Yesterday I had the pleasure of playing in a game of The Whitehack run by Horst Wurst, The Gardens of Ynn! I was pumped for it as of sign-up and dang, it exceeded my expectations. Let me talk a little bit about why, both regarding impressions of the module but also the system, as it is my first time actually playing with it.
This module is super cool. We are adventurers going to get rich and looking for some kids in this surreal garden; not exactly a revolution in my brain there. However, as soon as you enter the garden, shit gets real. The procedural generation of the spaces is super cool; the results evocative. We are only one session in and I definitely want to discover more.
There is time fuckery, literal machinations beneath the ground, and we always have the option of staying in a given space to spend time with it or like just take off. We were also told that we should be thinking about out items for fictional positioning and if we just wanted to go hack things up… we’d be having a bad time. If you stay in an area time passes as well. We didn’t really get the connotations of what that means, though.. and still don’t? I like that! Are we going to emerge from the gardens into like an altogether different time period or something? Are we going to age rapidly when exiting? Cool!
We only got to navigate a couple of these spaces but all had cool sensations around them. Smells; sights; taste; sounds, etc.Evocative and interesting. I hope that continues. We met a talking cat. Saw some skeletons as human-sized peacock things were mesmerizing a poor boy, presumably ready to devour him.
Can’t wait to see what more happens~~
System-wise:
Some people may know that I have barely any working knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons. I played a couple adventures I recall very little of when in junior high school, then reentered the hobby 5-6 years ago by way of DnD Encounters, Pathfinder Society, etc.; hated it, eventually found online gaming, then finally found this community and could not be happier.
So 2 years or so ago (is) when I purchased The White Hack, I was very excited by the design work and could imagine how it might go. So much so I took inspiration from how class creation worked to put it in this month’s Codex issue! I finally got the opportunity to play it thanks to Horst, and my word, I just loved the whole experience.
The Deft, The Wise, and The Strong are the character classes. Elegant, subjective, and open to interpretation. Evocative names, good examples. What you choose as your ‘thing’ in the game allows you to do difficult tasks with complete success if you’re deft. The Wise have miracles that are negotiated and cost HP. So. Much. Cool. Stuff!
The notions of Groups to craft previous life experience (lifepaths) and the other associated fiction you should have for your character is a bit of a mental hurdle at first, but ultimately very helpful in having you place some cognitive load as to what is important about this person and therefore granting them better fictional positioning. These things being coupled with mechanics was like a breath of fucking fresh air for me. I felt like notions I had about what my character ought to be good at actually mattered. My internal subjective ideas were externally supported by the system as I came up with them on the fly.
I ended up deciding to play a wandering Deft monk. In the gardens we came across a suspicious, foaming at the mouth mind, talking cat; I asked the referee, Horst, if I might have experience with these things having wandered about for ages and encountered strangers often. Specifically, I wanted to know if they were trying to ambush us or otherwise lie, etc. Because I might have been set upon before in my travels, I gained that fictional positioning and rolled with Advantage.
These things about my character I decide are important are each tied to a stat, which I’m less crazy about. Why not just have it so when it makes sense I get Advantage, right? Why does it have to be only when I’m being intelligent or wise I get this benefit? Most of the time characters will be rolling specific stats for what they’re good at anyhow, I’m sure. I’m super high in DEX and my fictional positioning beside DEX is that I was trained in martial arts at the monastery, for instance. Super cool.
Another thing I loved was critical roll target numbers being the exact stat value, that’s a really small but fun thing. The design work really makes it feel like it’s all about the characters; empowering them with just enough fictional positioning that they get excited about contributing without dictating too much.
One thing I didn’t like much was that you can also be squishy AF. I myself and one another started with just 2 HP, which made me feel way too precious about my character. Sure, they could die and I could roll up another… but I just thought up all these cool ass things for my monk! I want to gain levels and gain even more Groups! In that sense, it feels a bit at odds with the system goals. But I was also told there are some fail-safes in the text that make it a little harder to die; I’ll have to revisit the text.
The end result was a Venetian Deft Thief, Vincenzo di Pasqua (Jason Cordova ); a wandering Deft Monk (myself), A Wise Clockwork Tinkerer (Paul Staxx Spraget ); a Strong Bodyguard (Shane Liebling ); all walked into the msyterious Garden of Ynn!
How fucking cool is that, right?!
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/237544/The-Gardens-Of-Ynn?term=gardens+of+&test_epoch=0
