gmless Archives

What We Played: Pottery Shards

Posted by Caroline

Playtesting continues for Marc’s latest project, the archaeology game currently titled Pottery Shards! Marc, Ben, Fred, and I had a great time testing out a new gameplay loop that really helped focus our world-building and felt organic and fun. Marc’s been patiently iterating on this design for just over a year, and it feels like we’re really getting close to the final rules!

The People of the Flood

We decided to study a brutal and ambitious civilization that resided beside a desert river. Our archeologist discovered one site with three artifacts that offered us a glimpse of the People of the Flood.

The Site

As first player I had the honors of describing the site. I made a tall cone made of hewn sandstone, with an underground tunnel entrance. Fred then got to describe what the site was used for. Since it floods each year, people swim through the tunnel opening to perform an annual soul purification ritual in the dark pool within the cone. Finally, Ben painted a picture of what this looked like – it’s all beige now when we look at it, but in the past the archeologist imagines it being painted brilliant colors against the desert tan.

The Artifacts

Marc introduced our first artifact, a large stone ball with three spikes protruding out of it, kinda like a spiky tripod. I got to describe its use. Our archeologist decided it was probably used as a sacrificial statue, symbolizing the evil you wanted to purify. Fred described the people hauling the statue as they would swim through the tunnel, a dangerous and difficult task. The statues get left at the bottom of the pool, making it more and more dangerous to enter.

We continued playing that loop format – one player introducing an artifact, the next player saying what it was for, and the last player sharing a little vision of what it looked like long ago. We created a series of carvings at the top of the cone, which were peoples’ ambitions for the year. Our archeologist imagined people climbing over one another to just barely reach the top and carve their hopes in the dark. And then we created a door that had bones in it, because of course people died during this ritual and so were buried within the walls. In fact, sometimes instead of bringing an evil spirit statue, you came with someone else to fight to the death. In the water. In the dark. Hey – we said they were a brutal people!

Onward

We only had time for that one full round. If we had kept playing, we would have gotten to move on to a new site, and discover new artifacts there. I’m excited to see how Marc keeps honing the rules and the text, and so happy that we are now in the ‘fine tuning’ stages of the design!

What We Played: Welcome to Sentai High! (Entanglement playtest)

Posted by Marc

The game starts with creating a setting. We’re supposed to pick a basic story concept, something everyone’s already familiar with. As Caroline read out the description, an idea flashed into my head. “Ok, hear me out,” I said. “Power Rangers.” We set up our little world of high school seniors at Sentai High in Neo-San-Kyoto, who face the challenge of fighting huge monsters in Japanese-warrior themed mechs while also finding time go on dates and study for the big test!

“We can’t lose someone else…”

Our cast of characters started with Riyuji Takanaka, a transfer student and newest member of the team, aka “the rookie” and Val Vaneo, a hot-headed hotshot member of the team. Next was my character Venetia Vaneo, younger sister of Val and decidedly not a mech pilot (and thus unaware of their existence!) Finally we had Tiger Lopez, Venetia’s boyfriend and (to complete the loop) Riyuji’s mentor. Tiger was the head of the ranger squad, but he was haunted by the loss of their former leader Jason, for which he blamed himself.

We finished character creation by writing feeling statements between our characters (Venetia loves Tiger, Val feels threatened by Riyuji), then passing the card to that player so they can write a reason why you should or shouldn’t feel that way (Venetia shouldn’t love Tiger because he’s hiding the truth from her, Val shouldn’t feel threatened because Riyuji aspires to be like him). We did this twice, then dove into the gameplay loop.

You got your sports anime in my mecha anime!

Our story was, from the get-go, a mess of emotions. Val and Riyuji were constantly at each others’ throats, both on the basketball court and during combat with giant monsters. Venetia, none the wiser about their secret identities as senpai superheroes, wanted to spend time with her cool older brother and go on a date to Boba Mountain with her boyfriend–but both activities were interrupted by the call of battle. Riyuji struggled to fit in, while also trying to fill the big shoes of the lost leader Jason.

In the end, Val overcame some of his impulsiveness, Venetia and Tiger broke up over a misunderstanding but got back together when she learned he wasn’t cheating on her (he was just out driving a huge robot!), and Riyuji finally found his place on the team after defeating the big bad and discovering the “actually just missing” Jason. Venetia got a mech of her own, and end credits rolled with the five of us silhouetted at sunset overlooking the city–along with a sixth character who was definitely there the whole time, what to do mean she never appeared in any scenes, she’s definitely part of the team and always as been!

Memorable Moments

“I’m heavily armed!” – Giant Octopus Monster, during battle.

“Now if you’ll excuse me… I have to go do a group project.” – Val, Tiger, and Riyuji’s consistent excuse for ditching Venetia over and over.

What I loved most about playing this game was the, well, entanglement of it all. We created a very deep and interconnected set of characters who just made sense together, and then attached them to each other with tons of thick strands of emotional yarn. This meant each of us had an interesting opportunity for interaction with every other character–and as any season groundtable gamer will tell you, often the best way to set up a scene is just pick someone you want your character to talk to, throw them into a situation, and let it fly.

Stay Tuned!

Entanglement is Caroline’s latest project that you’ll hopefully be able to play yourself in the not-too-distant future!

River Hobbits & Dirty Horses

Posted by Caroline

The Sunday Scouts took a break from our usual diet of Kingdom games to play some four-player Downfall a while back. I wanted to test some different world building mechanics as well as play with some new rules for character roles. We had two different arcs over several sessions with different societies in the same world, sharing the same Flaw. It was super interesting to see how each society took the Flaw in different directions and with different moods and stakes.

“I want to make noise on the water”

When we started, we decided we wanted to make a big classic fantasy world (you know the one) and zoom in on different parts of it. Our nations were separate, but all were connected by the flaw of Loyalty (and some mysterious ancient canals).

Our first society was an isolationist hobbity community, and our first Hero was an adorable fluffy gondolier, Charlie Sweetgreen. We had a tradition about apprentice bonds being as strong as family bonds, and then had a lot of fun exploring the tension Charlie felt between fulfilling that emotional bond to their opinionated retired master and being true to themself.

The whole game was filled with bittersweet moments of emotional and interpersonal struggle – and we ended the arc with our Hero Charlie quietly rebelling, releasing their own young apprentice to follow his dreams. Charlie sees it as a gift, but their legacy in the community is that they betrayed their apprentice.

“None will remember us.”

After we closed the book on our hobbit-town, we switched up roles and moved over to a “badass knights on dirty horses” setting in the same world. We adapted some traditions, fully changed a couple of them to fit the new aesthetic, and ended up with feuding matriarchal warrior clans living and dying (mostly dying) for glory and honor.

Our Hero was a proud, seasoned warrior named Brocha (Thane of Sigun Hall, Dromund’s Bane, Sword of The West Fold, Horn of Kell, Laklun’s Bane, etc. etc. etc), who resented being dragged into a raid to avenge the Fallen’s mother after her (dishonorable, treacherous) death. It was a night and day difference in tone from our pearl-clutching river hobbits. Lots of direct insults, duels, brawls, and bloodied swords. Brocha sees the folly in being loyal to a dishonorable cause, but is pulled into fighting to maintain her own honor. She’ll make the most out of it, disobeying orders to get the greater glory for herself, but in the end she is betrayed, and the clan fractures.

Experiments Continue

One of the things I enjoy most about a longer-form Downfall game is the ability to let things simmer, explore relationships outside of the Hero, and get into the heart of what different voices in the society are saying and feeling. We didn’t get to do it in this game since we changed settings, but I’m excited to play around with passing the torch from one Hero to the next, and seeing what happens after the Hero (or the society) falls. What can we forge from the ashes?

In Praise of Setup

Posted by Caroline.

In an effort to get players to the fun stuff quickly, a lot of recent games aim for minimal setup. This is a good design impulse; we all have limited time and we want to get to the good stuff fast. Ideally, games get you into play quickly by being well-written and designed so you have what you need right away (to then jump into your fun game loops).

But some games that get you started quickly fail to get players what they need to play meaningfully or easily. There is such a thing as not enough setup.

Groundwork

Setup includes building and agreeing upon a shared, foundational imaginary truth. What / Who / Where is our game about? What do we need to know to get the ball rolling? If we’re co-creating fiction, we’ve got to agree on the basic facts of our fiction.

Setup is also about laying the groundwork for meaningful exploration. What types of relationships / themes / experiences is our game about? Why will I care about this thing we are creating?

When setup is broken down into concrete procedures (with requirements to build upon what other players have contributed, Ground Table style), we end up with a set of fictional elements that allow us to create and explore a world / characters / theme – whatever the game is about. It gives us a sense of ownership, a shared understanding of what’s going on, and an investment into the deeper meaning of what we’re making. Good setup sets us up (haha) for good times.

Creating relationships and needs in Fiasco.
Making bonds in Kingdom.
Adding symbols to traditions in Downfall.
Describing the departed’s goal (and whether they achieved it) in Epitaph.
Creating the starting statements in In This World.

All of these are vital parts of the games and allow players to confidently build fiction. They’re fun to do! And they allow what comes next to be meaningful.

Grist for the mill

As a game player, you are author, actor, and audience. A short setup allows you to go into actor and audience mode more quickly, but it can sacrifice players’ ability to be an effective author.

For example, in a recent game, the rules only asked us to give our characters a name and a short description. That bare-bones approach didn’t tell us what our characters desired or feared, or how they related to each other. It didn’t give us much to work with. I struggled to make decisions about a character that I didn’t understand (while also trying to relate to another character that I didn’t understand), and the game fizzled out.

Contrast that with a game where we start with a hot relationship issue that we’ve decided together. Everything our characters say to each other has meaning. Our characters can leave things unspoken, but we know there is trouble there. We can confidently make fiction because we’ve set ourselves up with enough good, shared information.

For me, time spent on a solid setup procedure helps the whole rest of the game flow. Coming up with an idea for a scene, or the next thing to say to another character, or a twist to introduce to the world is so much easier with a shared understanding of the fiction and a set of fictional tools at my disposal.

Not only that, I truly think the setup part of a game can be deeply fun and satisfying, especially if what you create then is designed to be incorporated throughout the game. To me, it’s well worth a bit more time up front.

Ho, ho, help!

Posted by Marc

This past summer, my wife and I were out on a walk with our son. The sky was blue, the air was toasty warm, and Yuletide shenanigans couldn’t have been further from my mind… until suddenly I got an idea. An awful idea. Marc got a wonderful, awful idea. I hurried up to Caroline and told her she was going to lose her mind at the wonderful awfulness of this idea for a Follow quest. “Tell me, tell me!” she said. I leaned in and whispered five words: “We’ve got to save Christmas.”

Cover image, a family in Santa's sleigh on a moonlit Christmas night

Introducing: the Save Christmas, a quest for Follow!

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Sleigh bells are ringing, chestnuts are roasting, and all is merry and bright… but what’s this? Santa needs our help? Christmas might be… canceled?! We’ve got to do something, and fast! We’re a group of ordinary people (friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors) who’ve been swept up in a wild, wacky, Christmas-saving adventure.”

This quest lets you play out a classic “very special holiday episode” Christmas story of a bunch of regular people rescuing Santa, helping out strangers with Christmas magic, and/or decorating the North Pole to bring back that ever-important Christmas cheer. It’s the holliest, jolliest time you’ll have playing Follow this winter!

The PDF is available on our itch.io page now. Thanks to Caroline for the delightful cover art and Ben for making Follow!

What I’m working on: Downfall 2nd Edition

Posted by Caroline

This is probably going to jinx it, but over the past few months I’ve been hammering away at a second edition of Downfall. *Cue thunder and lightning*

I’ve had ideas for a second edition now for several years, but have finally found the time and willpower to start actually playtesting them, in no small part due to Ben’s encouragement and the fun notes I’ve gotten about his Empire of Light Downfall game.

We just started our own game and are having a fantastic time so far. We’re an insular Hobbity society, just beginning to have our Loyalty turn against us. We set it up so that we are one society among a whole world of fantasy societies, and our plan is to jump between places as each one falls in its own way.

Things are still pretty fluid, but for the second edition here are some things I’m working on:

Rules for 2-5 players
Slightly different Elements set up to calibrate settings to be more or less weird
No more character non-monogamy and space for more subplots within the society

Revolutions

The most fundamental change is an option for long-term legacy style play – Revolutions – where we see the society changing over a longer period of time with different Heroes emerging and falling. Instead of playing until the society collapses, and that’s it, we get to keep going and explore what comes next.

There’s a few more changes that I’m still testing out, and it’s going to be a long development road. I like to take my time, so there’s really no telling when it’ll be ready. But at least for now things are looking bright for a Downfall 2 *eventually*!

What We Played: The Farm

Posted by Marc

With the new free version of Follow and Caroline’s The Farm quest hot off the presses, I decided to take both for a spin at Story Games Olympia. And it was a blast!

I sat down with four Follow newbies and we dove in. Our first task was to customize our farm setting. How did we all end up here? Turns out there was a magic rock in a field that sort of “called out” to us all, and we just wandered in and decided to make a farm around it. Nice. Next question: what makes our quest to revive our farm difficult? Well, probably all our experimental magical farming techniques. And bad soil. Lots of rocks.

Next we made characters. I held off until last to see what everyone else made and fill in any gaps. We had a cook, a botanist, a poet, a local kid… but no farmer, so I grabbed that one. Our cook Cap’n was all about becoming famous for his cuisine. Local kid Rosemary just wanted everyone to believe she really could talk to rocks. The botanist Coriander wanted to create magical seeds to sell, and our poet Eloise wanted to connect with others. As for me, the farm owner Josie? I wanted to escape my dark past as some kind of evil wizard. Y’know, get back to nature and all that.

Rocks, weeds, and ghosts – oh my!

First challenge: clear the land. We struggled against weeds that put themselves back in the ground when you weren’t looking and an overeager Rosemary who insisted the rocks weren’t happy about us moving them. Finally Coriander suggested we “scare” the weeds away by planting Boo Berries (a Scaregrow was also floated as an option). We planted a ton of bushes, drew our stones, and… failed the challenge. We lost a farmhand (minor character) and tried to figure out how we’d screwed up. “Oh no,” I said, “we planted all these boo berries, and they drove off the weeds… but now our farm is covered with ghosts!”

Sure, the ghosts were cute and chubby. Sure, they only played minor pranks sometimes. But we had a farm to build, and we needed them gone. Challenge two: deal with pests. We hemmed and hawed about maybe making a soothing herb garden or using enchanted crystals… but then Josie went ahead with a dark banishment ritual and roped Coriander and Eloise into helping. We awaited the draw… and succeeded!

Our play time ran out, so we called that the end and did some epilogues. All told, I loved playing the Farm. Caroline managed to capture the “cozy” element quite well. The many roads untraveled in how we set up the farm and the characters made me want to play again right away, just see how it could go differently. Thanks to my players and good work Caroline!

insert wacky sound effect

Posted by Marc

One gaming mashup I’ve been wanting to try for a while involves Caroline’s incredible Fedora Noir. Sure, it’s a game about a gritty detective struggling against their inner demons amidst a sea of backstabbers, crooks, and con artists… but what if their girlfriend was a huge cartoon bear?

I got a chance to play this ridiculous version of the game at Go Play Northwest this year. I pitched the game as the standard Fedora Noir, but with a twist: the Detective is human and the other characters are cartoons, a la Who Framed Roger Rabbit. When we got to the table, I improvised a bit to set things up. First I pulled two of the setting cards–New Amsterdam and San Savio–and asked the players which flavor they’d prefer (New York or LA). We settled on New York. Then we followed the custom setting creation rules that come in the box and created the “Toon Town” section of the city. The customization rules ask players to think of two reasons why living in this place is difficult (in our case it was the unreliable physics and the black market for the drug “ink”), then make four locations for the setting and continue on their merry way.

Reskinning the setting was a blast, and what I appreciated about it was how tight the gameplay felt because of it. Having only four named locations wasn’t a barrier at all–it kept us closely focused on the story beats and let us reincorporate the places over and over, to great comedic and dramatic effect. We wove cartoon nonsense into the story and the scenes; for example, the Detective drank from a giant jug with three X’s on the side, and there were moments of getting clobbered and seeing little stars spinning around the character’s head.

What’s the takeaway from all this? Twofold: first, Fedora Noir is great and I love it. And second, don’t be afraid to try an off-the-wall variant of one of your favorite games. Many gmless games lend themselves well to this (for example, bask in the glorious sunlight of our Aztec Polaris hack). If you are planning to reskin something, be clear about the premise up front, and make sure you get everyone on the same page about what’s changing and how it’ll work. That’s what we did for our cartoon game, and the results spoke for themselves (in a little speech bubble that said “Yipe!”).

Jacques the tuxedo cat wearing a fedora — *“Meow I need a drink”*

We’re bustin’ outta here

Posted by Marc

I recently played a game of Follow that used the Heist quest, and unfortunately we did the one thing you should never do when doing a heist: we got caught. Cut to our “heroes” stuck in prison, trying to figure out how to escape. The remaining challenges of the Heist playset weren’t exactly conducive to our situation, and we kind of struggled to move forward from there. We’d set out to tell the story of a theft, but instead we were stuck in lockup.

But that got me thinkin’: what if there were a quest for just such a scenario?

Introducing: the Prison Break, a quest for Follow!

“We’re prisoners locked up together. Maybe we deserve it, maybe we don’t, but either way: we’re bustin’ out of this joint.”

Exactly what it says on the tin. You and your crew are in prison. You don’t wanna be in prison. What happens next? Play to find out!

The PDF is available on our itch.io page now. Thanks to Caroline for the incredible art and Ben for making Follow!

Follow me to the Farm!

Posted by Caroline

Follow by Ben Robbins is a masterpiece – if you’ve never played it, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s a great exemplar of gm-less gaming, and I always have fun running it at conventions or playing it among old friends. So I was thrilled when Ben announced that he would be releasing a new, free edition called Follow: A New Fellowship to help spread the fun.

The bonus gift is that Ben also released a template and guidelines for creating your own quest! I got started on one about a week ago (it’s a new record for me to write and send something out in the world), and I’m so excited to be able to share it with you now!

Introducing: the Farm, a quest for Follow!

Cover for the Farm quest. It's a cartoon-style digital illustration of a little farmhouse with a small kitchen garden. Farmland extends into the distance on a sunny day.

“All this place needs is a little bit of elbow grease and a whole lot of love! Our goal is to revitalize an old, run-down farm. We are the dreamers, workers, and community members endeavoring to establish the farm and ensure it has a bright, sustainable future.”

Build a community, connect with nature, and build something new together with this cozy little quest!

You can pick up a PDF of the Farm for free over on itch.io.

It was a joy to write this cozy little quest (inspired largely by that one time we played a pastoral period during our long-running Kingdomon game), and I hope that folks will get some fun out of it!

But even more than that, I’m excited to see what other quests people think of! I do know that Marc has something much less cozy up his sleeve too…