Justin Achilli

Category: design

13 June 2012

IXN Interview

I did an interview with IXN recently, which is a Spanish-language games, comics, and anime site. Here’s the interview in English, should you be interested in such things as design principles, the overlap between hobby games and video games, and my life.

This Charming Man

First of all, who is Justin Achilli, sometimes also known as DJ Achilles?

I’m the sum of my parts. Game designer, writer, cook, DJ, father, husband, son, and brother. I think in particular, I’m drawn to the things that let me interact with other people, such as playing games with them, cooking a meal for them, or entertaining them on the dance floor. I’m a social creature. Gregarious. Like a monkey.

Could you tell us what’s life for a game designer is like?

For me, it’s a professional career. I work a Monday-Friday schedule at Red Storm Entertainment, and in the evenings I head home to work on Vampire and spend family time. Sometimes there’s travel involved, but for the most part, it’s a steady arrangement until crunch time.

Your blog says you’ve been in game designing for about 16 years, which elements do you think are the most important to create and develop an RPG?

For me, the most important element of an RPG is that it allows players the ability to affect the environment. This is really the heart of an RPG: The gamemaster sets the scene, the players interact with it in some way, and then the gamemaster interprets those actions into results. This is where RPGs run by people currently shine above and beyond computer RPGs, which are limited by the logic developers place inside them. An RPG run by a person has infinite potential player interaction and infinite potential outcome analysis. A computer game is a finite series of if/ then, by comparison.

From a design perspective, that’s easy for a designer to achieve because it’s inherent in the function of the game. The harder part, and the part that takes the most refinement, is creating a unique combination of systems and setting that communicates the essential experience of the game. As an example here, look at Humanity in Vampire. One of the essential experiences of Vampire is the struggle against the Beast, which is a setting component and a system. When those two come to the fore, you’ve got something that’s uniquely Vampire as opposed to, say, a sci-fi exploration game or a fantasy monster hunt.

This is a double question… Which do you like better:
Games with an emphasis on narrative over system/mechanics or vice versa?

I don’t necessarily think that these are mutually exclusive. You can have a game like In a Wicked Age in which the system is constructed to foster the narrative, or you can have a game like Risk in which there’s very little inherent narrative, but the narrative arises as a result of the system’s determinations. For me, it’s more of an understanding of the game I’m playing on its own terms. A friend came over the other day and we played Puerto Rico, for example. None of the narrative that emerged from our session had a damn thing to do with Puerto Rico, but the most notable narrative element that emerged was the fact that my wife forced the endgame situation one turn before the plan I was putting together came to fruition. I was so close!

In terms of a “storytelling game,” we’ve always built the systems to be non-intrusive. We don’t have exhaustive rules for every situation that might occur. I think there’s more narrative flexibility in that, with the story directing the rules interpretations. That’s why you see so many things like “The storyteller will determine.…” It’s not saying that one way is better than the other, it’s just the game we’ve chosen to make. I enjoy both narrative systems like Storyteller and games in which the systems are fun to manipulate as well, like Pathfinder/ D&D.

And, game settings with a rigid, ambiguous or virtually non existent meta-plot/backstory?

Here, I prefer a background that has either a lot of “gaps” between the background facts, or has a very broad background with lot of room to focus in on the details that emerge for my troupe. In the first situation, like Vampire, there are a lot of “hooks” in place that give players room to take one of the setting tenets and then do what they want with it. In the latter case, the setting is vague enough that the facts of the game world are defined over the course of playing the game and as a result of it, and I love that.

What I’m less a fan of is a progressive metaplot, in which the game material is serial, and if I miss a book, then I miss something that developed and my next book may or may not have all the facts necessary to run a game in a world in which the printed detail is paramount. The stories really belong to the people playing the game, and the printed material exists primarily to give them a game experience, not dictate the outcome of their game. If my troupe tells a story about the siege of Miami and the Camarilla wins, but then a book comes out that says the Sabbat wins, I feel disconnected from the game. That’s why we’re mostly working with detailed histories and broad modern trends as opposed to current metaplots with the V20 material.

Besides Vampire The Masquerade you’ve worked in a lot of other games, which ones are the most famous or the ones with the highest profiles? And which ones have you enjoyed working on the most?

I was lead multiplayer designer on Assassins Creed: Revelations, which is probably the title of mine that has the most shipped units. I really enjoyed the freedom of working on Requiem, and I really wish we would have jumped into the deep end with it and changed it more from its predecessor, in hindsight. But most of all, I love working with Vampire: The Masquerade. I love its singular confluence of setting and mechanics, and I can always find some unexplored corner of the world that’s casting its own distinct shadow and use that to tell a story.

As a game designer you’ve not only concentrated on pen & paper games. Which other activities you´ve been able to delve in?

Most of my work is on RPGs, but I actually started at White Wolf working on the Rage collectible card game. I’ve worked on board games, as well, and some amount of writing for the Vampire Mind’s Eye LARP rules. Beyond that, I’ve done AAA MMO development, AAA console action-game development, Facebook game development, and a few novels.

You’re a family man, how hard is it to balance a professional life oriented to fantasy/game designing with your family responsibilities?

Everyone in my family plays games, so we do a lot of that in our free time. We play all different types of games, but I think play is healthy for learning and imagination, so I’m glad my daughter does it, and it’s also a wonderful social activity, so I’m glad I share it with my wife and friends. Nietzsche said that, “Without music, life would be a mistake,” and I feel the same way about games.

We know that V20 was created using Open Development system, who was the first one to come up with the idea and how do you feel about the result? Do you think that the future of game development is geared towards open dev?

I don’t know if the collective of future of game development lies with open development, but I definitely think it offers a lot that benefits designers. From the practical aspects of being able to collect far-ranging feedback on a game in design to the more community-based aspects of building a relationship with the game’s players, Open Development has been a huge boon to the ongoing development of Vampire. Being able to talk directly to players, especially across wide geographical separations, is something we didn’t have 20 years ago when Vampire came into being, and a lot of our decisions were kind of “cowboy” decisions, made based on gut feelings and guesswork rather than with any direct indication that a design decision was the right one. The only real feedback we had to go on was sales numbers, and those lagged so far behind and revealed only such a small portion of the player experience that we were largely developing by trial and error. Now, being able to share a systems or setting draft and integrate feedback is not only possible, but easily done and maintained.

Looking back, how long ago did you started role playing and why? What caught your attention initially?

I’ve always been attracted to the fantastical and fanciful. I remember seeing Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards when I was really young, listening to music that had a unique sound and cool cover art, and indulging imagination. When I was nine, my cousin ran a D&D game in his basement, and that was my first introduction to roleplaying games. Even in my periods of RPG gaming lull after that, I was always engaged in some kind of game, even if it wasn’t a LARP or tabletop RPG. I didn’t even need to be playing directly, just interacting with an imaginary place.

It’s a very different kind of monster being a GameMaster/Storyteller than being a player, how is it that you went from being a player to GM and then to game designer?

I’ve always been attracted to the worldbuilding aspect of game design, so while I was entertaining myself with the worldcraft of character creation, I turned my thinking to a larger scope. Why is this true in a particular world? A lot of that has narrative application, as you’re building webs of motivations for characters or creating cause-and-effect rewards for players to uncover and exploit, but it’s also interesting in a rules and experience context. For example, that’s why Vampire works as a morality story – your power as a vampire comes from an expendable resource, like, say, “mana” or “action points,” but it’s actually blood. You have to take your resource away from someone else and harm them to do it. At what price power? So the thought exercises that came from explaining the why behind the systems really turned my attention to design as a practice.

Do you feel satisfied with your achievements as a game designer? Is there any game, whether in genre or subject, you would like to create or work on but haven’t been able to?

I’m pretty happy with where I am. There’s always more work to do, of course, but I’m thankful to have had the opportunity to steer the direction of a game I love. I wish I had more time to do more playing, more writing, and more conceptual exploration, but that’s a truism of human life, I think. We all want more time. Time is the only resource that means anything, both in gameplay and life.

For example, I’ve been working on Pagan Lands, which is an original-rules fantasy hexcrawl inspired by the weird fiction that started the hobby, as a sort of love letter to why I like to play RPGs. With all of the V20 work that’s been going on plus day job plus a lot of my recent relocation, I haven’t been able to work on it nearly as much as I’d like to. Why not? I NEED MORE TIME, MAN.

Finally, which are your current projects both rpg’s and other stuff?

Right now, I’m working on an as-yet unannounced project at my Red Storm day job that’s pretty exciting, and perfectly in line with my design philosophy. The current Vampire title I’m working on is Children of the Revolution, with Hunters Hunted 2 right around the corner. I’ve got an old-school fantasy game hex crawl shaping up in my tiny bits of free time, and I’ve got a card game that’s ready to play, but that needs some art and graphic design before I can do anything with it. A few more fiction projects (both short- and long-form) have been lying neglected for a while, but I don’t think I’ll make it back to them any time soon with the other projects I have in progress. Everything in its due time.

Thanks a lot for the interview.

My pleasure! Sorry it took so long to get it back to you.

How can people keep up with your projects and contact you?

On Twitter, I’m @jachilli

On Facebook, I’m justin.achilli

Once the V20 schedule stabilizes, I also hope to be blogging more at justinachilli.com. Which, of course, I need to carve out the time to do.

And well, you knew we had to ask: what’s your honest opinion of the Gehenna book? Is it the ending that V: tM needed but not the one that it deserved?

It’s a tough question. I was definitely happy with the Gehenna book, and so were many players. It went to reprint three times! That said, Vampire is an intensely personal game, and I know that it couldn’t possibly conclude everyone’s individual chronicle personally. That’s why we presented the variety of scenarios we did. We had identified the most frequent playstyles and chronicle types that people were using, and then created scenarios specifically suited to those types. That’s the key word, though, “types.” If your type deviated from the most frequent or had some other unique characteristic, we couldn’t possibly have created an infinite book that was all things to everyone.

One of the core principles of storytelling is crafting an end, obviously. All stories have to end. Did Gehenna conclude the “official” Vampire storyline with an appropriate bang or whimper? I think it did. And yet, here we are, talking about Vampire stories that continue long after the end of that particular continuity thread. I think that’s a good sign.

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12 June 2012

Game Design is a Skateboard


I remember seeing Rodney Mullen skate outside of a department store at Valley View Mall in Dallas back int he late 1980s. He was an amazingly down-to-earth guy, who was happy to shake the hand of this squeeb-headed street rat who came clattering up to him without knowing him from Adam. So many of the rest of the top-tier skateboarders at the time were so unapproachable, because they were making six figures and flying to Japan and Europe and being rock stars as much as they were athletes. Even though I didn’t freestyle, I always loved watching RM skate because he had this way of realizing the potential rather than just banging out rote tricks. He was really one with his artist’s implement, using the skateboard as an extension of himself.

What does this have to do with game design? Watching this video is a good reminder to think in terms of the game as a means rather than an end. From the perspective of the game, you don’t want the game to be a product, you want the game to be an avenue of expression, creativity, and social engagement. (There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make a game a product from a business perspective, but it’s probably not your game design objective.) How can you use your creative process to better inform your game? How can your creativity inform the development of the game itself, as opposed to simply expressing an idea in the context of the game? What game design tools or game pieces can you use in new ways?

Note that there’s no creative jerkoff in Mullen’s skating. At no point does he hold up a skateboard with, say, two pieces of bread on either side and say, “I’m doing something with this that doesn’t really have any inherent value, but, oh, man, isn’t this just so different from what you expect?. He’s innovating trick performance as part of the activity, not to say, “Look at this. Look how different this is. Aren’t I clever?” When he talks about darkslides, he immediately thinks, “Twenty new tricks can come from this, now that manipulating the skateboard in this way is possible.” The game — the skateboard — is the means for that expression, not the expression itself.

So what does this mean, actually? What do I mean with all this talk instead of a bunch of hot-air bullshit? Let’s take a character sheet as an example, and assume a multiplayer game. We could build a rules system by which the players cooperatively fill out a character sheet that represents their relationship instead of their individual capacities. Or perhaps the character sheet represents an asset they have to cooperatively use. The context — a character sheet and cooperation — informs the content, as Rodney says.

Also, there’s another great idea in here: That no one skater [or designer] is the best. What makes them individually great is the degree to which they use their skating [or design] to individuate themselves. Powerful stuff!

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2 June 2012

The Business Side: V20 Companion and Children of the Revolution

Vinny Badcat is disinterested in my perspective.

We’re winding down to the final week of the Kickstarter for the prestige edition of Children of the Revolution for Vampire: the Masquerade, and we’re feeling pretty good about making the funding after a final-week push to get the word out and remind players that once these prestige printing are gone, that’s it. As normal, the POD and PDF versions of the book will be available on DriveThru, but the extra-fancy, leather-bound versions are a one-time printing. We’ve received more than a few requests from players who missed the opportunity to reprint, but it’s just not feasible because the printing costs are too high for small, supplementary runs.

We did a postmortem of our first Kickstarter prestige book, the V20 Companion, last week. If you’d like to listen to that, it covers more in-depth our per-unit costs, the Open Development process, some of the lessons we learned from the experience of creating the book, and a few of our upcoming plans (as well as ow we changed them once we looked at the data after the Companion Kickstarter closed).

In the meantime, I’m finalizing the Children of the Revolution manuscripts and sending those to the editor. Most of it is in her hands now, but I’m in the home stretch this weekend with the last 10,000 words or so. Check out the Children of the Revolution blog — which should be back up and running now after a brief and unexpected outage — for more details on that end.

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7 March 2012

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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3 February 2012

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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8 January 2012

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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2 January 2012

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

3 comments
30 December 2011

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.

5 comments
18 December 2011

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.

7 comments
17 October 2011

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.

2 comments
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