Sorenson's 3 Questions - Sword & Scoundrel

In ye ancient days of yore, Jared Sorensen (designer of many things) put forward three questions that now collectively bear his name. Between writing on the subject, I've been attempting to decide how I wanted to answer.

What is your game about?

Sword & Scoundrel has the tag: A game about Passion, Violence, and General Skullduggery. Above all, the game is a passion play. It's medieval morality theater presented as an HBO or AMC-style character drama. Players decide what's most important to their character, what they care about, what they want, the lines they will not cross. Through play, we challenge them to see how far they are willing to go and what they are willing to sacrifice. The game is about moral conflict, with forces set in motion against the player's goals and beliefs. Finally, it's a blood-opera with the player's passions leading to quick and brutal violence. We wanted the fantasy equivalent of a western or a john woo film, with swordplay being quick, flashy, and lethal.

How does your game do this?

Mechanically speaking, characters are not just their attributes and skills. Their goals and beliefs are represented by player-nominated phrases called Drives which have a mechanical weight to them. Similarly, characters have Traits which can represent everything from the character's history and background to their physical or personality quirks and their relationships with other characters, including the players in their group. These all have mechanical significance in play, often giving them additional dice for their pool when relevant.

On the other side of the coin, the game is written in such a way that it is explicitly about conflict. If there is nothing in conflict and nothing at stake, there is no roll made. Further, while the game goes out of its way to play up its blood-opera persona with a detailed combat system, the rules support conflict in a broad range of arenas. The current beta supports anything when rolled as a simple conflict, but as we get the opportunity we intend to add a fully formed social combat system, faction rules, magic, and other forms of more abstract conflicts.

How does your game encourage/reward this?

The primary reward mechanism is through the accumulation of Drive Points. When players engage in conflicts with their drives, they are rewarded for it through additional dice that drive is worth. These dice come up as bonus dice in any conflict that is directly about the drive in question. Further, when players engage in certain behaviors that highlight their drives and traits, they can gain additional points that can be added to the drive of their choosing. The quickest way to earn these points is often to allow your drives or traits to get you in trouble, rewarding the player directly for making choices that are in line with who their character is even if those choices are not the optimal way to get what the player might want. Finally, these drive points can be spent to increase any of the character's abilities or traits or learn new of the same.

In short, players advance solely by making the kinds of characters suitable for good character dramas (ambitious, resolute, yet flawed) and then role-playing them in the fashion that these characters tend to behave (struggling between who they are and what they want). When they do this, the game not only gives them more dice to throw around in the conflicts they will face but also gives them the means to improve their character's scores as they play.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

The blog here has been silent for a while, as my writing efforts in the last few months have been almost solely concentrated on a project that I can happily announce has begun its release cycle today.

If you would, head over to Grand Heresy where the Sword & Scoundrel (great name, huh?) RPG will be beginning it's release cycle. The starting documents contain the core rules and the character creation materials. We also have a print pdf, form-fillable pdf with character creator, and a sheet already approved and available in Roll20.

This is going to be an interesting ride, folks. Buckle up.

Grand Heresy in 2017

Matt Easton posted a video recently entitled "Scholagladiatoria channel in 2017." It's a video of limited use to anyone who isn't already his subscriber (though, if you're at all interested in martial history, you should be) and chiefly details his plans for the coming year.

That's when I realized it was already February. How does that happen? Worse, I've written nothing on this blog this year. In an attempt to begin rectifying this mistake, I thought I'd post my own variant of the theme: Grand Heresy in 2017.

It's a very creative twist. 

GH2017

With luck, this will be the break-out year for Grand Heresy. 'Bastards (now bearing the more marketable title Sword & Scoundrel) is getting a major facelift and some key rewriting. As this draft gets close to completion, I'll be redoing the site to better show it off as well as redoing some of the marketing/fluff text. Plans are to launch the kickstarter in the very near future. I cannot tell you how excited I am for the thing to be in the wild and officially off my desk for a while.

We've kept track of the download counts of each edition of 'Bastards released. We've gotten anywhere from 400-1000 downloads on each. The last edition of the dueling kit alone has gotten about 1200 downloads. On the surface, this looks fairly promising but you never know what this will mean in terms of kickstarter support or sales down the line. On the other hand, we've also not gone out of our way to market the thing at all. We haven't reached out to rpg.net, storygames, or any of the other hub communities out there aside from a brief flirting with 4chan.

The level of interest we receive after launch will determine the next move. I have a number of things I'd love to develop out of the core rules as supplemental material for the game. Higgins and I have been wanting to develop the naval warfare rules since early in the project's development. A full pirate/age of sail book would let us treat the topic with the same kind of adoration we've spent on the HEMA nerd stuff in the book. I also have a number of setting-seed books I'd like to have the chance to develop for the game as well, all of which are basically toolkit modules for hacking the book to fit whatever you're trying to do with the main system. I've been keeping notes on this sort of stuff since just after the project began. If there were enough interest, I'd have material to write for this game for the next five years or more.

On the other hand, if it turns out to be an extremely niche interest with a limited following, I'm fine with that too. I have a half-dozen other projects I'd love to dev out. As anyone who reads this blog can attest, my gaming interests are eclectic as they are promiscuous.

All of that aside, I acquired a new mic today. It's a proper condenser mic I got relatively inexpensively. After some futzing around with Barbarossa on the audio we got it sounding pretty decent. Now properly equipped, we'll be doing a lot of youtube recording in the near future. Expect at least one actual play campaign of something. I'll probably record some AP material, explanations, and play aids for 'Bastards Sword & Scoundrel as well.

2017 is going to be a big year. Here's to it.

Art Woes

The 'Bastards draft is chugging along. I may or may not meet my year-end deadline, but progress is being made at least. As the days tick by and I get the systems bolted nicely into place, I start to worry about other issues. Writing a game, as it turns out, is only one part of making a game.

We're going to have to deal with the kickstarter thing, sooner rather than later. We've waited too long to wrap all this up as it is. We have a date in mind to begin once we've gotten feedback on this draft. The problem, of course, is that we need art. It was an inevitable issue, but one that presents me with sort of a catch-22. To really get off the ground with a kickstarter, you need good art to sell it -- but our primary reason for doing a kickstarter is to get an art budget.

If you've been around my blog long enough, you've no doubt seen some of my own artwork. I know I'm decent at it, but I also know I'm not good enough to meet the task at hand. Not in any substantial way, in any case.

Further complicating matters, I'm not entirely sure how to start the shopping-for-art process.  I sent out a couple notes on Deviantart, but that's about the depth of my experience with the subject.

This post was mostly just my musing on the subject, but if anyone wants to toss me any advice, offer their services and quote a price, (or ESPECIALLY if you want to contribute art) feel free to leave a comment, hit me up on G+ or otherwise get in touch.

'Bastards 0.2

If you lurk around our forums, you may have already heard: Band of Bastards is currently in the middle of a substantial overhaul. I thought it was appropriate to make some kind of a statement about what we're doing and why.

We've done this a few times before, though most were before we were ever under as much scrutiny. 'Bastards was (fittingly) the illegitimate child of the Trosfans forums, in their project to produce a new, unofficial, and revised edition of The Riddle of Steel after Driftwood went dark. This burst of creative impulse ultimately gave birth to Blade of the Iron Throne as well, which we still look at as a sibling for that reason. Like most siblings, though, we wound up going very separate directions.

The first iteration of the game was exactly what it set out to be - a TROS update, with all the bells and whistles. We had something like 60 maneuvers, 150+ weapons (most of which had more than one stat-line), and a whole mess of very exacting specifications for everything we touched. After the initial creative rush of cobbling together every optional rule from all of the TROS books and somehow making them more-or-less work together, we realized that this was a beast so ungainly that it would be a nightmare to run, let alone teach a new player.

Back to the drawing board.

The next iteration of the game would become what we promoted as Song of Steel. At the time, our focus was still on historical fiction -- a position we leaned into all the harder with Blade selling itself by contrast as a Swords and Sorcery game. It's a funny thing that siblings do. Bernard Cornwell had a prominent place on our bookshelf, along with a great deal of non-fiction that we picked up on swords and swordsmanship (including the book with a very similar title). This is about the time when we started pestering people like Nikolas Lloyd, Roland Warzecha, and Matt Easton for insights, which they all graciously provided.

This was the iteration when we really came into our own. Systems were scrapped, new bits invented, unnecessary bits stripped away. Our ranged combat and skirmish systems date back to this iteration (both of which were Higgin's contributions, amusingly enough. Thank him. He was very insistent on ranged combat being awesome).

Then came Song of Swords. What were the odds of another game being developed by another indie-dev team based on the same original game with a nearly identical  name? We discussed the thing with them - their hands were tied. The name was chosen by their fans. They were polite about the thing and even complimentary. At least one of them had been a fan of our work. It's always nice to be noticed.

Restriction breeds creativity. We were already competing for attention in the same sub-niche of a sub-niche of an already niche hobby, so we were left with the options of either sharing an initialism with who was arguably our closest competitor or redefine ourselves. We chose the latter.

One day, I'll shake Jimmy Rome's hand. Rebranding seemed like a setback at the time, but in the process, we had the license to re-evaluate everything we had chosen to do up to that point. Everything got cleaned up and polished, had the rough edges smoothed out. A lot of the stuff we had been so insistent in trying to replicate in exacting detail simply got dropped or abstracted. 'Bastards began to really hone in on what it wanted to be, which was a game about ambition and conflicts of the moral, physical, and bloody variety. In a strange way, despite being the furthest mechanically from its forebear, it may have been the closest in essence to what TROS wanted to be about.

This latest revision is a continuation of the iterative saga this game has undergone. The purpose of a beta test is to get feedback and have room to make adjustments. Between some of the cracks that have shown themselves at the fringes of our own play, and some of the feedback we've gotten on the forums, we're finding places where things could be better, tighter, or conversely need to be loosened up and made less rigid.

Higgins and I have both grown a lot as both players and designers since we started this project back in (dear God, really?) 2011. The last couple years, in particular, have been spent in a kind of ongoing game design boot camp. One of the driving forces in the revision is that certain areas of the game reflect designs that were either inherited from TROS once upon a time, or products of our early attempts to fix the products of those inherited parts. We can do better, and we're going to.

The end goal is to make a game that I will be inspired to play again. In slaughtering some of the sacred cows we've held on to in search of better design, of cleaning the clutter that we've amassed, we hope to create the kind of game that we're going to want to play and run for years to come. I want to be so again impassioned by this project that we have the energy and drive to see it through to the full vision we had for it. We hope that in making ourselves passionate about the thing, in cleaning up and overhauling the design of the thing, we'll make you passionate about it as well.

An update

Triage. It seems to be the theme of my life. There is always some fire that needs put out and too often it demands my attention be somewhere other than here. This, of course, is a shame as this is one of the things I really enjoy doing in life.

Rather than talk about why I'm not here (no one reads this blog to hear me whinge), I'll just update where I am with the various irons I have in the fire.

The Tyrant's Fear

The campaign is still going, though we've missed as many weeks as we've played. Session 2 is mostly written up, I just need to finish said writing. I've got three more sessions with notes on them that need to be written. We may actually be playing one tonight, depending on who shows up. In addition to the Actual Play stuff, I've got some other commentary and musings I want to ramble on involving the thing, so plenty of content there coming down the pipe. A lot of people seemed to enjoy the first write-up, so with luck they will be so happy about the future content that they will overlook my delay in publishing it.

Band of Bastards

The Wounds and Healing chapter is written up and just needs to be formatted, along with incorporating the edits I have from our last release. It's moving along and with the release of this chapter we technically have everything you need to actually play the game properly. Well, maybe prices. We have those written up somewhere. It'll be fine.

To Henri's horror, I've been contemplating some major revisions to the system. I'm not satisfied with the shape of the present incarnation. I have a whole spiel I'll be writing on that before long, so that when/if that happens people will at least know why. However, I'm going to make sure that the necessary bits get put out to play the current game before I launch into another revision project. Our fans have been incredibly patient with my bullshit, a fact for which I am grateful. I have a play-by-post campaign I need to start up as well. 

Other Blog Shit

Troll Gods has some articles sitting on it. I've got some stuff to add. I'll eventually sit down and get it ironed out. In the meantime, if anyone still has stuff to submit by all means do so. I have a couple things I'm going to be writing reviews on, including a couple indie OSR bits from other amateur creators.

Going forward, I'm going to try to keep up at least a post per week, and hopefully get caught up on some of this nonsense.

Until then, 

Beta Release - Part 3

Another Thursday, another release. Last week we got a ton of feedback on 90 pages of content and some very interesting discussions going on the forums. You guys have been phenomenally helpful. We tried to incorporate as much of that as time allowed, but we've still got a great deal of it ahead. That will be a project to carry us through the weekend.

In addition to some editing for clarity, this week we introduce two chapters that you have been eagerly awaiting.

Chapter 09: Full Contest gets into the core rules we use for chases, debates, and other prolonged skill-based conflicts.

Chapter 10: Melee Combat gets into the meat of our fighting system, which many of you have been speculating over for months now.

We haven't had as much time to work on everything this week as we had hoped, so the examples are still missing in certain areas. If our schedules allow, we may toss in a mid-week update before next Thursday to get everything taken care of and our release schedule back on track.

You can pick up your copy here or on our downloads page. As always, we'll be opening discussion threads for feedback on our forums.

Thanks for sticking with us, folks. Enjoy.

- The GH Crew

Beta release - Part 2

Mirrored...

 

 
What a week. With the last edits as fresh as this morning, we've pulled through. Grand Heresy is happy to announce release 2 of our rolling beta. This week we cover a ton of material, going from about 15 pages to 95, putting us up to Chapter 08.

You can download your copy here

Chapter 03 Anatomy of a Bastard takes you through the structure of character creation, starting with creating your band of bastards first and establishing the overall tone and expectations for the campaign ahead.

Chapter 04  Attributes & Skills has full writeups for each, exactly as you'd expect, as well as some more specific rules on using them in play.

Chapter 05 Proficiencies & Maneuvers is what many of you have been looking forward to. It covers a character's training at arms, our proficiency system, and the maneuvers 'Bastards uses to make combat interesting. In addition, it also covers Simple Combat, allowing for less intensive combat resolution for quick scuffles or groups that are less interested in the ebb-and-flow of melee.

Chapter 06 Edges & Flaws is thus far the largest single chapter in the book, accounting for 23 pages on its own. Therein we list all of the information for the various options available to your character, and how to get the most out of your flaws in play.

Chapter 07 Story Aspects details the mechanic that really drives our game forward, covering the role it plays in allowing the player to guide the story, the reward cycle, and how SAs play into character advancement. 

Finally, Chapter 08 Supporting Cast covers how players can establish NPC relationships at character creation, or make new contacts and enemies through play.

Threads have already been set up on a chapter-by-chapter basis on our forums for feedback.

We look forward to hearing from you!

- The GH Crew

Beta Release - Part 1

Just echoing this out across the various channels...

Beta Release - Part 1

This wasn't how we intended to do it, but we figured we've kept you guys waiting long enough. Credit for the decision can actually go to some of the posters on our forums, who made an argument for a chapter-by-chapter release of the documents we have. Alright, you guys win.

This first release is going to be the intro chapter and basic mechanics. Each Thursday, we'll release another chapter or two to you guys to dissect and discuss. With the biggest chapters mostly behind us at this point, we expect the rest of the document to be finished in the next couple weeks anyway.

The download can be found here:

https://dl.orangedox.com/OzGaYpVrYIULsCFspK/BandofBastards-Beta01-Ch08.pdf

If you share the link or the document, we'd appreciate it if you used the original link, just because we want to keep track of how many people downloaded the thing as we go.

This is for you guys. Thanks for sticking with us.

- The GH Crew

The Problem With Assassination in Role Playing Games

This is mirrored from a discussion the GH forums, but I thought I'd throw it up here as well. The discussion is specific to the way Band of Bastards works, but it applies to any game with moderate-to-high potential lethality.

As I've been hammering out the rules for 'Bastards, a topic has been eating me for a while. Since Higgins and I were unable to come up with a good solution, I thought I would offer it up for discussion here.

We are going to define the word assassination in this discussion to mean "a situation in which the target is dead without a meaningful chance to prevent or react to it." The primary examples to be discussed are sniper shots and poison.

Both of these things are extremely effective in killing people. That is why they exist. It's realistic and good simulation that they should kill people pretty effortlessly when they happen, and it's fitting that the rules should encourage players to make use of them (if it is the sort of thing their character would do). After all, getting in a fair fight is usually a very poor tactic utilized by the foolish, idealistic, or desperate.

The problem is that this blade that should cut both ways, but in practice doesn't. Mechanically speaking, there's nothing stopping me as a GM from rolling some dice and announcing "Your conversation is cut short when the window shatters. Blood and brains fly out the back of your skull and splatter the wall behind you. A half-second later, your friends hear the report of a high-caliber rifle some distance away." The rules support it just like they do if it were a player character doing the same to an NPC.

The problem is that any GM who would actually do that out of the blue is ..well.. probably an asshole. For a game like 'Bastards to work, you have to have some kind of trust in your GM and killing a PC off without any meaningful chance to prevent it is a gross abuse of that trust. Poison is the same way. An option is always some kind of perception test to spot the sniper or detect the poison first, but even that seems grossly unfair when the fail-state of the test is "you die."

Thus in practice, this becomes an extremely strong tool for the PCs to use, but one that they are essentially plot-armored from ever receiving. At best, the GM is going to have to either intentionally miss the first shot, or an NPC winds up eating a bullet to alert the players to the danger.

In our discussion, Higgins did point out that we are primarily simulating fiction - not reality - and that protagonists very rarely die suddenly and without warning from assassination attempts (George R. R. Martin notwithstanding). This is a good point, but the counterpoint I offered was that the protagonists in fiction aren't aware of their own plot-armor. By contrast, players can generally trust that their GM isn't just going to kill them without a warning or a chance to prevent it - which has a strong tendency to translate into player-characters operating under the same assumption.

So the question we are forced to grapple with is "how does one balance assassination as a useful and effective tool for the PCs without making it so effective that it can never be used against them?"

Following this up with some broader-applicability to other games - I find this isn't an issue in OSR games specifically, or D&D games in general. After first the first couple levels, you generally have enough HP that a single crossbow bolt to the face isn't going to kill you, and even then in most D&D games death isn't permanent. Poisons lose a lot of their efficacy, because you can still try to make saves for them. In general, dungeon-crawling also usually means the characters are always on the lookout for something trying to kill them anyway. 

Still Alive

Hello internet. It's been a while.

I'm still alive, fortunately. Our orc-based campaign got sidelines when the GM had his work-schedule change, and my own writing time has been compromised by my day-job, the sad reality of adulthood.

So what's new:

• Bastards is hopping along. We got out another couple teasers on the GH site, and discussions on our forums. Progress is being made on the core book for beta, but not nearly as much as I would have liked.
• Our site admin decided to start designing a game of his own, which will be later revealed under the GH brand. I won't get into details here, but it looks to be very cool. I've been consulting, but I won't be sitting down and putting words to paper until 'Bastards has gotten to publish.
• OrcQuest picked back up last week, hopefully to be a regular occurrence again.  I'll have an AP report again before long. 
• We're considering an AP podcast with our next campaign, in case you have a dire urge to listen to us ramble for hours. We'll need to figure out how we want to do it, but it sounds like a good idea on the face of it. 

That's where we're at for now. I'll have the next OrcQuest installment before long.

Carry on.

History is Not Boring: Cool Stories That..

Something that I posted on the GH Forums, but I thought I'd mirror it here as it's kinda cool:

History is not Boring: Cool Stories That Actually Happened (Probably)

A common argument I hear in favor of fantasy literature and games is that real history is boring. I will here defend that not only is history not boring, but it is actually more interesting than anything we could come up with. One need only look at A Song of Ice and Fire to pick out the historical inspirations - Hadrian's Wall, the Protestant Reformation, the Angles conquest (really? he called them Andals, of all things), even the landscape of Westeros is basically the British isles with Ireland turned sideways. The list goes on.

So here I will begin posting really cool people and events from history, either to inspire your own game as a historical pursuit or to take the ideas, stories, and elements for use in your own fantasy adaptations.

To get us started, some cool stuff from more or less own period:

Cesare Borgia
(1498-1507)
A Spaniard and an Italian, son of a Pope, ex-cardinal (first person to ever resign the office!) who becomes a condottieri (soldier), commands the papal armies, eventually carves out his own state and is ultimately cast from power by a series of betrayals and political machinations. An excellent tale of passion, ambition, assassination, and political intrigue. The Showtime Borgias isn't terrible either, even if it starts quite slowly.

Hernán Cortés
(1485-1547)
Another Spaniard who goes from being a relative nobody (born of lesser nobility) to carve a bloody mark in the history books. Explorer, soldier, military captain. Brilliant politician that successfully forges alliances among natives in order to bring down an empire.

Sir Kenelm Digby
(1603-1665)
English courtier, diplomat, natural philosopher, alchemist, fencer. Born not only Catholic, but the son of one of the Gunpowder Plotters, he still manages to gain enough favor at court to land a seat in the Royal Academy, later becomes a privateer, captures spanish, dutch, and flemish ships. Gets involved in the civil war, fights quite a few duels.. guy is absolutely fascinating.

Johannes Liechtenauer
Mysterious fight-master who was active sometime in the 14th century. Most of the later fight-masters trace their own "school" back to him in some way. Even with the limited information we have, he's worth reading on. The mind immediately wants to cast this wandering yoda-like elderly sword-saint traveling through the German countryside.

Hans Talhoffer
(1410-1482)
Professional swordsman turned Fight-master that eventually founds and becomes grandmaster of an entire German school of fencing. True renaissance man who was also studied a number of academic subjects throughout his life.

Swordsmen Cultures and Organizations
Brotherhood of St. Mark
15th century German fencing guild. Talhoffer may have actually founded it. Some really cool information on the way fencing guilds functioned. The article also mentions rivalry with other fencing guilds - the Lukasbruder (Brotherhood of Saint Luke) and the Federfechter. Immediately, I want to run a game about rival fencing guilds and the bloody conflicts between students vying for position within their own guild, and defending the honor and prowess of their guild through battle with its rivals.

Rodeleros
Spanish Sword and Buckler men, originally a troop type invented by the Italians. High risk, high reward troop types that become popular as adventurers and mercenaries, including following Cortes into the New World.

Landsknecht
Arguably some of the most famous mercenaries from the Renaissance period, known for their colorful clothing and - perhaps most famously - their massive two-handed swords.

Tercio
Also known as the "Spanish Third," they were the first modern, professional volunteer army. While Landsknecht certainly get a lot of attention, the culture and lifestyle of the Tercio is fascinating.

"Soldiers serving in the tercios were proud and extremely cautious men when it came to their personal honour. So much so, that they would die before staining their reputation as soldiers."

"Such an obsession for matters of honour and reputation would provoke numerous duels, which, added to the soldiers' fierceness on the battlefield, earned the tercios a quarrelsome reputation. When fighting together with allies or tercios from different nationalities, it was common that the Spanish ones demanded the most decisive, dangerous or important positions in combat, in order to defend their reputation. In fact, the Spanish army was the only one at the time which had to include punishments for those who dared to break formation due to eagerness for fighting or to distinguish themselves in the face of the enemy."

I will come back and add more over time, but seriously - history is fascinating. 

Band of Bastards: Intro Teaser

I've always hated writing self-promotion. I always feel compelled to seek out that (what seems to me) incredibly narrow space between "HYPE: The HYPENING" and "So dry that the author seems to have forgotten the purpose of an introduction."

I know what I'm supposed to do. The job of an introductory text is to hook players and answer some questions up front: What is this game? Why should I care? What makes it special? Why should I waste my time reading the next 300 pages?

The obvious desire then is to answer those questions in the best light possible - preferably filled with as much energy and passion as you can muster. The problem is doing so in a fashion that won't cause your audience to groan and roll their eyes. Indie games can be quite bad about this in general, so I feel the need to be twice as careful about the image I present.

As it stands, the teaser is now available here, and I would really welcome any feedback on it.

On other fronts: We have a new logo! Well. modified logo.

 

Following entirely reasonable feedback from our forums, I wound up redoing the sword image to be specific to the period we're talking about. Once I found some sample images to work with that weren't basket-hilt swords, we were in business. I actually really like basket-hilts, but they are very hard to "read" in an image of this type.

'Bastards is now in InDesign, being formatted as a 6"x9" (trade hardback) style pdf for the Beta. We're taking some risks on the format, but it will at the very least be mobile-friendly, which is important given that I don't expect anyone to print off a 300 page pdf to beta test. I can see the light on the horizon, and I am unbelievably excited to have this project out in the open air for a while.

Stay tuned, 

Band of Bastards: Working Cover

Something I've been working on lately, and I'm exceptionally excited about - I managed to throw together the cover layout for the Band of Bastards book. Well. Sort of.

This is an experimental cover that I'll show on it's own merits before I bother explaining it. Just for a moment click it, enlarge it, and take it in. Bask in it. Bask.

This is an experimental cover. I think it was Luke Crane that really advised for an indie-dev to sit down and really invest in some nice cover art, more than anything else, because you're going to use that cover art for publicity and marketing again and again and again. In theory, the investment should pay off in spades. It is, after all, the face of your game.

The thing for me though is that I've never much cared for the art on the cover of a book. At best, I nod and go "oh, neat." and move on. At best, it helps me identify the specific genre (Oh, she's wearing a bronze breastplate, this must be a set in antiquity), but I'm far more likely to totally ignore it, or be actively turned off by it.

Conventional wisdom demands one place a certain kind of artwork on their cover. Usually this is either a collection of the characters on the front, hoping to speak to "this is what you can be," or some kind of scene on the front depicting the nature of the game - for fantasy games, this is usually someone fighting some kind of monster.

I think the problem for me has always been that when it comes down to it, I have no investment in what's happening on the cover. This is not my character, that's not my story. Since the overwhelming majority of my campaigns are home-brewed, I'm generally not even looking to the cover for atmosphere.

The above cover was my thought on "what if we tried something different?" I intentionally gave it that "old book" look, and I think the details came out very well. The leather texture, the binding, the faux gold leaf. It would in fact make for one sexy glossy hardback, and look gorgeous on a shelf. I even love the fact that it doesn't immediately look like another fantasy RPG book - but it does look intriguing.

On the other hand, this could all be one man's eccentricity again. By publishing time, you might have exactly what you expect in an RPG book - some dashing scene of blood and swordsmanship.

For now, I'm going to sit back and enjoy it.

Regards, 

A Question of Nomenclature

There is an extremely under-appreciated skill in game design. Naming stuff. I literally cannot tell you how many times I've written something or worked something out only for progress to grind to a screaming halt for want of a good term to label it. As an excellent case in point, I present the following from the Introductory chapter of Band of Bastards.

How to Use This Book

Band of Bastards is based around an idea we can credit Vincent Baker for: Concentric Game Design.  The game is divided into four Books within itself of escalating levels of complexity.

Book I contains everything you need to play the absolute core of the game, including task resolution and character creation.

Book II escalates this, including the rules for Full Contests, as well as Melee and Ranged combat sequences.

Book III includes all of the additional optional rules for fighting giant beasts, customizing weapons, and other topics.

Book IV is the province of the Game Master, and includes the rules for generating NPCs and running games in the ‘Bastards style player-driven narrative.

You don’t need to learn or use all of the rules at once, especially if you’re playing with a more experienced group. start with Book I and get used to the basics. It’s even possible to play the game using only the rules from Book I. You’re missing out on a lot, but it can be done. Many groups will be entirely comfortable just using Books I & II for most of their game-play, and certainly for the first few sessions or campaign. When you’ve got a handle on everything else, then you can expand into Book III, or not. Use everything, or just what you want, it’s in your hands.

Toolkit Mentality

Ultimately, this is your game, not ours. What you choose to do with it is more important than any suggestions we might make and we’ve designed it that way from the ground up. The division of the rules above supports a modular approach, and many systems can be tweaked or replaced entirely without damaging others in the game. We’ve even included some of the most common tweaks as Levers in Book III. Ultimately, we’ve set the game up to imitate the kind of world we want to play in, and expect that you will do the same. Look at this entire manual as a toolkit of interesting potential rules, and assemble them in the way you like. We just ask that before you do, play it our way, just once. After you’ve had a chance to see what we’ve done and why we’ve done it, tweak to your hearts content.

On the one hand, labeling things Book I - IV is direct and utilitarian, but also doesn't really do anything useful beyond being a placeholder. Burning Wheel was quite brilliant in this regard with its "hub," "spokes," etc.

Wanting for clever metaphor, I considered going something like "Core," "Basic," and "Advanced" but that doesn't seem like it accomplishes anything more than Book I-IV would. On the other hand, it would be pretty funny to have "Basic Bastard" and "Advanced Blades & Bastards" as terms. I'll have to pitch AB&B to Higgins. I can hear him groaning all the way from Estonia. It will be awesome.

Thinking on nomenclature will be my task for tonight. I'll have to sleep on it.

Until next time,

Notes from 4chan Interview

So the other day I was taking a break from the NaNoWriMo grind and as a reflex, I hopped on 4chan's tabletop games board. I hang out there from time to time when I get the chance - it's worth noting that my current gaming group is actually a skype-based group recruited from one of their Gamefinder threads.

I saw a Riddle of Steel thread and checked it out. To shorten a longer story, imagine my surprise when people were talking about Band of Bastards?

We had planned on making a big 4chan unveil for a long while now, but wanted to wait until our beta was in motion. With people actively asking "What is band of bastards?" in the thread though, there would be no better time to hop in and make an introduction. What followed was an impromptu four hour Q&A / interview that kept me up until nearly 5am. 

You can get the full archive of the thread here (Caution: NSFW), but I thought I'd post some of the better bits discussed. When it comes up, BotIT refers to Blade of the Iron Throne, SoS refers to Song of Swords, and TROS or RoS refers to The Riddle of Steel.

> Who are you?
Jackson Malloy, on the forum or dev page of our site, listed as Agamemnon (long story). I'm more or less creative lead on Band of Bastards, which you can get a healthy bit of information about at grandheresy.com.

> What is your game?
> What is Band of Bastards?
Without copypasta'ing the whole sales pitch: The GH team was part of the TROSfans forum that developed after Norwood sold Driftwood to George Thompson and the TROSforums fell apart. Ian Plumb (god rest him) basically kept the whole community together on his dime. When people started pitching a successor, something like 2000 threads were posted about what to do with the unofficial TROS2.0. The results of that work ultimately turned into two projects - Blade of the Iron Throne, and Song of Steel. We were on the latter team. When Song of Swords released its beta, we talked to Opaque and ultimately decided that some rebranding was in order. Along with it, we made some revisions and some design changes that, while significantly improving the game, set us back some time.

> So what do you hope to accomplish with Band of Bastards, and what do you feel you've accomplished so far? 
The original goal was "make TROS playable" but it kind of shifted away from that.

In practice, we wound up taking the things we liked about TROS - the HEMA/ARMA fetish combat, the extremely dangerous bloody wounds, the cinematic action, powerful protagonists from the beginning and player-driven narrative.. and then deconstructed everything and rebuilt it in a way we though would be more internally consistent, more streamlined, move more smoothly in play, and much easier to learn for a new player.

One of my biggest problems in getting people to play TROS back in the day was overcoming the system itself, so we tried to make that as easy as possible. So far, testing has suggested it's a success on all counts. The Beta will prove it one way or another. We'll drop it on our site and 4chan.

>How do you feel about your chances of success, making a game for such an unexpectedly-crowded niche market? 
We're pretty happy with the way things are going. We've changed enough that, while we keep the core ideas in place, we hope to aim our game at a broader audience than "old TROS vets." Michael (BotIT) mentioned in an email a while back that cleaving so closely to the original game was something he regretted for their release.  

> How do you plan on distributing the completed game? Will there be .pdfs or are you going with books?
We are researching our options for physical copies now, and nailing that down as we get closer. We have some friends who have been through all of this before, so they are being really helpful in that regard.

We plan to initially distribute a beta in pdf form through our website, and then look at kickstarter options. The end goal would be to have both physical copies and pdfs available.
 

 
> So, what is up with the wound wheel, How do you determine where exactly you've hit.
When you attack, in melee, you call what wheel you're attacking (head, shin, etc) and roll a d6 if you succeed in your attack. If it was a swing, use the outside results. If it's a thrust, use the inside. Go clockwise, starting with the top.

> This sounds just cumbersome enough in actual play for me to never want to use it
In practice, it's pretty effortless, particularly compared to the TROS way of doing it. It also means we don't need a dozen tables to cover every possible body structure to account for the angular momentum of the weapon (horses don't need separate location charts, etc) 

> It's the same thing as a bunch of hit location tables, just expressed visually.  
This exactly. 

> This is for melee, how do you do the ranged hits then?
> Can you not aim?
For melee, you get to specify your wheel. Thrust attacks actually allow you to expend dice to have more control over where on that wheel you can hit, making them by definition more accurate than swing based attacks.

For ranged, you roll 2d6. The first die determines the wheel, the second die determines the exact location, using the thrust table.

If you are close enough, you can choose high or low (thus only counting the top 3 or bottom 3 wheels. Treat the first die as a d3).

You can also make called shots with ranged attacks by expending dice from your ranged combat pool to cover up wheels you DON'T want to hit. So if you you wanted to make sure you didn't hit Shin or Thigh, you can drop two dice to cover them up.


> So, why should I pick this game instead of SoS?
Personal preference?
Really, there's no edition war to be had here. I've talked to the guys at Opaque, they seem pretty cool - even if we were briefly arguing over possession of an acronym in an extremely obscure and surprisingly overcrowded sub-niche of RPG.

Song of Swords seems set out to accomplish very particular things in a very particular way. It's got a bundled setting, and is designed to model a particular kind of fantasy. I won't comment on their approach, and as I haven't been keeping up on the current state of the game (sorry, James) I won't try to compare mechanics.

What I can say is that as of the version I had read (1.7? maybe?), they went for a much crunchier, much more simulationist kind of feel than we did. At the time, they were also designing a game that had encouraged you to "build" a character in a way that reminded me of d20 systems. I apologize up front if this is an unfair characterization - it's been a long while since I've read up on their work. I should do so again sometime soon.

Comparing now directly with TROS: we didn't want a system where you were concerned with your build. We didn't want there to be any Edges/Perks/whatever that you felt compelled to take to make your concept work. Accuracy was practically the default Gift choice in the original game, and the Companion and Flower of Battle only made this worse.

We wanted a game where the outcomes of actions were based as much on player choice as possible, rather than any kind of cultivating bonuses (no +1 this, +1 that stuff floating around). We wanted the system itself to be as unobtrusive as possible, and to have as little book-keeping as we could get by with.

So, in a lot of ways I would argue that we went the opposite direction of Song of Swords - the impression I had was that they saw tros and wanted to add more crunch, detail, and customization options. We saw TROS and wanted to make it smoother, and in some ways more narrative focused.

If anything, I'd say they are different systems aimed to produce different kinds of experiences. We aren't a rules-light game by any measure, but I would say it is fair to argue we take a lighter, more narrative approach than Song of Swords.

Which one you might like better is largely a matter of what you like in your games.

> So how do you kill a man in plate, then?
I'd go get a pollax, mate. Maybe a nice mace. Would certainly be easier.

That said, if you insist on fighting him with a sword - remember that bit earlier, where thrusts can spend dice to be better aimed?

Your best tactic is to get some good whacks in on his helmet - you won't cut through him, but you might be able to ring his bell enough to get a dice advantage. Then you need to spend some of that dice advantage to get in a precision thrust to the joints. Plate protects you, but you aren't invulnerable.

This is all much, much easier if you're using a longsword than a one-handed sword, as you can then take advantage of half-swording to more easily overcome maille, or nice murder-stroke to the face.

Of course, if none of the above is an option, you always have the ability to straight up go in and grapple - as we have a system built in for modeling limb locks, choking, etc etc...get in there, get him down and knife him in the throat, or outright break his neck.

The goal we keep coming back to for these questions was "How did it work in real life?" Our bar for success is when the answer that worked in real life is the answer that works in the game.

> What's your favorite kind of berry?
Blueberry, actually. I realize this may be a controversial choice. 

It all went fairly well, I think. I always have a kind of dread of these things, and in 4chan I felt a bit like I was stepping into Song of Swords' home turf, but I was pleasantly surprised. I look forward to checking in there again when we've got something of substance to show them.

Until next time,

Angry DM Rants: Randomness (An Alternate Take)

This morning, The Angry DM posted an article entitled Angry Rants: Randomness which shared some of his views on the place of chance in a role-playing game and his opinions thereof. As you might guess by the title, he wasn't a fan. While I can see his point, I'd like to offer an alternate take.

Random chance in a game is a very specific tool in the GM or game developer's arsenal. Like electricity, it is a neutral force. Used correctly, you produce wonders. Used incorrectly or carelessly, you're going to get someone fried.

The argument presented in the Angry DM's article is mostly demonstrated through a discussion of a poor experience in a prewritten module and from what I understand of it, yeah. It sucked. At a glance, it seems to ask players to play through what is essentially a lottery to determine an important plot point, and that is a very poor way to make use of chance. I can't blame him for not being pleased.

That said, what the Angry DM is addressing is player agency. Players want to feel like they are making decisions, and that those decisions matter. This is a big deal for a game, as otherwise you wind up just going through the motions. "Oh, there's a monster? I guess I keep rolling dice until it dies."

I'm a big fan of player agency. In fact, that's one of the driving design goals in Band of Bastards - that everything from character creation to combat and social politics are based on interesting decisions that the players have made, rather than simply "how many dice can I roll?" or "How high is my modifier?" It's the chief reason that there were no "combat bonus" Edges one could take, as we wanted explicitly to get away from the idea that you had to "build" your character a certain way in order to be effective. It's about choice. 

But does that make randomness the enemy? (Even a necessary one?) Absolutely not. It's about how you use it. So how do you pull this off correctly?

Join me again tomorrow, where we'll explore that very topic and more.

Until then,