Review of the Cyberpapacy and Tharkold for Torg: Eternity

A few years back I did a review of the first three rounds of supplements for Torg: Eternity--The Living Land, The Nile Empire, and Aysle.  Overall these products were strong, and I got the sense that the designers were getting their "sea legs" as they went along and the overall quality improved.  In the last few years. notwithstanding COVID and all of that, Ulisses Spiele knocked out crowdfunding campaigns for all four of the remaining cosms--Cyberpapacy, Tharkold, Orrorsh, and recently Pan Pacifica.  All of the campaigns had the same format as the previous cosm campaigns, so check the previous post for a discussion of what's involved.  This post will handle the Cyberpapacy and Tharkold, and I will follow up with the other two.

Cyberpapacy:  If there was ever a concept that was designed to appeal to me and my interests personally, it would be the Cyberpapacy.  As one can glean from the name, the Cyberpapacy is basically cyberpunk fiction, but with the Evil Corporations replaced with the worst sort of "burn the witch" inquisitorial expy-Catholicism as the primary antagonist.  I like cyberpunk fiction, and I am really interested in all-things related to Christianity in general and high-church versions of Christianity in particular, both the good and the bad.  So, again, right in my wheel-house.   

I loved the original Cyberpapacy Sourcebook at the time it came out, but having re-read it in preparation for this review, I get the sense that the designers were not entirely sure what they wanted to do with their concept.  It has plenty of cyberware, which is good, and it had some stuff about burning witches, which is also good, but it didn't really deliver a cohesive picture of the reality of the Cyberpapacy.  Part of the problem was that the continuity of the original game had the "cyber" dimension of the Cyberpapacy be a newly imposed innovation into the reality of Magna Verita (the home cosm of the Cyberpapacy).  As a result, all of this cyber stuff was actually layered onto otherwise standard oppressive psuedo-medieval Catholicism.  It didn't fit together, and that was kind of the point.

This new take on the Cyberpapacy abandons that altogether, in favor of a much more interesting vision of the linkage between the "cyber" and the "papacy."  Now, technological innovations come from direct divine revelation (or: in a slight spoiler, from other sources. . . .)  And, critically, from no other source--science is not supported by the reality of the Cyberpapacy, and is in any event completely heretical.  Cybernetics are seen as holy because they channel the Holy Spirit of the Machine, allowing the believer to shed the weak and sinful flesh for the pure, divine mechanical replacement.  Because science is not a thing, the feel remains very culturally medieval--monasteries are basically centers of manufacturing, with monks serving as floor supervisors and the assembly line workers basically taking the role of serfs.

All of this is clearly at least an homage to the Tech Priests of Warhammer 40k, but I think this was a strong design choice.  It makes the whole thing feel like a fully formed idea as opposed to jamming together two ideas.  A small, but I think very clever and flavorful idea is the notion of a "Piety Score"--each person has a numerical rating based on saying prayers and doing Cyberchurch-approved activities (ranging from "spending your Sunday volunteering to make cyberware" to "denoucing a heretic").  Those scores are displayed when you jump into the Cyberpapacy's version of the Matrix, the Godnet, as well as anyone who has a connection to the Godnet (which is basically everyone in the Cyberpapacy).  Reaching certain tiers in your Piety Score brings you access to certain perks, both inside the Godnet and in the "real world."  For example, the "Annointed" (Piety Score 1000+) have the right to use a personal car, as well as grow wings when the they are in the Godnet.  The idea of the "gamification" of faith as expressed with Piety Scores is both brilliant and perfectly on point for the setting.

Speaking of the Godnet.  As in the previous version, the Godnet is basically the Matrix, but with a religious theme--Heaven, Hell and Purgatory are places you can go in the virtual world.  In this version, Heaven takes the form of a seven level mountain, and one's access to the levels is determined by, you guessed it, one's Piety Score.  Conceptually, this works, just like it did in the original.  But, if I may say, the devil is in the details.  Netrunning/decking rules are a notorious pain point in almost all cyberpunk games, and the rules in the original Cyberpapacy sourcebook (and the associated Godnet sourcebook) were no execption, requiring GMs to map out a dungeon-style route to go through to get to the data the PCs are seeking.  The rules in this book are much more streamlined, checking in at only eight pages, and are pitched at a much higher level of abstraction.  

Beyond the rules, I really liked two other design decisions for the Godnet.  The first is the idea of "hard light holograms."  Basically, holograms in the Cyberpapacy take on tangible form, which allows personas that are in the Godnet to project into the real world.  This solves maybe the biggest conceptual problem in netrunning/decking systems, which is that they often become divorced from what the rest of the PCs are doing.  Now, "Nodders" (Cyberpapacy's version of deckers/hackers) can hack a holoprojector and fight in the real space beside all of the PCs.  It's a brilliant solution to a difficult design problem.  The other is to put all of the "paydata" that the PCs are going to want to go get in isolated monasteries or convents, isolated from the broader Godnet.  That way, PCs as a group are going to have to physically travel to locations to get what they want, bringing the non-computer focused PCs into the action.  Also very smart, even if the explanation for why all the good stuff is in isolated locations might be a little hand-wavy for some tastes.

Unhallowed Data is the adventure path, and it is different from the previous cosm's adventure paths. It is both a mystery-focused adventure and designed for the PCs to take the quiet approach as opposed to going in guns blazing.  Stealth-oriented adventures, depending on the personalities of the players at the table, may require the GM to "gently remind" the PCs of the consequences of breaking cover, and the adventure is clearly aware of this and provides plenty of hand-holds.  It also has a very well done Act set in a convent, where the PCs have to infiltrate the convent and the nuns to get access to the key data to move the story forward.  It also features the Godnet in a later portions of the adventure path, which makes perfect sense for the Cyberpapacy adventure path.

All told, the Cyberpapacy package takes a set of sneakily difficult ideas and fuses them together in a clever, accessible, gameable set of products.    

Original Torg
Tharkold Sourcebook,
with High Lord Jezrael
a/k/a Cyber Benetar

Tharkold:  I also went back and read the original Tharkold sourcebook, and I am reminded what a fun bit of early 90s RPG cheese it was and why it was one of my (and I think many people's) favorite original Torg products.  It is just chock full of big guns and cool powers and recycling trucks that will recycle people and a major bad guy named "Sterrett of the Blades" and some half-assed social commentary on early 90s Los Angeles and a High Lord, Jezrael, that kinda looks like a cyber version of singer Pat Benetar on the cover art.  Is it all well balanced?  No.  Does all of it make sense and fit together?  Not entirely.  But it is fun.  

With the exception of the Living Land (and arguably Pan Pacifica), Tharkold got the biggest make-over for Torg: Eternity.  Much of that change has to do with relocating Tharkold back to its original location of Russia (in the original Torg continuity, Tharkold attempted to invade Russia, was defeated, and then arrived in Los Angeles and later Berlin later the war).  Some of the change was a straight-up nerf--Tharkold is now inferior technologically to the Cyberpapacy, and no longer has access to religion and miracles, getting instead psychic powers.  But reading the Tharkold sourcebook, it is also clear that the tone and mood of Tharkold has been radically changed. 

One of the more subtle but far-reaching changes has to do with the nature of the headliner antagonists in Tharkold--the techno-demons, or Tharkoldu.  In the original version, the Tharkoldu are monsters, in the sense that they are normal, albeit magical, creatures native to the Tharkold home-cosm.  In this version, they are demons in the classical, theological, and ontological sense--pure evil incarnated into a physical form via the power of magic.  Rather than the eternal predators of the humans of Tharkold ("the Race"), it is stated that these Tharkoldu were originally summoned into the cosm from Tharkold's version of hell by the wickedness and sins of the Race.  As we learn in the opening fiction, the creed of the Tharkoldu is "the evil we do lives after us"--they exist to make the world worse, to spread pain and abuse.

In fact, let's talk about the opening fiction for a moment.  I will admit that I often skip the opening fiction of ttrpg books, as it is often not that great.  The opening fiction in the Tharkold sourcebook is some of the best I have ever read.  It's so well done, in fact, that I think it probably should come with some sort of content warning.  In a few pages, the authors depict an abusive relationship between Kranod, the Tharkoldu High Lord, and Jezrael, Kranod's (at the time) human woman thrall, and the psychology that underlies such a relationship.  There is a small detail where Kranod licks Jezrael's face, and we are told that he has done that so often that hair doesn't grow on the side of her head in that region.  That detail made my skin crawl.  The resolution of the story (which I suppose it's OK to talk about as the designers have talked about it publicly) is that Jezrael kills Kranod, and Kranod accepts this because he knows that he has so traumatized her that she will never be free of the effects of the abuse she suffered at his hands.  

The new Tharkold, expressed most clearly in this story, is in a very real way an exploration of generational trauma, and how evil gets passed down and transmitted across time.  That's pretty heavy material for a game like Torg.  But it also acts as a glue to the genre elements embodied by the cosm--basically Hellraiser meets Mad Max.  Both of the component genres are pretty grim, and the synergy of them is definitely grim.  To take a single example out of many--Tharkold's version of the Matrix/the Godnet is Kur, which is literally hell, populated by lost souls and horrors who must be bargained with to find the information you are looking for.   

Upping the grimness factor is the fact that Tharkold is in the midst of a three-sided struggle for power in the cosm in the wake of Jezrael's assassination of Kranod.  One side is the completely sociopathic Jezrael; side two is fan-favorite from the original Torg Thrachen, a Tharkoldu with big ambitions and an alliance with the Gaunt Man (the High Lord of Orrorsh and the leader of the overall invasion).  And the third side is the President of Russia, a former intelligence officer who wormed in way into power pre-invasion and has used the crisis as an opportunity to not only solidify power in Russia, but also invade and annex Russia's neighbors.

I mean, it's Putin.  I know it says in the book "President Volkov," but it is clearly Putin, so much so that I would just call him "Putin" in my games.  Keep in mind that this was written prior to the invasion of the Ukraine, which I actually think is really fortunate, given the apparent unwillingness of the Torg: Eternity team to engage with current events (see my next post on Pan Pacifica).  The idea that a "native" would use an invasion as an opportunity for power is a dimension that was not really present in the original game, but it makes sense and is a fertile field for game stories.  And reading the material in the context of real-world events adds an additional edge--as over-the-top as Tharkold is, it feels more real somehow.

As far as the game mechanical content, it is what you might expect--lots of cyberware (known in Tharkold as "occultech") and psychic powers and magic spells with a suitably demonic theme.  In a nod to the original game, there are rules for playing a demon who rebels against their demonic nature; unlike the original version, these rules are relatively well balanced, which is nice.  There are also mutant powers that come with random negative side-effects, which do a nice job of being meaningfully negative without being unworkably punitive.  Nothing is world-shaking here, but everything is well done and flavorful.

The adventure path for Tharkold is Blood on the Blasted Lands.  I have discussed previously that Torg adventurers tend to have a "theme park" quality, designed to show off all of the varied elements that a particular slice of the Torg universe has to offer. Blood on the Blasted Lands is absolutely an example of this, but it is a really, really well done version of the Torg theme park.  The PCs will be traveling across the Tharkold realm, hitting both the irradiated wilderness areas as well as the major cities.  One of my favorite elements in its structure is that it starts out as a fairly conventional quest structure to travel around and find clues about The Thing while fighting off baddies and dealing with horrors, and then organically immerses the PCs in the political elements of setting.  That's tricky from a writing perspective, and it is easy to make awkward and clunky, but here it is done very well.  Getting players to care about politics in a setting and getting buy-in for difficult moral choices is often a struggle, but I think this is going to work, even for groups that already drinking deep from the Torg lore.  It's more conventional in its structure than Unhallowed Data, but it works and is very evocative of the brutal complexities of Tharkold.  

I can't decide whether Cyberpapacy or Tharkold are my favorite cosms in Torg: Eternity.  Design-wise, I think Cyberpapacy had a higher degree of difficulty, if for no other reason than coming up with good and workable netrunning rules has been such a white whale for some many games.  And I think Unhallowed Data is one of the best of the adventure paths (rivaled only by the Orrorsh one, about which more in the next post).  But there is something about Tharkold's grimness and splatter-violence mixed with a more sophisticated-than-you-would-expect political intrigue that really works.  Tharkold is still every bit as fun as the old version, but now much better balanced.  Either way, I think these two really show off the best of the genre mash-up fun that Torg has to offer.

How Dark Is The World of Darkness?, Part 2.2--Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition

Part 1 of this review was about lore, and this will be about rules and my overall thoughts.  As far as the rules go, it is probably worthwhile from the outset to articulate what the general objection to the design of Vampire and the other World of Darkness games is.

Vampire, says this critique, spends a great deal of time talking about and promising to deliver a deep immersive role-playing experience, in which the players explore what it means to be human as their characters lose their humanity.  But Vampire delivers little in the way of mechanical systems that actually create that sort of play experience.  Moreover, it doesn't seem to be mechanically trying to create a particular play experience at all, instead engaging in a kind of self-negation at every turn by telling the reader that the rules are not really all that important, and that they (especially the Storyteller) should throw them out at the first sign that they are not working.  This is, by this school of thought, bad game design, as the goal of ttrpg game design is to build a mechanical system that generates the play experience you want.  If you as the designer is not putting in the work to make the system do the thing you promise in the lore and fluff, then why am I paying you for your game design?

Having now gone through V20, I think this criticism is completely fair, but only insofar as you accept the underlying premises.  If you believe that the job of a game designer is to engineer a play experience at the table, then you will find lots in V20 that will leave you scratching you head.  But, having gone through the book, it is clear to me that V20 are working off of a very different set of goals and a very considered understanding of what it is doing.  It doesn't engineer the play experience because it is not trying to engineer the play experience, as part of an intentional design ethos, not because of incompetence or laziness.

At the beginning of the very short "Rules" section (Chapter 5), the designers lay down a very interesting marker for what the rules are there to do: "Game rules exist to impart a sense of fairness  among story participants."  As the section goes on, it becomes clear that the mechanical components of the game are there to do two things (1) inject fun uncertainty into the story (after all, rolling dice is fun); but primarily (2) to make sure that the players don't feel like outcomes are being rammed down their throat by the Storyteller.  On the next page, there is a discussion of the difference between an investigation scene (where the advice is to forego rolls and just hand out the clue a la GUMSHOE) and a combat scene (where players would likely be very unhappy if the Storyteller just dictated the outcome to the players).

I can't help but see the strong influence here of the massive LARP community surrounding Vampire, in which game rules primarily exist to adjudicate intra-player disputes or potential disputes.  Here, the game systems are really there to avoid or negotiate player vs. Storyteller problems.  In this light, the complaint that the rules of Vampire have a disproportionate focus on combat relative to its role in the lore comes into focus--there are lots of combat rules because combat is going to be a pain point and place for disputes.  Whereas, if the interaction can be resolved without rules engagement, and everyone is going to be OK with that, then it should be done so without rules engagement.  Rather than "say yes or roll the dice," the ethos here might be "come to group consensus over what is happening, or roll the dice."

None of this is likely to sway the people who believe the goal of ttrpg game design is to engineer a play experience.  But, to be honest, I found the approach set out in V20 to be something of a breath of fresh air.  Games, and especially those games informed by the broad "indie"/Forge tradition, have become hyper-focused on a specific play experience, and as a result become very narrow, and even a little overbearing.  As exciting as I found the ideas in the Powered by the Apocalypse games when I first encountered them five or so years ago (hence the title of the blog), I am finding them (especially in their more recent incarnations) to be confining, a bit too much of a straight-jacket for the players and especially for the GM.

I'm also thinking about the time Critical Role played Monsterhearts.  Mercer and the gang (or, at least, some of the gang and some other folks in the broader Critical Role orbit) did a one-shot of Monsterhearts last Valentine's Day, and there was some loud backlash in the fan community that Mercer "didn't play the game right."  And, I think on a strict reading of the rules of Monsterhearts, those critics were right.  Monsterhearts, maybe moreso than any other PbtA game, is very aggressive in pushing a very specific play style, with very specific play experiences and outcomes.  To pick one example that I think best reflects the game's ethos, by rule an NPC or other PC can cause a particular PC to be turned on, regardless of how the player running that PC thinks his or her or their character would react.  This is usually talked about with the idea that "by rule, everyone is bi," and that's true but it is much broader than that.

So, I think the people saying that Mercer was "doing it wrong" are right.  But, would "doing it right" have made the overall play experience better?  Everyone was really into their characters, and I thought the session was very entertaining.  I don't think anyone at that table needed any of the mechanical elements of Monsterhearts that Mercer et al. admittedly glossed over.  Watching that game made Monsterhearts feel over-engineered and over-determined, full of systems that aren't ultimately all that necessary, or at least not necessary with that group.

Maybe they would have been better off just playing Vampire.

The Basic Mechanics

V20, like all of the World of Darkness games, is a dice-pool system.  The trend in dice-pool systems appears to be toward fixed target numbers--you need to roll a certain number or better on each die, every time, with difficulty set by how many successes you need.  This is the approach taken by Fria Ligan's Year Zero engine, and it is also what Vampire 5th Edition goes with.  V20, however, sticks to its roots by keeping the variable target number model--difficulty is modeled by sliding the number you need to get on each die up or down (with 6, i.e. 50% chance of success, as the default).

I don't think the variable target number system is inherently more complex or difficult to internalize than fixed target number system.  I think the problem comes when you do both--where there are two different difficulty sliders (TN and # of successes) and the relationship between them is complex and/or opaque.  We will come back to this issue in a big way when we get to Mage: the Ascension, but here I will point out that V20 doesn't do much with number of successes except as a narrative device--one success is a "marginal" success, two is "moderate," etc.  Some specific abilities (especially the Disciplines) have fixed success-level scales that are pretty easy to apply, though you are likely to be referencing the chart pretty often.

Most rolls are a pool equal to Attribute + Ability (i.e. Talents, Skills, and Knowledges--Skills in other systems).  One of the better elements is the concept of Feats--specific combinations of an Atrribute+Ability, a difficulty, and an outcome for a particular game play scenario. So, there is a climbing feat, a pursuit feat, an awakening (meaning vampires waking up from sleep) feat, and about two dozen others.  This is conceptually much like Moves in PbtA games, in that it is a discrete, self contained mechanical system that is triggered by the fiction.  I like it, especially since the rules go out of their way to say that these are basically a cheat-sheet for the Storyteller, one that the Storyteller can always modify or ignore at will.

PCs have two resource pools--Blood points and Willpower points.  Willpower points are probably the closest to Hero points or Benes in other systems, and do big things like give you a bonus guaranteed success, or overcome a compulsion or derangement (which, given that this is Vampire, comes up a lot).  It's also worth noting, given the discussion of tying setting and roleplaying to mechanics, that one of the core ways to refresh Willpower is to take actions consistent with the PC's nature.  Blood points power Disciplines, and heal damage, and as you might expect are recovered by feeding on blood from humans (or, other vampires, though that can be a risky move).  The pools are relatively small (5-10 for Willpower, up to the low teens for Blood pool), so they are not all that difficult for a player to manage.

One of the things that is noticeable from a brief look at the character sheet is that a Vampire character has a lot of stats and characteristics.  In addition to Attributes, Abilities, the Disciplines, and the Blood and Willpower pools, there are also Backgrounds (things like Status and [higher] Generation), Merits and Flaws, and Virtues.  The character sheet is very busy.  Here, though, I think the convention of expressing stats using dots as opposed to numbers actually works and pays off.   Yes, three dots is the same as a numerical 3, but if V20 and the World of Darkness games used numbers, the character sheet would like like an accounting ledger or lines of code.  I think the dots are more accessible and visually appealing.

Disciplines and Combat

Cool vampire powers are a big part of the appeal of playing a game like this, and the V20 book devotes almost 120 pages (a bit under 1/4th of its total length) to Disciplines.  The Disciplines are the definition of a mixed bag--some are very broad like Animalism (both controlling/manipulating animals and also the Beast), some very narrow like Serpentis (various snake-related powers).  Likewise, some of these Disciplines are associated with multiple Clans, and others are specific to the themes of a single Clan.  Each Discipline is rated on a scale of 1 to 10 dots (though, only 1 through 5 are accessible to PCs using the base rules), and each tier unlocks a new ability.

More importantly, given that there are 17 Disciplines and more than ten entries for each Discipline, the power levels and utility of the different powers are all over the map.  Many of the 6 to 10 dot powers are OP, but they are supposed to be kinda broken powers for antagonists, so that's OK.  The bigger problem is that you have to ascend the chain of each individual Discipline, so you have to spend points on some of the lamer powers to get to the good stuff.  It's also worth pointing out that a PC vampire is not likely to have the full range of Dracula's iconic abilities, as they are spread over multiple Disciplines that would take a a ton of experience points to gain.  Instead, PCs will have a couple of the Dracula tricks, or a group of PCs from multiple Clans will have all of the Dracula tricks collectively (and a few other weird ones thrown in).

As far as OP Disciplines go, let's talk about Celerity, which requires us first to talk about combat.  The combat system shows off the fact that this game is 30 years old.  I don't mean that in a dismissive way, and I don't even mean that the combat is bad; I mean that you can see that certain ideas have become ubiquitous in ttrpg design via their absence here.  For example, it's been a long time since I have seen a game that uses turn-based combat that doesn't use some variation of D&D 3rd edition (and its successors)'s "action economy," in which a character gets a hierarchical suite of actions on your turn that can be used for various purposes.  By contrast, in V20, the default notion is that on your turn you get to do one thing.  You can move, or your can defend, or you can attack.  If you want to do more than one thing, you have to "split your dice pool"--you must declare which actions you are taking, use the smallest pool of the selected actions, and then literally divide those dice between the various actions.  While this provides a lot of flexibility on a turn, splitting your dice pool is very punitive.

Celerity lets you add your dots in the Discipline to your Dexterity, which is good because Dexterity is going to be the base Attribute for most combat actions.  But, even better, you can spend a Blood point to convert one of those bonus dice into an extra action.  And, when you get that extra action, you don't have to split your dice pool between them, but you get full dice for each of them.  This is crazy good, and my brief internet research shows that this is toned down from the original presentation of Celerity.  To be fair, basically every ability in every game that allows you to break or bypass the action economy is OP, so it's not like this is some unique problem for V20.  And the number of extra actions is limited by the need to spend Blood points, so it's less broken than, say, wired reflexes in Shadowrun.  Still, it's hard to see how a vampire with Celerity isn't going to wipe the floor with non-Celerity opponents, unless the Celerity character is vastly outnumbered, as each Blood point spent with Celerity more or less doubles a character's dice pool.

Putting that issue aside, one thing about the combat rules is that they seem to play very fast.  Since each participant gets only one action, the round moves very quickly.  Plus, in something that surprised me when I saw it but I remembered was exactly the way it worked in then-contemporary AD&D 2nd Edition, you roll initiative each round and declare actions at the top of the turn.  All of this reinforces the speed at which combat is occurring, as well as pushing players to make choices for their PC as quickly as possible.  There is a frenetic quality to the combat, one that I think that fits well with the tone of the game--especially since combat is likely to be less frequent than in many ttrpgs.

Humanity and Paths

I should say up front that I am very uncomfortable with the idea of the GM/Storyteller grading the choices and roleplaying of the players and dealing out rewards and punishments based on his or her assessment of said roleplaying.  It feels to me like a power imbalance, as it's not like the players get to vote on how the GM/Storyteller is doing in playing the NPCs.  Plus, the GM has enough on his or her plate as it is, without having to take a discerning eye to the characterization of the players.  So, I don't like systems that require the GM to give out XP or Inspiration or what have you based on the players' choices and implementation of those choices.

So, I am not inclined to like the Humanity system.  The basic notion, set forth on page 309 of the V20 book, is "[w]henever a character takes an action that Storyteller decides is morally questionable, the character may suffer degeneration--a permanent loss of Humanity."  And then V20 doubles-down:

A Storyteller has carte blanche to monitor character morality in her chronicle.  This is a huge responsibility for the Storyteller, but one that ultimately makes for a great deal of tragedy and horror, as the characters gradually descend into a state of utter monstrosity though they desperately rail against it.  Storytellers, beware--players should never feel that you are screwing them out of Humanity, or consequently, their characters.  Use degeneration checks consistently but sparingly, lest the tragedy erode to an incessant series of failed rolls.

(Page 310).  Ehhh.  I get that moral degeneration is a key part of the themes of the game, but this is exactly the kind of power dynamics that make me uncomfortable.  On the flip side, it's presented as having such a central role in the game that there is a strong case for informed consent on the part of the players--if you agree to play V20, you are agreeing to let the Storyteller make those calls about your PC's moral choices, so you have no room to complain.

Mechanically, the degeneration rolls are tied to a Humanity scale of bad actions.  If the PC's action is below the PC's current Humanity rating on the scale, they have to make a Conscience check to avoid losing a point of Humanity.  This makes further degeneration less likely, but low Humanity has game mechanical effects--most importantly, it caps the rating of your PC's virtues, with means that Frenzys are going to be more likely.  This requires that the Storyteller keep track of all the PCs' Humanity ratings, in order to evaluate whether a particular action triggers a degeneration check.

Complicating things are the Paths.  Paths basically replace Humanity with an alternative moral scale, tied into a particular philosophical position held by the PC.  The Paths are conceptually interesting, in that they bring out some unique points-of-view that raise interesting roleplaying opportunities--the Path of Caine treats Caine as essentially the vampire Jesus, the Path of Cathari is actually a reversal of the views of the actual historical Cathars, etc.  The problems are two-fold.  First, the diversity of Paths means that the Storyteller has to keep track of multiple morality scales and the particular PC they are associated with if the PCs are part of different paths, which sounds like a nightmare (and something that I know myself well enough to know I would completely butcher).  Second, some of them are set up in a way that makes it hard for the PCs to violate, leading to what commentators have dubbed "Path of What I Was Going to Do Anyway."  Given how much the early part of the Morality chapter emphasizes the importance of these systems to gameplay, it's a little weird for players to be able to bypass the whole system with Path choices.

Does This Game Work for Me?

The short answer is yes, V20 works for me.  Themes that held no interest for me back in the 90s have much more resonance for me now.  In particular, I found the Caine framing myth to be very compelling, especially in the way it interfaces with theological considerations.  I won't get off on a tangent here, but the Cain and Abel story is a touchstone for Girardian-inspired approaches to Christianity (which is my primary approach to Christianity--you can read more on my other writing project).  So, the idea of Caine's curse as the foundation for corrupted civilization, violence, and exploitation is right up my alley now.  Sixteen year old me didn't really have any experience with obsession and distorted love, but now 42 year old me resonates much more with the ways you can explore the concept of the Blood Bond.  More generally, though, I think I'm less afraid of exploring dark themes and moods now than I was--and it feels genuinely dark, as opposed to performative and edgy-for-edgy's sake.  Maybe I just resonate better with what V20 is providing than I was before.

I also found the three page spread of testimonies about how Vampire affected their life to be compelling.  People clearly found community and safety and belonging from this game, and now reading the game, I get it.  In fact, it makes me a little bit wistful that I didn't try out this game and this community at the time when it was so big.  I absolutely looking for a place to belong and be accepted at that time, and I think if I were more open I might have found a positive experience.  Reading V20, I feel like I missed out on something.

As far as the rules go, I think they are perfectly serviceable.  I think the complaints about the game, while not unfounded, do not tell the full story.  The game makes some very intentional choices, and its systems are much more considered than the indie critique would suggest.  It's probably one standard deviation more complex than it needs to be, but it's not over-the-top or unplayable.  Moreover, it is designed in something of a modular fashion--you have a core, flexible dice system, some central mechanics, and then a series of take-it-or-leave-it systems that the Storyteller can add or ignore.  It doesn't do the things that a part of the ttrpg zeitgeist says games should do, but it works if you take it on its own terms and don't get bogged down in insisting that the game by "played according to the intention of the designers."  The designers intend you to use the rules as you need them; just do that.

V20 is an excellent compilation of a game that is a classic.  And, moreover, it deserves to be a classic.  I'm glad it's back.  If someone asked me to play V20, I would be in, no questions asked.  If someone asked me to run it, I would hesitate a little more, but I'm likely in if the group was all on the same wavelength.  Basically, I was wrong about this game.

How Dark Is The World of Darkness?, Part 2.1--Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition

In the intro post, I set up three framing questions for these reviews--(1) do these games speak to me in a way that they didn't when they first came out?; (2) how do the mechanics hold up in light of 25+ years of tabletop RPG design evolution?; and (3) how does the lore land in 2020?  I think it makes sense to tackle these questions in reverse order, so let's begin with the lore, at least in Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition (hereafter "V20") form.  Because this got long, even by my standards, this post is just going to deal with the lore and aesthetics, and 2.2 will talk about mechanics and overall impressions.

The Premise

This might be basic to the point of ridiculous, but the premise of V20 is that you play a vampire.  Vampires as presented here are more or less a pastiche of the vampire myths--they drink blood, they are immortal, they have cool powers, sunlight burns them, a stake through the heart puts them into a state of suspended animation called torpor (the first of what is an extensive list of specialized terminology, something that the World of Darkness is known for), etc.  Critically, being bitten by a vampire does not make you a vampire--you must have all of your blood drained and then be fed a portion of vampire blood in order to transform into a vampire, a process known as "the Embrace."

The core mythology of Vampire: the Masquerade is that all vampires are lineal descendants (via Embrace, not by genetics) of Caine, as in "Cain and Abel" in Genesis chapter 4.  The "mark of Caine" bestowed by God on Caine for murdering his twin brother Abel is the curse of vampirism.  The power of a particular vampire is defined by his or her "Generation" from Caine, with 13th being the default for PCs.  Caine and his immediate children lived in a city called Enoch, until the 3rd Generation rose up, overthrew Caine and the 2nd Generation, and then were scattered when the Flood (again, as in Noah and Genesis) destroyed Enoch.  Those 3rd Generation vampires are known as the "Antediluvians" (literally, those before the Flood), and are the founders of the Clans, about which more in a bit.  Caine and the Antediluvians are truly mythological figures, treated in explicitly religious terms by some, and viewed as fictions by others.

Another core concept in Vampire: the Masquerade is the Beast.  A vampire is, unambiguously, a monster, expressed in both the fiction and the game mechanics as the Beast.  When a vampire is hungry, or is put into fear from fire or sunlight, or just gets angry, there is the possibility of slipping into Frenzy, which is basically what it sounds like.

As far as feeding on blood goes, one of the more engaging concepts is the idea of the Blood Bond.  Taking a drink of a vampire's blood creates an emotional connection to that vampire; take three drinks, and you are Blood Bound to the vampire.  This applies both to humans and vampires, and so Blood Bonds are a key element of vampire politics.  As I read it, to be Blood Bound is to be forced to love the vampire you took the drink from, and the implication is that on some level you know the love is fake, but it is nevertheless compelling.  It's also, by definition, entirely one-sided, as the party you love has no similar feelings for you (unless they too are Blood Bound).  This works for me on basically every level, as a metaphor for every kind of distorted and dysfunctional romantic or sexual relationship, as well as for addictions and compulsions of every sort.  And, since this plays on some of my personal fears and insecurities, I found this to be one of the most horrific ideas in the book. 

In terms of V20 specifically, all of this material is presented in an easily accessible form in Chapter 1.  There is a useful pull out box that talks about themes and mood, mixed in with the presentation of the lore itself.  There is a lot of terminology and concepts to take on board if you are unfamiliar with this material, but it is logically organized and easy to digest.  Speaking of terminology, I was a little surprised that I found the bespoke terms for common gaming terms (the gaming group is a "troupe," a campaign is a "chronicle," the GM is the "Storyteller," etc.) to be evocative and flavorful, as opposed to forced and affected.  This, I am certain, is a change from when I first encountered Vampire in the 90s.  I don't know--I think it sets a tone and expectation for the play experience in a subtle way.  It's a small thing, but it's fine.

It's also worth noting that if V20 is deeply immersed in the metaplot developments from the history of the line, I can't detect it.  I mention this because Mage: the Ascension puts the discussion of the metaplot developments front and center, whereas here, if it is there it is tucked deeply into the background.  For newbies, this is clearly to the benefit, as there is no confusion as to what the current state of things actually is.  That's not to say that there is not depth here--I felt like I had a solid sense of what was going on and who the major players were.  But it was also accessible for someone like me who was not deeply immersed in the lore already.

Clans and Sects

The political dimension of the game is set up on two axes, Clans and Sects.  The Clans (of which there are 13, plus some "bloodlines" in the Appendix which seem to be mini-Clans) are the heart of what attracts people to Vampire, as the Clans are generally speaking reflections of archetypes of vampire fiction.  So, you have punk, Lost Boys-style Brujah, the animalistic Gangrel, the Nosferatu from the classic 30s film of the same name, the beautiful people Toreador, the aristocratic manipulator Venture, the charmingly monstrous Tzimisce, and the darkly religious Lasombra.  These Clans with a clear theme and antecedent are great--very evocative, and easy to latch onto when developing character concepts.  Some of the other six, however, are interesting concepts but lack a clear thematic hook.  Vampire sorcerers (the Tremere) and crazy vampires (Malkavians) is OK, but not as flavorful as the others.  The remaining four are weird grab-bags of ethnic stereotypes and play concepts that don't really work for me.  I mean "what if the Mafia were also vampires, and also necromancers?" is too many moving parts to be a coherent idea, in my opinion.  There is also the trickster, Romani-associated Ravnos and the Islamic assassin (in both the original and modern meaning of the word) Assamites, both of which come pretty close to line of perpetuating problematic ethnic stereotypes.

The 13 Clans

Despite some missteps, there is a lot of good stuff here.  Most people, I suspect, resonate pretty quickly and strongly with one of the Clans, in a way that makes character creation, at least the conceptual part, easy.  [I always make a character when evaluating a new game system, and it didn't take long to come up with the Irish former priest of Clan Lasombra].  The Clans are different enough that there is going to be significant diversity of characters in a group, and with a few exceptions each of the Clans is broad enough to create space that characters are not going to be pigeon-holed into boring, predictable archetypes.  Though I suspect some of the 90s-era designers of Vampire would bristle at this, the Clans are basically character classes, and generally well-designed character classes.  And it works for all of the reasons that character class work in D&D and other similar games--it's a flavorable, easy to internalize hook for making a character.

As far as the Sects go, there are a couple of smaller ones that are given limited presentation, in the form of the enlightened, detached Inconnu and the conspiratorial Tal'Mahe'Ra.  But the groups that get the most presentation are the Camarilla, the Sabbat, and the Anarchs.  The Camarilla are the Establishment, trying to maintain a stable, quasi-feudal society of vampires while keeping the prying eyes of humans away from their activities.  This effort of secrecy is the titular Masquerade, and becomes the first and greatest commandment for the Camarilla.  By virtue of that focus on staying in the shadows of mortal society, the Camarilla promotes a dark mirror version of human virtues and morality (more on that in the mechanics section).  They also represent rigidity and stasis, as the leadership consists primarily of very old, and thus very powerful, vampires.  This represents a bit of a conundrum, especially as the Camarilla appears to be the default framing for campaigns. . . excuse me, chronicles.  Because of the power disparity between the folks running the Camarilla organization in a city and the PCs, it's going to be hard for the PCs to take over and run things, which is perhaps the most obvious premise for a chronicle.  The leadership in your city is The Man, and you are very much not, and so you are pretty much a permanent underclass.  That's certainly dark, and not inconsistent with the themes in the rest of the game, but I think it limits the creative freedom of the players and Storytellers.

On the flip side, you have the Sabbat.  They are organized around two big ideas--we have to kill the Antediluvians before they kill us, and being a vampire makes you a superior form of life to the mortals.  The Sabbat are, very explicitly, a religion in addition to a political faction, and are organized around a series of religious rituals (including one in which a group of vampires more or less Blood Bound themselves to each other to form cohesive strike teams).  They, too, have a hierarchical structure like the Camarilla, but it's a little more open and fluid than the Camarilla, providing more political opportunities for PCs.  The challenge, however, is that the Sabbat are not at all bound by any sort of human morality, and view mortals as animals to be exploited at will.  So, while the Sabbat present some interesting ideas, a Sabbat chronicle is likely to drift into some pretty brutal and morally challenging territory.

Finally, the Anarchs are the rebels, either trying to overthrow the Camarilla or Sabbat in their particular city, or having done so, trying to govern things on more egalitarian lines.  The Anarchs are the least clearly delineated of the Sects, but also the one that provides the most freedom of action for players and Storytellers.  This gets to one problem with the Sects--they are basically mutually exclusive, as the Camarilla and the Sabbat are at war, and the Anarchs are trying to overthrow both of them.  So, you basically have to pick one of the three as the basis for a particular chronicle, as they don't really work or play well together without some serious contrivances.  As a result, no matter which way you go, a big chunk of the material in V20 is going to be relegated to background or antagonists.

Art and Aesthetics

Probably the most famous of Bradstreet's
Vampire pieces

Vampire always had a distinctive visual look, defined by Timothy Bradstreet's pen and ink pieces.  Of late, I have become more plugged in to the way games communicate the ideas of the game via a unified visual approach--Fria Ligan is the current king of this.  But Vampire and the World of Darkness was ahead of the curve.

V20 blends three different visual approaches--Bradstreet-esque black-and-white pieces, digitally-altered photography, and some more standard painted pieces.  As to the third category, there is a piece on Page 2 of V20 (I couldn't find it on line, otherwise I would have included it here) that shows Caine killing Abel that I found to be particularly striking--it feels like a genuine piece of religious art.

I also really like the photography-based pieces.  They are recognizably grounded in photographs, but the filters made them walk the line between aged photographs and faded portraits.  There is something ethereal about them, and they fit the mood of the game perfectly (my favorite is the woman in red on Page 4 of the V20 book).

The bottom line is that it's a beautiful, evocative book, and it communicates what the game is about, and more importantly how it is supposed to make you feel.

OK, let's turn to the rules. 

How Dark Is the World of Darkness?, Part 1--Pre-Conceived Notions

Everyone, or at least everyone who is likely to be reading this post, is likely aware that Dungeons & Dragons is in the midst of a renaissance.  The renaissance has reached the consciousness of people who are not ttrpg fans, several of whom have mentioned it casually to me in various circumstances.  This D&D renaissance, one hopes, will lift ttrpgs as a whole, such that the benefits of it are not simply limited to those who are part of the Wizards of the Coast ecosystem.

Vampire: the Masquerade [5th Edition]

But, of late, I have also noticed that there is a discrete renaissance in another ttrpg--Vampire: the Masquerade.  In a way, this is perhaps not surprising, as Vampire is probably the second most popular, and second most important historically, tabletop RPG behind the collective versions of D&D.  If we are in the midst of a tabletop RPG renaissance (as opposed to simply a D&D revival), you would expect it to reach Vampire eventually.  But I think there are other factors in play.   One is the release of the 5th Edition of the game, which despite controversy has generated broadly positive reviews from what I can see.  Another is that its own "Critical Role"--a streaming game that showcases the ideas and style of the game in a stylish and accessible package--in the form of Geek & Sundry's LA By Night.

This rise has gotten me to re-examine my position on Vampire and the entire World of Darkness game line.  Despite getting into this hobby in the late 80s, I was never a big fan of Vampire, and was only somewhat more interested in the World of Darkness games.  The majority of that, I think, was where I was, and who I was, at the time.  With Vampire, I found the themes to be off-putting, but I think more importantly I found the aesthetic to be very off-putting.  Young me was desperate to fit in, to be seen as normal, and so the very intentionally outsider-ish and provocative posture of Vampire was the opposite of what I was looking for at the time.  I wasn't ready to be seen as any weirder than I already was, and so I avoided those spaces.  Now, with the benefit of being able to look back, I think I missed out on something that might have been very enjoyable, and even beneficial, to the person that I was at that time.  Be that as it may, I basically became convinced that I was not a "Vampire person," and maintained a healthy distance from the World of Darkness and especially Vampire.     

Vampire: the Masquerade
 [20th Anniversary Edition]

In the interim, there has been another layer of ttrpg discourse, one that asserts that the World of Darkness games are bad games.  The basic version of this argument is that World of Darkness games promise deep, character-driven play experiences, but don't provide sufficient mechanical support for that style of play.  Indeed, many of the folks in the "indie" ttrpg design space will point to Vampire and the other World of Darkness games as, while perhaps a step in the right direction, an example of what not to do.  And yet it certainly seems like the folks who have been playing these games have been having character-driven play experiences.  So, one of the things I would like to do is to dive into these games with the benefit of modern rpg design "tech" and concepts.  Maybe they will feel clunky and discordant, or maybe some of the negativity is overblown.

Finally, there is the thing that really hooked people on these games in the first place--the lore.  My perception is that the lore is perhaps second only to the aesthetic as the reason people get "hooked" on the World of Darkness games.  And these games had a lot of lore.  This lore was also, intentionally, something of a moving target, as the World of Darkness was firmly planted in the 90s ttrpg love affair with "metaplot."  For those who did not live and play games in those days of yore, the 90s was the apex of the idea that ttrpgs were about story, and designers understood stories move and progress.  As a result, ttrpg designers would release a game that would set out the lore of the game world, and then release supplements or adventures that would introduce events that would move things along and change the circumstances presented in the original book, often rather dramatically.  This ongoing story made up the "metaplot" of the game.  The concept of a metaplot has been essentially abandoned by the ttrpg world now, on the grounds that it makes it difficult to onboard new players and GMs ("yeah, I know it says in the core book that Mr. Jones is the Prince of this town, but as it turns out Mr. Jones is dead"), restricts GM freedom of action, and makes much of the books you buy retroactively out-of-date and useless.  But, in the 90s, everyone was doing it, not just White Wolf Publishing for the World of Darkness--TSR was particularly aggressive in adopting metaplot via its novel tie-ins for its D&D campaign worlds, making the Dark Sun boxed set out of date in less than a year.  So, I am interested to see what the lore and metaplot looks like now, after it has all been wrapped up.

Mage: the Ascension
[20th Anniversary Edition]

It will also be interesting to look at this lore on its own terms.  While many people passionately loved the World of Darkness lore, even at the time some people had complaints and problems about some of the material.  The World of Darkness was trying, I think, to be edgy, and being edgy is always a hit-or-miss proposition.  On the flip side, there were issues raised about the less-than-sensitive-and-aware treatment of religious and ethnic themes (I hear that the book on the Romani people, titled with a name that I believe is now considered a slur, is especially bad).  And then there might be stuff that just doesn't work anymore, or seems especially dated.  Because the World of Darkness and its corresponding lore was very unique at the time, I imagine that things that seemed creative and fresh in 1994 may not seem so in 2020.       

I want to figure all of this out.  As weird as it might be to "review" games that are as much as 30 years old, I am going to do a series on the World of Darkness games as they stand now.  At 16, in 1994, I decided that the World of Darkness was not for me, but how do I feel at 42, in 2020?  How do these games hold up, particularly in light of the changes to the approach to tabletop RPG design that have occurred in the intervening years (changes that, in many respects, were generated in reaction to the World of Darkness games)?  How does the lore land now?

To make this a little more coherent, I am going to limit my look to the three "core lines"--Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage.  Each of them have robust "20th Anniversary" editions that collate and streamline the original games, and my reviews are going to be working off of those texts.  I am also going to take a look at the Vampire 5th Edition book, since it is an attempt to repackage the material in a modern format.  In looking at these books, I'm going to focus on three things (1) do these games speak to me in a way that they didn't (or I wouldn't let them) when they first came out?; (2) how do the mechanics hold up in light of 25+ years of tabletop RPG design evolution (fun fact--when the 1st edition of Vampire came out, ttrpgs as a whole had barely existed for 15 years)?; and (3) how does the lore land in 2020--still edgy and fresh? cringeworthy?  blah?

Werewolf: the Apocalypse
[20th Anniversary Edition]

To that end, a brief note on terminology.  In 2004, White Wolf "rebooted" all of their game lines with a revised rule system and (more importantly, given the nature of these games) new lore.  This "new" World of Darkness has become officially known now as the "Chronicles of Darkness," as distinct from the original [old] World of Darkness.  I have even less familiarity with the Chronicles of Darkness games than I do with the World of Darkness--I played two sessions in a Changeling: the Lost game almost 10 years ago, and that's it (verdict--genuinely creepy and disturbing, would play again with a good GM/Storyteller).  I hope to take a look at the core games of the Chronicles of Darkness--Vampire: the Requiem, Werewolf: the Forsaken, and Mage: the Awakening--at some point, but definitely after taking a full look at the World of Darkness games.  And, to keep things from becoming impenetrable, when I refer to "the World of Darkness" in this series, I am only talking about the pre-2004 games and those games who are derived or share setting with the pre-2004 games (i.e. the new edition of Vampire)--not the Chronicles of Darkness.

Part of me wants to start with Mage, as (despite my anti-World of Darkness attitude back in the day) I always thought the lore of Mage was very engaging.  But it seems silly not to start with Vampire, which is really the jewel in the crown of the World of Darkness.  So, I think the order is going to be Vampire [20th Anniversary], Mage, Werewolf, and then the new Vampire.  So, let's get to it.  

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.

Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition Review

[Update:  This review was written based on the PDF version.  I just received the hard cover version, and it is visually spectacular--the most beautiful ttrpg book I have seen, in a way that doesn't really come across in the PDF.  So, that's worth saying.]

Back in 2009, I was living in San Francisco, and from time to time I would pop into the Borders bookstore across from Union Square and just browse.  At the time, I had been out of the tabletop RPG scene since the mid-90s, but every once in a while I would wander over to the RPG section of book stores and see what was new.  In '09, the new thing that I saw at Borders was a glossy, black-spined book called Eclipse Phase.  For whatever reason it caught my eye, so I picked it up and read it for a while.  An hour later, I was at check out buying the book, and pretty soon I was back into the hobby.  There were other games that I picked up and played more--4th Edition D&D, then 13th Age, then Numenera and 5th Edition and basically everything.  But my return to tabletop RPGs really got kicked off by Eclipse Phase, and I have followed their line all the way through.

In 2017, the designers at Posthuman Studios Kickstarted a 2nd Edition, and they sent out the PDF version of the Corebook (the hardcover is due soon), and that is the version I am reviewing.  It is worth noting that Posthuman releases its products under a Creative Commons License for the PDFs, and so if you want to check out the 1st Edition materials, you can get them legally here. 

The selling point for Eclipse Phase, or EP, is the setting.  EP is a transhumanist sci-fi role-playing game, with strong elements of conspiracy and horror thrown into the mix.  The best short summary of what it going on in EP comes from the evocative tagline:

Your mind is software. Program it. 
Your body is a shell. Change it. 
Death is a disease. Cure it. 
Extinction is approaching. Fight it. 

Prior to EP, I had very little exposure to transhumanism and transhumanist ideas.  At least in its EP presentation, the technology exists to make copies of the consciousness of a human being, store it as data in a computer system, and then download it into a new body (known in the game as "re-sleeving").  This makes your body a possession that you have (and can change, if you have the means or access), as opposed to a reality you must accept.  These bodies are modified through genetic engineering into a wide variety of optimized forms, or replaced with mechanical forms, or dispensed with altogether in favor of existing in a purely digital form.  There are also uplifted animal forms, allowing you to play, among other things, a giant octopus.  Thus, while there are no playable aliens in EP, there is an enormous variety of character types, and the ability to move from embodiment to embodiment that creates additional options.

Anytime you engage with transhumanism, you are on some level engaging with questions of identity, and EP puts those questions very clearly on the table.  To take one example, in the last few years questions of gender identity, and associated questions relating to changing or conforming one's physical presentation to those identities, have entered the mainstream discourse.  In the world of EP, most people have easy access to tools that allow them to explore a vast array of physical presentations in a non-permanent context.  And this, in turn, raises questions--if I, someone with a male gender identity, could spend a week in the body of a woman "just to see what it is like," would I do that?  Probably.  After all, in the world of EP, that kind of experimentation would likely be considered vanilla, as your options literally include inhabiting a giant octopus.

The "extinction" bit has to do with the threat of the TITANs, a set of ascended AIs that attempted to wipe out the "transhumanity" ten years before the starting point of the game.  At the cusp of achieving its goal, the TITANs disappeared, for completely unknown reasons.  As a result, EP is a post-apocalyptic game, with the Earth mostly uninhabitable and policed by an orbital satellite defense system that no one is willing to take responsibility for setting up.  The inhuman threat of the TITANs also adds a strong horror component.  The default game concept in the 1st edition of the game had players serving as members of "Firewall," a conspiratorial organization dedicated to preventing another extinction-level-event.  Second Edition retains the Firewall campaign option, but broadens the focus--more on that in a bit.

The third major tent-pole of the EP setting is politics/economics.  Roughly speaking, the Inner Solar System (i.e. from Mars inward to the Sun) is controlled by a consortium (called...the Planetary Consortium) of business interests that push a capitalist line.  The Outer System, by contrast, is dominated by anarchist and other non-capitalist economic and political systems (most notably the Nordic Socialism 2.0 of Saturn's moon Titan).  These two sides, as you might expect, don't like each other very much, and are engaged in a system-wide "Cold War."  At the heart of this divide is the fact that nanotechnology allows for something approaching a Post-Scarcity economic situation, where a household nanofabricator can "3-D print" anything you might need with some power and a store of bulk matter.  The Outer System is all-in on these ideas, while the Inner System powers strongly regulate the use of nanotechnology, ostensibly for security reasons by also to protect their economic position.

Once again, I had very little familiarity with anarchist political ideas or Post-Scarcity economic theorizing prior to EP, and while the designers are pretty clearly on "Team Outer System" by and large, there is enough there to show off the pros and cons of each system in order to provide a balanced perspective and interesting story material.  For example, anarchist systems run entirely on the "reputation economy" to distribute skilled labor, unique materials, etc., mediated in part through online scoring systems.  In '09 when EP first came out, this seemed (and was presented as) mostly unproblematic; after ten years of social media ubiquity, it's not hard to see how that can be subject to manipulation and grief.

The final tent-pole of EP are the Pandora Gates--basically star gates that appeared mysteriously after the TITANs left at five places in the Solar System and which allow for instantaneous travel to other systems.  Different entities are exploring and settling these extra-solar worlds, discovering the ruins of other civilizations (though, no living aliens, apart from the slime-mold like Factors who showed up in the Solar System and are basically just "keeping an eye on things").  So, in addition to or as a substitute for Firewall-oriented play, you can play a group of explorers seeking out new worlds in a Very Weird version of Star Trek.  Second Edition also gives more resources for running a Han Solo-style "scum and villainy" criminal focused campaign, which is an interesting choice as it was not front-and-center in any of the 1st Edition materials.

As you might be gathering, the setting of EP is very dense and very rich.  It is a lot to absorb for the newbie, especially as it draws on material from less common ends of the sci-fi pool.  And, perhaps except for a pure Gatecrashing campaign, it would be difficult to run a campaign that doesn't engage with the political and economic ideas of the setting.  EP as written is clearly anti-capitalist, pro-anarchist, and pro-transhumanist, and while they are not going to come to your house and seize your gaming materials if you depart from that, the work needed to re-craft the setting away from those concepts is likely not worth the effort.

Having said that, I love the setting, despite not necessarily sharing all of those ideas personally.  And I think the setting material matured, in the sense of becoming richer and more nuanced, as the line developed.  For example, the original corebook presented the Jovian Republic in a pretty standard left-wing, unflattering characterization of US-style political and religious conservatives.  The Outer System sourcebook, Rimward, didn't so much depart from that as present things from their point of view, allowing you to see why folks would be on-board with a basically fascist state and presenting interesting (if not very nice) factions within that structure to work with for story purposes.

Second Edition keeps all of that good stuff, with the changes limited exclusively to the rules engine.  First Edition was a very crunchy game, especially by 2019 standards, showing off the influences of the designers' previous work on Shadowrun.  The new edition is still comfortably above the median on the crunch scale, but they made some targeted changes to bring it down a bit.

The biggest change has to do with how bodies work.  Remember, your character's body (known as a "morph") is basically a piece of gear in EP, and can be changed and swapped during play.  In 1st Edition, your morph provided bonuses or penalties to your attributes, which in turn affected your skills.  Thus, when you switched morphs, you had to in a sense rebuild your character and recalculate all of your skills.  Second edition morphs, instead of affecting attributes, instead provide points to physical, mental, and social pools that allow you to alter dice rolls or perform other effects.  So, instead of the Olympian morph giving a bonus to your Somatics attribute that effects every test, you get a pool of points to spend on certain tests.

While this does make morphs less relevant to the outcome of the game overall, it greatly simplifies the character management process.  The pools also push the game in a bit of a narrative-game direction, a departure from 1st Edition.  Spending a point from the Insight Pool allows you to automatically find a clue a la the GUMSHOE games, and there is a fourth, "Flex," pool that allows for things like causing a helpful NPC to appear or introduce an element into the environment.  I like these sorts of mechanics, but they are a little bit jarring for a game that is otherwise very simulationist.

The second change is to character creation.  The system in the corebook for 1st Edition was full-on point buy, with all of the time-consuming min-maxing that goes along with that.  It was divided up into packages corresponding to a character's background, but most of it was freeform spends.  Second Edition puts the emphasis on bigger character creation "blocks," with a few bonus point to sprinkle around at the end.  You can still basically build your character however you want, but it moves faster and it is less overwhelming for new players.  In service of this, the number of skills in the game was significantly reduced to 21 plus knowledge skills, which helps.  They also smartly segregate the points used to buy morphs from the rest of the character creation points.  In 1st Edition, buying a tricked-out morph at character creation was a trap option, since many adventures would require you to ditch your morph to move around, causing you to lose those points.  [In EP, the most common way to travel from place to place is to download your consciousness, broadcast it to your destination, and "sleeve" you into a new morph].  Now, you basically build your "ego" (consciousness), and then select a morph separately.

With all of the simplifications, though, it's still a crunchy game.  The basic mechanic is a percentile dice system using "the Price Is Right" rules--you want to get as high a roll as possible without going over your target number, which is your skill/attribute value modified for difficulty.  In addition to the binary success/failure, a roll of 33 or above that succeeds is a superior success, while a 66 or above that succeeds is a double superior success; likewise, a roll of 66 or below that fails is a superior failure, and a roll of 33 or below that fails is a double superior failure.  On top of that, doubles (i.e. "00," "11," "22," etc.) are criticals, either a critical success if the roll is a success or a critical failure if it is a failure.  This system creates a lot of conceptual space for narrating outcomes from a single roll, and the clean breaks make it pretty easy and quick to interpret a particular roll.  My one concern is that the distinction between superior successes/fails and critical successes/fails is not immediately obvious (though, the rulebook does a good job of providing concrete examples of implementing both), and I suspect it will take a while for GMs to get used to narratively describing all of the different permutations.

Combat wise, everything is an opposed test--attacker rolls to hit, defender rolls to dodge or otherwise defend.  Damage is then applied against a HP-like pool, and attacks that do a certain amount of damage cause more significant wounds.  In keeping with the horror dimension, there is also a parallel mental damage track, as you lose sanity through confronting inhuman horrors (though, in EP, you can go under the psychosurgery "knife" and get that fixed up).  One smart change from 1st Edition was to get rid of Shadowrun-style multiple actions per turn for high initiative results, which slows combat to crawl in my experience.  I haven't done a comprehensive comparison between editions, but it also looks like they paired back the combat modifiers and noodly bits.

Hacking rules are a notorious pain-point in cyberpunk and cyberpunk-adjacent games, and I will confess that I made a point of avoiding the Hacking systems in my previous encounters with EP.  Smartly, 2nd Edition EP follows the trend I've seen in hacking systems generally of moving away from making hacking a separate mini-game and toward a menu of actions that you can take to make the computer do what you want it to do.  This integrates hacking better into the rest of the game.  The rules for cyber-combat (called here "Mesh combat") take up only one page, which suggests that they are not going to be overly burdensome in play.

There are also rules for psychic powers, for transferring your character's brain from body to body, for dealing with different sorts of habitats and a variety of locales throughout the solar system and beyond, for reputation and social networks, and a bunch of other stuff.  There are a lot of systems and material, but there is a lot of stuff in the setting, so I'm not sure what else they could have done to streamline it more than they have already done.  And that really speaks to my overall take on the rules changes--it is markedly simpler than 1st Edition, but it's not really simple.  The streamlining is meaningful as compared to 1st Edition, but it may not be enough for many folks.

So, here's my ultimate conclusion on Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition.  First off, everything that made EP an amazing setting is unchanged, and if you have any interest in these themes and ideas, you owe it to yourself to check it out.  Even if you never play the game, it's worth reading and thinking about as a piece of fiction--it's that good.  As far as the game goes, unless you are a dedicated high-crunch fan or completely allergic to narrativist mechanics, 2nd Edition is clearly the way to go.  As neither of those things, from my perspective 2nd Edition is an improvement on 1st Edition in basically every way.  But it's still crunchy, and it's unavoidably "a lot," as new players and GMs will not only have to take in a multi-faceted setting with concepts that might be unfamiliar, but also a demanding (though, not as demanding as before) set of game mechanics that cover the sprawling setting.

Would I be willing to play or run Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition?  Absolutely, gladly--as long as I had players willing to "dig in" a bit to the lore and the mechanics.  There are stories that EP can tell that I don't think can be told in other settings.  It's worth the effort, and its less effort than before, but it is still going to be effort.