Keeton's Journey is a pressure cooker for role playing

Keeton's Journey is my favorite game that came out of the Free RPG Blog's 2013 Harder Than Granite competition. The contest inspired me to write about different entries for a week and I saved what I think is the best for last. While it does make some interesting use of dice, it is the structure of the game that makes me appreciate Keeton's Journey.

In Keeton's Journey, one player plays a wandering medicine man named Keeton who travels from village to villages, helping them deal with mysterious supernatural life forms called yokai. One player plays Keeton while everyone plays villagers. While Keeton is there to deal with the yokai, the problems will always be intertwined with the secrets and lies of the villagers.

It's based on Mushishi, a manga I've never read. However, Keeton's Journey does remind me of Dogs in the Vineyard, Princes' Kingdom or Kagematsu. In each case, an outsider has come to solve an isolated population's problems with a strong focus on character development and story.

Setup for the game is quick and straightforward. You'll need a regular pip die for every villager and some paper and pencils. At the start of the game, the villagers come up with a rough description of the village and their roles in the village. They also need to each come up with an important secret they keep.

Gameplay has a fairly strict structure. Keeton has an introductory scene with each villager. Other villagers can appear in that scene but it is that player's spotlight scene. There is then a second round of scenes, heightening and escalating there situation. The outcome of these scenes will determine if the village can be saved, with the game ending on an appropriate epilogue.

So, here's the mechanics. At the start of each round, all the dice will get rolled. At the end of each scene, a die will be used to determine a dramatic revelation or action that will end the scene.

It gets even more interesting that that. It doesn't matter what the number is, per se, but what kind of picture the pips form. Two and three represent the Path, pushing people forward. Four and six represent the Box, when people close themselves off. Five is the Crossroads, tough decisions. Lastly, one is the Loner, isolation.

In the second round, choosing the Path or the Crossroads means you reveal your secret. Choosing the Box or the Loner means you keep your secret. At the end of the game, if more people reveal their secret, Keeton is able to deal with the yokai and save the village. 

Yes, that means that the dice rolls will determine if the village is saved or not. And guess what, that doesn't matter. That isn't why you play a narrative-driven game like this. The reward of a game like Keeton's Journey is how you tell the story and a well-told tragic ending can be immensely satisfying.

Part of this is because, outside of the restrictions of the dice, there is immense freedom in what kind of story you want to tell. There is only the illusion of restriction. Instead, the structure in a narrative game helps guide you and keep you focused. The structure is a tool for you to use.

In other words, Keeton's Journey is the kind of game I've come to really enjoy after discovering and exploring the world of indie RPGs.

I like how Keeton's Journey is well designed for a low prep one-shot that still has room for deep and meaningful role playing. With just two rounds of scenes an experienced group of players could finish a game in three to four hours. Less experienced players, I'm guessing two to three hours. (Less experienced narrative players will probably have shorter scenes) I can even see breaking it down into two little sessions with ease.

Keeton's Journey isn't brilliant, although the dice symbolism is a really good idea. It is a game with a structure that I know works and creates some really great story telling. It takes many of the lessons I've learned about indie game design and story telling and puts them in a tiny, pocket-sized pamphlet, perfect for a one-off night of gaming and story telling.

http://www.thefreerpgblog.com

http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/keetons-journey

A Flask Full of Gasoline is also full of crazy awesome

A Flask Full of Gasoline is one part genius, two parts machismo and eight parts unbridled lunacy. If you ever wanted the perfect RPG based on movies like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Snatch with a chance at folks ending up in the hospital, this is your game. On the surface, it's a really funny spoof of RPGs. However, beneath that is some interesting design choices.

Before you play, you're going to need to get a bunch of shot glasses, some matches, a bottle of 190 proof grain liquor, a pile of bullets and a hip flask full of gasoline. Character sheets consist of writing down five things that make your character a badass hard case.

Dealer sits everyone down at the table in any order they choose. Sitting farther away from the dealer is a disadvantage so this is blatant favoritism time. Everyone gets a shot of grain liquor and sets a bullet face up in front of them.

Here's the mechanics. If you want to do something or you don't like a decision the dealer made, you flick your bullet at the dealer's bullet. You make it, cool. You get your way. Miss, lose one of your badass traits, which are also your hit points.

Don't want to lose a trait? Fine. Take a hit from the flask of gasoline to show you really are that tough. In case you didn't know it, ask any idiot who tried to syphon their neighbor's gas tank and is now at the hospital, this is a REALLY dumb idea. Put you in the ER or the grave dumb idea.

PVP is handled by flicking your bullet into the other guy's shot glass. Miss, you drink your shot. Make it, you get your way and they have to drink their shot, bullet and all. Beats chugging gasoline but not by that much. 

Dealer hands out match sticks for doing awesome cool stuff. End of the game, whoever has the most matches gets to burn down whatever they feel like. Whoever has the least has to burn down whatever the group votes on. Better hope it's not your ma's caravan with her in it.

A Flask Full of Gasoline consists of three little pamphlets. Main book, dealer's guide (which is mostly how to play head games and mess with people but does include NPC rules), and a sample adventure. Taken as a whole, it's a hysterical read and amazingly over the top madness crammed into 24 little pages.

However, The last page of the adventure includes alternate rules to make the game something you could play without people dying. And that turns the whole thing on its head.

Fill the flask with grain liquor. Fill the shot glasses with vodka. Swap out the bullets with candy. Boom. Instead of a parody that could kill someone, you have a functional game based on pub games.

Yeah, I'm actually looking at a Flask Full of Gasoline as playable game. Deal with it.

Here's the thing. Over the years, I've played a decent number of games of Dread, the one with the Jenga tower. Swapping out dice or cards for dexterity games does work and it adds a completely kind of tension and excitement to a game.

Don't get me wrong, even with the alternate rules, we're looking at a fast and silly game where everyone is going to get hammered. Seriously, how good do you think your candy flicking skills really are?

At the very least, A Flask Full of Gasoline is definitely worth a read. You could stand up on the stage and just read the rules and have everyone rolling in the aisles. However, with the alternate rules, I can see the right crew of people having a lot of fun with it. It would be a light, silly, sloppy game that would require designated drivers but people would have fun. 

http://www.thefreerpgblog.com

http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/a-flask-full-of-gasoline

Blind bidding and the Prisoner's Dilema as the basis for an RPG

The kingdom is at war and the king lies dying. A power struggle has begun between the rightful prince, the supreme general and the the resourceful bastard son of the king. One of them will rise to the throne but war might destroy the kingdom before them.

Make the King is a tiny RPG designed to be played with exactly three-players. It was part of the Free RPG Blog's 2013 24 Hour contest. What makes it interesting for me is that the mechanics use blind bidding and a variant on the prisoners' dilemma.

Each player starts off with two mugs, one full of black chips and the other full of white chips. Two empty mugs sit in the middle of the table, one for each color.

The players will take turns playing the king, calling the other two characters to the king's deathbed. The king will ask questions, asking the two of them of the wars going.

After they give their versions of the situation, which will probably be completely conflicting with each other, the two players bid on who's version of the truth is real.

Each player can bid up to half of either their remaining white or black chips. If they both been wanting to, the larger bid wins. The winner gets the losers bid and their bid goes into the mug on the table designated for white chips. Black chips always beat white chips and both bids going to the mugs on the table. If both players good with black chips, the higher bid wins with both bids going into the mugs on the table.

Well there are rules to make sure that everyone gets to play the king twice, the game ends when one of the mugs on the table is full. If the white mug is full, whoever has the most white chips left in their personal stock, they become the new king and describe how they win the war. But if the black mug is the one that is full, the kingdom has lost the war and been conquered. Everyone loses but whoever has the most white chips is the scapegoat.

On the one hand, the board gamer in me likes the simple but tight auction mechanic with the twist with the end. It's simple but it works from a mechanical standpoint. It reminds me a lot of games like Terra and High Society. It isn't a proper prisoners' dilemma but it reminds me of it.

On the other hand, what I don't like is that the role playing isn't really tied to the mechanics. It doesn't matter what you do in your interviews with the king or what kind of story you create. This is a game with a real winner and loser and that is solely determined by how well someone works the auctions. That really isn't a winning point for a role playing game for me.

I've seen mechanics that make more sense in board games used in RPGs before. Mars Colony and Dread come to mind. But in those cases, they were married to the story and helped drive it.

Still, to be fair, Make the King is an entry in 24 hour contest. It had some interesting ideas. I don't see myself every playing it but I did have fun reading it.

http://www.thefreerpgblog.com

http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/make-the-king

Discovering a new blog and reading about an RPG contest

I recently stumbled across www.thefreerpgblog.com. Honestly, being someone who is interested in quirky RPGs, it's amazing it took me this long. And the first post I really poured over were the entries for the 2013 Harder Than Granite 24-Hour RPG competition.

Rob Lang, who writes the blog, set some pretty tough additional requirements. The games had to not include numbers and they had to fit in pocketmods. For them that don't know, a pocketmod is folding and cutting a regular sheet of paper into a little eight-page pamphlet.

No numbers was an interesting idea, since that meant so many basic RPG concepts get ruled out. Pocketmod seemed a bit more odd to me, since PDFs and ebooks and mobile devices have made me stop caring about the size of rule books :P

Oh, and he also wanted designers to include an NPC named after the guy who runs one thousand monkeys one thousand typewriters since 1KM1KT is the biggest online collection of free RPGs.

The contest gave me nineteen tiny, odd little RPGs to read through and I did that in over the course of twenty-four hours. Not that impressive when you remember that that was just reading nineteen single-sided sheets of paper.

I found that some of them were really just conflict resolution systems, which honestly didn't interest me that much. Some of those were really interesting ideas for mechanics but they didn't give me a game I wanted to play.

But others had much tighter focuses. They gave me settings and told me what kind of story I was going to get out of the game. They had serious structures. Which is actually really impressive for such a small space. They also usually had actually simpler rule sets but I'm cool with that.

You see, if I'm going to carry around a RPG in my pocket, I want to be able to play it at the drop of my hat with five minutes or less of teaching. Simplicity married to a structure/story is what I want.

Truth to tell, I came away with five or so games I think would be fun to play, a couple more than I want revisit and examine and one that is the product of an insane mind that I had to share with a bunch of friends. (The core rules of A Flask Full of Gasoline will put you in the emergency room.)

I am really happy that I found the Free RPG Blog and the 2013 contest was such a fun introduction.

http://www.thefreerpgblog.com