TAO Games adopts new business model, makes best games ever.

Above: Bliss Stage

TAO Games, makers of Bliss Stage and Polaris, have just adopted a "pay-what-you-want" model ala the Humble Indie Bundle for PDF copies of all their RPGs.  This is something you should definitely care about, because they make games that kick lots and lots and lots of ass.  They're experimental, relationship focused, and, most importantly of all, recognize that being a hero costs more than it pays.   I remember hearing an interview with Ben Lehman, the designer behind TAO, in which he said something to the effect that when he was first getting into gaming he noticed that other people were trying to keep their D&D characters alive while he was trying to get his killed in the right way.  This anecdote basically describes my initial experiences with D&D to a T.  Anyone who's ever gamed with me or talked about fiction with me or basically ever met me is well aware by this point that nothing gets me going quite as much as a well executed melodramatic heroic sacrifice.  It's why I love David Gemmel, it's a large part of why I love Lloyd Alexander, it's why I still cry every single time Boromir takes that third arrow and keeps chugging in The Fellowship of the Ring.  I like to see my heroes worn down by the business of being heroes.  It's not an easy business, and I hate it when it appears to be.  If you've ever felt the same, you should absolutely buy a copy of Bliss Stage.  I'll do a more complete post about it at a later date, but suffice to say that it manages to out-Evangelion Evangelion and is about emotionally scarred child soldiers battling aliens using mechs made out of love.  Also, the mechanic for resolving major plot points mandates that PCs die, and it's got all kinds of character erosion going on at all times.  So yeah, it's pure, unadulterated Ben-shit, and you can get it for whatever you're willing to part with.  Do it now.

Shock: Social Science Fiction

I've rarely loved anything the way I love Joshua A. Newman's Shock (stylized "Shock:" by the author). This is why RPGs exist.   Those who know me are aware that, even back in my D&D days, I was never really interested in the whole "get loot, go up levels" focus of a lot of games.  Shock is most decidedly not one of those games at all.  Instead, it works like a collaborative world-building and novel-writing framework with a laser-like focus on the thing that makes the science fiction genre interesting, namely the way it explores extrapolated societies and their pressures.  In a single sentence, Shock: is not quite a game, it's more like an engine for creating dense, meaningful, exploratory stories like Dune, Neuromancer, and The Left Hand of Darkness, and then watching them play out in realtime with a bunch of your friends.

The game starts with creating the world.  There are 2 major elements that need to be decided upon, called Shocks and Issues.  Shocks are the scifi insertions that separate this world from our own.  Shocks can be anything: old classics like "Robots," "FTL Travel," and "Human Cloning" or stranger excrescences like "Death is reversible."  The other category, Issues, Are the social concerns that will be important to the society.  "Corporate Greed," "Human Rights," whatever, these are the confilict zones that will drive the story.  Everyone comes up with these together, all the players building on eachothers ideas and tossing out suggestions until you have your shocks and issues set, as well as an understanding of how they intertwine to create a functional, realistic alien/future society.  Each person gets to "own" a shock or issue, giving them final say on any matters related to that particular subject and how it pertains to any situations in the fiction.  Given the conflicts at stake, you then create the Praxis Scales, the measures of how things are done in this world.  There are 2, and each has 2 differing ways of solving problems that are emblematic of the culture and its core issues.  For example, Neuromancer might look like this:

Shock: Cyberspace
Issue: Urbanization
Issue: Globalization
Issue: Wealth Gap
Praxis:  Buying vs. Stealing
Praxis: Confrontation vs. Deceit


When you are done making the world, you populate it.  Everyone plays 2 characters, a protagonist and and antagonist.  Each protagonist is defined by his/her/it's conflict with one of the issues in play, which will form the backbone for their individual story.  Each character is also given a rating on both praxis scales, showing what their most effective means of getting things done are.  Once each player has a protag, they choose another players protag and create an antag for that character.  An antag can be anything, an individual, an organization, a political movement, whatever.  It's the force that drives the protag into conflict with their central issue.  The also are rated on the praxis scales.

When play begins, you take turns going around the room, each player getting a turn to showcase a scene where their protag battles with their issue, and the person playing their antag trying to break them down or push them into greater conflict, and all other players adding details and subtly changing the outcome of events through their manipulation of the shocks and issues they own.  Each antag has a pool of points they use to hamper the protags, and when they run out, that particular story enters its conclusion. You're basically guaranteed tons of interesting character play, a deep multilayered meta-narrative constructed from the individual protags' stories, and even some meaningful commentary in the course of a single night.   If you're playing with smart, cool people (which you doubtless would be), you're probably going to end up with something that would be worthy of a Hugo nomination after a couple of drafts.

Addendum:
Kelly, Jon, and Ben, if you read this, we need to have another hot-tub Shock: party when I'm back in the US.

The Other: A Storytelling Game of Alienation

Nicholas Dowbiggen's "The Other" is a free, extremely rules-light take on the horror RPG that is more or less entirely unknown, but deserves wider appreciation. Inspired by the kind of haunting, psychological dread characteristic of the Silent Hill series of games, "The Other" is almost entirely focused on the steady mental degradation of its characters. Certainly, this in and of itself is nothing particularly new. Call of Cthulhu and its venerable sanity system have been compelling would-be paranormal investigators to suicide and madness for more than 20 years. The thing that is so compelling about "The Other" is the total primacy to this idea. While sanity is important to CoC, it is simply a part of larger equation, and more often than not has a way of becoming little more than a secondary hit point system. In "The Other," the psychological state of the characters is the only thing that matters. All other elements are seen through the lens of your mental decay. The question isn't so much whether you have the skills to pick a lock or aim a gun, but whether you have it together enough to do so, and how the increasing pressure reveals new aspects of your character.

Each character has three Progression Stages, emblematic of their decreasingly rational methods of response to the formless evil that pulls the strings behind their world. Each Progression Stage has a number of Threshold Notches (3 for the first, 2 for the second, 1 for the last). Whenever the player loses a roll against the Other, they go down a notch, crossing into new stages as appropriate. Each stage describes the overarching attitude of the character, which changes as the stress increases. The stroke of genius comes from the fact that character creation consists entirely of a 3 page psych evaluation that the player hands in to the GM, who then creates appropriate progression stages for the character, which he keeps hidden until they come into play. So, much like in reality, the players don't really know how they're going to respond once they snap, and the ramifications are much more personal and character driven than CoC's "run screaming" or "go catatonic" sanity effects. It also contributes to mechanically aided character development, as each progression stage reveals something about your character's unconscious mind.

On a similar note, each character has a Stress-Perception Symptom and a Repression Symptom which are unknown to the player but shape the way that the game plays out. The Stress-Perception Symptom is a buried truth integral to their personal story that they must cut through the Other's machinations to uncover. More interestingly, the Repression Symptom is a lie, something important that they believe to be true, but that is in fact a self-deception they must overcome.

The combination of the Progression Stages and Repression Symptoms makes every character delightfully unstable, creating one of the few roleplaying experiences I can think of in which the players themselves are unreliable narrators. I cannot stress highly enough how cool this is, and how much more conducive it is to genuine horror than pretty much any other system I can think of. When a game forces you to question not only the world, but your character's perceptions of both himself and the world around him, you know you've found something special.

Sadly, the blog on which this game was originally posted has been reabsorbed into the seething froth of primordial darkness, but I've put it up for download here: http://www.mediafire.com/?tc5q4m97v144sty.

If anyone plays it and wants to share experiences, I'd love to hear how it went for you.