Fire & Fatigue

Writing Legends of Alba as a 24XX game (see last post) helped solidify some ideas about what I want from a ruleset for this game. I want it to be brief, the core rules should take up no more than 2 sides of A4. I want it to be intuitive, appealing to common sense through plain language. But I also don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: There needs to be enough design space to play with to give interesting benefits for Character backgrounds, equipment, magic items, and rewards during play.

So expanding on the core resolution mechanic I talked about here, I've added a few concepts which I consider essential. You can read the WIP ruleset here.

Fire

I like having ways to reward Players for great role play, creative thinking, clever tactics etc with the chance to turn luck in their favour when it counts. Things like: Rolling with Advantage in 5e; making an Enhanced Attack in Into The Odd; Creating an Advantage in Fate. So I'm thinking about "Fire" for my take on this. I mentioned Fire briefly at the end of the last post, and that it would essentially be the Character's inner fire. On the edge of cheesiness perhaps but even so I really like it, so I'm sticking with it for now. So with Fire as a reward, the behaviour I want to reward most is Characters acting "in-character". So this seemed like a good way to encourage players to engage with their Character's Clan* as well, so for now fulfilling a Clan Virtue is the main way to get Fire, which you can burn for a re-roll.

Fire Digital Art CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 by MayGoldworthy

Fatigue

I'm curious to see whether or not this actually works in play: I'm not planning to have Hit Points in Legends of Alba (!). Characters will however be travelling around in harsh conditions and fighting dangerous enemies so I think it's important to reflect the toll of this mechanically. I also want to give players an incentive to seek out hospitality because in doing so they'll get to speak to folk - the best source of info on the locale. My concern with Fatigue as it's written is that it might just feel lousy for players to have this number sitting on their Character sheet as a constant debuff till they can clear it. Might players simply prefer hit points that get whittled down harmlessly till their Character drops dead?  We'll have to see!

Wounds

Why have lasting injuries in this game? The story of Nuada The Silverarm mostly. I'm not sure they need to be strictly enumerated like this (Minor, Major, Mortal) but this felt like a natural way to go, and I quite like this loose representation of a Wound as an answer to the questions: "What treatment is required?" and "How long will it take to get better?". It took a bit of spinning to get here however because the main way to get Wounds is going to be through Combat. So what does Combat look like in this game? While I don't want unique rules for Combat - ultimately it's just a Check, right? But it's such a common situation, and the stakes tend to be higher, I think it would run more smoothly if there was a procedure to follow, so I'm thinking about that.

This feels like a good point to take a step back. Even working out a Combat procedure is a big job. The main things I want Combat to do in the game is first provide opportunities for dramatic, memorable moments and, second, complicate the lives of the Characters. That's a decent start. Having had a think it feels like the main question I need to answer next is what sorts of things might Characters be able to do, so my plan next is to keep these principles in mind and try to build some Characters!

* Clans are a big deal in Legends of Alba and probably need their own post later on! For now the important info is that each Clan has a unique Virtue they hold sacred (e.g. Truth, Status, Friendship)

Alba: 24XX

Still on the road towards an original ruleset for Legends of Alba, I took a side path into the world of 24XX. For the unfamiliar, 24XX is the SRD created by Jason Tocci to accompany his 2400 series, a collection of modular, rules-light RPGs. They all follow the same 4-page format, designed to be printed double-sided on a single sheet of A4, with a cover page for art, the middle pages for the rules and character creation, then the back page devoted wholly to random tables for creating adventures. I absolutely LOVE these games! Each one is so packed with ideas and the setting comes through so clearly through the wild cover art, character options and adventure tables. It's impressive and inspiring stuff.

I'd already been thinking that it might be worthwhile trying to write up Legends of Alba using a few different SRDs, sort of like trying on a bunch of different hats to see which hat suits you best. Or maybe even just to get an idea of what you actually want in a hat. It can be a hard question to answer if, like me, you're not really a hat person. So over the last couple of weeks I've done a treatment of Legends of Alba using the 24XX SRD, and you can check it out here!

Fingal's Cave, Island of Staffa, Scotland by Thomas Moran (public domain)

I've not play-tested the game (maybe someday?!) but it's at a point where I'm happy to leave it for a bit. It was a lot of fun to write, and a really useful exercise. I wanted to record and share some of the things I learned from it, so here we go:

SCOPE: When you've only got 4 pages, the scope wants to be narrow and specific. Probably more so than what I went with. This will be my D&D background showing, but Legends of Alba is quite a big setting in terms of scope. There's clans, kingdoms, there's the hags, there's The Legends, The Otherworld, there's deities, there's history, there's the land of Alba itself... any one of these could be a 24XX game on its own probably. I'd like to try again and do a 24XX game based around the clans of Alba, where its all about reputation and community; then maybe another separate one on weird and wonderful Otherworld adventures. I think either of those ideas would fit the format well.

TIME: Part of the appeal of 24XX is how small the games are, but I deluded myself a little into thinking I could rattle one off in no time at all. These games are small, yes, but they are dense. The lower word count doesn't necessarily mean less stuff, it just means each word is doing more. Games take time to make.

SKILLS: Most of 24XX games use a wide set of skills (15-20). A lot of these games are set in strange sci-fi settings so I think the skills really help in nailing down some world-building (what sorts of things can people do in this setting?). But even though these are fun and flavourful, I found myself spinning on them when it came to writing character options. With the wide range there's a temptation to try and cover everything. But you're never going to cover everything, so I think embracing that there's going to be some blurred lines and fuzzy edges, and keeping with a narrow set of abilities (3 or 4) is the way to go for me, or certainly for this game.

FIRE: Following on from my last post about a core resolution mechanic, I've been thinking about what else the game needs to start to come alive a bit more. The sort of fire Lucy H Pearce talks about in her book Burning Woman is an idea that's really stuck with me; a righteous inner fire, the burning of which will lead you to yourself. I thought about bolting on a rule for Fire and, though I decided against it to keep in the minimalist spirit of 24XX, I want to write it down here as I might come back to it. Characters would gain Fire by enacting a virtue or ideal that is sacred to them (e.g. their Clan virtue, or something more personal). Fire could then be burned to get help on a skill check, or as defence.

I think that's it for now. Until next time!

The Rules Skeleton

Reading awesome games like Mork Borg, Shadowdark RPG, and the upcoming Mythic Bastionland from Bastionland Press I find it hard not to come away inspired and full of ideas for games of my own.

I’d love to have a rules system to go with my Scottish-mythology-inspired setting, The Legends of Alba. I’m running it in D&D 5E, which is working just fine, but it's the tool that came to hand, not the right one for the job. There are more rules here than I need. A lot more! On the player-facing side alone, the Character Creation rules in the 5E Player’s Handbook run to 162 pages. Troika! handles Character Creation in a tight 38 pages while Into The Odd covers it in just 7 pages! Including art! Wowsers!

Most of the time this isn't a problem but when it is, I feel it. The weight of all those extra words. It's a bit like the feeling when you get to the supermarket checkout with a very full trolley and you can't remember how or when half the stuff got in there. But instead of the supermarket you’re in a dungeon full of skeletons and you have this big trolley full of things and there’s actually so many things in here that surely one of them will be helpful in this situation but you’re looking and you’re looking and what even is this thing and now the skeletons are stabbing you. Ugh. No good.

TFW suddenly there's like 3 skeletons

Thankfully, it doesn't have to be that way. So I’ve been thinking about what I’d want in my own ruleset, coming from 5E but moving towards a mechanically lighter game. 

But where to begin?

Sly Flourish’s One Sheet 5E, which you can get by subscribing to their Newsletter, describes the core loop of the RPG so concisely: “...the DM describes the situation, the player describes what they want their character to do, and the DM adjudicates the results.”

Short enough you could send it via the Sending spell!  But that's really all there is to it.  And the only bit that cries out to me as needing any rules is the last part. So there's my starting point: How does the GM adjudicate the results of character actions?

I'm going for rules-lite, so I'd like just one mechanic for this. No separate Skill Check, Saving Throw, or Attack Roll, thank you. I want one Check that covers everything, one rule to rule them all.

And I’m coming from 5E, so for this master check, let’s stick with D20 + some modifier vs a target number. “If it ain’t broke” etc. Also a D20 is just a nice big fun dice to roll.  It’s the RPG dice!

For the “some modifier” part, this is typically based on the character making the Check. How good are they at doing what they're trying to do? I want a small, broad number of variables here. Abilities rather than Skills. I'm still thinking about how to frame these but for now I like Talents. Who wouldn't want a Talented character?

As for when to make Checks, I like the simplicity of “Roll to avoid risk” but I also like a low-stakes, “let’s see how this goes” sort of Check from time to time. They can help keep players engaged and add to the feeling of an emergent shared narrative, so I want to leave the door open for that.

So here’s my WIP rules for Talent-based Checks for The Legends of Alba.

***

Talents are a Character’s natural and trained abilities.

• [STR] Strength - Brawn, resilience, endurance.
• [SKL] SkiIl - Dexterity, stealth, reflex.
• [SNS] Senses - Awareness, instinct, insight.
• [SLF] Self - Presence, charm, guile.

A Character’s aptitude for each Talent is represented by their Bonus.

Example Character starting Bonusses:

• Warrior: STR+5, SKL+0, SNS-1, SLF+2
• Hunter: STR+0, SKL+5, SNS+2, SLF-1
• Druid: STR+0, SKL-1, SNS+5, SLF+2
• Bard: STR-1, SKL+2, SNS+0, SLF+5

Checks are necessary when a Character takes an action that challenges one of their Talents and the outcome cannot be taken for granted.

The GM determines the most suitable Talent, then sets the Challenge (C) of the Check, e.g.:

• C10: Not easy
• C15: Difficult
• C20: Very difficult

Establish the consequences of success and failure before the Check is made.

The Player rolls a D20 and adds their Bonus. If the total is equal to or greater than the Challenge, the Check succeeds.

***

So there we go, hardly a full ruleset, but maybe the backbone of the skeleton of one.

Till next time!

Kafka: 100 Years Dead

3rd June this year will mark a century since Franz Kafka’s death in 1924. So he and his writing have been on mind. Not that they are ever far from it - it’s hard to think of an author who’s had a more formative impact on my life than Kafka. I finally visited Prague in 2016 with the specific purpose of seeing where he lived, where he worked and wrote, seeing the castle that inspired “The Castle”, visiting his grave, all that stuff. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

I wrote this during that trip:

The Kafkaesque is so readily confined to the domain of incomprehensible bureaucracy and surreal nightmares that it’s easy to overlook its most beautiful aspect: That it expands the realm of possibility. Kafka’s world is dark but also magical, possessed by wondrous potential.

I think past me did a pretty good job of summarizing just what it is I love about Kafka’s work and having an excuse to revisit it feels like catching up with an old friend.  And of course, the natural thing to do with all this inspiration was to write a one-page RPG called The Riskiest Moment, which you can download here.

Why is it called The Riskiest Moment? I’m glad you asked. The concept of the riskiest moment is one that's never far from my thoughts, that the moment of waking up in the morning is the riskiest moment of all. I’ve always thought I read this in The Trial but had trouble finding it in my copy. According to John T Hamilton writing here, it’s actually a deleted passage from that story (which explains why I couldn't find it). But the essential idea is that it’s pretty miraculous when you wake up in the morning and find the world just as you left it. In Kafka's words:

“For when asleep and dreaming you are, apparently at least, in an essentially different state from that of wakefulness; and therefore […] it requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That was why [...] the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day.”

There is something uniquely destabilizing when this moment bears its teeth, when one does wake to find the world irrevocably changed.  Nowadays it can feel like this happens every day.  The first thing many of us do on waking up is check our phone, which is all too keen to show exactly that.  And perhaps this is the first mistake for we have, in that simple act, already given up so much.  Considering how often Kafka’s work conjures a sense of helplessness and futility, the quote above places a surprising - almost supernatural - degree of agency upon the waking person.  It is up to you to seize hold of the day.  If it is a shortcoming of our will that fails to correctly summon the waking world back from the dreaming one, perhaps we also have the power to conjure it back not simply as it was, but better than it was.  With risk there is always opportunity.  Hidden in that riskiest of moments, there is the invitation to awake in the best version of reality.

A Hundred Thousand Hags

Last time I talked about hags in RPGs and how cool it would be to see a hag that wasn't just another wicked witch. This time I'm putting my money where my mouth is and sharing my take on hags! Generally I wanted my hags to be ancient and strange, to know useful things, and to be having a fantastic time themselves. So this is what I came up with and am using in my games, which are set in a sort of mythical version of Scotland. So far the players have only met one, but she left such a strong impression that the quest to find another hag is one of the main threads driving the characters forward.

The Hags

These venerable wise women are a law unto themselves. They are not beholden to clans, monarchs or even one another. Even Kings listen when they speak. 

Each hag has achieved, through decades of questing, planning and ritual, a sublime and unique self-actualisation. Changed beyond the bounds of mortality, it is the bold, the foolhardy and the desperate who seek them in their distant sanctuaries. For the hags know how all that is will be lost, how all that was will be again, and how all that is to come may yet be changed.

Creating a Hag

Roll 2D10 on the tables below and combine the results to generate a name for this hag.  

D10	Element	Aspect
1	Blind	Bone
2	Bloom	Eye
3	Frost	Fire
4	Moss	Horn
5	Prism	Moon
6	Salt	Shroud
7	Shadow	Skin
8	Thistle	Stone
9	Thunder	Water
10	Wither	Wind

Next roll 3D10 on the tables below to answer the following questions about this hag:

• How has she chosen to express her physical form?
• What does she surround herself with?
• What is her manner towards visitors?

D10	Feature	Surroundings	Manner
1	Animated hair	Animals	Cheery
2	Astounding age	Carvings	Cryptic
3	Distributed form	Crystals	Direct
4	Round body	Insects	Excitable
5	Magnificent wings	Mushrooms	Flustered
6	Many eyes	Rags	Grim
7	Many limbs	Roots	Prickly
8	Menacing size	Skeletons	Relaxed
9	Terrible beauty	Whispers	Tender
10	Unashamed decoration	Wisps	Weary

Example

I roll a 5 and a 3 for the hag's name, conjuring forth The Prism Fire Hag.  Haha! She sounds pretty cool already! I'm immediately getting a mental picture of some crystalline glass or rock formations with multi-coloured fires dancing inside.

For her physical feature I get a 3 on the D10: She has a distributed form.  Now we're talking - this hag lives as a gestalt network of crystals that pulse and glow with magic fire from within when she speaks.

For her surroundings it's a 2, she has lots of carvings around her.  This fits well with her distributed, mineral-based form: I was already thinking she probably dwells in a cave. As to what the carvings are, this seems like the ideal way for her to answer the important questions the players surely have for her: The truth is revealed in a new carving! And the carvings that are here already tell the stories of the people who've sought the hag's guidance before, so this is also a good place to reveal some unexpected info that could be useful to the players when they visit. I'd probably leave this undefined until the last possible moment, so whatever is written here is relevant to the characters' current situation.

(I pause briefly to find a d10 because I realise I've actually been rolling a d12 so far...)

Finally a roll of 8 tells me this hag is relaxed when she has guests.  Amazing: She's super-chill.  You feel right at home in her warm, crystal caves.

So here's our hag:

The Prism Fire Hag

• Her essence is contained within an extensive crystal network that glitters in the depths of her subterranean home.
• The crystals glow and pulse with chromatic inner fire to the calming warmth of her voice.
• She bestows her wisdom in the form of carvings that form on the surrounding cave walls.

I'd be pretty excited for my players to meet this hag!

What's Next?

Ideally the description of a significant NPC should include something they want. What can the characters do for the hag in return for her council? I've left this out here as this is usually the sort of thing I'd base on the state of the game and the characters.  Here are some examples of things the hag might want though:

• An agreement sealed
• A debt collected
• An event witnessed
• A message delivered
• An ingredient found
  
• A prophecy fulfilled

Other than that I would like to expand these tables to be D20-based for even more unique hag variations, but I'm pleased with the results from the D10 tables.  And a hundred thousand hags seems like plenty for the time being!

Hag Quest

When we encounter hags in RPGs, they are invariably villainous. They're cruel, manipulative and selfish creatures. We see so much of this archetype that I think it has become the prevailing conception of what a hag is. It's tempting to shrug this off as a symptom of the gameplay requirement for opposition in RPGs: The child-eating crone in the woods makes for an engaging adversary for heroic player characters after all. 

But this issue isn't particular to RPGs. In films, TV, books and games it's hard to escape the sinister hag. Which leads me to think the real reason for this is societal. A hag is not just an old woman, she is a powerful old woman. As such, she's been historically side-lined and vilified to the extent that her negative aspect is all that survives. Which sucks.

So what can we do about this in our RPGs? One thing for starters is to find a representation of the hag as something other than yet another flavour of "nasty old witch who does curses". 

I'm running some D&D games based in my own setting which is inspired by Scottish folklore. Hags are a big feature and yes, in the old tales, sometimes they are antagonists. But the pre-Christian myths and legends, where these stories have their roots, are seldom so clear-cut. There's another side to the hag that we seldom see. The wise-woman. The supernatural guide. The Goddess.

So this was one of the things I wanted to explore with my game setting. A hag inspired by the writing of Sharon Blackie and Lucy H Pearce, and the art of Red K Elders. I wanted to prominently feature hags who are powerful, ancient, and have a meaningful connection to The Otherworld. Hags whose wisdom and experience is honoured and respected, rather than feared and reviled.

As I was planning the campaign, I was also reading the preview for Chris McDowell's Mythic Bastionland. I love the treatment of Seers in this game: Cryptic oracles dwelling in distant sanctums, who know the past, present and future. Players are mechanically and thematically motivated to seek them out for advice and guidance. The Seers are also weird, each changed by their unique gift of Sight. In the presence of a Seer, players will be aware they are in the presence of something not quite of their world.

All of this has led me to a version of the hag I'm having a lot of fun with in my games, and I look forward to sharing this in a future post!

Vampire Adventure

It was my birthday. Then I got sick. Feeling old and wretched, I was in the perfect mindset to revisit the excellent Thousand Year Old Vampire solo RPG.

It had been a while and I stalled a bit at Character Creation. "Imagine a character from the distant past" is such an open prompt, I ended up rolling some dice to generate a year*, then googling what happened that year.  Apparently in 1498, The English Merchant Adventurers Guild were granted a trade monopoly with the Netherlands.  Merchant Adventurers Guild?  Sign me up!

That sort of discovery is a huge strength of the game. I'd found a corner of history that captured my interest and imagination and I had fun reading around, finding out about these Merchant Adventurers. 

After a couple of hours I had a newly sired vampire, skulking around Amsterdam having just murdered his best friend, with a beloved child sister back home in London whose prospects were suddenly looking very bleak indeed.  She actually became a vampire too, I don't know what became of her after that.

I had a fun afternoon bouncing around the prompts in the book making friends, drinking blood, getting buried for 100 years. Wikipedia was a helpful co-pilot for the gamebook, though I definitely found there was a balance to be struck with how faithfully to stick to history. I settled on a relaxed approach, using it mainly as a jumping off point (similar to the prompts in the book). This is pretty much the same approach I use for running D&D in a published setting like the Forgotten Realms.  Try to relax, and let your own version emerge organically.

I should have adopted another good practice from running D&D actually and had a 'go-to' resource or method for generating character names.  You need a lot of names for TYOV!  Next time I play I'll maybe try it with this random name generator from Behind The Name.

There's also a balance to be struck with how 'close' you position yourself to your vampire. You want to get into their head to be able to make decisions that are true to the character, but the game is at its best (I think) when revelling in the gloom, embracing the darkness as things just get worse for your vampire. So you don't want to be too close.

I did notice though that I'd created a vampire that was mostly just trying to find a quiet, safe space to Get Stuff Done.  The most heart-breaking moment for him was having to flee his research laboratory in Florence. By the time he'd re-established himself in the University of Altdorf, he'd forgotten what drove him to seek knowledge in the first place.

As with the last time I played it, real life started happening before my game finished, and I'm not sure when or if I'll get a chance to find out what happened to my vampire. But I left him in a good spot, somewhere in the 18th Century, schmoozing around the aristocracy offering private night-time tuition.  What could go wrong?

* I used 3d10 for a d1000, then added 1000 to the result to give me a year between 1000 and 2000 AD.