On the Ridge - A Game Poem

I have to admit that this is a hack of Jason Morningstar's Game Poem The Last Stand. It started out with me trying to adjust it so that it could be played by email and I ultimately ended up with a different game.

On the Ridge - A Game Poem

Required: 

Two to six players

Four index cards

A pen or marker to write in the index cards

Four six-sided dice per player

You are the sole survivors of your squad. You stand alone together on the ridge with the enemy coming over. You can put up a good fight but you know that you will die in the end. How well will you stand your ground? How well will you live your last moments?

Take a moment to decide the setting of the ridge. It can be anywhere. A real life historical setting, contemporary, fantasy or science fiction. Go around the table. Everyone come up with the name of their character and one sentence to describe what they are like.

Write down "SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR", "SOMETHNG TO DIE FOR", "YOUR GREATEST FEAR", "WHY YOU HATE YOUR COUNTRY", one on each of the index cards. Then roll one die for each player for each card. So, if you have three players, there should be three dice on each card.

Choose someone to begin the battle. They will take a die from a card and describe a short scene about their character in the battle, using both the theme of the card and the dice roll. Then, the next player will do the same. When the last player has taken a die and described a scene, start again with the player to the left of the start player. Continue until everyone has taken four dice and had four scenes.

It is possible, actually extremely likely that a character will die before their fourth scene. The player of a dead character will still take a die and describe a scene. However, it will describe the absence of their character, still reflecting the theme of the card.

Die Roll Table:

1 - Somehow, through some miracle of fate, you have escaped getting hurt.

2 - You try to avoid the battle via a dirty act of cowardice but you are still wounded.

3&4 - You are wounded in battle

5 - You are wounded but you have made a real difference in the battle

6 - Blaze of glory. You die but you have made a real difference for your side in your death

If a player receives their second wound, they will die during that scene.

After everyone has had four scenes, if anyone has survived the battle, which means they have taken three or four ones, that player or players will narrate an epilogue scene.

Otherwise, everyone should just nod to each other. The battle is over. 

Tenure or an eldritch roach in my head?

I am pretty sure that my experiences with Jason Morningstar's designs started with Shab-al-Hiri Roach. He's designed Fiasco, which I consider to be one of the most important indie RPGs, and Gray Ranks, which is an amazing and disturbing design. But before that, in his career and my exposure to his career, there was Shab-al-Hiri Roach.

Shab-al-Hiri Roach is narrative-based and GM-free RPG, which puts it squarely in what has increasingly become my interests. Although I played it before I got into those kind of games :D

In the game, the players are all faculty in a New England university in 1919. Underneath the genteel veneer of polite society is a seething pit of jealousy and rivalry. Over the course of several scenes, the players will engage in social conflicts, risking their reputations in order to increase those same reputation. 

Oh, and there's a Lovecraftian roach from ancient Sumeria who can empower and damn the players in its own quest to spawn and spread its malignant influence.

If you accept the roach or are possessed by it, you get some big bonuses. That little Cthulhu cockroach will give you some considerable mechanical advantages. BUT you can't win the game no matter high your reputation is if you are still possessed by the roach. And getting rid of that little eldritch abomination will require luck and sacrifice.

In my one experience with Shab-al-Hiri Roach, just about every last one of us caved in and gave in to the roach. The winner ended up being humiliated and forced to leave the university in shame and disgrace but, by golly, he won because he didn't give in to the temptation of the roach. 

It was a hoot.

Shab-al-Hiri Roach Is not one of the great indie games. Fiasco, which is an obvious comparison since it's also by Jason Morningstar, has slightly simpler rules, tighter relationship rules and the flexibility to be used with any setting. Shab-al-Hiri Roach doesn't just tell a specific type of story but a specific story. I'd play it again cheerfully but I wouldn't form a group to play it over and over again.

But it's still a fun game, in huge part due to the theme. For me, it's like a mashup of Lovecraft and Wodehouse (which, I know, has been done plenty of times) The concept, while it could be straight up horror, really lends itself to hysterical black comedy.

I view Shab-al-Hiri Roach as the promise of greater games to come in Morningstar's work but it's still fun on its own.

My awe at the Grey Ranks

The Grey Ranks is the emotional equivalent of getting a sock full of bricks to the back of the head while simultaneously getting hockey punched. Which is kind of the point. This is a role-playing game about playing child soldiers during the disastrous Warsaw uprising in World War II.

In the introduction to Slaughterhouse Five, there is a discussion about how there isn't any such thing as an antiwar story, that movies and stories always make war seem heroic and exciting. The Grey Ranks is about as anti-war as you're going to get, this side of Grave of Fireflies.

Part of what makes The Grey Ranks so strong is the respect and seriousness that it treats the subject matter. This is very heavy stuff, war and love and desperation and depression and death. If Jason Morningstar made light of it, the game would be an offensive abomination.

Particularly since this isn't just about the idea of child soldiers. The Grey Ranks is about a very specific event that actually happened. The book does not only give an overview of the Nazi occupation of Poland and Warsaw in particular, it also gives a number of brief biographies of real teenagers who were part of the Szare Szregi, the Grey Ranks of the title.

What is also very powerful is that the characters are only defined by their emotional growth and journeys. They have reputations which _will_ change over the course of the game and a place on a grid that depicts where they are in an axis of love, hate, enthusiasm and exhaustion.

And madness and death can be the very likely, almost certain, end points on that grid.

When your character dies or otherwise cannot be played, you don't create a new character. Instead, you play the absence of your character and how it affects everyone who remains.

The designer is Jason Morningstar and the mechanics have a lot of the touches I have come to expect from him. No game master, strong focus on narrative, and relatively simple rules but still create a tight framework. The centerpiece of the mechanics is the grid I mentioned, showing the emotional state of the characters.

I read a lot of role playing games. It's kind of become a separate hobby of mine. And there is a very good chance that I will never play a lot of the games I read. I am in between groups at the moment and, frankly, I'm more in the market to find a new board gaming group.

However, I do want to eventually play The Grey Ranks, even if it's just one of the modified, one session versions.

Laughing while Drowning and Falling

Since I have been going through a bit of a Jason Morningstar phase lately, all thanks to the Grey Ranks which I will write about fairly soon, I got out and read through Drowning and Falling.

Drowning and Falling is made up of two parts. The first one is a loving parody of Dungeons & Dragons. The second is an actual set of functioning mechanics. To be honest, when I started reading the game, I wasn't expecting the second part.

In general, the book is awfully funny to read. The theme of the game is being some kind of generic sword and sorcery hero who goes out to fight monsters and get loot. If you fail in this crucial task, you are either going to drown or fall. If you find yourself on fire or being strangled, you're clearly doing something wrong.

Characters have a whopping 15 different traits. Definitely brings back memories of some of the old-school games I have played. However, since their only mechanical use is to help generate numbers that you have to roll under with two dice, it's not nearly as complex or overwhelming as it might sound.

Since this is a Jason Morningstar game, it's not a surprise that it's a GM-free system. At the start of the game, you deal out playing cards to everyone. They then use those cards to create challenges. If you are really going old-school, each one is basically the next room in the dungeon.

Really, the only mechanical purpose of either the traits or the cards that you use to create challenges is to generate numbers. Individual names and details are just flavor to create the story. Come to think of it, isn't that how most role-playing games work? Using your strength, charisma and clumsiness to overcome a firebreathing dragon is a lot more interesting then just saying roll under a five.

I have to admit that since I read this right off of reading the Grey Ranks, which is the emotional equivalent of catching a sledge hammer between the eyes and one of Jason Morningstar's masterpieces, it was a bit of a let down. Compared to that, Drowning and Falling has an impossible act to follow.

These days, I look at role-playing games from two criteria. Was it fun to read and what I want to play it? Drowning and Falling passes the first criteria with flying colors. It is really funny and I can see it getting laughs if it was read out loud on the stage.

However, while it is clearly a functional and playable game, there are other games that fill the same niche of being a silly, funny one shot better. Toon, Kobolds Ate My Baby, Baron Muchaussen. Heck, both the Shan-al-Hiri Roach or Fiasco by Morningstar would be games I reach to before Drowning and Falling.

There is only one time I can see where I would really want to play Drowning and Falling. That would be as the last event on a Saturday night of a convention, when everyone is exhausted and slaphappy and just plain silly. I think it would work really good then.

So, I had fun reading the game. I'm not planning on playing the game. And the proceeds for the game went to charity. On the whole, Drowning and Falling didn't change my life or give meet any amazing insights. But I don't regret reading it.

A micro-RPG that covers love and death

Despite my efforts to read through them slowly, I was starting to get burned out by the Indy Megamix Mixtape, that collection of tiny RPG's that was sold to help designers in need. The South Side of the Sky didn't interest me and Shelter left me with so little that I didn't bother writing about it.

Then I read Darlin' Corey and realized I was not so burnt out that I couldn't find something that would spark my interest.

Darlin' Corey is inspired by and quite literally about the folk song by the same name. My parents were survivors of the great folk scare of the sixties so I grew up listening to more folk music than you could shake a banjo pick at. So I will freely admit that the subject matter was one that I could easily get into.

As opposed to being written to have you play out the scenario like you'd find in a folk song, darling Cory is specifically designed to have you roll play out that specific song. It is the story of how a beautiful moonshiner dies.

The twist and the actual game play is that at three specific points, you essentially flip a coin to determine what is really happening. Is Darlin' Corey really in love with the narrator or is he a stalker? Who really killed her? What's going to happen between the government man and the narrator in the end?

It's definitely an interesting take on the old role playing concept of railroading. Generally, railroading means that the players have to do something specific. In this case, something specific happens and the actual choice is how you react to it.

The game also has the profoundly bizarre player account of one to three. Yes, you could play this game as a solitaire exercise. Which is nothing new in the world of role-playing, given options like video game role-playing or game books. But it is kind of unusual for a storytelling game.

Heck, I might try playing it as a writing exercise.

Make no mistake, Darlin' Corey is a very simple and limited game, extremely restricted in what it does. It's not a game that you would play over and over again. It's not a game for outliers who are trying to find a way to break the game.

However, it uses the two fundamental themes of love and death in a very strong way. It will only tell one story but it will let you explore it in a variety of ways. And, as I already said, it's not what happens. It is how it effects you.

One of the things that caught my eye about Darlin' Corey from the start was that it was by Jason Morningstar. Without realizing it, I have become quite the fan of his work.

My earliest experiences with his designs was with the Shab-al-Hiri Roach, an experience that was a laugh riot in black comedy. I really hope to at least be able to play the short version of the Grey Ranks some day. And, not only did I have fun playing Fiasco several times, I also think it is an incredibly important game in the overall development of RPGs.

Darlin' Corey is not one of Morningstar's great or important designs. But it does show how his approach to storytelling and GM-free play can be applied in a game that it's only two pages long.