Pushing the envelope: Deconstructing RPGs

When you push the boundaries of a medium, you tend to reveal interesting things.

A wrong, but illuminating, TTRPG theorypost

In the case of role-playing games, I think there are two very important axioms:

1. players get to make character choices that are meaningful
2. players are deeply constrained as to how they otherwise affect the world

Axiom 1. Players get to make meaningful character choices

By this, I mean their choices must be

real (the outcomes are not faked or predetermined), and

impactful (the outcomes and/or act of deciding matter to the player/character/setting), and

associated (the choices are made as if by the character within the world, not just by the player within the rules), and

plausibly adjudicated (the choices have predictable or at least credible impacts on the imagined world).

Axiom 2. Players are deeply constrained regarding the world

Players impact the world by their character choices, but otherwise have few or no ways to impact the imagined world.

(Most TTRPGs, of course, let a player decide details about the world specifically during character creation, which their character could not possibly have chosen 'in-world'. This is a pretty accepted carve-out, and one of the reasons I say 'deeply constrained'.)

Pushing the TTRPG envelope

Now let's contort these established TTRPG boundaries and principles, to see if anything interesting falls out.

-

We already know what happens when you step back further from Axiom 2 (as part of game design or during play), giving players more options to intervene directly in the world.

You get experiences that are more like collaborative story-telling games, and postmodernish games where the point is to play around with the truth, and eventually you end up with free-form roleplay and expressive world-building.

-

What happens when you deliberately change Axiom 1, making character choices less meaningful?

There are some obvious examples, which tend to be unpleasant, especially in the context of contorting an existing traditionally-designed game.

• If character choices aren't real, you get railroads, which almost nobody likes.
• If character choices aren't impactful, the game (and fiction) has no stakes, which few people like.
• If character choices aren't associated, you're playing something more like a boardgame that has heavy fiction/fluff elements, which some people like, but can be dissonant.
• If character choices aren't plausibly adjudicated, there's little sense in which you're making a 'choice', so you might as well be rolling dice instead, since that's fun.

...But those are mostly the results of taking a role-playing game and 'playing it wrong'.

Designing an experimental game

Challenge: Can we go against the zeitgeist and design games which play with the formula of Axiom 1? Can we push the envelope to deliberately make character choices less meaningful, and still create something compelling?

I can see two things to try.

Less meaningful choice... in pursuit of themes

You could do this deliberately, in an artsy way, to explore certain themes.

Inevitability and the linear nature of time. Doom and futility. Fate and prophecy. Closed-loop time travel. Nihilism.

Less meaningful choice... but more meaning elsewhere

You could shift the focus of the game from meaningful choice to something else, so that there's still something challenging for the player to do.

One possibility is having the player grapple with emotion and feeling, something reactive and exploratory rather than goal-oriented and decision-guided. The obvious pathway for doing this is through journaling games, which often emphasise those aspects more than traditional RPGs (as well as often relaxing Axiom 2).

Combining these ideas into new experimental game designs

I'd like to see a game develop some of those specific themes in parallel with locking down player choice in favour of developing character emotions and feelings (while still being on this side of 'being a roleplaying game').

I'd like to see a choose-your-own-path game set in a world deliberately designed to teach the player that their character's choices fundamentally don't matter in this particular fictional context, and develop an exploration of what that entails (...while still on this side of 'being a game at all').

I'd like to see some hybrid of boardgame and roleplaying game that's not just 'boardgame mechanics under deep layers of fictive fluff', but some other unusual interpolation of the two mediums.

And if I can't find them, maybe I'll make them.

 

The retconned lifepath

I want to develop an idea about a novel RPG progression mechanic which was pitched here:

https://www.tumblr.com/alexanderwales/771838390587047936/pitchposting-retcon

The main idea is this: it's a narrative game where the majority of the gameplay involves placing the pieces of your own past.
[...]
So the whole game would be this: slowly adding to your own backstory, penning yourself in over time, until there's no room to maneuver anymore, and shortly thereafter, the game ends. The fundamental tension of the game is that you want to keep the character as amorphous as possible, to commit to as few details as possible, but commitment is necessary to actually accomplish things.
[...]
in this game "progression" does not come from increasing skills because you got better, it comes from defining the past.

I view this as an interesting twist on lifepaths.

 

Refresher: Lifepath mechanics

In TTRPG gaming, characters are classically generated by picking character elements (or clusters of them) from a set of options, supplemented with dice rolls to instantiate numerical attributes. Most games still do something in this vein.

A lifepath character generation system switches this up. Now you make early life decisions as your character, and/or roll to see what happened to them before gameplay began, and the outcome of that process is your character's start state.

(Aside: I made a comprehensive lifepath character generation book for D&D 5e which you can check out here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/438774/Steps-to-a-Hero)

Lifepaths are an attractive alternative because they (can) restrict a player's decisions to only those of their character, not a bunch of things that their character was never in a position to choose themselves like their 'intelligence' stat. As a result,

• They add more gameplay to the game
• They feel more real
• They reduce the pressure on the player to be creative
• They replace the part of a role-playing game that has little to no role-playing (character generation) with a version that is mostly role-playing

Refresher: Retcon mechanics

Retcon is retroactive continuity. It's a broad category of ideas, and 'deciding parts of the past which were left undecided' is just one very narrow part.

The main RPG retcon mechanic I'm familiar with is the one Alexander Wales mentions in his pitch. Blades In The Dark, the GLOG, etc, permit a character by 'careful preparation' to retcon in things they have available to them, e.g., by carrying a bundle of unspecified equipment.

Outside of RPGs, something like this is a common part of story-telling games, where there are mechanisms for a player (as opposed to game master) to determine or replace parts of the world, often to the benefit of a character favoured or controlled by that player.

 

A possible synthesis

So we have this idea for, essentially, building a character by determining underdetermined bits of a lifepath.

➡️ Let's say characters all start at age 25, having had formative experiences since the age of 15, and initially have just one or two of their traits determined.

➡️ There's experience points, and you 'spend' xp at any time to declare how you 'spent' one year of your life (a nice little verbal correspondence).

➡️ Each year of your life grants you an appropriate character trait: an ability, skill, power, whatever.

➡️ Each trait you 'gain' in this way is, of course, one you've always had within the continuity of the game world. You're just revealing it now.

So you decide you spent a year traipsing the desert trade routes, and get increased endurance. Or you were pressed into military service as an archer, and are capable with a war bow. Or you spent a year repairing fishing trawlers, and have basic sailing and carpentry skills.

This setup allows for ten "level-ups", one for each adult / young adult year of your life prior to starting the game proper. You could tweak the time periods to get more buffer. If you do bump into the end game having 'spent' all your undetermined years, the game master would need to contrive a year-long time skip between adventures for the player characters to keep progressing, or switch to a different progression system.

Other than managing time, I see two main open problems. They're shared by most retcon / story-influencing mechanics:

1. Things in the game world can / should be able to interact with your character's history before you're "ready" to determine it. When this happens, the choices are: do the character advancement early, contrive a way out of revealing (deciding) it, or suffer contradiction later on.
2. When you do determine part of your character's history, it may make previous in-character choices and outcomes seem very stupid indeed. "You're telling me you apprenticed as an acrobat for a year? So have you been deliberately clumsy these last few weeks?"

 

Closing thoughts

By its nature, I think as a class of game mechanic this idea leans a bit towards the story-telling game end of the spectrum. It doesn't have many of the advantages of lifepaths which I mentioned.

It's a way for players to influence the overall narrative or game world more than their character's decisions. So I think if you were to develop it further, you'd be better off implementing it in a story-telling game or hybrid game rather than a 'strict' TTRPG.

Reviewn June 10: Fey Critter Tea Party

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today for Reviewn June I read Fey Critter Tea Party, by AnnieDisaster09. I picked it up in the “Your Best Games” Indie TTRPGs bundle on Itch.

The game is 15 pages, and strictly a story-telling game rather than a TTRPG, although each player does have ownership over one character (‘critter’). Being the storyteller is a matter of turn-taking plus collaboration.

The characters must journey through a sort of liminal fantasy fairy-world, gathering ingredients to prepare food for a witches’ tea party. The tone is cutesy, perhaps even twee, carried by both the subject matter and the verbiage – ‘ask nicely’, ‘Orchardhome’, ‘sneezefests’, ‘tricksy’, ‘yield the sweetest reward’, ‘hurt feelings’, etc. I’m a sucker for games with an unusual focus (food preparation) and setting (interlocking fairy worlds). It feels a little like Candied Violets.

The game system:

Fey Critter Tea Party is built on the Caltrop Core game engine, which I’m not familiar with. A 1d4-based system is rare (they don’t seem to be a popular dice type). Having only four outcomes necessitates a coarse-grained dice resolution system, in this case packing in four different degrees of success. You can have a success requiring teamwork, for example. I was interested to find that you can't roll a simple failure, only a ‘success plus a bad side effect’ or a ‘failure plus a bad side effect’. It makes sense, for a story-telling game; everything has some immediate impact, serving to drive the narrative forward.

The game isn’t mechanically complex. It has a nice, simple split of stats, Gumption / Grace / Guile, and character generation looks like it would be fast.

It’s always interesting to me what goes unexplained in a full game release, especially for a small game. The hobby has a certain amount of jargon. In this case, both common TTRPG elements (‘d4’; ‘stats’; ‘NPCs’; ‘an adventure’) and common story game elements (‘scene’; ‘mechanical element’; ‘story element’; ‘the prompt’) are left undefined.

There are a few undefined phrases, like ‘magic ability’ and ‘movement ability’, which feel like an oversight. Notably, the game mentions eight specific types of magic but has no magic system. You use the ‘Guile’ stat for it and then make the 1d4 dice roll. If you have a 2 in Guile, you will always succeed. It’s interesting that there’s no meta-guidance on magic, since (a) at the upper limit you can just ‘cast a spell to win the game’ if you want, (b) in practise players are going to have different ideas about which particular power level is going to be in the spirit of the game, and (c) rotating through the GM role means there’s no authority.

I’m curious whether things like magic are deliberately elided, or are something given a complete treatment in the underlying Caltrop Core game system. If the latter, they could have been included in the Fey Critter Tea Party text, if the author’s relying on the Creative Commons license to use the Caltrop Core SRD. But I’m actually not sure on that point – the text references the CC-BY-SA license, but doesn’t appear to actually state that the game is released under that license, which is a requirement of using CC-BY-SA.

The tone and feeling:

The titular critters, who are also the player characters, are sort of like witches’ familiars, but in fairy form. I tend to associate ‘critter’ with a small animal, and some of the options are anthropomorphic animal fairies, but you can also play as a pixie, water spirit, walking plant, and so on. They have fun little abilities, like ‘Anytime you use an object that is your favorite color, add a +1 to the check’. I think such class features probably work fine for collaborative low-stakes story games like this whereas for a classic TTRPG they’d be fodder for tiresome min-maxing.

The text provides just enough detail on various creatures and backgrounds to build from, without constraining or needing the players to memorise a bunch of canon. All the characters are capable of using magic, which is a fine solution to the matter of ‘spellcaster disparity’, and of course is thematically appropriate.

Following its tone and aesthetics, Fey Critter Tea Party limits the severity of negative consequences to any bit of gameplay. (Although I did notice that the text sometimes evokes the idea of harm greater than the rules strictly allow.) It’s interesting to see how rules try to route around needing to depict harm when they can’t directly prohibit the player choices leading to that; for example, in Fey Critter Tea Party, sufficient failure in combat leads to the character involuntarily running away. With this, the simple mechanics, and the primacy of story participation, it might be a good game for kids of a certain age.

The layout makes nice use of simple graphics. The sections have nice descriptive titles like “The scones and cream of it all”. The text does a good job of making the food and ingredients sound tasty, a prerequisite for a food-focused game. I like the tone, and I like the intermingling of fluff and crunch which is more common in indie games like this: things like “Storytelling will continue until the Critters successfully obtain their ingredient for each chapter.”

 

The adventures:

Any good game includes a starting adventure (scenario, etc), and this one includes four. They have to be a little vaguer to fit the purposes of a story-telling game, but Fey Critter Tea Party handles it with aplomb.

• I really like that the text breaks down each adventure into a shallow hierarchical information structure of goals and subgoals, rather than making the players search around for what they’ll need. These are also optional, so you can improvise and adjust for your level of comfort. Each adventure is similarly structured, so I’m not sure I’d want to run several back to back.
  
• The adventures have some evocative details (hot peppers that only grow in the dark, a sapient tide, etc) and there’s a bit of magical treasure which interacts directly with the few facets of the very simple rule system (e.g. providing a type of magic, or preventing a critter from losing in combat).
• The specific challenges are left very open-ended, almost always amounting to just a few short NPC descriptions; it’s not clear if you use just one or all of them (the latter is both more constraining and offers more complexity to sink your teeth into). I suppose that open-endedness is part of the intrinsic fun of story-telling games when you’re taking turns to run the challenges.
• They also don’t dictate a mode of problem solving, even implicitly: there are rules for combat, there’s the previously-discussed unconstrained magic, and the biggest challenges are clearly written with either subterfuge or social interaction in mind. This subtle emphasis on player choice is something I look for in any game, and is one of Fey Critter Tea Party’s best features.
• Each adventure has a built-in climax in the form of a slightly bigger NPC obstacle between the characters and the last ingredient on their list. On the whole it’s good, tight design.

 

Minor text quibbles:

• A fair number of grammar problems, in particular punctuation problems (in the form of missing commas, spaces, and periods) and inconsistencies: mismatch of number words; inconsistent capitalisation for most of the key terms.
• A few typos (‘reccomended’, ‘lychens’) and homophone errors (‘weary’ for ‘wary’ throughout). One typo particularly confused me: ‘Guise’ for ‘Grace’, not for another stat, ‘Guile’.
• Layout-wise, I don't like the ragged right edge, runt lines, and indents on section start. But my biggest quibble is that the text uses up more space than necessary (combining paragraph indents and paragraph spacing) while the headings suffer from lack of space.

 

My favourite bit:

Playable mushrooms!

Where to get it:

On itch at https://anniedisaster09.itch.io/fey-critter-tea-party

Reviewn June 5: Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. It’s a 100 page work, written by Jenna K. Moran, who you may know from things like Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine. This breaks the pattern for Reviewn June, as it's something I’ve read parts of before. But this is the first time I'm reading it through on its own (supposed?) terms: as a (supposed?) role-playing game.

Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist (which can be abbreviated to WTF for reasons which aren’t accidental because nothing is ever an accident) bills itself in its subtitle as a story-telling game. Is it a story-telling game? Is it a game? Is it a series of sense-impressions? I’m unclear whether it’s a joke game, or at least, just a joke game. It’s a concept game, or it's the concept of a game, or at the very least it’s very interested in the concept of a game. It is, maybe, a partial exploration of games-space. It’s Buddhist philosophy and fake astrology, for some reason.

It might be in the twenty most entertaining things I’ve ever read, which is impressive for a set of rules and flavour text.

In case you're unfamiliar, let me quote the page 1 introduction in its entirety, just to set the tone.

Reality is an illusion.
Those who seek to understand it corrode their understanding of it. In naïveté, objects are solid, ideas are true or false, sensations are real, and communication conveys information. To the adept, these things are as fading dreams.
There is no object that is not also emptiness.
There is no arbiter of truth.
Sensations are the lies of Maya; they are the shifting of electrical patterns in the brain; they are signifiers without referent.
Communication is violence.
Reality is false.
It does not matter how many layers one peels back. It does not matter what revelations one has. This is because there is no truth.
We are things that we have dreamed, and there is no sense in it, and when the sleeper wakes we shall be washed away.

Really, this is a very hard work to review. I started writing this up from brief notes while I was partway through Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, but by the time I'd read to the end something rung false about my own words. They were somehow lacking in substance. I was writing phrases like “as in many story-games, the role of GM is optional”, things which just don’t seem to cleave reality at its joints when it comes to WTF.

So this is my second attempt. I've decided that to convey my helplessness as a reader, I'm going to forego sections and order and begin most of these paragraphs with "...So", the textual equivalent of the kind of shrug that's meant to indicate being overwhelmed.

...So there are places in the text where two different sentences reference the same footnote. It has rules for working out whether you are playing Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. And then rules about using those rules. It's all breathlessly earnest and obviously joking at the same time. I am deeply worried that I might be insufficiently enlightened to truly appreciate the idea of this game (as much as I do appreciate it).

...So the wisher/theurgist/fatalist character split is unlike anything I have read before or since, whether in story games or classic TTRPGs. Together, some of these characters must find the Jewel of All Desiring and make the universe they live in, and must make it well; or they fail and are forgotten in the great unravelling of what is. This, on top of the complexity and self-awareness and bizarre philosophy and astrology and player/character/god blurring and fourth-wall-breaking and layers of nuance, gives nothing so much as Homestuck vibes. But the one has has colossal toads fundamentally important to the quest-for-the-universe and the other frogs, so I guess the similarity is superficial.

I mentioned astrology. Page 6 introduces the first of several planet/star diagrams and tells you “Planets and stars help you play”, which is one of the text's many preposterous straight-faced half-truths. It adds that “You'll find more details on these planets — including two mystery planets seen only during eclipses — in the first supplement for WTF.” It sounds like a joke, but I did locate a three-page supplement the author released which introduces some new rules for the Weaver and a “competitive” WTF variant. They’re not presented in the form of planets, and I suspect the ‘supplement’ is basically patch notes (except maybe it was planned from the start). The supplement is called TLDR because of course it is.

The attributes/powers/skills/gifts system seems like it would be robust, and ties in very deeply with the lore that WTF is steeped in and emanates like a weird radiation. I’m not going to go into the mechanics even though I feel like I could write an essay on them. They seem good. Go read the thing.

...So I’ve skimmed this book before and everything about it still feels weird and surprising. On this full read-through I remembered with surprise that it has those hard mechanical underpinnings, and that feels weird. Discovering that it has an enormous pseudo-canonical world setting, not just implicit lore, feels odd and unexpected. (Each setting location includes both practical matters and ‘moral implications’.) The planets subsystem feels weird and I’m sure would surprise someone who didn’t go in forewarned. Don’t get me started on the ‘rules toys’ and ‘donuts’. When the book comes to an end, you blink, startled.

WTF

...So there’s the Weaver, or GM. At one point we are told that “If you are the Weaver, announce this to the group. Note that only one person is the Weaver. If you are the Weaver and someone else speaks up, it's up to you whether to denounce them now or let their heresy flourish.” This isn’t a joke. It can come into play. There are related rules. If a theurgist character becomes corrupted (it’s a whole thing), they can end up forcing the Weaver into the role of player, ‘immured in horrible durance within the world’, and the accursed theurgist takes on a correspondingly greater role in determining what is true. The dragons of the deeps, which are not bound by the rules of WTF, can “free” a weaver immured in the world. The rules note the possibility that you encounter the dragons of the deeps while you are not aware that you are playing WTF.

The rules are bizarre. I cannot begin to do either the base level or higher-order rules justice. Consider just one example. The author deftly calls the reader’s attention to an unlikely, yet possible, meta-rules interaction, neatly outlines the nature of the issue, and writes:

You might think that, having anticipated this problem, we’d have a solution.
Instead, we have a koan.

True to its word, the text presents its koan and continues with no solution offered.

...So there’s this incredible high-level meta stuff, juxtaposed with things like “The elemental basis of communication in WTF is sound and gesture---vibrations that you transmit through the air and gross physical motions that you use to adjust the pattern of light that you reflect.” This is part of a four-page section on talking/communication as a necessary component of “how to play WTF”.

Does the game book even give you enough to go on to play? I’ve read it and I couldn’t tell you, not without making a fool of myself by trying. Numerous places in the text discuss, either subtly or overtly, whether the game is playable or even designed to be played. One diagrammatical rules toy, if I read it right, has implications as to what ways the game might model fate entering into the equation as to whether WTF is being or will be played. A player’s “willful ego that does not want to play WTF” is a node that is lovingly described but never actually used.

What does Jenna Moran think about the actual process of playing Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist? Well, things like this:

The author has a strong sense of what you're supposed to be doing when you play WTF.

That said — you can't read her mind.

It’s protected by the fundamental isolation of personhood and the unbridgeable divide between soul and soul!

We are also offered hints like this:

The players' efforts to incarnate and instantiate a transcendent spirit of infinite universal love in the fabric of the game are the source of the meaning of the game. It is the contention of the author that players cannot help but catch fire with this burning spirit as soon as they attempt to play WTF, preventing any inappropriate uses of the mechanics below.

(I want to go out of my way to reassure you that all the quotes in this review are real.)

...So... Look, I don’t know. I kind of love it.

The game, as a story game, is divided into character creation and rules and then further organised by progression through a prologue and 5 books associated with realms or places. Each one has both practical threats and moral threats. The practical threats seem interesting but the moral threats feel more pressing.

Book 1 is set in the Civilized Lands, unless (except but also or even if) all the characters died in the prologue. In Raif, royalty have become vampires. “Setting forth to find the Jewel of All Desiring without their blessing would be unimaginably improper.” In Tin ’An, wishers are hunted by the Duke’s Axeman. “Also the characters do not know where to go next. That is why their mission must end in ignominy here.”

The game requires the players and/or their characters to at least consider a major problem of philosophy before they can move on to book 2.

Book 2 is travel through “the lands of the savage peoples” and then those of the fairies, whose lives are full of stories, and who, the book takes some pains to point out, do not exist.

Book 3 of the game is about the Dragons of the Deeps, unless of course it gets skipped, “although that means never knowing what happened in it or if the characters found the Jewel of All Desiring when you weren't looking.”

The Dragons of the Deeps present a moral threat “whether or not you skip” them.

Book 4 takes the characters under the world, to the realm of the ur-toads. Also, “If the characters have not yet visited the sun now might be a good time”. Did I mention that there are five cardinal directions and that blackguards live on the sun in palaces of ice?

Book 5 is the conclusion, wherein the characters (might) find the Jewel of All Desiring (depending on fate, maybe?). Just working out what it means that this has happened is what an enormous chunk of the book is about. I don’t have the answer. I will note that the game at this point more or less requires the players and/or their characters to solve that major problem of philosophy from the end of book 1.

By the way, somebody “is going to have to die to become the firmament of the world.” There are rules for this. WTF has an imposing spine of metaphysics beneath the dreamlike layers of cloud and poetry veiling it.

The example of play begins with the example character being “troubled by her destiny as an example player in a WTF game” before gathering some other players and discussing whether or not they are already playing Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. It proceeds into a fascinating exercise in creative writing which does not really clear things up all that much, but is written in compelling dialogue of the sort that seems unlikely to occur at a table not occupied by six Jenna Morans. By the time I finished WTF I was looking up all her past work to add to my neglected reading lists.

Minor text quibbles:

• The simple style and layout is actually quite nice. In any other work, I would be nitpicking things like the author’s use of three dashes instead of an em dash. But... I don’t know.
• This work is obviously unfinished from a presentational viewpoint. I don’t remember where or when I found it, but it’s just a word doc converted to PDF with some line diagrams. I don’t know what it could possibly look like, finished and cleaned up and published. If anything, WTF feels like it ought to be more cobbled-together than it. Handwritten in a fading ink, maybe. Or spiralling around like House of Leaves.
  

 

...So that’s it. 100 pages. Difficult to write about but a delight to read. I would be staggered if I read anything more steeped in interesting weirdness for Reviewn June.

I don't know if I'll ever try to play it. There were various little evocative details a person could lift and put in their own games, but that's not why I think you should read it. I don’t care if it counts as a game. It was a textual experience. If you're not in the market for those, leave it alone. What's my favourite bit? All of it.

Let me leave you with a word of warning from page 25 of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist:

Use caution when playing WTF while tired, drunk, or punchy, as it may increase the chance that the shadow lurking beyond the edge of the world shall immure you all in timeless misery.

Where to get it:

http://hitherby-dragons.wikidot.com/a-small-gift-to-my-readers

 

Reviewn June 3: Wanderhome, the basic playkit

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today I read Wanderhome: The Journey, by Possum Creek Games. Wanderhome’s been on my radar for a while, but I only have the 27-page basic playkit version, so that's what I read. As a Redwall reader growing up, but one for whom the series eventually lost their lustre, I didn’t know whether or not Wanderhome would tickle me. I'm pleased to report that it did!

What I found is a story game founded upon a huge number of options and creative potential. The short playkit book overflows with lists of possibilities and setting elements of all kinds, so that players will never be in wont of things to have in front of their characters.

Art from the Wanderhome Kickstarter

The game style and rules

On the spectrum of collaborative story-telling game to tabletop role-playing game, this is far on the CSTG end. I’m interested in both, but personally more of a TTRPG enthusiast. I found the Wanderhome playkit a tantalising read regardless, and I’d be interested in giving the complete game (with its wonderful artwork) a try at some point.

In particular, it's interesting to see a game that’s not fundamentally about problem-solving and in fact several times goes out of its way to disavow it. “Stories tend to involve groups of people who have gathered for a reason, who set forth on a quest with a purpose and a goal. Wanderhome is not like that.” Wanderhome also isn’t “preoccupied with failure”.

It’s all very wholesome. It's charming without quite veering into twee. It does feel like it’s going to need absolute player buy-in up front, to avoid the ‘but what if I try to do this thing that the game says it’s not about’ problem. Some of the 'journeying tools' seem like they might be geared to help, but without having played it, I can't say for sure.

Wanderhome is a game to be played collaboratively, with or without a guide (GM). The guide doesn't have any ‘special authority’, acting more as a character-less player than a referee.

All the game rules and terms are given in a conversational, in-world manner, as if discussing an actual story or journey that the speaker or their audience has been on or is going on. There are very few references to it being a game.

• This ties in well to the overall nice and wholesome vibe, but I also found it slightly frustrating when it veers into vagueness, and also when the plain language slightly obscures the gameplay elements.
  
• For example, the word ‘kith’, a key term in the game, isn’t defined until halfway through despite being mentioned numerous times. Sure, it’s nicer and more flavourful than ‘NPC’ or ‘temporary character’, but knowing the real-world meaning of the world is insufficient for understanding.
• There's only one really gamey term, ‘token’, which by design doesn't seem to represent anything within-setting. I wonder how it actually plays at the table when you can't help solve a problem or connect to someone “on a personal level” because you have insufficient tokens, or you declare that you’re attaining a token by doing something like “taking a moment to bask in the grandeur of the world”. (There’s definitely a meta-game wackiness to getting a token in return for “doing something kind without getting anything in return”.)
• These minor plaints might be resolved in the full game book, of course.
  

The content of the playbooks (character class exemplars, roughly) makes it seem like Wanderhome must play as a deeply performative game, with all the players ideally absorbed in their own and fascinated by each others’ characters, not just what they do but who they are and how they feel. This makes sense, given that many of the main avenues of more trad RPG play (goal-driven problem-solving, overcoming perilous obstacles, exploring an internally-consistent simulated world, etc) are, deliberately, absent from Wanderhome.

Setting:

• I love the giant-bugs-as-livestock trope in basically any setting. It works well here.
• I wonder if the full version of the book has more lore and guidance behind the animal-folk thing beyond “While a family might be all the same animal-folk, they might also have wildly different appearances. It’s frankly none of your business to inquire.”
• I wasn’t expecting animals as big as horses to be in the mix, maybe because I don't remember Redwall going bigger than badgers and this game had such a “Redwall” pigeonhole to me.
• Mighty people being the only candidates for evil, their souls ‘weighed down with power’, their goodness possibly ‘poisoned by struggle’, is an interesting element in such a pleasant and placid game. It’s hard not to read it as both political commentary and metaphysics.
• I like the emphasis on seasonality and the rhythms of the year, which I think most games in pre-industrial worlds don’t place anywhere near enough importance on.
• The character classes (‘playbooks’) are very content-rich and evocative, which is probably especially important for a relatively rules-light CSTG. I’m always a big fan of starting a character with a selection of class-specific equipment or clothing.
• I like the level advancement, which can result in things as disparate as magical powers, changes to friends, or realisations. I like that it happens on seasonal holidays – IMO vague ‘milestonesque’ level advancement works much better for games like this one: loose and low-stakes, without choices which revolve around challenges and costs and expectation of rewards.

Minor text quibbles:

• Part of Wanderhome’s strength is its big structured lists of content. Some of the emphasised adjectives have an additional symbol which is never defined, but makes it clear they are keywords. They’re basically magic powers, or things that are connected with magic powers, which might force the spending of tokens. I don't know whether this lacuna is due to the stripped-down nature of the playkit, or the text's commitment to never speaking in 'game terms'.
  
• The fact that the vagabond character is necessarily a criminal and/or moral failure seems at odds with the spirit of the game. It feels like they’re leaning heavily into the (secondary) negative connotations of the word ‘vagabond’. Really, all the characters are vagabonds! This is one of several cases where Wanderhome slightly redefines words or selects more archaic meanings, and it can trip you up because it's not like other games which sit you down and say e.g. there’s a game thing we call a hallow; it's not quite the same as the normal meanings of the word 'hallow'; here’s what it is and what its rules are.

My favourite bit:

The firelight character. For a game about the road and helping people, a ‘guide class’ works well. Their key feature is that they have a firefly companion and a light source. A close second place for me is the moth-tender, a little pigeon or rabbit or whatever who looks after the courier moths and their towers.

Where to get it:

The playkit is on itch.io
The full game is on the publisher's site or on DriveThruRPG