Gumshoe Deep Dive, Part 4--Swords of the Serpentine

Swords of the Serpentine, by Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner, is still in playtest, and as of this writing there is no official release date.  And it is grounded in a genre--pulpy, swords-and-sorcery fantasy--that is not normally my favorite sort of setting, or even my favorite sort of game.  But, man, am I excited about this game.  And, for this reason, while I thought about holding off on this until the game actually comes out (my understanding from talking to Kulp and the indominable Cat Tobin of Pelgrane Press is the ETA is the first half of next year), I decided to do a "pre-review" so I can gush about how great I think this game is/is going to be.

Let's start with mechanics.  As I mentioned in the review of Fear Itself, default GUMSHOE fits pretty cleanly into the "rules light" paradigm, as seen by the size of the book and the percentage of that book dedicated to game mechanics.  Moreover, especially in the early generation of GUMSHOE games (Fear, Esoterrorists, Trail of Cthulhu), the focus was on getting past the (often hyper-deadly) action as quickly as possible in order to get back to the business of solving mysteries.  So, on the surface, GUMSHOE seems like a strange fit for a swords-and-sorcery game that is presumably going to have an action focus.  But, if you stack lots of mechanics onto top of the GUMSHOE engine, you lose much of the benefit of the clean, fast GUMSHOE engine.

This problem has been addressed before in Ken Hite's Night's Black Agents, and you can see the influence of that game clearly on Swords of the Serpentine.  The biggest add is that each of the General Abilities now has a "Booster" (a "Cherry" in NBA-speak) if the PC has a rank of 8 or more in that Ability.  So, Warfare of 8 allows you to attack multiple targets; Bind Wounds of 8 or more removes the normal penalty for healing yourself, etc.  This sounds really simple, and it is, but it is a very elegant structure that makes characters with different arrays of General Skills feel very different.  It works so well that one of the bits of feedback I got was the playtest characters that spread around their General Abilities and don't have Boosters feel a little dull in comparison to the one's with Boosters.

The other big move that pumps up the action level is that Swords of the Serpentine works on the explicit assumption that players will use their Investigative Ability spends to enhance their General Abilities, and provides very clear guidelines for how to adjudicate those spends.  Previous GUMSHOE games tend to keep the world of Investigative Abilities very separate from General Abilities, and I would be hesitant to let players in most GUMSHOE games go hog-wild with using spends to get a combat advantage.  But it works and makes sense here, and it makes PCs feel heroic without really changing the way the system works.  It's subtle, but has a big effect on the way the game feels.

One departure from Night's Black Agents is that Swords of the Serpentine dramatically cuts down the number of Abilities, both Investigative and General, on the character sheet.  In addition to simplifying the on-boarding process for players, this move also enhances the genre "feel" of the game.  In something like NBA, drawing distinctions between different kinds of spycraft-oriented knowledge or ways of killing foes feels in keeping with the feeling of being a super-spy with multiple hyper-specialized areas of training.  Whereas in Swords of the Serpentine, the "Warfare" General Ability covers every conceivable way of making physical attacks against opponents, which is in keeping with the idea that Conan can do his Conan thing with whatever happens to be available to him.

The Abilities that do exist are dripping with atmosphere.  The "medicine" Investigative Ability in Swords of the Serpentine is called "Leechcraft," which is so great.  The "drives" mechanic in Trail of Cthulhu and other GUMSHOE games is re-interpreted as defining three answers to the question "what is best in life?"  That questions comes from the legends of Genghis Khan, but it is best known from a scene in Conan the Barbarian:

I love every bit of this--(1) it's very genre appropriate; (2) it's very funny; (3) it's a really good way for a player to get a handle on what their PC is all about.

But the atmosphere is not just generalized fantasy, or even swords and sorcery fantasy.  Swords of the Serpentine is situated squarely in a setting, and that setting is every bit as compelling as the rules material.  Right off the bat, the draft document gives you what I think is the ideal amount of setting detail, enough to communicate a clear sense of what this setting is about, without constraining GM freedom of action and creativity.  In this way, it is very similar to the default "Dragon Empire" setting in 13th Age--it draws the map for you, but it leaves plenty of blanks.

What is defined for you is primarily the city of Eversink.  As the name implies, Eversink is built on a swamp and is slowly sinking.  Venice, in all of its medieval glory, is a clear inspiration here, with canals functioning as streets and gondolas being a core means of transportation.  Eversink is portrayed as a classic fantasy "mega-city," in the vein of Lankhmar and its inspirations like Greyhawk, Waterdeep, etc., so it is big and crowded, with many factions, conspiracies, and intrigues.

Speaking of factions, they are built into the rules and PC design.  Each PC begins with relationships to three of the major factions of Eversink (two as Allies, one as an Enemy), and these relationships function like Investigative Abilities, allowing for spends out of these pools (as well as pool from which the GM can make spends against the PCs, in the case of Enemy factions).  This system has some similarities to the Icon mechanics of 13th Age, but on a much more grounded level, in keeping with Swords of the Serpentine's lower power level generally--rather than the undead Lich King of 13th Age, Swords of the Serpentine gives you the Guild of Architects and Canal-Watchers, a secretive clan that is pretty important in a city that is sinking into the water.  The faction mechanics allow GMs and groups to play a gritty, politically-oriented game.  If you asked me which ttrpg system I would use to run Game of Thrones or a Game of Thrones-like story, I would go with Swords of the Serpentine.  But the faction mechanics are also not absolutely essential to play, so if the group wanted to go the other way and just have high-adventure without any political elements, that would also work without having to rebuild the system from scratch (unlike, for example, the Icon mechanics in 13th Age, which have their roots dug pretty deeply into the game system).

Another defining element of Swords of the Serpentine, one that merges rules and setting, is the sorcery system.  Sorcery, by definition, involves consulting with dark powers--a sorcerer makes a pact either with a small god or demon, or otherwise gains forbidden knowledge from the lost Serpentine civilization of the past.  In order to learn Sorcery, your PC must take on Corruption.  Corruption can be spent to boost your spells, at the cost of either taking on physical deformities, or spreading that Corruption out into the world.  As far as a mechanics of Sorcery, the Sorcerer chooses one or more Sorcerous spheres to represent the manner in which their Sorcery manifests.  So, if a Sorcerer has the Luck sphere, he or she can produce magical effects that manifest as extraordinary lucky events; if he or she has the Stone sphere, his or her powers can manifest as creating or affecting rocks or earth.  This system gives players enormous room for creativity (if you squint hard, it has some resemblance to the magic rules in the White Wolf Mage games), while still imposing meaningful restrictions on the power of the PC and without requiring an massive rules apparatus for Sorcery--the entire Sorcery rules are 30 pages of single column, un-layed out text in the playtest document.

Finally, I want to talk about Denari, the patron goddess of Eversink.  Actually, patron goddess sells her short, as Eversink is literally Denari's body made manifest.  Denari is the goddess of commerce and civilization, and every mercantile transaction is a prayer to the goddess.  The brief section describing Denari and her church makes clear that she is the embodiment of capitalism as a religion--the priests and priestess of Denari preach on how to best calculate gross profit margin, giving away something for free is a sin, etc.  Here, I think, we see the strong hand of Emily Dresner, writer of the truly outstanding (and hilarious) Dungeonomics blog about the economic challenges of being a fantasy hero.  This dimension opens up space for Swords of the Serpentine to work as satire and social commentary.   As someone who believes that modern capitalism is, in fact, a religious belief system, this is like catnip for me--pump this directly into my veins.

I know I'm gushing about this game, but it is genuine--I cannot wait for this to come out and get this in the hands of more people.  It has all the simplicity of GUMSHOE, but with interesting and fun mechanical elements and action potential, wedded to an interesting and compelling setting that provides for real depth and complex story-telling opportunities.  Every part of this feels like a massive hit, and I have no problem acting as a shill and evangelist.  Be on the look out for this game in the New Year. 

Gumshoe Deep Dive, Part 3--The Fall of DELTA GREEN

I get it.  You're sick of Cthulhu.  Honestly, I am for the most part as well.

There are a lot of reasons to be burned-out with Cthulhu.  First, the source material is problematic.  And, I don't mean that in the edgy, "everything is problematic in 2019!" sense.  Lovecraft's work is actually problematic--he was deeply, virulently racist even by the standards of the 1920s, and many of his works reflect a deep xenophobia of the sort that bedevils our current era and its politics.  He's not exactly enlightened on women's issues as well.  Whatever you think of them, the Chapo Trap House games of Call of Cthulhu (examples of which can be found here, and here), while an intentional parody, are not that far off from the actual attitudes expressed in Lovecraft's works.

Second, I think over-exposure has dulled some of the edge of the Cthulhu Mythos.  I mean, I have a cute Cthulhu plushy sitting on the shelf of my bookcase at home that my brother got me for a birthday present a number of years ago.  It's hard to take Cthulhu seriously as an alien menace from beyond reality when he has been tasked with teaching little kids their letters.

Finally, there are structural problems with using the Cthulhu Mythos in tabletop roleplaying games.  In order to adequately represent many of these creatures in game terms, you have to make them insanely powerful.  But making them so powerful (especially in games that tend not to have quadratic power progression a la D&D) makes them difficult to actually use in the game.  Famously, in a combat with Cthulhu per the Call of Cthulhu rules, Cthulhu eats a random number of PCs every turn, and the PCs are unlikely to be able to do anything meaningful in response, as the PCs will be blasted with the enormous Sanity loss as a result of observing Cthulhu himself.  Actually encountering Cthulhu is a one round TPK, guaranteed.  And so, generally speaking, PCs don't actually encounter many of the more interesting elements of the Mythos.

As a result of this last element, tabletop RPGs that are "about" the Cthulhu Mythos are actually about something else (or some set of things), with the Mythos acting as a kind of background MacGuffin.  Those games are as interesting as the thing they are really about is interesting.  And, at a certain point, following a trail of clues up to the point where you get blasted in the face by an overwhelming foe, which is a simplistic but not inaccurate description of what many Mythos-based RPG scenarios are about, gets a little boring.  It is a testament to the skill of the adventure writing in both the Call of Cthulhu line and other lines like Trail of Cthulhu that they can make this basic formula work and be interesting and fresh, because the underlying premise is not inherently that exciting.

Nevertheless, even if you are officially on the "I'm done with Cthulhu" train, I would urge you to suspend that sentiment and give Ken Hite's The Fall of DELTA GREEN a chance.  Hite understands, or at least seems to understand, the idea that Cthulhu games have to have something in the foreground that is not Cthulhu in order to work.  So, while The Fall of DELTA GREEN on one level about fighting the infiltration of the Cthulhu Mythos into our world, it is really about the 1960s.  More specifically, it is about the 1960s in the United States, and how the 1960s eroded the essentially unbounded confidence that Americans had in their country that was inherited from World War II.

The key to The Fall of DELTA GREEN and why it works is that it uses the Cthulhu Mythos as a way to supplement and "turn up the temperature" on events and ideas that are already present in the 1960s.  Telling a story about Vietnam is in many ways already a horror story; adding the supernatural elements just highlights what is already there.  There are many very valid reasons to lose faith the U.S. government through the course of the 60s, so adding on top of all the other reasons the idea that there is a secret conspiratorial organization within the government that is researching alien technology and magic ("hypergeometry" in the language of the game) just puts a finer point on things.  There is a natural marriage between the sense of alienation that comes as a result of the actual historical events of the 1960s and the alienation embodied in the Mythos, and that marriage is why The Fall of DELTA GREEN is so compelling.

This dual sense of alienation is furthered by the fact that the PCs are agents of the U.S. government, members of unacknowledged agency DELTA GREEN dedicated to hunting down and destroying elements of the Mythos.  As such, PCs are placed in a front-row seat to watch things go down the toilet, both in the world generally and in terms of their own particular situation.  The default starting year is 1968, a year which in many ways represents the tipping-point beyond which no one could deny that the halycon days of the immediate post-War period were firmly in the rear-view mirror.  Even better, The Fall of DELTA GREEN fits within the broader DELTA GREEN universe, which states that the DELTA GREEN was shut down by the Pentagon in 1970.  In other words, the organization you are working for is literally at the end of its rope, but no one knows it at the time.  I'm not going to tell anyone how to run their games, but I would favor telling my players this fact ahead of time, as a way to emphasize the idea that this is the "fiddling while Rome burns" phase of things.

So, The Fall of DELTA GREEN is a dark game and setting.  But, unlike so many fictional settings that try to be dark, this game is very understated.  There are no cheap and contrived "edgy" set-pieces put in for shock value.  Instead, it lets the source material do the work.  The intro adventure that comes in the corebook is set in part in the tunnels used by the Vietcong, which is an inherently scary location even before you introduce elements of the Mythos.  War, racism, political violence, social unrest--all of these things are right there, in real life, waiting to be mined as the base for the supernatural to be layered on top.  The events of the late 1960s are so wild on their own that scenario design seems to me to consist of finding some crazy event that really occurred in history, brainstorming the most paranoid explanation for that event, and running with it.  Two hours after putting the book down for the first time, I had eight pages of notes on the how the Mythos ties into the Kennedy assassination, and had Oliver Stone's JFK queued up on Amazon Prime to mine for more material, all ready to be used in a campaign.

Another dimension to The Fall of DELTA GREEN, and a reason I think the game resonated with me, is that the 1960s are the perfect distance away to tell stories that have resonances with the present.  I don't think many are going to find this controversial, but I feel like we are living in another period in which people are experiencing alienation as a result of being let down by institutions and governments.  But it is hard to write about, or even really engage with, events as they are unfolding, because you are too close to them and it is hard/impossible to see the full picture to construct narratives.  The 1960s, however, are firmly in the past, and so they can be seen as a whole, with a sense of remove.  At the same time, it is familiar enough and similar enough to the situate we have now that GMs and players can make easy comparisons with things happening right now.  I suspect that running a few games of The Fall of DELTA GREEN, while perhaps not always "fun" in a conventional sense, might be cathartic for many people in 2019.

Mechanically, The Fall of DELTA GREEN hews pretty close to the GUMSHOE baseline.  Players pick a background specialty that lines up with their prior military or other government service before they were recruited into DELTA GREEN, and this background gives them a spread of Investigative and General Abilities (a system used, in one form or another, in many GUMSHOE games, including Ashen Stars and Trail of Cthulhu).  These are then tweaked with a few more points to spend, and then the character is good to go.  In terms of new elements, The Fall of DELTA GREEN has more extensive combat rules than the baseline GUMSHOE, but unlike Hite's own Night's Black Agents and the forthcoming Swords of the Serpentine which push the action in a more cinematic direction, these combat elements mostly revolve around making combat more violent and deadly, adding critical hits and the "insta-death" Lethality rules.  All of which is well within the tone and feel that the game is going for, without bogging things down too much.  It's still GUMSHOE, it still moves fast, but now with more options and approaches to take when fighting it out.

The other new mechanical piece, and probably my favorite thing in the game besides the setting, is the Bonds and Personal Life system.  At character creation, the player designates Bonds with people, places, and organizations (like a church or other body).  After missions, the player and the GM play out short scenes of what the PC is doing during downtime, and one thing that the player can do is spent time with those Bonds to repair or reinforce those connections.  The mechanics of the game, especially the Stability rules, create a kind of gravitational pull that wears away those Bonds, and so spending your PCs downtime with those Bonds keeps them strong.  But, spending time on our Bonds means you are not spending time doing additional research into the Mythos or other tasks that might help you on future missions, so there are real cost/benefit considerations to maintaining your Bonds.  As a result, many if not most PCs will see their connects with friends and family slowly erode during the course of play, which really reinforces the theme of alienation, while still ultimately leaving it in the hands of the player and avoiding heavy-handed intervention by the GM.  It's very elegant and fits perfectly with the rest of the game.

One last point--I have seen some reviews describe the physical presentation of the book as "amateurish," but I could not disagree more.  I think The Fall of DELTA GREEN is one of the most beautiful books Pelgrane has produced, and the layout and art design fit perfectly with the aesthetic.  The design is going for the random-pages-from-a-dossier look (a common choice for espionage games), but everything is washed through a sepia-toned lens that invokes films and television from that era.  The art is intentionally fuzzy and out of focus, heightening the weirdness and dislocation.

The Fall of DELTA GREEN won the Ennie Award for best setting a couple of weeks ago at Gencon, and it is well-deserved.  It is a deeply flavorful game that works even for those who are not otherwise massive Cthulhu fans, and the 1960s setting is a perfect fit for the tone and themes the game is going for.  The system shows off the flexibility of GUMSHOE, and is well paired with the setting.  The Fall of DELTA GREEN is not one of the most prominent GUMSHOE games, but it is a gem, and well worth a look.

Review of The Living Land, Nile Empire and Aysle for Torg: Eternity

A while back, I wrote a review of Torg: Eternity, the ambitious and (IME) successful re-imagining and reboot of the early 90s classic Torg.  In my review, I mentioned that there were plans for rounds of expansions for each of of the settings, or "Cosms" in Torg-speak.  Thus far, two of the seven Cosms--the Living Land, and the Nile Empire--has been released to the public, while the third--Aysle--has completed its Kickstarter and sent out the drafts of the core products to backers (of which I am one).  So, I figured now was a good time to check in and see where the game is and what we can look forward to in the future.  Because I am going to review three waves of products, I figured it would make sense to make some general comments and then get into each product.

The Kickstarters and the Kickstarter Model:  The base Torg: Eternity game was Kickstarted back in 2017, and was built around a package that the Ulisses Spiele folks called "the Cargo Box."  The Cargo Box for the original Torg: Eternity Kickstarter was a massive 12" x 9" x 8" box made of high-quality cardboard that weighed about 12 pounds fully loaded.  In addition to the hardcover Core Rulebook, the Cargo Box contained two hardcover adventure books, a GM screen, the Drama Deck of cards necessary to play the game, a commissioned soundtrack, and a wide assortment of chips, tokens, and other games aids.  The Cargo Box was and is an extremely impressive physical product, made with high quality materials and a ton of useful features.

This model has been replicated for each of the Cosms--a dedicated Kickstarter, centered around a Cargo Box consisting of a sourcebook for the Cosm, one long, 7-10 session adventure set in the Cosm and one compilation of short adventures (though Aysle has two long adventures), a GM screen, a soundtrack, more Drama Deck cards, and a bunch of accessories.  While I bought the Cargo Box for the first Kickstarter, I have gone for a lesser tier for the Cosm Kickstarters, in the form of the sourcebook in hardcover, pick-and-choose the accessories, and the rest in PDF.  This is in part for budgetary reasons (the Cargo Box was a $175 pledge for the first three, up to 175 Euros for the Aysle round due to the extra hardcover book), but more out of despair for finding storage space for a series of massive boxes of stuff.  Having seen the Cargo Boxes for the Living Land and the Nile Empire "in the wild," they appear to be every bit as impressive physical products as the original, and I am really tempted to go in for a Cargo Box on the next round.

The multiple sequential rounds of Kickstarters and the need to produce a massive product like a Cargo Box has made the release schedule slower than many fans were hoping for.  To be fair, these Torg: Eternity Kickstarters have had very fast turn around times--5 1/2 months between end of the Kickstarter and product shipping for Living Land, about 6 for Nile Empire.  Going forward beginning with Cyberpapacy, they are promised even shorter 4 month intervals between Kickstarters, which is crazy-fast (to put this is perspective, and I hate to drag Heinsoo and Tweet, but it was three years and nine months between the close of the 13th Age in Glorantha Kickstarter and my receipt of the physical product).  A big part of how the Ulisses folks pull this off is that the text of the sourcebook and the other big written products are done prior to the start of the Kickstarter--which is why the draft Aysle sourcebook arrived in my inbox a couple of hours after the close of the Kickstarter on Monday.  That kind of instant feedback is great, and avoids the feeling that you have thrown your money into the void.


Cosm Sourcebooks in General:  While the original Torg boxed set was certainly playable by itself, the original game in many respects wasn't complete until the six Cosm sourcebooks were released (six, because in the original Torg timeline the seventh invading Cosm, Tharkold, was initially defeated, and doesn't reappear until two years into the war).  This is, in part, because Torg is such a big, sprawling thing that you simply need more page count to flesh out each of the Cosms.  But in the first incarnation, it was also clear that the writers of the Cosm books were "making it up as they went along," building out each of these Cosms as the books came out.  As a result, the Cosm books were literally necessary, as they contained critical rules needed to play and make characters in the Cosm.  This also had the effect of retroactively making some of the material in the box set obsolete--famously, the final encounter in the introductory adventure in the boxed set is essentially unplayable if you use the Power of Fear rules from the Orrorsh Sourcebook.

The Cosm sourcebooks for the original game also varied in quality.  From my perspective, Nile Empire (except for the gadget rules) and the Cyberpapacy were excellent, Orrorsh had great lore but poor, complicated rules, the later Tharkold book also had great lore but was completely OP, Aysle and Nippon Tech (now "Pan Pacifica") was hit-or-miss, and the Living Land was poor.

With all of this in mind, the Cosm books for Torg: Eternity follow the trajectory set out by their predecessors for original Torg.  Most importantly, the Cosm sourcebooks provide 144 pages of additional page count to fill in the blanks for their respective Cosms.  I'll get into more detail with each of the respective books, but as a whole they do a great job of being very focused on what is going on in the invasion zones, and thus on the material that is immediately "game-able" as opposed to background lore.

They also provide more game mechanical material.  Unlike in the first go around, however, there are no instances of "remove and replace" that invalidate material in the Corebook.  Instead, everything is tacked on to the existing framework laid out the Corebook.  It's here we see the effects of one of the smartest changes introduced in Torg: Eternity, the unified Perk system.  Every character ability that is not a Skill or Attribute is expressed in a Perk--magic, miracles, cyberware, and a whole host of Cosm-specific abilities and doo-dads.  Because each Perk is a discrete, modular bit of game mechanics, the Cosm sourcebooks can add a bunch of new options without invalidating the previous material by trotting out new Perks, which is in fact a big part of all three Cosm sourcebooks.

To the extent there is brand new material, it is layered on top of existing material and enhances ideas and themes that are already there.  One of my favorite things are the new Drama Decks that come with each Cosm.  The Drama Deck is the lynchpin of what makes Torg unique and great--instead of rolling initiative or similar mechanics, for each round of combat or other dramatic scene, the GM flips over a card that controls initiative, provides bonuses and penalties to the Heroes and/or Villains, and regulates other elements of the round.  The Drama Deck makes each round of combat unique and unpredictable, avoiding the often tedious slog that combat in tabletop RPGs can become.

The Cosm-specific Drama Decks are card-for-card replacements for the existing Drama Deck that add, on top of all the existing Drama Deck elements, a Cosm-specific condition that affects both the Heroes and Villains during the round.  So, Card #1 in the Nile Empire deck makes every Air Vehicles test Favored (in D&D terms, rolling with Advantage), but all planes must make a Check to avoid colliding with another plane or the ground.  Because the new deck is just like the old deck plus the condition (and new art), you can use or not use the Cosm deck without changing the fundamental game flow.  The diversity of Cosms is the heart of what makes Torg great, and anything that makes playing in each Cosm feel distinctive and unique makes the game better.  The designers get that, which is good to see.

The Living Land:  I pretty confident I am not alone in rating the Living Land sourcebook as the weakest of the original Torg books. It's clear they had an initial idea--a Lost World of jungles and dinosaurs--but then didn't really know what to do with that basic concept.  Perhaps more to the point, the original Living Land was just not a fun place to set games in.  In addition to very low levels of technology, social organization (which, if you are a real stickler, makes it hard to organize things--like adventures), and magic, there were World Laws that basically were just vehicles for the GM to troll the players.  The Law of Decay caused items to randomly be lost from the PC's inventories and food to spoil, while the Deep Mist made it hard to get from place to place and easy to get lost.  It just wasn't fun or interesting, and the writers in the original continuity seemed to recognize this by making the Living Land the perennial whipping boy, turning the whole thing into something of a joke.

So, the Torg: Eternity crew had a lot of work to do with the Living Land.  Much of the rebuild can be seen in the Corebook, where the World Laws were revised to make them more playable and fun, and the dominant religion was tweaked to be a little more "user friendly."  The Living Land Sourcebook extends this project, in a couple of ways.  First, it goes into pretty significant detail about the various tribes of Edeinos (the lizard folks that are the dominant inhabitants of the Living Land Cosm), and does a good job of making each one feel different and interesting in ways that can be used in play.  The one topic I would have liked to have seen more development was the role of transformed humans in and among those tribes--I seem to remember the original version having a human-only tribe, but there's no indication of one here.  The other element that this version of the Living Land really dials up, to good effect, is the idea of savagery and kinetic action.  The World Laws of the Living Land make healing easier, and the social Axiom makes large-scale coordination unlikely, so the best course of action is usually to charge in and go all-out.  Torg in general works when each of the Cosms has a distinct feel, and I think the "new" Living Land has that in a way the old one did not.

The big adventure for the Living Land, The God Box, is . . . OK.  In many ways it is a published Torg adventure in the classical style, in the sense that it is very linear (some might say "railroad-y") and it has the feel of a theme-park ride, whisking you from place to place and showing you the highlights of the Torg world.  The God Box brings back the sub-reality of the Land Below, which I know was a crowd favorite but I never really saw the attraction to or purpose of, and here it feels like a weird detour in an adventure that is supposed to highlight the Living Land.  There was also an Act that felt especially like a theme-park ride, where the PCs are whisked to Chicago to show off the death-worshiping Edeinos tribe, and then whisked away for the conclusion of the story.  Still, despite the problems I had with the middle of the adventure, I liked Act One in Washington, D.C. and I especially liked the last two Acts, set in the jungles of the Yucatan in Mexico.  If I were to run it, I think I would just cut out the Land Below and Chicago stuff in the middle and run the beginning and the end as a shorter scenario.

Overall, the Torg: Eternity incarnation of the Living Land is much, much better than the original.  It's still not my favorite Cosm by a significant measure, but it is a place I would run stories in, as opposed to being a place to be avoided as in the original.  The Edeinos are now interesting and scary, and the place has a distinct feel.  Again, not my favorite, but much better, and that "much better" can be seen in the Living Land materials.

The Nile Empire:  In a way, the Nile Empire presented the opposite challenge for the Torg: Eternity team from the Living Land.  Wisely, the Torg: Eternity designers recognized that the Nile Empire as presented in the original game was fantastic, and thus changed very little of the substance.  It's still the pulp stories of the 30s, encompassing low and medium powered costumed super-heroes alongside adventure figures like Indiana Jones.  It still has all of the weird ancient Egyptian magic and mysticism.  It still has Dr. Mobius, the costumed super-villain/fascist dictator/re-born Egyptian Pharaoh.  It still dials up the action to 11, with heroes and villains dying and making their Inevitable Returns.

So, the challenge here is to give old-school Torg fans something new and make the material feel fresh.  To be honest, I am not sure they totally accomplished that goal.  Upon first reading of the Nile Empire Sourcebook, I thought "this is basically the same stuff in the original Nile Empire sourcebook," and I was a little disappointed.  But, on second read, I think that's unfair.  In part its unfair because the original stuff is so much fun, and not everyone remembers or has access to that goodness.  All of that fun goodness is here for the new incarnation as well, and the designers should be applauded for knowing a good thing when they see it. So, the Nile Empire Sourcebook gives you more pulp powers and Egyptian miracles and weird mathematics and engineering magic and piston-engine fighter planes and all of the good stuff from the original.  It holds on to everything that made the Nile Empire great.

Speaking of holding on to things, we need to talk about Wu Han.  Wu Han, in the original and in this version, is Dr. Mobius's right-hand lieutenant and frenemy, and he is very intentionally designed to be the embodiment of the "inscrutable Asian mastermind" trope.  Now, the use of this trope makes sense in the context of the Nile Empire, as it is a trope that has its origins in the pulp stories from which the Nile Empire draws.  And I should say that high school me who ran original Torg absolutely loved Wu Han, and used him all the time as a primary antagonist.  But, I mean, Wu Han as a character is racist, or at least is likely to be portrayed in an unflattering, racially-influenced way.  I get, in a meta-sense, that that's part of the point, but me of 2019 was way less enthused about the idea of  busting out Wu Han as a villain as the me of 1994.  Particularly in light of the way the Pan Pacifica Cosm steers away from some of the problematic early 90s Japanaphobia of the original Nippon Tech Cosm, I'm a little surprised to see Wu Han retained here.  Because of the meta-context, I get why he was retained, but, yeesh, I don't know.

As for the adventure, The Fires of Ra, here's the thing.  If you are going to play in the Nile Empire, you have to accept the genre in which you are operating (this really applies to Torg as a whole--embrace the genre tropes, don't fight them).  If you come to a Nile Empire scenario looking for deep character moments and subtle opportunities for role-playing, you are missing the point.  You come to a Nile Empire scenario for break-neck action and the piling of challenges one on top of the other ad infinitum.  And The Fires of Ra delivers that, in the form of set piece after set piece, alongside the all but audible voice of the authors shouting "Go Go Go!" at the players and the GM.  This is the sort of adventure where having your plane shot down, finding parachutes, and jumping out of the crashing plane is the set up to a first Scene of an Act.  It looks exhausting to run or play in, and I mean that in a good way.  You have to know what you are getting into, but within those parameters, The Fires of Ra reads as a really fun time.

So, while the Nile Empire set doesn't break any new ground, the underlying idea of The Shadow meets Indiana Jones meets ancient Egypt weirdness is so good and so much fun that it carries the products along with it.  And if you are new to Torg, and so don't have ready access to all of the old Nile Empire material, the Nile Empire Sourcebook is a must-buy if you are playing Torg: Eternity.  It's goofy, but it's goofy on purpose, and it is just so much fun.

Aysle:  In a stream that the designers put on as part of the Kickstarter, Lead Designer Darrell Hayhurst hit on the core problem with the original Aysle Sourcebook.  That book spends pages and pages describing Aysle "back home"--the geography, the factions, the history, etc.  But none of that stuff is really all that relevant for play unless you decide to ditch Core Earth and the Possibility Wars and turn the game into a pure fantasy, D&D-style game--in which case, are you sure you want to play Torg?  But, more to the point, while Aysle is an interesting and well-done fantasy world, it is just another fantasy world, and so not really distinctive enough to bear the weight of being by itself.  Which, of course, was not the point--Aysle is designed to exist in the broader Torg context--but it points back to the question of whether all that home Cosm material makes sense or is helpful.

As you might expect based on Hayhurst's comments, almost all of that background lore is cut out, and there is a strong focus on what is going on in the Aysle realm on Earth.  This is a good decision, and it makes the product much tighter than its predecessor.  But the other thing the Aysle Sourcebook does is that it hones in more clearly on the type of setting it wants to be.  Yes, Aysle is a fantasy world, but there are a number of subtle variations in fantasy worlds.  The Aysle Sourcebook, in a way that doesn't come through as clearly in the original version, grounds itself in the conflict between Light and Dark, in a way that reminds me tonally of movies like Willow and Excalibur (the 80s version) and, especially, Return of the King.  It isn't consistently "grimdark" a la Warhammer, but it also is darker than most D&D-influenced fantasy settings, and it intentionally layers the grimmer and the more hopeful elements next to each other.  Light and Dark are almost tangible elements, and they are at war, and the Dark is winning (though, not overwhelmingly so).  This is in the original version in a game mechanical sense, but it feels like it is more reflected in the setting in this version.

I really like this.  It's just enough of a specific angle to make Aysle stand out from a truly generic fantasy world, without limiting access to all of the standard, generic fantasy tropes.  And, let's be honest, fantasy role-playing games are popular because those standard generic fantasy tropes are good and fun.  You want your fantasy setting to do all of the fantasy things, and Aysle does all of that.

Not surprisingly, much of the game mechanics stuff is associated with magic.  The Aysle Sourcebook really does a great job of threading the needle between providing a diversity of options for magic-focused characters, without ratcheting up the complexity level.  The fundamental choice now is between being a generalist mage who has access to all of the spells, or picking one of four schools of magic (plus necromancy which acts as a fifth school) and limiting your spells to a particular list in return for having more spells (especially in the beginning).  These schools were sketched out in lore form in the original Aysle book, and they have the advantage of being broader in scope than most "magic school" taxonomies, while still being distinct and making for interesting choices.  So, for example, the "Kindred" school lets you affect all kinds of living beings, while the "Principles" school includes light, darkness, magic, "living forces," and "inanimate forces."  It seems a little obscure on first read (especially if you don't remember these categories from the original Aysle book), but it is easy to apply in play.

Similarly, they add a cantrip system, giving all magic using characters access to a fairly robust set of utility spells automatically, but only usable within the Aysle Cosm (though, you can take a Perk to use them in other Cosms).  I love these kinds of systems, because they make magic using characters really feel like wizards and allow players to come up with creative uses for magic, without adding complex systems or allowing wizards to defeat every problem with magic.

Then there is the adventure, Revenge of the Carredon.  Revenge stands-out from the previous two tent-pole adventures in a couple of ways.  First, it incorporates more of the deep Aysle lore, bringing in the two big name good-aligned NPCs, Lady Pella Ardinay and Tolwyn of Tancred.  In doing so, the adventure feels like it has more weight and significance than the previous two.  Second, it has a more open structure, with an opening Act, a set of middle Acts that can be accomplished in any order, and then the finale.  This is not some radical innovation in RPG adventure design, but as I mentioned Torg adventures historically tended to be very linear, so I found this to be a refreshing change.  Likewise, while the quest is get the five Things you need to defeat evil, so pretty standard, I found it to be an interesting and engaging version of that pretty standard outline.  Revenge of the Carredon is a strong offering, and the best adventure I've seen out of Torg: Eternity so far.

The bottom line is that I think the Aysle product wave is very strong, the best of the three so far, and it makes be very optimistic for and excited about the forthcoming Cyberpapacy and Tharkold waves (which are the two Cosms I was most excited about going in).  It makes Aysle distinct without being narrow, and it provides a wealth of interesting play options for Aysle characters.  If you weren't part of the Kickstarter, keep an eye for when it comes to general release at the end of the year.

Gumshoe Deep Dive, Part 2--Fear Itself

The Fear Itself core book, in its 2nd Edition form by Robin Laws and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, is 176 pages.  That's basically the whole game--I've nicked monsters from The Esoterrorists (which is encouraged, as the two games are  considered to be existing in the same "shared universe"), but other than that it is complete.  Of those 176 pages, maybe 30 of them consist of game rules.  The rest is scenario design and GMing notes (more on that in a bit), along with three complete scenarios, or at least scenario outlines.  In a world where RPG books get longer and longer, Fear Itself is a masterpiece of economy--complete and comprehensive without being excessive and overwhelming.

Part of that economy comes from the fact that Fear Itself is a very tightly focused game.  Fear Itself is a game that is about emulating horror movies, including notables like Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Omen, The Exorcist, and even more self-aware and self-referential fare like the Scream franchise.  PCs are ordinary people without significant training or preparation for facing the horrors they will encounter (if you want more competent PCs fighting back against the horrors, then you want The Esoterrorists).  Many, perhaps most, of the PCs are going to die in the course of a story, as is the case with horror movies.  Running away is a viable, wise strategy for PCs, just like in horror movies.

This tight focus of Fear Itself brings with it two interesting consequences for game play.  First, Fear Itself is very intentional on relocating the default mode of play away from a "campaign" style model.  Most tabletop RPGs have a built-in, but often unspoken, assumption that the game will consist of a series of sessions, involving the same PCs and set in the same narrative space, that build on one another in a linear fashion.  Now, of course, there are other ways to play RPGs, but most games assume that you are playing, or are trying to play, in a campaign, and the rules and GM advice are built around the notion of a campaign.

Fear Itself, by contrasts, explicitly discusses both one-shot play and a short "mini-series" of a couple of game sessions, and provides dedicated sections of GM advice for each mode of play.  The idea that these modes of play exist is nothing new, but explicitly talking about them and discussing how they change the way the game is played and what unique considerations they bring to the table is unusual, and welcome.  It's particularly welcome in a horror movie context, which is defined by self-contained stories and a lack of character consistency.  After all, it is hard to have an extended campaign with persistent PCs while killing off those PCs right and left (a core conceptual problem with the classic Call of Cthulhu campaigns like Masks of Nyarlathotep and Horror on the Orient Express).  But if you commit ahead of time to a short duration story, you head off the problem at the pass, while staying within genre conventions.

Before I get to genre conventions, I want to say something about the GM sections, which, again, are most of the book.  As I am writing this post, the big discussion going on in tabletop RPG Twitter is whether or not the 5th Edition D&D Dungeon Master's Guide is any good/is useful for new DMs.  From my point of view, the problem with the 5e DMG, and it is a problem with 95% of all similar materials, is that it understands its task as providing advice for DMs about various tasks that are part of being a DM.  But the new DM does not need or want advice, but instead concrete instructions on what it is they are supposed to do as a DM.  The advice found in books like the 5e DMG is really only comprehensible and useful once you have already figured out on a base level how to be a DM.  And, once you have done that, much of the advice is pitched at such a basic level that it really doesn't help, because the DM who has figured out how to DM by hook or by crook has figured out the elements found in the basic advice.  This is why Dungeon World is the absolute best book for new DMs/GMs running any system, because it tells them what to do to run the game, and why GM advice materials pitched at experienced DMs/GMs are far more useful than those pitched at new ones (because their hyper-specific focus actually brings something to the table for even experienced GMs).

The GM sections of Fear Itself are not as specific on the absolute basics of running any tabletop RPG as Dungeon World is, but they are very specific about how to run the kinds of scenarios Fear Itself is about.  This is why dividing the game up into three different modes is so brilliant--it allows the Laws and Ryder-Hanrahan to be very concrete about how a GM should structure a one-shot or miniseries.  If you are a GM who is new to horror stories and/or investigative stories and/or GUMSHOE games, Fear Itself is a great place to start, because it gives you a clear road map to get through your first couple of GM sessions.  It is a great entry point.

The other thing Fear Itself brings to the table is the genre focus and the way it is clear about what it is doing.  There is a tabletop RPG design principle that a game should clearly communicate what it is that the game is about and trying to accomplish.  This principle is particularly important with horror games, as there is disagreement as to what these games are trying to do conceptually.  Adam Koebel (who I love, for the record) takes the position beginning at the 34 minute mark in this video that horror RPGs don't work because the goal of horror games is to scare the players (not the PCs, mind you, but the players), and it is very hard to scare the players at the table as a result of a number of factors, most notably the fact that you are experiencing the potential horror at several levels of remove (i.e. the fictional character you have created in your mind, mediated through the fictional scene you are also creating in your mind as a result of the GM's description).

He's right that it is really hard to consistently scare your players in a tabletop RPG session.  But this framing just takes as a given that the goal of horror games is to scare the players.  But why have that as a goal?  Rather than scaring the players, it seems to me the goal of horror RPGs is to create sessions that emulate horror fiction, just as the goal of fantasy RPGs is, at least in part, to emulate fantasy stories and fiction.  It's true that horror RPGs have in general done a poor job of communicating that goal, but that's true of most other kinds of tabletop RPGs as well.  And, to be fair, the recent 7th Edition of the grand-daddy of horror RPGs, Call of Cthulhu, lays down a clear marker that the goal of playing CoC is to tell Lovecraftian stories.  In the course of telling those horror or Lovecraftian stories, you may end up scaring your players, but the game session can still be fun and be a success if that doesn't happen. 

Fear Itself is equally clear about the goal of playing the game--the GM and the players are going to create a horror movie, or maybe a series of horror movies, together.  The PCs are going to go into the dark and solve a mystery and confront some slasher or horrible monster, and many of them are going to die.  My experience is that the fun is found in digging into those tropes and that structure.  In the course of doing that, most of the players (and sometimes even the GM) are going to come out the other side at least a little bit scared or creeped out, but as a GM I don't see it as my job to ensure that the players are scared.  My job as a Fear Itself GM is to lay out a horror movie story, and let the chips fall where they may.

You may have noticed that I haven't talked much about game mechanics so far.  That's because there isn't much there beyond the base GUMSHOE system, which I talked about in the last post.  Really, other than a brief section on psychic powers (which I have never used, only glanced at), the only mechanical elements added from base GUMSHOE are risk factors and sources of stability--drivers that push a PC toward dumb horror movie actions and sources of comfort, respectively.  Because it is so lean, Fear Itself is a good way to learn the basics of GUMSHOE here and the rhythm of play, before moving on to the more complicated implementations of the system.

That's not to say that Fear Itself is anything like a "starter set" for GUMSHOE--it's a complete game on its own.  But it is an accessible "on ramp" to the broader world of GUMSHOE, providing a game compelling experience.  If the idea of playing a character in a horror movie, or writing/directing a horror movie, is at all interesting, then Fear Itself is the vehicle for making that happen.  Fear Itself can easily slip under the radar, but it is definitely worth a look.

A Humble Request

For those not aware, every year there is an awards show at Gencon called "the ENnies," which tries to capture the best games and products of the previous 12 months.  The process is that a group of judges nominate a list of about a half-dozen products in various categories, and then there is a online vote for the winner and runner-up.  You can see the 2018 nominees and winners here.

Well, I've applied to be a judge for the 2020 ENnies, and so I am writing to ask for your vote.  If you have read my reviews, I think you will have a sense of how I approach games and game design.  I am looking for innovation, for a clearly defined focus and an execution of that focus, and for accessibility to players and GMs, especially new ones.  If you have enjoyed my content in the past, I would appreciate you voting for me.  

The voting period is from July 10 to July 21, and can be found here.  Thank you for your consideration.

Gumshoe Deep Dive, Part 1--The Basics, and Problem of Investigative Failure

After having a blast running two different GUMSHOE games at Origins, I want to do a deep dive into these games and how they work.  First off, the basics.  The "GUMSHOE" system was developed by Robin Laws (he of Heroquest, which I discussed before), and the majority of the GUMSHOE games are published by Pelgrane Press.  GUMSHOE is not a tabletop RPG itself, but a chassis upon which you build a game around (in video game terms, it would be the "game engine").  And that chassis is designed around and optimized for games that have a focus on investigation.  During the course of a game session, the players are going to gather clues, and those clues are going to propel the story forward toward the resolution of whatever the mystery is for this session.

Investigative stories are certainly not the only sorts of stories that you can tell, either generally or in tabletop RPGs, but far more stories then you might think at first blush have an investigative structure at their heart.  The first implementations of GUMSHOE were in the horror space, such as Esoterrorists (X-Files-esque secret conspiracies versus the Outer Dark), Fear Itself (one-shot and short campaigns that model horror movies), and Trail of Cthulhu (a "GUMSHOE-ification" of Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu).  But Laws's Ashen Stars works on the observation that a Star Trek or Firefly episode has an investigative structure, too, and so are well suited to GUMSHOE.  More recent games, especially Kenneth Hite's Night's Black Agents and the forthcoming Swords of the Serpentine by Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner (each of which are going to get their own posts), continue to stretch the bounds of the system while keeping the basic investigative model at their heart.

Because GUMSHOE is designed around investigative stories, it is built to address a fundamental problem with investigative stories in tabletop RPGs.  When tabletop RPGs approach investigative elements, they generally do so the same way they approach any other game play element.  A PC has some character ability that is relevant to the investigative action in question, and that ability produces a probability of success.  The PC rolls the dice, and either she succeeds or she fails.  So, to take an example from my D&D 5e game of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist the other night, the PCs were searching a mausoleum, and I wanted to see whether they were going to find a key that had been left by the bad guys on the floor.  Nick's PC, Dramorn de Azhaq, rolled a Perception Check and got over a 15.  As a result, he found the key.

As long as the PCs succeed on their checks, everything is fine.  The problem comes when PCs in investigative games start failing investigative checks.  If Dramorn blew his Perception Check, then he wouldn't have found the key.  But, in order for the story to progress, the PCs must find the key, because the key leads to the locksmith, which leads to the falling down windmill, which leads to the sewers where we ended the session.  So, if all three of my players botched their Perception Checks, now I as the GM have to find a way to get them to the locksmith or the windmill or the sewers by hook or by crook, on the fly.  And, unlike the sorts of unexpected, off-the-wall choices that PCs make that take the story in unexpected directions (which are good and fun), failed investigative checks tend to lead to dead ends, with the players looking at the GM and saying "now what?"  Failed investigative checks for story-critical clues are frustrating for the players and a problem for GMs.

There are a couple of solutions to this problem.  One solution offered by Justin Alexander (which can be found on his outstanding blog) is the "three clue rule."  The idea here is to design your story such that there are always multiple (in this case, three) ways to get from any one scene to another via three different clues that the PCs could find.  By doing so, you reduce significantly the chance that the PCs won't find any of the necessarily, and thus avoid the story dead-end.  In other words, the solution to the problem of PCs failing to find story-critical clues is not to have story-critical clues in the first place.

I've used the three clue rule in game sessions, and it works.  The problem with the three clue rule is that it requires an enormous amount of prep time on the part of the GM, because you have to build all of these redundant paths and structures ahead of time.  If you are a GM like me who is, shall we say, "prep averse," and likes to do things on the fly, the three clue rule is a tremendous burden, all for creating content that you are likely never to use anyway, or at least is not necessary to the story (after all, as seen in the session from the other night, sometimes the players find the first clue and don't need clues #2 and #3).  For me, the three clue rule is an example of winning the battle and losing the war--it fixes the problem with investigative stories, but it makes me not want to run investigative stories in the first place.

The second approach comes out of the family of "indie" RPGs (Burning Wheel, the Powered by the Apocalypse games, etc.), and that is the idea of "failing forward."  In general, those games avoid a succeed/fail resolution structure, in favor of some variation of "succeed or succeed, but with consequences" structure.  Applying this to an investigative game, a botched Perception Check would not mean "you don't find the key," but instead "you find the key, but you suffer some consequence as a result that you wouldn't have suffered if you had rolled better."  Because at the end of the day you find the key no matter what, you never run into the story dead-ends.

The problem here is that it is hard to consistently come up with meaningful consequences to investigative failure, especially if the PCs are going to be doing a lot of investigating in the course of a session.  "Failing forward" in the context of action sequences gives the GM a golf bag of ways to meaningful consequences; failing forward in a investigative sequence provides a far more limited tool box.  You can impose delays (i.e. if you fail, it takes longer to find the clue), but that may or may not be meaningful under the particular circumstances, and going to that well again and again can get boring.

GUMSHOE cuts through that problem by cutting out the dice roll altogether.  If you have the relevant investigative ability (more on that in a bit), you are in the place or circumstances where the clue can be found, and you tell the GM you are using the ability, then the GM gives you the clue, and the story moves forward.  Investigation is no longer tied to the whims of a roll of the dice.

When people hear GUMSHOE described like this, some folks react negatively, thinking that removing the possibility of failure removes meaningful game play or dramatic tension.  But there is game play here--it's just different from the normal game play you get in other games.  For one, GUMSHOE games do not have general purpose information gathering skills or abilities like "perception" or "investigation."  Instead, investigative abilities are far more granular, divided up by knowledge type or approach to information gathering.  The roster of investigative abilities varies from game to game, but you will see things like "reassurance," "bullshit detector," "forensics," "anthropology," and, my personal favorite from Swords of the Serpentine, "leechcraft."  Gameplay in GUMSHOE is about using the relevant ability in the right situation.  And because the abilities are so specific, it's easy to narrate what is going on in detail--using the "reassurance" ability has a distinct narrative hook that is easily distinguished from "bullshit detector."

Splitting up the investigative abilities does two other things.  First, it makes the investigative abilities one of the defining elements of the character, both conceptually and in terms of how the character interacts with the world.  Since the game is investigative, the bulk of game time is going to be spent interrogating the world, and the way in which a PC interrogates the world is through the suite of investigative abilities.  Each PC will have some, but not all, of the available investigative abilities, and so the character is defined by the ways and circumstances in which he or she will be interrogating the world.  My experience is that as players get more familiar with using their character's investigative abilities, they also get more into the head of the kind of person that character is--it's a kind of "learning by doing."

The second result of splitting things up like this is that it distributes spot-light time between the PCs.  A single investigative ability empowers a player who builds their character toward being good at investigating things.  By splitting up the abilities and distributing them among the PCs in the group, every player is going to have a chance to have their PC gain the clue that the party needs, and thus feel like they are contributing to the story.  This is enhanced by the "investigative spends" mechanic.  While simply having a particular investigative skill will net you the core clue in the appropriate circumstance, PCs have pools in the various investigative abilities that they can spend to net them additional information that is not story-critical, but will be useful in navigating the story and solving the mystery.  By making these spends both a finite resource, and one that is tied to the array of investigative abilities that define the character, each PC is only going to be able to grab the spotlight a handful of character appropriate circumstances.

Spotlight time and spotlight management is one of those things that tabletop RPGs rarely focus on, but it is an important issue in the internal dynamics of a tabletop RPG session.  Most groups will have players with a mix of experience levels (my experience is that it almost always takes folks new to RPGs a while to feel comfortable enough to consistently assert themselves during a game session), as well as a mix of personality types, levels of outgoing-ness, and general assertiveness.  As a result, the more experienced, more out-going players have a tendency to dominate play, and other players can be crowded out.  Rationing out the ability of players to use spends means that the more assertive players will only have a finite number of times to step in and "do something cool," while the less assertive players will have prompts that can be a launching-pad for cool character moments.

So, that's investigative abilities, which is really the heart of GUMSHOE.  The other type of character abilities in GUMSHOE are General Abilities.  GUMSHOE doesn't use D&D style attributes (i.e. Strength, Intelligence, etc.), but instead has a list of abilities that reflect the core non-investigative actions taken by characters in the particular GUMSHOE game.  So, Fear Itself has General Abilities such as Fleeing (which horror movie characters tend to do a lot), Shooting, Hiding, and Driving; the swords-and-sorcery inspired Swords of the Serpentine includes Bind Wounds, Sorcery, Sway (persuading or brow-beating foes into surrendering), and Warfare.  Each ability has a rating and a pool of points (like the Investigative abilities, though they are not on the same scale--characters will have much higher ratings in General Abilities than in Investigative Abilities).  Task resolution is 1d6+ the number of points spend from the relevant ability (if any), with the goal to get equal to or greater than a target number (default is 4, hard is 6, etc.)

The system is very fast and very intuitive for players to pick up.  It is fundamentally a resource management system, so in broad terms it is similar to something like Numenera and the other Cypher System games.  But the General Abilities are far more specific and targeted than the attribute-like abilities found in Numenera, and this has the effect of focusing players on a suite of actions that are appropriate to the genre.  Having a distinct "Fleeing" ability tends to focus players on the possibility of running away from monsters or other foes, which in turn means that characters will flee more often, making the game play more similar to the source material being emulated.

You are not going to get a hyper-detailed or granular combat experience in GUMSHOE games.  Even those GUMSHOE games that have a more active focus, like Swords of the Serpentine or Night's Black Agents, do not get deep into the weeds of tactical positioning in the way you would get in something like most editions of D&D (especially 3rd and 4th edition, but even 5th edition).  In other systems, I find this to be a drawback, but for GUMSHOE I think it works.  For the GUMSHOE games where combat is a sideline/usually a death sentence for the PCs, there's no reason to spend much time on complicated combat system.  And the more action-oriented games add elements that make it more interesting and dynamic in play than the other "rules-light" systems.

So, that's the outline of GUMSHOE and how it works.  I'm not going to go over each specific game, but I want to talk about a few of them that, in my mind, really show off what Gumshoe can do.  First off, the game that I think is the closest to a "pure" GUMSHOE experience--Fear Itself.

Origins 2019 After Action Report

So, another Origins game convention is in the books.  This year, I did three full days--Thursday, Friday, and Saturday--and I had overall a great time.  As I have said before, I think Origins is more or less the perfect size, being definitely big, but not overwhelmingly big as Gencon can be (though, I was surprised to see that four-day badges for Gencon are still available, which suggests that it may not be quite so big this year).

Here are my highlights and thoughts:

1.  How Not to Sponsor RPG Sessions at a Convention:  Last year, I ranted a bit about game companies who sponsor game sessions and then have the GMs not show up, and how bad a look that is for the publisher.  [As it turned out, Kobold Press (the folks who had the GM flake on me last year) turned over the running of sponsored games to a third party entity, Warduke Press, and while I didn't get a chance to play in one of those games, I talked to those folks and I am confident they were on the ball.]  This year, I ran sponsored games for two different companies--Pelgrane Press and another publisher that shall remain nameless (so as not to, as the kids say, put them on blast).  This is my fifth con (between Gencon and Origins) that I have run things for Pelgrane, and every single time it is a joy.  Running games for the other publisher was, um, less of a joy.

From my point of view, if you agree to GM games on behalf of a publisher (especially a medium or smaller publisher), part of your job is to make the game, and thus the publisher, look good.  I want to try to sell people on your games.  But the publisher needs to put the GM in the position to make that happen.  And the #1 way to make that happen is to provide high-quality, finished materials for the GM to run.  Instead, I got a half-finished draft of an adventure.  And when I say "unfinished," I mean it was unplayable strictly as written, because there were no stats for the antagonist in the last encounter.  And when I say "no stats," I don't mean there were no stats printed in the adventure, thus requiring the GM to hunt down the relevant stats from various published books (though, that, too); I mean the stats for that antagonist are not printed anywhere.  Either the GM has to come up with the stats on his or her own, or (as I did) you have to cut the last encounter.   

And, to be clear, I got the adventure with a cover email saying "[the product line manager] wants you to run this at Origins," so this was what they wanted put out there.  I suppose you might say "well, you got the adventure the 1st of May; this wouldn't have been as much of a problem if you looked at it earlier than the week before the con."  And, true, but (1) I was busy; and (2) at the end of the day I am a volunteer.  Don't make me do all of this free labor to get your materials in a position that I can use them.  And if your adventure is not ready for prime-time, don't send it to me to run in public.  Help me help you.

By contrast, Pelgrane has a set of publish-quality adventures, written by their top authors in a publish-ready format, strictly for use at conventions.  I also ran an adventure for a game that is in playtest that was at a far higher level polish and completeness than what I got from the other publisher.  This not only makes it much, much easier to run and a much, much more enjoyable experience, but it makes me want to run more things for Pelgrane so I can promote more of their games.  I split my GM time two and two, and I wish I had just run four games for Pelgrane.

Be like Pelgrane, publishers.  Do right by your GMs that volunteer to promote your stuff.

2.  Gumshoe:  Speaking of Pelgrane, I ran an adventure for Trail of Cthulhu and the playtest adventure for the forthcoming Swords of the Serpentine.  Both went well, especially the Swords of Serpentine adventure.  I'm going to do a series on the Gumshoe games, including Swords of the Serpentine, so more on this in a bit.

3.  Starfinder:  I played two Starfinder Society games, and had fun with both of them.  Whatever you want to say about organized play in general and Paizo's version of organized play specifically, they really do a good job of showing off the strengths of the game.  The setting of Starfinder is fun and light-hearted while still having stakes and tension--I've used this analogy before, but it has that Guardians of the Galaxy magic.  So, for example, the first scenario I played involved being on a game show run by undead, and the second one involved a massive invasion of an enemy force, and both of them felt like they belonged in the same world without contradiction.  And the Starfinder scenarios, while not usually breaking any sort of new ground from a design perspective, are consistently solid.  Plus, I have found that they do a good job of making sure the GMs are prepared to provide a good experience at the table.

Saturday night was "the special"--a forty or so table extravaganza where the results of your table affect the things going on with the other table.  There are a series of discrete encounters that the table gets to select from, and after a certain number of groups complete a particular encounter, it is closed for other tables and new encounters are unlocked.  It's chaotic, combat-heavy, and a bit disjointed, but fun--I wouldn't necessarily want to do this every week, but as a once-a-year thing, it's something different and enjoyable.  Also, shout-out to the Starfinder Society folks, including many from the local area--it looked like an enormous undertaking to put this on, and they did a great job.

4.  Pathfinder 2nd Edition:  I was hoping that the two hour demo game I played would be using the final, forthcoming 2nd Edition rules.  It wasn't--it was basically the last version of the playtest.  That was an odd choice, and if I had known that was the deal I probably wouldn't have done it, as I have already messed around with the playtest.

As far as the game itself, I worry that they are going to caught between worlds, and between audiences.  It certainly seems like they have smoothed and streamlined the game as compared to 1st Edition, making it appealing for someone like me who finds 1st Edition too slow, too complicated,  and with too many options to wade through.  But, I'm not sure it was streamlined and smoothed out enough for me to really want to dive in and/or use it as a replacement for 5e or 13th Age.  And, on the flip side, the complexity and options of 1st Edition that turn me off are the very things that have hooked a big chunk of the Pathfinder community, so the streamlining reduces the thing that draws them to the game.  That seems to be the conclusion in the main from the folks in the local Pathfinder Society around here--they have been pretty clear that they intend to run both 1st and 2nd Edition stuff come August when 2nd Edition launches.  So, whatever the merits of the game as a game, I think it may be a misstep as a consumer product and as a community building exercise.

5.  Overlight:  I try at conventions to find at least one game that I will never play otherwise, and this year it was Overlight from Renegade Game Studios, which I had not heard of until now but had a big presence and appears to be a large company.  Overlight was interesting, and a little bit hard to describe--I think the best short description is "surreal, non-Tolkien fantasy."  For example, I played a talking archaeopteryx--a bird-like flying dinosaur--that are expert scientists and logicians.  The system is tied to colors, which in turn are linked to emotional traits like compassion and wisdom.

I could be reading too much into this, but I got the sense that this game was on some level trying to be a metaphor for being LGBT--the PCs are "skyborn," who are noticeably different from other people at birth and inspire either adulation or fear among others.  So, basically, the X-Men, which is probably why I got the "this is really about being LGBT" vibe.  Plus, the rainbow color thing.  If so, great--the fact I am not sure if this is the designer intent show that the metaphor, if it is there, is applied deftly enough not to bludgeon the players in a way that will take away from game play.

I had fun with Overlight, and I would definitely play again if offered, but I wasn't completely captivated by it.  I flipped through the core book in the dealer's area, and it is a beautiful book with a unique art style, but it was $60, and so I passed.  But it is definitely something that folks should look into.