Reading TTRPGs - Issue 57
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A TTRpg reading post featuring non-English authors. An italian game, also available in english, and two french games, only available in Alexandre Dumas's language.
Death Enters the Saloon
It's not often that I talk about Italian RPGs around here. But the Italian RPG scene is alive and well, and this alternative game proves it. Written and designed by Greta Bellagamba and Daniele Di Rubbo, Death Enters the Saloon is intended as a short narrative interlude. We play the habitués of a saloon, who see Death enter. Death is there for one of them. They don't know who. Neither do we.
The game uses a mechanic similar to that of Vieux Garçon, a game I played in high school. You play with a standard deck of cards, to which you add a joker. This joker designates who Death is looking at. On your turn, you draw a card from the deck of the Doomed, the player who has this joker. The aim: to get rid of your cards by forming pairs.
Each time a card is manipulated, you answer questions about your innocence or guilt. The others react. The aim is to divert Death's attention from oneself.
It's reminiscent of the mechanics of For the Queen, with an elegant “I'll defend myself/I'll push the other guy down” feel. Several endings are possible, depending on where the mechanics take us.
As for the text, the layout is clear and elegant, the illustrations set the tone perfectly, and a great deal of effort has been put into usability, with numerous examples and a well-done summary sheet.
All that's left to do is play it (it's scheduled!).
Death Enters the Saloon/Morte Nel Saloon is available on itch.io
Dans l'Ombre d'Excalibur - Partie unique
Dans l'ombre d'Excalibur (In the Shadow of Excalibur) is a TTRPG written by KrisDoC, accompanied for the occasion by Gaël Sacré on layout and editorial. It's a French-language Carved from Brindlewood, and it's great to start seeing more of them appear (with more in the pipeline!).
The theme: we'll be playing women in post-arthurian Britain, seeking the Grail in order to thwart the Fairy King, who has his sights set on the kingdom. Profiles range from wife and heiress to horsewoman, enchantress and mother... It's a cast that I find very well conceived, with inspired “branches” (the keys, masks, crowns typical of CfB games...). Questions and flashbacks that will help build these characters little by little, and enrich their story.
This first draft is designed for a single game, a one-shot introduction to the game's tone and atmosphere. The layout is light and airy, with illustrations free of copyright (you see, no need for AI!). At times, the text may be a little too concise.
I have a few reservations about the usefulness of this discovery kit, which in my view proceeds far too quickly. In one game, we'll discover the location of the grail and battle the forces of the Fairy King. I would have preferred just to discover the mystery of Glastonbury Abbey slowly, without forcing this epilogue. I feel like we're rushing things, whereas these characters deserve to be explored, as is the location.
In any case, the pieces already introduced make me want to know more about this game, which I'll be following with interest.
Dans l'ombre d'Excalibur is available on itch.io
Noblesse Oblige
Noblesse Oblige is a Powered by the Apocalypse game written by Luc Boillot and Hasgard, under the patronage of Les Douze Singes (The XII Monkeys). Published via crowdfunding, I had subscribed to the basic package and I'm basing my opinion here on my reading of the Book of Heroes and the Book of the MC.
I love PBTA. I love Swashbuckling. But... I didn't find what I was looking for here. The good thing is, I know why. And I think that someone who doesn't have the same expectations as me will find something here. And note that this is a reading impression!
First of all, the mechanization of the resolution lost me. I don't find it any more interesting than the simplicity of 2d6+X. To me, reading is not immediate. Basically, you roll d20, and you have to roll below your Attribute (for the equivalent of 7+), and below your Brio (Attribute/2, for the equivalent of 10+). What bothers me is that we lose the following ease of reading:
- 2d6+1, I rolled 8.
- OK, so 7-9 result.
Here, we have to find out the type of result after rolling the dice: major success, minor success or failure. It's not that complicated, but it bothers me. And given that we only have even values for attributes, why not a d10 (well, ok, to divide by 2)?
The other element that disturbs me more is the “you play what you want”. There are archetypes (very well thought-out in terms of the setting), but there's no group setting for what you're going to play. You can play musketeers, you can play rebels, you can play a band of thieves, you can play ... whatever you want. And so, there's a lot of framing work to be done if you want to run this game so as not to have a disparate group that's impossible to manage, with no bonding. Without necessarily imposing a type of group for the whole game, I would have liked to have campaign sheets, with already established ideas of what brings the characters together, what awaits them, what they're looking for, the antagonists.
There's a whole section on a session zero, allowing you to map out relationships between characters and with a host of allies and adversaries. It's important to underline this. There's also a whole section devoted to threats, and how to manage a threat clock, which is very welcome.
The game is not short on examples, and you can feel the expertise of a well-established publisher in the layout and clarity of information. There's even a little color coding to help highlight certain moves. There are a lot of them, especially for the Fight parts, but that's inherent to the genre, and many of them are fictional maneuvers (such as striking a defenseless enemy) that don't add any mechanics, but clarify this kind of action.
As it stands, I don't know if I'll play Noblesse Oblige. Because it doesn't necessarily correspond to what I want to play, but it's full of quality and doesn't dodge its belonging to the PBTA movement at all, integrating a lot of shared narrative, offering a good story engine and understanding its genre well. Who knows, my daughter is a fan of the Scarlet Rose, and it's what I have in stock that would work best for playing this kind of story.
Noblesse Oblige is available at les XII Singes and in store.