Perhaps no one can be told what the Engine is without seeing it for themselves – which is why Black Iron Engine is finally dropping on March 26th! At last, you will be able to read it for yourself, and I will be free of this heavy, ferrous burden.
Until then, let’s talk about what you’re going to do in this game.
Calling of an Engineer
The premise of Black Iron Engine is that an electromechanical megastructure hidden in higher dimensions creates reality, but it was built a long time ago and is falling apart by now. Therefore, the world is erratically glitching out like a poorly maintained computer program, necessitating constant trips into its labyrinthine grid of utility tunnels to repair it. The people who do this are the proud men, women, and otherwise of a secret government organization known simply as the Civil Service. Agents of the Service carry special keys they can insert into the maintenance slot on any elevator to make it shift into 4D space and take them to the source of each new problem, before the general public finds out they live in an artificial simulacrum of a city.
Obviously, there’s a tension there: do you actually want to keep lying to people about what’s really going on? Is it ethical to work for what is ultimately a product of the military-industrial complex? Do you have a right to play God with the rest of humanity? Those are questions you’ll be able to address during a campaign, potentially choosing to turn on your organization and rend the veil if you like.
On the other hand, this game makes being an engineer seem cool. You get to wear an iron ring and summon floating retrofuturistic devices that shoot lasers and pour concrete. In this world, the sciences have been systematized to the extent that even psychology, philosophy, and art are considered form of engineering. There’s a certain Golden Age SF sense of engineers saving the world through cleverness and audacity. So the rules had to reflect this.
No Dice, Only Mastery
Although I’ve recently started to come around to them (on my own terms, which I’ll discuss in a future post) I spent years working to eliminate dice from my games. I don’t like the ways that they disrupt logical progressions of events and get in the way of what players are trying to do, both on a roleplaying and a problem solving level. So this game uses something appropriately mechanistic instead: you have an attribute score, and skills, and you total all your modifiers up and try to get a number bigger than whatever (or whoever) is opposing you. You skip the part where you would add a dice roll to it, like many other games. It’s partially inspired by Nobilis and the Amber RPG.
On its face that might seem less interesting, but there’s one more aspect: if you come up short, you can buy a success by taking a “Risk”, a bad outcome that bumps up your check value. The line of thought here was including PbtA-style mixed success complications but making them a direct choice by the player. So in practice, you’re always making a decision about how important something is to you: is it worth breaking your equipment, getting hurt, or losing precious time to make that repair? You’re on a tight schedule and everyone is counting on you.
Project Management
This approach also manifests in character progression. You’re always working on a project, a big change to yourself or the world: trying to uncover a mystery, healing from an old emotional wound, or reconfigure the Orrery subsystem so it’s sunny in the city all year round. Projects proceed in a series of steps, and when you get to the end of one you can always choose to either get what you wanted, or get what you needed instead. Projects aren’t purely external, physical goals: the steps are set up like acts of a story, and include romances, redemptions, and reconciliation with personal problems.
This part of the game is inspired a great deal by the “arcs” of Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, in that they reward you for roleplaying how much you’re dealing with, and moving through the steps grants you narrative authority to make certain things happen. I find that most games don’t give players enough of a change to meaningfully alter the world, so I put in a direct narrative override to let people do precisely that. Projects tick up each time you return home for downtime in between assignments – during playtesting, people wrote little microfiction vignettes in between sessions about what they were up to, which were an incredible joy to read.
Over Budget
You don’t loot the Engine to acquire equipment: you’re a civil servant, you requisition your gear. Requisitioning assets occurs after taking an assignment, so you have a chance to tailor your loadout to the task at hand. Each asset is fully customizable, built using a point-based system in which the size of an item sets a budget, which is added and subtracted to by positive and negative traits respectively.
Equipment comes in seven types: companion, file, outfit, sensor, toolkit, vehicle, and weapon. While you can probably guess how the others work, those first two are special. A companion is a friend, subordinate, pet, or something similar: this is treated as essentially another equipment slot, since they don’t affect action economy and exist to provide additional expertise or aid your checks. A file, on the other hand, is a physical document (or a floppy disk) holding vital information about something you’re likely to encounter. You can functionally expend a file to declare a fact about it (such as using a map of an area to point out a secret passage) or provide a bonus on a check.
Closing the Loop
So, the core gameplay loop of BIE looks like this: something goes wrong in the city, like gravity pulling upward in one particular alleyway, or the sky going offline. The team requisitions a loadout of equipment they think will be most useful in dealing with this particular issue, then goes out into the city to investigate the problem directly. Once they think they’ve nailed down exactly what part of the Engine is going wrong to cause it, they find the nearest elevator and go on a cyberdungeoncrawl to locate the broken part and repair it. Then they head home, and use their downtime to both recover and work on personal projects. It’s a familiar pattern for people who’ve played other modern RPGs, but one with a particular spin on it: you’re not going into the Engine to loot it, you’re there to fix it. Acquiring wealth is meaningless, if you wanted gold you could just get a fabricator to dispense some bullion. What matters is skill, lateral thinking, and getting your paperwork filed on time afterwards.
Especially the paperwork. It’s really been piling up while you were away.
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