Skullduggery - Initial impressions

Many years from now, longer than I can remember, a game called Dying Earth was released. A nice little game that I played once or twice. One of it's nicer features was a simple and elegant system for solving conflicts, both social and physical. I have looked at it a couple of times over the years, wanting to do something more with it, perhaps using it in other settings.

Turns out, I don't have to anymore!

This tuesday, Pelgrane Press released the game (or at least, opened it up for pre-orders) Skullduggery, which is a generic game for backstabbing, intrigue and dark conspiracies. It is to large extents based on the old Dying Earth game. Since I preordered it, I got to download the pre-release PDF that same day.



The game system is some kind of resource-management combined with a simple die rolling mechanic. Basically, you have a pool of points in each ability, and if you fail a test, you are allowed to spend a point from that pool to roll again. When you have run out of points, you still can use that ability, but it's a bit harder than before. Others can also spend points to force you to reroll if they don't like that you succeed.

It becomes a little more interesting when we start to talk about conflicts. For both physical and social conflicts, each character has a certain style. Each character also has a certain defensive style for both areas. Each style have two opposing styles on "the other side". One of the physical attack-styles has two opposing styles in the physical-defence category. One of these opposing styles is a style that trumps the style, the other one is trumped by. For example, the Speed attack style is trumped by Misdirection defence, but trumps the Dodge defence. This gives the attacking player certain advantages or disadvantages in the conflict.

Overall, the rules are fairly simple, although not 100% intuitive at times. The book required for me at least, a couple of read-throughs before getting the hang of it.

Character generation is very simple, at least from the players point of view. Each character is built from cards of a number of different categories. There is the identity-card, the Persuade-card, the Attack-card etc. Before the game, all the players randomly draw 1 card from each category. The result is the character they are playing for that session. So, after that initial draw, a little trading of cards and some filling in the blanks, the game is ready to go.

This get's the game going quite fast, and since the game is supposed to last just one evening, the lack of detail or investment isn't that limiting. It also ensures that the characters fit in with the setting that the GM has in mind.

This is, however, also one of my problems with the game. The above idea works very well with the pregenerated settings included in the game (political intrigue, high-school drama, pirate crew infighting and sci-fi trading competition). However, when the GM wants to build his own setting, it seems to me that it does require some heavy preparation to work. The game is also fairly sparse with guidelines and tips for the newbie GM, or the GM that feels a bit unsecure when it comes to building these kinds of settings.

There is a short chapter on customizing Skullduggery, but I would have wanted it to be a bit longer. I would also appreciate alternate rules for player generated content, a more traditional build of characters etc. The game is also lacking in tips on how to actually run the game, or how to handle intrigue-type of games overall. For gamers used to it, that may not be a problem, but I'm certain that there are many gamers who want to give this kind of gaming a try, but are a bit unused to it and can therefore feel a bit lost when it comes to playing it.

My own tips for running these kinds of games would be to read Play Unsafe, and use some kind of relational mapping-tools like Excel or CMap Tools. Some advice on how to do that would be appreciated.