Torchbearer

I think about abstractions all day. Something about me is wired to do so. I suspect it is tied to my background in some way. The combination of events that led me to right now bring it to the front of my mind at all times.

It probably started in college where I was studying to be a painter. That is a strong word. I was fucking around and thought that Jackson Pollock's powers came from his lifestyle.

Still, that was when I started thinking about abstractions. Not because I liked abstract painting so much, but because it was easier than realism. That is a young man's thinking, because that shit is hard, but it set the stage, I think, for how my career unfolded.

In the late 90's there weren't a lot of options out of college for a kid with few ambitions, some middling talent in art and design, and an absolute dislike of computers. Necessity is the mother of something, so of course I went into print design followed by web design. Two fields that require an understanding of abstraction to be successful.

A lot of people don't realize this, but most of the world of technology is built upon abstractions of the layer beneath it. It is a grand cake that steadily gets more layers added to it. I once saw a rocket scientist use it to explain why we don't go to the moon anymore. We have abstracted our way from the underlying machinery making it hard to write safe software.

I think about that and get a chill every time I hear someone is using some sort of Javascript abstraction library to run some piece of machinery... like your car.

So what the hell does this have to do with the Torchbearer RPG?

When Torchbearer first came out, the thing people grabbed hold of was the nostalgia factor. On the surface, the game looks like a send off to the Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons editions of the early 80's. It is unabashedly centered on dungeon crawling, getting loot, and carving your name into the face of the world.

Terms like deadly, brutal, and challenging all rolled off people's lips. People talked glowingly about how it handles a character's inventory and how it leveraged elements from the previous BWHQ games, Mouse Guard and The Burning Wheel.

It also turned off some people. On the surface it appears to sit somewhere in between the story folks and the old skül folks, satisfying neither group fully. It doesn't satisfy their sense of self. The identity they have crafted for themselves through their hobby.

This isn't about casting shade on that. It is a weird, but consistent thing in our society. People build their sense of personal value in part or whole based on the things they do. It is often the first question people ask new folks they meet, which is almost always answered with some articulation describing their profession.

That said, I think that works against people's ability to see the game for what it really is. It is neither a story game, an OSR game, or even a game set in the middle. It is, in fact, an abstraction engine that lets you define the depth you want to explore the fundamental conflict of our time...

The individual vs the group.

This is going to take a minute, so you may want to grab something to drink. This game didn't start as my personal darling, but it became it over time. It did so for a LOT of reasons. Reasons I am going to unpack here, so buckle up...

The Bootstraps Myth

If you live in the English speaking world, you probably have heard some version of the bootstraps myth. We mock it with rejoinders about marching uphill both ways in the snow. We embrace it in our celebration of the wealthy robber barons. We memorialize it in our national myths about the founding fathers, civil war generals, and World War II heroes.

Oddly enough, we often ignore it when it comes to team sports. While we lionize the greats of the games, we also celebrate the best teams. The best way I have ever seen this explained is in this scene from The Untouchables.

Am I saying Torchbearer is like baseball? Yes. Yes I am.

Like baseball it perpetrates and contradicts the American mythology. The difference is, it was done with the intention of illuminating the mess that is a libertarian society. By extension, it is also addressing the underpinnings of the father of all roleplaying games, Dungeons & Dragons.

The game shines a very bright light on the myth of the self-made man with several different interconnected systems. Like a well made watch, these gears abstract away their individual purpose in service of the whole, but I am still going to try and examine some of the most obvious gears.

Who Am I?

As with most roleplaying games, Torchbearer begins with character creation. Right out the gate it establishes the tension of the world vs the characters. "Born to Lose" is the title of the opening chapter in the Dungeoneer's Handbook. It is a bold statement that sets the players and, by extension the characters, on familiar ground.

In the 70's, D&D established the hallmark model for RPGs. Characters that begin with little agency and less capability start at the bottom and must kill and steal their way to a better life. If you have played a computer game or a table top game, you have seen this model play out countless times.

The lone wolf facing the hordes with a stick and a prayer for a lucky roll of the dice on their lips.

And yet, Torchbearer immediately subverts this by making character creation a communal action. You do it together, and some of the choices you make must be different than your peers. You aren't a lone wolf, but a member of a community of interconnected people.

Nested in this process is also the creation of your other community. You establish your collective localized world. The community that sits on the outside of your chosen family. Not only that, but they have a material impact on what your character can do and who they are.

Instead of succumbing to the self-made myth, you ultimately slap that veneer upon a collective. A chosen family sits at the heart of what you just made, establishing an us versus the world structure. A world that is described as unforgiving and without options for those not born to the right circumstances...

Sound at all familiar?

How Do We Do Anything?

One of the common complaints I have seen about this game is the conflict resolution system. It doesn't at all follow the "turn order" that predominates so many games. There is no way to tweak Astarion's gear to ensure he goes first in every conflict.

Instead it draws heavily from the roots of war gaming by tapping into the simultaneous action model. Each side selects their abstracted actions with face down cards, then reveals them at once to resolve. It combines the very thing De Niro calls out about baseball in the clip above; individual achievement and team action.

There is a tension that is create with this model of play. It creates points of deliberation as stratagems are discussed and responsibilities for actions are chosen. Decisions are a result of collective action funneled through a captain who they chose at the start of the conflict.

This beautiful give and take isn't optional in play. Going solo is a recipe for disaster. The party rises and falls as one. If there is an injury to be had as a consequence of failure, everyone gets that injury. If there is a prize to be won, it goes to the collective.

Who has Power?

The conflict is also where the power dynamics of the world come into play most strongly. In D&D this has often manifested with tools like Hit Dice or Challenge Ratings. It becomes a tool to let the Game Master know what monsters to use depending upon the level of the characters, and it is intrinsically bound to physical conflicts.

Torchbearer chooses to explore this power dynamic more directly while still leveraging abstraction as a tool. For physical conflicts, Might is the point of reference. For social conflicts, Precedence comes into play. There is interesting nuance between them, but both leverage a simple scale and relative positioning on those scales to dictate possibilities.

Unlike games like D&D, where the power dynamic functions more as a gate keeper to engagement, Torchbearer's abstraction engine doesn't encourage this gate keeping. Instead it changes the options available to the players when faced with something bigger or more important to society than themselves. You may not be able to kill the dragon, but you can trick it.

Ultimately, the game shows a different option. One, that despite its abstractions, is much more grounded in reality rather than myth. It moves play away from the zero sum game and towards one of options that open up new doors.

What is Valuable?

On the surface of the game, the adventurers are in search of the same thing in Torchbearer as they are in D&D style games... Wealth to improve their position. It is a very libertarian idea that even ties personal improvement to wealth in older versions of the father of games. So of course, this too falls under the gaze of the abstraction engine.

Money is important in the game. Unlike some story driven games that gloss over the role money plays in human existence, Torchbearer makes it an important choice with consequences. How much you can carry is fixed, and even falling upon vast wealth doesn't mean you can take advantage of the moment. In fact, your vast wealth can even upend the economy of the society you are a part of.

Inflation is a bitch, even in the imaginary landscape.

However, money doesn't make you better in the game. Instead the currency around self improvement is directly tied to your chosen community. This manifests with how characters gain levels and how they gain and improve skills.

Collectively called Artha in Burning Wheel, the coin of play in Torchbearer is Fate and Persona points. These currencies are only gained through rewards for play. These rewards are granted to you by the other players as well as your own actions. Actions that are best served as being aligned to your chosen community.

The thing that makes the circle complete is that your ability to level is tied directly to how you spend these points. If you spend enough, you gain a level. To earn enough, you need to be an active member of your community. And on and on so the wheel turns.

At the same time, gaining and improving skills is based on the usage of those skills. At each increment, you must pass and fail a number of tests dictated by the skill's value. The opportunities arise because of your collective actions as a group, but even getting the opportunity is only the first step towards success.

You can certainly try to rely upon luck, but a better option is to get Help from the other players. This mechanical bump to the number of dice you roll increases your odds for success, but it also ties you together. While the success may be your own in service of your collective or individual goals, the failure is shared by everyone.

Help as a mechanic means the helper has skin in the game, meaning they also suffer the consequences of your failure. It changes the nature of how you look at individual rolls at the table. Even self improvement is best served by working with others.

What is an Abstraction Engine?

Now I have mentioned that Torchbearer is an abstraction engine a few times. I have alluded to what that means, but it is important to be clear why that is meaningful to illustrating the power of the game. After all, all roleplaying games are some form of abstraction engine to facilitate a group activity.

What I mean by this is that the game abstracts things on two levels. As I have illustrated above, it abstracts away a fundamental discourse in American society. The myth of the self made man vs the reality of a society in action. It is a powerful tool for exploring the implications of this cultural conflict.

On another level, it also abstracts away from the core patterns of roleplaying games in a way that opens up endless possibilities. I have more than once seen discourse on the game that it is "only good for dungeon crawling" or that it is "a brutal game like Darkest Dungeons." Both statements fundamentally miss the mark of what Thor and Luke, the designers have created.

This level of abstraction makes it possible to bring the conflict of the first into any space of fiction you wish to explore. The binary split between what I call active and passive time, or in Torchbearer terms, Adventure and Town Phases, is a mode of play, not a fictional constraint. I am continually surprised that this is missed and other games show up in the discourse instead.

The Magic of the Game

There is an undercurrent of conservatism in roleplaying games that has been there from the beginning. It manifests in lots of ways. Some are overt reflections of politics like I have illustrated here, and others are tied to a desire to preserve the past. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with that, but it is certainly not for me and those I play games with.

Torchbearer is magical to me because it intentionally moves away from a conservative structure. It subverts the fundamentals of the lineage of Dungeons and Dragons mechanically in service of illustrating its flaws. I suspect this factor plays a role in some folks dislike of the game because it refuses to venerate the past and instead points to new possibilities.

I'm personally not interested in nostalgia and holding onto the past, so it speaks to me on a very specific level. You certainly need to embrace the ability of the abstraction engine to take you to new modes of play and thought to get the most out of it. That can be a challenge that many aren't interested in pursuing in their leisure time.

More power to them, but I love that shit.

Volume 2, Issue 1

A new year, so a new volume of Yggdrasil MGZ and it is huge! Sixty four pages of adventure for both the Torchbearer RPG and Basic/Expert Dungeons and Dragons!

And this issue is only the first part in a trilogy of adventures deep in the Sanctum of the Serpent Vaults, the last echo of a civilization cursed to desolation. In this issue you will get a vast adventure that includes:

• A sprawling urban crawl that shifts and changes every time you enter the city.
• The Dream Way, a dungeon that embraces the randomness of the Shifting City.
• A novel faction system that is centered on the adventurer's actions.
• A host of monsters for your party to face.
• Guidelines on how to use adventures for both D&D and Torchbearer.

Buy Now!