#2: Band of Blades, Huetopia TV, learning from APs and the future of this newsletter!
hope you're all having a nice day!
Hello! Look who it is! The 2nd issue of the Indie RPG Newsletter! The newsletter already has 235 (?!) subscribers and I'm really excited for the future editions. Thanks for reading and as always, if you’d like to get in touch with me - message me on twitter @chaibypost or comment on this thread! If you haven’t subscribed, please do!
If you missed last week’s newsletter, none of that stuff has gotten old, read it here.
I. Band of Blades Is Very Cool And I Want To Play It. That’s The Headline.
This week I finished watching Actual Play’s epic playthrough of Band of Blades, a dark military fantasy RPG based on Blades in the Dark. I loved the series and I can’t stop thinking about the game - my body is vibrating at strange, uncontrollable frequencies as I begin plotting to put a group together to play it. The series was recorded just as the game was first being released - mid to late 2019, I think. Stras Acimovic, one of the co-designers of the game, is the GM and he turns the videos into a GMing masterclass. If you’d like to learn how to play Band of Blades or even Blades in the Dark, I’d highly recommend watching Stras - you can pick up a lot just by watching but he also routinely stops play to address the audience or players directly, explaining what the rules say and why he’s making *these* particular choices. If you’re anything like me, GM advice in books - however well-written or well-intentioned - just doesn’t get into my head. It just doesn’t work. Seeing the advice in action? Suddenly, everything makes sense!
Also! The game is ridiculously cool. There’s lots of really cool new design elements in Band of Blades. The core premise of the game revolves around the aftermath of a climactic battle between a vast army of undead and humanity’s last hope, the legendary military company known as the Legion. The Legion loses. Shattered and broken, the surviving army must retreat to Skydagger Keep where they can make what might be humanity’s last stand. Band of Blades lets you play the entire Legion. You not only control the leaders - Commander, Martial and Quartermaster - who make the decisions during Downtime. Every mission, you play different members of the Legion - either a young naive rookie, an experienced soldier, or an epic specialist! If you haven’t tried “troupe play” (which is when there’s a common pool of characters and players pick from the pool depending on the situation), this is as good a place to start as any!
The game might not be for everyone though - either because the genre isn’t your thing or because you wouldn’t enjoy some of the resource management or strategic elements of play. The Indie Game Reading Club - one of the nicest indie RPG blogs out there - has a series of articles about Band of Blades - one here, another here. But in their final wrap up report, they talk about being dissatisfied with the game and how it was highly engaging but low on embodiment - by which, I think he means that “playing your character” isn’t the real focus of the game. I agree and disagree. Band of Blades makes every individual character less important but consequently the character of the group and of the Legion itself becomes a more prominent part of the story.
The game has a lot of what I call “narrative crunch” - which means a lot of tactical options and choices but most of these are diagetic, i.e., real in the fiction. I like narrative crunch because it’s purpose is to aid the story or deliver a specific experience. Non-narrative crunch - stuff like spell levels or complicated dice-based combo-powers - doesn’t interest me much nowadays. But thinking about food - to stop the Legion from starving - or thinking about which soldiers to send on a mission a la Darkest Dungeons? I love that stuff! Honestly, I recommend you check out the game just to see what Stras and John, the duo behind Off Guard Games, have done with Mission/Downtime and the meta-structure of the campaign. Evil Hat recently released the Roll20 pack so now if you want to start your own campaign on Roll20, you just need to click some buttons. All the prep is done for you. It’s pretty cool.
Meanwhile, I still continue to pace in my tower and plot how to get my own game off the ground…
II. Actual Play, Learning Games and GM-ing styles
On a related note: Actual Play / Let’s Play content is probably my current favourite way to learn how to play a new game. But I’ve found that the more a show tries to “hide the rules” and focus on the performance, the less useful it is as a learning tool.
I was thinking about this recently when I saw a thread on reddit that wanted recommendations for actual play podcasts or videos that featured “non-performative” GMs. I can’t speak to most of the recommendations (though, just a note, why did someone recommend Brennan Lee Mulligan - he’s a professional actor!) but I thought it’s an interesting question. I think there’s an idea that the purpose of an actual play is to be like Critical Role or a radio play or a movie. But should that be the goal?
Even apart from learning new games, I imagine that the vast number of GMs and players aren’t “performers”. They’re roleplaying - but that’s about thinking about characters,and making choices & decisions from the character’s point of view. They’re storytelling - but that’s about describing the fiction and thinking about interesting directions to take the narrative. So, like the redditor who asked the question, they probably need “useful reference(s) on running compelling games without their acting performance being a contributing factor”. Makes sense to me!
Do you use actual plays to learn? Or do you use them primarily as entertainment? Am I way off?
III. Huetopia TV Has The Game Design Advice You Need!
I realize I link to Youtube a lot but I promise this isn’t all I do with my time. Please believe me! Gen Con 2020 came and went - and for all of us who don’t make that regular pilgrimage, this was the first one that we can claim to have “attended”. But the side-effect of this Gen Con being digital is that all the cool panels and discussions that would’ve happened in private were all broadcast or streamed and now potentially will live on Youtube forever. One set I’d like to highlight were the beginner-friendly panels organized by Huetopia TV. Huetopia have an extremely diverse group of panelists but they’re all small, independent designers and their advice and stories are fundamentally unpretentious and down-to-earth.
They had one panel called “Everything is a Remix - Creating Your Own Original TTRPG System” (linked above) and another called “It's Not Generic - Utilizing Existing Game Systems For Your Own Ends”. Both were fun. If that seems like something you might enjoy, check them out.
IV. Building Out This Newsletter!
So I wanted to talk a little about my plans for this newsletter because a few people reached out to me after last week’s edition - either offering their games for review or asking me for help with promoting their kickstarter. I wasn’t expecting this. And it meant I had to actually sit and think about what I wanted this newsletter to be about. After a week of thinking about it, this is what I’ve got: This newsletter is an idiosyncratic curation of what I - me, one person - have been seeing across the indie RPG scene. It’s meant to share and promote some of the best things that this wonderful hobby of ours has to offer. It’s not complete or objective - it’s personal and everything in it is because I am excited for it to be there.
So where does that leave us?
Well, first, I do think that it’s difficult for indie designers to get reviews or honest feedback on their games. Even if you’re making games for fun, if you don’t have a community of designer pals to talk about your game, it sucks. So I want to help people get reviews but at the same time, I can’t be the one reviewing it. There’s too many games and also I have very specific tastes! So my plan is to set up some kind of Community Exchange to connect designers who want reviews with each other - so they can review each other’s games. It’s going to be a lot of work and I’m really not ready to do that right away so the deal is: When I hit 500 subscribers, I launch the Community Exchange and start helping people trade reviews and feedback.
If you’d like to make that happen, share the newsletter!
Second, and this might seem controversial so buckle up: Over this week, multiple people have reached out to me about linking to their kickstarters and I wasn't sure how to respond. On one hand, I do want to support indie creators as much as possible. On the other hand, I don't want to turn the newsletter into just a list of kickstarters. (If you *do* want an exhaustive list, go here!) A link to a kickstarter, at the end of the day, is an ads for a commercial product and there's no way for me to actually know anything about the game or the people behind them. But at the same time, if I make some money from these ads - however little, it’ll help me continue making this newsletter.
So, after some thought, I've decided that there will be a section called “Small Ads" at the end of newsletter. If you have a kickstarter or something else that you want to promote, you can reach me through this form. Each ad will be 25-30 words (hence “small”, also no pictures) and will be clearly marked as “ads”. There’s full guidelines available on the form. If you are an under-represented designer in the tabletop RPG space and want to advertise a kickstarter, it's free.
V. Miscellaneous
A grab-bag of the quirky and the insightful.
Nobody wants a twitter thread of micro-reviews of bird-themed TTRPGs. But yet here it is!
Under-represented game designers can apply for micro-grants from the Tabletop Mentorship Program!
“Games on Demand Online is an independent, three-day online role-playing event from August 28-30, 2020, free and open to all.” Check out the schedule!
“The History of Mana: How an Austronesian Concept Became a Video Game Mechanic” Read the full story behind the history of that word from Magic the Gathering.
Thanks for reading! As always, share this with someone if you liked it. See you next week.
In response to your question about Actual Plays, I absolutely detest stuff like Critical Role. If I start listening to an actual play and people start saying they're actors or improv whatevers in real life, I immediately delete it. I'm completely uninterested in those kinds of shows. I want normal people that are engaged and not too slow to act or respond to a situation. One of my favorite APs recently are the Torchbearer 2E playtests with Luke Crane. Everyone is a normal person and the game is run by one of the writers of the system. They're not actors, but they play their characters well and I feel like I'm there with them, learning and playing the system. Your suggestion of the Band of Brothers AP and its qualities got me interested in listening to it because it sounds a lot like the Torchbearer AP I'm listening to. If you come across any other good APs (my preference would be OSR-related), please let us know! Thanks for the newsletter and all your hard work!