For once, I’m going to write about something hot off the presses! Specifically, here are my thoughts on Twilight Sword, brand spanking new RPG by Two Little Mice in cooperation with Free League. So let’s pick up a rusty sword and venture forth – and for goodness’ sake, don’t attack any chickens!
Yeah, like my snark indicates, this is basically The Legend of Zelda in TTRPG form, with a generous sprinkling of Final Fantasy, isekai anime, and a slew of other things that combines “kind of cutesy” with “faintly melancholic.” You play as a band of Champions wandering the Lands, fighting a monstrous Scourge and trying to bring back Hope in the face of Despair. There are rules for cooking. Monsters have elemental vulnerabilities. You ride giant chickens and get quests from annoying yet lovable little munchkins. It’s adorable.
The general system is basically D&D simplified – you have eight different Abilities that run from 5 to 9, and to do anything you try to roll under one of them with a d12. When a monster hits you, you lose Hearts, and if you run out of Hearts you get knocked out. Monsters don’t roll dice, but rather perform one of a set number of moves they have, such as inflicting damage or knocking someone down.
You have a Way (class) and a Kin (race), the former being your standard fighter, cleric, mage, etc, setup, but the latter being rather more idiosyncratic – the most “normal” thing to play is a Huma (effectively an elf), but you can also play a piece of corporeal shadow in a big hat or a burly Viking penguin. After a certain amount of character progression, you can choose a second Way to cross-class.
There is no PC death; if you get knocked out by a monster, it will either take you prisoner or steal all your gear and leave you to recover on your own. I love that last part – most games don’t actually want you to kill PCs, but they still make PC death constantly possible because they can’t tear themselves away from the hobby’s war-game roots, so the GM has to constantly flub rolls and come up with contrived reasons why the rules don’t apply. Here, we’re at long last being honest about it. You’re not gonna die, because that would ruin the story. Being defeated is a setback, not the end of the campaign.
Magic comes from the spirits of the land, so it’s very wholesome. Champions who follow the Way of Magic or the Way of the Light can learn spells – combat spells for the former, defensive and healing spells for the latter, utility spells for both. You can cast a spell once before it’s “expended,” at which point you can still cast it but it costs you Stamina. When you take a short rest you can replenish one spell, and when you take a long one you can replenish the lot of them. You have to roll against something to cast a spell, but even a failure gives you a minimal result – spells never just “fizzle.”
Cooking and alchemy is a whole thing whereby you combine a bunch of different stuff (foraged from the environment in the case of food, or collected from fallen monsters in the case of potions) and stir them together. The ingredients you put in provides a direction for what the resulting yums will do (e.g., if your base ingredient is red peppars, it’ll probably be something that helps stave off cold), though you roll to find out precisely what the effects are.
Weapons exist in a variety of form, most of which have an “old” and a “regular” version. You usually start out with an old weapon, and it’s normally the best you can loot from monsters, but the regular type is better. Arcane weapons, like staffs, can be used to shoot magical bolts for no cost. More impressive magical items, for instance ones that let you cast a particular spell through them, exist, but are stated to be rare. Armour subtracts from incoming damage and often have some sort of environmental protection too (e.g., wearing heavy furs makes you resistant to cold), but you can also just wear clothes, in which case the particular type of clothes you wear can offer some situational bonuses. Also, weapons can be breakable and degrade over time, though that is an optional rule.
You gain Hope (XP) from exploring new places (the GM is instructed to make such places visible and distinctive-looking from a distance, so the players know which direction to head in), defeating powerful “Boss” monsters, and doing acts of kindness for townsfolk. In doing so, you also decrease the Despair of an area, getting rid of the worst of the monster infestation and getting everyone in a better mood. Bring down Despair to 0, and the locals will throw you a party where you’ll get to meet everyone you’ve helped and be given gifts in thanks.
The game has a default setting called Radia that’s sketched out, ruled over by a menacing Scourge, but it’s clearly meant to be pretty easy to create your own Lands and Scourges. If you run a Legend (longer campaign) then the Scourge will have its own Despair rating that gets decreased along with the areas’, and once it reaches 0 it launches its final assault and the players will get to defeat it and save the realm. Hooray!
Oh, I love this thing, it’s so precious! And I also love that it’s going all in on its video game mechanics – there is zero pretension that this is some sort of gritty simulation where you’re supposed to be able to do anything you want, no, this is about doing the things you do in a light-hearted video game RPG, and everything follows the logic of one. Which also means that all the rules are really hard-and-fast and straightforward. It’s not “rules-light,” per se, because it’s still 200 pages (albeit with a lot of illustrations) and with a solid amount of D&D-ish strategy, but it’s a game where the rules are very easy to follow because they don’t try to cover every imaginable situation. This is a game about heroically fighting monsters and saving the world, so get a-fightin’ and a-savin’!
Also, and I feel like this needs to be mentioned because I honestly couldn’t believe it at first: there are no sAfEtY tOoLs. Not a line, veil or X-card to be seen! And this isn’t Shadowdark, where “suck it up” is the implied attitude – no, this is a bright, cheerful, friendly, feel-good game with, you know, colour and stuff. It’s absolutely marketed to people who want to chill out and not worry too much. And yet, no brittle admonitions about how you must treat everyone around you like they were made of glass because they’re probably one unpleasant thought from collapsing and then it will be your fault for not sanitising your every word?
Is… is woke hyper-fragility actually dying? Might I actually see a day when I can enjoy something light and breezy and it doesn’t make me miserable by lecturing me on how my autism is a crime against humanity? When words like “positive” and “idealistic” won’t immediately send me into panic mode because I know they’re code for “let’s kick around Mister Monster to make ourselves feel better”?
Wow. This really is a game about Hope overcoming Despair!