Review: Level Up (Advanced 5th Edition)

There is a set of people out there for whom Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition (hereafter, for simplicity, "LU") from EN Publishing is exactly what they have been waiting for--for several years now.  If you are a D&D 5e player that is starting to (or have been for some time) chaffing at the limitations and restrictions in the game system as presented (particularly in terms of character creation and mechanical support for non-combat activities), but you otherwise like playing 5e and are not really interested in checking out a whole new game and structure, then LU is an extremely compelling product.  And even if you are not (and I am not exactly in that particular space), it's impossible not to see and be impressed with the game design craft at work here.

The initial challenge in approaching LU is to understand exactly what it is, something that didn't really become clear to me until I got the PDF copies of the three core books in my hands [Note: as of this writing, it is only available to Kickstarter backers, of which I was one].  The simplest way to explain what is going on here is that LU takes D&D 5e, strips it down to the skeleton (dice mechanics, action economy--things like that), and then rebuilds it from scratch.  While nothing you will see is unrecognizable for people who have played d20 games, I was not expecting the scope of the changes LU makes to the 5e paradigm (I think, in part, because the EN Publishing people made a strategic choice to undersell how much work they were doing--more on that in a bit).  Not only is it a different, albeit recognizably so, game from 5e, it is very clearly designed to be used on its own, as a replacement to the 5e rulebooks as opposed to a supplement to them (and, like D&D, LU consists of three core books--the Adventurer's Guide, the GM-focused Trials & Treasure, and Monstrous Menagerie).  LU is not a set of house rules to 5e, nor is it an expansion in the mode of something like Xanathar's Guide to Everything, but instead its own game.  The best comparison of the relationship between 5e and LU is between Pathfinder 1st Edition and D&D 3.5, and even that might undersell it.

In fact, there are so many changes that summarizing all of them would be tedious and unproductive.  But I think the changes can be grouped into two major buckets, with a couple of other interesting single shot ideas that are worth talking about.  Major idea #1 of LU is to make good on the (IMO, wholly unfulfilled) promise of 3 pillars of play in D&D 5e--combat, exploration, and social/roleplay.  To that end, Trials & Treasure has a lengthy section providing mechanical support, with examples and random tables, for non-combat, environmental-based encounters.  There is also a robust set of journey rules, similar to those found in the now out-of-print Adventures in Middle Earth (in turn based on The One Ring rpg).  And while I love the AiME/The One Ring journey rules, I think LU's version is better in that it contemplates a wider variety of non-combat challenges.  There are puzzles and lore-based challenges and weather and a whole host of different ways for all PCs to engage with the exploration portion of the game, all of which is simply not present in 5e as written.  And no one can say that the exploration mechanics are a throw-away or something tacked-on, as Trials & Treasure devotes about 120 pages to these new mechanics.

The social pillar is less mechanically engaged, but there are some actual rules (including rules for awarding XP!) for social encounters along with advice on how to run them.  But LU approaches the social dimension in a slightly different way, bringing back the once ubiquitous but now somewhat out-of-fashion stronghold and domain management rules.  There is also a Prestige rating, measuring how well known a particular PC is, which provides concrete mechanical hooks for the standard "unknown wanderer to world-renowned hero" arc of most fantasy campaigns.  Critically, every PC has class-related abilities that interact with both the social dimension and the exploration piece, making them a central part of play as opposed to an afterthought or something only specialized characters interact with.  For example, the 1st level Cleric selects a "Sacred Call" ability which provides circumstantial social advantages, while at 3rd level the Cleric selects a "Sign of Faith" which is an ability that provides meaningful, if cabined, advantages while traveling.

This transitions into the second big-picture change in LU--all of the classes are rebuilt and redesigned.  Part of this redesign is adding class abilities tied to the exploration and social pillars, as mentioned above.  But it is more than that, and the changes can be seen most clearly in the martial classes.  Martial classes now have access to combat maneuvers, which are divided up into "combat traditions" (think different kinds of martial arts in the real world) that unlock progressively more powerful abilities along a fairly simple tree.  There are also a short list of maneuvers that are now available to all characters, fleshing out the combat turn.  Most of the discrete class abilities given to martial characters in 5e are wrapped up into the maneuver system, giving martial characters more options to choose from at each level.

Indeed, choice is a consistent theme of all of the revised classes is LU. In many places where 5e simply assigns a particular ability at a particular level, LU provides options.  It's not nearly the breadth of options found in the feat system in Pathfinder 2nd edition; instead, there are usually three or four specific options for a particular level.  As a result, it sits in a middle place between 5e and Pathfinder 2e on the character creation complexity scale, a place that I think is going to be a sweet spot for many people who are looking to ratchet up the character creation mini-game.  My one comment here is that, given that there is increased choice at all levels, I wonder whether including the 5e sub-class system was the right choice.  I get that it helps establish a theme for PCs within the broader class concept, but much of that work is being taken up with the individualized abilities that classes get at most levels, so some of that work is duplicative and maybe a bit more complex than is necessary.  On the flip side, the design for the subclasses in LU is broader and more archetypical than especially the post-PHB 5e subclasses, which often goes in the direction of rather specific character concepts.  I like this better, and the subclasses are well-designed and easy to adapt to almost any possible setting one might be inclined to use. 

A couple of other quick notes on character building.   The game mechanical construct of "race" in 5e is replaced with Heritage (which might be called "species" in a sci-fi context) and Culture, allowing for greater character diversity and avoiding essentialism.  Along those lines, Background is now the character creation piece that provides ability score bonuses and penalties.  This is a small change, but an elegant one and one that makes perfect sense in world--if you were raised as a scholar, it stands to reason to get an Intelligence bonus.  I am less sold on renaming some of the core classes (Barbarian is now "Berserker," Monk is now "Adept," Paladin is now "Herald").  The thinking, I suspect, is to expand the conceptual space encompassed by those classes, but honestly I found it to be more confusing than helpful.  Those names are so ingrained in the collective consciousness of D&D players that re-wiring the brain takes some doing.  A small thing, ultimately, but something that I kept tripping over.     

One last point on character creation--and this is maybe my favorite addition in LU--every PC now has a Destiny, which provides a core character motivation, a way in which the PC gains Inspiration (as opposed to the unstructured and arbitrary "good roleplaying" from 5e, which I hate), a particular way the PC can spend Inspiration to do something thematic for the character, and a grand quest to fulfill the Destiny which provides a special character ability.  It's simple, easy to expand with new Destinies, provides a concrete roleplaying anchor for a new character, and gives them a reason to do things in the world and interact with it.  Love it, 10/10.

On the miscellaneous side, it's worth talking about the Fatigue and Strife system.  I've complained on a couple of occasions about the Short/Long Rest mechanics in 5e, and in order to maintain compatibility those rules are ported over to LU.  However, some of the dimensions I don't like are mitigated by the "Roughing It" sidebar on Page 425 of the Adventurer's Guide that specifically ties full heal-ups to being able to rest in favorable conditions--unless you have a bedroll, are not cold, are not in the rain, etc., you only get half the normal Hit Dice back after a night's sleep.  But the real punch is in the Fatigue (which replaces 5e Exhaustion) and Strife rules, which represent physical and mental strain, respectively.  Those conditions can only be recovered in a "haven," defined as a home or other ideal location for recovery.  And Fatigue and Strife are no joke--the last level of Fatigue means the PC will just die at a story-appropriate time as determined by the GM, and max level of Strife causes permanent mental conditions with concrete game mechanical effects.  This walks the line of creating real opportunities for attrition-based play, without completely gimping a PC's combat effectiveness.  You also gain a level of Fatigue the first time in an fight you fall unconscious, providing a real if perhaps modest penalty for going to 0 HP and avoiding the consequence-free rebounding from the brink of death to being fine that characterizes the 5e death and healing rules.

The problem with all of this, to the extent it is a problem, is that LU is really a package.  Because the pieces interact with each other and fit together pretty tightly, it's not optimized to be a tool-kit of ideas that you can drop into an existing 5e game.  For example, you might think to just add the journey rules to an existing 5e campaign.  You could do that, but the journey rules are designed around the PCs having all the exploration-oriented class abilities.  And if you add those elements, you might as well rebuild all the PCs around the LU class model, in which case you might as well just take on the whole package.  Likewise, because of the way LU redistributes the pieces of what 5e groups under "race," if you want to use the Heritage/Culture system you also have to use the LU Backgrounds, or at the very least re-work the existing 5e Backgrounds to provide ability score modifiers.  The changes that LU makes to the 5e system are pervasive and extensive (I haven't even mentioned that they have redesigned most of the core spells), pushing you at every turn toward adopting it wholesale.  Honestly, probably the most modular portion of the whole project is the redesigned monsters, all of which are both recognizably similar to the stock 5e versions and yet more interesting and dynamic in play.  

Which leads to what I think is ultimately the big question with LU.  This is a project targeted at existing 5e players and DMs, and one of the core marketing pitches for LU is that everything is compatible with existing 5e materials like adventure paths and supplemental material.  And that is true, in the sense that the stats that you will find for opponents in existing published material mean the same things in LU, so there is no direct conversion needed.  But that presentation undersells, I think deliberately, what LU is and what it is trying to do.  Which, ultimately, is to be its own game, albeit one that is backwards compatible with 5e.  As someone who has gotten burned out and frustrated with 5e, and especially with the apparent unwillingness of Wizards of the Coast to do anything interesting or creative with the game for many years running now, this is not a problem for me.  I have no problem moving on from 5e with only casual picking over the carcass for bits and pieces to integrate.  But I wonder whether LU will be a bridge too far for many people in its target audience.  Yes it is compatible and yes many of the core elements are the same, but LU is otherwise very different from 5e.  Given the "stickiness" of the 5e fanbase to changing games, I wonder if this will find its audience.  There are vague hints of a revised set of the 5e core rulebooks in 2024 for the 50th anniversary of D&D, but whatever that looks like I doubt it will be as well done, thoughtful, or as expansive as LU.  It would be a shame if this product doesn't find a home because it looks like too big a change.

There are also some minor quibbles.  I mentioned the changing the class names thing previously.  There are places where they went a little too hard in the direction of edge-case, fiddly rules for my tastes--for example, the Fatigue rule I quoted above is slightly wrong, as you can recover the Level 1 Fatigued condition without resting in a haven, but not any higher levels of Fatigued.  Right now, the PDFs are in a Beta version, and are in need of some smoothing over.  

But, at the end of the day, LU is an outstanding product that is worth putting in the work.  It keeps most if not all of the things about 5e that work well, and it improves the rest of it in basically every way.  While I liked what I saw from Pathfinder 2nd Edition, I think LU also has many of the advantages of that game with less fiddly-ness and complexity.  If given a choice between starting a campaign in 5e, Pathfinder 2e, or LU, I would choose LU.  If I have time over the holidays, I think I'm going to dust off the materials for my old campaign world and convert it over to LU, which would fit it perfectly.  If you were not a Kickstarter backer, and this package is remotely appealing to you, I would strongly recommend keeping an eye out for its general release.  It's a really, really impressive piece of work.

Some Random House Rules for 5e D&D

I tend to run games pretty close to Rules as Written.  Part of that is because I like many different kinds of games, and I like to see the ways in which their design translates into the play experience.  But the bigger part of it is that I'm not incredibly interested in being a game designer, and I don't feel like that should be part of my job description as a GM/DM--I'm paying you for this game so I don't have to do the design work.

The exception to this seems to be D&D 5e.  I don't view myself as a 5e Hater.  I like a lot of what the game does.  But there are a handful of things that really bug me about the rules, things that reflect some (I think) weird and kinda inexplicable design choices.  But because I like the game, I want to try to fix what I see as problems, without throwing up my hands and going down the road of "5e Bad."

To that end, I figured I would put out some of my house rules for 5e that I have been working on, along with a explanation of my thought process.  There are four of them--the Rest rules, XP, low levels, and Inspiration.  

Rest Mechanics

Let's lay out the basic problem with the rest mechanics as written in the Players Handbook.  PCs can take a Short Rest or a Long Rest, and every class ability in the game that requires a recharge refreshes on either a Short Rest or a Long Rest.  Because the Short/Long Rest system is so deeply grounded in all player-facing mechanics, it is extremely difficult to change around the actual mechanic itself without rebuilding the class mechanics completely.  For example, if you have a Warlock in the party, the effectiveness of the Warlock visa ve the other classes is heavily dependent on  there being opportunities for Short Rests, as the Warlock's more limited spell selection is balanced around the idea that spell slots refresh on a Short Rest as opposed to a Long Rest for the other spellcasting classes.  Meanwhile, we are told that encounters are balanced around the idea of six to eight "medium" difficulty encounters between Long Rest, and two encounters between Short Rest (so encounter, encounter, Short Rest, encounter, encounter, Short Rest, encounter, encounter, Long Rest).  To activate a Short Rest, the PCs must take one hour of in-game time to rest, while a Long Rest requires eight hours of sleep by the PCs in-game.

The interface between the last two elements means that there is an expectation that PCs will engage with six to eight encounters in a 24 hour period.  That makes some sense in a pure dungeon crawl scenario, but its hard to justify in most other story contexts.  In an urban exploration scenario or a wilderness travel scenario, it's pretty easy for the PCs to take rests between every encounter (at least Short Rests), which means that the PCs will be at or near full strength for every encounter.  Which requires the DM to throw tougher challenges at the PCs, which makes combat more swingy, more unpredictable, and more of that "rocket tag" phenomenon that was a big issue in previous editions.  

So, what do you do to solve this problem?  One idea is to borrow from the rest mechanics for 13th Age.  Whereas 5e requires you to take a particular amount of time to rest (one hour/eight hours of sleep) to trigger the recovery, 13th Age ties recovery directly to the number of encounters completed.  In 13th Age, this is balanced around the idea of a Quick Rest (the 13th Age version of a Short Rest) after every encounter and a Full Heal Up (i.e. Long Rest) after three to four encounters.  This way, the PCs never get out of sync with the encounter balance guidelines built into the game.  If you were to import this over the 5e, you would simply say that PCs get a Short Rest after every two encounters (no matter how much time passes in between encounters) and a Long Rest after six.

The objection to this approach is that it makes rests an entirely dissociated mechanic.  You are keeping the rest economy consistent with the gamist encounter design principles, but there is no consistent thing happening in the world that is triggering the recovery of PC resources--no consistent amount of time passing, no consistent PC action.  The degree to which this bothers you is a matter of personal taste.  It never really bothered me running 13th Age, but I see why people object to it on principle.  It also removes any sort of tactical thinking on the part of the players with regard to rests, as they just happen automatically.

On the other side, there is the "gritty realism" approach described in the Dungeon Masters Guide, which requires eight hours of sleep for a Short Rest and 7 days of rest for a Long Rest.  My problem here is with the 7 days for a Long Rest, as I think it creates a new set of pacing problems for stories.  If the PCs have to stop cold their adventuring for an entire week to heal up, it's hard to maintain any sense of tension and urgency.  And if you as the DM contrive to prevent the PCs from taking Long Rests in the name of maintaining tension and urgency, I think players will eventually become resentful, as at the end of the day 5e is about using your cool character abilities.

The final approach I've seen is in Cubicle 7's wonderful (but, at least for now, out of print) Adventures in Middle Earth, which is built on the 5e chassis.  AiME keeps the basic time lengths for rests, but adds the restriction that a Long Rest can only occur in places where the PCs have "safety, comfort, and tranquility."  In other words, no Long Rests in the wilderness, or in dungeons, because those environments are unsafe/uncomfortable/disturbing.  In other words, you can basically only take a Long Rest in a protected place like an inn, or (in Middle Earth terms) some place like Rivendell or Lothlorien.  I like this a lot, and it makes perfect sense (and is very thematic) for Middle Earth stories, but I think it is also a little too punishing for most standard 5e campaigns to say no long rests at all during wilderness journeys.

So, taking all of that together, here are my Rest rules.  

• A Short Rest is eight hours of sleep, as per the gritty realism rules;
• A Long Rest requires: 
• 48 hours of uninterrupted rest or
• 24 hours of uninterrupted rest if the PCs are in a place with "safety, comfort, and tranquility" as per AiME--their homes, an inn, a castle of a friendly noble, etc. 

What I like about this scheme is that it incentivizes players to look for places of safety, without making it completely impossible to get Long Rests in a wilderness or other unfriendly environment.  It has the advantage of being very easy to explain in-game--it's not hard to see why resting in a place of comfort and security is more refreshing than camping in the wilderness.  It also keeps things moving in-game--"you've rescued the daughter of the local baron and returned her to her family.  After a day off to recover while taking advantage of the hospitality of the baron, you are off to continue your quest for the Crown of MacGuffin.  Reset to full health and spells."  Finally, I think this hits a good middle point between the base rules on one hand and the "gritty realism" or AiME rules on the other.  

One quick note--I would allow a Ranger to make a Survival Check to create a "place of safety" in the wilderness in their favored terrain as part of the Natural Explorer class feature.

Experience Points

There are two basic problems with XP in 5e.  First, RAW, the only thing you get XP for is killing things, which strongly incentivizes "murder hobo" play and disincentivizes the other "pillars of play" that are much talked about in 5e but not really mechanically supported.  Second, while 5e is better about this than previous editions, counting out XP from different enemies defeated by the PCs is a pain in the ass for the DM, with little obvious upside to anyone.

On the flip side, many folks (including the Adventurer's League, 5e's organized play campaign) have abandoned XP altogether and have gone with a story milestone approach, in which PCs gain levels after progressing through a pre-set amount of story content (FWIW, 13th Age works this way as well).  Story milestones are, in my opinion, lazy design, as they don't really reward anything other than showing up to play the game.

So, here I would borrow some ideas from other fantasy games.  This particular scheme is based on Dungeon World via Adam Koebel, and it happens to be similar to the approach used in Forbidden Lands (which I reviewed here).  At the end of the session, the DM asks each player six questions about what their PC did during the session.  For every question that the player answers "yes," the PC gets 1 XP.  The questions are:

• Did you overcome a challenging enemy? 
• Did you gain a magic item or other significant treasure?
• Did you discover a new location, secret, or piece of interesting lore?
• Did you gain a valuable NPC ally?
• Did you express a unique element of your Race, Class, or Background?
• Did you express your Bonds, Flaws, Ideals, or Alignment in a way that complicated your life?

The first four questions are group oriented (i.e. the PC doesn't have to overcome the challenging enemy alone to get credit), while the last two are more individual.  You can only get one XP per category per session--so, if you defeat two challenging enemies in a session, you still only get 1 XP.

To advance to a level, PCs must acquire XP equal to their current level + 6.  Once they hit that mark, those XP are "spent" and the PC level's up, with any left-over carrying over as a head-start on future advancement.  I find that the simplest way to handle things, but if you wanted to keep the D&D standard of constantly increasing XP, you could easily do that (i.e., Level 2 requires 7 total XP, Level 3 requires 15 XP, Level 4 requires 24 XP, etc.).  "Current level + 6" is also a flexible metric that the DM can tweak to control the speed of advancement.  One note here is that because you can only get 1 XP per category per session, if your sessions are short, the PCs will gain XP faster relative to story elements, so it might make sense to increase the thresholds in that case.

I think this system does two things.  First, it rewards, and thus incentivizes, a wide variety of player behavior and play situations.  A tense diplomatic negotiation with zero combat and heavy RP can earn just as much XP as a kick-in-the-door dungeon crawl.  Second, it allows the DM to completely abandon the tedious task of adding up all the XP from all the monsters and then dividing it by the number of players, especially if the DM is doing that with an eye to maintaining some kind of advancement pacing.  The questions take 5 minutes at the end of the session, the numbers are small and easy to keep track of, and players know exactly what the need to do to gain XP.

1st and 2nd Level

As I previewed here, I don't like low-level 5e play very much.  Bounded accuracy means that you can use the same spectrum of enemies at 3rd level than you can at first, except that fights at 3rd level are more fun and more consistent than they are at 1st.  Plus, a PC doesn't get the full scope of character abilities until (depending on the class) 3rd level.  To be fair, everyone from Mearls on down says that 1st and 2nd level are basically the D&D version of a video game tutorial, except that the rules don't really reflect that if you look at how much XP, and thus how many fights, it takes to go through those levels.  *Shakes Fist at the Sky.*

So, I would handle 1st and 2nd level the following way.  If I was playing with an experienced group of 5e players, I would skip it altogether and have them make 3rd level characters.  If I was dealing with people new to 5e, I would start at first level, but make the first two sessions explicitly tutorial by setting the XP threshold for advancement at 1 XP, and awarding 1 XP if the PCs did any of the things on the normal XP list.  So, a campaign would basically have two tutorial sessions to slowly on-board the new D&D players to the game and their characters, and then when they get to session 3/level 3 the real game begins.  I would also allow unlimited class rebuilds through the end of 3rd level for new players, so that a player is not stuck with a suite of options they don't really like.  So, if a new player who starts with a wild magic Sorcerer and then decides after a couple of sessions they don't like the Sorcerer or wild magic mechanics, I would let them just pick something else at any time before hitting 4th level.

Inspiration

Last one is inspiration.  My problem with Inspiration is that I hate mechanics that empower/require the DM/GM to grade a player's roleplaying and give some benefit based on that grade.  I think it is disempowering to players, while putting the DM in a weird power position--after all, the players don't get to grade how well the DM is roleplaying the NPCs.  In addition, if the concern is getting PCs to role-play at all and/or making Ideals/Bonds/Flaws meaningful, the XP mechanics I sketched out takes care of that problem while putting the judging in the hands of the players themselves.

The simplest thing to do here is just cut Inspiration out altogether, which is what I normally do, as PCs in 5e are pretty robust for the most part and don't really need the free Advantage.  Instead, I would port over a variant of the "Fight in Spirit" rule from 13th Age.  When a PCs is unconscious or otherwise unavailable during a combat round, on what would be their turn (in addition to rolling Death Saves, if necessary), the player of the unconscious PC can narrate how they are or have bolstered one of the other PCs in their current situation.  The bolstered PC then gets a floating Advantage that they must use sometime in that encounter or it is lost.  An out-of-action player can only bolster a particular PC once per encounter, but if they are out of action for multiple rounds they can bolster multiple PCs.

What I like about this rule and the original "Fight in Spirit" rule is that it keeps players of unconscious or otherwise non-participating PCs engaged in what is going on at the table.  Rolling a Death Save takes a few seconds, and otherwise their turn is skipped.  Now, they have something to do.  It also somewhat cushions the death-spiral that tends to occur when one PC drops in a combat. 

Thoughts on GMing, Part 3--Forbidden Lands, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the OSR (Kinda)

If you engage even a little bit in the online ttrpg scene, you will encounter the term "OSR."  I have struggled with the Discourse around the OSR, because it has been hard to figure out precisely what it is and what it stands for.  There is even disagreement over what "OSR" stands for--does it mean "Old School Roleplaying" or "Old School Renaissance"?

Maybe in part because of this ambiguity, nothing that I have encountered from from the OSR has really grabbed me.  There is a segment of the OSR that in embodies an aesthetic position, trying to recreate the feel and look (often through the art style) of late 70s/early 80s ttrpgs, more specifically D&D.  Probably the best example of this is Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics, with its Errol Otis art and focus on short character life spans, but there is also the more horror-oriented and sex-forward Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  These games do a very good job at doing what it is trying to do--I fully acknowledge the craft of both DCC and LofFP--but playing them left me cold.  That style and aesthetic was not the feel of D&D that I remember from first getting into the  hobby, as I am a child of 2nd Edition AD&D, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance, all of which come after the early-80s touchstones of the DCC and LotFP aesthetic.  So it didn't work for me on the level of nostalgia, and it doesn't really work for me on its own merits.

Then there are the games that are very self-consciously about the mechanics of early editions of D&D.  Gotta say, I have even less interest here.  It's not that those rule systems are bad or necessarily unplayable, but there is so much good design out there going in every conceivable direction that I don't really see the point of locking into a forty-five year old design as a core commitment.  

Finally, there are a set of ideas about the play experience.  The best articulation of this game-play focus is expressed by Ben Milton in a compilation called the "Principia Apocrypha":

"The more of the following a campaign has, the more old school it is: high lethality, an open world, a lack of pre-written plot, an emphasis on creative problem solving, an exploration-centered reward system (usually XP for treasure), a disregard for 'encounter balance,' and the use of random tables to generate world elements that surprise both players and referees. Also, a strong do-it-yourself attitude and a willingness to share your work and use the creativity of others in your game."

This is all very interesting, but none of these ideas never particularly fired me up and got me excited about running or playing in that context.

That is, until I found Forbidden Lands, by emerging Swedish juggernaut Free League (Fria Ligan) Publishing.  Ben Riggs of the Plot Points podcast called the Forbidden Lands the "perfect rpg product," and that seemed crazy when I first heard him say it, but I get where he is coming from.  

I mostly want to talk about the mechanics, because that where I think the game really shines, but I want to say a few things about the lore and setting.  First off, the trailer video that Free League put together is pretty close to being the perfect introduction to a setting.  Check this out:

Evocative, atmospheric, moody, informative without being overly long and expository--that video is great.  Beyond the trailer, the setting walks the line between providing familiar fantasy RPG tropes (so it is accessible) and being distinctive and unique (providing a compelling reason to check it out).  It also walks the line between fun-dark and obnoxious-dark.  Here, I think there is something to the fact that this comes out of Sweden, and is the product of Swedish fantasy writers.  I don't have deep experience with the Swedish fantasy scene, but Forbidden Lands feels different from English-language dark fantasy like Warhammer, and I like this version much better.

But the setting and lore of Forbidden Lands can be swapped out for other fantasy tropes without too much trouble (as, to be fair, the game acknowledges).  The real magic is in the mechanics.  Forbidden Lands is a gritty, survival-oriented wilderness exploration game at its heart.  The boxed set (itself an old-school touch) contains a hex map showing the land forms of the titular Forbidden Lands, and a set of stickers for placing down cities, towns, dungeon ruins, and other examples of what the game calls "adventure sites."  But, in between the adventure sites, the PCs go from hex to hex, deal with potential random encounters, and have to maintain their supplies.  There are very clear systems for handling pathfinding, foraging for food and water, hunting, making camp, even sleeping.

These sorts of systems are not new--early D&D products like the "BECMI" Expert set had similar systems.  But Forbidden Lands puts a subtle twist on each of these elements, reducing the grind and fiddly-ness for the players and GM, grind and fiddly-ness which caused those mechanics to go out of fashion in the first place.  For example, instead of counting individual units of resources like rations and water and torches (and arrows, too), those resources are expressed as a die--d6, d8, d10, or d12.  Every time you have to eat or take a drink or light a torch, you roll the die; on a 1 or 2, you step down to the next lowest die type (i.e. d10 to d8).  Roll a 1 or 2 when your resources are at d6, and you are out of the resource.  Not only does this cut down on book-keeping, but it adds a dramatic tension to resource consumption--failures increase the chances of future failures in a downward spiral, and the more operationally-minded PCs will not be tempted to (or able to) tediously micromanage away resource scarcity.  

While in exploration mode, the GM is encouraged to let events play out according to a well-designed set of random tables.  What sorts of random encounters to do the PCs come across?  What animals are available to hunt?  What happens when they camp at night?  No need at all for the GM to prep any of that--let the tables decide.  The key feature here is that the random tables and systems-oriented, player driven action removes responsibility from the GM to craft a curated game experience for the benefit of the players.  As the manifesto quoted above says well, I think, the outcomes of play are a surprise both for the players and the GM, in a way that doesn't happen in a more standard GMing experience.  Also, and I think this is a key feature of Forbidden Lands, exploration mode in Forbidden Lands requires literally no GM prep.  Between random encounters and the various (mis-) adventures of wilderness travel, it is possible for a GM to run an entire satisfying session with zero prepared, and not feel like he or she has to be constantly improvising and keeping the plates spinning.    

But Forbidden Lands departs slightly from the old-school formula by mixing the procedural elements in with modular adventure sites.  If the players and/or the GM get bored of wandering through the wilderness, the GM just plops down an adventure site and play focuses there.  But, even here, the models we are provided in the core rulebook and in the expansion materials (I currently own the Bitter Reach campaign and the Crypt of the Mellified Mage adventure set, but there is also the Raven's Purge campaign as well) show off sand-box style design, with competing factions and goals that the PCs can insert themselves into.  "The Vale of the Dead" in the boxed set could easily have been a rather boring paint-by-numbers dungeon crawl against a giant, but instead it has four or five different competing groups that can be allied with, and/or played off against each other.  And each adventure site is set up with a rumor that is given to the PCs, which is a great touch for world building, but also allows the GM to situate these adventure sites into a broader narrative without forcing players into a narrative railroad (the Bitter Reach campaign is especially excellent at creating a overarching story while maintaining a truly open format).  And it should be noted that there are robust random tables for generating adventure sites, though I would suggest rolling up the site prior to the session.

All of this is layered over Free League's "Year Zero" game engine.  Forbidden Lands is likely the most complex and mechanics-driven of the Year Zero games, but the underlying dice pool system is easy to learn and easy to teach.  The heart of Year Zero is the push mechanic--you basically have two chances to succeed on every check, but going to the second roll is going to cause some consequences for the PC.  In Forbidden Lands, the consequences of pushing rolls is damage to your equipment and/or to your character.  That might seem awfully punitive, especially as a PC is going to have only a handful of points before the character is "broken" and really bad things happen, but in return every point of damage from pushing rolls nets the PC a willpower point.  Since Willpower points are the currency that powers most Talents (including all spellcasting), this creates an interesting feedback loop, in which players are incentivized to put their own characters through the wringer in order to do more powerful things.  It also incentivizes PCs, especially spellcasters, to get "stuck in" to the other elements of game play, so that they can generate Willpower points to power their magic.  So, in good old-school fashion, PCs in Forbidden Lands are in for a rough ride; unlike other old-school games, much of pain is going to be self-inflicted.

I'm still not super interested in most of the OSR games.  But I am all-in on Forbidden Lands.  For me, it takes the best ideas from that play style--especially the random tables and open sandbox-style play--and presents them in a thoroughly modern, innovative format.  If you, like me, are or have been an OSR skeptic, this would be the place I would start to maybe change your mind.

Thoughts On GMing, Part 2--2d20 and Conan

In the last post, I talked about the idea of limiting the GM's freedom of action as a way to engage the GM in play.  When I was writing that post, I had a number of games in mind, but primarily I was thinking of Modiphius's Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of.  Conan is interesting in at least two ways--one as a particularly strong implementation of Modiphius's "2d20" system (though it's worth mentioning that fellow 2d20 games Star Trek Adventures and Infinity are both excellent and worth consideration on their own merits), and thus shows off the ways that 2d20 pulls off the creative constraints on the GM.  The other is the way that Conan engages with and emulates genre material, especially problematic genre material, but that's going to have to wait for another post. 

Before getting into Conan and the 2d20 system, I want to give a shout out to the Complex Games Apologist and his Youtube channel.  He has a very interesting channel that discusses a variety of ttrpg topics, but relevant to this post he was the one that convinced me to give the 2d20 system a shot with his series on Star Trek Adventures.  I was skeptical/uninterested in Modiphius's products prior to watching his videos, as I was strongly in the 90s-era mode of licensed property + "universal" game engine adapted to that property equals forgettable shovelware. Modiphius's stuff is anything but shovelware--it's some of the best, most thoughtful licensed adaptations I've seen.  I wouldn't have checked out these games without CGA's prompting and showcasing, and his game analysis, and especially his analysis of the 2d20 games, is some of the best out there.  Check out his stuff.   

So, let's look at Conan.  There's a lot of interesting design in this game--I love the "zones" system for handling distances and the battle space, for one, as well as the very genre-savvy set of mental attacks that include things like brandishing the severed head of your enemies to intimidate your remaining foes.  But the real heart of the 2d20 system, in my view, is found in two things--scene framing, and the push-pull of Momentum and Doom.  These two elements, working together, both constrain the GM's freedom of action in a way that increases player buy-in, while providing the GM with an "mini-game" that keeps him or her engaged in the play experience, all the while still allowing the GM to be a GM and express his or her creative and narrative freedom.

As to the first element, Conan instructs the GM to think about the game narratively in terms of a series of set-piece scenes.  It's the job of the GM to frame those scenes, and the GM is basically given unlimited discretion in this framing.  A key component of this framing is to provide the scene with a series of what you might call in video game terms "interactive elements"--different things that can be triggered or activated by different players in the scene.  The most obvious form of interactive elements are NPCs, but Conan also includes like terrain effects and other sorts of non-living elements as part of the tool-box for the GM to be included in a scene.  [Here, it's worth mentioning Infinity's "psyops" or social interaction rules that provide a very robust platform for running non-combat encounters in a way that doesn't just turn into an unstructured/freeform pure roleplaying experience.]  Once the GM frames the scene, the players and their characters are let loose into that space, and the action begins.

There are a number of games that focus on scene framing and scene elements.  7th Sea 2nd Edition was the first one of these I encountered, and my understanding is that FATE works this way as well.  But the key thing is that once the scene is framed by the GM, once it is "released into the wild" as it were, the GM is constrained in the manner in which he or she can manipulate or change the parameters of the scene.  In other words, once the GM sets up the scene and puts the pieces in place, he or she is now bound by the rules of the scene and is truly "playing the game," albeit with a different palate of options than the other participants.

The game that the GM is playing is defined in terms of the GM's Doom pool.  In an abstract sense, these pools are a quantized version of the "hard moves" of the PbtA games, as the GM spends points out of his or her pool to either boost the actions of the NPC antagonists, or to activate elements of the scene in a way that makes the players' lives harder.  So, the GM can, for example, introduce enemy reinforcements into the scene, but only by spending points out of the pool.  Likewise, the GM could activate an environmental element in a scene (say, the trees in a forest catching on fire) by spending points out of the pool.  The things the GM can do via Doom are, like PbtA hard moves, broad enough as to allow the GM to basically do anything he or she might want to do in a particular situation, but always constrained by the number of points that are in the pool that could power the GM's ideas.  Moreover, the pool system is transparent--the players know how many points are in each of the pools at any time, and all of the spends are constrained by the rules, facilitating player buy-in.

Even better, the source of the Doom pool is the actions of the players themselves.  The basic dice mechanic in 2d20 is that you roll a series of d20s (and, as the name implies, the default is 2), and try to roll under a fixed target number based on your attributes and skills on each die to get a series of successes.  Any "extra" successes can either be spent immediately to generate some bonus effect, or can be banked for future use.  In the case of the players, the bank is called Momentum, and can be used for, among other things, buying more dice on particular tests.  This creates a feedback loop--more dice spent on tests means more successes, which can mean more Momentum to be spent later to generate more successes.  But the players can also engage in "deficit spending" by giving the GM Doom points instead of spending Momentum on a 1-for-1 basis.  So, the players can buy the chance to do some big cool thing, or buy a chance to set up some cool thing down the line, by handing the GM the tools to make their lives harder at some point in the future.  And the Momentum pool usually starts at zero at the beginning of a scene, so the players are likely to "jumpstart" their efforts by buying Doom, especially early on in the scene.

This back and forth creates a natural escalation effect.  The players doing something cool usually requires the players to give the GM the tools to up the stakes and match the efforts of the players.  But, because this is embedded in a very transparent mechanical framework, it doesn't feel like the GM is screwing over the players or just "treadmilling" the adventure to keep things interesting.  The GM is playing the game "by the book" and according to the rules, and I think this aids in getting player buy-in.  And I think the constraints make it more fun for the GM, who gets to throw things at the players with more abandon, knowing that the players have some degree of mechanical control over the escalation.  If the players decide to wipe out the henchmen by loading up the Doom pool, the GM shouldn't feel bad about turning around and spending that Doom to cause more henchmen to appear, or making the bridge collapse under the players--after all, the players handed the GM the stick with which to club them.

The GM section of the Conan corebook goes out of its way to emphasize that Doom is not an adversarial tool, pitting the GM against the players.  That's true in a macro sense, as I think Conan is ultimately a game with a strong narrativist agenda, focused very tightly on the players and the GM working together to recreate the feel of the original Conan stories by Howard.  But in the context of a particular action scene, there is a sense in which the GM and the players are adversaries, and I think that's a good thing.  GM/Player adversarial play is usually seen as a problem because, as I mention in the previous post, it is by definition not a fair fight.  If the GM can just press the "I win" button at any time, then a competitive relationship between players and GM is ultimately no fun for anyone.  But if you give the GM rules and limitations, all set out transparently for all involved, then adversarial play can work, and can be fun for everyone involved.  After all, competitive board games are fun even though the participants are adversaries, or at least they can be.

This structure works particularly well in the specific context of a game that is trying to emulate the Howard stories.  I am in the process of reading these stories now, and the two things that jump out at me about them is (1) how scene-based they are, with cuts from set-piece to set-piece; and (2) how many setbacks and reversals they contain.  A GM who pours on the Doom and puts the characters under strong pressure in a scene, and then cuts away to another scene is staying well within the genre emulation dimensions of the game, so the narrative agenda and the mechanics support each other.

Ultimately, the real benefit for me of the 2d20 system set forth in Conan is that it allows the GM to feel like he or she is still playing a game, while also still getting to be a GM.  Yes, the GM is a story-teller, but he or she is also a player, and can feel free to push the Doom pool all the way to the redline, and thus correspondingly push the PCs to the redline.  Limiting the GM's freedom of action via the amount of Doom in the pool also takes away a big part of the sense of obligation on the part of GMs to dictate the play experience.  If you are getting burned out as a GM with the "story concierge" experience I mentioned in the previous post, then I think Conan or the other 2d20 games provides a nice antidote.   

Review: The Witcher TRPG

On the year-end episode of Waypoint Radio, the crew discussed the game of the decade.  Austin Walker, he of Friends at the Table fame, offered a bit of a curve ball for what is essentially a video game podcast and picked Dungeon World.  Walker's argument (go to the 31:00 mark in the Youtube video linked above) was that Dungeon World was the game that he played the most, and had the biggest impact on him via Friends and the Table.  But then he said something else really interesting, which is that (and I am paraphrasing here) Dungeon World is a kind of stepping stone toward whatever is the Next Big Thing.  And I don't think Walker is alone in this view--the idea that there is a trajectory of ttrpg design that builds on and evolves from what came before seems to be the dominant model in the loosely defined "indie" portion of the ttprg world.  And that trajectory has certain markers or touchstones, such a focus on narrative and creating particular narrative experiences and a preference for light (or, at most, medium) mechanical game mechanical "crunch."

But I think if you take a step back and look at the space as a whole, you also see a couple of other trends happening in parallel to the trajectory described by Walker.  One is looking at many of the same foundational games relied upon by the indie scene (i.e. Pendragon, Burning Wheel, Ars Magica, Apocalypse World), pulling out a handful of ideas from them, and then incorporating those concepts into what are fundamentally "traditional" ttprg designs.  13th Age, which I have praised several times in these pages, is maybe the most explicit example of this model, but even something like D&D 5e has echoes of narrative mechanics and ideas (another, more ambitious, example is Modiphius's 2d20 system, which I am going to say more about in some future posts).  But there is also a self-conscious retro trend, one that wants to bypass much or all of the design ideas that have come out in recent years in favor of older forms.  The OSR movement (itself an amorphous and not necessarily singular grouping) is perhaps the most obvious example of this trend, but there are others.  Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, which I reviewed here, made a deliberate decision to use Runequest 2nd edition, a game that was released in 1979, as the baseline--it is, in a way, an "OSR" game, albeit not one grounded in D&D.

All of which brings me to The Witcher TRPG by R. Talsorian Games.  For those who don't know, R Talsorian Games is best known as the makers of Cyberpunk, which in turn was picked up by Polish video game company CD Projekt Red as the basis for the (as of this writing) forthcoming Cyberpunk 2077 game.  This relationship in turn led R. Talsorian to get access to the fictional property that made CD Projekt Red famous, The Witcher.  I should say up front that I never played any of the previous versions of Cyberpunk and have no prior experience with R Talsorian's games, which I think is relevant for reasons I will get into shortly.

Reading The Witcher, my initial thought was that this is a game that is definitely, maybe even self-consciously, traditional in its approach, at least in terms of the mechanics (look-and-feel wise, it is full color, pretty, and feels very modern).  Characters are defined by nine core statistics, basically rated on a 1-10 scale, along with a set of derived statistics.  On top of that, characters have skills (52 in total) tied to those statistics, also rated 1-10.  The system is class-based, with classes bring with them access to a class-specific ability is that is functionally a skill tree.  Task resolution is statistic+skill+1d10 versus a target number or an opponent's statistic+skill+1d10.  Rolls of 10 explode, and rolls of 1 gives a "negative explosion" in a clever way--if you roll a 1, then you roll again and subtract that roll from your statistic+skill.  But there are lots of individual circumstantial modifiers to rolls, so there are usually four inputs to every check (statistic, skill, roll, and modifier).

Combat is an opposed roll, giving the defender options to dodge, re-position (basically a dodge where you move to a different location), block, or parry (harder to pull off than a block, but doesn't damage your weapon and imposes a status effect on the attacker).  There are hit locations, and depending on which location you hit you get a damage multiplier (x3 for hitting the head) or fraction (x1/2 for hitting the arms or legs), but that modifier applies only to the damage remaining after deducting for armor.  There are also two different types of attacks for PCs, fast (two targets or the same target twice) and strong (-2 to hit but double damage, which is calculated before considering armor).  In addition, when the attacker's total is at least 7 above that of the defender inflicts a critical wound, which grants bonus armor-ignoring damage and imposes a wound-based status effect.  There are also combat fumbles, and characters can spend stamina points to take additional actions.

Gear is a big part of the game.  Weapons and armor degrade, and can be repaired.  There is a dedicated Crafter class, who can not only repair things but can make new things.  Those new things are defined by a diagram for that item and a list of components (literally--forging an iron longsword requires 1 unit of timber, 2 units of iron, and two units of leather).  There are two pages full of charts of possible crafting components, and ten pages of charts of item diagrams showing how to combine those components.  Alchemy uses a similar system, with nine different alchemical reagents, each extracted from about a dozen different sources each.

As I mentioned above, my initial response to all of this was how old-school it seemed.  In fact, in my first draft of this review, I said "this game could have been written in the late 80s and early 90s, when I was getting into tabletop RPGs."  But I now realize that's not quite right.  Yes, the core mechanics and the focus on granular combat feel very early 90s, but it is clear that there are some very modern influences--video game influences.  It's been a while since I played The Witcher 3, but the alchemy system may actually be the alchemy system in the game, and if it isn't, it could be.  The quantized scrounging of resources to fill out your crafting shopping list is basically what you get in the Far Cry series.  The combat system has light and heavy attacks--just like the Witcher video games (or, at least, The Witcher 3, as I haven't played the others).

In doing so, The Witcher TRPG is engaged in an interesting form of genre emulation.  Many ttrpgs have tried to emulate literary or cinematic works (with varying degrees of success), and video games have been emulating ttrpgs since the beginning, but I can't think of a clearer example of a ttrpg emulating a video game.  In fact, way back in the days of the hot flame wars over 4e, "it's trying to be World of Warcraft" was a core talking point/slur of the anti-4e partisans.  Here, though, I don't think this is a disputed point--this game is trying to feel like and play like the CD Projekt Red games, and only derivatively like the books or the TV show.

Given the predominance of video games, this dynamic is not surprising, and probably inevitable.  If you did a free association using the words "Baldur's Gate" and "Planescape," I suspect far more people would come up with something video game related than name some D&D product from which those concepts originally appeared.  With regard to the Witcher series, outside of Poland the overwhelmingly predominant point of access is the video game series, and so that's the lens through which people (including the designers) are going to view the material.  Leaning into that makes a lot of sense, no matter what reaction it might generate from a certain sort of purist.

What The Witcher TRPG doesn't do is engage meaningfully with any of the influences or trends that Walker is talking about.  There is a very brief section that deals with "social combat," presented as an optional rule, that truthfully feels like a placeholder for some more robust idea or system.  Beyond that, there is basically none of the narrative mechanics or concepts that most modern games at least gesture toward.  There is a lengthy discussion of the tone and feel of the Witcher universe, but it is all in the GM section in the form of "GM advice," without much in the way of mechanical support for those ideas.  It's as if the folks making this game played ttrpgs through the 90s, switched over to video games for 20 years, and recently came back.  And, if you look at the history of R Talsorian Games, that's basically what happened--the company went on hiatus in the late 90s while creative lead Mike Pondsmith went to work for Microsoft, sidelining the company until its association with CD Projekt Red and the Cyberpunk game lead to a recent renaissance.  The primary designers of The Witcher TRPG are Cody and Lisa Pondsmith, Mike Pondsmith's son and wife, respectively, but the arc of Mike Pondsmith and R Talsorian Games feels baked into the DNA of the game.

Is this a bad thing?  Not necessarily.  There are a lot of people who do not like the design ethos and concepts that inform the "indie" design arc that Walker is referencing, and for them this kind of game might be well suited to their tastes.  In that sense, while I don't think it is right to call it an "OSR" game, it has some similarities to the ethos of those games.  Also, a whole lot of people love The Witcher video games, and not without reason, so getting a chance to explore and expand that space is going to be attractive to many people.  And the game does a good job (at least from my perspective as a casual fan of the Witcher video games) of capturing the combination of grimness and medium high fantasy of that world.  To that end, there is a solid setting section for folks who are not deeply immersed in the lore already.  The Witcher TRPG serves both of those audiences well.

But I also think many people are going to bounce off The Witcher TRPG, especially those who are coming out of the more narratively-oriented parts of the ttrpg pool.  It's crunchier than 5e, and while I wouldn't say it's at the Pathfinder 1e level of mechanical weight, it definitely adjacent to that space.  And if you are the sort of person who might think, "gee, I wonder what a Dungeon World or Blades in the Dark hack in the Witcher universe would be like?" then you probably should work on that as opposed to picking up The Witcher TRPG, as you are very likely to be frustrated by its lack of narrative support mechanics and perhaps a bit fiddly game engine.  It would be too far to say that The Witcher TRPG and the indie games exist in different universes, but they definitely exist in different ends of the spectrum.

All of this, I think, speaks to a broader point about "where ttprgs are going."  The answer to that question is clearly "at least a couple of different directions."  There is the trend that Walker points to, manifest in both the indie games as well as (in a somewhat different way) the culture of play coming out of streamed D&D--roleplaying and narrative forward, relatively limited rules engagements.  But there is also a retro trend, looking back not just to 70s-era D&D but older play models more generally--more rules engagement, far less self-conscious narrative structures.  And then there are hybrids and permutations branching off from these trends, incorporating other influences (such as, in The Witcher TRPG's case, video games) in the process.

I suspect that the power of the IP, the connection with the video game experience, and the crunchy, somewhat retro mechanics are going to make The Witcher TRPG a popular and relevant player in the fantasy RPG space.  Whether it works for you depends in large measure on where you see ttrpgs heading in the future.

Fantasy Religions, Part 3--Glorantha (or More Specifically, the Lunars)

When you talk about religion in fantasy, the discussion usually finds its way to Glorantha.  And that's fair, because I think Glorantha provides the most in-depth and complex presentation of religion in a fantasy setting.  Looked at in a certain way, religion in Glorantha is the whole setting, as everything engages to one degree or another with the gods and with the God Time.

I've talked about Glorantha a bit here, and there is far more to talk about than can possibly be covered in a single post.  So, to try to get something manageable, I'm going to focus on my "entry point" for Glorantha, and my favorite part of the setting, the Lunar Way.  In the last post, I praised The Blood of Vol for being a believable "bad guy" religion with believable motivations.  Well, the Lunars are the ultimate bad guy religion, so much so that there is a credible argument that they are not actually the bad guys at all.  But, even better, their argument for why they are not the bad guys is very likely to resonate with the actual people interacting with Glorantha--21st Century pluralistic Westerners.  The Lunar Way is, by far, the  point-of-view in Glorantha that most closely aligns with "modern" Western sensibilities, and pitching them as antagonists (at least by default), you create space to ask some interesting questions about Western modernity.

To unpack this, we have to take a detour into the core Gloranthan mythology.  Note that what follows is going to be a radical simplification of the story (for a more detailed, but still basically entry-level presentation, I would recommend the Glorantha Sourcebook, available from Chaosium), it only reflects the version of the story told by those living in more or less the center of the main continent of Genertela, and is something of a consolidated point of view of many different cultures (in in-world terms, it would be a "God Learner" point of view).  But the basic story is that when the world got created and settled, it was first ruled primarily by the gods of the Fire/Sky tribe, led by the sun god Yelm.  Yelm's rule was challenged by the gods of the Air/Storm tribe, led by Orlanth.  This conflict reached a climax when Orlanth gained possession of Death, and used it to kill Yelm.  This led to a period of rule by the Air/Storm tribe, but the act of killing Yelm opened the door to Chaos entering the world.  There's much to be said about what Chaos is (especially from the Lunar point of view), but for now we will go with the "orthodox" position that Chaos is an entropic force that seeks the destruction of the world, and thus is an existential evil.  Orlanth and the Air/Storm tribe gods battled Chaos, but quickly began to lose, and the world started to fall apart.

To save the world, Orlanth and his companions journeyed to the underworld to find Yelm.  Upon finding him, the two rival powers buried the hatchet and forged what is known as the Great Compromise.  Under the Great Compromise, the prior events, and the gods themselves, would in essence be frozen into an eternal stasis of endless repetition.  Yelm would be endlessly killed by Orlanth, endlessly travel to the underworld, and then endlessly rise out of the underworld to start the cycle anew (i.e., day and night).  By contrast, the world, and the mortal races therein, would be subject to Time, in which events would occur and people and places were capable of changing and dying.

Three things are really important, I think, about the Great Compromise.  First, the stories of the God Time prior to the Great Compromise are the "rules" by which Glorantha works in Time.  To take the easiest example, the sun sets in the evening and rises in the morning because it is the playing out of the narrative of Yelm's death and rebirth--not because of any "scientific" explanation or process.  Magic, at least the Rune Magic that comes from being a devotee of a particular god or goddess, is about embodying the stories of the God Time and making them manifest in the world in Time.  Second, because the Great Compromise fixes these stories in place, the world is in theory static.  Everything that happens in time should be just the replaying of the stories of God Time, with different mortal actors playing the various roles.  Indeed, that stasis is the thing that keeps Chaos at bay.  But that is only in theory, because the story of Gloranthan history in Time is the story of various groups for various reasons trying to "change the rules of the game" versus other groups either trying to keep things as they were or trying to change the rules according to some alternative, competing agenda.

The Red Goddess Ascendant

Which brings us to the Lunars.  Twelve hundred and twenty years after Time began, a group of folks known as the Seven Mothers (not all of which were women, FYI--there is a whole essay to be written on how Glorantha engages with gender in fascinating ways) were living under the brutal occupation of the Carmanian Empire, and sought some means of liberation and salvation.  Rather than following the paths of the established stories, they went on an "unguided" journey through the God Time, and managed to incarnate a goddess of the moon that was killed during the God Time.  This entity, who became known as Sedenya or the Red Goddess, beat down the Carmanians, and then wrapped herself in a chunk of earth and ascended into the sky as the red moon.

The problem, at least from an "orthodox" perspective, is that there was no red moon in the stories of the God Time, or at least not in the form expressed by the Red Goddess.  The Seven Mothers, in essence, stitched together various pieces of various stories into a new story, that of the triumphant red moon goddess made manifest in Time.  And, because she is manifest in Time, the Red Goddess is not bound by the Great Compromise like the other gods are.  As such, from the "orthodox" perspective, there can be only one explanation for the Red Goddess--she is a being of Chaos, a return of the dread powers that the Great Compromise was designed to control or limit.  The Red Goddess changes the rules, and that change is precisely the thing that the Great Compromise was designed to avoid.

To which, the Red Goddess and her followers essentially plead guilty.  Yes, the Red Goddess incorporates Chaos into her nature.  But, you see, this is a good thing.  Chaos is not the evil force that it is portrayed as by the "orthodox" traditions, but an essential part of the universe that acts to break up the otherwise scleretic structures and realities, allowing for genuinely new things to emerge.  By incorporating Chaos into her person, and by incorporating Chaos into the new religious tradition made possible by her incarnation, the Red Goddess transcends the rigid, fixed divisions inherited from the God Time.  There is a new order now, expressed best in the mantra of the Lunar Way "We Are All Us."  Difference and change can be brought together and harmonized, as manifest by the Red Goddess.

The Lunar Way, thus, is an inclusive, cosmopolitan, progressive religious tradition.  In a world that is largely (though not exclusively) patriarchal, it practices gender egalitarianism, and if anything has a feminine leaning and flavor.  Older ideas and ideologies are not suppressed, but instead incorporated into the broader tapestry of the Lunar Way (well, mostly. . . ).  It can fairly said to be multicultural and pro-diversity.  It was born out of oppression, and preaches liberation from narrow, limiting orthodoxies.  And, in a sense, it is the only tradition that even allows for the possibility of human and cultural development, and embraces the idea of development without reservation.  The Red Goddess, to use terminology currently fashionable in the tech world, is the ultimate "disruptor."  As such, it is the closest parallel to our modern, Western perspective in Glorantha.

Sculpture of Jar-Eel in classic
"heroic nude" style by Eric Vanel

What's that you say?  The Lunar Empire is deeply and thoroughly imperialist in its methods?  It uses terror weapons like the Crimson Bat to keep the populations of its peripheral possessions in line?  If you don't pay your taxes, Lunar Tax Demons will appear and drag you to hell?  Hmm, interesting.  Surely there are no parallels for any of those things in the modern Western way of engaging with the world.  I have this vision of Jar-Eel the Razoress, the preeminent Lunar champion, speaking in front of a group of solidly liberal New York Times readers, trying to convince them that they should really support the Lunars in their conflict with the Sartarites and other Orlanthi.  I suspect the line she would take would be "we Lunars are like you, and the Orlanthi are basically ISIS.  They are terrorists--for example, they summoned a dragon to eat all of our people when we tried to build a temple to spread Lunar ideas."  And, when someone in the audience brings up the Crimson Bat, she would be able to say "you drone strike your enemies, we use the Bat.  Just because the Bat shoots blood from his eyes is no reason to get squeamish now."

And that's why the Lunars are so amazing as a fictional antagonists.  At its heart, the ideals of the Lunar Way are not bad, especially when viewed from a modern Western perspective.  Their primary opponents are, at the end of the day, basically religious fundamentalists.  And if you want to criticize them for their methods, you end up asking some pretty uncomfortable questions about ideas and practices that many of us except without much critique or deep thought.  And by setting them up as the default antagonists, and casting the players as Orlanthi rebels, you get this wonderful arc of development--"the Lunars suck, we hate them; oh, wait, they kinda have a point; oh wait, they are kinda like us in real life.  But they still suck."

And, then, here's the great secret--the Orlanthi heroes that oppose the Red Goddess and the Lunar Empire are not actually advocates of a status quo antebellum.  They, too, are looking to change the rules of the game, just in their own ways and for their own ends.  The ultimate Orlanthi champion, Argrath, is every bit the "disruptor" that the Lunars are, tapping into the lost magical secrets of the Empire of the Wyrm's Friends (which had the goal of summoning new dragons, in order to reshape the world).  Like all fundamentalist movements, the rhetoric is about the past and a return to some stable equilibrium, but the reality is firmly set in the present.  And its not like the Orlanthi are pacifists, or particularly concerned with collateral damage--Argrath was so determined to defeat the Lunars that he eventually was willing to bring back from the dead the Gloranthan equivalent of Genghis Khan, knowing (or at least, Argrath should have known) that this was going to unleash unprecedented destruction in the Lunar heartlands.  So, the "woke" take that imperialism is bad and thus the Orlanthi are good after all is not free of major difficulties and problems, either.  Both sides think they are doing the right thing, and both sides are at least a little bit full of shit.

There is a segment of the Gloranthan fanbase that is sick of the Orlanthi/Lunar conflict and wants Chaosium to focus its attention on the rest of Glorantha.  This may make me basic, but I think that would be a serious mistake, as the Lunar/Orlanthi conflict is the most interesting part of the setting, and really shows off the best of what Glorantha has to offer.  Chaosium has promised a "Great Argrath Campaign" along the lines of the Great Pendragon Campaign coming soon, and I can't wait.  Lots of fantasy worlds promise nuanced, multi-dimensional conflicts and point-of-view clash.  Glorantha, and specifically the Lunars and their opponents, delivers this in a way that no other setting I am aware of does.         

Fantasy Religions Primer, Part I--The Religion of Critical Role

The great Matt Colville had a stream a while back in which he designed (or began to design) a pantheon of deities for his campaign setting, which got me thinking about fantasy religions and what makes them good or not.  So I'm going to give more thoughts about that in this post, but before I get into that, I want to begin with how Colville began his stream.  Colville made the claim that you don't actually need a fully developed pantheon of deities or a complex religious system for a fantasy game, especially D&D or one of its variants.  After all, the game mechanical component for clerics is a set of wholly abstract "domains"--all you really need to do as a cleric is select the "Light" domain, and you never have to worry about the gods or worship or whatever (that's exactly how 13th Age tells you to handle it, by the way).

Colville is 100% right.  If fantasy religions are not something that the DM/GM is interested in, it can be completely hand-waived away.  There are a ton of things that are just hand-waived in fantasy worlds--here's a great series on all of the problems of D&D economies, for example--and it can absolutely be done with religion, as 13th Age proves.  Or, in some cases an even easier solution than hand-waving is to just pick something "off the shelf" and stick it in the campaign.  That's what Matt Mercer did when designing his campaign world for Critical Role--all the gods are from the 4e default pantheon, plus Sarenrae from Pathfinder/Golarion (I noticed he got rid of the proper names for those gods and goddesses in the Tal'Dorei campaign book, presumably for copyright reasons, but I have to say I like the titles they came up with better than the original names).  The fact that Mercer didn't come up with the Raven Queen didn't in any way lessen the storytelling he was able to do around the Raven Queen.  World builders, especially folks starting out, can easily get into the trap of thinking they have to build everything from scratch, making the task seem overwhelming.  Instead, I think the way to go is to work on what is interesting to you and then just borrow the rest from someplace else, or just ignore it and move on.

So, you don't need to think deeply about fantasy religions and how they would function.  But some people are really into religions as an aspect of world building, and I am one of those people.  When I am not writing about D&D, I am writing about real-world religious issues, and faith is a big part of my life, so it is not surprising that this is an area of interest for me.  When I get a chance to play (as opposed to running the game, which is most of the time), I tend to play clerics or paladins, and I am one of those players who does care about the temple rituals and mechanics of the fictional faith, not just the domain and cool powers my character gets.  And while Colville is right that much of the world building surrounding religion is really for the benefit of the world builder and not the players/the game, you should do the things that are fun for you, and fun for me is thinking about how to make the fantasy religion seem as "real" as possible.

So, this series is going to take a look at fantasy religions, how they work, and some things to think about when you are designing a fantasy religion or implementing a pre-existing one into a campaign.  To make things a little more comprehensible, I'm going to focus on five fantasy religions as exemplars--the religious system of Exandria as described by Matt Mercer in Critical Role, the "Faerunian pantheon" for the Forgotten Realms (set forth, most recently, in The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide) and the religions of Eberron, both by Wizards of the Coast; the gods and religions of Midgard by Kobold Press; and the OG of religious presentation, Glorantha.  I could have picked others, either inside or outside of the greater D&D sphere, but I went with those because the Forgotten Realms is the default campaign world for D&D 5e, and thus the Faerunian pantheon is the default religious system for people playing the most popular tabletop RPG, Critical Role is the most public vehicle for D&D and shows how religions can be used in the context of actual game play, and the other three are, in my judgment, particularly interesting and/or outstanding implementations of fantasy religions.

But, to begin, I want to talk about Critical Role and how Mercer uses gods and religion in his world.  Note that I'm going to try to avoid spoilers as much as possible, but some of these discussions require some generalize spoilers of broad show themes.  I am also far, far behind on Season Two of Critical Role, so if Mercer has changed things up in his presentation of religion, I will likely miss all of that--this is primarily coming from Season One.

As mentioned above, Mercer borrowed the "Dawn War" pantheon from 4e and dropped them into Exandria.  The Dawn War pantheon itself is a mix of deities from previous D&D sources (Moradin, Corellon, Pelor, Bane, Lolth, etc.) with a handful of new entities to fill gaps (like the Raven Queen).  The Dawn War gods and goddesses are perfectly serviceable on their own, but ultimately they are just names on a piece of paper.  What is interesting about the Exandria deities is how they fit into the world and how religion functions for people in the context of the world.

The general presentation is that each deity is worshiped in the context of its own, more or less self-contained religion.  Pike, as a cleric of The Everlight (Sarenrae), is part of a church of the Everlight that is dedicated only to the Everlight.  Pike's religion is different from the religion of Lady Kima, who is part of the Church of the Platinum Dragon (Bahamut), with different rituals, edicts, organizational structure, etc.  Now, because the ethos of the Everlight and the ethos of the Platinum Dragon are similar, or at least not in direct conflict most of the time, these two religious institutions can cooperate and co-exist, as we see in a place like Vassalheim.  This is because, in part, it seems pretty clear that the members of the Church of the Everlight accept the idea that the Platinum Dragon exists as a separate divine entity, and visa versa.  Some folks are on Team Everlight, and some folks are on Team Platinum Dragon, and while I would imagine that folks on Team Everlight would prefer that more folks got on board with Team Everlight, the existence of folks worshiping the Platinum Dragon does not raise any internal theological problems for the Church of Everlight.  Likewise, while the worshipers of the Betrayer Gods are bad and opposed by the Church of the Everlight, everyone accepts that the Betrayer Gods actually exist, and are broadly speaking peers to entities like the Everlight in terms of power and scope.

The usual critique raised with a set-up like this is that it doesn't reflect how polytheism functioned in actual historical cultures, and that's true.  But Exandria's religious system as portrayed in the show is not polytheism.  The closest real world technical term is "henotheism," though even there Exandria's system doesn't perfectly line up with the real-world examples usually offered for henotheism because many of those examples (Hinduism of the Vedas, for example) teach that all of the different gods are ultimately different manifestations of the same unitary principle (whereas, again, it seems pretty clear that the Everlight and the Platinum Dragon are "objectively" different entities).  Actually the closest, if controversial, parallel to Exandria's religion is the way pre-exilic Judaism talks about the God of Israel.  If you read the Book of Exodus without the later, definitively monotheist pre-suppositions of later Judaism, the most neutral interpretation is that the God of Israel is a particular deity for a discrete group of people, one who is better and more awesome than the gods of Egypt, but that the gods of Egypt are real entities with real power.  Exandria's deities lack the hard-edged exclusivism of the God of Israel of Exodus (at least, in general), but the concept is basically the same.

So, there are some parallels to what Mercer is doing to the real world.  But, much more to the point, this system makes a great deal of sense as a fantasy religious system for a D&D game, both from the point of view of the logic of people in the fictional world and from a meta-game perspective of real people sitting down to a table to play D&D.

From the meta-game perspective, the primary advantage is that religion in Exandria more or less works the way religion works in the real world now, or at least in the broadly pluralistic West.  If you live in the 21st Century West, you are familiar with a religious framework in which people are members of one of a set of discrete religions, each of which has a singular focus of worship, doctrine, organizational structure, and ethos.  Notwithstanding the real distinctions between those religions, by and large they are able to co-exist and work together around broadly similar goals--Episcopalians and Presbyterians and Jews go to different houses of worship, but otherwise generally get along fine and have at least compatible world-views.  That sociology of religion is the result of a complex series of ideas and events, all of which entirely anachronistic if projected back onto a quasi-medieval or quasi-ancient world.  But, so what?  It's familiar to the people sitting down to play the game, and doesn't require them to take onboard anything about how actual religions work in the real world outside of their generalized experience.  And if the DM and the players don't really care all that much about religious questions all that much anyway, then you are not adding any unnecessary mental work to anyone.

But there is also in-game logic to this system.  First, the Dawn War pantheon is particularly well-suited for this sort of set up, because the different gods and goddesses are both broadly defined and somewhat overlapping.  In doing so, it avoids the problem of explaining why non-adventurers would ever be members of a particular god's church.  Consider the deity Bane as portrayed in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.  Bane is the god of tyranny and hatred, and (at least at one point--I'm not up on current Realms canon) was the exclusive religion of the city of Zhentil Keep.  Now, clerics of Bane make perfect sense, both from an in-world sense and from a story sense, as they are part of a powerful organization that believes it should rule everything in the name of a god who should rule everything.  But imagine being a shopkeeper living in Zhentil Keep--how does worshiping Bane benefit you or impact your life?  You could imagine buying into a kind of quasi-nationalism or manifest destiny idea--we are going to rule everything in the name of our god, and I am part of that larger struggle.  But manifest destiny doesn't put food on the table or insure that childbirth will be safe or any of the other real-world tasks that occupy the bulk of people's lives.  If the religion of Bane is only about tyranny and hatred, it doesn't really speak much to the day-to-day experience of an ordinary person.  And if ordinary people would never join your church, then it isn't much of a church.  These narrow faiths work better as cults, consisting of only dedicated elite worshipers.

By contrast, the non-Betrayer Gods in Exandria mostly cover a wide set of abstract ideas.  The Platinum Dragon is about justice and a certain vision of order and stability; so is Erathis the Lawbearer, and Moradin the Allhammer.  Those visions are probably different, but all of them could be the basis for a vision of society and social order, and so you could imagine any of them being a respectable religion for the Exandrian equivalent of the dutiful, upwardly mobile bourgeoisie.  Likewise, farmers might follow the Dawnfather or the Wildmother or maybe even the Archeart.  The only rather narrow portfolio among the Prime Deities is the Raven Queen, and even there life and death is fundamental to the experience and world view of people, so it would have broad applicability.  The point is that these religions are broad enough to encompass regular people doing regular things, and thus they make sense for regular people to belong to.  And the evil Betrayer Gods like Bane are more like cults, which makes sense in light of their more narrow focuses.  Many folks will not care about any of this, but to me this adds verisimilitude to the setting--a place where people live, as opposed to simply a platform for adventurers.

The other reason this structure makes sense in the context of a D&D campaign setting is that it takes into account the radically different religious epistomology of a fantasy world.  All real world religions must grapple with limitations on knowledge of the divine--how do we know about God/the gods?  In a D&D world, this complex question becomes much simpler, because you can just ask the gods direct questions and have at least the possibility of getting direct answers.  The level of mystery surrounding divine things is radically reduced, at least so long as you retain the default D&D assumptions about things like planar travel, spells like Contact Other Plane, and the like (which is why, as we will see, Eberron and Midgard both charge those default assumptions in order to preserve the elements of mystery).

Sure, the gods seem to intentionally give limited or incomplete information to worshipers--the folks on Lady Kima's team that went into Kraghammer probably would have benefited from more detailed intelligence from the Platinum Dragon beforehand.  But the fact that you can go to the gods and ask them questions suggests that religions in such a world will have more concrete, consistent information about the nature of the gods.  If there was some church somewhere that taught that the Everlight and the Platinum Dragon were actually the same entity, Pike could definitively clear up the matter directly with the Everlight when she spoke to her on the Island of Renewal.  Splinter movements, doctrinal drift, schisms, heresies--all of those things that are common in real-world religions would be much, much less common in a world where powerful religious leaders can just submit disputed questions directly to the source.

Likewise, being a low or mid-level cleric in Exandria (or any other fantasy world where you can talk to the gods directly) is much more like working for the government than it is being a part of the religion as we know it.  If you are a mid-level official in the bureaucracy, you are not directly communicating with the President on a daily basis, but you know that it is possible to ask the leader a question and get a concrete direct answer, even if you must do so through proxies.  In fact, in D&D worlds like Exandria, it is actually easier to do that than it would be in the real world, as the deity can functionally see everything that is going on and talk to multiple people at once.  So, you don't necessarily need to go "up the chain of command" to get your answer, and it would be much harder for the "telephone game" problem to crop up (someone accidentally or intentionally distorting the message that gets passed down from the leader).

This means, in turn, that religions would be much more consistent from place to place and culture to culture.  It makes sense that the worship of the Prime Deities is more or less the same across continents, especially where you have one central locus of religious worship and authority that has endured and maintained continuity from when the gods walked the land, Vassalheim.  But, again, Vassalheim displays a relationship between the gods that is more like the World Council of Churches than like a classic polytheistic pantheon--an alliance of essentially independent organizations as opposed to an interconnected and inter-related set of cults.  This center of gravity for religious practice would reduce cultural differences and drift, because there would be a singular, "objective" reference point for the proper way to follow the Everlight, the Platinum Dragon, et al. 

The bottom line is I think Critical Role's presentation of religion is one of the most sensible and "realistic" presentations of fantasy religion assuming you are working from all of the baseline D&D assumptions.  "Fantasy World Council of Churches" is probably what you would end up getting if the gods were directly accessible, you had an array of multi-cultural, semi-overlapping deities, and long-term continuity of practice and worship.  If you are looking for a model for how to run religion in a campaign world that uses all of the D&D-isms, particularly if you and your players don't want to invest much time or mental bandwidth in the religious system, what Mercer has done is a great place to begin.  It's a great example of "leaning in" to the rules material in building your setting, as opposed to trying to jam a historic model into a fantasy world.