Risky Stories

Thomas Manuel

I. Spotlight

Over on Rascal, I wrote about Band of Blades, which might be my favorite game, not because it’s the best but because I can basically talk about my entire relationship with games through it. While I didn’t cover my entire life, I did write what is called a ‘braided essay’, meaning there’s two strands through the whole thing.

Apart from the personal essay and review (which are the same thing here), there’s a reported story about a campaign of Band of Blades in Australia run by a school teacher that had more than 30 players who were all dealing with their own challenges. I try to talk about how amazing that project was, not because of the outcomes are universally impressive, but because of what that game was to that teacher, those students, in that moment. We only get a glimpse of it but a glimpse was all we could’ve hoped for, without prying.

To get into some writing craft-talk, I was also trying to reflect the content in the form of the piece. So as I was praising how Band of Blades de-emphasized individuals to tell the story of a group, I tried to make the piece also de-emphasize individuals and tell the story of many people. There’s many voices there, many connections, and hopefully you experience that as you read it. It conveys the argument in an aesthetic form to some extent.

You can read it here!

II. Media of the Week

  • It’s always great to hear from Avery Alder about design.
  • I also liked Snow’s video essay about trans designers.

III. Links of the Week

  • Paul Beakley writes about a previous overbearing GMing style where the players only feel able to affect the narrative through dice: “You can imagine the thrill of empowerment learning that if you roll dice, then it’s real. Then God Themself cannot override you. You’ve stormed the gates of heaven and dethroned a capricious and unjust divinity.”
  • The designer of Horse Wizards sent me a design diary and I really like the point here about how the scenario is the game engine: “Horse Wizards begins with a single rule: horses are wizards, and humans must never know. Everything else grows from the collision between those two facts.”
    • Just a reminder that you can also just send me things!
  • I don’t usually link directly to games but if you like Band of Blades, the new edition of The Watch is set in space and will probably be great. They’re similar-ish games. Alongside Night Witches, they form a trio of cool games in my head. The Watch is explicitly about fighting the patriarchy but turning that into a thing-that-can-be-fought. I’m hoping it funds.

IV. What am I playing?

In Ryne x Silent Titans, we had an interesting moment this week that reminded me about something that happens in games. I’ll tell you what happened. One of the playbooks is called The Unravelling, who is a sorcerer that uses magic in a way that destroys them and the world around them. It’s a great premise: so much power but at the end, so much inevitable tragedy.

They wanted to cure a woodwose. In Silent Titans, strange things are happening: the animals are becoming People and the people are becoming plants. Woodwose are people but with grass for hair and a hankering to chew on some leaves. They rolled to use their awesome magic and missed, badly. I described how the spell went wrong and instead of curing this person, the woodwose was filled with magic and sprouted into a tree, bursting through the ceiling with branches and cracking the floor with roots.

This was a complicated moment. Did I just kill a person they were trying to cure? Was I being suddenly and inexcusably harsh? Not objectively, but relatively, because the consequence was such a wild screeching shift in tone from the intent. It caught everyone off-guard a little.

I’ve done this before, sometimes harsher. In Daggerheart, a character pissed off a crime lord and I described his henchmen grabbing him and threatening to cut off his hands. They begged for mercy so instead the crime lord cut off their ankle. It was a really violent act with no invoking of the combat mechanics. It was a single Level 1 character against a whole room and that’s not fair odds.

In both of these situations, I want to make it clear that the players were fine even if the energy in the room was a little tense for a moment. In Daggerheart, the character shrugged it off. They got a magic ankle (like you do) and the whole group went back and got revenge later. In Silent Titans, the character was horrified but I was also fueling them. That was the purpose of the playbook: you’re choosing tragedy. I really loved the conversation around whether turning someone into a tree was killing them. Some of us would like to be trees, I’m sure.

I remember my first time in a horror game where the GM casually described my character losing a leg to a bear trip after a missed roll and thinking, you can just say that?? I remember in another game, where my character was slapped by another character, but I felt my own cheeks turn red. Looking back, these were some of my favorite moments but in the second they happened, I wasn’t exactly feeling happy about them.

When I grasp a moment like that as a GM, I really do feel the risk of misreading the vibe of the room. It’s real! But my intentions are good — everything I do is to make sure we all have a fun time. And every gaming group has got to trust each other intentions because it a risk to play in this style. Of course, once you start doubting someone’s intentions, it’s time to get out of there, fast.

(Actually, Seraphina, who’s on the Avery Alder video from earlier, said it much better than me.)

V. 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.

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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. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.

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