This is the conclusion of the critical analysis of Heirs of Leviathan You can find the first part 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.
Ludo
Coming from World of Dungeons, Heirs of the Leviathan has an uphill battle to implement its own engine: after all, World of Dungeons has no engine — just a framework to strap adventurer-conquistador adventures to it.
Heirs of the Leviathan’s engine is modular, with all those little things you set up at the beginning of the game putting different pulls and drives. This succeeds because of the agglutinating force keeping it all chugging along: Leviathan.
While what is Leviathan is permeable, I mentioned in the previous points that Leviathan always takes a certain shape. This can be very literal with Leviathan being an attribute — one that sets up how much of the games of power an Heir is likely to survive.
However, Leviathan’s shadow is large and falls upon the different modular components from different angles. Sources are another part of a character that makes them an Heir, where their power “comes” from; why the superstructure sees them as peers in powers: aka: the part of them that is Leviathan and/or what they can take through power: territory, information, knowledge, armies, interest groups, etc. The sources are powerful: for you to succeed at something you are committed to, you need to leverage them — they upgrade partials to full successes. Without sources, you are just an individual climbing the Leviathan.
But this is also how Heirs of the Leviathan keeps you engaged with its engine. Sources are what power lets a character exploit and extract, but they are not the character. They create as many obligations as they are a source of opportunities. Sources will have demands of their own, and when the randomness flips on you they can cut you off until you make amends — and they may be subject to the consequences of your character’s actions and/or be the perfect target for the machinations of other Heirs and Threats.
Sources are so tempting because of how much of Heirs of the Leviathan is built upon “failure”. Because of the genre and the desired gamestates, Heirs of the Leviathan understands that you are not so much for a specific action “succeeding” or “failing” but the impact of your grand plans and actions in the world and yourself. Your duelist bastard will not roll for hit someone with a sword; it will roll for the outcome of the duel where they hope to kill the usurper’s daughter that killed your family and you are afraid of how many people in the court actually support you. So, when you roll the dice, all the outcomes are desired game states: your attempts at acting the Leviathan may lead to your worst-case scenario happen, even worse unintended changes, you getting what you wanted or a legendary setting-shaking outcome. Because character’s attributes are randomized, and worsen as the game plays, the game pushes one to constantly be looking for ways they can use their sources and/or secure advantages. Any plan is unlikely to go as expected without those.
Finally, intrigue needs time to develop, and the game facilitates that with how Heirs are weakened or defeated. First of all, if two Heirs hurt each other directly — that is, they damage either other physically, mentally or socially, — they both get seriously hurt — and may very well die. This sets the game to be about interfering with each other, to use other characters as intermediaries, and signals confrontations between Heirs the climax you build up to end their stories. Furthermore, while sources of hurt are common, it is quite rare for someone to be truly gone: even when reduced to 0 of Hubris — the Leviathan' derived amount of hurt you are able to take, — the fate can still save the Heir from being removed from the game. And more likely than not, their defeat is one that still gives space for them to return in one form or another. This may not seem like much, but considering that it comes from World of Dungeons (a game that carries the assumption of traditions of omnicide), it is a powerful engine one that makes even your flawless plan end up with you having to still coexist with those you used and fucked over.
Brad
The inherent power of the Leviathan stat is interesting, and Lu and I are in agreeance that it is the central drive of this game. You use Leviathan to calculate HP (here standing for Hubris Points), and it is the most player-defined stat because you all agree on what the Leviathan is/was. You also spend HP whenever you get an advantage, which is another fascinating use of HP as a resource.
Sources make your Heir an Heir, they are what separates you from the lesser folk of your court, and every single character has one at the start. They are not simple engines of power, they can make demands of you, decide that you aren’t worth backing anymore, and even betray you. The unique thing about Sources is that they also are all connected, whenever you introduce one you are expected to tie it into the other Sources into a Source Map.
Whenever Heirs meet in combat one dies, there is a non-zero chance that both die, there is no way to manipulate your odds and the only way to boost your chance to succeed at all is to have the Higher Leviathan stat. This means that Heirs are much more likely to focus on foiling each others schemes rather than force a direct confrontation, it helps reinforce the political themes by making you talk things out, rather than risk a miserable death over an ugly disagreement.
6. Essentials For Session One
So, you got this game, you going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, your have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to try to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the felling of what makes this game stand out from similar art.
Lucrécia
The game is well aware of the unique required buy-in, and how challenge it may get to get rolling — even with the benefit of a simple game; so it includes some pretty neat tools to get you started right off the bat.
You don’t need to read World of Dungeons. It will not benefit you for preparation. You may not need to read the rules themselves beforehand; however, it will be quite beneficial to go through the rules booklet as a group during your first session.
What you definitely should read is the guide. The guide does not go into the rules but goes through the procedures of the first sessions, with plenty of guidelines on how to cover the needed points for collaborative creation of the gamespace. It also goes into why some rules are the way they are, so you are better equipped to tinker with them as early as during the first sessions. It also includes some clear-cut guidelines for one-shots.
Speaking of one-shots, the game includes an example of what a gamespace may look like with Shadows of the Ancient Citadel; it includes many questions and prompts that easily helps you make this realm your own. I found that sometimes discussion of certain needed topics can get stiff or overlook important details needed for building Heirs and Fragments; looking what Shadows of the Ancient Citadel looks like can give you an idea of the key notes you should be hitting during the first session. So yeah, this one page realm start-up and the guide will serve you well getting a game of Heirs of the Leviathan rolling.
Brad
Do a regular check-in, and do comprehensive notes during session 1, make sure everyone is on the same page regarding what the themes mean to everyone. You should always familiarize yourself with the book, Shadows of The Ancient Citadel is a fantastic resource, read that and don’t be afraid to use it.
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 time, 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 (our have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line in page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?
Ludo
There are some points about Heirs creation that may be easy to overlook and lead to stress points later. Leviathan may suffer from “God-Stat” syndrome, and/or enact a rubberband effect and be treated as a purely passive “toughness” stat. While you have no say in an Heir’s stats, and Heirs are not necessarily bound to a specific players, it may be important to ground what stats mean in Heirs of Leviathan. While this will depend on many others things you decide when you start playing, we can do some generalized thinking together as a possible starting point for the conversation at your table.
Heirs start with two Sources, and it is easy to forget that you have an additional one beyond the one given by your Class. This second Source not only is powerful (as a Source), is a very good way to establish what the deal is with an Heir and adds yet another important feature to the world of the gamespace1.
There are some head scratchers, that will for sure cause the rules negotiation the game hopes will happen. One that is impossible to avoid is the handling of consequences: while they are central to everything that happens in the game and there are plenty of mechanics to worsen or ablate them, how they are handled is pretty guideless. Not necessarily a surprise coming from PbtA lineage, however, there is a problem of gradation: when you reduce or worsen conditions, or get additional conditions; such approach feels more “grounded” and some people may need more support to get an idea of what kind of impact their decisions will have. Discussing consequences before any roll with the table and defaulting to Hurt — since basically anything can be Hurt2, — was an approach pretty successful in our games.
I cannot make heads or tails about the fact that attributes worsen as a Heir levels up; it is a decision that is awkward to implement but that carries very strong ideas in it: this feels very important and somehow I cannot get why. What does this mean just to the general idea of level up? As Heirs level up, they become better at playing the Leviathan and shoulder the losses of the political games (increased Hubris dice), you are able to use power to tap from more sources (more Sources), and gain additional abilities (stuff you just use without entrusting to dice and fates). But your attributes decrease just as this happens: why, what is this meant to represent? The tangle of obligations diminishing what you can do as an individual as more and more of your time is spent doing that for the Leviathan superstructure you now are able to marshal? Decay from passage of time? As more people involved in your fate, the more likely it is to go the way you don’t want? Also, one may become worse as a Leviathan while growing into the role of Leviathan? Ultimately, I failed to find a satisfying answer in the games we played; everything seemed like something that could better be handled through Hurt, demands of Sources and Fragments or Threats tied to the passage of time.
This is what levelling up does: you will become more likely to get partials or failures, causing you to suffer more consequences; you get more sources to draw upon to upgrade partials but also are more likely to upset the sources and have them suffer consequences. The Heir also gains new abilities, which lets them get advantage and just do things without rolling. It will be up to each gamespace to figure out with this meaningful fact and what it means for their Heirs and in their Commonwealth.
Wealth and Possessions do not really work. The Wealth attribute does not seem to translate very well to “having things”, and they do not seem that useful information to know. After all, if those items mattered, possessing them would just be a thing and/or be rolled with Wealth, and/or asking the fates if you have the right item and/or cause Hurt when lost. Possessions being derived from Wealth seems odd for how little information it gives and how much confusion it causes3. Wealth is pretty good at handling grand actions where the ability to gather and use personal wealth is key; Possessions may end up just adding confusion.
Abilities can also be confusion, special when one levels up and having multiple sources of Advantage becomes commonplace — a situation that will require creation of new rules. They also hint at complexities that lead to an empty space: for example, Landed, an ability often of the Ruler class gives Fragments, which have their own rules and function as their own character, a hybrid (N)PC-Source. However, others are not so clear — for example, Loyalty and Shield-Master use Companies, which seem as complex objects as Fragments that not only don’t have their own rules, it is not clear how they interact with the Companies changes from Wealth — or what happens to Companies when your level up causes a decrease in Wealth (for example, the Treasure ability gives you also a Company but may put you closer to a Large, and so on). Lucky gives you a coin flip to see if you are killed by another Heir, but you always get a coin flip when you get to 0 HP anyway (and it specifically says when you lose, not in a tie). Abilities are tied to Classes, which people will make many, so how abilities work is going to be something you discuss often at the table.
Threats are not part of the rules, however, they are discussed in the guide and are a powerful tool for characterizing a realm. They have their own rules that are not clear how they interact with the rules in the booklet; for example, they often have Custom Moves — in a game with essentially two moves (maybe four).
Finally, the passage of time is a crucial way to earn XP and advance Threats and the affairs of a Fragment. It is not clear how to advance time, but it should be clear that it is the only way to recover Hubris; however, it is not clear if everyone must agree to advance time together or time only advances to a single Heir — after all, a 12 Hubris heir my find they now have 2 Hubris from a bad roll because someone else advanced time as result of a consequence. The passage of time is another thing you need to decide how you are going to handle it.
Brad
We voted very quickly to replace wealth points as a stat with having specific Wealth Sources and just using those to present things that you would need grand displays of wealth to buy, we did the same thing with Companies, treating these men who are loyal to you as fickle friends.
Leviathan could be a huge problem in a long-running game, due to being both whatever you all agree The Leviathan was, and your source of HP, so its probably worthwhile to define what you can use it for.
Leveling up and making you worse is thematic, but feels really bad and could probably use some table modification, and the way some abilities work is going to inspire a round of discussion.
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.
Lucrécia
One would think, based on the previous section, that Heirs of Leviathan is a bit of a mess. However, while those subsystems have issues, this game is proof of how rewarding and powerful game design can be. Heirs of Leviathan spends a lot of time on how to achieve its self-proposed goal, as focus on stripping all the assumptions one would have tangling the game’s heritage to make a good engine. This pays off every single time there is a bump.
The main lesson to take way from Heirs of Leviathan is to observe in action how powerful a well-designed, concise core is for collaborative cooperative storytelling engine — and it does not even need to be that complex to be worth it.
Another lesson to get from studying this game is about letting go. Production has its limits, and is constrained by such; Heirs of Leviathan focused on the core and ends up being a spectacular, must-check game for it. However, it can be frustrating when so many things seem to have clung, not given the space to match that brilliance, but also have not been removed. Less may have served this game more; it is definitely a thing to sit and ponder about our own projects — should I remove this part of the game, if the only way I can do it is an addition that conveys little of my participation in collaborative storytelling and/or is would be a poor tool. That said, I am left wishing for much more; I hope this game causes enough waves to justify further investment in taking it even further.
Finally, Heirs of Leviathan is an inspiring challenge against “common wisdom”. I hope it inspires people to keep going back to “tapped out”, exhausted “design spaces”. And to try unconventional approaches to games that they themselves have not found to express in attempts made by others. If you think something may work, there is no reason not to try it.
Brad
Heirs Of Leviathan accomplishes so much in its small but mighty format that it is shocking. I came away with a great sense of fondness for a game that won me over in the first read. The main lesson to take away from Heirs of Leviathan is that if you focus on what you are trying to accomplish with a game, and keep that focus in mind, you can do anything.
There is an acceptance in Heirs of Leviathan that I think all of us could learn too. The designer clearly knew what format they were working with and found how to deliver a pitch-perfect design, and aesthetic in the pages.
I hope that we can see these lessons applied everywhere in the future, and for bold design that goes against traditional thought to always win out.
Also, remember you can make custom classes and are expected to make new ones for realms.
Keep in mind what this will mean for Hubris and the Leviathan attribute issue we mentioned beforehand.
“What it means to be the ruler of a Rich Fragment with three sources of wealth and have just a hut as possessions?”