~5 minute read

Imagine: You’re 35. You don’t have a driver’s license. 

When you were 18 you moved to the city, and you’ve lived in the same 10 mile radius ever since. Any time you wanted to go anywhere, do anything, have an experience outside the same rain-slick streets you call home, that meant public transport.

It meant trains. During the years when you were devastatingly, teeth-falling-out-of-your-head poor, it meant long coach journeys booked months in advance, paying a couple of quid to travel hundreds of miles and getting exactly what you paid for.

Have you ever seen a coach station at 4:30am? Have you ever slept in one, because whatever thing you were going to finished after the last coach had left but you couldn’t also afford a night in a hostel? 

They’re hostile places. Harsh strip lights, anti-homeless seats that you can’t stretch out on or get comfortable on for more than a few minutes at a time. Blaring announcements, distorted tannoy voices telling you to remain vigilant, report anything strange. See it. Say it. Sorted. Designed for waiting but not lingering. Liminal spaces that hate you and want you gone.

So many journeys have started and ended at coach stations. So many stories. So many adventures.

A story: 

When I was 20 I read Dracula for the first time and I became obsessed. I can’t tell you what it was about the book that gripped me but something did. Fifteen years later it’s still one of my favourite novels, to the extent that I collect different editions of it for no reason other than that I started doing it at some point and never stopped.

But that’s not the story.

When I was 20 I read Dracula for the first time and I became obsessed. And I decided, on a whim, that I wanted to go to Whitby. The ruined abbey towered in my mind, beckoning me to come and visit. There was a Dracula museum, the kind of thing that’s probably shit but might not be. 

I don’t drive, and I couldn’t afford a train (if you can even get a train from Manchester to Whitby. I honestly don’t know) so I booked a coach. Not the National Express – no way I could afford that. MegaBus, the world’s most inappropriately named travel company.

The first leg of the journey was fine. I got on a coach early in the morning – I don’t remember what time exactly – and settled in for the trip to Leeds, where I had to change. I have stories about Leeds coach station – one of the most depressing places in the country – but they’re for another time.

In Leeds I waited for an hour. I bought greasy bacon on a floury white barm from a man in a van in the carpark and dripped fat and brown sauce down my t-shirt. I read a couple of chapters of Dracula. And then the next coach turned up.

The next coach wasn’t a coach at all. It was a double-decker Stagecoach bus, the kind that shuttles you around city centres, and it was going to drive me up the moors to Whitby. 

The cosastliner takes two hours. This bus, somehow, was going to take four. 

I’ve never had a bus journey so simultaneously terrifying and boring. There’s no way to be comfortable on the hard plastic seats of twenty-year-old Stagecoach bus at the best of time, but especially not when it’s careering around the tiny, windy country roads of the North Yorkshire moors. Every time we rounded a switchback going down the side of a hill the bus tipped in a way that made me think I was going to revisit my breakfast. At one point we stopped for twenty minutes to wait for a flock of sheep to cross the road.

Eventually we reached Whitby and I stretched my legs, somehow numb and cramping at the same time. There was a ship moored in the harbour and the abbey was silhouetted against a sky so bright and blue I thought it would blind me if I looked up for too long. The day was gorgeous and I felt that the journey had been worth it.

The Dracula museum was closed, because it doesn’t open on Mondays and I had somehow missed that when planning the trip, but it was hard to be too disappointed. I made the long hike up to the abbey and spent an hour wandering around the ruins. I visited charity shops. I ate fish and chips in a pub with a view of the sea. I walked the gangplank onto the ship – I can’t remember now whether it was used in Pirates of the Carribean or Master and Commander or both – and explored the decks and talked to the guys who worked on it, sailing this mobile tourist attraction around the world. I watched people empty mountains of lobster pots.

A few hours later I walked up the road and got back on a coach and returned to Manchester via Leeds and I remember nothing of the journey. I still haven’t been to the Dracula museum.

Other stories, but briefer: A six hour coach to London to see Hot Water Music, the bus packed full of kids who called themselves Army going to see BTS, my first exposure to K-Pop, their excitement and passion contagious and thrilling; crossing the Severn bridge, watching in bleary-eyed surprise as on one side a tiny Peugeot 206 depseratly tried to fight against a crosswind threatening to blow it across the carriageway while on the other side a mile-long queue of tanks rolled slowly into Wales; the lurch in my stomach, sitting on a bus in Salford trying to get to work, as a lad in a mask ran out into the road and my instincts knew that a brick was about to go through the window of the bus before my eyes had even registered that he was holding it; sitting down on a coach to go to Glasgow and realising that the guy asleep next to me was someone I’d lived with for two years at uni, whose name I’d never learned. He didn’t wake during the journey, we didn’t speak, and I’m not even sure he knew I was there or that he would have recognised me if he’d opened his eyes.

I could tell stories that take place on buses and trains coaches, in taxis or tour vans or lying in the boot of a friend’s car at 3 in the morning hoping we wouldn’t get pulled over because there wasn’t room for all of us but we were definitely going to a rave, all day long. The percentage of my life that I’ve spent in transit is vast.

Public transport runs on timetables. I’ve been hours early for buses, forced to wait around in blustery shelters for what feels like days. I’ve been almost late, sprinting down train station platforms to jump through a door being held open by a kindly conductor as the train begins to pull away. I’ve missed buses, the door closing in my face as I reached it, or watching the damn thing pull away as I desperately try to cross the road, being forced to ask myself now what. One time I booked tickets for a bus that did not exist. MegaBus, again. Thanks.

One thing I can’t tell you? The times of any of those journeys. The day of the week. The service number.

Many of my stories begin and end with journeys. Many of them are the journey. But the systems that made those journeys possible don’t factor in to the stories at all. They don’t matter.

Similarly, I could tell you stories about the game I’ve played over the years. I could tell you about the whisky-slinging munitions expert who set off a grenade deep underground and buried himself and his friends. I could tell you about the super chill demon guarding a stash of ancient magical artifacts, who shot the shit with a group of adventurers and calmly warned them that he was very sorry but if they opened the door to his room he’d have to murder them all. Nothing personal, just my job. The dwarven cleric wrestling with his gender; the orc bard with the history of his people tattooed on his skin; the barbarian who stuffed an enemy into a bag of holding and dropped him off a roof; the reluctant magician in Victorian england who fell in love with a man he’d only ever seen through a scrying mirror.

So many stories about so many games, and not one of them cares about the way I rolled dice or the numbers I wrote down on a sheet.

Systems facilitate story. They get you where you need to be so that you can do the thing you’re going to do. They aren’t the story itself. As I write this I’m on a train heading to Nottingham, to spend the weekend playing games in person with people I’ve been playing with online for the past 18 months. 

The stories this weekend will bring don’t care that my train left Manchester at 11:27 this morning.

Stop obsessing over systems. Start telling stories.

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The first time I ever played a roleplaying game was in June 1994, when I was given the AD&D First Quest boxed set for my birthday. I remember it fondly and still have it on my shelf in surprisingly good condition (I even still have all the minis, and the CD still plays). But while First Quest was the first time I actually played the game, it wasn’t my first experience of D&D.

The reason I got given that present, and the tender age of 8 years old, was because I used to go with my dad to his friend Henry’s house, where I’d sit and watch them play a game I didn’t understand that involved a lot of shouting, some really intricate, beautifully painted models of ruins and caves and graveyards and stuff that looked metal as fuck, and some books with bright red covers.

I actually only vaguely remember the books that my dad and his friends used – my memories are filled with an enormous, intricate dungeon spread across a tabletop, which I assume was some kind of ongoing megadungeon they were playing through. I don’t know what edition they were playing. This would have been some time between ‘90 and ‘94, so there’s probably equal chances that it was AD&D, BECMI, or 2nd Edition. And I have the rulebooks for all of those editions, inherited from my dad, so that doesn’t help at all.

What I do know is that I’ve played AD&D and I’ve played 2e, but I’ve never fucked with BECMI. And as last week was horrible, I want to do something that I’m at least tangentially familiar with. So today we’re rolling up a character in the dragon game.

The first thing that surprises me is that BECMI contains a solo adventure to teach you how to play the game. How has nobody ever told me about this?

Well, the answer to that question is that it isn’t really a solo adventure at all. It’s an overly long, not very well written story with some mechanics thrown in that slowly introduces the basic concepts of the game and asks you to roll a d20 a few times while you go through it. I can imagine it was quite helpful if you had no conception of how an RPG worked. Nearly 40 years later it’s nowhere near as relevant or useful, but that isn’t the game’s fault. (The two alternate endings to this “adventure” absolutely remind me of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. Maybe one week I’ll roll up an Advanced Fighting Fantasy character, though that would be a very short post.)

The second solo adventure really does feel like a Fighting Fantasy gamebook. I don’t bother to read it or play through it because frankly I just want to get to making a character, but I’m back to being surprised that nobody ever told me this is how BECMI taught the game. I’m also surprised I’ve never heard of M1: Blizzard Pass or M2: Maze of the Riddling Minotaur before.

Time to jump forward past the rest of the book to get to character creation. Will I regret skipping the next 20 pages or so? Very possible. Is that going to stop me? Not at all.

BECMI tells me that my first character will take about an hour to make. Since I’m writing this post at the same time I assume that’s going to be closer to 90 minutes. I’ll be interested to see how accurate that guess is (and whether the fact that I’m familiar with later editions of D&D helps at all).

The first step is one I’m definitely familiar with: roll 3d6 in order for ability scores. I get the following scores:

STR 11 INT 13 WIS 11

DEX 15 CON 9 CHA 13

I rolled surprisingly well. I can’t complain about those scores at all.

Step two is to pick a class. My first ever D&D character was Slinker, the thief from First Quest, so I’m going to make a thief. I’d decided this before I rolled, and it’s very convenient that my highest score is in dexterity since that’s the prime requisite for Thieves. (I promise I actually rolled 3d6 in order and came out with these results).

Also, using the words “prime requisite” again for the first time in 20 years makes me very nostalgically happy.

Step three is to exchange ability score points if you want to, raising one ability score by 1 point at the cost of lowering another by 2. This feels like an early form of point buy, and it’s something I don’t ever remember being allowed to do in AD&D. Maybe it was removed from later editions, or maybe I just didn’t know that was a thing I could do. Who knows? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.) I decide I’m going to drop my Wisdom by 2 points (to 9) and my Intelligence by 2 (to 11) so that I can raise my Dexterity 2 points to 17. I would have liked to have dropped my Charisma to get the Dex up to 18 (because if 27 years of playing dragon games has taught me anything it’s that 18 is a good score to have) but that’s not allowed for some reason. Now my abilities look like this:

STR 11 INT 11 WIS 9

DEX 17 CON 9 CHA 13

Step 4 is to roll for Hit Points. Thieves have a d4 hit die, which is ludicrous and tells me that the play style for thieves has really changed a lot in the past 30 years or so! With a Con of 9 I don’t have any modifier to my roll, and I end up with 3hp to start.

Step 5 is to roll for money. My character starts out with no possessions except for normal clothes and a little money, and now I see where Mӧrk Borg gets it from. (I’m realising as I write these posts that I’m really showing off how little I know about the history of this hobby, and honestly I’m fine with that.) I start with 100gp, which seems okay? I guess I’ll find out in the next step, when I have to try and equip myself with this money.

In checking the description of the Thief I learn that I should carry missile weapons, plus a sword or dagger for situations where I can’t avoid close combat. I’m only allowed leather armour, and I can’t use a shield or two-handed weapons. I’ll also need Thieves’ Tools if I’m going to open any locks – and since that’s literally my job, I guess I’d better buy them!

With all this in mind, I turn to the weapons and equipment list on page 29. Leather armour, a short bow and quiver with 20 arrows, a normal sword, backpack, set of Thieves’ Tools, hand mirror, 10’ pole, and 50’ length of rope costs 97gp. That means I can’t afford rations, which I assume I’ll also need. I put the normal sword back and instead buy a short sword, freeing up another 3gp. 1 week’s worth of rations and a waterskin takes me up to 100gp even. Now I see why I’m a thief – gear is expensive, and I’m flat broke after outfitting myself. I also realise I don’t have a lantern – hopefully, whichever theoretical adventuring party I join will have ample light sources with them.

In step 7 we work out the rest of the mechanical stuff – AC, Hit Roll chart, and Saving Throws. With leather armour and a Dex of 17, I have an AC of 5. I suddenly remember that THAC0 and “lower is better” AC is a thing that I might have to contend with, but I also remember that I never hated it as much as everyone I speak to about early D&D seems to. I imagine it’s different in BECMI to 2e, and I suppose I’m about to find out.

It turns out that every starting character uses the same Hit Roll Table. So that’s handy – I don’t need to work anything out, and won’t need to until I get to at least 4th level. I grab my Saving Throws from my class description, figure out my modifiers (called Adjustments in BECMI), and now my character looks like this:

• Saving Throws
• Death Ray or Poison: 13
• Magic Wands: 14
• Paralysis or Turn to Stone: 13
• Dragon Breath: 16
• Rods, Staves or Spells: 15

Can I just take a second to say that I love that in a set of five saving throws, there’s one that’s explicitly for dragon breath? Dragons have never really shown up in the D&D games I’ve played in, but this tells me that the early dragon game expected you to be fighting them quite regularly. Which makes sense, since they’re in the title of the game and all.

I know two languages, Common and my Alignment tongue, but I haven’t actually chosen my alignment yet. I assume we’ll get to that. I know – just through cultural osmosis rather than reading the game – that alignment was a lot more important and impactful in early D&D. I’m not 100% sure on the how or why, other than knowing that alignment languages exist and that only creatures of the right alignment can speak them. (Very historically accurate, right?)

I don’t have to wait long to figure this out, because step 9 is to choose a name and an alignment. I’m just going to call my character Slinker because that was the name of the 2nd Edition thief I played and I don’t fancy making up a name at 2:40am (don’t ask me why I was writing this post at nearly 3 in the morning).

As far as alignment goes, I follow the suggestion of turning to page 55 (not 59, as the book states) and reading about it. I hadn’t realised that BECMI just uses Lawful/Chaotic/Neutral, with no Good and Evilm and honestly I prefer that to the later iterations of alignment. I decide on Neutrality for Slinker – they’re self-involved and out for their own personal gain, but they’re not so untrustworthy that they can’t work with a group. They wouldn’t last long as an adventurer if that were the case.

And that’s it! Even with typing up this blog post at the same time as creating the character, it only took around 45 minutes. I know absolutely nothing about who this person is (other than that they’re Neutral, with the brief character traits I came up with to justify that decision) and that’s fine, because it will come out in play. I know my role, I know why I’m adventuring (because I’m flat broke), and I’m ready to play.

Having made this character I can definitely see where the OSR games like Mӧrk Borg come from (and really that’s not a grand revelation, is it? I already knew that they’ve got their roots here even if I hadn’t experienced it for myself). I’m interested to see how B/X differs (especially as OSE and Labyrinth Lord are retroclones of B/X – I’m curious to know why they chose that over BECMI). I’m also interested to dig into some of the more modern OSR games like the Black Hack, Whitehack, and maybe Macchiato Monsters just to see how games approach the source material from a different angle.

Next week, though, I’m going to go in a completely different direction. BECMI was fun and familiar and scratched a nostalgia itch for me, so next time I’m going to delve into territory I know nothing about. It’s time for Rolemaster. 

Here’s what I know about Burning Wheel.

1. Mouse Guard is based on it and I like Mouse Guard a lot
2. It’s got some kind of lifepath character creation system
3. The book on my shelf is still wrapped in the plastic it came in when I bought it

That’s it. I don’t even know whether the book I’ve got (the Gold Edition) is the most recent edition. And, frankly, I’m not about to spend the time finding out. This is the edition I own so it’s the edition I’m going to use.

Let’s crack the spine and make a character.

The Foreword to the book is encouraging. It states, boldly, “Burning Wheel’s character creation drips with character history. History breeds conflict. Conflict means taking a stand. What will your character stand for?” I’m into it. 

The book then goes on to say that there’s no default setting for the game, and that gives me pause. This might be a frustrating exercise, making a character who’s a collection of meaningless numbers and abilities with no ties to any fiction. We’ll see what happens I suppose, though any excitement I was feeling about this process has just drained out of me like…I don’t know, something that drains. Quickly.

The next thing that saps any remaining enthusiasm is this paragraph: “The basic rules for play are presented first. We recommend starting by reading the first 75 pages of Burning Wheel. After digesting the basics, make […] a character.”

Seventy. Five. Pages. In a book that’s already told me there’s no setting or lore.

75 pages of pure mechanics is my nightmare scenario but I guess this is what’s going to happen now. I’ve got some reading to do.

I have a confession to make. Reading mechanics makes my head hurt. I learn games best by doing, not reading, and if your game book frontloads all the rules for play without giving me the ability to jump in and start playing, I’m probably not going to read them.

That’s exactly what happened with Burning Wheel. I got about 20 page in, did a big frown when it started talking about exponents and shade, and skipped the rest of the rules to get to character creation. Let’s see if that had any ill effect on the rest of the process, shall we?

After another 5 pages of lectures and explaining what’s about to happen and why it’s so very important (I’m really not enjoying the tone of this book at all – can you tell?) it’s time to get down to Character Burning. It’s broken into three categories:

1. Developing a concept
2.  Choosing lifepaths
3. Spending the points earned on those lifepaths

Within these three categories there are twelve steps, and the rules say that I should expect to take 45 minutes to an hour the first time through. 

I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll enjoy this little character creation minigame. That optimism is tempered by the fact that I haven’t enjoyed reading anything preceding it in the book. Maybe that’s a me problem.

The first step is developing a concept, which is meant to tie in to the kind of story your group wants to tell and the world they want to tell it in. Since I’m doing this solo and don’t have anything to go on, I’m going to take the concept of the character I made last week in Mӧrk Bӧrg – a fallen royal called Arvent whose kingdom has crumbled into extreme poverty, who is trying to reclaim their former glory.

The next step is to choose a lifepath limit. I guess this is like the number of reenlistments in Traveller? The book says that three-lifepath characters make good starting characters so I’ll do three. Unless I hate it or this post gets overly long, in which case I’ll do fewer.

At this point I decide to read the rest of this chapter before I do anything else (which breaks down the 12 steps for character creations and is one big example). It’s 20 pages long and as I go through it any residual enthusiasm I had for making characters in this system evaporates.

But anyway. Step 3 is to choose “character stock” – Dwarf, Elf, Orc, or Man. Since there’s no inherent setting to the game I don’t really know what this means, if anything. I decide on Man purely because the character I made in Mӧrk Bӧrg was human so I guess this one should be, too. And that’s the default option in most games, right? In theory it will be the most straightforward, and that’s what I need right now.

There’s no page references here. I turn pages until I find the section titled “Man”, with a finger in the book so I can turn back to the instructions to remind myself what I’m meant to do.

I’m not going to document every little detail of the character creation process as I flip back and forth in this book. I’m going to list the lifepaths I choose in the same format the book’s example gives, and then go into the mechanical decisions. Let’s see what happens.

The fun part of this process is that I’m writing this blog as I’m making the character, not afterwards, and so I don’t know what’s going to happen.

What happened is that I gave up. I started picking lifepaths, beginning with the Born Noble path as required. I tried to figure out how to make a character from fallen nobility, and assumed this would require me to pursue some Leads. I wanted to choose the Prince of the Blood lifepath before having the fall happen, and that was where I hit a wall. That lifepath requires the Your Grace trait, which is something that comes from the Born Noble path. But I couldn’t fully get my head around how Traits work. Do you need to choose them in order? Can you buy any trait from your lifepath once you’ve taken the first one (which is required)? I have no idea, and after half an hour of flipping back and forth in the book trying to work out what the fuck I was supposed to do I gave up.

I refuse to believe that anyone has ever made a character for this game in less than 15 minutes, as the book claims is possible once you’re used to it. If I ever suggest to you that we play Burning Wheel, come round to my house and kick me in the throat.

Next week I’m going to make a character in something that I actually enjoy.

If you’ve followed me on Twitter for more than five minutes then you’ll know that Mӧrk Borg is one of my favourite games. I run it a lot, but I’ve only had a chance to play it as a player rather than a GM a couple of times – and each time we used the fantastic Scvmbirther character generator to make characters. What this means is that I haven’t actually had an opportunity to create a character from scratch in one of my favourites games.

Today I’m going to fix that.

For those not in the know (I assume you’ve been sheltering in place under a rock or something), Mӧrk Borg is a very rules-light OSR game by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr with the most visually stunning rulebook I’ve ever seen. Here’s how the game describes itself.

A doom metal album of a game. A spiked flail to the face. Light on rules, heavy everything else.

MÖRK BÖRG is a pitch-black apocalyptic fantasy RPG about lost souls and fools seeking redemption, forgiveness or the last remaining riches in a bleak and dying world. Who are you? The tomb-robber with silver glittering between cracked fingernails? The mystic who would bend the world’s heart away from it’s inevitable end? Confront power-draining necromancers, skulking skeletal warriors and backstabbing wickheads. Wander the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead, the catacombs beneath the Bergen Chrypt or the bedevilled Sarkash forest. But leave hope behind – the world’s cruel fate is sealed, and all your vain heroic efforts are destined to end in death and dismay. Or are they?

Mӧrk Bӧrg

There’s two ways to go about character creation in Mӧrk Borg – with a class, or without. I can’t remember at which point in the process you decide, so I’m just going to start at the beginning of the book and see what happens.

As with Spire (the game I played around with last week – and this may well be the first time Spire and Mӧrk Borg have ever been directly compared, so we’re making history here) Mӧrk Borg opens with setting information. Spoiler alert: that’s going to be true of most games I look at. Although it isn’t true of Traveller, which is what prompted this whole exercise. And what a setting it is. I could write a dissertation on my thoughts about the world of Mӧrk Bӧrg and how it’s presented, but that’s not what we’re here for. That’s getting perilously close to review territory, and that’s not a pool I’m about to wade into.

Actually that’s a lie because the book doesn’t open with setting information. The end papers contain random tables – names, occult treasures, traps and devilry, weather, and corpse plundering that tell us a huge amount about the game before we’ve even properly opened the book. But again, I’m getting diverted from my purpose.

Let’s roll a goddamn character.

Spire starts us out with what you used to do before you joined the resistance. Mӧrk Bӧrg doesn’t care who you used to be. Instead, “to begin with, you are what you own.”

Immediately I get to do my favourite thing – roll dice. And my first roll is fucking great. My character starts with 120 silver (2d6x10 – yes, I rolled double sixes), a waterskin, and 2 days worth of food. Presumably I’ll have to spend some of that silver if I want to eat, unless I get stabbed for it first. I don’t know where that silver came from but apparently I’m rich.

The game does warn me that “your soul and your silver are your own and equally easy to lose” though, so there’s that.

Then we roll some more dice to see what else we own. I start with a backpack for 7 normal sized items, a medicine chest with Presence +4 uses, stops bleeding and infection and heals d6 HP. I’ve played Mӧrk Bӧrg before so I know what Presence is for, and so I have no insight about whether this is one of those occasions where a rules overview might have been useful before character creation or not. I don’t remember being at all confused the first time I read the book, though. I also have exquisite perfume worth 25s.

The fact that I’m rich, carrying a medicine chest, and have some very fancy perfume tells me I’m probably playing someone who’s relatively upper class (whatever that means in Mӧrk Bӧrg). We’ll see what else comes out as I make the character.

After rolling the starting equipment, we now get the full rundown of how to create a character – and this is where we have a choice. We can either:

1. Randomize the starting equipment (which we’ve already done)
2. Randomize weapon and armor.
3. Roll abilities.
4. Roll Hit Points.
5. Name the character. (The exact wording is “Name your character if you wish. It will not save you”)

Or we can use the optional rules:

1. Start by choosing or randomizing a class (page 46 and on) and follow the class’ instructions on rolling for equipment, weapons and armor.
2. Roll on the tables on pages 39–43.
3. Roll a number of Omens (page 38).

For completion I’m going to do both. We’ve already rolled starting equipment, so I’ll carry on with that method first and then make a new character using the optional rules. 

So. We have our starting equipment. On to weapons and armour, which involves rolling a d10 and consulting the illustration of Wound Man. I roll a 6, which gives me a Sword (d6). Fitting for someone of higher class, I suppose. Armour is a d4 roll, and I come away with heavy armour which has some mechanical concerns. The full entry reads “heavy armor (splint, plate, etc, -d6 damage, tier 3) 200s. DR +4 on Agility tests, defence is DR+2”. 

Again, if I hadn’t played the game I wouldn’t know what all this meant and that might be confusing. But the good thing is that because this is randomised, there’s no option paralysis here. I don’t have to wonder about whether I’m choosing the “right” things or not, because the dice choose for me.

The bottom of this page also tells me that scrolls will never work when wielding medium/heavy armor. So I’m not a spellcaster, unless I want to take my armour off. 

The next step is to roll Abilities. Mӧrk Bӧrg has four of them – Agility, Presence, Strength, and Toughness – and they all use a modifier of between -3 to +3. It’s generated by rolling dice and consulting a table. Initially the rules tell you to roll 3d6, but then it goes on to say that if you’re not using the optional character classes you should instead roll 4d6 and drop the lowest for two abilities.

It’s implied here that you roll in order, but the fact that you can choose to roll 4d6 for two abilities tell me we get to make some decisions about who our character will be. I’ve already established that this character is quite wealthy, and I suspect that means they’re probably relatively well educated. That says to me that my Presence should be quite high (although with my armour I’m not going to be able to use Scrolls, but whatever). The massive armour and the sword also tells me that I’m probably quite strong, but the medicine chest has got me wondering if maybe I’m some kind of apothecary (in which case maybe I’m trained in poisons, and should think about Toughness).

In the end I decide that I’ll roll 4d6 for Presence and Toughness and 3d6 for Agility and Strength, and I get the following scores:

Agility – 10 (which becomes +0)

Presence – 14 (which becomes +1)

Strength – 8 (-1)

Toughness – 13 (+1)

They’re not bad scores really. A +1 makes a lot of difference in Mӧrk Bӧrg. It’s also interesting to note that the range to get +0 is 9-12 – a span of 3 numbers right in the average roll range, with results of -2 to +2 having tighter ranges of 2 numbers each. The game expects you to be average.

The final step is to roll hit points and pick a name. You begin with Toughness + d8 hit points, with a minimum of 1. I have 5 hit points, which is pretty good for a Mӧrk Bӧrg character. As for my name? The problem I had with naming my character in Spire doesn’t exist here, because there’s a d68 table of names on the inside front cover. My character is called Grin.

In theory I’m now done, but I know that there’s something missing because I’ve played the game before – Omens. The optional rules tell you to roll your Omens (which are a currency in the game you can use for rerolls, neutralising crits and fumbles, etc) but the standard rules don’t. Every character I’ve generated with Scvmbirther has had Omens as standard, even when I haven’t used the classes, so I turned to that page (pg 38) just to check. It turns out that every class gains a number of Omens specific to that class, and if you don’t use classes you start with d2 Omens. GrinI starts with 1.

This actually marks the first criticism I’ve found of Mӧrk Bӧrg in all the times I’ve read it and played it. This part of character creation isn’t clear. It’s not game breaking, it’s not a large issue, but I’d like it to be mentioned earlier in the book.

Right now I have a vague sense of my character and their place in the world. I have stuff that I’m not entirely sure how I came by, and my character doesn’t have much purpose, but that will come up in play. If I hadn’t been writing this post while rolling this character the process would have taken less than 5 minutes – which is great for Mӧrk Bӧrg, because lethality is high. (Last time I played the game I had two TPKs, and we just kept introducing new characters. Aside from the one who got cursed with immortality and therefore couldn’t die. It was a blast.) This process gave me a good sense of the tone of the game and the way it views characters, but not a huge impetus for my character to actually venture out into the world and explore it.

Let’s see if that changes when we use the classes.

As a reminder, here’s how we make a character with the optional classes.

1. Start by choosing or randomizing a class (page 46 and on) and follow the class’ instructions on rolling for equipment, weapons and armor.
2. Roll on the tables on pages 39–43.
3. Roll a number of Omens (page 38).

There’s no list of the classes, but right at the top of page 46 is the header OPTIONAL CLASSES (D6). So let’s roll a d6.

I roll a 4, which gives me Wretched Royalty – weirdly, that’s quite fitting for Grin. Maybe I’m about to make the same character twice by accident. The flavour text tells me I’m “Bowed down only by the memories of your own lost glory, you could never submit to anyone else. Not you, of noble blood! (Not that you expect any of these peons to understand the depth of your sorrow.”

I start with 4d6x10 silver (140) and d2 Omens (2, this time).

I’m “painfully average”, so I adjust no abilities. (I assume that this is when I’m meant to roll my abilities, though the book doesn’t tell me to. I end up with Agility +2, Presence +1, Strength +0, and Toughness +0 after rolling 3d6 in order. Decent scores.)

I roll a d8 on the weapons table to end up with a Knife (interesting that Wretched Royalty are unable to access the crossbow or the zweihander, which are results 9 and 10 on the weapons table respectively). I’m also told to roll a d4 on the armour table, rerolling if I receive heavy armour (why not make it a d3 roll, Mӧrk Bӧrg?). I guess Grin wasn’t royalty after all, since they have heavy armour. Anyway, this character ends up with light armour (fur, padded, cloth, etc) after having to reroll twice.

Then we’re given a list and told that we begin with two items from it. It’s not explicit that we should roll, but each entry is numbered from 1-6 and it seems in keeping with the way the rest of character creation works to randomise it. I end up with “Poltroon” the Court Jester, who accompanies me on my adventures and distracts enemies in combat, and the Horn of Schleswig Lords, which I can blow in to bolster my companions and make them succeed at tasks they might otherwise fail. That’s pretty good.

There’s also a roll table scrawled down the side of the page titled, “Things were going so well, until…”. Rolling on it I find that my caravan kingdom of Tveland fell into penury. This is what I was missing from the classless character creation – something to tie me to the world in a concrete way.

The next step is to roll on the tables on pages 39-43. These are tables of traits, traumas, and history – things to flesh out your character and give them some life. There’s nothing telling us we can’t use them when we generate characters without the optional classes, but similarly there’s nothing saying that we should and that’s why I didn’t touch them when we were making Grin.

On the first table, Terrible Traits, we roll 2d20. My character has a loud mouth and is prone to substance abuse. The Broken Bodies table tells me that I’m corpulent, ravenous, and drooling – which ties in nicely to the substance abuse, and the overall theme of Wretched Royalty. I’ve lost myself to excess in response to losing my ancestral seat. The Bad Habits table tells me that I’m a pyromaniac. And, after throwing a knife at page 43, I learn that my flesh heals twice as fast, but my companions twice as slow, and that I see a many-eyed “guardian angel”.

This is not a nice person to be around. 

I also realise that I need a name, so I turn to the front cover again and learn that this disgusting, fallen monarch is called Arvent. And that’s my second character done.

All told, it took less than hour to create both of these characters while writing this post. Grin would have taken 5 minutes on their own. Arvent would have taken a little longer – maybe 10 minutes, since there was a bit of flicking back and forth in the book and finding the right pages for things.

It’s interesting that the classes have very little mechanical effect in the game. They’re a collection of thematic trinkets and hooks to the world, and they change the way you generate your abilities and equipment to make things slightly more fitting to your role. One of the potential things the Wretched Royal can start with is a talking horse, which is ludicrous and incredible.

Whereas my Spire character felt anachronistic to my expectations of the world, both Grin and Arvent definitely met my expectations for what a Mӧrk Bӧrg character looks like. I’m a little disappointed that my random rolls generated two such similar characters thematically, but that’s not a problem with the game. In fact, the theme of fallen nobility was something I attached to Grin myself as a result of my interpretation of the equipment they started with. 

Of the two systems I’ve played around with so far, Mӧrk Bӧrg’s character creation definitely suits my preferences as a gamer more than Spire (even though Spire is a game I thoroughly enjoyed playing and shares a lot in common with Blades in the Dark, which is one of my favourite games).

Next week I’m going to play with a system I know nothing about as I roll up a character in Burning Wheel.

This past 12 months has seen a surge in the popularity of solo games (something I’ve very happily benefited from). I haven’t written anything on this blog in a while – not since I finished writing trinkets for all of the sets of starting equipment in the dragon game – and I’ve been looking for a new reason to do small bits of writing that I don’t try to make money from.

The current Bundle of Holding is for Classic Traveller, and last week I picked them up and ended up playing through the character creation mini game in a Twitter thread. I really enjoyed the emergent storytelling that came out of that lifepath system, and I felt like it taught me a lot about what kinds of stories Traveller is meant to tell.

So I thought fuck it, why not turn character creation into a series of blog posts? At least until I get bored of it or forget that I was meant to be doing it. I’ve got a ton of games that I probably won’t get a chance to play any time soon and the books are simply gathering dust on my shelves, so I can at least crack them open to roll up a character. And then I can write about it, maybe.

These aren’t reviews. They’re a look at the first part of a game that players engage with, annotated with my thoughts as I’m going through the process. Since I’m writing this introduction before I’ve actually done the thing I don’t know whether these posts are going to be worth reading, whether anything will come of them, what kinds of conclusions (if any) I’m going to draw, etc. I imagine the format will refine itself as I go along and I’ll have more interesting things to say as I engage with more systems and am able to draw comparisons.

We’ll see how it goes I guess. 

I also couldn’t figure out what to call this series. Cat Evans suggested Naming The Faceless and it’s better than anything I could come up with so I’m stealing it. Thanks, Cat. (Also you should pick up her Wretched & Alone game Final Girl while I still have copies in stock.)

Today I’m doing Spire by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor. I picked it first because I’m playing it tonight and need a character. Which goes directly against what I just said about having these games I won’t get a chance to play, but whatever. It’s my blog and I’ll do what I want.

Here’s the pitch for the game:

You are a dark elf. Your home, the towering city of Spire, was occupied by the high elves two hundred years ago. Now, you have joined a secret organisation known as the Ministry, a paramilitary cult with a single aim – to overthrow the cruel high elves and restore the drow as the rightful rulers of the city.

What – or who – will you sacrifice to achieve your aims? Will you evade the attention of the authorities, or end up shot in the street like so many before you?

Spire RPG

I know literally nothing else about it other than that. So let’s roll up a character.

The first thing to say is that the character creation rules seemed like they were buried really deep in this book. They’re actually only on page 25, but I think it’s the fact that some of the stuff that came before them wasn’t needed that made it feel like they were further in. I don’t mind having the core rules come before character creation – it’s nice to know what you’re going to be doing in a game and how the numbers work before you make a character (sometimes) – but I don’t need to see equipment lists that span multiple pages, and I don’t need to see things that won’t be relevant until later in the game (like crafting rules, to give a specific example from Spire). That’s only a mild criticism, though – that stuff has to go somewhere, character creation can’t always be the first thing in the book, and figuring out the right place to put character generation rules is often the most difficult part of laying out a rulebook.

Anyway. I’ve found the character creation rules, so let’s get down to it.

The first thing to do is choose my character’s Durance – the 4 year period of indentured servitude that all Drow undergo before play begins. I’m immediately drawn to the Duellist – a prize fighter for an aelfir lord who’s equally at home in a brawl or at a fancy party – the Hunter (I love the idea of hunting prey across the rooftops, that’s very atmospheric), and the Occultist. In most games I play I end up as a melee character of some kind, so I’m going to pick Occultist. Here’s what it says:

You plumbed the depths of arcane knowledge for your master, risking your sanity by poring over forbidden tomes in an effort to unlock the secrets within. You are used to concealing your activities from the authorities and decoding ancient spells.

I note down that I start with +2 Shadow and Occult.

Now we select a class and two Low abilities. If the Durance is what I was doing before I joined the resistance, the Class is what I do now. (Another note on the rulebook here – I would have appreciated a list or a table showing all of the classes with a one-sentence description of what they are, rather than having to flip through them all to figure out what I want my character to be.)

I’m drawn to the Idol (I’m a sucker for a bard and this feels close to it) and also the Vermissian Sage, which is the kind of class I like to see in a game – something that doesn’t really have an analogue in any other games, that is a product of the specific setting that we’re playing in. In the end I choose the Idol. I like the idea that after 4 years of fucking around with weird magic, I’ve come out the other side filled with ideas and a strange means of manifesting them,

With that chosen I write down my Resistances – Silver +1, Mind +1, Reputation +1 – and my Refresh trigger (“Someone feels deeply moved when they witness your art”). 

This is where I hit a snag. The Idol class gives access to the Occult domain, which I already have from my Occultist Durance. It’s not clear here whether I should just pick another one myself. I assume I should, since the game seems to want me to have 3 of them. I decide to pick Academia, and I figure I spent a lot of time pulling dusty tomes out of libraries for whichever aelfir bastard I used to work for.

Now for Bonds. The first states that I have a street-level bond with my adoring fans, and asks me to name 3 of them and say what they’re most excited to see next. (Another note – I don’t like it when games ask me to come up with a name without giving me some examples of the kinds of names that exist in the setting.) I do a quick search of the PDF for names and spot an NPC called Quince, and that reminds me of The Eve of St Agnes by Keats, so I name my three adoring luvvies Quince, Plum, and Gourd because I have a Masters degree in English Lit and I’m going to fucking use it, damn it. They’re most excited to see a piece I’ve been teasing for months, a living meat sculpture formed by summoning different bits of demons (do demons exist in this setting? I don’t know) that I smash together in real time into some weird chimera creature, before banishing it again. What could go wrong?

The other bond says, “You have a bond with another PC who you know has feelings for you, even if they wouldn’t admit it. Describe the moment when you knew for definite.” Since I’m making this character on my own I can’t answer that yet, so I’ll figure it out when I get to the table.

Now I have to choose two Low abilities. I pick Incorruptible (“Your mind is crystal, shining and pure, and madness rolls off you and onto others.”) and Majesty (“You become so beautiful that none would dare raise a hand against you”)

The final thing to do is to name my character. Again, I’m struggling with this because I don’t really have any examples of names in the setting (and searching the PDF again didn’t help this time). So I go back to the poem I used earlier, choose the name “Porphyro”, and decide that my character exclusively wears purple. And I’m done.

So, conclusions. The first thing is that when I read the setting and rules before the character creation section, I wasn’t expecting to come out of this with a character quite so fabulous. The mood I got from the rulebook was definitely more Blades In The Dark with drow than anything else, so to end up with a flamboyant artist who people worship was quite a surprise. The character feels fairly anachronistic to the setting, and while I enjoy that in games I know well I’m not sure how it will pan out in a game I’ve never played before. We’ll see.

Maybe the trad gamer in me is showing, but I missed getting to roll dice during character creation. There’s something about random number generation to dictate a character that I really enjoy, and that itch wasn’t scratched here. Choosing backgrounds and classes felt a lot like making a character in the latest edition of the dragon game, and I don’t like making 5e characters. Being asked to pick starting abilities is tough when you don’t know how often they’re going to come up in play or how useful they’re going to be. (I had the same problem with BitD, where I had a lot of fun building a ritual that I have never once used in ~10 sessions of play. But that’s for another day).

This possibly wasn’t the best game to start this series of posts with, but that’s fine. I expect that some games will work really well for this and others just won’t, and I’ll deal with that as it happens. 

Next week we’ll do Mӧrk Bӧrg, because I always run that game and never get to play it and I want to roll up some horrible bastards.

Let’s not bury the lede – I’m delighted to announce that Loot The Room is published Batts’ Songbirds in print for the first time in the UK!

Batts is one of my favourite designers who is responsible for some of the most original, thoughtful, and beautiful games I’ve ever played – things like The Wizards and the Wastes, Vultures, and Red Snow have changed the way I think about designing games entirely.

Songbirds is no different. It’s a game that asks the question, “What if knights didn’t slay dragons and instead helped them with their emotional issues?” It’s a fantasy heartbreaker that will actually break your heart, that uses songs to generate adventures and plays like a Diana Wynne Jones book wrung through a lens of Studio Ghibli movies.

I love it, I’m honoured to be bringing it to print, and I hope you’ll love it too. Find out more and pick up your copy here.