Navigating Paintings - a review of the Rogue Trader CRPG

I bought this for Christmas and was playing it a bit every evening during my temp job, then I lost that job unexpectedly and at the same time UK got paralysed by dirty snow. I was depressed and  frustrated because I thought the game screwed me out of an achievement, so I made a decision, a really BAD decision; I decided to restart, use a mod to activate ALL romanceable characters across gender and remove jealousy, and re-start the whole game with a new character - a gloriously fancy noble with a high fellowship and moneymaking skills and rock bottom toughness and willpower and commit myself to playing the whole game again as the fanciest boy imaginable. 

And that is what I did, for much longer than I expected, about two weeks I think, though time got a bit formless during the experience, and now I stand before you, finally free from the Koronus Expanse, having completed the whole game, or as close to whole as one persona can reasonably get on one playthrough.

 

Raszard

I have deleted Rogue Trader. Never let me play a CRPG again. 

 

Vast

RT is a vast, ridiculously fat, byzantine structure. Its sheer weight, scope, and the interconnectedness of all its multifaceted systems is both the flaw and the draw. The systems sing when they interrelate in interesting ways that provokes more than the sum of their parts. 

Draws; The gigantism is appropriate for the Warhammer universe and the ever-collapsing Imperium of Man. It actually makes you feel like a Rogue Trader, desperate ruler of a small empire, drowning in problems  and facing everything with the fractured morality of the 41st Millenium. 

Flaws; There are multiple intersecting types of crunch and grind, (which I probably made worse by downloading DLC and leaving ALL romance options open), from grainy grindy battles towards the second half, to the literal accountancy job of progression. There is an Imperium-appropriate companion quest in the game where you literally have to stand in line for days in an Administratum complex and its more fun than the actual bureaucracy of levelling your characters. 

The systems of Rogue Trader are; Navigating Paintings, Reading and Clicking, Murder Chess and the lesser systems of Navigation, Space Battles, Empire Management and Storybooks.

 

 

Navigating Paintings

An isometric system like the old Infinity Engine classics but with the scenes and arenas modelled in 3D and with a swirly camera so you can spin around, and limited 3-dimensionality. 

By limited I mean there are sometimes two 'layers' or levels to a game, with advantageous sightlines, ways to get up or down to and from places and ways to bottleneck and control areas in combat, but the areas you run your little figure around when you are just being a Rogue Trader and talking to people are the same as those you use for combat, to the games advantage when gunfights erupt in places you thought were safe, which they do constantly in the first part of the game, or turn into negotiations, which is more rare but does happen sometimes. 

Most potentially-tactical areas have one or two aspects or elements you can use in combat, like a secret or less obvious flanking path you can find by exploring, or a perch to put a sniper on, and in the later game, some limited interactable elements, like stairways you can materialise and remove if you are in the right place, and objects and items you can mess with to alter the circumstances of a fight. 

They are pretty. Really actually beautiful, and characterful environments, and are all limited in size, very much not procedural or simulated 'real scale' environments but more like 'stages', 'scenes' or chessboards with the narrative being made up of journeys between these stages. And that is both good and bad, because there is no insane wilderness wandering through procedurally generated hexes, like you might have had with earlier CRPG's - but the game has to communicate its sense of scale and vastness through these many journeys between limited stage plays - making it more 'like' a play, in which a story of great events takes place, but  the scene moves from 'court' to 'battlefield' to 'wilderness' with only the inference of an in-between. 

There is a mild conflict, or at least, a managed polarity, between the complexity, detail and baroque nature of the painting-scenes and the gameplay. The 'scenes' are a rhapsody of wild detail, from fecund jungles set with sapphire streams where snakes wriggle between the feet of your characters, to spiky space elf megacities (Drukhari are very 90’s), to the endless pipage and grating and plates of a cogboy world, and this deep overflowing of detail and specificity makes them very good at imbuing the game with the spirit of 40k in all its heaving byzantine gigantism. 

But the tools and methods used for navigating these baroque digital paintings are highly limited, specific and well-honed from making many previous CRPGs. There are traps, which can be found and disarmed by your not-D&D-thieves in the same way as the strangely-rectangular goblin traps in Baldurs Gate, (they are actually a little more complex), fiddly hidden things that glow or are outlined so you can click on them, and secondary routes to places, (but very rarely tertiary or more, there will be an obvious way forward and, if you explore and click about the margins, maybe a less-obvious way, but not the infinity of choices presented by, for instance, a real forgeworld or space ship interior). 

Of course actually making functional use of all this visual and spatial detail would make the game virtually unplayable - investigating every crevice in something like a hive world map would be mindbreaking, though it does leave open the potentiality for a much narrower more 'arty' game with a few very detailed maps and a large amount of context-dependant executable detail in them, I suppose something like being a belowdecks investigator looking into smaller scale dramas.

 

  

Reading And Clicking 

The next most common activity in Rogue Trader is reading dialogue text and clicking one of a range of options. It’s through this that you feel much of the 'reality' of the world. The dialogue is solid, the character writing somewhat better. 

An interesting case of 'known unknowns'; dialogue will sometimes highlight when an option will require a skill test to pass, and will sometimes visibly grey out dialogue options based on how you have played the games morality path - so you could have said this, if you were more Iconoclastic  or more Puritan etc, but aren’t, so you can't. The game is letting you know and making it clear there were other possible paths, but I think there are also truly hidden options, lost and found though high or low intelligence or fellowship scores, though done or undone events and relationships with various characters and organisations. there are times when the game wants you to know you are making a choice with certain consequences and times when it will hide the existence of that choice and those consequences. 

The question of knowing and not knowing when you are making a choice and what it might mean goes down to one of the core conflicts I felt when playing the game. 

if you've played infinity engine games or their ilk before the slightly natural/unnatural sometimes looping gamic structure of the dialogue its more questions-and-answer than more natural dialogue and flows more like an interview. 

There is almost too much dialogue for me to simply review it. The main impression it left me with was its own giganticness, the sheer mass of it, and the incredible organisational systems that must be required to arrange all of it, and to update it. On my second playthrough I added the void shadows expansion and that adds characters and integrates their conversations into the game throughout the whole thing. I almost want to watch a documentary on how Owlcat manages this stuff. 

To return to the known and unknown element; there are characters we meet as NPCs who can clearly become companions, as this is set up in their introduction, we can lose companions, though it’s usually very explicit when this will happen and usually has to be a deliberate choice, (many reviews of the game criticise the fact that your clearly one-way aligned characters stick around way too long if you are obviously going in a different moral direction and don't respond to that enough),

and there are a handful of secret companions who start out as NPCs and can possibly be recruited if you  have the right alignment and pick the right dialogue options. 

I know that if it was easier to 'accidentally' lose companions, like if the battle sister sees you becoming heretical and either leaves or even tries to kill you, this would probably draw complaints, but the addition of more unknown unknowns really adds to the feel and flavour of experiencing a living world, and knowing, or not knowing, precisely who might be recruitable, deepens immersion.

 

Murder Chess 

Though all chess is murder chess I suppose. 

The square-grid turn-based combat is one of the most fun things about the game. The combination of moves, actions, attacks, cover, mutual support, area control etc, makes the fights feel very lively and fun, especially in the early game when you only have shit guns and your characters haven't levelled to absurdity. 

The combat brings together a lot of the 'material' aspects of the game; all the weapons you found, recovered or traded for, the elaborate procedure of 'dressing your dolls' with the best possible armour and clothes, and the mildly pleasurable autism of balancing boots that give plus one movement if an adjacent character is upset vs shoes with knives that let you kick someone in the nuts and so on

The weapons also 'feel' chunky and appropriate. Sister Argenta’s familiar bolter sound was so loud I had to go into the settings to turn down effects. 

Positioning and planning your little chess pieces, preparing sightlines and trying to control areas with grenades and magic powers, trying to make sure your psyker or nutty tech priest only explodes the enemy and not you, planning when you will pull out your special sword for a super swing, or organising your character build so you can dual-attack, trying to position your officer character so they can hand out buffs and extra movements, setting things and people on fire, is great fun. 

I played this on normal difficulty and by the last part of the game most fights were too easy to be interesting in themselves. A few stuck out as having abnormal or wild difficulty. I could have turned the difficulty up, to make things more interesting, but by the last act the sheet length of the game and the number of battles I had to fight became a weight on its own - many had turned from something I 'got' to do into something I 'had' to do to progress (also I probably should have turned off the non-attack animations, the game does give you the options for this), and the general deep sweaty graininess of the combat and character progression system also became a weight of its own 

If you are a different kind of person I think playing on very hard and continuing to carefully analyse and progress your characters might still be fun 

A few interesting points; 

The true currency of the Krononus Expanse is.... GRENADES! Especially sustained area-effect grenades like smoke, toxin or fire. These are incredibly useful for dealing with big fights where your best tactic will be to try to lock off areas of the board and control the flow of enemies into choke points where you can maintain your characters in close proximity to aid each other. Even at the early points, I was the master of a city sized starship and hope of the dynasty, but I kept running out of grenades and especially useful ones. Like, I can have a gun that fires alien dreams or whatever, and apparently we never run out of ammo for that, I get infinite reloads, but I cannot get a fire grenade to save my life - I'm meeting with the Governor of a whole world who is offering me a trade deal and I'm looking for the option to ask for a handful of grenades. The same is true of melta-charges; specific demolition items that can open boxes and sometimes in open up new paths and areas of the board - if you are trying to 100% the game I think you can actually get soft-locked because there are not an infinite number of melta charges in the Koronus expanse - you can only buy or find so many so be careful. 

Sightlines work surprisingly well and intuitively. Sidling up to a corner to peek round is something that actually works. Turn based character will hide behind something and pop out to shoot. Neat red lines indicate all their possible sightlines, snipers and careful skilled single shot ranged weapons users can often fire into combat but your normal close range guy and mid-range people will have real trouble doing so. Having a sniper is fun and satisying, they are someone who can deal with enemy snipers, which is very useful, reliably dish out high damage on key enemies, but there is again a slightly grindy quality to carefully selecting a target, then one after another sequentially applying all your different buffs, each time the camera swiiiiiings across the battlefield and you have to drag it back, then clicking 'fire' and hopefully watching some goon hiding behind soft cover a mile away totally evaporate. Again it’s the crunchyness and the infinity of mild effects, the careful application of the same buffs in fight after fight, that might be something you 'get' to so, but might turn into something you 'have' to do. 

 

The Space Marine character, once you get them, is surprisingly mid. Or at least, they are a very chunky tanky guy who hits mildly hard and shoots reliably, which sounds like a disappointment but is actually how space marines tend to play on the tabletop, (unless they are optimised for something else); very very survivable heavy infantry that shoot reliably at close range and fight ok, but less good at any of those things than your by-now more specialised characters. 

I feel like the combat system, and Owlcat generally, really need to make a Necromunda game. In terms of personalities, drama, large scale intersecting systems representing a complex world;

they have worked that out, and the early fights are better specifically because you have crappy tech and weapons, limited buffs that relate more clearly to the imagined world, and limited character options so you have to think more about using them, which fits well with Necromunda. Owlcat even managed to get their engine to create a 'dark' level where you can barely see anything and your little lumen servo-skull follows your cursor, which surely they could adapt into Necromunda. Their visually dense and carefully made maps are already good, the one limitation is dimensionality. Most Rogue Trader area have two levels and that’s about it, and characters cannot pass 'underneath' other characters if they are on a gantry or something, so really its one level but at different heights, which would be a challenge for underhive play, but their ladders and movement up and down work really well, and the often fancy oblique sightlines and stuff like throwing a grenade from above actually function well 

 

Crunchy Levelling 

The levelling is really where the systems gigantism and hyper-detail brings together its arguably-less-good aspects. I feel like computer games are a good place for the very crunchy but still human-operable systems like the Final Flight system Rogue Trader is built on, since the machine can handle the endless series of buffs and details but the core number system is still comprehensible enough that humans can fiddle with it. 

In RT you level up across three 'wheels' and you level up a LOT. You start with basically a core class which often relates to your characters lived background; Soldier, Psyker, Officer etc, then once your characters max that out you go to a second wheel that is a bit more abstract; ‘Arch-Militant’, ‘Executioner' ? Then once you max that out, you go to a third wheel which is nearly the same for everyone, the 'Exemplar' wheel. There are fifty something 'levels' in the game and five 'chapters' so you will be levelling regularly. 

ITS VERY GRAINY 

Some core choices are simple, like 'you get this magic power', 'you get dual-wield (its shit without the right stats and buff)' and 'you get another action point' or 'you can wear heavy armour now', but a lot, a lot a lot, are more like 'you get times two this derived value in when X equals double efficiency stack'. (THE FUCKING STACKS). Basically if you have a high IQ, or just really really like excel sheets and deriving figures, you can build probably some insane broken characters to do specific things, but if you are like me, in the middle of the graph or just fucking basic, the 'normal' sensible choices run out quickly and it’s very easy to soft-lock or bollock up a character, like did you know an 'Executioner' specialises in deepening and exploiting long-term damage like people being poisoned or on fire? So if you want to select that when it comes up, you really need to have a character that is good at those things, or a bounty hunter gets big bonuses for personally taking out characters they have marked, so they need to be mobile or have strong range. 

None of this is super-difficult, and is quite fun to begin with, but it’s the main drift of the game where its scale, detail and length all add together to make it more of an annoying weight rather than a fun weight. 

Did I mention that all of your companions all level at the same time? You can only ever take six on a mission - the rest just hang around on the ship, (presumably training hard), so, every time you level up and get back to the ship you have to go through the HUGE lists of feats and incremental buffs and special tricky powers, which are usually a bit different from character to character, compare those with your companions core competencies, stats, improved stats from items, favourite weapons, the way you tend to use them in fights, and, if you are a drama queen like me, the type of person you think they are, and you synthesise these all together and click 'this' or 'that' option from a huge range and hope you haven't accidentally soft-locked yourself from not being able to wear power armour or something in twenty levels time (which I actually did with my main character, and had to re-train them, which you can do, but again, you have to choose EVERY level again, which is a ten minute job). And you have to do this for ALL AVAILABLE CHARACTERS with every level-up. THE FUCKING CRUNCH! 

This is the part of the game most like work. I still had fun with it, especially in the early to mid game. It went along with the whole 'dressing your dolls' aspect but it became less fun as the game went towards its end and for characters I didn't 'like' or rarely used, I just ended up clicking whatever to get them out of the way. I did go from 'yes, another level' in acts one and two to 'oh my god fuck not another  level' in acts four and five. 

[A side note; the instability and violence of imperial society, and the constant intrigues and real physical dangers at the top of the pyramid, (in the first parts of the game you get attacked pretty regularly in high and low status areas, even to the extent that it becomes a bit silly), all does fit with the background, and does make sense of imperial characters taking sword and pistol literally everywhere they go. If I was any of these people I would be taking my looted drukhari blast pistol into the bath and to bed because of course someone is going to try to assassinate you in the bath, it’s the best place for it, and of course demons will materialise in your bedroom during a warp transition, and of course the local rebels will try to shoot you down over the governors palace, where else would they do it? yes I am taking my fucking chainsword to the dinner reception, and so is everyone else, are you fucking stupid?]

 

 

The Lesser Systems 

Navigation 

This is neat. It’s a really simple system but encapsulates an interesting paradox of navigation and exploration in games. A terrible incident destroys your dynasties knowledge of the stable warp routes of the expanse, and warp routes in this area shift regularly anyway, so what you have is a map with a bunch of stars with mysterious names, some of which you know are important to you,

and are a handful of potential warp routes already highlighted. Every time you reach a new system you can hit a spooky button to chart new routes which sends out a magical sonar blip which might highlight some new routes between places, maybe some whole new systems you didn’t know about before, it also gives you Navigation points, which represent your navigators skills and knowledge gained from going to new places, and you can use these points to either make warp routes less horrifically-dangerous,  or to forge brand new routes to discovered or already known systems. 

This balance of discovery to opportunity to making-safe, all bound by your rate of exploration itself

works... pretty well. Like a few things in RT, it can be possible to accidently soft lock yourself out of things and in my first playthrough I didn't understand what I was doing, accidentally burnt my points by making an inconsequential route green and then got attacked by demons everywhere else. But its a fun system generally. 

The paradox about game navigation I feel it highlights is the discovery of the known. Because actual totally undiscovered places in real life, I mean places undiscovered by anyone, are actually very dull and not useful. At takes sustained human interest and activity to turn a totally unknown place into one where exciting and useful things might be found and exploited, and where dramas might happen

so, like in a lot of games and stories, what you are exploring in the Koronus expanse is the forgotten rather than the unknown, and the game deepens this in many ways - there are lost imperial ships, forgotten frozen colonies, strange bunkers, abandoned mines, lost cities, mysterious research sites around impossible objects etc. This adds to the deep sense that the border of the imperium is not something it is expanding into, but a deep tidal zone, that imperial power expands into and retreats from on the scale of millennia, reaching forth when strong or driven, fading away at other times, only to  be rediscovered by new ages, that what you are exploring, others have explored, many times, and will again, and this add to the sense of tragedy and deep time that creates part of the sorrowful nature of the setting and which feeds into the morality or sense-of-self of its characters. They are truly the children of the ruins. 

 

 

Space Battles 

There is a cool ship combat system based on the Battlefleet Gothic rules, where space ships manoeuvre in curves and arcs, trying to get each other in their prow or broadside ranges, and in the case of imperial ships, trying to set up the rare ramming opportunity. Few things are more fun than the occasional chance to Plow madly into the prow or stern of some giant chaos battleship or mysterious alien artefact, one thing I miss from my original character was her crazed voice lines from ship combat, she went off like a lony supervillian with every battle; 

"CHAAARGE THE LANCES! FIIIIRE!" 

Winning these ship combats gets you access to certain planets and spaces. Planets either have nothing, but you get xp for discovering them, some have exploitable resources to feed your growing empire, some have dialogue-only away missions where you send guys out to investigate mysterious ruins etc, and some have actual full adventure zones. 

Ship Battles interlock with two factions in the game you encounter in various forms; the Navy and the Flellowship of the Void (Pirates), each of which can trade you various handy things if you build enough of a reputation with them. 

 

Empire Management 

Once you have a few planets under your belt you can start making horrific management decisions about what projects to build there and how to govern them. Depending on how good a ruler you are, how much resources you can gather etc. There are limits on what you can build, some projects getting you certain rare resources, special items, (my late-game familial power armour came from one of these options on my main planet), and locking off other later options. 

There are also mystery events or crises that require your personal intervention, which means you have to hare off across the map again to return to a colony to tell them to stop being idiots about something. Having a meaningful empire means doing a lot of governing, so I hope you spent those navigator points carefully to green the routes between your main planets. 

A fair amount of the mid-game of RT is being in the middle of something important and getting a message saying your need to race across the expanse to deal with something else. 

 

Storybooks 

The last system is an interesting one. Certain events or situations will trigger a multiple-choice storybook section. This is like a chronicle or a tale told from a certain perspective, of a time someone encountered the Lord  Captain, where your protagonist is a character in their story. 

So at various points, you might be about to invade a world to free it from chaos and the story of the invasion is told from the perspective of one of the grunts on the ground with your decisions and skill tests deciding how the invasion goes, or at another point your get the first person story of a Drukhari Scourge given the contract of assassinating the mon-keigh leader, with your character being the subject of their hunt and your choices deciding how the hunt goes, or as the tribal retelling of the story of when the great leader came from the stars and what they did. 

These are interesting for a variety of reasons; they offer a relatively quick and cheap method of dealing with huge events and complex situations without having yet another dialogue tree, they build the sense of gravity of the reality by showing your character from a variety of different perspectives - to a tribesman or soldier you are a semi-mythical figure, they challenge your skills and abilities with the familiar known and unknown unknowns, in most dialogue and painting-navigation sections, your character can 'use' the skills of your retinue to deal with challenges, which leads to you carefully developing and selecting characters to be good at certain things, if you think there might be traps you need the Aeldari ranger high perception to find them, and someone good at demolitions to disarm them, if there is warp fuckery you might need to bring the inquisitor, but in the book sections is it’s your abilities alone that decide things. 

In my first playthrough my character was smart, strong minded and good at shooting, so they were an icy intelligent type that made them a competent sniper on the battlefield, gave them perhaps hidden dialogue options from a high intelligence and let them face down scary threats with high Willpower. But shit fellowship, persuasion and commerce, so actually not that good at a lot of 'governing a star empire' events. My second character was a noble fancy boy with super high fellowship and commerce, but I actively tried to keep his willpower and toughness low for as long as possible, so he was rubbish in a fight unless he had people to command. 

These storybook sections really highlighted the difference between them, with the icy sniper Isabella dealing relatively well with physical stuff when isolated, but being bad at persuading people or altering events, while Valerian Von Valencius, my posh fancy boy, was in absolute pantsshitting terrorgdanger with solitary adventure sections, but actually very good at managing people, doing diplomacy and managing his empire.

 

  

Love And Failure - Did I Fail The Game? 

I played this game one-and-a-bit times. Once with my first character, when I nearly go to the end of the second act, and again with my second character, where I played the whole thing all the way through. 

My first time I really didn't know what I was doing and made a bunch of mistakes, soft locking myself out of certain things and generally being non-optimal, but my sheer lack of knowledge about what I was doing lead to me being much more immersed in every individual choice as that character

even though the game was going less well overall. I was overwhelmed by events and systems and everything, but this frantic sense meant that I felt like my protagonist; constantly on the move

uncertain, not knowing what choice or option might lead where, weighting my dialogue choices and strategic choices more like a person than a player. 

On my second run I knew more about the game, already knew what would happen in much of the first two acts, and my character was deliberately unbalanced, designed more to be a particular person with a strong set of abilities and weaknesses. I also downloaded the Void Shadows DLC, which added a whole bunch to the game. 

In some ways Valerian Von Valencius felt more like a rogue trader, while my first character, Isabella, refused to take a bath, Valerian did so immediately, presumably as a noble it was simply his nature, and he ended up bathing with every member of his entourage over time, but in other ways, though he was, in some ways, more optimised to be a 'person', he, (meaning I), had lost our ignorance, our unknowing of what meant what and what was to be. I was less immersed, because I knew more. 

It’s very hard to play a game and not try to optimise yourself, but that very instinct is in conflict with a deeper desire or impulse; the need to really experience events, from the first time, un-warned in advance and unknowing of their consequences. 

Throughout the game RT deliberately plays with veils, giving you some choices with clear causes, consequences and mechanics, others blind, some given without reason, others removed. You never really know when the game will respond 'as a game' or when it will simulate a world, with strange long term consequences resulting from apparently minor choices or effects. This slightly shadowy 'magic trick' quality seems another curious paradox of play, one central to the RPG experience;

the strange gift of ignorance. 

I did cheat at times. 

There are cheats I defend and would do again. Using the toybox mod to activate ALL romance options across gender and removing the jealousy feature; why this is simply how a true Rogue Trader would play. 

Likewise, there were a handful of annoying multiple-choice shit riddle questions where you have to either relentlessly examine tiny fragments of environmental information and then postulate from those the correct sequence of answers with no indication of which in the sequence might be right or wrong, or just brute-force them. I looked those up and I feel fine about it. They were shit challenges. 

The deeper question of what it actually means to play blind, and what and where the value of a game lies, of the fundamental difference between meeting an apparently complex situation for the first time in ignorance, and therefore treating it as fundamentally more-real, and meeting it for a second or more times, and the deep conflict within myself of wanting to experience vs wanting to 'get things right', I am no closer to resolving. Though perhaps by accepting it I can manage it better.

 

I got a Goth Girlfriend, and a hot Mutant Bae, but they both left me in the end…..

Thief and Butterfingered Infinity

In one of my rare excursions into gaming, I recently finished 'Thief: The Black Parade'; a full game of fan-made missions for the 199-something “immersive sim” (before we had that phrase) – ‘Thief: The Dark Project’.

I originally conceived this article as an essay on the concept of ‘Butterfingered Infinity’; something about the uses and limitations of ‘natural language’ as compared to, and revealed by, a complex virtual simulation like Thief. 

In the end it became just the meat in a thief burger, with the start being a distaff review of a much-reviewed game and the end being an odd mix of suggestions for D&D.

The Thief-Review is below. 

The essay on Butterfingered Infinity in the middle.

Thief’s Lessons for D&D at the end.

Why Thief is Good

Thief was a nearly pure-stealth simulator which, through talent, work and luck, coalesced into perhaps the best stealth game. Other reviewers have talked about why this is in more depth than me; its engine, built specifically around shadow, its first-person nature, its exquisite and carefully engineered sound design, and the integration of that sound into its level design and its relationship with violence and the vulnerability of its main character.

[A brief digression on stealth and violence; they don’t mix. Stealth and murder, (or, if you are batman, stealth and a beating), make an intoxicating combination, such that, if you build a complex immersive sim, where both stealth and violence are available, any sane character build will naturally coalesce around some kind of stealth-archer or stealth-assassin - as this is optimal in-game and feels powerful to the player. 

Then, if the game wants to make the now hugely-empowered player behave in a purely-stealthy fashion, to fit the theme and feel of the game, they need to add in extra-diegetic elements, rulings, 'points*' and so on in order to make the player-character behave 'stealthily' and, in the words of one reviewer; ‘you are being stealthy to protect the NPCs from you, not to protect you from them’. 

This is a mistake no game in the Thief series ever makes, since the Player Character is always, by Protagonist standards, insanely vulnerable, and sword fights are a nightmare. The structure of the game, without extra-diegetic elements, makes you want to play as a thief. It’s a game where you can snipe people in the back of the head, but won't want to as it would feel unprofessional.

{A digression with a digression on ‘points’; There should be some neo-OSR ruling about points being the opposite of gold as, just as xp for gold is almost always good and feeds dietetically in so many ways into the game, there is a kind of reverse of that, in which, as soon as 'points' are involved in anything, it almost always gets worse, though the means and method of how that happens will vary greatly.}]

The Black Parade

Based on the engine for the original ‘Thief’, Black Parade is large and complex enough to be a fourth game in the franchise. For free. Which is, I think, larger than any of the other games, and might be the best one? At least I think it has more consistently high level design than any other version of the game.

Its staggering really that a small number of talented people could collaborate for so many years

to produce something both so massive, and so exquisite. Thief was always a distantly OSR-ish game and its fan-mission community is even more so. For ‘The Black Parade’ Melan gets a mention in the credits!

The Paradoxes of Thief Level Design

What defines Thief games more than anything else is level design and it is here that some of the interrelationships between Thief and the OSR are brought into focus

Fear, Desire, Exploration and Investigation

In 'Thief', you think like a thief. You are vulnerable and can be killed easily, so you carefully watch, and LISTEN, to the environment, constantly checking for threats. You also hide relentlessly, moving carefully from shadow to shadow, cursing electric lights and marble floors. Your only real safety is the darkness and so you cling to it instinctively, even when there is no tangible threat, because there might be one; a wandering guard or servant, or something else. 

So fear and vulnerability ensure you deeply and constantly search, investigate and utilise the environment, and when these are naturalistic environments, you are deliberately navigating them in a way that feels ‘inverse’ and therefore a little cool. You might be in a kitchen and, instead of doing Kitchen things, be searching for fragments of shadow in the light coming from the stove, creeping behind shelves etc.

You are a Thief, you want to steal not kill. There are no points for killing and increasing the difficulty of the game (usually) only increases the conditions of play, not the substance of the game itself. Maximum difficulty means getting all of the treasure without killing and sometimes even without harming anyone. {Thief does mix this up somewhat with the easy availability of the blackjack, with which you can "knock people out" (irl this would likely mean a lot of brain embolisms), but only if you catch them unawares}.

Desire keeps you fixated on that shiny artefact on the dresser, and carefully avoiding anything sensate or alive. Guards walk regular routes and chat with each other, and this means a chunk of Thief is listening for and measuring the movements of others, so you can avoid them. In almost every case you are searching for a way around anything dangerous. You are continually mapping the physical space in your head and also the routes and movements of any living thing within that space.

The Music of Pseudo-Naturalism

The best thief levels are pseudo-natural. You can intuit things about them from their nature and then investigate based on those intuitions, and sometimes be right, which makes you feel very clever stately home will have a kitchen and cellars, a Cathedral will have a belltower, etc. They are also physically distinct and separate from the surrounding area. 

The urban slum levels are slightly less-perfect because the pseudo-nature of the level becomes more obvious; there are unopenable doors and inaccessible areas; PNG’s of doors on buildings that rim the play area. Though you can still try opening them, and discover from the games response if they are actually just PNG doors, or would respond to a lockpick or yet-to-be-found key. A handful will turn out to be functional, as you will discover when you find the right thing to open them, or pop up from the other side after dicking about in a sewer for hours.

Still, it’s curious that in D&D there are no unopenable doors, or at least, there are no simulated doors. The play area, in theory, expands outwards forever, and in practice, only becomes misty, general and improvisational as you move out of whatever the DM has thought about already, (but come back next week and the details will have sharpened up a lot).

But, just like Dungeons’, Thief levels are almost never purely naturalistic. Firstly; they are simulated environments, and can’t match the chaos or complexity of the real world, second; they have locked doors which need keys, sequences of actions needed to progress, certain pieces of intelligence which must be combined to succeed; they have paths, like flow-charts, which lace through these otherwise wide-open environments.

Still they are otherwise very wide open, with a large array of possible ingress points, secret routes and other possible access-ways that strongly reward exploration, investigation and, sometimes, cunning extrapolation from the logic of the depicted world. Nothing is quite as pleasurable in Thief as spotting a chimney, pipe or ledge, wondering if you can get to it, finding a way to, then realising you can find a way inside/across, then popping up somewhere you should never have been able to get to.

There are “weird” Thief levels too, set in ancient magical tombs, lost cities or supernatural netherworlds, but they are never quite as good. Great Thief levels exist at a near perfect synthesis of  naturalistic play-space and toyetic, planned sequential-challenge environment. They are levels where the nature of the space provokes investigation and exploration, which it also rewards with naturalistic opportunities, where a complex adventure-flow runs through the pseudo-naturalistic space but where the space always gives opportunities for adaptation, evasion and incursion. A toybox with the lid half-open if you will.

Butterfingered Infinity

Thief is actively trying to give you an experience very like that of an AD&D Thief, and does so, in a curious mirror-view fashion, but the differences between a Thief in play in D&D, and a Thief in Thief, are interesting to consider.

Problem solving in D&D is often related to the concept of ‘tactical infinity’ due to the very wide-open nature of possible approaches to various problems, but its more like a ‘Butterfingered Infinity’ in which the Players can hold and use almost any imaginable, or describable, concept, but carefully, and with blunt inexactness. The infinity of the Word rather than the Vast but Finite potential of the Eye.

An Equation on the Utility of Butterfingered Infinity

A very rough pseudo-equation on the utility of words in roleplaying might be something like this;

[The Descriptive Power of Language] – [[(word concepts the DM actually knows) x [(The Speed of relation) + (what the Player Group can easily understand)]]

The Descriptive Power of Language

There are a lot of words. If you have enough time and a big enough dictionary, you can describe almost anything. It we assume the total potential of words, and look for things they absolutely cannot describe, there is not much, but here we enter paradox, because we are trying to use words to describe what words can’t describe.

(This is a problem which exists continually, as a faint umbra, which sometimes obscures and sometimes reveals, whenever we come to think about the things language can’t do, in almost any situation.)

But, so far as things that could be interacted with in a tabletop game, a computer game or any other form of simulation, let’s assume that words might be able to describe nearly everything necessary to know

How much the DM actually knows

The classic DM is a natural word-hound and Gygaxian Wunderkammer encyclopaedist. Not a few writers have named D&D as a font for their discovery and use of words, and the use of strange or novel words can, with limits, be a pleasurable aspect in itself in D&D.

Lets assume the DM knows a lot of words.

Speed of relation

We can describe anything if we have time. But technical, unfamiliar jargon, and highly precise measurements, as well as large numbers of things or elements, will all take time, which robs immediacy, and in some theoretical cases, perhaps a truly insane amount of time.

How much and how easily the players understand

For a concept to be useful, it has to be known to at least some of the players. A rare word-concept only the DM knows is a near-useless word-concept. It is the Player Group that must understand. I real terms this means, probably (?), at least two or three know it and can easily explain to the rest. If this happens many times in sequence, the game dies.

No-one is paying as much attention to the whole thing as the DM. Every individual has a totally different base capacity for imagining different things, so the words flow out, are half attended to

and when they are attended to, are understood differently by almost everyone. In effect, a DM has a relatively small ‘armoury’ of words and conceptual language which is strong, simple, descriptive and already mutually understood by almost everyone, from which they can take excursions into complexity, for short periods and specific problems, but which they always return to. We can think of this as the ‘verbal armoury’ or word-hoard of natural language. The aspects of spatial and physical situations that make up the meat and majority of D&D problem solving are those for which or conceptual language is already well developed and widely shared, and which can be imagined with ease by a wide variety of people. 

So: being STUCK to something, being TIED to someone. Being BEHIND someone. Getting a LEG UP.  In fact in terms of three-dimensional space, these are all things most of us did as children, which is why we understand them. For many of us who are not athletes or dancers, childhood was our first, last and by a large margin, greatest education in the nature of three-dimensional space and the language of physical problems remains that of the playground.

Responses to ‘The Limitations of Language’

I asked people on Twitter and Facebook about “things and situations you have experienced as a DM, which have proven really difficult to describe quickly and clearly using *only* spoken words?

(The classic is trying to describe a complex 3D environment to a bunch of people but I am interested in other examples.)”

The responses were very interesting!

Tim Samwise Seven Harper; “I sometimes struggle with describing natural environments filled with fantasy plants and animals. I always try to picture those scenes from Dark Crystal and that helps, or I default more toward real trees and plants as well as real life animals with a twist.

Big parties with hundreds of NPCs are always a challenge. I tend to use 3x5 cards with a few descriptive words on each NPC card.”

Yuri Zanelli; “PC's and other creatures' positions in their environment. Miniatures can help a lot with that, but I don't like to use them. My game tables tend to be already too crowded with maps, manuals, bottles, snacks, character sheets, dice, notepads and so on. I tend to use a quick sketch on a sheet of paper.”

Greg Benedicto; “Describing liminal elements in a scene WITHOUT drawing obvious attention to them.”

Jesse Rooney; “As a general rule, spacial relationships are much easier and faster to show then tell. Hence minis at the table. There are a number of times when playing theater of the mind that Ive pulled out a sketch pad to demonstrate who and what is where.”

John Enfield; “That's why I use gridded maps (either hand drawn or published), minis and occasionally terrain pieces. Having visual aids helps aid in describing environments.”

Ragnar Hill; “A good ambush because players always start squealing and panicking and then I get over excited.”

PARAMANDER @CravenSensation; “Mechanisms or devices made of many parts and monsters with complicated and alien anatomy. Even if each detail is relatively straightforward/easy to visualize, more details means higher potential for miscommunication + more attention required on the part of the players”

Derek Dees @NihilSineLabor; “Places with lots of shadows and light, not sharp contrasts, but layered or with partially obscured nooks and objects.

The Great Hall of Durin, as light broke through, but shadows still engulfed so much, for example.”

Bo Banducci @bo_banducci; “I’m struggling to remember one aside from the classic. Possibly when an NPC is lying to the players and I want to intimate this somehow without giving it away.”

Synthesis of Responses

I broke these down into a few large categories as a tool-of-thought, (with the usual effect that many real-life situations involve one or more categories, often in point and counterpoint.)  

These provide a very brief idea-map of things with which ‘Words’ are especially butterfingered;

PLETHORALITY

“natural environments filled with fantasy plants and animals”

“Big parties with hundreds of NPCs”

“Mechanisms or devices made of many parts and monsters with complicated and alien anatomy”

We know about these things because we encounter them in life, and the Eye can show them to us easily and immediately – well, if not quite immediately, a scene or painting can give us a very quick general impression of a scene with many things of strange and novel quality in it, which the scanning of the eye-and-mind can ‘fill in’ very smoothly and fluidly, much faster than words could describe. When the eye works with the ear, they can combine, bind and represent a truly complex scene, in but a moment. Nature can present deep, immediate and novel interconnected complexity in-one. Words are slow, specific and sequential, happening one after another, and sometimes blunt. These are two forms of time in conflict.

Thief does well with some forms of ‘Plethorality’; its ‘big views’ where you teeter on a rooftop and get a nice ’Batman’-esque view of a highly vertical city, are exciting and poetic, and also useful as you start planning routes and investigating things with the eye. But Thief, like other virtual simulations, is strongly limited in the number of active, moving, identifiable, people and living things it has going on. Not quite as much as words, but a fair amount. They really eat programming power.

DIMENSIONALITY

“PC's and other creatures' positions in their environment”

“As a general rule, spacial relationships are much easier and faster to show then tell”

Or more prosaically; physical positioning and complex three-dimensional situations. But ‘Dimensionality’ sounds cooler. 

In Thief the exact precision of a jump, climb or any other kind of movement, can be demonstrated in the substance of the world with deep subtlety and immediate precision. As in; “*this* I can jump on” to “*here* I can climb on to in a few moments”, “*here* I can climb up to, if I have equipment”. 

The assessments are fluid, rapid and immediate, and this is a key part of the game. A patrolling guard is here and going this way, the next pool of shadow is over here and it will take me this long over the loud marble floor to get there. Then a climb of this length, then.. and so on.. Immediate, intuitive, fast. 

A similar thing takes place with even small skirmishes, let along larger ones. Close physical positioning matters enormously and is very hard to communicate, accurately, and quickly, to a group. For this were sketch-maps made. Words alone have a butterfingered grasp on three-dimensional space.

LIMINALITY

“WITHOUT drawing obvious attention to them”

“A good ambush “

“Possibly when an NPC is lying to the players”

If problems with describing three-dimensional space were what I expected, and problems with ‘Plethorality’ were less expected, but make sense, then ‘Liminality’; secrets, shadows, deceptions and double meanings, in all ways, is an unexpected but quite beautiful problem to face.

It’s the illusionists problem. Or an actors problem. It seems to flow deeply from the situation of the GM or storyteller being the fount of both the reality as-a-whole, and of a deception within that reality.

A simple example; a scene in a visual narrative like a play or film. One character is lying. The actor and director want the audience to know they are lying. But the characters in the fiction are not supposed to know. How to solve this?

The answer depends entirely on the naturalism and subtlety of the fiction, its tellers and its audience. In a pantomime or cheesy melodrama, or a children’s play, its relatively simple, at least in concept; the mustachoed villain twirls their moustache and even cocks an eye at the audience, before saying “of course not! Bwahahaha!”.

The more naturalistic the drama becomes, the more complex and difficult the lie becomes to communicate. For a soap actor, a touch of archness, for a dramatic actor, a complex scene-setting and capturing by the director to prepare the way for the lie and leave the right kind of space around it, for a highly naturalistic ‘spy’ or intrigue drama – almost nothing maybe, but the tone and emotional volume of the scene must be low or even and this might suit best a modernist story where the audience just never finds out what the ‘truth’ is, or at least that ‘finding out’ isn’t central to what the story is doing.

For other kinds of secrets, they have been written about in depth by many people. How, and how often, to portray lying NPC’s, (my last read on OSR culture was that it was generally anti deceptive NPC’s because they were over-used, difficult to get right and crippled the PCs long term relationship with the game-world, leading to more murderhoboism than desired), huge debates and discussions on how to run investigations, (what does or doesn’t count as railroading), and clues, (the ‘three clue rule’), 

“Places with lots of shadows and light, not sharp contrasts, but layered or with partially obscured nooks and objects.”

This was an especially interesting response as, I didn’t even mention Thief in the question, and literal complex environments full of layered shadow is the main thing that Thief does. They built an engine specifically for the game called ‘the shadow engine’. 

Though this has strong elements of Plethorality, (the simultaneous number of things and their complexity), and Dimensionality, (its about a large, complex, 3D space), the fact that it is also about the revealed/unrevealed paradox at the heart of Liminality is fascinating to me.

Words find it hard to form reliable shadows and perceptible lies. Words can lie easily, but its very hard to get them to build a lie as-object. 

Thief Lessons

Considering the deep differences revealed between the world of the Eye and Virtual Simulation, and the world of the Word, and social, conversational simulation, are there lessons we can actually learn from Thief about how to run D&D? Or are the worlds so different that we might even deliberately not  try to transfer lessons between them, as they would lead to bad play?

Here are a handful of concepts from Thief and some comments from me on how and whether they might be useful in D&D.

‘Ghost Missions’

Even the hardest level of Thief doesn’t demand that you be seen by no-one, but high settings often insist you hurt no-one.

In D&D the effects of a difficulty setting or complex level can be delivered diegeticaly by a highly specific quest-giver; a priest or wizard wants something, and insists that you ‘kill no-one’ or ‘hut no-one’ or in extreme versions ‘are never seen at all’, performing a ‘perfect ghost’ Mission Impossible situation where the incursion takes place and no one ever knows it happened at all.

(Of course the Party get paid a lot for fulfilling these conditions.)

A mission like this already implies a very different kind of D&D, a quest based around planning, surveillance, mapping and intelligence gathering, and then a quick and complex incursion full of distractions. 

Difficult to pull of in D&D, but far from impossible,

Sketchy Maps

Thief usually provides a map for each mission, and it is always a vague map. A sketch map with some useful information, but a huge amount of things it doesn’t tell you. Its usually enough for you to orient yourself in the play area and tell where the major sections roughly are, but absolutely insists you explore to find out what you need to know.

More sketchy dungeon and play area maps before games might be a good idea. Diegetic literal ‘sketch maps’ by previous thieves and adventurers. Maps good enough for you to form the bones of a plan, but clearly vague enough that you know going in that they won’t describe everything. 

Monster PATROLS, not Monster ROOMS

God damn patrols are hard to manage in D&D without a lot of extra shit. No wonder monsters in D&D just really like their particular rooms. Its easy to simulate one or two from the encounter table, but a key element of Thief is timing the patrols. If patrols are regular or even mostly regular and predictable, then they become part of the environment you can learn about and plan for, and evading or subverting them makes you feel very clever as a player.

Arranging a full system of patrols for a dungeon or wizards tower would probably require an entire sub-system, but it might be fun to give it a try.

Clumsy Monsters with Keys

There should be more clumsy monsters carrying VERY OBVIOUS keys through the darkness. Big, dumb stupid but dangerous ogre guards who could easily one-shot a PC if they see them, with huge gold or silver keys hanging by their sides.

I’ve spoken at length before about how the big, dumb, dangerous ogre is the perfect low-level opponent for D&D. 

Helix Views/Verticality

Dark-Souls helix-like atriums. In terms of dungeon design, this would be a game where there is more up and down. A dungeon arranged around a step well, inside a tower, down a mountains slope or similar. 

Tempting Treasure

Would being able to SEE the treasure really have the same effect in a described game as in a virtual simulation? 

For the main treasure, the idea is that, from most points of ingress, the main treasure the PCs are here to get is very visible, in a revered-panopticon style, but very hard to actually get to. I imagine it poised on the top of a tower, itself at the bottom of a vast cylindrical step-well or similar. You have to infiltrate all the way down, and then all the way up to get to it. 

Thief has a lot of visually obvious, but very hard to reach, small and light treasures. So many in fact that it becomes hard to believe you have fit them all in your Thief-sack. Rather than having lots of mixed, hidden treasures in a dungeon-equivalent, what if instead, there were a small number of very gold and shiny very visible treasures, each in the centre of a complex, shadowy environment with guards patrolling, traps and other hidden obstacles, so it was easy to see where the treasure was, but very hard to work out how to get to it.

Discoverable Pseudo-False Alarms

A ‘ghost’ mission which demands perfect, or near perfect, stealth, (from a group), and pseudo-naturalistic patrolling guards, suggests a very binary result to mistakes. Which is; you make one, are discovered, alarm raised, mission a dead loss and now you are just fighting to get away.

In D&D you have a group who all need not to fuck up, and there is no quicksave, so some of the binary, complex and difficult challenges of Thief just won’t work.

An idea might be a way of artificially cancelling a general alarm. Or several ways, but each one only works once and is specific. This would be the equivalent of modern Thieves calling in to the police station with the password to tell them it’s a false alarm.

If the guards are big dumb ogres, and other things with less adaptability, like ghosts or constructs, then its not impossible there might be some kind of code or sign to get them to stop banging the Big Bell, blowing the alarm horn or whatever it is. Ideally, each of these methods would be completely different, and you would need to actually do the incursion and poke around to find some of them out. There would also likely be a max-usage, where, if you trigger the alarm three times, even if you have methods spare, even the Ogres are going to keep ringing the bell.

Visual Verticality

One of the most fun and engaging elements of a Thief level, if its pseudo-natural, is getting up really high, maybe somewhere you had spotted earlier, and climbing about, pulling a batman, looking down at the streets and tenements, the little guards scurrying about, and having a Cid Kagenou moment as you cackle to yourself about all the SHEEP below you!

For all the reasons give above in ‘Plethorality’ – this would be hard to make use of.

One method would be to combine the ‘Coms Snails’ idea below, with an ‘Eagles Perch’ position. Some hidden spot far above the play area with a big view that allows one person to sit there and whisper information to their fellow PCs as they buzz about below, each on their individual missions.

Comms snails

My old teen players got a bunch of silver-shelled telepathic snails and ended up using them as in-ear comms. In a Noisms game, we tried using psychic shrimp as a radio base in a similar way.

Why? Because comms are super-useful in D&D and once you have seen them in a film youjust naturally want to use them in group mission situations.

I know this is CRINGE as FUCK from a low-fantasy OSR perspective, BUT – it’s so deeply and desperately useful in doing meaningful physical GROUP stealth storytelling and problem-solving. It turns a knockabout fiasco into a heist.

For a purely-stealth mission where you actively don't want violence to happen, having the party split up is actually good it makes much less sense if they are all together, huddled together as a ‘stealthy gang’?, since stealth as a group always starts to feel more ridiculous than is useful. The social dynamics of play push against it and a tragedy of the commons situation happens where one impulsive player ends the mission.

Around the table, everyone can hear everything the everyone is saying and doing, so the extra-dimensional player-entities that pilot the PCs always have more of a global awareness than the PCs themselves, which, even with very disciplined play, often communicates itself to the PCs via shadowy tubes.

Allowing Comms-Snails for stealth-only missions might actually be a good idea that would improve play. Perhaps the stealth-obsessed wizards who hired you will loan them out.

Less-Lethal Falling

In these levels with-verticality, there should be more falling, and it should be less lethal. More bits where you fall into water, or something similar, but it doesn't kill you, and you end up at a different spot in the dungeon, separated from the group, and can explore and maybe find new routes to what you want, or just to link back up.

If being noticed is a fail state, then non-lethal separation is more interesting in play than HP loss.

Sound-Encounters

I think Brendan and others (possibly many others), have considered this will the ‘overloaded’ encounter die, but more encounters when you things or people coming, would be interesting.

In standard D&D being surprised is a reasonable punishment for dicking about and not paying attention, but in a stealth-only game, the threat of being discovered is more useful – the PCs have maybe one or two actions to hide or try something.

Stealth via Diegetic Sound

This isn’t directly from Thief, but I do think it would be a fun idea for stealthy D&D, which is; the sound you make around the table is the sound your character is making in the game.

So, if you want your PC to be stealthy – SHUT THE FUCK UP, and get WHISPERING! I think this would be a fine addition to the game. It would give all PCs access to some form of silence, and would encourage the players to actually fucking concentrate and think for once in their lives.

The ‘Mission Turnabout’

One possible useful import from Thief might be the ‘turn’ that happens in a lot of missions, for its is a way of involving liminality and deception that might  be useable in D&D.

The classic ‘questgiver turns on you when you are done’, is rightly abjured in OSR circles, for reasons well-known. (Although Thief, does in fact use this trope a lot). But the idea of a delve having a clear set of objectives, and then, right in the middle of the adventure, something is discovered or something changes, and suddenly the goals and nature of the mission change, and change a lot, leaving you to improvise a new plan and work with the same space you had previously, but towards entirely new goals, this could work in D&D I think.

Things that happen in Thief include;

Shalebridge Cradle – you sneak through the haunted asylum, but to complete the mission you have to turn the electric lights on, then somehow sneak past all the terrifying things again, in bright light.

Ghosts – You sneak past some dumb zombies and animals, but grabbing the target means a supernatural event and oh fuck actual high level ghosts and wraiths are now patrolling about.

Rescue to Heist or Heist to Rescue – You are going in to get someone out, but can’t and end up having to re-plan to grab an item, or the opposite is true.

Guards Guards – getting in is easy but the alarms go off and now the 

The entire axis of a mission might alter and now you are trying to do a very different thing, a theft becomes a rescue, an assassination becomes a theft, an exfiltration becomes a sabotage. This might be do-able in D&D. 

NPC Conversations

This was one charming Thief method that sadly I could find no way to use. In Thief, guards and servants commonly mutter and complain to themselves while wandering around, they also have sometimes long, informative or just whacky conversations with each other in pairs. Just two guards chatting in the middle of the night. Coming upon these conversations and sneaking around behind them while they yap is quite charming, and listening to them often provides intel. But I couldn’t find a way to reproduce, or even use, this in D&D as long intra-NPC convo’s are a damned nightmare when the DM has to deliver the whole thing. Maybe if you are a massive ham it could be fun.

A Thief-like Dungeon

So, what do we have?

Powerful and wealthy wizards hire the PCs to do a heist. They offer to pay a LOT and have strong conditions;

• Grab this one particular thing and bring it to them.

• You don’t kill anyone or the missions off

• Ideally, you swap the thing for a fake they will give you. This raises your pay.

• Even better – no-one has any idea you were ever there. Perfect Ghosts.

• They will give you these comm-snails to help, but they don’t live long.

• They have some sketchy maps and a handful of ideas about where to get more intel. 

The mission is a mansion-tower, maybe in a deep valley, or an ancient terrace mine, or somehow part sunken into the under verse. There are layers to go down, they are arranged as gardens or mazes or other somewhat-knowable patterns.

At the bottom is the mansion/tower/castle. 

You have to sneak all the way down, then get inside, then sneak all the way up to get the thingy.

There will be locked doors, gates, traps and hidden problems.

There is an overwatch position somewhere where one person can see a lot of the area. If a PCs can get there and hide, they can whisper a lot of useful info to the others.

Its guarded by a clan of strong ogres. They are pretty dumb. They walk in regular patrols with lanterns. If they have a key they have it tied to their big belt with a label saying KEY, so they know what it is. The keys are also large.

There is a big gong or bell the Ogres bang on if they think something is up. There might be some kind of counter-signal or password or spell to convince them to stop this, but your patrons don’t know what it is, though it may be discoverable in the area.

There are sewers and fast-flowing water. Several of the falls, drops and traps dump you into these and will wash you up somewhere, or wash you against a grate you can climb up.

If you do get the actual treasure – surprise, it’s the only things holding the Vampire/Lich/Ghost in place. You now need to get out, but instead of, and sometimes as well as, dumb Ogres, you will now be dealing with clever, dangerous ghosts or vampires with keen senses.

I Played King of Dragon Pass

(in response to the comments in this post) and I was not that good at it, and then did ok. But then got bored. But I learned a lot and now have much more sympathy with iron age clan leaders than I did before. Honestly you people are impossible.

Piss off your Weaponthanes and they start doing interviews on Fox News about the lack of national defence

META GAME ELEMENTS

There is no save game and no multiple simultaneous paths, whatever game you are in you are IN and there is no going back from any choice or looking to another causality stream to see what you could have done - unless you want to quit and tank every decision made up until this point.

There are indeterminate responses to God quests based presumably on lots of stuff happening behind the scenes like the religion of the quester but it looks also like the religious nature of the tribe and what temples etc, also whether you have been raiding or whatever.

The interrelationship between invisible numbers, limited knowledge and the will of the gods is the most interesting element.

I never got to ride Dinosaurs & feel personally betrayed by this

GUNS AND BUTTER

There are two kinds of raids;

cattle raids - which require stealth and basically theft, and Raid raids which can vary hugely from armed demonstrations to theft with force to, in theory - genocide and repossession of land.

Intra-culture raiding is considered normative and in fact a complete lack of raiding at any time is considered a bit weird will lose you respect and the happiness of your warrior class.

A primal human problem; you need warriors to defend the farmers or other warriors will come and take stuff, and you need farmers to feed the warriors. But the two are in endless conflict, pissed off with each other at least half of the time and annoyed about the others privileges - or lack of their own.

(And holy fuck are farmers conservative. They do NOT like outsiders and are very happy to be dicks based on ancient cultural stuff despite the fact that its you the leader who has to deal with the problems that result.

Cattle are the 'points' of the game so everyone always wants more cows.

The best way to get cows is cattle raid or full raid, (plus you need to raid and to be seen raiding to be a 'proper' clan both within and without). No raids and your weaponthanes get upset, no raids and others start to think you are a pussy and your diplomacy weakens.

However, you are surrounded by neighbours. These are also the easiest and lowest risk people to raid. BUT - if you can make allies of them then they are also your best partners, can protect you from other raiders with warnings, set up short trade networks and can ultimately help form your tribe which is the route to 'winning' the game. 

As always and forever it seems in all human cultures outright setting out to be purely and entirely peaceful just fucks you over while going full-military fucks you in a different way.

You can go the full-military war clan route (haven't tried it myself), and basically be Sparta with wars and super-slavery but the more you raid the more potential allies you lose. So I would imagine that if you are going to rule others through military force you better be very VERY strong all of the time.

Enemies - feuds, are a big long-term drain on your resources and constant threat, however, they can also be useful as with a feud, you at least know who you are raiding next time. So the next time your warrior class wants a fight you can just say oh yeah we can go raid the blue ox clan like last time and from the point of view of internal clan politics it doesn't really matter if you win or lose, so long as you don't lose too badly. If you win the Thanes are happy and if you lose it was their own fault for raiding and there are presumably less of them to support.

There are also random events which crop up which can sometimes result in 

weird or supernatural problems which need to be sent "elsewhere". So in those cases you can say "ok send the spirits to the blue ox clan".

Ultimately, if you want peace, stability and continuity you actually need enemies, or at least one enemy, roughly your strength, hopefully a bit weaker but still a threat, a medium distance away so it’s you are not a continuous threat to each other but can still reach each other. The most stable, and ultimately peaceful option is to just have a continuous low-intensity conflict with the same tiny group, without anything really changing.

WOMEN

The game pretty decent iron age simulator where you can choose whether or not to keep slaves and can possibly even build a slave empire and can engage in human sacrifice, and even mass human sacrifice, as well as raiding and plundering other clans, but still has the normative fantasy standard of combat skills and political power being evenly distributed between men and women, which, if it comes to political power is not impossible as small societies can have huge cultural diversity and lots of variety in iron age cultures, but pretty sure the Indo-European groups were v patriarchal.

Not complaining, it’s just an interesting look at our particular cultural moment where yes you can build a slavery simulator but it has to have a gender balance.

THE PERSONALITY OF A BUNCH OF NUMBERS

Truly the human mind is extremely based because a portrait, some auto generated text speech and a bunch of semi-random numbers do indeed become 'people', especially for my clan leaders, the first of the council and usually the first face you click on to get advice on stuff.

My first leader was kind of a hyper competent technocrat, a female worshipper of Issiaries, the talking god and the clan itself were quite non-normative, and worshipped Almal the sun god. We didn't even have a temple to Orlanth, the main god of our culture group. I really liked her because she always gave clear and detailed advice, consistently crushed trading and diplomatic issues, and our clan got really good at trading so in many ways the best person for the job.

But the clan, or perhaps the game, or the structures of culture the game was simulating, didn't like her, and while most of her explicit missions worked out and she was good at most individual things, the clan itself laboured; short on resources and cows, low status and ultimately disbanded.

For my second try I went with a very normative Orlanthi clan who made all the normal choices and the leader was a very normal male Orlanth worshipper with ok stats and was frankly something of a midwit mediocrity giving banal or empty advice regardless of circumstance.

I honestly really didn't like the guy and in most of his crises found him to be a very basic, even poor, leader but the clan flourished, a normative Orlanthi leading a normative clan with a nice big temple to Orlanth in the middle. Not exceptionally great at any particular thing but doing quite well on everything. Eventually we formed a tribe - but he got cucked out of the tribal leader role and we were stuck waiting for people to die and still couldn't get him in and eventually I got bored.

Third try was basically classic old woman feminist leader in a peaceful tribe dedicated to the mother goddess. Our main objective was to sit there and grow, which indeed we did in our increasingly fortified steading. Never had food problems, still couldn’t get population up much and no one really liked us, but fuck it otherwise things were fine. But it felt like game was becoming static and I am again a bit bored.

The "correct" answer is "suffer the blows" but this might get your Quester killed...

RELIGION AS TECHNLOLGY

Actually it’s pretty substantially different in a lot of ways, but in terms of dedicating resources to 'researching' things to provide improvements, its somewhat similar.

You can sacrifice to a range of gods to find out more about them, (it's never explicitly clear which sacrifices, or how many or how much will be needed for each god). In my first game I actually sacrificed a human to the cow goddess and she got so fucked off someone in my ruling council left the tribe in disgust, also never sacrifice cows if you don't have to, just sacrifice goods. 

From these sacrifices you can learn 'mysteries' which are either something like blessings or lore you can use to do ritual magic.

With enough knowledge of blessings from a god you can build a shrine which can be expanded to a temple or a big temple. This is basically a resource exchange as for regular resource loss you get an 'always on' blessing which affects your whole clan. Or you can sacrifice for individual blessings

which can cost more but isn't a yearly tax (but also might not work sometimes), and as you get more fragments of myth you can do Heroquests which is form of clan wide magic where you re-enact elements of myth 

to get real magical effects.

If you fuck it up you get a BEATING; big magic loss, loss of reputation and maybe the quester and others physically wounded pluss WILD MAGIC - I fucked up a quest from the talking god and all of the maps for everyone in the area were FUCKED for years and all of my exploreres I sent out died. I dang well broke reality with my bullshit and people never let me hear the end of it.

It’s the lack of knowledge, indeterminacy or results and unseen interrelationship with your clan structure that really makes this interesting in-play.

Each Hero-Quest is a multiple choice adventure and over time, through reading lore or through cheating, you can learn the 'optimal' choices but the choices are not always equally weighted, and do not always respond the same way.

There are a few things you know about. The quester being a worshipper of the right god can help, having one clan council member from different gods each can help.

(That can be a challenge because very normative clans are often not very diverse in their makeup (as pertains to worshippers)

The two 'normative' clans I ran, the Orlanthi and the Mother Goddess clan, had shitloads of the normative gods but if I wanted someone on the council from some less regular god, either I couldn't get them or I had to settle for someone with mediocre stats in order to fill the post - goddman diversity.

Whereas the somewhat odd clan I started with had a bunch of wild and whacky members - so diversity of worship was never a problem - but the clan itself felt less 'cohesive' and the things it was good at never synergised as much across domains (though it was also my first try).)

(also its a nice point that its always good to have one worshipper of the trickster god on your council - in some special events they can generate alternative solutions to problems; tricking a hungry ghost with a trail of food, tricking a dragon out of its gold, being an expendable council member when shit hits the fan, but they never really cause enough trouble *in* the clan for it to feel like an interesting choice having them on the team - its more like marvel Loki than myth Loki)

Beneath all that, does your clan 'feel' right? Are you Orlanthi, with a big Orlath temple, Orlanth-worshipping leader and do you 'act' like normative orlanthi? 

Which numbers, precisely, is the game looking at to make these questions work? you don't know and that lack of knowledge makes things both frustrating and interesting?

This was a really cool choice to make the first time, less so the third time.

POSSESSION IN GAMES

in almost every case when creating a true sense of possession, or a feel that you are really making choices as this entity in an imagine world there must be some combination of stable known rules and the unknown - yet an unknown not without reason.

If the game is pure known-rules and you can predict and weight how everything works - then it is merely a game and you end up just shuffling numbers.

If truly chaotic, the negative bad DM stories - where there is no stability or learnable rules - then its just a contest of personalities or wills or nothing at all.

There is some subtle synthesis between known rules, unknown rules and pure chaos (along with everything else) that tilts a system towards feeling 'real' - were you go from 'how do I maximise my sacrifices to Orlanth' to feeling like a clan leader thinking 'o fuck I hope Orlanth is ok with us this year'.

You are doing similar things in both cases but the difference is subtle. You are still making a die roll but it doesn’t feel like you are rolling the dice but like you are facing the gods.