Face-to-Face Play in the Year of the Snake

While the Google Plus front of the Hill Cantons keeps chugging along week after week, I had been lamenting the many-month gap of the real life group—a streak blessedly broken with a soiree at the palatial new Casa del Kutaliko a week and change back.

Dragging out the dusty cardboard boxes crammed in the hundreds with lead and pewter figures, lichen trees, dungeon tiles, silver beads, bits of rock and other household flotsam/jetsam pressed into service reminded me—alongside the more immediate human joy of having real, laughing faces of friend-players around the table—that although I love my virtual play group it never quite closes the gap.

Don't get me wrong, the experience is quite nearly “there”, real friendships have even grown out of the experience and the consistency of that much play (closing in on 70 sessions) has been a longtime goal of this campaign. We even have the long post-game (and work morning-hating) bull session.

But there are the little moments I love in a face-to-face game: the arched eyebrow, the “oh shit” expression flashing on the face, the sudden collective crackup, the dramatic hand flourish--all the little bits of nonverbal communication that only roughly translate when you are looking at a third of a torso on a foot-wide screen. The minis, artery-choking foodstuffs, booze--the stage props of tabletop play--naturally, something I always miss—even the sudden forcible intrusion of a hijacking junior DM.

The long and short for 2013: expect more rolling of funny-shaped dice and the quiet death throes of lead men around my white pine dining room table.  

Truly the Greatest Hobbit Adaption

It's not the Jackson epic money-machine. 

And as much as I love the Rankin-Bass 1977 cartoon (I mean I still see elves to this day as sour-faced greyish plant monsters) it's usurped in the number one position by another, lesser-known foreign-made film:  The Fabulous Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit, a live-action version produced in the Soviet Union (no less) in 1985.

Thanks to an entirely faithful and accurate translated credits the understated brilliance and sublime performances of this adaption—Glimmer-Glam Gandalf (pictured above), pink-shirted dumpy Bilbo,  Pufnstuf dwarves, song-and-dance goblin dance routines by the Leningrad Ballet, Smaug puppets and more—can now be enjoyed by English-speaking audiences.

The Weird is Rising, Thanks World Engine

Robert Parker, player of mountebank-turned-”god-king”Manzafrain the Mirthful in my G+ campaign, trotted out a spot-on analysis about the Hill Cantons back-end mechanics—what he nicely terms the “world engine”--in a post yesterday.

I've been reluctant to talk over much about the “Chaos Index” blog side as it's awfully close to home in revealing how I make the “whirly bits” (the moving parts that lie outside what the PCs do) whirl. But Robert has let the proverbial cat out of the bag (with my blessing) so a few more clarifications are in order.

Reading Robert's account (which is quite good overall) one might get the impression that I run a crazy, over-elaborated, mechanistic system on my off days at the table. Crazy, I will cop too but what's going on is probably less rigid then it seems.

An early prototype of the Chaos Index . Click to enlarge. 

First off the whole “track” concept (a mechanic grabbed from old wargames with political dimensions) is tied to the tension between human civilization/stability/corelands and the Weird/reality-bending in the campaign world (see here for the full tour of that who-ha). It's somewhat akin to the Law vs. Chaos tension we all know and love, but not quite: the Weird is not necessarily inimical to humanity, though it has a strong tendency to act that way. The whole she-bang has a definite geographical expression in the campaign, the stable corelands lose physical and metaphorical ground and the Weird rises and vice versa. 

The Index is just the ball park tracker for that struggle in the particular corner of the world the characters do their business in. A big emphasis on “ball park” because what's not happening—and this was a central feature of the World Pattern schemata from the old Douglas Bachmann article that inspired it—is that when you hit certain points a rigidly defined event happens. In that old Dragon article when the chaos marker (on a track) hits say one point a war breaks out or a plague happens. While that's evil DM fun for a while, it ties you in my opinion way too rigidly to the whole scheme.

Stop fucking with us...

What I do instead is tend to brainstorm likely events (and on occasion roll them on the old AD&D Oriental Adventures events charts) and ask myself “how probable is this to happen and if it does how intense will it be?” How far the track is on the stable or weird side influences the number of dice I throw Matrix game side when answering the question. If the Weird is riding high, for instance, the chance of some kind of large scale supernatural strangeness occurring goes up (the “argument” strength goes up in other words).

Keep in mind the system is also hardwired not to be a High Fantasy business. In a campaign that is still really mostly about murderhoboes bouncing around exploring a strange and dangerous, robbing it of its wealth and blowing it in a debauch, saving the world from Chaos typically only comes as a self-interested after thought. The G+ party just famously saved the besieged city of Kezmarok facing an imminent collapse, but only after pushing the Index up themselves session after session disturbing the slumber of necromantic kings transitioning to Kirbyesque space gods deep in the undercity.

The Index by itself moves spaces back to balance--when in-game events and triggers don't keep propelling it away. Which, of course, the players so often do with their mucking around in places best kept locked and forgotten (cue the maniacal laughter).

But where would be the fun if they didn't?

Mastering Wilderness Description at the Table

“Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you--beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.” 

- Ed Abbey

Mastering natural description is a real bear in tabletop rpgs. It's a damn tricky balancing act that charts a tight little channel between the Scylla of bland terseness (“you're in a forest”) and the Charybdis of eye-glazing purple prose description.

Gaming products rarely hit this sweet spot in their unrushed published forms, pulling it off at the table even more difficult. (Who says GMing isn't a hella demanding performing art?)

I've written before about how wilderness crawls seem to always be a little dullish compared to the real deal, one of the few areas in fantasy gaming that seems so. Months later—with a wilderness survival-escape mini-campaign in the offing--I still find myself ruefully still mulling how to get out from under that rock.

Part of the problem is that there is really little in the way of outside assistance to help a brother out.

How strange it is in a hobby where we are almost buried in the sheer amount and diversity of free and commercial products that we haven't really produced any great, go-to guides on mastering the theatrics of the game table. You can read hundreds of pages of mind-numbing minutiae about things like the culinary predilections of Subspecies 35 Elf, but almost nothing about how to do something that happens thousands of times a week in as many play groups: describe a wilderness area that “pops” without boring your players to tears.

So what's to be done?

The best answer I've come up with is starting to pay attention in my readings to the best passages of naturalists (the new tendency to want to substitute “nature writer” or “natural historian” leaves me cold)--or barring that the best descriptions of writers closer to home in speculative fiction. Read a few pages of the sad ruminations of Aldo Leopold or the caustic and anarchic Ed Abbey and you find pure gold: a vibrant and well-paced descriptive art.

Let me start showing and not telling.

Take the opening of The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, a horror tale made all the more melancholy and terrifying by the attention to the “mundanity” (yes, that is a word Open Office) of natural detail:

“After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes... 

In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire plain is moving and alive... 

Happy to slip beyond the control of the stern banks, the Danube here wanders about at will among the intricate network of channels intersecting the islands everywhere with broad avenues down which the waters pour with a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing at the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and willow-clumps; and forming new islands innumerably which shift daily in size and shape and possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates their very existence.”

Ok paragraph two is a bit excessive and smacking of things too poetical to be of use. But trim out half that and you have a description that evokes a great gaming wilderness scene in less than a minute of breath.

Obviously the answer here is “we should all become incredibly-talented writers”, but I do take away from this and other passages that there are elements worth trying to ape.

Here's a start—and I will add to this as my thinking out loud continues:

Pay Attention to the Whole Package. How does the whole area fit together in your mind's eye? If you think it's “just woods” you are likely to describe the trees and maybe the underbrush. But if it's a “high alpine basin choked with conifers and warmed by geysers” the details started clicking together an evocative unit.

Mood is Important. It's not just a swamp or some willows on an island: it's a twisting, moody, almost-sentient labyrinth of shifting channels with great beauty and the hint of something unknowable.

Short Laundry Lists Help. Trotting out a single line of small details can help color it all immensely with a veneer of how sweeping the diversity of the area is. Take this from Abbey's Down the River (and this is not his best): “We listen for the breathing of the Minotaur but find only cottonwoods glowing green and gold against the red rock, rabbitbrush with its mustard-yellow bloom, mule-ear sunflowers facing the sunlight...and curled horns of a desert bighorn ram, half-buried in the auburn sand.”

Brevity. This is the trickiest part take all of that above and try and distill it down to descriptions less than a minute—closer to half that really if possible. Take all those mental descriptors you are now mulling in your brain to sex up your wilderness area--and then cut that by half. When you are done cut it again, dropping all but the most essential of adjectives. (Note my impatient ellipses in the quotes above.)

This post is growing overlong and my list incomplete, any tricks of the trade you lean upon? What do you do to make your wilderness areas pop? What do your players say?  

Medievalist RPG Campaign Types

Medieval Hack has gone and got itself a new working name, Feudal Anarchy, a title ripped from recent academic debates that have buried the idea of a stable, dullish thing called “feudalism”. (We are lining up with the more gameable strain that emphasizes the chaotic mafia-like view of how things were likely run in the High Middle Ages).

Since those of us working on the game primarily play old school D&D-like campaigns, quite naturally the game has evolved in directions that support campaigns with some of those elements. Emphasis on the “some” since the design frame of the game has some departure points–fewer and more mythical powerful monsters, more limited site-based exploration, a greater emphasis on the PCs role and station in society etc.--from that style of play.

Which naturally leads us to be thinking a lot more intentionally about how we can get the high-player agency, dangerous, non-linear “sandboxy” elements while keeping the game's more focused flavor. And that means trying to wrap our heads around different kinds of campaigns for Feudal Anarchy--and how to support them in the rules.

Some examples:

Local Sandbox. The players are mostly assumed to have their adventures in a small, bounded sandbox say a barony, county, or other region generally walkable in a few days or a single week. The campaign dynamics revolve around a mix of news hooks, site-based exploration, and to a greater degree than some other fantasy games a web of personal relationships. This kind of sandbox thrives on small details and is thus generally smaller and more bounded geographically than most fantasy game campaigns. (To date both Ulfland and Evan's Cocanha playtest campaigns are examples of this kind of campaign).

The random fief/realm generator can spit out counties, earldoms, manors, towns, monasteries, megalith, weathered ruins, etc to help speed or guide the creation process. We have also developed a subsystem to quickly generate the broad brushstrokes of a big cast of NPCs--and their broader relationship web (who hates who, whose plotting against what, etc). We still need a system to generate period-appropriate events en masse.

The Roadshow. This is a sandbox mode where the players are wandering Europe. The game hardwires certain non-linear incentives (primarily in the Magic chapter) to getting to other places: gaining new knowledge of the “magical” powers of different saints at pilgrimage sites, shrines, cathedrals, etc; finding new demons and black magical knowledge; and hunting rare herbs and alchemical components. The characters are mostly footloose for various period-appropriate reasons (perhaps they are on pilgrimage, fleeing serfdom, or on a long circuitous trip to a distant city) with various adventures along the way.

Warband. Somewhat similar to above in that it assumes a high degree of roving (can in fact be combined like all these modes). In this case the PCs lead (or are part of larger NPC force) a free company, bandit band, or other warband. A more combat oriented game with copious usage of the mass battle, siege and other rules. We are developing a special set of rules to handle small battle combats without miniatures (and are more interactive and less abstract than the mass battle rules). Also special rules for resource management and retinues in general.

Marco Polo. More trading (perhaps with some exploration) focused campaign that combines elements of above. The players could have a home town/port that they have local adventures on but play is mostly focused on turning profits on a grand circuit. Simple long distance and commodity trade system and a mishaps table combined with some of the warband and roadshow mechanics will support this.

Off to the Crusade. Traveling to the Crusades in the Levant was a long, arduous journey often filled with much turmoil and chaos—i.e. great gaming material. Both the land route through Central Europe, the Balkans, Byzantine Empire, etc. and the sea route through the hotly contested Mediterranean (with ports of call along the way) present enormous adventuring opportunities.

This type of campaign could essentially be a mix of both the Road Show and Warband with the possibility of a final climatic phase using the Abstract Mass Battle Rules we have currently for the game. Deus Vult.

Of course like all categorizations of things that tend to be messy and evolve on their own (human that is) the different sandboxes here can overlap, vary in specific character or even be phases in a campaign's evolution as players' goals/desires change.

Thoughts, oh peanut gallery? Any suggestions for different categories or supporting mechanics? Things you'd like to see or just plain don't like in there?  

Do Sandbox Campaigns Evolve in Distinct Patterns?

Trying to get my blogging sea legs back again I seem to have stopped suffering from the “not having much sufficiently different to say” problem (a sclerotic affliction that seems to affect a rather large number of gaming blogs that age past three) to the more germane, if somewhat manic publishing quandary of having a spate of things I am so pumped about writing out that this thought train begets that thought train—and the danger of “option paralysis” starts to set in.

Writing out a rather detailed analysis this morning of how the Hill Cantons campaign evolved between its three major play groups (and 3.5 years) I was struck by how similar the overall arcs where between each of them. Though each (sub)campaign was/is very different in feel by dint of the wonderfully deviant and unique stamp each group of players brought to the table, all three groups--the Austin, San Antonio home, and Google Plus (which just celebrated its one year anniversary) parties--have seemed to fall into the the same broad brush strokes patterns when I put my mind to it.

Phase One: Buffet Period. Lots of roaming around the map, bouncing around, feeling out the walls of the sandbox metaphorically. Explorations are generally quick and limited, popping into one place for a session then another. A good deal of time is usually spent figuring out what to do especially in the beginning of a session. Generally a somewhat dangerous period for the PCs as they are low level and feeling out the “danger contours” of the sandbox.

Phase Two: Settling In. The group becomes more focused and goal oriented. Leadership or group decision dynamics start to settle in and become stable (though this can be unsettled when differences start to set in later). A home base “in town” is found and generally stuck to for a while. The group starts to build relationships with NPCs: patrons, useful contacts/sources, hired help, etc. Money and other resources are still pretty limited but growing and starting to allow for more choice.

Phase Three: Long Haul. Usually the group becomes fixated on some kind of long focused exploration arc, thoroughly exploring one site or “quest”. Fatalities start to ramp up again as the more dangerous areas of the big site/quest are reached. The party is slowly, but surely gaining power and resources. The home base may be upgraded and the hireling list starts to take on the appearance of a private army.

Phase Four: Rock to Rock. The long arc plays out and then the group starts bouncing around from sites or hooks again. Usually shorter bouts but with more focus on party-derived goals. The party will either stay in this pattern for a while, jump back into the previous phase (but never with the same intensity of purpose) or move on to the next.

Phase Five: Maturing Goals. Players start really digging into long-term goals of their own devising. Great long schemes come into being with some significant time spent out of session dealing with individual player's machinations. Some divisions may start arising as the players find themselves leaning in one direction or the other about where to put game time into. The characters are solidly mid-level now and PC death is rare. (Hireling/henchmen--who stay in a lower power rang--death though can skyrocket in the face of the ever-mounting dangers.)

I feel like there are more phases beyond this last settling phase. To be honest I just haven't gotten there yet with any of the three groups (and that reminds me that I want so desperately to get the home face-to-face group back playing in the next month), but I seem to remember back in the hoary day that Phase Five mature goals begin taking on long roots and the players become big name players who are increasingly as directive as the GM in where the campaign grows.

Now obviously these patterns could be totally specific to how I run a game and the kinds of players I like to roll with, but it does make me wonder if people who run similar campaigns over long periods of time are seeing patterns. Are they ballpark similar, wholly or partially divergent or what?

What dynamics have you seen develop at your table and do you feel that they have some kind of distinctness to them that you can generalize from?