Knights of the Triangular Table

 

As many of you have recently, I presume, I have been corrupted by Mythic Bastionland brainrot. There is, by my rough calculation, at least one day's worth of content from Chris McDowall himself explaining things about Mythic Bastionland on YouTube split between his own channel and the PlusOneEXP channel. Having been sucked into the Fantasy Life sequel recently and being unable to do less than two things at one time or my brain explodes, I've had a lot of time to absorb this content which has been riveting but unfortunately it has solidified the brainrot and that means I have to make a blog post so I can go back to my life.

Give Us This, Our Knightly Brainrot

Around the time I started watching all of McDowall's deep dives, I also saw Caleb Zane Huett posting on Blooski about wanting to play knight games and getting sucked into Pendragon and Mythic Bastionland. Now, seeing Caleb talk about what he wanted out of knight-focused games combined with the literal day's worth of hearing Chris McDowall talking about the inspirations and mechanics of Mythic Bastionland got me thinking about a few things I'd never really stopped to consider before since I'm not really any kind of Arthurian scholar:

1. The Knights of the Round Table are really weird. Like, really weird. Like, possessed of superpowers that make almost no sense for anyone to have.

2. The thing that solidifies myths as myths is in the power of the telling - that is to say, the specific iteration of a myth might be mutable or adapted from region to region, but the broad strokes of the story are going to remain the same no matter who tells it.

3. The thing about Knights (certainly in Mythic Bastionland, probably in the Arthurian tales) is that broadly speaking, they're just dudes who fight well. Sometimes they're dudes who are invincible or can grow to giant size or shoot lasers from their hands or get really strong, but they're just dudes who are concerned with Doing The Right Thing and Being Honorable.

Hang on a second. Regular Dudes who have some Very Specific Special Powers, can regularly defy death with the power of Plot, and are extremely concerned with a narrative metacurrency which is mainly used in the context of their job and occasionally checked by Deific Powers-That-Be? Why does that sound fam-

By God, Triangle Agency agents are knights. It's knights all the way down.

(Hang on to Point 2 though, we'll come back to that.)

HWÆT

"Now hang on," you say, "you can't just overgeneralize two games as well as an entire category of story you've just admitted you have no background with and point to them all and go 'It's the same thing!'" Well, first off, yes I can, you've just seen me do it. But second off, the reason I point to all of this is because I think that that not only does Mythic Bastionland have some procedures that can fill in some gaps in Triangle Agency's encounter/campaign design, I also think that these games are both playing around in the same metanarrative space despite being wildly different genres and it can be helpful to examine them both.

I'm going to try to talk about this as sensically and concisely as I can without just copypasting huge swathes of both rulebooks into this post, but unfortunately I do need to point to a few concepts so you know what I'm talking about. In Triangle Agency, the middle third of the book (that nowhere near enough of you have read, because you followed the instructions not to read it) deals not only with GM tips but also some fundamental background truths of the world of the game that you're supposed to enforce - in other words, while much of the game text is dedicated to encouraging the players to improv and design the world right along with the GM, this part describes a number of failstates for a campaign by way of explicit worldbuilding, thereby setting some guardrails around your game. (By failstate, I mean from The Agency's perspective. That's not to say that triggering these failstates is bad, but rather it functions as another way to let GMs expose the metaplot behind Triangle Agency and choose to either accept or reject the core conceit of the game if they haven't already made that choice.) A big portion of this section is dedicated to understanding how Anomalies work - the threats in this game. An Anomaly is a concept given agency to affect the world, and while Minor Anomalies can be dispatched by hurting them physically, the Major ones (which are the main targets in the game) usually don't just go down by punching them real good - usually you've gotta figure out a trick to them, and this portion talks a lot about this. 

As it turns out, all of these principles map directly onto the Myths in Mythic Bastionland. Just like Anomalies, Myths have their own spheres of influence, portents of their arrival, and while some of them are concrete monsters that can be overcome quite a lot of them are just oddities that create situations that need to be dealt with like "The Wall" or "The River." In fact, while the challenges the players need to overcome as well as the basic conceits of the characters themselves overlap quite a bit between both games, Triangle Agency and Mythic Bastionland fit together precisely because they are mostly concerned with giving you procedures to deal with opposite problems: Triangle Agency gives you a largely mutable world with hyper-customizable characters who are given concrete tasks which must be created by the GM using a toolkit to generate new threats; meanwhile, Mythic Bastionland gives you largely immutable characters in a world that must be defined by the GM prior to play and populated from a known list of threats, but then leaves the actual exploration and interpretation of the world up to the players. 

Don't Just Ask A Manifold For Help

Okay, so that's a lot of words to say that these two games are interested in going about vaguely similar premises but approach that concept from opposite vectors. The reason that needed to be so explicit is because having run Triangle Agency a few times at this point, I've found that one thing that the core rulebook and The Vault (a book of pre-written adventures that, with care, can be strung together into a campaign) don't spend a lot of time doing is helping GMs with defining the actual space that players will investigate during the course of their adventure. Triangle Agency is not a game that cares about travel-focused exploration, instead focusing on defining scenes in which action happens, and so that means it can take a little more work than expected when those interstitial parts suddenly need to exist for one reason or another. For some tables, this may be a non-issue - particularly for tables more familiar with more story-based investigation games like the Carved From Brindlewood family of games. Additionally, the fewer things that are defined ahead of time, the more opportunities the players have to shape the world themselves with their powers/the Ask The Agency move, which in turn allows for opportunities to roll dice and generate Chaos and move the plot along that way. 

For other tables though, I think that the "Sites" rules on p. 15 of Mythic Bastionland provide GMs a handy way to conceptualize an investigation space for Triangle Agency - functionally, it provides you with a way to not only loosely physically map a space but also to narratively map story beats (such as features or threats inherent to the space) to provide a visual key to go along with the story. Likewise, I think that mechanizing the distribution of information via travel (i.e. the revealing of Omens) can be helpful when you need something to fall back on to allow the world to reveal information if interacting with NPCs isn't driving the investigation as strongly as you'd hope - this problem is somewhat hinted at in the GM tips section of the Triangle Agency book, but only in the context of if the players have accrued a lot of Loose Ends and the world begins to unravel causing NPCs to become somewhat meta-aware (or The Agency speaks directly through them). 

Some of you might be going "But Adam, travel literally doesn't matter in Triangle Agency when Manifold players can just teleport around/Timepiece players can just bend time so there's no penalty for travel times so why even bother trying to set any kind of map?" A fair question, but it's important to remember that even literal/functionally instantaneous travel is still travel. Both of those things are extremely valid ways to solve narrative problems - using them doesn't invalidate challenges as presented any more than a sword invalidates a monster. You're just using game mechanics to interact with the game world. And that brings me to one other point...

Knights of the Triangular Table

This is mostly revealed in that middle third of Triangle Agency with a little bit scattered around elsewhere, but from The Agency's perspective the biggest threat to reality is the Chaos generated from regular people observing and interacting with Anomalies. All players are playing Resonants, which are regular humans who have bonded with an Anomaly to give them extremely specific powers - and because The Agency has deputized them, they themselves have a very localized exemption on that Chaos issue but still have to be mindful about how much Chaos they cause by (mis)use of their powers around regular people and/or by rogue Anomalies. If you let too much Chaos accrue, your literal game world begins to unravel, and in the intervening time you might be assigned not only to cleaning up your messes but also those of other agents - unless you follow the plot presented by The Urgency, who advises you that Chaos is really just a resource that will lead to a new and better world. (Or you ignore them both and seek the path of Reality, which has Other Outcomes.) Compare this to the metaplot of Mythic Bastionland, a quest that pays off on the conceits of the world going back to Into The Odd - the players are Knights who have been appointed by all-knowing Seers, blessed with very specific superpowers, who must maintain their own realms lest they fall to schemes or revolutions but must ultimately seek enough Glory that they are worthy of embarking on The City Quest: the quest that will establish Bastion, the only city that matters. What I'm saying is, both Triangle Agency and Mythic Bastionland are telling stories of shaping the world and bringing on what at least the characters (and maybe the players) believe to be a bright new future. And if we accept that there's enough overlap between the metaplots and the narrative conceits and the player choices and on and on and on that these games are trying to do the same thing, then I think the only logical realization to come to is that when Caleb said he was hunting for the perfect game to play knights in, he didn't realize that he'd already written it.

So here's what I'd tweak to adjust Triangle Agency to become Knights of the Triangular Table:

• Allow for more lenience on Loose Ends - people have believed all kinds of weird stuff throughout history until science comes in to disprove it, which means that reality is at much less risk of unraveling just because a bunch of peasants saw a weird monster or heard a rumor about a tree that makes you sad if you eat its fruit or whatever. This in turn means a rebalancing of the Weather Events table.
  
  
• There are a lot of adjustments to be made to bring the tech level in line across the various ARC types, but I don't think any of them are wholly incompatible with a different time period. Also, a Newborn could come from the regular world/time of Triangle Agency as a fun little isekai treat.
  
  
• The biggest change would have to be with The Agency itself - both in terms of what it is and what it offers. I feel like corporate culture doesn't necessarily map well onto other historical time periods, but the idea of studying things and bringing realms to order have been around ever since people learned how to learn and to covet their neighbor's goods. To avoid explicit colonialism or imperialism, I would probably flavor The Agency as The Academy - an organization that maintains a Vault of oddities and dispatches its Tainted Knights out into the world to both help catalogue and contain all of these Anomalies and bring Order to the land. Obviously, these Knights have been Tainted by their contact with these Anomalies and venturing out into the land on behalf of The Academy is the only thing that keeps them from being imprisoned in The Vault. If you did want to keep it on a more monarchist route, obviously you'd have to end up calling it The Regency. 
  
  
• The Grand Quest the game could build towards might be capturing (or siding with) The Urgency, which would still be up to its tricks but again due to it being more difficult to generate Chaos since people are much more believing of weird stuff in the world wouldn't be as infinitely powerful of an entity. Perhaps the big moral dilemma for The Urgency could come from the fact that they need The Academy to bring more Order to the world because the more The Academy got people to stop believing in Anomalous things, the more Chaos it would generate by forcibly remind people of its existence. 
  
  
• The Anomaly generation advice still functions perfectly to figure out what Anomalies may be plaguing the towns, forests, and other desolate places the Knights traipse across - just pair it with the hex crawl and omen rules from Mythic Bastionland.

OUTRO

I mention from time to time that I run a bookclub - I had originally called it my Very Secret Bookclub, but I don't think I can anymore since I don't shut up about it. This bookclub is made up of friends of mine, most of whom just like playing games, some of whom interact with the game world more professionally, but all of whom have very specific gaming circles who tend towards very specific games and who never really have the chance to grow their circles. Thanks to my friends trusting me to be a tastemaker, I've now gotten to have a full year of sitting down to chat about games in my backlog I might never have gotten a chance to get to table at all, let alone actually sit down and read no matter how cool I think they are - which includes Triangle Agency, Into The Odd, Electric Bastionland, Mythic Bastionland and a bunch of others. 

What I've found really fun, though, is that by regularly reading and discussing games, my friends and I have been able to not only help develop our own ability to identify things in games we do and don't like but we've also been exposed to whole kinds of design concepts that were outside of our areas of expertise. People forget just how much of gaming culture is ephemeral and insular - things that might be painfully obvious to people who were in the Google+ blog circles 20 years ago are brand new concepts to the person who only just started playing games, or who might have had a group where everyone only played one particular game because that's what the person who liked running games owned, simply because those circles never overlapped. I really encourage you to build this kind of community yourself - if you're someone your friends trust as A Game Person, give them books to read for you all to talk about! If you want to learn more about games different games, seek communities outside of your own - lord knows every publisher has their own Discord these days and each of those Discords has people willing to run games that publisher puts out. We live in a time where the barrier to learning is so much lower than at any point in the past - not completely gone, but definitely lower, and I really encourage people to take advantage of that.

A special thanks to my friend (and member of the Very Secret Bookclub) Krysta for doing the mashup of the Triangle Agency promo art with the Mythic Bastionland cover on extremely short notice. She actually did two versions of my prompt and I couldn't tell which one I liked more, so I'll leave the other variant down here and leave it up to your internet browser to see which version gets pulled in for the thumbnail.

Thanks for reading, please go play knights with your friends.

O! Death

I've been thinking about death a lot lately.

Like, as a mechanic in games, sure, but also because it's the time of year I remember the loss of some of my highschool friends' parents, both of whom who have now been gone from my friends' lives for as long as they were in them. Death in real life is a cruel and uncaring thing - it is rare that someone goes "Yeah, this person died at exactly the right time, we're all happy about it" unless that person was a truly reprehensible person (and even then, we might wish Death had paid them a visit a little earlier on). In roleplaying games, I feel this is why there is often such discourse about the agency of a player in the death of their character - constant cycles of people creating mechanics to let a character escape death, or lamenting how a bad roll can damn a character at a narratively unhelpful time. Why should a character we've invested so much time in die before they get to finish their goals? What's the point of even playing a character who can die to a random goblin poking them in the butt with a spear? On the far opposite swing of that though, you also have folks who play games like DCC who treat character lives as entirely disposable, pumping characters through level 0 funnels and not getting attached to characters until they've "earned" it, if ever.

In life, as in TTRPGs, an unexpected death is generally deeply unsatisfying - particularly for the main party involved. While I am in no way qualified to be a grief counselor, I do think that I'm particularly qualified to talk about RPGs and death mechanics, and if you'll take my hand and walk with me a while, I'd like to help you become okay with the reality of death in your games - and why talking about the expectations of what death looks like in your games might be an important but oft overlooked safety tool to consider bringing up. 

Who Decides Who Dies?

I would argue that essentially every game descended from the tabletop wargaming scene is a game about death. Sure, it might also be about the bard trying to seduce the dragon, but most of the rules of the game are about inflicting death on people. But herein lies the rub - I find many players perfectly willing to dole out death upon their foes, but when it comes to their character (or, more often, their character's pet/animal companion), it's this big no-no - a "what's good for thee ain't good for me" kind of moment, if you will. These players want to retain the agency on who lives or dies at all times in the narrative - and that's okay in some games! But that's something that you need to discuss ahead of time, with all players including the GM. I think the prevalence of this desire to protect one's blorbo stems from something that people don't necessarily think to include in their session zero: if you're playing a game to have a power fantasy, what does that mean to you? And if someone wants to play a game where death isn't on the table for the player characters, an important thing to ask is - does your game even need to be about death? Should you perhaps look to a different game to tell the kind of story you want to tell?

Is Your Game About Death?

The Skeletons, by Jason Morningstar, is at its surface appears to be a game about death. You do, after all, play as skeletons - something known first for its distinct lack of life and secondly for its proficiency at autoxylophonics. I would be willing to bet that most people who actually read or play it, however, would say it's actually a game about life. While you're playing skeletons who have been stationed as tomb guardians, your brief moments of consciousness as you are called to duty to defend your tomb are actually much more about remembering who you are - or were - and coming to terms with that. There is death that your characters inflict - but the how of how that happens is something that the game is largely unconcerned with the specifics of except as to how it affects your character. 

The other thing about The Skeletons is that all players have full agency over life and death in the story - at least, right up until the end, but the game is very clear about how the skeletons are eventually overwhelmed which means that everyone can go into that portion of the game informed and prepared for the end. It sets this up right at the beginning and then gives you three different ways to play the game, letting you dial in the kind of narrative you want to explore. I think this is a game that people who are afraid of having their characters die should play to explore what that actually means and take that experience to reflect against their time in other games.

Betrayed by RNGsus: or, 

The Fallacy of Wanting to Die When It's Narratively Interesting

On the subject of player agency about character death, one of the other big complaints I've heard over the years is "Oh, the dice fucked me! It's stupid that this one random roll killed my character! That sucks!" And like, yeah, congratulations, you're right, dying randomly sucks. However, in this case, what you're saying is "I don't like that I rolled a number that was bad for me" - which is something that is part and parcel with any game where random chance is involved. If you cannot reconcile with the fact that sometimes you will roll numbers that are bad for you, I once again direct you back towards The Skeletons and would gently suggest against buying that bus ticket to Atlantic City. But digging even deeper here, what I personally think that this reaction stems from at its deepest, truest heart, is the feeling that the character's death was pointless. The same folks I see getting bent out of shape about random character death are often the same folks ready and raring to go about making a heroic sacrifice where it counts, which means it isn't the dying part that's the issue but rather that they 1. didn't have agency in it and 2. the death didn't meaningfully affect the narrative, it just took them out of the game.

While I don't necessarily think the OSR mantra of "Only Roll Dice When It's Important" is a catch-all piece of advice, I DO think that somewhere in the fields between that sentiment and "Character Death Should Only Happen When It's Narratively Important" grows a fruit ready to be plucked, and the name of that fruit is "Make Every Moment Important." If you are playing some kind of heroic fantasy that puts death on the table, consider just making every time where you could die actually matter. Why go through "We got a quest to go burn down that goblin camp and oh man now I'm Big Angy that one of those goblins shot me in the butt and my character died, why do they get to kill me back when I'm killing them >:( " when instead you could have something like "The party needs to go take out a goblin encampment that has been terrorizing a nearby city - these goblins have been killing everyone and stealing their stuff, and the only way to free this town from the terror of this menace is a decisive victory. If they can do it, they'll ensure this town lives on for another generation - if they fail, both the townsfolk and the party's lives are surely forfeit." It's the same story - but in the second version, the stakes are more clearly set. It's not "randomly" dying - the party knows the stakes going into it, and their actions will impact the story of the game world whether they live or die.

There's a corollary to this too, which is that I think that people get too afraid of losing their character because they have a bunch of specific goals in mind, whether that's because they built a big backstory for that character or because they've got some other thing they want to work out through that character. I used to be this kind of player, to be clear, especially deep in my D&D days. What I would hope that people who play like this might consider is that just like in real life, your character's legacy can continue on in the story even if they're not alive! If you made Your Original Character Blonan The Barbarian whose family was wiped out by a warlord and on whomst he swore revenge but gets killed before he can mete out justice on the edge of his blade, consider the fact that that warlord still exists in the game world. Talk with your GM! If you were really married to this storyline, a good GM will likely find a way to keep it relevant in the game world - because spoiler, if you put in the effort to do good worldbuilding, you've saved your GM the effort of coming up with things! Helping lighten the load for your GM's prep is almost always a good thing! And how cool will that be when your party strikes this warlord down and your GM gives you a Jojo's Bizarre Adventure-esque cutscene with your old character looking down from the clouds, giving the party a thumbs up and then disappearing as they can finally move on?

When You Die In Game, You Do Not Die In Real Life

I've been playing a lot of "Play To Lose" games recently. In the last few months, I've been in one shot APs of Trophy Dark and Inevitable, I was on a three part promo series for the recent Hellwhalers crowdfunder, and I've been running a lot of Mothership for my friends (I got the taste for it after playing it for my first ever AP series back before 1e dropped). These are all games that are all up front about how bad things are going to get for your character. Survival is possible, but unlikely. The interesting part is playing to see how far you can get with them before they get got. I mentioned DCC's funnel system at the beginning of this for a similar reason - there is a certain style of play which much more strongly emphasizes that the activity you are performing with your friends is a game and not just sitting around telling stories with your buddies. Your character is merely the way that you interact with the game world - and while all of those games encourage you to put as much effort into those characters as you'd like to, the words MEMENTO MORI might as well be carved into your character sheets. 

When death is inevitable, I find that this allows players to be much freer with how they play their characters - making much bigger swings, doing more bombastic things because they know that their time in this world is limited. You might not get another chance to do something wild, so why not do it now? Every thing you do brings you closer to your inevitable end, so why not have some fun and save the world along the way, right? I take no responsibility for how much of that apply to your real life and choices thereof, but I DO think that taking that philosophy into your gaming table will lead to much more interesting games. If you've made your peace with the fact that your character can die, then rather than playing cautiously and protecting them so that maybe they'll reach the end, you can do things like make absolutely wild choices that you and your friends will be talking about long after the game ends. So what if you burn through five characters over the course of an eight year campaign if each of those characters goes out in a blaze of glory - or doing something hilariously stupid like rolling to seduce The Tarrasque? (Arguably still a blaze of glory, depending on what happens and who's arguing.) You just have to reframe your "win" condition, and remember that a character dying is not some kind of moral failing or slight against you the person - you are not your character, no matter how much of a self-insert they may be.

Outro

My roller derby friends will, somewhat jokingly, sometimes say that if you're not playing hard enough to get fouls, you're not playing hard enough. This isn't because they all have infinite bloodlust and a desire to hurt people - it's that if you're not playing to find the limits of how hard you CAN play, you don't know what you're missing. And yeah, sometimes you make a big play and you catch a foul - but sometimes you make that big play and everything is just fine and that puts you WAY farther ahead than you were! 

My point here is that you shouldn't fear the threat of death if you're playing a game with death on the table - you should just endeavor to do everything you can to make any situation in where someone might die be interesting enough that it doesn't feel boring if it happens. And, much like playing roller derby, if you're not comfortable playing a game where you might get hurt then you can and should consider a different game - which is fine, because there are many, many games that can and will cater to the story you're trying to tell. You just need to be able to articulate what kind of game you want to play with your friends.

A Day With Jay Dragon's Wizard Madness Simulator: 7 Part Pact

The Seven Part Pact is a roleplaying game

The Seven Part pact is a LARP

The Seven Part Pact is will get you into astrology

The Seven Part Pact is a series of minigames

The Seven Part Pact is an examination of societal power structures

The Seven Part Pact is a cognitohazard

The Seven Part Pact is Jay Dragon's Wizard Madness Simulator

    If you're a particular kind of RPG sicko, or if you follow the Possum Creek Games Patreon, you may have heard rumblings from some TTRPG creators over the last few years joking about interacting with Jay's new game and then catching Wizard Madness, suddenly becoming unable to articulate how when pressed directly but being very vehement that The Seven Part Pact had consumed their mind. Surprisingly, given how many people I know have played a version of the game so far, there is frighteningly little written about the game that is publicly available: Rascal has a post about it, but it's only available to the higher tier monthly subscribers. Darling Demon Eclipse has a four episode playtest preview up on her YouTube channel which is at this time currently the only way to see how the game might be played, and of course at the time of this article the version of the game they played had been out of date for some time meaning you may only glimpse a shadow of the current shape of Wizard Madness as it exists today. No, indeed the potentially the only quickly digestible way to learn anything about The Seven Part Pact would be to read Dwiz's recounting of his Shapeshifter's Duel with Jay Dragon directly - a duel in which I attended, sat upon the Celestial Council, and helped shape Dwiz's ultimate fate.

    My friends, I too have the Wizard Madness, and I'm going to do my best to make sure you catch it.

What Does A Day of Wizard Madness Entail 

    7PP (which will be how I refer to the game for the rest of this) is an unholy marriage of one of the genre of LARP-adjacent boardgames and a TTRPG. The rules of the game are spread across seven zine-length character-specific rulebooks accompanied by their own individual boardgame, plus a main rulebook and a Grimoire which contains the spells available to you at start of play. If that sounds like a lot to interact with - it is! But the good news is that the game is structured in such a way that you really need to only care about what's in your specific rulebook, because everyone is working together to ensure that everyone knows the parts of the rules that are relevant for whatever comes up during the course of play. It's fascinating, because you can go an entire game having no idea what anyone else is actually doing outside of what they tell you about in any scenes that you have together, and yet a small thing that happens in a single scene may cause ripple effects across everyone's corners of the game and when that happens the veil gets pulled back and you get to see how the whole machine fits together.

Months of Wizardry

    In terms of what actually happens in gameplay, an Orrery is set up that tracks the location of the planets across the sky. This is updated each month (or if a Wizard uses their power to modify it), and the location of the planets and the Sun as they move across the map of the astrological houses have different kinds of impact on everyone's board state and upon the ability to cast magic itself. Everyone takes a moment to update their board state at the beginning of each month, and then they are given several tokens that they can use to indicate how they will spend their time that month: Will they spend time with their family or loved ones in order to gain a bonus to their ability to cast spells? Will they spend it interacting with their board game, harvesting resources or preventing societal collapse or maintaining trade routes? Perhaps they will spend the time visiting another Wizard to discuss their wizardly affairs and cast spells? This phase is both the longest part of each month of game time and also where all the best bits happen, because you will very quickly see exactly how shakily the world holds itself together and how little time you have to act to stop it - and where you get to roleplay as your horrible little magic blorbo with everyone else. And you just keep doing this while the world hastens towards destruction and Wizards begin fulfilling their ultimate, secret destinies.

A Council of Wizards, A Celestial Audience

    As many of Jay's games are, this game both is and is not GM-less. It is, insofar as you are largely responsible for your own boardgame and managing your own affairs through play. It isn't, however, because in any scene in which you are not an active participant (or if all Wizards are present and you are called on to assist) you assume the role of the Celestial Audience - essentially, you're there to provide rules adjudications as they come up throughout the scene as they pertain to what your Wizard is responsible for, or sometimes broadly. For example, the Sorcerer maintains both the Lore of the setting as well as tracking the current stability of magic across the setting, meaning that if someone were to cast a spell from a school that had fallen out of balance then it would be the Sorcerer's responsibility to warn them of the consequences, and has final say on rulings where the results of magic would be ambiguous. The Celestial Audience is also how you make sure that a room full of people doesn't devolve into side conversations and chit-chat - even if everyone isn't the focus of the scene happening, they may still have important context to add to it. 

What Can 1001 Imps Do For You?

        You may have noticed I haven't really talked about casting spells in this game where you are Wizards doing Wizard things which should, ostensibly, be about casting spells right? Herein lies the real "What Are We Even Doing Here" of it all: this game is about seven men who have incalculable power and use it to enforce their will upon the world while everyone hopes that they will do the right thing when the time comes. Most of the Wizards present could play the game without casting a spell at all, which is something that the Lore of the game even touches on - most of the Wizards do surprisingly mundane things in their own domains: The Mariner maintains shipping routes and keeps tabs on pirates and giant beasts in the world; The Sorcerer removes unsanctioned magic users from the realm and keeps the traces of magic corralled to innovate on magic itself; The Warlock basically just gets to play Game of Thrones off in their little corner; The Necromancer travels around banishing the souls of the dead so that they don't get out and cause havoc; The Hierophant functions as a religious leader that mostly tends to the needs of the people; The Sage simply exists to guide the world back into equilibrium and guide the other players towards their fates. Only The Faustian has an immediate call to potentially use magic - because they deal directly with The Literal Actual Devil (less the Christian concept of The Devil, more of the folkloric trickster Old Scratch) and both try to curtail The Devil's schemes while also kind of acting as a foil to The Sage by trying to get other people to act in certain ways.

    But the thing is, the call of power is a loud one, and sometimes you really, really don't want to do something the hard way. Sometimes, you just want to Summon 1001 Imps to solve a problem for you, and that's where it gets ya - because the moment you begin interacting with magic, the moment everything goes off the rails in ways you will not be able to predict. That's not to say complications won't arise in other ways - but once you start using magic to solve your problems the only way to solve the problems that those problems cause is with more magic, and you're gonna keep doing it until you figure out how to stop. 

A Play Report, Of A Sort

    I agree with Dwiz in that trying to produce a full and accurate play report of our game would likely be unhelpful and boring to read. I would, however, like to hit some of the high points of the day - and I do mean a day, because it was a huge nine-ish hour long marathon session - starting with the Wizards In Attendance:

-myself as The Sorcerer

-Dwiz as The Warlock

-Jay as The Sage

-Natalie as The Faustian (and also host of the event, for which we are eternally thankful)

-Alan as The Necromancer

-Cass as The Hierophant (who very graciously agreed to play last minute, and who we are eternally thankful for)

-Simone as The Mariner

    Aside from Jay, everyone other than Natalie was coming to this game completely fresh (Natalie had previously played a game as a different flavor of Wizard). It was very nice to have Jay acting as our Facilitator for this because I think that we may have been quite lost with the intricacies of our individual boardgames. In terms of gaming backgrounds, I feel like we had a good spread between folks with more trad game backgrounds and those who focused more (or exclusively) on the LARP side of things, and I think everyone did an amazing job both in and out of character. This is very much a game that encourages people to jump in and play NPCs as they become relevant and to pass them around troupe-style which I think we did to great effect - me and Alan each got a time to be The Devil, and an NPC knight named Sir Gabriel showed up early on but ended up gaining more importance each time a new person played him. Because the in-game timeline was only about three months, we didn't get a whole lot of time to see the impact of what we were doing boardgame-wise, really with The Mariner and The Warlock's games being most visibly relevant to the narrative - but then, that's also kind of the point, because the more time each Wizard dedicates to solving issues in their own domains, the less visible any of those problems become to the rest of the Wizards.

    There were some really stand-out character moments: because misogyny and The Patriarchy are core themes that this game deals with, the scene where Natalie and Cass got to get together and be like "Hey yeah actually we're both women and we're both cool with that and also The Sage is going to try to use this to destroy us" got to be way more important and cool than I can render in words. Any time someone got to have a scene with Jay was moving - in the setup of the game, after Jay had told us that her character was still a teenager and suspected that one of us had killed her character's master, the previous Sage, we all just kind of collectively agreed that we all cosigned that and had picked this kid to serve as a patsy to make sure we had a full seven Wizards to maintain The Pact, and boy howdy let me tell you that would already be enough reason for some intense roleplaying if it wasn't also for the fact that Jay was trying to manipulate all of us to achieve our destinies which had an impact on the outcome of the stability of the world. 

    For my part in all this, I had two big scenes - once, where Simone and I agreed that it would be good for The Mariner to cast a spell to try to beautify the plants at a junkyard we had met at only to have the complications for that spell cause the fruits of that plant to become poisonous, which The Celestial Audience decided would mean that while not too many people immediately died from eating that fruit, it did end up getting bottled into wine which was then sent to the wedding of the princess which caused ALL KINDS of issues for The Warlock and The Hierophant for the rest of the game. Another time, speaking of The Hierophant, early on an NPC occultist appeared in Cass' realm which I needed to go deal with and decided that I would spend my monthly Big Time RP Scene to find this heretic, descend from the heavens and stab him to death to eliminate him as a problem in this realm - only to find out that there are actually combat mechanics in this game and suddenly and unexpectedly have to figure out how to strike this man down without killing a bunch of civilians with magic. (I did try turning him into a pillar of salt, for the bit, but sadly he resisted.) This in turn caused enough chaos that I would end up dealing with the RP consequences of that for the rest of the game - but lemme tell ya, it was cool as hell.

    Actually, I'm gonna take a second to expand out that fight because it has a lot to do with Dwiz's duel with Jay which he described in his blog post I linked up near the top, and which you should really go read. I was not expecting this game to have combat mechanics. I had seen The Shapeshifter's Duel spell and knew that that was an option for Wizardly Battling, but I figured mundane violence would be abstracted. Not so! Essentially, you end up establishing a number of Things That Are True about you and the person you are fighting, and then it just goes back and forth - either you attack them, and they parry with something they have (which could be as nebulous as "You cast a lightning bolt at me, and I command your bodyguard to jump in front of it), or else you try and destroy some of the Things That Are True about them so that they have nothing left to defend with. I quickly realized that this both incentivizes being very thorough about prepping for Doing Violence, but also that especially if a Wizard is involved and tried to bring magic into it that things will go out of hand extremely quickly. I was very lucky that my attempt to Petrify this occultist into a pillar of salt failed - had it not, the complications would have been such that the effect would have spread elsewhere in the temple, potentially affecting innocent people and going beyond the battlefield itself. Ultimately, I drove the Occultist away, but had we played for longer he may have come back to be a particular problem.

    

Final Wizardly Musings

    7PP is a game that is unabashedly and openly about confronting the expectations of masculinity and how that plays into global power structures. Through this, you can explore gender, famine, unjustness and how much it sucks that a small number of weird men rule over us all in ways that are sometimes hard to understand until it is too late. The thing is though, at one point Jay told us that her character could "either be a good person, or good at the game." And that really is what it boils down to - because let me tell you, if you want a power fantasy? You can absolutely indulge in a power fantasy. Do you want to create a world-ending beast? Do you want to summon long-dead wizard kings to do your bidding and reshape the world? Do you want to ascend beyond what the game is asking you to do and attempt Apotheosis? Do you just really, really want to summon 1001 imps? You can do all of these things and many, many more. Our playthrough didn't even touch on half the mechanics available in the game because we were on such a tight timer - there were things we could have researched, we could have gone beyond the Isles of Isha out to other parts of the world to bring back hidden knowledge, we could have had to fight Sick-Ass Undead Dudes Who Cause Problems On Purpose. This game is truly infinite in a way that a lot of RPGs are not but reigns that in by giving you a number of things on your individual boardgame that you HAVE to care about. You can't just explore everything and do everything - if you do, your realm will fall to chaos and hasten the end of the world. You have to care about your community - if you act selfishly or carelessly, you will doom the world so you can get what you want.

    If you, dear Wizard, have a chance to partake of the Seven Part Pact, I would offer you these warnings:

-If you come to this game with your own agenda, you will be foiled.

-If you come to this game to cause mischief, great ruin will be visited upon you.

-If you come to this game to do great deeds, know that everything has a cost - whether it is immediately visible to you or not.

And finally: if you find a problem that Summoning 1001 Imps cannot solve, I recommend you summon another 1001 imps.

Stay wizardly out there.

Don't Make A Journey Without Knowing Where The Road Leads: Ryuutama & Wanderhome

 tl;dr

    It seems somewhat counterintuitive to drop this at the beginning since it goes about trying to prove my point via blunt force trauma, but perhaps that's the best place to start: I don't think people read critically anymore. Whether due to lack of time, willingness to commit, or just atrophied critical thinking skills, by and large I think that the average TTRPG enjoyer does not take the time to read TTRPGs anymore and therefore will turn to community commentary on a game - which is inherently neither a good or a bad thing, but one that I do believe often leads to misconceptions about games as they must necessarily be filtered through other people's biases before they come to you. 

    The good news is, I think these are all things that can be counteracted. If you're willing to come take a journey with me, then I think I can lead you onto the path towards understanding games better. As luck would have it, there are two games about journeys that I often see conflated that we can thereupon practice our critical reading skills: Ryuutama by Atsuhiro Okada; and Wanderhome by Jay Dragon. This may be setting off alarm bells for some of you - specifically, because Wanderhome is so often recommended in the same context as Ryuutama, incorrectly. To be honest, I don't think anyone but Jay has ever pitched me one of Jay's games properly - that's a blog post for another time, but I think we have to do this one first.

Some Context

    While my current job doesn't quite afford me the privilege of unfettered access to the deluge of podcasts that I once had, I've spent the better part of the last three years mainlining TTRPG review podcasts, and the better part of the last decade consuming (and occasionally being a part of) TTRPG actual plays. Before that, the most common ways I heard about other games were from the experiences of my friends playing games. Since entering the world of games professionally, I've run a lot of games for people at cons who were not in my immediate friend group, often by having to rapidly onboard myself to a system I'd never read. I've also taken to working through my TTRPG backlog by way of forcing coercing cajoling curating and gently encouraging a very specific group of my friends to read through games with me as an act of play in and of itself, and perhaps most relevantly to this blog I also contributed to a Ryuutama zine this year! All of this is to say that I feel like I am a pretty reliable resource to make the kinds of claims I'm going to make in this post, but since part of the point of this post is learning to examine biases both of yourself and others, I feel like this is an important thing to include here! Ultimately, I am just some sicko on the Internet, just as you are. Suffice it to say that the advice I'm about to present is ALSO useful for evaluating this very article as you read it, so feel free to chug a Monster Zero and get that brain meat jiggling.

Pattern Recognition & Data Synthesis

    I do not think it is a particularly hot take to say that we humans love us some good old fashioned pattern recognition. We love to associate things with things we already know - it makes the world more digestible, and being able to assign context to new situations allows us to function. A lot of the time, this kind of data serves us well enough to get by - so much of the time, in fact, that it becomes very easy to just rely on this with no further consideration to the conclusions we jump to. Not to belabor a very obvious point here, but like, just going off of this data is kind of exactly the situation we run into with both AI and hurtful stereotypes of all kinds - if you don't consider the data you have received and just take it at its face value, you've done at the very least yourself a disservice and depending on what position of authority you hold to other people, that disservice may become damage to many other folks.

    As much as I would love to make my English degree worth more than the paper it was printed on by way of explaining all the ins and outs of how to synthesize data and evaluate sources, that would make this blog as long, dry, and interesting to read as a CVS receipt so I'm going to skip around a bit: You have, almost certainly, heard of primary and secondary sources. In the context of what we're looking at here, a primary source would be an RPG text itself, whereas a secondary source would be a review of a game. Blog posts by the creator of the game about the game itself are kind of a nebulous area outside of these two classifications - they are technically primary sources, but can sometimes be secondary sources depending on the content - especially as it starts bleeding out into author interviews, etc. It's not really important right now that we categorize this thoroughly, but I need you to have at least this as a starting point for where we're going so that you're thinking about how tightly tied to the core concept of a game a source may be. It may be more helpful to you to consider things as a spectrum of direct and indirect sources - a direct source being the RPG text itself, an indirect source being someone with no relationship to the game voicing their opinions about it, and everything else somewhere in-between. 

    So. You, dear reader, likely have sources you like to go to for content about games. You might just talk to people on Discord about it, or you're reading horror stories on Reddit, or you're watching nerdy-ass voice actors play the game on Twitch, or you've assembled a group of friends to talk about games in person, or maybe you like to listen to a pair of disembodied hands flipping through a game and talking about the ways a game may or may not be compatible with the owner of those hands' own game system. Whatever floats your goat - but the point is, these are all functionally secondary sources to the actual text itself. These are extremely valuable resources, each in their own ways, but each with their own pitfalls as well. For a brief and noncomprehensive list, here's some hits:

Watching/Listening To People Play On A VOD/Podcast

• Pros: Getting to see the actual gameplay mechanics at work; being able to see a demonstration of how the game actually works; getting a good idea of pacing and timing for when to do certain things in the game; learning what parts do and don't chafe that group to potentially plan for those things in your own group
  
  
• Cons: Gameplay made As Content (TM) is often heavily edited not presenting an accurate depiction of how a game plays at the table; differing levels of skill as performers vs your home group; unclear what things are houserules that group has implemented vs what is in the text; otherwise unrealistic expectations of how easy or difficult the game is to pick up as a player/GM

Forum Posts

• Pros: extremely accessible; easily see multiple viewpoints on a topic; people motivated to speak on a subject in a forum are almost certainly passionate about that topic
  
  
• Cons: inevitable and extreme bias; unable to tell if people are voicing original thoughts or parroting things they've heard elsewhere without interacting with the game at all

Online Reviews

• Pros: someone has taken the time to thoughtfully lay out their reaction to a game; biases are often disclosed and repeated entries may allow savvy consumers to predict how a reviewer may interpret something; often presented in an easily digestible form to deliver information quickly
  
  
• Cons: potential for unethical journalism; obvious bias may prevent accurate coverage of a game; people who do not like a game often do not give it the same kind of care and coverage of a game that they do enjoy whether they take pains to mitigate their bias or not

Reading and Playing a Game With Your Friends

• Pros: You are directly digesting the text as intended; you and your group will form your own decisions based on your own experiences
  
  
• Cons: Cognitive load for learning a new system; conscious and unconscious biases may prevent you from enjoying the game before giving it a fair shake; nerds are afraid of change and attempting to get them to learn a new game rather than just play the thing they already like may provoke nerd rage

    In a perfect world, you would do all of these things to fully understand a game. But the thing is, of course, that a lot of the time you're not going to be approaching games from an academic standpoint - sometimes your decade long D&D group has exploded and now you're on the hunt for a new game for that group of friends and have to try and sell them on something new, so you've gotta figure out what to play next with not a lot of time. How do you figure out what a game is actually like, and what do you do when you start playing something and realize it's not what you wanted? And what does all of this have to do with Ryuutama and Wanderhome, or that other thing at the beginning of this article about people not reading?

Natural Fantasy Roleplaying

    To completely jump away for a moment, let's talk about Fabula Ultima. Fabula Ultima is an homage to classic JRPG videogames, and as of March of this year has released three total setting guides to help you dial in the flavor of your story - beyond the content in the main guide, you have the Atlas: High Fantasy for games geared towards epic magical quests to attack and dethrone god, Atlas: Techno Fantasy which is more about the struggles between capitalism corrupting the environment and co-opting natural resources and the people who have to fight back against it (the whole Final Fantasy 7 situation, you know the deal), and most recently Atlas: Natural Fantasy which to quote directly from the DriveThruRPG page "...bring[s] you into worlds deeply permeated by the cycles of time and nature, where young heroes face the consequences of past mistakes and demonstrate that history does not have to repeat itself, creating a brave future of coexistence[.]" Ryuutama is likely the game that got the term "natural fantasy roleplaying" in the ears of gamers in the West, and given Fabula Ultima's definition thereof you could probably argue that Wanderhome fits into this category as well. There are, in fact, a staggering number of similarities between Wanderhome and Ryuutama, some of which are brought up more often than others. Superficially, they are both games with very cute art where you create a group of travelers that are not traditional RPG combatant types, they're both games intended to foster collaboration between the players and GM with a robust set of options for building out towns and festivals and which care heavily about the seasons and how those affect the characters, and most importantly the characters are learning about themselves as they help people along their journey. Less superficially, they're both written by people with backgrounds in teaching and specifically teaching games to newer players meaning that they feature language intended to be easily consumed and with broadly simple character mechanics, plus they're both doggedly committed to making sure that everyone at the tables knows that the journey is the point of playing.

    The issue is, that's where the comparisons basically stop. While both games take great pains to emphasize that they are about telling the story of a journey of people who are just regular folks, Ryuutama still includes combat, meaning that it expects players to interact with the world through violence despite trying to indicate otherwise. Wanderhome all but explicitly forbids violence - the one character able to commit an act of violence must be removed from play immediately after doing so - and predominantly expects players to affect the narrative directly. What this means, then, is that while both games are interested in telling a story of a journey, how each game defines what a journey is is wildly different. 

    The journey you take in Ryuutama is one where your Great Journey is one where you must Accomplish Something and you do so by way of your Skills And Might despite being just a regular person in the world. The story you tell in Ryuutama is quite literally in-game being recorded by a DMPC who will then feed that story to a great dragon, and so wants the characters to Do Great Deeds and push them beyond their normal humdrum life to make sure it's a good story. It's focused on DOING. And once the characters have finished DOING, then they are done, and the journey is over.

    The journey in Wanderhome is just that - a journey. Characters may come and go during the journey. They do still have goals to achieve and can affect the world in material ways, but since violence is not an answer, all the actions your characters can take focus around being present in the moment and practicing compassion. When a character accomplishes a goal, or when it feels appropriate, that character may leave and another may take their place, and the journey continues. Wanderhome is a story of BEING. Wanderhome asks you to BE with the characters for a while - for you to BE the town, to BE the landscape, to BE the NPCs. Wanderhome wants the players simply to BE the journey until they are satisfied and move on, just like the characters they play.

But What Does It All Mean, Basil?

    If you were pressed for time and listened to someone tell you about the basic premise of Wanderhome and Ryuutama and you drew the assumption that they were similar games because they're both nature-focused, travel-focused games with easy-to-learn mechanics, you would be correct - they are both that. However, you would also be completely wrong, because without an understanding of how each of those games want players to interact with the narrative, you cannot understand what each of those games will be. This, I think, is the major issue people have with trying to interact with any new RPG, and why I brought up how frustrating the lack of critical media consumption is - it seems as though people lack anything but the most baseline curiosity, and so when they find out about something new they try and immediately sort that game into a box with things they already know rather than making any kind of attempt to meet the game where it is and see what it actually wants you to do. In some ways, this lack of curiosity also leads to people trying to shoehorn their favorite games into being things that they are not because the intent of the existing mechanics encourages a specific kind of play which usually does not jive with whatever the new intent is which leads to either bad play experiences for everyone or the birth of new game designers, but I feel like that's a drum I beat in every article here  and I don't really need to go into that right now. The point is, people will do literally everything in their power to make assumptions about a game rather than try to figure out what the game actually is, and then are often upset or confused when they find the game is not what they assumed it would be.

    Frankly, I think that sucks. So.

    Let's imagine that spectrum of sources I mentioned earlier for a moment. Let's say someone told you about a game that for whatever reason piqued your interest. You're not sold on it enough to just go out and buy the book and read it, so what do you do? Here's my quick and easy tips:

• If "the book itself" is one side of the spectrum and "random person sharing thoughts about a game" is the other side of the spectrum, start near the middle: try to find an interview with the designer of the game and see what they say the intent of the game is.
  
  
• If you're still interested, go one step to either side of center - moving closer to the text itself would be something like looking up development blogs or other posts by the creator about the game, whereas moving farther away would be something like watching or listening to a one-shot of the game being played.
  
  
• If you've gotten this far and you're still hooked, you can now move to the farthest sides of the spectrum - listen to some people review the game itself, and then go read it.

    AND BEFORE YOU START WITH ME, because I can hear you begin to type furiously across the gulf of space and time, what I did not just say was "you should go spend money on something you don't know if you and your friend group will like." There are so, so many legal ways to get games for free if you cannot or don't feel comfortable purchasing a game. You should check with your local library - if it's a more mainstream release, one that has received at least a paperback or hardback printing, most library systems will have at least a copy or two floating around that you can grab via Interlibrary Loans. If it's an indie game and it has an Itch.io page, I would all but guarantee you that the page for the game either 1. has community copies available or 2. the creator of the game would be willing to send you a PDF for you to read - many creators are just happy people are interested in their work. Speaking of Itch, if you are someone who often purchases the charity bundles that pop up, there's a strong chance you might already have the game you're curious about! And perhaps the most critical thing - you should ask your friends if they have a copy of the game they could let you borrow - or, gasp, since they already own it, ask them what they think! Have them run a game for you, or get them to let you run a game for them!

    This blog post got a little more negative than I would have preferred, but at the end of the day I really just want people to feel comfortable critically evaluating things because it is not materially harder to do than what people are already doing - the only difference is actually thinking about the information you take in and how you feel about it to have your own thoughts. Simply absorbing information is not enough - you do sometimes have to use that piece of soggy bacon between your ears.

    Also, you should go play both Ryuutama and Wanderhome. Ryuutama is a great game to bridge the gap between people used to playing turn-based JRPGs into the world of tabletop RPGs. Wanderhome is a great game to bridge the gap from passive players to active storytellers. Both are great tools for your toolkit - you just have to know when to use them.

Stay weird out there.

What Have I Actually Learned After Escaping The Dungeon(s & Dragons)

 Intro

Context

    If you're new here, the important context for this post is that I played almost nothing but D&D (3.5, then 5e) from the beginning of my time in TTRPGs when I was in highschool (let's say 2005ish) until the time I went to GenCon in 2022. For 15 years, give or take, the Dungeons and Dragons ecosystem was what colored how I saw TTRPGs. There were extremely brief glimpses into other games which were still D&D adjacent - I recall very early on playing the original version of Rolemaster with some grognards at the FLGS, and I had hopped onto (and quickly dropped) Starfinder at its release. I knew ABOUT other games, certainly - Vampire: The Masquerade was that game all the horny weird kids I didn't associate with played (I was the OTHER kind of weird kid, the dual class band/theater kid), Shadowrun was D&D But Cyberpunk, but I had no way to get any of those books and certainly nobody around to play them with.

    Also, quick aside - you're gonna see a lot of links in the rest of this article. None of them are affiliate links, I don't make money from anything, I just want you to have context for what I'm talking about if you find it interesting.

Beginnings of Beginnings

    I don't think I got to play any games at GenCon 2022, but I got to meet a number of my fellow ENnie nominees and learn what they were all about, and that was enough to sell me on quite a few games. I was ahead of the curve on the sea shanty trend, so I was very happy to get my hands on a copy of Shanty Hunters then. My other big purchases were Colostle (a game that I sadly started to flip through and then stopped, which you can read more about in this post), Ryuutama, and the Old School Essentials core set + Halls of the Blood King and The Isle of the Plangent Mage. But it really wasn't until 2023 when I started playing Mothership with my friends at Project Derailed that I really started breaking out into playing other kinds of games. That was also the year I ran Kids on Brooms for Hunters Entertainment at GenCon and ended up meeting Tony Vasinda of PlusOneEXP and learning about the wide world of zine games. When my 8 year long D&D game died in 2024, I knew it was time to start hunting for more. (It also didn't help that I went a little too hard on some crowdfunded games, some of which have wrapped production and have been filling my thoughts as of late, some of them are still on the horizon.) 2024 also marked the year where I started learning about all the blog content I'd missed back from the G+ era and The Forge era of the early 2000s (again, back when I was just getting into RPGs and was fully entrenched in the D&D ecology, shoutout to the Giant in the Playground forums). 

That's A Lotta Words...

Too Bad You Aren't Reading Them

    So like, I get it. You found D&D, or Pathfinder, or one of the other current spinoffs of them and you like to play it and you're like "HELL YEAH BROTHERRR, I'm gonna dedicate all my time getting good at THIS GAME and I'll never need to learn ANYTHING ELSE because my attention span is FINITE." I get it. I was like you, once. The issue is, when you don't venture out beyond the walls of your enclosure, you miss out on how other people are doing things, which means you're missing out on all kinds of inspiration and tools to make your life easier no matter what game you're playing or running. Here are some things I've learned from games that aren't Dungeons & Dragons:

The Clock In San Dimas Is Always Running

    Something I've seen in Yochai Gal's "Beyond the Pale," Micah Anderson & Nate Treme's "The Batrachian Swamps," Brad Kerr's Hideous Daylight  (EDIT: that's what I get for posting late at night, sorry!) and scattered around in watt's "Cloud Empress" books are explanations of the timeline of events of a campaign assuming the PCs don't exist/don't intervene. (Critically, these are for smaller stories - like, one-to-two-shot length, not big massive drawn out campaigns.) Having clear views of what the basic plot of the adventure is means that you've got eyes on the characters' motivations. You don't need to randomly roll encounters as your PCs move around, nor do you have to try to route the characters one way or another. You, as the GM, know the basic plot of what the most important characters in the story want, and so you know where they might be when they players go poking around. Furthermore, you might think that this is just an excuse to railroad the players but personally I find it to be quite the opposite as long as you're not shoehorning that basic plot back in. If, for example, you know that the first day of the story that Bob the Wizard goes to Fantasy Costco to buy a Staff of Plot Importance, but instead the players get to Fantasy Costco first and buy the staff, it's not that the players have ruined the game but rather that you can chart the clear consequences of these actions throughout the rest of the adventure. Maybe Bob the Wizard tries to take the staff from the PCs. Maybe by Bob not having the staff, the big bad guy that's supposed to be released on Day 7 will now stay trapped and instead it will manifest its desires some other way. By having a physical outline of how the plot would go without PC intervention, you can still run the other parts of the simulation in your mind instead of having to randomly bullshit something together at the last minute! It helps!

Only Roll When Failure Is Interesting (But Wait, There's More!)

    One of the things I find in people who played a lot of D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder is that they get rock hard for the extreme simulationism of rolling for every action. "You're climbing the ladder with no time pressure. It's a ladder that will be able to hold your weight and the only way you could fail is by extreme random happenstance. Can you just do it? No! Roll to climb! There's a 5% chance you get a spasm in your back and fall to your death." Now, I think enough time has passed that many of those DMs will glide past the boring parts - unless they're wargamers, in which case, good luck, you're going to roll for every flap of your buttcheek as you do a stealth mission - and this course of action (the skipping past, not the buttcheeks) is something that is made explicit in most games now. Monte Cook's Cypher System games certainly call it out, and I feel like they're the next logical stepping point for people trying to wean off of D&D - between 1. what I refer to as "coupon clipping" where you stack what abilities and items you have at your disposal to numerically try and lower a challenge to 0 which means you don't have to roll for it and 2. the insistence of reducing the mechanics of the system to operate entirely within that system while encouraging you to flavor the actual challenges however you want, if you're playing with a crew who just can't seem to shake the habit of rolling for everything, it provides a mechanized way of going "Ok, it's a Difficulty 1 task. You have a skill that helps. Congratulations, you don't need to roll, can you please stop asking to roll for walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time thankyouverymuch." I think that's a valuable deprogramming tool to teach people the joys of not simulating every single part of the experience.

    What I did not experience until very recently, however, is the idea of not just rolling when failure is interesting, but rather only rolling for what thing is interesting if you fail. This epiphany came thanks to My First Dungeon's interview with Mikey Hamm and Laena Anderson in preparation for this season's game Slugblaster (which Hamm wrote, and which Anderson is a member of the longest running AP podcast of the game, Quantum Kickflip). There's a bit in this interview where they mention the Action Roll, Slugblaster's catch-all "Roll To Do A Thing" roll, and they mention using the Action Roll for things like trying to move your finger two inches to tap your phone because you're tied up, or for things like resolving an entire gang fight. This was, to me, much what I assume it's like to be on those drugs where you experience complete ego death, become one with the universe, and have a brief moment where your consciousness is connected to every other consciousness and suddenly all things become clear. By being willing to go "OK, what part of this interaction is the actually interesting part - is it that you're fighting a giant slug? Or is it that the giant slug is blocking your way to your escape route, so while fighting the slug is a natural consequence of the narrative, the actual interesting part is the challenge it provides as you're escaping?" I think being able to do that kind of in-narrative root-cause analysis to figure out what the actual motivation of the characters in the scene is balanced with what the narrative needs of the players and GM (or Slugmaster, in this case) is absurdly slick, especially considering one of the most consistently frustrating things about D&D (even for people who love the game!) is the absurdly long combats!

Make The PCs' Backstories Matter, But Not Like That

    We all know the stereotypes: Timmy has written a seventy-six page backstory of all the legendary deeds of his Level 1 Ranger which he expects every other player to know and interact with and for the DM to cater to his desire to live out a heroic fantasy; meanwhile, Johnny has scoured the forums for the most optimized build and has exclusively made decisions about his character based on the most mechanically optimal selections - if he bothers to justify anything, it will only be offhandedly in the moment and is generally more interested in playing the build than actually playing a character that engages with the story. I've been both of these people. You probably have too. In fact, there are a number of things that show up in 5e D&D - Backgrounds, Personality Traits, Goals, Bonds, Flaws, the Trinket Table - that actually show up in many other games as well and are extremely impactful to the gameplay experience. But you know how many times I've filled out any of those other than the Background in 5e? Not even once - because only the background is mechanically relevant, and everything else is just sort of there to be a personal reminder to you on how you want to play your character. And that sucks, because other games make that shit the whole point of the character you're playing.

    Chris McDowall's games are probably the easiest thing to point to here - Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, etc all have the very fun and fast character creation that boils in your equipment, your background, and just a little flavor to help inform who your character was right up until the point in their life that you took control of their life as a player. My most direct experience with this was actually  playing Cairn (as GM'd by Joseph R. Lewis) at Gamefacecon a few weeks back - despite me and another player picking the same archetype and thus having the same starting equipment, we both rolled vastly different spells which informed each of our characters' playstyles and personalities and ended up completely different from each other. Cloud Empress' classes and starting packages for each class end up doing a lot of heavy lifting establishing what part of the setting your character might come from and what they would know or care about. And the biggest thing with all of these, in all of these games, aside from teaching you the patience of being okay with random rolls for integral parts of your character, is that none of these are mechanically different enough from any of the other options. Yeah, one option might give you a cooler piece of starting equipment or a little bit more money than another, but the critical thing is that in a lot of these games, that level of granular balance just doesn't matter at the character creation level - you can just be invested in figuring out WHY the character is the way they are, not just WHAT they are in terms of a statblock.

    I would be remiss to have a section about the use of character backstories without bringing up The Between - while you do pick a character archetype, you're specifically forbidden from talking about your character's backstory until you do something which triggers you talking about it - either using a resource to get out of trouble or by sharing a vulnerable scene with another player. I've found this allows you to dial in precisely the amount of investment in your character's backstory as you might want - in the game I played, any opportunity I had to explain my character's backstory I just improvised something about the prompt on the spot and just allowed that to inform the character going forward. I could theorize about what that character's backstory might have been - but it was all ultimately important only when it was important and not when it was not!

Crunchy Games Can Still Make Backstory Matter

    "But Adam!" you say, "I like making a series of extremely mechanically important choices that impact my character's playability! I like perusing large lists of character options! Am I not allowed to have a game that gives me both interesting robust character options AND meaningful character backstory choices?" Well buckle up, buckaroo, because you want to start smoking whatever the fine folks at Mythworks have been smoking. They publish the aforementioned Slugblaster, but they've also published The Wildsea and the level of granularity you get while making characters for that game while also somehow being very quick to get through is a level of tech I do not understand how it was achieved. Every pillar of your character's place in the world comes with a number of choices you can make about what items or abilities they have available to leverage, and since each of these items also function as your characters' hit points, you can make all kinds of choices! And the fun thing is, because again this is a game that does not care about the kind of balance you find in simulationist games, it literally doesn't matter what you prioritize in your character build from a mechanical standpoint! Just make a cool guy - I made a hulking mushroom chef with a fuckhuge cooking pan and a magical Game Boy that blasted people with energy! It's just that easy!

    As an aside, I think Felix Isaacs might take umbrage with me referring to The Wildsea as a crunchy game because once you get outside of your character creation options it truly is not - but in terms of "a game that gives you a number of mechanically different options to choose from" I would say that part is probably the crunchiest bit. But that leads me to my next point...

Prioritize The Things You Think Are Cool: or, POSIWID

    You can learn a lot about a game creator's intent by looking at what things are mechanized. Dungeons & Dragons is a roleplaying game about fantasy heroes, yes, but most of the game's mechanics resolve around combat. The Purpose of a System Is What It Does - Dungeons & Dragons' purpose is to save the day through overwhelming violence. Ryuutama has many of the same things as Dungeons & Dragons - still dragons, still adventuring, still saving the day, but most of the crunchy bits of the system pertain to simulating travel including only a few pages on combat and almost all utility spells. Ryuutama is a game about taking a journey - the fantasy heroics and violence are secondary. Cloud Empress is also explicitly a game about travel - although it, as a hexcrawl, mechanizes its modes of travel quite differently than Ryuutama. Much of Cloud Empress' mechanics (partly as a function of being derived from The Panic System, the name of the core system that Mothership runs on) pertain to mitigating the stress you receive while traveling, much of which is gained from engaging in violence or seeing Things That Should Not Be. Cloud Empress is a game about surviving a journey in a horrifying, beautiful world. I feel like I beat this drum in every post, but my point here is that when you as a player or GM want to explore a certain kind of story, it can be helpful to choose a game that wants to tell the same kind of story. 

Not Every Game Takes A Million Hours To Understand Enough To Play

    This was probably the most important thing I learned from exploring games that aren't D&D. I remember spending sleepless nights on forums doing character optimization theorycrafting. I remember poring over books upon books upon books, searching for the most optimized options for various kinds of challenges - whether it was just building a particular kind of character I could see in my head, or if it was things like "How to be able to cast level 9 arcane spells, divine spells, and psionics before level 20" or any other number of things. If we were more open about talking about autism and ADHD 20 years ago I'm pretty sure my parents could have just turned over my internet history and my stacks of character sheets to any psychiatrist and gotten that diagnosis rubber stamped pretty much immediately. There was a thrill in that kind of mastery - spending every waking hour to memorize all of these extremely particular things to be able to talk about with the few people IRL who I could actually talk to about D&D. Even with 5e, there was a time where I had a near-encyclopedic knowledge of character options and monster statblocks just by how much I interacted with them as part of running games.

    Most games are not like this, and you won't know that if you don't read anything else. Like, the number of zines I own now that are complete, self-contained games inside of 40 pages or less is frankly absurd. The few games I have that are the same length as D&D still manage to fit their functional rules inside of 20 pages, and sometimes as little as a single page - most of the rest of what many games include these days are all GM tips and tricks, which again are extremely valuable to take away for any game that you play (and saves you the hassle of having to track down blog posts about various topics). The other good news is that so many games derive their lineage from other games (which are also short reads) that it makes onboarding to other games just that much easier. This is actually something I have particular feelings about vis-a-vis this blog's stated purpose, but that's an article for another day. 

Every Game You Play Has Something To Steal Will Inspire You

    Y'know how The Elusive Shift talks about the fact that nobody really knew how to play D&D at the beginning and so each table that played it each played it a little differently and it wasn't until people started putting out fanzines that people realized there was no unified play culture? You...wait, you don't? Go watch this Matt Colville video real quick.

    Okay, so - in the earliest days of the hobby, there were no unified play cultures. There was no "you're playing the game wrong" because you didn't play it like they did in Lake Geneva, because nobody was policing each game table then and believe it or not, they still aren't now! You can play the game however you want! Why am I talking about this right now? Because if you're running a game for your friends, there is literally nothing stopping you from playing one game but stealing a mechanic from a different game if it'll make your game play more like you want it to. Do you really want to play D&D but find that the Blades in the Dark Progress Clock is a better way to track certain things happening in your game? Use it! Do you want to do an alternate universe game where you're playing the Baldur's Gate 3 characters in the world of The Wildsea? Figure out how to make the various character options work and just reflavor them! Do you see two games that are thematically similar but have different rules but somehow want to mash them together? Triangle Agency and Liminal Horror literally did this as part of Triangle Agency's crowdfunding campaign - and they're the people who made the game!

    My point is, just like they tell you that taking in media outside of the genre you're trying to write for will make you a better writer, taking in games outside of the one you spent 15 years getting good at will only make you a better GM and player, because every time you learn how someone else approaches a problem in a way that is novel to you, you get the opportunity to stick that in your toolbox for just such an occasion that it might be useful rather than having to go into a situation unequipped.

Oh hell and I haven't even talked about all the blogs full of tools too! That'll have to be another time.

Outro

    I still like playing D&D. I do. I've been playing an Out of the Abyss game for a while now that is almost over, and you'll still find me running D&D at GenCon from time to time. (Maybe this year too? Only time will tell.) I've got stacks and stacks of 5e books that I'd love to use, particularly the Goodman Games "Original Adventures Reincarnated" line. But I've also had a great time learning about all the other games that are out there - I've played a whole bunch over this last year in particular, and recently I've been getting more into sci-fi and sci-fantasy games like Salvage Union and The Electrum Archive. The game of The Between I've been playing in every other Monday for a few months just wrapped up, and I basically just played my character like a Castlevania character, which ruled. I've joined a bunch of Discords for various publishers and am getting into one-shots or several-shots for all kinds of things. I'm even going to be on a charity stream next weekend playing Trophy Dark, a game I've never actually played before! (Well, I've run The Wassailing of Claus Manor, which is like the same thing...kind of.) And I have had amazing times, even given the fact that most of the people I've played with have been total strangers! And I would have done NONE of this had I just stuck with D&D all this time. With that said though, every other game I play has also helped make me a better D&D player specifically because I can identify things in other games that I've enjoyed doing and can seek ways to recreate that experience while playing my cheesed out edgelord wood elf dhampir double-bladed-scimitar-wielding beast shape barbarian/rune knight fighter/way of the ascendant dragon monk who just got a Bloodfury tattoo. 

OK I spent 12 hours on this post, I'm out. Catch you on the internet.