As the Sun Forever Sets: playtest

Over the summer, I’ve been running a game of As the Sun Forever Sets, a Forged in the Dark game set during HG Wells’ Martian invasion by Riley Daniels. The game isn’t out yet – I signed up for the playtest and received a long pdf rulebook, some summary sheets and a hex map of Britain.

The game is a sort of hex-crawl. You decide where you start, determine your objectives during the prelude, and then work your way across the map to your destination, avoiding Martian terrors and the fall of civilisation.

Our characters

I ran it with three characters: Sir Sidney Eaton-Warwick (widower and industrialist – played by Terry), Major Horace Armstrong (guilt-ridden military historian – Jon), and Miss Dorothea Feldman (German magician’s technician – Thomas).

We started in Dudley, with Sir Sidney and Horace at a performance by Miss Dorothea. Then, the roof of the building was torched by a Martian heat ray, and we were off.

Practically, we played the game online. We used Discord for video and chat, and Trello as our virtual table. Players rolled physical dice and told me what the results were.

Our Trello board

The story

Our story was very enjoyable. After escaping the initial panic, the PCs sheltered with some nuns in a nearby nunnery. They then escorted the nuns to their sister order near Stafford before heading north. On their way, they rescued civilians from a Martian capture-machine and helped military scientists refine and test their new, improved artillery piece. Eventually, they left England on Sir Sidney’s yacht – just as the Martians died out.

Some great moments:

• Hiding in the nunnery cellar as the building collapsed above them – and then escaping while there’s a war machine watching above.
• Rescuing people from a trapped Martian capture-machine – shooting its sensors and then killing its occupants.
• Testing the new artillery piece – taking out two tripods and then getting a ridiculous success when shelling the Martian structure, blowing it to smithereens.

The system

However, I hated the system. ATSFS is a Forged in the Dark game, which I’m not familiar with. (I signed up to the playtest because I liked the sound of the game’s setting.)

Rolling dice: Most of the time in ATSFS, the players make planning and action rolls. Planning is for larger, overall actions where everyone works together. Actions are when characters are doing something dangerous or difficult.

(There are other rolls (reflex, chance, feud), but I found they came up only infrequently.)

Both work the same way – decide what you’re doing and build a dice pool of six-sided dice. Then, roll the dice – if your highest dice is a six, you succeed. If you roll two sixes, that’s a critical success. If your highest dice is a four or five, it’s a mixed success (there’s a complication). And so on – if your highest dice is a one, well, that’s a critical fail.

However, the way you build the dice pool is slightly different for each roll, and I found that I was going back to the rules every time to remind myself how it all worked. (That was the playtest – I hope the final system will be more consistent.)

The loop: Gameplay effectively follows a loop:

• Players decide what they want to do.
• Players make a plan roll.
• Players resolve any events that occur.
• Players decide what they want to do.
• And so on…

In game terms, you can cover a lot of ground this way. A journey of ten miles on foot is merely a single roll. And you can zoom in if you need to.

In play, I found that the way the planning rolls worked (each player builds their own dice pool), we had a lot of successes.

The fiddliness: While the core system seems straightforward, I found it fiddly. The core system is backed up by many subsystems (consequences, companions, transport, camping, shelters, the accord, threat, the map), and I often felt overwhelmed. I’m a “let’s keep things simple” GM. I’m new to Forged in the Dark, and ATSFS was not a good fit for me.

I became very frustrated with the system. Despite playing for nine sessions, I never felt comfortable with the game.

Support: The support from Riley on the playtest Discord server was superb, and I got quick responses to my questions.

Online maps

We found superb online maps for Victorian Britain – the National Library of Scotland has online OS maps of the entire country, including those from the 1800s.

Overall

So I’m pleased I tried ATSFS, but I can’t imagine playing it again. I enjoyed playing through War of the Worlds, but I don’t think I’d want to do that again. And I don’t like the mechanics – they’re more complicated than I am comfortable with.