David, Greg, Rod, Sam and I recently played our eighth session of Lace & Steel, a game we’ve been playing for approximately five months. I want to write about the game, for myself, with an eye toward jump-starting my own critical reflection on roleplaying, which has suffered quite a bit in 2025.

Rod, who’s GMing, selected the time and place of play: 17th century, the former German “free city” of Strasbourg, now under French control. Europe is steeped in the unimaginable bloodshed of the Wars of Religion, with all its sectarian tensions still present, and more war on the horizon, but also the possibility that, in this particular place, we’ve seen and survived the worst of it, and maybe have something else to look ahead to. 

For a week or two in December, the Discord chat was a buzz of articles, maps and period paintings as we each tried to get a basic sense of the relevant political and cultural landscapes and, in parallel, identify material that would inspire us visually and situationally. Each of us has private standards for how much historical grounding we give a particular aspect of the fiction. What’s made our shared play of the historical material successful, I think, is that we prioritize its potential for inspiration, never letting historical fidelity get in the way of creating vivid sword & sorcery romantic adventure.

With that in mind, a quick summary of our characters:

—Hans-Jacob (Greg): Illusionist and playwright for The Grey Ferrets, a troupe of bawdy street performers.

—Konrad (Sam): Protestant communitarian, now a painter.

—Pierre (David): A cut-purse, whose calculating ex Elsa inducted him into the underworld.

—Valentin (me): Aspiring soldier-of-fortune.

And around them, Rod’s constellation of NPCs:

—Bustamante, leader of the bandits Hans-Jacob (Greg) used to run with

—Eulalie, daughter of the Marquis d’Avallon, engaged to de l’Ozére, French military governor

—Rosa Rósza, apocalyptic visionary that Valentin (me) is under the spell of

—The Free Brethren, communitarian sect Konrad (Sam) was a member of

The politicized marriage of Eulalie and de l’Ozére has been the source of a lot of situational content. In a typically elegant bit of table design, Rod decided the game’s notion of a “scenario” could be timed to city-wide events outside any one character’s control. Our first scenario was bounded by Eulalie and de l’Ozére’s wedding. Our second by the “Festival of Love” (complete with piglets wearing cardboard wings) that Eulalie declared to celebrate her nuptials.

The procedures of Lace & Steel in motion are a thing to behold, each strong and nuanced on their own, but overlapping in fascinating ways. I may try my hand at a system diagram at some point, but for now, I’ll highlight five of interest. These various systems don’t lock together so tightly that the system can “play itself.” Instead, they each have a unique range of motion that permits them to overlap in cool ways (for instance, the outcome of a Skill roll impacting Self-Image, or one’s profile of Ties/Antipathies suffering sudden change-ups in the midst of a duel).

First, the ever-shifting network of Ties, Antipathies, and Self-Image provides rich constraints for how characters relate to others and to themselves. As characters reveal themselves to each other, new opportunities arise to check for changes in Ties or Antipathies. Players are constantly wagering +1 or +2 to Self-Image on how their character’s projects will turn out. In an early session, three of our four protagonists ended up at the same bar with a chorus of NPCs, each carrying various opinions of themselves from previous scenes. After the Carousing, Tie/Antipathy, and Self-Image rolls had fallen and their outcomes been narrated, we collectively realized that this social event had been as consequential, numerically, as a knock-down, drag-out brawl might have been in another game.

Not to discount area #2: straight-up brawls! The duels are dynamic and dangerous, packed with procedural material that practically volunteers itself as verbal choreography. We’re playing with a single adjustment, made after multiple duels (for those who know the system: in our game, cards discarded as part of a Desperate Defense go to the defender’s personal discard pile, rather than to the general pile, so that Desperate Defense takes a toll in exhaustion).

(Third, I’m curious to observe how we’re orchestrating these complex social interactions. They have as much simultaneity as a Runequest combat, but there is no explicit procedure structuring IIEE. I’d guess there’s a big dollop of Tunnels & Trolls’ “roll everything and figure it out afterwards” in how we’re doing it, but I’d like to attend to our logic more closely and learn what’s working well.)

Fourth, the game is remarkably well-suited to exploring queer and homosocial character dynamics. I think Sam broke the seal on this by explicitly determining Konrad’s sexual orientation in session two or three, but with the relational procedures, it was only a matter of time.

Fifth, from the perspective of dice probabilities, Skill checks look incredibly generous, with characters being relatively unlikely to fail. However, we’ve noticed in practice that, because characters’ motivations cross one another in complex and totally unpredictable ways, defeat often arises from someone else succeeding on their roll and having an unintentional impact on your character’s endeavour. And of course there’s no reason you can’t roll an 11 or 12 on two six-sided dice. When failure appears in this guise, I’ve noticed we tend to relish it and want to make it hit a little harder than we might otherwise.

To provide an example, I’ll zoom in on David’s character Pierre and track the interplay of these features over multiple sessions. He’d attempted to capture the bandit-leader Bustamante during an attempted theft of wine meant for Eulalie and de l’Ozére’s wedding. Their duel hadn’t gone his way, and only the intervention of Hans-Jacob had saved him from getting skewered by the bandit. Since their first meeting was this weaving of crossed steel, David checked for the formation of a new Tie or Antipathy with Bustamante, and unexpectedly found Pierre strongly admiring (possibly head-over-heels?) for the man who had nearly murdered him and dumped his body into the canal.

Pierre was out of commission for a little while due to his wounds. When he was back on his feet, he offered his services to the bandit. The second scenario had begun; as part of her “Festival of Love,” Eulalie had concealed a valuable necklace and commissioned a painting from Konrad (Sam) to serve as a clue in a city-wide scavenger hunt. Bustamante wanted to pilfer the necklace before the painting was unveiled, and asked Pierre to find it for him.

Pierre managed to find the location by shadowing Konrad. There was no love lost between them, as they’d fought a duel of cutlass and improvised bar-chair when Konrad grew jealous of Hans-Jacob’s illicit relationship with Eulalie (I am having to drag my own hands away from the keyboard and choke them by the wrists to stop myself from writing a long aside about the cool things David, Greg, Rod and Sam did during this duel!). 

When Bustamante demanded the location, Pierre tried to lie. David shared that, “I wanted Pierre to be able to go fetch it himself — but I didn’t know what I was going to do with it yet. I just figured it would be better to have it and then decide, even if it was just for brownie points with Bustamante, but maybe I would think of something better once I had it.”

Bustamante’s demand created palpable uncertainty in the scene. David decided to roll to see if Pierre could act against his Tie with Bustamante, a roll that encapsulated the Tie, Bustamante’s Charisma, Pierre’s self-mastery, and his Self-Image. It failed. Bustamante walked out with the necklace and no plans to see Pierre again.

Now, consider that all this happened in the midst of Tie/Antipathy changes between Pierre, Hans-Jacob, Eulalie, and Konrad. That Pierre’s interaction with Bustamante became material for the scene a few moments later, where my character Valentin tried to “save” Pierre from Bustamante’s influence by inviting him to join Rosa Rosza’s apocalyptic Protestant sect. And you start to get a picture of how well Lace & Steel suits the socially complex and character-driven play we’re enjoying right now.