A COURT OF SPARKS AND ASHES

It's time for beautiful fey lads at the end of the world.

A Court of Sparks and Ashes was made as part of the Romantasy TTRPG Jam, organised by Fistful of Crits.

Romantasy is very much not my usual genre. In fact, it's pretty much not for me, as evidenced by the way that my first draft of this game was called A Court of Thorns and Roses which is, I'm assured, not only everyone's first-thought name for a Romantasy title but also an incredibly successful series of books that definitely already exists.

I have been told by Naomi, our Social Media Wretch, and the Most Online person in the office that every woman she knows has been bombarded with chat, sponsored or otherwise, about Romantasy stuff on her feeds. It was news to me when I learned about this jam, if I'm honest, but I'll admit I'm lured in.

(Romantasy is - I looked it up and did twenty whole minutes of research - a combination of the Romance and Fantasy genres, as you'd guess, with equal importance placed on each. If you have to fall in love to save the kingdom, that's Romance; if you have to kill a dragon to do it, that's fantasy; if you have to fall in love with a dragon, that's Romantasy.)

It's part of a movement in books - and fiction in general - spawned through TikTok and, I'd imagine, AO3, where you're allowed to just sort of broadly outline the tropes used in the media and that's great. Back in my day if you wanted to show Enemies to Lovers you'd have to have a picture of two good-looking types snarling at each other in a way that suggested they might kiss any second, but now you can just say "Hey! This one is Enemies To Lovers" and everyone who likes that knows to buy your book.

Good fucking stuff, if you ask me! As a writer I've been continually bothered by the idea that some books are hard to read, and writing Hollows has given me an appreciation of going hard into purple prose. Nothing wrong with it. Wear your heart on your sleeve and your influences on your book jacket. No need to be coy about it; people want what they want and maybe we can give it to them without anyone having to feel silly.

I CAN'T STOP MYSELF

However: my immediate instinct, mannish and detached as I am, was to take the piss.

Call it an ingrained reaction. When I first approach something I want to get a handle on it and find out what's daft about it so I can, as the drag queens say, read it for filth.

If something gets its hooks into me and I appreciate it not on a critical level, but on an emotional level - like not "that character's well written" but "I really like that character" - I genuinely feel a bit tricked. Like the makers have pulled one over on me by manipulating me into feeling something rather than all of us nodding sagely as peers congratulating each other on a job well done.

("But Grant, that's art, you dickhead! That's the point!" I hear you yell, and yes. I have a problem. It makes engaging with media very difficult. I have to tell Maz to just start watching stuff I might enjoy when I'm out of the room doing something else, and then I'll sneak in and watch half of one episode, then three-quarters, then I'm in. It means I've never seen the first episode of Leverage: Redemption or Our Flag Means Death or Slow Horses, all of which I've enjoyed, but it's a compromise I've learned to live with.)

And: writing out your tropes straight off the bat gives the potential insincere dickhead a shopping list of things to be unkind about.

So, joking about it but not really joking about it, wouldn't it be funny if I a man did this, sensible chuckle, I started writing the intro for the game. (Usually, I write the into first and begin it with an all-caps "YOU" so I can get a handle on who the player characters are, and it lets me engage with the fiction before I get bogged down in mechanics.)

We've got knights - lots of chivalry, plenty of "I must but I can't," and you get swordfights too and heraldry and nice bright colours. We have something called "The Sundering Wars" that, when I wrote it, I immediately knew I would not expand upon at all. We've got courtly fey. We've got magic, but magic that used to be a lot better. We've got a dead king and a dead queen, which leaves us a power vacuum to play around with. We've got a dying realm that can - maybe! - be saved by falling in love with one another.

And the more I did it, the longer I spent sketching out the setting and the stakes, the less I found myself joking and the more I started to earnestly write a straight-down-the-middle game about falling in love at the end of the world. It's just the thing it is. I'm quite happy with it.

It was rather like when you first meet someone you like - fancy, even! - and you're trying to prove that you're cool and worth knowing, so you act aloof and uninterested because that's what cool people do, and you just fuck about trying to look impressive rather than actually saying anything to one another. But, thankfully, pretending I didn't care gave me the emotional armour I needed to actually care a bit.

THIS ISN'T MY FIRST ROMANTODEO

I've dabbled with this sort of thing before. The very first game I put out through this Patreon, unless you count We Set Out and no-one does because you shouldn't, was entitled Warrior-Poet. Or rather, it was entitled Shinshi-Shijin, which is sort of Japanese for "Warrior-Poet," because the game is desperate tryhard Orientalist guff that conflates Japan with China as much as it bloody likes.

The core mechanic of Warrior-Poet - let's use the English name - is to write competitive haiku against one another, line by line, and if English speakers already have a bad rep for not really getting how haiku work then having people take turns to count syllables then all pitch in on an unsatisfying verse that doesn't mention nature once is verging on taking the piss.

It's a nice idea, mind; you play courtly superheroes, and you're up against each other (or allied! Or both!) to do... something in the Empire of the Moon. Sword-fighting. Dancing. Flower arranging. Sneering. Wizard wars. Whatever. The competitive poetry shows how your magical powers work, in as much as you all try to abstractly influence reality as hard as you can but only one of you can succeed. Then, because it was 2014, I shoved a load of dice mechanics on the end of it to make it feel more like a TTRPG.

The restrictive form gives the writer a bit of arm's-reach from the potentially intimate or uncomfortable subject matter, I think. People have really enjoyed playing it, and it's opened up a different sort of game for them, and that's good.

I wouldn't write it now.

I'm not going to take it down, I don't think, because I'm not overly ashamed of it - it's not a very sensitive investigation of the poetry form, and it approaches the Asia-Pacific region like a trope buffet, but there's something interesting there and it shows where I've come from.

But of course, this all goes back to Polaris.

CHIVALRIC TRAGEDY IN THE FAR NORTH

Polaris is a Forge-ass game. Polaris is GMless (GMful?), and it gets around the GM not being there with a set of strict rituals and phrases. Polaris is set in a crystal kingdom on the north pole where you play beautiful elves who are doomed to die or betray each other or both, not just in the fiction, but also very much so in the mechanics. Polaris has three drawings in it, is printed in black and white, and won several of the more interesting awards on the year of its release.

I purchased Polaris in 2010 and never really got over it.

I had moved to London the day before. We decided to make the most of our new home by catching a tube down from Tooting Bec to Tottenham Court Road and bumbling around the centre of the city.

I didn't have a job at the time - which is very much not the sort of thing you want to say when you moved to London yesterday - having left my last-ditch job as a microwave-jockey chef in Norwich and followed Maz down to the Big Smoke in search of career gold.

But we visited The Orc's Nest, which is well-known as one of the oldest games shops in the country and thanks to the sort of contracts you could sign back in the 70's has a storefront just down from Seven Dials, and I had I buy something. The cheapest complete thing I could find was Polaris, at fifteen quid. I read most of it on the tube home.

Fuck me but it's clever. I think it's slightly too clever; it's very high-concept, it's tragic, it's maybe not even really "fun" in the way that we're used to in TTRPGs - your Power Attacks, your potions of healing, your 4th-level spellcasters, your Owlbears. It doesn't do those things. It's about something big and strange and inescapable and it's tense and taut.

(I feel the same thing about DIE: The RPG. I think Kieron did a tremendous job with it, and we also did a tremendous job of kicking the tar out of his copy until we could squeeze it into a scant 400 pages, but it's... difficult. You make a character who makes a character, and then the first character is trapped in the body of the second character who was always a pretty thin facsimile for the first character anyway, and then you're both trapped in a sort of Goth Jumanji made by your best worst friend, and the dragon is your dad and the dungeon is the nagging sense that you should have told your dad you loved him more. It's a brilliant game - and it's the exact shape it should be - but it's hard to pitch to it anyone who isn't messed up in the same way as Gillen himself and have it land.)

(Those sickos, though? They fucking love it.)

And when I say "Polaris was too clever," I mean that "Polaris was too clever for me" but again I'm engaging with it on a critical level rather than an emotional one to keep my precious feelings intact. It's an appreciative nod, a smug look, and a desperate desire that you think I mean "too clever for most people, but of course as a games design genius I got the whole thing and I did so first time."

Much like when I read Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation and subsequently wrote Heart, which is Annihilation but also bees are there, I've been trying to write whatever it is that Polaris will make me write ever since.

Warrior-Poet is Polaris wearing an appropriative kimono and eating its noodles with a fork. Tonight, Tonight is cyberpunk Polaris. (Force-Blade Punk is cyberpunk Monsterhearts.) The aelfir in Spire are Polaris-coded - shit, they even come from a crystal kingdom on the north pole! Honey Heist lists Polaris as one of its inspirations, in as much as it's where I got the idea of "when one of your stats fills up all the way, that's game over."

"Sad Beautiful People That Die" is up there with "A Very Big City" and "Rambunctious Animal" when it comes to my reusable ideas. And I don't think that it's out of my system yet; I'm sure there'll be some more sad beautiful deaders to come.

DO IT PROPERLY

The final draft of A Court of Sparks and Ashes is barely tongue in cheek, barely knowing, barely acknowledging its own existence. I think many of the games in the jam will end up a lot more on the nose, because they're being written by people who know what they're talking about and aren't afraid of poking fun without feeling like an absolute fraud.

The biggest nod to the genre, I think, is the inclusion of the Mortal. One of you doesn't play a Knight; you play a girl (not a woman. A girl. I went back and forth on the exact word six times. I don't say but I hope it's implied she's soon to come of age, rather than, you know, a six-year-old) from the mortal world who's trapped on the far side of the hedge and protected by her grandmother's cold iron amulet.

The other thing about that amulet is that it bans her from ever touching the fey without causing them searing pain, but you can break it, but then you can die, and I think that's about as schlocky as I get. Everything else is earnest, and even then, the Mortal is an earnest attempt to emulate the genre.

Now: mechanically, A Court of Sparks and Ashes is Honey Heist. It uses Honey Heist rules. I barely changed them at all. I wrote out the bits that weren't Honey Heist first and the further I got the more I realised, perhaps with a sinking feeling, that the correct system for this is one that I stole from Lasers and Feelings and - yes - Polaris.

The Knightly Houses are based on European birds, because that's a fun way of making them feel a bit old-worldy and magical. At one point you were birds, or at least bird-people, but I very quickly abandoned that because birds can't kiss each other on account of not having any lips.

The Courts are the classic four seasons, which I now realise we also gave to the aelfir in Spire as a religion, and god I need to read another book soon before my next opus is just a Pierre Menard-style word-for-word recreation of Perdido Street Station.

Rules-as-written, you can have an unhappy ending, which sort of goes against the Romance side of things - but I wanted to give the stakes some teeth, so it's in there. You can probably fudge it so it doesn't happen with very little effort, even as a player.

And! It's a little book!

I made it so you can print it out on a sheet of paper and cut across the top of the front and back covers and then fold it into an eight-page pamphlet, which means the text is supremely fucking tiny, but there's also a legible version if you'd like to actually read it. I'm not sure why I did this but I do enjoy playing around with a little book.

I hope you like it.

And I hope I don't come across as an absolute tourist.

And I hope that if I do you don't tell me.

Love and fury,

• Grant "Three Ideas" Howitt