All the fun of WWI - now with blood magic!
The Game: Never Going Home
The Publisher: Wet Ink Games
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one
I've had Never Going Home on my shelf for a few years now, and I think I had it misfiled - I had it under post-apocalypse, but it's really an alt-history game (which I usually filed with urban fantasy, but maybe it needs its own section? Hmm). Anyway, it's up there with Lightning War and Wild Skies: Europa Tempest in that it presents an alternate take on a real-world historical event, in this case the Great War.
The Great War is fertile ground for RPG-type stuff; we see it in Wraith: The Great War as well as the aforementioned other games. I'm sure there are others, too. It's got the tactical aspects, sure, but I think it's just as interesting to lean into the dark, violent, messy absurdism of the whole thing - here are a lot of fragile young men put on the front lines before an enemy that has the technology to turn them into hamburger on a heretofore unseen scale, the people pulling the strings are too blinkered and old to even acknowledge that things have changed and that shit like "shell shock" is a real thing, what can we do but write poetry? I've always wanted to run a game set during the Great War, but I don't think I've ever quite had the right group for it.
Anyway, Never Going Home is about the Unit - the group of soldiers out here doing missions. There's a dice system called the +One system, same as Wet Ink's other game Heckin' Good Doggos (which is, shall we say, tonally different). Basically you roll your skill dice but use your Attribute rating to add dice, or add pips to rolls, or reroll dice. As such, if you have a high skill rating or a high Attribute rating, you're in better shape. Reading the game, I worry you'd fail an awful lot even with decent ratings, but then, Heckin' Good Doggos worked pretty well at the table and this game has a lot of line support (usually the sign of a game that people are interested in, unless your name is 'Lakim').
Anydangway, let's make a character. Let's assume he's American, and named William Jones (yes, this is a reference to the "Jones" bloodline in Vampire: The Requiem, which was renamed "Brothers of Ypres" because somebody is a fuckin' Philistine. But they're the Jones, that's their real name).
I get 10 points to split up between Brawn, Smarts, and Guts, except I really get 7 points because there's a 1 minimum in each one. Anyway, let's assume that young William is more Guts than Smarts. I'll put his Guts up to 5, his Brawn at 3 and his Smarts at 2.
Next step is gender, sexuality, and personal history. Um, OK. Is my sexuality that big a part of the game? It didn't seem like it, reading it, but that's fine.
So, sure. William Jones is from...um, someplace with pears, I think. Who grows pears? Washington, sounds good. Willie is from central Washington, got drafted at 18, sent away to France, and now here we are. Willie misses the smell of pears on the air, and the sound of the bees when the pear starts to ripen. And he misses Jackie, another boy his age who promised to kiss them before they both shipped out, but then when Willie showed up to where they'd agreed to meet, Jackie wasn't there. Alas.
Next up? Training!
(An aside: I don't remember another game that interjects the "concepty" stuff of chargen between mechanical stuff, but I wonder if that's not a smart way to do it. Enough mechanical framework to get some sense of who the character is, and then consider history, and then back to skills? Hmm.)
I get three skills that are "trained", so let's pick Athletics (runnin', jumpin', climbin' trees), Transport (Willie is a skilled driver, I guess), and Whisper (magic; maybe Willie just has a knack).
Now I get three points to actually buy Skill dice in those three Skills. I think I'll go one each. That means I must pick a Whisper path. I want one that relies on Guts, obviously. I'll take Healing Words, and take the Holiday spell (I can do a group ritual that lifts everyone's spirits, that's pretty cheerful).
And that is it, actually. If I were playing I'd draw three cards for my "starting deployment" (a lot of sub-systems work with cards, and it looks pretty interesting, actually), but since I'm not, I shan't bother. Willie is now 19, brown hair, brown eyes, looks like any of thousands of other young men dying in the trenches.
