English Eerie (11-02-21)

 

A solo journaling RPG, so unlike everything else here, I write this after having actually played it, which took some time as I followed the advice of the game and played just one day for each real day. The theme is M R James style horror, the game provides 10 Scenarios which you play through using a d10 and a deck of cards, turning one over for each morning and afternoon, resolving whatever they present and writing up your journal entry to reflect this.

Your character has 2 stats, Spirit and Resolve and 10 points to split between them at the start of the game (I think I went for 6 resolve and 4 spirit). About half of the cards present you with some kind of obstacle the severity of which is a expressed by a target number you have to beat on a d10. You can spend Resolve to gain a bonus, +2 if declared before the roll +1 after. Failing loses you a point of Spirit. The specific end of the game, the story outcome, is determined by how much Spirit you have left when all the cards have been played. As its a horror game the ending is likely to be grim, I had 0 so yeah.

The other key mechanic is the Grey Lady card. The deck is structured around these, you organize the cards such that all are random except the 6th, the 12th and the 19th (the final card) all of which are Grey Ladies. When a Grey Lady is drawn you must lose a point of Spirit or Resolve and consult the Tension Table to see what occurs. The target number of all obstacles is increased by 1 for each Grey Lady that has been revealed.

Beyond their name, Spirit and Resolve, your character is defined by 3 Fears and 3 Defining Features, the idea being that these should give you details to play with when writing your journal entries. This is the weakest bit of the game for me, I completely ignored what I wrote down as they were created without knowledge of the Scenario and consequently not relevant.

The 10 Scenarios included provide the story setup, specify the kind of character you should be and provide the details to use with the cards. The cards cover what Secondary Characters exist and their relationships to you (‘Secondary Character Obstacle' being one and 'Secondary Character Harmed' another), what Environmental Obstacles you must deal and what Clues arise. They also provide the Tension Table which outlines the event caused by each Grey Lady and finally the Spirit Table which reveals your fate.

The game comes with a booklet of cards to print, but it can be played with a normal deck of playing cards. I made my own set as I've been getting into lino-cut printing. 

 

I played one day per real day, and followed all the advice - wrote by candle and well, monitor light  and went one step further by using dip pen and ink to record my tale. I really enjoyed it, I’m almost tempted to try make something of my journal, it was actually fairly long in the end. The only real issue was that a detail I invented, which became central to my story, turned out to be a bit discordant with the end. Although I realize writing this that I could probably have adapted it more to fit. Interestingly this tangent, which involved goat people, essentially 18th century depictions of the Devil, was suggested to me by one of the clues (‘The sound of distant piping in the air’) calling to mind a painting inspired by Tam O’Shanter, but yeah satanic goat people seemed a bit at odds with the alien world ending.
 

One final point; I think the game might be improved by having Fears rolled from a table for each Scenario to make sure that they are always relevant, and potentially do the same with Defining Features, although perhaps those could come from a game wide table. As much as anything this would eliminate any choice paralysis at the start of the game and let the player get into it faster, although maybe that's just the influence of Knave & Mork Borg on my thinking, maybe other people like a reflective character creation phase for journaling games.

English Eerie is on DriveThrough.

Universalis (05-02-21)

 

Arguably harder to write about than My Life With Master, I came across a reference to it while reading around MLWM before writing it up. In some ways more like a board game, Universalis is essentially a structured way to create and tell a story in a group.

There is no GM, at the start of the game each player gets a number of coins which each spends in turn to establish facts about the story. Once play begins coins are spent to introduce or take charge of components (characters, locations, props) and assign them traits. Players can spend coins to challenge each other and dice are used to resolve complications, i.e. when there is a contested outcome. Coins are won from the resolution of complications or minimally refreshed at the start of each new scene. In this way a story unfolds.

It looks like a really carefully considered system, the rules come in at just over 100 pages.
I’d really like to try it and I’m surprised I’ve only come across it now. It looks like a potentially useful creative tool when working in groups, and there are many lovely aspects to it, the advice on adding traits and setting up scenes for propelling a story towards where you want it to go look like good advice for writing generally. The pdf I downloaded is from 2002 and there was an updated edition in 2006, but the publisher website is sadly defunct. Indeed I could not actually purchase it anywhere, which is a real shame as they really deserve the cash.