Thunder Road: Divine Instruments

This campaign brought to you by material
from The Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica,
as well as The Explorer's Guide to
Wildemount

In the midst of crisis, I fall back on what I know, and seek to entertain my family with tabletop RPGs.

While Eightfold goes on - a little irregularly, and with a mix of local and remote players - I am running a sister campaign called Thunder Road, set on a different continent of the same world, where the Thunderhead Dominion - a successful union of the martial nobility of the minotaurs, a loxodon (elephant folk) diplomatic corps and a largely human civil service bureaucracy - and the Elysian Federation - a union of twenty-six states, largely controlled by an aristocracy of earth genasi face each other over the buffer zone known as the Free Moblands - the territories of mobs(1) of minotaurs who didn't form up into larger dynasties and alliances and join the Dominion. Since all the players on this one are in lockdown together, sessions are way more regular.

Session Zero began with the PCs on the titular Thunder Road, the trade and diplomatic routes across the Moblands. Each player introduced their character in conversation with the others, and a fourth traveller, an orc named Razak who was basically there to channel my DM questions as part of the character creation process.

The questions I was putting included: "Where did you come from?" "How did you get here?"and "What did you bring with you?" so that each character ended up with a bit of backstory, a philosophy and an heirloom. Then we rolled some dice, had a brief combat and called it a night(2).

The next day, I wrote up the backstories and added some details by running through aspects of the heroic chronicle system from The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, thus granting the PCs a few extra proficiencies, as well as some rivals and allies from their past. I added a secret fact for each PC that the player doesn't know yet, then passed the full backstory on for the players to comment and provide three goals for their character to pursue.

And then I took the three heirlooms and converted them into Divine Instruments, my homebrew world's version of Exandria's Vestiges of Divergence; magical items that get more powerful as they are used in more and more epic circumstances, and which have their origins in moments of divine conflict.

Here, I faced a bit of a challenge. The barbarian's greataxe(3) was easy; it's an axe, it gets some combative buffs. The bard's lyre was also straightforward. It has a range of elemental spell abilities that work when you play it(4).

And then there was the loxodon's tinker's tools. Now, a set of tools of any kind is not a traditional basis for a magical item, least of all the stuff of legends. I think I came up with something pretty good - basic level, it gives you mending, magical weapon every other day, and you can ritual cast tiny hut, with enhancements in theme as you go up - but as items of great moment and destiny go, it's a bit left field, and I'm not sure how well I'll be able to work in epic tinkering challenges without it seeming forced, even by heroic destiny standards. Moreover, very few divine conflicts feature much in the way of tinkering; blacksmithing, yes, but not much tinkering. Maybe the tools will turn out to have been fashioned from the parts of something bigger at some point; I'm not sure, but it will probably be fun finding out.

(1) I'm not sure why I settled on mob, if it's not in the book, since it usually applies to kangaroos or sheep, but I didn't want the minotaurs to have herds.
(2) My seven year old daughter has decided that she might join us for a D&D game when she's eight, so this was not a daytime activity.
(3) Technically a bronze axe that was swapped for her entirely mundane steel one by the minotaur mystic who led a raid on the caravan, knocked her out in one hit and thought it seemed like a good idea.
(4) Charm was too obvious, and it came through the aasimar's genasi family.

Eightfold: Legacies

"...but for 5th edition, let's try to reclaim the grace and
dignity of the elves." - Image from D&D 5th ed. PHB

One of the big challenges in homebrewing a setting based on a substantial body of existing lore lies in finding a fresh approach to that existing lore. Maybe your dwarfs run their armouries like a fashion industry, or your elves are angry Glaswegians. D&D has a shit tonne of established races to work with, so I need to find a place for them to exist in the world of Aiaos (or else scrap them from the setting entirely, which I've done with the Gith, the Eberron-specific races and the Simic Hybrid and Vedalken from the Ravnica sourcebook.) As I noted before, all of the mortal races were created by the Young Gods in imitation of the Titans. Each race is therefore somewhat protective of its place within the world, which manifests as a fascination with legacy, which is what I hope makes this world different from others. Everyone, from the elves to the kobolds, is trying to achieve something that will make their name live forever.

For the elves, this manifests as a collective urge. It's all about the elves, not about the elf.  It was for the glory and legacy of the elven people as a whole that they created the Regime, the last really world-wide government. Unfortunately, the four elven kindreds, each aligned to a different element, each wanted a very different direction for the Regime. The high elves (earth) are the great city builders of Aiaos, while the wood elves (air) are all about preserving the natural character of the world. The sea elves (water) travel and tell stories, while the drow (fire) see their legacy in familial continuity. Thus the Regime was already somewhat on the skids when the Legion and the Horde turned up, and I've talked about the orcs already.

Dwarfs build things, but their legacy is shaped in obligations. Dwarfs never forget a promise, and obligations are passed down from parent to child, shaping future generations. Gnomes create homes that encompass their family's legacy, while halflings go to new places; their legacy, inasmuch as it has a concrete form, is measured in cartography. Kobolds... Kobolds dig.

And humans have ideas. Humans change things by having new ideas, and they do this because, of all the races, humans don't know where they come from. No-one knows who made humans, or why, so humans constantly reinvent themselves and the world around them. This is also why humans are best at creating religions which rework the plastic nature of the Young Gods into forms that are useful to them.

Eightfold: Monstrous People

"Orc is not man. Prick orc, you bleed."

Since James Holloway lately put up my requested episode of Monster Man ('The Things are Also People: Monstrous PCs',) it feels appropriate for this installment of 'Luke's world-building process' to focus on the integration of monstrous races into my early modern setting.

Your typical D&D monstrous humanoid race occupies the role of the barbaric, or even savage, tribal society existing on the fringes between more civilised state-level cultures. When the early states are forming into more sophisticated sociopolitical entities, it becomes more and more unlikely that there would be a tribe of brutal raiders living down the road, without someone sending the actual army that they have now - or the mercenaries that they can afford - to do something pointy and irrevocable about them. So what, in this scenario, are orcs - for example - all about?

I've tied this in with the broader process of world-building. I know that the mortal races were created by the Young Gods, a sprawling pantheon of relatively crap divinities that git gud by pooling their efforts and adopting combined personae. For each race then, I started by defining the gods that actually created them.

Actually, back up a step. I started by dividing them up into cardinal, secondary and tertiary races. Cardinal races - giants, dragons, elves, dwarfs, dragonborn, orcs and tortles - were the early successes, secondary races - including humans, halflings, goblinoids and gnomes - are the up and comers, and tertiary - including lizardfolk, gnolls and kobolds - have never been much cop, at least as social influencers.

Then each race gets a loose set of creator gods, a relationship with those gods, a potted history of the race since the Cataclysm broke the world and split the population across the continents, and a brief demographic overview. For example, those orcs:

The orcs were created by the Dark Lords, an unknown number of unnamed Young Gods with the goal of creating the perfect race, not to rule, but to serve. They are powerful and hardy, able to live where others would die, and made specifically to follow. They were the original horde, sent forth to conquer, and in the early part of the mortal age they gained a dark reputation for savagery, but in the midst of their conflict with the nascent Regime, the orcs turned on their creators and destroyed them. In the ensuing confusion they were pushed back into the barrens and the swamps, but they recovered and returned as a proud and independent people.

The culture of the orcs is tribal and shamanic, with each tribe fostering its own traditions. The one constant is that each tribe has a totem, an icon built up over generations and representing the soul of the tribe. In a similar fashion, individual orcs collect tokens from those that they meet, sewing them to their clothing. The tribes of northern Yethera maintained tribal banners, each chief adding a new panel so that they grew from simple pennants to great tapestries telling the tale of the tribe to those who could understand. Many of these were lost when the tribes were pushed south by the descent of the giants, to the anger and sorrow of the tribes, but some are still passed down in families within the Republic.

Orcs revere their ancestors, instead of gods. Having killed their creators they have never sought to replace them, although in the Republic they pay lip service to the Church. The traditional practices of the tribes touch on druidism or forms of arcane practice, and are suppressed by the church. Some continue the old ways in secret, while others have abandoned their communities for the ways of the Church, usually finding positions as enforcers.

I mention the orcs specifically because having written this, I rewrote the existing orc race profile, swapping out their -2 Intelligence hit for disadvantage on Wisdom saves (is this balanced? I DON'T KNOW! I've literally never used these rules before!) and giving them a survival-based feature as well.

The 'descent of the giants' mentioned here as causing the orcs to migrate into the Republic's territory is actually lifted from the canon write-up for giants, whose culture is in decline from the days when they lived in cloud palaces. On Aiaos, the giants inherited the titanic civilisation of Ostoria, but the cloud cities have degraded, periodically dropping populations of giants which force settled populations to move.

I've also done some work on the humans, because I don't just want them to be the 'default', so their deal is that they are socially and theologically adaptable, with a plasticity of belief that suits the plasticity of divinity. In other words, they are especially good at moulding a group of gods into a unified identity that suits them. They are also the ideas people, and have a destabilising influence on the orderly social structures around them. In addition, they don't have a great civilisation or ancient social order, but sometimes they pretend that they did in order to feel more important among races like the elves. The nearest thing they actually had was an emergent kingdom that went all snake-worship and turned into the Yuan-ti, which most of the humans in the Republic were refugees from anywhere from ten to no generations back.

Eightfold: On Gods

The Ogdoad of Hermopolis: Frogs and Snakes

The problem with gods in fantasy settings is that they make way too much sense. Seriously; look at any actual mythological pantheon and see how well the gods fit into neat packages. Even the Greek pantheon, which has been progressively tidied and homogenised through generations of study and retelling, has figures like Apollo, god of the sun, music, prophecy, sickness and healing, which is a pretty broad portfolio and probably still misses a whole mess of local attributions.

Obviously, there's a big difference with fantasy gods - to whit, that they are an indisputably real presence in their worlds, who did specific and quantifiable things in the fictional history - but unless they're constantly chatting to their clerics on a first name basis, there's likely to be some blurring, especially since the gods themselves in this scenario are probably unreliable narrators.

James Holloway explains most of this better than I can - certainly better than I can in a blog post - in his podcast, Patron Deities (a Patreon-only bonus for backers of his Monster Man.) It's well worth a listen, and I really don't mind shilling for it, but be warned: If you're planning to create a fantasy world any time soon, it's going to make it more complicated.

For Eightfold, I took my first inspiration from eight of the more obscure figures of Egyptian mythology: the Ogdoad of Hermopolis. These gods - four couples, each consisting of a snake-headed woman and a frog-headed man, which sounds like something out of the world of southern blues - represent the pre-creation primordial world - possibly time, water, darkness and sky or something like that; I'm not being vague here, we just don't know the specifics - in the Hermopolitan creation myth, and that's about it. I felt that the couples were a little redundant, and risked sidelining the female members of the Ogdoad, so instead I began my world with a set of four, gender-neutral, primordial gods, who created the world as an elemental progression: Na sings the sky out of the Void, Una dances the land from the sky, Muna wept and created the waters, and Amuna breathed the spark of life into existence.

And that's it. Having done this, they bog off back to the Void and leave the world to the Old Gods - who directly represent air, earth, water, fire and spirit - and the Primordial Dragons. These figures are part of a perfect, harmonious world, peopled by Titans and dragons, which is promptly fucked up by the arrival of the Colossi, alien creatures that mess with reality itself; because there's always room for Lovecraft, except in racial politics. Thus the Old Gods bugger off, the Primordial Dragons have a falling out and the world breaks, which is the traditional Reason Why Everything Sucks that most religions - real and fantastical - incorporate.

So much for the creators. This is D&D, which means clerics, and that means vaguely comprehensible deities who grant powers. (In theory, you could get your powers from incomprehensible deities, but that's more the bailiwick of the Warlock of the Great Old One, who in this setting would make their pact with a surviving Colossus.) to fill this want, I have the Young Gods, who came after the Old Gods left, but before the Dragons had their schism. There were many of these gods, some of whom did well and some of whom did not. They made the many mortal races as imitations of the Titans, and the ones whose creations flourished (mostly the elves, dwarfs, orcs, tortles and dragonborn) grew stronger. When the world broke, the races were scattered and divided. Different races recovered at different speeds - humans, goblins and kobolds did specially well, because they breed fast - and many found new gods, because there are loads of them.

'Modern' cults - like the Church - essentially worship corporate deities, made up of the gods of the various smaller cults that have gathered together under a single religious identity. This is why the clerics of a given god might have very different domain powers, and why a given god can represent so many things; what a cult calls a god is more a collective identity for a number of gods, each taking their own slant on the shared name. It's basically the divine equivalent of a shared pen name which allows, say, 'Daisy Meadows' to churn out books about fairies like a Mills and Boon author on speed, or that film in which half a dozen people all played Bob Dylan. This is more than a mere fiction, however. The nature of divinity is somewhat plastic; gods become what their worshippers need them to be, but become fixed over time, so that the collective deities answering to the name of Iuva are all Iuva, and speak as one voice, albeit with sometimes varying accents.

The Eightfold Church has - you may be surprised to hear - eight cults, four greater and four lesser. The greater cults are the ones who were part of the original alliance against the Mage Sovereigns, while the lesser were brought in after, either because they provided clear utility to the Church or because there was no way to get rid of them.

Iuva the Mage-Breaker is the god of magic, the sky and the sea, storms, authority, law and dominance.

Tinevra is the god of knowledge, teaching, truth, secrets, lies, the moon, strategy and civic planning.

Tanit is the god of war, the sun, enforcement, glory, healing, and all forms of physical and performative excellence, including sex as performative.

Ilmar is the god of crafts, the forge, civic health, trade, sports, oaths, ships, shipbuilding and golems.

Aster is the god of agriculture, tamed nature, husbandry, growth and also a big fuck you to the druids, whom the Church hates.

Morha is the god of love, ecstasy, marriage, family, loyalty, fellowship and organised crime. They are associated with sexual relationships.

Nissus is the god of joy, music, drink, art, athletics, sex as a form of expression, and riot.

Yagai is the god of death, birth, boundaries, dreams, time, and kicking in the undead or planar intruders.

They're probably still too focused, but on the other hand their cults are meant to be pretty synthetic.

Eightfold: The Church Octaval

So, why is this game called 'Eightfold'? I hear you ask, and I'm glad you did, as it plays into today's topic.

The title refers to the principle political force in the Sacred Republic: the Eternal Union of the Church of the Eightfold Way, known colloquially as the Church Octaval. This is the coalition of religious cults that formed to overthrow the previous regime - that of the Mage Sovereigns - in the War of Hubris. As well as defeating the Sovereigns of six of the seven dominions of Talahaea, the Church was able, after the war, to unite those dominions - less a chunk of the south coast that was conquered by the Drow while everyone was distracted with the internal conflict - and forge something very roughly approximating a single, centralised government.

Each of the seven provinces - the six dominions that were taken in the War, plus a section of the south coast reconquered sometime after, possibly because it was the former domain of a necromancer and the Drow just got fed up of dealing with the zombies - has its own civic government dominated by the estates - the non-magical survivors of the old aristocratic structures, who own most of the land - and the guilds - the rising merchant class who have most of the money - and there is a shared civil state structure, but all civil authorities are at the very least strongly influenced, if not openly dominated by, the Church.

The High Regent - supreme priest of the Church Octaval - is also the head of state, in which position they use the title Octarch, but the head of government is the Supreme Consul, leader of the executive branch, the Supreme Consulate. The Consulate and the Assembly of the Republic (the legislature) are elected by and from the estates and guilds of the provinces, while the Court Absolute is a collection of mutually acknowledged jurists who act as a judicial branch. Any and all of these civil positions can be, and often are, filled by priests of the Church Octaval.

The Church Hierarchy is complicated (although probably not as complicated as it ought to be.) First, there are the eight cults, each of which is actually a collection of similar cults originally worshiping many similar gods who have now been given a collective name. 

The greater cults are the ones who formed the original alliance: The Cult of Magic, the Cult of Knowledge, the Cult of War and the Cult of Crafts. The lesser cults are those who were brought into the alliance later and considered important enough not to just absorb into the greater cults, usually because they fulfilled a vital role in maintaining social order: The Cult of Agriculture, the Cult of Love, the Cult of Joy and the Cult of Death. 

Each of the greater cults is headed by one of the four Regents of the Church, whose roles are largely symbolic, but who are seen as the candidates to become the next High Regent. The lesser cults have no singular head, but all of the cults have Regents-in-Ordinary who form a governing convocation, and a number of Regents with provincial or smaller geographical remits, priests attached to great temples, smaller shrines, seminaries or to civil bodies as spiritual advisers. There are also mendicants, paladins and templars (non-paladin soldiers in service of the church,) and notably not all of the priests are clerics in the character class sense.

And then there are the Congregations. Notionally committees formed to address specific issues, some of these have become the permanent organisations known as Cardinal Congregations, which wield considerable authority within the bounds of their particular remit. Some of these are inquisitorial in nature, enforcing orthodoxy or hunting down arcane practitioners, others oversee public health initiatives; one of the congregations of the Cult of Love maintains bonds of community and has links to organised crime.

Honestly, I think that the thing I'm most proud of about this whole set up is how difficult it is to briefly explain it. As I say, it's still way too simple to simulate a real international religious organisation, but it's got much more complexity than I would usually include - the war cult is also involved with healing and dance, and while there is no simplistic 'god of love', three cults oversee sexuality as a performative, relational and expressive activity, respectively - for which I blame the influence of the Patron Deities podcast.

Eightfold

It's been a while since I posted on this blog, but since I'm designing a new game setting and people seem interested, I thought I might expand a little.

Not incidentally inspired by streaming games including Critical Role, High Rollers and the Oxventure Guild, and thanks to moving to a larger house with space for a proper table, I'm going to have a shot at running a D&D 5e game in my own, homebrewed setting. This setting is the Sacred Republic, a major power in a smallish fantasy world, which I'll talk about as a whole in another post. I kicked off with a few basic notes: That the tech level was roughly at the Renaissance, rather than the pan-mediaevalism of the 'stock' setting; that the Republic was controlled by a powerful church; and that wizards were outlawed.

The Sacred Republic (and neighbours)

These three factors all fed into each other of course. Why is the tech level higher than in most fantasy worlds? Because there isn't as much magic. Why isn't there as much magic? Because the church has outlawed wizardry. That just left the question of why wizardry was outlawed, and so it came to be that there was a period in history when the wizards ran the whole show, before the Church overthrew them. From this, I developed the history and geography of the area, before moving on to the world and a planar system - because you have to have a planar system - and a rough approximation of the balance of trade between the provinces of the Republic, because if Catan teaches us anything it's that you can't call it world-building if you don't know who's buying sheep.

Since the church is important, of course there had to be gods. In this area, matters were greatly complicated by the influence of James Holloway's Patron Deities podcast, which has made me think even more than usual about how gods and religion work. The provinces of the Republic are mostly on a European model, because while that is a bit old hat, it's also what I know and what I can write without falling back on nothin' but stereotypes. Still, I've tried to make a bit more use of the concept, so the PCs' home province is your standard Anglo-German business, but moving out they'll encounter less familiar cultures. The real trick will be making sure that the specifically non-human cultures are actually non-human, rather than just... non-European.

Those non-human cultures?

Well, because I like to challenge myself, the Halflings of Yethera (the name of the continent; the world is called Aiaos,) are originally a travelling culture, so they mustn't be too egregiously cod-Roma.

The orcs and goliaths in this world had a somewhat less advanced culture in the north, before they were pushed out by encroaching giants, and now mostly form an immigrant workforce in the Republic.

The 'beast kingdoms' to the east are where the various animal-like humanoids live. Well, apart from the Tortles, who are another nomadic race and travel in massive, mobile fortresses, driven by subterranean lizards on treadmills.

And to the south we have the Drow, who are a major mercantile and occasionally military power bloc to the south, who control trade in and out of the Great Delta by means of a massive, fuck-off chain stretched across the mouth of the bay. There are some aspects of Constantinople/Istanbul in there of course, but so far I haven't gone into detail because I want to do something unique. I'm aware that I've kind of put the black-skinned elves in what looks like North Africa; in my defence this is actually in the shadow of the crown - the highest point on what is in fact a dome-shaped world - and it thus in shade for about half the day; I just have a limited range of coast shapes in my mind.

Finally, there are the Yuan-ti. Now, they're a particularly touchy case, because Yuan-ti are canonically humans corrupted by dark, sacrificial rites, so that has to be handled with care so you don't end up with a Peter Jackson kind of situation.

And the elves are Euro as fuck, because elves are the definition of racial privilege. Specifically, High Elves are the city builders, having been the rulers of the culture before the culture before this one, while the Wood Elves are the preservers of the wilderness and thus latterly leaning towards eco-terrorism.

There are also dwarfs and gnomes, but I haven't gone into much detail on them yet, and dragonborn in the archipelago of Ladonia, who trade with the coastal province.

RPGaDAY 2017 – 'Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?', 'You can game every day for a week. Describe what you'd do!', 'What was your most impactful RPG session?', and 'What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?'

Here I catch up on the last four days of RPGaDAY. I honestly don't know if this is in the spirit of the thing, but...

'Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?'

I'm not sure how to answer this, since honestly the best covers tend to gel smoothly with the design so that you barely notice them as a discrete element of the whole. Covers that fail to capture the spirit are the ones that stand out, usually when you get about halfway in and find yourself thinking 'why are five centuries of British history all happening at once and where the actual fuck are the pirates?'

1668? Bollocks more like.

Yes, that's right long-time readers, I'm talking about first ed. 7^th Sea again, and in particular the fact that its cover very clearly promised one thing – swashbuckling adventures in the Golden Age of Piracy (1668, to be exact,) and instead delivers a mishmash of historical fantasy including the weird assumption that Elizabethan drag never went out of fashion in a pseudo-Britain where Scotland is hardcore post-Catholic Stuart and there is no Commonwealth, because after all, history doesn't consist of related events at all.

You know, it's never really occurred to me before, but I think that after the massive dissonance with the cover, the thing that stopped me getting back into 7^th Sea however many people told me it was the most amazing thing ever(1) was that its world-building grated so much. Thea is a world put together from an anachronistic assemblage of each nation's 'classic' period, without regard for the fact that history is a great, interlocking machine, and that you can't just ignore those interactions and have each nation have reached their idealised historic peak simultaneously. Also, the Eisen looked ridiculous, and I turn out to have a serious twitch about a swashbuckling game with a full-fledged magic system.

Now, it's entirely possible that there is a solid fictional history behind the cultural clusterfuck of Thea, and I hear that the second edition is a very high-class piece of game design. I'll likely never know, because with my time so brutally curtailed by the demands of adulting, it's hard for me to take a chance on something new, and harder still to take a chance on something that's burned me before.

'You can game every day for a week. Describe what you'd do!'

A whole week with no other demands? Sleep?

Okay, if I am required by the terms of whatever scenario means that this can happen to be gaming, then I'm going to hire a place in the country and put together a programme, damnit.

Mornings would be fresh air and exercise after a late start and a good-size breakfast: Nice walks or visits to local parks and places of interest with my daughter, because yes I'm taking my daughter with me. Late morning we'd have board and card games out for those back from their walks.

There would be a social, but not sit-down, lunch at about one o'clock, after which we'd begin in earnest, with two hours of 'A Game of Ponies', followed by breakout boardgaming. A light dinner would be served early, followed by a large-scale boardgame while whatever kids are with us are put to bed, followed by a late supper for the grownups and the meat of the week, a five-part campaign, probably run in a relatively freeform fashion using Fate Core rules.

'What was your most impactful RPG session?'

The climax of James Holloway's long-running Unknown Armies game was a big one, dramatically reshaping a lot of my expectations of how a campaign should go when we wrapped up by running into a burning building with no real expectation of survival and called it an unqualified win.

'What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?'

Wait; there are sessions of more than two hours? That would be nice.

(1) And there are a lot of them, and people I trust, although in truth a lot of the enthusiastic descriptions have served only to convince me that this isn't for me. One friend described the awesome pirate adventures her PC had while near-permanently shapeshifted into a cat. Weirdly, I would be more enthusiastic about a pirate swashbuckling game in which you could opt to play as the ship's cat, than one in which you could turn into a cat.

RPGaDAY 2017 – 'How do you find out about new RPGs?' and 'Which RPG have you played the most since August 2016'

Another twofer today.

New RPGs tend to come my way when Robin Farndon excitedly posts something about a Kickstarter campaign. I also see announcements from Onyx Path since backing the fascinating but virtually unplayable Mummy reboot(1), but for the most part that's a matter of curiosity.

This image is relevant to so much in this post.

Okay, I backed the game about anthropomorphic cats, but it's a game about anthropomorphic cats(3).

In broader terms, I get my news on game releases from social media, either because someone (not always Robin, sometimes it's Eleanor Hingley(4)) has taken a shine to something, or is pointing out a Lovecraftian thing to one of the serious Lovecraft completists on my friends list, or because Grant Howitt is releasing something new, blast his enviable blend of creativity and productivity(5).

So, before I get lost in my own footnotes(6), on to the second question.

As is well recorded in this blog, I don't get to game anything like as much as I would like. In the past year, the bulk of what I've managed to play has been the winding down of my online Fate game, Operatives of CROSSBOW, which suffered immensely from something I commented on on Ellie's blog the other day, and in an earlier post about letting other people design your character, which is the ill fit between the spontaneous, near-anarchic back and forth of Fate's core mechanics and the necessary formality that makes online video conferencing so much better for steering committee meetings than casual chat once you involve more than two people. The fundamental problem with CROSSBOW was embodied in the way the players declared their action. Seven in ten times, they would begin 'can I...?' The core concept of Fate is that yes you can, if you tell us how.

Well, that and I think one of my players had been burned once too often by GMs insisting that anything not explicitly mentioned during the planning session – like torches, lockpicks, a spy's pistol, or a hacker's laptop - wasn't there at all.

"All right, so can we get one of these?"

"Do you have an aspect called 'I'm a Spy' on your sheet(7)? Then keep going; I'll tell you when you need to spend a Fate point to have something."

"Cool. What about one of these?"

I'm not judging my players here. Learned behaviours are hard to escape, is my point, and especially when you add the social constraint of that screen and only have a fuzzy webcam image to judge other people's responses by when they're not speaking. There is simply no way that remote gaming of this sort will ever truly stand in for proper tabletopping; at least until immersive telepresencing becomes a thing.

This is basically the online gaming table and I wants it.

The only other game I've played any of is, as I mentioned last time, Tails of Equestria, with which we are introducing my daughter to roleplaying (well, that and Empire,) and that has barely got going thanks to our schedules.

(1) It joins old-school White Wolf's Wraith in the centre of a Venn diagram of 'fascinating mechanical conceit', 'mega-high concept' and 'there are maybe three conceivable combinations of people who could play this without it going off the fucking chain(2).'

(2) Not that I'm saying 'off the chain' is a necessarily bad play style, but it doesn't seem to be what they're going for as a default.

(3) I'm still a little disappointed that they went with Monarchies of Mau instead of presenting the cats as a communist collective under the guiding paw of Chairman Miaow, but I suppose a working game setting was higher on their list of priorities than a one-off pun.

(4) Very occasionally someone else, but like... 80% from that one household. 90% if you count the cats.

(5) Because envy, rather than because I want him to stop producing, although if he could slow down I might be able to afford to back more of his stuff. Or if I hadn't slipped and backed the cats thing. Oh, Kickstarter regret! Such grief you bring me!

(6) Seriously, they'll be in small type once I upload this, but right now they take up pretty much the same space as the text.

(7) Yes they did, pretty much for this reason.

RPGaDay – 'What Published RPG do you wish you were playing right now?' and 'What is an RPG you would like to see published?'

In the game of ponies, you win, or you
try again.

I'm only really involved in one game at the moment, and that's 'A Game of Ponies', my oft-in-hiatus campaign for the Tails of Equestria RPG. The PCs managed to not-quite destroy the Castle of Friendship when entrusted with guarding the Cutie Map, received a Cutie Compass – sort of a MLP version of the aleitheometer – and were guided west, past the mountains of Griffonstone to a city on the edge of a desert. They defeated Pie-rats on the way, although my daughter has requested no more of those, but have been stalled in Koto-Kolia for a long time now, as it's hard to find time to play around LARP and life.

For the same reason – plus my general, although obviously not absolute, aversion to licensed games – I don't really have an answer to the second question. It' hard to want something that is completely undefined, especially when it would ultimately just be another thing I don't have time to play. I'm hardly going to sit here thinking 'man, I wish there was a low magic horror-fantasy game out there,' especially if I don't have a group I might want to run that for.

So, what these two questions really highlight for me is that it's hard to get hyped when you know that you aren't going to have a game. If you've just got your Wednesday night group's schedule locked up for the next five years, you can still get excited that maybe you could slot Marvel Supers in for March 2023, but it feels very different when there's no real prospect of getting a game in at all. It's not something I know how to remedy, because in the general sense I would really like to have a game again, it's just that I'm not all that mobile and Arya's much too young to leave on her own.

Maybe I should offer to run some Tails of Equestria for her and her friends on a Sunday.

Tails of Equestria

Bit of a change from Hitman, I know.

I decided last week that I could economise elsewhere, and I was going to buy Tails of Equestria, the new My Little Pony tabletop RPG from River Horse games, created by Alessio Cavatore. I wanted to do this primarily as a means to introduce my daughter to roleplaying through a property which she is invested in, and which offers some serious opportunities for teaching her.

As RPGs go, Tails of Equestria is pretty simple, as you'd hope for a game aimed at children and families, but not simplistic. Three stats and an open-ended number of talents are each rated by die type from D4 to D20. Rolls are either to beat an opponent's roll or a static difficulty. Combat is there, but while a 'scuffle' can – indeed will – have consequences, they are never outright lethal. If you have a talent that applies to a roll, you typically get to roll an extra die and pick the better result; points off for removing a maths teaching opportunity, but more than made up for by the gain in pacing. In addition you get a quirk, which is a non-mechanical drawback that the GM can use to create interesting trouble for your character, which is one of the ways of regaining Friendship Tokens.

Friendship Tokens are the game's fate/drama mechanic, and tie into the franchise's 'friendship is magic' theme. You start with more tokens in a larger group, because more friends means more friendship, and players are encouraged to donate their tokens to help a friend out with re-rolls and other bonuses. Easily the best and most innovative mechanic in the game's simple system is that if two players are willing to pool their tokens, they can be counted as more valuable than the sum of their parts to represent the fact that Equestria almost literally runs on friendship. A little less successful is the last-ditch 'exploding hoof' mechanic, allowing for a slim chance at impossible seemingly impossible tasks, which is one of the more complex elements of the rules (which is, I think, its failing.)

Secret Ants Midget Mother Cheese.

Character creation is simple – we generated three characters in half an hour, including my daughter's first PC, Secret Ants Midget Mother Cheese(1) – and plays to the strengths of the series. Mechanical variation and niche protection is slight. Earth Ponies are strong, Pegasi can fly and Unicorns can do magic, but the game encourages open problem solving and represents many approaches with a handful of mechanics to let the story shine and to ensure that the characters will tend to be on an equal footing. After a few level-ups there is likely to be more distinction, but everyone levels up together so the PCs should always be equals, although some may choose specialism and others range, and everyone will benefit from doing things together.

Without testing the system to destruction, the game seems a good fit to the license and target age range. This may well be my favourite licensed RPG now, although it's not a high bar. 

I'll report further on the adventures of Secret Ants Midget Mother Cheese and friends and they happen.

(1) Her second choice for a kind Pegasus with 'The Stare' as her cutie mark talent, after I suggested that 'Fluttershy' was taken.

Disney Storytelling Adventures

One of Arya's presents that I'm hoping to get plenty of use out of was a double helping of Storytelling Adventures tins. Produced by Parragon publishing and largely themed around Disney products (although there is also a PAW Patrol one,) these are basically a kind of child's first roleplaying set, or perhaps an introductory version of the card game Once Upon a Time. Each tin - Arya has the Disney Princess and Marvel Avengers sets - contains a set of storybooks and a few cardboard models, and more importantly a set of character cards and storytelling dice (one each for feelings, actions, props and locations.)

To play the game, you pick a card and role one of the dice and use the combination to tell a part of a story. The next player can either pick a new card or use one that's already out, then rolls another die. Arya's not bad at it, although she has does tend to want to sort out the Tangled characters from the deck beforehand and roll the feelings die exclusively. Honestly, I think this is okay as long as we're telling stories together.

The Trouble with Skype

I was reading an article by game writer +Grant Howitt about the joys of letting your group write your RPG character for you, and why it's awesome. It's a great article, and you should probably read it. In fact, if you've only got time to read that article or mine, I recommend his.

It also brought home to me something I've not really been able to put my finger on about the limitations of online roleplaying. Despite the title of this post, I've actually been using the built-in video/voice chat function of Roll20 for my most recent game, but the same things apply. It all comes up because my last few games have all run on some variation of Fate Core mechanics, and letting other people determine aspects of your background is a main part of Fate Core character creation, and one which has never gone really well, and I think for two reasons.

The first is simple and primal: We're not used to it. It's weird and scary. These are our characters, and I* don't want you** getting your fingermarks and your anime influences and your relentless 90s comedy referencing and your Ministry of Sound all over them. I can love the idea as much as anything and there's still a snarling, territorial beast at the core of my authorial soul that resents it. I suspect that this part has been strengthened by years of LARPing in an environment in which physical investment heightened that character possessiveness - and often a sort of narrative narcissism that insists that this is their story - to an almost insane degree.

Did I say narcissism? It's actually more like a form of partial solipsism, in which each player subconsciously assumes that the game is purely about their character, converting that to the conscious notion that each character has their own story, all of which link, rather than there being one story about everybody.

Give your 'princess' concept a bigger spin than 'plays the guitar'. Image from
Tale of Tales (2015, Archimede Pictures)

Now, having said all of that, the problem in Fate Core is almost the inverse - you are supposed to include another PC in your backstory, and people get just as twitchy about doing that as they do about letting other people include their character.

Either way around, what's the solution to that? Time, patience and the millions of years of evolution that allow us to confront our subconscious urges, basically. It's all fixable if we'e willing to go with it.

But the second problem... There's the rub. The second problem is the medium we're using. Any form of video conferencing is a poor substitute for personal interaction on a lot of levels, from sound and picture quality, to the exclusion of a whole lexicon of body language, to the fact that you don't get to share a meal and hug. Perhaps the most restrictive aspect, however, is that you can't crosstalk, and you can't have separate conversations; at least not organically. It inhibits the back and forth of conversation, and you can't make eye contact. There's no real way to signal your desire to speak other than shouting out, and if you can overcome your awkwardness enough to do that you can bet that the person you're interrupting will be pissed as hell, even if you are interrupting to make do something that will make them look cooler or prevent them from opening the door to certain death because they learned the two guard problem from Labyrinth. That sort of awkwardness is inimical to the sort of free exchange that makes such collaborative character creation both fun and involving.

There's probably a whole other article on video conferencing and player trust, but competition for the single communication channel has a deleterious effect on player and character interaction in the best of groups, and genuinely collaborative character generation needs a level of free and spontaneous interaction that let you feel comfortable shouting 'secretly a revolutionary socialist!' as the idea comes to you, instead of waiting for a free channel as the idea gradually becomes more and more awkward and eventually you decide it's a terrible idea and just sit by while someone suggests 'really into flower arranging' because it feels like a safe bet.

As a side problem, the limited time typically allotted to an online game - I'm lucky if we can get in three hours per session - tends to result in everyone coming to the 'table' with their ideas largely formed, simply because we lack the setting for people to talk, pass books back and forth, and write at the same time.

So, having named the problem, what's the solution?

Well, for starters, we need to be willing to try things. We need to be brave, and willing to give up our impulse to play the mechanically optimised character if that's not the point of the game***. On this subject, I refer you back to the original article.

On a more specific level, if we're going to be communicating largely online, then we need to work out better ways to do it; a new etiquette for social video conferencing. After all, it's not as if we don't have tools at our disposal. Explicitly use voice chat to encourage simultaneous responses. Employ a virtual ticket system. Avoid rigid turn taking, as that could be awkward if someone doesn't have an idea, or if someone else already said there. If two people present 'secretly a ninja' in simultaneous text chat, that's a vote of confidence in the concept. If one person suggests it and the other goes after them and didn't have any other ideas, then the second person feels uninspired, even though the first may also have nothing else in mind.

In conclusion, we're not as tech-savvy as we'd like to think we are. This is still terra incognita for us, and we're going to need to start blazing some serious trails if conference roleplaying is ever going to be the alternative that so many responsible, hard-working adults need.

* By which I could equally mean you.
** By which I could equally mean me.
*** I'm infamously bad at optimising, but I'm not saying that y'all need to get with my programme. It's not that I don't try to optimise, I'm just bad at it, and incompetence is no substitute for intent.

Confessions of a Dormant Gamer

I really miss gaming.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not completely gameless. There's No Rest for the Wicked, which is great, and my online Fate game 'Operatives of CROSSBOW' is a lot of fun, but there's something about hanging out, sharing snacks, cooking giant pans of pasta and making endless pots of tea that I really, really miss (and it's not really the tea.)

Obviously, the golden age of tabletop roleplaying is at University. Your time is largely your own, you all live close together and you have somewhere to game where you generally won't disturb anyone else (especially not if, like me, you end up spending two out of three years living next to the noisiest room on campus and directly above the bar.) After that, work is a bit of a shock to the system, but in the end it was my increasing involvement in IoD LARP that did for my tabletopping. I just didn't have any more time for writing games or in many cases for playing them.

Since then, I've had some success with skype games, but they always seem to fade out more easily. Something about the disconnect means that people see them as less of a commitment, and it's harder for the rest of the group to have a separate conversation - whether planning your next moves or just shooting the breeze - if one or two PCs are monopolising the action for a time. As a result, although I love 'CROSSBOW', I do find myself hankering to add an in-person tabletop game to my roster.

Sadly, I live in the middle of nowhere and I don't drive, and I and all my friends are now - as much as we might wish to deny it - middle aged professionals*. At my last attempt to pull together a tabletop game, I couldn't find one night a month to assemble more than two people at once. I'm also very bad at meeting new people, so finding a group in Littleport would be a massive source of stress for me.

I wish I had some grand conclusion, but I don't. I just really miss gaming.

* Okay; some of them are young professionals, but for the most part we have jobs and the other things that keep a body from hauling an hour and a half across the country to play an evening of Pathfinder.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 30 - Who do you love?

Prompt: Favourite roleplaying celebrity

TV's - well, the web's - Mr Games.

So, what are we talking about here? Celebrities who roleplay or celebrity roleplayers?

Wil Wheaton is the poster boy, I guess, and I have a lot of time for the former Wes Crusher. I confess, I was mean about him as a youth, but it's not really his fault; I was bound to hate a character who was supposed to relate to me but whom even I thought was a swotty creep (and I would have been deemed a swotty creep by most outside observers.) With Tabletop and later Titansgrave, he's done a lot to move the gaming profile up from a subset of general geekdom to pretty much blanket geek coverage. He's also done a lot to out a great many other celebrities, some nerd, some more mainstream, as gamers.

Diesel & Dench

Advanced Diesel & Dench

About as mainstream as they come are Vin Diesel and even more so his #1 roleplaying disciple Judi
Dench. According to the story - nay, the legend -the Iron Giant hisself taught M to play D&D during the filming of The Chronicles of Riddick in order to illustrate what an Elemental was, which I have to say is hands down the coolest thing about The Chronicles of Riddick and one of the coolest things about Vin Diesel. Dench... well, she's lived a lot of life, so I'm not going to rule out her having done cooler. She handed Bond his balls at the age of 60 for one thing.

Roleplayers have slightly less
swanky headshots.

Okay, Laws knows how to headshot.

And then there are the celebrity roleplayers, the rock stars of the industry, chief among them I guess being Ken Hite and Robin Laws, game writers, game bloggers, podcasters and just plain gamers. They have the same sort of bubbling brains as my man James Holloway, of whom I spoke yesterday, which makes their writing always fascinating, even when it doesn't have immediate use.

Come back tomorrow for the last day of RPGaDay 2015.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 29 - Friendship!

Prompt: Favourite RPG website/blog

So, I think that just from having referenced it so often, this one goes to James Holloway's Gonzo History Gaming. It's seems a little damning with faint praise, as I don't really follow any others, but it is also a grand read and covers a nice range of miniatures and history in and about gaming. James is a bit of a renaissance man and his blog is occasionally brief, but never less than interesting. I also heartily recommend his non-gaming blog, Gonzo History Project and created that most beloved of webcomic characters, Robot Face Smith, History Bastard.

My remaining posts are scheduled to release each morning, as I'll be spending time with my family, but won't be shared to G+ unless I can grab a moment to do so and work out how to do so on my phone.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 28 - Hello Darkness my old friend...

Prompt: Favourite game you no longer play

Not the edition I knew, but a better pic than I
could find for 1st ed.

I loved the old West End Star Wars. It was one of my first games and it was a lot of fun. The mechanics were... interesting (progression went +1, +2, add another D6 to your roll, then +1 again) and the game contained absurd amounts of detail on different types of Stormtrooper armour, although since our GM was into action movies we could do more damage with a shotgun than a blaster cannon. We also had a habit of crashing starships (the Aluminium Falcon and the Millennium Dustbin both bit the dirt) and stripping them of weapons, heedless of encumbrance, recoil and common sense.

Fun fact; all four of the soldiers on this
cover are the GM from that Star Wars
game.

Oh, yeah; we were 12 at this point, so things got pretty Gonzo. we basically bimbled around drinking too much and shootin' Stormtroopers. We had to take out a boy band at one point; the whole thing was oddly reminiscent of early Schlock Mercenary, but more... 12. I mean, my character was a bounty hunter called Loki 'Spanners' Amenhotep, also known as 'the Bastard', which probably tells you a lot about how assiduously we stuck to the established themes and continuity of Star Wars.

Ah, the wild excess and joy of youth. It was dumb as rocks and fun as anything.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 27 - Strange Alchemies

Prompt: Favourite idea for merging two games into one

Yeah... no.

So... Hmm.

Man, Age of Sigmar has really turned me off this concept. Even my fondly planned campaign in which WFRP PCs lead a defence of the Empire against a force of crashed Imperial Guardsmen fallen through the Warp Gates seems less appealing in the light of Games Workshop's reboot of the Warhammer line, apparently to a) simplify the rules and b) make it more 40K. Successive editions having already transformed the Old World from a culturally blurred pseudo-Renaissance fantasy setting into a planet of nation-hats, they've now gone and blown the entire planet up (you maniacs. God damn you all to hell. It's a madhouse.) and replaced it with some sort of high-concept God-Realm where colossal superhumans punch each other across the dimensions and no-one is playing Blood Bowl.

Are you happy, Age of Sigmar? You killed Blood Bowl.

That was a great mashup though: An American football simulation and Warhammer? I wish 40K had something like that*, especially now I'm playing in a 40K LARP. What sports do 40K citizens follow? I think we know that Ciaphas Cain was good at sports, but not what he played. Probably the Schola Progenium equivalent of the Eton Wall Game**. Maybe a lot of field hockey with chainblades on the sticks, or fire, in the case of the Sororitas novitiate. Paintball assassin with real guns. Hot lava on the gantries over the furnaces.

The few times sport is mentioned in the source material it's almost universally in the context of hunting something immense and malignant in the local fauna. Or war. Maybe the Imperium is actually like the upper classes and the only sports are huntin', shootin' and fishin'. On the other hand, you can imagine inter-platoon soccer matches played by the enlisted men of the Guard, with the ultimate honour going to any team that can beat a Stormtrooper Eleven. And do the Navy play zero-G volleyball along the vastness of a cargo bay?

Death Worlders have a sport; they call it 'staying alive'. The rules are pretty simple, and no-one wins***.

Now Orks; Orks know about sport, I'm sure. Squig fights, squig races, kustom kart racing, 'itting each uvver 'til someone remembers dey've won. I guess the Dark Eldar have sports, but I'm not sure ritual bikini murders and slave beating have a place in a respectable live game. The Eldar must have sports, a Way of the Athlete which they spend centuries obsessing over before moving on to something else; perhaps they play some form of insanely acrobatic touch kabbadi. The Tau... The Tau probably have a sport where both sides win.

Tomorrow I'll be talking about a thing to do with roleplaying (preparation!) Favourite game I no longer play (thank you other tab.)

* The nearest they had was Gorkamorka, a skirmish game with lots of vehicles, but alas not a racing game, and they dropped a bridge - well, orbital strike - on that one.
** From Wikipedia: "The main game consists of the two sets of players forming a rugby-style scrummage (called a "Bully") in which neither team may "furk" the ball." Blood Bowl almost seems more reasonable.
*** Actually in fairness, we did create 'Arborian chain disc frisbee' last game.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 26 - Take a Look Around

Prompt: Favourite inspiration for your game

In a word, everything. Literally anything can be a source of inspiration: fairy tales, other people's fiction, anthropology, folklore, history, oh my, history.

Not to be a broken record, but you'll find better words on using the real world and history as inspiration on James Holloway's video for today and the same Ken Hite interview I linked yesterday. In particular, James talks about the denseness of stuff that only comes from reality, and Hite about exploiting the alternate history fictioneer's greatest natural resource, the instinctive human propensity for pattern recognition, the faculty that lets us see a man in the moon, gods in rock formations, and Illuminati in the White House.

As a specific aside, I submitted an entry to the RPG Geek GUMSHOE One-Sheet contest that was inspired by the real world and which really exemplifies the sort of thing Hite discussed in the interview. I started with the Pech Merle caves in France, which are full of monstrous - eerily Cthuloid - paintings and rock formations, and as I was writing it discovered that a) Pech Merle is down the road from the 'Chateau du Diablo', and b) the timing of the discovery and excavation of the caves matched almost perfectly with the dates for events in 'The Call of Cthulhu'.

Anyway, as stealing from real life has been done, I'm going to talk about stealing other people's fictional ideas instead. It's a cheap trick - although sometimes a profitable Dan Brown - but so long as I'm just writing stuff for me and my friends to enjoy, I don't feel any real shame in giving my Geist game a creepy fenland district that mashes up Silent Hill, Ravensholm from Half Life 2 and a creepy fenland village from James Holloway's Unknown Armies game. If I were writing it as a novel I intended to publish I imagine I would be rather more coy, but these are games and not for publication.

Did I say Dan Brown*? I meant 'practice'.

I do feel that it behooves me to make enough changes that the original is hard to discern. It's one thing for someone to look back and be all 'oh; like in...', but if they're thinking that from the get go, then they're more likely to be thinking about the original than your version while they approach that plot and at that point you might as well just sit down and watch the movie, because easily recognisable borrowings never come on their own. You can't take one thing and leave the rest; once identified it brings with it a lot of other expectations, themes and atmosphere. If you have a blue guy who teleports, you'd better be prepared for your players to expect the X-Men and to act accordingly. If on the other hand you borrow the Quartet for the Dusk of Man from Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slicked Precipice of Darkness, change the words and scribble down your own cosmology and god names, you've basically just got a moody piece of verse to pass down and the loose framework for a game, and the players probably won't be anticipating fruit fuckers or Gabe showing up to punch a god in the face.

And again, while it would be cheeky to use that plot and that altered verse in something I was publishing for money, I don't feel too bad using it to entertain my friends for a few evenings a month.

Tomorrow is day 27 and mutant hybrid games. See you then.

* The irony is that the fiction he cribs from tends to be derived from the methods employed by Holloway and Hite. There's that pattern matching again.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 25 - Stop! Hammer time

Prompt: Favourite revolutionary game mechanic

"It's murder. And somebody's responsible."

So, there are two of these that I want to talk about, and they both work by taking the crunch of the system and making it visible for dramatic effect. Cards on the table (that's not the mechanic) I'm not enough of a student of mechanics to know which ones are truly revolutionary, so bear with me if this is old hat to you.

The first is in my old fallback, Fate Core. When you roll, you always know what your opponent rolls, or what the static difficulty is, and once you've seen the outcome, you can then choose whether to spend Fate points. This means that you never blow your Fate points, a scarce resource, on a roll that comes up against you anyway, and gives the players - and the GM, who also has Fate points to spend - much more direct control over the action. This is of course on top of invoking for effect and creating advantages, both of which are means by which the players can control the scene.

GUMSHOE has a more adversarial feel than Fate - the GM is specifically setting puzzles for the player characters to solve, or not - but its investigative focus is highlighted  by the division of skills into General Abilities, which use a regular pass/fail mechanic, and Investigative Abilities, which always work at least perfectly, maybe even better, thus ensuring that - unless the GM has screwed up and included a need for an ability no-one in the party has - you always have all the information you need to solve the mystery, although you may yet fail to do so.

-

I know I put this up before, but seriously, that is a lot of fucking
cards and tokens.

It's a lot harder to come up with revolutionary mechanics than it used to be back when THAC0 was the height of innovation and, indeed, still seemed like a good idea somehow. Those were the heady days, when drama points were unheard of and non-cuboid polyhedral dice were so alien as to give HP Lovecraft conniptions, before roll-and-keep, playing card mechanics, custom dice, custom card decks and - gods help us - 10div5*. The sprawl of cards and tokens and dice that, while six sided, are completely useless for anything else due to their custom symbols used in Fantasy Flight's Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition are perhaps the ultimate evolution in terms of complexity, but also something of an evolutionary dead end** in a world in which simplicity (and, given the ever growing number of available products, affordability) is increasingly preferred***.

In this interview from yesterday, Ken Hite quite coincidentally**** sums up this point by explaining that the industry is moving away from the model of games as super-expensive magazine series for which you must get a loyal audience who will keep buying the stuff so that they can keep playing the One True Game, and towards looking at games as individual small press books, with each as a largely stand-alone product that only needs to sell itself. This is all tied in with the OSR***** and the increased presence and relevance of self-publishing, epublishing and PoD through outlets like DriveThruStuff, and of course Kickstarter, making it increasingly likely that the garden variety gamer will have an eclectic mix of stuff rather than a huge, coherent set of core and expansion books for a single game.

Anyway, come back tomorrow for Day 26 and my favourite inspiration.

* The system for the new World of Darkness Mind's Eye Theatre live games, which had the revolutionary effect of turning experts into barely competent amateurs and dilettantes into useless assholes. In fairness some of this came down to implementation, but combat was a joke.
** Like a giant, sabre-toothed cat that can take down any threat but needs to eat a mammoth a day just to keep get up in the morning.
*** Like some diminutive, lippy primates jeering at the flailing death throes of the once-mighty sabre-tooth while they pass around a mango.
**** Man, if I could afford to pay Ken Hite to drop apposite references into interviews for me to point to, I would just buy my daughter all the tiny, adorable Frozen dress up clothes I could find. Sorry, Ken.
***** I expect. Honestly, whenever I start to talk authoritatively in these things, you can be 90% sure I'm blagging it. The other 10% is educated guesswork.