[Burning Empires] Casiguran Matriarchy Scenario

[Erik Weissengruber]

Hi Erik,

... if the game hadn't been cut short just prior to the final dice exchange. Is that right?

That is mostly correct. The 2nd running of the scenario had to be cut short. So I had to say to the player of the mutant: "Great! What a great idea! But we don't have time to play that out. so howzabout I let you roll for the end of maneuver results" or some such lame recompense.

It really hurts the game if you skip over the big conflict on the players' side. I have run other RPGs where the players let me run roughtshod over them but it goes fine because they expect the GM to do all of the work. But in this game, if you flub the scene economy the session just feels weird.

It also strikes me that you took Burning Empires pretty far down the road of social science fiction, rather than staying with the intrinsic social crises baked into the setting - medieval vs. modern, minority issues with the frog-people, for instance. Did those seem too obvious to you?

It was not a conscious decision to avoid those crises. My choices of characters emphasized different parts of the default setting. By going with the extant lifepaths, I generated PCs whose different experiences but them in tension with each other. A PC with experience in the mercantile world has different traits and abilities than one who has been through the courtiers' world. And they are in tension with each other even if they are both female, of high social station, and possess psychic powers. I was able to get men from low-level lifepaths to high-ranking court positions by having them serve as bondsmen. That mechanical necessity created an interesting implied social relations.

Our strange world and the highly setting-tied characters all came about by following the game's procedures, even if my input was somewhat atypical.

I have always wanted to play Burning Empires but not to GM it. From that perspective, I'm interested in the details of the NPCs, and how you came to realize they hadn't been burned (generated) well, especially regarding their contribution to the adversarial fiction. How would you go about burning them better, keeping everything else equal?

Best, Ron

The NPCs lacked the social skills needed to do well at Duels of Wit, and the millitary skills to do well in Firefight. They did OK at the end-of-session Maneuver rolls. I just have to make smarter skills choices when I rewrite them, no big conceptual rethink.

Now it's my turn. Why do you want to play BE? And why do you not want to GM it?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Erik,

Thanks! To my eyes, this is Sex & Sorcery in all its glory, precisely the kind of thinking and play I'd hoped to inspire – and historically, successfully did. I'm not claiming you in particular were prompted just by this book, but I am proud of prompting an influential swath of on-line RPG contributors who effectively made talking/playing like this "the new normal." And yes, Meg's "I will not abandon you" in full.

The structure's also boggling my mind, especially since you're not imposing it so much as frantically seizing existing game-structure features as needed.

Why do you want to play BE? And why do you not want to GM it?

It's high on my list of SF RPGs to play. I see it as an exciting combination of action-SF (Aliens) and social-SF, along the lines of a lot of Poul Anderson's fiction. From an RPG standpoint alone, it's an extremely ambitious design, combining the age-old campaign+personal play with the Story Now priority. I don't think I've ever seen that before or since.

I also realized in drafting this post that there are two separate issues at work for me: one is excitement about playing a character concept for a given game, and the other is GMing that game. They're not alternatives, but independent issues.

For example, for 31 years, I have wanted to play an Irrippi Ontor sage flirting with Chaos, in hopes of finding someone to GM while I do so. And I'm also willing to GM Hero Wars.

I feel similarly regarding the lifepaths in BE, as with all the Burning games, and would simply enjoy playing the result of character creation, armed with and ultimately struggling with Beliefs and Instincts, in both the color and substantial content of this setting.

However, unlike the Glorantha example, I'm not personally a good Burning GM. Part of the reason comes from trying to GM the Burning Wheel exactly at the moment of transition between the very-first 2003 original and its revision, which screwed up my learning curve such that to this day I can't keep procedural differences straight between the two. Some of the GMing tasks aren't really my favorite things to do either, or perhaps that's a function of needing to play with people who know the system thoroughly and can do things like apply damage results without me mastering the process every single time for them.

Best, Ron

[Erik Weissengruber]

There is no way that I would be designing scenarios like this without having read Sex and Sorcery and playing a gender-informed Sorcerer Game.

I saw this scenario as a demo of the features I love about BE. So I did not permit myself any drifting.

But I grabbed the rules and just applied them with a fully-realized intention. You must write beliefs and come up with a character concept or the game goes nowhere.

The clash between chosen theme and the colour of the lifepaths is a fruitful one. For example, one of the female characters was forced to take the "Effeminate" trait to reflect her time at court. And the politically correct side of me said, "wait, this is an independent minded woman with great power, how could she have this trait." But then I reflected that to be a courtier is to be concerned about the daily maintenance of social perceptions, meticulous attention to every aspect of one's appearance, attracting the attention of admirers and subtly marginalizing competitors. The mastery of these behaviours could be considered stereotypically "feminine" but they are a necessary part of survival in a highly-ritualized court setting.

A character conflicting against her memories and politics in order to reach a political goal, and bearing the marks of that decision to compromise and fit in with the court, makes for good drama. And the game allows you to OVERCOME traits through focused play. So you are made to play a character who has been made "effeminate" but who can, through work and personal commitment, rework or remove that trait. Something like "people make their own history but do not chose the grounds on which they make it ..."

The Poul Anderson connection works for me. BE is not Asimov and it's not George Lucas or Ian Banks (RIP). I am also reminded of Gordon Dickinson.