Archive Delving - The Curse of the House of Rookwood

Another week, another archive delve! Today I'm taking a look at The Curse of the House of Rookwood by Brian Bình and Michael Addison.

Rookwood is another game that I have no memory of! Reading the kickstarter page does not immediately inspire me - cursed gothic family drama does sound neat, though. I think at the time I was interested in picking up small, specific games. I'm still interested in that of course, but with the splintering of my social group due to several factors, I no longer have as many opportunities to actually play them, which I think has cooled my enthusiasm for acquiring them.

The description on kickstarter promises supernatural adventure, familiar family drama, and an adaptable setting/genre. That's kind of interesting to me - one of the proposed settings is "spy-fi" 1960s, which would not occur to me for the supernatural adventure family drama game.

I also forgot that this was a whole game,  I was expecting something more zine-shaped. There are a whole 137 pages, and we get a whole introduction to ttrpgs and everything. The introduction does something that I really like, actually - this is another game with its own special term for the gamemaster role, the "Chronicler," but lays out that this role is actually several roles - you are a referee, answering questions about rules and the fiction; you are a historian, in that you're responsible for establishing the world and helping prompt other players to think about how they're connected to it; you are a narrator of events and the story; you are an adjudicator of disputes between other players; and finally the text pulls out gamemaster as the role for playing all the other characters of the world. I wrote those all out because I think 1. this is really cool, and a helpful way to think about it for me, but also 2. I think this list is incomplete, and/or poorly sorted! The closest thing I think I've seen to this strategy is in Possum Creek's Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast, which has a particular imagination of their gamemaster role (there called the Concierge) and what that player's duties are and what their role is, truly.

After some thoughts on safety tools and setting expectations (literally expectations about the setting) and the idea of the manor the family lives in, we start hitting some text about the procedure of the game. The very first rules are about "Legacy Points" - this is a legacy game! There are rules for successive generations. That's fun. Legacy points grant family resources, which can be spent for dice bonuses, but they have to be assigned to a kind of power. It could just be money, or power, or the upkeep of valuable additions to the manor. This is a neat little subsystem! If you choose to allocate points to fame (or power), you have to specify among what kind of faction or circle; that one of these is "Underworld" and then another is "The Other Underworld" is an early contender for favorite piece of text.

Directly after this we get an explanation of the central premise (the family is cursed!) and have some establishing questions that will help us assign our first legacy points. I probably would have reversed these two sections, but I get it. The questions are not super exciting to me, but they do their job. I would probably appreciate some cool picklists to help inspire fun choices, but I suppose these answers can draw "backwards" from the resources people want, anyways. And the example answer/story is fun and I wouldn't mind just stealing it, frankly.

Time to build the family! The text advises us to have character concepts that boil down to adjective+family noun, but also declares that we should "keep in mind the Rookwoods are a cursed dysfunctional family, so the adjectives should not be entirely positive." That's pretty good. The other thing of note to me is that the text asserts that, as a family, our connections can't be one-sided. I think the most popular mode of, like "character bonds" has become making them a little one-sided; it's easier and faster to do them that way, since you can just assert stuff, like "I'll never trust that scheming warlock, I know they're up to no good!" and it doesn't matter if you're wrong (in fact that can sometimes even be the point or the drama). It's more complicated to make a family of deeply interconnected people!

Mechanically, characters are defined by how many dice they've assigned to the three traits. You start with 5, and you can divide them as you like (including putting all 5 in one and 0 in the others). Biological descendants of the cursed progenitor also get curses, which are detailed in one of the appendices (although the game says we can make our own, but reminds us to be careful with them). Curses give magical powers, but cost a significant portion of dice to use, and you can eventually become "lost to the curse" which sounds exciting to read about. The text gets a little into the weeds here, describing how our "marks" (the curse downsides) can impose risks on rolls, but I don't know what those are yet. We also get a kind of fiddly (but entertaining) rule that you can spend your magic dice to suppress those marks during the day, but not at night. There's also an alternate rule that you can discover your curse through play - the other players will decide what it could be, and play rock-paper-scissors to decide.

There are ways to recoup spent dice - indulging in your desire. The text suggests some pretty classic self-destructive kinds of addictions, but notes that any desire/goal that puts you at odds with the long-term stability of your family is fine. This seems fine for the genre, but it's not particularly exciting to me.

The other piece of character creation designed to lead to inter-family strife is the "skeletons" in your closet. These are actually more specific than just bad stuff in your past - they're quite specifically things that threaten your relationship with a particular family member/player character. The crux of the issue (and the player it's connected to) are the "Spine". The other player characters get "Bones" - a way they have a personal connection to the problem, which promises to be awkward or uncomfortable but hitting those cues refreshes spent dice. Finally you must also declare two "Spades" - a resolution you hope will come to pass and one you fear. Positively resolving the skeleton rewards you with a legacy point; the negative resolution subtracts one from the family, but leaving the skeleton unresolved subtracts two. Woof! This is a lot of stuff to declare before we even begin playing. There are again examples in the appendices, at least.

There's one final part to character creation even - establishing assets. Uncursed characters get more than cursed characters, and these seem to be pretty useful. They can be spent just like family resources, but your terrible relatives can't vie for control of them; they're all for you. Definitely a nice consolation prize for not having magical powers, but the text doesn't seem supportive of spending more than one per roll, and if you're constantly playing into the family drama to regain your spent dice, I don't know how much more impactful the extra assets are likely to be.

In the middle here we got an exhortation from the text to play messily, where the text notes that the rules reward certain kinds of behavior. I like it when texts have a really clear player agenda this way, but I think it's kind of too bad to have married it to an "incentive" (like getting to roll more dice more often). It's tricky! But I think it's ultimately kind of self defeating - if the "reward" is, like, succeeding at the game, what you really hope for is that succeeding at the game is "fun". But just playing the game should be fun, right? So if I'm having fun playing the game the way the text doesn't reward, I don't need the psychological reinforcement of the reward, since I'm already having fun. And if I'm not having fun playing into the rewards, then acquiring the rewards probably isn't fun either. Anyway I don't like it!

Now it's time for the dice mechanic! Whenever it's time to do something, we choose to roll up to 3 dice. Getting a 4, 5, or 6 means a success! Getting a 6 on a color (trait) of die that corresponds to the kind of action we're taking is worth an additional success, but otherwise it seems that the traits don't really matter - we can use any trait dice for any challenge I think. If we want to roll more than 1 die, we can - but getting doubles (or triples) exhausts one of the dice used. If we were using our cursed power (which requires us to roll 3 dice, the maximum), we also take another Mark of the curse on doubles/triples. 

Statistically, I'm not sure that this quite works out in a really interesting way - the text notes that only rolling 1 die means it's quite unlikely to get more than 1 success, but it's not that much better to roll 2 dice - you've got a 30% chance to roll at least one 6, which if the trait matches is an automatic 2 successes, but you've only really got a 9/36 chance to roll 4+ on both of two dice (same as trying to get two heads in a row).

The reason we'd like to get more than one success is that each roll carries risks and rewards - we can spend successes 1-to-1 to negate risks or receive rewards. So if there's more than one risk to a roll, we'd really like to get more than one success. Rewards seem a little more finnicky - if I'm dueling, for example, I can imagine a lot of rewards that would be cool, but probably simply winning the duel (by getting a single success?) is the important thing?

We get some example consequences/risks/rewards, among them damage. Damage is often a risk that we'll have to spend dice to negate, and if we cannot, damage exhausts an equivalent number of assets or trait dice (or else is fatal). Running out of trait dice removes you from the game, unless a family member sacrifices one of their own for you (and even then, the text notes, you'll probably both get into a bad argument to regain those spent dice).

I'm not in love with it! It's kind of a fiddly resource management game. Granted, the way to manage your resources is by indulging in family drama, but I'm just not that interested in the gameplay of assigning dice this way to negate bad consequences and also try to earn positive ones (nor am I interested in being the person who's improvising those all the time).

The procedure for moving to a new generation is fairly simple - just reviewing whose skeletons were buried and accounting for the change in legacy points, with allowances for changes in the fiction and thoughts on characters after timeskips. I do like this idea, although there's nothing really special about the procedure.

We get a quick rundown of some different settings/ideas for different generations, like secret agents or weird wild west adventurers, or supernatural superheroes, or society occult investigators. The little writeups do help sell the idea of a lengthy game where we change genres over time, since each of them seems cool. There are a few pages of "goals" that the family might be pursuing, too, which seem helpful as framing devices. And at 50 pages, that's it for the "game"! The first appendix is for player resources.

This is a useful appendix! The example skeletons are well done, although some are a little more melodramatic than others. Any of the edits I would suggest are pretty immediately apparent, I think, which means that these are doing their job well. There's also a great many example curses, which are also useful, although some of them aren't written very evocatively, and start to feel pretty formulaic - they all begin with "x bad thing, but you have magical power over x..." Worse is that many of them aren't really exciting to imagine their ultimate end, something that I kind of expected the text to get a slam dunk on. But there are a bunch of them, and magic powers are cool, so that is probably one of the draws.

The second appendix is "setting resources" - about 40 pages of monsters, rivals, and other people the Rookwoods might compete against! One thing I had not realized is that enemies would also be rolling dice - or at least they also get traits and assets. Woof! That seems complicated. Is every roll a contested roll, then? How does that work?

Questions about the fundamental working of the game aside, these are pretty strong! The writeup of the Knights of Savoy, for example, notes "They are usually mistaken as republicans who want to eliminate the monarchy, but their actual disagreement is with the British monarch’s role as Defender of the Faith. The Knights of Savoy think the faith is not being adequately defended: they want the Anglican church to be purified of any trace of its catholic roots." That rules! This is a good, weird, fun faction for me to use in my game. There's a lot to love here - the occult and techno blend of MI-13, the distinction between reluctant and enthusiastic werewolves, the personality defects of wizards... It's good! The organization leaves a little to be desired, and not every entry is a winner, but there's enough here that I can easily imagine pulling fun little weirdos from the book to throw at my awful cursed family members.

This appendix ends with some lengthier writeups that are a little funny - great attention is paid to ghosts, which I suppose is fitting for the source material, and the way that being an insubstantial spirit affects your traversal through the dice system. There's also a section several pages long on how to make your own demonic cults, another classic, although kind of strange to me that there aren't any ready to go.

The final appendix is a list of resources for the Chronicler. First up are locations - these seem to be aimed at helping you talk about the manor's geographical location, little blurbs you can read aloud to players to get everyone on the same page. Then the same idea for time eras. These eras come with special assets, tied into the "theme" of the era. I think this is a little silly. The one for the era including WW1 made me chuckle at least - players "may have a free Asset describing something creative, constructive, or virtuous, on the condition that it can only be spent for something stupid or destructive." The most contemporary era (and the final piece of "rules text" for the book) falls a little flat with a tired old joke about apps. Ho hum.

That's The Curse of the House of Rookwood! I don't think I was very subtle earlier in my dislike of the central dice mechanic. I don't even really want to test it out, since the risks/rewards system just does not seem like a fun thing to run as the chronicler/referee. But the setting stuff and monster manual are definitely interesting to me! As is the idea of a legacy game (although, given my sensibilities, I'm probably more likely to check out the eponymous pbta games). Too bad! But a pretty fun read, and I am glad to have read an attempt at a new cool way to roll dice.

24 paragraphs for 120 points, +5 for reading and +3 for rating for 128! Oh my gosh did we do it?? But first the romans - they're at strength 9, and roll 35. We're at strength 10 still and roll... 33! Oh, cruel fate! I wouldn't feel right about winning that pizza on this note. We'll have to spend some points to go up levels. I'll go ahead and buy two more levels, up to 12, to buy us some wiggle room, and hopefully our next review will get us our ultimate reward.