Honeybee RPG First Playtest!
My friends David and Sandro AD were kind enough to join me on a maiden voyage of my Honeybee RPG tonight and we had a rip-roaring good time. This past weekend I decided to buckle down and turn my huge volume of notes and references about bee-havior into a short playtest document so that I could finally get it out of my head and onto a (virtual) table and tonight we played through a full Spring season in my example keyed hex map!
Annotated 7-biome map that we used for this first test
Quick Chronological Summary
We started with a quick guided meditation to put ourselves in the headspace of some hotshot scouting bees ready to explore the wide world. I introduced them to their Queen Bee, Lorraine the Naive. Lorraine's ambition as a queen was to overprepare for the winter. Satisfying the queen bee's Ambition is how the beehive gains Adaptations. Meliss (Sandro AD) and Dewdrop (David) set out north from their cozy home forest for the Resource Expedition and decided to split up. Meliss was interested in exploring the swamp to the northeast of their hive while Dewdrop wanted to see the northern grassland.
Mechanically, players are responsible for managing three key inventories during the Resource Expedition: Memory, Honey Crop, and Pollen. These are tracked with playing cards and poker chips.
Very quickly, I realized that my mental model for how Pollen and the Honey Crop interact was...flawed. Sandro and David were quick on their feet and proposed that, rather than flatly adding the rank of your pollen cards to your honey crop inventory, the act of collecting pollen should just give you 1d6 water tokens. This was a very slick modification that I was grateful for and will be carrying forward! I am really fortunate that I ran this first playtest with such skilled designers.
We ended up playing out about 6 rounds of exploration and found some really interesting rule interactions that felt nicely consonant. Because the two scouts separated, there were often 2-3 resource cards available in a hex and it sometimes made sense for the bee to stick around in a tile for an extra hour to collect a second resource. We judged that this should also be a little more efficient in terms of water/honey management. I liked this!
In the interest of keeping to a 90 minute session, we stepped through an abbreviated Waggle Dance (worker placement) phase and a quick Hive Management (basebuilding) phase just to stretch our legs a little bit before we went into Stars and Wishes and last thoughts. I started them with a pretty barebones hive, so they spent the Waggle Dance phase fulfilling Lorraine's ambition and harvesting some deer fur from a carcass in their forest and they spent the Hive Management phase feeding the population and growing some Brood Cells so that we will have more adults to work with for the summer.
Evaluation
The bones of the crawl procedure worked very well for me, and my players were good about keeping me honest on stepping through it in the right order. I used a hex flower 2d6 roll to check for weather each round, and I used the result of that roll to simultaneously check the encounter table for the first tile being explored. Since our two scouts split up early on, I would quickly provide the landmark information for the hex key and encounter to Meliss and draw her resource cards, then swap over to Dewdrop, roll her tile's encounter, provide landmark info, and draw her resource cards. This gave Sandro AD time to think about how to use the drawn cards while David and I talked through what his bee sees.
I think exploring two tiles at a time is probably the limit of what would feel good for this procedure. The combination of weather, hex terrain/features, and encounters is a decent amount of load to manage per round, but it felt like the correct level of complexity for two players and I think it would scale well to four players. We discussed whether it would scale up to five+ players and I am...dubious.
I kept the time and weather player-facing as a convenience and so that I could use Owlbear Rodeo as an all-purpose HUD
The procedural generation also felt good. I prepared this hex map a few months ago based on some spark tables and a big honking terrain feature table that I originally composed for Bee-Sized Anchors of Wilderness Play and it was enough information to improvise and narrate. I ran the hex crawl very similarly to how I ran Mythic Bastionland (various levels of "zoom" based on what there is to interact with), but the resource management minigame took the place of Omens.
We had some terrific moments that emerged from the weather, the encounters, and the keys. Sandro AD's "Star" for the session came while exploring the swamp. It was thundering, so Meliss needed to fly close to the ground, and I rolled a sign/spoor of a local predator. I knew that the local predator for this swamp was dragonflies, and in the Spring they would likely still be in their aquatic nymph stage. I narrated that, as Meliss buzzed close to the swamp water, she saw the darting nymphs and knew in the back of her bee brain that those would one day grow up to be a nightmarish intercept predator. She made a mental note that it could be worth devising a Waggle Dance that could remove the dragonflies from the swamp, even if it was challenging. In the same round, however, she also came across blooming milkweed and knew that the noble Monarch Butterfly would also transit this swamp and had a moment of reflection. This was really lovely emergent play.
The face of death
David also had a great moment of encounter alchemy. Dewdrop discovered a rival beehive in the heart of the grasslands and gave it a wide berth. She then ran into some scouts from that hive scoping out a possum nest, the lair of the grassland's local predator. She commiserated with the rival scouts and bounced some ideas about how to displace the possum in the future. This dovetailed with one of David's wishes for the session; he wants to figure out what tools our honeybees have access to effect change in their environment.
This has been a struggle for my mental model; I want this to be a grounded game. The fantasy is being literal tiny bees in a big world! The three of us spent some time talking about things like, what level of intelligence should we role play? My intent is that players approach this game from an OSR angle. I want them to feel empowered by tactical infinity through the constraint of a tiny body during the scouting phase. Their ability to affect the world should come into play during the worker placement phase, but is that sacrificing too much player agency during the Resource Expedition? I don't even have a resolution mechanic for if the bees attempt something uncertain while scouting, and that's by design. If you're not sure it would work for an individual bee, it probably wouldn't! I think we reached consensus after this first session, but I have some work to do on communicating that expectation at the start of the game.
My justification in game is that you are playing as a member of a hive mind, so why not grant that hive mind human intelligence?
Sandro AD's wish for the game was to see some better codification of how the poker hand quality in the Waggle Dance should factor into that worker placement phase. This was a known gap of mine headed into the session and I am of a few minds on how to tackle it. One approach we discussed was turning the four basic actions into something more like the Apocalypse World-inspired Moves that we have discussed in Surveyed by the Apocalypse?. Low-quality Instructions could come with some sort of fictional consequence for the hive. You could even take this a step further and make it something more like Otherkind dice, where players are managing both what they want to do on the map and domestic problems in the hive (parasites, disease, large animal intrusion) with the same Waggle Dance operation.
A final version of this game would likely include seasonal events like parasite infestations that must be managed
Alternately, if you took it in more of a wargame direction, there could be some function or matrix of Instruction Quality, Population assigned to the task, and Distance from the hive that is then assessed against some Difficulty determined by the GM, but then you run into the constant problem that poker hand distribution is just wildly nonlinear. I think if you were going to do that, you might do better with scoring players' Memory like a hand of cribbage, which was an idea I had in the back of my head when I prepared the playtest packet.
In general, we all liked the resource management minigame! I love the gamefeel of poker hands, so I would be hard pressed to write it off completely as my approach. As far as ludonarrative consonance, David also had a really slick idea that I need to meditate on further; if there would be some benefit to leaving resource cards on the map, then that number should be in some way tied to the quality of the Waggle Dance. Just a nice way to play with the fact that we are calling that resource "memory".
Character sheet in use! The main function of the sheet is a place to hold your cards and poker chips.
What Comes Next?
I have another session scheduled for later this week with some other new players, and my plan is for them to continue to play in the same map but in the next season. I'll try to get some redlines onto that Google drive by then just so we are playing to the same sheet music, but it will be interesting to drop some new players into the world with a larger hive (they will have 3 population) and a new colony adaptation (Nestbuilding: Leafcutting).
My highest-priority development task is drafting a higher-fidelity Waggle Dance, and possibly more than one version at that. I think the Resource Expedition and Hive Management are about where I want them for continued testing. I really love the bones of the game so far though, so I'm just thrilled to have gotten it to the table. Thank you for reading and please reach out if you're interested in organizing a session!