You can find links to the Barrow Keep playsets discussed in this post here and here.
I would also note that Richard and a bounty of other innovative game designers are participating in itch.io’s megabundle to raise funds for racial and social equality. Please move quickly to take advantage of that deal which is set to expire on June 15, 2020.
An isolated castle. A new king with an ambitious heir apparent. Ghostly apparitions. Mysterious surveillance. A band of itinerant travelers.
Such elements sound like the makings of a juicy Shakespearen tragedy, but Richard Ruane turns them the cogs driving a role-playing game project he calls Barrow Keep. His brainchild was successfully Kickstarted and is now into serious development with playtest documents already available on itch.io and DriveThru RPG. This month, he has graciously agreed to provide me and fellow educators with an experiential tour in the Ludoverse Lab.
What is Barrow Keep?
Richard takes basic fantasy role-playing rulesets to drive scenarios filled with political mystery and social tension. He is specifically designing sheets and statistics to match the systems of Diogo Nogueira’s Sharp Swords and Sinister Spells and Gavin Norman’s Old-School Essentials (Necrotic Gnome) . . . which means that they will be easily translated into any “old school” style fantasy rpg.
To begin, players choose from character sheets. These outline a role in Barrow Keep (hostage, ward, revenant, spy, etc.), and an archetype (beast bound, seer, rogue, magic-user, etc.). They also provide sequence of character questions, the answers to which modify character attributes. The responses also fill in character backgrounds and generate a motley crew of rivals and allies.
With character sketches in hand, the players direct their attention to Barrow Keep itself—its political situation, current internal antagonisms, the archon’s ambitions and fears. All this material then becomes fodder for one of the playsets that Richard has designed. Essentially, the playset gives the GM a scaffold for a wicked network of schemes and machinations bubbling about in the keep. While a Barrow Keep adventure might involve travelling to a mysterious cemetery or investigating an abandoned tower, the key action occurs within the keep itself, which is filled with all sorts of colorful NPCs—courtesy of the character and setting creation work accomplished by the players in the opening minutes of the session.
Much of Richard’s playset approach derives from Beyond the Wall (Flatland Games), but whereas that game is steeped in the young adult fantasy of writers like Ursula K. LeGuin, Susan Cooper, and Lloyd Alexander, Richard is more influenced by more recent writers like George R. R. Martin, Ellen Kushner, N.K. Jemisin, V.E. Schwab, Lois McMaster Bujold, Tamora Pierce, and Mercedes Lackey.
We are playing Barrow Keep (with Richard at the helm) across two sessions, and you can find the first of these recordings by clicking here.
The game strikes a neat balance between character and setting complexity. The initial player-facing questions provide everyone around the table with juicy ideas and NPCs to work with, and the playsets allow a GM to develop an intrigue-rich setting in a 15-minute planning break. There are a number of factors to admire about the design. The character and setting creation process is efficient while still giving the players room to invent and further develop initial concepts. The elements of the playset provide rich, suggestive catalysts for the GM. Play begins with hard-framed scenes that allow the players to set their characters in motion through the activation of suggestive signs and portents.
You can watch the dynamics of the game in action starting at the 33:45 mark of the recording: In our playset, we have a group of pilgrims who have made a stop at the keep, and there are all sorts of strange events and bumps happening during the night.
One thing I love is that it’s not clear that everything strange or mysterious is related, and the playset doesn’t dictate that the players pursue any specific course of action. For example, there’s an NPC named Sennin who sets off for an evening ride (1:48:00), which seems kind of unusual, except it has also been established that Sennin is involved in a secret affair, so maybe he’s just off for a romantic rendezvous. And there seems to be an intrusion of some strange feline monster in the Keep, but it’s not at all clear that that’s related to the appearance of the foreign pilgrims.
For a bit of RPG history and some sense of Richard’s deep design roots, I suggest you look at the discussion beginning at the 2:11:00 mark. There, Richard mentions David Wesely’s Braunstein, a game concept developed in 1969. Coming out of the miniature wargame tradition, Wesely introduced a variety of roles into the normally martial setting. Many of these roles were explicitly non-military: For example, in a scenario involving a war-ravaged city, someone might play the university chancellor or even the local baker. In addition, Braunstein embraced an “anything can be attempted” mindset that encouraged players to think creatively and to become driving forces of the developing fiction. Though the specific “rules” of Wesely’s game were never published, Richard is aware of the notes that Wesely made, and he is looking to recapture that earlier ur-D&D style of roleplaying.
I’ll leave with one last suggestive note. Going back to the start of this entry, I would be interested in writing some specifically Shakespearean Barrow Keep playsets. In other words, the game would lend itself to a number of specific tropes and conflicts taken from texts like Hamlet, Richard III, 1 Henry IV, etc. Given how streamlined rulesets like Sharp Swords and Sinister Spells are, I can imagine setting students loose to inhabit a Shakespearean setting brimming with paranoia, anxiety, and backstabbing. Barrow Keep would potentially give a classroom an engaging, dynamic insight into the fraught royal courts we find in Shakespeare’s world. I can see similar applications to history classes covering the charged politics of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
I'll be back in the next post to discuss the outcome of our second session in Barrow Keep.
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