Black Stars in a White Sky: Reflections on a Year of Playing the Yellow King RPG

I enjoy writing about games, and I really enjoy writing about games I’ve had deep engagement with. Most game writing consists of buzzy pieces about hot new things. Those can be fun to read, but honestly, I’m here for the deep dives when I can get them.

In that spirit, I offer up my reflections on the first year of our Yellow King RPG campaign. To give some context, Robin Laws’ YKRPG spans four different eras starting in Paris in the 1890s and ending in an “alternate” present day. Each era comes with its own setting-specific rule tweaks. Playing all the way through represents a huge commitment and can take years. It promises the reward of “legacy” play. Each new generation builds on the successes and failures of the previous generation’s characters; themes, concepts, organizations, etc., evolve in a meaningful way as you play.

As we come to the end of the first leg of the campaign (Yellow King: Paris), we’ve had some of the most artistically satisfying play I’ve ever experienced. I thought it would be interesting to share how that’s happened, and how we’ve tried to lean into a certain kind of play to help it happen. Whether you’re here because you want to know more about Yellow King, or because you’re prepping your own game, I hope you find this exploration of our play practices useful. Are they best practices? You’ll have to be the judge of that!

To Do It, Do It (or No One Can Do Your Gaming for You)

I’ve fantasized over the years of playing some of the Big Campaigns that you hear about. The individual titles are less important than the promise of a long epic adventure. During Covid I picked up a discounted copy of YKRPG and looked through the player-facing bits. I put it on the shelf and I wondered if it would just collect dust. (Chances are if you’re reading this you have your own fabulous dust collectors.)

At some point I talked it over with my group and they seemed surprisingly eager to try it. My buddy Brian and I talked over who should run it; as a big fan of Parisian history he decided to give it a go. That’s all it took!

Sometimes when you ask for the world, you get it.

The Game of Role-playing and More Role-playing

The procedural elements of Yellow King are lean. One roll resolves any challenge, and there are seldom scenes with more than a handful of rolls. Long swaths of time go by with RP scenes and information gathering. Somewhere along the way we discovered that the play cycle is: explore, investigate, interact, intervene.

When we first started I had to adjust my metabolism away from the fight/talk/fight pattern of most trad and trindie play. 4+ hours of straight role-playing is a lot! Since then we’ve settled into a nice rhythm that sees a story arc play out in 2 to 4 sessions. Even when we do stand and fight (rarely!) those scenes are over quickly, and we are soon back in character doing our thing.

Create Someone you REALLY Want to Play

With so much focus on role-playing, you’ll want a character you can sink your teeth into. We’ve found that you’ll want to play someone that believes the hell out of something, or believes in absolutely nothing. Almost certainly someone that knows how to get into trouble… but not mere trouble, The Best Trouble. Not a character prone to drunk driving, say, but rather a character that’ll scamper rooftop to rain-soaked rooftop while they’re bombed out of their mind on absinthe. (This never happened in our campaign. I swear.)

And you’ll want to put particular care into your first character, the one you’ll play in Yellow King: Paris. My sense is that your initial choice sets the tone for subsequent characters you’ll play during the four part Yellow King arc. (We’ll see!)

The game features a healthy number of archetypes to choose from. As we were looking through them The Poet jumped out at me. (I mean how often is “poet” your character class???) I decided to create Sinjin St. Claire, the fine young fellow in the picture. He’s from the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” school. He’s louche; he’s pansexual; he’s the life of every party. And it turns out that The Poet is, for my money, the 800lb gorilla of the Paris setting. Poets come with a tasty mix of investigative abilities that allow you to know shady people and do shady things (Demimonde), get “a bad feeling about this” (Intuition), start with a leg up on esoteric knowledge (Occultism), and write nasty screeds about your enemies via thinly veiled references (Poetry).

Starting with this array of skills, and later gaining a custom Seduction investigative ability, Sinjin has a evolved into a force to be reckoned with. My group have started calling him the Character Assassin thanks to his knack for murdering public personas. (He’s the guy sending the Repairer of Reputations all his business!) In one memorable story turn our group caught wind that Camilla, a daughter of the King in Yellow, was planning a coming out party in Parisian society. After scoring invites we cased the joint, and Sinjin got to work orchestrating a fiendish dirty trick. Our mechanically inclined character quietly rigged up the stage to collapse on cue during Camilla’s big moment. Another character contrived to have a camera on hand for the occasion and spent a Push (an in-game resource) to take a damning photo at the perfect moment. The next day Paris’s biggest daily ran the story of Camilla’s literal faux pas.

Soft Power or Go Home

We came into the game well aware that we couldn’t stand toe-to-toe with monsters and Carcosan entities. What we weren’t quite prepared for was just how uneven these fights could be. There’s a particular vampire we’ve made an uneasy alliance with, simply because we’ve never given him so much as a scratch. He seems to hate Carcosans, and that (for the time being), is good enough for us.

On the other hand, we’ve scored spectacular successes with whisper campaigns and dirty tricks. (Like the one with Camilla above.) Here’s another example of how we leveraged soft power…

A couple of sessions ago we were almost jumped by a group of thugs dressed sort of like the gendarme… we’d run into these goons before; they call themselves Doomsayers, and they’re the human shock troops of the Yellow King. Our encounter was uneventful, more a near miss really, but we realized we could embellish the incident and whip Paris’s ever-agitated students into a frenzy. Thanks to our efforts, posters started going up all over town singing the praises of The Commune, Zola, etc., and warning that there were those that would tear down the Third Republic, and put a monarchy in its place. We decided that the uprising needed a bit of symbolism, so we put our heads together. Purple, someone mentioned, is on the other side of the color wheel from dreaded yellow. Before long, we were having our friends hand out purple armbands with crimson trim for the latest cause. I’m not sure if we ever decided what this movement should be called, but we were leaning toward it being something along the lines of a “vigilance committee.” Maybe the Légion de vigilance. (Not terrible for a burgeoning resistance movement.)

Too Much of a Good Thing

The one surprising challenge of this game is keep tracking of all the clues, hints, and rumors you come across, along with the many people you meet. Yellow King is a veritable content creation machine. Unfortunately the game doesn’t give you any tools to organize that, at least not on the players’ side of the table. (I’m not sure how GM Brian tracks everything, but he must have one hell of a note-taking system to go along with his prodigious memory.)

At the beginning of the campaign I took it upon myself to record each NPC on an index card. That stack is now an inch high and climbing; it’s just about impossible to manage. The dream of arranging everything on the table to tease out relationships is a thing of the past. Although recently I fanned through the stack like an animated flip book, and the perfect NPC for our current predicament jumped out at me. So if your stack gets big enough, maybe you can try this trick, too.

We players do our own note-taking, and it takes contributions from all of us, but we’ve managed to maintain an institutional memory of the game. Last week I talked with Brian about the possibility of teaming up to make a Miro board solution to track all the insanity. He agreed that we needed to try something new. Who knows, it might be just as useful to him as it is to us. [Update: GM Brian is building out a Miro board to track Parisian places and faces. I can’t wait to see how it looks!]

Build your Legacy

At our most recent session I explicitly said to the table, let’s think about leaving clues for our future selves. At the same time it hit me that our characters have a lot of agency we haven’t been using. As part of the Yellow King: Paris set up we play a bunch of wealthy kids whose families sit comfortably in the social register. I thought, why aren’t we leveraging our clout?

With the campaign careening toward the next installment (The Wars) it was time to set some things in motion…

Many sessions ago, we stopped a church organist from replacing the details on the doors of Notre Dame cathedral with a weird black crystal. After tricking him into thinking we were on the same side, in one of the more surprising moments of the campaign, our most wholesome character punched him in the gut and drowned him in the Seine. We eventually discovered the priest was getting this crystal from the body of a demon he had caged in his apartment. I freed the creature and, using a Spend, gingerly asked it to go home. It seemed pleased and went back from whence it came. But we were left with black crystal chunks from its body. Apparently this is a substance called micar. I’ve always felt that we could weaponize it to use against entities from “outside.” Recently we circled back and did just that.

Turns out this weird crystal is much more powerful (and creepier) than conventional ammo. So, we started talking about a future where the basements of Paris are filled with oil drums growing micar from the seed crystals we saved. My buddy got super-excited about turning the catacombs into a giant micar cave. At some point he said, we’d be growing them on the bones of our fathers. And without thinking I blurted out… From the Bones of our Fathers to the Guns of our Sons. I quickly decided that this would be the title of my character’s great epic poem that touches off the uprising to come. (Maybe this is mad corny, but it definitely fits the vibe of our game.) [Recently GM Brian hinted that our use of micar would really pay off in the third Yellow King installment, Aftermath.]

For a long time, we’ve wanted to better understand the agendas of the many Carcosans that now infest the Paris of our campaign. Last session we got some answers during a seance. We were reaching out to the “sweet spirits” that haunt one of our friend’s photographs, and it unexpectedly turned into a scene of Very Big Reveals. Finally someone (something?) was giving us straight answers, so we asked about everything. The Lumière Bros were in attendance filming the whole thing. I suppose the biggest reveal was not that we’d already read the King in Yellow script on the night that the campaign started, but that my character wrote it. (I’ve been suspecting for awhile that my bad boy Poet, Sinjin, was responsible for Much Badness.) The seance was eventually broken up by some Doomsayers, but by then we’d gotten what we came for.

After being told by our friendly(?) mysterious entities that Carcosa is vulnerable to attack by “beauty,” we hatched a plan to create our own meme-bomb to counter the King in Yellow… It’s a film we’re calling The Man in Purple, to be produced by the Lumières. We don’t know much about it yet, but the first line is: He wore purple, the color of Kings, because in his land, every man is a King.

I love it that we ended on the idea that the fight is on and it’s Our Ideals vs. Your Ideals. It was a special moment at the table.

Stop and Smell the Café

You can’t ask for a more magical game setting than 1890s Paris. I’ve lost count of all the weird and cool events our characters have attended. There’ve been seances, salons, absinthe bars, break-ins (the state archives, a creepy flower shop, that one vampire’s house), break-outs (a basement during a time-slip to the Paris Commune of 1871, that one vampire’s house), costume parties, and many things I’ve forgotten.

There are times we drift into a cozy game atmosphere as we chill at our local pub with NPCs, or talk about the food at a fancy restaurant. Don’t rush past those moments; give them their due. In between mad nighttime dashes through back alleys, it’s fun to stop for a croissant and café.