The Campaign Coach

The man who would play too many games and tell you about it

[the-campaign-coach]

Game Review #4- Wanderhome

This past weekend I had the pleasure to play my 89th RPG in the Magpie Games Server, and it was a wonderful one in Wanderhome. Looking over my list of games, I am hard pressed to find a single other that lives up to the premise and promise of completely removing what many consider to be a core pillar of RPGs. Wanderhome is an RPG doesn’t discourage combat, but simply forbids it.

This was in fact how I was pitched Wanderhome, as a game where the core resolution will never come from violence,  and its been on my to play list for many years because of it. I was never able to find a game of it on Start Playing or at cons that fit my schedule, and with such a twist in the foundation of RPGs, I was hoping to experience it as a player before I ran it. I was very excited to have this chance, and had a wonderful GM who also helped us explore some of the other unique concepts that make this game shine. 

This game has a collaborative world building element to it, but at least as we ran it, it starts with the world as defined by the relationships our characters have bult with each other before the game even begins. As I explained this to my partner on a hike the day after, our party isn’t meeting for the first time in a dark tavern, given their mission by a old man who will either end up saving or betraying us later in the adventure. I have played a lot of games that ask us to point to other players at the table, and create a fiction about our relationships to each other, but Wanderhome particularly excels at this. Since so much of the world can be defined in this stage, it really helps flesh out a world that really is only defined in the book as a (recently) peaceful place. When you start to define the relationship between two PCs, its takes the choices we made in a vacuum about our own PC make more sense. I chose to make a circus performer, and when I asked  the question “how does my PC get on your nerves”, to another player, embodying their child character, they told me they had already gotten sick during our travels of the stories about growing up in that life. I of course could reject that fact, or twist it to better fit my narrative, but instead it gave me an opportunity to lay further into my hyper rabbits, tendencies and flesh out a flaw that gives the character more dimensions. 

Now that we have a more firm idea about our characters and the world they live in as defined by our relationship to each other, we then got to spend some time defining the world we would interact with. The GM had some helpful starting prompts picked out since we were doing a one shot in 4 hours, which prevented some analysis paralysis, and got us along our way. From that one seed, we were able to quickly spin a yarn about a world darkened by a rainy season that drenched more than just the soil. These processes so far took about 90 minutes, but I expect with a less experienced GM , it would often take a bit longer. That being said, unlike many session zeros, it was engaging enough to feel like a true part of the game rather than a chore one has to do to simple start the game.

Once formal role play started we were introduced to the final two tenets that make this world shine. In another upheaval to the status quo we would be playing a game that I would like to call GMless-ish. Often when playing GMless games, we would need to consult a table or otherwise be called to balance our own interest and the interests of NPCs. While I haven't’ yet played a game that is GMless that has combat, I can only assume those can be quite difficult to balance. Instead in this game we can each act as the world our characters are in, and the narrative friction that is needed for the fiction to have meaning. Our “GM” was great at helping us transition from the more passive player role to a true collaborative performer. 

The final conceit of the game, that makes it different than the vast majority of games I have played, is of course the way to resolve when our players may not get what they want. Without appropriate  resistance the narrative would fall flat. Instead it is up to each player to in a sense, get in their own way, or at least be okay when someone else does it. This is a game that does not have dice. Instead a character earns tokens, in a variety of ways, but the most likely trigger is when they make decision that get in the way of their own goals. This is where Wanderhome will either rewire your mind for how stories can be told at the table or completely fall flat. When you earn those tokens, you can simply succeed against all odds later in the session. You get to decided when you get tokens, and when you would spend them. The reasons to gain them, aren’t just having your character sacrifice for the greater good, and to spend them isn’t just to “win” the encounter, but at its core it helps you balance the moments that tell a good story. Your character often is rewarded for growth, participation, and generally diving in heart first into the tale. If you are still playing with the mindset of efficiency or even just completion you aren’t likely to find the soul of this game. It is for that very reason I would suggest working this into your game nights. This game will not be for everyone, but I think many players won’t know that this is something they have not only been missing but have been dying for.  So its pretty obvious I would recommend this game, as I would any game I ever take the time to review. At this point though I want to start a trend with these articles to help sum up the games, and talk about the tools they present us. Not mention previously there are some wonderful safety tools that help contextualize them not as limitations to a narrative but also a tool to push them forward. These are the most literally tool you can take from this game, but there are plenty of others. The world building prompts are great even if you aren’t going to be playing a game of Wanderhome. Also I feel if you are gearing up for a big long campaign of something heavy or even are coming off of one, this could be both a great creative warm up or emotional cool down. Finally I have to ask myself, and in doing so help give you one last piece of context that could help you decade if this game is for you, how I would use Wanderhome. While I am not entirely enamored with the all animal setting as whole, and it would be a poor fit for some of my gaming tables, I have an “Oops All Familiars” Campaign idea that we accidently created during a Game of Kids on Bikes, that happens on a different sub plane of the main games reality that would work very well for Wanderhome, so I do expect this to hit the table at some point.

[the-campaign-coach]

Super Heroes RPGS: Drama or Combat

One of the most contentious debates I have seen in the TTRPG space, is the idea of running a superHero campaign. The reason why is that while we have a preconceived notion of what a DND game is, one filled with combat, deception, and dungeon diving. Simply saying “Super Hero game” can range from the Avengers saving the Universe, to the Teen Titans living it up in their tower.. My third system ever was the Second edition of Mutants and Masterminds, which I bought from a Game Shop that couldn’t afford the high rent of my local mall. If there is ever a sentence I can mutter to date myself when it comes to TTRPGS it would be that I bought RPGS in a mall when malls were still expensive for shop owners. Our group was still largely in the Power Gaming phase, and I made the mistake of agreeing to playing a PVP game in a wildly unbalanced system.

The grand challenge with Superhero RPGs is trying to distill a medium with such inconsistent power scaling to a game framework that originally was meant to run grounded fantasy heroes. While gandalf would probably hold his own against many of the X-men, the fight is one Legion, or Casandra Nova away from a forgone conclusion. Mutants and Masterminds attempts  to solve this by giving exact measurements to the abilities of heroes. Because of this, you can end up with a PL7 speedster being so out-classed by a PL10 Speedster that the difference is so great that the lower speedster may as well be a normal person. This is of course the hardest power to give hard numbers to, as speedsters velocity isn’t measurable in MPH, as they always run at the speed of plot. 

With the rise of more narrative focused games, a PTBA, called Masks has risen as one of the most suggested games for people to play. I am one of the people often trying to push players towards it but it should be pitched with a very important caveat. Rarely will a battle feel tactical, as the crunchy tools of precise movement, characters relative position, and resistance to consequences being more generalized. Powers aren’t bought or used in the game at specific scales. Instead powers simply exist as narrative positions. Your character can attempt anything with the same 2d6 plus attribute roll as anyone else, but to be allowed to make that roll you will leverage the word of your power as you have defined it. I will go in the difference between these two systems and the usefulness of them in a later post called, Games Head To Head # 1: Super Heroes: Masks Vs Mutants and Masterminds

I have never found either of these approaches to these games amenable to all players at the table. If the pitch to play is simply, “do you want to play a Superhero game?”, you will have people show up with wildly different expectations. If you want to see the horror of a misaligned table, keep an eye out for my later article, The Super Villains RPG Campaign That Made Me Understand the Need for Safety Tools . 

In truth this article is a little bit of a Trojan horse. While I think there isn’t a single better type of campaign where Tone, and discussing the pillars of play are more important, I think this honestly can apply to any and all different kinds of role playing experiences. If you are running a Pirate campaign, are you Captain Barbossa, the Dread Pirate Roberts, or something a hell of a lot darker. Even if we go back to our roots of Playing DND, there are a lot of ways a campaign can go, even if they often devolve into the normal core loop of murder and negotiation payout for murder. So next time you pitch a homebrew or module, a system or a storyline to your players, make sure you are working to create accurate expectations that your players can use to bring the right energy or the right excuse to bow out.

[the-campaign-coach]

Game Review #3 Dresden Files RPG 

So many IPs get adapted using an engine made for one story, that is then manipulated to better fit the established cannon. There are some games that do this quite well like Everyday Heroes with its implementations of a handful of action movies, and the Essence 20 system used to run Power Rangers and other IPs owned by the same company. But it is amazing to see a game that was built from the ground up to support the narrative of a Novel series in an effort so genuine that it even spawned an entirely new game along the way. The Dresden Files RPG was my first experience with Fate as a system. This game keeps many aspects (that's a joke that will land with players of Fate Games) of Fate, and it shines through just how much of the creators of this game are fans of the books. The most minor spoiler for the books, is that Harry actually spends some off screen time in the novels as a TTRPG player. In a very funny and fitting joke, he refuses to play magic users when roleplaying. The RPG is presented like a piece of found literature that could exist in the Universe of the Dresden Files. With that in mind,it is slam packed with spoilers for the series first 7 or so books. Since we are eagerly awaiting book 18 of the series, it's not the worst thing that can happen.

As for the game review, know that this is as much a review of Fate as a whole as it is for this RPG specifically. First off the character creation has a rule that I love so much. In most games, players are punished pretty heavily if they don’t spend all of their advancements right at the top of character creation. For example, if you are coming into a game where your party has chosen to start at level 6, using anything less than the full six levels would be begging to be less effective or have a smaller hit point pool. This leads players new to a system, or to RPGS at all, to make hard choices without the context that they need to make them in an informed way.

Fate turns this on its head, with the idea of Fate Points. These represent two things in the game. They are spent during character creation or between sessions to pick up new abilities. Any points unspent become a resource that recharges per session, used to allow for rerolls, and also hand a small amount of narrative control to the players. With this players aren’t punished for not knowing exactly what their characters should be able to do. Instead, as they develop the narrative of their character, they can use the extra fate points in play. Once they decide the character should learn a new talent or give into temptation and become a vampire, those points are ready to spend, giving up one type of mechanical leverage for another

It was because of this we had a wonderful character in our game named Marcus. He was a “vanilla mortal” cop, meaning he wasn’t a vampire, a were, a magic user, or any other kind of supernatural being. He could have taken some mortal stunts, which are something between a feat and a class feature, but he chose to instead roll through the game with a wild amount of Fate Points. While we had a mummy magic user, a Knight of a fairy court, and a Were-Owl, his decision to play the straight man to everyone else on the team was both narratively interesting and mechanically advantageous. Now something you are going to see as a trend for me when it comes to games is that I love a system that rewards both character choice. Markuses player wasn’t looking for a huge advantage when he made his character, and the system didn’t punish him for choosing to play what other systems would reduce to a meme character. In Fate games like the Dresden Files RPG, Characters are composed of a High Concept,and a trouble that are designed to be thematically linked. What the characters are, and what they struggle with are not just extraneous details like Flaws and Bonds can be in DND, but instead they are core to the gameplay. Those Fate points can’t simply be used for a reroll without consideration. Instead you have to invoke these or other aspects that are written on the characters sheet. In other RPGs these might be simply statements created in a vacuum, but in Dresden Files they are instead the first steps of your character's journey to becoming a protagonist, and they even include cross over with the other players characters. This creates great hooks to use to motivate characters which I will go into greater detail in the future post, Strings to Pull On: Opening up your character to trials and tribulations”. Before I give this a flawless stamp of approval I need to also talk about the parts I don’t love quite as much.  First off is the Fuge Dice. When resolving an action characters will be told of a level of success that they need to get to to complete the action. In addition to any bonus inherent to the character or the particular solution the player will roll 4 Fudge dice. These have 6 faces, two of which are blank, two have pluses, and two have minuses. This means a roll can swing from negative 4 to positive four but average is simply zero.There are ways the players can alter this, mainly their fate points, but in the 70+ systemsI have played, I have never played anything that makes dice rolls feel like they do in Fate. While they can be swingy with a 8 point spread being possible, I find players don’t really want to do a check if they aren't in a mechanically advantageous situation, which with the dice really just means playing to their strength. While this doesn’t kill the system for me, it is the aspect I spend the most time justifying to the players. 

Finally characters will also have three different pools of what other games would label Hit Points. These are each a different type of stress, and rather than direct damage they will have these pools depleted by hostile characters.  Each one can represent a reason why the character has to leave a scene. Physical is pretty obvious and feels the most like normal hit points, with the exception of how little you might have compared to other games. Mental also feels like it makes sense, because rather than for example taking psychic damage to your physical body, you take it to your mental stress track. The hardest one to get your head around will likely be Social Stress. This conceptually represents your character's willingness or maybe at least effectiveness in a social encounter. With Mental and Physical I feel normally end with unconsciousness or the like, it seems that this one needs to be used more to indicate when you character can no longer make any meaningful progress. Overall I really like this stress mechanic, and it does a good job of giving characters the ability to be effective in different situations. Over all I really like this Adaptain of my favorite book series. I consider this a love letter to the work. They were so dedicated to getting this game that as the series outgrew its Noir Roots, they actually spun off the first version of the game into an entirely new system called Spirit of the Century. It’s quite admirable that the developers wanted to make sure the game represented where the story was heading, but managed to salvage the rules they had so far into a new game. 

Whether you are a fan of the Books, urban fantasy, or just good game design I can’t recommend these enough if you can get your hands on it, and if you are coming from a traditional d20 system, it can be a breath of fresh air to change your perspective on collaborative storytelling. 

[the-campaign-coach]

Adapting Stories: Themes versus Aesthetics

When it comes to capturing the soul of a preexisting work, its best to understand what it looks like, what it feels like, and which is more important to you.

One of the reasons adaptations work so well as TV shows and Movies, is that it's possible to pull not only events, but also imagery from the original source. Comic books are a wonderful example of this. As I write this I am watching the Second season of the Tick adaptation and it starts off with the Tick Molting. When they first started this adaptation they had put on what looked like armor plating over the spandex. This was probably because they felt like The Tick had to look cool, but it seems going into this season they realized that’s not what The Tick is all about. He doesn’t look or act cool. He is genuine, and endearing in a way a cool character never could be.

I could go into great detail about how to run a SuperHero RPG, and in fact I will in a later post called, Super Heroes: Drama or Combat, but this article will have more general information on how to adapt IPs, especially using the systems created to tell those stories.

I have three examples of IP games I have run in the past. My knowledge of the works I adapted ranges from superfan, to never having seen a single complete episode of the show.

Let’s start with the Dresden Files and its RPG. Now I have read each book in the series at least once, and listened to them another 4 times or so.When I was given the RPG I was super excited as two of my players are also fans of the books but not to my obsessive level. The remaining two players consisted of a guy who had only heard second hand about the series from me and an old girlfriend, and someone who had zero idea about the world aside from that it was a modern “magic is secret” series starring a wizard named Harry that wasn’t written by a TERF.

We actually laid into their lack of knowledge about the series. That experience is the inspiration for a later article called, Player Knowledge: How to Roleplay Someone as Lost as You Are. Running the Dresden Files RPG led me to the most important piece of advice I can give anyone when running an RPG based on a previous work. Get away from the main action of the series.

Dresden is set in Chicago, and pulls upon the myths and stories of that great city and the surrounding area. I didn’t want Harry to ever be a resource for the players or for him to cross over with the characters, so I moved the setting to Nashville. Once we made that decision we could pull from the strange and unseen stories of our hometown. Rather than taking on the Noir aesthetic, and the drapery of Chi-town, we instead realized the themes of being the underdog. Even 17 books in, Harry manages to fill this role by punching above his weight class every chance he can get. We explored locations that are unique to Nashville, and that gave us a chance to explore another theme that is prevalent in Dresden Files. We all look away from the things we don’t want to see.

Jim Butcher has also authored a wonderful book called Spiderman Spider-Man: The Darkest Hours. It wasn’t till I read it that I realized one of the reasons why I resonated with Harry was that much like Spider-man, Dresden lives by the mantra, With Great Power MUST Come Great Responsibility. It's often misquoted, but the idea is that we have to make the choice to use our abilities to make the world a better place.

Speaking of making the world, or in this case worlds a better place, my next story comes from running the Star Trek Adventures Tabletop RPG. This was my first time running a game in a universe where I was confident everyone at the Table knew more than I did. At that point I had watched about half of TNG, the first few seasons of Lower Decks, and the first two Chris Pine Movies. This was enough to understand that while the aesthetics have touchstones they rely on truly there are themes that are pervasive across the various media. The next big piece of advice I can give you is, Vibes are where Theme and Aesthetic meet.

The game has a wonderful exercise where we get to build out the ship we are going to be on. Again, we took a large departure from the exact setting, and created a new class of ships. Each of these, unbeknownst to the characters at the beginning of the narrative, contains a piece of illegal technology. IThe plan is for this to be slowly discovered by the PCs. They started on that path by noticing an inefficiency in the ship's design.I mostly gave them fun random episodes , where the only real through line was the development of our cast. Whenever I would need a character in a scene I would allow a player to tell me a little bit about them, and from there we created a character web. In just three sessions we developed a minor antagonist, saw them fall from grace, and grew to forgive and understand them. I feel this is the soul of Star Trek. Yes we are going to places we have never been, encountering new beings, and pushing the bounds of science. In the end though, it's the trials and traumas of our characters that drive the story. This is a type of sci-fi that explores the human (sentient ) condition by putting us in direct confrontation of our fears and insecurities, in a meaningful and intentionally progressive way. What I grew to love at the end of every session was asking the party, all of whom had more Trek knowledge than I, “what episode did I rip off this week?”. There wasn’t a single time where they couldn’t name an episode that I could have been referencing or paying homage to, but that came from knowing what the soul of Trek is, rather than any need to replicate scenes or locations from the body of work.

The final story I want to talk about is my ongoing Buffy the Vampire Slayer game. I only offered to run this because I found a second hand copy at a used book store, and I knew that my friend's wife was a huge fan of the series. This was a personal challenge, as before our first session I had never sat down to watch a complete episode before.

Now as a big fan of Firefly I wasn’t completely lost when it came to Whedon. I had a passing knowledge of the series, and I knew that the heart of this game is that while the action is about kicking supernatural creatures asses, the real story is the B plot.

Buffy understands that the choices the characters make outside of battle are often more important than the ones inside of it. Yes killing vamps, and saving the world are on the to do list, but it's the struggle to balance that with your awkward teenage years that is the true theme of the world. This brings me to the final piece of advice I have been building towards. The best Adapations Preserve the Themes of work, even if it sheds the aesthetics. We could have set this game in Sunnydale, in the 90’s and had the characters using flip phones and walkmen. Instead our group found itself in the innocuous town of Roanoke Virginia, as Gen Z kids. Our Slayer Charlie is struggling with a move to a smaller town, her watcher is her age and is falling in love with her, and our werewolf is coming to terms with her new powers. Instead of making the game only about defeating evil, it's also the act of balancing duty with desire. To fit in, to allow yourself to love, to get a good score on the SAT, while you happen to be protecting the town from the grip of evil. And I was able to produce a very Buffy vibe by drawing on our collective angst from an uncertain time in our lives.

I want to leave you with one last piece of advice on running IP RPGS. It doesn't matter if you are the subject matter expert or the person who has never seen an episode of the story you are taking inspiration from. If you are enthusiastic and open to suggestions you are going to make a good game for your table. If someone corrects you on a piece of lore, give them a chance to explain to the table. Assuming it doesn’t wreck your intentions, just fold it into the narrative. At some point someone might really insist that “it doesn’t work like that” or “they would never do that”. When that happens, you can also just double down, and invite that player to explore the mystery. Turn their , “this can’t happen, into a “why did this happen?”. Turn plot holes into the place where buried treasure is hidden. And remember, if any one is acting fishy, they could always be a bad guy in disguise, or someone so woefully incompetent that it looks similar to malice.

[the-campaign-coach]

Using Rules From Other TTRPGS

As a game runner and player experienced in over 75 game systems, I can let you in on a big secret. 

No rule is as important as the experience your players are having at the table. 

This doesn't mean the rule of cool gets to take over all at times, in fact for many if not most players, consistency matters. It is nearly impossible for a game group to be able to find a single system containing all of the rules your players will like, and even more importantly doesn't contain any rules your players hate. Rules can be built very well for the theme but maybe a certain subsystem doesn't gel well with each player. 

Generally, I would not suggest changing the core concepts of a game, without completely changing which game you're using, but I will actually address that in a later post called, Porting a Game to a Different System. 

Instead, I want to talk about rules that exist within certain games that are able to be pulled across and either subtly added to the game, or used to change an inherent aspect of the game that doesn't work for your group. 

My first major addition that I would suggest using in almost any game is the concept of Advantage and Disadvantage. For those that don't know, the most common version of this is rolling an extra die and taking either the best of the pile or the worst of the pile. The math on a D20 for example is something like a +4 to the die roll. The importance to the game is beyond the simple math. Rather than this just being something that can allow the party to succeed or give them greater challenge, I've always found that succeeding at a disadvantaged role or failing at an advantage role creates the drama with just the dice, which is often hard to do. 

When someone has all the odds stacked against them and still managed to succeed, your party will celebrate the hardest. By the same metric when everything is set up for success, and failure still happens, the resulting consequences often define a game session, and can be memorable than a simple success would ever would be. I really suggest adding these as part of the game, but only after negotiation with your group to understand when and where they will apply, as they create a simple mechanical lever to pull on to increase the tension within a session. 

I played Brindlewood Bay for the first time recently and it has a wonderful way to resolve mysteries. Even if you're not specifically running a mystery game, the idea that the players build the story with you, is one that I strongly advise. In Brindlewood Bay, the players collect clues during play which make the final “solving the mystery roll” possible. The player who chooses to make the roll asserts what they think to be true, and if the roll succeeds then that becomes the solution to the mystery. Now ideally a player won't attempt this roll without discussing how they would like the story to end with the whole group.  A fun twist can happen when a great theory, and a decent chance at the roll, still ends up with a failed result. They will have to pivot to a twist ending that no one expected, but that still aligns the clues to point to the new suspect. 

I actually have an example of this from the year prior to playing Brindlewood Bay for the first time. I knew generally of the mechanics, so when a player interrogated a NPC and layed out a better, more well thought out explanation to the events that were unfolding, I just went with it. I had fed them clues that I thought were pointing them to a certain direction. The way he had interpreted them and explained it to our group via the interrogation was bette. He set up a scenario with better stakes than I had put in place. He then went on to create a magic spell from scratch because of this information, a mechanic both in that game of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying 2e as well as the Dresden Files RPG, but I will go into greater detail about that in a future post called “Making Magic: Custom Spell Creation”.

The last rule I would love to include for you to consider is giving away some of the narrative control. Most games limit this to a Meta Currency such as the Fate Points in Fate, or the Bennies from Savage Worlds. These allow small changes like an open window to sneak into, or maybe the bouncer at the club is an old friend. 

Alternatively you can use the Flashback mechanic from Blades in the Dark, and its derivatives. In this a player doesn’t just speak something into existence, but takes a hit to their main character resource to activate it. Once they do they get to have a flash back to how this change to the narrative was really part of the story we just hadn’t seen yet. That might be a similar result to those above but the vibes can be quite different so I would suggest grabbing the version that speaks to you. 

There are so many more rules I would love to highlight, so this might end up just being the first in a series of posts with the same theme. If you read this and feel like there are rules you can’t help but use in all you games let me know and I can try them out as well!

[the-campaign-coach]

Thank you @missboogsie and everyone who got me to 5 reblogs!

[the-campaign-coach]

Game Review #2 The Konosuba RPG

As part of a year-long GMing challenge where I ran 12 new to me RPGs, I ended up with a chance to run the Konosuba RPG with a few friends. 

I had never seen the show previously but in anticipation of the game day, my partner and I jumped on CrunchyRoll and binged the first season. Having a fresh view of the series, I was very pleasantly surprised just how well the game managed to be true not only to the tone of the series, but to the mechanics of the games the series itself is drawing inspiration from. In a future post, Adapting Stories: Themes versus Aesthetics, I'll be speaking more about my personal philosophy about running games based off of pre-existing IP. 

This RPG is one of many using a base system created by a company called FarEast Amusement Research, otherwise known as FEAR. This game system is primarily used for them to adapt pre-existing animes, and while I haven't played any of the other games using this system, I do like how it works with Konosuba. For those looking to try out a new type of game, this one's nice because instead of using any special dice, you're simply going to be using piles of d6. 

This is a dungeon diving RPG, and this as a guiding principle allowed for other rules to support the core gameplay loop in a way that was unique and interesting. 

We decided to go with pre-generated characters for this event, and my only complaint would be that some of the translations of the original text leave certain things up for interpretation.  I'm sure that if I had spent a little bit more time learning the system, or had played any of the other FEAR games , certain aspects would be a little bit more intuitive. It felt much like any game that is made here in the West assuming you are familiar with the D20, as well as the Six Attributes. I feel some of this confusion might stem from this being my first RPG from Japan. 

Overall, I really enjoyed this game. It was a fun experience to bring a bunch of people of different levels of games savviness into this world. My players were, my partner who had played less than a dozen sessions of any RPGs, a friend who primarily had only played 5th edition,, and the owner of the rule book, who is the most voracious reader of RPGs I've ever met. Each session you're going to be given a chance to select the mission that you wish to go on. Rather than a lone quest giver in a tavern much like the traditional setup of other sword and board RPGs, this is a guild signup board, so you should be able to provide the players with a lot of options each time. The players have a choice to make.  Do you go for the high payout mission, knowing that there's a chance you might not survive? Or do you choose to spend this week trying something a little simpler. 

The crux of this choice is not just the opportunity to do a harder mission for the XP, but the payout. Where normally this might be so that the players have money to buy things like magic items, this game adds a subsystem I am certainly going to steal. You can choose a higher standard of living to get buffs for the dungeon dive, or a more simple room will leave you going into the fight at normal strength. You can even choose to rough it for the night and that ends up with you taking some hits to your stats, including the resources you use for spells and special martial abilities.  While I am not normally one to use XP for leveling, this concept of room and board affecting character stats is such a good implementation that it makes me want to use it more often. The game takes the decision so seriously that most of the game will hinge upon this one choice. For the game play itself, I commend the application of a single resource for both spells and martial maneuvers that allow all players to have a similar sense of scale and effectiveness . One of my favorite, “oh thats why” moments was when we realized that our fighter was carrying a sword so large it actually affected her speed stat. From there our funniest situation was when the player with mostly only 5e experience, made a wild decision to carry around a goblin corpse as a way to trigger traps. This led to some wonderful comedy when they came across other goblins, drawing agro in a way that can be defined in the system mechanically simply as “angry”. We also didn’t know going in the way bosses are designed. Rather than in 5e where you are pretty hardy for the day, until you have seen multiple serious fights, this game is all about preserving each and every HP and MP you can till you hit the bottom of the dungeon (or in this case Rocket Mushroom Forest) I don’t think that the system as a whole really struck our group in a way that left us wanting more immediately, but I would be glad to run it if someone really connected with it and I will certainly be working on implementing my favorite rules from it. 

[the-campaign-coach]

Using Rules From Other TTRPGS

As a game runner and player experienced in over 75 game systems, I can let you in on a big secret. 

No rule is as important as the experience your players are having at the table. 

This doesn't mean the rule of cool gets to take over all at times, in fact for many if not most players, consistency matters. It is nearly impossible for a game group to be able to find a single system containing all of the rules your players will like, and even more importantly doesn't contain any rules your players hate. Rules can be built very well for the theme but maybe a certain subsystem doesn't gel well with each player. 

Generally, I would not suggest changing the core concepts of a game, without completely changing which game you're using, but I will actually address that in a later post called, Porting a Game to a Different System. 

Instead, I want to talk about rules that exist within certain games that are able to be pulled across and either subtly added to the game, or used to change an inherent aspect of the game that doesn't work for your group. 

My first major addition that I would suggest using in almost any game is the concept of Advantage and Disadvantage. For those that don't know, the most common version of this is rolling an extra die and taking either the best of the pile or the worst of the pile. The math on a D20 for example is something like a +4 to the die roll. The importance to the game is beyond the simple math. Rather than this just being something that can allow the party to succeed or give them greater challenge, I've always found that succeeding at a disadvantaged role or failing at an advantage role creates the drama with just the dice, which is often hard to do. 

When someone has all the odds stacked against them and still managed to succeed, your party will celebrate the hardest. By the same metric when everything is set up for success, and failure still happens, the resulting consequences often define a game session, and can be memorable than a simple success would ever would be. I really suggest adding these as part of the game, but only after negotiation with your group to understand when and where they will apply, as they create a simple mechanical lever to pull on to increase the tension within a session. 

I played Brindlewood Bay for the first time recently and it has a wonderful way to resolve mysteries. Even if you're not specifically running a mystery game, the idea that the players build the story with you, is one that I strongly advise. In Brindlewood Bay, the players collect clues during play which make the final “solving the mystery roll” possible. The player who chooses to make the roll asserts what they think to be true, and if the roll succeeds then that becomes the solution to the mystery. Now ideally a player won't attempt this roll without discussing how they would like the story to end with the whole group.  A fun twist can happen when a great theory, and a decent chance at the roll, still ends up with a failed result. They will have to pivot to a twist ending that no one expected, but that still aligns the clues to point to the new suspect. 

I actually have an example of this from the year prior to playing Brindlewood Bay for the first time. I knew generally of the mechanics, so when a player interrogated a NPC and layed out a better, more well thought out explanation to the events that were unfolding, I just went with it. I had fed them clues that I thought were pointing them to a certain direction. The way he had interpreted them and explained it to our group via the interrogation was bette. He set up a scenario with better stakes than I had put in place. He then went on to create a magic spell from scratch because of this information, a mechanic both in that game of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying 2e as well as the Dresden Files RPG, but I will go into greater detail about that in a future post called “Making Magic: Custom Spell Creation”.

The last rule I would love to include for you to consider is giving away some of the narrative control. Most games limit this to a Meta Currency such as the Fate Points in Fate, or the Bennies from Savage Worlds. These allow small changes like an open window to sneak into, or maybe the bouncer at the club is an old friend. 

Alternatively you can use the Flashback mechanic from Blades in the Dark, and its derivatives. In this a player doesn’t just speak something into existence, but takes a hit to their main character resource to activate it. Once they do they get to have a flash back to how this change to the narrative was really part of the story we just hadn’t seen yet. That might be a similar result to those above but the vibes can be quite different so I would suggest grabbing the version that speaks to you. 

There are so many more rules I would love to highlight, so this might end up just being the first in a series of posts with the same theme. If you read this and feel like there are rules you can’t help but use in all you games let me know and I can try them out as well!

[the-campaign-coach]

Game Review #1- The Deep Forrest

For my first RPG review I have decided I want to tackle The Deep Forrest .

This is a map making RPG where all your decisions at the table are not adjudicated by dice but by the words spoken by the players.

After an initial setup where the players decide certain facts about the world, you'll be playing during a year of Peace in which the monsters of the region attempt to recover from human rule, with a truth known to the player is that at the end of that year the humans will return.

Having played The Quiet Year with AthenaxVio on Start Playing I was very interested in this reimagining of the game. I was at PAX Unplugged 2024 and this actually ended up being the second map game I played with the GM over the weekend with the group Games On Demand.

The players will work through a setup phase in which we will come each come up with a specific type or group of monster to add to our world. As this is a GM-less game, each player at the table was able to pitch in and create a group, and from that point forward no one has any ownership over a group more than another person. I found in practice most people felt comfortable speaking on behalf of the group they created for the first few rounds, but we slowly became more and more comfortable adding in our own influence over the different creatures. Adding in our own influence over the different creatures.

Through a series of prompts given to us via either a standard deck of cards, which other than compared to a chart, or with custom printouts, people will answer questions about events that are unfolding throughout the year. Many of these questions will have not only the active player responding, but every other player at the table. Then the player is given an opportunity to do three one of three options. They can either create a project, something that can have great impact and weight on the narrative, and decide how many weeks this will take (up to 6 which are noted by a die), or they can hold a town hall in which the players can each take turns speaking for any of the creatures or groups of creatures that exist on your map, often as a way to spur more collaboration between the players. Finally, they can choose to uncover something old. This can be an opportunity to introduce elements that existed prior to the start of the game, that for whatever reason have been hidden from the knowledge of all of the players.

Between the card pulling step and the action chosen by the player, you'll tick down one of the projects and assuming that it has finished, the person who created the project explains its impact on the community.

With themes of occupation, and uncovering what a monster can and cannot be, the Deep Forest RPG is a wonderful exploration of what a collaborative storytelling experience can be.

Personally, I now look at both Deep Forest and the quiet year as tools in my gming toolkit. I personally would reach for Deep Forest for a singular experience, because I feel like the zoomed out in nature of the storytelling works really well when we are exploring the fantastic creatures we create. For the quiet year, I think of it as something that I could do before a campaign, in order to establish some stakes for an important location that we may use in a story.

I'm going to end all of my reviews the same way. I'm never going to grade or degrade any system. I'm simply going to tell you my honest opinion about whether I would play it again, and whether or not the game is a good fit for me, I'll talk about who I think is the core target audience, who might bounce off of this concept and if at all applicable what singular rule I think you should take from the system and apply it to other games.

I would absolutely play this game again, and am hoping I can convince my grognards to give it a shot.

This is a game for people that want to explore huge sweeping stories, and create lore together. I think it would be impossible for a game of this to not break nearly any gaming group out of their normal ruts. Whether you're swinging swords and Pathfinder or D&D, solving mysteries in call the Cthulhu, or being sexy vampires in a masquerade, this is such a wildly different approach to how we can tell stories together.

If your group really needs hard rules for conflict resolution, whether that be the social dynamics or melee combat this isn't a game I would jump into lightly. That being said, I think that stepping away from your tense simulationist game for a week, especially if you're the kind of group that tries to meet even when a player is missing, this might be the game that helps you all find a new love for a new section of the hobby.

For most people, this is going to be so wildly different than anything they've experienced, so calling out a singular rule is a little bit difficult in a game like the Deep Forest. If I had to pick a singular concept, that is very interesting, it'd be the fact that you're going to spend some amount of time up front conceptualizing, and then explaining what a specific brand new creature is like, maybe even exploring a little bit about what their culture is. Doing so and then immediately relinquishing the control of those characters in The narrative, is an experience that I think would help people transition from being players, to being game runners. So if you're stuck as a forever DM, maybe give this game a shot with your players to see if they be will end up catching that game running bug.

The Deep Forest is a free reimplementation of A Quiet Year and can be downloaded for free with the link below, but I highly recommend checking out their other products to support a wonderful Creator.

[the-campaign-coach]

The Campaign Coach

Gather round friends, I have a story.

One afternoon in 2007, a high school freshmen played his first Game of DND in a library, and we had so much fun playing make believe that our characters never even made it out of the inevitable tavern start. Fast forward 17 years to 2024 and that kid has grown up to play more than 80 different RPGs, countless sessions, a ton of completed adventure, and become part of a group of gamers so close knit and dedicated to telling stories together, that we were the wedding party for one of our players, and our game night was mentioned in his wife's wedding vows.

My name is Briggs Schneider, and I want everyone to have amazing stories to tell. Never in these posts do I want to come across as in infallible source of utter truth. Instead speaking as a veteran player, a seasons game master, and a coach for a handful of sports, I feel I can speak to my experience as someone that has done the work to stay curious and keep asking questions. I also want to disclose, that yes, I live in a capitalist society, so while many of the resources I hope to develop on this blog will live here for free, there will be a published work at some point, that I hope will be able to get physical books in the hands of those who need a copy! So thanks for joining me as I discuss the process of publishing games, modules, and more. Expect Game Reviews as well, as I am constantly trying out new systems, and love to share the wild and wacky rules I have found along the way!

Oh and here is a random selection of games I have played in my time in the hobby.

#Dungeons and Dragons #Masks #Pathfinder #Stars Without Number #Burning Wheel #Kids on Brooms