Writing | Justin Achilli

3 January 2013

Appetite for (Cooperative) Destruction

I’ve been thinking lately about how people do things cooperatively online (no surprise), but I’ve also been thinking about “consumable” media and its persistence. For example, Bret Easton Ellis includes name-brand references in his fiction, the result of which is an intentional obsolescence that marks the writing as belonging to a particular period of time. As well, books that affect their environment, like Jorn and Debord’s Mémoires, and other artistic endeavors, like The Return of the Durutti Column, both of which featured covers made of sandpaper that abraded — destroying, slowly — whatever occupied the spaces next to them on the shelves or even the individuals holding them. The art resided as much in the statement of where it had been placed, at the choice of the owner, making that statement mutual and participatory. Putting the book or album on a shelf meant damaging the other objects nearby, so the owner engaged in the conscious action of the experience.

Now, my natural inclination is more toward creation than destruction, so I don’t want the same effect there. A while back I did have the idea of writing a book, printing it, and then deleting the data once it had been printed, both planning for obsolescence and destroying, as it were, but that doesn’t leave much room for the individual’s participation. So now, I have in mind a writing, and a printing, and then a pass-off of the book text to the reader. I’m thinking via a wiki: I dump the raw text onto an editable website, deleting the original data, and leaving it to the tender mercies of anyone who wants to make a change.

This is how Wikipedia works (to an extent), but I don’t know if it’s a good fit for a piece of fiction. Part of Wikipedia’s appeal is the plain truth, without bias, and its legion supporters work scrupulously to cull editorial and revert malicious change. I don’t know that I necessarily want that, because even “malicious change” is participation, to whatever end, though it would certainly be remarkable whether people attempted to preserve some amount of the original intent, or would rather engage in pure defacement. Wikipedia also has the benefit of, being factual, a great deal of investment by people who care about that plain truth, and I don’t know that such a thing is possible for a one-off piece of fiction intentionally designed to be manipulated into something other than its original shape.

Still, I think it’d be an interesting experiment, particularly as word-of-mouth spread to people without the first-degree interest of people who cared that I was working on it. Would Kevin Bacon make an edit, once it made it through the six degrees of removal?

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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26 August 2010

Open Game Table, Volume Two

Open Gaming Table, Volume 2 is now available in print and digital download formats. If you enjoy reading blogs and ruminations on the things that make games what they are, this Jonathan Jacobs-collected passel of journal entries is a gold mine. I wrote the foreword, so I’m not entirely unbiased on the matter, but you’ll certainly find more herein than my perspective. For me, talking about games is as much fun as playing games, so if you’re of a similar sort and the about part is as fulfilling as the games part, you’ll definitely enjoy this virtual, text-baseed panel of some prominent pontificators in the blogging community.

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15 August 2010

Setting Sketch: The Queen of Roses

I’ve been working on Wintergris over the bachelor weekend while my wife and daughter are away, and in some of the downtime, I scribbled this together. It seems like it might be a fun thing to run as a one-on-one campaign using Pathfinder or maybe something more painterly. I liked that it mixes intrigue and “go fight stuff.” In fact, I see the player in the role of the Queen’s Envoy as sort of like Walsingham from Elizabeth. It’s also fun to revel in the influences here. You can see obvious inflections of Gene Wolfe, Glen Cook, and a heapin’ helpin’ of Victoriana. Or perhaps just a less-deft Gormenghast.

Since time out of mind, the Queen has rules the City of Roses, which spans beyond the horizon in all directions. Truly, none knows what, if anything, lies beyond Roses; no once call recall ever meeting anyone from outside its walls or even how to leave its environs. So it is with the Queen, as well — it seems she has always ruled, and likely always will.

The Queen and Court

Hidden behind a curtain-veil that surrounds her throne, the Queen rules the City of Roses as its unquestioned monarch. Beneath her, her court schemes in secret after making a show of bowing to her absolute power.

The court is very much an extension of the Queen’s will. She grants and rescinds titles with motive known only to her, and her poisonous ire one day might turn to fawning favor the next.

At present, the courtly fashion accessories in vogue are fanciful masks, giving the impression that the whole of the aristocracy is involved in an elaborate charade. While the nobles conspire behind their stylish accouterments, the politics of the realm take shape. One is left with the impression that the ceremony is as much for protection as it is for amusement — but exactly who’s playing the joke on whom often remains unclear.

The City of Roses

The city itself is a sprawling mystery, a vast urban dystopia, and a clash of haves and have-nots. Unseen forces plot inscrutable agendas while the Queen’s court conducts its own perilous game of power and intrigue. Things man was not meant to know prowl the City of Roses at night, while it also issues forth wonders that might be considered little less than miracles.

In the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, towers soar skyward, pushed toward the heavens by gossamer architecture and traversed by bridges that seem to fly from structure to structure, while stained-glass windows glitter like gems when the sun strikes them.

Not all is so beautiful or vibrant in the City of Roses, however. Much of the city is poor, filthy, underdeveloped, or industrial. The city’s mines churn out coarse ores from beneath the surface of the earth. Smithies and refineries spew impenetrable smoke. Rookeries and tenements flourish in the shadows of the wealthy districts.

Much of the city — perhaps a third or more by the reckoning of some sages — is a cyclopean ruin, a still-standing testament to forgotten times. Today these ruins house the desperate and strange, and are even whispered to be the domains of monsters and other unspeakable things.

Matters of Faith

Officially, the religion of the City of Roses is Theosophy, a pursuit of virtues that lead men toward “the Absolute.” The Queen’s Theosophy is a civic faith, intended to promote critical thought, science, artistic expression, commerce, and a more vaguely defined “good deeds.” Understanding of universal mysteries and a study of the arcane arts are also relevant, as Theosophy maintains that the cosmos and all its attendant powers are both conscious entities and interrelated in some capacity.

An official religion does nothing to stem the tide of the various other faiths, cults, and outright heresies that thrive in the city. Everything from veneration of obscure pantheons to nature worship to a bizarre sect claiming that the Queen herself is a god finds adherents in the City of Roses. Ancestor worship, deification of abstract concepts, the Temple of the Rat-Curse God: All of these and more find their place from the home shrines to the subterranean altars of the city.

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22 July 2010

Wintergris Outline

So, as I mentioned before, I’m working on an old-school adventure game setting. I’m planning to publish it, but that comes later. For now, I’m writing the thing from scratch. Here’s the outline.

Wintergris

Campaign Introduction (1,000 words)

Discuss core setting principles.

• Setting is a northern expanses environment, with much ice and snow and cold-environment severity.

• “Island frontier”: an undiscovered land where little law holds sway and the landmarks in the environment are relics of previous civilizations. Players are the first to rediscover their world. Spread out over multiple islands, giving plenty of opportunity for wilderness, seafaring, and dungeon exploration.

• Much of the geography is deliberately left unnamed, so the PCs, as part of the reward for (re) discovering it, can name it what they wish.

• Further, in the manner of the original rulesets, discuss the ability for the PCs to carve their own domains out of the environment. As they gain levels and explore, they should keep an eye out for potential locations for their own strongholds.

Wintergris Home Base (4,500 words)

People and places: Quick, one-line synopses of notable people and establishments in Wintergris. Hit their central function, and flesh them out with open-ended interests or functions to allow players to “explore” local establishments and people. Give GMs plenty of gaps to fill, but don’t leave useless voids.

Cover Castle Wintergris, Wintergris town, and Potter’s Camp. Castle Wintergris is the seat of local power, though it’s a fiefdom granted by a distant authority that doesn’t really devote much attention to this border territory. Wintergris town has a frontier feel, more of a permanent trading camp than a civilized city. Around 3,000 people. Harsh climes make for spare amenities. Potter’s Camp is the disenfranchised “quarter,” where refugees, the destitute, and those fleeing something on the mainland have their makeshift homes.

Detail hints and rumors that can be obtained in the community. Likewise, allude to storied treasures that might exist out there in the island frontier.

Encounter Descriptions (8,000 words)

A collection of point-of-interest single-encounter descriptions. These include the location title, map reference, encounter description, creature or circumstantial challenges to overcome, and any relevant treasure.

Emphasis here is on the unique, alien, weird, and intriguing. Examples might include a long-defunct alchemist’s laboratory, a mountaintop preserve of some interesting creature, a dragon’s rookery built into the chimney of a volcano, or a shrine to a dead culture’s god and what’s nearby. Examples of what not to include are “common” or staple fantasy campaign ideas. Feel free to include common ideas, but focus on the details that make them unique or interesting. No “goblin camp,” for example, but it would be okay to describe a colony of grotesque, debased humanoid creatures dwelling in the hollowed-out ruin of an enormous collapsed statue. Make exploration that reward, and punctuate it with a challenge to overcome. Reskin some of the classic monsters to make them fresh again (leave their mechanics unchanged), but also indulge those iconic monsters that represent the hobby by their presence.

Not all challenges must be monsters, but most should be. make exciting use of consciously built traps, but also include dangerous or difficult obstacles that are simply part of the environment, from aggressive plants to natural phenomena to curiosities unique to the landmarks.

Remember to use the “island frontier” and cold-weather setting elements.

I made the mistake of Googling “winter fantasy” and then retuned my search to “winter castle.” My soul is scarred.Dungeon Locations (12,000 words)

These are the longer-form encounter environments. They don’t have to be huge, but they do need to be thematic, and they need to present unique play episodes — nobody wants to pay for run-of-the-mill setting material that anyone could create.

This is also the place to evoke the literature that inspired the original game. Avoid homage, but create the same feelings of wonder, dread, and weirdness that the golden age of sci-fi and fantasy did. Some environments to include:

• The temple of a horrific cult. This should have a creepy feeling; the place should exude the malice of its evil rites. Avoid splatter and schlock eeeeevil, but make it plain that the world is a better place without this cult.

• A dungeon environment that hits the ice-and-snow set dressing heavily. I have a thing for white dragons, but it doesn’t have to be that.

• An aquatic stronghold of some sort that showcases aquatic combat and the benefits that a native sea critter has therein. This is a great place to get exotic and put the players in weird situations, such as walking on the sea floor, breathing water, moving in three-dimensional space, observing the alien beauty of the frigid seas, etc.

• A dungeon environment in which social interaction and/ or morale becomes a central challenge. Over the course of play, this “dungeon” might actually become of some allegiance to the PCs — it may become a trading outpost, a lookout against mainland intrusion, or something else. Build the dungeon so that players can use charm or reasonable diplomacy to overcome its threat

• Pirates! Use the 90/10 rule to make this more than just a generic pirate port, but also, let’s be honest, let us have fun with the pirates. This can be a cove hideout, a shipwreck, whatever, but do something interesting with the idea of pirates in a permanent winter environment.

• A “crashed spaceship.” Obviously, the PCs won’t know what this is, but its alien origin and incongruity with the world provide a sense of otherness.

• An introduction to a megadungeon. A later supplement can cover the whole complex, but establish a place in the world for it, and give enough basic detail with which the GM can flesh it out himself if that supplement never materializes or if he just wants to build this part of the world himself.

Tables and Appendix (3,000 words)

Support material including:

• Random encounter tables

• Random ruin and landmark tables

• Pregenerated characters for use as drop-in PCs or members of an NPC party

• A section offering the GM advice for expanding the adventure beyond the written text here, and further encouraging stronghold construction

• Any new monsters, spells, items, or whatever that need their own descriptions

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16 April 2010

Build Gardens, Not Museums

Worldbuilding comes with perils, not the least of which is often the tendency for a designer or writer to want to answer all of the questions he puts forward. This is a natural instinct. It creates a feeling wholeness and integrity. It suggests that the created world is a logical place, and that cause has effect. From a perspective of vanity, it demonstrates that the designer knows what he’s doing: No loose ends means nothing can unravel.

Two geniuses conspire drunkenly. What are they planning? WAIT, WAIT, DON’T TELL ME.Where’s the fun in that?

If you’re a writer, leave some loose threads. If you’re designing a game world, leave some of those stones unturned. The interstices, the lacunae, that’s where a world comes alive because they invite the creative participation of the readers or the players. A player or reader who finds a gap or shadowy bit in your world uses her imagination to fill that gap or shine light there. It makes her feel the world is partially hers.

(I’m not saying make your plot a sloppy mess — but we’ll cover plotting more in part two of this topic.)

Now, many worldbuilders don’t want to hear this. They hold up their worlds as bits of virtuoso craftsmanship, unassailable, unchangeable works of sovereign genius.

But that’s not interesting. If the player can’t change the world through his actions, or if the reader’s every bit of creative enjoyment takes a back seat to the writer’s omnipotence over the world, that leaves the audience disengaged. Especially in the modern communication medium, participation is key.

That’s not to say a writer needs to relinquish his “canon,” or that a game world needs to be slave to every passing player caprice. Writers, your readers don’t commit their details to print or digital permanence unless you let them, but they’re going to remember your work for far longer if you let them come along for the ride instead of just watching from the station. Gamemasters and designers, you’re building the world on a macro level, but isn’t it all really just a stage upon which your players can shine? Doesn’t it exist for them to explore, solve, and wonder about?

After all what’s more compelling, a block of quarried stone, or a sculpture?

Blasphemy? Or have I witnessed a secret resurrection? Let me savor not knowing for a while.This was the stock in trade for Vampire when I was running it. The writers and I would spend a few paragraphs putting together a situation or setting, and then we’d cast a bit of mystery over the idea by suggesting that the opposite might be true. Prince Umbrageo holds the city in his iron grip… or does he? Who are those vampires over there? Is there some truth to the fledgling Martina’s claim that she holds the Prince in blood thrall? What’s the real story here? Even if a chronicle never investigated that little quandary, it made the fictional world seem like a bigger place. It gave the sense that not all of the answers had been discovered, that some mysteries still exist.

Not everything fits in a neat little box. That, friends, is where the imagination can shift into high gear. Even though it’s tertiary to the central story (which it must be, because a world of nothing but smoke and mirrors is as unfulfilling as a “museum world” in which you’re not allowed to touch anything), the little things keep boiling in your players’ or readers’ minds. It keeps them coming back to you, hungry for more.

Next time: putting the theory in practice. Get out your gardening gear, as we’ll be planting some fecund seeds of doubt.

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24 March 2010

Belluna Serenissima: Solo 4e Campaign Plans

Several years ago, I ran what I still regard as my best D&D campaign. Set in a fictitious version of Venice, it had a world that I really liked and a group of players who really challenged me as a gamemaster. The first session of the campaign, I remember having the entire plot worked out — which then ran completely off the rails as the PCs proceeded to get drunk and lead a good-time mob of revelers to the docks where they were supposed to (heh… supposed to) sneak or fight their way on board a ship with a sinister artifact in the cargo hold. Instead, the impromptu roving street festival proceeded to get the dockmaster loaded, and they obtained the information they needed anyway, in addition to taking a humbling swim in the canals.

I loved that game, and I want to revisit it. I don’t have the time to undertake another campaign right now, given the schedule my wife and I work and the other games I’m already playing. But I still want to get back into Belluna, that imaginary city for which I have so many fond memories.

So I’m going to run it for myself. With a little prep work, I can put together some encounters using the D&D 4e ruleset and play out all sides of the conflicts into which I dump my hardscrabble hero.

I have many things I want to do in this solo game.

Use the world: Worldbuilding is fine and good, but it’s just a tableau if you don’t do anything with it. Ask any number of tabletop gamers how many ideas for games they’ve had that they’ve never run, and you’re bound to see a pretty high number. I’m combining a loose storyline with several of the established principles of the world that I hope will result in a compelling narrative using the “stock first” sandbox playstyle.

Fill in the blanks: After completing a session, I want to afford myself the luxury of turning the conflict’s events into written logs, imparting a sense of importance and consistency that unconnected encounters don’t have. It’s a writing exercise and a gaming exercise all in one.

Have fun with the maps: One of the things I really enjoy about 4e is that it makes good use of movement. Shifting, pushing, pulling, and moving allies and enemies about makes sure the characters end up all over the map. This broad movement, combined with cool locales and interesting environmental effects makes for compelling combat that’s more than just two entities standing next to each other and pounding on each other until someone runs out of hit points. To that end, I’ve built a character who moves a lot as his MO, so I plan to see some spiffy combats as a result.

Use skill challenges: This is an aspect of 4e that I haven’t experimented enough with in actual play. I plan to use the skill challenges as a tool to connect some of the combat encounters, which should likewise provide more fodder for interesting session synopses.

Let the dice fall where they may: When writing fiction, the writer determines all outcomes. In this exercise in adding supportive fiction to summaries of events that are influenced by chance, I’ll be writing in a different way. Someone else — fate — will have as much or more impact on the outcomes of the story than I would in the traditional writer’s role. This is, of course, obvious to anyone who’s ever played a game with randomizing elements, and it’s also the whole point of playing a game as opposed to telling a story, but it’s a refreshing change from my daily design work and the normal process of writing.

I’m not sure how frequently I’ll have the updates posted, but I do plan to log the whole thing. I’m using Obsidian Portal to host the guts of the thing, which you should consider for your own games if you aren’t already using it. Tell them I sent you. I’ll also be posting some of the design notes here, explaining why I chose the enemies or storylines I did, or why I made all the gods powerful fae instead of keeping them as deities and that sort of thing. The campaign journal is here. I hope you dig it!

4 comments

2 March 2010

Requiescat In Pace

I think I dated this girl once.A great many stories revolve around defeating and killing the Big Bad Foe, which isn’t exactly a revelation. I’ve been thinking about ways to revisit this hoary old plot point, and one of the avenues I’m exploring is not new and clever ways to kill Big Bad, but to make sure Big Bad stays dead. In fact, I don’t even know that the killing is necessary in and of itself. I can probably keep that story element as a piece of history, given certain assumptions, so I’m obviously after a different sort of challenge.

Historically, separating an individual’s head from his body served to accomplish this at least part way. Superstitions aside, most of these were cases of wanting to keep an individual’s followers from rallying to a martyred leader, as with William Wallace or Vlad Tepes, but some occult aspects are sometimes associated with the act, as with John the Baptist. (And I suppose Vlad Tepes can probably fit here, too.)

What I’m really look for is a quest-type storyline that’s more preventative than overtly empowering. The protagonists don’t necessarily receive the grail at the end of the quest, they manage to stave off the occurance of some horrible thing. This is, of course, the bailiwick of many Cthulhu tales, the culmination of which is buying the world a little extra time before “the stars are right” again, but also has precedent in other fantasy fiction, as in “The Hour of the Dragon,” in which Conan’s ultimate foe is a long-dead sorcerer of Acheron raised from the dead by a faction of jealous conspirators. The reward for success is continued wellbeing, at least for the time, and makes a refreshing break from the standard model of task resolution equals item upgrade.

What about you? Have you used “And stay dead!” in any of your games or writing endeavors?

2 comments

18 February 2010

Guest Lecture: The Ethics of Exploration

I’ve had the opportunity to attend a couple of interesting events over the past few weeks that have given me some good food for thought. While much of the craft of game design is introspective, outside influences are critical not only for verisimilitude in games, but to prevent the medium from becoming hopelessly exclusionary. Nobody wants a game that you have to already play games to enjoy. (Well, some people want that, but they’re not usually the sorts of people who are fun to actually play games with — they’re the extreme lifestylers who want to hole up in their hobby and use it as an identity with which to insulate themselves from the rest of the world.) I even use this as interview criteria: I always ask in interviews what other interests the candidate has besides gaming and if they answer, “Really, gaming is it,” they get a big ol’ thumbs-down from me.

Digression notwithstanding, one of the presentations I attended was the Ethics of Exploration, given by the vatican’s astronomer, Br. Guy Consolmagno.

The presentation itself covered a lot of ground and I took from it some expanded thinking horizons. In terms of history, everyone remembers Galileo… but can you name the pope who brought him to trial? Galileo’s story resonates with people because it’s essentially human to wonder what’s out there. Asking the question satisfies a “hunger in the soul,” which is why we remember Galileo instead of those who condemned him and their comparative small-sightedness.

Much of what I pulled from the Ethics of Exploration was content related, stuff to construct games about or questions to ask in games rather than systems with which to create new games. A few of the topics that excited me here were:

Gah. Who to root for in the clash of good vs. good?A “conflict among goods”: The goods in this case are things that are good, as opposed to products or resources. We often speak of having to choose between the lesser of two evils, but how often must we choose from among multiple outcomes that are all positive? So many of today’s games feature dark and dystopian game settings. So many others offer the “Jesus or Hitler?” paradigm, purporting to offer moral choice but really offering pick-extreme-good-or-extreme-bad gameplay paths. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to be able to pick an outcome from among a variety of things that are awesome? My mind immediately springs to a golden age sci-fi tale or a mythic idyll, but those are only my immediate responses.

Ethically obtained specimens: Is it ethical for a scientist to conduct research for the greater good on a speciment knowingly obtained under illegal or morally (or ethically) wrong circumstances? This is the classic “misunderstood scientist” trope, but it has plenty of mileage left in it as the thrust of a game story. The player might be obtaining the specimen, or he might be part of the group that plans to perform the research.

1) Discover meteor. 2) ??? 3) Profit!The ethics of economy: About once a year, a meteor of approximately one-kilometer size passes near enough to the earth, well, to be a meteor. Extrapolating from samples, a one-kilometer meteor would be worth tens of trillions of dollars in salable value. So let’s say some entity — a government, a commercial concern, a scrappy bunch of players — invests in a sound method of grabbing this meteor (itself probably tens of billions of dollars in cost) and manages to pluck it out of the sky. Let’s say this happens in the middle of nowhere. How would the local economy of that nowhere respond to suddenly having tens of trillions of dollars worth of inflation dumped into it?

Subverting the purpose of playing a game: Ultimately, Brother Consolmagno stated, to refuse to make a choice will always be a mistake. I don’t know how to wring a playable facet from this, since a game is a series of choices with consequences, but there’s something about the refusal to take action in a given situation that has story potential. Perhaps an authority in the story refuses to take action until swayed toward a course by the players, who must accumulate enough information to choose intelligently (or perhaps control the information influx to suit the course of action they want).

Oh, it was Pope Urban VIII who tried Galileo, by the way. In a bit of cosmic justice, his villa is now the location of the Vatican Observatory.

3 comments

26 January 2010

The Joyous Toil

I’m back at earnest work on another full-length work of fiction (having not learned my lesson with Demimonde). Over the past several days, I’ve been gathering the scraps I had previously scribbled in various forms — longhand in Moleskines, pinned unceremoniously into ill-named Google Docs, two stubborn Scrivener binders — and assembling the thing from the morgue has been a great deal of fun. After having been at impasses with the idea for intermittent spells, it all just clicked for me the other day, and the rocky parts came together with the newfound glue of having a good time with it.

That’s the shame of it. Too often, I find myself laboring under the effort of making it all work that I lose the ability to step back and just let it work. Because it will. Fiction writes itself, and the writer is just the conduit. As Steven King says in his wonderful On Writing, “Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.” I enjoyed On Writing more than any of King’s fiction, in fact, and I’ll sing the praises of its message to high heaven.

So as I sit here, stitching together the unearthed fragments of conversation between Misters Finch and Thrush, the bravado of the American Arthur Armiger, the bittersweet resolve of Rachael, the hubris of Prince Geoffrey of Avalonia, and the honest evil of Dr. Cross, I get excited to see what will come out of the ground next. I promised myself two thousand words tonight, and while I’m not quite there yet, I look forward to going back to the dig.

Justin Achilli

Tag: Writing

3 January 2013

Appetite for (Cooperative) Destruction

13 June 2012

IXN Interview

26 August 2010

Open Game Table, Volume Two

15 August 2010