Hi all! Today I have an interview with Michael Dunn-O’Connor about Rebel Crown, which is currently on Kickstarter! Check out the responses to my questions below!
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Tell me a little about Rebel Crown. What excites you about it?
Rebel Crown is character-driven rpg with a player-facing campaign. Each character playbook focuses on a unique relationship with the claimant and gives that character a driving motivation to remain on this quest. The claimant is its own unique playbook, which thrives on sharing the spotlight with their allies and acting on their council. The campaign is driven by player choices: which factions to ally with and which holdings to pursue. As you group, you play to find out whether the claimant can take their throne and what sacrifices must be made along the way.
What are the various playbooks like, in a few examples of their abilities and how they interact with the game, and what power do they have in the narrative?
A lot of our design process started in the playbooks. I tend to get the most out of campaigns where the characters are deeply connected to one another and have a shared commitment to a goal or objective. Since the premise of a succession crisis lends itself to focusing on the relationship between a Claimant and their allies, that created an opening for us to create purposefully asymmetrical playbooks. Most of that asymmetry has to do with the Claimant playbook. There must be a Claimant at the table, and the other playbooks are sworn allies of the Claimant. This playbook is at the heart of the campaign, but we didn’t want to make a game that follows the story of one player character at the exclusion of the others. So we made the Claimant’s player explicitly responsible for spotlight sharing and reinforced this responsibility through their XP triggers:
The result has been that the Claimant is constantly pulling other characters into the scene to ask their advice, to request a sacrifice, to reward their loyalty. The other playbooks have XP triggers that reward them for taking initiative, to not wait until the Claimant asks for their advice or intercession. Here’s the Devoted:
The flow from these rewards has been really satisfying, and character motivation and relationship is constantly at the center of play.
The playbook special abilities reinforce character dynamics without being too restrictive (especially since special abilities may be chosen from other playbooks).
A sample of the Devoted’s special abilities suggests different approaches to protecting the Claimant (guarding them in battle, defending their name in a public forum, or engaging in duels on their behalf). The Devoted is defined by their love of the claimant, but there are many ways a player might take action on that motivation.
To dig in deeper, in the case of the claimant in play, how does the game guide the player toward a just and moral leadership that would make their claim to power morally superior to the claims of the usurpers?
The moral righteousness of the Claimant’s quest is in many ways the core fruitful void of this system: it’s a driving question that the game can’t answer for you without closing off some of the explorations that make RPGs really compelling. However, we try to direct play toward this question in thoughtful ways.
One way is the way that each sortie generates Unrest for the retinue, and more destructive sorties produce significantly more Unrest. The sortie objectives push the retinue to gain new objectives and ingratiate themselves with powerful factions, but the consequences of this expansion often impact the common people of your holdings the most. Here are the Entanglements you might roll at the highest level of Unrest:
Unrest provides a slow creep of consequences for the people your Claimant has sworn to protect and provide for. How they address these consequences is an unavoidable topic of play.
The playbook that most explicitly focuses on the question of just rule and moral leadership is the Idealist, who has allied with the Claimant because they believe it is a path to the greater good. The Idealist’s XP triggers put pressure on the Claimant to do the right thing even when it’s not expedient and encourage the Idealist to keep that question of moral leadership right at the forefront of play.
I note that you talk about expressing your heritage, background, or trauma. How are players supported within the game in regards to traumatic or triggering content, and also, speaking of heritages, are you involving sensitivity readers in the project?
Trauma is a term from Blades in the Dark that appears in many Forged in the Dark games. We replaced that mechanic with ‘Scars’. When a character’s Stress exceeds their limitations, they must choose whether to take one final action before collapsing or to pull themselves together and carry on. We both wanted to avoid the term Trauma given its specific meaning in the context of psychology, and we wanted to rework the mechanic to provide more player choice in the moment.
We’re working on integrating safety tools into the rules text. I’ve been influenced in this regard by playing with some folks through The Gauntlet’s community. We want to provide clear prompts on CATS (content, aim, subject matter, tone) that people could leverage when introducing the game to a group. We’ll also encourage the use of Lines & Veils and the X cards. When we run are games at Games on Demand, these are the tools we’ve used and we want to provide the same resources to folks running it on their own.
The design team is just Eric and me; we haven’t brought in outside readers, though our playtesters have given a lot of valuable feedback on how we can directly address the more problematic aspects of any fiction set in a feudal setting.
What does an average session look like, including the sorties you mention (a term some of my readers may be unfamiliar with)?
A typical session runs through three phases:Recon: In which the retinue (the Claimant and the allies) gather information about other factions and identify an objective.
The Sortie: The main ‘mission’ of the session. This could be an attack on an enemy faction, a diplomatic meeting, or an attempt to drive off wraiths from a vulnerable holding. The goal of a Sortie is typically to gain a new Holding (some property or asset) for the Claimant’s Domain, to strengthen relations with another faction, or to weaken an enemy faction in some way. The retinue may also seek to vassalize another faction, bringing them under the Claimant’s rule without seizing their Holdings.
Downtime: In which the retinue recovers from injury and stress, engages in long terms projects, and trains their skills. Downtime abstracts weeks of time as the player character pursue their own interests, discuss their long-term priorities, and seek solace together from the difficult campaign.
The Domain sheet includes a calendar for players to track their Sorties, Seasons change every two Downtimes, providing a richer sense of time scale and place.
At the end of the session, players asses how they earned XP based on their playbook, and whether their character’s Beliefs and Drive changed based on the events of the session.
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Thanks so much to Michael for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Rebel Crown on Kickstarter today!