Welcome to the first installment of the new Cloven Pine Games newsletter! Every month or so I’ll be sending out some reflections on games I have run and played, aspects of game design I’m thinking about, and assorted topics related to tabletop roleplaying games.
Let’s begin!
Played: AGON
I got the chance to play AGON last month. AGON is a game by John Harper and Sean Nittner about mythic heroes on a long journey home, battling epic challenges and competing for glory.
By default, AGON is based in the world of Greek mythology and heavily inspired by works like The Iliad and The Odyssey. The series I played, however, had been transplanted to the Celtic Otherworld. The GM, Alun R of Gallus Games, did a great job reskinning the game for the new setting, including swapping in a Celtic pantheon for the Olympians.
Highlights: AGON is a game that encourages you to swing for the fences. You’re building often quite large dice pools by tapping into your hero’s name, epithet, traits, divine favor… My character, Lion-Hearted Aethelflaed, frequently called on the wisdom of Brigid (though, as an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman with a mixed Pagan and Christian background, she had heard conflicting reports from her parents as whether Brigid was a goddess or a saint). By the end of the series, I had seized a monstrous flying wyrm and made it my mount, changing my epithet from Lion-Hearted to Wyrm-Tamer.
Musings: AGON has a competitive aspect—heroes are vying to be “the best” in each contest, and to the victor goes the Glory (something like XP for this game). Our group were good sports about this. I wonder, though, if every group is ready for a game blending cooperative and competitive elements, especially since it seems like a hero could pull far ahead if they get enough Glory to upgrade their name dice (from a d6 to a d8) before their companions.
Final thoughts: I think it would be very fun to reskin AGON with the gods of Theros and play a game set on that plane of the Magic: The Gathering multiverse.
Ran: Checkpoint Midnight
I just completed a three-month “Quarterly” series of Checkpoint Midnight on The Gauntlet. Checkpoint Midnight is a game I am designing about supernatural operatives running missions and juggling loyalties in Cold War Vienna.
Highlights: It was wonderful getting to run 13 jam-packed sessions and see how the game plays at campaign length. I had a rotating crew of players, with two in it for the long haul, two in for two of the three month-long “seasons,” and two joining for brief and intense season-length arcs.
Some favorite moments: Jack the undead soldier taming a nightmare horse and then riding it, guns blazing, right through the wall of a mansion. Emilie the supernaturally-lucky grifter deliberately drawing a sniper’s fire (every bullet just barely missing). Ashleigh the animated wooden manikin dying in an ambush in a Viennese sewer, and bequeathing her conscience (a talking ladybug) to Emilie. Valentine the otherworldly racketeer selling out his friend Joske (the obsessive Nazi-hunter) to the realm of Night—and Joske deciding he can work with this arrangement. And Skye the doctor-turned-rusalka working a miracle to wake up a sleeping beauty from a cursed sleep.
I got lovely feedback from my players, one of whom said he’d recommend the game to “anybody who loves The Third Man, noir fiction, games that mix intrigue, emotional play and adventure.”
Musings: It’s a game in development, and I’m learning a lot about it as I run it. Some of my thoughts relate to the idea of a holding environment (see below). I’m also realizing that I want to tweak advancement. In the Quarterly, as characters advanced they also took on entanglements with the Great Powers. This created a certain propulsion, but the endgame lacked some tension—it was relatively easy to choose your character’s fate, whether becoming an asset of the West or the Soviets or else playing the sides against each other to retire to safety. I’m reworking the system so advancement and entanglement are separate tracks, and there’s a bit more tension about where your character will end up.
Final thoughts: I’m so pleased to have run my first Quarterly, and I’m thrilled that Jim Crocker is running a new Quarterly of the system—with me as a player this time!
Design Discussion: Holding Environment
I had the good fortune to participate in Magpie Games’ inaugural Game Design Festival, focused on designing Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games. I got to run a short playtest of Checkpoint Midnight with a great quartet of players. It was my first time using pregenerated characters for the game, and I feel they worked very well. They made it easy to drop right into a mission, and the players still had enough room to surprise with me with what they had up their sleeves—literally, in the case of the Unburied who interpreted “one limb is distinctly non-human” to mean he had one arm replaced with a massive switchblade!
But what I want to discuss here is a topic Mark Diaz Truman of Magpie laid out in his opening presentation on the finer points of PbtA design: holding environment. He used the term (drawn, apparently, from a business world concept of adaptive leadership theory) for the physical, organizational, and relational forces within the game’s fiction that pull player characters together. Here’s my attempt to summarize it in my own words: your game’s holding environment is the answers you’ve built into your game to “What do PCs do?” and “Why does this particular group of PCs keep doing things together?”
Magpie’s wonderful game Masks has a strong holding environment: you’re an established team of teenage superheroes, you all are prompted in backstory questions to discuss why you care about the team, and there’s a Team Pool mechanic that gives you bonuses for working together.
Magpie’s game Urban Shadows has some tricky aspects to its holding environment: you’re mortals and supernatural beings navigating the shadowy politics of a big city, and the primary thing tying PCs together is Debt—which can get a bit impersonal if you’re not careful. Mark shared some fascinating sneak peeks into how Magpie is strengthening Urban Shadows’ holding environment for its second edition, and it makes me even more excited for the new version of the game.
Of course, this also prompted thoughts about my own games. Some of them have strong holding environments: PCs in Secret Science Sewer Siblings are a family of sewer mutants tasked with rescuing their mentor from nefarious forces. PCs in Plutonian Shore are a spaceship crew skirting the law in the frigid fringes of the solar system. But Checkpoint Midnight has some of the same trickiness as first edition Urban Shadows. Why will these particular operatives stick together to some extent, even as they start having conflicting loyalties?
So the design festival has clearly given me food for thought. Perhaps part of Checkpoint Midnight character creation should be defining what holds this group together: a common enemy, a prophecy that must be thwarted, a blood pact? What do you think, reader? Feel free to share your thoughts on holding environments and their place in PbtA game design in the comments below.
Elsewhere
I was very pleased to have a piece published in Plough magazine, pitching RPGs to a communitarian Christian audience.
I will also be running games at a number of upcoming online conventions:
At Gauntlet Community Open Gaming, I’m running Autumn Triduum: Deliver Us from Evil, on Saturday, Oct 17, 7pm ET. The convention is free and open to all!
At Doxacon, I’m running The Great Soul Train Robbery on Friday, Nov 6, 2pm ET.
I’ll be speaking on an panel at Metatopia 2020 on publishing games to itch.io. Metatopia is Nov 5–8. Panel timing details TBA.
At RPG Alliance Con, I’m running The Great Soul Train Robbery: Ballad of the Desperados on Saturday, Nov 21st, 4pm ET.
I’ll be back in touch next month with more games played, games run, and design discussion. Till then: may your feats be heroic, your skullduggery pleasant, and your holding environments healthy.
Gamefully Yours,
Alexi