Proper Villains: Season 1 Retrospective

Plus, what's next for PTFO in 2025!

After 20 episodes over the last 10 months or so, we’ve concluded of the first season of Proper Villains: The Jesseks are re-united with Emma, and Emma has made a power play within the Cult of the Burnt King, which will allow her freedom to pursue her own agenda, and we’ve had a revelation about the Jesseks’ past: That their parents were murdered at the order of Roric Shaw, their former underworld overseer and ward boss of Crow’s Foot.

There’s still a lot of story left for the Jesseks — lots of open questions we’ll have to play to find out the answers to. Will Rian be able to carve off a slice of the good life in between planning heists and serving the Burnt King? Will Carver be able to extricate himself from the haunt that clings to him as retribution for past violence? And will Emma draw her brothers into the cult? Or will she find a reason to turn away from the Dalmore House and its dead god?

But for now, we will close the book on Duskwall and the family Jessek and look to some other stories. Before we do that, I wanted to do a bit of a retrospective on this arc of PTFO and talk about what I felt was the good and the bad of Arc 1.

The Good

The first big element I think was strong in Proper Villains was the setting of Duskwall and the Shattered Isles broadly. I can’t take credit for the quality of the ideas in the setting, as John Harper wrote Blades in the Dark and all the setting material, but I am satisfied with our version of Duskwall as represented in Proper Villains. Back in the first few sessions, I had a lot of fun with scenes like the rat baiting at the Red in Tooth Tavern, the Punch-and-Judy show where the brothers met Laroze, and the meadhall in Nightmarket and its faux-revolutionary aristos. It was fun to have a more modern period to play around with, though I think in the end, I prefer more swords-and-sorcery-style fantasy.

In the same vein, I thought the dialogue came out well — particularly in the earlier sessions. I did my best to create some verisimilitude with the criminal dialect, the rhyming slang, and the general manner of the Jesseks and the underworld they moved around in. I will say, though, that I do feel the dialogue began to fall off later in the arc — focusing more on the cult took us out of that underworld, and I couldn’t make the scenes outside of Crow’s Foot so flavorful.

Finally, I thought the game’s underlying premise worked well: The separated siblings, the quest to find the lost sister, and the parallel stories that came together at the end of the first arc all felt like rich areas to dig into. Now that they’re back together, it feels like there’s still lots of meat to chew on — how the Jessek boys integrate with the cult, how Emma takes to a life of property crime, and all that.

The Bad

While I felt like Blades in the Dark performed well as a narrative-focused system to help create the story of the Jesseks, I have to confess that I struggled a lot with the ruleset, particularly the downtime rules. I frequently longed to return to a PbtA system, particularly when I was working through the Jesseks’ downtime actions and trying to represent the fiction compellingly and completely while also adhering to the downtime action economy. I found the more open structure of Stonetop’s homefront vs. expedition play to be easier to work with, though it could just be a matter of practice.

I also felt that all the characters were underdeveloped compared to our trio of heroes in Stonetop. In Blades in the Dark, I relied on the game construct of the ‘crew’ to create a relationship between the characters. As a result, I didn’t do enough work to create a personal storyline for them, particularly Rian and Carver. With Aldo leading the hunt to find Emma and Emma trying to make her bones with the Burnt King, the other two characters fell through the cracks a little. Rian’s intended personal story was about material gain and comfort — capturing a slice of the good life for himself and his brothers, but other than some scenes with Nyryx, we didn’t have time to develop that. Carver’s personal story was initially just about loyalty to his found family, but there wasn’t enough meat on the bone, so I introduced his haunt, a narrative device that would let us explore more of his past and his motivations for throwing in with Aldo and Rian.

Overall, I regret how little of Emma’s side of Duskwall I showed, particularly since we’ll be spending more and more time there. Of course, there’s plenty of time to explore it now that the family is back together, but it would’ve served the story and setting well to have more Emma-viewpoint scenes. As a result, I’m also not sure how well all the scenes with the Burnt King landed — I had to represent him in much more detail and at length than I have other divine characters (Stonetop had a couple that might qualify — the scene when Anwen meets the Lady of Crows, and the scene when Vahid sees the Thousand-Year Storm through the hdour’s eyes). I hope he feels powerful, dangerous, and mysterious in the ways that ancient, eldritch deities should, but I’m not sure we got there. More Emma time might’ve helped!

These flaws are manageable, IMHO — as we move forward in the story, the characters can be better fleshed out, and their personal stories can be explored more. If this were a traditional novel, these flaws could be polished out in the editing process, but since we’re playing through the story live, y’all have to deal with my first drafts, warts and all! In future seasons of Proper Villains or any other FitD games we dive into, I can play a little more fast-and-loose with Downtime rules or maybe incorporate the rules update from the new Deep Cuts supplement to BitD if they better serve what we’re doing here.

That’s my take on the last year or so of PTFO — feel free to agree, disagree, or pile on in the comments!

What’s Next

The first thing that’s next is a good long break. You may have gleaned this from the many disruptions in the weekly-turned-biweekly publishing schedule, but life has gotten substantially busier since I started this project more than two years ago — my kids are now three and five and require ever more elaborate education and amusement, and the startup game studio I work at as my 9-5 is getting busier and more interesting by the day. Despite the ramping up, I intended to continue writing this project — it’s been great for my writing skills and creativity, so I’d probably keep doing it even if nobody was reading and I could only turn out a tiny bit each month.

As of now, I’m targeting March as the month PTFO returns to regular publication. That means between now and then, we’ve got to decide what story we’re diving into next.

Looking back at Pilot Season 2024, we chose between four ‘pilots’: PTFO:Stonetop, Proper Villains, Heartsworn (A wuxia tale set in a fantastical reimagining of classical India), and That Devil, Sam Crow (a Weird West monster hunt).

Many worlds to choose from. // Source: Midjourney

Rather than writing up new pilots — I have some ideas, but ideas are cheap — I thought we’d revisit the roads not traveled in 2024.

As is the custom here on PTFO, deciding what story to play out will be left up to you, the readers. I’ll kick up a new round of votes in late February or early March to pick our next story. If, in the meantime, you want to revisit those pilots, here are the links!

Sadly, there is not a quick-and-easy summary of the story-so-far in Stonetop; if you haven’t read it and want to dive in, here’s the ToC:

As always, thanks for reading PTFO. The audience for this substack is small but mighty, and I feel enormously privileged to have this group of people who are willing to read along and play along with these little adventures. I hope you have a great holiday, whatever shape your holidays take, and you’ll hear from me before you know it in 2025!