Sovereign Syndicate

Thanks to the good graces of Another Brother, I recently got to play through Sovereign Syndicate, a great little indie RPG. Reading the description makes me think that it was created in a laboratory specifically to appeal to me: if you imagine the intersection between Shadowrun Returns, Disco Elysium and Fallen London you'll have a great idea of what this game is. As those are my three favorite RPG-ish properties of the last decade, it's a uniquely compelling pedigree.

Sovereign Syndicate is set in an alternate version of Victorian England. There's steampunk-y technology, along with a completely new world history that includes some new global superpowers (Zululand is an empire that spans the Atlantic). One of the more striking aspects is the insertion of fantasy races into human society; unlike Shadowrun's adoption of Tolkien-esque elves, dwarves, orks and trolls, Sovereign Syndicate highlights races from classical mythology like centaurs, minotaurs, cyclopses and satyrs.

Like Disco Elysium and Fallen London, Sovereign Syndicate has stats like an RPG, but is oriented around non-lethal encounters and problem-solving using skills like observation, critical thinking, persuasion and sleight of hand. The system oozes with flavor: you may level up in humours like "yellow bile" and "melancholy", which will eventually increase stats like "Self-Determination" and "Animal Instinct". The skill system isn't as broad as Disco Elysium, but is used very similarly: you take challenges based on the skills you have, and also see reactive observations from your inner dialogue based on those aspects. (So, your "Animal Instinct" may chime in in response to something another character says. Even the art for these aspects is very evocative of Disco Elysium's. Overall the game very much feels like it's continuing in Disco Elysium's footsteps, which is fantastic, because we need a lot more of those sorts of games!

Continuing with the very unique and evocative character of its systems, Sovereign Syndicate does not follow the die-rolling or random-number-generator approach followed by most RPGs. Instead, challenges are based around a Tarot deck. When you take a challenge, you'll draw a card from the deck, add that value to the relevant stat, and compare that against the challenge value. So, for example, if you are checking a Spryness of 20, have an innate Spryness of 15, and draw a 6 of Cups, then you'll have a total of 21 and pass the challenge. The special card "The World" will auto-pass any challenge, while "The Fool" will auto-fail the challenge and re-shuffle the entire deck.

This has some interesting and cool mechanical implications. It took a while for me to realize it, but you're essentially card-counting whenever you check the odds of completing a challenge. If you've already drawn a lot of high cards, then those can't be drawn again until you find The Fool, so you're more likely to be stuck with a lower card; of course, if you have had a string of bad luck, then karma is naturally weighted in your favor and you'll be more likely (but not guaranteed) to draw a high card. Neither success or failure are ever guaranteed, and there's always an outside chance that luck will triumph over the odds. Also, this system limits against save-scumming: you're not re-rolling the dice, just drawing whatever card is on top, which was set way back when the deck was last shuffled. BUT, depending on where you are in the game, you might be able to take different challenges to get deeper into your deck before returning to the first one.

The tarot deck you're using is specifically the "minor arcana". You can also acquire "major arcana", which permanently unlock certain dialogue choices and abilities: being a social chameleon, or blunt speaking, or able to cast illusion spells. They function like Etiquettes in Shadowrun, giving you a challenge-free way to progress in a dialogue or situation.

I really love the non-combat design. I think a lot about ways that we could design and play RPGs without fighting and killing, and I love seeing more and more of these games come into the world. So many of the things we have in RPGs today are there because Gary Gygax made an arbitrary decision 60 years ago, and we all kind of continue those systems forward without thinking about it: things like gold, XP, levels, hit points, etc. I love it when games get away from those conventions. Sometimes, as with Tides of Numenara, it can feel like the designers are working a bit too hard to go against the grain, which also isn't great: doing something different isn't automatically better, and can feel annoying if you're being asked to learn a new system that doesn't improve on the mechanics or flavor of the status quo. But it's really nice to feel like you're playing a game that popped in from a parallel universe where games evolved differently, and Sovereign Syndicate belongs to that latter group of games. 

One specific example here: your character's mood acts kind of like their health bar. It's a range from 0-100, with descriptions like "weary" near the bottom and "content" near the top. Your mood may be damaged if you fail a challenge, but also if, like, you see a dead bird in the gutter, or if you give a cynical answer to a question. You can improve your mood by succeeding, but also by expressing optimism, noticing pretty things in the world, or listening to praise from others. Once you get the hand of the system, it's pretty easy to raise by paying attention to your surroundings and the options: picking upbeat replies, taking baths, and so on help raise it, so you can maintain around 100 after a while. In some ways this becomes self-reinforcing, as certain dialogue options are themselves gated by your current mood.

I'm not sure what happens if your mood reaches 0 - mechanically it seems like it could be a "game over" type of situation, but given how the rest of the game works, I imagine it's more of a story impact, restricting your actions to the "Weary or Worse" choices.

The mood bar oddly makes me think of Lord of the Rings Online. In the Tolkien mythos there is no resurrection, so death has always been tricky to handle in games set in Middle-earth. LOTRO handles this by instead having "Morale", which functions equivalently to Health but is meaningfully different in the story. The idea is that your character can press on, will grow discouraged over time (due to their wounds or other hardships), and once they fall into despair they give up and need to return home to regather their strength and courage. Acts like singing are very powerful in raising morale, functioning similarly to applying a bandage to a health-based system but much more meaningful and evocative in this setting. Anyways, I like how Sovereign Syndicate does something sort of similar, and I think it could work well for lots of other games too. (There are many other examples, of course. Failbetter has Fallen London with "menaces" like Scandal and Suspicion, along with Supplies and Nightmares in the Sunless games, and going way back there's Sanity in the Call of Cthulhu pen-and-paper games.)

Visually, the art design of Sovereign Syndicate feels a lot like the new Shadowrun games. It mostly feels isometric, with a bit of dynamic shifting: in Shadowrun there was a light parallax effect around the Y axis when you panned the camera. In Sovereign Syndicate, the camera always centers your character in the middle of the screen, but the camera tilts around as you move through the map. For a while I thought Sovereign Syndicate also used 2D hand-painted backgrounds, but later levels of the game make more clear that the whole game is 3D, just locked to a range of a given isometric angle.

Also like Shadowrun, most of the gameplay consists of you clicking to walk around on a map, then clicking on people and objects to interact with them. This brings up a Shadowrun-style (and I suppose Disco Elysium-style) dialogue pane on the right where you can read through the speech or narration, and select from a few response choices. 

There's also an occasional segment of comic-book-style movement panels. I was impressed that these are introduced so late in the game; it's pretty striking and cool imagery, and it was nice to have it be a surprise and not something you see right off the bat. Likewise, there's no voice acting in the game, but it's really cool to hear a character sing after playing as them for a while.

Before dipping into plot discussion, I have a few minor criticisms to share:

• The music is pretty, but is too short and quickly gets repetitive. This is compounded by how often music is shared between different large maps.
• The art style is pretty nice, but the loading screens feel muddled.

• Navigating large areas like Sorris Square gets tedious. I'm glad that you can fast travel between maps, but you often need to walk a long way to get where you need to be. (I'm really feeling for the players of my Shadowrun campaigns!)

• There are some minor glitches with quest progression. Occasionally the Journal still lists a task even if you've completed it. There was one point where I thought the game was stuck, had to Google and find that I needed to take a non-intuitive step to progress.
• This isn't exactly a problem, but the Journal includes some tasks that aren't really actionable (like "Wait to find out more about the voices in your head") alongside actual things you can progress. Early in the game you get a LOT of quests and can only see 4 on screen at a time, although it's easy enough to pop open the Journal and see the rest. (Later on you can trim down and just have a main and a couple of side quests at a time, which feels better.)

That's about it for complaints! Now for some

MINI SPOILERS

Besides sharing some of the same design principles and mechanics, I feel like the overall ethos of Sovereign Syndicate fits within the psychic space of Shadowrun, Disco Elysium and Fallen London. All of these games feel generally progressive, skeptical of capitalism in general and the mechanization of labor in particular. They also (other than DE) express some interest in transhumanism and non-biological sentience. (Well, I guess DE does have the Horrific Necktie, so maybe that counts.) Sovereign Syndicate is maybe a bit more like Shadowrun in that the world created seems to imply a point of view but that point of view isn't explicitly expressed within the game, whereas DE and FL seem more confident in adopting an authorial perspective.

One really cool aspect of Sovereign Syndicate is that you play as four (mostly three) distinct characters. You don't travel together in a party: instead you play as one for a while, then after hitting a story beat you switch to another, and so on. For each character you choose an initial "archetype" that sets their initial stats, which in turn helps determine how they will tend to approach problems: like, a Clara who focuses on Grace will likely mostly try to charm people, while a Clara who focuses on Intellect will outwit them. This opens up some neat possibilities for you as a player: personally, I find it easier to role-play against type when I have multiple PCs, so one might be a goody-two-shoes while another is a scoundrel.

The actual plot of the game takes quite a while to get going, it's more about immersing in the atmosphere. You start off playing as Atticus Daly, an illusionist Minotaur who is contacted by a mysterious man to get out of a jam. Later on you also play as Clara Reed, a courtesan; and Teddy Redgrave, a combat veteran and tinkerer dwarf along with his automaton. The main plot seems to circle around a Jack the Ripper-esque criminal known as the Courtesan Killer who has been murdering Londoners. That's mostly a background concern, though: your characters are focusing on other tasks and looking into the killings whenever the opportunity arises.

MEGA SPOILERS

Some evidence suggests that a werewolf is the killer, but that evidence seems a bit too convenient, and for much of the game I suspected that they were being made scapegoats. Werewolves seem to be the main target of prejudice at least in London; people generally seem cool with centaurs, maybe just slightly skeptical of cyclopses and minotaurs, but quite down on werewolves.

As it turned out, I was right, I think. A lot of disparate plot threads come together at the end. I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's something like this:

The industrialist Silas Bragg (Lord Braxton) is a brilliant inventor. He created the Determination Core, which enables Otto with free will. He also wants to prove that the Determination Core can be used on humans; in particular, vegetative people can be brought back to self-sufficiency. This is a significantly harder task as the Determination Core is metallic and any human body would reject it. Braxton steals research from Dr. Wainwright, a scientist, and uncovers a serum that will allow the body to accept the transformation. That serum requires a large quantity of live werewolf blood. Braxton then contracts with Molly O'Malley, a crimelord, to obtain that werewolf blood. Separately, Madam Zora, proprietress of the brothel, has murdered some of her girls, and then murdered others who were getting close to discovering she had done it. The madame and Molly collaborate to frame a werewolf for the crimes. Once he is under suspicion, the werewolf will be offered sanctuary away from the police and imprisoned by Molly at Braxton's manor, where he can be exsanguinated for the experiment. Oh, but the woman selected for the experiment is none other than Atticus's mom.

So, everyone ends up having some connection: Atticus is close to the victim, Clara is friends with the murdered courtesans and an employee of the murderer, the dwarf is hired to kidnap the werewolf. They all come together at the end to uncover the plot, save the werewolf and stop the experiment. The mysterious masked man from the start of the game arrives with the authorities to take the perpetrators into custody. Much like Nick Fury, he then reveals that he represents a special organization that works for Her Majesty to confront secret threats to the Empire... and he is looking to recruit all four of them into this organization, Sovereign Syndicate.

So the whole game ends up feeling like a sort of origin story, the first chapter in an Avengers or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, with the implication that these characters have been recruited into a bigger world of new adventures.

Some final thoughts:

I still had some open and unresolved quests at the end. I'm not sure if that's because I missed some things during the game or if I was locked out of completing some of those tasks from failed skill checks or earlier decisions I'd made.

I am curious about money. It's an important and seemingly very limited resource throughout the game, and there doesn't seem to be enough to do everything that you need. That said, there didn't seem to be any consequences to, say, not paying Atticus's rent. There's a lot of stuff that I could have bought that I chose not to, and I wonder what any of that does.

Near the end of the game, the loading screens and dialogue made it sound like I (Clara) had discovered some damning evidence in the madame's room; but I'm like 99% sure that I never searched her room. It seems like a bug, but maybe I clicked through something without clocking what it was talking about.

There's a ton of acknowledgement of your actions at the very end of the game, as the masked man recounts many of the side-quests you finished and choices you made. This isn't as much choice-and-consequences in the main body of the game, at least not that I picked up on; it could be interesting to see how things change in a replay.

END SPOILERS

As I keep writing, one of my favorite things in the world is a Relatively Short Game. Sovereign Syndicate isn't super-short; it kept me entertained for over a week of nights and weekends. Still compared to the mammoth RPGs I've been playing lately like Elden Ring, it's incredibly satisfying to be able to start, play, and end a game in a reasonable amount of time. Sovereign Syndicate impressively manages to do that while also delivering a wholly original world, new mechanical system, and a complex storyline will multiple player characters and dozens of non-player-characters. While definitely a lower-budget game, it hits above its weight and has earned a place on my shelf of fun indie RPGs.