For Common Hour D&D yesterday, I ran an hour’s worth of a game called Wolves at the Lake, in a scenario I called “The Oasis of the Blue Magus.” I had fun with it! The system is sparse but elegantly so, and the players (three students, two professors, all male) dove right in. We’d agreed a few days earlier to play the game, and after a little discussion about possible scenarios decided to be normal or mundane people in a fantasy setting, with wrong place, wrong time vibes.
I had talked with Quinn Blackwell, the game’s designer, at Gen Con outside the Diana Jones Award ceremony, and his description of the game sold me: the game is survival horror, and the group has a pool of tokens, half “clean” and “half” bloody, that represent its collective resources. Faced with a challenge, you can decide to succeed or fail. If you succeed, flip over clean tokens to their bloody side; if you fail, flip over bloody to clean. If the pool is ever all bloody, take away a token and reset half and half. If it’s ever all clean, add a token and reset likewise. Boom! That’s it! All you need, really.
There is more, though. As an individual, you have “merits” and “flaws” that can make it more or less costly in terms of token flips, sort of like Aspects in Fate. You have three points of “Resolve” that are basically your hit points. You have a “trinket” that represents your connection to your life outside the survival horror scenario you’ve found yourself in. Burn it, and you can succeed beyond your wildest expectations—if you’ve played the Pool, it works like a Monologue of Victory, more or less. But once you’ve done that, you’re vulnerable to the malign influence of the Lake and things get harder for you. This is cool; it’s a space for characterization of the PC and creates room for noble sacrifices and the like.
The one rule I didn’t quite get was “threads,” even though I introduced them in play. The rules say, “The DM [Den Mother] introduces Threads when a character fails an action, faces a pivotal moment, or becomes vulnerable.” The DM can at that point either add two Thread counters to the DM’s pool, or move a counter from the DM’s pool to a PC. Once it’s in front of a PC, it can then be “pulled” by the GM, at which point the player has to decide either to resist or not. If you resist, do what you want, discard the counter, and flip a token from clean to bloody. If you don’t resist, you do what the thread is pulling you to do (in line with your flaws, maybe, or with the malign influence of the Lake), discard the counter, and flip a token from bloody to clean.
I actually have a tough time with GM currencies of this sort, so I’m prepared either to just dispense with it or make it more player-facing. I’m using those little skulls from the Quiet Year—contempt tokens—to stand for Threads, and they’re suitably atmospheric I want to keep them on the table. Maybe something like this: DM puts threads on PCs per the rules: when you fail or make yourself vulnerable. Nice. Now that means things get harder: anytime you have to flip tokens, each thread on you means you flip one more to bloody when you succeed, or one less to clean when you fail. It’s a permanent always-on flaw, in other words. You have to do something to “snap the thread,” that is, take an action to confront the horror. When you do that, you flip as many tokens over to bloody as you have thread counters, remove your thread counters, and add a point of resolve. So it’s trading group weal for individual benefit, which the game wants to be in play.
The PCs in “Oasis of the Blue Magus” were on a caravan through the desert when a giant sandstorm scattered the caravan and they, the survivors, found themselves atop a sand dune looking down at an oasis where a great big palace rose up from the middle of the lake, and a giant sandstone cliff loomed over it all.
They made their way down. The merchant who’d lost everything in the storm headed straight for the palace; the others followed the pilgrim who thought to climb to the top of the cliff to get his bearings. They made their way along the marshy margin of the lake and ran into a boar among the reeds. The pilgrim got gored (new Flaw: Bleeding), but the cocky caravan guard got in close and hacked it to bits. The camel drover and the exile tried to help the pilgrim, but just made it worse (Bleeding-2).
Meanwhile, the merchant spotted a young boy in blue robes fishing on the walkway, and followed him inside. “I was too young the last time we had strangers,” the boy tells him, leads him into the kitchen where his older sisters are, and then goes off to find their eldest brother. The master is resting and cannot be disturbed, though, he is told.
The others meet two young men in blue robes in the water garden below the cliff, raking some rocks into a pleasing pattern. The exile defuses the tension, and they take the wounded pilgrim on the camel drover’s last camel inside the palace, where he is taken into a bed chamber where he is tended by some young women, with the caravan guard to protect him. The exile and the merchant talk to the eldest brother—something about a feast, the master will be happy to welcome them, blah blah blah—and the camel drover stays in the courtyard looking after Old Ugly, his camel.
Next up: the Feast! When things start to get weird. There’s a character creation gag in the book about having people close their eyes and secretly signal their bid for prizes, like “The first player to accept gains a 2-cost Merit, but the second to accept loses 1 Resolve.” I think it would be cool to deploy that diegetically, as part of the sorcery of the Blue Magus. So I’m excited to try that out next week.
