by Kyle Thompson, Keeper of the Light of the Peerless Star (@wiegraf_)
​
A Strategic Withdrawal

The period since I wrote the last design diary has been difficult for me in terms of my life situation, but also in terms of development of All Systems Nominal.

I ran the game at GauntletCon as a one shot, and that began to reveal a lot of fundamental flaws with the design that I talked about in a vlog on my YouTube channel:​

by Kyle Thompson, Keeper of the Light of the Peerless Star (@wiegraf_)

What is All Systems Nominal?

All Systems Nominal is a mecha RPG based on gritty “real robot” military science fiction like Battletech, Front Mission, Gundam 08th MS Team, Titanfall, Brigador, Heavy Gear, and Maschinen Kriger. It is designed to be a brief read that will be easy for GMs and other players to learn, with a focus on tactical and cinematic combat, teamwork, and the grind of life on a military campaign.
The core rules are based on Blades in the Dark. However the combat is more similar to the Range and Cover rules in The Burning Wheel, and the downtime phase resembles Night Witches.
The game relies heavily on tags in a way that will be familiar to players of Lady Blackbird, City of Mist, or Vagabonds of Dyfed. A full campaign of All Systems Nominal can be expected to run for about 8-10 sessions of play.

What is it like to play?

Most of the play time in All Systems Nominal is spent in the combat scenes that form the core of the mission phase. While the general feeling in The Gauntlet community is not very enthusiastic about tactical combat, in playtesting I received comments from multiple players saying that the combat in All Systems Nominal surprised them with how engaging and interesting it is.
Each combat sequence begins with an engagement roll similar to Blades in the Dark, and then proceeds to two rounds of combat. At the start of each round the Commanding Officer of the player unit chooses a maneuver (Ambush, Fighting Retreat, etc.), and then each member of the unit describes how they contribute to the unit’s actions. Depending on how the players roll, they get a result after the two rounds of combat that describe their position coming out of battle.

This system moves fast and keeps all the players thinking about the fiction while making tactical decisions that contribute to the group. The stakes feel real and every hit the unit takes makes their situation more difficult in downtime.

The downtime phase will be familiar to players of Blades in the Dark and Night Witches. Pilots spend their downtime actions to make connections, acquire the materiel they need to continue the fight, and care for themselves and each other in the face of the violence and terror of war. Like in both those games, the downtime starts off easy enough but becomes more and more intense and meaningful as the players’ pilots and mecha accumulate scars and break down under the stress of fighting.

What makes this game special?

I decided to make All Systems Nominal after the launch of Harebrained Schemes’ Battletech this year. Many players were talking about how they wanted to run some kind of mecha RPG for their friends after playing the game, but they just weren’t satisfied with the options out there because they were too cumbersome to fit into their busy lives. I had been fiddling around with ideas for how to make a Forged in the Dark game based on Brigador ever since I first started making my Let’s Learn Blades in the Dark series, and I had plenty of experience with the mecha genre, both from playing and reading games based on Battletech and from my work as the lead translator on the Front Mission Fan Translation Project, so I decided I was well qualified to give this design problem a shot.
Every part of the design was written to focus on fast uptake for the player and GM, interesting decisions, the struggles of campaign life, and scenes that would show off the mecha stomping around the world. Here are just a few worth highlighting:

No classes, no playbooks

John Harper famously wanted to design Blades in the Dark as a classless game, and I decided to follow that design instinct with All Systems Nominal. Players don’t choose a class or playbook with a bunch of moves, they simply choose a background and write two specializations that represent what they learned from their background. They can use these as tags during missions or downtime to help themselves get extra dice on rolls. This keeps things simple and flexible no matter what setting the group wants to play in.

Simple mecha creation

Mecha creation is designed to be fast, and involves just four steps. There is no getting bogged down in equipment tables or weight calculations.

1. The pilot selects the weight class of their mecha (Light, Standard, Heavy, Assault). This involves a trade off between weight and speed. The heavier the mecha, the slower it is. Some combat maneuvers test speed, while others test weight, so no one option is clearly superior.
2. The pilot creates the weapons for their mecha, this mainly involves noting the optimal range and equip location of the weapons. Light and Standard weight mecha get one weapon, while Heavy and Assault mecha get a hold out weapon as well. This adds to their durability in combat.
3. The pilot chooses special systems for their mecha. Each mecha gets three to choose from and starts with one the pilot can use. These give each mecha their own individual characteristics like special sensors, extra legs, jump jets, and heavy armor. As the pilot ranks up their mecha gets access to more special systems.
4. The pilot notes the mecha’s model name and manufacturer. Depending on the setting these can add to their fictional positioning, and even become the source of new plot lines.
   
   

Fight as a team, show off your pilot

As I noted above, the combat system in All Systems Nominal involves fighting as a unit, and it requires that everyone’s pilots make meaningful individual contributions to the fight. While individual duels can be resolved with Blades-style action rolls, that is not the focus of the game.
In combat, the commanding officer decides a maneuver for the whole unit, and then each pilot makes decisions about the range they will occupy, the specializations and talents that are relevant to what they’re doing, and the special systems their personal mecha can use in the situation. There is a back and forth of group and individual action that avoids the isolated and sequential decision making that often characterizes grid-based tactical combat.

Build relationships to stay in the fight

Unlike Blades in the Dark, All Systems Nominal does not involve a complex written setting with lists of factions and NPCs for the players to interact with.

However All Systems Nominal does provide players with the tools necessary to gradually expand their network of contacts in order to get the resources they need and involve them in compelling personal struggles.

The game mainly does this by taking a page from The Burning Wheel’s Circles mechanic, which has been rewritten FitD style as The Link Roll. This roll allows pilots to use their background, status, and connections to reach individuals who can help them get what they need. They declare what sort of person they want to link up with, answer questions about their relationship, and then  roll a number of dice dictated by the answers they provide.

A critical result will get the pilot an eager and helpful ally, while a miss will get them an enemy who harbors a secret or open enmity against them.

Once the pilots have contacts they can make a Resource Roll to acquire what they need. Every fictional advantage they can muster helps, but fundamentally pilots acquire resources with their Rank, which acts as both the pilots level, and their tier in Blades parlance. Ranking up will help pilots get what they need, but they will have to leverage every advantage they can get to stay sound of mind, body, and mecha. A pilot without some solid relationships will fight alone and die alone in the end.

Links and media

All Systems Nominal is currently in public beta testing and can be found here with character sheets and Roll20 play aids.

by Tomer G, Keeper of the Squamous Beast Below

This is the second in a Design Diary series for MR-KR-GR: The Death Rolled Kingdom. It’s a game setting by Mun Kao and Zedeck Siew, and one I want to evangelize to others in the world. This second installment is a deeper dive into how I built the mechanics around supporting the game I wanted to play.

Changes since the last time

I removed the World of Dungeons mechanics completely, and created a character generation process which very much mimics that used in Fall of Magic. I used names from various places (the prior game, other Thousand Thousand Islands, World of Dungeons, and some I just made up). I used titles from hints in MR-KR-GR, some from the second Thousand Thousand Island book: Kraching, and a few that I made up. Additionally I needed to distinguish those who are Uplanders (only connected to the outside world through MR-KR-GR) and Downlanders (those from the rest of the world). And then Traits… I wanted everyone to start with at least one, to start defining their character:

​Talking about the past
In The Between, players are strongly encouraged to avoid talking about their character’s past, both in-character and out-of-character. Players are expressly forbidden from discussing certain aspects of their past, principally the elements of their Janus Mask (discussed more below). Players can expect characters to question their character about their past, but their character must always avoid the conversation, either by tensing up, acting awkwardly, or simply excusing themselves from the scene. 

In addition to conforming to my personal preferences regarding character backstory, the restrictions on talking about your character’s past also happen to fit the game’s setting. The player characters are privileged individuals who each have a dark, troubled past that is trying to catch up to them. Members of their social class in Victorian London simply would not discuss such matters openly. 

Having run a few dozen playtests, I can tell you this particular aspect of the game always requires a short period of adjustment for the players. As role players, we are accustomed to jumping straight into our character’s backstory, chatting back and forth about what it all means, how the player characters fit together, how they  got involved in the adventure, and so forth. But in The Between, you don’t do any of that. After a very short round of character introductions, during which we learn next to nothing about the characters, the D.I. (what the GM is called in The Between) presents the first Threat and the characters begin the investigation in medias res. 

But here’s the thing: once you get past the initial awkwardness of not being able to talk about your character’s past, you start to become aware of something this game does constantly, which is it deftly manages your cognitive load. I’m going to talk about this effect more in future Design Diary posts, because I think it is the ultimate triumph of this game, but in the context of this particular aspect of the rules, what it means is that you can focus on the investigation–the here and now–without worrying about whether you are conforming to some concept you have expressed aloud about your character. 

The Janus Mask 
Of course, the above doesn’t mean players shouldn’t think about their character’s past. Quite the contrary: they should think about it a lot, because they’re going to be revealing that past, piece by piece, in a grand, entertaining fashion. 

Every playbook has a section called The Mask of the Past and a section called The Mask of the Future. Together, these sections are referred to as the Janus Mask. At specific points during the game (discussed more in a future post), players may invoke their character’s Janus Mask to alter events that are happening in the fiction. When they do so, they make a mark in either the Mask of the Past or the Mask of the Future. If they mark the Mask of the Past, they are called upon to narrate a particular kind of flashback at some point during the session. These flashbacks are how we, as audience members, begin to learn about these characters’ origins. 

In order for you to have some context, below are the elements that comprise the Mask of the Past for the Vessel playbook. The Vessel is a character who has been surrounded by dark, shadowy entities their whole life. 

• Narrate a flashback to the time when you were in your mother’s womb that shows, even then, dark entities were interested in you. 
• Narrate a flashback to your childhood that shows the first time you encountered a dark entity. 
• Narrate a flashback to your young adulthood that shows your first sexual encounter with a dark entity. 
• Narrate a flashback to your young adulthood that shows a time when you used your supernatural affinities for selfish purposes. 
• Narrate a flashback to your young adulthood that shows when you first met the leader of the coven. Name them. 
• Narrate a flashback to your young adulthood that shows part of your initiation into the coven. Name the coven. 
• Narrate a flashback to an event that influenced you to leave the coven for good. 

Once these elements have been revealed by the Janus Mask, the player is free to discuss them both in and out-of-character, so long as they continue to keep the unrevealed elements behind a veil. Note, however, that there is still a great deal of mystery surrounding the character even after all these elements are revealed. Also note the cognitive load effect I alluded to earlier: yes, you should be thinking about your character’s past, but in order to narrate an entertaining series of flashbacks, you only need to think about these highly specific aspects of the character’s past. The Between, above all, wants to constantly reinforce its themes and does everything it can to keep players on task in this regard.  

by Tomer G, Keeper of the Squamous Beast Below

This is the first in my Design Diary series about MR-KR-GR: The Death Rolled Kingdom. It’s a game setting by Mun Kao and Zedeck Siew, and one I want to evangelize to others in the world. This first installment is an overview of the setting, and an initial playtest. Future installments will dive deeper into how I built the mechanics around supporting the game I wanted to play.

Playing with RPG systems

Running a game module using an alternative game system is not a new idea. OSR thrives on the concept, with many D&D derivatives being used to run modules that were written with D&D in mind, or sometimes with no game system in mind.

A very influential game for me was run by Tom McGrenery: the module Death Frost Doom, run as Death Force Doom (in the Star Wars universe, as an old haunted Jedi temple with us as adventuring snow troopers). Tom used Stay Frosty, an OSR system built to emulate stories of marines in situations similar to Predator or Aliens. I was impressed not just because the system worked, but because the game we played felt enhanced by the system, above and beyond what a D&D clone would’ve done. Tom and Jason Cordova have since taken this ethos and discussed it in the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast.

Additionally, I’ve seen Rich Rogers do very similar things with his series of Star Wars themed games, using systems like 1%er for swoop gangs, Apocalypse World for drama on Tatooine, and The Few (a game about WW2 fighter pilots) for a game about X-wing pilots. Each system felt like it targeted the narrative and mood more directly and appropriately than a generic Star Wars RPG would have been able to pull off.

What is MR-KR-GR?

It is a work of art, plain and simple. Mun Kao and Zedeck Siew are working on a Thousand Thousand Islands, a Southeast Asian-inspired fantasy setting. The first of these books is MR-KR-GR: The Death Rolled Kingdom, a land of crocodiles and the people who mostly worship, or love, or work for and with them (or perhaps even plot their downfall). It’s less a setting book or module, and more a work of sublime poetry. A world visualized in sparse words and phrases and drawings. I can’t remember the last time I felt this connected to a game world, and yet it’s so short it can be read in half an hour.

But how to run a game in this land? I spent time ruminating on that before finally being inspired by Mun Kao’s art, and Zedeck Siew’s eloquent wordplay. It reminded me of Heart of the Deernicorn’s Fall of Magic, a game made popular because you literally play on a scroll. Fall of Magic uses beautiful and simple artwork, reminiscent of those maps from Lord of the Rings. The story prompts and wordplay on the game are simple yet evocative, providing just enough direction for a story focused around a single topic, yet open to myriad interpretations (as I’ve seen experienced through play many times).

A test run of MR-KR-GR

After inspiration hit, I created a few locations (such as MR-KR-Singga Port and The Gates, as described in the module), and created a few thematic story prompts that would get players diving into this world. I wanted players to be able to come from the perspective of foreigners visiting this land, but also as locals or those from neighboring kingdoms.

I still needed a way for conflicts to be adjudicated, and turned to a relatively light system that I was familiar with: World of Dungeons (John Harper’s simplified Dungeon World hack). I planned for the players to be able to create a simple character on the fly, or even fill out much of the stats and other information as we were playing.

Because of the short time from inspiration to playtesting, I didn’t post this as a scheduled game on the Gauntlet calendar, but instead took advantage of the Gauntlet Slack community and resources such as the #need_players channel therein. My crew consisted of stellar players Lauren, Ellen and Ary, so even though I was nervous, I knew I was in supportive hands.

Unlike Fall of Magic, which is a GM-less / GM-ful game, MR-KR-GR is a setting where having a facilitator is important to providing the players a grand tour of this beautiful world. Because it’s also drawn with so many blank spaces, you can easily fill the world and adventure with input from the players, which for me is some of my favorite gaming. So, we started with some story prompts to get them going and introducing their characters.

Image from my cards, graphic by Mun Kao:

​What is The Between?
The Between is about a group of monster hunters in Victorian London. It is directly inspired by the TV show Penny Dreadful, but also takes inspiration from British horror classics like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and various Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as the comic books The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell. 

The game is called The Between because we find the characters in a very liminal moment–caught between a mysterious past that is trying to catch up to them and a future that is cloaked in darkness. It is also called The Between because, unlike many tabletop roleplaying games, the players in this game do not live solely behind their character’s eyes; rather, at specific times they are called upon to help the D.I. (this game’s version of a GM) fill in many of the details related to the world. 

What is it like to play? 
In The Between, the D.I. presents and tracks an ever-growing list of Threats across the city of London. The players, collectively called Hargrave House (which is the name of their base of operations) conduct investigations related to these Threats and either engage in hunts to destroy them or otherwise enact plans to manage the danger they pose to the city. The D.I. is also responsible for developing an uber-Threat called The Enemy, a Moriarty-style criminal mastermind and the true villain of the story. 

Gameplay is divided into two phases: the Day phase and the Night phase. The Day phase has a languid, almost casual pace. The scenes in the Day phase are largely framed by the players, and the goals of those scenes include some combination of: exploring conflicts and tension between the player characters; relieving Conditions, which are negative traits the players can acquire during play; observing the player characters at leisure; and conducting light, daytime-appropriate investigation of Threats. 

The Night phase, on the other hand, is more visceral. The scenes in this phase are framed by the D.I. and focus on the intense, bloody business of hunting vampires and serial killers on the lamplit streets of London. The pacing of this phase is governed by a special procedure called the Overscene, which I will discuss a bit below. 

What makes this game special? 
There are many things that make this game special, but I’ll give a quick preview of a few mechanics I believe help make The Between a very novel experience. I’ll be discussing these and other elements in more detail in future Design Diary posts, but this should be enough to give you a sense of things:

The Janus Mask
In The Between, players are not generally allowed to speak about their character’s past, either in-character or out of character. If someone asks a player character about something from their past, players are encouraged to demure or otherwise avoid the conversation. Specific elements of their past are explicitly forbidden to be discussed at the table unless a certain mechanic, the Janus Mask, is triggered, at which point those elements may be revealed in a cinematic fashion by the player. 

The Janus Mask is divided into two: the Mask of the Past and the Mask of the Future. The specifics for each playbook differ, but generally-speaking, the Mask of the Past has you narrate flashbacks that gradually show us how the character got to where they are today, whereas the Mask of the Future gives hints as to what the Fates have in store for them.

During the game, after a die roll has taken place and the outcome narrated, the player can choose to invoke the Janus Mask to turn the roll into a 12+ and completely alter the fictional outcome. They mark an element from either the Mask of the Past or the Mask of the Future; then, at some point during the session, they have to do whatever the Janus Mask element instructs. Note, however, that the more and more they invoke the Janus Mask, the closer and closer the character gets to being retired. 

The Overscene
The Overscene is a special scene that governs the pacing of the Night phase. During the Overscene, we see a situation playing out in another part of London on the same night Hargrave House is engaged in the hunt. Importantly, the Overscene is not connected to the Hargrave House story in any way. It exists as a bit of texture, a glimpse into our version of Victorian London at night. But that doesn’t mean it is without mechanical weight (see Echoes in the Dark, below). 

Echoes in the Dark
During the Night phase, whenever a player narrates something in the main scene that is thematically or visually similar to something that occurred in the Overscene, or vice-versa, they have done what is called an Echo in the Dark. At the end of the Night phase, so long as they did at least one Echo in the Dark, they get to mark XP. 
 
The Day Move and the Night Move
At its heart, The Between is Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA). However, most conflicts in the game are resolved by a single move that comes in two different flavors: the Day Move and the Night Move, both of which were inspired by various PbtA games, including Monsterhearts and Bluebeard’s Bride. I have put a tremendous amount of thought into these moves, and the end results not only arbitrate fictional outcomes, but also help negotiate stakes between the player and the D.I., as well as determine who has narrative authority. The difference between the Day Move and the Night Move is that the latter is designed to be significantly more dangerous to the player.