Gnome Stew

I love a campaign with a good central plot, but as much as I love those, some of my favorite times and revelations at the table come from the B-plots; those small scenes and stories that are tailored to one or a few characters. I find a place for them in nearly all my games. Over the years, I have a formula for working them into my games. So let’s talk about it…

What are B Plots? 

The B-plot, according to Google, is a subplot or secondary narrative, that runs parallel to the main plotline (sometimes known as the A-plot). In RPGs, these are little side scenes or stories that you work into the session. While they can occur at nearly any time in a story, they tend to appear more when the A-plot is not actively being worked on. This could be before or after the A-plot or during a break in the A-plot. 

A B-plot can center on a single character or a group of characters. My preference is 1-2 characters, otherwise, it’s creeping up on an A-plot. More about that in a few min. 

In the games I run, the B-plot gets 1-2 scenes before we move back to the A-plot. However for a full table of 5 players that may be 5-10 scenes, in which the entire session could be just various B-plots. I am comfortable with that for my home games, but in a one-shot or convention game, I may not run a B-plot and if I did I would not go past 1 scene per character.

What do they do? 

The B-plot can do a few things for your players and the session. Here is a short list:

• • Spotlight Time – When you create a B-plot scene focused on just one character, you are creating spotlight time for the character. You are dedicating a portion of the game for them to shine, to have the attention of the GM and the table. 
  • Depth of character –  Often the A-plot is about some larger thing happening in the world, and while the characters will grow by their interaction with the A-plot, with the B-plot you can narrow in on just one character and focus on their personal stories. The things you make up for these scenes and the actions the character takes will help to make the character deeper. 
  • Engagement – Combining these first two things…spotlight and personal stories create player engagement. The player will become more attentive and will be emotionally engaged. This will raise the quality of play at the table for that player and everyone else.
  • Experimentation – A-plots have a lot riding on them, and need to progress for the main parts of the campaign to be successful. Not B-plots. B-plots can be nearly anything, something taken from the character’s background, a wish the player had, or a GM thought experiment (i.e. I wonder what they would do if someone tried to steal their staff?). You are free to try stuff out, and if something doesn’t work, no worries it was just one scene in the game, you can find something new next session.

Some Tips for Good B-Plots

These are just some of my tips for making a good B-plot. They may or may not work in your game, story, campaign, or group. Like any buffet, take what looks good… 

• Simple – I keep my B-plots simple; few twists, no red herrings. They typically have a single large goal for the whole plot. For example: Chad will discover his uncle is embezzling from the family business.
• Episodic – My B-plots are episodic, meaning that whatever scene or two is played in that session, incrementally moves along the overall plot. In future sessions, the plot will be moved further until its conclusion. For example: In tonight’s session, Chad will see his uncle skulking around in the office after closing. He will have a chance to confront him or observe.
• Not tied to the main plot – My preference is for the B-plot to be something independent of the A-plot so that the player feels free to do what they want without worrying that it will affect the whole group. It also gives a break or a beat change from the A-plot.
• Only a Scene or Two – Most of the time, I have about a scene-worth of material prepared for this, and then break it into two parts to keep the spotlight moving.
• A B-plot for everyone – Every player character in my game gets a B-plot so that everyone can have some spotlight time.
• Phone A Friend – Sometimes, I like a B-plot to be for a single character, but if they want to pull others into a scene I welcome and at times encourage it.

Where to fit the B Plot?

I have a preference for where I put my B-plots. This is not the only way to do it. It is my preferred way to do it. 

I like B-plots between A-plot stories (not sessions). After an A-plot story has concluded, after any leveling up, and before the next A-plot story starts, I like to put in a round of B-plots. It looks something like this:

• Session 1: A-Plot Story 1 (start)
• Session 2: A-Plot Story 1 (middle)
• Session 3: A-Plot Story 1 (end), Experience, Advancement, etc
• Session 4: B-plots & Start of A-Plot Story 2
• Session 5: A-Plot Story 2 (middle)
• Etc

This way we have finished an A-plot story, the characters have progressed, and in most of my campaigns, some time will pass before the next A-plot story starts. This place, where time has passed, is a perfect place to put in these B-plots. 

It is not the only structure that works, it’s just one that is easy because the A-plot is out of the way. Depending on your game there may be other places where those could occur. For instance, if your starship was on a long warp jump, in the middle of the A-plot, you could switch to B-plots to see what the characters are doing during the jump, and then return to the A-plot as they come out of warp.

Just A Small Plot… it’s Wafer-Thin

B-plots are a nice break from the main plot of a campaign and are a great way to spotlight and build engagement in your players. Good B-plots are simple and incremental, moving along a larger plot or question, a scene at a time. An easy place to place B-plots is between larger A-plot stories, but with some creativity, you can fit them into other parts of the story.

Do you like B-plots? What is your favorite B-plot in a game you have played/run? Where do you like to run your B-plots in your overall campaign? 

After you have your story arc put together, you’ll notice that the PCs will need clues and information to get between the various plot points. The first bit of information they receive is the story hook. This launches the whole adventure. If the story hook doesn’t grab them, then the adventure screeches to a complete stop before it gets up to speed. You don’t want this to happen.

Your opening salvo of information needs to be timely, pertinent to the PCs, actionable, achievable, and not too horribly risky at first glance. Once you have momentum in the story, your future bits of information can be helpful in nature, but if you can make each piece of information along the way as vital to the PCs as the opening story hook, all the better.

Timely

If your opening story hook does not have a sense of immediacy or urgency, it’s going to fall flat, be ignored completely, or the PCs will decide to “deal with it later.” In gaming terms, the “deal with it later” category is a death knell for an adventure hook as now it becomes a casual side quest that will most likely be forgotten. Get the hook in their face and demonstrate to them how urgent the hook is.

Pertinent

Even if the plot hook is urgent, it needs to be pertinent to the PCs. A plot hook of “A scout has discovered that the goblin tribes are going to attack the village on the other side of the range of hills in a week,” will most likely not entice the PCs into action. Sure, it’s timely. They have a week to stop the goblin incursion, but it’s going after “that other village over there” not the village the PCs live and breathe in.

However, if the PCs have NPC connections to that village on the other side of the hills and it’s a four-day travel to get there before they can setup defenses for the village, then you have a pertinent and timely hook.

Actionable

Make sure the story hook has some action in it the PCs can take. If they have an unmarked, barely decipherable treasure map to a section of the world they’ve never seen, heard of, or can get to, that treasure map will go in someone’s pack until such time they feel like figuring out where the treasure map leads.

In my example above about the goblin tribes attacking a nearby village, the PCs can take a variety of actions to save their NPC friends in that village. They can travel to the village and setup defenses. They can venture into the nearby wilderness to directly confront the goblins and disrupt the tribes’ abilities to mount an attack.

Regardless of what actions the PCs can take, make sure the action that is similar to “I go to the capital city and beg the king to send his army to defend the village,” is off the table. Make sure the king or capital city are too far away to be of assistance. Make sure any “powerful wizard” (you know the ones I’m talking about) are conveniently out of town or away on vacation or some such. This will allow the immediate, pertinent actions to land squarely in the PCs’ laps.

Achievable

When presenting the story hook, make sure the PCs have a clear, understandable, and calculable chance of success. If “the goblin tribes” are too much, maybe scale it down to “a goblin tribe,” but definitely don’t use “all twelve hordes of demons from the underdepths below are going to wipe out that village.” Of course, if the party is higher level, then multiple goblin tribes may be what the adventure calls for. Likewise, if the party is very high level or has a great deal of competency and/or prowess, maybe they could face down all twelve hordes of demons.

Regardless of what power level you’re playing with in your game, do not throw the impossible (or something perceived as impossible) in front of the players. This will almost guarantee that they will call upon someone or something more powerful than themselves (like the king’s armies or that vacationing mega-wizard) and this will then make it “someone else’s problem.” You’re trying to create a cool story with obstacles for the party to overcome, not for them to circumvent by recruiting others to blow up the obstacles for them.

Risk

If a venture is not risky, then it’s a travelogue with lots of walking (or riding a horse or transporting in a spacecraft). There will be risk involved. The risks you are going to plant in front of the party do not need to be called out in the story hook. The risk should be implied in the presentation of the hook, but you as the designer and/or GM do not need to lean hard into this area. Here are some segments of sample hooks that imply risks. Can you figure out what risk (or risks!) these segments imply?

• The night of the lawless purge will arrive in the city in four nights, and you’ve been hired by a noble family to secure and protect their home.
• The treasure map you’ve found clearly marks the loot’s location as being in the center of a cemetery in the ruins of a large city five days horse ride to the north through the Gray-Finger Forest.
• The full moon is coming in five days, and your faction’s benefactor was bitten by a werewolf last night. You must find the cure before the full moon or prepare to kill your benefactor.
• A pyramid has risen from the sands outside the city, and demonic forces have poured from openings on all sides. While the demons aren’t approaching the city, they are disrupting trade, travel, and supply trains. Also, the largest oasis in the area happens to reside immediately next to the pyramid, and water supplies are running low. You are the city’s best, and perhaps only, hope of chasing the demons back into the pyramid.

See how easy that was? Of course, a hook can have more elements to them than my above samples, but I was trying to illustrate risk more than any other component of a hook.

Momentum

Once you have your initial story hook in place, you need to continue dropping clues that will get you and your PCs to the next section of the story in the adventure. This is where designing the adventure from back to front makes setting clues and hints easier. If you’ve followed my advice on this topic, you already know what is happening next. You just need to establish a set of clues that will point the party in that direction.

What kind of clues work as continuing story hooks? Well, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait around a few more months. This is the fourth installment of this series, and I do a deep dive on the clues, rumors, and connective tissues of adventure design in the eleventh installment. I apologies for you having to wait until then, but it’ll be worth it. I promise.

Upcoming Months!

The first set of information you established for your adventure was mood, tone, and theme. In the upcoming months, we’ll be breaking down the thematic elements of adventure design. Namely, I’ll be looking at thematic environments, thematic bosses, and thematic mooks across the next three months.

Since the beginning of the hobby, starting at a tavern has been the most cliche and stereotypical beginning for medieval fantasy campaigns in TTRPGs. They are that way for a reason! Taverns are meeting places for all different kinds of people to group up and find missions to get started. The tavern keeper always has some gossip or information to give, maybe some rats to kill in the attic. There is always that mysterious person in the shadows as well, ready to approach the group of wacky individuals and make a team out of them. I, however, come here to offer you something that is far better (in my opinion) than the tavern beginning, and it can easily be applied to any TTRPG.

The Wedding

Note that even though I say a wedding, many sort of similar parties apply. A “fiesta de quinceañera“, a funeral, a bachelor party, or any sort of meeting that encompasses people from different areas connected to one same person or group of people works fine. All of these usually have events going on during the meeting in which everyone is invited to participate. Apart from that, people are put in groups or they self-gravitate into forming smaller groups of people to chat with. Once they are all together in one same spot, within the same subgroup, it’s time for something to go wrong or have someone recruit the group.

I tried this approach at the start of two of the last campaigns I ran: one for Pathfinder 2e, the other for City of Mist (which you can see in a soon to come Spanish Actual Play by RolDe10). The Pathfinder campaign involved the wedding of the Emperor’s right-hand man, having all party members meet up and put into one table together with one NPC that was going to be important to the story. During the event, there is an assassination attempt on the Emperor’s right-hand man, and the story starts from there. For City of Mist, all player characters meet during the “fiesta de quinceañera” (an event celebrated in Latin America when a woman turns 15) and the birthday girl never appears, because she was kidnapped. Both events are kind of similar, having the players meet at an event without knowing each other (or having a few connections with each other), and something happens that kickstarts the campaign.

The best tutorial

Both times I ran this kickstart event for a campaign, I was teaching the players how to play the game. At the same time, they were getting to better know their characters. These meetings usually have events going on in them. It is pretty usual for weddings to have games, or have the classical “grasp the flower bouquet”. Think of them as the first checks or interactions the players will have with the system. It’s a no-risk situation that players always want to participate in because they are just fun. Even if they decide to have their character not participate in it, that also shows the kind of character the player is playing.

In Media Res

In media res, which is Latin for “in the middle of,” means dropping the players into the action from the very start. I have tried this several times, and it has never failed me. It immediately hooks the players and gets them into character. Being in the middle of a celebratory event, you can have them start in some low-risk but action-heavy event, such as dancing with an important NPC, or carrying a plate full of food as a waiter. Once you have them there, they describe their character, what they are doing and how, and they make a first roll. Players get to know a bit about the system immediately, allowing them to better know how their actions have consequences.

Campaign Kickoff

Once the big meeting has occurred, and all the key parts of the campaign have been introduced (players and important NPCs), it’s time to show what the campaign will be all about. This can happen by having something or someone break into the meeting, or by having an NPC approach the player characters to fill them in with information. As I said, I used both an assassination attempt, and a kidnapping as past examples and both worked excellently. Having a knight of the king break in, having the mother of the birthday person abducted by an alien, or having an NPC approach the PCs because they did extremely well in an event that transpired there could work just as well.

The 4 steps to make it work

In essence, this meeting will be separated into 4 different steps:

1. In Media Res Start. Start with a bang to instantly drop the players into the game. Have them rolling from early on and you will have them interested in no time.
2. The First Meeting. Players are put together at the start of the meeting. Maybe there was no one else they knew at the party so they are put with each other, maybe it’s a mere coincidence. Note that not all player characters must be together at the start, but it is recommended most of them do. That way it is not as difficult to put them together to continue the campaign.
3. The Mini Events: Just like minigames, the mini events are risk-free reasons for the players to interact with the system through their characters, as well as getting to know important NPCs. In funerals this may be doing a whole oratory about the now deceased person, in birthday parties hitting the piñata, etc.
4. Campaign Kickoff: Have something happen that sets the player characters in motion to work together for the duration of the campaign.

Conclusion

Simple, right? Next time you start a campaign, no matter the game system, try doing so with a wedding or similar event! You will see in no time how great of a campaign starter it is. It will also catch your players by surprise, who might be expecting another tavern beginning!

Have you ever started your campaign with a similar event? If so, let me know in the comments below, so we all can inspire each other campaign starters!

Join Ang, Josh, and Phil as they talk about GMing for Turtles. No, not those charming reptiles with a house on their back, but the players that end up not wanting to engage with what you’re putting down in front of them!

LINKS:

Sandra Taylor’s ‘Structuring Life to Support Creativity

2024 D&D

Daggerheart

Meguey Baker

What are Jared’s weaknesses? Epic fantasy, check. Space opera, check. Pirates and swashbuckling? Absolutely.

Considering all the above, it may not be a surprise that the product we’re looking at today, Sundered Isles, is a high-seas swashbuckling supplement for Ironsworn: Starforged, which itself was an updated version of the fantasy RPG Ironsworn. Ironsworn must be evolving entirely based on my taste in adventure genres. Allow me this brief moment of pretending the world revolves around me.

Sundered Isles is not a stand-alone game and requires Ironsworn: Starforged for its core rules. It does provide additional character resources, new moves for resolving circumstances unique to the setting and genre, and a host of new oracles.

Disclaimer

I received my copy of Sundered Isles from backing the crowdfunding campaign for Ironsworn: Starforged. I have not had the opportunity to run or play Sundered Isles, but I have played a lot of the solo rules for both Ironsworn and Ironsworn: Starforged.

Credits

Sundered Isles Writing And Design Shawn Tomkin
Additional Writing, Proofing, And Editing Matt Click
Lead Artist Joshua Meehan
Cover Art Bryant Grizzle, Joshua Meehan
Interior Art Bryant Grizzle, Joshua Meehan, Nello Fontani, Phill Simpson, Reza Bagheri, Shawn Tomkin, Vyacheslav Milinchuk, Yifei Li
Icon Design Nathen Græy
Cultural Consultant Liam Stevens
Safety Tool Development And Consultation (FOR STARFORGED) Kienna Shaw, Lauren Bryant-Monk
Consultant For Disability Sensitivity (FOR STARFORGED) Mark Thompson
Digital Tools Ayethin, Nick Boughton, rsek
Illustrated Character Sheet Design Galen Pejeau

Our Booty

The digital version of Sundered Isles includes the following:

• Character Sheet
• Playkit
  • Moves Reference
  • Navigation Chart
  • Connections & Specialist Page
  • Combat Challenge Page
  • Treasure ledger
  • Character Sheet
• Asset Sheets
  • 8 pages of asset cards, 9 to a page
• Asset Sheets (Singles)
  • 63 pages, one asset card per page
• Guide Book
  • 132 pages (facing pages printed as single pages)
• Guide Book (Spreads)
  • 261 pages (each page separate)

The Guide Book PDF is in color, with multiple images of ships at sea, swashbucklers, and weathered maps. The pages with assets and moves are color-coded to help delineate what phase of the game is related to the section at hand.

Navigating the Book

The book is divided into the following distinct sections:

• Adventures Among the Isles
• Getting Underway
• Oracles
• Moves Reference

The first section of the book is dedicated to converting concepts imported from Starforged into ships at sea, as well as introducing some rules modifications when performing similar functions. The second section presents the base assumptions of the game, in a modular format that allows for different elements to be added or subtracted. It also covers the creation and managing of factions, setting tone, and establishing content to include or exclude. The last two sections are some of the most extensive parts of the book.

The Oracles section includes the tables that are the heart of the solo game and games without a GM. There are Oracles to help determine what’s going on, how plots develop, as well as the fine details. The oracles are divided into the following tables:

• Core Oracles
• Seafaring Oracles
• Weather Oracles
• Ship Oracles
• Island Oracles
• Overland Oracles
• Settlement Oracles
• Faction Oracles
• Character Oracles
• Shipwreck Oracles
• Cave Oracles
• Ruin Oracles
• Treasure Oracles
• Miscellaneous Oracles

The Moves Reference section collects the mechanical meat of the game in one place. While each type of move isn’t used in every game, the moves are grouped in a manner to make it obvious where to look. The Moves are grouped in the following sections:

• Session Moves
• Adventure Moves
• Quest Moves
• Connection Moves
• Exploration Moves
• Combat Moves
• Suffer Moves
• Recover Moves
• Threshold Moves
• Legacy Moves
• Fate Moves

As an example, if you are exploring the isles and mapping new trade routes, you may be using rules in the Exploration Moves section. If you get into a duel with another pirate captain, you will be using the moves in the Combat Moves section. In both cases, if you fail and the move indicates that you have a consequence for failure, you will find the different moves showing consequences for exploration and combat under the Suffer Moves.

Quick Overview

While this product doesn’t present the core rules, for those that are curious, let’s examine how you determine what happens in Ironforged-derived games.

Characters have five stats. The stat you use to resolve a roll is detailed in the move description. Characters have multiple tracks to manage, which include Momentum, Health, Spirit, and Supply. As characters are injured, demoralized, or use up their resources, their Health, Spirit, or Supply goes down. There are specific moves you can attempt to recover each of these resources.

Whenever a character attempts to do something, if it matches one of the moves in the game, you reference the rules for that move. Resolution involves rolling a d6 and two d10s (not percentile). If your d6 + the relevant ability is greater than one of the two d10s, you get a weak hit. If it is better than both d10s, you get a strong hit. The d6 is the Action Die, and the d10s are the Challenge Dice.

If you are familiar with Apocalypse World-derived games, the move structure should sound familiar. The moves are arranged with results for total success, partial success, or failure.

Momentum is a resource you can burn, which lets you swap your Momentum score for your Action score. You can have negative Momentum, and in that case, when the integer equals your action die score, it is negated.

While there are many moves that are resolved immediately with a single roll, anything that is meant to represent a significant challenge involves creating a progress track. Your success on some moves allows you to mark a number of boxes. In some cases, you can attempt to complete the task before reaching the end of the track, but the more boxes you fill in, the more reasonable the difficulty of the move to resolve the action measured by the track.

Progress tracks are different lengths based on the amount of effort required to resolve them. The challenge ranks are:

• Troublesome
• Dangerous
• Formidable
• Extreme
• Epic

Dueling a skilled opponent may require a dangerous progress track. Sailing from port to port trying to track down the location of a fugitive could be a formidable task. While a task like a duel with a hostile opponent will be something you work on until it’s resolved, a task like hunting down a fugitive would see you roll each time you put into a port, in between resolving other actions and engaging other action tracks.

Characters have Assets, which are discreet rules that introduce different moves related to that Asset, or that modify the rolls you make for existing moves. There are several categories of Assets:

• Vehicle–details of vehicles you possess
• Module–new parts you can add to modify your vehicle
• Path–your core talents that represent your profession or archetype
• Companion–NPCs that accompany the player character
• Deed–new abilities you gain for performing specific momentous events

Sundered Isles assumes that you are using some of the assets from Ironsworn: Starforged. While some Assets, like Engine Upgrade, may not make sense, others, like Heavy Cannons, function the same whether you’re firing cannonballs or energized plasma.

Setting Assumptions

If you are familiar with Ironsworn or Ironsworn: Starforged, you may be used to the format in which the setting is presented. The setting assumptions are more about facilitating play by determining the active tropes. Some tropes are more important than others, and the game assumes some specific truths about your character. There are several places where the game asks questions and presents some possible answers.

Player characters are assumed to be privateers. There is a starting ship, and if you aren’t playing solo, all of the PCs operate off the same ship. You may or may not start to acquire other ships under your command, creating your own fleet. There are assumed to be multiple factions, including an expansionist empire of some kind. While the game assumes diverse cultures living on various islands, the tyrannical empire hasn’t colonized the region and exists as a threat to fight against.

While those are the thematic elements that are assumed, there are a few specifics, but those specifics can exist in different contexts. There are two moons, Cinder and Wraith. The interplay between the moons causes the tides to be less predictable, allowing for more variability that can come from various moves. The islands are assumed to be spread out into three broad regions, the Myriads, the Margins, and the Reaches. The different regions can facilitate different aspects of play, from piracy, exploring ruins and locations, charting new routes, and finding new islands.

One of the biggest decisions is what Realm you are adventuring in. The options provided are the Seafaring Realm, the Skyfaring Realm, and the Starfaring Realm. The Seafaring Realm resembles a setting not unlike the Age of Sail adventure stories featuring pirates and privateers in our world. The Skyfaring Realm still assumes that your players are heroic pirates, but they fly skyships between floating cities that rose to the sky when the surface of the world suffered some great calamity. The Starfaring Realm assumes that islands are floating in the void of space, and that you can use a magical version of a sailing ship to travel between islands and asteroids, a wee bit like Spelljammer.

There are a ton of tables for fleshing out different aspects of the setting. They include the following tables:

• The Sundering–how the setting came to be how it is now
• Relics–what remains from before
• Modern Era–what does technology look like
• Iron Vows–what does it look like to swear a vow to complete a quest in this setting
• Navigation–how do people navigate and what are their unique challenges
• Empires–how powerful and active are the imperial powers you fight against
• Piracy–how do pirates behave, and are there wider trends
• Religion–how do people interact with the divine or the supernatural
• Magic–how magical is the setting
• Beasts–noteworthy creatures that are special, but not legendary
• Horror–terrifying legendary elements of dread

In addition to these setting details, there are also tables for origin stories both for your character and your ship, potential curses you may be dealing with, random islands you may find, the details of different beasts the PCs can encounter while exploring, and what the various active factions are. The factions are organized into the following categories:

• Societies–shared traditions and/or ways of life
• Organizations–groups working toward a common goal
• Empires–what the villains of the setting look like
• The Cursed–people bound together by supernatural misfortune

Compared to Starforged, Sundered Isles introduces new resolution frameworks to reinforce the themes and tropes of seafaring and swashbuckling. This includes a multi-step process for naval combat that involves closing on ships, engaging, and boarding. There are procedures for tracking your wealth, repairing your ship, and exploring caves and ruins. As with other elements in the various Ironsworn games, none of these additional procedures are mandated, and there are single roll resolutions for most of the scenarios that have more detailed procedures. You may use individual moves to close in on and loot a standard merchant ship but decide to use the full procedure for naval combat when encountering the imperial dreadnought that serves as the flagship of one of the oppressive nations pushing into the region.

The game has a few assumptions about who you are and how you operate, and some of these assumptions are reflected in how the moves work. You are assumed to be heroic pirates. You may not be angels, but you aren’t bloodthirsty killers. You are assumed to be in opposition to the expansionist powers in the region, which helps to present you with some guilt-free targets for your piracy. When you explore ruins, you are not looting the ruins. The moves are focused around finding out who lived here, and what happened to them. Instead of looting, you may end up finding the descendants of that culture to share your findings.

The wealth rules are simple, tracking a wealth level from 1 through 5, and providing situations where you lower your wealth level to perform tasks like doing regular upkeep or repairing damage to your ship, and increasing when you loot a target vessel. This wasn’t the first time I was reflecting on my 7th Sea 2nd edition games while reading these rules, and I appreciate that there is just enough to the wealth rules to make them meaningful, and to remain logical in their abstraction. You can make wealth rules too minimalist, where the questions about the lack of rules cause more problems than a more detailed system causes.

The Oracles

You can engage with the rules for quite a while without consulting the oracles in the game, if you know exactly what you want to do, and what you want to include. Sometimes, even in solo play, you have some ideas of what you want to accomplish to establish your character in the setting. However, the Ironsworn games have a reputation for their oracles. These are the keys to being able to either play solo, or to play without a GM. While the PCs still need to have a broad idea of what they want to do, they can still be surprised by rolling on the oracles to learn the nature of their challenges and the evolving story of the world outside of their immediate quests.

The Core Oracles can be used to give you momentum. These include what kind of action the PCs need to take, what the theme of the current adventure should be, what kind of descriptors you should add to more mundane elements, and what the focus of the adventure should be.

Sundered Isles includes a new wrinkle, the Cursed Die. If you want to introduce more sinister elements to your game, but you still want them to come into the narrative at surprising times, you add a d10 Cursed Die to your d100 rolls. If the Cursed Die comes up a 10, instead of rolling on the regular oracle tables, you instead use the more sinister results on the Cursed Oracle tables. For example, while the standard weather results may include things like stifling heat or raging storms, the Cursed Weather oracle may result in blood rain, mist that displays the crew’s darkest secrets, or shifting clouds of pulsing arcane energy.

Something true of all the Ironsworn games is that these oracles can be used even if you aren’t currently using the Ironsworn rules. If you’re running a fantasy game where the characters are sailing dangerous waters, or even if you’re playing a semi-historical game set in the Age of Sail, if you want a mass of adventure seeds and random thoughts to trigger your own creativity, these oracles serve that function very well.

Wind in the Sails

 Engaging with the game shows how well it hangs together, but the Oracles are a great gateway to get eyes on the inside of the book. 

If you’re already a fan of the previous Ironsworn incarnations, this is going to provide more of what you already enjoy about the system. The Curse Die is a solid addition to the rules. It adds another dimension to the utility of the oracles, and it provides pacing for your nasty surprises when you don’t want to trust your gut instincts on how often you should be introducing nasty escalations to the narrative. The oracles are useful beyond their functionality in the game and can be used for all manner of thematically similar games.

Becalmed

This game knows what it wants to do, how to resolve things, and how to introduce more elements to the game to represent new narrative additions. While that’s not bad, at times it can be a little overwhelming. Even with the clear organization and color coding, the fact that the game has that level of organization in the first place can sometimes be off-putting to someone new to the system. Reframing the exploration of ruins as solving the mystery of the lost culture is an approach I appreciate, but while I can envision complications for adventure stories, it’s harder for me to picture emergent mysteries as satisfying.

Recommended–If the product fits in your broad area of gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase.

Ironsworn is an interesting conglomeration of gaming concepts, from adding elements of Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games to providing solo and GMless experiences. While it does those things well, from the outside, it can sound like a bit of an experimental activity. Engaging with the game shows how well it hangs together, but the Oracles are a great gateway to get eyes on the inside of the book. They are consistently full of interesting options, and those options just beg for you to roll a die and see what comes up.

If you want adventure fuel for your fantasy privateer game, or even if you may want an alternate way of telling stories in existing swashbuckling settings, you shouldn’t be disappointed with this purchase. Even if you only have your fantasy crew take to the waves intermittently, the oracles alone may make it worth the price to you.

The fates are conspiring against me, working in the background to tempt my inner dice goblin to indulge his baser instincts. How else would you explain the plethora of shiny math rock kickstarters, fundraisers, videos, and freakin’ cool STL files that have made their way across my feeds as of late? Surely it can’t be some cold, unfeeling computer algorithm. No, it must be fate, and it must be my destiny to find a way to master all of these funky weird dice.

Seriously, though, the last few months, I’ve been thinking about dice a lot. Specifically weird dice. It all started back at the end of 2023, when my husband gave me this awesome dice spinner for Christmas.

It’s beautiful. It’s fun. But most important – it’s weird, and I love weird. So I started thinking about how I could use this weird artifact for more than simply generating a random number. A die (or dice depending on how you’re counting it) so unique deserves a special place at the table, in my opinion. Using it for every random guard’s sword swing or royal vizier’s bluff check would lessen the impact.

This train of thought took me to a lot of offbeat places I didn’t expect – like spending a week musing over the act of building a Cortex system dice pool and how just choosing the stats you’re going to roll with in that game becomes a kind of role play experience on it’s own – but ultimately it coalesced into philosophizing about the purpose of dice.

Because if we really dig into the raison d’etre of the math rocks it becomes clear that they’re not just randomizers. They are tension-makers. Suspense-creators. Engines of uncertainty.

That’s how all the systems tell us to use dice, isn’t it? When you don’t know what will happen, when you’re playing to find out, when success is uncertain – roll the dice.

Dice are the unknown. They’re luck. They’re – dare I tempt it by saying – fate.

Incarnate.

And fate can be fickle.

When we’re rolling dice, we’re taking a chance, and chances are dramatic. Chance creates tension, and when I understood this, I knew how to best use not just my dice spinner, but a bunch of different kinds of dice in weird and unique ways.

Below, you’ll find five weird ways to up the tension at your table using dice. I’ve collected these ideas and arranged from least to most weird. I’ve also tried to include links to the inspiration for the methods when I could provide them.

HIGH – LOW – EVEN – ODD

Credit for this one goes to my old college roommate (thanks, Jeremy!). I don’t know if he came up with it first, but he’s the first GM I’d ever seen use it.

The process is simple, take a D20 (or whatever die your system uses) and point at a player (preferably the one attempting to do the risky action that required a die roll) and say, “High, low, even, or odd.”

Let them call it. Roll the die. If they managed to call the roll, the action goes in their favor.

Essentially, it’s a coin flip and it works well in situations where pure luck determines the outcome of an action. But this works better than a coin flip because the player feels like they have more agency. Not much, but four options are better than two even if the math works out the same. Plus, it plays into dice superstitions such as “I never roll high” or “I really don’t want to ‘waste’ a twenty on this.”

If you really want to play with their emotions, grab a D20 from their dice jail and call for a high-low-even-odd roll. (This is the most evil version of this roll, and is only recommended for GMs who are willing to tempt every god of fortune at one time.)

ROLL UNDER A CUP

Inspired by Liar’s Dice, Yahtzee, but mostly this video on the Quinns Quest Patreon. (It’s a fun video and I highly recommend watching it if you can.)

Imagine this: the rogue has split off from the party to scout the villain’s keep. They’re sneaking through darkened hallways and creeping around corners, when they run into a guard patrol. You call for a stealth roll, BUT you tell them to roll under a cup (an opaque cup. Otherwise this doesn’t work) and tell them not to look at it until you say so.

Then you cut back to the rest of the party. You run a scene. Maybe even an encounter. All the while, the rogue’s player is staring at the cup. Wondering if they’ve been spotted.

When I heard Quinn describe this method, I immediately ran out and bought a set of special little bowls for my home game. I can not wait to watch my players squirm under the tension of not knowing if they succeeded or not.

And yes, you could just roll in secret, but then the answer is an ephemeral result in your brain, not a tangible die sitting just out of reach.   

ADD SOME DESPAIR (Dice)

Adapted from Edge of the Empire/Genesys.

Lots of games have their own custom dice – like Edge of the Empire’s Task dice or Fate’s Fudge dice. You can easily steal the special dice and import them into your game to add a little spice along with some nuance.

When a character goes to hack a computer system, toss them an Edge of the Empire difficulty die to roll along with their D20 and interpret the resulting narrative complications as you would if you were running that system. Or have them roll a Fudge die. On a minus they set off the alarms, on a blank they succeed with a “yes but,” on a plus they get extra information.

Sure, you can bake these gradients of success into a normal D20 roll based on how far below or above the target number they roll, but adding a special die points a huge ass spotlight on the action. It adds another layer of importance to the action and dials up the tension along the way.

ROULETTE DICE COUNTDOWN

Inspired by my Christmas present.

I timed it, and with a really good flick my roulette die will spin for about one and a half minutes, but that’s just an estimate. I’m not certain exactly how long it will spin. And what does uncertainty create? That’s right. Tension.

So, imagine this: you set up a scenario where your players have a limited amount of time to make decisions. Let’s say the jackbooted troops of the evil empire are hunting them through back alleys, trying to catch them before they reach their hideout. The group has to either act together or separately, but they only have until the spinner stops to tell you their actions. You set the stakes and give them the parameters of the situation, and then you start the spinner spinning.

“You have until this stops spinning to make your actions. The result on the die will represent the evil empire’s perception check to find you. Go!”

Will the empire succeed? Who knows! You don’t. Your players definitely don’t! All you know is that there is a limited amount of time to choose.

Now THAT’S dramatic.

SKILL-BASED DICE TOYS

Inspired by these incredibly awesome 3D prints.

These 3D prints turn standard dice rolls into actual real-life skill checks. They take the nail-biting challenge of those old tilt and spin puzzles where you try to navigate a ball bearing through a labyrinth without dropping it through a hole and combine them with either a D20 or a D6. The more dexterous you are at guiding the ball bearing through the maze, the higher your roll result.

Tons of fun on it’s own. Especially if you use it for something like disarming a trap or activating a complicated magical puzzle. But what if you added in a push your luck mechanic?

“The room’s ceiling is coming down and will crush you in three (real time) minutes. If you can ‘roll’ a 13 on this skill-based die, you can unlock the door and escape. But if you get a 17 you can stall out the mechanism completely and find the secret passage that will let you bypass the rest of the dungeon’s traps. If you get a 20…well something extra special will happen.”

These weird dice rolls can add spice to your sessions, drawing attention to pivotal rolls and heightening the tension to astronomical levels of excitement, but do remember to use them in moderation. After all, if every roll you call for has its own gimmick, they’ll lose their specialness real fast.     

I’m also still trying to find ways of adopting these methods for online play. The “roll under a cup” method can be replicated in the Foundry VTT by having your players make blind GM rolls and then you can reveal them in the UI when the timing is appropriate. Including Genesys or Fudge dice into the system could probably be done with a moderate amount of coding, depending on the VTT. Mailing your players care packages with the 3D printed skill dice could be an interesting way to add mystery to the session as well, but it of course has its own limitations.

Would you use weird dice like these in your games? How? Let us know in the comments.

Join Ang, JT, and guest Andy Jaksetic as they talk about the art of pregenerated characters. They cover everything from why you would want pre-made characters to what details you need to give your players.

LINKS:

Untold Stories Project Twitch

Untold Stories Project YouTube

Victoriana Kickstarter

Worlds Without Number

Planning in RPGs is not a fun activity, so don’t do it.
Planning in RPGs is necessary so that we don’t get our characters killed.
Both of those statements are true.

The optimal way planning should work in your game is somewhere in the middle of those two statements. The optimal way is a combination of genre and play style. And if we were to discuss what that looked like up front, we could define how much planning was necessary for the game we were playing, so that our games had the right amount of planning, minimizing the un-fun-ness (take that Bob, our editor), and making it effective enough to keep the characters alive (at least most of them). Let’s talk about how to do that.

Is Planning Un-Fun?

I think so, and I say that as a person whose day job is planning things, and outside of work I plan everything else in my life. In RPGs, planning is just not that fun of an activity. It often consists of the table coming up with ideas and then saying “…but what about this?” going around and around in circles. If you are a player participating in the process, it can be a bit draining, but if you are the GM, waiting for the players to come up with a plan, then you are just sitting there on the outside. It is not how I want to spend my gaming time.

Is Planning Necessary?

Having a plan is a good idea because it aligns the group in terms of their goal and how they are going to achieve it. It allows the group the time to figure out how to best use their resources (equipment, powers, etc). These things greatly increase the group’s chances of being successful and surviving. 

The Components of a Plan

Let’s take a few moments and discuss what makes up a plan. A good plan has all of these, and lesser plans lack detail or are missing some of these parts: 

• The Goal/Objective – A plan must have an objective. What are we doing? This goal should be shared by the entire group. Are you going in to steal the money? Or are you here to rescue your ex-wife from the Prince? If you are not on the same page about the goal, the group may pursue different goals, split up their resources, or at worse come into conflict.

• Milestones – The smaller objectives you need to achieve to build up to the goal. It could be disarming the alarm system, or stealing a key from the guard. Some milestones will be in temporal order while others may occur at any time.

• Information/Intelligence – plans run on information. You can’t plan if you don’t know where you are going, what to expect, how many guards, the terrain around the location, etc. When you lack information you start to make guesses (see below).

• Risks – Risks are the things you don’t know but think are possible. Risks can be things like a hidden alarm system. Or something like, “What if we can’t take out the guards quietly?” In addition, Risks have a probability (how likely they are to occur) and an impact (how big of a problem it is when they come true). A lot of people who are bad with risks spend too much time worrying about how to handle low probability/high impact risks over high probability/lower impact risks. 

• Mitigation and Contingencies – Hand in hand with risks are Mitigations (how do we make risk less likely to occur — lower probability) and Contingencies (what do we do if that risk comes true — lower the impact). You can manage neither, one, or both of these. The trick is deciding for each risk what you want to manage. 

This is why Planning is difficult and may not be fun. It is a lot to manage and done well it takes time – time that you are not playing the game. 

The Trust Issue 

The reason that people tend to over-plan is that they fear that there is some piece of information that if the players knew before they put their plan into action, would ensure the success of the goal or prevent excessive harm/death to the characters. To combat this, players do one or both of the following: 

• Collect as much information/intelligence as possible; at times to excess. 
• Perform excessive Risk mitigation — naming risks, and coming up with mitigations and contingencies. 

In fact, as a GM, you will know this is happening in the game when these two actions take over the session. When characters feel like they know enough, is when they are ready to switch from planning to action. 

Genre and Playstyle

Before we get to the social contract part of this… we need to discuss two more things. 

Some Genres have plans as one of the tropes. If you are running a game about thieves and heists, or a military game about Spec Ops missions, then those genres require some degree of planning. These games are also best served by mechanics that help compensate for suboptimal planning or help mitigate the lack of planning that occurs at the table. Look at how Blades in the Dark and other Forged in the Dark games remove the need for extensive planning by using mechanics to simulate good planning done by the characters rather than the players.

The other thing is play-style. Some groups get off on playing the cat and mouse game, where the GM comes up with a plan and twists and the players face off to come up with a plan to outsmart the GM. Others want nothing to do with planning. Whatever brings your entire group joy, then there is no wrong-bad-fun, as long as you all, as a group are on the same page.

The Social Contract of Planning

The truth is that not all RPGs need the same level of planning, but unless you establish that fact, most players will assume they do. 

Some genres do not lean into detailed plans. Superhero games often rely on bold action and powers to overcome problems, not intricate plans. Pulp games also favor action over plans as well. So as you establish your game, consider what the genre and your setting should favor and then combine that with your play style. 

An example: My players had recently finished a Night’s Black Agents campaign. It was a game where planning was key, and the game had some mechanics to support planning. The players knew not to move from planning to action until they had enough intel. They would sometimes spend a session collecting intel and making a plan. Currently, we are playing Mutants in the Now, a game inspired by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game and comic. In our most recent session, the players were working on a plan for how to attack a Yakuza hotel where some mutant animals were being trafficked. They started to work on a plan worthy of Night’s Black Agents when I reminded them that this game was more action-based. They quickly simplified their plan to “We rappel to the top of the hotel and fight our way to the bottom while rescuing the other mutant animals along the way”. A perfect plan for the setting and genre. 

The key to having players not over-plan is trust between GM and the player. As the GM, I am telling the players that I am not going to punish them for choosing a simple plan. For the players, it is trusting that I am not withholding some key piece of information that would break their simple plan. 

That is not to say you cannot have a twist. The twist is a time-honored trope in all plans. The twist is the unexpected thing that the players have to deal with in the middle of executing the plan which can cause the plan to alter it on the fly. The difference is that what I am promising, as GM, is that the twist will not up-end or thwart the plan. Rather it will be a fun surprise that the characters can deal with.

This is the social contract of planning as a group, for the game you are running (genre and mechanics) and the way you like to play (style). Agree with how much planning is necessary for this game, in general. You can come up with things like this:

• This game is about a sci-fi Spec Ops team, and the mechanics are gritty, you are going to want to have a good plan before executing an operation. 
• This game is about mutant animals fighting other mutant animals and criminals, you don’t need more than a simple plan, as most things you encounter are going to be resolved by fighting.

By doing this you are creating expectations for the whole group on how you should handle planning. This is the social contract that you agree to and guides how you play. Establish this in Session Zero and you can set the tone for planning in your campaign, and help keep planning to exactly what it needs to be for your game.

A quick note. Even after you establish a level of planning as part of your game, you can have a story where you change the amount of planning for that session. All you have to do is indicate to the players the change so that they can reset their expectations.. 

Plan Out Your Planning

Planning is not always fun in games, and it can be worse if you are over or under-planning based on the game you are running. But like most things in RPGs, if we do some upfront communication and set some expectations we can dial in planning to just the right amount for the game we are playing. 

This expectation along with any planning mechanics that the game provides can make planning far less tedious while being effective, and make for an overall play experience. 

How do you handle planning in your games? How do you set those expectations with your players? What planning tools do you use or what planning mechanics do you employ?

Onyx Path has been around since 2012, taking over the publication of the New World of Darkness RPGs from White Wolf via a licensing agreement. They rechristened the New World of Darkness the Chronicles of Darkness and began producing updated anniversary versions of the original World of Darkness RPGs. All of this got a little more complicated in 2018, when White Wolf’s new owner Paradox Entertainment launched Vampire: the Masquerade 5e and has handed development of the new “fifth edition” versions of Hunter: The Reckoning and Werewolf: The Apocalypse over to Renegade Game Studios.

Onyx Path hasn’t been locked into only producing classic WoD and current CoD RPG supplements. Their RPG IP has been growing with games like Pugmire, the “They Came From . . . “ line of RPGs, and Scion 2e, which is powered by the Storypath System. This is a system that looks familiar to people accustomed to the Storyteller System that powered the classic WoD games, but added some currency spends that allowed for more flexible narrative elements as well as providing the basis for complications and conditions.

Curseborne is a modern-day horror RPG, set in a world of the supernatural known as The Accursed World. Player characters portray afflicted characters who acquire supernatural abilities that recall ghosts, vampires, demons, angels, and sorcerers. What we’re looking at today is the precursor to the full game.

Disclaimer

I picked up the Curseborne: Ashcan Edition when I saw it pop up on DriveThroughRPG and I am not working from a review copy. I have not had the opportunity to play or run Curseborne, but while it utilizes a newer iteration of the Storypath System than the one used for Scion, I do have experience playing Scion in the past.

 Curseborne: Ashcan Edition

Developed and Written by: The Curseborne Team
Editor: Reginald Pewty
Art Direction and Design: Mike Chaney
Layout: Dixie Cochran
Creative Director: Richard Thomas

What’s in an Ashcan?

This PDF is 60 pages long, with a color cover. The interior punctuates the two-column layout with what looks like the Rorschach version of a moth. This includes a Table of Contents, and four ready-made characters. These characters are presented as stat blocks in a chapter, rather than being formatted in character sheet form.

The listing on DriveThroughRPG mentions that a more finished version of the ashcan will be added to your library if you purchase it now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t include the Ready-Made Characters in character sheet format. If you read this in the future, some of this summary may not match what’s currently available, but I wanted to cover this sooner rather than later.

Concept

As mentioned above, the setting for this game is the Accursed World. It’s named such because all of the supernatural creatures you portray are the result of curses. The types that the ashcan details are:

• The Dead–a dead person who is animating their own body, but can jump to others
• The Hungry–a cursed person that needs to feed on others to empower themselves
• The Outcast–a person with something lurking inside, which could be angelic or demonic
• The Primal–a person with shapeshifting abilities and impulse control issues
• The Sorcerer–a character type that is in the final game, but only gets broadly described here

Each of these lineages can look a lot like the traditional version of, for example, a vampire or a werewolf, but the final rules will have additional options that introduce other wild forms beyond wolves, and other things that The Hungry feeds on that may be more esoteric than blood. If you’re familiar with The Dresden Files books, this is a similar concept to the White Court vampires.

There aren’t a lot of example opponent adversaries in the book, but the ones that appear all tie into the example scenario. This also brings up another aspect of the game, that you may not just be fighting invaders from other realities, other cursed individuals that are less than benevolent, or dangerous non-cursed individuals, but also malevolent conceptual locations.

Threats include Interstitial Zones, liminal spaces that may trap people within them if they cannot determine how to leave, as well as Shattered Spaces, spaces on the borders of reality that actively seek to feed off the people trapped within them and possessed of an antagonistic intelligence.

It’s not explicitly stated that characters are meant to be teenagers or young adults, but there are various passages that reference “adults” as clearly “not you,” and all of the Ready-Made Characters are high school-age people.

How Are We Doing This?

Your successes or failures are based on rolling d10s, with a success on an 8 or higher, or two successes on a 10. You roll a pool based on adding your attribute score to your skill rank. Most checks don’t require you to have multiple successes, however, you may have a number of complications that trigger even if you are successful. You can use extra success to pay off these complications. There are also tricks that you can purchase to enhance what you accomplish. One example of a trick is to do additional damage with an attack.

Some situations will grant the characters Enhancements. Enhancements are bonuses that you add to the successes on the dice, but you can only use them if you have at least one success. You may also have Advantage, which only comes up in contested situations. If your Advantage is significantly higher than your adversary, you may get what you want automatically, without rolling.

The game defines about twenty different conditions. The variety of conditions helps determine the kind of complications that might arise when the Story Guide is setting the stakes of a roll. While there are combat-related conditions like Agony (increased difficulty on tasks) or Bleeding (you take additional injuries if you don’t pay off the ongoing complication), there are also conditions like Guilt-Ridden (you feel so bad about something you need to address, everything that isn’t addressing that situation has an increased difficulty). I’ll just point out, I’m pretty sure I suffer from Confusion, Ennui, Exhausted, and Guilt-Ridden regularly.

One of the game currencies is Momentum, which can be spent to add Enhancements to your rolls, or to move your dice result one step up the ladder (turning a success with complications into a straight success, for example). You can also spend momentum to find evidence when you are in an investigation, or to add a story element to a scene. Every time you fail a check, you add a point of Momentum to your pool.

Characters also have Bonds, which can be positive or negative. These provide a pool of Enhancements that you can add to rolls whenever your action has something to do with the person with whom you have the bond. You have a limited number of bonds, and you can strengthen bonds by spending scenes with the subject of your Bond.

Throwing Down

When you get injured, you move through Injury Levels, which include the following:

• Bloodied
• Wounded
• Maimed
• Near Death

You get bonus dice in certain skills as you get beat up more, until you are Near Death, which gives you bonus dice and Enhancement, but you immediately gain the Taken Out condition after this. Armor, if you have any, adds boxes you can fill with damage before you start taking levels of injuries. I haven’t seen injury levels adding to your ability to succeed in many games outside of 7th Sea 2nd edition, and I like to see it here.

You roll initiative for at the start of an encounter, but that’s only to see who goes first. After that, the player that just acted hands off to the player or character they want to go next. This hybrid of traditional initiative rolls and hand-off initiative is used in Pugmire, and it is welcome to see it appear in these rules, as well. Weapons, like tools, grant Enhancement, and there are several modifying tags that weapons can have, usually no more than two. For example, the Brutal tag makes it cheaper to buy additional damage when you hit an opponent.

Combat uses range bands. Characters can move from Close to Short or Short to Medium as part of whatever else you’re doing. You can Rush as part of a combined action allowing you to charge further and make an attack at the end of your movement. Some areas can have effects applied to them, like Crowded, Darkness, or Overstimulating, which may add complications that you need to buy off when taking action.

Exploring the Curses

Characters have an Entanglement score, which starts at one, and sets the limits for some point spends and resources. Entanglement represents how intertwined you have become with the curse of your lineage. In addition to setting spending and pool limits, Entanglement also sets the number of Curse Dice you start with.

Curse Dice represent potential supernatural power. For each one you have, you replace a regular die with a Curse Die. In addition to the Curse Dice you get for your Entanglement rank, you can accumulate others by playing into your Torments (we’ll come to those below), whenever the crew comes together to start troubleshooting, when you enter certain locations, or when you hit certain roleplaying triggers.

If your Curse Die is one of the dice contributing to your successes, you may do what you intended to do, but too well. You may also attract the attention of various supernatural beings, from otherworldly creatures to the members of your Accursed family. If you fail a check, and none of your Curse Dice are hits . . . the same thing happens except it’s worded more ominously? I understand the narrative concept here is that you may get yourself into trouble because you’re too good, or you may look bad because your power draws attention to you, but it feels a little functionally clouded. If the Curse Dice are too hot or too cold, it may mean the Story Guide will be spending time trying to think of what kind of supernatural attention you have drawn to yourself or sourcing the table for ideas a lot, to the detriment of the current narrative.

When you roll hits on your Curse Dice, you have access to tricks that you can buy with extra successes, that are only available in that circumstance. You can only spend hits from the Curse Die successes for these tricks. Some examples include forming immediate bonds when interacting with others in a social test, hitting everyone in an area with an attack, or picking up on supernatural clues while looking for mundane ones.

You can also Bleed your Curse Dice. That means that you trigger some kind of special ability, roll your check with the Curse Die still in the pool, then remove it after the roll. Some of your special abilities are triggered by Bleeding a die, while others may depend on you having a set number of dice in your pool.

I’m going to slip in a discussion of Damnation here, because it interacts with your Curse Dice. When you no longer have any Curse Dice, you are subject to your Damnation. Most of these have a roleplaying component, as well as the more mechanical provision that the character can’t use spells or gain any new Curse Dice until they perform the action that resolves this instance of their Damnation.

The Dead take risks to make them feel more alive, The Hungry are driven to feed, The Outcast manifest outwardly visible signs of their angelic or demonic glory, and the Primal shifts into their alternate form and tries to establish their dominance in any given situation. The Dead can end this Damnation by performing a meaningful and thoughtful action, The Hungry must feed, The Outcast has to spend time establishing a bond with a normal person to ground them, and The Primal has to inflict one of a number of conditions on a victim for the primal form to be satisfied and recede. All of this reminds me of Monsterheart’s Darkest Self rules. That’s not a bad thing from my point of view.

I’m a little confused at the relationship between Entanglement and your Curse Die limit, because if your Curse Dice are limited by your Entanglement, and starting Entanglement for a game is usually 1, that means you can only have one at a time. If that’s the case, that means any time you trigger one of your special abilities that requires that you Bleed the Curse Die, you’re going to be thrown into your Damnation, some of which would subvert what you are trying to accomplish by triggering those abilities. I feel that what’s actually going on is that at Entanglement 1 you can have X number of Curse Dice, but I can’t find a reference to that in the PDF.

Torments

Different lineages have unique torments, although the final rules will have multiple Torments from which the character can select. Torments are the nagging weight of the reality of your situation, which can drive you to certain actions. Unlike Damnation, these aren’t triggered when you run out of Curse Dice, these exist as roleplaying hooks that you can use to add momentum to the Momentum pool, although in the section on Curse Dice, it also mentions gaining a Curse Die when you roleplay your torment. That’s not mentioned in the explanation of the torments, only in the Curse Die section.

The torments that we see associated with the lineages in the ashcan are as follows:

• Yearning for Life (The Dead)–you become obsessive in making sure the people you care about remember you
• Take What’s Mine (The Hungry)–you claim something that you want that isn’t currently yours, because you deserve whatever you can seize
• Show of Force (The Outcast)–you use disproportionate means to achieve your goals, showing off how much power you have, even if it causes collateral damage
• Elemental Fury (The Primal)–you pick the biggest target to attack, and can’t break off to help your friends or do anything other than take your target down

All these play into the archetype of the lineage well, and I like the ability to trigger your bad habits to build up your resources for later, as a means of rewarding roleplaying. It’s like a more focused version of invoking your own traits against yourself in Fate. The Outcast and The Primal feel a little less varied between their Damnation and their Torments, so I’m interested to see the additional Torments in the full game.

All of these Torments are listed in the section detailing the Accursed, and showing us Torments tied to those themes. The Ready-Made characters also have another Torment on the character sheet that has a title, but no definition in the ashcan. These are referred to as Personal Torments. The additional Torments we see on the characters are:

• Being Denied a Desire
• Elder Abuse
• Seeing the Innocent Harmed
• Being Left Alone or Singled Out

Two of those seem like perfectly normal roleplaying triggers, and two of those really concern me. I don’t know if these are meant to show that the character is tormented by seeing these things, or by performing these actions, but either way, that’s some very loaded content to add into your game. You may say, “different tables need to determine their own boundaries, as long as they are being safe,” and to that I would say, these are example characters meant to be played in a short scenario to show off the system. Maybe don’t hit the accelerator quite so hard.

Edges and Practices

These are straightforward, especially if you’ve seen other Onyx Path games. Edges are like edges, feats, or talents from a variety of games. They’re special abilities that thematically modify the game rules in your favor.

Practices are spells, supernatural rituals or actions that characters can take, some of which are native to a single lineage, and some of which can be broadly learned by students of the occult. Most of these require you to Bleed your Curse Die, but some can only be accessed if you are holding a set number of Curse Dice.

Qualities and Dread Powers

There aren’t a lot of adversaries in the ashcan, which is understandable. On the other hand, there are several Qualities and Dread Powers, rules modules that you can plug into an Adversary to help define what they can do in the game. You may get some extra mileage from the few stat blocks in the ashcan by mixing and matching these. Some examples include Clear Vision, which means the Adversary can see through magical and mundane disguises, or Invulnerability, which means the Adversary can only be harmed by a specific weakness.

The active side of traits, the Dread Powers, includes things like Bend Minds, which can allow the Adversary to take control of its opponents, Consume, which lets the Adversary chew on something substantial from a victim to remove injuries, or Devour, which allows large Adversaries to completely swallow their foes.

The Scenario

This one is short, and I won’t go into too many details, but it touches on some of the things explained about the setting in the rest of the ashcan. Some of the challenges are dealing with everyday frustrations, there is some investigation to find out what has happened to a missing friend who isn’t Accursed, and the characters may have to reckon with a malevolent location to find out what’s going on.

Style

I did want to touch on an aspect of the rules that may not be relevant for many people and is the most subjective part of what I’m writing in this First Impression. The chapter that introduces you to the lineages has introductory fiction where characters speak directly to you, the reader, as if you are a character in their world. This isn’t particularly strange for this style of RPG, and it’s been the custom in one way or another since the 90s.

I’m worn out by it. Having the in-world narrator talk to me, as I try to put myself in the place of someone in this world, and immediately begin to berate and belittle, while also talking about how tough they are leaves me cold. When I’m trying to acclimate to a new setting, I don’t need the default view to be someone that is hopelessly naive, probably doomed, and definitely pathetic, and I don’t need the person introducing me to that world to be cool and tough and edgy and to put me in my place. It feels like the pervasive adversarial tone says more about how to roleplay in the setting than anything in the Story Guide section. It also feels like a misplaced remnant in this book.

In a lot of the World of Darkness games, you have a reason to be associated with others. You’re part of a vampiric tradition or a pack. You can all hate each other and still be forced to work with one another. In this book, you’re people that are striking out away from their families, trying not to fall into the same negative patterns embraced by a lot of the Accursed. You’re forming bonds and working with friends. Even the example scenario is about trying to find out what happened to one of your mortal, non-Accursed friends. The adversarial in-world introductions seem at odds with the narratives introduced in the setting and reinforced in the example scenario, and feel like a misplaced remnant of World of Darkness games.

Final Thoughts

 I like that this feels a little scaled back and built to mix supernatural creatures from the start. 

As someone with a lot of affection for Scion 2e, and who appreciates the changes made to the core system compared to Scion 1e, I enjoy seeing the Storypath System being used for a wider number of games. As someone who enjoys the contemporary fantasy/horror genre, a game setting with monsters, magic, and supernatural complications is something I’m on board for.

I like how some concepts have been taken into this game and remixed to do something different. I like that this feels a little scaled back and built to mix supernatural creatures from the start. Even the means of introducing lineages that can look like the most traditional versions of the things you know but allowing them to swap in abilities that drift them from their expected archetypes is appreciated.

I like a lot of the components that make up this system. I think the bonds are a great way of mechanically reinforcing the connections your players will want to have with each other and NPCs. I am a fan of the general concept of what the Damnations and the Torments are doing, and I think they are moving in the right direction. I think I’ll like the ebb and flow of trying to decide if I want to Bleed Curse Dice or use them for stunts or other effects, once I understand what the actual economy of those dice looks like.

I’m hoping for some additional calibration to take place. Individual rules are easy to grasp, but a few connecting points are a little blurry to me. I need to know if this is a game about high schoolers trying to figure out who they are as they realize the world is worse than they thought, or if this is a game that is meant to be about people of different ages navigating supernatural politics while potentially becoming more monstrous, because some of the tone introduced in the book leans one way, and some of it leans the other. I also really hope that some of those Torments get reworked in their wording to make them less aggressive and that we get a clearer idea if this game wants you to be someone regularly doing not just bad things, but very uncomfortable things, to build up game currencies.

There is so much in this ashcan that is intriguing, I had to move it up to the top of my pile of first impressions and reviews. There is so much potential for this game to be exactly the kind of game I want. I just need to see the edges defined a little bit more before I know for sure.

Update: It slipped my mind that some of the Ready-Made characters have references which clearly place reference college. For some reason I took the coffee shop antagonists as older than the Ready-Made characters. Sorry for any confusion.