#bundletober 2023

continuing on yesterday's theme of 'games that make you re-engage with books in new ways' today's game for bundletober, the cool series everyone si doing where i talk about . a ttrpg, that i got in a bundle, is the books were wrong by chivu.

the first time i tried to paste this image into my post there were like four lines of space before it i couldn't delete. web site. anyways this is a very short game. one-page, in fact, and none of that duplicitous and scurrilous 'one spread but you call it one page' bull shit. no this is the real deal, one a4 page with barely any formatting to speak of. and it's brilliant.

like the rpgs in lit rpg set, the books were wrong needs a book to play with. unlike those rpgs, it can't be any (or nearly any) book -- instead, it has to be a wiki page for the lore of a fantasy series. which is already a fascinating constraint. i think it could also easily be played with any splatbook or sourcebook for a fantasy rpg -- and would only require minor tweaks for a non-fantasy setting.

they require you to do the exact thing i criticize fantasy and ttrpg lore for not doing all the time, and realize that this lore has a perspective. the books were wrong specifically casts you as an anticolonialist scholar, reading through anthropolohical accounts of peoples and cultures and disputing the colonialist and othering narratives woven into them.

it does this by giving you a selection of prompts to answer while going over different parts of the text you're playing with. the sort of questions that increasingly have been asked in anthropological and historical scholarship over the last century as decolonial perspectives have made their voices heard.

it's a real triumph--taking lazy worldbuilding that often (as i've talked about on this silly little blog) employs the vernacular and format of colonial scholarship and actually engaging with that--not just critiquing it, which is easy to do, but engaging with it and asking you play with it and treat it as malleable. one game like this is worth a million 'um you can just ignore the parts of the lore yo udon't like if you're the DM' disclaimers, in my opinion. it's deliberate, clever, and invites you to do something really cool.

today's bundletober is a game i've already read but wanted to reread and talk about because i think it's neat and also wanted to do something easier since yesterday's bundletober diverged midway through into a mini-essay on sex and romance in rpgs. idle cartulary's blow up hamlet is a profoundly silly game, and i say that as deepest praise.

blow up hamlet is played with playing cards (this is not that uncommon for a ttrpg) and the full text of william shakespeare's hamlet (this is quite uncommon for a ttrpg). i often talk about ttrpgs as an excercise in collaborative storytelling and the rules text as a co-author -- i don't think that's a comprehensive or universal definition, to be clear, but it's a lens that's useful to me in playing, designing, and reading rpgs. many people feel like the central activity in an rpg is playing, or acting, or embodying, rather than storytelling, and i get where they're coming from and respect those ways of playing. however. blow up hamlet is in the most literal sense a game about collaborative storytelling (you are telling the story of william shakespeare's hamlet) in which the rules text is in the most literal sense a co-author (the co-author is william shakespeare, whom you may know from his beloved play troils and cressida).

the core gameplay of blow up hamlet goes like this: you and your friends perform hamlet. you're given a hand of playing cards, which you may reveal (sometimes discarding them afterwards, sometimes not) in order to alter your line, changing anything from the tone of the scene to the direction of the plot to whether or not hamlet is a talking tyrannosaurus rex. it's very simple. but that simple conceit is presented stylishly, with several optional setup choices provided to tweak your table's personal performance of hamlet however you personally prefer.

ultimately i like blow up hamlet a whole lot, because it poses really interesting questions. questions like 'can a performance of hamlet be a roleplaying game? what if you change the lines? what if you change the plot? what's the difference between changing the lines and changing how they're delivered? are you roleplaying, or are you telling a story, or are you acting?' because you could, rules-as-written, all sit down and soberly play out hamlet beginning to end without making any changes, as per the rules of this game. at that point, would you still be playing blow up hamlet?

i like games that make you ask these questions and seriously think about them in the process of reading about and playing them. blow up hamlet isn't complex, but it pushes the boundaries of the format in a way that's still fun to engage with directly, and it does it with style.

there it is, two bundletobers in a day. women can do anything. apollo 47 technical handbook is a delightfully silly game by tim hutchings that's basically one level up from a playground game. and it fucking rules

there's basically nothing to this game, mechanically. it goes like this: one player is playing an astronaut (this role rotates every scene). everyone else is a voice on their radio. the astronaut describes where they are, then someone describes a problem, then the astronaut and the voices on the radio have back-and-forths of technobabble about whether their spectrometer has a code-blue FTU and whether the astronaut can loosen the type-5 2cm boring tube.

you say goofy space words at each other. that's it. this might sound like i think the game is bad but to be clear i think it is awesome. it is at its core just pure play, an improv prompt that is just fun and joyful. the book comes with a helpful long list of verbs nouns and adjectives to help you come up with Space Problems and the solutions to them, as well as a few oither promtps. they all share the same features: they're banal, technical, and if you have the type of autism i have where saying one funny sentence over and over again lights your brain up like a pinball machine, perfect.

i love this. i want to play this. as the game observes, you can play this over any communication channel for any length of time with anyone who's in on the game. and that rules. it's play! it's just pure and simple play, it's erin hunter's game. delightful

hello and welcome to bundletober, the numinous ritual that shall call down the damnation of angels upon our deserving heads. today's game is this party sucks by beating the binary

i won't beat around the bush: i was primed to not like this game much, which is maybe uncharitable--but games making a big deal of how 'queer' they are in their marketing copy always puts me off. this might stem back to my love-hate relationship with thirsty sword lesbians and that game's chronic tone problem, or i might just be a cynical bitch. but this party sucks surprised me in a good way. it's a pretty simple game: it's about a single protagonist (control of whom rotates around the table) going to a bunch of parties to try not to think about their ex, having a bad time, and then thinking about their ex. it's the kind of razor-sharp concept that i think TTRPGs should tackle more (or, rather, that the hundreds of TTRPGs tackling should get more attention) and imo it pulls it off well.

i've been talking a bit on the horizon machine blog about safety tools and which ones i like and don't like--this party sucks does something surprising and invents a brand new safety tool that i actually like a lot. i mean, it's by the author's own admission half safety tool and half play aid and half joke. but it does all those things really well

the IFCOBPC card is a really funny and fantrastic concept and it fits perfectly in this game -- it's a game about a queer awkward twentysomething and that also seems to be the obvious target audience, and it's a play and design space i haven't seen explored--a way to signal this kind of over-the-table emotional response without a complex mechanical framework or the extremely serious and weighty context of x-cards & the like

the other thing i like about this party sucks is that it's specifically three-player. this is a game for three people to play, there are three books, you rotate them round once each, and everything in the game is designed for that. i like this kind of restriction, because it's much easier to design tightly around three people than, say, '3-5' -- and it shows! the division of play roles into the Protagonist, the Venue, and Other People at the party makes perfect sense and gives everyone a fair amount to do. as someone who was a 'forever DM' back when i still played d&d, i now adore games that clearly delineate and distribute narrative power and responsibility.

one last thing--this party sucks has an epilogue mechanic, a real ending. and i love that! ending one-shot games in a satisfying way can often feel difficult, and having a set of prompts asking you to decide on what happens after the game is over is a great way to provide guidance for that. ultimately, though, as much as i talk about tight design, what really made the focus on queerness in this party sucks work for me when for the most part it doesn't in thirsty sword lesbians is the tone--there's a frank first-person tone, no attempt to put on a narratorial persona, only the designer talking about the game from what is clearly and unabashedly their own perspective.

if you want me to look kindly upon your game as a labour of love, talk openly about that love and about that labour in the game's text. you're allowed to do that--often, it will make that game better.

hello and welcome to bundletober, where i look through TTRPGs i got in bundles like a year ago and see if they're good or not. i will be doing this with no rhyme or reason but i will be trying to do one a day. i'll note whether or not i've played the game in these reviews but more often than not i'll just be looking at the book and offering my first-level thoughts. if a structure or something develops over the month so be it but for now the plan is just to ramble about the game a bit and give an overall recommendation or lack thereof

first of all, the cover (by finbah neill) is really nice. a good cover, a smart choice of font, a couple of masking layers over it, can really go a long way.

the game is one of my favourite types of game -- a single, razor-sharp concept. this game is about one thing: mechs that have fallen in love with their pilots, reminiscing on the time they spent together. it is specifically about that and nothing in it can be separated from that.

i've talked quite a bit (including in the pages of my own game, most trusted advisors) about how i think the text of a game should act as a co-author, prompting you and providing bits of story you wouldn't have thought of otherwise--and as an alchemist, transmuting narrative or mechanical input from the players at the table into a narrative or narrative output for them to engage with. LLDR is much more of the former than the latter--there is no real alchemy going on here, it's very much a co-author, asking questions and inviting a simple pattern of call-and-response.

so what are its contributions in that capacity? LLDR wants to tell intimate stories, love stories--or rather, it wants you to tell them. the meat of the game is the thirty-item long list of prompts that ask you (playing the mech) to recount stories of times spent with your pilot. some of them are pretty standard as romantic prompts go, but some create a real sense of place and tragedy -- "When you couldn't save someone" and "When you helped them pick fruit" stand out for me as being deliciously emotive while being specific. this game is at its best when it is specific, when it seems like it has a specific vision (like a huge powerful war machine and its pilot picking fruit together) and is inviting you to share that vision with it, into its secret hidden places to feel private feelings with it.

the only real 'mechanic' other than these prompts -- the only thing that the game asks you to do other than tell short stories based on them--is "marking your chassis". the game asks you to use eyeliner or marker pen to track, on your body, how many scenes you've played out. i really like this--it definitely does something to set LLDR apart from other small prompt-based games like it. it's the closest thing to alchemy this game has, and it's an oddly physical and located thing for a TTRPG to ask of you. i really like it.

ultimately, this is a five-page RPG with sparse mechanics. that's not enough space to set the world on fire. i think it falters in a few places where there aren't quite enough distinct ideas to fill out every slot on a table that needs filling. but for what it is, the razor-sharp concept goes a long way towards justifying the spareseness and tonally i think it's melancholy and warm in a way that makes me excited to check out more of creator reizor's games.

had a busy day, so this is a very late entry to bundletober, the world-renowned monthly event where i talk about a ttrpg i got in a bundle every day of october. nearly a third of the way through! last year is a short game, but a stylish one, from emmy verte.

oh noooo oh noooo tagline type. its a game about remebering............

okay as funny as that typo it doesn't detract from the fact that this game is overall really stylishly presented. the typography and layout on this game are fucking immaculate. just drink in this art deco cool:

god damn. last year is a game about remembering your time at a mysterious, eerie hotel with danger lurking in the lobby, and it looks it.

this is a game for 2 players, which means it needs to have a very tightly themed set of roles, a perfect interplay--2 player games really need to make use of that limitation, and i think last year pulls through in that regard, with the 'pause' and 'motion' playbooks. they match perfectly--they could be used to play out a romance or an intimate rivalry, but they're perfectly symmetrical in a way that seems really fun to play around with. the pause's move "Ask 'when can I find you again?' You cannot know where" and the motion's move "Ask 'where can I find you again?' You cannot know when" are a great example of this great synergy.

last year uses a token-based diceless framework that'll be familiar to anyone who knows about dream askew. this can be a tricky framework to make use of, because by nature of its get-a-token-spend-a-token rhythm, it's easy for things to sine wave around a status quo. it's not inevitable, but you have to design your moves or game carefully to prevent narrative stagnation when you use this framework--last year does this beautifully with a big clock that you can fill in by taking a duet move, remember. when segments of the clock are filled, you answer questions--revelations that tell you the events of the titular 'last year'. each one deals with 'the danger' that approaches in some way, and when you've played out either two or four (depending on how long you want to play for) the game ends.

in an interesting move, the game tells you not to play out defeating the danger. it guarantees that you avoid it, asks you a few questions to think about for the aftermath, but it deliberately leaves the danger shrouded in shadow. it's a choice i appreciate that i think speaks to the ethos of this game--mysterious, shifting, nebulous, deceptive.

almost halfway there. woah. living on a prayer and all that. today's bundletober is interesting in that i'm not looking at a standalone game. the sunless seasons is a blades in the dark--i hestitate to call it a supplement, it's more a play tool or as the cover proclaims, a toolkit--by eskur.

so, for those who haven't played it--blades in the dark is my favourite ttrpg. it's a heist game set in duskvol, a city in the middle of a blighted perpetually dark wasteland, a dark and brooding take on a world like that of dishonored or bioshock that embraces character competence, the over-the-table conversation, and cutting out all the parts of stories and games that aren't the fun parts.

the sunless seasons is a very short set of pages containing tables of plot hooks, vignettes, and weather conditions for each of duskvol's seasons.

the weather tracking works with a pretty ingenious hex grid--you roll to move a counter between these hexes at different intervals--you can base it off in-game time passing or between scenes for when you want a dramatic hard cut. it's a simple thing but it takes another element of 'being the world', of creating an immersive and breathing space to play in, off the sole shoulders of the GM.

the plot hooks provided on the 'weird weather' hex are very cool, too. this toolkit gives duskvol a pulse--i'm always talking about how games can be co-authors, and this is pure game-as-co-author, this is game as someone who interjects 'oh, and it's raining' at the most dramatic point. if you play blades in the dark, you should 100% read the sunless seasons, if not to use it, to get some inspiration for how you describe duskvol. even if you don't, it might inspire you for whatever ttrpgs you do play, or to include something similar in your own game.

this, imo, is better to make a place feel real than any amount of lore or timelines or family trees or could be. it's something material and present, something you use in play rather than just read and forget about. this is how you make your world feel real.

alright i've fallen behind on bundletober (the series of blog posts where i review and talk about a ttrpg i got in a bundle every day) and am hoping to make up the difference by putting out two entries today. this is the first one, and i'm looking at the mecha-piloting, synthetic-armour wearing, blaspheming-against-God-and-his-angels game blazing hymn by peach garden games.

now sadly this game is not a lyric/blackout poetry game about rewriting church hymns to be about gay sex. someone should make that btw. no it's just about wearing highly advanced battlesuits powered by the song of your heart to kill aliens with weapons of pure energy. which is about as cool.

first off, the layout of this game is unique and stylish. there are hexagons everywhere:

the game puts sparse splashes of dreamy pastel colours amid a constantly shifting set of black and white hexagons. it gives the book a visual identity that is at once both visually distinct and also changing massively from page to page. it's a really cool way to mix things up and keep you wanting to turn the page if just to keep seeing what the next one even looks like.

what's the game about? simple. angels have come to earth to destroy it badly. with the power of song, young people can power specially designed battlesuits, called Hymnals, that when not activated collapse down into crystal necklaces. it's a pretty anime concept--the game is pretty open about being inspired by Evangelion and Symphogear, neither of which i've actually seen--but it's cool as hell. the aesthetics of the layout really help bring the aesthetics of the game itself, of technology and ethereal mysticism merged into one thing, to life.

the game uses a pretty simple three-stat system where you build dice pools with a state relevant to an action and can get a full success, mixed success, or failure, depending on what you roll. your characters have two resources, Health, which is what it sounds like, and Gain, which is essentially magical power. because you can swap Health for Gain and Gain for Health at a 1-1 ratio with no restrictions, i'm not really sure why they're separate things--seems like a missed opportunity to not only simplify the mechanics but also create a strong mechanical narrative element by making Gain the only thing that keeps you going--once your song is silenced, you're out.

to create a character, you pick from one of six unit classes--here's where i'd describe the six classes, but honestly, they don't quite feel distinct enough. a lot of the powers you can pick for each hymnal class feel very similar, or are outright overlapping in a lot of cases. this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the descriptions of the hymnals, while trying to clarify their combat roles, all end up seeming to repeat themselves or say contradictory things. i think some direct ties between those descriptions and their mechanics would have helped--i'd find it a lot easier to remember that, for example, the 05 Xyston type "brutal in combat" if that flavour text was followed by a direct reference to one or more of its abilities. they do all have pretty different stats--which, in a game with a very simple and elegant combat system, means i'm confident they play very differently once you hit the table. but just looking at them, as a prospective player, i struggle to tell the difference.

i don't have that problem with the next character creation mechanic, though, which is choosing the songs you sing to power your hymnal. each song, as well as a thematically appropriate set of stat boosts, also prompts a pair of revealing character questions. they're the kind of mechanic that i want to get my hands on because they make it fun to create characters, giving real mechanical expression to the emotional fundamentals of who they are.

the combat system itself seems really, really good. it's astoundingly simple--you're encouraged to use a map, but there's no fiddly grid or distance tracking, just the ability to move between being Close, Near, or Far from an enemy. it keeps the numbers low to keep it getting silly and doesn't bother with any of the unecessary bookkeeping and fiddliness that plagues TTRPG combat as a whole. no initiative, no separate turns--there's a 'player' turn and a GM turn, and during the GM turn the GM picks from enemy's listed actions until they've done two for each player. players can use their abilities on the GM turn, and the game encourages the GM to take enemy actions that wil lforce them to--so nobody's ever standing around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the whole table to rotate back to them, and having a lot of enemies doesn't mean the players listen to the GM talk for fifteen minutes.

there's two unique mechanics that i think are very interesting-- Civilians and Condemnation. Civilians are--well, exactly what they sound like. on their turn, players can use an action to evacutate up to 5 of them. this extremely small and simple mechanic is fucking genius. so many games tell you they're about saving innocent people, but yet the only mechanical verbs you have to interact with anyone are violent ones. as elaine scarry says in the body in pain:

so in a way i think blazing hymn puts its money where its mouth is in a way very few combat rpgs with emancipatory or heroic aspirations bother. angels are said to attack populated areas--you're sent to preserve life as well as destroy the enemy. it makes the game feel fundamentally different, like despite the questionable ethics of hymnals (after all, they only work on young people, who then have to be sent into deadly combat situations) there is something heroic you can do.

the second cool mechanic is condemnation, a reality-warping toxin that angels use to destroy the places they're sent to. this rocks because it adds a ticking timer to the battlefield, a passive threat that forces the player characters to be proactive. if condemnation gets too high, not only is the fight going to get harder, but civilians are going to die en masse. it's a great piece of game design that gives the GM a great lever to pull for pacing and urgency.

i also really like that one of the steps of the GM turn is to 'change the situation', whether that means something happens in the narrative or something on the map changes (a train arriving is the example the book gives) or more angels attack. in general, one of my biggest complaitns about d&d is that unless a DM takes it upon themselves to design additional mechanics and encounters outside of anything the game actually gives them, combat inevitably turns into two lines of people hitting each other with sticks until one of them dies. i love dynamic, progressing combat, combat where the stakes change moment to moment. and blazing hymn delivers.

anything else? oh yeah, the angel designs are cool as fuck.

god damn. anyway despite a few minor issues with the hymnals themselves, the core of blazing hymnal is fucking good, a nice tight and razor-sharp combat system wrapped up in pulsing pastel crystalline aesthetics. if you like cool anime fights and like having the rules to back it up but hate complexity, crunch, and tedium, this might be the perfect game for you. it's certainly given me a lot of cool design ideas to take foreward into my own projects.