Gallows Corner - A Peasants' Revolt RPG is produced by Three Sails Studios and is set in England in 1376 in a time of revolution. It's a 246-page full-colour soft-touch hardback book, beautifully illustrated with throughout with a stock silver on black cover showing a gallows silhouette either against the moon or the Sun. The layout is clean and easy to read, but personally I find the font size too big. I can easily imagine this as a slightly smaller book, perhaps B2 or digest especially as there are quite deep top and bottom margins.
Two waves of the bubonic plague have swept through the country and the Hundred Years War is well under way in France. Power is ruthlessly hoarded by the nobility and the peasantry is oppressed with little in the way of rights and freedoms. Indeed, in many cases those rights are being stolen away thanks to the greed of the ruling class who can act with impunity. The players take the part of members of the peasantry who are resisting this oppression.
The game brings its own unique dice pool system and a more extensive meta-game for Influence and Control that reminds me of Blades in the Dark. There's a huge amount to impress in the background and setting, and the game is ambitious in what it wants to achieve. The designers describe it as being narrative first and foremost, which would explain why there are some elements of the system design that I feel let the game down because they are underwritten and unclear.
Characters are defined with three traits: physical, emotional, and intellectual. Each of these has a single die assigned to it, usually a D6 or a D8 at the start. They also have a trade which is a general area of expertise and a job related to that trade, both of which give additional dice.
Similar trades are presented together under heading the ties them all together. For example, "The Body" includes labourers, miners, pugilists, servants, sex workers, and soldiers. Each of these groups has six different trades within it, and each trade typically has three jobs underneath it; a Soldier could be a conscript, deserter or mercenary. Each of the group of trades has four skills defined, which provide a way to narratively impact the world without necessarily needing to take a test. For example, a soldier could be a survivor which means they are hard to kill.
Usually skills don't have dice rolls associated with them, but if they do the Narrator is advised to take this into consideration. It's not describing the core book, but the publisher's Discord suggests raising the dice level in such cases.
This lack clarity, needing to fall back on the Discord as a reference, is quite common in the sections on mechanics.
Characters can unlock additional skills, and increase Dice levels with experience. Non-Player Characters are simply defined by the core three traits.
When making a test, players will roll one or more dice from the dice pool. As a minimum they will roll one of their experience dice – physical, intellectual, emotional – but they can roll additional dice if they can justify why their trade or job would come to play. To succeed, you only need to roll a 5 on any of the dice rolled. If another character offers help, this will increase the appropriate dice by a step if their assistance relates to their experience, or they get to roll their job or trade dice if the help relates to that expertise.
In some circumstances, dice can be reduced down to a single D4. Obviously, you can't roll a success on a D4 if the target number is 5 and there are no adds. Mechanically, there is no point in making a dice roll. Initially, I thought that this was a typo in the text, and the target number should be a 4, not a 5. However, I sought clarity in the Kickstarter comments and the Discord and the designer said this was a deliberate choice. It's not a choice that sits well with me, because several of the NPC as presented have D4 ratings in their experience and this doesn't always align with the character description. Player characters can also have their dice reduced to this level if they suffer some kind of setback. It just doesn't sit well with me that you have a dice to roll that cannot really ever achieve a success unless the character is helped by someone or finds some other kind of advantage.
Characters develop by gaining expertise and training. Every time a test is done that involves a job dice, a player records a point of expertise for the character whether or not the roll succeeds. Once expertise points equal to the value of the next dice step are achieved, the character can undergo training to either raise the dice by a step or to unlock an additional skill. There is also a route to unlock a new job, but the character needs to have achieved at least journeyman level in their job, and there will be a temporary reduction in their skills in the existing job while they learn the new job. Learning two new jobs increase the trade dice by step.
The meta-engine that drives the game is all about influence and control. Influence represents the fame and notoriety of the character and the party, enabling them to acquire followers, known as retainers. They also gain a single benefit and detriment which will happen once per season. Influences measured both at an individual level, and at the party level. Once the party achieves a high enough collective influence, they can stage a showdown with the authorities to gain control of an individual hundred or even the county. Control reflects the size of county and the status the person who rules it. Control can be challenged by taking part in an active liberation or directly engaging with the central antagonist. These actions can reduce the Control value or increase the parties influence.
This is another area where the game isn't clearly written. The benefits and detriments of influence are clearly defined but the typical amount of influence gained from acting is not. Likewise, examples aren't given of what levels of reduction should be applied to control values. When I sought advice from the designers on the Discord, I found that they said that this was deliberate to give the Narrator flexibility. Personally, I found this a bit of a cop out, because because understanding this is really important in understanding and running the game. I do think they should've included examples in the book and then just stated that they were open to the Narrator's discretion.
The book is also lacking in examples of the mechanics for tests and Control/influence in use. It feels under written. However, I'm pretty confident it will work in play and the clarifications on the Discord have addressed all the areas I wasn't sure about.
There are some useful rules and tables for managing retinues and retainers, and determining the outcome of missions that you may send them on. Retainers are the natural replacements for the player characters, should they die.
Combat uses a diamond to represent the status of a combatant. Combat is a simple exchange; both the Narrator and the player roll their dice (as a minimum the physical experience dice) and the highest roll wins. Success means that the loser;s condition can be reduced, or the winners condition can be improved. Assistance can also be rendered and down or retreating combatants can be captured. Retainers are included by adding their physical dice into the players dice pool. Tests can also be made appropriate points during combat to gain advantage. If you win a round a combat, you gave momentum which typically means that you get narrative control at the start of a scene in some form. Overall, mechanically this is a really simple system with a degree of ambiguity as it's written. It's nothing to set the world alight, but it should work okay.
The next part of the book focuses on the background and establishing the area of England that you'll be using for the group to play in. This is done by establishing the point crawl. England is broken into regions, and within each region there are Counties, and each county has several Hundreds. There's an interesting set of key principles for establishing the point crawl;
- England is a living place.
- The space of England is the structure of the game.
- Start local (you don't have to prepare it all at the start).
- Travel should be exciting and dangerous (even though it's abstracted in play).
- Use emergent storytelling – the place and people that the characters meet and react to should drive the story.
- The storytelling is intimate and grand at the same time, linked by the point crawl.
- Players are custodians and victims of England.
- Hope & hardship of the two sides of the same coin.
- Don't get bogged down in historical detail.
- Choose the scene location (this could be a town within the Hundred or even another location).
- Build a scene around the verb for that point (although there are some scene suggestions in the book if you are struggling for an idea).
- Establish the clock for the scene (and it is possible that you could have more than one clock).
- Plan for the scene's resolution (which means the Narrator needs to have a feel for what success, failure and a mixed result would bring).
- Use the resolution of the scene to inspire future scenes
- Having skill levels that generate automatic failures is a red flag to me. There's no point in having the skill if you cannot succeed in it and that's a design choice the authors have consciously taken.
- If the authors intend for the Narrator to be able to set how influence works, then they should give clear guidance on that. The reader shouldn't have to go and look on a Discord forum to find out how the game is meant to have played.
- I also found the lack of maps within the book disappointing, especially in a game that is tied to geography. Yes, I know that they are available as downloads but I feel they should've been in the book itself.
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