So folks by now know that I regularly post recent game arrivals here at Grubb Street. I buy most of them, either in Brick-and-Mortars or Kickstarter. I read most of them, though some more diligently than others. But I don't consider those mentions as real reviews because I haven't played them, and to give a game a review you really need to see or experience them in play.
In any event, The Well. I kickstarted this way back, as well as a number of my colleagues on the Saturday Night group. One of my colleagues has done so to the tune that they rated a in-person gaming session with the designer, Peter Schaefer, who is local. So Peter came down from Mercer Island and ran us in a few sessions. And it was really good, and I actually had a personal epiphany involving it.
The Well is a nice, tight little RPG. Its world and purpose are extremely focused. Its mechanics are relatively simple and adaptable. The mechanics exist primarily to serve the world, and the world is an expression of those mechanics. Yeah, that sound pretentious, but that's the best way to explain it.
The world consists of Bastion, a single city, moving eternally down a bottomless shaft. What else is there? Doesn't matter. The city moves ever-downward, digging out new rooms and storehouses on the sides of the shaft, eventually exhausting their resources, and continuing downward into new territory, abandoning the older city behind it/above it. Think of a slug leaving a slime trail, where that trail is the earlier civilizations. They use the previous cityscapes as dumping grounds for trash and burial places for the dead.
OK, but the dead don't stay quiet, as the dead tend to not do. There are humanoid skeletons and zombies roaming the upper reaches, but also spiders which are constructed of boney bits, skull-shaped bats with wings of rotted meat, and piles of ropey, semi-liquified flesh prowling the halls. So adventurers known are gravediggers (that's you guys) pass up through the locked doors to find lost stuff. It's an inversion of the traditional going down into the dungeon to loot ancient civilizations - instead you're going up to loot your own recent past.
Completing a task is simple - roll a d6 against a target number set by the moderator (GM). If you roll a "6", roll again and add that number as well. There are no character stats in the traditional sense, but you can get additional dice to roll for proper tools (Axes, for example, add a +1 die when the action is murder) or specific skills (Mechanics, First Aid, and magic (involving painting runes)). In addition, you can propose a gambit, which is an potential situational penalty you come up with it (I get an extra die to hit my target with an arrow, but I risk running out of arrows would get you an additional dice). Depending the severity of what you offer, you can gain up to three dice. The downside is that if any of the dice you roll show a "1", the bad thing you propose happens.
Your history and contacts provide springboards for the adventures themselves. There are a lot of factions in Bastion, and at start you have good relations with one of them and less-than-good relations with another. The ones that don't like you can give you grief, but the ones that DO like you can lean on you for jobs, which carry their own perils.
Peter Schaefer, the designer, led our little group of gravediggers through two adventures over several Saturday nights. The first was to take a group of tourists (well, sensible upper-class citizens) above the city to find an old fountain from a previous age. The fountain had a particularly nasty mass of animated dead tissue called a tangle, and we beat a hasty retreat (I don't think we lost anyone, which was to our credit). The next time we heading up, it was to track down an escaped criminal. Everyone else had contacts to bring her back alive for trial. My group of criminals wanted her dead, and my orders were to bump her off. And I made a hash of it - blowing a couple straightforward opportunities and not taking any gambits in order to improve my odds. In the end she escaped and I was treated as an incompetent by my criminal gang.
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| Did I say it had cool art? It has cool art, by Kurt Komoda |
Anyway, the play of the game fits well within short timeframes, like convention games or an evening session or two, but has the potential to spread out into larger campaigns and issues. You can guide your character through the pitfalls of life as a gravedigger and retire, or end up source material for the undeadlies prowling the upper galleries. It is an excellent melding of traditional dungeoning and gritty urban roleplaying. Wilderness need not apply. Good times.
The book itself is very stylish, showing you can do stuff in black and white and still have it come off neat and professional. The interior art is evocative, in particular the monster illustrations. The cover gets a nod for not being the traditional three people looking heroic on the cover. All-in-all, its an excellent presentation of an excellent game.
You can get the pdf of the game at Peter's Itchio site, and get a gander at some of the cool art. Worth checking out.
More later,
