Grant Us Eyes!

One of my favorite game mechanics in videogames in Insight from Bloodborne. You increase your character’s Insight by encountering weird alien shit for the first time, or by consuming the Madman’s Knowledge item. As your Insight increases, you gain the ability to see more supernatural stuff happening around you that would otherwise be invisible. But as you are pulled into the world of eldritch beings, you also become more vulnerable to their strange powers.

For a campaign in which the player character’s are on a journey to visit sacred shrines of supernatural power to gain greater wisdom and enlightenment from personal encounters with cosmic forces, an Insight mechanic would be just perfect.

In Dragonbane, this is a perfect case for introducing a secondary skill. That is, simply a skill that isn’t in the main rulebook for the game. Assuming the campaign begins with the PCs already having done a circuit of the regular pilgrim’s path but still craving for greater understanding from more out of the way and controversial sites of power, all PCs would start with Insight as a trained skill in addition to the starting skills of a new character. Which means it starts at a rank of 1 to 7, based on the character’s Willpower attribute, corresponding to a 5 to 35% chance at making a successful skill check.

Insight checks are rolled when touching a supernatural object, entering a supernatural area, or first interacting with a supernatural creature to gain a first impression of what’s going on. It might also be rolled in secret by the GM to become aware of a hidden presence. And in turn, an Insight roll might need to be failed or otherwise supernatural beings take notice of the PCs entering their vicinity and come to investigate. (That part is admittedly still very vague at this point.)

As with all skills, a roll of a 1 or a 20 marks the Insight skill for advancement at the end of the game. Once the game ends, players make a skill check, and if the check fails, the skill advances by one rank. The sacred shrines that the characters are seeking and visiting count as a teacher for for the Insight skill. Spending a full shift in a sacred shrine and contemplating the experience lets players make a skill advancement roll with a boon (roll twice, take the better result).

The Pilgrimage

The main challenge for me in imagining fantasy adventure stories has always been the motivation of the adventuring heroes. Oldschool D&D was before anything else a tactical dungeon crawling game. It wasn’t even called a roleplaying game for some time. Just a fantasy adventure game, that had evolved out of wargaming. Characters were play pieces for the players. Both disposable and replaceable. The game is being played to have fun interacting with the challenges. It was not a game about experiencing the heroic journey of memorable characters. In that context, people just picking up a rusty sword to walk straight into monster-infested hellholes and to their pretty certain death was not an issue of narrative dissonance.

But very few roleplaying games that succeeded early D&D since the mid-80s are anything like that. They are not dungeon crawling tactical games. They are roleplaying games about characters with personalities, motivations, and ambitions. But in the typical fantasy adventure game, they are still walking straight into situations that should be certain and immediate death on a regular basis. Real people do significantly dangerous things as a job, even if the pay is poor, because they want to help people in danger and believe that this is worth the risks they are taking. But these people usually go to incredible length to mitigate all the possible risk to themselves and rely on extensive support structures to fund and equip them. And even then, there is regularly a point where they concede that there is nothing they can do because the risk of becoming additional victims that need saving is just too high.

Fantasy is fiction of the impossible and magical. But when it comes to the risk that characters take in fantasy adventure scenarios, and the possible gains they expect from that, my brain just can not believe that a person with a mind that works in similar ways to real humans, would make decisions like that. (Let’s not even touch on the whole genre of JRPGs and Shonen anime.)

We do have many fantasy protagonists who go on adventures outside of games, and many of them were the direct inspiration for dungeon crawling games in the first place. But old king Conan does not go on adventures. He rides out into battle to defend his country from invading armies. Ending up in dungeons and fighting demons was never his plan. Young man Conan does go dungeon crawling many times. But his motivation is that he thinks killing, stealing, and intimidating people are the most fun passtimes one can engage him. Not exactly a model for the typical fantasy game player to emulate.

Elric and Kane frequently find themselves in adventure situations, but adventuring is not what they set out to do. Most commonly they are on a journey to get a thing that is important to them or will be a valuable tool for their goals. And along the way, an adventure happens to happen by accident, and is something they would rather have avoided.

I don’t think any of these characters and stories make for good models for player characters in roleplaying games. And that is probably at the heart of why all my campaigns in the last 10 years have felt to me like a compromise to just have something to play, rather than nothing. But the adventures as a whole never felt meaningful to me.

But thinking about the topic again over this weak did lead to an idea that could be interesting to pursue further and build a campaign around for the Iron Lands.

Characters on Pilgrimage

Why would people go on adventures? That does depend on what even is an adventure in the first place? In the context of Sword & Sorcery tales, it’s pretty much a given that it is about characters on a journey during which they enter at least one exceptional, and often supernatural, location and face off against a significant, and usually supernatural, threat. But why do they go to the place, and why do they risk facing the threat? And for a campaign, why do they keep doing that over and over?

Self-preservation and defense only works so many times. By the third time the heroes’ home gets attacked by demons, the believability breaks down. Seeking an opportunity to get rich quick or die trying does work structurally, but that just goes completely counter to any themes I find worthwhile to engage with. And traveling heroes for hire who ask around in every village they come through if they have any monsters they want to be freed from just doesn’t pass my personal checks for a plausible world.

But here is one new idea! What if adventuring is basically a religion?

The idea is that there are many kinds of mystic cults and societies that seek to gain understanding or enlightenment about the reality of existence and their own being through personal experiences of the supernatural or divine. Living a rural life in the natural world only lets you experience a small fragment of what reality in its entirety really is. Studying tomes and listening to the words of mystic teachers in great metropolitan cities will only get you so far. To truly gain enlightenment and real understanding of the world and being, people have to experience the supernatural as well. And to that purpose, followers of these religions go on pilgrimages to visit many holy sites, and experience the presence of supernatural phenomenons and beings for themselves.

For most people, these pilgrimages are just that. A year, or maybe two, visiting several revered shrines and sanctuaries, and returning to their former lives as a grown person with a greater appreciation for the world and life. But some pilgrims feel that there is still more for them to learn. Greater truths and more revelations that are just out of reach and prevent them from returning home just yet. Many great and most revered mystics continue their pilgrimages to more distant and remote sites for decades or their entire lives.

And off the regular pilgrimage routes, on rarely travelled paths deep into the wilderness, pilgrims can often find themselves in the presence of forces far from the serenity of the more famous sanctuaries. And on these journeys, some people discover that they have it in themselves to face the supernatural even when it is frightening and hostile, and to keep going forward into the unknown when most others would turn back. Warriors and mages who have stepped on the pilgrims’ path are often found among those who have both the courage and the compulsion of curiosity to push on on these darker paths. But they can also be found in the most unlikely people who have never considered themselves as being particularly brave or thirsting for knowledge. And it is these people that many remote settlements, that have no experienced priest or shaman of their own, put their hopes on when they are struggling with the dark forces from below and beyond. And in many cases, pleas to take a look into these strange and rare manifestations of the supernatural are too tempting to resist investigating.

In Dragonbane, professions for new player characters cover the typical fighter, hunter, mage, and thief. But they also include scholars, merchants, artisans, and mariners. People without any special martial skills or magical powers, who really would have no qualifications to leave their homes and clear out bandit lairs, goblin warrens, and haunted tombs. But going on a pilgrimage to visit holy shrines? Sure, why not. Lots of ordinary people do that. And as their journeys go on, asking other pilgrims if they can tag along to visit some of the more dodgier and out of place sites is not much of a stretch. The professions are also only a template to speed up character creation. Once play begins, character advancement is entirely by using skills and receiving skill training from instructors. Who your characters will become depends entirely on their experiences during the campaign. This seems a really nice mechanical fit for a world in which characters become adventurers during their journey, instead of chosing it before they set out.

This setup also provides a nice default action for sandbox campaigns, for when an adventure is wrapped up with nothing else for the characters to do. Just take out the map again and look if there’s any other pilgrimage sites in the area. And if that turns out uneventful, continue on to the next one until something extraordinary disrupts the quiet journey again.

This is a new idea I just started thinking about. But I think this could be something really interesting to use as the centerpiece to build a fantasy world around.

The Iron Lands

Among all the GMs on the internet, I should be remembered as the guy who’s always been super excited about planning for big sandbox campaigns and Sword & Sorcery, and whose actual games never turned out as delivering either. After two years in the wilderness, the ancient call sounded again on the wind, and I am back to thinking, “Man, wouldn’t it be cool…?”

I now believe that probably the biggest thing that always got in my way was that I really wanted to make a beautiful world first, that is magnificent in itself, and then somehow adapt a game system to match the world, and create campaigns set in that world. And the world that I was dreaming up just wasn’t really well suited for Sword & Sorcery adventures and sandbox campaigns. No amount of retooling was actually helping with that.

But now, I am once again here thinking how could it would be to really take a proper shot at that kind of campaign I’ve seen people talk about over many years. And I feel that probably the best shot at making this actually work for once, is to start with a game system and campaign structure that have worked for many other people first, and then build a world around those. And the system I am thinking about is of course the 1981 Dungeons & Dragons Basic and Expert Rules by Tom Moldvay and Zeb Cook. (Actually Old School Essentials Advanced Rules but that’s 98% the same thing.)

And instead of making the world some new take on the old concept with recycled places and cultures from Kaendor and the Ancient Lands, the plan here and now is to really start with something new from scratch, going all the way back to the original references and sources.

Sword & Sorcery & Sandbox

The starting point for this campaign idea is to take the Basic and especially the Expert Rules as they are, and not make any attempts at improvements and streamlining, like retooling the saving throw categories, modifying the experience point reward system, or changing the spell lists to fit a different image of what magic is in the world. It should be just B/X with a few additional custom classes. (And the modern way to calculate attack hits after the d20 is rolled, because it’s just so much objectively better!)

But what is very important to make clear is that I have no intention of planning the campaign and populating the world to be a hexcrawl. The players picking one of the five unexplored hexes around their current location and with luck finding a hole in the ground in an area of forest covering five Central Parks, and maybe killing a dozen goblins for 3 copper coins sounds as dull to me as it is to apparently a very large number of players. My idea of sandbox campaigns is to have the players get involved in conspiracies against some minor king, find the hidden temple of a high priest kidnapping princesses, destroy the pirates sinking merchant ships and following them to their volcano lair on skull island. With the players making the choice which of the rumors they encounter on their travels they want to follow, and what sides they want to pick, and what kind of ultimate outcome they want to see. (This is one of the reasons why B/X is such an attractive pick, as it’s a system that allows preparing NPC leaders and their minions, or maps for lairs and ancient ruins very quickly to be ready to play within five days.)

The main works I am drawing ideas from for the game world are the classic 80s Sword & Sorcery movies Conan the Barbarian and Fire and Ice. But also the interpretation of the Young Kingdoms in the Elric RPG Stormbringer, the Wilderlands of High Fantasy and Planet Algol, and the post-post-Apocalyptic sandbox game Kenshi. Given the classic depictions of Sword & Sorcery scenes by the most famous artists of the genre and the highly fragmented state of civilization I want to go for, I would roughly place the cultural state of the setting in the mid-Iron Age. That’s the time where Greek city states were starting to make their comeback and the Phoenicians and Etruscans were doing quite well for themselves, but still a considerable time before the Romans and Achaemenids became major players in the cultural and political landscape.

The Iron Lands

As a start, I grabbed this map from the internet to have a first reference for the geography of the setting.

But in particular this area.

This area here covers roughly the size of Asia Minor, Greece, and Mesopotamia. That’s more than enough room for a decently sized Iron Age population, with a vast interior remaining for numerous nomadic tribes and all kinds of great and strange beasts.

The world of the Iron Lands is very much not planet Earth. The mountains, forests, and islands are recognizable enough, but the wild beasts and even domesticated creatures are more like prehistoric creatures from hundreds of millions of years ago, and the the monsters have only very little overlap with the generic D&D creatures.

In the very ancient past, some 10,000 years ago, the continent was home to strange inhuman civilizations. These Ancients have been long gone, and little has been left of their empires other than a few overgrown ziggurats made from strange green stone or purple glass, hidden deep in the jungles and mountains.

Long after the Ancients were gone came the age of the serpentmen, who build numerous large kingdoms across the coastal lands, ruling over great populations of human slaves. Their civilization eventually fell as well a thousand years ago, but a few half-abandoned cities still are clinging on in the jungles to the east.

After the serpentmen were gone from the Iron Lands, most of their human slaves dispersed into the highlands and forests, but eventually some clans began to rebuild abandoned cities or build new ones of their own. 300 years ago, a powerful sorcerer king conquered most of the city states of the Iron Lands. But even with his magic, he eventually died, and his 100 year long empire fell soon after, as his governors were overthrown by the people one by one. The rivalry between the many petty kings has diminished trade and education noticeably since the time of the Empire, and their individual power rarely extends for more than a three days march around their cities. The hills and many of the smaller islands are home to countless minor lords who are often little more than mercenary captains who moved into border forts abandoned by the Empire or the Serpentmen.

Planets of the Foross Sector: Sarhat and Kion

The Foross Sector is located near the edge of Known Space, at the outermost point where the regions of vhen and enkai colonial influence meet, and give way to unexplored space, and only a bit more than a week from the genya homeworld by cargo freighter. It saw some very extensive mining in the 5th and 6th century, but was abandoned by government-owned mining corporation in the early 600s.

Since then, the sector’s population has dropped from more than 100 million people to less than 60 million due to emigration. The local economies were fully privatized, and economic output declined down to 20% of its peak levels in the late 5th century. The greatly scaled down mining operations are used to fund the import of advanced electronics and medical supplies, but almost all the local infrastructure and industry relies on 200 year old heavy machinery parts salvaged from abandoned mines, and almost half the sector’s population is working in food production, often for mostly personal consumption.

Sarhat

Sarhat is an arid planet dominated by rocky deserts and a number of enclosed salty seas that are home to oxygen-producing bacteria, and whose continuous evaporation provides the scarce rain that fills the planets rivers. While the salt seas are highly alkaline and covered in thick layers of pink bacterial sludge, the seasonal rivers are regularly replenishing underground caverns in porous rocks, which create numerous oases that have become the main sites for settlements on the planet. Though vegetation on Sarhat is sparse, the planet is home to many species of native animals. Most are fairly small and of little threat to people, but some are large enough to be worthwhile to hunt for food. Agriculture of hardy crops in the soil of Sarhat is possible, but the import of fruit and vegetables from Kion is the main source of cargo traffic within the sector.

Sarhat was first settled in 523 by enkai from the Parakarit colony, who established a small survey station as an outpost of their settlement on Kion. Discoveries of numerous small, but still highly concentrated sources of Iridium and Palladium on Sarhat in 547, and decreasing outputs from the mines of the Turik colony on Halon, led to nearly all the Turik mining operations being moved to the much less hostile and inhospitable planet. The Turikan cities and settlements are now home to 15 million people ruled by twelve oligarch families. The earlier Parakarian settlement are home to 6 million people, and are ruled by 8 oligarch families. Another estimated 3 million people live scattered throughout the hills or the ruins of settlements abandoned after the Turik and Parakarit governments cut all infrastructure funding.

Counted together, Turikan and Parakarian enkai make up the largest population on Sarhat, and all the oligarch families on the planet are enkai. But are outnumbered by the large populations descended from alien migrant workers, mostly chosa and tubaki who deal well with the hot and dry climate of the planet. The Turikan and Parakarian oligarchs often prefer to have dealings among themselves, but at the end of the day, business interests go above cultural animosities.

Kion

Kion is one of the two most hospitable planets in the Foross Sector. Its surface is covered in several large continents, separated by a global network of winding narrow seas. Except for the polar regions and the higher mountain ranges, much of the planet’s land is covered in dense vegetation. As expected from a planet like this, Kion is home to millions of species of native animals, only a tiny fraction of which has ever been scientifically described or named over the past two centuries.

While the first settlers from Turik immediately went to full scale mining on Halon, the Parakarit government decided to first focus on setting up sustainable food production in the sector to greatly reduce the costs of supplying later mining operations. The first Parakarian settlement on Kion was established in 503 and some mining was begun on the planet in the following decades, but it never reached the scale of the Turikan mining operations on Halon and later Sarhat.

The mines on Halon ended up buying large quantities of food from Kion, as even with the enormous prices paid to the rival Parakarians, this was still cheaper than relying entirely on shipping food in from Turik. Correspondingly, a Turikan settlement was established on Kion in 529, though this was exclusively a food production facility with no plans to do any mining on Kion.

Today, the Parakarian colony on Kion numbers 12 million people ruled by five enkai oligarchs. The Turikan colony is home to 5 million people, ruled over by three oligarchs. Two enkai, one vhen.

A Brief History of Space

When I came up with the idea for Iridium Moons three years ago, the concept was to create a world that is a blend of Cyberpunk and Dune, with the only fantastical elements being hyperspace travel and artificial gravity. Other than that, everything was meant to remain plausible under conventionally understood physics, biology, demographics, and economics. But this year, I’ve really gotten invested in a much more space fantasy style, more similar to A Princess of Mars and early Star Wars. In that context, many of the planets and factions I had created for the Esekar Sector no longer really make much sense. And since I picked up 3D modelling and rendering in Blender as a new hobby, and very much entertaining the possibility of expanding from that into videogame development with Blender at a later point, focusing on a smaller number of planets with fewer different kind of aliens would be a significant reduction on the asset creation workload. So I created a new sector for Iridium Moons, that’s more in line with the new vision. Reusing many of the aliens and other concepts, but also replacing or throwing out others.

Starting with the history of the Foross Sector doesn’t feel like a particularly good way to introduce the new setting, but it still seems to make more sense to cover this background before going deeper into the description of the individual planets and factions.

The Start of the Interstellar Age

700 years ago, the first working hyperspace drive engine was constructed by the vhen. This marked the beginning of the Interstellar Age, and conventionally treated as the start of interstellar history. Though for the first century, this history is the story of vhen space exploration alone. Traveling out into space, they explored hundreds of star system and established a number of small outposts on habitable planets, though most of these were constructed to primarily serve as supply stations for expeditions deeper into space.

After having previously encountered only a few very small populations of intelligent species with early stone age cultures, vhen explorers discovered the homeworld of the enkai in 104. The enkai were already a technologically very advanced species, but their planet was highly divided and at that time in the grip of several major conflicts. With no side having a technological or military edge over the others to risk a full out global war, the conflicts had been largely frozen for many decades. While the arrival of aliens in their star system did have a great cultural impact on all of enkai society, the possibility of interstellar expansion through hyperspace travel was primarily seen by many of the warring governments as an unprecedented opportunity to gain major economical and military advantages over their rivals. Several of the most powerful enkai states did have the technological and economical capacities to build shipyards for the production of hyperspace capable ships and begin construction within 20 years after gaining knowledge of the physics behind hyperspace drives from the vhen.

The Enkai Space Race

While the vhen had undertaken space exploration as a primarily as a scientific effort, for the larges enkai states, falling behind in the race to gain and secure access to valuable resource in other star systems was seen as an existential threat to their survival. Throwing their entire industrial might behind the effort to beat their military rivals, the enkai space race accelerated the exploration of new systems and the establishment of major colonies to a pace far beyond anything seen before.

Of the four largest enkai colonies, one would eventually be largely abandoned after 60 years, failing to become self-sustainable after being a huge drain on the state’s economy. The other three turned out to be extremely successful, and by the year 300 each had grown to population sizes over 100 million people, due to massive state-sponsored migration and very effective social policies to encourage high birth rates. However, the great war on the enkai homeworld never actually materialized. And with communication between the colonies and the homeworld being delayed by weeks, and the colonies having become economically fully self-sufficient, two of them gained full independence as sovereign states during the 4th century. While the last colony had become very successful, its establishment and very high support costs during the early decades had played a major part in ruining the government on the home world. With several regions breaking off to become independent minor nations, the colony eventually outpaced the state that had founded it both economically and in population, ultimately leading to the capital being moved to the colony. This effectively makes it sovereign state that has a colony on one of the homeworlds. A unique case in all of interstellar history.

Further Expansions

During the enkai space race of the 2nd and 3rd century, several other large civilizations were discovered in the exploration of habitable planets and became part of interstellar society. The enkai discovered the chosa in 197, who also had already developed limited space travel within their own system.

In 274, vhen explorers discovered the homeworld of the tubaki, who did have quite advanced steam power technology but no electrical infrastructure.

In 312, the vhen also discovered the mahir, who turned out to be the descendants of enkai who had been settled on a far away planet and genetically altered by an unknown lost civilization tens of thousands of years ago. Mahir technology was already quite similar to that of the vhen, except having never discovered the means to produce hyperspace drives.

In 381, enkai discovered the firax, who had just begun to develop electronics 50 years earlier.

In the early 5th century, the major enkai colonies had become significant powers in their own right and began to establish new permanent mining outposts on more resource rich planets that had been discovered after their own founding. During this time they discovered the genya in 442. The genya had discovered electricity, but due to their planet’s scarcity of coal and almost complete lack of oil had never been able to make use of it industrially. The introduction of fusion power by the enkai led to an incredibly fast industrialization that happened in all parts of the planet simultaneously, leading to an enormous population explosion.

Settlement of the Foross Sector

One of the regions of space that was of great interest to two of the major enkai colonies was the Foross Sector. The first outpost to be established in 478 was on Halon, an inhospitable and barren planet covered in near permanent haze and dust storms, but with breathable air and being home to several rich deposits of Iridium and Paladium from asteroid impacts, which made it very attractive for mining.

Another new settlement followed on Kion in 503, which became the main food producers for the mining operations in the sector. By this time, the genya homeworld was reeling from a six times increase in global population numbers, and severe economic hardship for working class clans, leading to several hundred million people taking up offers for work in alien colonies, with large numbers of them ending up in the Foross Sector.

In 547, new rare metal sources were discovered on Sarhat. With the most abundant deposits on Halon having been mined decades ago, and the environment being much more hospitable, the main mining operations in the sector were almost entirely moved from Halon to Sarhat, leaving the first settled planet in the sector mostly abandoned.

At the same time, the vhen fuel refinery in orbit around the moon of Palan was greatly expanded, with extensive support structures and housing facilities being build on the surface of the habitable planet. In time, Palan became home to the main spaceport of the Feross Sector, with the vhen settlement growing into a city of 9 million people. A majority of them being genya.

The Decline

By 7th century, mining on Sarhat declined significantly and had already mostly ended on Kion. The enkai colonies that had been funding the new settlements greatly reduced their budget for maintenance and upkeep and completely pulled out of the sector in 617 and 623. Palan followed in 635. Over a third of the sector’s population left in a span of 25 years, most of them taking up contracts in the new mining operations in neighboring sectors.

Whatever, by that point largely worn out and outdated, industrial equipment and infrastructure remained on the planet was quickly auctioned off to the highest bidders. As the vast majority of people in the Foross Sector had been government employees who received most of their wage in the form of housing, food, and social services, the only people rich in cash tended to be criminals. Who now in control of the remaining industry and infrastructure, became the new oligarch class.

Without the regular supply of subsidized advanced technological components, and largely limited to what could be manufactured locally with existing industrial capacity, the technological level of the Foross Sector declined significantly. Large parts of the population on Sarhat and Kion turned to farming, possessing only a few small electronic devices, and often relying extensively on work animals. The oligarchs still maintain access to many advanced technologies by trading the resources from the greatly decreased mining operations to interstellar trade companies from the homeworlds.

Despite the massive industrial decline of the Foross Sector, a new settlement was set up by the firax on Meruna in 631. While the planet is highly habitable with a fairly mild climate, its lack of valuable resources had left it unclaimed by the industrial operations of the enkai and vhen. The firax, whose homeworld lies in one of the most remote frontiers of known space, wanted to establish a presence closer to the vhen and mahir, that would allow them opportunities to open relationships with other peoples than only the enkai. Attracting a large number of genya settlers and workers from Kion and Palan, the new colony managed to become economically self-sufficient, but remains the smallest of the populations in the sector by a great margin.

Some insight into FitD Action Roll difficulty

With Blades in the Dark and the other Forged in the Dark games being so much more straightforward and conventional looking than Apocalypse World, I often forget how its entire internal logic is still very difficult from traditional and neo-trad game systems. While reading through Scum and Villainy again in preparation to finally taking it out for a campaign, one peculiar thing I realized only on the third or fourth pass is that getting circumstantial advantages, like optimal equipment for the task or great numerical superiority, can only improve your Effect for the Action Roll, but not affect the odds whether the roll will actually be a success or a failure.

Which coming from a traditional approach to RPGs just feels somehow wrong. Stacking the odds of success and failure in your own favor is the main objective in the gameplay loop of most games. But here it’s very important to understand that PbtA games are  fundamentally different in what the action resolution mechanic is supposed to accomplish in the first place.

In classic and traditional games, an adventure consists of a number of opposing NPCs and obstacles that the GM has put between the players and their goal. The regular action is one PC facing an NPC or environmental obstacle, and making a roll whose odds are based on the PCs abilities and equipment compared against the NPCs abilities and equipment, or the obstacles static difficulty. If the roll is a success, the NPC or obstacle is either removed from the player’s path, or partial progress is made towards removing it. Sometimes it takes two or three successful rolls to drain the NPCs health to zero, but it’s the same idea.

PbtA games don’t do anything like that. In FitD games, the players initiate an adventure by deciding what they want to ultimately accomplish. And instead of the players controlling their characters to remove the obstacles in the path to their goal, the players and the GM are taking turns in taking control of a story about the characters. Apocalypse World tried to make this very explicit by calling everything that a player or GM does a Move. Unfortunately, the very peculiar presentation of the game left a lot of people very confused. Blades in the Dark tried to make the text of the rules more accessible by using more conventional language, but for me personally, that makes it much easier to forget how fundamentally different the gameplay structure of the game is.

An FitD adventure starts by the GM describing the first obstacle that the PCs encounter on their way to their goal. Then one player takes control of the story by describing how one of the PCs is removing that obstacle. If the roll is a success (one 6) or critical success (two or more 6s), then the PCs removed that obstacle. If the roll is a partial success (4-5) or a failure (1-3), then the GM takes control of the story by introducing a new obstacle. Any scene in a PbtA game consists of the players removing obstacles from the scene, and the GM adding new obstacles to the scene. This loop continues until the players have removed all the obstacles. Then they move on to the next scene, and the whole process repeats again. Like a GM in a classic dungeon crawling adventure deciding on the number of rooms and floors in a dungeon, it is up to the GM in a PbtA game to decide how many scenes the players will have to go through before they reach the goal of their adventure. This is always an arbitrary judgement call by the GM, regardless of the style of game structure, based on a personal estimate of what would make a fun adventure for the players.

And this loop of removing obstacles from a scene and adding new ones to a scene, is the reason why the PCs having advantages or disadvantages in any given situation does not affect the probability whether any given Action Roll will be a success, partial success, or failure. If the players had the ability to stack up really big dice pools for any of their rolls, they would just keep getting successes and critical successes all the time, and most scenes would be resolved in just one or two action rolls. The whole point of the PbtA games is to enjoy the wild rollercoaster of things constantly escalating into more and more chaos and panic. We want scenes to go on for a good while, but we also don’t want them to drag on forever. That’s why the ways in which dies can be added or removed from the dice pool are very limited.

But players do still have other ways to stack things in their favor by establishing and setting up situational advantages for themselves. Trading Position for Effect becomes a critical mechanic here. Somehow establishing an advantage that give the PC Great Effect, or at least going from Lesser Effect to Standard Effect for the planned action is not that hard. That’s exactly what Flashbacks are for, and I think generally most GMs are quite generous when players want to have some kind of not yet mentioned environment feature that would help them. Or you can just Push Yourself to get +1 Effect for 2 Stress. (Though then you can’t push yourself to also get +1 die to the roll.) By Trading Effect for Position, players have the option to improve the position for their action to Risky or even Controlled. And in a Controlled Position, a failed action roll can’t really do any further harm. Even on a failure, you can always just accept that it didn’t work, and no new problems are added to the scene. If things are going terrible and you are getting tired and frustrated with the scene and your character is drowning in Stress and Harm, get that increased Effect and trade it for Controlled Position. Otherwise, enjoy the wild ride.