Skipping Past The Ending

I. Dear Reader

Another week, another little anecdote. If you’re following me on bluesky, you might’ve seen this already.

Last week, in my Apocalypse World: Burned Over game, an interesting thing happened: all my players teamed up. Now this is something that you might take for granted in most games… but in AW, you shouldn’t. AW is really good at handling conflict between characters. In fact, if you’ve never played the game, I recommend trying to kill another character in your first session. You’d be surprised how gracefully the game responds. Just apologize to your fellow players later, it’ll be fine.

Anyway, in my game, the characters weren’t in conflict with each other but they had their own agenda and their own problems. But then last week, they all came together with a common objective. Which is great! Except their objective was to kill god. In our very first session, I had personified the psychic maelstrom that rages across the landscape as the bitter “Uncle Big”. So along with Death, we had two supernatural beings and the players agreed that they had to go.

AW isn’t really geared for that. It could’ve been fun to explore how they failed. I could’ve also done some design, made some custom moves to extend the game in the direction that they wanted it to go. But I wasn’t feeling up to it. So after being reminded that AW says “Sometimes, just give it to them”, when we met this week, I said, it’s ten years later, god is dead, things are worse. Then I asked if they wanted to pick a new system and start a new campaign.

I was worried that the players wouldn’t be into it. They had just settled on this epic goal. Would they feel cheated out of achieving it?

But as we talked amongst ourselves, I had two realisations. One, we’ve had a lot of fun figuring out the “why” of these characters. We weren’t actively trying to do that. It’s just what ended up happening. We had played our way to the answer of a question we didn’t know we were asking. Second, everyone was actively excited at figuring out the “how” in reverse, ie, as the history or lore of the next game. By skipping forward in time, they could figure out what their characters did in the past instead of playing through it.

One of my players explicitly said that in his experience, these big epic moments are hard to pull off. I have a lot of respect for folks who have done it but I agree, it’s not my strength. I’ve never been able to wrap up a D&D campaign with all the splendour and razzmatazz that saving the world demands. This time skip let the ending for the campaign remain in our imaginations, keeping it wild & mythic.

I know this sounds to some people like we just skipped playing the game. In a sense, that’s completely right. If we extend this logic (in a slightly absurd direction), it could lead to why play anything at all, just dream about playing. While I’m obviously a big fan of playing, we can’t deny how important dreaming-about-playing is. It’s one of the most central, fundamental parts of the hobby. It’s not something to be avoided, it’s something to be played with. This is one way of doing that.

Getting back to our game, the players wanted the world to regreen and become a dense, high weirdness jungle. They wanted to crew a skyship. This is basically Wildsea but I’ve already done Wildsea. You know I like finding new toys so I’m going to root around and see what else I can bring to them.

Yours, cutting away early,

Thomas

PS. Apologies for the poor phrasing on one of my links last week. When I said “helps out nazis”, I meant “helps reveal nazis” or rather “helps nazis out themselves”. I’m sure everyone figured it out in the end but I should’ve saved you some consternation and spotted the problem.

PS2. The Cosmic Dark kickstarter launched and I’m writing a scenario for it! It’s a kind of weird fiction sequel to Graham Walmsley’s Cthulhu Dark. It does a lot of interesting things, including how it teaches the game by making character creation a psych test and how it combines the rules and scenario into one package. Check it out!

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II. Media of the Week

• A Different Kind of Hex is a new series from the Open Hearth that talks about RPGs explicitly from the angle of being better players, not GMs. It’s an underserved subject so I’m glad to see it. This episode with Agatha Cheng (Deadly Society) is about coming up with arcs for your characters and framing scenes around them. There’s a lot of discussion about bad boys, which is always a good subject.
• On Dice Exploder, the latest episode features jay dragon talking about Ten Candles, one of the most iconic and ritually potent RPGs ever made. jay says something interesting when asked about what makes RPGs different from larps:, suggesting that the main strength of RPGs is that they come in books. Which, if nothing else, explains why Yazeba’s is what it is.

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• 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 round-up, which will be coming out next week.

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III. Links of the Week

Because it was that kind of week, I’ve done very little reading and so this section is empty.

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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.

• Grimwild, the cinematic heroic fantasy RPG, is now available in hardcover! Get your copy of this beautiful book.
• Find your next TTRPG group on the Never Forever GM Discord! We love rolling dice, telling stories, and hanging out every week to do both. Live and play-by-post games welcome!
• Night falls. The enemy army is at the gates. An Hour of Wolves, the Wretched & Alone game of a final battle against darkness, is available now. What will you sacrifice to live another day?

This newsletter is sponsored by the the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• Dungeon Dressing is a series from Raging Swan Press full of tables of details to add to your settings.
• Shadowrun Sixth World, get the corebook or get the second bundle with more sourcebooks

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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!