Welcome. A big highlight to share upfront: I was very pleased to join Leah Sargeant, Magpie Games’s Mark Diaz Truman, and host Ben Milton for a conversation on Questing Beast’s Youtube channel. We got to bring perspectives from indie games and the OSR together, covering topics like theme vs. mechanics, alternatives to hit points, and social combat within games. Check out the video here:
Played: Plutonian Shore
Plutonian Shore is a game I’m developing about a scoundrel crew aboard a scrappy spaceship, inspired by media like Firefly and The Mandalorian. I was very pleased to get to be a player for a series run by Rich Rogers, a prolific GM of Star Wars games. The game was part of his vast Star Wars Saturdays meta-series, where he runs Star Wars series using many different RPG systems. You can find his full and impressive Youtube playlist of these series here—scroll down to March 2020 to find Plutonian Shore.
Highlights: We had an excellent crew, hailing from all over the Star Wars galaxy: a former Mandalorian, a former ISB agent, a former TIE fighter pilot—and a Force-sensitive youngster just learning the ropes. Rich threw plenty of Star Wars goodness at us as we took on jobs for the New Republic, the InterGalactic Banking Clan, and the Mining Oligarchy, all in a system controlled by an Imperial Remnant. We had run-ins with a Sith Pureblood and an Imperial Inquisitor, while my Fallen Mandalorian tried his best to mentor his Neophyte Force-sensitive crewmate, based largely on a mysterious past team-up with a Jedi (I made ample use of the move that lets me declare a new NPC an old friend—though sometimes I rolled misses with this and got old friends who were trying to kill me!).
I think my favorite move is Patch Something Up. It triggers when characters try to repair devices such as systems aboard their ship, but also when they patch up a crewmate’s injury or try to patch things up in a relationship! The middle result for the move says: “On a 7–9, it takes a sacrifice to do the job—scavenged parts, an honest answer, etc.” This has led to some great scenes, like characters borrowing parts from one droid to patch up another, or finally surfacing a disagreement they’d been talking around all campaign.
Musings: The game is not terribly compatible with an open table: the PCs are tightly bound to each other and the ship, and advancement is based on accumulating Trust and Tension tokens with your crewmates. So I wondered how it would work when we continued the game into a second month with one player turning over—the Captain was the one who had to go, no less! It turned out surprisingly well. Our Pilot stepped up to being Captain (a great opportunity for some Trust and Tension tokens to be handed out, based on how people reacted to the promotion) and the new crewmember managed to fit right in thanks to the player being friendly and flexible. I’ll definitely take some notes for the full version of the game, to help tables navigate this sort of situation. Perhaps I’ll even create some separate mechanics for Guest Star PCs, in case groups have someone joining for a single session along the way…
Final Thoughts: I’m definitely going to keep developing this game, and I really enjoy getting to play it myself. If you’re interested in Plutonian Shore, sign up here for updates. I’ll want to put together a longer campaign sometime to test out the arc of play over a longer period.
Ran: Back Again from the Broken Land
Our game of small adventurers walking back from a big war is in a new round of playtesting. We’re testing new playbooks, including the Stargazer. I got to run the game for a group of friends and see the Stargazer in action for the first time. It was a lovely session.
Highlights: Our Stargazer, Vella, was a driven seer with inconsistent people skills. Her player made several inspired choices, including reaching through a sliver of void created by the Doomslord’s reality-straining magic—and pulling out spices from another dimension to liven up a meal!
I’m always moved by the way epilogues play out in this game. Players have a lot of freedom, but are tasked with incorporating a story of Growth, plus a story of Amends for each named Burden they’re carrying at the end of the game and a story of Isolation for each unnamed Burden. The story prompts can be read as metaphorically as desired. In this game, two adventurers settled down to make a life together (story of Growth: “An old home has a new tenant”) but one is haunted by visions of the Doomslord’s Hunters (story of Isolation: “a wound from a Hunter festers”). The Stargazer found her foresight blocked. She kept looking up out of habit, but there were no more omens for her in the heavens. So gradually she turned her eyes downward, to tend to her long-neglected garden, and found her gifts taking on a new form as insight into earthbound growing things. (Two stories of Growth: “A ruined field is replanted” and “A dammed river finds a new course.”)
Musings: There’s a scenario that keeps coming up in this game. One character is preparing to make a heroic sacrifice, and another character tries to convince them not to. There isn’t an obvious way to mechanize this interaction. In this game, I offered the players a chance to roll dice for this, framing the Bodyguard’s aim to sacrifice herself as an emotional obstacle the Volunteer could try to negotiate (the most basic of basic moves is “negotiate an obstacle”). Of course, the players had to agree to this, accepting that on a hit the Volunteer would convince the Bodyguard and on a miss he wouldn’t. This worked out for this session and these players! But I wonder if I should codify this more in some way, or if that cuts against the simplicity of the game’s moves.
Final Thoughts: I am excited about the way playtesting is going for this game. If you want to learn about playtesting opportunities, sign up here!
Design Discussion: Alternate harm tracks
One of the most interesting parts of the Questing Beast conversation was about alternatives to HP. How can “damage” mechanics in RPGs feel more, well, damaging? Subtracting 5 HP from our 60 HP total feels pretty abstract. What if instead the mechanics of harm told a story with impact about how our characters undergo wounds?
I spoke about Masks in the video, where the equivalent to HP is Conditions: Angry, Afraid, Insecure, Hopeless, Guilty. It’s a brilliant bit of design. In comics about young superheroes, roiling emotions are more important, and consistent across characters, than literal physical damage. But they also coincide: e.g. Spider-Man gets smacked into a bus and feels Insecure about letting the Rhino get the drop on him. Masks does a great job crafting an alternate harm track where each hit can have a really different valence. Plus, the ways to clear Conditions are flavorful as well—either you act out (“Clear Angry by hurting someone or breaking something important”) or you accept comfort and support from a teammate.
I’m currently running another game with a great little twist on HP. Iron Edda: World of Metal and Bone has characters pick from a list of “wound statements” at character creation. As you take hits you mark off statements like this, ideally also exclaiming them aloud: “My leg! I will drag myself over my foes!” or “Pain! Reminds me I'm alive!” If you run out of wounds, you roll to Face Death. But along the way, the wounds feel more fictionally alive than simply subtracting hit points. (Stay tuned for more on this game in next month’s newsletter!)
I found some interesting discussion online about drifting the harm clock from Apocalypse World into something even less like HP. Apocalypse World’s harm clock involves ticking off numbered segments until life becomes untenable, at which point you might die or might claw your way back, weirder. But the basic use case (you can get hit a certain number of times before you’re in peril of death) is a bit closer to trad game HP than might be expected from as innovative a game as Apocalypse World. NPCs, notably, simply have shortened versions of the PC’s harm clocks.
Here’s one hack for NPC harm in Apocalypse World, presented on the forum Barf Forth Apocalyptica by Paul Taliesen. It’s an ordered list of possible effects of NPCs taking harm, starting from “They cede something to you, submit, or flee,” and ending with “They are killed on the spot.” MCs are given guidance for how many options to pick and how far down from the list to pick from. In between there are messy options that introduce interesting choices for the PCs, like “They will die without immediate medical attention.” Did you want to kill this person? Will you try patching them up or dragging them to an Angel after going a little farther than you meant? (Scroll down in the same thread for a link to Paul’s alternate harm moves for PCs also, which potentially let a bunch of bloody story beats spill out from every wound.)
What are your favorite alternatives to HP in RPGs? Are there any harm, wound, or emotional trauma systems in games you’re intrigued by? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!
Elsewhere
—I am contributing a game to Level 1, the official anthology of Free RPG Day, as assembled by Ninth Level Games. Come October 16th, be sure to pick up the anthology at your friendly local game store to get a hold of my game Once, This Land Was One… You’ll get to roll all the dice you own and stack them up to build little post-apocalyptic cities!
—The Gauntlet has a new merchandise store. It’s the place to go for Secret Science Sewer Siblings t-shirts, hoodies, and mugs! If you pick one up, send me a selfie and I’ll retweet it from the Cloven Pine Games Twitter, and send you an exclusive little expansion for Secret Science Siblings.
I’ll be back in touch next month with more game recaps and design discussion. Till then, may you keep on flying, tell stories of growth, and clear your conditions with the help of comforting and supportive allies.
Gamefully yours,
Alexi