Blade-Binds in the Bronze Age (!) and the mechanics of cultural fighting styles

Are you interested in Bronze Age archaeology? Are you interested in sword-fighting? Wanna talk about making it all game-able? For the four and a half people globally who are nerdy in exactly the same ways I am, this is mindblowing: I've just skimmed through a new article from the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory (Hermann et al 2020) that argues...well, I'll get to that. If you want the skinny version, you can also read a shorter essay explaining the hullabaloo here: "Sword-Wielding Scientists Show How Ancient Fighting Techniques Spread across Bronze Age Europe." 

But first, dear reader, an interlude to set the stage. If you follow the world of what is often called HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) or if you have ever done any longsword or sword-and-buckler training based on authentic medieval manuscripts, you presumably know about blade-binding. For those who don't follow those worlds, blade-binding is an essential technique for controlling and advantageously (out-)maneuvering an opponent's blade while also sensing their tactical intentions. It provides a foundation for the other highly-sophisticated techniques of medieval swordsmanship, in which combat looks nothing like the wild swings and blocks of Hollywood, but instead something like this.

That, and the next linked videos, are all by the esteemed Roland Warzecha (Dimicator), a leading HEMA authority (particulary for sword-and-buckler play) who collaborates with museum and experimental-archaeology researchers in Germany. You can find him explaining some aspects of binding with swords here and here.

Now, here's the kicker: as Roland describes visually here (jump to about 9:50 if you're in a hurry), changes in the physical design of Viking/Carolingian swords appear to reflect a shift away from shield-binding and toward a new approach - blade-binding. That is to say that blade-binding as used in the written medieval fighting treatises was (in the big picture) relatively new (i.e. only a few centuries old), and revolutionary.

Ok. Now back to the Bronze Age. The new article (linked at top, above) by Hermann et al. reports on a detailed study by the Bronze Age Combat Project, a research venture combining experimental archaeology, trained swordsmanship, and archaeometric laboratory analysis. In a nutshell, here's what the authors have done. They procured high-quality replicas of swords from the European Bronze Age; practiced a variety of controlled strikes with/on those swords, then took those swords to a lab, and studied the ways different kinds of impacts affected the blades; then they gave further bronze swords to fighters skilled in a particular HEMA method of European swordsmanship (Lignitzer on sword-and-buckler), had them execute short bursts of combat techniques, and then, again, took the blades to the lab to understand how such techniques would affect the location, size, and type of marks left on bronze blades.

Then - and here's the kicker - they compared their results to the archaeological record, reverse-engineering the marks found on authentic prehistoric European bronze blades to see which kinds of strikes would have produced the marks we actually find on the ancient blades. And here's what they learned...in their own words:

Firstly, the research has identified several types of diagnostic and undiagnostic combat marks on prehistoric bronze swords and has interpreted them in light of the experimental tests. This has fulfilled, if perhaps partly, one of the project’s main objectives, which was to link distinctive combat marks with specific uses of the weapons. Secondly, it has elucidated how Bronze Age swords may have been held and operated, and the degree of skill and training required in their proficient handling. Thirdly, it has overturned previous assumptions concerning the alternating attacking and defending stances that—it is often posited—would characterise prehistoric swordplay, while also disproving scholarly claims that early fencers would avoid blade-on-blade contact to preserve their weapons. On the contrary, the research has demonstrated that Bronze Age fighters would deliberately seek contact with their foes’ swords in order to stifle and control them. Not only is this a significant advance in its own right, but it also provides a convincing explanation for the plethora of wear marks found on archaeological swords, as well as much-needed analytical diagnostics for discriminating between combat and deliberate destruction marks...

As the rest of their article makes clear, they have discovered that blade-binding was developed thousands of years ago and had spread across much of Europe before the end of the Bronze Age, working as part of a coherent system of sophisticated swordsmanship that would have required coherent and regular training by sword-fighters. Moreover, they can track the spread and then the end of such techniques over space and time. Archaeologically, this is super cool (to use a technical description :-).

Ok, Capt. Nerdfest, but what about the games? 

Sure. Stick with me.

GAMING IT

Let me (briefly) discuss three possible insights for applying this at the gaming table, like in (Oh, I dunno, fer instance) a sword-and-sorcery game using my Brazen Backgrounds: Character Backgrounds for Bronze Age Settings (that's an affiliate link).

1) Prehistoric "Fighters" are legit. As this new research reminds us, martial cultures are capable of producing highly sophisticated fighters whose abilities would overwhelm those of less-sophisticated combatants, and such cultures of violent technique were present in many prehistoric contexts. You don't have to wait around for the written word (in a European context) to get oral transmission of these sorts of techniques. So if you run a prehistoric or Bronze Age campaign, rest assured that "Fighter" class characters deserve their mechanical benefits. :-)

2) ...But Fighters from different cultures might fare differently. Now this one is tricky. This isn't an endorsement or an encomium (see below), but just a recognition of the socio-political realities of human experience. As Hermann et al (2020) point out, fighting methods rely not only on bodily biomechanics but also on socially- and culturally-formed behavior patterns that will shape how one may and should move and act in combat. And as they illustrate, we can see evidence for the spread (and later, apparently, the retreat) of new martial techniques across prehistoric Europe. This means that at some point fighters with more sophisticated capabilities will have encountered fighters without such capabilities, giving the more sophisticated an edge in the power dynamic between different communities.

3) ...So consider applying a mechanical bonus as relevant. One *could* simulate this distinction at the table by giving Advantage or Disadvantage to PCs or NPCs who face fighters from cultures or backgrounds with more/less developed swordsmanship capabilities. Imagine a PC Fighter skilled in blade-binding facing off against two or three fighters ignorant of that technique; hand the lone PC a bonus d20 with Advantage on their attack/defense rolls, and suddenly this lopsided exchange just got a lot more interesting.

I would suggest, however, that GMs should remain mindful of the broader power dynamics involved outside the sword-fight itself. What we call colonialism and imperialism had their own prehistoric and ancient analogies, and when we start tossing around ideas about 'more skilled' and 'less skilled' cultures, we need to be aware of the dynamics at play and the prejudices that can dwell therein (by highlighting objective differences in capabilities of technique within one competitive arena, swordfighting, I'm not inviting GMs to start thinking of cultures as superior or inferior to others). I can imagine, however, that if someone wanted to grapple in honest, interesting ways with imbalanced power dynamics in antiquity, it could be interesting to have simple mechanical tools for showing the martial advantage of Servants of the Citadel/the raiders from over the waves/etc., while honestly addressing the inequalities and prejudices connected to such imbalances, too. Again, if I can self-advertise in closing, my Brazen Backgrounds tries to suggest some of those dynamics without making them overwhelming.

Bronze Age European minis from Foundry

Play-testing My Swashbuckling Solo Skirmish Rules!

Despite all the COVID shutdowns, things are very busy around here - I'm still teaching via online media, and this is that late-semester-crazy-busy season. Still, I have been able to get some gaming action in nonetheless. No doubt, this has nothing to do with the recent Pirates of the Caribbean viewings at our place, but...last weekend, one of my kids helped me do some further play-testing of a solo/coop minis skirmish ruleset I'm working on, intended for heroic swashbuckling/black powder action where a few gallant heroes (or desperate rogues?) face off against much greater numbers of enemies, and act quite dashing while they do it!  

Just that afternoon, coincidentally, I learned that Nordic Weasel Games (see my positive recent review of their Five Klicks from the Zone) has just released beta rules for a black powder solo skirmish game, Five Kilometers from Leipzig! Oh well... ;-) At any rate, my own system-in-development also aims at that solo niche, but I'm trying to accomplish quite different things with the system overall. I have to say that after several initial play-test rounds, I'm very pleased with it - it clearly needs some more work as it develops, but the core bones really seem solid and it provides a very fun game that regularly leads to the kinds of swashbuckling shenanigans I'm after. 

Our last test-battle saw 3 heroes variously jump, swim, climb, swing from the rigging of ships, drop onto enemies below, and even duel to the death atop a tall marble column supporting a statue of King George! One of the 3 heroes died right before the end, but oh it was smashingly heroic. 

Here are my articulated core design goals: 

+ fully engineered for solo/coop play from the beginning.

+ quick-playing, dynamic game; figs can easily move around the board and movements that change the tactical situation in one turn are normal and easy to administer. 

+ 'Swashbuckling' actions to interact with the physical game environment are flexible, open to player creativity on the spot, and easy to administer. Success is not guaranteed, but failure won't be too punitive. They should evoke genre, but be worth doing for more than just flavor - the mechanics should encourage such behavior, but not in an artificial way; rather, the game should highlight the ways 'swashbuckling' well can (colorfully) solve tactical problems. 

+ When in doubt, pick the cinematic/dynamic over realistic game physics.

+ Each round of combat involves meaningful decision-making that evokes (even if abstractly) the cut-and-thrust of parrying and striking back and forth. Your choices will shape the outcome, not just luck!

+ Blackpowder weapons are powerful but reloading takes time, so each shot fired is a notable investment of resources.

+ A few heroes face off against a much larger number of enemy combatants - to facilitate this, enemies use slightly different, streamlined version of the "heroes'" rules. Enemies may reinforce mid-game, even multiple times, depending on the outcome of push-your-luck player decisions. The game should involve a bit of nail-biting tension. 

+ The heroes can definitely die, but they aren't going to go down quickly or easily. 

Several games have particularly influenced my internal "design conversation" - not that I'm always doing what they're trying to do; in fact sometimes I'm moving off in a very different direction, but some piece of the whole shows their influence in one way or another. These are:  

+ Honor + Intrigue (an RPG, not skirmish wargame, but hey...)

+ CROM!

+ Sellswords & Spellslingers

+ Five Parsecs/Five Leagues/Five Klicks (and now Five Kilometers from Leipzig)

+ And One for All 

+ Pulp Alley 

Interestingly, this list does NOT include Ganesha's Flashing Steel, which I know of but don't have, and hear is quite excellent (I am familiar with their core Song of Blades... system); though I'm inspired by one aspect of their SS&SS (the nail-biting solo tension that game can produce), I'm trying for a quite different approach to their games based on the SoB&H "engine."

Anyway, I don't know what this will all amount to, but perhaps at some point I'll have something I can share with others. For now, we're having great fun with this. 

Sword & Planet could work for this, too...

Streamlining Play: rules for Wealth & Currency (studying *A Land of Ice and Blades*)

I recently promised/threatened to polish off my mini-series on streamlining RPG processes by addressing streamlined mechanics for WEALTH and for DOMAIN PLAY (where you run an estate, manage a realm, etc.). Well, here we go [EDIT - this ended up with plenty to say on wealth, so I'll put most of the Domain discussion in a later post, but this will serve as a necessary introduction to that stuff]. 

This will be far from comprehensive, but I want to highlight some ideas I’ve run into that could be useful in a variety of contexts. Although I’ll add a bunch of commentary, everything flows from this point:

Go download A Land of Ice and Blades. No, seriously; it’s free (affiliate link, as are the ones below) - and while this is not a game that I am eager to play in its totality, it has certain aspects that have got me all excited to implement them in my own games, whether I’m running PbtA stuff or an OSR game. Let me explain. 

Vincent Baker kicked off the whole Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) game movement with his landmark game Apocalypse World. He later thought about making a game called Apocalypse World: Dark Age set in, well, the ‘Dark Ages,’ but he ultimately didn’t finish that project (you can, however, find Apocalypse World: Fallen Empires, which is a fantasy rendition of the AW system). Instead, Baker apparently gave his blessing to the fan project A Land of Ice and Blades, which built on the early chassis of AW: Dark Age and then turned it into its own standalone PbtA game. It has a number of features that don’t really appeal to me, including the expectation hard-coded into the game that the GM chair will rotate among the players, who share narrative authority over the in-game world. 

What it does offer, though, is a really cool, streamlined way to handle wealth and domain play. 

STREAMLINING WEALTH AND CURRENCY 

I have a love-hate relationship with tracking wealth found or “earned” in RPG campaigns. Most of of the time it’s kind of irrelevant (unless your players are zealously tracking gold-for-xp). My current campaign doesn’t use that advancement model, and to be honest, my players and I have completely lost track of how much wealth they’ve collected. In our most recent session, a PC opened a treasure chest in a goblinoid shaman’s bedchamber. “You find a stack of silver bars,” I told the player, and his eyes and voice lit up: “REALLY!” But…did we ever quantify it? Nope. Never came up. 

I suppose one could run an entire campaign this way, just hand-waving it all, but there are still those rare (to me) moments when having enough cash on hand is fiercely interesting. Can I level up? Can I pay this bribe to ransom Lord Mufflesbury, or is Lord M’s player rolling up a new character? If I throw a huge banquet for the Androbobulan Ambassador, will I have enough left over to equip my warhorse with gleaming dragon scale armor? Or - well, whatever it is that suddenly excites that prospective customer at the table (personally, I find routine gear shopping kind of boring in play). So I want a way to have wealth still matter when it matters, but I don’t really want to have to track pennies every time the players loot another room in the dungeon. 

Some games address this desire by going full-on abstract. The domain system in An Echo, Resounding, for example, has domains generate (and use up) “Wealth” as an abstract resource that is explicitly distinct from the quantified coin-counts the heroes are hauling out of dungeons (there is a way to get $$$ from the dungeon to the domain, but it’s a little awkward in those otherwise fine rules, I think). Apocalypse World - say, its Fallen Empires hack - uses an abstract “Keep” to handle wealth and upkeep: 

“At the beginning of every session, spend 1, 2, or 3 keep for your lifestyle (plus 0, 1, or 2 more for your mount’s hunger, if you have one).” Spending 1 keep means you lead a normal, not particularly nice lifestyle; 2 marks you out at the upper end of your local community’s social ladder; 3 reveals you as a 1-percenter who enjoys a world of kingly or queenly luxury (oh, and spending 0 keep means “you are starving, in rags, desperate, dying of hunger, thirst, and exposure” unless someone bails you out.

Now, this solves some problems: it is pretty easy to track, but it means the economic game still has real teeth. On the other hand, I don’t like the way that making all wealth fit into one abstract resource - “keep” totally flattens the range of resource inequality. I mean, if you pay 2 keep, and 1 or 2 to keep your august battle-mount fed, you’ve apparently just fed so much wealth to your mount in a month that it would have made the difference between a rich burgher’s life and a king’s. Nuh-uh. If 1 keep is just 1 keep, and if players aren’t going to be tracking 150 keep at a time (in which case, just switch back to tracking cp, sp, and gp anyway), then this is TOO abstract for my tastes. 

Ok, now here’s where Land of Ice and Blades improves things:

“Wealth is measured in Coppers, Silvers, and Golds. … If you get paid for service, the price will depend on who hired you: usually you get coppers from villagers, silver from notables and notables (or from an entire village), gold from royals or high nobles. You cannot exchange coppers for silvers, or silvers for gold, but if you have silvers you have and don’t bother to count coppers, and if you have gold you have and don’t bother to count silvers, unless you really jump into crazy expenses for that season. When you pay more than what’s asked from you, you get better stuff, or friendship, a kind disposition, you buy their silence, you get a few words of advice, and some rumors are told, and so on. … When passing the season, you are supposed to pay for the coming season in advance. … You pay for yourself, and for other characters and/or Notable NPCs that you wish to sustain. … Regardless of your wealth and of your ranking, you live according to what you spend. If you’re a small noble and declare you spend a copper, you save your silver, sure, and everybody around you starts rumoring that something is wrong…” 

What are Coppers, Silvers, and Golds worth? Well, for example, in these rules (meant to evoke an early medieval society), “one copper is the price of basic weapons” while “a full war-set (sword, spear and bow, shield and armor) sells for three silvers” - a war-horse might cost 5 silvers or more, even 1 gold for a truly magnificent creature. One gold also “buys full war-set for a gang, and two golds war-horses for a gan, if you can find who sells that many.” 

Why am I so enamored with this approach? 

First, it’s pretty abstract, and doesn’t require much accounting. “Ok, you enter the village, what do you do?” “Can we go pay for a wild party at the tavern to get the locals on our good side?” (GM sees the players have silver) “Um, sure; you throw coppers around liberally and a few hours later are deep in conversation with an old lore-keeper, who says that…” 

Second, it permits accounting when it’s actually interesting (this comes into play in particular with domain play, see below). 

Third, by incorporating a trimetallic system without forcing a mathematical ratio between the metals, it imposes qualitative and not just quantitate differences between the kinds of treasure. To live by your Coppers is not fixed by accumulating more Coppers; if you want to live like a king some day, well, you’d better take more risks, explore deeper dungeons, accept the kind of job that you’ve been scared to try but will start earning you some silver. And so forth. To live with gold is not just to have more wealth, but to have a different kind of wealth and a different kind of social position. 

Fourth, with minimal tweaking this approach to wealth could work in a wide variety of campaign settings. Anything with a trimetallic value system (that’s the Roman Empire, and much of medieval Europe, though various coinage regimes sometimes focused just on silver) should work. In fact, the system as written for Land of… isn’t tied to coins at all; the default assumption reflects a non-monetary economy in which precious metals are measured by weight. But you could use this with coins, too - and you could use this system for campaign setting A, where 100 copper pieces = 1 silver piece, or campaign setting B, where the ratio is 50:1, so long as you have three distinct metals (or commodities) of value and want to use them. 

And it all looks so easy to administer. I haven’t tried this yet in play - I’m mid-campaign right now with some players running a sort of Iron Age version of B10 in Karameikos, and it seems a bit awkward to suddenly impose in medias res - but man, I really dig this system and can’t wait to try it out. 

Know what? There’s more to say about Domain Play, but I think this is getting long enough. I’ll pin this here and plan to revisit the topic again soon. 

Anyway, what do you think? 

Happy gaming!

[Review] Five Klicks from the Zone, Ch 1 - Post-Collapse Skirmish Campaigns

In a temporary diversion from the blog’s usual RPG content, I turn today to review Five Klicks from the Zone, the new solo/coop skirmish and campaign war-game rules for post-apocalyptic action from Nordic Weasel Games! Equip your band, trade for ancient relics, hold off mutant reavers, and try to make the wasteland safe again! 

CAVEATS/DISCLAIMERS/ARCANE LEGALESE: I received a .pdf copy of these rules in exchange for an online review, though of course no conditions were placed on my review. I should note that I am a fan of Nordic Weasel Games’ products in general, and I correspond every few months or so with the author/publisher to discuss matters of game design or play. Also, please note that weblinks here to WargameVault and/or DriveThruRPG are affiliate links, which add no extra cost to purchases but help support this blog and its content. Ok, on with the show!

Nordic Weasel Games, the vast business empire (just kidding) of one Ivan Sorensen, offers an almost shocking number of affordable, straightforward war-game rules. To be fair, none of NWG’s products will win prizes for graphic design or layout, but the rules themselves tend to produce highly enjoyable games with elegant mechanics that reinforce specific design goals for each title. As I mentioned above, I’m a big fan of the line. Among NWG’s many systems, some of the more popular of late have included Five Parsecs from Home (science fiction), Five Leagues from the Borderlands (fantasy), and now Five Klicks from the Zone (post-apocalyptic; $12.99 USD at Wargamevault). Like its sister games, Five Klicks provides genre-suitable:

+ tables for generating a random post-apocalyptic warband, with a very basic life-path/background system for each character

+ a robust “campaign turn” system, also relying on numerous random tables, allowing you to advance your squad’s characters and gear or pursue other long-term goals in a rich procedurally generated narrative between combat missions

+ and, finally, straightforward skirmish combat rules built from the ground up to favor solo or co-op play.

Let’s walk through each of those elements and see how they fare in play. 

GETTING STARTED: RECRUITING YOUR OWN IRRADIATED PSYCHO HEROES 

I like that the game clearly evokes its genre, yet remains open to significant player creativity. No explanation for the apocalypse is assumed (or required, if all you want to do is blast mutant bugs or raiders). The campaign framework assumes that the player is building up a base, enclave, or stronghold of some sort - but the player is left to determine its nature; because the actual combat fights will occur while out on patrol in ‘the Zone’ the base can be given as much or little detail as desired. However, some abstract Stats are used to track its overall condition and development. 

Ultimately, you can make whatever you like of the setting. That being said - this volume plays as a complete game, but self-advertises as the beginning of a larger series (thus the subtitle "chapter 1") - something similar happened with Five Parsecs from Home, which now has many sci-fi expansions. The tone of this volume is a little closer to Mad Max than to Gamma World; although you may tangle with mutant plants or creatures, for now large monstrosities and killer robots, etc., are apparently reserved for future entries that may appear in the series. 

So. To get things started, you randomly generate your 8-person squad. Over time, you’ll have the chance to recruit more characters, but during skirmish fights you’ll always be limited to a crew of 8 on the table (which should fix some of the complaints about Five Parsecs’ Gang Warfare supplement, which could lead eventually to impossibly strong player bands). I suppose you could make your band non-randomly, but I would advise against it; this isn’t a game of carefully curated point lists for balanced matches, it’s a game of seeing what you can make of the cards you’re dealt - and the random, haphazard results you end up with absolutely nail the post-apocalyptic trope of random survivors banding together. For example, after generating my own starting squad, I wound up with the following team: 

1 Ash Merchant [4, 7, +1, 2, 0] from a Safe City (+1 Medical skill). LEADER trait, 1 Grit. 

• Zone Exposure, Betrayed, Traveled with Nomads

2 Ash Merchant [5, 6, 0, 2, 0] from an Isolated Enclave

• Zone Exposure

3 Ash Merchant [2, 4, +1, 3, 1] from a Frontier Settlement / Rallied Event - also gains Leader Trait 

• Survived Bandit Raid

4 Enforcer [2, 4, +1, 4, 4] from some Roaming Survivors 

• Made a personal Enemy 

5 Caravan Guard [2, 4, 0, 3, 2] from a Trading Post (Speech skill +1)

6 Scavenger [2, 4, 0, 4, 3] from a Stable Settlement

7 Enforcer [3, 4, +1, 3, 3] from a Nomad Camp 

8 Reclaimer [3, 4, 0, 3, 3] from a Safe City (+1 Medical skill)

To keep these stalwarts safe from the horrors of the wasteland, I also generated some starting combat gear: 2x bows, 1 musket, 2x “scrap rifles,” 2x shot guns, 1 civilian carbine, 2x military rifles, 1 light melee weapon, 2x heavy melee weapons, and 2x suits of “scrap armor.” 

The numerical stats above are: Initiative, Speed, Combat Bonus, Toughness, and Nerve. Those stats have been modified not only by character type but also by the specific life path Events affecting some of the characters. This squad illustrates one of the benefits of Five Klicks’ random generation process. When I began, I imagined creating some kind of paramilitary group carving out law and order in the wasteland…how original. After looking over my results, however, I saw an unexpected theme coming through: with three “Ash Merchants” and a Caravan Guard, half my squad had some association with commerce. This was not what I’d expected, but as I thought about it, a new vision for my team emerged. I decided they were founding a small caravanserai near an ancient route through the mountains; their goal was to re-open long-distance trade and thus bring some stability and prosperity back to the region. Fans of OSR RPGs will be familiar with the ways random tables can stimulate your own ideas but turn them in unexpected directions; that kind of thing happens all over Five Klicks. 

MAKING A LIVING AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD

Once you’ve got your team built, you turn to the campaign rules. They are simple and straightforward, relying on a wealth of random results rather than rules complexity. The game provides a menu of suggested campaign victory conditions, allowing players to tailor each campaign to their desired tone and length. 

You get a limited number of Action Points each campaign turn, and can spend them to do things like: train or recruit troops, look for resources, spend resources to upgrade your Base, buy semi-random Trading access to merchants (who might have junk, or might have really helpful goodies to outfit your team), etc. Then you send your team out on an exploration patrol. Depending on the dice rolls, you may find yourself responding to a variety of special events, or encountering a variety of travelers, exploiting further resource opportunities - or (most likely) fighting a battle in the wastes. 

I should note that the character XP and advancement rules seem more structured and balanced than those in Five Parsecs from Home.  

Here’s how my first two campaign turns played out. 

Campaign Turn 1: 

Play began with a special EVENT - Economic Upswing, receive +1 trade points this turn (a fitting opener for a merchant group!). I chose to spend my action points gathering scrap for resources - some of which I sold off this turn to boost my “trade roll” even more. Spending 4 trade points gave me 4 random trade results, any 2 of which I could choose to keep. What was available for trade? A suit of military-grade armor, a crummy suit of scrap armor, a medical ‘diagnoser,’ and some water tablets. I kept the military armor and diagnoser, which can help when treating wounds after combat but also fit the randomly generated medical background of some of my characters. Finally, I tried to recruit another squad member, but the attempt washed out. 

I then sent out my patrol. Unfortunately, they encountered a nastier EVENT - hostile flora (mutant man-eating plants for the win!) injured one of my Ash Merchants - meaning that he’d have to sit out the action for the next campaign turn (this was just the result of a few dice rolls, not a pitched skirmish). 

Campaign Turn 2: 

The weather started getting worse, which would limit any use of the “survival” skill bonus. I spent some action points looking for more scrap, but decided to save my “earnings” so I could invest them later in improvements to my home base. More limited investment in trading therefore earned more limited results for now, but I was able to recruit a new squad member - a rookie that I armed with one of our bows (if only so I could use my old GW archer-with-mohawk miniature in my next fight). As it turned out, that rookie would earn his keep…right away! 

Exploration resulted in a battle, modified by the special condition “scouts report” - I could randomly select 2 enemy groups and choose my preferred opponent. A d20 table offers a score of possible opponent types for each skirmish, each with particular stats, weapons, and tactical behavior. About 75% of these are some form of human opponent, perfectly suited to a Mad Max-like game: nomads, bandits, outcasts, rad-tainted mutants, local militias of various strength, hardened warlord retainers, etc. The other 25% bring in the post-apoc zany: packs of infected dogs, “snarler beasts,” mindless zombies, or my favorite - “hunter bugs…predatory insects big enough to knock down a door” (time to get those tyranids back off the shelf…). 

In this case, the dice said my choices were to challenge a band of cautious Nomad Scouts or aggressive Raiders. As being attacked by Raiders fit my narrative better, and because I wanted a more challenging contest to prepare for the review, I decided to fight the Raiders. As one of my kids declared as I set up the battle, “they want to eat us.” Better not lose, then. 

TO ARMS, HOOLIGANS! 

The game provides a handy random-terrain generator that sets up the battlefield in 8” wide chunks. I liked this scenery randomizer a lot and may use it for other games in general. Deployment is fast and uncomplicated, basically involving the standard “you line up over here and we’ll line them up over there” approach near different board edges. Depending on the terrain generated, your skirmish might also include some “Suspicious Features” - little objective-like targets that either side can explore. I quite like the rules for these features (and would prefer they show up more frequently!). On the one hand, the player who diverts troops to investigate might find helpful loot inside, but might also trigger some obstacles or problems - so there is a bit of a push-your-luck element at work. Based on that alone, these mini-objectives might be a little “meh” - but there’s a catch. The AI-operated enemies can also investigate these special features - and they have a very different table of possible results…which can include triggering enemy reinforcements right in the middle of the battle. So the player might need to guard these features whether or not they want to unpack them  - a cost-benefit analysis that might shift back and forth throughout a single skirmish (my test game didn’t include Suspicious Features, but I really like them after reading the rules).  This is a neat addition to the 5 Parsecs etc. rules series. 

Five Klicks uses, and builds on, the same core combat mechanics of its sister games Five Parsecs and Five Leagues. Writing combat rules for solo play can be tricky to get right; you need an enemy AI that is interesting and somewhat realistic but not too finicky to manage, plus own-side command & control rules that provide interesting decision points to the player without overburdening the processing power of the only brain working the table. I think Five Klicks does a fine job of addressing these needs. Each enemy type has a tactical posture - cautious, tactical, aggressive, or psycho - that determines the default behavior of each model in combat. The aggressive raiders played easily and quickly under this system; they felt aggressive but not in a way that required abject stupidity on the part of the miniatures. :-) They did pose a real danger and there were some tense moments in my test-play.

The command-and-control model works really well for making solo play interesting each turn. You roll 1d6 for each character still active in your squad, then assign each die to one of your troops. Depending on their initiative score, each character’s assigned die allows it either to act before the enemy, or after. This typically leads to tense decisions - two characters are under pressure on opposite sides of the fight, and you just don’t have the dice to let each one act before they’re attacked again…who gets the priority? Leader abilities usefully allow extra action, and careful consideration ofyour fighters' tactical situation and their dice assignments makes a real difference in the battle. 

Shooting at people involves rolling 1d6 and adding a combat bonus if you have it. There are three target numbers - for foes in the open at close range, for foes in the open, and for foes in cover; these target numbers make the value of cover clear pretty quickly once the dice start flying. There are some very simple effects to evoke suppression/pinning (much less sophisticated than in Nordic Weasel’s other games, but I found they did the job perfectly adequately for the quick-solo-skirmish-between-campaign-turns niche here). Weapon ranges matter; usually I am not fond of this, having been converted to Infinity-style infinite ranges on a small skirmish tabletop. In this case, it works out ok; your weapon’s range is not its maximum range, but its maximum easy snap-fire range; you can extend your range by 4” if you skip movement, and at any rate you can still shoot at a target beyond your range, but you will only hit it on a roll of 6 on the d6. The opportunity to gamble a wild long-shot came up several times in play; in retrospect I’m happy with the way these rules limit the death-dealing capacity of waste-raiders, without nerfing the player’s ability to try when they really want to shoot at extreme range. 

If you hit, you allow an Armor Save (but most characters won’t have Armor) and then roll above the target’s Toughness to incapacitate them. Simple and fun. When you kill one of the baddies, the nearest foe makes a morale check and might flee the field; play continues until one side has no one left on the table. Winning gets you Loot and XP. 

You also are supposed to roll 1d12 along with each shot fired; there is a 1-in-12 chance of an ammunition fail, which has to be resolved by a reloading test (the way it’s described, it actually behaves more like a gun jamming or misfiring, leading to the possibility of losing use of the weapon if your clearing action fails). I sometimes forgot to roll this 1d12 - keeping it right next to a single set of dice for rolling shots would help - but there were a couple times in play when weapon failures suddenly made things much more tense and exciting. It also nicely evokes the ruined, broken-down atmosphere of the genre. 

Brawling, or hand-to-hand combat, is also provided for. Whereas Five Leagues from the Borderlands’s fantasy emphasis leads to a very detailed, multi-step brawling process, Five Klicks instead returns to Five Parsec’s simpler rules for hand-to-hand action. The game’s focus is mostly on shooting things, though weapon failures etc. may lead to more intimate action than you’d expect! 

To test all this out against those Raiders, I opted to play a half-size battle (I was a bit pressed for time), so I took a half-squad of four men and challenged five Raiders on a field of about 27" x 24". This allowed me to test the mechanics and was great fun. Have a few highlights photos, and then I’ll wrap up with my final thoughts about this game. [I will apologize in advance for the unspectacularly slapdash nature of these photos - I just threw together some stuff at hand with little attention to aesthetic beauty...how un-post-apoc of me...]

"Hey, Boss! What do y' suppose this strange white groundcover is? Hardened salt pan? The ancient ash of a desolate nuclear winter? Or the surface of an IKEA desk from back before The Big War?"
"Quiet, Rookie! We feed you so you can fire that bow, not ask questions!"

Suitably chastened, Rookie proves his worth by felling a Raider with a long shot from his bow. Unfortunately, his bowstring breaks immediately thereafter, leaving Rookie weapon-less! Is he out of the fight?

Hardly! With his Leader incapacitated by the Raiders' gunfire, our mohawked friend proves his mettle yet again - leaping into unarmed melee combat with a vicious Raider! It's the kind of stupid, suicidal move that could only be redeemed by a high/low split on the dice - oh, look! Incredible!!!

Take that, you wretched Raider dog!!! My Enforcer closes in on the already-wounded, last Raider.
Pro tip: you can tell the Raiders are the bad guys, because they're not even painted. Oh wait...what does that suggest about my Enforcer...errr, perhaps we need to review the terms of his employment...

FINAL RECOMMENDATIONS

Who should NOT get this game? 

If your primary considerations are having a visually fancy book, reading a fully-realized, defined setting instead of an open toolkit, crafting just the squad you want using a balanced points system, or challenging a human opponent to a very in-depth wargame, this won’t be the game for you. There are a number of post-apoc rulesets on the market you might look into, such as: This is Not a Test from World’s End Publishing; Mutants and Death-Ray Guns from Ganesha Games; No Hope in Sight, also from Nordic Weasel, but focused on in-depth infantry squad combat between two opponents; Fallout Wasteland Warfare (which, I think, calls for a specific miniatures line?); or, from Osprey Wargames, the brand-new Zona Alfa: Salvage and Survival in the Exclusion Zone, not to mention their 2017 title Scrappers. 

Who SHOULD consider this game?

If you are interested in post-apoc gaming, and ALSO interested in solo or cooperative play, narrative campaign development, and adapting to creative limitations rather than crafting exactly the team you desire, then I would heartily recommend Five Klicks from the Zone. 

Either way ... happy gaming!

Streamlining/Making Emergent Play Emerge Sooner, Part 2

Still more to come (so expect a Part 3), but some updates to the conversation beginning with yesterday's post emerge already.

First: we've been having a go at some of this on the r/osr subpage, with interesting questions, ideas, and comments over there.

Second: since my post I've picked up both The Perilous Wilds and Freebooters on the Frontier, which together offer a very well-regarded way to play a PbtA game honoring OSR principles (if you keep reading below, you can see what I mean by that). Early impressions after studying them is that these may offer a very good compromise solution when I want to address the needs I raised yesterday, which I can supplement with a few tricks from other games as needed. Meanwhile, however, reddit user u/Deathadder99 suggested that I also check out Ironsworn: Delve, a new (paid) expansion to the (free) solo-or-coop-or-GM'able pbta game Ironsworn. Since I just dropped $12 on the Perilous/Freebooters combo, I'm not going to drop another on Delve just yet, but it looks, frankly, really awesome. It has a 60-page preview and if you read our reddit dicussion you'll get some further input on how it addresses the issues I raised.

[please note that the links in the previous paragraph are Drivethru affiliate links, which means that you don't pay anything extra, but I do get a credit-tip from DriveThru if somebody buys something via these links.]

Third: over on the "off topic" (soooooo off-topic, sorry folks!) page of the Into the Odd Discord channel, @Freddo and @Yochaigal asked me to clarify my views on the lines between storygaming and OSR gaming. My response turned out to be about the length of a blog post, so I figured I might as well drop it here as well with light editing:

Thanks! Hmmm...honestly, that seems like a simple question, but it could be addressed in so many different ways...I'm not going to try to offer my take on a definition of the two forms, which often seems just divisive as well as subjective (ok, here's my working definition of OSR, only partly tongue in cheek: if anybody has ever had an argument about whether your game is OSR, congrats, it's OSR ;-). No, more seriously...I'll offer some personal, subjective impressions of what makes me go "oh, I see it's a storygame" and what I like or don't about these options.

[10:07 AM]

A game shouts "OSR" to me if it emphasizes the concrete reality of the shared fiction; locates (at least almost) all narrative authority over that fiction with the GM; and encourages thoughtfully manipulative engagement of that fictional reality through players' creative problem-solving rather than predetermined video-game-like actions or abilities. Within the universe of games that do this, I personally find the ones with elegantly minimalist rulesets more appealing.

[10:12 AM]

In OSR-land, we often (rightly) use the expression, "the answer isn't on your character sheet." That's a helpful shorthand way to express the value of creative problem-solving instead of those video-game prescribed moves. However...it is possible to push this too far. In point of fact, even in an OSR game (say...B/X or Old School Essentials, which nobody should doubt = OSR), sometimes the right answer is, very clearly, on your character sheet. The baddies are about to attack across this narrow log-bridge and we need somebody to hold them off while the rest of the party tries to get the gates unlocked. Well...it's not shocking to discover that the character sheet that says "Fighter" on it also has the best available Stats to handle holding off the hobgoblins on that single-file log bridge. If somebody decides that what we need now is "FIREBALL," well, this is probably also somewhere on a character sheet and/or in a rulebook. So OSR play doesn't actually abandon "answers on a character sheet," it just emphasizes the importance of other answers too. At the end of the day, however, if there are NO answers on a character sheet then we lose: genre. It's just a universal rules system. You can hack genre back in, but ultimately we do have to balance player freedom with genre emulation. Even OSR games have to honor genre emulation a little bit - or they'll get boring.

[10:12 AM]

Now, what about storygames?

[10:18 AM]

Ok. Like OSR games - whether or not we admit it - "storygames" also exist somewhere in a range along part of the same spectrum. There are some storygames that almost completely do away with the 'concrete reality of the shared fiction', and this can happen whether the GM alone or all players share authority to change that reality on a whim by reshaping reality with new 'facts.' I have the ruleset for a narr game called "On Mighty Thews" that I greatly respect in terms of game design - but I just can't get behind its agenda. It uses a delightful, elegant chargen and resolution system, and/but it works by inviting players to introduce new facts about the world (ranging from "the first hobgoblin falls dead from the log bridge" to "ah, but those runes on the gate are the work of Atlanteans, my ancestors! I read their glorious words and command the gate to unlock." The reality of the game-space is in perpetual limbo, and in some of these games, nothing is sacrosanct about that reality unless/until it gets fixed through narration at the table. I can respect what these games seek to do, but I generally don't find them appealing.

[10:19 AM]

But hang on...because there is a whole range of games OSR-fans might dismiss as "just narrative" games that actually still have a lot to offer.

[10:23 AM]

Games like the PbtA series do - or at least can - operate in this middle sphere. Years ago I was an ardent devotee of PbtA, then got sick of it and turned to OSR gaming. I've realized recently that there are ways to play PbtA that wouldn't have bothered me as much. In some ways, a 'restrained' PbtA approach is kind of middling on my spectrum. Fictional Positioning can be honored in ways that align neatly with the OSR's emphasis on concrete, manipulable reality. I am not a fan of inviting the players to call down brand-new facts about the game world during play, but you don't actually have to adopt this approach in PbtA gaming (so, e.g., based on my read of Freebooters, it seems that the 'spout lore' approach only works, explicitly, if the GM buys your rationale for what you have heard). So in some ways the spirit of OSR gaming's "game structure cosmology" clearly can be maintained in a PbtA game [c'mon, Gundobad, if you're going to nerd out, then nerd out properly: "the game's assumed ontology" would be a much better way to express this idea].

[10:26 AM]

The last piece I want to signal takes us back to what's on the character sheets. The common playbook structure in many PbtA games drops game-changing special abilities that do sometimes look like we're moving back toward the 'video gamey prescribed abilities' problem. Above, however, I suggested that this is a false binary; even OSR games have to rely on a bit of this to promote genre immersion. As I've chewed on all this lately, I've realized that I value the ways a restrained PbtA playbook can honor OSR concrete-reality yet take the players deeper into genre immersion. In Freebooters, for example: anybody can fight, of course, but the Fighter can do it better. Yet this isn't just due to some bonus bumps. The Fighter playbook includes a starting Move/Ability that basically means you're better at charging like an idiot against overwhelming odds. The game doesn't guarantee success - you get some cool perks when you do this, but the rules also require you to 'burn' Wisdom - confirming that this is probably a dumb idea. But one of the possible outcomes is that you make the enemies focus on you and you alone until you've gone down swinging.

[10:28 AM]

So: return to our hobgoblins-at-the-bridge example: B/X already has a character sheet telling us that the Fighter is the right one to put on the bridge. Freebooters, however, moves just a bit in the storygamey direction, but does so to breathe life into this moment. The fighter is going to look awesome, but he might also die horribly. Either way, a Boromir-defending-the-wee-lads moment - a major genre touchstone - is easily fulfilled.

[10:28 AM]

I find this appealing. As I've recently quoted Michael Prescott saying "when I've had a lot of one of these approaches, I start to get hungry for the other approach." Ok, sorry for the long rant-dump, but y'all literally asked for it!

So, what does this all mean? Well, for now, I think it means I need to try out Freebooters when I GM for the kids, and see how it goes, without letting go of my OSR concrete-reality sentiments; and it means that I need to keep running my based-on-OD&D play-by-post campaign, but stay open to fluid pbta-ish ways to handle its pacing should that seem appropriate. And it means that I still owe a promised Part 3 discussing some useful mechanics for streamlining wealth and domain play. And finally? It means that I, and you, should enjoy some happy gaming.