Tag: Black Iron Engine

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 26^th! 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.

When I first started writing tabletop RPGs, I made a huge mistake. Not an entirely unique one, but one those with similar tendencies of temperament have made many times before and will no doubt continue making into the foreseeable future: I tried to make a single glorious game, a shining city-on-a-hill with all-encompassing rules and a vast, detailed setting.

This led to predictable consequences. Any time I had an idea, I put it into the setting, repeatedly reassembling the tetrominoes to create a snug spot for each new piece. I tinkered with the mechanics endlessly, striving to simultaneously innovate while also streamline subsystems into easily grasped patterns. So of course, the almighty megaproject went on for year after year, expanding in scope with no end in sight.

A severe rookie move on my part, and one I’ve been regretting ever since. At a certain point I snapped, and stopped making games altogether, shifting gears into writing fiction instead. But, after numerous short stories and one novel, I could not help but feel the urge to write an RPG again. But first, I must exorcise the demon of my past, which goes by the name Black Iron Engine.

Prehistory

The earliest version of the Great Work coalesced in my late teens, under the title “Inheritors of the Artificial Earth”. It began as a joint project undertaken together with my twin, whose love of roleplaying games equaled my own at the time. This phase can be mostly easily summed up as “wizards with laser rifles riding dinosaurs”, a gonzo science fantasy future taking place after the second cyclic apocalypse. Each cycle created a different kind of technology (biochemical in the prehistoric age, electromechanical in the modern one, and psychomagical in the future), on top of space aliens, outer gods, and crystalline beings living in geode cities within the Earth’s mantle.

One aspect I put an inordinate amount of thought into was floating islands – I wanted them all over the place as the fortresses of sorcerer-kings, but there needed to be a reason for them. The best I came up with was this: in the fourth (or higher) spatial dimension, the apparently thin air they floated in had a physical structure (say, a mountain in a parallel universe) that invisible struts attached to, anchoring the island. Thus it would appear to hover, but from a God’s eye view, was merely part of a larger building.

This idea spun off with numerous other consequences. Why not use that logic to explain, say, giant humanoid mecha (unrealistic for all manner of reasons, but especially the crushing weight they would exert on the ground and difficulty of supplying sufficient energy density) by making them function like oversized marionettes, their joints subtly attached to a 4D armature that held them up? Why not let people carry devices (or even simply decorative accessories) that floated along with them? Why not create an unseen storehouse of objects that could be summoned up or put away with a word?

It’s important to note here that I was steeped in media that dealt with the surreal rejection of the world as objectively real: The Matrix, The Truman Show, The Big O, and the entire bibliography of Philip K. Dick, to name just a few. So all of these concepts gradually coalesced into a single idea. What if instead of a collection of possible applications, there was one, single, vast structure that performed all of them? Given a sufficient amount of time and development, you would hook it into everything, make every rock and tree subject to modification at will, as though they were models in a computer simulation. Such a machine could replace every natural process, becoming the great engine that drove the world. So, drawing on PKD’s novel VALIS, I lifted the phrase “Black Iron Prison” (a gnostic term for the false material world) and gave it a driveshaft spin. Thus: Black Iron Engine.

BIE the RPG

The war of conflicting ideas did not, however, end there! Clearly I wanted to elaborate on the sort of world you’d get when absolutely everything was artificially controlled, but I had several different potential premises within that concept. Three of them ended up receiving some form of expression, the first reaching its zenith in Black Iron Engine version 0.8, the cover of which you can see above. This interpreted the Engine as a steampunk contraption of planetary gears, powering a 1900s-era Art Nouveau utopian megalopolis. It used a Through The Looking-Glass-derived chessboard metaphor for the city blocks and centered around the conflict between four factions (The Throne, The Guild, the Church, and the Academy) for control of the great machine and thus, the world. I had fun playtesting it, but the biggest issue is that the world was simply too nice. I liked it but it lacked the bite of “everything you know is wrong” that I liked so much from a lot of my source material.

Thus, the second major iteration: Black Iron Engine 0.9. This transposed the Engine closer to the modern day, a retrofuturistic cassettepunk world flavored by conspiracy theories about men in black and the 1970s NASA style guide. Now the player characters were the hardworking engineers of the Civil Service, tasked with maintaining an aging infrastructure while not causing a public panic by letting word get out that the world was fake. The shift into a higher technological level made explaining many elements easier for my brain (which always asks “is that actually physically possible”) and gave it a desirable degree of secrecy and revelation. I finished the game some time in 2022.

And then sat on it. I just wasn’t happy with it, it wasn’t perfect. By this point I was getting anxious that roleplaying games were even a viable path forward for my writing career, so I set it aside (a ~250 page, fully laid out and illustrated game, mind you) to shift gears into writing a novel of the same name instead. The novel pushed the premise even farther into the future, about a protagonist who suffered from a glitch-disease who had to learn to speedrunning exploits for reality itself to face a malignant god-AI. It is my intention to release that novel as well, after I’m done launching this game, but one thing at a time.

Lessons Learned

A couple years back, I saw a friend successfully publish an RPG and asked myself why I hadn’t just done the same. So I made an Itch.io page and put out a couple small games for the joy of it. Even so, that old monolith never stopped haunting me. My whole creative career after it has consisted of carving off singular ideas from the omni-setting and giving them their own space to breathe, and each part I gave its own life made me a little freer. If I was ever to move forward creatively, I would need to finally reckon with the lurking progenitor.

So I hauled it out, dusted it off, and polished it up. I’ll be releasing it on the 26^th: Black Iron Engine 1.0, the version I finally let myself call “done”. Next post I’ll dive into what you’ll find inside, as well as announce an official release date, but for now, thank you for listening to a very personal story about something that defined a significant chunk of my life. I’m never going to do it again, but perhaps the work wasn’t wasted after all.

[This was previously a post on my Patreon, now being migrated here. Members get early access to all new posts!]