Ascendancy Review

Another game I’ve been meaning to review for awhile, Ascendancy, is made by Gemworks and is a “Cyberpunk TTRPG about selfhood, trauma, and identity”. It was included with the “Bundle for Abortion Funds Itch bundle. This game is built off the Resistance Toolbox, the foundation of Heart: The City Beneath and Spire: The City Must Fall.

Keeping with my barely coherent review style, I’ll go over this 210 page PDF and pluck out things I think are interesting or are confused by, and maybe I’ll sort them into some sort of category beyond “chronological in the book”

You play as an Ascended, a human augmented by the Uplift, the former empire of the planet. You were created to stop a revolution, the Dawn Revolution. In the fallout of this of this revolution, you remain, now free of the hand on the rudder of your life. Your only goal now is to change the world for yourselves and whoever is important to you, not for some corporate or empirical overlord. How will you carve your place in this new world?

There are six really evocative Principles that should guide you through the game.

• The City Sees You As A Gun
• People Need Help
• Things Are Going To Change
• They Will Not Break You
• You Are Incredible
• You Are Not Alone

This game uses a D6 pool construction system, with your pool starting at 1d6. You add an additional D6 if you have an appropriate skill for the situation, another if you have an appropriate Domain (which I’ll have to look into later), and another D6 if you have Mastery. Each source can only add 1d6, so even if you have two appropriate skills, you can only add 1d6. Take the highest number, and your highest die determines your result. 1-3 is Failure, with 1 being “Failure At A Cost” and 3 being “Failure With an Advantage” and 4-6 being success, but 4 and 6 having the same Cost/Advantage results. Your roll can also be modified by Difficulty. Most tasks are Difficulty 0, but really difficult tasks can be up to Difficulty 2, which reduces the number of dice in the pool. If the Difficulty would take you below 1, you instead roll a single D6 and subtract the leftover Difficulty from the final result. So if you have 2d6 for a Difficulty 2 roll, you’d go down to 1d6, and since you can’t roll 0d6, you’d instead subtract 1 from your roll.

Looking at the Skill list, it looks pretty standard for 7 of them (Fight, Move, Stealth, Rig, Operate, Communicate, Interface), with Communicate just covering All Talking Skills, but the 8th Skill is Learn. Learn feels weird, because it not only is the acquisition of information but also comprehension. Seems like it would cover research, investigation and spot type check. I get what it’s going for, it’s like Communicate, but it feels really broad, which I guess is better than having Study and Recon or whatever.

OK, Domains, good. Domains are, well, realms of influence from the looks of it. It represents things like institutional knowledge, etiquette and behavior associated with people, places, and things of that Domain. There are 7 Domains that applicable to your rolls. I think at least one Domain would be appropriate for every roll, since you’re rolling within someone’s turf or whatever. The 7 Domains are: Uplift, Corporation, Engineering, Revolution, Digital, Mooncore (The city of power the Uplift ruled from), and Shadow.

Onto Stress, the game’s main harm track. You have 6 Stress tracks, 4 on the individual level and 2 that are shared by the entire party, which is neat. It means that everyone’s actions can strain how other people feel about you just through association. The personal ones are Body, Augment, Heat, and Hope, with Hope being really interesting as something you can strain. I actually really like this, because if that one breaks bad and fills, it really feels like it represents things spinning out of control or something rocking you emotionally.

Whenever you take stress, you mark the appropriate track, then roll 1d10. If you roll under your new total in that track, you suffer a Shift, with the Severity of the Shift being determined by how much stress is in the pool. 2-4 stress, suffer a minor Shift, and recover 3 Stress. 5-8 Stress is a moderate Shift, and recover 5 Stress. 9+ is a Severe Shift, and recover 7 Stress. A Body Shift should look different from when you Shift from Hope Stress. Shifts aren’t exclusively negative. They can force you to change your tactics, lash out, become traceable, draw attention, or even awaken a new fire inside of you. These are your major consequences of Shit Breaking Bad. Will the pressure break you, or will you come out of it stronger than before?

Pushing is also in this game. It’s used to help set a positive narrative effect for you. It may not negate the need for the roll, but can enhance your result. You tell the GM how you want to push yourself, and decide if it’s a d3, d6, or d8 stress. Roll the stress value, and the GM checks for Shift. So by my count, we now need roughly 4d6, a d8, and a d10 for this game. Just something to keep in mind for those of you who want to play in person.

That’s enough about general mechanics for now. Onto Character stuff.

Your character is constructed of their Title (which is your ID you were given by the Uplift during the experimentation that created you), Their IDs, A Core, 3 Beliefs (A belief about yourself, a belief about the world/your place in it, and a belief of your own making), gear, contacts, and Expectations. Your IDs are your playbooks, and you choose two of them, taking all their base abilities, domains and so on. The Core is how your abilities work, even outside your IDs. Your Core is more general and may change as things progress. Gear is gear, but each player gets a piece or two of like, signature gear. Things like a souped up weapon, a vehicle, pet or drone, or just More Mundane Gear than you normally would have. That’s neat. I like signature things. I like watching a character with a signature weapon do their thing.

The Contacts are neat too. You pick two contacts, and gain their benefit. You can create a Fight contact, to gain training in Fight, or a Resistance Contact to gain resistance in their related Stress Track. A Hope Resistance contact could be like a long time friend, for example. It makes you more resilient to the harshness and stresses of the world.

Alright, so I love this part. Love contacts that have had a tangible impact on you. You’re Trained in Fight because you spent time with a retired professional boxer who taught you some things. You have the City domain because you made friends with a bartender at a busy bar downtown. Shit like that. It rules.

The next bit is also kind of cool. Expectations, which can lead to Advancements. Your first Expectation is your ID. The weight of your past, and purpose of your creation is not so easily forgotten. The others are based on what your other PCs think of you. These come late so you can talk about who your characters are before getting them. Feeling that Adam’s Type G Glitch “Firewall” feels more for unliving machines than anything sentient, I could give him the Expectation: Cold-Hearted. If this expectation is pushed you gain Weight. What I don’t know though does “Push” mean “pushed against” as in defied, or does it mean “pushed” as in “invoked”, as in, “If I act cold-hearted, confirming the expectation, I gain Weight” or “If I defy my expectation I gain weight”. Maybe it’s intentionally vague because the next section is “The player decides if an action would Push an expectation”.

When you reach 4 weight, you can spend it to take an Advancement, which then lets you decide if you want to change your title and expectations. The more drastic the change, the greater the Advancement you take. Major advances should accompany a large change to your character’s thoughts, beliefs, or mode of operation. You don’t have to take the Advancement from one of your own IDs. You can take it from any of the other IDs, or one of the generic pools.

Looking at the IDs, we have 11 IDs to pick from, and since you pick two, you get some interesting hybrid opportunities. I like that there is a Content Warning for the Memory ID, to just give people a heads up about memory manipulation and memory loss. I didn’t want to dive too deeply into the classes because I want to leave some mystery for you. Caster jumps out to me because I want to play with the Word-Eater ability real real bad. Word Eater, summarized, is “You can push yourself for d3 Stress to take the Adjective from an object for yourself” Take Cold from ice, and it melts until you release it. You can only hold one Adjective at a time, and every action costs 1d3 stress because of the effort of keeping that adjective. This is incredibly cool and I feel like it’s the most fun mechanic to mess with.

Something else I really like is that each ID has a High/Major Advance that’s just the start of a quest. You get half of the benefits upon taking it, and then at the end of the Quest, you get the fully realized version. Really cool stuff.

Next I want to touch on some GM stuff.

Specifically I want to talk with the your GM Principles.

• Push, don’t break
• Reject logic, embrace the abstract
• Find the real stakes in a Fight
• Find beauty in the city
• Villains are structural, not individual
• Let them be incredible
• Let things change
• Talk to the table
• Plan scenarios, not solutions

The one I really like for this is “find beauty in the city”. It calls out that this is where people live, so focus on the things that make it beautiful and unique, spending more time on that stuff, rather than it’s underbelly. The underbelly and shadiness and gutters still exist, but moments of joy still exist too. Villains being structural mainly means that your individual villains should be part of the overall problem. A cog in a machine, someone doing their job, or a representation of the beliefs of the society that you’re pushing against. A fascist politician may be unaffiliated with any major faction, but it could still shine a dark mirror on the rest of the civilization.

Going further into Shifts, these are your game breakers, especially at higher tiers. This could change a title, remove an expectation, create a new expectation, and so on. The general guideline for minor/moderate/severe Shifts is (roughly) for how long their effects are felt, for a scene, a session, or if it’s more permanent or multiple sessions. Shifts aren’t negative entirely, so that’s something that I would need to get used to, because Shifts feel like they’d be a fallout of some action or something at a cost, but it’s not quite that. A Shift in Fight, the book states, could be a broken bone, but it could also be finding your conviction in what you’re fighting for.

Ascendancy lends itself to melodrama, so violence and death should carry a lot of weight. When taking out an NPC from a Fight, it’s up to the player to decide if it’s lethal, though if they describe going “I just cut off his foot and leave him so he can’t pursue”, it’s well within the GM’s right to go “That action will result in their death from bleeding out, are you OK with that?”.

Looking at how to prep a session, I do like how it breaks things down into thinking about Lead Actors and Secondary Actors. Lead Actors are people guaranteed to be involved in this. An antagonist, a contact, a citizen caught up in the action… these should be the most fleshed out people. Your Secondary Actors could be underlings or other people in a community, but they aren’t mission critical. They’re nice to have but not 100% required. I like how the book lays out what an Actor should have: Their basic description (name, looks, pronouns, etc), Allegiance, Beliefs (1 shared with their Faction and 1 about the Ascended or PCs), and a Passion. If they’re a recurring character, you can add more beliefs fitting different criteria, and if they’re a Villain, they should have a belief that is either a dark reflection of a PC’s belief, or a belief about one or more PCs, potentially lining it up with their Expectations.

I like this quick and easy way of defining things. Already thinking about how to apply this base level stuff to some other stuff I’m running which is nice.

The next section is FANTASTIC. It’s about how to tie the IDs that players pick to the game. Each ID is signposting what a player finds interesting or fun, so this section goes over each ID and gives a little description of the general Arc of the ID, what makes the ID fun, and how to address the ID structurally. Keeping with Caster, we have this.

• Arc - Manifesting your identity in physical form. C-Type mostly will be augmenting their other ID by granting the player a way to present their identity
• Fun - Manipulating reality to your whims, messing with difficult ideas, playing in the space between metaphor and reality.
• Structural - Play like it’s a pun. Have fun with wordplay that warps reality. Live in the abstract. Be creative, be passionate, and think in the space of abstraction and metaphor made real This is Very Cool. And also very helpful. It lets you know what you should think about when prepping stuff for certain characters.

The last 80 pages of the book concerns itself with Locations and Factions of the world. Your version of Mooncore should be designed with your players, including it’s aesthetic, tone and technology, but the book provides some stuff that you can slot into any game. There are things like the ruins of the Uplift seat of power, weapons manufacturers, the Altered Dawn and some stuff about the Dawn Revolution, and so on. If I ran this game I would take a lot of this stuff and integrate it because there’s some cool stuff here. One of the more cool ones is a group called Vestiges, run by the author Ring. Ring was anti-Uplift, and snuck it into their writing, but they also were against the Dawn Revolution, because the Dawn Revolution was going to tear up and destroy everything Uplift, resulting in a massive historical erasure, which was proven true. They believe that the elite of the Uplift were the problem, not the complete society and buildings, but who wielded the levers of power.

That’s such an interesting faction to work into the game! Someone who might have complicated feeling about the Ascended, viewing them as a tool for the Uplift’s past oppression, as well as a way to forge a new path forward for a more equitable future! Would they consider Ascended disposable after their revolution because they are so much like the Uplift, despite their newfound personhood?

Ascendancy is a really cool game that I would probably struggle to run. I don’t know how to properly wield combat and violence as a more like… complex tool? I don’t know how to use it for drama. I don’t know if I could roll with Shifts very well, and I don’t know if I’d be good at pushing at players expectations.

I will say though, it’d be a game I’d be willing to run and fail at just to test those waters.