Bringing Battle Royale to Mothership
And Why Sometimes Throwing Everything Out Helps
This is the first in a semi-planned series of preview deep dives into The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station, my Mothership zine coming to Kickstarter next month!
First, I wanted to walk through the thought processes around translating battle royale structures and tropes to tabletop and how, specifically in a rules-light roleplaying context, I really had to hone down what was worth focusing on and what was simply dead weight.
In late November of last year, I reached the point of knowing that I really wanted to make this project a reality and as such, much of it had to go from some decent ideas typed quickly out into a Google Doc and had to actually take shape as a thing that was playable for a group at the table.
Originally, I wanted to create an almost systems-free structure for running a battle royale game on top of an existing TTRPG (Mothership, in my case). This earliest version of the Bloodfields saw Wardens, using a number of random tables and a battle tracking sheet (see above), placing all of the enemy teams, deciding their movements around the arena according to preset “attitudes” (essentially fight, flight, or freeze), and then using certain values to determine if teams won or last battles that were occuring “off-screen” across the arena. The original idea being that the Warden could pull from all of these extra details because they knew how everything in the entire arena was playing out. Of course in practice, this was (just as it probably sounds from me writing it out) a lot of work. I do think it was well streamlined for what it was - but even 5 minutes of dead time between in-game rounds for the Warden to essentially simulate everything happening in the whole arena was too much. It felt like it created a cool story in many cases, but it was a story that only the Warden would see in the vast majority of cases. So… I threw almost all of it out.
In going back to the beginning on my design process, I thought about what is key to any battle royale story and came up with a few core aspects: sudden/unexpected action, a variety of contestants coping with the situation in a variety of ways, massive hazards and ways the arena shifts to push contestants together, and more ways to win than simply playing by the rules. Whether it’s the original book or movie Battle Royale or more recent forays into that subject like Hunger Games, there’s always more than just a simple kill-or-be-killed game going on and the horrors of that game are always focused squarely on the central characters and their perspective. I kept all of this at the forefront of my mind and designed a system of play with some big changes from the original.
Now, Wardens only track enemy teams when they first enter the players’ story, simply rolling 2d10 and writing a team name on the Bloodfields sheet. If the enemy team is killed by the players right away, they cross them off and move on. If the team is evaded or flees or the players flee, the team stays on the list and that list becomes its own table for future prompts - seeing memorable enemy teams returning, sometimes multiple times in the same game. Wardens still track sectors being “redlined” where they are filled with a variety of hazards to push contestants towards one another — again a few simple rolls and crossing out of a sector on the map, but there’s not bookkeeping around tracking or moving or dictating offscreen combat between enemy teams. Importantly to play as well, this minute-or-less of tracking of the battle royale game itself is also played out at the same time via in-game announcements from Wren Sinclair, the owner of Blackstar Station and MC for the event. So the Warden simply narrates through the few rolls they need to make as they make them and then play continues.
Beyond that, everything else is player and table driven. When players enter a new hex, the Warden rolls on a table depending on the in-game round to see what happens and goes from there. When a round ends, roll on another table and see what wacky modifiers the slimy business mogul running the game throws into the mix, etc. Ideally, it will be “sight-readable” — a term normally used to show someone’s skill for reading music but that I apply to adventures in which I am able to GM them without any prep (and without even having read the book beforehand). It’s my goal to make Bloodfields a completely sight-readable experience. It’s not there quite yet but a few edit passes and a bit more testing, and I think it will really be something special.
Maybe one day I’ll go back to that original version of the Bloodfields and turn it into a solo story game where you get to simulate a battle royale all on your own and see what stories it creates from that top-down perspective, but now as I am about to wrap up the full manuscript, I feel confident that the new Bloodfields is one that will be vastly simpler for Wardens to run and will create faster-paced and more exciting stories for the players.
If you haven’t seen, Kickstarter recently only sort-of announced that Zinequest won’t be happening this February and is instead being moved to August to coincide with GenCon, a move that has largely baffled everyone and left many folks (like myself) without any real support from the crowdfunding platform less than a month out from when we thought we would have another big promotion (like there was the last 3 years).
Thankfully, Feral Indie Studios was already in the works on a February zine promotion focused on moving away from Kickstarter in the long term. Enter Zine Month 2022! So far, ZIMO has seen a massive swell of support in the last week and a lot of it is still in flux in terms of what it is and isn’t exactly. Whether or not it becomes a more community-driven way to support one another as indie creators or a more directed effort by Feral Indie Studios with specific goals, it’s definitely worth following, especially over the next two months.
Check out the site with more information about what the event is and isn’t currently as well as a wonderful showcase of projects (including Bloodfields) coming next month! #zimo2022
OTHER GOOD THINGS
I completed my read-through and reactions to the Mothership 1e WIP Player’s Survial Guide over on my Twitch and archived on Youtube. I’d love to know what others have thought after their initial reads of it. Especially if you’ve found anything interesting in how the rules are coming out in play!
I’ve been buds with the folks over at The Jodo Cast, a Star Wars gaming podcast, for years. They have been out of the actual play game for a while (at least in terms of longer-form, more serious-minded campaign play). They asked if I’d be willing to play in their new Force & Destiny campaign set during the High Republic era and I was happy to join! It’s a 2 PC campaign where I play Jedi Knight Colil Nu and my friend Evan plays Jedi Padawan Vulkite Aggeros. Having one player be significantly higher than the other and getting to roleplay out that really core SW relationship was already a ton of fun. I’m excited to see where we go from here!
Guess what else? I have a project coming to Kickstarter on February 1st! If you are reading this, you probably already know that, but I’m not really going to shut up about it until the end of February! Sorry!