Roll to Raise Dead

More thoughts on tabletop RPG systems for the Craft Sequence

Hello, friends! First, fun and relevant: Dead Country is a Kindle Big Release deal this week in the US and Canada, which means that, thanks to automatic price-matching, the e-book should be available at $2.99 wherever fine digital books are sold, including B&N, Kobo, Google Books, and of course the folks over at the Big River Omnimart. The deal lasts through 8/13, I’m told. Happy reading!

Beyond that, I’m head-down on reviewing the copyedit pass for Wicked Problems this week. Copyedits are the last real bite at the apple of revision—page proofs come next, but by that point the typesetter and book designers have done their magic, and substantial alterations to the text require them to re-do all that magic. I try not to revise much during the CE review pass, which occurs after the copyeditor has done their magic—but the intense attention to comma placement and word usage occasions fiddling, and focus. In the meantime, let’s talk about nerd stuff.

When I was nine, my folks used to drop me off at Davis Kidd Booksellers (of blessed memory) in Nashville TN of an afternoon, while they went to the guitar store, bought clothes, and did all the other parent errands we couldn’t in our small mountaintop town an hour and a half away. I hoped those afternoons would last ’til closing time. I thought about that big rambling bookshop the way some kids think about Disneyworld. (Don’t get any ideas, mouse. I see you over there in the corner, steepling your white-gloved fingers.)

I would wander the shelves gathering books, find a cafe table, and there I’d sit, walled off behind a leaning tower of fantasy and science fiction paperbacks. But one day I found something I’d never noticed before: these weird large heavy hardcover books with dragons and spaceships on the cover, and a bunch of tables inside.

That was how I first encountered tabletop roleplaying.

I’ve been an rpg junkie ever since. I read the books long before I played the games—this was post Satanic Panic, after the hobby’s ET-era heyday. It took me years to meet anyone who played, and the books were wildly expensive, and to play the games, I would need dice in weird shapes which could be found in no store for an hour’s drive in any direction. I loved the worlds and I loved the systems through which players explored them. I loved the stories you could tell—that overpowering feeling of potential, the wound-up narrative mechanism each of these systems represented. I loved the weird dice.

So, when I’m asked what systems I’d use to run a Craft Sequence tabletop RPG—and I get asked this question a lot—I find myself overflowing with answers. I’ve written about some possible answers to the question, with their advantages and drawbacks, on Tor.com, but I wanted to share more of my thought process, and how I conceive of the problem.

The Craft Sequence, with its kaleidoscope of post-industrial fantastika, its skyscrapers floating upside down in air, its lich king CEOs, its demon chariot autos and driverless carriages and its necromancer bankruptcy attorneys, draws heavily on a sort of post-D&D gamer’s intuition. One of the setting’s core structural conflicts is between the gods, who empower mortals to work miracles, and the practitioners of the Craft: mortals who work magic on their own. And, of course, mortal magic has a strong risk of wrecking the world. That’s a very TTRPG tension—so far, so Dark Sun, or even Forgotten Realms in certain eras. Characters have classes and professions, which also seems to map. You have the Craftsfolk, of course, once-human sorcerers on the long road to arcane undead immortality, and you have the Priests and Saints of various gods. There are knights and warriors, and people who have been empowered or transformed in some way by sorcery or miracle: magical paladins or cyborgs. And there are engineers and theologians and bankers and risk managers and fruit sellers and journalists and news-singers and longshoremen and, well, most of everyone who exists in our world—just seen through a funhouse mirror, darkly.

This means that one character might be a reality-shattering wizard and their buddy might work in accounting. (Though sometimes, to be fair, it’s reality-shattering accounting.) Rare is the system designed to accommodate both extremes—though sometimes (as in high level D&D 3rd edition) both are represented by accident. RIFTS is one of the few games that encompasses the proper power range from jump—it’s often accused of splat book-driven power creep, and there’s merit to those accusations, but even the core book includes base classes ranging from “Dr Quinn Medicine Woman” and “street punk” to “cybernetic Gundam warrior,” and “immortal dragon master of all magic”—but if you play RIFTS, well, you’re playing RIFTS, with its four hour character generation, its ad hoc and wacky rules system that most GMs in my experience just handwave away, and its predilection for trademark and copyright symbols.

Another approach to the challenge is to recognize that a fun tabletop RPG session is not, principally, about ‘character balance’ or power parity (so long as you’re dealing with a comradely group)—it’s about player balance, ensuring that all players feel they contribute to the evolving story, and that their contributions are respected and valuable. So you get systems like FATE, which focus their mechanics around narrative, rather than on characters’ ability to accomplish certain tasks. 

In FATE Core, characters’ main features are their Aspects, which are ‘tagged’ for effect in the fictional space of the game using an economy of FATE points. One character might have the Aspect “Strongest in the Seven Realms,” and another might have the Aspect “Weaselly Little Cheat!,” and while the two Aspects mean different things fictionally, they have similar functions in terms of driving story. It’s a great fit for a Justice League style game, where you have PCs who can fly faster than the speed of light or manifest spaceships using the boundless power of their imagination, and also you have Batman and Green Arrow, who are basically rich guys with good personal trainers and an idiosyncratic approach to public service. But this strength can be a weakness. If the immersive fiction slips, characters in FATE can feel same-y, and the set-spike rhythm of creating and tagging aspects loses the sparkle of surprise. Many players care about self-expression within a ruleset—about creating a character who works differently from the other characters at the table—and vanilla FATE has less to offer them. 

Powered by the Apocalypse games, and their derivatives, present a third path, offering character “playbooks” studded with “moves” that provide mechanical as well as fictional variety. One playbook in teen superhero game Masks: A New Generation, for example, is a magical child with a Dark Destiny, and another is the sidekick of a popular and powerful adult hero. The first might have a move around ‘embracing my inner darkness,’ and the second might have a move of ‘remembering my teacher’s lessons.’ Monsterhearts, the high school-students-are-monsters PbtA game, has a kinda-sorta Mean Girl playbook, and a kinda-sorta Werewolf punk boy playbook, and so on, with lovely ambiguity as to whether the Werewolf is actually supernatural, or whether the Mean Girl isn’t. This approach sings in broadly-understood genre spaces, like “high school drama” or “superheroes,” where players know what sort of characters populate the space, and what sort of stories those characters imply. It’s harder to create a PbtA character who hasn’t been anticipated by the playbooks on offer—the PR handler who works for the celebrity mecha squad, the superheroes’ non-super powered medic. This doesn’t matter in many settings or for many groups, but that kind of tonal contrast and invention feels important to Craft Sequence stories to me—I often find myself asking “what does this more or less mundane job or calling or experience look like here? How is it twisted, distorted, revealed?” Playbooks are a great springboard but can feel Procrustean if a player’s idea doesn’t match with the playbooks on offer. It’s wonderful for an entire game to be interested in one big idea (“loss of innocence,” “fall from grace”), but it can also feel airless. A dungeon romp will be enriched by a powerful emotional moment; sometimes a crushingly brutal adventure needs a ray of light.

It’s also worth asking what the core experience of a Craft Sequence game would be. What is the game loop? How do characters spend their time? One large and pedigreed section of the hobby (Pathfinder, D&D) focuses on adventure through the lens of small unit combat, with many rules for engaging monsters, exploring treacherous terrain, etc, but fewer rules or even guidelines for, say, institutional politics. Then there are games focused on mystery solving or exploration—like Pelgrane Press’s Gumshoe system, brilliantly elaborated into Swords & Sorcery-land in Swords of the Serpentine, or MCG’s Cypher system, or Apocalypse Keys. There are highly episodic Do Crimes style games (Blades in the Dark being the modern anchor text, but if you want to look further back you’re looking at Shadowrun, Cyberpunk 2020, etc). There are Theater of the Mind adventure/angst games of the World of Darkness variety. 

All of these loops are fun, and any of them (most?) could work in the Craft world—certainly there are people out there in the far corners of the Craft map doing OSR dungeon crawls into God Wars ruins (and damn, now I want to write their story… though I did in Ruin of Angels, I suppose), criminal gangs expanding their influence, wizards playing wizard power politics, and so on. To my mind, the key feature that would mark, say, a dungeon crawl or a murder mystery as Craftlike would be not skeletons (though always a plus!), but entanglement. Characters accumulate allies and enemies; their actions take place within a larger political and social context. You gotta serve somebody, as the man says. The world isn’t a static backdrop, but neither is it totally reactive to character choice. It is possible to do good in this world—to solve a mystery, stop a war, save a life or an entire city. But what’s ‘good’ is rarely simple, or obvious, or without consequence. That draws me to systems with elements like the 13th Age’s Icons, or factions in Swords of the Serpentine (and to a lesser extent Blades in the Dark)—systems that tie the characters’ choices and their powers into a developing, organic social environment.

There are piles of games and systems I have not mentioned, either because I haven’t played them yet (Burning Wheel, Morkborg, Troika!) or because there just isn’t time. I don’t have any solid answers to this question, but I love thinking about it—at heart questions of gaming system are questions about theme and character and pace and pattern, they’re questions about what’s important in the world of your story. (And what kind of neat dice you get to roll.)

If any of you have tried to run at Craft-world ttrpg adventure, let me know! I’d love to hear how it went.

And, if you’re wondering how I could talk about a Craft-world rpg for over a thousand words without even mentioning magic systems—stay tuned for: magic systems!