The Shadow of Yesterday Actual Play: introduction

5 weeks ago, I started a campaign of the Shadow of Yesterday, an indie tabletop rpg from their first era, in 2005, back when the Forge was still a thing. It was in that forum that this game, the Shadow of Yesterday, grew to become a community development, thanks to its author's, Clinton R. Nixon, strict adherence to Creative Commons license. This culture of freely sharing his work extended to the game's setting philosophy: instead of a set cannon, the community contributed to the setting's development with new cultures or alternative takes on existing ones, which made this game a refreshing addition to a scene often filled with cannon set in stone.

First, a brief introduction to the game. The Shadow of Yesterday is a fantasy game with an existing setting, unlike, for example, Burning Wheel, another game from a similar time which I find somewhat similar. In this game, the world's recovering from an apocalypses, from the skyfire (a meteorite) that befell the land aprox a century ago, shattering the lands, the social structures, the empire and the memory of the past. The world is only now recovering from this event, people start to travel, commerce slowly resurfaces and new social structures try to coalesce. It's a fantasy setting without the rigidity of most fantasy settings, where heroes can place their footprint into the new world, if they're brave enough.

Another interesting element of the setting is its focus on cultures: each culture has its own style, ideology, methods for organizing themselves and solving problems, all of that expressed in "crunch", in their own selection of skills, secrets (like d&d feats), and keys (like BW keys). There's more focus on cultures than on races, but they do exist, albeit with an interesting twist: elves and goblins are unique transformations of humans. A person can turn into a goblin or into an elf, and back into a human, under certain conditions, so elves and goblins don't have a culture of their own, but rather partake in the culture they're part of.

On the rules: the 3 stats, vigor, instinct and reason, are pools instead of fixed stats, and they help ability rolls or trigger secrets, which is a nice way of dealing with the distinction between stats and skills. Abilities are fixed, and are added to the result of a dice roll (using fudge/fate dice) to get the result. The 3 pools are replenished using recovery scenes that always involve an interaction with another character.

A secret is everything that changes some of the basic rules in a singular context. It's fairly similar to d&d 3.x's feats, and most of them are activated by spending pool points. This is where the crunch differs the most from culture to culture.

Keys are the main means towards gaining experience, but they come with an interesting twist: if you act against your key in a dramatic fashion, you can cancel it and gain lots of experience points, on the condition you never again buy the same key. It's an interesting design choice that rewards your character if they change under pressure.

Enough about the rules. There is a core tenet that informs the design philosophy of the game: "no gods, no monsters, only people." It's fairly simple, but it's consequences are vast: first, there's no metaplot, no bigger game played by gods, where player characters are merely pawns. There are also no monsters, no creatures doomed to be essentially evil or antagonistic. Everybody has reason to act the way they do, communication's always possible, which means every conflict is political at its core, and there is no gratuitous violence. It's easy to see how this tenet puts this game simultaneously at odds with D&D, and 90's gaming style full of metaplots and campaign arcs the players can never influence.

Back to the campaign. We're not using any of Nixon's editions of the game, nor the Spanish translation (which is really good), but instead 2008's edition by Eero Tuovinen, who split the game in 2: Solar System for a generic presentation of the rules, in theory adaptable to any genre or setting, plus The World of Near, a book containing the setting, but also all crunch associated with it. By the way, both games are pay what you want here!

Eero's edition is simply amazing. Seldom have I found so much content, so many explorations on crunch variants in a single book, so many cultures, magic subsystems, coverage for different venues of conflict, etc. It's almost too much, which, sadly, makes the book a bit hard to digest, but an amazing read if you're willing to invest in it, or merely fishing for ideas. The layout isn't particularly inspiring, again, but if you get past this barrier you'll be rewarded.

So, why this big intro? I want to reflect on my experiences GMing this game, mainly how does it feel different or similar when compared to newer story games. I figured a small introduction was needed prior to my post on the first session. I'll try not to bore you writing about rules, and insted will gradually mention them every actual play. Next time I'll write a brief introduction about the game and a few notes about first session, so see you soon!

PS: if you understand Spanish, you can watch the first 2 sessions on twitch or youtube! First session here, then second.