Long form: Reduxical Mechanics?

As well as remaking all the imagery to be human-made artwork, I’m also taking the opportunity to update some of the text of Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland in light of my most recent reading, as well as expanding the reading list.

This might look like just four books, but one of them is 1200 pages long and I actually understood some of it. (Joke, but I was very happy to realise how much I’ve learned when it came to tackling some of the hard bits!)

There’s a couple of lines I want to amend about the setting - I’ve found research into some skeletons found close enough to Doggerland from the Mesolithic, which are old enough in age to call the “everyone dies young” aspect into question, by its own logic.

I’ve always been aware that we have skeleton evidence from the earlier Palaeolithic era of older individuals, so it seems reasonable to assume people lived well into what we consider middle-age and beyond in the Mesolithic. We have skeletons from the Mesolithic Era elsewhere in the world that are those of middle-aged individuals (QV: the fascinating and highly sensitive case of so-called Kennewick Man). The margin of uncertainty when dating older skeletons also allows for considerable latitude on this point. But as far as my reading showed at the time, there was no actual skeleton evidence of people older than roughly 30, close to Doggerland. I took that as a cue for the setting, knowing full well it was an imaginative leap.

Now that I have evidence for some older skeletons close enough to Doggerland, the text will likely change to reflect that, to ensure consistency with my own weird setting rules.

(Don’t at me about infant mortality rates - the idea that people died young in Maskwitches was never anything to do with any misunderstanding of how average lifespan is calculated in modern times. We have even less evidence for those numbers for the Mesolithic period than we have skeletons of older people! This aspect of the setting was only ever about the age of existing skeleton evidence, and running with that as something I thought was interesting.)

A last minute update - a new source has been talking about the life expectancy at Göbekli Tepe being around 30, which puts me back where I was. I think more reading is required, along with just deciding what I want for the setting, and why.

There’s also another line in the book which provokes a content warning, that on reflection, while I see why it’s there, can happily go. The inference remains without needing to be quite so on the nose.

It is nice to get a chance to polish the text.

Mechanical additions new to the Redux Edition

There’s an entirely optional mechanic that occupies the space of hit points to provide some “game” “challenge” for those that cannot live without it.

It’s purely optional, but is intended to be better embedded in the setting and premise of The Silver Road and Maskwitches than merely bolting on “you can be hurt three times” hit point patches.

The key drawback with adding “hit points” to The Silver Road/Maskwitches is what it does to the freedom of narrating consequences. “Someone is hurt” as a consequence is really powerful stuff when no one is trying to preserve a collection of numerical “hit points”. It removes the need to worry about losing something and then “going out”, or “missing a turn”. There are of course many brilliant, highly enjoyable games which do work that way, and more power to ‘em. I like a load of ‘em. But for this game, I don’t want it to work that way in the book.

Where there are mechanical hit points in play, narrating a consequence like “someone is hurt” really loses its strengths. It gains a nasty edge, cutting into the shared social contract of the game: in narrating who is hurt when there are hit points, you have to choose between mechanically hurting another player, succumb to manners and only ever take it on your own character, or “cheat” by applying mechanical injuries to non-player characters.

It’s hard for me to hide my disappointment with that kind of hack to the system, because it means I didn’t communicate the wonder in the game processes exemplified by “someone is hurt”. To me that’s a wild and amazing bit of games tech: you “failed” a dice roll, and the consequence is that what plays out in the scene is affected, and you choose how.

I’ve enjoyed such amazing times and witnessed such creative storytelling around the prompts generated by consequences like “someone is hurt” or “something is lost” that I don’t want it to go away. If anything I’d like to work on making the consequences even more esoteric. I love occasional consequences like “someone remembers something from long ago”. Consequence, as a word, can mean a lot of things.

“It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing ... such a little thing.”

A great example arose when playing a Silver Road Lord of the Rings game. Boromir’s player realised that Boromir only has a 1 in 6 chance to fail in battle, because he’s good at sword fighting. But due to the way consequences are framed, that potentialy means that people around you get hurt when you don’t succeed at overcoming obstacles with violence.

If Boromir attempts to use violence to overcome an obstacle in the form of a band of orcs and fails, it might be Boromir who is wounded. It might be the orcs he’s fighting (wild, I know, right? Boromir doesn’t win the fight right away, but he still does some high quality stabbing) or it might be Frodo taking a spear across the other side of the battlefield. And it is Boromir’s player who decides. There’s no aggro in causing Frodo to be wounded, because Frodo’s player has just as much power to narrate the effects away on their turn (perhaps with his mithril shirt?). Or to run with it, and build the story with an ever increasing selection of prompts and information that the game is generating.

It bears mentioning that within the fiction of Lord of the Rings, Boromir is a highly experienced fighting man engaging in lethal sword fights against 3000 year-old, murder-obsessed torture survivors serving the most evil force in Middle-earth, and he’s brought some rustically naive, child-sized people to work with him. What would be the likely consequence?

Especially when we consider a kind of “what would Tolkien do?” stance to what happens as a result of Boromir failing in battle. The Silver Road is predicated on suggesting that when playing this game the answer is not “lose 1d8+1 hit points”. As much as that can also be also fun in the right context.

The best solution to the character flaw in me which feels that disappointment and frustration at hit points patches is to offer something I consider to be a better fit. I hope if you choose to use it, you like it.

No mask? No problem

There’s also a small addition to the rules to cover instances where a player has no mask or amulet that relates to a challenge, and no one at the table can work out a creative way to involve what they do have, in order to tackle an obstacle.

In play that can occasionally cause things to grind to a halt, and it helps the flow of the game to have a way to get past that quickly.

For such a tiny addition, it needs an enormous amount of digital ink to be spilled. Get ready. (Does it NEED it Jon? Does it, really?)

The intention with Silver Road play is always to think creatively and laterally around your characters’ strengths and weakness, and to weave those into the story using the huge power of narration available to each and every player. Players can reframe entire scenes if they want or need to. There’s so much you can do using the power of narration, extending way beyond the scope of simply being literally good or not at the challenge before you.

You might be facing the obstacle of “a cliff blocking your way”, but you’re entirely empowered to use your “good at encouraging others” mask to overcome that obstacle. You just need to narrate how. You don’t need your character to have a rating at “climbing” to overcome this obstacle - even if it’s a strongly literal hinderance to your characters’ progress.

The challenge in Maskwitches is not so much about rolling dice matched against skill-based probability challenges, with numerical resources as the spicy stakes, so much as it is about creatively weaving a story around “what you’ve got”. The story is about your characters.

And it’s important to note that where there are no consequences, no one should be rolling dice. For example if the witches are setting up a camp on their way somewhere, there’s no need to be rolling dice to build a fire - just narrate it, because there’s no mechanical consequence for “failure”. It really doesn’t matter to the rules - maybe the players agree they don’t set up a very good camp because they’re all tired, and the wood is wet, because a persistent rain is pooling on the ground all around them. Or they want to get involved in really describing the detail of what they prepare for their evening meal. Do Maskwitches eat an evening meal? What kinds of things do they eat?

Let players narrate that scene however they like. Once they embrace not being punished mechanically for “failure” in other parts of the rules they’re free to include the ups and downs of the setting in their stories.

In the fire-building example, if making a fire matters because there are consequences for failure, perhaps because a fire-fearing spirit is threatening the camp and will attack if there’s no fire? That’s an opportunity to have consequences and dice rolls. Those rolls are adding a degree tension and a guide to what happens that has a chance of surprising the group.

But! All that said and understood, there can still arise situations where no one at the table can work out a way for a character to be considered good or bad at a relevant thing, in spite of the collective creative powers of the group being fully deployed.

In the new edition there will be a mechanic for such instances.

It is taking some careful writing work because it is categorically not for “when you’re medium at the thing”, and I absolutely do not want that traditional RPG idea creeping into this game. The game is not changing its premise that says characters in stories are only good or bad at things. (Does it show a little bit that I feel quite strongly about that?)

This additional rule uses the same state as when a character who is good at the thing rolls a one. You take a consequence and then succeed on your next turn. In this instance there are no dice rolled, so knaps cannot be used to alter the outcome. You straight up take the hit, as it were. And then clear the obstacle on your next go.

Traditional disclaimer

I always feel compelled to make something clear when I talk about rules design, especially around the weird little game that is The Silver Road and Maskwitches which it powers.

I very much see it as my job as the designer to aim for a kind of purity of intention in the rules, and to stick to those principles. And Maskwitches, as written, has a very clear aim and a clear set of premises. They’re quite far removed from traditional RPGs. And that’s ok. They’re something of a different way to play, although they’re certainly not unique in the space. And that’s ok that this kind of play isn’t to everyone’s taste.

While I have some very strong ideas on how I want the rules to work within the context of the book itself, if you want them to work a different way at your table, or want to entirely detach the setting from the rules, then it should go without saying (but doesn’t, apparently) that you are absolutely entitled to switch it up. I have (and can have) absolutely no complaint about that - it is your game, at your table. It’s literally none of my business! If you don’t find anything compelling in maintaining “someone is hurt” as a freewheeling narrative prompt then, as we say in Falkirk, fill your boots!

I mean it when I say that any frustration I feel at people switching to more trad play is always at my failure to communicate in a way that made you want to play it as written.

Your preferences, the preferences of your players, how you get them to play something new all have a profound impact in how games work at the table, and it’s certainly better to play your own version than to not play!