Emergent Stories

HQ is a toolbox, just use the parts you want to

2011-08-25T16:30:00.001+01:00

Two answers to this one.

1) Thank goodness it is, I can stop worrying about the rules that make HeroQuest so unreliable as a Narrativist game. It just so happens a lot of these rules are the Glorantha specific ones that some may not even recognise as part of the rules.

2) This is again a bit of a traditional gamer perspective, places like the Forge were created to do away with this kind of vague unreliable treatment of game rules. With this kind of approach you can drift any game into the type of game you always play, which results in a group having a house style and being convinced that systems are interchangeable. Nothing wrong with this, but HQ was very clearly a different and powerful game, I have no interest in turning it back into RuneQuest with a bit of narrational colour. And, I firmly believe the tenant that system does matter.

Your Glorantha may Vary

2011-08-25T16:25:00.003+01:00

Hell yes, but in Narrativist play this variation isn't even an important consideration. Narrativist groups are not concerned with building up situation from a solid background and rules, they generate situation from character and the here-and-now situation the characters are in.

My Glorantha isn't really in focus most of the time, it may or may not vary, it has little to say about why my Orlanthi has a feud with the Ernaldan Priestess because that feud is more informed by my character description and the GMs portrayal of the priestess than by how Ernaldan Priestesses are described in the books.

You are trying to have the positives without the negatives

2011-08-25T16:20:00.002+01:00

More fully expressed: by de-emphasising things like cult or community obligations you are just trying to max out a character without the negatives.

This concern is an expression of the Simulationist/Narrativist divide. In Simulationist play disadvantages are mainly enforced by the GM to ensure they are brought into play as a form of balance.

In Narrativist play it is mainly the player of a character that would be driving this kind of issue. A player in a narrativist game only needs the number on the sheet and perhaps a bit of a reminder that it is there. It is about the GM and the players bringing these negatives into play as interesting elements of exploration for their own sake not a matter of enforcement or balance.

HQ2 is the best version of Greg Stafford's intention

2011-08-25T16:15:00.002+01:00

Every version of RQ/HW/HQ has been approved as a better representation of Greg Stafford's Gloranthan fiction and or vision.

This is mainly a marketing stance. Who would buy the new game if the consensus was that it was less like Glorantha? Some things appeared to line up well and some things seemed to be a bit forced, but on the whole I think this statement is meaningless.

More than this I don't really care. World setting is part of the game and as such there will always be differences in presentation of the world in each game but the world as envisaged is not a game. It would be better if the designers could acknowledge this innate separation of the game, the setting and the inspiration for the setting.

Augments were a key part of the system from the start

2011-08-25T16:08:00.003+01:00

For a start the text of HW wasn't quite finished, such that there was still evidence of a previous version of the game where there was a distinction between skills that could be used only for augments and those that could be used as both skills and augments. This distinction remained as a part of the magic system, based on what level you were in a cult.

Augments were presented as a part of the extended contest rules and were not very well defined, provoking a lot of discussion on-line. The on-line community very quickly drifted augments and they became more flexible, were used in simple contests and often used in pairs, with a physical and a non-physical augment often advocated. The biggest change got placed into the early supplements, the idea of automatic augments. something I believe was a very bad precedent even though it seemed like a time saver at the beginning.

It seems to me they have always been problomatic, with problems rooting back to the play test. I have never been a fan of anything being treated as augment only, and I don't like the way they can lead to prejudicing the narration of a conflict before you even roll.

I prefer augments as presented in HQ2 but not as presented in the magic system or in the Sartar Book.

Occupation and Magic Keyword character traits have always been there

2011-08-25T16:05:00.001+01:00

Yes, and they are a really great and fully functional part of the game, but look closely. The emphasis was originally on choosing and playing a particular type of character. You didn't for instance have to select cult or culture traits that you were not interested in. Your relationship to the cult or culture wasn't seen as a limitation of effectiveness, or as a specific character driver. It was instead seen as a stat used to represent how easy it was to use that relationship to solve problems just like any other skill. Yes there were entry requirements for cult levels but it was easy to start as a devotee, so this wasn't exactly a limiting factor. Early on it was even possible to be an initiate of one cult and a devotee of another, and pantheon worship was emphasised. Things drifted very rapidly soon after because these things were apparently not correct.

HeroWars wasn't designed to be Narrativist

2011-08-25T16:01:00.002+01:00

Well I think it was, but it wasn't expressed well in the text, and controversially I don't think Robin Laws fully understands Narrativism, some of his comments on the subject seem plain wrong.

But, even if it was an accident of design, HW was rapidly picked up as a poster child for Narrativist style roleplaying. This wasn't some kind of co-incidence or because of some misunderstanding of the Narrativist crowd, it was because lots of elements of the mechanics actively support this style of play. The Fortune-in-the-middle system; the use of Hero-points in contests; the bidding system in Extended Contests; the grabby and situation heavy 100 word character generation; the universal conflict system, specifically the equality of relationships and character traits to more standard skills; all aid and support a Narrativist agenda.

My Own Devil's Advocate

2011-08-25T16:00:00.000+01:00

This is an inherently tricky exercise, but sometimes objections like my previous post don't make any sense without some kind of cross examination. So to act as my own devil's advocate I will present some arguments against my point of view in the next few posts, they are possibly Straw Men, but I hope they help me make my point more clearly

HeroQuest 2 - Off the path again!

2011-08-25T11:44:00.002+01:00

I have been putting a lot of thought into HQ2 in the last couple of years, but I haven't played it anywhere near as much. Partly for health reasons and partly due to becoming very disillusioned with it as a game.

The Reason for this disillusionment is partly the published material. There has been a stubborn pattern in HW/HQ, which naturally leaves my preferred style of play in the minority.

It first happened with HW, the style of play advocated in the rule book had a clear focus on using the conflict systems provided. It was all about Conflict Resolution and story logic. It promised a style of play that wasn't hindered by the complex world of Glorantha, but instead used its inherent narrative potential as a springboard for your own games.

Then the Gloranthan material started to emerge. The rule books themselves contained some of this material, in fact the main part was even available online as part of the free preview. This material, focused on examples of how the game could be used with the cults in the setting and didn't seem to detract too much from the core. The cults just felt like examples of how to use the new system. Extra rules crept in for bezerkers and undead almost unnoticed.

The next material to be published was a strange hybrid, it was partly a continuation of the examples in the core books and partly a reassertion of the setting as king. This was subtle, and in many ways to be expected. Glorantha has a long publishing history and the material has gone out of print on a regular basis, such that a new Glorantha RPG was expected to reproduce this material.

The problem was the presentation of this new material was old school in disguise. It had all the trappings of a new revolutionary RPG, but it kept drifting from a game that allowed grabby situation to emerge to a game that suggested that the key to providing the situation was all about building situation from the world up using rules. For the best part of two decades RuneQuest had followed this logic. Make the world a real and vivid place and integrate the rules at this level, and slowly build up into situation.

An example of this was the new presentation of key NPCs as a funky cool looking map of relationships to followers and community. It looked good, it had lots of complex information presented in a new and easy to understand way and it emphasised the idea that everyone was part of a community and that relationships were reciprocal.

The GM could use this to help create grabby player character focused situation, but there was a strong emphasis on situating characters within the rigid structures of cult and community obligations. This was technically a retreat back into old school ground up play. It felt right and useful for players used to RuneQuest, which was full of details of cult oblations expressed in percentages, and limits on how high a skill could progress based on such things.

It felt very wrong to me, I couldn't express it clearly, but it felt like a betrayal of the freedom presented in the core rules. The problem was that if you talked to anyone involved in the presentation of this material it became a discussion about how no man is an island, and that there was a clear social expectation that you spent 30% of your time in cult based activities. It was more about not getting something for free, and ensuring players understood their character's social situation.

It was about 'realism'. It was impossible to explain to a wider community trained in RQ that it was equally possible to have stories that acknowledged relationships and maintained a very real sense of setting without having to worry about this kind of detail. The HW character sheet had a space for relationships and an abstract number, it didn't need extra details like percentages of time working for the cult. The type of story emergent from the grabby situations implied by the character creation system and the way the rules interacted with them wasn't about this kind of detail. This game didn't rely on gritty realistic modelling of a world.

This was just the beginning of bringing in rules disguised as setting. Before long we had a massively detailed write-up of Orlanth and Ernalda, which placed a great emphasis on exactly how a person in the world interacted with the cult and what was required to enter the structure and move within it. Again this was a bid for detailed 'realism'. It was a description of how Glorantha worked, and it equally missed the point. Yet again it was setting/rules built from the ground up, yet again it provided no real enhancement to grabby situation based on character concepts.

Overall, the experience of character creation was initially a highly creative process full of situation and relationships that felt natural and grabby redolent with heroic action. But then, the process slowly became about fleshing out the interaction with a 'realistic world' slowly and effectively tying down and stifling the character concept.

By the time we got to HeroQuest we had this institutionalised into the rules. Now, character creation was all about using templates that provided this background. The creative process of character creation was still there, but the detail was sneaking in through the keywords relating to community and cults. Even these played lip-service to a dynamic style by each template containing a number of reasons to have left home, but as soon as the character started to be fleshed out in magical terms it became a process of situating the character into a social structure with requirements and obligations.

It was like writing a detective novel and making a high percentage of the story all about the tedious paperwork and the drudgery of detailed investigation and limiting legal advice, in the interest of realism.

HQ was also guilty of messing with the core mechanics as well. It changed Simple Contests, which originally were a straight forward expression of Conflict Resolution with no distractions, into a detailed exploration of the conflict through augments. After all if the character sheet has all of this rich detail, which often amounted to a page worth of skills extrapolated from multiple sources, then you may as well find a way of using them within a conflict. So now instead of a Simple Contest focusing on a goal with the skill selection being a mixture of character emphasis and colour, it became a detailed list of skills employed, often with a complex narration to justify the augment choices. This not only missed the point of Simple Contests, it started an emphasis on front loading the narration. Effectively killing the strength of the core mechanics.

As an interesting side effect, augments became so ingrained into the mechanics there was a collective amnesia regards the HW rules. Everyone forgot that you were not allowed to augment simple contests before. Most of the community was convinced that augments made things better anyway.

For a number of political reasons some of the changes made to HQ were reversed for HQ2. Augments were effectively turned into a discrete contest, detailed lists of sub-cults and magics were de-emphasised, for all the world it looked like things were moving back in the right direction. Back towards dynamic character and situation focused play. But then the drift began again.

At least this time I was expecting it, and I even managed to slip a few bids for freedom into the game text itself. But before we knew it there was bottom up world building baked into the game world through yet more subtle mechanics. The cult requirements again have their expression in limiting player characters, but at least this time it isn't done by forcing detail onto the character sheet. Now it is about naturally behaving like the gods through runic affinity. The added rules for runes include behaviour and personality guidelines complete with advice for imposing these by the narrator. All in the interests of 'realism' and ignoring the fact that the system encourages exploration of these issues without the need for such guidelines.

The creeping in of bottom up world design is hardly surprising in a game designed primarily for an established world that evolved from a traditional RPG. But it is really f*%king annoying for someone like myself that continually sees the promise of the rules system. The dangling carrot of a truly dramatic and character centric game within a wonderfully realised world, ideal for grabby situation. That carrot is just there, but there is this almost invisible 'stick and rope' of added rules and subtle world building concerns keeping the carrot out of reach unless you are prepared to forge your own path.

Reflections on my HeroQuest Journey

2009-07-07T13:03:00.005+01:00

The HeroQuest Core Rules (HQ2) were officially released on 1 July, early reviews are hitting the net, and I find myself reflecting on a decade of playing with this game in its various forms. This is partly due to realising it was ten years ago when I first encountered a playtest version of HeroWars (HW).

My Roleplaying is radically different now, due in no small part to this game. I would love to be able to say that as soon as I took up that first proto-character sheet, instantly the scales fell from my eyes. But instead it was a long painful process that took years of background reading and trying out other games. And, in my weekly game, as a group we are not quite at the end of the road.

Is there anything inherently difficult about HeroQuest? I note that this question has already been asked and answered in the fan community with a huge NO, with only a few dissenting voices, but my truthful answer is, I don’t know. I can only look back at my experiences and cannot read the document with truly fresh eyes.

The new book, the draft version of which I have had for around ten months, takes huge strides towards being a game that achieves its now more clearly stated aims:

“Although there’s no right or wrong way to play the game, a certain story based logic does underlie the entire system.”

And much of the advice and rules streamlining is steering play specifically towards this aim. For example, we have a clear move away from stats for monsters or equipment, instead guidance is given as to how to describe such things depending on genre, and examples include textual descriptions like the flying speed of a griffin with no attempt to represent the creature in game mechanical terms.

If you read carefully between the lines in HW and HQ1 you can just glean a way of playing the game that relies purely on the Narrator selecting an appropriate resistance, instead of having pre-prepared stats. This is not to say that those games were meant to be played this way, indeed there are examples and advice directly contrary to this, but many of us noticed the potential and our games adapted accordingly.

Playing this way, with resistances left up to the Narrator, is a liberating and interesting idea, that on the flipside has many pitfalls and potential problems. Because earlier versions of the game did not espouse this method, the guidance and advice was lacking. Instead we had to find our own way through along the path less travelled and seek advice from those who had been this way before. For me this advice was mainly centred on the Forge HQ Forums before it was ceremonially removed from that place for dabbling with third party publishing!

Of course, taking the road less travelled is inherently more difficult, the majority of the community was walking down another path. A path that more clearly followed the examples in HQ1. For me the first point of diversion was when the HW line included Anaxil’s Roster. Suddenly we had a book that attempted to construct the creatures, monsters and inhuman races into PC like game mechanics. Somewhere along the way I took a few steps in another direction. I started to have doubts about what attribute stats like strength and size actually meant in this game, and by the time HQ1 was published, complete with a Creatures section ported from Anaxil’s Roster, I realised that I was off of the map.

It was around this time I had stumbled into the Forge forums and my early views on this issue can still be seen, still frustrated by how my version of the game seemed to be different to everyone around me, and how the new rules were making things worse! It was up to my group to find our way along this divergent path, and we slowly and surely did, with many of the wider HQ community also finding their own ways off of the main path espoused by the published rules.

The new rule book has thrown the rules onto a new path, and now a whole other group of players are bound to be startled. That new path heads towards those less travelled paths that so many of us had started to explore, and it is easier for us to step right back on the main path again and see where it takes us. But for those who had followed the examples and played by the established book, this new direction is going to seem weird or just plain wrong.

The new rules do a very good job of explaining the principles of the game, and how it is supposed to work. It has some minor elements that in my opinion will still create cognitive dissonance in groups using this game as a route map into uncharted territory. In other words, the game still has pitfalls all of its own, and I expect to occasionally fall into some, but at least it is leading in a direction that I want to go now.

Is the new HeroQuest Narrativist?

2009-07-07T09:00:00.000+01:00

Is the new HeroQuest Narrativist?

Of course the simple and most correct answer to this question is no. Narrativism, as situated within The Big Model is about the agenda of a group around the table for a particular game, not about the rules chosen or the techniques used.

Does HQ2 support Narrativism?

Yes, in so far as there is a clearly stated aim to focus on story. This in itself can cloud the issue, as story is a value laden term, but yes, there are specific mechanics that support narrativist play in HQ2.

What about the game supports Narrativism?

Primarily, the fortune in the middle mechanic allows for a player based decision on the outcome of the conflict, and as such whether you succeed or fail is heavily weighted towards how important the conflict is to the player.
How this aids narrativism is by allowing the players to make decisions on consequential outcomes, but of course it is still dependent on the Narrator to allow this to happen. Note that this mechanic has always been present since HW.

Fortune in the Middle, what is that?

Fortune refers to the randomising dice mechanic. The Middle part is related to where the randomising factor occurs in relation to the resolution of the conflict.
In HQ2 the player and the narrator will agree on a conflict, then the player will decide on a goal and the narrator will decide on the opposing goal of the opposition. The conflict is then resolved by a mechanic that allows the player to influence the outcome in his favour if he wishes to spend his limited Hero Point currency. Sometimes the dice will dictate the outcome, but usually the outcome can be swayed by Hero Points. The key here is that finalising what actually happened, how the conflict was resolved, is ascertained by this Hero Point expenditure mechanic. You get to make decisions about relative success or failure after the randomiser.

Consequential Outcomes, explain?

In order for a game to be Narrativist, players must be able to influence how the story is being told. If decisions about story structure and pacing are informing the usage of Hero Points then there is a good chance that the game is being played with a narrativist agenda. In other words, if the outcome of the conflict has story related consequences, and that the responsibility for these outcomes is distributed amongst the group and not in the hands of the narrator, then the conflict mechanic can support a narrativist agenda.

This all sounds non-committal, can HQ2 be narrativist or not?

When you boil it down, HQ2 has loads of advice about story telling in games, but the advice is not aimed towards making the game narrativist. There is lots of advice directly compatible and even supportive of narrativism, and some that may detract or work against it. It would appear that Robin Laws does not adhere to the Big Model, so HQ2 can never be a narrativist toolkit. Indeed much of the advice, such as its approach to pacing with the Pass Fail cycle, could easily lead the well meaning group far away from a narrativist agenda if it didn’t already have this agenda firmly established.

The book clearly addresses narrative story methods, surely this is narrativist?

In some places yes, and in others no. The advice is often geared towards collaboration over the story and the narration, but I think it is important to have in mind when reading this advice that collaboration over such issues as narration can be used as a technique in any agenda.

Pass, Fail Cycle?

A chapter of HQ2 is given over to advice on story structure based on keeping track of how successful the players have been, and adjusting the current conflict’s resistance based upon a loose negative feedback loop. (A run of success leads to stiffer resistance for instance.) This system is geared towards using success and failure as a model for story structure.

Does the Pass, Fail Cycle work against Narrativism?

No, but it could have the potential to do so. A Narrator that is clearly trying to facilitate a group responsibility for story structure will possibly find that the Pass, Fail Cycle models a system very similar to their instincts. The danger may be for those Narrators who use the Pass Fail Cycle to enforce structure rather than help inform it, taking story structure out of the groups hands.

The Necessity of Questions in Conflicts

2009-01-12T00:41:00.005Z

The adoption of Conflict Resolution by many games in recent years has focused on asking questions on the nature of the conflict. For instance, 'Why are you doing that', 'What are you trying to achieve', 'What do you want to happen'.

In traditional games these questions often went unasked, and were implied in the usage of the skill chosen. Combat was mostly about a series of attacks and defences, and most other skills were defined in detail, usage and scope within the rules. It is not necessarily true that the question was not present or implied, but it was rarely dwelt upon. Indeed in some groups, questions that pulled one into the meta-game were suspect at best.

There were however mechanics that supported Conflict Resolution, an example that comes to mind would be the Resistance Table in RuneQuest, which sought to provide a percentage chance of succeeding against any value of passive resistance. A heavy object would resist passively and the character had to cross reference his skill against the resisting skill to discover the chance of lifting it. The idea that the passive resistance was acting was hard-wired into the rules.

RuneQuest also grappled with that perennial situation getting past the guard.

In RQ2(1979) which itself was but a polished version of the 1978 first edition a sneak would be accomplished by Move Quietly, which on a successful roll would surprise an opponent unless he rolled a successful Listen. Listen is described as taking precedence over Move Quietly

Here we have some elements of conflicting interests. The guard is naturally watching and listening as part of his roll, and we have two opposing rolls. Boiling it down the player will only be successful if he succeeds and the guard fails. If he fails then the guard need not roll and if the guard succeeds then a success will not be enough.

However, this was frequently house ruled to take into account the Fumble and Critical rules, which led to an actual mechanical Conflict Resolution, as both results were necessary for a description of the result. RQ3(1984) had us subtracting the stealth skills from the guards skill which did away with the need for the house rules and made the rolls more task focused again, but only by adding a distinction of active listening, which brings the interests of the opposition to the fore.

As soon as games began to allow skill names that were not chosen from a set list but made up to suit, it became far more difficult to define rules that handled such issues because you could no longer have detailed skill descriptions. And, more to the point, it became possible for misunderstandings over intent. Couple with this the prevalence of universal resolution systems and you have issues of scope and skill application to handle.

Asking questions to pin down exactly what is about to be resolved becomes necessary.

Why Scope and Stakes cloud Conflict Resolution

2009-01-11T18:28:00.008Z

My reason for posting these ideas on Conflict Resolution is that many definitions of the term seem to focus on the scope and or stakes of the conflict, see for instance Vincent Baker:

In conflict resolution, what's at stake is why you're doing the task. "I crack the safe!" "Why?" "Hopefully to get the dirt on the supervillain!" What's at stake is: do you get the dirt on the supervillain?

or this Glossary:

A Forge term for a resolution mechanic which depends on the abstract higher-level conflict, rather than on the component tasks within that conflict.

as opposed to the The Forge Glossary (which still clouds the issue by contrasting 'components'):

A Technique in which the mechanisms of play focus on conflicts of interest, rather than on the component tasks within that conflict.

or the far more succinct definition by Tim Kleinert:

Conflict Resolution is when the dice decide whether a character/player's interest is realized, most often in contrast with another character/player's opposing interest.

In my opinion the key is in assigning opposing interests. Where confusion has arisen is in ideas of scope and stakes, seeing conflict resolution as deciding on the outcome of the overall conflict as opposed to the individual tasks in the conflict, and using the question 'why' to decide on the scope and stakes, in the process de-emphasising the clash of interests.

Where this becomes most apparent is in games like our two earlier examples Dogs in the Vineyard and HeroQuest. Both attempt to define the contest using conflict resolution and then allow the contest to be broken down into individual actions.

I would argue, just because these games focus on the individual actions, this does not mean that they move towards task resolution. The conflicts are still defined in a context of conflicting interests, and outcomes of individual rolls are interpreted within the overall conflict.

Both of these games can confuse players more used to task resolution, because component actions can easily be misinterpreted as tasks. If you fall into this trap in HeroQuest, you find yourself playing a game of point scoring which feels like a sub-game removed from the conflict at hand, and in Dogs, you end up playing a competitive dice game which becomes a battle over the stakes, instead of a conflict over the importance of the stakes to the characters or players.

Conflict Resolution and Agendas

2009-01-10T14:08:00.007Z

I will discuss the javelin example again in order to illustrate Conflict Resolution as I have defined it in my previous post.

There is no other character involved, so there is no inherent conflict. I think there are three possible options, an external conflict (with the elements or the world), an internal conflict (with himself), or an internalised external contest (with his non-present father).

The Forge Glossary suggests that the world should be seen as having interests even if abstracted, so the external conflict could be the breeze attempting to push the javelin away or the target itself appearing small distant and un-hittable.

An internal conflict needs to contain a conflict of interest, part of the character must either have an interest in failure (he wants to miss because he is uncomfortable with the symbolic patricide), or contain a potential for failure that can be abstracted as an interest(he has never managed to hit this target before and so his own doubt seeks to cause him to miss).

The non-present character option is a kind of internal conflict asserted upon the character by external forces. So we might have our character remembering his fathers scolding dialogue which serves to make him miss. We could use his fathers disapproval skills here even though he is not actively using it here and now.

In any of these cases it is necessary for the opposing agenda to actively oppose the character during the mechanical resolution so that we can decide on the outcome. So in HeroQuest we would have the resistance be the opposing interest in order to have two dice to compare, and in Dogs in the Vineyard we would use the Demonic Influence as the opposing dice pool.

Deemphasising the ‘Why’ of Conflict Resolution

2009-01-09T12:58:00.008Z

I have been concerned for some months about the categories of Conflict and Task Resolution.

The problem is in how the ideas have been explained. It is common to break them down into Task = What and Conflict = Why, which I don't believe is a correct interpretation.

It is probably better to define them thus:

Task resolution is concerned with the individual action that a character is performing and deciding whether that action is successful.

Conflict resolution is concerned with a character's interests in opposition to, or at least interacting with other interests, leading to a description of the resulting outworking of that clash.

This is not a new definition and is broadly in line with the Forge glossary which emphasises “conflicts of interest”.

The idea that the difference is in the 'what' and 'why' seems to be born from the concept of agenda taking a central role in the latter, but an over emphasis of this as the key difference leads to all kinds of confusion. The key difference is in how the GM defines the opposition.

Lets think of a really simple example, target practice with a javelin.

Task resolution simply requires the player to roll his javelin skill to determine if he is successful. He could have a reason and it could be emphasised heavily in the narration but that reason does not inform anything at the mechanical level.

Conflict resolution needs an opponent, we could abstract an opponent as the physics of the universe having a conflicting agenda that reflects the difficulty of the shot, or we could take the current context of the action to determine the opponent.

They may appear similar take this example that appears to fall between the two:

Player: I throw my javelin at the target.
GM: OK, but why are you even doing this now?
Player: To let out my frustration with my father!
GM: OK, so you visualise the target as your father and throw your javelin, make the roll.
Player: I get a critical!
GM: The javelin sails straight at the centre of the target and impales itself deeply with a satisfying thud, and you have to put all of your strength into pulling it out again leaving you exhausted but relived of frustration.

I would argue that this is task resolution. Yes we have a why, and yes we even have an idea of the opposing force, but there is no actual mechanical opposition, we only resolved the task at the mechanical level. I think this kind of example illuminates a current confusion inherent in the What/Why definitions and the current state of Task/Conflict theroy.

Humakti on the Marsh Edge : Intro

2008-10-03T09:07:00.002+01:00

Dogs in the Vineyard, Glorantha style

We started playing my DitV variant last week, which I originally ran at Tentacles Fumble 2008.

When I started reading about DitV, I imagined Humakti PCs fitting with the play style so I was quite keen to give it a go. Humakti have a strong honour code and an interestingly stark outlook on life, but their values are rarely challenged in RuneQuest. Besides, death magic wielding teenagers with family issues is just too tempting to ignore.

I didn't want a thinly disguised Utah setting, so rather than make an exact Dogs parallel I chose an area where Humakt is very prominent (near Delecti's Marsh) and where a number of taboos and superstitions would develop over death. And, rather than a list of religious strictures I have laid down some flavoursome local customs to help highlight how the people think, and some religious restrictions, which could be seen as unworldly or overly pious by outsiders or non-cultists.

I have maintained the idea of being sent away for training. In this case a military training and initiation camp, which gives us plenty of options for accomplishment conflicts. I also wanted to really focus in on the community level, so the game is set in the characters' home village, and plays on the fact that the characters have been away and will not be sure if it's the village that has changed or their own mindset. A year having taboos and injunctions force fed to young minds is bound to confuse and change perspectives.

Death Magic replaces Gunfire, and conveniently Humakti would consider wielding a sword death magic. Cult Runes replaces Coat, The Unquiet Dead replaces Demons and Necromancy replaces Sorcery. This is not to say that the whole area is crawling with necromancers so much as in a Humakti world view necromancy would include any magic or practice that deliberately contravenes their black and white attitude to death (at least in this game which I acknowledge has an extreme interpretation).

I will post a story overview and also focus in on some of the key conflicts. I am recording the game for this purpose but the recordings will not be published as I would not gain permission to record if I was to do so. I do find the reflective insights that spring from being able to listen back after a few days invaluable. The nuances of what people say are often missed in the moment, including the effects of my own wording on the game. Listening back to the tricky parts and thinking 'how could I have made that better' is a great way to reflect and learn for me.

The De-emphasis of Numbers in HeroQuest

2008-09-17T11:46:00.006+01:00

One way of examining a game's mechanics is to focus on the numbers, specifically the dice used, their relative probabilities and what they represent in the game. HeroQuest is not easily analysed in this way, and even when it is, it confounds normal expectations. Indeed it is often accused of being broken, the D20 cited as having a flat probability curve, or the break points around 20 and 1W being strange and non-linear. Alternative dice are even suggested to fix these problems.

However, for me these issues fade into the background, and more radically I believe the numbers to mean very little within the context of the game as a whole.

To explain this let us imagine a situation within a game, and for simplicity's sake the game is structured around simple contests and makes use of a formal scene framing technique, with only a few key rolls per scene focused on areas that shape the story.

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The story so far:
Our hero the prince has fought his way through the monstrous and shadowy thorn bushes surrounding the castle and has found his way through the maze like corridors to at last find himself in the bedchamber of the comatose princess.

Imagine that this story is unfamiliar to the player and that it need not progress inevitably to the conclusion that we all know from childhood.

The Scene:
A once regal bedchamber with a thick layer of settled dust everywhere and old heavy cobwebs hanging from every available object. Draped in these cobwebs like a funeral veil is an apparently dead young lady. Our hero is exhausted following some narrow successes and some setbacks.

Some HQ2 Stats:

Adventurous Prince 5W (Keyword)
Heirloom Sword 18
Valiant 3W
The Good Fairy's Prophesy 17
Virginal Naivety 2W

The GM is selecting resistances based on story judgement and wants the hero to face a climactic challenge in this scene but also has planned that the beauty of the princess should play a major role in this. Letting the player take the lead he asks what the Prince's first move is and the player goes straight for "I part the cobwebs from her face".

The GM sees the opportunity for a nice heavy resistance and states "the Princess's unsurpassed beauty holds you paralysed and you find yourself unable to do anything but stare at her, as if your whole quest was leading up to this moment, and there is nothing else to surpass this, and if you want to do anything else at all you must resist her beauty". He has in mind a 'Very High' resistance (Base +9) which is 3W for a game of three sessions or less.

The Player decides this is the ideal time to go for The Good Fairy's Prophesy 17 and states that he is driven to action by the prophesy which has been described as "a prince will one day liberate a forgotten princess from within the dark thorny forest, lift the 100 year curse and they will wed".

This is probably the ideal skill selection in terms of the story and is an assertion that the prophesy applies to his character at this crucial moment, which is interpreted as a specific bonus so gains +3 to the skill taking it to 20 v 3W. The Player rolls 15 and the GM rolls 8 gaining a marginal defeat.

The GM narrates this as "You contemplate the prophesy whilst held by the princess's beauty and you find yourself lost in a fantasy of your future together which like a waking dream seems real to you, as if you have passed this point and moved on. It is only when a spider crosses your face halfway through spinning a new web between you and the princess do you realise that you are still trapped in her beauty and that your fantasy was but a naive dream of what could have been if you had had the courage to act".

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This example is designed to highlight the subtle forces that work to make the numbers part of an abstract game in HeroQuest. At first glance it is a straightforward examination of the basic mechanics of HQ as expressed in skill numbers, resistances and modifiers, but there are many places where the story elements and subjective judgement start to de-emphasise these.

There is the GMs initial vision of the story arc, and the current position within that trajectory, in this case he has sought to make some of the earlier scenes difficult and physical to make any victory sought feel hard earned. He has an arc for the player in mind, possibly playing on the virginity and inexperience of the character by drawing out the overtones of loss of female innocence that lie in the sleeping beauty story. He has the power to frame the scene to present a suitable situation for a particular resistance level and specifically draw out the attitudes of the player via the character to the situation.

The player has the ability to choose skills that best reflect his character, which in turn will have an impact on skills rolled on and modifiers gained, in this case he is emphasising the alignment of his fate with that of the prophesy and so emphasising in the story that he is seeking either an ending that gets the girl or perhaps an ending that shows how he is naive to believe he is the one. He can tip the results in his favour via use of Hero-Points. With his choice of skill he is also negotiating with the GM over skill applicability and modifiers and to some extent resistances and future story trajectory.

The GM is then casting the narration to direct the narrative arc towards another challenge or situation which while paying heed to the result subtly re-interprets the failure to suit his plans and tie into the planned themes and the character's issues.

The numbers are at the heart of it all, and by far the easiest part to discuss and explain, but the subjective aspects that surround these are using the numbers in far less direct ways and de-emphasising them at every turn.

Resistances Revisited

2008-08-06T10:12:00.003+01:00

The preview edition of HQ2 has hit my desk, and the first thing I am interested to see, is how resistances are handled in this new rule set.

And, there are some definite improvements. Mainly, in the form of advice on how to set resistances, with a table and tools to help gauge what the resistance should be. I am delighted to see that much of the advice is focused on setting the resistance based on the flow of the story, where levels are decided primarily in relation to how successful the players have been in their last two conflicts.

There is guidance on how one should set the resistance first and then find story reasons why the resistance is at this level, so one could imagine a challenge with a clan champion which would normally be a high resistance but situated in the story after a sting of losses. In this case a low resistance would be selected and perhaps a secret weakness is revealed to the player by a surprise ally making it far easier to win the fight.

Another positive move is the advice that factors that cannot be changed by the players should be rolled into the resistance and not used as modifiers. This again allows otherwise complex sets of situational factors to be folded into the overall story and kept away from the mechanics. So if our champions challenge is on a cold and foggy morning this can be used as colour without the temptation to start adding modifiers for visibility or cold to both sides in a relatively pointless exercise. And indeed we have advice on folding away all of those weapons and armour modifiers as well unless there is good reason to bring them in.

Such guidance certainly steers the new HQ Narrator away from the habits of constant high resistances as challenge and instead moves towards high resistance when appropriate to the story, so I for one am delighted.

The Tyranny of Resistances as Challenge in HeroQuest

2008-04-12T13:26:00.006+01:00

In HeroQuest Simple Contests, the GM selects the resistance to the PC’s actions, and will often do so based on challenge. The thinking as I understand it is thus:

HeroQuest focuses on story.
In stories, stakes rise as obstacles increase.
Story satisfaction comes from the struggle to overcome these obstacles.
High resistances equate to high obstacles so overcoming them will be satisfying.

It is hard to fault the logic of this thinking but I believe it to be false, and that basing resistances on the skill of the PC is fraught with difficulties.

Firstly there is the question of balance. HQ provides lists of sample resistances so that you can decide how difficult opponents should be, but because Hero Point expenditure is not bound by this table the issue of campaign balance soon arises. There have been any number of posts on the various HQ forums regarding these lists and how some games have moved beyond these scales. Indeed it is relatively easy for a focused player to achieve a combat ability to rival the famous heroes of the setting. This in itself may not be a problem but it can cause problems for groups who wish to maintain a lower campaign balance, as an arms race of skill v resistance emerges.

Also, there is a tendency of mediocre results. If the resistances are set to provide a struggle they encourage the player to treat matching or surpassing them as a challenge, bringing in augments and Hero Point expenditure as necessary. Indeed such skill scouring is directly analogous to the struggle at hand, the desperate search and skill selection by the player, mirroring the resulting narration and actions of the character.

My concern is that essentially this is a player driven challenge, that is not as clear a reflection of the character’s goals as it might at first seem. The player is seduced into a game of numbers which is then reflected in the narration as how much the character cares and strives towards victory. This pleases the GM who intended this level of challenge, but the actual reward for this struggle is most likely to be a Marginal or Minor result, which can leave the contest feeling unresolved or unsatisfying. Also, the actual search can become boring but necessary, with the surface trappings of story-telling representing a challenge that is only really existent in the numbers.

To put this another way, the mechanics are informing the narration. My instinct has always been for the mechanics to reflect the narrative as closely as possible, each informing the other, creating a whole greater than the sum of the parts via mutual support.

My solution is not to set resistances based on challenge, but to base them purely on story grounds. But, by this I don’t mean following the above logic of story = challenge = higher resistances, but rather by handing out some of the dramatic logic to the player. If you set lower resistances and then back these up with good story reasons then you are providing the players with in-roads into the story.

The example most commonly mentioned is when players choose the contest arena based on NPC weakness, but this need not be the only time that circumstances dictate lower resistance, sometimes the NPCs may not be as good as they might seem or have other priorities. It is even possible to disassociate the resistance from the skill of an opponent and represent it as what feels right for the story at that moment.

If the resistance is low, the player can decide if they want to match, exceed or even overwhelm the resistance, and by making this choice accessible and relatively easy, the player can push for the higher victory levels and achieve them. You still get the striving, and the relevant augments still provide colour, but only when the player wants to see the character strive.

HeroQuest's Strengths

2008-03-12T12:14:00.007Z

I have been feeling a bit guilty that my longest post about HeroQuest is essentially a negative one, and I have even noticed that some of my group appear to think I am on a downer over HeroQuest; that I have somehow written it off or let it fall down my list of favourite games.

So I am going to explain the reasons why I think HeroQuest is a great game, and why its still up there as one of my favourites.

For starters, HeroQuest was my first experience of a game that changed the way I thought about role-playing. It took a while, and my views changed incrementally, but it took me to a whole other place.

Admittedly, I had a head start, having been introduced to gaming via Runequest and very quickly immersing myself in the rich and multi-faceted background of Glorantha, with its very particular take on mythology. This led onto reading about mythology and devouring Campbell's 'The Masks of God' then skimming alternative mythological views like Levi-Strauss and some of the earlier writers heavily influenced by Fraser that were then turning up in cheap public domain print versions.

Armed with this mishmash of ideas I then started trying to understand the powerful stories of our culture. Obviously Star Wars becomes a lot clearer once you have access to the very same tool-box from which it was constructed, but even otherwise trite TV shows suddenly became fascinating and I started to understand how and how not to construct a story; or more specifically what makes stories work for me and what doesn't.

And then there was roleplaying, and boy did that activity start to loose its shine in the light of this new found appreciation for story. Stripped of the ability to pretend we were making good stories only a few games seemed to stand up to scrutiny. One was Runequest's heroquesting, the activity that characters in the world perform in emulation of their own Gods' mythological stories. These still worked, partly because they had an inherent story structure that could then be played around with and partly because its a disguised form of meta-game; you are playing your characters who are in turn playing the roles of their gods. This has a subtle but tangible effect, it allows you to play a character that has one eye towards the story.

Another game that still worked for me was Call of Cthulhu, mainly because sanity was another reasonably transparent meta-game mechanic, which allowed the player to tell more interesting stories about his character, even if only to himself.

Other games seemed to fall short of my expectations, and it seemed to mainly stem from a frustration that myself and other players just didn't get something, we would all talk like there was this desire for epic story and seem to go through the motions, we would even look back and recognise some moments that had worked and shine those up like old pennies, but deep down there was something not quite there for me

It really hit home whilst watching an episode of Starsky and Hutch on daytime TV and thinking that I could just lift the plot for a game. As I watched it, and singled out the key scenes that made the rather naff mystery plot work I realised that Runequest, which I honestly believed could emulate anything at the time, has absolutely none of the tools necessary to pull off even this disposable TV show plot. The reason: the show was mainly about character! Every scene in the mystery was playing straight to those character elements, be it the relationship between the detectives or their blossoming relationships with the two guest star girls that wouldn't even be there in the next show.

So I went through a disillusioned period where I would only play games occasionally, but still read all of the books. Between games I imagined a probably infeasible game of Runequest that was truly epic by maintaining focus on heroquesting.

But of course there was always the constant promise that HeroQuest would be out next year. Any 80's RQ fan knows what I mean, Greg Stafford, recognising that Runequest didn't quite manage to pull off heroquesting, had been promising for donkeys years that he would one day write a game system that could handle it properly. We all imagined this was purely a scaling issue or something to do with how magic worked in Glorantha that wasn't being modelled in RQ properly.

What I didn't foresee, was that the game system had to be capable of handling conflict in a universal manner. And when HeroWars came out (which at the time could not be called HeroQuest for legal reasons) that new concept hit me so hard that I was blind to the rest of the game for months. One of my first thoughts was: here is a game that is actually capable of emulating a Starsky and Hutch episode! Obviously I didn't rush out and locate a copy of the show, but it was a startling realisation none the less.

And for that one slightly strange reason, I think HeroWars was the best RPG product that I ever bought. It was capable of handling any conflict that I had ever seen on TV or at the cinema or had read in novels, even the serious ones without space hardware in them.

My previous negative post is about the initial period of play with this product and HeroQuest which followed it, and about my groups growing pains with the often unnoticed shift from one style of play to another. But, I am convinced that HeroQuest will serve me well in the future ,because of this key flexibility, and its ability to play at an epic scale.

I know HeroQuest can do the things I want, its just a matter of finding a group that also wants the same, or convincing my group that its worth investing some time in. At the moment I am doing the latter and some are interested and some are less so, here's to an interesting future.

Premise Avoidance

2008-03-11T15:15:00.004Z

A while back I voiced my concerns over our Spirit of the Century game at the Forge Actual Play forum.

Put succinctly, I was concerned that play consisted of too much story discussion and not enough actual exploration of the conflict at hand.

The discussion led me to consider that we were avoiding a direct addressing of premise, and that when premise was addressed it was done so with a light touch and with an expectation that pulp characters succeed.

My main concerns during play were firstly to introduce Spirit of the Century as a rule set, and to make clear what a Narrativist Agenda was. With both of these things I achieved some successes and some failures.

I succeeded in demonstrating how the Skills and Aspects work and the scope of Stunts, but didn't introduce enough Consequence to clearly demonstrate how failure works.

Related to this I was probably guilty of conspiring with the players over the story. In an attempt to clearly hand over story control I was openly working with them, but never successfully let go myself. Which meant I was't focusing on examples of premise to highlight and explore and I wasn't forcing conflicts.

But I have been reflecting since and have further thoughts over how premise is used in games.

So what is this Premise thing and what does Addressing it involve you may ask?

Lets use some simple definitions because these ideas can be a little high brow and as such loose some of their practical meaning.

Premise has a number of definitions, but for GNS theory the concept was derived from Lajos Egri and in this link he takes a whole chapter to define premise, both by example and by comparing other theories of play writing.

At it's heart the premise of a narrative is the key idea that the rest of the narrative is formed around, and attempts to resolve. Its the thing that moves the story forward and makes it worth telling. The underlying message that the writer is trying to convey. Premise places characters in a situation that involves conflict and demands a conclusion, and that journey is empowered by the writers stance on the issue.

But a role-playing game is not a play, and this provokes a key question that I believe cuts to the heart of the formation of GNS theories: what is a RPG from a story perspective. We have all read and or espoused that RPGs are part of the story telling tradition, but where do they fit in relation to the other forms.

Let us take screenplays for instance. Good examples are designed to involve the audience, and draw them into the story. They utilise characters that can either be identified with and/or are recognisable from real life. They take an emotive stance on the issues at hand, by provoking conflicts that hold the viewers opinions or preconceptions in question thereby provoking an emotional reaction. They drive the story towards its conclusion to heighten the feelings of involvement, adding a sense of urgency and escalating this emotive attention to the core issues.

In traditional games the GM decides what the key story elements are, and in this respect the GM is more like a writer, and his creation stands or falls based on how well his payers get involved with these ideas, or how adaptive he can be in changing or moulding these ideas to the players' play.

His goal is to carry the players with him on an emotive journey to the conclusion that he has possibly preconceived, or at the very least has the climactic scene pre-framed in his mind. To this end the premise in such games is a tool of the GM, one that helps him engage the players.

In Narrativist games the premise is the thing! If a Narrativist game is all about telling the story in the most satisfying manner, then the group have a responsibility to engage with premise, because that is the touchstone around which the story structure will form. The premise acts as a kind if measure for successful storytelling, because it's the premise that will allow the story to drive forward through conflict and rising tension. It becomes far more than a single tool in the GMs box, it becomes the focus of everyone.

But that doesn't answer the question 'who decides upon premise and how do we recognise it' and I believe this to be a stumbling block upon which many groups and theorists fall.

One solution is for the game itself to have a nascent premise that can be taken and formed by the group through play. My Life with Master is a good example, taking the single idea of monstrous dysfunctional relationships and allowing play to form this into a functioning premise. Dogs in the Vineyard does this too. By setting up a proto-premise for a town, stressing individual character judgement and placing the ultimate conclusion of the story clearly in the hands of the players, it literally begs the players to form and engage with an involving premise.

Such games do not guarantee a satisfying story but they place the idea of collaborating over premise front and centre thereby increasing their likelihood.

Which brings us back to Spirit of the Century. This too puts all of the tools on the table, and the advice throughout the book helps the GM both use and explain to the players how to use those tools. But, it is not as narrowly focused as MLWM and not as structured as DitV, so it is up to the group to define and engage with premise, and it is easy to use all of the tools without truly engaging with a premise. It is possible to tell stories without deep personal meaning or engaging conflict.

This is analogous to a screenplay that lacks a decent premise, but instead of this being a purely subjective thing that can be blamed on the GMs inability to grab his players attention, it is more likely that the group as a whole have not grasped their responsibility to the story.

So I look back at the Spirit of the Century game and see a number of things:

The story was satisfying in that it had a beginning a middle and an end. This is no small thing, as an exercise in collaborative story telling, at least it told a story.

The process of collaboration was enjoyable and often lead to some inspired and exited discussion, which was a new and enjoyable experience.

The willingness to really test and challenge the characters was muted. The competence of the characters and a protective sense of character concept by the players lead to a limited engagement over premise with no fundamental parts of character really being placed in conflict by either me the GM, or other players.

So what resulted was a form of collaborative story telling, where the players enjoyed the ability to mold the story around their characters, but were ultimately more concerned with how the characters performed and how pulp-like the action was, than forming a meaning to the story and engaging with that meaning to drive forward and escalate the plot.

How HeroQuest Failed our Group

2008-01-06T14:17:00.000Z

Heroquest is based solidly on a simplified and universally applied Conflict Resolution System. Outside of this is a large continuum, which starts as System and ends as Setting but doesn’t have any clear boundaries.

Heroquest in its current dominant form is also tied up with Glorantha, and until Mongoose resurrected RuneQuest it was the only system for Gloranthan gaming being actively supported by publication; with much of that community at least moved to have a go with the system, and many feeling that it was the natural move to make given this support.

The setting issue is not a trivial one; we are talking a massive and multifaceted universe of a setting, with an established community of opinion and debate. A setting that has spent most of its life being developed for RuneQuest in its varied forms, and as such has picked up many assumptions.

For example, here are some key assumptions that I think of when people talk of Gloranthan characters:

Characters progress from average members of the community and become powerful individuals.
Characters tend to be adventurers or have a reason to be out and about in the world.
Characters are partly defined by the attitudes of their community.
Characters have a profound relationship with magic, which itself is defined by their community.

I could go on, and indeed I could define many other areas that contain assumptions, such as what constitutes a typical Gloranthan campaign, how scenarios tend to be constructed or what kind of adversity is expected.

Heroquest attempts to codify some of this into its rule set, for instance the magic section is huge. This is partly because the issue of magic in this setting is major, and partly because RuneQuest was well developed in this direction.

Also, the character creation system is assumed to create a starting character with skills that improve over time. (Interestingly, this starting level is higher than the old starting level, as the characters have at least the potential to be something other than average.)

We started playing HeroQuest (actually its precursor HeroWars) with a feeling of familiarity and continuity, recognising much of the construction as elegant ways of using this new resolution system to do the things we were used to in RuneQuest.
And, with RuneQuest informed expectations, the game seemed to hang together well, and was resilient to much initial poking around by the sceptical.

But, HeroQuest is not RuneQuest, and some of the habits that we developed playing with HeroQuest were actually RuneQuest informed habits. Extended conflict for instance was seen as similar in scope to the long fight that was often experienced at the end of RuneQuest scenarios, and Extended Conflict tactics were developed to replace the RuneQuest tactics that we were used to seeing in these scenes. And because HeroQuest is a flexible system it was easy to mould it to this end. Indeed some of the rules in the book were designed to achieve this end and were equally informed by RuneQuest.

Of course the flexibility of the Extended Conflict system is appealing, and demanded that we tried to explore other forms of conflict using it, and these in turn became equally tactical and best suited for the final scenes.

But there is a hidden pitfall at the heart of the game, and that is the Universal Resolution System itself. Symptoms of this problem were sometimes subtle and sometimes game halting. Here are a few:

Certain magics from the setting have decisive effects that always required specific rolls in RuneQuest. Something like Sever Spirit could be used in RuneQuest to attempt to kill a character outright. In the middle of Extended Conflict these either felt equivalent to any other action and so lost their appeal, or demanded separate resolution and so twisted the system.
Use of skills became a very subjective affair, as many skills can be used to achieve a single goal, and this sometimes led to unresolved discussions over whether it was acceptable to use general sounding catch all skills like “Keen Senses” or “Quick” and poetically named magic like “One Thousand Tiny Leaps” in a wide variety of situations. This in turn, informed ongoing choices during character creation and development.
Related to this augmentation became associated with tactics, as it is a way of increasing skill levels, but there is no easy way to define where skills can’t be used as an augment because of the same subjective nature of skills.
Extended Conflicts could just break down, when one or more players realised that their understanding of the ongoing conflict was either undermined by the actions of others, or was countered in unexpected ways by the GM: the subjective nature of what could be done, sometimes undermined carefully constructed tactics. These instances were worse when underlying assumptions about the conflict were revealed to be totally different.

Sure there are solutions to most if not all of these problems, but these solutions are also based heavily on the assumptions about what the game is supposed to achieve.

If you see HeroQuest as providing tools to tell stories in a flexible and ongoing manner then you are not going to be too concerned about whether a certain skill can always be used in the same way every time. Use of any skill will be naturally informed by the specifics of the situation and the requirements of the scene. But, if you are concerned with developing tactics and carving out a niche of effectiveness that gains you leverage in the setting then this consistency will be vital, and attempts to downplay it will seem obtuse at best, if not deliberately obstructive to your idea of what the game is for.

The hard and stark fact of it all is that despite the numerous assumptions from RuneQuest, both built into the HeroQuest rules and brought to the table via players, the Resolution System at the heart of HeroQuest is not suited for RuneQuest like games. At best it can be made to work that way by conscious modification and unconscious filtering. At worst, it will continually throw up situations that reveal it to be ill-suited to that task.

In my experience it has done the latter constantly and consistently over a very long period, and during that period I have found HeroQuest to be equally unsuited to demonstrating what it is good at, because the assumptions from RuneQuest have had a profound effect on the way that the game has been constructed, the way that the setting has been integrated into it, and the way that we have played it as a group.

Spirit of the Century - Session 7

2007-12-05T16:12:00.001Z

BLOOD!

As Clay clings on to the controls of the wild machine the unnatural illumination of the vast room reveals a section of the machinery, glowing and expanding.

Clay flings himself towards a covered vent in the floor, and pries it open, but the explosion throws him hurtling through the entrance. When the maelstrom subsides Clay comes-to and finds himself in the safety of the vent twitching uncontrollably. Sounds of a pitch battle emanate from above, between the Nautiloids and their rebelling Slave Race and Clay decides to find his way, via the vents, back to the office and his prone friend Oriole.

Oriole knows of death, he finds himself in the Endless Plain and looks down for the footprints he must follow to the Land of the Dead, and sees none. This is a time long ago, the first of his people to die has not yet walked the path for others to follow, Oriole realises with wonder that he must find his own path on a vision quest to wherever that may lead. He strikes out in the direction that feels right and wanders endlessly across the featureless plain until he comes across an oasis tainted with blood.

By now, the flooded office is red with blood, and Clay locates Oriole lying with a barbed harpoon dart straight through his chest. Clay lifts and cradles his dead friend, pulling the dart through from behind, a dark red cloud follows in it's wake. Clay reaches out with his mind in an attempt to make at least some slight contact with his fallen comrade, and remembering a terrible thing from his battles against the occult, he cuts his wrist open with the harpoon, and meditates upon the fresh blood that spills into the room. The blood flows out and forms a trail for him to follow.

Oriole is amazed to find himself next to his friend Clay, and greets him “How”, but Clay shrugs and says that he does not know.*

Doc and Sylvie contemplate the friends that they have left behind. Docs old Blood Brother scars begin to bleed and he senses that Oriole is somehow not dead but lost. Realising that he is now in the mysterious valley of Oriole's clan, he decides to recreate a ritual of self torture that he experienced in becoming Oriole's Blood Brother; in order to contact his adopted clan. As Doc performs these strange rights, Sylvie decides to have a look round, and comes upon a group of Apache, carrying an elder who says in broken English that he is following Docs call and is here to help bring back Oriole. Sylvie expresses her doubts, as Oriole is dead, but the seer states with conviction that Oriole is not yet in the Land of the Dead. The ancient Apache explains that Oriole could be brought back by creating a beacon in the spirit world, and offers Sylvie a central role in the painful and arduous rituals alongside Doc.

Oriole and Clay wander in the endless plain until Oriole espies a high hill, and explains to Clay that they must climb it in order to see far, as they are lost far back in time. They embark on a direct path, and come across the tracks of a big cat, Oriole is convinced they have nothing to fear from the tracks of a Mountain Lion but Clay suspects that, as they are so far back in the past, they may belong to a far more vicious creature. Clay persuades him to be more cautious and taking a sheltered route they spot a Sabre Toothed Lion on the side of the hill, and Oriole is grateful that they followed the Path of Friendship.

The Apache clansmen take down the unconscious body of Doc, and build a large tent in which to hold the beacon ritual. Sylvie declines their kind offer and asks if she can be useful in a less painful manner. The warriors ask Sylvie to stand guard with them outside the tent, as such rituals attract many foes. Doc surfaces from unconsciousness in a wild ritual of dancing and pain, and in his delirium he follows the guiding voice of the seer, to embrace his pain and stand tall in the spirit plain.

Outside, a beam of light flashes out from the brush, and scythes through two warriors on a path towards Sylvie. She leaps over the beam with catlike grace, and bounds towards it's source. Her lash arcs viciously into the brush, gripping and pulling the leg of the fiendish Martian bent on revenge. The Martian struggles, bearing his deadly weapon upon Sylvie at close range, but she evades it, by pulling him onto his back. The beam cuts wildly above, and disturbs a rock outcrop, and as Sylvie dives clear the rocks pin the Martian down and entomb him.

At the top of the hill Oriole and Clay peer over the strange and indistinct landscape of the spirit world, and Oriole sees a large figure on the horizon, which explodes into a cloud of blood. “We must go that way” says Oriole recognising it as a signal from Doc, and they set out towards the vision.

In the heady atmosphere at the heart of the ritual, amongst the wild dancing, and the heat and smoke from the fire, Oriole and Clay emerge from the shadows. They are embraced in great celebration at the return of lost friends.

And so our heroes have all returned from the distant past, the Martian's plan foiled. The Apache considered the Martian's punishment and settled on leaving him to his own fate, beneath the rocks, deep in the wilderness. We can only speculate on how the rebellion fared but the Nautiloid threat has not been felt since.

* Yes, we are aware that this greeting is not very Apache, but this is a pulp genre joke and we couldn't resist its corniness. http://www.native-languages.org/iaq16.htm

Player Scene Framing

2007-11-25T15:33:00.000Z

Session six was most notable to me for the players insisting on a scene, taking on the role of scene framing usually reserved by the GM.

I had imagined that the fastest way towards resolution of the story as a whole would be to escape the guards somehow and cut straight to a scene in the hanger, and was prepared to engineer a situation with the Slave Race (so oppressed they don't even have a real name in our story) in the corridor.

But, the players were adamant that we should have an Evil Genius Monologue scene, and were actually disappointed that I hadn't pre-prepared the speech. So much so that I felt obliged to put a detailed monologue in the write-up to sew up the loose ends in the speech I used. That element of the write-up is really an exercise in Story After, but one that feels right in this instance.

Interestingly, I couldn't have properly prepared the speech anyway, because the actual NPC used was only settled as a Martian by Oriole's player using a fate point to declare that the bad guy wasn't a Nautiloid just as I narrated the swivel chair turning to face the PCs. That in itself is a demonstration of the massive shift towards narrativist play that we have taken whilst playing Spirit of the Century. So much of a shift in fact that I feel we now have issues of how much of the game should be dedicated to plot construction and associated meta-play as opposed to exploration of situation. I believe that Meta-play element is a key reason that Phantom's player decided to sit out of this and remaining sessions, stating that he isn't enjoying this style of game.

Spirit of the Century - Session 6, Part 2

2007-11-24T18:01:00.000Z

In which the Tide Turns

The remaining heroes are taken to the Tidal Machine, leaving Oriole's dead body alone in the office to slowly shroud itself in blood. Doc begins work on the machine, but in an act of bitter defiance he surreptitiously recalibrates the machine to only transport the inhabitants of the hanger into the future.

Just then, an explosion rocks the hanger as the slave race escalate their rebellion, breaking through a wall into the hanger. Sylvie takes her change to slip away from the guards in order to liberate any artefacts of weird science and technology from the Nautiloids lair. Whilst she peruses the hanger, Sylvie espies Nautiloid soldiers driving back the slave race incursion by use of a pain enslaving device. And, overhearing their boastful claims that the device will doom any rebellion, she locates the core of the device, and removes the biological empathic material that is the source of its amplified, projected pain.

The machine now back in operation and the tide rising, the machine roars into action, but at the last minute Doc realises that in order for it to work, and project the heroes and their captors back to his own time, someone must stay behind and hold in place the calibration lever. Clay bravely takes the task on, and everyone else disappears leaving Clay stranded in the distant past.

Doc and Sylvie appear in an ancient and empty version of the hanger in their own time, surrounded by the Martian and his Nautiloid guards. The Nautiloids, now devoid of water fall choking to the ground, and the Martian makes a dash for it. Evading Doc and Sylvie's attempts to confine him, partly due to Sylvie's shock at the sudden loss of Clay.

Is Oriole really dead? Will Clay be trapped forever in the distant turbulent past? Has the Martian commander escaped Oriole's predicted fate? Find out next week in the concluding episode of the Tides of Time.

Spirit of the Century - Session 6, Part 1

2007-11-24T12:30:00.000Z

In which all is revealed

Our heroes are disarmed and Sylvie has her Lash used to bind her arms to her body, before being led up to the flooded Base Commander’s office.

The Commander is sitting with his back to the door, behind a large wooden desk in a Nautiloid suit despite being underwater. He is monitoring the activity below through a huge window overlooking the hanger containing the tidal machine.

Once the captives are positioned before the desk, Nautiloid guards watching their every move, the Commander rotates in his chair to reveal himself as a Martian! “So we meet again Oriole” he says peering through the red mist contained in his suit. Oriole recognises the commander responsible for the huge invasion fleet which you will no doubt remember from that daring interplanetary adventure Red Indian, Red Planet.

“How you here, in deep past of my home?” asks Oriole, maintaining his composure by crossing his arms and holding himself proud in the face of his nemesis.

“When you destroyed my fleet you caused a massive explosion, and the wildly failing tachyon drives of our space ships caused a time distortion that threw me into the distant past of my world at the very height of the Martian civilisation. There I commandeered a space ship and flew to Earth, where I guided and moulded this promising race of Nautiloids. Manipulating their essential essences, making them as long lived as my race, I carefully selected the most aggressive of the species in a huge breeding program, which led inevitably to a new, world spanning empire capable of wiping from the face of the planet, the nascent potential of humanity before, they could forge the world that you know.

“But the islanders of Atlantis, proved tenacious and resourceful, their strange mechanical technologies thwarting me. So I hatched a plan to invade the future in an overwhelming surprise attack, oppressing humanity and stealing the technologies of your time. And, you have arrived here just in time to witness my tidal machine turn the oceans into a huge temporal vortex, allowing my amassed Nautiloid armies to sweep across the continents of your time, bending your whole planet to my will.

“Sit and watch with me” he says, gesturing to seats near the viewing window.

Doc Automatic peers down into the hanger with his expert eye at the reworking of his tidal machine, and spots a flashing warning light in an essential sub system of the grossly scaled up machinery. And, at this moment a Nautiloid scientist bursts in, hurriedly crosses the office and whispers a problem into the grim Martian’s ear.

Doc realises that the Nautiloids have not corrected the flaw in his original design which caused him to discard the tidal machine and leave it gathering dust amongst the many half finished prototypes in his laboratory. He delights in informing the Martian that the machine is doomed to failure without correcting and recalibrating that vital subsystem.

Oriel then has a vision of the Martian's fate, and pointing at him predicts that the use of technology beyond his ken will result in his destruction.

The provoked Martian raises his hand, and the Nautiloid guards level their guns at our heroes and the fiendish alien demands that Doc fix the problem or his friends will die. Quick as a flash Sylvie frees her hands and whips her lash across the room, dragging him and his chair across the room to face her.

Unphased the diabolical Commander raises a single finger and a Nautiloid fires his weapon felling our hero Oriole and leaving him on the floor, blood slowly clouding the water around his dead body.

“I do not bluff” says the Martian levelling his gaze at the distraught Doc, who screams in his distress.

“My Blood Brother!” Defeated and in shock, Doc agrees to mend the monstrous version of his machine.

Provoked into further action, Sylvie whips a Nautiloid’s gun from his grasp and into her hand levelling it at the Martian in front of her, but the Martian calmly directs her to shoot, and the gun clicks uselessly in the Martians face.

“Do you think I would let these guns work on me?” says the grinning alien commander.

Spirit of the Century - Session 5

2007-11-20T10:34:00.000Z

In which our heroes stir-up rebellion

Coming to a halt on the flight deck our heroes jump out and quickly assess the situation, noticing many large lumbering shapes in flash-proof suits that Phantom discerns are not Nautiloids. The heroes make for a large pipe outlet, and on their way Clay notices two pinpricks of light, shining out from darkness. The Phantom can sense no danger, so they continue towards the pipe's dark safety.

Waiting for our heroes in the pipe is a furtive Atlantean named Artemian who reveals that he had prior knowledge of their arrival via a message from Atlantis. He leads our heroes to safety before talking with them about the current situation. Answering their questions about the humanoids on the flight deck, Artemian explains that the Nautiloids make use of a slave race who do much of their manual work. This reminds Doc Automatic of a fragment of ancient prophecy about a group of heroes who came to liberate just such a race from sea-born oppressors, and the heroes ask if the slave race might be ripe for rebellion. Artemian says he knows just the man, and he takes them to see a covert slave leader in the cramped and squalid slave quarters.

He receives our heroes with interest, but seems reluctant to lead an active rebellion without assurances that this is the right time, Clay cold reads him, and convinces him by playing on his eagerness for rebellion and thus the rebellion is set in motion. Oriole senses a fortune for the slave, and pointing at him reveals that he will be a heroic martyr to his race.

Our heroes then start to ask Artemian detailed questions on the layout of the base, and providing them with frog masks, excepting Oriole who uses his Atlantean Diving Techniques, he leads them through water conditioning pipes to a vantage point above a weird-science Map room, which displays an interactive map of the base via mysterious glowing coral.

Whilst Clay looks down on the map, the Nautiloid in charge of the map room, the original Nzarlk, spots him and sends guards to arrest him. Clay tells the others to escape and awaits his captors.

Clay is brought to Nzarlk, who appears to have been demoted in favour of his future counterpart. Clay recognises his opportunity, and convinces Nzarlk that he is a time agent come to take his counterpart back to his own time. Nzarlk is convinced enough to help, granting him a security badge and access to the map room, and agreeing to provide a Nautiloid Guard. Clay quickly relocates his friends and our heroes march down a secure corridor towards the labs.

Meeting a security checkpoint Clay fast talks the guard into being relieved by his own guard, name dropping his superior officers name (provided by his own guard), and the group access the labs, packed with Weird Machines, the whole room giving off a Sinister Aura.

Clay is mesmerised by a strange mirror which once picked up opens a dimensional portal, which sympathetically sets off portals randomly throughout the base, and at one point opens near the slave leader and his amassing slave rebellion. Recognising the possible doom of his freedom movement he throws himself through the narrow portal, causing it to explode and then dissipate. Dying the slave leader becomes prophet, as he finds himself in the distant past in a village of his people, and with his last breaths recounts how they will be enslaved by the Nautiloids and then liberated by our heroes and their own rebellion.

Meanwhile back at the weird science labs, a Nautiloid commander bursts in through the door.

The Phantom shoots him, but not seriously hurt the commander fires his large multi-barrelled gun into the room, unleashing swarms of tiny drones swimming with menace towards each of our heroes. Phantom unsuccessfully tries to dodge them Oriole jumps onto a weird science bike and outpaces them, Sylvie stirs up the waters with her lash disrupting the swarm, Clay takes refuge in a cupboard but on reopening the door the waiting swarm sting him, and Doc smashes them away with a well timed punch from his mechanical arm.

GM Responsibilities

2007-11-13T15:17:00.000Z

Early in my Spirit of the Century game one of my fellow players made an interesting observation:

"The more I see of these story games the more I think it is all about the GM being lazy and getting the players to do his work"

I am paraphrasing this from memory but I think I have the gist right.

This interests me on many levels, due to its resonance with Big Model theories and various techniques espoused by Narrativist game designers and players about distribution of traditional GM roles. But my first thought was that it was almost exactly the opposite from my side of the table.

When I started running HeroQuest my aim was to encourage a style of play where the Characters were set free in the world and their actions would somehow shape and dictate the plot. Without a theory background I was attempting to resolve the Impossible Thing, by divorcing my responsibility to the story in order to allow the players to tell it through their actions.

The Impossible Thing:
The GM is the author of the story and the players direct the actions of the protagonists.

Where the game failed in my opinion, and it's still in its death throws, was that there was a story void in the centre of the game, and when the players didn't actively start to fill that void I was forced to. Slowly without me realising it, the game was transformed into the reverse solution, and I was dictating much of the story and allowing contributions rather that encouraging protagonism. Realising that things had gone awry prompted my turn to theory, mainly at that time through the now closed HeroQuest Forum at the Forge.

And the main thing that this journey has taught me is to prepare better. Instead of the logic that said "if I want story to be told at the table then I should do the minimum preparation and be prepared to roll with the players' suggestions" my preparation should be focused on facilitating the ongoing story.

An old RPG tradition has been not to cement stuff before play, a technique that allows the GM to keep his story on track. If the PCs capture the evil assassin then he turns out to be an underling: if the PCs obtain the enemy plans then they turn out to be an elaborate bluff, if the PCs make a wrong turn in the dungeon it matters not when the map hasn't been drawn. This technique takes away GM responsibility, but it's covert and works against protagonism because the players achievements are filtered through the GM's story.

Player: “I did it!”.
GM: “Yes but what did you do?”
Player: “huh! Oh your evil.”
GM sits back with a satisfied grin.

As a player this is fine if you are happy for the GM to provide story, the declaration of evil may be genuine appreciation, but it falls short when you want to reach for and achieve things set by your own agenda. For this the GM needs to have more than the narrow confines of the story prepared. He needs to know what kinds of things would be triggered by both success or failure or the big grey area in between, and ensure that any outcome is fun.

More radically, for a Narrativist Agenda to become established, it requires buy-in from the players either way: either an informed choice between success and failure or a trust that the methods of resolution provide scope for the characters and allow the players to further the story.

This requires just as much preparation, and just as much work for the GM, but the work is facilitative rather than directive and requires preparation to that end. Instead of constructing devices and plots that continually withhold resolution until the designated moment in the story, the GM needs to provide ways that the players can become involved in the story, and present situations that allow the players to achieve their character's objectives or at least ask the characters meaningful and action-provoking questions that allow further investment.

Back in the HQ game my preparation involved an incoherent mixture of the two, and unsurprisingly the game was also an incoherent mixture, but for this SotC game I am trying to confine my preparation and active involvement at the table to facilitation. Which still means providing story occasionally, but as a means to an end not the end itself.

It may appear to some players that my preparation has disappeared but it has instead been directed towards a totally different arena.

To Sim or not to Sim...

2007-11-08T15:42:00.001Z

Session 4 also contained a few moments where we had to consciously and overtly set out how close to the Pulp Adventure source material we were trying to be.

The moments were thus:

- In describing the Atlantean aircraft we decided that it should be silver and futuristic looking from a 1920's perspective, that it would probably look like a bi-plane but not have propellers, and in flight it should look and sound just like the old Flash Gordon matinee shorts, complete with sparks and the electronic turbine sound.

-The flash Gordon look also informed our ideas of the interior of the craft, which was basically a large cylinder with big simple dial readouts and room to walk around inside.

See here for those unfamiliar with 1930s style sci-fi.

- As mentioned in the last post, when the players reached a planning stage and one player was keen to jump into the action "this is pulp...".

- In the negative, when one player suggested that another player could jump from the supersonic plane onto a chasing plane (seen as unrealistic by the same player who asserted the pulp ideal earlier and ironic given the clip above).

As a GM attempting to encourage a Narrativist Agenda I am not always comfortable with the comparison with source material, and at heart it all depends what the group are using the source material for. If we are looking back at our favourite pulp stories and using them as inspiration and colour to help with setting exploration then it is a positive force. On the other hand, if the game becomes concerned with emulation of the source material - confining story and actions to expected channels in an attempt to protect that material and play within, the game drifts into a simulation of that material.

As GM I try to walk this line, encouraging pulp inspiration and colour but trying not to confine ourselves within a pulp aesthetic for its own sake. Realising that I have to be wary of using Constructive Denial and putting forward a case for breaking with the source material when other players use Constructive Denial.

Thoughts on Session 4

2007-11-07T12:51:00.000Z

Narrower in scope but with a more action orientated pulp feel session 4 was notable mainly for the use of character spotlighting, and considerations of pace.

For a start, the session very quickly moved towards use of the chase mechanics. Oriole's player was keen that the pulp format should not involve too much planning, and I was trying to keep up the suspense by making sure the players were on the clock in story terms. (Only 7 hours to avert a catastrophic invasion of the earth.)

For perhaps 30 seconds the players started to worry about what they were going to do when they got to the Nautiloid base, as they would need to find the tide machine, disable it in some way or get hold of the plans of the base (obvious parallels with the Death Star blueprints were noted). Oriole's player averted this potential lull by stating "come on this is pulp we can worry about what to do when we get there lets just jump in the plane", which had already been flagged up as the next source of drama by me discussing trying out the chase mechanics.

The chase mechanics were not an exact match for the situation, but they are clearly how the book would advocate running such a scene and I was confident that I could mold the situation to the mechanics. I didn't want to house rule or patch the mechanics to fit the situation, as this was the first time I had tried them out, and that way can lead to confusion, and if it falls down can lead to players coming away from the game thinking the mechanics are inadequate.

I set up five planes that would oppose the group, 4 'good' planes with 2 stress tracks and and a final plane as a Last Pursuer with +1 Pilot and +3 stress boxes. I haven't quite got the hang of balancing out combat and its ilk in SotC so this was based on instinct. The PC's plane had 3 stress tracks and had a speed of 'great' mainly dictated by how we had narrated the plane, our instinct being that it should just get the players to their destination.

The scene was run as a series of manoeuvres as suggested in chase scenes with any combat being left to the players not flying. This felt natural in the story, as Oriole was written up as a natural pilot and it seemed right that his pilot skills be in the spotlight as opposed to gun skills.

Treating the scene as a chase also allowed us to stay focused on the reason for the scene 'get to the Nautiloid base and quick' instead of treating it as an aerial combat scene. It was interesting that when the option came up to declare that the plane had rear guns this was quickly discarded in favour of using a gadget, which provided more colour and kept the pulp flavour going.

The chase advice suggests that no passenger can act for two exchanges in a row, which proved a nice way to keep the spotlight rotating around the table, although we found it difficult for Clay to contribute to the action as the character has a social skill focus. This was handled at first by a player tag, suggesting that a pipe had come loose, which I used to compel Clay's Tough Scot, and a direct compel of his espionage aspect to provide a reason why the plane should crash land at the end (as agreed earlier).

So via these two spotlight controlling actions, and the sharing of the passenger role the chase was quite satisfying. Although, Sylvie and Clay may need to hold the spotlight in the next session.

I had misread one element of the chase rules, I had been treating the passenger roll as a separate roll as opposed to taking the higher roll to work out success in the chase. On reflection despite this being a detraction from the rules it allowed more action in the scene and the balance of the chase seemed to work. Had I realised and played it by the book it is possible that the opposition may have been too highly powered.

Thoughts on Session 3

2007-11-05T22:29:00.000Z

I found session 3 of this game very interesting from a theoretical perspective, hence my inclusion of mechanical details such as compels and tagging in the write-up.

I was very pleased to see the three players present embrace the possibly of shaping the ongoing story. I had sketched out some details of what might happen but wanted the players to decide on a course of action.

Previous sessions had involved player disagreement over the theme of time travel, this was expressed as in-character choice and played out in an ultimately unresolved conflict. The issue felt to me, more of a player level problem, needing some form of resolution at the "lets tell the story this way" level.

The functional working-out of this conflict was the Butterfly Effect aspect placed on future scenes, effectively acting as a "told you so" aspect which allows the Phantom to express his reticence without halting the story. It also allows the player to engage with the time travel theme in a meaningful way that supports further story.

Clay pushing his Nautiloid contact through the portal was a PC act that reflected an embracing of the possibilities of player authorship. The assertion implying that there are only a finite number of Nautiloids and that they do not reproduce freely (akin to the Asgard in Stargate) and creating a weakness that could be exploited later in the story.

During play I also discussed the possibility that the story could result in a wiping out of the Nautiloid race wholesale, and how this could necessitate a rewriting of the characters aspects. This was not only accepted, but Doc's player considered that his Bane of the Nautiloids aspect could be an indication of this eventuality, and we were amused that this aspect could be used a little like the Doctor uses his reputation against the Daleks in Doctor Who.

All-in-all the session involved feeling-out story direction and establishing themes for future sessions, something that I have never experienced before, but have attempted to facilitate in the past with little success. Given that one of my reasons for playing Spirit of the Century was to help explain my predilection for Narrativist game play this was an excellent result.

Spirit of the Century - Session 4

2007-11-05T22:26:00.000Z

In which Oriole's flying skills are tested to the limit

The Heroes discuss the world’s fate with the Atlantean leader who puts a supersonic bi-plane at their disposal and tells them of the secret, giant-clamshell, Nautiloid base where they are setting up their tidal equipment. Oriole recognises this description, as matching an account in Ancient Indian Lore of a box canyon near the Path of the Dead where the remnants of a giant fossilised clam shell could still be seen.

On the runway, Oriole kicks the plane’s tyres and decides that it will just about get them there even if he needs to crash land the thing, and no time to plan further the heroes jump in and take off.

Oriole finds that at supersonic speeds the planes handling is disorientating, but is still able to pilot the plane at these unheard of speeds, and before long they are approaching the vicinity of the Nautiloid base. At this point a pipe on the outside of the rocket comes loose and our ‘Tough Scot’ Clay is forced to hold his breath and hang out of the plane, allowing Doc Automatic to crawl over him. With Clay clinging onto his ankles the Doc attempts to affect a mid-flight repair on the steam belching pipe.. It is at this crucial moment that a Nautiloid patrol, consisting of two rocket ships, comes hurtling in on our heroes at 12 o’clock. Oriole maintains a straight course to aid his friends, allowing the rocket ships to turn and place themselves on Oriole's tail. Next, Oriole banks sharply to drag in his two colleges, leaving Doc Automatic a split second to affect his repair.

Doc Automatic is, as ever, un-phased: hammering the pipe into place and using his mechanical arm he walks calmly back into the wildly banking plane. Clay, on the other hand, is flung into the craft, causing his face to become temporarily distorted by the supersonic forces.

Now unencumbered by the mechanical failure Oriole slams his plane into a stall slowing his pace to more familiar speeds but damaging his flaps in the process. The Rocket ships bank also, suffering similar damage and Sylvie grabs a flare gun and shoots at the rocket ships kicking smoke into the cockpit. Spotting clouds ahead Oriole plunges into their cover, and pulling off a superb manoeuvre emerges at an unexpected angle. This timely deed looses one of the rocket ships and grants the Doc a clear shot with his light amplifying lens, sending the remaining ship spiralling to it’s doom.

Oriole turns back his plane towards his destination, and is confronted by two more rocket ships in close formation. He aims his plane neatly between them blasting them in his wake and sending them into a spin; struggling to correct their path they collide and explode.

However, the patrols have had time to alert an ace pilot in a delta winged, twin-rocket plane, Oriole is drawn to the danger of capturing this plane and with a stupefying stunt, lands his plane in the gap between the rockets. Sylvie acrobatically climbs out of the plane and edges along the wing attacking the water filled cockpit’s weak point, springing a leak of life supporting water from the pilots refuge. As Oriole fights valiantly to stay piggy-backed, stressing both vehicles further, the Doc focuses his lens on the cockpit: boiling water and placing the foul Nautiloid pilot in distress. The pilot surrenders and succumbs to Clays intimidation and falls in with our heroes plan to fly back to the clam-shell base declaring the Atlantean plane as a captive.

However, Clay’s espionage skills are a double edged sword, and the Nautiloid, in a last desperate attempt to foil our heroes, uses a code word to alert the flight controller. Clay cold reads the controller and recognising stress in his response, tells our heroes that the game is up. Oriole forces the delta-wing into an explosive crash and dives his heavily stressed plane headlong into the rapidly closing clam shell scraping the rim and spinning to a halt on the flight deck leaving our heroes with moments to spare before Nautiloid troops inevitably appear Harpoons at the ready.

Spirit of the Century - Session 3

2007-11-05T22:25:00.000Z

Clay turned up as the police arrived and was able to take charge of the situation using his contacts in the police: keeping the police happy and allowing the phantom to strip out effected seating and fixtures and Doc Automatic to set up equipment to remove the temporary anomaly.

However, a Tag from Clay’s player on Doc’s self experimentation means that he temporarily endows his arm with temporal abilities and uses it to create small portals to set up equipment on both sides of the boundary. This allows Clay to push his Nautiloid contact back to 100,000 BC, declaring that the Nautiloids do not reproduce and actually have lived for at least 100,000 years, (via the declaration and maintaining his aspect of the named Nautiloid contact, now 100,000 years older). This sets up a compel that by throwing him back, the Nautiloid race have had 100,000 years to prepare an invasion to conquer the world. Effectively giving the Nautiloid race the aspect of ‘plans as long as civilisation’, and allowing them to infiltrate many of the world’s occult societies in preparation for their ascendancy.

On return to Doc’s lab, the heroes discern that some things seem to be disturbed and phantom and the Doc are able to detect that forces from the altered timeline have been rummaging around his lab and have stolen a discarded tide controlling device from the Docs submarine experiments. Realising that things are afoot the phantom has a horrified premonition that the Nautiloid invasion will take affect the next day during high tide. The Phantom also foresees that time travel can only bring trouble, creating an ongoing scene aspect of Butterfly Effect.

The Doc rapidly builds a time travel device in record time transporting the Heroes to a field in 100,000 BC along with a couple of hundred innocent individuals (and some not so innocent) compelled to have been transported by the untested device. The heroes realise that some of the individuals are thinly disguised Nautiloid spies (heavy cloaks and an inhuman aura) and dispatch them as quickly as possible but then realise that some of the humans may also be Nautiloid agents.

At this point, Clay hears a conversation emanating from one of his many trench coat pockets and pulls out a rare artefact of a petrified Atlantian head, which now serves as a mysteries communication device with its original owner, and after a brief introduction and explanation the heroes use the artefact to teleport themselves to the Atlantian's presence (the players realising that their very existence was due to a GM compel and as such will cause trouble one way or another and the choice allows them to decide the nature of that trouble (spies on pre-sunk Atlantis or spies at large in a Nautiloid dominated world revealing their presence and actions).

And so the session ends with the heroes on Atlantis with only 7 hours to stop the Nautiloids launching themselves across time in a wholesale invasion of earth.

Spirit of the Century - Sessions 1 & 2

2007-11-05T22:17:00.000Z

Weeks 1 & 2 are glossed over to pull out the elements that remained active in session 3 and beyond.

The Story so far…

Session 1

During an academic’s stage demonstration of a supposedly Atlantean Artefacts, our heroes discern its 100,000 year old Nautiloid origins (an ocean born ancient race secretly living below the oceans).

They inadvertently activate it and it turns out to be a portal to that ancient era. The immediate effect being a tumult of water, which threatens to flood the theatre. Oriel (still not sure which spelling is preferred) looks through the portal and sees a coded message on a sub-aquatic building from his old mentor beckoning him through but Phantom breaks the device and closes the portal.

Oriole and Doc Automatic investigate the water and declare that it has temporally anomalous properties and that Doc Automatic would be able to use it to create a time machine to the distant past. Phantom is against such meddling knowing from experience how painful and disturbing the repercussions can be.

Session 2

Phantom receives a mysterious premonition that the flooding of the theatre has created a giant portal through which the Nautiloids will attack, and Sylvie races across Paris with Doc Automatic and Phantom to reach the theatre on time to avert the danger.

The heroes manage to kill the Nautiloids but not without casing some complications along the way. An innocent lady was shot as Doc Automatic ducked behind her to avoid a dart, and many people were horrified by the Phantom’s attempt to make the theatre goers flee by appearing to threaten to burn the place down.

Whys & Wherefores

2007-11-05T21:29:00.000Z

This blog will mainly focus on my experiences with roleplaying games. That is, the pen and paper, sitting round a table, creating a story variety.

I do not know where this blog will go, but it starts as a scratch pad of ideas, a log-book of my experiences, a journal for my actual play reports, and musings on the games I play.

The topics are bound to head into theoretical territory because that's how my mind works, and it will certainly be focused on games that provoke story because that is the kind of game I like.

My thinking is currently influenced by Ron Edward's Big Model Theory and this, in turn, will certainly influence my thoughts and indeed my play.