I had this weird experience picking apart the design of Agon.
Agon (second edition specifically, but I’ll be saying just Agon for the rest of this piece), by John Harper and Sean Nittner, is a game of Greek heroes, big action, and gaining Glory. It’s silly and fun and like The Odyssey plus The Fast and the Furious.
It’s got one main mechanic, a conflict resolution system that covers an entire scene and every player’s action in that scene with a single roll. The GM rolls for antagonistic forces, players roll to see if they best them, and then you go from worst player result up to best player result with each player taking a moment to describe their horrible failure or wild success within the scene.
It’s slick! I’ve found the process of assembling a dice pool for this roll to take quite a long time and be tough for new players to wrap their heads around, but that’s partially made up for by there being basically just the one mechanic to learn and by just how breezy the system feels when you’ve become comfortable with it.
But in having run ~two campaigns worth of Agon, I think the secret sauce of the game lies less in its mechanics and more in the writing of its pre-written adventures, or islands as Agon calls them.
Agon’s Island Structure
Agon comes with 12 pre-written Islands, of which I’ve loved about a third, liked about a third, and could live without about a third. I think that’s a good hit rate, especially when I know many people whose favorites are in that third category for me.
Each is two spreads long. The first contains a full page of art followed by an overview and Arrival situation - an immediate action set piece that the players find themselves confronting.
On the second spread you get ideas for what the PCs might do next, ideas on how the island might conclude, a dramatis personae including stats, and some open-ended questions to prompt the GM to customize the island to their table (i.e. “Does Nassia fight now to restore her mother’s honor? Or because Kapra broke her heart?”)
The setup for most of the islands is that there’s two to three factions, all of whom are sympathetic in their own ways, and who all want conflicting things. Basically the PCs are being dropped into a no-win situation and being told by the gods, who don’t even agree with each other about what should be done, and to figure out how to resolve things.
In my experience, the way basically every island plays out is the same regardless of playgroup:
The PCs show up and do a cool action set piece opener. This opening reveals some obvious conflict but hints at a deeper mystery.
The PCs investigate, and I just tell them whatever they want to know (if they roll poorly, maybe they end up locked up for it, but they get the info). This takes another couple contests / set pieces like talking to the king or tracking someone into the woods or whatever.
Having figured out what’s going on, the PCs reconvene and sit down to decide (A) who do they actually support in this conflict now that they know all the secrets, (B) what’s the endgame they’re looking for here, and (C) how are they going to make that happen. Maybe they want Nassia on the throne and they’re gonna kill Kapra the Usurper’s giant boar to make that happen.
The PCs go on a final set piece to do the thing.
As I hinted at earlier, my favorite part of this process is that third step where the players all sit around and hash out a plan. I’ve seen real arguments between players about who is right on an island and what ending this place deserves. They reveal what they really think, what they value, and what’s important to their characters. It’s the best.
I think this moment is one of the things that RPGs are best at relative to other mediums. There is no other medium for storytelling that offers you greater choice and agency, and taking advantage of that means asking players make hard choices. After all, easy choices are no choice at all. But watching players truly agonize over what should be done? That’s my favorite part of GMing. That’s the moment I think true character is revealed in both PCs and in players. That’s what putting people in no-win situations and making them figure out a way through is good for.
And doing that comes from the fiction, the diegesis of story, not from rules.
So I’ve Been Getting Into Dungeon Crawls
…as part of an ongoing project to try out more styles of play. And I’ve found that the good ones, the ones me and my groups like at any rate, are the ones structured just like Agon islands. They have two to three groups that all want conflicting things, they’re all mad about it, and things are gonna go south quick if the PCs don’t do something about it.
I have found exploring a dungeon without purpose beyond gold and treasure to be fairly uninspiring. And I have found the actual exploration of difficult to navigate spaces to be something my players are reluctant to do without sufficient motivation.
(Now maybe that’s because we haven’t taken the time to set that up ourselves, or maybe it’s because a lot of modules don’t come with great hooks, but the point remains that the people I want a reason to be doing their exploration.)
But a shitty no-win situation is fun for the whole family. It gives dungeon crawling, or avoiding dungeon crawling, purpose. It gives people something to push against narratively. It remains fun in an extremely rules-light system that’s trying to tell stories at a small scale as opposed to Agon’s gigantic ones.
And the more I have thought about it, the more I think this holds true across basically every game I like that’s about external conflict. Apocalypse World is about communities in conflict over scarce resources. Blades in the Dark and most of its successors are all about the faction game. Even For the Queen has at least two factions at play with its ongoing war and in the way it funnels you towards deciding whether you stand with the queen or against her.
This isn’t exactly new advice or a new observation. While talking about some of this on Discord this past week, Aaron King pointed out they’d written essentially this exact advice into Patchwork World after being taught it by an old mentor. This is essentially what Apocalypse World’s MC section and the Blades in the Dark GM section tell you to do.
But I think this describes the power of a good module or scenario. It is, at least for me, at best time consuming and at worst downright hard to come up with a good no-win situation from scratch. Story games like Apocalypse World and Blades are often like “just come up with something! Here’s some guidelines!” when advising the GM on how to kick things off, and I wish more of them came with Agon islands instead.
Give me detailed no-win situations to toss PCs into the middle of like a grenade. More than a new system, that’s what I want when I GM.
And on that note…
Further Islands and Even Further Islands
One of my first RPG publications ever was Even Further Islands, a trilogy of additional islands for Agon. When I wrote it three years ago I was operating much more on instinct than the front of mind thoughts in this blogpost. On revisiting, I think it holds up extremely well and is a great illustration of the kind of thing I’m talking about above. If you want to see me put my money where my mouth is, give it a read.