Returning to NPFTH: a ttrpg to face your tragedy, a wargame to take your revenge.

Game Design Log #51

It's time to return to “No Peace for the Heathen”! To the stories of those whose lands were invaded by conquistadors and that have to survive in a world changed by violence.

The last time I wrote about the game, I was deciding what to do with it, both in terms of format and direction. Because of that, I made a poll, so you could help me with that decision, as I wanted this game to be a space of collaboration, and I thought that starting with a poll could be a good first step towards that goal.

What I was deciding was whether to frame the game as an OSR, or not, and if the best format for it would be multiple zines or a big book with everything in it.

After reading some comments and the result of the poll, I saw that what some of you told me aligned with what I felt was best for the game: make it a zine, make it an OSR.

But this week, when I started the zine, collecting everything I have written on Substack for the NPFTH (and some things I haven’t shared on here), I realized that the number of intertwined rules will make the game difficult to spread across multiple zines. Adding to this: Space is a problem, as I would like to present the basics of the rules, but also the basics of the setting in the first zine.

So the second-guessing started again. What if I put everything in a book? What if the game isn’t really an OSR? Or what if there is another play style that would provide a better space to develop the ideas I wanted to explore in the game? And remembering the play tests I had run for the game, I asked myself, and the people that played with me: What is the core of the game?

Yes, that’s indeed something you should ask yourself before having written more than one hundred pages for a game, but I guess that at every step of the creative process it is important to interrogate one’s goals.

And what I realized, after talking to one of my players, my partner, was that the core of the experience when playing NPFTH was facing and unveiling your character's tragedy and its origin. While dealing with the possibilities of revenge and weighing its repercussions on those close to you. This is beautiful, and sad, and was what happened at our table.

With this in mind, with this clearer view of the heart of the game, I thought of other play styles, and systems, that will be better suited for a game trying to convey this experience, and I lay my eyes on “belonging outside belonging”, a system by Avery Alder, that I have seen beatifully weaven stories of outsiders on games like “Dream Askew" and “BALIKBAYAN”.

In this process, I tried to see if I could disassemble NPFTH and still keep something of it to fit on this other style of playing. I was on the rabbit hole, rethinking everything, studying and reading all the games I could, until I forced myself to stop. At that moment, I knew what I was doing: I was making an entirely different game, because all the things I had built for NPFTH were being tossed aside in the search for this “perfect” set of rules that supposedly would facilitate the kind of stories that, talking with my partner, we had identify as the core of the game. But the fact is that we had already been telling those tragic stories with the game as it was, so was the change necessary? And if not, what part of the game did those stories come from?

The answer was the setting, the backstory given to each player by the origin they have chosen, and the “goals” each of these origins gave to them.

One of the eight origins you can choose for your character.

I really think that system and mechanics matter, and that they determine the type of experience you will have in a game, but for NPFTH, what mainly drove the experience was the setting.

I suppose you all have already guessed where this is going. After going round and round in circles, I have decided to keep NPFTH on the OSR frame, but as a setting zine, to use with your favorite OSR ruleset, where, from time to time, I will include modular rules/procedures that you can include on top of the rules you are already using.

Obviously, not all OSRs are the same, and as such, I will focus the compatibility of my procedures on one set of rules with which I have experience: “Cairn” by Yochai Gal.

But that’s not all, because there is a part of NPFTH that goes outside the scope of OSR and story games like “Dream Askew”: the skirmish rules. To these I plan to give a space in one or two of the zine issues, probably as a small wargame (more excuses to build and paint minis!) interwinded with faction/land-control mechanics that connect with the setting.

So this is it for today. I just want to share with you the direction NPFTH is taking, and also to assure you that I will continue working on it. And if you are interested in my solo/miniatures TTRPG game “Runner of the Wastelands”, you still can help me do more for it by buying it, sharing it with other friends, or commenting/reviewing it on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, or Wargame Vault.

See you next time!