New on Desk #13 — The Gaming Plague

One consequence of the corona pandemic seems to be that gamers have more time for activities. Sure, you might want to cancel the face-to-face games, but meanwhile motivation for online play seems to be on the rise. I’ve been busy myself facilitating all kinds of interesting games this week, so that’s what I’ll be telling you about.

Monday: Castlevania Wizard

Club Hannilus successfully continued playing Castlevania Mountain Witch hack by video phone, a project which I discussed last week in some depth. The session bogged down just a bit over a lengthy negotiation scene, but it was in a good cause: the situation was genuinely difficult, and the players were in the zone regarding their character portrayals. As a consequence, though, the chapter (a concept specific to TMW, sort of half-way between “scene” and “situation”) ended up getting extended to next session, which is a bit of a beauty flaw in arrangements — I generally prefer to play full chapters in the Mountain Witch where feasible. Foibles of new players, new game, new medium.

The content was A-grade, though, and I particularly liked how well the players executed their tasks. In TMW the game’s pacing depends on how the players project their characters, the GM can’t choose to move on to the later stages of play before the players have fulfilled the currently on-going part of play. In Act I this performative player task concerns introducing their characters: we need to learn about who the characters are and why they are here, in Transylvania, in this dread hour. I declared at the end of the second session that the players had fulfilled the task to my satisfaction, and we could move on to Act II after finishing the on-going chapter. Check out the results, we have a trio of vampire slayers here or what:

Dragoslava is a Russian vagrant witch, a wild woman paradoxically prevented from settling down by the burden of her blood lineage: the Dhodoru witches possess a blood-borne talent of the Death Smell, the ability to distinguish the undead from among the living, which they use to defend the communities they live in from the covert threat. Dragoslava, however, has the rarer variation of the ability, the Life Scent, which she seems to be completely unable to control: the Scent causes people around her to become mesmerized and drawn to her in a way that fosters dependency and cultic behavior. Tormented by the responsibility, Dragoslava travels homeless with her ever-burgeoning train of followers, uncertain of what to do with these people whose real fates have been tangled by simply crossing paths with her.

Abraxas Wilde is a westerner, a young doctor of medicine whose family history is rife with misfortune, the ancestral manor growing mold today. During his Grand Tour (a sort of sabbatical enjoyed by higher class youngsters of western Europe) Abraxas was acquainted with a colonial mystery woman, Nyx, who would prove to be the Vampire Slayer – the Chosen One of the Shadow Men myth. Nyx left her paramour to travel to mysterious Castlevania, disappearing with slim explanation, and now Abraxas, the love-smitten fool that he is, journeys after her, armed with little but the knowledge of the macabre underworld revealed in her journals, and the curse of Kasoya, the strength of the Chosen One that has mysteriously transferred onto him from Nyx.

Charles Summers is the son of the infamous vampire hunter Nathan Summers, the preternaturally youthful man who stopped Dracula’s designs outright during Cromwell’s Spanish War near-on a 150 years ago. The father has trained his son to take on the job, and the Fate of the Oaths, whatever that may prove to be. What I like best about Charles is how vivaciously swashbuckling he manages to be despite hiding much of his background and true designs under a cheerful and heroic demeanor. He’s a gentleman unburdened by the common toil, or the grief of the world, yet nevertheless he has chosen to sail his ship to these ever-hospitable shores to, by his own admission, confront the Prince of Darkness in his lair. It is a credit to the player that despite me realizing that we actually don’t know anything about Charles yet, his stage presence still makes him the actual leader of the group. A bit like Han Solo, except I know for a procedural fact of the game that Charles does have an actual Dark Fate lying in wait, and therefore he may only pretend to being a simple swashbuckler hero, rather than being one in actual fact.

I’ll also describe the main points of play content here; I thought that this was all pretty good, both on my part and how the players interacted with the material:

• Dragoslava and Abraxas led a sizable caravan of rural refugees to the walls of Warrachia, a forlorn town close by to the Dragon’s Castle. The town guards informed them that nobody would get in and they should join the refugees already camping by the castle walls; the town had closed to gates due to the number of refugees seeking sanctuary from the monsters haunting the country-side, plus the general paranoid vapours and siege mentality weren’t helping things. The third vampire slayer, Charles Summers, had already gained entry inside and was helping the town guard with confronting the refugees.
• The monster hunters ultimately agreed to the compromise solution of meeting with the town reeve and doing some service to them in exchange for letting the refugees within the walls sooner rather than later. From the reeve they learned that at least part of the reason for the townspeople’s leeriness towards the rural refugees was a satanic panic on-going in town: there had been disappearances and rumours, and the people were afraid that letting in more people would mean letting in more soulless servants of the dark forces. The heroes of course decided to resolve the situation forthwith, particularly as the reeve promised consideration for the refugees afterwards.
• The next morning the slayers started in their task of tracking down the possibly real satanic cult, only to be disrupted by Dragoslava (their MVP in the monster tracking department, I should note; her Dhodoru blood allows her to identify the undead by smell) discovering that “her” refugees, camping outside the walls, had been horribly harried by wolves and other Children of the Night overnight. The scene was grotesque, and the monster hunters grieved. It didn’t help that the monster at fault here, the terrible Bat-Wolf, was the very same they had chosen to leave be in the first chapter.
• Ultimately the slayers discovered the dark emanations in town to center on the town church. Abraxas demonstrated mettle by investigating within, discovering that the town priest had abandoned town in favour of hiding at the Janus Manor for the duration of the crisis. Abraxas managed to provoke the sexton (groundskeeper) of the church into revealing his demonic possession as a Biphron, one of the numberless (I mean, there must be well over a thousand of these) kinds of monster in service to the darkness. We had a hard-fought battle, a good workout that demonstrated well how clever the conflict rules in TMW are.

Amusingly topical, all told; I didn’t particularly plan for the second chapter to be about refugees and plagues, it’s just how the material ended up. The campaign will continue on the coming Monday, assuming we don’t miss each other due to Summer Time complications. I’m already eager in anticipation.

Tuesday: BBRPG

On Tuesday our local crew gathered for a second dollhouse/planning session of the Blood Bowl campaign, familiar from earlier newsletters. The major issues of the day were the handling of the league commission – convincing the Imperial Rugby League to grant us franchise for a new team – and finishing the building of the team’s new stadium, the “Ponsse Hippos”. Dice were rolled a few times for things like determining the possible cost overruns on the stadium, but mostly the managerial play consisted of book-keeping and decision-making.

The issue of the team’s marketing identity continued to vex the players. It’s darwin’s own truth that the crew has made their own job as sports entertainment directors somewhat more difficult by deciding to run a radically progressive team, featuring non-humans and women in prominent roles, and it’s worse still that they’ve decided to do that for a fundamentally conservative local city market instead of starting the team in a metropolis area. We went over several alternative marketing angles again, but in the end the “Auerswald Highwaymen” won the field over a second time. The crew has this big-picture plan of selling the team to the Auerswaldians on the strengths of local outlaw folklore; it’s basically going to be “Robin Hood and his Merry Men, the rugby team” when they’re finished.

The main concession that the team ended up making to win votes in the league commission was with the Nufflite monastery in Talabheim, the Brothers of Pure Ball, who happen to own the only league team still completely controlled by the cult of Nuffle, the Talabheim Pure Ballers. (“Nuffle” is the god of rugby in the setting, which is polytheistic for some world-building reason that escapes me.) It proved relatively simple to get the Pure Ballers on board with the idea of expanding the league: as the Nufflite cult is remarkably non-racist for an Imperial institution in the 30th century, they have no problem with the idea of including a cross-racial team in the league, and the Brothers aren’t worried about the profitability of the league either. The only things they ended up requesting were that the new team would require all players to be “friendly to Nuffle” (as in, not members of enemy cults, not necessarily active worshippers of Nuffle), that they would play according to the sacred precepts (no fixed matches, steroids, etc.), and that the owners would promise their commission vote on any “moral issues” to the Nufflists for a period of 10 years following the team expansion.

To recap, what the team has promised to various parties so far:

• The Dwarven Kingdom is paying like half of the immediate outlay for the new team in exchange for having four of its own dwarf players in the starting lineup, being presented positively to the media. The team is also obligated to not hire any orcs, skaven or filty elves, or other ancestral enemies of the dwarf-kind.
• The Wood Elven Kingdom has agreed to cordial relations with the team, and one of the old elven war-dancers has agreed to play for the team, which will no doubt prove an embarrassment with the dwarves, but whatever. The team is also hoping to make use of Elven healing arts later on, but that’s still to be negotiated.
• About 40% of all possible marketing space on the new stadium has been sold to local forestry industry and Bugman’s Brew, the foremost Dwarven ale company. There’s still room for more commercialism, in other words!
• Adrian Veidt, the erstwhile owner of the league team Averheim Sunblaze (and villainous anti-hero Ozymandias, of Watchmen fame) has been sold a permanent seat in the actual Royal Box on the stadium, hilariously without informing princess Dainstjern, the team’s imperial patron. The team owners have also agreed to slip Veidt information about the movements of royal princess, presumably because Veidt is keen to woo the princess romantically.
• The team has made a pact with the Brothers of the Pure Ball to uphold traditional Nufflite rites (game starting rituals, etc.), to play according to the sacred precepts, to only accept players friendly to Nuffle, and to vote with the Brothers on “moral issues” in the league commission for the next 10 years.

All this means that when we get to hiring players, we can’t hire goblinoid or chaotic races, undead, amazons (they generally don’t worship Nuffle, preferring other sports gods) or elves. I think we’re free and clear to hire more dwarves, male humans (incl. foreigners), halflings (I don’t know why, though) and particularly civilized ogres. Lizardmen and Slanns are a maybe – they might trip on either the dwarves or the Nufflites, but mostly they may be pretty rare in the Empire.

So that’s where we’re at. The next step would be to hire an organization, including actual ball-players, and to create some player character players for the team. We’ll see when that’ll be; although the players are nicely motivated, it may be the case that we’ll have to either move online or have a bit of a hiatus while the epidemic blows over.

Thursday: Fables of Camelot

Paul arranged an extra game for Club Hannilus this week. Fables of Camelot (“Pyöreän pöydän ritarit” in the original Finnish) is this beginner-friendly chivalric adventure game that we put together with Sami Koponen in the late ’00s. Paul’s been eyeing it for a while, but with the game only existing in English as a very sparse playtest draft, he was obligated to attract me to run the game to get some sense of how it plays in practice. To do so, Paul found us some delightful newbie roleplayers to play with!

The adventure of the day was an old Welsh myth that I’m fond of, the tale of Culhwch and Olwen. Culhwch (pronounced “Killhooch” insofar as my Cymric ortography is concerned) is a Cymric knight and a cousin to King Arthur, notable for having been cursed by his stepmother into being able to marry only one girl in the whole world, the impossible-to-attain bride Olwen. To help him triumph in the formidable trials ahead Culhwch came to ask for aid from his cousin, and thus we’re off to the races as Arthur sends some of his best knights to hel Culhwch out. It’s just like in the original myth!

The adventure worked well, I thought, with the players getting a good handle on the situation. The most hilarious turn of events was when one of the PC knights fell in love with the fair Olwen by accident, causing no end of complication; very Arthurian, that. What really attracted my own attention, though, was how fun it was to play with some new players for a change. I mean, the old hands who form the core crew of Club Hannilus are always a joy, but here I particularly enjoyed the contributions of the new players. One of them had to leave midway (which I blame on how fun the game was being; it ran a bit long), but both threw themselves bodily into projecting their characters as atmospheric and dramatic actors in the story, which is always a relief to a GM expecting to carry the game himself.

I mean, this is just one of my favourite bits, but I’ll show it to demonstrate: part of the character creation in Fables of Camelot is for the player to establish what I call the Fabulous Blazon (this is funny if you’re into Heraldics and remember that the game has a bit of a literally fabulous theme to it), a description of how the character’s heraldic animal describes their fundamental nature. So one of the players picks the Moose as their heraldic animal, which is OK, a classic bold move in Fabelot. But then they dragged up this description of what a Moose is from the Internet, and took it verbatim as their Fabulous Blazon:

Moose – signifies strength, pride, and life. Clumsy and graceful and strange and breathtaking at the same time.

Not only is that a fabulous Blazon, but then the player followed up by establishing the character exactly as that reads: they took the idea of “clumsy cute” and ran with it for a classic running gag, but the character was also earnestly heroic and oddly graceful. I felt like being in the audience of a buddy movie with great actor chemistry when Aubry the Clumsy was chivalrously-yet-clumsily trying to dissuade the foreign knight Bysador from forswearing his oaths to Arthur in favour of his sudden love for fair Olwen.

I’ll emphasize that everybody was great, though, from Cassandra’s haughty treatment of the High King to Percival’s fumbling self-image as a gracious ladies’ man. I hope we’ll get to play some more of this stuff, I’d like to see where these knights end up.

Weekend: Preparing for next week now, I guess

My sweeps week was supposed to continue with a movie club showcase on Friday, but then the scenery came crashing down: corona has reached the distant reaches of Upper Savo, and one of my movie club friends even had a corona patient revealed at their working place. Being as we all have friends and family particularly susceptible to the disease, we decided to call off on the face-to-face meetings for now. Not that any of us know that we have the disease, but that’s just how insidious it is. (I’ll desist from explaining the rationale for various anti-plague actions here; you either know already, or should be reading up on it from reliable sources instead of some random blog.)

The corona situation is generally becoming more active around here, so it’s entirely possible that we’ll suspend the frivolous social life, such as the BBRPG campaign and the movie meetups, for a time. I imagine that in practice we’ll talk about the situation weekly or so and try to decide on an appropriate time to continue with the hobby. I’ll ask the guys to join us online at Club Hannilus in the meantime, anyway; the online gaming seems to work reasonably well, so no reason to stop playing, singing, drinking wine just because a plague is ravaging the countryside. Maybe have a masque among the well-to-do while we’re at it, not like the Red Death would ever find us here.

Gentlemen on the Agora

The choicest bits from my cultural saloon of choice, the Agora:

• The gentlemen discussed the concept of “game state” that I’d mentioned in passing in the newsletter two weeks back, when telling about my structural freeform experience. Contributors had generally heard of the term used in computer gaming context, but for many this was the first time they’d seen it applied to tabletop gaming. We couldn’t quite pinpoint the etymological history of the term aside from it probably being a variation of “program state”, a term of wider currency in programming theory.
• A contributor asked about tabletop rpgs that would be particularly well-suited to online play. While some options were mulled over, I spoiled the fun by claiming that the medium choice is sufficiently low down on the totem pole of creative priorities that it’s going to be overshadowed by the question of what you actually want to play: the most well-suited tabletop rpg to implement online is going to if not the exact game you’d want to play anyway, then at least something closely similar. The difficulties of online play simply aren’t major enough to justify sidelining your other creative priorities like that. When pressed I did suggest Paranoia as a game that should particularly benefit from the online medium, but it’d be sheer insanity to decide to engage such a deep game for the mundane reason of medium compatibility.
• Complaining about traditional rpgs, the entertainment of choice on the Agora. The theme this time around was “authenticity” (a notion I’ve been favouring this decade) and illusionism. Particularly, we reminisced about how the various contributors had adapted to rpg player characters being sort of wacky, sociopathic murder hobos by default. It’s a tendency that tends to play poorly with a GM’s storytelling ambitions, which is why we often end up using illusionist techniques, railroading and obviating player choice in general — in a word, ignoring the murder hoboing in favour of pretending that the player characters are actually reasonably competent adults who can manage to pick up a quest without shitting themselves in public. However, authenticity of contribution is what you lose in this practice. Just last fall I allowed a player to murder-hobo-mess-up the climactic final of an otherwise very dramatic short campaign; the choice was between obviating their authentic participation in the game or letting them exercise their rules-given authorities over the proceedings, and I’m pretty happy with where I am on this: you want to ruin the game, that’s your right as long as we choose to play with you and the “ruining” is just you playing by the rules and exercising your dim little mind the best you can. The right way to keep the murder hoboing in check is not for the GM to cover it up with illusionistic techniques.
• An interesting follow-up thesis to the above: players are less likely to get a shit-fit in a fantasy genre game than in other genres, true or false? My experience is that roleplayers on average are more familiar, more comfortable and more committed to playing roles and behaving in expected ways in a fantasy game than they are in e.g. a cyberpunk game, or other genres in general. It’s like they’re too engaged with being a noble knight, a mysterious wizard or other character role, and this restrains them a bit from being sidetracked into burning the grocer’s dog alive. Could just be my personal experience, of course, and of course you still get some murder-hoboing in fantasy games.
• It was revealed on the Agora that one of the contributors has actually played the Pendragon Grand Campaign. Mad respect! The idea of somebody actually playing the thing appeals to me quite a bit, as not only is the Grand Campaign possibly the longest clearly documented fixed-form railroad rpg campaign at ~80 sessions of intended play-time, but it’s also a massive literary work on its own merit, an excellent example of what roleplaying can be in the wider context of our literary culture if it wants to be. I did admittedly wax a bit poetic at the Agora about it. Playing the Grand Campaign is definitely on my own bucket list, and I think I’m starting to be competent enough as a GM to facilitate just such an endeavour as soon as the appropriate player base shows up.
• We also learned that another contributor had participated in a run-through of the Pendragon Grand Campaign in their time, except their group had a party wipe about ten sessions in, after which they lost the taste for it. The anecdote inspired me to discuss the “sacrament of death”, a particular feature or technique necessary in specific kinds of traditional rpgs; it’s something I figured out in the ’00s while playing Praedor with a few friends. To put it succinctly, if you run games like Pendragon or Praedor (games with harsh combat systems coupled to trad play priorities) without fudging, the issue of character death will raise its ugly head, and the game isn’t going to survive the system shock unless you specifically implement the “sacrament of death”: the group has to adapt psychologically and socially in advance to the idea that player characters are going to die, and they’re going to die sooner rather than later. Create your character with their death in mind; play them with their death in mind; have them march to their death with the understanding that they are going to die. It’s essentially Zen Buddhism applied to roleplaying games, and I’ve found that the sacrament helps you recontextualize the deaths into something meaningful rather than simply frustrating. It may help with understanding the concept if I note that while it’s not generally discussed in game texts, the sacrament is very much a part of the play culture for Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia, two games where players literally brag about how their characters are soon going to die.
• Also, discussing the sacrament of death produced in due time a funny little corollary to the Hannila test (explained in the earlier newsletter after the dinosaurs bit): assuming a fantasy adventure rpg, set up a casual combat encounter with a pack of wolves. Assume that it’s a space-filler encounter early into the game, a “random” encounter the GM puts in there because that’s what you’re supposed to do in these games. Given the rules system we are looking at, is this shit even fun to play, or is the combat system actually a huge obstacle to you trying to perform a cliched fantasy encounter? (Hint: anything descending from Runequest fails this corollary hopelessly; those systems aren’t intended for running casual filler fights for the sake of characterization.)

State of the Productive Facilities

The plague gaming week again didn’t leave me with the spare wits and wherewithal to continue writing, which means that I’m getting increasingly behind on my plans in that regard. I’m not actually concerned about the situation, as the reason for my not producing anything is not procrastination; I’ve been quite productive this week, it’s just been actual gaming that’s been eating the time. I’ll get back to the writing when things slow down on the gaming front.

In the interest of accountability (and therefore a better writing motivation), here’s what I would be working on writing-wise if I had the time:

I’ve decided to put the polls on hold for the month of April. I like the polling (and I hope it’s not too bothersome to vote when visiting the blog), but as I haven’t been writing for two weeks, I don’t want to be gathering more writing advice before I get some of the above written out. I don’t know if the practical gaming bonanza from last two weeks is going to continue in April, but presumably the amount of game prep I’ll be doing will be going down nevertheless, so hopefully I’ll get this under control and resume polling in May.

For reference, here’s the ending month’s poll results — or a voting opportunity if you move quick, the poll closes at the end of the month on Tuesday. Still a couple of days to vote, although the relative positions seem mostly pretty clear.