One of the nice things about having your own website is that you can experiment with form. I’ve been wanting to do more RPG work this year and to that end I am giving you this First Read of an RPG. Unlike the other RPG work I have done over the years I have not played or run this game. What I’ll be doing is going over the production of the book, what I find inspiring, what isn’t clear on a first read through, and anything else I think might be of use to you. Let me know if you find this useful.
Over the last couple of decades we have seen a plethora of Young Adult fiction adapted for the screen. Hunger Games was the one that kicked of this deluge of films and TV series. This dystopian setting pitched young people against each other in an arena for the benefit of their districts and the satisfaction of a baying crowd. Fiction has always been fascinated with what happens when you isolate people from the world. From “Robinson Crusoe” and “Lord of the Flies” to the modern interpretations like “Lost” and “Battle Royale” our stories have explored the ideas of isolation and conflict for centuries.
Deathmatch Island from author Tim Denee and publisher Evil Hat Productions takes inspiration from these stories, evoking especially films like “Hunger Games” and “Battle Royale”. It sees the players waking up on a small boat, weaving their way through the waves to Island 1. They are all wearing the same clothes. A letter in their pocket welcomes them to Deathmatch Island and tells them to ‘Play to Win!’.
That is one compelling pitch. The welcome letter is the first thing that greets you after the credits at the front of the book. Right opposite that is an orange page with just one word in the centre of it in blazing white “Orientation”. This sets the tone immediately alongside the fantastic layout from Tim Denee and the creepy way the welcome letter is phrased. The welcome letter encourages Competitors to use the icebreakers at the bottom of the letter to get to know the others on board the boat, before you decided whether or not you can trust them. It is pitch perfect.
The book wastes no time in giving the Competitors (players) and Production (GM) an overview of how the game will play. This is big picture stuff starting with a chapter entitled “Deadly Games on Mysterious Islands”. It goes on to touch on influences, the role of the Competitors and Production, and how each Island will play out leading eventually to the endgame on Island 3. This is a great grounding to give your reader. It gives context to everything that follows.
If you are familiar with Agon already, the next chapter on differences to that game is a useful one. Again this is brief, just to give you an idea of the changes you can expect, setting you up to succeed in learning the game. Without this, it could have taken me more time to get a handle on the changes to the Paragon system. With it, I found it a breeze to notice the changes and also understand why they had been made.
Competitors
Leaving the big picture behind, Deathmatch Island gets players into the creation of their Competitors. Much like in Agon the characters are very broad strokes. Unlike Agon you generate these poor souls almost entirely at random, right down to their appearance if you so wish. The nature of the setting is that Competitors can have a short life span. This random character generation gives you permission to not form too close an attachement, while giving you the broad strokes you need to imagine who they are: occupation before they came to the island, the stat they are best in, and their appearance and name (if you want to generate those randomly).
Agon’s four domains are replaced by competencies that fit with the setting; Social Game, Snake Mode, Challenge Beast, and Deathmatch. I don’t need to explain each of those for you to understand what they are used for. That’s the mark of a well thought through piece of design.
A fifth Competency has been added called Redacted. The idea of redacted information gives a great feeling of mystery and prompts for the Production player. Imagining what these words might be can lead down some fun paths while you think about the setup of your game. You will encounter redacted information right through your games of Deathmatch Island.
Of course you have a bit more to your character than just your Competencies and your job. In Agon you end up on these islands because the gods have waylaid you. Even so you can call on their aid in the form of Divine favour. In Deathmatch Island that aid has become assets and they are a really clever adaption of that core system. You start with no assets and can pick them up across the Islands you will visit. When you get assets they can give you anything between 1 and 3 d4 extra to your pool of dice, rather than just the 1d4 of Divine favour. I really like this simple twist as it allows Tim to make equipment feel more powerful and get the Competitors excited about finding the good stuff.
Character creation dealt with the book goes onto detail contests, dice rolls, and how each Island will play out in a bit more detail. There isn’t a lot different here from Agon but I feel like the mechanisms and advice are laid out better. One of the interesting changes to the game does crop up here: how leadership works.
In Agon you establish one of the heroes as the leader for an island. They are the deciding vote on how the party goes about their tasks. Technically players can spend Bonds with the leader to take control of a situation, but in practice I have never seen it happen in a game (and I’ve played and run in two full campaigns of Agon).
Deathmatch Island takes leadership and makes it more competitive. Instead of establishing a single leader for an entire island, the Competitor that rolls best in a contest will become the leader until the next contest comes up. The leader gets to distribute assets. They also get to choose where the party will go next on the Island, and the approach and goal of any contests while they are in charge. It is a little unclear who is in charge in the very first contest on an island, though I am sure your group can figure out a method for deciding that.
Agon’s character bonds have been renamed trust. You can spend trust with the leader to sway them to your course of action. This can even result in a bidding war as players try and take advantage of a situation! You can also spend trust to block harm, just as you could with bonds in Agon. This is another thing I’ve never really seen happen in a game of Agon. It will be more useful in Deathmatch Island as the ability to take damage has been reduced.
These few chapters at the start give Competitor players a solid foundation of what they do on an island, how they do it, and what happens in between islands. It finishes with some advice on how to play a Competitor. Now it is the turn of Production.
Production
Production is the role of the GM in Deathmatch Island. This section of the book is dedicated to giving you the steps to make that job a lot easier. From establishing what the “voice” of Production sounds like to talking about safety tools, Denee leaves no stone unturned in offering solid advice.
There are lots of alternative modes detailed in this section. You can make a more co-operative version of the game. Even make it non-lethal. There is even some good one-shot advice. Making RPGs playable as a one-shot is a great way to give folk a taste for a system and I would love to see more games give such advice. For now though I’ll direct you towards my friend Guy Milner of the Burn after Running blog. Guy excels at giving great one shot advice in general and has a variety of scenarios ready to roll.
Rememeber Competitors play to win! Co-operation is sometimes necessary but there can only be one victor!
The design of Deathmatch Island is that the players, both Competitor and Production, don’t know at the start of the game the true nature of the forces running the competition. Deathmatch Island is a Battle Royale style game show, but it is possible that the real reason behind this drama is much more mysterious.
In between islands the Competitors can speculate as to what has happened to bring them there and who might be behind it all. This theorizing falls under various categories; political project, entertainment, big experiment, or weird. The Production player then uses those theories to guide how Deathmatch Island is presented to the Competitors. Effectively this is an integrated method of giving the players what they want. Nothing really mechanical here, just a way of giving the GM good advice on how to actively listen to what the players are saying and how to reincorporate those ideas into play. Lovely stuff.
As for the Competitors, there is a section on how the Production player should conduct themselves. This is followed by a worked example of play to reinforce all those ideas. It is a weird artifact of the RPG hobby that many books just assume players and GMs know what to do at the table with a given game. All RPGs should be specific about ‘how’ the different sides of the table are meant to be for a particular game. It just makes sure everyone is on the same page.
Casts and Islands
Deathmatch Island contains 3 islands that you will use for a ‘season’ of the show. Now you may think that one season is all that the game can take however REDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTED
Production does not acknowledge the existence of other islands. There are only 3 islands.
There are 4 casts available to populate these islands over the course of a season and they have incredibly evocative names: On the Applied Dynamics of Authority, Three Defences of Coerced Conflict, A Cyclical Theory of Competition, and The Stagnant Species, Towards a Greater Evolution. Don’t you want to immediately know about all of those?
Casts give you the antagonists for the islands. They are setup with an initial encounter for island one, and then an idea of where things might go with that particular cast over the course of a season. There are lots of good ideas in each cast that the Production player can pick up or not as they choose. Each cast has some internal conflict as well, making them feel alive and real.
The islands of Deathmatch Island are more complex than those of Agon. The latter had a rough description of the island, some places you might go, as well as an overview of the inherent conflicts of the island and its cast of characters. Deathmatch gives you a map of the island with a variety of nodes. Each node has its own description and falls under one of the following categories; landing point, built up area, challenge, points of interest, or restricted area. This means as Production that you have to know a bit more going into each island. There is more prep involved than you would find in Agon.
There are lots of these nodes. Over the course of an island the Competitors aren’t going to visit more than 4 or 5 of them. Their choices are restricted by the map as well. The Competitors can only go to an adjacent point along the node map. This gives Production a bit of a hint as to where they might go next. The book advises printing out the cast and island info and that seems like a good idea.
Like the cast lists the islands are just a smorgasbord of inspiration. The challenges are dark, funny, and full of just enough detail for you to paint a picture without being beholden to a piece of read aloud text. The redacted areas are especially intriguing and give permission for the Production player to just mess with the Competitors heads. I am not going to spoil any of these for you. Trust me when I say you will be sad that you can’t visit every node on an island. Wait until they discover RUNRUNRUN!
End Game
The book finishes up by detailing how to bring a season of Deathmatch Island to a conclusion. When it comes down to it this game is a Battle Royale, and there can only be one winner. Or is there another way out? THEY ARE COMING FOR YOU
I have loved reading Deathmatch Island. It is a dark setting of course with themes of control, coercion, and violence to get what you want. The game wants to put the Competitors in situations which will see them form bonds, betray those bonds, then find out who they can trust down the barrel of a gun. It has a wicked sense of humour throughout and Tim’s graphic design and writing have made it a joy to read. Every page gave me inspiration and clear instructions on how to run the game. I think it is going to be more challenging to run than Agon. There is a bit more to hold in my head, but I am incredibly excited to give it a try. I’ll report back when I do. If I can get off the island.
By reading this review you have agreed to particpate in Deathmatch Island. Do not be alarmed. Check your pocket for your welcome letter. Remember. Play to Win!
I backed Deathmatch Island on Backerkit with my own money.
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