Frustrated by their inability to breathe fire on their own, the chimney imps decided to pool their money, buy the biggest lens they could & go all magnifying glass on the village houses.

Frustrated by their inability to breathe fire on their own, the chimney imps decided to pool their money, buy the biggest lens they could & go all magnifying glass on the village houses.

Illo by Boris Diodorov

S. John Ross put up a poll about whether you just want to play your character without needing to learn the rules.

S. John Ross put up a poll about whether you just want to play your character without needing to learn the rules.
So usually I like this to be the case – in fact I Iearn the basics of the system just so I don’t drag, but it’s the main reason I play more fighters than MUs – I want to get to the adventure.

But as a DM – sometimes I want my players to make tactical decisions that depend on knowing the system. CCH is like that – wargamey enough that I’d like the players to get a sense of what they can and can’t get away with.

Incredible Hulk reboot: Banner is actually a Wendigo.

Boardgame designed by my daughter. James Raggi I think she might be ready for LotFP!

Boardgame designed by my daughter. James Raggi I think she might be ready for LotFP!
Players spin in place – the number of spins before they fall over is the number of spaces they advance.

…the game is based on the novel Bloody Mary about the life of Mary Tudor who, now I think about it, is a pretty good Flame Princess.

Game name: The Spiral of Death. Note especially the very first step after “start.”

Counter-colonial Heistcrawl: previous high scores

One of the reasons I’ve been blogging so little here of late is that it inevitably takes me a whole day to write a post. I’m going to try to keep this one short because it’s a simple point, relevant to the campaign I’ve just started running (after 15 years gestation – that might be why I’m reluctant to start campaigns, too).

Have you seen Black Sails? It’s trashy but better than I expected (see previous post). In fact on the trash violence to interesting plot axis, I think I prefer it to Game of Thrones.

It so happens I’m discovering it just as my son is re-playing Assassin’s Creed 4 (the pirate one – Black Flag). Both treat the same loosely-historical events in fairly similar ways – the struggle between the pirate anarchs (sometimes dignified as a republic) of Nassau and the nascent British Empire, the latter personified by Woodes Rogers with his pardons and pirates-turned-king’s men. The historical events take place during the period 1715-1720. The TV and video game versions seem to compress it all into a few months.*

So. 1715 is a terrible time to be starting a pirate republic:

1. there’s more peace between the big pirate empires – Britain, France and Spain – than in the previous hundred years or more. As a group they are disinclined to welcome a competitor (cf. WW1, which was really about not wanting to set a place at the Great Power table for upstart Germany).
2. although there are plenty of malcontents in the American Colonies, the local power-holder landowners still look to the homeland for preferment – if you want to start up an American Revolutionary Republic in 1715 you first have to engineer a real peasant uprising and kill all the aristos and then still have resources and trade networks to fight off the British counter-attack. In case you’re thinking the actual American Revolution offers a better model, note that it’s a tax revolt by an already-established gentry class – people who already have a working political system for controlling the masses, which they can adapt to new ends. Every fort they can take by ideology rather than force is part of a political machine the English built for them.
3. the British are already thoroughly networked across the Caribbean and if nobody stops them they will certainly colonize it all. They have a lot of ships, a lot of places to repair them, and a lot of resources to recruit crews. It seems anarchic and it’s definitely full of holes a ship or captain can hide in, but it’s the anarchy of capitalism – there are in fact even venture capitalists in London and Boston trying to exploit the temporarily-anarchic situation by sponsoring “privateer” agents abroad, which is as sure a sign as you’re likely to find anywhere that the pirate bubble is about to burst.

Both Black Sails and Black Flag do a good job of peeling apart the micropolitics of trust that are the basic problem for any gang of murderhobos that wants to turn into a working polity – not everybody understands the same things at the same time. Many people just want to be murderhobos. Nobody wants to invest their treasure in a communal chest. Independent ship captains already command pirate republics (wooden ones) – why should they want to be represented by some wig-wearing tax-collector on land?

But neither one really addresses the bigger picture of why a republic in Nassau is doomed to failure, while one that encompasses the eastern seaboard of North America just might work. Fair enough, dramatically – the pirate genre is really all about Great Man history, not long-reaching economic forces – but that bigger picture is important to the kind of exercise I would like CCH to be. In CCH I want the players to seriously consider first what they have to do to survive the day, and later what they have to do to make a safe space for themselves and people like them. And they can learn (anachronistically) from the mistakes of Blackbeard, Vane, Anne Bonny and all…

1. the Caribbean pirates never try to make allies, except among equals. They probably fear to lose their independence (fair) but by victimizing everyone indiscriminately, they make themselves the common enemy of all. They do not learn to play politics. England (later Britain) tries several times to recruit them when its own prospects are uncertain. The pirates keep refusing because they rightly guess that Britain will never offer a really good deal – their problem is they lack the presence of mind/discipline to lie to her convincingly (with some exceptions).
2. they’re trying to establish themselves in the very heart of the imperial project. Caribbean sugar is the starter fuel for colonizing the Americas. That’s why there’s so much merchant shipping to prey on, but it’s also the resource that the imperialists will fight hardest to keep. Basically the Navy will come here sooner or later, which is not true of Madagascar or Mauritius or even the coast of India if you know who to attack (smaller native capitalists, Mappilas, the Portuguese) and who not to attack (the British or French) there.
3. they declare a tiny castle outpost in defiance of nation states. There’s really no way they can get big enough to become a real threat because they’re not ambitious enough and they’re too public, too early. Compare and contrast with Germany, which definitely won its pirate phase – Prussia was a dead state in 1814. It was reconstructed after Napoleon to act as a buffer between Russia and Europe. It reformed its armies (took care of getting the best equipment), seized a bunch of German-speaking pocket states that the big players didn’t care about (grew in the dark) and focused hard on industrializing (exploited a technological weak point) until it was big enough to be a threat… and then it moved (in restrained ways as long as Bismarck lived) on the big, old players.
4. ETA: my son makes an excellent point: Nassau is also never self-sufficient. Black Sails suggests it could be if it made an alliance with the planters of the island but it doesn’t, so there you are.

I’m not saying that CCH must follow my vision of a teleological course, I’m not saying it’s the game where you emulate Prussia or anything like that, I’m just saying the pirates of Nassau show some classic traps.

1610 (the opening date for CCH) is a much kinder moment to start than 1715, if you did want to build a strong, working polity in Southeast Asia. The Spanish and Portuguese have been annoying the locals for a century and all they’ve got to show for it is a trading post empire of isolated fort-factories sitting on a set of resource-flow routes – one for cinnamon, one for pepper, one for dye-woods…. not the kind of thoroughly interlinked plantation colony Britain will develop in the Americas a hundred years later. The legal control environment is not so much a Swiss cheese as a few strands of spiderweb stretched across a dark and unknown jungle. Nobody even knows all the kingdoms out there, and inside those kingdoms, nobody has hegemonic control of anything – the general political mode is to have villages pay tribute to warlords when they can be forced to, not nation states with defended borders. Stone forts are rare (and are generally either European colonial, Chinese, Japanese or Mughal).

Perhaps most critically, the fundamental basis of power is not land or even money but manpower. That’s what local rulers fight over, and what Chinese commercial networks export, in return for unique island products. It’s what the European colonists really need (even if it’s not what they most desire). There is rich loot to be grabbed in the form of spices, Spanish silver, Indian gold, sea cucumbers (the Chinese love ’em), perfumes, dyes, cloth etc. so there’s ample opportunity for piracy, trade and smuggling, but the key to long-term success – the key to independent survival – is nakedly and unquestionably uniting people.

* There’s basically one literary source for all this “history” and it’s superbly written, so it’s ideal genre fiction writing fodder and it sparked a pirate genre that’s still playing out today. Seriously, Captain Charles Johnson was the Tolkien of 1725 (or maybe he was Daniel Defoe all along – the case is not definitively settled) – if you want to be an instant expert on the “golden age,” go read him (the paperbacks are cheap, the etexts only cost you time).

** Black Sails has some gorgeous imagery, though. The carved ivory title sequence is a delightful synthesis of familiar elements into a typically 18th century harmonious, murderous whole.

A short rumination on the “pirate republic” of Nassau and why PCs shouldn’t emulate it. Cross-posting with Counter-colonial Heistcrawl, of course.

A short rumination on the “pirate republic” of Nassau and why PCs shouldn’t emulate it. Cross-posting with Counter-colonial Heistcrawl, of course.
…the main reason I’m not blogging is I’m too busy writing…

Counter-colonial Heistcrawl: previous high scores

Metal Dragons

Metal Dragons
Inspired by a Scrap Princess post about how forgettable the metallic dragons are.
There’s now one dragon for each of the alchemical metals, with a personality based on the associated planet.

I have never storygamed.

I have never storygamed.

Am I right in thinking it’s a sort of… collaborative improv for budding novelists? Like, everyone’s self-consciously into the fiction and the goal is to present your fiction that you’ve prepared and baked into your character and then have interesting interpersonal drama/collision of all the players’ fictions? And so all the plot tokens and McGuffins and opening situation and so on are just dressing to enable that action – is that right? Kind of like scriptwriter school in a group?

I think if that’s what it is, I could be into it if it had as little as possible to do with the usual genre tropes. Like I could enjoy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown as this sort of exercise, but not at all The Walking Dead or Vampires and Frankensteins or whatever.

I like familiar genre trappings in games where the point is to succeed in the world because they help you get quickly to the plot, which is where the action is. Then it’s great to be Robin Hood because that helps you fit the objectives. But I have no desire to play Robin Hood as an emotional entity/landscape.

OTOH as a DM I love playing the Sheriff of Nottingham because it’s got the potential for broad comedy and gives the players a well-established target to bounce their schemes off.

Weird? Fair? Misguided? Please tell me how I’m wrong.

We will be playing Counter-colonial Heistcrawl tomorrow 9:30pm EDT!!! I will try to make an Event but don’t hold your breath. If you want in, let me know and I’ll add you to the community. If you’re already in the community, please reply to that post there. If you already said you want to play on the previous post(s)… well it can’t hurt to say again here but I probably have you covered. Tell me twice and I definitely won’t forget (hopefully).

We will be playing Counter-colonial Heistcrawl tomorrow 9:30pm EDT!!! I will try to make an Event but don’t hold your breath. If you want in, let me know and I’ll add you to the community. If you’re already in the community, please reply to that post there. If you already said you want to play on the previous post(s)… well it can’t hurt to say again here but I probably have you covered. Tell me twice and I definitely won’t forget (hopefully).

FINALLY THE CHARGEN
If you already made up a character using the linked post, you can play them if you want. The system has changed a bit to more-or-less LotFP (or more-or-less Mageblade!) (emphasis on less – rules lite is my thing) but the chargen doesn’t care much.
I recommend rolling up 2 characters right now. They know each other.
Here is chargen in its entirety (mostly pasted from the post):

ATTRIBUTES: Str, Dex, Int, Wis, Con, Cha. 3D6 in order, punk.
Wisdom is common sense and perception but also ability to notice spirits. Charisma doubles as magic power & luck.
CLASS: choose from fighter, specialist (ie skills-person), or spirit-wrangler. Fighters can possibly learn skillimagical effects during the game a little bit like Mageblades, if anyone knows what that is.
Specialists get 2 skills/tropes – one at 4, one at 2 (roll under on a D6 with mods to perform skill under duress). They should be of the breadth of sailing, gunnery, animal handling, trading, persuasion, herbalism, navigation, smugglers’ tricks, spirit talk – not as narrow as “lockpick” nor as broad as “thief.”
Spirit Wranglers are a bit like spirit mediums, a bit like pokemon-trainers. All magic happens because of spirits. Spirits can sometimes be forced, more often must be negotiated with. I warn you now this part of the game is totally untested you will be helping to define the rules as we go. Like a true sorcerer.

Also choose a background. This is what people know you as and you can plead based on it saying “but I should be able to do this because I’m a…” and it gives you 1 skill or a default roll off your attributes when successfully invoked. Example professions include: pirate, smuggler, concubine, procurer, medium, monk, bodyguard/mafia hood, magistrate, spirit medium, cunning man, builder, fisherman, whaler, scout, merchant, legal opiner, scholar, “viking” slaver, diver, navigator.

Note: we will not be using DnD type levels. Advancement is by increasing skills, crew and most of all, loot. This is a domain game from turn 1 – your group holds and uses property in common. If you conquer a kingdom, you’re kings.

Default status
You can have a secret, long-lost background as a ship captain/priest/village judge/longhouse master/princess that’s fine, write your story. But (spoilers) you start in chains, with none of your stuff on you – Equipment (below) is somewhere on the island, your Special Possession is somewhere out there.

Equipment – roll once on Table A, once on Table B. You had these only yesterday and you know they’re nearby…

Table A

1. crowbar
2. dagger
3. shield
4. food, drink and backpack
5. lamp and flasks of oil (3)
6. melee weapon
7. armour: leather or improvised equivalent
8. bow or crossbow with 10 arrows/bolts
9. small raft (size 1)
10. mirror
11. rope (50′)
12. grappling hook/anchor
13. pouch with 20 silver dirhams
14. musical instrument
15. hammer, chisel, pick + 8 iron spikes
16. writing box and seal
17. arquebus + 10 shots
18. small barrel of gunpowder.
19. Barrel of arrack
20. 3 caskets grapeshot, with powder

Table B

1. lucky medallion (re-roll 1 failed saving throw)
2. potion of healing
3. lockable iron-bound chest
4. guard animal (dog, lynx, monkey or similar)
5. riding or pack animal (camel, pony, goat)
6. size 2 boat
7. armor: scale or exotic
8. loyal family retainer ( a standard grog with a couple of charming quirks).
9. map
10. book – holy text or instruction manual
11. holy symbol or badge of office
12. spirit in a jar
13. slip of paper with a spirit contract – eat and then specify what you need
14. bird in a cage that repeats spirit chatter

Special Thing – roll once on each table – this is somewhere out in the world, a hook to be retrieved, rather than something you had only yesterday:

1 a ship
2 a fort, bay or haven
3 a contact – smuggler, informant, fence, carpenter, smith, spirit go-between
4 a weapon – cannon, bomb, spirit, blackmail, poison, disease
5 a debt – blood, goods, mafia, spirit
6 a diminished god from a foreign land
7 a massive cache of gunpowder
8 several gallons of the interloper’s “holy water”
9 a sibling rival – kite pilot, long-distance swimmer, pirate, magistrate/king/official
10 the washed-up corpse of something massive
11 a spring that bubbles with blood or a cistern filled with teeth
12 Hungry Grandmother’s bottle of secrets
13 a funeral barge, surrounded by silence
14 a Dark Child
15 a commander of the invaders, disgustingly ill, on a mission
16 one of the enemy’s ships, on the edge of mutiny
17 one of the enemy’s Holy Books, foolishly translated into a tongue we understand
18 the ashen remains of an ancient Obsidian Queen’s funeral pyre
19 a relic of a foreign saint
20 one of the teeth of Brother Shark

Your relation to it:

1 It’s rightfully yours but currently captive
2 It’s marked on this map
3 It’s known to be abandoned, there for taking,
4 It’s lost in a useful way
5 It’s in danger from something esoteric
6 It’s been swiped by an enemy

And/or:

1 you are blessed/cursed in some way
2 you are bonded/owed in some way
3 you have a mysterious ally/enemy
4 your memories/skills/loyalties/reputation/status/soul have been stolen/augmented/crippled/replaced
5 your tribe’s priest/captive spirits need you and only you
6 you are an exiled spirit with temporary control of a body

Counter-colonial Heistcrawl Rules v 0.1

via Winchell Chung. I feel like I’ve been working toward something like this for a while. The next trick is, how to make an actual game system out of it.

via Winchell Chung. I feel like I’ve been working toward something like this for a while. The next trick is, how to make an actual game system out of it.

http://www.projectrho.com/nomogram/index.html