Bucolic green fields and sweeping manorial lands fill the ever-shrinking lands of The Dramark: The setting of Our Brilliant Ruin, an assimilation of the Edwardian (Belle Époque) High Society of Western Europe with a dark, cosmic horror. That’s a weird combination, right?
You’ve got giant machines left over from an industrial age, and you have the manor-dwelling aristocracy (albeit, without the top layer of royalty) overseeing a society largely made up of guild and guild-workers, balanced out by those who live outside this simple societal structure. All of this while the world is being eaten away by sinister forces. In Our Brilliant Ruin the royalty is dead, most of history is gone, and the world is ever shrinking due to the encroachment of Ruin; A corrupting influence that has turned most of the world into bulging pores of waste and converted many of its previous denizens to monsters. For many of the aristocracy it’s now the party at the end of the world, for most of guild-members it’s looking to the remains of governance to ensure a comfortable end.
I’m not a player, or gamesmaster, who enjoys the absence of hope. Thankfully, despite how often Our Brilliant Ruin very quickly kicks off by saying that the world is ending, it also offers hopes of survival through reclaiming land from the corruption, the ability to stop the Ruin from claiming more, and the resistant, third-faction as a hardier, ruin-resistant group of adventurers. However, I’m getting ahead of myself.
- For those who do want something almost completely sans hope, you can’t go far wrong with Death-Metal OSR masterpiece: Mörk Borg.
A lot of Our Brilliant Ruin is dedicated to the Aristocracy and their ways, rather than the slightly more adventure-ready Truefolk (Guild Members and other members of society) and Unbonded; Estates, although they can be run by non-Aristocrats, are highly detailed with some fantastic examples; And, aristocrats are always detailed before the other factions. That’s because its a setting that clearly took inspiration from the shrunken world and setting of period dramas like Downton Abbey and The Guilded Age, stories where there’s normally a couple of families and their staff at play, but the introduction of an eccentric single character from outside that collective can unravel years of scheming.
There’s enough here that players could simply play as aristocrats, running balls to gather rumours to become more powerful than their neighbours, or simply live comfortably, without ever having to deal with the Ruin in any direct, meaningful way. In fact, each character comes with two condition trackers (replacing your HP and Mana, if you will): Vitality, which represents your physical self, and Distress, which tracks your mental state. Take too many sassy digs, lead a guest into an ill-maintained wing, or have a secret spilled and you make steps toward becoming a gibbering mess that needs to be excused and rest. A societal, defeat of the ego.
The Rules
Our Brilliant Ruin‘s book serves as an incredibly rules light guide for players and gamemasters, with most of the book dedicated to setting, resulting in a book that will feel a little inside-out to OSR or modern D&D readers.
While I don’t believe that many designers do book layout for those who work from front to back, this is a case where there’s zero benefit from reading cover-to-cover. It’s a beautiful book, and its 292 pages cover all of the basics you’ll need to get started — and more — but it takes nearly 100 pages before it gets to character creation (94-111) or touches on gameplay mechanics (112-133). In fact, these mechanical, ‘playing’ aspects are bookended with world-building content, with an in-universe history and example ‘saga’ (micro-campaign) wrapping up the book.
Those rules are incredibly simple, and resolution is perhaps more intrinsically bound to character creation than elsewhere because it uses a conversational, compound dice pool system that is — apparently — reminiscent of Blades in the Dark (I’ve got to admit, I’ve not played BitD, which will probably be obvious in the next few paragraphs).
Character creation has players pick a faction and family or guild, then picking an Epigram and — if Truefolk — a specific thing that they always succeed at. There’s no rolling for attributes, instead you’re assigned points to distribute in Personality, Skills and Portfolio depending on your class.
Personality is nine categories: Audacity, Benevolence, Cunning, Decorum, Defiance, Ingenuity, Loyalty, Obsession and Sensitivity. Each player assigns the following points how they want: 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0. Assigning points between nine skills (Craft, Express, Fight, Foster, Intrigue, Intuit, Observe, Physicality and Transgress) follow, and are much more bias toward Truefolk (3, 2, 2, 1 ,1) while Unbonded are close (3, 2, 1, 1) and Aristocrats are ill-equipped (2, 2, 1).
The balance to that is Portfolio, which includes Entourage, Information, Mentor, Reputation, Title, Tools & Equipment, Wardrobe and Wealth. Aristocrats assign a similar number that Truefolk did to their Skills: 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, while Truefolk get 1, 1, 1 (and a bonus 1 to Title) and Unbonded gain 3, 2, 1 and 1.
Players also have Vitality and Distress blocks (5, unless you’re Unbonded in which case 7) as well as 5 passion spaces which are a gamble system.
That makes up the character sheet, and each of those skill/personality numbers are the number of dice that you’ll put into a rolling pool when you do a test (which combines a personality and skill) in a situation. You’ll rarely add modifiers onto this, with most of that left to the GM. Portfolio is, instead, used as calling in connections and favours, however restores very slowly.
Our Brilliant Ruin only uses D6s and in a roll a 1 counts as a gloom (fail), 6 counts as a brill (and you only need one to succeed) and instances with three sixes triggers a triumph (which removes a passion dice from your tracker). Having more glooms than brills triggers a catastrophe in which something extra bad occurs or an extra complication appears.
In ‘combat’ you’ll hit with brills through picking a personality and skill combo, and when choosing to ‘defend’ you’ll use just one of those stats to do so.
That’s very much the heart of it. If you gain too many passion dice (which you can summon up when needed to give you a 5-6 success result window and add two dice to the pot) then you’ll ultimately have to roll them all to clear them. This is a ‘fail or pass’ state and generally very bad news, but often worth the risk when you’re at an impasse or otherwise fully healed.
Finally, there’s no levelling up, although you can increase the cap of your portfolio, as well as bumping up personality and skill stats however there’s no hard and fast method for this, although here are some examples for how the Gamemaster could encourage it and link the progression to story notes.
Our Brilliant Ruin as a setting
I’ve already outlined the core of what the setting is about: A class divide in an Edwardian-style world that’s being gradually clawed away by an evil, incomprehensible force. In its Iron Riots, from the blights and from the general encroachment of the Ruin, it’s now a world where the population has been almost completely destroyed. That, combined with the fact that the royals were actively replacing the poorest, unskilled workers with giant ‘Syllokinetic’ machines, means that outside of the criminal or jack-of-all-trade Unbonded, the vast majority of non-aristocrats have trades and are parts of a classic guild system.
This guild system, as well as the ‘family’ systems of aristocrats and the ‘staff’ groups that come with aristocracy work as a great point of origins for missions, and creates a setting where rumours flow freely. Metal currency in a world where the metal tends to ‘rust’ when left alone means that secrets and favours are often as valuable than the ceramic chits and paper notes that has replaced it.
Because I haven’t spent much time watching the shows that inspired the setting, it took me a while to get my head around it due to how it seems to strafe several time periods. It feels very much like somebody took the British Empire and its European neighbours in the pre-war period, then shaved off the royal layer and squeezed the world into a tiny space. There’s clear inspirations for the brief age of exploration that inspired pulp media like Indiana Jones and Doc Brown: Man of Bronze, but with real-world political structures like democracy, Marxism, fascism almost completely gutted out. There’s no reason why characters can’t be exploring tombs on the frontierlands, where the ruin has almost fully taken hold, it’s just not what the core of the book focuses on.
I mentioned the absence of democracy, Marxism and more. The political structure that does exist in Our Brilliant Ruin does so because it is allowed; Trueborn acknowledge that there needs to be some form of a ruling class, and that it might as well be a somewhat self-obsessed class that generates, centralises and distributes wealth in its own way.
This is the greatest success of the setting, and what’s fascinating is that several times throughout there’s mention of what happens if anybody acts out of line to that system, be that a petty thief that keeps hitting the same workers, or an aristocrat that centralises power at starts to slide to despotism. Shivaree (presumably a pun on chivalry) is the word for the agreement that replaces law and justice, and maintains order. Everything in the setting is honour-driven; honour to server, honour a deal, etc.
The rest
The artwork throughout is fantastic and there’s a great variety. It really helps you ‘get’ the character behind each of the factions. The crests are always great, although as a small point I do wish that each faction’s crest had a motto; We are spoiled by House Bellephine’s one. Example estates are welcome too, and the breaking down of ‘being’ them and the ‘stereotypes’ of them by other factions is also incredibly useful. (As I said earlier, this feels like it originated as a setting first.)
It features a ‘Scheme’ system, where you roll at the end of each session to try and progress a deeper scheme. This feels like an afterthought that takes away from narrative opportunities and could instead be tracked by the GM as part of their narrative duties.
Once you get over the structure of the book its clear how much good stuff there is tucked inside. Estates are a major part of intended play, as more and more RPGs are heading toward. There’s a nice description of some archetypes that can be spun up into minor or major features within your estate; and elements like adding a ballroom which then makes it so you can’t gain glooms when rolling Socialise-based activities within it.
For all of the complexity of the estates, NPC and enemy stats, and example to go with them, are stripped right back. This gives a great, easy to apply ‘purity’ to non-player characters however these sections are often very useful tools for GMs and they’re simply not there. Similarly, there are no example weapons — although the ‘beat it, burn it, booze it’ section of how to defeat/halt the Ruin is welcome.
I love the map, backgrounds and example characters that come later in the guide, these make for great plot hooks that you can drop in. Appendix Part 1, which is about the world’s little known history, is normally exactly how most would start the book off and it’s tucked right at the end. Meanwhile Appendix Part 2 is a pretty solid introduction to the estate-driven gameplay, featuring one fight and — at that — possibly no skill checks in a relatively freeform example that should take 1-3 sessions to complete.
As a published work, I’ve got only a few complaints and they mostly come down to the fact that there are a few points where there’s dark text on dark backgrounds. While, as a GM’s guide or setting book, it covers most of the bases, it feels inside out. It feels like a (magnificent) setting that then had to be fully fleshed out, but that the fleshing out wasn’t done in as many directions (combat, ‘ball themes and structures’, rumour/secret tables) as the setting inferred you might be able to comfortably play in.
Our Brilliant Ruin is a fantastic setting for those who have played games with darker settings and wondered how the non-player characters exist in such a place and time. It’s also a great starting point for those who have been looking for something to homebrew into a pre-war age of exploration complete with pith helmets, blunderbusses and creaky old biplanes, one where everybody pops home for a nice cup of tea and a ball when they’re not out on their adventures.
Our Brilliant Ruin is available now, you can find out more information on the official website.
