I. Dear Reader
I’ve got a neat story and game mechanic for you. Everyone likes the idea of teamwork in games. It’s really satisfying to work together and pull off something cool. You know, “I line ’em up, you knock ’em down”. In sport or more tactical games, these often are explicit roles or moves – someone might explicitly be playing “the person who sets other people up”.
This is also – maybe obviously, maybe not – a thing you do in narrative games. You can, of course, do this just in the fiction itself. You might be playing the good cop to someone’s bad cop, for example. But usually, most games have a straightforward mechanic for this, maybe you take the help action or roll a set up move or spend a resource to assist.
But when playing Bite Marks last year, I got to see my favourite version of this so far. This is a werewolf game that focuses on werewolves as a pack. This focus on being a pack comes up in many ways (like coming up with specific pack traditions and inside lingo) but as far as teamwork goes, the main mechanic is the pack pool. This is a pool of points that you can spend to help other characters. Like in Masks, you can spend pack pool to get a +1 to moves. But, you can also do cool stuff like this:
Overwhelm Them: Pay [12] Pack Pool and no matter the odds, no matter your differences, the Pack comes together and fights as one. Nothing can withstand you, and this battle is yours. Everyone describes one awesome thing they did; and the Packmate who chose to make this move describes the overall, glorious victory.
Bite Marks, Becky Annison (Page 160)
Which is neat. But that’s not the best part. The best part is how you get pack pool, which includes turning into a werewolf (good) and spilling your emotions (better).
Basically, every time you reveal your feelings of love, anger or fear, you can add stuff to the pack pool. This led to one of my favourite gaming moments of last year.
We’re in the middle of a fight. It’s not going well. We’re getting absolutely messed up by what are essentially Super Werewolves. They’re just better than us at everything. I take a look at the pack pool and we’re at 10. So my character turned to another character and brought up something that was decided during character creation but has not come up since – mainly because both characters are too sore to do so. In the middle of the fight, as we’re giving battered, I turned to them and basically blurt out “I’m so angry with you!”, and then explained that I felt betrayed and let down about their decision to leave. Then, they spill back, revealing some feelings of their own. Now with these feelings out in the open, we’re at 12 pack pool. We trigger Overwhelm Them, narrate how we’re finally working together and turn the tide of the fight.
It was pretty close to a perfect moment.
Now I’m partial to this kind of stuff. If this was a game about fighting, an end-the-fight button like this might not be a good idea. But in a game that’s mostly interested in fighting as a vehicle for feelings, it’s fantastic. Building up pack pool with character drama and then spending it to succeed at other things is a neat game loop. It leads to situations where the better the pack communicates with each other, the stronger they are.
Neat, right?
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
- Party of One had actual play sensation Brennan Lee Mulligan on as a guest to play a chaotic game of goblin knights.
- RTFM do a very positive episode discussing the duology of Dream Askew / Dream Apart, the first two Belonging outside Belonging games.
- On Third Floor Wars, a great session with Sean Nittner where he explains how Evil Hat makes games, walking through the process from picking submissions to final publication.
- Please consider joining 100+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.
- If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.
III. Links of the Week
- Fantastic review of So You Want To Be A Game Master, Justin Alexander’s new book, from EpicTableGames: “In short: this title claims this book is something it’s not, and I’m mad about it. This book is, once again, an extremely good guide to writing, preparing, and even at some points running certain kinds of adventures… There’s just way more to GMing than that.”
- Nordic Larp has a great post about how to play a powerful or high status character as an introvert. While it’s aimed at larpers, for tabletop games, describing your character doing these things will be a good first step.
- RolltoDoubt is a blog that mostly writes about the FKR playstyle and in this post, they talk about principled freeform using a post by Vincent and Meguey Baker and Emily Care-Boss as a starting point. It’s a really neat article that explains what principled freeform means, how it connects to FKR or other freeform-adjacent playstyles.
- Idle Cartulary analyses Elden Ring and explains what it would look to like to make a tabletop setting that looked like the Lands Between.
- The Prismatic Wasteland blog asked people to submit novel new resolution mechanics and the submissions have come from mostly OSR-adjacent bloggers but with so many that are delightfully weird and very radically not-OSR. Like this one from Ènziramire which is about accepting or rejecting the influence of spiritual forces.
- This is an old post that I only found recently but it’s good stuff. From Magpie Games, two articles about Picking the Right GM Moves to use as the GM when running a PbtA game. Here is part one and here is part two.
- On the same note, Fantastic Worlds is a collection of creative commons licensed articles for running all the various fantasy PbtA games in your life. A good intro or a resource to share with someone new.
News/Misc
- EnWorld released their result of a poll of most anticipated RPGs. Pendragon 6e is on the list for the hundredth year in a row but coming it at the top is Shadow of the Weird Wizard.
- Atlas Games are releasing a revised definitive version of Ars Magica 5th edition and claim it will be the final version of the game with the text being released into Creative Commons afterwards.
From the archive
- “I want to play in the world of Shadowrun but with a different system.” Here’s a great answer via Reddit. (Issue #5, Sep 2020)
IV. Small Ads
All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.
- Startup Three Cubes is developing an online voxel-based video game. Its mission — to launch the most relevant creativity&learning platform! By supporting them early, you get Kickstarter exclusive in-game rewards!
- Sharpen your ESP skills and seek out suspicious activity as a pendulum-dowsing Field Agent when out & about with the Field Agent Handbooks: Observancy Department, 1924–28 — four solo RPG zines coming to Kickstarter on 6 Feb!
- Arcana Familia – Fresh Meat is the first adventure module for Arcana Familia, the esoteric cyberpunk ttrpg. Bend reality with occult powers as you protect the world from knowledge of supernatural, using a poker card-based system!
- Carve your own fate with Runecairn Wardensaga Remastered, a refreshed and updated version of 2-player Norse fantasy Soulslike TTRPG Runecairn. Launches on Tuesday, 23 Jan. Day 1 backers get a Runecairn patch!
- Community Radio, a quick playing improv game inspired by Welcome to Nightvale, is crowfunding soon! Sign up for launch notification and more info!
This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.
- A chance to grab Arden Vul, the popular 1000+ page fantasy megadungeon.
Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!
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