METTLE Core Launch!

 METTLE Core is a compact set of powerful and adaptable rules to help you run or make your own Role-Playing Game (RPG). This core set is geared towards heroic tales of courage, mystery, and intrigue. Detective stories, crime dramas, B-movie mayhem, daring rescues, tense exploration, gritty post-apocalyptic survival, wild-west gunfights, Nazi-clobbering, low fantasy, and grounded science fiction. This focus on so-called “mundane” heroics caters to an underserved style of play and provides a general base to the system. Upcoming games may indulge settings reliant on magic, superpowers, or miracles of science.

• Adaptable Toolkit: flexible enough to suit a wide variety of genres and power levels.
• Easy to Learn and Play: The basic rules are all you need to know. Mastery is a matter of using those basic moves in clever ways.
• Engaging Combat: Move? Attack? Block? Rally back into action? Grapple? Guard an ally? Your call!
• Freeform Experience: decide for yourself what your own character did to earn their advance in power.
• Funky Dice Pool: a new hybrid dice pool system keeps the number of dice low, counting to a minimum, allows for direct contests between scores, and supports collaborative Twists, Raises, and other fun stunts.
• Rich Narrative: players can explicitly alter events using Twists. These add dramatic surprises and give players bargaining power in the story.
• Room to Grow: the intentional “hackability” of this ruleset leaves plenty of space for your own creative additions.
• Scalable: combat fits all sizes of creatures or vehicles with no tweaks or extra rules.
• Vivid Characters: Characters start out with history, goals, and personalities of their own. No need to ask, “but what’s my motivation” – it’s built right in.
• Volleyball Initiative: combatants pass their next turns to each other or their target, so your chance to shine can come at any time.

METTLE Core is on a CC-by 4.0 license and we are excited to hear what you do with it!

Get it here at DrivethruRPG (Digital and Softcover POD) or Itch.io (Digital only).

Half off for launch!

 

Red Light, Green Light

I found this charming little cat statue at the Ships of the Maritime Museum in Savannah Georgia:

With the accompanying description:

14. "Cat"

Probably French, 19th century

"Ceramic "cats" like this were placed in the windows of brothels in English ports in the late 18th and 19th centuries. If the cat had green eyes, this meant the house was open; if the cat had red eyes, it meant the house was full or that police were nearby; if the cat's back was turned, it meant the house was closed.

So uh, hey...

 

Is that where the traffic light colors come from? Brothel cat eye codes?

The Straight Dope about the origin of traffic light colors cites early 1800s railroad signals, but is the cat's eye code older than those?

Daytrippers: Impression

This is my review/impression of Daytrippers, by Tod Foley.  

Setting

The main draw of this game is its tone and sense of wonder.  You play sci-fi explorers of other planes of existence - pioneers proving their world extends beyond its bars. They hop in their rickety deathtrap "slip-ships" and go practically anywhere you could imagine; through space, time, imaginal worlds, the Multiversal Chao for Eris's sweet sake, etc. This setting is a doorway to others. You might say this is true of many -or any- games, but here it is explicit. Even the weirdest adventure ideas can find a place in a Daytrippers session. Think Rick & Morty or Dr. Who or Time Bandits... just make sure the party comes back in 24 hours!

System

Daytrippers runs on a version of Core, Foley's own system. It's fairly intuitive, just roll a pool of d6 and keep the highest, sometimes with bonuses or penalties. The outcome yields a narrative array of yes, yes and, yes but, no and, & no but options, as above. There is no way to get a plan "no," which is probably intentional. If you're going to fail in this system there's gonna be a little mustard on it.

An interesting feature of character creation is the choice of "Lifeshapers" for each character - backgrounds, beliefs, relationships, goals, etc. that motivate their actions and make them who they are. There is room for plenty of them on the character sheet and they can give you extra dice on a roll if relevant. It's an interesting way to add a layer of drama onto what would otherwise just be a set of attributes, and seems very flexible. It's a bit different than the way FATE uses Aspects or METTLE Core uses Descriptors, but still lends narrative weight to the character.

 

There are actual plays of this game all over Youtube, always a good sign!

 

I'm reviewing this without having played it, but I'm sure that will change one day.

So that's Daytrippers, pick it up at DriveThruRPG or Amazon!

The Sol Survivor: Impression

 

I picked up the print version of The Sol Survivor a few months ago and finally got around to playing. This is a new title by prolific indy RPG designer W.H. Arthur, whom you may know from Tales of the Heisty Vixens or B'Town Beak Detectives.

The very first thing this book does is just sum up in two sentences what it is about:

To alleviate the drought, the emperor ordered an archer to shoot down the ten suns. As the last surviving sun, you wake up on earth wounded and confused. Can you find a way back to the heavens?

More RPG books should get to the point this quickly. The fluff is actually in the back of the book instead of the front!

 

In The Sol Survivor you use a regular deck of cards to guide an emergent, collaborative story and gather a cast of supporting characters - common folk, mystical weirdos, fantastic creatures, etc. You need at least three people to play, one playing the part of the narrator, one the ally, and one the sun. There's a balancing act throughout with meeting the sun's Needs and Goals, not losing Faith (tracked by a d6), and gaining Companions.  When all is said and done, it is possible for the sun to return to the sky... but maybe they can and maybe they cannot. I think the story would be compelling either way.

I'm a little isolated from gaming groups during the pandemic, so I ran this as a mock session. It's not the same however as I think this game really shines as an interaction between friends.

Interesting features:

One of the most interesting things about this game is that you rotate these roles every round. I am not sure how that affects the way the story is perceived. I like to think that not having stable roles would detach or "twist off" the story from the players, making it more of a thing in itself. This differentiates it from traditional RPGs where you are largely limited to your own individual character.

Another is that the sun is fairly helpless and acts mainly through their ally. This is another advantage of the rotating roles. If the same player was expected to come up with a new ally or narrator story every round, it would likely be fatiguing. But every third round it is probably refreshing. The creative juices get time to simmer a bit.

One of the emergent choices that comes up is between playing a card high enough to win the round and playing one of the suit that recruits the ally as a companion. Sometimes you can do one, neither, or both. If your sun still has a lot of Faith left, it might be worthwhile to "throw" a scene just to bag another Companion.

There is a convenient index in the back of the book to keep track of which creature goes with each card, but since each player only handles one at a time, it is usually not an issue. I'd love to see a card deck made for this game however. Maybe if enough of you buy it this will magically come true.

I had a little difficulty coming up with needs and goals for the sun. I honestly wasn't sure what they meant by human needs at first. Don't they have all of them? Fortunately examples are given later in the book that clarify this - apparently it is one need, like thirst or space, that is emblematic of who they are. I'm guessing it is up to the group to say whether the sun has other basic human needs than that.

Conclusion

To sum up, The Sol Survivor is a collaborative story session guided by card draws and enhanced by emergent choices, creative prompts, and deliberate strategies. It's a deeper game than you would suspect and would be ideal for a small group of very creative friends who want to build a story that escapes the bonds of the individuals telling it.

You can get it at Itch.io or in print at DriveThruRPG.

Labyrinth The Adventure Game: Impression

I picked up the Labyrinth game (by Ben Milton and Jack Caesar) about a year ago at a local game store, not having heard much about it. I loved the movie when it came out, if that dates me as Gen X then congratulations, yes, yes, you are very smart. Shut up. 

That said, I weary of the reverence we try to inflict on newer generations in regard to our formative media. Passing on Goonies and Star Wars and Ghostbusters with trembling hands and hushed voices like they were sacraments, basking in our precisely targeted market of smug nostalgia.

I don't want to be that guy. 

But still, I figured I would have fun reading the game, maybe play it with the kid when he got old enough.

Flash forward to now, the kid is a prodigal 4 year old and pulls it off the shelf, demanding I play it.

Generational aesthetic dilemma averted. :)

Overall

On the whole I have been enjoying it, and my kid keeps asking to play. The game consists of many short scenarios in a random path through the game, most of which are good fun. This is both a positive and negative - it makes for a different game each time, but it is also hard to prepare for. I imagine there are people who will read this book end to end before running it. I am not one of them. For me, there is a notable pause between the point where I read the intro to each page and when I actually start. Fortunately while the room descriptions are a bit wordy, none of them are too long.

System

I like the rules-lite system it includes, and feel like it meshed with the scenarios nicely. There's not a lot to it, just roll a d6 - two if you have advantage or disadvantage for whatever reason. Everything you really need fits on the little paper book mark. Anything more would have probably been a bit much and there is already plenty of dice trickery within many of the scenarios. Also, because it is so minimal, the effects of many potions and items need no elaboration - they either do a specific thing or grant advantage/disadvantage, making them easy to adjudicate on the fly.

 

Play

The conceit of skipping through like a sort of choose-your-own adventure took a little getting used to. I ended up making small changes like not rolling to backtrack.

Some of the scenarios were a little opaque. This is to say that to pass into the next room often required the party to know things they had no obvious reason to. Usually this meant we had to backtrack and find another way. Often, finding an item afterwards gave us a new means to get past a seemingly impassible area, which is a nice touch.

We loved the Fortune Teller scenario every time it came up, and backtracked often to get another reading. These were things like "I see you buried deep below!" or "I see a giant made small!" There's even a mechanical benefit you can call on if a fortune actually takes place, letting you save precious time (fitting!). I suspect some of these are also hints to later puzzles. Overall a really well done and enjoyable scene.

By contrast, the Balloons scenario fell a little flat. There is a lot of potential here for climbing up the balloons, struggling with the goblins, reaching the highest balloon for an overview, etc. Problem is there is no apparent reason to do any of that. The balloons are not going anywhere and, while a threat due to projectiles, can be ignored. For what it is worth, the kid liked to find out what the goblins would throw out of them, and got a goblin helmet out of it. While I list this as a criticism, it also makes me wonder whether every scenario in this book really needs an obvious reason to engage. Could some scenarios be appreciated as mere interesting events that don't necessarily lead toward the goal?

The Buried Giant was memorable because it is one of those seemingly impassible scenarios mentioned before. We found a solution in one of the potions you can get, and backtracked to this area to use it. It worked and we finally passed, it was a real victory and this made me understand why so many of these pages did not provide a solution in the text.

We tended to skip over The Gatekeepers in the beginning, as the choices seemed forced and a bit game-y for my taste.

We have not made it to the Goblin King yet, maybe never will. There is a lot else to do.

Presentation

It's a nice enough book and the art is good. I didn't have the problem some people report about the pages falling apart. Some were a little dinged and smudgy from the printer. The dice slot is a little annoying but does keep the dice around in the book between uses.

You can buy it Amazon or a local game store. Please patronize the game store instead.

And that's my experience with it so far. Tell me about your experiences or ask questions about mine!