Fellowship 2e (Part 1)

A polished masterwork or burdened by over-design?

Fellowship 2e is a game published by Liber Gothica Games and designed by Vel Mini. Financing of the game involved crowdfunding. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by Liber Gothica Games and Vel Mini.

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 acknowledgement 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 term, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgement.

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Ludo

Fellowship 2e exists in four massive tomes; it presents three stand-alone games. Fellowship, where the people of the world gather to fight an Evil Overlord; Inverse Fellowship, where seekers adventure the Horizon meeting and helping different peoples; Fellowship in Rebellion, bringing hope to a dark world where the Empire won. One would think this makes the books inaccessible, but far from it: the 4th book, Generous Fellowship, is an easily usable archive of everything Fellowship.

Some layout can be a bit crowded, which may cause difficulties to some. Facilitators will need to consider that and make sure everyone can consult playbooks easily during play.

Before sitting down for this review, I used to call Fellowship “the most heterodox member of the PbtA orthodoxy”. I have been, somehow, both vindicated and humbled. Vel Mini’s approach to PbtA is deceptively conventional, only revealing the careful choices upon close inspection. PbtA is not approached as just a system of mechanics, with certain trappings that you can strap on to a genre and fine-tune emulation; Fellowship design treats PbtA as a framework of design.

Treating PbtA-As-Framework allows Fellowship to consider its strengths, the role of its choices, and what PbtA seeks to model, and the flow and culture of play it seeks to propagate and which informed it. The design mastery about what was so exciting about the first two generations of PbtA makes Fellowship special, a work of art that stands apart from PbtA-As-System games.

Fellowship cannot be approached as a “conventional” PbtA game, and that can be an aprocheability problem. It may look familiar, but has entire unique mechanics and flow-of-play, apparently minor changes that change how many things work. The Player’s expectations need to be accommodated and met, otherwise, this may lead to frustration. Putting the effort to overcome “PbtA muscle memory” is well worth it: Fellowship is more than just a remarkable game, but an entire different evolutionary branch of PbtA design. It may be rough for veterans, but with a bit of patience, they are in for a pleasant surprise.

Brad

Fellowship is a stunner, I mean that very genuinely. The art pieces in each section are unique and harmonious, the playbooks are some of the best in The PbTA world, and it does one of my personal favorites and leads with the mechanics everyone will need to know.

I do think it is important to note, that I started off as a Fellowship non-believer, and it wasn’t until my recent campaign of Fellowship that I became a big fan of the game. This was partly due to Ludo’s high praise of the system convincing me to do a look back through it.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly breakdown, 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.

Ludo

Fellowship is a Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) game; this comes with its own expectations and assumptions. However, it rejects or has a unique spin on many conventional elements of PbtA. On one hand, this may present an obstacle for veterans learning the game, but on another hand may be more welcoming for those otherwise skeptical of PbtA.

Players are expected to have greater narrative control in Fellowship than other games with a GM role, even compared with other PbtA games. This responsibility-sharing can be daunting for those not expecting it.

The GM role is more ritualized and restricted, which makes them less of a director and arbiter and more like another player with different responsibilities.

Fellowship takes an interesting departure from the Conversation, considered by many the central feature of PbtA games, and its relationship with moves, either as Moves-Subordinated-To-Conversation or Conversation-Subordinated-To Moves.

Conversation? Sit down and let’s share a story…

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 create a common space for creation.

Ludo

Fellowship tells you it is a game about Lord of the Rings, but also not that. It is also Avatar The Last Airbender, Wakfu, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy and JoJo Bizzare Adventure.

Wow, really? Yeah, pretty much: if there is a villain causing problems in the world and your multicultural group of friends keeps foiling their plans, that’s Fellowship. And this before we consider Inverse Fellowship and Fellowship in Rebellion; these, respectively, let Fellowship tell stories about journeys of awe, discovery, and wondrous potential or about a conquered world where evil is victorious and your rebel against the Empire squashing your cultures.

I don’t know how to process such strong claims; one thing is for sure: boldness in aim and scope, Fellowship 2e has those in abundance.

Brad

Fellowship doesn’t just tell you it is these things, it boldly crows them as often as possible and wears them boldly on its sleeve without becoming slavishly devoted to emulation. Each separate “Campaign Type” of Fellowship makes sure to show you both in the obvious and subtle references what it is about.

It is in fact, bold to claim that one game can do all this. To cover stories from a couple of dudes traveling a continent to brawl with someone, to some homies crumbling an evil empire would require one helluva game.

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 on 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.

Ludo

Fellowship is a game about Culture: each player plays a Champion - even if not necessarily literally, - of their people, a cultural representative. The game is about the Cultures represented by the players, their places in the world and how they cross-pollinate and interact with other cultures - through the interactions within the players but also with the communities they encounter.

Culture is not seen as static lore in Fellowship. Culture is created, explored, shared, and developed over play. History positions a Culture in the world, make it lived in. Culture is also a source of hope, a reminder of what the world can be, how this process is an ongoing dialogue by and for your people: there is a future, an alternative to the despair of the Horizon, evil of the Overlord and hegemony of the Empire.

Brad

Fellowship demands that you, as the Hero, protect communities. The core of the game assumes that The Overlord will ransack them, The Communities need things from The Horizon, and The Empire will oppress them. This makes your players, who come from living breathing cultures, eager to challenge these foes. They naturally develop a connection to these communities, and it creates a wonderful feedback loop, where the players seek to defend the communities, are rewarded for it, and then look for more communities to defend.

Ludo

So, I guess it can’t be avoided; I must confront my analysis back at point 3. With those claims about the game’s wide subject matter, variety of tone, and genre, coupling it with the stunning trove of resources, I can see why it would be fair to consider Fellowship - to some degree - as another attempt at the infamous “generic” PbtA.

However, before proceeding, one must understand how that is a loaded term to give to any game: “convention wisdom”, after all, dictates that tone and genre emulation are the main strengths of PbtA-As-System; the more “generic” a PbtA game, there is the assumption that its essence will be “diluted”, that it tries to hit too many beats and fails short in most if not all - leaving it a game with nothing unique to distinguish from sharper, more focused games of that lineage. Which does not mean there have been attempts, with different degrees of success, from City of Mist to Thirsty Sword Lesbians. These two are good examples of the limitations of PbtA-As-A-System for “generic” tabletop roleplaying, with two quite distinct design strategies that try to overcome these limitations: hybridization with a co-system (the Fate/PbtA hybrid nature of City of Mist) or a metatextual superstructure that creates a “supragenre” that keeps the whole thing together (it is literally on the name of Thirsty Sword Lesbians).

Back to Fellowship. This is where the brilliance of PbtA-As-Framework pays off: because you are not bound to the conventions of PbtA-As-System, you are also not stopped by the same bottlenecks. Fellowship uses its framework to develop its own systems and interactions rather than building on a “vanilla” PbtA skeleton; this careful approach ensures that it hits all the beats it proposes to beat.

I’m baffled at the power of this approach, and I am still grasping for something that cannot be denied: Fellowship just hits differently from other PbtAs.

Brad

I think that the reason Fellowship hits differently is because of the sheer variety of how the playbooks work. No two of any playbook will be even close to similar in the hands of focused and interested players, this really makes the game pop. Every different campaign will feel dramatically different, and it makes it so good.

The Game pops so well, and it really begs to be visited and explored.

Ludo

Just one last thing, just a little thing rattling in my head: I can understand why some may consider Fellowship “generic”, but I want to resist the assumptions many may have when thinking of “generic”.

Fellowship is laser focused on a premise; that premise happens to be wide: Stories about Culture. Within Culture, Fellowship offers tools for telling three types of stories:

• Culture as part of the struggle of the world against an evil vector of Empire;

• Culture as the flow of in/out group interactions in an expanding, awesome world;

• Culture as a form of resistance to imperialism and colonization.

Wide, and yet focused.