The Sad Trad Parade

Mini-reviews from pandemic gaming

I recently talked about how I’ve been able to play longer game series during the pandemic; this provided me in-depth views of several systems. Today I focus on “trad” games, RPGs rooted in the early years of role-playing even if they have been published in the last decade: 13th Age, Paladin (Pendragon),Cypher (Numenéra), and Dragon Age and The Expanse (AGE). 

Buckle up, if you know my tastes in RPGs you know this is going to be rocky.

What do you mean, “trad systems”?

I played in four campaigns, and ran one, using systems that have a direct lineage to the early days of role-playing and still foster the same kind of experience. I would characterize them thus:

They use pass/fail mechanics: you succeed at a task and advance in the story, or you fail and nothing happens. In limited cases, you can get extra-good successes (“critical” in common RPG parlance) where you get a cherry on top, or extra-bad failures (“fumbles”) where disaster strikes.

Player ideas and narrative authority are filtered through PC skill rolls: you may have a brilliant strategy or a rousing speech but the impact on what happen in the fiction depends on a skill roll result, not player creativity.

The GM is the primary author of the game. By default, information is secret until revealed by the GM. The players’ decisions on the fictional background is limited to their characters.

PCs can only accomplish things that their character sheet and the rules give them explicit permission to. PCs are presented with challenges (e.g., a locked door or an adversary in their way) and players check their character sheets to find out what they can do about it. Do you have the lockpicking or fighting skill? Then you can roll. Some games may let you roll certain actions unskilled at a penalty (i.e., the explicit permission is in the rules.)

This latter point is the sharpest contrast with more modern or story-driven games: in PbtA or Fate games, for example, you figure out what you want to do and then determine which mechanics to use in order to support the fiction, in other words, you do what makes sense in the story. In traditional games, you figure out what you’re mechanically allowed to do, and the fiction is what is left after the dice are rolled, in other words things happen because of the way the rules are written regardless of whether they make sense in the story.

Paladin: The Werewolf, the Witch, the Baby and the King of Nutons

We had another episode of our ongoing Paladin game. Alas, one player was unable to join but we still had three of our four sibling knights facing supernatural adventures!

At the end of last episode, our grandmother—now widowed, retired from her own days of knighthood, and abbess of a nunnery—had revealed that she was cursed by witches to turn into a werewolf AND had abandoned a baby at birth, triplet to our father and evil uncle Guillaume, because she could only care for two infants.

We had then discovered that a group of local Redcaps had found the baby in the forest and kept him. They handed it back to us, unaged! But the mere sight of the baby cause grandmother to turn into a wolf creature and attack.

So we started this episode in the middle of the Ardennes forest at night, facing a werewolf of supernatural strength which we did not want to harm but who kept trying to attack the baby. Hildegund’s page Bernard, son of Ogier the Dane, was tossed like a puppet and dashed against an oak (earning him a good concussion but nothing worse than a scratch otherwise.) We tried to restrain the wolf but in vain [largely because the system is that of Pendragon, where you should not expect your characters to be competent…] so Theodelina [my character] vaulted on her horse, snatched the baby and fled with him to keep baby-uncle from being eaten by wolf-grandma. Hildegund drew her rosary and called up the love of God [with a critical success], sending the werewolf fleeing directly away.

We regrouped and tracked grandmother wolf, finding her in human form once the sun rose. We secured her and resumed our search for the witch who had cast the curse—or at least for a village where we could get the baby fed.

We eventually found the witch’s hut in the depths of the forest. She recognized us, let us in and even gave us milk for the baby but wanted our entire lineage to suffer under the curse: long ago, our grandmother the Lady Knight Giselda had slain the witch Liutgarde’s sisters, as ordered by then-King Pepin.

We tried to convince the witch to relent, but she would not give up her vengeance. When we said that the (now-dead) king was the one she should take exception with, she demanded to be heard by “our king” but we soon realized she meant Carloman; she refused to recognize Charlemagne, even though we were in the lands given to him by Pepin when the old king split his kingdom between his two sons.

Meanwhile, our grandmother kept urging us to kill her and the witch both, and wanted nothing to do with the baby.

I finally got the notion to ask the witch if she would agree to the judgment of the king of Nutons instead since I was his knight and champion. She agreed, so we all trooped out to seek the Nutons. (It was the first such visit for my twin brother Adalfried, who finally believed the stories.)

The King of Nutons agreed to hear both sides, then rendered his judgement: his curse would fall on the king instead but would have to be witnessed by us young knights. Our grandmother would be freed from lycanthropy, at least for for now. Presumably, if we failed in the task the deal would be off. And the King of Nutons refused to name which king we should take the curse to…

We took our leave, returned grandmother to the abbey, and took the baby to Adalfried’s impoverished manor in spite of the rumours this would spark. We asked our steward Radegunde to find him a wet nurse, then prepared to visit Carloman—because to make things even more tense, our liege Duke Thierry asked us to attend Carloman’s winter court!

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The Pendragon system is, to be frank (haha), an antiquated disaster. We all use it cheerfully, no one is lobbying for a conversion to another system because we love the setting (writer Ruben in ’t Groen did a great job with the Paladin material) and we love playing as a group, but we’re constantly mocking its ridiculous whiff factor, its unnecessary random tables, and its laborious logic. Yet we have such great stories together!

Paladin!

Today’s episode of Paladin: Warriors of Charlemagne was like Call the Midwife meets Brother Cadfael by way of Brotherhood of the Wolf. The group is wonderful and the story was great.

Our four knights (Hildegund, Gottfried, Adelfried, and Theodelina) went to see our widowed grandmother, recently elevated to abbess of Our Lady of Pain and found the abbey under lockdown: three nuns had been torn to piece during a night of vigil in the chapel. We ended on a cliffhanger when we finally came face-to-face with a werewolf in an entirely unexpected way.

Oh, and the weird name for the abbey was due to my bad translation for “Notre Dame des Douleurs” (Beata Maria Virgo Perdolens, or Mater Dolorosa): this facet in the Virgin Mary’s veneration, I found out after the game, is actually known in English as “Our Lady of Sorrows.” But I did find A.C. Swinburne’s 1866 poem that does shed an odd light on the topic!

Who has known all the evil before us,
Or the tyrannous secrets of time?
Though we match not the dead men that bore us
At a song, at a kiss, at a crime —
Though the heathen outface and outlive us,
And our lives and our longings are twain —
Ah, forgive us our virtues, forgive us,
Our Lady of Pain.

Kickstarter arrivals

I’ve had a couple of Kickstarter campaign deliveries in the last couple of weeks. First, the Zine Quest entry by Lauren McManamon and Jesse Ross (Hedgemage Press), Girl Underground, a game Powered by the Apocalypse:

Contents: The game is really interesting and I definitely want to run or play this soon. I particularly like that although the Girl playbook is narratively central to the game, the Companion playbooks all feel interesting and exciting to play, not mere sidekicks. Other favourite feature: GM support for adventure-building includes an array of fantastical locations with prompts, NPCs, plot hooks, and guidance for scene-setting.

Even though I already have two games booked at Big Bad Con, I’m now considering running this at Games on Demand in October, or maybe running it online for friends this summer.

Format: It makes a better ebook than print zine because the text ends up so small I can barely read it even in good light. That said, the layout is elegant and the art lovely.

Second arrival: Paladin: Warriors of Charlemagne by Ruben in ’t Groen (Nocturnal Media/Gallant Knight Games/Chaosium), a game based on the rules from Pendragon:

Contents: The book is massive, with over 450 pages, and excellent. The Pendragon v5.2 rules are carefully adjusted to reflect the Frankish empire, and the rich setting section is well written. It’s exciting for me to read a game based on these tales, which were as present or more in my youth’s reading lists as Arthurian legends. Edmund is planning to run a campaign starting very soon.

Format: The text is small but not as tiny as Girl Underground‘s. The book binding, end pages, gilt page edges, bookmark ribbons, covers, and section headings are beautiful. The pleasing layout is similar to that of Pendragon, but in addition the red headings (rather than blue) make it easier to navigate quickly.

The illustrations… Well, the first backers-only PDF version had raised a hue and cry with the poor quality of some illustrations. In response, Nocturnal Media and partners commissioned new art to replace the most egregious pieces. The art is now technically competent but often flavourless. Unlike the famous pieces from the public domain, most notably those by Gustave Doré, few of the commissioned illustrations evoke the Carolingian setting and not just some generic European medieval fantasy.

And this gem still made it as the chapterhead illustration for Chapter 17: Foreign Cultures. RLY? I can’t decide which this least evokes at first glance, Charlemagne’s paladins or foreign cultures. Except the cis het white dudebro culture, which is foreign to me.

Still, the book is overall a good purchase and I think we’ll have good gaming with it.