140 Hirelings

140 Hirelings

http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/sketches-in-bedlam-1823/

Today’s idea that could easily derail me for 2 months if I didn’t have iron will and too much to do anyway:

Today’s idea that could easily derail me for 2 months if I didn’t have iron will and too much to do anyway:

…Ars Magica Tiki.
Why did I never think of this before? Spells as cocktail recipes.
That’s a Jamaican rum and pineapple, 3 shots. You want to try shaking it spontaneously, or are you going to let someone else have a go that might have something useful already written out?

you know what GURPS China is perfect for? Running a Nephilim or time travel campaign that depends on some Chinese buildings or bronze drums or other artifact.

you know what GURPS China is perfect for? Running a Nephilim or time travel campaign that depends on some Chinese buildings or bronze drums or other artifact.
…you know what would be great? A Doctor Who/Nephilim mashup.

Why I’m not writing a Chinese game; or, Let’s Eat Thai!

Some Aphorisms:

1. the best kinds of information in RPGs are the ones that get revealed at the table, as a consequence of things the players did. If you have to impart lots of information before the players can start playing, you’re probably not having the best time with your game.

After information the players generate or earn, the next best thing is information the DM imparts directly, which the players can use to form actions. The bad thing about this information is, it holds the players up in a not-playing state while the DM has to impart it. The good thing is that it’s authoritatively part of the game because it comes from the DM. Even if it’s false information – lies told by NPCs etc, its falseness is a deliberate part of the game.

The worst kinds of information for a game are assumptions the players carry around in their heads, which may or may not be part of the game under way at all. When this information doesn’t match the game (or the ideas in the DM’s head) you get the unintended kinds of misunderstandings – bad assumptions, dissatisfied expectations.

The more a game’s setting (or any other element) encourages common understanding of the moving parts of the game (the stuff on which or through which the players can act), the more it helps the game to happen. The more it imports divergent understandings/assumptions/expectations, the more it gets in the way of a fun game.

2. in order to be worth bothering with, a setting should have some effect on the players’ actions – what actions are available/plausible and what they mean.

Star Trek is pretty much The Odyssey in Space. So why is it not _just_ The Odyssey? I’d say principally because the crew of the Enterprise are not Ancient Greek adventurers. They’re not acquisitive or warlike, they are there simply to understand what’s around them. And for the audience to buy that _and buy into the exploration themselves_ alongside the crew, the whole thing has to be in space, in the future.

– – – – – – – – – – – – –
So Patrick Stuart asked why there is no OSR game that tackles China, and I took that personally, like Richard, why have you still not written a China supplement especially when you write but don’t publish stuff about fantasy Turkestan and Southeast Asia why ignore the elephant in the East?
And I have 4 real problems with writing a China supplement:

1. No table full of players really agrees on what they want out of China. Everyone has their own assumptions and expectations, so half the work would be brush clearing.

Consider the sorts of settings that get successful games/supplements made around them:
A. entirely made up, or crudely hacked off Tolkien’s oeuvre. There’s heavy lifting here, but every word the author writes is gospel. It’s all the second sort of information, above.
B. Ancient Egypt – true, that’s a long history but for most audiences it’s just fine if it’s treated as a single moment, half funny hats and gods, half Arabian Nights. You can totally set just one adventure here and everyone will think you’ve done it justice.
C. Mythic Europe again – usually really just England and even more usually directly sourced from Robin of Sherwood and/or Excalibur. Like Ancient Egypt, it’s treated as a single moment, free of historical development, and everyone already knows what it smells like so you can get on with your plot.

The point is, each of these settings is already pretty familiar to players. Each can be presented in a few scenes, sufficiently to give the players an idea of what sorts of characters to make up, and each can be selectively ignored or highlighted at the DM’s discretion in order to support the demands of the current adventure. None of them imports a lot of player assumptions.

But China is big enough and diverse enough – and “our” (Westerners with a yen for pop or pulp fiction) understandings of it are divergent enough to be trouble. Not trouble you can’t fix at the table, but if you’re writing a supplement that “covers China” then you have the job of encompassing at least some of that diversity.

2. And with 4000+ years of history and a quarter of the world’s population, in a lot of ways that’s not very different from writing a supplement to cover Earth.

GURPS China is a superb illustration of how hard it is to “cover China” – it offers an excellent potted history that points toward dozens of adventures, and it has a few monsters and notes on culture and it even tries to pretend that there’s a Chinese mood or moment that persists through all that history but… it doesn’t give you the tools to write or run Chinese adventures as anything other than GURPS with droopy sleeves. It’s a wonderful sourcebook, but it totally fails as an adventure-writing kit.

3. Unlike the Ancient Egypt or Star Trek, it doesn’t really have a genre of action attached to it.

What?
OK. Knights ‘n’ Dragons is a genre of action. If you say you’re going to play Knights ‘n’ Dragons everyone knows not only that they’re going to play a knight and meet a dragon, they also know pretty much how to play through that scene. There’s an established language of actions they might take, and if they choose not to take those actions then they’re already subverting the genre in a way everyone gets. (KnD is NOT Europe, BTW, although culturally European audiences will tend to set it there. KnD is much more limited and focused).
Pirates is a genre of action, and you can set it in Ancient Greece or Southeast Asia or Space and everyone will still know how to proceed. Vikings is usually a subgenre of Pirates in which there might be history and cultural diversity but they don’t matter because FIRE AND THE SWORD.

Pseudo-medieval Europe’s genres of action are different from Ancient Rome or Modern Europe’s. Arabia(n nights) really has one and only one genre of action as far as Western audiences are concerned.
But China?

an RPG setting needs to offer a situation:
– a place, tools, moving parts, usable details
– a menu of meaningful or appropriate actions – a language of interactions with the setting. Bakhtin called these “Chronotopes.” The dungeon, wilderness, city adventure, court: each has its own idiom of actions and challenges associated with it.

Gary called his situations scenarios – a term borrowed from theater to mean plot summary, scene list.
But really I’d prefer chronotope or environment, meaning the stage setting; the background that suggests/supports the actions that will play out on top of it.

the most readily usable chronotopes or environments for games are ones that already have few stories laced through them – the Grimm woods, the Greek mountains, Arabian caves and palaces. The stories provide the language of action, the settings inflect that action in particular directions.

So what does China give us? What do you do there?
– dark doings in the Imperial Palace
– magistrates and bandits
– explore beyond the boundaries
…but in what way are these things particularly Chinese? How does it change each of these elements when they are placed in China and not anywhere else? Arguably the wandering martial artist or reclusive scholar who just wants to write poetry but must solve all the world’s problems is a Chinese archetype [ETA:] and +Dennis Laffey‘s Flying Swordsmen does a superb job of answering “what do I do?” for generic wandering martial artists, but it works partly because he deracinates them from any Chinese context, making them portable to other settings. That is, they remain excellent characters with their own genres of action or even solutions to bring to adventuring problems, but they’re really not an adventure – they’re not like the knight who requires his dragon and from whom one can infer a whole world of values.

Disney’s Mulan is a pretty good story about gender chauvinism, and it’s based on an actual Chinese story so it makes great sense to set it in China, right? But what difference does Chineseness make to Disney’s Mulan? I’d say it pretty much just excuses the audience from thinking too much about the feminism by making it all somebody else’s problem – some other person with weird, inscrutable hang-ups about honor and stuff. If you were running a Mulan-like game, what would make it imperative that it be set in China?

4. It’s hard to find a basic core or essence that makes China distinct from other settings. This is partly because it’s a real place with real complexity, and partly because of the ways Chinese culture has been presented to Western readers/viewers.

First, it’s not that easy to say where China ends. Chinese culture is everywhere in Southeast Asia and Japan, like ethnic Chinese migrants are everywhere. And migrants make their own cultures.
Is Big Trouble in Little China distinctively Chinese? Well then, so is about half of Thai, Burmese, Indonesian and Vietnamese culture. If you’re writing a China supplement, where do you draw the line?
If we’re being inclusive, on the other hand, should we insist that Japan is distinctively not Chinese? Why?

…..well, the answer is nationalism. Burma, Thailand, Japan, Indonesia et al have spent a great deal of effort to distinguish themselves from China, through national education programs, careful management of their images abroad, and the promotion of sites inside the country that stand as symbols of their distinctive national essences. In short, all those other places claim Chinese culture AND their own distinctive culture as national features.

In the 1910s and ’20s, surrounded by high-tide colonialism, Thai King Rama VI (who was himself ethnically Chinese) pushed visible symbols of the Siamese nation hard and specifically set out to distinguish Siam from China. He also approved of Hitler and wrote a little screed about the pernicious nature of the Chinese, whom he called “the Jews of the Orient.”

Among other things, he determined to find a distinctively Thai national cuisine – and he landed on a certain set of dishes drawn from Bangkok street vendors to stand for Thai food. Lemongrass, lime leaves, coconut, and chili were rarely used in combination in any of the Chinese regional cuisines, so he promoted these as specifically Thai ingredients, alongside the native ginger varietal Krachai. He sponsored cookbooks to spread the new national food and had it served at world fairs. When he was deposed in the coup of 1933 it was by an even more nationalistic government, which in 1938 held a competition to choose the new national dish – Pad Thai won (although it’s a lot more Chinese-looking than all those curries that require Rama VI’s fork-and-spoon).

Subsequent governments have continued the effort to present a particular kind of Thailand, both at home and abroad. Thai restaurants around the world can apply for government help in decorating their dining rooms and training their cooks. Result: a highly recognisable, homogenous set of flavours that serve as a base for local experimentation. You know when you’re in a Thai restaurant. You know it’ll have certain dishes (definitely Pad Thai), and you can usually count on a certain level of quality.

Chinese menus, on the other hand, tend to be much more regionalized. The celebrated (and completely made up) General Tso hardly ever shows up in Europe. If you order Lo Mein or Lemon Chicken in an unfamiliar Chinese restaurant you never quite know what will arrive. Different tables, different Chinas. This is partly because there hasn’t been a big international push on nationalizing Chinese cuisine, and partly because during that period when everyone else was getting the fever of nationalism, China had a little revolution and Greap Leap Forward to deal with. Presenting Chinese distinction was regarded as less important than rice quotas.

Japan, BTW, was easily the most “modernized,” industrialized, “Westernized” and well-connected country in Asia in 1890. The Japanese Emperor wrote that his subjects were white (unlike the “yellow” Chinese and Koreans) and even got in on the act of colonizing China in 1931, right alongside the European powers. And yet in the 1980s the popular view of Japan in the West was still of a nation that had been “closed in on itself” for hundreds of years and was responding to American modernity like a drug. News voiceovers would intone: “under this modern veneer lurks a deeply traditional culture,” while pictures of Shinto priests and the Castle of the Swans floated by. It was a national (and colonial) story, dominated by Samurai and Ninja and Sushi, useful to the current moment of postwar economic miracle – that curious moment when America was a little afraid of miniature Japan. Strip away those nationalist tropes and you’re left with a place that looks a lot like it could be China’s affluent corner.

And these nationalist stories and flavours (aside from their effects in real life) are useful for a harassed DM trying to create something recognizable at the table. Precisely because they’re brightly coloured and incomplete. They provide enough of a hook to get play going, and then they leave the stage clear for the story you want to tell, rather than leaving a load of divergent ideas lying around in corners to trip the players up.

So if I were going to write a Chinese game, what would I do?

1. I wouldn’t bite off the whole thing. I’d choose a specific moment with its own concerns and make the game just about that. Maybe I’d make a few of those in a series.
2. I’d look for situations where there is a clear answer to the question what do you do here?

Candidates:
– The Mongols. Limited to Kublai Qan’s reign and maybe his predecessor and successor, the Mongols are just what I’d be looking for: brightly coloured, with their own modes of action and challenges, and without a ton of incidental detail in the public consciousness to get in the way.
– The Warring States and its aftermath. This is Chinese Nationalism 101; the formation of the nation and its discontents. You can play soldiers drafted into the national army or people from Not-China. Either way you have to confront the newly emerging state as a thing separate from yourself and find your place inside or outside it.
– the late Ming – internecine squabbling fit for an Italian court, rising barbarians all over, a distant emperor… like Game of Thrones on the brink of disaster. Who can unite the disparate Chinese, now that the national story is in such tatters? Also/alternatively Restore the Ming, where you sail with the pirate and revolutionary Coxinga and navigate Manchu, European and Mughal concerns and try to build your new empire on smuggling.

In each of these cases the home culture of the PCs is compressed into a few repeatable tropes. The action of the game involves confronting some kind of Chinese cultural other, so it can be built on learning about it, rather than one based on performing it on day one.

Maybe your game group is totally ready to take on the role of Chinese explorers, confronting their own Others? In that case there’s a great alternative, Journey to the West. I actually think it’s not such a great candidate for Western newcomers to Chinese culture because you play Chinese people confronting the zone of adventures – outside the safety of the Empire. Fundamentally it’s a lot like The Odyssey – a picaresque series of self-contained monster encounters. But where we Westerners can pick up the Odyssey and explore it as Greeks or Vikings or Knights, we find it a lot harder to explore it as Chinese wandering bandits who are recognizably Chinese. The only current game I know of that covers this one is James Desborough’s Irrepressible, which is self-consciously campy and post-colonial and kind of extremely interesting in its own right, being based on a 1980s English dub of a Japanese TV retelling of an English translation of Wu Cheng’en‘s original stories. With voiced by Andrew Sachs, a.k.a. Manuel from Fawlty Towers. I love it in its own way, but it’s not a game I would have designed, and it’s definitely not a good introduction to China.

Just got my pdf of Tom McGrenery’s Malandros and it looks like everything I hoped it would be. I’ve never played Drama System before (and I might yet run this in something more mechanically Old School) but I’m willing to learn and the setting notes hit most of my buttons, although that might be because I’m at least a little familiar with Rio and its types.

Just got my pdf of Tom McGrenery’s  Malandros and it looks like everything I hoped it would be. I’ve never played Drama System before (and I might yet run this in something more mechanically Old School) but I’m willing to learn and the setting notes hit most of my buttons, although that might be because I’m at least a little familiar with Rio and its types.

I particularly like the fact that you start with no wealth, no matter who you are. Immediate Top Cat/Chaplin motivation, but the rest of the setting offers more restraint from immediate slapstick than, say, GURPS Goblins, with which I might otherwise compare it.

Also, this intrigues me as a simple method of dealing with Godfather/gift economies in general:
give in to others’ demands for a couple of scenes and you’ve already got enough drama tokens to force someone to do something they don’t want to do. This is intentional. It reflects the give and take of relationships between people who are emotionally connected, and you can use that. This approach to play works well if you’re playing a character who’s a bit of a hustler, a social manipulator or a politician.

Nucky Thompson (not Johnson) and John Snow paid too much attention to their major token sponsors, and got shanked by problems they ignored. Watching Narcos right now (which is excellent, BTW) I’ve a feeling Pablo Escobar is going to just run his pot of tokens dry.

I’m really looking forward to having the time to read and play this.

http://pelgranepress.com/index.php/malandros-a-new-dramasystem-game/

Inside the dungeon-cephalopod

Inside the dungeon-cephalopod
#invertebratemapping

Regrettable Spells

I wrote these ages ago but never got around to publishing them. Then somebody asked me where Summon Bigger Fish was and I had to go looking. So here it is.
Summon Bigger Fish has become something of a worn-out meme. But it wasn’t when David Morgan-Mar published his comic and it was still at least a bit fresher when I wrote this, so there.

Summon Bigger Fish
can actually be used to summon any sea creature, and all it costs is HP. The sea creature is a perfectly normal specimen of its species except for the size, which is determined by the number of HP expended.
This spell has a memory of its previous uses. Each time it is cast, the fish summoned must be capable of eating the previously summoned fish whole,* otherwise the spell fails, in which case all HP are refunded. Singers, dancers and synchronized swimmers can be used to augment the HP pool available: if sufficient HP are present to cast the spell at its current magnitude then the spell will be cast and HP taken, even if this means the deaths of most or all of the creatures involved in the casting ritual.
Although any sea creature may be specified at any size, the following is a rough guide/mnemonic:
1 HP gets you a herring or similar tasty snack.
2 HP gets you a pike,
4 HP summons a tarpon.
8 HP gets a man-sized fish, such as a mako shark.
16 HP gets a tiger shark, (or 20 HP a great white),
32 HP attracts a megalodon.
64 HP gets you Livyatan Melvillei, which is pretty much a blue whale with teeth and attitude.
…or similar.
Aerowhales are included in the list of “fish” purely so that Timor Tom and his ilk can be included at 1024 HP (not this Timor Tom who’s probably not worth more than 70 or 80 HP).
For 16,384 HP you can definitively destroy Honshu by waking up the carp it’s built on top of.

The fish is not remotely controllable (although mythical fish such as the Salmon of Knowledge or Timor Tom may respond to reasoned arguments) and always arrives very hungry.

A specific fish may be summoned (eg SoK or Timor Tom) for double the standard cost – that doubling is not counted toward the fish’s size cost for escalation purposes, however. Of course, if you’re summoning something the size of Tom of Jormungandr then there probably will only be the one example around to hear your call. Probably.

* note: just because I’ve gone with powers of 2 in the examples doesn’t mean you have to double every time. Evil tooth-factories like the Gulper Eel or Fangtooth might be able to eat things only a little bit smaller than themselves. But consider carefully how much you really want to summon a giant Fangtooth.

**Attract Fish and its potential for disaster has been covered adequately by Scott Dorward and his salty clan. It occurs to me belatedly, however, that fish attractant should probably be a salve or ointment that you spread on yourself before you get in the water.

Call Sandgorgon
The caster sends out a psychic call to the sandgorgons of the deep Taklamakan. One will respond and come to devour the caster and anyone else in its way. The principal reason for casting this spell is to take an awful lot of your enemies with you: the sandgorgon wants to eat the caster alive and will therefore eliminate all other threats to the caster in order to do this. If the caster is killed before the sandgorgon arrives, then the sandgorgon will not know this until it gets to the caster’s current position, at which point it will be deeply disappointed and enraged. It is therefore absolutely imperative, if you kill the caster of this spell before their nemesis arrives, to get rid of the body ASAP and hope they have no immortal spirit with which to haunt you.

Since nobody who has sees a sandgorgon has survived, no reliable physical description is available. It is, however, known that sandgorgons have some kind of blunt fists with which they can beat down castle gates, bony heads with which they can batter castle walls, and jagged bony jaws with which they leave a red trail of destruction. Sandgorgon response time depends on the distance between the caster and the Taklamakan: if the caster is within 100 miles of the desert then the sandgorgon will come in 20 minutes or less. 1000 miles can take up to 4 hours. If the caster is in another universe/on another plane the sandgorgon could take up to 5 days to arrive.
Cost: 8 HP and one gold or platinum piece (consumed in casting).
(with apologies to Stephen R. Donaldson).

an elderly idea just couldn’t die quietly. So it woke up my similarly elderly blog.

an elderly idea just couldn’t die quietly. So it woke up my similarly elderly blog.

Regrettable Spells

We Need to Stop Saying That There Are 33,000 Protestant Denominations

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/scottericalt/we-need-to-stop-saying-that-there-are-33000-protestant-denominations

Back in 2000 Chris Crawford published a little essay on two motives for play that I thought was kind of interesting at the time but didn’t really know what to do with. Following more famous thinkers he called the motives agon and paideia, and characterized them more or less as struggle and joyful improvisation respectively. Tavis Allison mentioned a Caillois essay where he calls the struggle part “a taste for gratuitous difficulty”(1) and it strikes me that most games set this part forward front and centre, and tend to avoid talking about paideia by instead using the don’t ask me to explain it term “fun.” Tavis’s post is a really good read on the value of agon (or “ludus”) in allowing paideia to emerge.

Back in 2000 Chris Crawford published a little essay on two motives for play that I thought was kind of interesting at the time but didn’t really know what to do with. Following more famous thinkers he called the motives agon and paideia, and characterized them more or less as struggle and joyful improvisation respectively. Tavis Allison mentioned a Caillois essay where he calls the struggle part “a taste for gratuitous difficulty”(1) and it strikes me that most games set this part forward front and centre, and tend to avoid talking about paideia by instead using the don’t ask me to explain it term “fun.” Tavis’s post is a really good read on the value of agon (or “ludus”) in allowing paideia to emerge.

At the time I was still making interactive computer stuff, and I was having a hard time finding anything that tried to lead with paideia, which to me is still best explained as “what small children are doing when they’re ‘just playing’ – exploring possibilities, amusing themselves with their own creations or manipulations.”

Some years later, I can see that paideia-forward video games have emerged – notably Rock Band and Just Dance. Playing and, even more, watching my son’s friends play Rock Band, it strikes me that the quickplay mode is close to pure paideia… and shifting gears to the agonistic Tour mode creates conflict in the player group. It’s a different mood, a different goal. It’s suddenly not just for fun any more, and for some players it’s not fun at all (perhaps unless/until they master the tools, perhaps inherently with the introduction of failure – karaoke, after all, has its roots in expression freed of failure-anxiety by the application of alcohol).

In my own experience of playing DnD, I find the roleplaying to be almost all paideia, with the occasional dip into agonistic dungeoneering. Sometimes I even resent the agon a little bit. But there’s a lot of disagreement about what the fun of DnD  is (perhaps because there’s a lot of space inside DnD for individuals to find their own joy). I don’t much want to read people’s pure paideia play reports.

It seems like Tomb of Horrors is supposed to be strongly agonistic but for me it would have to deliver paideia along the way – maybe you even have to have a certain affinity for schadenfreude in order to find the paideia in that situation. Maybe a DM who presents it as strongly agonistic(2) is playing that side up and losing the opportunities for paideia? Missing out a bit on the journey in favour of the destination. Or something. I haven’t really worked it out yet, but I feel like there’s something useful here.

(1) https://muleabides.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/the-taste-for-gratuitous-difficulty/
(2) note: laughing in your players’ faces about their characters’ deaths is not necessarily part of being strongly agonistic – it seems like it’s more about performing dominance, which I think is another thing worth distinguishing from the other factors here.