The First Outing to the Drowned Isles, feat. Tannic

In November, I ran a oneshot using my ruleset/setting/campaign, The Drowned Isles. I was trying to test drive the kernel of a ruleset I’ve written as well as some character classes. This oneshot ran for two sessions, each about three hours. We played Tannic by Amanda P, sticking pretty closely to the zine’s material in the first session and diverging sharply in the latter.

Feel free to jump ahead to my thoughts on Tannic or my takeaways for the game’s design.

What’s the Drowned Isles?

For a long answer, check out my March blogpost introducing the project. For a shorter answer: the core of the game is investigative adventuring, social interaction, and interesting superpowers. Decent rules for handling fights are a genre necessity, but not my overall focus. Think of it like “D&D as imagined by someone who has never played an RPG.” It’s sort of my forever-WIP RPG, which is finally coming to fruition this year.

Play Report

If you don’t want spoilers for Tannic, I suggest skipping to the system postmortem.

Three intrepid Wardens set out to rescue the missing children of Tannic:

Well, before they set out they played some carnival games. Niya stole an axe so she could enchant it to win a game of strength, but she was caught by Peregrine, the town’s local Warden. Peregrine were disappointed in her behavior. She did go on to win a plush unicorn.

Shortly after they set out on the road, the Wardens were beset by bandits. These bandits were unpracticed and disorganized. Their leader fled after Chet delivered a devastating blow to his head, and the others shortly followed suit.

The Wardens found the children’s campsite and investigated it. They found some footprints that lead to the south-east and decided to follow them. Just as they were leaving, Niya sampled some suspicious liquid in the camp, and became enchanted. Her companions chased after her while she blundered through the woods, thankfully in the same direction as the children.

Unfortunately the blundering and chasing lead them right into the arms of a carnivorous tree. It scooped up Chet and Niya, and nearly succeeded at eating them. While Vonk failed to save the pair by hacking at the vines with a knife, Niya was able to magically confuse the tree and the three fled. They rested for the night once they were a sufficient distance. Vonk used one of his magical seeds to create a pit-trap plant, and placed Niya in it (to prevent further wandering).

At a forge in the woods Niya encountered a ghost named Gustav, that only she could see. Under his instructions she repaired his forge, which caused small iron elementals to spring to life. Chet defeated them by soccer-kicking them into the furnace. Niya then forged the ghost into iron horseshoes, which she attached to her stuffed unicorn. I ruled that Gustav was now able to use the stuffed animal as a body.

The next day they made better progress and arrived at the adventure’s dungeon. There they found Astrid hiding in a suit of armor, with her ears stuffed up to avoid hearing the enchanting harp. The Wardens calmed her down and left her with Gustav the unicorn as they moved further into the dungeon to free her friends.

Niya drinking some embalming fluid aside, the party made their way to the bottom of the dungeon uneventfully. There they encountered Prince Sebastian, playing his haunted harp to enchant Flora and Osric. After some experimentation, Vonk decided on a course of action. He created another pit-trap plant under Sebastian (who promptly fell into it and stopped playing). Chet grabbed the dazed kids and high-tailed it out of there.

When the Wardens returned to the entrance of the dungeon, they discovered a consequence held from earlier in the session: the highway band of animalfolk that Niya had harassed kidnapped Astrid and Gustav. They left a note demanding Niya come to their boat alone.

Around here is where the content from Tannic ends. Everything after is Drowned-Isles-related embellishments.

The Wardens arrived to find Tannic under siege by Atlantean soldiers. They had been informed of magical goings-on in the region and decided to quarantine the town until things were thoroughly investigated. Vonk used the last of his power to create a tunnel across the town and return Osric and Flora to safety.

Rather than allow Niya to face her ransomers, Chet decided to do some negotiation / intimidation. He did retrieve Astrid and Gustav, but did not placate the band. They attempted to blow-dart Niya and the other Wardens as they left, but only succeeded in wounding Vonk. The Wardens returned Astrid to their home and decided to shelter with Peregrine until the morning.

At this time it was around the end of our usual session slot and we decided to call it there. It can be assumed that the Wardens wrapped up the situation satisfactorily off-screen.

Tannic Thoughts

I picked up Tannic from a new hole-in-the-wall local game store. The module sounded familiar, looked appealing, and was a nice small zine. It was a great pick! The stats provided are for Cairn and OSE. Our combat was pretty loosey-goosey, but when we did use dice it looked something like Cairn.

The zine is well-organized, with a nice overview in the first few pages to situate the referee. The map immediately after is helpful as well. Places and characters are well-described; I ran most of them out of the book with no issue. Overall Tannic strikes a nice balance of lighthearted fun and enough menace or danger to keep some stakes. I especially had a lot of fun with players drinking various mind-altering substances, though in a less one-shot/nothing-matters situation I think fewer players would have partaken. The central mystery is good, with enough points of interest pushing you in the right direction.

I had only two criticisms. One is minor: the page number references are consistently wrong throughout. Tannic is short enough that this wasn’t game-stopping, just a point of friction. My other problem is that I had a hard time understanding the layout of the dungeon. The provided map doesn’t include any obvious indications of verticality - unless the numbering of rooms also indicates their floor (which may be the case). I’m also unused to a dungeon-based playstyle, so that could be on my end rather than the zine’s.

Overall I enjoyed Tannic, would run it again with a new group, and recommend it.

System: What Worked

Decentering Combat

The reason I haven’t found any suitable ruleset for the Drowned Isles is how dang combat-focused a lot of fantasy adventure games are. I just don’t care that much about fights, and I find games where characters are built with that in mind a little limited. My hope was that ICON, by siloing its combat rules into a separate game, would do the trick for me. It turns out that wasn’t the case.

Back at the drawing board I decided two things: I don’t want to break into a separate game “mode” for combat, but I do want some rules support for it. I’m still vacillating on the exact form it will take.

In this playtest, no character was built with a narrow focus on battle and all the fights flowed pretty smoothly. That’s exactly what I wanted.

Archetypes

I’ve always struggled to write character classes. It’s not in my interest to write numerical, game-y classes like you’d see in D&D, but it’s not in my skill-set to write large classes composed of interesting and unique upgrades. Years ago (when I had more free time and energy) I tried to write a hack of Heart, giving each player a branching upgrade tree with a dozen abilities each. That’s hard work to write, and even harder to make ‘em good!

What I settled on for this draft is essentially GLOG classes, but with a higher overall level cap. A class (called an “archetype”) grants some interesting core to a character and usually around 4 level-ups. Players start with one Archetype and can earn others by spending XP.

Some Archetypes are going to be adaptations of existing GLOG classes (see above - one was used in this very adventure) or ripped from Brighter Worlds. Others I’ll write myself. I can knock out a pretty passable Archetype with a good idea and an hour jotting notes on a park bench. My goal is to have twelve to fifteen archetypes available at the start of the full campaign, and end with thirty to fifty.

Powers

There are two main approaches I’ve seen for superpowers in RPGs. The first is “codify you to death” (any 90’s superhero RPG, any D&D spellcaster), which I want to avoid. The second is “superpowers exist in the fiction but not the mechanics” (i.e. Masks), which I find unsatisfying and difficult to run. Whitehack’s freeform magic system comes close, but the random elements of power cost and the relatively arbitrary criteria put my group off it.

The best superpower mechanic I’ve seen is from Fall of the Red Planet[3]. Each time a character uses their superpower to do something significant, we use a table of different factors to calculate the cost. There are some various bits and bobs (currently characters can choose to cause mayhem to get more power), but that’s the core idea.

Where I think it excels is the kind of thinking it encourages. Player inputs are totally freeform; someone might propose “can I use my feats of athletics power to kick this golem into the river” or “I want to use my performance power to distract everyone in town.” The rules only kick in after that and help give structure to what characters are capable of. My hope is that it can encourage creative and surprising uses of character powers[4], and so far that hope has borne out.

Threat Roll

For the first of two sessions, I used a dice ladder kinda system. Your stat is a d6, d8, d10, or d12; get a 4 or higher to succeed. It was kinda meh. Then between sessions Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts dropped and I knew I had to steal the Threat Roll. It worked great! I’m really loving it.

System: What Didn’t

Stats

Characters had four stats: Toughness, Agility, Finesse, and Presence (standard heartbreaker stuff). Honestly I didn’t like the result. Things felt stiff and unnatural - tons of rolls don’t slot in nicely to those stats. I forgot that I actually… don’t like D&D stats. I think I’ll probably go with a Blades-style Action rating?

Moves

Before play I had written out some PbtA-style moves to guide the social side of play. I ended up preferring threats I had created on the fly to the moves I had pre-written. Great moves make games sing, but poorly-written moves grind like broken gears. If I had a strong vision I could spend more time hammering out moves, but I think I’d rather just spend effort elsewhere.

HP

I don’t really like HP in general? Any time you’re rolling for damage and subtracting numbers, it’s hard to remember that there’s some actual fiction that should be underlying combat mechanics. I had HP because “getting into a fight with somebody” is something I want to model with rules, but I think much smaller numbers with fixed damage values (a la Apocalypse World) is the way to go.

  1. A two-foot tall gremlin who haunts my playtests. She has seen the Drowned Isles from a hack of Into the Odd featuring crashed spaceships, to a Trophy Dark derivative with sea-walled cities, to its current iteration. Each time her character abilities are rebuilt from scratch, but her nature is constant. She is very short, she is petulant, and she causes problems on purpose. Previously she has wielded wizardly abilities, thunder magic, radioactive materials, and strange tree powers. ↩︎

  2. The name and powerset is inspired by Mako Trig, a character from COUNTER/Weight. Instead of hacking machines, though, this archetype is about confusing and misdirecting people. ↩︎

  3. Also in CAIN, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some kind of shared ancestor that both games are inspired by. ↩︎

  4. The “creative and surprising uses of powers” is one of my favorite parts of Hunter × Hunter, which I’ve been watching through with my roommate for a year and a half. It’s become a significant influence on Drowned Isles. ↩︎