Perhaps you, like I, have backed a tabletop RPG or other product on any of the variety of crowdfunding websites. Or maybe you've bought one of the intimidatingly large bundles of games for a good cause. It's possible you've heard a cool game featured on an actual play podcast or stream or video series, and wanted to pick it up. And of course, you try to follow the trends and check out interesting new releases.
Well, I don't know about you - but if you
are in such a position, having bought many more games than you've read (and read many more games than you've played), you might find yourself considering, like I have, what to do with such a vast treasure.
Richard Kelly has provided me with one possible answer - save the world.
Or at least, a library.
Heroic Archivist is a game in which you accrue points by reading through your backlog of games, and potentially earn more points by rating and reviewing. These points can then be spent in a little dice battle against the dastardly Roman invaders, who come every week to try and burn down our metaphysical library. Accrue 500 points and the author will buy you a pan pizza for your efforts. Gentle reader, I intend to win that pizza. And so, I turn my eyes to the archive I'll be delving...
Today, I will be reading and reviewing
Bleak Spirit, by Chris Longhurst. It's not the first game I ever joined a crowd to fund, but it's the first game that I simply do not remember ever reading. I might blame some of that on the context - it looks as though the pdf went out in December of 2019, but I didn't download it until March of 2020, a time when, famously, other things were going on. After nearly four years, I am ready to begin living again. Let's read!
The world of Bleak Spirit is one of majesty and mystery, where the landscape looms vast and conceals manifold cryptic secrets. The twisted descendants of ancient civilisations live among the faded glories of their forebears, pursuing arcane agendas indecipherable to outsiders. And in primordial woods and swamps, fabled treasures and long-forgotten sorceries lie guarded by deadly monsters both fearsome and noble... Bleak Spirit is a tabletop roleplaying game inspired by the empty, haunted worlds of video games like Dark Souls, Hollow Knight, and Salt and Sanctuary. Using a rotating role system, two or more players collaborate to create the story of how a wanderer comes to a strange place, and leaves it forever changed in their wake.
Cool! Somehow I've never found the time to actually play any of those games either, but I can appreciate a cool aesthetic. I'm eager to see how the text helps support building those "empty, haunted worlds". The rotating protagonist is a neat way to handle the "loneliness" of those games too - when I imagine playing Dark Souls, I don't really think of a group of adventurers, riding out against the darkness. Interestingly, the other Dark Souls-inspired game that I'm familiar with (and this one I have actually played), Grant Howitt's Fucked Up Little Man, utilizes a similar solution!
Very quickly, the game tells you that the mechanics are hacked/borrowed from Lovecraftesque - a game I have heard of but also never played. Apparently, the thread goes deeper! According to Black Armada Games, Lovecraftesque "influenced a generation of mystery games like Brindlewood Bay, Apocalypse Keys and Bleak Spirit." Brindlewood Bay and Apocalypse Keys both seem like they made a slightly bigger splash, from where I'm standing. It will be interesting to trace that line of inspiration. The last thing I want to say on this little tangent is that I really appreciate it when a text does this. I have no problem with games taking cool mechanics from each other, but I do want to at least see some attribution. So, what actually is going on with the mechanics?
The Mechanics
I've never believed in a very strong distinction between "rules text" and whatever we might call the "other" text - all of the text in a game builds the experience of playing the game, even if we choose to "reflavor" what's happening, or throw out a "rule." But here I'd like to address the systems and procedures that the text establishes, as well as what it prohibits.
I'd like to start with some of those prohibitions. Bleak Spirit prohibits discussing ideas/theories/worldbuilding at the table, once the game has begun in earnest, and forswears "explanations" in favor of "lore" - it's interesting to me to think of these as part of the same project. The latter move is one I've been moving towards in general, to renounce absolute truth in a setting and instead live in uncertainty, with all its complexity and incompleteness. But I love talking about it with people! I think I can see what the purpose is, however - one of the phases of play has everyone "jump to conclusions" on their own, independently deciding what a revelation or discovery or event must mean, and using their thoughts to guide what happens next. By making it private and personal, I think the goal is to help cut against the notion of a shared truth found in consensus. I've played a handful of co-op boardgames that try this enforced obfuscation, in order to prevent the "quarterbacking" problem of games like Pandemic, and I've basically never liked how they play - but here, I'm more interested.
After laying out some of these restrictions and setting expectations, the text offers some ways you could fiddle with those expectations. I generally am in favor of this - the text can't stop me from changing what I want, so offering opinions on ways the game could be changed while preserving the "core" experience are interesting to me (even if I wind up discarding the suggestions or wanting to change the core). The suggestions for the stakes of the story are all great, and really help center the experience for me (ie, is this Dark Souls and we're changing the whole world, maybe even metaphysically? Or will the world barely notice? Are we instead only changing ourselves?).
The game is structured in three acts, so you'll start by introducing lore, then build some tension, and finally have a fateful showdown with an adversary (left up to the players as to if this is the final showdown or merely with a smaller one, perhaps a "level boss"). One player in each scene plays the protagonist (called the "wanderer"), another player details the world, and the remaining players are the "chorus," who are there to "add depth and texture."
The actual details for running the scenes are a little light. The gist is that the world player will start each scene with an idea for a new piece of lore, and bring along the protagonist player to discover it. It might be a scene with some kind of threat or danger, or it might have a weird social interaction, or the focus might just be entirely on some phenomenal feature of the location. There is a list to help inspire your lore, which is appreciated - my bet is that usually I'd start out the game checking the list frequently and taking a while to set up my scenes before I get into the flow of things, but that's not a huge deal. A random table to roll on to spark lore would be pretty nice. There's a nice example in this section about what this is building to - each piece of "lore" should prompt players to wonder about the deeper meanings and implications. How did these corpses turn to stone? What are these strange flowers, and where did they come from? Why was the statue of the princess cut in half? And following our principles from before, lore should never answer these questions completely.
There's a resolution mechanic! During a "danger" scene, in order to defeat the threat (a beast, a great chasm, etc), the wanderer must pay a price, choosing between a consequence offered by the world and the chorus. There is again a nice little explanation on how this might work, with some guidance/reassurance that it's ok if the prices are not a big deal at first, and can tell us primarily about the what the wanderer values. By the second act, prices should ramp up in significance, in a way that might seriously threaten the wellbeing (and capabilities) of the wanderer. I like these guidelines, although I think again a list of inspirations would be nice to have. Fellowship has an identically-named component, and some moves will direct you to "pay the price", and added such a list in a later expansion.
The other kinds of scenes are less demanding "mechanically" - encounter scenes will introduce or re-introduce one of those delightfully cryptic and weird inhabitants and through them produce little "b-plot" sidequests, and feature scenes are essentially just about vibes. The scenes involving the adversary open up a little, letting anyone offer a suggestion about how the showdown begins, and ending with an "epilogue" that zooms the lens out a little bit. The middle scene is an extended clash that demands a great price from the wanderer.
The questions the text has you ask after each scene are fun! These are part of the "leap to conclusions" procedure. I think these questions seem like they'd help point me towards the "lore" I'd want to introduce, so in that respect they work well.
The final "mechanical" component is an optional set of cards that let players influence scenes, even when it's not their turn as the world. I think this is a neat way to introduce some variance! The game directs you to give out only one per player, or two in a two-player game. This seems a little low to me... There's a balance to be struck, since the game will have (if you follow the guidelines exactly) no more than 11 scenes, so if each player has two cards and you're playing with 3 or 4 players, card playing might become kind of routine, which I agree is not ideal! But I think one of the fun parts of having hidden cards is choosing between them - I might play so that all players get three cards, but can only play one. There are also only 20 cards, though, so my hack would probably need to come up with some more to keep things fresh. They're all pretty neat prompts, though! And they can have a fairly significant effect on the tone or structure.
All right, that's it for the "mechanics"! The rest of the book is given over to inspirational text, settings, lore, and that kind of thing.
The Writing
I'm pretty "generous" when it comes to calling something a mechanic or not - to me, all those knobs you could turn on the stakes or expectations are all "mechanics" in a way. Even though they're not very mechanical or rigorous, those pieces of text are there to establish the processes and systems you'll be using, and what those are aimed at accomplishing. They're text with the aim of helping you understand what it is you're doing when you're playing the game.
The other major aim I usually think the text might have is to inspire me or fill me with ideas about what I might want to do when playing the game. I'm pleased to report that in this sense, the "writing" text whips. Here's one, from the example areas to inspire the region you might play in - "The Labyrinth of Becoming, where things from elsewhere come to make humans from raw materials." I want to go there! There's a piece of text that immediately evokes ideas and excites me to play.
While there's a smattering of inspirational text to get your gears turning in the early sections of the book, it does seem like the intention was to leave most of the examples here, where they could all be collected. I maybe would have appreciated a few more really evocative pieces in those earlier sections to help sell the mechanics to me, but it makes sense as an organizational principle.
Unlike The Labyrinth of Becoming, the example areas in this "Inspiration" section are intentionally broad, in order to make them flexible (and also to inspire players to hack them into something more personally interesting). I can appreciate this, although I wish there were more swings for the fences - of course you have to actually put the text for "Poison Swamp" in, even though the poison swamps of Dark Souls are infamous, but I think there's room to get a little weirder with it. Thankfully, some of the sub-locations do - "It Is Here", under the "Bleak Temple" area is doing a lot of work!
We're also given a list of character archetypes, with some sentences to describe how they might relate to the plot, and another list of "things" which might be lore or might just be color. Also here is a list of potential prices! That's nice, although I think it would have been nicer to collect this with the "rules" for the procedure.
The very final part of the book goes through several pre-written scenarios. There are some names I recognize here! Kienna Shaw and Takuma Okada I knew immediately, and Alastor Guzman was in my mind from their work with Ixalan - wild! I'm less excited for some of these scenarios than others, but that's the point - it's useful to see what directions you're less interested in. One of the kickstarter backer ones does this perfectly for me - it's a little too devoted to replicating the movie it's inspired by, but the evocation of crumbling Americana is extremely evocative for me. It's hard for me to pick a favorite! Even the ones here that most closely resemble the original inspirations go in unexpected directions. I'd probably have bought just a collection of these.
Final Words
This is a neat little game! I said at the beginning that I was hoping to get some ideas on how to make an "empty, haunted world," and I think Bleak Spirit delivers on that promise. The highlight is easily the scenarios at the back of the book, but the procedure for playing seems quite useful too, and I'm hooked enough that I want to try it out myself!
And that's our first attempt at archival heroics! For reading the book, we get 5 points, +3 for rating on itch.io, and 5 points for each of 14 paragraphs (counting conservatively) of review! Whew, 78 points! We'll earn this pizza in no time. Archivist levels are quadratic; the cost, c, for a level, x, is represented by c = 2.5x^2 + 2.5x; with 78 we can juuust afford 5 levels, but that seems a little like overkill. Let's grab three levels for 30 points, one Reality Medal for another 5, and we'll bank 43 points for next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment