Game Review: His Majesty The Worm
Break out a tarot deck, delve the depths, and bond with your guildmates.
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On The Tin
“New-school roleplaying game, old-school sensibilities”
Food, hunger, light, inventory-management are central and fun
Rest and recovery mechanics are powered by “Bonds” - roleplay charges them for use in-between delves.
Tarot cards are used to randomize and resolve challenges and combat.
Procedures for each phase of play that promote interesting player decisions and integrate roleplay with mechanics.
OSR Stylings:
Rulings rather than rules
Implied setting rather than explicit
Whimsy!
Introduction
This thing is a beast for a TTRPG book at 9x12 inches. It’s the size of a coffee table book and could serve as such. The cover has black-on-black background art with interesting inset shiny silver decoration that makes the title pop. There’s piles of excellent black and white full page illustrations and all the content needed from both player and game master perspectives to create a guild of characters, a city for them to call home, and a terrible underworld mega dungeon for them to explore.
Fifteen chapters make up the breadth of the content.
The first five chapters cover the basics of gameplay, creating adventurers and their guild, kith and kin (ancestries and sub categories), and the four paths (the class talents linked to the main attributes).
Chapters six through nine expand upon the four “C”-phases of play, each with specific examples of play:
Crawl phase - Exploration down into the depths of the Underworld mega dungeon. Mysterious places will be explored and bonds will be charged.
Challenge phase - When the relatively free-form play of exploring breaks down into combat, the play shifts into this phase for rules bounded blow-by-blow tactical action.
Camp phase - Take actions specific to rest and recovery between the action of delving.
City phase - When it’s time to go back to civilization laden with loot and in need of supplies. There are city events to witness, taxes to pay, and specific city actions to take to advance long-term goals.
Chapter ten is all about gamemastering, and the rest of the chapters are appendices for reference including: Sorcery, Alchemy, Dungeon Denizens (Bestiary), City Creation, and Underworld Creation.
Each chapter is heralded by a full page art piece, a quote, and some introductory text.
The Basics
I’ve often thought about how a card deck or tarot deck could replace dice rolling as a resolution mechanic. Dice always have the same odds when they’re rolled, and card decks “remember” the past by taking the drawn options out of the running - altering the odds of the outcome with each card drawn. This game as a fully fleshed out system for resolving risky PC actions and utilizing the Tarot deck for combat action resolution.
To utilize the deck in play, the GM takes the “Major Arcana” - are the named cards (except the fool) totaling 21 cards and the players draw from a deck consisting of the “Minor Arcana” - consisting of the cards within the four suits that also represent the attributes of characters in this game: Swords, Pentacles, Cups, and Wands.
During play an action resolution consists of a player drawing from the minor arcana and adding the value of the card drawn to their corresponding stat of the test, if they meet or beat a value of 14, they pass, otherwise they fail. Drawing a card the same suit as the test AND passing will result in a “great success”. In a failure, players can choose to push fate by drawing an additional card, risking a “great failure” if they still don’t beat a 14, which will worsen their situation.
In a challenge combat situation, the GM draws a hand of cards from the major arcana and the players each draw a hand of three cards from the minor arcana, and then the actions they can take in combat are linked to the cards they can play.
A slew of status effects and conditions are codified early in the book so all players understand what these effects can do to their characters. The codification makes sure players can know what to expect when there are effects that may take some player agency away temporarily, which can be a point of contention in tabletop role play when that is not codified and the expectation of the GM varies from that of the players.
A slew of player options and situational benefits or detriments will provide “favor” at a +3 or “disfavor” at a -3 to the total.
Creating Adventurers
The book suggests a session zero and then lays out a step by step process for character creation that is overviewed and contained to a single two-page spread.
Each character will have the values of 1,2,3,4 assigned to their attributes: Swords, Pentacles, Cups, Wands. The chosen path will assign the highest value of 4 and a mastered path talent, and the ancestry (Kith and Kin) will provide a mastered talent.
The short list of ancestry and path options are typical fantasy game fair:
Humans
Fay
Elves (High/Dark/Wood)
Gnomes
Underfolk
Dwarves
Halfling
Trolls
Orcs
Earthblood
Stormblood
Seablood
Fireblood
Each section is has succinct but robust descriptions of the lives, attitudes, and preferences of these Kith and Kin in the implied setting. Each Kin option also has an “Arete” - basically a list of three life goals that once achieved, enable an additional talent ability that special to them. These goals range from getting married to crafting something that will last a very long time to other well thought-out game play grist.
Sidebar
I have noticed throughout this book that the design does something well I have been thinking about of late when running my games. How do you get a little more mechanical weight to the roleplaying? I think this is the right directions. Having roleplaying moments that make for great gaming have mechanical incentives for the players. Of course this requires a certain amount of buy-in from the players to not just try to short-cut the system and bypass the excellent roleplay opportunities provided, but that is going to be different for each table and I think cannot be completely designed out of a tabletop roleplaying game. They could always just change the rules if they wanted anyways right? But I really enjoy some of the ideas presented in these rules as a vision of playing this kind of game at the table. Even if you’re not getting players to talk as their characters to have meaningful conversations, you’ll have them piloting their characters closer to what real versions of them would be motivated to do.
The Paths
The paths are like class choices, except you are not locked into a path. It is easier to train on-path of course, but if there are talents from another path than the one you’ve chosen, you can still work towards mastering them. Spending XP so many times in the right conditions unlocks it for you. I like the idea of SPENDING XP to do this, rather than just having it unlocked once you’ve collected so much XP. Either way works, but this seems like a fun idea.
The Paths are:
Swords (fighters, hunters, would-be knights)
Pentacles (theives, duelists, spies, bounty hunters)
Cups (priest, cleric, aptothecary)
Wands (mage, astrologer, charlatan, wizard)
Inventory in this game is one of my favorite things since i’ve discovered it, which is slot-based inventory. but the twist is there are two different types of slots, four of them are for your belt which are things that are easy to get to, and 21 of them are for all the gear and loot in your pack.
The Crawl
The crawl phase is the most free-form part of play. Like many other games, it is mostly a conversation between the GM and players. There are traps and doors and maps and measurements of time and an encounter table called “The Meatgrinder” that is drawn from with the tarot cards and options fall off as the cards are taken out. Light is important and there’s bad thing that happen in the dark to incentivize and motivate the players to always have enough candles, torches, and lanterns to keep the dark at bay.
Some particulars are a “stressed” condition, item durability, and spelled out afflictions.
Social
Social encounters have a disposition grid and laid out descriptions to try to get the GM in the mindset to roleplay specific dispositions from NPCs and monsters towards the PCs.
Challenge Phase
Challenges are combats. Challenge cards are spent on initiative, actions, and minor actions. The combat system is most ambiguous where other games are specific, and more specific where other games are ambiguous. The long and short of it is, the scene has zones and you are engaged or disengaged within that zone. A PC must move between zone as they can only effect things within the same zone as them.
These challenges are played out with each player receiving a hand of cards from the minor arcana and the GM receiving a hand of a number of cards that is effected by how deadly the encounter is from the major arcana. A card is chosen face down for initiative on both sides and then the turns are resolved with players playing cards for the type of action they wish to perform. (Sword/Pentacle/Cup/Wand)
A player can also choose to spend their “resolve” to gain favor on a challenge action, but whatever suit of card they play determines the type of actions available to them, and the value of the card is added to the corresponding attribute value from their character sheet to get the total value.
The lower your initiative, the faster you go, but the easier you are to hit. Your fate test during combat only needs to meet or exceed the targets initiative value…
Camping
There’s eleven spelled out and specific actions that can be taken in the camping phase. This phase is meant to be a respite without going all the way back to town, and to use the hopefully charged bonds of the player characters through their actions and roleplay to heal and perform specialized actions.
Camp will allow for spending XP to train talents, rest and recover, learn more lore, patrol, scout ahead, or even spend time in camp charging a bond to be used later.
This game states that the players should be provided with an area map that show the shape, orientation, and layout of the floor the PCs are exploring. It will of course not have specifics or secrets on it, but this map will also be updates in camp phases to allow faster travel through known territories.
The City
Going to the city is designed to be rare. The game is about going into the underworld as much and for as long as possible before coming back to civilization to resupply and complete your contracts. 50% of the gold brought back to the city is taxed and taken (though there is no tax on hard goods like gems and artifacts), then there are eleven city actions available that include stashing money in a bank for interest, working for cash, carousing for Xp, building things in the city, researching topics, training talents, and even an interesting concept of holding a funeral for a fallen adventurer that allow for transference of XP from the recently deceased to a new player character.
I actually really like this idea that if an adventurer dies, for a price the party can mourn them creating interesting role play scenarios that then allow for a replacement character to gain XP to spend on talents and not be as green. This game doesn’t really have levels like other games where you’re gaining alot of health and power as you level up, so it’s more of just giving a mechanical reason to mourn the passing of the dead characters as a path to allow the player to transfer XP to their new character. Very interesting.
Conclusion
There’s still even more for me to read. I went through the entire book once and then have been trying to give as much of a feel for what this game entails without spoiling everything. The gamemastering section has a ton of good advice that is very good for this specific game, but also is just good for any game that dungeon exploration. There’s advice for running each phase of the game and how to maximize the experience of the GM and players. There’s even an excellent reference list of movies, books and blogs that I need to check out myself.
Magic has risk and tends to utility and weirdness over direct damage. There is also an entire subsystem for charging your spell components to avoid having to use your resolve to power them.
The games currency’s are gold/treasure, lore bids, and resolve. For my end, it feels both mechanically interesting deciding when to use each of these in a way that out-weighs the weirdness of some of the interactions - like lore bids is a whole system but seems like you should be able to just know some of the stuff that you need to use this system for. The rules give the lore bids mechanical weight allows for interesting actions to be dreamed up to use them or not.
I fully intend to try out some of the ideas of this book in my own games. I’m not entirely sure how much or how hard I will push some of the integrations, but this structure of gamifying the character creation, incentivizing the party to be bonded together and produce interesting roleplay scenes, and using the mechanics to give a rhythm to the delve are all things I’ve felt needed more focus in my own running of other OSR/NSR games.
This one might be a bit abstract and out there, but I am really enjoying reading through it.
Till next time!
https://www.hismajestytheworm.games/
https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/his-majesty-the-worm
https://riseupcomus.itch.io/his-majesty-the-worm
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Excellent review! How do you like using the tarot cards? I’ve yet to try this in a game but seems interesting for sure.