Heart of Ashes - RPG, coloring book and whimsy

I make a point of reading everything I can by Avery Alder McDaldno. I just came across Heart of Ashes, which I hadn't heard of. I don't know if that means it just came out or it is obscure or if I just am a bad researcher.

Heart of Ashes is a combination RPG and coloring book. The players are children who have somehow entered another world, one that is fantastical and whimsical and dark and faerie tale-like. In the past, the great sundering removed the magic from most the people of the land.

But the kids weren't there for that so they still have access to magic. Now, they have power in a world of have and have-nots, a world where the lost heart of ashes might remove all of the remaining magic.

The mechanics are beautifully simple. Roll two six-sided dice. One will determine if you succeed and the other other will determine if there are bad consequences. You decide which die is which after you roll.

There's an economy of darkness where the game master can use darkness tokens to further the bad things that are happening in the world. But they only get those tokens when the players make poor or desperate decisions. The spread of darkness comes entirely from the players choices. Which is really cool.

What really impresses me about Heart of Ashes is how clearly it is designed to be a game that you pick up and play. The rules are laid out as an instruction process and you only read the rules to the players when they come up. 

One of Alder's great skills as a designer is the ability to communicate. With the exception of Perfect:Unrevised, which I think was an early work, their games do an amazing job at helping you understand the process of the game. Even by those standards, Heart of Ashes does a great job.

Where Heart of Ashes falls short for me is that there really just isn't much there. Fifteen pages of setting and mechanics with ten more of player characters and nonplayer characters. To be fair, you can download it for free at Buried Without Ceremony and the small size does help with the whole sit down and play with no prep.

While I know the idea behind minimal settings is the be a bare bones canvass that you can paint however you want to. However, the details that we do see clearly indicate that there is more to the original vision.

I want to see the setting fully fleshed out, to really feel the world of Heart of Ashes. I want to see pages of setting and magic and pictures to color.

Basically, as it stands, I think Heart of Ashes is neat for what it does in a few pages and I would play it. But if I saw a full-sized version as a Kickstarter, I'd back it immediately and tell everyone about it.

Starting at Web of Power and going so much further

While Michael Schacht has designed a lot of games I like, the Web of Power/China family is my favorite. One the the purest area of control games, very tight conflicts and it plays out in under an hour.

It's had at least three different published forms: Web of Power, China and Han. On top of that, Michael Schacht has offered additional maps on his website. Personally, I found the subway map to be strangely hard to process :D

Elevator pitch: the different maps show various regions that have spaces connected by paths. Players play cards to place either forts on the spaces or diplomats on region markers, then draw cards Ticket to Ride style. (Although it predates Ticket to Ride) You get points by fort majorities, forts in a row and the diplomats score by majorities BETWEEN regions. 

Trust me, that elevator pitch glosses over tons of stuff. Basically, you play cards to place pieces and try take over areas. 

What makes the system really tick is scarcity. You have a limited number of pieces. There are a very limited number of spaces on the board for those pieces. And since most of the cards are for two regions (every map I've seen has one big regions with its own cards), cards are scarce as well. The economy of the game is very tight. Every card you play can be played in many different ways but you only get to do one of them and it's never enough.

While there is a strong tactical element to the game, since you cant control what cards come up and other players are going to do their best to mess up your plans, there's a strong strategic element to Web of Power/China. You need to go in with a plan or you'll get crushed, just make it a flexible one. 

I first discovered Web of Power on BSW back in 2003 or 2004, including some speed games that played out in less than five minutes. I picked up China as soon as it came out. And I get in online games on Schacht's own site. I've had years of fun with this family of games and that doesn't sound like it will end anytime soon.

Milestones in character's lives

As I grow older, I have found that I have become more and more of a fan of milestone advancement in RPGs. It makes more narrative sense and makes for much easier bookkeeping. And, frankly, I would rather save bookkeeping for real life and board games like Le Havre :P

This came up twice recently. Once with the mutual agreement to use

milestones in our fifth edition campaign on Roll20 and second when discussing Shadow of the Demon Lord that some other friends are thinking of running as a summer campaign. As I understand it, Shadow has the group, not individual characters, have levels with every session as an adventure and leveling at the end each one. (If I'm wrong, sorry) 

One of the things that I didn't care for in first and second addition Dungeons and Dragons was that every class had its own experience chart. It made the bookkeeping more confusing and it also created a real disparity between classes. Yeah, becoming a high level wizard really was an impressive thing to pull off but, considering the years of frustration that it took to do it, small wonder so many high-level wizards in any given setting were insane and evil.

One of the many things that I really liked about third edition was how everyone just shared the same experience chart. In part of how they did that was by also leveling the power disparity of classes. And while I did have a lot of fun with fourth edition, I do think that they went too far leveling the playing field there. 

However, the real appeal in milestone advancement is narrative. Gaining a level becomes a natural part of the story. You don't learn new spells or new sword techniques in the middle of a fight, not unless you're in something like Dragonball Z. Gaining a level becomes a reward for accomplishing something, as oppose to a reward for grinding.

And, as I have grown older, the narrative part of role playing games has become more important to me. You can blame those indie games.

I do realize that there are some systems milestones won't work with. The original TSR Marvel system uses karma for advancement and for bennies. It's a game where you spend those points in the middle of a fight to do something new. But that system has incremental advances as oppose to a big level.

When I first heard of milestone advancement, it completely through me off. It wasn't what I was used to, it wasn't the paradigm I had grown accustomed to. However, in practice, it makes perfect sense.P

My Print and Play May

I had high hopes for PnP projects in May but I didn't end up going as crazy as I thought I would. Really, it's for one major reason. Printer ink :P While switching to laser instead of ink jet has made our ink dollar go a lot farther, I still don't want to make art heavy projects will nilly.

Despite that, I still have a few games that are either made or in the process of getting made.

After not looking at it for years, I have been looking at the website Good Little Games again. (It's at http://www.goodlittlegames.co.uk/ by the way) It's a collection of free prints and play games that are by publish designers, although some of the games have gone on to actually get  published.

I started with Combo, since it was just two pages of cards with no extra components and I figured the toddler could mess around with it, even if he wasn't ready to get all the rules yet. Frankly, it has the feel of a pre-Love Letter micro game. Which is to say, very simple without challenging ideas or mechanics.

But that has led me to start working on Good Little Trains, which looks to be a much more interesting game. It's not really a train game. Instead it's a salesman dilemma game where you are rearranging a maze to visit different spots. But it looks promising.

And it is a compromise with myself over another game PnP project I keep looking at, Country Trains. The idea of combining Carcassonne with pick-up-and-deliver is very appealing. (I don't count South Seas as pick-up-and-deliver although I do like it) But, despite being around for years, Country Trains has had very little commentary and a lot of that has been meh. Heck, I don't think the files are on BGG anymore, although I have them downloaded.

And, really, between games like the Great Heartland Moving Co and BUS and DIG, I already have light pick-up-and-deliver games. I'm sure I'll eventually cave and make Country Trains but I think that Good Little Trains will prove a better game.

Outside of Good Little Games, I'm planning on making a laminated board for Village Run, a tiny little race game whose biggest claim to fame is that you just have to print out one piece of paper to make it. It's pretty much a random first but I do like the random power up element, giving it a faint hint of Mario Kart. The toddler is getting close to be old enough for it, which is the real reason to try it.

And, part of my recent spike in interest about Michael Schacht let me learn that there are some PnP versions of Don and I'm making one. Don't know when I will get it played, since it requires at least three players, but it seems well worth making.

Patricians: Building towers and memories

Patrician is not one of my favorite Michael Schacht games. However, it was a watershed game for me as far as his designs are concerns. And, even though I don't consider it to be one of his greats, it is still a pretty fun game and one that has stayed in my collection.

In Patrician, you are competing to build towers in Renaissance Italy. The theme is pretty thin. You could just as easily be building sky scrapers in US cities or rockets in the moon or just abstract symbols. 

The two-to-four player board shows nine cities while the five-player board has ten. Each city has a distinctive crest of arms, two spots for towers, two spots for scoring tokens and a space for a card. Every card had a city crest on it, showing which city it will let you build in. In addition, every card has another symbol, giving some of a bonus. These include a second crest of the same city for another build, the power to draw a card from any city, the power to move the top piece of a tower and patrician heads which are worth points at the end. Everyone gets tower blocks in their own color, which are slotted so they can stack up without slipping.

Game play is very simple. Play a card. Place a tower block in one of the spaces in the matching city and take the face-up card from that city. Each city has a number over the city crest to show how many tower blocks can be in it, which is also the number of its higher score token. Going through the deck will complete every city.

When a city is full, you score it. Whoever controls the higher tower gets the higher score token and the shorter tower gets the lower token. There's an odd number of blocks allowed in each city so there will always be a higher tower. Whoever has more blocks in a tower controls it with the top block being the tie breaker.

At the end of the game, when every city is full, players also get points for having sets of heads from the cards they played. And, of course, whoever has the most points wins.

I was initially interested in Patricians because of the stacking towers. So I picked it up and tried it as a two-player where it fell flat. Not enough tension, too easy to do what you wanted to do. So Patricians went to the back of the closet to gather dust.

Months later, Patricians was one of the games Mayfair was running as part of their ribbon quest at Origins so I played it with five players. And it was so much better. With five people, the board was so much smaller and there was so much more struggle to control the board and get any points. Since then, I've played it with three and four as well and it was good at those numbers too.

So, they should have just put three-to-five players on the box.

As it turns out, stacking towers up isn't really what makes Patrician interesting. It is the very simple decision tree that ends up being intriguing when your simple decisions collide with everyone else's. Patricians has a simple but almost hypnotic rhythm, playing a card while knowing what card you will be taking, plotting out your moves to the entire table.

Patrician sits in a weird place for me. It's a bit too long and set up is a bit too involved to be a game I just plunk down at the drop of a hat. At the same time, its not as long or as heavy as, say, Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne, a game that could be the centerpiece of a quiet game night. So it never came out that much back with the old game group, although everyone liked it when it did.

However, what Patricians really did for me was have me look up who made it. And then I looked up what else this Michael Schacht guy had done. That's when I realized I had been playing his games for years.

Patricians did not make me a Michael Schacht fan. It made me realize I was one.

Thanks for the fun movies, Sir Roger Moore

Sir Roger Moore died today. Wow. I know he was 89, which, as I get older, I don't like to think of as that old, but that still counts as a full life.

I know Moore did a lot of acting, including becoming famous as The Saint but, for me, James Bond was his defining role. I think Roger Moore, I think James Bond.

He was not my favorite Bond. That's a toss up between Moore and Craig. They played more visceral Bonds, James Bond the Assassin. Roger Moore had the lighter, happier James Bond. He was James Bond the Super Hero.

I know it's fun to belittle the Roger Moore era because it was more silly with more wacky quips and over-the-top gadgets. But, come on. Seven films over twelve years. Moore helped define not just James Bond but the whole pop culture concept of a secret agent.

Sir Roger Moore's time as James Bond was just plain fun.

And he wasn't that much of a goody two-shoes. He still had a small war's body count :D

I am not even close to being an expert or aficionado of James Bond. Other folks are going to do a much better job looking at Roger Moore's time as Bond, let alone the rest of his life and career. But I just had to say thanks for those fun movies. 

The clicking of a campaign

Over the last couple months, I've been part of an online D&D (Fifth Edition) campaign, one that has the specific aim that everyone who is involved has a life full of adult responsibilities. Which means we only play for a couple hours and we have an irregular schedule. We're also spread out over three different time zones.

The other night, we had our fourth session, counting the introduction session where the DM introduced us all. (All of the players are from different campaigns he ran in the past. I'd like to think this is a greatest hits campaign :D) And that session is where things really clicked. 

Clicked as far as the game is concerned. As far as everyone getting along and having fun, we had that down from day one. But the first couple sessions were basically spent trying to get to grips with the Roll20 interface and each one was basically a minor combat apiece.

Session number four, we finally had a working knowledge of how to use the interface. We also started to do the basic D&D 101 experience, a dungeon crawl. The familiarity and simplicity of that helped us move things along. And the characters' personalities started to come out.

I now know the core concept of my fighter's personality, which is sacrifice. He is always first in battle and will do his best to define the front but not for glory or valor. His whole schtick is to protect everyone else, no matter the cost. Now that that has solidified as a motivation, I know what to do in any given situation. And I think everyone else is in a similar position.

Campaign are fragile creatures. They can break or fizzle out so easily. But now, we have a sense of ourselves as a group, which is a big step.