Escape from Dino Island, and Scions

Escape from Dino Island is, quote: “a thrilling adventure game about intrepid heroes trapped on an island overrun with creatures from a lost age — dinosaurs! Players take on the role of everyday people who are brave and competent, but also in over their head. The game is designed to help you create the kind of stories that are full of action and suspense, but in which fighting is rarely a good option. Will you escape with your life? And what kind of person will you become in your quest to survive? There’s only one way to find out…”

The system itself — the one designed to help you create stories full of action and suspense — is Powered by the Apocalypse.

What does that mean?

I talked previously about Universal Systems, which are designed to work in any setting, world, or genre. Interestingly, the appeal of Universal or Generic systems appears to be waning in the community’s imagination in the modern era. Certainly, there are still advocates and devotees, but a new kind of Universality has blossomed in recent years.

Powered by the Apocalypse is the term used by games that have similar rules and design ethos to Apocalypse World. In Escape from Dino Island’s case, it means that the system codifies the player interaction with the story through “moves;” established behaviors that characters can use to roll 2d6, add a stat, and try to get over 10 to succeed. A 7, 8, or 9 results in a mild success, or a success with a complication, while anything less than a 7 is a failure. Also, characters have “playbooks,” rather than “classes,” which detail unique moves and special narrative abilities for characters who take on a specific role.

In short, if you’ve played Apocalypse World, you know how to play Escape from Dino Island.

And it’s not the only one that’s Powered By The Apocalypse; there’s Monsterhearts, Burning Hearts Forever, Impulse Drive, Interstitial, Dungeon World, Voidheart Symphony, and many more.

Apocalypse World is not unique in having such a rich family tree. Blades in the Dark was successful enough that people have borrowed the system’s rules to make games like A Torch in the Dark, which is a solo RPG about dungeon delving. Or Neon Black, which is about living in a cyberpunk community. Or Beam Saber, which is about giant mech battles. All of these games are “Forged in the Dark.”

There are games that are Breathless, Ruled by Night, have the Mark of the Odd, and are Descended From the Queen. System Reference Documents, or SRDs, such as Guided by the Sun, Push, Caltrop Core, 36th Way, or Carta all provide guidelines for creating either your own game or supplements for an established system. They are usually little more than lists of mechanics — a framework for anyone to use to build their own RPGs.

In the early years of RPGs, the go-to method of expanding or changing a beloved game was to create a supplement. Supplement rule-books added new abilities, spells, items, or rule additions that improved a system without fundamentally changing it. Worldbooks did similar things, providing new worlds, characters, and concepts.

However, the changes from supplements were generally small and Worldbooks never changed the game too drastically. The Ravenloft books turned D&D into a horror-themed fantasy adventure game, not a new horror game in its own right.

Universal Systems allowed someone to learn a single set of rules, and then play any game they wanted to of any genre or tone. You could play a horror game one month, then sci-fi the next, then pulp steampunk, or Gothic romance, or anything in-between — all with the same set of dice and character sheets. You didn’t have to re-learn a whole new method of play.

And lest I steer you wrong, people are still creating Universal systems; GUTS+ and Solipstry, for example, are recent creations. But that’s completely different, isn’t it? Universal Systems are designed for you to create your own story, not your own ruleset. You aren’t supposed to create a different game based on the Solipstry ruleset, you are supposed to use the Solipstry ruleset to play a different game.

There are certainly parallels between modern scions and the venerable games of yesteryear: Chaosium, for example, made multiple games that used similar mechanics, ensuring that if you knew one rulebook, you were at least familiar with the others as well. White Wolf did the same.

So what’s the difference between “Powered by the Apocalypse” and “Made by Chaosium?” Nowadays, not much, since Chaosium released their Basic Roleplaying system as an SRD, but that really underscores two fundamentally different ideologies. Scions make bespoke systems for specific genres and tones, while Universal systems are supposed to be…well, universal.

So why are scions and SRDs becoming more common? Why are these families of bespoke RPGs flowering now, instead of Generic and Universal systems?

Well, the obvious answer is that it’s easier to build on top of an established foundation of rules than create your own system from scratch. If you think Mothership is fun, you don’t need to spend time playing around with different systems to make your own horror-fantasy RPG, you can just copy Mothership’s rules, add the hacks you want, remove the bits you don’t, and be finished in half the time, confident your game will at least be as fun as Mothership.

But again, why we are here is less interesting to me. I’m fascinated by what being here means, because scions are a great way to discuss ludo-narrative.

Even Universal Systems have ludo-narratives. GUTS+, for example, says it’s a game that: “allows you to live out wild adventures without straying too far from your own abilities in the real world.” FATE is about: “proactive, capable people who lead dramatic lives.” If you want to play a quiet cozy game about a witch who wants to be left alone, maybe FATE isn’t the best system to use. If you want to play a superhero, maybe give GUTS+ a miss. Even GURPS, an effective and powerful Universal System, asks the GM to adjust the rules depending on whether the game is supposed to be realistic or cinematic, gritty or pulpy.

Belonging Outside Belonging is a narrative roleplaying system about what happens when marginalized groups establish their own communities. Wretched & Alone games are solo journaling RPGs about struggle and suffering. LUMEN is about action-packed power fantasies. WuDe — the Five Elements is about maintaining balance. Each of these systems and their scions have mechanics designed to focus player attention and shape their experiences not only with the story, but with the system.

All of this is to say: I could spend all my time detailing the different system pedigrees and build a “Family Tree of RPGs,” but that sounds exhausting. Instead, I’m going to look at a few choices made by specific systems, and see how those changes impact the act of playing.

Next time, I’d like to look at a type of game that challenges one of the foundational aspects of RPGs: the GM-less game.