Welcome. Lots of exciting games and design thoughts to share, so I’ll get right to it after the briefest preamble. Magpie Games hosted another online Game Design Festival last weekend and it was a wonderful time. Brendan Conway and Mark Diaz Truman led seminars on basic moves and on “The Fruitful Void” (definitely candidates for future design discussions in this newsletter). Designers got the chance to playtest their games, including my submission Plutonian Shore. If this sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend you join the Magpie Discord and stay tuned for info on their tenth anniversary weekend in April.
Played: Root
Speaking of Magpie Games, I finally got to play a couple session of Root, their RPG of woodland adventure based on the popular board game. You may remember this was on my list of must-play games I hadn’t gotten to try yet. I was very pleased to give it a go.
Highlights: We had a great crew of vagabonds: a badger Ronin, mouse Scoundrel, beaver Tinker… and me, a quixotic frog Harrier questing for a beauteous frog maiden he saw in a dream. Everyone played their playbooks to the hilt, whether by committing arson at every opportunity or by building truly improbable devices. A favorite moment for me was when we were fighting a brigade of bird ambushers, sniping at us from the branches above an ancient woodland ruin. I ask the Tinker to give me a boost, and he flung me into the treetops with his backpack-mounted catapult. My Harrier shouted “en garde!” and whipped out his sword mid-flight to duel the surprised Eyrie soldiers.
Musings: A number of elements of this game push it towards trad-style gameplay (I say, having played a bare handful of D&D sessions in my life… so take it with a grain of salt). The PCs are a wandering band of troubleshooters pulled between various factions. Most moves are combat-related, and there’s a whole set of weapon moves that require both a particular weapon tag and a particular PC skill to activate. And the weapon customization options are deep and involved, leaving a real sense that you can “optimize” your gear with enough time studying the rulebook. This creates a different texture of play for me than most PbtA games have! I enjoyed some of these novelties (there’s a sense of satisfaction from statting out a rapier to make your swashbuckling frog a beast in combat) but I wonder if they make the experience alienating to other PbtA partisans—or more welcoming to folks coming over from a more traditional background!
Final Thoughts: The game’s three harm tracks (Wear, Injury, & Exhaustion) didn’t pinch us much over two sessions, so someday it would be interesting to play for longer and feel how those mechanics drive gameplay and story.
Played: No Love’s Land
Yes, a bonus played game! This was a real delight. For Valentine’s Day, my wife and I took Adira Slattery’s game of star-crossed robot lovers for a spin. The game had us build bunkers in our living room and throw hastily-scrawled love note missiles back and forth. Excellent.
Highlights: There was a moment when it became clear (from our robot beeps to keep track of how many notes we’d received) that Leah had not found a particular note I’d lobbed over her bunker wall and past her. I quickly wrote another note-missile, wadded it up, and tossed it closer to her. It said “Look behind you.” She let out a triumphant robot beep when she turned and found the errant note.
Musings: While prepping for the game, we realized we had very different expectations of what the notes would consist of. I’d somehow been thinking there might be full letters, like the epistolary phase of Good Society. Leah assumed they’d be more like “Do you wanna run away together? Y/N.” I still think my approach could be interesting, but playing closer to hers made for a fun and fast Valentine’s game.
Final Thoughts: A sweet and high-energy duet game! If we play it again sometime before having put our daughter to bed, it will be fascinating to contend with the additional environmental hazard of a baby beast tramping round the battlefield, attempting to eat note-missiles!
Ran: Hearts of Wulin: Tarkir—In the Shadow of Dragons
For Gauntlet Community Open Gaming, I ran a two-shot of the wuxia melodrama game Hearts of Wulin. Our setting was the Magic: The Gathering plane of Tarkir, so our characters were human warriors attached to a monastery under the rule of ice-breathing dragons of the brood of Dragonlord Ojutai. We had a blast, and you can watch the videos here.
Highlights: I loved introducing dragons hovering above the player characters. As you might expect, dragons were necessarily above the scale of the rest of the cast. But we saw our Aware trying to approach the dragons with the utmost politeness and respect, even earning a favor from Dragonlord Ojutai—which she cashed in to demand to be executed in place of her beloved, who’d been accused of learning heretical dragon-slaying techniques!
My players brought a mix of experience with Magic: The Gathering, and this worked out great. One player who knew the game well based his character on a favorite card, Temur Battle Rage, and so we got a Loyal Atarka Clan emissary. Other players worked primarily from my quick summary of the setting, and we got a dragon-idolizing Bravo, a perpetual Student, and an Aware dealing with difficult family expectations. It all played beautifully.
Musings: I noticed that the first session featured far more Inner Conflict rolls, and in the second session players rarely rolled that move. I think two things contributed to this. The structure of the story itself moves from one about confused and conflicted characters to one about characters charging forward to get what they want or die trying. And I often gave players leeway to answer however they wanted when I asked “Does this rise to the level of Inner Conflict?” So it’s more enticing to roll Inner Conflict in the first session, and take the XP, than in the second session, when it might impede you achieving what you most want.
Final Thoughts: This was a successful backdoor pilot for Magical Multiverse Tour, my plan to run games using a bunch of different systems on a variety of Magic: The Gathering planes. Stay tuned next for Magical Multiverse Tour—Iron Edda: Kaldheim Chaos.
Design Discussion: Rotating GMs
As promised, I’d like to discuss ways of making campaigns with rotating GMs more feasible. This month I got to hand over GM duties for a session to a player in my intermittent Checkpoint Midnight campaign. My player was nervous about taking the reins, but he did a great job and we had an excellent session!
For the most part, we handled the GM-ing handoff by carving out a particular space for the new GM: he had carte blanche to define a setting in the city and a mission relating to it (as it turns out, stealing a map to Atlantis from Vienna’s Globe Museum). I used pre-session love letters to move forward some campaign-level plot elements. So far, therefore, this model includes me as a sort of over-GM, making room for sub-GMs as desired. Which is a fun and relatively simple way to set up GM rotation. But what would a more fully collaborative multiple GM series look like?
I posed the question on The Gauntlet Forums and got interesting responses. I heard about a few games that build this into their structure:
Night Witches is about Soviet airwomen in WWII, and is meant to rotate GMs with each duty station (it might become clear who the next GM is if their PC is killed or dragged off for NKVD interrogation!).
In a Wicked Age… is a sword and sorcery RPG where the first two sessions must be GM’d by the same person to set the tone, but then the role can rotate as desired among players.
Ryuutama, a cozy game of Miyazaki-esque adventures, has the GM controlling a character, specifically a dragon called the Ryuujin. GM rotation is not spelled out, but the game world has four, seasonally-themed dragons, so it might be natural enough to hand over the Ryuujin, and thus the GMing role, as the seasons turn in the game.
I’m excited to learn more about these games and how GM turnover feels in them (my one experience of Night Witches was unusual, in that it had a big rotating cast thanks to an open table policy, but a steady GM to provide some anchor to the campaign).
I also heard from some folks who homebrewed approaches to GM rotation. One had stories of a long-running Champions campaign where several player had a colorful mission-giving NPC they would use as a mouthpiece while taking their turns GMing. The player reports: “We played from modules the other GMs ignored. We were always fresh as GMs and as players it brought variety, too.” It sounds like part of the fun of this approach was giving the current GM the chance to roleplay a particular character they enjoyed while being in the GM’s seat. The players who didn’t want to be in the GM rotation each created two PCs, so that they could rotate characters also and the whole party could level at roughly the same rate.
Another player shared a concept he’s drafted but never gotten to try, where an adventuring party would constantly have tasks outside of adventuring (“we’ve got to send an embassy to the Emperor!”) and send off one party member to fulfill that task, so the character’s player could DM the adventure. This made me think that the next player chosen to GM could write a love letter to resolve the previous GM’s character’s sidequest! There could even be a supplement with a wide variety of fill-in-the-blanks love letters to make this type of role rotation easier.
These were interesting models to discuss, but I’d be happy to hear more. Please feel free to share thoughts on GM rotation in the comments below or at the Gauntlet Forums thread here.
Elsewhere
—Back Again from the Broken Land made it into Forbes! Very pleased to see a shoutout to our game among other great ZineQuest 3 offerings. Rob Wieland’s summary is on-point: “The players have defeated the Doomslord, but can they resolve all their burdens and keep their promises before returning home to their normal lives?”
—On Sunday, March 21st, at 9:30pm ET, I’ll be a guest on Questing Beast, an RPG Youtube channel run by Ben Milton, creator of Maze Rats and Knave. Fellow guests will include my lovely wife Leah Sargeant and the aforementioned Magpie Games designer Mark Diaz Truman. Tune in to hear us answer viewer questions!
See you all next month for more game reflections and design discussion. Until then, may you stave off exhaustion, connect with your loved ones, and (if necessary) ascend on draconic wings.
Gamefully yours,
Alexi