July Murmurs
Featuring Trophy Gold, Rebel Crown, and more
Greetings. June was a light month of gaming for me, but July has been very full so far (largely thanks to SargeCon). So I’m going to pull from both months for this newsletter. There will still be plenty of material for next month, never fear.
Ran: Trophy Gold
For the first time, I ran Trophy Gold, a game of desperate treasure-hunters clawing for gold in a haunted, hateful forest. Jesse Ross is the designer of Trophy, which comes in two flavors: Trophy Dark is ideal for one-shots where the strong expectation is that the characters won’t make it out alive, whereas Trophy Gold is built more for campaign play, with sturdier characters but a grinding economy of treasure-hunting that keeps pushing PCs to take more and more risks in order to extract precious lucre from the terrible places where it can be found.
Highlights: I ran an Incursion (adventure module) I had written for the Trophy Gold Incursion contest. My Incursion is called the Crawling Citadel, and in it the treasure-hunters are raiding a mobile fortress of the tyrant Viscountess Yinthia. The fortress was wounded when Yinthia was overthrown by an angry mob of rebels, and now the monstrous stone citadel has crawled into the depths of the dark forest of Kalduhr.
The players and I all enjoyed the gothic strangeness of the citadel, and there were great moments when the characters came to a crossroads: should we press on through the doors we’ve managed to open in the banquet hall, or explore the creepy chapel we’ve found hidden behind a secret panel? The PCs ultimately did pretty well at plumbing the Citadel’s secrets without falling to Ruin—save for the farmer-turned-sorcerer, who at the very last moment fell into a giant heart-shaped device full of golden ichor.
Musings: The Devil’s Bargain mechanic can create a whole parallel, non-canon story of the session! For context, Trophy takes the Devil’s Bargain from Blades in the Dark. In Trophy, as in Blades, you can take a Devil’s Bargain proposed by the GM or another player to roll an extra dice on some rolls. The Devil’s Bargain is usually some cost or complication that the proposing player finds juicy (e.g. “the monster marks you with a scar others of its kind will recognize!”), and it comes to pass whether you succeed or fail on the roll.
In our session, one PC had a pet goat, and there ended up being a running thread of rejected Devil's Bargains between two players: the goat's owner would offer bargains where the goat showed up or humiliated another PC, and that PC’s player would offer bargains where the goat was hurt or killed. Those bargains were not accepted, so the goat had a chill time in the canonical narrative of the session, despite the dramatic suggestions of the Devil's Bargains.
At last though, when the players spent three Hunt Roll tokens to complete a set goal ("Discover the secret of Viscountess Yinthia's unnatural powers") I told them how it happened: the goat headbutted the pedestal of a statue, revealing the hidden drawer hiding a blasphemous tome.
Final Thoughts: Trophy Gold is a slick game for intense-feeling dungeon crawls. It came out originally in Codex: Gold with a guide to converting old school modules into Trophy Incursions. I could see using it that way if I have a group that wants to play those modules using a system that brings indie and OSR sensibilities together. But there are also plenty of cool Incursions original to Trophy Gold—including my stretch goal contribution to the Trophy Gold Kickstarter, The Rime Palace.
Played: Rebel Crown
I have been playing in a two-month campaign of Rebel Crown, a Forged in the Dark game of feudal intrigue replete with diplomacy, subterfuge, and armed conflict. Specifically, we’ve been playing the Oak campaign, which is designed to be a faster game. Here the claimant and their retinue begin in control of a province, giving them a stronger power base from which to pursue the throne.
Highlights: We’ve built a great retinue surrounding our claimant, Lady Siobhan Darach, working to unseat her alleged cousin, the usurper. I am playing the Devoted, a sworn sword to the Claimant. I’m Sir Cevyn Grist. He’s an ambitious young knight, the illegitimate son of a lord, and he is totally head-over-heels in love with the Claimant herself.
We’ve focused more on the supernatural side of the setting than is perhaps usual. Our campaign has featured multiple sorties against the wraiths of our domain, either battling them with silver weaponry or attempting diplomacy to forge an alliance with them!
This is the first time I’ve played a Forged in the Dark game for a series that lasts longer than a one-shot. The system really shines over the long term! Gameplay mechanics like downtime actions, stress clocks, and long-term projects create interesting choices and add up to fascinating storytelling over a campaign. Some of our long-term projects have created new wrinkles in the metaphysics of the game’s world, as our Chancellor researches ways to channel the power of the wraiths while I build more effective wraith-killing weapons.
Musings: Even with nine sessions, we would not have enough time to reach the endgame and make a final sortie against the usurper. So we’ve engaged a mechanic that the game’s designers are testing out: the One Year Later flash forward. In our penultimate session, we advanced the story’s timeline by one year. We followed a procedure to expand the claimant’s territory, and have the retinue members pick up new skills and new scars. Now we’re in position to make a serious play for the throne itself.
I really enjoyed this process, and I wonder if it could be adapted for other games. We essentially got to take a writer’s room approach to our campaign: if we assume there’s a time-jump between “seasons,” where do we want to see the claimant and the retinue when episodic storytelling resumes?
The procedure was particularly dramatic for Sir Cevyn. Just before the jump, he finally declared his hidden love to Lady Siobhan. She took him at his word that he would rather be dispatched far afield than bring her any dishonor, so during the year-long gap he was sent to the Empress to allay her ire against the Claimant. Turned out his service was joining the imperial reclamation effort against the wraith-haunted Lost Isles. At year’s end, Sir Cevyn returned to Dol heartbroken and wraith-touched. A dramatic starting point for our finale!
Final Thoughts: I am really enjoying Rebel Crown’s take on Forged in the Dark. It makes me wonder what other stories of gradual progress towards a grand goal could be facilitated by this system—and what other contexts the One Year Later flash forward could apply to.
Design Discussion: Starting a Design
A while ago, a player asked me some basic questions about designing a game. Now that I am getting round to answering him (sorry for the delay, player!) I realize the discussion might be of broader interest to Cloven Pine fans.
My interlocutor asks, “What is your overall approach to game design? Do you start with a situation? A mechanic? A story?” A fine question, though a big one! Honestly, I start from all sorts of places with game design. I’ll give a couple examples.
Sometimes I start by pulling on a thread of an existing game. For instance, there’s a lot of inspiring design built into Alex Roberts’ For The Queen. On the flight home from the GenCon where I’d acquired For The Queen, I mused that many of the game’s prompt cards would still work if they referred not to a Queen but to a City. “What brings out the [Queen’s/City’s] kindness?” “What brings out the [Queen’s/City’s] cruelty?” With that, I began design on For This Ungrateful City, a Descended from the Queen game about a team of supers tasked with defending a City they may decide is not worth saving.
Sometimes I start with a piece of media I want to explore or emulate. For instance, I enjoyed The Mandalorian so much that I wanted to try my hand at a space scoundrels game. Thinking about what made people (including me) love the show, it became obvious that the family dynamics of a thrown-together crew had to be core to such a game. Thus my game Plutonian Shore, where Trust and Tension are key to character advancement.
Sometimes, more rarely, I’m pushing at the boundaries of game design. For instance, in my 200 Word RPG Challenge winner, 002: License to Eavesdrop, players pretend to be secret spies dropping overheard code phrases into conversations. The game puts a layer of espionage shenanigans over a real-world social gathering, at least for those playing. It’s poking at the question of unwitting participants in a game: Is it a) possible and b) ethical to have someone play a role in your game without their knowledge? Vincent Baker brought up these questions for me with his experimental game The Vengeful Demon of the Ring. (Like Vincent, I’ll offer a caveat—you should probably pick folks who would be amused rather than annoyed if they found out about the game to be your unwitting co-players.)
Overall, I’m always thinking about theme and mood when I approach design. What is the game saying? How do I want players to feel? Is the aim to create a gritty superhero comic with complex and compromised heroes? Is the idea to paint a cold and seedy world, where scoundrels turn to each other for a spark of warmth and solidarity? Or is this one about a silly spy story with a touch of childish pretend to it? Grasping your goal in terms of theme and mood will help direct your next design steps.
The player sent me a bunch of questions, so perhaps I’ll continue this series in later Murmurs. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
Elsewhere
—You can now order the physical zine of Great Soul Train Robbery! I am very pleased that my game of Desperados robbing the train to Hell is available in print. If you backed the Kickstarter for a physical copy, you should have already received a Backerkit survey so I can get you your zine. If you backed only for a PDF, or missed the Kickstarter entirely, you now have a chance to pick up a beautiful zine of your own. Head to the Backerkit pre-order page to buy a zine!
—To celebrate the game’s release, I am running a one-shot of Great Soul Train Robbery on the Gauntlet Calendar. The session is Thursday, August 12th, at 8pm ET. I am reserving a spot for a subscriber to this Substack. That’s right! If you subscribe to Murmurs from the Cloven Pine, let me know in the comments if you want to join for this session. I’ll be excited to include you. (If there is high demand, I may add another session later in the month.)
Till next time, may you make it out of the forest alive, claim your rightful crown, and find good places to begin your designs.
Gamefully Yours,
Alexi