Posts Tagged ‘corebook’

¿Qué Es Un Libro Género Perfecto?

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Well, I’ll tell you. A perfect genre book should be comprehensive; nobody who loves that genre should feel slighted by it. (This makes loose or enormous genres, like steampunk or fantasy, nearly impossible to do perfectly. Fortunately, they can still be done very well indeed, say by Bill Stoddard.) A perfect genre book should also be welcoming; nobody who doesn’t know that genre should feel mystified. (Ideally, even an utter genre newbie should have an idea for the game she’d like to play after reading it.) Both of these conditions argue for a certain narrowness of view: you may not be able to make any kind of usable genre book out of “road stories,” but Midnight Roads made a pretty good one out of “modern American haunted road stories.” But a useful genre book has to offer more than one story; ideally, the whole narrative cosmos should unfold out of its genre treatment like a fractal flower. And finally, the perfect genre book should be for a game system ideally suited to telling its sort of stories. A genre centered on long, dramatic, wild and wonderful fights should have rules for them.

Also, there should be awesome monsters.

All these considerations are on display in Lucha Libre HERO (263 black-and-white pages, $29.99), which is comprehensively compiled by two maniacal lucha fans, Darren Watts and Jason Walters, and seductively astonishing to an almost-complete lucha ignoramus (me). Mexico’s masked wrestling films (now you know) are part detective story, part horror, part martial arts adventure, part social commentary, part SF, and part smacking Aztec mummies around. Like a good Puebla mole, it is the blending of these disparate, even psychotronic, ingredients that makes the dish sublime. Not merely mad doctors and Aztec mummies, but Ape People, Blonde Martians, and lady vampires festoon this book, along with patented wrestling moves like “Freightliner,” “Extended Fight Scene,” and “No! Not My Laboratory!” Plus a history of Mexican wrestling, a full filmography, and a guide to Backlot Mexico City. And midgets. All lovingly (even slaveringly) detailed for HERO 5th Edition — a completely playable version of which, tuned for the squared circle, is included in the back. If ever there was a game system designed for brutal, knock-down, drag-out fights driving narrative turns and clinches, it’s HERO. (And but me no buts about HERO 6th Edition. If you’re able to play HERO, you’re able to swap the stats in this book out if you want.) In short, genre perfection, slam-bang fights, and Aztec mummies. All in One Book. Todos En Libro Uno.

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Not Just Another Bug Hunt

Monday, January 4th, 2010

What can I say about Gregor Hutton’s space-war masterpiece 3:16 : Carnage Among the Stars (96-page black-and-white softcover, 8.5″ x 5.5″, $20) that hasn’t already been said by its adoring fan community? Robin Laws, for example, says it “out-Verhoevens Verhoeven,” which is if anything an understatement, given that 3:16 is actually fun and playable, as compared to Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers clanker. What Hutton’s game does do is present a superb piece of battle-ready game design, a brilliant evocation of genre, as much satire as you want to chew on, and a fine lesson in minimalism, all at once.

Character creation is simplicity itself: you have two stats (Fighting Ability and Non-Fighting Ability), which drive your Rank, which sets your basic loadout. Given that 3:16 is a game of interplanetary amphibious infantry warfare (there’s that Starship Troopers reference), the speed of chargen comes in handy when you have to build replacements. Because it’s brutal, tactical, and not a little bit cynical all at once (there’s that genre evocation), your characters may die through no fault of their own, through their own stupid fault, or thanks to their officers’ incompetence. You feel it when they do, though; each character has Strengths and Weaknesses revealed in flashbacks, aimed to reduce the GM’s threat pool for each planetary invasion. (Note how all of this is tying together.) That’s right; as in Agon, the GM has a “pain budget,” and if the troopers of the 3:16th can dish out more pain than they absorb, they win!

A clever, old-school style planet generation system helps the GM build worlds, vicious aliens, and missions in a hurry, varying the rules just enough to keep everything tactically interesting, but never slowing down the game or hampering the players. The characters are plenty hampered, but if they can just rack up more kills than the next squaddie, they’ll get promoted … just in time for the next mission. The rules hit a perfect sweet spot, where there are just enough tactical options to keep everyone guessing and surprised (happily or not), but not enough to drown players in options or soak up game time. (And lots and lots of play examples cut the learning curve down still farther.) Extended play can aim toward satire, as the 3:16th uses ever more comically vast weaponry on their missions of pre-emptive genocide, or simply provide a soap-operatic extension of adrenaline and exploding aliens.

This simplicity and speed make 3:16 an ideal “not everyone can show up tonight” game, while the themes and mechanics allow a surprising amount of meat and depth to come off the bone. It can be as dark, or as simple, as you’d like to make it — and if you want to play out Starship Troopers (either version), you can do it as fast and fatal as the M.I. themselves.

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Clash City Rockets

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

The most important thing to know about Chris Birch and Stuart Newman’s game Starblazer Adventures (629-page black-and-white hardback, $49.95) from Cubicle 7 is that it has nothing to do with Star Blazers, the Englished version of some anime or other. No, “The Rock and Roll Space Opera Game” is based on a 1980s British comic book series called Starblazer. This was an anthology comic book series set all across (various different futures of) the Galaxy and all across millennia, barely connected by occasional series characters or conceits — in short, exactly how an RPG setting should be: sketchy, large, and packed with familiar tropes, plentiful blank space, and contradictions. If you don’t know anything about the comic book series, don’t worry — it’s pretty much the exact same “default comic outer space” assumed by every Silver Age DC comic: there are domed cities, and space dogfights, and aliens, and post-apocalypses, and sentient computers, and robots, and space dreadnaughts, and silvery jumpsuits galore. With just a soupcon of wonders like the “Fi-Sci” (short for “Fighting Scientists”) and the Moonstealers to give it some zing, which you can ignore or replace or change, because most of the writers of the original comic did. I like to think of it as a setting based on a random six-foot section of my SF bookshelf, or rather of my SF bookshelf in 1979. Plus, there’s a lot of setting stuff given stats (or just name-checked) if you’re lost, and whole tranches of adventure generation, planet generation, and “campaign starters” in the back.

The other important thing you need to know about Starblazer Adventures is that it uses the FATE engine, as seen in Spirit of the Century, and does at least as good a job laying out the “FATE Space” ruleset as SotC did the “FATE Pulp” ruleset. It introduces some new fillips: Scale (for starships and doomsday machines and sentient moons and …) and organizational rules (for star empires and secret brotherhoods of space monks and Fighting Scientists) between them give you a mechanical (and therefore story) hold on anything from a dogfight to mass combat between twin planets’ armadas. “Plot stress” is a magnificent innovation, applying “hit points” to story elements — when your space station suffers too much drama, the reactor melts down! Last, Starblazer Adventures takes SotC’s story-driven character creation to the next level for collaborative story-driven campaign creation! It’s only two pages, but it opens up, well, worlds!

Topped off with a super index, and lovingly blanketed with original Starblazer comics art (which is so iconic as to cause nostalgic fits even in people who never read the original Starblazer comics), this is one monstrously usable, magnificently story-starting game book. You could easily port it to Star Wars, the Kree-Skrull War, old-school Star Trek, or any game of fightin’ robots, fightin’ spaceships … or, of course, Fightin’ Scientists!

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Dry Bones Gonna Rise Up

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

Consider this the most comprehensive playtest review in history. I’ve probably logged more hours playing one or another form of Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing engine — the core of Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, Nephilim, Stormbringer, Superworld, and Ringworld, to mention only the games that I’ve played with it — than every other RPG system combined. Including, I should add, using it as a “generic” engine for games from wild multiversal action to steampunk to Westerns to space opera to, well, occult horror investigation. I’ve also, for what it’s worth, written plenty of rules for it professionally, mostly for Nephilim and for Mongoose’s latest iteration of RuneQuest.

So I was glad to see that Sam Johnson and Jason Durall did a pretty darn good job of creating a core book for the game I’ve been running, off and on, for the last 25 or so years. Basic RolePlaying: The Chaosium Roleplaying System (399 pages, black-and-white softcover, $39.95) takes all those Chaosium core books and filters them down into one generic RPG system. Surely everyone knows by now how BRP works: human character stats go from 3-18 (the new book offers point-builds as well as random rolls), skills go from 0% to 100% (the new book has rules for skills over 100% now), you roll percentile dice under your skill, and bang. Armor subtracts from damage, and you can get as crazy as you want with hit locations, but it’s still basically “d100 and a cloud of dust” with characters that are almost always gratifyingly fragile in combat. That, and the robust skills engine (this book’s skill list is a macedoine of Chaosium’s greatest hits), let the game explore other sorts of scenes besides fights. Magic? Depends — this book has superpowers, mutations, magic (a la RQ), sorcery (a la Stormbringer or CoC), or psionics (a la ElfQuest). Pick and choose, or mix and match. Gear, likewise; monsters, again likewise, taken from other Chaosium games and generified. Most of the specific Chaosium games have specialized mechanics and rules; most of them are somewhere in here, usually as optional rules. (The best? The passions mechanic from Pendragon. Use it.) But the core is the same game we’ve all been playing since 1978, when Steve Perrin looked in his white box and said “I’ll bet I could design better rules than this.”

In my experience, BRP remains excellently suited for any game in which combat is dangerous and something important reliably happens outside combat. It breaks down for demigods, but it breaks cleanly — there’s not enough rules to become cumbrous. BRP is also excellently suited for the modular attachment of any other, non-Chaosium game mechanics that you happen to like: at one time or another, I’ve added Ars Magica magic, GURPS advantages and disadvantages, and the old Marvel SuperHeroes superpowers (I’m not a fan of percentile superpowers) to BRP with less trouble than it took to type this sentence. (Not for the same game, I hasten to add. Although…) In short, it’s the cleanest, simplest, easiest generic system around. This is not to berate baroque (GURPS), complex (HERO), challenging (FUDGE) generic systems — but it’s nice to have a really good loaf of white bread, too.

And now it’s in one book, not 20.

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Choose Your Own Tragedy

Monday, December 29th, 2008

I got a copy of Kevin Allen, Jr.’s Sweet Agatha (envelope containing one 32-page full-color digest book and one 11×17 instruction sheet, $16) at GenCon, but I had to wait awhile to review it. I wanted to play it with my wife, who is as devoted to true crime and tragic drama as she is uninterested in roleplaying games. So it took awhile to convince her that this was something she wanted to do. The day after Christmas, she gave in. Now she wants to play it again.

“Play” isn’t quite the word, but neither is “read” or “build” or even “tell,” which is probably closest of the four. Many indie RPGs are not sandbox games — go anywhere, tell any story — but quest games — go there, tell that story. At their extremes — Bacchanal, Polaris, Jeepform — they depart from the RPG as she is understood and become something kindred but unlike: “co-op narratives,” or “directed storytelling,” or “scripted improv.” The designer has become the director; the play’s the thing, and the players merely strut and fret. Sweet Agatha is one of those, except the designer has no script, no narrative, and no direction. It’s a sandbox game disguised as a quest — Agatha has disappeared. Thirty pages of evocative, strange, elliptical photographs and notes and codes and pieces of her life are there for you. As you read them, you cut out “Clues,” which are no such thing. They are narrative Lego blocks, and there is no blueprint, only a color scheme. One player — “The Truth” — picks three blocks for each of nine or ten scenes. The other — “The Reader” — decides what to make of them, and where to go next, for ten scenes until the end. It’s an exquisite corpse, and indeed, Agatha may well be just that. Or she may be a ghost, or a UFO abductee, or a flake, or a drug dealer, or a time traveler, or a spy, or a murderer, or a Gnostic deity, or a nice girl who got lost. What Kevin provides is all flavor and feel; you decide the direction and the payoff. (There’s a brilliant meta-conceit planted in the booklet to give you some directions from Kevin — or Agatha, or God — if you feel the need.) While I was playing, I realized this game has amazing replay potential, getting richer as you play it more. (There’s 67 Clues provided; at most, any one game will only use 30.) As you recognize fragments of past tellings, you assign unwarranted meaning to them, as if you could re-watch Twin Peaks for the first time. This is all down to Kevin’s uncanny ability to exactly hit the notes of half-memory, half-insight, to paint the canvas without revealing the picture.

Every so often, someone wishes that gaming still had a shared universe, that all gamers could still trade stories about our own private Keep on the Borderlands. It would be no bad thing if all gamers knew where — or if — they found sweet Agatha, at last.

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And So, Having Escaped the Pit

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

At GenCon in 1998, James Wallis released an RPG, or perhaps a storytelling game, called The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. He graciously gifted me a copy, and I read it in about 20 minutes, as it was very short, and I spent the next three days bullyragging everyone I saw into buying it, as it was very good. Although it got me quite a nice dinner (the first of many, as it happened) from James Wallis at the time, it has caused me no end of inconvenience at later GenCons, because the number of games I can read in 20 minutes is pretty minimal, and the number of such games I subsequently demand that everybody buy on pain of being ejected from the company of civilized people everywhere even moreso. Despite this, thanks to the home-run I hit back in 1998, people at GenCon still insist on asking me what the must-read game of the show is.

Well, next year, at least, I can and shall say it is the new, expanded edition of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (128-page, black-and-white, digest-sized softcover, $19.95; PDF $10.95), from James’ Magnum Opus Press, published by Mongoose’s Flaming Cobra imprint. For those who don’t know the Baron’s game from its previous incarnation, it is a game of competitive storytelling. In response to a request (“Tell us, my dear Baron, how you came to right the Leaning Tower of Pisa”), you tell an extraordinary tale of your exploits; other players pay to interrupt, or you pay to continue uninterrupted. Lies are settled by duelling. The winner (the teller, by acclamation, of the best story) pays for the next round of drinks, and play continues until closing time. The new edition contains, in addition, two variants: “Es-Sindibad’s Game,” which alters the interruption and story-requesting methods with an intriguing waft of Arabian Nights style (story requests are now collaborative, and the once-verboten “But were you not killed?” is, in this version, the only allowable interruption) and “My Uncle the Baron,” a version of the game for the younger set.

Like the original, it is illustrated by Gustave Dore, who obviously has a bright future (or past) ahead of him as an illustrator. Also like the original, it is magnificently funny, brilliantly clever, and a mandatory purchase on pain of ejection from the company of civilized people everywhere.

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Down In The Tube Station At Midnight

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

In the Afterword to his masterwork Hot War (202 digest-sized pages, black-and-white softcover, $28), designer Malcolm Craig says that the game is “centred around things that fascinate me.” I could embroider that on a sampler and put it on my wall; I would go so far as to say that any game designer had damn well better find something that fascinates her if she’s going to go through all the mishigoss of writing a game. Not just to keep her plugging away at it, but to sell it to the readers: fascination is contagious. But un-fascination is freaking viral – if you aren’t interested in your game world, or elves, or combat rules, the readers can tell, and they won’t bother to be players. Or to keep reading. Malcolm Craig, on the evidence of this game, is fascinated by monstrosity, betrayal, dystopia, underground structures, and politics. (But I repeat myself, he laughed hollowly.) And you the reader will be, too.

The British, from Wells to Wyndham, have a genius for dystopia; with Hot War, Malcolm Craig stakes his claim to that noble tradition. Presenting a semi-sequel to his previous game of monster-hunter infighting in postwar Berlin, Cold City, Craig lays out the world of Hot War in a very few bold strokes. (Paul Bourne’s illustrations — mostly propaganda posters and photos of monstrous “test subjects” – provide the ideal atmospheric assistance in this project.) The Cuban Missile Crisis became World War III. All sides used “twisted technology” stolen from the Nazis: building and summoning monsters. The War has wrecked Britain, and civilization (as far as the PCs know) is pretty much restricted to London and the Home Counties, and is likewise pretty much disintegrating. You are part of a secret inter-agency task force ordered to hunt down Soviet monsters leftover from the invasion, and anything else the Government needs hunted. (Terrorists, mouthy refugees, fascists. You know.) Your true agenda depends on which agency you really work for: The jealous Royal Navy? An experimental monster-research lab? The increasingly desperate Americans? Your true agenda will also differ from your orders, perhaps fatally. Conflicts are dice pool battles; you get more dice by pulling in those secret agendas, your relationships, and anything else you want to risk. (There’s a beautiful negative-feedback system by which you can sabotage your own secret agenda by using it in doomed battles.) The winner of the conflict narrates how he won and assigns any fallout, the characters change, and the game propels itself punchily on. It strikes me as a nigh-perfect game for shorter campaigns of six to thirteen sessions; about the length of a British TV season. It strikes me as a nigh-perfect marriage of rules engine with game feel. It strikes me as fascinating.

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Baugh, Humbug!

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

By which I mean that the clever and humanistic game writer under discussion today isn’t Bruce (“Adventure!”) Baugh, but Benjamin (“not Bruce”) Baugh. What’s next? Jensen Achilli? Mike Forbeck? Dare I hint it, Kevin Hite? Is nothing sacred? And as if to further jangle my over-tired nerves, Benjamin Baugh’s Monsters and Other Childish Things (182-page black-and-white hardback, $29.99) from Arc Dream Publishing seems to believe that what Veronica Mars needed most was a crossover with Stanley And His Monster. Seriously. This is a game about youthful trauma (high school, middle school, or grade school) in which the youths have horrible monster companions who eat people. If you buy the premise – which I’m still not sure I do – the bit is terrific. The game runs on Greg Stolze’s One Roll Engine, as seen in Wild Talents, Reign, and NEMESIS, and when I say “runs,” I mean “runs.” There are ORE rules for making up monsters and story conflicts, along with the rules for putting dice into (and taking them out of) Relationships, dealing (and dealing with) Shocks or Scars (physical or emotional), and lots of monster abilities. If you like ORE, you’ll love this. There is simultaneously more and less GM material than I’d look for if I were running: there’s a ton of NPCs (child, monster, adult, and Other) that are either iconic or clichéd depending on your perspective, and a pretty good intro adventure, and two of the three other campaigns on offer provide strange variations on the theme. But the book doesn’t ever just come out and explain how to decide, most importantly, if your campaign setting should have secret monsters or public monsters. Calvin and Hobbes is a different story from Pokémon; Monsters seems to want to split the difference, and I still don’t know how.

Arc Dream goes out of its way to provide me some answers, though, in Ross Payton’s Curriculum of Conspiracy (55-page black-and-white softcover, $9.99) and Baugh’s own Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor (160-page black-and-white softcover, $24.99). The first is a perfectly sound “evil high school” setting that all fans of Buffy will recognize and love. It could use some more NPC students (but the ones from the corebook will do to get started), and it still tries to split the difference a bit, but the rest of the setting is supernatural enough that the thematic hiccups level out. (It forbids monsters on campus, which also helps.) Where Curriculum is good, however, Candlewick is magnificent. The monsters here are internal; the PCs (“Pathetic Children”) have Creepy Skills that leave them shunned and hated. Perhaps that’s why they’re orphans. Perhaps that’s why they’re at the Candlewick Orphanarium. The players don’t know; with Echoes instead of Relationships, the orphans remember their own pasts in play. The theme, mood, and rules of this setting hit all the targets head-on. By adding the surreal Lemony Snicket sensibility and dialing down the monsters, Baugh reaches an ideal sweet spot of campaign design. And the rules – such rules! We get a jaw-dropping set of mystery rules for battling the mystery as though it were a big, amorphous monster – and better yet, for writing it collaboratively in play! Too weird for you? Well, the “normal” mystery creation system is also quite nice (reminiscent of the town creation subsystem from Dogs in the Vineyard) and involves plenty of One-Rolls to rule the story neatly. The setting material is sheerly wonderful, borne along by Baugh’s pitch-perfect tone. Baugh’s writing in both books is pretty great, verging on brilliant with only the occasional sidestep to too-clever. Robert Mansperger’s art throughout is only a touch less good than that, and it’s nestled in Daniel Solis’ predictably excellent page designs in Candlewick and the Monsters corebook. Those two books are worth getting for Candlewick alone, if you have any interest in playing a game of country-house mystery, boarding-school strangeness, even small-town skullduggery.

Note: I originally credited Curriculum of Conspiracy to Benjamin Baugh, when, as Shane Ivey notes with remarkable politesse in comments below, it was written by Ross Payton. My apologies to Ross, although I’m not sure it’s an insult for someone to think you write like Benjamin Baugh. In short, publishers should put authors’ names on book covers.

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A Mighty Hunter Before the Lord

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

At the risk of giving away the surprise ending of this review, I have a new favorite World of Darkness game. I whined like a stuck pig about Hunter: the Reckoning back in 1999:

It’s not about badass Green Beret gunslingers puttin’ down the dead and smokin’ cheroots, despite the promotional art. Which is a shame. I wanted it to be; I like humans, even Dirty-Harry-humans, Navy-SEAL-humans, Batman-humans maybe, but humans nonetheless who kick monster butt. … Personal prejudice; I am, after all, a human.

Maybe a young Chuck Wendig read those words nine years ago, and said “When I become the Hunter developer, I’m going to give Ken Hite the game he wants.” Well, along with Justin Achilli, Richard Thomas, and a dozen writers, he did. The badass Green Beret gunslingers are on pages 147-149 of Hunter: the Vigil (372-page two-color hardback, $34.99). And their awesome ghost-killing “Etheric Rounds” lead off 8 more pages of the monster-killing arsenal available to Task Force VALKYRIE, the U.S. government’s interagency monster squad. (There’s even a shout-out for Very Old-School Hunters: Hunted fans — Project TWILIGHT is a VALKYRIE sub-agency.) That monster-killing arsenal is one sort of Endowment that your high-end hunters get as a benefit of membership in a high-end hunting conspiracy. Each conspiracy gets a different sort of Endowment; my least favorite by far is the devil-spawn conspiracy with demon powers, but I have to say I love the weird syncretic Egyptian guys who drink poison Elixirs almost as much as I love the multinational European medical conglomerate that vivisects monsters for biotech Endowments. Plus a magical relic-hunter conspiracy, and of course the Catholic Church, which gets its Endowment mojo from Upstairs. All of which supernaturalism sets up a nice Nietzschean abyss-staring type vibe.

But if you don’t want even that much inhumanity on the scale, you can just drop down a level and play a member of a “Compact,” which has nothing but human ingenuity and cussedness going for it: from the Wobblies’ Supernatural of “the Union,” to the Eurotrash John Constantines of “Ashwood Abbey,” there’s a great spread here, too. Or just play a gang of hunters with no friends but their shotguns at “cell level.” The game world is modular; any piece can come out or get slotted in sideways. Mechanically, there are superb uses of the Status Merit, a glorious tie between Willpower and Morality, a sweet “R&D” system to get new Endowments, a surprisingly comprehensive “build your own monster” section in the back, and best of all, Tactics rotes for player teams to smash up monsters big-time. It all adds up nicely to the sweet spot: humans are still horrifyingly fragile unless they hit monsters hard and hit together.

More mundanely, the cyan-tone color scheme is quite effective, although none of the art really jumped out at me; the editing has a few gaffes (including, ironically, a missing Editor credit); the main text hits the high Fortean note of the core World of Darkness book better than the Antagonists chapter does, although that chapter has to carry a lot as it is. And there’s no map of Philadelphia in the provided city setting, which in the world of Google Maps is probably no great crisis. The big picture, though, builds exactly the sort of multivalent-modular setting/game that White Wolf does better than anyone when they do it right. And Hunter: the Vigil does it so very, very right.

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carry on my wayward son

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

I got a demo of carry (76-page black-and-white digest, $15) from its designer, Nathan Paoletta, at a convention last year: Origins, I think. At the time, I thought this column was coming back sooner than it did, and I promised him a review, because the demo sold me on the game. It took awhile, but here it is.

In most RPGs, the dice constrain the story; in carry, perhaps appropriately for a game about futility and the Vietnam War, they do so more overtly than normal. The size of the dice you roll depends on your character’s Profile and the Approach he takes (an “Accuser” gets a d12 for Subversive actions and a d6 for Honorable ones; the “Brawler” would get a d8 and d10 for the same choices). Your Profile changes as you burn out; an Accuser can become a Brawler (“fight back”) or a Soldier (“man up”). The GM, also, has a dice pool, which she must expend; the combination of a GM budget and the Vietnam genre points toward very adversarial play. Players pass dice around to each other, driving the story with those actions, as the GM frames conflicts and the players set the stakes. As the action scenes mount up, even “successful” actions cost fallout: wounds and death for PC Grunts and NPC Fodder alike. Your dice pool includes a “Burden,” a die that represents your “major malfunction,” in the words of F. Lee Ermey. Your Burden stays the same, or gets bigger, but it’s the only die you can always roll. Even if you resolve your issue, you just get another one the same size. Eventually, everyone’s Burden is too big, all the Fodder are dead, and there’s nothing left but the final conflict in a last-scene endgame.

This isn’t Recon, in other words. It’s a tragedy of inevitable human failure set not even in the Vietnam War but in our hazy cultural recollections of it. I could see the same engine powering stories of the Civil War or, hell, the Trojan War. But in all cases, the engine drives the story, not the other way around. But it drives it directly, interestingly, and well from a base of recognizable, genuine human concerns. If that sounds like your kind of Approach, carry won’t be a Burden you can easily put down.

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