The business of experience does have the potential to make you more resilient, capable, or expert in something new, but there are no prestige classes or level packages. You won’t find new options for your build or acquire a new move. I hope that part of the immersion within the game will be the potential to unlock achievements through making new contacts, securing new alliances, and finding the means to strengthen the position of Britain on the European stage.

Part of the experience of the average Agent of Dee lies in keeping a journal and charting the discoveries, secrets, and challenges met in the course of your adventures. Sometimes, those events will impact the future; occasionally, they might even have relevance, or identifiable connections, with matters as yet unresolved, in play, in the past. It isn’t quite time travelling, but it’s certainly a sort of interactive flashback. Why is something the way it is? Is there more to a person, place or event than meets the eye?

The Dee Sanction isn’t anti-character development, it’s just less important than some more complex and crunchy game systems might seek to make it. Agents of Dee will find their road to self-improvement a more subtle and narrative affair.

Every day during August, I’ll be writing something new on The Dee Sanction and aim to connect the word prompt of the day with the development of the game. Check out the concept, the list and the graphics over at AUTOCRATIK.

The GM should, for example, think plot rather than a story. Better yet, thinking plots, plural, would be even better, as then the GM can be in a better place from which to improvise (a little or a lot). That sort of living on the edge should never present more stress than it has to; if you do better with more prep, go for it, but the game will benefit from greater fluidity. You can’t be totally side-swiped by the players going off-menu if you only bought in the ingredients rather than preparing a single set meal in advance.

The players, as the bulk of the table, have characters who will never know the full story at the outset. And the fact that the game uses an alternate history where the unfolding of events has opened up the reality of magick as a force for change in the world means that even the history buffs can’t know everything in advance!

Another thing about being majority stakeholders at the table is that players shouldn’t stay out on the edge of being involved with keeping the game moving, entertaining and well-managed. Because the session will involve a fair amount of story-telling and setting creation on the fly, knowing a player (or players) will diligently keep notes in their Journal is reassuring for the GM and the others at the table. Maybe someone keeping an updated map would be good, too.

And yet another way off the edge of the unknown is to step away from the sidelines in prepping the session location, the play space, the beverages, and so forth. Sort the time out and the place. Let the GM know in advance if you can’t attend. Discuss at the end of the previous session — or certainly well before the next session — if there’s something, in particular, you think the party will want to do next time. If a thread of investigation caught the table’s interest, let the GM know so that this particular morsel can get appropriate prep time.

Working together as a table — as a coordinated gaming group — should add to the entertainment of venturing beyond the edge of the unknown without making it all the business of a minority (or even just one) to get it sorted and kept track of. 

Every day during August, I’ll be writing something new on The Dee Sanction and aim to connect the word prompt of the day with the development of the game. Check out the concept, the list and the graphics over at AUTOCRATIK.

When you’re dealing with the supernatural and dabbling in the occult, you’re already dealing with a grey agenda, murky with heresy. The Agents have their own livelihood and service preservation to consider, facing forces that cannot hope to fully understand, whether commonplace — like the forces and agents of nations — or supernatural — like the Fae, demons, and other creatures born of strange forces.

However, I didn’t want to have the game devolve into an uphill struggle nor did I want to have failure become a barrier to advancement toward some kind of conclusion. Yes, that conclusion might be some pyrrhic outcome, but it’s an achievement nevertheless.

Therefore, we have success or failing forward when you meet a Challenge.

We also have enemies that don’t solely go out of their way to slaughter their opponents, seeking instead to disable them. If the Agents fail to stop an adversary, they survive to face the music and, perhaps, the opportunity to make amends.

The death of characters might not be rare, but pointless losses should be. Every Agent has the opportunity to leave their mark or become part of the ongoing story. The game encourages that one or more players keep a Journal; it might just be their character sheets and adventure notes, or they might consider something more in-depth.

The GM and the table as a whole benefit from the investment in something more making pointless encounters and meaningless conversations with non-player characters rare — there’s the potential for anything to come back later and reveal some hidden depth or return value.

I’m not looking to reinvent wheels or upset the tabletop paradigm (those things are rare), but I hope that The Dee Sanction makes use of a few more interesting ideas and common practices at the tabletop that will make sessions memorable.

Every day during August, I’ll be writing something new on The Dee Sanction and aim to connect the word prompt of the day with the development of the game. Check out the concept, the list and the graphics over at AUTOCRATIK.

Like The Cthulhu Hack. The Dee Sanction is a game where the campaign matters. How close you are to the campaign happens to mean a lot more than getting bound up in the fate of a single character. That’s why keeping notes — even a Journal — matters; the details of your investigations and exploits will have an impact. The individuals serve as catalysts, nothing more.

If you pick up the histories of the period, you will see that time-and-again individuals have flown high and then crashed like Icarus ignoring Daedalus and flying too close to the Sun. The favourites of Court all too quickly find themselves ignored, side-lined, or even imprisoned. John Dee was not immune to this treatment, so why should your characters expect better?

As with The Cthulhu Hack, you’re better to consider The Dee Sanction a Troupe-style game with a dash of the West Marches, where characters come and go, but the game continues nevertheless. For flexibility, the history and Journals mean it’s also possible to not only push on with different characters, but you might even hop back and forth in time.

The core book contains a brief timeline that sets out some of the key periods, from the weakening of the veil into other realms following the break with Rome and the Dissolution of the Monasteries (in the 1530s and 40s), to the decline of Dee (in the 1590s) and the rise of the School of Night. The table can work to tell tales and create stories across the whole period, revisiting old characters or making new ones.

But always thinking, you should never get too close.

Every day during August, I’ll be writing something new on The Dee Sanction and aim to connect the word prompt of the day with the development of the game. Check out the concept, the list and the graphics over at AUTOCRATIK.