topshelfworlds

[topshelfworlds]

Look I don't care for straightforward Progression Fantasy/LitRPG stuff for like a dozen different reasons. Intolerable reading experience.

But 'liking self-indulgent power fantasies is basically fascist in impulse' feels like an unkind parody of tumblr discourse, y'know?

[topshelfworlds]

Reading some unintended and much-needed counter-points to my last post in this one, with the summation being "touch grass." Refreshing.

There's Other Kinds Of GM Advice: Theatricality versus Transparency

I find that broadly there are at least two kinds of GM advice – and they have a very different philosophy underpinning them.

The first kind of advice aims at all costs to maintain verisimilitude. It’s a solution that you can implement without breaking the players’ immersion in their characters. This can just be stuff like Matt Colville explaining that if your players are taking too long discussing plans, guess what, orcs attack! We’ve all probably played a game where people were going in circles and not able to decide what to do. If it looks like we’re not able to decide, we’re probably going to be relieved if the GM makes something happen to break the deadlock and prompt us back into the action.

(Historically, this kind of thing was taken to egregious lengths like Gary Gygax saying if players start acting uppity, have a rock fall on their head. It’s mostly gone now but reddit tells me that Cyberpunk Red which came out relatively recently still says something similar.)

The second flavor of advice involves breaking character and talking to your players directly. I know “talk to your players” is a mantra repeated so often that autocorrect suggests it as soon as you type the letter t. At its worst, this advice is vague and unhelpful. We’ve all considered talking frankly to people in our lives, we just find it awkward and hard and annoying. But, but, but – at its best, just describing the problem as you see it and escalating it from a character discussion to a player discussion will make it go away instantly. Like magic. (If you’re not sure what that means: In a previous issue, I discussed Jason Tocci’s excellent advice on escalating conversation in this way.)

And since the theatrical flavour of advice has the weight of history on its side and transparent advice keeps getting boiled down to mantra form, I thought I’d write down some examples of situations and some alternative ways to handle them:

Situation 1: The players are marines discussing whether to dive into the alien lair and recover their stolen engine (their main goal) or go and see if another missing team of marines is okay. There is only 45 minutes left and this is a one shot.

Theatrical: The other marines suddenly come on the radio and say, “hey we’re okay, please complete the mission.”

Transparent: “Hey, folks. There’s 45 minutes left. If we don’t do the alien lair now, we won’t be able to do it at all. Is that fine?”

Situation 2: The players are low-level fantasy nobodies who have a famous wizard friend. They’re about to tangle with some medium-level bad guy and decide to call in their wizard friend.

Theatrical: When the players try to contact her via a telepathic phone call / spell, she sounds breathless and says she’s busy doing something way more important like fighting a dragon.

Transparent: “Hey, folks. If we get the wizard in, she’ll absolutely make this fight a cakewalk. We won’t even need to roll initiative really. Is that what you want? Or would we rather have a fun fight?”

Situation 3: The players were having fun exploring when they meet a cool NPC (an android! an elf! an android elf!) who has this interesting backstory with an urgent, earth-shattering hook. They go along with the android elf because it seems more important but immediately look like they’re having less fun.

Theatrical: Narrate how the android elf meets a group of other android elves and have the elf say, “Hey, now that I have these folks helping me, you can leave it you want!”

Transparent: “Hey, folks. Talking to you as players here, do we want to stick with this whole android elf plot here? It does mean that we won’t do any open-ended exploration. Which would you prefer?” If they want to ditch the elf plot, you could just retcon it entirely or do the theatrical solution.

All of these situations have happened at my table. They’re all relatively low stakes and I think whichever way you handle it, it’ll probably be fine. But that said, some situations absolutely work better when done transparently so if you’ve never tried the transparent way, give it a shot. If immersion matters a lot to you, try it at the end of the session.

/End

PS. The theatrical options often still require the players to willingly suspend their disbelief and go with it. If a player didn’t play along, they might just say “I thought their radios weren’t working, otherwise we could’ve just contacted them before. Why can they suddenly contact us now?” or “Oh, the wizard is fighting a dragon right now. We can totally wait. There’s no reason we need to fight the bad guy right now.” And sometimes I can’t shut off that part of my brain either so I won’t judge. But if there’s a way to sidestep that situation even coming up, I’m going to take it every time.

[topshelfworlds]

my stupid squire opening the gate so I can go strike peasants with my sword until I have the plague

[topshelfworlds]

*note-taking intensifies.*

Some of my favorite words and phrases to describe a character in pain

coiling (up in a ball, in on themselves, against something, etc)

panting (there’s a slew of adjectives you can put after this, my favorites are shakily, weakly, etc)

keeling over (synonyms are words like collapsing, which is equally as good but overused in media)

trembling/shivering (additional adjectives could be violently, uncontrollably, etc)

sobbing (weeping is a synonym but i’ve never liked that word. also love using sob by itself, as a noun, like “he let out a quiet sob”)

whimpering (love hitting the wips with this word when a character is weak, especially when the pain is subsiding. also love using it for nightmares/attacks and things like that)

clinging (to someone or something, maybe even to themselves or their own clothes)

writhing/thrashing (maybe someone’s holding them down, or maybe they’re in bed alone)

crying (not actual tears. cry as in a shrill, sudden shout)

dazed (usually after the pain has subsided, or when adrenaline is still flowing)

wincing (probably overused but i love this word. synonym could be grimacing)

doubling-over (kinda close to keeling over but they don’t actually hit the ground, just kinda fold in on themselves)

heaving (i like to use it for describing the way someone’s breathing, ex. “heaving breaths” but can also be used for the nasty stuff like dry heaving or vomiting)

gasping/sucking/drawing in a breath (or any other words and phrases that mean a sharp intake of breath, that shite is gold)

murmuring/muttering/whispering (or other quiet forms of speaking after enduring intense pain)

hiccuping/spluttering/sniffling (words that generally imply crying without saying crying. the word crying is used so much it kinda loses its appeal, that’s why i like to mix other words like these in)

stuttering (or other general terms that show an impaired ability to speak — when someone’s in intense pain, it gets hard to talk)

staggering/stumbling (there is a difference between pain that makes you not want to stand, and pain that makes it impossible to stand. explore that!)

recoiling/shrinking away (from either the threat or someone trying to help)

pleading/begging (again, to the threat, someone trying to help, or just begging the pain to stop)

Feel free to add your favorites or most used in the comments/reblogs!

[topshelfworlds]

hi I'm from your pseudo-medieval fantasy city. yeah. you forgot to put farms around us. we have very impressive walls and stuff but everyone here is starving. the hero showed up here as part of his quest and we killed and ate him

[topshelfworlds]

BEYOND THE TABLE: REALITY, THE SECONDARY WORLD, AND THE ROLE OF THE DUNGEON MASTER

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

DEFINITIONS

(Primary) Reality – whatever this is, just read some metaphysics or some shit

The Secondary World – the Other Realm, the place beyond Primary Reality bridged by Imagination

The Table – Imagination; the veil of play-space wherein the Secondary World makes contact with Primary Reality

Campaign – an excursion into the Secondary World via Imagination, obfuscated from Primary Reality  by the friction between Gameplay, Simulation, and Narrative

adjudication – the process of mitigating friction between Gameplay, Simulation, and Narrative

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My most recent ex all but annihilated me last October with the contents of an amicable text message. Over the previous few months, we’d been slowly repairing our communication enough to plan cat-care responsibilities. By all accounts, it should have been a completely normal interaction following a breakup just finding its footing: she had unearthed index cards encoded with statistics for magic items her character acquired in my since-canceled campaign from among her effects and buried the small-bore offer of their return for my records under discussion of scheduling time for me to see Mr. Kitty.

I fell apart.

Background

The fantasy adventure campaign the cards originated from was easily the most ambitious – and quite possibly most successful – design of any game I’ve constructed in my near-15 years of facilitating TTRPGs: what started as a weekly Thursday meetup running dungeon crawls by the book for some co-workers quickly became a West Marches game with a roster 12–14 players deep across 2 regular play-groups using a hacked-up mish-mash system I built on the fly week-by-week. The scale was magnificent to behold, our hex map slowly blossoming as the players peeled at petals to see what the flower of this mythic land looked like inside. Nearing a year removed from those adventures, I am proud of what we accomplished to this day.

Session was an opportunity to run from the deep problems festering in my relationship; I had just moved into my partner's run-down, dream project home with her & absconded from any deeper thinking about the friction that had been building over the previous year, instead fixating on clear records of narrative timelines, dungeon excursions, side-quests, character relationships, and world events. When I made time for (free) labor around our changing living space, I permitted resentment to simmer: that my passion – being the best facilitator of this emergent fiction I could – was secondary to the dreams of my property-owning partner. When I surprised her with completed projects from her list around the house while she was away, anything less than her utter amazement left a bitter taste in my mouth. I let slip passive-aggressive moans at never having time for the prep work that made me happy, lacking the insight to realize the game was a shield against the loneliness I felt in my relationship. 

This was also my then-partner’s third Campaign of mine played in 2 ½ years. A stand out from the start, she rarely took time to understand the game outside of session for her natural ability to process mechanics and draw narrative details from thin air; creative writing and an overachieving academic streak gave her a leg up when attuning to the role she played in the group’s function. Piloting a campy, edge-adjacent build played with deadly seriousness, she worked from the shadows to accomplish her goals, maneuvering the roster’s characters as means to her ends. I was proud of her for this, the scheming and the side-quests and the subtlety, because she was playing the game and well. I could never get over the gnawing feeling that participating in the Campaign wasn’t her desire, though, but that a sense of duty absent of passion for my interests brought her to the Table; like she felt that playing was important because it was my game, and not because she was having a good time. I could never tell if she was having a good time.

When my partner and I separated last April, I disbanded the company of cordial comrades who attentively arrived to each session, oathsworn that our jaunts through The County of Blunderburry in Esterdale would continue at another time; The Secondary World moved and changed even when our minds’ eyes were occupied, I insisted, and each future visit was a promise of new ideas, of change. It wasn’t until months later that I let on to some of the game-regulars the real reason why I called our grand adventure off, well after I had found temporarily stable ground post-life-collapsing-around-me. 

Judgment

In the fallout of the breakup and upkeep of coordinating kitty care, I had completely forgotten that she had the cards, physical cues marking her in-game possession of the artifacts statted on them. Rather than answering the inconsequential question raised for me of the cards’ fate, I fell headlong into debilitating anxiety catalyzed by months of emotional turmoil, seeing past the oversight in my facilitation to the now-painful memories of hours spent at the table reaching into the Secondary World with her. My binder stuffed with dog-eared notes chronicling the escapades of the roster had gone untouched in months for the same reason; confronting the hurt inside those records of her achievements in my game was something I was not ready to bear.

I agonized over the “right” answer to her offer, begging myself to conjure something satisfactory to my principles. The way I understood the scenario, there were 2 outcomes:

• I take the cards

• She keeps the cards

These outcomes were further layered by the intentions associated with the choice:

• I take the cards...

… because they are sentimental to me … because unique items should not have duplicates … because I did not want her to throw them out

• She keeps the cards...

… because I want her to deal with them … because their existence is painful to me … because… because…

I had very little to lose, and I knew it: the items’ information – two magic swords with dragon-slaying enchantments – had been recorded in my binder upon their looting, reducing any stakes of the outcome to whether it would keep me up at night. People-pleasing tendencies reared reliably thrashing maws at my principles, insisting through self-sabotage that my only priority was to act without spite or resentment. I was frozen by this weightless decision resting on my dignity.

So I hit the copium: rather than address this unsettling quandary as the most authentic version of myself, I reached into the depths of my Imaginary Costume Chest and procured the garb of the Dungeon Master. What would the ideal facilitator do? How would they deliberate over such a low-stakes scenario, charged as it was with emotionality? I quickly found my answer and transformed through its adjudication. 

Experience dictates that enlightenment is not a once-and-for-all type deal, Siddhartha wasting away under the fig tree until perfection, weary from resistance, unravels forever. Rather, it is a series of accumulations, moments that shriek across the sky of inner sight, arriving unexpectedly and leaving as soon as you look away. In that moment, seeing through the eyes of the Dungeon Master, the Secondary World was there. The Table rose before me, and from ego-differed I saw what was due: that the fate of the cards should be decided by the player of the character possessing them, regardless of personal desire for the physical symbols. The player-character position of possession is weighty in classical adventure games; treasure is a promise of the play-style, the payout for characters bought into designs of Dungeons, Demi-Hells, and Derelicht Halls. The Truth of the Secondary World hinged on this adjudication: that – no matter what interpretation of the items’ possession I could enforce in later chronicles – the fate of their simulacrum in Reality must be decided by the equivalent representative of their possessor in the Other Realm. Any other choice was a dishonest attempt to twist the Secondary World around my selfish desire for power in Primary Reality.

Erudition

Who gives a shit, though, right? So much emotional effort spent just to decide the fate of some dingy 2x3 index cards pedantically recorded months before. Even still, I returned to the decision again and again, feeling a familiar truth that had evaded my comprehension for more than a decade of facilitation finally coming into focus. In therapy sessions following the breakup, I had confided doubts of my motivations for running games amidst shifting insecurities and self-loathing: that I used table time not as a thought-experiment I longed to leverage against those weaker parts of myself but as abolition of my responsibility to Primary Reality, to my obligations and concerns of a better life for myself and those around me. I doubted my practice, this steadfast duty to my happiness, in fear that it caused the crumbling of my relationship, rather than the tension and mistrust obviously sign-posted in shrinking gaps the farther down the road our time together traveled. 

Cloaked in adjudication, I found sublimity. I was free from expectations of self-importance and righteous grandiosity, unshackled from my self-imposed totalitarian responsibility to be anything other than a conduit for the Truth of the Secondary World. My weakness was leveraged against the fulcrum of objective judgement. Removing my ego from the equation, I found peace in the Dungeon Master’s decision. 

This epiphany is my remaking, an affirmation of my long-held belief in the practice of officiating the movements of the Secondary World; when we gaze into the Other Realm to see what could be, we are afforded the grace to think beyond our compromised persona in Reality to the idealization of our selves. The Dungeon Master’s thankless role is to give what is due the actions of those who brave the dangerous truths inside the Secondary World, moving and changing as it is even when our minds’ eyes are occupied; becoming this conduit, the Dungeon Master is anointed in acceptance of the truths they must bear. For me, just this is it: the idealization of my highest self is purest acceptance, and each orracular excursion across the Table and into the Beyond is an exercise in that action. With hope, I gaze into wonder and oblivion, knowing that the Secondary World is only just outside the scope of reality by the width of a dreamspan.

I sent her a reply with thanks for the consideration. In the post-apocalypse of my anxious breakdown, I coincidentally put my current game on hiatus for the season; sabbatical was spent compulsively plumbing the depths of myself for changes the Dungeon Master has imparted to me with years of practice. Any ttrpg player with some experience can describe at least one moment when the line between themselves and their character blur, the bounds between the Primary self and the soul on the Table becoming too small to sense. These event horizons eclipse the light of our egos, and in the cold shadow we learn where our silhouette overlaps with our characters’. Is the Dungeon Master a projection of my inner landscape, disappearing with ego death? An archetype of acceptance to aspire to, standing parallel to me in the shadow? Only a lifetime can tell.

[topshelfworlds]

Me: wow three nat 1s in a row the odds of that are like one in eight-thousand

My determinist friend: actually the probability of it happening was one-hundred percent because it happened

[topshelfworlds]

Design, Demand, and the Need for a Stroll Around the Park - World Walking, Vol. 1, Issue 2

Design, Demand, and the Need for a Stroll Around the Park – World Walking, Vol. 1, Issue 2

It’s the end of Spring, folks, and we’ve been glimpsing the first instances of honest sunlight here in Salem, Oregon. Stifled by the last defenses of the colder seasons, the rain falling in intervals around the rays of light are reminders that Summer is soon, and we at the office can’t wait to see them in full force.

Summer often means people get out more, as more daylight and the promise of…

[topshelfworlds]

World Walking: WTF?! Dark Match Wrestling and Supporting Your Community

Want to know more about Top Shelf Worlds plans to expand the gaming community with its current ttrpg meetup campaign? Read on about how you can support your gaming community and have fun doing it... by wrestling!

A few days ago we announced our newest Top Shelf Worlds gaming experience we would be offering on a local meetup’s Facebook page:

Top Shelf Worlds is always looking for more unique ways to make more exciting experiences for the players that participate in our games. We are especially excited about Dark Match Wrestling – drawing a lot of inspiration from Nathan Paoletta’s World Wide Wrestling:…

[topshelfworlds]

Championship Belts and Setting the Stakes: Narrative Through Combat III

We've come to the end of our Narrative Through Combat posts on Top Shelf Worlds! Learn about what Championship Belts can teach us about the stakes of your combat encounters in RPGs!

This is part 3 in a 3 part series about Top Shelf Worlds’ current World Wide Wrestling RPG-meetup and the lessons learned from it.

Part 1: https://topshelfworlds.blog/2019/03/03/faces-and-heels-narrative-through-combat-i/

Part 2: https://topshelfworlds.blog/2019/03/26/move-sets-and-psychology-narrative-through-combat-ii/

Details about Top Shelf Worlds’ game event appearances can be found at TSW’s…

[topshelfworlds]

World Walking: Updates, Fight Scenes, and Kids on Bikes

Top Shelf Worlds' first World Walking post! Detailing the smaller prep work and goings on of our crew, read about and comment on how yor record your setting details!

Hey everyone! I wanted to take the top of this week before Nerd Night next Monday to start a new kind of post I’m calling World Walking. I’m hoping to supplement bigger, critical essays and articles with smaller posts full of connected ideas that flesh out the Worlds of gaming that TSW is journeying through! Feel free to throw us feedback about what you’d like to see in these posts.

~Round 1:…

[topshelfworlds]

Move Sets and Psychology: Narrative through Combat II

Move Sets and Psychology: Narrative through Combat II

Disclaimers:

This is part 2 in a 3 part series about Top Shelf Worlds’ current World Wide Wrestling RPG meet up and the lessons learned from it. For part 1 in this series: https://wp.me/paw6sB-t

Some background knowledge of professional wrestling is advised, but not necessary. For a thorough examination of the Sport of Kings, here’s the TV Tropes page about it: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki…

[topshelfworlds]

Updates and Looking Forward

~ Well, rocky start to the blog. ~

Given the utter PR disaster that Tumblr is facing in the aftermath of its adult content fiasco, Top Shelf Worlds will be relocating to a new site in the near future. Stay on the alert for new links to content coming very soon!

[topshelfworlds]

The Future of Nerd Night & Game Vote Results: And the winner of this match is...

Ok, I promise we’ll get to game stuff, but there’s something I have to explain first that will inform the voting results of my game pitches for Nerd Night. 

Last Saturday night, at Survivor Series 2018, in a shocking turn of events, Charlotte Flair beat the hell of Ronda Rousey with a kendo stick. 

It was a powerful display of ring psychology: after an extended bout of strikes, holds, throws, counters, and copious amounts of shit talk - in which Rousey proved that she truly is a natural to this business and had every right to be there - Charlotte Flair abandoned the hope of a much needed Smackdown win and made the fight personal. As the match continued, it was clear through her amazing performance that Charlotte had begun to doubt whether she could beat “Rowdy” Ronda toe-to-toe. Tearing her Smackdown shirt off during the brutality - culminating in a particularly nasty attack with a chair around Ronda’s neck - she proved that punishing Rousey for her feud with Becky Lynch and the rest of the women’s Smackdown division was important enough to disregard the loss.  

The fall-out of this incredible in-ring narrative has since been squandered on the fallout shows of Raw and Smackdown, but that doesn’t make this match - which many fans are calling the fight of the night on a stacked card - anything less than great, and a perfect example of how when wrestling is done right, the story can be dramatic, engaging, and surprising.

With all of this build-up, I’m sure the reveal of what game won the pitch meeting’s votes won’t be surprising, though, will it?

It’s World Wide Wrestling. 

 ~Some background~

Last Saturday night, at the same time Charlotte was putting the beat down on Rousey, a small collection of Nerd Night players and facilitators gathered in a quiet secret theatre located on the second story of a small pub in north Salem to discuss the future of Nerd Night!

More specifically, we gathered to discuss what about Nerd Night - our local gaming meet-up in Salem, Oregon - could be improved upon, and how my upcoming second season campaign run could assist in this. A lot of the discussion came down to the steady growth of the player base that cannot be met with the current stagnation in our pool of GMs. To this end, a big deciding factor in the game selected for the next run was in how it could be used to address this problem. Of the five games pitched (more on that in a moment), the one game with a (potentially radical) answer was WWW. 

The game - a damn near perfect capture of the moving parts that make wrestling the fascinating bit of pop culture it is - actively encourages rosters of many different sizes, creating opportunities for promotions with just enough performers to keep the lights on, or fighting to keep their massive lineup’s  storylines straight. To this end, when discussing the influx of players without Game Masters to run for them, I proposed that this game could solve it with...

~ ...and here it is...~ 

No table limit. 

The five games that I pitched read as follows (and in the order of interest I had in running them): 

Blades in the Dark Season 2, a continuation of the narrative I had going through continuous play at Nerd Night for most of 2018. I wrote a reflection of how I felt that game went here.

A DramaSystem game set in the offices of the fictional Underdog Comics, a company slowly on a rise in popularity in the age of the internet (Mark my words, this game will happen at some point). 

The Forest Hymn and Picnic, I game I recently kickstarted because I love whimsy.

Tales from the Loop, specifically set in a small town in Oregon, played in a West Marches style. 

World Wide Wrestling, set in an underground college promotion in Illinois called WTF?! Wrestling. 

Of all of them, the one that ticked the most boxes for the small council gathered around my games - excitement, uniqueness, and the tools to solve some of our problems at Nerd Night - was WWW. 

Sure, it will take some maintenance on my end as the facilitator, but with matches that can be run as quickly as 15 minutes (and that’s just to make sure everyone in a large group gets a decent amount of screen time), we at the table can fit a number of matches in and observe where to go next with each wrestler’s storyline. With a vast amount of creativity at the table, the energy that comes with participating in a live performance, and the knowledge of wrestling I have recently acquired because of this system, I have no doubt that this could be an amazing game.  

~Not convinced?~

Neither were my three game designer friends, veterans of quirky systems and settings, when I asked them to abandon their skepticism long enough to demo the game with me. By the end of it, the excitement of finding out in play who was going to pin the other had them chanting like the smarkiest of wrestling nerds. Pinfalls were met with shouted counts to three, descriptions of high flying moves with gasps, and the energy of people reveling in the sheer thrill of storytelling through physical action with a genuine excitement I haven’t felt in my players in some time. Like the match of the night at Survivor Series, the feuds - and therefore the story - were dramatic, engaging, and exciting.  I welcome you to be part of this action when I introduce World Wide Wrestling - and WTF?! Wrestling’s inaugural champion, Vlad the Mad - at Nerd Night in January 2019. 

Join us! 

[topshelfworlds]

Writing about Role Playing Games

Throughout the almost decade (May of next year) I’ve been running tabletop role playing games, I’ve always been involved with them more than I care to talk about; I have slowly acquired the ability to admit in casual conversation to more than just an affinity for the hobby, but even among my friends who share the same proclivities, admitting how much I have spent total on all of the most recent ttrpg kickstarters I’ve backed can prompt some redness in the cheeks. I love this hobby, so much so that I commonly defend it as a medium of art, and have written extensively about it in the past.

Now, the younger version of Stephen who wrote those words was an incredibly insecure nerd who couldn’t get over the fact that people have been hip to nerd shit since before Game of Thrones made it cool to admit you like dragons. In many ways, that nerd is still here, albeit with different interests (I spent all last weekend waiting to watch Survivor Series, more on that in the next post); 2018 Stephen, though, can’t wait to share the good word of role playing games. After three years of thought, experimentation, and secret design, I need a place to put my thoughts for inspection and general feedback before bringing them to my home game or the local meet-up. I hope that this can be that place, and I hope you can join me for this latest experiment. 

(Photo credit: http://www.r-n-w.net/play/the-scholar) 

[topshelfworlds]

My Brief Stint as a Criminal Mastermind

Content Warning: brief description of violence against children.

Just over two months ago, on a typical Monday night, at roughly 10 PM, in the speakeasy underneath Archive Coffee and Bar in Salem, Oregon, amidst reclaimed pipe shelving units lined with empty whiskey bottles and the warm glow of oil lamps, the spirit of Kotar was bound to the body of a young Iruvian boy.

The boy was one of the few remaining descendants of the spirit– an enigmatic sorcerer from before the Cataclysm - and therefore one of the few bodies equipped to accept ritual binding of a spirit to a host. With this ritual complete, Lord Penderyn finally has the ally he needs to defeat his long-time political rival, Rafello, the demon leader of the Circle of Flame’s 7 council members, giving him control of major access points for information within Doskvol.

Now, if you know nothing about the world of Blades in the Dark - John Harper's incredible game about scoundrels surviving in a haunted, industrial city by running criminal exploits – you are not alone in your ignorance; the players gathered around the table had no idea to expect this development. In fact, they weren't even looking to investigate the issue. As they waited in a sitting room of Lord Penderyn's manor for the master of the house to retire from the grisly experiment they could hear occurring upstairs, it was the curiosity of the newest member of the a crew, a pit fighter with no connection to any of these events, that finally lead to the trap door in the attic being opened. The whirring of generators powered by spectres, the boy strapped to the table, the grizzly tools and instruments on trays surrounding the heinous act; the players looked in shock as I described to them the cries of the young boy their characters had smuggled in to the city 7 sessions earlier.

How could this have happened? With direct involvement in the boy's fate on more than one occasion, how could the players have missed the signs of his doom, or, even worse, ignored them? Settling into a tense tambor of speech, I expounded on the grim fate brought upon this child by a man with only his own political aspirations in mind; I watched as realization tightened their faces, months of plot lines coming to fruition in the steadiness of their breathing and the stillness of their movements.

Now, before I get much farther, let me articulate something:

~I'm a big believer in putting all the fiction on the table in a game~

The fundamental uniqueness of RPGs as a medium of art should not be tied up in the cleverness of the facilitator; we are not LARPing one of Plato's dialogues, the Game Master as Socrates deftly setting aside the best blows of their fellow elocutors and rebutting with the resounding wit of a story they had created without the players in the first place. The medium functions on a measure of collaboration, and at its base, that collaboration should start with the Game Master presenting their players with what is happening or will happen, and allowing the players room to organically respond before setting costs, limitations, and consequences to their actions. To this end, a Game Master does well to place all the clues of the narratives happening off-screen in front of the players for easy access, ensuring that the challenge of the game is not finding these clues but instead in their interpretation.

It is this spirit of game play that I set out to explore with Blades. At first, it was just an excuse to run a really interesting system in a fun - if a bit edgy - setting that would make for great sessions at my bi- monthly meet-up. Built around isolated scores run by a crew of smugglers in the supernatural, victorian-era city of Doskval, the game would act as a reprieve from the consistent stream of one-off scenarios for the 5th edition of the “the world's greatest role playing game” run by the table coordinators to that point (including myself).

At the initial gathering to create the crew of characters, however, I got greedy; I saw all of the narrative connections that were forming - all the networking with fictional factions and the scouting of unreal landscapes that make the game the sprawling masterpiece it is - and I felt that there could be more.

~There could be a bigger story.~

The base idea was simple: because the game assumes that the player characters are united as a crew, with every decision in game, with ever score run and coin snagged, with every knife slipped through ribs of the civilians and every bomb that ripped through buildings of the city, the macro-narrative would change. Allies would be put in danger, rival gangs would seek recompense for misdeeds or unsettled scores, and the movers and shakers would take notice of - and action about - the player characters' involvement in politics and agendas. I had grand visions of the crew – to be named at their first official gathering as Le Ghouls – growing in size as more and more players in and around the real life meet-up heard about the exploits of the gang’s members; of seeing new faces join the ranks of criminals, as this small gang attracted interested young bloods to be jumped in for their cut of the spoils that come with crime.

This presented our first challenge: how to manage a large number of players interested in the game. My local table caps at 5, making a large pool of interested players difficult if more than the maximum number of people wanted a seat per week; if the idea was to accommodate a growing player base, I would have to ensure that new players got time at the table, and that we were seeing returning characters on a fairly even basis, allowing for everyone to have a fair shot at observing and influencing the ongoing narrative.

At the time, the solution I came up with seemed elegant: institute a precedence and recency system – adapted from the model of student congressional debate  – to keep track of how many times any given player had sat at the table, and how recently. In practice, preferring table bids from players who played less often than others meant that new characters would be introduced much like a television show: some “episodes” we would follow whole new storylines made personal by the character's motives. These angles, by virtue of affiliation with Le Ghouls, would impact the parts of the setting the crew interacted with, and when players with higher precedence sat at the table again those storylines would weave with others for more linking narrative beats, ensuring fresh relationships and motivations were being developed as members of a growing gang learned to meet and cooperate with one another.

This scheme proved a double-edge sword in practice; complicating the process was the uncertainty of never knowing who would be sitting at my table every other week. It added a challenge to the game: if I used my time to catch up players who were gone, how could I communicate this changing fictional landscape when players were not guaranteed a return spot at a table with limited seating?

~My answer: let the players do it~

I created a whole secret channel on our local meet-up's Discord server to be used for communication between players; during sessions, I named the player characters not present who knew the information current characters needed to follow up on plot threads; I encouraged the writing of quick session summaries to be passed between players, justifying characters knowing important information they were not there to catch first hand. I wanted it to feel like the gang was always meeting up in their lair off-screen, swapping secrets that they learned on their scores to keep them ahead of the game. New opportunities for more lucrative scores would be made, and the plots and schemes of the crew's foes would be made plain, allowing for decisive action to be taken. With enough momentum from every faction's involvement, I could tie the players in knots as they raced to acquire more and more power and relevance in a city unforgiving of ambition from those so low on the social ladder. It would be a grand statement about just what this world valued, and an even grander gaming experience for it. I proselytized to anyone who would listen about the ingenious way that this idea would get the players involved, incentivizing them to communicate between event dates, establishing a community – or, more accurate to my unconscious desire, a fan base – around this game. I was inundated with the merits of this score that I was running on my players.

~It was not until too late that I saw this for the cleverness that it was.~

In practice, the Discord channel wasn't used, session notes were not swapped, knowledgeable players were not consulted. The level of commitment I was asking for from players was a lot when considering a game system and setting they were only just becoming familiar with at an event space where players dropped in expecting simple-to-play, simple-to-understand games. At first, my response was simple resentment; I was frustrated that no one wanted to take the extra steps needed to completely interact with the game. With my sprawling city politics, faction agendas, and spider webs of plot threads that shook with each fly that touched a strand, I was not collaborating with my players' expectations; I was looking for a way to flex my cleverness and have the players' hard work reveal it, a trait I damn in other Dungeon Masters. Just over half-way through my plan of a 10 session first season, I felt that this game had already seen its potential wasted by an overeager Game Master more interested in his reputation than in mitigating the confusing meta-narrative of an already detail-rich fictional environment. With this in mind, I set out to end my grand experiment with a bang: the complete resolution of every major plot thread the characters had ignored.

~The amazing thing of all of this? It all worked out in the end.~

When I posted the sign up board for the final session of the season for this Blades campaign, I was surprised that the players determined by my precedence and recency for the table were a varied lot in their number of in-game appearances. Several members had only played in the first few sessions, one in the middle sessions, one throughout the entire season, and the last having made a singular appearance in a session almost completely inconsequential to the rest of the campaign. Before the game, the players introduced or re-acquainted themselves, and immediately began preparing themselves for the onslaught I had only hinted at in the promo posts and Discord drops by swapping any and all information they had concerning what would likely happen. I was taken aback as they described with glee the many heists and beatdowns they had been apart of, and languished as they heard of brawls and riots they had missed. There was an electricity in the air as they game started, with every player ready to find out what was going to happen to their beloved game of thieves and criminals.

The answer? I destroyed it. I took from them their lair -a barge floating in the canals under the city -, now a smoldering pile of ash from the firebombs of a rival gang; I took their protection afforded them by a more powerful gang for their ambivalence to personal requests from its leader; and I took their pride, as they sunk away to find somewhere quiet to lay low. It was a satisfying way to end a season of a grim game centered on the consequences of living as a criminal.

~And yet, something wasn't right... or, rather, wrong.~

I think, by the players hands, the game somehow turned out okay; I loved watching the characters develop in their spotlight moments. The major plot points moved in such dynamic ways based on character actions in scores, leaving intricately woven connections between every part of the city. In the end, a story was told, and a good enough story that I am apprehensive to step away from it.

Walking away from the game was tough. As we left the bar, observing everyone swap their favorite moments of the game through the months, catching up on life events and just generally being friendly reminded me just what the games run at Nerd Night every other Monday actually accomplishes: a group of people meeting and getting to know each other better by casual comments about what's been happening in their lives between game sessions and the decisions made at table in equal measures. They not only reveled in the fiction, but also celebrated the people the had an opportunity to share it with; in short, they were a community - not a fan base - and I could not have felt happier about how this had come to end.

~Now, I must ask myself: What's next?~

My biggest concern moving forward is how I intend to internalize these lessons in future gaming endeavors. To this end, I want to follow a very similar model of gameplay – a large pool of players, a system of selection around table bids that prioritizes new players first but recognizes returning characters on fairly equitable basis, and an ongoing narrative impacted by the choices made by characters in the fiction. The major change that needs to occur is how information is exchanged between people about what has been happening at table. I have a few ideas on how to do this, which I hope to express when I call the next personal gathering of Nerd Night players to determine what next I run. I also hope to be more transparent about the preparations and procedures I use to bring games to the table, a habit I hope this inaugural post will help establish.

Ultimately, I think event spaces like Nerd Night can be amazing opportunities not just to get people gaming, but also to showcase the many incredible things these games can do as art without limiting play experience to a sanctioned adventure module or one shot written by a Dungeon Master. I've been committed to using my table to explore these opportunities, and I encourage you to share your play experience with me, here or at a future Nerd Night.