I. Dear Reader
Today, I join the proud tradition of making up award categories as an excuse to talk about games (shoutout to the Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming).
I don’t have a cool name for the awards yet but here they are anyway:
Game That Made My Brain Ask “What The Hell Is Going On“: Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands
There’s a mini-game in this Bakers’ gem which is about open violence. It’s the one you play when two groups are in a fire fight – when your faction or squad is attacking another. Normally, when this happens in other games, each side takes turns attacking the other until they win. That is a sentence that is almost absurdly self-evident. In Firebrands, each player takes turns narrating how the other side kills one member of their squad. So I narrate how Vincent Baker’s faction kills one of my squad and then he narrates how my faction kills one of his squad. We go back and forth, narrating how our squad is decimated until the other side retreats or submits. It doesn’t make any sense. It makes perfect sense. You should try it and report back on how your brain feels.
Best Self-Declared “I’m a Good GM” Moment: Last Fleet
Story time! Last Fleet is a game about the last of humanity fleeing an alien horde. I’m running the game and a character named Gabe Roma is talking to an NPC to get something. The player rolls a mixed result. I narrate how the NPC turns to Gabe and says, “Dr Roma, you already asked me for this last night”. You see, Gabe Roma is an infiltrator but he doesn’t know it. During the day, he goes around like a normal person. But at night, his secret programming kicks in. He essentially sleepwalks into committing acts of sabotage for humanity’s alien enemies. Anyway, the magic of that moment is that its happening on two levels: the player is shocked to learn that their character has done something without them knowing, which mirrors the shock that the character is feeling. Perfection. It’s weird to pat myself on the back but somebody’s got to do it.
Game That Shouldn’t Exist: Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast
There’s a lot of talk about this hobby being full of collectors and art objects. But I didn’t really get it till this book came out. For me, this book really feels like the current pinnacle of what is possible in terms of turning a book into a work of art. Any single example doesn’t quite capture the achievement. It’s the grander vision that permeates every aspect of the game and book’s design that is so intimidating. It’s a work of skill and craft and such maximalism that it almost sank the publisher. Do I own the physical copy? No. Is it my kind of game? Not really. Do I respect the hell out of it? YES. I fully expect this to be a game that we talk about for years.
Game I Would Review Most Differently From Quinns Quest: Wildsea
Wildsea received a glowing review from Quinns earlier this year but it never got much of a write-up in this newsletter because all the best parts of the campaign I ran came from outside the game text. This is the designer’s first game and in that context, it’s a real achievement. The setting is the game’s strength and tends to be how the game is pitched. But a lot of the discussion about the game is its system design, which simply doesn’t live up to the praise. It’s not bad – just very clearly someone’s first game. I sometimes think about covering myself in grease and diving into the nuts and bolts of how the mechanics could better support the game. But it would be a lot of work and it’s not clear if either the designer or readers would appreciate that so for now, this is it. All in all, I hope the game gets a second edition in a couple years.
Game That Make Holding Hands Very Exciting Indeed: Hearts of Wulin + Numberless Secrets
We’ve played more than 10 sessions of Hearts of Wulin, maybe closer to 12 or 14. And we’ve got a bunch more coming up next year. Like a lot of PbtA games, it’s driven by an understanding of the genre assumptions (melodrama) and a couple of core moves. All of the melodrama is driven by entanglements, which ask you to tie yourself into triangle, romantic or otherwise. Then, there’s the Inner Conflict move that helps you keep the melodrama high. And finally, there’s the very understated Study move, which helps you gather clues to solve the mystery, understand opponents before fighting them, and also, if you want, just add details, big and small, to the world. It’s not a perfect game – I have various quibbles with it. Like Last Fleet and Pasion de la Pasiones, these games do need some amount of player practice to really sing. But what it does with its design, it does tremendously well. My games have had me laughing and swearing and dreaming about them between sessions.
Looking forward to doing this again in 12 months,
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
- Brain Waves is a tabletop news podcast from the UK that has some smart people on it. They cover boardgames and RPGs and everything else. Nice listen.
- Weird Place is a new soft-spoken RPG review channel. In this video, they talk about Clever Girl, a solo or duet game about men and dinosaurs.
- Thank you to Jean-Pierre, Reed, Tina, Claudio and Illusory Sensorium for becoming new patrons this month! You too can support the newsletter on patreon!
- 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
- On Rascal News, I wrote a fun story about the Brazilians fans who keep the Street Fighter RPG from White Wolf alive, even though it’s been out of print for 30 years.
- Deeper in the Game has a nice post about the three things to avoid GM burnout.
- Indie Game Reading Club has a long review of Zoetrope, a time-fixing card RPG.
- On tumblr, Mint writes a long essay about the fun of pre-generated characters.
- Via Geek Native, here are end of year reports from Kobold Press and D&D Beyond. 3.6 million people have made characters using the new 2024 rules for D&D.
From the archive:
- Judd Karlman of episode of Daydreaming about Dragons tackles the “how do I make my players care about my worldbuilding” problem. (Issue 75, Jan 2022)
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.
- Live on Kickstarter now, We Dig Giant Robots is a comedy mecha anime TTRPG of super robots, giddy teenagers, and bodacious villains. Get that robot working and stomp some baddies!
This newsletter is sponsored by the the wonderful Bundle of Holding.
- Transhuman Space and GURPS 3e from Steve Jackson Games
- Cities without Number, the cyberpunk book from Kevin Crawford, available at a heavy discount till 23rd Dec.
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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