It's Easier to be Hard on Myself

I remember running a game for some friends a long time ago, long enough that we were playing a new Judges Guild adventure. There was a TPK.  The PCs came to a crossroads and could go left or right. They went left. The module said "800 orcs attack the party. There are no survivors." This was after a couple of summer vacation months of building them up from first level. It was ugly. We were playing in a friend's basement. He was hurt worst of all. He started crying and ran up the stairs. 

His mom came down shortly thereafter and said, "Maybe we should all go home today and find something else to play tomorrow." She didn't understand what had happened. He didn't understand what had happened. None of us understood what had happened. We just knew that it hurt.

Forty years later, I'm still pointing at the horizon instead of letting the rocks fall.

Earlier this year, every time our Wizard rolled a complication when casting a spell in our Dungeon World demo game preceding Arden Vul, I had a choice. I kept making the wrong one. He would choose “You draw unwelcome attention or put yourself in a spot.” Instead of putting unwelcome attention on the doorstep, I kept pointing at the horizon.
I record and transcribe our sessions, and I kept seeing myself doing it. I wanted to stop. 

Promising myself to “do better” wasn’t going to work. I needed a plan. I thought about how I could practice promising danger and delivering. I settled on some games that I thought would put me in that position repeatedly. Helping me to build the muscle memory that meant I didn’t let my players off the hook. If it worked, it would take my games up a notch. If it didn’t, I’d feel like I was cheating the table out of the experience they deserved.

In CfB I (and everyone at the table) had a little shiver each time I replied to a player's fear of how failing a move would turn out with, "It's worse than that! . . ." The game was tooled to take it out of my hands. People think of CfB as a mystery system. It's not, it's a pressure system.

I realized that there were other games that focused on pressure, too. GMless games and diceless games meant learning how to negotiate pressure and bring it to fruition together. When the head of our academy humiliated the Backalley Duke and threatened to upend his petty fiefdom in the market district, we had to decide together what that meant. Kingdom made it a pressure classroom: what escalated a crisis, what resolved a crossroads, and how to make consequences feel earned rather than arbitrary. (I've written about another thing I learned from Kingdom here.) I also leaned on solo games to help me steward pressure and consequence.

I grabbed Thousand Year Old Vampire because the whole point of the game was to watch things go sideways. I would roll for my prompt and start writing, then I'd stop and think, "No, I can do better than that." And, I'd try again. At first, TYOV was a Kata, like It's Worse Than That!, but pretty soon I learned something else. I learned that it was easier to be hard on myself than on others. 

There's an asymmetry between GMs and Players, but that didn't exist when I occupied both seats. I realized that it's mechanically reduced in CfB and FitD. In CfB’s Night Move, the player describes an action and the Keeper calls for the move, saying, “What are you afraid will happen if you fail?” The player describes the outcome they fear and the Keeper responds, “It’s worse than that …” After the Keeper describes how, the Player chooses whether or not to go through with the action or to try something else. 

Mechanics like that make it easier to keep the promise of pressure in those games. And the players enjoyed it. Heck, they even laid into it. I've never seen players lean into steep odds and bad ideas like they did in my Public Access campaign. 

“It’s worse than that Javi, if you fail, your girlfriend won’t die, her mouth will unhinge like a snake's revealing row after row of sharp, tearing teeth. She’ll join the monster you were already fighting and make it a two-on-one brawl.”
“Yeah, that sounds right. Let’s do this!”

All of a sudden, pressure was fun. 

But it was still easier to throw myself to the wolves than any of my friends gathered around the table with me.

TYOV also taught me that “all teeth, all the time” isn’t sustainable. I love me some bleak doom spiral as much or more than most folks, but I found that I needed to step away from my vampire's journal for a bit. As I looked at the games that hit my table I realized that I did it at a broader scale too. It’s not a mistake that Toon did so well in my Sweet Sixteen, or that Crash Pandas made it into the mix. Absurd comedy and other forms of pressure relief are a lot of fun, and they help the horror land harder when it’s time for that. Besides, Friend Computer from Paranoia has teeth too, even if they’re hiding behind the slapstick.

So, where have I landed? I’m looking for negotiated consequence in pursuit of catharsis. I want to promise players real risks, a game with teeth, and I want to deliver. We talk about it at the beginning of a campaign, we show it during sessions. It’s not cheap shots like that 800 orc ambush, it’s deserved consequences that land. 

Shadowmaster realized the nuclear device was about to explode. He stepped into the shadow and carried it with him. The other heroes waited for him to reappear. He didn't. There wasn't time, and he knew it. The action promised a consequence. When it delivered, the table went quiet.

There may be asymmetry between GM and Player, but there can also be agreement. When players knowingly participate in the possibility, when they see the risk, then not feeling the agony of failure also means not tasting the sweetness of success. 

What have you learned about letting the world be honest and letting things fail when that’s what should really happen? Even better, what taught you that?

Kingdom as Faction Infrastructure: A Gedanken Experiment

I've been running faction play in various games for a while now, and I keep circling the same problem: most faction tools either track resources or narrate vibes, but they don't generate consequences. So when I sat down to test Kingdom 2nd Edition as faction infrastructure for the campaign, I expected to find a decent tracker with good flavor.

What I found was something considerably more interesting. And also something I can't use every session, for reasons that have nothing to do with the game's quality.

The Setup

If you haven't encountered Kingdom, here's the short version. It's a GMless and Diceless game about people in charge of something: a town, a crew, an institution. Players take one of three roles. Power makes the final call on the Crossroads question (the session's central decision). Perspective makes a prediction that becomes true in the fiction. Touchstone reflects what the people feel, which shapes cultural drift.

For my experiment, I ran a simulated playtest with four personas: two pro-integration, two opposed, playing leaders of the Children of Deino. The Beastmen are a disciplined military faction descended from Archontean soldiers transformed by an enchantress named Deino. Their Crossroads: do they accept a group of outsiders as auxiliaries, gaining operational reach but risking structural impurity?

I expected a useful conversation. I got a faction that made a decision, paid a real price, and came out different.

What the Tool Does Well

The role separation is the system's strongest feature. Because Power, Perspective, and Touchstone have different authorities, they can't simply outvote each other. They have to engage. The Perspective player issued a hard prediction early: if auxiliaries are accepted, goblins will exploit the integration seam and the Beastmen will lose a hall. That prediction became true. The faction accepted the outsiders, the goblins adapted, and the hall fell. No negotiating around it.

That mechanic produces narrative causality in a way that most faction tools can't touch. Decisions have downstream consequences that bind future play.

The Touchstone role surprised me more. I expected it to function as emotional color, a kind of cultural weather report. Instead, the two Touchstone players didn't just reflect sentiment. They redefined what success meant. The Beastmen went from debating whether to accept risk, to treating the loss of the hall as proof that they needed to expand aggressively. Touchstone isn't a mood meter. It's a strategic ideology engine.

The depth of what came out of this experiment genuinely surprised me. The Beastmen feel like a faction now, not a stat block. They have a position, a wound, and a changed worldview. That's hard to get from a spreadsheet.

What It Costs

Here's where the honest evaluation lands, and it's important. The richness Kingdom produces comes at a real price in time and logistics.

To run it properly, you need multiple players willing to sit down and engage seriously with a faction they probably don't control at the table. That's a hard ask. Alternatively, you run it yourself, playing all the roles: holding competing positions simultaneously, arguing against your own conclusions, trying to keep Power, Perspective, and Touchstone genuinely distinct. That's possible, but it's cognitively demanding and the seams show. 

Neither of these options is lightweight. Neither of them is something you want to do every week. Kingdom also generates motion, not equilibrium. A successful decision still produced structural loss, increased pressure, and a faction that felt different at the end than at the start. That's genuinely exciting when you want a faction to evolve. It's too much torque for a faction you're checking in on between sessions.

There's also a translation layer required. "Hall loss" as a Kingdom outcome has to map to something in Dungeon World terms: a location clock ticking down, a threat activating, a front escalating. Without that work, the outcomes stay abstract. Rich and interesting, but floating.

Where This Fits

I'm thinking of Kingdom as a strategic session tool, not a session-by-session tracker. Use it when you want a major faction at a genuine crossroads, when you're willing to do the work, and when the outcome should reshape how that faction operates going forward. The Children of Deino came out of this experiment more alive than they went in, and that's worth something.

For Arden Vul, this probably fits best at inflection points: big political moments, major alliance decisions, the kind of shift that changes a faction's posture for the rest of the campaign. I'm also watching it with one eye on my Fracture Radius SWN campaign. Stars Without Number already gives you faction mechanics with real teeth, but Kingdom might serve as a deep-dive tool for the moments when you want to get inside a faction's head, not move its counters.

I wrote about Kingdom during the Sweet Sixteen bracket series, and it made the final rounds for a reason. This experiment confirmed why. It's a serious tool that rewards serious engagement.

Go Play It

If faction depth is something you want at your table, pick up Kingdom. Ben Robins built something genuinely worth your time. I'll be reporting back on how it fits into Arden Vul once the Beastmen finish licking their wounds.

This Week at the Foot of the Mountain (April 25, 2026)

The dungeon breathed back at us Monday night. Arden Vul has a way of doing that: you think you're making progress and then the fiction reminds you that the place has its own agenda. Thursday's Seven Sons session moved things forward in a different register, and I spent some time on Stars Without Number prep, which meant working on factions and brushing up on the rules for psionics.

That reading: I'm partway through Goblindom, a pre-release from the folks at Oddplan!, and I did a full reread of Gord Sellar's Something Tookish! in preparation for a proper review. Something Tookish! holds up beautifully on the second pass. Both reviews are coming in the next couple of weeks.

On the design side, Beneath Ahknoor's structural reorg is underway, about 10% through the text. It's invisible work until it's done, but it matters: tightening the connective tissue so the levels and the moves pull in the same direction.

The more interesting desk work this week was a Kingdom experiment, pre-work for an upcoming post on using Kingdom as faction infrastructure. The hypothesis: you can lift Kingdom's faction-play engine and run it as a standalone tool inside almost any campaign, without running Kingdom as written. The experiment mostly confirmed this. What surprised me was the depth of the result, though it came at a pretty steep cost. This isn't a direct replacement for lighter faction tools. It is great for strategic deployment. The wrinkles are worth a full post, and that's coming. But that's the kernel you can steal right now.

The Radar Chart has been getting some quiet use in the Sweet Sixteen posts, and a few readers have asked about it since the semifinals. If you've been looking at it: what shape does your current campaign make? That's a question that takes thirty seconds to think about and sometimes tells you something useful.

Speaking of the bracket: the final is Monday. Public Access against OSE. One is high-concept mystery, the other is the gold standard of old-school play. Which one do you trust with a new table? Drop the why in the comments.

Coming up: Monday is the final. Wednesday is the Something Tookish! review. After that we're into post-series territory, and I'll be shooting for a weekly-ish cadence.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Kingdom v Toon - Others Lane Final

 

No one dies, they just fall down. No Dice, No Masters. An industrial-sized box of ACME mayhem against a thinking game about a society's attempt to survive.

Both games knocked out stronger seeds to get here. Kingdom sent Crash Pandas home. Toon edged out FATE Accelerated on a banana peel. Two games with almost nothing in common except that they both belong in this bracket.

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Toon

Toon is about choosing the funniest thing you can do in the moment and running as hard and fast as you can in that direction. That's the whole game. The rules exist to keep the momentum up and get out of the way of the chaos.

The contagion is real. New players catch it fast. The zaniness is self-explaining in a way that most RPGs aren't, and the table energy it generates builds into something genuinely memorable. 

The new edition is reason enough to revisit it. A game this fun deserves a fresh audience, and it holds up.

I keep thinking about introducing my grandson to this one. It won't be his first RPG, but I think he'll latch right onto it. A game that can reach across generations and land without explanation is doing something most games can't.

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Kingdom

Kingdom is about exploring questions and communities. The conflict isn't between PCs and monsters or NPCs. It's between ideas. That's a harder game to sell in a sentence, and a more rewarding one to play across a campaign.

The no-randomizer design keeps coming back to me. When there's no dice to hide behind, what the characters say and do carries all the weight. The clarity that produces is unlike anything else in this bracket.

We're wrapping up a Kingdom campaign now, and I'm already half-tempted to bolt it into the faction play in my Arden Vul and Stars Without Number campaigns. The Voidsong Collective is out there somewhere, navigating its own crossroads and crises, and Kingdom is the perfect engine to find out what happens to them off stage.

That possibility, Kingdom as living infrastructure for games that are already running, is the most exciting design idea I've taken away from this tournament.

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The honest case for the loser

Kingdom is going to see more play at my table than this pick suggests, probably as the backbone of faction play in my SWN campaign. The way scenes accumulate into crossroads and crises, the weight that comes from removing randomizers, the clarity about what actually matters: all of it bleeds into every game that comes after it. If your table likes to ask hard questions about what a community is and what it costs to keep one together, Kingdom is the answer. This pick is about what works at my table right now. At another table, the result might be different.

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The pick

Toon, and it came down to my grandson. A game that reaches across generations, lands without explanation, and turns a new player into a cartoon character inside of ten minutes is doing something Kingdom can't touch. Kingdom is the more sophisticated game. Toon is the more joyful one. Right now, joy wins.

I'd love to hear what works at your table. Tell me in the comments.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Crash Pandas v Kingdom

Crash Pandas is a one-page RPG about a gang of raccoons who have to cooperate to drive because none of them can reach the steering wheel, the brakes, the accelerator, the clutch, and the shifter all at once, much less see over the dashboard.

Kingdom is a game where you play members of a community, guiding it through a series of growth and changes at crossroads and crises, without ever rolling a die or using any other randomizer.

One game fits on a page and produces pure mayhem. The other asks you to build something that matters and watch what happens to it.