What is Ruins & Revolutions?
The short version is: Ruins & Revolutions is an ultra-light tabletop roleplaying game that aims to provide game masters with a set of tools for maximum versatility with an absolute minimum on mechanical complexity. It’s intended to be a drop-in replacement for most roleplaying game systems that you can use as early as your very next game session, to play in your favorite setting with your favorite characters, with a simple, open source ruleset that will put the emphasis squarely where you feel it should go. In that sense, it’s a toolbox for filling in your best game ever. In this toolbox, there’s really just two tools: random tables and scrolls. But there’s a lot you can accomplish with just these two tools — more, I’d argue, than you can accomplish with hundreds of pages of rules that might run you $179.97 or more.
The long answer is, well, rather longer.
What is a roleplaying game?
It’s been twelve years since Mike Sugarbaker gave the world his take on what defines a roleplaying game, and I am sorry to say that, in all that time, his idea has yet to achieve the prominence it deserves. With the clarification of “tabletop roleplaying games” we have, arguably, taken another step away (since the digital heirs of tabletop play have so far surpassed their analog progenitors in popularity that they now bear the unqualified name, and it’s the original version that must now receive modification).
Games are, of course, interactive systems. The rules constrain what moves you can make, and the state of the game makes some moves good and others bad, to varying degrees. You make a move, which changes the game state. The game state sets the context for what move you make, and the move that you make alters the game state, until we reach some final state. Every game has its own, unique gameplay loop, but this is the defining shape: what I’ll be calling “the black loop,” in reference to Sugarbaker’s illustration.
You can make up a story in these games — anything can become a “roleplaying game” in this sense if you want it to be — but the critical thing is that these stories don’t affect the game. We can tell a story about the events leading up to this battle we’re playing out on the chess board and give every pawn a name, but none of that is going to affect how the game is played.
According to Sugarbaker, this all changed in 1974 — though perhaps we can push that back to 1967 — when the first roleplaying games provided a means by which the stories you make up could affect game state. This added a new, narrative loop to the gameplay loop: what I’ll be calling “the green loop,” once again in reference to Sugarbaker’s illustration.
Of course, once you’ve added a new loop like this, there’s nothing requiring it to remain secondary to the original. It can become the primary game loop, with the original gameplay loop of moves and game states becoming less prominent.
Twelve years ago, when Sugarbaker wrote this article, there was some debate in some circles of the internet (circles where I spent some time lurking and even occasionally posting) over the terms “story game“ and “roleplaying game.” Sugarbaker defines “story game” more broadly as any game that features this green loop, and is happy to leave “roleplaying game” to be more narrowly defined as “a story game that hews to the traditions of gameplay that started in American skirmish wargaming and were crystallized by Arneson and Gygax.”
Fiction-First Gaming
The first place I saw the term “fiction-first gaming” was in Blades in the Dark. It might well have been in circulation somewhere else before that, or it might be John Harper’s own invention; I really have no idea.
The idea of fiction-first gaming is that the story determines which rules or mechanics are engaged, and when. Blades describes “fiction-first gaming” as:
When it’s your turn, you say what your character does within the ongoing fictional narrative. You don’t pick a mechanic first, you say something about the fiction first. Your choices in a roleplaying game aren’t immediately constrained by the mechanics, they’re constrained by the established fictional situation. In other words, the mechanics are brought in after the fictional action has determined which mechanics we need to use.
Or, to put it in terms of Sugarbaker’s theory, “fiction-first gaming” is when the green circle drives the black one, rather than the other way around.
This leads us to what I consider the big design innovation in Ruins & Revolutions, one that can be a bit subtle and easy to miss, and might require 1,000 words of background before we can really say what it means: in Ruins & Revolutions, we push as much of the game state as possible out of mechanical artifacts (e.g., character sheets or battle maps) and into the fiction, that “shared imagination space” of the world and its characters.
That might still sound aggravatingly abstract, so let’s bring it down to earth with an example.
The Warrior’s Pilgrimage
Miri is a human fighter. She’s setting out to become the greatest human fighter that she can be.
In Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition, this is a matter of leveling up. Most groups use milestone leveling, so this means going on adventures until the dungeon master decides that the party has accomplished enough to gain a level. At that point, Miri takes the next level in fighter, granting her all of the abilities that she unlocks at that level from her class and subclass. Her goal is to reach level 20, so she can unlock all of the abilities she can, finally achieving her dream of becoming the greatest human fighter that she can be.
If she’s playing in a group that uses experience points instead, then her goal is to accumulate 355,000 XP, at which point she’ll reach level 20. However levels are awarded, though, Miri’s quest to become the greatest human fighter that she can be is measured mechanically. She records levels, classes, subclasses, and (maybe) experience points.
In Ruins & Revolutions, Miri will have to determine what “the greatest human fighter she can be” really means to her. Perhaps it means defeating the deadliest foes. She starts by writing a list of deadly foes that she wants to defeat: a red dragon, a storm giant, a kraken. Each time she defeats one, she can cross it off her list. When she learns of some new, deadly foe, she might add it to the list. This isn’t just a list that the player has, though; this is a list that Miri, the character, has.
Perhaps instead (or in addition), Miri defines “the greatest human fighter she can be” as mastering a great variety of weapons. She starts with the longsword. The game master tells her that the basics of the longsword start with the four basics guards: the ox, the plow, the roof, and the fool. To master each one, Miri will have to complete three scrolls. So, for the ox, she needs to complete Learn the ox [4] (which she unseals each time she is trained by a teacher), Practice the ox [4] (which she unseals each time she practices the guard), and Use the ox [4] (which she unseals each time she uses the ox in combat, though she might suffer disadvantage by doing so, since she hasn’t mastered it yet). When she has completed all three, she will have mastered the ox, and when she has mastered all four guards, she will be proficient with the longsword — at which point she can begin the process of becoming a true master of it. And when she’s finished that, she can move on to the next weapon.
While Miri’s player might need to keep a list of the weapons she’s learning and where she currently stands with each one, the game state isn’t an abstraction — it’s the state of Miri’s ongoing education. To become the greatest human fighter she can be, she has to focus on what it means to be a great fighter.
This is about concrete details in your setting, not just advancing through an abstract class but what it actually means to be a great fighter, specifically. It’s about fleshing out the parts of the world that the player characters are invested in and want to explore and making that rich and nuanced and real.
The best part of any roleplaying game is the world and its characters. Ruins & Revolutions is about shifting the focus from complex rules to the thing that makes your game fun and engaging: the world and its characters.
Storytelling or Roleplaying?
In some corners, saying that roleplaying games have anything to do with storytelling is a controversial claim, but I find that this often comes down to what we mean by “story.” To those who decry “storytelling“ in roleplaying games, “story” means a narrative that exists in a storyteller’s mind before it is told. The storyteller knows the story in full before she begins. She’s able to tell the story only because she already knows it. As such, this is antithetical to any idea of a game. A story is, by definition, known beforehand, while a game whose outcome is known beforehand is scarcely worth playing.
As a fan of Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, I hear some very literate assumptions at work in this argument. Writing advice insists that a story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but this is an artifact of the medium of writing. Writing, thanks to its “thing-like” qualities, must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, because books are objects and objects are finite. The earliest written works, like the Iliad, the Odyssey, or Beowulf, are transcriptions of oral tradition. What feel like rambling tangents to modern readers are, in fact, examples of oral storytelling, where every story connected to every other story, all linked together in one conversation stretching back to the very first utterances ever made by chattering apes. The tangents that abruptly end, the side characters and events that are mentioned but never elaborated upon, are the scars where the author had to cut this endless web to fit the story into a single, written work.
The “stories” in “story games” are more akin to oral stories than literate ones, and story games more akin to oral tradition than literature. There is no singular “storyteller,” and if the game devolves into one person telling a story, something has gone seriously wrong. The master of ceremonies in Apocalypse World has only three items on her agenda, and one of them is to “Play to find out what happens.” The story isn’t something that anyone knows ahead of time; it’s the thing that we discover together, by playing. The critics are correct that these stories might not be of great literary quality, but the key here is that they’re not of great literary quality. They are often fine examples of orality, though.
I’ve really never seen this point made more beautifully than it was by Avery Alder in Monsterhearts, where she explains her game’s version of that same agenda item, phrased so evocatively as “Keep the story feral.” She describes the impulse to take control of the story as “domesticating” it, and then she writes:
The game loses its magic when any one player attempts to take control of the story. It becomes small enough to fit inside one person’s head. The other players turn into audience members instead of participants.
A lot of my favorite games are built less around genres than around particular story arcs. You have total freedom to play out the particulars, but the rules of the game compel a particular shape. Every game of Polaris is unique, but every game is a tragedy. Every game of Misspent Youth has moments of hope and victory side-by-side with moments of self-destruction and poor impulse control.
Ruins & Revolutions isn’t that, though. It’s more of a toolbox that makes it easy for you as a game master to create your own experiences like that. It makes it easy to make particular themes and ideas real and tangible, and then play to find out what happens.
Ruins, Revolutions & You
If you have a regular game that you’ve been enjoying, with a world and characters that you want to keep exploring, but you’re feeling like the system you’re using right now is holding you back, or is too heavy and complex, or too slow, or just, I don’t know, is created and owned by a corporation you kind of despise and want nothing more to do with (so random, I know), Ruins & Revolutions is a game that you should consider. You should be able to replace your current ruleset with it for your very next session. Yes, many players are resistant to the idea of learning a new ruleset, but Ruins & Revolutions fits on the front and back of a single sheet of paper. You can teach all of the player-facing rules in under a minute. The harder part is on you as the game master, but even there the hardest part is thinking about your setting in greater detail than you might have before — the sort of thing that will benefit your game no matter what rules you use.
If you want more emphasis on your world and its characters, then Ruins & Revolutions is a game that you should consider. The best part of all the best games I’ve ever played were the worlds and their characters, not the rules. Ruins & Revolutions leans into that, making your world and its characters the rules as much as it can, not with an endless toolbox of optional rules, but with two really solid, simple tools that you can apply to your taste to model any situation.
If you want a game where social interactions, relationships, factions, artistic endeavors, diplomatic negotiations, philosophical ponderings, and even societal change are as mechanically engaging as combat is in other games, Ruins & Revolutions is a game that you should consider.
What you can expect from this blog
The main purpose of this blog will be to explore the ways that you can use Ruins & Revolutions to bring your ideas to the table. When to use a particular table, or start a scroll, is a creative decision that the game master makes, an act of artistic expression that puts another stitch in the unfolding tapestry of your game. These are the threads you’ll use to weave the world. This blog will be all about some of the embroidery techniques you can consider to do that more effectively.
Even if you’re not playing Ruins & Revolutions, though, you might still find some useful things here. After all, the tools that Ruins & Revolutions offers are simple and ubiquitous. Most games have dice rolls and random tables. While scrolls are a little less common, they’re an idea that you can easily bolt on to most other systems.
I designed Ruins & Revolutions with the principle in mind that a few simple rules can lead to very complex outcomes. I’ve already spent many more words describing the game than its rules actually contain, so we’ll leave it here for now. We’ll have all of this blog’s future posts to explore all the roads this can open for us.