The Newest Flesh

Crescent B/X is a very, very rules light game that is aimed at generating a whimsical light fantasy experience that still nods towards D&D.

One of the aspects of the game I'm finding fascinating is the degree of negotiation there is in the creation of the shared world. There is the usual Palette, Tone, Lines and Veils but then explicit discussions of whether character death is on the table and with what regularity, what kind of tasks do adventurers routinely do and what presents a challenge for them?

Powerfully it also introduces the concept of a negotiated Baseline which sets the power-level of the characters. Namely what things are routine for the kind of people the characters are, what requires a game check and what things are beyond them and are the realm of higher powers.

The world building section is explicit but short and I've immediately thought of hacking in Archipelago's ownership to make this idea a bit more concrete.

Character generation is interesting and almost all entirely narratively based with no numbers assigned. There is a mention of dots on Features and this doesn't seem very well explained and probably could have been handled by adding an adjective to the Feature. It is the one duff note in an otherwise excellent guide to sketching a character.

The Alignments and Priorities section is quite interesting. For Alignments player describes a few opposing axes and places the character on them with a preference to one side of the axis. So “more dishonest than honest”, “More inclined to trust someone than distrust them”, “Eager to embrace magic and rarely rejects it”. These seem like they are ways to ease into the character without being too restrictive.

Priorities are described as moral compass but some of the examples are more like things that matter to the character like “Having the last word”, “Living life to the fullest”. They feel more like maxims of how the character wants to behave. The description here isn't the greatest but the examples are clear and together the Alignments and Priorities give you a sense of the moral nature of the character and what they are trying to achieve.

Crescent B/X espouses a lot of FKR principles in terms of focus on the world and negotiation in game rather than mechanics but it also combines it with some storygaming concepts. The story may not be the point of the game but shared creation is important with creation and inspiration coming from all players not just the facilitator (GM).

The final page has a quick roll table for creating characters which helps illustrate the creation rules and then has some optional rules for Experience (which to be honest don't seem to be that great) and death which seems good.

The game is great distillation of freeform and storygaming principles that retains a very light mechanic with relatively light consequences for failure. It is a brilliant distillation of what good rules light games should embody and I'm really interested in using it to bring some ideas I have to life.