I love Ascension. Love it. It’s a capstone for the whole corpus of roleplaying, a love letter to taking on a strange, alternate persona, and a meditation on the problems gamers run into. Its politics were never particularly focused and often based on wacky interpretations of the source material, but were provocative enough to piss  off people years later.

The Magic(k) Test

That doesn’t mean it was an entirely successful game. There was always an inverse correlation between Ascension play and discussion. It got to the point where I developed a basic test to determine whether someone played the game to any significant extent, since you sure as hell couldn’t tell from post volume. It’s pretty simple, and I’ll share it with you now. Just ask yourself:

Has this person alluded to the fact that Mage: The Ascension‘s magic rules make no goddamn sense?

If you play Ascension 2nd or Revised for any length of time you’ll immediately notice that the magic rules are — and I usually hold this term in low esteem — “broken.” The power of a magical Effects are determined by the number of successes. These average less for higher-Ranked Effects (with a capital “E” — guess I still remember the style guide) because those use a higher difficulty on the die (in old World of Darkness games the number you had to roll on each die to succeed varied, instead of always being 8). It also made coincidental Effects less powerful than vulgar ones, which contradicted the role of vulgar magic. Instead of being the moment where you bust out and damn the consequences, it was just a bad decision.

This isn’t immediately obvious if you don’t play the game regularly. It looks like ascending difficulties should make sense, and the odd combination of type and intensity governed by Sphere ranks might disguise it for a couple of sessions, but the problem sticks out like a sore thumb in ongoing games. It’s also something that you’re kind of stuck with as a legacy issue, so I don’t really blame anyone for it sticking around through most of the line’s existence.

When the discussion doesn’t address the fact that Ascension‘s mechanical bones are rotten, it often means the participants may be into it for the conversation over play. When staunch defenders of 2nd Edition (a compelling game!) don’t seem to know that it introduced almost everything they think Revised “broke” it makes me think lots of them stopped supporting the line once they gave up on playing the thing, and it started to stumble.

(That’s right. Chris Shy once told me that he’d been encouraged to do what he liked because he was told 2nd was “a failing line.”)

It looks like Phil Brucato (who this isn’t written to diss — I very much enjoy his work) carefully preserved funky space shit while he let everything blow up in the background of development as a “nuclear option.” Well, something happened that probably involved talkative fans not buying the funky space shit they would later claim to love, so somebody pushed the button that made explosions n’ things which had floated in some canon-indeterminate novelspace waveform collapse on top of everybody’s Free Pegasus Rides.

From here we get into some kind of conspiracy theory involving making Mage like Vampire. This is kind of an assholish claim because you can’t do it without implicitly accusing a bunch of folks of lying. We said this wasn’t the case repeatedly.

Still, Mage Revised had problems out the gate with editing, content and a chunk of opening fiction that could have been better (and in the intro story that appeared on White Wolf’s old website, actually was better). I heard that massive overwriting was part of the reason why the book took the shape it did, but nothing about developer headbutts or anything.

The Matrix proved that Ascension‘s time had come, but but it didn’t suggest a version of the game that existed or could be easily salvaged from the wreckage of 2nd Edition’s metaplot. Jess Heinig set things up to rebuild the game as gritty urban fantasy with a focus on  the moral choices of freshly created characters. He planned to build a full ladder of setting options to replace the ones destroyed in the previous edition. This not only involved retooling the Umbra but making PC Technocrat characters viable without ruining the Union as an antagonist. (This arc was fulfilled through Bill Bridges’ run, so the idea that Ascension was fundamentally rebooted in mid-stride is wrong too.)

Science Ninja Team Motherfucker

Now people really fuck up the Technocracy because they want to be seen as rational folks defending  Truth from the religious Right, but that conflict is just a stupid dog and pony show pushed by participants who don’t want to deal with shared, urgent problems with their worldviews. Baptists and Brights don’t oppose the omnisciently selfish homo economicus even though it should be morally offensive to the former and empirically absurd to the latter. When it comes to actually wielding force they still align based on crass political interests, and both sides have been historically willing to prostitute their supposedly deep convictions to do it.  That’s why you have prosperity theology and BP’s funny estimates of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The problem with the Technocracy isn’t that it fails to be your League of Feeling Superior to Creationists. It’s that it doesn’t have sucker Creationists willing to send mercenaries to Iraq for Jesus on tap.

The Technocracy represents the Western tradition’s ductility in the face of realpolitik, as well as its habit of saving face by redefining its own historical narrative to portray itself as consistently progressive. This is hard to talk about because people have bought into it completely, especially as America has shifted to the Right over the past decade. For example, over on RPGNet I read the usual silly things about constantly accelerating progress, even though actual history shows back and forth fluctuations in height and life expectancy until the early 20th Century — including declines directly related to urbanization and industrialization. For example, the First Nations who met European colonists on the Atlantic Coast were probably 4-5 inches taller than the diseased gnomes who’d give them trouble later.

Even this ignores the fact that averages don’t take into account the large populations who were exterminated in the course of colonization, and imperialist wars, and the lasting, more subtle damage done to subject cultures’ overall utility. Mage Revised runs on the premise that these events are not merely impersonal historical forces. They grow out of moral choices. Calling the consequences the necessary outgrowth of a metaphysical position is moral cowardice. We suffer from strong inducements to be cowards, but that doesn’t remove the fact that we choose to stigmatize other ways of knowing to justify the bad things done in the name of our own positions.

In the Western tradition these choices are framed within a distinct urge to systematize societies — to make them Utopian (or at least egoistic) projects. Another stupid thing people say about Ascension is how if some Tradition were in charge we’d be eating our own babies. Fact is, the Traditions were almost never in charge. (This also means they weren’t really responsible for various bad things, though they were irresponsible about them.) There’s a reason every Tradition is heterodox or heretical compared to the baseline beliefs of its related cultures. The Celestial Chorus isn’t the embodiment of monotheism. It’s a global monist conspiracy with a decided bias against the doctrinaire positions of its component religions.

The desire to progressively engineer cultures is not universal. The Technocracy is that urge, and it’s not an inherently good urge. You cannot ignore the fact that even though science is a force for good, this is the urge that pays its bills, and it is this urge that especially lends Western civilization to centralized control by elites. (Other civilizations may be be controlled by a central group of oligarchs, but alternatives like Tianming aren’t progressive, and represent popular cultural standards to which they can be held accountable.)

When you combine the urge to engineer a better society with political ductility, you get the problem the Technocracy represents, including its adoption of the most effective  instruments for change — tools based on scientific methods (and no small amount of pretense — lots of Technocracy “science” looks like bullshit for the same reason that lots of management and QA techniques look like bullshit — they use hoodoo with fancy lingo). The Technocracy are supposed to be the guys behind screwed up hegemonic systems that blur the division between science and ideology. It’s supposed to be a bitter pill to swallow because you already read that system’s propaganda and have to contend with its slant in every political matter.

The Goodish Guys

Mage: The Ascension never quite finished the job of taking that Technocracy and sifting out a group of idealistic science advocates. The bad-guy Technocracy is more relevant than ever. (BP is using the Coast Guard to suppress media around the oil hole right now after its scientists lowballed the effects. That situation covers every branch of Technocracy operations in the game.) Still, there ought to be high tech guys who aren’t into VR, orgone and pyramid power.

But none of the factions should be untainted good guys. If we say that there’s a nice “pure” science faction it breaks the tone of the setting (where no faction is pure) and ignores an important theme: that people necessarily conflate ideology with the way they interact with the world. This is true in Mage, and true in the real world, too. For example, it’s a safe best that no Pioneer Fund research project is ever going to end in results that defy white supremacist thinking. And when our society switched to “scientific” management, it did so to satisfy entrenched interests and their Fuck You Buddy ethos.

Hell, just watch The Trap.

Redeemed “magical” scientists need a virtuous ethos to influence their work, and Mage doesn’t do that for any faction. The Traditions are good guys because they do not oppress humanity in any organized fashion and say that you get to choose whatever belief system makes you happy. This doesn’t recommend any of their paradigms or internal workings as models for society, but the game’s stance is that people ought to decide these for themselves, based on whatever lets them navigate the world while adhering to a basically compassionate stance.

The Traditions don’t necessarily do compassionate. They’re a collective insurgency with a hierarchy that was once designed to pass on traditional knowledge, but is now the ranking system of the strangest army in the universe. The Sons of Ether are ignorant of colonialism. The Akashics can use abstraction to excuse themselves of anything. The Euthanatos . . . well, you know. The Traditions’ collective goal — give Sleepers the freedom to decide what they want and not come to a universal consensus, even — is a good thing, but the Traditions are self-absorbed and amoral until the PCs do something epic to turn them around. Good Guy Science should be in a similar place, with some underlying ethos that is compelling and a bit dangerous. That’s what I designed the Transhuman Adepts to do. in the Dirty Version.

Paradigms don’t make good or bad people. They serve as props that allow people to commit wonder or horrific acts because they act as conceptual frameworks for moral decisions. They don’t determine what those decisions are going to be. That’s why the game never got into “paradigm wars,” and why thinking along those lines isn’t that relevant to game play. It’s a very attrractive field, but the game’s about getting past it. There’s no denying you could do something cool with it, but it would probably be less cool than designing specific situations and stories to play in.

NoMo PoMo

It’s too bad that talking about them and about Ascension in general is always going to be marred by the game’s fairweather postmodernism (which it isn’t all about — I think I’m the guy who worked on the line who used that point of view the most, and there’s at least as much pop philosophy, New Age and 90s occultism in there) and the fact that lots of fans don’t actually know what postmodernism is.It’s not a free for all, not a way to create your own reality (though that’s in Ascension — see how I said it’s not all PoMo?) but an acknowledgement that we act in a context provided by the facts of our histories and the stories told about them. The context features biases, hidden implications and lots of other wacky stuff. Some of these things will piss you off, since they will imply unkind things about you. This is a feature, not a bug.

As far as getting postmodern, the mage is a Pharamakos: an ambiguous figure who may be an influencer and leader, but is himself a product of a narrative outside of himself (his paradigm). These narratives shouldn’t just be a matter of “voting,” since mages and Sleepers alike are subject to these big stories that tell them who they are and assimilate new information in ways that avoid contradiction (or Paradox). Working subtly from one’s own subject position nudges the feedback loop between self and culture, but doing the vulgar magical jack move is what really establishes Pharmakos status: that of the sorcerer-scapegoat who is at once confined to the subaltern, but necessary to keep society dynamic, and away from the trap of total systemization in the service of elites, rather than the polis/culture/world as a whole. I have my way of tweaking the game to support that better.

I think the sorcerer-scapegoat angle is important. I think Ascension is a great game, an almost accidentally important game, and I’m going to enjoy running it for the first time in six years.

Dread: The First Book of Pandemonium

This is a violent, sleazy splatterpunk epic. Everybody’s a bit tougher than human but that just let’s ‘em bleed a little longer. The system uses a straightforward dice pool mechanic that just takes a few minutes to pick up, but the real charm of the game lies in its inventive demons and the way it’s easy to build basic stories and boot characters right into the action. The game’s only drawback is the fact that it’s background’s a bit sparse for long term play, but the supplements correct that.

MSG(tm) Executive Edition

MSG is Wood Ingham’s corporate dystopia, remarkably relevant in the way it models relationships that exist now, but merely stretches them to the point where you can satirize them “safely.” Otherwise, you might be left with rather savage self-criticism, but that can come later, after you’ve screwed over each other in search of security, raw power and the extraordinarily fuzzy line between the two.

Reign

Consider making Reign your alternate go-to fantasy RPG. The One Roll Engine System runs smoothly enough to support any core fantasy gaming you feel like doing with remarkable efficiency. Much has been said about the Company (big-ish organization) rules, but I think these are merely serviceable, while the core RPG concepts as presented here are remarkably refined. This game also has one of the better discussions of magic systems in RPGs (even though I don’t agree with it 100%, I think people fiddling with magic in a game should read it) and a world presented in digestible chunks, making it much simpler to take away basic ideas and cool bits.

Honorable Mention: RedBrick’s Catalog(s)

For God’s sakes people, you can buy Blue Planet, Earthdawn and Fading Suns from them! What the hell are you waiting for? All great games. Look ‘em up online to see why. EDIT: CORRECTION.  Sadly, you have to buy everything but Fading Suns through Mongoose now, and that company doesn’t deserve a cent of your money.

1) I’m not going to review The Burning Wheel after all. I came to this conclusion after realizing that the problems with the game map to the problems with indie games so exactly that it would be hard to write anything constructively critical about it. What I mean is that the good bits would have been obviously good before current pseudo-theory, and the bad things are bad because of the revisions awkward mating with pseudo-theory. The game is amazing in places, and the obvious victim of buying into garbage ideology in other places.

The one bit emblematic of this is the misguided “Let it Ride” rule. This rule is basically everything wrong with indie gaming in a few short pages:

• The rule (no re-rolls required unless conditions radically change) is based on an assumption that the players are basically damaged gamers. It is touted as a form of “protection” from the GM. Ultimately, it’s based on distrust of the player. GMs actually tend to ask for re-rolls to give players another chance, not to screw them.
• The rule is badly designed. Increased randomness actually favours the player with the worse edge. That means that in many situations, re-rolls are good for players, not bad. This is why re-rolls are actually a poor punitive tool by GMs who are control freaks. Bad GMs normally use them to create a result they think “should” have happened, but they’ve already loaded the contest and have the edge. Thus, they do not reap significant rewards unless the result was really unlikely to begin with and are just exercising the gambler’s fallacy. But if a player with a poor chance of success gets another shot, this can become a significant advantage because of the same principles that dice pools operate under.
• The rule is vague. The example of the rule in action is actually a situation where the GM screws the player and the example actually calls the application of the rule into question, since the GM forbids a new roll where the rule implies one ought to be allowed (“legitimately and drastically change”).

In short it assumes that you, the player, are a rather stupid and difficult person and don’t deserve a break. It’s everything wrong with the game in a nutshell.

Everything *right* with the game is summed up in Instincts, which is an elegant solution for a genuine issue in play, with consequences built firmly into its structure.

2) After D&D last night I found myself able to articulate something that kind of sucks about the rules. D&D is designed to strictly assign responsibilities and outcomes for dungeon crawling. This breaks down into a number of standard tasks that players constantly undertake. D&D mandates rolls in short intervals in tasks like Search. D&D also assumes that players declare the task each time.

The unspoken balancing mechanism here is that as players have to declare that they’re doing exactly the same thing over and over again, somebody will slip up and miss the trap/monster/door. Basically, D&D relies on player boredom to create tension and conflict.

Many groups simply use a written set of standard dungeoneering practices, but this is really a crutch for broken play. Then again, people should be able to slip up or rush past standard tasks from time to time for the sake of tension and DM deviousness. And multiple rolls do build a sense of uncertainty that simply running a “party macro” won’t do. This is why the smartass suggestion to use the rule I just lambasted won’t work either.

3) Oh for God’s sake! John Kim’s theory glossary had two . . . mistakes. John Kim is a smart guy but his role as a compiler of information seems to leave itself vulnerable to absorbing dumbass statements by others without critical comment. To wit:

Metaplot A widely-used term for an overarching plot which appears in published RPG books, such that over many published books (including several game series from White Wolf) you can read about the adventures of these characters. How this is supposed to apply to ongoing games is a matter of considerable debate.

This is literally incorrect. Few (I’d say none, but I’m not up on Heavy Gear’s fat books and such) published metaplots do anything of the sort. White Wolf’s metaplots did not actually follow a single set of characters consistently. It’s common for people to complain that metaplot was about such a group of characters, but those people are fucking idiots. If you try to follow the history of any signature character you will find significant gaps as well as dozens and dozens of throwaway exemplar characters. That’s why the wrongness of this description is a matter of objective fact, not opinion.

Aside from this, the last sentence is a hoot. There isn’t a “debate.” There is a continued desire on the part of theory types to remain willfully ignorant despite multiple essays, emails and communiques about metaplot’s purpose. The idea that the purpose of metaplot is a mystery even though any schmoe can email people who design metaplots and get straight answers is, quite simply, an idea that results from a failure to honestly engage the material. In other words, since actually talking to anybody who’s written metaplot about metaplot would probably disqualify the kneejerk bitching that some people use as part of the basis of their association, such people have avoided talking to said people as much as possible.

What’s even funnier is seeing the process of willful ignorance come full circle with this:

Underbelly A term coined by Ron Edwards on The Forge for a technique of preparation and play using a canonical setting and storyline, known to all participants, in which the events of play create a “hidden” storyline to enrich and reinforce the primary one, which is treated as a creative constraint. Also called “inverse metaplot.”

In yet another charming example of the Forge process, Edwards apparently decided to “fix” metaplot through a complex, involved exercise that ended up with him just using metaplot according to one of its intended functions — a function that was (naturally), described by anyone who ever wrote much metaplot to anyone who asked. Or explained by every LARPer ever. Instead of “inverse metaplot,” it’s metaplot as used by people who aren’t determined to make asses of themselves.

(This gets back to the whole indie thing about designing games that assume the players are basically unpleasant or untrustworthy. I realize I’m losing money from the valuable Asshole Demographic by not designing games assholes would be able to play at length, but I can live with that.)

This trend of patting oneself on the back for inventing aspects of a game you hate seems to run deep. Not long ago, they were proudly “inventing” the relationship maps used in 1st edition Vampire. Two years ago a theorist proudly released a diagram with the basic structure of stories in it, as if this was a revelation. Don’t get me wrong: This stuff is still a goldmine. Kickers were cool when they were first widely implemented in 1991.

Again, I don’t think this is John Kim’s fault. It’s everybody else’s fault. What the fuck is wrong with you people? If you don’t know what something is for, why don’t you just ask? It reminds me of Trekkie fanon. Instead of admitting that you don’t like Enterprise or metaplot, you have to invent some dumb explanation where metaplot is a staggered novel or Enterprise took place in the Mirror Universe (a theory Trekkies bandied about) instead of accepting that you’re responsible for your own taste. I sympathize: the early seasons of Enterprise were lousy and Mage’s Horizon: Stronghold of Hope is crappy.

I’m tempted to quip that Deliria should be called Phil Brucato’s World of Darkness, since it covers territory that players of Mage and Changeling will find very familiar. This would be unfair, though. because the game makes no pretenses toward being horrific and lacks a firm setting. Deliria doesn’t provide setting support (titles, rivalries) for social play. It doesn’t have splats or a firm cosmology. Instead, the bulk of the game is devoted to telling certain kinds of stories: “faerie tales.” Brucato’s writing is compelling here, even if I don’t think it’s really about faerie/fairy tales. Rather, I think it’s about how to use some of the ideas from faerie tales to enhance the stories a certain segment of the hobby wants to play in.

The pseudo-history of fairy stories in the book isn’t to my liking, since it’s both extremely vague and ignores the political context behind our approach to them. See this post on the Savage Minds anthroblog about the Gilliam Grimm movie, and then compare it to the film itself and you get some idea about the distance between Deliria and actual faerie tales. The game uses broad strokes and appeals to archetypes that owe more to geek culture than universal human sentiment, whereas fairy stories are not really all that universal. Actually, having worked on Dark Ages: Fae, I have to admit that my secret sentiment was that faerie tales are actually pretty culturally specific. They require an interplay of myth and history that didn’t happen in very many places.

In Deliria‘s defense, though, it says it’s about “Faerie Tales for the New Millennium,” which means that it’s trying to inject faerie tale logic into the zeitgeist. But whose chunk of zeitgeist is it for? It seems to me that Brucato (and the “Silver Circle”) were writing for a specific audience that’s far from the engineering students, bored jarheads and high school AV club members that populate the mainstream hobby. This is a game that’s searching for the segment that White Wolf brought in to give it a home again (even as White Wolf’s new World of Darkness has an almost conciliatory tone in trying to reach for that mainstream) after being left out in the cold with the decline of MET LARP and the death of soft/semi/non-horror White Wolf properties like Changeling and Mage 2nd. We’re talking about arts/theatre majors, Renn-faire goers and generally, the types that the first edition of Changeling was almost painfully specific about luring.

Brucato lays out some very loose, utilitarian rules for these stories. Deliria is about people who encounter faerie wonders and the faeries themselves — each side finds the other fascinating. There are three kinds of faeries: powerful divine ones, your basic PC-friendly types and sprites for colour. You’ve got the mundane world, the Mysterium (weirdness in the world) and Deliria (faerieland). Like Changeling, Deliria uses a trait (also called Deliria) that conflates sensitivity to the supernatural world, madness and a certain amount of childlike innocence. Brucato wants you to bounce around these realms and chat with these folks using devices from fairy stories: a heavy dose of pathetic fallacy, NPCs painted in bold, broad strokes and story arcs that belong in a lit course for non-majors. I have to admit that I wanted more showing instead of telling here. Brucato’s unvarnished enthusiasm is fun to read, but I prefer examples of practice. The book certainly isn’t lacking them, but it’s a big book; specific examples could have taken up a bigger ratio of the text.

I’m a bit frustrated that none of this really has an ethos I could hang on to. Brucato talks about faerie ethics. This reminds me of the way he transplanted neopagan business on the historical Rennaissance in Mage: The Sorcerer’s Crusade and presents many of the same problems. There’s something there that feels alternately self-indulgent and irrelevant to real moral questions. This may be appropriate for faeries, but as a moral rudder for protagonists the ideals of upholding beauty and keeping your word don’t cut it. In fact, I’ll drop a Godwin-bomb here and note that certain Germans used to love their volk-inspiring fairy stories (Brothers Grimm, remember!), classical truth-in-beauty, sacred nature and steadfast loyalty. And that’s why drab-clothed folks with their dissonant jazz, boiled cabbage suppers and blood-rusty hammers and sickles had to wade in and blow their fucking heads off. Even the wondrous demimonde needs a moral heart of iron to protect its free expression, and Deliria fails to deliver it. Without a coherent moral struggle, there isn’t much conflict that follows. This suits the generic nature of the game, but ends up lacking in the antagonists department. Conflict — the living blood of the story — doesn’t get too much attention in Deliria, and this is where I felt the game hit one of its weakest points.

I suspect that the reason why we see repeated motifs from the old World of Darkness as well as some noticeable omissions when it comes to showing the reader how to create stories is because Deliria is an incremental design. You like that? It was a cool neologism I came up with just now!

An incremental design occurs when a play group modifies an existing game (or group of games, combining elements from each of them) over time to the point where it has blossomed into an original creation. Incremental design used to be the standard, with results that were alternately risible (Palladium Fantasy and any number of D&D clones) and praiseworthy (D&D itself; Runequest). This can be a conscious process as well, where we hack a gamer to distill it down to what we like — which ends up being a different game altogether.

Deliria feels like it was incrementally designed based on reacting to Changeling and Mage until at some point, Phil Brucato and co. decided that it could stand on its own and deserved a distinct treatment. This may have come from play experience or it may have come from Brucato’s design experience. I know for a fact that when you’re working on a line you didn’t create, a part of you constantly says “I would have done that differently,” and makes a mental note. It’s a smart thing to do and is what separates fanboys with a contract from real writers.

But the danger of incremental design is that you might forget that you’re designing an entire game from the ground up. An incremental design takes you deep into specialized territory to the point where you might forget how to tell people to roll dice and construct stories with villians. Sometimes you can get away with skipping this, but Deliria marches to a sufficiently different drummer that it can’t. The game needs more advice on the basic craft of play and Guiding (the Guide is the game’s GM).

Part Two

Now I’ll talk a bit about the game’s gorgeous (if slightly problematic) design, organization and system.

The game isn’t just a leap forward in art and layout. It’s an order of magnitude better than anything else out there, including industry leaders like Dungeons and Dragons and the World of Darkness. Only the sheer amount of ornamentation is a problem (and in spots, a very real one — not just a matter of taste, as I’ll detail later). The best looking RPG in existence would be with us if a game combined the stark grace of Nobilis with the colour production values and artistic talent of Deliria. It’s almost embarrassing that other companies are so stingy, but then again, other companies have much more intense production schedules.

The book is a work of art — so much so that it sometimes undermines itself. Deliria uses a system of icons and coloured text and sections to help readers find what they need, but it’s less effective than it could be. The icons aren’t, well, iconic enough. They are complex, pretty bits of art in their own right, which makes them harder to remember than simpler symbols. The coloured pages by section are more successful and really help you navigate to the right ballpark.

You need these tools, because the game’s organization leaves a lot to be desired. There’s no central glossary of games terms. Character creation takes place after the task resolution system, which forces you to flip back and forth to find out what your Grace and Aspect and so forth are on a character sheet. Explanations are either exhaustive or overly simplistic. The game needs a couple of detailed two page summaries for characters and systems for reference, to orient new readers and (most importantly) to point to when you’re trying to help players make characters and figure the game out. Deliria is one of those games where the Guide will usually be the only one with a copy, so flipping has to be kept to a minimum. Deliria does try to ameliorate this a bit by providing regualar pointers (red text) to other pages relevant to whatever you’re looking at. All in all, the game feels a lot like a website: as if a series of hypertext documents were strung together sequentially.

The smartest thing Laughing Pan could to would be to release an abbreviated player’s guide that includes all the rules you need and a few new bits of character flash. There are plenty of games like this (Nobilis comes to mind), so this isn’t a particularly strong criticism. At this point I think I need to remind you all that you should buy this book.

Once you find your way, you’ll get to know the game’s Compact System. Compact seems to have learned its lessons from live roleplaying and displays a keen understanding of the relationship between live and tabletop games. Compact gives you the option of three levels of complexity. The most complex end of it is less involved than games like The World of Darkness or TriStat. It’s less complicated than the new MET and a bit more complicated than the old one. In essence, it’s a variation of Stat+Skill+die, but in this case the complexity level lets you choose between a broad or narrow stat (a Grace) and skill (Vocation). Use the broad versions for simple games; the more detailed Aspects for a more traditional tabletop experience. Players draw from cards (or use dice that simulate a draw) and either add or subtract from their dice totals. Suit draws can variously generate no modifier, automatic success or failure and critical success or failure. Your total is compared to a competing draw or a target number.

It’s simple, it looks like the math works (the CD-ROM that comes with the game features probability charts) and can be used in many venues; cool variations (I was thinking of a Asshole style variant where the GM deals the whole deck, players can see their cards and bid accordingly. You get to pick more from the discard pile only after running out) suggest themselves.

Subsystems for conflict cover physical, mental and social combat. Similar to chadu‘s PDQ, you can injure an enemy’s pride and sanity as well as their body. In the Advanced style, higher Graces give you multiple actions, so there will be definite thresholds of comptency where skilled characters can run rings around you.

Finally: the magic system. This uses a framework that will be familar to Mage players. Your magical style is your Accord. You may have multiple Accords (though you select one as your primary). These ecapsulate a belief about magic and the world as well as a spellcasting style. Like Mage, you need tools to enact your will. The system doesn’t force you to buy into specific realms of power (like Mage‘s Spheres); these are just categories you use to figure out what a spell does. You simply decide what you want to do, try to hit the target number and see how it worked out.

The game describes a handful of Accords by belief, not be any in-game social organization. My main critique is that Brucato has the same basic bias he had writing Mage, in that you can pretty much tell that he’s a pagan neophile who thinks pagan neophilia is the coolest way to go. Accordingly, the pagan style’s flaw is that it’s too intensely personal — an instance of “praising with faint damnation.” Then again, perhaps my personal bias creeps in here: Brucato’s run on Mage featured lots of instances of the stand-ins for my favourite belief system being folks who deny sensuality, repress their true feelings and kung fu people to death over minor doctrinal differences. Good people don’t let people but into Starhawk’s critique of Buddhism, folks.

Still, the quick descriptions of Accords and the system as a whole is probably one of the most succinct yet useful treatments of multicultural magic yet and worth your attention, especially if you’d like to port culturally driven magic over to another game. It’s wortn noting that even though faeries and humans both use the same magic system, faeries get to bend the rules at the Guide’s fiat, usually by performing ritual magic quickly.

Finally, the game has rules for “static” powers (which are compatible with magic): Shapeshifting, mental powers and the like. You can use these and your Wyrds (flaws) to create pretty much any normal or supernatural character you can think of.

Let me sum it up: Deliria is a beautiful game using a solid rules engine. It has many flaws and elements I would consider controversial, but it should not prevent you from picking it up. One keyword that comes close to summing up the game’s needs is Guidance; it needs to be better organized, it needs to push the protagonists toward real moral stakes and it needs to provide more concrete examples of how the fae world interacts with mundane lives. These deficits are one of two things that prevent the game from being the “standard text” of modern fantasy gaming. The other flaw is in the areas where Brucato fails to discuss and answer antithetical appraoches: the political faerie tale, the world beyond the self-styled American demimonde (if the commericialization of things like Burning Man even elt us still apply “demimonde” to the thing) and faiths, beliefs and magic that would apply a competing totalizing model. But these issues are easily remedied by a mature group of gamers who are self-willed enough to differ in opinion and use the text as a way to uncover fun antitheses to its viewpoint, as well as cleave to points where they agree. Buy it.