In which we discuss Dethroners, a game ostensibly about narrative control, and consider the relationship between mechanics and narrative within

Dethroners is a game that involves the players tearing pages out of its rulebook to signify narrative control being wrested from the GM. The GM plays the Divinity, who is attempting to solidify their rule while the players play a band of Renegades who are attempting to prevent the Divinity from doing so. The game intrigued me with its premise and the promise of a good reason to rip pages from a rulebook and so I brought it to a table with a couple of friends. We played it as a oneshot (as it is intended to be) and we thoroughly enjoyed the experience, having told a story that had everyone engaged at the table and was very memorable. However, upon reflection there are parts of the design that I feel points of friction with and it took writing this to properly articulate why. In this post, I will be looking at Dethroners and the relationship between mechanics and narrative within it, as well as asking “what are these Titles, actually?”

The Flow of Play

Dethroners has a strict flow of play where during each stage, the player with a certain title is in charge of pushing play forward and leading the narrative. During character generation, each player character rolls on a table and receives one of the Titles — this is signified by the player physically taking the rulebook and ripping the corresponding part of the book out.

An aside: when I played this, I made the mistake of printing the game onto A3 paper and messing up the printing (something I only realised at the table), so I would recommend printing the game on A4 paper in a booklet format and make sure to check that both pages of each Title are on the same side so that when you tear a page out, the entire Title can be taken by the player.

After character generation comes map generation, where the players get a taste for the narrative control that each Title grants. The player with the Wayfinder title rolls for what starting locations will be placed on the map, the Lorekeeper then rolls on a table for lore regarding each location and describes a significant feature. The title holder that corresponds to each type of starting location adds it to the map and names it. Five of the ten Titles correspond to location types.

The Whispersmith, Endbringer and Firetender are not involved in this process, but notably as even in a full sized five player game, the Divinity will still begin with six of the ten titles, so this map creation process is going to be mostly the Divinity rolling a lot of dice, flipping back and forth in the rulebook and then coming up with a lot of details on the spot and the Renegades occasionally contributing to the process.

Once character and map creation is over, the main phase of gameplay begins with the Whispersmith establishing the first Title that the band of Renegades will go on a quest to tear from the Divinity. In this way, the Whispersmith is in charge of describing the quest that the Renegades will embark on. Then, the Wayfinder rolls on a table to place progress tokens on locations on the map. Going to a location allows the Renegade to collect the progress tokens there, but every time they move to a location they also meet a challenge where they have the chance to gain more progress tokens. These progress tokens give the Renegades the ability to take initiate a challenge to take a Title from the Divinity, the number of Titles each side holds on to at the end of the game deciding who has a better chance of winning the final confrontation.

Mechanics and the Narrative

In order to facilitate narrative control being redistributed across the table, the game uses its detailed procedure of play to limit who can speak when. One of the players at our game remarked that it felt quite ‘boardgamey’, which is hard to deny. Majority of the actual mechanics are tied up within themselves to create a game of moving around a map in order to collect tokens to take Titles. It is entirely possible to play the game without any narration or roleplay, which would take majority of the fun out of the process but would not hurt the mechanical structure at all. This is not a problem in itself, there are many TTRPGs that ask the players to follow strict procedures, but the way it is done in Dethroners made me feel like sometimes I was more making sense of the mechanics and its outputs rather than actively making up a story.

A reason for this is that the game can be very specific in how it prompts you to narrate. For example, as the holder of the Title named Cobblehaunt is given ‘right to narrate’ in cities but let’s break down what that actually entails. When the Renegades travel to a city during a previous phase of the game, I roll on a table to determine what kind of challenge or event takes place in the city. I roll twice and get the results for ‘Shadow Challenge’ and ‘Flame Challenge’. I must pick from the two options that I have, which tell me what attribute is going to be used in the challenge and thus the overall theme for what kind of challenge it is. I then roll on another table, this time with three columns with ten results in each, assigning each value I rolled to a respective column of my choice to create something like “A Coinbreaker of the Sunken Bazaar, greedy beyond measure, throwing the party of the century”, which is the prompt I am to incorporate into my description. It’s important to note that your choice of challenge type is a big influence on what combination of prompts you take from the table — the most narratively congruent decision is to make a combination that suits the challenge type that you already picked.

During these parts of the game where the the Title holder is supposed to have narrative control, the procedure of the game can feel too strict with what actual options it offers you, and the prompts that it gives you to work with are often so specific that the game has done most of the main creative generative work for you, meaning your contribution is filling in the gaps and providing details. It also inverses the usual relationship between mechanics and narrative in a TTRPG where the story that the player makes up is what usually triggers a mechanic. For example, I will say I am hitting the vampire with a silver sword and we will roll for an attack. But in Dethroners, the procedure of the game and the mechanics tells the player, you are making an attack and the thing that you are attacking is a vampire. The ‘narrative control’ that the player has is only to narrate around the core fiction that is already provided.

Another strange thing about Titles is that they are given very little diegetic meaning. Holding onto the Title gives the player the power to frame the narrative during a corresponding part of the flow of play but what is that supposed to represent for the Renegade who wields this power? Does having the title give them divine power over that realm of the world (e.g. the Greenmantle having power over the forests)? What is the extent of that power? On the other hand, what is the Title to the Divinity? We can infer from that the Titles being torn from the rulebook that it is symbolic of the Titles being part of the Divinity and their divine power and the tearing of the pages from the rulebook is the sundering of a part of the Divinity from themself — this also a metaphor for the GM’s power being taken by the players, the symbol and literal source of their ‘reign’, the rulebook, being physically wrested from them. This is all great implication, but the only diegetic detail about the Titles that the text makes clear is that the Titles are important for the Renegades’ quest to defeat the Divinity in some way

This strangeness with the titles and the inverse relationship between the mechanics and narrative in Dethroners could sound like they are huge flaws in the design but that is where I am conflicted because I had a terrific time with the game. Sure, in the course of thinking about the game further and in my conversations with my fellow players about the game we questioned whether we were really playing a TTRPG at all, but foremost on everyone’s minds has been how much fun we had that evening. Although at some points the narration that we wanted to do brought us out of sync with the game and we had to reconcile or make concessions within our story to resolve it with where the mechanics told us we were and what we were doing, but it was easy enough for us to do so. While Dethroners could perhaps be seen as more of a board game than an RPG, the presentation of itself as an RPG and that mode of play that we were all agreeing to take part in was strong enough to overcome the awkward rigidity in the design.

What I liked about it

To end on what I liked about the game, I enjoyed how the focus was more on the story as a whole and the locations that are put on the map. While the character sheets are small enough to comfortably fit on half of an A5 sheet of paper (sans reminder text), the map that is created through the course of play should take up most of the table space. The game is designed in a way that brings you back to locations that already exist, instead of constantly creating new ones. That means that the system incentivises the players to loop the stories back to where they once were, allowing the group to narrate how the places were influenced by their actions and events in the world. This creates the kind of internal cohesiveness and callback to previous events that is rare in a oneshot oriented game, and often produced the most memorable parts of the story that we told. While there is a ‘Divine Clock’ that tracks how close to the end of the game the players are, the actual timeframe of the journey is not specified. This allows the players to expand and contact the amount of time that they want to cover based on what feels right for the story at the time, which is another point of flexibility that just worked and contributed to the fun that we had with the game.

All in all, Dethroners is a game with an intriguing premise that delivers — albeit in ways that sometimes don’t quite fit together under scrutiny. But much like there are movies that are amazing to experience in the moment but nightmares to make sense of later, Dethroners is enough fun at the table that I would not hesitate to bring it to another group, provided it was what felt right for that evening of play.