Nov '21 Murmurs: Bite Marks + Dread
Plus, system mastery as thematic mastery and tons of podcasts & videos
Greetings! Since I’m reflecting back to October, we’ve got a bunch of spooky content in this newsletter. Consider it an entry in the tradition of Yuletide ghost stories that gave rise to A Christmas Carol, if you wish.
Ran: Bite Marks
I ran a series of Becky Annison’s Bite Marks set on the Magic: The Gathering plane of Innistrad. Bite Marks is a game of werewolf pack dynamics. Innistrad is a world of Gothic horror from Magic’s Multiverse.
Highlights: Building the wolf pack in the first session was a really cool experience. The game guides players to Pack Culture to embody (in the form of slang, rituals, group bonding activities) and also Pack Traditions that are the supreme law of the pack. Then it asks: “Which player character has secretly violated a Tradition, and who knows about it?”
This is wonderful. It means there are simmering secrets and untenable situations already in place before the GM has thrown any opposition at the player characters. In our game, the Fixer Cawle has violated tradition by outing his pack to his human lover Clare, the beautiful daughter of the town’s mayor. The pack’s Alpha, Serafina, would never be able to let such an offense go—especially not after she was arguably too merciful to the last packmate to violate tradition, her own mate Georgi whom she exiled rather than killed.
Musings: Bite Marks leaves its setting open-ended, but by default the game takes place in a modern milieu where werewolves are considered mythical and people otherwise live mundane lives. Running it in a world of Gothic horror challenged some of the game’s assumptions. There was a different sort of risk with suspicious humans and werewolf-hunting inquisitors everywhere.
And there were also more epic fantasy moments, like the pack’s assault on the Grimm Keep. I put together a custom move on the fly to cover the wolves battling the Keep’s undead defenses and making it inside. I wasn’t interested in playing out those battles blow-by-blow, but I did want the wolves to take a little damage before the final confrontation, just to raise the stakes a little. As it happened, the inter-pack drama had a higher body count than the confrontation with the “Big Bad”—which seems in-line with Bite Marks design goals!
Final Thoughts: This was a fun marriage of game and setting. I don’t know if I would have run Bite Marks if not for Innistrad’s werewolves, and I might not have successfully found a focus for a game set on Innistrad if it weren’t for Bite Marks. If you want to check out our sessions, you can find a full playlist of videos here.
Played: Dread
Dread is a classic indie game by Epidiah Ravichol. It’s a horror game where the resolution mechanic is an ever-more-precarious Jenga tower. If the tower falls, your character’s fate is sealed, often in an immediately fatal way. I got to play an in-person session around Halloween. Our game was set on a space station in the aftermath of a mysterious disaster.
Highlights: The space station had a little bit of everything space-y and spooky: garbled transmissions, malfunctioning security robots, zombies created by government scientists, utterly inscrutable aliens… It turned out it almost everything was my character’s fault, as her secret and illegal project to recreate her dead brother as an AI had gone horribly right.
I decided my character would not be horrified by this, but would instead misinterpret all these events as validation. When it became clear her AI brother had uploaded the minds of many of the people onboard the space station, she glossed this as him saving them. Facing an increasingly rickety tower, I tried to convince the AI to “zip” itself and the uploaded minds onto a futuristic flash drive so we could all escape the station together. It was a risky move, and the tower was getting quite wobbly. I made my pull… and the tower stood. I left the station with a drive full of uploaded minds and one advanced, illegal AI.
Musings: The tower kept looking like it had no loose blocks left, and the GM wasn’t going easy on us. Again and again we approached the tower (looming ominously on a small table by itself, rather than serving as a centerpiece for the main table we were gaming around). And again and again, the player at risk found a block, pulled it from the tower, and placed it on top. Against all our fears and predictions, the tower stood the whole time and our entire crew made it out with life and limb intact.
Is that… a little disappointing? Maybe. Obviously, Dread does promise that you can stay alive if you’re sufficiently good at Jenga. But, for a horror game, you kind of do want someone to die. I don’t really know what to suggest if you’re running Dread and your players are doing too well at Jenga. We even had each player make an epilogue pull, pulling from the tower after the game’s main narrative was over for a chance at achieving their post-spooky-space-station goals. Still a standing tower and four uncannily lucky spacefarers!
Final Thoughts: Dread is a great way to celebrate getting to play games in person again. The tower and all the tension that surrounds it really only works in an analog setting. So if you’re up for a little holiday season horror and you’re able to safely gather with friends or family, I highly recommend giving it a go.
Design Discussion: System Mastery as Thematic Mastery
My game design thought this month is a partially-baked one, so bear with me. I am interested in games where players’ system mastery is also thematic mastery. What does that even mean? I’m thinking of games where becoming a more effective or more powerful player also means you understand the game’s themes more fully. I put the idea out there on Twitter like this:
To expand on that Masks thought beyond the scope of a Tweet: In Magpie Games’s Masks, the teenage superhero PCs are susceptible to others shifting their self-image, which cashes out in shifted stat modifiers (Labels). An adult could tell you off for recklessness and shift your Savior stat down and your Danger stat up. But, here’s the thing! Fellow PCs can also shift your stats, if you give them Influence over you. So if you want a high Danger before getting into a fight, you can totally give a teammate Influence and they could (if it makes sense in the fiction) shift your Danger up and another Label down. Could this be considered “powergaming”? Perhaps, but it’s also playing right into the themes the game is interested in: the malleability of young people’s identities and the dangers/possibilities of letting other people tell you who you are.
I got some interesting responses about other games where, essentially, high-powered tactical play also bespeaks a fluency in the game’s themes. Examples people gave:
Accruing piles of Debt to cash in in Urban Shadows (also by Magpie Games), where being able to leverage Debts can help your character become a power-player in the city and thus underlines what the game is saying about the way cities work.
Understanding the asymmetry of human and android PCs in the Alien RPG by Free League. Humans have Stress they can wager to re-roll dice (but this can lead to more fallout if it doesn’t pay off), androids don’t and instead get a static bonus to certain competencies. Playing well as a human looks very different (more full of stressful, risky gambits) than playing well as an android, and this pushes players to embody their characters and feel the distinction between volatile humans and calculating androids.
This point about Trophy Dark, with a very strong but defensible opinion about what “winning” the game might mean:
@LeahLibresco @ClovenPineGames @Epidiah Another is Trophy Dark: Be just enough of a bastard and stay alive until Ring 5, where you can fully embrace your character's destruction due to their own hubris and greed. Extra points if you can end ironically vis-a-vis your character's stated Drive (i.e. motivation.)
I would love to hear more examples, and any other thoughts inspired by this design discussion. Are there general principles we can derive here about what helps a game combine system mastery and thematic mastery? What other games excel in this area? Leave a comment below or chime in on Twitter!
Elsewhere
This time I’ve got a lot of podcasts and videos to share. They’re good ones though, so enjoy!
—The video is now up for my Metatopia panel on zines and ZineQuest. Many thanks to Tony and Adriel for chatting with me! I think we have meaty conversation about the hows and whys of game zines. Plus, there’s a surprise cameo at the end of the video…
—I ran a mini demo session of Back Again from the Broken Land at Doxacon, the Christian sci-fi and fantasy convention (held virtually this year). It proved to be a fun window into the game, with a mix of experienced and brand-new players who all enjoyed embodying small adventurers on the long walk home. Here’s that video.
—Last video: On All Saints’ Day, I ran a game of Autumn Triduum on the PlusOneExp Youtube channel. We got to tell a dramatic story of religious sisters confronting the forces of darkness from All Hallows’ Eve to All Souls’ Day. Check it out here.
—On the Gauntlet podcast, I discuss playing Tales from the Low Cantrefs and running Magical Multiverse Tour (the meta-series that the Bite Marks game from above was part of). It’s a really fun conversation.
—My interview with the Beer and Pretzels Podcast about designing The Great Soul Train Robbery is up now!
— Last but not least, the Trophy podcast began a series playing through my Trophy Gold Incursion called The Rime Palace. The cast of the Chimaeracast play a disreputable party seeking treasures in the icy courts of the fae. Episodes one and two are out now, subscribe to the Trophy podcast for more!
Till next time, may you run with a good pack, avoid toppling any dangerous towers, and master your life’s systems and themes.
Gamefully yours,
Alexi
I think this might be the first time I've seen a screencap of one of my Tweets outside of Twitter! Glad to be part of the discussion!