A BMD Catalogue
Putting it all together
Much has been written about BMD in this publication, but it’s time to put things in perspective. The rulebook is being updated daily, and the time of BMD is soon upon us. A roundup of available information is necessary.
Substack currently does not have advanced organization schemes for displaying articles by topic. Thus, let’s go through all the works produced here about BMD and highlight what they have to offer—and how their topics fit into the big picture.
War is coming! Take up your sword and join the Primeval Patterns warband! Fanatics who add their spoils to the war chest are funding the march! Their names will ring in the hollow skulls of the enemy, and their glorious PDFs are secured!
The first playable skeleton of the rulebook is coming soon! Seize your destiny, and take your men to WAR!
The View from a Distance
The best “summary” (before this piece!) of BMD is the introductory post:
BMD: A True Contender TTRPG
If you want to gun down contemptible aliens—annihilate as many as possible, on a massive scale—then the game I’m working on is right up your alley. This game is something I’ve been waiting on for a long time. Unfortunately, no one stepped up to the plate. “If not you, then who? If not now, then when?” I’m biting the bullet and making this vision into reality.
What is BMD? It is a futuristic, wargame-infused TTRPG about slaughtering aliens. Rifles and flamethrowers and artillery. Nuclear warheads and orbital bombardment and absurd impossible weapons left by the Precursors.
It is a vision of something missing from the TTRPG sphere. AD&D can do a lot, but it is really best as an Appendix N simulator. We need a game designed for the vagaries of space living that focuses on the attitude of RIGHTEOUS WAR!
It is an attempt to create a True Contender TTRPG—one that can stand the test of time by properly acknowledging and utilizing TTRPG strengths and discarding tacked-on failed ideas that plague modern designs.
It is all of these things at once and together. There are three key points outlined in this article.
Wargame Focused
BMD is explicitly a wargame, and it cannot reasonably be played as anything else. After completing the character creation step, players have their character—a Troop Leader (TL)—but also a force of fighting-men to lead. These Troops have simplified character scores for ease of management, but they are also important player-controlled characters. Whatever gun our TL can hold, the Troops can each hold too—though there are a lot more of them!
When we gain “levels,” our power grows! But so does our responsibility. The respect we garner with our fellow Crusaders sees us become a more attractive home for men seeking to join the Holy War.
And what do we do with all this manpower? We gear them up! Buy some tanks and APCs and hoverjets and cause some mayhem! Take out entire alien worlds and resettle them with Terrans!
The Gameplay is the Story
It’s a wargame, and the war is provided for us in what we have named the “metafiction.” There is no setting or story in BMD, but it is also not a featureless system to prop up any setting we choose. There is no “Lore” or any such chapter in the rulebook, but a certain history is spread all throughout the game’s character creation system, gameplay and resolution tables, and other entries.
The classes derive from the hierarchy of a singular militant band known as the Sol Crusaders. The Crusaders have a mission of vengeance and purification and have declared total war on all alien races—and in particular on the Big Three races they blame for the enslaved state of the great mass of humanity.
Put simply, the game’s very construction and game mechanics are designed not only to support the setting but to be or to create the setting. BMD has no setting because, in an important sense, the game is the setting.
An Engine of Creation
And what does this setting look like? Massively asymmetric warfare on a galactic scale. A huge galaxy-spanning council of dozens of alien races against a defeated, enslaved population of Terrans. The Sol Crusaders—condemned as pirates, mass murders, and terrorists by the Galactic Council—are the one last spark of hope for a Terran future.
There is no need to make up a place for this conflict to play out—all locales in the game have their own formalized creation system.
Planets and moons, star systems, giant space stations, colony settlements, wilderness environments—the game provides detailed guidelines and systems (based on substantial research, but always prioritizing efficient gameplay) for creating these gameplay spaces.
What is the atmosphere like? Are there plants? Animals? Who lives there? Who rules there? What is the local economy like? Agriculture? Industry? All of these questions—and much more—are answered clearly by the game itself. This is one of the reasons the game can be the setting!
More Overview
Listeners can review a podcast where we contemplate a general overview of the game, outline some of the central ideas, and address a few miscellaneous questions:
The best way to get a feel for how the game plays out is to see an early playtest:
This playtest was done very early on with assembled notes, and many details have been refined or significantly changed since that time. However, we took the time to carefully lay out what was done at each gameplay step, the rules and design involved in executing gameplay, and how player decisions impacted the gameworld (which was also created by the game itself!).
There is a lot involved in BMD, but there are two parallel operations conspiring to make the gameplay easy. First, the underlying systems in the game follow a strongly diegetic logic—things work the way we would expect them to, and divergences from this convey the unique character of the gameworld. Second, resolution mechanisms have a small learning curve and are designed to be simple to execute. Just because the reasons behind an outcome are complex doesn’t mean getting the outcome should be!
We want the players to spend all their time and mental energy plotting and planning their next moves. Simple outcome-seeking resolution systems provide a satisfying degree of input (to reward planning and game knowledge) without taking ages to clumsily model a process, as so many modern games attempt.
Game Systems
Encounters
The Encounter System—in conjunction with the Worldbuilding System—is probably the most important and impactful design in the game.
Back up one step. There are a lot of meanings out there for “encounter” that have nothing to do with BMD. This is a game where it would make little sense to roll up or design pre-determined “encounters” such as boss fights etc. No, the referee in this game will do no such thing!
Encounters in BMD are either placed directly as a result of game events or they are randomly determined. “Randomly determined” has a bad reputation (and well-earned!) these days—it might be nonsensical, for example, for our men to encounter sharks in a desert waste on a planet with almost no atmosphere! But in BMD, the tables we’re rolling on to discover an Encounter are richly informed by the local conditions.
It’s all thoroughly explained in this article! There is a lot of thought and care put into these designs, and that means the explanations can be very long. The time it takes to assemble and roll on a table is only a few seconds during gameplay.
Combat Resolution Design
This is a really big one. Because BMD is a wargame, we are carrying out a war effort. Our characters, the Troop Leaders, are officers in a warband. War!
It is important to get combat resolution right. That’s why we designed resolution systems specifically to accommodate the scale, weapon style, and flow of this specific game. Anything that was slow or could not diegetically fit was aggressively cut.
Dice and Gameplay Mechanics
The very first devblog was about exactly this topic: a seemingly good idea that had a catastrophic breakdown from a gameplay standpoint. It was reforged into a new (and great!) system.
BMDev 1: Behind the Attack Design
If you’re not sure what BMD is, check here: The BMD attack resolution system is one of the highest design priorities. The game is explicitly about guns-free open conflict. Thus, we need a reliable means to mediate that conflict in a way that is both satisfying and sound.
The article goes into great detail, using specific examples from playtesting, to uncover the challenges and intent behind the combat resolution design. We were seriously in the fire on this one; the only way out was through!
Once we established the correct framework for combat resolution, there was the lingering question of how it could be expanded. The combat resolution we use could even be called simplistic by someone pretentious enough! How will it manage to convey the complexity of action and effects of the many different weapon types we’re going to have?
How do we make a simple set of die rolls describe rifles, handguns, grenades, missile launchers, artillery cannons, and orbital bombardments? Well, that’s a big ask! But a first step is a simple keyword system that allows us to slightly modify parameters during and between attack steps.
BMDev 3: Keywords
From a practical standpoint, the BMD attack resolution design is one of the most important to get right. It has to be fast and fluid, and it has to be sensible enough that common questions have an intuitive answer. We’ve already seen the basic attack resolution design
Hardly any system in the game does as much with as light a touch as the Keywords! Add a few keywords to an attack, a weapon, or a soldier; and we’ve got a whole different ballgame—our imagination sees something dramatically different happen! We will endeavor to write more about keywords in a future article—possibly one focusing on weapons.
General Combat Design
Finally, an extensive look at wargame combat design in general is available here:
BMDev 4: Wargame Combat Design
From the present moment onwards, it is important to see and understand TTRPGs as wargames in every sense. If the gameworld has the opportunity for conflict and the requisite freedom of action inherent to TTRPGs, we will necessarily encounter large conflicts. Though
We focus less on specific dice rolls and resolution systems and focus on what questions game designers should be asking when designing those systems. This is an exceedingly thorough analysis of that question as it relates to combat systems (and their natural adjacent systems).
One of the biggest challenges wargames face is the question of scale. For most games, this is a struggle of “how can I make combats bigger than 5v5?” or other silly modernbrained confusions. But even in serious old-school wargames, scale is very difficult. Designers often abstract large-scale events so much that they essentially disappear!
In BMD, the number of combatants in a fight is not a particular challenge. Infantry are organized into units of ~10 and even the largest and most complex vehicles act as a single entity (though often with a lot of simultaneous capability), though they are manned by many individuals.
No, in this game the question of scale is about physical scale instead. How do we have crossbows, autocannons, and nuclear warheads utilized in the fight? This became such an important question that we designed a whole system around it: Signature Size.
BMD: Signature Size
One or two paragraphs will suffice to explain away size differences in most TTRPGs. But in BMD, an object’s Size—formally called Signature Size in case the meaning is ambiguous—ties into many gameplay effects. One of the persistent challenges that wargames face is questions of scaling
By (very carefully) crafting a simple transformation between different Signature Sizes, we can have infantry firing rifles at a tank using nearly the same dice and logic as the tank firing at the infantry—but with the dramatically lopsided results we would expect! This system is exciting just because it’s so easy to move between “scales” of weapon power. It’s very easy to reason about outcomes, and we don’t need to use crazy numbers of dice or create a mess with keywords.
Characters
One of the topics we need to cover more on this publication is the characters! Troop Leaders are incredibly important as the canonical player characters, those who are set to drive the campaign forward.
A bit of discussion about the character classes is here, but this piece is mostly illustrating the idea that Troop Leaders do not fight alone. We can see some of the extreme differences between the classes in this piece. This is an important design pillar and, frankly, an undersold and under-presented idea thus far.
Even though Resolve and Morale are topics that logically belong in “combat mechanics,” we consider it as more a part of strategic force management, one of the primary gameplay considerations.
BMDev 2: Resolve and Morale
If you’re not sure what BMD is, check here: A major element in any campaign is the waning and waxing willingness of men to keep fighting. Morale is something that always matters, whether in the moment or over the course of campaign events. In BMD, there are two tools offered to help players answer questions about the fighting spirit of their troops: Resolve and Morale. Both systems have a direct effect on each other, but they also must
A lot of the finer details, particularly regarding initiative handling, have been revisited, but this article outlines an important aspect of force management in extensive detail—including the considerations of threats and boons that a good commander will watch.
Another article showing off the extreme differences between the character classes is about Personnel, which includes Troops (fighting-men) and other types of followers:
BMDev5: Personnel
Because BMD is a wargame-infused TTRPG as a core design concept, one of its most important elements is the management of personnel. Players will create their canonical Troop Leader character, but the other characters are doing the heavy lifting with respect to military might and raw power.
Though it does not go into detail about every aspect of personnel management in the game (that’s too much ink for one article), it shows off the most immediately relevant management aspect for new player characters: Mustering—gaining new Troops!
Most devblog posts are Paid-Only, but this one is free for anyone to view. Enjoy!
Miscellaneous Systems
With the more organized stuff out of the way, we are left with works whose place in the big picture is probably less clear.
The Intel system in BMD is another system we are proud of—it is a unique design that gives players diegetic “authorship” over world events! It strongly aids the wargame focus of gameplay while putting players directly in the driver’s seat of the campaign.
BMD: Intel
The Signals & Intelligence arm of a war effort has the potential to be the deciding factor in the outcome. In BMD, the Intel system is plugged into many game systems to the point that collecting and distributing Intel could be someone’s preferred style of play.
Imagine your players run into an Encounter with some local denizens—Terran denizens, naturally. They exchange some greetings and information. Now, in addition to the Intel given, the party’s Armacogitar leeches another point of Intel from surface thoughts. With 2 Local Intel, the players formulate what questions they will ask. They will demand answers and spend the Intel to get them! Lots of games leverage post-hoc reasoning for interpreting dice rolls, but BMD uses it for discovery!
Last but not least, a piece about the Populations system that is encoded into worldbuilding tables. What is the logic behind the population of a settlement? How many people live in a Very Large settlement vs. a Very Small one? Surprisingly, the gameplay-driven desire to have 4-hour travel time between districts placed enormous constraints on the population system! We go through the detailed arguments here:
BMDev 6: Populations
Playing a game and designing it have a surprisingly large overlap in requisite thinking. The areas they don’t hold in common is where serious design work must be undertaken. When presented with a complex game we intend to master, we approach the game in a 3-part cycle
Like so many considerations in game design, these specific arguments will never make it into a rulebook. Instead, the results of analysis of complex inter-related problems like these will find its way into a baked-in answer somewhere in the book. But for those interested in game design, this outlines an intriguing journey.
A Storm Gathers
We’ve reviewed a lot of information about BMD, but there is much more! The first viable skeleton of the game rules will soon be released, and all the odds and ends that are difficult to convey in an organized article will make their way out there.
These are exciting times for TTRPG players. The ACKS kickstarter has been a massive industry-nudging success. Something is shifting, and serious players are finding their way back into the hobby. The time for real game designers making real games is nigh; no longer must we suffer games whose first instruction is to ignore the rules because the designer couldn’t be bothered to put in the effort to take a real stand!
Compact List of the Articles Presented
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Sorry man already bought ACKS II u gonna have to wait