For f's sake

Dear Reader,

I briefly played "Evony," a MMORTS... I guess. Something like that, anyway. It was alright, if you're into resource management games and mmo's you might want to give it a shot. I got quite obsessive about it though (I had spreadsheets, and diagrams... my alliance was starting to hate me) so I quit.

But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about Evony's banner ads. They used to look something like this, and look at that guy complain! Now they look like... well, it's a bit absurd. What I love is that they advertise that you can play from home, school, or work.

Shameless.

Bercilac

New Stuff!

Dear Reader,

My friend and I went to a slew of games stores in the city today. It was pretty weird seeing all of the shelves loaded up with D&D 4th Edition, made me feel pretty old. It also tanked one of my ambitions, which was to try and publish some of my 3rd Edition adventures for a few extra bucks. I have no idea how much money I could have made doing that, probably not very much, but it would have been neat, and a good way to get started in the industry.

I saw some wonderful stuff out there. It's been ages since I was in a proper games store. I was horridly tempted by the various board games set in Renaissance Italy, but I resolved to wait until I'm teaching (tax deductible!). I did, however, succumb to a few temptations. I am the proud owner of three shiny new translucent d20s: one yellow, one dark blue-green, and one clear. I saw my friends tossing around some translucent d20s at our last session of Dread Ilk and I resolved to own some myself (in addition to my sparkly apple-green one). I much prefer them to those illegible speckled monstrosities, or simple opaque colours (I have a white one: how boring is that?).

I also gave in, to a somewhat pricier tune, to a neat little rpg called "Faery's Tale: Deluxe." I have yet to figure out what's deluxe about it, but as you might guess it's all about playing as sprites or brownies or what have you. I'm a bit disappointed to see goblins and the like as evil NPCs, and the game centred on being kind and nice, but that's true of most systems I've seen and hasn't stopped me from running a monster campaign yet.

Apart from the wonderful artwork and fluff, what interested me in the game is that it's geared towards children. Don't think this makes it a frivolous system: it has nice simple dice-pool mechanics based on body, mind, and spirit, as well as gifts/traits, and a wonderful system of "Essence." Essence functions as your hit points, as you lose it in a fight; your experience points, as you gain it for desirable behaviour or great success; and as mana to fuel certain abilities and spells. There's also a great system of boons, which are essentially roleplaying rewards in the form of NPCs owing you a favour, which can be traded in for magic items, stat increases, or titles ("from knight to faery princess" boasts the blurb). It's a lightweight tome, at 90 pages of A5, most of which is taken up with flavour text and lovely illustrations, and certainly the simplicity of the rules lends itself to playing with kids (though I also find it appeals to my gaming instincts).

There's a lot in there, however, that is much more considered in how it approaches children. For starters, there's a section which introduces the concept of developmental stages (taken from good old Erikson) in how you should write your adventures: younger children are likely to have trouble with empathy and moral dilemmas, whereas as children get older they are more interested in what their personal characters are doing and more difficult challenges. There are plenty of places where the game can be tuned down: either mechanically (simplified combat, diceless, character creation based on sketches done by the child and interpreted by the GM) or emotionally (simpler challenges, avoiding death scenes with "falling into a magical slumber" or running away). And there are, of course, opportunities to take it the other way: there's a decent section on LARPing as pixies, which sounds fantastic, and encouragement for props, costume, et cetera. It suggests scenery such as couches, rugs, et cetera, but I can imagine taking a whole primary school class out to a park one day and going nuts...

I'd really like to run this game with my group, but I'd need to toughen it up slightly. The system is geared towards encouraging children to behave nicely to one another: you get Essence for being kind and considerate in various ways, and "Dark Essence" for being nasty. I'd have to develop the Dark Essence bit, since I know my group wouldn't view it as a bad outcome. The combat rules are probably fine left simple, but to hell with falling into a magical slumber: if the goblins beat you, they're going to chew your limbs off. I had an amazing idea for an adventure based on a marauding entomologist.

Bercilac

24 Hour RPG: Out of the ashes of a failed attempt

Dear Reader

I tried my hand at the 24 Hour RPG competition, and failed. I had picked the phrase "semi-disposable," and was beginning to structure a game based on the experience of Soviet soldiers at Stalingrad. Each soldier had an individual dice pool and battles were played out in a series of scenes inspired by Grey Ranks (there were, in fact, a lot of similarities between this game and Grey Ranks or Carry). In each scene, every soldier rolled their dice pool to determine what contribution they made to a plan negotiated between the GM and one player who played the Sergeant. Successes (5 or 6) contributed to overcoming the Germans, failures (1) didn't detract from that but put the soldier at risk of death.

The interesting bit of the concept was to be a communal dice pool called the "Tactical Situation." These dice would be at the disposal of individual players, who could roll tactical dice to protect themselves from the dangers of failure. Any that weren't used in this way would be at the Sergeant's disposal to help beat back the Germans. So there was to be a tension between individual survival and group success.

The concept was flawed in a few ways:

1. I wasn't quite sure what the overall goal was, except perhaps to play until the squad was exterminated or the GM decided they'd had enough and the Germans would get defeated. It made it difficult to predict progress through the game, and how to set the stakes at each point.

2. I had a roll outlined for a political commissar, who could theoretically sack the Sergeant. But I had no idea how, or why, he would do so.

3. The game was lacking in motivation, not just for the group as a whole, but for individuals. Why would they sacrifice themselves for group success? Then again, there was little room for individual development, so why not?

I have thought of how to salvage some of the work, however. I might recast this as a medieval rpg. By that I mean emphatically NOT a fantasy rpg, but one depicting the struggle between lord and villein. Perhaps this is because I know a lot more about medieval society than the Red Army in WWII, but this causes the roles to come into sharper focus: the Sergeant becomes a Lord, the Commissar becomes a Priest, and the soldiers become peasants. The game is about the peasants trying to eke out a living, playing mostly as a team that rolls a dice pool called "the commons," or working small freeholdings of their own, while the Lord and Priest are trying to appropriate as much of the peasants' wealth as possible for their own enrichment and goals.

Possible "adventures" would include the black plague (creates a land surplus or labour shortage, depending on how you look at it), wars with France or Scotland (calls men away from their farms, threatening famine, but also offering riches), or simply start conditions off as gruelling (high taxes, incessant persecution of heresies) and see how the parties work things out (google 1381 if you want my prediction).

This game would probably be best played without a GM, with Lords or Priests initiating most of the action by naming their own goals (fight a war, build a cathedral) which would necessitate a high rate of taxation. It would need means of tracking construction projects, accumulated wealth of various sorts, and a rudimentary combat system.

It would be quite nice to design this so it could be played with up to 25 players, including several lords, priests, and even a few townsfolk, with a wide range of dice pools representing productive land all over the place, and let the rivalry of the lords (both spiritual and temporal) drive the game. Then I could use it for introducing students to medieval history.

Hmmmmmmmmm. Sorry for the rant, an idea is forming.

Bercilac

Housekeeping

Dear Reader,

If you're reading this at the time of publication, may I apologise for the dreadful state of this page's layout. I was planning something rather ambitious, but I only went halfway with it. Maybe I'll clean it up some day.

I've thought of three tools that I need to develop to give focus to my Swamp campaign:

1. A clear system for hunting. At the moment, I'm leaning towards a Wilderness Lore check to find food of some sort, then have a mini-encounter for actually getting it. In some cases this will be simple.

"You find some fruit trees. What do you do?"

"I pick it."

"Roll a reflex save..."

Other times, the food might bite back. I want to put a lot of emphasis in this campaign on survival, so the roll=rations equation ain't working for me. Plus, once players are used to roleplaying their food-gathering, I can use it as a springboard for whole adventures. Perhaps one day they hunt a whale or something...

2. The success of the wilderness lore check will determine how much food they find, I suppose. Assuming there are no problems, I'll give them that many rations. But rations are going to be like currency so, following on from this article about money, I'm going to have a physical representation of rations. I think I'll take the obvious solution: a candy dish. "Okay guys, three days pass. Everyone have three smarties!" There are two obvious pitfalls: not enough candy, so the players absentmindedly scarf a week's work of rations in one handful, or (quite possibly) too much candy, if the players get sick of it. But who the fuck gets sick of candy? I might have a separate "Out of Character" dish to combat the former, or just eat them myself to combat the latter, or if they share food with NPCs, which brings me to my next point.

3. The tough part I'm having is how to simulate a gift economy, so that the players have concrete goals and receive concrete benefits. I think the way I'm going to do this is by having them make diplomacy rolls when they give gifts. If you have the 3.0 DMG handy (you don't?!!) the rules are on page 149. Essentially, NPC attitudes are rated on a scale from Hostile to Helpful, and depending on where they lie at the moment there are different difficulty classes to improve their attitudes to a given level (and low scores resulting in a worsening of attitudes, as you might imagine). I'll give the players bonuses to the roll for presenting a particularly extravagant gift or a particularly glowing speech about the friendship between their communities. If they get another clan to "indifferent," it will respond with the occasional mundane gift. If they get it to "friendly," it will frequently offer minor assistance. If they get it to "helpful," then it will give them some outrageous gift. Performing quests for another clan always counts as a great gift, and will shove them up the scale dramatically. A group that is "helpful" to the party will consider its debt repaid after one great gift, and return to "friendly" dealings. This means I need some treasure tables for what clans will regular give, and a list of services a player can regularly expect from friendly clans. Of course, certain things will tend to hurt a character's relationship with others: too frequent requests for assistance, failing to pay back a gift, or running counter to their interests in one way or other.

Anyway, this should provide me with a nice, characterful setting, as well as plenty of plot hooks. Always a bonus.

Bercilac

Back in the saddle again

Dear Reader,

I suspected that I wouldn't really get started on this blog until I finally launched a campaign, and now I have. So here is a post. After discarding several ideas (drafts for future work, perhaps), I finally settled on a nice old D&D 3.0 campaign. But I've subverted the mechanics in a few ways.

The setting is "the swamp." It is mostly based on my memories of doing social anthropology, in particular Levi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology and a film we watched called Onka's Big Moka, about the amassing of social capital, commodified mostly in the form of pigs and yams. These ideas were bubbling in my brain back when I ran the Green Isles and I had a little gang of native folks that I drew some genealogy charts for, but that was about it. It was mostly about mercantilism, in retrospect.

This one is totally about a different mindset. Alliances and obligations are all structured by clan relations. There are about a dozen clans, each with multiple villages, organised into five tribes (for which I'm using 5 D&D races). I've thrown out D&D's steady old equipment creep based on set treasure rewards and spending money in appropriate market places in favour of a gift economy. Gift economies are not unstructured, however. Far from it. Rather, by gathering prestige and doing favours for other groups, the players will wrack up a lot of credit around the swamp. Eventually that credit will be received both with support (places to rest, food, healing, all free of the normal cash charge you pay in D&D towns), as well as a few more major items in return for great services.

The first adventure went quite well. A minor ecological catastrophe has disrupted fish stocks for Mannanan, one of the oldest crocodiles in the swamp. He went in search of greener pastures... er, waters. This involved a rampage through the Bullfrog clan's territory, right at the end of the monsoon season when they were starting to lay eggs (is this ecologically correct? I'm not sure I care...). Many in the Bullfrog clan (Nixies) blamed Crocodile clan's (Lizardfolk, go figure) witchcraft, and gathered under a young turk named Gwair to demand vengeance.

They set out on their canoes to the Crocodile clan's village, where the party, consisting of a Crocodile Barbarian, a Birch (Wild Elf) Bard, and a Sorcerer (Grig, but exiled from the Wasp clan as all Sorcerers in my setting are regarded as contacts with the spirit world) were involved in a ritual exchange of gifts (quite an important part of the setting, and I gave the players the mantra "Who gives must receive" to structure their thinking in this way). The Bullfrog warriors demanded Crocodile Clan's eggs as payment for their young killed, under the same reciprocal logic of "Who gives must receive." The PCs drove them off without much trouble, taking several captives in the process.

I explained to them that warfare in the swamp was viewed as disequilibrium and the goal of violence was to restore equilibrium. The Barbarian took up the chant, again, of "Who gives must receive" and sent out the call to other Crocodile villages to gather up a warband to return the attack on the Bullfrogs. The warband paddled across the swamp, stumbling through a Wasp village. They failed to make the proper introductory rituals when entering Wasp territory, and the malicious Grigs (impervious to the attackers, as they were all invisible and their home was up in the trees), responded by giving them bad directions. This led them to a small lake, full of fish who had been swept in there by the monsoons (this is good wetland ecology, I did SOME research before designing the setting). The warband settled down to gather provisions and were attacked by a Tendriculous. This was, in a way, revenge on my GM who had sent one after us, nearly eating my character, in a previous campaign. Except that had been a level five party of three characters, this was a mob of level 1 and 2 weaklings, so it took a bit longer to break and managed to munch a few of the Crocodile clan in the process.

They eventually found the Bullfrog territory, to find it had indeed been ravaged by a horrid beast, as the rather aggressive "emissaries" had implied. With the help of allies they stumbled upon by "pure luck" (I asked all of my players to give me an ally, an enemy, and a goal or belief for their character before the game), they located a surviving Bullfrog village. A druid came forth to see them, receive the prisoners, and explain what had happened to them, and how the attack had NOT been sanctioned by the elders of the clan. He gave the party a ring of speak-with-animals. Equipped with this, they went to meet the crocodile.

Mannanan explained to them how hungry he was, how his home waters had been poisoned... He nearly made a meal out of the whole canoe full of the party (except the sorcerer, who, being insectile, was prepared to fly away) until they dumped a basket of fish. The party returned to the Crocodile village to rest and recuperate, and to prepare to investigate Mannanan's old hunting grounds and locate the source of the infection. We ended there, on a decent cliffhanger.

Overall, a good first session:

1. The players all had a few chances to shine in one light or another.

2. They got a vague sense of the different clans, abolished this concept of "wilderness" and instead realised that the swamp is actually teeming with different groups, with densely packed territories consisting of fishing and hunting grounds, water sources, and safe places to rest.

3. Except at a few odd moments, I managed to keep the story moving, with a good pace of action. I indulged in a few long dialogues (especially the sin of two NPCs talking: when that happened in the opening scene of the Bullfrog attack I had the NPC Crocodile representative suffer a seizure and prophetic visions to get her out of the way, and also add a bit to the story).

4. As indicated in the previous point, I improvised my head off in terms of game mechanics, tweaks to my (limited) adventure notes, and just about everything. And it worked pretty well, when I could remember it.

A few problems:

1. The players haven't really got a grasp of the kinship system. They learn pretty quickly by participating in things, so I'll need them to go to a wedding or something to show how that works, and how it affect politics... if only so they can have the opportunity to exploit it.

2. As one player points out, there were few tangible rewards. While, to some extent, it was my intention to throw away the whole D&D gold-piece counting, I was a bit vague in my replacement system to the point of devaluing it. Baskets of fish were flying right and left across the ceremonial gift mats, and the party was never in any real danger of hunger. I need to figure out a concrete system for tracking rations, determining roughly how much food a village might be able to give to friendly visitors, and polish up the starvation rules a bit so it actually matters to the party that some allies gave them ANOTHER basket of freakin' fish. But in the long run, as they get more involved in the setting, I will have allies come by from time to time to present them with the odd magic item or truly rare piece of equipment. I haven't quite figured out what's scarce yet. They're basically trading in social capital, which is cool, but doesn't give them much to write on their character sheet.

3. I need to draw up a decent map of the swamp with clan territories: I have a tiny speck of it mapped out now, and I re-arranged a few elements to suit the story. On the one hand this is fine, on the other hand I only did it because my notes were sketchy to begin with. I'd also like some diagrams of how each clan is relating to others, to show ongoing grudges, rivalries, and enmities. It gave me a pretty good adventure in this one, and I can see a lot of good ones in the future.

I'm actually stunned how quickly the players are taking to my setting. The biggest problem they're having is an ingrained ruthlessness from our group's other campaign which doesn't serve them well in a society based on mutual co-operation. I've had a few elders show up to chastise them a bit from time to time, including making up a lot of "wise sayings" on the spot. I think my favourite was "Small canoes and long journeys make strained friendships." But my dream for the campaign is to reach a scenario where the players are carefully weighing up their obligations and rivalries with half a dozen different powers, judging what gifts they might have to make to sway the neutrals, and really trying to establish themselves as the Big Men of the swamp, using all of the invented lingo and logic I've imagined. It's definitely an achievable goal, and it's going to be fun.

Bercilac

Staying sane

Dear reader,

I've been working my green butt off on my post-graduate degree, but lately, between this, that, and the other piece of "legitimate" work, another work has started to take shape.  I call it Lunarkis, and while I hate the name I like the concept.

Without going into the story that I have (poorly) planned, I would like to mention the mechanics.  I have been, for a long time, a pretty solid D&D player.  This is mostly down to tradition, I suppose.  My first game was D&D, I received the 3.0 PHB as a birthday present, I got my hands on 3.5, and I'm passing into that grumpy stage where I refuse to look at 4th edition.  In the meantime I've played Stalin's Story, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (an appendix to Second Person), and glanced at a few other systems.  But in terms of ongoing role-playing campaigns, it's always been D&D.  I have a love-hate relationship with the system, and have wanted to branch out for a while.  I worked on a homebrew system that ended up as this bizarre affair after many incarnations (some of the earlier ones were probably more playable).  I created a character for a Shadowrun campaign that never took off.

So now I'm working in FUDGE.  As many of my readers will know, FUDGE asks the GM to essentially craft their own system, with nothing but a few ideas, guidelines, and some basic (but solid) mechanics.  I'm having the most fun right now with the magic system.  The setting is loosely medieval, and I'm trying to avoid a fantasy setting.  But I still wanted magic... maybe this is a hangover from D&D.  But my system is all my own.

I knew I wanted magic to be:

-Socially situated.  Priests can perform miracles, which are looked upon kindly, and wizards can perform other acts, which basically amount to devil worship.

-Something that a character uses only after great consideration, in great need.

-Potentially very powerful all the same.  I like the odd cinematic fireball, even if most of the focus of the game is on crossing rapiers.

I read the FUDGE rules, and one of the first questions was where magic came from.  So I gave the medieval answer: God or the Devil.  After that the system followed pretty quickly.  Every spell uses the following format, based on The Rites of Passage, which involves opening a gate through which an otherworldly "Power" may enter (that's jargon, let it be noted):

1.  Contact Power.  The priest either prays to God, or the magician invokes some demon or spirit.  Different Powers can do different things.  Some can heal wounds (nicey-nicey deities or nature spirits, whatever), some can make fireballs (hellish demons), some can find answers to questions.  Every Power has a difficulty that the character has to achieve (at least Fair, I imagine) with their roll to call it.

2.  Power acts.  Note that the character's stats do not matter at all for this phase!  They merely become a vessel for something else acting.  Hence, magic can be extremely powerful, even in untrained hands.

3.  Return Power.  This is the tricky part, and the crux of the whole system.  The character has to make a roll against the Power they just summoned to force it back to the otherworld.  If they succeed, the ritual safely ends.  If, perhaps having bitten off more than they could chew, they fail by a massive amount, they can be possessed by that Power.  Being possessed by God makes you into a Paladin, probably.  Being possessed by a demon does something else entirely.  Every Power has its own agenda.

Let's say you fail your return role, but only by a little bit.  That means you've closed the gateway, but not completely.  To some extent you're still channelling that entity.  This is recorded as an Power's Influence, and it increases with every failed roll (starts at Poor, could go as high as Superb).  Every Power has a short description of how its Influence will be activated.  A healing deity, for instance, may have a taboo against initiating fights or slaying defenceless foes, which would activate any time the character tried to violate it.  So priests that constantly worship kindly gods will actually be filled with the holy spirit, as it were, and become better people.

On the other hand, if you've been consorting with a fire demon, its Influence may activate once a week, at an opportunity chosen by the GM.  If you fail your roll against the Influence, then the angry, jealous, insane demon drives you to attack the symbols of any other religious worship.  If you fail the roll by a little bit, you might start shouting blasphemies uncontrollably in church, or rip pages out of a Bible.  If you fail by a lot, the demon momentarily possesses you.  You walk down main street, shooting fireballs out of your eyeballs at every church in sight.  Or something.

Priests, under this system, will be quite free to use their Power.  Everyone approves, but of course it means a certain kind of submission to that Power.  The healing cleric of D&D will have to become a somewhat more saintly character, just by channelling so much of the presence of a healing god.  Wizards, however, will have to be careful.  If they indulge too heavily in the use of their Power, they will slowly become controlled by it.  And this will not be socially acceptable.  What do we do with witches?

I think it's quite a neat system, because there's no game-mechanical distinction between gods and demons.  However, gods will influence characters towards an established social structure, demons will influence them against the structure.  So the problems with consorting with Satan are practical more than anything else.  At the same time, some characters may not wish to surrender their will to even a benevolent god.  (Note, I still haven't settled on whether the official, acceptable pantheon will be monotheistic or polytheistic; if it's the latter, certain Powers will be proscribed as demons, just to get that inquisitorial feel).

Also, I can always add new Powers.  I could have an entire subplot around the discovery of a cult worshipping (highly under the Influence, some Possessed, regular ritual proceedings) a plague demon, probably starting with a plague hitting the city.  There could be hundreds of minor powers, the equivalent of first-level spells, that wizards will invoke without a second thought, because it's safe to contain.  And there will be leather-bound tomes, locked deep within the city library, containing names of some of the most powerful and dangerous demons ever contacted...

Paradoxically, getting to do this is keeping me sane.  Compared with the constant demands and requirements of "real work," the need to meet an external standard, this is entirely a creation of how, in my opinion, an RPG ought to work.  Screw you, Gygax.

Bercilac

Introduction

Dear reader,

You are welcome to what this house holds.  These are the first words spoken by the Lord Bercilac to Sir Gawain as he entered his great hall.  For those of you who are not familiar with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I thoroughly recommend it.  I chose the nom de plume Bercilac for my online gaming persona for a couple of reasons.  First, my obsession with Arthurian myth in general.  But, of course, all of the well-known names are taken, so I couldn't be Lancelot, Arthur, Tristram, Gawain, or Merlin.  I had to pick something relatively obscure.

Second, I read and loved the above-mentioned poem.  It's a great example of the English language.  In particular, it features one of my favourite knights, Sir Gawain (Tristram and Gareth are runners-up).  It also has a great feel to it, the structure of the poem being a mix of medieval romance and Celtic myth.

Third, the character of Bercilac himself.  He is simultaneously the welcoming lord, and the Green Knight that tests the hero.  This idea of a dual nature appeals to me (and green is my favourite colour).  So, yes, you are welcome to what this house holds.  Hopefully it will both nourish and challenge you.

The purpose of this blog is to reconcile a bad habit of mine.  I've been posting on Play This Thing, Enworld, The Forge, and Gnome Stew on and off for a while now.  But I often get carried away in responding to what others have written, producing vast tracts that have little relation to the subject at hand.  So I'm writing this in the spirit of organisation, more than anything else.  This is a place for my ideas about gaming, primarily Dungeons and Dragons, but also whatever else strikes my fancy.

Bercilac