May Murmurs
Featuring Iron Edda, Crossroads Carnival, and character classes that do worldbuilding work
Welcome. Read on for my thoughts on running Iron Edda: World of Metal and Bone and playing Crossroads Carnival, and a discussion of character classes that contribute to worldbuilding. Let’s jump in!
Ran: Iron Edda
I ran four sessions of Iron Edda: World of Metal and Bone, a heavy metal Viking fantasy game by Paul Stefko. The premise is based on Tracy Barnett’s Fate setting, War of Metal and Bone, but the mechanics are their own thing, based on Dungeon World with some key tweaks. The heavy metal part comes in because you are fighting colossal, dwarf-forged, mechanical monstrosities—and some of you can summon up the bones of ancient giants and ride around in them to fight back! I decided to set the game on the Magic: The Gathering plane of Kaldheim. You can check out videos of the series here.
Highlights: As promised, the game was metal as all get-out! The premise gave me room to throw some of the biggest threats I could think of at the players, from the expected dwarven mecha to an army of the undead to a flippin’ vampire dragon. But, interestingly, other elements of the game pushed it away from simply being all-combat all-the-time.
The game has you generate your human settlement (“holdfast”) by making some rolls and choosing from some picklists in the first session. Our holdfast creation built a fascinating political situation, involving rival factions, a mysterious poisoning, and an upswing in honor duels. Despite all the excitement in the world outside the holdfast, players were also quite keen to return to the settlement and get mixed up in the precarious political problems we’d painted.
I really enjoyed the players in this series and the choices they made for their characters. A medley: Our Berserker dove through a portal to a realm of the dead and ended up dueling an undead Valkyrie. Our Seiðkona vowed to prove the worth of a man runecasting as he took up his mother’s role. Our Skald became blood-brothers with a troll. And our Vargr showed off what archery looks like at giant scale in her bone-bonded form, firing whole torn-up trees at the vampire dragon!
Musings: One cool feature of the game is the different combat moves that represent different relationships between your scale and your opponent’s scale. The moves are fascinating, and worth quoting in full:
Drive them before you: When you exhibit your prowess against a force of unworthy opponents, you eliminate any number of them, and the GM makes a move against you.
Deal death: When you wield your power against a worthy foe, roll+Arm. On a 10+, you inflict a wound. On a 7-9, you inflict a wound, and your enemy makes an attack against you.
Hold ground: When you stand firm against an overwhelming enemy, roll +Heart. On a 10+, choose 1. On a 7-9, the GM chooses 1:
• The enemy is slowed, buying time.
• The enemy is weakened in a real way.
• You reveal a significant opening that can be exploited against the enemy.
• You save something precious that is at risk.
After the roll, regardless of the result, you Face Death.
Two of these moves were always dramatic in play. Drive them before you invites the players to describe how cool their characters are as they waste an entire field of enemies, and the GM gets explicit instruction to hit the PC with a move afterwards. Hold ground, on the other hand, sets up the possibility of a dramatic last stand against impossible odds. It’s the stuff finales are made of.
The middle move, for combat at an even scale, is the least interesting. It’s quite bare-bones (har har!), and a full success doesn’t give you a list of fun options, just “you hit them and they don’t hit you.” For the combat move you would expect to trigger the most, it puts the least on the table in terms of story. Perhaps I ought to have avoided even combats more, and pushed the players towards the more dramatic combat moves!
Final thoughts: I’d absolutely run this again when I’m craving classic fantasy. It takes the core of Dungeon World and adds a lot of interest via its juiced-up Norse mythology setting. And I’ll continue my experiment with Magical Multiverse Tour. Perhaps running a game set in Strixhaven, School of Mages will be a good use for the Hogwarts RPG…
Played: Crossroads Carnival
I was very pleased to get the chance to play a one shot of Kate Bullock’s Crossroads Carnival at a Magpie Games online gaming day, organized through Magpie’s active Discord community. The game is about carnival of outcasts and freaks trying to push back the darkness in a Dustbowl-era apocalypse.
Highlights: The playbooks are extremely evocative, and prompted us to create a great cast of PCs. I picked the Mermaid playbook and created a squid-based merman named Erasmus, raised by his lighthouse-keeper father with tales of his Atlantean mother like some kind of tragic, monstrous Aquaman. Also in our carnival was a demigod strongwoman, a cursed seer, and a hungry hungry dog-faced woman.
I always appreciate GMs going hard in one shots, and we had a doozy of an ending to the session, with the carnival train pulling out of the desperate town we’d come to as an angry mob chased several PCs. One PC rolled badly and took a shotgun blast that left her crawling off into the night, permanently separated from the carnival.
Musings: Here’s something I’ve noticed in a number of one shots, including this session of Crossroads Carnival. The GM creates a complicated and fraught town that the PCs arrive in as outsiders/troubleshooters—and then time runs out before the PCs get much of a handle on what’s going on in the town.
This is a genuine challenge: how do you balance the benefits of a thought-out, immersive setting with the tight time constraints of a one shot?
A couple possible ways to handle this occur to me. You can dispense with investigation entirely—as soon as the PCs arrive, someone desperate comes to them to explain the situation in town and ask them to do something about it. This doesn’t need to make their job easy: the person explaining things may not have a good solution in mind, and there may be no clear solution that doesn’t cause some other kind of problem. But it gives the PCs a clear place to start. Another approach: have a much more lightly-sketched town, and introduce a problem wherever the PCs start to poke around. That way there’s no guessing games or red herrings, and the PCs feel as a smart as TV procedural characters who unerringly pick up on where the plot is.
Final Thoughts: The premise of this game is giving me a lot to think about. It seems to me that “Weirdos come to town and try to fix things” is extremely fertile ground for games—perhaps because it’s a deconstruction of D&D? Your average D&D party is pretty weird and not obviously qualified to help the places they go, and yet players will often try to help anyway. There’s room, I think, for more games to run with Crossroads Carnival’s insight, and lean in on the weirdness of PCs and the challenge of how to have a positive impact on a world that hates and fears you.
Design Discussion: Character classes that give a sense of place
One of Iron Edda’s playbooks, The Vargr, combines elements of the classic Ranger and Rogue into something a touch more novel: an outlaw who lives at the edge of civilization, skilled in the ways of the wilderness and connected to the criminal element. This really conveys a world of scattered settlements where the wild spaces in between and those who wander them are viewed with suspicion and dread.
On Twitter, @Pandatheist asked about classes and playbooks that give a strong sense of the world of their game:
I followed up with a similar question because I was intrigued by that conversation:
Folks highlighted some interesting games in the two threads:
Heart: The City Beneath, with the Deep Apiarist class (a delver who is filled with bees!)
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay with the Ratcatcher and Beggar backgrounds (establishing how grimy and hardscrabble a setting you’re in)
DIE with the Neo (injecting cyberpunk technology into a fantasy setting, with somewhat horrific results)
And, more generally, the Belonging Outside Belonging games Wanderhome and Flotsam were recommended for their inspiring picklists on character playbooks. To zoom in on one, Flotsam is about the outcasts, misfits, and renegades living in the belly of a space station in the shadow of a more prosperous society. One playbook, the Cast-Off, is someone who once lived a prosperous life who has found themselves here at the bottom of the heap. The playbook has picklists for “previous employers” (e.g. A gang, a religious order, rich above-folk…) and “why you’re down here” (e.g. Brought down by scandal, hiding from your enemies, wanted by the law…) that build a lot of the world in one fell swoop.
What examples do you think of when I ask about playbooks doing worldbuilding work? What techniques have designers used here that intrigue you? Sound off in the comments!
I am interested in the question because of a back-burner design idea of my own, a “fantasy heartbreaker” with D&D-esque classes rendered (hopefully) more specific and interesting by attention to worldbuilding. I’ve been calling the game idea Her Silver Majesty’s Lorebinders. The PCs are agents sent by the new queen to act as troubleshooters, peacekeepers, and goodwill ambassadors in the fringes of her empire, taming and regulating the wild magic of these parts. So instead of a Wizard, there’s a Folklorist, researching and combining disparate folk magic traditions in an attempt to systematize them. Instead of a Paladin, there’s an Oathforged, a quixotic knight-artificer clanking around in bulky techno-magical armor to fight the dragons worshipped by outlawed cults in the realm’s backwaters. Follow me on Twitter if you want to stay updated on this idea as I occasionally tweet about it.
Elsewhere
—The PDF of The Great Soul Train Robbery is for sale! Pick up the game of Desperados robbing the train to Hell at DriveThruRPG or on Itchio. I’m really excited to have the full zine out there. Please send me play reports and let me know how your Desperados fare!
—I had another fun Twitter thread where I challenged people to build a party made up of classes named after other RPGs. People really delivered! Click through and check out the replies and retweets:
I’ll be back in touch next month with more game recaps and design discussion. Till next time, may your lives be epic, your freak flags fly, and your character class up your surroundings.
Gamefully yours,
Alexi