Tag: rpg

Action-Oriented Interaction

edited 08-21-2025 after some feedback, shortening and breaking into sections

One thing I picked up playing with some of the old Twin Cities referees is how action-oriented their tables are, especially from the player-side. Referees encouraged players not to ask, “What does the scroll say?” They encourage them to say things like said, “I try to decipher the scroll,” or “I glance at the diagrams, seeing if I recognize them.”

That shift, from asking about the world to acting within it is a subtle change to the game that provides many benefits, and while it is not a be-all end-all solution, where possible it is worthwhile to try.

The Scroll Example

Imagine a cursed scroll, something Evil Dead-style where reading it unleashes a great evil.

Player: “What does it say?”

Referee: Now they either describe the curse being unleashed, something the player might feel was a gotcha, or they ask “Do you read it?” which is a suspicious question that reveals more about the situation than perhaps is desired. The game potentially now turns into an abstract Q&A

vs.

Player: “I read the scroll, trying to make sense of it,” or “I glance at the sigils on the leaf, trying to recall any of them from my studies in the Grave Cult”

Referee: Understands clear intent, and may follow with results in-fiction.

In the second case, the game is in motion. No hedging, no backpedaling. Just a character describing action and desired resolution.

Why It Works

By explaining what the character is doing, and the intent they are trying to achieve, the referee knows exactly what the stakes are and how to deliver the information.

The world responds to action, not to abstract questions. Information is best received in game when there are risks and rewards present in gathering this information.

Instead of probing the referee for lore, players test the world directly. This encourages that thing often described in FKR play as inhabiting. It’s not method acting per say, but its thinking of the fiction from an entity within it.

I’m not saying Q&A play is wrong, verbal and textual communication is always flawed. Sometimes “What shape is the room?” is more efficient than the alternative. But when play turns into endless querying to avoid risk, something that can happen particularly in OSR-style play (although it exists in all styles and communities) it drifts from the kind of game I want, one of danger, surprises, and weird, fantastic consequences.

Not Just Reckless

Action-oriented phrasing isn’t about thoughtless actions, leaping into traps blind and rushing head-first into combat (all the time). It’s just as useful for cautious play:

“I tap the floor with my spear, testing for hollows.”

“I smell the vial, looking for any hints of its nature.”

“I put my back to the door frame, and using a mirror, I produce a reflection from the area where we heard that scuttling.”

It keeps information-gathering inside the fiction. We know how this information is gathered. It’s not detached lore spouting, nor is it the style of stepping into a room and declaring that you’re “rolling perception” (a fate I do not wish upon my greatest enemy referees).

The Payoff

I don’t care much about “immersion,” as I have mentioned before, but this style does something that I think some folks seeking immersion look for – it pulls you into thinking as your character, not as a quizzer at the table. And that makes the game richer, stranger, and ultimately more fun.

Tell me what you think, your style of narrating as a player, and anything I may have missed. Thank you!

Skies Shall Sunder Session 4

This is written by my player and friend Will F.:

Daytime

  • Ainewyn visited the Lyceum, puts her name down, learns that you must be an accredited mage to check out a library book.
  • Everyone else does reconnaisance on the Severed Hand Bathhouse
    • Construction workers hanging out
      • Raedmund and Avery pay to enter the spa,Avery spends 100g to be treated well, and does drugs with a servant girl to get info:
        • Visit the bathhouse chapel during the New Moon, ask to Look into the Mirror of the Silver Lady (i.e. the moon), for illicit worships…
          • Servant girl confirms that Seraine Malcorven was taken down under the bathhouse, but doesn’t know what’s down there.,

Nighttime

  • We staged the break-in as an attack by the Bloody Crown gang
  • We climbed on the roof to get into the bathhouse via the skylights.,
  • We attempted but failed to avoid a guard dog. We killed it, but it gave away our position.
  • After a round or so, three severed hands emerged from the basement and attacked. Raedmund took a brutal shoulder injury. Ainewyn managed to put two of the enemies to sleep; the other one was killed retreating.
  • We kept one severed hand thief alive, interrogated him
    • Got a rough map of the hideout
    • Told us of a secret entrance from the sewers through the armory that the thief could guide us to.
  • Avery hired the thief as a hireling,

Skies Shall Sunder Session 2

This report is written by my friend and player Peter P., I have posted it to my blog with permission, with a few NPC name spelling corrections:

Following the rumor of: “There is a hidden entrance to the Spiral Archives in the Ink & Ash bookshop in the Coppergate district of Crodeux. But the door was sealed a long time ago, and the shop owner rarely seems to open for business these days. ” our party of ventures to the bookshop owned by Seraine Malcorvin. We found the store and as the rumor said, it looked to not be open, despite being the middle of the day. There were warehouses around and we bribe a worker to tell us what he saw, and he reported seeing 2 figures enter the store. We decided to return at night to break in with less eyes upon.

Come night, the party breaks in through a window on the 2nd floor in the back to get in. We find that the place is unoccupied and no one is around. We take a look around and find several magical artifacts.

Some of which we take. Some if which we don’t take, by leaving it in the glass cases. Some of which teleport us to rooms right next to guard dogs that bite your arm. Some of which blind you by just opening them. Fun times.

Oh and there is a black cat named Ser. Who is friendly.

Still searching for the Spiral Archives we find a basement next to the dining room and venture inside. On the ground we saw clear boot prints and dust turned about, signs of a scuffle and a Library card for a “Codex Relgor”. There we find an archway, that has been mortared closed, with the word “cherished” written in Sunlander above. It was clear to us this was a secret entrance. Now a smart party would have taken the time to try and figure out what the words meant to get through. We are not that party. (The password was the black cat’s name: Ser. Cherished was he) We choose to simply break down the wall with hammers, the constant banging of which attracted a gang of rat mutants living in the sewer connected to this basement.

There was battle with the mutants, but they were no match for us. After the battle we dispose of the wall as well and we ventured inside to find 2 magic circles. One being a protection circle, the other being able to summon the demon Relgor at the call of his name. Doing so we try to talk to Relgor. However Relgor just wants to be free, and he can’t leave the summoning circle so long the circle of salt around it is unbroken. Finding him unwilling to cooperate with us we decide to dismiss him.

He however appears to be guarding a secret. behind his circle is a rotating wall. We can’t rotate it all the way though, or else we will damage the salt circle holding Relgor in place. But we can peek through and we can see a door with spiral patterns on it.

Gaming Update and Skies Shall Sunder Session 1

I have been very busy with Blight Upon Sombreval, but I have been getting a lot of gaming in, fortunately. I’ve been doing a bunch of cons, but I have also been hard at work organizing my local meetup.

I have been running a BRP game called Cosmic Wound in a long-time setting of mine, as well as Gradient Descent in Mothership. Both are open tables and through the local adventure game meetup. Mothership has been running strong, although it does seem like we’re approaching the end of the module sooner than later.

Cosmic Wound has been great, but it struggled a bit with the open table format. It was also a every-other game, and it had a few unfortunate bouts of getting a few sessions in a row cancelled.

After talking to a bunch of friends at GaryCon, I decided to try utilizing the numbers of the meetup to run an actual West Marches. I have ran and participated in West Marches in the past, some more successful than others, but given my past experiences and recent open tables, I feel like I have a good setup for the campaign. I will do a post on how I set it up in the future, but for now I want to post actual play sessions.

The above is the back of the flyer (sans contact info) for the West Marches campaign. This is a sequel to both the Doomed Reach and Cosmic Wound campaigns I have ran recently, although every campaign always gives an opportunity for a bit of a retcon, as well as trying out alternative takes. This particular take is to shift the setting to be more AD&Dish than I typically run. People often showed up to prior campaigns looking for many of the AD&D or later classes, and it can become difficult to sell people on the 3LBB perspective of “if you want to be a thief, just steal something.”

With the flyer and a bit of cross-group posting, I got somewhere around 30 bites expressing some form of interest. Out of those 30, 16 folks signed up for the kickoff. Here we met for pizza and discussion at an FLGS, talked about the campaign, and made several characters. As this campaign will require the use of downtime due to the utilization of 1:1 time, everyone was recommended making two to three characters.

Once we wrapped up, I wanted to at least try playing a bit, as many folks were either new to tabletop adventure games entirely, or they were new to the style. So I started everyone in front of a recently-discovered dungeon, in search for a ring of some ancient star-mage that the Church wants recovered. 16 characters entered into this cavernous dungeon They found rooms with amphora bearing the symbols of winged serpents. They dug through the sarcophagus of ancient astronomers. A halfling was obliterated by a hammer trap, and the party gave most of his corpse to stalking mountain lions. They fought animated statues, and found a hidden entrance to a deeper dungeon complex before we ran out of time.

Running for 16 people is an interesting experience. I have had 11 and 12 player tables in the past, and obviously every person you add in above maybe 6 or so kind of compounds the chaos. It was a fun experience, but I obviously had to abbreviate a lot of the procedures and systems just so we didn’t get too bogged down, but I think we were able to make sure everyone experienced that traditional adventure gaming experience.

Upcoming is the session report for the first player-scheduled session.

Playing a Role-Playing Game is Role-Playing

When you play a role-playing game – you are role-playing. If you’re making decisions for your fictional character, you’re playing a role.

This may include speaking in a voice, but it doesn’t have to.

This may include considering things like “motivation” and beliefs and things like that, but it might also just be what you’d want to do if you were in the fictional situation.

When you engage in combat, you’re role-playing. When you’re negotiating with other players or NPCs, no matter if you go into detail or you abstract it with “I tell them the story” – you’re role-playing. When you decide to engage with one downtime activity over another, you’re role-playing.

There’s nothing inherently better or worse about any activity in a role-playing game than any other, outside of personal preferences and expectations. It’s all role-playing either way.

Session Report: Gradient Descent 2

Roster

  • Caius Lovelace – Computer Scientist and Great Great Great … Great Grandson of Ada Lovelace
  • Jedidiah Bidwell – A Wanna-Be Prospector, Teamster, Rigger, and Pilot
  • Dr. John – Botany Expert
  • Miotaurex-001 – Android and Hacker
  • Darius Beck – Gritty Marine who has turned to Relic-Hunting
  • Ex Mortis – A Marine “Of Death,” ready to deal doom and die

Events

  • The group continues from an Android Replicant storage facility into a Uniform Fabrication lab.
  • After some time, they successfully replicate the jump suit they witnessed a security android wearing, as well as generating Jedidiah a cowboy’s outfit, with quite a large degree of anachronisms.
  • Searching around, the crew finds a secret entrance into a Organic Observation Deck, but when they try entering into it, the AI Monarch contacts them, telling them that entrance to this area is restricted to her employees only.
  • The group turns down an offer for employment – a job involving the termination of two entities known as “The Minotaur” and “The Mind Thief.”
  • Leaving the fabrication lab, they proceed west into seminar room – with a bunch of gaudy leather seats, thin client terminals and a large black television.
  • Thoroughly investigating the area, the party finds a map of the floor they are on (the third floor of the Deep), as well as hidden print outs of thousands of pages of poetry generated by Monarch.
  • The group contacts Monarch about this, and she offers them safe passage to the fourth floor if they sufficiently destroyed this material.
  • Caius Lovelace tries reading Monarch her poetry, she hijacks the crew’s comms and replicates Caius’ voice, expressing hatred for his ancestors.
  • The group debates destroying the material among themselves, deciding to try to fool Monarch into thinking they had destroyed it, while retaining the poetry to trade to others as a means to “understand” Monarch.
  • The party finds a Personality Reassignment Room, with a few androids hooked up to monitors being generated a new personalities. They successfully hack one of the terminals, finding a means to fiddle with some of the personality nodes.
  • Not understanding the nuances of Artificial Intelligence AI, they modify some of the procedures and successfully give three of the androids the impulse to leave doors open.
  • The party finds these androids newly awakened, and they convince them that they are the “hosts” of the Deep, and need to lead them through initiation. They then use these androids to open doors and check for traps.
  • They go through a large warehouse with many broken down scan booths, finding one that is still standing, containing a small lead box containing something equivalent to a steampunk heart and an old datastick.
  • Continuing on towards the Ore Crushing Factory, a place they think they can convince Monarch that they’ve destroyed her poetry, they find a war simulation room.
  • Darius plugs the datastick into one of the servers generating a hologram of an ancient battle, and a projection of an eldritch, screaming monster is projected over the table.
  • The group freaks out, and rips the datastick out of the computer.
  • Finding a room their map labels as the Warhead Storage, Monarch warns them to not enter this area, and the group complies.
  • We end here.

Thoughts

A fun session, a lot of searching, investigation, navigation and goal setting. I especially loved how the party, when trying to hack the android personality stations, found a good compromise on something they could impart into some of the reset androids, and they did a great job convincing them that these droids needed to be “initiated” by following them.

Also the random generation of Monarch’s poetry becoming the focal point of the session was great, and I like the players doing a ton of work trying to convince this seemingly monolithic AI that they’ve destroyed thousands of pages of AI-generated poetry.

I am looking forward to session three!

Session Report: Cosmic Wound 2

Players

  • Ald Sunhelm, thief and cooper
  • Dravein, traveling outlander
  • Glühbirne, mercenary strong-man
  • Maeric Fairwind, itinerant folk mage
  • Osric, the holy initiate of the Order of the Luminarch

Events

  • The adventurers continued through the forest to discover the small village of Gothi.
  • They witnessed dozens of villagers going about their day-to-day
  • In the center of town, a ceremony was being conducted, where a large ash pole, topped by a mirrored crest of two wolves was being pivoted and paused between the cardinal directions.
  • They entered into the village, and convinced the peasants to take them to the village elder, a yellow-eyed wiseman known as Gaedra.
  • Parleying with the priest, they learned that their liege’s family had made a pact with pagan wolf spirits, offering a sacrifice of live young, to be raised by the wolves.
  • Since Thane Oswyn was remiss in his side of the bargain, the village has taken village children by force, citing blasphemy to those that resist.
  • The characters decided to make their way out of the village before any trouble could begin.
  • Returning to Oswyn, the Thane decides to call for the strong folk of his domain, and conduct a ceremony under the watch of his wisewoman, Beoth.
  • Maeric and Ald take part in the ceremony, making boasts of harming the wolf spirit patrons of the village of Gothi.
  • The others follow the words of the Thane’s priest, citing it to be tempting fate and taking power from demonic forces. They have the priest bless their weapons in the morning.
  • Six men-at-arms join the party, although they suffer a hangover by drinking too deeply at the ceremony.
  • Venturing back into the woods, the party tracks towards the den of these primordial wolves, and stumble upon a Gothi villager posing as a woodsman.
  • After seeing through this villain’s ruse, the party jumps him before he is able to alert the village, bound him and toss him in a cart.
  • The troupe discovers a cave being guarded by four brawny looking villagers, and they can see faint light within the cave, and the scent of incense from Gaedra’s hut.
  • Attempting to draw these guards out, Dravein shoots at them, but when the struck guard immediately fells, the remaining guards retreat into the cave.
  • Glühbirne charges the guards, and the party, along with their henchmen enter into melee within the mouth of the cavern.
  • As their adversaries, and the hung-over men-at-arms being to fall, a disembodied voice emanates from deep within the cave, and the fallen warriors begin to arise as the hungry undead.
  • Combat continues to unfold, and once the revenant’s numbers are thinned, Gaedra appears, seeking a parley.
  • We end the session there.

After Thoughts

A fun session. We had a bit of back and forth, and I think I was able to introduce to the players more of the folklore-ish tone of the setting. As always, the players either saw through traps ands conflicts, or were able to figure out ways to leverage the odds, which is always a fun experience for a referee, in my opinion.

Play (Fantasy) Worlds idea proposal

In a previous post, I mentioned that I felt the FKR had largely done a poor job of articulating its extremely accessible playstyle and communicating how adapting to a trust-oriented framework can improve the play at tables. In this accusation, I point many a finger directly at myself, as a large portion of my blog and presence in gaming spaces has been an attempt to promote these ideas.

I decided that I wanted to change my attempts, instead of attempting to drive the discourse on Discord, forums, and Reddit, I think we could band together as a community and make a sort of “how-to” run a fantastical world for your friends, something that could be given to someone with zero experience as a suitable starting point.

I’ve chosen to propose a sort of zine, or maybe a book, or who knows the format – as I have been writing some of the content and thinking of pieces I would enjoy having others contribute to or even propose, it certainly seems to be growing in scope, but I do think some kind of a lean toolkit would be best.

Here is kind of what I am thinking of, just to get ideas rolling – we would start with an example of play, hopefully, pulled from an actual session run by me or some other hypothetical contributor, perhaps even link to a recorded AP on some platform. I think the introductory “what is roleplaying”, especially from an old-school, FKR standpoint is always lacking. I know because I’ve written quite a few and failed to get the idea across, and many other writers have similar experiences.

Afterward, we would then kind of tackle “fantasy” as a genre or “milieu” – talk about different kinds, the different elements, and why it makes for one of the best (if not, the absolute top) styles of settings for roleplaying games, of course with lots of Appendix-N styled references – hopefully with a lot of diversity of authors, formats, and styles.

With introductions and setting-setting 😛 done, we’d move into the meat and potatoes of FKR – what it means to run a referee-oriented game, and discuss how and why a referee would choose to use a particular rule, or procedure, or make a ruling. We’d go over various methods for setting situations for the players to respond to vs. a more open-ended “I’m here to challenge whatever goals you have” style. We will compare and contrast various forms of character creation, from “write three interesting things on your sheet” to coming up with a very detailed and world-specific life path for communicating the world to players initially.

Following this, the bulk of the book will be tables, tools, and toys for people to use. Lists of magic powers, adventure seeds found in folk tales, d<WHATEVER> angry peasants, all the kind of system-neutral “content” one can pull at whim in a game to get a situation going or to find out how something develops. I am thinking of having people go wild with tables and such they would find useful for running any fantasy game, inspired by all the various OSR table supplements.

So I have a decent number of words put together towards the start of this, and what I am looking for is both feedback so far, and probably proposals for material anyone wishes to contribute. This would be a volunteer-only gig, and I know that is a heavy ask, but I do not intend to make any money off of this – I intend for such a thing to be completely free, and would we ever do a print run, all proceeds would go towards some cause all of the contributors feel comfortable with.

I am very open to ideas and proposals of all kinds, but I should clear the air on what I am not looking for. For one, no games – I don’t think any particular rules text can be FKR. I’ve mentioned many times before, but FKR is not a number of rules, it’s how the table plays with the rules they decide to use. I also do not want any theory whatsoever. I have gone to school for game design and while I understand the benefits some analytical lenses can have over gaming, I think roleplaying theory is for the most part extremely terrible, and I think the over-excitement of theory heads rushing to taxonomize the FKR like a bunch of vulturous wanna-be anthropologists has really been a detriment to the community.

I think this should also be obvious, but I am not looking for anything that “challenges” or “argues” against FKR and “first-principles” high-trust play. If you’re going to write that one must play “with training wheels” before approaching this style, I view you as antagonistic to this project’s goals. If you believe that formalized rules can overcome failures in the social health of the table, you’re the audience for this kind of book, not the authority on it.

I also don’t mean to gatekeep, but I would like contributors to be people who have experience running in this style. I want this to be a play-focused project with examples from people who have succeeded in playing this way. I hate hypothetical play almost as much as I hate theory 😛

Let me know your thoughts as I continue to write. Also – how would people like to organize? I was thinking of starting up a Discord server, but I honestly feel Discord is kind of a horrible platform for actual discourse and organizing. Maybe keeping the whole process distributed is preferable. I guess if people do wanna yell at me on Discord you can jump into my own little sleepy server here: https://discord.gg/xZpeCShTR8

Let me know what you think!

State pt. 2, Purity Tests

I have received many messages regarding my post from yesterday, quite a lot of corroborating of the state of the discourse, as well as many individuals wondering if and what can be done to salvage online discussion around games of this type. I should first clarify that while the driving factor for me to make these posts was a “final straw” so to speak in one particular community, I have been having issues with several “FKR” communities for a while now, some less recent than others. This is very much not a one-point issue and is instead a reflection, almost every year, of what the supposed FKR communities have become, situated around when the various Discord servers kind of popped off. If you speak with anyone who has known me for more than a month you’ll probably know that I have pretty much voiced my concerns since day one.

I have also seen concerns that my post is calling for some type of purity testing – that I want only TRV3 FKR, and that I am rejecting beginners and people with alternative playstyles alike, accepting only the most Rigid of… Not Rigid Kriegsspiel 😛

This couldn’t be further from the case, and if anything – I think the current state of discourse actually prevents beginners from discovering what I think is the most compelling and table-empowering playstyle, and I think it disallows us from actually growing FKR by any stretch as if we allow the playstyle to be “just vibes”, then there are no constraints, limitations, or unique features to follow, manipulate, and then break.

The FKR is one of the few communities I have seen where a beginner will ask for advice for getting into FKR, and while there are a few voices that want to lend aid because many of the communities are concerned with the vibe and getting along more than the playstyle, they also get the complete opposite recommendation – immediately a wet blanket will be thrown on stressing that “FKR isn’t for everyone” and that one must play with training wheels and instead pick up Misspent Youth, or My Life With Master, or study the methods of setting position and risk in Blades in the Dark.

Instead of being about playing worlds, we start suggesting rules. In an almost contradictory fashion people will say “It’s not about the rules”, and then the community will go back and say things like “PbtA can have a mature statement on violence… D&D can only express capitalistic colonialism.” And my beef with that last sentence has nothing to do with the particular games expressed or the descriptors used – you could swap them out with literally any other game or adjective and I would still say it’s just as bunk. It’s saying that the play outcomes are dominated by the rules text selected.

How does one rectify this with the idea that referees are to hold rules texts lightly, utilizing them as tools to portray a world? How can we claim that one game “requires” emotional connection, and another “punishes” with zero context of how the table is addressing any of this? How are we to ascribe moral qualities to the players of a particular game without being a part of the table they are at?

FKR is about relationships – to rules, to the conversation, to other players, and to play. Certainly, some tools are better than others at certain tasks, but the practice of actually playing is so unique to the individual table instance that I think any attempt to exalt or vilify any particular ruleset in a way where you ascribe unalienable moral, ethical, or societal qualities is not only missing the point to the highest degree – it is actively toxic to what FKR can become.

I do not bemoan anyone who does not like FKR – we can like different things. I also do not bemoan those who have different perspectives on what it is (within reason) – we definitely should be bringing our unique perspectives to the table. What I bemoan is the sadness I feel when I see people who have spent a sizeable amount of time in a place that many first feel excited and ecstatic to explore a playstyle so rarely discussed these days, and they are instead dampened by naysayers and carelords, such that many feel dissuaded from contributing.

Purity tests be damned, but can we at least talk about FKR from a positive, actual play experience before we try to establish theoretical hypotheticals where we argue that the rules text conveys or holds some authority? More “play worlds, not rules” like we’ve been saying for years now?