#greyplainsttrpg

The cover to the Greyplains: Core Guidebook is a very designed product that is intended to express the themes of the game as quickly as possible. It also a weirdly dense piece (because of its nature as design) despite depicting relatively few key elements. The art is made by the marvelous Mirel Crumb.

This is a full/earlier sketch of what is now on the cover. The same image wraps from the front of the book to the back, crossing the spine (you will see pictures of this later).

You'll notice a couple of things here that are distinct from most other TTRPGs:

1. The background of the book is white and the composition is pencil. There are other books that do this, but it is not the majority at all.

2. There are no people or monsters in this composition.

3. The only elements in the scene are environmental and a single object, a sword, which is centered to the bottom and very small.

I can explain each of these points (and why they are important).

1. It will stand out on a TTRPG bookshelf. It stands out on my bookshelf (please excuse the books on my shelf, it is mostly D&D I promise I play other games).

2. The piece is a first person perspective of a character entering a scene, and that's why you don't see any characters depicted in the cover. I want you, the player reading this book, to feel like you are in the adventure. This matches the intended tone of the gameplay.

3. The scale also communicates the scope of the game's rules as well as the tone (more naturalistic within fantasy). Ultimately, this is a landscape with fantasy elements, and that's what the game is like.

Let's look at how the book manifests in its final, printed form.

This is the intended way that a person is meant to view the piece. They get about half of it from the front, half of it from the back, and the rest on the spine. While, yes, that does in fact literally describe the cover of every book (I get that), the piece plays into this design structure. The intended engagement is that a player is placed at a table with the book in front of them, they open it and use it to make a character and/or play the game. They might flip the book over to read the summary, but they probably won't. They won't really understand the whole piece and its context without seeing the spine, and at that point, the player might own the book. The structure of the book makes you want to investigate it. It has a natural flow that encourages the player to search the environment. By holding the book, you are emulating the experience of playing the game.

The opposite perspective is that somebody sees the game on a shelf at a store. The spine being part of a larger piece is intended to entice the viewer to pick it up and see the rest of the art. The image cannot be conveniently understood by just looking at the spine; you have to actually pick the thing up and look around to get the "whole picture."

The sword on the spine comes from the Greyplains main campaign. The encounter is presented pretty much exactly like this, and the sword is sitting there on a piece of scorched earth just chilling. It is begging for someone to try and pull it out, however this is a terrible idea (obviously). Touching the handle kills the target and sucks their entire life essence and flesh into the sword leaving behind only the person's skeleton, which then sinks into the ground. It's an obvious trap. You can't "I disarm it" on the sword. You can't dispel the effect (unless you come back with much better magic). It just gets to sit there, menacingly. The only way to solve the sword encounter is to accept "you know, I don't understand this situation, and I don't really have to play along." On the onset, it seems like just a dick move (and it is), but by the end of the adventure, the party encounters several other of these swords and can begin to understand what they do, how they work, why they are here, and how they can be sundered. The point is "you don't have to understand everything, now, the more you engage with the game, the more things make sense." And that is also what I'm getting at with the book.

The juxtaposition between the forest landscape and the unnerving crag is also part of the themes of the game. Much of Greyplains is, what I would consider to be, a pretty familiar, "vanilla" TTRPG experience. However there is also a throughline of strangeness that intentionally makes the book, as a whole, feel both familiar and alien to the average TTRPG reader. The cover is designed to feel familiar and alien at the same time to a viewer.

This is a companion piece to my 5e Villain Arc. In my first villain arc, I mentioned that 5e was so bad that it sent me into an angry writing-binge since 2018. That writing project is Greyplains. With the second, and I believe "definitive" edition getting finished (at least in templating, writing it is still an ongoing project), I feel comfortable enough to fully discuss how 5e is a direct anti-inspiration for Greyplains.

Before I talk more about the numbering of Editions, I think I want to take this time to explain what "Greyplains" means.

Greyplains: A Weird Title

First of all, I think "Greyplains" is a pretty good title. I've stuck with it since 7th grade. That would have been like 2006? Fuck.

Dungeons and Dragons is a fairly accurate summary of what you will experience in the game. It’s a good title. It’s hard to argue with success. Below, I’m going to explain what the title, Greyplains means, but I would like to hear your responses, actually. Either in a reblog or a comment, let me know what you would assume Greyplains is about by just hearing the title (before knowing what the explanation is). What kind of mood/feelings/expectations do you get from the title, Greyplains? It’s hard for me to imagine what others think of the title because this has been such a solid part of my being for so long that it is hard to see outside my own perspective. 

Greyplains is composed of two words: Grey and Plains. This is reflective of the magic system in the base setting of the world. Greyplains, as a world building text, is extremely interested in engaging with the assumptions of a "kitchen sink" fantasy world and digging for answers as to why it functions the way it does. Why do the gods care about their subjects? Why do they have domains (fire, wind, earth, art, smithing, etc.)? Why do the undead attack people? Why, if there is magic, do people die? How do monsters work? All these things and more have discrete and somewhat insane answers in the Greyplains setting.

The basic idea is that all elements of reality are composed of some percent-composition of magic. This material magic is called "souls," and different things (people, places, objects, creatures, etc.) have different amounts of Souls. Souls are 4th dimensional matter, basically dark matter, that is tethered to mundane matter like a square is a part of a cube or, more accurately to this case, like a cube is a side of a tesseract. The Soul, thus, can benefit from the organization of matter from which it is tethered to, and more complex combinations of Souls can be formed as more of the possessor’s mundane matter becomes ensouled. Magical elements are made (where magic items come from), magical cells, being organic machines, can be formed (monsters), and creatures can increase the percent composition of their body that is Ensouled by going on adventures (heroes and Player Characters).

Gods exist outside of the Prime Material Plane, and they are beings completely formed by magic, principally as the coincidental result of planar tectonics. This collection of magic and souls creates a functional personality. The issue with being a god is that everything you do consumes the resource which makes you alive (souls and magic). Thus, the only way to grow is to find ways to get more souls from other sources. That is the reason why gods have domains. To the gods, all the elements of reality are capital investments. Humans are an ideal subject due to their natural ability to accumulate ensoulment compared to their short lifespan. Thus, a human will on average yield a lot of souls over their life, and thus gods seek devotion from humans. In order to get this devotion, they will intervene in strategic ways to maximize their returns on investment. They will subtly influence things, they will give guidance, they will give inspiration. Occasionally, if absolutely necessary, the gods will intervene in moments of crisis, but this is rare and extremely expensive. More likely, the gods would prefer to sell off their investment and refinance their portfolio into new domains to adjust to the shifting order of the world. Why defend Constantinople when you can liquidate your shares in Byzantium and instead invest into either The Ottoman Empire or the Tzar of Russia? That kind of thing.

To get these souls, the gods rely on middle-men, called the Bealdres (singular Bealdor, who you might recognize as the old english version to the norse Baldr, as in the brother to Thor. Also from some game called Baldur's Gate?). The Bealdres of the Prime Material Plane are the Riftere, essentially the folk character Death from Death (the Grim Reaper). The direct allusion to reaping in a field of wheat is the operative source of the name Greyplains. Souls are like the berries of wheat, and the straw are the human bodies which contain them. Death is the only outcome when life is a traded commodity, and the gods reap the fields of reality. Despite this darkness, there is light in the lived experience of being alive, thus the world is fundamentally "grey." Thus, Greyplains.

Greyplains is interested in the relationships between feudalism and capitalism. The lived experience of people in Greyplains is feudal, however the entities which exist outside the scope of reality are engaging in capitalism. This progression of increasing denaturalization of the human experience through commodification is one of the central themes of the world building and in the text of the Greyplains rules themselves. While playing the game, you are heavily encouraged to look at your character as a pile of mechanics that exists to solve problems, because the joke is that you, the player, are in a position of playing "god" with the Characters. You are encouraged to dehumanize your own PC in order to reach the outcome of farming EXP, and you are supposed to feel the inherent conflict of learning more about this "living" person over the course of the adventure. Greyplains instructs you to treat people as tools, and it also exists to make that experience extremely painful. Greyplains is designed, from the ground up, to be a pain simulator. This is what Greyplains has in common with Wisher, Thurgist, Fatalist. WTF is just more upfront about the kind of experience that you're going to have. Greyplains uses math and hard-to-decipher probabilities to arrive at that position. The true goal of playing Greyplains is for the Player to hate themselves for what they've done to their Character; for you are the darkness and they are the light in a field of wheat. They gather the berries and turn it into bread, and you digest their lives and turn it into your own experience. Upon learning the truth of the Greyplains magic system, you are forced to confront yourself. I guess I came up with an alternative (and in my opinion, more interesting) to Roko's basalisk in 2007, three years before LessWrong had a terminal thought abortion and cursed us with the stupidest fucking billionaires of all time.

The game achieves this result by generating an intense verisimilitude with its mechanics. Greyplains encourages the GM to stop players in their tracks and force them to answer important questions about what they are doing, how they want to go about it, where they are getting the resources to spend on it, etc. Because GM powers are democratized to the table (in the sense of what exists in the world), Players also get a lot more influence on what the world is like (as a direct response to their Character’s abilities).  This ability to forge reality using their character adds to the verisimilitude and it makes reality directly attached to that character. Thus, when the character dies (because characters are very vulnerable to death in Greyplains), reality itself feels vestigial. I find it somewhat hard to explain, but it is very impactful. It almost feels apocalyptic when a relevant PC dies because so much of the reality around the adventure was tethered to them. And now that they are gone, reality remains but the Character does not get to live in it. It’s really tragic, and as the game designer it is really funny. This situation exists at the same time as the Level 0 mechanics, which I have explained in another post, essentially forbids players from “creating a backstory” at the beginning of the game. The only things we know about a PC are what they do and who they are based on the needs to solve problems during a session. But the emotional result of PC death is so much more intense in Greyplains than any other TTRPG I’ve played or ran. 

I'm working on my seminar explaining "Value-Negative TTRPG gaming." One of my points is to build situations with unclear morals. I talk about conceiving of the base problem as a series of escalating trolley problems, and I'm pretty happy with the result.

The goal of creating "narrative storytelling" out of a game is somewhat perplexing to me. A game isn't fundamentally compelling because a narrative is present. Every slop movie tie-in video game from the mid 2000s can prove that. Instead, what makes a game compelling is its capacity to create interesting gamestates. In games that have a narrative element, the narrative can be a part of the gamestate, but the purpose of the game is not to create a compelling narrative.

Greyplains is very interested in using emergent narratives as elements in the gamestate. This is due to its quantum stance on elements in the scene. What this means is that anything that has not been properly defined can be probabilistically generated or modified in the scene. Early on in a campaign, characters have little-to-no "backstory" to inform the player how they should engage with the narrative. This is actually a good thing, because it means that players can start the game solving problems purely by the logistics of the gamestate, and they can generate who their character is as the course of resolving these gamestates. The "board," as in a game board such as Chess or Go, is open. The only elements on the board are the board itself and the rules of the game. Players view their character and their narrative function as a tool to resolve gamestates. This in contrast to what I have observed, at least in the 5e space, where GMs are expected to create gamestates which feed into their character's narrative characteristics.

Greyplains takes this narrative neutrality to the limits. In my most recent run of adventures, I have the "hook" of:

You are traveling to Far Tower. You are a days march (7-hours) away. There is X (where X is the randomly generated environmental problem) in front of you.

This intentionally leaves it within the quantum state exactly why the party is going to Far Tower and what is at Far Tower. However, the series of decisions used to get past the first obstacle often inform the tone of the rest of the adventure. Players are invited to play in flashbacks to provide context, build out their inventorties, and develop the present of the gamestate by intervening in the past.

As the players develop their characters to solve problems, the parts of their backtories that get developed are able to immediately be used because they were designed to be used. Their personality is contrived for the sole purpose of playing the adventure. It is a feedback loop. A perpetual motion machine. Backstory manifests into the game, and the game returns narrative to the character which becomes their backstory in the future, which advances the gamestate.

The results of this style is interesting gamestates that uses the generated narrative as useful elements that can be manipulated by both the player and the GM. Players remember what is in the scene because they generated it. Players enjoy it when the elements that they generate are used against them (in ways that make sense). This method is the closest I've experienced within TTRPGs to a classic board game like Chess. The focus of the game is on the developing state, and the GM gets to dynamically play with the elements on the "board" (or in the scene) in the same way that the players can.

This kind of play fundamentally demands a certain amount of trust between the players and the GM. The GM has to be willing to surrender much of their authority. Most systems are not comfortable with this, so playing within the quantum space is not an aspect of the rules. I find this to be a shame and fundamentally limits the possibility of dynamic gamestates.

This wasn't a goal going in, but in the game I run, there has been several sessions in a row about planning a counter invasion of a dungeon/castle, and this has been huge in answering a lot of questions about the setting, the character's place in the setting, and what the players can and can't do with this information.

The basic way this works is:

1) A question needs answering: this question is about the setting or about characters in a larger sense. In this case, a question was, "okay, how many people are in our polycule?"

2) The GM reframes this to players to figure out what they could want that answer to be. Do they want fewer people or more people? And we discuss what the ramifications of either would be.

3) The player determines an answer to that question.

4) The player, and the rest of the party, can bring up things that are true about the adventure and their characters so far that are true. Every relevant truth statement provides stacking Advantage (a bonus to the roll). Players can also come up with bullshit that they want to be true, and we enter a subgame to determine if that's true and can be leveraged to the original statement. This makes the roll a collaborative process where players are using their human brains to try and help a player define something to be true.

5) The player rolls a relevant skill (in this case, Chance (Person)) using all the Advantage they've gained. The GM rolls a challenge. The degree of success and failure can either make the statement true or false if the question was a binary, or it impacts how true or false the statement is (each success adds +5% to a percentile roll, each failure adds +-5%), and the player also rolls a percentile roll.

6) Some math is done.

7) Repeat until all critical questions are answered.

This sounds somewhat complicated, and in a sense it is, but the intent isn't for this to specifically be complicated. The intent is to democratize the world building and possible resources players have. This way, I, the GM, am not solely responsible for giving and taking things away from players. It also highly encourages players to pay attention and reflect on the events of the adventure.

The result of this is we have a party who:

Are (generally) members of a polycule consisting of 42 members (representing roughly the 75th percentile of the Datisian Empire), 40 of which have their own direct down lines. 5 of these polycule down lines are specifically warrior polycules, who largely man the castle (which has a river nearby, was recently built, and is NOT haunted). Their total coffers (their amount of expendable wealth) is 300 total platinum worth: 100 of which is in live stock, 171 is in stored grain, iron, stone, or clay, and 39 is in coinage.

Doc for more information.

Greyplains, for this reason, stands very much opposed but weirdly on the same side as PbTA and other "narrative/drama forward games." The key difference is the method of delivery. In Greyplains, you play as relatively normal people who exist in an ever evolving world, largely at your and your fellow player's control/influence. This leads to big dramatic story moments, but they are not pre-packaged into your character. Greyplains is a logistics heavy game. Because adventures are by and large about logistics, and I feel that they should largely be accounted for when planning adventures of any scale. Despite the possible presentation of tedium presented here, all these results were directly informing their approach to another long-form problem that they are solving. A problem in which has formed nemeses and villains, deaths and tragedies, whims, woes, shattered toes (due largely to fall damage), and much more.

It has been very exciting to get the opportunity to really stretch the game's muscles though a longer form play experience, a thing that the system is very much intended to be optimized for.

If you like games that produce comedy and drama through math (I'm sure you do, that IS why you play TTRPGs, right?), then stay tuned for the release of the art/revised edition of Greyplains. It'll come out eventually.

One of  the issues with Greyplains is new Players looking at the rules of the system and getting immediately overwhelmed. It is, admittedly, an intricate game. I stand by my position that Greyplains is not a complicated game, but it is intricate. Most of this intricacy is in the form of making and advancing characters. This has made each “Session 0” event a bit of a nerve-wracking scenario. Getting a group of 3+ players to make a Level 0 (or higher) character can be quite the struggle, so instead I tend to just give players a premade. I also don’t like players (or myself) making a character before playing any of the adventure because it is not clear what kind of character they (or I) should make. When running the game, a session 0 often ends up being a long conversation about lore dumping so that players can try and make a character within the setting while learning the rules of the game at the same time. There is a basic notion in TTRPGs that players make a character with defined skills and backstory and then play them in an adventure, but I have always found that to be a bit backwards. If only there was a way to make a character during gameplay? 

Wait, I could just do that! 

The new session 0 rules for Greyplains is that players are given a blank character sheet, the math for point-buy, equipment tables, the Combat and Action Skill lists, the Proficiency Table, etc. Then the game just starts (after I explain the basic idea of how the game works). Whenever a player engages with a mechanic that needs to be mechanically justified, the player then goes through and defines the elements of their Character that aligns to this. For example, if the player’s first action is to “cut down a tree,” then they will need to define if they are either using a) Strength or b) Outdoorsmanship. They will then define how much Power or Awareness their character has and define if they invest a Level 0 Slot into either the Ability, Base, or Subskill (investing into different tier of Skill has different results on the math, more or less). They can spawn equipment into their inventory either by using Object (a Luck subskill) or by buying it from the inventory list (using money generated by declaring their character’s Luck ability). The adventure evolves as the players figure out what kind of characters they need to complete the adventure, and the logic of the party and the personality of each character comes into focus. 

The specific adventure I ran (and the kind of game I will encourage GMs to run) was framed as being morally ambiguous. The succeeding the goal of the adventure can be done in any number of ways for any number of reasons. In this case, I use the same basic setup as I have for Motte and Bailey. “In front of you is the bailey fence. Beyond is the motte wall. You must extradite the princess from the tower.” When I run this game as Motte and Bailey, I often end up with characters who are in some way noble and some way devious. This adventure, however, went very differently. The party carved their way through the bailey fence. During so, one of the characters took out the nails and the braces of the fence joints. These were very large nails, and we had to calculate how heavy 20 4” nails would be (about a pound, by the way). The joke then became that these are the ideal nails to crucify someone, someone being the princess. The rest of the adventure then took an increasingly dark tone. They got caught by a child, who was promptly killed. Another child came out to investigate, who was also promptly killed. They rolled their way into trying to make the situation such that, yes, they were a weird apocalypse cult, they were here to crucify the princess, and, importantly, the princess is on board. This was all possible because of the fundamental mechanics of Greyplains, but it was generated because the players did not have a character with a defined backstory or skills before the adventure. 

The players would never have gotten to these kinds of characters if they had planned them out ahead of time, but they really enjoyed who they created. Even though their character sheet was not completely filled out by the end of the session 0, they now had enough knowledge about their character that they could finish them (if we were going to continue playing with these characters). The irony of this kind of gameplay, and the inherently ironic mission statement of Greyplains, is that by creating a structurally sound trad game you can create compelling, collaborative story telling. You don’t need mechanics specifically to foster storytelling. The game just needs to be good. The trick here is that the game needs to be willing to give some of the power of the meta-fiction to the players. As per usual of a TTRPG story, the actual throughline narrative is not very compelling in terms of straight prose or dialogue. However, the evolution of the events and context as everything began to connect together, through the function of mechanics, was extremely compelling. It was, in my opinion, an ideal TTRPG session.