Table-Tested Review of “Agon”
I started an RPG book club with my friends! The plan is to read the same book, run a few sessions, and then discuss it. The first book we picked was Agon and I was pretty impressed with what I saw.
Some quick info about the book before we dive in.
- Game Designers: John Harper, Sean Nittner
- Publication Year: 2020
- Page Count: 160
The Vibe
I think the main draw for this game is going to be the heroic power fantasy, especially for those into Greek mythology. But even as someone who never got much into Greek mythology, I felt sufficiently guided by Agon. There are a lot of media recommendations and even some really good advice how to play with people with different genre knowledge. There are some good bits about safety tools and how to treat the content with care, which I appreciated.
Each session centers around a particular island and in a campaign the group will visit those islands on their way home, crafting their legend. Each island has a conflict to resolve and how the heroes resolve those conflicts will shape their story (and the gods’ opinion of them). It’s a game about big decisions and drama and the heroes’ actions will decide the fate of those islands.
Agon is structured around a series of mechanics and sequences that frame the entire experience, without getting in the way of the narrative. They’re a frame around a specific story being told and they make running a game easy. This shows itself in things like the group leader being chosen with a roll at the beginning of the session, each island beginning with a contest upon arrival, the leader having to interpret signs from the gods during the adventure and multiple other steps to follow when leaving an island, that advance the characters and the game as a whole and make the group play out some more specific scenes. This makes Agon play out in a very “standardized” structure, although outcomes will always be unique due to player choices and dice rolls.
The island itself is the most freeform part of the game. Depending which trajectory the session takes after the first challenge, the GM shapes the story with the guidelines provided by the island being run, together with the players.
The Mechanics
Character creation is easy enough, especially with the cheat sheets provided. There are some neat bits in there, like demigod heroes having fewer bonds to their companions than those born to human parents, but having a better connection to the gods instead.
Rolling the dice is surprisingly complex for a game this narrative. At first I thought it sounded convoluted, but with some practice I enjoyed using the system in play. It’s a combination of dice pools (for each player, as well as the GM) and having rituals where everyone is stating their whole name, deeds and intentions, it’s really quite fun to do.
Pools get assembled from various sources and the two highest non-d4 dice are added together (plus an extra d4 in certain cases) for the final result. Usually many (or all) players roll at once, which is where the competitive aspect of the game comes in: everyone wants to be the best in the contest. I’ve heard from some people that this created an overly competitive atmosphere, but in my game it mostly just added a fun little extra layer in the narrative created together. Being the best awards you some better dice pools over the span of multiple sessions, which is neat but not devastating if reached slightly later than other players. The results are compared against the roll of the GM (the GM pool being assembled somewhat simpler) and then narrated by taking turns from worst to best result, with the GM narrating in between. This made for highly narrative rolls, which I enjoyed greatly.
Larger combats (or non-violent conflicts reflavouring the combat rules) usually consist of a sequence of three rolls that set up the scene of large conflicts nicely. The players’ rolls and decisions determine things like who has the upper hand from the start, which disasters get averted and what happens to their opponent should they win. This makes outcomes dynamic and embraces failure in a way I haven’t seen done before - failure scenarios are explicitly spelled out and it’s easy to not get the best ending possible. Trying to do so might even lead to total failure.
There are some other neat mechanical bits in there that I enjoyed, chief being mechanics around death. A character can die in order to auto succeed and there are different ways to handle death - it can be immediate, you might get a second chance or you might need to do a rescue mission, which is provided in the book already. Creating a new character is also neat because you can choose how much you want to “level up” your new character upon creation - but doing so also brings them closer to their end of the story again.
There’s also a lot of really solid GM advice in there.
One-Shots vs. Campaigns
The game is clearly designed with campaign play in mind, but it holds up well in a one-shot. It’s easy to fit both character creation and an island into a single session. If you’re running it as a campaign as intended you’re looking roughly 10-15 sessions, if not more, although that can of course be adjusted to taste easily enough.
Running islands is surprisingly easy. Each island consists of three very concise pages of text, including signs of the gods to interpret, a conflict to solve upon arrival and a collection of trials, battles, characters, places, special rewards and mysteries. If you want to make your own islands or need more than the initial twelve provided in the book, there is some excellent advice to do that. The book not only explains what you need, but also the design intentions behind the game.
The thing that will need a bit more GM fiat is handing out divine wrath and favour, which is not rooted in any mechanics. To be fair, this is probably also easier if you aren’t a Greek mythology noob like me.
Conclusion
Agon is definitely a game that has caught my interest. The mechanics can seem slightly crunchy at first, especially if you’re used to PbtA games or similar. But once you get the hang of them you see the elegance beneath those mechanics and that’s what made Agon great to me. It’s a strong choice for groups interested in structured, mythic storytelling.
