Witch: The Fated 2e (Part 2)

You can find part 1 here.

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Lhuzie

Fated witches love casting spells and that is the engine driving Witch: The Fated.

But let’s go properly in depth with those system dynamics.

If you are familiar with Afterlife, you will recognize the resources available to each Fated character. You have Concept pools and Vitality pools. Concept pools are reserves of reliable capacity: rather than rely on randomness of dice, you can spend Concept pools to grant yourself or covenmates successes; in other words, it is insurance of what you can do. Vitality pools are reduced when you fail a check and sometimes to empower magic, communicating how much you can afford to sacrifice.

There is already a neatly compartmentalized sub-engine as numbers go between Concept and Vitality pools. Failure depletes Vitality pools, Concept prevents failure; once you have no more Concept available, you will lose more Vitality. If any Vitality pool gets to 0, it is very bad news. By itself, entertaining system, but it is not exactly the most dynamic — this is not enough to push the pistons of narrative.

Enter the Eternity Track. Eternity Track is the feedback and backlash from using magic to tampering with universal forces far greater than your Fated and their demon. Every time you cast a spell, you accumulate Eternity Track. Get to 10 you get an Eternity Chasm—an event that if not a “game over”, it is as close as you get, with multiple characters likely to die (or much worse). So above all you want to do things that reduce Energy Track. That means letting magic makes thing worse for you, or if you really desperate, making a deal with your demon.

But what if you take it easy? What if you just take your time recovering and using pools and magic sparingly. Well, you cannot. This engine does work through time; you play during dynamic periods where you are deeply involved in magical activity, with months and sometimes years of breaks in between where you are consumed with. Take your time and you miss the window of opportunity to act. So not only have limited resources, time is also a limiting factor. Recovery is powerful but limited: to recover your Concept pools and a single Vitality pool you need to commit an entire day to it—closing that window of opportunity. To clear a single point of Eternity track you need to spend an entire week of recovery, which may be as disastrous as an Eternity Chasm; as such, you are pushed to let magic make your life worse instead of accumulating Eternity or make a demonic deal. Furthermore, certain types of magic require time to learn, and them and social attributes only increase when you take a prolonged downtime.

Alright, so I avoid doing magic. Problem is, you’re playing a Fated; if the things you want to accomplish could be solved by Concept and Vitality pools alone, you would not have had need for magic or had to sell your soul for it. So you keep juggling your Eternity Track, Concept, and Vitality pool, trying to get the most out of it.

So all these sub-engines come together to drive what the game is about: your relationship with your demon. While you have a lot of agency and fun with the levers you get to pull, things will get sideways—not only that, character advancement is based on failure, you need things to get sideways— and outside of control. Your demon is always ready to step in, ready to offer a new contract in exchange for refilling depleted Pools, reducing your Eternity Track, permanently increase your magic power and knowledge, or help in any other way. The only catch to this panic button? The demon will not make a new contract until you have fulfilled your end of the previous bargain.

It is as interest as it is elegant how the strong cybernetics of things engine flawlessly create a changing relationship and narrative with your character’s demon. Most demons are not hostile to their witches, and to those early in their careers, they are extremely generous and helpful while asking very little on their contracts. This pushes player characters to take risks, as their demon is going to get them out of any trouble at the expense of some antagonism. Failing risky actions and making bargains for power will increase the power of your character, with the gameplay loop and relationship with the demon changing. Failure and taking risky actions will make you more powerful, and hopefully, this means relying less on your demon; your demon is also willing to do less for your Fated and will demand increasingly more. Should you get powerful enough where you would renege on the original deal and take your soul back, that’s when the demon turns outright hostile.

So yeah, you can be sure that whatever your Witch: The Fated game is about, you will keep making more Witch: The Fated.

Brad

The engine is casting spells, my co-writer is in fact a genius and already pinpointed all of that. However I am going to emphasize how fun and easy casting spells is, you get a set of them by your character archetype that just clearly state what is possible, these powers include making undead servants and summoning huge chunks of water or fire at character creation, then you do the thing. However, because you are a servant to your ever-growing problems, even all that magical oomph won’t solve it, summoning all the undead minions in the world won’t cure your mom’s severe illness! You need to double down, so you contact your demonic debt-holder who agrees to lend you some more power, in exchange for making the cute neighbor fall in love with you, they also probably couldn’t be swayed by undead minions1. So you have to roll checks, and if you fail you are gonna come down to vitality, and when the chips are totally down you can always run to your demon for more power, but oh no, what about the Eternity Track?!

There you see it, you are gonna get so caught up in your goals, that like the Witch you portray are gonna end up to your eyeballs in debt and struggling to make it to the end.

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Lhuzie

Before anything, familiarize with its safety tools (pg. 44) and make sure everyone you are playing with understands, is able to use them, and recognizes their use.

• Familiarize yourself with how dice rolls work (pg. 28)

• Familiarize yourself with magic (pg. 37)

If there is something that I miss from Afterlife: Wandering Souls in Witch: The Fated, is the “deathpath” character creation. If something similar had been implemented, that by itself would be a flawless introduction to the game. In the absence of that:

• Refer to the character creation cheat sheet (pg. 110)

• Let each player answer the questions for character creation (pg.108-109)

• Avoid Greed (pg. 111)

• Introduce the Fates and let each pick a different one (pg. 8).

• Be permissive with how players assign points and maybe let them keep some as “floaters” to add as they get a feeling of how pools and stats work.

• Give them the Devil’s Deck as an artifact.

The Distant Way scenario book may be used for a session one/demo/one-shot, but I found most scenarios fit better established characters and covens. If you pick one of those, you may want to also make pre-generated characters. In any case, the scenario should be having a time window to accomplish something important to the coven or their community.

More important, you should have demons be part of this session, otherwise you may be missing one of the best elements of it. However, it is unlikely anyone is going to get a Vitality pool sown to 0, so keep in mind the following opportunities for demon involvement:

• Create scenarios and challenges related to the magic picked by your cast during character creation. This keeps them proactive and have the demon be summoned to reset Eternity track, letting them try all their magic in a single session.

• Dangle powerful magics over them. Look at their Fates and their level III magic, creating a scenario which while overcome in other ways, it is a tempting opportunity if they could use that level III magic. This way they will be tempted to summon their demon for more magical power even while playing only one session.

• Be a bit frivolous with demon pacts and summoning. While not healthy for the long-term life of a character or campaign, if you doing a single session to get a taste of the game, let players make use of demons as a “problem eraser”.

Brad

Be confident you know how the system works, and make sure you know how to build characters and introduce the coolest parts of the system, show off some demons make sure people feel the Coven interact, and print off as many cheat sheets as possible.

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Lhuzie

The game engine is well polished and elegant, engine does its thing without needing much attention, so there are very few stress points. The ones that exist are some unsaid metanarrative concessions.

The demon gets your character’s soul when they die. So it may seem there is a conflict of interest here, and demons should be working to get your characters killed. However, not only is that not the case for the game to work as a game, the demon will always be ready to bring your Fated back to life should their Health drop to zero, no matter how many pending deals. While this is not something easily abused (there are nasty consequences either way), it requires kayfabe and agreement at the table that this is a thing and you should work together to harmonize narratives. Keep in mind that demons don’t think like humans do, most of them like their witch’s even if they show in odd ways, and are getting things from their activity in the world that they may value much more than souls.

Demons start to make demands on demonic pacts starting on Destiny I, but player characters start at Destiny 0. The result of this is that until a character negotiates for more magical power, they have a grace/honeymoon period in which they can keep asking for help from the demon riding on the selling of their soul. This period is perfect for trying and learning the system and/or for developing the personality and relationship of demons. Of course, due to the power of demons, there may be the temptation to preserve Destiny 0 and demonic deal “freebies”. It is left unsaid that this grace is not to be abused. Should a character linger at Destiny 0 to abuse it, make clear this is not how the game is supposed to work and are not “starting to play the game” until tension is inserted into the relationship with the demon. Furthermore, make clear that there is a taboo in Fated society about frivolous deals with demons. Demons may also ask for minor tasks as part of the demonic deal, which while not as costly as Destiny 1 deals, the demon would not make new bargains until they are performed. All in all, be honest that these are training wheels they are meant to abandon as soon as they are comfortable enough with the system.

The game does not need to be about Fated reclaiming their souls. However, it is both what the game excels over any other in TTRPGs, and also something quite boring if the entire coven wants to break free. Playing a Witch: The Fated 2e campaign is about figuring out what urban fantasy nonsense the game does well, avoiding what it does not and sprinkle enough characters that want to get their soul back to highlight and enhance its unique flavors.

Finally, the game is quite light in Game Master levers and dedicated advice; as such, not the easiest game for first time facilitators.

Brad

This game doesn’t have much advice for you as a player or Game Master, so you definitely need to make sure you are confident. The game shines when you do what it says, so make sure your players have a goal focused on regaining their souls, I also think that it is easy to mess up the greed chart, so definitely decide if you are gonna use it or not.

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Lhuzie

The main lesson from Witch: The Fated 2e is that game design is an art, craft, and science. It can be learned and you can get back to it. What a glow-up this edition is, making an outstanding game.

Unfortunately, it is a grim reminder of the material conditions and incentives involved in this artform. Between this game and Afterlife: Wandering Souls, Steffie de Vaan and Elizabeth Chaipraditku are indisputable some of the best game designers working now. They also involved in some of the biggest mainstream projects out there, and ran some of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns in this form.

They have the talent, skill, social network, and sheer stubbornness to make these amazing games. And yet.

And yet, how many of you are only hearing now about Witch: Fated Souls? How many of you ever heard of Afterlife: Wandering Souls? For all the support this game’s team were able to muster for mainstream games and TTRPG Funko Pops, they cannot get more than modest material support for their projects.

So maybe we can learn from this, all together. Do we want more games like this? Do we want these games to be viable? Do we want them to be played?

Or we do not care about excellence in the artform and want artistry like this be overlooked as its creators are remembered only by Viacom’s Kickstarters or work in the 5th edition slop of Paradox Interactive or Hasbro IP?

Brad

So I am one of those people who hadn’t even heard of Witch 2e until Lhu turned me onto it. I loved it, a wonderful work of urban fantasy that understands the fantasy of being cleverer than a demon, but even wilder, Lhu turned me onto Afterlife: Wandering Souls, and folks? That game is so much more Brad coded that I was flabbergasted I hadn’t heard of it.

You need to take-away playing and talking about more good games. You need to experience wonder in this art form again, do it for me.

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