# RPG A DAY 2024: Evocative environments tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2024 ![[RPGaDAY2024-024x723.jpg]] You know what? I'm going back to the well. But maybe not the side of the well that you expect. The phrase *"evocative environments"* could go any number of ways, like many of the discussions in *RPG a Day*. It's intended to be open-ended, to invite discussion, to draw you into thinking about elements that you might not otherwise engage with consciously in the course of playing or writing about RPGs. That's a good thing. I want to be very clear. I'm deeply in favor of everything there (except the occasional confusion about what it really means). For me, today, this isn't one of those situations. Let's delve into it. ![[Delve (cover).jpg]] Oh yeah. We are busting into the dungeon, the hillside, the long journey, the dangerous trek. And we're going to do it with the Ironsworn. **[[Ironsworn|Ironsworn: Delve]]** engages on all cylinders to drive evocative environments. It won't take long to convinced you. It isn't hard. All I have to do is show you how it works. Truthfully, **Delve** is one of my favorite supplements for any RPG. Not because it's incredibly art heavy, or because it is critically important to be able to play the game at all, but because it literally adds experience to the core game in a way that expands and expounds. All of the mechanics which are in the book are pretty straightforward extrapolations of the core mechanics with a little more detail in some places and occasionally a new approach from a different angle. The bits that it does add are really tight and well expressed. - You've got the introduction of threat tracks which give you insight into how to mechanize narrative time pressure. - You've got the mechanics which I have no hesitation in folding into **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]**, and am vaguely surprised aren't there already: the objects of power/rarities system. - You've got a pile of oracles to generate new things including mutated monsters and creatures which I absolutely love. But none of that is why we came to the show. What we're here for are the *delves*. The delves are your dungeons, your complex pathways across the terrain. Things within which there are objectives to be obtained. The mechanics in the core text cover journeys, which are telling stories about going from one place to be in another. Delves are all about going to a place for a purpose, whether it be to get something from it, to learn something there, or to get to the other side in order to achieve a specific thing more than the journey itself. They are your traditional dungeon crawl, but without *being* a traditional dungeon crawl. You generate the content, but it's not on a room-by-room basis. In the process, you end up discovering a very evocative mechanism for telling the story of what happens when you go into this place looking for this thing. Let's do the obvious thing here. Let's just do it. Nothing is more descriptive than actually doing a thing. We'll start with a callback to physics and [assume a standard adventurer. Usually, that advice is followed by specifying that the standard adventurer is a sphere on a frictionless surface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow). We're going to skip that part. > [!info] Servan Splitskull > iron: 3, heart: 2, edge: 2, wits: 1, shadow: 1. *Honorbound*, *Shield-bearer*, and *Swordmaster*. > > You can already see him in your mind's eye, I'm sure. A gruff, hard-living fighter with a short sword and a shield who feels compelled to fight to live up to his promises. > > Hell, let's go all the way and give him a big bushy red beard, a big nose and piercing eyes. However, he stands an easy 6'6", so definitely not a dwarf. He's just built like one. One standard adventurer ready to go.^[It literally took me 3min to put that together. I may spend too much time with this system or it's really just that easy. (It's the latter.)] We've discovered that nearby there is some sort of *thing*. A place we need to go, within which we are going to get I don't know what. I need a little inspiration. Let me pull out the oracles and see what I can come up with with the straightforward methods you normally would use in **Ironsworn**. I threw some dice on the Action/Theme Oracle, and I get, *"Finish Safety"*. This sounds like some kind of escort quest, or at least clearing the way so that some travelers can follow us. Awesome. That sounds pretty good. Now we just need to decide on a Theme and a Domain for this particular delve. That will decide the sort of things that we find within it. We could pick them, or I could roll for them. I'm feeling pretty random. Let's see what we come up with. An *Infested Tanglewood*. That seems pretty solid, frankly. We need to clear the way ahead of a group of merchants through a perilous forest, which is infested with foul creatures. I like it. This sounds good. Already you can start to see it in your mind's eye. A filthy forest full of horrific nightmare beasts, possibly giant spiders, perhaps swarms of smaller spiders. Maybe just the odd interaction with the white hart. Possibly some undead; you know how this goes. Because we don't want to spend all day on this, we're going to give it the rank of *Troublesome*, which means there will probably be three major rolls for advancement in that progress track. Let's roll up a name: **The Thicket of Sunken Secrets**. That's pretty intense. Again, I'm already starting to have some imagery come to mind. This is a very wet forest. Maybe it borders on being swampy. That gives us some ideas of other things that we might run into along the path. The environment becomes ever more evocative as we go along. Right, so we tick off the things that we need to have down on the sheet so that we know what we're doing. We've got the Theme and Domain. We've largely set up the playscape. We know what the site is, and it has some detail. We've given it a rank. We know some of the things that we may find inside. We just need to "envision the scene" before we make our initiatory move *Delve the Depths.* **Ironsworn** is big on guiding you to envisioning the scene at every turn. Pretty much the entire game is composed of you envisioning what is happening and being directed to do so by the text. This is, after all, a fiction-first game, where the fiction leads the mechanics and not vice versa. > So here we are, standing in the scrub looking at what appears to be a fairly significant forested area, and the road with trees leaning over it oppressively goes deeper. > > There is very likely some kind of horrible nightmarish ugly nasty in there. But we can't let a bunch of unarmed merchants go face-first into that. Time to go take care of the problem. Once we start into the forest, we realize that there's no time to waste. The last thing we need is to keep the merchants waiting. So we use haste, which lets us roll +edge for our Delve the Depths move. This turned out pretty well for us. > **Delve the Depths** > **Strong hit**: 6 + 2 (edge) = **8** vs **4**, **1**.[^pf] On a strong hit, we delve deeper, which means that we were very successful. We get to mark progress on the progress track of the site and pull off a *Find an Opportunity* move. Let's figure out what the result of that is and then we will envision it. > **Find an Opportunity**: This area provides an opportunity to scavenge, forage, or hunt. > > Shortly after entering the forest, moving along the road, we find a sunken swampy area, which hasn't washed away the road, but has provided an opportunity for downed logs to sprout a truly bewildering array of edible mushrooms. They cluster along the rough wood in weird lines, all vaguely off beige in pale pastel colors. Our pockets are full of supplies, but if they weren't, this would be a fine place to harvest some food for later. We'll make note of it. Already we are three-tenths of the way toward a successful delve through this forest. Let's take one more punch at it and see what comes up. > **Delve the Depths** > **Miss**: 1 + 2 (edge) = **3** vs **4**, **9**. > **Reveal a Danger**: You face a perplexing mystery or tough choice. > > Past the mushroom patch, the forest gives way to swampier ground with the road actually being submerged at several points. Clearly, the recent flooding has made it difficult to figure out which way the road actually proceeds. > > And it almost feels as though the trees are actively hindering our progress. Have we lost the road? It's been a while since we felt ruts under our feet. Did we wander off into the swamp by accident? A full miss was definitely not something that helped us out. Instead, it stuck us straight into *Reveal a Danger*. If that danger had been some sort of swamp frog or evil undead thing, we would have been fine. But instead, we are lost. I didn't *roll* for that, by the way, because one of the core ideas of **Ironsworn** is that you don't roll if something is obvious to you. It seemed obvious to me that in a swampy, flooded forest, getting lost would be a really likely outcome. So here we are, standing shin-deep in water, looking around for a path and not seeing it. What kind of a place are we in? Well, we can roll on the Theme and Domain tables, which are selected based on what we came up with originally, and see what falls out. > **Delve Thicket of Sunken Secrets's area** > Area: Infested Tanglewood > Feature: Rocky outcrop > Danger: Denizen lairs here > Aspect focus: Secret Illumination Oh. That's not good. > We find a relative rarity in this swampy forest: a large rock jutting up out of the water. It's slippery, but it could provide an elevated position to look for markers or just figure out which way the road might be. > > In the shadow of the trees, swarms of fireflies chase each other. This might be beautiful in other circumstances, but now it just reminds us of the bugs and worse, what might be lurking nearby. We'll leave it there, but I think that you can see what I find appealing about **Delve**. The random oracle system provides just enough guidance and nudging for the one person who is most important to really generate and engage with the environment, the player. We'll leave Servan hanging out here in a bad spot, potentially soon to be swarmed with Hades-knows-what in a swampy forest, looking for a lost road out. If you want to follow along and finish his story off yourself, go pick up **[[Ironsworn]]** and **Ironsworn: Delve**. You definitely won't be disappointed. [^pf]: I'm using **[Pocketforge](https://pocketforge.rockpaperstory.com)** to do the rolling because I'm way too lazy to break out my dice *and* because it has a nicely integrated character sheet system and Move list which makes this zip.