A new game from Sam means a new blogpost about how it came together! This time I’m looking at Couriers, my 2-ish page RPG inspired by Blade Runner 2049 and Lasers & Feelings. You can find the game on itch.io or as a web app.
This one came to me more or less fully formed while I was listening to the Blade Runner 2049 episode of Botcast.
(Aside: 2049 is among my favorite movies. I’m more than happy to litigate its various faults and beauties if you hit me up on Discord or some other medium if you disagree and want to talk about it, but for some takes I like about it: I loved the Botcast episode in question, which is pretty critical of the movie, and also this article by Priscilla Page.)
The Core Mechanic
On Botcast, they talk about the horror of having to sit through a baseline test, this pretty harrowing procedure where a voice is basically battering Ryan Gosling emotionally, and if he has too many feelings about it, they mark him for death. I was like, damn, when you put it like that, that’s a game mechanic. This game’s entire design is around supporting that one idea for a check: roll vs Emotions, and if you fail, your boss kills you. I love art about emotional repression; thanks The Midwest!
Implications of the Core Mechanic
This mechanic implies a bunch of supporting mechanics, including:
Players have an Emotions stat, whatever that means.
In order for the game to have real tension to it, players need to want to get more Emotions for some reason even as they don’t want to get too many lest they be killed.
I needed a play loop where you go off and do something then come back in from the field and make the baseline test. That sounded like a Blades in the Dark style downtime / score loop to me.
If I really wanted to feature that baseline test, that whole play loop should be pretty short so it’d come up at least once and ideally more than once per session. This is really different from most Forged in the Dark games I’ve run, where we end up really dwelling on every part of the loop.
I was starting to get a picture of a very light Blades hack, maybe even one-shot, where scores are as short as possible. I figured one score = commit 1 murder for HQ since that felt accurate to the movies.
The next thing on my mind was player count. I knew this was going to be roughly a Blade Runner pastiche, but did that mean there was only one PC? I didn’t want to make a solo or duet game because I personally rarely play those, but a whole party of Blade Runners also felt really off for the noir genre. A whole crew of people becomes something else.
But a partner… there was something interesting in that. And as I extrapolated that out in fiction, it got even better: why doesn’t Ryan Gosling have a partner in 2049? Wouldn’t they send people out in pairs so they outnumber their target? Also, aren’t his bosses constantly worried he’s going to flip out and turn on them? Wouldn’t it make sense to pair people up to watch each other? I loved that. Couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.
The prisoner’s dilemma thing that emerged from this was almost an afterthought. I don’t expect many people will ever inform on their partner because I think most people will be kinda desperate for some kindness in this game world. But the mechanic being there sows mistrust. It’s delightful.
Details: “Scores”
The Lasers & Feelings esque handling of Emotions came next. I was thinking about Emotions as a stat and what else you might roll it for, and the idea of “roll over your Emotions to commit murder” was very darkly funny to me. The more empathy you get, the worse you are at your job. I thought briefly about the flip side of committing murder and determined “do anything except commit murder” was a hilarious trigger for a move.
I was still looking for when you’d actually gain Emotions, and I landed on including Resistance from Blades. I love Resistance, aka player-sanctioned retconning, as a mechanic. It gives players an in-game safety tool of sorts, it lets the GM go hard as hell in describing what happens to players when they fuck up because the players can retcon it, and it makes it clear that the protagonists of your game are bad ass. That all felt appropriate to the genre.
All this together creates an effect I love where you’ve got very few Emotions to start a score, either because you’re fresh off the assembly line or because you were strategizing to survive your last baseline, which means you suck at actually getting close enough to your target to murder them, and you’re generating problems at the start of the score when you want them. You’re also retconning a lot, which makes you feel Emotions, and every time you do that is interesting. But then slowly you gain Emotions over the course of the score, which means you’re now good at getting out of trouble, the score naturally wraps itself up… and you’re bad at finishing the job. Hilarious and poignant.
Reflection on Tone
I realized around here that this game was dark as hell, but that’s just what it was going to be. That’s Blade Runner. Enslaved robots running around murdering each other because the system demands it. It’s a fucked up premise!
I also considered whether I really wanted to make a game in which you’re a cop. I knew the game wanted to be about slowly realizing what you were doing was terrible and escaping it, but I wondered: is it at all interesting to watch characters learn something we players already know?
For me, yes. I think there’s a lot of playing story game RPGs that’s about relitigating emotional lessons we’ve already learned, trying out how we might do things differently, and trying to retain empathy for people who haven’t come as far as we have. Sure, I think they’re about exploring forward and trying out new ideas, too, but there’s value in looking back.
In the end, this felt like a game I wanted to play and a game I wanted to make. So I blazed ahead.
Details: Downtime
Details of what happens between a baseline test and a score/murder felt like filling in details and polishing.
I gave you the option to go up or down by 1 Emotion by repression or indulging in your Emotions. Give everyone the chance to check in on their home life and have a little control over their stats.
I also like the idea of “compartmentalize your Emotions” as a mechanic in a game about repression, and it did seem like you were gonna need to dump a lot of Emotions every cycle. I liked the idea of having individual Compartments for each Emotion, and I picked 12 off the idea of rolling 2d6 to see if you overflow your Emotions when you Compartmentalize.
Ending the Game
The ending of the game was sort of an accident. I was thinking, what happens when you run off? Do we need rules for a whole new phase of the game? No, HQ just replaces you, and we can keep playing to find out if you get away or not and how your partner handles it. The cyclical nature of what follows is so satisfying to me but a complete side effect of what I was trying to do, and still it’s such good commentary on this stupid fucking system HQ has set up. I love how it also reframes the GM players as active participants with a protagonist they’re playing as and rooting for, even if that person is probably doomed.
Another side effect from all this: the fact that max Emotions means your character stops being a PC is almost a safety tool, because players can always just retcon an infinite number of times and max their Emotions whenever they want and run away. They can always make that choice, and the mechanics technically support them doing so. It’s not obvious that you can do that, and most players don’t, but I think it’s a nice way of underlining that you can tap out at any time. The game system, like the fictional system, implies you should be trying to do one thing, but you can just ignore that and do something else if you put your mind to it.
There’s a nice thematic thing there, too, where the game is kind of always asking “why aren’t you maxing your Emotions and walking away?” The rules aren’t stopping you. There’s nothing stopping you, so why don’t you? Hmmmm?
Two GMs??
Okay why does this game have two GMs?
The short answer is I’m obsessed with The Wizard’s Grimoire, a game where the one PC has all the rules basically, and they just recruit two friends to be their helpers and ask questions of. It basically has you trick two friends into GMing for you.
But with that comes a few notable strengths, the biggest imo being that no one GM is responsible for everything. If you’re at a loss for ideas, you can turn to your buddy for help. I’ve found one-page RPGs especially hard to GM in the past since there’s so little room for GM advice, and I really like “just bring in a second for insurance” as a way to shore up some support there. This is also part of why I put the entire burden of mechanical knowledge on the Couriers: I wanted them to be able to focus just on answering questions about the fiction.
I think I had the idea for two GMs before I’d figured out that two Blade Runner partners made a sweet prisoner’s dilemma situation and I didn’t want to make a duet game, but then I kept it even after I’d figured that out. Four’s a great number of players! It just felt weird and right.
The game works fine with one GM, of course.
Other GM Mechanics
On the format of the starting situations: it never changed. I wanted them to be quick, both for the GM’s sake and in order to keep scores short. I also wanted to underline that the “aberrants” the couriers are hunting are people, and probably marginalized people. So: strange names, lots of pronouns (I should’ve put some neo-pronouns in there), a kickass location, and a twist if the GMs need it. In and out. It played great from the jump and never changed.
I like having two GM sheets with a slightly different set of situations; I find it fun to make the GMs kinda huddle up together and compare notes.
The other major weirdness to talk about with the GM rules is how I wanted to push at which players have what mechanical powers at the table. Rules as written, in Couriers, the GM role is really different in this game than most. Instead of narrating what’s going on and calling for rolls, you’re only supposed to speak up to set the initial situation and react to questions the Courier players ask (plus a one time “I’m introducing a twist” moment). I wanted to try out reframing the usual power dynamic of GM vs PC in the pretty short way that The Wizard’s Grimoire does. Yes, a Couriers GM is responsible for a lot more of the fictional world than the Courier Players, but they’re much more reactive than in most games. I wanted to try and ease the cognitive load of GMing, and to give players more agency and authority about what happens to their characters and how badass / competent they are.
In playtesting, this is not how the game played. People just naturally did the normal GM thing. I ended up going really hard on underlining my intentions here in the final version of the rules.
I think it’s fine that people play this game more in line with TTRPG cultural tradition, but I encourage any readers of this who go on to play the game to play more rules as written. The people and situations the GMs are depicting are decidedly out of their depth when dealing with the Couriers. Lean into that in in the player dynamics. The Couriers should feel like terminators.
Finally, astute readers will note that I never call the GMs in this game by that term in the rules text. They’re aberrant players, not game masters. I like that choice because I think it underlines everything I just talked about, even if I broke form for clarity in this commentary. These players are absolutely not the “masters” of anything in this game, and it may have been a mistake for me to frame this game as having GMs at all.
Lol No Character Creation?
Yes it’s true, I accidentally made a game where you don’t do character creation, and it’s somehow extremely thematically appropriate. I didn’t realize this until my playtest. It was disorienting, but that felt right! Very cool. It wasn’t until after I realized this that I baked names into the Courier player sheets. Love that.
Changes From Playtesting
I did a single playtest, and the game immediately worked great. We did a full score/downtime loop in about an hour, which felt perfect. Two problems:
I’d kinda predicted this, but then it happened: someone came into their first baseline with 5 Emotion. In this version players got 2 strikes before they got murdered, but it felt like people were gonna be killed after 2 scores with a high frequency. That didn’t seem great.
The Courier players wanted was time to talk to each other in a low key setting.
We brainstormed and came up with the solution of moving the option to compartmentalize up to before your baseline test. That makes the compartmentalize roll to see if your Emotions overflow back out of your compartments more stressful because you probably die if you flub it.
We also came up with the idea of replacing baseline fail “strikes” with checking the levels on your emotions compartments. This makes it so it’s impossible to die on your first baseline and very unlikely to die on your second. I also love it when you can collapse mechanics into each other: no one has to track “strikes” anymore, whatever nonsense those were, you can just check a resource you were already tracking. It’s great.
This pre-baseline compartmentalization moment was also a great place to set aside time for the Couriers to talk. The rules almost frame it as “this is corporate-mandated time to reflect on how you can be more efficient killing machines” but then it often devolves into tentatively talking about feelings. Love it.
And that was basically it. That was the game.
The Art
Boy shucks howdy am I happy with how the art came out.
I had that image of emotions exploding out of someone’s head from too much repression basically as soon as I thought of the core mechanic. Look, here’s my initial sketches of what the game would look like:
A notebook page containing various sketches: a torso with arms and legs busted up into 12 pieces for compartments, a head tilted down with an emotions meter coming out of its cranium, and a mouth in profile open super wide with an emotions meter extending from the mouth. Also some words that are about various other projects I was working on and not relevant to this game.
A notebook page containing a sketch of the character sheet layout for Couriers. The title is at the top, then blocks of text for “Rules ref: Rolls” and “Baseline” and “Downtime.” The “emotions meter exploding from cranium” sketch is back on the right hand side, and a torso sketch is now present laying along the bottom of the page.
Honestly the only reason there’s two character sheets is I wanted to make both pieces of art.
I did sketches of the art I wanted at first:
A version of the Couriers character sheet with a much more sketchy, geometrically drawn, almost “made in MS Paint” lookin image of the emotions meter exploding out of head basic sketch.
Some people told me this was good enough, but those people were Wrong. So I took a crack at photobashing, and I’m so happy with how it came out. I was pretty convinced I was gonna have to hire an artist to make exactly the thing I wanted, but no! I got there on my own! Super happy with the results. Hell yeah. Look at that shit. Whether you like this or not, it’s exactly what I wanted it to be.
I also knew I wanted some ornamental digital filigree around the sheet like the design in the wonderful CBR-PNK, but I didn’t want to rip that exactly. Decided to do a QR code texture, which I believe you can mostly reconstitute if you put your mind to it, and which contains a little After Yang reference if you do.
Conclusion
This was a tight little game that came together in like a week. I’ve had a lot of fun playing it, though it’s also unclear to me if anyone else actually wants to play it or if it comes across as a bit too grim. We’ll see. I’m gonna get the sheets printed and laminated and bring them to Big Bad Con this year, so if you want to play it with me, you know where to find me (or hit me up in the comments, on Discord, on Mastodon, or wherever).