my first article on GMing for Kids. The second, looking at the idea of making choices meaningful and centering agency, is coming along slow and steady.

Otherwise life goes on as normal for me: GMing for the kids at work, running for my home group, desperately trying to fit more hours into the day.  

I think that’s about all for now. Hope to see some of y’all in chat for my Twitch game sometime!

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If you'd like to support me to keep creating material like this and working on other RPG/game-design projects, check out my Patreon to help me do more cool stuff and get access to monthly Q&As, early-access playtesting of my story games, or a place on the credits list for any game I make).

Across the Endless Sea: Mechanics and Playbooks (#3)

(Across the Endless Sea is a storygame I’m writing, blogging the process here to entertain and hopefully get some advice/feedback. For the introductory post that lays out the design goals of the project, look here.)

I’ve had a week to think about last week’s draft for a resolution mechanic for Across the Endless Sea.

In that time, I’ve reread my Patreon preview of Vincent Baker’s The King is Dead. I’ve reread my copy of Jason Morningstar’s Skeletons. I’ve rewatched some of Adam Koebel’s games of A Sundered Land.

On Monday at work I sat with a bunch of kids making up stories: about their characters, about the campaigns, about key NPCs they admire. After a particularly beloved mentor died of old age, one kid very sincerely told me that “nothing happens to me, because I’ve died of a broken heart”.

Seeing the strength of the narrative moments that can be generated just through using commonsense/fairness and asking provocative questions, I’ve come to a decision:

There will be no randomization or dice in Across the Endless Sea.

They just feel unnecessary. There’s an existing body of storygames that demonstrate that diceless non-random games can be done, and done well.

I want Across the Endless Sea to have something of the feel of traditional storytelling, to lean into Vincent Baker’s model of “roleplaying as conversation”. I want, as I mentioned in my design goals, for the mechanics of this game to seem invisible.

I also want this to be a game that requires and teaches trust of the other players at the table.

(Trust in their integrity, trust in their creativity, trust in their support as you imagine and improvise.)

So, with all that in mind here’s another attempt at that core resolution mechanic, and one that I am much happier with:

Time passes, triggering an encounter. A random encounter prompt is drawn.

The group determines which Threat the encounter belongs to. The Threat player gets to answer some questions and maybe ask some leading questions to flesh out their vision of the encounter.

They then give an initial description of the encounter.

The rest of the group determines which Aspect player will meet the encounter.

The Aspect player gets to interrogate the fiction of the encounter before they resolve it. Each playbook gives them a list of questions to choose from; this lets the player signal what about the encounter interests them. It also lets them steer the encounter a little: creating openings or weaknesses.

The Aspect player then begins the encounter.

They choose (from a playbook list) how the People meet the encounter, and then draw on their earlier questions and the established resources of the People to describe what that looks like.

The Aspect player asks the Threat player if their course of action works. There are no mechanics for this; the Threat player considers what was described and what they know about the encounter and answers according to what seems fair and truthful.

IF the course of action works completely, the People win something.

IF the course of action works at a cost, the People win something and lose something.

IF the course of action doesn’t work, the People lose something and then the Aspect player has to choose a new course of action.

Whenever things are won or lost, the Aspect players gets another player to choose them;  (either off a playbook list or from scratch, as that player chooses).

So, there it is!

We now have five basic moves that are going to part of every Aspect playbook-

• One that determines the investigative questions you can ask
• One that determines the courses of actions you can take for resolution
• One that determines what may have been lost
• One that determines what may have been won
• One that establishes some fictional resources the People have access to through this Aspect

and then choices that design the encounter that occurs when the People reach their destination.

There needs to be a clear trigger for what sets off the encounter at the destination: at this point, I’m thinking that the game happens over the course of an in-fiction year.

Each month, there may be one or two encounters (at the players’ discretion) and once they come to the twelfth month the next encounter involves their destination and what happens there rather than the normal deck of prompts.

I loved the chapter on little cultural details that John Harper wrote for Blades in the Dark, so I might do something similar with the months and their traditions of the main rules sheet.

That’s about all for today, I think.

I’m currently halfway through drafting the Aspect playbooks, and things are looking promising. I’ll probably post some of that next time around, along with some thoughts about what the template of the Threat playbooks should be.

And then there’s the question of the encounter prompts…

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If you'd like to support me to keep creating material like this and working on other RPG/game-design projects, check out my Patreon to help me do more cool stuff and get access to monthly Q&As, early-access playtesting of my story games, or a place on the credits list for any game I make).

GMing for Children #1: Abstract Resources & Tangible Objects

The first time I picked up a set of dice and rolled up a character, I was 9 years old. The first time I got a taste of GMing I was 13.

For the last 7 and something years, since the age of 16, I’ve been employed as a professional GM for children and young people at a business that uses roleplaying to teach history, teamwork, problem-solving, and empathy.

Suffice then to say that I have some experience GMing for children.

How to introduce kids to RPGs is a perennial topic in the hobby, but it seems to be one that’s picked up traffic in recent years.

The original generation/s of roleplayers are now of an age to have children, and for those children to be old enough to read, and do addition and subtraction, and hold a conversation, and possess all those basic human skills necessary for roleplaying.

And so, of course, there is now a generation of kids being introduced to roleplaying by their parents.

Children are natural roleplayers already: they take on other roles and characters as easily as they breathe, they have a near limitless capacity for invention, their imaginations are boundless and creative beyond many artists and authors I know.

But while they have a natural inclination towards roleplaying, they are still children.

Certain aspects and demands of roleplaying games are difficult for them; certain skills required of players rely on patience and focus they may not yet have.

In order for kids to have the best possible experience as they’re introduced to roleplaying games, it helps to adjust some techniques and reassess some assumptions. That way the GM knows what to expect, and the players aren’t confronted by demands for which they aren’t yet developmentally prepared.

One of the major issues I’ve noticed over the years is children struggling with the abstractness of RPGs.

There is a lot of resource management in most RPGs, from the near-ubiquitous concept of hit points/health/similar equivalents, to the concept of spell slots or abilities limited per day in D&D (due to its popularity, the most common RPG used to introduce kids to gaming).

And these resources, in the default form of most games, are entirely abstract.

They are written down, tracked only in numbers and in the head of the player, and their proportional relationship – that hit was half of my HP, using a spell is a third of my resources – is intangible.

Children, particularly those between 7 and 10 (the main demographic I GM for) don’t do well with abstractness and intangible numbers.

They happily take hit after hit during fights, but are visibly shocked when eventually they look down and see they’ve only got 5 hit points left. They conserve all their spells slots through the day just in case and never end up spending them, or else blow them all on the first dice-roll of the day despite being warned they won’t get to rest and get them back.

The grasp on these numbers – of hit points, of spell slots, of limited-use abilities – necessary to manage them effectively eludes children, because in a very literal way these numbers aren’t real to them.

They can’t see them, they can’t count them as real things, they can’t touch them or feel them.

And so, I’ve found, the answer is to turn abstract resources into tangible objects.

Give them something that they can touch, and count in a way that’s sensory and meaningful. Give them something that they can visually identify is only half of what they started with, or a third, or a quarter, or only one left. Give them something that lets them understand the gravity of using a limited resource, or lets them feel the impact of losing an amount of hit points.

Give them coloured toothpicks for hit points that they have to snap as they lose them.

Give them spell-tokens, shiny and magical-feeling, that they must expend to use their arcane powers.

Give them cards for limited-use abilities, and better yet put the rules on them in child-friendly form.

You could even go so far as to make specific tokens for each type of thing they can do in a combat (a Movement, an Action, a Reaction) and reissue them at the start of each new round.

(There are already some games for adults that do this transformation of abstract resource into tangible objects brilliantly: filling in the Harm clock in Apocalypse World, turning a dice from side to side to track increasing insanity in Cthulhu Dark, using poker chips to track Trust tokens in the Mountain Witch, everything about the resolution mechanics in Dread and Ten Candles. Look to these games for inspiration.)

Make resources tangible. Make them meaningful.

Make them visceral, if you’d like and you think it will enhance the experience.

(The toothpick idea above is one attempt to do just that.)

Kids are more than capable of giving you some of the greatest RPG experiences of your life, and it’s an incredibly rewarding feeling to watch them create their first characters and let their imaginations flourish and run wild.

All you have to do is rethink some assumptions, give them a hand, and watch them fly.

(Find this post useful/interesting? Enjoy the content I'm putting out on this blog? 

If you'd like to support me to keep creating material like this and working on other RPG/game-design projects, check out my Patreon to help me do more cool stuff and get access to monthly Q&As, early-access playtesting of my story games, or a place on the credits list for any game I make).

Across the Endless Sea: Structure and Game Resolution (#2)

(Across the Endless Sea is a storygame I’m writing, blogging the process here to entertain and hopefully get some advice/feedback. For the introductory post that lays out the design goals of the project, look here).

So, what does Across the Endless Sea look like as an actual game? This is the first and most important question that needs answering.

Every other mechanic and piece of writing must flow from this basic place: What is the structure of the game, and what is the resolution mechanic?

Let’s begin with structure.

Some years ago, I read Avery Alder’s Dream Askew: a GMless hack of Apocalypse World that presumes a slower-motion apocalypse and the formation of alternative and queered societal models to cope with this advancing frontier of weirdness and apocalyptica.

I haven’t yet got a chance to play it, but one thing stuck with me: players with multiple Playbooks to run.

In Dream Askew, every player is running two Playbooks at once: a character (slightly different from the normal AW list, but essentially similar) and a part of the world’s apocalyptic state.

The fictional tapestry controlled by the GM in Apocalypse World is carved up and parceled out among these “GM Playbooks” that give narrative authority over the aspect they describe: the world’s Psychic Maelstrom; a Warlord leading other survivors, violent and opportunistic; Grotesques and their cultists and believers.

Every player controls an aspect of the world and generates antagonism that originates from that thing. Every player controls a character who can confront the aspects of the world’s badness, except for one.

(Sidenote: The idea of making thematic statements by pre-determining these links is an interesting one. Whoever plays the Gunlugger must also play the Maelstrom; guns have no power over the bleeding psychic hole at the heart of the world. Whoever plays the Brainer must also play the Warlord; psychic fuckery cannot stop a soldiers well-led and armed with bullets. But this is a thought for another time…).

So: in Across the Endless Sea each player controls an Aspect of the People whose journey we tell the story of and a Threat of the Endless Sea upon which they travel.

This idea has been part of the game since very early on. One of the earliest things I wrote was:

• One set of them [Playbooks] represent the Aspects of the People (that’s what they call themselves). You might be the Heart of the People, the Hands of the People, the Eyes of the People, the Memory of the People, etc.. Your sheet offers choices that define some of the cultural practices and values of the People, and your Moves provide ways to interrogate the fiction regarding things that the Endless Sea presents and ways to overcome them.
• One set of them [Playbooks] represent the Threats of the Endless Sea. You might be the Weather of the Endless Sea, the Tides of the Endless Sea, the Islands of the Endless Sea, the Dwellers in/on the Endless Sea. Your sheet offers choices that define the environmental aesthetic of the game and the world the People move through. Your moves provide ways to flesh out and elaborate the randomly-generated prompts for what the Endless Sea presents, and establish challenges for the People to overcome.

As mentioned in the text above, inherent also in the design of the game has been the idea that the encounter that the People have on the Endless Sea are drawn at random from a deck of prompts.

There is a Twitter account that I dearly love called @str_voyage, a bot that generates an “endless nautical story” using random procedural generation.

The content it produces doesn’t always make sense, but more often than not is evocative and provokes the imagination. If a simple bot can produce coherent consistent story using procedural generation, I’ve always wondered, what could a table of creative and cooperating players do with a similarly-limited set of basic building blocks as their source material.

All that being said, then, here is the basic structure of the game:

1. There are playbooks for the People and for the Endless Sea. Each player runs one of each.
2. The structure of the game involves a series of encounters, prompts for which are drawn from a deck.
3. One player, controlling a suitable Threat, fleshes out the encounter.
4. One player, controlling a suitable Aspect, leads the People in confronting the encounter.

This is basically all there needs to be. 

I have an idea that there’ll be some special mechanics for the end-game, when the People arrive wherever they’ve been going, but the overwhelming majority of the game’s rules and play are going to rest on having these encounters.

What do these encounters look like, mechanics-wise? Here’s the current draft:

1. Time passes, triggering an encounter
2. An encounter card is drawn
3. The group determines which Threat the encounter belongs to
1. The Threat player should get to answer some questions (define some things) and ask some leading questions (force others to define some things)
4. The group determines which Aspect player will meet the encounter
1. The meeting of it should be a group effort; the lead Aspect player directs the confrontation, but choices/moves of the others may be involved
5. Mechanics happen – roll dice? draw runes? look at Blades & Sundered Land for inspiration –that resolve how well/badly things go. 
1. Possibly modified by whether the Aspect was a good choice to meet the Threat in question?
6. Consequences occur as a result of the encounter; something is lost, something is gained, something is learned
1. Are these the choices made by other players? Maybe?

Recently I’ve been watching Adam Koebel play Vincent Baker’s forum game A Sundered Land on his Twitch channel (slightly adapted), and a lot of the way this resolution mechanic is shaping up is inspired by that.

I’m loving the way A Sundered Land uses leading questions as a central mechanic: it’s entirely functional, it emphasizes those old AW ideas of “make the world seem real” and “always say what honesty demands”, and it leads towards fiction that is both compelling and non-generic/unique.

Interestingly, it’s the dice mechanic for combat in A Sundered Land that I find least interesting.

The most evocative confrontations in the several games Adam played were when he and Twitch-chat went slightly off-script and forgot about the combat dice.

So maybe the resolution mechanic for Across the Endless Sea should involve no dice or randomization at all.

Hm. A thought to return to in a future post, I think.