New on Desk #14 — Quarantine Days

Sitting at home continues. Fortunately my hobby and working life has prepared me for the eventuality, so it’s not my own sanity that I have to worry about. I’m doing just fine, playing games and charting the lands of imagination.

Monday: Castlevania Wizard

Club Hannilus continues campaigning against nationalized blood banking in Transylvania. We finished the first “Act” of the game this time, meaning that we’ve now established the heroes in sufficient detail to move on to greater ambitions. The slayers uncovered and stopped an evil cult of the Followers of Darkness, risking life and limb to beard the lion in its den. The lion here was Toden Schaft, the “Adamantriax” of a magical conspiracy devoted to bringing back the Prince of Darkness (the occult title of Dracula in this mythos). According to the reports of the populace, the cult seems to have been successful.

Actually, I’ll show you Schaft’s info block from the campaign encyclopedia – this is what a Boss monster looks like:

Schaft was sort of a tutorial Boss fight, wielding powerful sorcery that had the potential to confound and utterly destroy his enemies if not for the fact that the slayers tackled him like a rugby team immediately as the fight opened. The fight devolved into a somewhat lengthy wrestling match, as the heroes were unable to set up a quick knock-down blow, but I think we got the boss fight rules down pretty well, and the fight choreography was cogent enough, so I’m not complaining. We’ll have different dynamics in future Boss fights, no doubt.

Tackling (or otherwise contesting) Boss fights is often somewhat optional in this game, and so it was here: the heroes could have ignored Schaft’s little cult altogether in preference of continuing directly to the titular Castle. Winning the fight meant gaining the spoils, though, which in this case came in the form of the Adamantriax’s library and correspondence, and the sole captive sacrificial virgin he still had secreted in his underground lair. The cult correspondence held some personally significant information for Abraxas, the slayer who’d traveled all this way after his lady love. Everybody would be concerned with the knowledge of the cult sites of the Followers of Darkness, the Elder Ruins and Temple of Pan, secreted away in the wilderness; they’re sort of extra easter egg side quest locations for the campaign, something the players will have to choose to pursue or ignore.

Schaft’s little captive proved to be a pretty interesting character, I thought: she’s Marie Renard, a local girl who just so happens to have some distant kinship with the Belmont clan of vampire slayers. In other words, she’s a prospective NPC vampire slayer! This is all very amusing for Castlevania fans, I’m bringing in all kinds of little snippet from the canon material into this little remix campaign.

Thursday: Fables of Camelot

We also played another session of Fables of Camelot this week, which was a nice surprise. I might’ve prepared for it more thoroughly, but we got by. The first half of the session was dedicated to court; politics, soap opera and magical matters. Merlin the chief druid and court wizard to the king was pretty amusing in his terminal depression. Merlin tried very hard to convince the knights that Battle of Camlann would soon arrive and sweep their entire world away, leaving nothing behind. The player characters, valiant knights that they are, concluded that Merlin’s full of shit; only a chump would believe something just because it’s in the Wikipedia, after all.

The true meat of the session was a small yet tragic adventure concerning a horrible curse that turned people into animals. Said magic was of ancient druidic make and revolved around a cursed boulder unearthed by the coastal Angles near the white cliffs of Dover. The knights discovered that Morgana Le Fay was encouraging the Angles, who used the rock to turn malcontents and snooping Britons into animalistic slavery.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the high point of the adventure was the valiant struggle of Aubry the Clumsy when she pit her strength of sinew against the cursed boulder. The knights had boldly led a small force of arms-men near to the cult site the Angles were developing at the white cliffs, and taken temporary control of the cursed boulder. The white rock sat spitefully there even as the heroes tried to figure out what to do with it before the Anglon king returned with his army. They couldn’t touch it for fear of the curse, and it was too heavy to take with them or hide anyway. Destroying the rock in place seemed impossible.

Aubry had always had a particularly close relationship to her heraldic animal, the mighty moose. Stripping naked, she approached the cursed rock and embraced it, turning into her majestically lumbering spirit animal. “Let loose the moose!” as she would have it. In this powerful form Aubry found that she could drag the boulder with improvised harness, bringing it to the edge of the white cliffs. Should the heroes manage to push the rock over the precipice of the cliff, the great fall would surely destroy it, or failing that, the rock would be lost to the surf that ever washes the white cliffs of Dover.

The dice were, however, cruelly against Aubry here: we know not what was the cause, if it was a form of the runner’s high as she joyfully pushed herself to the limit against the weight of stone, or if the base animal nature of the moose had her panic in harness, but whatever it was, she simply would not stop pulling at the rock, not even as the cliffside drew closer and the armsmen were shouting warnings at her unheeding animal form. The weak chalk of Dover crumbled under her hooves and brave Aubry fell, shouting like a fog horn as she plummeted off the white cliffs of Dover.

The arms-men were sent to recover her from the mishap, but oh how sorry they were on their return, forced to report that the knight beloved by all for her earnest bravery had not survived the great fall. Aubry’s brother knights were besides themselves with grief, with Percival so moved he tried to throw himself off the cliff as well. Bysador wailed his swan song and attacked the ruthless boulder, taking it the last few yards to the brink and beyond, finishing what Aubry could not.

The experience of playing these events was unusually intense I think because I, and the others, rather liked Aubry as a character. I liked how chivalrous she was, always trying her best. The fact that her demise was so stupefyingly stupid had us howling in stitches as the events unfolded. (Remember, she was known foremost for not only her valor, but also for her clumsiness.) It was a perfect storm of tragedy and comedy that stole all our attentions for the rest of the session, with funeral processions and general revelry helping us process what just went down.

Some casual creative concepts

In between all these rpg campaigns I’ve been mulling over a few creative ideas. This is just casual brainstorming for now, but let’s put the thoughts down for future reference. That’s one of the prerogatives of having a newsletter after all.

Game Concept: HX Fighter Program

The HX Fighter Program is the Finnish Air Force’s on-going fleet replacement project; the old Hornet fighter planes that Finland has been flying since the ’90s are being replaced by a new airplane. It’s pretty expensive (about 10 billion euros on top of the usual budgets) and therefore politically interesting: who gets the contract, what’s the best plane?

Anyway, I was doing general interest reading on the topic when I realized that it could actually make for a pretty nice wargame of the sort that I most like – which is to say, GMed and learning-oriented, less of a hex and tokens exercise and more a meeting of the minds. Here are the core ideas:

• The players would take on roles as key Finnish decision-makers on defense matters. The president and prime minister, the head of the defense forces, the air forces chief, the military intelligence advisor, and so on. The core gameplay would revolve around committee meetings where the players discuss key questions of Finnish defense and arrive at decisions. The material would revolve around current-day 2010s issues such as the HX Fighter Program. Maybe strictly the HX thing and nothing else, that might help keep the game lightweight enough.
• To prepare the players and lay the groundwork the GM prepares a folder of material, custom-made for each role. These folders include a suitable compromise of depth and breadth on the facts and big picture understanding that the players should have to discuss the warcraft issues at hand intelligently. The players have half an hour at the beginning of the game to read up on their folders and any supplementary material they choose. The result should be that the players, while on the same side, will have somewhat different decision-making priorities and background knowledge when joining the committee.
• The wargame focus here is, perhaps innovatively, in practicing effective committee work: the players are required to judge what information they have that others might not, and to communicate what they know so the group can make use of the information in their decision-making. The goal is to avoid group stupidity and make well-reasoned choices.
• The game’s last part is a simple simulation of Finland’s military future into the coming decade when the decisions made here will come home to roost. A bit of dicing will discover what e.g. the Finnish Air Force will actually be doing in the near future, and therefore how well the players prepared for the unfolding situation. The players can’t rely on there not being a major war at the end of the scenario, unlikely as it may be. Perhaps Finland ends up joining NATO, maybe those HX fighters are used in a major peace-keeping mission somewhere, who knows. The point is to try to figure out just a little bit about the consequences of the decisions made.

The concept is admittedly a bit dry, but that’s how it goes when you grow old; you’re less interested in dragons and more interested in real-world stuff like this. I imagine that the reader might find it hilarious that I’m daydreaming about military procurement as an exciting gaming topic. If I develop the idea further at some point, you’ll see that there are all kinds of interesting facets to the matter.

Creative Writing: The Tulpa of Stan Lee

So as part of my on-going superhero studies I’ve been reading old Daredevil comics now, from the ’60s. It’s somewhat similar to old Spider-Man in general terms, as one might expect: a mix of hammy soap opera and superhero wrestling. I find the fight scenes less innovative than in Spider-Man for the most part, but the high concept is in many ways better, so overall it’s a wash.

Stan Lee was a relatively old-fashioned writer, sufficiently so that when reading these comics from the ’60s and ’70s (the silver age of superhero comics, as the historiography has it) I find his style to harmonize with golden age a lot. I fully expect that when Gerry Conway starts writing around issue #70 it’ll mean a major shift away from the hammy wrestling-like style and more towards the kind of relatively realistic psychology that defined superhero comics in my childhood.

Anyway, Stan Lee’s Daredevil inspired me to think in more depth about how these early superhero comics in general are psychologically really raw, almost as if the characters channeled some sort of subconscious lizard-brain of the author’s. Daredevil, for instance, is often a simple bully and a frighteningly childish figure despite ostensibly being an adult lawyer in his alter ego. He’s just like his villains, in fact: despite them all being nominally human figures in a human world, the superheroes and supervillains behave in a simpler, more primal way than the people around them. They are, in fact, suspiciously non-human.

And that brings me to an idea that could form the core for a superhero novel or rpg campaign, something I’m calling “The Tulpa of Stan Lee” until convinced otherwise:

The phenomenon of the “thoughtform”, of a psychic emanation of a person, has been known to occultism for ages. Finnish sorcerers were reputedly able to perceive the “forethought” of a person in advance of their arrival, while Buddhist monks could condense their emanation bodies until they could be perceived and interacted with as separate individuals.

In the early 20th century it was discovered that powerful electric fields could stimulate the brain to empower the thoughtform to unprecedented levels. For some rare individuals this meant the forming of a powerful alternate existence, a separate person that academia conventionally refers to as a “Tulpa”, as per Tibetan Buddhism. For the most part Tulpas would be formed by accident at first, but research would refine the process over the century.

The Tulpa are to a degree independent of their creators, but human they are not: being formed of the primeval mindlush of its originator, the Tulpa is cognitively a simple being, presenting exaggerated and one-dimensional character traits. Visually the Tulpa might resemble a human from further away, but most have four-color skin akin to a skin-tight covering, with no genitalia. They do not follow conventional laws of physics.

As electricity continues becoming more common in society over the 20th century, the Tulpa phenomenon will continue becoming more common. Already the Tulpas of people who’ve never met each other are fighting on the streets, drawn to each other by their common psionic nature, only co-existing in peace with the greatest difficulty. Some people form relationships with Tulpas, being their friends and confidantes, even lovers. It is a relationship fraught with peril, for ultimately there is nothing behind that masked face.

Or, to sum that up succinctly: “what if superheroes acted like they do in these comics, and the reason is that they’re psychic projections instead of humans?” I mean, there was this one comic in that Daredevil run where Spider-Man (as a visiting guest star) was being absolutely terrifying, having the patience and logical faculties of a 3-year old child combined with the brutal strength of a superhero. He would go around ostensibly being a superhero, except what he was really doing was breaking things, beating people up and trying to kill you because you looked at him wrong; a cartoony street tough, except for the terrifying strength. Having something like that be real would be such a bizarre situation. How do you even communicate with this, for the lack of a better word, creature? I think the only choice might be killing Stan Lee and hoping Spider-Man goes away once you do that.

Game Concept: Running Man

I’d never seen The Running Man before; it’s pretty great! It’s one of the best cyberpunk movies I’ve seen, in fact. I particularly enjoyed the ludicrous tv gladiators, each one stupider than the last, combined with the political pathos. The movie was enjoyably well-formed, with all scenes serving a purpose. The only notable weak point was that the dialogues throughout were pretty bad; not the script in general (the plot and structure were fine), just the dialogues. Giving Schwarzenegger quippy one-liners was apparently the thing to do in the ’80s film-making culture, but the movie would be strictly better without those, and with a some sort of word-smith going over the text in general.

Anyway, so I’ve been working with The Mountain Witch recently due to our on-going campaign, and it occurred to me while watching the movie that the TMW system could make for a pretty appropriate chassis for a blood sports cyberpunk scenario. Maybe not literally Running Man; I’m pondering some sort of slightly wider fictional arrangement, maybe with several competing blood sports tv shows and a range of character backgrounds like professional gladiators, convict sacrifices and resistance fighters. Something that captures the genre in general, everything from Rollerball to Battle Royale.

It’s just an idea at this point, but one reason it interests is that this would be the first TMW hack that takes the game seriously away from the team-based quest format that it starts with. A bit more radical in that aspect. There would still be an Act structure, but the game would be slightly more like a blood opera, with the player characters really not knowing who to trust. A bit more Dark Fate stuff to encourage thriller plot paranoia.

Margin Commentary: Online Wargaming

Here’s something wicked cool; friend Sherrypie has started experimenting with GMed online wargaming with a particularly functional and simple premise: the GM runs an appropriately robust wargame at home, writes up unit action reports for the actual players, and those players then provide him with further orders to execute, everyone according to their role. It’s simple, but it achieves a lot in terms of organic wargaming and generally digging oneself out of the boardgame hole that wargaming has generally stumbled in.

Sherry’s model doesn’t require major game design in advance because he’s using a pre-existing boardgame as a simulation chassis, but the presence of the GM as an overlay enables him to step outside the boardgame’s constraints where appropriate. Meanwhile, the players do not need any knowledge of the underlying boardgame, as the interface presented to them by the GM is consistently based on the scenario’s fiction: these are your forces, this is the terrain, this is the goal, what do you do? Needless to say, things like a proper fog of war and internal communication lines are trivial to simulate compared to boardgaming.

Sherry wrote and illustrated a nice little after-action report of his first run-through of the new concept, so perhaps check that out for particulars. The game he’s running is Epic Armageddon, a Games Workshop miniatures game set in the WH40k setting. I imagine that the nature of the method makes it easy to produce AARs, too: the GM is already mapping and writing up the action for the other players through the game, after all.

Gentlemen on the Agora

The Agora has been a bit subdued, but that just means more room to discuss e.g. Sherry’s project above. And there’s been some other topics, too:

• A contributor had been thinking about Ars Magica, and had developed an excellent campaign concept for it: what if instead of starting the game with the by the book covenant creation process, such that the covenant is already set up and operating when the game proper begins, you’d just have the game start with the PC wizards trying to establish their own covenant? You could have all kinds of cool political maneuvering and practical issues, and the players would need to choose their covenant location within living sandbox constraints instead of picking an arbitrary dream location. Meanwhile the clock on their Hermetics lives is ticking, so you want to get the covenant and the associated laboratories up at some point if you’re going to be wizarding properly, too. I was amused to a shameful degree by getting to inform the contributor that he had reinvented Guardians of the Forest, the classic first Tribunal supplement of Ars Magica. Smart minds think alike, evidently.
• Later on, a game idea was floated: now that we’re playing online, why not play a game about characters being online. I imagine that the contributor was thinking of e.g. a cyberpunk hacker game, but what my dirty mind came up with was a game about “cam-whoring”, which is to say begging for money from strangers via webcam chat. Could be amusing in a dark comedy way. Unless I misremember, we never got around to what they were actually thinking of in the way of subject matter; I’ll need to ask about it. Maybe something about being social media influencers?

State of the Productive Facilities

As I outlined last week, I’m not running a new poll until I actually get back to writing. Seems like for that to happen I need to get my GMing down to less than two concurrent weekly campaigns. That, or be less of a daydreamer and more of a dayworker. Maybe next week.