PlayLog: Lo! Thy Dread Empire
Lo! Thy Dread Empire might be the game that gets me to paint minis again. Aside from its fascinating grimdark yet somehow hopeful setting, it manages to mix cooperative storytelling and competitive skirmish
A book that packs a lot of extra spicy
Form factor: A5 hardcover, 90 pages, full colour on thick glossy paper. The font is large, the text is terse, and the art is everywhere — I’ve counted 36 full-page illos. It’s not one of the ultra luxury RPG books we’ve been seeing by some other Scotland based indie publishers, but it’s an eye-catching, nice to handle, sturdy game manual cum art book. Julia Nevalainen’s art is one of a kind, managing to represent each faction in the game while evoking a unique mood. There are a bunch of punk and oldhammer references, and I don’t gell them all, but it’s an engaging read nonetheless.
The gist: Capitalism has drained all life from the world and kept going, working dead people to the bone. But some undead are rising against their exploiters, and now a skeleton war is raging in the forever apocalypse. The setting is explained in half a page, the rest you’ll glean as you read the ten factions — weird, whacky, wonderful factions. I refuse to spoil your pleasure by even hinting at anything.
It’s going down
Phrases and power
In her afterword, Tanya Floaker explains she aimed to create a skirmish game like a story game. It has no numbers and no dice rolls. It’s a coop-narrative game, and it lets you honestly try to kill your opponent’s little guys. Let me summarise the system: The troop descriptions are lists of tags, traits related to one of four attributes: Force, Confidence, Training, and Equipment. Further tags can represent exploits (weaknesses) or injuries gained in battle.
Conflict is resolved by finding out which side is most forceful, most confident, better trained, better equipped, who’s on advantageous terrain, etc., You look at the situation, look at your tags, and discuss which ones apply. Sides get one Violence point for each of the above. After adding a secret bid, Violence totals are compared. The winner chooses tags to be removed from the loser’s models (following common narrative sense). Losing all Force tags takes a mini out, while losing all Confidence tags forces it to run away or hide.
One thing I’ll say about tags/traits/keywords systems: they require some work. Either at the beginning when they are defined together, or when you need to know if they apply to the situation. The game doesn’t hold your hand with this, and some tags felt vague or obscure, which pushed us to be creative. I see this as a plus, but you could find it annoying. In which case, I’d recommend going over everyone’s army list before playing to define, perhaps even replace the tags that aren’t clear to everyone.
But wait, what about that secret bid? What resource do you use and where does it come from? Well, as the world was dying and reality was collapsing, money lost all value, land became barren, and the social order was all but forgotten. The only valuable that was left was raw, pure Power. The game gives you Power points (or tokens) as your only ressource. You spend them to build your warband like you do in most skirmish games, but you’ll need it to influence the battle (by bidding to win conflicts and remove tags from the opponent’s models) and to create and update your battle orders.
Chaos and orders
This is where we get back to the narrative aspect. You have to roleplay your minis because they follow their leader’s orders, and only act on the information they know. This good old wargaming mechanic pulls you from your omniscient player’s point of view and gets you back into RP mode. In the game I played against/with my friend Flo last weekend, we agreed that my overconfident Prime Sinister hadn’t seen the Swarm of Wildcats skulking in the ash-covered trees right above two enemy grunts when he led the charge. That was the end of him, but I didn’t feel bad about his death by a thousand tiny claws.
I must add that battle plans and further orders are written secretly and revealed together, as are individual actions. This is how Lo! pulls the rabbit of competitiveness out of the hat or storygaming. That, and a strong preamble about being friendliness and care. Miniatures games have a lot of baggage and you are told in no uncertain terms to dump it at the door.
Finally, there is a page about game modes. Like some of its peers (I think of Emmy Allen’s The Dolorous Stroke in particular) Lo! can be played with a referee, in a multiplayer campaign, as a regular RPG, or as a full-scale battlesystem. And with the rules under a Creative Commons Zero license, I expect (hope!) to see add-ons and hacks. Tanya and Julia are already working on a campaign supplement. My time and energy levels are pretty low right now so I won’t promise anything but… when I need a mass combat system for a roleplaying campaign, I’ll post whatever I come up with.
Our battlefield
Literally a million free copies
Listen, I’m not an expert in minis or wargames. I spent most of my WH and 40K hobby time painting armies rather than actually playing, and that was over three decades ago. I can’t say I have played any of the recent miniature agnostic rules. I’ve painted exactly seven models in this century, and two of them are Gaslands cars. I have found something special with Lo! Thy Dread Empire, but you don’t have to take my word for it.
At the time of this writing, there are 998,935 community copies on the game’s Itch page. I don’t think the authoresses will mind if you download it for free. And I bet they’ll be grateful if you like it enough to go back and buy it.