Greetings! First of all, a time-bound reminder:
Tomorrow, June 25th, is Free RPG Day! Make your way to your friendly local game store and pick up a free game, supplement, or anthology. I have a new game available as party of 9th Level Games’s Level 1 anthology. This year, the anthology theme was “Myths and Legends.”
My game, To Wield the Blade of Ages, is a comedic high fantasy game about bickering over the credit after an epic quest. You play a champion who must convince the Swordkeeper that you—and only you—are worthy of the titular Blade of Ages. To do this, you must cast subtle (or not so subtle) aspersions on the merits of your fellow champions as you collectively recount your adventure. The mechanics are heavily inspired by Jeff Stormer’s wonderful espionage workplace comedy Mission: Accomplished! and I think folks are going to have a lot of fun with it.
Now, onto our regular programming.
Ran: Cartel
I ran a series of Mark Diaz Truman’s Cartel set in the Magic: The Gathering setting of New Capenna. Cartel is a game of tragic Mexican narcofiction, all about cops and criminals in the war on drugs being caught in a cycle of stress, addiction, and bloodshed. New Capenna is a towering metropolis ruled by demonic crime families; a fantasy setting inspired by 1920s gangster fiction.
Highlights: I had a lot of fun with this mashup! I was very much inspired by what the wonderful Rich Rogers has done with Hutt Cartel. The gritty subject matter and dark fantasy setting played off each other beautifully.
Our set of player characters were all connected tightly to each other and to a criminal operation called the Grinders, operating in the shadows of the five major crime families (the ones the Magic set itself focused on). We has an ambitious upstart scrapper, a middle-manager who was secretly a spy for thee Obscura crime family, and the spy’s spouse who was also the scrapper’s sibling.
One great moment of backstabbing came in the second session. The first session had ended with the scrapper and her crew taking on a smash-and-grab job that ended in disaster—a bloody shoot-out which could bring the wrath of the Riveteers down on the Grinders. In the second session, an unrelated scene was playing out between the spy and her Obscura handler, Queza. The spy rolled a move to ask how se could convince Queza of her loyalty (and thus earn some more resources). I followed the game’s advice to push on PC’s interpersonal relationships. “Queza will be impressed if you demonstrate your ties to the Obscura matter more to you than the ties of family.”
The spy then revealed that she was the one who had fed the scrapper the bad intel that led to that ill-starred job, essentially screwing over her sister-in-law! That hadn’t at all been my theory about what had gone down, but I loved the idea and immediately made it canon. And, of course, revealing that treachery in the final session was a great way to precipitate a lethal climax.
Musings: Due to players’ life circumstances, I ended up running two of these sessions for just two players. We did an admirable job sowing plenty of chaos in New Capenna with just the pair of them. But it did create an additional challenge for me as the GM. I had to make sure each PC’s plot didn’t spiral too far away from the other one’s, as we were definitely interested in getting the PCs onscreen together.
Cartel gave me some good tools to do this. I could have the NPC crime boss, for instance, send the scrapper to collect the spy. Or have various handlers point the PCs at the same prize. But the rulebook also encouraged me to embrace coincidence. Durango, Mexico isn’t that big, so it’s not too surprising if a pair of characters end up at the same bar. I decided to extend that logic to New Capenna.
Final Thoughts: Cartel remains a finely-tuned engine of tragedy. I expect a longer campaign would see lots of character turnover. As it was, we had three exciting sessions of building up Stress, secrets, and hidden agendas, which reached a bloody boiling point right on cue at the end of the third session. You can check out video of the series here.
Design Discussion: Hit Points Dice Pool
I can’t seem to stop designing systems for hit points or death saves. Yes, even though my games usually don’t use hit points or death saves. Even though I devoted a prior newsletter to alternate harm systems. I guess HP, like initiative or encumbrance, is one of those artifacts of traditional gaming that indie games often make no use of—but indie designers remain intrigued enough to try out their spins on these concepts.
Anyway, here’s a tweet-length death save subsystem I made:
Now I’ve thought of another little system, this one a hit point dice pool. Here’s roughly how that would go:
Your health track consists of a pool of hit dice, 7–8 d6 or thereabouts. When you take damage, roll the pool. As long as you roll at least one 6, you weather the blow. If you do not roll a 6, remove a hit die from your pool.
I imagine there is also a separate dice pool mechanic for resolving other tasks (exact mechanic TBD). You always have the option to “push yourself” by taking a hit die to add to add to your task dice pool. And under some circumstances, you lose that hit die.
Since this mechanic is still undefined, I’m not sure of the exact circumstances. It could just be a cost associated with a miss or a partial success. Or it could be more of a gamble that’s unrelated to the overall task mechanic, like you lose the hit die if it rolls a 1, 2, 3. I’m interested in the different flavors of “push your luck” this system could create, depending on the ways you can wager hit dice.
So here’s my question: say a game used this hit point dice pool subsystem. What genre and theme should that game have? I thought maybe it should be a one-shot horror game. But a friend of mine said the type of tension this wagering creates could fit lots of stories, including sports! It’s all about characters’ fragility increasing as they pour themselves into risky tasks.
Let me know what you think about this little mechanical sketch, and about what type of stories you could tell with it.
Elsewhere
—Two published Cloven Pine offerings are now available from Indie Press Revolution! You can order print copies of The Great Soul Train Robbery or Back Again from the Broken Land from the IPR webstore. You will also see IPR selling my games at conventions, including Gen Con this summer. Tell your friends!
—This coming Monday, I will appear on a Life, Action, RolePlay stream with other designers to discuss our contributions to the Level 1 anthology (see the top of this post). Tune in at 6pm ET to hear us chat about our games, including To Wield the Blade of Ages!
—The video of the livestreamed Back Again from the Broken Land session I ran at GaryCon is now up on Youtube! It was a great session with a great mix of players, some old hands at Back Again and some new to indie games. Check it out here.
Till next time, may you get some cool free RPGs, escape from vicious cycles, and spend your hit points wisely.
Gamefully yours,
Alexi
My first thought with the HP dice pool system was that no 6's is a catastrophic failure, each 6 adds a benefit (so a sufficiently critical success can even swing the tide of battle), but all 6's are removed from the dice pool, so you *really* don't want to use the dice pool too often, because eventually no matter what you're going to get screwed (unless there's a mechanical way to add dice back into the pool).