Tuesday Night Yoon-Suin: Session 8

Adventurers Present:

• Marich, Level 2 Magic-User [played by David]
• Anil, Level 2 Cleric of Manpac [played by Patrick]
• Manjeet, Level 1 Fighter [played by Nathan]
• Retainers: Nagendra I, Nagendra II, Lokendra, Sinba

The session had ended last week with the adventurers hiding out with two Quaggoth sisters while invisible hounds roamed outside. After the hounds had gone they spent some time discussing the layout of Sangmenzhang with these sisters, but Manjeet managed to annoy them and a fight ensued: they were both killed. The players then ransacked the room and discovered a silver belt, studded with aquamarines. 

Anil, however, had disobeyed and angered his god, Manpac, by going against his command to ally himself with the Quaggoths. Manpac commanded him to clear Sangmenzhang of the undead dwarfs which infested it, to appease his anger. 

What followed was an extended exploration of the flooded area of the first level of the citadel, as a way to work around and find dwarven ghosts. This was largely unsuccessful, but a larger portion of Sangmenzhang was now mapped, a shaft down to another level discovered, and some more of its history made known - the group found what seemed to be an old chapel, with grooves worn into the floor from generations of dwarfs praying before the altars to the Yak and Scorpion gods. They also hit upon the good idea of scooping up some of the luminous jellyfish in the flooded area in a wine bottle and using them as an alternative light source, which came in handy tied to a rope and lowered into holes.

They also encountered giant exploding snails, another giant cave locust, and more flesh-eating maggots. Eventually they came across a barricade, which they dismantled, and discovered another adventuring party hiding in a room. Three of these four were dead, and one dying. They were emaciated, pale, and with blood and mucous pouring from their noses and mouths: suspecting disease or gas, the PCs and their retainers covered their faces as they explored the room. They found some treasure in chests - over 700 gold pieces - that these adventurers had apparently recovered. The one man still alive, apparently a magic-user, was barely able to communicate, but he managed to utter dire warnings about strange demonic hounds roaming Sangmenzhang and breathing poison gas.

The group decided to leave, taking the treasure and the dying man with them. Some efforts were made to heal him, but failed, yet he managed to cling to life [DM's note: he kept rolling 20s on his saving throws versus poison]. They decided to take him to the Walung monastery - the headquarters of the strange holy order who practice self-mummification - to see if they would heal him.

They carried him on a platter into the mountains, following what they hoped was the way to the monastery, along a hill path through thick cedar and bamboo forest. The path eventually forked, leading NW and SW; they went NW and the next day came across a strange, walled garden set away from the path. This was overgrown, and the gate long locked and rusted, but still contained chrysanthemum and rhodedendron bushes, and a strange, purple-breasted peacock and some peahens. The PCs elected to spend the night here, and push on the next day. 

But the next morning they asked the dying man - whose name, they found out, was Madhav - if he knew where the Walung monastery was, and he told them that, actually, it was to the SW. [DM's note: tee hee] On a whim, Anil decided that "rather than having wasted a day coming all this way" it was worth investigating the garden further. Famous last words. On entry to the garden, the peacock revealed itself to be something else entirely - with its tail, it hypnotized and paralyzed all except Manjeet and Nagendra I, who charged it and found themselves pecked and slowly petrified to stone. Things could have gone terribly, but the hypnotized ones managed to escape the garden after a time and set up a shooting gallery on top of the garden wall, correctly surmising that the peacock could not get up at them. They gradually shot it to death with slings and arrows, taking turns climbing onto the wall top to fire, and helping each other get down when petrified by the thing's tail. 

They were now faced with the conundrum of what to do with the petrified Manjeet (and Nagendra I). He would be too heavy and awkward to move, but they hoped that the Walung order might be able to save him. They decided to go back on themselves and head SW as quickly as possible. 

This they did, and the next day came across a clearing in the forest, containing a grassy mound covered in flowers. This was inhabited by an (apparently) friendly witch called Omrita, who told them that the peacock thing was actually a peacockatrice, owned by an ancient wizard called Chokgyur who had died centuries ago. Anil immediately - and quite logically - jumped to the conclusion that this was an undead wizard, in which he was entirely correct. The witch told him that Chokgyur was probably dormant at the moment, if the garden was overgrown, but one could never be sure when he would wake. She also said that the Walung might help them, but would probably demand a geas in return. 

In return for helping gather hallucinogenic mushrooms, she also agreed to read the slate book written in Late Sangmenzhang Dwarfish that they had discovered in the secret chamber in the citadel. She told them that it was a journal, and an account of the latter days of the citadel. The dwarfs had apparently divided into two hostile groups, one worshipping the Yak god, the other the Scorpion god, and they had fought a bitter civil war, committing horrible acts of torture against each other and summoning demons to fight alongside them in battle inside the mountain. The dwarf who had written the journal had left "the secret way", but did not detail how - this explained how the chamber the journal had been discovered in had been locked from the inside, with no apparent way out. 

The witch Omrita also told the group about a temple to the Scorpion god high in the mountains, where the necklace of the dwarf king Tenzin II could be found - though she heavily implied this would be very dangerous. She speculated that the Scorpion god and the Yak god were not really deities, but ancient spirits of the mountains which had been there even before the dwarfs had arrived. 

She allowed the group to try her hallucinogenic mushrooms. Marich and Sinba partook. David, Marich's player, rolled the reaction dice and got a mischievous/crazy face, which he interpreted as a bizarre trip showing visions of himself riding a raptor around the mountaintops. Sinba got a happy face, which Patrick interpreted as involving her father sitting her on a ledge above the valley and explaining to her that all of creation belonged to her. Marich would be able to cast Charm Person as a one-off, for one day only, the next day. Sinba would be able to cast Faerie Fire. 

Thoughts: A mixed session. There was a little bit of friction at the beginning, because - for some entirely unknown and unjustified reason, Nathan got the bizarre impression that I was trying to kill all of the PCs. Amazing, I know. At one stage there were also allegations of fixing dice rolls, from a number of parties. It was generally good natured, but still...tensions rose. The second half of the session went much better - though Nathan was again unfortunate to have a character removed from the action, not by death this time but by being turned to stone. 

There were some good creative episodes. Using the luminous jellyfish as a light was a great idea, as was correctly concluding that the peacock was in a walled garden for a reason - it couldn't get up on the wall, and hence the worst it could do to somebody on the wall-top would be to hypnotize them with its tail for a brief period. Eventually it would die from missile fire. I was also pleased with having Patrick and David narrate hallucinogenic visions for Sinba and Marich after eating the mushrooms.

I am going to have to think of a way to punish Anil, Patrick's PC, for failing to obey Manpac. He should have been forced into a difficult dilemma - to do what Manpac wanted and banish undead dwarfs, or leave Sangmenzhang for the Walung monastery to help Madhav, and risk further wrath from his god. Instead that got forgotten about in the heat of the peacockatrice fight and its aftermath. I owe the peacockatrice idea to Melan, regular poster at rpg.net and therpgsite.com, finest gamer in Hungary and author of the infamous "Tyranny of Fun" posts (see e.g. here and here; for some reason I can't find the original enworld post). 

Tuesday Night Yoon-Suin: Session 7

[I promise this blog isn't going to become just actual play reports after 4 years of studiously avoiding them. I just have almost no time to devote to RPGs at the moment except the weekly session.]

Adventurers Present:

• Marich, Level 2 Magic-User [played by David]
• Anil, Level 1 Cleric of Manpac (eunuch) [played by Patrick] 
• Manjeet, Level 1 Fighter [played by Nathan]
• Retainers: Binod, Nagendra I, Nagendra II, Fat Sanjam, Lokendra, Sinba

Marich, Anil and Manjeet began plotting ways to placate the wizardess/whore Jharanda, and also get their revenge on Marich II, who they suspected of stealing from them. Eventually Manjeet and Marich decided to write a message which they sent to Jharanda through the daughter of the owner of their lodgings, a girl called Tyree. In it, they promised to tell the wizardress about one of the clay creations of the archmage Gulvedra, which they had encountered hiding at the Old Watchtower in the South, as a quid pro quo for letting Anil off the hook for annoying her. As yet, they have not received a response. 

Marich II was dealt with expediently: when the hirelings gathered together the next day he was exposed and humiliated in front of all of them, told to hand back the chain mail and weapons that had been bought for him, and removed from the PCs' employ. [DM's note: I was amazed that they didn't take him into the forest and beat him up or worse, which would have been far more in keeping with their escapades so far.] To replace him, and also Padma who had been slain, they hired a tall thin spearman called Lokendra, and a rather ugly teenage girl called Sinba, to fill out their ranks of underlings.

They then went to the Guild of Sages: Anil had decided that his god, Manpac, had preordained his previous encounter with the galeb duhr in the forest, and he wanted to know more about the galeb duhr and their origins. He agreed to provide a partial map of the first level of Sangmenzhang to the sage Man, in return for information on the galeb duhr. He learned that it was very unusual to see one in the forest, and that they usually inhabited the high mountains where men found it difficult to breathe. They wanted above all to merely survive - to exist in the face of adversity, like a mountain itself. Man speculated that the Yak Folk, the malevolent slavers of the peaks, would know more of them. The PCs left with curiosity piqued.

They decided to make their way to Sangmenzhang. On the way they encountered a group of pilgrims heading to the nearby Walung monastery; they later learned that the Walung were an order of meditative healers who practice the art of self-mummification to gain eternal (un)life. 

They entered Sangmenzhang through their secretly-discovered back entrance, from which they had ejected the Feathered Men. Here, they set about constructing an elaborate set of barricades from bamboo, allowing them to use the Feathered Men's cave as a kind of base of operations in the old citadel. From there, they set about exploring the immediate chambers. Almost instantly they encountered a group of hideous, flesh devouring maggots, which nearly killed Manjeet, Sinba and one of the Nagendras by released burrowing worms into their bodies which had to be cut out with knives and much loss of blood; but in the maggot chamber they recovered 8 big clay pots containing 784 coins of blended silver and gold. While they were busy dragging their wounded and the money to their base, they were set upon by a giant cave locust which they cornered and stabbed to death.

They stayed in their base for a few days, licking their wounds, although the fights had taken Anil to Level 2, and he was now able to use the power of Manpac to aid with healing. While resting in the cave they were forced to drive off or kill four pandas which ate their mule, tied up in the bamboo groves below; they decided to try to sell the panda bones and skins in Silaish Vo next they were there. They also, at night, heard something big and humanoid moving through the forest; the next day they found big footprints and a path of broken canes of bamboo, but decided to press on deeper into Sangmenzhang instead.

They came across a small chamber with the door barred from the inside, which they hacked down with axes, to discover what had once apparently been a bed chamber. It was a mystery as to how it could be barred from the inside with nobody in it. They discovered an ancient book made out of slate hidden in the wall, covered in strange circular script, and decided to take it with them.

They also discovered a group of strange gibbon-men, who they quickly slew; exploring further, they discovered another chamber in which they found many branches and twigs and broken egg-shells: they surmised that this was the place where the Feathered Men had been rearing young, and they speculated that the gibbon-men may have smashed the eggs.

Pressing deeper, the party came to a narrow corridor with a door at the end. While decided whether to open it, they were set upon from the rear by strange creatures: shaped like large dogs, they were nearly invisible and perfectly transparent, with only a vague outline indicating their presence. Bunched up in the corridor as the party was, things looked bleak: these strange dog-things killed Binod, in the rear, and then tore out Fat Sanjam's bowels, filling the corridor with blood and faeces. Manjeet, at the front by the door, had no choice but to open it and try to escape that way - but discovered the chamber behind was already inhabited by two very large, very intimidating female humanoid creatures of indeterminate origin. Desperate, the PCs begged to be allowed to shelter from the dog-things, while their remaining hirelings kept the hounds at bay with spears. Eventually the two female creatures allowed them to enter the chamber and shut and bar the door. 

The two creatures revealed themselves to be sisters, Quaggoths from the mountains, who had fled their clan and were hiding in Sangmenzhang. They explained that they had encountered the invisible dog-things before, and thought them demons who the ancient dwarves of Sangmenzhang had disturbed from the depths of the earth shortly before their downfall. Anil managed to strike up a relationship of a kind with these two Quaggoth sisters - mostly by abject begging - and they agreed an arrangement with the PCs, that they would cooperate to try to drive monsters from this area of the citadel and make it a more safe dwelling place for them. 

Thoughts: A fun session, with plenty of derring-do, some secret doors, some retainer death, and pandas. Patrick also seemed genuinely chuffed about making level 2 and finally being able to cast Cleric spells. The final tense crescendo - a perfectly timed random encounter - just goes to show that it isn't always all about bathos.

Tuesday Night Yoon-Suin: Session 6

[No session last week, because of work-related business. Unperturbed, we picked up where we left off, with Eki Ulele dead, and Marich and Anil camping alone in the forest, hiding from bandits and giant bees.]

Adventurers Present:

• Marich, Level 1 Magic-User [played by David]
• Anil, Level 1 Cleric of Manpac (eunuch) [played by Patrick]
• Manjeet, Level 1 Fighter [played by Nate]
• Retainers: Padma, Binod, Nagendra I, Nagendra II, One-toothed Marich ("Marich II"), Fat Sanjam

On character death, I am usually very quick to bring a replacement in for the player concerned, as soon as their new character is rolled-up. So we had Manjeet, Eki Ulele's replacement, appear as if from nowhere. He is a human fighter and son of a tea plantation owner, and Nate rolled a ridiculously luck set of stats, with a 16, a couple of 13s, and only one score under 9. He also got 8 on his hit point roll. Manjeet was travelling through the mountains on the way from his family's plantation in Sughd, with the aim of delivering some papers to the Baburam family, a clan of minor oligarchs in Silaish Vo. He more-or-less immediately threw in his lot with Marich and Anil when they promised him gold and glory, as one would expect. 

The three made it back to Silaish Vo unscathed and unmolested by bandits. It was pretty clear that return to Sangmenzhang was off the agenda for now, and revenge against Manesh and his bandit clan top of the 'to do' list. (Another benefit of character death in a game: it pisses the players off and adds that extra emotional bite.) After some rest at the Madrassah of Arcanea, where the PCs have their lodgings, they immediately began investigating Manesh's history, and were introduced to Jhalak Dorji, one of the Oligarch's factotums, who told them that Manesh was known to the authorities and wanted. He promised the PCs 500 gold pieces for Manesh dead, and 1000 for him alive. They immediately set about hiring goons to aid them in bringing him down.

This time they meant business, and not only recruited 6 underlings, but kitted them out with chain mail, shields, and various weapons, spending a sizeable wedge of their gold hoard to do so. These 6 were Padma (long beard, short bow), Binod (midget, dagger), Nadaraja I (red hair, javelins), Nadaraja II (no nose, spear), Sanjam (fat, spear), and Marich II (one tooth left, sabre). While in the market, however, they were stopped by a woman who had noticed their large expenditure. This was Tara Dev, a tax collector for the Oligarch, who told them that in future any amount of gold they gained for themselves would have to be taxed - at 50%. This was in return for the safety and comfort offered by the Oligarch to all those living in Silaish Vo. 

They set off into the mountains, heading back to Manesh's cave under the waterfall. They hatched a plan to, essentially, lie in wait by the cave to ambush people coming and going. Eventually five bandits appeared with a mule and a cow, heading towards the cave - they were obviously returning from a raid. After a brief skirmish the bandits were all slain to a man, with minimal harm to the PCs and their motley crew. But one of the bandits managed to run into the forest and yell to alert those in the cave to intruders before he got an arrow through the gullet. 

Manesh and 8 of his men sallied forth, and a lengthy battle ensued. But the players seem to have learned their lesson: combat is war, not sport. They had stacked the odds heavily in their favour by properly kitting out their underlings, and they used pretty smart tactics, with spear-wielding troops using their better reach over machete-wielding bandits, to take down Manesh and a few of his men; the rest fled. In return, only Padma was killed. 

The PCs left Marich II to search the bodies of the slain bandits, while they searched the cave and discovered a sizeable treasure hoard, including two scrolls. One, Anil discovered, contained a prayer to ward against the undead. The other was magical, and Marich would have to wait to return to Silaish Vo to discover its properties. Triumphant, they headed back to the city.

On the way, burdened with treasure and slowed by their captured mule and cow, they entangled with some giant centipedes and also came across a strange boulder-man in the forest: a galeb duhr. He was not violent, and simply insisted on being alone, offering the view that, rather than kill bandits, one could simply wait for them to die. He revealed himself to be thousands of years old.

Back in Silaish Vo they left their cronies to their own devices while they went to get their reward, which Jhalak Dorji duly paid. This, along with the treasure trove they had recovered from the cave, was enough to push Marich up to Level 2. This was the first level-up of the campaign. He got 1 extra hit point for his trouble, and the kudos of being the only PC who is still alive from the start. At the Madressa of Arcaneum he managed to persuade friendly Sujan, one of the instructors, to look at his scroll - it turns out it is a charm offering protection from beast who can become men, and men who can become beasts.

Anil decided to hire a replacement for the slain hireling Padma. On discussion with Liangyu Hui, the desert troll tea-shop owner, he learned that the hireling Marich II had been spending gold in sizeable amounts at the nearby whorehouse. This, Anil immediately (probably correctly) surmised, was because Marich II had been left alone with the bandit corpses after the battle, and had pilfered their gold for himself. He summoned  Marich and Manjeet to help, and went to the whorehouse to lay down the law.

The whorehouse is a pyramid structure, and is owned by a madam called Jharana. The PCs tried to get her to reveal where Marich II was, but she proved uncooperative, maintaining that she did not like to tell strangers information about clientele. Anil threatened her with his club and she became annoyed and asked them to leave, threatening them with powerful friends and emphasising things would turn out badly if he persisted. He ultimately left, with the idea of preaching against prostitution outside and scaring away all her clients until she cooperated, but Marich decided discretion was called for and slept him. 

Manjeet then went to ask Liangyu Hui about Jharana, to ask how he might make good and apologise. Liangyu Hui told him that Jharana had many extremely important and powerful "friends" in the city, and that Anil's life was probably in danger now he had annoyed her. But he also revealed that Jharana is also a wizardress of some repute, and is always interested in new knowledge, magicks, strange artefacts and documents, and so on. Such a gift might ameliorate her.

Some thoughts on the session: it was nice to see Marich level up, and good to see the players get revenge on Manesh, who was after all responsible for some amount of heartache. The players are also learning a bit more about the setting now, interacting with some of the more important NPCs in Silaish Vo, and getting to know the lay of the land. They are also probably getting an understanding that generally, there is no such thing as "excessive force" in D&D and only fools fight fair. 

They came up with some creative ideas, too. Marich used his only sleep spell in the first bandit encounter, and after that came up with the notion of using his mirror to reflect sunlight in the eyes of the enemy to distract them, which I ruled would reduce a bandit's effective AC to 10 and put them at -2 to hit for one round if he scored a successful hit. Anil's idea of preaching outside the brothel was also a nice attempt to work around a botched situation, after the players realised they'd probably bitten off more than they could chew with Jharana.

Finally, Patrick, Anil's player, has come up with the notion that his cleric continually prays to Manpac for guidance; whenever he does this, Patrick rolls an encounter dice he has, which is a d6 with a face on each side (smiley face, frown, sad face, indifferent face, etc.). He then uses the result to indicate what Manpac's view on the situation is, and acts accordingly. What started as a humorous idea now seems to have taken on a certain amount of meaning, and it is amusing to watch Patrick attribute fortunate turns of events to Manpac's guidance.

On Bathos

I think what I appreciate most in D&D is bathos: perhaps the overwhelming narrative characteristic of the game, insofar as it has any such characteristics. Random encounter tables, rolling dice in the open, taking results as they come, and resolute avoidance of illusionism or pallete-shifting of any kind - all of these elements of 'old school' D&D play contribute to the development of the bathetic.

People who like "narrative" games and prefer things to make "dramatic sense" usually miss this. 

An example of bathos from last night's game: Eki Ulele had just survived the most difficult and bloody encounter the party had yet had, in which 8 bandits and 2 hireling retainers had died and one of the PCs dying. He had been through, in many ways, his toughest moment. He had faced down the bandit leader and bluffed him into retreat, then survived a nerve-wracking chase through a pitch black forest, with no weapons or magic and only flasks of oil to aid him. He had led the opposition away from his wounded friends, buying them time to escape.

He survived all this, and if I was interested in trying to develop the "plot" of the campaign, as if it was a story, this would have been a defining episode for his character - the making of him. He would have gone on to better things, and grown as a person because of what happened to him at the bandit lair. Or perhaps he would have died bravely in one final showdown with the bandit leader, going out in a blaze of glory, remembered for ever more.

But the dice said otherwise: the next day he got an unlucky result and had a wilderness encounter; he got an unluckier result when it turned out to be giant bees; and an even unluckier result when he failed his surprise roll. He died a meaningless and ignoble death alone in the forest, stung to death by mindless insects. Bathos.

Yet this has its own narrative sense. Bathos and absurdity are proud and important traditions in drama and comedy. They may not be "emotionally satisfying", but they have their own value. The next time somebody makes out that you should fiddle or ignore dice rolls in the name of maintaining some sort of narrative consistency, remind them of this: "I prefer it bathetic, darling".

Tuesday Night Yoon-Suin: Session 5

[I've mostly avoided Actual Plays in the past, but I've decided it would be nice to have a log of my ongoing Yoon-Suin campaign for posterity's sake, and this is as good a place to keep it as any. It's largely for my own benefit because I know Actual Plays are incredibly dull 99% of the time unless you were at the table. I've not kept it for the first 4 sessions, but will do so from now on.]

Adventurers Present: 

• Marich, Level 1 Human Magic-User [played by David]
• Anil, Level 1 Human Cleric (eunuch) [played by Patrick]
• Eki Ulele, Level 1 Slug-man Magic-User [played by Nathan]
• Retainers: Asha (spear-wielding ex-whore), Surya (sabre and short bow), Bam (sabre and short bow)

In the previous sessions, the adventurers Damodar, Marich and Eki Ulele had sought employment with Nepsydaz, a sage at the guild of sages, who had paid them 500 gold pieces each for bringing them the Old King, a mad eunuch roaming the forests to the South of Silaish Vo. This they had done, after employing some peasants to help them, seeking the aid of a monkey-faced Mountain Spirit, and tangling with Renaudip and Binod, two rival adventurers they eventually killed. They also discovered a clay automaton hiding in the Old Watchtower, who it is said was created by Gulvedra, an arch-mage who lives far to the South - and they also irked Ui Yi, Eki Ulele's father/mother, from whom they stole horses.

After this, they had begun to explore the ancient Dwarf citadel of Sangmenzhang, discovering a group of strange almost-humans they later learned were called Hohools. These they killed, and recovered some treasures, although they lost Damodar [Patrick's first PC] and their cleric henchman, Sanjam. In return they rescued a poor kidnapped eunuch named Anil [Patrick's next PC], a cleric of Manpac, god of mazes. Back in Silaish Vo they secreted their treasures in their lodgings at the Madrassa of Arcanea, after avoiding the Oligarch's tax men.

They returned to Sangmenzhang forthwith with new recruits, and tangled with some bandits on the way who they learned were led by a man named Manesh. In the citadel they encountered dwarf skeletons and discovered a vast underground lake filled with luminous jellyfish, which they traversed with a bamboo raft. Here, they fought with carnivorous lungfish and lost another of their retainers, the lowly Dev. Chased by a giant slug, they were then herded deeper into Sangmenzhang...

The session began with the players in a small room containing bones and rags and a large hole in the ceiling, which they established with the use of mirrors contained some sort of crustacean or insectoid being. Avoiding this hole, they left the room heading south, and discovered a long corridor with two rooms leading off it. The first of these was a circular pit-room decorated with murals that were mostly eroded by water damage, but seemed to depict dwarves in combat. The second, a little further along, was empty save for ancient bird bones covering the floor: in the ceiling was a long, narrow shaft leading up hundreds of feet to the outside world.

At the end of the corridor they discovered a cave which opened up onto the mountainside. This cave contained four Feathered Men: scrawny humans with wings for arms and beaks for mouths, who were apparently using this cave as a launch pad to the outside world. After a brief fight Eki Ulele was left unconscious but two of the Feathered Men were dead; one managed to fly free and make his escape, while another, injured, managed to climb down the mountainside from the cave mouth to safety in the tree-line. With Eki Ulele unable to continue the party returned to the shaft room, where they made camp for the night, barricading the door.

During the night their sleep was disturbed by more Feathered Men, who came looking for their missing fellows. They charged down the door and in a sharp exchange one of the Feathered Men was killed; the rest fled and the party re-barricaded the door. After a time it became clear the other Feathered Men were busy with some ruse outside; the party charged from the room to discover an effort to smoke them out. They fought a running battle back to the mountainside cave, where they killed six Feathered Men in total. But brave Surya's head was clubbed in by the enemy leader and he was slain. Marich and Anil mutilated the Feathered Man corpses and hung them from the mountainside as a warning to others.

With Eki Ulele eventually recovered, they pressed on, and discovered the treasure of the Feathered Men: 800 gold pieces in metallic urns. These urns, coated with poison, nearly killed the foolhardy Eki Ulele, and again the party was forced to retreat, climbing down the mountainside from the cave opening and working their way back to Sangmenzhang's entrance.

There, they discovered that their mule, Eko, who they had left outside, had been stolen. They immediately assumed Manesh's bandits were the culprits. After resting to lick their wounds they followed the trail of the stolen mule and after a day's travel discovered a secluded waterfall and river - Manesh's lair. Here, they ambushed a pair of wandering bandits and after killing one, tortured the other to reveal that Manesh's gang had 9 members. 

Without further planning, they hatched a scheme to bring Manesh and his men out from their cave lair behind the waterfall. This involved pretending to be the members of the bandit patrol they had ambushed - a ruse which was almost immediately foiled when a password was demanded. The party taunted Manesh with the further torturing of their captive. Six bandits sallied from the cave and a vicious fight ensued. Anil was sorely wounded and rendered unconscious, while Bam and Asha were slain, and all the six bandits killed (with Eki Ulele slicing the throats of three who Marich had cast into magical sleep). 

A standoff followed as Eki Ulele tried to distract Manesh the bandit chief and his two remaining men while Marich dragged Anil deep into the forest to safety. After some cat and mouse evasion in the dark, Eki Ulele too managed to make his escape, though in a different direction to Marich and Anil. Scattered and bloodied, the party rested in their separate locations, wondering how they might reunite.

The next day, Marich and Anil rested in an improvised bivouac. Eki Ulele, however, was set upon in the forest by giant bees and stung to death. And thus the session ended.

Only the Good Die Young

One of my favourite NPCs died tonight. You know how it is as a DM. Most of the time the NPCs you create are there for a purpose and you play them as best you can, but not with any special interest or enthusiasm. But every so often one comes along who you happen to really enjoy playing - and usually it's by serendipity; somebody who for one reason or another you and the players develop something of an attachment for.

Dev was one of these. A retainer who the players hired to accompany them to the dungeon for the grand sum of 5 gold pieces a month, my initial notes for him on my random hireling table were "about 15 years old, short bow, skinny, 2hp". He was generated alongside a woman called Asha, whose notes were "retired whore, one-eyed, spear, 5hp". I immediately decided that Dev was in love with Asha, but didn't know how to express it, and that Asha allowed him to 'pleasure her' whenever she wanted it. I didn't expect them to last very long, but they actually stuck around through a few delves, and Dev managed to get a few kills with that short bow.

What I liked best about Dev was the idea I hit upon that the only word he knew how to say was "okay". He would say it in an eager-to-please fashion in response to anything anybody said to him. This never failed to amuse me, especially in situations where he was asked a question.

In any event, Dev died tonight. It was a pretty ignoble death: crossing a subterranean lake in the ancient dwarf citadel of Sangmenzhang on a bamboo raft the PCs had brought along, he was savaged by a carnivorous lungfish and fell overboard into a swarm of tiny stinging jellyfish. He never stood much of a chance in the front row with 2 hit points.

It was a pitiful end to a rather pitiful session: tonight was one of those nights for my players. They lost 2 retainers, and twice PCs came a flukey dice roll away from death. They were forced to flee by a swarm of cockroaches, attacked by dwarf skeletons, and chased by a giant slug which they had to shut behind a doorway which was their only apparent escape route back to the surface. All they got was about 1000 silver pieces from inside the bellies of a bunch of lungfish, and a couple of rings with semi-precious stones, for their efforts. Oh well. Nobody ever said dungeoneering was easy.

Stream of Consciousness about Morality

Patrick wrote an interesting post about an event that happened in a Cyberpunk 2020 game I was DMing. It's about morality. It's a really well written piece that you should all read. But it got me wondering about things that have gone on in games I've been involved in, and whether those things have had real-world consequences for my own sense of myself as a moral person.

I was brought up by Christian parents (a Christian mother, more accurately - my Dad mostly humoured her), and my mother always tried to instil in me the notion that things that we watch, read, or listen to do actually affect our 'souls'; when you watch a violent film it is actually bad for you in some sense. It is corrupting.

I still think I agree with that, to a certain extent, although I wouldn't frame it in terms of the soul or sinfulness - except perhaps in the illustrative sense. I agree with it insofar as I think that movies, music and books can have a coarsening, hardening, and cheapening effect on the way we view the world: the more violence and badness you absorb in fiction (particularly visual fiction), the less you can empathise with others. It's why I'm in favour of some level of film censorship and why I think that films like the Saw and Human Centipede franchises are actually quite dangerous - not because I worry about copy cat-ism, but because I worry about the cumulative effect of all this cruelty on our collective unconscious. I'm aware this is a controversial view that some people reading this blog will not agree with.

But for whatever reason, the games I run are pretty amoral affairs. (I would use the term 'morally ambiguous' but I always think that is a pretty cowardly euphemism.) And I never, ever find myself sitting there as a DM, or later on that night, or the next week, thinking about what went on in the game - the brutal slayings, the casual theft, the complete lack of compassion demonstrated by everybody involved - and fretting about morality. Until I read Patrick's post it never even occurred to me that anybody really would think that way. The game is just a game.

But then again, Saw is just a movie. I believe I have found myself in a moral contradiction. I suppose I'm okay with that.

D&D: Enabling Amorality Since 1974

I played in Patrick's weekly LOTFP game on Wednesday. (There's an actual play here.) The highlight of the night was probably Patrick's off-the-cuff "Don't you die on me, man!" rule: if you are willing to shout "Don't you die on me, man!" at the top of your voice while stabilising somebody on negative hit points, you automatically succeed. It only works if you play in public, though.

But I digress. What I really wanted to talk about was amorality, and how D&D in particular (but role playing games in general) facilitate it. It really was remarkable how, literally within 10 minutes of joining the game, my character had conspired to loot a crypt, burgle a church, and murder an innocent old woman in cold blood for the crime of being a witness to our theft - and that such goings-on were treated as an almost mundane event within the context of the game (although the DM, to his credit, did disapprove of our awful behaviour regarding the old woman). That could almost be a motto for D&D, I think: the mundanity of amorality.

Let me make a few things clear before I proceed: first, I don't think this is a bad thing. Secondly, I'm well aware that D&D doesn't have to be played this way, often isn't, and perhaps shouldn't. And thirdly, I use the term "amorality" advisedly - what I am talking about is not so much evil or badness but merely the absence of ethical thought: a total deliberate abandonment of moral sentiments, almost nihilistic in its scope.

D&D enables amoral behaviour: that is my contention. It allows you to give voice and effect to actions and beliefs that you would never exercise in real life - in other words, to give free reign to your id without that pesky super-ego getting in the way. In this respect it is rather like Grand Theft Auto, or Grand Theft Auto is rather like D&D: it is a sandbox in which being bad has no real consequence, and your inner demons can come out and play.

There are, however, limits. There are behaviours and beliefs that are not even acceptable to air within the context of a game of D&D (probably rightly, in my opinion); there are lines that oughtn't to be crossed. And the laws of the jungle - a kind of quid pro quo altruism - intervenes too: players help each other in the hope and expectation the favour will be returned. So, despite the fact that my character partook in the murder of an old woman without a second thought, he was kind to the lantern-girl he hired to join the party in entering the dungeon, and assigned one of his dogs to protect her. When the idiotic fighter (complete with irritating 17-year-old player) ran off and fell down a pit trap, the rest of us helped him out because he'd sacrificed material gain in order to find us healing earlier that day. There are moral rules, of a kind.

This suggests that morality enters D&D alongside the "real world", when that intervenes. Player-characters tend to behave better towards one another than to NPCs, because what happens to them matters in the real world: they have players who are real people and who are really invested in them. And likewise, player-characters tend to behave well towards in-game children and animals, because cruelty to children and animals is so utterly unacceptable in our society that it cannot be seen as anything other than abhorrent and evil even in the context of make-believe. (Rightly, I might add.) This is also true "at the margins": rape and torture are likewise so unacceptable in our society that they can generally only be seen as evil in-game, again probably rightly.

Otherwise, all bets are usually off. As I said, I don't particularly see this as a bad thing: it is probably a sign of good mental health that you are able to let your id loose and reign it in at will. The capacity to switch off one's own capacity for moral thought is probably an indication that, otherwise, one's moral compass points in the right direction.

If this entry has been somewhat rambling, it is because it's been 3 weeks since I blogged, and my blogging muscles are atrophied. Bear with me: I'm like a footballer returning from a hamstring injury, or a Carlos Tevez-esque lay-off - I can't quite do the full 90 minutes yet, and need a 60th-minute substitution.

In Which I Am A Hypocrite

Patrick, one of the players in my regular group, has posted an AP of sorts for the session we had on Tuesday. We decided to create a shared world with Microscope, in which we plan to share a rotating GMship and run different campaigns in different genres.

I think we all started off with good intentions to create a darkish, hard SF setting, but things got weird, silly and fucked up very quickly - it progressed from a reasonable beginning to a sprawling melange involving, amongst other things, war meetings between the President of Humanity and his Chief Warlock, "ontological warheads", and a not-Tyranid race called the HMBTs (Hideous Murdering Bug Things). It ended up with a genetically engineered Velociraptor called Spielberg tending a sculpture garden in which a murder was taking place, on a space station in the Oort Cloud with a pseudo-Byzantine culture featuring an AI who was basically a futuristic version of OK Cupid. (And this after I'd claimed hypocritically to prefer my settings to be not-so-gonzo literally the day before.)

You can read all about it here, if you're odd enough to be interested.

Expecting the Unexpected and Narrative Purity

My Cyberpunk 2020 campaign ended last night in rather unexpected fashion. Well, the ending was planned - I'm transitioning to an OD&D Yoon-Suin campaign, though we'll also be doing a rotating-GM-style Microscope-created Shared World type project in tandem.

I tend to glaze over when reading other people's Actual Play blog posts, but I've done some short APs from the "Cyberpool" campaign here and here. It may be remembered that my players had a huge project underway which involved parachuting £200,000 of heroin into an inner city park, hiding it in plain sight in the form of an aerial DJ gig in front of an audience of 10,000 people. (They came up with this crackpot idea during a secret gaming session in my office in blatant contravention of regulations - we live this cyberpunk shit.)

There was another "grand theme" to the campaign, in which the PCs had become involved in a corporate-war-by-proxy between Gazprom and a Bulgarian IT conglomerate called STRELA, and one of the characters was about to throw himself full-pelt into this.

In the end, neither of these strands came to anything. In the final session (I think we've had somewhere in the region of 12 to 15) the PCs rocked up at the Cameroonian pentecostal church whose mysterious pastor, Father Philemon, is their erstwhile employer in the parachuting heist. They had, in true cyberpunk fashion, decided that their cut of the heroin money (10%) was not enough given their expenses (they'd already spent about £10,000 laying the groundwork for the gig) and they had decided they wanted the whole £200,000. In order to achieve this, they hatched a plot to smuggle a cell phone, jury-rigged into a primitive bugging device, into the church, and use it to gather information on the organization. Their ultimate goal appeared to be to set up a huge bomb under the church by entering the sewage system, thus killing Father Philemon and his cronies and allowing them to complete the parachute jump and keep the full amount of smack.

They didn't even get this far - after an altercation with Father Philemon in an attempt to create a distraction for planting the bug they were marched outside and told the deal was off. Things rapidly spiralled downhill and guns were pulled. 15 seconds of in-game time later and one of the PCs was dead (after taking at least a dozen bullets and two shotgun blasts) along with 5 of Fr. Philemon's gunmen, who were mown down by Patrick's assault-rifle-toting Somali teenage girl. The remaining PCs then fired a Light Antitank Weapon into the church and drove off.

I decided this was a reasonable point at which to End Credits, at least for Season 1.

From this we can draw two lessons:

1) In CP:2020, handguns and shotguns are all very well, but what you really want is an assault rifle when the shit hits the fan.

2) More importantly, I think our campaign demonstrates the messiness and Picaresque brilliance you get when you give players free reign. If I'd been plotting things out, there's no way the PCs would have ended up even coming up with the parachute heist anyway - I threw so many other adventure hooks their way - but once they had done, it would almost have been perverse for it not to happen. It would have been such a natural conclusion to the campaign - such a narratively logical, complete note on which to end it. It would have been climactic.

Instead, not only did the parachute jump never happen, the PCs plotted an entire level underneath it (kill employer; keep heroin), which itself didn't happen, because they ended up involved in a full on gun-fight which laid waste to all of their carefully laid plans in the course of less than 20 seconds of shooting.

If it had been a film or book, there's no way it would have turned out this way. But it did, and it was in its own way highly satisfactory: we didn't get a plotted ending, but we got an ending - and one that felt realistic. Life doesn't tie things off neatly. If you were going to compare it to something plotted, the ending seemed more like the end of Season 1 of The Wire: confused, slightly arbitrary, unexpected, and very life-like.

The conclusion being that it's important to stay true to your principles: when the sirens of plot and narrative come singing, plug in your ear wax of sandbox purity and keep on going. You won't be disappointed with the results.

Porfiry Petrovich I Hardly Knew Ye

Porfiry Petrovich, a PC in my Cyberpunk 2020 game, died tonight. He was summarily executed at 3am by security men after being an unwilling accomplice in a drive-by shooting which saw a drunken local politician threatening 4 Russian mobsters and 2 of the other PCs from the window of a Porsche which Porfiry was driving after all 8 men had participated in a night of whiskey-fuelled gambling together at a local casino. In a scenario almost literally too complicated to untangle, one of the Russian mobsters was shot by the local politician who was tazed by Porfiry and then beaten to death by the surviving Russians while the other PCs fled into the night, whereupon Porfiry, for reasons far too complicated to go into here, attempted to gun down the other Russian mobsters. Security personnel from the nearby corporate mall delivered the coup de grace by massacring Porfiry and the Russians in the street and asking questions later.

All in all, a good session and a somewhat fitting end: Porfiry's epitaph reads, in his player's own words, "He lived as he died, acting like a tit." Although I think that's a bit harsh - Porfiry was in large part the engine behind what was going on in the game and the leader of the "gang", and his player was resourceful and ingenious.

His next character is a homeless 19-year-old Somali immigrant girl who carries an assault rifle around in a sports bag.

I love gaming.

Parachuting from a Plane while DJ-ing

The set-up: the players in my Cyberpunk: 2020 campaign owe Gazprom £20,000, which has to be paid back in two weeks (this is because they got into a fire-fight and had to pull strings to get Gazprom to airlift them from danger). They're also being pursued by a nefarious and as-yet unidentified organisation, who might be connected to a security firm whose employees they killed "in the course of their investigations". They are also under suspicion from the police for the abduction and murder of a high-class call girl, with some justification. Meanwhile, they are trying to think up a way to get £200,000-worth of heroin from a cottage outside Douglas, on the Isle of Mann, to Liverpool, without being detected by the authorities, in exchange for 10% of the cut, for a Cameroonian pentecostal church leader-cum-drug baron.

Their plan? To parachute the drugs into an inner-city park. Under the auspices of a 24-hour charity gig performed by the rockerboy character (an East German DJ), the climax of which will see him parachuting with his turntables (containing the heroin) from a plane flown from Douglas to Liverpool, while continuously DJing. The theory being that, if you want something hidden, you should hide it in plain sight.

This is why I play role playing games. You never, ever know what you're going to get until everybody sits down at the table and starts play. 

Microscope in Play

Last week I recommended Microscope on the basis of downloading and reading it. Today I can recommend it on the basis of playing it. A friend and I sat down for a couple of hours and gave it a run through, and enjoyed the experience.

A caveat: there were only two of us, and though the game works with two, you really need more than that for it to run properly. But in spite of that I felt that it came together surprisingly well: initial awkwardness about what to do during a "scene" - which is basically like free-form role-playing within a certain structure - quickly faded and we got into the swing of things very easily. The history we created charts the life time of a city, from founding to dissolution, and encapsulates a Mantis God, ab-humans, anti-daylight, Big Fuck-off Pterodactyls (BFPs), and street wars between merchant guilds. We filled out bits of it in detail, skirted over others, and left huge swathes unexplored.

I wouldn't call Microscope a role playing game. I'm not even really sure I would call it a game. (Not that it particularly matters.) It's more a set of tools for structured brainstorming: a means by which you focus your creativity like a lens on different subjects at a time and make them grow. And it is quite potent stuff. Properly guided, a group of people can come up all kinds of crazy and wonderful nonsense within a surprisingly short space of time.

This is why I think the potential criticism of Microscope - that you might as well just sit round as a group and create whatever your want; why bother buying the game? - misses the point: structure, to a certain degree, is important. It stops you meandering, drowning in a sea of too much choice and freedom. Microscope gives you just the right amount of discipline, providing a framework in which group creativity can flourish.

How I Run Sandboxes in the City, Part III: Appendix N

Here is a list of fictional and non-fictional resources I look to for inspiration in designing a city-based game setting, and when fleshing it out.

• Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Before David Simon wrote The Wire, he wrote this masterpiece of nonfiction. Ostensibly the account of a year spent with the Baltimore Police Department's homicide squad, it is so much more than a 'true crime' book: it is almost a social novel, encompassing every area of Baltimore life, with a cast of hundreds and dozens of plots and subplots, very few of which get resolved. It's also stunningly well written, once you get used to its detached, objective tone. The perfect description of a modern, developed-world city seen from the belly up.
• Ian McDonald's The Dervish House. Set over the course of a few days in Istanbul in 2027 AD, the city is as much a character as the people themselves in this novel: there are few books you'll read which more accurately capture the complex, random fabric of city life than this.
• Uncaged: Faces of Sigil. 40 NPCs to use in a campaign set in Sigil. If the unimaginative folks at TSR could come up with Big List of 40 NPCs to start off a game with, then you can do it too.
• Time Out city guides give a great sense of what a city is like - charting their history, geography and social characteristics, as well as providing lists and lists and lists of restaurants, clubs, bars, galleries, shops, etc. If you can take in the information through osmosis, you can then pull it out when you need something like it to appear in your game.
• Detective/police procedural fiction often relies heavily on a strong sense of the city as a living, breathing place. They also have large casts of interesting characters, with tangled webs of interaction. Reading a lot of detective fiction gives you a genuine sense for how complex settings work, and how narrative (or, in our context, the game) emerges from the interactions between different elements within them. I highly recommend Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (Copenhagen), the Inspector Rebus novels (Edinburgh) and Gorky Park (Moscow) in this respect.
• Many people have read his feudal-Japan-set book, Shogun, but Noble House is James Clavell's real masterwork. Set in a week in Hong Kong, you get to see every facet of life in that great metropolis, from the bottom (maids and prostitutes) to the top (stock market traders, corporate executives). It's also impossible to put down, despite being 1200 pages long.
• I should also include William Gibson's Bridge trilogy, which is in a way an imagined city par excellence (even if it's sort-of based in Oakland), and many of my notions of cyberpunk cityscapes in particular stem from it. 
• And finally, of course, there is Perdido Street Station, which as a novel I don't particularly like, but as a setting I think is wonderful. Again, it's an imagined city par excellence, complete with subway map and sprawling suburbs: if you're going to come up with a fantasy city, this really ought to be one of your starting points when it comes to inspiration.

How I Run Sandboxes in the City, Part II: In Play

So I have the Big List of NPCs, the Random Mission Generator, the List of Organisations, and the Relationship Hexmap. This is the raw material from which the game emerges. It's important to keep this vision of "game as emergent" in mind when running any sandbox game, as I'm sure you'll agree.

Anyway, how does it work in play? Like anything, it needs a bit of work from the GM and a bit of work from the players.


The GM


The GM's job is to use the raw material to improvise. This is more than just rolling on the Random Mission Generator. It needs him to constantly think about what's going on throughout the city, what the various actors are doing, and what the consequences of the players' actions are. This could be as simple as "the players have robbed a bank so the police will be investigating" or as complicated as "the players have introduced £2,000,000 worth of heroin onto the street - how does that affect the state of play between the different drug gangs in the city?" The Big List of NPCs and the List of Organisations help with this, because they provide motives for the different actors which suggest how they will react.

The GM also needs to be good at improvising. The nature of a non-linear game is that it's surprising, and a city sandbox has fewer anchors than a traditional fantasy one: there is no hexmap and there are no random encounters (at least, not how I run it), two things which are natural fulcrums for a GM to riff on. And the players are not constrained by geography, if it's a modern or futuristic setting: they can travel freely and quickly, wherever they want. This means the GM needs to be on his toes all the time - the players could do decide to do anything at any moment, and he needs to be able to make stuff up on the fly in response.

The Big List of NPCs naturally helps, here. Perhaps the players decide they want to get their hands on some horse anaesthetic? Check the list of NPCs, find a vet. Turns out somebody who they know knows him. Bingo. But it also helps to let the players know that you're making stuff up. I'm never afraid to be obvious about the fact that I'm making something up on the spot. An example from tonight's game: my players went to a bar to try to meet a politician rumoured to drink there. I had no idea they were going to do this. I needed to make up prices for champagne, the names for the politician's friends and floozies, the name of the barman, and several other things. I was perfectly open about plucking names from thin air, and rolling a dice to see how many drinking companions the politician had. They know it's a game: you're not fooling anybody by pretending you have it all planned out.


The Players


Correspondingly, the players have a big role. They have to be active. I'm blessed with really good players in this regard. They have ideas. They brainstorm. They want to interact with the setting - to meet new people and make contacts, to move things forward, to act. They are an engine.

But their actions are also food for me as the GM. By going to that bar that I wasn't expecting to go to, I now have four new NPCs for the Big List of NPCs. And each of them has a motive, a reason for existing. More flesh is added to the setting, and who knows when one of these NPCs will become relevant again?

Players also have a tendency to take a "bull in a china shop" approach (I'm sure this holds true across every game group that ever existed). To put it simply, they fuck things up, in good and bad ways. And their actions also feed into the setting: they attract the attention of the police, they make enemies, they kill people, they fundamentally change the economy and the physical make-up of the city.

All of this is gold for the GM, and it becomes a self-perpetuating process: the more the players do, the more they flesh out the Big List of NPCs and the List of Organisations; and the more this happens, the more stuff there is for them to do. Over time, the setting becomes far more than the sum of its parts.

What this means is that, the longer you play, the less time it takes for the GM to prep. Things begin to take on a life of their own. The players act, and their actions have consequences, and those consequences force the players to act, and that results in more consequences... and so on and so on and so on like a snowball. While the time investment before play began was big (say 5 or 6 hours total), the GM now spends about 30 minutes a week preparing for the next session - just statting up anything that needs statting up, ruminating over what the different NPC actors might be doing behind the scenes, and book-keeping. If you're a busy person with work, family and a social life, it's a no-brainer: the prep-per-minute to hours-of-enjoyment ratio is hard to beat.

For the final post in the series, I'll list some of the things I use for inspiration when I'm making things up on - either in the planning/setup stage or on the fly during play.

How I Run Sandboxes in the City, Part I: The Setup

Non-linear game play is not the preserve of fantasy gaming, and a sandbox does not require a hexmap. This sort of game can take place in any setting, in any genre. I'm running such a game at the moment: it's a totally non-linear, sandbox campaign of Cyberpunk 2020 set in Liverpool, or "Cyberpool" as it has come to be known.

It occurred to me recently to write a series of posts on how I've gone about running this, and here is the first: The Setup.

If you are a player in my game and would not like to see "behind the veil" and thus realise that I am in fact no Wizard of Oz but a mere conjuror, stop reading now.

In setting up Cyberpool, I sat down and created three things that I consider indispensable:

• A big list of NPCs, each with a plot hook/motive attached.
• A table for randomly generating missions/tasks/jobs, linked to the NPC list.
• A list of "groups/institutions/gangs/organisations", similar to the NPC list.

Then, with the help of the players, I created the icing on the cake:

• The relationship hexmap. 

Let's take a look at these in turn.

The Big List of NPCs

The Big List of NPCs exists in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. At the beginning it contained approximately 30 NPCs, each with a Name, a Profession, a Description, and a Motive. Every time the PCs encounter somebody in the game and have an interaction lasting longer than a few sentences, that NPC goes into the list. It's now 63 entries long. 

I think of this as being akin to the hexmap that you might draw when starting off a typical D&D-style sandbox campaign. Rather than having a number of hexes filled with adventuring locations, you have a web of NPCs who will, if you like, provide the stuff of adventure. 

The Random Mission Generator

This is a more complicated, bespoke version of the Mr Jones Mission Generator. It is 20 entries long. I can roll on it at any time, and instantly come up with a link between two NPCs (if, for instance, I come up with "A pimp" "needs to" "kill" "a local businessman" I can within 10 seconds find that pimp and businessman on the Big List of NPCs and create a link between them. It's then a matter of a few more minutes' thought to come up with a backstory for the pair and why the former wants to kill the latter, drawing on their different motives and descriptions). Sometimes, if the mood takes me, I create a new NPC for one of the results and add him/her to the Big List of NPCs.

This is what you draw on when the PCs go out looking for work. If they know some of these NPCs, then work might come looking for them.

The List of Organisations

This is similar to the Big List of NPCs. It's a collection of organisations present in the city, each with a Name, Type, and Description. Sometimes the Random Mission Generator generates results that necessitate referring to this list - other times I use the list when I need to elaborate on the backstory for NPCs.

The Relationship Hexmap

This is the final piece of the puzzle. In our first "chargen" session, I sat down with the players and we created a web of relationships for the PCs and the people they know. Cyberpunk 2020 has a character generation system which by necessity gives each starting PC a certain number of acquaintances (teachers, friends, enemies, family members, ex-lovers, etc.). We put the names of the PCs in the middle of a sheet of hexes, one name to a hex. We then started adding acquaintances in neighbouring hexes, again at one name to a hex. If two names came to neighbour each other, it meant the two people concerned know each other for some reason, which we noted down. 

We also write down the names of other NPCs who emerge during play on this hexmap who are in some way "allied to" or at least in cahoots with this core group of PCs and their acquaintances. These, of course, also go in the Big List of NPCs. The Relationship Hexmap now looks like this:

Which might be a bit confusing to you, but does the job.

These are the basic tools from which the game emerges. The next post will look at how I use them in play.

The Table is Creative

P., my Apocalypse World MC and regular in my CP:2020 game, came up with a great idea on his blog: take the "Isle of the Unknown" hexmap, write down a list of all the hex numbers, use the list randomiser at random.org to scramble them, then past the random list back into the original. Suddenly all the hexes are randomly "paired" and connected:

This forms a list of connections between every hex in the map. For instance, in my first attempt I found the B-Located cleric in hex 0114 is connected to the crystal statue in 1709. Maybe that's where he got his bi location power? The statue used to be a person whose soul was taken by the poisonous giant woodpecker in hex 2410. The woodpecker is connected to the weird island in 2415. Is that where it lost it's original soul? Is it still waiting for it to re-appear?

The only problem, according to P., is that:

[T]his pretty locks down the whole island from the beginning. I prefer it when things are generated randomly at the table. It provokes a more interesting state of mind. But to do that I need a dice method that can randomise 343 hexes.

But one of my other players, N., had a solution. Put all the hex numbers into 7x7 tables. Roll 3d8: the first d8 gives you the table, the second gives you the row, the third gives you the column (re-roll 8s). Hey presto! The hex you are in is connected to the numbered hex you just generated.

Instant-random-hex-connection-generator: sorted.

When Story Games Go Bad

I've given Apocalypse World, and story games in general, quite a bit of love recently. Tonight's session was fun, as always, but we came across an apparent limitation in the system which bears a bit of discussion - namely player versus player conflict. I'll have to go into a bit of detail about an arcane rules point here, but bear with me: it'll be worth it. Maybe.

Anyway, a situation arose in play in which two characters (one of which was mine, as it happens) nearly came to blows, and ended up embroiled in a social conflict of a kind, in which my character was trying to persuade the other to stop pinning him against a wall and the other guy was trying to persuade mine not to do something he deemed foolish. AW has a resolution system comprising a set of "moves", such as "going aggro" or "reading a person", where you roll the dice and successes allow you to either get meta-game knowledge or achieve something in-game - usually with quasi-narrative-control consequences either for you or the GM. This works swimmingly when it comes to NPCs; if (for example) you are "reading a person" your character engages him in conversation and rolls the dice, with a minor success indicating you get to ask a question about the NPC which the GM has to answer truthfully, and a major success indicating you get to ask three. (Failures allow the GM to turn the result around on the player, though we don't need to go into that in detail.)

In the situation described, both players were essentially relying on a seduction/persuade roll. The way this works on an NPC is that your character rolls the dice, with success indicating that the NPC will be persuaded (although only after extracting a promise in return) and failure indicating that he/she will only be persuaded from going against the PC through some sort of significant sacrifice. (I'm simplifying a little.) Fine. But when it comes to PC-on-PC conflict, the mechanism works differently: you roll, and if you get a success you force the other player to choose - they can either be persuaded, in which case they get XP, or they can refuse, which means they have to make a different roll of their own to see if they manage to resist the seduction/persuasion (failure resulting in negative consequences).

All well and good, but there is a subtext, or underlying assumption, to all of this: the players have to be willing to play along. This isn't what happened in our session: I rolled to persuade the other PC to let mine go and succeeded, whereupon he refused and rolled to see if he could do so. Which he did. Whereupon, duly, he rolled to persuade my PC to go along with what he wanted. Whereupon I refused, and rolled to see if I could do so - which I did.

This resulted in a clear impasse, which could technically have gone on for the entire session if we had continued to roll successes, with both of us persuading and resisting back and forth ad infinitum. The system seems to rely on players, at some stage, being willing to sacrifice "winning" for the good of the "story", which cannot be guaranteed. The designers seem not to have realised that, well, lots of people (myself included) are obstinate fuckers who want to get their own way all the time.

We managed to get a resolution through using other mechanisms (the GM forced us to try to "read" each other to work out how our respective characters could be persuaded to back down and reach a compromise, which came good in the end), but there was still something fundamentally unsatisfactory about the whole affair. There is something to be said for the traditional D&D approach, which would simply have involved the two players inhabiting their characters and talking/arguing things through without rolls; if you have to bend the rules and negotiate a compromise anyway, why bother with a mechanism for social conflict in the first place?

Although maybe we were all being too D&D-ish in the first place and conceptualising things in terms of winning/losing, rather than what would turn out to be interesting in narrative terms.

Or, alternatively, maybe we just don't understand the rules properly and somebody is reading this and frothing at the mouth, ready to open the comments and start typing: YOU UTTER MORONS, THIS IS NOT HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS!!!!!!!!!!1

Life Lessons

I ran the first session of my Google+ Yoon-Suin campaign last night, with -C, Jeremy, Kelvin and Anthony (who I don't think has a blog) in attendance, and a good time was had by all. (Well, by me, anyway.) Although there were some technological issues, I think everybody got into the swing of things and, as a group of strangers, we gelled relatively well. This, as we all know, is usually enough to go 75% of the way towards good gaming in and of itself.

I was also reminded of three genuine "OSR life lessons" during the session, which (despite my diplomatic assertions to the contrary) only serves to confirm in my mind that this circle of 1000 or so people, who come for good or ill under the auspices of "the OSR", have discovered or created something close to the One True Way of role playing games. At least, for our own purposes. These life lessons are:

• You really, absolutely, definitely, unquestionably, indisputably, do not need a detailed character background before play begins. In fact, all you really need is a name, a class, stats, and some equipment, and you're good to go - because within five minutes of the game beginning you will without fail find your character beginning to take on a personality of his own. This strange and almost mystical emergence of character through play is one of the best things about the hobby, and it amazes me that people have been so determined, for decades, to kill the concept.
• You only need to roll the dice when the outcome of an action cannot be decided by agreement or fiat. In 2-and-a-bit hours of play (short, I know, but my motto is "always leave them wanting more") there was exactly one dice roll, and it was by me to see if there was a random encounter (there wasn't). Otherwise, everything happened either through consensus or a bit of fiat, no eyebrows were raised, and things progressed entirely adequately. Dice are a last resort, to be used for adjudication where something has to be contested. And, in fact, dice are a thing which good players will do their damnedest to avoid, because dice mean you may end up losing hit points. When your character has 1 hit point, as Kelvin's does, that can have serious consequences.
• If you let players loose in a sandbox, they'll do things that you as the GM never would have expected, and for you these moments are the most enjoyable of all. Why several generations of GMs have been told that their job is to get the players from A to Z, instead of giving their players an alphabet and telling them to come up with their own words, is one of the great mysteries of the modern age. Probably.

We Play

Apocalypse World in action. Note the Vornheim-created city in the middle, proving its value for fancy-pants story games that have little in common with D&D.

The character sheet in the foreground is mine. I play Trout, a hocus (cult leader), who we have decided looks like "Steve Buscemi in a smock".