You can find part 1 here.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

The reason why these kinds of games are so often (usually in bad faith and/or dismissive insult) compared with wargames, boardgames or video games is that they lack solid roleplaying engines that reproduce the game. You run encounter after encounter and keep getting into encounter after encounter because you want to get into another encounter. No matter the narrative dressing, the essential buy-in is that you want — any non-combat options is to reframe externality to the fight; encounters will happen, just different and with different setup and stakes. You’re nudging the game in a certain narrative direction, not avoiding playing it.

There are really no engines in Draw Steel recognizable as a cooperative collaborative storytelling game engine — as there is not one in the pop games this descends from. That is not to say these games lack engines. They do tend to have very refined engines, just not one that you may not recognize as a roleplaying ones. They are primarily concerned about scarcity, resource-conservation.

This tends to be the case because, well, it is a perfect fit for a focus in “tactics”. Getting fun and feeling successful in a tactical sense come from efficiently pursuing the goals set by strategy. If your game is focused on tactics and maneuvering around scarcity is not your engine, you’re creative indeed.

Draw Steel is conservative on this. HP, HP Recovery, Recovery Recovery. You want to get as much done for least HP, least HP Recovery and taking the least Recovery Recovery. Then, each class has its own Resource, which adds nuance with their own mini-game. This engine hooks nicely with the play-by-play of encounters, which is throwing powers against each other, and those powers are set up and the outcome of Class Resource use.

Renown, Wealth, and other drivers for adventuring are quite secondary and shallow, given only a brief acknowledgment but not integrated on the engine.

You go to the next encounter because you want to play through the next encounter. Anything else is a distraction.

I wrote a whole article on this, but this is truly a game you play for the sheer joy of the danger of combat, you have the ultimate incentive: having a good time. That is your engine forward, the gas in it, and brother, if you like tactical games, you are going to have it.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Listen.

You will not get this huge thing ready for the table in one hour. However, the good thing about Draw Steel is that its lead designer made a career telling people how to prepare games. So the best thing you can do is get Youtube fired up.

If you have time before, I suggest making pre-made characters for the table, preparing 3-4 encounters and fire the grid up.

On precise rules. Focus on the powers and list them to players, and understanding how powers work. Treat everything like a power if you remember nothing else: there are 3 (4) outcomes. Less than 11, progress at a minimum but progress, nonetheless. 12-16 . 17+ is maximum success. 20 is for there as legacy support for meme outcomes. When in doubt, fall back to that.

Also learn how Malice works for Monsters. Come on, the best part of this game is encounter design and playing from the Game Master size, so don’t deny yourself that.

My friend, this is a big,meaty game. Build your first dungeon ahead of time and remember this is a game where movement is a big thing, both yours and the enemies. When you are building dungeons and other encounters, you need to think about it like a boomer-shooter and focus on strong kinetic possibilities.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Before I go deep into the many stress points of this game, I have to commend it on its sturdiness. Draw Steel knows people will play the game wrong no matter what and has made sure that no matter what, they still get a satisfying tactical and cinematic experience. That by itself makes it excel at this parameter of critique.

That said, while you would struggle to really derail this game, you cannot spend any amount of time with this game without stepping on its exposed nails.

The game has many issues, and almost all of them stem from one or two points:

• Despite being aware that they cannot “fix” Dungeons and Dragons and so they must build a game from scratch, they keep swerving into fixing Dungeons and Dragons, integrating sacred cows and its legacy elements.

• The naked focus on marketing previously discussed on part 1, screaming about Market Optimization, Focus Testing; as such, every single tendency of designfluencers and “design it for the post” trend manages to crawl in any moment Draw Steel falters in what it is about.

Every single one of the things I will discuss as stress points can be traced to one of those, if not both. I say it now so I don’t have to repeat myself every step of the way.

The one that keeps reappearing over and over is when Draw Steel falters in what it is about. I often harp on an on about what failure and success means, and how most game do not think about their desired gamescapes and how every mechanic should produce outcomes that are their game desired gamescapes — and thus, abandoning “success” and “failure” altogether as design concerns. Draw Steel understands that, everything you do advances the game and produces the desired gamestate; where Draw Steel is Draw Steel, where it excels, it sticks to this principle and the game is satisfying. You do something, there are three outcomes (plus one), all of them produce Draw Steel as intended. When it loses sight of itself, it wanders off and uses some generic inputs that produce generic noise. The biggest case of this has to be Skills. So how come when it comes to fights and powers, there are three possible outcomes and all produce the desired gamestate, why do skills have 12 possible outcomes and almost half of them get in the way of Draw Steel doing what the rest of Draw Steel is doing/wants to do? Why can you keep failing and twiddling your thumbs with none of the Tactics, Cinematics or Heroics of the game? This contrast really comes out as unnatural with Maneuvers, aka: using Skills in Combat. They have to be massaged into powers (because everything you do in this game when you are actually playing Draw Steel is mechanized as a power), but somehow they still have to be Skills, so… half of the time they are powers that do nothing. Making pretty apparently that if one was to think about all those non-power Skill mechanics as powers, they would be bad powers. Which then we see on the entire mechanics for Negotiations: where half the outcome of Negotiations does not advance them, and thus making Negotiations — which otherwise would have the potential to be as tactically, heroic, or cinematic as encounters — feel as deeply satisfying as any other pop fantasy game non-combat sequence. “Oh shit, if I try to take part in this Negotiation scene I will make things worse half the time? Oh, I will help the people good at this then. Wait, for some reason helping in a Skill is very likely to make the outcome worse?” These are the kinds of things that players that stumble into playing this different game coming from Draw Steel realize and verbalize with disappointment.

This mess of Skills/Maneuvers/Negotiations aligns with a common issue across the rules: the game is not as elegant in its mechanics as it could be. And most of the time, when I mention that in my critique, it is because of some limitation or constraint that is obvious to anyone delving into the process of design. You can see where the engine struggles, where things don’t connect so well, how design processes went and solutions were integrated; how many small fixes accumulated but the final step of redesigning/rewriting never happened — imagine breaking it after all that trouble just to make it more elegant. The most common example is when a designer singles a part of the engine as a “resolution mechanic”, and as a game grows in complexity, more parts of the game have to hook up to the inputs of a “resolution mechanic”; as a result, soon a “resolution mechanic” has more and more intermediate/pre-processing steps. Now, where this grows into a lack of design elegance is when the complexity of inputs does not match the resolution of outputs; so you keep doing more and more steps, which have less impact on the outcomes, making each step (and every part of the engine hooking to that step) less important. This is a problem that it would be inevitable for Draw Steel and failing to do so would, again, be the expected way for the game to become less elegant — after all, everything feeds into a power and a power only has 3(4) possible outputs and they all drive the same direction. Except it is not: Draw Steel knows this is something that needs to be made a feature and not a problem, so it attenuates how many inputs can actually interact with the micro-engines of Draw Steel.

So the inelegance is not coming from inside the organic game design process? Where it is coming from. I will now list many stress points that would be elegant if Draw Steel stuck to its ongoing design rather than optimal marketing/how pop fantasy games are supposed to be:

• Due to one of those attenuations, the modifiers to a use of a power can never, after math, go more than -4/+4 mallus or bonus. With attributes, this means after even more math, the range will be -9 to +9. This is part of careful design, however, it is a very interesting range, because it means it: a) very similar to rolling 3d10s rather than 2d10s b) it is just enough to drop a tier 3 outcome to tier 1 and raise a tier 1 to tier 3. It is a good fix to the problem of game math, however these numbers highlight how foreign the problem is to Draw Steel — it is an excellent solution and gating function to a problem they introduce for no benefit for the game in terms of power mechanics or somewhere else1. The perfect solution shows design chops and awareness, which then, when you are slowing down playing your game doing pointless math, you start to wonder why. Why am I even doing this math? And even more, why am I even rolling dice in this situation. Since every outcome is tier 1-3, if one is building on Draw Steel’s game design, the solution internally would not be to add and subtracting numbers: it would be, for extreme situations, to bypass rolling altogether — you are trying to do something you are not good at in awful circumstances this can only be tier 1 or everything is in your favor and you excel at this so it is automatic tier 3. Any more common in between could be solved with a third dice, which the edges and banes nudging how the results are read. The pointless math steps are coming from outside the house.

• You would not think so based on my harsh words in part 1, but Draw Steel has the best implementation of ancestry in any Dungeons and Dragons heartbreaker. The problem with that praise is that rather than being the awesome ancestry rules of Draw Steel, they are the best implementation of a pop game heartbreak. All the pieces are there: a point-buy system to fully customize the embodied ancestry of your character, the culture, and career choices to complement those, unique abilities that change interaction with the world and game. But because it has to be bundled in a certain way, things have to be divided into packages that are “elf”, “orc” or “dwarf”. All those good ingredients come up as traditional adventuconquistador Hitler particles sludge. All you needed to was open the point build creation options for every character, have the unique ability be tied to a macro-region/culture, and then have example builds of the majority population of people in a given location, it would be much more in tune with the rest of Draw Steel.

• Part of why this was not done was because the setting of Draw Steel is intentionally designed to be as generic, bland, and Mass Market Appeal as possible. It refuses to commit to anything or be about anything, because doing so would close the door to potential clients. It is clearly a successful product, but suffers as a game and cultural production because of that.

• And of course, discussing marketing, we should round up to the point I mentioned about the borderline false-advertisement of playing with expectations in part 1. You have a game named Draw Steel; you keep dropping words in all copy like medieval, high fantasy, heroic, tactical, cinematic, etc. And weapons and armors and their interplay really don’t matter compared with the rest of the game. Because of all these entanglements and expectations, the opportunity was missed to redesign the role of equipment in heroic tactical fantasy. For example, attributes exist because attributes have to exist in these games, I guess, and so there has to be pointless math. And affect powers since they exist. But if they are here, why not move those to weapons? Especially when weapons as they are already doing that? Why are the attributes not in their weapons? Why does each class not have their main attributes in a primary weapon and their array of choice in a secondary weapon? Why not make signature weapons a thing in this game, expanding the rather pointless role of Kits?

If the previous stress points are of a category of “why you have everything going so well you have to add these things”, there are a few minor ones that are more of missed opportunities.

The Project rules are fantastic, with all the pieces there for great gameplay. I love when downtime mechanics are well integrated, and it is nice to see how well they attune with the 24h rest of the Draw Steel gameplay loop. Still, they are kinda lumped together with Treasure but not really well formalized and integrated. Furthermore, the systems to make weapons and armor more iconic are already there. All the parts are there, so this could just be presented as having collective party projects (creating a party identity) and individual projects (where you improve your weapons, armor, or character).

Renown and Wealth are given a token page in the rules, but it is so underwhelming it makes one wonder why even is presented in this way. Almost as lackluster are Perks.

The thing with Renown and Wealth comes with an issue with Draw Steel: it is a game about heroes playing coy not to alienate any market share. So heroes and heroism are not about anything. So they don’t end up feeling like much of characters. Sure, this is my time raider agent urban conduit with a swashbuckling kit and a dragon knight name. But that is what it is. It is not a person. And it is a hero in much the same way a Marvel superhero is: because Disney brands them so.

A minor but still remarkable omission is a lever about the “opportunity cost” of resting. When the engine of a tactical game is resource scarcity, it would be fitting to have some kind of “looming threat” to make clear what is at stake and the urgency. We don’t do a Recovery Recovery after every fight because X. Since this is a feature of the engine, and Monsters are such looming figures, it is quite an omission that the advancement of villainous plots is not formalized as correlating with how much time Heroes take in stopping them. You could even use the same Project system for villains to advance their own projects.

In addition to all the above, I am going to call out such a bizarre miss. You should absolutely wrongly steal and use the 4th edition skill challenges for this game, they would have been a natural fit and it feels weird not to have them.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Okay so, what lessons can we take from here?

There is, of course, the old lesson about confidence of design. If you are not confident in a design choice, don’t include in; commit to it and stick to design principles you establish for yourself and your design work. Draw Steel is an excellent game when it knows what it is about, sticks to its guns and commits to certain design choices. Sure, you may not like the focus on powers for combat, but the game is better when it does it.

Another lesson is that trying to appeal to everyone is a quick way to appeal to nobody. Draw Steel does not gain any fans to it with its generic non-comital fantasy slurry — you coming into it for other reasons. Chasing after Product Optimization, Focus Testing and Market Penetration takes a cost. You can look at what Draw Steel got for paying that price and think, well, that’s a price I will gladly pay. However, James Introcaso and Matt Colville are marketing adepts and the biggest designfluencers not working in the space of traditional pop games — and only now migrated from Hasbro’s tit. You’re not Colville or Introcaso. The cost will be the same for your game and will get you not as much. You will need to embrace the freak, the niche, and go deeper. Find your people.

This is also good instruction in how “fluff”, setting and other “soft” elements are actually part of a system, mechanics and should be taken as serious as any other design.

As a final note, I must mention Draw Steel’s licensing. Most of those efforts are just to make new enclosures rather than Hasbro’s, but this one seems determined in one thing and one thing only: to protect MCDM interests. It seems to grant nothing to creators while imposing all sorts of limitations. It is not clear to me what environment for third-parties it creates. As such, I cannot end up with a recommendation for designers, podcasters, life players, streamers to produce art related to Draw Steel — despite how much potential the game has for that.

We live in a post-OGL world. That seems like such an unusual thing to say, it seemed that the OGL would always exist and loom large in this hobby, but truthfully, you can see its bloody end all over this world. Draw Steel is the first of the next generation of true Fantasy Heartbreakers, inheritor to a legacy of jeweled thrones to tread and earths to wander.

But what for you to steal? Enough of talk of passion, of familiarity, fools have plenty of each. I have a simple question? Why reinvent the wheel? We live in an art form that hasn’t even seen what the top speed of the wheel is yet, and you have people afraid to use it. Draw Steel saw a wheel and tried to improve it, maybe you could do the same?

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Draw Steel is a game by Matthew Colville and James Introcaso. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by MCDM Productions. Draw Steel was supported by a crowdfunding effort.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

How do you think about the material conditions of a Dungeons and Dragons heartbreaker?

Even the most well-financed ones are still falling quite short of the resources at the disposal of Hasbro, one of the biggest toy companies in the world.

I guess for this one we will stick to the historical context in order to do the material analysis. In January 2023, Hasbro dropped the ball with threatening to revoke the OGL. Not only did that undermined the enclosure of the artform they had cultivated for decades, it caused many a third-party creator to start looking for an exit strategy. Of course, eventually Hasbro realized nobody was buying Dungeons and Dragons toys because of Chris Cocks’ beautiful eyes and stock portfolio and the entire brand relied on things that were not controlled by Hasbro — from Netflix and Amazon to the smallest LLM-slop publisher of third party materials in the DMs Guild, with classic detours into war-criminal Ghibli 5e supplements. It walked back, but not before a dozen “replacements” for 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons were announced.

Most of those projects are not even worth remembering. Of all of them, Draw Steel is the only one that does not feel pointless. Why the competition was doomed to irrelevancy was quite simple: not only were most “competitors” happy to return to Hasbro’s enclosure, all but one misunderstood what they were competing with. They thought they needed to fulfill the hole of a lackluster generic fantasy game using a bad randomizer; however, they needed to offer a lifestyle as an alternative to the Dungeons and Dragons lifestyle products. The most successful one of those knows that and offers itself as a lifestyle product; you have and play this game as part of your Critical Role consumer lifestyle.

However, as a game and a piece of art, it is as pointless as the others, abandoned before it was even born by parents not really into it.

Then, why is Draw Steel the one that stands out? Well, first, it is the one that is an actual game on its own and that was not just a preemptive reaction to being kicked out of the Garden of the Coast. Sure, it is clear the entire episode was the thing that made the game actually happen, but there was a lot of design work already in motion —- decades of it. Second, is having the design chops behind it — in a decade of “homebrewing” and “third party” content of statblocks of Pack Tactics and Bite, MCDM Productions stood out in actually reworking and elevating Hasbro’s slop rather than sticking to it like a ravenous lamprey. Couple that with the understanding that there was no “fixing” that mess of a game and you would need to reexamine every assumption and build a game from scratch, and we break past cynicism or opportunism and into genuine artistic contributions. Finally, MCDM Productions may have dependent on Hasbro, but most of its products and their success was born as much of frustration as fandom with their pop fantasy game; having gone through the trouble of making a game from scratch, they would have the drive to go their own way and an audience that would follow.

Draw Steel is fascinating to me personally. MCDM first came to my attention when someone brought up its rules for strongholds as a counterpoint to playing something more focused on the elements of running a large-scale organization. They were cemented in my mind at that point as “Dragon Game Extraneous Rules”. They remained comfortably in that spot until Draw Steel.

Draw Steel exists in a world where more and more we are seeing people accept the rightful place of Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, as an amazing tactical combat engine. Pathfinder 2e is what led me to Draw Steel, when a different person brought up its rollicking movement functions in comparison to less kinetic tactical affairs. So I checked it out.

The MCDM guys left me impressed, because they could have been just as happy continuing to release Dragon Game Extraneous Rules, and instead they took a massive swing here.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Well, it is still a pop fantasy game. Inquiring the violence of the adventuconquistador genre, Draw Steel does not. Or much else, really. Draw Steel priority is to be an entertainment product. It is about big cinematic fights and expects you to consider that by itself as fun and offering all fulfillment that you need from a game through that.

It is also not about dungeon-crawling. It is all about heroic fantasy flights, made interesting by rewarding tactics and cinematic action. Sometimes it happens in a dungeon. For Draw Steel, this means two things: moving miniatures across a grid and a focus in the use of powers.

This is important to mention in terms of expectations, because the marketing and presentation of the game create very strong expectations. The game is named Draw Steel, all over the place are words like Medieval Europe Analogue, heroic fantasy, a focus on tactical combat and cinematic classes. I’m pretty sure the clash of weapons and breaching of armor featured intensely in your mind’s eye upon reading those words. However, that is not how Draw Steel imagines heroism, cinematic action or tactics. Weapons and armor? No. What matters are the powers your knight has. You will have an easier — and more fun — time meeting the game where it is if you think of the characters of Draw Steel as fantasy superheroes than anything else.

Modern pop fantasy games and their heartbreakers have been struggling with the racism incorporated within and how to move on from that. The efforts are ultimately misguided and/or tokenistic: getting a stamp from a consultant they paid for to say it is racism-free and cynically pretending to change based on that — because the power relationship is not of peers and collaborators but of employer and employee. Of course they fail, because to actually do something about that would require examining the violence of the adventuconquistador and taking a stance of universal personhood that is incompatible with Hasbro’s game — it is like trying to make a Marxist Monopoly game while not changing anything of Monopoly other than calling propriety and rent other stuff1. So I did not expect Draw Steel to do better than most. However, it is surprising how it both had the tools within to be much better than the competition and how it ended up kinda accidentally being pretty bad at it.

So, the tendency among these games has been to move away from “evil races”, or at least to avoid the term and not apply those to peoples connected to “player character options” within two degrees of separation. While there has been a lot of experimentation with “racial mechanics” around the problems with pulling out the calipers was the calipers not being small and precise enough so you can stat your character “racial destiny”, the dust has settled into just replacing “race” with “ancestry” and not really examine where the racism keeps coming up from. Or maybe they do “examine” it, and we get the aforementioned tiny calipers so you can properly stat the perfidious elf blood from your dwarf’s grandmother or replacing American-style racism “all elves are good dancers and archers” with the European-style racism “those from Elfwood are all good dancers and archers”. Draw Steel does the bare minimum token effort of replacing race with ancestry, but creating the mechanical foundations to move past ancestry altogether, with a point-buy system of embodied lineage, cultural backgrounds and lived experience. Then, after doing the hard work, it wraps it up in the same old wrapping, resulting in the outcome being good old “build-your-own racial stereotype” bags. In such bundling and selling, it is hard not to see the human ancestry ability as anything other than “Sense Other”, giving humans an inherent Hitler-radar for anything Foreign.

The reason it ends up stumbling backward after taking a leap forward will be discussed in point 4 and the genius that could have truly improved things will be covered in the next part.

Excellent craftsmanship bundled up with weird packaging can summarize a lot about Draw Steel.

I am very excited to see that Draw Steel has its own bespoke efforts to create specific, localized safety tools that actually foster a culture of safety and comfort. Unfortunately, they are not in the book proper and must be obtained online.

Draw Steel is unabashedly a pop-fantasy game. You are going to be playing a larger-than-life, mighty thewed, bubble-gum-chewing, ass-kicking hero, and you are going to use cool powers and extra movement to do it. The game is focused on this, and therefore has some notable failures in other related areas, which my cowriter summarized beautifully.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Draw Steel is about Heroes fighting Monsters. Big damn figures going against truly terrifying opponents that nobody else could face, happening through a tactically focused combat systems.

Draw Steel is about Heroes on big damn adventures stealing victory from the jaws of defeat by confronting dangerous enemies.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Draw Steel definitely is a game about combat. It is an excellent game for grid-based tactics about throwing powers against each other. It performs quite admirably when compared with games like 13th Age, Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition, or Lancer. If you like the powers of those the most, Draw Steel will quickly win you over and maybe become your game of choice.

What is quite unclear is whether Draw Steel is about anything else. It seems it is about larger-than-life heroes, but seems pretty coy about exploring what it means to be such a looming figure or a hero. Sure, their powers may be impressive, cinematic and worthy of a demigod, but the player characters tend to be quite diminutive figures in terms of narrative presence and personalities. There is not much space for exploring what it means to be a hero, why they keep adventuring, why they do what they do, and what they want to achieve as actors in a story. They are Heroes because they fight Monsters; same way a Superhero is someone who fights Supervillains. It is Monsters and NPCs that have wants, motivations, drives, actions, and Draw Steel offers almost 400 pages of much more interesting characters. Heroes in Draw Steel seem to be defined entirely in opposition to those actual narrative actors.

Part of the issue comes from the clash between the carefully designed rules, mechanics, and stat blocks clashing with how much a fuzzy bland mess the universe of the game. This is no accident, but a well-planned choice.

No, it does not give character. It actually strips of it. It adds every ingredient, not caring how well they work together. It is all maximizing Market Penetration, to exclude nobody from its Target Audience, an action screaming excessive Focus Testing. Where one half of the game is so confident and sure about what it does, what it is about and puts every effort in excelling at it, the other seems unwilling to either take any stance or open any theme to exploration. Setting is not separated from system, setting is system. This stains across the entire game, resulting in the heroes becoming so vacuous, so disconnected from anything, as Orden IS a world made of pudding. The result is a game about heroes that does not want to talk about heroes.

Draw Steel is about having a fun time in a tactical combat. This could be an insult; it could be damning via faint praise, but I am going to tell you the truth, it isn’t a big thoughts game. You are going to build characters, who you may define in relation to whatever corner of the setting your GM spends the effort to spin out into a defined setting, but the game isn’t about that. It’s about the sheer thrill of your barbarian picking up and slamming a dude through walls for the joy of seeing the number get bigger.

I hope that as time goes on we get a chance to see Draw Steel develop a deeper meaning.

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5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

What does an engine look like in a game about a play?

My first impulse was to identify the Owe list as the engine of Masks of the Leviathan: as Figures performed by the characters played by the players go through the play, they get added and written off from the Owe list. This highlights which Figures can appear again in future plays performed in later sessions.

However, something that primarily manifests with gamescape as foreshadowing/setting up the fate of a Figure and possible returns in later performances and plays feels wrong as the engine. Sure, it pulls a lot of weight, does plenty of work, but it is more for more than one session. And clearly Masks of the Leviathan is making Masks of the Leviathan even as a one-shot. Furthermore, it is drawn from In A Wicked Age, where it is definitely part of the engine; if the Owe list was the pulsating core of the game, the pacing and energy of playing Masks of the Leviathan would be much more similar.

Mood propels Masks of the Leviathan. Each play has two Moods, that not only define the play individually, impact its drastic swings as they flip back and forth. The game happens by constantly pushing you to embrace or flip a Mood, interacting with the Chorus/audience through the lens of the Mood. This feeds into two parallel economies of Mood “tokens”, which will help you set up scenes, decide outcomes, and otherwise complicate the ongoing drama.

I think its vital to highlight as an important part of the engine of Masks of the Leviathan is how vital The Chorus is. The Chorus is the driveshaft off the system, a shared concept controlled by the player characters and can be used to introduce characters in the play, to place items in the hands of Figures in the play, and a variety of other things. This creates a fascinating tension, where players aren’t simply required to wait until their chance to have a scene, instead allowing them to steer and influence how the scenes go, including adding things to the Owe list. Its a fascinating turn for an interesting game.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Every session in this game is “Session One”, and reading the entirety of the game can be done in that one hour of prep.

Keep an Owe list, and read multiple times how the Moods of a play are determined (pg. 8 and 9).

My co-writer really assembled the perfect essentials list. I recommend printing out the playing a tale flowchart.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

The main stress points of the game are clarity of communication and teaching itself. While they do not cause issues in execution, they are worth considering.

Part of why we insist on learning how Mood is decided for a one-shot, is how hard it can be to parse. It is the one part of Masks of the Leviathan where it could have benefited from clear instructions and/or diagrams of the process. We recommend that you try some draws and spreads first to get a feel for it.

When you do so, you will also notice that not all Moods are likely to come up in a play being performed, and some combinations are more likely than not. Certain Moods will be experienced if you perform enough plays through multiple sessions; as such, be aware you can challenge Fate and perform matching that mood anyway.

The Chorus can be tricky to get without references, and could have been improved with some examples. The main issue is how the Chorus interacts with mechanics usually facing player thespians’ and the Figures they perform.

The main stress point is figuring out how to really nail down how mood works, make sure you feel confident, don’t be afraid to try it a couple of times, and make sure everyone is into the mood.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

The thing with small, minimalist games is that they are the best at offering a narrow, focused experience — and the ones that benefit the most from it. This is something that has been lost by the flood of “rules lite” games (which are anything but, and instead are rule-heavy (require you to know the rules of other games) and cognitive load demanding (requiring experience with rulings and a constant hyper-awareness to run). Since they are light on text, the waters been muddled between rule light and smaller games, and at some point that ended up in a trend of games to becoming unfocused, to “be about anything” as much as they can “have any rules”. Blending so many promising games into faux-SRDs about nothing that you too can use to make your game about nothing.

Masks of the Leviathan hits like a bucket of icy water. It rouses through the numbing trends, demanding you to pay attention, to focus. Its biggest lesson is that you actually do have top be about something if your game is small and minimalist; that some of the best examples of those in the last twenty years were very clear minded about what they wanted to say with their few procedures and mechanics. That the system screamed something worth listening for through play.

And you don’t need to close yourself off from that. It is in dialogue with that vast field of the artform. It is in dialogue with other art of the same artist. It is in dialogue with every single game, and you can drop it and play alongside/within any other game.

Turns out you don’t have to compromise. You don’t have to put your game and fingers in the blender and churn.

You can know which role you are to play.

Masks of the Leviathan is a tale you are glued to watching, because of one simple and unassailable fact, its a focused and designed thing. You can’t do anything in Masks of the Leviathan, you can portray actors in a play and all the mechanics relate to that. There are mechanics contained herein, not the shadowy ghost of design, but a solid thing. I would learn that if you want to design small, design efficient, there’s no reason to step away from thinking about this art-piece you are building just because it can be read in ten minutes instead of an hour.

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

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Masks of the Leviathan is a game by H. Dithmer Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by H. Dithmer. We have benefited from a review copy.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

TTRPGs have a problem with bloat, being sold with anything but the game itself: illustrations, writing, influencer collaborations, Funko Pops and other lifestyle props and treats. This, alongside the awful habits of consumers and the audience for this art to correlate quantity with quality, makes difficult to really nail down what is necessary for a game, what is essential. The Minimal Viable TTRPG that is not just a performance piece/microfiction. What do you need to hit all those five letters?

Masks of the Leviathan is a wonderful effort in pursuing this question. What is needed to make a game with the least amount of labor and resources? Would the resulting game still be a worthwhile piece of art?

And for such a game made with so little at its disposal, Masks of Leviathan offers art worth discussing and experience.

Many words don’t guarantee many feelings. Masks Of The Leviathan seems skinny and malnourished compared to the other swollen titles sitting on your digital bookshelf. Yet, if you dig into it, you will find every single word is used to inform, to help color and produce a wonderful game at your table. This isn’t something designed for a post, where you tell a ten-word punch line in a hundred-page book. This is a living, breathing, lean, and mean game at the core.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Despite being a game with a short body of text, Masks of the Leviathan is a game that demands to be taken seriously. It is deeply procedural and requires commitment to roleplay and to following its procedures.

There is a second layer of abstraction involved in playing Masks of Leviathan. Rather than scenarios, you play the performance of a play. You play actors playing actors, a chorus of secondary/tertiary characters and audience, and a performance location. The actors, their performances, the play, and its moods must be treated seriously and with commitment.

A Game about actors in a troupe? This could easily turn to goofs and bits, but Masks Of Leviathan talks seriously without being dour, and by treating itself as serious it gives you permission to take it seriously.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Masks of the Leviathan is a game about a theater troupe performing plays in a fantasy world. Each session is a new play, a new show with a different cast and audience. Different moods, different oracles, different dynamics. Each player plays an actor, portraying a character of their own. As they perform, they play off each other and the audience, to see how the drama is perceived and interpreted — and how the performance changes to meet the audience at their state of mind.

Masks of The Leviathan is a rpg where each session is a self contained tale of a theatre troupe performing a play in a fantasy setting. The game has some great random generation to determine not just the play, but what the play is about! From there you slowly play out games of power, tragedy, and joy on the stage to a crowd as you assume both actor and chorus in the show.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

To me, Masks of the Leviathan is inseparable from its spiritual sibling, Heirs of the Leviathan. Such as Heirs of the Leviathan explored what could be done with the OSR framework and learned from the best examples of the artistic movement, Masks of the Leviathan explores what it means to play a “storygame” by playing with the assumptions about thespian aspirations and “theatre kid” play and taking lessons liberally l from classic storygames like In A Wicked Age.

Not only that, the two together create a much richer game. Heirs of the Leviathan used the lack of personhood of OSR characters to great effect, using them as sleeves not just for players’ will but for Leviathan’s — to the needs of performing power. As such, it was a great game for intrigue and drama, but the personal aspects of the narrative were downplayed — after all, a successful Heir is one that is consumed by the role of Leviathan.

Cycling between sessions of Heirs of the Leviathan with Masks of the Leviathan creates a much richer tapestry. The events of Heirs can become plays in Masks, the Heirs characters. Performing the plays, the audience can show and work off the play to represent how the Heirs are being seen by the rest of the world; the actors can speculate and act out the struggles — or lack of them — the Heirs go through.

Masks of the Leviathan can perform the same for any other game in which there is a deep imbalance between the inner world/expression of characters. Besides, I’m sure any of you has played games in which they would love to see in-setting media produced about the characters.

Guess which game is perfect for just that.

I know, I know, I say this frequently, but Masks Of The Leviathan is actually about TTRPGs, specifically the ideal political game. This game is in direct conversation with Heirs of Leviathan, they are both about people in tense situations that are really no concern to those portraying these characters, and like all the best games of political fantasy, the true magic is in letting someone else win sometimes.

You see, in Masks of Leviathan, you create scenes and act them out, with the upper hand probably changing the mood, and then eventually the player with the upper hand proclaims what actually happens in between this scene and the next. This means you may create a scene, only to have it run away from you and end terribly for your character, or it might end perfectly.

The reason this connects to Political Fantasy, is that the coolest moments to happen in political fantasy only occur because a character loses. Ned Stark gets outmaneuvered and dies on the steps of The Great Sept.1 Bayushi Shoju gives into paranoia and decides to kill the Emperor, these moments only happen because characters fail.

Yet, if you talk to no small percentage of players, they’ll contort into knots to avoid the fail. This can be a massive failing on behalf of the player, and what I think makes Masks Of The Leviathan so compelling, is that it effectively shows you that failing in the scene is okay, it’s a failure of a character you are portraying. That’s always true! If you want to make a more compelling character in a game in general, fail!

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

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5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Fated witches love casting spells and that is the engine driving Witch: The Fated.

But let’s go properly in depth with those system dynamics.

If you are familiar with Afterlife, you will recognize the resources available to each Fated character. You have Concept pools and Vitality pools. Concept pools are reserves of reliable capacity: rather than rely on randomness of dice, you can spend Concept pools to grant yourself or covenmates successes; in other words, it is insurance of what you can do. Vitality pools are reduced when you fail a check and sometimes to empower magic, communicating how much you can afford to sacrifice.

There is already a neatly compartmentalized sub-engine as numbers go between Concept and Vitality pools. Failure depletes Vitality pools, Concept prevents failure; once you have no more Concept available, you will lose more Vitality. If any Vitality pool gets to 0, it is very bad news. By itself, entertaining system, but it is not exactly the most dynamic — this is not enough to push the pistons of narrative.

Enter the Eternity Track. Eternity Track is the feedback and backlash from using magic to tampering with universal forces far greater than your Fated and their demon. Every time you cast a spell, you accumulate Eternity Track. Get to 10 you get an Eternity Chasm—an event that if not a “game over”, it is as close as you get, with multiple characters likely to die (or much worse). So above all you want to do things that reduce Energy Track. That means letting magic makes thing worse for you, or if you really desperate, making a deal with your demon.

But what if you take it easy? What if you just take your time recovering and using pools and magic sparingly. Well, you cannot. This engine does work through time; you play during dynamic periods where you are deeply involved in magical activity, with months and sometimes years of breaks in between where you are consumed with. Take your time and you miss the window of opportunity to act. So not only have limited resources, time is also a limiting factor. Recovery is powerful but limited: to recover your Concept pools and a single Vitality pool you need to commit an entire day to it—closing that window of opportunity. To clear a single point of Eternity track you need to spend an entire week of recovery, which may be as disastrous as an Eternity Chasm; as such, you are pushed to let magic make your life worse instead of accumulating Eternity or make a demonic deal. Furthermore, certain types of magic require time to learn, and them and social attributes only increase when you take a prolonged downtime.

Alright, so I avoid doing magic. Problem is, you’re playing a Fated; if the things you want to accomplish could be solved by Concept and Vitality pools alone, you would not have had need for magic or had to sell your soul for it. So you keep juggling your Eternity Track, Concept, and Vitality pool, trying to get the most out of it.

So all these sub-engines come together to drive what the game is about: your relationship with your demon. While you have a lot of agency and fun with the levers you get to pull, things will get sideways—not only that, character advancement is based on failure, you need things to get sideways— and outside of control. Your demon is always ready to step in, ready to offer a new contract in exchange for refilling depleted Pools, reducing your Eternity Track, permanently increase your magic power and knowledge, or help in any other way. The only catch to this panic button? The demon will not make a new contract until you have fulfilled your end of the previous bargain.

It is as interest as it is elegant how the strong cybernetics of things engine flawlessly create a changing relationship and narrative with your character’s demon. Most demons are not hostile to their witches, and to those early in their careers, they are extremely generous and helpful while asking very little on their contracts. This pushes player characters to take risks, as their demon is going to get them out of any trouble at the expense of some antagonism. Failing risky actions and making bargains for power will increase the power of your character, with the gameplay loop and relationship with the demon changing. Failure and taking risky actions will make you more powerful, and hopefully, this means relying less on your demon; your demon is also willing to do less for your Fated and will demand increasingly more. Should you get powerful enough where you would renege on the original deal and take your soul back, that’s when the demon turns outright hostile.

So yeah, you can be sure that whatever your Witch: The Fated game is about, you will keep making more Witch: The Fated.

The engine is casting spells, my co-writer is in fact a genius and already pinpointed all of that. However I am going to emphasize how fun and easy casting spells is, you get a set of them by your character archetype that just clearly state what is possible, these powers include making undead servants and summoning huge chunks of water or fire at character creation, then you do the thing. However, because you are a servant to your ever-growing problems, even all that magical oomph won’t solve it, summoning all the undead minions in the world won’t cure your mom’s severe illness! You need to double down, so you contact your demonic debt-holder who agrees to lend you some more power, in exchange for making the cute neighbor fall in love with you, they also probably couldn’t be swayed by undead minions.1 So you have to roll checks, and if you fail you are gonna come down to vitality, and when the chips are totally down you can always run to your demon for more power, but oh no, what about the Eternity Track?!

There you see it, you are gonna get so caught up in your goals, that like the Witch you portray are gonna end up to your eyeballs in debt and struggling to make it to the end.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Before anything, familiarize with its safety tools (pg. 44) and make sure everyone you are playing with understands, is able to use them, and recognizes their use.

• Familiarize yourself with how dice rolls work (pg. 28)

• Familiarize yourself with magic (pg. 37)

If there is something that I miss from Afterlife: Wandering Souls in Witch: The Fated, is the “deathpath” character creation. If something similar had been implemented, that by itself would be a flawless introduction to the game. In the absence of that:

• Refer to the character creation cheat sheet (pg. 110)

• Let each player answer the questions for character creation (pg.108-109)

• Avoid Greed (pg. 111)

• Introduce the Fates and let each pick a different one (pg. 8).

• Be permissive with how players assign points and maybe let them keep some as “floaters” to add as they get a feeling of how pools and stats work.

• Give them the Devil’s Deck as an artifact.

The Distant Way scenario book may be used for a session one/demo/one-shot, but I found most scenarios fit better established characters and covens. If you pick one of those, you may want to also make pre-generated characters. In any case, the scenario should be having a time window to accomplish something important to the coven or their community.

More important, you should have demons be part of this session, otherwise you may be missing one of the best elements of it. However, it is unlikely anyone is going to get a Vitality pool sown to 0, so keep in mind the following opportunities for demon involvement:

• Create scenarios and challenges related to the magic picked by your cast during character creation. This keeps them proactive and have the demon be summoned to reset Eternity track, letting them try all their magic in a single session.

• Dangle powerful magics over them. Look at their Fates and their level III magic, creating a scenario which while overcome in other ways, it is a tempting opportunity if they could use that level III magic. This way they will be tempted to summon their demon for more magical power even while playing only one session.

• Be a bit frivolous with demon pacts and summoning. While not healthy for the long-term life of a character or campaign, if you doing a single session to get a taste of the game, let players make use of demons as a “problem eraser”.

Be confident you know how the system works, and make sure you know how to build characters and introduce the coolest parts of the system, show off some demons make sure people feel the Coven interact, and print off as many cheat sheets as possible.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

The game engine is well polished and elegant, engine does its thing without needing much attention, so there are very few stress points. The ones that exist are some unsaid metanarrative concessions.

The demon gets your character’s soul when they die. So it may seem there is a conflict of interest here, and demons should be working to get your characters killed. However, not only is that not the case for the game to work as a game, the demon will always be ready to bring your Fated back to life should their Health drop to zero, no matter how many pending deals. While this is not something easily abused (there are nasty consequences either way), it requires kayfabe and agreement at the table that this is a thing and you should work together to harmonize narratives. Keep in mind that demons don’t think like humans do, most of them like their witch’s even if they show in odd ways, and are getting things from their activity in the world that they may value much more than souls.

Demons start to make demands on demonic pacts starting on Destiny I, but player characters start at Destiny 0. The result of this is that until a character negotiates for more magical power, they have a grace/honeymoon period in which they can keep asking for help from the demon riding on the selling of their soul. This period is perfect for trying and learning the system and/or for developing the personality and relationship of demons. Of course, due to the power of demons, there may be the temptation to preserve Destiny 0 and demonic deal “freebies”. It is left unsaid that this grace is not to be abused. Should a character linger at Destiny 0 to abuse it, make clear this is not how the game is supposed to work and are not “starting to play the game” until tension is inserted into the relationship with the demon. Furthermore, make clear that there is a taboo in Fated society about frivolous deals with demons. Demons may also ask for minor tasks as part of the demonic deal, which while not as costly as Destiny 1 deals, the demon would not make new bargains until they are performed. All in all, be honest that these are training wheels they are meant to abandon as soon as they are comfortable enough with the system.

The game does not need to be about Fated reclaiming their souls. However, it is both what the game excels over any other in TTRPGs, and also something quite boring if the entire coven wants to break free. Playing a Witch: The Fated 2e campaign is about figuring out what urban fantasy nonsense the game does well, avoiding what it does not and sprinkle enough characters that want to get their soul back to highlight and enhance its unique flavors.

Finally, the game is quite light in Game Master levers and dedicated advice; as such, not the easiest game for first time facilitators.

This game doesn’t have much advice for you as a player or Game Master, so you definitely need to make sure you are confident. The game shines when you do what it says, so make sure your players have a goal focused on regaining their souls, I also think that it is easy to mess up the greed chart, so definitely decide if you are gonna use it or not.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

The main lesson from Witch: The Fated 2e is that game design is an art, craft, and science. It can be learned and you can get back to it. What a glow-up this edition is, making an outstanding game.

Unfortunately, it is a grim reminder of the material conditions and incentives involved in this artform. Between this game and Afterlife: Wandering Souls, Steffie de Vaan and Elizabeth Chaipraditku are indisputable some of the best game designers working now. They also involved in some of the biggest mainstream projects out there, and ran some of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns in this form.

They have the talent, skill, social network, and sheer stubbornness to make these amazing games. And yet.

And yet, how many of you are only hearing now about Witch: Fated Souls? How many of you ever heard of Afterlife: Wandering Souls? For all the support this game’s team were able to muster for mainstream games and TTRPG Funko Pops, they cannot get more than modest material support for their projects.

So maybe we can learn from this, all together. Do we want more games like this? Do we want these games to be viable? Do we want them to be played?

Or we do not care about excellence in the artform and want artistry like this be overlooked as its creators are remembered only by Viacom’s Kickstarters or work in the 5th edition slop of Paradox Interactive or Hasbro IP?

So I am one of those people who hadn’t even heard of Witch 2e until Lhu turned me onto it. I loved it, a wonderful work of urban fantasy that understands the fantasy of being cleverer than a demon, but even wilder, Lhu turned me onto Afterlife: Wandering Souls, and folks? That game is so much more Brad coded that I was flabbergasted I hadn’t heard of it.

You need to take-away playing and talking about more good games. You need to experience wonder in this art form again, do it for me.

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

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Witch: Fated Souls is a game by Steffie de Vaan and Elizabeth Chaipraditku published by Angry Hamster Publishing. It benefited from a crowdfunding campaign.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

Lhuzie

It is amazing how polished and gorgeous the second edition of Witch: Fated Soul is compared with the original edition, especially considering the material conditions allowed by their modest Kickstarter performance. Outstanding book all-around.

If you been reading me for any amount of time, you will know that I hate TTRPG Funko Pops. Either literal TTRPGs that are glorified TTRPG-Shaped Funko Pops, or TTRPGs that are sold on vibes and gimmicky, cheap, plastic “accessories”. As such, it was a welcomed surprise at how good the accessories of Witch: Fated Souls are. You get three physical representations of one of the three artifacts that players pick at character creation: a notebook that can stand as the grimoire that stores all learned magics, a Spirit Board to connect with other realms and witches, and a divinatory deck of cards. The last one, in particular, also comes with a zine and extra DIY cards, serving as a “mini-expansion” for the game. It was nice to find these accessories are as delightful as a helpful addition to my tables.

Brad

Witch 2e is a clean and focused layout and art direction that accomplishes being easily read and readable. It is a plain, clean, workhorse of a design philosophy.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Lhuzie 

The game is well-laid out and compact. It is easy to transport and consult, quite well organized and easy to read.

The game centers around witchcraft and Faustian deals with demons. Furthermore, there may be all sorts of nasty bargaining and self-destructive bargaining that happen over the course of the tug-of-war with your demon. The game has a specific tool for safety and comfort that excels at being something that integrates flawlessly with the normal procedures of playing Witch: Fated Souls.

Brad

Witch 2e has a wonderfully done internal safety tool mechanism as well as clear concise warning as to it’s nature.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Lhuzie

Witch: Fated Souls is about being trapped by a deal, having sold your soul to a demon for magical power. However, it is also about hope that your newfound magic and power can bring up a better world and you may still get your soul back.

Brad

Witch 2e is about being one of several different flavours of person who sold/traded/bartered away their soul to a demon for power, it is also about gaining more power through further modifcations to that deal as well ass all the other things you are now exposed to

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Lhuzie

Witch: Fated Souls is a game about beating the demon that got your soul in exchange of magical power or be doomed trying.

The biggest problem of Witch: Fated Souls always been that it could only tell one story. Now, one should quickly recoil back and say “hold on, the best TTRPGs in this goddess-forsaken artform for the past two decades have been precisely those that lock-on and focus on telling a very specific story”. So yeah, should not be much of a problem, should not have been a problem for Witch: Fated Souls 1e… but it definitely was. I was not easy to describe why it was a problem: maybe it was the d20 engine that had a stink of “generic” and aimless in the mechanics when the narrative is meant so focused; maybe it was when said narrative framework and gamespace bounced between the witch-demon dance and trying to offer an “open-ended” experience more akin to World of Darkness and other urban fantasy. At some point having to beat each player’s would start to feel like a chore. Whatever what was, the result was a good game that suffered from not committing to the bit and turning what should have been its biggest strength.

Witch: Fated Souls 2e is a tour de force, knowing what it is about and delivering. You want to play a Faustian TTRPG? This is THE Faustian Deal TTRPG and every single mechanical and cybernetic dance within is about making it THE Faustian Deal TTRPG.

I could tell about how the engine of the game lays that path — and I will in the next part, — but the “how “that came to be would remain unclear unless one talks about Afterlife: Wandering Souls. And one cannot talk about Afterlife: Wandering Souls without talking about Wraith: The Oblivion.

Wraith was, in many ways the pinnacle of the 90s World of Darkness. Some of the best narrative, the best setting, the most melodrama, the best writing. Too bad it was unplayable. More than any other game, it included mechanics disruptive to play, the setting was too big and require players and their characters to be spinning too many plates, it was meta-geographic expansive when traveling was a struggle and properly appreciating the game would require it to be a constant, it was the worst implementation of a stick-mechanic of their entire library, etc. The tragedy of Wraith was ,that if it was a dozen different games, each would be an excellent focused slice of the afterlife of the World of Darkness. In fact, there is a reason why, anyone that has a found memory of Wraith, it is usually from one of the more focused sourcebooks/spin-offs.

Afterlife: Fated Souls had the difficult task of being about one thing and also communicating an afterlife as large — if not larger — in scope as Wraith. It required a system built from the scratch, ditching the awful d20s, and a player-facing narrative framework for its system’s engineering. The result was a game about dead stranded in a strange desert, clinging to fleeting memories, trying to find out who they were and where should they be. Because this is no cosmic afterlife designed for mortal souls, no Limbo or Hell: this desert-expanse is home to other peoples and cultures, humans being unusual beings that ended up stranded here after death. They are supposed to journey on, by venturing into pocket-realities created by memories of the dead. However, other dead humans go back, becoming a source of trouble to the locals and the other wandering souls…

All those lessons have been learned and applied to make Witch: Fated Souls the ultimate experience of getting your soul back from your personal demon. Every turning wheel advances the inevitable confrontation. So make sure you are ready.

Brad

Witch 2e is about how sometimes the only way out is through.

You are caught up in the web of this deal, of your obligations to help the others on their way out/through the ugliness that is about the reacquisition of your souls. You might wanna cry, you might wanna get stinking drunk and regret the fact that all of your life has come to this ugly point where you may have to fight multiple actual demons to recover this essential piece of you.

That doesn’t mean that you don’t have to, and it doesn’t mean you won’t.

You are gonna struggle, and trick and lie and cheat your way to reacquring your soul, and then with a mouth full of grit and a black eye you are gonna help your companions recover theirs. You are going to end this heist with a sackful of newly acquired powers and knowledge that you took from these bastards who thought they could beat you.

Because you won’t accept the other way.

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

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5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Brad

So. You wanna build an army huh? You think you are cut out to win a Battle of The Tigers? Or become a real Strategy Troll? Well i think you can rather easily. Character creation starts with creating your commander, a collection of special rules and unique abilities like being aquatic or being big, that you can use to influence the world, but perhaps most importantly your Authority, which determines what characters your army can use.

You then organize your characters into a Unit, which is made up of to six characters in tywo rows of three that determine when their abilities go in a combat system that is totally free of random initiative. Characters are hugely customizable and there are even rules for building custom ones. This means that there are tons of possibilities for each unit to say nothing of each army.

This is the basic building block of Over War, and everything, from the social system added in Ballark In Flames to the war camp system feeds into and off of it. You can build a JRPG army of your dudes, spending hours pouring over for the most optimal combinations of unit layouts and abilities. You could also design an army that actively reflects one of the subfactions from Ballark In Flames, Overwar captures that fun wargame push and pull of canon and fun unit composition.

Lhuzie

The game engine is a Matryoshka of character creation. Armies are made of units, each unit is made of characters — unit characters, commander, formation. It works a lot like Chariots of Steel by way of DnD.

How you make characters, which characters are in a unit and in which a formation: that is what determines the outcome of warfare-narrative. There are optional rules that give additional nuance, but they are built upon this deterministic engine where agency is in pre-combat customization — akin to stellar strategic TTRPGs such as Lancer: Battlegroup.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Brad

Build your own scenario, and absolutely make sure to pregen some interesting units, this will give your players a chance to see how wild this game will work. As Always, make sure you are confident on Targeting and if you are going to use any further optional rules from Ballark In Flames.

Lhuzie

Do not run the example of one-session presented in the Monarch Edition (pg. 67) as Patrol play. It creates an awful introduction to the game that was often off-putting to players. Instead, run one of the Scenarios from the back of the book (pg. 88).

Make some example units for players to pick, ideally some that are good and bad matchups with those of the scenario you have chosen.

Study how targeting works (Monarch Edition pg. 45), so you can see how different units interact when they battle each other. It can get extremely convoluted sometimes.

Give each player 1-3 divination cards (Monarch Edition pg. 49), so they can try this element of the game that is usually reserved for longer play.

You may want to give a pass on Orders and Magnanimity for this play, to let combat flow “baseline” so players get a sense of what those levers do if they play the game again.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Brad

For the love of god, use the Gambit rules, they will dramatically improve the roleplaying part of this roleplaying games. I recommend prebuilding enemy encounters to theme, after all they will be more mechanically interesting and able to stick out in players minds as well. Plus you can introduce recurring and growing enemies as fun NPCs. Don’t let anyone custom-build units until everyone is confident.

Lhuzie

The game does not have a good presentation of examples, so requires rerereading and rereading. We made our own examples for later references, taking snapshots of our hex movements for reference for the future/others.

Not all options are born equal. While a good nod to the inspiration material (RIP Knights, Cavaliers forever), no option really feels like a trap option and the “wrong” choices or combinations in a TTRPG do not feel as punishing as in wargames.

There is no “game balance” concern in Over War. You will enjoy yourself more if you abandon such notions. That said, for the most part, unit characters of same cost tend to perform at the relative same “tier” consistently.

Downtime and Support mechanics are very awkward to use.

Despite the randomizer elements on tables being all over the game, randomizer unit compositions are not very satisfying in a strategy game. Whenever possible, prepare thematic/mechanically satisfying units to face against.

While where it is at most unbalanced territory, making custom unit characters is a joy and definitely something anyone with some system mastery should try to do for some satisfyingly absurd units.

Combat is pretty underwhelming only predetermined. I recommend using Order rules. To really make use of the trickier rules/unit composition, Magnanimity rules are essential to make those viable/strategically interesting.

Gambits (Ballark in Flames, pg. 65) makes Skills meaningful and is pretty much a requirement for satisfying roleplay.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Brad

If you listened to traditional design wisdom, it would say that Overwar is impossible, a rules heavy OSR game, a rules medium JRPG adaptation, and a tabletop strategy rpg sound like the fever dreams of a game designer. It is a good thing Overwar doesn’t care what design wisdom says is possible. This game proves that you should take big swings, and let your loves outside of the artform color your loves inside the artform.

Overwar also is proof of less page-count being more, in that you have a truly massive and possible to understand system contained in less than four hundred pages, so try slimming your book down a little.

Lhuzie

Over War is a delightful attempt to cross the bridge between wargaming in tabletop and video games and roleplaying. The excesses of cognitive load are worth considering and studying, as well as what it gained and lost by staying close then moving beyond the OSR movement and its philosophy.

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

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Over War is a game by Richard Kelly and published by Blackoath Entertainment.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

Brad

So let's talk about something a little different. Let’s talk about Over War: Monarch Edition. This fascinating little game came to my attention for its pitch as a strategy RPG TTRPG. I was immediately fascinated and so read it and its expansion Ballark in Flames and immediately rushed over to talk to Lhuzie about it.

Over War is a deliciously sized game, being all meat and no fat. Even with Ballark In Flames it is a lean mean rpg’ing machine, with a simple but pleasing art direction.

Lhuzie

For details which we will go over in later sections, this critic will treat Over War: Monarch Edition and its supplement Ballark in Flames as a single game. Over War: Monarch Edition + Ballark in Flames is an amazing experience and a must-get roleplaying game for lovers of strategy and moving around little guys, who want their Old School Renaissance to include SNES Fire Emblem and Kriesgspiel.

To get to this point, there was a lot of effort in testing the mechanics, polishing the game elements, and fine-tuning it until it became the special thing we can play today. I am very grateful for every game that is generously pushed to this point. That work kept being done to it until it reached the current implementation is nothing short of remarkable.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Brad

So, Over War: Monarch edition and Ballark In Flames set out to do something that is rather difficult. Can you put the Strategy Role Playing Game1 onto the tabletop. This is something that has a rich basis in goals for early editions of the dragon game, with fighters eventually establishing strongholds and gathering followers. It only seems logical to eventually gamify this experience rather than just handwave it as a thing that occurs in the background.

Over War goes a step further, it looks at its contemporaries and focusses on establishing a rule set for gothic combat as enemies descend from the sky. Now, I am wargames and board game guy and in this field I couldn’t even argue its success, a ttrpg that plays like a wargame is exactly what we got out of Monarch Edition. Ballark In Flames really finished the recipe though, fulfilling its promise of a tabletop wargame role-playing game.

Lhuzie

So, why are we talking of the collected omnibus version of the game plus a supplement? The game struggled through the condition of an OSR game, and as such, it took various steps until it became “a game”. The first versions of Over War were built on assumptions of OSR, offering additional rules for the Omnigame Adventuconquistador rulesets the artistic movement of the OSR operates on. These rulesets (I think you are suppose to politely call them rulings) were condensed into rules/a game in the Monarch Edition. This was quite awkward.

The Monarch Edition highlighted two things: Over War was something really special and highlighted a lot of potential unexplored in the OSR artistic movement — while at the same time evolving into something else that could not be carried with the assumptions of the Adventuconquistador Omnigame. In one hand, it was not enough as it was on its page for someone “de novo” creating a culture of play for Over War and play an artistically fulfilling game; on the other hand, the fully matured Over War could not be something you played with generic OSR modules and did not play well with most of their rulesets, making it of limited use for many.

Ballark in Flames pushed Over War from this awkward place of not really being fulfilling for the OSR movement or an audience outside of it; rather than a quirky curiosity, it became an astonishing display of the art. Ballark identified the holes missing from the experience and provided additional context—and the roleplaying for the roleplaying game part of TTRPG! The land of Ballark, com a vague generic frontier fantasyland campform for adventuconquistador stuff (avec armies) was promoted to an actual place, with real peoples and cultures. There was vision, there were themes, there were levers to pull; this was now an experience.

As such, despite the apparent assumption of OSR one may encounter reading the Monarch Edition, the Over War that we are discussing does not require familiarity with that culture of play and/or materials. It does require maybe a bit more cognitive load than those games, a bit similar to that of the average tabletop wargame — so don’t worry, the game does not require you to be the computer for a paper Fire Emblem. Compared with Warlord Ascendant, a similar solo strategic TTRPG, it is remarkably easy on cognitive-load.

This is a war game, a war story, and you are someone who is an agent in bringing war and its violence to the land of Ballark. As Over War was further polished, the game became one of the best at dealing with what it means to adventuconquer all over the place. What it means to be a Man Of Violence and how you interact with the world.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Brad

Over War is about fantasy commanders fighting for control of a patchwork land of fantasy kingdoms.

Lhuzie

Over War is a game about gothic warfare: play as commanders from distant floating islands making their fortunes in the war-torn — now I wonder whose fault that is — lands of Ballack.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Brad

Over War is something so rare. Over War is about combat as a delicious sporting experience. This is still a game of luck and death, more Rollerball than NFL, but it is something with rules that both you and your enemies follow. You play at top level against other dangers and must rely on your teams abilities to really win you the day, but you are constantly learning, tinkering and adjusting your abilities into a tightly oiled machine of combat… Only to discover that the next faction uses and entirely different set of abilities and so it’s time to take a different run at them.

Lhuzie

It is about making Kriesgspeil in the XXI century, but fun.

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

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You can find part one here.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Lhuzie

Infinite Revolutions falls right next to some of my favorite engines — a game engine powered by stress in a mission-based structure.

Except that is not what is driving the game. Oh, no. Combat and combat tactics are the burning heart making Infinite Revolution happen. Stress, often so key in defining what characters can do, tracks the cost of what they do.

It is all about the joy of pulling tactical brilliance in combat and being rewarded for it. Because of this aspect, Speed is the primary way the engine of Infinity Revolution interacts/interacted with the rest of the game.

Speed is everything: position, Hit Points, armor, range. It is how you read the patterns of weapons and powers. Where most games with mechanical interesting chooses give you multiple levers with you can pull to divert resources one way or another, connected to different things, in Infinite Revolution everything connects to Speed (with or without Stress involved).

This singular focus on Speed produces two interesting effects. The first, is that the game is extremely light in cognitive load — whatever you do, you can get an immediate read on Speed and how it is affected, no need to juggle different trade-offs. The second is, a clever investment of those “cognitive credits. Where most games when simplifying give in to the tendency to keep simplifying — ultimately making one wonder why bother — Infinite Revolution takes that cognitive load it just freed from players to increase the complexity of interactions between weapons and powers.

The result is a fast-paced, error-proofed, yet extremely satisfying tactical game. The importance of Speed for combat makes the comparison to Flying Circus’ Energy system mandatory. Indeed, there are a lot of similarities that highlight how different the game these engines produce is. Infinite Revolution offers an almost “arcade” version of Flying Circus, like the difference between being a plane in a bullet hell shooter and in a flight simulator.

Brad

As someone much more brilliant than I once put it, the cost of going fast is the lack of control. Speed rules the roost in Infinite Revolution, you need to go fast to do anything, a slow Revolver is a dead one, so for the sake of humanity you better go as fast as you need to. As a GM this was an interesting thing, because the Veil immediately says they have a minimum speed of one, due to not caring about Newtonian Physics.

Now speed merely is the primary force here, but the level of customization from what seems at first to be a very basic pattern system didn’t fail to intrigue and seeing how they could further interact with the rest of the pulsing engine created by your Drives are where the real flavour starts to pour in.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Lhuzie

The game does not need much to bring to the table. With little prep and for a shorter session, I would recommend you lock down on some key points:

• Even if customization is part of the fun, for a one-hour-prep one-shot trial of the system, the facilitator should prepare a few Revolver “builds” ahead.

• Prioritize Combat Play, with just enough dipping into Crisis play to give the game structure.

• Read how Combat works.

• Disregard Cradle Play

• You don’t have to worry about Deep Support.

• Pick some simple Veil enemies like V-Seeds and Blooms, making one of them a Boss.

Brad

The Veil are an antagonist group that you are going to make interesting as the GM, you are gonna have to sell these unknowable horrors are a threat to these knowable heroes and I would honestly have some interesting short-hand present (I chose a list of common laws of physics to snap in their presence.)

Always be Pushin’ Your Limits, the game pops when it is about desperate heroes drawing greater and greater energies into themselves and damn the engines, keep the pressure up and remind players that is a powerful theme in the game.

I wrote up a quick and dirty cheat sheet of conditions, and I recommend you do the same.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Lhuzie

All this time, Saves felt like a placeholder, weirdly disconnected from an extremely tight game engine. They work… fine. But it never feels quite right., it is like having an overclocked, custom-built, gaming machine but then you play with a 2 buttons 5 bucks mouse.

The “can only burn brighter, can only go faster” element has become a bit diluted through game development. When you go through accumulation of drive stress and eventual drive burn — and the climatic blaze of glory BURNOUT — it just becomes ticking segments in a clock. Where this element was always at its best when you Push Your Limits, so it is better to do it so. No matter the outcome, make every single decision to Push Your Limits or use a drive power be pushing yourself faster and Infinite Revolution will sing masterfully.

On the same topic, it may be that the burning up of your Revolvers is too random, and is messing up the pacing — I found it is quite awkward to introduce new squad mates to replace the One Of A Kind Legendary Hero late in a game. Failsafes, Failsafes, Failsafes. This is how you make sure BURNOUT are climatic and not just duds. Do not miss opportunities to do so during Cradle Play.

Crisis are not intuitive to integrate with the rest of the game, but add a lot. They were well worth figuring out and finding the best way to introduce them within the group.

The relationship with the Veil (and Veil enemies) is a bit lacking compared with the Revolver and the Drive. Considering that it is one of the three edges of the triangle supporting the stories of collaborative storytelling, the triangle may be a bit loopsided. Be prepared and alert to support it in other ways.

Brad

The more you understand tactical combat games, the better you will feel. I struggled with conditions and templates at first, but I think those are easily fixable as long as you come to the table with the tools to adapt1.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Lhuzie

Infinite Revolution can be used to tell two tales.

Originality is overrated, and too many games fall in the trap of hurting what their game is about chasing after originality-for-originality shake — making contrarian decisions, going against the grain for no reason. Infinite Revolution is brilliant and innovative almost exclusively on its mastery of its design foundations and how other games did their things. Skill and competency at implementing something familiar has an originality of its own.

For each time Infinite Revolution is brilliant, there is another time where it takes a safe choice; it is quite risk-adverse in its design choices. Despite that, it is still a special game because it leverages full-knowledge of every “safe choice”. Even when games suffer from chasing after originality, it is those failures that often give them an unique character and make them remarkable. They overshot their ambitions, their aptitude was still not there, but they tried to do something new in the artform. Good students can learn a lot about the high ambitions of others and where they failed — and wise students can learn they don’t need those ambitions to make their game work the way they want it to work.

But not everyone is a critic, is it? I like interesting failures and stress points because they make me think about design and give me material for a critique; when designers take big swings and miss due to their ambitions, the critics write themselves. However, most of you will rightfully read this conclusion as “the biggest stress points of Infinite Revolution are safe, well-tested design”. And you think you think that’s a wonderful “flaw” for a game to have and consider it a near perfect game.

And you know what? There’s a lesson there too.

Brad

Infinite Revolution is compelling and confounding. It is a game that is truly finely designed, tuned and capable of making you feel the ups and downs of its fast moving kinetic combat. But I always felt in control; never once did I live up to that quote in the engine section. I think that is a good thing, a game that does exactly what it says on the tin and with a design focused and powerful in bringing those things about.

You should absolutely absorb that fully, and learn that you can do just that, but as my co-writer mentions, it is a weird feeling to sit here and say “A perfectly fine game, that is a little safe” as a an argument against, after all, my group loved Infinite Revolution.

I think that’s going to be my conclusion: master the basics, but don’t be afraid to take a big, crazy swing. If you are good at the basics, the big, crazy swing can only be mediocre at worst. However, to end on another famous athlete quote, I fear not the person who has used 10,000 mechanics once, but the person who has used one mechanic 10,000 times.

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

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Infinite Revolution is a game by Gwendolyn Clark . It benefited from a crowdfunding campaign. We have received a review copy of the game.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

Lhuzie

An outstanding achievement, Infinite Revolution is just magical. With a deeply under-evaluated crowdfunding campaign, we get one of the best-designed games of 2025 — probably only beaten by Zephyr in my estimation — it is also one of the most beautiful — probably only beaten by Zephyr in my estimation.

Excellent layout, cohesive artistic direction; every choice of art and color evokes the themes of light, darkness, hope, and furious space action. Excellence in every aspect, impossible art at these rates.

Brad

A gorgeous art piece, with the kind of breathtaking layout you can only imagine. The game is beautiful and sharp, but never dangerous to hold. I can only say that as I was reading it, people kept peering over my shoulder and oooh-ing and aaah-ing.

The layout? Sensible. The Art Direction? A fantastic expression of the theme of light in the darkness. I can’t find a single thing to nettle or needle, including a sensible table of contents.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Lhuzie

Infinite Revolution does not go deep into safety and conform, disclosing its themes but having no assumptions about how to tackle them — but laying on the table what the game will involve. Infinite Revolution game is about dreams, hopes, and being larger than life. It is also about the inevitability of death, loss, forgetting, and violence. It is still a war story — albeit one with almost abstract, cosmic enemies and stakes.

Brad

Infinite Revolution wears its identity as a shining armor, and doesn’t really concern itself with how you will make its themes occur, instead trusting on design and form to make sure you really get the gist. To be honest, I think it succeeds.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Lhuzie

You are a revolver, a human bound to a star-traveling drive that resonates with alien energies. You can never stop, you can never slow down., you can only keep revolving forward.

It replaced your heart, and your hopes, fears, and dreams power it. Human, drive and the threat to all form a triangle, locked into a mythic struggle for the universe.

In a universe where the stars themselves have gone out, you have to shine brighter. Fight the forces of entropy and keep spinning — until you have burned through all you are.

Brad

The Revolvers were pathfinders, heroes of the great civilization of Prima Sol, Their hearts replaced with beating turbines of limitless energy. They cut a glittering future for colony cruisers and oversaw the construction of V-Gates that made faster-than-light travel the future.

Now hundreds of years later, paracasual entities pour from somewhere else and devour the light of stars, they prevent the workings of the V-Gates, and you must turn your star heart to drive them back.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Lhuzie

I never understood the instinct of some designers and players to make TTRPGs emulate video games. Been burned up on the concept from the decades of “way too literal” adaptations that try to work too much like a computer program but the math have to be done at the table; and the other hard of the swing, of the superficial drawing of the aesthetics

While there a game we have covered quite close to video games that worked for me was Kill Him Faster, there is a giant in doing it successfully that I cannot avoid: Lumen. I never talked much about it, because there is not much to be said. I have played and designed in Lumen. It is amazing at capturing in a different medium the magic and dynamics of looter shooters, but… I don't get why. The design and engine is serviceable, but does not do anything unique, something that justifies prepping, gathering multiple people, and using your collaborative cooperative storytelling to emulate your favourite looter shooter — not when you can just fire that one up. So it became something that I appreciate, have nothing but positive things to say, but “don't get” why the looter shooter TTRPG and its many iterations is a thing.

My beloved partner, Anemone, loves looter shooters. And has played zir share of Lumen-likes. So ze was actually to turn my frustration back and me and explain what I am missing.

Looter shooters are like TTRPGs, something that is going to be mostly miserable if you just hit random queues. In both, they really become worth playing when you have a small consistent group that you can play with. They share many of the same positives, so it makes sense that people seeking that experience play games that have learned the right lesson from looter shooters.

So, why did I took this detour before going back to Infinite Revolution?

Infinite Revolution has clearly taken a lot of inspiration from Lumen and from looter shooters but… the actual playing of the game has a quite unique energy. An energy, the closest I ever felt was when playing bullet hell games. You will get when you start overlaying weapon patterning.

Infinite Revolution is a game about capturing the frenetic energy of a bullet hell and allowing those that do not play video games to experience it. Add the patterns for Drives, being luminous girls of light darting through space and the character-specific theme song? Infinite Revolution may be the purest translation of Touhou to the artform of cooperative collaborative storytelling.

Brad

In a similar spin, I love certain looter shooters, having played a fair bit of Bungie’s big light-themed one that I can feel in here. But I think that Infinite Revolution wears its clearest theme on its broadest shoulders. That Humanity can do anything.

The Revolvers are humans gifted with infinite power, who, even in this brutal war against an enemy who sees to unmake all that is, still take time to rest on Cradle. The Revolvers have the power of starship powerplants resting in their chests, and yet they are still people first and foremost. They went out into the inky black forever of space and guided humans to a future, and now they have simply to step out and drive back the darkness once more.

Spin on.

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

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You see, even if the game doesn't outright gimme a goodie1 for doing the thing the game asks me to do. There is still the simplest and most beautiful incentive of them all, having fun and playing the game. I'm not being goofy or mocking when I say that, but if you show up to a game you know is about Space Horror, you are gonna go towards the space horror, doing whatever the fuck it takes to your character’s motivation to enable this. You want to have fun, so you are incentivized to do the thing.

Now you’re right, in that nothing requires you to do that, there is no punishment2 for not playing that way… But isn’t that almost the platonic ideal of an incentive? That you don’t have to do it, but you will be absolutely rewarded for playing the game for the sheer thrill of the game, and if you don’t want to play the game, you could just leave.

Oh, Brad, you just ceded ground! Thats what we've wanted the whole time! We obviously know that! We just don't want any of your gross in-game incentives.

I'm willing to cede that maybe you believed that before I pointed it out, but I'm gonna go a step further! Does your incentive-free game use gold as XP? You see, you can argue that only children need incentives to play to reinforce themes. But, here's the strictest thing, if I am rewarded to bring gold back to town with XP, thats an incentive that says to me "Avoid Combat." And "If the adamantine doors aren't magically attached to the wall, let's steal 'em." If this isn't an incentive, what is? You have just encouraged me to play a certain way and directly tied my XP gain to it. This shapes how you are going to play the game. If I know that you are playing by these rules, I am likely to adapt not just my play style, but any character concepts to make sure that I can, in fact, bring back loot to level up. Gold as XP means that a wandering monk with a vow of poverty who believes that all wealth is inherently evil is not a viable concept, unless I want to never level up.3

If you hold GM authority sacred and believe in rulings, not rules, you can't have unincentivized play! The GM's whole job in that framework is to improvise rules into situations, which, in turn, means that players are incentivized to interact with new situations in as unusual a way as possible. You want players to do things that your GM will have to rule on, right? You want to have a variety of situations in this sandbox, and if this is a cornerstone, and not simply an excuse to not have to game design, you have to hope the players will create situations for rulings! It has been... Incentivized! In the most basic and simple way possible, you as a GM want to put your players into situations to see how they react, and now you get to make changes to the rules to enable that. Once your players know that, they are likely to keep doing that!

This isn't a bad thing at all! The earliest tournament modules had a metagame incentive, the incentive to succeed and earn points doing so! In the early space-faring game Traveller, money is your primary incentive! You literally go about trying to earn money to afford doing stuff you want to do!

The game is incentivized! It's fine, but attempting to act like it’s not? That just seems a touch silly, so relax and enjoy... Plus, a game without any clearly written incentive? Sure seems like Mother May I?

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Lhuzie

Rules-light games, by definition, do not tend to have engines. The game master’s role is supposed to throw improv storytelling, off-the-cuff performance, and impromptu game design to make a game “work” and reproduce itself. Still, After is a well-structured game, being able to produce After through its mechanics; if not an engine, it has something quite engine-like. Each session in a campaign establishes what is expected from a session, with a limited number of Memories and Flashbacks establishing how many scenes will play in the Past and how many will play in the future/present.

Challenges and trying to meet them drive narrative between scenes — and sometimes between sessions or even through a campaign. However, their use is too arbitrary to be reliably counted as an engine. This is where the unusually named Focus takes over as what powers the game.

Focus is the true narrative currency of After. Memories are nice and all, but you have one per session and can, realistically, get another one during a session; they don’t really change how you play After, but are a nice treat that you are wasting if you are not using — a real waste, considering how powerful their effect is. But Focus? Each character can get up to 5 Focus, with the amount of Focus they have earned during the campaign communicating at which stage of their personal narrative they are. This is no idle indicator, but an active algedonic signal: it connects everything.

Focus (and Empty Focus) are used to fuel powers, being deeply interwoven with your character archetype. Focus is the dubious reward of Experience: failure and costly successes will increase your Experience in attributes; the better you are at an attribute, the more Experience you need to learn before being subject to a Focus. Focus accumulates; it changes how you relate to your powers, change how you play your character, chugs the game in a given direction. Because Experience gets you Focus, you both want to avoid rolling with your bad attributes if possible… but you also have to roll with different attributes because your primary ones have already accumulated too much Experience. Focus represents the weight of the events, the consequences, and lasting changes inflicted by your choices and actions; the amount of Focus you have accumulated determines your epilogue; max your Focus and you are at the mercy of a fate decided for you.

Brad

Focus is where the rubber meets the road, the place that says where you are at the narrative of After. You gain Focus as you spend experience, which drives you ever further towards the end of your arc, inexorable and sudden. As you become more powerful, your stats become impossible to roll, so burdened with all of your experiences, you are pushed to the end.

Memories are powerful, but we have already established that After is about who you are with power, not who you were before, so it is only fitting that they are motor oil to Focus’s gas.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Lhuzie

Well, After already has your season zero well planned. So what should you use your hour of prep for? Some suggestions.

• Familiarize yourself with the structure of the game, specially with what you do in Session 0 of After (pg 3).

• Learn how Checks (pg. 6) and Challenges (pg. 7)

• You need to become good at making challengers sooner rather than later. Cross-reference the Challenge Template (pg. 9) with the talk about Challenges to the Narrator (pg. 58-61).

• Due to the quite unique definition of terms used, maybe familiarize yourself with the Glossary (pg. 72) for later consultation.

• You can post-pone making decisions for character creation until the second session, but you should check how characters work if you have the time, at least the steps of character creation (pg. 12) and how risk rolls and focus interact with character options (pg. 13-14)

Brad

Read the game, high-five your players for agreeing to play a game that is actually low prep!

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Lhuzie

The nomenclature of the game has to be one of the biggest stress points. Experience and Focus will always feel inappropriate for the concepts they are meant to describe to an experienced ear; reminding yourself and others of what they actually mean in After whenever assumptions take over is a good way to prevent issues from false familiarity.

Challenges are presented relatively tone neutral, as an “advanced” conflict resolution system. However, as mentioned previously, they are extremely central to the game. Powers and the mechanics of After only really work when Challenges are centered as the mechanical pivot point for the entire game. This is obvious to anyone spending some time with the game, but if you take a brief glance, jump in, and want to learn on the go, it is easy to misunderstand how central they are to After. So, any dice rolling that happens should, by “default,” be tied to an ongoing challenge — making challenges the norm and orphaned dice rolls the exception.

The Consequences on After are some of the most fun takes on the concept I have seen in this artform, but rely a lot on gut feelings and arbitration and are not always intuitive. They take a bit of system mastery on the part of the game master to really live up to their fun and narrative potential. It is well worth it.

Brad

Hey, use challenges and for the love of sweet lady statistics, use a light hand of statistics and be careful that you don’t veer too heavily into “Mother May I?”.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Lhuzie  

Listening to many of the frustrations people have with Triangle Agency, After is exactly the type of game people seem to want and expect from Triangle Agency rather than meeting the game where it is at. Triangle Agency is still there if you want the best horror roleplaying game of the last decade and the depersonalized horror of corporate slaves capturing others like them while everything is drowned in HR Cozy and Corpokitsch; but if you want something more rule- light, improv-heavy, with mechanics that lend themselves to some wacky randomness, well, After does that. No need to be frustrated trying to make a game do what it is not about, denying yourself both what you want and the opportunity to subject yourself to transformative art.

Compared to yet another games, there are many echoes of Nobilis and Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine in After. In many ways, After paints a picture of what a “rules-light” take on the oeuvre of Jenna K. Moran would look like. Those games are carefully designed and very heavy in rules and systems — just not in the way many recognize those —so it is a remarkable case study to see what we lose and what we gain with the different approaches and what must fill the space left by a “rules-light” approach.

Finally, if you are looking for different ways to tell stories, especially ways that may not work in other media but work amazingly in this artform? Play After.

Brad

I’ll always bang the drum of commitment, but After is proof. Think about the artform we are in, and build your art to use the medium to help you. That’s honestly what separates the great painters and sculptors from the average, the people who use their medium to its maximum potential understand how it actually works and what its limitations are. After only works in ttrpgs, so give it a shot and see how the medium can help work with, and define art.

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

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1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

Lhuzie

We asked for them, and you delivered more impossible art pieces. What a delight After is. A rules-light narrative game set in a world of domains where everything is possible, play as powerful entities dealing with a critical event — one that echoes their more innocent past and that will shape their fate and that of their domain.

The layout is clean and practical, the art direction exists and works arduously at conveying the range of possibility of domains and games of After besides the creatively-dead, IP-maximalist “multiverse” concept that dominates this imaginary. The illustrations are delightful and do a great job at setting the tone of the game.

A treasure among these kinds of game, that’s what I found in After.

Brad

We frequently say here, if your game can be shorter? Make it shorter. If your game can be tighter designed? Make it tighter. Coming in at a lean and mean eighty two pages, I don’t think you could make it tighter or slimmer.

The layout and art direction feels fantastic, never constraining but guiding to the wonderful possibilities of After.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Lhuzie

After is one of those “rules-light”, with little mastering support that rely on familiarity with other TTRPGs and/or aptitude with a more improvisational game mastering. While this format of the game has been made popular by designfluencers influenced by artforms like improv and/or one-shot focused actual play, it is way more demanding from a table than the label of “light” may suggest to the unaware. Arbitration and design are expected on the fly, as well as more flexibility than “yes, and” and “not, but” through other players’ contribution. As such, After will be exactly the kind of game you love or one that you struggle with. Know one thing: it does not hide behind words like “fruitful voids” to explain why it did not bother design a playable game.

These kinds of games tend to be on the side of “designed to one-shot” in the TTRPG spectrum-treated-almost-as a binary of “designed for one-shot”/”expected to go on forever”; which is why it is surprising how strict in its structure After is. Each campaign of After has five sessions: two of these sessions have unique rules — a “Session Zero” where the structure of the campaign is established, a “Final Act” with unique rules that concludes the campaign and wraps up in a series of epilogues; the rest are “regular” sessions, following the “default” rules of the game.

For a game that expects an audience already familiar with roleplaying games, After keeps throwing curveballs to those that are too into roleplaying games. It knows what people will assume when confronted with concepts like experience or narrative currencies and plays that familiarity against you. It keeps one on their toes and paying attention to what After is trying to get them to do; After may startle those that “already know how these games go” and wanted something they could auto-pilot through with no speedbumps. This makes After a great experience for people that really like improv GMing and rules lite inventive practices but are looking for a game that would challenge them in novel mechanical and narrative ways.

As a game with a well-structured campaign framework for an experienced audience, Session Zeros in After are part of the play experience beyond what you usually discuss in a session zero. This requires you to frontload a lot of the GMing and conceptual work where one would “play to find out” in the majority of rules-light narrative games. By the end of Season Zero you must know why you are playing and what this campaign is about; come prepared for that.

After has a glossary, a feature essential for a game that plays so much with familiarity and expectations associated to colloquial concepts; it is also a feature rare in this artform and that I will always praise any TTRPG that includes one. You rarely need to check a glossary, but whenever you do, it is a life-saver.

Brad

In addition to everything Lhu says above, After is so clever that I am glad I read it, but for the love of god, read it from front to back. You are going to lock into truly a fascinating experience, but it does require that moment of buy in from you.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Lhuzie

After is a game of narrative time-travelling, where a story is told both in the present and in the past, interwoven with each other. It uses the perspective change of a more innocent, less powerful self and its contrast with a mighty present incarnation to layer rich, personal, complex storytelling with simple tools.

Brad

After is a game about innocence and power, where you are different in the present and occasionally get to show us how you were in the past.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Lhuzie

After is a game about doomed choices and the weight of memory and consequences. The role of the past in the storytelling differs greatly from what you may assume from the previous point. It is not about starting in session zero “in media res”, every session a moving present following on the ongoing action from the past; as you play, you learn more of the ongoing present but also more of the events of the past that led to this present.

It is a game about future perfect played in present perfect.

During session zero, you establish the past in pretty definitive terms: how life was for your past self, what the situation is now and how that is different, and your personal conclusion. Before the game “starts,” you already know how you got there. And you’ve have already been marked: you then gain your first Focus.

The rest of the game is played in present perfect. The story is about the present, a present that is ever anchored in that Focus — in the consequences of your past, on the course already set for you. Memories of the past are a mechanical resource, no more narrative in two-temporal frameworks than using Stress in a FitD game is. Flashbacks throw you back to the past: you have to face a challenge in your more innocent, less-capable, yet unburdened by their destiny and archetype; the narrative, however, never marches ahead in the past. It remains in the present perfect, Focus of the past doing nothing to the past, consequences remaining away from what was; it is the present that suffers the consequences. Rather than discovering the past as its own foreign country, it entrenches how your present has to be.

To flashback to the past becomes freeing. It is when you can be a person. When you do not have to fear Experience or Focus. There are so many other stories you can tell, so many things you can be, so many different persons that you can yet be and become. But that is temporary; the past is gone, all that is left is an anchor of the present. It will pull you back; and each time you do, the more your path forward is set in stone.

During the Final Act, the future perfect explodes in a climactic conclusion. This is the path you’ve been upon, set before you “started” playing the game, reinforced every past act or present decision. Your destiny beckons, and you can embrace its power, accepting this is who you are — or resist, drawing on the freedom of the past memories. No matter what, then there is only the uncaring future, shaped by the Focused consequences of a present shaped by a past it could not change.

Not In Media Res, not TTRPG Rashomon, Not Playing to Find Out; narrative time travel like no other that is only possible in this artform.

Brad

There is a constant desire in narrative to frame who people are before they gain power in all fiction. You see it in TTRPGs from the classic E6 and Level 0 concepts of the dragon game to the all too common preludes of World of Darkness and the “you gain superpowers” sessions of a variety of the classic super RPGs.

After chooses to make the most interesting choice it could. By dividing your character mechanically into two separate beings, you are given the stunning and fantastic opportunity to show how power twists and changes you.

This is such a compelling idea that I’m genuinely mad I had never seen it implemented till then, and the game focuses itself on the idea of time advancing, with rules for what happens after the final session. This game isn’t just about the ending, it is one of the few games that is totally focused on actually bringing one about!

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

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You can find part 1 here.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Lhuzie

8DTW engine is the turn of the page. It is an engine very common in solo journaling games: turn the page when prompted/to the next prompt, use the mechanics to obtain that, and add an entry to your journal based on your answers.

Where 8DTW stands out is in how effectively it uses disruption of this familiar, intuitive engine. As the days pass, not only do the prompts start to get weirder, but there is also a more subtle, encroaching sense of wrongness. Small things, which sometimes become clear obstacles to your expectations of the game—unexplained events, missing time, hallucinations, outrageous prompts. The layout has tiny specs of wrongness (or blatantly obvious ones when you’re on the deep end), problematizing the simple turn of the page and making 8DTW.

Brad

The page turn is the engine, and curiosity is the gasoline. I have never found myself so deeply concerned about getting a prompt in my life, all of which drives the deep sense of wrongness.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Lhuzie

Well, this is a solo journaling game about not sleeping. I guess a good night of sleep? Jokes aside, having played this game multiple times, I think it is worth repeating the experience, and you should at least once play it one day at a time.

Brad

A comfortable place to sit, a good night’s rest, and some snacks.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Lhuzie

No critical stress points, really. There are some confusing prompts (for example, once I was told to jump ahead to use a prompt from a later day but was not clear if I also skip three days ahead or just use that prompt instead of the other ones), but nothing that runs the risk of ruining the experience.

Brad

Don’t read the book out of order… Unless it tells you to.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Lhuzie  

Alongside Dragons and Traveler ‘s Tales, 8TDW is an example of how intricate systems and complex ideas can still be presented in an approachable, simple front for the player end through thoughtful and careful design.

Besides that, it is an important work to ponder infinite love, to forgive yourself, and to stop thinking about debts as something that must be repaid -- or to build that as a foundation for morality.

Brad

8DTW is a fascinating little experience, but you should steal its honest and locked-in approach; it doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t, and that allows it to focus on refining exactly what it is. This is what allows its presentation to be such a top-tier example of the solo journaling game.

Steal its fun and focused layout; it never gets confusing, but definitely gets concerning and off-putting in a fun way.

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

Share

Subscribe now

Check the Cybernetic Coven

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

Lhuzie

A small solo/journaling game (a zine-sized zine), 8th Day of The Week (8DTW) takes a minimalistic approach, making every graphic element and design choice speak loud and clear. The cover does a lot of work to establish what the game is about and makes it an excellent example of how one or two illustrations can sometimes serve a game better than one every other page. 8DTW is a small game of simple mechanics, but a lot of labor is contained within. What is there is there because it is needed; what is there creates the proper atmosphere to play the game.

Brad

How much can you pack into 32 pages? A tight design, interesting graphics, a handful of fascinating illustrations, and some tight design. No vast monolith with a thousand prompts, a tightly written journaling game that touts itself as being completable in three hours.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Lhuzie

It is a self-contained solo game, and as usual with games of this size and complexity in the genre, it does most of its work through what the player brings with them.

This limits them in what they can/from what they assume. 8DTW has an easier time than most games of this type as it only needs to assume two things from you: having had trouble sleeping ever in your life and being pressured by some kind of material or spiritual debt.

Being built around what may be as close to a universal experience as it can be, it is also universal in its terrors and dangers. It is, ultimately, a game that evokes the experience of self-harm and reflects the consequences of going seven days without sleep without turning away. It makes clear what the game is about — what will happen for sure if you play this game — and makes sure this experience will be as comfortable and safe as possible.

Brad

8th Day of The Week is clearly written by someone who appreciates the struggle of not being able to fall asleep, and I will tip my hat in that they accurately warn about the experience of even fantasizing about it. The frank discussion of debt, harm and concise opening text carries a lot of solid weight for me. I like that there is even a second introduction section partway in.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Lhuzie  

8DTW is a game about forcing yourself awake for seven days until you unlock a secret eighth-day. It is about self-hate, self-harm, and how harm to ourselves is somehow justified because we don’t harm anyone else. It is the toll that debts places on ourselves, and the extremes they push us to.

Brad

8DTW is about remaining awake for seven days in a desperate attempt to unlock an eighth; it is about the fact that you are doing this to escape the debt you are so burdened with.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Lhuzie 

8DTW has a pretty complex message that tries to communicate and create a synthesis with you/through you, using only what you bring with you.

8DTW is about infinite love, about loving yourself, and about the dire consequences of failing to honor the infinite love we receive from others (and owe to ourselves).

Two philosophers struggle through the game: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Two visions of debt: a spiritual, infinite one; another an exponential, material one. What you have been given versus what can be taken from you.

In Works of Love, Kierkegaard presents love as infinite, as a debt that can never be paid. One debt that you can never hope to repay, and in fact debts, should not be repaid. Repaying a debt is the ultimate antisocial act, a rejection of all the love you have received. This means that you must accept debt as part of existing. This is far from ignoring; just because a debt can never be paid, that does not mean you get to ignore it. Only infinite love — and the associated infinite debt — is comparable with with infinite love. Even the ability to forgive guilt, to clear a debt, is a necessary act of love — not forgiving, or lording over someone guilty or indebted to the potential of forgiveness — is an unloving act, increasing how much one owes to the infinite love.

The denial of sleep is self-harm, seven days in which you draw upon the infinite love given to you by denying it to yourself. The true lender, the true monstrous debtor, is you: when you refuse to forgive yourself, you draw more on the debt of infinite love; when you fail to love yourself by denying the simplest act of love — sleep — you draw more from the well of boundless love. These ideas wrap around yourself as you play 8DTW. What you already knew was a bad idea to do, you realize how much more harmful it actually is.

Now, I have never been a big fan of Kierkegaard, so my knowledge of it was lackluster at the best of time. Even so, one of the final remarks of the game did not sit quite right with me.

I could not recall or find what this may be a reference to, and there is no exact phrasing or direct citation. It seems to contradict what I got from Kierkegaard: yes, while Kierkegaard sees paying debts and demanding/trying to repay them as harmful and unloving, there does not seem to be value on guilt and extracting it. And the onus of quenching love is pinned on the lender demanding repayment/lording over with their ability to forgive debt rather than the debtor.

This is, however, something that the other philosophy the game is arguing with/for voiced often — and one with which Kierkegaard stance on infinite love clashed often. In Genealogy of Mortals, Nietzsche argues that repaying debts is the source of debts. Every society is one of creditors and debtors, drawing these conclusions about fundamental human nature because… German has the same word for debt and guilt. To be in debt is to give permission to be taken apart; repayment will happen, one way or another. You can try to exert your will and morals by repaying your debts; otherwise, it will be taken from your suffering. That Nietzsche was full of shit on this is irrelevant — but make no mistake, he was full for shit, for you you cannot take these conclusions from the quirks of Germanic languages (and the supposed “blood debt” rituals of mutilation he uses to support these claims are an invention from Early Modern dramaturges rather than anthropological or archaeological scientific facts). It is an argument meeting bourgeoisie assumptions of the world, and it makes sense in a world created by the bourgeoisie. When Nietzsche speaks, it is about the Modern Man, not about any other people.

This is why the ritual of the eight-days of sleep deprivation makes sense. It is absurd, harmful, destructive, impossible. And yet, for the twisted mockery Nietzsche paints of the bourgeois society, nothing else can make sense, fully building on its inherent moral puritanism and fascism. Yes, I will sigma-grindset myself an eight-day. Out of sheer will to power. Why not? I hurt only myself if I fail.

Through play of the game these two titanic ideas cleverly form a synthesis in you. Through 8DTW you can get it in ways no amount of German philosophy can convey.

Brad

“There is nothing on earth I have ever bought with money, only things I have bought with hours of my life.”

You trade away the precious moments you have on this earth. Sure, you trade them away for the necessary resources you need to survive on them, but sometimes you end up in a cycle; you are trading away these hours to buy nebulous things, to pay off medical debts, to have a little treat so you don’t go crazy. At the end of the cycle, you still have traded them.

There are people today, organized into online communities, who are rallied around the idea that you should work as much and as hard as possible for as long as you can, until you earn the mythical amount of money that will enable you to enjoy the rest of your life in comfort, that you should spend only what you absolutely need to survive now, and then get to live later.

8DTW is about that urge. The idea is that you can suffer a lot now and then get ahead and even out later. That if you work hard enough, you will be lucky enough that you can square every debt you’ve ever made… But you can’t; a bad run of luck, and you pay off your debt and end up a sucking void for the rest of your life… Wouldn’t it have just been easier to live slow?

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

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You can find part one here.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Brad

The engine of Zephyr is almost too obvious: its Constitution. The acquisition, expenditure, and even the exact kind of Constitution determine what you do in play, how you do it, and what it means to you.

Let’s take a step back first. Constitution is the energy your windfolk gains from consuming food and drink. This stuff is called Zephyr and isn’t just nutrition, but also determines what emotions your windfolk can feel. Zephyr comes in four colors, and beyond simply allowing you to trigger emotional bonds that make reveals easier is also used for…

• Is used to make Reveals, which determine if an action succeeds.

• Influence the scene, creating new narrative details.

• You may discard Zephyr to make reveals easier.

• As long as you have the correct colors in your pool, Entwining with the very features of the environment, making them part of your character, and therefore giving you narrative say over what they do.

• You will also occasionally add Zephyr from your pool into the environment.

• You lose at least one Zephyr from your Constitution every day, and you lose more equal to incomplete Obligations.

Through the Zephyr in your Constitution, you will interface with every other element of the game, which means that controlling and filling your Constitution is one of the core drivers of gameplay elements.

You primarily gain constitution from eating the food you hunt and forage. You will frequently find at least a portion of your day-to-day objectives being “What can I eat/drink to change my Constitution, and what abilities do I bring to the table to allow these things to be done.” which means that having a cookpot, or a hunters trap, or the technique to know which mushrooms are edible are hugely important and require extensive inter-group collaboration. You are going to be debating what’s for dinner and how to get it, to allow you to roleplay as a mountain, and going to have a blast the whole time.

If Constitution is the engine, Obligations are the gas. Obligations are what motivate your Windfolk on this cool journey with their friends, the promises you made that are tasks you will do that take you across Ophoi. In exchange for doing these, you were given not just the mental technology to know how to glide, or what the perfect cut of meat for a roast is, but the physical technologies like a glider or a windfarming kit.

Your Obligations could be anything from helping bridge an old river, to gathering rare herbs that only grow a huge distance from here, to rescuing slaves from the horrible violence of the Salt States. For completing these tasks, you gain the power to weave patterns on your character sheets, granting you strange mystical abilities, from the ability to simply produce useful items, to the ability to actually breathe underwater.

So you are going to go around, travelling with your friends, eating good meals (or bad ones if you fail a reveal), while completing your obligations, you will probably see most of the continent, and meet lots of new weird people and make some obligations with them!

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Brad

Pages 72-73 are vital for Zephyr, they literally lay out all the basic mechanics you, as the GM will need. You should read ahead and understand the comics that discuss the mythology of the windfolk as part of character creation, read and understand what the environments for the different plaques have to offer a wandering group of Ophoi.

Otherwise you just need Chapter 5, specifically the Communal Storefront, which has exactly what technologies do, how much they cost in Oi (the obligation currency), and you are ready to run.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Brad

So. The only pitfall I have to warn you about, the starting obligations you get are how you acquire your starting technologies, both external and social. There is no other random determination, no secrets to figure out what’s right for them; your players will take what they think they need, and you will lead them forward. I would remind them of the drawbacks of taking too much heavy gear.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Brad

I went into Zephyr with a group of people who had a little trepidation; they weren’t sure if they would like it. They left asking when we were going to play a full campaign, full of interest and wonder, and joy. Zephyr wears its inspirations and intentions not just on its sleeves, but also takes the time to explain exactly what they mean.

You should steal Zephyr’s willingness to break with orthodox TTRPG stuff, If you pitched Zephyr to a room full of suits, they wouldn’t even look up as they ordered their security guards to throw you out of the building, and that is exactly why it’s so amazing. You should steal the fact that Zephyr has thought out the whole of its setting and your specific place in it.

All to often, we are told to imagine a better world, a different world, a world that is free of the hegemonies and bonds we live in now, and you need to steal from Zephyr, the idea of actually building a space to play in a world free of them. You cannot build a world that is free of these things until you can imagine it, and Zephyr does a stunning job of having a space that is free of some of these things, if you steal that and do it as well as Zephyr, you’ll get a thumbs up from me.

Zephyr: An Anarchist Roleplaying Game Of Fleeting Identities is a game by Arakauna Media. It benefited from a crowdfunding campaign.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

Brad

Zephyr is a beautiful tome, its front title alluring. That’s not enough for Zephyr; the layout and editing are beautiful, designed to be read and referred to. I don’t need to comment on the art; each piece is beautiful and gives us more insight into the world of Ophoi.

Zephyr is a fantastic example of that rare creature of art direction; every font and every art piece pushes towards not just each other, but towards a greater whole, communicating the ideas of the text and the tone of the book. Zephyr doesn’t ever get overly familiar or clinical, instead threading the needle between them and focusing on a tone that can be playful or serious.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Brad

But how does this come together? Zephyr leads you through itself, teaching you the layers of the game as it goes, beginning with the basic mechanics and building on that as it turns. The book is incredibly well written in this specific regard, successfully reminding you of ideas that you need to build on to make the ideas work.

Zephyr doesn’t include safety tools, expecting you, as someone who is familiar with the hobby, to be willing to look into the text and work the issues out with your group. Session Zero is focused on everyone making sure that they understand not just their characters, but their place in the world, and how that affects them.

The other thing that I think is notable about Zephyr is that it actually has usable inspirations, not just weird references; it explains how they matter and points you to further references if they interest you.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Brad

Zephyr is about the Windfolk, people born out of the emotions of the massive living landmass Ophoi, and of their adventures fulfilling the obligations they have to friend and community. Along the way, you form bonds to each other, to the wonders you encounter, and to the very landscape you inhabit.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Brad

Zephyr is about connection, not just the way you connect to each other but the way we are all able to connect to the greater environment around you. Zephyr doesn’t imagine some unspoiled wilderness, but a living environment where people steward the environment and work together to build a more habitable and hospitable environment for every being in it. Your Windfolk is skilled in survival and navigation of this environment, but not alone; you are part of a group for a reason. Each member is able to contribute to a more comfortable and happier whole.

Zephyr is about so much more than that, I could literally have made this section as long as the rest of the article, but this is the theme that resonates strongest with me. You can literally bond yourself to an environmental feature, which allows you to dictate the things it does, and all you need to do is arrange your feelings to resonate with it. You exist in tandem with the environment, in a bond that is mutually beneficial and that is such a magical thing.

Hi reader, this is Brad solo again.1 Now, before you put on your waders and get ready to hear me whine, I want to be honest with you, First, you need to go and read You Will Die in This Place by Lhuzie; otherwise, you are only getting part of the discussion. Second, it is equally important to note that this isn’t a normal Split/Pary critique… Because much like my braver companion before me, I don’t know if I can actually do that with this game. As a last girding measure, you need to remember that I am hard on solo games, while I will always respect their design, I don’t think they are always for me, and usually skip them.

When it comes to You Will Die in This Place, I am thrilled I did not.2

I also want to be clear with you: it is impossible for me to talk about this without pulling back its curtains and revealing things about it to you. Go play the demo, support it however you can, then come back and walk with me.

What is You Will Die in This Place?

To tell you the truth, dear reader? Genius. But it’s also ostensibly a solo ttrpg about crawling into a nihilistic hellhole that you will never escape. You design your character by rolling stats or choosing an array and assigning them to the World’s Most Popular Statline. The class selection is the first place where the game surprised me, cause reader none of these are the sorta thing you expect! Play Poker, or move one die around for a variety of actions, maybe manage heat in a cursed mech, or build a being to be your buddy! A game that slams in the face of trying to make classes equal and instead focuses on making them as interesting as possible.

Then you enter the dungeon, each floor lovingly described, with a combat system including tracking miniatures and a huge bestiary, a megadungeon that is in fact a love letter to both of those words! Reader, it drips cool; it makes you inhabit a gross and painful world as you read notes from previous adventurers.

Then you die. I suppose you should then rebuild a character and take another run at it. This is where I thought this was going to end, then I’d write up a cute little article and demand an explanation about what’s so fascinating from Lhuzie… But I have a question?

Who Is Charlotte Avery? Who is Samantha Little

Huh? You bought this game from a person named Liz, right? Well, the book opens with a foreword from someone named Samantha Little, who explains that You Will Die in This Place is actually the work of their late friend Charlotte Avery, and that they did their best to finish it, edit it, and release it.

The text is also peppered with notes, essays, maybe? From these two, in addition to occasional notes from their beleaguered editor and reader, KC. These show two thoughtful girls, obsessed with game design, who are intrigued about the very bones and beasts of this art form that I find myself in regular, obsessed conversation about.

These points seemed interesting, but that was the problem, wasn’t it? The game was a brutally hard but interestingly designed romp, but I had become even more curious about what lay in the text behind the text. For a moment, I assumed I was going to have to roll up another character, play it again, and try to get further this time…

That’s when I had the first thought about what I was working with, closed the game, threw the entire article I’d been writing away, and took a second shot at it.

What is You Will Die in This Place?

You Will Die In This Place is the game that every mystery box game has dreamed of being. YWDITP is where the ultimate craft of solo RPG and choose your own adventure were cross-bred and then raised in a sewer by the most hideous monsters of horror metafiction.

YWDITP is the game that actually understands the role the artist plays in the art, and reaches into your brain to help you do the same. I’m not gonna rehash my cowriters’ work; she already told you that these women have different design philosophies, and you can see that in everything in the text.

You see, because I became as concerned with the meta-narrative as I was with the actual narrative, I took a second run at the dungeon and died two floors later than I had previously, and began to consider what I would do next, should I build four characters?

It was then I realized perhaps the most important thing You Will Die in This Place could say.

But Who Plays Games Anyway?

This is a common joke you will hear if you are adjacent to his hobby. No one really plays games, people buy games, they read games, they plan games! But do they actually play ‘em? No.

YWDITP has something to say about this. The very first of Charlotte’s perspective pieces ends with this truth.

“This is the paradox of the indie roleplaying game. Countless hours of creation with the purpose of being played, only to sit on a shelf, read but unused. So why even make playable games?”

This is such a point of contention that I don’t care to reproduce thousands of hours of discourse. But for a moment, it seemed odd to me, why would you include this line at all, in a lean, mean book that clearly has something to say! Every word has meaning, and so I realized the smart thing to do.

I Cheated.

That’s right, dear reader. I went back, and instead of participating in any encounter, I simply did what many of us have for dozens of indie RPGs and adventures.3 I read the whole book, ruining the surprise for myself and finally understanding what the hell this whole thing was about. Then I threw out my second draft of this article, walked away for a week, and marinated on my thoughts.

What is You Will Die in This Place?

It’s everything else I said in this article, and also a metanarrative tale that left me genuinely in tears. It’s a story about grief, about the connections we make on every angle in this hobby of ours, it’s a story about change and transition and how art helps enable those things. It’s also a story about the bitter work of making art, how painful and difficult it is to make something that will not just show the world your vulnerability but has to be acceptable to be enjoyed, and about how this imperfect communication will have to do for all of these things.

And above all else? It’s the story of how You Will Die In This Place.

I am going to be vulnerable here and mention that this narrative connected very deeply to me. The person who introduced me most deeply to this hobby and took me from a stinky teen who only ever played The Dragon Game4 died a couple of years ago, after we had fallen out of contact. They showed me what this hobby could be, and led me here, so maybe I’m just the exact person this game was built for. They are the first person I thought of sending a signed copy of our book to, and I will never get that opportunity. 5

This narrative haunts the game; it makes it a two-point narrative, about the deep melancholy horror of the dungeon you find yourself trapped in, and the deep sense of loss of connection, but the hope that the connection existed at all will make this suffering worth it.

Is It Worth It?

Yes. If you read this whole article and needed to hear that, then absolutely. You Will Die In This Place is a titan in this art form. I’d say I can’t put how I feel about it into words, but here are about 1,400 words on it. I rarely struggle to conclude things like this, but in this case, you’ll have to indulge me in doing something simple. Pick up a game on your shelf and play it, and maybe introduce someone in the hobby to something they wouldn’t normally play.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Lhuzie

D&TT’s engine is built around sojourns and the seemingly compartmentalized worldbuilding phase. They are not truly segregated, but then again, it would not be a cybernetic game if they were, would it?

Two parallel economies push the levers and serve as algedonic signals across the system: worldbuilding points and experience tokens. These are, however, not the engine, not the system—they are the ways in which the different components communicate seamlessly with each other.

The engine, as I mentioned, is the sojourn. The pupil player has decided on what a sojourn the sojourner goes through. Each scene, each challenge, each vignette, is to be redirected to one of the various systems to produce the desired signals. Mediating this is the top level: absolute democratic interaction between pupil and guide. The guide prompts the pupil for details of what they want to do, see, and accomplish and the trials the sojourner will go through. The pupil asks the guide not for permission, but for opinions and guidance. Through this process, they can carefully decide which blocks of the engine the signals go through.

This dynamic, simple, algedonic trouble-solving with immediate feedback allows the game’s system to be extremely complex, capable of absorbing high variety, and somehow take so little cognitive load that it passes as a very simple, “rules-lite” game. Despite never making such claims, it ends up being a light cognitive load game—fulfilling the implication claimed by so many “rules light” games.

Brad

Genuinely, in a rare turn of phrase here, Lhuzie perfectly encapsulates the systems engine here, and I find nothing to add.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Lhuzie

Very little, since there is no distinction between “prep” and “play.” I would actually get the printouts and read them beforehand. Those 10 pages are everything you will need to be aware of through the game. And considering game sessions are expected to be between one to two hours, there is really no harm in throwing yourself head-on and calling a break if needed.

Brad

Read the ten pages of printouts, find your favorite RP buddy, and do the thing!

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Lhuzie

What can this game not teach us? You may play this a hundred times with different people and always be learning something new about yourself. The game is designed to do that and does that very well.

It is also an excellent introduction to cybernetics and how to take systems sciences from something vague and abstract and visualize how it can become part of the games we designed.

Finally, it has a lot to say about how games make artistic choices and why. Why the two players? There are no real systemic reasons this is a game strictly for a duet. You can barely change a thing and be able to get more players. Well, because all the didactic elements and the self-discovery suffer with more players. It is a good reminder of why sometimes restrictions serve a purpose; you don’t need to give anyone permission to break these rules, but you for sure can try to make them the best they could be for the purpose driving the game. This is not an iPhone and right-to-repair, come on; you cannot even count on people reading the book. If they are doing their own things, it is not because you gave them legal permission. This is you being a better collaborator—even if an asynchronous, atemporal one.

This is also the best FitD game, with Slugblaster as a close second, to understand how to use FitD without keeping reproducing BitD even when it is not intended/prejudicial to the game. It is no accident: Kyle Thompson has the eyes of the systems scientist and is the best person that understands how BitD works and where it does not work that is not John Harper. Since not being John Harper is kinda of a requirement to work with FitD in a direction John Harper would not take it, this may be that Kyle is one of the best to ever do it. If you ever want to get into the guts of BitD/FitD, you ignore his work at your own expense. I cannot recommend a better intro to disassembling/reassembling the engine than his deep learning series on Blades in the Dark; it was a priceless resource to me as I was trying to maneuver the changes of different versions and the clash between hype and play cultures, marketing, and the game actually printed.

Of course, as someone whose entire design work is built around cybernetics, and you can see it all over Violet Tangerine and Ruin Has Come, I can point at this game as evidence of the power of applying cybernetics to a game.

Brad

Honestly? I know I said this about Slugblaster but every single widely adopted game system needs people who are willing to look at it and play with its pieces. DT&T is such a fun romp and gives such a fun experience with which to play.

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Dragon and Traveller’s Tales is a game by and published by Kyle Thompson. Content is reproduced and referenced here for review purposes, and is owned by its owners.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

Lhuzie

Dragons and Traveller’s Tales (D&TT) is a delightful little TTRPG that has impressive art direction, excellent use of its art, plenty of gaming tools, and rich, intentional design implemented over the course of five years. Another impossible game, another treat you may be sleeping on. No more!

Brad

Dragons and Traveller’s Tales is a masterclass in understanding the purpose of art direction; every single piece, from individual art pieces to font choice, feels beautifully assembled and pulled together.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Lhuzie

D&TT is a strictly two-player game, where one player takes the role of a pupil and the other a guide.

Despite being technically a FitD game, it changes so much of the game (no clocks, goddess’ mercy, no clocks!) that it requires it to be approached on its own terms. You would probably not notice it is a FitD without me pointing it out.

Speaking of similarity, there is a ludo-educational tone to the game, making it quite approachable—perhaps the most approachable TTRPG I ever played, even more approachable than already quite welcoming pickup-and-play games like For The Queen. While far from a simple game, and definitely not one of those “rules-lites” unhelpful tomes, it is easy to read, run, bring to the table, and to play. It requires little pre-knowledge and makes few assumptions about you: it can be easily played by a young audience, does not talk down to those players or infantilize anyone, and requires very few assumptions from the player-facing side—even when there are some pretty complex concepts and systems doing work under the hood.

It is helped by absolutely amazing printouts, cheap to produce and extremely useful at the table.

While D&TT has no specific safety tools, it is very aware of the need for local and specific tools for comfort and security. Its system structures carve the place for those to be implemented/emerge organic but also connect to a vast library of knowledge about tools; it places emphasis on introducing why, and how they are necessary rather than just listing the same three tools and linking to them elsewhere before washing its hands.

The game has no interest in success or failure, just development. Yes, yes. That's the way, to interrogate which game state every outcome creates and design accordingly.

Brad

D&TT answers a desire almost specifically for me, I adore a good printout, several of you will note that in most articles, I shout out the need for them, goddamn does DT&T have printouts! They all rule, and you should use as many of them as you need.

I frequently complain about games with overfamiliar tones and writing styles, and find myself actually charmed by DT&T’s. I never felt like it as saccharine or overfamiliar, just interested in making sure I understood its expectations and how to best reach ‘em.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Lhuzie  

This game’s title is extremely self-explanatory. This game is about tales of travelers and dragons. You play two dragons: a pupil and a guide. The pupil is learning to use their dragon magic to shape the world, by lending help to travelers as they seek to achieve their goals. The guide offers guidance and helps the pupil accomplish what they believe travelers seek to achieve. Between journeys, they both meditate on the story and create a record of what happens. The pupil uses their knowledge to use dragon magic and shape the world.

Brad

A student and master change the world by affecting the journey and lives of travelers!

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Lhuzie 

IIt is a game about training the next generation of game masters and designers.

Attentive readers may have noticed in the previous point that the described dynamics of the travelers are very similar to those of your typical “TTRPG protagonist” groups. They go around on journeys trying to accomplish things, guided by fate and a meta-fictional hand. The pupil is effectively playing as game master to this group: serving as arbitrator, working on interpreting the needs and desires of players, how to effectively use worldbuilding for storytelling and not for the bloated, database/lorefied/wikification sake of itself. The guide is a collaborator, someone listening to their ideas, suggesting the best ways to handle what the pupil wants to accomplish, offering feedback, and helping the narrative be the best it can be.

D&TT teaches. Many things, to either player, putting them in spaces where they cannot avoid learning. The reason behind this is what it seeks to teach beyond how to be a better player and collaborator. It also seeks to teach cybernetics.

It does not do so by using references to Beer or hammering us with the viable system model. No, it does so by using cybernetics to make the game offer a friendly, approachable, accessible face without downplaying or simplifying any of its complex machinery. By reducing the cognitive load and steps required in signal translation and/or decision-making through legitimate, actual system sciences. Oh, what a delight it is to see a game not only doing game design but also doing science and applying its insights to design.

The deep cybernetic roots of the game start with its philosophy: desired and needed change is something achievable by anyone given support and learning; changing and growing is inseparable from existing.

This game’s excellence is why I have come to abhor the colloquial view of “lore” and “worldbuilding”. The former has come to signify the datasetification of everything that can be content; the latter has come to be “writing to the wiki” sloppification. But it used to mean things, and this game is about that. When worldbuilding meant “storytelling that is done bottom-up, systematically.” Which is sad, and has harmed this artform; no other artform of collaborative cooperative storytelling is as good at doing storytelling from systems. We have lost an easy way to communicate that, but we have D&TT as a spectacular example of this kind of storytelling in the art form, a celebration of the joys of worldbuilding, a rejection of dead lore, a landmark accomplishment in cybernetic role-playing.

It is also a Ryuutama’s spiritual successor, but not to the meaning that concept has developed in the last years. Where the most popular Ryuutama’s successor, Fabula Ultima1, does so by building upon its mechanical core and reimagining it with the benefit of a decade of design, it abandons a lot of the stories Ryuutama was about in favor of the more popular Final Fantasy stuff and being much friendlier to the adventuconquistador assumptions of mainstream roleplaying games (thus gaining wider appeal), D&TT is the opposite. It has no sacred cows to preserve, no mechanics to make a cargo-cult around; it is all about telling the same stories that only Ryuutama had managed to properly deliver. Cannot imagine nothing further away from engine and systems as BitD is to Ryuutama, but in the hands of a skilled systems scientist, that was turned into the perfect way to do the same Ryuutama-style storytelling—and then some more, crossing into something truly unique to D&TT.

Brad

DT&T is about worldbuilding. Specifically building the world your players are invested in, the dragons don’t just choose to build nonsense facts and conlangs. Dragons pick the adventure and then build the world around the Sojourner, this is the primary element of play after all.
There are a great number of games that have pages of information that are useless to the average player and less restrictive to GM’s. DT&T tells you flat out and then shows you how important it is, “If the worldbuilding doesn’t involve the story, why are you doing it?” This is a valuable and important lesson that it teaches exceedingly well.

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