Over War (Part 1)

It is over, reader; I have the high war.

Over War is a game by Richard Kelly and published by Blackoath Entertainment.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

Brad

So let's talk about something a little different. Let’s talk about Over War: Monarch Edition. This fascinating little game came to my attention for its pitch as a strategy RPG TTRPG. I was immediately fascinated and so read it and its expansion Ballark in Flames and immediately rushed over to talk to Lhuzie about it.

Over War is a deliciously sized game, being all meat and no fat. Even with Ballark In Flames it is a lean mean rpg’ing machine, with a simple but pleasing art direction.

Lhuzie

For details which we will go over in later sections, this critic will treat Over War: Monarch Edition and its supplement Ballark in Flames as a single game. Over War: Monarch Edition + Ballark in Flames is an amazing experience and a must-get roleplaying game for lovers of strategy and moving around little guys, who want their Old School Renaissance to include SNES Fire Emblem and Kriesgspiel.

To get to this point, there was a lot of effort in testing the mechanics, polishing the game elements, and fine-tuning it until it became the special thing we can play today. I am very grateful for every game that is generously pushed to this point. That work kept being done to it until it reached the current implementation is nothing short of remarkable.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Brad

So, Over War: Monarch edition and Ballark In Flames set out to do something that is rather difficult. Can you put the Strategy Role Playing Game¹ onto the tabletop. This is something that has a rich basis in goals for early editions of the dragon game, with fighters eventually establishing strongholds and gathering followers. It only seems logical to eventually gamify this experience rather than just handwave it as a thing that occurs in the background.

Over War goes a step further, it looks at its contemporaries and focusses on establishing a rule set for gothic combat as enemies descend from the sky. Now, I am wargames and board game guy and in this field I couldn’t even argue its success, a ttrpg that plays like a wargame is exactly what we got out of Monarch Edition. Ballark In Flames really finished the recipe though, fulfilling its promise of a tabletop wargame role-playing game.

Lhuzie

So, why are we talking of the collected omnibus version of the game plus a supplement? The game struggled through the condition of an OSR game, and as such, it took various steps until it became “a game”. The first versions of Over War were built on assumptions of OSR, offering additional rules for the Omnigame Adventuconquistador rulesets the artistic movement of the OSR operates on. These rulesets (I think you are suppose to politely call them rulings) were condensed into rules/a game in the Monarch Edition. This was quite awkward.

The Monarch Edition highlighted two things: Over War was something really special and highlighted a lot of potential unexplored in the OSR artistic movement — while at the same time evolving into something else that could not be carried with the assumptions of the Adventuconquistador Omnigame. In one hand, it was not enough as it was on its page for someone “de novo” creating a culture of play for Over War and play an artistically fulfilling game; on the other hand, the fully matured Over War could not be something you played with generic OSR modules and did not play well with most of their rulesets, making it of limited use for many.

Ballark in Flames pushed Over War from this awkward place of not really being fulfilling for the OSR movement or an audience outside of it; rather than a quirky curiosity, it became an astonishing display of the art. Ballark identified the holes missing from the experience and provided additional context—and the roleplaying for the roleplaying game part of TTRPG! The land of Ballark, com a vague generic frontier fantasyland campform for adventuconquistador stuff (avec armies) was promoted to an actual place, with real peoples and cultures. There was vision, there were themes, there were levers to pull; this was now an experience.

As such, despite the apparent assumption of OSR one may encounter reading the Monarch Edition, the Over War that we are discussing does not require familiarity with that culture of play and/or materials. It does require maybe a bit more cognitive load than those games, a bit similar to that of the average tabletop wargame — so don’t worry, the game does not require you to be the computer for a paper Fire Emblem. Compared with Warlord Ascendant, a similar solo strategic TTRPG, it is remarkably easy on cognitive-load.

This is a war game, a war story, and you are someone who is an agent in bringing war and its violence to the land of Ballark. As Over War was further polished, the game became one of the best at dealing with what it means to adventuconquer all over the place. What it means to be a Man Of Violence and how you interact with the world.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Brad

Over War is about fantasy commanders fighting for control of a patchwork land of fantasy kingdoms.

Lhuzie

Over War is a game about gothic warfare: play as commanders from distant floating islands making their fortunes in the war-torn — now I wonder whose fault that is — lands of Ballack.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Brad

Over War is something so rare. Over War is about combat as a delicious sporting experience. This is still a game of luck and death, more Rollerball than NFL, but it is something with rules that both you and your enemies follow. You play at top level against other dangers and must rely on your teams abilities to really win you the day, but you are constantly learning, tinkering and adjusting your abilities into a tightly oiled machine of combat… Only to discover that the next faction uses and entirely different set of abilities and so it’s time to take a different run at them.

Lhuzie

It is about making Kriesgspeil in the XXI century, but fun.

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

1. With key examples being your Fire Emblems, Tactics Ogres, and Final Fantasy Tactics.

Infinite Revolution (Part 2)

Should the stars go out too?

You can find part one here.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Lhuzie

Infinite Revolutions falls right next to some of my favorite engines — a game engine powered by stress in a mission-based structure.

Except that is not what is driving the game. Oh, no. Combat and combat tactics are the burning heart making Infinite Revolution happen. Stress, often so key in defining what characters can do, tracks the cost of what they do.

It is all about the joy of pulling tactical brilliance in combat and being rewarded for it. Because of this aspect, Speed is the primary way the engine of Infinity Revolution interacts/interacted with the rest of the game.

Speed is everything: position, Hit Points, armor, range. It is how you read the patterns of weapons and powers. Where most games with mechanical interesting chooses give you multiple levers with you can pull to divert resources one way or another, connected to different things, in Infinite Revolution everything connects to Speed (with or without Stress involved).

This singular focus on Speed produces two interesting effects. The first, is that the game is extremely light in cognitive load — whatever you do, you can get an immediate read on Speed and how it is affected, no need to juggle different trade-offs. The second is, a clever investment of those “cognitive credits. Where most games when simplifying give in to the tendency to keep simplifying — ultimately making one wonder why bother — Infinite Revolution takes that cognitive load it just freed from players to increase the complexity of interactions between weapons and powers.

The result is a fast-paced, error-proofed, yet extremely satisfying tactical game. The importance of Speed for combat makes the comparison to Flying Circus’ Energy system mandatory. Indeed, there are a lot of similarities that highlight how different the game these engines produce is. Infinite Revolution offers an almost “arcade” version of Flying Circus, like the difference between being a plane in a bullet hell shooter and in a flight simulator.

Brad

As someone much more brilliant than I once put it, the cost of going fast is the lack of control. Speed rules the roost in Infinite Revolution, you need to go fast to do anything, a slow Revolver is a dead one, so for the sake of humanity you better go as fast as you need to. As a GM this was an interesting thing, because the Veil immediately says they have a minimum speed of one, due to not caring about Newtonian Physics.

Now speed merely is the primary force here, but the level of customization from what seems at first to be a very basic pattern system didn’t fail to intrigue and seeing how they could further interact with the rest of the pulsing engine created by your Drives are where the real flavour starts to pour in.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Lhuzie

The game does not need much to bring to the table. With little prep and for a shorter session, I would recommend you lock down on some key points:

• Even if customization is part of the fun, for a one-hour-prep one-shot trial of the system, the facilitator should prepare a few Revolver “builds” ahead.

• Prioritize Combat Play, with just enough dipping into Crisis play to give the game structure.

• Read how Combat works.

• Disregard Cradle Play

• You don’t have to worry about Deep Support.

• Pick some simple Veil enemies like V-Seeds and Blooms, making one of them a Boss.

Brad

The Veil are an antagonist group that you are going to make interesting as the GM, you are gonna have to sell these unknowable horrors are a threat to these knowable heroes and I would honestly have some interesting short-hand present (I chose a list of common laws of physics to snap in their presence.)

Always be Pushin’ Your Limits, the game pops when it is about desperate heroes drawing greater and greater energies into themselves and damn the engines, keep the pressure up and remind players that is a powerful theme in the game.

I wrote up a quick and dirty cheat sheet of conditions, and I recommend you do the same.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Lhuzie

All this time, Saves felt like a placeholder, weirdly disconnected from an extremely tight game engine. They work… fine. But it never feels quite right., it is like having an overclocked, custom-built, gaming machine but then you play with a 2 buttons 5 bucks mouse.

The “can only burn brighter, can only go faster” element has become a bit diluted through game development. When you go through accumulation of drive stress and eventual drive burn — and the climatic blaze of glory BURNOUT — it just becomes ticking segments in a clock. Where this element was always at its best when you Push Your Limits, so it is better to do it so. No matter the outcome, make every single decision to Push Your Limits or use a drive power be pushing yourself faster and Infinite Revolution will sing masterfully.

On the same topic, it may be that the burning up of your Revolvers is too random, and is messing up the pacing — I found it is quite awkward to introduce new squad mates to replace the One Of A Kind Legendary Hero late in a game. Failsafes, Failsafes, Failsafes. This is how you make sure BURNOUT are climatic and not just duds. Do not miss opportunities to do so during Cradle Play.

Crisis are not intuitive to integrate with the rest of the game, but add a lot. They were well worth figuring out and finding the best way to introduce them within the group.

The relationship with the Veil (and Veil enemies) is a bit lacking compared with the Revolver and the Drive. Considering that it is one of the three edges of the triangle supporting the stories of collaborative storytelling, the triangle may be a bit loopsided. Be prepared and alert to support it in other ways.

Brad

The more you understand tactical combat games, the better you will feel. I struggled with conditions and templates at first, but I think those are easily fixable as long as you come to the table with the tools to adapt¹.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Lhuzie

Infinite Revolution can be used to tell two tales.

Originality is overrated, and too many games fall in the trap of hurting what their game is about chasing after originality-for-originality shake — making contrarian decisions, going against the grain for no reason. Infinite Revolution is brilliant and innovative almost exclusively on its mastery of its design foundations and how other games did their things. Skill and competency at implementing something familiar has an originality of its own.

For each time Infinite Revolution is brilliant, there is another time where it takes a safe choice; it is quite risk-adverse in its design choices. Despite that, it is still a special game because it leverages full-knowledge of every “safe choice”. Even when games suffer from chasing after originality, it is those failures that often give them an unique character and make them remarkable. They overshot their ambitions, their aptitude was still not there, but they tried to do something new in the artform. Good students can learn a lot about the high ambitions of others and where they failed — and wise students can learn they don’t need those ambitions to make their game work the way they want it to work.

But not everyone is a critic, is it? I like interesting failures and stress points because they make me think about design and give me material for a critique; when designers take big swings and miss due to their ambitions, the critics write themselves. However, most of you will rightfully read this conclusion as “the biggest stress points of Infinite Revolution are safe, well-tested design”. And you think you think that’s a wonderful “flaw” for a game to have and consider it a near perfect game.

And you know what? There’s a lesson there too.

Brad

Infinite Revolution is compelling and confounding. It is a game that is truly finely designed, tuned and capable of making you feel the ups and downs of its fast moving kinetic combat. But I always felt in control; never once did I live up to that quote in the engine section. I think that is a good thing, a game that does exactly what it says on the tin and with a design focused and powerful in bringing those things about.

You should absolutely absorb that fully, and learn that you can do just that, but as my co-writer mentions, it is a weird feeling to sit here and say “A perfectly fine game, that is a little safe” as a an argument against, after all, my group loved Infinite Revolution.

I think that’s going to be my conclusion: master the basics, but don’t be afraid to take a big, crazy swing. If you are good at the basics, the big, crazy swing can only be mediocre at worst. However, to end on another famous athlete quote, I fear not the person who has used 10,000 mechanics once, but the person who has used one mechanic 10,000 times.

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

1. Longtime readers will point out that I always make handouts.

Infinite Revolution (Part 1)

Should the stars go out too?

Infinite Revolution is a game by Gwendolyn Clark . It benefited from a crowdfunding campaign. We have received a review copy of the game.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

Lhuzie

An outstanding achievement, Infinite Revolution is just magical. With a deeply under-evaluated crowdfunding campaign, we get one of the best-designed games of 2025 — probably only beaten by Zephyr in my estimation — it is also one of the most beautiful — probably only beaten by Zephyr in my estimation.

Excellent layout, cohesive artistic direction; every choice of art and color evokes the themes of light, darkness, hope, and furious space action. Excellence in every aspect, impossible art at these rates.

Brad

A gorgeous art piece, with the kind of breathtaking layout you can only imagine. The game is beautiful and sharp, but never dangerous to hold. I can only say that as I was reading it, people kept peering over my shoulder and oooh-ing and aaah-ing.

The layout? Sensible. The Art Direction? A fantastic expression of the theme of light in the darkness. I can’t find a single thing to nettle or needle, including a sensible table of contents.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Lhuzie

Infinite Revolution does not go deep into safety and conform, disclosing its themes but having no assumptions about how to tackle them — but laying on the table what the game will involve. Infinite Revolution game is about dreams, hopes, and being larger than life. It is also about the inevitability of death, loss, forgetting, and violence. It is still a war story — albeit one with almost abstract, cosmic enemies and stakes.

Brad

Infinite Revolution wears its identity as a shining armor, and doesn’t really concern itself with how you will make its themes occur, instead trusting on design and form to make sure you really get the gist. To be honest, I think it succeeds.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Lhuzie

You are a revolver, a human bound to a star-traveling drive that resonates with alien energies. You can never stop, you can never slow down., you can only keep revolving forward.

It replaced your heart, and your hopes, fears, and dreams power it. Human, drive and the threat to all form a triangle, locked into a mythic struggle for the universe.

In a universe where the stars themselves have gone out, you have to shine brighter. Fight the forces of entropy and keep spinning — until you have burned through all you are.

Brad

The Revolvers were pathfinders, heroes of the great civilization of Prima Sol, Their hearts replaced with beating turbines of limitless energy. They cut a glittering future for colony cruisers and oversaw the construction of V-Gates that made faster-than-light travel the future.

Now hundreds of years later, paracasual entities pour from somewhere else and devour the light of stars, they prevent the workings of the V-Gates, and you must turn your star heart to drive them back.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Lhuzie

I never understood the instinct of some designers and players to make TTRPGs emulate video games. Been burned up on the concept from the decades of “way too literal” adaptations that try to work too much like a computer program but the math have to be done at the table; and the other hard of the swing, of the superficial drawing of the aesthetics

While there a game we have covered quite close to video games that worked for me was Kill Him Faster, there is a giant in doing it successfully that I cannot avoid: Lumen. I never talked much about it, because there is not much to be said. I have played and designed in Lumen. It is amazing at capturing in a different medium the magic and dynamics of looter shooters, but… I don't get why. The design and engine is serviceable, but does not do anything unique, something that justifies prepping, gathering multiple people, and using your collaborative cooperative storytelling to emulate your favourite looter shooter — not when you can just fire that one up. So it became something that I appreciate, have nothing but positive things to say, but “don't get” why the looter shooter TTRPG and its many iterations is a thing.

My beloved partner, Anemone, loves looter shooters. And has played zir share of Lumen-likes. So ze was actually to turn my frustration back and me and explain what I am missing.

Looter shooters are like TTRPGs, something that is going to be mostly miserable if you just hit random queues. In both, they really become worth playing when you have a small consistent group that you can play with. They share many of the same positives, so it makes sense that people seeking that experience play games that have learned the right lesson from looter shooters.

So, why did I took this detour before going back to Infinite Revolution?

Infinite Revolution has clearly taken a lot of inspiration from Lumen and from looter shooters but… the actual playing of the game has a quite unique energy. An energy, the closest I ever felt was when playing bullet hell games. You will get when you start overlaying weapon patterning.

Infinite Revolution is a game about capturing the frenetic energy of a bullet hell and allowing those that do not play video games to experience it. Add the patterns for Drives, being luminous girls of light darting through space and the character-specific theme song? Infinite Revolution may be the purest translation of Touhou to the artform of cooperative collaborative storytelling.

Brad

In a similar spin, I love certain looter shooters, having played a fair bit of Bungie’s big light-themed one that I can feel in here. But I think that Infinite Revolution wears its clearest theme on its broadest shoulders. That Humanity can do anything.

The Revolvers are humans gifted with infinite power, who, even in this brutal war against an enemy who sees to unmake all that is, still take time to rest on Cradle. The Revolvers have the power of starship powerplants resting in their chests, and yet they are still people first and foremost. They went out into the inky black forever of space and guided humans to a future, and now they have simply to step out and drive back the darkness once more.

Spin on.

We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.

Gold, Glory, God, and "Gee, I'm Having a Good Time"

Incentivize This!

There is no such thing as unincentivized play. It just doesn't happen, folks, and you can sit here and pull out all the faux intellectual words you want to justify it, you can call me a philistine who doesn't understand art, this hobby, or you.

But that doesn't make me wrong.

You see, even if the game doesn't outright gimme a goodie¹ for doing the thing the game asks me to do. There is still the simplest and most beautiful incentive of them all, having fun and playing the game. I'm not being goofy or mocking when I say that, but if you show up to a game you know is about Space Horror, you are gonna go towards the space horror, doing whatever the fuck it takes to your character’s motivation to enable this. You want to have fun, so you are incentivized to do the thing.

Now you’re right, in that nothing requires you to do that, there is no punishment² for not playing that way… But isn’t that almost the platonic ideal of an incentive? That you don’t have to do it, but you will be absolutely rewarded for playing the game for the sheer thrill of the game, and if you don’t want to play the game, you could just leave.

Oh, Brad, you just ceded ground! Thats what we've wanted the whole time! We obviously know that! We just don't want any of your gross in-game incentives.

I'm willing to cede that maybe you believed that before I pointed it out, but I'm gonna go a step further! Does your incentive-free game use gold as XP? You see, you can argue that only children need incentives to play to reinforce themes. But, here's the strictest thing, if I am rewarded to bring gold back to town with XP, thats an incentive that says to me "Avoid Combat." And "If the adamantine doors aren't magically attached to the wall, let's steal 'em." If this isn't an incentive, what is? You have just encouraged me to play a certain way and directly tied my XP gain to it. This shapes how you are going to play the game. If I know that you are playing by these rules, I am likely to adapt not just my play style, but any character concepts to make sure that I can, in fact, bring back loot to level up. Gold as XP means that a wandering monk with a vow of poverty who believes that all wealth is inherently evil is not a viable concept, unless I want to never level up.³

If you hold GM authority sacred and believe in rulings, not rules, you can't have unincentivized play! The GM's whole job in that framework is to improvise rules into situations, which, in turn, means that players are incentivized to interact with new situations in as unusual a way as possible. You want players to do things that your GM will have to rule on, right? You want to have a variety of situations in this sandbox, and if this is a cornerstone, and not simply an excuse to not have to game design, you have to hope the players will create situations for rulings! It has been... Incentivized! In the most basic and simple way possible, you as a GM want to put your players into situations to see how they react, and now you get to make changes to the rules to enable that. Once your players know that, they are likely to keep doing that!

This isn't a bad thing at all! The earliest tournament modules had a metagame incentive, the incentive to succeed and earn points doing so! In the early space-faring game Traveller, money is your primary incentive! You literally go about trying to earn money to afford doing stuff you want to do!

The game is incentivized! It's fine, but attempting to act like it’s not? That just seems a touch silly, so relax and enjoy... Plus, a game without any clearly written incentive? Sure seems like Mother May I?

1. That is the technical term by the way.

2. Besides maybe being asked to leave the game.

3. Or cut a deal with the GM and party about it, which doesn’t circumvent the argument.

After (Part 2)

Present Perfect Continuity

You can find part 1 here.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Lhuzie

Rules-light games, by definition, do not tend to have engines. The game master’s role is supposed to throw improv storytelling, off-the-cuff performance, and impromptu game design to make a game “work” and reproduce itself. Still, After is a well-structured game, being able to produce After through its mechanics; if not an engine, it has something quite engine-like. Each session in a campaign establishes what is expected from a session, with a limited number of Memories and Flashbacks establishing how many scenes will play in the Past and how many will play in the future/present.

Challenges and trying to meet them drive narrative between scenes — and sometimes between sessions or even through a campaign. However, their use is too arbitrary to be reliably counted as an engine. This is where the unusually named Focus takes over as what powers the game.

Focus is the true narrative currency of After. Memories are nice and all, but you have one per session and can, realistically, get another one during a session; they don’t really change how you play After, but are a nice treat that you are wasting if you are not using — a real waste, considering how powerful their effect is. But Focus? Each character can get up to 5 Focus, with the amount of Focus they have earned during the campaign communicating at which stage of their personal narrative they are. This is no idle indicator, but an active algedonic signal: it connects everything.

Focus (and Empty Focus) are used to fuel powers, being deeply interwoven with your character archetype. Focus is the dubious reward of Experience: failure and costly successes will increase your Experience in attributes; the better you are at an attribute, the more Experience you need to learn before being subject to a Focus. Focus accumulates; it changes how you relate to your powers, change how you play your character, chugs the game in a given direction. Because Experience gets you Focus, you both want to avoid rolling with your bad attributes if possible… but you also have to roll with different attributes because your primary ones have already accumulated too much Experience. Focus represents the weight of the events, the consequences, and lasting changes inflicted by your choices and actions; the amount of Focus you have accumulated determines your epilogue; max your Focus and you are at the mercy of a fate decided for you.

Brad

Focus is where the rubber meets the road, the place that says where you are at the narrative of After. You gain Focus as you spend experience, which drives you ever further towards the end of your arc, inexorable and sudden. As you become more powerful, your stats become impossible to roll, so burdened with all of your experiences, you are pushed to the end.

Memories are powerful, but we have already established that After is about who you are with power, not who you were before, so it is only fitting that they are motor oil to Focus’s gas.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Lhuzie

Well, After already has your season zero well planned. So what should you use your hour of prep for? Some suggestions.

• Familiarize yourself with the structure of the game, specially with what you do in Session 0 of After (pg 3).

• Learn how Checks (pg. 6) and Challenges (pg. 7)

• You need to become good at making challengers sooner rather than later. Cross-reference the Challenge Template (pg. 9) with the talk about Challenges to the Narrator (pg. 58-61).

• Due to the quite unique definition of terms used, maybe familiarize yourself with the Glossary (pg. 72) for later consultation.

• You can post-pone making decisions for character creation until the second session, but you should check how characters work if you have the time, at least the steps of character creation (pg. 12) and how risk rolls and focus interact with character options (pg. 13-14)

Brad

Read the game, high-five your players for agreeing to play a game that is actually low prep!

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Lhuzie

The nomenclature of the game has to be one of the biggest stress points. Experience and Focus will always feel inappropriate for the concepts they are meant to describe to an experienced ear; reminding yourself and others of what they actually mean in After whenever assumptions take over is a good way to prevent issues from false familiarity.

Challenges are presented relatively tone neutral, as an “advanced” conflict resolution system. However, as mentioned previously, they are extremely central to the game. Powers and the mechanics of After only really work when Challenges are centered as the mechanical pivot point for the entire game. This is obvious to anyone spending some time with the game, but if you take a brief glance, jump in, and want to learn on the go, it is easy to misunderstand how central they are to After. So, any dice rolling that happens should, by “default,” be tied to an ongoing challenge — making challenges the norm and orphaned dice rolls the exception.

The Consequences on After are some of the most fun takes on the concept I have seen in this artform, but rely a lot on gut feelings and arbitration and are not always intuitive. They take a bit of system mastery on the part of the game master to really live up to their fun and narrative potential. It is well worth it.

Brad

Hey, use challenges and for the love of sweet lady statistics, use a light hand of statistics and be careful that you don’t veer too heavily into “Mother May I?”.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Lhuzie  

Listening to many of the frustrations people have with Triangle Agency, After is exactly the type of game people seem to want and expect from Triangle Agency rather than meeting the game where it is at. Triangle Agency is still there if you want the best horror roleplaying game of the last decade and the depersonalized horror of corporate slaves capturing others like them while everything is drowned in HR Cozy and Corpokitsch; but if you want something more rule- light, improv-heavy, with mechanics that lend themselves to some wacky randomness, well, After does that. No need to be frustrated trying to make a game do what it is not about, denying yourself both what you want and the opportunity to subject yourself to transformative art.

Compared to yet another games, there are many echoes of Nobilis and Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine in After. In many ways, After paints a picture of what a “rules-light” take on the oeuvre of Jenna K. Moran would look like. Those games are carefully designed and very heavy in rules and systems — just not in the way many recognize those —so it is a remarkable case study to see what we lose and what we gain with the different approaches and what must fill the space left by a “rules-light” approach.

Finally, if you are looking for different ways to tell stories, especially ways that may not work in other media but work amazingly in this artform? Play After.

Brad

I’ll always bang the drum of commitment, but After is proof. Think about the artform we are in, and build your art to use the medium to help you. That’s honestly what separates the great painters and sculptors from the average, the people who use their medium to its maximum potential understand how it actually works and what its limitations are. After only works in ttrpgs, so give it a shot and see how the medium can help work with, and define art.

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