Brinkwood (Part 2)

This is the second part and conclusion to our Brinkwood critical analysis. You can find part one here.

Ludo

FitD don’t really have traditional engines. BitD uses a meta-engine: oh, this is a game of binary clocks? Oinks! Turns out all the clocks going on in the city paint an ongoing spectrum of events and directions things are going and tell much more than the binary status of any individual parts. Most FitD have a similar approach or another meta-engine that envelopes its mission routine.

Brinkwood is no different, using various meta-engines to keep feeding player characters through the mission routine loop. Two stand out:

You have access, beyond your personal loadouts and projects, to a shared revolutionary set of Resources. Three rare substances — ashwood, black powder and blood sterling — are extremely useful for your forays, giving you powerful bonuses. Due to their scarcity, the rebellion is always hungry for more of those. The pressure to use these resources and to acquire most of them is a subtle but powerful meta-engine.

Brinkwood stays focused in its goal: overthrow the vampiric regime. This keeps pushing you to meet and improve relationships with other factions and/or increase your rank and aspects. Beyond the large goal, there are countless flags you activate hitting certain goals, establishing what you need to do guest and starting a cascade of other events, which set more opportunities to improve aspects.

Brad

The revolution is a snowball, or at least Brinkwood’s is. The meta-currencies and engines make it so, you begin as starving revolutionaries out in the woods, having to carefully dole out scraped-together resources, and as you ally with factions, as you crush the blood sterling, and as the Vampires get put on the back foot, you find yourself gaining more and more until the revolution is inevitable. You will be bleed and die and retire and go mad, but so long as you are lucky and gain the right friends, you will slowly drive the vampires away.

Ludo

Let’s be frank here: FitD is extremely fidgety to learn, too many things need to come together. You are not going to get the fundamentals in one session with maybe one hour of reading beforehand. Let’s keep expectations realistic here; you will need at least a few runs before you get a picture of how things come together, and exactly how many tools you have at your disposal — and what the actual price is.

One approach may be to embrace the chaos — fitting to replicate the desperate and chaotic early steps of the revolution. Other is to try to get a grasp of the fundamentals of BitD: the most comprehensive and insightful analysis of involved systems is still Kyle Thompson’s video series.

The module Pools of Red is an excellent introduction, which can be finished in a single session and establishes many elements about the player characters and the setting. You will get a nice overview of what makes Brinkwood unique and you will know enough to figure out if you want to commit to this game. However, the entire module can — and benefits from — be played without a single roll.

My suggestion, if you are new to FitD, is to start with low-stakes clocks and optional objectives during Pools of Red, letting players try and fail at the mechanics and see which levers they can pull. The minimum you will need to consult for this first session will be:

Unfortunately, this is as far as you can simplify while sticking to a single session demonstration with minimal reading required. This is a game you are going to have to drink deeply from.

Brad

My players are definitely rules minded, and as always that could affect my experience. I say this every time, but PRINT OUT THE MOVES HANDOUT you will be grateful. I ran my own custom scenario which was honestly pretty easy, and with it, I agree so much with Ludo above, definitely make sure you at least understand the rough flow of the game. I don’t think this game requires too much cognitive load on the GM though to be honest, and a lot of it can be more easily handled via handouts, understanding how Clocks work and the concepts of Effect.

Ludo

I will avoid losing myself in most obstacles that Brinkwood inherits from FitD, and focus where it diverges, especially as those may cause issues with BitD assumptions.

Resistance rolls is one of those mechanics that taken out of its original game context (a thing FitD does to BitD by necessity of SRD) I can only describe as “Feels Bad” design. I’m afraid the “touching the dice is a losing state already” people are correct on this one: rolling dice to slightly reduce problems you got into by rolling dice is a “lose-more” approach. Resistance leads to trauma spiral and burns through your resources, making it something you are punished for using and you should avoid at any costs; it is always the worst use of your resources. Resistance rolls sit on this weird place, as a soon you try to Resist a consequence and see your character become useless for that mission, it becomes this faux-safety tool that costs you a massive share of narrative resources in exchange for a small downgrade of consequences. Fitting for BitD, but alas, is your FitD something it would be fitting for?

Brinkwood takes a different approach to resistance. First of all, When you resist, you resist; only very rarely you resist to reduce. It also has hard caps on how much of your resources it can it and you can use different resources; it is also possible to improve your Resistance pools. Combine this with the Masks mechanics, and Resistance becomes an appealing mechanic. I had to prod players that have had internalized Resistance avoidance to try it, and they were delighted at the gambling risk/narrative synergy it allowed with Masks.

Players are not limited to consequences: they may also get Bans. These allow success without rolling at the exchange of specific conditions tied to your Mask. Players may think they have less resources than they actually have if they do not realize all these tools at their disposal.

When the topic of “playing the game wrong” and BitD/FitD come up together, the cycle of mission and the awkward sliding in of downtime crosses the mind of many1. How does Brinkwood handle its pacing routine? Brinkwood dances around the awkwardness by jumping back and forth between downtime and forays; because of the way BitD is presented and organized, everything seems to be laid out to feed back into missions: if you are not on a job, you are better be getting resources for the mission2.

Just by changing the framing, Brinkwood maps the parts you play through the most rigid procedures to vampiric Reaction to rebellion: this lays down that the “default” status of brigands is hidden revolutionary actions — the early steps of forays and downtime.

Of course, this lay must contend with assumptions that come from Blades, but the same can be said of all FitD games — comes with the territory. Still, it seems significantly less awkward. I found that even players that struggled with mission routines had a great time internalizing the following beat:

Prepare a foray, seek to achieve your goal, meet resistance and engage with it, disengage as soon as possible, slip into downtime.

As we played more, the lines between downtime and pre-engagement forays blur, to the point some players came to consider forays “start” as a distinct phase only when things go poorly and there are bad guys to deal with. It came to be just as organic as the best mission routine loop games3.

The Almanac and Codex are rich, fantastic resources full of great writing and set-pieces. However, one can easily get lost in it and overlook the flags set by the pacing defined by the Brinkwood manual.

Brad

My players and I had a great time with Brinkwood, and one of my players in fact liked it enough to begin to plan a campaign for it, and I think that is important, I think it’s also important to mention that I adore Brinkwood’s setting. I am left, however, thinking a single thought, why FITD?

I don’t hate BITD, but I do find its focus on heists that it lends to all progeny to be a weakness for Brinkwood. Revolutionary action could be broader, weirder, and wilder if unshackled from the heist-focused play of FITD. I found myself thinking that Brinkwood would be killer as a Worlds of Legacy, or even greater as a Resistance System game. Brinkwood is great, but I was left thinking that with its deep world-building and fantastic villains if it couldn’t have been even greater.

Ludo

It is not easy being a FitD designer. You spend months building your house with it in three easy steps, and then spend years trying to get BitD from reproducing itself inside the walls of your house. The path from beginning to release of every FitD game is a true calvary, and every game that makes this far deserves to be cherished and treasured.

Brinkwood has developed a lot of interesting tech for FitD, to the point I wonder if a Brinkwood SRD would be a more useful starting point for the general public than the current FitD SRD. Don’t take my word; try it for yourself.

Even within the Brinkwood framework, you can do a lot to customize and change the character of the game — as seen by the richness of the Almanac and Codex content. Those that want to make focused game, with a single purpose reinforced by a simple gameplay loop but that still have a lot of replayability could benefit from studying Brinkwood.

More games than FitD can be played in Brinkwood: Armies of Blood and Silver brings Brinkwood to the realm of wargaming with a Skirmish scenario. Which other games could be made to support Brinkwood, to represent other aspects of revolutionary play?

Finally, everyone could benefit from examining closely how this sausage got made, how things have come together, and how everyone was able to contribute in equal terms. Many projects would be much better if they were organized like Brinkwood was, and this poisonous industry would be made less exploitative and abusive.

Brad

Hey, as I mentioned above, you as a designer should dream of designing a setting and game as excellent as Brinkwood. It does fascinating things with FITD design, and honestly is it wrong to say, steal the setting, port it to your favorite game, and don’t be afraid to get weird.