I'm going to start by quoting the opening paragraph of Flying Circus in its entirety, because I think it sets the tone better than I ever could.
Flying Circus is a roleplaying game about the fantasy and reality of being a flying ace in the days of early air combat. Over the course of the game, players will take their ramshackle aircraft into battle, find triumph and defeat, get blackout drunk and have ill-advised sex with each other, and find a way to somehow pay for it all. They will be heroes and scoundrels, knights errant and killers for hire, and they just might find out who they are and where they belong, if they don't crash and burn first.Did I whisper "yes" aloud on reading this for the first time? Perhaps. Having read through the book a few times now, I'd like to revise this reaction to "hmm". A positive "hmm", mind, like your first sip of an interesting new cocktail. Let me try and explain.
Let's get my ugliest complaint out of the way first: this book needed more proofreading. PDF releases being what they are, it's entirely possible that this will be fixed soon, but I noticed a lot of typos and formatting oddities even on my initial read-through. It always feels petty to bring up things like this, when they don't actually detract from the flavor or mechanics of the game, but it genuinely did feel like it was tripping up my reading. The book also has no index, which I'd like to have seen in a game with as many rules components as this one. Aside from that, though, it's a well-assembled piece, and there's plenty of art (colourful DeviantArt-ish fauxnime, competent to good, the planes look better than the people).
The unquestionable high point of Flying Circus is its characters. This is a Powered by the Apocalypse game. Like many gamers, Apocalypse World blew my mind wide open when I discovered it, and I went through a phase of devouring everything PbtA I could get my hands on. I've played Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, and Ironsworn, GMed Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, and dreamed distantly of finding a group to run Pigsmoke for. The PbtA folder in my PDF collection is the biggest by far.
So I hope it's clear how much of a compliment it is that Flying Circus has the best character playbooks I've ever seen, dethroning the previous champion, the criminally underrated suburban crime game The 'Hood, by a substantial margin.
In case you're not familiar with the PbtA school of character creation, your playbook is a personalised character sheet that also acts as your class, taking you step by step through a series of questions both fluffy and crunchy to build your character and define their unique "moves" (PbtA's shorthand for things a PC can do). Flying Circus has ten playbooks, from the Farmer, a naive prodigy in the spirit of Episode IV Luke Skywalker, to more exotic options like the nomadic Skyborn or the sinister, supernaturally empowered Fisher, and every single one of them is brilliant.
First things first, the only fixed "core" move any given playbook starts out with is actually a drawback (except the Student, who has a beneficial core move but worse base stats than everyone else). Most of these drawbacks relate to the social side of the game, and many deal with stress - the Farmer is Naive and won't indulge in unfamiliar vices even when it's their only source of stress relief, while the Soldier's Stiff Upper Lip means they can't hold an honest, emotionally open conversation unless they're on the verge of a stress meltdown. I like this because it puts a character's identity as a person front and centre, defining everyone by their drama-fuelling fatal flaws in a way that meshes really well with PbtA's character-forward philosophy.
Speaking of stress, it's a huge component of the game. You build it up in the air, mostly, and on the ground you'll be trying to get it off your chest any way you can. Some stressors are universal, but each playbook has its own list of "stress triggers" that dictate what exactly stresses that character out when they come back from a mission. These stress triggers are fantastic pieces of mechanical storytelling. The Believer, with their life-defining victim complex, is stressed if they don't actually take a hit in combat. The privileged noble Scion takes stress if they're disobeyed... and even more stress if everything works out fine in spite of it.
There are loads more little touches that really make these playbooks sing for me. Each one offers its own selection of four unique starting planes (though you can choose one off-menu from another playbook within a price limit), and these planes tend to say something more about your character's background and personality. One of the Student's mandatory starting items is "crippling debt". In the Trust field, which determines who you do and don't trust at the start of the game, the paranoid, fanatical Believer simply has "Trust no one." printed in huge typewriter font.
Oh, and we should talk about trust. Many PbtA games have some sort of stat (Apocalypse World calls it History, or Hx) that measures the closeness of relationships between player characters. In Flying Circus, trust between PCs is binary - either you trust someone, and would die for them, or you don't trust someone, and don't care if they live or die. This is another great mechanical choice, reinforcing the volatile pressure-cooker lifestyle of a flying ace. A couple of people I've spoken to about the game feel that it's overly reductive and could lead to strange, unnatural roleplaying, and I respect that take, but I personally like it a lot.
So what we have here is a socially-focused game that encourages fast, irresponsible living from a dynamic, compelling cast of characters. The systems for getting hammered, having arguments, spending quality time with erstwhile lovers, and so on, all seem to drive the game in the direction of a genuinely brilliant character drama. But Flying Circus is explicitly a game of two halves. The structure of a Flying Circus campaign is actually pretty rigid, alternating missions and downtime, and, while the downtime half is PbtA at its best, the mission half is... well, okay, let's talk through it.
Yes, that's a dragon in the background. Flying Circus' overtly fantasy elements are a fairly light touch, enough that you could leave them out entirely and still have plenty of game to work with, but they add a nice touch of Ghibli wonder to the setting.
We should start by going over the very basics of PbtA. To attempt something challenging, you roll two dice - originally and conventionally d6s, but this game uses d10s - and add a relevant stat bonus. Difficulty doesn't scale aside from the occasional plus or minus to your roll, so the outcome is determined by which of three possible brackets you fall into: a failure or "miss" (1-10, in this game), a partial or qualified success or "weak hit" (11-15), or a full success or "strong hit" (16-20). Missing allows the GM to make bad shit happen, while a weak hit will sometimes make you or the GM choose from a menu of successes or complications.
In Apocalypse World, this is about as complex as the system gets, but Flying Circus layers a good deal more mechanical weight on top of it when you're in the cockpit. You'll be tracking altitude and air speed as pools of tradeable points, and each plane has more than a dozen numerical stats attached even before you factor in weapons, including such specifics as Turn Bleed (how much speed you lose when you turn in combat) and several different handling scores and stall speeds based on how much fuel and how many bombs you're carrying. Managing the technical detail of flying a plane in Flying Circus is probably more involved than piloting a mech in Lancer (the subject of my previous critique), which is not at all what I expected when I started reading. Apparently, designing a plane from scratch with the upcoming design guide is going to add even more specifics to track.
The book frontloads all these technical details in the Preflight Checks chapter, right before getting into the specifics of air combat. I brought up Lancer because, reading through all these stats and dials, I had a feeling this game was going to have the same problem: game systems feeling completely different between the air and the ground. Unfortunately, though, air combat in Flying Circus has a very different problem, and it's probably a worse one.
When the squadron joins battle, a usually-unmodified 2d10 roll determines starting positions and lets you and the enemy pick some advantages - maybe you start with height advantage but your opponents catch you spread out, for example. And then, here's the bombshell that made me utter my second word aloud, after the initial "yes".
Combat is pure theatre of the mind with no battle maps and no defined initiative or action system.
That second word, in case you were wondering, was "what".
There are twenty-odd moves that cover the manoeuvres you can attempt: gaining and losing altitude, flying straight to build up speed, dealing and taking damage with onboard weapons, and so on. But the way these moves are applied is almost entirely freeform. The game offers some ground rules as to how many distinct things a player can try at once, but these are pretty meaningless when the game doesn't specify how often and when pilots actually get to act.
The standard Apocalypse World approach to turnless combat is to let "the fiction" handle how and when people can attack. This is why the PbtA games I like more tend to be the ones with few prolonged fights, like Pigsmoke and The 'Hood, where any combat that does happen is sorted out in an exchange or two. But here, leaving the order of actions and other basics of combat to "the fiction" in something that's otherwise full of numbers and stats and modifiers makes players uncertain of what they're allowed to try. It also puts a frankly unreasonable amount of strain on the GM, who's expected to keep track of each player's altitude and speed and the approximate relative positions of the enemies, and make judgement calls about who acts at what point.
I'll freely admit that I might be looking at this whole system the wrong way, but, with no example of play, I can't be certain. I don't think I'd be capable of running even a fairly simple dogfight in Flying Circus as written. Perhaps that says more about my limitations as a GM than it does about the system, but the question remains: what's the point of all these obsessively detailed stats (which even go as far as rotary engines making planes better at turning in one particular direction!) if they're not applied in any consistent or orderly manner?
I think the best microcosm of this is in how the game handles fuel consumption. Each plane has a listed fuel capacity, and, as mentioned before, your plane's essential stats change as it burns fuel and gets lighter. But your fuel capacity only changes when the GM tells you to make the Fuel Check move, which usually happens before and after combat, but can also be pushed mid-combat as a "hard move" in response to you missing on some other move. I think this is supposed to give fuel checks more narrative power, with the camera only cutting to the fuel gauge when it becomes dramatically significant, but, in practice, it means some pilots might be arbitrarily burning more fuel because they did badly at something more or less unrelated.
I want to be nicer to Flying Circus. A lot of love has gone into this project, and the social half of it is fantastic, PbtA at its height. But I don't exaggerate when I say that the combat system is a dealbreaker for me, and, judging by how much of a pain combat could be when I GMed the rather simpler Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, for a good number of others too.
I have this theory - and now we're in the realms of pure speculation, but bear with me. I have this theory that choosing PbtA for your roleplaying game is sometimes a statement that reaches beyond the rules and how the game's actually played, a statement about who your game is for. It's a response to what's perceived as a hostile environment promoted by rules-heavy games, and its rules being relatively light and comprehensible are part of that. PbtA is feminist. It's queer. It's leftist. It exists in opposition to the conservative "old-school" realm of more traditional TTRPGs. Flying Circus certainly plays up this angle in its text, talking at length about the Survivor playbook being a metaphor for the trans experience and suggesting "too queer" (direct quote) as a reason for your character leaving home and becoming a mercenary. This is a game that will let people shut out by exclusionary capital-G Gamers have their voices and tell their stories.
This dichotomy, though, is false. It's always been false - I, a bisexual anarchosyndicalist, love OSR games, oft-derided as the epitome of Gamer conservatism and neophobia, and I know plenty of other queer leftists who feel the same - but it's never been falser than it is now. We now live in a world where D&D, a relatively complex and "old-school" game despite 5e's refinements, is a household name and considered (rightly or otherwise) one of the best, most accessible starting points for people who might not fall into the old Gamer stereotype. To be clear, I don't think Flying Circus is unaware of this. Even in the introduction, it openly states that it's a complex game and has a lot of moving parts to learn and track, and clearly it doesn't see system density as fundamentally incompatible with its politics. But it wants to be PbtA and this more complex, almost simulation-style air combat game, and, to get to the point I've been circling, I don't think it can be both.
I will probably never play Flying Circus, and I do think it's a good example of the limits of the PbtA engine and the kind of game it really isn't suited to. But I enjoyed reading it, I'm glad it exists, and I don't regret spending money on it. It offers a brilliant premise and some excellent material that a more dedicated GM than I could probably spin into something fantastic.
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