Archive Delving - Sigmata

Welcome back to another archive delve! Today I'm reading Sigmata: This Signal Kills Fascists.

Cast your mind back to 2017, if you can. Those troubled days of the past sometimes seem so quaint, compared to the troubled days of the present. I think I would locate an inflection point at around this time in history, where media, including ttrpgs, put the pedal to the metal towards loudly voicing politics. I think it's that same impetus behind "cozy" games &c - the dream of the 90s and new millennium was dead, history was not over after all, and now it was time to declare oneself for the sides of good.

I mention it not to denigrate it, but to try and conjure the stew out of which Sigmata bubbled up. As I've demonstrated time and time again, I am not immune to advertising - I was sold on the pitch of fighting fascism. There's a lot in its pitch that I think you'd still see today ("a cyberpunk tabletop role-playing game about ethical insurgency against a fascist regime"), but the thing I remember most strongly about it now is that it had a nuanced, considered, and not entirely appealing politics - we'll get into that. The author, Chad Walker, is an infosec professional, and "is committed to using the tabletop role-playing genre as a medium for education and political advocacy, particularly in the realms of cybersecurity, national security, and resistance movements." He was also a stretch goal writer for Spire, which does seem like kind of the perfect setting for that.

I did read through this at the time - I was angry and interested in a game that might be educational or at least cathartic. I bounced off of the game's writing, and the procedures of play have basically erased themselves from my mind due to the intervening time. In the grim march towards the 2024 election, I'm a little better read, and just as angry about US empire as ever. Is Sigmata an outlet for cathartic play? Is it educational, pointed towards revolutionary praxis? Or even just simply fun?

This is a game that opens with a "Doctrine," which is both a reading list, set of academic citations, and a manifesto - "All people have the right to resist...Radical empathy is not a sentiment. It's a strategy, a sword held to the throat of tyrants. Stand with your brothers and sisters or die." Whew! I haven't read any of the works cited, but they strike me as a little "policy-wonk" style stuff. On the one hand, I think there's something appealing there - I would like to know how an insurgency movement can win against their oppressors for real. On the other hand, I'm a little doubtful how much they'll come through in game form. We'll see!

The text is about 300 pages; it takes 78 to get to the "Operating System" and by page 288 the text is still informing you about the play procedure. This is a lot! Especially when the text almost succeeds at kicking me out immediately. Before getting into the setting fiction, we're treated to two "in-character" speeches, one of which ends like this:

To those among you wilting under the dissonance of standing with dominionists, capitalists, and militias, even temporarily, I’m telling you right now, you can either go back to shrieking at the mirror until the echo is so loud you cannot hear anymore, or you can get back in the motherfucking fight.

This is apparently the outgrowth of that doctrine of "radical empathy." It's meant to be a psychological tactic, winning hearts and minds. Walker elaborates on this later, in a subsection titled Insurgency is Theater; "An insurgency that wins over both the local population and the international community will win the war." I'm not as well read, and so can't dispute the literature - all I can say is that I have grown really tired of hearing the adults in the room berate boogeyman "leftists" for being uncompromising.

We open with a further declaration of what the game is about - it's about freedom fighting cyborgs, it's about the information technology of the 1980s, it's about ethical and effective insurgency. "Unless strategic thinkers prevail, the Resistance will degenerate into a band of terrorists that only validate the Regime in the public imagination." I can't say I'm not interested, but I do wonder what Walker would have to say about the ongoing genocide in Palestine, where it seems quite clear to me that "public imagination" has little to do with the "degeneration" of the Resistance, and everything to do with racism and imperialism.

But the further elaborations of the politics make an effort to sell this strategy - Walker's position is that history validates the strategy of "winning hearts and minds," and so the question of the game becomes how do you do that, while also fighting as a resistance movement. We end the chapter with a note that some of the game's allied factions might be "detestable" to players, and that Walker expects players will be "uncomfortable with some aspects of this game’s exploration of politics, ideology, and political violence. We certainly were."

The next section, It Could Never Happen Here, is 11 pages of short fiction to set the vibe. They're pretty good! It flows right into State of the Union, which details the alternate history of Sigmata's United States, which is pretty bleak. It's also, to me, a ttrpg-ism of yesteryear. The last thing I read with a history section this long was Salt in Wounds, which was also one of the earlier rpg things on kickstarter. The history starts with McCarthy and ends with border walls and mass deportations. 

By page 48, we're on to The American Insurgency, which is more fiction & set dressing. It's... a little weaker, both structurally (often just not as clearly written), and thematically (I don't really love what it seems to be going for). It picks up in The Sigmata, detailing the central fiction of the player characters. I think it declares just a little too much - I'd be perfectly comfortable with "you were exposed to a mysterious radio wave and now you're a cyborg" and leaving it at that. But we get a lot of text about what the signal does to you, how it works, how you can continue to blend into normal society (which kind of undercuts the idea that it's a stigmata, that marks you out to the state...?).

After this we're still not ready to learn the rules of the game - we have one last section, It's 1986. Welcome to the Future to get through, with some background details about what life is like in the fictional 80s. It's fine, but it's the kind of stuff I'd probably say could be in the back of the book.

With all that political theory and fictional history under our belts, we get to the Operating System. Sigmata understands three kinds of scenes, Combat, Evasion, and Intrigue, though all three will use the same rules. It also makes allowances for "free play," which it imagines as player driven connective tissue. There are four stats, Aggression, Guile, Judgment, and Valor. The dice mechanic is a dice pool, but with a kind of fun twist - you always roll 5 dice. You get as many D10s as your relevant stat number, and then grab D6s until you have 5 total. You're looking for as many 6+ results as you can get, and as few 1's. The number of successes you get determines who says how the test goes. It's kind of cute! It's a little "early storygame-y" to me - I don't think I see as much of this kind of shared narrative control anymore, outside of games that are explicitly gmless. But Sigmata goes for it full-throatedly! "Don't ask the GM for permission" kind of stuff! It does have some guidelines about how to "respect the established tone/fiction" and that kind of thing. Pretty cool. 

Play occurs in "rounds" and everyone gets their turn in a round to roll dice. "Exposure" is the harm/stress/clock/whatever that you're trying to avoid. GMs have threats in a scene, and these put exposure on the player characters. In a combat scene, these might be combatants. The example threats have a sizeable "fiction" write up, and a tiny "mechanical" write up, which is merely how much exposure the threat inflicts at the start of each scene. There are four kinds of actions in a scene, which correspond to the four stats, and either add or remove exposure, depending on the number of successes. It's a little boring to imagine, frankly - right now, it seems like a lot of circling the table and not very many interesting choices to make. It's a little more exciting to me to imagine the Evasion scene, which is about getting everyone through before the alarm goes off, but the mechanics are nearly identical. Intrigue scenes are centered around "talking points" but I don't really have enough in here to make me want to run one at all.

Maybe it gets more exciting in the Cybernetic Vanguard chapter, which is about character creation. We've heard about the stats ("processors") but not about blades (cybernetic modules) or subroutines (powers), or libraries or memories or peripherals. 

Unfortunately, there's only so much these can accomplish. There are some kind of neat choices to make here - blades augment those "basic moves," and can change the numbers around a little bit. The fiction is quite cool, but the mechanics are usually pretty subtle, since there's just not a lot going on mechanically. Subroutines are special powers, but limited in their application. Players will have to decide when they want to turn on the Signal in order to have access to them, but they also have to roll high to unlock them in a scene. They're fun, but again the fiction and mechanics have a tough time lining up - if this were a pbta game, the fiction of blowing up a bunch of tvs or shining with blinding light would be all you need, but here, they have to convert into a paltry "number of successes." Even the "Ultimate Subroutines" max out at inflicting 20 exposure, which is exactly as likely as flipping 5 heads in a row. You have a 3 percent chance to take out two guys. It's just kind of a letdown!

Memories are backstory tie-ins, which let you turn "blanks" into successes; Libraries are skills that let your 10s count as 2 successes (which seems marginal to me); Peripherals allow players to ignore a single 1 roll. I'm not compelled.

We're only about halfway through the book! This second half is doing a lot, but I'd basically summarize it as being more assistance for the gm. The next section is The Resistance. Of great interest to the text is how the "big picture" can make a big tent, but the specifics can vary greatly - does abolishing the fascist military occupation force mean dissolving it entirely, or separating it back into "the police" and "the army"? Conceptually I'm interested, although it's tough for me to imagine how this makes it into play. For the most part, though, we're back to complaining about demagogues who demanded "party purity" and prevented coalition building.

There are four factions making up the resistance; the Old Men (libertarian militants who hate government overreach, drawing especially from war vets); the Party (dem socs & marxists); the Faith (charitable Christians); and the Makers (free market libs who think the regime is bad for business). These each get written up with what seems to me a pretty clear-headed assessment of what's going on - I do think it's telling that the "liability" of the Old Men, for example, is that they're racist misogynists who are likely to be infiltrated by white nationalists & other regime moles, while the Party's liability is that the russians might plant a spy. Sour grapes, I know, but it does not seem to me that in the current era, we're seeing large scale "free market" opposition to genocide. Anyway, this maneuver is precisely the one I remembered best about the game, and it didn't entirely endear me to the idea of playing it.

Another setting chapter, this time about The Regime. All of this stuff is nice to have, I suppose. I wish the information were slightly better signposted or organized - the chapters aren't terribly long, at least.

The next three chapters are an explanation of the technology used. Repeat the Signal: FM Radio relates a story about how egyptian revolutionaries used radio, when the government shut the internet down. Telephony gets into switchboards and phreaking. Computers gets into BBS and file storage. There's a fourth chapter on Propaganda which gets into stuff like making zines. Each chapter has a little bit on "Cat and Mouse" which are pretty good for thinking about how to gamify them.

Ethical Insurgency relates the three core rules of engagement for the insurgency - basically, don't commit war crimes. More interesting is the chapter's discussion of how an insurgency might choose from among different kinds of targets, and how to execute on those missions. This Signal Kills Fascists opens with that bit of "Insurgency is theater" that I quoted earlier. It spins a story about how Assad turned the international community against the Syrian revolutionaries. The chapter then goes on to describe broad warfare strategies available to insurgencies, and make the case for why guerilla warfare is the only effective one.

It also introduces the final piece of the game that I dimly remembered from my first read. There's a COIN tracker, representing the "three pillars" of the insurgency movement - the local populace support, the international community support, and keeping the insurgents alive. There's a little procedure to combine these scores into a "Signal Strength" score representing the war as a whole. There's not a whole lot of guidance for how to use these, although the text suggests some possible missions that could gain or lose support in those three pillars.

A few more trackers: there's a Signal Wars tracker, representing the current use of the Signal in whatever scene you might be in. I would probably have swapped these names. If the Signal drops too low, death squads will arrive - a consequence that seems perhaps like it might have been relevant earlier. There's also a faction loyalty tracker, which adds a rather involved procedure, involving loyalty rolls, loyalty increasing missions, and loyalty abilities. This is the kind of thing I'm looking for! Although it's a little condensed and also I'm running out of steam (we're on page 282).

This section also goes into "what happens if the good guys win" since our good guys aren't all very good. If the faction fails its loyalty roll after victory seems imminent, they execute a "great betrayal." This spills back over to the COIN tracker and probably snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, but also unites the remaining factions into an unbreakable, extra loyal faction. It's a pretty cool little thing, and interesting to find all the way at the back of the book.

We're very nearly at the end. Campaigns, Actions, and Missions goes into a play phase procedure and then a bunch of play aids. These are again exactly what I'm looking for - Regime Actions comes with a list of intensifying operations the fascists undertake, Resistance Actions, which are a bunch of possible mission stems the players can pick from (like a Blades in the Dark mission plan, except more examples and still fairly hackable), Faction Favors for earning loyalty, or Faction Fallout for when a faction goes bad... It's chock full of good, useful, interesting stuff! There are a few misses, and it goes on a little long, but broadly, this is the chapter I'm most excited about.

There's an Outro at the very very end that's a call to action and a denunciation of just about everybody in american politics. Once again, Walker's left wing looks a lot different than the one I think I'm a part of, but my window is awfully small - maybe there are a lot of people out there giving Daniel Ortega a pass, or something.

That's the whole thing! I wound up higher on it than I expected, frankly, largely thanks to the mission structure revealed at the very end of the book. I don't think it's enough to save it from the lackluster dice mechanics and rather boring scene procedures - I'd probably always pick Spire over Sigmata if I wanted to play a game about compromised revolutionaries. But it could be neat to pull some from its structure - the various trackers, ideas about factions and their conflicts, regime actions, etc.

After writing this, I saw that there's an expansion, Repeat the Signal, which advertises itself as a "second edition" with a lot of updates - I might check it out in another delve, but I'm not curious enough at the moment to need to dive in.