Capsule Games Part II: Meditations on Capsule Design

In part I, I tried to define a sub-genre of RPG that my friends and I are calling a "capsule game." 

To revisit that definition: Capsule games are a genre of RPG where the game is sold as a complete experience. They often have a light-weight rule system, predefined characters, and a bounded adventure for the GM. 

Is it possible to move our discussion of "capsule games" from declarative to imperative? Let's find out. Vive le manifeste!

These principles structure capsule games so they can do what they do best:

• Provide predefined characters
• Create rules that are the right size
• Create immersive rules
• Create maps with no blanks
• Provide a sense of finality

Principle: Define Characters

Capsule games don't say "You can be anything!" They say "Come play this sort of thing." 

And the more specific a game is, the more bespoke the experience becomes.

This is good: "Come play Cops and Robbers. You can be a Cop or a Robber."

This can be even better: "Come play Cops and Robbers. You can be Sweet Georgie, the head of the family. You can also play Dick Little, his consigliere. You can also play Fred "Scar Face" Scaramucci, who's Sweet Georgie's cousin but also an FBI informant. That's all the characters."

Give players the chance to play important, specific characters like they would take on specific roles in a play. 

(For a while, "playing a premade character" seemed to be the defining trait of capsule games to me. But enough games lack this specific element and still feel extremely encapsulated (notably the Labyrinth Adventure Game), so this cannot be a hard requirement.)

Example: Lady Blackbird by John Harper

Man, I can't explain Lady Blackbird better than the author himself. The first page reads:

Lady Blackbird is on the run from an arranged marriage to Count Carlowe. She hired a smuggler skyship, the Owl, to take her from her palace on the Imperial world of Ilysium to the far reaches of the Remnants, so she could be with her once secret lover, the pirate king Uriah Flint. 

However—Just before reaching the halfway point of Haven, the Owl was pursued and captured by the Imperial cruiser, Hand of Sorrow, under charges of flying a false flag.

Even now Lady Blackbird, her bodyguard, and the crew of the Owl are detained in the brig, while the commander of the cruiser, Captain Hollas, runs the smuggler ship’s registry over the wireless. It’s only a matter of time before they discover the outstanding warrants and learn that the Owl is owned by none other than the infamous outcast Cyrus Vance.

What an intro! It immediately sets up the scenario and names some of the characters involved—many of whom will be controlled by the players themselves!

In this game, you play as the eponymous Lady Blackbird, the outcast skyship captain Cyrus Vance, the lady's bodyguard Naomi Bishop—maybe even Snargle, the skyship's goblin pilot! 

These characters feel alive, interesting, and ready to go the minute you look at their character sheets. 

Principle: Create Rules that are the Right Size

Capsule games thrive by being an all-in-one package—the setting, the adventure, the characters, and the rules. 

It's not just "completeness" that defines this experience, though. These games are only effective when they are the right size. 

"Bespoke Specific RPGs trump unmodified general RPGs" - Phlox, Whose Measure God Cannot Take 

If you added a bespoke, discrete campaign on top of the 5E player's guide, dungeon master's guide, and monster manual, you wouldn't have a capsule game. Capsule games have just as many rules as they need. No more, no less. 

Create rules that you can hold in your head all at once. 

Example: Wolves Upon the Coast by Luke Gearing

Wolves Upon the Coast is a 'dark ages' hexcrawl campaign. In this game, players are landless, state-less raiders loosed upon a fantastic Scandinavian-esque setting. 

Everything in this game has Luke Gearing's signature terseness, from the hex descriptions to the monsters to the rules. 

The rules span 15 pages, and at first glance look like another OSR blogger's retroclone: standard but serviceable. 

With so few pages devoted to rules, though, what is included and what is excluded is extremely important. It tells you what sort of game this is. Here, look at the table of contents:

Rules for travel. Rules for wind. Rules for timekeeping. Rules for naval battles. These are the things the game is about. 

Principle: Create Immersive Rules

RPGs excel as genre emulation devices. Capsule games, doubly so. (This is related to games being the "right size," but is distinct.) 

The rules don't need to be gimmicky, but capsule games provide a space to embrace genre in a way that might feel repetitive in a game intended for longer play. For example, tearing off pieces of your character sheet or snuffing out candles isn't a mechanic you'd want to replicate over an entire campaign, but could be fun in a smaller game. What feels fresh after 20 hours of gaming might feel tedious after 50 hours. 

Write rules that evoke something from the genre you're trying to emulate. If they aren't intuitive, easy to remember, easy to reference, and immersive, cut them from your capsule game.

Example: Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast

Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast by Possum Creek Games is about the titular B&B owned by the witch Yazeba and staffed by a colorful cast of characters: a robot maid, a frog knight chef, a rock & roll porter, and a runaway who sleeps in the laundry room. 

There are very few rules to speak of in a trad game sense. But there are rules in this game. 

For example: Don't open the sealed envelope until you're told to do so by the game. Doing so will evoke a curse on your family.

There are stickers. As you progress through the game, you'll unlock stickers which you will place into the game book—reminiscent of a legacy board game. 

And there are tons of little mini-games that you play as you progress through the chapters. (Indeed, the chapters of the book are out of order, making you feel like you're catching reruns of a Japanese cartoon show on network TV at 2:30 PM as a kid.)

All of these "rules" provide a distinct feeling when you're experiencing Yazeba's. The book is half a Lisa Frank activity book and half Studio Ghibli series bible. It's very evocative.

(Note of interest: I have it on good authority that Yazeba's was originally a hack of Lady Blackbird until it became it's own thing.)

Principle: Create Maps with No Blanks

Capsule games aren't just RPGs with strong settings, like Shadowrun or World of Darkness. Capsule games aren't just a collection of random tables for the GM's inspiration, like Ironsworn or Stars Without Number. Capsule games are adventures that are ready to run.

Create structures to facilitate play out of the box for GMs. 

Out of the box play might still have some elements that encourage replayability, like random tables. But having just random tables isn't enough for a GM to run the game. Give your GM something substantive to work with. 

Provide lists of scene prompts and evocative questions. Provide dungeons with maps. Provide depthcrawls with interesting scenes. Provide whodunits with well-realized NPCs and clues. Provide fully keyed hexmaps. 

Example: Silent Titans

Silent Titans by Patrick Stuart and Dirk Detweiler Leichty is an Into the Odd-like game set in a strange world of masked talking animals, Faerie Queene references, and slumbering giants whose nightmares have distorted reality. The setting of Silent Titans is persistently dreamlike and unreal: the physics of time, space, seasons, color, causality all seem broken. 

But it is a very "runnable" book. It has a two page spread on how to create an encounter for the GM, combining elements of the scenes provided by the game book, random table entries, and the players' actions. 

It has a starting scene. Each game begins with Dr. Hog screaming "You fools! My dementia bomb has wrecked your very minds!" and proceeds to have the PCs climb up the spine of a clocktower titan to defeat him. 

From there, the players wash up in the watery city of Elles Mere. The city has noted points of interest and NPCs to speak to. 

From there, there's a clear campaign structure wherein the players journey to five slumbering titans, explore their dungeon bodies, and repair their ego machines to fix reality.

Everything you need to run this game and this setting is given to the GM in a single book.

Principle: Create a Sense of Finality

RPGs don't succeed when you think of them like novels. The linearity of a "story" creates friction with an RPG's infinite input. However, a clear structure in a scenario with a beginning, a journey, and an ending will give your game a sense of finality that is appealing.

Create a goal for the players. Tell the players and the GM what the goal of this game is: take the ring to Mordor, blow up the Death Star, reunite Lady Blackbird with her former lover the pirate king. The game is about trying to fulfill this quest. 

Give the GM a scenario for if and when the players finally get to the end of their journey. Give the GM tools to run this final scene. Give the players a sense of accomplishment when it is completed, even if there are twists and unexpected turns.

Example: The Dark Crystal Adventure Game

The Dark Crystal Adventure Game by Janet Forbes and Jack Caesar takes place in the setting of the movie, but in the distant past when there were many gelflings and the skeksis were in the first ascendency of their evil power. 

The set up is this (text directly from the book):

• The party must travel Thra, collecting seven seeds from the seven great trees.

• They must do so within ninety and nine days, otherwise a great calamity will strike Thra.

The book provides a keyed map. The players can go to any of the seven trees in any order, and the GM knows what sort of lands they cross through to get there and what sort of adventures must be overcome to get the seed at that great tree. 

As you journey, you tick off days. Each purple day is a "Darkening" event that causes shadow and ruin to fall over an area of the map. Maybe this is an area of the map the PCs have visited, or maybe not.

[SPOILER] Once the party enters the seventh great tree to get the seventh seed, they trigger the final scene of the game: the skeksis have stolen the final seed and taken it to their evil castle. The players then have to infiltrate the castle to get the final seed to complete their quest. If successful, the Darkening has been held off, and the PCs are given opportunities to say how they will help rebuild the world after the events of the story.

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As I mentioned in part I, definitions are squiggly things. A game might not adhere to one or another of these principles and still be solidly a capsule game. Still, these structures (I think) allow capsule games to clearly define themselves as a category apart.