Brinkwood (Part 1)

Brinkwood is a game published by Far Horizons Co-Op. Financing of the game involved crowdfunding. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by Far Horizons Co-Op.

Lucrécia

Brinkwood evokes its Forged in the Dark lineage but still gives its own rich tone and personality. Somber stylish patterns of blood splatter and grasping branches. Vivid uses of reds and greyscale. It can be a bit oppressive, with little use of negative space for effect sometimes results in crowded pages; overall, stands on the better side of the average difficulty of role-playing books to consult.

Beyond its manual, Brinkwood also comes with all nice handouts and toys. They are notmerch, but different toolsets. I found the references in particular very useful, especially when I needed to stretch and flex my Blades in the Dark muscles after a long break.

There is a tendency to cram everything in one book, but a lot of the content for Brinkwood is in two separate text, Almanac and Codex. While this may be something one finds overwhelming, I had an easier time when I accepted Almanac and Codex to be things to keep away from the table and consult in between sessions; this made the manual more useful a resource during actual play.

Brinkwood is also a product that, unlike most of this artform, was produced within a publisher co-op rather a top-down vision from an artist or a branding exercise. I will leave for you to appreciate the effects of equitable decision making and profit-sharing upon the composition of the art elements1.

Brad

It is a fantastic-looking document, it by simple virtues of its clean design and evocative layouts transports you into its dark woods of existence. This book is well laid out and organized and I was able to easily absorb the thing itself in one reading. The art is definitely worth discussing, again in stark black and white, it helps ooze the environment.

All three books are great, divided up helps keeps things digestible to me. The manual is the only necessary play document, but the Almanac and Codex do add a lot to the game, and one of my players sunk his teeth deep into them. I did the same, and honestly loved that I only desperately needed to have one book at hand.

Ludo

Brinkwood is a Forged in the Dark game (FitD), built upon the open framework of Blades in the Dark (BitD). It requires familiarity with this PbtA lineage and expectations, and brings up such type of mechanics as you may expect. However, it has some changes that one may be cautious about and Blades veterans may want to carefully read those changes as they greatly influence the tone and pacing of the game. The game requires revolutionary violence, property destruction and messy disposal of society’s parasites. The game premise, centering around mystically empowered revolutionaries, at the cost of losing their identities — something that may not be for everyone.

As usual in this section, as I acknowledge what the game requires of me, I must disclose bias and hurdles I could not get over that may affect the critical analysis. I like BitD, but I absolutely abhor FitD as a designer and player; the reason is the same: you cannot get BitD from FitD without years of design and such work you may as well remake a system from scratch. BitD is tailor made for BitD and every choice reinforces BitD; everything about it feeds what BitD is, and if you like it, it is the best. However, most of the games that use FitD expect this to have been neutralized and their designers don’t want to design BitD again; as such, the parts of BitD that creep in keep remaking BitD inside other games. This can be an advantage; I greatly enjoy FitD that are close enough to the beats of BitD that they benefit from running this mRNA through its ribosomes — Band of Blades and Hack the Planet come to mind, but if you don’t, your game suffers to it whenever you try to swerve away from BitD, like Scum & Villainy and Mutants in the Dark or designers have to reinvent the wheel to extensive degrees, diminishing the benefits from working from an established engine — for example, Beam Saber and Crescent Moon. This constant “surprise BitD” sucker punch came so much to me as a designer and player came so often that I am afraid that will always colour my approach of these engine games.

Brad

Brinkwood has major themes of revolution, social change, and the sacrifice required for both to be brought about. It is not going to be a game for everyone, because, in all honesty, its major inspirations aren’t for everyone.

Now, my dear readers it’s time for me to reveal something to you. I have never played a FITD game, I have never played or run even BITD. I know, cut a corner off my indie darling card, condemn me to the outskirts of the world. I have read many of them, I even went so far as to briefly discuss running Band of Blades with the group. Brinkwood is my first crack at this family of systems, and my groups first crack into it. I went into this experience a little nervous: BITD and FITD are very tied into the theme of high-danger heists and downtimes, of developing a group you fight with.

Lucrécia

Brinkwood is set in a world where evil has won, where parasitic vampire overlords seize labor and blood2. You play brigand rebels that have escaped to the woods, where they become Merry Men and struck a deal with the fae for the means to bring the fight to vampires. They get the power of ancient masks, that take their identity apart in exchange for power.

Vampires and fae steal any show they are part of. Brinkwood tries to keep the focus narrow. This is a game about the brigands and their revolutions, and these are just support characters. Perhaps a bit nãive about the appeal of vampires and fairies — hard to not make everything about these alluring beings.

Vampires as aristocratic parasites that are vanquished by humble utensils of labor is hardly a new way to portray them, but Brinkwood’s language about them is pretty Modern with a capital M. They are not tribute seekers of manorial or feudal relations; they collect rent. They are not victims of cursed blood, different creatures bound by a challenging existence that demands terrible things from them; you can stop being a vampire at any time.

Brad

Not only do I think that Lucrécia perfectly summarizes things, I think it’s important to mention that they include a couple of flavors of different antagonistic vampire overlords for your players to fight, want to face rent-seeking as religious trauma? Fallen Nobility? Rampant Industrialization? all these and more wait for you and your players.

Brinkwood really tries to be about the brigands, tying it down to the revolution.

Of course, this must ask a question that every role-playing game that takes this path must answer. How do you play the revolution?

The biggest obstacle is the protagonist problem. In this artform and in so many others produced in the current socio-economic organization, art is personalized and atomized; it is the story of a main character and/or a small cast. Used to the “player character party” concept, it is very hard to see the characters we incarnate as integrated part of the world and not somehow apart, protagonized.

This, well, most of the time, is how hegemonic media has prepped us to think how stories are like. This is a big problem when it comes to revolution. Revolutions have no protagonists. Revolutions require tides of people becoming tides of history. Revolutions happen in minutes and happen in centuries, in time scales that do not feature neatly into bottled two arcs and a half structures. Even a world-shaking, platonic revolution featuring great characters such as the February and October Revolutions had no protagonists: the seeds from it go back to work done before the Emancipation act that freed the serfs but made the antagonism about land central, resistance to a strong peasant capitalist class, fighting the tsarist secret police, engagements in the Great War and civilian and sailor resistance to it, organizing labor and soldier councils and the general education of people, work that could be done elsewhere and lessons that could be taken3. We cannot attribute this to a central casting of protagonists, no matter their irreplaceable roles.

So that where puts our player characters, the protagonists of the revolution?

Having a protagonist-focused view of revolution, well, leads to revolutionary action of limited usefulness if not outright harm. This need to be seen, to make it your story, to take heroic action, to be reckless, to engage in the terms of the oppressor, to act as an individual. It favors macho, “cinematic” action, revolution-as-self-expression rather than useful action: violence, acts of destruction, big speeches, vain last-stands, absurd self-sacrifices, etc. Everything to be the man of the hour.

The first acknowledgment Brinkwood makes of the protagonist problem are the Masks. To even start fighting, the player character must understand they cannot fight as themselves. They need to surrender themselves to greater ideas, represented by the Masks. Through Mask Bargains, the Masks will keep making demands for their contribution to the revolution and they may require committed Bans to their role in the revolution in exchange for success. Masks have material needs, which you fulfill by sucking the blood back from vampires. They are a constant whisper reminding this is not about them, and to tap into the sheer potential of organized labor is always a social negotiation — as abstract or allegorical as it may be. Other factions besides the brigands make part of the revolution, and at key moments will shape what kind of world the rebels are fighting for.

But maybe this is too abstract, right? Maybe you just see the Mask as a protagonist and act as such. Well, Brinkwood also tries other ways to avoid the protagonist-centered revolution. Blades just chews through characters; the hardest thing of many FitD adaptations is when they don’t want their characters to burn like candles and end up piles of trauma or retire into middle class landlording.; Brinkwood embraces this to position an individual’s character role in the revolution. You feed your Masks that may be wielded by someone else; you build from tragedy into triumphant dual power; you retire from active duty to support from the sidelines; you may come back for one mission. Revolution is hard, and you are no super hero; Brinkwood uses the engine it inherited to make sure you remember that.

And you know, you still get to do the shit that looks cool, like blowing up a dam of blood sterling or something.

Brad

Once again, my perfect collaborator hits all the right notes, and I think the game also heavily discusses the sacrifice of being in the revolution. You are fueling your Mask, you are throwing yourself into danger against immortal failsons and other horrors of the dark, and why? You will probably never live to see the end of the revolution. It’s likely that you will, in fact, die to facilitate a new world. Brinkwood makes a central point that, if you want to make the change, you have to fight for it, and that you should shed that light on the future.