modoreadsttrpgs

[modoreadsttrpgs]

Game Reactions: Spire - Shadow Operations (One-shot collection)

Link: https://rowanrookanddecard.com/product/shadow-operations-a-spire-one-shots-book/?v=7885444af42e

[Quick note, I’m never concise in these, but I waffle a *lot* at the start here. If you’re already comfortable with Spire and are just curious about Shadow Operations itself, you can skip to after the Wayland’s Forge link.]

Spire is “a fantasy-punk RPG about rebellion, brutality and oppression” by Rowan, Rook and Decard. Shadow Operations is a collection of 11 one-shot scenarios to play with Spire. If you’re not familiar, the game is set in the titular city, a mile-high construction of unknown origin. It’s run by the aelfir (high-elves), while the PCs are drow working for an organisation called the Ministry, who the aelfir would call terrorists. The game itself is a d10 dice pool mechanic that RRD call the Resistance system. It’s close to a FitD/PbtA style, ‘fiction first’ setup, with graded levels of success depending on the dice roll. Fails (or compromised successes) result in characters marking ‘stress’ against a relevant ‘resistance’. Whenever stress is marked, a check is made for ‘fallout’, or some concrete consequence, e.g., taking fallout to your Blood resistance might mean that you have a broken leg. The more stress you build up, the more likely fallout is, and the worse it will be the higher the stress is when it hits. That’s a whirlwind tour, but in short - it’s a great system, for me it’s just about the perfect level of crunch. It’s way less restrictive and crunchy than a D&D, but still gives enough of a framework to support players (and GMs) who might struggle with a very rules-light system.

On top of that, the world (and the art in the core rulebook, wowsers) is fascinating. The ‘fantasy-punk’ label makes sense once you start reading, as it combines classic fantasy creatures with more modern elements like factories, trains and so on. Good touchpoints might be Dishonored or Arcane. There is an abandoned train network that was designed to manipulate space-time itself, and has left behind a seemingly infinite labyrinth of tracks and stations. Underneath the city is the Heart, which there is a whole other game dedicated to. The Heart is organic, or magical, or maybe technological, but it’s definitely messed up, has a tendency to drive people beyond the bounds of sanity, and possibly created the city of Spire. There are ‘mega-corvids’ that can be used for travel. There’s a distant war with gnolls that receives armies from the barracks near the base of Spire, and returns corpses and injured soldiers. Speaking of corpses, there are ghosts, and also people who can commune with the dead. There’s an intelligence housed in a crystal that is recruiting ‘followers’… or something, I can’t fully remember that bit. Needless to say, there’s a lot of lore. It’s a really cool world that is not the same old shit you’ve seen a thousand times, and offers a lot of opportunity to be creative. It’s also a lot to try to take in, especially as a GM whose players will probably need to ask a lot of basic questions about how the world works, what their characters would know etc. In fairness, there’s a lot of world detail in the core book, and quite a few supplements that add more, but also a lot still left undefined, and explicit permission (even encouragement) from the authors to make up whatever sounds good for your game.

That latter point is appreciated, and I certainly have made use of it. I’ve played a single one-shot of Spire, and then last year GM’d a mini-campaign (about 8 or 9 sessions) using the ‘Snuff Out the Sun’ scenario provided in the quickstart. I was winging it a lot, and making up whatever felt best at the time, and it went great. I was running it for 2 players, both from my regular D&D group. We all started TTRPGs with D&D in 2020 (guess why!) and I’m predictably the nerd that got super into the whole scene and branched out from D&D itself. I’m the primary force behind us ever playing any non-5e games, much to their chagrin at times. With some scheduling conflicts, I’d suggested setting up a secondary weekly slot for these 2 players, that gave them a chance to keep playing, in return for letting me experiment with other games. Spire was the first game we’d really played that was fundamentally different to the D&D approach. Up to then we’d played Cyberpunk Red, Mork Borg, Cy_borg. It took some time for the players to adjust to things like no, we’re not using roll20, you don’t have HP, there are no maps for tactical combat, and yes, it’s ok that I just asked you to tell me what your relationship is with this new NPC, you can pretty much do what you want within reason, and we are making this story up together as we go.

Honestly, it took time for me too. I’ve been used to D&D-style adventures that broadly know where the characters need to go and how they will need to solve the situation they’re dropped into. Spire is more of a ‘play to find out’ game, which I absolutely love! I’m also not always the best improviser on the spot, so it’s a challenge too. The quickstart scenario gives you a cast of characters, a list of locations, and a goal, and wishes you luck. Players need to prevent a religious zealot from ascending to a seat of power. My players skulked around, gathered information, curried favour, bribed, and generally politicked their way through. My partner, by contrast, had fought the city guard and kidnapped the archbishop within 2 sessions! [Side note, there’s something so interesting in that split, where my videogame/D&D background players expended every effort and ounce of wit they had to avoid any potentially dangerous situation, clearly retaining a primary goal of keeping their characters safe at all times.] This is all great stuff, but had made me very curious about how to introduce more adventures/missions, and especially how you might write more for the game. So when I saw Shadow Operations, I was eager to pick it up.

Quick shoutout, I bought this (and two other Spire supplements I may post about) on a trip to Wayland’s Forge, an excellent RPG/boardgame shop in Birmingham. I love the place, and if you ever get the chance, you should visit: https://www.waylandsforge.co.uk/

Shadow Operations itself then, contains 11 standalone, one-shot scenarios for Spire. Each is by a different writer, but all have the same construction. There’s a pitch, suggestions for useful classes, a list of key characters with descriptions, a series of locations, a few suggested scenes, a few ‘props’, an explanation of the scenario’s twist, and a suggested reward for successful completion. Just like Snuff Out the Sun, there is not a linear sequence of events, you’re being handed a toolkit that, at its best, can facilitate any of a number of fun stories for your group. If you’re curious about the ‘twist’ - for most of the stories it is a literal twist, i.e., the straightforward mission pitched to the players gets a complication, some sort of rug pull like ‘that NPC you’re here to rescue actually defected and left of their own free will’.

It’s a fun structure, and for the best examples, it gives the GM a great framework with interesting characters that have multiple conflicts going on and no clear right or wrong, but a few obvious paths that players could take. These Feral Saints is the last of the scenarios, where a ‘hallow’ (a reincarnated drow saint) is walking around a lower level of Spire, performing miracles and gaining followers. Not all is quite as it may seem, as you’d expect, and there are multiple characters with their own agendas and (understandable) motives. My brain exploded with possibilities reading this one, and I’d really look forward to running it.

Powderkeg is another favourite, setting up two rival pubs that are both allies of the Ministry, and on the brink of open violence. Your players need to find a resolution that works out well for their organisation. Does that resolution need to benefit everyone else involved? Not necessarily. Again, there are a handful of strong characters with different motives, that would likely react in interesting ways to any attempted interventions the players make.

These scenarios, as well as a few others, do exactly what I need as a GM - give me sufficient scaffolding that I can kickstart the players into action, and have the world push back in fun ways, without struggling to look up or invent a ton of lore along the way. Those scenarios above are both, at their core, fully comprehensible to anyone familiar with human stories of any kind. The rich, unique lore of Spire is a creative bonus, not an impediment.

Some of the others don’t meet the same level, for me. Where that’s the case, it’s always because I feel like I don’t have enough to go on. If you’re a strong improviser, and like to invent a lot during play, or your players are particularly good at collaborating to construct the world and story as they go, you might feel differently.

As an example, House of Leaving is set in a place called the Infinite Library, which has only a couple of paragraphs describing it in the core rulebook. A researcher found important information and has disappeared. The answer to the mystery is very simple, the cast of characters is small, and the number of people who know the answer to the mystery (and can tell the players) is even smaller. Just the name Infinite Library sounds great, and you have a lot of scope to build out the story, but the amount of concretely useful detail in the scenario could be delivered in a couple of sentences. I think my players would draw a blank on how to get started, and I wouldn’t feel confident enough that I could help them, or throw up interesting obstacles once they got going.

Similarly, The Last Train is set in the Vermissian, the abandoned train network that exists partially outside reality. I love this part of the world-building, but it gets very abstract whenever it’s mentioned. The objective here is again quite simple, and there isn’t a great deal in the scenario as written to complicate it. I’d hesitate to run this one, and if I did, I’d feel a need to put in a lot of prep work to give myself more characters, locations, and events to pull from, as well as more setup and guidance for the players.

Overall, I really like this approach to writing ‘adventures’, in contrast to the worst of the stereotypical D&D adventures that are very linear rollercoaster rides for the players. Forgive my videogame background, but this is Stalker rather than Call of Duty, for example. That said, it is a mixed bag at times, as it’s a very fine line to walk between being too prescriptive and not giving GMs enough to work with. If you’re a Spire fan though, and want some inspiration for your future games, it’s definitely worth picking up.

[modoreadsttrpgs]

How to write a location for your TTRPG

An important, and for some people fastidious, part of writing a TTRPG scenario is to fill the universe. Some improvise this part, and I admire them (from afar, they scare me), but others like me need to prepare things. I suggested in a previous article some techniques to write NPCs, let me share here a few others to write places, you never know, it might come handy.

Before even starting to look at individual places, a technique that I really like and that helps a lot for players' immersion, and for giving a coherence to your universe, is the regionalization technique. It consists in dividing your universe in zones (regions, city districts, or even time periods or sociological groups) and give each a few minor characteristics. For example the houses in a given region are built from a local ochre stone, little pale blue flowers grow in another, architects from a given time period always placed the kitchen on the left just after the front door, or people from a given origin use furniture from a recognizable style.

These are purely cosmetic elements, but for one they’ll regroup your places as part of the same world, and then they’ll give you substance to fill your descriptions in a credible and easy way.

Once the regionalization is done, let’s focus on individual places. The first thing to do is to determine what is the function of your place, to place it in one of three categories : the passage location, the quest location and the recurring location.

The passage location is a place that only serves as a background for a one-off scene, for example a shop or a campsite. Your focus point for this type of place is its atmosphere. You must describe it to your players for their immersion’s sake, but mustn't dwell on it lest they might get distracted from the scene. I’ll give you advice that would make a lot of literary professors’ blood boil : use chichés. You want to build an ambiance in a few words ? That’s what stock expressions are for. Why describe a whole waterfront when “Dream beach with coconut trees” exists ? Or “Dusty crypt” ? Or “Cutthroat alley” ? Just sprinkle a bit of regionalization on it, and it will even become a unique place !

I’d tell you not to abuse clichés but… on a larger scale don’t abuse passage places. You’d get a very generic and blank universe if you did.

Now let’s see the quest location. It’s a place where a challenge occurs (puzzle, NPC discussion, battle, even a whole dungeon). While the passage location focused on the ambiance, here you’ll have to prioritize the gameplay. You have to determine what will serve the challenge, and only then will you be able to furnish the environment. Will your NPCs move on walkways over a chasm ? Will there be acid lakes around them ? Are rocks flying in the air ? Those are the main elements of your background.

Once you have your gameplay elements, the trick to avoid pulling your players out of immersion is to make them coherent in your universe. Why is the place built like this ? Is it realistic for the function it carries ? How does it work ? You actually only have to answer one level of precision, it is enough to maintain the immersion. The walkways over the chasm may decay rapidly and be difficult to repair, so their great number may be a redundancy and the players will find them at different degradation states. The acid lakes may be a natural resource and extraction equipment can be spotted since the prices for this specific acid are high on the market. The flying rocks may have a glowing mushroom growing on their underside, giving them their antigravity properties. Not only will this enrich your universe, but it may also give ideas to your PCs to exploit the environment and, in the end, play with your world instead of just going through it. Another pinch of regionalization and you’re good !

One last tip specifically about dungeons : if you don’t use a battlemap covering all of it… then don’t make a map at all ! It will only lengthen the exploration part of your adventure without giving anything to your players. It will be easier to make a logigram, with blocks for every important room and lines to connect them. It would also allow you to make your dungeon modular to adapt it to your players’ choices (and avoid backtracking if they missed something !), after all you want them to have fun, not lose them or waste their time.

Finally, on to the last category : the recurring location. This is a place where PCs might have to come back several times, to meet with important NPCs for example, or because a lot of crucial points of the scenario happen here. The main characteristic of this kind of place is to be recognizable, and to make vivid memories.

Those are the places you’ll have to write with the most care, because they must be remarkable and they will give your universe its identity. The first time your PCs enter such a place, the description must be long and detailed enough that they understand this location is important. Besides the (now traditional) regionalization, it is important that each one of these places has at least one outstanding element. A tavern may be adorned with a dreadfully stuffed deer head. A castle may be carved out of a unique gigantic crystal. A train station may have a monumental clock on its façade. Whatever it is, this element must be well described : this way, every time the PCs come back to this place, you only have to evoke this one characteristic to bring back the whole place.

Moreover, if you’re writing a campaign, some of these recurring places might need to evolve along the scenario. You should consider cosmetic, or even functional elements that may change with the actions and choices of the PCs. A window may be in good condition at the beginning, broken during a certain scene, then hastily fixed with newspapers afterwards. A whole building may be partially destroyed, and the following scenes will happen in its ruins (will the outstanding element be intact or damaged ? Your choice !) The emotional weight of the location will be reinforced by this.

A last little bit of advice for all kinds of places : add at the beginning of your notes one to three adjectives to define the atmosphere. You can refer to it for improvisation needs, and to choose the right tone to read your description.

There we go, I hope these techniques will be of use to you, or at least pleasant to read ! I’ll come back later with other articles, so stay tuned !

[modoreadsttrpgs]

HIRE A DISABLED TRANS GIRL AND HELP HER PAY RENT!

I've got new commission sheets, and am now offering more services, such as layout and web design!

Hire me! I'm still struggling out here!

You can fill out the form on my website, or DM me here!

[modoreadsttrpgs]

Now at IPR: Make Your Own One-Page Roleplaying Game

Create your own roleplaying game that fits on a single sheet of paper. Written by the creator of the ENNIE nominated Exclusion Zone Botanist, this Skeleton Code Machine guide takes you through every step of the process from initial concept to publication.

https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Make-Your-Own-One-Page-Roleplaying-Game-Print-PDF.html

[modoreadsttrpgs]

Game Reactions: Transgender Deathmatch Legend II

Link: https://ratwavegamehouse.itch.io/transgender-deathmatch-legend-ii

Bear with me, but I’m still on the motorsports idea, it will make sense soon maybe. I’m also kinda cheating as I read this in late Feb pretty much as soon as my copy arrived (ironically, on the day I was out watching The People’s Joker). I’ve gone back to it though, as I was riding the ADHD brain-train through ideas for this motorsports game, and I remembered playing Top Trumps as a kid, with a pack focused on cars of course. Of course I thought wow, what if you could base the game around a Top Trumps deck?! I have no idea how that would work, but also I looked at modern Top Trumps and they’re just about the ugliest things I’ve ever seen, and not even in a fun way. Look at this thing:

Terrible photo, cropped onto a horrible background, with nasty colours and just about the worst design for usability you could ever imagine. So this was definitely a bad idea. Anyway, it did remind me of TDLII, which uses a trick-taking card game as its core mechanic. In short, I’ve wondered whether a hack of this would work well. I’ll come back to that at the end.

The game itself is fantastic. In contrast to Top Trumps, it looks great - it’s a spiral-bound A4 book in landscape format, so it looks different to anything else I own. Most of the art is photography of Kayla Dice (the creator of the game) and Forest Jones. They’re caked in blood, holding weapons, grappling etc. It’s violent, in your face, and sets the scene perfectly.

I should probably say it’s a game about pro-wrestling, primarily designed for 2 players, one Promoter (GM) and one Face (player). There are rules for more players too though. As mentioned, the core mechanic is a trick-taking card game, which determines the outcome of each fight. The fights take place as part of a hexcrawl, and the game includes seven distinct hexcrawls as well as rules for designing your own. It’s about pro-wrestling, but it isn’t just a series of organised matches. Each hexcrawl is a scenario playing out that has you fighting in and out of the ring. A booker hasn’t paid you and you need to fight through his goons to get your cash, a trans healthcare provider is denying access and you’re going to beat some sense into them, and so on. The hexcrawls give it vibes of 90s beat ‘em ups like Streets of Rage, or movies like The Warriors. Kayla in fact lists both of these, among many others, in the bibliography, as I just remembered!

Basically that’s the core of it. The framework is pretty straightforward, in that you crawl through the hexes, and play the card game when there’s a fight. Some hex variations can give you weapons (a bonus card to play at an opportune moment), story beats, or other events. The flavour all comes from the hexcrawls themselves, which are really strong individually, and come together to build a collection with both variety and a consistent theme and voice. It makes me not want to hack it for the motorsports idea because it would pale in comparison :D

Before I get back to that, one last word on the book. In addition to everything mentioned so far, there are three essays included. One about Kayla’s relationship to wrestling, one about the history of wrestling (that is only a single page but would legit be a great thing to share with anyone who knew nothing and wanted to start learning), and one about blading (or more specifically, about pain in art, contrasting pro-wrestling with stand-up comedy). All three are brilliant. The first in particular comes along on page 2, and immediately had me reeling. I don’t know how old Kayla is, but we must be vaguely similar ages. My family couldn’t afford Sky Sports, and yes I’m also autistic so I watched the shitty Sunday morning highlights show as well, and checked the WWE website (and then other websites, like Rajah was specifically my main go-to for a long time) religiously. I never got a bloody nose from taking a pedigree, but I had a bad back for a while from taking a chokeslam (onto a small rock I hadn’t seen before landing on it spine-first). I related quite a bit already, so when Kayla describes Eddie Guerrero’s passing as “the first time I became aware of death” I think I paused and had to interrupt whatever my partner was doing to animatedly point all of this out. Other than my childhood dog, Eddie was the first death I was actually sad about, and I could never process that the week before I was watching him wrestle, then he was gone. To this day I will just randomly think about Eddie sometimes, and it will still make me sad. He will forever be my favourite wrestler, not just because his untimely passing adds weight to the memories of him, but because he was genuinely the best to ever do it. I had no idea we’d lose him early when he won the title and I screamed in joy at the TV, jumping up and down. Nor when he unlaced his boot to cheat Kurt Angle out of a win and I cackled with glee. Eddie was the fucking greatest.

That was a bit of a tangent, but I will never feel bad about giving props to Eddie Guerrero. Getting back to the notion of hacking this for the motorsports idea, I really like that it has a simple card game to play out the fights. As I’ve gone through a couple of explicitly motorsports-themed games, I’ve honed in on the exact dynamics I’m aiming for. I want it to be about a driver’s career, revolving around the racing, but zoomed out enough that a race is a few minutes, not an entire play session. You should be working through a full career over a game (that could be multiple sessions), and have the opportunity to play through multiple careers. I loved the dice mechanics for the racing in Grid Beef, but there isn’t the space for something so detailed. The subject of the game is the driver’s career, not the racing itself, but equally there needs to be an element of uncertainty in the race and championship outcomes. TDLII has respawn checkpoints if you lose a fight, but I’d like to let the cards determine whether your driver wins the race, and the championship, or not, and you play through the consequences. Sometimes a really talented driver just misses out on a win, and it sends their whole career down a different path.

I’m less certain right now how the hexcrawls play out. Each could be a championship, which would be very clean, though perhaps more zoomed in than I’d expected. They could also be shorter though, and then feed into a meta-structure where the results of each championship determine what options you have as a drive in the following year. Each crawl could also be a whole career, but that could get unwieldy, or too zoomed out. It all feels like it fits very well though, so well that I’m struggling to escape the gravity of the idea, and have already written a load of notes about how to reconfigure the fighting styles, the hex types etc. I don’t think I can get my brain away from building it in this way. It’s also notably a 2 player game, when I’ve had this idea as a solo game - either I figure out how to make the card game solo-able, or I turn the idea into a 2 player one. I honestly wouldn’t mind the latter, I’d love more 2 player games in the world.

To come back to the actual game at hand though, it’s easily the best thing I’ve posted about so far. If you’re interested in wrestling, 2 player games, or just good TTRPGs, I’d highly recommend checking it out.

[modoreadsttrpgs]

Consider Kayla

The nomination period for the CRiT Awards is open and cause I did heaps of stuff last year I'm very eligible and considerable (as in, there's much to consider).

For Your Consideration

Best GMless TTRPG - PSYCHODUNGEON

Best Multiplayer TTRPG - Transgender Deathmatch Legend II

Best Indie TTRPG - Either of the above or any of the other games I released last year if they were your favorite

Best Podcast Host - Kayla Dice (Game Soup or This is Your Lifepath)

Best Legacy Podcast - This is Your Lifepath

(so Lifepath's first season started over two years ago, though admittedly the second season was entirely contained to last year)

Best Upcoming Podcast - Game Soup

But yeah everything I released last year, plus Transgender Deathmatch Legend II, is eligible so if you have any favourites I haven't mentioned I'd still appreciate the nod.

Like obviously awards aren't a be all end all, but I have been struggling with seeing the worth in what I make lately and awards, or at least consideration, is one way of remembering it's not all noise in the dark.

[modoreadsttrpgs]

And it's official, starting this Saturday at 9 pm CEST (UTC+2) I will host a live panel talking about food and ttrpg.

With questions like what are your fav snacks at the table, your ideal pizza, your classic tavern meals, which game would be your dessert in a menu, or which monster would you most like to eat.

Find me on the EUphoriaAP twitch channel

[modoreadsttrpgs]

We took a week off, threw the dog in the car, and are on holiday for a few days. Obviously the best kind of holiday is one where you buy way too many books. This was my haul, including Colostle, which has been on my list for aaaaages. When I saw it I grabbed it immediately. Hooray for bookshops that have RPG sections! This one was small, but well-formed, with only a handful of 5E, Vaesen, Blades, Spire, Heart (including Dagger in the Heart), Be Like a Crow (I almost came back with that too), Scum and Villainy, some Cthulhu, and others I’ve already forgotten.

I’ve already read Hunchback (very good), I’m halfway through Outrage, and have started The Mechanic as some fun research for the motorsports game.

[modoreadsttrpgs]

the forced feminization game jam is a one-month ttrpg game jam taking place this march about exactly what it sounds like.

an immersive larp about turning into a doll designed to be printed on vials of estradiol.

a game about a group of women forced into submissive domestic roles plotting to kill their husbands.

a third-party adaptation of dorley hall into rpg form.

hello sweetie. we've been waiting for you.

[modoreadsttrpgs]

Celebrate your favourite indie TTRPGs!

There are a lot of TTRPGs out there. A lot of them are very good. A lot of these good games don't get seen as widely as they deserve.

When it comes to fan creations, a few games dominate the scene. Dungeons and Dragons is, obviously, at the top of the pile (for a host of reasons I won't get into here), but Blades in the Dark, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Call of Cthulhu and a few others have their fair share too.

Indie titles rarely have any. Sometimes this is because there's no clear license to do so, but more often I think it's because people are daunted to try expanding on a game no-one else is expanding on.

All this to say, take the leap! Contact the creator if you want to sell your creation and there's no license, but be the first!

I'm going to be trying to do this myself, picking the games I've enjoyed reading and playing and making something small for each. I'm beginning with @rathayibacter's [BXLLET>, one of my favourite yet-to-be-played games.

Go check out Rath's game and what I've made for it, and make something for your favourite! I promise, the designer will be incredibly flattered!

[modoreadsttrpgs]

Some of the illustrations I've done for Under a Pale Sun, a gothic science fantasy TTRPG which you can grab in early access here!

[modoreadsttrpgs]

Moon Rings, a new solo journaling game, is out now!

In the game, you play as a witch who wishes to end the reign of the cursed Blood Moon. Venture into the labyrinth, find the Moon Rings, and cast the ritual to change the moon! The labyrinth is deadly and the Blood Moon is watching, so you’ll need your strength of will, magick, and good fortune to make it to the end!

This game is based on the Carta and Aspire SRDs. It was made for the Below a Bad Moon jam!

Check it out and please share!

[modoreadsttrpgs]

Game Reactions: SUPERSTARS Racing Icons

Link: https://feelingfickle.itch.io/superstars-racing-icons

I’m back on the motorsports idea again. This is the second game from Mint’s list (https://www.tumblr.com/theresattrpgforthat/748009076009697280/any-games-about-cross-country-racing-or-just) that I’ve checked out. Turned out I already owned this from a past bundle purchase! So… technically this is reading a game I already own rather than buying a new one, even though it wasn’t actually in my backlog?

Anyway, it’s a Firebrands hack about racing. I haven’t actually read Firebrands, but I’ve heard about it, as a game from Meguey Baker and D. Vincent Baker of Apocalypse World fame. Firebrands is here, and is about mechs so I’m sure I’ll end up buying it at some point: https://lumpley.itch.io/firebrands

As I understand it, Firebrands is essentially a series of mini-games with limited mechanics, a sequence of scenes framing and encouraging roleplay and collaborative storytelling. Superstars uses that framework to facilitate stories about racing. Although it’s themed around modern motorsports quite directly, with images of formula cars and motorbikes etc throughout, it’s explicitly built to support anything that you could deem ‘racing’ - pod racing? Sure. Mech racing? Why not! I’d say that some of the language (though not much) refers directly to tires or pit stops, or other things that you would need to address if your setting is significantly different.

It’s a 34 page zine, and looks really good. Every page has a full background shot, mostly of a car or track, some of other possible settings, but they’re all heavily glitched and distorted so you’re dealing with vibrant colours. Text is white, sitting on semi-transparent black blocks, so it’s legible whilst letting the background stand out as well. It’s kind of busy, but the font is very neutral and clean, and the layout itself doesn’t go wild, so it’s a pleasant read.

There are a few character backgrounds to choose from, these are really well done and very recognisable to any motorsports fan. Players then determine their relationships with each other and get underway. The mini-game/scene format means that you’re getting a broad view of your character’s interactions, with 4 or 5 (depending if you count practice) of the 8 total scenes being set away from the track. It was so interesting for me, reading this soon after Grid Beef and with research for my own idea in my mind. Grid Beef was weighted toward on-track action, and it helped me to realise I wanted to be more zoomed out, and possibly to focus on specific moments rather than playing every lap of a race. Superstars does exactly that, but I know now that I want to be somewhere in between, with more focus on the racing itself than there is here.

What it does mean, is that Superstars is great for bringing out relationship melodrama from a group of racers. Think of it like Drive to Survive TTRPG. On that point, you could probably create equivalent hacks for many sports or other similar situations. Knowing the community, there’s probably dozens of them on itch already! And I’d read them all if I could…

If that’s going to be your vibe though, I could see this working really well. I think I would struggle a bit, if I’m honest, and maybe this would go for the original Firebrands too. It’s very lightweight, and feels like you would need a creative bunch of players who could really bounce off of each other, but also keep themselves aligned on tone and direction. I worry that there’s also a strong possibility that each scene sort of goes nowhere, or goes so off the rails that what you end up with won’t feel coherent.

Prompts have also been a discussion topic a couple of times recently (certainly on the Dice Exploder podcast, I’m sure in a couple of blogs or reviews I’ve read as well) and I had those in mind reading Superstars. The one piece of advice that has been pushed strongly, and resonates a lot, is to make prompts really specific. I know I would’ve assumed you needed to leave a lot of space and ambiguity for the players to take a prompt in any direction they wanted. But extremely specific prompts can actually be more creatively stimulating, forcing you to think and come up with an interesting take. I know from playing through the Citizen Sleeper TTRPG, it’s tarot-based and you’re left to your own devices in creating storylines and determining how they play out, and while I really enjoyed the game overall I struggled a lot with that. The scene prompts in Superstars are generally very open. Take an example like “I hope to convince you that ___. Can I?” - there are two players involved in this scene, granted, so two people to iterate and lift the scene up. However, would it be more interesting to state something concrete in the text? “I hope to convince you that I didn’t take you out on purpose in the last race. Can I?” - this would immediately give the players options of roles to fulfil. Did you take them out on purpose or not? Is there a history of this happening? You could even go more specific, and state within the prompt that you did in fact do it on purpose, or that this is not the first time it has happened, or that it cost them a shot at the championship. Adding detail and stakes could give it more flavour immediately on the page, where right now I wonder if the quality of the group will almost entirely determine the quality of the game.

It was cool to finally read a Firebrands hack though, and while it’s very different to Grid Beef, it’s another game clearly made by someone who is a genuine fan of motorsports. I may never actually make a game, but I’m certainly enjoying finding that there’s already so much crossover of motorsports into TTRPGs!

[modoreadsttrpgs]

There is a new episode of RTFM, the RPG book club podcast. @goblinmixtape joins me and Max to talk Triangle Agency. Is corporate horror for the youths? Does metafiction have a place in RPGs? And who is the yellow voice?!

[modoreadsttrpgs]

There's a new rpg channel out on Youtube, and I'm falling in love with it fast.

Cozy RPG Reviews is a Youtube channel that looks to be focusing on solo and GM-less games. The creator has just two videos out at the time I'm writing this, but I already adore the calming music and their quiet, gentle voice that guides you through both play and concept.

[modoreadsttrpgs]

Game Reactions: Maharlika RPG [Filipino Anime Mechs!]

Link: https://tagamantra.itch.io/maharlika-rpg-core-rulebook

I picked Maharlika up last year at EGX (or what used to be EGX, having now been swallowed up by Comic Con) - I’d never heard of it before, but I’d gone determined to come back with a new TTRPG, and was it more exciting to buy a book that is a known quantity, or something I didn’t know existed before I saw it? Especially when it had mechs! I’ve always been a sucker for mechs. Honestly, I think my first exposure was Earthsiege 2 on the PC. Equipping different weapons on each arm, adding shoulder-mounted rockets, managing heat etc, amazing! In my late teens a friend introduced me to Gundam Wing, then Macross Plus. Somehow I fell off then, and have always wanted to really get into Gundam but never managed it. This year though, I watched Iron-Blooded Oprhans (great) and finally started to watch 0079 Gundam, listening along to the Great Gundam Project podcast. I’m halfway through Zeta now and am loving it. Needless to say, this all had me properly in the mood for reading Maharlika.

As a quick introduction, this is “a technomystic Science Fantasy mecha RPG inspired by Filipino Mythology, centered around Mekanized Weapons or Meka, and their pilots: the eponymous Maharlika.” If that sounds like a lot, it is. If that sounds awesome, yes it’s that too. It’s heavily based on Lancer, as I understand it (I own Lancer but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet), so it’s rules-light for the narrative beats and has crunchy tactical combat, which is its main focus. It’s a decent size at 220 pages, but much closer to regular book proportions than some hefty D&D tome.

Where it differs is obviously in the setting, with the designer bringing an incredible world to life by introducing the Filipino mythology. The pilots, or Maharlika, are generally teenagers (of course) who have established a connection with a divine being that becomes, in the books own phrasing, kind of like an onboard AI that allows the pilot to control these mechs that otherwise a human mind and body would be unable to. The writing really impresses on you the power of these beings, and the extent to which humans are playing with forces they don’t understand. Hey, it’s definitely anime mecha. This is just scratching the surface, as the game is far future, and very cyberpunk. Aside from the divine beings from another plane, there are aliens (including one previously invading force that humanity barely fought off), and a system of megacorps that are each as awful as the last in their own special way. These corps are the guys you’ll largely be doing missions for, and will not hesitate to come after you if you fail. All of this setting is fully realised, there are unique terms for everything, like your pilot being a Maharlika, connected to their Diwata, using their Gahum Reactor-powered mechs to do missions for the Lakanate. It definitely gave me a headache trying to keep track of everything, and honestly I’d be anxious about trying to run it, but it a cool enough world that I’d want to give it my best shot regardless.

Happily, the art is fantastic and helps to visualise the maximalist setting. A significant chunk of the book is dedicated to running through each of the five megacorps and a selection of their mech designs. Every corp has some unique approach, like the militaristic SD-SK or the theocratic KLL, and their mechs are very stylised to match. The art for each is gorgeous, I can’t show you all of my favourites or I’d be sharing half of the book, but check out the shot from the itch page below.

Really, this is what I’m here for with this book - it’s such an inspiring read, visually speaking, both in terms of the actual art, and the world described in the prose. There are some formatting issues in the book, like headings at the end of a column when the text starts in the next column, as well as a few typos. I also don’t fully love the layout and book design, with white text on a black background, using two columns on a fairly small page, and justified text which looks neat at a distance but makes the spacing really inconsistent, especially with a lot of long words that can throw off the alignment.

I already mentioned that the lore is quite daunting, and the same goes for the mechanics. As I said I’m not familiar with Lancer, and to be really clear, I am not built for tactical combat in the slightest. I wish I was, I always tried to play RTS, 4X, and tactical games of various stripes, and I’ve always been a complete plonker in every single one. I zone out in every D&D combat and really dread levelling up, because it means I need to pay attention to a bunch of stupid upgrades again. All that to say, the tactical combat here could be awesome, it could be awful, I have no idea and I’d be terrified of attempting to run it either way. There does seem to be good advice for setting up and balancing encounters, but I’d say that you and your players need to be comfortable with this kind of game, or up to the task of putting in the work to understand it sufficiently.

Regardless, whether I ever manage to run or play Maharlika or not, it’s a very cool book that I’m glad I picked up. I don’t think Filipino anime-mecha-cyberpunk-science-fantasy TTRPG is an oversaturated genre, to be honest, so this is a standout game whose world and aesthetics will stay in my head.

[modoreadsttrpgs]

Game Reactions: GRID BEEF - A Racing RPG

Link: https://ealaimo.itch.io/grid-beef-a-racing-rpg

Motorsports have been a passion of mine since I was a kid. I grew up with my parents watching the F1 on a Sunday, or mostly they fell asleep while Murray Walker’s commentary described the race to no one in particular. I can’t honestly say I followed what was going on, but I knew who Nigel Mansell was, and I knew his blue, yellow, and white Williams FW14 - the car that took him to his world title. There’s a vague memory of visiting a motorsport museum, and seeing the car in the flesh. Probably it was a replica, but I wouldn’t have known or cared. My grandparents used to go to the local Speedway track (if you don’t know it, look it up, it’s dirt bikes with no brakes going around an oval track and it’s incredible), and I got to join them a few times. Any time we were travelling, my face would be glued to the window, naming every car that went past, looking for the first of the new registration plates when it was the right time of year. Racing games are what most of my video gaming life has been dedicated to. Right now I have a folded up sim rig in my office, with a Fanatec wheel and pedals that, although I haven’t had time for it in a long while, has given me a lot of joy through iRacing, Assetto Corsa, Automobilista, and of course the best of them all… Euro Truck Simulator!

Anyway, that’s a long introduction to say I had an idea recently, of a TTRPG about racing. I’ll maybe post about it in more detail soon, but it quickly coalesced in my head to being a solo game, probably journaling to at least some extent, about the career of one racing driver. So instead of reading any of the games I already own, I went looking for games about racing, or anything that might have mechanics that could function to support something like this. One of my first ports of call was Mint’s theresattrpgforthat blog, where of course there was the exact post I needed: https://www.tumblr.com/theresattrpgforthat/748009076009697280/any-games-about-cross-country-racing-or-just

GRID BEEF was one of those games, and it’s the first I read. Of the list, it’s the one that is most purely about real-world racing, so I was quickly drawn to it. The theming is really good, including an entire fictional world with a list of teams and drivers that in a couple of instances seem to draw inspiration from real life, but are more dramatic and flamboyant than an actual F1 grid. This world has android racers as well as humans, and a team called Motorsports and Romance, whose livery is “mauve with floral patterns”. It could be an awkward fit, but it works well. I think this is because the designer clearly is a genuine motorsports fan, which is obvious as you read through the game’s structure and mechanics.

Backing up a little, this is a 43 page game, with minimal art and layout (but very easy to read as a result). It’s intended to be run by a GM for 2-6 players, and combines extremely rules-light roleplaying scenes with quite detailed dice pool mechanics for the actual racing. The game has players run through a full race weekend, expecting each to take a full session, so it operates at quite a granular level. Each race lasts 10 laps, and on each lap players take turns to choose an action to perform, such as an overtake. So as GM you’ll be tracking the positions of the racers after each lap.

The core mechanic is a d6 dice pool, the current player will declare how many dice they’re using (more on that in a second) and roll, counting the number of successes. I really like the idea behind this - players choose a tyre compound out of soft, medium, and hard, which determines the number of total dice they’re using have to work with. When you allocate and roll dice to perform an action, they’re removed from play. This represents your tyres wearing down, so you can play it safe using fewer dice, but not progress as far, or push to progress more, but use your tyres faster. Once you’re out of dice, you need to pit for fresh rubber. It’s a really clever system that captures what is probably the most important aspect of contemporary F1 races in tyre management, and is definitely my favourite thing about the game. Reading through GRID BEEF helped me to realise that the game I’m thinking of is focused at a higher level, following a driver through their career, not the minutiae of on track action. If I was to make something focused on that though, I’d have a hard time not stealing this approach.

There are a lot of possible actions, and it seems like it could get a bit fiddly to work through it all, but my guess is that you’d get the process down after a race or two. Perhaps a cheat sheet of actions and related mechanics would help. Pretty much every mechanic and rule has a gameplay example alongside it, which will really help to get to grips with the system. I won’t go into more detail on the mechanics, but I really wanted to talk about the tyre compounds as I’m such a big fan.

Outside of the racing itself, the weekend is interspersed with other activities, including quite a few roleplay opportunities. This is explicitly called out as the other big aspect of the game alongside the racing. A few key instances are highlighted and written into the race weekend structure, such as the driver’s meeting, post-qualifying chats, race debriefs etc. The actual rules around roleplay are very light, players and the GM work together to establish an interesting scene, play it out, and then the GM determines what the resulting bonuses and negatives are. The impact of those is fully mechanical - negative outcomes in your roleplay will hinder your rolls on track. I found this to clash with the guidance to GMs and players encouraging exploration of narrative events that are negative from the character’s perspective. Players will end up regretting their roleplay scenes if they feel it has impacted their race too much.

On top of this, the framing is extremely loose. It will work for some groups a lot more than others, I suspect. There’s a huge amount of freedom for the roleplay scenes to cover anything the players and GM want, and have any impact they want. It would allow a good group to do whatever works best for them, but it doesn’t impose enough structure to really guide players to a good experience. Honestly, the group that makes this work well, is probably a group that could’ve achieved the same thing by only being told “roleplay some scenes around the races”.

The racing mechanics seem great, though I’d want to do something more with the roleplay side, especially as the roleplay’s interaction with the racing means that its loose nature could affect the racing too. I enjoyed reading it though, and would love to try out having a race at least, even if I didn’t get chance to run through a whole season.