RPG Book Review: Skycrawl

Who are the players and what do they do?

Explorers of a "weird, whimsical, endless sky". The main focus is on exploration and travel.

This is a supplement (setting?) for any roleplaying system, packed with systems and procedures for journeying between mysterious lands floating in an endless azure sky, ship to ship combat, and more.

The colours are better in real life!

What's the core mechanic?

The book itself is systemless and provides guidance and examples for how to use it with d20, 2d6, percentile, or FATE mechanics, but could easily be used for dice pool games or other mechanics as well.  The core procedures use standard terms such as "crit", "strong success", "success", "complication" which can be easily defined for any method of generating these outcomes.

What's good?

The procedures here are wonderful; there are systems for:

• Procedurally generating Lands and the Folk who inhabit them, and the ships that move between them
• Tracking the movement of those lands as they orbit in the sky
• Researching, plotting, and executing journeys between these lands
• Ship-to-ship combat
• Orcery, which is an interesting alchemy system 
• Generating and resolving random encounters in the skies

The systems used for play utilise "moves" which will feel familiar to anyone who has played a PBTA game, but these can easily be explained as player procedures at the table if not.

I particularly like the systems for travel; PCs accrue and spend a meta-resource called "tack" to help with navigation and journeys are planned out and executed in several steps (be they days, weeks, or abstract measures of difficulty) which naturally resolve into scenes and encounters as the players spend their tack and decide how best to play out each step.

Lands are mechanically easier to get to if the party have been there before, or if they have discovered three or more rumours about the place - which is something I love as a driver for exploring and interacting with the world.

The main procedures are seemingly based on the designer's other game Downcrawl, which you can get a good feel for in its free HTML version here.

The lore and art, that there is, is evocative and flavourful too. It's a great book!

What's bad?

Honestly, I'm struggling. Some people might find it a little wordy for their tastes maybe (I really don't) but that's just thinking of something - anything - to put in this section!

Bottom line?

Highly recommended. There's a lot here to mine from and adapt to other games (the systems shared with Downcrawl could just as easily be adapted for overland travel and traditional pointcrawls, and these rules could just as easily be applied to traditional sailing ships with a little tweaking) and it feels like it could be run straight from the book. Looking forward to doing so!

Fans of the depthcrawls generated by The Stygian Library or The Gardens of Ynn, traditional OSR hexcrawl mechanics, or the travel procedures in Ultraviolet Grasslands would probably find a lot to like in this little gem.

If you have any favourite procedure-based RPG resources then I'd love to hear of them, either in the comments or by submitting a link to one of your blog posts on this month's RPG Blog Carnival hub, where the theme is "procedures".

On Covid, Blades in the Dark, and blogging

I've been away for a while, sorry.

Image (cc) Nick Kenrick

After facing redundancy my gaming life went through a drought, then there was Covid which has brought some interesting changes to the way we play.

I'm now running Blades in the Dark, on Roll20, which is worthy of a whole review post in itself.  It's a game I have wanted to try out for some time, given my recently discovered love of Dungeon World and PBtA games in general, and while it isn't perfect it has been very enjoyable indeed.

Before that was a brief return to WFRP, a dalliance with the intriguing Monster of the Week, and of course very little boardgaming or wargaming!

It's time to get the blog back up and running.  I've even applied to host the RPG Blog Carnival sometime.  I'm excited about getting my head back into gaming and, perhaps more importantly, gaming back into my head!

How have you all been coping, hope your gaming life has adapted to this odd new normal?  Comments always very welcome...

On DMing, or How I Learned to Let Go and Embrace the Chaos

Image (cc) Kridily

Dungeons & Dragons is a bad game.*  Bad naughty.  It's irresponsible in that it doesn't show us how to be Dungeon Masters - my favourite term for which is Apocalypse World's "MC" as we are, after all, Master of Ceremonies above all else.

D&D teaches us to build encounters, but not how to build stories and worlds.  It teaches us to think in terms of probabilities and not stakes.  I learnt to DM on 4e and I've spent maybe a decade unlearning how it was presented to me then.  It took Stars Without Number and Dungeon World to open my eyes to how a game could be run.

Making Skill Checks More PBTA

Image (cc) oxpal

One thing I loved when reading Dungeon World was how all the moves fall into the same basic pattern:

• 10+ (on 2d6 plus modifiers) means clean success
• 7-9 means success, but with a cost or limitation
• 6 or less means failure and the DM moves the story along

It's an easy change from pass/fail and it runs right through all "Powered by the Apocalypse" games.  Note how there's no DC. I like this. So often my players roll skill checks and announce the result before I decide the DC that I end up just eyeballing it - so why not get rid of it? This is all about stakes and not about difficulty.