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System rotation and moments of peace

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I, like many RPG fans - especially designers, thought for a long while that I should play every game I could get my hands on. I bought digital copies of countless games with the intention of getting them to the table. You don’t need me to tell you - in many cases this hasn’t happened.

But this isn’t just about time and energy. The fact is - many of the games I bought, I read multiple times, chewed them over and realised ‘I am not going to run this’. This isn’t me telling anyone to buy less games, I gained a lot from systems I haven’t played:

• They’ve helped me hone in on what I like from games and narrative themes.

• They’ve given me lessons in game design and visual design.

• It’s helped me understand why others enjoy styles of play that I don’t.

A year ago, I thought these systems would be in rotation at my table at some point:

Year Zero Engine games (Forbidden Lands, Vaesen etc.); Dragonbane; Call of Cthulhu; Blades in the Dark; Never Going Home; Agon; Borg games (Mork Borg, Cy_Borg, Death in Space); Odd-likes (Cairn, Mausritter, Perils & Princesses, Into the Odd, Liminal Horror); Mothership; Salvage Union; Symbaroum; Trophy Dark.

I’ve ended up playing the following:

Mork Borg; Death in Space; Cairn; Mausritter; Symbaroum (heavily hacked); Blades into the Odd (my Into the Odd hack of Blades in the Dark); Call of Cthulhu (in which I realised I’ve fallen out of love with it); Void Above (my sci-fi game).

In short: Borgs, Odd-likes, my hacked up take on Symbaroum, and my own games.

Of the glut of systems I own, the ones I can see myself playing in the future alongside what I’m already running are Cy_Borg, Liminal Horror, Salvage Union, Into the Odd, and Coriolis: The Great Dark (when it arrives).

That’s a pretty small subset of the first list. The games that are getting left out are not bad games. They just aren’t games I want to run right now, maybe ever.

This goes for theme too. I’m pickier about themes now. I like grounded, dark, gritty, atmospheric games and I don’t apologise for it. Part of the reason I can’t see myself ever running Agon is because I’ve no interest or capability to run a game about mystical heroes. It’s not my lane.

I’ve been thinking about that idea of a ‘lane’, and for me, that seems to be the NSR with a bit of bleed through from more narrative gaming styles, and with grounded, darker themes. I enjoy heavier prep work, taking the time to engineer a nuanced and detailed scenario for my players, and using improvisation to fill the gaps as they come.

There’s a temptation to feel like you should be dipping your toes in everything in the RPG world. If you like that, then go right ahead. But I feel like I’ve found a focus, not a restriction, but a focus to set my gaze on - for some time at least.

Part of this journey was realising how much I love modules, not even necessarily for running them but for the concrete gameplay ideas they present and the useable content they give you. Someone else’s ideas at your table, or a mix of yours and theirs, can really spice things up.

In parting with my desire to absorb as many systems as possible, I realised something ↓

Systems don’t often get games to tables. GM prep does - or GM tools, or a module. And I think (possibly controversially) that when a GM claims a system is what got them to prepare a game, really it’s the ideas and themes that surround the game that got them going, not the system itself. Alternatively, it may be that the system came packaged up with deployable ideas.

These other games, many of them could be cannibalised for usable content - the campaigns for Forbidden Lands for instance. But in that question, I realised something - I don’t want to run the Forbidden Lands campaigns, regardless of what system I use.

And there in lies a revelation. No amount of mechanics, or art, or presentation (in my case at least) can substitute for the themes of the game being aligned with what I like.

One of the best ways to access this as a GM, is to look at a starter adventure and ask yourself ‘would I want to run this?’ Not based on mechanics, just ask yourself ‘do I want to run what this game is designed to run?’. From now on, this is my method of deciding if I should buy a game system → if I can, I read one of the adventures first.

When a quickstart gets released, I’m going straight to the adventure part.

Prose: Quiet Parlour

Patient rain taps the windowpane and soft trickles run down the misshapen glass rectangles. Eve has come quick. In the street, outlines of figures move through the drizzled haze to their homes, to ward off the cold and the damp.

There is no creak of wood or audible footstep in the inn, the distant clatter of the kitchen melts into the rainfall. Warmth bleeds from the fire, its dance cast in the waxed rind of the cheese slice on the table. Mellow ale is set in rough carved cups about a jug, near a torn loaf of rye bread.

The chairs are varnished with thick pine tar, positioned close to the fire and with a view through the window. The air is stuffy in a comforting way, scented by the coals of the hearth and the drying clothes of the weary.

It’s not much, but it provides a repose to the tired and toiled.

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Table: Peaceful Spots (d6)

When a party searches for somewhere safe to rest out in the wilds, I like being able to set the scene. I run darker games and a pause for gentle breath is important for the players and the characters, less everything become overloaded and seem silly. These can also be features for hexcrawls.

1: A stream bank. The water is clear and drinkable. Catchable fish swim with the flow. Grasses grow in the silt (good for foraging), though so does water hemlock.

2: A meadow of tall flowers and grass. The foliage is like a soft mattress when laid upon. Buttercups climb towards their mother Sun and daisies sway.

3: A resting hut. It’s made of pine logs. There is a store of dry wood and a fire pit inside which dried meat hangs above. Fur blankets sit in a footlocker.

4: A small overhang. A nook in a face of rock, just deep enough to shelter from harsher weather. Cool moss coats the stone patches, and leaf litter covers the floor.

5: A great oak tree. Its roots form seats, and its rustling leaves sing a lullaby to any who sit here. Twigs upon the floor are good for kindling a fire.

6: A lumber pile. Made of large felled trees. Left for collection later in the year. It can act as a windbreaker in a pinch. Song birds roost on top of it.

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