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10/31/2018

Gauntlet Con: Test Fire

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by Jason Cordova

We're getting close to hitting our $3,000 Patreon goal, which means we will soon begin planning for two editions of Gauntlet Con each year. We don’t yet know what that second edition will look like—maybe it will be like the regular Gauntlet Con, maybe it will be something different—but I want to use this blog post to make a proposal, which is Gauntlet Con: Test Fire.

This weekend, many of my friends and fellow Gauntleteers will be at Metatopia. I have gone the last few years myself, and I’m sad I can’t make it this year, because it’s a really enjoyable convention.Metatopia, for those who don’t know, is all about playtesting in-development games. It’s a place where many folks from the indie ttrpg scene gather to hang out, swap ideas, try each others’ games, and network. It has been a launching pad for the careers of many folks in the indie scene and, overall, I consider it a convention people should try to get out to if they can.

Gauntlet Con: Test Fire is directly inspired by Metatopia, except, like the original Gauntlet Con, it’s entirely online. I’m envisioning something smaller in scale than Metatopia, and laser-focused on indie rpgs, story games, and the OSR. We would have a slate of diverse designers for each edition of Test Fire—say, 15-20 from outside The Gauntlet, and 10 or so from inside The Gauntlet—each of whom would have their game (or part of their game) rigorously playtested by Gauntleteers and other attendees. It would all be coordinated through a Discord server (just like Gauntlet Con), except there would be channels and chat rooms dedicated to that year’s featured games. The selected game designers would also sit on panels moderated by members of The Gauntlet community, and participate in workshops and playstorms. In short, it would be an opportunity for the selected designers to interact with, and get feedback from, the most active, vibrant, and dynamic indie ttrpg community there is—and in a really deep, productive way.

I want to be clear that Test Fire would not be positioned as an alternative to Metatopia. It’s no secret that I, personally, have had some unpleasant interactions with the people from Double Exposure (the company that puts on Metatopia), but Test Fire has nothing to do with that. I truly believe that Test Fire could help expand the conversation about what it means to be a playtest-focused convention. In fact, if I didn’t think Test Fire could legitimately benefit the wider ttrpg community, I wouldn’t be proposing the idea.

So let’s talk about some of those potential benefits, because I think they are key to understanding where my head is at with this. Here is a bullet point list (I’ll say a bit more about each below):

Test Fire would be an ideal space for game designers (and fans) from marginalized groups.
Test Fire would be an ideal space for international game designers (and fans).
Test Fire game designers would receive very rich, useful feedback.
Test Fire game designers would benefit from close association with The Gauntlet.
Test Fire games would have to be ready for online play.
Test Fire would minimize social anxiety or feelings of imposter syndrome.

Test Fire would be an ideal space for game designers (and fans) from marginalized groups. This is my personal Number 1 reason for wanting to put on a convention like this. Meatspace conventions are expensive, often prohibitively so. This is especially the case for people from marginalized groups. The sad fact remains that the roleplaying game industry, like every other industry, privileges people who can afford to network. When you consider the overwhelming whiteness of the industry, and why it’s that way, you have to acknowledge the major role that access plays, and much of that access comes from being able to attend conventions. Test Fire could help balance that out a bit since it would be free or, at the very least, inexpensive. Attending Test Fire would require some basic tech stuff (internet access, a computer, a mic), but certainly not airfare, Uber, hotel accommodations for 3 nights, and meals at restaurants.

Test Fire would be an ideal space for international game designers (and fans). All the things that would make Test Fire ideal for game designers from marginalized groups would also apply to game designers from outside the United States. I recently reached out for feedback from folks vis-a-vis Metatopia and I was inundated by international folks lamenting that it was extremely difficult for them to attend. There was a sense of international designers being completely left out of the indie ttrpg design scene because of their inability to attend Metatopia. Test Fire could certainly help remedy that.

Test Fire game designers would receive very rich, useful feedback. Gauntleteers get to attend Gauntlet Con for free, which means the people helping playtest the games at Test Fire are steeped in The Gauntlet’s famously strong play culture. On Gauntlet Hangouts, our day-to-day gaming platform, we schedule nearly 150 sessions per month. Gauntleteers game all the time, not just at conventions, and that means Test Fire game designers would have a very deep pool of energetic, experienced indie gamers to rely on for feedback. Also, because the slate of games selected for Test Fire would be relatively small, they’re going to each get a lot of attention.

Test Fire game designers would benefit from close association with The Gauntlet. The Gauntlet is becoming an increasingly important place to promote indie ttrpgs. When our podcast hosts, game runners, editors, and community organizers are looking for games to engage with, the Test Fire games are going to be near the top of the list simply because we have been exposed to them in the context of the convention.

Test Fire games would have to be ready for online play. I’m somewhat biased, but I think playing ttrpgs online is the future (and possibly the now). Game designers who aren’t thinking about how to make their games easily played by Twitch streamers and communities like The Gauntlet and Roll20 are behind the curve. Test Fire would force game designers to start thinking in terms of online play.

Test Fire would minimize social anxiety or feelings of imposter syndrome. First of all, you’ll probably be sitting in your room or office the whole time during Test Fire, so you won’t have any undue pressure to socialize. And hopefully the fact that your game was selected to be part of the Test Fire slate would minimize any feelings of imposter syndrome.

For now, Gauntlet Con: Test Fire is just an idea. I still need to bring it to The Gauntlet and let everyone in the community have their say. If we decide to go forward with this idea, the first edition of Test Fire probably won’t be until early 2020, so there is still plenty of time to figure out the exact contours of what a playtest-focused Gauntlet Con looks like.

Do you have any thoughts for a convention like this? Let me know in the comments!

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10/31/2018

Age of Ravens: The Year in Horror RPGs 2017

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HORROR SHOWINGS
This Halloween I've belatedly decided to look at Horror RPGs published in 2017. I like to wait until late in the year to see how the previous year's releases have shaken out (winning awards, ceasing publication, available for free). For this list I've focused on core rules, not supplements or modules. Some games more clearly offer horror than others. I've listed items if they have a printed version or, if they're pdf only, they're at least 100 pages or so. It's arbitrary, but the list would be crazy big otherwise. For each I've provided a small summary and in some cases minimal commentary. DTRPG has sale prices on this, the last day of their Spooky Games Sale 2018.

Arrghh Bottom Sound
I love the pitch for this game, "Being a game of pirates, Norse Deities, magic, Cthulhu and rum in the Southwest Pacific." These rules have a deeply unfancy presentation, but they're also available for free from DTRPG. Arrghh jumps in with a hodgepodge of resolution mechanics before you even get to character creation. It's very trad, with FRP-esque classes. The bigger problem is that it's blurb implies some horror elements, perhaps the supernatural of Pirates of the Caribbean or Tim Powers novels, but it doesn't provide much to shape or support that.

Bedlam Hall
"A Depressing Role-Playing Game About Horrible People." A PbtA rpg taking inspiration from Lemony Snicket, Edward Gorey, and the Addams Family. You play servants in a decaying English manor after the Great War. It's a life filled with chores, toil, petty jealousies, and madness. Players seek to Maintain the House, Protect the Family, Overcome the Strangeness, and Improve their Station. In keeping with the tone your playbooks include: Your Hopeless Prestige, Cruel Move, Ghastly Attributes, Alarming Trauma, Expected Duties, and Pointless Move. Tyler, among others, has run sessions of this on The Gauntlet.

Bluebeard's Bride
A PbtA game taking the classic fairy tale and turning it into a surreal game of psychological horror. When Sherri played this at Origins, she thought about it for days after. Though she would never tell me what actually happened in her session, she said BB spoke to her fears and socialization as a woman in a way no other game or media had. There's an interesting parallel between this and Delta Green. Where DG swept the 2018 mainstream ENnies, Bluebeard's Bride won attention with an IGDN victory and other awards. Trad horror with firepower vs. feminine horror.

Colonial Gothic: Third Edition
The latest edition of this long-running rpg. Colonial Gothic sets itself as more horror than action. It is a dark supernatural conspiracy game set on the eve of the American Revolution. Various forces work behind the scenes to manipulate events and control the destiny of this new land. The PCs are not characters trained to fight against the darkness, but instead have crossed paths with it and now understand the dangers facing them: American Revolutionary Hunters.

Cthulhu Dark
This rules-lite system for handling Lovecraftian investigations has become a go-to for the Gauntlet Community. We've seen GMs use it for published CoC adventures and new scenarios. It leans into the idea that the investigators are doomed, what Trail of Cthulhu calls a "Purist" approach. Includes short rules, a GM section on mythos and mysteries, and several settings (London 1851, Arkham 1692, Jaiwo 2017, and Mumbai 2037).

Dead for the Living
In this you play a ghost sent to police other ghosts. It feels a like a noir version of Beetlejuice with you acting as an agent of some kind of afterlife protection bureau. In Dead for the Living you carry out those duties while dealing with the societies and bureaucracies of the dead. In that it also feels a little like later Wraith. Dead for the Living has a clean layout and nice artwork. This one definitely goes on my wish list.

Dead Scare
A PbtA game of 1950's home front zombie horror. I backed this Kickstarter and received the pdf version, but the printed version has yet to be released. They sold it on DTRPG for a time, but have since pulled it. It's a great concept, with some dynamite expanded setting material at the back. However in running it we found several problems and contradictions within the rules. You can see our sessions here. The designer, Elsa S. Henry, has appeared on +1 Forward to discuss the game.

Delta Green
One of the big winners in the 2018 ENnies. This revision of the "Government Agents vs. Cthulhu" rpg streamlines and makes it stand-alone. The publishers have supported the clean, two-volume core set with multiple supplements. Delta Green remains at heart a BRP engine game, albeit with some interesting takes on personal connections. But the new version feels a little sterile next to the crazy, grungy material of the original DG and its follow up, Countdown. I played DG extensively back when it appeared in an Unspeakable Oath article and I liked the grit and personal uncertainty. Despite that I'm looking forward to Pelgrane's ToC book, The Fall of Delta Green.

Elizabethan Adventures
A two-volume game (players and GM book) taking place in a supernaturally infused Elizabethan era. Looks fairly trad: ten stats, multiple die types, professions with sub-types, large skill lists. It has a dense text design, with full page watermarking. The players' book is entirely mechanics, while the GM book has advice, the world, ship rules, and an intro adventure. Despite being dense, it's clearly designed to be a toolkit rather than a fully described setting.

Glimpse the Beyond Second Edition
The original edition read like Mage: the Ascension vs. Cthulhu. This edition pulls back a little one that. It's a "secret war" horror game, with characters with special powers and talents fighting in the shadows against supernatural threats. That's approached more as general paranormal threats rather than Lovecraft-esque forces this time. Players take on the role of Magi in this conflict. Glimpse uses a die pool system, with the twist that you multiply your highest result by your skill level and compare that to the target number.

Horrors: The Scary Story RPG
In this, normal people investigate horrors while being stalked. Reminds me of Fear Itself, Dead of Night, and Epoch. It has a die step system (ala Savage Worlds). Looks pretty conventional, though I like the idea of the sanity tests being called "jump scares." The GM builds scenarios around a Big Bad (ala Monster of the Week) with the players investigating to find out its weakness.

I Love the Corps
At first I assumed I Love the Corps was just an Aliens rpg (which we actually had years ago). But the setting's broader, with the "Marines in Space" battling against a host of different horrors after the fall of Earth. It's a reasonably light resolution system, 1d6 + ability vs. task number but it adds a metric shit-ton of chrome to that. I Love... makes an interesting division between narrative and action scenes. The former lets PCs conduct large scale operation, like sweeping a facility in a single check. The latter comes when a threat appears. The actual rules come in two volumes, with a minimal text design. You can also check out the free QS which has complete rules and an adventure.

Incubus
An Italian post-apocalyptic rpg with both fantasy and cyberpunk elements. Humans have mutated and horrors still lurk in the outside world. The fall comes in 2026 and the actual game's set 530 years later with significant rebuilding having happened.

Innocents
Originally a Spanish game, Nocturnal Media ran a short, smart Kickstarter for this English translation. In it you play a child, approaching fears with young eyes and imagination. There's an interesting sub-set of horror games on childhood, many more now in the era of Stranger Things. ST protagonists are a little older than the PCs in Innocents, who range 4-12 years old. The system uses color-coded "knuckles" instead of dice for resolution. The character sheet's a fun mix of mad-lib fill-in and answering questions.

Libreté
For this I'm going to quote Christo Meid's description: "Libreté is a gritty, Powered by the Apocalypse Game created by the French designer Vivien Feasson. The game is set in a miserable rainy world where there are only children, the abandoned city, and the horrible abominations that hunt children, the sirains. There will be drama, confiding of secrets, and desperate, often violent struggles to survive as our heroes search for the safe haven, Libreté."

Lights Out The Roleplaying Game
A game about children protagonists, aimed more at children players than Innocents above. In the city of Applewood the kids wake up to find all of the adults gone and each of them possessing strange new powers. That's seems cool until night falls and monsters appear. An interesting concept that mixes mysterious academy and survival horror stories, albeit toned down. The publisher's blurb explicitly talks about putting female protagonists to the center. They also have a series of books based on the setting.

Memento Mori
A striking Italian game book with a medieval feel. I'm still not sure what the game's about. Here's a Google translation of part of the pitch. The game explores "Wanderers, or of men suffering from plague in the continuous search for their dream. An ancient curse has opened them the doors of a new dark world full of power, suffering and horror, but not without unthinkable opportunities." The same company handles Italian production for Werewolf, Vampire, Kult, and Ars Magica, so I suspect it's a heavier game.

Nostalgia: La Flotta Nomade
An Italian rpg of a "nihilistic science fiction setting for the universal rpg MONAD System." Humans escape a dying Earth in eight ark ships. These arks weren't created by humanity, but rather by unknown forces. Ages have passed. After a crisis, each level of the ark cut itself off from one another. Now after generations those barriers have lifted and those independently evolving peoples will meet and clash. Looks more bleak than horrific. From the blurb I'm not sure how much the mysterious creators play a role.

OneDice Hauntaway
Cakebread & Walton's take on Ghostbusters. I especially like the names for the rival companies: Ghostbursters, G6S, and Exorcisms-R-Us (endorsed by the Pope). Then there's Hauntaway's tag line: "We'll Bring Your Spirits Down." OneDice offers a super light-weight resolution system which is what you need for this kind of setting. I'll be curious if they add any mechanisms to support the tone or feel. InSpectres had the reality show gimmick which worked well and enhanced the system.

Oubliette Second Edition
And this is how I learned what oubliette means (noun: a secret dungeon with access only through a trapdoor in its ceiling). Oubliette uses Fate Core to offer a fantasy horror setting that feels like Castlevania, Innistrad, and Ravenloft, though leaning more towards the high fantasy side. Players can live in and explore the titular Castle Oubliette, a sprawling mass of buildings which have formed a massive city divided into districts and factions. Worth checking out if you're interested in a highly defined dark fantasy setting, especially for Fate.

Pathogen: Unclassified
A zombie game of survival horror. This doesn't take place in the immediate aftermath, but rather a few years down the road. You play vital members of one of the surviving communities. You work to protect it against zombies and worse things created by the parasitic illness that brought down civilization. The organization looks a little messy, and resolution requires cross-reference on a chart of difficulty vs. skill value. We haven't seen that many Z-Day games set this long after the initial outbreak, so I'm intrigued.

Raiders of R'lyeh
This presents a slight contradiction for me. On the one hand, the title harkens back to Raiders of the Lost Ark and the 30's-40's pulp milieu which inspired it. On the other, the game's set in 1910 and echoes fantastic Edwardian and colonialist lit. Raiders uses OGL d100 rules, so it offers a familiar feel for BRP fans. Seven stats, professions define skill picks and a special abilities, multiple die types for damage. The game looks strong and professional, so if you're interested in the period, it's a good resource, particularly the full version with the GM & setting material.

Strange Aeon
Though initially the game seems to position itself as a generic Cthulhu rpg, it actually has a distinct and new setting. Play takes place in ominous 1980's Britain. Seven years earlier a cataclysmic incursion destroyed Midwich and created a zone of horrors. You play survivors within that zone, armed with an item allowing you to move between times and worlds. The system itself leans more trad, and the dense run-on text makes reading harder than it needs to be. But it's worth checking out since the full edition is currently PWYW on Drivethru.

Toxicity
This uses the Axiom system powering the publisher's earlier I AM ZOMBIE rpg. You pick and arrange five cards and build your character via connections between them. For tests you roll three d6, plus one per associated trait. 1-4's are totaled and compared against a target number. A 5 is Chaw and a 6 is Brainz, creating different effects and also tracked with tokens. This seems to be a throwback variant trying to capture an OSR feel. Toxicity does look super 1970s underground and the printed version is a cool artifact.

Unknown Armies
The third edition of this rpg of modern magical conspiracy. This has an amazing four-volume set, with striking illustrations. It remains a system with some strangeness in character creation and resolution which take some getting used to. This edition moves away from the "meta-plot" of earlier versions, instead focusing on the general world of supernaturals and how it grinds down any who interact with it. I love the campaign starters Atlas has provided. You can see my sessions of one of those, "Raiders of the Lost Mart," here.

The Vampire's Codex
A modern, gothic noir rpg that carries more than a little whiff of a Vampire: TM heartbreaker. The publisher blurbs don'tmuch to show how it breaks away from that, besides being percentile based instead of dice pool driven. Then there's the pitch line "This is not your typical #dungeonsanddragons or #?vampiremasquerade #game" the publisher used on forum. Despite a canceled Kickstarter the game released in 2017. The publicity text does two things that bug me: presenting the game as the newest edition of something that didn't have an earlier edition and advertising itself as set in the world of "J.A. Dohm's new and refreshing setting" as if it's not just some webisodes and a novel I can't find actually listed anywhere.

vs. Stranger Stuff: Season 2
There's been an explosion of "Kids on Bikes" games in the last couple of years (including a game using that name). This emulates that using Phillip Reed's VsM Engine- a super light-weight card-driven resolution system. The mechanics don't take up a great deal of space so there's room for campaign creation, plot ideas, and a fully developed setting. There's also an adventure included. Fat Goblin's released another version, a stand-alone with a trio of clown-themed modules (that's a big nope). If you're interested, check out the free version: vs. SS: S2 Easy Mode.

PREVIOUS LISTS
History of Licensed RPGs (Part I 1977-1983)
History of Universal RPGs
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs
History of Steampunk & Victoriana RPGs
History of Superhero RPGs
History of Horror RPGs
History of Wild West RPGs
Samurai RPGs
For the full backlog of Age of Ravens posts on Blogger see here.

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10/29/2018

The Time for The Gauntlet is Now

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by Jason Cordova

I am coming off the two most insanely busy months I have ever experienced with regards to my work in The Gauntlet. The stretch from September through October of 2018 will be remembered as one of the most important times for the growth and development of our community. I want to use this blog post to talk a little bit about the two most important things that happened, the Codex Volume 1 Kickstarter and Gauntlet Con 2018, as well as speak a bit more generally about the importance of our community in the ttrpg scene.

The Codex Volume 1 Kickstarter

First of all, we funded, which is a relief. Some people will say “Well, of course you funded,” but I don’t think it was a guaranteed thing. The Codex Volume 1 book was a very difficult pitch. In roleplaying games, and especially on Kickstarter, people want simple things, things for which the value proposition is quickly understood. Codex is not that. If we had launched the Volume 1 Kickstarter immediately after Volume 1 was complete in PDF (over a year ago), the KS campaign would have been, at best, a modest success, and likely a failure. “Back this collection of a weird zine you have never heard of and, btw, is only available in hardback,” is an extremely difficult sell. Instead, we decided to take an extra year; we needed the time to continue to develop Codex as a product, to build up the Patreon, and to help people understand what it is. I’m not convinced we have even accomplished that last part yet, but we have done so enough to get 720 backers on Kickstarter, and that feels great. (Mercifully, our next KS project, Hearts of Wulin, will be a very easy pitch: “PbtA Wuxia drama.”)

I do want to express my gratitude to all the people who backed the project and/or helped spread the word on social media. This project saw almost no benefit from Kickstarter traffic; almost all our pledges came from members of The Gauntlet community or people they know. Without the support of our community, this would have been a disaster, and so I want everyone in The Gauntlet (or Gauntlet-adjacent) to know they are seen; I realize how important you were to the success of this project, and I’m going to do my best to deliver a book that is worthy of that effort.

Even more than just spreading the word about the KS, The Gauntlet community did a lot to support me, personally, during the 28 days of hell that was the campaign. There were some days, especially in the beginning, where I was definitely absent, and probably unbearable, but people in the community cared enough to give me the space to deal with that stress in the way I needed to. I never felt judged, only loved, and so I’m grateful for that. Many people sent me encouraging messages or made awesome celebration videos (like the ones embedded below), and that kind of stuff definitely kept me going.

I want to extend particular thanks to Kyle SImons, Fraser Simons, and Mark Diaz Truman who each, in their way, advised and mentored me on the campaign. I also want to thank all the amazing people who volunteered to run games in support of the campaign, as well as our exciting stretch goal authors. You are all truly spectacular and I love you.

Gauntlet Con 2018

Gauntlet Con 2018 also took place in October. Overall, it was a great success, but there were also a few lessons to be learned from our sophomore outing. I was very pleased with the overall number of games that were run. Not including canceled games, we had about 180 sessions, which is a huge increase over last year. As best I can tell, most people were really enjoying the games they got to play in, and the vibe around the Discord was very positive, very caring, very Gauntlet. I saw people discovering what I call “Gauntlet nice,” and that made me happy. The Help Desk was doing a fabulous job fielding questions and directing traffic. Gauntlet Games Now had a very successful launch. The games I ran went very well, probably some of my favorite sessions I’ve ever participated in, and the games where I was a player were also lovely.

But there were also some critical lessons to be learned from Gauntlet Con 2018 that we will hopefully apply to next year. Mainly, I think Gauntlet Con was simply too big this year—too big and too “external.” We had something like 50 guests which, in hindsight, was too many. I’d like to redefine “guest” next year so it has more meaning. This is especially the case because a number of games that got canceled with little or no notification were games being run by guests. In some cases, we never even heard from the guest, and I can’t express enough how disrespectful that feels.

But, overall, it was a very successful second year. My impression is that most attendees had a very positive, even joyous, experience, and that counts as a win. Big thanks to Kate Bullock and her organizational team for pulling off a great Con.

The Time for The Gauntlet is Now

So here we are having just gotten past an extremely busy period, but we have so much more to come. As the principal organizer of the community, it’s my job to always look ahead. Things going on in The Gauntlet right now are things I anticipated 2, 3, 4 years ago. I am a long-term thinker, and that quality helps me (and us) navigate the vicissitudes and petty dramas of the tabletop roleplaying game industry so we can focus on what’s important: playing games and making The Gauntlet truly special. For example, when we first began restricting Gauntlet Hangouts with what is, effectively, a paygate, many people thought that was going to be the death of the platform. “No one will want to pay to play games,” “I feel uncomfortable charging money to have fun,” “Are we just a money-making venture now?”—I heard variations of all these arguments and more. But I was looking ahead: the long-term health and dynamism of the community depended on 1) revenue and 2) people taking what we do seriously. Giving away the shop for free was not a good way of accomplishing either of those things. It was the same with Codex: “No one will understand this,” “It’s too expensive,” and “What are we, a publisher now?” But, again, I was looking around the corner. Codex was, and is, my Trojan horse to move The Gauntlet into publishing. And why publishing? Because I think, for the most part, the current ttrpg publishing model is garbage and we have a chance to fix it. And why do we need to do that? Because I want a fundamentally different hobby and industry for our members. You see how it works? I’m always looking ahead, and always with an eye to what I think is best for Gauntleteers, or to facilitate conversations about what is best for Gauntleteers.

But I certainly don’t have it all figured out. Sometimes the community surprises me, and those surprises are the reason why I keep doing this. A certainty: I know what I know. But also: there are things I don’t know or can’t anticipate. And it’s those little blind spots of mine that the community fills in to make The Gauntlet the best fucking gaming community there is. One of those blind spots is just how important Gauntleteers are to each other right now.

And this leads to my main thought in this post: no matter what we’re doing for the future, the time for The Gauntlet is right now. The world is, increasingly, garbage. We need good spaces—spaces that help you feel supported and sane and whole—more than ever. We need community more than ever. And here I’m not talking about a forum, or some game designer or Twitch streamer’s fan groups, or some passing association at a convention. I’m talking about legit community.

People come to The Gauntlet through lots of different ways: podcasts, Codex, Gauntlet Hangouts, Gauntlet Con and, this month, Kickstarter. Often they hear about the community through a friend. However they get here, they instantly realize that we are a group of people who really cares about each other. We play games together, we encourage each other, and we love each other. When Trump was first elected, The Gauntlet helped me get out of the pit of misery I found myself in. Brazil just elected its own Trump, and one of our Brazilian members was despairing in our Slack, and I was impressed by how many people reached out to him with total kindness and love.

Another example: in the middle of our insanely busy October, the Trump administration leaked a memo outlining how it intended to erase the legal existence of trans people. Many people in The Gauntlet were distraught over this, myself included, and so we set about doing something amazing to both lift the spirits of our queer community members and to show the ttrpg world that we stood behind them. Over the course of a whole day, we used the #QueerGauntlet hashtag to simply celebrate the accomplishments and existence of our queer members, and it was wonderful. It was the power of real community, the power of a group of people who care about each other to spread light during a dark time and to love each other. That single day of unapologetic, loving support for our queer members makes me happier than anything else we did in October.

This blog post has been going for too long already, so I’ll just wrap up quickly with this: the last two months have been crazy (and occasionally hellish), but I am leaving them feeling more confident in The Gauntlet’s purpose than ever before. Gauntleteers fill me with inspiration, and I always hope I am returning it back to them.

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10/26/2018

Gauntlet Video Roundup - October 26, 2018

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Greetings, and welcome to the weekly Gauntlet Hangouts video roundup! Don't miss any of the great sessions in the updated playlists and video links below.

For Gauntlet Con 2018 videos, don't miss the special Gauntlet Con 2018 YouTube playlists for recorded games and panels from Gauntlet Con 2018. Hope to see you there next time!

At the time of this post, we are in the final few days of the Codex RPG Zine Volume 1 Kickstarter campaign! Your chance to get in on this gorgeous hardcover collection will end on October 28. The project is funded, and you can help crush the final stretch goals. Check it out and back it today!

TGI Thursday

Orun (Session 2 of 2)
Lowell Francis runs for Larry S., Micki Bradley, Rich Rogers, and Walter
Our Djali split their efforts: running a heist on a corrupt pleasure-palace owner to secure a lost civ-matrix while Mobo flies in a deadly orbital asteroid race.

Gauntlet Hangouts

Masks of the Mummy Kings (Session 2 of 3)
Jim Crocker runs for David L., Jeremy, Rachelle Dube, and Robbie Boerth
This time, 4 Rogues battled magical Senet pieces, a lake of maggots, man-eating plants, and the Second Mummy King himself!

Avatar 1%er: Agents of Balance (Session 2 of 4)
Luiz Ferraz runs for Josh DeGagné, Kyle Hodnett, Rich Rogers, and Taylor W.
Our insurgents see the consequences of the Fire Nation's campaign, both good and bad. They then decide to take on the visiting Fire Prince himself.

Masks: Shadows Within (Session 2 of 3)
Maria Rivera runs for Darold Ross, Joshua Gilbreath, and Leandro Pondoc

The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power: The Blood on Our Hands (Session 4 of 4)
Maria Rivera runs for Agatha, Leandro Pondoc, and Phillip Wessels

Zombie World (Session 4 of 5)
Yoshi Creelman runs for Bryan, Chris Wiegand, Jim Crocker, and Noella H
Zombies are still present outside the hospital. Everyone is tense and getting a little stir crazy. AND food has gone missing. A plan is made to clear the Psych ward and to get a camera. They will find out who has been taking the food...but what will they do when they find out? Content warning:pregnancy and abortion discussions.

Zombie World: More Braaiins (Session 2 of 2)
Lowell Francis runs for Larry S., Robert, Sarah J., and Steven Watkins
After the chopper crashes and living dead close on the police station, our survivors escape with meager salvage and a high death toll...not all of it due to zombies. Warning: The GM screams into the mic at about the midpoint.

Monsterhearts 2: Kingsport 1962 (Session 3 of 4)
Catherine Ramen runs for Agatha, David Morrison, Jesse A., Seraphina Malizia, and Simon Landreville
As the world reels towards nuclear annihilation, newcomer Dennis makes a play for both Xanthus and Mal; Bev's and her sisters discuss the gender balance of their family; Lucca is drawn into the Hunter family intrigues; Mal begins to see the dark side of K; and Xanthus makes a sacrifice.

Veil 2020: Eurotour (Session 2 of 3)
Fraser Simons runs for Asher S., Darren Brockes, J.D. Woodell, Lauren, Ryan M., and Tony H
The gang teams up with two other 'punks in order to find Jack Entropy in the UK.

Veil 2020: Eurotour (Session 3 of 3)
Fraser Simons runs for Darren Brockes, J.D. Woodell, Kurt Potts, and Lauren
As the 'punks are overtaken by the police they must make a choice: flight or fight. Apropos of nothing much at all CW: graphic violence to police.

Monster of the Week: Fetid Waters of Marais Loup (Session 4 of 4)
Tyler Lominack runs for David Morrison, Leandro Pondoc, Noella H, and Skyler Nelson
As the Apocalypse manifests in Marais Loup our band opens their arms in compassion, a tentacled Demon rises from the swamp, and the Angel of The End Days has a very hard choice.

Check out all the great videos on The Gauntlet YouTube channel and be sure check out the playlists to catch up on all your favorite games. If you'd like to play in games like these, check out the calendar of events and the Gauntlet Hangouts Google+ Community where new games are announced! To support The Gauntlet, please visit the Gauntlet Patreon at https://patreon.com/gauntlet. All are welcome to play Gauntlet Hangouts games, and Patreon supporters have extra options like priority RSVP for Gauntlet Hangouts games and joining the Gauntlet Slack team where special events are announced like Gauntlet Games Now. Enjoy, and everyone have a great weekend!

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10/25/2018

Age of Ravens: History of Licensed RPGs (Part II 1984-85)

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TRY AND TRY AGAIN
Once again we dip into the heady waters of licensed games. I'd forgotten how many different properties appeared in the early days, some of them repeatedly. We've seen lots of one-shot attempts to bring a property to rpgs. Many I'd be willing to bet we won't see come around again (Farscape, Everquest, Necroscope, Lawnmower Man, La Compagnie des Glaces). But several properties have come back again and again. Here's a relatively unsupported list of the top ten properties with multiple editions and/or versions:

4 Judge Dredd (Mongoose x2, GW, EN Publishing)
5 Lahkhmar (TSR x2, Mongoose, Pinnacle, Goodman Games)
5 DC (Mayfair x3, WEG, Green Ronin)
5 Marvel (MWG, Marvel Entertainment, TSR x3)
6 Conan (Mongoose x2, TSR x2, SJG, Modiphius)
6 Elric (Chaosium x5, Département des Sombres Projects)
7 Middle Earth (Decipher x2, Cubicle7, ICE x4)
8 Star Wars (WEG x3, WotC x3, Scholastic, FFG)
10 Star Trek (Tsukuda, FASA x2, SJG, TFG x2, Modiphius, Heritage Models, Last Unicorn, Decipher)
*** Cthulhu (Too many to count)

REPETITION FOR EMPHASIS
This list focuses on products which adapt novels, movies, video games, or comic books. I’ll generally restrict myself to official licenses. My comments offer a mix of context, commentary, description, and review. If you see something I’ve missed from 1984 to 1985, please tell me in the comments.

PREVIOUS LISTS
History of Licensed RPGs (Part I 1977-1983)
History of Universal RPGs
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs
History of Steampunk & Victoriana RPGs
History of Superhero RPGs
History of Horror RPGs
History of Wild West RPGs
Samurai RPGs

1. The Adventures of Indiana Jones (1984)
Charts. If you weren't there, you might not understand early gaming's love of charts. RPGs relied on them in this era-- Rolemaster, Gamma World, Villains & Vigilantes. New kinds of charts felt revolutionary, like James Bond's "We sort of have a formula" success table. I remember when I saw Paranoia 1e's skill-tree I thought, "ooh...there's a sexy chart."

The Adventures of Indiana Jones offered a new approach to resolution charts: color-coding. Instead of numbered results you got easy-to-read visual levels. The designers wanted to make games accessible and mass-market friendly. TSR used this for Marvel Superheroes and an in their attempt to make Gamma World viable. Indiana Jones embraced the colorful and appealing. Its thin boxed set included a 64-page rulebook, map, screen, evidence file, and 3-D stand-up figures. Bits over substance.

The game's limits created problems. Most importantly, you could only play as one of seven characters from the movies. All adventures had you effectively re-enact the films. James Bond shared this issue, but AoIJ took it to extremes. TSR released a handful of supplements, but Indiana Jones never found an audience. It didn't appeal to the mass market and traditional roleplayers hated it.

When Gygax returned to TSR, the company allowed the Indiana Jones license to lapse. TSR had to pulp their unsold inventory. As Wikipedia tells it, "Employees at the UK office of TSR Hobbies mounted a portion of the burnt remains of the last copy in a small pyramid trophy made of Perspex. Beginning in 2000, the trophy became known as the "Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming." Indiana Jones would return (and fail) again ten years later at West End Games.

2. Elfquest (1984)
Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest series had existed as an underground comic by the time of the 1980s independent comics surge. Lots of small publishers—Fantagraphics, Comico, First Comics—took advantage of the rise of a direct market. New sales in comic book stores allowed them to play with genres and concepts mainstream comics wouldn't touch. Creator-owned comics like Usagi Yojimbo, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Elfquest succeeded outside the restrictions of the comics code.

Chaosium hoped to tap into a new market with the Elfquest rpg. The Pini's came to Chaosium with the idea, but didn't really know what rpgs were. They wanted few changes from their stories and plots. For their part the Chaosium staff had to learn the source material from scratch. According to Sandy Petersen, Steve Perrin took over Elfquest's design duties. However, Perrin also worked on the increasingly crunchy Runequest III in parallel. Mechanics bled over, resulting in a complex end product.

Despite a lovely boxed set, Elfquest didn't do as well as Chaosium hoped. They released a few supplements, with later books including new and not-yet-seen in the comics material. Ral Partha released several sets of figures in conjunction with the line. Chaosium tried a softcover edition in 1987 but that proved to be their last go.

3. Larry Niven's Ringworld (1984)
Now here's where crunch was appropriate. This game mucked with my thinking about rpgs for several years. In the 1980's, I convinced myself that where my sister (and all girls) liked fantasy, I (like all proper boys) liked science fiction. In particular, the hard science fiction of Asimov, Pournelle, and Niven. I latched onto the Ringworld rpg right away. It had amazing production values: clean, sharp, dense. It wasn't soft or girly at all. And the mechanics...holy moley I mean just look at those sub-skill systems. For a long time Ringworld shaped what I thought rpg mechanics should be—every hack or homebrew I did had to have a dense, tiered set of skills.

It didn't matter that when I actually tried to run Ringworld, character creation took forever and play flopped. It looked so cool.

Part of Ringworld's problem came from the game being based on two short novels. The other two appeared many years later. A chunk of Niven's work, including Ringworld, takes place in a shared setting called "Known Space." However, the rpg only has fragments of that as a backdrop. Instead, Ringworld focuses on exploring the artificial ring-strip planet. That leaves out elements like spaceship combat, other planets, and interstellar travel. Today's gamers might embrace such a limited focus, but it would have depth. The Ringworld rpg didn't. It felt purposeless and empty.

Like Elfquest, Ringworld didn't do as well as Chaosium hoped. They released a single supplement, Ringworld Companion. That included more info on Known Space and a couple of scenarios. If you're interested in learning more I recommend checking out this read-through series.

4. Marvel Super Heroes Role-Playing Game (1984)
TSR kicked superhero gaming into overdrive with the release of Marvel Super Heroes. MSH remained strong until the mid-1990s at our local store. While adventure modules often sat on the shelves for years, sourcebook and group supplements sold again and again. We constantly had to reorder from the high sales (and shoplifting).

MSHRPG offered a new approach to game and box design. It moved away from conventional rules layout to a conversational approach: examples of play, comic book illustrations, and introductory prologues. We'd see this again in other off-beat TSR products of the era- The Adventures of Indiana Jones and Bullwinkle and Rocky Role Playing Party Game. Most importantly, Marvel broke away from numbers & mechanics, instead offering an immersive universe from the comics.

I bought it...and I just didn't get it. Marvel seemed so thin, especially for a group invested in Champions. We thought ourselves sophisticated and FASERIP (the resolution system's acronym) seemed like Baby's First RPG. Nine pages for character generation? Names instead of numbers for things? Zone movement? Inconceivable. Where was the crunch and detail? And thus for us Marvel became a non-contender. I couldn't even see the interesting bits which could be stolen for other games, like the rules for criminal trials.

So I have a twinge of jealousy when I hear about other gamers' great experiences with the system: amazing campaigns, the joy of the big supplements and handbooks, the pleasure of tooling the rules to do many genres, the ability to handle cosmic-level adventures. I was having good times with supers in the same years, but with more time spent calculating out the characters’ OCV, ED, and REC. Better? Worse? Who can say? Random Generation. Point Spend Development. Percentile dice.

TSR did quite a bit with Marvel, especially the Marvel Handbook series which sold and sold and sold. Two years later they released the Marvel Super Heroes Advanced set which significantly expanded the system. Other sourcebooks like Ultimate Powers, Realms of Magic, various group compendiums, and the Deluxe City Campaign set made this the best supported line for TSR outside of D&D. In 1991 TSR released an even more introductory version, the Marvel Super Heroes Basic Set. But by the following year, the game was being phased out. A few years later, as TSR began its death spiral, they would try again with the Marvel licensed and the card-driven SAGA System.

5. CB1: Conan Unchained! (1984)
Conan's a major influence on D&D so it's no surprise that TSR moved to pick it up. Conan's Hyboria, however, throws into relief some of D&D's setting assumptions (non-humans, high medieval technology, common spell casters). Despite that, TSR began with two straight AD&D adventures: Conan Unchained! and Conan Against Darkness! Both draw from the movies more than the stories; each features cover photos of a flexing Arnold Swartzenegger. They're not that great, feeling like quick adaptations. TSR would do only one other "Conan-esque" AD&D module, 1986's Red Sonja Unconquered. (For more of Red Sonja and her sources see here). In parallel with these modules, TSR also released two Conan-themed volumes in their popular Endless Quest CYOA series.

In 1985, TSR decided to try a more focused approach with the Conan Role-Playing Game boxed set. This went a completely different direction, drawing on Marvel Super Heroes rather than D&D. It's interesting that while D&D rolled towards more crunch and complexity, the company opted for a rules-lite approach to this major fantasy property. The Conan RPG is a striking game that seriously approaches the world. Magic, for example, is dangerous and unpredictable. TSR released three modules for the game. When Gygax returned to take control back, the company let the license lapse. Three years later, Steve Jackson acquired the license. The Conan RPG still has fans and for a time you could find a version of the rules online with the setting stripped out.

6. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness (1985)
I really don't know what to say about this game. Designed by Erick Wujcik, it is less disorganized than many other Palladium Games of the period. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness builds on the Palladium engine, and the result is a game which feels incomplete, leaving much to the GM to fill in. In short it feels very old school. Right out of the gate it offers ideas about a larger world outside the TMNT universe: a place of strangeness and anthropomorphic animals (which would be built on for the various supplements). Perhaps most strikingly, this game came out before TMNT became a thing...two years before Eastman and Laird agreed to license the concepts for toys, which led to the cartoon, which led to the movies and so on. Here we have a game built on the original incredibly dark stories, which had just begun to move beyond being parodies of Frank Miller and David Sims.

And TMNTOS is crazy wonderful, filled with new art and bizarre tables. Everything’s built on randomness, with a let's-see-what-you-get approach. The game has multiple sub-systems with tons of crunchy bits and modifiers, from skills to Animal Powers to Psionics to equipment. Surprisingly, there's few detailed rules for handling martial arts. It includes a new TMNT story as well as a retelling of the origin. If you like the Turtles, you ought to track down a copy. It went through multiple printings and at least one significant revision. Copies always sold at the store up to the end of the license in 2000. Palladium supported the line with many unique books, some offering anthropomorphic new worlds independent of the TMNT setting: Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, After the Bomb, Road Hogs, Mutants of the Yucatan, Mutants Down Under, Mutants in Avalon, and many others.

7. Lankhmar: City of Adventure (AD&D 1e) (1985)
Technically this was TSR's second outing with Fritz Leiber's universe. The 1980 edition of Deities & Demigods included the "Nehwon Mythos." That remained even after legal issues pulled the Elric and Cthulhu sections from the book. Like Conan, Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories had clearly influenced D&D. The pair's travels and adventures shaped the idea of the dungeon crawl. But many of Leiber's stories take place in cities. Up to this point, urban adventures had been given less treatment. Lankhmar's one of the first TSR sourcebooks to dig into city adventures and offer a sandbox. TSR was catching up to what City State of the Invincible Overlord, Thieves World, and the Thieves Guild series had been doing for several years.

Lankhmar was boxed set with a hefty main book, 32-page supplemental folio, and large map of the city. About half of the core volume covers the city; the rest examines the larger world, the gods, and conversions for Nehwonian campaigns. As with Conan, it acknowledges the D&D's premises might not fit in Leiber's world.

TSR produced only two supplements for this as a AD&D 1e product. Five years later they returned to it with the first of nine releases for AD&D 2e. In 1993, they revised and re-released the box set as a larger, single volume edition for 2e. Then three years later they swung the pendulum back with another core box set, Lankhmar: The New Adventures of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser. This new edition took ideas from across the releases and built a comprehensive and more accessible approach to the setting. However, by the following year, TSR was beginning to crumble.

8. Doctor Who Role Playing Game (1985)
I found Dr. Who in grade school. First I ripped through my sister's set of the Americanized novels, then I found Target import volumes. Finally I discovered you could watch episodes late, late on Sunday nights via Chicago's Channel 11. I had lots of friends who liked Who, but not as avidly as me. There was one girl in the neighborhood who did, but I was dumb and could barely get the nerve up to talk to her. As expected for a goofy early roleplayer, I tried to figure out how to hack and run it. But the same problem kept coming up: Time Lords. Who gets to be a Time Lord and who is relegated to Companion? It may seem easy to resolve now but it didn't work for evil munchkins like myself and my friends.

FASA's Doctor Who RPG didn't provide any great solutions to the problem. Players had to sort out for themselves the Companion/Time Lord sitch. Alternately, the GM could sidestep the whole debate by having the PCs be agents of the Celestial Intervention Agency on Gallifrey. The Doctor Who RPG uses FASA's Star Trek mechanics but with d6's rather than d10's. FASA went through three editions of the core book. The first edition had to be redone when they discovered they lacked the rights to the 6th Doctor, Colin Baker. The second and third had much the same box but very different interior covers. FASA released many supplements (The Daleks, The Master, Cybermen) and modules (City of Gold, The Iytean Menace) in the two years they had the license. A Sontaran sourcebook was advertised but never released.

It's amazing to me how much product FASA pushed out in this era. They had significant print runs for their products; years later I'd still find modules in discount bins. The company dropped the license when the game received a tepid reaction.

9. Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game (1985)
Judge Dredd has danced in and out from being problematic. Depending on the era and the writer he's been more or less a four-color lawman. At times he's an instrument of gory violence and at others a figure for striking satire. I caught on to Dredd when the comic offered a smarter take on issues of violence, punishment, and consumerism. Many striking talents cut their teeth working on 2000AD. I've read a little too much later material that just embraces ass-kicking. In an era of high fascism, he makes me nervous. On the other hand, he's teamed up with both Batman and Lobo.

Dredd rpgs generally take ideas at face value. Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game came out at a time when Games Workshop hadn't yet figured out what kind of game company they wanted to be. I picked up a copy and made up characters, but never ran it. Instead I went for the easier Judge Dredd board game. The rpg itself feels like an old school hodgepodge: random characteristics with weirdly different value ranges, oddly organized rules, and highly detailed character sheets with tracking for each bullet. But if you like Dredd then the game's fun to read with tons of art from the comics, reference details, and cross-section diagrams. It borrows concepts from other games, including a speed and action chart which looks suspiciously like Champions.

As noted in the header, Dredd would return (at least) three more times.

10. DC Heroes Role Playing Game (1985)
DC Heroes showcases my gaming hypocrisy. The year before I'd dismissed Marvel as unworthy of usurping the rich crunch of Champions. But a year later I grabbed this up as an alternative. Champions’ new edition had fixed issues, but added many new options. Skilled players could crush the less experienced. I wanted a game which would level the playing field. And frankly, I loved DC more than Marvel.

Mayfair's smartly put DC's most appealing property, The New Teen Titans, front and center. The game looked like Champions, with point-based stat and power purchases, but remained more abstract. Champions offers an atomic-level approach, while DC Heroes offers a molecular one, with bits assembled into pre-made sets. It had several other innovations: a sliding scale for ratings which allows for cosmic level abilities; breaking stats into opposition/strength/resistance; spending Hero Points for resolution benefits; and team-based combat maneuvers. We played and enjoyed it for years.

Because we'd come from Champions we overlooked some of the oddness and complexity of the system. We knew it handled low-level characters terribly, making them the same bland set of single digits. But it handled epic scale play well. Some disliked "clue point" based investigations, but we ignored those rules. But over time we discovered cracks and gaps in the rules: balance issues, hyper-effective combat tactics, and fundamental problems with the division of the three effect types. Still we stuck with it for a long, long time through several campaigns.

Like the later DC Adventures, the first edition of DC Heroes suffered from releasing just before a world-changing reboot; in this case Crisis on Infinite Earths. That generated huge interest in the DC Universe but forced the company into covering old material multiple times.

Mayfair would end up doing three editions of DC Heroes from '85 to '93. That last edition repacked the game in a more attractive, single-book form, but it wasn't enough. Many interesting things came out of DC Heroes including several Watchmen supplements, a spin-off Batman RPG, "Who's Who" sourcebooks, and several books focused on Vertigo title elements (Magic and Swamp Thing). Those remain the best sourcebooks for DC characters and elements. While the Green Ronin's DC Adventures has solid material, it tries to cover everything in a tight space. DC Heroes' themed supplements (Superman, Justice League, and World at War sourcebooks especially) covered their topics in depth.

11. Midnight at the Well of Souls (1985)
This is a weird one for several reasons. You may not have even heard of Jack L Chalker's Well of Souls books. I can't describe how ubiquitous Chalker's novels were in the sci-fi sections of bookstores in the 1980s. He had multiple popular series. In many of his novels, the idea of transformation drives events. Characters turn into other species, people get sent into other bodies, magical forces & curses transform people. The blog Weird Combinations has an interesting look at these ideas in his fiction.

The Well World series had five volumes when this game came out (two more appeared later). Well World itself is a massive planet/super-computer/alien artifact made up of civilizations and species separated into hexes. Hexes have different rules and controls, with some knocking out use of technology. Our characters arrive, explore, get changed into other species, and try to stop people from taking over the universe. It's a wild ride and was among my favorite weird sci-fi growing up. I loved all the different creatures.

Midnight at the Well of Souls was the only release from TAG Industries. It was a boxed set throwback to production values. It looked like something released five or ten years earlier. It had amateurish art, word processor layout, and little to help the reader through the rules. There's almost no discussion of what characters actually do in the setting, but it does have a massive, multi-chart section on building stellar systems. The intro adventure could appear in any sci-fi game and doesn't even really connect to Well World. On the plus side, it's fun to see all the old Macintosh fonts.

12. The Justice Machine (1985)
A sourcebook for Heroes Unlimited covering a comic series which had onlya handful of issues at the time. Palladium's release included ideas and concepts outside those scant sources. Interestingly Justice Machine introduced The Elementals from artist/writer/game designer Bill Willingham. He would go on the great success with Fables and then dismiss the concerns of women creators at Gen Con. Justice Machine moved among other publishers until creator Mike Gustovich dropped out of the comic industry. As a result, The Justice Machine Sourcebook would be one of the first Palladium products to go out of print. Material from it would later be incorporated into other Heroes Unlimited releases.

PREVIOUS LISTS
History of Licensed RPGs (Part I 1977-1983)
History of Universal RPGs
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs
History of Steampunk & Victoriana RPGs
History of Superhero RPGs
History of Horror RPGs
History of Wild West RPGs
Samurai RPGs
For the full backlog of Age of Ravens posts on Blogger see here. 

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10/22/2018

The Microscope Palette, Its Usefulness in One-Shots, and a Dungeon World Starter Discovery

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By Tomer Gurantz, Keeper of the Squamous Beast Below

One Shots with World Building

The majority of the games I play are one-shots. I don’t have a regular gaming group, and until recently did the real bulk of my gaming at conventions. In the last 2 years, I’ve also been an organizer for a fairly active story game meetup, and an active GM and player in The Gauntlet online community, so I run and play games constantly and consistently. However, they are still one-shots, for the most part.

One of the issues with many of the games I love, is that although I love the build-at-the-table nature of many story games and indie RPGs, the process can be time consuming, and eats into the 3-4 hours allotted to the game. This isn’t a problem when you can spend “session zero” of a campaign doing world and character and backstory generation, but for a one-shot game? It’s an issue.

One solution is to come to one-shots with pre-generated characters or world settings to save time on world building. However, after asking many of my players after these games, almost all agreed that they wouldn’t want to sacrifice the world building due to the collaboration and unique gameplay that resulted.

GoPlayNW, ET, and The Microscope Palette

I recently went to Seattle’s GoPlayNW game convention, and got to play a game of The King is Dead, run by my friend ET. Instead of doing world building as a conversation, they used the system of the Palette from the Microscope RPG. Although I’ve played Microscope many times, I have to admit I was completely dumbfounded and in shock with how easy this was to use in our game, and how quickly we were able to establish a unique setting that all of us players were both responsible for making, and invested in.

For those not familiar with Microscope, it is a world and history building game written by Ben Robbins, and can easily be used to create an amazing unique world or setting for any game, or just for the sake of doing it. However, the game itself can take hours. That said, the Palette, which is part of the initial setting creation, is a process of adding and banning elements from the game and takes only minutes. It’s a quick round-robin, where players get to add or ban one item during their turn, until we’ve gone around a few times and someone has decided to “pass”. At that point there is a final round, and we’re done. We now have a list of things we want to see (or avoid) in our game.

After seeing how excellent it was in this use-case, I decided to steal the process and use it in one-shots that I was running over the next months, and it has yet to fail. I used it for The Quiet Year and Atlas Reckoning, two extremely different RPGs, and it worked fabulously each time.

It turns out that there is some consensus that this may be an excellent idea, as a Google search, which I just performed while writing this article, revealed a Gnome Stew article with the title Steal This Mechanic: Microscope’s Yes/No List written by Martin Ralya. It effectively says this very same thing!

Keep in mind that many games might already have a strong established setting (such as Urban Shadows), might have their own system for generating content (such as Dialect), or may make use of a pre-generated list of questions (such as The Warren and Dungeon World starters). In some of these cases there is no need for this procedure, or the GM may want to run the game in a specific setting. However, for games where you want to build the setting at the table, you can easily benefit from this procedure.

Using The Palette To Create A Dungeon World Starter

I didn’t really plan for what came next, but was so happy with how it turned out, so I knew I had to share it. It was our 2 year anniversary of our Story Games Glendale meetup, and I decided to run Dungeon World, which I hadn’t done in maybe 6 months or so. To establish a fun custom setting, I pulled out the Palette procedure, and we went around the table adding and banning things (myself included), and ended up with this list:

ADD: Planar Gates, Unicorns, Martial Arts, Magic Fabric, Underground Villages
BAN: Aliens, Future Tech, Children

(It is important to establish here that in clarification, the player wanted to ban children - the last item in the ban list above - from being around in the society of this world, and not to ban them from being in the game itself.)

The players next chose their playbooks, and started filling out their sheets. As the GM, I was sitting there wondering what to do to run the adventure, and then had an idea… create a bit of a “Dungeon Starter” by listing a series of questions that they could choose to answer. And for inspiration? The lists above!

I ended up with the following question:

Who took the children? How long ago?
How do your people reproduce without children?
What do you fear most about the above-ground?
How do you control the planar gates?
Where did you get your magic fabric? What does it do?
Why are you searching for “unicorn”?
How long have you been seeking your master?

It took me less time to write up these questions then it took them to fill in their playbooks. When they were ready, they each chose two questions, and after answering these, also filled out their bonds. It was fantastic!

We had devastating unnatural storms that had decimated the above-ground, forcing our people underground in recent generations. We had teleportation portals powered by blood, but that would only stay open 12 hours (after which no one had ever returned). We had a curse upon the people that stole the children 20 years ago, and a “unicorn” that was being searched out to try and lift that curse. Magic fabric had been found, and was a key reason why Salamanders now had enhanced powers (and hence: one of our PCs was an elemancer). And we had a party, and in fact an entire society, that was actively trying to find the children (some few of which had been recovered, including one of the PCs).

As a GM, this was magic. I no longer had to create some generic adventure, and didn’t have to create everything from scratch. Instead we all collaboratively came up with a unique set of elements via the Palette, and that gave me, as the GM, something I could react to, by making those starter questions. The players answered those questions, so that again I had something I could react to: their answers spawned some good adventure directions.

I don’t know how useful this will be to others, but I know how I’m going to run my next Dungeon World adventure!

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10/19/2018

Gauntlet Video Roundup - October 19, 2018

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Greetings, and welcome to the weekly Gauntlet Hangouts video roundup! Don't miss any of the great sessions in the updated playlists and video links below.

Also, don't forget that Gauntlet Con is taking place right now, this weekend from October 18th through the 21st! The Gauntlet Con online gaming convention features tons of games, panels, and special guests. Find out all the details at the Gauntlet Con page.

Finally, be sure not to miss out on the Codex RPG Zine Volume 1 Kickstarter campaign! Your chance to get in on this gorgeous hardcover collection will end on October 28. The project has already funded and crushed many great stretch goals, and the final stretch goals and reward levels have been announced. Check it out and back it today!

Special Feature

An impromptu game this week turned into an ongoing series of videos featuring Gerrit and ANNA !

First, Gerrit and ANNA played this game of Murderous Ghosts (German language).
Then, ANNA compiled this "best of" supercut of the game (German language with English subtitles).
Then, ANNA also filmed this additional short continuing the character's story, Blair Witch-style (German language with English subtitles).
Finally, Gerrit then recorded this reaction video along with this son (German language).

Quite a saga!

Super Tuesday

The Ward: EXTRA (Session 1 of 3)
Jim Crocker runs for Greg G., Marissa C., Robert, and Sam Z.
Beachboy is hot, a reporter wants a tour, and old soldiers never die.

TGI Thursday

Orun (Session 1 of 2)
Lowell Francis runs for Ary Ramsey, Larry S., Micki, and Rich Rogers
Our Djali are dispatched by their Oluru patron to rescue a ship of refugees trapped in a space station in the midst of a civil war.

Gauntlet Quarterly

Hearts of Wulin: Book One (Session 2)
Lowell Francis runs for Maria Rivera, Noella H, Patrick Knowles, and Sherri
Jade Sabre Lan's demonstration offers an opportunity to catch the villains, but it goes awry with Daughter Bird's double betrayal and Perfect Mist's apparent turn to unrighteousness.

Gauntlet Hangouts

Masks: Shadows Within (Session 1 of 3)
Maria Rivera runs for Darold Ross, Greg G., and Leandro Pondoc

Avatar 1%er: Agents of Balance (Session 1 of 4)
Luiz Ferraz runs for Kyle, Rich Rogers, and Taylor W.
Our daring resistance fighters are brought into existence, and a night raid on a Fire Nation outpost takes an unexpected turn. Content warning: physically scarred children - heads-up given both times it comes into focus.

Masks of the Mummy King (Session 1 of 3)
Jim Crocker runs for David L., Owen Thompson, and Rachelle Dube
3 Rogues enter the Ziggurat of the Zodiac Emperor to grab whatever treasures they can lay their hands on!

PbtA Changeling Quarterly: Month 1 (Session 2 of 4)
Tyler Lominack runs for Chris Newton, Matthew, and Patrick Knowles
A lady from the past reveals a horror and our Motley reaches out to protect her. As the Motley tries to discover the darkness she is fleeing, they come face to face with the Devil in the White City.

Monster of the Week: Fetid Waters of Marais Loup (Session 3 of 4)
Tyler Lominack runs for Aybars Yurdun, David Morrison, Leandro Pondoc, Noella H, and Skyler Nelson
Our party splits as some go to the village priest to learn more of the past, while the others go to investigate a missing families plantation house. Revelations are made, our Angel is tempted, and a beloved figure goes to her final reward. The End of Days draws nigh...will a new dawn break?

The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power: The Blood on Our Hands (Session 3 of 4)
Maria Rivera runs for Agatha, Leandro Pondoc, Phillip Wessels, and Stentor Danielson

Zombie World: More Braaiins (Session 1 of 2)
Lowell Francis runs for Larry S., Robert, Sarah J., and Steven Watkins
Six weeks after Z-Day a new wave of "Chompers" forces survivors out to secure supplies from a police station, while the future US President hijacks the medichopper for his own ends.

Zombie World (Session 3 of 5)
Yoshi Creelman runs for Asher S., Chris Thompson, Chris Wiegand, and Jim Crocker
Martha the Scientist needs more supplies, so a scavenging mission is developed. Sarah wants desperately to help... but no one has told her the truth about Brad. On the helicopter survey they find signs of another small enclave. Will the new folks be friendly or hostile? Will they get more people? Is there enough space here, privacy is already a concern. Will they get the supplies they need, will Sarah figure out that those caustic chemicals... probably aren't going to save Brad?

Monsterhearts 2: Kingsport '62 (Session 2 of 4)
Catherine Ramen runs for Agatha, David Morrison, River Williamson, and Simon Landreville
In episode 2, Mal tries to help the Traveler fit in, new kid Xan joins the drama club to put on "The King in Yellow," Lucca plays with hexes, Wendy tries to find her pelt, and President Kennedy announces that missiles are in Cuba. Special guest star: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States.

Check out all the great videos on The Gauntlet YouTube channel and be sure check out the playlists to catch up on all your favorite games. If you'd like to play in games like these, check out the calendar of events and the Gauntlet Hangouts Google+ Communitywhere new games are announced! To support The Gauntlet, please visit the Gauntlet Patreon at https://patreon.com/gauntlet. All are welcome to play Gauntlet Hangouts games, and Patreon supporters have extra options like priority RSVP for Gauntlet Hangouts games and joining the Gauntlet Slack team where special events are announced like Gauntlet Games Now. Enjoy, and everyone have a great weekend!

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10/18/2018

Sharing the Cognitive Load

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by Gerrit Reininghaus, Keeper of the Voice of the Silent Emperor

Summary

Recently, I put together a template free to use for everybody which can serve as an actionable guideline for facilitating online RPG sessions, laogs (live action online game), GM-free and traditional set-ups alike. This article shall explain each step in the guideline and give a bit of background and lessons learnt.

This guideline is not about technical aspects like how to set up a session or how to handle last minute drop-outs, etc. This would be worth an extra article. Here, we solely focus on the social dimension, on how to facilitate the conversation on a universal level.

The guideline is my attempt to combine the best practices on how to introduce a game to players and how to structure a session. But more so, it contains my take on sharing responsibility roles, a concept I first saw in Jason Morningstar’s Winterhorn, and which I adapted to online play. Finally, it contains a proposal on how to do a proper debrief which I consider especially relevant in games with higher emotional impact (and believe me—that can quickly become the case even in your standard dungeon crawl).

The template can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/OnlineGamingTemplate

Simply make a copy if you want to make use of it.

CATS & Safety

CATS stands for concept, aim, tone, and subject matter. It’s a procedure which was once an entry for the 200 Word RPG contest. It has been described elsewhere in greater detail, so I will only quickly talk about why it’s a structure I consider worth being in this guideline.

When you begin a game session, specifically when playing online with new people or a game new to you or them, it helps tremendously to take some time to get everybody on board. You might already have covered parts of the CATS discussion when inviting players to your session. Actually, following CATS when announcing your game session is good practice, too.

So, giving some thoughts pre-game and making a few notes about what concept you have in mind for your gaming session, what your aim with the session is and which tone you strive for, gives you a great starting point when entering the session. Don’t hesitate to share the text you wrote and simply read it out loud.

Five minutes in - everything goes smoothly

After having gone through CATS, you survived already the first five minutes of your session and probably feel already more at ease with guiding several other people through the next hours. CATS serves its purpose of bringing everybody on board directly but also indirectly serves as a warm up for you as the facilitator.

Don’t forget that subject matter is an interactive step: other players should be asked to bring in subject matters they would prefer being treated with care or exclude altogether.

Responsibility Roles

Responsibility Roles is a way to reflect the many aspects the facilitator of an online game usually has to consider while running a session.

Reflecting on these responsibilities serves two purposes: keeping them in mind and honouring that they all require work and partly a different mindset. Secondly, that in some of your games it might make sense to share some of these responsibilities with your players.

Aspects of facilitating an online game

The template provides a table with the standard tasks a facilitator usually has to handle: keep track of time, check-in with players who possibly don’t have a good time, explain what the game is about and how the session will proceed, answer rules questions, support others and take action in case of technical difficulties, and moderate a debrief or feedback section at the end. There might be more things depending on the game.

In some games, people like to have an image board or a map of an area where the characters move through, for example. Then it’s good to have somebody responsible for keeping these up-to-date. Same goes for taking notes for specific events in the game, tracking counters, updating a list of NPCs, etc.

Share the burden

So before you start the session, consider if you as the facilitator would like to source some of these tasks out to players. Ask a player directly if they would take over a certain task or ask openly if anybody is interested to share some of the work you as the facilitator usually would have alone on your shoulders.

Some things like having a specific person responsible for checking-in with players not having a good time (if possible on a private channel) shouldn’t be understood that everybody else would be allowed to ignore their responsibility in doing so. From my experience though, it helps a lot if you have somebody having their mind fully on such a task. This lowers the imposter hurdle (‘should it really be me pointing that out’) and encourages action.

Handing out the debrief moderation is something I can personally highly recommend. I’ll talk more about further below.

Keep what you prefer to keep

Surely, sharing some of these tasks is not everybody’s taste and doesn’t have to happen at all. I would still recommend taking a look at everything that you as the facilitator are balancing while in a game—helping you to understand how much work you are actually doing in a session you facilitate.

Tools

By now, there are so many different ways and practices people have while playing online that there isn’t a set of tools that will for everybody and every play culture. Some people stream live on Twitch with audience interaction, others play voice-only but with battle maps on Roll20.

So the list of tools the template provides is just reflecting one of many different play cultures. It is the one most common in the Gauntlet community, although even in the Gauntlet many different styles are present.

Managing information

The tools listed here are all browser based. I strongly recommend to have each tool in a separate window so you can easily switch between them. You will probably have the video window, a dice roller, a character keeper, a picture board, personal notes and a search engine open. Additionally, you might have one or two PDFs with the game text open (full rules / reference sheet). That’s already three to eight windows to move between and hence a lot to keep up with.

Take a moment to think about how you can manage all these tools efficiently for yourself. Ask the other players to check if they have access to all tools before the game starts and if they feel comfortable in using them.

For dice rolling, it’s always an option to have people roll their real dice on their own table. Some people though prefer the excitement of sharing the dice result in a tool and our own Shane Liebling has given us rollforyour.party as a wonderful gift. It’s an open source dice roller without registration and provides tools for many different games. It also has a built-in X card and other safety tools.

The Play Aids folder of the Gauntlet community has character keepers and play aids for over 100 games ready to be used.

Character Keepers

A character keeper is one of the amazing things online play has to offer which works (from my point of view) better than in face to face groups. A typical character keeper is a spreadsheet shared among participants with all information about your characters on one page. So no matter if you want to look up the player characters’ aspects in Fate or check which Bonds somebody has in Dungeon World or which Skin Moves the Ghost has picked in Monsterhearts, it’s all there and instantaneously updated when changes are made.

How to end a session / Debriefing

Early ending

An online session often goes between two and four hours. My preferred length is three hours. We are sitting on a chair watching one or two screens and although we will have breaks sessions which go longer can have a tendency to not being fun anymore. Reading other people’s emotions, listening through not always perfect connections and controlling several tabs and windows with information is work and we will be exhausted (but hopefully also excited) at the end of the session.

So most importantly, end the game when you don’t feel comfortable anymore with going further. In the end, it never pays out to continue beyond your limits. ‘Life is more important than a game’ is what my son (6) always tells me in such situations, giving me a hug, and so should you be good to each other if one does not want to continue any longer.

When the game is over

When the game is over, the template recommends to switch off cameras and mics for a moment and to stretch your body. Since our hobby is mainly an intellectual exercise we tend to forget what our body needs. We had an exciting times, were totally immersed in our story—so now be gentle to your body. In intense games, this is also the opportunity to de-role. Remind yourself and your players that the game is over and you are not the characters any longer you incorporated. Don’t use character names anymore and talk about your character and NPCs in third person.

Begin the debrief

It’s then time to hand over to the debrief moderator (if that is somebody different than you). The template provides people with different options and a text they can read out loud if they want. One proposed option is to focus on appraisal and excitement, the other focuses on emotions and reflections. There are many other possibilities, so these are just examples. It’s nice to shuffle your procedure up a bit every other time and to find out for yourself which procedure works best for you. It probably isn’t directly the first one you tried.

In the case you are recording your session for others to watch, make a decision as a group if you want to record the debriefing as well or not. People who enjoyed your Actual Play, might be very interested in the debriefing, too, and we can all improve play culture by making debriefing a visible part of our online play. However, people sometimes have good reasons why they don’t want to do debriefing publicly. Then stop recording, no questions asked.

Debriefing does not equal feedback

Most importantly, debriefing is not the same as giving feedback. From a work context, many people have learnt to keep feelings out and feedback procedures in the workplace context focus on rational pros and cons, stuff which worked well versus what didn’t. Feedback is good to get. But this isn’t the kind of debriefing we might need after intense roleplaying sessions. We are allowed to have feelings and we shall have space to express them. (Side Note: that this should also be the case at work is my strong opinion but not the topic here).

My proposal therefore for debriefing is to keep debriefing and feedback conceptually and as agenda items separate. It depends on your preferences how much space you offer to each of them. It’s alright not to have a debriefing in some games or not to ask for feedback at all.

Debriefing emotions

Debriefing should therefore focus on personal emotions experienced in a game and explicitly offer them a space. Pick a moment in the game which stood out in reference to your play experience. Talk about it. If possible, focus on emotions, on what you felt. It’s tempting and indeed we are trained to hand out positive feedback and compliments to other players. If that happens, that’s ok but try to focus on your own experience. Keep the celebration for the feedback time.

Debriefing reflections back into real life

A second and equally important dimension is to allow players to talk about how their play experience connects for them to their life. The game session was just a three hours slice in our lives.

Our life is what happened before the session, while the session was going and after it ended. We came in with a state of mind, business to do, emotions we worked through (aka bleed in). We related to a fictive world, with the escapist dimension of a game while playing but we also related to real people who we might know well from ‘real life’ or had never met before the game.

When the game is over these relationships continue to exist while the characters we played become just a memory. But still, although our story, the world and the characters were created by us, they might still mean something (aka bleed out). Maybe the old grandmother I incorporated reminded me of my recently deceased grandma. Maybe the oppression our group of rebels suffered is something my sister had to suffer.

Use the debriefing to reflect how the game related to your life. It’s totally ok to discuss something light-hearted—if you found a game design element super interesting and this is what you want to talk about—do so.

No need for strong emotions

To emphasise the last point, a debriefing shall not turn into a show-off of how emotionally impacting the session was. It’s alright to have no strong feelings, nothing serious to add. A simple state of happiness or just feeling not moved at all by the game even if everybody else said so, is as good as talking about how life changing the game was for you. Both can stand next to each other. You might also not feel anything you like to talk about but in a couple of hours after the game, after a discussion with your partner or a good night sleep it starts to keep you thinking. If that is the case, reach out to someone in the game you trust and do another debriefing when it feels right for you.

Feedback

When the debriefing of emotions and reflections (or any other form suitable for you) is over you can ask for feedback towards you and between players.

You might be interested just in positive feedback or you want constructive feedback about what went sup-optimal. It’s your decision as the facilitator to decide which type of feedback is welcomed. Especially for playtests, you might ask for written feedback or if anybody has time to look in detail about some material.

My personal taste is to take positive feedback only directly after the session. I’m often pumped by adrenaline and feel happy to have finished the session. But since I still want constructive feedback on how to improve my GMing, game material or how I facilitated the session, I ask that people come back to me a few hours after the game only with such feedback. I have also already reached out individually to people in such situations.

Another recommendation for players who don’t feel comfortable with handing over negative feedback: you could ask the debrief moderator or another player you trust to hand over the feedback they have anonymously.

Where to go from here

The online facilitator template is just one of many possible ways to structure an online session. I personally look forward to see variants diverging widely from this one and to continue my own learning experience. I especially look out to how I could incorporate more best practise lessons from the Nordic Larp and American Freeform scene who – from my point of view- are several years ahead in terms of how they facilitate good sessions and good aftercare. Finally, with online streaming there is a dimension in online play whose consequences haven’t been thought through yet (by me): how does a live audience change our games, our safety, what structure would work better for an audience, how to do aftercare as part of the audience etc?

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10/17/2018

Age of Ravens: Adapting Icons

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TRADITIONAL THEFTS AND CRAFTS
This month I've split my gaming nearly 50/50 between PbtA and "Trindie" games. My trad-indie hybrids of choice have been Trail of Cthulhu and 13th Age. The latter satisfies my love for epic fantasy. I know Jason (among other Gauntleteers) isn’t as big a fan of that, but I love huge, shake-the-pillars fantasy campaigns. Yes, I can do intimate but I'd rather bring sky cities crashing to the earth.

Both games have a little more tracking than I love. But both have clear core mechanics, despite the range and variety on offer. I’ve stolen their most interesting mechanics for other games (thinking about core clues, distance, respecs). In particular I've come to appreciate 13th Age's “Icons” mechanic. I liked it when I first saw it, but over time I've discovered more depth and utility within. It's a concept worth lifting and remixing for other games.

WHAT THE WHAT? ICONS
13th Age has a default high fantasy setting, The Dragon Empire. Within that world exist 13 icons. These figures of great power and influence shape events throughout the land. Some are mortal, some are immortal. All have a suggested "alignment" but personal agendas complicate that. Each icon has a symbol—used throughout the text and on supplementary bits like tokens and coins.

At the start of the campaign, players assign three points worth of relationships to icons. These relationships can be Positive, Negative, or Complicated. So you might be aligned with the High Paladin, but you’ve had some misunderstandings.

At intervals determined by the GM (per session, per adventure, etc.) players roll one die per relationship point. Each 6 means a meaningful advantage from that icon; each 5 means a boon with a cost or complication. The GM may also have players roll when encountering significant manifestations of that Icon.

GMs have several options for handling those advantages. Information: a contact reaching out to the player, a flashback to a past event, supernatural messengers. Support: small magic items, clearing obstacles, allies with lodging. Mechanical: inspiration for a roll bonus, extra recharge attempt, desperation reroll. These can be handled in multiple ways and the rules encourage flexible approaches. Suggestions can come from the GM or player. There’s lots of icon option discussion in various supplements; third party sourcebooks like Gods & Icons offer many variations.

Icon rolls don't have to be purely a boon or gift. The GM can also use them to determine the influence of particular icons on the story. If the Ancient Turtle keeps popping up from these checks, maybe there’s a deeper reason at work. In my sessions, I give players tokens to represent 5/6 icon rolls, and sometimes I'll offer to cash them when a particular opportunity occurs to me.

ICON IMAGINE
So what's the big deal? At first I thought Icons just offered a nice setting shorthand and useful session planning mechanic. But Pelgrane did something weird with their adventures and supplements; something I didn’t dig at first. Nearly all the 13th Age books use icons as a framework for presenting ideas. The Book of Loot's broken into chapters of themed items based around them. Most published adventures offer detailed options for antagonists and patrons based on icon relationships. Both Bestiarys present multiple origins stories and concepts for monsters based on which their iconic association.

The icons offer a rich angle into the setting and an organizing principle that reinforces the world. They're the factions and forces at work everywhere. I don't need to know the nations, gods, geography—instead I can focus on these pillars. And it doesn't have to be 13; one Pelgrane setting variant presents the Dragon Empire in just seven icons.

SIX REASONS FOR ICONS
They offer useful improvisational resources. Icons set up an easy leading question for collaboration:. "Tell me about one of the icons, the figures who define the world and shape events.” Players can establish a name, some traits, and an agenda. As always, what they come up with tells you what they want to see in the world—as friends or enemies. You could even follow Questlandia's lead and give some authority over that icon to the player who came up with it.

Icons are compact way of conveying the setting. They put a name to a concept. If I wanted to pitch 13th Age's Dragon Empire to players, I'd start with the icons and maybe a minor sketch of the land's shape. I wouldn't have to go any deeper than that. We'd explore everything else in play. I think you could boil down many dense settings in this way: find key figures to represent factions and forces. Use those as your touchstones.

They can monetize the setting. Legends of the Wulin has a great mechanic called loresheets where players spend points to connect themselves to the stories of the world. Icon serve the same purpose—those relationship points let players buy into the aspects of the world they want to see. Players can invest deeply in one icon or spread their interest around.

Icon connections can make relationships messier and more dynamic. These ties lie on top of PC to PC relationships. In Hearts of Wulin we build those relations as triangles. Icons—either directly or in the form of specific agents—can be the third vertice. It doesn’t add complexity, but it does add depth.

The icon rolls offer a concrete setting connection to Players gain a currency they can spend to interact and push their agenda. Sometimes they have costs. The aid I get to fight against my icon enemy The Naga Prince may have strings attached. It may eventually push me into a relationship with another icon.

Icons help define campaign levels—there's a difference between an icon master of a thieves guild and an elder dragon who swallows the dawn to start the day. Icons can represent factions, philosophies, organizations, families lines, nations, or whatever feels to the GM like the building blocks of the world. That's something I want to come back to in a latter post.

OTHER ARENAS
Because the icon mechanics are loose—connections and an invocation mechanic—you can fit them with systems as is. On the other hand you could also adapt them to fit with a particular game. For example, you could adapt icon relationships to Dungeon World. At the start of the campaign, players would assign three +1 to Icons (max +2 at start). They'd define the relationship as Positive, Negative, or Complicated.

You could have a simple start of session move or opt to have players invoke the move in play for a particular moment. Roll +relationship value. On a hit, forces move to aid you (explain how). If you’re opposed to the icon in question, you get aid from mutual enemies. In a 7-9, there’s a cost or complication—either now or in the future. On a fail, problems arise or the cost is higher.

I can imagine many variations on this. Hard and soft moves might change relationships. The GM might have successful rolls generate hold to be spent on particular options. A more ambitious approach might have a general icon roll move and then specific ones for each of the icons.

Overall I like the concept because it's rich, requires a minimal amount of work, and has player interaction. I've been thinking particularly for fantasy, but I think it has applications beyond that.

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10/16/2018

The Gauntlet and the Big Bad Problem

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by Jason Cordova

While at Big Bad Con this weekend, I was struck by how few people knew what The Gauntlet was. I’d estimate only 1 out of every 15 people I talked to had heard of us. This struck me as funny for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that we are in the upper echelons of Patreon creators, and between Patreon, DriveThru, and Kickstarter, we’re pulling in a decent amount of money. Not earth-shattering amounts by any stretch, especially when you consider most of it goes right back out the door, but pretty darn good for indie ttrpgs. How was it possible so few people at Big Bad Con—a haven for that niche, indie ttrpg stuff we’re so good at—knew who we were?

I have been pondering this and a few other questions more or less non-stop for the last 24 hours. It is honestly driving me kind of crazy, because it makes me feel like we’re not doing enough to get our message out there. Big Bad Con is all about diversity and inclusivity, and yet The Gauntlet, which has a frankly radical approach to inclusivity, was barely a blip on that community’s radar. I know, to some degree, there is a performative aspect to being inclusive that we have never been very good at (we’re too busy doing the thing), but I feel like there is something deeper going on; that there is something about our basic “pitch” which is difficult for people to grasp or talk about.

The difficulty of The Gauntlet pitch has bedeviled us for years. We’re not a publisher, even though we publish a magazine every month. We’re not actual play-types, even though we produce two actual play podcasts. We’re not convention organizers, even though we run an annual online convention and organize literally thousands of game sessions per year. You could say we’re podcasters, but that doesn’t paint the whole picture. The most accurate thing to say (and what I prefer) is that we’re a community, but even that word, “community,” is nebulous. It means a hundred things and nothing.

The Gauntlet: The Most Successful Thing in Indie TTRPGs No One Fucking Knows About. That’s us! Gilded anonymity ftw!

And maybe this isn’t a problem. Our smallness, our nicheness, is a strength—always has been. I’ll take 100 super-committed, super-active community members over 10,000 Twitch viewers any day of the week. We are able to accomplish a lot because we keep everything small but very high quality.

And yet…

My ego simply does not enjoy feeling like a nobody, like a joke. And it’s not just for me. I want people to know how awesome The Gauntlet is, how awesome our members are—how kind and generous and talented Gauntleteers can be! I’m not doing all this work so we can be some obscure club on the internet. I’m doing all this work so we can break the fucking wheel of what is possible in ttrpgs and I want people to know about it!

But enough of this whiny nonsense. It isn’t my style to get all warped over something like this. (“Oh sadness, I’m not as cool or popular as I thought I was!”) I view what I am henceforth calling the “Big Bad Problem” as an opportunity: there is still a MASSIVE number of people out there who would love being part of our spaces if they only knew about us. It is going to be my job, and the job of all Gauntleteers, to communicate our values and to make sure people understand what we’re all about, because those people might need us, and we might need them.

Some solutions: I intend to follow up this post with more posts in the coming weeks and months that explain the radical approach The Gauntlet takes to the ttrpg industry. I think we need to be on Twitch and other platforms so more people can see our play culture in action. And more than anything, we need to start talking about The Gauntlet (mind you, there are many people in the community doing that work already; even at Big Bad Con, folks like Tomer Gurantz and Tor Erickson were evangelizing like crazy). The Big Bad Problem is only going to go away if we start showing people we are proud of what we’re doing over here.

And pride is what it all comes down to for me. I love the people in The Gauntlet community, but more than that, I am so damn proud of what we do every day. This place is special. And people need to know it.

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The Gauntlet Blog

Gauntlet Con: Test Fire

Age of Ravens: The Year in Horror RPGs 2017

The Time for The Gauntlet is Now

Gauntlet Video Roundup - October 26, 2018

Age of Ravens: History of Licensed RPGs (Part II 1984-85)

The Microscope Palette, Its Usefulness in One-Shots, and a Dungeon World Starter Discovery

Gauntlet Video Roundup - October 19, 2018

Sharing the Cognitive Load

Age of Ravens: Adapting Icons

The Gauntlet and the Big Bad Problem

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