The Skeletons
Exploring narrative design vs. resolution mechanisms in The Skeletons
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Last week we talked about depth crawls and how they structure randomness in a way that the deeper you go, the stranger things you find.
This week we are looking at something you might find at the bottom of a depth crawl… a tomb full of skeletons!
Specifically, we are taking a look at The Skeletons by Jason Morningstar, published in 2016.
The Skeletons
I originally heard about The Skeletons via Discord, with most people praising it as a really interesting concept. So when I spotted a copy at FarboCo over the weekend, I couldn’t pass it up.
Here’s how the game is described: “The Skeletons is meditative structured freeform game for 1-6 players. You'll need a few hours and a private space.”
You are a group of skeletons guarding your tomb from intruders, thieves, and vermin.
Meant to be played like a TTRPG, each player begins by choosing their skeleton. There are nine pre-generated ones to choose from, each with specific characteristics and questions that will be answered during play. Some are fairly straightforward, such as The Silver Torc (who is wearing a silver torc) while others such as The Outsider are a bit more strange.
The strangest is perhaps The Horror, who is an inhuman construct: “You were assembled, or summoned, or imagined by an unstable mind and made real. You carry no weapon - you are a weapon - but you were adorned with jewelry.”
The Tomb
Gameplay involves collectively drawing a basic map of the tomb, and then adding details through it based on the questions and prompts presented. Other than four walls and a central sarcophagus, it begins with few features.
At the start of the game each player has a prompt on their sheet that lets them add one starting feature. For example, The Silver Torc is asked to add a “beautiful artifact” in an alcove off the northern wall.
Throughout the game more features are added that will change the tomb. Walls collapse, blocking off sections. Water floods the rooms. New items are discovered.
The Intruders
The core gameplay loop looks something like this:
Choose an intruder from a short list of three options.
Resolve how you defeat them, drive them away, or otherwise protect the tomb.
Allow time to pass, represented by sitting in the dark and silence for a few seconds or minutes.
Choose the next intruder.
Each time an intruder appears, the players describe how they defeat them. Perhaps The Silver Torc uses its sword, or The Horror slashes them with boney claws. Victory is guaranteed.
Each encounter will cause more questions to be answered, and more features to be added to the tomb.
The Desecration
There are three “stages” to progress through, each will have two intruders. The final intruder of the last stage (i.e. “The Desecration”) will not be defeated. You will lose, and the game will end.
It might be an army of plunderers or a necromancer, but they will defeat you regardless of your choice.
No dice
There’s a discussion of the game at Reddit that includes this:
The problem, though, is that although one of the main focuses of the game is the skeletons defending against adventurers/thieves/animals/natural disasters there are absolutely no mechanics provided for that. And I don't think it's system agnostic as it has some ([simple]) mechanics of its own that wouldn't quite fit into most games I'd think to use with it. It is its own thing... the author just decided that resolving the actual encounters wasn't worth addressing?
This brings up an interesting question!
Is a resolution system necessary for this game? In this context, a resolution system might be one similar to other TTRPGs: roll dice vs. a target number, make an opposed roll, draw cards, or somehow otherwise determine success or failure when attempting an action.
The Skeletons includes no such thing. The entire game is played without the use of dice or cards. In fact, even the Intruder tables are a conscious selection and not a random roll of the dice.
There is no combat in The Skeletons. You simply describe how you succeed in the first stages of the game, and then how you fail in the final stage.
Your type of fun
This is a perfect example of knowing what kind of fun you are looking for in a game, and knowing what type of player you might be.
Let’s look at The Skeletons through the lens of Marc LeBlanc’s 8 Kinds of Fun:
If you are looking for Fantasy Fun (i.e. escaping into another world) and Narrative Fun (i.e. a well told story), The Skeleton can do that without dice.
Playing The Skeletons with others (vs. solo) might also provide some Fellowship Fun (i.e. playing for the social interaction).
If you want Challenge Fun (i.e. difficult or competitive) or Submission Fun (i.e. grinding to get rewards), those aren’t really present in the game.
I played The Skeletons as a solo journaling game, and had a great time reading the prompts, adding to the map, and building an imaginary setting.
The game has both very little player agency at a macro level, because you will ultimately be defeated. Yet it also has the almost infinite player agency at a micro level as you get to decide how to answer the questions, how to build the tomb, and what features it will have.
In fact, I’m quite tempted to take Vibius the Oracle and his dog Aello from my playthrough and expand it into a MÖRK BORG location!
It didn’t matter that in the end, I knew I would lose.
Playing to lose
While not exactly the same, there are some board games that I think touch on the same feelings.
If you’ve ever played Arkham Horror 2nd Edition (Launius & Wilson, 2005), you know that the game is difficult to win. In fact, at least with my group, it’s almost impossible. We would joke that we weren’t playing to win. We were playing to see how we would lose!
A similar thing is happening in The Skeletons. You are playing to see how you will ultimately be defeated… and that can be quite a bit of fun!
Flipping the script
The Skeletons description also includes this:
The Skeletons flips the script on the classic dungeon crawl— here you play not the intruders, but the guardians, cursed to spend all of eternity defending a tomb. As time passes, both the tomb and its guardians will change. Ferocious battles are fought and won, and the skeletons slowly remember who and what they once were.
The Skeletons absolutely flips the dungeon crawl trope of playing the adventurers who seek gold, and instead you are the skeletons trying to keep them out.
Mechanically, I think the more interesting trope that it flips, however, is the notion of rolling dice on random tables, and of having a mechanism to have success. It’s fascinating to me that The Skeletons strips away resolution mechanisms, combat, chance, and luck, and yet retains narrative urgency and fun.
This doesn’t mean I’ll be abandoning dice in the future! It does, however, leave me with new ways of thinking about games.
Conclusion
Some things to think about:
Subvert the tropes: I love games that take ideas so embedded in a genre, ideas that we barely even notice, and then flips them. This can be a great way to generate creativity. How do I do this without combat? How can the villain be the hero? How can gold be worthless?
Solo games as world building tools: I designed Exclusion Zone Botanist to be both a fun drawing exercise, but also as a tense push your luck game. What I didn’t anticipate was that players would use it to build worlds for other games. Now I consider that when playing solo games, and wonder how I can use the output from one game as input to the next.
Know your players: As a designer, it’s worth thinking about what type of player you want to target, and what kind of fun you want them to have. It is unlikely you’ll satisfy the many types of players at the same time.
What do you think? Does it sound like The Skeletons achieves its goal as it is, or would it be improved with more event and/or resolution mechanisms?
— E.P. 💀
P.S. Just a few days left to pre-order BLACKFLOWER, a CY_BORG heist. Order now and in addition to the printed version, you’ll get the PDF for free.
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I'm surprised that you didn't mention the most interesting (to me) design decision in the game: waiting in real-time between actions you take in-game. It's not superficially related to player agency in terms of the game's narrative resolution, but the choice of how long to sit in the dark in silence between the acts of the game struck me as particularly significant when I played it. Some of those decisions were based on the amount of time that I had budgeted to play the game, sure, but there's something sort of alchemical that happened with my experience of the game while sitting doing nothing as the timer ticked down. It really felt like I was one of the skeletons waiting for the tomb to be reopened
I think that by playing this as a journaling game, you take the lack of agency in stride. So many journaling games out there use dice or cards for prompt selection, but these elements of randomness have no influence on the actual outcome of the game. Even with journaling games as complex as a Wretched & Alone game, with dice, cards, and a jenga tower, none of that actually gives an opportunity for a meaningful choice to be made by the player.
If you had been playing this with more players, I imagine the dearth of decisions would have been more readily apparent.