Calvinballing a Whole Campaign

A case study in throwing together a campaign's rules system on the fly

While I’m busy finishing recording the second season of Dice Exploder (10 episodes! Get pumped!), I wanted to write about an experimental campaign that one of my groups wrapped up this week.

I’m kind of obsessed with this article over on the excellent Indie Game Reading Club. It’s a guest post by Jason Morningstar in which he describes his process for throwing together a game in an hour. And I don’t mean prepping for a session, I mean soup to nuts all the mechanics and everything, done in 60 minutes.

This post is more or less a love letter to that article. Maybe read it instead. I’m going to say a lot of the same things but with my own examples, and all credit to these ideas goes to Jason.

This thing changed the way I think about RPGs. I’d known for years that the OSR people were over there doing “rulings not rules” and talking about procedures and generally caring more about player ingenuity than mechanics. But I hadn’t made the connection that you can just, like, do the same thing without playing a dungeon crawler or Mothership.

My ruminations on this came to a head while acting as a judge for The Awards in 2022. I wrote that essay on The Book of Gaub that I republished here two weeks ago, and something clicked for me: at present, I find the scarce resource in RPGs to be scenarios, not systems.

The next time one of my weekly groups was looking to start a new campaign, I proposed we pick a scenario and then hack together rules on the fly for it. We did it, wrapping up that campaign this week after about six months. And it went… pretty well! Not perfect, but I think we all found the process easier than expected. If you have a story in mind and an established group, you can absolutely throw together rules and hit the ground running.

Here’s how we did it.

The Pirates Game Rules

We started by doing some worldbuilding. We wanted to do pirates on the high seas. We didn’t want standard fantasy races, so we pulled in the animalfolk style world of Wanderhome. We put together some factions, used a map generator to get some islands out there, and mixed in a weird idea for how magic works: if you get lots of a thing in one place, you can do magic around that thing. Pirates hoard treasure because then they can do treasure magic, and that’s what the evil capitalists were up to. Cool. But the main thing was being on pirate ships doing pirate stuff.

Onto mechanics. Per Morningstar’s advice, we picked a game we were all familiar with and enjoyed: Blades in the Dark. But we stripped it down to its absolute core:

Characters had:

• 3 traits (i.e. bookworm, needs to speak to a manager, and infamous)

• A flaw (i.e. “NOTICE ME!”)

• 8 stress

• Gear as appropriate

• 2 special abilities invented by their players during character creation or stolen from whatever game (Blades and Apocalypse World moves made appearances, along with ~80% custom moves)

Action rolls worked like standard Blades, with dice coming from:

• +1d for having a relevant trait or piece of gear

• +1d for pushing (2 stress) or taking a Devil’s Bargain

• +1d for getting an assist (1 stress)

You never need more than 3 dice.

Resistance was a thing, always with 2d6 dice. This table loves its consequences and is not known for resisting very often, so we didn’t feel the need to make a bigger deal of it.

During downtime, you’d reduce stress by [2d6 take the highest] by framing a private bonding scene with another character.

We cut advancement because none of us care about it too much anymore. (Even beyond my feelings on XP, I’m going to have a lot to say about advancement at large on an episode of Dice Exploder one of these days. Hopefully season 3.)

That was it. We played a few sessions. It went pretty smoothly. Traits instead of action dots is amazing, and everyone should be doing it.

Aesthetics

I think Google Slides is maybe the best virtual tabletop on the market. It’s simple enough that no one has trouble using it while robust enough that you can throw a ton of flavor and fun into it. It’s easy for people to customize their character sheet slide with pics and graphical flourishes, find anything quickly, and remember where things are.

Here’s some example slides from this campaign:

Mood board! We had 3-4 art slides. One of the little guys on this sheet ended up being someone’s character portrait.

World map! Always nice to have a professional animator in the group to whip up something that looks nice from a procedurally generated starter

That’s me, I was Rhys, a bibliomancer (tm). I liked styling the text to look kinda like it was strips cut out from a book and pasted into the slide.

I love both of these special abilities. Rhys could do book magic because she lugged around a treasure chest full of books that generated a magical field for doing cool book stuff. Trapping people in books has been an obsession of mine since I played Myst with my dad at the tender age of 5, so I made a whole ability of it. Eventually I figured out I could put an ally in a book with their consent and then in the heat of conflict swap them out for an enemy. A perfect, if sociopathic, battle plan (carrying people around in books against their will is pretty messed up, but Rhys didn’t care about that.)

Stormspeaker literally never came up. I’d forgotten until right now as I’m typing this sentence that I had this ability. But it’s cool as fuck, isn’t it? What an adventure that ability could’ve made for. Maybe in season 2.

Interesting to note there that I basically made an entire fleshed out character on the back of three traits, one flaw, and a single custom special ability.

On the Refresh Trigger: that was a thing we added later that I’ll get back to.

Here’s some more sweet special abilities from other characters:

Reflection: Push yourself to look/speak/reach into the mirror world. Glimpse a parallel timeline (may be inaccurate to our world), ask a question of yourself or another being (may not be the truth in our world), or steal a small item (it is now missing from the mirror world).

This one was great. Turned out to be the backbone of much of the campaign after it was used to steal a copy of a powerful necromantic book.

[unnamed]: Can touch a coin (or other piece of currency) to ascertain its history, including what it bought.

A classic, made more piratey. Who needs to name special abilities anyway?

Fire Within, Fire Without: Burn down the government with fire.

Big fan of this one.

It was remarkable just how much of the campaign ended up warping around a small number of these abilities. You might call that “broken,” but I’d call it “sweet as hell.” There’s a whole episode coming in season 2 of Dice Exploder about making bespoke moves for your campaign, but I really can’t recommend the practice enough. This blog post by Vincent Baker is, like the Morningstar article I opened with, something that broke my brain when I first read it. It’s not just that you can make custom moves that, like, name specific NPCs in your story. It’s that those are the coolest moves around.

Make custom moves, and let them hog the spotlight.

Assembling a Plane as it’s Taking Off

There’s so much glossed over in these last two sections about the corner cases of how things work in Blades and this hack. But for us, with an established playgroup, glossing was fine. We knew how those things worked at our table. And when we didn’t, we made a ruling on the fly and kept playing. This meant the rules were kind of in a constant state of development, and we negotiated them very much by whatever made sense to the specific moment in question.

Here’s some of the changes to the rules we found as we played:

• Do special abilities give +1d or improved position or effect? We decided no one cared, and we’d basically cut position and effect anyway in favor of a more freeform conversation about fictional positioning.

• Harm! We’d forgotten to make rules for it until someone got hurt. We decided everyone had one harm box. If you took a second harm, you were incapacitated and/or dead. You recovered harm by spending your entire downtime and thus forgoing any stress recovery. The GM felt this was pretty harsh (fair!) and compensated by essentially never handing out harm. That worked well in its own way for the swashbuckling genre.

• You could trade one of your downtime stress reduction dice for a different downtime action. This was such a cool, sensible, and effective mechanic that I was shocked I hadn’t seen it in a FITD game before. People should steal this.

• After I published that episode of Dice Exploder about Antiquarian Adventures and Composure, the group got real excited about Composure refresh triggers and added them in (see that Rhys character slide for an example). This basically meant we cut downtime and did this instead for the back half of the campaign. This worked better for what we’d settled into, which didn’t have much of a score / downtime loop in the first place.

• Someone picked up a second PC about 3/4s of the way through the campaign, an ex-NPC who had joined our crew. It went completely fine.

• At some point several characters had acquired copies of this necromantic book capable of controlling a kraken. After my book-o-mancer used this to great effect, I started writing a custom move specifically to handle what happens when you try and use one of these books. The campaign promptly ended before anyone used it or I got around to finishing it, but it was kinda neat. I wonder what the third shitty thing would’ve ended up being.

When you attempt to control the Kraken using a Book, it first probes your mind. Answer its question(s). Then roll as usual. On a 6, choose 2. On a 4-5, choose 1.

• You do not suffer harm from it overwhelming your mind

• It does only what you ask of it

• [third shitty thing]

• In the second to last session, someone flubbed a roll in such a way that it became clear that another character should gain a string on them. We’d played Thirsty Sword Lesbians a few campaigns back, and now strings were in this rules set. They worked pretty well, spent to give +1/-1d on a roll depending on whether you wanted the person to be doing the thing or not doing the thing. We handed out a couple.

This whole experiment was such an interesting way to develop a game. A side effect of trying to make a story happen with whatever tools we had at our disposal was that we found a bunch of delightful little weirdsies. These rules weren’t good enough that I’m chomping at the bit to write them up and publish them, but I suspect several will make it into future games I design. I hope if they inspire you that you steal from them liberally.

Basically we built an ever-changing, shaggy as hell pile of mechanical parts. But we knew how to use them well, and we banged them together, and it was good.

Drawbacks

As much as I found this whole experience interesting and I very much enjoyed the campaign that resulted form it, I’m not sure I’d do it again.

That’s not for mechanical reasons. Our rules were by and large quick and clear even in their simplified state, at least for our table that had years of FITD experience to draw on.

No, my problem was I kept losing focus on the game because I wasn’t as invested in the story and setting as I’d have liked to be. I think we made a cool world, and we made cool characters, and we told a cool story. But it took a while for things to get rolling, and I always felt a little at sea (pun intended).

It’s very possible this is because I had a lot going on in my life over the past six months, as did other members of the group. We weren’t able to play as often as we’d have liked, and I lost track of things. This game was not as high a priority as I’d have liked it to be. I did not focus on it the way I wish I had.

I think we also made the mistake of setting up a sandbox but not giving ourselves a compelling initial objective. We spent a good chunk of the campaign being like “uhhh, where do you wanna go?” “I dunno, where do you wanna go?” We found some direction eventually, but by the time we did, I had used the vagueness of our objectives as an excuse to check out.¹

But even beyond those smaller troubles, I think there’s something to the fact that making up a setting from scratch is ridiculously hard. It’s so hard. I have made some cool-ass worlds in Apocalypse World session zeros, and even using the MC procedures in that game, it’s still so much work to then populate them and make them feel truly alive. I think we had some solid ideas here, but I bet they would’ve been a lot more solid with two years of time spent fleshing out a setting book to publish.

Which brings me back to this:

In Conclusion, Write More Settings

I’m basically quoting my The Book of Gaub essay here, but: I know enough rules to throw something together, even if your new bespoke game is good. It’s rules are probably much better than my table’s Calvinballing. But there’s a lot of systems out there with a flexible genre: Thirsty Sword Lesbians. The Exiles. Cairn. Adventures on a Dime. Unconquered. Even Apocalypse World. If you give me a cool sandbox full of a couple big ideas, a couple factions, a handful of characters, and a starting place for how the PCs fit into it all, I can find rules for it.

I do not need your rules, I need Blades in ‘68. I need new sandboxes I wouldn’t have been able to think up myself.

So please: write more of them. And recommend me your favs.

1. That said, our GM had a different perspective on this moment: “I feel like my big takeaway from what we did specifically (where we had no real specific A plot in mind going in) was the spot where we were like, “Do we think we have enough plot points that we can start condensing back down to an end goal?” I kinda loved that? Cause it was like, targets acquired 🚨”