In Praise of Trophy Gold

Every so often you encounter a piece of art that fundamentally changes how you view the artistic medium it's a part of. This is distinct from simply great art; I'm talking about the stuff that blows the doors off your inner conception of the form--works that make you jump out of your chair and say, "You can do THAT? This was possible all along?"

The first time I remember feeling this electric shock was hearing the Allemande from Caroline Shaw's Partita for Eight Voices (give it a listen) in undergrad music history class. The past three years of my life had been spent immersed in the canon of western music; I thought I understood pretty well the range of what existed. Or at least, the range of what I enjoyed. There's plenty of wacky ugly sound out there, if that revs your engine.

But this! Eight human voices, pushing to the edges of what human biology can phonate. Tidal waves of perfectly tuned chords interspersed by visceral dissonances, spoken words, snarls, and more. I nearly wept in my little bucket chair with its built-in writing desk. Six minutes in that dim lecture hall are a core memory.

Most of all, I remember thinking, "My god, new music can still be beautiful."

Anyway, I got a hard copy of Trophy Gold a few months ago. My god.

Trophy is an interesting beast. The design traces itself back to the fiction-first, almost story-game tradition, but generalized to break out of that narrative straightjacket and provide an engine for collaborative storytelling in any bespoke adventure. 

Of the two familial lines (Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold) I've only played or read Gold, the younger child. Dark is obligate play-to-lose; your treasure-hunters are not coming back. 

Trophy Gold, on the other hand, is something of a hybrid. Characters always skirt the edge of doom. There's no "advancement," per se; completing one adventure ("incursion") doesn't make you more likely to survive the next one (quite the opposite, usually). 

But you can work towards a goal: collecting 50 Gold and accomplishing your Drive. It's a tantalizing promise, like paying off your debt at the company store and finally being free to leave the mines.

I've never played a game anything like this before. The only story game I've ever touched is Nightling Bug's Wickedness; other than that, I'm a child of the dragon game and its many mutant cousins. Maybe that makes me a poor judge of a work so outside my wheelhouse.

But maybe not. The folks behind Trophy Gold describe it as a new-school engine to run old-school dungeon crawls. In that way, Gold bridges the gap between my experience and the wonderful world of collaborative, forge-the-narrative RPGs which until now have been a mystery to me. The "doors blown off" moment is a function of the one who experiences it, not just the work of art that triggers the revelation.

What is Trophy Gold, anyway? 

Let's answer a question with a question: what's the largest stand-alone unit of fiction in a traditional RPG? There are lots of answers you could give, but I think "the dungeon" is a good one. Dungeons are self-contained: you go in, you do stuff, you come out (or don't). At a higher level, a hexcrawl map mostly tracks where adventure locations are. The central example of an adventure location? The dungeon.

Dungeons, in turn are broken into rooms. This is a diegetic division; that is, the in-fiction characters are experiencing the same hierarchical breakdown as the players. The doorway boundary between physical dungeon rooms corresponds to the textual boundary between area descriptions.

Trophy does it differently. A Trophy Gold incursion is divided into "Sets," each of which might be as small as a dungeon room or as large as an entire forest. This is a thematic rather than physical division; the incursion is the dungeon-equivalent and the set is the room-equivalent, but bounded by conceptual breaks rather than physical walls.

Actually, this kind of slicing shouldn't be unfamiliar to dungeon-crawl GMs. Many dungeons have their rooms grouped into "the ones with bugbears," "the ones with orcs," "the ones with undead," etc. Trophy just takes that kind of higher-level association, and makes it the canonical subunit in the text.

Crucially, Trophy also makes the players aware that this shift in viewpoint has occurred. Player/character knowledge separation is fairly key in Trophy, and it's another step away from the old-school worldview. Each Set has an explicit goal, and the players are informed of it as soon as they enter. How often have I agonized over the party overlooking the (seemingly) obvious interaction hook in a room? I could have just been telling them!

Set goals can get crazy explicit in practice. A band of treasure-hunters might enter a field littered with corpses, and the GM tell them, "this set is called 'Magegrave.' The set goal is 'Break Kubnezzin's final spell.'" Immediately the players know a whole slew of things their characters don't:

• There's somebody named Kubnezzin
• He can cast spells
• Given the word 'final' and the set name, Kubnezzin's probably dead
• But one of his spells is still active

It could be fun, in traditional play, to figure all this out through exploration and interaction with the environment. But one of the major strengths of Trophy is that it boils down the necessary material to the bare essentials. If you wanted to convey the above bullets through pure setting description, you'd need to litter the area with clues, most of which the players would probably never interact with. Trophy jumps straight to the meat.

Actually, that gets at a deeper point. The traditional model is that physical facts about the fictional world inform the overarching concepts, themes, and truth of the setting. Trophy's incursions and Sets reverse that: overarching concepts, themes, and truth inform physical facts about the fictional world.

There's a stereotype that the rules in less traditional RPGs are somehow looser and weaker, that because the players shape the story more they're by necessity less bound by the system. This is the cause of a lot of the poo-pooing of newer games by the longbeards of the scene, as if some players aren't tough enough to handle a strict and unforgiving ruleset.

I think this view is completely backwards. At least in the case of Trophy Gold, the rules are often far less flexible than in your average dungeon crawler. If a roll of the dice says that you take consequences, there's no arguing for a way out. The fiction bends to the rules. 

About those dice. There are only three kinds of roll in Trophy Gold, and each of them is genius. As with the breakdown of incursions into Sets, the game has sliced through dungeon-crawling play at the joints and carved out the three things that treasure-hunters are always up to:

1. Poking around and looking for interesting things (the Hunt roll)
2. Doing dangerous stuff to accomplish their goals (the Risk roll)
3. Fighting terrible foes (the Combat roll)

I mean, that's pretty much dungeon-crawling in a nutshell, right? Anything that has a success and failure state--that is, anything that would require a roll of the dice in a traditional game--can readily be plopped into one of those three buckets. I've occasionally seen inexperienced Trophy GMs make a roll outside the triptych, and the game is almost always the worse for it.

I won't belabor how the various rolls actually work. Buy the game! Suffice it to say, the mechanics ensure that players get meaningful choices by default, and when they suffer consequences it's always because of those choices. How many RPGs can say the same?

Making the leap from dragon game successors to Trophy is no mean feat. I credit my success to the excellent how-to videos by Trophy publisher Jason Cordova, whose Sixth Ring podcast is another great resource. It's undeniable that playing a game like this requires a new mindset. It's an entirely different frame around role-playing; a different angle from which to examine this hobby of ours.

My reaction: "You can do THAT? This was possible all along?"

-V

Naval Combat

(previously: Simple Seafaring)

Handling ocean travel like an overland pointcrawl is all well and good for most use cases. When you're just going from island A to island B, you can ignore the gritty details and boil the experience down to 1) do we get to where we're headed? 2) how long does it take? 3) do we have to fight any monsters?

What's a pirate-themed game, though, without the occasional high-seas battle? Not much point to having all these warships lying around if we never have them blast each other to splinters with ranks of cannon fire. 

With that in mind:

HERE ARE SOME NAVAL COMBAT RULES

Game in progress using this system

Thoughts

This ruleset is intended for use with Kevin Crawford's Godbound; terms such as "straight" damage and "mobs" are drawn from that book.

The eagle-eyed may notice that there are no rules for wind and weather, changing speed from round to round, or any number of other subtleties to which veteran naval warfare gamers may have become accustomed. That's by design; this isn't a wargame. It's a framework to be interpreted by a GM, hopefully with the best interests of the whole table at heart. 

My goal here was to balance simplicity with depth (isn't that always the goal?). A classic tactic like "crossing the T" works as expected if you know your naval history, without becoming a distraction from the Role-Playing part of the RPG experience. 

If you're tempted to think these rules are TOO simple, be aware that a playtest battle with only one PC ship tool almost three hours. On the other hand, if that's really your cup of tea, feel free to tack on more complexity! 

-V

The Adventurer as Insect

I recently got my hands on the Quickstart edition of the upcoming Beetle Knight RPG. The mechanics seem interesting enough at first glance, but what captivated me was the high concept: the adventurer as insect.

The idea of casting the PCs as a small animal to emphasize their vulnerable place in a dangerous world is not new, of course (Mausritter being perhaps the most prominent example of the technique). Insects, however, are different from small mammals in one important way: they're far more powerful for their size.

It bears repeating: proportionally, insects are Marvel superheroes. They can fall from great heights or be struck with enormous force, then get up and casually lift many times their body weight. In other words, they have all the qualities of adventurers.

Some in the TTRPG scene are wont to lament how far modern pinnacles of the genre (see 5e) have strayed from the gritty and lethal days of yore. Gone are the editions where a single blow from a goblin's rusty blade could fell the hardy fighter. At today's gaming table, you're more likely to see that fighter hurled through a wall by a dragon's wing buffet, bear the full brunt of its breath weapon, and charge right back into the fray. After a few levels, heroes handle like tanks.

Or, you know, like insects. I think this comparison is worth more than a cursory glance. Consider the difference between the things an ant can shrug off (falls, flicks) and those it can't (glue, sustained crushing force). What if we let that inform our design? Rather than just becoming increasingly impervious to their environment, our adventurers wax invulnerable along some axes while remaining very much mortal along others.

The Beetle Knight Kickstarter is coming soon, and I'll be interested to see whether they play up this aspect of insectoid nature. Either way, it's a treasure trove of ideas for us all.

-V

Tasks and Fuses

A while back I submitted three cards to Long Tail Games' Tiny Library: Modern Fantasy deck of MOSAIC-strict game fragments. One of them, HEXRING character creation, was selected for inclusion in the final deck!

This is one of the other two cards. Glory in my handmade clipart.

front and back; click to enlarge

Thoughts

Timekeeping is as old as RPGs. It hits at all scales, from opening a locked door while combat rages to researching an ancient ritual in a vast library of scrolls. How long until the vizier's troops break down the door? How long until the potion is fully brewed?

By the nature of the medium, the cards are pretty self-contained. Tasks have made it into THAUMOS, while fuses ended up on the cutting room floor. 

-V

Simple Seafaring

"Between the lands march whale-roads."

-Luke Gearing, Wolves Upon the Coast

My current Godbound campaign is (loosely) based on the Skull and Shackles setting, replete with pirates, krakens, and merfolk. No surprise, then, that the PCs spend quite a bit of time shuttling back and forth between various islands aboard their ever-expanding fleet of sailing ships. 

I've never been much for overland travel rules. My games don't tend to be the strict time/resource type that benefits from religious day-counting, nor do I usually use the combat-XP-based advancement that rewards random encounters along the way. And sure, you can write up regional encounter tables that move the plot, but those are a LOT of work. "Easy for you, difficult for me," as the saying goes.

Still, I want to capture the inherent risk of ocean travel in the Age of Sail. Even for demigods, things can and do go wrong. Here are the minimal rules I use:

Simple Seafaring

Based on the distance to your destination and the speed of your vessel, determine how many WATCHES the journey will take. A WATCH is 12 hours.

Each WATCH, roll a d6. On a 1, you face a STORM. On a 6, you face an ENCOUNTER.

For an ENCOUNTER, roll on your prepared table. Sorry, no royal road. I'll include my current ocean encounter table at the end of this post.

In case of a STORM, decide whether you're steering to AVOID it or PLUNGING straight through.

If you AVOID, roll 2d4.

If you PLUNGE, roll 1d8.

Either way, if the sum is 8, your ship is wrecked. If the dice show a double (this obviously can only happen if you chose to AVOID) your journey is extended by that many WATCHES. E.g. on a double 3, the trip will now take 3 extra WATCHES as your evasive maneuvers take you far off your planned course.

I like this because it revolves around player choice: how much risk are you willing to take? Plunging has a 1-in-8 chance of catastrophic shipwreck, while avoiding reduces that to 1-in-16, but comes with an average of seven and a half extra hours of travel. 

In practice, of course, the first time I whipped this system out one of my players gently reminded me that as a Godbound of the Sea, he and all ships in his company are immune to bad weather. Ah well. Nevertheless, one of his loyal captains who wasn't with the main fleet did get caught in a storm, though he chose to avoid it and suffered no delay.

Bonus: Gods of the Isles Ocean Encounter Table

If you're a player in this campaign, read no further!

1. Roll a wizard
2. Sea Serpent (bestial, hungry), damage rolled straight
3. Grindylow kidnappers, slaves taken in the night to 0102 (reroll if it’s daytime)
4. Sahuagin raiders from 0209. They want to capture the ship, or at least sink it. Stats as Mermen led by a Minor Hero w/ gift of the Sea
5. Clan of water Nagas, on the warpath against King Phoon the storm giant
6. Rival pirates (one of Harrigan’s lieutenants in command)
7. Raft of castaways one with ghoul fever
8. Dulimbaian scout riding a Roc. Will not attack an obviously superior force
9. Talking whale named Marenestimabilissima, who insists she is a god and demands worship (stats as “Titanic Beast” Misbegotten)
10. Resplendant Barge of Heavenking, seeking tributes
11. Patrian warship X Fretensis
12. Roll a dragon

The Drinkers of Light

The two sources of celestial power in Oth are light and fire. Light is of Alef; fire is of Tav. That much is broadly agreed on. The light of Alef fuels the web of life (and thus the web of magic) on the surface, flowing through plants to animals and eventually to thinking beings like the alefim, grimmot, and humans.

Some say that humans also contain the fire of Tav; this is controversial. Letys Ink-Eyes' thesis defense on the topic was famously interrupted when a Last Radiance terror cell firebombed the classroom. Their message of "if she loves fire, let her have it" was considered philosophically unsound, but pragmatically convincing.

Anyway, it's well-known that humans contain a sliver of Alef's light. What's less well known is that this light can be stolen.

They rise to positions of power. They draw all eyes when they enter a room. They are the subject of fascination, admiration, speculation. Victims come of their own volition, once the art is mastered.

Alefim call it "oluká," and many give the same label to its practitioners. When the right resonance is established in the weave of magic, the physical and metaphysical can be made to mingle. Celestial light, that abstract etheric concept, harmonizes with the material world. An oluká can then draw it out of their victim by consuming their bodily essence.

Eating flesh is possible, but rare. Oluká who take the ghoulish path rarely last long, as the hunger for light quickly becomes an addiction, and hiding serial cannibalism is difficult. Instead, the most common choice is the consumption of blood.

yum

(There are other reliable methods, from which spring the legends of succubi.)

Light so stolen can only be held for so long. When it inevitably drains away, the oluká is left ravenous for more. They will do anything to regain the feeling of transcendence it grants, to say nothing of the adulation and status to which they have become accustomed. 

They take more, more, more. Even those who are careful begin leaving a trail of bodies.

At best, they are hunted down and slain without anyone learning the reason for their predations. At worst, they begin teaching the secret to others, gathering apprentices to share the burden of collecting victims. These twisted cabals are often made up of the leader's former victims themselves, now bound to their teacher through ties of not-entirely-natural loyalty.

Some families of oluká persist for generations. They age only slowly, dying to violent internal struggle more often than time's arrow.

Brahim Phtali, called the merciful, is kept under lock and key by the glass archivists of Nabb. In exchange for a trickle of volunteer victims, he provides insight into historical arguments, lost lore he still recalls.

There are those in Nabb who question the balance of power in this relationship.

One might expect the alefim to revile this perversion of their lord's power, but they seem indifferent. Perhaps the degeneracies of an already-degenerate people hold no surprise for them. Or perhaps they are all too glad to see humanity devour itself from within.

Engaging Challenges for Godlike Characters

Challenging the Gods

They say the best Superman stories are the ones where the problem CAN'T be solved by Superman's powers. No amount of strength or speed can fix interpersonal drama or untangle a logical paradox. Or rather, Superman's abilities may play a key role in the ultimate solution, but they can't solve everything on their own. There's no "brute force" method. Writers for such high-powered superheroes face an eternal challenge: how to reliably put them in situations they can't just punch their way out of? 

GMs face a similar in games where players can reach godlike levels of power. I'm running a Godbound campaign right now, and a big part of the fun is that many challenges that would stymie your average RPG party are a walk in the park for a pantheon of demigods. Horde of demons? Two combat rounds; three at most. Angry monarch? A single Theurgy spell makes him your best friend, permanently. Societal ills? Invest some Influence or Dominion; repeat as needed.

This is fun in moderation, just like beating up a roomful of goblins as a level 10 character can be fun. But at a certain point, running roughshod over a world that can't push back loses its luster. After all, if we wanted PURE wish-fulfillment, we'd get rid of the the rules entirely and just re-write fictional reality.

DCs don't mean nothin' when you've got the Word of Might

The "Superman solution" of non-physical challenges isn't a silver bullet (to mix our metaphors) either. Taking Godbound as an example, plenty of divine gifts and miracles can sidestep the problems one would often throw at an invincible protagonist. Even large-scale trouble, city-scale dangers, don't reliably force clever decision-making.

What are some solutions?

1. This isn't a problem

(or, wish-fulfillment can be fun)

Maybe your players just want a sandbox to mess around in. That's fine! It can't all be OSR grittiness and getting skewered by a skeleton's spear. Some groups might never get tired of putting dragons in headlocks and kicking storm giants in the nuts.

If this describes your band of herculean misfits, read no further. Let them run wild across the campaign world to their hearts' content. What I've found, though, is that this kind of license grows stale over time. Maybe a long time! But eventually.

2. Juice up the baddies

(or, ogres now have 12HD)

Godbound itself is guilty of this sin to some degree. The section on adapting monster stats advises a Hit Die scale that's quite a bit higher than old-school equivalents, and goes so far as to say that a creature should have at least 10HD if you want it to pose a challenge for the a Godbound party. It's tempting, then, to let your expectations (dragons should be a deadly challenge!) inform the power level of the foes your party faces.

Resist! This failure mode is so, so common in video games; don't let it happen to you. I've never played Skyrim, but every time I read about how if you go back to low-level dungeons at high level, all the enemies have leveled up as well, I want to tear my hair out. 

If the party has the same probability of victory against an ogre that they would if you were playing B/X, then in what meaningful sense are they more powerful? If every time you get a +1 to hit, the monsters' AC improves by 1, you're treading water.

I actually do make exceptions on this point for mythical foes like dragons. Demigods vs. an ogre should be a one-sided beatdown; demigods vs. a wyrm of legend deserves an epic fight.

3. Zoom out

(or, nice empire you've got there)

Ah, domain-level play. The promised grail, so rarely reached. Unless you're a god! This is the recommended solution in Godbound--give your party vast lands to rule, besieged on all sides by dark empires and jealous rival demigods. 

I've said before that scale isn't a solution on its own, but that's not entirely true. The use of Influence and Dominion in Godbound is limited by the scope of the changes you're making: town-sized, city-sized, or kingdom-sized. 

Zooming out to the level of fantasy geopolitics also creates foes that can't just be killed: how do you handle a nation bent on your followers' destruction, when killing their leader just leads someone else to take up the scepter? Do you wipe them out? Is protecting your flock worth violence on that scale? Hah, ethical dilemma! 

4. Go cosmic

(or, punch god in the face)

In a sense, this is the right way to use solution #2. Instead of increasing the power level of your standard monstrous menagerie, let your party fight their way up the corporate ladder of enemies all the way to the top. Broke: orcs in an abandoned castle. Woke: bound demons in an abandoned flying wizard's tower. Bespoke: insane angels in an abandoned celestial dominion.

Of course, creating epic-level adventure locations is a challenge of its own. They've got to feel strange and wondrous, not just "this is a dungeon, but you can't use your divine power to teleport through the walls because they're made of special celestial concrete." My best shot at this so far is the Oubliette.

5. Incompatible goals

(or, what color do we paint the temple walls)

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Sometimes your high priest wants to make peace with a rival religion, while the grandmaster of your paladins wants to wipe them out. Maybe the heart of a celestial machine offers the key to ultimate power, but disrupting the machine's operation would devastate the mortal world. Ain't that just the way.

go watch Over the Garden Wall

The two incompatibles might both be good, they might both be bad, or there might just be a tradeoff. The "both bad" version is a staple of superhero movies, from the exploding ferry in The Dark Knight to the death of Lois Lane in the first Christopher Reeve Superman. 

But the "both good" scenario has its merits, too: imagine you plan to honor one of your followers as your greatest mortal champion, but two candidates both desperately want (or even need!) the glory.

One danger with this approach is that it risks making the characters' great power irrelevant. If I joined a campaign because I wanted to play a god of fire and death, I'm going to be pretty peeved if every session is spent debating the finer points of tithing for my cult. 

So make sure the party still has a chance to open up the throttle and let rip once in a while. Put something in their path they can crush without remorse.

Perhaps an ogre?

Thoughts

One of the most striking insights of the OSR, for me, is this: don't give out abilities that render core challenges moot. In dungeon crawling this means no light cantrip, no goodberries, and no bags of holding. It got me thinking about when a game, by design, elides the classic obstacles of an RPG.

My current Godbound campaign faces all the problems described above. At level 1, the pantheon was about as capable as high-level mortal heroes, but at level 3 they're carving through krakens like cake. All the solutions listed are tricks I've tried or traps I've fallen into. 

It's tough, but crucially the players seem to be having a great time.

That's the whole idea, right?

-V