Revenant: A Game of Vengeance

UPDATE: The latest version of REVENANT is available here.

I recently posted a new RPG playtest demo on the Last Redoubt Games page called Revenant. The core concept for this game is that the player is a restless spirit drawn back into the world of the living to avenge its death. Drawing heavily upon the “revenge story” tradition of films like The Crow or the Kill Bill series, Revenant encourages players to avenge their deaths by slowly destroying the things that matter most to their killer before finally destroying them directly.

The concept is pretty dark and I deliberately avoided including any sort of redemption mechanics. Your hatred for your killer is what brought you back from the dead and you cannot rest until you’ve had your vengeance.

Like most of the other games I’ve designed, Revenant is very narrative heavy and light on rules. It’s also specifically designed as a two-player game (although there is a variant included for more players). The player and the GM work together to tell a collaborative story about how the Revenant pursues and carries out its revenge. Narrative control passes back and forth between the two throughout the game, but the rules (such as they are) don’t provide much in the way of restrictions. As long as both the player and the GM agree on how to resolve situations, pretty much anything goes.

The playtest pdf gives you pretty much everything you need to play other than six-sided dice and something to write with. There are no stats, but a character sheet is included near the end of the document. So take a look and let me know what you think. As always, I’m interested to hear thoughts and suggestions.

Oh, and if you’re looking for something to strike the right tone for the game, check out this Spotify playlist I put together to put me in the appropriate frame of mind for, you know, rising from the dead and seeking vengeance.

Venture Into the Weirdwood…

This year I’ve shared two prototype roleplaying games I’ve been working on for a while. I’ve written a bit about Crimson Seas, which has existed in various forms over the last five or six years, but haven’t shared a lot behind Hounds of the Tsar. I’ll probably save a detailed overview of the later until I get around to doing some playtesting and release an updated version of the game. In the meantime, though, I wanted to share a new project that I’ve been working on the last week or so. The game is called Weirdwood, and it requires a little explanation.

Rules-Lite, Freedom-Heavy

Hounds of the Tsar is a pretty rules-lite game, but it feels like Rifts compared to Weirdwood. It’s a game with no stats whatsoever. There’s no combat system, no skill system, no real character creation system. Aside from a very simple resolution mechanic and a few tokens, the game has no “hard” rules at all.

That’s by design. Weirdwood borrows heavily from John Harper’s Ghost/Echo, which is one of the most interesting games I’ve played in recent years. To be honest, it completely changed the way I thought about RPGs. Ghost/Echo is a two-page game. That’s it. Aside from a simple resolution mechanic, all it gives you to work with are a couple of evocative images and several lists of people and places. To make the game playable, you have to fill in the details. It doesn’t even tell you how to do this, but when I ran the game, I asked the players questions about the setting and their characters, then built the game session around that. The couple of times I’ve played the game have been some of the most fun gaming sessions I’ve had in years. Ghost/Echo never fails to deliver exciting and memorable moments.

But back to Weirdwood. The concept for the game goes back to my 2017 trip to Helsinki, Finland. For some reason, the name got in my head and as I explored the city, every tree, park, and wooded area fit into a growing concept of a primordial forest that existed in a parallel dimension just beyond human perception. This is well-trod ground, obviously, and I’ve even taken to referencing the “Upside Down” from Stranger Things to explain the concept. But I still found it pretty evocative. Something about Helsinki really sparked my imagination, and I came away from it wanting to write a book about it.

Unfortunately, I already have a lengthy backlog of book ideas. While a graphic novel would probably be the medium best suited to the idea, going back through a lot of old White Wolf World of Darkness rulebooks (Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, etc) made me think that it might make for a good roleplaying game.

So. Many. Rules.

As I’ve gotten older, I have more and more problems getting into roleplaying games. There are more cool game settings than every, but they all have so much setting material to absorb. Reading all of that information and then finding ways to convey it to the players just makes my head hurt at this point. These details seldom even matter all that much to players anyway. If they wanted all those people, places, and events they could just go read a book.

And then there are the rules. So many damn rules. I’ve gotten to a point where I just don’t care about rules anymore. I don’t want to keep track of hit points. I don’t want to remember every character ability and spell effect. I don’t want to figure out how many plusses players get for equipping “magic item X.” I just don’t give a shit. It’s boring and tedious. I love the thrilling moment when a combat encounter begins and the players wonder what they’re going to do next, but I’m ready to fall asleep within two rounds when it descends into battlefield positioning and endless rounds of dice rolling as enemies are mathematically whittled down to oblivion.

Running Ghost/Echo made me realize that it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the reasons games have so many rules is to provide a consistent game experience no matter who is playing the game. Without rules, games would descend into chaotic sessions of cops and robbers in which no one can agree who can do what and when.

Ghost/Echo implicitly looks at this problem and says “So what? You’re adults, figure it out.” While it never comes out and says as much, the game’s lack of rules structure is built on the assumption that the people playing it are engaged in a collective experience that they are creating together. If someone pushes things too far, breaking the internal logic of the game they’re creating, then the game trusts them to rein that person in. Sure, there’s no rule saying you can’t magically produce a super weapon during a combat encounter, but the rest of the players will look at them like they’re an idiot and tell them they can’t just do whatever they want. In the times I’ve run that game, I never had a player push back when they were told that what they wanted to do wasn’t in keeping with the internal logic of the game we were playing.

Collaborative Gaming

Which brings us back to Weirdwood. The game provides a basic premise for a setting, describing the concept of the Weirdwood and how it generally works, but it leaves it to the group to decide how it all works in practice. Essentially, every group that plays this game should have a totally unique experience. The Weirdwood and its denizens may appear and behave one way in one game, but in a totally different way in another. It’s a game that puts a lot of pressure on the players and the GM to collaborate and create the details they need to run the setting effectively. It’s a challenge, but in my experience, players are far more engaged in a game when they feel like they’ve had a hand in creating it.

This initial playtest version of Weirdwood gives groups just enough to create their version of the Weirdwood and generate their own characters. There are no character sheets. A simple sheet of paper is more than enough to keep track of everything players need to know. At some point in the near future, I will provide setting sheets groups can use to record all the important information about the world they’re creating. This isn’t just for their benefit. At some point, I’d love to make it possible for groups to share their different setting locations with other players. In a later playtest version, I’m going to include a “sample setting” using Helsinki, which will always be my own canonical version of the Weirdwood. However, I’d love to know what a group in Missouri could tell me about the Weirdwood in St. Louis, or discover the many forms it might take in different neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

Weirdwood Rules Update

I made some updates to the initial playtest demo of Weirdwood to overhaul the core resolution mechanics. After giving the system some thought, I decided that the game needed something a bit more complex than the very simple mechanic I had in place before.

The new version of the playtest demo pdf has been updated to incorporate these changes. It’s still a very rules-lite system that requires quite a bit of judgment calls on the part of players and GMs, but actions no longer hinge entirely upon the outcome of a single die roll. Borrowing a bit from multiple games I’ve encountered over the years (with a big nod to OneSevenDesign’s Lady Blackbird, the Ubiquity system from Hollow Earth Expedition, and Evil Hat’s FATE Accelerated) the new resolution mechanic involves building and managing dice pools that change over the course of play.

I’ve also designed some play sheets to help keep track of character and setting details. They’re pretty simplistic at this point, but they get the job done. The latest version of the rulebook includes the sheets.

Feel free to download the latest version of Weirdwood to take the game out for a spin. And if you want to have some music to put you in the right frame of mind, check out the Weirdwood playlist I put together on Spotify.

To Sail the Crimson Seas…

In a recent post, I talked a bit about the somewhat rocky road I’ve taken to working on publishing my own roleplaying games. One of the chapters in that story was the development of a pirate RPG called Crimson Seas. Yesterday I cobbled together my various design notes and draft text into a single document that can serve as a basis for playtesting. I can’t really say what prompted this effort (and it was an effort, believe me), but I thought it might be worth reviewing how I ended up getting to this point.

Crimson Seas grew out of a short story I wrote called “La Tierra de la Sangre” back in 2006 or so. I can’t remember what prompted me to write a pirate story, exactly. Maybe I was inspired by the pending release of the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Anyway, the story is an alternate history pulp adventure in which the Aztecs have resisted Spanish conquest and have fought back by constructing massive stone pyramid ships that keep afloat by way of blood sacrifice. I enjoyed the concept so much that I planned to write a series of such stories and use the setting as the basis for a roleplaying game. That didn’t work out so well initially. I started a second story, but never finished it (an exceedingly rare situation for me, by the way). After sketching out some initial ideas for the RPG, I started graduate school and didn’t have the time to devote to it any longer.

I came back to the game shortly after The Walls of Dalgorod was completed. My initial design work got pretty far. I had the basic rules system in place and worked on a prototype game book detailing character options, spells, and an entire miniatures-based ship combat system. But the game only existed in my head. I couldn’t really playtest it in any way. The first big moment came when I tried to run a session at a local gaming convention. After playing around with some pregenerated characters, I realized that the rules system had some crippling flaws that rendered the game almost unplayable. Panicked, I literally rewrote the game overnight, completely overhauling the basic dice mechanics and how characters worked.

In retrospect, I got lucky. The convention wasn’t heavily attended that day and I didn’t have enough people sign up for the game to merit running the session. Thankful for the reprieve, I started working on fleshing the game mechanics out more thoroughly, adding situational rule after situational rule to address every problem that came up.

It was at some point while writing a section of rules to determine the “pull” strength of various sized whirlpools that I realized I’d gone very far afield from the type of game I wanted to make. By that point, I was playing and reading more games than when I started the design process. Crimson Seas was supposed to have been a “simple” or “rules lite” game, but somewhere along the line it had transformed into a crunch-heavy monster, with rule after rule after rule for every possible scenario players might encounter. After all that work, I’d created exactly the sort of game I hated to run as a gamemaster.

In a flurry of frustration and minimalist inspiration, I scrapped everything and threw the few aspects of the game I thought were worth saving into a series of redesigned character sheets. While I’m not particularly fond of the Apocalypse World rules system, I love that game’s approach to character sheets. “Powered by the Apocalypse” games put all of your character creation decisions on the sheet. When you start a game, you look at a series of options for your character, make a few choices, and you’re ready to play. The new Crimson Seas sheets followed this design mandate, discarding the game’s original “classless” character creation system for a more rigid, but still flexible Role system that slotted characters into a series of specific archetypes that made sense for an open seas piracy game. I was really happy with the way they turned out and I felt like I’d solved a huge conceptual problem with the game.

So naturally, I set the sheets aside and didn’t work on the game in any serious way for two years.

Even as recently as a week ago, the idea of dragging Crimson Seas out of mothballs and working on it again seemed unlikely. I can’t really explain why I started looking at the files again yesterday other than I hate to let hard work go to waste. Looking through the prototype game text, I’d forgotten just how much I’d actually finished. I started sifting through files and thinking about how they would mesh with the most recent rendition of the rules. At some point over the last year or so, I wrote up some very basic outlines of a new dice mechanic that I felt had some promise. While the old rules went in a very simulationist direction, the core ideas behind them were always very simple, so a lot of what I’d written could be brought into line with the new system. A lot of what I wrote back then had to be scrapped, of course. At one point, I caught myself trying to adapt some old mechanics to the new system and had to ruthlessly delete things to avoid going down that road to needless complexity again.

The game still has a long way to go. It’s in a very liminal state now, with some aspects that are very well developed and other core mechanics existing in very abstract, untested form. As a far more ambitious game than Hounds of the Tsar, Crimson Seas will require a lot of playtesting and refinement to get it closer to a polished, publication-worthy state. I think it can get there, and I’m still intrigued enough by the setting and the spirit of the rules system to want to guide it through that development process.

In any case, it will be fun to see where the game ends up after its already lengthy voyage.

The Long Road to the Last Redoubt

So, Last Redoubt Games…

Maybe it’s best to start at the beginning. I’ve been playing roleplaying games for over twenty years, going back to the time I somehow convinced my mother to buy me a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons “Red Box” starter set (the Mentzer version with the sweet Larry Elmore cover) at a yard sale. I must have been eleven or twelve at the time. That box set included a single-player starter adventure that introduced you to some of the basic elements of the game and then provided a basic starting adventure for a multiplayer game run by a game master (or, in D&D lingo, a Dungeon Master). Since I was an only child living outside of town, I didn’t have a group of friends at the ready to play, so the game kind of collected dust on my shelf after I played through the initial adventure.

My real introduction into roleplaying came when a guy in my marching band squad in the ninth grade turned to me and asked me if I’d heard of a game called Shadowrun. I was, in fact, familiar with the game because I knew about the recently released Super Nintendo game that was based upon it. He and a friend of his had recently ordered a copy of the Shadowrun rulebook and suggested that I join them for a game session when it arrived. We got together with yet another friend to play a game called Underground, which was kind of a bonkers sci-fi dystopia where the players are down on their luck mutant war veterans making a living on the mean streets of a cynical post-capitalist society (think First Blood crossed with Taxi Driver crossed with Blade Runner crossed with Total Recall). It was a weird game session that saw my character literally blown to bits in the first ten minutes (and carried to the hospital in a beer mug and a used condom), but I had a blast and I’ve pretty much been hooked ever since. In addition to playing Shadowrun, I ordered Earthdawn, the recently released fantasy game from the same publisher (FASA Corporation). My high school gaming group changed composition a bit throughout the years, but we played a lot of Earthdawn. Even when I moved to another state while I was in college, a few of us would still play every time we got together (Sadly, we took a hiatus from Earthdawn a few years ago, but that’s a rather sensitive subject for another post).

That’s all a long way of saying that I’ve always been drawn to roleplaying games. Almost from the very beginning, I was the person in my group running games and coming up with adventures. In high school, my dream job was to be a writer and game developer for FASA or White Wolf Publishing (who at that time published the World of Darkness game line). By my first year of college, I was devoting a lot of thought to creating roleplaying game settings, fleshing out entire worlds that could be used as the basis for entire game lines. Much of this was a byproduct of the era. Roleplaying games in the 1990s focused HEAVILY upon setting and story. Even D&D was featuring game lines like Dark Sun and Planescape, which established evocative new worlds with intricate storylines that were advanced little by little with the release of each adventure module. I played a lot of FASA games in those days, so I got a hefty helping of this style of game development from Shadowrun, Earthdawn, and Battletech. I had more setting material for Shadowrun and Earthdawn than I could ever hope to use in a single campaign, but I couldn’t get enough of those worlds.

My first game I tried to develop was…um…bad. Known at various points by the awful title “SoulQuest” and name of the setting, “Ranchess,” this game was…well…an attempt at something. All kidding aside, the setting was important for my development as a writer because it was the first thing I actually tried to use as the basis for a novel. I still have a crate of notebooks somewhere in my house with the first thirty or forty thousand handwritten words of this first attempt (Bits and pieces of it have actually survived to live again in other projects, some of which might yet see the light of day). As a game, though, it sucked. I don’t remember how much of a rules system I had sketched out, but I quickly abandoned the idea for another game that I started working on in the early 2000s. That game, Dark Earth, actually got quite far along. I had a prototype rules document, complete with various races, classes, and abilities written out in rather exacting detail. Since I didn’t have a gaming group at the time, playtesting never got off the ground and I eventually decided that the rules were too similar to other things I’d seen anyway (there was an attempt to convert it to a d20 system at one point as well).

A little over ten years ago, I wrote a short story called “La Tierra de la Sangre,” which features a magical, swords & sorcery alternate history of the Caribbean in the Age of Piracy. Partially inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, I envisioned a setting that drew heavily upon both actual history and a madcap mashup of historical “could have beens” such as the Chinese continuing to establish naval dominance in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Vikings gaining a firm foothold in northeastern Canada, the Aztecs repelling the Spanish with massive stone warships powered by blood sacrifice, and so on. I thought the setting was a natural fit for a roleplaying game, so I set about developing a rule system I thought was pretty unique. The resulting game, Crimson Seas, felt like it fit a niche I hadn’t really seen filled and I had high hopes for publishing it in some form as digital publishing for rpgs had become so much easier by the early 2010s.

Last Redoubt Games was the name I came up with for this publishing venture that never got off the ground. The name itself is a reference to “The Last Redoubt,” the foreboding pyramid fortress featured prominently in William Hope Hodgson’s brilliant but obtuse 1912 novel The Night Land. Unfortunately, Crimson Seas didn’t withstand the rigors of my own close scrutiny, much less playtesting. By the time the game got to a playable state around 2014 or 2015, I’d started gaming more frequently and I came to see that Crimson Seas wasn’t quite as groundbreaking or as interesting as I’d thought. Even worse, the more I worked on it, the more it started to resemble the types of games I didn’t particularly like in the first place. I eventually scrapped everything and laid out a plan to totally redesign the game.

But I never got around to it.

Sometimes you work on something for so long that you just can’t go back to it again. Maybe I got burned out or maybe I came around to the idea that the concept itself wasn’t all that great. I don’t know, but for whatever reason, I never went back to rework the game into something usable. In the meantime, though, I started developing a few new ideas into fully-fledged game concepts. One of them was inspired by the video game Helldivers, which my son and I became obsessed with about two years ago. For those unfamiliar with the game, it’s essentially Starship Troopers, with the players in the role of elite soldiers being dropped down to a planet to perform some super dangerous mission deep in enemy territory. For my son’s birthday party, I thought it would be fun to make a tabletop miniatures game version of Helldivers for him and his friends to play. We didn’t get around to playing it, so the idea sat in a notebook until last year when I started tinkering with it again. This time, however, I actually got a group of people to sit down and play it. This kicked off a playtesting process that saw the game, now called Archangels, change dramatically. The first major change was the elimination of a gamemaster player. Originally, Archangels required one player to control enemy units. In the latest version, enemy actions are totally automated by way of a card system, so every player can concentrate on strategy and coordination with their teammates rather than bookkeeping enemy stats. While it still needs a bit more refining, Archangels is feeling more and more like a finished game and I’m starting to let myself think about things like researching how to produce game components, how to organize a Kickstarter, how to commission artwork, and how to do graphic design. It’s a daunting but exciting prospect.

Since Archangels is a bit of a complicated project, I thought it would be a good idea to put together something simpler that would help me establish an identity for Last Redoubt Games. My taste in roleplaying games has changed dramatically from when I was younger and had more time on my hands. While I used to enjoy books that gave you page after page after page of rules, character options, and setting detail, today I appreciate games that are simple, flexible, and to the point. A book like Dragon Age from Green Ronin Publishing is fantastic and I love it, but sometimes I want the simplicity of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which provides no specific setting material and a very simple set of rules. The two games that have had the biggest influence on me in this regard are Into the Odd by Chris McDowall and Ghost/Echo by John Harper, which focus heavily on getting into the game as quickly as possible and not getting bogged down by requiring players to master extensive rules mechanics to get the most out of a game.

The result of all this brainstorming is a game called Hounds of the Tsar. Based on an idea for a Lamentations of the Flame Princess game I never got around to running, the game sees the players take on the role of Oprichniks, who were ostensibly the secret police force for the Ivan the Terrible in late 1560s Russia. While I intend to run a number of playtests myself, I decided to make the prototype version of the game available for anyone who wants to give it a try. The draft document is only about fifteen pages long and provides enough information to get a basic campaign off the ground, but gamemasters and players will have to fill in some gaps if they want to stretch things beyond a few adventures. Some of those omissions are intentional. I want the game to be open-ended enough for groups to create their own unique material. Too often roleplaying games condition players to do everything strictly “by the book” and they become hesitant to make up their own rules when the situation might demand it. While Hounds of the Tsar will almost certainly add more material to provide players with a toolbox for incorporating their own ideas into the game, I don’t anticipate adding much in the way of specific rules or content. For the time being, the game is what it is, and I’d need to have some pretty compelling and overwhelming feedback to make me want to change that.

You can view and download a PDF copy of Hounds of the Tsar here. Read it, play it, and let me know what you think. I’ll have a little more to say about it in the coming weeks, so keep checking in here or the Last Redoubt Facebook page for updates if you’re interested in how this little project pans out.

Welcome to the Last Redoubt

This changeover has been a long time coming, but there’s been enough progress with this little side project that it finally made sense to move LRG out from under the umbrella of my personal website and into its own space.

For the time being, there’s not a lot of new material here, but I have transferred all of the downloadable games from the old website. After mulling it over for quite a while, I decided to keep these games easily accessible and not “gate” them behind a sign-up form. My hope is that people will enjoy the games enough to keep checking back here to see what’s going on with LRG and want to be a part of the future.

For now, feel free to browse the existing games. If you want to reach out with feedback on any games, you can send all comments/suggestions to pyramid@lastredoubtgames.com.