System Hacks: The Long Defeat

Yesterday I stumbled upon Mick’s Advanced Mystery & Manners: Together Through Ages of the World…. In which the author shared The Long Defeat, a hack of Mothership 📖 , that can swap out the rules engine of The One Ring 📖 , while preserving much of the source material of that system.

Having recently picked up Mothership and having played solo sessions—The Travels of Duinhir Tailwind— of The One Ring , I was curious. I downloaded the 10 or so page manual and gave it a read. And it does seem to do a good job at rules distillation.

From there, I pulled out the Warden’s Manualof Mothership and started reading. I’m not one for horror in movies, but invariably, I find myself drawn to how I might invoke dread and fear in role-playing games. And the Warden’s Manualprovides that guidance and more.

I found myself nodding along with Mick’s analysis; namely that the narrative procedures and game pillars of Mothership align well with Tolkien’s narrative arc of Middle Earth.

I think of the era of d20, in which we saw a rush towards universal systems. And contrast to this era, where we have a plethora of available systems, and can connect “tech” from different systems to different “genres” to try to tease out something that works for our individual play cultures.

Yet it goes beyond that. The Long Defeat is what happens when designers don’t simply put forward mechanics, but also bring forward agendas and principles—to invoke Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA 📖) -from which they then build approaches and considerations for running the game.

We have, for awhile now, been in an era of visibility regarding Role Playing Games (RPGs 📖) . We have open source systems, session reports, actual play recordings, discourse about game-play, and academic studies of these games of ours. I think to my personal style of facilitating games, something that I developed by way playing in games run by other people; and often those others were ones that were players in my games.

Meaning we created a localized play culture. From which I developed the foundations of how I facilitate games. And overtime, as I’ve studied other folks approaches, I’ve metabolized some of those approaches. Assembling a person toolkit of approaches. And The Long Defeat is that mindset, now codified into a playtest document.