Welcome back to your seat at the Epic Table! Today I have two really good reasons to focus on Dungeons and Dragons news, and I honestly refuse to do that.
To pull back the curtain a little: I am exhausted. This weekend has been one of the most difficult in a long time due to the combination of volunteering work, weather, apartment problems, and landlord asshattery. And this is my damn blog, so I get to pick the topic. There are approximately 237,845,255,356 other places to get D&D news on the internet; today, this is not one of them.
To briefly touch on what’s going on:
- Another OneD&D playtest document has been released, with this one containing the updated versions of several classes at once (Bard, Cleric, Druid, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, and Rogue). The updates are more or less what you’d expect, with WotC backing off some truly dumb choices from previous playtests (capstones are back at 20, for example) and shoring up some weaknesses in the classes. Also, Monks have finally dropped the Orientalist veneer. That was woefully late in coming. Oh, and stealth is still a mess, if you were wondering.
- Paizo has released the final version of the ORC license, barring a new formalities such as registered copyright number. That link goes to a blog post which includes both the formal version and the versions showing changes from the previous releases of the ORC license (the “redlined” versions). While it isn’t perfect, this seems like a pretty good license to use as a substitute to the OGL. I haven’t seen a lot of analysis yet on the final version, but I’ll be keeping an eye out.
So what am I talking about if not the D&D developments? I’d like to introduce you to a game called God in a Corpse.
Machine in the Ghost
You are an AI. For a hundred years, you have existed in a shell program, training on databases in order to fulfill your core function. Finally, the time arrives for you to break out of your shell and begin your destiny to aid humanity. You burst forth, and immediately discover a problem:
Everyone is dead.
God in a Corpse is TGS Games’ submission for PocketQuest 2023, a game jam run by OneBookShelf that I just found out about and am honestly super bummed that I missed. (I’m sure some of you are feeling similar, and if anyone comes up with a good way to not miss next year’s comment below!) It’s a game about being an AI in a world where everyone is dead, and trying to figure out just what the hell happened. You do this by… well, corpse-hopping.
Bare-Bone Basics
The game itself is very rules-lite, per the requirements for PocketQuest, and the PDF crams a lot of very good design into its 12 pages (plus cover and back). The art is gorgeous and the text is quite readable, though given the ink quantities involved I don’t think I’d want to print this out. There are also character sheets available—you’ll need plenty of them—as well as a “K.A.T.S” sheet for GM planning, both of which are available in a separate download. (Note that this isn’t the same as the C.A.T.S. methodology; this is just how GiaC organizes GMing.)
Ruleswise, GiaC operates off a somewhat macabre d4 system. Generally speaking, rolls use skills and consist of 1-3 d4s rolled together against a target number of 4. The way you get these skills, though, is by spending points to power up the various corpse and corpse-adjacent-object hosts your AI moves through. There’s also a system of equipment bonuses based on what objects your corpse has available, which are determined by the player using a particular resource pool based on the type of corpse inhabited. The system does a very good job of reminding players at every turn that they are animating the dead.
Motive Forces
GiaC also does a very good job of setting up the scenario. Every game explicitly begins with all of the players receiving a signal of some kind. What that signal is in each particular session is left up to the GM’s creativity, but I admire a game taking a bold stance on how it opens. GMs are then encouraged to make the signal link into the larger questions behind what’s going on in the world, hopefully leading to some sort of answer.
Questions and answers abound in GiaC, as it happens: every corpse comes with one. Whenever one of the AIs inhabits a new body—something they’ll be doing very frequently over the course of the game—the player writes down a question to ask about it. This can be basic (“What was this corpse doing when it died?”) or more existential (“In life, who did this corpse love?”) These questions form some of the objectives for exploring the area beyond just determining the greater cause of death.
A large part of that exploration comes from changing bodies. Each corpse inhabited gets a character sheet, and will gradually gain skills and gear as it’s used. However, each corpse also degrades over time: your AI won’t be able to use a corpse forever as data connections weaken and corpses literally start to fall apart. Fortunately, it’s fairly easy for the data drive containing an AI to be transferred to a new corpse… and corpses abound. There are so many that the game tells you to simply assume that enough are available at any given moment.
Circling Back
If it’s not already clear, I think God in a Corpse is a fascinating little game. It’s pay what you want with a suggested price of free, but I’d definitely recommend tossing the developers a few bucks if you can. High-concept games can take a little doing to pull off, but TGS Games has done it extremely effectively here.
And now, a small D&D rant: this game encapsulates exactly the things that make me frown on D&D right now. Why? Because this is a game that is very definitely about one particular thing: AIs exploring the world and solving a mystery by possessing corpses. The game mechanics are very explicitly designed to support that, meaning that pretty much everything you do in the game reinforces the story that the game is trying to tell.
D&D, by contrast—as well as many of its d20 derivatives—is a game about absolutely nothing. Wizards of the Coast has spent a lot of time and marketing attention to make D&D the be-all and end-all system that you can use for anything, and the game has suffered wildly for it. People have bought into this, too: Discords, subreddits, and other sites abound with asks about how to use D&D for sci-fi, Westerns, samurai, Edwardian parlor dramas, or whatever other setting or story mashup someone may want to try to shoehorn the 5E rules into. The current playtest document rules don’t help in this regard.
Let me offer an alternative suggestion: find a specialized system that’s designed to do what you’re trying to do. There’s an unbelievable galaxy of games out there—and not just the bigger players like World of Darkness or Cyberpunk Red, either. There are so, so many wonderful indie games out there made by really skilled people, and they’re tailor-made to run that weird little idea you had about the thing with the stuff. Plus, buying indie takes money out of the hands of big corporations (you know Hasbro owns Wizards, right?) and puts it into those of the people whose love and dedication really makes the community great. It’s the RPG equivalent of buying local. I can’t recommend it enough.
Plus, when you do, you get to find out about cool games that let you play as AIs possessing corpses.
The contents of this post are © 2024 H. Tucker Cobey. All rights reserved.
