Hell’s Vengeance Review, Part 3/3

And here we go, the last of the series, covering the campaign’s concluding volumes, Scourge of the Godclaw and Hell Comes to Westcrown, as well as a lot of other… stuff.

Here there be SPOILERS.

Scourge of the Godclaw

In Scourge of the Godclaw, the agents are dispatched to gather plot coupons to make a magical weapon of mass destruction. In the process, they will retake Citadel Dinyar from the Glorious Revolution, desecrate a sacred spring, kill a village’s worth of people, and burn a library.

I’m not a fan, but that’s because I have a dislike for blatant plot coupons. Like, in something like The Rod of Seven Parts or the Extinction Curse adventure path they work, because it’s baked into the structure of the campaign. That’s what you do, and they’re also the excuse to see new places, meet interesting people, and kill them. In Scourge of the Godclaw, the coupon hunt is dropped upon the agents mid-campaign and while it does take them across the width and breadth of Cheliax, there’s no consideration for travel and the presentation ends up being a series of disconnected encounters.

Anyway, before Her Infernal Majestrix had time to send the party off to storm the castle, they had some time for shopping. Of course, even a bustling metropolis like Egorian doesn’t have everything a well-to-do adventurer might need, and thus the agents, like in so many previous campaigns, turned their gaze to the planes.

As a Planescape fan, I have a personal dislike of players treating the planes like a shopping mall. I also just straight use Planescape instead of Pathfinder’s interpretation. And so, when they stumbled through a portal to Sig- uh, I mean, Axis, and headed off to buy new magical gear, I was ready, and the poor sods ended up accidentally stumbling through a portal into the events of The Deva Spark. The module, of course, is one where a deva relinquishes his angelic spark to go undercover in the Lower Planes, and the spark ends up in a bebilith demon, who then becomes very confused and has an identity crisis, and the party needs to herd it through one of the Upper Planes without getting it killed so the situation can be resolved. It’s a lovely adventure because it genuinely presents alternative solutions to the issue and does not (strongly) assume that the PCs side with the cosmic good. Which, of course, they didn’t.

The Citadel Dinyar sequence is the best part of Scourge of the Godclaw. It’s somewhat open-ended and rather organic in how the defenders react to the party’s assault or infiltration. There are ways to shortcut encounters, paladins to turn, prisoners to rescue and rearm, and officers to eliminate. And, of course, a golden dragon to slay.

In the middle of the module, I snuck in another adventure from Dungeon, the infamous “Porphyry House Horror”, a D&D 3.0 scenario written for use with the Book of Vile Darkness. To raise hype, it was printed with sealed pages that you had to cut open yourself. It was good for two sessions. In writing the conversion, I changed the proprietors of Porphyry House from yuan-ti – not a Pathfinder creature – into reptilians. For the orlath demon at the end, I used a conversion from The Creature Chronicle, which is an invaluable resource when utilizing stuff from older editions. The adventure is silly splatter comedy and juvenile sexuality all the way through, and we had great fun with it. It, also, kinda had the issue that that it assumed the party is a force for good, but I figured that what the hell, I’ll probably never run another Pathfinder campaign where those themes are appropriate.

After the party has concluded the last part of making their WMD, the focus of which is that golden dragon’s severed head, they will have to fight the dragon’s ghost. It’s a bit of a questionable encounter. First of all, there is no foreshadowing and it’s likely the party will do it immediately after clearing out a monastery full of Geryon’s monks and wiping out a minor Hellknight order, without resting in between. Second, the creature is not only tough but also potentially rule-breaking, depending on how one views the compatibility of Vital Strike with a ghost’s corrupting touch, for an impressive 34d6 points of damage. My party did rest, but then they chose to head off to Arabelle’s personal demiplane to actually perform the ritual, and the thing about really tiny demiplanes is that an enemy with enough reach can effectively threaten your whole world.

Hell Comes to Westcrown

In Hell Comes to Westcrown, the agents start off by blowing up an army of the Glorious Revolution with the tathlum, magical nuke that they just spent a book creating, and then infiltrate the paladin-occupied Westcrown, take out key targets, reclaim the Asmoedan cathedral, and finally fight Alexeara Cansellarion, the Big Good Boss of Hell’s Vengeance.

Our interpretation started off innocently enough, with the deployment of the WMD, which in my opinion is kind of a whiff after just spending an entire book on making the bloody thing. There’s not enough build-up for the army or its leadership to actually have any emotional stakes to it. But at least you can have a fight between nightwalkers and paladin troops.

Then they infiltrated Westcrown, and everything went off the rails. Partly this was planned, partly not. See, we’d played Council of Thieves mostly for the purpose of fleshing out Westcrown in preparation for this. There were former PCs and their henchmen waiting for them. The old Westcrown resistance had been levelled up and in some cases given really interesting classes, like the Talent from the grievously unbalanced d20 ruleset at the back of Godlike, or the classes from Book of Nine Swords, with a few slight tweaks to make them more Pathfinder-compatible. The party had a few clashes with them, took out a few, got Vesper’s henchman captured by basically Chelaxian Superman, and took the cathedral. Then, they decided to shortcut the scenario. While the plan presented in the book is one of peeling an onion, taking out the leaders of the rebellion one by one, these chuckleheads decided to head straight at Cansellarion, bypass most of her guardians by using adamantine weapons to enter through the roof, and then engage her in a session-long fight that saw a succession of really big hitters they had neglected to kill show up to kick ass. What happened then… well, I believe I covered that back in the first post of the series.

I honestly cannot form an objective opinion about Hell Comes to Westcrown. I can conclusively say that I think the first act, functioning as the actual climax of the previous book, is a let-down. However, the rest of the book we completely deformed with my strange Westcrown Avengers and their skipping of a good chunk of the adventure’s content. We had fun, but I cannot see a meaningful relationship between the text of the adventure and the events at the table.

And that’s a wrap for Hell’s Vengeance. Now, I am running The Enemy Within for Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play 4E and Extinction Curse for Pathfinder 2E. We will see which one finishes first and if I have anything to say about it then.

Hell’s Vengeance Review, Part 2/3

Continuing my reviews of the Hell’s Vengeance adventure path, we come to books three and four, The Inferno Gate and For Queen & Empire. Here, I really headed down the path to madness.

SPOILER warning is in effect.

The Inferno Gate

In The Inferno Gate, the party heads to paladin-occupied Senara and then into the dark Whisperwood to find the Inferno Gate, a stable conduit into the Nine Hells that can be used to summon an army of devils. Of course, their boss Archbaron Fex backstabs them, and is in fact the final enemy of the book.

The thing about The Inferno Gate is that one chapter of the book is a hexcrawl. The problem with that hexcrawl, however, is that it does not adhere to Pathfinder’s rules about hexcrawls. The hexes in The Inferno Gate are 25-mile hexes, while the game rules assume 12-mile hexes. 25-mile hexes, incidentally, are larger than the city of New York. So, I’d just bought Campaign Cartographer off HumbleBundle, and I figured I’d redraw the map in the right scale.

The more mathematically inclined among you will see where this is going.

From 43 hexes, I went to around 200 hexes. I had to go to a print shop to get the map printed in A3 size. Of course, when one has around 160 more hexes than one started with, one needs to populate them. First, I emptied the random encounter tables from the module into the hexes. This helped a bit. Then I placed a couple of known landmarks from Cheliax, the Infernal Empire, and their surroundings, like the Pillar of Palamia, and constructed loose encounters around them.

Then I started getting desperate. I placed a few side trek encounters from Wizards.com, where you can still access their old 3E pages if you know where to look. In a fit of madness, I grabbed the old Fighting Fantasy book The Forest of Doom, mapped it out, and placed the encounters and subplot from that into my hexmap. I stole a chunk of Reverse Dungeon. In the end, I never populated the entire map, but I did do most of it, and then moved stuff around as the party explored the forest.

It did make The Inferno Gate very different from what it was, since most of the play time was spent in the forest – I think we had four complete sessions of that. Here, I also chose to fix what I perceive as the biggest shortcoming of Hell’s Vengeance. It’s missing one obvious adventure concept, the reverse dungeon. In my opinion, there should’ve been at least a chapter in one of the volumes where the party needs to defend a dungeon against encroaching paladins or whatever. So I did it here. For the final session of The Inferno Gate, after they’d slain the perfidious Archbaron Fex and claimed the Inferno Gate for their own, I broke out my old Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures rules.

Obviously, we used the first-edition rules.

Back when D&D Miniatures was a thing, I was an avid and active player. It also marks one of the few instances of a skill-based game where I was actually good on a competitive level. I still have my collection, and all the stat cards, so we calculated the commander stats for each member of the party, I whipped them up warbands and four enemy warbands – one was led by the Savage Mistress of Beasts, another was Glorious Revolution paladins, one I think was dwarves from The Forest of Doom, and one was just a bunch of do-gooder adventurers. The DDM Guild, a fan group keeping the game alive, was an invaluable resource in building the warbands.

Then I quickly taught my players the rules and we all played a couple of one-on-one matches, as the agents of Thrune summoned fiends from the Inferno Gate and defended Fort Arego against encroaching foes. Fun was had.

Arguably what I ran was not really The Inferno Gate, though most of its material did still survive to see the table. The thieves’ guild of Senara even killed Cimri Staelish. She was buried in a shallow grave at the edge of town. She did not feature in the campaign after that, though it was accepted among the group that she rose as some kind of vengeful undead.

Still, it’s hard for me to actually evaluate the text since my experience with it is so different. One thing I did not particularly like was the structuring of the final chapter, where first the party has to fight its way through a besieging force so that they themselves can assault Fort Arego, which feels a bit confused. Still, fun was had.

Whisperwood, in all its glorious greenness.

For Queen & Empire

This ended up being the shortest adventure in practice, and though I modified a lot, I did not add much. I did fix a major inconsistency that I perceived, however. At the start of For Queen & Empire, the House of Thrune calls all of their agents to Egorian to find someone who can do a major job for the Queen, but none of these other agents are featured in the module. If the agents have to queue for hours, as they do, the city would have to be teeming with high-ranking agents of Thrune. So, I added them in. The party ended up in the same inn with all the rest of the pre-generated characters from the adventure path, and kept running into colourful characters who were ostensibly on the same side. I tried to present Emil Kovkorin & co. as fellow agents who were going through exactly the same kind of crap that the party was.

In For Queen & Empire, the agents must navigate the intrigues of Egorian and pick a side from between two nobles vying for the Queen’s favour. The other one they must take into a grove in Barrowood and sacrifice to the Nine Hells to renew House Thrune’s contract. The contestants here are a duke whose wealth is based on breeding fiendish pigs, to whom he also feeds his enemies, and a countess whose husbands keep dying mysteriously. Also at the sacrifice there’s an end fight against a turncoat cleric of Asmodeus with no foreshadowing, which is a total asspull. Fortunately, as I described in the last post, I’d set up Lazzero Dalvera as the party’s foil, and could utilise him as a replacement.

Another thing I did was keep track of the calendar throughout the campaign, which bore some fruit in For Queen & Empire, as they ended up arriving in Egorian just in time for the last big gladiator tournament of the year, Dies Irae. They could not fight, of course, but they were invited to the stands by their other noble contact.

I like the setup of the adventure. The two NPCs are very juicy and interesting to roleplay, and the module also features one of the obligatory story beats for a villain campaign in Cheliax, crushing a cell of the Bellflower Network, which is basically a halfling underground railroad. However, I feel the adventure doesn’t lean enough into the courtly intrigue theme that’s right there and everything ends up being a fight. Go to a ball? There’s a fight. Sabotage a pig farm? There’s a fight. Try to prove the countess’s boyfriend is cheating on her? Dude’s also a high-level monk so I hope you put on your fighting trousers this morning. If I had had more time, I probably would have removed half the combat and rewritten the book as a more social adventure, but we were playing weekly at the time, and there are only so many hours in a day. Obviously, your mileage may vary and not every party is suited for it, but in my party, the lowest Charisma was 14.

For Queen & Empire has a solid core, but it feels like it doesn’t dare to venture too far from the combat-centred gameplay assumption, even though the game explicitly has tools and subsystems to handle courtly intrigue.

Hell’s Vengeance Review, Part 1/3

This one has been a while in coming, but here we go. To recap, earlier this year I finished running the Hell’s Vengeance adventure path for Pathfinder RPG. Because reasons cleared everyone’s schedules and we got to play on a nearly weekly basis, what I’d intended to be maybe two, three years of leisurely play ended up as 41 sessions in 20 months and now I’m running The Enemy Within because I had to take a break from Pathfinder after that.

The first two books of Hell’s Vengeance, then, are The Hellfire Compact and Wrath of Thrune, and they thematically mirror each other so it makes sense to discuss them together. Also, this discussion will be rife with SPOILERS. I will also be making notes on what I changed or added, which in some cases was a lot. This was not necessarily because I found the scenarios somehow defective – though obviously nothing is perfect – but often just because I wanted to fiddle with the material myself.

Also of note is that though with past campaigns I’ve found the Paizo AP forums very helpful, in the case of Hell’s Vengeance they were rather on the quiet side. The villain campaign is not everybody’s or even most anybody’s cup of tea and seems to have been a fair bit less popular, so less help there.

The Hellfire Compact

The first book of the campaign introduces the town of Longacre, ruled by the aloof Archbaron Fex, who will early on have the party’s reprobates assigned as the sheriffs. There’s a rebellion in the nation, and Longacre is full of disgruntled war veterans. The big church in town is Iomedae, not Asmodeus, which is a problem when the rebellion is led by Iomedaean fanatics. And there are revolutionaries hiding in the Whisperwood, which is a terrible place.

I liked The Hellfire Compact very much. It presents a lovingly detailed town with lots of NPCs to keep track of, but with a bit of work and time it can come to life in the best tradition of Our Town or Emmerdale or whatever your cultural touchstone for that kind of small town life is. And then the jackbooted thugs that are the PCs will stomp all over it. I made a two-page printout with all the townsfolk’s faces and names on it and stuck it on the player-facing side of my GM screen so they could keep track of folk. Whenever someone died, their manner of demise would be written over the face. Out of the NPCs in the book, very few lived. The physician Gerya Rohalendi and the young girl Jemmy Kemmaino – whom one of the agents was actually paying to be his informant while she was also distributing revolutionary pamphlets – skipped town under the cover of night, the alchemist Elish Odmer was sentenced to community service to take care of the hospice after Rohalendi fled, and Ingoe Zoags the harbormaster stayed on their good side, but pretty much everyone else of note was executed, murdered, or slain in combat.

I wanted a slow burn for the start of the campaign, so I utilized all of the optional encounters presented in the book, to good effect. I also allowed the party to putter around town and explore to their heart’s content. The hobgoblin Zaggar from one of the minor events actually became a longtime NPC companion of the party. Zaggar and Cimri Staelish tagged along with them for a very long time. In the final battle they were also accompanied by Razelago’s krenshar Gaurig, but it was killed by the Angel Knight. These allies were very important in the final assault on the Court of Spears, because it is one of the most dangerous sequences of combat encounters in the whole adventure path.

Another thing I did was lift the pre-generated character, the cleric of Asmodeus Lazzero Dalvera, into NPC status as the direct superior of the party’s Asmodean priestess Arabelle and the antipaladin Nemanja. Dalvero and Arabelle had a strongly adversarial relationship and I spent time building him up as a potential enemy until finally replacing the final adversary in the fourth book with Lazzero Dalvera.

After the adventure proper, I ran two sessions of interludes. In the first, the agents asserted their control over the pacified Longacre and they were also sent a trio of Asmodean priests from the capital to take over and reconsecrate the cathedral of Iomedae. One was a lawful evil cleric, one was a neutral evil inquisitor and one was a lawful neutral warpriest, and they had to figure out who would be the best for the job. There was also a theatre troupe in town, the Royal Chelaxian Re-Enactment Society, telling only state-approved historical yarns. This was an old Living Greyhawk adventure that I’d wanted to run and then adapted for the campaign.

In a lot of cases, adapting adventures from outside the campaign was a lot more trouble than it would have been in pretty much any other case, since everything else is written with the assumption of heroic player characters. Of course, I did it more in this campaign than any other PF campaign I’ve run.

Overall, I enjoyed running The Hellfire Compact very much. It is a lovely sandbox.

Wrath of Thrune

And then there’s its thematic flipside. Where the first book has the agents play the authority in town and crush the resistance, in the second they are sent to infiltrate the rebel-occupied town of Kantaria. I spent an entire session on their travel to Kantaria, which is not actually anywhere near Longacre. There was no real adventure in the session, just puttering about the countryside, meeting interesting people, and visiting the town of Dekarium which I fleshed out a bit. I was also laying groundwork for a B plot about the Hellknight Order of the Vice and their ruined Citadel Darvhage, but that in the end went nowhere. I did get good use out of the material in Wayfinder #11, which is the fanzine’s Cheliax issue.

I approached Kantaria much the same way as I did Longacre. I took the time, kept track of all the NPCs, and used all the suggested material. Here, though, we had what we like to call emergent content. The agents decided that to do one nightly sabotage thing they’d planned they would wait for bad weather. Okay, I thought, let’s start rolling for weather. After two clear nights, the random weather table produced us… a blizzard. The town of Kantaria received all the snow of the winter several weeks ahead of schedule, and the rest of the adventure was spent snowed in, with low temperatures, very difficult terrain, and no tracking rolls needed, which changed the character of the infiltration mission crucially.

Also noted in the module is that Oppian Nevilindor, the cleric of Iomedae in charge of Kantaria, has a crush on Loredana Viorica, the innkeeper who’s also the agents’ contact in town. So in the morning after the blizzard, he rumbled through the snowdrifts to check up on her, bringing with him warm delicacies he had made that very morning.

I must admit that I still do not quite understand s’mores.

In Kantaria, the party also picked up another companion, the ukobach devil Brextur. He was mostly a liability rather than an asset, but along with Zaggar, one of the two NPC companions they had who lived through the campaign.

I also liked Wrath of Thrune very much, though it was perhaps a bit more constrained in its sandboxiness than The Hellfire Compact. One thing to keep an eye on is the combat encounters at Valor’s Fastness. The church grim in the courtyard can be extremely dangerous. Also, it is likely that the agents will not clear the entire complex in one go, and it pays to consider how the defenders react – can someone try to flee, is counterattacking an option, and how will they bolster their defences? In my game, the innkeeper Jana Holdus got out while the going was good.

Post-Wrath of Thrune, I ran an old Dungeon adventure named “Fiendish Footprints” by Tito Leati as they were returning to Longacre from Kantaria. The module’s hobgoblin villain ended up actually being Gwalur’s former boss and they hired the whole company after fighting a very dangerous combat with a bunch of elves. Again, the perils of converting stuff meant for heroes. Another thing was that an evil-aligned party doesn’t necessarily have the tools for dealing with supernatural evil adversaries that a good-aligned party would have. As the antipaladin’s player noted, “When you pit us against evil enemies, I’m a fighter with no feats”. The scenario’s macguffin ended up being connected to Socothbenoth, Vesper’s patron, though he didn’t know where his powers were coming from yet.

Next time, The Inferno Gate and For Queen & Empire.

The Most Mystifying Game of All – AD&D Trivia

Sometimes, works of art get forgotten after their own time. They may be rediscovered decades, even centuries later, to face re-evaluation by critics and perhaps be inducted into the canon of classics.

Of course, sometimes the re-evaluation concludes that it’s a dud and deservedly forgotten.

So, which one is the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Trivia Game?

Released in 1991, two years after the release of AD&D’s second edition, it’s what it says on the tin. It comes with 600 question cards organized into five levels (100 per level except 200 for third). First-level questions are usually multiple-choice and easy (one might say “trivial”), while fifth-level questions are often long descriptions of a game situation that then asks the specifics of the rule being applied in the situation. Because the questions are about game rules. They’re specifically drawn from the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master Guide, Monstrous Compendium Volume 1 and Monstrous Compendium Volume 2. That was before the 2E hardcover Monstrous Manual, when they were still doing the ring binder experiment with the monster collections.

I do not remember why I own this game. I believe I may have picked it up for a nominal sum at Ropecon some year in the early 2000’s. I had never played this until this past month when I was browsing BoardGameGeek, which unbeknownst to me was bugging (or I looked carelessly) and it showed zero logged plays for this undoubted, unsung masterpiece. I posted about this on Facebook and somewhat surprisingly was met with enough enthusiasm that I scheduled two sessions of the game on Discord.

Rules

This is not a board game, strictly speaking, as there is no game board. Every player gets a character – Fighter, Priest, Rogue, Wizard, or Monster. These are only identifiers and have no class abilities. There are two character cards and sets of tokens per class, making this a ten-player game if one can scrounge up sufficient AD&D nerds for such madness. The cards are beautiful. While the art assets are recycled, TSR’s character image bank is a really good place to recycle from. There’s all the big hits, like Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell, and Jeff Easley, plus the then-new hotness of Brom, and a rogue from the underrated Robin Wood, who sadly passed earlier this year.

Every character has six tokens. Their tokens are put into a cup – or an Italian bersaglieri fez in our case – and you pick one token blind. That’s the first player, after which the round moves clockwise. The player whose turn it is picks a question level, and the player to their left – their Question Master – draws a question card and reads it. If the player’s answer is wrong, their turn ends and it’s the next player’s turn. If they’re right, it gets interesting. They take the question level’s worth of tokens from the cup. If they’re the other players’ tokens, they take that much damage and the tokens are put on their sheets. The player’s own tokens heal damage. Once all six of a player’s tokens are on their sheet, they’re dead. There is thus an indirect PvP element – you can’t choose who you attack, but attacking is baked into the procedure of play.

The last character alive is the winner. Simple.

Of course, since we were playing via a Discord video call and I had all the question cards, we had to modify the procedure slightly. I asked all the questions and took care of the tokens.

Comments

It’s a weird game. The mechanics of it work, and made for nice 30-minute session with three players. It was easy to explain and fast to learn, but there was also a thematic connection with the question levels. I do not feel the player-versus-player element is quite as thematically strong, as to me AD&D is a game of cooperation, but I do get that it’s traditional for there to be one winner. The token system also brings in some interesting complexity and reduces the probability of someone getting eliminated right out the gate. Since damage tokens are removed from the cup, you’re less likely to draw all six of someone’s tokens immediately. The more you have players, the more the probabilities will even out – and all of this just happens and you don’t have to know or think about it. That’s solid design, there.

And then there’s the question cards. 600 cards of game rules. It boggles my mind that anyone thought this was the way to make a trivia game. Here, let me give some examples, one from each level.

What is a hireling?
a. A type of pole weapon
b. A small, scaly creature found in caves
c. An NPC who can be employed by a player character
d. A tool used to scale walls

The bardiche, ranseur, and spetum are all examples of what?
a. Foul creatures from the Outer Planes
b. Polearms
c. Orc spittle
d. Druid spell components

Gragmore the Warrior is attacking an opponent in a barroom brawl. He punches the drunk with his hand, which is equipped with a metal gauntlet. How much damage can Gragmore inflict (not including a Strength bonus)?

Of all the giant-kin, which one has innate magical abilities?

Underwater settings can offer unique opportunities for adventure (ever had a carp nibble your toes)? On the other hand, underwater adventures can pose problems. How far can characters see while exploring a murky lake, 50 feet below the surface?

The first is too easy, really. The second is a bit more difficult but still trivial, especially as one of the options is a clear joke answer. Three I could’ve guessed, four I would’ve guessed wrong, and five I could not even begin to answer. Three, by the way, is an example of how many of the question cards tell a little story to set the stage for the question. I like the idea.

My problem with this is that rules questions age fast and they’re kinda boring. If you do not play this particular edition of the game, you have little to no chance. I played AD&D for years, but that was over 20 years ago. While obviously all trivia games age to some degree – our family copy of an early 1980’s Trivial Pursuit Genus Edition is notorious for the Sports & Leisure category being all but impossible today – I feel this one became obsolete far faster than if it had been, say, Forgotten Realms trivia.

Really, what this feels like is a joke on ruleslawyers that’s gone too far: it’s nothing but rules knowledge without the distraction of story or role-playing.

Answers: 1. c, 2. b, 3. 1d3, 4. firbolg, 5. 10 feet.

RPG Research Rundown

This is the weekend of Ropecon 2021, virtual for the second year in a row. As there have been a lot of role-playing game studies books coming out in the past few years, we felt we needed an excuse to catch up, and thus was born the clunkily and slightly inaccurately named “Jukka Särkijärvi and Evan Torner Chat About Recent RPG Monographs” (there’s one book there that’s not a monograph).

I was also asked for a bibliography, so here’s the books we covered, the books we mentioned, and the books we obliquely hinted at in the program description by mystifying references like “Bowman (2010)”. You can find the International Journal of Role-Playing here, Analog Game Studies here, and as a bonus, the Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies here.

Of course, accessibility is always an issue, especially when dealing with academic publishers who price their stuff for institutions, not private individuals. Some we bought, some we received straight from the authors, some we wrested from the jealous grasp of university libraries. DriveThruRPG carries a lot of the McFarland books, but not all of them. Some are entirely or partially free downloads, and I have linked to those. I can only wish the best of luck to those embarking on the same journey.

Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2010. The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity. McFarland. Link.

Carbonell, Curtis D. 2019. Dread Trident: Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Modern Fantastic. Liverpool University Press. Link.

Deterding, Sebastian and José Zagal. 2019. Role-Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach. Routledge. Link. Open access articles.

Fine, Gary Alan. 1983. Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds. University of Chicago Press. Link.

Grouling Cover, Jennifer. 2010. The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games. McFarland. Link.

Hedge, Stephanie and Jennifer Grouling. 2021. Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age: Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop RPGs and Fandom. McFarland. Link.

Henriksen, Thomas Duus, Christian Bierlich, Kasper Friis Hansen, and Valdemar Kølle (eds.). 2011. Think Larp. Rollespilsakademiet. Download.

Jones, Shelly (ed.). 2021. Watch Us Roll: Essays on Actual Play and Performance in Tabletop Role-Playing Games. McFarland. Link.

Kamm, Björn-Ole. 2020. Role-Playing Games of Japan: Transcultural Dynamics and Orderings. Palgrave Macmillan. Link.

Loponen, Mika. 2019. The Semiospheres of Prejudice in the Fantastic Arts: The Inherited Racism of Irrealia and Their Translation. PhD thesis, University of Helsinki. Download.

Mackay, Daniel. 2001. The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art. McFarland. Link.

Mizer, Nicholas J. 2019. Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds. Palgrave Macmillan. Link.

Mochocki, Michał. 2021. Role-play as a Heritage Practice: Historical Larp, Tabletop RPG and Reenactment. Link.

Montola, Markus and Jaakko Stenros (eds.). 2008. Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games. Ropecon ry. Download.

Montola, Markus and Jaakko Stenros (eds.). 2010. Nordic Larp. Fëa Livia. Download.

Peterson, Jon. 2020. The Elusive Shift. MIT University Press. Link.

Saitta, Eleanor, Johanna Koljonen and Jukka Särkijärvi (eds.). What Do We Do When We Play? Ropecon ry. Open access articles.

Schallegger, René Reinhold. 2019. The Postmodern Joy of Role-Playing Games: Agency, Ritual and Meaning in the Medium. McFarland. Link.

Seregina, Usva. 2016. Performing Fantasy and Reality. PhD thesis, Aalto University. Download.

Seregina, Usva. 2018. Performing Fantasy and Reality in Contemporary Culture. Routledge. Link.

White, William J. 2020. Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012: Designs and Discussions. Palgrave Macmillan. Link.

Williams, J. Patrick, Sean Q. Hendricks, and W. Keith Winkler (eds.). 2006. Gaming as Culture: Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games. McFarland. Link.

Additionally, I have been working on a series of articles for the Loki role-playing webzine about many of these books. Only in Finnish, I’m afraid.

• Roolipelien juurilla – Jon Petersonin The Elusive Shift
• Millaista siellä on olla? – Nicholas J. Mizerin Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds
• Mikä oli Forge? – Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001-2012: Designs and Discussions
• Japani, Saksa ja me kaikki muut – Björn-Ole Kammin Role-Playing Games of Japan: Transcultural Dynamics and Orderings

Playing ALIEN, or, How I TPK’d the Entire Party

The ALIEN Roleplaying Game came out in 2019 from Fria Ligan. It was a bit of a surprise – on one hand, it felt like a likely very expensive, major license, but on the other, there was also the feeling that the more recent, very unfortunate movies had kinda killed interest in it. Certainly, I felt like that Alien’s very specific mode of survival horror in space was perhaps too narrow a frame to support the classical approach of putting out a big rulebook, adventures, sourcebooks, and an introductory boxed set. That’s the stuff you want in a long campaign, but long campaigns imply characters stay alive. This is Alien. People don’t do that here.

However, Fria Ligan makes quality stuff, so when the opportunity came to play, I jumped on it. Also, it’s not as though there’s anything else to do these days than play roleplaying games online.

We played the Starter Set’s introductory adventure Chariot of the Gods. The venue was Foundry VTT, where you can buy modules with all the necessary stuff already set up. I find it helps getting used to a new system when the VTT does half the work for you and tells if your roll was a success or a failure. Voice and video we got through Discord. Playing virtually also had the crucial advantage that we could send secret messages to the Game Mother without the other players seeing us pass notes, which can be a very important part of ALIEN.

ALIEN uses Fria Ligan’s house ruleset, the Year Zero Engine, used in Mutant: Year Zero, Tales from the Loop, and the rest. Basically, you roll a pool of six-siders and sixes are successes. Failure is very common, which fits some games better than others. It fits ALIEN‘s desperate survival horror very well.

The following, of course, will have SPOILERS for Chariot of the Gods. Proceed at your own risk.

ALIEN has two game modes, Cinematic and Campaign Play. Campaign Play is exactly what it sounds like, while the Cinematic mode has pre-written adventures with pregenerated characters, each with their own secret agendas. They’re long enough for a one-shot or a mini-campaign, and at least Chariot of the Gods lived admirably up to the “Cinematic”. The first session, our approach on a derelict ship in the dark between the stars, our exploration of its frozen corridors and disused laboratories, was straight out of the movies. Of course, this was also because that’s what we as players were there to do, so that’s how we played it. The characters were archetypical and easy to fall into – the crew of the Nostromo, basically.

We also observed a shift in style in the later sessions. After we had explored the ship, the fear of the unknown dissipated, and once we had fought some monsters and discovered them to be dangerous but killable, we went from playing Alien to playing Aliens, as it were.

The scenario also had an act structure, which governed the characters’ secret agendas that shifted as the situation escalated. Some of the goals were mutually exclusive and drove player-versus-player conflict. The corporate liaison, for instance, is pretty much Burke from Aliens. Oh, and one of the PCs is a secret android (because of course there is a secret android!) whose Act III agenda was to kill everyone who knows too much and stop any xenomorph crap from reaching Earth. Which I then proceeded to do. I think that was the first time I’ve effected a Total Party Kill from a player position. And it was total, since after shooting the corporate liaison and putting the other two crewmembers in cryostasis, I started the ship’s self-destruct sequence. No survivors, great game.

It was interesting to play a game that not only allowed lethal player-versus-player conflict, but was also designed to spark it. The Cinematic modules are such self-contained stories that they can allow for frequent PC death. There are also plenty of NPCs that can serve as replacement characters, and Story Points carry with the player and aren’t lost when your space trucker gets disembowelled by something that came out of the air duct.

One thing I am not entirely certain about was how the android worked in the narrative from the viewpoint of the other players, because our debrief was very brief indeed. From my point of view, it worked well, because I knew all along that my character was a synthetic, with double sets of agendas. For the other players, it just suddenly turned out in the third act that the roughneck Cham isn’t Cham at all but a synthetic, and then he shot Wilson and told his name was really Lucas, and then the story was suddenly over. I think there was little in the way of foreshadowing, apart from some players having realized that one of us must be a secret android because this is ALIEN and there’s always a secret android.

I think ALIEN also somehow redeems Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. I do not think they are good movies (to be frank, I think they should’ve quit after Aliens). However, Prometheus has a mythological gravity to its setting. While it doesn’t really work in the context of the previous films in the franchise and feels like Ridley Scott pulled it out of his hat, the ALIEN Roleplaying Game uses that mythological aspect to great effect and synthesizes it with the bug-hunting marines and space truckers of the original movies. Your crew may be just working joes hauling stuff from one colony to another for a paycheck, but they are doing it across the awful majesty of deep space. You might be a down-to-earth colonist on the final frontier, just wanting to make a living, but that earth is not yours. There are terrible secrets at the edges of the galaxy older than life on Earth, and they do not want to be discovered. Alien didn’t need to ask the question of why the xenomorphs exist, it just needed to have them there so hijinks could ensue. Prometheus… also really didn’t need to ask that question, but it did, and that’s why we have a setting to explore. I’m not sure we had that before Prometheus. Certainly the previous attempt at making an RPG of the franchise flopped hard. Then, the 1991 Aliens Adventure Game was also based on the ruleset of Phoenix Command, so it was never destined to widespread appeal.

I kinda want to run this myself, now. The idea of a longer campaign appeals to me less and I am already running three of those, but a series of adventures in the Cinematic mode, with conflicting character agendas, chaos, carnage, and few survivors, sounds just great.

Knights of the Dinner Table and Self-Loathing

Early this year, before the world went all the way to hell, back when we still met people, a friend dropped off his entire collection of Knights of the Dinner Table at my place. This amounted to about 40 Bundle of Trouble trade paperbacks, all five Tales from the Vault collections, a few other collection books, and where the paperbacks tapered off, single issues up to around 240’s.

So I did what any self-respecting geek does and began reading, while taking notes.

The strip itself started in 1990, intended as filler for the Shadis magazine, and kicked off in 1994 as a monthly comic book which is still ongoing. The first Bundle of Trouble collects the first three issues of the magazine. The first eight Bundles of Trouble are stapled, but from the ninth book onward they are perfect-bound. Starting from Vol. 12, they compile four issues of the magazine each.

Here are my observations after reading the first book.

So.

Um.

The comic tells of a gaming group in Muncie, Indiana. The Game Master is B.A. Felton, who’d like there to be role-playing in his game. Brian, Dave, and Bob are hack & slashers to the core, and will kill everything they meet. In the second issue, they are joined by Sara, who’s also capable of diplomatic solutions. Nobody ever talks in character. I understand Bob, Dave, and Brian are based on certain people Blackburn knows, while Sara is a composite of many female gamers of his acquaintance.

It’s been drawn once. There’s a wide shot of the table and the players, a couple of close-ups, and some variation on these themes that’s then copied and pasted into comic strips. These are short tales, a couple of pages long at the most, about how something goes wrong. Half the time the players threaten each other or B.A. with violence and in several instances they actually come to blows. It’s like looking at some secluded tribe that never came up with the idea of non-violent problem solving. What I don’t get out of this is why these people would spend time with one another or play role-playing games. They don’t seem to be having any fun, ever. The strip is missing the love of the game that’s intrinsic to the success of, say, The Order of the Stick.

The jokes are so worn that the stories would be disturbingly familiar even if I’d never read KotDT. The first story in the book is a retelling of “Eric and the Gazebo”. There’s a larp story, where Dave and Bob go to a vampire larp and start dressing up goth and wearing makeup and piercings, because larping is weird. There’s the story where Sara joins the group, Brian doesn’t dare talk to a girl, and Dave is a tedious sexist. Sara solves the situation by threatening Dave with violence. There’s a story where the players go play with the infamous Nitro Ferguson (or Furguson, or Fergueson – Blackburn never settles on a spelling) while B.A. is away. Nitro runs an adventure based on Deliverance and Bob gets traumatised by what his elf experiences. He no longer wants to play the character. This is played for laughs.

In the editorials and the collection’s introduction, there’s a running theme of fans finding their own experiences and their gaming buddies in the situations and characters of the comic. In a way, I kinda also do, but in these characters I see all those people I’ve had to ban from gaming clubs and online spaces. The image of gamers in KotDT is suffused with the self-loathing that characterizes American nerd media, which makes most of this stuff entirely unbearable (see also The Big Bang Theory).

It will be interesting to see how the book’s portrayal of gamers changes with the times. Three down, 237 to go.

Let’s Read Planescape: Monstrous Compendium Appendix I (and the Outer Planes Appendix)

There were ultimately three monster books released for the Planescape setting, the Planescape Monstrous Compendiums I-III. They eschew the product numbering of the rest of the Monstrous Compendium line, which was a mess anyway. The first printing of the AD&D 2E Monstrous Manual was a big binder with loose-leaf monster entries, running off the idea that additional monster supplements could just be slipped in and you’d have all your monsters in the same place. While I like the idea, they’d have needed something in place to address the issue of new monsters that fall alphabetically between two creatures that are on different sides of the same sheet. Anyway, by the time this book rolled around, that concept was dead and buried, and thus in 1994 we got this lavishly illustrated 128-page book and its sequels. Well, by the time this book rolled around the second time.

A lot of Planescape Monstrous Compendium Volume 1 — or PSMC1 — is actually recycled content from 1991’s MC8 Monstrous Compendium Outer Planes Appendix. And when I say “a lot”, I mean “nearly all”. There’s a convenient Wikipedia page that lists the critters and where they’re originally from (while it’s generally bad form to use Wikipedia as a source, but I did check, and at least now in late March of 2020 it was valid). MC8 has 91 monsters, while PSMC1 has 105. By a quick count, 71 of these were carried over. Of the remaining 20, most resurfaced in Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix II and Planes of Law (notably the archons). Only the air sentinel, the celestial lammasu, and the adamantite dragon didn’t make further appearances. The air sentinel is basically an off-brand djinn native to Bytopia (or the Twin Paradises as it’s still known at the time), and the other two are what it says on the tin. The adamantite dragon is also native to the Twin Paradises. Its breath weapons are the traditional cone of flame, and a time stop effect. Planescape didn’t really do dragons, which is probably why it made no further appearances.

All this makes PSMC1 a dissonant book. While the art was all redone by Tony DiTerlizzi and the layout is the Planescape we know and love, complete with in-character blow-up quotations, a lot of the text was not given the proper attention. While it’s by no means just copypaste, and some entries are lavishly expanded from the original, the fact remains that MC8’s writer J. Paul LaFountain was not a particularly good prosaist. The text is janky, which is thrown into sharper relief when it sits alongside material written specifically for this book.

However, PSMC1 is a vital book. It gathers together most of the major critters of the setting with the exception of modrons and some of the good-aligned outsiders. It’s got the main lineups of baatezu, tanar’ri, and yugoloths. There’s the marut, which D&D 3E later ran with and used as a springing board for the inevitables. There’s the random monster generator that is the hordling, there’s tieflings, shadow fiends, night hags, and the animal lords of Beastlands. We’re introduced to the combatants of the Blood War and the whole larva ecosystem/economy that the Lower Planes have got going on.

Most of the art is good, though a couple of the fiends only have very closely framed mugshots that don’t really tell much about how they look besides ugly, and it took me until the 3E-era Wayne Reynolds illustration of the ultroloth to figure out what it looks like.

Possibly my favourite thing about this book are the mephits. They’re basically elemental imps; small, winged humanoids with breath weapons and bad attitudes. The core of the entry is boosted off MC14 Fiend Folio Appendix, but that one has six mephits whereas this book has sixteen, one for each elemental, paraelemental, and quasielemental plane. They’re characterised by weakness as combatants and being an amusing collection of unwanted personality traits, but what makes them really shine is the concept of mephit messages. They are used as messengers by more powerful creatures, but the mephit itself is the message, and the type of mephit sent. A radiant mephit offers truce, a salt mephit declares open warfare, and so on. It’s like the language of flowers, if the flower was also an asshole to your pets, smelled bad, and tried to cadge cigarettes off you.

Next up is Planes of Chaos, and I’ll see if I can’t draw something more interesting out of that.

Let’s Read Planescape: The Eternal Boundary

It’s been a while since we did one of these, hasn’t it?

Around a year ago we inaugurated an RPG book club on Facebook and it took me this long to figure I might use the social pressure to get me working on this project again. So, to reiterate, as I am the keeper of a complete collection of the Planescape product line, I will read all of it and jot down my musings.

A lot has changed since I started these. Nowadays, this stuff is available in PDF on DriveThruRPG, with product histories written by Shannon Appelcline. I will be drawing on those histories as I go. I also noticed that the blog Guile’s World has created conversions of Planescape things for Pathfinder 1E, which I’ll be linking as we go along. The Eternal Boundary’s conversion is here.

Here we go, then. I chose The Eternal Boundary, partly because it’s a short 32-page adventure and I could get through it in an hour even while taking notes, and partly because it was the first adventure module published for Planescape, coming out in June 1994. Its product code 2601 is the next one from Planescape Campaign Setting.

Incidentally, an in-depth look into its bowels will contain SPOILERS.

The Eternal Boundary is written by L. Richard Baker III, who according to Wikipedia is the same person as the Rich Baker or Richard Baker who worked on a lot of AD&D, D&D and Alternity stuff as well as some of the better Forgotten Realms novels like the Last Mythal trilogy and City of Ravens.

The first thing that strikes about this thing is that production-wise, they weren’t messing around. It comes with its own DM screen, with NPC stats and dungeon maps on the DM side and art, a tavern map and a map of the Hive on the player side. The adventure itself is a coverless booklet.

The Eternal Boundary, spread out

Plot and Structure

The adventure’s background is that a wizard by the name of Green Marvent, based in the gate town Plague-Mort, is hatching a cunning plan to destabilize the kriegstanz and become a real shaker in Sigil. It’s a bit on the convoluted side, but the basic idea is that his agents pick out barmies in the Hive – the mentally ill, beggars, people nobody will miss – and take them out with a spell called feign death, which makes them appear, well, dead. They’re then taken to the Mortuary, where Marvent’s agent on the inside flings them through a portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire, ostensibly for cremation but really into a base run by other agents, who take the knocked-out barmies, reprogram them by telling them they’re dead but have a second chance at life, and give them orders to go to Sigil and join a faction. Marvent would then use these sleeper agents to do something that’s not described in detail. Green Marvent’s outfit is named the Illuminated, and they’re what we would call a sect.

The 1996 German translation by Uwe Körner.

The adventure is meant for low-level characters, levels 1st-3rd according to the text, 1st-5th according to the back cover. I checked my German-language copy, which says “Die Ewige Grenze is geeignet für eine Gruppe von 4-6 Charakteren der Stufen 1-5″, so I guess that settles it. This makes sense, first adventure and everything, and it kinda also works as an introduction to Planescape. It’s not a Grand Tour of the Planes kind of thing, but starts off slow. I figure a playthrough would take some four to six hours, depending on how quick the players are on the uptake and how much fighting they end up doing. In my judgement, this could be run as a one-shot.

The Eternal Boundary is structured into three parts, “The Hive, “The Mortuary” and “The Eternal Boundary”. In “The Hive”, they are hired to look for a person. It depends on party composition which introduction they get. If there are no faction members or only members of the Dustmen, the Bleak Cabal, or the Xaositects, they get the no-faction intro, and otherwise they get the faction start. This is because those three factions are deeply involved in the plot and especially having a Dustman in the party can shortcut most of the second part.

As a side note, it’s always felt to me like some of the factions are more NPC groups than others, and these three are on the NPC-ey end of the scale. I will talk more about this once we reach Factol’s Manifesto.

Anyway, they’re hired to look up a Hiver by name of Eliath because he has information about a demiplane called the Isle of Black Trees. This is funny to me because Planescape: Torment was later developed by Black Isle Studios. Anyway, by meeting people they should be able to figure out Eliath was killed recently and taken to the Mortuary.

“Should” is the operative word here. AD&D wasn’t the best system for running investigations and the DM is advised to just give them the map with hotspots and then throw encounters at them. They will meet Dustmen and Chaosmen and/or Bleakers, and a barmy local who “dies”. The Bleakers and Chaosmen are investigating the deaths and may decide that the PCs are either guilty or impeding the investigation. They will eventually be assaulted by the Shadowknave, Green Marvent’s catspaw, and his gang.

Hopefully, the party eventually figures out they need to investigate the Mortuary, which brings us to Part II, “The Mortuary”. First, though, they will be informed by their boss that Eliath has been spotted alive, and will hopefully look him up and interrogate him (among the things they can find out is that the Isle of Black Trees is a dead end with him). They’ll also encounter the barmy they saw “die” in the Hive, now going by another name and a member of a party member’s faction.

At this point, the party should have enough railroad track built to figure out there’s something sketchy going on at the Mortuary, so the next thing is to infiltrate it. Hopefully infiltrate, because a frontal assault will result in character deaths. Getting caught, on the other hand, will shortcut the entire second part of the adventure, since whoever catches them will either be Illuminated or hand them over to the Illuminated undercover agent. Unless they come clean to Factol Skall, who will conduct an investigation of his own and “dispose” of the PCs, which feels like bad design to me and I would have Skall throw the PCs at the problem on the philosophy that if it doesn’t make the problem go away, at least the PCs did.

The Mortuary is basically presented as a dungeon crawl instead of a more reasonable format for an infiltration mission, which I suppose is understandable considering the book reads AD&D and 1994, but does take up a lot of space. Incidentally, the Mortuary presented here is basically the same as the Mortuary of Planescape: Torment, with in some cases not only precisely the same floorplan but also the same encounters.

The problem with Part II is that by my reading, the clues the PCs go into the Mortuary with are pretty thin. They’ll have “the Mortuary” and possibly “Elemental Plane of Fire”, but unless they have a particularly kleptomaniac outlook and go to a specific crypt, they will not discover the agent’s name. These are always a bit hard to see just by reading the text, but to my eye the investigation does not flow naturally.

Anyway, one way or another they will end up through the gate to the Elemental Plane of Fire and the Citadel of Fire. The setup implies a few ways for them to go about this such as infiltration, but the end result is likely going to be an assault. At this point the party will likely have enough information to piece together what’s going on and will try to end it. There’s a boss, a githzerai fighter/mage named Imogen, to fight who will demonstrate admirable initiative once she figures out there are intruders, and will gather a team to seek and destroy them. This makes speed imperative – the more enemies the party can take out before Imogen gathers up her posse, the fewer members it will have. I like the crew in the Citadel of Fire. There’s a nice variety of adversaries. I have no idea what the stone golem is doing in a low-level adventure, though. By my reading, they’re not supposed to fight it, but it’s there and under the control of Imogen, which is weird.

The ideal ending is presented as destroying the life support gem, rescuing the prisoners, and returning to Sigil. What bothers me is what’s not presented. Green Marvent’s whole plot isn’t laid out very well, which makes failure or partial failure harder to adjudicate. The Eternal Boundary also doesn’t present options for follow-up. It’s like it’s written as the first part of a series but there are no sequels. Green Marvent, the evil mastermind, is never encountered. While he’s mentioned in the Plague-Mort entries in Planescape Campaign Setting and later in Well of Worlds, there’s no follow-up that I’ve been able to find. Reading this is like watching a story through a keyhole. I have a constant awareness of missing context.

The other side of the screen.

Summary

The Eternal Boundary is the first place where we encounter the concept of sects. Not quite as large, or powerful, or as Sigil-centered as the factions, they’re similar, significant power groups. Some of them have a governing philosophy of some kind, some – like the Illuminated – are mostly just a bunch of thugs. We will be formally introduced to sects in Planes of Chaos.

Another thing that struck me with its absence was Tony DiTerlizzi’s art. There are three full-page colour illustrations of a Sigil street, the Mortuary, and the Citadel of Fire, by Rick Berry, Ned Dameron, and Alan Pollack. The cover, portraying a Mortuary zombie with a number on his forehead, is by Robh Ruppel. I like it as an atmosphere piece but it is a bit drab.

So, there it is, The Eternal Boundary. I feel it is more interesting as a resource on the Mortuary than as an adventure module. Indeed, if its description of the Mortuary hadn’t been so detailed, I think it could’ve accommodated more immediately usable material such as more a more thorough description of the Illuminated and a rundown of Green Marvent’s masterplan. If you want a starred review, 3/5.

Next up: Monstrous Compendium Planescape Appendix I, unless someone convinces me otherwise.

Spire: The City Must Fall, or, “Menzoberranzan Writes Back”

I am probably late to the party on this, but just this past week I discovered the game Spire: The City Must Fall. It looked absolutely fascinating, so I threw myself into it and read the entire book cover to cover, and now I have thoughts about it.

I have not yet played the game, though I’m already scheduling one-shots to kick the tyres a bit and see how this bad boy works in practice. The book itself clocks in at 220 pages and is gorgeously illustrated by Adrian Stone. I bought the PDF. It is published by the London-based Rowan, Rook, and Decard Ltd. and written and designed by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor.

Spire is a game about drow elves. The drow live in the city known as Spire, an impossible pile of buildings that reaches towards the stars. A proper hive city. It used to belong to the drow, but two hundred years ago an invader came, and their rule was overthrown, and they are now the underclass, the dregs of society. That invader was the aelfir, or the high elves. To earn the right to live in Spire, a drow must do a period of indentured servitude known as the durance. Perhaps they will serve in the army of the expansionist aelfir, perhaps in the city guard to oppress their fellow drow. Perhaps they will be servants to the high elves.

Whatever their profession or background, all player characters belong to the Ministry, a quasi-religious revolutionary conspiracy. Their goal: to overthrow the rule of the aelfir and restore Spire to the drow.

To start with, a word on the ruleset. The system looks like an cousin of Blades in the Dark. This is not a generic system. There’s character classes, which are woven deeply into the world of the game. There’s the Knight, which is a fighter class, but also the member of a drunken and disorderly chivalric order, who can glance at the room and instantly determine who to pick a fight with in order to create a distraction or impress people. There’s the Midwife, who’s the caretaker and defender of drow eggs (!) and gets weird spider abilities. The Firebrand is a revolutionary who eventually becomes to embody the anger of the people. Each class has a couple of abilities they get at the beginning, and advances that are grouped into Low, Medium, and High. There is no level or experience system as such, but the characters gain advances as they effect change in the Spire. In addition to the ultimately finite lists of advances from their class, the characters can also pick advances from the lists of specific organizations, or related to their durance. The system is lightweight but the characters seem very customizable.

The basic resolution system is elegant. You roll a small dice pool of d10s – possibly as few as one – and the highest one counts. There’s degrees of success. You can fail bad, just fail, succeed at cost, succeed, and succeed really well. Failures and success at cost inflict stress. The durability of your character in Spire is measured by stress and resistance, and there are five types of resistance. Blood measures your physical durability and is basically your hit points – you fuck up in combat, you usually get Blood stress. The other resistances measure your finances, mental stability and wellbeing, cover identities and secrecy, and local reputation. As stress accumulates, the GM rolls stress tests and failing one of these results in fallout, which comes in minor, medium, and severe. The fallouts are narrative. Severe fallouts may result in death. A minor Blood fallout might be “bleeding”, a medium one “broken arm”, and a severe one “dying”, which gives the character a choice of either doing one final action with bonus dice, or trying to desperately cling to life, losing something vital in the bargain. I like this system. Character death in Spire feels like a thing that happens and should happen, and the character creation seems light enough that creating a new one even at a higher level doesn’t feel like a drag.

The setting, then. I’d describe the world as “weird fantasy”. While the drow are definitely D&D, the city of the Spire is a closer relation to China Miéville’s New Crobuzon than Waterdeep or Menzoberranzan. The book itself acknowledges as much. It’s a fallen world, littered with the detritus of a bygone precursor civilization that the humans have reverse-engineered to bring about their own industrial revolution that hasn’t quite percolated all the way to the elven lands. Spire is a backwater metropolis beset by social issues and religious strife. There’s high weirdness in the city, such as the Vermissian, a subway system that was never finished, whose tunnels interact with strangely with the quaint notion of three-dimensional space, and where odd creatures roam, and whose maintenance ways lead to the Vermissian library.

Spire does not entirely make sense, and is famously unmappable (okay, there is a map, but it’s one of those that more suggests “here there be cool shit and also dragons” than telling you where place A is in relation to place B), which means the GM doesn’t need to worry about where whatever they want to put there would actually fit. There’s competing academies and universities, and “it is hard to find a school that isn’t a recruitment agency for a dark cult, insidious conspiracy or apocalypse cabal, so students in the know do their best to learn what they can and get out before they’re roped into murdering a city official or sacrificing a blind gutterkin on an altar of the hungry deep” (p. 81), and cults practising air burial, and the sky docks where megacorvidae soar and skywhales bring wares from distant lands. Hidden gnolls lurk in the slums, something dire lives in one of the algae vats, and down in Red Row, Brother Hellion’s Church of the Gun congregates and worships.

It’s a delight to read, has its own voice, and sets a unique tone that fires up the imagination to come up with more.

The relationship between Spire and New Crobuzon does not stop with the weird fantasy, but extends to the thematic level. The astute reader may have picked up by now that it’s what might be described as “explicitly political”. The entire setup is basically a postcolonial critical reading of D3 Vault of the Drow. The classic D&D drow is a sadistic, evil, hypersexualized monster of a person, who’s also by the way black, in contrast to the white, noble, cultured and good high elves. This is kinda, you know, racist (and the art in Spire leans into this – instead of white hair, the drow here are black-haired and sport dreadlocks, cornrows and undercuts). Spire is a reading of this against the grain, the classic D&D drow a creature of aelfir propaganda. Another inspiration that the game lists is Discworld, and this is the only place I’ve seen where the influence of Pratchett is the anger. (My own additions to its Appendix N would be Warren Ellis’s superlative comic book Transmetropolitan, which has become more and more relevant every damn election cycle ever since it was released in 1997, and Neil Jordan’s film Michael Collins, for its depiction of low-tech counter-intelligence in action.)

The setting and setup of the game are a juicy commentary on oppression and colonization. The institutions of higher learning are controlled by the high elves, but is anything they teach about the drow true? Are they even the same species? While even during their durance a drow is legally a person and not property, the injustice and economic implications of the system are complicated. Oh, and the drow Home Nations are embroiled in a brutal civil war and refugees are streaming into the city. The worship of some of the drow gods has been banned, driving their faithful underground and radicalizing them.

Spire is also harsh about the life of the resistance fighter. From the point of view of the high elves, or even the ordinary drow on the Blue Market omnibus, they are a terrorist organization. Though the top-level setup of colonizer vs. colonized is black and white enough, on the practical level it becomes a grey muddle of who you can trust, how far are you willing to go and what is the personal cost of the struggle. The characters are not murderhoboes but have relationships with NPCs, who may (will) end up hurt in the course of the revolution. The game states up front that your character will die, the Ministry itself and their own families will sell them out when they become liabilities, and the best they can hope is to become the bastards in charge.

And sure, you can play Spire without getting all political about it and just run it like it was released by Ubisoft. This, to be fair, is probably how it’ll mostly get played and how I would also run it in, say, a convention setting with a collection of random players. The deeper level is there, though, and it’s explicit about it.

I really have only a single, minor quibble. That quibble is languages. Though the Azurite class has two different advances that deal with language acquisition, Spire is remarkably coy about what languages there are actually spoken in the city. The information that aelfir speak their own language and have trouble communicating with ordinary citizens is squirrelled away in the glossary appendix, and all other mentions of language in the book are of occult, dead and some cases executed, forgotten and forbidden tongues, which are not really the purview of the merchant-priest Azurites. I feel this is also significant because when you’re running an insurrection and counter-intelligence operations, who can understand what language is very important – do they need an interpreter, can they be compromised, and so on. It’s possible the setting book Strata or the crypto sourcebook Secrets Kept from the Sun go into more detail on this, but really, a couple of paragraphs in the corebook would’ve gone a long way.

And that’s it. Spire is one of the strongest games I’ve picked up in recent years. The system is elegant and fast to pick up despite the amount of character options, the city of Spire is delightfully weird and offbeat, and the game has a clear, bold vision in critical dialogue with established tropes of the genre. It dares to get POLITICS IN MUH GAMES, and I respect that (of course it helps that I agree with those politics). Most importantly, it does this in an accessible way. Spire is an ambitious work but unlike many such role-playing games, especially from the storygame side of things, it doesn’t demand that from the players.

If my dance card wasn’t full for the year, I’d look into kicking off a campaign.

Oh, and about those spiders…

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