Archive Delving - A Guide To Casting Phantoms In The Revolution

I'm back to take a look at another game that's been sitting on my shelf for years and years! Today I'll be reading through World Champ Game Co.'s A Guide To Casting Phantoms In The Revolution.

The Guide was on Kickstarter in early 2020, and I remember a little bit of the campaign (mostly jogged by seeing the webpage again) - apparently the idea was semi-communally developed, including by kickstarter backers, although I think I probably joined too late to be a part of it. The impetus for the game is semi-historical, taking note that "magic lanterns" were becoming popular around the time of the french revolution. The vibe I'm getting from rereading how the game is supposed to play out is something like a semi-horror pokemon battling against the aristocracy. There's a bespoke "system" for the game, involving a pentagram! I splurged for the physical copy, which came in a fun little box that reminds me of vhs tape boxes. I remember opening it once, thinking "wow!" and putting it away for when I'd have more time to look at it. I guess that time is now!

I like the introduction, which gives us a brief historical overview of those inspirations, and moves very quickly into the pitch - "You are a cabal of lanternbearers, their attendants, their ghosts. You will topple the aristocracy and reform the world in your phantasmic image." Yeah, that sounds cool! There are also two notes. The first is largely a quote, which I've seen shared pretty widely or adapted nearly verbatim, declaring that "this game is not for fascists." This is contextualized here with some words from the authors about how, hey, this is a game about killing aristocrats and royalists - on one level, you simply can't play the game as written without doing that (and on another, you should drop the book, monarchist scum). I'm on board! As previously mentioned on this blog, however, text has no power over me, and I have reason to believe it doesn't have the power we'd hope it does over fascists. It's unfortunate! I would also like to ward my work from evil assholes. All that's just to say that I never quite know what to make of this quote (or similar sentiment) when I see it in a game. I think maybe I'd like to see something closer to "hey, games, like any community, has bad actors in it. The only way to be "safe" is to cultivate radical community, which is hard, and cannot be skipped over by reading the right things." Anyway, the second note is about historical accuracy, and it's nice. The authors suggest that "French accents are fully important to the enjoyment of this game. Knowing the right kind of lightbulb isn’t." which reads to me like it's coming out of a different epoch. I've never been much one for accents when GMing, so this might just be me.

Playing begins with some text to read aloud and a handful of questions for the group to answer, to establish some details and create a first cast of characters. There are a few details that are dictated in the questions - like that the cabal will be called Redshank (or have some connection to that name), and that the cabal was betrayed by Quinn Vipond, who lay some kind of curse on their way out - this is a maneuver I don't know that I've seen done in quite this way. I think it's kind of cute, although I just know I would want to pick a different name from a list if there was one. The questions also declare that we'll be seeing the very first time this cabal successfully summons a phantom, which isn't the choice I would have made! I suppose it's kind of "cinematic" in that if this concept were made into a movie, it would assuredly go over these kinds of facts in torturous detail. And if I really wanted to see an accomplished cabal of sinister sorcerers pull off a desperate crime, I could always play blades in the dark.

From here, we jump directly into dice weirdness! Dice get rolled on the pentagram, and their pattern marked on a slide. Then the sum of the dice is used to summon a phantom, (sums are sorted into ranges, which is reminiscent of pbta success bands). Finally, the dice are moved to the closest circle on the points of the star.

Actually, we're not done yet - now that the phantom is summoned, we establish three goals of its - a Revolutionary Goal (what tenet of the revolution it desires), a Caster Goal (a desire the phantom provokes within a character), and an Ethereal Goal (mysterious). These are represented with dice as well. Whenever action towards the goal is made, the die representing that goal ticks down one - ideally, flipping from 1 to 6. If a goal is not completed (flipped to 6) by the next summoning, the earlier phantom's goals draw power (dice) from the new casting, becoming harder to complete. In addition, multiple active phantoms raises the floor of dice results - with two phantoms, the minimum die value to start at is 2, with three phantoms, the lowest value die goes all the way to 3. 

There's one last thing to do with dice, which is to give characters dares, which operate essentially identically to the goals, but don't appear to have any consequences for failing or accomplishing them (yet, anyway).

Whew, that's kind of a lot! And I still have questions - what happens if I have only 6's for my phantom's goals? what's to be done with the dice on the circle? These look to be answered shortly. We're not finished with our pentagram!

The dice in the circles can be the basis of "challenges" for scenes - we can use the numbers on the dice to declare that "X symbols will be drawn" or "X characters will be cast" or "this scene takes place in time, relative to the current moment by the magnitude of X". These are tricky for me to get a grasp on.

More interesting to me is the way the game uses the pentagram to organize characters and scene ideas - players occupy one of the "arms" of the star, and so are adjacent to two "wedges" which have scene cards. I will say that the organization of these rules is not particularly helpful.

The "reward" for dares and challenges is made clear, but not explicitly - when you accomplish dares or challenges, you get to put some number of dice back in the lantern, and it's only these dice that are used to summon the next phantom.

It's not until page 25, after an entire first runthrough and second overview of the rules that finally addresses my questions like "where are all these dice coming from?" and "what if there aren't enough dice for everything?" and "when do we deal out these cards I've heard about?"

With pesky difficulties like procedure out of the way, we can get to the cool stuff, which are all the phantoms. There are actually many more phantoms than previously indicated, and they're each of them lovely. There have been a few typos throughout, and they surface again here - "tenant" for "tenet" and "diffuse" for "defuse" for example.

They're also enormously helpful for understanding why dares are important or interesting - they're ways to make real weirdos in your troupe/cabal and play out doomed and wacky scenes. They're evocative and cool, and great inspiration for weird magic stuff generally!

The text concludes with a few thoughts on creating your own phantoms, and a concise step-by-step list of the play procedure. It's still not perfect, but would definitely be nice to have at the front, I think!

Complaints about the organization of the rules procedures aside, it's a pretty neat little game for a one shot. The theme is hook-y enough that I think you could maybe use this even with folks who aren't big on other ttrpgs, but it's kind of involved in a way that probably demands people with some patience. I don't know how you could simplify it while still keeping the use of the pentagram mat, which is delightful - I think you'd probably have to really tone down everything that wasn't on the mat, but the phantoms get a lot of their flavor from character interactions and handing out dice that way. All in all, I think it'd be cool to play! But if all I ever did was sit and think about the wonderful phantom write-ups in the back, that would be ok by me.