One Year of a Very Secret Bookclub

 INTRO

I have, as I believe I have alluded to in the past, personally curated a group of local(ish) friends to read games with over the last year. They are, by and large, people who have suffered the same curse that I did - people who only ever knew Dungeons & Dragons or perhaps one of its offshoots because that's just what everyone played, and who never really knew anyone who had any other books. A rare few came to this already as game designers, having some projects under their belts (honestly, more than I have frankly). Some, like myself, are avid podcast aficionados and have learned of some games this way - many, unfortunately, have the particular mélange of neurospices that make listening to actual plays literal actual Hell for them and so just haven't had the opportunity to be exposed to other games. All of these folks, however, have two things in common: they know me, and they know I've got an unstoppably huge backlog of games to get through. What is pictured above is most of the games I own IRL - I've left out most of the D&D specific books, and of course most of those zines haven't been properly filed. 

With the season of unchecked capitalism upon us (read: Black Friday & the push for buying games for folks for the holidays), I felt like I should run down the games we've read this year and give you some mini reviews in hopes of inspiring you to purchase them for yourself or for others. I don't have any affiliate links or anything, nothing you click in this will give me any money - I'm just doing it for the love of the game(s) and shilling for stuff I like. In no particular order, we have:

Triangle Agency

Triangle Agency rules. Full disclosure, I've been hooked on this sauce from the very beginning: as a gift to myself back when the Kickstarter was running, I backed this at one of the highest levels so I'd get a chance to play with Caleb, I got to bring some podcast friends along, it was great. I've since run this on-air for The QueerXP, and I've run it off-air a few times including an as-yet unfinished mission I wrote prior to the game coming out. But why do I like it? For the reason I think a lot of people get it wrong - this is a game about your fundamental understanding of how you interact with the world, both in and out of game. It is a game that, if you break the rules and start reading beyond the playwall and you go read all the GM tips on how to run the game, forces you to reconcile with exactly how games work in a way that I personally have not been challenged before. This is a game that does require some GM prep, yes, but it is also an onboarding manual for helping players think more creatively and fill in the world with you via its "Ask The Agency" move, a move in which a player presents a causal chain for a thing they want to exist in the world to be true, and then there's some input from the table about it and then they roll to see the impact. I have now started playing almost every other game like Triangle Agency - not that I get to Ask The Agency and reshape reality in every game, but rather the same kinds of questions I would engage with when thinking about using that move are ones I'll ask the GM. If the GM hasn't established something, it's in a quantum state until they do - if a game doesn't let you mechanically assert your own narrative about it, the next best thing you can do is ask the GM! This is a thing that I think that people have done for ages in a sloppy way - the "rule of cool" argument can be somewhat of a large club swung around rather than a precise and delicate masonry hammer - and I think that by filtering this tendency through the prism of Triangle Agency, you learn to be better at other games.

Also there's a bunch of cool weird shit you get to do that lets you be an absolute horrifying freak. I don't know what else to tell you here, if you haven't already bought it I'm going to roll to Ask The Agency to have made your [benefactor/trusted adult of choice] get it for you.

Moonlight on Roseville Beach

Look, you had me at "queer disco cosmic horror." This is a game I ran at PAXU in 2024 (a thing which the game's creator mentioned might be the first time it's been run at a con not by him? And if that's the case, I need y'all to step up here okay), have loved GnomeAnne's 4-part AP of it, and generally wish I had more chances to run for folks. In terms of what you do in this game, you and your fellow players are queer weirdoes living in a beach bungalow in a seaside resort town in the 70s. It's a homonormative, lightly magical, and very mysterious alternate 1970s setting that lets you investigate supernatural mysteries - some of which might be your fellow players! My favorite prewritten adventure I can only describe to you as "Warlock Berghain." I love the dice pool system - one you don't really see in other games, where you're building a pool, rolling, and assigning dice to various tables to see what results you get which really lets you dial in your varying level of success in a narratively interesting way. Roseville Beach lets you go as silly or serious with the horror as you like - it's a really excellent and versatile game.

Ryuutama

Ryuutama is the game that actually made me start this whole bookclub thing, because I knew I needed to read it and yell about it with someone. Finding out it had already been out in America for almost a decade and yet I had NEVER heard about it blew my mind. There was a very recent video promoting it, and it does seem like periodically someone like myself will pick it up, yell about how nobody seems to have heard of it and then it falls back to obscurity, and I think that's a real shame. Especially with stuff like Fabula Ultima catching on recently, a game like this can really shine. It is, at its core, a game of not playing heroes, but rather people who are off on their One Great Journey in their life. There's all kinds of collaborative worldbuilding things in it and some very special things for GMs to do including building their own GMPC which may or may not directly affect a session - a lot of choices make sense when you realize that the author is/was a teacher, and used this as a game to teach people the fundamentals of roleplaying games. I do find it strange where it decides to get into the crunch, mainly on the overland travel rules, but I suspect this is a holdover from D&D's export to Japan and certain aspects of it simply sticking around in the Japanese game design space whereas we in the US had chosen other aspects, but I'm not educated enough on this to make definitive statements - regardless, it is a very easy game to pick up and play, and while certain elements may see part and parcel for a lot of modern fantasy adventure games, the fact that this did this a decade ago is something to be noted. There are nuggets of wisdom to be gained here.

Also, and again, cannot stress enough I do not make money from this, but I cared about this game enough to take part in a community zine and created a sort of Shaman King-y, DanDaDan-y class you can play along with including some advice for running games with death and the undead as a more prominent element. I think everyone did a really good job with it, I encourage you to check it out if you end up liking Ryuutama.

Salvage Union

Salvage Union is a game I am so Normal and Neurotypical about that I have literally reactivated my locked Twitter account to go pull up a thread I posted to put into this post because I forgot to delete Twitter before it got scraped for AI - a thread in which I went to bat for Salvage Union because I was so tired of people saying "Oh it's just another mech game that's all about combat." Salvage Union is a game that DOES let you do mech combat, yeah. It's also about building a community to live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland dotted with corporate arcologies, a sea of zombifying nanites, kaiju, raiders, and simple folk who are just trying to stay alive. It's about being a part of a union fighting against those who would tear you down and either wipe you out or use you as just another cog in their machine. The three pre-written adventures have you either dealing with corpo espionage, horrible kaiju meat-mechs, or a cold war where people fight to control the bountiful and extremely dangerous resource that is the aforementioned nanites. Or you can just go off and do your own thing, man! Do a Borderlands With Mechs if you want to. Or a Fallout With Mechs. Or a Zoids But With Non-Animal Mechs. Or anything else your heart desires honestly! It's a cool game.

Now, you can skip this part if you don't want to hear my arguments about why this game isn't just about combat and actually it mechanically supports lots of RP options: Please pardon the extreme amount of spreadsheets I'm about to share here, but what I did was I went through every possible character option available to choose either as your pilot character or for your mech, and tagged everything as either being RP focused, combat focus, utility focus, or a hybrid, and tallied up all the totals for each section. They're all color coded for how they are in the book for easy reference. (Click each to embiggen!)

Pilot Abilities

Pilot Equipment

Mech Abilities

Mech Systems

Mech Modules

Mech Chassis

Also, none of these even touch on the Carrier Mech options, which are where all your NPCs live and which are almost EXCLUSIVELY about RP options with a small hint of combat or utility - because that's your home base where your guys live, and it's also a soft worldbuilding/tone setting choice because the kind of carrier you build denotes what kind of game you're going to play! AGH. OK I'm done yelling for now.

His Majesty The Worm

Ah yes, blessed be the Wormgame. I am very grateful to have played this game once with its creator and I have to say that it is very much a game that makes more sense once you get it to the table, at least in terms of how the game actually functions. Josh is an extremely prolific blogger and is the current editor for the OSR magazine Knock!, itself a collection of prominent blog posts from over the years. As such, much of this book is poised to teach you a lot of basic principles and how they apply to this game specifically - designing a megadungeon, building a believable town for the players to exist in, codifying interpersonal roleplaying with a set of mechanics to encourage you to get into character, all kinds of cool stuff. It uses tarot cards as its RNG and which tie to your stats, specialties, and also some really interesting combat tricks. It is somewhat of an arcane contraption and may not be for all tables - but if it's right for your table, I think it's a game that really sings. It's done well enough that it pretty regularly sells out, and right now the expansion/megadungeon that Josh has been working on is preordering/slowfunding over on Exalted Funeral.

Also, this is another game I was so moved after reading that I joined a game jam for it just to build a fishing minigame, because every game needs a fishing minigame. It's free online and probably will be forever unless I take time to actually make it a product worth paying for, but I had a lot of fun with it. Speaking of fishing minigames...

Hellwhalers

Hellwhalers, another game I ran at PAXU 2024, is actually a game I felt maybe too Jewish to do justice? Like, to be clear, it didn't actually impact my ability to run the game, nor did it really impact my ability to play the game with PlusOneEXP this year (a Twitch stream which has sadly been lost to the depths), but this is a game of a very particular kind of Christian religious horror that I feel like people raised Catholic will really, really get a kick out of. Or if you're just a hardcore Moby-Dick fan, that's also an option. You are, predictably, in Literal Actual Hell, on board a whaling ship on the hunt for the Hellwhale - a foul demon that your mysterious captain has told you is the only ticket out of Hell. This one's got a lot of juice - as a GM, you can play with or leave behind as many pieces of lore included in the book as you like. The story is primarily driven by the nightly gambling - in a very slick piece of tech, the results of your roll on the sic-bo board will provide you the prompts for the following day's activities, and aside from that it really leans on the characters' playbooks to encourage different kinds of roleplay scenarios. It's a lot of fun if you're a sicko like me who enjoys really, really bleak games, gallows humor, and roleplaying just an absolutely awful person. It also got a zine of extra content this year!

The Wildsea

What if the apocalypse didn't come from war or bombs, but instead an eruption of vegetal life - an uprising of the trees, drinking the oceans dry, burying people beneath new waves of brown and green, and at the tops of these ever growing trees a new world arises - a world in which people ride around giant, chainsaw powered boats trying to make ends meet, tell each other stories, and make sense of this world. That's The Wildsea. It also gets a distinction for being one of the only truly post-human games on this list: like, yes, there are technically human-like people you can play in this game, but they're...not humans like you or I know them. Some were trapped in amber for centuries and have been changed by it. Others, the true descendants of the humans of the old world, have been mutated by the toxic sap that oozes from these giant trees and permanently rerouting the course of their evolution. But much more common are other lifeforms that have been elevated - cactus-folk, fungus-folk, discarded-machinery-folk, thousands-of-spiders-forming-a-single-consciousness-like-that-one-alternate-universe-version-of-Peter-Parker-folk. Rather than classes and hitpoints, your character instead gets built of a number of traits which have their own boxes which when you take damage get marked off, helping more accurately represent how one loses access to the things that make them good at what they do as their failures mount higher and higher in desperate situations. It's a game that is all about the wonders of the world, of hearing reality-warping Whispers on the wind. It is a game of adventuring in a new world, only as concerned with the old world as you want to be. I mean this both in the modern sense and in the antiquated meaning of the word - it is an awesome game.

Mausritter

I probably do not need to sell you on Mausritter. It has an extremely healthy community, maybe even too healthy by some standards - it, like Mothership, has caught on such that the community is regularly holding game jams, doing collective Backerkit funding months, and is all over the place. My friends knew none of that when I showed it to them, of course, nor did they know Into The Odd or any of the other games that ultimately derived from it. (Hold that thought, though.) This being many of my group's first foray into anything from that lineage, I think folks found the character creation mechanics extremely novel and interesting, as well as exactly what kinds of things the rules of the game concern themselves with versus what things are left to the table. You get rules for making your mouse, for the things they carry, for interacting with other animals and for waging very tiny wars. That is, mostly, it. There are of course GM instructions, but while there are rules for making hex maps to set up exploring the world, and there's a mechanical impetus for the mice to make it home to be able to level up (if they survive that long), there's not a whole lot else in there - which has let people play around and make some really cool campaigns for it. There is of course the official boxed set The Estate that has a bunch of adventures in it, and there's Tomb of a Thousand Doors - originally a community-created megadungeon that then got polished, crowdfunded and published by PlusOneEXP. But you don't need any of that to play! There's so much free content out there, and honestly creating a Mausritter adventure is easy enough just by looking around your own house and imagining the mice that are (hopefully not) in your walls and what they might find. And if you're like "Adam if it's so easy why haven't you made anything for Mausritter yet," first of all 1. how dare you, and also 2. I'm in the very early planning process of Krabberitter, so just hold your horses.

The Electrum Archive

Getting this one out of the way right off the bat - I am not linking the adventure I made for this, partly because it's not done/usable and partly because I don't want to have to explain the name of it to polite company. If you know, you know.

Now, more to the point: The Electrum Archive is a game of exploration in a science fantasy world. It is equal parts Moebius and Morrowind. As I have told many people, the fact that the way magic works is that you have to huff ancient alien gasoline that allows you to pierce beyond the veil of death to learn the true names of spirits to evoke them into the world isn't the coolest thing about the lore of this game should be enough to have you running towards that Itch page right now. This game truly has the sauce, as they say. I think it makes exploration-based gameplay much more accessible than some other games (Ryuutama coming to mind immediately, but that's kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison here). You can get FromSoftesque with it in terms of loredropping and worldbuilding if you like. There are many NPCs and locales with just enough information about them that you feel like you have plenty of usable tools at your disposal without feeling like you and your players need to go study a textbook. The few times I've run this game have all been wild - it supports dungeon delving just as much as it supports sandbox exploration. There's two zines out for it now, and I'm hoping once the creator's most recent Kickstarter for an expanded version of one of their other games finishes fulfillment, we might see a Volume 3. 

The Smörkasborg Experiment

One month, I pitched a truly preposterous thing to my bookclub. Because Mörk Borg was so short, and because I had so many variants and so so many more existed, my challenge was for everyone to read the base book and then as many others as they could. Here are some one-sentence reviews of the ones me and my crew physically own:

Mörk Borg: Start here - see where everything else compares, have fun dying, idiot.

Dark Fort: The actual one-page solo game start of the lineage, good to play around with to get the hang of it. (Available along with the MB expansion Feretory.)

Grotten: 1-Bit Deeper: Technically a solo or GM With Player tile placement boardgame that uses MB rules, this one's pretty fun.

Pirate Borg: Is potentially overhyped but honestly still good - I would reflavor all the alternate history stuff unless you and your playgroup are real history sickos about that particular time period like I am.

Blood Borg: Real punk shit that lets you do Vampire: The Masquerade without all those pesky extra rules. 

CY_BORG: It is exactly what you think it is, and is the only other MB derivative made by the original crew which means it's the only one with the same level of care.

Kill Your Necromancer: An almost completely standalone adventure book where you're all undead who have to kill the person who has cursed you with life once again - have fun killing, idiot.

Honestly, knowing Mörk Borg is very handy for deciphering so many other games these days, if you don't have at least the baseline one I'd recommend it. There's all kinds of people doing really inventive stuff with it because of how simple and straightforward the rules are, and the people who really put in the time and care rather than just jocking Johan Nohr's style have some really cool spins on the concept - I personally recommend anything Adam Vass (of Blood Borg, above) or Paweł Kicman (of Kill Your Necromancer, above) do if you want a good place to start once you've tried the OG.

(Yes I was born in 1990, what about the slang that is stuck in my vocabulary tipped you off?)

A Tour of Bastionland

Another month, I convinced the crew to read Into The Odd, Electric Bastionland, and Mythic Bastionland - not just because ITO is foundational to many other games as mentioned previously and both Bastionland games build on that, but also because of the evolution both of the narrative of the world and of Chris McDowall as a writer. Like I personally was interested in mapping the plot arc of the universe that Bastion lives within, but without overselling it I really think of these games as paradigm setting for each era they dropped in. These games are the gravity wells that distort the space-time of this particular side of the gaming world, and I think that taking the time to understand them as well as things Chris puts on his blog, or the interviews he does for his podcast online, really end up unlocking a lot of ways to think about games. 

Of course, it doesn't hurt that they're all pretty fun to play. 

Slugblaster

I got to run Slugblaster this year at PAXU and I'm very glad I did, but I really want to get a full game in. I am not usually a person who goes for a game that has mechanized emotional damage as an option, but I'll be damned if getting to play around in a world where you're cool teens (or at least, teens who think they're cool) using hoverboards to traverse the multiverse and cut sick promo videos while also trying to deal with interpersonal drama and keep your parents happy isn't the sickest shit. Most of my experience with the game prior to reading it was via the Quantum Kickflip and the My First Dungeon podcasts which are both excellent. The thing that really draws me to the game, though, is that while yes you can do it as a one-shot and do all your cool stunts and have fun goofing off - this game's downtime activities really do encourage you to build out your character's life in a way that many other games do not. In addition, there's a finite number of sessions you're going to play with these characters - much as life is being a teen, you will be forced to come to the end of this period of these characters' lives and you will be forced to see what the future holds for them based on your actions over the game in a truly Breakfast-Clubian way. Again, I'm in my mid-30s, so the 80s teen coming-of-age movies mixed with 90s highschool-centric TV with its afterschool specials are just as much a part of my DNA as was seeing people be really shitty at skateboarding but doing it for the love of the sport and recording them and their friends trying to pull of sick stunts. You don't have to have lived that era to have fun with this game, but I think any folks my age or older by about 10 years are going to have a certain kind of nostalgia for it.

One other thing about Slugblaster - much like Triangle Agency rewrote my brain about how I interact with any game world, Slugblaster rewrote my brain with the intent behind its action roll - you may have heard to "only roll when failure is interesting," but Slugblaster takes it a step further to say "only roll for WHAT is interesting." If you're being jumped by a biker gang, if each and every punch against each and every biker isn't the interesting part, don't roll for that. Roll to see how well you resolve the situation - a 6 on your d6 might mean you beat the shit out of an entire gang, or it might mean you successfully escaped with your teeth intact. Likewise, and I think I'm roughly quoting this directly from the Episode Zero of the My First Dungeon AP, if you're tied to a chair and need to grab a laserknife to cut yourself out, maybe it's interesting to see each and every inch that you skooch your hand across the floor towards that laser knife. Roll for what is interesting.

OUTRO

So that's it! That's every game I forced my friends to read with me over the last 12 months.

Except that's not every game I read over the last 12 months, is it? Take, for example, my haul from PAXU:

I ran CBR+PNK at PAXU as well on behalf of Mythworks in their big 50+ person megagame, which was absolutely wild. I'm reading Stillfleet now in preparation for playing it on Sunday in the Stillfleet Discord. I read the original preview edition of The Between and played in a medium-length game of it while the hypetrain was rolling for the crowdfunding campaign. While my job ultimately ended up screwing me out of the time off to go work for Possum Creek this summer at GenCon, I'd read and prepared to run Wanderhome. I've been writing an adventure for PlusOneEXP for Down We Go for...frankly too long now actually (sorry Tony) but I've been deep in those mines. I ran The Wassailing of Claus Manor at PAXU 2024 as well, and ended up writing something for the upcoming second expansion for it called The Pine Tar of Claus Manor which is...coming out sometime soon? I used the original edition of A Land Once Magic (updated version pictured above in the hand-stamped bag) to help worldbuild for a game of Armour Astir (which I talked about in a previous blogpost). I played Mappa Mundi, Trophy Dark and Inevitable for charity streams this year. I've played an absolute shit load of Mothership and Cloud Empress this year, both of which have had a ton of adventures to flip through and use (CE's books are still pre-shipping from the crowdfunder, but watt sent us the PDFs ages ago and lemme tell you, they're worth it). I finally read the Old School Essentials rules so I could play in a stream over on PlusOneEXP to promote Duginthroat Divided. While I haven't actually sat down to read the Cairn 2e rules I got recently, I did get to play one of Joseph R Lewis' adventures with him at a con in Baltimore with a veritable who's who of the Cairn extended family. And that's before getting into all the zines I got either from PlusOneEXP's Zine Club or from the various zine month crowdfunders! It's been a huge year for games, both personally and broadly! I encourage you to get out there and go buy some of these games - every single thing I've talked about in this post is a game I feel has value either as reference material or as an actual game to be played, and I'm very glad that both my friends that I pressganged into a bookclub and the people out there in the world who've welcomed me into their gaming groups and streaming games have all been willing to play with me this year. Excited to see what 2026 holds.

Stay weird out there.

On Meeting Games Where They Are

 

    So this doesn't usually come up, but I'm a huge robot & mecha fan. I was of the generation that grew up with Toonami bringing such delights to USA teens as Gundam Wing and G Gundam right after school, Evangelion in the dead of night on Saturdays on Adult Swim, followed by eventually getting IGPX & Eureka Seven, and even Gurren Lagann managed to make it onto The SciFi Channel's Ani-Mondays in that era (before it became The SyFy Channel, but my hatred for that rebrand can be a rant for another day). When I played WH40K, my army was The Iron Warriors who I ran with as mechanized of a list as I could, with as little flesh showing on the models as possible - same with Warmachine as well, where I ran as many Warjacks as I could in my Cygnar list that honestly probably wanted some support from dudes with guns. While learning to play D&D back in 3.5, once I stumbled on the Warforged in Eberron I never looked back. Once I got to college and could afford an XBOX 360, I invested in the Gundam Dynasty Warrior games and absolutely went to town on some Zakus. What I'm trying to say is, you give me a game about robots or about piloting giant robots, 99% of the time unless the actual way that you interface with the game causes me physical pain, I'm going to play it until either the robots or my brain have rusted away.

POWERED BY THE ASTIRPOCALYPSE

    As I mention from time to time, I have a bookclub with some local pals to help me clear out my backlog. Usually we read stuff from my personal backlog - between bad impulse control at cons/on crowdfunding sites/for Itch bundles, I've got a pretty sizable pile of games to go through and maybe hopefully play. I'd already read Salvage Union with this crew, and we'd talked about Lancer (a game which I have read but have never gotten to table, and which most of that crew have only heard of). At one point, one of my crew mentions they had backed a game and had joined an online campaign of it only to have it crash and burn harder than Zeon's attempt to drop Side 2 onto Jaburo - not only did it fail, but also everything still blew up and made sure nobody was happy. They asked me if I'd be willing to run a game for them and some other friends - they knew I liked mecha, they'd seen my Escaflowne Blu Rays and knew I'd run some other PbtA games recently. I agreed, sight unseen, because hey - it's not like a game like this would cause me to have to do an immense amount of bookkeeping as the GM, right?

    If you've never played the original Apocalypse World, there are a great deal of things which future iterations have largely dropped - namely about setting up narrative pillars of the world. Some things have persisted on and have also changed further on down the evolutionary line into your Blades in the Dark-likes and such, but Armour Astir: Advent pretty fiercely holds onto some of the OG framework for Apocalypse World - because it is, after all, a game about fighting a fascist empire, and even if our modern day fascists appear scattered and incompetent there is always an underlying structure to their actions which dictates what they want and what they hold dear, and that's a thing that needs gamifying for this kind of situation. After a few days of deep reading the book and panicking that I wouldn't have enough things ready to start play, I came to two conclusions - we would use a worldbuilding game to help set a baseline for the world, and I would take some time and watch/listen to some APs to see how other people had played the game to see if I could smooth out some of the things that were giving me trouble.

    Armour Astir is not a game that necessarily concerns itself with how you got to where the present day tensions are. This is very much by design - the author's note on Page 7 tells us that we can do whatever we want - there is an implied setting by way of the art choices and names for game pieces, but ultimately it's up to you and your players to define the world. This is, I think, fine for reasons I'll get to - but lightly problematic for kicking off a campaign. Much of the worldbuilding mechanics in the game are very reactive - intended to decide things in the moment, which is fine for literally everything except all of the parts where you lay the groundwork for your world. The good news is, Armour Astir is a game that implies a magical setting that also has mecha, and that meant I could try out Viditya Voleti's A Land Once Magic, which rules. While we found a lot of good meat to chew on through our session generating the backstory of the world this way, it did mean that before we had even started playing the game we had already deviated from the intended gameplay. Which like...that's fine, right? Right?

FURTHER DIVERGENCE

    When trying to do my research on other folks who had actually run Armour Astir online, results were...pretty scarce. There were a few places that had covered the book as a review, but otherwise? Well...Friends at the Table used it in two episodes of their show, but they already had an established universe they were slotting into and had pretty good ideas of how to map what Armour Astir was offering onto their world. A few other folks had put very small APs, and that's about it.  Heck, even my beloved One Shot hadn't covered the game, and James & Dillin have practically covered everything over the years. What this meant was that I needed to make some choices on exactly how closely I wanted to cleave towards the rules text as written versus importing mechanics from other, similar games whose mechanics I understood better/felt fit what the system was "going for." After all, I'd already decided to use ALOM to build the baseline of the world, right, so what's the harm in grabbing a few of my favorite innovations in the PbtA and post-PbtA sphere? The game itself is structured in multiple phases which jump around from the actual boots-on-the-ground Robot Action (called Sorties, which pair with B-Plots if you have folks NOT in a mech at the time), then Downtime once the Robot Fun Is Done, and then you've got the Conflict Turn which checks in on what the bad guys are doing and how the world changes - why, that sounds an awful lot like what Carved from Brindlewood games do, right? And this game is riddled with clocks to track progress of good and bad guy schemes - sure, Blades does that, but haven't The Wildsea and Slugblaster both made cool innovations on the use of clocks in dynamic narrative scenes? Wouldn't it be cool if I just-

RULES AS READ VERSUS RULES AS WRITTEN

    Ultimately, I decided not to add anything in mechanically. I was starting to make choices about a game I hadn't even played yet, and that's unfair to the game AND its creator. Much like adding salt and pepper to your meal before your first bite keeps you from tasting the delicate blend of flavors the chef intended for you, I think it's important to try to meet the game where it is so you can actually see what the game is trying to get you to do. Aside from the ALOM session to help set up our collective baseline for our universe, we took either two or three sessions actually creating characters, the bad guys, and the rebellion that our players found themselves allied with. We basically get through one phase of play per evening, which means it takes us almost a month to get through a full "cycle" of play - which is fine, that's partly due to not having more than like 2-3 hours a night to play and also our collective newness with the system. It has meant that actual revelations about the system's inner workings have come slowly, but as we have played over the last few months they have in fact kept coming. 

    I would say that across the board, the players are certainly good at creating narrative though may not be as practiced with narrative-focused games which has meant there has been a learning curve teaching them exactly how much power they have over the world (both in terms of the magic their characters wield as well as in other phases where they are inhabiting other NPCs). Getting used to combat has been interesting - I think all of us are tactics-pilled when it comes to big robot fightan and so trying to decouple those expectations with the more cinematic combat this game expects has been our biggest pain point: but of course, so many of these stories aren't really about the combat since one well-placed laser kills any number of mooks - outside of fighting mindless beasts (which are not explicitly detailed in the rules but are hinted at), the point is to remember you're fighting people which means doing things like demoralizing them to stop fighting, intimidating them to run away or even convince them to defect are all valid options. 

    The thing that truly stopped us in our tracks, though, is the bookkeeping - both in terms of how much to pre-establish (i.e. the main pillars of the bad guys' organization which it is ostensibly your job to take down) vs. things that come up incidentally (clocks for progress on both the good and bad side of things, tapping and untapping rebellion segments for resources plus keeping up on them to make sure they don't get destroyed unless you want them to, that kind of thing). A lot of this didn't really click until one of our players was absolutely obliterated - hilariously, the same player who wanted us to start playing this game in the first place. Now, they got better, but a character facing death (especially so suddenly and almost casually as a stray laser from a mecha-kaiju intended to destroy their carrier instead got the PC dead center) triggers a lot of rules to come into play and suddenly a lot of the character advancement mechanics that at first just appeared to be roleplaying prompts revealed their true purpose as we handled the cleanup. This then prompted a major party-wide audit of character sheets to make sure that all the various bits and bobs aligned with what we realized their actual functional purpose was.

    There have been chafe points, but they've been rewarding to get through as I do my best to present the game that my friend bought and has wanted to play. As we get a better handle on the structure of gameplay, maybe I'll end up bringing in a few outside ideas to smooth things out, but honestly we're having a good time and I'm content to leave my speculation there.

Or at least I was, until... 

RULES AS INTENDED & UNDEATH OF THE AUTHOR

    I was very surprised to find out that Briar was actively and immediately working on a second edition of the game practically from the moment it was published and in peoples' hands. In reading over their devlog I was surprised and delighted to see a number of choices they were making were right in line with things I myself had been chewing on - how to make Pillars more tangible, adopting the Carved from Brindlewood mystery resolution mechanics over into dealing with the metaplot, building in a lifepath & worldbuilding system, potentially changing combat to be more tactical. That all rules, and not just because those are all things I specifically pointed out as chafe-points - it's because I love when creators look at other convergent evolutionary paths (both Armour Astir and The Between appear to have started development around the same time, with The Between eventually spilling out into Brindlewood Bay and eventually the rest of the Carved from Brindlewood games in the interim) and borrow ideas to grow stronger. 

    What that means, though, is that now we're in kind of a liminal zone - because we have a fully functional book of rules to use, but we also know that the person who wrote those rules is hard at work trying to make those rules something newer and better because they no longer fit their vision of the game - so like...maybe being so precious about adhering to the rules to provide the game experience as intended by the developer isn't so important since the developer themselves is opting to update everything?

    For now, I'm content to let the real game designers do the real game designing and stick to what's in the book for running our game. The rules in the book are as balanced as they need to be, and they do work as intended even if I personally have a little trouble parsing out what that intention is sometimes. But it also means I'm going to take opportunities to pull in my favorite CfB tech like Painting The Scene & maybe doing some Unscene-esque B-Plot scenarios to help learn about NPCs in the rebellion that we otherwise don't get to check in on. Maybe I'll whip ALOM back out to whip up some prompts to help fill in some characters before the PCs run into them. Maybe I'll just do Tarot readings for some of the background characters to see what they've been up to while the party goes off to show the fascists their Burning Finger.

    No matter what I end up doing though, it'll be with the knowledge that rather than enforcing my will on the game system and my players before trying to see what kind of game the game itself wants you to play, I listened to it, I interpreted it, and I'm using the tools I have at my disposal to make sure that the gameplay experience that the game wants us to have and the gameplay experience all of us at the table want to have are harmonized as best as I can. 

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.