Free: Midsummer Wood

It's midsummer and in the darkest, weirdest wood the fairies meet in mask to feast and fête. Of mortals, the canniest and most wary can dare to join them. The rewards are wealth and poetry, pleasure, love and magic. The risks are sanity and soul. One of you is just such, a mortal man or mortal woman cunning, lovely and bold. Can you move uncaught among these, the perilous and subtle, shapechangers, elementals, embodiments of the oldest fears? Can you rob them of their treasures and escape, or will they discover you, bind you, and make you theirs?

Midsummer Wood is a competitive single-session rpg for 4 or 5 players designed by D. Vincent Baker. Get it for free here. 

Microscope Review

I was very surprised when my one of the players/GMs in my weekly group invited me to play Microscope this past weekend. This game, which bills itself as a "a fractal roleplaying game of epic histories" is an entirely diceless game without a game master. Which, given that we've been playing DCC RPG for the better part of a year now, is quite the change of pace.

You begin the game by making a statement about the situation at hand. This is going to be the focus of the entire game. This is statement should be larger than a singular event but more of a paradigm shift. Things like, "aliens contact humanity" or "humanity mutates into demi-humans." We went with, "magic enters the world." From there, you make a list of things that are in the setting and things that are banned from the setting. One of things we made mandatory is what we dubbed "arcane pollution", which is that every use of magic saps the land of life. Things we banned included native fantasy creatures and wizard schools.

From there, you pick a starting period and ending period and decide if it is "light" or "dark". These two periods bookend the entirety of the game. Nothing that happens can pre-date the starting period and there is no conceivable future beyond the ending period. During each round, one player takes the role of the lens. That person writes a statement of focus, which all actions have to engage with in some way. The lens may make two actions and add either a new period and event or add a new event and a scene and everyone else may make one action. Periods account for decades or hundreds of years, events happen within periods and may represent stretches of time, and scenes attempt to answer questions through roleplaying.

While that may sound fairly simple, it took our group a little time to get into the rhythm of the game. Writing those statements, creating the milieu, as well as the starting and ending periods is fairly difficult. At the beginning, it felt very much not like a game and more akin to the process of sketching out the basic architecture for your game world with a few friends. Once we got into the actual game of creating periods, placing events, and playing out scenes, the game came alive.

This is what a finished game looks like, whiskey not included.

Where the game really shines is in the scenes. The player writing the scene asks a question, chooses a location, and makes a list of required characters as well as banned characters. Everyone claims a role and you play the action out until that question is answered. The rules for this are very loose. If you want to affect another character, you state what you attempt to do and the character being affected chooses how that plays out. During one of our scenes during the War of the Magi, after the nation of Merkavia successfully eradicated the people of Baguul for expelling all magic users, the king pondered the question, "should we cleanse our own population of the ungifted?" Despite pleas from the vizier and his leading general, I decided this was our course of action. 

Our game ended with a sinkhole swallowing the capitol city of Merkavia and leaving a portal between worlds in its wake. The final events were the emergence of deities smiting both demons and humans alike while a precious few escaped to the next plane of existence. 

I highly, highly recommend you snag this game. The rulebook is a scant 81 pages but there is some serious fun to be had as you and your friends create a world, its Armageddon  and throw the whole thing into the waste basket at the end of the night. 

Freebie Alert: Lady Blackbird

Lady Blackbird is on the run from an arranged marriage to Count Carlowe. She hired a smuggler skyship, The Owl, to take her from her palace on the Imperial world of Ilysium to the far reaches of the Remnants, so she could be with her once secret lover: the pirate king Uriah Flint.

HOWEVER, just before reaching the halfway point of Haven, The Owl was pursued and captured by the Imperial cruiser Hand of Sorrow, under charges of flying a false flag.

EVEN NOW, Lady Blackbird, her bodyguard, and the crew of The Owl are detained in the brig, while the Imperial commander runs the smuggler ship’s registry over the wireless. It’s only a matter of time before they discover the outstanding warrants and learn that The Owl is owned by none other than the infamous outcast, Cyrus Vance.

How will Lady Blackbird and the others escape the Hand of Sorrow?

What dangers lie in their path?

Will they be able to find the secret lair of the pirate king? if they do, will Uriah Flint accept Lady Blackbird as his bride? By the time they get there, will she want him to?

Go. Play. And find out.

Lady Blackbird is an adventure module for 2-6 people. It contains a starting situation, setting, pregen characters, and quick-play rules perfect for a no-prep game of 1-3 sessions or more.

Check it out here!

Freebie: Stars Without Number

You should cruise over to DriveThruRPG and snag a free copy of Stars Without Number. The ruleset looks similar to OSR versions of D&D but, you know, science fiction. Even if you never run it, it's worth the read.

Of Dice and Men

The throwing of these dice is discouraged.

That I am not the first one to abuse such an awful pun for a gaming-related article only furthers my theory that the pun is the worst of literary devices. Low hanging fruit and all that. Moving on.

I've been thinking a lot about dice recently. The vast majority of people in this hobby play the world's premiere fantasy RPG or some analog of it, and that means linear rolls. Now, I don't dislike linear rolls, but I do think they make play experience more finicky  This is partially their implementation. A very large number of games, possibly the majority, do not have rules for gradients of success; you either pass or fail. I cannot count the number of times that I have watched a party fail miserably due to the dice. Conversely, there have been just as many overwhelming successes. I will forever remember the final encounter of my last Pathfinder campaign, where the first player to act rolled two natural 20s and hit for something like 140 damage right out of the gate.

It's when the opposite happens that you feel the tendency to fudge rolls or allow re-rolls. That's even worse! But nobody wants the campaign to fall apart just because you rolled a failure at some critical (or trivial) moment. At the same time, I am strong proponent of the "Let it Ride" rule from Burning Wheel. The results are a binding and, fail or succeed, you better make the consequences interesting.

I suppose that's why I've been itching to play other games that use the alternative: a dice pool. This, in my opinion, is much preferable simply because these games almost always have rules for gradients of success, which makes it much harder to get fucked by the dice. The good news is I have two Burning Wheel campaigns slated to begin soon.