by Luiz Paulo Ferraz, Keeper of the Violet Spectacle (@puizlaulo)
I love games that don’t require a dedicated Game Master*. In the time I’ve been in The Gauntlet, I’ve played in a lot of GMed games that had so much player input that they basically felt GMless (or rather, GMful, but I’m not going to get into that). I’m also gay as hell, so it should come as no surprise that Dream Askew instantly snatched my attention. It is a game about “a queer enclave amid the collapse of civilization”, and half of Dream Askew / Dream Apart (the latter deals with “a Jewish shtetl in a fantastical version of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe”). These games were written by Avery Alder and Ben Rosenbaum, and both run on an engine they call No Dice, No Masters. It’s Powered by the Apocalypse-adjacent, and it gives all of the narrative control and responsibility to the players. The core of the engine is a simple and elegant mechanic: there are three kinds of moves — Weak (moments of vulnerability and failure), Regular (straightforward tasks), and Strong (very impactful and powerful actions). You can only make a Strong Move if you spend a token, and you can get a token if you perform a Weak Move, which encourages everyone to build an engaging narrative with ups and downs. You can also earn tokens by playing into another character’s Lure, but that’s beyond the point of this article. I’m also a big fan of another one of Alder’s games called Monsterhearts, which is about “sexy monsters, teenage angst, personal horror, and secret love triangles”. We often say around The Gauntlet that Monsterhearts “runs itself”, in the sense that the system gives the players such a good framework for creating interpersonal drama between their characters that the Master of Ceremonies can often sit back and just let the cast rip each other apart, both physically and emotionally. So I thought “what if?” and took (most of) the sleek engine of No Dice, No Masters and shoved it into the chest of the metaphorical teenage monster of Monsterhearts. But something felt lacking, so I took Jason Cordova’s “the player whose character has most Strings on yours decides your character’s fate” mechanic from True Beauty (his excellent Monsterhearts playset about queer ball culture in the 80’s, available in Codex: Joy 2) and threw that into the mix. For the purpose of this analogy, we’ll say I gave our little monstrosity a gorgeous wig. And so MONSTERDREAMS arose from the metaphorical slab, ready to strut the runway and wreak havoc. Here’s how it looks: CORE CHANGES Players pick the result of their moves. When they pick 6-, they gain a token. The player who has most Strings on them will make an MC move against them. If there’s a tie for Strings, the tied players decide together. When they pick 7-9, follow the move as usual. To pick 10+, they must spend a token. There is no rule for who gets to play side characters. Use them as a way to divide the spotlight. Make sure the person playing the side character at the moment respects the decisions made by the player who has narrative authority over the scene (as established by Strings). Stats are gone. Every player starts with 0 tokens. If at any time you get a +2 or higher bonus on a would-be roll, you instead get to pick 10+ on that move without spending tokens. It’s important to keep track of +1s you have lying around so you can stack your bonuses (the +1s only count as fictional positioning if they’re not stacked). For example: Meredith has two Strings over Dario and wants to Keep Her Cool against him. She uses Pulling Strings and spends both her Strings to pick the “Add 1 to a roll” option twice, which gives her a +2 bonus. This means she gets a free 10+ on Keep Your Cool without spending tokens. All other rules and moves are kept as-is. I haven’t combed through all playbooks to make sure they fit this format, so you might need to do some tweaking on-the-go. TIPS AND PRINCIPLES
EXPERIMENTAL RULE One thing I’ve thought about but haven’t tried is removing Experience and conflating it with tokens, so whenever you would get experience, you get a token instead (that already happens on all 6- outcomes, so you’d just have to change some playbook-specific moves and the “Tempt” option on Pulling Strings). With this rule, a player would spend 3 tokens to get an Advance instead of 5 Experience (like I said, I haven’t tested the math, but 5 tokens feels like a lot). FINAL THOUGHTS, FUTURE PLANS I’ve unfortunately only run one game with this format due to time constraints, but it was a great amount of fun. It gave me everything I could hope for from a Monsterhearts game, and I’d dare say some more beyond that. We did run into some speed bumps (part of the mechanics in this article were created on the fly during the session), but it was still a hell of a ride. I plan on running this system in Gauntlet Hangouts and applying it to some Monsterhearts playsets to see what happens, and maybe even expand it with some tech from other systems (Storybrewers’ Good Society could lend itself nicely to this format). We’ll see what the future holds. Until then, keep your dreams feral. You can acquire Dream Askew / Dream Apart and Monsterhearts 2 by clicking here. If you'd like to see more by Luiz, visit his Itch.io here.
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by Ludovico “Ludo” Martins Alves, Keeper of the Malign Mouth of Danjeel the Confessor. When not haunting the Gauntlet spaces, they can be found on Twitter @delethiel or bringing super-heroes back to antiquity at https://heroesoftherepublic.com/.
Disclaimer: I love City of Mist. I have backed both Kickstarters and have two piles of stat and character cards. It is one of my favorite games to play face-to-face. But, from a hacking and online play perspective, I cannot make the game work for me. Hello there. I am starting this series of articles as a look into how Gauntlet Spaces can be useful for design. I hope my experiences with public design, as well as the benefits of collaboration, feedback and playtesting are useful for those looking from outside the community. Hacking is a well-tested design model. I have been dabbling in it for twenty years with different degrees of success. One of the games which has presented some quite unique challenges to me has been City of Mist. City of Mist is a game of superhero noir, of living incarnated myth in a city of intrigue, mystery and forgetfulness. It is also a beautiful chunky book that can be pretty hard to follow. I tried my hand at hacking City of Mist before; it did not go far. Within Gauntlet design spaces, Luiz Paulo Ferraz created an excellent, streamlined, World of Dungeons style take on City of Mist. It and the related conversation about what made City of Mist tick - and what did not work so well - offered a sharp blueprint. After all, it is easier to kill someone else's darlings than your own. I started working on my hack, an Antiquity version of City of Mist. A City, not of Mist, but of Myth, where legends walk in the open and struggle with themselves and for their community. I named it Fabulae Urbe. I knew from the get-go that I wanted Fabulae Urbe to do:
Character Creation One of the best features of City of Mist is the duality within every character. To preserve the conflict between their mortal and mythic nature, I introduced two natures: the Infernal (mortal, theluric, material); and the Celestial (platonic, abstract, supernal). Each PC has four points called “Names”, which they must divide among Infernal/Celestial at a 2/2, 3/1 or 1/3 ratio. Names serve one extra function: each Name gives you two tags. So, a starting PC has 4 Names and 8 Tags. Tags are an important part of City of Mist. I wanted them to be a resource, stress/health track and a constant part of fictional positioning. Some of the most attractive points of City of Mist are the Mysteries and Identities of each character. Player characters are supposed to clash against each other and trigger relevant narrative moves for each player--at least once per session. But that is rarely the case: what works great on paper is pretty difficult to setup. Personal mystery and conflict are pretty unusual and can go entire sessions without boiling up to the surface. Still, that idea was part of what I loved of City of Mist. I want to make it work. Many games have promised similar experiences; some even deliver. One in particular, has been developed within Gauntlet spaces: Lowell Francis’ and Agatha Cheng’s Hearts of Wulin. The consistent, organic and dramatic conflicts created by Hearts of Wulin inspired me. Characters of Fabulae Urbe should also have their own tangled web of conflicts and incompatible desires. As such, each character has a couple of Imbroglios:
And… that is a Fabulae Urbe PC. Enough depth to get them into trouble and give them an inner and outer life. A fundamental level of complexity. Resolution Mechanics I had quite a lot of trouble deciding on a general resolution move. Many alternatives offered themselves, but which one would fit better? I tried a World of Dungeons style move first, but could not make it work with Tags in an organic matter. I tried a Forged in the Dark style move, but it was so complex that it would be better to make the entire thing FitD from the start. I tried a very conservative PbtA move, closer to City of Mist’s own, but it was not as player facing as I expected the game to be. The answer came to me when reading old Codex zines. What if I made the game’s core move a version of Jason Cordovosa`s Labyrinth Move? This is how this version came to be: Descend Into The Underworld When you face the legends of the city, roll +Celestial or +Infernal. If tags help you, roll with advantage; if tags hinder you, roll with disadvantage. A single player rolls for the whole group; all relevant character and story tags apply. On a hit (7+), gain hold 1. On a critical (12+), gain hold 2. On a miss (6-), mark a tag or remove yourself from the scene. Mark experience. On a 7-9, ask a question and declare what you seek to achieve. The GM will answer you and tell how your course of actions drives you deeper into the Urbe’s intrigue. On a 10+, you are fortunate in your investigation. You make significant progress on your goal or events in the Urbe play in an helpful way. Hold from this move is cumulative and tracked for the entire party. You may spend hold to:
This move pulls a lot of weight. It allows one to ask questions, and remove obstacles and enemies--by marking their tags. It also lets the players move around town, using their hold to get access to all manner of characters and events. It may be overambitious, but on paper, it seems to capture the feel of recurring encounters and situations. Narrative Moves City of Mists has a lot of moves. The most important are the narrative moves, which offer a lot of value to games. The Montage move is perfect to give players a breather or control the pacing of the game. You can give players a montage to let them commune with their myth, pay attention to their mortal life or a bump to their narrative control. Montage (Downtime) Whenever your character has some downtime, choose one: Connect with your mortal life. Narrate what happens. Mark experience. Commune with your divine legend. Narrate what happens. Mark experience. Prepare for a confrontation. Narrate how you prepare. Recover a marked tag or get hold 3. Flashback is one of my favorite moves of City of Mists. I love the ability to bring it back, but name it Darling Most Likely To Be Killed. Letting players flashback details into a scene by spending hold is nice, but it is the idea of having “nested” scenes as flashback that gets me excited. Yet, I can already see so many problems and reasons why players will not use/forget about it… But for now, it is still in the game. Flashback During a scene, spend 1 hold. Then, choose between: Establish a true fact about the current scene. Spend extra 1-3 hold and run a scene as a flashback as if you had spent it for Descend Into the Underworld. Now, Make a Hard Choice. This is the one; this is the move that is supposed to make or break City of Mist. This is where the Triumph and Momento Mori have to play out a role. This move should be used as often as Descend Into The Underworld. My proposed move draws much from the original move design intentions, but little from its mechanics. Instead, I draw inspiration from both Blades in the Dark and Hearts of Wulin and mechanics that achieve similar goals. Thanks for Lowell Francis for teaching me how Hard Choices are created. Make a Hard Choice When you come face to face with your imbroglios, mark experience. Then roll your choice of +Celestial or +Infernal. On a 10+, you manage to keep yourself together. On a 7-9+, players will suggest a disquieting truth about your Triumph or Memento Mori. If you refuse, leave the scene. If you accept that truth, lower the stat used and increase the other. If that would lower it below one, you must mark two tags instead. On a 6-, choose one: Lose control of your character. Lose something dear to you. Lose a tag. It takes all you got. Mark all your tags. I also have an end of session/advancement move, but what can I say? Currently it is very crude, direction-less and will change a lot. Lessons Learned And The Future Playtest, the game demands it. Only then can further changes be implemented. Fortunately, this is something Gauntlet Spaces excel at. Expect further articles on the future of this game. Fabulae Urbe: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1MugReflBllJ-LJFj_2uv95bRhnasDW1M by Kyle Thompson, Keeper of the Light of the Peerless Star (@wiegraf_) with contributions by Lauren McManamon, Keeper of the Secrets of Quachil Uttaus (@thestraykiwi) The default classes in World of Dungeons hew closely to original classes in B/X D&D, but the custom class rule allows players to enjoy much more creative fare. I was raised on the video games of the Japanese developer Quest, and the plethora of class types in those games always used to fascinate me as a child. World of Dungeons has let me express that fascination with its simple and fun class system, and I sometimes spend my free time hacking away at new classes to play with. In this series of articles I will be sharing some of the classes I’ve made. These three classes are ones I have thought of pairing with the dark Celtic fantasy of the OSRIC adventure The Barrow Mound of Gravemoor. Such strange adventurers as these might be found stalking the bleak swamps and barrows of that land. Changeling Because of its lack of emphasis on combat, World of Dungeons is a game that can reward characters that focus on trickery, and there are few better tricky archetypes than the fae changeling. Use this class to bend words and the world around you to your character’s will, but remember that tricks sometimes get the better of the trickster! Changelings get Decipher. Choose two special abilities: Pact Sense (You can attempt to recall an ancient faerie pact a creature is bound to), Wild (You can converse with and attempt to command animals), Shapechange (You can attempt to assume the shape of a similarly sized creature), Riddlespeak (When you attempt to confuse someone by speaking in riddles, roll with advantage). Death Knight This design was largely inspired by the Terror Knight class in Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, and unlike the Changeling is very much focused on combat. However each of the Death Knight’s abilities tell us something about their frightening character. This is the sort of person whose use of violence comes at their own expense - and is all the more terrifying for it. Death Knights get Leadership. Choose two special abilities: Necrotic Strike (You can choose to spend resting hit dice one for one to deal a commensurate amount of bonus damage vs. the living—until your next rest), Duel (You understand the rituals of dueling and can compel any opponent of equal or greater HD to duel you in single combat), Terrifying Presence (You may use your charisma to attempt to transfix any living creature with fear), Unnatural Corpus (You do not require drink or rations to rest). Herald of the White One of the most memorable Celtic goddesses is Morrigan, and this character is meant to be her herald. As a goddess of war and death, Morrigan grants her closest followers the power to thrive off of her domain, and so the Herald is able to draw souls from the war dead or command the carrion beasts who are drawn to any site of battle. The Herald of the White might not be the best dungeon crawler, but they are very effective in overland travel, and can always frighten off enemies with a banshee’s scream.
Heralds get Lore. Choose two special abilities: Soul Harvest (You can attempt to harvest the soul of a creature recently deceased. It provides you with rest and nourishment for the day and tells you one of its secrets), Cry of Doom (You can attempt to use your horrific cry to convince a creature of their impending death), Uncanny Manifestation (When you scout ahead you manifest eerily at the edge of a creature you encounter’s vision), Carrion Queen (You have the respect and veneration of all carrion beasts). by Will Patterson, Keeper of the Child's Dream
As discussed in episode 86 of the Gauntlet Podcast, I have been using streamlined PbtA rules to play "Dungeon World" with my boys since they were three years old. Here are those rules. It is an even more simplified take on World of Dungeons, with thanks to John Harper. Character Creation Either:
Gear The characters have whatever they would reasonably take on an adventure. The Player Move When a character makes a risky attempt, roll 2d6. If everyone agrees the character would excel at this task, instead roll 3d6 and ignore the lowest die. On a 10+, the character succeeds, and the player describes the result. On a 7-9, the character generally succeeds with a complication. On a 6-, you make an MC move. Alternatively, we sometimes use rock, paper, scissors to resolve rolls when traveling or waiting in line. If the player wins, it is a full success while a tie is a partial success. If the player loses, you make an MC move. If everyone agrees the character would excel at the task at hand, then the player can request one rematch on a partial success or miss. The MC Use the MC section from a PbtA game that fits your expected setting. Remove any MC Move that inflicts harm on the players. Rather than injuring the kids' characters directly, I threaten their allies, equipment, and goals. Combat/Social Encounters Either:
An Urban Shadows character generation procedure by Lauren McManamon, Keeper of the Secrets of Quachil Uttaus (@thestraykiwi) and Kyle Thompson, Keeper of the Light of the Peerless Star (@wiegraf_)
In some parts of the Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) community it's a popular practice to import characters from a finished Monsterhearts campaign into a new game of Urban Shadows, giving them a new context and new story to tell on top of what the first campaign already established. It's easy to go overboard with character backstory in a new campaign, adding nothing but cruft and taking away from the stories that can be built around other PCs, but in a campaign with only one PC from a small town background, this kind of character development can be a great help to the MC. Not everyone has a spare Monsterhearts character lying around to import into Urban Shadows, but the key plot beats of a Monsterhearts game are a great way to establish external and internal character conflict. These extra establishing questions will let you hit those plot beats and feel like your character has gone through their own monstrous high school experience. The MC chooses 4 at character generation before asking the standard US establishing questions:
a hack of Scum & Villainy by Kyle Thompson, Keeper of the Light of the Peerless Star (@wiegraf_) Scum and Villainy comes with an extensive setting for use in play, but for a new campaign I’m launching in The Gauntlet’s Slack community I wanted to do some collaborative world building. I decided to prep about 10 major factions and 5 star systems on the basis of player input, and then created this move to allow the players to do post-generation of factions they would like to see in the game. Forged in the Dark (FitD) games like Scum and Villainy draw heavily on The Burning Wheel for inspiration, while giving it an action-oriented twist. I’ve extended that set of borrowed ideas by writing a move that combines the Acquire Asset downtime activity from FitD with BW’s Circles to add new factions to the game. Just like Circles, the Faction Roll represents how connected the crew is and how well they can leverage those connections to get what they want. It allows for players to do world building and presents trade offs between resource consumption, faction potency, and complication of relationships. The Faction Roll costs 1 downtime activity. A successful Faction Roll creates a new faction in the game, sets a status for the crew with the faction, and grants temporary access to their resources.
To create the faction, name who you’re looking for and what you want from them. The GM sets a minimum Tier for the faction you want resources from and you roll your crew’s Tier. The result grants a budget of points to be spent on the tier of the faction and the status of the relationship. Using the crew’s Tier as the base, the number of points is as follows:
The faction begins at Tier 1 and their status with the crew begins at -2. Spend result points 1 for 1 to raise these values. The player must narrate how the resulting faction relationship makes sense in the fiction according to the following guidelines, and declare if the faction is weird, establishment, or criminal. The quality of the resource temporarily provided to the crew is equal to the faction’s Tier. As long as the created faction meets the minimum Tier, the player gets the resource, even if the relationship is negative. How powerful are they?
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