(Header image is Captain Flint from Disney’s Treasure Planet)

If I were to play for you, back to back, One O’Clock Jump by Count Basie then Caravan by Duke Ellington, could you tell me which is harder to play?

“What are you talking about?”

I’ll get back to it, I promise. First let’s talk about

LEGALESE AS A MAGIC SYSTEM

OH LORD LET ME SCREAM ABOUT HOW COOL THIS IS! Did you think Prince of Hounds was about a rabscrabble crew, sailing the seven seas in search of treasure? WRONG. 

In Prince of Hounds you play as rabscabble crew sailing across a wasteland of purple haze aboard a quadrupedal mech that is powered by a thousand year old magical contract. Your ability to keep afloat is fully dependent on how well you keep the charter intact. It’s been running since well before you were born, so you better not mess it up!

You must obey the merchants laws. They are simple. 

Thou Shalt Not Kill
Thou Shalt Not Steal
Thou Shalt Not Fall in Love

You may make additional oaths, but everything is secondary to these. Not only do they power your ship, they power your character sheet. Every oath is tied to a number between 1 and 6. When you act in ways that uphold the oath, you roll a d6 trying to roll under the stat. When you act in ways that bend or intentionally break the oath, you try to roll over. 

These target numbers constantly flex and shift as your relationship with the laws change. If you follow your oath too closely, your target number will rise above 6 and you lose yourself in dedication to the law. If you consistently ignore the oaths, your target number will fall below the possible roll over range, ensuring the destruction of yourself and potentially even the charter, leaving a dark stain on the world.

Oaths even act as your health bar! When you are hurt, either from your own choices or by the choices of others, pain will constrain the track narrowing your possible options even further.

Your oaths are your motivations to act, your stats for acting, and your health bar for when those actions go sideways, all wrapped up in a few numbers between 1-6. That is good game design!¹

“Is it time to talk about jazz now?” 

NO. There’s more good shit in this book for me to gush over first, specifically hounds.² I love these hounds man!³ These are recurring characters from the PCs past that are hunting down the players and can arrive at any moment. When we played, one of our hounds was a Devil, the former tutor and employer of two of the player characters. His appearance led to one of the coolest moments of my gming career as I narrated the devil scribing a powerful contract with the air in the players lungs, suffocating them. 

That shit rocked. 

The hounds are so fantastic because they are the answer to the issue I so often have with mixed success systems: I rarely have a complication ready to throw into the game, and for most systems, complications are much more likely to happen than straight successes or failures. In this game, the complications are easy, they are always the hounds. “Oh, your ex has shown up when you are trying to trick a devil” or “The elven royalty you abdicated from has arrived and they are pissed.”

“Is this game hard to play?”

Okay. Now it’s time to talk about JAZZ.⁴

The answer to the question I first posed is that Caravan is harder to play. For most people Ellington is harder to play than Basie, and it all comes down to familiarity. 

Both were colossal band leaders of their time, but Count Basie had a bigger, longer lasting influence in the way big band charts were written. Most people start with Basie, so Ellington’s shapes and licks feel alien and clumsy. If you want Ellington to feel smooth and natural, you have to work at it. The music might sound like its from the same tradition, but it feels different under the tongue. 

OSR is Basie. Prince of Hounds is Ellington. At first glance they may appear very similar, but the skill set to run them is different.

In both, the mechanics are simple and the stories are interesting. I know that designer Jay Dragon steeps in the OSR stew, and the book is chock-full of interesting tables to roll on like all my favorite OSR games. But the style here is different. Despite its many set procedures, this does not run like a careful, methodical system. Prince of Hounds is a messy mechanical bull that had me holding on for dear life.

Recommendation

You should play Prince of Hounds,⁵ even if, like me, the thought of running narrative games scares you. The hounds and other procedures will give you the support you might find lacking in other narrative forward games.

As with all things, there is no hard, there is only unfamiliar. The more time we spend in unfamiliar genres and niches, the faster we go from “this game just isn’t for me” to “ahh yeah baby, this hot and steamy magic pirate mech lawyer game is exactly what I was looking for.”

It’s good. Go play it.

Acknowledgements

The quickstart for Prince of Hounds can be found here. I look forward to when the full version is available.

Thank you to Jay Dragon for writing games that make me think and get me to stretch in new roleplaying directions, to Robbi Burns for the evocative art, and to the rest of the team that worked to make this game happen.

Thank you to Sparky as our polite elf chef (and elf royalty), Gemelli as the drunken legal wizard, Chun as the tired ship legate and one man band, and Matthew Ayers as the heartthrob demon killer.

And a special thank you to Matthew and Gemelli for providing editing notes.

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1. This mechanic is attributed to Troll Babes by Ron Edwards and Lasers & Feelings by John Harper, neat! ↩︎
2. Dragon lists Debts from the game GUN by Tom Bloom as the inspiration for hounds, which makes me want to play GUN! ↩︎
3. Non-gendered ↩︎
4. The following paragraphs are the result of my friend Robinson’s “Everything is Jazz” theory and a continuous discussion about how rpgs is jazz. ↩︎
5. One small caveat, as of writing, the game is still in a playtest form. It is 100% playable right now, but there may be reasons to wait for the full release whenever it is available. I personally am hopeful for a few more oaths, essentially the game’s classes. There are currently three, and each player will choose options from multiple oaths, which can result in some niche overlap especially if you have more than three players. ↩︎