Last week marked Goblinization Day, an event from Shadowrun’s future history. While SR was everywhere in the 1990s, my group had become Cyperpunk 2020 grognards. I only vaguely knew Shadowrun’s backstory and joked about trying to decide if I wanted to be an Elf or a Gnome. I figured Goblinization was when everyone started to turn into fantasy, non-human races in the setting.
 
But it isn’t. Instead it’s a little more pernicious. Goblinization Day’s when, after a few years of folks turning into graceful Elves and stout Dwarves, another plague began to turn babies into Orks and Trolls. And in the setting, that’s what made everyone flip the eff out. Here’s a thread about that and why it’s a problem:  https://twitter.com/LuchaLibris/status/1388188587196362753?s=20 (ht to @PoCGamer).
 
Older games have lots of baggage. The last few years have seen people begin to listen to folks who have talked about race, colonialism, and other issues in rpgs for a long time. Any meaningful change in my perspective comes from that and from reading Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi. That book started to wake me up to how dangerous the concept of race & birth as destiny could be. That it concept isn’t a single thing but a host off destructive theories which the power structure has changed and modified to fit the times.
 
It’s made me more aware in reading modern rpgs. Anything published in the last five years needs to take account of this conversation about race, culture, and representation. With that in mind I’m looking at how large-tome recent fantasy RPG releases consider race. I’m not going cover the arguments and importance of these issues. I take that as a given. If you want that part of the conversation check out PoC Gamer, James Mendez Hodes, and Asians Represent among others.

AGAINST THE DARKMASTER
Against the Darkmaster is a retroclone of Iron Crown Enterprises’ Middle Earth Roleplaying. I asked for and received a review copy. It’s a gigantic book. Before I get into how it treats race and culture, I want to talk about my experience with the system and some of the book’s positives.
 
I played a lot of Rolemaster. Like a ton. From the mid 1980s to the early 2000s it was my FRPG of choice (in parallel with GURPS if I wanted something low fantasy). I played RM when it was a piecemeal add-on to other games, when it became its own complete system, and when it overhauled itself into Rolemaster Standard System. I also played Middle Earth Roleplaying, the streamlined little sibling to RM.
 
I got good at it. I had system mastery and I cut away the parts of the game which didn’t fit the way I played. I could run a combat quickly—meaning as fast as something D&D or Champions, not actually quickly. A couple of years ago I ran two parallel series on the Gauntlet using a tightened version of Rolemaster (particularly the magic system). RM had a reputation of being heavy, but I knew it could work so I wanted to give folks-- more accustomed to Indie & Story Games-- a look at how it could work. It was eye-opening for me. I don’t think I’d realized exactly how far away RM would be from their experience.
 
All that being said, Against the Darkmaster does the job it sets out to do. It’s a Retroclone which means it wants to clean up the original game, integrate some later ideas, strip out any IP, and provide the best possible experience with these core rules. I spent years reading through Ice Crown Enterprise’s dense, wall of text, tiny font layout design. AtD is a breath of fresh air. It’s actually readable and has generous whitespace on the page. The cost of that is that the book’s frikkin’ huge, clocking in at 563 pages.
 
For those not familiar with MERP or Rolemaster, it’s a percentile based skill and stat system. You roll and add your value, trying to get a high number rather than trying to roll under. Characters have access to nearly all the skills and abilities, but costs gatekeep those choices. So for example, it’s cheaper for a Rogue to buy Roguery skills than an Animist, but a Warrior has cheaper access to Combat skills. There are only 22 skills by default in four categories and two special sets.
 
The bigger selling point of the game lies in the magic and combat system. The magic system allows for all kinds of spell purchases, again managed by differing costs. Spells can the changed and manipulated by a skilled character. The base game has 36 spell lists of 10 spells each and four spell-casting professions. On the other hand, the combat system bells and whistles with players able to shift focus on the fly between attacks and defenses. An attack roll (less the target’s defense) is checked against the target’s armor type on a table specific to that type of weapon (Blade, Blunt, etc). This results in a # of hits done and more often than not a roll on a separate critical table (Beast, Impact) which generates the really cool effects.
 
The book presents this cleanly and clearly. If you’re looking for a MERP retroclone, this is it. If you’re a Rolemaster old hand looking for an easier version you might get your D&D group to try, Against the Darkmaster has you covered. It has solid and consistent art as well as its own unique setting which doesn’t get in the way if you want to adapt it elsewhere.
 
BUT...
Being a MERP retroclone Against the Darkmaster carries with it Tolkienesque baggage about race and culture. I want to walk through how the game treats those issues.

AtD offers 13 “Kins”: Dwarf, Halfling, Man, Wildfolk, High Man (think Aragorn), Half-Elf, Dusk Elf, Silver Elf, Half-Orc, Orc, Stone Troll, and Firbolg. These are meant to be a biological distinctions I think, rather than cultural ones since each Kin description also offers suggested Cultures to shape your Kin pick. These Cultures are generally regional (Arctic, City, Fey, Woad, etc). Players can choose a culture outside the suggested ones but only with approval of the table. So if you want a City Silver Elf or a Fey Halfling you need permission.
 
Your choice of Kin affects your stat bonuses, hit points, bonus magic points, toughness and willpower saves, background points for cool extras, and wealth level. Three of the Stats are physical: Brawn, Swiftness, and Fortitude. Three are non-physical: Wits (cleverness, reasoning, mental agility), Wisdom (empathy, intuition, willpower, awareness), and Bearing (presence, charisma, and social influence).
 
Several of the Kins have penalties for these non-physical stats. Stone Trolls have a heavy penalty to Wits (and only Elves have any bonus to this). Orcs, Stone Trolls, and Firbolg’s all have a penalty to Wisdom. Dwarves, Half-Orcs, Orcs, and Stone Trolls all have penalties to Bearing. That’s a common trope among fantasy games with “Dark Folk” races often having penalties to mental and charisma-type stats. This means that certain races are inherently weaker in those areas based on their biology. There’s a baseline that these exist in relation to. That biological essentialism is problematic.
 
There’s other odd choices in the presentation of the Kins themselves. We have the Wildfolk, a humanoid race with a strong nature magic. They’re illustrated in primitive-coded dress. It’s notable that this is the only humanoid race presented with darker skin. All the rest of the ‘close to human’ folk (elves, hobbits, dwarves, high men, etc.) are fair skinned. The female Wildfolk has dreadlocks/cornrows hair. It’s another issue, but it’s worth noting the presentation difference here between the male and female. The male is covered in hairy fur while the woman is depicted as conventionally hot—with the fur there being a just pelt draped over the shoulders.

Moving on the male Half Orc is depicted with full body tribal tattoos and again dreadlock/cornrow hair. There’s another weird sexualization split with the Stone Troll female as conventionally hot with a bare midriff and the male being much more inhuman appearing. Some of the character image depictions for the Cultures also raise some questions. For the Desert culture, we have stereotypical Arabian Nights garb and an extended nose. The image for the “primitive or barbaric” Woad folk has an aboriginal look with bone weapons and what’s either tattoos or paint. It’s worth noting that with the exception of the Woad, all the Culture images have lighter skin.

Lastly Orcs are presented as an intelligent, but enemy race in the bestiary section alongside a couple of others (Dwergar, Trolls).

Overall
If you want the mechanics for a retroclone of Middle Earth Roleplaying, this is it. It does that super well. But it also falls into some of the traps of racial essentialism and cultural coding that many other frpgs do.

WORLDS WITHOUT NUMBER
This is the new game from Kevin Crawford, creator of Other Dust, Scarlet Heroes, Silent Legions, and Wolves of God. I’ve reviewed several of his games before and talked about Godbound in particular. Crawford’s Spears of the Dawn is one of the few frpgs to build on classical African myths and fantasy. Worlds Without Number takes Crawford massive OSR toolkit sci-fi game Stars Without Number and brings it over to fantasy. To call it a reskin would be a disservice. Instead he’s crafted a parallel but compatible fantasy system.

Note: I backed this game and my comments are based on the final pdf delivered to KS backers. I also backed Wolves of God and have bought most of Crawford’s other games.

Worlds Without Number’s an Old School Renaissance rpg. It uses the stat six stats—rolled or chosen from an array. Players make skill rolls using 2d6 plus skill level (0 to 4) plus relevant stat modifier. If they roll equal or higher than the check’s difficulty, then they succeed. Worlds without Number has 21 skills. Players use a d20 for the other two major types of resolution, Saving Throws and Combat. The combat’s simple but offers some detail. These are mostly player options rather than consistent complexity.

Worlds Without Number has a built in setting: Latter Earth. That’s written lightly enough to be adaptable to other settings. Most of the built-in assumptions come from the bestiary, the magic system, and the background choices. The game offers a massive toolbox for fantasy gaming, with lots of discussion of options and tweaks.

So where does race come in? Characters begin by choosing or rolling a background. Some of these backgrounds are more about profession (Artisan, Criminal, Soldier). A couple reflect the character’s culture (Barbarian, Nomad, Peasant). Each background gives a free skill. Players can then choose to take the two skills listed with the background; pick two skills from an associated list of 7-8, or roll three times with that background’s Growth and Learning tables.
Players choose a Class from the four offered and then select Foci. These are “side talents or particular specializations of your hero.” This is where nonhuman PCs come in. Players can spend a Focus pick to be from a nonhuman race which gives them an Origin Focus. These aren’t presented in the base rules but instead have to be looked up in the Bestiary section.

In the bestiary section there’s Origin Foci for a variety of Demihumans. The setting offers logic for the differences in folks, all of whom come from a baseline of humanity, but who have changed over “(c)ountless eons of sorcerous and genetic manipulation.” These Demihumans are seen as radically distinct though those differences may be more social and psychological and physical. Overall there’s more discussion about the logic and place of these different lineages.
However Crawford makes a split here in the rules. He provides deeper guides to playing only two Demihuman peoples in the game’s Latter Earth setting: Dwarves and Elves. These echo traditional demihumans but with a distinct backstory. The Origin foci add bonuses and new abilities. Each get a couple of pages of rules.

On the other hand Worlds Without Number provides only modest guidelines for “traditional” fantasy raves. Dwarves, Elves (Civilized), Elves (Half-Elves), Elves (Forest), Halflings, Gnomes, Goblins (Tinker), Goblins (Savage), Lizardmen, and Orcs are provided. Each gets a short descriptor text (brutish and stupid for Orcs, bucolic and diminutive for Halflings). For the most part they get bonus skills based on the origin and a stat modifier. Most of these are a positive combined with a negative. What’s usually considered the “Dark Folk” usually end up with a choice of penalty to Wisdom or Intelligence.

World’s Without Number doesn’t have individual illustrations for the cultures or peoples, so there’s no issue of visual representation.

Theirs is a really interesting choice the game makes to handle the concept of “Evil Races.” As you know, most traditional fantasy rpgs have a pool of races who intelligent but inherently evil and therefore legitimate to slaughter. Worlds Without Number has The Blighted. They’re “…Those wretched descendants of men and women horribly warped by wielders of ancient sorcery and genetic science, people forged into tools for purposes that had no place for mercy.”

These folk have been deeply changed by The Blight which “corrupts and limits the normal human range of emotion and cognition.” Basically they suffer under a curse which pushes them in certain ways, but which the book notes some can overcome. They have a difficult time in human society and the book takes the tension and hatred between the Blighted and other people not as an excuse but as a problem of clashing cultures and the desire to wipe each other out.
Players can play Blighted and the rules offer Origin foci for several different kinds-- from those created to be servants, to the Anakim driven by rage, to Houri driven to satisfying emotional and physical needs at the cost of others. All of the Origin Foci are about overcoming the impulses of the curse of the Blight.

Crawford spends a good deal of time going over the implications of these people. They’re people driven by a curse who may be genuinely unable to co-exist with humanity. I need to quote at length from the "Blighted in Your Campaign" section. 
Aggressive Blighted tend to be unambiguous villains and enemies in most campaigns, sentients that are genuinely incapable of living peacefully with humanity. They have been cursed from their creation with a need to kill and ruin, and while they may be blameless of the ancient sorcery that twisted them, humanity simply cannot live with them under the same sky.

Penal Blighted and servitor-species often appear as victims of cruelty and oppression, suffering due to the weaknesses and flaws impressed on them by their creators. Heroic PCs might find significant adventure grist in protecting or helping communities of these people.

Some players may find the existence of Blighted species to be a kind of teleological horror, and feel obligated to find some cure for their curse or method by which peace can be made with them. A GM who knows their players are likely to feel this way might choose to soften the mental effects of the Blight or make room for a cure.
It’s a really interesting approach and one that aims to add dimension and depth to some of the classic fantasy tropes.

Overall
I really dig Worlds Without Number. It’s a solid game that follows the template of Crawford’s earlier work. He provides a solid but simple core system, offers a ton of support material and tools, and gives you a cleverer setting than you might expect. Some people will go into WWN expecting a simple, generic fantasy sandbox and discover a much richer play experience. That might make it a challenge to adapt to more fringe fantasy settings (like Glorantha for example) but I think it works.

And Crawford engages with some of the questions about racial essentialism in gaming, which is more than many other games do.

AFTERWORD
Why talk about this? Because we have to be better about spotting and discussing these issues in new games. Ideas about biology and "essential" natures are hugely dangerous-- they're a tool for exclusion, justification, and abuse. My read's a light one, done from the perspective of an older white male. I'm sure there's a variety of other codings happening that I'm unaware of. It's a starting point, a small analysis built on the deeper work being done by PoC and LGTBQ gamers. We have to make this kind of necessary talk commonplace. 

Codex is Gauntlet Publishing's amazing magazine filled with great games, new voices, and amazing artwork. A few months after release to Patrons, back issues of Codex can be found on Drivethrurpg.  Issues can be bought individually or in bundles which collect together volumes of the publication (four so far). 

By Lowell Francis, Gauntlet Gaming Community Manager
Bizarrely this pandemic year robbed me of has been my ability to sit down and focus on reading ttrpg rulebooks. My  anxiety spikes when I do that—a constant thinking about the other projects I could be working on and media I could be imbibing.  To break that in the last couple of months I’ve made an active effort to center myself and work through the pile I have stacking up.
 
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been working through some big ones Nibiru, Opera House, Dune, Against the Darkmaster. Most importantly I’ve started on Worlds Without Number, the massive fantasy-based parallel to Kevin Crawford’s Stars Without Number. And that got me to thinking about my favorite Crawford rpg: Godbound.
 
And made me want to run that again, like a lot. So I dug back through my notes and material. In there I found an Age of Ravens post from my second year on the Gauntlet—talking about hacking Scion to Godbound. Ironically I’m more likely to do this now given how much I dislike Scion 2e. Below I present the original piece, along with a few new thoughts at the end.
 
GODS & MONSTERS
I’ve always dug Scion’s premise—modern day children of gods fighting corruption and monsters. It has signature magic items, fate-binding, and cool powers that ramp that up. But I’ve never been happy with Scion as a system. I ran an extended campaign of it, but the “battle wheel,” dice pool fatigue, and tracking so many abilities & rules wore me down. I had fun, but felt like the system and I fought one another.
 
Later I tried a Fate adaption (pre-Fate Core). I borrowed from Strange Fate to manage scaling. It wasn’t terrible. But it wasn’t that great. I went too literal with my conversion. I included everything rather than stepping back to think about changing the mechanics to make them smoother. If I re-wrote that hack I’d do it differently, armed with new game tech like DFAE’s mantles.
 
All of that was in my head as I played Godbound, a high-level OSR game from Kevin Crawford. In it, you’re fantasy character empowered by the divine bleed off from gods destroyed when humanity stormed heaven. Your world may vary. The bottom line is you roll a fairly standard OSR character and then pick from awesome and devastating powers (Alacrity, Night, Sword, etc). The rules scale your abilities—you do damage not in HP but Hit Dice. To represent your lethality, you get a free strike each round (called the Fray die) against lesser or equal level foes. Squads of minions will fall before you.
 
Godbound has an interesting sales pitch. You can go get it now, free and pretty complete. That version’s artless and lacks some of the advanced options from the full version, but it’s robust and playable. Seriously—if you’re at all intrigued by the concept or mechanics, you should go and pick it up. I ordered the full hardcover after one play—I dug it that much. The actual physical product’s gorgeous: great art, solid page design, and a ton of resources.
 
I’ve looked at several Kevin Crawford rpgs and dug all of them so. Each of the core books (Stars Without Number, Other Dust, etc) contains OSR-inspired rules, setting/campaign material, and some of the best random game generators. I talked about this in (an) earlier Silent Legions review. These books are amazing toolboxes. I especially love some Star Without Number supplements (like the alien ruins and espionage campaign ones). Other Dust has dynamite tools for any post-apocalyptic campaign. Godbound includes awesome tables for creating different kinds of fantasy courts, ruins, challenges, and foes. Great stuff.
 
In short a game worth picking up. There’s so much here. When I went to reskin Godbound to Scion, I ended up seriously cutting. Or maybe I should say I left things out—like the great Influence system. Since I knew I’d only be running two sessions I tried to keep things light.
 
You can see the Actual Play of these sessions here (Session One, Session Two)
 
HACK STEPS
I figured I could run Godbound as Scion with few rules changes, just trimming. I’d stick with basic systems and mechanics. Doing pre-gens would make the task easier. Secondary mechanics, like Dominion, Influence, and Worship, I’d leave out. To keep things grounded, I decided that while the characters would be second level (giving them a few more resources), I would limit their divine gifts. Usually at Level 2, PCs would have eight points to buy gifts. I gave them five. I thought that would help them absorb what they had. If I went back, I might even cut it down to 4 points.
 
Additionally to keep things simple, I gave each character just two unique Purviews (Words in GB). In Godbound you begin with three distinct areas. In Scion you can have a bunch, depending on your divine parent. Those gifts can be stat foci (divine its, manipulation, strength) or purviews (animal, fertility, prophecy). There’s also sorcery. Godbound has a parallel system for, but I left that out since it added complexity.
 
I knew I had four players and I wanted to give a broad range of pre-gens. I decided on eight, which is probably too many. I opted to give each pre-gen a choice of three divine parents, so the players could select a pantheon or concept they dug. That meant going through the list of all the gods from Scion to find overlaps. I also wanted to represent each pantheon a couple of times. All that took a spreadsheet to work out. It ate up a lot of time and was probably a dumb spend. I ended up with the following options; the first four are the ones the players picked for their characters.
 
ALACRITY & HEALTH

• Artemis (Greek, Goddess of the Moon and the Hunt)
• Dian Cecht (Celtic, God of Healing)
• Hachiman (Japanese, Lord of war, fishing nets, and fertile fields)

Gifts

• Alacrity Base
• Health Base
• Faster Than Thought (Alacrity, Smite, Instant)
• All Directions as One (Alacrity, Constant)
• Merciful Gaze (Health, Action)
• Vital Furnace (Health, On Turn)

 
DECEPTION & NIGHT

• Tezcatlipoca (Aztec, God of Fate)
• Izanami (Japanese, The first woman and Queen of the Underworld)
• Hades (Greek, God of death and Lord of the Underworld)

Gifts

• Night Base
• The Darkling Stairs (Night, Constant)
• A Familiar Face (Deception, Action)
• Impenetrable Deceit (Deception, Action)
• Knives of Night (Night, On Turn)

 
ENDURANCE  & MIGHT

• Ares (Greek, God of War)
• Sun Wukong (Chinese, The Monkey King)
• Tyr (Norse, God of Victory)

Gifts

• Endurance Base
• Might Base
• Defy the Iron (Endurance, Instant)
• Amaranth Vitality (Endurance, Constant)
• Fists of Black Iron (Might, Constant)
• Loosening God's Teeth (Might, Action)

 
LUCK & FIRE

• Shennong (Chinese, Second Sovereign)
• Loki (Norse, Trickster God)
• Shiva (Hindu, The Destroyer)

Gifts

• Fire Base
• Luck Base
• Consuming Gaze (Fire, Action)
• Nimbus of Flame (Fire, On Turn)
• Salting Away the Luck (Luck, Instant)
• Spun Fortune (Luck, Instant)
• Unmarred Beneficence (Luck, Constant).

 
COMMAND & SWORD

• Guan Yu (Chinese, Current Jade Emperor)
• Isis (Egypt, Goddess of Magic)
• Parvati (Hindu,The Incarnation of Shakti or feminine energy).

Gifts

• Command Base
• Sword Base
• Contempt of Distance (Sword, Constant)
• Know the Inner Truth (Command, On Turn)
• Shattering Hand (Sword, On Turn)
• A Thousand Loyal Troops (Command, Action)

 
EARTH & DEATH

• Izanami (Japanese,The First Woman and Queen of the Underworld)
• Osiris (Egypt, Lord of the Underworld)
• Baron Samedi (Voudon, God of Death)

Gifts

• Death Base
• Earthwalker (Earth, On Turn)
• Mantle of Quietus (Death, Instant)
• Obduracy of Stone (Earth, Constant)
• Rebellion of the Soil (Earth, Action)
• Scythe Hand (Death, On Turn)

 
KNOWLEDGE & SKY

• Frigg (Norse, Queen of the Gods)
• Quetzalcotl (Aztec, God of Beauty and Art)
• Susano-O (Japanese, Lord of Storms and Sea)

Gifts

• Sky Base
• Disclose the Flaw (Knowledge, Instant)
• Sapphire Wings (Sky, On Turn)
• Stormsword (Sky, On Turn)
• The Best Course (Knowledge, Action)

 
PASSION & SUN

• Apollo (Greek, God of the Sun and Art)
• Atum-Re (Egyptian, God of the Sun)
• Baldur (Norse, God of Light, Beauty, Love and Happiness)

Gifts

• Sun Base
• Body of Burning Light (Sun, On Turn)
• Follow the Threads (Passion, Action)
• Snuff the Heart's Candle (Passion, Action)
• Sunstrike (Sun, Smite, Action)

 
In Scion, each pantheon has a unique purview representing its approach or special purpose. That meant that the choice of parent could affect a character’s gifts. They’re important flavor so I adapted them. Four of these purviews have gifts that are new to or modified from Godbound:

• Arete (Greek): Commit Effort for Scene. You gain an “Escalation Die” for yourself. Each round after this you gain a cumulative +1 to your attack rolls (up to a +6). This goes away at the end of the conflict.
• Itztli (Aztec): Once per day you may roll 1d12 damage on yourself to immediately regain Effort committed for the scene or day.
• Cheval (Voudon): Commit Effort. You can communicate from afar with any person whose location you know to within a mile. You can borrow their senses if they permit it. Persons who have spent at least a week in your presence or have been Fate-Bound can be reached wherever they are.
• Tsukumo-Gami (Japanese): Commit Effort for Scene. You can communicate with an inanimate object, seeing and perceiving everything it has witnessed at a certain time of your choice. The spirits of these objects do not think as humans, but they can perfectly relay all the sounds and sights that took place in their presence. You must specify a particular time to focus on, however.

 
For the others, I simply used existing Godbound gifts. For Enech (Celtic) I used Deceiver’s Unblinking Eye from the Deception word. For Taiyi (Chinese) I used A Second Spring from Fertility. Heku (Egyptian) I used Heart of the Lion from Passion. For Samsara (Hindu) I used Nine Lives from Luck. Finally, for Jotunblut (Norse) I used Link of Unity from Beast.
 
TEN GENERAL THOUGHTS
ORIGINAL FLAVOR: My experience with Godbound isn’t just these two sessions. I played in two online games and (I ran) it f2f for our Sunday night group. We’d just wrapped a year+ Middle Earth game with our Action Cards homebrew. It’s a striking shift to move from that limited scale to epic actions. And I haven’t yet introduced the concept of Dominion and Influence, ways in which the PCs can spend to change the world. They’ve hit level three so I’ll introduce that next time.
 
OVERSIGHT: In those sessions, I spotted a couple places where players get lost. First—Effort. That’s the energy the Godbound use to fuel their gifts. It takes a bit to understand that unless a gift says to commit energy for a certain period (a scene, a day), you regain that Effort after using it. It’s a limit on how many things you can have going rather than a mana system. Second, most Godbound Words have a default benefit which players can miss. Third, players sometimes disbelieve what the powers can do. They’re deliberately powerful, but they’re also a sledgehammer when sometimes you need a scalpel. Show them the awesome.
 
BRING THE BOOM: On the flip side—as a GM you may be shocked at how potent the Godbound powers are. Remember that just gives you license to throw more awesome shit at them. The book has some conversion guidelines for existing monsters and foes. I’ve dug out all my ld Monster Manuals and bestiaries to look at what I can unleash.
 
IT'S A MIRACLE: Make sure to spell out the mechanics for Miracles, improvised divine powers. They open up choices and push players to commit effort for the day. I like those kinds of resource-drain options. It’s easy to overlook these mechanics in the book.
 
HOLY SHEET: For the Scion game, ran online with Roll20 and Hangouts. I’m still having audio/video issues with Roll20, despite being a fully paid high level subscriber. I have to use alternate tools for that. There’s a Godbound character sheet—however be warned that it calculates and rolls some things incorrectly. You’ll want to check that if you opt to use it.
 
NEW GOD CITY: I ran the game in Las Vegas. The core Scion: Hero book has an adventure set there, but I’ve always ignored it. I have a gimmick that the gods can’t go to Vegas because of all the chaos of fate and chance there. They have to send in Scions and other supernatural agents to do their work. It means that Vegas has been a gathering ground for all kinds of forces trying to evade divine attention. I really love that backdrop for this. I might not dig Vegas in person, but it’s probably my favorite modern campaign city. Other folks loooove New Orleans, I dig Vegas.
 
SUCCESS? Does Godbound work for Scion? Yes and no. It did a good job in the constrained version I put forward. But I did trimmed and refocused. Doing a full scale conversion would be a ton of work. I’m not sure how you’d handle some of the most cool elements (merits and fatebinding for example). Scion itself has a weird power creep. You’re potent, but still kind of low-powered in the Hero range. Godbound bundles together abilities that individually would be equivalent of Scion’s gifts and knacks. But there’s a jump in power and complexity when you move to Scion’s Demi-God and God level. I think that’s probably closer to Godbound.
 
OR NOT? But Hero’s what I’m most interested in. Empowered characters, armed with strange powers, but still vulnerable and connected to the mortal world. Get too powerful and those things start to matter less. So the Godbound reskin I did wouldn’t—in the long run—create the campaign I want to run. It might work for people wanting a more potent campaign. I had a great time with the sessions, but the power scale wasn’t too high.
 
MORE STUFF: That being said, my reskin is a rough, quick patch job. Kevin Crawford’s provided an insane amount of additional material at the back of the Godbound book covering different campaigns: mortals, martial arts, Exalted-style themed PCs, fantastic war machines, cybernetics. But I haven’t really sat down to explore those since I’ve been more worried about getting the base game under my belt. I suspect if I go through there I’ll find ways to rescale Godbound to the level I’m looking for.
 
MORE ROOM: One thing I do want to mention about the online sessions if you watch them. At the end of session two we do a short assessment of the game. Jump there if you want to know the players’ reactions. In looking back, I realize I made a big mistake with the final fight. In it, the group assists a member caught by a bunch of Titan-empowered baddies. This takes place in the basement of an abandoned medical clinic. I absolutely should have blown that fight open and widened the terrain. As it is they fought in a large room and at the top of a staircase. An epic fight like this needs space and elaborate sets. I could have had the floor collapse into an underground cavern. More smartly, the powers being throw around should have destroyed the ceiling. Then they could have fought inside the whole of the abandoned clinic—with walls being smashed, movement, verticality, improvised weapons, and so on. Missed opportunity. I thought too small screen.
 
OVERALL
Godbound’s fantastic fun. It’s more than a little niche—you have to want to explore potent characters and high level play. For that it does a great job. It’s well-written, has great artwork, and delivers great campaign tools. Even if you’re not usually a trad or OSR player, it’s worth checking out if that concept grabs you. If you want to hack something like Exalted, Scion, or even Rifts, you’ll find ideas you can use. I backed the Scion Kickstarter, so I’m curious about what that brings to the table and if it’s more or less adaptable.
 
I should  mention the Godbound core book contains a fully-realized fantasy setting. While you can use the rules for generic fantasy (as we’re doing f2f), there’s a whole world presented. Crawford provides strong sketches and ideas rather than over-elaborating the material. He’s released a region sourcebook for that, Ancalia, about a country overrun by undead. More interesting to me, he’s released two “modules”: Ten Buried Blades & The Storms of Yizhao. These offer great sandbox plots, but more importantly they’re some of the best Wuxia adventures I’ve ever read. Their backdrop’s a riff on Imperial China and they feel like ‘80s-‘90s high fantasy martial arts films (Storm Riders, The Bride with White Hair, The Duel).

THOUGHTS A COUPLE OF YEARS DOWN THE ROAD
I still really dig Godbound. Since I wrote this Crawford has added a whole range of new Domians with The Lexicon of the Throne supplement. They open up the world in cool ways—including the addition of material for modern or science-fantasy games. It remains probably my favorite OSR game; I dug immensely the sessions I ran last year on the Gauntlet.

I have a few additional thoughts about Godbound
1. One of the things about it I love is that is doesn’t even consider fantasy races. That’s not a factor in the setting or material. It feels like you could easily add in some of those elements, but they’d just exist in the fiction rather than mechanically supported. That’s a relief given the problematic treatment of race in a couple of the Big Book RPGs I’ve been reading through (racial essentialism, stat penalties for INT & WIS, etc).

2. If you’re going to run this you need to decide how you want to handle mind-controlling gifts and powers. Some of these things are more than simple Suggestion. They’re legit mind control and mind rape. In particular the ones which affect passions and lusts are problematic. Check your safety tools, assess your Lines & Veils, and have a discussion with your players in session one (or beforehand) about how you plan to handle that.

3. There are moments of terrible frustrations in the fights. The players have taken on the role of godlings, rising powers in the world, but they can go through an entire combat just wiffing. Sure they have a lot of tools and gifts at their disposal for offset that, but there’s a decent chance in each fight you’re going to have some players who effectively do nothing.

If I run this again, I’m going to borrow the Escalation Die tech from 13th Age. Basically each round after the first the players gain a cumulative +1 to their To Hit rolls (up to a limit of +6). It means 13th Age builds its fights and monsters to be super challenging at the start, forcing players to fall back on resources. But then they can get their feet under them. I’d either offer this as a Gift or just have it as a feature—but if I use it, I’d also increase the foe’s potency by 10-20%. As an added bonus you can have monstrous abilities which key off the Escalation Die for affects or benefits. 

By Lowell Francis, Gauntlet Gaming Community Manager
You can see the first part of this analysis here. Last time I talked about the Night's Black Agents hack I wrote and how that worked. Then I looked at how I started the campaign (with a five session prologue to a twelve session campaign. Note that this discussion contains spoilers for some published NBA adventures.
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WHAT I RAN
In the end, I decided to run using The Persephone Extraction. As I said last time, it had the strongest initial set up and the most interesting kinds of vampires. The Orphic Vampires offer the players real opportunities for mystery and discovery. Classic vampire rules don’t entirely hold true for them. They come from a more mystic, pre-Christian tradition. Combating the Orphic also allow for interesting confrontations, since they use human hosts in a unique way.

Persephone wouldn’t work as well for a start of campaign adventure—the first scenario assumes the PCs have been in the spotlight or attracted enough attention to be useful scapegoats. Since I’d already run a prologue adventure, I played off the fallout from that. Interestingly having a new player in the team of four created a cool dynamic. While the opposition knew the other three PCs involved, the new one hadn’t yet popped up on their radar.

The basics of the first adventure (Persephone has a sequence of five): the PCs learn someone has been using their identity for multiple purchases and appearances in Paris. The group arrives to discover there’s an elaborate set up framing them for an assassination and a bombing. They can get to the former and find evidence of supernatural weirdness, but it takes a little longer for them to reach the bombing site to prevent it.

It’s a scenario that pays off early leg work because there’s a lot going on.

• Someone is using their identities to frame them for an attack. Who?
• The target of the attack has some kind of Vampiric connection. Why were they attacked?
• What’s the deal with these vampires?
• Why blow up that particular building?
• Where did the target of the assassination escape to?

It’s good, puts time pressure on the group, and gets them moving right away with personal stakes. But there are things from the original which wouldn’t work with my story conception. As I mentioned last time, Persephone's turns on a massive bioweapon. I didn’t want to run that. In the original the initial incident is one branch of the Orphic Vampire Conspiracy (Dissidents) striking at the other (Loyalists). They’re opposed to the wholescale wiping out of humanity. The Dissidents have two goals in this starting incident: a) doing damage to the “Pale Agenda” aka the bioweapon plot and b) getting the PCs involved and maybe pointing them at the Loyalist Orphic Vampires.

I decided to table the question of what the new plot was instead of the bioweapon. That could wait a few sessions to work out. It would be something more supernatural, ritual, and small scale. Devastating, but not to the world—just Europe, North Africa, and parts of the Middle East. So I set that aside for the moment. But the more important question remained: who actually set them up, if not Dissidents?

​I decided to make that EDOM, the sinister organization from the Dracula Dossier. It made sense that they would want to dispense with their vampiric competition. While not in EDOM’s pocket directly, the vampire the PCs fought in the prologue would have been on their radar and a sometimes asset. When the PCs created lots of noise in Bucharest, it would have put them in EDOM's crosshairs—and made them solid patsies for the operation. If they got caught, great. If they went free they’d still be pointed at the Orphics.

So here’s where I got too clever for my own good.

NBA THOUGHTS
A few meta-thoughts on running NBA, gamemastering, and handling mysteries

• If I run again, I suspect I’ll do it outside of Europe. There’s an interconnectedness to Europe that cuts against difficult travel as an obstacle. Persephone does give us some off the beaten path settings with Barcelona and Istanbul. But I might move further afield to put characters out of their comfort zone. One player suggested South America, but I’d probably look at Asia first. There’s such differences in culture and governance there because of the sheer size and diversity. It would give me new tools for creating contrasts between locations.
• Pacing. Pacing. Pacing. It’s really important. From time to time I see those “what’s your GM skill?” questions. For me I think one’s definitely pacing. Switching rhythm from fast to slow, keeping action scenes tight, intercutting between scenes. It’s a particular kind of traffic management. Games like Night’s Black Agents have heavier GM hand at the tiller. Using a PbtA based resolution loosens that up, but you still have to do more management than in many indie games.
• If players don’t buy into to the game’s purpose, you’re going to have a tougher time as a GM. RPGs can have game objectives built into them. For example, Champions assumes a value in a certain kind of tactical, resource management combat. If that’s not what a player wants out of the game, there’s going to be a collision. And that’s not one that you can fix with a tone discussion, talking game objectives, and getting player collaboration at the start. It’s a basic element.
• In mystery games, the process of investigating and gathering information is a key game focus. It’s what you will be doing and it’s what the game is selling as the enjoyable part. Finding clues, putting together pieces, slowly accruing information—that’s a big portion of the game. But if you have players who don’t assign value to that or think those activities waste time or block the road to action scenes, you’ve got a problem. That’s especially true when you have different players with strikingly different senses of what’s fun and valuable to play in a game.
• I’m not sure what the answer is to that, except that as a game facilitator you may have to recognize and have a conversation with players who have a different sense of what the game ought to be versus what you plan on running. I’m all in favor of adjusting to player desires and moving the target to what’s fun for the group, but you have to recognize when that shift has drastically shifted from what you envisioned.
• My hack created an interesting dissonance between the intent of GUMSHOE and the intent of PbtA. The former expects slow gathering of details. Core clues move you from one scene to another, but you have to supplement that by carefully gathering additional details using the group’s varied Investigative Abilities. If you don’t then when you actually get to the end, you may be bewildered by what’s happening or unprepared for the foe you face. Because of the value the game places on this, we slow down when we come to that material. OOH the impetus of PbtA is a kind of speed and compactness. We set the scene, establish the stakes, play out the drama before moving to a single roll which often settles the question. It highlights on the dramatic beats and not the gritty details. Where GUMSHOE’s action resolution is often discrete and accumulative, a PbtA resolution moves from key point to key point. (Note: NBA: Solo Ops takes a more all-or-nothing approach to action resolution, but may work because you’re working to the rhythm of a single player).
• Another tension comes from a gamefeel element of suspense and thriller games: surprise and uncertainty. Classic games often ask for a roll without full explanation of the stakes---the player knows something’s up. The intent is to create worry and uncertainty. PbtA works against that because it’s generally an active rather than a reactive game. The surprise only comes when the GM pulls out something from a hard move. Or at least that’s how some players have come to accept it. I had one player who objected to my use of rolls where I didn’t clearly establish the stakes. But for me that's part of the structure of a game like this-- creating uncertainty. I need to find a medium place between those two poles—one where I do a better job of setting up the context for a role while stilling leaving some mystery.

LAST THOUGHTS
Again all this being said, I enjoyed running the campaign. I would do it again—though not this story. I have to tweak the rules and I know I need to set expectations more clearly at the start. I think overall I did a pretty good job—and the hack held together for the most part. I’m glad I got a chance to use a lot of my NBA materials though there’s still more out there. ​