- Initial fragments — place names, etc.
- Vain’s Rest — home base of the game.
- Banegard Tower
- Drunken Magistrate — an inn in Vain’s Rest.
- Secrets — magic and religion in Tarnished Brass.
Category: Gaming
There’s a thread over at rpg.net called “Lost Victoriana,” which is actually about the RPG Victoriana, but it got me thinking about a sort of lost history of the Victorian era — a history of technology that dwarves our own, a world of crystal skyships and sophisticated colonies on the surface of Jupiter. The Queen’s Patrol jousts with philosophical criminals who will toast the Queen despite their anarchic ways. Not a steampunk world at all.
Not sure what I’d do with it.
[Game background; not to be taken as literal history.]
It’s 69 AD. The Han Dynasty rules China in the form of the hard-working but sometimes cruel Emperor Ming. He has been emperor for over ten years, and previous to his ascension, he was intimately involved in matters of state. Perhaps this is why he was so diligent and capable.
But there are shadows over his reign. It is well known that Prince Jing plotted to rebel, some years ago, going so far as to employ sorcerers to curse Emperor Ming. The Emperor resolved the issue by forcing Jing to commit suicide, and slew literally ten thousand others who were implicated in the conspiracy. It is whispered that Emperor Ming’s eunuch advisers were responsible for counseling the Emperor to this extreme act, but perhaps it was necessary in order to maintain the Celestial order and the Mandate of Heaven.
Some time after that unfortunate incident, the Emperor’s chief general was sent to hunt down the dangerous rebel known as the Jade Dagger. Much to the surprise of all, Ban Chao never returned from the hunt, and was has in fact been seen many times since cooperating with the Dagger Bandits, as the Jade Dagger’s men are known. Where there was once an annoying but ultimately ineffectual band of rebels, there is now a skilled, well-led fighting force fomenting tumult at the edges of the Empire.
And, finally, China is plagued by demons. While the Emperor’s men have always been successful in defeating demonic incursions, province by province — the eunuchs are rumored to be instrumental in these successes — it yet seems that no man is capable of pushing the demons back for good. For no matter how often they are defeated in any one place, a new infestation arrives in another province soon thereafter.
The Emperor continues to battle these shadows. He has the assets already mentioned; his current general, Guo Xun, is only slightly less formidable than Ban Chao. His twin bodyguards, Lin Bao and Lin Bo, are never-speaking pillars defending him from all harm. He is far from helpless, but he is also far from victory.
According to the wiki, I put up the prospectus for Orlando Trash on June 6th, 2006.
“Mickey Rourke is in this movie. Val Kilmer is in this movie. It’s directed by Michael Mann, or maybe Tony Scott. But it’s not The Hunger. Luis Guzman has a role as a shiftless drifter who erupts into surprising bursts of violence.”
Hm. I never did get Luis Guzman into the movie, but in retrospect that was just as well. Danny Trejo made it in.
This is the first campaign I’ve ever run to completion. I planned for it to last about one long story-arc; this was really liberating in that I didn’t worry about handing out experience too quickly, and I didn’t worry about whether or not the world would be playable long term. I just went full speed ahead with whatever caught my eye, following the leads of the PCs, and it worked like a charm.
Things I concentrated on:
Cool NPCs. I do good NPCs, so I wanted to let that shine. (Also I’m modest.) I like to think I have a strong range of voices, and since every NPC was played by a well-known actor, it was even easier to make the characters memorable. I had to pull off imitations of Val Kilmer, Meryl Streep, and Nathan Lane — sometimes in the same scene — but I was pretty sure I could do that.
Big blatant plots. It turns out that it’s almost never a lose to telegraph stuff from a mile away, and it’s always easy to turn around and surprise players when you need to. Also, I have a tendency to automatically do mystery plots, and I wanted this to be an action flick rather than a detective thriller. So while I wrote in a certain amount of mystery, I never wanted it to be too mysterious — answers weren’t ever that far away. It is not my fault that the players occasionally decided to kill the source of the answers.
Balance between shooting things and talking. Given our approximately 3-4 hour session time, a good fight wound up taking up most of the session, as I discovered a few sessions in. That meant, to me, that the right thing to do was to throw in a chance for a good fight scene every two or three sessions. I think that worked well. I could have stepped up the fight scenes if the group had seemed to want more of them.
Player-driven. I let ’em do what they wanted, and it all worked out okay. I was ready for just about any turn of events, although I would have been sad if the group had split up. But I was ready for their allegiances to go wherever, I had spurs to push them back towards the action as needed — I was a leaf in the river of their plot interests. Boo yah.
Things I want to do better next time:
Foreshadowing. Example: in the last session, I pulled out Jack Trash’s body, and that was cool, and I showed them a letter clarifying a couple of issues. Also cool. But it would have been better if I’d pulled out Trash’s corpse in the previous session.
This goes with planning; I didn’t really have an overarching plan. I had a few key NPCs with strong motivations, and I let the world react to what the PCs do. Good for me for empowering the PCs and avoiding railroading, but it meant there wasn’t as much build as I woulda liked. I think the way to fix this is to have some cool multi-session things in mind, and remembering to drop the setup scene in there.
I’d also like to take more advantage of player backgrounds. I didn’t pay enough attention to that, particularly in Teo’s case.
But all in all? Quite happy.
I’ve been kicking around a lucha libre Scion game in my mind, along with a couple of other ideas (Southern Gothic comes to mind), but I think the winner is 17th century pirates who happen to be children of gods.
We’d wanna finish up our Catholic saint pantheon, for obvious reasons. Voodoo fits well, Aztecs fit just fine. Greek gods? Sure. Norse gods? Very well, given the Norse tradition of rampaging around on boats. Egyptian and Japanese are a little tougher, but I have ideas.
And it’s not at all difficult to make Caribbean piracy mythic and grand.
Done as an exercise:
Reese Beulay, Roadway Prophet
Parent: Hermes
Nature: Fanatic
White Wolf put up the Scion demo the other week; I just got around to downloading it. Scion is the one where you play the children of gods in the modern world; it’s not the World of Darkness. They’re going for a Mage: The Hero Defined feel, and not coming up much short as far as I can tell from reading the demo.
The system is standard Storyteller, tweaked for heroism. Successes are 7 or more on a ten sider, rather than 8 or more. PCs have a Legend rating, and penalties can’t bring your die pool beneath your Legend rating. And, of course, there are stunt rules.
I count six different kinds of special powers you get out of being a hero. Epic attributes are a lot like Aberrant’s Mega-attributes; they give autosuccesses and provide variable benefits related to the attribute. Nothing else is really explained in the demo. I’m a bit concerned that there’s too much complexity there, but we’ll see.
Combat is pretty heavily revamped. It’s reminiscent of Feng Shui, in that every action takes a number of ticks. If we’re on tick 3, and I take a Speed 3 action, I’ll act again on tick 6. There are no rounds, however; you just keep going until the fight’s over.
For example characters, we’ve got a jetsetting gunslinger child of Aphrodite, a former US Marshal investigative type who’s the son of Horus, a cardiac surgeon child of Tezcatlipoca, a teen auto mechanic whose dad is Thor, a necromantic embalmer from New Orleans who’s the daughter of Baron Samedi, and a photographer/martial artist child of Susan-o. That happens to be one Scion from the six pantheons outlined in the main rulebook.
I’m sorta medium amped for this. Street date is a couple of weeks from now.
This is not actual game text, which would want to be substantially more evocative.
Inside the Egg is set in a dystopian future, in the style of V for Vendetta, Matrix, or when you get right down to it we’re all stealing from Brave New World. (Not the superhero game.) The central paradigm of the government is the Egg; at an unspecified time in the past, something awful happened, and only the pure security of the World Egg can keep us safe.
There are no corners in the Egg. There’s no place to hide evil things. It’s pure in color, so you can’t avoid scrutiny from your fellow man. It is the perfect, safe shape. Architecture emulates the Egg. Everything does.
There’s a drug that keeps everyone happy by the simple expedient of grinding away their memories. This, in fact, is why PCs begin with nothing written down on their character sheet. While the player may know what they want their PC to be like, the characters themselves are tabula rasas.
The progress of a campaign is the progress of the characters towards self-realization. As time goes by, they learn more and more about themselves by virtue of rebellion against the Egg. By definition and mechanics, the arc of a character is complete at the moment that they themselves have realized completely one of their three aspects (Mind, Body, and Soul, as per the character sheet.)
This is the Inside the Egg character sheet. When a campaign starts, it’s exactly this blank. No name, no stats, just an empty sheet. By the time a campaign ends, it’ll be nearly full.
Chris Lehrich is writing a series on designing fantasy cultures. Two chapters up so far, plus an introduction. Read and enjoy.