Forge Midwest 2026 Recap
Forge Midwest ran April 24-26 this year, so I'm quite late getting this report out. I had a blast as I do every year. I'd planned on running one session for each of my playtests, but we ended up short on pitches Friday evening, so I ran a bonus session of Jewelsea RPG. Without further ado, here's what I got up to this year.
Day One
Pits of the Curse Lords
Pits of the Curse Lords was Mike Holmes' newest playtest, a sort of story telling game centered around a dungeon crawl into the titular pits. We played as a group chasing after Vashkar the Thrice Promised, a general who had disappeared into the pits with his entire army.
Characters each had five stats, Fight, Sage, Tricky, Magic, and Wild, along with a reason they were cursed and thus had to enter the pits to seek a way to break their curse, a profession along with two freeform abilities that profession gave them, and an Oath which breaking would mean advancing their curse. We also each started with a magic item.
My character was Marcus, Procurator of the Treasury of the Missing God. He'd been bitten by an asp and the driving out of the poison had cursed him, but he'd made an oath to retrieve the Spear of the Smiling God from where it had been lost in the pits as payment. He could physically hold conceptual things and had perfect knowledge of the laws of heaven, along with being the holder of the Signet of Openings, which could open any door or container when stamped against it but would never allow anything so stamped to be closed again.
We played a series of scenes in a way that felt quite reminiscent of Eat the Reich. I used my powers to steal the voice of a guard dog trying to alert an enemy camp, but other players ended up deciding to fight the whole army anyways. Ultimately it felt hard to meaningfully interact with anything other players were doing. There's a spark of something here, but it's going to need more work.
Wulfwald
I first played in a Wulfwald playtest at Forge in 2016 or 2017, so I was an eager backer of the Kickstarter in 2022. It was good to get another chance to play. This time I went for a scinnlaeca, the game's necromancer, as my character.
It didn't take me long to figure out that we were playing through The Rose War of Wigwell, one of the adventures in the boxed set and that I'd playtested back at Forge pre-pandemic, so I stepped back a little bit and let other players who hadn't seen the scenario before take the lead. We had fun playing through and ultimately climbed down the well to destroy the creature infesting the town.
Jewelsea RPG #1
I showed up to Forge this year with an updated draft of the Jewelsea RPG, incorporating some of the updates I've blogged about over the past year and incorporating several new systems for invocations and rituals. This year I also brought my own draft adventure, Tempest Kettle, rather than using Trilemma Adventures like I did last year. I'll go over my new rules and play reports in more details in a later post.
Day Two
Maskers
Maskers is my other draft game, much more story game inspired than Jewelsea RPG. It's a game about desperate people seeking occult power to achieve their goals. I've pitched it as Breaking Bad meets Majora's Mask in Unknown Armies. This was an extremely rough draft that I threw together two nights before the convention as a few discussion I had on Discord coalesced in the back of my mind into something I thought could finally realize this idea that's been stuck in my notebooks for most of a decade. Like Jewelsea RPG, I'll detail this more in a further blog post.
Den of Wolves
This was the first time I'd ever played in a megagame, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Den of Wolves: New Eden takes very clear inspiration from Battlestar Galactica - the players are the officers of a fleet of ships fleeing Wolves (the game's equivalent of Cylons) through a dangerous region of space, trying to stay far enough ahead while managing supplies and the unrest of the civilians aboard their ships.
I ended up as the chief engineer of the fleet's fuel refinery ship. Every turn, I was managing the allocation of power between our ship's various systems. Unfortunately, on the first turn of the game, the fleet was ambushed by the Wolves. Our military commanders decided to attack them head on, a decision which ended disastrously for our fleet, knocking out both most of our military capacity and ending up with most of the crew of the flagship dead. We spent the rest of the game fleeing any engagement with the Wolves.
It wasn't long before unrest started building, both mechanically and between players. We were all aware that there were a few Wolf plants within the officer corps and there was a lot of time spent trying to figure it out. The President was acting suspiciously and it wasn't long before a posse arrested and deposed him. This caused more problems, however - we'd already been bad at communicating and coordinating the target of the next jump, and while we were attempting to coordinate the election of a new president, the Wolves ambushed us. This led to the fleet getting split between systems as different groups of ships had different jumps planned. One of the ships failed to jump at all and was destroyed. Fortunately, we were able to process enough fuel to get the rest of the fleet assembled again and jump away before we could be picked off one by one.
At about this time, I started to become suspicious of my own captain. She'd been taking our engineering shuttle to distribute fuel to the rest of the fleet. I knew how much fuel each other ship should be consuming per jump, and with the fuel she was taking away, there should have been more than enough for the whole fleet. Despite this, I had multiple engineers on other ships telling me that their reserves were short. When the captain came back to the ship and accused me of being a Wolf spy, I knew I had to act. I rounded up a posse and committed her to the brig.
Now both Chief Engineer and Acting Captain, I proceeded to manage the entire fleet's fuel supply by myself and the issues immediately cleared up. We figured out one of the Wolves' plants and spaced them, managing to stay one step ahead of the Wolves until we finally reached a sector where we believed we could jump to a safe planet. We sent out scout teams that were able to plan a route, but it was going to be a risky jump and we didn't have enough fuel for every ship to make the attempt. We chose to abandon the flagship and one other as we packed everyone into ships with the most crew capacity relative to fuel consumption. We lost one more ship in this final jump and ended the scenario getting about 1/4 of our starting population to a safe destination.
I had a lot of fun with this one! By far our biggest mistake was when no officers were present on the civilian ship that had the largest population during our attempt to organize an election. We lost a good quarter of our population in one fell swoop there. The case of the missing fuel was also solved in the wrap up - my original captain had pocketed the fuel, thinking we had to distrust everyone and that meant concealing how much fuel the refinery had available. She then promptly forgot she'd pocketed the fuel, so a significant amount of fuel spent the rest of the game hidden from everybody. We definitely learned that trying to accurately coordinate and trust each other while looking out for betrayals was a much better strategy than trying to keep the inner operations of each ship secret.
Jewelsea RPG #2
I ran another session of Jewelsea RPG on Saturday evening - details to come in a future play report.
Day Three
SETI
I brought SETI, the board game about exploring the solar system and finding aliens, for the Sunday morning session. I'm usually pretty quick to figure out at least basic strategies for this kind of game, but after two plays I'm not sure I'm there yet. We didn't quite make it all the way through in the slot, ending partway through the fourth turn of five, but I was not well positioned to win this one. I look forward to getting it back to the table.
Into the Odd
This was a sequel to a game I didn't get the chance to play in last year, though I don't think it suffered from my lack of context. I got a brief recap - last year's group had been seeking after a relic and failed after encountering the Finite God. As the successors and allies of that group, we'd been recovering in the sanctuary of Dorema, the goddess of uninfested mattresses, before we moved to complete the contract given to us by the Brotherhood of Scientific Supply to recover the Mantle of the Stars.
Leaving the sanctuary, we headed to the Shrine of Lost Things, a sort of library/monastery where anything that was lost might be found. We walked in and then quickly broke into a restricted area, searching after the Eyeglass of Piercing, which we should be able to use to pierce the illusions hiding the Finite God. Heading into the basement, my companion Caul followed me into a locked room while Edgar and Mylah took off running and pull the guards after them. Caul and I found the Eyeglass and escaped into the sewers, but we heard a great boom up above. After we emerged in the temple of Lusk, the Uncaring God, we were able to link back up with Mylah outside. We learned that Edgar detonated a grenade to get away from the guards of the Lost Things, but that soon afterward he'd been taken by the Brotherhood of Scientific Supply, unhappy that we were in arrears on our contract.
We met up with Sven, another of our compatriots, and used the Eyeglass of Piercing to pick up the Finite God's trail, following it to the edge of Bastion, confronting some aggressive atheists along the way. We found the Finite God living in modest but well-appointed house and he invited us to stay the night before leaving to return to his temple in the morning, bringing the Mantle of Stars along. As the evening passed, we began to forget why we were there - the Mantle was altering out minds, making us forget the wearer in the same way that the Finite God's temple had forgotten him. We tried writing ourselves notes, but these were wiped clean as soon as we weren't looking at them. The only thing that worked was staying in the Finite God's presence.
The next morning, we rode in the Finite God's steam carriage back toward his temple, but it soon broke down and we had to walk the rest of the way. As we passed through a back alley, we were confronted by collector aliens who wanted to abduct us, but we were able to defeat them when they decided not to accept our refusal. We returned the Finite God and the Mantle to his temple and got our debts to the B.O.S.S. forgiven, along with acquiring the deed to the house we found the god in.
Conclusion
Another successful FMW in the books! As always, I'm grateful to Willow, Tim, and Shari for organizing the event and I'm glad I can help with it in what little ways I can.