May 08 2012
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RPGs

The Three-Sentence Character

I’ve spent many years of my career expanding characters into prose-length works, establishing elaborate backgrounds for them and giving them extensive histories. Heck, I’m working on just such a book right now. The trick there, though, is that those characters are designed to have broad appeal. Somewhere in those 2,500-4,000 words is a hook almost anyone can use in a chronicle. Whether your storyline is about Sabbat depredations in the Old World or a Camarilla coup in Chicago, you should be able, as Storyteller, to grab one of those character hooks and fit it into your chronicle. It might require a little fine-tuning, but that’s okay – fine-tuning is less cumbersome than whole-cloth world- and character-building, and that’s what published source material is all about. You trade a couple bucks and save several hours of campaign engineering.* As well, Vampire draws on a very loquacious literary tradition, so it’s often appropriate to the genre to run off a bit at the pen and engage the florid.

“My character belonged to a faith persecuted for heresy.” That must have been harsh — but growing up, you learned the location of the secret tunnels beneath the Cathedral of St. Venetus.

When you’re a player in a specific gamemaster’s campaign, though, you want gameplay and your GM wants a way to engage you. As fulfilling as it can be to write an 8,000-word biography of your character, that’s an endeavor entirely separate from playing the game. Instead, give your GM three sentences. They can be whatever you want, but a) seriously, keep it to three sentences and b) present them in terms of the game’s subject matter. You’ll find them most fruitful, too, if c) they’re related to a character’s goals or history. These can be ambitions or dreams, or they can be biographical elements that add color and resonance to an encounter. They can be tragic, comic, or dramatic – whatever you want. Just create them with the intent to be used in the game, and set them up so that there’s creative wiggle room for the GM to do something interesting with them.

When you do this, what you’re really doing is giving your GM a short list of things you’d like to see happen to or involve your character, so keep that in mind if it helps. These background sentence are like skills in that mechanical regard. You’re telling your gamemaster, “I’d like to do this.” Your three background sentences also convey the added benefit of shaping the character’s personality or history. Eventually, you’ll accomplish by starting with those three sentences and involving the other players what the 8,000-word bio attempts to do by itself, telling the story of the character. Only you’ll be doing it as the core activity of the game rather than the metagame activity that lies on top of it.

Check out some examples:

“My character comes from a merchant family that traveled the three kingdoms and never settled.” Great. Check it out: You recognize the brooch in the treasure hoard as valuable. Your family used to deal in jewelry like this occasionally. But this isn’t three kingdoms workmanship, it’s from the city-states past the Golden Peaks. How did this brooch make it all the way down here and end up among the refuse in this particular troll cave?

“My character wants to join the Friends of the Night.” Marvelous. You’ve actually come to the attention of the Amici Noctis, and they’d like to have someone of your caliber as well, but they want to test your mettle first. How committed are you? Committed enough to risk the favor of your sire, who it turns out betrayed the Amici Noctis long ago? Committed enough to trust the Friends of the Night over your sire’s sire and Mentor? Committed enough to endanger your coterie? Committed enough to risk your Humanity? All you have to do is deliver this mortal vessel — this bound, gagged, and blindfolded mortal vessel — into the cellars beneath your Mentor’s estate. If you’re capable enough, your Mentor never even has to know….

“My character has a dark secret.” Really? You’re giving me carte blanche to summon that skeleton from your closet whenever I find it most appropriate? Fantastic. Over here in my chronicle notes, I have a betrayer/ diablerist/ chaos cultist who needs a compelling way to enter the story. Years ago, you heard a knock at your door and a scream in the darkness….

“My character occasionally doesn’t know that what she’s doing really matters, and she’s looking for a sign.” Swell. Since the town’s only temple to the Redeemer burned and the burghers have denied all new construction, the folk have been seeking one who could hold a candle against the darkness encroaching from the Frozen Wastes. The handwritten journals your party found beneath the temple’s ruin spoke of just such a bleak time before the coming of the Redeemer, and how He brought solace to a wicked folk.

“My character is a lone badass. His family was killed and he’s practiced with his katana relentlessly for every waking hour since their death.” Okay, fine. Tonight, though, the party is digging up dirt on the Nosferatu union boss and — what’s that on the Sewer Rat’s desk? It’s the title to the house your parents were living in the year you were Embraced. What the hell does it have to do with him, and why does it look like he’s doing something with it now?

Away from the game table, go ahead and indulge that 8,000-word character vignette. Just don’t expect to be able to use it in the game. Manage your expectations and respect your GM’s time. If he wants to read that bio because of its entertainment value alone, that’s great. Just remember that reading is separate from playing, and the GM’s job is to prepare a game to play.

* (A separate topic, certainly, but money-for-time is the Zynga model in action.)

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Apr 09 2012
2 Comments
RPGs, Tabletop Games

Emergent Terrain

If you’re like me, you don’t have time to paint miniatures, and even if you could find or make the time, they’d eventually look like you painted them with a hammer while recovering from having your head kicked off by 35 beers. Prepainted minis, cardboard chits, and slotted-base figures are godsends for people like me, who enjoy a visual artifact at the game table, but who can’t quite muster the skill to create them myself.

Click to embiggen, and to see at scale with a 28mm fig.

Here’s a great photo from Benoist Poire, showing the use of a piece of non-gaming “terrain” that creates a great effect. It’s a fish-tank accessory, but when placed on the gaming table, it’s a buried titan’s corpse, or the entrance to a fearsome temple, or the relic of an ancient culture of giants, a fetish left by a non-terrestrial society, or an idol crafted by slaves to honor one of the original race of vampiric blood-gods. Whatever it is, it’s begging to be explored.

I love coming across this sort of thing, the repurposing of something entirely ordinary that, when shifted in scale or perspective, becomes the foundation of a game session or even an entire campaign or chronicle. Look at this! An entire megadungeon could exist below it, or it may be the last shrine that still contains a complete translation of the Book of Nod in Aramaic. You don’t even have to use the thing at the table (Vampire doesn’t usually require miniatures…), you just have to have seen it in context. Marvelous! Makes me want to stop at Petsmart on the way home to see what other amazing artifacts line the aquarium aisle.

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Mar 07 2012
4 Comments
design, RPGs, Tabletop Games, video games

The Right to Hack?

I asked on Twitter if gamers had a “right to hack.” The response was somewhat more even than I had expected.

ImageTo be clear, when I say “right to hack,” I’m talking about a player’s ability to get into the nuts and bolts of the game, wether setting or systems, and make changes they felt like making. For the purposes of the conversation, I didn’t care whether we were talking about tabletop games or video games. Call it kitbashing, homebrew, house rules, or actual code manipulation, if you will.

Most of the conversation asserted that it was, in fact, the player’s right to bend systems and setting to taste. In fact, some approached the topic from a “just try to stop me” perspective, indicating that for some, it’s more than a right and nigh upon a duty. Especially from the tabletop RPG angle, I can see this. Groups of tabletop players literally need to make their own mark on their games, because the improvised stories that emerge from them — and indeed, outside the written body of work for these games — are the game’s content itself. A publisher can construct a scenario, but once that scenario is in play, it’s inherently being manipulated toward the player group’s end.

It becomes a bit different in video games. The “right to hack” takes on an almost Oliver Wendell Holmes approach, in which a player’s manipulation of the game systems is allowed to travel as far as where another player’s game experience begins. For instance, if I’m playing a game by myself, I can hack it all I want — I’m changing the experience only for myself and I’m not affecting anyone else. But when I do it in a situation in which other people are involved, I’m not only affecting my game but theirs. If we agree to share that modified environment, that’s fine, but if I’m playing a version of the game that offers me different and not-agreed-upon differences, I’m playing against the spirit of the entertainment.

Most remarkable about all of this talk was the sense of community that the conversation indicated. When hacking tabletop games, the expectation was that the changes made were accepted by and intended to satisfy the players collectively. I’m not hacking my fighter to have an unfair advantage to outperform yours by breaking the rules. My vampire can’t use Mage magic while yours has to use by-the-book Disciplines. Changes that are made affect the players as a whole and, indeed, the gamemaster who’s coordinating the whole affair.

In terms of video games, the “right to hack” may begin with a single player, but eventually grows to encompass and benefit the whole community of players. Now, that’s not really surprising, given that few people want to identify themselves as cheaters, but the very idea of what we being hacked here game a sense that it was being performed in the interests of fair play. Not so much, “I’m going to do this,” but, “Lets’s do this.” For example, the old WoW add-on that showed the spawn locations and best routes for completing quests was initially created by a player seeking to most efficiently level his character, and that player then shared the mod with other players to offer them the same benefit. In fact, Blizzard eventually saw how many people had been using the mod, saw that it had benefit to their players, and rolled it into the “official” game system.

I love this sort of thing. As a game designer, design is really only the beginning of the process. A game is nothing but a box of pieces, a book, or some code until it’s played. The game comes to life when the player brings the spark of activity to the inanimate parts in question. If that design needs to change to accommodate a player or community’s breath of life, that’s not only fine but desirable. The game itself is just a thing. It’s what we do with it together that matters, and if what we do with it changes the nature of the game in order to facilitate that player-to-player interaction, more’s the better. After all, what right should I have to stop it?

In fact, I think there’s a certain responsibility, or at least an enlightened self-interest, for publishers to watch how their games are being hacked and to criticially determine whether those hacks do, in fact, improve the game experience so that they can be integrated into future editions, expansions, patches, or what have you. There’s no playtest so thorough and useful as actual in-play games, and with the ready communication and online, updatable nature of modern games, a designer who wants longevity for his titles would do well to turn today’s best hacks into tomorrow’s core rules.

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Feb 03 2012
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design, Fiction, RPGs, WIP, Writing

Written Sketches

I recently started using Day One, a journaling app that’s sleek and fun and has a popup feature whereby the app tells you, “Okay, write something.” I’ve been using it mostly for sketching — a paragraph or two at a time just to keep the words flowing without any real thought to where they might fit. They all seem to have some commonality, and from that, I’m getting a sense for what the world they’re describing looks like, which is a sort of neat emergent feature. Well, perhaps not a feature, but more of an intersection of how the app works and what I keep scribbling into it. Here are a few of the excerpts.

“What lands are these? They are the lands we lost, as men, to time, to declivity of the soul, and to outside forces against which we failed to rally. These lands once belonged to our fathers, sustaining us on their bounty, but then we grew proud, and in our pride we grew ignorant, and in our ignorance we debased ourselves and called it culture. Ours is not a legacy of culture, our legacy is a loss of the culture that once united us.”

These words were spoken by Taraq, son of Haroun, before he turned his back on humanity and walked into the wilds, never to return. Some will say his bride bewitched him, but others know the truth: that Taraq did indeed fall in love with his beguiling bride, but that the choice to leave the realm of mankind was wholly his. Taraq has followed his wife into the life of the Good Folk, those who were ancient before even the first true Men could speak words. No more does he practice his huntsman’s craft, for now he dwells in the world instead of merely being its guest.

Looming on the horizon is a castle penumbrated in a timeless twilight. I have watched the lords descend from the castle, thralls to their dead with-lord, to pull women screaming from their beds in the village below. They take them up the icy path, into that dark-shrouded castle and their screams linger in the cold air for an eternal moment and then end. I cannot say how often they do this, these awful lords, for the dread that oppresses me makes me fear and look away.

I hate this weakness in myself. I am powerless to stand against the lords from the shadow-castle, powerless to call out their evil, and too small to even raise my eyes to them. What is the greater crime: their boldness and inhumanity to men, or my selfishness and small misery in complicity?

The folk of the undertown whisper of the rogue’s omen, that when a scandal sets the privileged against one another, low men suffer the most. In such ugly times, though, events occur after which those low men’s fortunes change. Not everyone born in a barn need be a horse, to borrow another commoner’s saying. And not every title need be granted at court.

Beneath the manor, beneath the lime and the chalk and the thousand-plus spiraling stairs that crept into the cavern within the mountain, the thing that gives horror to bloom floats, in its parallel of life, in the brackish, primeval fluid that nourished it before the time when gods claimed to have made the world. There, in that stagnant pool, it floats endlessly, glutting itself on the thought and fear of those who live in the valley below the pass. Through millions of tons of stone, it swells in metonymy with the emotional tides of Men who feel its evil and quake in idle dread.

Those who once dwelled in the manor couldn’t have known the awful, cyclopean sect that stirred beneath them when they built it, looming over the pass. Some horrible, cosmic coincidence must have been at play or else, more likely, the creature reached out with its will and forced the construction of the castle, whether through some hellish minion or some more subtle machination. Although, to what end, none may guess.

Some of this should fit easily into the Pagan Lands material, but other stuff might find a place in some Vampire work (with a little retooling). The general sense here is that whatever world this is must ruly be an awful place, with all its rotten happenings and victimizations of the people who live in it. Or maybe it’s the people themselves who are so awful, and they keep bringing ruin upon themselves. There’s definitely a feeling of loss and fear going on.

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Jan 08 2012
16 Comments
Actual Play, design, RPGs, Tabletop Games

Preschool Pathfinder

My kid loves games. None too surprising, of course, and when I say that she loves games — she’s three — I really mean that she loves opening the boxes and hammering around with the stuff inside. Unfolding maps, stacking pieces, punching out chits, all the sorts of things that aren’t really playing the game that nonetheless involve or facilitate playing with the game.

Fighting the goblins.

Conceptually, Madeleine certainly understands a lot of things, even if they’re not exactly the rules of a given game. For instance, we recently played Ticket To Ride and she was upset that when my wife played the pieces to claim a route, the color of the trains on the route didn’t match the color of the route itself. Of course, she didn’t know the rules themselves, but she made her own associations among the game components in her mind.

Anyway, I had ordered the Pathfinder Beginner Box because I wanted to take a look at the boxed loot and see firsthand how successful it was as an introductory piece of material. When it arrived, Madeleine, being no stranger to the appearance of games and other boxed goodies, assumed that this was another something for her. She pushed her stepstool over to the kitchen island where I was unboxing the whole thing and jumped right into playing with the pieces. She put together some of the figures on the stands and was already familiar with dice. I don’t know how, exactly, we started actually playing, but when we did, she took right away to the interaction between the players, even though it was only the two of us.

In fact, she liked it so much, she talked about what she had done afterward, and even asked to play again when she woke today and wanted to play again after we got back from the zoo.

The reward for any good dungeon delve is a pile of loot.

Of course, we weren’t playing Pathfinder as its rules define it, but I described a few situations, she told me she wanted to fight the whatevers, and then she rolled the dice. The cause-and-effect sequence took form. Over the course of our play, I observed the following things:

  • I started with the standard exchange of RPG interactions, but then I modified the sequence to fit her interests and attention span. That is, we didn’t really both with AC or movement rates or missed attacks or even hit points, we just rolled dice and knocked over figures. It was the interaction with the pieces and me that held her interest.
  • I varied my tone of voice and the pacing of my descriptions, to which she reacted as cues. She knew that she needed to “hurry up!” while she was fighting, because of the tension of the encounter with the monster. At various points, she jumped up and down, raised her hands in victory cheers, and even placed the new monsters from the observed flow of prior turns. Today, we added background music, but I don’t know if that had any effect on the experience for her.
  • She picked up parlance very quickly, knowing that she was rolling for “damage” and identifying individual monsters. She liked fighting the dragon and the goblins; she didn’t like fighting the spider or the “goop” (ooze).
  • She immediately mapped the relationships of the character types to the prompts for their actions. That is, she knew the fighter fought and the wizard cast spells. After a few turns, when I asked her, “What sort of spell do you want to cast?” I didn’t give her any list or context, and she replied, “Pink.” So I described the wizard’s spell in terms of a pink ray. The next time it came to the wizard’s turn, she replied, “Blue,” “red,” “green,” etc., and every spell effect became shaped like a “ball” that the wizard cast. The fighter always closed to a melee piece placement and the wizard always maintained distance.
  • Importantly, the extrinsic motivator of treasure didn’t supersede the intrinsic motivator of playing the game itself, or at least manipulating the pieces. I placed glass beads at various points on the map and described them as giant diamonds. After she defeated the monster guardians, Madeleine would pick up the character token and the glass bead (as if the character were carrying the treasure) and move them over in front of her. Then she’d move to the next glass bead on the map. At the end of the game, I encouraged her to take the glass beads into her room and keep them as her treasure, where she can see them and count them.

Civilization's victory over the fiendishness of monster-kind.

The result was certainly more toy than game, but the interaction had the key elements of a true game. The only thing missing was meaningful choice, in that there were no real consequences to actions and that Madeleine’s choice for both of her characters was either fighting or casting a spell based on which character we were talking about. Still, she chose which treasure next to pursue and which square on the grid she wanted to occupy to fight the monster, so the rudiments of game play as opposed to toy play were there. Toy play is also consistent to the way her age group participates in expressive activity, so it was encouraging to see that expectation and her formative steps into development beyond those boundaries.

Next time, though, I’m not backing off the TPK.

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Jan 02 2012
3 Comments
design, RPGs, Writing

Give ‘Em a (True) Hand

Something that has surprised me in the ongoing V20 work I’ve been doing is that I’ve taken a new shine to the True Black Hand.

Among the Vampire community, Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand can be an unpopular book. I’ve never been an apologist for it, and I can see what some people don’t like about it. It turns the idea of one of the most distinct Disciplines into something that’s thematically at odds with the rest of Vampire. Some of the powers get a little screwy. It has a few ideas in it that threaten to jump the shark, and the premise of the book itself comes perilously close to doing so, too — it leans on Vampire’s device of secrets within secrets a little too hard. Here’s this ancient weird sect you’ve never heard of before, and they’re pulling the strings of the other groups that you have heard of (so they’re not as cool anymore). A little fast and loose with the baseline Vampire experience, the True Hand is Vampire for people who want something a little weirder.

That said, there’s a lot it does well, and I’m really enjoying rooting around in its vaults again. In particular, here’s a list of what I like about the Tal’Mahe’Ra.

  • Perfect Vampire Tone: I’ve said this on panels and in forum discussions before, but the book absolutely nails the “wheels within wheels” conceit that makes Vampire tick. It’s a sect full of factions, and the sect itself overlaps with some of the other sects, and it even bleeds a bit into the thematics of the other supernatural types. What can you believe or trust? No one knows — and since the unknown is such a vital portion of the horror genre, the True Hand is a great sect for fomenting fear of the unknown by its very existence. It’s especially good for a Storyteller whose players know it all, being well-versed in WoD lore, because all that knowledge works against them in a dramatic way.
  • Exoticism and the Macabre: A slightly Eastern, Gnostic flavor mixed in with cyclopean tombs and the bleak resonance of the First City where vampires held sway. It’s a place where stones as old as Eden make up the halls where monsters plucked from their mother’s bosom as infants have never known anything other than servitude to Kindred — Kindred who claim to be shepherding them and protecting them. Everything they touch is twisted or becomes so, and the lament for what’s lost to their unlifestyle is either immediate and poignant or has never even entered their minds.
  • The Dark Side of Academia: There’s a strong monastic element to the Tal’Mahe’Ra, and it works wonders for Vampire. The idea that there’s such a thing as too much knowledge, that some secrets are better left unearthed, and the perils of what someone might do if only they could find out how — that’s a great motivator, both for or against the troupe’s Kindred. What is the morality of fighting to suppress information?

I’ve been scribbling notes for a True Hand chronicle I want to run, a sort of coterie-against-the-world thing that I don’t think should last too long, but would be an interesting exploration of digging some mysteries up and tirelessly hiding others. Tal’Mahe’Ra agents operating in a domain that doesn’t know they’re there but certainly doesn’t want them. When the whole of the local power structure is against you, but what you’re doing you do to protect it? That’s a theme worth telling a story about, I think

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Dec 30 2011
5 Comments
design, RPGs, WIP

Nemesh

Nemesh, Avatar of the Black Ram

The party may encounter a black ram prowling the alpine forests, leading a herd of mountain goats that seem without number. Surprisingly, the black ram has the ability to speak, and will introduce himself as Nemesh, should the characters engage it in conversation. Nemesh is haughty in demeanor and exudes a powerful aura of evil, though he expresses no agenda that seems at odds with that of the civilized races. He refers to leading his herd — his children — between worlds upon worlds, serving a great master with an unspeakable name.

Eventually, Nemesh will exhaust his conversation with the characters and move on, leaving literally no trace of the herd’s passing as they disappear into the wood. Nemesh gives the impression of a creature with great and alien malice in his heart, though he takes no action to justify the impression.

Engaging in combat with the mountain goats is likely foolhardy, given their immeasurable number. Any individual one of them,including Nemesh, may be slain, and doing so results in a permanent blight on the spot of the killing where no plant life will grow and the spilled blood will excoriate the ground to the stone beneath. (It is also almost certain to enrage the rest of the herd).

Nemesh can command (Su) any goats that can hear him speak (Will save of DC 10 to resist, if it becomes necessary). Goats within his sight gain a +1 morale bonus to attack rolls and saving throws. He has DR 10/ magic (Ex), may cast true strike once per day as a 3rd-level wizard, and can speak with animals at will (Su). Treat the herd as a nigh-infinite number of normal goats, wholly docile unless incited. The mountain goats carry no treasure.

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Dec 18 2011
7 Comments
design, RPGs

The Universal RPG Play Loop

In game design, the designer wants to put the player into what’s known as a “game loop,” a repeated sequence that the player can learn and depend upon, and that helps the designer communicate the essential experience of the game. In many Facebook games, for example, the game loop is plant, harvest, build. In Assassin’s Creed multiplayer, the game loop is hide and seek. In EVE Online, each of the subsystems points back to spaceships fighting.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, of course, because it’s my job to do it and it’s my goal to keep it as uncomplicated as possible for the player. I’m not a big fan of complex systems for the sake of complex systems. I’m not a big fan of difficulty for the sake of difficulty. I think game design is at its best when it’s simple. The strength of a game is in how it allows the players to relate to one another and the systems are all vehicles for that experience. If players can find new uses or clever interactions with simple systems, I think that’s infinitely better than having them solve a difficult system, because it’s more open-ended.

So, given that I’m finishing my most recent game supplement (the V20 Companion for Vampire: The Masquerade), I’ve been going back over the material in the book, making sure that all of the material therein has an appropriate place in the loop. Tabletop roleplaying games are an interesting model because, in my experience, the loop is identical in all of them. The set dressing can change a million and one times, of course, but the ultimate expression of the game, whether you’re playing D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Dogs in the Vineyard, or Vampire, is one of situation and response. Vampire observes event. Vampire participates in (or evades) event. Consequences of action (or inaction) apply. New stimulus results and the loop continues.

One cycle of the tabletop RPG play loop

Now, I’m not saying that every game is the same, of course. I’m saying that how we play these games is a universal construct. The gamemaster presents a situation, the players respond, and the resolution occurs. This resolution leads to the next situation, etc., which keeps the loop in motion. At some point, the action concludes (at the story’s end, when the final challenge is overcome, or just when the game peters out), but every action taken at the game table, regardless of the game, has results and creates a new situation.

That makes me nervous, actually. If there’s one thing I’ve learned form 16-plus years of professional game design, it’s that nothing is so goddamned simple, and if it looks like it is, there’s something horrible about to happen and derail the whole sequence. My loop here is either too general to have much value — which I don’t think is the case — or it’s not accounting for something.

I think the simple loop does have value, because it informs both the core game and the supplementary material. If, for example, I tried to cram a resource-farming loop into Vampire, it wouldn’t work. To a degree, there’s a resource-farming loop that’s integral (vampires need blood and Willpower in order to use their powers or even just stay vital), but that loop is part of the central “situation happens, vampire responds” sequence. If I tried to force an additional interaction of “go back to your blood castle and fertilize your fang trees,” the game would take a radical departure from the expected roleplaying game sequence and the Vampire: the Masquerade experience in particular.

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Oct 17 2011
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design, RPGs, WIP, Writing

Pagan Lands: Where Are We?

"Where on the map is a giant, creepy eye hovering over a ruined fortress? I think we're lost."

One of the things that has enthused me while working on Pagan Lands is that the PCs are literally captives of the environment. They don’t know where they’re going, and they know where they’ve been only if they’ve been keeping a diligent map. It’s an exploration campaign that assumes the characters have been dumped into a strange land with plenty of its own oddities that alter the environment or otherwise ensure they have no adequate way of forecasting where they’re headed until they do the mapping. The semi-aboriginal cultures that exist there don’t do much traveling and when they do, they do so along routes that have an oral or small-scale cartographical tradition.

The upshot of this is that I don’t know if I need to include a map in Pagan Lands. In fact, some part of me believes that the setting would be better off with it intentionally excluded.

It’s a weird kind of thing to consider. I think, from the perspective of Pagan Lands as a “product,” lots of fantasy players —€” especially D&D players —€” expect a map to be included in a setting. GMs usually buy pregenerated materials to save them time, or to steal little bits and pieces from them, including maps. Conceptually, though, what better way to ensure that no two Pagan Lands campaigns are alike than to require part of the creative preparatory work be to build the stage, and only if you need it. It’s perfectly possible, actually, to let gameplay shape the continent. The GM can randomly determine which encounters come after which or can plan a vague sense of a picaresque campaign flow. In this sense, the players and GM would be working collaboratively to not just explore but wholly generate the campaign geography.

"Suuuure, I can get you where you're going. It's over a mountain. Or under a swamp. Or near a— look, do you want to get going or not?"

A map like this doesn’t have to be exactingly detailed. The Pagan Lands are on a peninsula and they’re bordered on the south by the Mark. That’s it. Go! There aren’t any political nations nor do any of the locations require such stringent placement as to necessitate a map. Like the early days of the Hyborean Age or the devil-may-care attitudes of Fafhrd and the Mouser, and definitely the vague destinations of the Dying Earth and Zothique. The idea also allows for making a reliable map be a true treasure. Thematically, the Pagan Lands are a “lost continent,” so the fact that this information simply doesn’t exist anymore is actually a setting detail.

On the other hand, I like maps. I like evocative maps in particular, like this Hârn map or the map downloadable for Vornheim (even though I don’t find the Vornheim map very useful, much as I like the book material itself). And, while there’s something to be said for the gigantic maps for the Wilderlands of High Fantasy and Ptolus, those settings are very different from what the Pagan Lands intends to provide.

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Oct 05 2011
7 Comments
design, RPGs, WIP

An Anarch (Free) State of Mind

In revisiting Vampire for the 20th Anniversary Edition, I knew I wanted to go back and give the Anarchs a fair shake. The Anarchs took a beating in the revised era, largely as a result of metaplot advancements, but also because their identity at the time was missing a key compelling element. The Anarchs needed the Camarilla to remain relevant. They needed an established organization to rebel against, because without rebellion, what were they?

The other entities in the game with similar outlooks at least had cultural identities to help shape them. The Brujah are the key example here: They’re the clan of “rebels,” but they also have an historical identity tying them to Carthage and Egypt during Classical times, they have an ongoing feud with the Ventrue, and if all else fails, you can just let them be the Lost Boys.

The Anarchs don’t have that. Without the Man, they don’t exist. At least, they didn’t.

Anarchs get all the hot chicks.

That’s a shame. The Anarchs were a really great piece of first- and second-edition Vampire that lost relevance over the life of the game. I certainly have to shoulder some of the blame for that. So that’s why I feel like I owe them an empowering update.

The more I’ve been working on V20, the more the Kindred have showed their age. The Camarilla still cares about its pomp and circumstance, becoming very much Nero as, in the End Times, Rome burns. The Sabbat still wages its holy war, consuming as many of its childer in consecrated fire as it sends against the hated Antediluvians. But the Anarchs? The Anarchs had their ass kicked so bad during the Revised era that they’re still smoldering and black-eyed.

So with the ongoing development work I’m doing for the classic World of Darkness, the more writing I’ve been doing, the more the Anarchs have carved out their own niche in my mind, and I’m wanting to bring that to the supplementary material. Here’s the thing: The Anarchs are younger than the other sects, by individual and on the whole. Their rebellious politics and comparatively low numbers and power (when compared with the elders and officers of the other sects) put them on a guerilla path. To remain viable, the Anarchs need to maximize whatever advantages they can find.

To that end, it’s made increasing sense to me to have the Anarchs become the most technologically adept of the Cainite factions. With the technological and communication advancements since the end of the Revised era, it’s been the perfect opportunity for the Anarchs to grasp emergent technology as a weapon and wield it against the larger, slower, more hidebound sects. It makes sense, Anarchs using Facebook and Google+ groups to trade information, using Twitter to organize (#fucktheprince), and trading or even selling boons on a dedicated auction site. They dump scans of Elders’ incriminating documents into shared Dropboxes. They pass around cultural tokens like music and pictures on sharing services like Tumblr and they call out Kindred hot spots using code phrases on services like Yelp and Foursquare. (Smiling Jack just checked in at the Prince’s Manor.) Hell, some of the really savvy ones might have created their own apps for use on mobile devices. (A geotagged RackFinder? “The music here is good and the kine are way drunk Thursday through Saturday, so the blood is plentiful but boozy. Sunday is industry night. Bartender Ashleigh is a blood doll, so order your drink ‘dirty red’ to let her know what you are.”)

So long as there's 3G available along the way, this guy might join the Anarch Movement in your city once he has to flee his own.

There’s space for this to become silly (Smiling Jack is the mayor of the Prince’s Manor…), but when used with reason, moderation, an Anarch’s on-the-ropes mentality, and with an basic understanding that it’s all a part of a secret war among bloodthirsty predators, it’s actually a really cool way to fight the system. There’s no reason the Anarchs can’t stage innumerable Arab Springs of their own or mobilize like #occupywallst. And think what a group of Anarchs organized and skilled like Anonymous might do — assuming they’re not vampires among us already.

It’s all got me thinking: Is the idea, even, of “domain” outdated for the Anarchs? Is the new Anarch model a sort of enlightened, information-rich Autarkis state? Is each Anarch his own sovereign domain?

This last might be getting a little out there, but it’s certainly food for thought. It’d be worth exploring in a one-shot or chronicle, and can definitely alter the course of the nightly . Whatever the case, it makes the Anarchs fundamentally viable again, and no longer the whipping boy for the Camarilla (and the Sabbat, and the Kuei-jin…). It also gives a compelling reason and method for them to be fighting back from the whipping they suffered throughout the previous run of Vampire titles.

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