Secrets Within Secrets: Introduction

     Welcome back to TwistedSpoon Studio! This week, we're taking a break from custom Magic and instead debuting a new game. Secrets within Secrets is a tabletop RPG powered by the apocalypse set in a dark folklore-inspired world where everyone has secrets. Today we're going to talk about the inspirations for the game, it's mechanical origins, and its current state of design.

    It starts with another roleplaying game: the OG, DnD (specifically 5e, you see). Not in the sense that Dungeons and Dragons is the progenitor of modern Western tabletop role-playing games and the wider genre of RPGs altogether, although that is also true; no, our story actually starts with an actual play podcast. You know, one where they actually play DnD. It's one you might have heard of.

 

   If you're not familiar, The Adventure Zone features the McElroy brothers-- three funny boys from West Virginia who also do another show called My Brother, My Brother, and Me-- and their dad. Over the years, they've done three main campaigns, a few experimental games, and a ton of one-shots. The main season campaigns are the Balance arc, wherein the heroes are tasked with finding seven Grand Relics across a sci-fantasy Faerûn under the guidance of the Bureau of Balance; the Amnesty arc, which sees new characters investigate strange happenings in the small town of Kepler, West Virginia; and Graduation, which tells the story of Heironomous Wiggenstaff's School for Heroism and Villainy (and, of course, it Sidekick and Henchperson Annex). I'm about to drop some major spoilers for all three arcs, so maybe skip ahead if you want to listen to the podcast with a blank slate. I can't recommend the show enough. 

 

///Here there be spoilers////

 

    Our story begins with the epilogue of The Eleventh Hour, one of the later arcs of the Balance story. After saving a town that was trapped in a time bubble and recovering the Temporal Chalice, the fighter Magnus Burnsides receives a scroll. The image on that scroll depicts the statue in the center of town-- the town's saviors, accompanied by a red-robed figure that the players recognized as one of the antagonists. Except this scroll is a previous draft, one that shows the red-robe's face. Magnus's face.

    And Magnus comes alive, in a sense. Travis, the player behind the ruff boi, voices how conflicted he feels. He wants to share this with the party, but he doesn't know if he can. He starts going off-script, derailing the routine cutscene between missions to explore the Bureau of Balance's off-limits areas. He has a drive that the other characters can see but not understand. Meanwhile, the other players actually know the secret (if they remember it, anyway). This one detail injects drama and tension into the every interaction for the next arc.

    Then, in Amnesty, we see another take on this dramatic irony. Ned Chicaine is a burglar-turned-scam-artist who runs the local cryptid museum. Aubrey Little is a traveling magician with more power than she realizes. Her mother died in a fire that started when Ned and his accomplice were breaking into the Little estate. The backstory slowly played out in flashbacks over the course of the campaign. Both of the players knew what had happened, but the characters didn't. Ned didn't know that it was Aubrey's home that he'd robbed, and Aubrey didn't know that Ned was the culprit. Until one day, they both knew, and like a powder keg, the potential energy exploded into a firestorm of an arc that concluded with Ned's death and redemption. I still tear up listening to that episode.

    Finally, Graduation. In this season, Fitzroy Maplecourt meets the embodiment of Chaos in his dreams, and finds himself offered incredible power, but he keeps his friends in the dark. Argonaut Keen has a vendetta against the Commodore, a famous naval Hero, and is inducted into a secret society called The Unbroken Chain. The third party member is the Firbolg, a lesser wood giant who can't lie. What ensues is a dance of intrigue that is palpable and just endlessly delicious.  

 

 ////Spoilers be no more////

 

    The common theme here is dramatic irony. Secrets make for extremely compelling narratives. I wanted to make a game about secrets. This was also a time in my life, at least in the beginning of the year, where I lived alone. I desperately needed some human connection. I'd been playing Neon and Chrome, a cyberpunk hack of Lasers and Feelings, with my mom and my sister. None of us had any substantial roleplaying experience, but I listened to enough actual play to be able to GM our games. I wanted something meatier than L&F, but not as chunky or prep-intensive as D&D. This was around the time that I found Monsterhearts and fell into the PbtA rabbit hole. Several other interests coalesced here as well-- a love of Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces; a deep admiration for Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles; and a general interest in mythology, especially in the idea of tricksters. What emerged was an enby ready to make a game.

 

    I knew from the start that it had to be Powered by the Apocalypse. If you're not familiar, Apocalypse World is a role-playing game by Vince and Meguey Baker with a resolution mechanic that differs heavily from DnD. Rather than a d20, players roll 2d6. On a result of 9-12, things go great and you get what you want. On a 6 or less, things break bad-- you don't just fail, the GM gets to take a "hard move" and introduce new problems to address. The real magic, though, is 7-9: the mixed success. Rolling a mixed success means that you do what you set out to do, but it's not as simple as that-- there's a worse outcome, a price to pay, or some unexpected consequence. Every roll moves the story forward, often in unpredictable ways. Apocalypse World also eschews heavy preparation, instructing GMs to "treat NPC's like stolen cars." These games are wild, dramatic, and fast-paced, with the GM having just as much fun as everyone else without putting in too much more work. In addition, the text for Apocalypse World includes an appendix with instructions for writing your own moves. The phrase "Powered by the Apocalypse" (or PbtA) denotes games that use Apocalypse World-style resolution and GM mechanics. Taking the process a step further, game designer and absolute icon Avery Alder created a framework for making PbtA games called Simple World. It has guidelines for creating stats, moves, playbooks, et cetera. She also wrote the hugely evocative Monsterhearts, which is riveting even if you never play it. Monsterhearts is a game of teen monster romance and coming of age, and it is a masterful example of game mechanics as metaphor.

    While Secrets within Secrets started as a Simple World hack, it soon turned into much more. Drawing from Monsterhearts and Lasers and Feelings, the core stats center around a simple dichotomy: Bold versus Subtle. You want to beat up the guards? Bold. You want to sneak around them? Subtle. You want to threaten them? Bold. You want to seduce them? Hot. I mean, subtle. Essentially, it comes down to direct versus indirect, going through versus going around. There's also Keen, which indicates how good  you are at getting information, and Strange, which represents supernatural forces. In addition to your standard basic moves, there's one called Bargain with Darkness-- you can make deals with the strange beings around you for knowledge, power, and so much more, but their price is as inhuman as they are.

    Borrowing from Monsterhearts again, the game's classes-- playbooks, in PbtA parlance-- are heavily metaphorical. The Bastard's secret is hidden from themself-- the truth of their parentage. The Fallen is fallen from grace, with a dark past. The Hermit is an outcast, distancing themself from the world. The Honorbound is out of place in a world of conspiracy, a beacon in the dark. The Shepherd bears the secrets of their followers, but they may not be what they seem. The Two-Faced is ready to turn on anyone at a moment's notice. The Fey is otherworldly and defies knowing. The Elder can be any of these, but they are first and foremost a mentor figure with the end in sight.

    Other core mechanics include Secrets as a fungible resource (similar to hX, strings, or debt in other PbtA titles) and Unstable, a condition that forces players to change playbooks when they take on too much stress. Each class also has a way to give up Secrets for benefit, encouraging players to share their backstories and secret knowledge rather than sitting on it silently without engaging one another.

    That's enough for an introduction, don't you think? SWS design is currently on hiatus-- you can only work on so many projects at once with an 8-month-old daughter-- but you can find documentation from various stages of design here. Next week, it's back to FUR Vision Design; after that, the spotlight goes to Quantum Mirror, a tabletop board game that my mother and I created in an impromptu self-imposed game jam. In the meantime, listen to The Adventure Zone for an emotional rollercoaster spanning seven years, or check out the +1 Forward podcast for more in-depth PbtA design talk.

See you soon!