Oct '21 Murmurs: Psi*Run + Tales from the Low Cantrefs
Plus, the Cinematic Metaphor and a Metatopia panel on zines
Greetings! I launched this newsletter in October 2020. One year in and we’re going strong! I’ve had to tweak my post titling conventions now, though, so I don’t repeat titles. If you’ve enjoyed what I’ve written about the games I play, run, and design, please share the newsletter with a friend!
Played: Psi*Run
This was the first in-person game we got to play at the new Cloven Pine headquarters in Falls Church, VA. Psi*Run is a game by Meguey Baker (expanding on an ashcan by Chris Moore and Michael Lingner) about amnesiac psychics on the run from shadowy forces. As the back cover says, “They took your life. You got away. They want you back. Run!”
Highlights: The game kicks off with a bang. There’s been a Crash. In our game, it was a helicopter. You and your fellow PCs are running away from the Crash, with powers you don’t fully understand and memories that don’t fully come into focus. Character creation consists of questions: “Why is my arm stuck as rubber?” “Who is Cindy and why do I have a polaroid of her?” You also get to list off your psi-powers and what you see when you look in a mirror. All of these are chances to deepen the mystery of your character. I went with “substance mimicry” as a power, and saw “haunted eyes, shaved head, and charred formalwear” when I looked in a mirror.
Then you play out your characters moving forward together on a path of index cards. Every time you go to overcome an obstacle, you roll a small handful of dice and assign them to one of the boxes on your “Risk Sheet.” If you roll more than a few low dice, you start having really hard choices to make. Do I put my one 6 in “achieve my goal,” if that means that the terrifying Chasers gain on us AND someone is hurt? Do I spend a good dice on remembering something from my past, and how much do I care to define that thing myself?
A big highlight of the game is that the truths of your pasts are often built collaboratively. If you put a 4 or a 5 in “remember something,” another player gets to put forward an answer to one of your questions. This means you can end up making big choices about another player’s character. I gave a fellow PC her name (“Poppy”) by answering a question about why she had a poppy tattoo. From other instances of remembering her past, Poppy gained a sick daughter, a pileup of medical bills, and a prison sentence.
Musings: I did wonder if the game was too punishing. Perhaps we just got exceptionally unlucky. But it seemed like most times we tried to use our psi-powers, we rolled so poorly that a low dice got put in “do my psi-powers cause trouble,” and therefore we got the result “Power goes wild: people are dead, things destroyed—it would make national news. GM has first say.” This was tragic the first time, farcical the fifth time. And by then we’d leveled so much of the city (most memorably, by combining our powers disastrously to create a stampede of poison smog ghost horses) that our poor GM was wracking her brain for what more damage we could possibly cause. One player added a new question: “Are we the baddies?” And by the end of the game, despite some of our best efforts, we felt like the answer was probably yes.
Obviously, this means the game is doing a good job of putting you in the shoes of desperate people at the end of their rope. But I did find myself wishing there were some kind of currency or teamwork mechanic to stack the odds slightly more in your favor when a roll felt like one that really counted. Otherwise, you quickly hit a death spiral, where previous choices meant you lost dice to being hurt or impaired, limiting your choices still more till all options are disasters. In stories like this (X-23 busting out of Weapon X, Eleven on the run from her sinister handlers) the characters often have some reserve of inner strength to turn the tide when things get darkest. I really wished my character had something like that as the hits kept coming in this session.
Final Thoughts: To be clear, it was cool to get to try out this system. I would definitely return to this game, possibly for a short series rather than a one-shot. I might experiment with some other source of bonus dice if the first session feels too bleak, though.
Ran: Tales from the Low Cantrefs
Readers, you may recall me discussing in February how much I love the in-development game Tales from the Low Cantrefs (designed by Luke Jordan of Games from the Wild Wood). It’s a hearth fantasy coming-of-age game about the young people of an isolated village. We returned to the system for an in-person campaign. I am running the first few sessions—then we’ll change villages, hand GMing duties over to a new GM, and create a new set of PCs.
Highlights: Even done in haste (I pushed a little mercilessly to make sure we got to start play proper in the first session) village creation is great fun. Our central village of Dale is near a rushing river with some spooky folklore associated with it, in the shadow of a tall mountain pockmarked with mysterious caves, and not far from some crumbling ruins where teenagers sneak away for romantic assignations away from adult eyes.
Our first session took place mostly in the mountains, where the Door sought answers from spirits and the others had to help save him from a freak storm. A bad roll saw our poor Staff struck by lightning and in need of medical attention! But things really picked up in the second session, where we got to dive into village drama and see the young characters pull together to help douse a burning inn, investigate the supernatural origin of the fire, and utterly fail at opening up to one another (causing hurt feelings all round). The Bell, who’d felt a little out of his element up in the mountain, came into his own as a power player at working crowds and getting adults to lend help. The Book even got to do a great work of grammary, transmuting fire into water—but now she owes the fickle Holly tree a major favor.
Musings: The magical playbooks in this game have enormous powers at their fingertips. It’s definitely not a system that’s overly concerned with “balance.” Our Door has played with these powers going to his head, majorly escalating a situation by bending an NPC’s will with the Door of Stone. The other PCs found out about this, told the Door off, and stood strong to make him undo this act of conjuring. But he’s still facing some major consequences, and it raises the question of how far a character can go and still be a Tales from the Low Cantrefs PC. The game is about the young people of a village—if our budding conjuror manages to get himself exiled from the village, have we broken the premise? I have a good table of players, and we are finding ways to play near this space without (I hope) seeing the Door go full supervillain. But it makes me wonder how to set expectations of how responsible these definitely young and inexperienced PCs are meant to be.
Final Thoughts: I really dig this game. I am playing in a different campaign of it online (perhaps more on that next month). I highly recommend getting on Luke’s mailing list to receive a playtest packet when the next one comes out:
Design Discussion: The Cinematic Metaphor
How do you describe the images you want other players to have in their head as you play a game? For me, and I believe for many players, the default language is cinematic. I use phrases like this:
“We open with an overhead shot, zooming in on the town of Dale…”
“And as swords are suddenly drawn, we cut away to other side of town, where…”
“Let’s handle this as a montage. Leah, what shots do we see that show the town preparing for the Harvesttide Festival?”
It’s very useful to be able to bring in imaginary camerawork! For players familiar with film and television, there are immediate associations there. And, for games that are heavily redolent of genre expectations, the (implicit or explicit) idea that our game exists as a cinematic work creates a sense that it’s okay to lean hard into tropes and have fun with them.
But the thing about defaulting to this language is that it can happen even when the game calls for something else. Masks, for example, tells GMs to “describe like a comic book,” encouraging the use of images like “we see a panel of Torq’s eyes glowing white” or “we turn the page to a full-page splash of Captain Invincible Memorial Plaza in ruins.” Despite the obvious resonance here, I find myself still taking in terms of a metaphorical camera for Masks. I guess superhero movies and tv have usurped comics in my subconscious!
The most successful implementation I’ve experienced of a non-cinematic metaphor is Urban Shadows run by Jim Crocker (of Jim Likes Games). Jim ran a number of Urban Shadows series centered on a supernatural crossroads called Coven Prime. The conceit of each Coven Prime series was that it was a comic book crossover, specifically a crossover of Vertigo-style “gothpunk” supernatural heroes in a gritty 90’s imprint. We had a lot of fun with the comic book framing here. Jim kicked off each session with us describing the comic cover featuring our character—each crossover issue, of course, featured four variant covers so every PC got to be spotlighted on one! We imagined ourselves recruiting an amazing array of artists to contribute to these covers, from Bill Sienkiewicz to Dave McKean.
Where have you seen a non-cinematic metaphor used well in a game? Why do you think the cinematic metaphor is so pervasive? Are there other metaphors we could use? What would it mean to position our gaming table stories as dramas or novels or poems? Let me know what you think in the comments!
Elsewhere
—I’ll be speaking on a Metatopia panel: Zines and ZineQuest. What is ZineQuest? What is a zine? Is turning my game idea into a zine and Kickstarting during ZineQuest really something I can do? Join me and Tony Vasinda of Plus One Exp and Adriel Wilson of 9th Level Games to discuss the ins and outs of Kickstarter's ZineQuest initiative. The panel will be broadcast at noon ET on Saturday, October 30th. Register for Metatopia today and tune in then to join the conversation!
—Speaking of Tony and PlusOneExp, I’ll be appearing on Tony’s actual play Twitch channel for a highly seasonal game of Autumn Triduum this Hallowmasstide. Autumn Triduum is my game about a convent of religious sisters confronting the forces of darkness from All Hallows’ Eve to All Souls’ Day. We’ll be playing the evening of All Saints’ Day, November 1st.
—I had fun at Free RPG Day, running a demo of my contribution to the Level 1 anthology! If rolling all the dice you own* and building them into little post-apocalyptic cities sounds fun to you, check your local game store to see if they have leftover copies of the anthology.
—I got to chat about my game The Great Soul Train Robbery with folks from the Beer & Pretzel Podcast. They’ll be releasing that interview soon, but for now they’ve posted the first part of their actual play of Great Soul Train Robbery. It’s a raucous time, and, as their podcast’s name suggests, fueled by booze—they’ve picked out not only some thematic beers but two varieties of whiskey to live up to the Wild Western setting.
Till next time, may you find the answers you seek, stave off Doom, and be ready for your close-up.
Gamefully yours,
Alexi
*You also have my permission to roll just a big ol’ handful of dice, if all the dice you own is a prohibitively large number. OR, you could roll all the dice you own, but onto a small table, and any that fall off the sides of the table are out of the game.
In my experience, descriptions that are largely or entirely noncinematic are at least as common as cinematic metaphors during game. I often hear players describing smells, tactile sensations, internal monologues, thoughts and dilemmas in ways you don't really get in movies. Mechanics can also be descriptive metaphors that are effectively unique to games - like the time Jim Crocker described a villain moving to seduce my character as 'a hard move', saying something about what was happening in a way you couldn't get in any other kind of fiction. I think the ability to move back and forth between literary, cinematic and mechanical modes of description (among others) is one of the things that can make ttrpgs vivid and exciting!
Picturing the version of cinematic/theatrical narration that's all behind the scenes focused, "thunder go. lights to 60." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqE-mGI5OaM