RPG Tasting Menu #2: Colonial Gothic

Colonial Gothic logo
This session was part of my RPG Tasting Menu series, in which my gaming group and I play through a one-shot adventure of an RPG system which we've not yet tried. Afterwards, we have an informal review discussion to decide if we'd like to expand the session into a campaign in future.

Colonial Gothic 3rd Edition

Colonial Gothic is a horror RPG produced by Rogue Games Inc. The rulebook states the game is set in America during its Colonial period (1585-1815). This is the third edition of the system, which utilizes its unique 12° system. In essence, the mechanic behind the 12° system is:

2d12  +  attribute modifier  +  skill rating  ≥  target difficulty

It also frequently uses a "degree of success" mechanic based on the difference between the modified roll and the target number for successful rolls.

It is skills-focused (there are 43 skills total), with each skill being connected to one of five attributes that will be relatively familiar to players of D&D or Call of Cthulhu

The following sections of this post contain spoilers for an adventure! Be warned before reading on.

The Session
I acted as GM for the session and I had five players in the group. The adventure opened in 1775, on a hot June night at a tavern in Trenton, NJ. The characters represented a spread of the game's character backgrounds: an urban colonist, a militia member, a Native American, frontier colonist, and a tribe-adopted colonist. After some initial role-play and introductory banter, the tavern crowd was disrupted by the arrival of a distressed, haggard-looking British army officer and soldier. Explaining that they'd lost two fellow soldiers under mysterious circumstances while traveling south from New York, the officer forcibly conscripted the PCs to form a search party and accompany them back along the road to find their compatriots.

Traveling back to the site of the disappearance, the group wandered through the woods and was menaced by wolves that loped around them, but did not engage with them. They finally discovered a clearing with two dilapidated buildings, a farmhouse and another larger structure. Going inside, they found a ruined Quaker meeting house with a sole occupant, sitting in silent contemplation. In spite of the weird vibe, the Quaker man was polite -- up until everyone was going to leave and he requested that they leave the British officer behind with him, intent on not allowing "the aggressor" to leave the premises. The man tried to bargain with the group for the life of the British soldiers. Things went from tense to threatening as a large wolf showed up, seemingly under the control of the strange man. A fight eventually broke out, the party killed the vampiric Quaker and his wolf, and returned to Trenton. Oh, and the missing soldiers were found exsanguinated inside the meeting house.

The Assessment
Overall, I think that Colonial Gothic was a mixed bag of gameplay results. There were some things that I and the other players really, really liked about CG; but there were also things that I feel could be improved. 

Aspects of the central dice mechanic were elegant. Having to make one roll for the test that then carried over to damage during combat really helped to streamline things. Also, the learning curve for new players was dramatically reduced by the fact that there was purely one dice roll that anyone ever needed to make. This helps gaming groups like mine, which is made up of folks who's lives might not allow them to devote a lot of time and attention to memorizing a lot of varying rules for different RPGs. When we get together to play, it helps if we can hit the ground running -- or at least with minimal time spent introducing the rules. By adding the 12° formula to the character sheet, players could readily get the hang of the system. Quite a few of the players commented after the session that they liked the simplicity of the mechanics. And, to be honest, I've always had a soft spot for the d12! Such a wildly underutilized die in most games, here it's given center stage. What's not to love?

One downside to the central dice mechanic was that the rules set the "default" difficulty for tests as 18. During play, my group quickly decided that was causing most rolls to result in failure. On the fly, we switched to 14 as the default difficulty, which seemed to correct the trend. Still, this causes me to think that the game's innate design was poorly chosen in the name of authenticity -- or possibly even the result of an error in editing, though that seems a little unlikely.

CG also includes mechanics called "hooks" and "action points." I've come to the conclusion that, for me to really love an RPG, it must contain some kind of mechanical currency that players (or even GMs) can spend for in-game effects. Action points are just this -- players spend them to raise their dice rolls by +1 or to lower the difficulty by one step. (I'm a little unclear why the option is given, as one step down on the difficulty translates to 3 integers, which is much better than a +1.) Hooks are the means of reinforcing and rewarding role-playing; statements about your character that earn you action points when you play towards them.

One of the central flaws of CG is the editing of the rulebook. There are several errors that a thorough editing sweep would have caught. In some places, a word or phrase makes no sense within the sentence, leading me to suspect that a find/replace function was clumsily carried out on the writing application used to craft the manuscript, without any follow up proofreading. And, while it's not terrible, the formatting could use a bit of sprucing up, too.

The adventure itself was based on "Sin Eater," from the scenario collection, Adventure. I heavily adjusted the plot in an attempt to create a situation that was more ethically murky and, to be quite honest, that was more interesting. I found the adventure-as-written to be pretty bad, so I switched the local farmer and his sons for British military and made the vampire into a devout Quaker with a strong, anti-war philosophy. A philosophy that inclines him to feed on the blood of the British army, but still. In spite of my efforts, I don't think it was very compelling for the players. Perhaps if I had more knowledge of colonial history, I could have made it more immersive, which might have made up for the weak plotting.

It seems clear to me that a lot of effort was invested in creating the sourcebooks for the game. In addition to the rulebook, I also picked up their Settings book (which has information on a handful of real locations across the colonies) and Flames of Freedom: Beginnings (a campaign starter with chapters on colonial Boston and Philadelphia in the back). A lot of research effort seems to have gone into both of these works. (Important Disclaimer: I am not a historian, nor do I know very much at all about colonial history. The above statements are my nonprofessional impressions, so take them with some skepticism; check things out for yourself.) 

On a broad level, I also find CG to be very appealing for reasons that I can't quite put into words. I've always been drawn to the idea of a campaign set during the colonial period of US history. CG seems to hit just the right blend of colonial history, horror RPG design, and that strain of folklore and weird tales that is distinctly American. 

One of the biggest impediments that a game like CG faces with regards to gaming groups like mine is redundancy. The big question for modern gamers with busy schedules: is this game unique and engaging enough that I should spend time learning/playing it in place of a similar game that I already know? And there's the rub; that's the big catch here. As much as I like CG, I'm not sure it would pass that test. My group is very familiar with the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and the universal sentiment was "we could play this using the CoC/BRP system and it would work just as well." The action points and hooks subsystems would have to be ported over, but this seems fairly easy to accomplish. This might be the biggest hurdle facing CG and a possible reason why I haven't seen CG catch on more with tabletop gamers.

Given the 2019 announcement that Colonial Gothic will see a future republication under the Zweihänder Grim and Perilous Roleplaying banner, I look forward to seeing what the future of Colonial Gothic holds.

Summary Impression: Colonial Gothic is a game that has a lot going for it, but that still has a lot of room for growth, revision, and improvement. It feels like a solid, highly interesting core game that is, unfortunately, burdened with inadequate editing and the risk of not being quite unique enough mechanically. Still, I'd recommend trying it out to experience the core system, which is largely pretty streamlined.

Rogue Games Inc. on DriveThruRPG.

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