Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series of novels, starting with Ninefox Gambit, depict a brutal and fascinating sci-fi world, full of strange and often unexplained technology.
The same author has put out a bunch of mini-TTRPG games on his Itch.io page, so it’s no surprise that he also published a Ninefox Gambit TTRPG last year.
The books are complex, deep, and nuanced — but the TTRPG is simple, spare, and abstract. I’ve wanted to run it since it came out last year, but finding interested players has been a challenge. Thanks to the folks at Furiously Eclectic, I’ve been able to run it twice!
It’s a D6 dice pool game, where you add to your dice pool by tagging in (using) your Edges (personality traits). There are no attributes, no skills, no gear, no tables of any kind. Almost everything you would use as scaffolding to hang your story upon is absent here, so it definitely took both me and my players some time to get used to it.
Unlike Daggerheart’s similar Experience, which should be used sparingly, in Ninefox Gambit, I wound up being extremely generous with chances to use a character’s Edge, because there’s virtually nothing else to use.
The game intentionally puts you in untenable situations, gives you impossible choices, just like the books. Your choices aren’t do the good thing or do the bad thing, they’re do the unconscionable thing or do the slightly less bad thing. I’ve tried to play my one-shots with at least some people who’ve read the novels, because otherwise such situations may seem too depressing for a roleplaying game.
Perhaps the most unusual and fun aspect of the game was the Clock mechanism. If you rolled any sixes, even if your roll otherwise succeeded, you wind up your Clock — which starts at 1, and if it goes up to 6, you are assimilated into the Hexarchate, the game’s worst fate. But, succeeding on your rolls gets easier the farther up your Clock is, because anything at or below your Clock value is a success. There’s also a Party Clock and a Hexarchate Clock that you can wind up instead, but they’re much harder to wind back down again. Figuring out what to do about your sixes is probably the most tactical aspect of the game.
The Ninefox Gambit TTRPG book has none of the professional typesetting and artwork you see in all the Kickerstartered games that have come out in the last bunch of years: it looks like it was put together in a word processor. It’s even missing character sheets, so I’ve used my meagre artistic and PDF talents to make my own:
I’ve now run two of the three one-shot scenarios that are included with the rulebook, and I’ll be running the third one this month. If the game had more meat on its bones, or if I could find interested players more easily, I might have been tempted to run a longer scenario, or even a campaign, but as it is, those sessions will satisfy my desire to explore this game. I’m glad I was able to do it!
Weaponized Fluff 
