[Leverage/Ravenloft] Theme and The Right To Dream

[Jesse Burneko]

So, I've wanted to talk about this thing I've been doing that's a lot of fun and I've been trying to figure out where I want to post it.  I've decided to post it here because I realized that what I want to talk about is how Theme (and Premise) and all that stuff we usually focus on in Story Now play can operate as a super powerful support beam for Right To Dream play.

I've been running a super slow campaign called LeverageLoft.  Basically, at each of our local conventions a group of us set aside one of the slots to meet up in private.  There, I run an old AD&D 2e Ravenloft module as a Leverage Job. 

Background

Here's the relevant background on these two properties if you're not familiar with them.

Leverage is a TV show about a group of con artists and thieves who use their illegal talents to bring down powerful elites who victimize innocents.  It's basically modern day Robin Hood with a healthy dose of social commentary.  It's one of those shows that tackles serious issues in an ultimately light and fun way.  There is an RPG based on the show published by Margaret Weis Production.  Basically, you get to be your own little team of con artists and thieves taking down powerful elites.

Ravenloft on the other hand is AD&D's "Gothic" setting primarily inspired by Gothic literature and old Hammer Studios horror films.  The primary idea behind the setting is that extremely powerful, evil and often monstrous people (called Darklords) are brought to Ravenloft by The Dark Powers and given absolute control over their own private domains.  While the Darklords have absolute control over their domains they can not leave them and often the domains are constructed to be thematic mockeries of their tragic flaws.

LeverageLoft

So, the basic idea I'm running is that the PCs are all members of a small D&D Thieves Guild dedicated to taking down Darklords.  I've made very little changes to the core Leverage game.  Mostly, I just renamed the character roles to make them sound more Thieves Guild-y.  The Mastermind became The Guild Master, The Grifter became The Scoundrel, The Hitter became The Thug and The Thief became The Rogue.  The most alterations I made was to The Hacker who became The Lore Keeper and even there I mostly had to rewrite references to technology into references to magic and arcane artifacts.

So ultimately, it's less appropriate to say that I'm hacking Leverage to run Ravenloft and more appropriate to say I'm hacking Ravenloft to run Leverage.  Or more specifically Ravenloft modules.  Basically, I'm working my way through the Grand Conjunction series of modules which are totally awful, manipulative, railroad fests but are absolutely RIPE with Leverage appropriate material.  Basically, I extract the usually very compelling back story, all the important named NPCs, Locations and Items and then organize them into a "Job" according to the formula laid out in the Leverage rule book.

It works brilliantly!  I'll explain why in a moment but first let me explain the key points of play that clearly make this Right To Dream play.

When I first started this endeavor I ran the original I6 Ravenloft module.  The module was written as a standalone thing way before Ravenloft ever became a setting.  The module's popularity eventually spawned the setting.  The module's premise is very simple.  There's a vampire named Strahd who is terrorizing a family because he believes the daughter Ireena to be the reincarnation of his love Tatyana, who committed suicide after Strahd murdered her lover Sergei, Strahd's own brother.  So in this setup you see the basic Leverage formula.  You have The Client, Ireena, who is being victimized by The Mark, Count Strahd.  Another key Leverage factor is that the Mark has a couple of emotional weaknesses, his obsession with Tatyana and guilt over killing his brother.

My big fear was that since Strahd is an actual MONSTER, a vampire, and not just a politician or business man as most Marks on the Leverage TV show are, that the PCs would just kill him.  After all there isn't a very compelling in-fiction reason to keep him alive.  But no, the players showed up 100% committed to the idea that we were playing Leverage and in Leverage you don't kill the Marks, you rob, expose and spiritually break them. 

The PCs ended up stealing Strahd's fortune (and giving it mostly to Ireena to start a new life) and in the process they faked Ireena's death.  But the really brilliant part was they did this by recreating Tatyana's suicide thereby forcing Strahd to relive this torment.  They left Strahd broke and emotionally ruined and that's so Leverage.

This has happened each and every time we've played.  There is this intense commitment to NOT just killing the villain no matter how monstrous they are.  My Guild Master player keeps copious notes during play looking for his... well his emotional Leverage.  There have been a couple of lesser monster killings and before each one there was kind of a pause and careful consideration of whether or not we might need this one alive for the Leverage-y payoff at the end.

Why the Leverage-Ravenloft Pairing Works So Well

So, Ravenloft has this really serious flaw as an RPG setting.  The problem is that the coolest and most compelling thing about it is the really fucked up and tragic back stories of the setting's Darklords.  The problem is that in AD&D there is no meaningful way to engage that material.  The modules kind of just let you look at those back stories and of course the modules have to protect the canon characters from any real harm or change.  Even if you lift those restrictions you fall back into the problem that these people are so evil and so monstrous that there's really no reason not to just try and kill them. 

Leverage, however, provides both the context and the means for really and truly engaging those back stories.  The team NEEDS that information, and then they make it the heart of their heist or con.  In many ways, it's literally the only game in which you can really, truly play Ravenloft as a canon setting and get at the heart of what the setting is built around.

So hopefully you can see how the whole point of playing this game is about getting to a thematic payoff.  However, it's a constrained thematic payoff.  1) It has to be Leverage-y, that is brings about a sense of justice via theft and con artistry and 2) It has speak to the Darklord's personal issues (which really ties back into #1 anyway).  It's the EXACT intersection of what's cool about Leverage and what's cool about Ravenloft.

So to be clear, this isn't Story Now and Right To Dream co-existing, this is theme (a critical component of Story Now but not itself Story Now) being used as a vital metric for successful Right To Dream play.  It's about the pure joy of Leverage and Ravenloft coming together in a sweet, sweet cocktail.

Jesse

[clukemula]

Holy shit this is awesome. This has seriously got to be one of the coolest system hacks I've ever heard of.

What I want to know is, how did this campaign get started? Like, how did the idea of LeverageLoft come into existence, how was the player group assembled, and how was the idea introduced to these players?

You said that everyone was fully on board with the Leverage theme from the get-go. Were all (or any) of them fairly familiar with Leverage and/or Ravenloft beforehand, or did you just kind of give an overview and they were hooked?

Anyway, this is wonderful stuff. Thanks for sharing.

- Luke

[Ron Edwards]

I think this ties in well with the second part of the Setting and emergent stories (thread), itself referencing Setting and emergent stories (essay). Frank and I talked about identifying what play was about as the core variable of identifying Creative Agenda, as opposed to identifying what play produced in fictional or interpreted-fiction terms. I've been trying hard, always, to acknowledge that "make a story" is an in-fiction (technically in-Exploration) phenomenon, and as such, compatible with any Creative Agenda. It goes all the way back to identifying the core breaks between GNS and the Threefold, for instance.

Jesse, I'm not sure what to say beyond that except "Yes," so, I'm hoping others will chime in with further points or examples.

Best, Ron
edited to fix link - RE

[Jesse Burneko]

Ron,

Yes, exactly.  And now I have a really strong example to point to where Theme really and truly is a major part of play, and not just a happy accident, but isn't Story Now.

Luke,

So the whole thing started as a joke on Twitter.  First of all, everyone in my gaming circle knows that my aesthetics run toward the dark and creepy and that my play preferences run toward the intensely emotional and personal.  A common thing to happen among my friends when I say something morbid or creepy is for someone to turn to me and just say, "Meanwhile, in Ravenloft..."

So, back in February when the first convention of the year was coming up people were chatting via Twitter what everyone thought they were going to run.  I mentioned that I thought I might try running Leverage.  My friend Colin replied with something like, "Man, I wonder what a Jesse Leverage game is like."  And I knew that he was thinking about all the things I just mentioned above.  It was actually my friend Morgan who retored with something like, "You've got to help me!  There's this Count named Strahd who keeps calling me Tatyana!"  And Colin got all excited and said he'd play that in heart beat.  So, I mulled it over and the more I thought about it the more the idea took root in my brain.  So, I thought, what the hell, I'll give it a try.

So, at the February convention I just put the game on the schedule thinking that it was the only time I was ever going to do this.  The original I6 Ravenloft module is really well known and fits the Leverage model perfectly.  I had no intention of doing any more.  But what ended up happening was kind of magic.

First of all, I did know all the players who showed up.  I believe all of them knew Leverage and all of them at a minimum knew what Ravenloft was about if not excessive details.  Second, Colin is a brilliant Mastermind (Guild Master) player.  It was after this game that I realized that Leverage actually belongs in the same category of games as The Drifter's Escape or They Became Flesh in that it really has two GMs.  The Mastermind player has to function like a second a GM running the job against the main GM.  It's also not dissimilar to the Caller role in older versions of D&D.

Anyway, everyone loved the game and in particular Colin was so supper jazzed about it he was almost willing to drop his home game he was running in favor of having me run more LeverageLoft scenarios.  I was skeptical because I had two things going for me (1) I was working from a module and didn't have to develop the job wholly from scratch and (2) the module was particularly well suited to Leverage and I wasn't sure I'd find that magic combination again but that I'd be willing to try.

So between that con in February and the next con in May, I began looking at Feast of Goblyns both the first module ever published for Ravenloft as a setting and the first of a series of modules called The Grand Conjunction (though that's a bit of joke since the first 3 modules were retcon-ed into the series, starting with the 4th).  And HOLY HELL, was I suddenly struck by the difference between 1e AD&D module vs. a 2e AD&D module. 

The original I6 Ravenloft module is just a fun romp around a Gothic castle.  The "story" is kept purely to the fun background stuff you discover along the way.  It was dirt simple to keep that back story, identify the victims, identify the villain and his resources and throw the rest away.  Feast of Goblyns on the other hand is a railroaded nightmare of pre-calculated secrets, twists and reveals.  Worse, it suffers from The Mr. Johnson problem of Shadowrun where the person in "distress" is really just using the party to his own nefarious ends.  Oh, also, there are no less than FOUR major villain characters.

I was very concerned it wasn't going to work.  But I took a leap of faith and very methodically and patiently applied the same *process* that I applied to the I6 Ravenloft module as best I could.  One thing I found interesting was that I really liked the module's presentation of the Mr. Johnson character and her appearance of distress and wanted to preserve it.  The problem was it requires the PCs being in jail and the module has all these tricks and traps laid out to force the players into jail.  Obviously I didn't want to do that.  More importantly I didn't need EVERYONE in jail, I just needed my Mastermind player in jail.

So before the May con I sent out an email to everyone who participated in the first game and asked who wanted in on the second game.  Of the original five players, three wanted in (and the other two really only had scheduling conflicts) and I knew of at least one other player who wasn't in the first game but wanted in on the second after hearing about it.  So, I didn't bother putting the game on the con schedule this time.  We just agreed on a time slot and met up.  This is when I knew that this really was going to be a regular thing.

Anyway, I started the game by explaining what domain they were in, it's general tone and flavor and then I turned to Colin and said, "So why are you in jail?"  And Colin just got this big huge grin on his face and said, "Well, I'm in jail because..." and the really awesome thing was that Colin's character never LEFT the jail.  He ran the WHOLE job from inside his jail cell communicating via Earings of Telepathy.  In fact part of the con at the end of the scenario involved him faking his own execution.

So, yeah, that's kind of the logistical history of the game.

Jesse

[clukemula]

Man, that sounds like quite the happy accident.

But what ended up happening was kind of magic.

Is it just me, or does this "kind of magic" seem to be a major part of the Reward in Right to Dream play? There is stress-testing and constructive denial, but the major fun is when we do all of the testing and the game (world, setting, theme, whatever) doesn't break. Those moments are just magical, and in the play sessions I've been a part of where RtD was fully supported and pursued, I've always taken away a sense of the numinous, the intensity of the feeling depending on how little I was sure of the game working beforehand (i.e., after my D&D 3.5 session I talked about in the "Authority in action" thread, I came away with a "well that was kind of cool" feeling, but in my first roleplaying game ever (a LotR starter adventure), it was more of "THAT WAS FUCKING AWESOME I CAN'T BELIEVE THAT JUST HAPPENED").

Thoughts?

- Luke

[Ron Edwards]

Yeah.

Luke, imagine ... OK, you're me, growing up on the California coast, let's say it's between 1970 and 1975. You're a bright little kid, surrounded by and over-socialized by adults, in a deeply political time, living half in the military and half in the counterculture, furthermore, immersed in underground culture of all kinds (that today I would never let my kids see, geez!). You are totally into the Planet of the Apes movies and Star Trek, then in its first wave of syndicated fandom and not in any way a franchise (OK, a little: very bad comics and pretty good action figures). Role-playing, to you, doesn't exist yet.

In '75, you turn 11. Your next-oldest brother, a year into owning his driver's license, offers to take you to the event in the Bay Area you pleaded to go to but were initially denied: something called a "Star Trek convention." Yes, if not the first, then close to it. Everyone's going to be there! (well, not William Shatner, who's trying to convince the world to forget Star Trek at that point, but Nichelle Nichols! James Doohan! And Bob Wilkins, the host of Creature Features, oh my God!) You can even stop off at the new store in Berkeley, the Federation Trading Post, with nothing in there but all Star Trek all the time. Again - all original series counting the animated one; no one ever used that term, though. Star Trek was nothing but Star Trek.

So, you go. It's awesome. You even get to watch, in a room of people equally agog, a whole episode up on the screen like a movie, with no commercials. (I'm not being snarky or cute. This was privately technologically absolutely inaccessible at that time; it was an absolutely novel experience for everyone there.) And you know what? Some amazing people had written and filmed their own episode of Star Trek, with themselves and their friends as actors, and we watched that too. No one had ever seen anything like that done, either.

When their film displayed a credible, if not 100% identical beaming effect, the room exploded in applause right then in the middle of viewing the episode. It wasn't just the filmmaker-fans we were applauding - it was a validation of the very fact that our love for the original show could and did overcome the imposing barrier (and reality) that we ourselves had not made it, that we were merely viewers and effectively customers. For this moment, the filmmaker-fans and fan-audience were able to say, "Yes, we do it too, we are with this material." Arguably false at its very bottom, but not without some validity in the context of how we were immediately socializing at that moment.

That's the Reward for the Right to Dream. Validation? Confirmation? Perhaps, in a Schrödinger's Box sort of way.

Now, that applause concerned a visual effect, a distinct motif. Getting theme right is much, much harder, and perhaps less appreciated by the fan-audience, pound for pound. Jesse, you've been trying hard to do this sort of thing for how long ... let's see, I'd put it back in your long-gone days of playing Chill, right? What's different between how you thought it would "obviously" work then, and how you know it works now?

Best, Ron

[Jesse Burneko]

So, I spent the weekend thinking this over.  I even went and poked at my old Chill books to get back in touch with that.  Here's what I came up with.

Back then I viewed scenario crafting kind of like writing a persuasive essay.  It was my job to carefully walk the PCs through a series of encounters and clues that would eventually "add up" to a thematic reveal.   I was very much going for the, "Oh!  Oh!  Now I get it!  Oh the horror!  The horror!"  Where that "horror" was very much something that touched the human heart, not just how creepy or weird the monster of the week was.

That never quite happened.  I got close a few times, but it was a lot of work and didn't quite "ring" the way I wanted it to.  I think that's because the PCs never incorporated that emotional impact into their solution for dealing with the monster.  One of my favorite Stephen King stories is The Library Policeman.  In that story the protagonist defeats the monster with the most ludicrous thing ever: a ball of waded up red licorice.  However, in context it's the most perfect thing ever.  The Library Policeman was my model and goal for every Chill scenario I ever wrote and I never got there.

One of the reasons I never got there was because in Chill most of the more thematically engaging monsters have their weaknesses predefined.  One of my favorites was the ghost of woman spurred by her lover.  Her M.O. is to seduce a man and then begin fucking with his memories so that the relationship becomes horribly dysfunctional eventually driving him to suicidal despair.  According to the rules the way you kill this thing, is that you first weaken it (it only takes Stamina damage, not Wounds) until it driven back the tree it lives in.  Then you place a wedding band in the tree and boom!  One dead ghost.  Because that method of destruction is fixed, you spend a lot of time floundering around while the PCs try to puzzle out exactly what to do. 

Leverage, on the other hand, doesn't have that problem because the entire purpose of play is CONSTRUCT that moment.  Everything you do in the game is producing the data and material necessary for the group as a whole to decide what is an appropriate thematic climax.  One particular key mechanic is the Flashback mechanic that let's you periodically ret-con anything you need to in order to make your con or heist work.  This takes A LOT of pressure off "being clever" because (a) it's assumed that whatever you're doing will work and (b) if you paint yourself into a corner you can use a Flashback to get yourself out of it.  In fact, I would suggest that painting yourself into a corner is what you're supposed to do and is the key marker that it's time to wrap up the game.  Note: The Leverage game actually has an explicit "wrap up flashback" endgame mechanic.

When I ran I6 Ravenloft module the event that prompted the endgame was that the PCs basically agreed to sell Ireena to Strahd for his entire fortune.  There was this definite moment of, "And now what?" among everyone at the table which is when I suggested that perhaps it was time for endgame.

When I ran the Feast of Goblyns scenario the PCs managed to manipulate three out of the four major villains (they killed the fourth) into agreeing to arrive at the same location, at the same time with different expectations of why they were going there.  Again there was this pause of, "So they're all going to show up at the same time.... so... now what?"  And again the answer was, endgame!

So really between Chill and now the difference for me is embracing the group constructed nature of the dream.  I'm no longer trying to *deliver* a thematic punchline.  Also, Leverage is focused on providing tools for exactly that kind of payoff.  Only SOME of the monsters in Chill carried thematic weight and the default assumptions of the game was that you were just there to hunt and kill them by any means necessary.

Jesse