GitHack

Announcing GitHack, the update to StormHack.

GitHack is a setting-agnostic OSR sword-and-sorcery game system. This is the introduction:

This is my OSR game. There are many like it, but this one is mine. It’s a remix of familiar OSR system objects and names from the Worlds Favourite Fantasy Game (such as Ability Scores, monster stat blocks, etc.).

Things that are like a “typical OSR game”:

  • Six ability scores (STR/CON/DEX/INT/WIS/CHA)
  • Ability checks involve roll-under with a d20
  • Saving throws are a kind of ability check
  • Monsters have hit dice, armour class, and damage (typical stat blocks can be used with little or no conversion)

Things which are a bit different compared to a typical OSR game:

  • freeform Backgrounds for the character’s life events
  • characters have “demons” (an actual dark side, supernatural patron, etc.)
  • demons are what provides the character’s magical powers, and grow as those powers are used, corrupting the character in turn
  • There are no levels, and the human side of the character doesn’t gain experience
  • On the other hand, all characters start off with a high level of competence and toughness

This should be the opposite of the “zero to hero” ethos in that the characters start strong and capable of taking risks, and all characters should be playable alongside each other whether they’re powerful sorcerers or the roguish hero who eschews magical aid. But otherwise it should play like any other fantasy RPG.

GitHack is hosted on GitHub.

Even though you can freely collaborate on some indie games the static pdf format isn’t optimal. This is a different approach to make it easier to collaborate by presenting it like a software project. The text is in markdown making it highly portable whilst supporting basic formatting and tables in a human readable way. You can then take the markdown text and convert it with pandoc or view it with your chosen markdown viewer.

Since this is a GitHub project you can clone or fork the repo and submit your own commits for the main branch. You can use Git from the command line and make edits with any text editor, see where your content differs from the main branch, and so on. However there are also graphical tools and plugins available. I recommend atom.io which integrates with GitHub nicely and has a lot of useful packages for writing and rendering markdown, and it’s cross-platform.

Of course, if you just want to read the content, it’s right there on GitHub and you can download it and even read it online. I’m adding chapters continuously. In addition there will be an Extras folder for alternative rules, settings (including StormHack) and more.

Any questions or comments, reach out here or on Twitter (@fictoplasm).

The Duelling Elves of Valon

In the recent The Princess Bride episode I talked at some length about RPG combat systems with reference to three systems: Paul Kidd’s Lace & Steel, Jacob Norwood’s The Riddle of Steel, and Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel. Since then I discovered something else in my RPG collection: The Duel, published by Alternative Armies in 1992.

Alternative Armies is still alive with a complete line around the “Empire of Valon”. The Duel has been renamed En Garde, clearly the same properly as The Duel since the cover with a female officer (a lancer?) in red disarming her opponent (a dragoon?) in blue is an identical scene.

(I have to say in both versions I don’t quite see how she got the disarm to work and I prefer the poses in the original)

This is of course not the same as GDW’s En Garde! from 1975 (see below). It’s a one-on-one wargame and I guess the intention was for players to paint their minis of their champions and then use the duelling rules to advance their duellist’s honour, which goes up for participating in duels, duelling to the death, decent strikes, etc.

The world is a faux Napoleonic empire before the “Elvish Civil War” just before “Flintloque” which I think is a more traditional wargame. In this particular game you align yourself with either the Empress or the Crown Prince, but all of the moving parts are dedicated to duelling, which works like this:

  • In each round you roll a load of d6 secretly and then play them out during the round as slashes, feints, ripostes and other moves
  • There’s an initiative roll for who goes first each round
  • Skills and weapons adjust the starting number of dice you get
  • Wounds are taken directly off the pool of dice, meaning that there’s a pretty acute death spiral here

I said in the podcast that one of the things Lace & Steel does is to frame the duel without taking the players away from the fiction too much; but at the same time the card game does require player skill as much as character ability. It’s the same here, I think. This book is about 48 pages long including ads, but it does make reference to a forthcoming RPG called Empire although that’s absent from the modern site.

Finally the book’s notable for crediting “the Welsh posse, the Frimley posse, hordes of convention goers” which, coupled with the use of Optima in layout makes this feel like an indie effort.

Anyway, here are some pics of grumpy elves in 19c uniforms (illustrator is Peter Knifton):

Given the name similarity I went back to my copy of En Garde!, although it’s early 17c historical rather than pseudo early 19c fantasy. This is a “semi historical game simulation” set in the 17th or 18th centuries, first published in 1975. It’s annoyingly patriarchal and heteronormative but that’s to be expected of the era of game design and the fiction it’s based on; the only problem with that is how some people might react to it today, and therefore overlook the actual game underneath which can be easily brought up to date with setting.

Structurally it has a surprising amount in common with The Duel with a focus on duelling etiquette, military rank and honour and even some of the furious terms used in the later publication. Where it deviates is the actual fence game; in this version, instead of playing moment to moment with combatants adapting, instead you write down a sequence of twelve steps in tempo, and then both reveal them. So just like Lace & Steel and The Duel and Burning Wheel it’s a mini game in itself that takes some learning to apply smoothly. But unlike the first two it expects you to plan many moves in advance. The simplicity of each individual beat means this is not too hard to keep track of (unlike Burning Wheel) and there are optional moves that happen as the sequence is executed, which means characters will respond. So I’m torn on whether this is a good, interesting mini game that parodies a certain kind of fencing, or a hot mess.

Anyway, if you haven’t listened to the episode yet this is something else to bear in mind. Thoughts and comments always welcome.

91: The Princess Bride

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91: The Princess Bride
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The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Intro 00:06 // Synopsis 01:32 // Themes 09:59 (Ruritania, Inigo Montoya) // RPG combat systems 28:50 (Lace & Steel, The Riddle of Steel, Burning Wheel, Three Rivers) // Media 41:50 (Le Bossu, The Duellists, Hawk the Slayer)

Links

Music Credits

Music is by Chris Zabriskie: chriszabriskie.com // bandcamp // free music archive

Samples: “Is that you or are you you?” from Reappear // “Another version of you” from Thoughtless

Podcast listening March 16

I guess I should turn this into a weekly thing with a more defined release cycle. Anyway, here are 5 podcasts I consumed and enjoyed in recent days:

Plundergrounds 163 and 164

This is Ray Otus’ podcast. I like the schtick of taking listener questions and then randomly addressing them with a d20 roll. Both interesting as off-the-cuff takes on the various questions. I liked the concept of looking at fantasy logic. Hope the series continues.

Plundergrounds

It’s Good Except It Sucks ep 1: Iron Man

I really like Tim Worthington’s Looks Unfamiliar. This is apparently based on his live tweets of watching the MCU back to back, something which we’ve also started doing. I’ll be listening to these in sequence as we watch. Lots of references to Iron Man comic plotlines as well.

Ep 1: Iron Man

301 Permanently Moved eps 2107-2109

The weekly “personal podcast” of the The Jaymo. I listened to 3 episodes back to back and I really liked the Solarpunk, Stacktivism and Cold Texas episode 2107. The follow up 2108 was also relevant to recent listening however, comparing the amount of time it takes to consume the whole MCU suite of films vs. how much time is spent playing Call of Duty by consumers.

Solarpunk, Stacktivism and Cold Texas

+1 FWD: Wolfspell

Very nice to listen to another podcast mentioning Wolfspell. TBH I’m completely out of the loop with indie releases and I hadn’t even thought of this game since I heard about it in another podcast (may have been Another Question) interviewing Vincent Baker.

Wolfspell on +1FWD

Design Doc: Everything Old is New Again

I admit to only half listening to this podcast as I was frantically tidying the living room at the time in anticipation of two rampaging 4 year olds. But the bits I took away included how the authors are revisiting their original game and how new games sometime overshadow past achievements and how to celebrate and keep the momentum and interest in your previously published games.

Everything Old is New Again

Podcast Listening: March 10th 2021

Thanks to a marathon desoldering session I’ve churned through another five really good podcast episodes.

The Midnight Library: S3 e8 “Very Superstitious”

Subtitled “factual tales from a fictional location” this is my first listen to this podcast but I really enjoyed the episode which was about luck and superstition, anecdotes narrated by Miranda Merrick, the show’s Literary Oracle. Top stuff.

Very Superstitious

The Thocc: Episode 10 with NathanAlphaMan

After the Xmas episode I listened to the following episode featuring NathanAlphaMan. This features a discussion that will be familiar to the RPG crowd, namely what is a designer? That discussion includes nuance around the community, how creatives see themselves, and the actual language. Something new I learned is that other languages have a lot more variety in the different terms for what we would call a “designer” in English.

Episode 10: NathanAlphaMan

Roleplay Rescue: The Elusive Shift

Part of the new wave of podcasts I’m seeing on Anchor which encourage and incorporate audio feedback from listeners, which is a great new thing. This one covers Jon Peterson’s The Elusive Shift and nicely distils down some key lessons, in particular the fact that RPG theory from the 90s is predated by Alarums and Excursions zine content from the 80s.

The Elusive Shift

Not Alone: the Windigo

Haven’t listened to this podcast for ages. There’s a long preamble where the hosts talk about life stuff but then it gets to the legends about the Windigo and the evidence from historical records. What makes it especially good is the scientific and critical thinking, the framing of legends in cultural context, and the research and citations. Warning: it’s a long podcast and the content includes cannibalism, which may upset some people. If that bothers you I recommend some of the other episodes including the Toynbee Tiles (which I pointed to in this earlier post).

“Think about bringing people to your dinner table, not on your dinner table.”

Not Alone: Windigo

Nocturne: Welcome to the Night

I found this last podcast browsing at random so I listened to the introductory episode (from 2014). From first listen it seems to be about people’s relationships with the night. The background soundscape is brilliant, and I’ll definitely be listening more. The introduction is only 15 mins long and worth a listen. Also the accompanying art is gorgeous (see the site here).

Welcome to the Night

Mystery vs Investigation

In the latest episode I talked about the difference between an investigation and a mystery game.

One: Investigation vs Mystery games

By “mystery game” I think of a very specific kind of minimal system game we played in the 90s (for example Over the Edge).

The basic argument (which I’m not sure I conveyed so well in the episode):

  1. an investigation is concerned with a group effort to uncover some truth that applies to everyone. It’s much more mission focused (which makes it better suited to one-shots).
  2. A mystery on the other hand is about a situation that a group of people find themselves in, and the single, unifying truth is secondary to (or at least not more important than) the individual personal goals.

This is totally artificial and real-world games exist somewhere on that spectrum. But there are a few general distinctions. First, the focus on getting to a single Truth in investigation game is underscored by the mechanics of investigation games, which often punish the investigators (through SAN or insight mechanics) for getting closer to the Truth. Mystery games don’t punish in this way, despite being just as weird and horrific.

Second, the investigation, being focused on getting to a fundamental truth, is often active in how it engages with PCs (e.g. it prompts their action and attention with narrative beats). Compare to the ambient weirdness of the mystery which is more passive, in that it comes to the front if the PCs want to engage with it.

So investigation games are really good for pacing whereas mystery games can be really unreliable for pacing and one-shots and hit their stride only after a number of sessions. Also (something I didn’t consider in the episode) they can be more at the mercy of the dynamic in the play group (great if you’re all on the same page; possibly disastrous if you’re not).

But… why?

Two: Sorcerer

I looked into Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer, where he discusses four ways to organise play (in Chapter 4, under Organising a Game).

  1. the “dungeon” way, where a bunch of characters come together to overcome evil, find treasure, etc.
    • the characters are all there for their own reasons
    • after the initial success, for some reason they stay together
  2. the “squad” way, where a bunch of characters are bound together by an organisation (like the FBI) and do the kinds of
    • Edwards says this format is boring, and I sort of see why if your players choose to limit the PCs’ curiosity and proactiveness to whatever the organisation does and otherwise says “not my circus, not my monkeys”
    • OTOH I would be inclined to treat this as a sandbox, and I’ve played plenty of games (like Department V, the Men in Brown corduroy) where diversity wasn’t a problem. I think this is only an issue if you view the game as exclusively a mission and nothing else
  3. the “dumb” way
    • a game where the characters have nothing in common, no shared backstory and their interactions with the plot and with each other are coincidental; for this reason they fall apart
    • Edwards called it dumb back in the original Sorcerer, but in the annotations he’s changed his position and he acknowledges that many games that look like this are actually way more subtle and not as unfocused as they seem. In fact he says that Sorcerer actually works fine like this
    • this is my template for the mystery game. Follow the PCs around and go where they take you. This is how we played OtE, and Mage and other WoD games
    • it’s also a standard of session zero PbtA (the Forge-made-good poster child) to follow the PCs around.
  4. the “hard” way
    • this is a way of linking the characters together with no shared background
    • the GM subtly includes everyone in the overarching plot and draws them together through manipulation of individual plots and backstories
    • Edwards’ annotations make it clear that what was written isn’t what he really meant, which was that backstory is all well and good but expecting everyone to come together isn’t.

I recommend reading Sorcerer if you can get a copy. Everything is worthy of criticism but this section on why players play and how they’re organised is not something you see in many RPGs at all… in fact I’d go so far as to say it’s slightly risky for an author to write down because it goes beyond options and into the realm of opinion. But it’s much more concise than the essays I used to wade through in the early Vampire supplements (well meant as they were).

Anyway… I put these four ways into a diagram

  • On the East-West axis you have Mode, which is either Pack or Solitary1
    • Pack means everyone focused on the same goal; usually these are tackled sequentially as missions. This is typical of Dungeon and Squad games.
    • Solitary means parallel individual/personal arcs, that may or may not be tied into the Threat. The Dumb and Hard games are focused on individuals rather than the pack.
  • For North-South you have Threat which runs from Explicit to Absent
    • Explicit = there is a problem, an enemy, something to expose or investigate
    • Absent = there is no obvious over-arching problem (although there may be session-to-session trials)
    • This variable passes through “implied” which sits between no Threat and a known Threat.

So in this context, I’d say the ur-Investigation game is North-West; it’s about Pack organisation and explicit Threat. The Mystery game is South-East, concerned with individual arcs with no obvious Threat. The North-East and South-West quadrants are variations on those two poles (the Squad is more about an organisation investigating a thing, and the Hard Way is about the GM doing all the hard work in bringing disparate characters together to a single narrative).

All of these modes are fine, preference, and games will probably drift around the diagram during play over sessions (like alignment). This is not really how Ron Edwards writes in Sorcerer; he’s implying some kind of exclusive choice. But mostly the point I’m making is that the structure in the OA is mystery rather than investigation, and it’s a play style I have a lot of love for.


  1. I took these terms from Jaron Lanier’s book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now 

88: the OA

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88: the OA
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The OA: crossing dimensions and living alternate versions of your life, Investigation vs. Mystery, exotic matter and general relativity via intepretive dance

Timestamps

Intro 00:07 // Synopsis 02:15 // Themes 10:52 // mystery vs investigation, Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer, alternate timelines, pressure of dimensional travel, small changes in the remixed world, how to cross dimensions through interpretive dance with robots, Einstein-Rosen Bridges and exotic matter // Media 27:48 // Flatliners, Dark, Odyssey 5, Zenith, The Everness Series, The Longest Journey, The Nomad Soul

Music credits

Music is by Chris Zabriskie: chriszabriskie.com // bandcamp // free music archive

Samples: “Is that you or are you you?” from Reappear // “Take off and shoot a zero” from Stunt Island // “But enough about me, Bill Paxton” and “I don’t see the branches, I see the leaves” from Direct to Video // “Another version of you” from Thoughtless

Art credit

Featured image is fan art created by user @dowdpro (instagram)

86: StormHack!

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86: StormHack!
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In this short episode I’ll pitch the game StormHack!, available for download.

Links

fictoplasm.itch.io

Other games:

Whitehack
The Black Hack
Beyond the Wall

Music Credits

Music is by Chris Zabriskie: chriszabriskie.com // bandcamp // free music archive

Samples: “Is that you or are you you?” from Reappear // “Another version of you” from Thoughtless

What I really think about D&D (and Dishonoured 2)

When Dirk the Dice asked me for my First, Last and Everything on episode 43 of the Grognard Files I had no idea it was going to be about D&D. D&D isn’t my First, Last, or Everything but I nonetheless expressed opinions about it, one of which is

I don’t think any game treats starting characters with as much contempt as D&D

by which I mean it normalises low level characters being weak and dying frequently (so normalised that Dungeon Crawl Classics parodies this with the Funnel).

The advocates of “zero to hero” tend to fall into two camps:

  1. Those who think that characters should always be weak, and dungeoneering should be frightening and fraught with danger
  2. Those who think high levels should be earned, not granted.

OSR style play is often portrayed as the first example (although that’s an argument in itself). I’m fine with this in principle, I just wonder if you are going to play a game with such fragile characters, why even bother including levels? (I think James Raggi planned to revise the LotFP system to exclude levels in both PCs and spells, which is a fine idea; obviously it hasn’t emerged yet).

This ethos was adopted in Sage Latorra’s 1 HP game jam and you can listen about that on the Another Question podcast.

As for the second… this is more of an impression I get from reading Dragon magazine in the 80s. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it from a real person (outside hyperbolic flame wars on the worst RPG forums)1.

Hyperbole or not, this position still makes the argument that levels are there to be suffered, not enjoyed. No-one actually likes levels. Levelling up, sure; but no-one likes to be reminded in such an artificial way that your PC is weak, that you’re part of a hierarchy whose upper eschelons you’re unlikely to see. We play RPGs to get away from that.

And as I said in the podcast the problem with levels is they make characters who are supposed to be risk-takers and heroes into conservative bean-counters, focusing on the future and not on the now2. More to the point, WotC knows the low level lethality is at odds with the aspirational nature of videogame-like mainstream D&D. This is why generation after generation of this game has made lower levels more survivable.

OK, what does this have to do with Dishonoured, you may ask?

So… the franchise has DNA in the original Thief and sequel3, probably my all-time favourite games. The first Dishonoured game didn’t have a no-powers option, but Dishonoured 2 has the option to refuse the mark of the Outsider entirely and play without powers. This is far and away the most satisfying way I’ve found of playing the game; it harks back to those original Thief games with the same kind of sandboxed levels and exploration in three dimensions rather than just teleporting around the city hunting the objective markers.

To make this work the designers had to make the maps almost completely accessible to a character with no powers. Playing this way feels a lot like you’re back playing Garrett mantling his way around the City’s rooftops. It also means you don’t need powers to complete the game (OK, there is still a bit of levelling up as you upgrade equipment with coin, but levelling powers with runes is gone). Emily is no less competent for her lack of supernatural ability; in fact you might argue that since she’s rejected the help of the Outsider and chosen to resolve things her own way, she has more agency and is more interesting.

In this situation powers are an aesthetic choice. They offer new ways to complete the game (including some spectacular ways to kill people) but they don’t define the character in the way that D&D’s class/levelling does (in particular 3e4).

Although to be clear I’m not against exotic powers — and if you want to make your PC’s powers the one special thing that defines them, go for it. But I think Dishonoured 2 has a useful lesson: build your character independent of the supernatural and they will be more interesting. This has sort of been my credo for StormHack; character is independent of demon. Character’s don’t level up, demons do. Of course that game does have levels after a fashion; but ascending levels isn’t a boon, it’s a trade off.

Of course any sensible play group will treat the characters equally, and levels and powers will be irrelevant to spotlight time. But that implied hierarchy is there, deep down in the lizard brain. Better to engineer out those biases entirely. Take the example of my “everything” game from the grogpod. Everway has no levelling up, no experience mechanism. You are the characters you start as. What you get instead are boons which come directly from the adventure and are therefore truly experiential (as opposed to artificial experience tiers).

Incidentally that’s why 1st edition Vampire was such a revelation. People point to the personal horror and the edgy gothic-ness but the thing that struck me the most was the complete de-emphasis of anything resembling levels and classes. Probably not remarkable to most people given how much choice we have today with better, lighter game designs, but it was pretty cool at the time, before they ruined it with the second edition.


  1. martial arts on the other hand… but that’s another story 

  2. I’m not knocking people who want to plan a trajectory for their PC and then see it through over months or years. I’ve enjoyed a lot of Diablo II myself 

  3. pre Deadly Shadows. And don’t even start me on the 2014 reboot 

  4. to be fair, I played 3e once, and I enjoyed it for what it was. Well, I say enjoyed it, I tolerated it. Well, I say I tolerated it, I stayed awake between rounds by grasping my lower lip and pulling it over the top of my head. Then I smeared my body with chilli jam and bovril before skiing through a cactus forest into a pit of starved honey badgers. Whilst listening to the unabridged audiobook of Fifty Shades of Grey read by Nigel Farage. That said, the gelatinous cube encounter was quite emotional.