Game Notes: Decuma
Last month, as a part of the Game Runner's Expo series of games, I had the pleasure of playing a new world building and campaign-preparing game with some of the incredible storytellers who take part in TTRPG Pickup Con. This game is from the team at Golden Lasso Games, headed up by my friend Kimi Hughes. I received a copy of the rules as a part of their Kickstarter campaign and have been champing at the bit to give it a road test ever since.
Decuma uses the draw of cards to choose the order of developments and events within the story. Each card is tied to a prompt which can be interpreted one of two ways depending on how the card is oriented. While this places it into an existing sub-genre of games like The Quiet Year. That surface appearance will not last. As soon as you crack into the gameplay, you'll find that the focus of this game is more on preparing the world for characters to inhabit. It’s building a setting for the future and that minor alteration of intention is significant in practice.
To play, you'll need a deck of tarot cards split into five piles by suit/ arcana. In it's basic configuration, this game is primarily meant to be played by a game master and the players who will be taking part in their campaign.* Cups and Wands are going to help to define relationships between the players. Swords and Coins help to define locations and people which populate the story you're telling. The major arcana (the cards with names) are the most interesting to me as they prompt the group to define social dynamics.
Game play is split into cycles which define the different elements, such as characters, locations and relationships in turn. This was easy to follow and really well laid out in the ruleset. We didn’t need to keep referring back to the cycle guide once wed started which meant that we could focus on the chart that attached meanings to the card draws. This meant flipping back and forth through the pages really only needed to happen three times as we changed phases. It’s an elegant design that bears out well.
In our session, we decided to create the origin story for an adventure setting. This gave us “characters” who would be a part of the story in place at the arrival of a future adventuring group. With our group, it made the most sense to place our story in an arctic research base. We chose to use our “characters” to represent different departments within the "1Responsible" research company who were engaged in deep bore hole drilling using particle accelerators. This seemed to prime our setting for corporate machinations and scientific hubris. What better to birth the kind of disaster that would draw adventurers to the site in hopes of picking up the pieces.
Of course, this meant that we knew our little creation was doomed. The question became, what would be the thing that brought it to pass? Over the course of a little more than two hours we were able to lay out a compelling location, define our roles and slowly discover together which departments acted selfishly, whose research was unsafe and why fighting over budgetary allocation was, as usual, the real cause for our destruction. Each turn of the card came with a very real sense of anticipation and the role of fate in the world of our game. One especially cool element being the group dynamics card which is revealed at the beginning of each cycle but not resolved until the end. This gave us a sense of where each bit was headed but still allowed us to wait to the end before defining the cultural implications.
Everyone at the table agreed that the game we played gave us a real desire to use Decuma as a tool over and over again. It proved itself immediately with a combination of elements that reminded us of some of our favorite games like Fiasco, The Quiet Year and Dialect. Those games are all amazing and specific to what they are. Decuma combines those best elements of mapping, building relationships and developing social mores while still encouraging the story to develop and the characters to become invested in what's happening to their world.
*There are multiple alternate play styles available in the rules for use in preparing in different scenarios including by oneself to prepare a game setting.
Get your own copy of Decuma, from Itch.io or Drive Thru RPG. More information is available on the Golden Lasso Games website.
The session discussed was played with:
Nathan Cavaliere is currently developing Domains of Shadow, a player guided game of corruption and tragedy. You can email Nathan at ncavaliere63@gmail.com, find him as Nathan Cavaliere on Facebook, and Nathan C.#7169 on Discord.
Stay Nerdy is the operator of Stay Nerdy Productions developing a game inspired by the work of HP Lovecraft among other exciting ideas in progress. Find StayNerdy online: @StayNerdy101 for both Instagram and Twitter.
Rayne Whitington Has been running games as a part of TTRPG Pickup Con since the early days and has come up with some truly innovative game concepts. Find him on Instagram @evoearts.
But Wait, There’s More.
The Game Runner’s Expo will be running again in just two weeks. One of the games being played will be a follow up to this Decuma game using the 1Responsible setting we designed as a Fiasco playset with some development by Nathan Cavaliere. He’s titled it Idiocy on Ice. We’re also going to have another game called Sean Bean Quest led by John Keefe. These games will be peopled by game runners from the con to give players a chance to see how they play, how fun they are and why you can trust them to run a fun game. Spectators can enjoy these games in the con’s Discord server. Everyone who signs up to play a game in the con receives a link to that server in their confirmation email.
