WoE Design Journal 3: A Systems History Brief, in Brief

Since 2016, I've entertained several options for the system that I'd use to run Emberreach games. I spent time considering each of them. Most never even got to the table before being passed over in favor of another. I thought I'd make a stop-over in SystemsTown to marvel at the long path that led me to the rules I crafted for WoE.

Initially, I planned to run it using Labyrinth Lord. It had a lot of appeal for me, in no small part due to the layout and design of the rulebooks. The chaotic, black-and-white ink drawings. The grisly, faux-Medieval, and old-school fonts. It had the just the right amount of rules granularity, but still kept itself minimal enough to feel light in execution. Somehow, it felt the right match for a grim setting that leaned into an emergent play style.

After about a year of periodic planning, I changed direction, going instead with Basic Fantasy RPG, which I felt improved on Labyrinth Lord's rules (specifically, separating class from race and defaulting to ascending armor class) while still keeping the flexible, OSR feel I was seeking. Plus, it's well supported by its creator and community, and it's free to download. I could even buy print copies of the rules for my players very cheaply, if I wanted. For a year or two, I assumed this was where things would remain. I built out house rules to add on to BFRPG, I familiarized myself with the BFRPG house style. I even designed a character sheet that caught a little of the flavor I was aiming for. Yet there was some hard-to-pinpoint dissatisfaction with BFRPG, some way that it didn't feel like an ideal match. I'd keep my eye open, and, if nothing else presented itself, I'd stick with this system.

Then, around 2018 or 2019, I briefly considered adapting my approach to use D&D 5th Edition. It was an understandable digression: 5e was the version of D&D that my group was playing most at that time. And, overall, it's a good take on D&D, assembling the game's essential rules within modern design sensibilities. But I quickly realized that 5e wouldn't be a good match in terms of overall feel. It was...too detailed or fussy in the wrong ways. It was built to incentivize a particular play style, and that style just wouldn't work here. I turned my lidless, roving gaze elsewhere.

Next, my attention was caught by two similar games, White Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game and Swords & Wizardry Complete. Again, they had all the selling points and flexibility of BFRPG, the low cost of entry (free for WB:FMAG, ~$6 for S&W). And even if I can't exactly describe it, there's something oddly appealing about the elegance of OD&D. But, much as I really liked White Box, I knew I'd end up tacking a host of house rules onto it (I was already eyeing up material from third-party supplements). And S&W came with some of the awkward rules and mechanics that were a hallmark of older editions. I knew there were other games that tried to take older D&D editions and update their rules to smooth over some of these bumps (BFRPG, currently idling on my gaming back-burner, was one of them), so I decided to leave all of these as options and keep looking.

A short time later, around 2020, I looked more closely at The Black Hack. I'd noticed it a few years earlier—then in it's first edition—and it seemed to offer some really cool, innovative takes on rules. I loved its usage die and how it took a single, elegant mechanic as its core, then built out other peripheral rules around it (but never too many). But, like White Box, I could tell this iteration was just a little too much on the rules-lite side for me. And the roll-low approach was also a friction point for me, too. However, the game was now updated with an expanded second edition that contained a lot more content, and there a robust community generating third-party materials to supplement it. Add to that its new art and stylish layout, and I was sold. I made my peace with the roll-low system and embraced it as Emberreach's 'final' system choice. Again, I spent some time developing custom materials for the setting.

A year later, I ran my first adventure in the setting. It went well overall—but there were some issues. As much as I liked how smoothly it played and how easy it was to keep my mind wrapped around all of the rules, as a game, it felt slightly...undercooked. It privileged certain stats and its mechanical simplicity made gameplay too forgiving and easy. Additionally, my players were definitely not fans of the roll-low approach. So...back to the planning stage.

Around the same time, I discovered Vagabonds of Dyfed. This one really caught my attention, for reasons I totally hadn't expected. Until this point, I'd mostly been looking at games with fairly trad mechanics and approaches. This one set out to marry old-school trad proceduralism with a narrative-centered focus. It struck me that this kind of mirrored the way that I actually ran my games: a small-yet-solid bank of rules and procedures that I employed around a core emphasis on the story and drama. I bought the core book and a few supplements and was really won over by its vision. The rest I've mostly covered in my introductory post.

Next time, we'll delve into some of the core rules of WoE. Stick around and gain some insight into detailed minutiae you never expressed interest in!

WoE Design Journal 2: Situating the Setting

For this installation of the series, I'm going to present a simple overview of the setting that's developed for Wayfarers of Emberreach. I've reached the conclusion that, to truly understand the workings of the game and its rules, you have to understand Emberreach, the setting that is its backdrop—more accurately, that is its foundation.

First, a little meta-history. Back in 2016, I was daydreaming at work. (I assure you, that's never happened since.) Engaged in one of my favorite pastimes, I was making a list of the various campaigns I wanted to run sometime for a group of players, the different specific RPGs and broader genres and tones that I wanted to explore as a GM. Previously, I had also discovered the Dungeon Synth Archives YouTube channel and was making my way through its contents, listening to every album in the order it had been posted to the channel. And it's got a lot of albums. So my mind at the time was steeping in a lot of old-school dungeon synth minimalism while I worked and periodically daydreamed of imaginary worlds.

Earlier that year, I'd been developing a concept for a fantasy setting. It was nothing particularly inspired—Western high fantasy roots and all the usual trappings. I'd recently started playing 5th Edition D&D, my first return to the Forgotten Realms since high school, so that was undoubtedly on my mind. I was building this embryonic setting's history and lore, which seemed on course to become pretty extensive. Not surprising, that: I tend to overplot my campaigns. At the time, I'd recently started running a Call of Cthulhu campaign set in 1920's Philadelphia, and had already built out a roster of approximately 40 NPCs to pepper around the PCs as they investigated. I could already feel this world starting to get bogged down before I'd even really begun.

Then, an idea struck me: a fantasy world that took a deliberately different approach, something much less pre-scripted and historied. And something with a darker, grittier feel, something that channeled the kind of atmosphere I was hearing in the music and album cover art of Old Sorcery, Guild of Lore, GuardianSorrow, and Dungeons of Irithyll. Less of the high fantasy aesthetic, more of a shadowy realm full of muted colors, where technology is less developed and magic is more uncommon and still largely feared (or at least viewed suspiciously). Again, nothing wildly original here; plenty of other game settings have done this and committed more to that course (e.g., Outcast Silver Raiders, Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing, etc.). 

I also wanted to infuse the world with a weird vibe—weird in the sense of the uncanny, the unheimlich. A baseline familiarity of the expected (at least in fantasy genre terms) that sometimes just feels off. High strangeness. A darkness that you can't pin down and definitely can't shake. But, lest it drift too far into grimdark excess, I wanted players to also have moments of hope. Lightness. Humor. Sweet to contrast with the salt.

I also wanted to play with the tension between individual character agency and the immense forces of the world. Emberreach should have and be its own character with its own story, a history being shaped by, with, and around player characters. Sometimes they are central characters, but, other times, they are dealing with shockwaves made by the world as it moves past them. The relationship and rivalry between Fate and Fortune (important and challenging ideas for me, personally). I would keep all of this in mind as I grew the setting and added detail to the initial sketch.

This new worldbuilding direction would also incorporate a looser approach: I'd use more randomly generated elements and would embrace improvisational GMing tactics. I wanted it all to feel evolving and slightly unpredictable, like a roiling, complex system. I scoured my game books looking for the better random tables to spark ideas. I sketched out a few simple sub-systems for use during play that could keep things unexpected, yet still maintain a sense of place.

At this point, I found the website, Wizardawn, which would prove important for gathering initial resources. At the time, it was still an active website, but has since shut down. It had a number of great random generators, including an excellent regional hexmap generator. The output was black-and-white, with simple icons for the biomes and landmarks within hexes. I fiddled with the settings and produced a sequence of three large hexmaps, one bordered by ocean to the east, another to the south, and another to the west. I regenerated each of the three maps multiple times, until each 'looked right' to my eye, then took all three into GIMP and stitched them into one expansive map, a sprawling subcontinent surrounded by water on three sides. This would be my baseline model of Emberreach. I then generated a few settlement maps—a few large cities and a few small towns—and decided to start working from there.

I knew I also wanted to take a more collaborative approach to worldbuilding. A few years earlier, I'd run a short mission for The Sprawl RPG. The game takes a very structured approach to its Session Zero, which I appreciated—but I especially liked its collaborative means of sketching out the metropolis that would be used during play. Players were formally prompted to add in details and elements of lore for the world. This quickly led to a unique place that incorporated pieces of each player's sensibilities and taste, and created opportunities for greater investment. I wanted to ensure that Emberreach would have that same interactivity and would appeal in the same way. I established a basic principle that ultimately became a standing rule: at the start of each session, players could make 'worldbuilding statements,' facts about the setting that would, from that point on, become true (provided they didn't directly contradict an established truth).

At this point, I had a large, sketch-like map and emerging ideas about a few settlements. LOTS of ground, presumably all filled with people, towns, governments, principalities, thrones, dominions... If I wanted to avoid lore-creep, I needed a solution, or at least a stop-gap measure. And I came up with one: a pocket. I specified a distinct part of the map along the eastern coast of the subcontinent, delineated it with clear borders, and made it a focus of attention. I sketched some more detail into this pocket, placed major and minor settlements, divided the pocket into three political regions ('domains' in WoE terms) that operated with semi-autonomy within a single, governing authority overseeing the entire pocket—now known as the realm of Merannen. Presiding over the realm was a line of archdukes/archduchesses, the recent few being isolationist and authoritarian. For the past hundred years, borders have been sealed; the realm has cut itself off from the rest of the world. History is curated and limited; nothing is available about the non-Merannish world. And it's here that play begins for characters. It's been interesting to see players start adventuring in this realm, have lots of space to explore, go on adventures, undertake entire campaigns, and take notice that they're immersed in unusual norms and ideologies around regional borders and the world outside them.

I ran the first adventure for this setting in 2021, five years after I started developing it. The world bible has gone from one page of sparse notes to a 16-page document. I'll admit: I'm pretty impressed that I kept my mitts off the world as much as I did, and managed to avoid turning it into a bloated, history-saturated setting. In the end, I think I struck a good balance, putting in just enough established detail to make it feel to players like something I'd created, and pairing it with enough collaborative authoring that it has room to grow in ways I'd never imagine.

Next, we'll have a short look at the winding path that led me to the final version of the rules. And then, we'll start to vivisect the rules of the game itself. 

Wayfarers of Emberreach Design Journal 1: Origin Story

Wayfarers of Emberreach (or WoE, as I'll refer to it going forward) is a hack of the Vagabonds of Dyfed role-playing game -- which is itself built on the chassis of World of Dungeons and a few other games.

Vagabonds of Dyfed (VoD) was written by Ben Dutter of Sigil Stone Publishing, published in 2018. It describes itself as "an unholy union between the OSR and PbtA," which I think is a fair descriptor on a few levels (more on that below). It credits its design to a handful of other games: World of Dungeons, Barbarians of Lemuria, Blades in the Dark, City of Mist, The Black Hack and The Whitehack, and Moldvay Basic D&D. The designer actually provides a very lengthy, thorough explanation of the game and their intentions for it on its DriveThruRPG page. I refer the curious there for details. VoD's central mechanic is the universal move roll lifted from World of Dungeons.

For those not already aware: World of Dungeons, written by John Harper and published in 2012, is a distillation of the Dungeon World RPG. All of Dungeon World's many moves are boiled down to one core "move" set up around the Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) engine's resolution system (roll 2d6 and add a modifier; 6- = fail with a complication; 7-9 = succeed with a complication; 10+ = succeed). Rather than providing specific outcomes and consequences prescribed by each move, World of Dungeons leaves the outcome for its core roll to the GM, who reads the scene and narrates a likely outcome based on the roll result. It's highly interpretive. It also puts primary focus on narrative by generating a lot of scene complications from that core mechanic.

RPG R&D: Wayfarers of Emberreach Series

 <click of a switch, and a few stark lights illuminate patches of cavernous dark>

I've come back to this old place to (maybe) breathe a little life into it, and to clear my mind of some thoughts. It's been years now since the last post—but I've done a lot of design work during that time. Very little to publicly show for it, of course, but trust me when I say I've been putting in the hours. Burning viscous oil. Grinding the gears. And now I want to lay all of it out in detail for an audience. Ha! I'm pretty sure I'm still just talking to myself here—even more likely after all this time. So, anyway...

I made an RPG. Or I hacked an existing one. Not sure where the dividing line is between the two. But that's part of what I'm hoping to sort out as I hash through all of this. Sketch out my thinking about this project in detail. Impose order on the inner whirlwind.

The game I designed is called Wayfarers of Emberreach. Not the greatest title, I'll admit. I wrestled with that for a long while. The name itself is pretty new when you consider the span of time that the game has crossed and the multiple iterations its been through. It's had other names before this one. And this one's got a little nod in it to its predecessors, plus (hopefully) some reflections of its own unique character. It's not the most elegant choice; could certainly be snappier. But, like a lot of names, it's idiosyncratic, and the game will, I hope, come to own it soon.

But that's where we'll start: with the title. Next time, I'll talk about the ancestry and lineage; its design roots. And from there, since the game is written and largely finished being revised, I'll do a detailed delve into the rules and other aspects of it.

Oh, almost forgot something important: this game will never see the light of publication day. It's purely for use in my home games. I'll get more into the 'why' of that soon. But I feel that the effort and thought I've put into it warrant some discussion.

More soon. <puts finger on the light switch, pauses> Ehh...I'll leave the lights on. I won't be gone long.

Deciphering the Instagrammaton

 I've recently rolled out a new Instagram account for Abhorrent Vacuum Games!

Huzzah!

I'll use the account to do some basic promotion of my publications, as well as periodically sharing pics of my RPG print collection and dice sets.

Ooo, marketing adverts, book covers, and polyhedral still lifes -- that sounds like the kind of excitement you'll definitely want to be a part of! I can hear you clicking on the "follow" button even now...

Abhorrent Vacuum Games on Instagram

Faint Pulse -- Yet Signs of Life

No, wait -- don't go! Your initial assumption that I'd abandoned this blog for dead was hasty and incorrect!

I'm still here. OK, yeah, there was a hiatus, a stepped away for a bit. In my defense, the world seems to have no shortage of existential threats to share, so...

OK, so, with that said -- I wanted to share a little list of updates and to-do items that lie ahead for me. Each of these will likely have a post that elaborates on the details. 

• Last September, I released my first, official RPG publication -- a third-party scenario for the Mothership RPG!
• Next on my writing agenda is to rewrite an adventure I recently penned, playtest it a second time, and then lay it out and publish it.
• After that, I want to draft and playtest a rules-lite cyberpunk hack.
• Somewhere amid all of the above, I aim to launch an Instagram account for my game publishing brand, Abhorrent Vaccuum Games -- or maybe adapt my personal account to somehow do double-duty? We'll see what works out. 

Anyway, here goes a new attempt at keeping things active here. Fingers crossed, more to come!

Foundational Friction in Mythos Gaming

All right -- it needs to be said right up front that I love the Call of Cthulhu RPG. A lot. Really like it. I'm even a very big fan of it's weird cousin, Delta Green. Honestly, I'm down with just about any cosmic horror/Cthulhu Mythos RPGs. And if I'm starting off with this overt of a disclaimer, it can only mean that I'm about to throw some serious shade in the direction of these games...

But it's going to be a very generalized kind of shade, I swear! Because, as I said, in my heart, I truly like these games.

That said... [OK, here it comes.]

I feel there is a baseline, conceptual pitfall with Mythos RPGs: to have an ideal play experience, everyone involved should be fairly well-versed in Mythos lore, or at least familiar with lots of the Lovecraftian horror tropes. Not having these conditions present can possibly set a limit on player enjoyment under best conditions, and can potentially frustrate players and derail fun under worst conditions.

All the Matrix's Many Faces: Cyberpunk RPGs

The cyberpunk genre always lends itself so naturally to an RPG context. I guess it's not too surprising -- there are lots of gameable aspects to it. And, to be honest, I'd be surprised if there was some established genre that wasn't being mined for content by game designers. It walks that edge between a dark, near-future dystopianism that's very relatable to a modern audience and far-side, high-tech science-fiction -- and walks it in a way that feels very natural and is invariably appealing. And, of course, liberally peppering it all with a hearty dose of the film noir aesthetic will only make it even more appealing to a gamer's palate. Multiple great tastes that taste great together: it's like a role-playing sundae. (In which case, what's the butterscotch? The gritty, urban landscape? Certainly, though, the cherry at the top has a monofilament stem.)

I decided that, instead of doing another installment of my prior RPG Tasting Menu series, I would share a few, quick thoughts on the cyberpunk RPGs that I've played over the years, then focus some future posts on a connected project that I've been working on. 

Hail to the Hack: Thoughts on The Black Hack 2nd Edition

When you've spent any amount of time running RPGs, you inevitably learn a lot about yourself as a person, as an improviser, and as a project manager. Or at least you have some suspicions about yourself confirmed through play. So it came as little surprise to me when, after running one-shot sessions of Low Fantasy Gaming, Colonial Gothic, and The Sprawl for one group and starting a longer D&D 5th Edition campaign for another group, I realized that I wasn't so great at storing and juggling a large number of system rules in my head while also presenting and arbitrating over a fictional environment. Giving me access to the rulebook during the sessions didn't help; I struggled with trying to do more than a quick, cursory search for a piece of information.

I thought back on my younger years. Did I really do that? Spend a lot of time just paging through myriad D&D books, searching for all the detailed rules? Did I derail a few dozen immersive moments each session to check on minutia? The memories are hazy and I'm left unsure. Maybe I wasn't tuned in enough to the dramatic potential of immersive gaming to notice; maybe I didn't look much up then either. 

Evaluating Systems

[Edit: I changed out one fantasy game for another, as I concluded that I preferred the more streamlined system of Vagabonds of Dyfed over the more complex, move-based system of Freebooters on the Frontier 2e. 4/27/21]

Recently taking a moment to reflect, I've found myself hip-deep in middle-age. It happens to a lot of us. I realized that, in a likelihood, I've probably got as many games ahead of me as I do behind me. (It's possible this is inaccurate, as I did take ~20 years off from RPGs, but in the interest of an introspective post, let's just roll with that estimate.) I looked back at past campaigns, thinking, They were numerous, but the variety of RPG systems across them was very limited. Like many RPG hobbyists, I tend to collect a lot of game systems -- but, if I'm being honest with myself, there's not a very high chance that I'll actually spend much time (if any) playing those systems.

Admittedly, it's fun to simply collect RPG rulebooks, even if you're not going to necessarily play them all. And, if you're like me, you also get enjoyment out of reading them and expanding your awareness of the variety of rules and mechanics across the hobby. But, that's not ultimately why we're here: we're here to play or run them at the table. So this pause for reflection got me reading. I decided to read through all the rulebooks that I owned (in some cases, it was a quicker read, closer to skimming) so that I might identify my personal "core" games -- those that I turn to as favorites and that I'd be most likely to enjoy running for others. I began a survey of my collection to help me wrap my brain around exactly what I had, how each worked on the simplest level, and how much I valued each personally.