Flying Circus (Part 1)
Flying Circus (Part 1)
Pushing the PbtA framework to its limits and taking to the skies
Flying Circus is a game published by Newstand Press and designed by Erika Chappell. Financing of the game involved crowdfunding. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by Erika Chappell and Newstand Press.
1. Every Individual Component Is The Best
In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we do not 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 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.
LudoEven with our usual caveat that every individual artistic element of a game is the best, there is something remarkable about the way this book is put together. This art form is infested with Auteurs, who subordinate the work of extensive talented teams under “a singular vision”; for all their claims, the closest to a singular author’s vision made manifest has to be Flying Circus. Almost a one-woman-tome, the effort poured into the book and every choice within cannot be overlooked.
Flying Circus is a passionate work about complicated machinery military hardware. War and violence are a part of this post-apocalyptic world. As well as the book tackles these themes, it is worth warning those seeking this game.
The setting is a hyper-real depiction of a World-Germany. It is a fantasy — and treated as such, — but it may be one that not everyone is comfortable sharing.
The game is also very horny.
BradSo, I am in firm agreement with everything Ludo says, but I want to briefly discuss art direction. Art direction is the overall artistic aspect of a project, and most importantly the idea that it feels cohesive, there are a ton of beautiful, and well-designed TTRPG books, with poor art direction, but Flying Circus isn't one of them, every single piece in his wonderful game feels like it belongs as part of a greater whole.
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.
LudoThis should be the hardest game for me to meet at its level and accept its terms. I don’t have a horny bone in me. I am exhausted of “Ghibli-inspired” non-sense. I walked past an aeronautic museum every day for twelve years and I still don’t know what a plane is. I’m skittish around weapons and violence. And a Kaiserreich world where Germans dictate all culture and social affairs? That’s just “Europe” to me.
And yet.
The game oozes charm. It hits you over and over with the daring spirit of the young aces and the fascinating complexity of the machines they fly. It is a beautiful post-apocalypse, one that invites one to think beyond our own toxic capitalist realism and embrace the fantasy of liberation. It is a new world; it is a beautiful day and you are a horrible young adult.
Perhaps I too can fly.
BradFlying Circus was a perfect treat for me. I love the idea of flight and find the concept of aerial aces fascinating. Flying Circus, sees that and embraces the idea of these larger-than-life weirdoes. The pastoral post-apocalypse vibe here is not simply window dressing, but uniquely explored and used as a way to challenge you as a player and create wonderful tools for a gamemaster. I too love to make my action figures kiss, and Flying Circus doesn’t just want them to kiss, it wants them to cry about others kissing.
Erika Chappell, the author, also has one of the most enjoyable voices in TTRPG writing I have ever experienced, it is clear she is having fun with the game, and it invites you to enjoy reading it and compels you to have fun with it.
LudoRight. I almost forgot the game’s politics. The game is set in a post-imperial, post-national, post-apocalypse world (don’t worry liberals, capitalism is still around); it explores the ideas of cultural hegemony and how the end of the world gave young people and the marginalized control of their future.
The game is worried about inclusion and making itself safe and comfortable for as many people as possible, taking care to address elements of mechanics, setting and play culture . This includes taking a hard stance against fascism, both in the text, sub-text and meta-text; no space for doubt there.
Flying Circus is an anti-war work, one that stands out, but not because of how much it enjoys its war machines. While critical of war and imperialism, the game does not fall into the trap of confusing passivity with pacifism; our pilots and others that take to the sky do so because fascism and imperialism cannot be allowed to return: peace cannot be achieved while the sources of violence and oppression remain.
BradAnother important part of the politics of the game is how it handles fascists. Now, if you read German-inspired, post-war, and pastoral and got nervous, don’t worry when I was first reading the book, I did too. But then I got to them and had that worry firmly and quickly addressed.
The Fascist Faction — The Gotha — is explicitly uncool. They are a faction of old men using young men to keep fighting a war that everyone lost. They have no secret advanced technology, no old-world magic to hold them together, just a culture that grinds up promising young people and turns them into battle fodder for old cowards. The officers dress like idiots because they think it makes them look cool.
They are a group of the dead, who are only still fighting because they are tweaked outta their minds on amphetamines, and the only true evil amongst them is the men at the top. This is exactly what I want from the fascist faction, a group who isn’t cool, whose leadership isn’t sympathetic, but who the people they are using as tools are. I think a less talented or aware writer could have made dangerous missteps, but a lot of skill is shown here alone.
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.
LudoFlying Circus introduces itself as such:
Flying Circus is a roleplaying game about the fantasy and reality of a flying ace in the early air combat.
The fantasy and reality of a flying ace; it has an obvious and quite literal interpretation in the game’s setting: a fantastic Germanic-inspired post-apocalypse of sovereign fey and sentient death-clouds. But it is also the more personal fantasy of taking the already larger-than-life demigods of aviation and making them even larger.
There is no shortage of “reality” in the stated goals of the game, for it promises all the fun and joy of intense, dynamic and tactical air combat — all without the burden of cognitive load and with a grid-less, free-environment action. This extends beyond the aerial battlefields: you can dive deep into the glee and possibilities of customizing a complex machine and making it fly just the way you want it to fly.
Flying Circus is well aware of its themes and what means to meaningfully engage with them, showing an unfortunately rare sense of consciousness and reflection; one cannot confuse its approach with the trap of reproducing “misery tourism”. Flying Circus creates a space where topics of culture, race, identity, violence, death, queerness, sex, intimacy and youth — especially youth tied to the above — can be safely made part of personal histories of daring in a world reborn.
BradFlying Circus doesn’t just engage with its themes, it plays with them. With that wry voice mentioned earlier, it gives you winks and shoutouts so that you know what inspired where, but it dares you to do something bold with these ideas. That each playbook opens with a discussion about who they are to the setting, and the themes contained therein, really helps make a decision about what you wanna play.
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.
Characters are created from a cultural archetype, represented by their playbook. Playbooks in Flying Circus do not as much represent who you are, but where do you come from — what you accept, what you reject, what you learned. This is, indeed, a great starting point for larger-than-life characters but alone does not deliver it; however, when ran through the mechanics of trust, learning moves from other cultures, indulging in vices and courting and losing confidants, your characters are always pushed to escalation and daring-do. Even support systems, such as company mechanics and combat masteries further elevate you towards legend-making behavior.
Creating a faithful and engaging depiction of aviation and air combat while rejecting the trappings and expectations of wargaming is a bold endeavour. Flying Circus manages to unshackle itself from the boundaries of the map, miniatures and to a lesser degree, even stats; all while not making itself less “crunchy”, remaining tactically satisfying, all due to the carefully designed energy system and the way all subsystems feed back into it.
We will go further into energy systems later this critic, but the back and forth between speed an altitude turns every dogfight into a competition about getting more buck for your energy; every edge will be converted into an advantage later in the fight. You can use the many other systems and go as deep as you want to get more from this exchange.
One is justified in worrying that such a complicated and niche combat would have an intense cognitive load; the cost of abandoning toy planes and the comfort of the grid. There were various, redundant and intentional design choices that make sure the engine keeps running even if things are forgotten or mistaken; even having any knowledge of planes is not required: it is a system based on what is basically moving things between a complex token economy where energy is the currency — if you get this, you can become a terrifying ace. An example of how layered simple rules keep this combat system working: the moment someone or something stops mattering for a scene, they are gone — to put in another words, pilots have no object permanency. This, combined with other mechanics that work without object permanency, relaxes the cognitive load significantly: the mountain exists when you need to dodge it, it disappears once you are not at risk of crashing into it. One could also expect that the game becomes exponentially cumbersome the more planes you put in the air, each of them with their own energy economy to track, with the game easily overwhelming unsuspecting players. This is avoided with asymmetric enemy design, allowing one to create a target-rich environment without bogging the game down with unnecessary bookkeeping.
This and many other considerations weave together to create a comfortable, low-cognitive load, yet mechanically rich roleplaying game — a pleasant surprise, as of recently, even seemingly rules-light games have become high-cognitive load and bloated with confusing design choices.
The themes Flying Circus proposed to explore are present all over the book, and it is impressive how Flying Circus manages to create spaces force such topics to be used as part of the creation of art. There is an over-consciousness permeating every choice, showcasing a worry about making it safe while not shying away from the hard and messy themes it proposed to explore. This care and sense of responsibility is remarkable in an art form where this is often done by a veneer of “wholesomeness”, making this, perhaps, the best handling of a gaming and art roleplaying space centered in war, violence, youth, sex and the struggles of living through the shadow of culture and imperialism.
All in all, Flying Circus crosses all boxes it proposed for itself; an outstanding game with a very strong sense of identity.
BradLudo once again hits the home run on this, but I am gonna talk about a perfect intersection of theme, mechanics, and reality by talking about the ways one can customize their aircraft. Because dear reader, you can customize the everloving heck outta your particular plane.
Do you want to change your guns? Doable. Do you want to alter your wings? Doable. Do you want to swap out the engine, coat the thing in metal, and turn the wings into big swords? Doable (no really). You can customize down to the smallest detail in this game, and with the fantastic Plane Builder linked down below, the math will be done, and your stats will be adjusted.
From the tactical guys standpoint, this rules, because, you can literally redesign huge aspects of your plane to complement the things you want to do in combat. Each playbook is pretty flexible, but even if you find yourself focusing on dogfighting, you can then make your plane faster, and more effective at turning, and now you are the Ace of Dogfighting.
From the historical gals standpoint, this rules, because this shit happened all the time. People love to customize their vehicles, and more than just a paint job. In the early days of aviation, discoveries were driven by pilots rolling up to an engineer’s door and demanding something better.
From the thematic person’s standpoint, this rules, because who doesn’t want their larger-than-life aces vehicle to be unique. We all want a custom vehicle, it is the coolest trope in any media with a vehicle for a character to have a custom vehicle from Char’s Zaku, to Max’s Pursuit Special. We love our little guys to have weird vehicles.
Everyone who could have a reason to customize their plane, will walk away thrilled.