Blood Feud is a game about
toxic masculinity: certain common attitudes and behaviors among men, that cause great harm to them and to others around them. This is a game about people being nasty to each other and about figuring out why.
It’s also a game about vikings of pre-christian Scandinavia; about honor and blood feuds, courage and brutality, corruption and consequences. Above all it is a game about what it means to be a man in such a world—and what consequences that has on the communities they live in.
The goal of the game is to
explore and experience toxic masculinity, while at the same time creating a thoughtful drama about relationships, competition and social consequences. With this game we want to make toxic masculinity easier to spot for a wider variety of people in our roleplaying communities—and
encourage critical discussions about how men behave, and why.
Playing the Game
The central theme of this game is power—specifically the power of men: How you earn it, what you have to do to keep it, and most importantly what you do with it.
To make power visible, we use a currency called
Honor Tokens. Throughout the game these tokens will get moved around between the players as their main characters interact with each other—depending on how “manly” or “honorable” their actions are.
Since there is
no Game Master, all players must pay attention to the seven
Moves that cause honor to shift. In this way, every player has to learn to recognize what causes the power structures to change.
The seven moves are:
- Sharing someone’s bed
- Giving someone a gift
- Commenting on a woman’s appearance
- Praising someone
- Insulting someone
- Escalating
- Striking a deadly blow
Apart from moves, the game uses a concept called
Narrative Freedom to handle questions of narrative authority. This means that every player has equal say in describing the fictional world and what happens in it—up until a move is triggered. Players may interrupt each others’ narration, but only to do one of two things: making an addendum or adding an obstacle.
- An addendum is an extra detail added to what was just said.
- An obstacle is a roadblock that explains why something that was about to happen, didn’t happen.
Addendums and obstacles allow for playing out scenes in an improv style, instead of using traditional resolution tools such as dice or cards.
There are also mechanics in place that deal specifically with the role of women in the game. The first one:
there must always be at least one woman present in every scene. When the last woman in a scene leaves, the scene simply ends. We are only interested in what happens publicly when looking at honor, so what happens when women are not watching doesn’t count..
Secondly, at the end of each scene, the players who played
women must decide which of the men in the scene was the least manly. That man loses one honor token. Hence, the men must always compete for the attention of the women and their implicit approval.
