System
Hero’s Banner runs on a simple and powerful engine. The GM sets up scenes which are going to pose some kind of problem for your character in sequence, and then you do a kind of free-form roleplaying to explain how you’re dealing with it. Tension mounts, and when the scene hits a climactic moment, you roll to see how it all shakes out.
What you roll depends on what kind of Influence governs the situation, which of your character’s core ideals he or she is attempting to embody through action. Your character has three Influences, Conscience, Blood, and Hero, that always add up to 100. Players flesh out Influences in these general categories by writing a paragraph describing them, and then flesh them out further by specifying an Ideal and a Goal, as well as several Connections, the important people in your character’s life related to that Influence.
For example, my character Teodor Vasiliu’s Hero Ideal was strategic brilliance, and his goal for that influence was to slay the Khazim war leader Huric (his Hero Influence, as well as his greatest enemy) and break his armies. In an early scene we were ambushed by Khazim warriors while bringing conscripts north to fight in Uran’s armies against Ryeic, and so I had to roll d100 under my Hero influence (34 at the start of play) to succeed.
If you make that first roll and succeed, the GM tells you what happened (along the lines you were angling for) and you’re done. If you fail, though, you can use your Passion to re-roll, with a bonus of between 10 and 30 percent. Also, if you use Passion, you can (succeed or fail) describe your character’s outcome for yourself, which can be quite enjoyable (I for one thoroughly enjoyed slitting the throats of those Khazim after a steam-breathed forest stalk).
Passion is a limited resource, though. As your Passion increases, so too do your Influences change, until finally, as your Passion reaches 100, you must choose which of your goals you value the most. Your character will soon afterwards die attaining this goal, while failing to attain the other two, and how he conducted his life will also determine whether he died well-loved or alone and abandoned.
When all characters have finished their stories, each player makes a new character whose Hero influence revolves around their own previous character. You can repeat this process until you have a satisfying cycle of short stories under your belt, and then on to the next game!
Setting
The setting included in the book – described at exactly the right level of detail, for my tastes – is essentially a slightly fantastic version of Eastern Europe, with Prodan similar to medieval Poland, Tucaescu similar to medieval Romania, cultured Ryeic in the west reminding one vaguely of a feudal Prague and its countryside, and savage Uran in the north as a kind of Slavic Cimmeria. That’s my way of filling it out; yours may vary slightly, which is good. There are incomprehensible miracles and strange demons around the fringes here and there, but the setting is mostly naturalistic in character.
I think it would be pretty easy to relocate the Hero’s Banner system in many other mildly fantastic settings (Harn, say, or historical Europe), but the Cross, with its frozen, brooding, off-European, weird-magic-in-the-corners feel sets exactly the right mood for the fraught emotional decision-making that drives the game.
Getting Started
Making a Hero’s Banner character is straightforward, though it will probably take an hour or two for first-time players of the game. (Oh for the days of five-minute Tunnels & Trolls character generation!) There aren’t any numbers to crunch or dice to roll. You begin by choosing a name for your character and embarking on a group discussion of what the overall situation tying together play is. We chose to connect our nobles to Tucaescu, which was under tremendous pressure to placate Uran in the north by providing tribute and conscripts. Then you write one paragraph detailing each of your three Influences. Here’s another Influence of Teodor’s:
Conscience 33
The blood of Tucaescu is weak, inbred, and corrupt; our vitality is sapped and winter takes a terrible toll. I wish to find love in another land, and marry a noblewoman of cultured yeic, fertile Prodan, or even vital and barbaric Uran. Sarai, a gypsy commoner and my best friend since childhood, will help me find her and bring us together.
Connection: Sarai, a Gypsy wanderer, my best friend
Ideal: Love as Renewal
Goal: To marry a noblewoman of another land.
As part of this process you also have to briefly describe three to six NPCs who are related to your character in various ways, the three Connections for your influences plus a friend, an enemy, and a relation (you can substitute Connections in for these if you want to and it makes sense).
This might seem daunting in some ways, but the fact that your character is a young noble, and the generally accessible character of the Cross as a setting, make it much easier. This stage is important, though: you want to make each of the three Influences something that you can really care about as a player, so that your character’s choices and conflicts come alive to you and your fellow players as engaging and problematic. The NPCs also serve as a tool to develop your group’s shared understanding of the setting and for the GM to confront your characters with personalities she knows will be interesting to you.
What Playing It Was Like
This game is powerful stuff. When I saw the heroic warrior with the strong jaw and sword on the cover, and the subtitle “The Fury of Free Will”, I was ready to rock, and I put on some Judas Priest, Hammerfall, and Demons and Wizards in eager anticipation while reading the rulebook. But then horror overcame me: in the credits section, dude acknowledges Death Cab for Cutie as an inspiration! Emo boy wrote a roleplaying game?
Alas for my metal fantasies, Hero’s Banner is in the end an emo game, but in spite of that it’s pretty darn cool. It’s very wrenching, in that, if you’re like me, you care a lot about your characters, but up front you know they’re only going to get one of the three things they really want out of life. Teodor wanted revenge on the Khazim war leader who slew his family and the reputation as a brilliant strategist that would go with it, he wanted to find true love with a noblewoman from a distant land, and he wanted to father a new dynasty in his family line. Pick: love without career or family, achievement without love or family, family without love or making your mark. That’s some messed-up shit to deal with right there. And it kind of hurts to deeply invest in a character that you know from the beginning is going to wind up that way.
On the other hand, you get to choose which you will get through your decisions in play, and for me at least that’s a really interesting process to play out. When I wrote Teodor up, I thought it was really going to all be about the conflict between his heroic goal and true love, and the Blood stuff was just filler. But as play went on, family got more and more important to me, and it may just be that he’ll give up on both his heroic dreams and his love in the end to sire a dynasty and see his family forward into the future. Or maybe love will win after all. Or revenge. The escalating Passion score means I have to decide, though; in the end I’ll have to pick, and the process of getting there is both interesting and emotionally wrenching.
Of course, it’s the GM’s job to constantly hit you with situations that challenge you with the thing you’re thinking of leaving behind. If you’re tempted to give it all up for your Heroic ideal, she needs to present you with the most appealing love interest you could imagine. The point is to make the choice as poignant as it can possibly be.
Another player in my group made a character with two more closely related goals: to kill her husband in revenge for another family member and to raise a great family out of her love for him. So to give her a satisfying play experience, it’s essential for the GM to play up the husband Connection just right: the GM needs to play this character frequently and strongly, making him lovable but not perfect, and emphasizing the character’s strong loyalty to her own family, so that neither choice is the obvious one in the way it would be if the husband were a saint or a wifebeater.
The nature of the material makes it in my view a somewhat introspective game, and when you add to that the setup of players taking on the characters of noblemen and –women who are likely from different families, the GM has to work very hard to keep the game moving at a brisk clip and keeping everybody’s attention engaged when they don’t have the spotlight. Using the same NPCs in different scenes is one trick to do this, having the players’ criss-cross on their paths is another one – there are a whole arsenal – but it will probably be the rare Hero’s Banner game indeed where you’ll ever get anything like a party of adventurers going. The GM has to think hard to come up with challenging material and interesting scenes for each player in turn and can’t get lost in details, because the other players will want their turn.
Koppang recommends five or fewer players (four plus GM) in the rules. We have one fewer than this, and our GM is good, and despite that there were definitely some moments where one person was In and the others were Out. It’s good to keep everyone In, and you can do it even when a player’s character isn’t on stage, but when added to the somewhat sober choices your characters have to make in this game it makes it very challenging for the GM to set the right pace. I’d suggest that this is an excellent game for a GM and 1 or 2 players, and that you can do 3 if everyone’s committed and the GM’s good, but only Grand Master GMs should try for 4 or more, if even them.
Immersion
Is Hero’s Banner an immersive RPG? That’s an interesting question. The game I played right before Hero’s Banner was a roleplaying-intense iteration of first edition Stormbringer, and so I was very much into “get into my character” mode when we sat down for the game. After my first scene, I was thinking about how Teodor would solve various practical problems presented by the first scene – all the stuff you have to plan out in many other RPGs. Like, when you want to kill the king, you scope out the castle, hire some trusted NPCs, maybe call in a favor from a wizard you helped a few years back, then you sneak into the castle, cast invisibility to get past the sentries, kill the troll bodyguard outside the king’s chambers, and then finally confront the king in his chambers.
Hero’s Banner isn’t really designed for play at that level of detail, despite some text to the contrary on pp. 59-60 (about which more presently). If there were trolls in the Cross – there are some spooky demons who seem to be corrupted people of some kind, and some unpredictable miracles, but no fey or monsters of the classical variety, though probably those elements could be added around the fringes without damaging the setting if you like that sort of thing – you’d probably go straight from the scene where you made the decision that you had to kill the king to the scene where you’re standing in the doorway with the dead troll behind you, your beloved sister standing between you and the king trying to stop you from carrying out your murderous deed. I think the best way to play this game, and the way our GM ran it, is just to push from one critical scene to another, to play out one scene where you have to embody an Influence and make a difficult choice, and then move on to the next one.
And so when Teodor moved straight from the frosty riverbank to his uncle’s church, with a beautiful and intelligent cousin who might make a suitable wife at the table, I was pretty disoriented. Wait a minute! something inside me screamed. I had to recon to my castle to get some extra men, and send a message over here, and… instead I’m here in this new scene. This is very disorienting.
Was my immersion broken? Some have opined that the word ‘immersion’ is ambiguous, but I’m not convinced: I think it’s the word ‘break’ that’s ambiguous in this question at least. Immersion was broken for me in the sense that it was interrupted, but it was not broken in the sense that my character just became a token in a story-construction machine, or that I was prevented from identifying with him because I was distracted by mechanical or metagame considerations during play. In fact, scene-level conflict resolution of the kind you find in a game like Hero’s Banner or My Life with Master means that while I’m in scene, I can totally bust it freestyle, I’m liberated to play my character just the way I see him in my head and react to what the GM tells me is going on around me, which is very immersive, and very cool. I had to mentally readjust to the new context, but within a few minutes I was OK in the new scene, and deeply imaginatively and emotionally involved in what Teodor was doing in the new scene.
I think the question of how immersive a game this is ultimately is one of how jarring you find these scene-shifts, how easily you drop back in after pulling out, and how comfortable you are playing through the highly charged points of a character’s life without spending much time on the stuff in between. I’m OK with it, and for that reason I’m enjoying it, even if there’s times where I could wish for longer-term seamless identification with my character, and places where I’d just like a down-time scene to establish my character a little and get comfortable with how he feels. On the other hand, if you really can’t stand the breaks or need to deal with the smaller stuff to enjoy your role immersion, you’ll probably have to play Hero’s Banner one-on-one with a GM who’s equally interested in lingering over the details, or some other game entirely. Different people have different preferences here.
Some Thoughts on Multi-Episode, Multi-Character Play
One of the potentially coolest features of the game is to play multiple characters who are all connected to the same dynastic lineage. Tanith Lee’s Storm Lord trilogy is one good model of the kind of narrative you might aspire to, though with greater economy of telling; alternately and even more abridged, the criss-crossing lines of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series might serve as another, and provides some inspiring descriptions of frozen northlands that could get you in the mood in addition. (A suggestion for a minor tweak: normally, characters are restricted to young scions of the nobility. I’d suggest that if you know you’re playing through multiple characters, it might be fun to allow people to make their first character (only) an outsider, say a peasant or a barbarian, if desired, as a way of establishing the early vitality of their family line.)
Greg Stafford has pointed out that in a sense your real character in Pendragon is actually your multi-generational family. Although this family connection is a neat, cool, and innovative feature of his Arthurian classic, it’s frankly pretty hard for me to keep that aspect of the game in mind when most knights takes five to twenty sessions to play through and you’re in the thick of lovingly described, connected scenes and BRP-derived combat mechanics on a regular basis during the adventures. Hero’s Banner has the potential to really deliver the feel of this kind of dynastic play over a half-dozen sessions as opposed to several dozen, and we’re planning on doing at least 3 generations so that we can really enjoy that feature of the game to the fullest.
Having your previous character become your new character’s Hero Influence is an excellent approach to keeping things connected from generation to generation. But there’s an interesting piece of GM advice in Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard that might be well applied to longer-term Hero’s Banner play as well. Discussing how to make the next town on the basis of the last one, Baker writes (p. 80): “In the town just past, what were the characters ABOUT? What positions did they take? Which sinners did they judge harshly, and which did they show mercy? What did they say, I mean really say, about themselves and others. Your goal in the next town is to take the character’s judgments and push them a little further.”
It seems to me that this is good player advice for Hero’s Banner as well. What was your last character about? What made the choices you made with that character memorable, interesting, painful, liberating, self-fulfilling? How can you amp up the pressure with your three influences this time so your choices are even more focused on those same underlying issues? And on you go, from generation to generation, with some interesting thematically generated and overlapping short story cycles exploring the same dynamic through the lens of different connected characters.
Knocks
I do have some reservations about the system’s presentation, as reflected in the low style score. There is very little GM advice; the game needs much more. There are also some egregious lacunae in the explanatory text. For example, in chapter four, where the scene mechanics are introduced and the procedure for conflict checks is explained, we are told (p. 31): “You will then need to determine which of your character’s influences the GM is challenging. On the basis of this decision, you will roll some dice and compare the result against your character’s influence rating.” But there is not one word in this chapter on how to apply influences to rolls! Later on (pp. 50-52), we’re told that there’s to be a pre-roll discussion where people come to consensus on the appropriate influence, but we’re not given any real benchmarks for what we might come to consensus on. This material should be earlier in the text and much more concrete.
Fortunately, in many cases it’s easy to figure out. But not all: if you view the Influences through the lens of your Ideal and Goal, say, it’s entirely possible to be in a scene where you are going for two Goals at once, or two Ideals, or where you might want to lose a conflict on behalf of one Influence for the sake of another. What do you do here? Our group decided that it was the Influence your character was embodying through her climactic plan of action that mattered, which helped us, the Influence that your character was honestly acting on behalf of when moved to action.
A second problem is that recalculating Influence scores as your Passion goes up is painful for those who are not mathematically inclined, and having moderately intense calculations in a game whose mechanics are otherwise rather non-intrusive is likewise somewhat jarring. Koppang intends to put a table to help out with this on his website, which contains a number of other useful support documents and an FAQ to help with the game; I would highly recommend this as a play aid if you’re not all Harvey Mudd students.
In general I think there’s a complete and excellent game here, but many of the explanations could be improved, in a few places dramatically. There are also a few places where Tim appears to be thinking of a roleplaying game other than the one he actually wrote in his text. For example, his sample character Eric has as his heroic goal to “join Sir Milef’s army against Uran.” So, let me get this straight: I’m playing a game where I have free rein to unlock my wishes to the skies, and I’m going to go slog it out at the right hand of some damn NPC to prove my worth? Why not go take it to the Urani yourself? Why not conquer the Urani and become their King? There are some RPGs where you start small and work your way up, and that can be a lot of fun, but I don’t really see Hero’s Banner as a game in this mold. Likewise, the section mentioned earlier on pacing and bouts, where it’s suggested that you can use the scene-level conflict resolution mechanics to settle something like a swordfight blow-by-blow, is really misleading, and seems to be an attempt to push a game which does what it does beautifully in a direction where it won’t work nearly so well. You may sometimes have multiple conflicts for one character in one scene, but that’s likely to be very much the exception rather than the rule, and driven by story-intensity considerations (“right here, right now, this is what my character’s life is all about”) rather than a desire to focus on specific imaginative elements of play. Having your Passion increase 50 points because of a few re-rolls in a swordfight with a few guardsmen is totally contrary to the spirit of the game, and will also slow down the movement from scene to scene in a way that will probably damage your gaming group’s shared focus on the story.
Art & Design
The book is a slim 93 pages, nicely put together. I found the art (color cover, black and white interiors) by Bill Mudron and Keith Senkowski very appealing and again just right for the game's mood. The crisp white paper and stark black ink inside bring out the best in Senkowski's moody images in particular.
Observer Bias
I suppose it’s fashionable these days for a reviewer to say something about his own prejudices to help people gauge how likely they are to find the review useful in light of their own. I think of myself as participating in an activity which might usefully be called “fantasy roleplaying”: the fantasy, the imaginative stuff, is primary, and role-playing emerges within that broader context as a tool for deepening that fantasizing and doing fun things with it (like, say, making interesting stories, or trying to win imaginary battles with clever tactics). I’m currently designing a combat-intensive minis RPG, but I enjoy a game like Hero’s Banner too. To me they’re just different ways of doing interesting things with an underlying fantasy life that would proceed through letters and stories and maps of imaginary worlds and lonely daydreams if it didn’t also have role-playing games as an outlet. Role-playing games are in my life a particular way, especially neat to my way of thinking because of their strong social dimension, of approaching that underlying fantasy. If your way of accessing the fantastic depends more on particular systematic considerations than mine does, or if there are other aspects of role-playing games which appeal to you more, my comments may be less useful to you.
Conclusion
There are a lot of interesting RPGs out there that facilitate group storytelling now, but relatively few of them have really learned (as opposed to cribbing neat bits) from My Life with Master, even though it’s widely acknowledged as one of the best. Hero’s Banner is an exception: it bears a broad structural similarity to Paul Czege’s masterpiece, and though it’s less perfect in execution it may well succeed in focusing even more purely and relentlessly on the central issues driving play. Though there are more than a few spots of roughness, there’s a large and flawless diamond, one which easily merits a substance rating of 5, at this game’s core.
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